Decision-Making – understand-culture

Cars and chickens

The American people have always benefitted from a very generous supply of natural resources. The United States in its over two-hundred year history has never known scarcity of resources. It is a land of abundance. And its economic history is one of constant growth.

Generations of immigrants were welcomed to support that growth. Dealing conservatively with natural resources was seldom a key to economic success, seldom a factor in the nation’s decision making. Far more important were such factors as innovation and rapid reaction to the demands of a competitive market economy.

The structure of American cities and towns is such that an automobile is required. Germany is different. It is the size of the U.S. state of Montana. German cities and towns – large or small – are well planned, well structured. They’ve grown based on structures going back as far as the Middle Ages with the core consisting of the church, the market square, the post office, perhaps a river running through or along it.

Over the centuries the towns grew outwardly, organically. Life and work were – and are still for the most part – integrated. Modern transportation and logistics adapted to the town’s layout. Trams (streetcars) linked the city’s neighborhoods. The underground (subway) did the same. Life can be lived in German towns and cities without an automobile.

A car in every garage and a chicken in every oven

In this, as in many other, senses, the quality of life in Germany is higher than in the U.S.. America experienced a huge growth spurt after the Second World War. Baby boom. People were tired of rationing. They wanted to consume. Eisenhower – and his military and civilian colleagues – were impressed by the German autobahn system and wanted the same for the U.S..

Not only because he saw it allowing for the rapid transportation of heavy military armor necessary in the case of defense of continental USA. A national highway system would make civilian transportation modern and efficient. It would further spur growth. The automakers in Detroit were thrilled. The automobile took over, pushing aside public transportation. “A car in every garage and a chicken in every oven” was the motto of the 1950s.

Then came the flight of white Americans from the cities (primarily in the North) to their suburbs. There were two main driving factors: First, families had more children, needed and wanted more space, in the home and in the yard. The automobile, and the building of streets and highways, made it possible. Secondly, more and more African-Americans migrated from the South to the North attracted to better-paying jobs. White Americans wanted to live among themselves.

Resources. I think of the family I grew up in. Mother, father, six children, a house with five bedrooms and two full baths, on a half-acre of land, in a neighborhood full of children (mostly boys): the Moses family with four, the Heidts with three, the Argyris family with four, D‘Aquila two, Bridi three, we Magees five.

“Don’t be wasteful” was only every said in terms of food.

Up the street lived the Plames. Mother, father, daughter. A few years ago I learned from my mother that Mr. Plame had developed the land and had built the ten or so houses, including ours. He had been a retired officer of the U.S. Air Force, his last years spent in Alaska.

“Hmm”, I thought, most likely Strategic Command, where the U.S. had long-rang bombers stationed in case of war with the Soviet Union. Then I read in the newspaper and online about Valerie Plame. The name was immediately familiar to me. Valerie attended grade school with my youngest brother, Tom. Valerie Plame: exposed (perhaps by the U.S. government itself) as a CIA undercover agent. Her husband, an American diplomat, was openly skeptical of the reasons the Bush administration took the country to war in Iraq.

Like most American families we were very active as children, which continued into high school. School, sports, visiting friends, all possible in the suburbs thanks to cars. As soon as three or four of us had our drivers licences we had three or four cars. This was the 1960s and 70s. One can imagine how much energy we used: water, electricity, gasoline, packaging for all sorts of products. And we were just one of millions of similar families. “Don’t be wasteful” was only every said in terms of food. That’s what the suburbs in the U.S. were (and are still) like.

Cheap energy is the motor of American society.

They were built quickly. They had no center, no village old town. There was open land. Streets were built. Houses were built. Developments they were called. Whenever my mother visited Germany she marveled at the elderly women riding their bicycles from their apartment houses to the various stores. We did not grow right in the U.S., not thoughtfully. I doubt that there was a discussion back then among town, city or civic planners about how to grow (expand) intelligently, not only in the sense of impact on the environment, but also in terms of quality of life.

The two are not mutually exclusive: growth and quality of life. Jimmy Carter made an attempt in his speech Energy and the National Goals – A Crisis of Confidence on July 15, 1979. He spoke about limits, about energy policy. Carter was criticized heavily. Energy is the motor of American society. It makes our life simpler and more comfortable. In the last years, however, we have realized that we need to make some changes. Gasoline prices have climbed steadily over the years. The second Iraq War did not go well, to put it mildly. Russia uses natural gas as a weapon against the Ukraine and as a lever against Western Europe.

