Yesterday’s Daily Thought ^[1] introduced the formula:

(1) Space in the World (Purpose) + (2) Core Beliefs + (3) Non negotiable Behaviours + (4) Organization Logic (Basic People Algorithms) = (5) Company Constitution

What is the Organizational Logic? It is the set of People Algorithms that constitute the basic Code under which the company needs to operate.

Example of the algorithm: ‘If there is problem in A, it is solved in A and not escalated to B, unless X happens’. Rule: an algorithm needs to fit into a maximum of two lines. These are like the code of the operating system. Rule 2: you must have a maximum of 10 algorithms in the company. In a large set up you may need some extra for specific areas, but you should never go beyond 10-15 basic algorithms. If you find yourself going that way, you are writing literature, not grammar.

No, this is not the complex ‘governance’ structure usually reserved to describe ‘who does what’ and who is allowed or expected to make particular decisions, a Rights System. The algorithms sit lower than that, underneath it all, at DNA (values, non negotiable behaviour) level. Organizational logic is to Grammar what Governance is to Literature.

To reiterate, ‘If there is problem in A, it is solved in A and not escalated to B, unless X happens’ is an algorithm. ‘All projects in Product Development are reviewed every month at a Product Review Committee, whose members are F,G,H’, is governance.

What is the connection between beliefs and the logic? In the example above, the belief is that people should be empowered (and that people will accept the empowerment) to deal with ‘A problems’. An opposite belief is, ‘we don’t trust people to do that, so we promote escalation’.

In an escalation system of beliefs, everything goes up and ends up with the Board. Or it does not. Interestingly, escalation cultures create their own unintended consequences of self-defence. Knowing that everything escalates, secrecy and ‘protected bubbles’ appear, and subtle (or not that subtle) conspiracies of silence are generated. Example: the banks. Ok, some banks. Despite their monolithic appearance to mortals like myself, many banks are organised in tribes: ‘the traders desk’, ‘the retail group’ etc. Many recent big fiascos have taken place at ‘trading desks’ that self-protected themselves (as good tribes do, after all, it may be you next time) and they ‘did not escalate’ issues or dealings in ‘grey areas’.

Spending time and investing serious leadership efforts in establishing ‘The (Organizational) Logic’, shortcuts months of alignment in the maturity curve. Usually it all starts with ‘it will be impossible to write the Logic down’, or ‘there will be dozens, if not hundreds, of algorithms’. Once a bit of settling in has taken place, this upfront panicking reduces and people progress, with joy, to the discovery of the very few lines of ‘code’ that should inform everything.

Next is ‘Non Negotiable Behaviours’.

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If I had a say in new roles for large organizations, I think I would establish this new Division:

• VP of Simplicity
• Directorate of Waste Disposal
• Noise Reduction Unit
• Revolving Door Ideas Breaking Squads

Just kidding. The last thing we need is another armoured Division in a divided organization.

But the principal is still nagging me. A lot.

In many organizations I know, the enemy is within. It’s called self-inflicted complexity. And that self-inflicted complexity is often justified by the real complexity of the business, the environment, the operations.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Waste (of time, of ideas, of hope) accumulates.

Noise (rumours, second guessing, sense of apocalyptic events just around the corner) increases. In some big cities, traffic has been banned due to pollution. Corporations take note, it’s not about the level of sulphur dioxide or carbon monoxide in the air, but the other pollution: negativism, procrastination, and monkey-passing amongst other toxic particles.

And you might have noticed that some issues never go away, they disappear briefly through the door, but come back through the other side immediately. It’s a revolving door. They refuse to go. Like some consultants. (A very funny client told me once that they had finished a long time ago a big mother-of-all-restructuring projects via that Big Consulting Company, but the consultants were still in her office).

There is an alpha-men-and-women busy-ness that shows how important we all are, and how difficult the issues on the plate are, and how many stakeholder-constituencies-people to please we have to consider. Frankly, in some cases it feels Herculean.

However.  Is it?

The problem with self-inflicted complexity is that one is so busy dealing with it that we miss the real objective complexity. Then we add the salt and pepper of noise and recycled items, and the entire company becomes a gigantic HiFi. If the aliens are listening and looking for clues, they will surely receive those signals and noises from our corporations, all packaged in one (since we have lost the capacity to distinguish between signal and noise).

Mmm. On second thoughts, maybe that VP office is not such a bad idea.

Reality is complex, but organizational processes need to go on a diet, so that humans can actually talk to each other.

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For more insights and thought-provoking discussion WATCH our free on demand webinars led by Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organization architects. 

 

‘A Better Way’ Series ^[4]

This series explores the future of organization life. We will explain how the 3 Pillars of The Chalfont Project’s Organizational Architecture – smart organizational design, large scale behavioural and cultural change and collective leadership – work together to create a “Better Way” for organizations to flourish in the post-COVID world.

 

Feed Forward Webinar Series ^[5]

In this series, Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of Organization Architects debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[6], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change, ^[7]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 regularly invited to speak at global conferences and Corporate events – to invite Dr Herrero to your event you can find out more here: Speaking Bureau ^[8] or contact us directly at: The Chalfont Project. ^[9]

There are hundreds of pieces of evidence including serious research that show that human beings (and animals for that matter) who don’t feel they have some control over their lives suffer all sorts of consequences, from anxiety, to depression to physical (‘psychosomatic’) problems. That has always sounded to me as a hypothesis with an easy life. Not that hard to prove.

Note I said ‘feel’ which is not the same as actually ‘have or have no’ control. Also, I slotted in another keyword: some.

