Accustomed as we are to creating plans to succeed on something, this may sound counterintuitive. Creating (serious) plans for failure is a much stronger source of creativity. The key question is simply, ’how can we make this fail, big time?’.

It’s not a joke, or a light exercise. It is actually very useful.

Over the years, I have used this technique to keep leadership teams thinking. Divided the team into two groups, one is tasked with creating a (high level) plan to succeed. The other is tasked with the opposite, an incredibly good plan to fail.

Four observations

1. The scenarios ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are almost never a mirror of each other (as one may have expected). There is of course an overlap but there are a lot more new angles in each of them, than simply the inverse of each other. It seems that in people’s minds, failing is not exactly the opposite of succeeding. And vice versa.
2. Invariably, the ‘failure scenario plan team’ is by far much faster than the other in coming up with a plan. It seems that we know more about how to screw up than achieving positively.
3. Although of course I don’t do this as an academic exercise, and both success and failure will be anchored to a specific situation (e.g deliver the strategic plan), I tend to avoid a very precise definition of success or failure upfront. I ask the teams to figure out those definitions by themselves.
4. This is one of my preferred methods to start uncovering the behavioural DNA for our Viral Change™ programme. However, ‘behaviours’ are not easy to uncover for people who don’t do that very often, or for a living. Most of the first answers to the above questions come in the form of ‘process and systems answers’: that did not happen, R&D was late, project management did not coordinate, the pricing was wrong, etc. I then use those first answers to do my archaeological work and dig in to understand what behaviours were underneath those process and systems.

Inverting the question, from ‘what is the best way to achieve those results?’, to ‘what would it take to screw up completely?’ should be standard practice of any planning.

I promise. It works.

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

The fastest and best way to build a creative culture is to have lots of creative people together. No kidding. It works. Hire creative people, they will create a creative environment (because the leaders will be creative) and we all will be creativists.

I am not pulling your leg. The issue is that we often hire lots of non-creative people, people who have never created anything (seriously, never, not even in school) and then we say: we want an innovative culture, we want you to be creative. It does not work.

Problem two (the above was problem one) is the inverse. We hire or gather lots of creative people, but we ask them to recite the yellow pages in search of the Big Idea. Bad idea.

Back to the creativists. Many people can innovate and be creative if, and there is an if, the environment pushes them that way. Innovation is going to the mental gym every day. No gym, expect arthritis.

Creativity is very sensitive to suppression. It’s actually quite easy to curtail. The education system in many places is a benign straitjacket. ‘Entering the school system as a question mark, leaving as a period ^[2]‘, a la Neil Postman.

Leaders have to create the conditions for creativity and innovation. I don’t buy the functional and professional boxing: accountants are not creative, engineers neither, and designers (particularly the ones in a garage) are full of uncontrollable creativity (And don’t try to put the accountants in the garage, you will waste your time and it annoys the accountants). I have met incredibly creative engineers (and accountants) and lots of emperors-with-no-clothes designing in garages.

Bottom line. Expect miracles if you wish, but to accelerate that thing called creativity and innovation, (1) transplant those people and give them the space; (2) add not-so-innovative people; they will copy the others.

Even in the case of creativity and innovation, Homo Imitans ^[3] works.

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WEBINAR TODAY: Company culture: a new look for the Board, ExCom and Investors

I have crafted a special webinar for Board and/or Executive Team members of organizations, and their institutional investors. Visit Executive Webinar ^[4] for full details and to reserve your place on Thursday 13th May, 1730 BST/1830 CET.

“I get your strategy. Now tell me how your culture is going to deliver it. Also, how that culture shapes the “Social” in your ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) agenda”.

Visit Executive Webinar ^[4] for full details and to reserve your place.

This webinar will cover:

• How cultures are created and how they are not
• The limited role of massive communications roll outs
• The even poorer role of training
• The contrarian view of the traditional role of leadership
• The problem with expecting ‘big scale’ culture change from ‘small scale’ or not scalable interventions
• Why culture is not an HR topic
• ‘Where in the organization’ does culture sit?
• How to ensure success in culture change so that it can be ‘explained’ to investors and shareholders
• Shaping cultures that create true competitive advantage and the differentiation

I, along with my team of Organization Architects from The Chalfont Project ^[5], will explain how to orchestrate culture change successfully.

Our managerial training and praxis has been quite successful at making us guilty of not focusing enough on a task or topic. Focus, focus, focus, has been the mantra of multiple managerial recipes, entire manuals of strategy, and overpaid coaching sessions.

Who could deny its logic? Well, some wild people who think we may have too much logic, too early.  ‘Tell them to focus on one thing, the one that will make a difference’, the Management Oracle advises. ‘Prioritise the top 3. Give me the one thing. Focus, for goodness sake!’

Out of guilt of not focusing and out of the external demand to focus, one thing surely happens: we focus. Which may mean missing a hell of a lot of things by surrendering too soon to the magnetic, in front of me, thing I can do and ‘focus on’.