Dramatic environmental catastrophes have become a yearly – often monthly – occurrence: Hurricane Katrina, the forest fires in California and the Southwest, hurricanes in Florida, the rapid changes in temperatures. Think of the impact on the ozone layer by air conditioning set on high and running from April until October in countless homes, schools and office buildings in the states of the Southeast stretching across the Southwest to the Pacific Coast.

“My goodness, what does it cost to heat those places?”, my mother always asks whenever we drive by so-called McMansions in the Philadelphia area, the houses built during the boom years of the 1990s: oversized, ugly, without style or character or imagination. Neureiche (noveau riche, new rich). Yes, people can do as they please with their money. Yes to private property. But individual interests often have impact on collective interests.

“Decision Making Philosophy“?

Is it even possible to translate into English the German word Entscheidungsverständnis? Decision making philosophy, is what most Americans would say. But, that’s puffy, cloudy. Americans us the term ‘philosophy’ often to mean ‘way of thinking’.

Literal, and more exact, would be ‘understanding of the decision to be made’, from Entscheidung, decision + verständnis, understanding of. The verbs are entscheiden, to decide, and verstehen, to understand. Only very few Americans, however, would use that kind of formulation, ‘understanding of the decision to be made’.

In any case, the American colleagues in the breakout (group work in a management seminar) did not ask themselves about their Entscheidungsverständnis. Instead, they rather quickly defined what kind of used car they were looking for (the question posed to them in the exercise). There were three, perhaps four key factors. That was enough. They moved on immediately to the next assignment in the exercise.

Germans believe that the best path to an optimal decision is first of all to nicht vom Zaun brechen, which is translated literally into “not break out or through the fence”, meaning to think first, then decide, then act. To reflect. Because decisions mean change, they are inherently involve risk. A good Entscheidungsverständnis minimizes risk. It should not be a surprise, therefore, that Americans often give Germans the impression that they tend to move forward too aggressively, impetuously, forcefully.

Americans can come across as not having understood, much less thought through, the complexity of the situation. Especially when it comes to decisions which have far-reaching consequences, the aggressive, impetuous and forceful American approach unsettles their German colleagues. They fear that the Americans are actions are naive, even irresponsible.

Mit dem Kopf durch die Wand – literally with the head through the wall, or forcing things – is how Germans can see Americans. Objectively this is the case quite often. Subjectively certainly very often. The Americans in the breakout group write their flip-charts quickly, but just as quickly tear them down and rewrite or toss them into the corner. Americans like to decide and move fast, change situations and create new ones. They take the initiative in order to ‘stay ahead of the power curve’, to ‘set the agenda’.

Difficult, complex and controversial events

But, is this unfamiliar to the Germans? Haven’t they had their own experiences with the advantages and disadvantages of such national cultural character traits? The German people has a highly developed historical consciousness. Many of their experiences as a people were painful, have made a deep impression on them.

When the Germans raise their Zeigefinger, their index finger pointing out something important (yes, often in a know-it-all way) it is in most cases because they do know better (at least for themselves, from their perspective). At a minimum they see a situation which they have experienced themselves. And as Germans they are seldom reluctant to point out these (their) lessons to other people.

I had hardly gotten into a conversation with a good German friend of mine. We were talking about everyday topics, nothing terribly deep. A friend of his joined us, a journalist, a women he had known for many years. She – let’s call her Beate – switched the topics of the conversation to politics, her area of focus. Wasting no time she brought up the most difficult, complex and controversial events. Back then I was a member of the professional staff of the Christian Democrats in the Bundestag, the majority party under then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Beate had returned from Southern Africa just a few months before. I had not known her or of her. In the years after that conversation I would see her in television, hear her on the radio, read her articles in newspapers. Very intelligent. Very well-informed. Very active mind.

I was tired. It had been a long week. The initial topics of my chat with my friend were light, casual, pleasant. Beate wanted, however, to get serious. She started off describing the monumental mistakes the Clinton administration had made in Somalia. With her experience in Africa, and in Somalia, it was clear that the American approach would be a total failure.