There is also a lot of data that suggests that our personalities may trick us in that respect. Some people feel that they have a more or less ‘fixed’ programme (whether IQ, circumstances, historical/family baggage) and others feel they can change circumstances, and are not dominated by them. In old Psychology we used to call this internal (it’s in my power) vs. external (it’s not me, it’s my circumstances) ‘locus of control’. More recently, Stanford professor Carol Dweck ^[10] had great interest in her book ‘Mindset’. A book reportedly read by the Great and the Good, from politics to education. The book says that you either have a Grow Mindset (I can control circumstances, make them malleable) or a Fixed Mindset (I am stuck with what I have, I am, it’s programmed). Mmm, it sounds familiar. Incidentally, I have just given you the shortest free Book abstract in history.

Back to control. One of the situations in which we humans tend to lose or relinquish control is when we are sick and seeing, or waiting to be seen, by a doctor. Our vulnerability increases by the second. Uncertainty goes up, control goes down, anxiety is up, and helplessness is up. Doctors (I was one, if one could ever write this in the past tense) and nurses, tend to play this situation in a very logical and rational manner, which may do nothing for the reduction of vulnerability, for example. Health care professionals are not always conscious that what for them is a question of fact finding, mental algorithms, protocol and reaching a (diagnosis) conclusion at some point, for the patient is vulnerability, uncertainty, and loss of control.

There would be a way to tackle this, which is to provide information and communicate human-to-human. What? But they don’t know yet! (Say you are waiting in an Emergency department).

Remember my keywords, ‘some control’. There is an abysmal distance between ‘I don’t know when we will see you’ and ‘I don’t know when we will see you but I will come back in 10 minutes and I will tell you what I know’. Similarly abysmal distance between ‘we will do an X-ray’ and ‘we will do an X-ray in the next 30 minutes, and you will see a doctor within an hour’. Ditto, between ‘You need a blood test’, and ‘I am going to take blood tests now, and the next thing is an X-ray, all to be carried out this morning’.

Giving the patient ‘the now and the next’ is purely behavioural. It’s a choice. It’s an injection of control and reduction of uncertainty. It’s a first step to decrease vulnerability and to remain human, whilst natural anxiety may kick in.

It is also something already contained in any Health Care budget under the spreadsheet line ‘Zero Cost’.

Why is it so hard? That is for another day.

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The Chalfont Project Academy ^[11] – these resources are for you!

 

 

If you work in change, transformation or culture, whether you are a business leader, HR/OD/Communications professional, or with a remit in people engagement, the resources in our Academy, will take you into the mobilizing world with very practical insights that will be enlightening for everybody.

The Chalfont Project Academy ^[11] is here to enable us to share our many resources developed through the work of Dr Leandro Herrero and The Chalfont Project, enabling you to gain a greater understanding of topics around large scale change, leadership and organizational design – all based upon our unique approach. Read, watch, absorb, then share, enhance, enlighten the world with what you learn, observe and engage with.

You can take our flagship course: Mobilize! Masterclass ^[12]. Enter the world of organization architecture and acquire a complete blueprint for mobilizing people whether you are working on change, transformation or shaping culture.

Or start with a comprehensive collection of learning resource packages which include videos, webinars, papers and book extracts.

You’ll be able to choose from:

• Viral Change – The Principles
• Viral Change – The Key Players
• Behaviours – Part I
• Behaviours – Part II
• The Informal Organization – Part I
• The Informal Organization – Part II

• Peer to Peer Influence
• The Art of Storytelling
• Leadership Principles – Part I
• Leadership Principles – Part II
• Social Movement Principles
• Designing remarkable organizations

 

What people are saying…

Attention re-structuralists, strategists and people about to be sold a multi-million pound reorganization solution that will solve all those nasty problems of collaboration, customer-centrism and agility, all in one, and in one bill.

Every new structure or system designed to solve a problem brings along new and different problems which in themselves may constitute a bigger problem than the one it was intended to address in the first place.

Any structural solution (translation: new group, division, team, business unit, re-structuring, re-shuffling, re-organization) created to fit a particular problem (and perhaps sold as a perfect solution that just seems to be exactly what is needed) needs to be implemented with at least the provision to deal with unexpected consequences and paradoxical outcomes. Some will be emergent, many could be predicted.

The designing of solutions needs to address the potential liabilities of the new design. No system, including organization architecture, will be neutral. In fact, as it’s said in the ‘systems approach culture’, the system always kicks back.

Even more, there is an application of The Chatelier Principle: any process sets up conditions opposing the further operation of the process.

The solution, always kicks back.

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For more on organizational design from Leandro and his team of Organization Architects – watch our webinar on:

 

The new Promised Land of the so-called ‘future of work’

We know that the new organization has to be very adaptable and flexible, beyond what it has been in the past, but what are the organizational   principles that can lead to that? Is there a singular best model? Or, more importantly, can several possibly competing models coexist in one single organization? And, if so, what kind of management and leadership are to be reinvented?

This webinar has now taken place. Please click on the link below to visit our On Demand page.

View for FREE On Demand ^[13]

 

I have seen the same slide yet again. It keeps following me on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. OK, not on Facebook, I have deleted my account. It says:  Old organization, new organization. Old power to new power. Power goes from hierarchical to distributed. Communication from silos to networks. Top down to bottom up. Top down to distributed. Command and control to empowerment. And another few more.

Have you seen that slide? If not, your Sabbatical sounds wonderful.

The beauty of this all-purpose-slide is that it will accept lots of labels: agile, future of work, change, transformation, and of course, digitalization. It is like a renewable energy product, a perfect idea recycling, multi-use, multi-purpose, prêt-à-porter  management.

This obligatory stop on ‘the new world that is coming to us ’ serves well as a tool for conversations . And this is good. The slight problem is that 90% of the talkers are proficient at talking but not many have a clue as to how on earth all that is going to be implemented. Small detail.

