The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’?

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, and in which circumstances. Sure, you need to think about that, but the real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? What kind of state of mind and behaviours? And why? What benefits? If there are 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 about 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 competencies. Equally, you can’t empower people to do something if they don’t know how to. 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 leader’s 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 the 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 by 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.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [1]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, Paul and Mary need to start working together from somewhere zero or below. The line is: This is what I am very bad at; what about you? And it’s plural, what are we very bad at; what is this company very bad at; what about you, yours? The Old School Toolkit has a saying, “we will take the best of A and the best of B in this new merged company”. However, this is a bad start. The best of A plus the best of B may still be  [2]insufficient [2]. Also, the safe discussion of ‘the best’ tends to hide the bad and the terrible for months. Take the ‘this is what I am very bad at, what about you?’ line upfront. As you can see, it is more than a line. It is an approach, an attitude, a whole jumpstart in a box. The artist Alex Grey once said: “True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s.” I think that this is a very good start to create ‘love’ in a reorg, an M&A, a whole restructuring. It should be a line and a quote for management. How about start loving fast? In a new situation (and old ones), when Peter, Paul and Mary ‘now must work together’, the three of them bring their brains, hearts, and skills and competencies with them. They also bring their inadequacies, contradictions and flaws. At the top of leadership qualities, acknowledging our own contradictions must have a strong place. We all have them. Acknowledging them is a strength. I don’t have to tell you what that approach will do for trust: you’ll see it rocketing soon. The inevitable super-hero (even if sincere) ‘this is what I/we am/are very good at’ is a starter built upon competition. My ‘very good’ is bigger than ‘your very good’ sort of thing. The ‘this is what I/we am/are very bad at, what about you?’ points straight to humanity, collaboration, cut the crap, let’s do it. Sure, you won’t see this in the PowerPoints of the Big Consulting Group Integration Plan. They never contain the how.

[1]

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [1]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

In the previous Daily Thought ^[3] I shared the simple idea that change management approaches often miss a big elephant in the room: what is actually not for change? Also I mentioned that the case for change is much stronger when we state what is not for change, what remains untouched and why.

In one of the Sunday papers I was reminded of Jeff Bezos’s view on strategic, commercial change. The paragraph is worth replicating here:

I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that, that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. It’s impossible to imagine a future where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’

As in ‘change management’, strategic thinking and planning often misses that Bezos moment. Of course this may be dismissed by many under the view that all that is usually implicit in the strategic plan itself. Frankly, it’s not my experience. It may be implicit and hidden but I have hardly seen it well articulated: this will not change, this we will not do.

The Disruption Religion misses the point. Lots of people go into a Holy Quest for a kind of disruptive old Skype or a disruptive new Uber and either get frustrated, even feel failure when they don’t find one, or are content with bringing a Disruptive Replication.

Disruptive Thinking, Disruptive Ideas and Disruptive Innovation is not Disruptive Religion. I am afraid the cultists seem to win many times when they dismiss the discontinuity built upon continuity. Translation: a strategy quantum leap may not be disruptive (of markets) but may be the most fantastic thing you ever did. And outperform the disruptors. Incrementalism, however, is pure survival.

I’d love to hear from people more of  ‘this is what we are, this is what we do, and now we will take over the world, next year, no pressure’.

The pseudo quest for the Mother of all Eureka Disruptions is overrated and usually ends in tears.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

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

 

‘A Better Way’ Series ^[4]

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

 

Feed Forward Webinar Series ^[5]

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

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[6], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change ,  ^[7]a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and Corporate events – to invite Dr Herrero to your event you can find out more here: Speaking Bureau ^[8] or contact us directly at: The Chalfont Project. ^[9]

 

Probably we will not go back to the telegraph, but when everything is ‘innovatively disrupted’, where will we go?

At least in one area, close to my heart, we will perhaps go backwards: the book. I am talking about that thing with physical pages made of that thing called paper that you could actually hold in your hands and it makes you think, or smile.

The death of the physical book has been announced for years under the conquest by e-books, digital reading, small screens, well, all things digital.

Bookstores are not making money and book chains such as Borders Books have disappeared. Always the example quoted. In the UK, Waterstones and others closed many bookstores. Death, death.

Until Nielsen ^[10] (‘information and measurement company’) announces that, actually, books sales have gone up. Up!? Suddenly book chains like Waterstones make profit. Interestingly, and I don’t know how significant this is, a reviewer says that ‘it seems one of the contributing factors to the increase in book sales are books authored by “YouTube Stars” where they have used YouTube as a channel to market their published hardcopy book’. Children’s books have also increased their sales. So, has the death of the book been grossly exaggerated? I hope so!

