Bam! Slam! Whack! Another business problem down. Where’s the next?

We’re delighted to welcome Douglas Ross as a guest contributor with this intriguing article on ‘Whack-a-Mole Management’.

The world is complex and moving fast. Demands are challenging and the consequences immediate. Unravel the challenges and the world is your oyster. Surrender to the challenges and the world swallows you. These are the systemic issues that are impacting virtually every organization in America. Yet, while some organizations are dealing with them successfully, many are not. They’re the ones using an approach that I call whack-a-mole management.

Whack-a-mole is a popular carnival game in which you try to hit ‘moles’ that pop up randomly on a board using a rubber mallet. Every time you hit a mole, you get a point. The objective is to get enough points to qualify for a prize.

It’s fun and people experience a ‘high’ as pent-up energy is released by whacking the moles. The challenge of not knowing where the next mole is coming from adds to the excitement.

Business whack-a-mole management is based on the same principles. The challenges are the ‘moles’. As each challenge presents itself to managers, they hit it hard and fast with the hammer of position and conventional wisdom. Slam! They get one. Slam! They get another one. It requires lightning-quick decision making in a fast moving game called “survival of the fittest”. It’s exhausting, but it’s also fun. Each night the players go home, knowing their job remains intact because they have successfully ‘whacked’ enough organizational problems to stay for another day.

Problem One: Whack-a-mole lures people in because it works in the short term

Even though whack-a-mole management ignores systemic problems in favor of the simplest, easiest and shortest-term actions, it appears to work at the start. That’s because the guiding assumption of survival, especially in a downturn, is to maximize profits and reduce costs.

Here’s an example. Suppose a company receives information from the industry analysts that forecasts a severe downturn in the next two quarters. The managers in this company know the reality of investors’ expectations, so they begin to pick up their game of whack-a-mole.

With revenues dropping, the immediate goal is to reduce costs so profit margins will not be affected. Whack! Programs and perceived non-valued costs are slashed. Whack! Whack! Cost centers are restructured and ingenious accounting practices evoked. Whack! Whack! Whack! Departments are restructured and people are eliminated.

Now, even though revenues will dip, costs have been reduced enough to ensure the profit margin stays the same. That means the management team retains investor confidence — for a time.

Problem Two: Whack-a-mole management is more concerned with looking good than with being good.

No one asks why the programs and non-value added cost were there in the first place. No one asks why cost centers and ingenious accounting practices suddenly appear. No one asks why departments and poor performance weren’t dealt with before.

Einstein said you can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. In whack-a-mole management, the decision-making and problem-solving mindset that created the problem is now being used to solve it.

In time, the exhilaration wanes as restructuring and cost-cutting efforts are swallowed up by the day-to-day reality of getting products out the door. The impact of the organizational inability to resolve systemic problems soon re-appears and the mole-whacking becomes frenetic.

Problem Three: Whack-a-mole management always ends by making things worse

As the systemic problems come back, the challenges they produce appear as bigger and more dangerous ‘moles’. The size, complexity and number of such challenges increase as cost-cutting measures weave their way into existing unresolved productivity, people and process problems. Pressure to hit targets increases. Downtime increases. Scrap and re-work rises. Productivity drops. Customer delivery problems escalate. Overtime costs increase. Only this time, those whack-a-mole hammers are neither big enough nor fast enough.

Eventually chaos reigns and morale collapses under the impossible demands of meeting the challenges of survival. There are more firings, more cost cuts. The politics of mutual blame dominate the organization. And it will get a whole lot worse before it gets better — if it ever does.

It doesn’t have to be this way

The plain fact is that whack-a-mole management does not work. People know the right way to do business — they always have and they always will.

That’s why it only takes one person to stop and say, “We can’t do it this way any more.” The rest merely need the courage to face this reality and act on it. This is called integrity — and it’s always a better way.

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