- Leandro Herrero - https://leandroherrero.com -

A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm.

Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated to safety training in major corporations. One death is too many. Accidents can be avoided. The cost of time lost due to incidents is considerable. Safety training is needed, but it does not necessarily create a culture of safety. Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. A culture of safety is not one of well-trained (on safety) people but one where safety behaviours are the norm. These two things are not the same.

Safety communication and training usually follow a top-down approach where facts are presented, guidelines and procedures exposed, tasks explained, and threats of noncompliance declared. It is a rational and emotional appeal cascaded down across all information channels of the organisation. It suits ‘information’, but it does not suit ‘behaviours’. Behaviours can’t be taught in the same way as a three-step process can be explained.

Behaviours spread via imitation of others. Behaviours travel via social copying and emulation, sometimes unconsciously. Training and communications on safety are needed – and major corporations usually have very good educational programmes. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’. Cultures develop – sometimes very fast – by the power of person-to-person influence.

“Training and communications are needed. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’.”

The most powerful influence in the organisation is not hierarchical; it is peer-to-peer; it is the conscious or unconscious emulation of ‘people like us’. The Health and Safety personnel teach the rules of safety, inspection, safety implementation and improve processes and systems. However, the day-to-day social copying of good safety behaviours in the workplace, plus conversations in the canteen (that is, informal conversations with people one trusts), is what creates a culture of safety in real life.

Viral Change™ is a way to create a fast and sustainable culture of safety which does not rely on the rational understanding of hundreds of people attending safety training workshops.

In Viral Change™, we identify a relatively small set of ‘non-negotiable behaviours’ which, when spread across the organisation, have the power to create a behavioural fabric, a DNA of safety. We also identify a relatively small number of individuals who have a high level of influence with peers, who are well-connected, and whose behaviours are likely to have an impact on others in a multiplying mode. These people may or may not be in specific management layers but occupy various jobs across the organisation. We organise and put together these components, behaviours and influences, in a well-designed format. We let the spread and social infection go, and we back-stage the management of it. We engineer an internal social epidemic of safety behaviours that can be observable and measured.

We do not ask to stop the ‘push’ of training and development! We do, however, orchestrate the ‘pull’ of connected and influential individuals and their role-modelling behaviours who engage with peers in conversations and real-life ‘doing’ and engage others in a viral manner. Viral Change™ is the only way to shape a culture of safety and maximise the potential and the investment of training and communications.

Viral Change™ LLP is currently leading programmes focused on the creation of a safety culture in the way described above. For example, using these principles and methodology, a global company – which has state-of-the-art, award-winning top-down training systems – has engaged us to create a culture of safety virally, reaching and engaging 50.000 people across the world.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [1].

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Communication,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Disruptive Ideas,Leadership,Management Thinking and Innovation,Viral Change | No Comments

The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’?

Employee empowerment is an output, an outcome. If you start thinking of employee empowerment as an input, something you are supposed to give, you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. As an input, all the airtime will be allocated to how much to give, when, and in which circumstances. Sure, you need to think about that, but the real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? What kind of state of mind and behaviours? And why? What benefits? If there are any.

The why is obviously important. Why is empowerment good? Because it is? What would happen to an organization with high levels of employee empowerment? Can you visualize it? If it is not clear, stop thinking about what to give away to empower.

In this path to uncover the benefits, the argument is going to take you to the territory of ‘autonomy’, whether you call it this or not. Autonomy means a degree of control that has been gained (so yes, you now need to imagine what you will need to give away, to let go). Autonomy means self-determination, self-help, ability to conduct independently.

If you had that, people in the organization will probably also gain a lot of self-esteem and confidence. Trust levels will go up. Autonomy means increased efficiency and efficacy. Usually, it also means faster reactions: markets, environment, crisis. The ‘business case’ is strong.

There are five ingredients that need to be cooked to achieve this.

  • Explicit ‘permission’ from leaders. There is something, perhaps in people’s upbringing, that makes us very dependent on ‘permissions’. Don’t underestimate the need to stress and repeat this to people. Don’t take for granted that this has been heard.
  • Trust. Call it how you like, but you need a good dose of this for autonomy and empowerment to be real. Are you prepared?
  • Resources. If people don’t have them, there is no point trumpeting empowerment. You can’t empower people to do the impossible.
  • Skills and competencies. Equally, you can’t empower people to do something if they don’t know how to.
  • A safety net of some sort. Within the compliance parameters that you may have, people need to be able to fail and not only survive but spread the learning.

A working definition of empowerment from the leader’s perspective may sound like this: To give control to people who don’t have it so that you can free yourself for things only you, as the leader, can do, and, in doing so, you are creating an efficient system with high levels of trust and self-esteem. All this provided that people have the skills and resources.

But the trick is to start by visualizing the kind of organization you want to see, not the theoretical view of empowerment or the things you would give away (decision rights, for example). Then you need to work backwards to see what needs to happen. If you can’t visualize the benefits in the first instance, or not yet, don’t go that route. Stop talking about it.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [1].

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

A heroic culture is a sick culture. If the company can only be run on heroic mode, call the doctor. But heroes, individually, are welcome.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Backstage Leadership,Building Remarkable Organizations,Leadership | No Comments

We all know, and have, some heroes in our organizations. People who jump in, solve problems, make themselves available, walk the extra several miles, and, more importantly, grab crisis’ and deal with them, whether asked or not.

There is also another feel and look of some heroes: works very long hours, puts the company above anything else, pulls out resources and brings people along, usually also in the same long hours. Life-work balance? What’s that?

Other heroes solve unprecedented situations, ‘kill’ themselves in the process, grab the crisis, particularly the Friday afternoon ones, save a lot of money for the company and turn up on the front page of the Company Magazine shaking hands with the CEO.

The super-hero, senor executive type, is adrenaline driven, jumps ahead usually to solve something drastic (‘Mary, get me on the 4:50 pm United flight to Munich’) and may or may not bring others with him. There is a type of senior hero, the Flying Saviour, who is particularly dangerous. I’ve known (and suffered) a few in my life. They cause havoc. They will be nothing without a good crisis. So they are very good at creating one.

Do you want a company formed by, or run by heroes? Do you want a culture of adrenaline excess, no weekends, long hours, dreadful mental health and always solving crisis? Do you want a culture where people say ‘I start at 8am with meetings and I have one after another until 6pm’? Said not as an anecdote but pretty much as the norm? A company of people extraordinarily busy? Where Busy-ness has supplanted busi-ness?

