The importance of ignoring the Emperor’s new clothes
/We all know the story of the vain and self-absorbed Emperor whose preoccupation with finery puts him at the mercy of two swindlers posing as weavers who sell him the most magnificent new clothes that are visible only to the cleverest and most competent people in the land.
Even though they cannot see the clothes as they are being ‘made’, the emperor and a succession of his advisers pretend otherwise so as not to be thought fools. The story ends (spoiler alert) with the emperor parading naked in the streets to the derision of the city folk while the conmen depart very much richer than when they arrived.
The story has become an idiom to describe fads or trends that are lacking in substance, but which people choose to follow slavishly rather than fly in the face of popular opinion and be seen to be out of step with current thinking.
Business – and especially the HR space - is a fertile breeding ground for these trends and fads, especially around employee wellbeing and benefits, so as we look ahead to the end of the year and the challenges that 2024 might bring, it seems like a good time to look at why you should resist having your head turned by every new idea that appears over the corporate horizon.
It's easy to get distracted by chatter about new ways of doing things or new ways of thinking about the things we’ve always done the same way since time immemorial – I mean, let’s face it, there are entire industries dedicated to selling us a cool new vision.
It’s at the very heart of the success of ‘edgy’ businesses like Google or Uber, or pretty much any business that has built a reputation for thinking outside the box and not chaining themselves to the ‘not invented here’ mentality.
It’s the same mindset that we might have had when we were at school and wanted to be like the cool kids. It’s in our nature to want to be on trend, whether in our personal or professional lives, and we’re drawn to the practices and approaches that set us apart from the crowd.
In the HR sector it’s easy to follow a similar approach to how we think about delivering strategy – especially if the idea or innovation in question promises to make things faster, better, and more efficient.
And that also explains why there’s no shortage of invisible clothes in the world of HR – or of people encouraging us to try them on.
But whatever our consumer behaviour looks like at home, we have a clear responsibility to make sure that what we invest in on behalf of our organisation has substance and can be reasonably confidently shown to add value to operational efficiency.
And if you’re reading this, thinking ‘well, new things are, by definition, untested and someone has to try them’, you’d be right. Buit you’d also then have to apply some pragmatism as well and understand the risks associated with trying endless new systems and approaches that ultimately fail.
Employees are generally a tolerant bunch and are especially open to new ideas that promise to benefit them. But when those things never materialise into the panacea they expect, their patience understandably wears thin.
They begin to question why they’re constantly being asked to do things that appear worthless when each idea is adopted, implemented, and then abandoned, only to be replaced by another, equally ineffectual measure.
And along with the growing unrest at an apparently unfocused HR strategy comes a degree of harm to your HR function’s reputation.
It’s the nature of new ideas to attempt to solve or tackle issues that are, in themselves, new and not clearly understood. And if we, in the HR space, aren’t totally clear on what it is we’re trying to address, how can we possibly gauge whether the solution we’re implementing is going to succeed?
This is not a contemporary or new problem that HR is grappling with. Twenty years ago, the Harvard Business Review looked at thi and summarised the characteristics of the Emperor’s new clothes in an HR context.
It concluded that new fads and trends were recognisable through the a set of common characteristics. Generally they were found to be:
· Simple and easy to understand
· Prescriptive in advising action (what you should do)
· Falsely encouraging - make grandiose claims about a variety of outcomes.
· Universally designed so as to be applied anywhere
· Simple to copy and paste – the silver bullet of being able to be implemented, at least in part, right away
· Aligned with contemporary concepts and capturing the zeitgeist
· Novel, not radical – or, put more simply, an iteration of something that has gone before
· Peddled by gurus and followers – in other words, their credibility is grounded largely in the advocacy of other people
We can add some other conclusions, as well. Trends tend to be very alluring, to the point where people become defensive and disinclined to hear another version of the ‘truth’.
Ultimately, if it’s difficult to look at a new idea and be able to clearly recognise the problem it is intended to solve, then that should be a major red flag that it’s an invisible but ineffectual cloak that you’ll be asking your business to wear
It’s important, therefore, that we’re sufficiently self-aware that we recognise our own propensity to crave the newest and greatest things and to take into account the warning signs that may accompany them.
After that, spend some dedicated time thinking about more practical and, perhaps, proven methods you might use to solve whatever problem is at hand.
And if there’s genuinely no better alternative, and you’ve assessed the risk of failure, then maybe that’s the time to stand in front of the mirror to determine whether those new clothes are real or not.
If you’d like to know more about how Constantia Consulting can help you to find meaningful solutions to pressing problems, why not get in touch for an informal friendly chat?