The problem is not that we need to focus – let’s agree to agree – but that we don’t prepare ourselves for ‘it’, and then we uncritically hook into whatever moves in front of us.

Leonard Mlodinow’s ^[6] book Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World is a shot of fresh air. A serious theoretical physicist, enters the cognitive territory and the airport bookshelves.  Amongst other things,  he encourages us (my paraphrasing) to look at our states of mind ‘before the focus’. Steven Poole’s review in The Guardian says it nicely:

‘It turns out that we might approach problems more creatively if our executive, conscious brain is exhausted from having focused on lots of boring choices: so a few hours doing your accounts might help you write a better sonnet afterwards. Alternatively, if you find the world to be a fuzzy place in the mornings due to sleep inertia, which Mlodinow charmingly admits is true of him (‘in my morning stupor I have done things like crack an egg into the sink and then start to fry the shell’), you will do your best writing soon after waking up.’

I have plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this. But I will go beyond that. Very creative minds are often not completely focused on the creation itself ‘before it’. It may look like ‘preparing your mind’ for what comes next by not focusing on that too much. I love Werner Herzog’s Masterclass on filmmaking in the fabulous masterclass.com. He spends a fair bit of his intro explaining how before starting the big day, first day of filming, he spends hours and hours listening to classical music, which will have nothing to do with the script of the movie. So he is preparing himself for the big day by not preparing for the big day. In fact, in the early chapters of that masterclass, he seems completely carried away reading some Nordic poems and asking the learner/user to reflect and digest, almost making you feel for a second that you have clicked into the wrong class.

I have no MRI data or cognitive sciences studies to show, but I am convinced that exploring completely different worlds, ‘alien to the task’, focus then comes out much better.

We are becoming poor readers. The new generations are small screen generations. On the face of it, these are very focused.  But the brain has not learnt well how to distinguish noise and signal. We fall in love for the signal and we want to apply the learning straight away to something, or we will feel guilty of un-focusing and non-delivering. We may just have to learn to give our brains a break by abandoning the push for the small here and now, the quick googling as ‘re-search’ (that is, search twice in Google) and perhaps allowing our minds to wander more before the end of wandering.

I wish these Daily Thoughts did a bit of that magic by transporting you somewhere else for a quick stop before you start your ‘day focusing’. Nothing would make me happier.

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Organizational Management Post Covid-19.

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations.  WATCH our 5, free webinars ^[7] as Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects, debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

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

 

1. The Myths of Change ^[7]
2. Can you put your organization through an MRI? ^[7]
3. The Myths of Company Culture ^[7]
4. The Myths of Management ^[7]
5. High tech, high touch in the digitalization era ^[7]

 

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[5], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[8] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[9].

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

 

Model 1. The technology, for example in the form of digital platforms such as Enterprise Social Networks, ESN (Yammer type) speeds some interactions, facilitates communication, provides a key vehicle for collective framing and shared common understanding (usually from the top of the organization), creates some spontaneous or engineered groups of ‘common  interest’ but, above all, provides a single common brochure/repository/news feed for the company (traditional intranet for example). In this model, ‘Digital’ does not change the nature of the (cross) collaboration much, or the fundamental activity of the company and its groupings.

Model 2. The technology serves to connect otherwise unconnected, or poorly connected, groups, and, as such, creates new reasons for shared understanding and collective action. It creates proximity, otherwise perhaps in doubt, and an ability to share ideas, answer questions, help other groups (occasionally or more formally). In this model, ‘Digital’ is network building in its own merits and the real origin of (new) cross collaboration, for example, otherwise not planned or anticipated. It does not change much the nature of work in the networks or clusters connected, but changes their relationships and their learning opportunity, and also creates a possible, more cohesive shared sense of belonging.

Model 3. Technology is on purpose a ‘crowd-enabler’. ‘Digital’ allows and prompts everybody to possibly talk to anybody across borders and structures. It allows for example to launch ‘global challenges’ and incentivised, or not, semi-permanent Q&A sessions. In this model, ‘Digital’ is focused on the individual, not the clusters, networks or teams (which it had little control over it). ‘Digital’ here changes the nature of the cross-collaboration in the form of a permanent (if desired) ‘digital-face-to-face’. ‘Digital’ here is very much ‘core’, sitting above everything else, perhaps ‘the way we also work’.

These three models are useful to at least reflect upon what we may expect from ‘the adoption of an internal digital strategy’. Very often, a significant investment is made to install a global ESN, just to be followed by an also significant disappointment about its use and effectiveness. Technology is still today ‘installed’ in a way that seems to expect a following miracle in cross-collaboration or even (more naively) a fundamental change of ‘the nature of work’.

At the core of these issues are three things:

(1) The knowledge of what the technology can do (easy);
(2) The agreement on why the technology has been ‘installed’ (difficult: some may think it should be a sophisticated brochure, others a communication system, others an internal reproduction of a cosy Facebook; None of these are the same. Start with the ‘why’ before you look for the miracle);
(3) The pre-existing behavioural DNA (or the created one, e.g. via Viral Change ^[11]™) required to use the technology in a way that serves the declared purpose, the why in (2); this is a more difficult one.