In fact, my original definition of a hero, how I started above –  ‘People who jump in, solve problems, make themselves available, walk the extra several miles, and, more importantly, grab crisis’ and deal with them, whether asked or not’ – runs pretty close to a definition of accountability. And you want that. You want these kind of people. But we are sometimes calling ‘heroes’ to people who have full accountability. How bad is that?

Do your homework distinguishing between ‘heroes’ and ‘heroes’. Welcome the individual, heroic and occasional contributions. But if ‘heroics’ take over day to day life, if there is no way to run the company other than in hero mode, you have a problem. Call the doctor.

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The Chalfont Project Speaking Bureau

 

Dr Leandro Herrero is frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide, and our team of Senior Organization Architects can deliver both dynamic and provocative speaking engagements [2], and are guaranteed to motivate, inspire and inform your audience.

What we offer:

  • Keynotes
  • Interventions [3]/workshops
  • Behavioural and Social Change Masterclasses
  • Social Movement Masterclasses
  • Engagements based on Dr Herrero’s books

Over the years Dr Herrero and our team of experts have created bespoke keynote interventions, workshops and masterclasses for both large industry conferences and C-Suite level corporate events, covering a wide-ranging and hugely varied number of topics.

What To Expect
We will work closely with you to fully understand the audience profile, business issues and specific event objectives to ensure we create a tailormade, immersive and personal experience.

To find out more or to discuss further contact us. [4]

 

Since anything can be translated into numbers, the possibilities of being fooled are immense

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Critical Thinking | No Comments

The late Stanislav Andreski (1919-2007) [5] British Professor of Social Sciences, in one of his vintage passages in ‘Social Sciences as Sorcery’, reminded us of the power of persuasion by ‘the numbers’, or, in his case a mathematical formula that provided the full legitimation of an argument. And what kind of argument? None other than the existence of God.

 During his stay at the court of Catherine II of Russia, the great Swiss mathematician Euler got into argument about the existence of God. To defeat the voltairians in the battle of wits, the great mathematician asked for a blackboard in which he wrote:

(x + y)= x+ 2xy + y, therefore God exists

Unable to dispute the relevance of the formula which they did not understand, and unwilling to confess their ignorance, the literati accepted his argument.

We all have Eulerian moments in organizations, and they come in the form of magic ROIs, magic Risk Analysis and sophisticated financial statements that not many people question. Don’t question the numbers! The numbers are the numbers!

It’s the ‘in God we trust, others bring data’ argument.

The popularity of surveys and rankings, come from the legitimisation of an argument via a score of some sort. There is nothing wrong with numbers and scores. What is wrong is us accepting them blindly, uncritically.

Also, any number, score, percentage, can be read in more than one psychological context. ‘20% of teenagers get drunk on Fridays’ sounds horrible; a serious problem. Probably it is. But, that also means that 80% of teenagers don’t get drunk on Fridays. Which ‘facts’ you pick depends on what message you want to get across.

In the battle of Gantt charts, scores and tables, the power of the Army may overwhelm us. Our daily organizational questions may not be about God’s existence, but our reaction might be quite similar to the people in the court of Catherin II: Unable to dispute the relevance of the formula which they did not understand, and unwilling to confess their ignorance, the literati accepted his argument.

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Critical Thinking [3] Accelerator from The Chalfont Project

 

At The Chalfont Project, we have crafted a short intervention on Critical Thinking [3]. 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:

 

Contact us [4] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

Pope Francis’ description of the 15 diseases of the Catholic Church administration apparatus (Curia) says a lot about the universal traps of human organizations

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,General,Leadership | No Comments

Pope Francis, spiritual leader to 1.2 billion people, likes ‘to call a cat a cat’. He has gained a world cat-naming reputation received with an equal mixture of excitement and joy, including non-religious people and bewilderment and even panic, the latter mainly by his own administrative structure in Rome, or Curia. He likes to make off the cuff remarks, whilst all his predecessors waited 100 years before deciding that it was time to pontificate on something (and this word comes from Pontiff, as used to refer to Popes, which in Latin means ‘maker of bridges’). I believe that the most difficult job on earth must be the one of Head of Communications for the Vatican. Francis is Authentically Disruptive [6].

I am bringing this here because, one Christmas time, Francis, in a well prepared speech, launched his ‘15 diseases of the Curia’, in front of all of the most senior people in the Catholic Church. Leaving aside religious belief and context for these words, these 15 illnesses that he identified, tells us a lot about the universality of the pathology in any big organization of any kind.  Here they are in his own words and a little comment by me.

1) Feeling immortal, immune or indispensable. “A Curia that doesn’t criticize itself, that doesn’t update itself, that doesn’t seek to improve itself is a sick body.” OK, so this is self-criticism, critical thinking and a bit of humility. Corporates? Yes please. We know about this. Groupthink? Yes, we can.

2) Working too hard. “Rest for those who have done their work is necessary, good and should be taken seriously.” OK. Work life balance Vatican version, equally applies to the average business organization.

3) Becoming spiritually and mentally hardened. “It’s dangerous to lose that human sensibility that lets you cry with those who are crying, and celebrate those who are joyful.” Here we have a version of social and emotional intelligence. Leadership 2021 needs this at the top of the agenda.

4) Planning too much. “Preparing things well is necessary, but don’t fall into the temptation of trying to close or direct the freedom of the Holy Spirit, which is bigger and more generous than any human plan.” OK, we, in corporations, have sometimes over-analytic processes and systems that become ritualistic and suck most of the energy, shaping and in-wards culture. Airtime is limited. 80% inwards looking, only leaves 20% outwards. Some parallels? Yes Sir,

5) Working without coordination, like an orchestra that produces noise. “When the foot tells the hand, ‘I don’t need you’ or the hand tells the head ‘I’m in charge.’ This is the ‘big company syndrome’ that I had referred to in my ‘You must understand, we are a big company’ true story.

6) Having “spiritual Alzheimer’s”. “We see it in the people who have forgotten their encounter with the Lord … in those who depend completely on their here and now, on their passions, whims and manias, in those who build walls around themselves and become enslaved to the idols that they have built with their own hands.” These words have a precise religious context but it applies equally to other types of ‘Alzheimers’ in which management practices become insensitive to the nature of a ‘human being’.

7) Being rivals or boastful. “When one’s appearance, the colour of one’s vestments or honorific titles become the primary objective of life.” OK, this is corporate and leadership egos. You and I see this all the time.

8) Suffering from “existential schizophrenia”. “It’s the sickness of those who live a double life, fruit of hypocrisy that is typical of mediocre and progressive spiritual emptiness that academic degrees cannot fill. It’s a sickness that often affects those who, abandoning pastoral service, limit themselves to bureaucratic work, losing contact with reality and concrete people.”  I don’t know how to put it better in corporate speak.

