This is plagiarism, of course. I am stealing 13^th Century Saint, Francis of Assisi’s  line: ‘Preach the Gospel all the time. When necessary use words’. Translation, do more, talk less. Lately recycled as ‘walk the talk’. Twisted by me as ‘talk the walk’. That is, you walk first, then you explain the walk.

Yes, I think the ‘walk the talk’ order is wrong. As leader, you walk, and walk; then, you bring people along and explain the walk, whilst walking, that is.

In our organizations, we have conceptual tsunamis of values and beliefs. Most of them dwell in the corporate graveyards of annual reports, reception halls and HR systems. These are words, not behaviours. People copy behaviours, not words on walls, not bullet points in PowerPoints.

We need to agree the non-negotiable behaviours of values and beliefs so that we can ‘do them’ and exhibit them, not just explain them. Those behavioural translations are life or death.

The ‘when necessary use words’ should be the motto of so called change management processes.

The pending role model/employee/peer-to-peer revolution, will be driven by deeds, not by words.

But let’s not forget. Words certainly engage and motivate. Words are the wake-up, the alarm bells, the declaration of intentions, the intellectual vehicle and the pre-emotional triggers of action. So we’d better be good at them as well.

However:

Words are pre-social, the revolution is social.

‘The things you don’t have to say make you rich’ – William Stafford’s ^[1] (1914 – 1993)

Let’s get richer. We act more, then, when necessary we will use words.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

For a selection of my Daily Thoughts on leadership, you can buy my latest book, Camino – Leadership Notes On The Road ^[2], available from all major online bookstores ^[3].

 

Downloadable extracts: Extract Camino Chapter 1 ^[4],  Camino – Extract Chapter 2 part 1 ^[5]

 

A collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts. Camino, the Spanish for road, or way, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves. Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest. But we never reach the destination. Our character is constantly shaped by places and journeys, encounters and experiences. The only real theory of leadership is travelling. The only footprints, our actions. The only test, what we leave behind.

 

 

Fourth in the mini series:  uncovering of truths of the failure of change and transformation programmes via a reverse engineering.

Lack of vision, one way or another, is often used to explain failure. In my experience this does not necessarily come at the top. OK, there may be sloppy visions, or half cooked visions, I accept. But nobody is completely blind.

In fact, strong tunnel vision is as big a problem. Something has been decided (a form of restructuring for example) and the red button is pushed with no flexibility to review or change gears. It’s a Brexit type of organizational transformation.

Of course, our wonderful mind mechanism, cognitive dissonance, kicks in and we have a million reasons why what we are doing is perfect, after all we have committed lots of resources and, PowerPoints, you know, have a life of their own. Cognitive dissonance then meets her sister Groupthink, and then it’s all sorted.

I wrote many moons ago that the Proverb’s line, ‘when there is no vision people perish’ needs to be translated in management as ‘when there is too much vision people perish faster’.

Fixed, rigid destinations expressed by fixed minded people, seen as fixed and strong leaders are simply dangerous. If top leaders have all the answers, they are not qualified for the job.

So, then, what? Am I  advocating chaos? Never said that. We don’t’ live in a bipolar world. We live in one where navigation skills are needed and that included the ability to change gears faster.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Hear more from Leandro Herrero and his team as they debunk The Myths of Change ^[6]. Traditional management and a great deal of academic thinking is responsible for the colossal failure of ‘change programmes’.

 

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations, particularly in the areas of change and transformation. We must abandon change as something imposed in favour of people becoming true agents. Organizations that have mastered this have been in ‘the new normal’ for a while!

 

 

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 ^[6]

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[7], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, 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 ^[8] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[9].

His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management ^[10], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

 

A slow growth cancer in organizations.

People unnecessarily and gratuitously condemning the company to an impossible future: we will never change, we will always be like this, our leadership is terrible, we have no hope in hell of A, B, C, everything is really bad, etc.

Many times these are simply unchallenged. Often met with a nod, even if one does not believe it. They are also sheltered under the ‘respecting opinions’, flawed diversity cause. And it’s toxic.

One of our most successful types of behaviour in our Viral Change™ programme is the challenging of those verbalisations in canteens and corridors.

Critics may say that we are then promoting the opposite, a world in which we are supposed to say that everything is good, where there is no criticism but a permanent Pollyanna principle of unreserved optimism, that we say should reign. But this is far from reality.

Take public health care, say a hospital set up. Resources have been constrained, staff reduced or not growing, and long waiting lists. Staff are frustrated and in a bad mood. And they are entitled to be. To say everything is good, or even dismiss these problems on behalf of all other good things happening is not the approach. But this is not a ‘toxic attitude’ as we call it. The toxic attitude is: and we will never change, we will never solve it, we will always be a monster, we have no solution. That is toxic defeatism and cynicism, not legitimate ventilation of frustration. Yes, of course, there is a fine line. But this is crossed very often. The result is the spread of hopelessness that creates a climate when not even the good things get airtime anymore.

In our Viral Change™ programmes, the situation’s similar. We hear people saying that, for example, we pay lip services to health and safety, but nobody really cares. If this is not the case, as in most places I know, every minute of silence, is an unsafe minute of propagation of a defeatist culture.

