The old tale of ‘Boiling Frogs’ says that there are too basic ways to boil a frog. One, the frog is thrown into a boiling water pan. The frog jumps out one millisecond later. Close to first degree burns, but alive. And learns the lesson.

The second way is to put the frog in a pan with cold water, turn on the heat, slowly, and wait. The frog, the tale says, likes the warm bath at first, the cosiness of that lake around him, the delight of the warm feeling. So delighted the frog is that does not notice that the water gets warmer and warmer. And warmer. And hot and boiling. The rest is a funeral.

At some point in the heating up, the frog would have tried to resist and adapt. Maybe. After a tipping point, the original adaptation becomes a liability.

Welcome to the Slow Cooking School of Management. We sometimes don’t realise that adaptation and robustness and resilience may provide some sort of blindness. By the time we realise, it may be too late. The (management) pan may be full of warm cosy water. We don’t notice the heat. We are cooked. Some people are cooked in their 30s, some in their 40s, some later. All of them may have been very adaptive and resilient.

Most slow cooking is self-inflicted. We need organizational thermometers that tell us the changes in temperature. Waiting for the 100 degrees Celsius to turn up does not seem like a great strategy.

In the land of prone-to-warm-water frogs, crisis is welcome. Stress to the system ^[1]must be welcome. Reboot mechanisms ^[2] as well. Nassim Taleb ^[3] (I keep quoting) would say that opposite to fragile is not robust or resilient. Actually he could not find a word, so he created ‘antifragile’: ‘things that gain from disorder’, as the subtitle of his book says. In his typical Taleb way he also says: ‘The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much’. That is the problem with robustness, including a ‘robust culture’; it turns us blind, complacent and insensitive.

Switching from frogs to cultures, for me, one of then most useful organizational thermometers are the Broken Windows ^[4] that I have written about. These are the relatively innocent failures in compliance, the not too strident signs of weak accountability, not life or death promises that are not kept, the windows a bit broken that nobody fixes. These not so tragic, not so visible, not so disturbing signs of organizational graffiti and broken windows, flood the organization, one day at a time, without anybody bothering so much because, as we say, in the great scheme of things, these are not a big thing.

But these are degrees rising in the thermometer. Actually, they are telling us that the patient has a temperature. I know, I know, not sweating and shivering yet, so a little analgesic and chicken soup may be just ok. Watch the funeral.

Apocalyptic? Tell that to the warmer frog.

We must have our own non negotiable. Still today I get pushed back on this language when we talk about ‘non negotiable behaviours’ in cultural programmes powered by Viral Change ^[5] . Well, I’ll keep the language. It’s a sort of a thermometer. I will not compromise with fevers.

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Interventions from The Chalfont Project

Reboot! The Game Plan ^[6]

Do you feel like you and your team are stuck in the day to day doing of things and many aspects of the running of the organization don’t make the agenda?

There may or may not be anything obviously wrong. Or maybe there is. But this is not a good enough state of affairs.

This high intensity, accelerated intervention takes leadership teams of all levels through a process of discovery and identification of both stumbling blocks and enablers will be followed by a clear ‘so-what’ and an action plan. It results in alignment around a well crafted Game Plan that reflects where they see the organization/team/department in the short to medium term and a detailed commitment to action that can be tracked.

Contact us ^[7] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

 

Sorry for the medicalisation, an annoying legacy in my brain from many years of diagnosing and prescribing.

Unlike many other ills, autoimmune diseases are generated by our own bodies. Our immune system, in charge of fighting external invaders, gets it wrong and fights your own defences. You are caught in your own friendly fire. You are attacking yourself. Rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel syndrome, etc. You name it.

In our organizations, we have our own autoimmune diseases. Employees fight colleagues and leaders, the Unions fight management, people fight the systems they have created, HR fight disengagements blaming the disengaged. So many things look and feel as self-inflicted pain. It’s often a war place, not a workplace. With lots of war-shops instead of work-shops.

If there is a long way, we will take it, a leader told me recently. They are fighting their own simplicity.

In my experience, the worst affected by the auto-immune mechanism, are industries that are ‘very regulated’. I work with ‘very regulated industries’ all the time, pharmaceuticals, finance, banking etc. There is nothing in any regulation that says you have to take 30 days and involve 30 people to make a decision when you can do it with 3 people in 30 days. Nothing. Zero. But the ‘we are a regulated industry’ kicks in all the time.

It’s self-inflicted pain as a symptom of their own autoimmune diseases.

They are fighting their own body.

And unfortunately these conditions are chronic.

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We can help your business Reboot!  

 

Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.

As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.

 

Reboot! The Game Plan ^[6]

Timing: 1 – 3 days depending on format

Audience: minimum 20 – maximum 40

Price: POA

For more information, and to discuss how Reboot! The Game Plan can support you and your business, please Contact Us ^[7] or email: [email protected] ^[8]

Model 1 of my 6  ^[9]is what I call, ‘Air time’. It translates into: ‘we recognise that employees’ views are not properly heard; employees need a voice’. And, I am not talking Unions here.

Model 1 usually comes as one of two solutions:

Solution one: we will go around the sites and affiliates and will carry out lots of Town Hall Meetings, Open Forum Executive Roadshows, All Hands meetings etc. (Sometimes, it’s funny to hear this because the planning of actions seems to be about giving more voice to management than to employees). But of course there will be a big Q&A at the end. Scenario A: following the 250 PowerPoint slides, management is seriously puzzled because there are hardly any questions. “They don’t ask anything!”. Scenario B: there are questions by two people who express incredibly negative views. These dominate all the Q&A airtime and people go back to their offices with negativity reinforced (‘be careful what you ask for, you might get it’. Tip: doing ‘Town Hall’ type of meetings and ending up reinforcing negative feelings is stupid, and worse than not doing Town Halls at all). Scenario C: Everything goes well, there is a reasonable dialogue, everybody feels good.

