ORacle
The Horse Trainer's Parable
by Douglas A. Samuelson
"I'm glad we waited until fall to take this vacation," the OR/MS analyst said. The crisp fall day was perfect for his kids' first horseback ride. Birds sang and a light breeze ruffled their hair as the group, including the analyst, his wife, and their teenage son and daughter rode along the mountain trail.
After the ride, the analyst struck up a conversation with the trainer who had led the group. "It's amazing that such a big animal lets a person ride him and direct him," the analyst mused. "I wish we could figure out how to get people in organizations to behave so well. Please tell me more about how you train them."
"That's not the secret," the trainer replied. "Of course, we do have to break them of wanting to run away, or buck off anyone who gets on them. By the time we're through, the horse knows that not following directions will result in pain. Just in case they forget, the bit hurts when you pull on the reins, so pulling the reins gets them to stop pretty quickly. They don't much like being kicked in the flanks, either, especially with spurs, so that will get them to go. But any horse, even an old, docile one, will act up if the rider does something stupid enough. A lot of managers don't seem to understand what anyone who's been around horses knows: trained horses don't object to being ridden, they object to being ridden badly."
"How can they tell?" the analyst asked.
"That's easy," the trainer laughed. "A lot of novice riders get jittery and tighten up on the reins, just to help them keep their balance, as they are trying to get the horse to speed up. The horse doesn't know what they want, because it's getting two opposite orders at once. I've seen a horse just turn its head as far as it can and look at the rider. That means, 'OK, numbskull, what do you want?' And if that doesn't do the trick, that's when the horse bucks."
"That explains a lot of things I've seen in organizations where I worked," the analyst exclaimed. "Several years ago, my wife worked in a federal agency that was part of the Gore 'Reinventing Government' program. The agency head called an all-hands meeting and gave this glowing speech about how good all this quality improvement was going to be. Then he showed a picture of the new headquarters building they were going to consolidate into in two years. It had about enough space for two-thirds of the current employees. He apparently never did figure out why morale plummeted right after that, and a lot of the best people started looking for jobs in other agencies."
"He got them thinking about whether they could expect to stay there, and what else might be available," the trainer nodded. "That's usually a really bad idea. And that's where a lot of these so-called sensitivity trainers and organizational psychologists go wrong, too. Marriage counselors, too. I've heard some amazing stories."
"I've seen a few myself," the analyst concurred. "I remember one 'sensitivity trainer' who turned a pretty good organization into a snake pit in three months. By the time he was through, nobody trusted anyone's motive for saying anything, including 'good morning.' I never understood until now why it worked so badly, but now I do: He just got them thinking about what could be wrong and forgetting about what had been going along all right. And I can see where some kinds of couples counseling would work the same way. Interesting!"
"Not all that hard, once you see it, is it?" the trainer smiled.
"No," the analyst agreed. "But how do you get them started in the right way in the first place?"
"A mixture of affection and fear," the trainer chuckled. "You want the horse to like you, but you also want the horse to fear what would happen if he disobeys. Ever notice how lion tamers use whips? The lion hates the noise and doesn't want to find out what the whip would do. But if the tamer actually hits the lion, two things happen immediately: The lion gets mad, and he realizes the whip can hurt him but not stop him. That's when the tamer gets mauled."
"How could you do that with people?" the analyst wondered aloud.
"Good parents do it with kids all the time," the trainer replied. "The kids get lots of love and attention, but they're still scared of what would happen if Dad or Mom got really mad. When they hear, 'Stop!' in a commanding tone of voice, they know they'd better stop, right then! A lot of parents seem afraid to leave that fear there these days, and you can see a lot of kids rushing into trouble. You mentioned Al Gore. Do you know what happened to him?"
The analyst shook his head "no."
"He took his son to a baseball game up in Baltimore after he'd been away a lot, campaigning. The kid saw a balloon and ran into the street after it. Gore yelled, 'Stop!' but the kid didn't obey and got hit by a car. See? Overuse of fear generates rebellion, but a little of the right kind of fear, used wisely, goes a long way toward keeping everyone out of trouble."
Doug Samuelson is president of InfoLogix, Inc., a consulting company in Annandale, Va. He is also an adjunct professor at The George Washington University and at the University of Pennsylvania, and an external research professor at the Krasnow Institute, George Mason University.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2003 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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