Creating a Framework for Saying 'No'by Richard Sikes “It was a crazy idea to begin with,” lamented the senior project manager, “and it only got worse from there. Now I have to go back and focus on extensive damage control with our client when I really should be spending my time on more productive tasks.” His company had received a request from a principal customer to translate over 52,000 words in 48 hours. Even an entry-level localization professional knows that this volume is the equivalent of roughly 26 translator days. With two days to deliver, this would mean 13 translators, not even allowing for supplier procurement time, terminology synchronization, editing and other relevant tasks that are part and parcel of high-quality, professional delivery. Even with the best technological support, diminishing returns are quickly reached as the addition of more translators to a job results in terminological and stylistic diffusion that, in turn, increases editing time. Despite the “red flag” situation, the company committed to the delivery, found the capacity, and did indeed deliver as promised against all odds. Instead of being grateful, though, the client complained bitterly about the quality. How could this have happened? Everyone in the client-supplier relationship came out a loser, not to mention the client’s end customers who will have to try to make sense of the substandard translation. Why didn’t clearer heads prevail? Why didn’t some clear-minded participant in the transaction chain stand up and say, “No, we can’t do this”?
We have to wonder what decision criteria led to the request for a volume/timeframe that so dramatically violates common wisdom about delivery parameters. There are probably two key players on the client side — a decision-maker and a project manager.
It is likely that the decision-maker was not the liaison to the vendor. It is also reasonable to assume that a localization project manager on the client side, rather than the decision-maker, was the one who communicated the parameters of the job to the vendor. As before, we have to wonder why the project manager would not object to unreasonable timeframes. Perhaps the project manager:
The vendor perspective In this particular case, the request was received on the vendor side by a junior project manager. This project manager did not escalate the request, but instead jumped right in and began execution. Some reasons that could have prompted this reaction are that the project manager:
Agreement and Abilene With 20/20 hindsight from an impartial distance, it is easy to assign potential blame in numerous localization-specific quarters. But the incident described is not unique to the localization industry. There have been notable and even tragic episodes in a variety of industries for which the saga described here is only allegorical. A prominent example of these is the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, in which numerous human factors including group-think, peer pressure and a culture of optimism that superseded caution, each of which might have been non-lethal in isolation, mixed with one another with deadly results. In fact, the Challenger story is an oft-cited case study in organizational-behavior courses. One approach to understanding such all-too-common types of incidents is to look at a phenomenon in human interaction known as the Abilene Paradox in which members of a group appear to agree but, in fact, do not. One version of the story goes like this: A family was sitting around on their dusty Texas farm in the middle of a heat wave. Someone suggested that they drive into Abilene to get ice cream. The whole family crowded into the car, and off they went. The drive was long, dusty and uncomfortable due to the heat. They bought their ice cream, ate it and headed back home. The drive home was worse than the drive into town. Sweat and dust permeated the atmosphere in the car, and, pressed against one another in the crowded space, the family became very grumpy. Finally, when they arrived home, their mood was worse than before the trip. One asked another, “Why did we do that, anyway?” They looked at one another, perplexed, and each said, “I didn’t like the idea at all, but I thought that you wanted to go.” For the original, see The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management by Jerry B. Harvey (John Wiley and Sons, 1988). Central to the Abilene Paradox is the concept of management of agreement as opposed to management of conflict. In the case of our vendor/client relationship, the parties were not initially in a conflict situation but rather agreed to move ahead with the translation. No one who was in a position to know better or to make a critical assessment of the situation spoke up to block or escalate the project, and so the vendor and the client found themselves, as Harvey writes, “on the road to Abilene.” In a management of agreement, it is vital to facilitate expression of honest opinions. Most people are by nature disinclined to say “no,” to argue, to fight, to lose business or to otherwise look bad in front of peers and the outside world. In extreme cases, poor management of agreement can result in colleagues or business partners lying to each other to keep the peace. After-the-fact finger-pointing to affix blame is also a common symptom. The latter is what happened in the scenario we are discussing. Harvey alludes to a phenomenon that he dubs “action anxiety.” Employees can experience a kind of emotional blackmail within their environment that inhibits them from doing what they know is in the best interests of their employer and the client. To illustrate his point, Harvey paraphrases Hamlet: “To maintain my sense of integrity and self-worth or compromise it, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the ignominy that comes from managing a nonsensical research project, or the fear and anxiety that come from making a report the President and V.P. may not like to hear.” This leads us to the question: “What could be different in the environment that would help employees, especially junior employees, steer clear of compromising situations?” What was it about the junior project manager’s interaction with the customer and his or her superiors that did not realistically address the customer’s explicit need for both quantity and quality? Was there too little emphasis placed by the project manager’s company on developing the type of questioning skills at the project intake level that would have exposed consequences of ensuing actions? A questioning protocol that ferrets out vital success criteria might include:
