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

Company structures: aggregate and disaggregate

New organizations, and old ones in the business of transforming themselves, would be better off learning by heart these two words: aggregation – disaggregation.

This is the ability to create ‘transitional’ or ‘time-limited’ (dare I say even ephemeral) fit for purpose structures that aggregate people for a purpose and disaggregate as soon as a mission has been accomplished.

I am talking here about normalising
aggregation-disaggregation as a form
of transitional (proper) structure

 

The concept is not new. Some organizations have used Tiger Teams and SWAT teams for a long time but it has mostly been a bit of an anomaly, and most of the time with an heroic-crisis-fixing goal and ethos.

I am talking here about normalising aggregation-disaggregation as a form of transitional (proper) structure that brings brains and hearts for a reason, in a non-permanent basis. Most new structures that we create have a permanent mission (or at least not the prospect of a relatively early disbandment). Organizational chart management (and reshuffling) is done mostly on hierarchical/reporting grounds.

 

Business organizations should look at the ‘movie studios’ model with different
professions aggregated and coming together for a while

 

Entire corporate functions, for example could host those temporary aggregations (effectively people in relatively short secondments) which could attract best brains and hearts that do not need to permanently ‘move house’. In particular people from the business side in operational functions. The difference with a Task Force is that these tend to become very bureaucratic and committee -style, whilst these aggregations are ‘for real and full time’ for the time frame decided.

Business organizations should look at the ‘movie studios’ model with different professions aggregated and coming together for a while, disaggregating as soon as an outcome is in place. It’s normal, nobody thinks the sky is falling, and you are called to arms if you are good.  By the way, the director is not fully in charge and the output is frequently not his or hers, but the editor’s. That is why there is something called ‘the director’s cut’ version, or the one they would have wanted. The producer has the money and has called the director but does not direct. The casting people bring the bodies but not the location, and the location people do the opposite. Composers work in parallel but don’t direct or edit. Script writers usually work as a mini group and produce the script that some directors, or indeed actors, often bypass. The actors act but only in their bits, they don’t sit around waiting. And special effects play with screens. And they produce a multi-million pound output.

Just imagine for a second this application in our traditional, permanent, stable, organization-chart-driven companies.  As many good disruptive ideas, the cost is anything from zero to minimal and the learning potentially huge.

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View on-demand webinar [1]

Can we put the company into an MRI?
Join us as we talk about 3CXcan, a product which will provide you with a full understanding of your organization’s formal and informal connections, communication channels and internal collaboration, an in-depth analysis, which is based on the highest scientific principles of network sciences. This webinar will show real examples of 3CXcan 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.

This company will reboot itself from Friday to Saturday. Apologies, services will be limited during this period.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Change, Leadership and Society,Reboot! | No Comments

I like the concept of reinvention, renewal, or transformation. But I like most the concept of rebooting! Organizations, teams, groups, entire companies, always reach some plateau at some point. The point in the curve where things are OK, but not brilliant; there is nothing wrong but also nothing very good; no particular problems but not many new ideas. Things are stable, there is no crisis, people turnover is low, all is fine, thank you. ‘You have reached the unremarkable destination’, your organizational ‘Sat Nav’ seems to say. It’s time to reboot the system.

One of the programmes I have designed under the banner of ‘Accelerators’ is called ‘Reboot!’ [2]. We ask people to find the elephants in the room, the corporate taboos, the things that need urgent health checks, make an inventory of mistakes and successes etc. What one can do in a Reboot! [2] is simply amazing. A Game Plan is then easy to create.

Regardless how you do it, or what you call it, you need to plan, not for ‘essential maintenance’, as many digital services and their websites do from time to time, but for a full reboot! Look inside, up and down, sideways, dust here and there, question the unquestionable, open the windows, allow fresh air, imagine, inject some disruption,  reboot!

This healthy shakeup can be planned. Actually, it is a hundred times better when scheduled, as opposed to when you are forced to do it in a crisis, or under stress. Schedule some ‘reboot time [2]’ in the life cycle of your organization, no matter what, even if you are at a peak of performance.  Stop, push the button, have the courage to pause, listen, then re-start.

The old lithium batteries that we used to have in older devices and phones, came with the warning: to discharge completely from time to time and then charge again, otherwise the continuous use and daily charge will make charging less and less effective. Eventually, the battery life will be minimal. Well, organizations today are still in lithium battery mode. Follow the advice. Schedule rebooting. Abandon the plateau, even if it is a comfortable one.

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We can help your business Reboot!  

 

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

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

 

Reboot! The Game Plan [2]

Fast diagnosis, fast alignment

This high intensity, accelerated intervention takes leadership teams of all levels through a process of discovery and identification of both stumbling blocks and enablers, will be followed by a clear ‘so-what’ and an action plan. Contrary to how this may sound, when the entire management team participates, this is an incredibly fast process. But it is also an in-depth one when using our tools which, amongst other things, shortcut weeks of discussions and pseudo-brainstorming. It results in alignment around a well crafted Game Plan that reflects where they see the organization/team/department in the short to medium term and a detailed commitment to action that can be tracked. You may or may not need us beyond that point in order to help you with the journey itself.

