‘Continuous improvement’ is part of the management furniture and something that, at face value, one could not disagree with.

But when the (operating system of the) organization becomes dysfunctional in many aspects, has unnecessary complexity, or slowness or, say, is inwards looking, the identification and fixing of some pieces may not be the solution.

People tend to fix, or attempt to fix, the obvious, and often the easy things. Which may be OK, but may also give an impression of strategic fixing, whilst it is in fact changing the oil of the failing car.

The comfort of the this (‘we are doing something about it’) may be so strong as to trigger a softening of the urgency, to seriously look at the whole thing in depth. We love ‘activities’ and ‘initiatives’ (and a project management system behind) and we get carried away with them.

At some point in the dysfunctionality, what you need is to create a ‘new agenda’ so strong that it swallows any previous deficiencies. You need to put yourself ahead of the game before people try to change the oil of the car (and look at the procurement of oil, the type of oil, and the available case studies of the use of that oil elsewhere) and question if you need a new car, or a car at all.

Most corporate dysfunctionalities are self-inflicted. Many of them are not even fully perceived by people inside. And if they do, to try to tackle it may be like asking the arsonists to be the fire brigade as well. Doable, but probably not the best idea.

By all means, tackle known deficiencies but also take a hard look at the fabric behind. Fixing a hole in a dysfunctional super tank may be dangerous, complacent and a starting point towards the sinking.

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Continue the conversation…

 ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[9]. Have you got your copy?

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[9], contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

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 ^[10].

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[11], 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 ^[12] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[2].

Louis Gerstner, chairman of IBM from 1993 until 2002, recalls in his autobiography, the company’s use of a competence model for leadership and change. He acknowledged that they had too many of these competences, but that, by and large, they contributed to three things: created a common language, provided a sense of consistency and formed the basis for performance management. As you can see, he did not say that it created good leaders.

And I think there is a profound learning here. Most competence-based frameworks for, say change, leadership or talent management are more useful as a language for the tribe than as tools to facilitate change, shape leaders or ‘manage’ talent.

At that time in IBM, which Gerstner was referring too, the leadership competence system in the company had eleven of these, which eventually they ‘summarised’ into three. Most of the competence systems I know today run into several dozens, a broad supermarket of ‘pieces’ that one has to ‘have’ in order to be categorised into a particular box, which usually is related to a particular salary or compensation.

There is a whole industry of consultancies selling these boxes and categorisations, which usually look conspicuously similar to those of the multinational next door. They all successfully pass the universal test: they are impossible to disagree with. Teamwork, collaboration, ‘drives change’, empowerment, proactivity, ‘provides clear instructions’, results focused, openness and customer-centrism, are ‘fundamental to your leadership structure’. (I have just saved you a few thousand dollars or any other currency for consulting fees).

So there you are. The trick now is the dosage. Lower ranks have less of them; as you go up the ladder, you have more of them. By which mechanism one goes from ‘manages change’ to ‘leads change’ and then ‘anticipates change’, is never clear to anybody. The linguistic injection of steroids seems to be enough to expect the differences between levels. And if you land in a higher rank box by accident or imposed reorganization, you seem to inherit the competencies of the new box. The corporate Father Christmas has just given you abilities you did not even know you had.

One of my tired, recurrent jokes in this area is that these systems seem to have been created by a quantum physicist, but this usually gives Quantum Physics a bad name.

But, the language, oh, the language. That is marvellous. Conversations about people and talent management rituals by HR could not take place without the language and its dialects. And that is a serious asset, as Gerstner acknowledged.

Don’t expect the perfect leader to be the sum of a perfect high dose combination of competences. But expect perfect conversations about career progression and bonuses.

Despite appearances, this is not a rant against competence systems. It is a rant against outdated and past-looking competence systems. I can assure you that if you have one of those systems in place, and are performing well, the chances are your company is fully prepared for the past.