9) Committing the “terrorism of gossip”. “It’s the sickness of cowardly people who, not having the courage to speak directly, talk behind people’s backs.” One of my 30 Disruptive Ideas [7] from the book of the same title, and our Accelerator at The Chalfont Project [8] read ‘Go to source, decrease the noise’. In any organization there are Noise Amplifiers and Noise Cancelling people. That he has chosen to use a dramatic term such as ‘terrorism’ to refer to gossip, says something about his brave stance.

10) Glorifying one’s bosses. “It’s the sickness of those who court their superiors, hoping for their benevolence. They are victims of careerism and opportunism, they honour people who aren’t God.” Mmm, should I bother to comment?

11) Being indifferent to others. “When, out of jealousy or cunning, one finds joy in seeing another fall rather than helping him up and encouraging him.” This is a serious sign of organizational toxicity, sometimes one of my Broken Windows  [9]signs.

12) Having a “funereal face”. “In reality, theatrical severity and sterile pessimism are often symptoms of fear and insecurity. The apostle must be polite, serene, enthusiastic and happy and transmit joy wherever he goes.” This is a favourite theme of his: in his view, religious practice does not need to be like going to a permanent funeral. Some organizational cultures are a bit like that, a type described by the great and late C.K.Prahalad [10] as the ‘Calcutta in summer’ situation, that I have referred to in ‘The Abandon Hope’ organization [11].

13) Wanting more. “When the apostle tries to fill an existential emptiness in his heart by accumulating material goods, not because he needs them but because he’ll feel more secure.” Much has been written about the corporate culture of greed. When is enough enough?

14) Forming closed circles that seek to be stronger than the whole. “This sickness always starts with good intentions but as time goes by, it enslaves its members by becoming a cancer that threatens the harmony of the body and causes so much bad scandals especially to our younger brothers.” In my consulting experience with organizations I have very often found the desire by leaders to create ‘One company’, where ‘the whole’ is priority, and where sense of belonging goes beyond your function, or area, or division, or country. Needless to say we all, you and I, tackle this with different degrees of success.

15) Seeking worldly profit and showing off. “It’s the sickness of those who insatiably try to multiply their powers and to do so are capable of calumny, defamation and discrediting others, even in newspapers and magazines, naturally to show themselves as being more capable than others.” Comments unnecessary!

Although it all makes sense, it should not be ‘unexpected’ by somebody in my profession, it did surprise me to have this diagnosis in front of my eyes. It seems that putting people together, growing to a certain size and spreading titles, jobs and role descriptions, ends up in some sort of common pathway.

I would really welcome to see any CEO of a sizable company to stand in front of his top 200 and ‘call a cat a cat’ in the same way.

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Accountability holes? Desert spaces? Orphan ideas? Buy the tent, occupy the street.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Corporate anthropology,Leadership | No Comments

Any organization has accountability holes, areas where nobody really owns the space. Sometimes these are true ‘grey areas’, sometimes are very black, true black holes or Bermuda Triangles where things get lost.

They seem to be either empty (of bodies, of ideas, of projects), silent Chernobyls avoided by the corporate citizen, or the opposite, full of stuff that nobody wants, idea orphanages. They are to organizational and business life what structural holes are to networks, those areas of the network with very low density.

Many organizations go on and on about needing more accountability, which is very often a linguistic proxy for ‘for goodness sake, do what you are supposed to do’.

HR complains that nobody knows whether employer branding is theirs, or if it is part of Corporate Communications. Internal communications thinks that Employee Engagements should be theirs, but HR pays for the survey. Strategic planning is driven by Finance but they don’t really feel they should other than taking care of the numbers. Organizational life is often a life of corporate ping-pong.

The above are not, by any means, the most problematic cases one can find because, one way or another, somebody may be doing something about them, reluctantly or not.

But there are many other situations where the-indecision-is-final seems to be the permanent state of equilibrium. Here are the black holes.

Interestingly, in the English language, the word accountability is often linked or even proceeded by the word ‘taking’. So, taking accountability, literally means that, an active appropriation effort, not passive receiving. Unlike ‘empowerment’, or being empowered, that always sounds as something you get from somewhere.

The cure for accountability holes, Bermudas and Chernobyls, is pure Occupy-The-Street activism. Bring the tent and occupy the space. Chances are the people on the 10th floor with the organizational charts have no clue as to what to do with those accountability holes, that is why (sadism excluded) they have not put names and bodies and reporting lines.

In organizational life there is a surprising lack of Horror Vacui (fear of empty space). Ideas and potential projects can be left wandering around, nomadic visitors, always avoiding those accountability holes which remain, oh, well, a hole.

There is however, a possibility that at some point, somewhere with decision power, the tolerance reaches a threshold point and the territory becomes occupied by decree. Be careful what you may wish to be waiting for, you might get it. But in many cases this is only happening because the power holder suffers in fact from Horror Vacui and can’t stand the hole. Not to draw disrespectful parallels but, in my previous life as a psychiatrist, Horror Vacui was a feature of seriously ill schizophrenic paintings in which every single inch of a canvas given to patients to express themselves by drawing stuff, gets completely filled in. No inch left blank. Only schizophrenic patients master that.

I am told often of an ill constructed mixture of prudence and respect, avoiding stepping into somebody elses shoes, as justification for not ‘stepping in’. But the problem is that those shoes are nobody’s and very often, they have not even been taken, ever, out of their box.

In my experience, I would go the opposite route: occupy! You’ll be surprised how many people feel relief. OK, perhaps some are a bit jealous that you have done it, but, hey, that is a precedent to copy.

Seriously, buy the tent.

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Orphan grenades: the worse form of friendly fire in the organization. Some examples.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Character,culture and behaviours | No Comments

We have a problem in Division A. Leaders are not doing their job. Leaders are not living the values. Some people don’t get it. I’ve seen cases of X. I am afraid that Y is spreading. Z is a problem. Division B has become bureaucratic. Group C is a nightmare, nobody talks to each other. There is a lot of frustration in Section D. I’ve seen gross failure of leadership in that management team.

I’m sure you get the picture, because you’ve seen this many times. Unqualified, sweeping generalisations, launched in some sort of assumed fertile territory where they will be listened to. Usually negative, of course.

In fact, we are so used to these that they are hardly challenged: whom are you talking about? Everybody? Everyday? How widespread is the spread? Who is frustrated? Who is not living the values? Does ‘failure of leadership’ have names and surnames? Who says?

The default position is to ignore or produce some strange sound in return, or magic nodding, or be too ready to agree, prolonging the sweeping generalisation.