Format:  in-person or virtual

Timing: 1 – 3 days depending on format

Audience: minimum 20 – maximum 40

Price: POA

For more information, and to discuss how Reboot! The Game Plan [2] can support you and your business, please Contact Us [3] or email: [email protected] [4]

The minority tyranny in the organization

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Behavioural Economics,Leadership,Viral Change | No Comments

Nassim Taleb’s [5] piece in Medium some time ago entitled The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority i [6]s one of incredible intellectual acrobatics, typical of him.

If you don’t know Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile), you must. But here is a piece of advice. Read him instead of hear him. They seem like two different Talebs. If you hear him speak first, chances are you won’t be inclined to read him. Start with Antifragile. And, don’t bother to follow his twitter feed; you’ll see a permanent angry man annoyed with everybody, especially fools and people of mediocre intelligence. Trouble is those categories include almost all professions. But he is without doubt one of the most interesting living intellectuals.

Back to the topic of the minorities. He explains how a vocal, intolerant and energetic minority tends to impose its views. So far plausible. But what I found interesting when I read it first, was that in doing so they manage to make everybody believe that it is actually the majority view.

In his accounts, that applies to politics and religions, two of his favourite topics, once he has assassinated all academics.

In my view, this also applies well inside our organizations. I have written about it several times and certainly found in many Viral Change™, Design or Leadership programmes that I have led over the years. Somewhere in the system, at some magic point, a disaster declaration takes place: X is not working, leaders are terribly bad models, project Y is failing. There is always some small number of people saying that, often vociferous, certainly visible.

It does not take much for a semi-apocalyptic flavour to dominate, unless one makes a concerted effort to unpack it, often to discover that the massive failure of leadership and project was the opinion of three guys in a pub following a boring off-site. I am not kidding.

More serious and worrying is when a true minority, for example, a particular layer of management, declares a view of the world that is soon perceived as the universal reality. Count them and it turns out they don’t even represent 10% of the company.

The learning for me is that our conventional wisdom says that a sensible majority would always win in the end, whilst it is often exactly the opposite: Taleb-like, many majorities lose the plot. In the macro-social world and in our micro cosmos of the business organization.  The capacity of the minority to hijack the conversation and make it feel as a majority view is masterful. Good or bad.

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 ‘Better Way’ Webinar Series  – now available to watch on demand

Our first two webinars from this series are now available to watch on demand:

‘A Better Way to… [7]design your organizational structures to create a Remarkable Organization for the future.’

A Better Way to [7]…create sustainable large scale behavioural and cultural change across your organization.’

Do you have a ‘Chaos Monkey’ in your management system? You should.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Disruptive Ideas,Problem solving | No Comments

Many organizations have a Risk Management function of some sort. Often scattered amongst different constituencies: manufacturing, engineering, R&D etc. It is also embedded in Quality Systems, such as ISO. Financial institutions, or indeed financial functions within the company, will have some form of system. However, the variations in depth and seriousness are enormous. From well-defined  ‘stress tests’ imposed on banks, to a vague list of potential risks with no more than lip service paid to actions, and one can find anything in between.

In my consulting experience, outside the most standardised areas of operations, in this area of Risk Management, I’ve seen more lip service and bad planning than the opposite.

I have argued in these Daily Thoughts that companies need to devise their own routine ‘stress tests’, beyond the financials, to understand their adaptability and indeed survival. But I’d like to take this further and suggest that these ‘stress tests’ need to be formalised in the leadership capabilities.

A good model is Netflix’s ‘Chaos Monkey’ [8]. This is how the successful video streaming company, with lots of avant-garde organizational and management structures, defines their ‘Chaos Monkey’: ‘A tool that randomly disables our production instances to make sure we can survive this common type of failure without any customer impact. The name comes from the idea of unleashing a wild monkey with a weapon in your data center (or cloud region) to randomly shoot down instances and chew through cables — all the while we continue serving our customers without interruption. By running Chaos Monkey in the middle of a business day, in a carefully monitored environment with engineers standing by to address any problems, we can still learn the lessons about the weaknesses of our system, and build automatic recovery mechanisms to deal with them. So next time an instance fails at 3 am on a Sunday, we won’t even notice’.

I think we should hire some of these Monkeys, with proper job descriptions, and give them the formal role of generating some chaos to test our abilities and resilience. And, as in my previous Daily Thought [9], I am not talking software or technology but in day-to-day business: hiring, product recalls, sudden acquisitions, etc.

Before you make the expected and easy joke that you do already have these Monkeys in your organization, and they are sitting in Marketing, or Sales, or HQ, or, indeed you have some in your own team creating havoc, I’d like you to consider the serious ‘Chaos Monkey’ that I am talking about.

OK, end of playing with words. Do consider formal simulations of how you will cope with unexpected issues, and do extend this to the ‘soft aspects’ of your management, not just the hard ones.

Instead of cables and servers ‘a la Netflix’, imagine processes, systems, your human capital. Do you really know how many people you have ‘at risk’ of leaving soon, and, if you do, do you really have a plan for that.