The talkers are fantastic at talking to each other as a global tribe. It’s mutually self-reinforcing. There will be workshops. There will be post-its (management development is the result of a conspiracy by 3M), there will be people on the floor arranging cards (why on the floor? It looks more tribal but it’s terrible for your back), wallpaper with arrows (change) and hexagons (design thinking). And all will be good. Biblical. They will look at everything they have made, and they will be very pleased.

There are however two problems

1. Nobody with real power to change in the organization listens or cares about the arrows, hexagons and the old power/new power stuff.
2. The Grand Designers design but have not a good idea of how this is going to be implemented in, say, a traditional medium to large organization. Will just go one day to leaders and say, ‘you people, stop being top-down, don’t you see this is démodé, embrace bottom-up!’ Change! You need to change! And be a good role model. People are looking at you! (No, they aren’t)

The ‘what’ (top down not good, bottom up good…) is well known by now. So well known that can be easily trivialised. The how is the trick. How to go from ‘that slide’ to changing 15000 people in the organization. How to actually change behaviours. You won’t find that in many powerpoint stacks from Big Consulting

When The Talkers venture into the how, they act as shoppers, not cooks. So they say, OK, we need more trust, a lot of accountability, and empowerment, and a lot, a lot, a lot of customer-centrism ( as if the customer cared about your post-its and Grand Designs) and, of course, leaders with vision who walk the talk. And let’s not forget Servant Leadership (why? I don’t know). Oh, I forgot resilience. Mary, could you text him to bring some resilience, before he leaves the supermarket?

I know about the shopping list but, excuse me, who is actually cooking?

Silence.

What do we do now? Well, when looking for recipes, that Talkers-Shoppers find them:  OK, a top down cascade of workshops to explain the  beauty of bottom up; an over inclusive training system to train how not to be over-inclusive;  the top 200 leaders attending Transformation Workshops (AKA pass the post-its)

And then what?

Still no cooks, no cooking, the kitchen is full of stuff. Leaders are bemused. No strategy of where to start, how to start, how to change, let alone how to scale.

We can do better. We must do better.

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

Watch our webinar: High touch, high tech in the digitlization era ^[5]

 

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Suddenly the world has been ‘zooming’ in the way that Sherry Turkle pointed out many years ago in her book ‘Life on screen’. Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative? This webinar 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.

 

What attendees said:

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

 

WATCH NOW ^[5]

 

Organizations grow in many ways: organically and quietly, organically and exponentially, by acquisitions or mergers etc. In every step of growth there will always be more problems to solve. This will lead to more structures, processes and systems to address them and to cope with the new complexity.

At the beginning of the growth curve, the marginal gains of growth are worth that increased complexity. But left to continue in this way, there will be a threshold beyond which, coping with the complexity starts to counterweigh the benefits gained or to be gained. At some point, the value of complexity may enter into the negative.

It may almost be impossible at that stage to unbundle complexity and simplify the system, due to the nature of the interdependence of all the components that complexity has generated. Then, rewinding is not an option anymore.

Organizations only know one way to cope with this situation, which is to cut headcount, downsize, right size, consolidate, shrink or whatever one wants to call it. But, deleting nodes in the network of interdependent connections does not guarantee a smaller network. Indeed that network may collapse. It is like having a five star hotel and deciding to cut costs by closing half of the bedrooms whilst keeping the heating going, or closing down the kitchen and offering chocolate bars. The problem is having the five star hotel in the first place.

The Organizational Growth-Complexity Paradox that I have described above is my translation of Joseph Tainter’s ^[14] explanation of how complex societies collapse (1988). Societies – he said – such as the Roman Empire, had a lot of sophistication, and, because of it, they could expand, they created more resources and needed to build the mechanisms to cope with their management. In the case of the Romans, there were plenty of weaker territories around to absorb, at least for a while. But that in itself became the problem: the management of complexity of communications, civil structures, the military, etc. At some point the system (the Empire) collapsed and split in two. The rest is history.

Incidentally, another way organizations cope with diminished returns in a stage of high complexity is the Roman Empire route: M&A.

Tainter went on to say that collapse was actually the best possible outcome for the Empire, and not always bad for people. He quotes archaeological evidence showing that nutrition of individuals was better after the collapse than before.

Clay Shirky (2010 ^[15]) has also applied this concept to the collapse of complex business models, particularly in the digital world.

Organizational complexity is often seen as inevitable and part of growth itself.  Sometimes it goes incredibly fast: recruiting, say, 500, or 1000 new people in a short period of time. We have recruiting machineries and perhaps onboarding ones, but it is not clear how, a few months down the road, we will be dealing with the liabilities of the complexity that this rapid hiring has generated.  The same applies to M&A situations where the maths of 1+1= 2 don’t work.  1+1= a Big 1. The ‘Big 1’ is a different beast that cannot be understood or manage as the simple sum of its parts.

Every successful growth contains the seeds of failure. So, how we grow matters. Recognising the liabilities is the first step to gain healthy control of growth. But we need a few vaccinations and safeguards.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[6], 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 and an international speaker, he can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[9].

 

Dr Leandro Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements. Find out more ^[16].

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 ^[9] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

‘Let’s be real and aware of the current budget realities’ is a warning that leaders should give to their people only if they are unreal people and unaware people. Otherwise, particularly when repeated in every single discussion, it produces two things: lack of imagination and misery.

Lack of imagination because it accelerates our minds towards what we cannot do, instead of what we can do, could do. So, I am told, in a way, to stick to the basics, bread and butter, things safe and budgeted, why to think further.

I have written before about how ‘budget constrains’ that leaders think (naively?) that will lead to more imagination, often leads to ‘mind constraint’. I don’t have to think about X, and Y and Z anymore. No budget, not happening, oh dear, that’s it. Of course it could go the other way and spark some cleverness, smart alternatives and creative pathways. But, for each of these, I have seen ten of the opposite: collective anaesthesia.