Thorough questioning in this vein could then have been followed by “OK, now that I understand your issues, your needs and where you cannot compromise, we can work together to get it done.” Implementation of such a protocol would allow services to be built around actual client need and intent, not client fantasy. This is an important distinction because, for numerous reasons, clients frequently do not think through their own projects well enough to be able to distinguish between what they really need and what they simply desire. Instead, the vendor and the client both found themselves “on the road to Abilene.” This was a classic groupthink communication breakdown. No individual came forward to present an alternate course of action that would have yielded an outcome different to that which every group member outwardly appeared to favor. There may be a variety of reasons for this:
Mission as framework Existence of a top-level mission statement, for example, “sustained customer satisfaction,” could have provided guidance for both the client and the vendor in evaluating whether or not to proceed with the project in light of the proposed time constraints. The mission could have provided a framework from which needs-analysis questions would more naturally flow. Creation of a mission statement is often considered by employees who suffer in the trenches to be a touchy-feely waste of valuable time that could be better spent being productive. This may be true when it is not done well, but, when a top-level mission statement is designed in such a way that departmental goals and objectives can easily be derived from it, an infrastructure against which to measure and objectify decisions can be created. A questioning protocol derived from a clear mission statement can be a very powerful tool within that decision infrastructure. Saying ‘no’ Let’s take a step back and see what could have been different on each side of the vendor-client equation if goals had been clarified and a decision infrastructure had been in place. The underlying assumption here is that in cases where a decision needs to be made the response to a request for services does not always have to be “yes” by default. If a knowledgeable and assertive project manager was outfitted with a mature questioning protocol and empowered to use it, the project could have been bounced back to the decision-maker on either side of the transaction with a request for consideration of options such as these:
The foregoing options imply outcomes that could be perceived as neg-ative and that therefore must be evaluated from a business case point of view. From a project management point of view, a powerful tool that can be used when confronting such a situation is a response that is accompanied by fall-back options, which we shall dub a conditional “no.” Four major reasons why a conditional “no” can be effective and can benefit client relationship management are:
Project managers frequently find themselves performing a balancing act between a variety of conflicting forces and goals, yet not sufficiently empowered to attract visibility to the issue or to initiate a business case evaluation that would result in clear guidelines. The tactic of providing a conditional “no” to superiors can open the door to a business-case-based discussion, especially if the options presented contain numerically based rationale and risk analysis. In some corporate cultures a strongly worded opinion will be respected, but in others a conditional “no” may be considered too confrontational. Localization professional Karen Fowlie, director of product services at Cognos Incorporated, comments, “My philosophy is to avoid saying ‘no’ and to instead say ‘yes, but . . .’ in situations where decision-makers need to understand that while their request to meet aggressive deadlines may be feasible, their request may unwittingly put quality or other key success criteria at risk. “An advantage of a ‘yes, but . . .’ response is that it cushions everyone in the process. Project managers are cushioned because they’re not saying ‘no’ flat out to their chain of command. Decision-makers are not frustrated by what they may perceive to be a lack of a ‘can-do’ attitude by being told ‘no’ flat out. Instead, they’re being told by their subject matter experts ‘yes, we can deliver, but here are the risks and ramifications if we proceed with this request.’ As with the conditional ‘no,’ a ‘yes, but . . .’ response always needs to be accompanied with an alternate solution that addresses the risk or issues and, also like the conditional ‘no,’ it throws the power back to decision-makers in such a way that they understand they share accountability for the decision to take the now clearly identified risk (the ‘but’ of the ‘yes, but . . .’). “In my view, it’s important to recognize that decision-makers and project managers share accountability if commitment is given to an overly aggressive deliverable without a prior discussion regarding acceptability of risk. ‘Yes, but . . .’ is a grassroots approach that project managers, as delivery and subject matter experts, can use to ensure decision-makers are aware of the risks associated with their requests and to table alternate solutions that better set the stage for success.” Regardless of whether the approach is confrontational or cushioned, the effectiveness of the “yes, but . . .” or conditional “no” strategy will be undermined if the corporate culture encourages groupthink by tolerating ridicule or inattention to the expression of opinions that buck the mainstream line of thought. Equally dangerous is a culture that rewards a reckless “can-do” approach that ignores common sense and de-emphasizes adequate planning. Project managers often find tantalizing the prospect of pulling off the impossible and get a kind of superstar pleasure out of working excessive hours to meet unreasonable deadlines. While this type of work ethic is prevalent in the localization industry and is of value and without doubt laudable in certain circumstances such as getting a failing project back on track, it does not necessarily make good long-term business sense and should not be encouraged in the absence of pragmatic controls.