Solution two: we do an Employee Engagement/Employee Satisfaction/Climate survey. Giving employees a voice? Yes, sure, here is the questionnaire. As we all know, there is a whole industry here. Survey is done, Gantt charts are displayed, numbers find a home in spread sheets, but there are these little red asterisks in the bars that say that your division is below average. Not good. Emergency Management Team meeting dictates that we need to tackle those little red asterisks. Particularly the ones that say that people do not feel heard. We must give more voice to people: go to Solution one. For the rest of the asterisks, we will create lots of mandatory workshops to find solutions, and each sub-management team will report back (mandatory).

Ok, but what about this “Air Time” model:

Pros. Increasing employee voice and giving employees more air time is much better than (a) the absence of either or (b) a poor state of affairs in this area.

Cons. When implemented as a tick-box exercise, it’s a complete waste, a lost opportunity and, in some cases, an insult and source of further disengagement. Employee Surveys are often executed as an annual or bi-annual ritual, something to go through, and something that triggers ‘actions’ to show that we listen to employees, that ‘they’ have a voice. I have asked a few times: ‘Why do you do an employee survey?’ and more than once have been told: ‘Because the Board wants one’.

So what? When Model 1, ‘Air Time’, is used in isolation, it’s hardly a solution to anything. It does not mean that some people won’t like it or will be grateful. However, ‘Model 1’ in isolation, can have the opposite affect to that which is intended, and often, is a bit of corporate exhibitionism. Model 1, makes sense when it is not the only model in town, when it’s part of a wider and more mature engagement plan. Trouble is, many Employee Engagement programmes in organizations are full blown ‘Model 1 only’.

Next is ‘Model 2’, The ‘Happy Cows’ model (‘Happy Cows’ deliver better milk’). See you later.

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REBOOT! The Game Plan

Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.

As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.

 

At The Chalfont Project ^[10], we have crafted a series of short interventions called Accelerators ^[6]:

 

Reboot! The Game Plan ^[6]

Do you feel like you and your team are stuck in the day to day doing of things and many aspects of the running of the organization don’t make the agenda?

There may or may not be anything obviously wrong. Or maybe there is. But this is not a good enough state of affairs.

This high intensity, accelerated intervention takes leadership teams of all levels through a process of discovery and identification of both stumbling blocks and enablers will be followed by a clear ‘so-what’ and an action plan. It results in alignment around a well crafted Game Plan that reflects where they see the organization/team/department in the short to medium term and a detailed commitment to action that can be tracked.

This high impact, short intervention for senior teams, will:

• challenge ways of thinking
• provide immediate and trackable actions
• drive change
• develop a better way of functioning across the team, department or organization.

 

Contact us ^[7] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

 

In WWII there was a curious episode of an injection of critical thinking, not entirely well publicised. Big bomber airplanes in the Allied camp were shot down more and more, and the lucky ones that returned to base did so with multiple bullet holes, all over the place in the fuselage.

It was obvious to people that this was a sign that the fuselage needed to be stronger, with more armour and protection. But heavier plates would not necessary help the performance of the airplane.

A Jewish mathematician who had fled from Hungary, Abraham Wald ^[11], was asked to look into the problem. I don’t know exactly why him. But the first thing he did was to sketch the distribution of the bullet holes in the returning planes. Doing so many times, he saw a pattern: the areas with more holes were wings, tail and the nose of the aircrafts, whilst others such as the cockpit and a section of the back were not. The answer was simple: these areas with the holes were the weak areas of the fuselage, the ones that needed the extra plates, the reinforcement, the thicker armour.

Really?

Wald turned the problem and the logic upside down. The reframed question now was not where the bullet holes were in the aircrafts that returned, but where they would be in the ones that didn’t. If areas of the fuselage needed reinforcement and the extra armour, it was not the ones with the holes – the aircrafts returned after all – but the ones with no holes at all such as the cockpit and part of the back. Presumably, this is why those aircraft did not come back.

Wald reframed and inverted the problem. It did not cost anything. Certainly at that time, sophisticated simulations that would have been the order of the day today, were not available.

Seeing the problem upside down, reframing and finding ‘the other side of the coin’, is a tool within a good Critical Thinking approach.

As in the previous Daily Thought, another case of ‘ ^[12]Invert, always invert’ ^[13].

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ACCELERATORS from The Chalfont Project

 

Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.

As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.

 

At The Chalfont Project ^[10], we have crafted a series of short interventions called Accelerators ^[6]:

• Reboot! The Game Plan –  ^[6] Do you feel like you and your team are stuck in the day to day doing of things and many aspects of the running of the organization don’t make the agenda?

There may or may not be anything obviously wrong. Or maybe there is. But this is not a good enough state of affairs.

This high intensity, accelerated intervention takes leadership teams of all levels through a process of discovery and identification of both stumbling blocks and enablers will be followed by a clear ‘so-what’ and an action plan. It results in alignment around a well crafted Game Plan that reflects where they see the organization/team/department in the short to medium term and a detailed commitment to action that can be tracked.

 

• Critical Thinking ^[6] – Do you feel like you’re missing the time to reflect and makes changes? Do you feel like your team has fallen into bad habits, business is unproductive and no one takes ownership to change it?

In this short intervention we teach you and your team Critical Thinking Methods and Questions that will help you focus your time on the things that matter, make good and fair decisions and escape the dangers of human biases. We will also help you apply these methods to your everyday challenges in your organization.

You will learn about Strategy Acid tests and many Mind Fallacies, including various biases, and the practical Critical Thinking methods that you can use to address these.

 

These high impact, short interventions for senior teams, will:

• challenge ways of thinking
• provide immediate and trackable actions
• drive change
• develop a better way of functioning across the team, department or organization.