I tried to steer the conversation back to the lighter topics. Beate just could not let go, however. Puffing away at her cigarettes I was engulfed in smoke and getting dizzy. She fired question after question at me about American foreign policy. Time and again I sent signals communicating: “Please, not now, another day. We don’t even know each other. Do I have to answer personally for my country’s actions abroad?” Beate made everything so complex. She was giving me a headache. It was a very unpleasant evening.

A factory in the Eastern part of Westphalia

I think of my fellow American, the soldier, dead and dragged by a rope naked through the streets of Mogadischu, his body mocked, derided and spat upon by the population. I think of his parents, his siblings and friends, especially of his mother. I think no less sadly of the man (the picture of him) in the second Iraq War, a father carrying on each should the bodies of his dead boys, each around five years old. We see him from behind.

Those little boys can’t move, they won’t ever move. I imagine their father’s heart as he heaves his boys on his shoulders, his heart as he lays them in simple wooden boxes, then lowers those boxes into the earth, his heart when he then goes home. He’ll never hear their voices again. My son, Daniel, was nine years old back then. Evenings, after dinner, he climbs up on my back. Piggyback we call it in English. I carry him up the stairs. Abendroutine, evening routine. Pajamas. Brush teeth. Wash face. Hop in bed. I read to him. Abendroutine here in Bonn, Germany. A German boy with an American father. Safe, secure, happy and healthy.

I see in my mind’s eye a factory somewhere in the Eastern part of Westphalia. The niece of my German wife’s grandfather. He was from Herford, not far from Hanover, a pilot in the Luftwaffe. Early in the Second World War in France, a part of the occupation forces. Then in the East, fighting the Russians. Prisoner of war. He returned to Germany in 1949, a broken man. My wife’s grandmother said of her husband that he had believed in German victory up until the very end.

She told the story only once of his niece. She must have worked in an armaments factory. I never asked. Tears worked their way carefully down her cheeks as she talked, her eyes fixed on a far-off point. Allied bombing one day. Direct hits. The mother of the young woman, the sister-in-law of my German wife’s grandmother, ran to the factory. Everything destroyed. She found her daughter. Her tender, youthful body ripped open by a steal beam.

Yes, it was a very unpleasant evening with Beate, but primarily because we’re far more different than we realize. In fact she is a very nice, intelligent, hard-working German journalist, who, like all of us, would like the world to be different, better. A woman who adopted a young African girl and is raising her alone. Beate is a fighter for the right cause. And there are others, like the late Peter Scholl-Latour, who in the months leading up the Second Iraq War was in the German media doing his best to warn of its risks: explaining, seeking, describing, questioning. Out of concern.

Long, detailed discussions about decision-making

Scholl-Latour was a prolific journalist and author about the Middle East. His early years, however, were spent first fighting in the Indochina (Vietnam) war, then covering it as a journalist when the U.S. had entered it in a serious way. Not a know-it-all but a concerned German, whose fears were based on experience and knowledge. One who is trying to say to his friends (to Americans): “Dear Friend, don’t do it. Think about what you learned forty years ago. Don’t repeat that mistake, please.”

To be called naive in the German context is very serious. It means a significant deficit in intelligence. It means not being in touch with reality. Naivité in the U.S. context, however, can be interpreted as positive. Young. Fresh. Optimistic. Full of initiative. Ready to learn. Willing to make decisions. Amerikaner sind wie große Kinder. Americans are like big children. How often I’ve heard this in my years in Germany. I understand how and why Germans make such a statement.

Decision Making in Germany

MerriamWebster online defines ‘to decide’ as: to make a final choice or judgment; to select as a course of action; to infer on the basis of evidence, to conclude; to bring to a definitive end; to induce to come to a choice.

I have always been of the opinion that Germans, in many ways, do not like to make decisions. It makes them feel a bit uncomfortable. Perhaps that is why decision making processes are so important to them. If those processes are well-constructed, are lived exactly, if the decision making options are filtered out stringently, the right decision will rise to the surface, will reveal itself.

We address this logic in the content on Persuasion, for persuasion and decision making are closely linked with one another. Intuition is defined as: quick and ready insight; immediate apprehension or cognition; knowledge or conviction gained by intuition; the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference. When I read this in MerriamWebster it occurred to me that Germans are very careful about trusting their intuition.

The German people has a different understanding (sense) of risk than the Americans. They aim to hold onto, to make secure. ‘Häusle bauen’ or literally to build their little house, meaning to establish permanence, predictability, security. The Germans purchase insurance policies of every kind.

