Reducing Unwelcome Surprises in Project Management

Many project challenges and failures catch executives by surprise. But not all such surprises are truly unforeseeable — if you know where to look.

Why do so many projects fail to meet their goals for time, cost and performance? Regardless of the answer, many project managers and their executive sponsors seem to be surprised when a new project gets off track: “Why didn’t we see that coming?” Even projects that employ sophisticated techniques for risk management can encounter surprising derailments. Those methods, while powerful, can only manage known risks. But projects are new and unique. What about the things that we don’t even know that we don’t know? These “unknown unknowns” — often called “unk-unks” — are lurking in every project, just waiting to emerge, surprise and derail plans. To what extent are they inevitable? What could we do better?

Project knowledge comes from learning about the project — its overall context, its goals and objectives, the process for achieving them, the people, tools and other resources to be deployed, and how all of these affect one another. This learning begins in the planning stages. One might think that planners would consider all of the scenarios, evaluate all of the options and identify all of the risks — but that is seldom the case. Many planners resist wasting resources on planning projects that may never happen. Even after a project gets the green light, a typical attitude of many managers is: “We’re already behind. We know what we need to do. Let’s get started!” As a result, the distinction between what is knowable about a project and what is actually known can be quite large.

Many so-called “unk-unks” aren’t really unk-unks at all. Rather, they are things no one has bothered to find out. Indeed, there are two kinds of unknowns: unknown unknowns (things we don’t know we don’t know) and known unknowns (things we know we don’t know). (See “Converting Knowable Unk-Unks to Known Unknowns.”) Every project has some of both. The techniques of conventional risk management apply only to the known unknowns. Yet some unk-unks areknowable and can be converted to known unknowns through a process of directed recognition.

Converting Knowable Unk-Unks to Known Unknowns

Some “unknown unknowns” are actually knowable. With directed recognition, they can be converted to known unknowns — to which the conventional techniques of risk management can then be applied.

This article provides an overview of the targets, methods and tools — the where, why and how — of directed recognition. (See “About the Research.”) First, we introduce six project domains in and around a project where uncertainty resides (and where recognition of that uncertainty should occur). Second, we describe six characteristics that increase uncertainty in projects and explain whythey make unk-unks more likely. Finally, we present 11 techniques for converting knowable unk-unks into known unknowns. The goal is to reduce the unwelcome surprises in project management.

About The Research

Our research develops the theory of knowable unknowns by synthesizing transdisciplinary theories and findings. We began by positing a conceptual framework composed of key factors that drive unk-unks, as proposed in the scholarly literature on operations management, project management, systems engineering, product development, complexity and risk management. We explored the subfactors of each of the factors, their relationships to each other and additional factors that should be added. Specifically, we conducted an extensive literature search of papers about areas including complexity theory, systems engineering, economic theory, behavioral psychology, knowledge management, software development and process engineering; keyword searches of “disasters,” “technological failures,” “knowledge gaps” and “unpredictable surprises,” which led us to broader, relevant literature on the economic theory of contingencies and contracts, sociology and behavioral psychology of individuals and groups, chemical processes, and knowledge management; and a Google search of “unknown unknowns.” Our objective was to see if there was something about a project that prevented its managers from recognizing that there could be potential unk-unks. While finding many sources and drivers of unk-unks, we also came across a variety of methods and tools for detecting knowable unk-unks. Our explorations uncovered many factors, indicators and circumstances contributing to the likelihood of unk-unks in projects. In response, we iteratively reconfigured our initial framework by revising our conceptual groupings.i

Where the Unk-Unks Are: Six Project Domains

Projects operate as systems. Project outcomes and performance result not only from individual project elements but also from how the elements work together. Every project has at least five key subsystems,1 which are enmeshed in the project’s broader context or environment. These five subsystems plus the project’s context comprise six important domains, each of which contains both known and unknown unknowns.

Result Subsystem

The desired result of most projects is a product, a service or some other deliverable. Results have many components, all of which must work well together to deliver success. Problems in one area can spill over into other areas, causing a cascade of problems. For example, the HealthCare.gov project at the heart of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 was more than just an e-commerce site selling insurance; it was a system with complex interfaces to other government systems across a wide range of departments. In October 2013, when there were serious issues with the launch, it was evident that the project had run into messy integration problems with its key product.

Process Subsystem

The work required to execute and manage a project is another type of system, one made up of activities, tasks and decisions related by the flow of information, work products and deliverables.2Efficient and effective processes depend not only on the activity content but also on the relationships among those activities. For example, a lean, value-adding activity could fail to add value if it receives bad inputs (which in turn could impact other activities and cause problems later). Because the network of activity relationships and its implications can be hard to see and manage, the process subsystem is often rife with latent unk-unks.

In March 2008, for example, British Airways and the British Airport Authority suffered a huge embarrassment at London’s Heathrow Airport Terminal 5. After the project’s use of the latest thinking in lean project management had been touted, the opening of BA Terminal 5 turned out to be a debacle, with hundreds of canceled flights and thousands of lost bags. BA lost $32 million, and two senior managers lost their jobs. While the BA project team had focused on the technical side of the project (such as getting the building equipped and testing the building’s services), it neglected operational logistics and staff training. On the opening day, many staff were late for work (they couldn’t find parking) and weren’t able to log into the computer system. BA’s experience underscores the fact that many unk-unks lurk within the complex network of tasks and relationships composing a project.

Organization Subsystem

The people, teams, groups, departments and functions collaborating on a project represent another type of system. In many cases, this system breaks down due to what is often referred to as “poor communication.” However, the solution isn’t for everyone to communicate with everyone else. Rather, it’s necessary to strike a balance between effective information transfer and information overload. When the organization subsystem is suboptimized by miscommunication, a lack of communication or information overload, the risk of unk-unks grows.

Tools Subsystem

To manage activities and transfer information, people in organizations need tools, facilities and equipment. Today, most tools needed for activities such as information exchange, compatibility and service support are software-based. Unfortunately, many software tools are unable to transfer data due to various incompatibilities and organizational decisions. For example, computer-aided design tools can work well in some settings but not in others. When an aerospace design project wanted a certain CAD tool so it could collaborate easily with its partners, the project’s parent organization said it had already standardized around a different brand. Adversities in the tools subsystem can be a significant source of unk-unks for a project.