For book lovers like myself this is good news. Beyond the unmatchable pleasure of having a physical book in my hands, preferable if their pages smell (old books talk to me via my nostrils as much as my eyes), I think physical books are companions of a high league, distant by miles from screens of all sizes.

But beyond these taste considerations it is the broader issue of whether all predictions of ‘disruptive innovation’ have to be taken both as inevitable and at face value.

For me, Backwards Disruptive Innovation (trademark pending, I may apply for this…) means to rewind life a bit, once the whole thing has been going forward at full steam. In this category I have the above-mentioned ‘books’, once all has been digitalised; the face-to-face conversation, once all has been compressed into 280 characters and the physical letter in the post, once all has been emailed, from congratulations, to ‘I love you’, to ‘you are fired’.

My favourite Backwards Disruptive Innovation, though, is silence. I am trying to get funding to bottle silence. The market is infinite.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

For 30 disruptive ideas that can be implemented at any time and at almost no cost – check out my book:

 

DISRUPTIVE IDEAS ^[11] – 10+10+10=1000 THE MATHS OF VIRAL CHANGE THAT TRANSFORMS ORGANIZATIONS

Imagine this goal. Let’s shift from 30 people making a decision in 30 days, to 3 people making the same decision in 3 days. Let’s imagine it! It’s only when one starts to visualise this kind of shift that all sorts of possibilities come up.

I do this with my clients to provoke a reaction: impossible, chaos, that would be good, but how? nice idea, crap, and the whole variety of things. I call this ‘introducing disruptive targets’. Some may feel unreasonable. Some may be indeed unreasonable. Some will turn up possible, necessary and incredibly powerful. Some changes would never take place unless it all started… unreasonably.

Anyway, why did you need 30 people to make a decision involving a 30 day process, in the first place? Well, there may be many reasons. Here are some

1. We need all these people to ‘represent’ all constituencies
2. Many of these people are not empowered to make a decision, so they will need to go back to their bosses
3. The issue is complex, it needs lots of people and lots of time
4. The majority of these 30 people are in the process to ‘defend’ some sort of interest, or they are there ‘just in case’ the decision may affect them, or the groups they represent.
5. The issue is not complex. So many people involved is historical. This is how it has always been done, and, although the decision is ‘ready’ today, the next project team meeting is in 30 days, so, we will ‘take it to the team’.

And combinations

What a Disruptive Target may introduce? Well, for starters, it will challenge the ‘It’s Not Possible Brigade’. Reasonable or unreasonable as it may be, it will force a review of processes and systems. It may discover that the only reason why things are done in a particular way is number (5), that is, it has always been done in that particular way. Perhaps.

Imagine again. ‘Let’s shift from 30 people making a decision in 30 days, to 3 people making the same decision in 3 days’.

I’ve done it. It is possible. Just a few bruises.

Five Outcomes of the disruption:

1. Acceleration. Suddenly decision making is fast. This is copied by other people, other places. Not change in SOPs. Just viral
2. Effectiveness. People work smarter, people get rid of barriers. If you want fancy labels, here are some: agility, entrepreneurial, nimble process.
3. Costs down. Do I have to explain?
4. Trust, delegation, empowerment, all up in ‘scores’.  You have to start trusting these 3 people and stop ‘attending just in case’ or being in ambassadorial mode, representing  somebody else.
5. Culture change. Big time. All of the above.

With the 30/30 to 3/3, you have just avoided a multi-thousand pound consulting bill to ‘create a culture of empowerment and delegation. (Tip: if you want ‘a culture of empowerment and delegation’, empower people and delegate).

The path to fast cultural change, organizational effectiveness and smarter working, sometimes starts with unreasonable thinking.

Unreasonable thinking as a stretch and unreasonable thinking as a blind, fundamentalist, nonsense are not the same.

Sadly it is sometimes difficult to distinguish them in real life. I know.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

THIS WEEK – don’t miss our final live webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series – Register ^[4] now:

 

 

Build and enhance your  collective leadership capabilities

Create a “Better Way” for your organization to flourish in the post-COVID world

Live Webinar with Q&A – 17th June at 1730 BST/1830 CET

 

 

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

Join us on 17th June at 1730 BST/1830 CET

REGISTER HERE ^[4]

 

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 ^[12]‘, 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 ^[11] works.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

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 ^[13] 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 ^[13] 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 ^[6], will explain how to orchestrate culture change successfully.

