Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. ´A people´ don’t talk to ´B people´; if we create a C home for A and B people together, they will talk. However, the new C people look mysteriously as uncollaborative as before.

At the core of this flawed thinking is the idea that structural solutions solve behavioural problems. They hardly do. Structural solutions, such as a reorganization, can indeed be a good enabler of behaviours, even a temporary trigger. But these behaviours have a life of their own, their own mechanisms of reinforcement and sustainability. They need do be addressed on their own merits.

Another way to look at this is to say that the traditional, conventional wisdom sequence of ‘structure creates process and systems, and then behaviours will come as a consequence’, is the problem. The real, forgotten sequence is ‘behaviours sustain (or not) whatever process and systems come from new structures’. Translation: behaviours must (should) be in the system first, not as an afterthought, a by-product.

Translation 2: install behaviours first.

It is simply another version of the old ‘we will tackle A, B and C first, then, when done, we will deal with culture’. This way of thinking (culture as the soft by-product) has been very harmful to management.

So, for example, restructuring for collaboration, when not much collaboration exists, is bound to create lots of anxiety and not much new collaboration.

In behavioural terms, if you see a sequence in which behaviours are last, it is likely to have the wrong thinking behind it. If you start with ‘what kind of behaviours do I need to?’, you are likely to be on the right track.

If you want to hear more about how we can address your organizational challenges, please contact my team at [email protected]. We have capabilities in organizational/cultural/behavioural change, leadership, organizational design and more.

Your organizational life is more than the sum of management activities and solutions. We partner with you to create a smart organizational design and strategy plan that sits above your competitors and that all of your organization can refer to.

Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the WMD of change and transformation in organizations. I mean Weapons of Mass Diffusion.

Traditional management was established to work top down and through formal structures, such as teams and committees. More and more, the neat and innovative work is taking place outside the formal, hierarchical structures, in the informal networks of the organization.

Forming and nurturing relationships outside the formal structures is a new key competence for mangers and leaders, and for that matter, all employees. It’s not new, but the emphasis and the weight is.

But, in the last few years, we have gone a long way from seeing this intuitively and as an anecdote, to making it part of the leadership of the organization. It’s of course at the core of what is called ‘distributed leadership’. And it’s an engine far more powerful than the hierarchical one when it comes to shaping cultures, diffusing unwritten rules, copying and spreading behaviours, creating new norms, sharing and establishing new ideas.

Understanding and nurturing informal
relationships has become an
essential part of organizational leadership.

In the formal organization, you would not survive if you did not know the teams you have, their composition, their leaders, their goals etc. If you don’t have an equivalent for the informal organization (influencers, hyper-connected people, activists, mavericks, positive deviants, advocates, ‘who influences whom’ outside hierarchies– these are not the same, by the way), then you are missing at least three quarters of the game.

There are of course ways of identifying these informal, peer-to-peer networks and integrating them into the life of the organization. However, the formal organization likes swallowing anything. It’s a macro-phagocyte that will tend to corporatize anything that moves. And this is a life sentence for the peer-to-peer networks which detest the teamocracy of the formal system.

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If you feel that you are a bit behind in all this, or that it is all very well conceptually, but not sure what to do about it, well, the world is in front of you. I am pretty sure that if you start with some simple homework, you’ll dig and dig deeper. From first gear to fifth or sixth, it is all doable.

Start of course by reading about SNA (Social Network Analysis) and then explore possibilities. We at The Chalfont Project ^[4] undertake work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people through our Viral Change™ programme ^[5].

Let me share a piece of our own research that has just come up from the oven.

In a 1200 people, pan European company, in the financial sector, we have compared the power of the five person Leadership Team, in terms of messaging and engagement, reaching other people, with the power of the top five Viral Change™ Champions, defined as top influencers and hyperconnected in the organization.  The analysis has been done blind and anonymously. All staff were asked a series of seven questions to try to identify the colleagues whom they would trust and reach out to, in order to obtain some real information, or the ones who usually reach out to them for the same communication purposes.

We analysed three steps (or ‘degrees of separation’) that can be understood like the immediate layers of connections. One layer or step equals your immediate network, second step the connections of that immediate network, third step, the connections of those connections.

The results are revealing. By step one, the Leadership Team had a reach of 21 people whilst the Viral Change™ Champions  had 104. Step 2 (connections of the immediate connections) Leadership Team 100, approximately, and Champions 3 times more, around 300 people. Step 3, 250 for the Leadership team and 450 for the Champions. By step 3, the five person Leadership Team was able to reach (tap into) 27% of the workforce, whilst the five top Viral Change™ Champions reached 49%, almost half of the workforce.

The power of this data, gathered through the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is its inclusiveness (all people in the workforce participated) and its anonymity.

The results reinforce the well established principle in Viral Change™ ^[6]  that hierarchical power is limited when compared with the one of highly connected and influent people (Champions or Activists, in the Viral Change™ methodology). Of course these Viral Change™ influencers need to be found, identified and eventually asked for help to shape a cultural transformation of some sort.

Finding the real influencers inside the organization is vital to orchestrate a bottom-up, peer-to-peer transformation (‘change’, ‘culture’, new norms, etc). It does not get better than this. Many organizations naively think that this pool of influencers match existing pools such as ‘Talent Management’, for example. This is not the case. Inside the organization, the importance of particular individuals, not in the hierarchical system, is clear. Internal, influence of the few, is well and alive.

Backstage Leadership™ is the art, performed by the formal leadership, of giving the stage to those real, distributed leaders who have approximately twice as much power as the Leadership Team when it comes to influence, messaging and communications inside the firm. Similarly these influencers shape behaviours and culture.

Our data is consistent with Edelman’s Trust Barometer that places the category ‘people like me’ (peers) twice as high as the CEO/hierarchical power.

Burn those organizational charts! Other than being a sort of Google map for who reports to whom, they don’t say anything about the real organization. Social Network Analysis ^[7] does. Then, Viral Change™ takes over to shape a culture.

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Continue the conversation…..

