Slow Down: You Move Too Fast

Two unrelated articles had me thinking last weekend about how we make decisions and why so many of them don't turn out as well as we had hoped.

Friday's New York Times carried an article by Steven Greenhouse about a discrimination lawsuit filed against an apparel retailer, Wet Seal, "asserting that the company had a high-level policy of firing and denying pay increases and promotions to African-American employees because they did not fit its 'brand image'."

Wow, I thought. If the allegations are true, that's a trifecta: illegal, immoral, and stupid.

The retailer of course denies all allegations, while the lawsuit claims that a former senior vice president of the company "ordered various managers to 'lighten up' the work force in stores with a large white clientele by hiring more whites and had told a regional manager that she must have 'lost her mind' to have put a black person in charge of a particular store."

A senior vice president said that?

So it looks as though we can throw out the extremely-young-inexperienced-supervisor excuse. Is it simply a case of racism? Most likely, yes and no.

Assuming the facts of the lawsuit are correct, this case would appear to be, to quote a law professor that Greenhouse interviewed, "a slam-dunk." As the professor noted, "Even if there is a consumer preference for employees to be of a certain race, even if it might reduce patronage, the law doesn't provide an exception for you to discriminate that way."

I immediately thought of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s comment that "while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also." (from a 1963 speech given at Western Michigan University; full transcript here)

But there may be another issue here, too, beyond the stunning racism.

People have always made business decisions based on insufficient data, but there is more and more pressure to make decisions fast. There's a problem? Fix it. Now. (Because there's another problem coming down the pike right behind the first. Not to mention that if the first one's not fixed, it'll cause us so much trouble that we may never recover.)

So, if, for example, you see sales slumping at one of your locations, you're going to want to move fast to turn that around.

But is the fast decision the right decision? In the 7 July issue of The Economist, columnist "Schumpeter" writes "in praise of procrastination." Specifically, the columnist calls out some research by Brian Gunia of Johns Hopkins University, who, with three co-authors, conducted research that indicates that slow right-wrong decisions are more likely to be ethical: "Our findings suggest that contemplation and conversation ... seem to provide alternate routes to ethicality, while immediate choice and self-interested conversations seem to provide detours around it."

In other words, slow down and think about that decision before you act on it. Or talk it through with a colleague, preferably one with a strong moral compass.

(The complete paper, "Contemplation and Conversation: Subtle Influences on Moral Decision Making," was published in the Academy of Management Journal, 55(1). Available online here as PDF. Note that Gunia et al. were considering "right-wrong" decisions, where one option is in line with values and the other is not, as opposed to "right-right" decisions, where two moral values are in competition.)

Gunia and his fellow authors suggest that some organizational cultures may be at greater risk for unethical behavior:

Organizations with a "fast pulse" or tendency to reward quick decision making may suffer ethical penalties by discouraging contemplation and conversation. Organizations that afford time to think and talk with others—especially ethical others—should benefit from more ethical action. Similarly, organizations with interdependent workflows, which encourage conversation, might promote more ethical action than organizations of independent silos.

Schumpeter reads "fast pulse" and thinks immediately of banks, noting, "The current LIBOR scandal engulfing Barclays in Britain supports this idea."

I think of companies like Wet Seal, which specializes in fast fashion for notoriously fickle teens, heralding "top trends" and "just arrived" on their web site.

To quote the business philosophers Simon & Garfunkel:

Slow down; You move too fast.