Goals Subsystem

Most projects have goals for time, cost and performance (functionality, capability provided, quality, scope, etc.). These three areas compete with each other: Improving on functionality, for example, often means increases in cost and/or time. The same often goes for performance: Increasing one capability usually requires a trade-off with another. The goals subsystem influences what is and is not possible, permissible, desirable and effective. As these trade-offs become more pronounced, the possibilities for unwelcome surprises increase.

All five of these project subsystems are related to each other. To accomplish the project’s goals, the organization uses the tools to do the work (execute the process) and produce the desired results. All of these relationships imply no small amount of complexity — which, as we will see, provides a fertile breeding ground for unk-unks.

Context

Every project exists within a larger context. A project may be part of a larger portfolio of projects, or it might have multiple stakeholders who have competing visions and requirements for success. A project’s ideal software tools might be consistent with its parent organization’s standards for multiproject commonality, or they may be completely incompatible. The project context contains a mix of known and unknown unknowns, and it interacts with elements in each of the five subsystems. As managers look to convert unk-unks to known unknowns, they need to consider all six of these domains and their relationships.

Six Factors Driving Uncertainty

Several characteristics of a project’s subsystems and context make surprises more likely. Although unk-unks are by definition specific things we don’t realize we’re missing, it’s possible to look at a project and its context and come to the realization that unk-unks are likely to exist — and why. For example, a large, complex project is more likely to encounter unk-unks than a small, simple project. An organization that is actively looking to uncover unk-unks is more likely to convert them into known unknowns. We have identified six factors — characteristics of a project and its context — that tend to increase the likelihood of unk-unks.3 (See “Factors Contributing to Unknown Unknowns.”) By evaluating a project in terms of these factors, managers can learn why their project might encounter unk-unks — and thereby justify why they should invest in taking a closer look for them.

Factors Contributing to Unknown Unknowns

The six factors shown here tend to increase the likelihood of unk-unks (surprises) in projects.

Complexity

A complex system contains many interacting elements that increase the variety of its possible behaviors and results. The five project subsystems described above each have many elements (components, activities, people, tools and goals) that interact in various ways to generate many kinds of outcomes. All else being equal, the complexity of a project (or a subsystem) increases with the number, variety, internal complexity and lack of robustness of its elements. A project with more tasks, more people and/or more requirements is usually more complex than a project with fewer. When a project’s elements have greater variety (for example, they do three different tasks rather than doing the same task three times, or have a team with representatives from four different functional organizations versus a team with four people from the same function), complexity also increases. The internal complexity of an element (for example, a project composed of five huge tasks versus a project composed of five small ones) also matters. Furthermore, if a project’s elements are robust in the face of change (such as engineering design changes, requirements changes, etc.), then they can act as change absorbers, preventing the propagation of change throughout the system, whereas elements lacking this robustness will amplify complexity.

Other aspects of project complexity depend on the relationships among the project’s elements. As the number, variety, criticality and internal complexity of these relationships increase, so will complexity. For example, a project to develop a product with many interconnected parts (for instance, some requiring close proximity, some needing to transfer energy) is extremely complex — and that is just the product subsystem. Collectively, the subfactors of element and relationship complexity can increase the level of complexity significantly, thereby adding to a project’s likelihood of encountering unk-unks. (See “Situations That Increase the Likelihood of Unknown Unknowns.”)

Complicatedness

Regardless of its complexity, a system may appear more or less complicated depending on one’s point of view. In contrast to complexity, complicatedness is more subjective and observer-dependent. For example, an automobile with automatic transmission is more complex than one with manual transmission; it has more parts and intricate linkages. To drivers, it is less complicated (even though it can be more difficult to fix).4 Similarly, a software application may seem more or less complicated depending on the simplicity and elegance of its user interface, regardless of the complexity of its underlying code. A project’s complicatedness depends on the participants’ abilities to understand and anticipate the project. That depends on subfactors such as the intuitiveness of the project’s structure, organization and behavior; its newness or novelty; how easy it is to find necessary elements and identify cause-and-effect relationships; and the participants’ aptitudes and experiences. The more complicated a project seems to the project manager and other participants, the greater the likelihood that something important will be missed, thus increasing the likelihood of unk-unks.

Dynamism

A project’s dynamism — its volatility or the propensity of its subsystems’ elements and relationships to change — adds to its complexity. A project’s external dynamics are especially likely to affect its goals. Regulatory agencies may impose new rules, customer preferences may change or competitors may alter their strategies. Changes in goals may lead to changes in a project’s results (the product or deliverable) and its means of achieving them. Portions of a project might be outsourced, customers or suppliers might become formal partners and so on. Such changes realign the components and relationships considered to be “part” of the project. And increasing complexity and complicatedness increases the likelihood that a project will encounter unk-unks.

Equivocality

Project work requires a lot of sharing of information. If the information is not crisp and specific, then the people who receive it will be equivocal and won’t be able to make firm decisions. Although imprecise information itself can be a known unknown, equivocality increases both complexity and complicatedness. For example, some projects require a number of participants to attend meetings “just in case” an issue comes up that might affect them. The inability to pin down exactly who needs to be at any particular meeting increases scheduling complexity and the length of meetings and makes for “too many cooks in the kitchen.” In such cases, an attempt to avoid one area of unk-unks ironically increases the likelihood of other types of unk-unks.

Offering incentives for candor can show people that there are advantages to owning up to errors or mistakes in time for management to take action. At the same time, it is imperative to eliminate any perverse incentives that induce people to ignore emerging risks.

Mindlessness

We refer to the perceptive barriers that interfere with the recognition of unk-unks as mindlessness (as opposed to mindfulness). Examples include an overreliance on past experiences and traditions, the inability to detect weak signals and ignoring input that is inconvenient or unappealing. By mindlessly relying on past data, book inventories and existing documentation or components instead of requiring physical verification, managers may be inviting unk-unks. Individual biases and inappropriate filters can keep periphery-dwelling knowledge in the shadows. A project manager’s limited “bandwidth” requires filtering out the “noise” while letting important information through. Unfortunately, filtering is prone to errors, and the information that gets screened out, willfully or not, can be critical. Although it can be tempting to suppress or dismiss negative information while accentuating the positive when promoting a project, that can be a slippery slope. Mindlessness increases a project’s susceptibility to surprising unk-unks.