Calling out these two sisters, defeatism and cynicism, is the best favour you can do to yourself and your fellow travellers. It’s enough to have real, funded frustrations, to then have to put up with prophetic gloom and doom.

Not in your name.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organizational Change Post Covid-19.

Watch our Feed Forward Webinar Series ^[6]. 

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations.  WATCH our 5, free webinars as Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects, debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

Have your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

 

1. The Myths of Change ^[6]
2. Can you put your organization through an MRI? ^[6]
3. The Myths of Company Culture ^[6]
4. The Myths of Management ^[6]
5. High tech, high touch in the digitalization era ^[6]

 

The England and Wales education authority has publicised a list of behaviours that will not be allowed in the classroom on the return to school. The threat includes anything from expelling children to putting them in special groups.

Amongst the transgressions in the list, according to The Guardian, is coughing on purpose or as a joke and also making jokes about the virus (‘malicious coughing’ or ‘making inappropriate jokes about Covid-19’).

I hope that the legions of so-called behavioural scientists that seem to be running in the corridors of government, nudging here and there, are not well paid . This is my hope. Because this is the greatest naive and pseudo-scientific blunder in behavioural terms.

If you want to avoid negative behaviours, the last thing you do is to publicise them, even worse at scale. The only thing that this does is too signal that those behaviour are expected, in fact that they may be a norm, current or in the future. It provides a fabulous free repertoire of bad behaviours for which to pick, if you can get away with it.

For kids that perhaps, coughing inappropriately, maliciously, as a joke, would have never crossed their minds, now they may see them as something interesting, funny and worth pushing the envelope for, perhaps to show off.

The world is full of ill-informed messages, of the types we see in hospitals or immigration at airports, in which posters tell us that ‘abuse will not be tolerated’, clearly signalling that this is a place where abuse has become normalised. ‘Don’t abuse the nurses’ (a real poster in NHS hospitals) says nurses here as most-abuse-able. ‘Don’t be rude to the staff’ (Heathrow airport) enlighten us for free that staff there are chronically insulted.

Whoever designed all those threatening notice boards and posters, had no idea of behavioural change. I bet there were some people with the word behaviour on their business cards.

Let’s not repeat the same stupidity in our schools and higher education places where we need to reward the positive behaviours, signal them, and stop the shopping list of transgressions with the associated punishment.

‘Everybody wears masks here’ at the frontispiece, would do for me.

 

 

 

Only when you see Performance Management as rituals, you can understand why we still do them in the same unchanged way. Think Anthropology, stop talking business school dialect.

In recent times people have become more and more disenchanted with performance appraisals, or at least in the form that traditionally is done, such as once a year, perhaps twice. Some companies have announced their death and consulting groups have advocated a semi-scrap of the system.

Why are they still here and robust? Because far from doing what it is obvious that they do, they also do other things. The truth? They are rituals. Rituals are hard to change because they are at the core of keeping the glue of cultures and organizations.

In my view, Performance Appraisals have at least five functions, not one:

(1) The official, declared goal oriented function: give feedback, learn, improve/professional development, manage the troops. Fine.

(2) The (Actionable) Taxonomy functionality: classify people, put them in quadrants and boxes, corporate ‘snakes and ladders’, with the aim to reward, promote, fire. The HR entomology system love this.

(3) An often hidden ‘agency’ function: bringing a sense of belonging, exercising power, asserting authority, being a vehicle for revenge (delayed until the end of the year); these are things Agent-Managers do. Take these away, you get, lame, one-armed managers.

(4) A tribal function: the tribe(s) have here a punctuation of time: same time each year, the before and after, prepare, guidelines, report, It’s that time of year again. Here we go, Christmas is coming.

(5) A structural function: this is uniformity for all, it cannot be changed, one system and glue, good group cohesion, good for maintaining social order. As such ‘we cannot touch it, it’s global, it’s HQ’ (usually expressed as with some sort of divine or supernatural power).

Only (1), the official, is often declared and talked about. But it is the 5 of them that keep the system alive. If it were only number (1), we would be doing a million other things instead.

The only way to seriously think about alternatives is to look at the five ‘functions’ in their totality and see how much each of them is Performance management supporting in your particular culture. The simple elimination or substitution of a ‘type 1’ system for a ‘more refined (1) system’ is naïve.

The clue about Performance Appraisals is in Anthropology, not in Harvard Business School.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Let’s Join Forces!

 

Let’s join forces. We can deliver a webinar tailored to your organization and delivered to an in-house audience or a remote keynote, masterclass or roundtable on topics including: leadership, leading change, internal influencers, corporate culture and more – all delivered by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now! ^[9]

Or if you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now ^[9] – we want to hear from you!

 

A CEO asked me recently: what do you do with a manager who does not embrace or support change, in fact, who is an obstacle? My answer is always the same, only adapted in tone to the circumstances such as how well I know that CEO. I say: ‘you put that manager in a room with another five managers who do support and embrace change.’

I am careful that this is not received as superficial, or a trying-to-be-clever answer. But this is the truth. Nothing equals the power of peer-to-peer influence. This is well above the boss convincing, threatening or brainwashing.