It’s hard to call out, to challenge. But it is the only serious thing to do. Throwing orphan grenades into the field will only create holes and little, or not so little, destruction of the organizational fabric.

It is a sign of a healthy culture to call out people making these statements. And this would be a behaviour that is as spreadable as it’s opposite. All it takes is that some people start the visible challenge (explain, please; who? this is not how I see it) for others to copy as well.

Caught in friendly fire within your own culture is the worst form of casualty. And sweeping generalisations seem to be a strong brand of grenades.

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Managing the Covid-19 pandemic using Viral Change™ principles. 12 Rules you can apply.

 

Read Dr Leandro Herrero’s in-depth, thought provoking article which addresses the non-medical management of the pandemic through the lenses of large scale behavioural and cultural change principles, as practised by the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform for the last 20 years, in the area of organizational change.

 

12 Rules For A Behavioural Counter-Epidemic To Deal With Covid-19   [13]

 

A viral epidemic for which there is no immediate cure, only ways of managing it, can only be controlled by a counter behavioural epidemic.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [14], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements [15] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project [4].
His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management [16], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

Don’t let the expression ‘this is just business’ be synonymous for inhuman. Business? Not in my name.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Backstage Leadership,Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,It’s Personal!,Leadership | No Comments

Somewhere along the line, in the history of ‘business’, something went wrong and people took the wrong turn at the bifurcation on the road. The world of ‘business’ started to speak a funny language and the 9 to 5 man (and at that time it was still 9 to 5 as opposed to today’s 24/7) became a species in its own right, eager to show that it was different from the ‘the rest of the day men’. Perfectly reasonable people at home, in church, at the kids football match and in the bars with friends, became ‘managers’ at 9:00 am, and not only did they speak a different language, but also behaved differently.

Something must have been in the ‘management’ clothes put on at 09:00 am that allowed people to speak and behave on behalf of somebody else: the bosses, the Board, the shareholders, or something quite esoteric and never seen, as invisible as a neutrino, called ‘the market’.

On behalf of ‘business’, managers started to exercise power over others and seek more and more control over life. When pain was inflicted, the word ‘they’ had to be invented: ‘they want us to do this’, ‘they will not like that’. This magical ‘they’ could justify almost anything. Then, Darwinian forces took over, and power, status and ability to dictate percolated ‘business life’. In this business life, things that were not acceptable outside ‘business life’ became very legitimate here. It became possible, for example, to fire people on Twitter.

Modern Darwinian Alpha managers could be rude, ruthless, take no prisoners and do that on behalf of ‘it is business, isn’t it; we are here to make money’. Also, a convenient, transitory schizophrenia became epidemic: ‘it’s not me, it’s the system, if it were me, I would not do this, but I have to, it’s business, it’s not personal’. Which is in itself the most personal statement a manager can make.

The power dynamics become a force of its own. I will always remember one of these schizophrenic corporate moments that I experienced a few years ago with a client, when the head of the division, my client, was told by her bosses that she was doing the most fantastic job, had created the best alignment of people, funded the most innovative leadership development for the top managers, and, she was a model of the modern way of doing things in the company, a benchmark for all. Now, unfortunately, the division was to be disbanded the following month and amalgamated with a bigger one (who had been playing Barbarians at the Gate for a year), everybody either absorbed into a different (usually lower ranking) job or asked to leave. Needless to say, our Leadership Development plan, benchmark of the universe, sadly, had to be stopped, now. Hey, but how are the kids?

There was no logic, no sense, no reason, certainly no business or organizational reason. This was magical schizophrenic thinking. The only reason why this happened was because of a capricious request from the Bigger Power Holder to ‘reorganize’ and give extra troops to somebody else. Pure currency, bazaar transaction, absolutely nothing that ‘the business’ could gain from.

These kind of situations are not unusual. The music in the background is the same: ‘it’s business, not me’. But the situation above had nothing to do with business. It was simply the same as street, neighbourhood, territorial distribution between gangs in downtown Powerville. Whoever thinks that things in organization, particularly reorganizations, happen because of the business, the markets, the customers or the environment, has perhaps not worked in a major corporation. Stuff happens because of power dynamics. Some organizations are successful despite this.

If every time that something absurd, let alone, unethical, rude, disrespectful, or inhumane, is done on behalf of ‘business’, Mr Business could come out of the closet and shout ‘Not in my name’, we would have a different society.

I have deliberately painted a black and negative scenario. I am conscious of that. If your business is not like this, congratulations. You belong to Planet Sanity. Hold on to it. So if you see some of this somewhere else under the ‘it’s business, isn’t’ it’, as coterminous for inhuman, please join me and shout, not in my name!

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To continue the conversation on challenging absurd management practices – explore  The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management [16].

 

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point [16], contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

 

This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Available from major online bookstores [17].

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [14], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements [15] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project [4].

 

 

Talk the walk (Note from the editor: it actually means in that order)

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Backstage Leadership,Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,Leadership | No Comments

‘Walk the talk’ is being consistent: say something and then do what you said you would. ‘Talk the walk’ is when you act first and then follow it up with words consistent with your actions. The former is good management, but the latter is an extremely powerful disruptive idea.

The expression ‘walk the talk’ means you do what you ask other people to do or what you promised to do. There are a few variations on the theme, but they all come down to this: practice what you preach! Walking the talk is a key behaviour in the organisation (but not a disruptive behaviour). Walking the talk is absolutely necessary and people who do this are true value creators in three ways:

 They build trust. Trust professes the most ‘unfair’ un-linearity of all: small breaches of trust have the power of extrapolation, generalisation and of triggering total defence: “If you have failed me on this one, you’ll do it again.” People who walk the talk are reinforcing trust all the time because their primary driver is to behave in a way that shows consistency with what they say. Some of these people do this in a rather unconscious way.

They are powerful role models. The power of imitation and/or social copying is enormous. Although one could role model via language, expressions, declaration of values, etc., there is nothing more powerful than overt, observable behaviours. Most of these powerful behaviours are silent. By that I mean that they are not announced and heralded; they happen naturally, not through spin.

They practice behavioural translation. Our language is full of things that we call values, beliefs, mindsets, attitudes, etc. We can have good conversations within that vocabulary, but these may happen under the false assumption that we all agree on the specific meaning of these terms. Only behaviours are observable and unequivocal. There is no such thing as honesty, at least like there is grey hair or a deep voice. There are behaviours that when exhibited we agree to call honest. From there we then infer and create ‘honesty’ as a value-concept. The problem with mindsets, attitudes, values, etc. is that they are not operational. We can’t do much with them unless we translate those values and beliefs into observable behaviours.