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

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

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

A good model is Netflix’s ‘Chaos Monkey’ ^[16]. This is how the successful video streaming company, with lots of avant-garde organizational and management structures, defines their ‘Chaos Monkey’: ‘A tool that randomly disables our production instances to make sure we can survive this common type of failure without any customer impact. The name comes from the idea of unleashing a wild monkey with a weapon in your data center (or cloud region) to randomly shoot down instances and chew through cables — all the while we continue serving our customers without interruption. By running Chaos Monkey in the middle of a business day, in a carefully monitored environment with engineers standing by to address any problems, we can still learn the lessons about the weaknesses of our system, and build automatic recovery mechanisms to deal with them. So next time an instance fails at 3 am on a Sunday, we won’t even notice’.

I think we should hire some of these Monkeys, with proper job descriptions, and give them the formal role of generating some chaos to test our abilities and resilience. And, as in my previous Daily Thought ^[17], I am not talking software or technology but in day-to-day business: hiring, product recalls, sudden acquisitions, etc.

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

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

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

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Do you know your REAL organization?

 

 

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

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

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

 

 

 

3CXcan ^[18] provides a diagnosis of your formal and informal connections 

 

3CXcan ^[18] uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for network cluster (community) detection, to give you a profound understanding of your internal networks. With this data you can built effective solutions for your organizational challenges. It is a diagnostic, not an action driven tool and it:

 

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

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

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

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

 

Note:

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

 

To find out what the results from this process look like and how it can help your business – find out more. ^[18]

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

There are times when you get stuck in arguments.  Discussions seem to go nowhere. You are running in circles and it’s not obvious what to do. People around you, in a meeting, for example, for very good reasons, don’t want to abandon the discussion. Despite the fact that it’s not getting anywhere, the subject is not trivial; you want to reach some sort of resolution.

There are many things one can do but here are three that will cost you nothing:

One: take a serious break
Two: tackle a completely different topic and come back to this one later
Three: reframe

Number three is the one I’d like to talk about here. It has to do with using new lenses and changing your mental frame of mind. The best way to start this is to use the most powerful Weapon of Mass Disruption we have in management. That is to ask the question: ‘What is the question (that we are trying to answer)?’ If you are lucky, that in itself may get you un-stuck, because a great deal of the running in circles and going nowhere may come simply from the lack of clarity about the question on the table.

If however the problem still persists, change the question. Play: ‘What if the question was different?’ What if the question was not the one we have formulated but an alternative one? We are stuck on the question of profit; what if the question was how to gain market share? We are stuck with the question of employee benefits; what if the question was employee engagement and retention? We are stuck with using a leadership model in a performance management system; what if the question was not about assessment but the way we develop these leaders?

Surrounding the original question with alternative questions, all of them close enough to the original (but not the same question just expressed through a simple twist of the language) may suddenly do the trick and provide a road map to answer all of them.

These three real examples, which I have dealt with recently in my work with clients, may seem like trivial changes in the questioning but they are not. The little reframing involved has great power to disrupt the thinking and provoke fresh ideas.

The main problem with being stuck, is being stuck. Moving in any reasonable direction is much better than running in circles. The alternative questions and the ‘what if’ will take you outside the vicious circle. Sometimes I call it ‘elevating the confusion to a higher level’. Or lower! Change the frame. It does a pretty good job.

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 ^[19] (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.

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

It’s a military operation even when we say it isn’t. But even the military have discovered that the world around us is volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous. They have even a word for it: VUCA ^[20]. And if you are in this VUCA world, you can’t afford high levels of ‘uncertainty-avoidance’ (a classical cultural hallmark of many traditional organizations). That world is uncertainty in itself, so, to avoid uncertainty is to avoid the world around you. I thought many times that the military have become much better than us, i.e. people in organizations, at navigating ambiguity. The enemy is VUCA, it does not have the name of a country anymore, can you believe it?

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

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

Einstein said, “I soon learned to scent out what was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind.”

Many corporate initiatives compete for airtime in the employees’ hearts and minds. Unnecessary organisational complexity and its associated terminology is a significant feature of modern corporate life. You don’t need re-engineering, but simple, ruthless and urgent un-cluttering. Clean up, do less.

Organisational life is cluttered. There are calendars full of activities and meetings fill the day. The internal cycles (strategic plan, business plan, next year’s budget) sometimes seem to have a life of their own. People exclaim, “I am doing the planning, the budget, the presentations… When am I going to do my actual job?”

People also need to attend training courses, professional development programmes, maybe even a leadership initiative or a work-life balance programme. And perhaps they also need to be part of a Task Force addressing the latest not-so-good results from an Employee Satisfaction survey.

