With All Deliberate Speed - Part 1. Talk, Talk

I was corresponding recently with Jeff Angus (of the excellent Management by Baseball blog) about the Mariners baffling unwillingness to promote some of the players from Tacoma who could contribute to the team's anemic offense. As I responded to Jeff I gathered some of my thoughts about the overall operating tenets of the Mariners front office. With Jeff's encouragement (and nagging), I'm getting those thoughts posted.

I'm breaking this missive into four separate posts. This introductory post describes the Mariners apparent core philosophy of making decisions deliberately and in strict adherence to plans. The second and third posts provide examples of Mariner operations that show that philosophy in action and inaction. The fourth post discusses why I share Jeff Shaw's opinion that Bavasi's job is not at all in jeopardy.

To start, I emphasize these postings are purely my interpretations and observations from a totally outside perspective. I have no inside contacts within the Mariners organization, I am not privy to any inside operating information, and I have not dumpster-dived at Safeco Field seeking carelessly discarded memos from Bavasi's desk. I am merely a fan on the outside, peering in through darkened glass windows, gleaning bits of information from the team's visible actions and statements.

The Mariners manage their baseball operations by setting and following overall courses of action, and steadfastly avoiding short-term actions that do not comport with the overall plans. Mariners' management resists making decisions under pressure, and if pressured, will make no decision rather than make a decision that might backfire. This philosophy undoubtedly originates in Lincoln's office (and perhaps with Yamauchi as well), and proceeds downward through all of the key operations personnel, including Bavasi and Melvin. This style, of course, is extremely cautious and risk averse; it's the management equivalent of a team offense dominated by batters who are high-contact hitters, low slugging average, and speedy on the base paths.

For convenience, I'm going to reference this approach as "deliberateness", and being aware of Mariner "deliberateness" aids my understanding of Mariner decision making. When I don't allow for this deliberateness, Mariner actions appear haphazard and totally unexplainable, but when I put them against that perspective, I can at least cloak them with some rationale. That doesn't mean I agree with the decisions; it simply means that I can better understand the basis for those decisions.

Let's look at how an organization that operates in this fashion responds when an established plan does not seem to be working. From my experience, organizations of this type adapt to change in three steps.

1. Review the situation to verify that the plan is actually not working.
   
   This step avoids the "knee-jerk" reaction of discarding or changing a plan prematurely. Deviating or changing a plan is a serious effort, to be undertaken only after due deliberation.
   
   
2. Modify or update the current plan.
   
   This effort can be trivial or complex, depending on what elements of the current plan have been called into question.
   
   
3. Implement the modified plan.
   
   This is the only place where change is apparent outside the organization.

Organizations that operate with this deliberate style will typically go through all three of these steps in sequence when they revise plans.

Although the Mariners' deliberate approach has been evident for several years, the response to the team's poor performance this year adds a stark relief to those operating principles. We can see a glimpse of the Mariners decision making process in Howard Lincoln's recent comments concerning the need for change on the Mariners. Look at the following quote from that article:

Without getting into specifics, Mariners CEO Howard Lincoln said Thursday afternoon that changes are in the works for the struggling team.

"There are a lot of things going on behind the scenes that I am not prepared to talk about, but we are obviously going to have to make some changes," he said. "The changes will be made in due course."

…

General manager Bill Bavasi apparently has received permission to pursue trades that could improve the team immediately and/or down the road. And money isn't an obstacle.

"Bill certainly has the financial flexibility he needs this year, and next year for that matter," Lincoln said.

Lincoln's comments show the deliberate philosophy in implementation. The team has decided changes are needed. There is activity going on, but the changes will be made in due course. Even though the need for change has been identified and initiated, changes will not be rushed.

Fans, for whom action exists only on the field, only see inaction. But note the difference in perspective from inside the organization. The Mariners see their background work as "lots of activity". When an organization operates with this deliberate philosophy, the mere process of reviewing and changing the plan is the "heavy lifting". Notice that the same situation occurs with the Mariners at every trade deadline. The Mariners management states, with straight face, that they have been very active, even though the roster changes have been only cosmetic. Fans see the lack of roster change. Management sees all of the work that they did just to be ready to make a change, and believe the fans don’t understand or appreciate the work they go through in reaching that point.

Again, I emphasize I am not defending the team's operating philosophy here; I'm merely trying to report what I observe. Personally, I think the deliberate operating model used by the Mariners is not an effective model for a team trying to win a championship. Properly implemented, the philosophy should enable a team to consistently perform at a high level, minimizing variations from the norm – i.e., to consistently be competitive. The deliberate operating style is sometimes a good model for a company trying to please private investors; it works best when a company's marketplace is well-defined and not highly dynamic. It's probably not a good model for a team trying to win a championship.

In my next post, I'll discuss the Mariners reluctance to call up players from Tacoma to bolster the team offense.

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Links to all four With All Deliberate Speed posts:

• Part 1. Talk, Talk
  
• Part 2. Don't Bucky the Odds - Resistance is Futile
  
• Part 3. Getting Deeply Insinuated
  
• Part 4. Whither Bavasi?