Join me and my team for our final webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series as we look at collective leadership:

Build and enhance your collective leadership capabilities

At The Chalfont Project, we prefer the use of the term ‘practicing leadership’ to ‘developing’ it to emphasise the real life essence of leadership. So much has been written that the world is full of recipes and techniques, examples and role models. The rich plethora of available answers obscures the need to have good questions. Reflection and introspection seem like logical ingredients for being a good leader, yet our business and organizational life treats them as luxuries that have no place in our ubiquitous ‘time famine’. Busy-ness has taken over business and leadership has been commoditised to a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in organizational life than the individual and collective leadership capabilities.

Join us on 17th June at 1730 BST/1830 CET to find out more.

REGISTER HERE ^[8]

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Can we work on the collective and reward the individualistic? Well, sure you can, it happens every day. But it’s a bit crazy. The organization, the corporation, the company, is collectivist in nature. It is not a collection of units doing individual things. It’s a collective for a reason. It’s supposed to do things that the individuals on their own can’t.

The contribution to goals and outcomes has two faces. On one hand, there is the individual: things I am supposed to do, and only me. On the other hand, precisely because the individual cannot reach goals on their own and needs others, the collective collaborative, joining forces, is a primary engine. So far so good.

But we hire individualistic agents and we tell them to ‘work as a team’. OK. What’s that? The individualistic cum laude says. When they manage to learn to ‘work as a team’, we reward them for their individual contributions, so we are reinforcing the original idea. We are confusing the troops.

At the other end of the spectrum, everybody gets the same reward on a collective achievement regardless the individual contribution. Read, universal bonus.

Behaviourists would have a problem with either end of the spectrum. The universal reward may address a sense of belonging (‘we are all here together ’) but this is more romantic than real, in behavioural terms. In those behavioural terms, the strongest reward is the one in which the individual can see a direct connection between his individual contribution and an outcome. That outcome may be collective. The greater the distance between what I can do, personally, and reward, the weaker the reinforcement effect.

A mix is of course OK. Some general pool reward and a strong personal one connecting me and the outcome, may be a good combination. But be careful what you are aiming for, you may get it. Be careful what you are rewarding, sure you’ll get it. Reward everything, get nothing.

Next time you want a compensation scheme, you need a careful behavioural sciences approach. Let’s say that you need something to be done in strict collaborative terms. You need to reward the collaboration at least equal to the output. You may of course reward both, but, if so, collaboration needs to be stronger. So that it’s not about achieving X, but about achieving it by collaborating with A,B,C. Not rocket science, but we very often forget the ‘by collaborating’ when pretending that we are rewarding collaboration. There is a name for this: a very high dose of decaffeinated espresso.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[4], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ ^[5], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, 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 regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project ^[10] or email: [email protected]. ^[11]

Collaboration is behavioural, not a process or system. As a behaviour, it can’t be taught. It’s something that some people exhibit and other people copy. It’s Homo Imitans more than Sapiens.

If you want to create a collaborative environment, you would waste your time preaching collaboration. You need some good collaborators who collaborate and other people can mimic. Simple. If you don’t have any, you may have to import them, transplant them, inject them, parachute them in. It won’t happen otherwise.

Collaboration won’t come down from the sky. Unless you have a 10 or 20 year plan, you can’t afford a slow change in the culture. Not now.

These are other things you may want to do if you want to waste your time:

• A cultural assessment of the ‘readiness’ for collaboration
• An in-depth analysis of why there is not much collaboration in the culture
• A team building, or hundreds of them, that magically will trigger collaboration in a non-collaborative environment
• A collaboration training package
• Putting collaboration and teamwork in the value system, say you value them and then pray

Implant collaborative people who do things by collaborating. Be sure they are visible. If they have high social connections, bingo. Protect them.

Inject the practice, social-engineer it, if it did not exist, make sure people copy, create a critical mass, spread the behaviours, make collaboration normal. Then, have any discussion you want about collaboration readiness and why it was not there in the first place. Only then.

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Join me today  at the Organizational Network Analysis Summit 2020 ^[12].

Free, online event – 2pm GMT/3pm CET for my keynote on:

Connectivity, communication and collaboration in the organization under the global pandemic. The experience with the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform.

This free, online event is a unique opportunity to learn from international thought leaders about how networks of trust and data-driven insights can help you accelerate transformation across your organization. This pandemic has significantly challenged your organization, teams, work culture and workflows. Trust plays a key role in how your organization adapts to the “new normal” and how the crisis will affect the engagement and productivity of your people.

For more information on attending: 👉 ONS Summit 2020 ^[12]

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[4], 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 ^[13] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[10].

His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management ^[14], is available at all major online bookstores.

Many years ago companies started to say ‘we are organized into project teams’. Professional projectisation was the thing. Until it became commoditised and meant nothing. No project team was equal to another. One has project leaders with budget accountabilities and great autonomy, another was a bunch of guys who did not want to be there and wrote minutes. Anything in between. Who cares today? ‘We have project teams’ sounds like we have electricity. You don’t get on the front page saying that, in your company, you switch that thing on the wall and light is produced on demand.

My prediction is that something similar is about  to happen with ‘influencers’ . Everybody seems to have ‘them’. The proliferation of methods to find them and name them has contributed to it. Years ago, a not terribly well-respected, branch of Sociology called Sociometrics had some grasp of the real connectivity between individuals.  Today you have many providers of those tools.

At The Chalfont Project, our Viral Change^TM progammes use Social Network Analysis (SNA), because of its strong scientific basis and friendly commercial applications, the latter not compromising the former. It’s as good as it gets.

My non scientific analysis of the current usage of SNA to find influencers is as follows: 4 out of 5 companies who ‘have done it’, have no idea what to do with the findings. Shockingly, they have not done it anonymously or on an opt-in basis, which means that names of people have been known at least to HR/OD/L&D etc. You now have that elite group exposed to all, with no clear plans, but sent to an off sites to ask them to deploy Vision Success or Future 2020 or Alignment & Empowerment 2.0 or whatever the name of those ‘change efforts’ may have.

In a recent HR/OD conference I dared to say that the corporation has no right to unveil all that and ask people to ‘use their influence’ unless they have opted in anonymously; that being, a high influencer was probably not in the job description and not something for what people were paid for. They did not like it. Some people were convinced I represented the workers Unions (not an offense in its own right, but a proxy for obstructionism).