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Do you know your REAL organization?

 

 

The organization chart tells you who reports to whom but not much else. But, who is truly connected with whom?

For many years the need to understand formal and informal connections in organizations has been well understood.  Now, we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

People will easily tell you where they get the information they need from. Sometimes they do this through informal channels that are not entirely visible.  We can help you identify those channels.

 

 

 

3CXcan [10] provides a diagnosis of your formal and informal connections 

 

3CXcan [10] uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for network cluster (community) detection, to give you a profound understanding of your internal networks. With this data you can built effective solutions for your organizational challenges. It is a diagnostic, not an action driven tool and it:

 

◦ Provides a picture: of the formal and informal organization and how effectively both operate.

◦ Reveals: organizational connections from strong to weak, to ineffective and broken connection.

◦ Gains insight: on the specific solutions and interventions required.

◦ Identifies: the individuals that will leverage change more effectively (ie champions).

 

Note:

 

To find out what the results from this process look like and how it can help your business – find out more. [10]

For a free virtual consultation or a short walk through our demo – contact us now.; [3]

‘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 [11] (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 [3]!

 

It all starts after the click!

I’m in [3]

Click away [3]

Contact Me [3]

Absolutely [3]

Sending details [3]

Forget robust and forget the tanks. It’s guerrilla and it’s gazelle/cheetah/falcon in the project team.

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

Renounce adaptation, robustness and even ‘flexibility’ in favour of ‘taking any opportunity to do things you think you could not do before’ (Rahm Emanuel [12]). And that means scary reinvention.

Adaptation is survival. Readiness in the new organization is preparedness for winning, for being ahead of the game, for reinventing. Call it as you wish, but it’s not adaptation.

It’s not robustness either. A rhino is very robust. And an elephant.

It’s not even flexibility, which is a form of sophisticated survival.

In the new organizational readiness, coming out of a crisis, of a tension, of an inflection point, is doing so by being much stronger than when the whole thing started. It is about creating a new baseline, a new normal, in which things are progressively much better, more sophisticated, more elevated, more able. That has nothing to do with robustness, flexibility and adaptation. The closest description for that ‘new readiness’ is Nassin Taleb’s [5] ‘antifragile’, a concept that his hypertrophic mind has not elaborated well on in organizational terms (see however ‘The Antifragility Edge: Antifragility in Practice’ Paperback – December 13, 2016, by Si Alhir)

Forget robust and forget the tanks. It’s guerrilla and it’s gazelle/cheetah/falcon in the project team. It’s continuous reinventing, not continuous improvement. I do not mean continuous reinventing of everything: business model, operations, strategy implementation. I mean, any next stage (post-crisis, post-challenge) is much better than the original. Any problem solving not only solves the problem but takes the organization to its next stage of possibilities. Never return to the baseline. The new baseline is higher, better, more sophisticated.

The four drivers for readiness:

  1. Rapid Reaction and Reconfiguration (RRR) [13]
  2. Focus on your ‘social algorithms’ [14] (non-negotiable behaviours)
  3. Build-in reboot systems [9]
  4. Renounce adaptation and robustness. It means scary reinvention

It’s a package. There is no guarantee that the package will solve your future, but without it, it’s going to be very difficult.

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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 [15] more information about these webinars.

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The Flipping Point [16] – 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!
Available from major online bookstores [17].
[16]

If you are not in crisis, reboot. Declare inflection points. That’s readiness.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,General,Management of Change,Organization architecture | No Comments

Some leaders are very good in a crisis. They may or may not acknowledge that, but the adrenaline of the crisis is fantastic for them. These people always explain to me the beauty of (finally) seeing employees aligned, super-committed, engaged, going the extra mile, taking accountability, collaborating across borders and achieving results in high performance mode. In other words, they are describing to me what the normal, non-crisis life of the organization should be. Pity you need to have a crisis to outperform.

But here is the trick. Don’t wait for the crisis. Create an inflection point in which you need to draw all those behaviours (employees aligned, super-committed, engaged, going the extra mile, taking accountability, collaborating across borders and achieving results in high performance mode). You need to reboot.

The organization needs ‘scheduled stress tests’, and leaders must be their orchestrators. This self-test, self-awareness, self-critical view, is vital for ‘readiness’. Again, don’t wait for a crisis. There are ways to do this. In our case, we compress a Reboot! Injection session in a day with a full leadership team. And this is often enough to launch ‘the stress test’.

The ‘if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it’ is wrong. If it ain’t broke, the break may just be around the corner, so don’t be complacent and reboot-‘it’, before you have to.

Readiness is not a concept, it is a state of action.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

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 [15] more information about these webinars.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

The Flipping Point [16] – 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!
Available from major online bookstores [17].
[16]

The real readiness trick is behavioural. The rest is commentary.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Critical Thinking,General | No Comments

The Four readiness drivers I have mentioned in previous posts [13] are:

  1. Rapid Reaction and Reconfiguration (RRR)
  2. Focus on your ‘social algorithms’ (non-negotiable behaviours)
  3. Built-in reboot systems
  4. Renounce adaptation and robustness. It means scary reinvention

I reintroduced  the Lego-Jigsaw/RRR dilemma. Next: all things being equal, I focus on behaviours.