The trick, that many of those ‘human capital consultancies’ do not seem to provide is how to look at strategic, future looking capabilities. That is much harder because one has to project oneself into the unknown and acknowledge that a copy and paste of the competences that seem to have served so far, equally yourself and your neighbours by the way,  are going to be in the best case a pass, a baseline, and at worst, completely unsuitable for you.

However, since language is providing you with a powerful glue, it’s going to be difficult to abandon those quantum physics boxes.

But, frankly, I can’t see any other option. It will take a brave leadership team to look at those boxes and say: seriously?

Mastering healthy tension between them, or surrendering to an ‘impossible alignment’ is a choice for leaders and managers. The worse case is to ignore them, to pretend that they do not exist, Even worse: ‘we need both’, as the default answer.

Mastering starts with a modest acknowledgement of the existence of the tension. Here they are:

1. We have management and leadership development focused on a number of troops, a bigger team or teams, a higher department, more people. But we need a management development based on how to influence without the hierarchical authority. Most of our (need for) influence will be directed towards people who do not report to us.

2. We are taught how to manage resources that one can control: my budget, my piece of the strategic and business plan. A good manager, we are told, is a manager who uses his resources wisely, makes budget and delivers on his budget line. But the real life challenge is how to obtain and use resources we do not control, that do not belong to us. ‘Managing’ resources outside our direct control is the trick.

3. We put a premium on analytical skills and the ability to ‘focus’. We desperately need synthesis skills and the ability to see the whole picture.

4. We master the formal organization, and its formal and visible structures such as teams and committees. But most of the good stuff (innovation, spontaneous collaboration, crowd-creation, meaningful conversations) takes place in the informal, invisible organization.

5. We have learnt to ‘manage change’ in a top down way, shooting for a final ‘destination’ or desired state. We assume predictability and linearity. But the organization is not linear, with high unpredictability. Top-down management of change is not working anymore.

6. To be effective, we are expected to create and sustain predictable, repeatable, reliable, and reproducible processes. But innovation requires ‘unpredictable answers, a ‘beta state’ and restless and unstable processes.

7. Equally we are told to aim at ‘zero defects’ and ‘doing it right first time’. But innovation requires lots of prototyping, testing and trial and error. I am not talking about ‘products’ necessarily.

8. Good managers are expected to be quite rational, predictable, reliable and ‘safe’. Reinvention and competitive advantage today requires a lot of unconventional thinking, irrational, unreasonable and contrarian managers that can deliver whilst at the same time disrupting the default position.
9. We are told that efficient management has no slack, duplication, overlapping of responsibilities, ‘no waste’. Same people praise the 15% ‘free time’ in Google or 3M (or interpretations of them). We don’t tolerate buffer times, we have calendars saturated, but we expect people ‘to think’ and innovate. Innovation needs some ‘inefficient slack ‘in the system. Good management hates it.

Attack plan:

1. Acknowledge the contradictions
2. Imagine worlds in each extreme
3. Imagine living in world A whilst progressing to World B. Progressing, moving, travelling, is a good thing
4. Choose, then choose and choose again. Most likely, living in both worlds simultaneously (‘we need both’) is conceptually very comfortable but you will not advance an inch
5. Choose the amount of pain you are prepared to take and live with, by moving to the uncomfortable side. Go to number 2, ‘imagine worlds’
6. Repeat
7. Move, don’t get stuck in the analysis
8. If it’s messy and a bit uncomfortable, it’s OK
9. If too scary, say this is all a lot of crap and stay where you are. Don’t think. Carry on.
10. Good luck if in number 9

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Continue the conversation. Join Leandro and his team for the next free webinar with Q&A, as they debunk The Myths of Management ^[13] – Thursday, 30th July.

Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid19 scenario. Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’. Register now! ^[13]   30th July, 18:00 BST/19:00 CET – for my free, live webinar with Q&A.

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?

All attendees will be eligible to receive one complimentary copy of Leandro’s new book, The Flipping Point ^[9].