Besides the ones who ‘have done it’ but who don’t know want to do with it (I swear I am not kidding, these companies do exist), others have commoditised the concept and in the process have muddled it. You hear people talking about influencers and mixing up role models, talent management, volunteers, and, of course, champions or ambassadors. Companies now have ambassadors of this and that, like they have those switches on walls.

SNA, with its ability to map the real organization (that is, not the organizational chart) has untapped potential to discover how information flows, how knowledge and expertise is used, or, for sure, who are the highly connected individuals.

Using SNA and ‘finding the influencers’ must not become a HR/OD sport. It drives me crazy to see how we can easily kill one off the very few management innovations of decades. It seems like ‘Le beaujolais nouveau est arrive’, the new beaujolais wine has arrived, as we get every year from wine merchants, but in organizational version.

‘Identifying influencers’ is becoming something that companies do ‘because they can’. Bad management at its best.

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‘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. 

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The following line will short cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, start-up get-to-know, redeployment of people, culture integration, collective leadership build up, and any situation in which Peter, Paul and Mary need to start working together from somewhere zero, or below.

And this is perhaps after a restructuring, or M&A, or transitory team, new team, the mother of all task forces included. Also, anytime when you can’t afford low building of trust, slow development, slow diagnosis, slow ‘it will take months before we are a team’, etc., that is, never.

The line is: This is what I am very bad at, what about you?

And it’s plural, what we are very bad at; what this company is very bad at; what about you, yours?

The Old School Toolkit has a saying: we will take the best of A and the best of B in this new merged company. But this is a bad start. The best of A plus the best of B may still be crap. Also, the safe discussion of ‘the best’ tends to hide the bad and the terrible for months.

Take the ‘this is what I am very bad at, what about you?’ line upfront. As you can see, it is more than a line. It is an approach, an attitude, a whole jumpstart in a box.

The artist Alex Grey ^[16], somebody I confess I had not heard of until a recent article quoting him – for which I am grateful; unfortunately I can’t remember anything else from that article – said: ‘True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s’.

I think that this is a very good start to create ‘love’ in a reorg, an M&A, a whole restructuring. It should be a line and a quote for management. How about start loving fast?

In a new situation (and old ones) when Peter and Paul and Mary ‘now must work together’, the three of them bring their brains, their hearts, and with them, their skills and competencies. But they also bring their inadequacies, contradictions and flaws. At the top of leadership qualities, acknowledging our own contradictions must have a strong place. We all have them. Acknowledging them is a strength.

And I don’t have to tell you what that approach will do for trust: you’ll be see it rocketing soon.

The inevitable superhero (even if sincere) ‘this is what I/we am/are very good at’ is a starter built upon competition. My ‘very good’ is bigger than ‘your very good’, sort of thing. The ‘this is what I/we am/are very bad at, what about you? Points straight to humanity, collaboration, cut the crap, let’s do it.

Sure, you won’t see this in the Powerpoints of the Big Consulting Group Integration Plan. They never contain the how.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[4], 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 ^[13] on topics covered in his Daily Thoughts and his books ^[17], and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[10].

There are about 200 people in the organization.

1. But 10 of them at the top are very powerful
2. In fact, 5 of them are more powerful than others
3. There are about 50 people who really try hard
4. That does not include the powerful 10
5. From these 50, 20 do more work than anybody else
6. And 10 of them end up doing 75% of the work
7. About half of the workforce is disengaged
8. About 15 people are very well connected and highly influent inside the organization
9. More or less half of them are part of that pool of 50 who try hard
10. 10 are clearly sceptical and negative
11. Most of them are highly influent
12. 10 people always ‘get away with murder’ and achieve things by bypassing rules
13. 15 people in sales are untouchable because they deliver high performance
14. None of them are highly connected and influent, but they meet high sales target
15. 25 people are ‘chronic volunteers’: they put their hands up quickly and get involved no matter what
16. From those, about half are full of good intentions but not very efficient
17. 5 people are incredibly toxic
18. About half of the highly connected and influent are quite low in managerial ranks
19. 30% of people are really worried about money and personal finances
20. 15 people are thinking of leaving in the next 3 months

(1) I challenge HR and senior managers to tell me who is who. To put names into groups

(2) I challenge HR and senior managers to tell me what to do differently with each group, once people have been identified (if they have been identified)

We are running organizations with social blindness and rough metrics, not fit for purpose.

The performance-based categorisation (underperforming, contributors, achievers, stars etc) that is often the single categorisation we have in an organization, says nothing about any of the 20 segments above, with perhaps a couple of exceptions.

I sometimes think that we are running the game but we haven’t got a clue what’s going on with the players, and that, if tomorrow half of the workforce is replaced with Martians, nobody would notice.

Ah! Am I exaggerating? OK, so, could you answer the quiz in your own organization? What would you get? 10 out of 20? 5? 20?

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• How people truly communicate and collaborate with each other in your organization?
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• How well particular departments are connected with others?
• How the informal conversations take place in your organization?

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There is a romantic view of the organization that sees it completely borderless, inside and outside. Inside, this view says, there should be complete fluidity between all parts of the organization, certainly no silos, and, in the extreme, it is all about one single big network.

Who could say this is a kind of noble aim? We all spend a fair bit of time talking about, and expecting, fluidity of collaboration. Indeed, a major problem in many places is the lack of communication between departments, groups, tribes and clusters, so cracking this problem must be good.

And it is. But in many cases the direction of energy is misguided. People equate the push for cross collaboration with the dilution of identities. Consciously or not. So we want Marketing and Sales and R&D and Finance to be completely ‘aligned’, which in some cases translates into agreeing too much. In the extreme, the popular ‘one company’ philosophy, reaches in some cases extreme fluidity of communication, at the expense of all expecting to belong to one single worldview and narrative.

I am clearly exaggerating to make the point that collaborating across borders actually needs borders. The issue is not to kill identities and tribal groupings (part of the fabric) but to make them talk and work together.

In caricature, stretching the argument, I would say, don’t destroy the silos; just make their walls very thin so that the loud music from next door can be heard, even, dare I say, become unbearable. That perhaps will trigger a visit to the neighbouring silo to talk or protest. That is communication ‘across borders’.