They are disciplined in ‘putting money on the high shelf’, meaning ‘saving for a rainy day’. I believe that most Germans would prefer to be civil servants as a way of reducing to an absolute minimum risks inherent in life. Civil servant status is the ultimate in professional risk reduction.

Ugly surprises form a people’s sense of risk

When we make these comparisons we make them along a kind of bell, or Gaussian, curve. Of course there are many, very many, risk-taking entrepreneurs and business people, who are moving technology into new and fascinating areas. So there is a certain distribution. We’re interested in a comparison, however, of the two respective bell curves, the German and the American.

I can understand the German understanding of risk very well. It begins with Germany’s geographical situation. The Alps in the south provide a natural border defending them. But in the West, East and in the North the topography is flat. The German people were always surrounded by several countries, who, at different times, were friendly or not so friendly.

German lands were not blessed with opulent resources. War in Europe was commonplace in every century, practically in every generation. At times the Germans were the aggressors, at times the victims. One only need to open up a history book in order to read about insecurity, instability, and sudden change brought on by power struggles. All these have informed and formed the German understanding of risk.

What if my grandmother had been born in Bonn, Germany on April 3, 1900, instead of in Cincinnati, Ohio? She would have grown up in an upper class (bürgerlich) family in Wilhelmine Germany, the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The First World War erupted on August 1, 1914. At the end of the Great War in 1918 she would have been eighteen years old. Germany lost that war. Many young men on all sides died. Then hunger broke out in many parts of Germany, possibly in Bonn, also.

Her world came crashing down. The shame of a lost war. The Versailles Treaty and its one-sided, unfair reparations burdened on defeated Germany. Then the Weimar Republic and all of its political instability. The Rhineland, where Bonn is located, is occupied by foreign troops. Then the hyperinflation with workers transporting their weekly pay in wheelbarrows. Savings gone almost overnight. Then, with the economy finally improving, with hope on the horizon, the Wall Street crash of September 1929 ushering in the Great Depression.

Sense of measure gone

1930. My grandmother is then thirty years old with three children. The political and social climate in Germany becomes more and more radicalized. The National Socialists (Nazis) have the say. The unemployed are put to work. The economy takes off. Political repression is plain for all to see, and for many to experience.

The Germans – not all, but most – trade their freedom in a totalitarian state for security. Those who do not go along are brutalized. My grandmother and her husband do their best to avoid any and all kinds of danger, do their best not to be noticed, to “keep their heads down”, not to go along with, but also not be against. A day doesn’t pass without them both having to make careful calculations about what they say and do.

What will all this lead to? What will the future bring? Events develop at a quickening pace. Everyday Germans have difficulty judging and calculating the situation. All sense of measure is gone. No one can speak openly. Prague falls. Austria is annexed. The invasion of Poland in September 1939. France is defeated within six weeks!

Then the invasion of Russia in June 1941. The USA enters the war. Germany is bombed from the air day in and day out. The Germans are defeated at Stalingrad in 1943. Patton and the Americans cross the Rhine at Remagen, just south of Bonn. The Russians take mile for mile of territory in the East. At the end of the war Germany lay in ruins.

My grandmother is forty-five years old. Her husband was killed on the Eastern front. A bombing raid on Bonn, the unimportant university-town on the Rhine, in October 1942 destroys their house. Grandmother and her children stay with relatives in Euskirchen not far away.

Lived in four epochs

Wilhelmine Germany up until and during World War I. The Weimar Republic after the war. Then then National Socialists. Post-1945 occupied again by foreign troops. The first few winters are bitter cold. There is a shortage of everything. But the Spring arrives. The Germans don’t ever give up so quickly. They build a country. A state is established. Their new currency is stable and strong.

They have friends, allies, an alliance which defends and protects their young West German state. People slowly but surely rebuild their lives. “Made in Germany.” My grandmother is fifty-five years old. She can begin to relax a bit. The experiences, the imprint, run deep, however. Four eras she lived in and through.

There would come another. My grandmother dies in March of 1994, after a long and difficult life. But in October 1990 she would experience the unification of the two German states. She, as well as Germans on both sides of the Berlin Wall, survived the Cold War.

For me, born in 1959, this is all history, exciting, fascinating, present today. I am an American. I was not a part of this history, not even related to it. No relatives of mine fought in the Second World War. No bombs fell from the sky on the town and cities of my American parents or grandparents. Americans did not experience severe hunger. No foreign troops occupied American soil. No raping of women old and young. None of the terrible things, experieced either as perpetrator or victim.