Most of our social positions are shaped socially, for better or for worse. Group pressure, conformity or influence, I don’t really care what you call it, can be used for good reasons. It works very well, when orchestrated well.

In a recent HR conference, after my keynote speech on Viral Change ^[11] ™ a manager came to me: but, is this not manipulation? My answer is always the same: ‘only if you call it manipulation when managing people, educating them, or dare I say, coaching them.’

Entire (change) management practices that are focused on the expectation that the individual will change his mind, attitude or mindset, via rational understanding or emotional engagement, or both, could be shifted towards group shaping of those changes, using peer-to-peer influence.

This is not to underplay the role of ‘individual agency’, something that leaders need to manage with their direct reports, for example, on a one-to-one basis. But when we’re talking change at a scale, it is impossible to work on a one-to-one basis only. The group effect is immensely more powerful. Individual seduction becomes group influence, or cultural change, for example, will never happen.

Traditionally, we have underestimated the power of social copying inside the organization. We have talked about the existence of peer-to-peer influence, or group pressure, as something that is there, in front of us, but we don’t quite know what to do with it. Peer networks have shown us that it is far more powerful to use them in order to shape cultures, create behavioural change, establish new rules or a style of working, and anything that has to do with the building of a particular culture. That is, large scale behavioural change.

The answer to individual resistance is often one of a social transplant. Dwelling in a new place of non-resistance cures far more, than hours of convincing that resistance is bad.

Of course, I am bound to say that, it’s Homo Imitans ^[12], stupid.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

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

 

Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for the penultimate free webinar of the series – The Myths of Management – hear from them as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional post Covid-19 environment. Register Now! ^[6]

All webinar attendees are eligible for a complimentary copy of Leandro’s new book: The Flipping Point ^[10].

 

I sometimes think that many global ‘one company’ initiatives are missing the point. The intentions are good: ‘look, we are all together in this, all in the same boat, one family, one set of values and a culture’. It sounds good. And at the same time: ‘we are diverse, respect many differences of opinion, sensitive to the markets and the local issues, we are all for local empowerment’. They are two narratives in conflict. I am not saying impossible to reconcile, far from it. But we need to acknowledge the tension. It is up to us to see it as a healthy or unhealthy tension. It is also naive to ignore the tension and more naive to try to suppress it.

The one company narrative is particularly ill-constructed when it is based upon an ideological position, not on rational needs. I know of a case where the European region of a company managed to create a unique product development structure within the global product development system. The USA headquarters felt very uncomfortable from the beginning despite the fact that the European system was not in conflict, but it represented a high value, innovative add on (incidentally featured in a business school case). The tension continued until the European idiosyncrasy was suppressed on behalf of the One Global Team. Read US. The One Global Team concept had no basis other than ideological and power control. And perhaps the inability of the so-called Global Leaders to manage a global structure. But lots of people were very happy with the killing and preferred to have a lower denominator, global system. Managerial incompetence was hidden in the closet.

The ‘us and them’ distinction is often quasi-toxic. It stresses the differences and implies some sort of conflictual relationship. However, if you want some identity and belonging, you are going to need a dose of ‘us and them’. The challenge for the leader is not to suppress the ‘us and them’ by decree in the hope that conflict will just evaporate, but make the most of the ‘us with them’. Build the with, retain the and.

Differentiation may be very healthy and helpful (may I remind you of the concept of brands?) or may be divisive and obstructive. There is a choice. And it requires the leader to navigate through what is common and is not, to find strength in the differences and to collaborate and be part of the bigger picture at the same time.

I have always said that acrobatics should be part of management education. OK, the mental one.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thank you to those of you who attended our webinar last Thursday.  It was great to see so many attending and enjoyed the lively discussion.

Our Feed Forward Webinar Series – the organization now, under new management continues on 16th July.

 

Register Here!  ^[13]  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 ^[10] – available now!

Some organizations, or groups inside the organization, suffer from lack of self belief. You could say weak self esteem. The belief system there is often contaminated by a narrative of impossibility. We are too small. We are too big. We are conservative, or old, or too young. Or we don’t have the money. Or we could, but the culture will never change. Or it will be hard, slow and painful.

The narrative dominates the thinking that, in turns, dominates the triggers for behaviours and behaviours itself. No point to take risks, or be adventurous. Not here. For example.

Good leadership can change the narrative of the belief system. Being aspirational and inspirational, at the same time as being realistic and honest about possibilities, is a good formula.

Leadership has a choice. It’s called setting the bar. My favourite is the Michelangelo bar: ‘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’.

Very often the true conversation on beliefs and expectations does not exist. Leaders need to hear what is unsaid. They need to go beyond what they hear and see if this is said because people try to please you. This is not even cynical or malicious or manipulative. Many people genuinely want to please leaders that they consider good ones, made of human DNA, not robotic.

Ask. What do you think? Can we make it? Is this doable? And, by the way, speaking of risk, is this risky enough? For example.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

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

Register Here! ^[13]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 ^[10] – available now!

Audiences receive messages, whether at your Town Hall meeting or your keynote speech. Communities use what they have ‘in common’ to join forces, collaborate, help each other or make things happen. But communities are not a team structure either, with leaders, members, milestones and deliverables.