‘Lasting capacity’ must be a keyword for change management and its methods. The issue today is less about how to go from A to Z,  and more how, in doing so, the project, programme, process etc, is or is not, building long term capacity for change.

Methods take you from A to Z but not necessarily build any learning capacity, other than perhaps paying some lip service. Platforms, however, include a method but ‘leave behind’ a capacity, new competences, new ways of working and perhaps a new style of leadership.

What we have learnt from many years of Viral Change™ is precisely that. Outstanding clients were always the first to point it out: now we know how to work peer-to-peer, how to use the informal organization, how to do storytelling, how to identify and use influencers, how to distinguish and manage behaviours, and, ultimately, how our leadership model became small and we needed to grow it in order to integrate Backstage Leadership™, for example.

There you are, Santa got them all, when in reality we just wanted to go from A to Z.

Today, ‘change methods’ that do not focus on legacy, and that still are presented and sold as the mechanics of going from A to Z, are not worth the money.

Once the objectives of the ‘change’ have been declared achieved (perhaps a reorganization, a deployment of values, a customer-centric change programme), if all we can say is that those goals have been achieved, but we have little to say about what has changed forever in the operating system of the organization, or what we have learnt, we have, sorry to say, failed miserably.

Reaching the (change) destination is a pass, a baseline. Learning about the journey and establishing a long term platform for change (change-ability) is the real goal.

We must leave behind more than an expensive set of powerpoints and dozens, if not hundreds of meetings, powered by workshopsterone.

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Continue the conversation.

Join our first, free webinar, The Myths of Change ^[13], TOMORROW – 18th June, with Leandro Herrero and his team. Register NOW! ^[14]

Traditional management and a great deal of academic thinking is responsible for the colossal failure of ‘change programmes’.

The first in our series of webinars will debunk uncontested assumptions in this area and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this debunking of myths is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

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

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Out Now! – The Flipping Point ^[9] – 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.

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[9] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[9] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review ^[15].

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.

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The Flipping Point ^[9] – 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 ^[10].

^[9]

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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 ^[16] 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.

Way number 1: My team has come up with these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us to do?
Way number 2: I need you to approve A. We also have options B and C, but we would not recommend them.
Way number 3: Just to let you know that we are doing A. We explored B and C but they did not rank as high as A.

These 3 ways describe 3 different concepts of empowerment, 3 different styles of leadership and, also, 3 different organizations. The 3 are legitimate, but they are very different.  Don’t kid yourself, they are not simple variations.

Many people still ask for permission for things that the leadership does not expect to have to approve. But they may do so, because it’s now on their plate, in front of them. Many Boards complain that decisions are ‘pushed up’ too much, but do very little to change the situation. On the other hand, many leadership structures expect to be presented with options, for the latter to make a final decision.

Knowing whether ‘you are’ 1, 2 or 3, and, more important, whether you’d like to be 1 or 2 or 3, or which one of them your senior leadership expects, is fundamental. These questions are, more often than not, simply not posed or articulated. In these cases, decision-making runs in automatic pilot mode, creating default positions, that are never validated properly, that, sooner or later, will drive people, top or middle or bottom, for different reasons, simply mad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Employee empowerment is an output, an outcome. If you start thinking of employee empowerment as an input, something you are supposed to give, you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. As an input, all the airtime will be allocated to how much to give, when, in which circumstances. Sure, you need to think about that but the real question is, what do you want to see happening that you can say ‘people are empowered’, what kind of state of mind and behaviours, and why, what benefits, if any.

The why is obviously important. Why is empowerment good? Because it is? What would happen to an organization with high levels of employee empowerment? Can you visualize it? If it is not clear, stop thinking what to give away to empower.

In this path to uncover the benefits, the argument is going to take you to the territory of ‘autonomy’, whether you call it this or not. Autonomy means a degree of control that has been gained (so yes, you now need to imagine what you will need to give away, to let go). Autonomy means self-determination, self-help, ability to conduct independently.

