Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about what people do, not about what they are thinking of doing, or just thinking. People, however, naturally focus more on processes and systems because this is what is usually at the forefront of the corporate citizen’s mind, in their day to day life. That relegates behaviours into the ‘consequence’ basket, what happens after, a bit of an afterthought.  But the problem is that behaviours create cultures, not the other way around. They are the input, not the output, not the day after, but Patient Zero. It’s where it all starts (what are the behaviours we need for A?), not the endpoints (declare X, Y, Z and you’ll get these behaviours). If you think of most of the themes currently on the table of the organization these days, they all are behavioural, and yet, the attention is somewhere else. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is a good example. It focuses a lot on ‘the function’, which not surprisingly automatically requires a ‘Head Of’.  Then, on what needs to be changed structurally (e.g. more representation of minority groups). And finally, on the associated communication and training. There is usually not a lot of behavioural granularities here. But if there is not habitual diversity of thinking and of ideas in the behavioural DNA of the company (which would mean that we value diversity per se, at a very granular level, foundational, not as an application), other applied ‘diversities’ (gender for example) could just become a quota to reach, a target, and, in the process,  possibly killing all the beauty of the never exploited primary diversity. Some DEI warriors don’t like this thinking and tend to dismiss it as ‘general diversity’, not the real diversity which for them is mostly a question of quotas. There is no question that creating the conditions for diversity (providing seats at the table, seeking different experiences, transcultural, for example) is fundamental. But this cannot simply become management by ratios for the purpose of ticking some boxes. For example, you can obtain a great deal of sustained diversity by having, say, 30% of your people this afternoon asking the questions: Is there a different way to solve this? Who else needs to know about this? Who needs to be involved? Or by always bringing 3 options to a decision, at least one of them unconventional. And this is not the whole list. We do this in our Viral Change™ [1]  programmes with great success. It may sound simplistic, but it is very powerful at scale, across an organization. When this kind of primary diversity is widespread and entrenched as a habit, any other ‘particular diversity’ will already be finding a good home. Unfortunately, this is not the standard way. It’s easier to look at ratios and quotas and showcase them. The re-presentations (as psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist [2] would put it) have taken over the presence. He often jokes about the question ‘how does one become a Buddhist?’ Easy – some people say – sit on the floor, cross your legs, wear orange, and close your eyes. My analogy is, have a Function, call it Diversity and showcase some people from minority groups in the leadership team. By the way, there is little logic in grouping D, E and I into a construct called DEI. Even from a financial performance perspective, it makes little sense, as the superb professor of Finance at the London Business School, Alex Edmans [3], has demonstrated. Mirror arguments can easily be made in areas such as ESG (another construct), Health and Wellbeing, Psychological Safety or even the whole ‘Future of Work discussion’, where the hybrid/non hybrid/remote/office ‘debate’ has taken over the airtime. The latter being the wrong end of the stick: workplaces are in cultures; cultures are not in a workplace – we have mistaken the content for the container. Debating the number of days in the office is like debating the number of commas in a Shakespeare play. So, what about training? For example, DEI training. Again, this is another ‘easy default’ that tricks us into adopting a relatively easy way to implement a ‘solution’. Training has more than a legitimate place in corporate development, serving well awareness and skilling. Unfortunately, it has limited power in cultures. These are largely un-trainable and shaped by the day-to-day (behavioural) interactions of people mostly following unwritten rules and social copying what is around them. Sending bankers to a business school for a course on ethics, to become more ethical- a real example in the UK after the ‘banking problems’ – is either a commendable good intention of extraordinary naivety, or a bad joke. The fact that people may ‘get’ the intellectual and rational side of something, does not mean that they will change behaviours. Rationally, people agree that smoking is bad, driving when under the influence of alcohol is bad, and ditto for not wearing a seat belt. If awareness and safety training were enough, most of these and other problems would have been eradicated ages ago. When compliance leaves the room, the real culture shows up. Similarly, the success of so called Bias Training, is largely underwhelming, not because it’s wrong in itself but because people wrongly expect behavioural change from a bunch of lectures or presentations only. The emphasis is on the only. We attribute powers to training that it does not have in the behavioural arena. Behavioural change at scale (and you would have thought that DEI advocates would want that, not just the awareness and enlightenment of a small part of the company) can only be achieved by a bottom-up ‘social movement’ that equally touches the Board and the front line.  That needs to be orchestrated carefully. Training is then a good comrade in arms. The combination of a top-down communication push-system and a bottom-up behavioural pull one is fantastic. I have described this in Homo Imitans [4] as the World I and World II working together and it’s at the core of our Viral Change™ methodology The tragedy of DEI is that it may progressively die of terminal corporatization. A recent, ‘epidemic-like’ round of dismissals, of (relatively recently appointed) Chief Diversity Officers has been described in the US. People often report that ‘it was mission impossible’, a monumental task that was naively addressed by creating a corporate function. All that is corporatized, eventually melts in the air, or in the pages of an Annual Report. My intention is far from discouraging the tackling of the reality of diversity, equity and inclusion (or any other set of cultural drivers, which I am happy to group in trios if you wish – what about Performance, Engagement, Belonging?), but I am making a plea to take them seriously by being very critical about the ’labelled solutions’.  Those solutions for me are behavioural in their roots and therefore require a behavioural-cultural approach. Corporate is very good at wrongly providing structural solutions (a new Function) to behavioural problems and is applying the same medicine to the recently acquired DEI. No surprises here. Using the lenses I use, I can tell you that DEI can be rescued from its hijack to truly realize the value of diversity of thinking, of ideas, of inputs, of participation, and equal treatment and involvement of people. The Viral Change™ mobilizing platform [5] provides the scaffolding to address the culture goals in an incredibly powerful way. It’s behavioural DEI, powered by Viral Change™. Just a conversation away if you wish. Reach out to [email protected] [6].