It is so simple that it gets overlooked. Conscious leaders, when confronted by occasionally infuriating people like me, acknowledge: yes, we’ve done this, we’ve done that, but we have never looked seriously at behaviours. And yet, there is always a plethora of terms and semantic hooks: empowerment, ownership, openness, entrepreneurship or customer-centrism. Trouble is, none of these are behaviours. That is, these are not operational because they have dozens of meanings. They are the equivalent of trying to build a house and declaring that you need ‘materials’.

Behaviours (clear units of action within unequivocal meaning) may come in all sorts of forms and shapes but you need to be clear what they are. Behaviours are your ‘social algorithms’: if this happens, we do that; we would always do this, we will never do that; if X, then go to Y and solve, etc.

If these behaviours are clear, they should inform all processes and systems, not the other way around.

In the new state of readiness, the behavioural fabric is the competitive advantage. The more digitalised we become, the more analogue the social algorithms are. They are called human behaviours. The ‘master algorithm’ is behavioural.

The slack advantage: ‘The minute the future becomes unpredictable, efficiency can become your enemy’.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Critical Thinking,Management of Change | No Comments

An interview with Adam Pisoni [18], American entrepreneur and previously, co-founder of CTO and Yammer, brings back to my table the issue of efficiency. Pisoni is very articulate on this:

“Efficiency is great if you can plan for the long-term. If you know what you’re going to do for a long period of time, you can really get into the nuts and bolts of how to do it efficiently. (…) The minute the future becomes unpredictable, efficiency can become your enemy”.

Slack in the system is often seen as inefficient.

‘Slack in the system’ allows for experimentation, adaptation, rapid reaction and rapid ‘grow-post-stress’, the basis of the antifragile [19] concept. Innovation requires slack. You can’t have innovation without it.

The efficiency-innovation tension can be described as follows:

Efficiency requires predictable, repetitive, reproducible, reliable processes. Innovation requires the unpredictability of the answers.

Efficiency pushes for ‘zero defects ‘and ‘do it right first time’. Innovation pushes for trial and error, playing and prototyping.

Efficiency requires rational approach, logic, comfort of ‘making sense’. Innovation grows in irrationality, the unconventional and the contrarian.

Efficiency loves ‘closure’, the finished and stable situation. Innovation requires to ‘stay in beta’, the unfinished, the unstable.

Efficiency’s motto is ‘focus, focus, focus’, Innovation is crying for broad views, helicopter views and ‘connection of the dots’.

‘Slack in the system’ is a source of competitive advantage, to use business jargon. Pisoni quotes Zara, the Spanish clothing empire which runs manufacturing at maximum 80% capacity, to be able to respond on the spot to a new idea coming from any of the world outlets, and produce super fast a stock of product for testing.

Innovation and responsiveness requires slack. Slack is inefficient, for some people. A bit of inefficiency could save you. The minute the future becomes unpredictable, efficiency can become your enemy.

Readiness is the new capability (just don’t ask what for) and it has four drivers.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Critical Thinking,Management of Change | No Comments

The word ‘ready’ has at least 4 meanings in any dictionary:

1. Prepared or available for service, action, or progress.

2. Mentally disposed; willing.

3. Likely or about to do something.

4. Prompt in apprehending or reacting.

Our state of readiness in the organization is about all of the above. In ‘change management’ it is ‘change-ability’ instead of ‘change methods’. In military terms (and the term is very military) it means several levels of preparation for action. The US military, for example, has its Defence Readiness Condition (DEFCON) codified at 5 levels.

For us, in the organization, a ‘state of readiness’ has four drivers:

  1. Capacity for Rapid Reaction and Rapid Reconfiguration (RRR)
  2. Clarity on your ‘social algorithms’ (your ‘non-negotiable behaviours’).
  3. Built-in reboot systems; ability to declare inflection points when there is no crisis, and jump up to a next level of possibilities
  4. Renounce adaptation, robustness and even ‘flexibility’ in favour of that ‘taking any opportunity to do things you think you could not do before’ (Rahm Emanuel). And that may include scary reinvention.

All the above could be possibly understood under a generic label of agility, but the term has become too commoditised to pretend we all know what we are talking about. State of readiness is a platform, a structural and behavioural set that does not pre-empt a particular future. In fact, anybody who plans for a precise future will never succeed.

Let’s tackle (1), the RRR: Capacity for Rapid Reaction, which includes Rapid Reconfiguration. The stiffness of many organizations is alarming. Even for those which would not consider themselves stiff. The key to ‘reconfiguration’ is to have built in enough capacity to re-shuffle, re-organize and change gears structurally (a) without making a fuss and (b) without decreasing performance.

I have articulated my concept of a ‘Lego-Jigsaw’ dilemma before. In a nutshell, jigsaws are not reconfigurable. You have a piece missing, you have a hole, full stop. Also, you can’t use the same pieces that build a Magic Kingdom castle to create a Call of Duty street shooting puzzle. These are two jigsaws, not one. The Magic Kingdom or the Call of Duty. Pick one. Lego however is largely reconfigurable. It takes very little to dismantle the tractor and use the same pieces to produce a boat.

