The Management Learnings from 'The Dead Horse Theory'

The Dead Horse Theory - quite interesting but hilarious..

Let's get to know what is this theory all about.

Let us assume that you are riding a horse. And, unfortunately the horse dies. Common sense dictates that you dismount it. Sadly but true, this is not what happens in most cases. A lot of people will assume that the horse can kick back to life. The high hope with exceptional belief is that the horse is experiencing a short term trauma and will get back soon to life and need to be helped to get back in line. 

Sadly, in reality, we all have seen some of this happen before our eyes. We have witnessed that we sometimes are riding a dead horse. We see our businesses, education, work life, and government take more 'advanced and political strategies' to nurture the dead horse back to life. 

The strategy comes in various excuses...

➥  Buying a stronger whip

➥  Changing riders

➥  Threating the horse with termination

➥  Appointing a committee to study the horse.

➥  Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses.

➥  Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.

➥  Re-classifying the dead horse as ‘living impaired’.

➥  Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

➥  Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed.

➥  Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.

➥  Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.

➥  Declaring that the dead horse doesn’t have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.

➥  Re-writing the expected performance requirements for all horses.

➥  Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position of hiring another horse.

Picture courtesy to Kevin Nicoll. Refer the site.. 

As depicted in the above picture, the Dakota Indians passed down the paradigm, generation to generation. 

Unfortunately, the right mindset is not found in a lot of organizations, with right management approach. As a result, the management (leaders) gets trapped with the short term solutions like,

➥  Unexpected overload of work which needs immediate response

➥  Firefighting culture at every action

➥  Toxic behaviour at workplace

➥  Frequent blame game and scapegoating

➥  Long and ineffective meetings more frequent 

➥  Poor work culture and exploitation  

➥  Poor time management

➥  Lack of personal and professional development

➥  Lack of efficient and effective execution

The lesson from this 'dead horse theory' is to dismount every dead horse. The focus must be on the long term benefits of the organization.