If you had that, people in the organization will probably also gain a lot of self-esteem and confidence. Trust levels will go up. Autonomy means increased efficiency and efficacy. Usually it also means faster reactions: markets, environment, crisis. The ‘business case’ is strong.

There are five ingredients that need to be cooked to achieve this.

Explicit ‘permission’ from leaders. There is something perhaps in people’s upbringing that makes us very dependent on ‘permissions’. Don’t underestimate the need to stress and repeat this to people. Don’t take for granted that this has been heard.

Trust. Call it how you like, but you need a good dose of this for autonomy and empowerment to be real. Are you prepared?

Resources. If people don’t have them, there is no point trumpeting empowerment. You can’t empower people to do the impossible.

Skills and competences. Equally, you can’t empower people to do something if they don’t know how.

A safety net of some sort. Within the compliance parameters that you may have, people need to be able to fail and not only survive but spread the learning.

A working definition of empowerment from the leaders perspective may sound like this: To give control to people who don’t have it, so that you can free yourself for things only you as leader can do, and, in doing so you are creating an efficient system with high levels of trust and self-esteem. All this provided that people have the skills and resources.

But the trick is to start from visualizing the kind of organization you want to see, not the theoretical view of empowerment or the things you would give away (decision rights for example). Then you need to work backwards to see what needs to happen. If you can’t visualize the benefits in the first instance, or not yet, don’t go that route. Stop talking about it.

The great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote about the early 20^th Century Spanish society as being ‘led by people who had neither the necessary talent nor desire to transcend their own personal inadequacies’. ‘These existential shortcomings’, Ortega said, ‘were transferred to the institutions these mediocre people headed to’ (1929, translated into English as Invertebrate Spain 45 years later!).

This transfer of personal inadequacy to ‘the institution’ is similar in the smaller ecosystem of the company. Organizational toxicity, teams that don’t work, decisions not followed up, these don’t all fall from the sky and can hardly be attributed to external circumstances, which are out of our control. The problem is most likely inside.

Our ‘structures’ are a function of ourselves. There is no such thing as ‘slow decision making’ as an entity; there are people making slow decisions. There is no ‘bureaucratic organization’; there are people behaving in a particular way. Not even ‘a culture of’ can be assessed outside the individual agents.

By diverting the focus (or the blame) to ‘the entity’ (structure, process, culture, leadership) we are most likely externalizing the problem and absolving ourselves from all sins. Not terribly good critical thinking.

By the way, there is no ‘they’ either.

Yes, there is a group effect, a critical mass, a social copying (‘Homo Imitans’ ^[17])  that multiply both the shortcomings and the progressive achievements. But this is triggered by us, ourselves, the greater exporters and externalizers, from us to the collective. Far from me to dismiss this. My consulting work is based upon mastering the large scale of things in the organization: change, leadership, transformation. And these are ‘masses’ (using the same Ortega’s terminology), ‘network effects’ if you want a fancier term.

But in the end, the individual is the unit, good or bad. The good news is that there is also the precise opposite of the title. We can be, ourselves, the biggest exporters of creativity, innovation, positivism and, dare I say, goodness. Margaret Mead dixit: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

I have always been a bit wary of people who repeatedly define themselves by what they are against. It makes me suspicious of whether they are much for anything. I want to know what they really stand for.

It is human to reject things that one does not like, and it is good to express it. However, organizations, society, also need people who are not just against things but also for something.

I know very energetic and vocal people who are against child poverty, against military interventions, against religion, and against gender discrimination. It would be wonderful if all those energetic fellows against things would also put some energy into becoming pro to something. Wonderful, not a requirement, but very helpful.

Being against child poverty is actually not that difficult. Finding a way to eradicate it is, and, the category of ‘against child poverty’ is bound to have numerous types of fellow travellers. Some would put all the emphasis onto charity. Others would say that this does not solve anything, in fact it perpetuates the problem and what is needed is a change in society. Both are ‘against child poverty’. The against does not say much (is there anybody pro child poverty?) until it starts explaining what to do about it.