For example in a very tribal, silo-like, fragmented enterprise, a model 3 type of crowd-enabled collaboration may completely fail; model 2 may have some effects, and model 1 may have no trouble, even if with very modest, if at all, effects on cross collaboration with perhaps little changes in the ‘ways of work’.

I have adapted for the organization these 3 models from the ones proposed at macro-level by Bennet & Segerberg in ‘The Logic of Connective Action; digital media and the personalization of contentious politics’ (2013). Model 1 is the equivalent of what the authors called ‘Organizational brokered collective action’; model (2) is ‘Organizational enabled connective action’, and model (3) is Crowed-enabled connective action.

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High touch & high tech in the digitalization era

 

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Pre-Covid we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative? Join us for our final webinar in the Feed Forward Series – Thursday, 13th August. 18:00 BST/19:00 CET, Register Now! ^[7]

 

 

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.

 

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

For building, read our companies, not just the walls (or lack of) and the physical environment, but also that beast of elusive presence called culture. We are sophisticated copying machines (Homo Imitans ^[12]) and, whether we like it or not, we are incredibly influenced by what is around us, what happens around us, and the airtime given to things. Big deal? Yes, it is a big deal. Because we don’t like it. We, arrogant Homo Sapiens, can’t accept Homo Imitans that easily. We say, not me! I know what I am doing. I am not going with the pack. I am different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Register Here! ^[13]Next webinar: The Myths of Company Culture on 16th July. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us.

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

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Don’t miss my new book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management ^[10] – available now!

These are the symptoms. Indicators, red flags, culture makers. If you have more than 5, you are in trouble. 6 to 10, it’s serious. 11-15 life threatening. More than 15, you need a big shake up, earthquake, shock, a battalion of emperor-with-no-clothes hunters, bubble punching at a scale. A revolution.

Resist shallowness. Life in the shallows is not worth living. We can do better than this. Resist. Work could be remarkable. Seriously. Get out of your Plato’s cave. Life is short.

Critical test:

1. Innovation is catching up with everybody else in the world
2. Group presentations are permanent after dinner speeches but served any time
3. Panel discussions are a parade of platitudes in 10 min slots praised as profound contributions.
4. External speakers are entertainment
5. Discussions are monologues occasionally crossing each other
6. Management talk is clichés + jargon + airport bookstore book
7. Lives are calendars
8. Continuous learning is watching a TED
9. People develop severe back and neck pain of pandemic proportions by constantly looking up to the top leaders for approval, nodding, Oracle revelations or marching orders
10. Teams are meetings
11. Diversity is the number of women on the Board
12. People refer to management as ‘they’
13. Presidents drop the P
14. Work-shops are word-shops (and occasionally war-shops)
15. Mission statements are created by word permutation software
16. PowerPoints have neither power nor points
17. Critical thinking is asking for more information
18. New Idea is one book
19. Mediocrity is rewarded
20. Not even members of the Leadership team can remember the list of values on the wall.

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New book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming management ^[10]

 

 

Feed Forward Webinar series ^[7] – Register now!

Deprogramming is a form of management detox. We navigate and work in organizations with a great deal of automatic pilot, even if we don’t accept it freely. We are stuck in expertise and experience. We lack the expertise of detoxing ourselves from our own expertise. There is nothing intrinsically bad with expertise and experience. Chances are you have been hired because of them, so it can’t be bad!

Our programming is a safety system. It is there to facilitate work, to avoid repetition, to be reliable. It’s an insurance system.

We rely on ‘the way things have always been done’ because it’s safe or even because this is what our hierarchy expects. I’ve seen may times managers referring to somebody as ‘Peter is a good manager, sometimes a bit too creative’. It’s not a compliment.

We start projects with a set of preconceived ideas and then we continue looking through those glasses and filters.

Deprogramming entails asking that precise question: what are the preconceived ideas here?

Deprogramming entails ‘leaving your sandals at the door’.

Deprogramming requires a dose of boldness and courage. Courage to challenge, to not accept the status quo, to look at possibilities and not settle for the ones on hand.

Deprogramming accepts that a diet of old ideas is needed.

The main cure for programming, or main deprogramming programme is to expose yourself to your own alien world.

News and magazines you’ve never read.

People who think differently from you.

Disciplines not taught in traditional management.

1. Suspend judgement
2. Test your comfort. It correlates inversely with innovation
3. Force yourself temporarily to an artificial territory
4. Ask how would X do this. X being not your hero but somebody you are miles away from
5. Do something completely alien and not work related, the week before you have a major project or task starting

You can add your own.

Detox is good.

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Continue the conversation.

Find out more about our free webinar, The Myths of Management ^[7], on 30th July, with Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects.

