When does perseverance become denial? When is it the right time to quit or to stop trying?
I've often thought about this in terms of the two most futile farmyard pastimes: flogging dead horses and chasing wild geese. Funnily enough they tend to be quite similar, as they are ultimately exercises in futility.
We all know about the importance of perseverance - Edison said "the most certain way to succeed is always to try one more time". But sometimes, perseverance becomes denial. For example, like most people I was staggered by the Contact Energy directors' refusal to see how their pay increase could be perceived. I was even more staggered to watch them try to mount a plausible argument. I wonder if they thought that people would forget about it, that it was just a minor issue, yesterday's fish and chip wrapping and all that.
It reminded me of someone I met when I started working with an organisation that was in serious operational meltdown. All the usual performance indicators had gone to hell in a hand-basket, and this organisation was facing massive customer defection. He quite honestly couldn't see the problem. It was temporary glitch, it would come right soon, people just had to be patient etc. His problem was not one of arrogance, but the outcome was the same as at Contact. He just didn't get it, and he had to go. It wasn't his fault, but until you can appreciate the problem, you're unlikely to be able to come up with solutions.
But there is a time to go, or a time to stop trying. Helen Clark exemplified it by resigning on the night of the election. Leave aside all the stuff about accountability and positioning a new team. The time was right for her because she recognised that the objective of her perseverance - another term as Prime Minister - was not, to her, worth the effort.
The time to quit is when the cost of the effort is greater than the prize itself. Lots of business ventures fail to take flight simply on that basis: the effort involved is greater than the potential return. The only questions are how long and how much money will we burn before we realise the futility. One of my first jobs was working for a couple of very quirky economists. They had a poster on the wall: "bad economics beats good management every time".
The only time we should persevere is when the stakes are high. Persevering when the stakes are low is when we get into flogging dead horses, and a thicker whip won't make a dead horse go faster.
Jim Collins talks about the Stockdale Paradox. Stockdale was the highest ranking American Navy officer held prisoner in the Vietnam war. When Collins asked him about his experience, Stockdale said that the optimists were the first to die. They believed that they would be released at Christmas, and then Easter, and then... But it didn't happen, and the optimists died of broken hearts. Then it was the pessimists, who simply believed they were never going to be released. They died of despair.
The Stockdale Paradox is this: You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
Incidentally, Stockdale was an articulate and thoughtful philosopher as well as one of the most highly decorated servicemen of his time. He gave a fascinating speech called "The 'Melting' Experience: Grow or Die".
Stockdale believed that his 'melting' experience - nearly 8 years in a POW camp, 4 of those years in solitary confinement - gave him an extraordinary opportunity, one that he would not trade for anything.
To succeed in the challenging times ahead, we have to take the same approach as Stockdale. This is a crucible in which we have the opportunity to make a choice to either grow or die as businesses.
Dr Mike Ashby
13 November 2008