A people’s understanding of risk (Risikoverständnis) – with that I mean what is in the soul of a people, deep down, linked to concrete experiences, based on concrete decisions – the German understanding of risk I can imagine, I can nachvollziehen (to trace back), I can understand. It is not the American understanding of risk.

Verzicht. Small skies.

I reflect, try to imagine how it was back then. It is 1944. My mother is fourteen years old. No father at home. Killed in an automobile accident in 1938. My grandmother at the time with seven small children. The oldest was nine. The youngest an infant. My grandmother carrying her eighth child. The coal supplier comes by the house. He informs my grandmother that he can no longer supply her. He demands that she pay the bill. Money was very, very tight. Grandmother is behind in her payments.

It is winter. Unusually cold. My mother is hiding in the corner, hearing for the first time how her mother pleads with the coal supplier to give her more time. He does. My mother has never forgotten that day, that conversation. It put its stamp on her, made a deep impression. Thirty years later, her husband, my father, Frank, would die at the age of forty-four. Heart failure. My mother then, 1974, with six children. His first heart attack was at age thirty-five.

“What does it cost to heat those places?” A question my mother asks spontaneously whenever we drive by oversized houses in suburban Philadelphia. Not just one of those curious questions, but a question of survival. For my mother, back then.

True, not to be compared with the experiences of the German people in terms of limited resources during certain periods of their recent history. Nonetheless, an imprint on my mother, 1944 and the coal-man. A far greater influence on Americans is living in a country of abundance, in many cases over-abundance. Land, natural resources, freedom and opportunity. I’ve never been to the Upper Midwest – Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana. Big Sky Country it is called. Literally: “Land as far as you can see!”

This must have been what the multitudes of immigrants to America had imagined, as well as the recently-arrived immigrants who moved west from the cities of the East Coast. But not only they, also the Germans. Yes, the Germans, back then. Many generations grew up reading Karl May, the author of best-selling books of fiction about the American West.

Cowboys and Indians. Germans of today, who travel through the U.S., who live there a few years, who dream of settling in America, see, imagine and experience that abundance. Who in their imagination is not attracted to the idea of no limits?

These days, to have to accept that there are limits, to reorient one’s own thinking, through self-reflection and self-critique, to change deep-seated habits of mind. Who wants to do that? Is able to do that? Painful and disconcerting. Verzicht. To do without. To do with less. To accept limits.

Tiled Stoves

Tiled Stoves: in apartments and homes, to burn coal, in order to produce heat.

Use resources respectfully, protect the environment. I recall the debates in Germany years ago about recycling. At that time the Social Democrats and the Greens were in power. Jürgen Trittin was Umweltminister, literally Secretary of the Environment.

German business was against any recycling laws. It’s been reality for years now, though. How could there have been a debate at all? Quite the contrary. Protecting the environment should be foundational to the politics of the Christian Democratic Party in Germany (CDU). They and their sister party in Bavaria (CSU – Christian Social Union) were clearly on the wrong side of that debate.

I’ll never forget the smell of coal back then in West Berlin. Late Fall of 1988. I live in a boathouse in Konradshöhe, on the Havel River, on the other side the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, German Democratic Republic). No wall between, just the river. On the other side a strange stillness. Just a road along the bank and streetlights giving off a weak, halfhearted yellow-orange glow. Evenings and mornings the smell was strong. A weird feel to it, somehow historical.

My girlfriend then lived in the Schöneberg section of West Berlin. On the fifth or sixth floor of an apartment house built in the early 1900s. Back then I was reading Sebastian Haffner’s Deutsche Revolution 1918. Dry cold days in Berlin, the smell of coal smoke from the houses ever-present, Rosa Luxemburg murdered and thrown into the Spree River, Stahlhelm, Rätherrepublik in Munich. I think of my grandmother who back then was eighteen years old and living in Cincinnati.

I imagine what Berlin was like in 1918 and 1919. I, the grandson and great-grandson of coal merchants in Philadelphia. Our great-grandfather, Alexander Magee, started out with a horse-pulled wagon, going from house to house. Years later his sons, Frank and Alex, would join the business. I see the images in my mind’s eye. The coalyard in the Kensington section of Philadelphia located right next to the train line.