 

Contact us ^[7] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

The difference between the critical thinker and the un-critical one is not a difference in IQ, or mental strength, or some sort of genetic privileges of the brain. It is a difference in practicing questioning, versus little questioning, or not questioning at all, or taking life at face value.

The critical thinker is always in the mental gym, exercising. The un-critical thinker is not very fit. But not very fit people are not necessarily ill. They get by in different ways, usually with some disadvantage.

The critical thinker is restless. Like the gym goer or the daily jogger, he or she has butterflies in their stomach as soon as they’re not exercising. These are mental butterflies, signs of restlessness, feeling uncomfortable with the status quo, the un-questioned life, if you want to get a bit philosophical.

Critical thinking can be learnt. As I said before, it’s like going to the gym. It’s a praxis, exercising, getting fit. The main gym exercises of the critical thinking are questions. The critical thinker is always learning (and practicing) how to ask questions. The other type of critical thinking fitness has to do with avoiding mind traps, mental tricks that we generate all the time. These are the so called fallacies and cognitive biases. Again, one can learn to deal with them.

The good critical thinker needs also a good dose of emotional and social intelligence to understand that ‘asking questions’, and, in particular, ‘asking questions very frequently’ as a habit, can be very, very annoying to others. Yes, critical thinkers can be a pain. It’s so much easier not to ask too many questions!

But if you have emotionally-intelligent critical thinkers in the organization, you are very lucky. You won’t be completely immune to failure. But you will have constant fresh air. A healthy environment with a constant flow of fresh air is a gem, a privilege.

There is a quote by H L Mencken (1880-1956) ^[14] that says: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” The critical thinker is gently aware of this. He is also aware that he or she may be the one providing that neat and plausible solution.

Critical thinking has wonderful unintended consequences: being humble is one. Free from the heavy load and duty of being always right, a burden that the uncritical thinker tends to bear, the critical one is agile and nimble.

If you could see your organization as a school of critical thinking, no matter which industry, no matter what size, you’d be on the winning track.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Critical Thinking ^[6] Accelerator from The Chalfont Project:

 

Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.

As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.

_____________________

At The Chalfont Project, we have crafted a short intervention on Critical Thinking ^[6]:

• Do you feel like you’re missing the time to reflect and makes changes?
• Do you feel like your team has fallen into bad habits, business is unproductive and no one takes ownership to change it?

In this short intervention we teach you and your team Critical Thinking methods and questions that will help you focus your time on the things that matter, make good and fair decisions and escape the dangers of human biases. We will also help you apply these methods to your everyday challenges in your organization.

You will learn about strategy acid tests and many mind fallacies, including various biases, and the practical Critical Thinking methods that you can use to address these.

This high impact, short intervention will:

• – challenge ways of thinking
• – provide immediate and trackable actions
• – drive change
• – develop a better way of functioning across the team, department or organization.

 

Contact us ^[7] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

 

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi ^[15], a 19^th century Swiss mathematician is remembered by many things in his scientific turf, but by one in particular outside the field: ‘Invert, always invert’. He used this phrase to suggest that hard mathematical problems could be addressed better, and eventually solved, by inverting the problem, articulating it in its inverse form, by working it backwards.

In recent years, the quote perhaps needed the visibility lent by Charles Munger ^[16], business partner of Warren Buffet. Munger is revered in many quarters as great thinker, and his pointing into directions, from general wisdom to investing wisdom, gets good highlights. He has referred to ‘Invert’ many times in his writings and interviews.

‘Invert, always invert’, is a very pragmatic and heuristic mental trick that we at The Chalfont Project ^[10] have long incorporated into our Critical Thinking ^[6] programme armamentarium. It is part of a broader set of ‘Reframing’ approaches. Reframing forces us to ask alternative questions to the question that seem to be obvious, or the given one.

For us in day to day management, a simple example of ‘invert, always invert’, is to invert the question. The question may be ‘how can we (succeed and) achieve X goal by Y time?’. This is a very standard question, but the problem may be complicated and people may get very stuck in the finding of the answer or answers.

Indeed, it may be that you find yourself already on the road with several brainstorming sessions and a few PowerPoint ‘summaries’ in your pocket, but you may feel that you are not getting closer to an answer or even a clear path towards it. And this may well be despite the overgrowing analysis of the issue.

Stop there. Invert! Reframe the issue as follows: ‘How can we completely and thoroughly screw up and fail miserably?’ Restart now. I can guarantee you that renewed energy will come to the collective brains, people close to falling asleep under the previous question will wake up, and, progressively, the dull infection of brainstorms will turn into speed recovery with exciting and creative exercises. Try it. Invert the problem.

Give to the inversion a serious change, not just a game or a mental trick. Apply the same brainstorm techniques that you use. Write down the principles of a Strategic Plan to Fail Miserably and Being Ashamed Fast.

At some point, when enough light has come up, you will invert again and will address the original question.

Reframe, always reframe.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Critical Thinking ^[6] Accelerator from The Chalfont Project:

Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.

As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.

_____________________

At The Chalfont Project, we have crafted a short Accelerator on Critical Thinking ^[6]:

• Do you feel like you’re missing the time to reflect and makes changes?
• Do you feel like your team has fallen into bad habits, business is unproductive and no one takes ownership to change it?

In this short intervention we teach you and your team Critical Thinking Methods and Questions that will help you focus your time on the things that matter, make good and fair decisions and escape the dangers of human biases. We will also help you apply these methods to your everyday challenges in your organization.

You will learn about Strategy Acid tests and many Mind Fallacies, including various biases, and the practical Critical Thinking methods that you can use to address these.

This high impact, short intervention will:

• challenge ways of thinking
• provide immediate and trackable actions
• drive change
• develop a better way of functioning across the team, department or organization.