Many organizations are jigsaws: a set of inflexible and non-transferable pieces that, in re-organization mode, may require full scrapping and buying of a new one. Many reorganizations, restructuring and rightsizing of the immediate past have naively intended to produce a ‘smaller and leaner jigsaw’ by taking out pieces here and there. These organizations have achieved gruyere cheese status with lots of holes and funny smells. They don’t work. An agile, slim and leaner company is not a big one without some pieces. The future is not a jigsaw. The future is Lego. But we recruit for jigsaws, and manage the precise fitting of the pieces in the organization chart.

 

 

“You never let a crisis go to waste”.

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

This is the famous quote by Rahm Emanuel [12], who was mayor of Chicago from 2011 to 2019, and before that Chief of Staff to Barack Obama: ‘You never let a crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that, is it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before’.

He was referring to the economic conditions of the day. Today, the unexpected and unpredicted have once again knocked at the door.

‘An opportunity to do things you think you could not do before’ is not just a wonderful line, it is a whole Strategic Plan.

What if the company could change gears and think the unthinkable? After all, we would be in good company of other unthinkable things.

What if we scrapped all traditional ‘leadership development programmes’ and we started from scratch?

What if we did challenge ourselves to stop managing the inevitable and focus all our energies on the apparently implausible?

I will end this period with optimism … if we focus on ‘making it happen’. ‘It’ being all those good things that the organization can achieve, the enterprise can produce, the public sphere could accomplish. Let’s make ‘it’ happen.

However.

The enemy has a name: Passivity. Meaning, assume history is already written (read the way we do business, political directions, world change). If involvement and engagement have always been the key to ‘agency’, our ability to take charge, as opposed to have our destiny controlled, now is the time for a big dose of that. Let’s be agents, not receivers. Let’s start within the organization.

If  deep in you, you think all the laws of the firm are written, we’d better go fishing for a while, or on a sabbatical to Mars, until the inmates stop running the asylum. But, go and tell the children that we are doing that. Have the guts to write in your legacy: we did nothing. We kept calm and carried on. Not a good idea.

If this is the Era of The Unpredicted, we’d better get unpredictability skills.

The company that gets better and better after disruption, disorder or chaos.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,General,Leadership,Management of Change,Reboot! | No Comments

Nassim Taleb Antifragile [20] concept is perhaps one of the most attractive frames (conceptual, philosophical, practical) we have had recently. By describing antifragile as the opposite to fragile, versus, say, resilience, adaptation, flexibility or even agility, he has opened the way to understanding growth and organizational complexity. He is not an organizational developer [21] so his references to the organizational world are not as detailed or profound as in other areas. However, the doors are open. The subtitle of the book reads: ‘Things that gain from disorder’. That’s it!

A few years ago I was part of a panel discussion organised by the restless thinker and great business coach Sinan Si Alhir [22] (@SAlhir). I recommend to those unfamiliar with Antifragility to look for Si’s writings and, of course, to read the book.

One of the questions I had in my mind, which I shared with the audience, was, when in the organizational life is antifragility more, if not relevant, present or simply fundamental to understand the organization itself. I thought of three scenarios:

  1. Daily life itself! Hard this one. But the question injected by antifragility would be (my paraphrasing), for any adaptation, response, ups and downs, resilient behaviour, does the organization come out better and stronger or just coping with and ‘adapted’? You see, whilst adaptation and flexibility need to be part of the machinery, they are not strong enough in themselves to elevate the company to its next stage of possibilities. In more prosaic words, you can adapt and show to be flexible, and learn nothing.
  2. A crisis. A crisis is an (unwelcome) experimental situation where all energies get together, hands on decks and here we go. Again one could ‘just’ solve the crisis (and become proficient at it) or come out much better and healthier.
  3. An artificially created stress in non-crisis. What? Yes, in my organizational consulting work I submit clients to ‘stress tests’ to simulate resilience, learning, adaptation and… antifragility capacity. One of the ways we do this is to use our one day immersion (Accelerator) called Reboot! [23] where we put on the table, with no preparation by the client, 12 organizational variables that need to be addressed on the spot. It’s not a game (I don’t do business games) and it works marvellously!

The key is to explore what it would take to create an organizational DNA that has antifragility in it, that, by definition, makes the company stronger and healthier out of ‘disorder and chaos’, to use Taleb’s concept (read: challenges, crisis, disruptions, distortions, M&As, markets behaving badly and so on).

There is something important here for the new organization of the 21st Century and we need to keep exploring.

Is antifragility the new change?

If you need to parachute in help, send builders, not problem solvers

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Leadership,Management of Change,Transformation | No Comments

Parachuting in help is daily life in the leadership of organizations. It may take the form of sending leaders from outside the division, or internal consultants, experts, or external consultants. Or combinations.