All these structures are legitimate. You can have whatever you like but don’t mix them up. You don’t create a community by bombarding the members with top down information. You don’t create a good team by saying ‘this is just like a family’. You don’t call the audience ‘this big team’ if they are not.

In many organizations, the team is the structural unit of collaboration. We have created huge teamocracies and, in the process, forgotten that there are other collaborative structures such as communities and internal social networks.

Language matters.

Yammer ^[14] users are not just a community by the fact that there are many of them. The ‘common’ needs to be translated into collective action. Facebook friends may not be friends, and your friends may not be in Facebook. LinkedIn followers are just a click away, and they are not necessarily your ‘community’.

Organizations create lots of audiences and then they label them with a more elevated label.

Not everything that looks like working together is collaboration.

If you watch out for the language, and take a critical view of the labels, you’ll be doing well on the path of efficiency and effectiveness. There is nothing worse than wrong expectations.

An audience is not a community. A community is not a team. A team is not an audience. Keep going …until what you mean and what it is called really meet.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation…..register now ^[13] for our next free, live webinar on 2nd July – the second webinar in our Feed Forward Webinar series.

 

Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? ^[13]

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.

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of Leandro Herrero’s new book: The Flipping Point ^[10]

 

 

 

 

 

 

I put framing at the top of the list on ‘leadership tasks’. One of those non-rocket sciences around us that we refuse to pay attention to. Because, it’s not rocket science and apparently, in management, we need to reach the rocket sciences qualification to be able to wake up.

Yes, I think that we in business organizations completely underestimate the power of (mental and behavioural) framing to trigger and sustain behaviours, emotions, ways of doing etc.

For me there are 3 aspects of framing that are very simple, and perhaps because of this, we take them for granted, or simply dismiss them. These are my 3:

1. Framing of behaviours so that they can be copied and scaled up (creating a particular culture, Homo Imitans)
2. Framing of the overall narrative of the organization.
3. Framing of the use of data or insights

Let’s start with the simplest components in the behavioural side

On the behavioural side there is plenty of repeated experimental data showing for example how being helped (for example to fix a computer problem) increases the level of collaboration of that particular group of people who has been helped with the people helping them. Collaboration for completely new, different goals. So far you may think, big deal. But here is the trick. The group helped increases collaboration with any other group afterwards, no matter what, versus a controlled group that has not received helped. ‘Helping’ is copied and spreads. It frames the future.

Lots of studies as well on the difference between people in a group that receive a  clear ‘thanks’, versus a control group that receive a neutral acknowledgement. Similarly, the thanked group behaves differently afterwards on a number of parameters that have not direct connection with the previous reason-for-the-thanks.

Studies on altruism in neighbourhoods shows similar patterns. Somebody starts, others copy, a critical mass is created, many other houses in the neighbourhood do the same. It becomes normal. No manual on how to be altruistic. No team, no committee.

Corollary is, start your mini-mini-behavioural revolution somewhere and be persistently focused on a couple of very granular behaviours. You don’t have to explain much. Just do it.  The more you explain why, the less power. Make it the norm. One off shows don’t work. You will be framing the conversation and seeding behaviours that may even seem small or trivial. If you get used to the technique, you’ll see the benefits grow.

It’s not a particular behaviour because it’s good in itself (I am sure it is) but because you are framing what comes next.

Next…

2. Framing of the overall narrative of the organization.

3. Framing of the use of data or insights

____________________________________________________________________________________

The Flipping Point ^[10] – Deprogramming Management

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs deprogramming. 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!

Read the latest review ^[15].

Available from major online bookstores ^[16].

^[10]

Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage

These are 3 self-sabotage systems to be aware of:

1. Inner civil wars

Internal infighting is a potential feature of any complex organization, business or not. We see the caricature of this, and its high cost, in political parties or social movements. Usually we see the features of the inner civil war in the papers headlines or television screens. Often it triggers in you a feeling of ‘how stupid can these people be? they are killing it’. And sometimes they do. In business organizations the mechanics of inner civil war are the same. The ones that worry me most are those that do not have 100% visibility: the hidden turf wars, the passive-aggressive reactions between corporate functions, the by design unhelpful collaboration, the cynical comments expressed in the corridor, men’s room and ladies room, by perhaps senior people, against  senior people.

2. Employee disengagement

The industry of Employee Engagement ( and there is one) tries to measure a mixture of satisfaction, happiness and willingness to run the extra mile. Year after year the rankings, for whatever they are worth, are terrible. We know more about the diagnosis than the treatment. I have written about the difference between being engaged with the company or within the company. The within (doing lots of stuff to make people ‘happy’) is a distraction. However, you define engagement, running the system with high degrees of a ‘lack of it’, is pure self-sabotage.

Leaders need to spend time on this, but it’s not about ‘improving a ranking’ but about gaining a deep understating of the motivation and ‘the chattering in the corridor’. It’s seeing, feeling and smelling. Some leaders can, others meet budgets.