The war over, but experiences continue to form us.

The coal was delivered from Northeast Pennsylvania. The Allegheny Mountains cut through the state from the northeast to the southwest, continuing into West Virginia. The business grows a bit, two trucks, a handful of employees. They’re not wealthy, will never become so. They pay the bills and have more than enough left over.

After the Second World War they convert to oil. Magee Coal & Oil. During my father’s freshman year at Amherst College in Massachusetts his father dies of a heart attack. His younger brother, Ken, uncle to my father, takes over the business. My father does not go into the heating fuel business, instead becoming a business consultant.

We six children of Frank and Laura Magee growing up in suburban Philadelphia have no connection to Magee Coal & Oil. But the constant coal odor in Berlin during those winter months of 1988-89, the dirt in my nose, cleaning it out a few times a day, brought me back into contact with the days when my recent ancestors lived from coal. And today? I, management consultant, put food on the table by supporting those who build coal-fired power plants.

Use resources respectfully, protect the environment, yes, the Germans do that better than the Americans. The war ended more than seventy years ago, but those experiences continue to inform and form us. During a long walk through Bonn with my son I try to describe to him what the town looked like in 1945. I repeat the stories of his German great-grandmother – my ex-wife’s grandmother. And why we are taking a walking and not driving tour by car or bus. Besides, walking is healthy.

Workshop Breakout – I

Systematic thinking is one of the strongest of German character traits. It‘s a red thread woven in and through all of the topics CI addresses.

I think of the many Germans in my seminars and workshops. I observe their tendency time and again. I separate the Americans and the Germans into separate breakout groups, pass out their assignments. They have an hour and a half to think, discuss and prepare their presentation on flip-charts, after which they give their presentations and discuss.

The breakout. What do the Germans invariably do? They get very quiet, focused, read the assignment carefully, ask me clarification questions. No detail is unimportant. After they have taken whatever amount of time is needed to read and reflect, they begin to discuss among themselves: respectful, quiet, their body language still. They listen attentively to each other, seldom interrupt. I observe, listen in, stand nearby in case they need help.

Germans analyze from 30k foot perspective

Even though I know how the Germans will proceed, it surprises me, nonetheless. It is foreign to me. It impresses and fascinates me still. The atmosphere in their breakout groups is like a graduate- or Ph.D.-level seminar at an elite university. It could be either in the natural sciences or in the humanities. Or perhaps business students analyzing a case study or mathematicians attacking a problem cracked centuries ago.

Maybe they’re students of theology or history studying the political ramifications of Martin Luther and the 97 theses he nailed to the door of the church in Witterberg in 1517. Perhaps they’re psychology students working on a particularly complex patient to be handled a day later.

The scenario is unimportant, the approach taken by the Germans is always the same. First they get (common) clarity on the case study I have given to them. Then they define the key terms. The scope is then discussed. After that they address approach and method. Then they finally get to the substance.

Isn’t that the case in so many situations in Germany? Analyze the topic from the so-called thirty thousand foot perspective. Identify the key factors in play. Pay attention especially to the interdependencies, the mutual influences. Then slowly but surely, carefully and focused, address the substance.

Like in early versions of Google Earth after one has typed in the address. You start out way up in space. See the Earth as a planet, then the continents. The globe rotates a bit. You recognize immediately if you are zooming down in the right direction. You go further down, stopping and starting as you wish, to get oriented. It’s just a matter of clicks, moving in and directly, north south east or west. Constantly seeing things from different perspectives.

Not without problems, not without mistakes

I imagine, as a metaphor, how much Germans would like to alter the code within Google in order to determine how quickly it zooms. They would slow it down, I suspect, whereas Americans, again metaphorically speaking, would not be interested in that in the least, instead switching to another website while Google completed the zoom-in.

I think of the English word circumspection, from Latin circum + specere via French into the English of the 15th Century: to look around, be cautious, to consider all circumstances and possible consequences, to be prudent. I see my German seminar participants in their work group with their handouts. They’re careful. Want to do things right, and not just avoid making mistakes.

Do things right, what is right, for themselves and their colleagues. Remember, we‘re talking about two of the most capable peoples on this planet, the German people and the American people. Both have demonstrated that their approaches to solving the fundamental challenges to any society work. Not without problems, not without mistakes, but they work, and work well.