All this is very well and desirable, almost a baseline. Hardly negative. You need all those behaviours and all those people big time. But the disruptive behaviour is actually the reverse of walk the talk. ‘Talk the walk’ goes beyond the simply needing to find that inherent disproportion between the relatively simple behaviour and the big impact in the organization:

The ‘talk the walk ‘disruptive behaviour can also be described as: do more, talk less.

‘Talk the walk’ is highly viral because people will see you doing something and then they will hear about the philosophy or the rationale behind it. Seeing the behaviour is the first step to successful imitation. Start with the action, follow up with the words. It doesn’t get more disruptive than that!

Imagine a culture with good mutual levels of trust because people do what they say they will do. Imagine a ‘walk the talk’ management culture where there is a clear observation of consistency between what management (or others) say they will do and what they actually do. Imagine an organization working like that. Now imagine a culture where the action is more visible than the ‘talk’ and where people are going beyond the ‘walk the talk’ to talk about what has already been walked! Imagine the behaviours in the organization. What will you see and what will be the benefits? Imagine what this will do for your overall trust capital. Imagine where to start building it.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

For more thoughts on company culture….

Watch our webinar on The Myths of Company Culture [18]

 

Stuck in old concepts, we have made culture change hard and often impossible. The failure of communication programmes or ‘culture training’ tell us a lot about the myths in this area. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us. Over the Covid-19 peak across the world we have seen the best and the worst of company cultures. Sometimes it felt like a pressure cooker. Culture is now ‘the strategy’, but we need to get rid of some assumptions and learn inconvenient truths.

 

What attendees said:

‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’

 

‘It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart.’ 

 

WATCH NOW [18]

 

 

 

Leadership is an amoral praxis. How about this to start a conversation?

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Backstage Leadership,Behavioural Economics,Change, Leadership and Society,Leadership | No Comments

Any label that could be equally applied to Mother Theresa, Hitler, your CEO, Kim Jong-un, Mandela, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Pope Francis, is in need of some polishing. That is leadership: the art of making others follow you, forgive me the slightly unsophisticated definition.

Leadership is a praxis. Something that some people practice, more than learn, or teach, or that has a solid, unique foundation.

As praxis, leadership is amoral. It’s only good or bad, positive or negative, depending on what the leader does and how.

As leaders, you bring the ethics to the praxis, the moral jacket to the naked amoral practice. Once you are practicing, the practice is not neutral anymore. You can’t get away with preposterous ‘It’s not me, it’s the system’, or ‘ It’s not me, I am representing the company’. People using these don’t deserve to be leaders.

‘The ethics’, of course, are not just personal. They include the values of the system, what is expected, accepted, tolerated or nurtured. By the way, these four words are not equal.

The elephant in the room in Leadership (studies) is that the term is a host for a myriad of interpretations and logic. Perhaps my superficial definition above, ‘the art of making others follow you’ is as far as one can go when trying to look at commonalities between ‘leaders’. Of course I am in caricature mode here. But it is impossible to continue talking about ‘leadership’ as a well understood, you-know-what-I-mean concept. In that respect it is like parenthood, the art of bringing up children, do-you-know-what-I-mean? No, actually I don’t, because it includes loving parenting and child abusers.

I am stretching it. If I didn’t, I would not be writing these Daily Thoughts.

Some labels don’t help. ‘Failure of leadership’, for example, as a diagnosis, is as robust as ‘discontinuation of energy based in charged particles’ do define a power cut in the house.

So?

In discussing praxis, as opposed to theories or attributes or traits, the key is the behavioural translation: what is that people did, or did not do and what happened as a result. I know, quite prosaic, but it’s a start.

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For more thoughts on Leadership…

Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid-19 scenario. Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’.

Watch our webinar on The Myths of Management [18]

 

Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’. We have been running enterprises with very tired concepts of empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged pillars.  The truth is that there is mythology embedded in all those concepts. Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid-19 scenario. So, what will the ‘new management’ look like? Which elephants do we need to see in the management room?

 

 

What attendees said:

‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’

 

‘It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart.’ 

 

WATCH NOW [18]

Many cultural change efforts fail out of a mathematical mistake

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Backstage Leadership,Change, Leadership and Society,culture and behaviours | No Comments

Many cultural change efforts fail out of a mathematical mistake. They focus on ‘people in the room’ (conference, off site, training course, cascading workshops) when what matters is how people not in the room are engaged.

To get 200 leaders in the room, or 200 ‘champions’ of some sort, or 200 ambassadors representative from the organization, is great. If you get 200 of them indoctrinated, motivated, engaged, committed and educated, even greater. If you repeat with another 200, well, great and great. But if the company has 4000 employees, tell me how they are going to be impacted by 200 well educated and committed people (usually senior).  Tip, it’s not cascaded down through a PowerPoint deck with ‘change is good for you, this is how’.

Cultural change is cultural infection, or it isn’t. Without infection, it may be cultural education, but not change. The maths of change is the maths of multiplication, not of addition. No multiplication, no culture shaping (which is to say no social movement, or collective action).

The trick is how those 200 could engage 20 each, for example, who could in turn engage 10 each. Pick a formula. It’s at least layer 3 of connectivity and influence that will create the critical mass needed.

Most cultural change approaches fail to understand multiplication and get very excited by the number of people participating in change workshops, generally a fraction of the workforce.

The Viral ChangeTM Mobilizing Platform deals with scale up change (behavioural, culture). The scale up, multiplication, ever growing critical mass of people moving in the right direction, should be an obvious objective of ‘change’. Why is it that in many organizations, scale is measured by number of workshops (activities) instead of number of  people reached?

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Our Feed Forward Webinar Series is now available to watch on demand.

Watch our webinar on The Myths of Company Culture [18]

 

Stuck in old concepts, we have made culture change hard and often impossible. The failure of communication programmes or ‘culture training’ tell us a lot about the myths in this area. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us. Over the Covid-19 peak across the world we have seen the best and the worst of company cultures. Sometimes it felt like a pressure cooker. Culture is now ‘the strategy’, but we need to get rid of some assumptions and learn inconvenient truths.

 

What attendees said:

‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’

 

‘It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart.’ 

 

WATCH NOW [18]

 

Trophy employees, their company and its useful idiots

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Economics,Corporate anthropology,culture and behaviours,Leadership | No Comments

In any organization there are positive deviants (deviants from expected norms, who achieve results) and other ‘statistical abnormalities’ by nature or nurture. Some of them become trophy employees.