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

 

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Out Now! – The Flipping Point ^[10] – Deprogramming Management by Leandro Herrero – his new booking challenging the trend for adopting absurd management ideas. Management needs deprogramming. This book of 200, tweet-sized, vignettes, looks at the other side of things – flipping the coin. It asks us to use more rigour and critical thinking in how we use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago.

If you look at political marketing, and the place to look for a serious PhD in communications and their segmentation is Obama’s campaign 2008 and 2012, for which there are plenty of books and papers, you’ll see that segmentation of the message is not even a question. You don’t go to them asking ‘do you segment?’ That would be the same as asking a restaurateur if he puts food on the table.

In these campaigns, the ‘data points’ per voter went into the hundreds. The entire communication system was tailored to segments of age, race, schooling, and another myriad of elements.

There is a wonderful clip on the web of Walter, a 90-year-old veteran campaigning via phone and a laptop, where a precise script is in front of his eyes, and a precise list of people to call. I have used this with my clients multiple times. We can only hear the voice at the other end of the phone, and it’s not one of a 25 year old. It sounds like one of his age or a bit below. Walter is asking for a vote but is not talking about an Iran threat, climate change, or education. None of it. It’s all healthcare. Nothing else.

When confronted with the clip, the first reaction by people in the room is ‘well, that’s obvious’. But then they have to suspend judgement about what may come after the obvious. I ask, when was the last time that you, in your internal, top down communication system, of the vision, the strategy, the ‘what’s next’ or the ‘what has just been’, segmented the message, a la Walter, versus one, single, monolithic, top down stack of PowerPoints shown at the all-people Town Hall meeting?

Invariably the answer is, don’t know, probably never. I think it is never.

The company, your company, probably, has Millennials mixed with Boomers, single mums and not, age bands with particular preoccupations, tribes (engineers, accountants, marketers etc.) speaking their own language, people in HQ and people outside, those feeling pretty OK and those worrying about the question mark over the site, passionate ones engaged with charities, super skilled and perhaps no skilled or very little, the secretaries tribe, the new in the company and those who have been there for years. Do I need to carry on? Why is it, for goodness’ sake, that everybody, I mean everybody, gets the same message, in the same format, at the same time? On behalf of what? Unity? Alignment? Democracy?

It’s simply crazy. Yes, you need a single, overall compelling narrative. But you need to segment, segment and segment the message. I know, this is not the conventional wisdom in ‘business’. But we, ‘in business’ are miles behind what happens in other parts of life where mobilizing people is the key. Perhaps this is why we have rather pathetic Employee Engagement practices.

If you had to build an organization from scratch, or re-design one, you would have options about some models to follow. Here are two that I use as an organization architect: designing the organization following a ‘who-does-what’ model, or following a ‘who-knows-what’ model.

Most people build with  the ‘who-does-what’ model in mind. It’s just natural. It has to do with division of labour, organization charts, efficiency and effectiveness, reporting lines and, ultimately, good governance. But I often challenge my clients to build a ‘parallel design’ with the ‘who-knows-what’ model. This model has some variances such as ‘who-needs-to-know’ and ‘who-shares-what’. The view of the organization through these alternative lenses is usually very different to the one seen through the traditional ‘who-does-what’ angle.

Both models are not incompatible but they certainly represent different worlds. The exercise I do is to try to match both models. Not to force an artificial ‘blend’ but to see where the synergies and the gaps are. It’s not an easy exercise because, very often, both models lead to very different views of what the company is about. And this is the richness and the beauty of the approach. What starts as a simple ‘what pieces to have for what and where’, progresses towards a ‘what is it that we are here for?’.

If you are designing a piece of machinery, your concern will be the pieces, how they work together, where is the input and the output etc. The modern organization is much more organic than a machine, and the information highways are both very fluid and changeable. The challenge, and the discipline of looking at alternative models, is more important than ‘what’ comes out from each of them. Without the challenge, you’ll end up with the predictable, most likely mechanistic model, translated into an organization chart.

The more models I bring to the fry, the better. It may be more uncomfortable, but it does make you think. Another model, for example, is ‘who-decides-what’. This model has to do with rights and thresholds of decisions, and is very often closer to the ‘who-does-what’ model, although not necessarily.

The exercise is not theoretical. Certainly not simply a ‘design method’ or trick that I use. It goes to the core questions of identity and ‘space in the world’ of the organization. Do you want to define yourself by ‘what you do’? By ‘what you know?’ These are not theoretical questions. The ‘by both’ answer is as easy as it is unsatisfactory.

‘Organizational architecture’, as we practice it, is far more complex than putting together boxes and reporting lines. It starts with purpose. Then it tests several alternative models ‘competing with each other’. It ends up with the building of a fit-for-purpose organization. It’s a neat job. Well, I’m bound to say that.

The concept of disruption in management has been applied to innovation before. A disruptive innovation is a technology, process or business model that introduces a much more affordable product or service (that is also much simpler to use) into a market.