There is an interesting social network study reported as ‘In social networks, group boundaries promote the spread of ideas, study finds’ (Katherine Unger Baillie, m.phys.org) that shows that completely open and fluid networks are not as good as clusters with boundaries (my expression) at promoting complex ideas. It seems as if those ideas could be completely lost in a theoretically boundary-less network. It needs ‘the tribes’ to make sense of these ideas and spread them. Referring to physical neighbourhoods, the study says: ‘But when group boundaries are eliminated entirely, people have almost nothing in common with their neighbours and therefore very little influence over one another, making it impossible to spread complex ideas’.

Translation for me: keep the borders (after all my TEDx talk some time ago was called ‘In praise of borders ^[13]’, but this was in the personal context of the self) and respect tribes and clusters. The effort is not in the dilution but their permeability.

We need the grouping identity and belonging (corporate tribes) which is the place where people find their commonalities with others, their differentiation.

When all organizational tribes (functions, divisions, sections, units) look the same, smell the same, feel the same and sing the same hymn, you don’t have an organization but a non-organization. Maybe a cult.

Borders are good. Just eliminate the passports and give permission to cross.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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• HOW INFORMATION FLOWS IN YOUR ORGANIZATION?
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• HOW PEOPLE WORK TOGETHER ACROSS DEPARTMENTS AND SITES?
• HOW WELL PARTICULAR DEPARTMENTS ARE CONNECTED WITH OTHERS?
• HOW THE INFORMAL CONVERSATIONS TAKE PLACE IN YOUR ORGANIZATION?

With 3CXcan ^[18], a simple to use online survey, we can tell you. We have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality. Find out more. ^[18]

Contact us now ^[10] for a free virtual consultation.

Stage 1: The Accidental Management team. The team is composed by whoever reports to the top. You are in that place, at that time? You are part of the management team. Period. Well, not quite a team but a juxtaposition of direct reports to the boss. The team members don’t talk to each other much (other than in meetings) because they don’t have to. The team is managed via one-one-ones, which the boss sort of likes. The team is a collection of binary relationships with the boss.

Stage 2: The Utilitarian Management Team: As above, but some alliances are formed and two or three members work together when needed, if needed, if they feel like it. That excludes the more useless members who are still consoled by the monthly one-one-one. Collaboration does exist, don’t get me wrong, but as long as I can benefit from somebody else.

Stage 3: The Maturing Management Team, SPAMETO model. The dynamics of the members are in all directions; cross collaboration takes place; all starts looking like a proper team. Small detail, everybody is equal but Some People Are More Equal Than Others (SPAMETO). Yes, Finance, Sales and Marketing dominate the airtime in meetings, whilst HR, IT and R&D look at emails in monastic silence. And I am committing here the sin I hate most. I am equating team and meeting. But, frankly, in the Stage 3, most activity is ‘in meetings.’

Stage 4: The Balanced Management Team. Cross collaboration and fertilization takes place. Performance is the focus. Everybody is contributing. everybody counts and everybody accounts. They may be ‘high performance’ or not depending on what you call performance. Well-balanced and high performance, is not a bad place to be.

Stage 5: The Leadership Team. There is a bit of jump here. Maybe more than a bit. The team leads the organization. The functional, operational and business representation is clear: as in Stage 4, there may be a CEO, CFO, COO, Head of R& D etc. But they have switched the ‘direction of the representational arrow’. They don’t represent anymore their areas into the company, they represent the company into the areas, the functions, business units, operations. No switch of ‘the direction of the arrow’ (in mind and heart), no Leadership Team, no Stage 5.

Stage 6: Collective Leadership. As above but members share the collective drive. They are interchangeable, with the only limitation of their skill base, not the area of ‘expertise’. The Head of HR may not be able to run Finance, but must be able to present to the entire company, if needed, the financial results or the budget. The Head of Finance may not be able to run HR, but must be able to stand up and articulate the Human Capital Plan for the company in full detail, etc. One of the tests for this stage is The Empty Chair Test. Mr or Mrs X, member of the team, has disappeared for 3 month to run an acquisition, or to look deep into a project, but nobody has noticed. The empty chair (functional, operational, or otherwise) is largely invisible outside the team itself. Mr or Mrs X job has been naturally absorbed by others, temporarily, and the sky is not falling at all. If this has happened, it is not because the CEO said so, but because the reallocation was spontaneous, natural, and with no fuss.

Not all management teams reach high levels. Not reaching high levels does not mean poor performance. How far to progress, what speed, where to target, are choices. But the conversation must take place.

(Copyright policy: please disseminate, copy, forward, print, use).

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Let’s Join Forces!

The team at The Chalfont Project  ^[4] are here to support you and your business.  We can deliver webinars, remote keynotes, masterclasses or round tables tailored to your organization – all designed by Dr Leandro Herrero.  Example topics include:

• leadership
• corporate culture
• internal influencers
• leading change
• employee engagement

To find out more or speak to us about your specific requirements, contact us now! ^[10]

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 ^[10] .

It could be argued that ‘silos’ are part of the human condition and group interaction, and Chris Rodgers (Informal Coalitions ^[19]) has argued this eloquently.

Silos have to do with borders, with identities, with focus of energy, with differences, with defence and success. Often we say that Marketing, Sales or R&D, for example are silos. When we say this we say it in a complaining mood. That articulation is hardly complimentary.

But whether this functional silo is a ‘good or bad cholesterol’ remains to be seen. It is only when you describe how people behave that the silo will become ‘good or bad’.

Very often management teams complain that there is no unified view of things, and this is because those functional silos are… silos. But, wait a minute, is Marketing supposed to do Sales, or Sales to do R&D? Is it the issue that they are supposed to (forced to) agree?  Sales wants 20 types of products and 20 prices; Marketing wants one product that can be sold and one campaign that can sell it; R&D wants a product that can be made. Yep, a caricature, but the point is, the functions are naturally driving their energy to different directions. Leadership is supposed to make sense and create a common purpose, not to suppress the differences. The leadership that always drives to a win-win situation (read, very often, compromise) is many times fostering a loss-loss one.

‘Bad silo’ is not the one that preserves the difference, but the one in which behaviours negate communication and sharing. When people are defensive, overprotective, excessively tribal and unable to see the ‘common’ idea, then they are in ‘bad silo’ mode.