And this is just daily life; just an average random Wednesday in the life of the company. On top of all this, ‘higher level’ corporate frameworks do exist: there is a set of values, a set of leadership behaviours, a credo, etc. Operationally, the CEO has set the six key objectives for the year and everybody is re-drafting their goals and objectives to fit in with those. Many companies seem to be run on the basis that 90% of the focus is on managing internally/inwards and only 10% on the customer side/outwards.

All those initiatives create a corporate ‘mille-feuille’ with layers that don’t usually talk to each other. Sometimes their only commonality is the fact they all compete for airtime. Confronted with this often overwhelming richness of corporate life, the average employee throws in the towel and switches off, unwilling to put some effort in trying to understand the connection between all the different things.

When I look through my client portfolio of the last five years, I could say that the average client has at least five or six major competing initiatives running ‘in parallel’, cluttering the airtime (not to mention an additional dozen or so minor, local or functional ones).

Decluttering is a truly disruptive ‘anti-initiative’ initiative that shouts “Time out!” and forces you to review what’s going on and to make sense of it all.

Decluttering can be done now. If you are in a senior management position, you could declare yourself to be the Chief Decluttering Officer and you would do your organisation a big favour. It doesn’t cost much and the sky won’t fall down. Sure, you might upset some people with a vested interest in the cluttering, but that’s a small price to pay.

This contrarian do-less will pay off.

If this could be copied by others and if each department or group had a decluttering objective in their goals, the business transformation would be truly significant.

 

(from Disruptive Ideas ^[21])

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 ^[22], 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 ^[23] ‘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.

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 ^[6].

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.

These are ‘functions’ and ‘structures’ in need of spaces in the organization. You may not be brave enough, or crazy enough to call them this way. OK, don’t. But as leader you need to seriously look at ‘where’ you can host them, nurture them, and manage (or perhaps un-manage, who knows) them.

School of Demanding Unreasonable Developments. Perhaps your new Leadership Development group, or the new Learning and Development’. (Note the reasonable ones have some spaces already, or so they say)

Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. Borrowing this from some anarcho-writings. Sorry. But you need ‘one of these’ somewhere.

Space of Expected Craziness. Maybe physical spaces, maybe not. If physical, why don’t you re-name that big B-307 room to ‘The Beta Room’?

What If Business Unit. Maybe not a unit. Perhaps a Brigade, a Squad, a Rapid Reaction Force. A place (place?) to question the default position, to force ourselves to see the infinite number of other sides of all coins

The workshop of Alternative questions. The question may be obvious. Declare it not obvious. Find all alternatives and at, the very least, take the trouble or writing agendas for workshops with different questions from the ones you have to address.

Make you own spaces. I am really serious about thinking of extra-ordinary titles. Perhaps over the top. Allow yourself. Give permission to your people to do so. Have an internal contest to find the alternative spaces (groups, people, physical space, function, bunch of, permanent structure reporting to you, all of the above)

If it sounds a bit crazy, you are in the right path.

If you dismiss it all, well, have a good day and see you in the crossroads whilst you travel to the Land of Predictable and Unmemorable Targets.

There are always people who ‘don’t get it’, are against cultural change efforts, do not support a programme, torpedo it, or are simply a toxic of some sort. Some of them may be senior people with senior bonuses, or at the very top, or a bit below, or combinations.

The traditional thinking says: time out! There is nothing I can do because if the top doesn’t get it, nobody will. Let’s spend the time trying to convince the top, and the next down top, and the next next, that this is good. Only then, we can change … the company/the world/anything. Which is a good explanation of why we are not that good at changing …the company/the world/anything.

Rational PowerPoint presentations to the top, led by well intentioned champions of the idea, internal and external consultants, trying to explain why ‘this is what we need’. The tribunal (there is no other way to describe that Executive Committee) pushes back with things such as: give us examples, tell us something concrete, concrete, concrete, very concrete, and what exactly is going to happen on Wednesday 23rd in the afternoon.

Let’s assume here that you have the extraordinary luck of a visionary leader who says: let’s do it! When can we start?! So you do. But you still have the problem of many others who ‘don’t get it’.

If revolutions were to start when everybody is convinced that the revolution is needed, including the ones who could, or should, start a revolution or could torpedo it, no revolution would have ever taken place.

The aim of a large scale behavioural and cultural change (as we do in Viral Change™) is not to fight these people, disable them, argue with them, convince them, detoxify them or have a long and rational discussion to rehabilitate them. The goal is to reach a threshold of critical mass of engaged, committed, positive and forward looking people, who are actively making changes, that makes the other irrelevant.