3. Dysfunctional leadership

For any functional or aligned, serious Leadership Team I meet in my consulting work, there will be four or five dysfunctional ones. Most of them look like juxtapositions of people reporting to somebody, but not a single entity ‘collective leadership’ type. It’s a journey, though. You don’t achieve high levels of sophisticated leadership in a week. But you have to work on it. I don’t have a big problem encountering dysfunctional leadership teams but I do worry when six months later they have not moved a bit. Or it seems they have via multiple changes and ‘musical chairs’.

These 3 areas, the inner wars, the hidden or not-that-hidden disengagement, and dysfunctional top leadership, are particularly toxic. The sad part is that they tend to come together like brothers and sisters in a dysfunctional family.

If any of these sound familiar, any stop and think will be a great investment.

PS. Don’t try to correlate success. Some successful organizations are dysfunctional.  Some functional ones are not successful. The issue for the perhaps successful ones working with high self-sabotage levels is how more successful they could be.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

New webinar series – Register Now! ^[6]

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.

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point ^[10].

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

______________________________________________________________________________________________

The Flipping Point ^[10] – Deprogramming Management

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs deprogramming. 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!

Read the latest review ^[15].

Available from major online bookstores ^[16].

Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. ^[10] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[10] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review ^[15].

 

 

Non-magic: what is the latest intelligence and new data? Magic: what’s the story?

Non-magic: give me feedback from the strategy meeting today. Magic: so, what’s the story? Non-magic: mum, could you explain to me again how the dragon leveraged his competitive advantage to get to the princess? (don’t worry, it’s not going to happen).

Non-magic: what is the latest intelligence and new data? Magic: what’s the story? The magic, non magic collection would go for ever. I have always hated the sanitised corporate language. The exaggerated and disruptive language of Ronald D Laing ^[17], a British psychiatrist who died in 1989, father of the then called ‘antipsychiatry movement’ and a figure who all of us, standard and medicalised psychiatrists in white coats, hated at that time, because it was ‘the right thing to do’, said in his complaining and critical mode: ‘Gone is any language of joy, delight, passion, sex, violence. The language is that of the boardroom.’ The last bit stuck in my head.

 

Non-magic question: what’s the cost of doing this? Magic question: what would be the cost of not doing this?

Non-magic question: what are the goals and objectives? Magic question: what do we want to see by? Non-magic question: what are the outcomes? Magic question: what do we want to be proud of? Non-magic question: what’s the cost of doing this? Magic question: what would be the cost of not doing this?

Non-magic question: what are the goals and objectives? Reframing questions is at the core of Critical Thinking training, something that we do in my company.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

The Flipping Point ^[10] – 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 ^[16].

^[10]

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

New webinar series – Register Now! ^[6]

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.

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point. ^[10]

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

 

Spot the difference at the dinner party or barbeque. So, what do you do Joe? [You must start with ‘so’ if you are in some kind of technology role yourself]

‘I am in IT, I work for Techno’ vs. ‘I work for Techno, I work in IT
‘I am a medical doctor, I work in PharmaTer’ vs. ‘I work for PharmaTer as a medical doctor’.
‘I am a hedge fund manager, I work for InvestSmart’ vs. ‘You know InvestSmart? I work there as a hedge fund manager’
‘I am an accountant, I work for GoodsMart’ vs ‘I am work for GoodsMart, in finance, I am an accountant by training’
‘I am a lawyer, I work for BankGlobal’ vs ‘I work for BankGlobal as a corporate lawyer’.

Imagine many other alternatives on any other function. The differences are not simple anecdotal ways of expressing the same. The expressions are not the same. In one type, the dominance is the professional tribe (IT, medic, hedge fund, accountant, lawyer). In the other type, the company (Techno, PharmaTer, InvestSmart, GoodsMart, BankGlobal) is the dominant source of belonging. Both are compatible, for sure. But, if I were the CEO of any of these companies, I’d rather have my people referring to the professional tribe after, not before referring to the company.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the tribal-professional sense of belonging. But when projected upfront as my real persona, it means that its power, significance, and identity is stronger than those of the employer’s itself. Tribe 1, company brand nil.

I have found two types of clients. Those who don’t get this, (‘don’t see the problem’) and those who care about ‘the order of things’. The latter are the ones who also care about culture. Since senior leaders, and therefore CEOs, are curators of their culture, it’s clear which ones ‘see’ the differences and have a preference for the company brand.

‘Seeing’ is the first step to interpreting and then doing something. Do you know what Joe, from your company, says when asked? I wish the Employee Engagement people included this…

If you work in a corporation with headquarters and affiliates, scattered in many places, or with international sites, you will be used to the ritual of ‘visitors’ coming from those headquarters on a regular basis. Indeed, you, yourself may be, or have been, one of those visitors.  Those visits may happen in the context of a business review, or the annual business plan, or simply as a more or less regularly scheduled visit.

Some clients, speaking from the receiving end, don’t call this ‘visiting’ but ‘descending’ from headquarters. Some pointed to me, half joking, (but only half) that they were considering setting up a proper Visitor Centre given the amount of disruption, hassle and complexity associated with dealing with these ‘visitors’. Some of course love to have visitors. It tends to end with a good evening meal, who knows, good wine, and possibly extras. Others hate it because it forces many people to focus on ‘the visit’ as opposed to ‘the business’. Preparing presentations for Gene and Tony is often an ephemeral and pointless piece of work, but …‘it’s important to keep them happy’.