Misery, because the air time is consumed in the negative, what is not possible, what was perhaps possible before but not anymore, how sad! Said once, ok. Twice, maybe. Starting every single meeting with ‘our budget constraints’ or ‘in the current budget situation’, or ‘let’s be real about the realities’, quite depressing.

In ‘current budget constrains’ (AKA cuts) the issue is not to ignore them or pretend that there is no pain. The problem is that talking about pain, referring to pain, discussing pain, lamenting pain and reminding everybody of the pain, does not take pain away. In fact, it multiplies it.

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While we’re on the subject……

Extract from: The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management.  ^[17]    

 

I RECENTLY FOUND THE MOST HILARIOUS AND POWERFUL CURSE, APPARENTLY YIDDISH: ‘MAY ALL YOUR TEETH FALL OUT EXCEPT THE ONE THAT GIVES YOU PAIN’. IT IS SERIOUSLY TEMPTING.

‘May all your teeth fall out except the one that gives you pain’. I learnt of this in a (The) New York Times article referring to the outstanding book by Fintan O’Toole, ‘The politics of pain’ (2019), about Brexit and new English nationalism.

 

If you have read and enjoyed The Flipping Point – we’d greatly appreciate a review from you on Amazon. We have received many great recommendations and would be delighted if this positive feedback filtered through to the Amazon reviews pages ^[18].  Thank you to those of you who have already taken the time to leave a review.

Performance appraisal or performance management are one thing. Forced ranking into an artificial normal distribution of people in the organization, is another thing. A Bell Curve/normal distribution of performance is still used in many organizations. In this way of thinking (and it is a way of thinking) a majority of people will fall into the category of (average) contributors and, then, there will be minorities on one side (excellent performance, get the big bonus), and on the other side (under performing, on the way out). I am talking in caricature, but anybody working in a medium to large organization will recognise this annual ritual, usually led by HR in order to ‘classify people’s performance’. Historically, it’s gone as far as telling managers, ‘you must have so many in the mean area, so many in one standard deviation, so many in 2 etc’. It was a ‘you must have’, not a ‘what do you have?’.

HR, and I am not directing the shots at the function only, but also to leadership of organizations, (we are all HR) needed tools to classify people and trigger professional development, pay increases, bonuses etc. So it has used for many years an intuitive and ‘logic’ tool, which has become ubiquitous.

However, the Bell Curve distribution in organizations is the wrong distribution for almost anything, even from a simple mathematical or statistical perspective. It is as irrelevant to organizations as it would be to supermarkets in order to explain the stock on its shelves. This is why.

The organization is a social network of connections. Bell Curves and social networks are as suited to each other as oil and water. Most distributions in a network are not ‘normal’ but follow a Power Law/logarithmic one. In a Power Law distribution, a few have a lot of (head), and most have few of (long tail). Translation: a relatively small number of people have high connectivity and influence, for example; a relatively large number of people have low connectivity and influence. It works for connectivity on the web (relatively few sites, compared with the huge total, enjoy high connectivity; most sites enjoy low connectivity, as compared with the total) and in any social network (scale free, is the technical level) The organization IS a social network in which many dynamics, from connectivity to power, follow Power Law principles.

You may think that this can explain connectivity and influence (see my books  ^[19]Viral Change™  and Homo Imitans) but not necessarily performance. But the only reason why we think this way is because nobody has seriously thought about Power Law and performance. It is however logical that the distribution of ‘performance’ (which after all is not a single ‘measure’) follows the same rules as other true social network distributions. So imagine a top of 100 and bottom of 0 and anything in between in a power law/logarithmic distribution/curve. This is a much better representation.

Trouble is, we are so used to Bell. The entire IQ system is based upon 100 being normal, 140 a genius and 60 a handicap. But this was a mathematical construct.

An additional problem is that HR/Bell/Forced ranking is heavily biased towards operational outcomes (read: hitting targets) and usually it says zero about other things such as connectivity, influence (positive or negative), positive deviance, experience, overall ‘market value’ etc.  You are going to tell me that Performance Management includes not only operational outcomes but also values and soft stuff. I see, ‘Performance’ is then a conglomerate. When you give conglomerates a number (and a position in a curve) you risk falling into the phenomenon that I call ‘Sumville’. ‘This is a hypothetical town with a sign at its entrance: ‘Welcome to Sumville; population 2500, 5 hotels, 20 pubs, 3 churches, 200 sheep, total 2728’. For the record, Sumville is my invention but I have seen that sign.

None of my (serious) clients use Bell/Force ranking anymore. It is an artificial distribution. A broader problem however is a similarly artificial competence system, but this is a story for another day.

People’s classifications are here to stay. It is our nature to frame things (reality, concepts, people) and make sense of them. But many of our toolkits are old. The Bell Curve applied to people performance creates more problems (including motivation and a high potential for unfairness) that it tries to solve. It is a convenient management tool, in 2020 only justifiable to provide convenience to management.

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‘The organization IS a social network in which many dynamics, from connectivity to power, follow Power Law principles…Bell Curves and social networks are as suited to each other as oil and water.‘

 

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.

We can help you identify those channels.

 

 

 

3CXcan ^[20] provides a diagnosis of your formal and informal connections 

 

3CXcan is an online survey which uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for social network 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 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).

 

Note:

• This process is totally anonymous.
• No names are ever revealed (unless there is a specific agreement)
• The data base of findings is erased soon after the debriefing has taken place

 

To find out what the results from this process look like and how it can help your business – find out more. ^[20]

For a free virtual consultation or a short walk through our demo – contact us now.; ^[9]

We all live and work in bureaucratic organizations. The differences between us is the dose. In today’s world, bureaucracy is often a symptom of dealing with complexity. We may not like to acknowledge this, or to call it like this, but that’s what it is.