‘Bad silo’ syndrome, by the way, is not solved by re-structuring, by putting all the silo people under one roof. If the bad silo DNA is strong, people will continue to silo-behave even if they are all now under one Vice President.

Surprise, surprise, it is behaviours, again, not structures.

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Thought leader, keynote speaker and author, Dr Leandro Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements. Find out more ^[13].

Leandro Herrero is frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide. He also speaks to Boards and Leadership Teams, participates in other internal company conferences as a keynote speaker, and is available to run short seminars and longer workshops.

The topics of Leandro Herrero’s presentations and workshops relate to his work as an organizational architect.

Each organization has specific needs to be addressed.  Contact us ^[20] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

‘People like me’ is a category in its own right in the Edelman Trust Barometer. Multiple sets of data point to this category being the highest source of trust inside the organization.

Translation: my mates, my colleagues, my peers, people who share similar worries about life to me, kids or football. Also, ‘one of us’. Call it as you want. It may or may not include the so-called friends in Facebook.

I am talking about this transversal, horizontal tribe, or tribes, I belong to, which have more credibility than official authorities. I play with this in my book Homo Imitans where I said it was ‘youth-to-youth, granny-to-granny’.

This horizontality of trust clashes with the verticality of our leadership.

• You can send 5 social workers to help a dysfunctional family, or enlist an ex-dysfunctional family to fix the problem. Ex-dysfunctional 5, social workers nil.

• You can preach and send messages from middle to old age priests, rabbis or imams to disengaged, disenfranchised youth, or you can engage people of the same age, positive youth, youth-to-youth. Young activists 5, clerics nil.

• You can bombard people in the organization, top down from the hierarchical system with calls to something (safety, accountability, execution) or you can craft and nurture peer-to-peer networks. Peer-to-peer networks 5, top down nil.

The world is horizontal. We think vertically.

The implications for leadership are enormous. ‘Looking sideways’ has a stronger traction than ‘looking up’. I always, always, always get push pack on this, saying I ignore the very hierarchical social systems of the world, where people look up for approval. All those patriarchal and caste-based systems, all those behavioural tapestries in which nothing is supposed to move unless approved by the authorities, elders, seniors and the rest. And that maybe true. People look up in those systems. But how they respond, is much influenced by their looking sideways, how other peers react, what ‘people like them’ do. If compliance is the norm, they will comply. If rebellion is, chances are they will rebel as well. Don’t underestimate the ‘looking sideways’ power.

This my PhD in psychology in one line. People behave the way they do for three reasons: (1) because they are told to; (2) because they want to, or (3) because other people like them do.

The entire traditional management system has been crafted around (1): telling people. The entire motivational/employee engagement system has been crafted around trying to make people behave in (2) mode: make people want to. In the process, people have forgotten (3): because others do.

And this is the best kept leadership secret/gem in front of us.

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Extract taken from my book The Flipping Point. ^[14] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[14] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read recent reviews on LinkedIn ^[21] and Amazon ^[22].

Peer-to-peer networks are dynamite. Teams are ground transportation, not Formula 1.

We still live in what I call teamocracies. Teamocracies are responsible for a great deal of the slowness of the place and it’s dismal innovation.

Have you got your copy ^[14]?

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Contact ^[10] my team for a diagnosis of your informal organizational networks. 

With 3CXcan ^[18], a simple to use online survey, we can reveal your formal and informal connections. We have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality. Find out more. ^[18]

Contact us now ^[10] for a free virtual consultation.

At some people’s request, I am revising an old Daily Thoughts on ‘solidarity’ in the work place.

Solidarity is one of those terms that can be used in many ways. It often brings a connotation of sympathy or an aspect of unity under threat, such as the 80’s Solidarity movement in Poland.

In traditional Catholic Social Teaching (a powerful set of loosely connected positions on social matters, solid, I insist, regardless of your religious beliefs), solidarity is about ‘valuing our fellow human beings and respecting who they are as individuals’, the website says ^[23]. The same website, that is,  in which some missing-the-point-completely webmaster has attached a picture of two high level bishops, a Catholic and an Anglican in forced ‘high five’, to the box of the definition of solidarity. I confess my embarrassment as a Catholic. A Catholic and an Anglican bishop in ‘high five’ mode is the last thing that comes to my mind on this topic.  I bring in the Catholic connotation because my original post was triggered by an invitation to speak at a Catholic forum and that forced me to imagine that ‘solidarity in action’.

Years later, it seems to me more pertinent than ever to go back to imagine a workplace where all those elements of unity, empathy, collaboration, cohesion and everything else in the thesaurus dictionary, could be at the core of culture. Yet, I don’t find many places (business organizations) where the term sits prominently in a value system, let’s say, compared with empowerment, ownership or accountability.

My hypothesis is that this is because empowerment, ownership and accountability are ‘things given to you’ (and taken or not), that is top-down created,  whilst solidarity is something that is not given to you, it is created by you and others, collectively, bottom up. And most value systems are dictated from the top and cascaded.

In any case, I am convinced that solidarity has more glue power than anything else.

In my previous, old Daily Thought I imagined what a ‘culture of solidarity’ may look like:

1. There will be a strong sense of interdependence in the place.  This is contrary to a culture of Social Darwinism, with excessive internal competition. ‘My safety is your safety’ or ‘my success is your success’, for example, would be wonderful examples of this achievement.
2. It will require a great deal of Social Intelligence: listening, putting oneself in other people’s shoes. Something organizations desperately need and that has become a topic of much conversation in recent years.
3. It will engender a sense of ‘the collective’. Suddenly, questions such as ‘who needs to know?’ and the subsequent action and sharing, will make real sense.
4. It will spread a sense of accountability and responsibility. You need to know what you and others are responsible for, to be able to contribute. Vagueness will not be supported.
5. It will also create awareness of the impact of my actions (of my work with others) on individual and collective commitments.
6. It will foster genuine co-operation, beyond connectedness. Connectivity per se is not collaboration.
7. It will go far beyond a defensive attitude (I can be hurt, I am likely to be a victim) to reach the proactive ‘we are all agents (of our destiny) here’.
8. It won’t feel like ‘theory’ or just good works. It will be action (the word activism contains the word act).
9. It will require authentic leadership that supports all of the above.
10. It will generate trust. Vulnerability is OK—‘I won’t be punished, we are all in this together’.