You need to see these visits and the whole paraphernalia around them as a ritual. And rituals stick because they are rituals. They serve a purpose, usually not the one that is declared and apparent.

Think about what is behind the visit ritual: the whole spectrum, from genuine interest to help, for example, to waste of time and corporate tourism. And all things in between. But, above all, think about four or five non-declared reasons for those visits. See what is behind them. Try to imagine what other purposes they may serve. Do Gene and Tony need comfort (that things are going well)? Do they come to exercise a bit of power?  Do they think you need more help that you think you need? What purpose does the visit serve for them?

You will find more than four or five reasons. You need to list them and consider them on their own merits. Then, use the ritual and participate in it with deeper understanding. My advice is, in any case, don’t fight it. When rituals go, other rituals take over. Perhaps you can, gently or not, use the time to explore the value of those ‘presentations’. Perhaps you could put yourself in the shoes of Gene and Tony and imagine how ‘the visit’ allows them to exercise control. Then, ask yourself, why do they need to ‘control’. Just because they are ‘managers’? What would you do differently if you were Gene or Tony?

(At some point, maybe, a budget cut comes in – another ritual in its own right – and Gene and Tony are not coming anymore. See what is going to substitute this ritual. Something will. Of course the obvious is the conference or video call. Observe and learn how the new ‘visit’ has changed meaning. Or not? The point is to reflect, ask yourself, see what is behind or underneath all the time. Never take these visits at face value. You’ll miss a lot of meaning).

With the best of intentions, to call an organization a Democracy is an abuse of the term, unless of course, the organization has been structured and functions on strict democratic principles. But what are these principles? Strictly speaking, in a democracy, all eligible members vote because power is completely distributed; laws and regulations are agreed etc. Sure, you can have a democratic organization on those principles, but it rarely fits the concept of the firm, as we know it.

Business organizations are not democracies. We should reserve the term for the Polis, for the political, civic arena.  People who, I repeat, with the best of intentions, use the word ‘democracy’ as an aspiration for a business organization, usually mean employee participation, employee voice, freedom of that voice, good representation to management etc. They want to inject a democratic flavour, ‘democratic principles’, synonymous with a healthy and participative environment. All this is very noble, but it does not make the organization a democracy.

Some people go further and describe the attributes of a democratic (business) organization. Amongst those: having a purpose, accountability, transparency, integrity, dialogue etc. I call this a Well Managed Organization.

Democracy, ‘the worst form of government except for all other forms that have been tried’ (Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1947) must remain in the socio-political arena. Even here, we could count in great numbers the institutions that, strictly speaking, are not democracies and form the fabric of a given society. Democracy is a form of civil government, not a form of corporate government (unless you chose this, of course).

To use terms such as ‘democracy’ or ‘being democratic’ in a loose way may inspire comfort, may legitimize noble goals of people participation, but may also be very misleading. By borrowing the language from the Polis, we may think that we add credibility to Employee Engagement. We don’t. What we add is a distraction.

Working in a ‘non-place place’ can’t deliver inspirations and aspirations. Ideas need infections, not Clinical Isolation Units.

Marc Auge ^[18] is a French Anthropologist that coined the term ‘non-places’, to describe spaces of little or no significance, of ‘transitory nature’ such as hotel rooms, or supermarkets, or airports. (Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity 2007, 2009). These ‘non-place places’ deserve an analysis of their own.

I sometimes feel that some organizations work on non-place mode. The environment is sterile and the all-glass offices have simply replaced the all-panel offices for another material whilst keeping the border close (but gaining in luminosity). In a non-place-company-place there is little room for associabilty, or the associabilty is forced into spaces where the only thing missing is a sign hanging from the ceiling: ‘you must be sociable here’. Examples are the solitary corner with a small table football, the awkward table tennis table surrounded by sofas, the open plan seating area with a whispering TV screen. Be here and do that: play, rest, eat (or eat, play, love).

Some company offices are closer to pre-operating rooms in hospitals than a work place. As an external observer, I often feel the pain or migrating from a ‘you work here’ to a ‘you play here’ area passing by a ‘you get your coffee here’ corner.

Some modern facilities with pristine space and tons of glass are modern prisons of ideas, non-places of undistinguished clinical interaction, that far from inviting human interfaces, discourages natural communications: silence is heard, faces are hidden behind transparent screens, meetings are orderly conducted behind the borders of fish bowls. Only the toilets provide some space for liberation, even if segregated.

Don’t trade off an old, messy, inconvenient and cramped place for a pristine, delux, glass cathedral non place.

In a non-place office even the receptionist’s ephemeral smile reminds you that you enter into a carefully designed world, a sort of Japanese garden of ideas, where humanity has been hijacked until the 5pm rush to the car park.

I shared yesterday the tragedy of the obvious. The obvious that is so obvious that we don’t see it. Read here ^[19] if you missed it and find out about the donkeys.