Doing alters, a given situation

And some of their mistakes were serious, gravierend (grave). Mistakes made by both sides, not just by the one. Both peoples want to do things right, and to do the right thing. Verantwortungsvoll. Verantwortung – responsibility + voll, full. Which of the respective approaches is better, more appropriate, superior, is not our topic here. Such questions can only be based on very concrete and specific situations. Even in such, it is difficult to answer the question in a definitive way.

The Germans focus on the consequences of their decisions. They think several steps ahead. They try to anticipate if you wiggle in one area where it will waggle in another. They are well aware that decisions lead to action. Things are set in motion. Doing creates, or at least alters, a given situation (reality), and not always in a positive way.

Workshop Breakout – II

Back to our breakout groups in the workshop. Americans very seldom discuss the deeper meaning of a decision to be made. If, however, such a discussion does take place then it‘s focused on the purpose of the decision, on whom it serves and how.

Nor do Americans spend much time considering a decision to be made in its broader context. They think more particularistic than systematic. Their approach to decisions is motivated primarily by pragmatism. Americans orient themselves on concrete decisions and actions. They are focused on decisions which lead to actions, which, in turn, require further decisions.

In addition, Americans do their best to avoid over-interpreting or -analyzing a decision to be made. Absolutely critical is maintaining forward movement. Individual decision makers seldom have the mandate, much less the inclination, to discuss and debate the philosophical meaning of a decision to be made. They want to maintain momentum.

Germans and Americans together against the competition

Breakout. The Americans read the assignment quickly (perhaps hastily), then begin to discuss it, but without taking too much time. Once they‘re in agreement what it is all about they choose a colleague to write the flipcharts, and they‘re off and running. They think aloud, brainstorm, ideas are written down: open, free, creative, for German eyes and ears an unstructured discussion.

Words and phrases are thrown up on the flipchart, perhaps a stick figure, a drawing, whatever works. Just as quickly, though, these are revised, crossed out, some pages ripped off the stand, rolled up into a ball and tossed into the corner. The Americans keep going, discussing, debating, writing down.

In this concrete case we‘re talking about a breakout group, in an integration workshop, in an American company which had been acquired by a German company, in a sector of the world economy in which the competition does not wait around for Germans and Americans to come to agreement on how they‘ll work together.

No time for contemplating things from 30k feet

Everyone participating, the consultant included, needs to move quickly (but not hastily) and intelligently. The participants are investing valuable time. They need to understand the complex cultural differences, how these affect their collaboration, then together define that collaboration.

This is reality, not theory. There is no time for contemplating things from 30k feet. The battle is taking place on the ground, not in the clouds. Germans and Americans together in that battle against their competition, solving problems, serving customers.

Decisions are always local, specific and concrete. Americans strive to break down complexity into its component parts, in order to make those decisions. Deciding and acting are synonyms. Decisions lead to action. Action lead to new situations, which demand more decisions. And action always influences (changes) reality, its parameters, that which is to be decided.

Self-reflection, a strength of the Germans

I remain standing ten or fifteen minutes. I imagine as best I can a summer day back during one of those years. What was life like in any of the houses, the homes, in that neighborhood? Just around the corner is the Karthäuserplatz, a small square, where I lived from 1991-95. In a three-room apartment on the third floor.

On the first two floors lived three sisters, all in their 80’s, never married. Born in the early 1910’s they would remember the last years of the First World War, and most certainly all too well the entire Second World War. I imagine what it was like for them. Did they have brothers? Did those men/boys fight, kill, die? Catholics in the German Rhineland.

I imagine, see the pictures move by in my mind‘s eye. Three brothers. Second World War. Wehrmacht. The one dies in the early days of the invasion of Poland in September 1939. The second survives the 1944 Ardennenoffensive – what Americans call the Battle of the Bulge – only to then die in Vienna in early 1945, not long before the end of the war.

The third brother survives the war, including several years as a prisoner in Russia. Their mother (the father had died in 1918 on the Western Front of WWI) and the three sisters pick him up one summer day in 1949 upon his arrival in Bonn by train via Berlin. Within a year and a half he would die of gangrene.

I am fifty-five years old. All of my brothers – two older, two younger – are still alive. None of us has killed or been killed. My son, Daniel, was born in May 1998. His mother is German. He is a German-American boy, more German than American. A school project in History. The fourth grade.