How you can rescue DEI from its hijackers – some recommendations: Don’t address DEI in isolation, as a distinct entity of some sort Blend it with broader culture change and evolution. Otherwise, the organization becomes a playground of competition between acronyms and their meaning. Many people who quote ESG have no clue what the letters mean. The more you label, the less you get it. Go down to the granular side (behavioural) as much as you can What is diversity? How do you recognise it in terms of what people do, not a label in the management structure. Translate into behaviours. (Hints: Opening the door to somebody is a behaviour; being courteous is not. Diversity as a mindset means nothing since it would mean different things to people). Don’t rely on training only Intellectual understanding, even emotional reaction to it, do not always trigger new behaviours. Above all, don’t use the victimhood card It never helps real victims. The DEI world is saturated by it. If you care about diversity, have the courage to say that it starts with ideas, opinions, points of views, cultures, experiences And, even more courageous, to say that it is intrinsically good as a value. ‘Employee engagement’ has killed the intrinsic value of work. It has been presented as a utility to deliver performance. What if ‘engagement’ (with your own work, with others, with a collective effort in the organization) were good in itself, regardless of how much performance ‘you get’? Diversity of the human condition, and in our business organizations, based on the intrinsic value of the dignity of work, is too important to leave it in the hands of any label The ultimate goal of a DEI corporate function should be to become irrelevant as fast as possible. If you are broadly in agreement with the principles of this article, and if you care about the behavioural and foundational aspects underneath diversity, but feel that the conversation has been hijacked, forward this article around your network.

Join the conversation on LinkedIn [7]

This week, I offered 10 types of people that challenge the status quo in organizations ^[8]. I also mentioned that our mind tends to protect us against ‘difficulties’ by saying don’t, conform, it’s OK. And its cousins: what is the point? Don’t fight those battles.

Dissent and challenge is more difficult when the overall narrative is strong; when there is a presiding, overall logic of ideas and their implications, nicely linked. Some narratives (political, for sure, but also macro-social and ‘micro’, such as ‘the company’) become semi untouchable. After all, in the political arena, that is the point of ideology. A dominant ideology (idea-logic) is self-reinforcing. More and more people ‘within’ will write or say something that is consistent with ‘the package’.

Have you noticed that those narratives come in (political) bundles? They follow the same principle you see in the online shops: people who bought this also bought that. So if you like this, you also like that, because otherwise it is a pick and mix, not acceptable. Which is  kind of another imperialistic narrative: with us in all or against us in all. So you may end up feeling guilty of agreeing with A but having reservations about B. It’s easier to agree with B as well.

Literally these narratives shut down the alternatives or the opposite. And often they blame each other for the same behaviour. A rather old, if still in place, Western, ex French Revolution ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, follows that rule: pick one, you get a bundle of idea-logic connections. People who like this, also like that.

Small state, don’t interfere with the market, the individual is the agent on the Right; the market needs to be domesticated, bigger role for government to the Left. But, you see, people who like this, also like that: so in the Left you also need to be pro-abortion rights, pro-redistribution of wealth and pro-suppression or reduction of social inequalities. Suddenly, you did not know, and have other things in the Left or Right package: gender issues, mums at home or not, believing in God and fox hunting. How did that happen? Well, it’s simple; people who like this also like that, so you are not going to be an exception are you? Etc. These are caricatures to make the point.

There are not a lot of differences in the organization even if we don’t talk about this in the same way. There is a narrative (whether you use the term or not) and it may be ‘all embracing’. And because of that you have halo effects that may even make you ‘the most admired corporation’, or not. Admired? On what? All 40 parameter? Wow! Can we unbundle please? No you can’t.

An artificial, if wonderfully pragmatic distinction between story and narrative looks as follows. Stories are self contained, beginning and end, that’s it. Narratives are open ended. They may contain stories but the narrative is constantly in creation. Narratives are journeys, stories are locations.

The Social Idea-Logic of the organization needs a narrative that allows for dissent, that is still open, that makes people feel they are crafting it, not imposed from the top.

Yes, people who like this also like that, but what if they didn’t? This is a leadership question.

Who challenges in organizations?