(1) It is obvious that top-down communication and information bombardment does not create change, or at least not at a scale. Communication is not change. There is no change unless there is behavioural change. However most of our management systems in organizations and many societal change projects are still mainly based on information. If we could just tell everybody, inform everybody, train everybody. But no revolution has ever been created in a classroom.

(2) It is obvious that even if we admit that behaviours are what matters, still we treat them as pieces of information: we put them in power points and posters (and then we pray). However, behaviours spread by copying, we copy each other, and we are a very sophisticated copying machine. It’s homo imitans ^[20] more than homo sapiens. In doubt, look at your television screens.

(3) It is obvious that if we agree that behaviours are ‘the currency’, and that this currency multiplies by copying, not by training or an information tsunami, then the question is who has more power to be copied, who influences us the most. The traditional view has been to look at the leadership, particularly at the top, and it is hard to blame anybody thinking that way, particularly when we see the consequences of bad examples. However the strongest source of influence in organizations and societal settings is peer-to-peer, what we see around us. There is plenty of data such as the Edelman Trust Barometer saying this every year for many years. We have largely ignored this, or seen it as a curiosity, or something that is acknowledged, but we don’t know what do about it because, top down leadership and visibility and authority seem to be more obvious. However for the purpose of culture shaping peer-to-peer has greater power than the hierarchical one. Its tribal, horizontal, one of us. Political marketing knows this very well (data, segmentation).

(4) It is also obvious that most of that fluid connectivity of influence from peers takes place in the informal organization: corridor, cafeteria, mens rooms, ladies rooms, the water cooler, the car park. However, most of the traditional management efforts are focused on the formal organization: the teams, committees, structures, task forces- we have created such colossal teamocracies that people don’t know how to interact and collaborate outside the formal strait jacket of a team.

(5) Another thing that is obvious is that stories are great currency to spread change. But traditionally organizations have used a lot of heroic stories (examples), it should be obvious that their effect on people is to switch them off: ‘not me’. They are useless as culture shaping. As opposed to the small stories of success of ‘people like me’, my peers (‘I can do that’).

(6) And finally, in these complex times of interdependence (I’d like every division, team, organization, business to write their declaration of interdependence), the top down leadership of before has tremendous limitations and it should be obvious that what matters is how leaders orchestrate things sometimes silently, what we call Backstage Leadership™ . This is, the art of leading by giving the stage to others and those others are the peer-to-peer groups and communities.

I have described to you a few components or ingredients of The Viral Change™ Mobilizing platform ^[21] . In Viral Change™ mode, we orchestrate large scale behavioural and cultural change by working in very precise ways using these components and others. It’s a true ‘operating system’ for the company.

So there are many obvious things in front of us, yet we keep looking for what is smuggled via that caravan of donkeys ^[19].

You are stuck when confronted with dilemmas. Maybe contradictory business decisions, or maybe the need to choose between two evils. Stuck here, means that the forces are equal but in opposite directions. They paralyse you. You feel the tension. Not pleasant.

But you can also be stuck when your circumstances are blocking you and you don’t see an obvious way out. You don’t have (or worse, don’t feel you have) control over those circumstances. Numerous pieces of research point to the mental and physical health costs of feeling hopeless, trapped, unable to get out. The whole ‘change management’ confusion of ‘people are resistant to change’ lies here. The sentence needs to be finished: ‘when they can’t do anything about it’.

Maybe you are stuck because, as leader, you have inherited a situation, perhaps even a structure, or a team, that you can’t change, and you feel the uphill  struggle.

Maybe you are exhausted and you are stuck, or you are stuck and you realise that it is because you are exhausted. Not the same.

There is also a form of being stuck that is quite common. You were counting on somebody else to help, or a support system that you used to have, perhaps in a previous company. They are not there for you. You’ve never done it on your own. Stuck.

Being stuck is awful. It’s worse than being wrong, which can be changed to right, or less wrong, when you are confronted with a reality or a colleague, or the team. Or you see the light. Wrong is wrong in some direction. Stuck is stuck in no direction.

But you may be lucky and become unstuck.

Crisis is very good for this. Miracles as well. Suddenly the circumstances change and you move. People around you pull you out. Invisible forces push you. Combinations. That’s good. Welcome the crisis. Rahm Emanuel, when he was Chief of Staff for Obama said: ‘Never let a serious crisis go to waste’.

The hack: move! Yes, you can always move. The problem is your fear of moving in the wrong direction. You know what? It does not matter. It’s the wrong fear. Wrong is better than stuck. If you move in the right direction, bingo! If you move in the wrong one, you have a much better chance of redirecting yourself than if you don’t move. No movement, zero chances, stuck.

Translations of move: don’t go to the office, watch that entire Netflix series, start a new project, change the frame, change the circumstances, put yourself, your being, somewhere else, maybe alien, maybe banal. Hack 2: Don’t fight it. Or not yet. Allow the pulling forces (as above) to work.

Have a love pact. OK, you may not want to call it this in the office. Have a few colleagues, top level, medium level, any level, who have agreed to the following: if you see me stuck, shout. If I don’t move, shout louder. Tell me to move. And when I am saying that I worry about going in the wrong direction, tell me that any direction is better than no direction.