Project Pathologies

Whereas mindlessness pertains largely to the individuals associated with a project, project pathologies represent structural or behavioral conditions in and around projects as a whole that allow unk-unks to remain hidden. Project pathologies include mismatches among the project subsystems and context (for example, goals for which no organizational unit is responsible), unclear expectations among stakeholders and dysfunctional cultures. A dysfunctional culture can manifest itself in numerous ways: information asymmetries (for instance, some stakeholders have key information about a risk that others lack), shooting messengers, covering up failures, discouraging new ideas and making some topics taboo for discussion. A manager might interpret a lack of active opposition as positive support, but in many organizations people who harbor doubts keep quiet, knowing that opposing views (either negative or positive) simply aren’t welcome. Each of these project pathologies can make unk-unks more likely by decreasing the likelihood of uncovering them before they become unwelcome surprises.

How to Reduce Unk-Unks

Each of the six factors that increase the likelihood of a project encountering unk-unks can affect each of a project’s six domains, yielding 36 places to look more specifically for knowable unk-unks. How should a manager go about looking? What techniques can a manager use to shine a light on these areas? We have identified 11 tools that can help managers with directed recognition: seven are project design approaches and four are behavioral approaches. (See “From Unknown to Known Unknowns.”)

From Unknown to Known Unknowns

Directed recognition, which can entail both project design and behavioral approaches, can convert knowable unk-unks to known unknowns.

1. Decompose the project.

Modeling a project’s subsystems — to understand their structures, how their elements relate to one another and the subfactors of complexity — builds knowledge that helps expose unk-unks. Decomposition should begin with the natural structure of the overall purpose of the project (the “problem”), identifying the subproblems relating to key areas (such as customer need, product functionality and the venture team) and complementing it with experience and experimentation. For example, one company was able to decompose a project5 by:

a) Identifying the problem’s goals, context, activities and cause-effect relationships

b) Breaking the domains into smaller elements — such as product modules, process activities and stakeholders

c) Examining the complexity and uncertainty of each element to identify the major risks (known unknowns) that needed managing and the knowledge gaps that pointed to areas of potential unk-unks

d) Managing the selected pieces of the project in parallel with different project management methods — for example, treating various project threads as “options” and determining further actions contingent on the outcomes.

2. Analyze scenarios.

Scenario planning involves constructing several different future outlooks.6 Unlike many approaches to forecasting, it accepts uncertainty, tries to understand it and builds it into the reasoning. Rather than being predictions, scenarios are coherent and credible alternative futures built on dynamic events and conditions that are subject to change. Scenario analysis looks at how indirect threats or situations affect stakeholders, competitors, suppliers and customers,7 and it is particularly suited to uncovering unk-unks in projects.

3. Use checklists.

Codified learning from past projects can enlighten future planning. This often shows up in the form of checklists or prompt lists. Of course, providing such tools won’t help if they are viewed as obstacles rather than facilitators of success. Checklists and categories need to be viewed as helpful prompts, not substitutes for thinking. Although some professionals such as doctors have sometimes resisted using checklists, airplane pilots have long known that a good checklist helps smart people free up thinking for higher-level problems.8

4. Scrutinize plans.

Project plans are merely a hypothesis for how success will occur. At a minimum, plans should contain information about the expected work (for example, when it should start and finish, projected costs, anticipated results, responsibilities and resource requirements). These expectations need to be scrutinized closely by project participants and other stakeholders. The scrutiny can come in the form of reviews, audits and even formal verifications of how the content was generated.9 Just as reliable products may require some redundancy, project plans may need predefined contingencies. An independent board of overseers composed of experienced experts, empowered to obtain all kinds of project information, can help reduce potential unk-unks lingering from planners’ entrapped mindsets. In a well-known case in 1992, NASA’s Mars Observer was lost due in part to a lack of independent verification and validation.10

Although it can be tempting to suppress or dismiss negative information while accentuating the positive when promoting a project, that can be a slippery slope.

5. Use long interviews.

Long interviews with project stakeholders, subject matter experts and other participants can be effective tools for uncovering lurking problems and issues.11 However, interviewers need to be careful not to be too enthusiastic about the projects they’re examining and not asking “yes or no” questions. The best interviews probe deep and wide and ask “out of the box” questions, which can help managers identify latent needs that project stakeholders are unable or unlikely to articulate readily. Consider Silverglide Surgical Technologies, a Boulder, Colorado-based company specializing in nonstick electrosurgical instruments.12 It came up with what it thought was a novel product — a nonstick surgical probe. Although surgeons were intrigued by what the new product could do, they weren’t accustomed to using a probe to operate, so the product bombed. Subsequent studies revealed that had the surgeons been asked, they would have preferred nonstick forceps to a probe. That was a knowable unk-unk.

6. Pick up weak signals.

Weak signals often come in subtle forms, such as unexplained behaviors, confusing outcomes or a realization that no one in the organization has a complete understanding of a project. Recognizing and interpreting weak signals requires scanning local and extended networks, mobilizing search parties, testing multiple hypotheses and probing for further clarity.13 It’s also helpful to include tools we have previously discussed, such as long interviews and diverse scenarios.

7. Mine data.

When vast amounts of data are available from a plethora of databases, electronic data mining can be a particularly powerful tool for extracting implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information. By simultaneously reviewing data from multiple projects, data mining could enable project managers to identify the precursors of potential problems. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) was established to improve safety by proactively identifying precursors to potential problems hidden in NASA’s diverse databases. The NESC found electronic data mining to be a particularly promising tool for the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information toward accomplishment of this goal.14

8. Communicate frequently and effectively.

Regularly and systematically reviewing decision-making and communication processes, including the assumptions that are factored into the processes, and seeking to remove information asymmetries, can help to anticipate and uncover unk-unks. The 1998-2004 Ladera Ranch earth-moving project in California, for example, needed to find a way to deal with any unk-unks related to discovery of prehistoric Indian ruins or rare animal or plant species the dig might uncover.15The project manager and the team met weekly to discuss whether the project or its current plan needed to be revised and how. Effective and frequent communication is essential for project adaptability and agility. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean communicating large volumes of information, which can cause information overload. Rather, the key is knowing how to reach the right people at the right times.

Managers can stress the limits to what can be known about a project, especially at its early stages. They can cultivate a culture of healthy skepticism about projects purporting an absence of risk.