‘It enables more consumers in that market to afford and/or have the skill to use the product or service. The change caused by such an innovation is so big that it eventually replaces, or disrupts, the established approach to providing that product or service’

Clayton Christensen ^[14], author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, created disruptive Innovation as a concept.

All very well, but before looking for the big product disruptors with the potential to disrupt and create entire markets, disruption, like charity, needs to start ‘at home’.

Before creating the equivalent of cloud computing, and the new wearables, and driverless vehicles, here is the challenge: what are the small disruptions that you can implement tomorrow in your thinking, in your teams, in your environment?

Here is a guide on what to look for, my definition of Disruptive ideas:

Disruptive [management] ideas are those that have the capacity to create significant impact on the organisation by challenging standard management practices. They share the following characteristics:

1. They are simple.
2. There is a total disproportion between their simplicity and their potential to impact on and transform the life of organisations.
3. They can be implemented now.
4. You can implement them at little or no cost.
5. They are most likely to be contrarian.
6. They are also most likely to be counterintuitive.
7. They pose a high risk of being trivialised or dismissed.
8. They can spread virally within the organisation very easily.

You only need a few disruptive ideas to create big transformation without the need for a Big Change Management Programme. The impact of a combination of a few is just like dynamite.

This is what I said in the book: Disruptive ideas ^[15] ‘provide management alternatives that, if spread, can completely transform the way the organisation works without the need to execute a massive ‘change management programme’. Each of them, in its own right, has the potential to create significant change. The compound benefit of a few of them is a real engine of change and business transformation.’

So here we are, disruptive ideas transcend innovation or technology and go back to the fundamental roots of day-to-day management in any kind of organisation, challenging conventional wisdom.

I wrote the book with some suggestions, but there is a much better way. What about this disruptive idea? Ask your team for disruptive ideas, brainstorm, get crazy, retreat, have more. See what impact they may have. Try hard to kill them. See the resistance, if any.

So if somebody says, for example, no meetings for a whole week, does this meet the criteria? If so, what would be the benefits? Why would this be crazy? What may the organization look like?

If you get into the habit, you won’t stop. I don’t believe in ‘disruption’ for the sake of it, but I know that not doing exercise will get you into trouble. The exercise is the relentless questioning: what if we did?

And this is very healthy. Disruptively healthy.

Is this what people want? Singing along with what the Big Gurus have provided? Music and lyrics?

Sometimes I feel this is the case. A cheaper, canned, commoditised version of Guru X,Y,X , or a regurgitation of A,B,C book.

A Lonely Planet version of a trip to Organisational Land? A Eurovision winner version of Change Management?

People get the music, sing the music and sing.

In our Viral Change ™ we have seen a fair amount of this. Behaviours? We have them, you bet. Peer-to-peer? We have the Talent Management group of course! The informal organization? Well, we have organised some employee cafes. Storytelling? Wow! We have lots of them. Backstage leadership? Mmm. Don’t know what that means, but we have leaders with PowerPoint. We have done Viral Change™!

Viral Change™ Karaoke? Yes.

This is the equivalent of a political campaign that says: we have some offices, a list of volunteers, the leader will turn up, we have tons of leaflets. What could possibly go wrong? We have all the ingredients. Excuse me. What about the cooking.

Unfortunately, amateur karaoke consultants are happy to come along with a CD player, a libretto (lots of librettos) singing along and inviting you to sing along.

Organizational work is not a rehearsal, or sing along cultural change.

But Karaoke is wonderful entertainment, I must admit. Well, I couldn’t tell you. I can’t sing.

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Thank you for being part of my Daily Thoughts community this year. Welcome to those newly subscribed in 2019 and for those subscribing for longer, thank you for your continued interest. We are a group of people who want to challenge the easy complacency of the organization and look at culture and behaviours through different lenses.

If you want to read more Daily Thoughts my book However is available to purchase ^[16].  To find out more: Books ^[17] .  Or simply subscribe ^[18] to receive my Daily Thoughts in 2020.

Wishing you all a merry Christmas and a very happy 2020!

Enjoy the holiday season with your family and friends.

Leandro

CEO and Chief Architect at The Chalfont Project ^[5]

We spend too much time seeking predictable answers. They are not necessarily bad. If I work with Peter, Paul and Mary on a regular basis, my mind has a good idea of what Peter, Paul or Mary would say to my difficult question. Not that this has little value. On the contrary, Peter is a good brain, Paul has a wealth of experience and Mary is a good critical thinker.

But, if I really need a breakthrough in my own thinking, view of the world, or my preconceived plans on how to address this big issue in front, I should try unpredictable answers. That rules out Peter, Paul and Mary. Also your close team, people you know well, friends.

Unpredictable answers are more likely to come from people you don’t know that well, perhaps you have some ties (‘weak ties’ it’s called in social sciences), perhaps you have been vaguely in touch. Or serious consultants who are prepared to tell you the truth, not to agree directly with what you think. (Come on, find them!)

You should make a list of your normal, good, reliable, safe, predictable connections and then rule out anybody on that list. Unless there is somebody in that list who, although you may know well, truly ‘thinks differently’.