Sending the ones with the answers is relatively easy. Fires are extinguished, anxiety is back to normal levels and the collective sense of accomplishment rules the waves. Crisis over. Next. Until next time?

If you need to send someone, send a builder. The one who takes the opportunity to rebuild something for the long term, to build capacity, to leave the scene not with a problem solved but with a root cause dealt with and fixed.

Builders are the heroes, solvers are the commodity.

 

I want companies with Post Traumatic Strength Disorder. Untreated.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Critical Thinking,Leadership,Management of Change | No Comments

Nassim Taleb’s [5] Antifragile book has this subtitle: ‘Things that gain from disorder’. This is a model for the new organization and its new management.

There are three types of organizations:

  1. Non-responsive, not reactive (to markets, to environment), rigid, tunnel vision and the rest. They sometimes are obsessive with comparing themselves with an obvious competitor, the boat next door, not realising that there is a full Regatta out there. This type is either dying, or in the Intensive Care Unit, or not feeling very well.
  2. The ones everybody talks about as the model: reactive, responsive, flexible, adaptable, resilient, with great plasticity, etc. “Flexibility’ is probably the most abused managerial term ever. But certainly this Type 2 are navigating well and competing with each other.
  3. There is a third type that includes the attributes of (2) but go beyond that: they renew and reinvent themselves; they seem to be ahead of the game all the time. A subset may be the ones that have suffered a massive attack (markets, environment) but have always come out of the fight stronger. Note that whilst Type (2) copes with adversity, and does well, Type (3) comes out stronger and healthier after adversity. They seem to ‘gain from disorder’ as Taleb would have put it. An Antifragile type therefore. This type (3) suffers from Post Traumatic Strength Disorder. It gets better and better all the time, not just restoring a baseline after hardship.

I want a number (3) please. But they don’t sell it in a box. You have to travel that journey. I think we have some idea of good maps, good CEO-explorers, good people, conquistadores and a decent toolkit for the journey. Just a bit scary, that’s all.

Talking about this journey is for another day. But as a reflection now, can we acknowledge that:

(a)  ‘Flexibility’ is not enough. Adaptation is short-term survival, so not enough.
(b)  ‘Robustness’ is a bad word. Too robust may take you to Type (1), you know the one that being so robust it forgot how to react.
(c)   Re-invention and renewal is the real driver, even if we are not quite sure about the right dose and pace.

Maybe, just maybe, if we have the Post Traumatic Strength Disorder in mind, we could ask ourselves, are we better off after ‘the crisis’, or just alive and well? How can we be ahead of the game next time, and next time? The question is the starting point.

Going back to normal, when normal is not waiting for us

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Behavioural Change,Change, Leadership and Society | No Comments
[1]

When on the road going back to normal, with catching up in mind, as if trying to find the old furniture, the old clothes, the old shoes waiting in the cupboard, we may find that the place is not there anymore. What happened to normal? We will feel cheated. Normal was not waiting for us.

Maybe that normal was not really normal, we will say, scratching our heads in consolation. We had smelled one or two abnormalities, after all. Maybe that is why.

Much better to put the energy into shaping what people often call ‘a new normal’ (a linguistic irritation that wants to be smart). A new house, the new reality, the new game, new space in the world. Better to shape a future, now that we can, than being given one later, one that we didn’t want.

This would be terrible: that we were distracted finding our way back to normal and we missed the fork in the road to that future. How did that happen? We did not notice, busy as we were travelling the old road back and imagining what normal had kept safe for us.

But normal was not waiting for us. How inconsiderate.

[2]

Back to normal is for true survivors. These are the only ones for whom normal is waiting. Normal will be kind to them. Because they need a space to breathe to keep going. We must respect them big time.

But, if you are anything like me, we are in part pseudo-survivors, maybe with a bit of impostor syndrome. We feel a bit guilty for occupying the same surviving space as the real ones.

It’s a crowded place around here.

Those who were never under any threat other than in their minds.

Those who were under some threat but they could control it.

Those who won a battle that they never fought.

Those who usually defend themselves against no attackers.

Those who suffered unsettlement, disruption, discomfort, even loss, but are still standing.

Those who were a bit scared, a bit worried, a bit shocked.

People like me.

A mixed bag. Who am I to catalogue?

[3]

We need to feed-forward. Not feed-back. We don’t need a thermostat. We need a compass. Move North or East or West or South, but never back to normal. Because normal is not waiting for us.

The so called ‘new normal’ (this thing is sticky) is for creators, makers, builders. Not for decorators of the same old room. Not going back to the pot of paint to finish the ceiling, that was left behind. And, when thinking about it, that dark blue was really horrible anyway.

[4]

For some of us, we can say that we are not on a Sabbatical.

We are not working from home. We are working at home.

We are not on pause.

We are not waiting for a reality that sits in the past.

We are not in suspension mode.

We are not in rehearsal for when we are back to the streets, kids back to school, when we meet again in the office, when flights take off once more.

There is no if, there is no green room, there is no intermission, there is no when. It’s now and next. And, you know what? I am beginning to see all sorts of possibilities!

Once in a generation we have a lot of blank space on the canvas. (And your chance to drop that dark blue, for goodness sake).