In the ideal world, have your Mutual Unstuck-ing Group ready, like a Rapid Reaction Force. It’s worth all the effort. And, if it is mutual, it creates lasting friendships.

There is a big difference between copying and reverse engineering. Many people in business wish they could copy the great successes, the visible achievers. Perhaps not the Google, Apple, Amazon etc., but other models and ways. After all, we have been told for years that ‘Best Practices’ are the most important source of learning. In the old days, we were told we needed to copy the GE workouts, or the Japanese Quality circles, or the Kaizen ways. Today, other models such as Agility, or Holacracy and Zappos, or both, all in one, reach the headlines of the ‘latest in management’.

There is an intrinsic difficulty in many models: their surprising lack of transferability. Some are more transferable than others, but most of the time doing the transplant is a dangerous business.

I think that reverse engineering and pausing (deconstruct, unbundle, think critically about what you see) has greater merit than the ‘model transplant’. Reverse engineering allows you to find out the principles before the outcomes, the rules of the game before the endgame, the deeper human dynamics before the organization chart.

When I launched Viral Change™ ^[22] formally in 2006, we were already on a continuous process of reverse engineering people mobilization. And the two places to start the unbundling were unconventional (for management standards) : social movements and network theory. Close to 2008 and then until 2012 and beyond, it was obvious to me that we were missing the greatest source of knowledge for people mobilization: political (science, movement) marketing. You’ll recognise the milestones as the US presidential campaigns. Since then, we have been dissecting and reverse engineering the political mobilization platforms, including digital activism. This is what has given the Viral Change Mobilizing Platform the ability to host and provide an ‘operating system’ for things as diverse as ‘standard’ change management, employee engagement or cultural change. Viral Change is today a fully fleshed out mobilizing platform as opposed to a ‘change method’. (it has methods inside).

I see again and again in my consulting practice the presence of some organizational designs, in small or in big, that have been ‘installed’ in particular organizations with the hope that, being a mirror, or a copy, of what other successful people have done (typically in manufacturing) they per se will become the vehicle of success. Risky business, when deprived from context and culture. A good idea in A does not make the same good idea for B.

The old Best Practices and its sister Benchmarking were successful at pointing to what other people had achieved, but often created an illusion of solution by transplanting them or copying them. If I had to trace back my very early interest in the organizational world, coming from clinical psychiatry and academia, about hundred moons ago, I would say it was this question: how is it possible that organization A and B share more or less the same resources in size and market, similar culture, similar product portfolio, similar industry sector, but whilst A is extremely successful, B fails miserably?

Pretending to become A when you are B is the wrong way to approach it. Deconstructing success and reverse-engineering both, their success and our own failure, is a good start.

I am of course paraphrasing Mario Cuomo’s ^[23] ‘You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose’.

Cuomo (1932-2015) was an American lawyer, a Democrat, a devout Catholic, a Governor of New York (1983-1994) and very fond of phrases. He did ‘Poetry’ a lot. He once said: ‘I talk and talk and talk, and I haven’t taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week’. Mario Cuomo did talk. Perhaps the Italian genes.

For all his visible and memorable ‘Poetry’, the Poetry of ‘Yes-We-Can’ and ‘Hope’, Obama, another lawyer, had to be coached and coerced into Poetry by his formidable team of political campaigners. Believe it or not, Obama was (is?) more comfortable with Prose. It’s the lawyer within. He would much prefer to give long and articulated explanations of the reason for a particular policy, than summaries and power-lines; driving his Communicators and Advisers nuts.

He was asked to be concise many times during the 2012 campaign, in particular, and he failed miserably at the beginning, for example in his first TV debate with Romney. He had to be reminded again and again (and to the point of people around being close to resigning in desperation) that, as leader, he needed to continue with the Poetry.

After the elections, he used to complain to David Axelrod, ^[24] his key campaign architect saying: ‘I am not campaigning anymore!’, meaning, I can leave the Poetry and get into the Prose – his long Harvard lawyer explanations on social justice for example. He was told, as firmly as a friendship of many years could handle, that he was very wrong. ‘You are campaigning all the time’, Axelrod shouted at him. (David Axelrod, ‘Believer’, Penguin Press 2015)

It would be a mistake to equate Poetry with spin. ‘Poetry’ means here, inspiration, purpose, drive, making sense, driving commitment, inviting to a place, a dream, a goal, elevating the logic to a higher purpose. Leadership Poetry can be (must be) sincere and honest, but has to elevate the narrative to a place of destiny; I don’t mind small d or big D.

The same honesty and sincerity applies to Prose. Prose means the day to day managing, governing, making things happen, driving to results. After all, ‘manage’ has its roots in the Latin ‘manus’ (hands). Hands on things happening, that is.

The problem arises when a natural Prose-person holds a top leadership position, and when a top leader Poet is sent to manage the troops. I know, I know, this is too black and white, too binary, particularly for those who always say ‘you-have-to-have both’ (a Deus Ex Machina we all have handy when we want to kill a good debate). But it makes the point for me.

As leader, never stop the Poetry. Small p, big P, it does not matter. Even if you are also comfortable in the War and Peace side of writing.

Prose makes things happen. Poetry explains why.