Definition: trophy employees are employees who:

(a) can be showcased internally and externally as an example of some sort of outstanding achievement
(b) who are symbolic or a status of the greatness of the organization
(c) who implicitly suggest that the organization is supporting or fostering this kind of people, like themselves

The trouble with trophy employees is that:

(a) the showcase may be a statistical anomaly that hides the truth behind the statistically common
(b) they may be a symbol of relative tolerance to their existence but not much more
(c ) the organization may be far from fostering, it is just using them

In the extreme, trophy employees may become what in political terms is called ‘useful idiots’.

Some types of trophy employees are:

The ‘utility spectrum’ of these abnormal deviations includes:

Look critically behind trophy employees. There may be a genuine company on a journey or a manipulation of spin to showcase greatness on the cheap.

Or anything in between.

Welcome and show solidarity with the former, call out the latter loud and clear.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [14], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements [15] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project [4].

 

The problem is that all we say is that ‘the problem is’. There is no ‘and’.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Economics,Communication,Communications,culture and behaviours,Language,Leadership,Problem solving | No Comments

We need to improve communication is not the same as, this is what we need to do to improve communication, and not the same as, this is what I am going to do to improve communication. In fact, these things are miles away from each other.

Life in organizations is often lived at the level of diagnosis. Oh God, how good we are at diagnosis. Sometimes people spend the day hopping from one meeting to another and providing an assessment, a view, a piece of diagnosis. Meeting one: we need to fix the supply issue. Meeting two: the product recall is a fiasco. Meeting three: we need to make sure we get the candidate right. With coffee in between. But who is going to at least start addressing the problem? You would have thought that somebody in the room. But what if the rest of the meeting participants are equally good at diagnosing but nobody really jumps in?

It may be that:

a. They don’t have the authority (but somebody has it somewhere)

b. They don’t need the authority but they don’t take accountability

c. They feel they need permission to take the accountability

And another hundred or so reasons.

The diagnosis life, without action, is exhausting.

The organization whose main core competence is admiring problems, is equally wearing.

It’s Ok if you don’t have a solution but you point to them. But if you start with ‘the problem is’, please don’t use a full stop after the description of the problem. The word ‘and’ is required.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [14], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements [15] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project [4].

 

The cost of checking. Looking at the number one cause of organizational ineffectiveness.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Change,Behavioural Economics,Corporate anthropology,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours | No Comments

If somebody could care to quantify the cost of constantly checking with people whether they are doing what they are supposed to do, we would come up with a horrible ROI.  Checking is the greatest source of organizational ineffectiveness. When checking, particularly constant checking, is not in the DNA, organizations are very effective. The opposite, checking as a habit, a culture of checking, is an effectiveness nightmare.

We have mistaken ‘management’ with ‘checking’, at high cost. When managers become policemen and information traffic wardens, we get a bureaucratic culture.

When the German sociologist, Max Weber (1864-1920) [19], wrote about bureaucracies, he said this about the bureaucratic legal system: “The modern judge is a vending machine into which the pleadings are inserted together with the fee and which then disgorges the judgement together with the reasons mechanically derived from the Code.”

We have many ‘vending machine managers’ in our organizations, which have given a bad reputation to so-called ‘middle management’. Personally, I do not share the standard view that middle management is responsible for all the ills of the organization, that they are resistant to change, withholders of information and, in general, not very nice, obstructive people. It does not have to be like this. The problem is that we have to reinvent management to get away from the partial truth of those stereotypes and from the model of ‘checking and policemen’. Middle management has a key role in maintaining corporate memory, not a small detail.

Could you imagine a culture where you don’t have to check much for performance? Where all your checking is strategic and for results? Could you imagine what would happen to trust in that organization?

By any account, the cost of checking is very high. For those hard skilled leaders who mainly understand numbers, this is not a difficult math to crack: number of meetings down by x%, add this to employees time focused on delivery and not on reporting to the boss every other day, equals Y savings and Z productivity gains.

If you fancy a good cost reduction programme, stop checking.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [14], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management.
An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements [15] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project [4].
Leandro Herrero is frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide. He also speaks to Boards and Leadership Teams, participates in other internal company conferences as a keynote speaker, and is available to run short seminars and longer workshops.
The topics of Leandro Herrero’s presentations and workshops relate to his work as an organizational architect.

 

Millenials have in common their age. The rest is more about the world we are all in, the meal we have cooked for their dinner.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Economics,Change, Leadership and Society,Character,Models and frames,Strategy,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments

At a conference I attended, the very sharp mind of Marten Mickos [20], CEO of HackerOne, ex HP, ex Nokia, reminded the audience that ‘the new generations are not worried about the future, but about what the older generations are leaving behind’. I thought it was a great insight in the context of discussions about what Millennials want from life, which took place in a panel of speakers where no visible Millennial had been invited to speak.

Another ‘expert in Millennials’ would assure us that ‘they’ have three distinctive characteristics: (1) They love relationships; (2) They need and follow a cause; (3) They don’t want a job.

These may be true. As caricatures go, this may be a good one. But I’m always puzzled by how these are always portrayed as almost innate and genetic of an entire generation. Are Millennials born with a relationship gene, a purpose and good cause gene, and a no job gene? Or did they all get together in a Global Millennial Alignment Convention and decide on these three features?

The truth about ‘the Millennials characteristics’ maybe more about how the non-Millennials, previous generations have shaped their world, so that the world in front, handed to them, is the only one they know.

They love relationships. Sure, they are ‘there’, in front, at a click and a like. Hyper connectivity is a global phenomenon (but not hyper-collaboration and hyper-proximity) so, they take it because they live it. What nobody really says is that their relationships may be very different from other relationships. The question is what type of relationship, if any at all, is a differentiation between us.

They want and follow a cause. Maybe the previous generations have created more and more causes to follow, so, no shortage, the supply is high. Maybe previous generations are looking at a serious purpose for the organization, having avoided full domestication under ‘the maximisation of shareholder value’, which reached a climax of Robotic Goals and proportions, until legions of people started shouting my favourite slogan: ‘surely, there must be a better way’.

They don’t want a job. Perhaps they don’t want your kind of job, or mine. Perhaps they are redefining ‘job’.

I think that, very often, we have a set of stereotypes and mental frames that we apply easily as a way to comprehend the world. That makes us (feel) more  in control. It’s easy to apply a frame of wishes, desires and predictable behaviours to an entire generation. Some of these behaviours may tell us more about our own ones, and the world that we have prepared and cooked for that generation, than something ‘intrinsic to them’.

The question about Millennials is not whether, or why, they love relationships, a cause, and ‘no jobs’, but whether, or why, we have a world that is craving for better relationships, has organizations that may have forgotten a ‘high purpose’, and jobs not worth having.