Granted, we don’t know what this terra incognita truly looks like, but one thing is for sure, it’s Hernán Cortés [24] all over, the ships are burning in the harbour and there is only one way, up the hills to explore and build.

Because normal is not waiting for us.

Like the Barbarians of Cavafy [25], (waiting for them, dressed in their best robes, preparing to impress them, but they never came, what are we going to do now – he says – those Barbarians were a kind of solution), this lock down is ‘the solution’ to our extreme ability to postpone.

But normal never waits. We only have its photograph.

 

 

COVID-19: From coping and adapting, to making things extraordinarily better. And surprising ourselves.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Behavioural Change,Character,Collective action,Purpose | No Comments

Nassim Taleb [5] has written about ‘antifragile’ as the quality of ‘growing from disorder’. He says that the opposite to fragile is not robust, but antifragile.

Translation: in a non-antifragile mode you address a crisis by adapting, surviving or coping.  You praise flexibility. Flexibility is getting yourself hit and bouncing back. More or less ready for a new hit. Think one of those punchbags or sandbags used in boxing training. Always back. But still the same punchbag, just a little bruised.

In antifragile mode you will try to come out of whatever critical situation stronger than before. You are not back to baseline. You are transformed. You are beyond predictions. And you surprise yourself.

What if we did that? What if we treated the coronavirus pandemic as a chance in a lifetime to surprise ourselves, surprise our colleagues, surprise our clients, surprise the market with our new ‘us’. Not survived, and tired, and happy to still be running, but unpredicted and unexpectedly better, fantastic, enhanced by a serious multiple.

It’s doable.

In praise of tension. Consensus as a permanent state in the organization, is a collective coma

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Backstage Leadership,Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,Collective action,Decision making,Leadership,Strategy | No Comments

The trouble with consensus is that it contains all the risks of poor thinking and all the possible cognitive biases, all in one. Yet, I am not saying we don’t need consensus, or that consensus is bad. We all have experienced the blessing of achieving it, and its anxiolytic properties. Something inside us is telling us, this is a good thing. But let’s try this.

If you start with consensus in mind as the uniquely desired outcome, your mind will try to avoid conflict as fast as possible. If you avoid conflict, you’ll miss the real issue very soon. You’ll be poorer. But perhaps happier.

When we reach consensus, we give consent to each other (this is the root): consent to agree, to feel good and proud, to feel that the debate was good, and, above all, that we are such great people who can achieve this, unlike the other terrible ones who are still discussing, and ‘can never agree’.

The role of the leader is to avoid consensus, not to create it; to make sure that there is tension, that people pulling in different directions can really pull. There is a false concept of leadership which equates leadership with conflict resolution. The leader in an organization is not a Chief Negotiator in Peace Talks. Tension is good. We need more. But we fear it, don’t like it, and we dress it up with adjectives such as ‘creative tension’. That, apparently, dilutes the toxicity a bit.

You may now be on the path of being perplexed reading this. I am stretching the argument by polarising the extremes. I am avoiding reaching an easy and early consensus with you. Please don’t agree with me. Not yet.

More. If you ran a product oriented organization, say, with Marketing, Sales, R&D and Manufacturing, you want each of these functions to be in tension, not in consensus. Sales wants as many forms and shapes and prices for the product as possible. R&D wants one that works. Marketing only the ones that sell. Manufacturing wants one version, one box, one size, one colour. The CFO wants the cheapest. Etc. If you start from consensus, probably nobody is doing a good job. Let the functions pull out. That is the only way to see, hear and feel the merits of each argument.

At some point, at some magic milestone, somebody, somewhere (hello leadership) has to put an end to tension and call a decision. The decision will be based on data plus judgement. The decision(s) may be individual, may be collective. That point of decision may or may not be equal to consensus. On the contrary the tensions may remain. But decisions are made. Here we go. Disconnect agreement from consensus at all costs.

The art of the leader is to navigate the tensions, not to suppress them, and to do so with imagination, humanity, respect, encouragement of openness, allowing displays of passions (not suppressing them) and making sure that everybody is at his or her very best. That is by definition messy. The leader needs to master the messy stuff to allow all expressions, all the tensions, and yet, maintain humanity and sanity.

And yes, for the record, there may be a healthy consensus! Consensus is perhaps at its best when it is a silent outcome with no label, a destination reached without knowing that you were travelling there.

The words consensus and agreement cannot be allowed to become the normal every day status. With the best of intentions, they may be the modern organizational barbiturates.

Create inflection points when you don’t need one. It’s better than waiting for the inflection points to come to you.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Corporate pathologies,Critical Thinking,Decision making,Disruptive Ideas,Leadership,Management of Change,Reboot!,Strategy,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments

Crisis are/constitute inflection points. Also M&A, extraordinary organic growth, relocations, and entering new markets. Keep adding. Pain is inevitable, misery is a choice, and coming out stronger and wiser the real, real winner.