So there you are. Solidarity may be the above package; far more than people with placards. ‘We are all Charlie ^[24]’ is a show of sympathy. ‘We are all in this together, we depend on each other, and we act collectively, without organizational chart barriers’, may be the expression window of a  ‘solidarity culture’.

If you have one of these, you have a community, not a company. And this, believe me, it’s not bad at all.

Or should I say, tremendous, it is tremendous. #tremendous.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation…..

Thought leader, keynote speaker and author, Dr Leandro Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements. Find out more ^[13].

Leandro Herrero is frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide. He also speaks to Boards and Leadership Teams, participates in other internal company conferences as a keynote speaker, and is available to run short seminars and longer workshops.

The topics of Leandro Herrero’s presentations and workshops relate to his work as an organizational architect.

Each organization has specific needs to be addressed.  Contact us ^[20] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the WMD of change and transformation in organizations. I mean Weapons of Mass Diffusion.

Traditional management was established to work top down and through formal structures, such as teams and committees. More and more, the neat and innovative work is taking place outside the formal, hierarchical structures, in the informal networks of the organization.

Forming and nurturing relationships outside the formal structures is a new key competence for mangers and leaders, and for that matter, all employees. It’s not new, but the emphasis and the weight is.

But, in the last few years, we have gone a long way from seeing this intuitively and as an anecdote, to making it part of the leadership of the organization. It’s of course at the core of what is called ‘distributed leadership’. And it’s an engine far more powerful than the hierarchical one when it comes to shaping cultures, diffusing unwritten rules, copying and spreading behaviours, creating new norms, sharing and establishing new ideas.

In the formal organization, you would not survive if you did not know the teams you have, their composition, their leaders, their goals etc. If you don’t have an equivalent for the informal organization (influencers, hyper-connected people, activists, mavericks, positive deviants, advocates, ‘who influences whom’ outside hierarchies– these are not the same, by the way), then you are missing at least three quarters of the game.

There are of course ways of identifying these informal, peer-to-peer networks and integrating them into the life of the organization. However, the formal organization likes swallowing anything. It’s a macro-phagocyte that will tend to corporatize anything that moves. And this is a life sentence for the peer-to-peer networks which detest the teamocracy of the formal system.

If you feel that you are a bit behind in all these, or that it is all very well conceptually, but not sure what to do about it, well, the world is in front of you. I am pretty sure that if you start with some simple homework, you’ll dig and dig deeper. From first gear to fifth or sixth, it is all doable.

Start of course by reading about SNA (Social Network Analysis) and then explore possibilities. We at The Chalfont Project ^[4] undertake work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people through our Viral Change™ programme ^[25] and now we can help your business too, with our 3CXcan. ^[18] This online survey which uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for social network detection, will give you a profound understanding of your internal networks.

With 3CXcan ^[18] we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

3CXcan  is a diagnostic tool which:

◦ 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)

If you want to know your REAL orgaization and be able to break down silos, identify collaboration barriers, unite your organizaton after a merger and more, then 3CXcan is your solution.

To find out more or book your free virtual consultation for a short walk through our demo – contact us now! ^[18]

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Don’t miss it – our final webinar of the Feed Forwards series TOMORROW – 18:00 BST/19:00 CET.  

During Covid, digital has taken the lead with remote working, virtual events and more connectivity, but have we become more collaborative & how do we keep the human factor?

Join us for this webinar on High Touch and High Tech in the Digitalization Era. It will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.

Register Now ^[26]

I was told, many years ago, by somebody very close to the old Microsoft management, in Bill Gates times, that they had a layer of around 70 VPs, below Gates, that people called ‘The Volunteers’. They called them like that because they had made so much money, that they didn’t need to be there. If they were there, and showed up every day, it was because they chose to be there, that is, they were ‘volunteers’

Since then, I have been using this metaphor to explain the ultimate goal of Employee Engagement. It does not get better than aspiring to ‘a company of volunteers’. And I am not talking about  the 70  MS VP style. It’s a powerful anchor. Some people may think that it is a bit naïve, or unrealistic, but it draws the attention to what people’s real authentic engagement may look like.

Not a long time ago, these ideas were dismissed by a senior HR person of one of my clients: ‘Everybody is a volunteer; everybody has a choice, if they don’t like it, they don’t have to be here’. And it sounded to me as if she was saying ‘Don’t you see it? This is not North Korea’. It was a facile, arrogant dismissal, and it missed the point…

Studying the dynamics of volunteer organizations should be part of the curriculum, formal or informal, instructional or ‘real life’, for anybody in leadership. All the ingredients of empowerment, motivation, collaboration, control and autonomy are often very quickly found in these organizations.  They are very vivid. When I tried this with a UN Refugee Organization, I learnt for example how normal it was to run the NGO with little control at the top and full empowerment of people on the ground. They had no other choice! And they mastered that.  Not the case for our standard business organizations!

I have suggested more than once to leaders, to literally embrace this as their number one Personal Goal.  Explicitly, written down: “I will lead a company of volunteers’. Just the thinking behind this idea, the effort required to understand what it would take, what would need to change, what would be the barriers to this company of volunteers, what ‘employee engagement’ might mean, and what that organization might ultimately look like, is well worth the effort. Imagine it! I suggest you try it.

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Let’s Join Forces!

If you’re enjoying our Feed Forward Webinar series ^[15] (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 ^[10]!

It all starts after the click!

• A similar webinar tailored to your organization can be delivered to your company for an in-house audience. Would you consider it?

I’m in ^[10]

• The presenters are available for a remote keynote or masterclass on the series topics. Would you be interested?

Click away ^[10]

• To discuss how these ideas can be applied within your organization, all you have to do is to let us now. Click here and we will be in touch.

Contact Me ^[10]

• We can organize a virtual roundtable for you on the topics specially tailored to you. Do you want to explore that?

Absolutely ^[10]

• If you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero, please give us your details here.

