Reliability vs. Validity

Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape, has a simple but powerful quote regarding clarity and understanding.

"The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing."

We all strive to do this in our chosen fields, but we tend to lose our focus, get misaligned, and drift further from the "main thing."

Roger Martin, the former dean of the business school at the University of Toronto, wrote extensively about this subject in his book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. 

Martin believes employers typically hire what's reliable, someone who fits how the job has been done in the past, who can continue on the same pattern. They turn to this instead of looking for someone who can re-design the position while not losing sight of the "main thing."

"Reliability is more readily proved than validity because reliability can be demonstrated by looking at the past," Martin writes. "If a system has been shown to produce a consistent result over time, it can be judged reliable, and the past data can be adduced to confirm the reliability. On the other hand, validity can only be demonstrated with certainty by waiting for the future to provide confirmation."

By hiring someone who fits into the reliable category, we believe we stay true to our "main thing," but we don't really grow. We instead avoid discovering people who seek the truth and push toward the essence of the main thing — all because there's no proven track record of success.

When hiring for strategy, find those with a vision and understanding of whatever the main thing is, then discover others who are reliable and can work within the framework.

Reliability and validity need to go hand in hand, as they did with Steve Jobs.

"Jobs was unceremoniously fired from his own company because in his first stint as CEO, he was unbalanced in favor of validity," Martin writes. "He believed that future events would substantiate him. He arguably paid little attention to the warnings of those concerned about at least a base level of reliability — financial planning, supply chain management, etc.

"The extreme attention to validity without reliability balance took Apple to the brink of insolvency. I would argue that when Jobs was rehired, he returned to Apple as a leader who demonstrated more balance between validity and reliability.

In anything we do, we need balance. We can't go toward the extreme on one side or the other — and we must maintain a complete understanding of the main thing.

Being reliable can be good. Searching for validity can be great.