Self-Induced-Complexity-Kingdom (SICK) is a state that does not correlate with size, but culture. Some of my relatively small clients (in comparison with the giants) suffer from SICK, or frankly, are sick. Other large client companies have managed to control the fast uncontrollable complexity by running the company on an operating system that obsessively avoids it.

Robert Conquest’s (1917- 2015) ^[21] third Law of Politics says: ‘The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies’.

And you could say that the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic company is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its competitors.

It always surprises me how easy it is to fall into the bureaucratic trap on behalf of growth, market complexity, or taking a company to a higher level of scale. Many of the people leading this in some organizations, people I know well, are smart and experienced people. If I were to say to them that we need to avoid that trap, I would insult half of them. They are, they may say, aware and have no desire to go down that route.

Everybody (OK, many people I know) likes the idea of remaining ‘small’, keeping the entrepreneurial spirit, running the company as a start-up, etc. But the same people are putting in more and more processes and systems to cope with their reality. Not all questions or challenges need a process and system, or indeed a structural answer. A great percentage of these need a behavioural answer. But once you start walking on the bureaucratic path with a new Review Committee, a new Innovation Board, and a new Approval Body, it is difficult to go back.

So maybe the conspiracy does not come from outside after all. Maybe it is inside. Maybe it is a hidden one (are they not all of them?)

By the way, the other two Laws of Politics are (1) Everyone is conservative about what he knows best, and (2) any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. I am sure we can find organizational translations.

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Do you know your REAL organization?

For many years the need to understand formal and informal connections has been well understood.

For many years as well, this was largely of academic interest.

Now, we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

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

With 3CXCAN we can tell you:

• How information flows in your organization
• How people work together across departments and sites
• How people truly communicate and collaborate with each other
• How useful people find the information they receive
• How the informal conversations take place in your organization

Find out more ^[20] or contact us ^[20] now for your free virtual consultation

or

Call us: +44 (0)1895 549158

Shaping Tomorrow’s Organizations Today, Making today’s organizations remarkable

 

I know it will happen. I’m certain. It’s nothing to do with trust.

 

Trust requires uncertainty. I trust that you will help me, because you have always done so, but I’m not absolutely sure that you will next time. I hope. I’m a bit uncertain, maybe. But I trust you.

 

Trust is one of these acquired management concepts we mess about with. Here we have a few things that I suggest we need to know about trust:

 

1. Trust is not linear. It’s one of the least linear things we have in organizations. It may take extraordinary efforts to reach a level of trust with an individual, group, a system, a company and, then, a relatively minor breach could get the whole thing down. It’s unfair. Non-linearity is always unfair. Small things create big things. Big things create small things. It’s messy, like life itself, the mother of all non-linear realities.

 

2. Trust is inevitably linked to promises. You keep your promises, my trust will grow almost inevitably. You said you would do something for me, or for everybody, and you do, all the time, or most of the time, trust will grow. ‘Keeping promises’ is a very recurrent theme in our Viral Change™ programmes as a behavioural currency that needs to scale up. ‘Keeping promises’ touches so many other things that, as a behavioural unit, is a little bit of a magic bullet.

 

3. Trust and vulnerability are sisters. If I made myself vulnerable by acknowledging a mistake, by saying that I don’t know, by declaring my lack of control, trust grows. I’m making myself more human, more accessible. But also I’m inviting you to do the same, I’m telling you that you can also tell me that you made a mistake, that you don’t know, or that you are in a messy type of thinking, and I will not hold it against you. You will not be penalised; you will not be labelled as weak or a muddled thinker. That is an intrinsic problem with performance management systems in organizations. We proclaim that it’s safe to make mistakes, but usually we don’t reward this. Despite the wonderful music coming from leadership, who has perhaps learned to say the right thing but not necessarily practise it.

 

The trouble with the latter is that we have mistaken that kind of vulnerability with exposure of our entire self for external consumption. The industry of expressing, sharing, venting, putting it on the table, feelings and emotions, very often done for the sake of it because it’s the politically correct thing to do, has not created more trust. It has created massive exhibitionism.

 

Instagramming our soul does not necessarily make us better human beings, inducers of trust or promoters of freedom. Most soul exhibitionism, which has gathered pandemic proportions with the selfie culture, depletes our inner self on behalf of flawed ideas of openness, honesty or transparency. We have become so transparent that anything can get through us like a penetrating sunbeam. The solidity of our soul has melted it in the air.  The late John O’Donohue expressed it beautifully when pairing ‘the sacred and the secret’. There is not much sacred left these days.

 

It always surprises me that people who are very proud of ‘controlling their boundaries’, seem to be the most prone to Instagramming about the quality of their cereals over breakfast, and Facebooking to the world with party pictures that regrettably they never delete.

 

I am digressing here, but when people tweet pictures of themselves on their own, with a beautiful sunset, holding a glass of wine, with the assertion ‘here I am with my solitude, enjoying beauty on my own, look at me, how profound and spiritual my being is’, I always wonder who takes those shots . Angels? But this is a conversation for another day.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Don’t Miss Our Free Webinar This Thursday!

The Myths of Management

 

Join myself and Anett Helling ^[22] for our free webinar with Q&A this Thursday.  Leadership traits, employee engagement, empowerment and more – old traditional management thinking will not win in the post Covid-19 scenario. So, what will the ‘new management’ look like? Which elephants do we need to see in the management room? Register Now! ^[5]  Thursday, 30th July – 18:00 BST/19:00 CET.