Sending details ^[10]

Peer power: if managers say, ‘safety is first’, the impact may be relative. The dictation is totally expected. This is what they are supposed to say. If my peer says, ‘safety is first’, I’m beginning to pay attention. It’s not expected, we were talking football and holidays. (what is the matter with him?) But I hear it. Tell me more. Peer-to-peer is stronger than managerial top down.

Peer power: If managers say, ‘safety is first’, the impact may be relative (…)  If my peer says, ‘safety is first’, I’m beginning to pay attention. Peer-to-peer is the strongest source or engine of change and mobilization inside any organization.

I believe that most silo problems have names and surnames

Stop complaining about silos between divisions. Computer screens are the new silos. If you amalgamate non-collaborating silo A with non-collaborating silo B with the hope of creating a collaborating non silo C, good luck. People will bring their screens with them anyway.

Stop complaining about silos between divisions. Computer screens are the new silos. Most structural solutions (amalgamation of divisions or groups) are a response to behavioural problems (e.g. lack of collaboration). Entire re-organizations, with hundreds of people disrupted, are triggered by very few people being the problem. The so-called Big Collaboration Problem between Marketing and Sales can actually be traced back to Peter, Head of Marketing, and Mary, Head of Sales. The rest have no problem but are forced to migrate with their screens. I believe that most silo problems have names and surnames.

Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. ^[14] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[14] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review ^[21].

________________________________________________________________________________________________

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

Join our second thought-provoking webinar in the series. This week – can we MRI the company & diagnose its health in terms of internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? Yes we can.  Join Leandro Herrero ^[27], Marieke van Essen ^[27] and Carlos Escario ^[27] on 2nd July – 18:00 BST/19:00 CET – to learn how 3CXcan provides this analysis using the highest scientific principles of network sciences.

Bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.    REGISTER NOW! ^[27]

The snap shot of the company as pictured in an organizational chart, is probably one of the most fictitious works of management art.  Yet, it is a map of power and control that perhaps, in many cases, needs to be shown by the HR Cartography Department.

But the idea that the static display of boxes, reporting lines, solid or dotted, tells us anything about what is going on, is very naive. I don’t think many people would see it differently.

To understand what is really going on, you have to have a ‘live organizational chart’ and that could only be achieved with a live social network analysis.

For all technological advances we have at our disposal, we have a fairly prosaic, rather boring and uninformative ‘thing’ called an organization chart as a ‘representation’ of the company.  For example, it tells us nothing about three vital, fundamental components of organizational life:

Unwritten rules. The organizational chart may point to the written ones and only in so far as they are connected with the mechanism of power and reporting lines. For example, whom to escalate a problem. But not even when.

The natural influencers. The organizational chart is blind as to where in the organizational network a particular individual sits. There is no correlation between a hierarchical system and an influence system. Mrs Jones running the mail room may have three times more (cultural) influence and connections than Mrs Smith running the Strategic Unit.

The tribes. Every organization has tribes. Some are functional, and they may have their own organizational chart: IT, Operations, Finance etc. But many powerful tribes are not functional and they don’t have ‘their chart’: the youngest, the part-timers, the remote workers, the newly-acquired, the ‘women in leadership club’, the smokers or the runners/gym-lovers/wanting-to-die-healthy people. And if you don’t know about your tribes, or don’t know what to do with them, please note your Sabbatical has ended, come back.

The organizational chart is that lonely artefact that corporate archaeologists will find and frame, a relic from the divisional and Fordian organization, a Guide to Bosses for Dummies.

Although the reports of its death have been grossly exaggerated, the practice of  management as ‘organizational chart reordering and reshuffling’, is today in a rather poor state of affairs.

I despair when I see reorganization announcements solely based on new power distribution, or that say little about the possible excitement of the new structure in favour of that new chair showroom.

Some press releases are new furniture brochures, the new chairs and sofa collection. And a few beds.

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THE COMPANY IN A MRI ^[27]

Are you ready to do your organization health check? A must for the well-being of any organization. Join the conversation with us this Thursday July 2nd for our 2nd thought provoking Feed Forward webinar with Leandro Herrero ^[28], Marieke van Essen ^[29] and Carlos Escario ^[30] from The Chalfont Project ^[27]. 18.00 BST, 19.00CET. Register Now! ^[27]

Can we have a sense of the reality of communication, connectivity, and collaboration inside the company, a real sense, without simply using assumptions, or taking for granted what we see at face value?

Maybe get confirmation bias out of the window and have a good diagnosis of what is going on, whether we like the outcomes or not. It can be done. And it may save you millions in reorganizations or reshuffling that may not be needed. Or, yes, it validates your intentions.

Let’s put the company in an MRI and find out so that any course of action is informed. (Would you have an operation without X-rays and perhaps MRI?).

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 ^[14].  Read a recent review ^[21].

Our traditional management education has almost 100% focused on the formal organization, the structural fabric of teams, divisions, groups, committees and reporting lines. The informal organization, often also called the ‘invisible organization’, has always been a ghost: you know it’s there but can’t see, can’t manage, can’t measure, so I don’t do anything about it. Not many years ago many leaders considered the informality side as a waste, a detractor from the core and formal, that is, doing your job. It seems yesterday when a friend of mine, a very successful business owner, spent a lot of time writing (hand writing for his secretary to type) memos to staff about how not use email for personal reasons, or the internet for that matter. Forget that online shopping and Ticketmaster deal. Not in his company.

Today, the role of the informal organization is more recognised. But still it is important to remind ourselves of what the informal social networks inside the organization, the web of connections, the largely (but not totally) invisible side does, and why it is inexcusable for leaders today to ignore it, or even treat it as an anecdote.