At inflection points, new possibilities arrive at the door, wanted or unwanted. It’s not business as usual. It’s not extrapolation of the immediate past. Suddenly you are running out of toolkits. Energy comes from everywhere, by nature or by force. Adrenaline is up. Brains and hearts start to connect, en masse. It’s an inflection. It’s a fork in the road. You could go one way or another, but certainly not on the same road.

These are reboot mechanisms. Mechanisms of re-alignment, reinvention, perhaps (fast) renewal. If used properly, they add tremendous energy and possibilities. Some leaders have a habit of making them a pain. Then pain multiplies and you get misery. Other leaders will grab the opportunity and will launch a call to arms. Pain also may be inevitable here, but they avoid the choice of misery, and people look up, stronger.

I suggest that (1) inflection points are good and that (2) you should not wait for them, you should create them. 

Disturbing some status quo, injecting a time out, asking fundamental questions of purpose in times where these are not forced upon you, is very healthy.

The point of the inflection point is to go up the curve. To come out stronger, wiser, perhaps a bit more humble. But never the same as before.

A feature of the organization of the future, the one that has started a while ago, is the ability to reboot and perhaps self-reconfigure. Whether you want to call it vaccination against complacency (OK with me) or Innovation in the DNA (OK with me) or permanent (stay in) Beta [26] (I prefer this one), it’s all the same: inflect, inflect, inflect.

Don’t wait for the curve to come to you, you decide when abandoning the curve and go up.

Stay in beta

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Antifragile,Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Corporate pathologies,Critical Thinking,Disruptive Ideas,Ideology,Leadership,Management of Change,Reboot!,Strategy,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments

The traditional organization is, amongst other things, obsessed with closure.  It despises ambiguity and puts a premium on the absolute clarity of processes, systems and structures. It’s engineered on testosterone. Inputs produce outputs, and they’d better be good since all those inputs are so expensive!

It’s a military operation even when we say it isn’t. But even the military have discovered that the world around us is volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous. They have even a word for it: VUCA [27]. And if you are in this VUCA world, you can’t afford high levels of ‘uncertainty-avoidance’ (a classical cultural hallmark of many traditional organizations). That world is uncertainty in itself, so, to avoid uncertainty is to avoid the world around you. I thought many times that the military have become much better than us, i.e. people in organizations, at navigating ambiguity. The enemy is VUCA, it does not have the name of a country anymore, can you believe it?

In this moving target world (markets, competitors, technology, pace of creation/destruction, predictability of anything, Black Swans…), to have everything crafted, well structured, closed, finished, stable and strong, is suicidal. People with all the answers should be disqualified from holding leadership office. This is not in praise of chaos but more a call for a well organised, un-finished, un-settled, un-stable, not completely closed, imperfect organization, with enough room to manoeuvre and adapt at the speed of light.  I call this ‘Unfinished by Design’ or ‘the Beta Organization’.

If you want to succeed, stay in beta. Lots of alpha organizations are either dead or are not feeling very well.

I want companies with Post Traumatic Strength Disorder. Untreated.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Collective action,Leadership,lem solvingp,Management Thinking and Innovation,Organization architecture,Strategy,Transformation,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments

Nasim Taleb’s [5] Antifragile book has this subtitle: ‘Things that gain from disorder’. This is a model for the new organization and its new management.

There are three types of organizations:

  1. Non-responsive, not reactive (to markets, to environment), rigid, tunnel vision and the rest. They sometimes are obsessive with comparing themselves with an obvious competitor, the boat next door, not realizing that there is a full Regatta out there. This type is either dying, or in the Intensive Care Unit, or not feeling very well.
  2. The ones everybody talks about as the model: reactive, responsive, flexible, adaptable, resilient, with great plasticity, etc. “Flexibility’ is probably the most abused managerial term ever. But certainly this Type 2 are navigating well and competing with each other.
  3. There is a third type that includes the attributes of (2) but go beyond that: they renew and reinvent themselves; they seem to be ahead of the game all the time. A subset may be the ones that have suffered a massive attack (markets, environment) but have always come out of the fight stronger. Note that whilst Type (2) copes with adversity, and does well, Type (3) comes out stronger and healthier after adversity. They seem to ‘gain from disorder’ as Taleb would have put it. Antifragile type therefore. This type (3) suffers from Post Traumatic Strength Disorder. It gets better and better all the time, not just restoring a baseline after hardship.

I want a number (3) please. But they don’t sell it in a box. You have to travel that journey. I think we have some idea of good maps, good CEO-explorers, good people, conquistadores and a decent toolkit for the journey. Just a bit scary, that’s all.

Talking about this journey is for another day. But as a reflection now, can we acknowledge that:

(a)  ‘Flexibility’ is not enough. Adaptation is short-term survival, so not enough.
(b)  ‘Robustness’ is a bad word. Too robust may take you to Type (1), you know the one that being so robust it forgot how to react.
(c)   Re-invention and renewal is the real driver, even if we are not quite sure about the right dose and pace.

Maybe, just maybe, if we have the Post Traumatic Strength Disorder in mind, we could ask ourselves, are we better off after ‘the crisis’, or just alive and well? How can we be ahead of the game next time, and next time? The question is the starting line.