Definitionally Correct - How to Use Tautology to Succeed
Things They Forgot to Tell Me in Business School

I was listening the other day to a podcast, as one does these days, about the future of work from home (WFH) in the post-Covid-19 world featuring a prominent business professor and self-professed evangelist for permanent remote corporate work structures. In the course of the podcast, s/he wove a perfect web, starting us on a “journey”, walking us in a big circle with several exciting stopovers highlighting interesting data features, then landing us back at our starting position but with a new perspective. I saw as I had not seen before. Great stuff.
 
But first, a digression into the subject matter: near as I can tell, whatever you currently think are the key drivers of a successful organizational transformation is more than likely correct. From yesterday’s digitalization to today’s Covid-19 remote work revolution for “knowledge workers”, business thinkers offer up a pretty standard palette when describing key ingredients. After all, there are only so many things that can matter. The primary difficulty seems to be trying to say the same thing differently enough that you do not have to specifically cite anybody else.
 
Lists invariably contain such bread and butter things as:
 
1. Communication: Clear and regular communication to all participants, stakeholders, and affected parties is a critical ingredient. People distrust change in general and change occurring in a vacuum in particular.
2. Knowledge Sharing: Communication is a start but ensuring long-term success requires more than compliance in adoption, it demands the active allegiance and assistance of key participants. Buy-in becomes easier when you empower people with more than information than “just the facts”, but delve into the real why and how.
3. Forward Planning: Don’t fake it until you make it. We need a comprehensive initial program with choreography. It will be hard enough to make the moves without having to think them up on the spot.
4. Effective Implementation: Even the best change strategy is nothing without effective implementation. It takes courage, resources, determination, and adaptability not just to get stuck in, but to stay unstuck.
5. Adaptive Feedback: Having a plan doesn’t mean becoming rigid. Even the best-laid plans require tuning and adjustment, and creating the shortest path between receiving feedback and adjusting response is the best way to accomplish it.
6. Progress measurement: New business paradigms require new business measures. As the world evolves so must our ability to describe it. Relying on the old metrics of success would be as silly as...as using the relative power of a draft horse to communicate the rate of work done by a modern engine. Okay, perhaps this isn’t the best example but still, you get the point, don’t be held back by your metrics, new measures for new horizons.
7. Data use and privacy: Data is at the core of everything today and our data, client data, open data, and super-sensitive data is zinging around the internet at unthinkable rates, posing enormous risks, like a stream of goldfish in a Piranha tank. Developing new, secure, and legal methodologies to accommodate rising data demands is paramount.
 
So far so good, nothing surprising, nothing that hasn’t been said a thousand times before, and nothing that requires citation. What lists like these do neglect to offer up, however, is the final miracle ingredient that brings it all together. Fortunately, this secret is hiding in plain sight. Unfortunately, in perfect riddle form, it is tucked between numbers 4 and 6 but is not number 5.
 
The key to measuring success is connecting the fact that during a profound shift we not only alter the function of the enterprise (4), but we also take control of the measures of progress (6). Think about it, how beautiful. And once we have done this we have a closed-loop, controlling all factors necessary to demonstrate success. Diabolical really.
 
Back to our podcast. When you think about presenters, one of the things that separate mere informers from truly successful evangelists is the latter’s use of tautology. Tautology is what gives you the closed-loop. I will save you the search, I already did it. In both formal logic and literature, tautology is a statement that is true by virtue of its form and construction alone: we either win this, or we don’t. It is impossible to refute that statement. While you can dismantle a tautology they don’t fall apart on their own and can be incredibly resilient.
 
Tautology is what allows our presenter, in sophisticated and data-driven compound argument form, to take us on an exciting journey while returning us to our precise starting point in a perfectly irrefutable fashion. These ideas just must be right, they’re bulletproof! And s/he does this by manipulating the functions of the enterprise, introducing the change itself, and the metrics that will measure success - which, unsurprisingly, they do. It is not that people forget about the traditional measures, it is just that they are either weight-adjusted (read: diluted), or better yet, teleported into a different dimension entirely, as during the first dot.com boom. Make the game about impressions, eyeballs, clicks, anything to turn attention away from yesterday’s boring norms of spending, costs, revenue, and profit.
 
Keep in mind, this has nothing to do with the ultimate efficacy of a particular set of actions, the tautological approach is completely agnostic in this respect, actions may or may not ultimately benefit the organization, this simply deals with the pesky problem of (trying to) control the perception of change through manipulation of the measures of success.
 
Tautology: It is hard to go wrong when you are definitionally correct. Another of the “Things They Forgot to Tell Me in Business School...”.
 
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