J’aurais dû marquer un but. I should have scored. That was the response (given many years after the event) to the question, What did you learn from that match? The match in question was the 1983 European Cup Final, in which Hamburg of Germany defeated the Italian champions Juventus 1-0. The question was asked of Michel Platini, the French footballer, who would in subsequent seasons lead Juventus to victory first, in 1984, in the European Cup-Winners Cup, and then, in 1985, in the European Cup itself. What the interviewer appeared to be suggesting with his question was that Platini must have learnt something from the 1983 defeat, something profound that changed the way he played or approached those two subsequent finals. No, the only lesson learnt was that he should have scored. That he should have done better. Sometimes, that’s the only lesson there is.
For what it’s worth Platini did not miss any easy chances in the 1983 final. Juventus, as a team, did not play particularly well, and their only real opportunity to score actually fell to Roberto Bettega, not Platini. But it was Platini, the team’s leader, who had been expected to deliver, and in that match he didn’t.
Watching that interview recently it struck me how refreshing it was to see someone so high profile not searching for more meaning than there actually is. We appear to these days live in a world where everything is a lesson, where every failure needs to be a ‘learning’. We appear to have lost the ability to simply say, next time I’ll try and do better.
Croissants or bicycles?
A bakery opens up selling croissants. Sales are poor. What’s the lesson here? Poor choice of location? Prices too high? Not enough marketing? Or maybe, just maybe, the croissants aren’t good enough. Whatever the answer (and it’s amazing how often the answer is the most obvious, in this case the croissants aren’t up to much), it’s unlikely that the solution is to pivot away from croissants and start selling bicycles. Radical change, radical reinvention is good, but only when it needs to be. At other times it can be a waste of resources.
This is why it is so important for organisations to have systems in place that can provide the right kind of signal. A signal is the smallest meaningful piece of information that may indicate something important about current reality, future relevance, pressure, opportunity or constraint. It might not (and often does not) tell you where or what a problem is, but it does usually point you in the right direction, so you at least know where to look.
Signals can be either internal or external, with external signals telling us how the world is moving, and internal signals telling us whether the system is capable of moving with it. If those croissants aren’t shifting, what the baker needs to look at is not that they’re not selling, but the signals that might suggest why. Only then can the right course of action be taken. Is there a problem with the ovens? Is presentation an issue? Are staff unhappy? Have people simply fallen out of love with croissants?
Answering those questions is the point of the whole exercise, because they sort the problem into one of two boxes. If the croissants are objectively as good as anything else in the arrondissement, the signal is external: the neighbourhood has perhaps indeed fallen out of love with croissants, however unlikely that may be, and the baker really does need to think again about what he or she is selling. But if the market for croissants is alive and well (as it probably is), and only this particular baker’s are not selling, then the signal is internal, that being that the croissants probably do need to be better.
Reading the signals
Most organisations, alas, given the choice, reach for the external reading, firstly because it asks less of them and secondly (and perhaps more importantly) because there are no systems in place to generate (and/or read) internal signals. Pivoting (to bicycles or anything else) sounds decisive and offers an impression of action. Admitting the croissants are simply not good enough is harder. The grand lesson lets you off the hook while the smaller one does not. The grand lesson is often the wrong one, however.
This is precisely why the signals matter, and why having the honest capacity to read them should be an integral part of any organisation. Read badly, they can send a baker riding off into the bicycle trade. Read well, they usually point in a more pertinent direction. Michel Platini did not change the way he played football after losing the 1983 European Cup Final. He simply turned up the following season, scored the goals Juventus had bought him to score, and won two finals. The lesson was to do better. He did.
Photo: Dreamstime.
