*By Anders Drejer & Christer Windeloew-Lidzélius, professors invited by Saint Paul Business School to teach leadership programs amidst the chaos in Brazil
Have you ever heard of Cowboy Number One's epitaph? It appears in both the 1937 Western film Public Cowboy No. 1 and the Frankie Goes to Hollywood Song song "Two Tribes," and is a reference to the posthumous U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
When we are faced with the question “What does it mean to be a top manager?”, the classic American approach is that the person is the one who knows the most and, therefore, should manage employees to the best possible result. A kind of “Cowboy Number One”, as President Reagan was nicknamed in his time.
But not everyone agrees with this “fire, aim, prepare” notion of a manager. So let’s reflect on what it really means to be a top manager?
What types of problems does a top manager face?
As a manager, think about the types of problems colombia whatsapp data you encounter and how you work to solve them: are most problems trivial in the sense that cause and effect are easily established and the solution practically creates itself and can be implemented, without confusion in the organization, simply by using good practices? Probably not. Perhaps a small percentage of your problems have this simple form, where the management activity is analysis.
Other problems may take the form of dilemmas, where the issue is deciding between two (or several) alternatives and where the cause and effect relationships are blurred by the lack of information and/or groups in the organization that advocate for each alternative. In this scenario, you have a lot more work to do since you need to analyze and test different models and sets of criteria to eventually choose the best alternative. It is a little more difficult than simple problems, but the key point is that everyone agrees that there is a best choice for solving the problem.
However, there are also situations where problems are disordered. Here, challenges usually come as a complete surprise to everyone, their content and importance are unknown, the definition of the problem itself is not clear and, therefore, the cause and effect relationship when analyzing the problem is impossible to identify. We call these “Wicked Problems ” .
The Top Manager and Wicked Problems
When on March 11, 2020, the entire event, restaurant and festival industry was shut down by law in Denmark, and subsequently in many other countries around the world, due to the risks of COVID-19, the company Danish Event Rental lost 95% of its sales in one day. Its top management now had to figure out what the problem was and what to do about it. For example, how long will consumers be under COVID-19 restrictions? Will it last for months? And then it quickly became apparent that this situation was going to last for much longer than just a few months. But as we write this article, the top management is still debating whether the current situation will affect 2022 as well as 2021 (since they wisely gave up on 2020). Other questions include: “Will there be a cure?” “How will we survive this blow? How long will it last?” And, with a drastic cutback in business inevitable, “What are the core competencies that we are looking to maintain through the many winter months ahead?” .
Woe to managers — and many others — and to companies! Fortunately, with a keen sense of the history of management theory, we already know a lot about the predicaments that top management faces on a daily basis. Perhaps some management “Cowboys” have forgotten, but another posthumous American president, George W. Bush, famously said “I am the decider” (a word that does not even exist in English, or Portuguese), but in 1967 the modern notion of “Wicked Problems” was introduced by C. West Churchman.