Dogmatically Pragmatic

Have you ever heard a doctor or a pharmacist say, “The problem with sick people is they go to a doctor when they should see a pharmacist, or they see a pharmacist when they should go to a doctor”? It’s possible that I spend too much time at both places! I know from experience that while a pharmacist really can help my child’s cough, a swollen ankle may need more than a neoprene wrap and Advil.

In these cases, we have built muscle memory around a mismatch between the problem to be solved and the available tools to solve it. I argue that – perhaps once we’re past COVID-19 – public health organizations should launch communication campaigns that run until this behaviour changes. Our health-care system would operate more efficiently, patients would get better care faster, and we would be free to complain about something else.

The same thing happens in business, but with a much more polarizing topic: when to be dogmatic, and when to be pragmatic. I would argue that many skilled managers and most senior leaders agree there’s a place for both approaches when dealing with change, growth, and the regular old day-to-day. I also believe that many companies use them at the opposite time than they should.

When leaders are being dogmatic in their decision-making, they mix opinion and fact in a way that leaves no room for discussion. Alternatively, pragmatic decision-making differs in that leaders will consider opinions in decision-making but won’t apply the “as good as fact” label to them. 

Much has been written about leadership and pragmatism – from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind in the 1960s, to Robert Eccles and Nitin Nohria’s Beyond the Hype in the early ’90s, to a more contemporary definition of The Purpose of a Corporation by the influential Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of many of the largest companies in the U.S. that employ a combined 20 million employees.

Less has been written about being dogmatic in business. Kevin Daum explores this concept at a high level in this Inc. article from 2013, contrasting the modern leader’s disdain for dogma while also needing to use it well to lead. The headline presents as clickbait with Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and the Dali Lama all sharing a common trait.

In fact, this passage sums up a key point I make with my clients who struggle with managing these concepts:

Leaders today are trying to avoid being dictatorial and heavy-handed. They want to seem open-minded and approachable. But this does not preclude being dogmatic. Evangelizing core principles doesn’t mean being close-minded, rather it provides the context and the filters for assessing opportunities and creating policies that enhance performance.

-         Kevin Daum in “The Powerful Trait Shared,” Inc., September 2013

On the surface, it’s easy to understand that successful leaders are dogmatic *and* pragmatic when they need to be. So how can they still mess this up? On a regular basis?

Basecamp is a successful software company (revenue north of $100 million) with a relatively small headcount (fewer than 60 employees). Co-founder and CEO Jason Fried is provocatively outspoken, often to great effect. He has taken on Google and Apple (with mixed results, but brave nevertheless) and tweeted a definition of company culture that I use when I speak with my clients about how to change theirs:

Company culture is not written down, it’s acted out. A company’s culture is a 50-day moving average of *how it is*, no how it thinks it is, wants to be, or was supposed to be.

-  @jasonfried March 3, 2021

Examining Basecamp’s history reveals that it was built on relentless pragmatism. Who says you can’t have a large (revenue) software company with only a handful of employees? Who says success with simple software means you automatically have to make a product more complex?

Which makes it seem more stunning when dogma suddenly appeared in dramatic fashion. Not even two months after Fried’s tweet, he announced these Change at Basecamp, citing Huxley from The Doors of Perception in the process. Fans of psychedelia knew they were in for something (Huxley wrote this book about the psychedelic experiences he had while taking mescaline in the early 1950s).

Fried would have made a calculated decision – driven by his personal ethos and confidence – that even if half the company quit, they would rebuild. I can’t say for sure if he actually believed that attrition is easier to handle than conformity, but I can imagine him thinking that. Especially knowing that here we are four months later, and Basecamp has no current job openings at the writing of this article.

Personally, I’m not a fan of leading to conformity. Rational or not, I’d like to change the world with my skills, not make my world smaller to suit my dogma. But yes, there is a place for dogma.

Eccles and Nohria provide an inspiring rationale for pragmatism and how to use it to drive performance, productivity, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and community impact. Unfortunately, thousands of businesses in North America nod in agreement at these principles while at the same time provide clear-cut examples of sunk cost fallacy when it comes to product or present bias when it comes to gaming quarterly results.

Here is where dogma can play a bigger role. Be pragmatic about how you operate but be dogmatic about why you do it. Companies need to adapt to survive in a world that is experiencing constant, and often unplanned, change; pragmatic decision-making won’t just support that but will also drive it. So be dogmatic in your support of pragmatism. No, this won’t cause a “cancel each other out” situation or be the catalyst for the appearance of some kind of singularity in space-time. Use dogma to fuel how your company shows up every day with pragmatism. No one accuses Patagonia of harmful dogma, but they absolutely are dogmatic about making change.

Your business does not need to have the scale of Patagonia or the personal brand presence of Yvon Chouinard to do this. Sonapay is a transaction processing company that is proving to be a major pain in the butt for its competitors. By comparison it is a small enterprise, processing mere billions of dollars of transactions annually, not the trillions of dollars of their mega-competitors. But they are killing it with customer loyalty. In an industry where natural churn can be ass high as 30%,  Sonapay’s customer churn is at 8%, beating industry average in a big way. How? Uncommon transparency that begins with price. This industry is known for the opposite of cost transparency while Sonapay is dogmatic about transparency, driving loyalty to uncommon levels. I will disclose they are a customer of mine, but their dogmatic approach to transparency is one of the many things I admire about this company.

I suggest that the use of dogma in enterprise is essential. But I also believe that using dogma to keep something from happening is NOT the way to do it. Instead, use it to make something happen. And that dry skin? It might be eczema, so pop by the pharmacy first.