Then make a list of more unlikely, unusual or possibly vague connections. This list may contain people from an opposite part of the company, from another company, most powerful even, from another industry sector. Tap into that intellectual capital.

The quest for innovation, small i or big I, starts from the unpredictability of things. Most of the time we surround ourselves with predictable ones. Just by injecting small doses of unpredictability (read: pick up the phone and call that guy you met a year ago at a kid’s school match, who is a head of Sales in A industry sector, whilst you work in B), those that may feel a bit weird (sure, you do the non-weird ones every day) will stimulate you to try again and again.

Then, it will become as normal as talking to your own (more predictable) team.

To think out of the box, one has to recognise first that there is a box. Therefore one has to see boundaries and understand what is inside and outside.

The box maybe very big, so there may be lots of unexplored areas inside the box, that don’t require us to have to go out of the box. But the box may be limited as well. Out of the box would be ideal here. Question is, would people trained in the box, with little idea of the world outside the box, be good at exploring out of the box thinking? Probably not.

Could people from other boxes see our own differently? Or would the fact that they are inside their own, prevent them from even seeing the possibilities of all boxes? Maybe.

Some people don’t see the box at all, are not aware of the borders. Other people see the box well and are interested in defining and redefining the box. They see possibilities: pink, small, big, red, large, mini, different kinds of boxes.

We have the PhDs in Box Management, the Within the Box Consultants and the Always Out of the Box people, who take terrible care about the box itself.

There was an old cartoon circulating a long time ago with two people talking to each other. One says: ‘My team is having trouble thinking outside the box, we can’t agree on the size of the box, what materials the box should be constructed from, a reasonable budget for the box, or our first choice of box vendors’. Do you know these people?

It’s incredible what you can do with a box as a typology of people in the organization.

Questions to navigate: define our box, can we see it? The Boundaries? Do we need to at least couple all the time, one in-the-box-thinking with one out-of-the box thinking?

A good way to start the conversation is ‘let’s define the box’. By doing so, you will open all sorts of possibilities, and some of them may not be required to be out. As a rule of thumb, before ‘thinking out of the box’, make sure that ‘within the box’ has been fully explored.

The Box Brainstorm is always a rich platform for conversations.

In Latin ‘Post hoc ergo propter hoc’. Free translation: B follows A, so A must be the cause of B. It’s a fallacy. We installed that piece of software; since then, the computer is very slow; that software is causing this performance issue in my PC.  We have just come back from a trip abroad; one of the kids now has a serious fever and is sick; she must have got food poisoning from that last dodgy restaurant.

Since everyday life is full of ‘post-hoc fallacies’, there is little point in giving more examples. You have, and will recognise, plenty of them. Not surprisingly, ‘post hoc fallacies’ also dominate business life.

• All people in the sales force have gone through the new, expensive sales training programme in the last six months. Our sales figures have markedly improved. That sales training did the trick.
• Joe has taken over as the new CEO, after the rather disastrous year of Peter at the helm. The stock price has rocketed. Joe is the right leader, the market always knows.
• We have gone through a one year, intensive Employee Engagement programme, with multiple initiatives at all levels, and you can see what happens: the overall company performance this year has been brilliant. And the overall employee turnover halved!  Another example of how Employee Engagement pays off.

These are three real stories from my consulting work with organizations. And ‘stories’ is the right term. Damn good ones, I have to say. But without exercising some critical thinking, these stories may remain at the stage of fallacy.

• The sales training may have been excellent, but the markedly improved sales figures could also be explained by a pathetic performance of the main competitor, who completely screwed up their greatly anticipated new product launch.
• Joe may, indeed, be what that company needs as a CEO. But the stock price success could also be explained by a cost cutting programme that Peter, the disastrous CEO, had started before he left, and which just now is showing results. No offense, Joe.
• The Employee Engagement programme is a great initiative, but instead of leading to a brilliant company performance, it could be that the brilliant company performance (based upon a series of successful launches) had shaped employee satisfaction and sense of pride. This may be why people scored so high in many parameters in the Satisfaction Questionnaire. A Halo effect.

A fallacy is only a fallacy until one looks critically at it and explores alternative thinking. Left on their own, they may be very good stories of success, but the arguments behind may or may not be true. When, in my Speaking Engagements, I challenge audiences to think of  potential fallacies in our arguments, I am conscious that I am pushing dangerous hot buttons. No Training Manager wants to hear that their programmes may or may not have the attributed impact. The same for Investor Relationships, or the Board of Directors, or HR.

Taken to the extremes – people tell me – we would not do anything, since (according to me, they say) we can’t prove much in Management. But this is a narrow view of why we should do things in management. Sales Training programmes need to take place, perhaps CEOs need a replacement, and there is nothing wrong at all with that Employee Engagement programme. We do all these things because we believe in good management and because we are paid to exercise judgement. Don’t stop them!