9. Balance local autonomy and central control.

Many unk-unks are obscured by the relationship complexity and dynamism of a project — dictated by diverse technologies, geographic sites, interests and external influences. Such confusion makes the project management team vulnerable to unwelcome surprises. Using decentralization of control to grant autonomy to the local nodes of a multinodal project facilitates adaptation and innovation as well as recognition of unk-unks (such as the effect of regulatory changes and customer preferences). Although decentralization helps project managers compensate for their knowledge gaps, it creates challenges for governance. Local nodes are less willing to report problems. To achieve adequate control, project managers may adopt an approach that combines bottom-up empowerment to correct errors with top-down efforts to embed learning across the project.16

10. Incentivize discovery.

Some of the most promising ways to identify unk-unks include timely and honest communication of missteps, anomalies and missing competencies. Offering incentives for candor can show people that there are advantages to owning up to errors or mistakes in time for management to take action. At the same time, it is imperative to eliminate any perverse incentives that induce people to ignore emerging risks.17 Among the most common perverse incentives are organizational tendencies to stress short-term over long-term results — a key contributor to the financial crisis of 2008.

11. Cultivate an alert culture.

An alert culture is made up of people who understand how unk-unks can derail projects and who strive to illuminate rather than hide potential problems. Managers can cultivate a culture of alertness in several ways. First, they can emphasize systems thinking, which recognizes that deciding what to do in a complex system is not simply a matter of repeating what was successful before. Systems thinking also emphasizes the use of multiple perspectives to reach a decision, does not expect to be completely right and changes course in the face of contrary evidence. Second, managers can stress the limits to what can be known about a project, especially at its early stages. They can cultivate a culture of healthy skepticism about projects purporting an absence of risk. Third, managers can seek to include and build a wide range of experiential expertise — intuitions, subtle understandings and finely honed reflexes gained through years of intimate interaction with a particular natural, social or technological system. Fourth, they can seek to develop the characteristics of a high-reliability organization: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience and deference to expertise.18 And fifth, managers can attempt to learn from surprising outcomes. In their eagerness for resolution and clear explanations in reviews, managers should eschew the rhetoric of justification and hold out for the possibility of a deeper understanding of the causes of failure.

PROJECTS ARE COMPLEX and complicated. A project’s desired results, planned process, performing organization, tool suite, goals and context all lend themselves to complexity and complication. What’s more, any of these areas can harbor unk-unks, the undetected problems that are buried in the morass of elements and interactions in and around a project. Some unk-unks are actually knowable, but individuals and organizations acting in mindless or pathological ways will allow the unk-unks to remain hidden, where they can fester into even bigger problems before becoming evident. Fortunately, there are tools and strategies to help managers. The 11 approaches described above give managers a tool kit for directing recognition toward uncovering the knowable unk-unks lurking in projects and converting them to known unknowns. By providing guidance on where and why unk-unks exist in projects and how to recognize their clues, managers can reduce the number and magnitude of unwelcome surprises.

REFERENCES (19)

1. These five project subsystems have been noted in several prior works, including T.R. Browning, E. Fricke and H. Negele, “Key Concepts in Modeling Product Development Processes,” Systems Engineering 9, no. 2 (summer 2006): 104-128; S.D. Eppinger and T.R. Browning, “Design Structure Matrix Methods and Applications” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012); and R.V. Ramasesh and T.R. Browning, “A Conceptual Framework for Tackling Knowable Unknown Unknowns in Project Management,” Journal of Operations Management 32, no. 4 (May 2014): 190-204.

2. S.D. Eppinger, “Innovation at the Speed of Information,” Harvard Business Review 79, no. 1 (January 2001): 149-158.

Tyson R. Browning and Ranga V. Ramasesh

Why Your Sales Reps Can’t Close

Think your team has a “closing” problem? Think again.

How often have you heard leaders say, “My salespeople can’t close”? If you’re a sales manager, you’ve probably even said it. But failing to close is never the real problem. Never. That’s just the symptom. The problem is that sales reps neglect important activities during early stages of the sales process.

Unless you address the broken links in your prospecting system, your sales reps will continue to struggle. It’s like back pain. You can stretch and put heat on an aching back, but unless you treat the source of the pain—a pulled muscle or degenerating disc—your back will continue to hurt.

Put Your Finger on the Real Problem

When you start analyzing what really went wrong with missed sales opportunities, you’ll typically discover that your sales reps didn’t make time to prepare for their meetings. They didn’t plan agendas, do their research, tailor their pitches, or even check the clients’ LinkedIn profiles to identify shared interests, connections, and similarities.

Other common prospecting problems:

• The initial prospects were unqualified. They had no idea why they were meeting with the salesperson or why they should be interested.
• The salesperson didn’t ask enough discovery questions.
• The salesperson left without getting agreement on next steps or scheduling the next call.
• Follow-up consisted of a series of emails that promoted products, didn’t address the client’s unique concerns, and had no calls to action.
• The salesperson was clueless as to why his emails were greeted with radio silence.

This is not how you wow prospects, build relationships with them, and convert them into clients.

One of my clients was on the way to a high-profile meeting. If his team wowed the client, they had an opportunity to close a million-dollar deal. I asked my client how the sales reps prepared. His answer: “Oh, we talk about it in the car on the way to the meeting.” Was their sales manager clueless, or what?

Start at the Source

If your team has trouble closing, go back to the beginning—qualifying prospects—and examine your entire sales process for missing links and broken tactics.

Ask these pointed questions:

• How are sales reps getting leads?
• How are these leads qualified?
• Are salespeople asking the right questions to identify prospects’ problems and propose thoughtful solutions?
• Do sales reps demonstrate product features, or do they talk ROI?
• What is the marketing plan for following up?

Don’t even think about training your sales team on closing techniques. Save your money. Instead, give them a sales process that works.

The ROI of Referrals

More often than not, the problem is with a team’s prospecting methods. If your reps are chasing cold leads, they’re pretty much set up to fail. There’s only one kind of lead that should be in your pipeline. Only one kind of lead with a 50-percent conversion rate. Only one kind of lead that sales managers should care about.

That’s hot leads—the kind you source through referrals from trusted allies.

