2-Feb-21 – In his 1982 book, In Search of Excellence, co-authored with Robert H. Waterman, Jr., Tom Peters started an entire movement and got a lot of things related to management strategy correct. He got almost as many guesses wrong when it pertained to which specific companies were likely to be long-term winners. Prediction is tough under the best of circumstances; predicting the future is even harder.

But one of the things he absolutely hit out of the park was his concept of Management by Walking Around (MBWA), which suggested that (a) the best managers are those who were most adept at regular, ongoing communication, especially with the frontline troops, and (b) the most valuable and instructive of those communications are almost always informal and face-to-face in the field. COVID-19 has largely removed the prospect of many of these conversations going forward.

Not surprisingly, those critical conversations were most often accomplished by managers who spent a significant amount of time patrolling their offices, buildings, and factories and listening to their people at all levels. Careful and consistent listening to everyone who is willing to share is the way important insights, crucial data, innovative ideas, suggested practical changes, and employee attitudes are gathered and ultimately evaluated and implemented where appropriate.

Peters (left) made clear that the image of a bunch of executives quietly sitting behind their desks on the umpteenth floor, trying to manage complex entities and waiting patiently for the news and reports of the day to make their way upstairs, was an outdated and unrealistic fantasy. Information has no value unless it’s effectively and timely communicated and turned into actionable knowledge.

Knowledge is nice to have, but it’s not useful and powerful until it’s applied and results in concrete actions and reactions. Shared knowledge and ideas are force multipliers that aren’t subject to the law of diminishing returns. Businesses have simply become too complicated, too distributed, and too layered to be effectively administered from afar, after-the-fact, or exclusively top-down.

In addition, we know that the precision, quality, and immediacy of information deteriorates as it rises and is sweetened and softened through the organizational ranks. Some things never change, and no one wants to be the messenger who gets killed or the bearer of unpleasant news or the “bad” in anyone’s day.

If anything, an informal factfinding and investigative process like this is even more important in a time of abrupt change, disrupted org charts, broken chains and channels of communication, and a growing and semi-permanent remote workforce. But unless senior managers start making house calls like the doctors of old, it’s hard to imagine that things aren’t likely to just keep getting worse.

In a world permanently turned inside-out by the continuing necessity/desire to work from home, the need for alternative methods of effective communication, information sharing, morale management, productivity measurement, and of course, innovation is going to be one of the most massive challenges every business will be facing.

The reality is that if you can’t see your business, it won’t be your business for long. MBWA, if it’s not absolutely obvious by now, simply cannot work with a material portion of your workforce perpetually remote.

As new team members enter this radically changed environment where any company’s protocol, culture, and strategy will all be much more difficult to share, maintain, and embed in the newbies, they will be increasingly reluctant, if not loathe, to say much of anything, step forward with suggestions, complain, or criticize.

In addition, many will be technical resources who are notoriously introverted to begin with, which will make the prospect of them readily and promptly participating and contributing to the critical company conversations even more unlikely. But at least the techies have shared code bases, enforced peer review, and an underlying set of procedures for input and review. The majority of the other team members (new and old) will have little in the way of tools to help them cope with the new world of remote work.

Fortunately, there are powerful solutions at hand, one of which I wrote about in 2016 that has only gotten better and added new, important features and functionality as well. It’s a company started in Chicago in 2015, when I was CEO of the incubator 1871, and now based in San Francisco. Balloon has developed a comprehensive system for companies to connect and collaborate with their workforces. I think of it as a streamlined and tech-enabled way of “keeping in touch,” but, even more importantly, as an effective replacement for some of those MBWA one-on-ones and factory floor conversations that may never return.

And, for management, it’s especially timely and valuable because your employees, wherever they’re located, will do most of the initial, relatively painless work by anonymously inputting their own concepts, comments, suggestions, proposals, etc., into the system and/or responding to prompts generated by the company or by Balloon’s experts. The system encourages and incents them to do so in an efficient and emotionally rewarding fashion as others join in the discussion.

The company’s analogy is to a new idea – or balloon – rising through the organization, urged on and advanced by others as they evaluate and get behind it.

(Left) Noah Bornstein and Amanda Greenberg, co-founders of Balloon.

Similar to sites such as Reddit – and a cousin to concepts such as prediction markets – they basically upvote an idea by secret ballot until it reaches management for final review and action. At that point, and usually not before, the identity of the idea’s author (if the employee chooses) is revealed and, where appropriate, credit and recognition can be given to that team member.

Even more importantly, no one is penalized or stigmatized for suggestions that don’t make the cut. In addition, as the process proceeds, there are no uncomfortable collisions between departments, turf wars, stepped-on toes, or other structural or personal impediments to progress. And finally, management will have clear quantitative evidence of the amount and extent of support for the suggestion, comment, or proposal throughout the company. Implementations and change management are a great deal easier when everyone’s already leaning in the right direction.

Instead of just talking about it, companies that want to grow and prosper can incorporate real and substantive transparency into their organizations. As one Balloon client said a long time ago: “It was like putting on glasses for the first time.”

And there’s another critical benefit that senior management, in its ill-founded belief in its omniscience, often overlooks. Applications such as Balloon represent an internal, next-generation, early warning system to provide alerts and actual data from the field about unexpected, unforeseen, and unanticipated threats and risks.

Because today, it’s what you don’t know that you don’t know that can kill your business in no time at all.