The children are asked to find in Bonn the evidence, indications, the signs that once, many centuries ago, the Romans had lived in what became Bonn. He and his mother take a long walking tour. Bonn is a small town. Daniel is excited. He soaks it all in. My son, by boy, is growing up in Germany. He is learning to think historically. He is learning to understand his present. He is being prepared to deal with the future.

The Big Meeting

An attempt to cure all ills, is the impression many Americans get of German processes. From their perspective, Germans try to apply processes in areas where only common sense and good judgement work. „Processes can‘t substitute for people“ is a common statement one hears from Americans in German companies. Much of what people in companies do simply cannot be objectified. Continuous process modification, from the American perspective, produces far more internal agitation than it does any kind of value.

Frustration was high, very high. It was about the bid process. A German multinational with a large presence in the United States. Plant construction. Big plants. Complex. Customers in a multitude of countries. The bid process, too, is complex. All of the key topics come together: market, customers, product portfolio, price, competition, etc. And the key disciplines come together: engineering, supply chain, project management, finance, risk, etc.

An offering is formulated. If they get the contract, the project runs over several years. Tremendous depth of detail. If the complexity is not grasped, nothing but problems during the entire project. Lose a lot of money. If the complexity is understood, the project is executable. Earn lots of money.

No good decision without a good decision making process

There is a process for bidding on projects. The problem is, the processes on either side of the Atlantic look different. From my point of view, no surprise. Americans and Germans have different approaches to the topics, to the disciplines. At its core, the bid process is a decision making process. And as such it is only to a certain degree technical. The baseline analysis is done. Engineers. Engineering methods. IT tools. The results: numbers. Processes are critical here. Science does its work.

But after that it‘s all about judgement. Experience, intuition, common sense. Everything comes together in the big meeting. The boss with her direct reports, the heads of the disciplines. Interdisciplinary, as they say. They discuss intensely, long, often in great detail, open, focused. Key parameters are looked at from every possible angle. The boss drills down with her questions. The experts respond to the best of their ability, and based on their calculations.

Far more than a brainstorm, they look for ways to handle the tough questions. Back and forth, up and around, combine, separate. More art than science. Bids are formulated not generated. The big meeting is not a factory. No place for a process here. The task is far too complex.

And so it went for years, actually generations. It‘s how Americans make decisions. The big meeting. I had heard about it. Then I was allowed to sit in, like a fly on the wall. German headquarters wanted to change the bidding process. Make it more German. Process harmonization. The Americans were not amused. The big meeting.

It was fascinating. It went as I had anticipated. I felt at home, understood its inner logic. The German colleagues do it differently, much differently. They move along a process, from beginning to end. No big meeting. The topics are addressed in a crisp, brief, focused manner, like knocking off the topics in a routine meeting. Not all that much interaction among the participants. Everything based on facts and analysis, and the process. Objectified in the spirit of: „Good decisions are the result of good decision making processes.“

A difficult decision

It was my first client. Two companies were merged. Former competitors each with a full line of industrial products. Decisions had to be made. Who continued to make what products? Who would not? Big decisions. Products. Jobs. Budgets. Production facilities. Power and influence. And national politics, for it involved two very large and very well know companies. Global companies.

Traditionsunternehmen, as the Germans call them. Politics at the highest levels are involved in such mergers. In order to decide on how to merge the product lines – continue, combine or eliminate – executive management opted to have the two sides compete with each other. A horrible decision. It led to a kind of civil war between the two companies. Trench warfare. “Us against them!” Each side dressed-up their numbers, some even manipulated them.

Accusations flew back and forth. “It got ugly fast”, said one of the Americans. The decisions were made. There were winners and losers. Country A got Product 1. Country B got Product 2. But Country B had driven the invention and development of Product 2 over generations. They saw themselves as that product’s parent, and Country A as the illegitimate parents, who really did not love and care for their “child”.

Little thought about long-term effects

They would certainly give preference to their “biological children”, their own products. There was the fear, and partly concrete evidence, that Country A was starving Product 1 to death. For the “parents of that child” in Country B it was a nightmare with so many sleepless nights. A horrible decision, indeed. The decision in and of itself, but also how they went about making it.

Purposely, consciously creating heated competition within a newly-merged company. Pitting new colleague against new colleague. Little thought about the immediate and long-term effects. Amateurish. Irresponsible. Over time the “biological parents” were given access to their “child”. But the wounds still run deep. Both sides continue to fight over the child.