It’s a question of critical mass, not seniority or hierarchical power. When things are moving, changes take place, differences are noticed, the Opposition starts to fragment into different groups. One, the ones who continue to oppose and can’t handle it. They either leave or have gastric ulcers. Two, the ones who can see and hear and become supporters. Three, the chronically neutral. By the way, a subgroup of Two are the ones who say, ‘I have always believed that this was the right thing to do’, even if they were the ones ready to kill you. This beautiful tribe deserves a big, big, big smile, followed by a ‘thanks for your continuous support, sir’.

What if there is still a fierce opposition at the top? Many years of organizational consulting with companies across the world, many, many Viral Change™ programmes later, many years of living on both sides of the fence of leadership, have found me the perfect formula, which I am happy to share with you. Here it is. If you are in a company, as an employee, manager, external consultant of an organizational type of some sort, where the top, or quasi top ‘don’t get it’, are against cultural change efforts, do not support a programme, torpedo it, or are simply a toxic of some sort, with some of them being senior people with senior bonuses, at the very top, or a bit below, or combinations, there is one clear and powerful, strategy: leave.

PS. If you are a consultant, don’t forget to give them the telephone number of your competitors.

Back in 1994, Jim Collins ^[24], consultant and author, gained a lot of attention with his book Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (HarperBusiness 1994), which became a bestseller quickly, and, since then, has been quoted as one of the seminal business books, after Tom Peter’s In Search of Excellence. One concept within the overall narrative of the book, has received perhaps less attention than I think it deserves. It is what Collins called ‘The Tyranny of the Or’. Most strategic frameworks use an OR of some sort. You must choose between cost and differentiation, between A or B, C or B. In other words, you can’t have it both ways. We are under the tyrannical rule of the OR. And it all made a lot of sense for a long time.

We have been accustomed to the OR in business and, frankly, in daily life. One of these dichotomies, for example, has always been speed and quality. Or perhaps, better, speed or quality. You can’t, the conventional strategic wisdom says, have both. Speed will compromise quality. Do you want quality? It’s going to be slow.

In this league of ‘or choices’, the often called ‘Constrain Model’ is another good example. This model is represented by a triangle with a word in each vertex: fast, good, cheap. And a legend says: ‘pick two’. You can’t pick three. If cheap and good, it’s not going to be fast. If fast and good, it’s not going to be cheap. If fast and cheap, it’s not going to be good.

The model is powerful. However, in 2019, one of the key strategic capabilities is to beat ‘The OR Model’. Speed of change, disruptive and unpredictable environments and an incredible technology push, forces us to find ways to break this tyranny of the OR.  Abandoning a default position of an inevitable ‘OR’ is key today. Speed and quality may no longer be enemies.

Mastering (a) critical thinking (b) without slowing down decision making and (c) not compromising quality is now a key competence. In historical terms this is squaring the circle. Today, the circle needs to be squared. Or at least, we need to try.  The default position is no longer an OR. The tyranny of the OR has been defeated by the inevitability of the AND.

New units:

• Certificate of existence = 280 characters (Twitter)
• Presentation of ideas, maximum attention span = 18 mins (TED)
• Digital reading, maximum attention space = 1 or 2 max smartphone screens. (Not a long time ago we used something called ‘one page’, as in, ‘I’ll send you a one-page summary’. It was a unit in its own right. This is now a smartphone screen with the exceptional allowance of a bit of scrolling down).
• Business time unit = a quarter (long time in existence substituting the Gregorian calendar)
• A dialogue = a digital chat (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Text message, etc)
• Business reality: whatever can fit on a PowerPoint slide and bullet-pointed (like this text, of course).
• A book page = a kindle screen.
• Busy-ness score = number of emails in my inbox.
• What your boss needs to know = Executive summary (most likely she will never read the 30 pages behind it).

Disruptive Innovations coming up strong:

• The book (hardback is more innovation-disruptive)
• A physical letter (handwritten even more disruptive; try to write one to your children, it’s a perfect start)
• A face-to-face conversation (incredibly disruptive, if with a loved one and a bottle of wine, but also works with colleagues at work, loved or not)
• A briefing document with no Executive Summary
• Presentation with no slides (this disruptive innovation has been in the making for years, but it has not quite made it yet)
• Bookshop and library browsing
• Silence (included in my ‘Border Diet ^[25]’)
• Banning the word ‘Basically’ at the start of a sentence.

(Sorry, I am running out of screen…)