Perhaps what Millenials want is the same as we non-Millennials want, but one of us is too shy to say. I think that they are having the meal that we have cooked for them.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children?

 

Try this: Son, I got up every day and went to the office to maximise shareholder value. I also participated in lots of Lean Teams. Ah, and I was an agile employee. In my time, our employee engagement scores went up from 4.5 to 7. Just try. Rehearse this by saying it to yourself in the mirror. Yes, what will we tell the children? That’s probably the only question that matters.

There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children? My children, your children, their children, the children. Apply wisely and broadly. Once you look them in the eyes, you’ll know straight away if the grandiose strategy you are proclaiming has any legs. What we will tell the children is ‘the red face test’ of leadership.

 

 

Extract from my bookThe Flipping point – Deprogramming Management. [16]

Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. Management needs deprogramming. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

‘Make it work first, then clean it up’ versus ‘Clarify all first, then act’. You Choose!

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Antifragile,Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,Corporate anthropology,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Leadership | No Comments

Imagine this situation, which I am sure you have never come across. Just kidding. A ‘project’ (not necessarily defined as such) is running with multiple people involved. Accountabilities are not terribly clear. In fact, there seems to be some overlap. People involved report to a range of people both geographically and functionally, and, at a higher level, things are a bit untidy as well in terms of who is in charge of what. The ‘project’ is complex. You seem to have the right people but they are constantly running up against barriers, some ‘political’, some not. It’s not a terrible situation, because, if it was, the project would have stopped. It hasn’t. But it relies on personal relationships and a lot of ‘people skills’ to keep it going, because there are many stakeholders involved and, as said before, there is no real clarity on who ultimately owns what.

There are two fundamental ways to approach this.

One, very traditional, very alive and present in many organizations, and sounds as follows:

Let’s clarify accountabilities first, have a clear picture of reporting and ownership, get rid of all possible barriers first. Because of the messy accountabilities, we need to ask senior management to make a decision, once and for all, on who owns what, ultimately whom we are reporting to, so that we know where we stand. Then, we will push forward. We have reached so far, but we can’t go further until we get that clarification from above. We need ‘them’ to tell us.

The alternative approach sounds like this:

Let’s make it work, acknowledge the imperfect world, the untidiness of the reporting lines, the messy responsibilities and the fact that it may be a bit painful to bring on board so many people all at the same time. We have the brains and the hearts and the willingness to do it. Let’s get on with it. Then, when we are making it work, we will point to the untidiness and we will make recommendation as to how to clean up the system, if possible, so that next time it is less painful. By then we would have learnt so much, that we would be in a strong position to propose changes, if any, on the question of accountabilities.

These are fundamentally two different cultural worlds, with two distinct sets of behavioural DNA.  Not good or bad, but different. The problem with approach number one is that it assumes, naively perhaps, that the men and women more or less ‘at the top’, who could allocate accountabilities, sort out the untidiness and remove the barriers for you, are in a position to do so. Often, their own world is equally untidy, messy, and unclear. They are navigating through this as much as anybody else. It’s not that they have decided not to clean up, to make life difficult and not clarify and declare a pristine organization chart with unequivocal boxes. It is that, perhaps, they don’t have a clue either on the best way to do it. Or, they do, but ‘they’ don’t have any problem navigating in muddy waters, and they assume you won’t have either.

Today, people need to learn to navigate as in the second scenario. For people who can’t act without a clear chain of command and perfect process and systems highways, this will drive them nuts. However, I have heard the Army is open for recruits and one can get a decent job there these days. Today’s organizational world needs 10 portions of scenario two and one spoonful of scenario one. Reverse the quantities and you won’t get any soufflé going, no matter how high tech the kitchen is.

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Let’s Join Forces!

If you’re enjoying our Feed Forward Webinar series [18] (next webinar 30th July – The Myths of Management) and want your own webinar tailored to your organization and delivered to an in-house audience or a remote keynote, masterclass or roundtable on topics featured in the series – all delivered by The Chalfont Project and designed by me – then get in touch and let’s talk [4]!

 

It all starts after the click!

I’m in [4]

Click away [4]

Contact Me [4]

Absolutely [4]

Sending details [4]

Mondays shape Tuesdays. If you could just fast forward…

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Corporate pathologies,Creativity and Innovation,Culture,culture and behaviours | No Comments

Winston Churchill said, referring to the Houses of Parliament in the UK, ‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’.

For building, read our companies, not just the walls (or lack of) and the physical environment, but also that beast of elusive presence called culture. We are sophisticated copying machines (Homo Imitans [21]) and, whether we like it or not, we are incredibly influenced by what is around us, what happens around us, and the airtime given to things. Big deal? Yes, it is a big deal. Because we don’t like it. We, arrogant Homo Sapiens, can’t accept Homo Imitans that easily. We say, not me! I know what I am doing. I am not going with the pack. I am different.

Then routine kicks in, inertia kicks in, we have a mundane and predictable day, and hope that the next one, some sort of divine miracle will occur and all will be just fantastic.

The ‘Change From Within Preachers’ must have an unconditional faith in the human condition but, for every Road of Damascus conversion and internal epiphanies that gear us into some direction, there are hundreds of day to day mundane circumstances that shape that thing in front of us called ‘tomorrow’.

Tuesdays carry a high dose of probability of being shaped by Mondays. Routine, inertia, default position, mood contamination, repetition, extrapolation, they all are bad friends waiting to be invited to dinner.

If you are stuck on a Wednesday, declare the next day a Friday, don’t get up on Thursday mode and wait for things to happen. Shape them. No, this is not New Age, self-help stuff (which comes in all sort of shapes, good and bad by the way), it is plain and simple behavioural-take-charge.

It may or may not be possible but there is a repertoire of possibilities to bypass Wednesdays (or Thursdays or Fridays…): take (deliberately) a wrong train, wear Sunday clothes, miss a meeting on purpose, have a haircut, meet somebody scheduled for the following week, have that meeting with your team all standing and in an unpredictable place, bring in your birthday cake (only if it’s not your birthday), disappear for a few hours and don’t tell anybody, combinations.

Warning: you may think this is a bit of a joke. I’ve never been more serious. Nothing about the above is a joke. Message is, do not let the day be a consequence of yesterday, intellectually or emotionally. Reject life as a constant extrapolation.

You don’t need to intellectualise this too much. Change the scenery and the scenario. Fast forward. You’ll live much longer.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Feed Forward Webinar Series – the organization now, under new management

Register Here! [22]Next webinar: The Myths of Company Culture on 16th July. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us.

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Don’t miss my new book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management [16] – available now!