1. Connectedness (= network) Obviously! The issue here is fluidity. Informal social networks inside the organization could become non fluid if you attempt to formalise them, ‘convert them into a team’ or corporatize them. They then become clubs (women in leadership, expats) which have their own utility, but they are not strictly speaking an informal network. The real connectedness dwells in the informal organization, well above the ‘forced connectedness’ of teams and task forces.
2. Information traffic and communication. The travel, the social life of information, uses two highways: the top down hierarchical system of communication (the pipes) and the informal network (chatter, rumours and all versions of Chinese whispering). You can’t exercise a role, or example, as Internal Communications without mastering the social life of the rumour. So you need to know how the invisible organization works.
3. Clustering. In the internal social network, people who know/does/did X, also know/do/did Y. There is an entire social cartography that can be considered. The informal organization loves clustering. Find an element, chances are you’ll fine the others. It’s ‘people like me do this’.
4. Listening. Receiving feedback. The informal organization/internal social networks are very good at listening and closing the loop with people. If you see the organization as a listening organism, then you need to focus on the informal organization, not the structural and formal of teams and committees. What the formal organization hears is then listened to in the informal one.
5. 24/7 Q&A. The informal organization is a 24/7 Q&A system you can tap into. The 24/7 Q&A knows no boundaries. The fluidity and use of the informal organization and its clusters of (informal) social networks allows for the bypass of a formal ‘expert system’. It is literally a ‘can anybody tell me about X?’, assuming that everybody is a possible ‘expert’. You don’t need to catalogue them anymore.
6. Ideas generation/crowdsourcing. Tapping into intellectual capital, idea generation and fast idea qualification requires the entire network. Internal crowdsourcing is only possible if the fluidity of the social networks is respected.
7. Ties. The social network is the generator of ties, strong or weak. The more weak ties, the greater the potential for innovation. Strong ties are more predictable (you already guess what your team members John and Peter and Mary are going to say) and less good for innovation. The informal network hosts the weak ties, which are often the most powerful ones.
8. Social capital. The network is a constant creator of relationships, a self-configuring one. It is therefore the strongest social capital builder; social capital defined as the sum of qualitative and quantitative relationships.
9. Host of conversations. The true conversations take place outside the straitjacket of the team meeting.
10. Stories. The informal organization is a big campfire for stories to be told. Their nodes in the informal organization (you and me) are raconteurs. The employees in the formal structures are more on the information traffic side.

Leaders should be curators of the informal organization, masters of the invisible world and keepers of the fluidity, avoiding any attempt, from anybody, to corporatize or formalise it. It is the art of unmanaging to reach full potential.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

THE COMPANY IN AN MRI ^[27]

Can we have a sense of the reality of communication, connectivity, and collaboration inside the company, a real sense, without simply using assumptions, or taking for granted what we see at face value?

Maybe get confirmation bias out of the window and have a good diagnosis of what is going on, whether we like the outcomes or not. It can be done. And it may save you millions in reorganizations or reshuffling that may not be needed. Or, yes, it validates your intentions.

Let’s put the company in an MRI and find out so that any course of action is informed. (Would you have an operation without X-rays and perhaps MRI?).

Join Leandro and his team on July 2nd, at 18:00 GMT, 19:00 CET for the second Webinar in the Feed Forward series (back to normal may be tricky, normal is not waiting for us). Register now! ^[27]

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 ^[14].  Read a recent review ^[21].

The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was defined by inhabiting and dwelling within an area defined by the walls of the castle. The new view of the organization is similar to the concept of a modern city, where citizenship is defined by moving around a network of communications (in multiple directions with multiple connections) with very permeable borders, if any. Nodes in this network are both destination and point of departure at the same time.

The ideogram of the old city is the enclosure; the ideogram of the old organization is the organization chart.  The ideogram of the new city is the underground map, the rail network or the highway chart; the ideogram of the new organization is the network.

The citizen of the old organization lives in a box on the organization chart, only occasionally getting out of the box to talk to another resident in a bigger box called ‘team’.  The citizen of the new organization is a rider of the network, moving around and talking to other loose connections, some of them with stronger ties than others. Three ‘B’s reign in the old organization: boss, boundaries and bonuses. Three ‘Is’ reign in the new organization: influence, inter-dependence and innovation.

Having acknowledged that the hierarchical organization with its functional silos (which can be visible in companies of 5,000, 500 or 50 employees) had a bit of a problem in cross-communication, but not willing to kill the power silos altogether, the invention of the matrix as a cross-functional way of working was inevitable. It became a language key (we have a matrix system) and a clever hierarchical plot (I have two bosses: one local the other global). And the matrix became a very, very large petri dish for team meetings.

It was invented as a way to force people out of their dwellings to work together with other people (who were also forced out of their own dwellings). It sometimes seemed that the conversation between them was just temporary and just long enough for somebody to look at his watch and exclaim: “Oh, my God, so late already! I need to get back, bye!” And back to their boxes they went…

Let me make a blunt statement. We don’t need more team players. We need riders and navigators. Big time! Riders of the network navigate through connections inside and outside the organization. They lead from their own connectivity and ability to imagine their world as a vast space, mostly undiscovered. They are relationship builders, not team builders. They may not have a problem with teams and may even belong to some. But they tend to regard teams as the new silos.

Riders have meetings as well: 365/24/7 meetings. They are ‘meeting up’ all the time. It is their very ‘raison d’être’. Riders want networkracy, not teamocracy. These new leaders will take the organization to territories where ‘the answers’ might be found and will do so via relationships, not through processes and systems. They are socially intelligent: a rare characteristic, often invisible in many layers of management or even in top leadership.

This is how you advertise for Riders:

-We’ve done the team stuff. We have lots of them and they operate quite acceptably, thank you.

-Before we implemented the matrix, we had seven divisions and seven silos. After implementing the matrix and creating the multidisciplinary team structure, we have seven non-silo divisions and 35 new team silos. We never solve the problems here; we just trade off between them.

-We are looking for (socially intelligent) people able to establish a web of both internal and external relationships. Management has promised to keep a relatively low profile and let them roam relatively freely.

-We acknowledge that, from time to time, we will have the temptation to declare some of them ‘a team’, but we promise we will refrain.

-We are looking for people who can demonstrate they can build relationships.

-We have a special interest in people who founded a club at 11, created a football team at 17 and put together a bunch of friends to explore the Amazon at 21. Or something like that.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Can we MRI the company & diagnose its health in terms of internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? YES we can. Join Leandro and his team for our next webinar on 2nd July – learn how 3CXcan provides this analysis using the highest scientific principles of network sciences. Register now! ^[27]

In the current environment it’s important to base the recovery and the post Covid-19 organization on a 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. Join us! ^[27]

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 ^[14].  Read a recent review ^[21].