Contact us ^[7] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

If you look at political marketing, and the place to look for a serious PhD in communications and their segmentation is Obama’s campaign 2008 and 2012, for which there are plenty of books and papers, you’ll see that segmentation of the message is not even a question. You don’t go to them asking ‘do you segment?’ That would be the same as asking a restaurateur if he puts food on the table.

In these campaigns, the ‘data points’ per voter went into the hundreds. The entire communication system was tailored to segments of age, race, schooling, and another myriad of elements.

There is a wonderful clip on the web of Walter, a 90-year-old veteran campaigning via phone and a laptop, where a precise script is in front of his eyes, and a precise list of people to call. I have used this with my clients multiple times. We can only hear the voice at the other end of the phone, and it’s not one of a 25 year old. It sounds like one of his age or a bit below. Walter is asking for a vote but is not talking about an Iran threat, climate change, or education. None of it. It’s all healthcare. Nothing else.

When confronted with the clip, the first reaction by people in the room is ‘well, that’s obvious’. But then they have to suspend judgement about what may come after the obvious. I ask, when was the last time that you, in your internal, top down communication system, of the vision, the strategy, the ‘what’s next’ or the ‘what has just been’, segmented the message, a la Walter, versus one, single, monolithic, top down stack of PowerPoints shown at the all-people Town Hall meeting?

Invariably the answer is, don’t know, probably never. I think it is never.

The company, your company, probably, has Millennials mixed with Boomers, single mums and not, age bands with particular preoccupations, tribes (engineers, accountants, marketers etc.) speaking their own language, people in HQ and people outside, those feeling pretty OK and those worrying about the question mark over the site, passionate ones engaged with charities, super skilled and perhaps no skilled or very little, the secretaries tribe, the new in the company and those who have been there for years. Do I need to carry on? Why is it, for goodness’ sake, that everybody, I mean everybody, gets the same message, in the same format, at the same time? On behalf of what? Unity? Alignment? Democracy?

It’s simply crazy. Yes, you need a single, overall compelling narrative. But you need to segment, segment and segment the message. I know, this is not the conventional wisdom in ‘business’. But we, ‘in business’ are miles behind what happens in other parts of life where mobilizing people is the key. Perhaps this is why we have rather pathetic Employee Engagement practices.

The concept of disruption in management has been applied to innovation before. A disruptive innovation is a technology, process or business model that introduces a much more affordable product or service (that is also much simpler to use) into a market.

‘It enables more consumers in that market to afford and/or have the skill to use the product or service. The change caused by such an innovation is so big that it eventually replaces, or disrupts, the established approach to providing that product or service’

Clayton Christensen ^[17], author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, created disruptive Innovation as a concept.

All very well, but before looking for the big product disruptors with the potential to disrupt and create entire markets, disruption, like charity, needs to start ‘at home’.

Before creating the equivalent of cloud computing, and the new wearables, and driverless vehicles, here is the challenge: what are the small disruptions that you can implement tomorrow in your thinking, in your teams, in your environment?

Here is a guide on what to look for, my definition of Disruptive ideas:

Disruptive [management] ideas are those that have the capacity to create significant impact on the organisation by challenging standard management practices. They share the following characteristics:

1. They are simple.
2. There is a total disproportion between their simplicity and their potential to impact on and transform the life of organisations.
3. They can be implemented now.
4. You can implement them at little or no cost.
5. They are most likely to be contrarian.
6. They are also most likely to be counterintuitive.
7. They pose a high risk of being trivialised or dismissed.
8. They can spread virally within the organisation very easily.

You only need a few disruptive ideas to create big transformation without the need for a Big Change Management Programme. The impact of a combination of a few is just like dynamite.

This is what I said in the book: Disruptive ideas ^[18] ‘provide management alternatives that, if spread, can completely transform the way the organisation works without the need to execute a massive ‘change management programme’. Each of them, in its own right, has the potential to create significant change. The compound benefit of a few of them is a real engine of change and business transformation.’

So here we are, disruptive ideas transcend innovation or technology and go back to the fundamental roots of day-to-day management in any kind of organisation, challenging conventional wisdom.

I wrote the book with some suggestions, but there is a much better way. What about this disruptive idea? Ask your team for disruptive ideas, brainstorm, get crazy, retreat, have more. See what impact they may have. Try hard to kill them. See the resistance, if any.

So if somebody says, for example, no meetings for a whole week, does this meet the criteria? If so, what would be the benefits? Why would this be crazy? What may the organization look like?

If you get into the habit, you won’t stop. I don’t believe in ‘disruption’ for the sake of it, but I know that not doing exercise will get you into trouble. The exercise is the relentless questioning: what if we did?

And this is very healthy. Disruptively healthy.

We spend too much time seeking predictable answers. They are not necessarily bad. If I work with Peter, Paul and Mary on a regular basis, my mind has a good idea of what Peter, Paul or Mary would say to my difficult question. Not that this has little value. On the contrary, Peter is a good brain, Paul has a wealth of experience and Mary is a good critical thinker.

But, if I really need a breakthrough in my own thinking, view of the world, or my preconceived plans on how to address this big issue in front, I should try unpredictable answers. That rules out Peter, Paul and Mary. Also your close team, people you know well, friends.

Unpredictable answers are more likely to come from people you don’t know that well, perhaps you have some ties (‘weak ties’ it’s called in social sciences), perhaps you have been vaguely in touch. Or serious consultants who are prepared to tell you the truth, not to agree directly with what you think. (Come on, find them!)

You should make a list of your normal, good, reliable, safe, predictable connections and then rule out anybody on that list. Unless there is somebody in that list who, although you may know well, truly ‘thinks differently’.

