Oversteer in Management Decision Making

About a year ago, I enrolled in a Modelnetics course. At the time, I also started reading a book by Scott Berkun titled "The Art of Project Management". Berkun alluded to a concept referred to as 'oversteer'. To me, Berkun's idea of oversteer in project management looked like a Modelnetics model. I'll do my best here to describe what that model might look like.

With a car, oversteer occurs when a small amount of steering input by the driver produces a larger than expected degree of turn. In the case of management practice, oversteer describes decisions made to take corrective action concerning a problem that in turn produces problems requiring additional corrective action. I think both the law of unintended consequences and misplaced confidence in our own assumptions come into play here.

I think management oversteer can take many forms. Overly harsh disciplinary action, creating spontaneous short term goals that distract from or conflict with long term goals, and faulty prioritization can all be manifestations of oversteer. Another interesting example might be an apology out of scale with a fault, thus making the mistake seem larger than it is. While recently trying to resolve a service affecting network issue in a VIP area of our campus, I directed steps based on bad data that completely failed to address the problem. The oversteer came from the fact that these steps, again based on bad data, would ultimately catalyze a new issue just two weeks later.

Where might oversteer come from? No doubt hundreds of things both conscious and unconscious play into our decision making. I'll guess, however, that common causes include faulty or insufficient data concerning the problem, inadequate focus on long term goals, panic or a desire to create drama, or the desire for the appearance of strong corrective action.

How do we avoid oversteer? Any of the best practice literature on good decision making should help prevent oversteer. I think staying focused on long term goals and vision and thinking about the real impact on those goals can help. The right perspective on a problem is a good insulator from all kinds of bad decisions. We need to make sure we're getting all the input from our team. The team input that will keep us from oversteer will sometimes only come from asking the right questions.