 

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

 

Attendees eligible for a FREE copy of my new book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management ^[17].

 

 

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! ^[23]

 

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! ^[23]

 

 

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 ^[17].  Read a recent review ^[24].

 

 

1. Increasing the connectivity of people, who will benefit from enhanced collaboration, to achieve good things better, faster, differently, is a good idea. We need to augment that connectivity and incentivise collaboration.
2. Increasing the connectivity of people who are slow, sloppy, substandard, uncommitted or combinations, will achieve mediocrity faster and at a bigger scale. So, not a good idea. We need to decrease connectivity and disincentivise collaboration.
3. Hyperconnectivity and hyper-collaboration of good committed citizens, corporate or otherwise, is desirable. We need to incentivise connectivity.
4. Hyperconnectivity and hyper-collaboration of terrorists, extremists and anarchists is undesirable. Unless of course for people in those baskets.  We need to disincentivise connectivity.
5. Digital connectivity can enhance grassroots collaboration for the uprising against dictatorship, and also can enhance its rapid quash. A twitter revolution is also a twitter contra revolution
6. In hyperconnected structures, bad ideas travel faster and reach more people.
7. In hyperconnected structures, innovation may be faster by involving more people.
8. Hypoconnectivity is not a God. It’s a blind tool, an empty highway that doesn’t know, does not care, who is travelling with anything from altruistic behaviours to suicide vests.
9. A popular network of connections (digital platform) with heavy user presence, will get more popular and will attract more use, even if the objectives or content are mediocre.
10. A non popular network of connections (digital platform) with poor user presence, will get less popular and attract less use, even if the objectives or content are fabulous. Don’t let good ideas dwell in poorly populated (curated) digital platforms. These ideas will die because their credibility is associated with the low membership or participation.

At least a few of these should make you think, or at least read twice, or at least irritate because it’s counterintuitive. At least half challenge the conventional, unconscious view that connectivity and collaboration are always good and always deserve a place in corporate values.

Behaviours are blind, neutral, amoral. Their consequences never are.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation – join our free webinar on Thursday 2nd July – 18:00BST/19:00 CET. Register Now. ^[23]

Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? ^[23]

 

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

 

 

Our Feed Forward Series of free, live webinars continues – find out more.   ^[23]To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations.

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 ^[17]

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

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

1. Inner civil wars

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

2. Employee disengagement

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

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

3. Dysfunctional leadership

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

New webinar series – Register Now! ^[5]

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

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

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

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point ^[17].

Webinar topics:

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

______________________________________________________________________________________________

The Flipping Point ^[17] – Deprogramming Management

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs deprogramming. This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Read the latest review ^[24].

Available from major online bookstores ^[25].

A while ago, a telecom client complained to me about his particular division which seemed to work entirely ‘on relationships’. People got things done because of their own strong networks and highly cultivated personal connections. That was the ethos and the style of the place. His complaint was: ‘We need to have more structure and rely less on people’s relationships. This is too fluid, too personal, we are a proper company, for goodness sake!’

At a similar time, another client said the opposite to me: ‘We are a well oiled machine where everybody knows what to do, when, and with whom. It works! But, hey, I wish sometimes people tapped into their own internal relationships more, made things a bit more human, we are people, not systems!’

In both cases things seemed to ‘work’. What is clear is that each of these organisations were (and are) very different, particularly in the kind of people that compose their workforce. Hire a ‘structured person’ for an environment where people cut across barriers, sometimes processes, to use their personal relationships, and you will see how long this person will last (or the state of his mental health after a while). In contrast, to navigate in a ‘relationship-driven’ culture, you need particular leadership skills, not just technical or professional ones. Rely only on the hiring of ‘skilled people who have done it before’, and they will not necessarily understand the expectation of ‘personally liaising’ with a perhaps large network!

I told the complainers of ‘too much reliance on personal relationships’, that many people and organizations would love to have this in place. But I do recognise that, although the ‘relationship-driven’ environment may be a very enjoyable and successful one, it can also be tiring for even the most astute of relationship builders, who, at some peak of stress, might wish that ‘a well oiled machine’ took care of things, on its own…

The title of this Daily Thought contains the word ‘versus’, which implies an opposition. Many of you may think that this should not be the case, that ‘we need both’. This is a legitimate position, if a bit of ‘default thinking’ (we all tend to want everything), but the reality is that both environments don’t marry well.

Most of the problems we have in organizations come from expecting something from somewhere (people, processes, structure, leadership) that can never be delivered. It pays to pay attention to the ‘culture in place’ (whether a culture shaped intentionally or organically evolved and that has grown ‘on its own’) to have a realistic picture of the type of business execution that can be expected. There is more than one culture that ‘works’. The question is ‘how’ it works. Then, the next question is which one you want. That is which kind of ‘how’. And leaders should care about the ‘how’ as much if not more than about the ‘what’.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

New webinar series – register now! ^[5]

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

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

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

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point ^[17].

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 digitalization era

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________

The Flipping Point ^[17] – Deprogramming Management

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs deprogramming. This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Read the latest review ^[24].

Available from major online bookstores ^[25].

^[17]

 

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[17] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[17] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review ^[24].

 

 

When managing an organization’s internal complexity, is a greater problem than managing the complexity of the environment.

When organizations grow, their systems and processes grow. When organizations grow, they are better able to address their complex, external environment. To react to that complex environment, the organization’s internal systems and processes become more complex. At some point, managing the internal complexity becomes a greater problem than managing the complexity of the environment. The airtime becomes internally consumed. The word customer is suddenly an inwards looking concept. The new, more complex internal systems attract even more internal complexity. The escalation is fast. 10 guys is a start-up. At 20, an entire HR department comes from nowhere. At 200, a new internal enterprise digital customer blah blah blah system is bought. From here on, the possibilities are endless.