Then make a list of more unlikely, unusual or possibly vague connections. This list may contain people from an opposite part of the company, from another company, most powerful even, from another industry sector. Tap into that intellectual capital.

The quest for innovation, small i or big I, starts from the unpredictability of things. Most of the time we surround ourselves with predictable ones. Just by injecting small doses of unpredictability (read: pick up the phone and call that guy you met a year ago at a kid’s school match, who is a head of Sales in A industry sector, whilst you work in B), those that may feel a bit weird (sure, you do the non-weird ones every day) will stimulate you to try again and again.

Then, it will become as normal as talking to your own (more predictable) team.

“A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire.”—Fred Ross ^[19]

Fred Ross (1910-1992) American community organizer was behind many modern social movements in the USA and also behind the organization of many labour and civil rights activities. Fred was a formidable figure in American grassroots social organization, together with Saul Alinsky ^[20] (1909-1930), the latter well known beyond his activism by his book ‘Rules for Radicals’, a left wing ‘how to’ book that no serious political movement, left or right has ever ignored, either to follow it or to counter it.

I have spent time reading around the history of social mobilization, which the USA leads in quantity and quality. As I have said before, the USA, more than anywhere else, has been built on social movements. Most of them follow a well studied pattern of struggle, success and exhaustion. Others will remain for longer as public platforms aided by the digital world.

History and personal education aside, I found the title of ‘social arsonist’ fascinating. I was not aware of the term until recently, despite the fact that we use it routinely in our Viral Change™ Programmes, where we use the metaphor of ‘the mountain on fire’ to explain how from a few areas of fire (arsonist?) the fire spreads and suddenly the mountain is on fire. That is, cultures, movements, and organizations themselves.

We say, once the mountain is on fire, it’s on fire. No point going back and dissecting ad nauseam whether it was the quality of the trees, the weather or a few arsonists, or combinations of. Deal with the fire!

People mobilization is, by definition, at the essence of leadership . Happy to adopt the ‘social arsonist’ concept, for the Viral Change™ glossary!

Modern and not so modern ‘social movements’ with or a without business propositions are portrayed as a concerted and positioned philosophy first, from which then, the ‘movement’ (and the business) takes shape. Translation: philosophy first, movement and practicalities, and business follow.

Take Uber; democratization of transportation in cities, competing with old fashioned taxi monopolies, disruption of a business model supported by technology. So the story reads.

Zipcar. Cars waiting for you in dedicated places, you rent by the hour, you return the car. Democratization of transport again, technology enabled do-it-yourself going from A to B by car without owning it. Disruptive model, changing the world of personal travel.

The so-called ‘sharing economy’ is another example. You own less and less and share more and more, from lawn mowers to anything. This is less consumerism, greater sustainability. Great.

Airbnb. Adios hotels; book a room, an apartment, a villa, anywhere. More disruption of the model. New concept and new philosophy embraced by thousands of followers.

All these are good examples of disruptive business models and, very often, are portrayed as ‘philosophy’, a matter of principles, an indication of the change in the world, a new lens, a clever and new worldview. Again, philosophy first and then the translation.

Nothing further from the truth. Most of these ‘disruptions’ were born out of a necessity with little philosophical, worldview, of the type ‘this will change the world for good’. Airbnb’s original members struggled to pay the rent and offered rooms. How’s that for a ‘change the world philosophy’? Uber, often portrayed as the mother of all evils (for taxi companies in cities, that is) and ‘sweatshops on wheels’, has created a lot of personal freedom (in hours to work, for example) and work flexibility. The ‘I am my own boss’ philosophy (‘don’t you see this is the thing that new generations want?’) plus ‘anything is possible with digital’(apps), plus creative or not so creative disruption came later.

The real stories are more prosaic than the portrayed philosophies in a disruptive world. Incidentally, all of them are more or less represented as enabled by incredible disruptive technologies, when technology in most of them is not really a big deal.

These examples are a mere replication of the way we shape our lives. We think that we have a theory first and then ‘we put it into practice’. The theory is the clever bit, or the romantic, or the save-the-world bit. But most of the time, we have practices first and then we extract a theory that explains them.

My experience with entrepreneurs to whom we attribute visionary, change the world philosophies, is that they are the first to be surprised about the attribution. Most want to solve a problem. Period. Not to change the world. This being said, many also love the post-hoc flattering attribution of Socratic and semi-messianic visions.

 

Organizations need a Rapid Reaction Force. OK, unless you are in the military, it does not mean military fatigue uniforms and a set of helicopters. It means being able at very short notice to deploy the best brains and the best skills to address a situation ‘now’, versus taking a ‘natural’ time to discuss, plan and act.

The obvious situation is a crisis, but not the only one, by any means. It may be the discovery of an opportunity in the market that needs serious indepth evaluation. Maybe a competitor’s move that changes the panorama. Maybe a world event that impacts employees and other stakeholders. Positive or negative, the situation requires rapid action, perhaps multi-functional, and, perhaps it may not be entirely obvious which ‘functions’ should react and lead.

The traditional functions, divisional structure,  expert-silo type reaction may not be enough in scope, nor in speed.

I am talking about a Rapid Transitory Reconfiguration, Response and Gain Force.

Rapid: yes, no need to think about it. As in the military or some relief, global, UN driven organizations, it means now.

Transitory: this is not embarking upon a new permanent structure, team or otherwise.

Re-configuration: it is borrowing people from multiple places and not making a fuss about the empty chairs created.

Response: it’s about addressing the issue or the opportunity head on.

Gain: it is about coming out the other end stronger and better equipped, not just illuminated, let alone simply ‘adapted’.

It may not be natural to react and deploy ‘spontaneously’, so this will need a Leader who has the authority to call to arms and create  rules of the game in 24 hours. The leadership at the top must give complete and unconditional support, and that includes the acknowledgement that some people may be taken out of their jobs for days or weeks. Full stop.