My top 5 Leadership questions at the top of the agenda

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Culture,culture and behaviours,Leadership | No Comments

Here are my top five from my organizational consulting work. The paraphrasing is mine, the ownership is shared with my best clients (In fact, I could categorise my clients by the types of questions on the table).

 

1. How can we mobilize people?

Mobilize is a better term than engage. Engage is too passive. I can engage in a great conversation leading to nothing. Leadership of people inside the company (and outside the tent) is people mobilization. We need to think in these terms. Leading companies are/will be people mobilizing companies. The model is the social movement, not Harvard Business School (have I said this before?).

 

2.How to (re) shape a company operating system? AKA culture.

Yes, that is what it is. This is different from ‘achieving an X culture’. You never achieve a culture, as you never hold water with your hands. Well, not all. ‘Achieve’ as a destination is old linear stuff. Reality is continuous reshaping and moving forward. So, it’s a journey model [23], not a destination model.

 

3.How do I scale?

If I want a culture of safety? ownership? accountability? agility? customer-centrism? all of the above?, how can I inject these, at scale?

Many initiatives, good ones, Organizational Development ones, Coaching, team buildings, Leadership Developments, do not scale well. That does not make them useless. Don’t stop them. But things that don’t scale, or scale only by addition (a bit of this plus a bit of that, one team, next team) are weak when trying to shape an entire culture. If you want scale, it’s social movement [24].

 

4.How to create a behavioural DNA that ensures success and, in particular, strategy execution?

This is the key question. It starts by trying to figure out what that DNA looks like. Not a back of an envelop affair. Values, beliefs, words, need to be translated into behaviours. Once this is done, behaviours will scale via social copying [21], not teaching and presentations (Viral Change™ [25] Mobilizing Platform).

 

5. How to make change sustainable? (but not too much) I have dealt with this [26] in a little more detail in the past.

 

These are fundamental questions, category 1! Don’t spare effort.

Many questions occupy airtime. But some are a serious source of restlessness, of the healthy type. These are Top Restlessness potential. If you are very relaxed about them, I am so sorry.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Feed Forward Webinar Series – the organization now, under new management

Register Here! [22]Next webinar: The Myths of Company Culture on 16th July. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us.

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Don’t miss my new book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management [16] – available now!

Scientism is taking over management, so garbage gets measured and saved in pie charts.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,General,Performance,Strategy | No Comments

Scientism is taking over management, so anything that can be expressed in scores and numbers is glorified regardless of the solidity of the origin. Those living under a Benign Dictatorship of Metrics can measure anything, so garbage gets duly measured and saved in pie charts.

Scientism is taking over management. I have suggested elsewhere to read ‘The Tyranny of Metrics’ by Jerry Z Miller (2018) 

 

What can’t be measured, can’t be managed

Drucker argued that what can’t be measured can’t be managed. I now know why I can’t manage love, God, or a sunset. Thank God these were left outside management theory.

Drucker argued that what can’t be measured can’t be managed. Drucker had lots of good things to say, but not this one. Read ’The Tyranny of Metrics’ (2018) by Jerry Z Muller for a rehabilitation programme from your armchair.

 

The obsession with what is measurable, leads inevitably to blindness

The obsession with what is obviously measurable, in front of your eyes, leads inevitably to blindness to what is not in front of your eyes, what is not obviously measurable, and potentially the most important thing to track. This may sound obvious.

The obsession with what is obviously measurable, in front of your eyes. All sorts of cognitive biases, including availability heuristic, kick in when we focus on the immediately available or immediately recalled. These are part of our Applied Critical Thinking seminar.

 

Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. [16] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point [16] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review [27].

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Many thanks to those of you, who were able to join our first webinar yesterday. Delighted to see so many attendees and from right across the globe. We’ve received great feedback and will be in contact with those of you, who have emailed us to claim your complimentary copy of The Flipping Book [16].

Don’t miss our next free webinar on 2nd July.

Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? [22]

Yes we can. You can have a diagnosis. Learn how 3CXcan provides this analysis based on the highest scientific principles of network sciences. In the current environment it’s important to base the recovery and the post Covid-19 organization with full understanding of its formal and informal connections, communication channels and internal collaboration. Suspend judgement about your assumptions and find the truth. This webinar will show real examples of this kind of diagnosis performed in real companies. Understanding the real organization, which may or may not be the one you assume it is, will show a completely new baseline upon which to navigate the future.

 

Top leadership role modelling is overrated.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Economics,Critical Thinking,General,Leadership,Management Thinking and Innovation,Peer to peer infuence | No Comments
Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. [16] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point [16] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

 

 

Top leadership role modelling is overrated.

It’s history’s equivalent of the great man theory, always one behind events. Most people don’t arrive at 09:00 in the car park wondering how the top leaders will behave that day. Most don’t care, sorry. Their role models are their peers. What shapes behaviours is what you copy every day from your immediate environment. In role modelling, peer-to-peer one, top leadership nil.

Read my book Homo Imitans (2011). Also, read the Edelman Trust Barometer which Mr Google will be happy to show you.

 

Leaders have two hats.

Leaders have two hats. Hat one is the hierarchical one, the one that is usually the reason to be hired or promoted. It comes with a position in the top down structure. Hat two is the one I have described as Backstage Leadership™. Hat two uses the power of hat one to create the conditions for peer-to-peer and informal networks to work, without dictating what to do, without interfering. Hat two recognises that leadership  is distributed across the organization and beyond the boxes of the organizational chart, the one populated by hat ones.

Leaders have two hats. This ‘two hats’ leadership is at the core of Viral Change™. There is (1) hierarchical and top down, (2) distributed significant number of natural leaders and people of influence with no correlation with their position in the hierarchy, and (3) backstage, based upon the need for the top down leaders to support from the back, not the front. Backstage Leadership™ is the bridge between the hierarchy and the peer-to-peer networks. Even the Intellectual Property Office understood that when they granted us the Backstage Leadership™ Trademark. I often think that we were more successful with the IP office than with some corporate VPs.

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The Flipping Point [16] – Deprogramming Management. This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!
Available from major online bookstores [17].
[16]

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New webinar series launching in June.

Feed Forward webinar series – the organization now, under new management

Machines work on feed-back. Minds work on feed-forward. We don’t need thermostats; we need new compasses. There is no ‘back to normal’. Normal has not been waiting for us.   Leandro Herrero

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for these 5, free webinars as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment. Join us and bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

All attendees receive a complimentary copy of The Flipping Point.

Webinar topics:

  1. The myths of change.
  2. Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration?
  3. The myths of company culture.
  4. The myths of management.
  5. High touch and high tech in the digitalisation era

Request [29] more information about these webinars.