I feel very strongly that these lenses explain a lot of self-inflicted problems. My solution: (1) stay in beta; (2) stay small or break up into small units [Dunbar’s number of 150? Bezos’s teams of one pizza feeding?); (3) Never try to reproduce in small what a big company is.

 

Autoimmune disease, organizations have a similar disease.

Autoimmune disease is when ‘the body produces antibodies that attack its own tissue, leading to the deterioration and sometimes the destruction of such tissue’. Organizations have a similar disease. Self-inflicted problems such as increasing complexity and ever-increasing decision-making processes. Give people on-the-spot permission to solve anything. Get 3 people, not 30, to make a decision in 3 days, not 30 days. Suppress the immune system with a high dose of common sense. In fact, listing self-inflicted problems is not that hard for any savvy manager.

Autoimmune disease. Listing self-inflicted problems is not that hard for any savvy manager. In fact, I ask clients to do this and create lists such as ‘problems that do not exist, but we seem to love to have’; ‘good problems to have’; ‘little problems with the voice of big problems’; etc.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

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

Available from major online bookstores ^[25].

^[17]

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

New webinar series launching this month.

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 ^[26] more information about these webinars.

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[17] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[17] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

 

 

We want the organizational flexibility of Lego. We recruit for the rigidity of a jigsaw

We want the organizational flexibility of Lego. We recruit for the rigidity of a jigsaw: pieces that fit perfectly in a space. When a jigsaw piece goes on maternity leave, or leaves the company, we will replace it with a similar piece that needs to fit in. Exactly. No replacement, hole is visible, jigsaw incomplete. The jigsaw gives us the comfort of the permanent structure of a castle (looks like a castle, the picture of a castle is on the box, not a dragon, or a boat, it’s that particular castle) but tomorrow we want the castle to be a gazelle, or maybe Formula 1, or perhaps something googlesque. The jigsaw needs the ‘expert pieces’, the Lego needs the re-usable pieces. The jigsaw is fixed, no dragons with the pieces of a boat. The Lego is a reconfigurable dragon today, farmhouse tomorrow. Lego or jigsaw, this is all you need to decide in organizational design. Organizational charts are the picture of jigsaws.

For those who want both: you need to at least settle for a percentage of reconfigurable Lego structures in the company. Leading jigsaw organizations are leading prisons, even if they look like golden cages. And you always, always drop that piece in the corridor. Finding the replacement is exhausting.

 

If you have a choice, (re) design an organization on the basis of  ‘who needs to know what’.

If you have a choice to (re) design an organization on the basis of ‘who needs to do what’ or ‘who needs to know what’, always start with ‘who needs to know what’. Then, match against the alternative design based on the former ‘who needs to do what’. If there is no good match, you have just discovered a problem and saved thousands on consulting fees to rescue an unworkable organizational structure.

Organizational design, as usually practiced, is quite irrational. Mostly it’s based upon a military concept of command and control. It is only when alternative designs based upon different criteria are let to compete with each other conceptually, that one can see the pros and cons of each and the kind of trade-offs one is prepared to make.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

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

Available from major online bookstores ^[25].

^[17]

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

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 ^[26] more information about these webinars.

Many organizations seem to run layers of parallel initiatives, all directed at noble goals, and in many cases, without talking to each other. My retrospective and un-scientific count on these in my clients of the last 10 years, which I did a while ago, showed an average of 7 per organization.  I identified Communication programmes, Employee Engagement, Values and Leadership model/programmes, Continuous Improvement, Talent Management, Change Management, Cultural Change, Innovation programme, Idea Management, ERP implementation, Corporate Social Responsibility programmes, Diversity and Inclusion, Six-Sigma, Simplicity Programmes, Agile and several others. The situation has not changed much over the years.

The corporate environment is today pretty cluttered. Leaders of each initiative have a vested interest in each of them, and tend to look at them in isolation. Years ago, I challenged a VP of Safety about how ‘our’ programme should have an impact on innovation. He said, ‘Maybe, but I am not in charge of Innovation’. I regularly gather similar examples in my work.

Unfortunately, it’s very frequent to find that nobody, certainly not even the CEO, is able to put all these initiatives together into a single strategy. To make sense of them all together. I ask the question many times ‘Where is the glue?’ but often I am met with a smile. Also, each initiative runs at its own pace, some travel very fast, some slow, some are transient, some appear and disappear for a while, resuscitating again at a later point in time.

The effect of this situation on the average employee is multiple. Some good (it may provide additional sources of employee engagement), some bad (mistaking the initiative as a tool with the overall company strategy in itself) But the most worrying effect is the saturation of channels. At some point, the mind switches off. It has enough. All becomes ‘noise’ and the ‘signal’ is indistinguishable. Not only is this bad, on its own merit, for all the respective initiatives, but it also injects a great, new stumbling block. From that point on, any new ‘serious’ initiative will have a big mountain to climb and may be mentally written off before it has even started. ‘Here we go again’ becomes the default thinking position.

I have written many times (Disruptive Ideas) that one of the key functions of top leadership is to de-clutter. De-cluttering is a stronger term than simplifying. It literally means killing initiatives. The slight problem is that we are asking the same leaders who clutter the environment, to de-clutter it. That said, de-cluttering should be well rewarded. It keeps communication channels with employees very clean and active, so that the magic currency of ‘attention’ can actually flow, is key to engagement, then the price to pay is to list initiatives and one by one submit them to serious scrutiny. I call it Corporate Spring Cleaning. It works. And it has huge therapeutic effects.