One unintended consequence of the existence of these ‘Units’ is that their visibility and effectiveness inevitably injects a sense of possibility and agility beyond the people involved. It’s a powerful psychological effect: in this company, we can do these types of things, we are flexible and agile.

This is infectious. Other people may consciously or unconsciously copy this ability to react rapidly .

In other words, instead of waiting for the entire organization to ‘work agile’ and ‘react agile’, create the artificial agility (transitory) vehicle and let it be role-modelled elsewhere.

A dangerous metastatic cancer in organizations ( no apologies for the strong language) is the equating of ‘team’ and ‘meeting’.

One of the most toxic practices in organisational life is equating ‘team’ and ‘team meeting’. You could start a true transformation by simply splitting them as far apart as you can and by switching on the team permanently. In a perfect team, ‘stuff happens’ all the time without the need to meet. Try the disruptive idea ‘Team 365’ to start a small revolution.

In our minds, the idea that teams are something to do with meetings is well embedded. And indeed, teams do meet… But ‘the meeting’ has become synonymous with ‘the team’. Think of the language we often use. If there is an issue or something that requires a decision and this is discussed amongst people who belong to a team, we often hear things such as, “let’s bring it to the team”. In fact, what people mean really is, “let’s bring it to the meeting. Put it on the agenda.” By default, we have progressively concentrated most of the ‘team time’ in ‘meeting time’. The conceptual borders of these two very different things have become blurred. We have created a culture where team equals meetings equals team. And this is disastrous.

As a consequence of the mental model and practice that reads ‘teams = meeting = teams’, the team member merely becomes an event traveller (from a few doors down or another country?). These team travellers bring packaged information, all prepared for the disclosure or discussion at ‘the event’.

Once the package is delivered, the information downloaded and the decision made (if lucky), the concept of team membership and its intensity fade. The sense of belonging has been hijacked by the meeting itself. And so, after the meeting, there is a void, waiting to be filled by the next call for items for the next agenda.

Imagine now the opposite scenario, where the concept of membership is one of 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And that this is when ‘the real stuff happens’, not at the meetings!

In ‘team 365’ mode, the meeting is an occasional event, something that happens when needed. It’s not the centre of activity for the team. Instead, the emphasis is on the team as a continuous collaboration structure. The meeting is merely a device for occasional needs. Literally, Team 365 is always meeting, so it doesn’t really need to meet. Well, almost.

PS for those on the ‘of course the team is more than the meeting’, do a friendly health check of what happens in real life.

(from Disruptive Ideas, book ^[21], and Accelerator ^[22])

Years ago, I persuaded a pharmaceutical client to make three bold moves in one:

(1)   To create a New Product Incubator Unit (NPI) in charge of fast assessment/fast fail of very early stage development of medicines, including those offered for in-licencing by outsiders. The client was slow in this crucial filtering phase of the value chain, and applied to this well-known bottleneck in medicines development the same laws and management criteria used in the rest of the company. We created an Incubator from what it was a Slow Incinerator.

(2)   To give the NPI complete autonomy with different governance from the mainstream company, for example, allowing different reporting system and different levels of risk management (read: high). In many companies, uniformity and homogeneity of process, systems and reporting, sold as quintessence of, otherwise flawed, good management efficiency, is the only way to go. To carve out spaces (we call it ‘cohabitation of spaces’ in our Organizational Design method) with different laws and rules of the game, seems sometimes to management like a non-affordable nightmare. But the only reasons for the non-affordability, though, are simply of the managerial convenience type. It is indeed more difficult and painful to manage an organization which de facto works as a host of different designs, units, and rules of the game, a diversity of spaces, not a one mansion with all the windows and toilets looking the same.

(3)   To put in charge somebody with a technology/engineering background, not medical or pharmaceutical. This bright gentleman, out of ignorance, started asking all sort of uncomfortable questions about speed, decision making, risk levels, resources and deliverables. The client anticipated a big backlash from ‘the professionals’ but, in fact, we had next to nothing of it, ‘professionals’ largely welcoming the alien and his awkward questions that nobody else had asked before.

This all-in-one bold move worked extraordinarily well in all counts. It got rid of all backlog of assessment of molecules. It attracted bright people wanted to join in. In fact, its permanent headcount was low, but we had a long queue of good brains wanted to join as secondments from other parts of the company. The NPI was ‘the place to be’. It was fast moving, high risk, work intense, stimulating, high output, thought provoking environment. And did delivered big time.

When later on the company was acquired by a Big-All-Things-Corporation, it took the new owners just a few days to dismantle this alien, avant-garde, magnetic structure. None of the new acquiring executives descending from heaven with a McKinsey cookbook understood this apparent madness, and the most successful experimentation in the long history of the company, going back to the 50s, died unceremoniously.

I made a big mistake at the beginning. I took for granted that success would always be protected, proven innovation would always win, and even Big Consulting Thinking would always acknowledge bold moves. I am slightly less stupid now.

My very good client BTG plc has created a habit of getting leadership teams together into racing boats for a day, in serious waters, to race, of course. The coach team are of Olympian level, indeed some of them now part of the British Olympic Team. They get the instructions first thing in the morning, get to do some training in the water and then racing for the rest of the day. Some people may be sportive, some may have never been in a boat before. After the long day, the dinner, the social aspect and a goof night sleep, the next day the team is confronted with their own business situation to apply any learning form the day before. It works brilliantly.

There is an extraordinary immediate (organisational and leadership) learning from the model, which I’d like to unpack. The whole experience, can be unbounded into 4 components. I will explain, and, at the same time, I will make the comparison with what is more or less standard in our business life.

