Playing To Win

Personal Effectiveness Strategy

Managing Signal vs. Noise

Roger Martin

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1 day ago

Source: Shutterstock, 2024

People frequently ask me about personal effectiveness — in part because they see me getting so much done and wonder — aloud to me — how I do it. They are all busy — but they wonder whether they are busy in a good or a bad way. And they don’t have a clear way to think about it. To give them a way, I have dedicated this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) to Personal Effectiveness Strategy: Managing Signal vs. Noise. All previous PTW/PI can be found here.

How I Think About Personal Effectiveness

I preface my thoughts by acknowledging this is not the only way to think — and maybe not even the best way! But since I get asked how I think about personal effectiveness, I thought I would describe my way.

I play close attention to and try to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio in my work. And I did long before Nate Silver’s best-selling book — The Signal and The Noise. Signal is the valuable stuff that you want, and noise is the useless stuff that comes along with it. I think of my personal effectiveness as the product of producing lots of valuable signal without incurring much noise.

For example, take this PTW/PI piece. The final 1850 words that are in the piece represent the signal. All the words that came and went during the writing/editing process are the noise. The desired product is the final piece. The words on the cutting floor disappear into the mists of time.

I will use this example to illustrate why I think my signal-to-noise approach differs from Total Quality Management (TQM). TQM seeks to detect and eliminate waste. I don’t try to detect and eliminate noise. There will always be noise. And the noise can be helpful. Sometimes it is useless noise and should be eliminated as in TQM. But sometimes noise is an important by-product of signal production.

For example, the editing process is essential to writing. No one writes the signal perfectly from inception. Editing helps increase the quality of the signal. But it produces noise along the way. The challenge for me on the writing front is to produce high quality signal without an excessive amount of noise. If I eliminated the noise, the quality of the signal would be low — a pyrrhic victory. However, if the noise is too great, the signal wouldn’t be worth the effort. It is a balancing act — into which I will delve below.

I worked hard on improving signal-to-noise when I took over as Dean of the Rotman School. Almost immediately, I took note of a major noise generator for both me and the professors. Professor A would book time with me to complain about Professor B. The outcome always desired by the Professor A in question was for me to intervene in some way to solve Professor A’s problem with Professor B. But of course, if and when I took the bait, I would inevitably find that Professor B had a much different perspective on the matter than Professor A. But it was much more fun for Professor A to complain about Professor B without Professor B in the room to defend. So, back and forth it went — with me absorbing lots of noise and the professors not doing the highest signal-to-noise thing: solving the problem between each other.

Channeling my beloved mentor Chris Argyris, when a professor came to me to complain about a fellow professor, I would jump out of my seat and cheerily ask my Dean’s EA, Kathryn, to call the fellow professor to say that the complaining professor and I would be coming to their office to discuss a matter. Without fail, the complaining professor would protest and tell Kathryn that it wouldn’t be necessary and would go off and solve the problem directly and without me. Basically, I spoiled the fun of the complaining professors who wanted to be able to unload on their colleague without that colleague having the opportunity of self-defense.

With all the fun gone, the lineup of professors at my door dried up completely. They worked out problems directly — which reduced noise for them and eliminated a cacophony of useless noise for me. I could focus more of my time on the signal of providing a great environment for student learning and professor research.

The need to balance signal and noise is also important in strategy. In the process of creating strategy, it is important to consider multiple possibilities, even though only one prevails. The rejected possibilities are noise in that they are not brought forward for action. However, their presence in the process helps ensure that the final choice is tested by competition in the arena of ideas. A complete absence of alternative possibilities will reduce noise but lower the quality of the signal. But at the opposite extreme, if there are too many ill-considered possibilities, there is excessive noise. And the excessive noise can create enough cognitive confusion to make it hard to generate a great choice — the highest quality signal. So, it is always a balance.

The goal is to reduce the noise to the minimal level required to maintain the signal quality at a high level.

Key: Avoid Atheoretical Activity

To accomplish the goal of a high signal-to-noise, you must live a theory-driven life. What do I mean by that?