Every sales professional agrees that referral selling is, hands down, their most effective prospecting strategy. When you prospect through referrals:

• You bypass the gatekeeper and score meetings with decision-makers every time.
• Your prospects are pre-sold on your ability to deliver results.
• You’ve already earned trust and credibility with your prospects.
• You convert prospects into clients at least 50 percent of the time (usually more than 70 percent).
• You land clients who become ideal referral sources for new business.
• You score more new clients from fewer leads (because all of your leads are qualified).
• You get the inside track on your prospects and ace out your competition.

Ditch the Canned Pitch—Ask the Right Questions

If your team is getting in front of the right prospects and still can’t seal the deal, they’re not engaging in insightful discussion or asking compelling questions.

Thoughtful and provocative questioning has a huge impact on close rates and sales revenues. When sales reps ask smart, probing questions to understand what their clients really need—not just what the clients think they need—the scale of projects increases, creating win/wins for everyone. Your company gets bigger deals. Clients get solutions that actually solve their problems and create measurable business results. And they are happy to offer referrals to their networks.

Bravo! You’ve addressed the problem, not the symptom. Your client looks good, your team is prepared, and deals are yours to win. You are now a true sales manager.

http://www.nomorecoldcalling.com/note-to-the-sales-manager-why-your-sales-reps-cant-close/

From Customer Interactions to Emotional Engagement: 5 Trends Shaping Marketing

Our world is nothing like our “father’s Oldsmobile.” Change is a constant yet those four words do not adequately capture what is going on. We are in the midst of a world shift that will forever change our and the lives of our grandchildren.

The shift is not about a faster more fluid global world or the rise of new technology, it is more profound than that. We, individuals and organizations, are losing our separateness and becoming a collective. The catalyst as well as what binds us together is technology.

Call it the Internet of Things (IoT) or the connected economy, the bottom-line is that technology binds us – individuals, communities, economies – together and is reshaping how we value and define relationships. What affects one, affects us all.

For marketers this is an exciting and terrifying time. We understand the customer in ways that was unimaginable in the past. We’re moving beyond customer interactions to emotional engagement. With new depths of data and analytics marketers can guide every corner of their entire organization on how, when and with what to create meaningful emotional connections with B2B and B2C customers. We continue to automate repetitive process and data intensive tasks and empower machines to make routine decisions so we can get out of the weeds. Our time is better spent on things like long-term strategy, social responsibility, and consciously with intent defining how we want our world to be in 2020 and beyond.

Technology coupled with the rise of customer has set an irreversible course forward that is redefining marketing and what it means – to customers, marketers and the C-Suite. To understand where we are in this transformation we need to understand how we got to this point.

I had the pleasure of interviewing a number of B2B CMOs from Fortune 10 down to Fortune 2000 companies at the request of Marketo who funded this research. The interview focused on the most significant trends that shaped marketing today as well as those on the horizon that CMOs are closely watching.

These five trends that shaped the state of marketing today:

1. Social media mainstreams

Social media is pervasive and has been embraced by B2B and B2C buyers as a key mechanism for taking full control of their brand relationships. The ease with which buyers can reach their peers has forever changed the influencer landscape. Brands and sales teams are increasing losing their role as trusted sources of knowledge. Both are increasingly viewed as a commodity. What drives a customer to purchase from a brand is not price, product or brand cache but their reputation within the buyer’s social graph, past experience and their ability to build value-based human-to-human relationship.

Buyers give more credibility and weight to the opinions and advice of their peers than they do to brand content, media relations or campaigns. That reliance on peers, easy access to customers and digital sites like G2 Crowd has all but obsoleted traditional industry analysts and media relations. The effect has been a complete redefinition of how trust is built and who communicates brand messages. Increasingly it is not the brand but customers, peers, communities and thought leaders that define positioning, messaging and the company’s reputation. Savvy marketers have embraced these trends by shifting their marketing culture, skill sets, programs and investments to be customer-aligned.

2. Death of outbound marketing

There has been over the past two years the steady decline in the effectiveness of outbound marketing. CMOs are finding that over 50 percent of their leads come from inbound marketing activities and they are shifting spend accordingly. Inbound marketing is more effective in pulling buyers to the brand and through their journeys though all would agree the practice remains nascent.

A significant portion of the early stages of the buyer’s journey is driven by buyer self-discovery – from understanding the problem, alternative solution approaches, outcomes their peers have realized and best practices. Brands have realized that the awareness-attraction-engagement cycle needs to be redefined to educate-enable-engage. The result of this trend has dramatically reshaped marketing team competencies.

3. Marketing’s street cred, finally

Marketing has struggled for decades to be seen as a value-adding member at the board table. Being seen as a cost center, the “colors” or “party team”, or the blamer for when things go wrong gets old real fast. Gaining street cred with peers and boards has been a major focus for CMOs. Technology has not only improved marketing execution but data driven decision outcomes as well.

Marketing automation, ERM, CRM and predictive analytics technology are enabling CMOs and their marketing teams to significantly improve their ability to credibly and transparently measure and report on marketing-attributable revenue and ROI. The ability to measure and predict how various marketing activities will perform and be able to adjust on the fly based on detailed insight into how buyers are reacting to marketing campaigns is the baseline to success. A number of CMOs have invested heavily in building very detailed market models that predict the yield from spend in various categories. Being able to confidently (and accurately) forecast pipeline and booked revenue from B2B marketing spend is changing the perception of marketing. Challenges remain in achieving full customer lifecycle visibility and using data science to advance customer engagement.

4. The link between employee and customer satisfaction

Organization theorists have long touted the importance of employee satisfaction. Yet CMOs have only recently recognized the strength of the linkage between employee engagement and customer satisfaction and loyalty. To that end, programs have been implemented, often in partnership with Human Resources, to keep employees up-to-date on company developments, news and product information. That information comes in many forms ranging from product announcements, knowledge bases, technical information, and financial news to real-time customer feedback.

CMOs are realizing that employee engagement and satisfaction doesn’t come from free lunches, Friday beers and fussball but from making sure that employees have meaning, mattering and belonging. The data shows there is a direct correlation between how happy, informed and trusted an employee is and the satisfaction of the customer they interact with. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the contact center, field maintenance, sales, marketing or finance – the linkage is real. This trend has focused organizations on equipping employees with the information and insights they need to better understand and respond to customer needs and expectations.