Exercising critical thinking and practicing good management are not in contradiction! Not all good stories of success contain a fallacy. But spotting management fallacies can only lead to a better management. The key is not to settle for a good story.

Medium and big organizations tend to use a competence system that segments people by grades and by degree of competence. A typical segmentation is, for example, one of non-managers, managers, senior managers, top leaders etc., and a set of achievement levels such as collaborators, contributor, exceeding, outstanding. Another cut is by ‘job families’. There are also core competencies, technical competences, job family competences and leader competences. Other authors distinguish between meaning competences, relation competences, learning competences,  and change competences. There are also behaviour competences, management competences and organizational competences.

The official use of this jungle is: selection of people, performance management, of course, career development, succession planning, etc.

There is an interesting line in one Wikipedia entry about ‘Competency Libraries’: ‘Organizations that don’t have the time or resources to develop competencies can purchase comprehensive competency libraries online. These universal competencies are applicable to all organizations across all functions. Organizations can then take these competencies and begin building a competency model’. Did you hear? ‘These universal competencies are applicable to all organizations across all functions’.

I am describing a jungle, a system of baskets and matrixes that often seem as if designed by a quantum physicist. In my consulting career, I am yet to meet a leader who seriously believes these  supermarket shelf approaches work. I have also met many HR mangers who, smiling and whispering, tell me that this is imposed by headquarters, and they have little room for anything other than implementing. Nice.

Sure we need a system of classification. However the use of that classification for the purposes of bonuses, for example, has taken over all the original noble aims. The complex system allows us to allocate money more than training packages or career path. Many systems and uses are deceiving. The music is about career development; the lyrics are about a percentage increase.

I don’t know where this fascination for the matrix of 50 boxes or so comes from. We are collectively fooling ourselves with some sort of smell of ‘scientific management’. We need a diet. The competency system needs to lose a few kilos, pronto. We need one, but slim and agile. Secondly, we need to be honest. Is it there to promote/demote/and allocate the ‘2 points above the inflation’, or to support performance and professional development?

Ah! I know. Both. The famous both, or all of the above.

Lets clean up these systems and make then fit for purpose. If I had a pound for every HR manager who says to me in private that he does not believe in the little monster, and another pound for every manager who, also in private (of course!) tells me that he has been asked to allocate money ‘in those boxes’ according to a pre-cooked Bell curve (‘you must have 5% outstanding, 10% below expectations’, etc.), I could plan for a holiday in the Bahamas any time soon.

There is an ‘Accidental Literature for Leaders’.  I call this my compilation of poems or pieces of narrative that are not intended for management education (!) but serves us well for reflection. They are cheaper than a leadership development programme.  This is a beautiful poem from Constantine P. Cavafy ^[19] (1883 – 1933), a Greek poet who had a day job as a journalist and civil servant.  Which gives us hope for day jobs…  It’s called ‘Walls’.

Walls

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind—
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.

Leader’s action plan:
Make sure that you hear the builders.
Make sure that your people hear the builders.
Look out for walls around you that appear from nowhere.
Make sure you are not the builder that builds the walls for your people.
If it looks like a wall, make sure you can open a door and a window.
If inevitable, choose your own walls.
If it’s too late, at least paint the walls.
Tell your children about builders that build walls and make no noise.

A specialist nephrologist I know well says to me: I get very nervous with all this heart stuff, I don’t know what they do well, but if you tell me to get a kidney out, sure, no problem.

As a trained and once upon a time practicing psychiatrist, I found specialties such as endocrinology and metabolic diseases, highly complicated and fascinating. I thought Psychiatry was pretty straight forward. My colleagues from other specialties felt that (serious) Psychiatry was something really hard,and that one had to have very special skills.

The financial analyst, the trader, and the risk manager think that what they do is something concrete, evidence driven and not that complicated. The HR specialist, the psychotherapist and the designer would not touch those areas and declare them opaque and unintelligible.

Each of us carve out the world around by areas of comfort. Within that area, ‘our certainty’ is high. It may not mean one single predictable outcome, but ‘the specialist’ knows how to navigate and what to expect within a margin of probabilities. The alien to those worlds would feel very uncomfortable because he can’t predict, he can’t be more or less certain. So we mix up certainty and comfort. But they are not the same, just good sisters. In fact, whilst certainty or uncertainty, per se, are pretty fixed, comfort can be crafted in different ways.

When your people feel ‘uncertainty’ (your team, your client) the question is not to pretend that the degree of certainty, or the lack of it, can be changed (they may be as they are) but to ask, how you can provide comfort. You cannot change uncertainty but you can generate many ways to produce comfort.

Comfort is intrinsically both (a) personal and (b) social. Personally, the question is what the other may want to hear that (being the truth) can produce comfort. (See my Daily Thought: I want to import this act of kindness) ^[20]. Socially, it is more a case of how the group dynamics (management team, committee, board) will work. In a group situation, comfort is 90% group dynamics (‘political’, some may say), and 10% topic-related.