Let’s take a case in which you give a task to a member of your team — Bill. You can assign the task in a largely atheoretical way: Bill works for me, so give Bill the task. There is a bit of a theory: Bill is my subordinate, so I can give Bill any task I want. But past that exceedingly rudimentary logic, you haven’t made any deeper logic explicit to yourself. If the colleague comes back with 100% the wrong stuff, it is 100% noise — which contributes to making your signal-to-noise ratio lower and you personally ineffective. And because you didn’t have a theory behind the action of giving Bill the task, you will have almost no ability to lower the noise.

Imagine instead if you say to yourself “I am giving this piece of work to Bill with this instruction set because I believe that the instruction set is sufficient for Bill to provide me the desired signal — the output.” You will be able to assess what was flawed about your theory — and improve it for the next time. Maybe the instructions were inadequate. Maybe Bill just didn’t have the necessary skills. Maybe it was a bit of each. You have a chance to diagnose the signal-to-noise deficit and do something useful to improve it.

You can try again, and again, if necessary, again — until you get signal. You will have incurred a lot of noise — but at least you will migrate toward more signal. You can’t and you won’t achieve that positive migration if you live an atheoretical life. You will keep producing noise, noise, and more noise.

If we go back the example of writing PTW/PI’s like this, I need to have a theory about every piece I write. I need to know the purpose of the piece: Why does its storyline make sense? What do I want the reader to take away from the piece? Having that theory will help guide my progress and tell me whether I am making enough progress toward that signal to continue or if there is too much noise, to stop working on it. By being theory-driven with the PTW/PI series, I have been able to reduce the magnitude of the noise and improve the signal-to-noise ratio of this (big) investment of my time.

For most people, when I ask why they did what they did, they have at best, a rudimentary theory. They don’t have no theory — I can always extract some theory out of them. But it is typically too undeveloped to help them be personally effective. I never hire people like that. I never want to work with them. They are just noise generators. They design inefficiency into their lives.

Why I am so Keen on Strategy

For me, strategy is the most powerful signal-to-noise booster in business. As I often say, without a strategy, you can’t tell in advance whether a decision you are making now will be shown later to be good, bad or indifferent. Companies without clear strategy logic just do stuff. And after the fact, a lot of that stuff turns out to have been destined to produce noise — and lots of it.

It is, somewhat sadly, a story of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Atheoretical companies produce more noise, learn less from the noise, and get weaker and weaker. In stark contrast, companies with a clear theory of strategy produce less noise, and in addition, learn from each little bit of it, and get stronger and stronger. It is not a stable equilibrium of stably lower versus higher levels of noise. The strategic companies get better, and the atheoretical companies get worse.

On this front, I often think it is almost (not entirely, but almost) unfair for AG Lafley, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, or Charles Koch to be CEOs. They have double advantage — better strategy and better learning — when either one of those advantages alone would probably suffice.

For similar reasons, I apply the Strategy Choice Cascade to personal strategy, which I did in Being ‘Too Busy’ Means Your Personal Strategy Sucks. Being theoretical about what you do and not do is the route to personal effectiveness. While you will never be perfect, you will have path towards noise reduction, increasing your signal-to-noise ratio over time — and over a lifetime, that adds up to a lot of learning and improvement.

Practitioner Insights

Don’t lollygag into any decision or action without a theory. If you do and you are really lucky, you will get high signal. However, the downside is that you won’t know why the outcome was good. But more likely, you will produce copious noise — and still won’t know why, or even have a decent hint.

Your personal effectiveness is best measured by your signal-to-noise ratio. Noise is inevitable to get great signal. But you need to keep noise level under control. Dedicate efforts to drive down useless noise — noise generated by atheoretical activity. Whenever you do something new, you will have to accept learning-related noise. But drive down that noise by having a theory against which you can assess outcomes and diagnose sources of noise.

For example, in my writing, at inception, I don’t know exactly what I intend to say. There is always noise as I figure that out. But it is not worth writing if I don’t at least have a theory of what I am trying to communicate. It is because that theory helps me learn from the noise and build the signal. But if my theory is weak and the noise is too great, I start writing something else!

Likewise for you, if you don’t have a theory of what you are trying to do and how, it isn’t worth doing. Stop wasting your time. Make sure you live a theory-driven life, and you will be more effective and successful.