5. Only talk about revenue

Some things haven’t changed, namely B2B Boards of Directors and CEOs continue to only be interested in revenue pipeline metrics. While CMOs have made great strides forward in accounting for the revenue impact from marketing spend, Boards and CEOs have little interest in understanding the softer attributes that impact revenue such as reputation, reach and customer experience.

The frustration for CMOs is that the conversation has so narrowed that neither understand the power of marketing or how the discipline’s dramatic changes impacts how companies spot and respond to opportunities. Having been burnt in the past by pushing non-financial issues, CMOs are sticking to the script.

There were a number of surprises from these interviews. One was that the sophistication of an organization’s marketing was not defined by company size, budget or CMO’s vision but by their customers. Regardless of company size, progressive CMOs are constrained by how comfortable their customers and Boards of Directors are with new methods of engagement.

These past trends have dramatically reshaped what marketing means today and what it will look like in the future. Everything from competencies, organization structure, reporting metrics to how CMOs keep their organizations agile and healthy is being rethought.

The future of marketing is exciting as well as challenging. CMOs are faced with the duality of managing breakneck pace of change within their customer segments and marketing practices while educating their peers and boards on the new role of marketing, revenue impact of customer alignment and the value marketing brings to the table.

Christine Crandell

Как найти и развить идею для бизнеса

The Performance Management Revolution

“Research indicates that workers have three prime needs: Interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company.” Zig Ziglar

 Many years ago I read “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn. The main idea he developed is that once a theory cannot explain the observable reality anymore, a crisis must emerge, a revolution should occur, and a new theory must be formulated and embraced, until the process begins again. The most common Performance Management system, the one based on numerical ratings and a one-time a year appraisal, is in crisis. The existing theory cannot explain anymore the observable reality of a worker’s performance, a crisis is evident, and a performance revolution must happen.

In my opinion, as proven throughout recent history, the existing Performance Management system was intrinsically flawed and doomed to fail, particularly the approach to assess whether individuals and teams are top performers or not.

This is not just my subjective observation; there is research to support this argument. The “2013 Global Performance Management Survey Report” by the consulting firm MERCER found that “51% of respondents said that their [goal] planning process needs work, 42% said the linkage to compensation needs work, and 48% said that the overall approach needs work”.

The most remarkable finding made by MERCER, however, is that only 3% of respondents “reported that their overall management system delivers exceptional value”. It is important to notice that nearly 90% of organizations surveyed have a common Performance Management system: goal setting, mid-year check in and individual-rating-based appraisals. The same report indicated that the most important manager’s skill to drive high performing organizations and overall success is “having candid dialogue” (AKA, constant feedback).  The report also indicates that 89% of the organizations have performance ratings, and that 89% link individual ratings to compensation decisions.

Similar to the MERCER report, in a public survey carried out by Deloitte, 58% of executives surveyed “believe that their current performance management approach drives neither employee engagement nor high performance.”

Unfortunately, as it is evidenced, most organizations still consider "the carrot and the stick" approach to be worthwhile as a way to motivate people. These organizations and their management are still injecting life to the dying theory of Performance Management. If only these organizations understood that the way to achieve better results, higher performance and exceptionally value, therefore accomplishing growth and sustainability, is by doing things in a different way. We already tried and, hopefully learned, that the one way not to achieve high performance is by having a ranking-based approach.

“All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they are now getting. If we want different results, we must change the way we do things.” Tom Northup

As probably most of us know (and have experienced ourselves) individual ratings in a final appraisal are a huge roadblock to unleash the potential of people and keep them motivated. This also goes along with the discussion of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators.

When I look around, most organizations that I come across with have designed and put in place incentive and reward systems that appeal only to those who are extrinsically motivated. If you get an Excellent, you receive x%, but if you get an “Ok” (of course, they don’t call it that, but “Meet Expectations” or any other fancy name to say that the quality of your work is… “Ok”) you receive a far lower financial incentive.

I believe that the approach of offering purely financial incentives to drive for high performance achieves the opposite effect of what it seeks. It actually encourages and promotes the wrong kind of behaviors. It  sort of forces people to do whatever is needed in order to get that Excellent rating, regardless of the real effect that their work has on the collective entity that is the organization. Not surprisingly, we see organizations sinking very fast, but full of shining individual stars. Keep in mind the case of Enron, whereby individual stars dishonestly tried to make their way up the corporate ladder, while at the same time hiding a reality that soon exploded. As William Shakespeare said:

“His promises were, as he then was, mighty; But his performance, as he is now, nothing.”

Now, in addition to having shining stars in the “Excellent” performance realm, a rewards system that is overly focused on extrinsic motivators also misses the big opportunity to tap in the potential of people who are intrinsically motivated, people who need constant feedback and acknowledgement, as well as Support and Challenge from their leaders.

These individuals (particularly Millennials – who will account for 64% of the workforce by the year 2020 according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics) get enough energy and motivation when their leaders meet with them on a regular basis, help them overcome the challenges that might be undermining their true capacity for high performance, acknowledge their accomplishments in real time and back them up, and support/challenge them to achieve even higher goals.

For Millennials (but also very much across generations), as has been indicated in a research by The Conference Board, feedback and flexibility are essential incentives (taking for granted, of course, that they are not exploited by their employers, but have a competitive salary). This system is different than one that constantly praises “good” performers. It is rather a system that rewards high performance, tap into the challenges of low performers, at the time that achieves a highly energized organization and teams. The system, however, requires that leaders have the skills and abilities to have real and thorough conversations with their teams.

“Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.” Neil deGrasse Tyson

I was once delivering a workshop on performance and somebody said “even if I get an ‘Excellent’ rating, the monetary compensation is the equivalent of two cups of a coffee a day. I want much more than that”. What does “much more than that” mean? Deloitte and Accenture are acting as trailblazers in this arena by thinking outside the box and experimenting with another methods to incentivize their workers. I believe feedback and opportunities to unleash talents are the two most important ideas behind the “much more than that”.

Constant positive and developmental feedback (not praise!) is one of the components of a bigger, more effective and purposeful approach than a merely rating-financial-compensation approach. Deloitte and Accenture deemed it necessary not only to give an answer to the Performance Management crisis, but they also take into account an updated generational (mostly because the influx of millennials in their workforce) approach in which unleashing the potential and maximizing the opportunities for learning and development are by far more important than a monetary incentive. I should say that having the equivalent in money to two extra cups a coffee a day, for a year, is definitely not a bad thing. Monetary compensation is, indeed, a critical factor..