The supplier side of the industry is particularly susceptible to falling into a reactive position dominated by a short-term view. This is definitely a by-product of competition and, to a greater or lesser extent, necessary for survival. Pressure abounds to deliver at top throughput rates. Nevertheless, corporations must remain aware of the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest which, in our context, can be likened to the ability to deliver sustained quality with reasonable velocity. Localization professionals understand that translating too fast or too long under circumstances that preclude terminology harmonization is a recipe for quality disaster, whereas some decision-makers frequently do not. So, why would a supplier risk entering into such a circumstance as exemplified by the case in point? As well as the reasons mentioned earlier in this article, there is the possibility that they simply didn’t know when to say “no.” A vendor must know “when to hold and when to fold,” as a poker player might say. Again, with 20/20 hindsight, a stronger strategy for maintenance of the vendor’s long-term reputation with the client might have been to refuse the job, facilitate the client’s taking the impossible job elsewhere and thereby open an opportunity for a competitor to visibly fail. A junior project manager obviously cannot be expected to make this kind of decision. For this reason, a fast escalation path must exist so that decisions, especially negative decisions that affect key relationships, can be made at the corporate level best prepared to bear the responsibility within the context of the overall corporate strategy. This would be fairly high in the organization, possibly at the C-level in the case of a key account. An escalation path on the vendor side would have similar attributes and corporate cultural prerequisites as those previously described for the client. In addition, clear guidelines that project managers can rely on as triggers for escalation should be established. In the case we are examining, either no such trigger existed or the junior project manager was oblivious to the red flags.
If, after escalation, the appropriate decision-maker at the vendor chooses to refuse the job, conditional “no” tactics can be employed to avoid flat-out refusal. These include:
Individually, any of these could fail, but in combination they make a convincing case. Nevertheless, the stakes are admittedly high. The customer might take offense at being require to sign a waiver or might hold the unreasonable job “ransom” against other, unrelated future work. Excessive customer strength is one of Michael E. Porter’s Five Forces (Competitive Strategy, The Free Press, 1980) — buyer power, supplier power, substitution threats, new entrant threats, and competitive threats — that are factors in any business and which should be kept in balance through strategic and tactical decisions in the corner offices. In fact, a primary responsibility of C-level management is to shape corporate-wide strategy in such a way as to keep Porter’s forces in balance. Absence of a functional escalation path for communication of tactical alarms from in-the-trenches project managers to corporate instances where strategy is debated and formalized implies that forces can become unbalanced without senior management becoming aware of the shift. Our case in point appears to be just such a situation. Smart management will take steps to rectify this deficiency. The alternative is clear: the corporation may steer off course. There are other risks as well:
In either case, a relationship between the client and a competitor could come into existence where none had been present before or an existing relationship could be further developed. Proactively creating motivation for a client to explore relationships with alternative providers would certainly be frowned upon by senior sales executives, so following this course might be politically difficult for the vendor’s project management office to sell internally, regardless of the pragmatic consequences. This underscores the necessity to have a pre-existing decision framework, built upon a corporate mission statement, to objectify the process, moving it out of emotional zones to more neutral, quantifiable and negotiable territory.
Decision-making becomes more difficult when it must address intangibles such as relationships and trust, especially with the much-lamented lack of commonly accepted metrics upon which to objectify localization industry decisions. In the absence of measurability, trust becomes hugely important. A thorough questioning protocol can go a long way toward building trust between vendors and clients by indicating attention to detail and clearly identifying transaction partner wishes and constraints. But project managers must be given the tools with which to build trust. Because of the excessive volume-to-timeframe ratio, this case is admittedly at the margin of normality; but, as a case study, it highlights the importance of proactively establishing guidelines for discussing expectations between clients and service providers, as well as internally on both sides. Both clients and vendors must remember that the greater goal of localization is not to serve and compensate each other, but to provide the user base with high-quality products over the long term. Unreasonable pressure created by poor project understanding does not serve this goal. Employees must be able to draw upon a pre-existing, corporate infrastructure for evaluation of what is and what is not reasonable and be empowered to escalate objections upward through the management chain when, in their informed opinion, a strong argument can be made that short-sighted judgment is in play. They must be confident that they can do so without jeopardizing their own career stability within their company hierarchy. It is the responsibility of management on both the client and the vendor side to implement communication structures that are in alignment with principles of long-term sustainability that can only be achieved by ongoing customer satisfaction. If corporate management has not fulfilled this responsibility, then it is up to project managers to educate them by lobbying hard for constructive change.
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