1. Minimal instructions. The early morning class on racing is beautifully done, but it is one hour, max. There you have ‘all you need to know’ from safety to rules of racing; from winds to maneuvering; from strategy to tactics. BTG calls this the ‘get it’ part. Compare that with our obsession with having a perfect briefing with perfect data with all the dots in a row and boxes ticked, before we start doing anything.
2. Minimum sense making. Nobody receives the total wisdom on racing in an hour, There is no room for absolutely, everything to make sense. It just makes enough sense to assume that that other things will emerge. Enough sense to act. Compare with our usual need to obtain maximum comfort. Is everybody on board? Everybody aligned? Does management support this and that? Are we sure that this is what he CEO wants? Have we double checked with the US? We spend our organization life creating ‘packaged comfort’ before we act.
3. The magic trust comes in. If the team has a decent level of trust, between their members, the magic sparks. You trust that others will have understood, that others will know what to do, that others will help and jump if needed. No trust, this is where all breaks down, or at least starts having some cracks. In our organizational life trust is also the fuel. Nobody quite knows how to create it but you’ll see it when you’ll see it, or you wont. In BTG racing sessions, teams with intrinsic low or poor trust in real life, perform significanlty worse in the waters. Interestingly, the coaches who may not know about the teams themselves in rewal life, can spot and predict a bad business execution but seeing what happens in those boats. And they are always right.
4. Then you go, go, go. And recalibrate, and execute. BTG calls these in several ways: to be ‘on it’, to ‘look out’ and to have the ‘appropriate bandwidth’. It is an imperfect world. As a guest, I have attended sessions where in the morning and during the training bits we have dealt with all possible winds and associated manoeuvring, to get into the race itself and find zero wind, nothing moves whatsoever. Prepared for high winds, what do you do with lack of it. Does it sounds business as well?

I am incredible skeptical of ‘sports analogies’ for business. This one works, because it is not an analogy, it is real experience of an full imperfect world in a day with immediate, transferable. unavoidable learning.

Dealing with the imperfect, the unpredictable, the ambiguous is part of todays business life. Part of my serious leadership development toolkits. And for the imperfect, the unpredictable, and the ambiguous, people still seek perfect training, perfect guarantees and perfect comfort. Old school that is.

I have referred several times to Charles Munger, investor, critical thinker, ‘librarian’ (he reads more books than anybody else): we are successful (investors) by making less mistakes than others. I have also referred to my initiation to boat racing as a learning platform for leadership, and my conversion from sceptical to ‘you-know-what?-it-makes sense’. The instructor said, forget winning each bit, you win the race by making less mistakes than the others.

I also know, and you know as well, that we have the management mantra of ‘learning from mistakes’. A good management mantra that in truth nobody likes, but we are supposed to spouse to be cool. (Then in the corridor, the smiling conspiracy: yes, mistakes, really? Do you know what happened to John?)

I propose that we don’t make a fuss about the so-called-cool ‘learning from mistakes’ and instead, starting with senior leaders, people get used to talk about mistakes, per se. My 2 mistakes of the month were A, and B; what about yours Peter? This is what I will do next time. (Can you try to avoid the ‘this is what I’ve learned’ thing? Nothing wrong with it, but the focus is on what you’ll do next time, learning assumed)

Only elevating that language and those narratives to normality, will shape a culture of real ‘learning from mistakes’ … without saying it. The culture will become one of that kind, when you don’t have to say it.

The boat racing instructor had no problem with it. Munger (empire) has no problem with it. Why do we, in management, have to look that clever and make the point? We are learning, you see? Just learn.

A while ago, I suggested The Hall of Fame of Mistakes as a Disruptive idea ^[22], easy to implement.

Given the temptation we all have to corporatize everything that is normal and convert it into hijacked and contrived reality, my only worry is that some people may go as far as over-formalising a process for processing the mistakes and their processes. In public. Last time this was done it was the Cultural Revolution in China. I would not like to see Maoist meetings taken over…

BTW, whilst Charlie Munger possesses a modern version of the Library of Alexandria, Mao and company had only one book. Tiny. Red.

Hominem unius libri timeo ( “I fear the man of a single book”). It took 10 years in China to get another book. And by then the population was minus 1,5 million.

‘I am convinced that a well thought out “small wins approach” is the premier path to effective strategy implementation, and therefore to long-term organizational capability building’, Tom Peters, Guru of Gurus said in 1998.

And it kept me wondering whether this perfectly legitimate advice would still be valid 21 years later. Tom Peters was then referring to a new book by Bob Schaffer entitled ‘The Breakthrough Strategy: Using Short-term Success to Build the High Performance Organization’. The book and approach is based upon ‘“locating and starting at once with the gains that can be achieved quickly and then using these first successes as stepping stones to increasingly ambitious gains.”

Things have changed a lot in 21 years; the environment is a quantum leap different. The principles behind Schaffer’s work were very solid then (and he went on to fund a non-profit arm of his company to help the developing world; he was very determined to creating long-term impact). How much of the ‘small stuff leading to big stuff’ is valid today?

Not many people would disagree with the rationale: small steps, ‘baby steps, ‘one step at a time’, don’t put ‘the cart before the horse’, ‘a thousand steps’, ‘the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step’, etc. Incrementalism is in our mind. Is it because this is how our brain works, and how sensible things need to happen, or because we don’t know how to make big steps, adult steps, many things at a time?

I am not against the incrementalism rationale per se, which is logical and rational. But we need to ask ourselves how far we can go with it.

Can we do a step at time if your major competitors does 10 steps at a time? Can you afford small wins if you need to prove a big output in five years? Does the step-by-step theory apply to a company growing fast, at pretty much any cost? When is small-win-leads-to-big-win strategy legitimate and when is it a suicidal note?

At the very least, I ask my clients to play contrarian and imagine that they have no time for baby steps and small wins. What would they do? What if they all needed to accelerate by 50, 60, 100%?