Many moons ago when I was working as a medical doctor in the pharmaceutical industry, I was part of many discussions about the market position of a new drug. As a naïve medic in the early days of my career, I could not quite understand what ‘market position’ meant, since for me that drug did what it did. That was it. But the marketers, of course, were very interested and focused on establishing a market profile, the selling features. The drug in question was clearly different from others in what it did not do. It did not cause that side effect, and the other, and did not accumulate, and it was not that toxic, and did not create this or that problem. We had a long list of what it did not do. I thought in my early days in the industry that this was a relatively poor state of affairs and that defining the drug by what it did not do, was surely missing the point. But these were the early days of my corporate domestication and this was, I discovered, an ephemeral state of mind.

The above is part of a broader ‘negative narrative’ that also hosts the ‘against narrative’. The ‘negative narrative’, of what something is not, and what I am against, is entrenched in human thinking. In organizational life we have a similar ‘negative narrative’ phenomena. Do people who don’t like bureaucracy, like anything non-bureaucratic? Do people who don’t like hierarchy, like complete self-management?

What about establishing an Against Tax? For everything we are against in the organization, we pay tax in the form of an idea For Something.

Click-tivism is armchair activism from your laptop, clicking on the Like icon and feeling good about it. Agains-tivism is spending the day shouting about what you don’t like in the organization and feeling wonderful for your contributions. Some people are against meetings, against reports, against hierarchical dictation, against an all male Board, against HR’s tedious processes and against a crappy work-life balance. I wonder whether meetings, reports, hierarchical dictation, all male Boards, HR’s tedious processes and crappy work-life balance are in place because there are so many people against them, that there are no bodies left, and no air time, for the pro-alternatives and the pro-change.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A feature of the organization of the future, the one that has started a while ago, is the ability to reboot and perhaps self-reconfigure. Whether you want to call it vaccination against complacency (OK with me) or Innovation in the DNA (OK with me) or permanent (stay in) Beta ^[18] (I prefer this one), it’s all the same: inflect, inflect, inflect.

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

There is a ‘meeting expectations’ cult in business. It has created its own concept of (customer) services: meet customer expectations, or, better still, exceed customer expectations. The cult has been developed without the cult leaders asking too much about the logic, reality, reasonability, irrationality or potential craziness of the expectations that the customer may have. The question is how to meet them, or to exceed them. It seems sometimes ‘at all cost’. After all, the same cult did create the expression ‘the customer is always right’, one of the most outrageous assumptions that business life could embrace.

I can understand the customer area. Sort of. But I have a hard time with this ‘philosophy’ when exported to all aspects of daily business life, resulting in bizarre stereotypes such as starting meetings, sometimes one-on-ones, with, ‘what are your expectations?’

Actually, I am a bit harsh. That may even be OK (maybe) but once ‘expectations’ have been listed, nobody discusses the pertinence of the expectations, or their relevance, or the potential ability of meeting them. I have yet to see a meeting that starts in that way (and I attend hundreds of them in client set ups) and that, once the expectations are itemised in the flipchart, somebody says: sorry, those expectations are rubbish, or they will not be met, or wrong meeting, or they are unrealistic, or, hey, I did not know that you were expecting this. No, here we go, lets carry on. Ticked. Next.

Also, only a minority go back at the end of the meeting and check. And then what? Is it a good meeting or a bad meeting because of the expectations? What if my expectations were A,B,C and the meeting went in unexpected directions where we learnt X,Y,Z? Does it make it a terrible meeting?

‘Expectations’ is almost always a bad frame, an input and output model that intends well but creates an artificial relationship in the form of transaction: I have something to give you, list what you want. Give and take. I may give you garbage because this is what you want, so here it is. I can even exceed it. It’s not up to me to tell you that your expectations seem subterranean.