Now, would someone go the extra mile because they received a monetary compensation as a product of their rating-based performance? is that compensation directly linked to an emergence of creativity and innovation? The answer to both questions is a definite no. Research shows the effects of diminishing marginal returns of monetary compensation for performance. After some point, it doesn’t make a real difference on your performance (your rating might still be the best, not your actual performance, though) to receive an Excellent rating.  

The good news is that, despite the fact that the crisis of Performance Management started a long time ago, the revolution is just beginning, and at a greater scale. Deloitte and Accenture are part of that revolution. Have they come up with the right theory to explain a new reality? Is their newly implemented Performance Management process the best approach? To be honest, I don’t know. We have yet to see.

Nevertheless, the neat thing about Deloitte and Accenture revamping their Performance Management system is that it is bringing to the table an ugly topic. You know, everybody loves to hate performance. And, as it happens very often, people don’t want to talk about what they hate. However, Deloitte and Accenture’s revolutionary approach to Performance is renewing a seemingly dead interest in talking about it, thereby creating a huge amount of dialogue, research, papers and, best of all, organizations questioning their own systems.

In a recent interview with the retiring CEO of Accenture, Pierre Nanterme, in the Washington Post, he said about Performance Management:

“We are not sure that spending all that time on performance management has been yielding a great outcome. And for the millennium generation, it’s not the way they want to be recognized, the way they want to be measured. If you put this new generation in the box of the performance management we’ve used the last 30 years, you lose them. We’re done with the famous annual performance review, where once a year I’m going to share with you what I think about you. That doesn’t make any sense. Performance is an ongoing activity. It’s every day, after any client interaction or business interaction or corporate interaction. It’s much more fluid. People want to know on an ongoing basis, am I doing right? Am I moving in the right direction? Do you think I’m progressing? Nobody’s going to wait for an annual cycle to get that feedback. Now it’s all about instant performance management.”

Even though Mr. Nanterme mentioned Millennials and the risk of losing them with the existing practices in Performance Management, I think organizations are already losing real potential across generations. And I purposefully use the expression “losing potential”. To me, this doesn’t mean that people are necessarily quitting their jobs, more so if they are not too far from retirement, but it means that they might not be using their full capacities to achieve even higher levels of performance, creativity and innovation.

We should be the protagonists of this revolution in the making. In that sense, for all our organizations, talking about the way we measure performance should be of paramount importance. From there, I think that the next steps in the conversation must be how to incentivize the constant formal and informal conversations between leaders and people (showcasing the benefits and results for the organization, the leaders and the people); provide collective incentives to team performance; create mechanisms in which individuals can also provide bottom-up feedback to their bosses and even appeal to the self-interests and ego of the leaders: show them the results that such a culture can have for them. In the words of Laszlo Bock in his book “The Work Rules”:

“Performance improved only when companies implemented programs to empower employees (for example, by taking decision-making authority away from managers and giving it to individuals or teams), provided learning opportunities that were outside what people needed to do their jobs, increased their reliance on teamwork (by giving teams more autonomy and allowing them to self-organize), or a combination of these.”

I keep in perspective that changes might happen bottom-up, top-down, or simply altogether. It only takes courage and leadership from the organization as an entity. Stephen Covey said “management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.” I know we need to measure performance, but, do we have the ladder on the right wall?

The ugly topic of performance is on the table and we have a big responsibility to shake up our beliefs in older and dying merit-pay systems and open the door to more energizing and refreshing approaches, be it the Deloitte/Accenture approach, or the new approaches not yet created.

Enrique Rubio

HR Professional, Engineer, Writer

Three steps to building a better top team

When a top team fails to function, it can paralyze a whole company. Here’s what CEOs need to watch out for.

byMichiel Kruyt, Judy Malan, and Rachel Tuffield

Few teams function as well as they could. But the stakes get higher with senior-executive teams: dysfunctional ones can slow down, derail, or even paralyze a whole company. In our work with top teams at more than 100 leading multinational companies,¹ including surveys with 600 senior executives at 30 of them, we’ve identified three crucial priorities for constructing and managing effective top teams. Getting these priorities right can help drive better business outcomes in areas ranging from customer satisfaction to worker productivity and many more as well.

1. Get the right people on the team . . . and the wrong ones off

Determining the membership of a top team is the CEO’s responsibility—and frequently the most powerful lever to shape a team’s performance. Many CEOs regret not employing this lever early enough or thoroughly enough. Still others neglect it entirely, assuming instead that factors such as titles, pay grades, or an executive’s position on the org chart are enough to warrant default membership. Little surprise, then, that more than one-third of the executives we surveyed said their top teams did not have the right people and capabilities.

The key to getting a top team’s composition right is deciding what contributions the team as a whole, and its members as individuals, must make to achieve an organization’s performance aspirations and then making the necessary changes in the team. This sounds straight-forward, but it typically requires conscious attention and courage from the CEO; otherwise, the top team can underdeliver for an extended period of time.

That was certainly the case at a technology services company that had a struggling top team: fewer than one in five of its members thought it was highly respected or shared a common vision for the future, and only one in three thought it made a valuable contribution to corporate performance. The company’s customers were very dissatisfied—they rated its cost, quality, and service delivery at only 2.3 on a 7-point scale—and the team couldn’t even agree on the root causes.

A new CEO reorganized the company, creating a new strategy group and moving from a geography-based structure to one based on two customer-focused business units—for wholesale and for retail. He adapted the composition of his top team, making the difficult decision to remove two influential regional executives who had strongly resisted cross-organizational collaboration and adding the executive leading the strategy group and the two executives leading the retail and the wholesale businesses, respectively. The CEO then used a series of workshops to build trust and a spirit of collaboration among the members of his new team and to eliminate the old regional silo mentality. The team also changed its own performance metrics, adding customer service and satisfaction performance indicators to the traditional short-term sales ones.

Customers rated the company’s service at 4.3 a year later and at 5.4 two years later. Meanwhile, the top team, buoyed by these results, was now confident that it was better prepared to improve the company’s performance. In the words of one team member, “I wouldn’t have believed we could have come this far in just one year.”