Cost cutting, cutting to the bone, cutting resources down to the bare minimum is praised as efficient. But it’s not. Once all the resources have been reduced to a minimum, a series of unintended consequences are seen. People who used to interface with 5 others, now have to do so with 15. Personal touch or intervention becomes mechanical. A sense of exploitation decreases employee engagement. Corporate memory disappears. Knowledge transfer is impossible. I can list 20 or more negative consequences.

The problem is that having been crafted under the banner of ‘efficiency’, it becomes politically incorrect to challenge it.

Overlapping jobs, shadow roles, some slack, even some reasonable duplication, may in reality be very efficient. It provides the cushion needed for knowledge transfer, organizational learning, contingencies, rapid reaction to customers and, above all, a fluid human fabric that can be employed in a flexible way.

The ‘centralisation’ of services ‘at any cost’,  the avoidance of duplications even small, the resourcing with no slack of any kind, is a fundamentalist view of the organization that only people who have never run organizations (and you can find lots of them in Big Consulting Groups) can recommend. It’s a nonsense mantra that only pleases people who mistake the company for a spreadsheet.

The cost savings can result in a very poor ROI. A very, very, very efficient company with no slack, would not have my money.

‘The exercise was very rich, everybody participated deeply, the walls were full of flipcharts with stuff. So many ideas floating around! It proves that, when we ask people, there is no shortage of innovation in their heads. We have very bright people in the company; we are blessed with that.

Many angles were explored. In particular, the guy from Sales in the South brought fresh thinking about the competitor situation, a complex one. We ended with a full complex, new picture of the enormous challenges we face, and I have never seen so much fresh and good material coming from the participation of everybody.

Due to the time constrains of two hours, we asked two people to give us the two key points coming from a maximum of two flipcharts. Each point could have max two bullet points. And here is the attachment, 2MB’.

And the above paradox repeats itself a hundred times per second in meeting rooms across all corporations. The fear of not capturing a rich world (and above all to be seen as unable to do so by others) leads to a simplification and reductionist exercise that inevitably focuses on the most tangible and concrete, the most manageable and the most consensual. To put stickers on the wall and rank statements is easy. To grab the unexpected, the un-categorised and unmanageable is difficult.

Over the exercise, the richness of the origins gets progressively slimmed down to a manageable version of life which is more comfortable, predictable and more easily associated to an action bullet point. I have never, ever been part of any of these ‘sessions’ that ended with ‘and for this, we don’t know what to do with it’. The horror of the unclassified and the irritatingly undefined leads to ‘closure’ at any cost. This is what traditional management thinking has told us to do.

What is left behind in that immense intellectual idea-graveyard of the flipchart is perhaps written down as ‘other points’, if lucky. What we take with us to the car park is a summary.

If you marry a summary, you’ll breed bullet points. Life is much easier, if hardly real. But it can pay the mortgage and even give you a promotion. We manage organizations with unreal pictures, filtered realities and dwarfed versions of issues. There is a title in traditional management education that helps you to avoid this.

These two positions may be part of the solution: ‘Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler’ (attributed to Einstein) and ‘It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away’, by Antoine de Saint Exupery. We, in management, have a long way to go to reach a reasonable point of critical thinking in which we acknowledge the complexity and resist the reality on a diet.

I wish leaders could stop requesting ‘the summary’ and start asking for ‘your enlarged version of things’. That would be a bit disruptive. If longer.

Discovering’ an old article that I wrote years ago, when I used to have a management column in a monthly pharmaceutical magazine, I can see how some of the themes that were pertinent then, are still relevant today. Remember the noise about the ‘knowledge economy’? Who would challenge this today?

Here is the story I told then. A rich American lady visits the most famous hat maker in Paris. She sees a beautiful, exquisite, long ribbon and immediately falls in love with it. The hat maker takes the ribbon in his hands, does a few twists with it and creates a stunning hat. Brilliant! The lady grabs it immediately. How much is it? she says. Five thousand Euros, the hat maker says. Five thousand Euros! the lady exclaims, but, it’s just a ribbon! Madam, the hat maker says, the ribbon is free.

The consulting world, where I navigate today, is a terrible place for hat makers. I’ll explain. ‘Consulting’ has developed a market focused on the quantifiable delivery of ribbons (pink, red, small, big, 20, 200, 1 consultant, 3 consultants, 300 consultants, 300 hours etc.…) ‘Delivery’ has become part of the language.

I am a Procurement Department’s nightmare because I challenge the daily rate, the number of days, the number of members of my team, the quantification of the ribbons. I provide the knowledge and the skills to work together with the client focused on an outcome. Madam, the workshop is free. I can understand, that if you sell boxes of biscuits, you would do so on the basis of the number of boxes and the number of biscuits, and, perhaps, the cost of the lorry to get the biscuits to you. But I challenge the application of ‘the delivery model’ to strategic advice, leadership development, organizational strategy and working closely with a team to make it successful. But this is only a 20-page report! Madam, the report is free. But this is only half a day with the team! Madam the meeting is free.

Am I alone in this? Surgeons, schools fees, works of arts, brand creation, executive search, these are examples of work done and priced on value, not on effort and ‘units of work’.

Just because the number of hours, number of days and number of anything is easily quantifiable, whilst  ‘value’ is much harder to measure, it does not mean that we have to take the easy route.

Starting with ‘the value question’ is the right start: employees, partners, activities etc. When I got immersed in Decision Analysis many moons ago, I learnt that people can distinguish well between preferences, and that, in doing so they are ‘measuring’ their reality.  I prefer this kind of value to that kind of value is as solid as a numerical comparison. It’s worth making the effort of comparing the value of various options: of doing A vs. doing B; of doing X vs. not doing it at all. I have come back to the ‘Madam the ribbon is free’ approach many times in my life. It has always kept me on track to keep my focus on value, to see it, to smell it, to decide on it. Not necessarily on numbers.