Never, ever, go in front of a management committee, board, or leadership team to present or sell a complex idea without having a perfect map of the levels of individual comfort required. You may find yourself in a lion’s cage and be slaughtered 5 minutes later. Spend individual time, providing individual comfort, with people of that ‘decision structure’ before ‘presenting’. I know there is Dragons Den and 5 minute pitches for many things. If you want to play that game, fine. But these are artificial, if visible and photogenic set ups, hardly the vehicles for rational discussion.

As an ideas generator, solutions proposer, consultant, or potential business partner, you are in the business of providing comfort, not to change the fixed uncertainty of the world, or let alone pretending that you can do that.

Emotional Intelligence was a paragraph-length concept expressed in a library of publications. At the time it was a shock in the system. Do you really mean emotions count in hard management and leadership? Wow! The Emotional Intelligence industry (that created subsequent sequels in the form of social intelligence, even spiritual intelligence) has continued to warn about the need for ‘broader intelligences’, in plural. And there is a place for this! But what really needs a book is Emotional Ignorance. Or two books, or… errr.  Day after day we see people in high places oblivious to what is going on in the human side of the enterprise: too complex, too soft (soft and hard are still used as terms) too distracting. The worst is not the ignorant though. They are the ones who think they have a high Emotional score but behave as blind men in the land of people dynamics. It’s this Ignorance that worries me: robotic management, robotic processes, robotic systems managed by people who want … innovation, entrepreneurship and risk taking.

I owe this to Nassim Taleb ^[21] (‘Fooled by Randomness’ (2007), ‘The Black Swan’ (2008), ‘Antifragile’ (2013). As a traveller of many years through New York airport, he recalls the times when he had to carry his always heavy luggage, or use a porter, until one day, from the middle of nowhere, the concept of a piece of luggage with small wheels comes up. Suddenly, all these years of bad back and bad shoulder disappear, and legions of people drag their luggage along the ground with little effort, as opposed to pushing them,carrying them, or sticking them in trolleys and pushing the trolley. Where did it come from? Not from Harvard or an academic institution, he says (he is not very fond of them).

He also brings up two observations, all in his very, very witty tone. One: this innovation took place 30 years after we put a man on the moon. Two: those airport lounges and terminals had seen quantum physicists and Nobel Prize winners go by in large quantities,(presumably all carrying wheel-less luggage), and of those “brains” came up with the obvious innovation. (In fact there was apparently a patent for some sort of wheeled suitcase as earlier as 1972, but the ‘invention’ did not take off until 1987 thanks to a pilot. So, still Taleb’s argument applies).

One of Taleb’s thesis, is that knowledge (and institutionalized knowledge in particular) does not bring innovation. You’ll have to read ‘Antifragile’ to navigate through his myriad of insights.

I’m going to compare ‘The Rolling Luggage Paradox’ to our inability to ‘see’ some simple solutions because we are determined to find a complicated one, and because we have Departments of Complicated Solutions with people on the payroll. Disruptive Strategies however needs disruptive thinking (and I have compiled 30 Disruptive Ideas for organizations as a book, and designed a short, intense ‘disruptive’ intervention that I call an ‘Accelerator’).

There is no magic in how to exploit disruptive approaches that will help us to ‘see’ the innovation, other than injecting this disruptive thinking and letting the innovation emerge. What we do know though, is that if you hire quantum physicists and Nobel Prize winners, you’ll never imagine those tiny wheels at the bottom of a piece of luggage.

Organizational life is in desperate need of spotting, grabbing and mastering its Rolling Luggage Paradoxes.

Our faith in communication is enormous. Why? Perhaps because we know well the problems associated with the lack of communication. However, we expect miracles from communication. After all, we hear the mantra: ‘communicate, communicate, communicate’.

We know about the liabilities of the lack of communication but we don’t worry too much about the other extreme, the over-communication. In my consulting work I see more problems coming from over-communicating than from the lack of it. If anything, everybody is communicating something, sometimes very loud: new corporate initiatives, new leadership principles, results of the Employee Engagement survey. All  usually done for very good reasons. Each ‘owner’ of an initiative has been told: ‘make sure you communicate this’.  And so they do.

Channels are often saturated and messages compete for airtime. The result could well be a preventative switch off from people, a sort of mental parapet, a shield against the bombardment of messages, good or bad, relevant or irrelevant.

I have often stumbled across this channel saturation by accident, when suggesting a small behavioural survey in a selected sample. It is not unusual to sense some apprehension, even when my client knows the limited scope of the survey and the low level noise I am proposing. Why? I hear: ‘We’ve had five surveys in the last two months! People can’t stomach another one, even a very friendly one!’

‘Communicate, communicate, communicate’ does not make more sense than the hypothetical ‘manage, manage, manage’ or ‘lead, lead, lead’.

Communication de-cluttering is needed in many organizations as a way to re-sensitise and re-educate the brains of all of us, in order to be able to spot the signals and filter the noise.

The alternative to a healthy communication ceasefire may be a nasty War for Attention.