2. Make sure the top team does just the work only it can do

Many top teams struggle to find purpose and focus. Only 38 percent of the executives we surveyed said their teams focused on work that truly benefited from a top-team perspective. Only 35 percent said their top teams allocated the right amounts of time among the various topics they considered important, such as strategy and people.

What are they doing instead? Everything else. Too often, top teams fail to set or enforce priorities and instead try to cover the waterfront. In other cases, they fail to distinguish between topics they must act on collectively and those they should merely monitor. These shortcomings create jam-packed agendas that no top team can manage properly. Often, the result is energy-sapping meetings that drag on far too long and don’t engage the team, leaving members wondering when they can get back to “real work.” CEOs typically need to respond when such dysfunctions arise; it’s unlikely that the senior team’s members—who have their own business unit goals and personal career incentives—will be able to sort out a coherent set of collective top-team priorities without a concerted effort.

The CEO and the top team at a European consumer goods company rationalized their priorities by creating a long list of potential topics they could address. Then they asked which of these had a high value to the business, given where they wanted to take it, and would allow them, as a group, to add extraordinary value. While narrowing the list down to ten items, team members spent considerable time challenging each other about which topics individual team members could handle or delegate. They concluded, for example, that projects requiring no cross-functional or cross-regional work, such as addressing lagging performance in a single region, did not require the top team’s collective attention even when these projects were the responsibility of an individual team member. For delegated responsibilities, they created a transparent and consistent set of performance indicators to help them monitor progress.

This change gave the top team breathing room to do more valuable work. For the first time, it could focus enough effort on setting and dynamically adapting cross-category and cross-geography priorities and resource allocations and on deploying the top 50 leaders across regional and functional boundaries, thus building a more effective extended leadership group for the company. This, in turn, proved crucial as the team led a turnaround that took the company from a declining to a growing market share. The team’s tighter focus also helped boost morale and performance at the company’s lower levels, where employees now had more delegated responsibility. Employee satisfaction scores improved to 79 percent, from 54 percent, in just one year.

3. Address team dynamics and processes

A final area demanding unrelenting attention from CEOs is effective team dynamics, whose absence is a frequent problem: among the top teams we studied, members reported that only about 30 percent of their time was spent in “productive collaboration”—a figure that dropped even more when teams dealt with high-stakes topics where members had differing, entrenched interests. Here are three examples of how poor dynamics depress performance:

The top team at a large mining company formed two camps with opposing views on how to address an important strategic challenge. The discussions on this topic hijacked the team’s agenda for an extended period, yet no decisions were made.

The top team at a Latin American insurance company was completely demoralized when it began losing money after government reforms opened up the country to new competition. The team wandered, with little sense of direction or accountability, and blamed its situation on the government’s actions. As unproductive discussions prevented the top team from taking meaningful action, other employees became dissatisfied and costs got out of control.

The top team at a North American financial-services firm was not aligned effectively for a critical company-wide operational-improvement effort. As a result, different departments were taking counterproductive and sometimes contradictory actions. One group, for example, tried to increase cross-selling, while another refused to share relevant information about customers because it wanted to “own” relationships with them.

CEOs can take several steps to remedy problems with team dynamics. The first is to work with the team to develop a common, objective understanding of why its members aren’t collaborating effectively. There are several tools available for the purpose, including top-team surveys, interviews with team members, and 360-degree evaluations of individual leaders. The CEO of the Latin American insurance company used these methods to discover that the members of his top team needed to address building relationships and trust with one another and with the organization even before they agreed on a new corporate strategy and on the cultural changes necessary to meet its goals (for more on building trust, see “Dispatches from the front lines of management innovation”). One of the important cultural changes for this top team was that its members needed to take ownership of the changes in the company’s performance and culture and to hold one another accountable for living up to this commitment.

Correcting dysfunctional dynamics requires focused attention and interventions, preferably as soon as an ineffective pattern shows up. At the mining company, the CEO learned, during a board meeting focused on the team’s dynamics, that his approach—letting the unresolved discussion go on in hopes of gaining consensus and commitment from the team—wasn’t working and that his team expected him to step in. Once this became clear, the CEO brokered a decision and had the team jump-start its implementation.

Often more than a single intervention is needed. Once the CEO at the financial-services firm understood how poorly his team was aligned, for example, he held a series of top-team off-site meetings aimed specifically at generating greater agreement on strategy. One result: the team made aligning the organization part of its collective agenda, and its members committed themselves to communicating and checking in regularly with leaders at lower levels of the organization to ensure that they too were working consistently and collaboratively on the new strategy. One year later, the top team was much more unified around the aims of the operational-improvement initiative—the proportion of executives who said the team had clarity of direction doubled, to 70 percent, and the team was no longer working at cross-purposes. Meanwhile, operational improvements were gaining steam: costs came down by 20 percent over the same period, and the proportion of work completed on time rose by 8 percent, to 96.3 percent.

Finally, most teams need to change their support systems or processes to catalyze and embed change. At the insurer, for example, the CEO saw to it that each top-team member’s performance indicators in areas such as cost containment and employee satisfaction were aligned and pushed the team’s members to share their divisional performance data. The new approach allowed these executives to hold each other accountable for performance and made it impossible to continue avoiding tough conversations about lagging performance and cross-organizational issues. Within two years, the team’s dynamics had improved, along with the company’s financials—to a return on invested capital (ROIC) of 16.6 percent, from –8.8 percent, largely because the team collectively executed its roles more effectively and ensured that the company met its cost control and growth goals.

Each top team is unique, and every CEO will need to address a unique combination of challenges. As the earlier examples show, developing a highly effective top team typically requires good diagnostics, followed by a series of workshops and field work to address the dynamics of the team while it attends to hard business issues. When a CEO gets serious about making sure that her top team’s members are willing and able to help meet the company’s strategic goals, about ensuring that the team always focuses on the right topics, and about managing dynamics, she’s likely to get results. The best top teams will begin to take collective responsibility and to develop the ability to maintain and improve their own effectiveness, creating a lasting performance edge.

About the authors

Michiel Kruyt is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Amsterdam office, Judy Malan is a principal in the Johannesburg office, and Rachel Tuffield is an alumnus of the Sydney office.

The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Carolyn Aiken, a principal in McKinsey’s Toronto office, and Scott Keller, a director in the Chicago office.