Nobody (that I know) goes home and says to her husband or his wife: “Darling what are your expectations for this evening, so I can make sure we are satisfied tomorrow morning?”

There is an incredible ability for business to adopt Martian language. My recommendation is ‘keep calm and speak normally; this is already 50% of the success of the meeting’.

Surprise is a powerful strategy in its own right. Surprise means being ahead of the game, being further ahead than others thought you would be, being able to pull out an organizational solution, disclose the next new idea when nobody was expecting one, take a rabbit out of the hat, bring to the market something that nobody has asked for.

Surprise the market, surprise your boss, surprise yourself, surprise your followers, surprise your teams, surprise the guys in corporate. All of them.

I know what you are thinking. Your boss does not like surprises. In fact, there are two types of bosses who don’t want surprises. Type one is the one who does not want bad surprises. Type two, the one who does not want any surprise at all, good or bad. Type one is understood; nobody wants bad news. You would not set out to surprise with bad news. Not on purpose!  The latter is a tricky one, because there are many people who, in fact, hate unpredictability. For them ‘meeting the budget’ is better than being surprised with savings. In other words, predictable numbers are better than unpredictable ones, even if these are better numbers. If you head a cost centre, such as R&D, spending every penny or cent may be ‘better’ than producing ‘an under-spend’. I’ve seen people labelled as bad managers by not spending what they said they would. If you don’t understand this, you may not have run one of these. Markets also like predictability. Investors like your accuracy. The whole industry of ‘fixed mortgages’ is based on the beauty and comfort of predictability. Surprising needs guts.

I hear all that. Yet, I will repeat myself. Surprise the market, surprise your boss, surprise yourself, surprise your followers, surprise your teams, surprise the guys in corporate. I am confident that you know what I mean.

The trade offs are: predictability and safe journey, or surprise and leadership. Nobody can argue against safe journeys, so you will be forgiven for ‘meeting expectations’. I personally dislike the ‘exceeding expectations’ expression. It sounds like heavy rain.  I prefer surprise, regardless of expectations.

Amongst my clients I have a good representation of ‘regulated industries’ such as pharmaceuticals and financial services. I, myself, spent many years in pharmaceuticals before founding the consulting group The Chalfont Project ^[11].

A typical expression from management in these industries has always been: ‘We can’t do X,Y, Z because we are a regulated industry’. In my experience, nine out of ten of the times when the ‘regulated industry argument’ has been used, it has absolutely nothing to do with a regulatory issue. It is a default answer, a learnt answer repeated automatically, that tends to block good creative ideas and innovation. It’s a proxy for no. When I have encountered this, it has almost always been a case of managerial incompetence disguised as regulatory compliance.

I have often challenged my audience: where in the ‘regulations’ does it say that you always require 20 signature approvals for a document? Where does it say that you need 3 months to decide Y? Where that you must have all those heavy processes, some of them clearly redundant? Where in the regulations, indeed, does it say that decisions will not be followed up, that people will hold on just in case the decision doesn’t stick? Where do you see the obligation to have massive monthly reports, quarterly reports and reports on reports? Do ‘the regulations’ say anything about having an incentive scheme that seems written by a quantum physicist? Perhaps the size of your powerpoint decks? Minimum a terabyte? Etc.

The worse that may happen next is the smiling or even laughter, as if this was a bad joke, or a clever trick by the consultant speaker.

No, regulations are there to regulate ethics, keep standards of quality and safety and, in pharmaceuticals, to ensure public health. Sloppiness, slowness, tiredness, busyness, complexity, process exhaustion, imitative fatigue and the agility of a Panzer Division are not intended goals of regulations.

‘We are a regulated industry’ is a cheap, easy hiding place.

Every organization, from a super-regulated industry to the opposite, can have speed, agility, innovation and entrepreneurial ethos. Even the Army.

I know, I know, you work in that software start-up and you don’t know what the hell we are talking about. Never mind. Keep going.