For all the merits of incrementalism, and there are many, our present times are against that rationale. Perhaps it’s not all or nothing. Some things need the increment, others the big leap. Question is, do we always know which ones are which?

 

A report on the Future of Jobs by the World Economic Forum compares the skills priorities of 2015 with the ones predicted by 2020.

I am pleased to see Critical Thinking jumping to number 2 in the list, just below ‘Complex Problem Solving’ (that requires a great deal of critical thinking until the robots take over and think more critically than us, that is)

In these Daily Thoughts I have endless parroted about Critical Thinking and many times said that is in short supply in our organizations. Alpha males (and females) are keen to do and act and produce faster than their brains can think critically. The others may have a different pace but they are prone to perhaps shortcut, use whatever information is available and declare it good, and then, there you go. Caricatures as these may be, the fact is that Critical Thinking is even seen as suspicious in many quarters as a risk to slow down and super-analyse. But Critical Thinking is about the discipline of questioning and avoiding mental traps that we all have. And if you do these well, not only you wont slow down but quite the opposite.

Critical Thinking is a meeting point of Psychology, Philosophy and Education and, as such, you need to borrow from these disciplines to be able to apply in the organization. But it is very doable and train-able

By the way, number 3 in the list is ‘Creativity’, which requires a great deal of lateral thinking and a ‘what if’, as critical thinkers do.

I believe that imagination and creativity are certainly something natural in some people, nature or nurture, but that it can be ‘institutionalised’. Not speaking for myself, one does not have to be an athlete to go to the gym. I am not an athlete. I don’t go to the gym. But in fact, gyms are full, I am told, of non athletes, but people who need and want to exercise. Equally, going to gym once a month may be social but nothing else. Again, discipline, discipline. Critical Thinking needs to be embedded in the culture, not just left for the Grand Strategic Decisions.

Injecting Critical  Thinking discipline in the organization is a good investment. It is unfortunate that the producer of the survey in Davos have not managed to get much Critical Thinking in the water supply of the World Economic Forum itself.

The person who fails the most wins

Seth Godin dixit.

Investors who make less mistakes win

Warren Buffet and Charles Munger dixit

We win the race by making less mistakes than the other boats

Head coach of boat racing dixit

Wait a minute, is there a pattern here?

I did not have Seth, Warren, Charles and Chris in the same room. What’s going on? Are we glorifying failing and making mistakes?

No. We are upgrading our mind to understand experimentation, trial an error, on spot learning, rapid reaction, strategic thinking (the real one) and … wining!

Oh, I forgot, what the three approaches have also in common is, they all are very humble. Big egos will have a hard time here.

Strategic thinking is less grandiose than you think: it has to do with handling failure and mistakes.

One of my 30 Disruptive Ideas in the book ^[23] and Accelerator ^[22] is to install a live Hall of Fame of Mistakes, where all of them can be ventilated in the open. The visible board becomes the less threatening panel on the walls of the company. Once people are used to it, permission to learn fast grows fast. Trust grows fast.

‘The Learning Organization’ is today a less fashionable term, but if there is one, is the one that embraces Seth, Warren, Charles and the Chris of this world. They all succeed by mastering mistakes and failures

Said many times? Paying lip services? Not walking the talk? The dysfunctionality is in our leadership, our organizations, not in the human learning itself.

The concept of disruption in management has been applied to innovation before. A disruptive innovation is a technology, process or business model that introduces a much more affordable product or service (that is also much simpler to use) into a market.

‘It enables more consumers in that market to afford and/or have the skill to use the product or service. The change caused by such an innovation is so big that it eventually replaces, or disrupts, the established approach to providing that product or service’

Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, created disruptive Innovation as a concept.

All very well, but before looking for the big product disruptors with the potential to disrupt and create entire markets, disruption, like charity, needs to star ‘at home’.

Before creating the equivalent of cloud computing, and the new wearables, and driverless vehicles, here is the challenge: what are the small disruptions that you can implement tomorrow in your thinking, in your teams, in your environment.

Here is a guide of what to look for, my definition of Disruptive ideas:

Disruptive [management] ideas are those that have the capacity to create significant impact on the organisation by challenging standard management practices. They share the following characteristics:

1. They are simple.
2. There is a total disproportion between their simplicity and their potential to impact on and transform the life of organisations.
3. They can be implemented now.
4. You can implement them at little or no cost.
5. They are most likely to be contrarian.
6. They are also most likely to be counterintuitive.
7. They pose a high risk of being trivialised or dismissed.

8. They can spread virally within the organisation very easily.

You only need a few disruptive ideas to create big transformation without the need for a Big Change Management Programme. The impact of a combination of a few is just like dynamite.

This is what I said in the book: Disruptive ideas provide management alternatives that, if spread, can completely transform the way the organisation works without the need to execute a massive ‘change management programme’. Each of them, in its own right, has the potential to create significant change. The compound benefit of a few of them is a real engine of change and business transformation.

So here we re, disruptive ideas transcend innovation or technology and go back to the fundamental roots of day-to-day management in any kind of organisation, challenging conventional wisdom.

I wrote the book with some suggestions, but there is a much better way.

What about this disruptive idea? Ask your team for disruptive ideas, brainstorm, get crazy, retreat, have more. See what impact they may have. Try hard to kill them. See the resistance, if any.

So if somebody says, for example, no meetings for a whole week, does this meet the criteria? If so, what would be the benefits? Why would this be crazy? What the organization may look like?

If you get into the habit, you won’t stop. I don’t believe in ‘disruption’ for the sake of it, but I know that not doing exercise will get you in trouble. The exercise is the relentless questioning: what if we did?

And this is very healthy. Disruptively healthy.

 

(From Disruptive Ideas, book ^[24] and Accelerator ^[22])