1. People who have nothing to lose
2. People who know that the art of challenging, equals not infuriating, annoying or putting people off.
3. People who have the intellectual and/or moral power, credibility, and standing.
4. Corporate useful idiots (mavericks, non conformists, radicals, rebels and self-appointed ‘different’, who are publicly exhibited by a non maverick, very conformist and non-radical-at-all organization as a sign of ‘diversity’ and open-minded innovation, although the activity of these fellows is always well under control and within reasonable non dangerous borders).
5. Professional challengers, speciality not required (also known as Yes But gene carriers)
6. People who want to improve things, get away from ‘the way things have always been done here’; usually passionate about the ‘surely, it must be a better way’. Gems, really.
7. People ( and that includes consultants) who are not afraid to say what authorities may not want to hear.
8. People who enjoy the intellectual discourse per se and play Chess with ideas. Full stop.
9. People who have bosses who genuinely ask to be challenged, pushed back and who look for alternative world views.
10. Combination and ‘others ‘ (so that my classification is complete)

The art of dissenting should be taught in management education. When we are asking for dissent or challenge, we don’t realise that our minds are saying don’t do it, conform, it is less risk, less anxiety, it’s survival.

Also too strong narratives tend to shut down the opposite, or simply alternative ones. People either conform or self-censor before daring to challenge. More to come on this.

To create a climate of openness and challenge we must go beyond words. Even beyond the ability to challenge itself. It has to do with understanding the consequences of challenging, positive or negatives.

Organizations sit somewhere in a cultural spectrum: discourage or forbid, accept, expect and promote. Where they say they are may not be where they actually are. Promoting challenge and dissent must come with a safe environment, a very visibly safe one.

 

Something for the weekend. Written back in 2017 but still rings true today!

We naturally retreat to comfort zones. If we didn’t, we would not survive, physically or psychologically. We live in Confirmation Bias Land: we hear what we want to hear, and have fixed ideas that we want to be endorsed. It’s all pretty unconscious. It’s survival.

When it comes to information, we surround ourselves with what confirms our views of the world. Many years ago, pre-digital, when newspapers were still the main source of information and hook to the world, people read or subscribed to their tribal ones. There were ( as they are still today) right wing, and left wing, and middle of the road newspapers. They were easily classified as liberal or conservative or ultra-something.

Then Mr Digital came to town. Clever baby digital allowed you to choose what the system would filter for you. Big news outlets promised you not to bombard your inbox with anything you did not want. Tick here and here and you will never know about the unticked boxes. You could literally create you Daily Me and keep warm and safe.

Mr Digital entered adolescence and then stopped asking you. The algorithms, which I liked to picture as hundreds of little digital men crawling your webpages, would know what you want. Today they know you, indeed, follow you, and miraculously keep offering you that shirt that you saw online but never really wanted to buy. Whether you are in a theatre ticket site, or the weather forecast or a sports feed, that shirt never goes away. Recently, I surrendered miserably and did buy that shirt, but the algorithms, those idiots, kept offering it to me.

Forget Big Brother. I am not talking about that. I know I have one. We need the other siblings, brothers, sisters, and also cousins. The Daily Me is now a Me by The Minute. It is Bubble World. Obama put it nicely in his farewell speech:

For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighbourhoods or college campuses or places of worship or our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. The rise of naked partisanship, increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste – all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we accept only information, whether true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that’s out there.

There is only one way to be saved. Get exposed to as many sources and inputs as possible. Diversity of news is OK, but not enough. It is diversity of topics. For me, as alien as possible.

My rule of thumb: at least 50% of what to read, be exposed to, should have little or nothing to do with your job/business area. That increases the probability of avoiding unconscious filtering since you would have less preconceived ideas. And your mind would welcome the Spring Cleaning and fresh air.

My only limit to this is toxicity. You would not want to be in a room full of smokers smoking. So, living in the UK, I stay away from the Daily Mail.

It is counterintuitive to managers but not to cognitive scientists. Given airtime to an issue is not always a good idea in terms of solving the issue.  ‘Addressing it’ in managerial terms means describing it, dissecting it, debating it and then doing something. In the process, the airtime dedicated to the problem has contributed to increasing the problem.

The problem  with terrorism awareness is that the terrorists love to have terrorist airtime to terrorize. You see, I have used the word terror four times in a line.  Now I asking you this: don’t think about terrorism. Now!

I know. You can’t

Diversity and Inclusion formal programmes, particularly the ones well broadcasted across the organization, declare that there is a problem called diversity and inclusion. We are not terribly diverse, not much inclusive, so here is a programme. This is how traditional managerial thinking goes.

Don’t talk about it, or not too much. Do things that increase diversity of opinions, not just gender or minority voices. Request to always have different options, to involve people who are not naturally involved. You can’t seriously have a Diversity and Inclusion programme that is reduced to the number of women in the management team plus a couple of ‘people of colour’ in high places.

I am not in the business of discussing here the moral merits of ‘affirmative action’ or forcing quotas. This is perhaps a topic for another day. But whatever you do, do it first and talk about it later.

The best Diversity and Inclusion programme is the one that is implemented without people knowing that there was one.

Part 1 of 2, First published in November 2015…

Who challenges in organizations?

1. People who have nothing to lose
2. People who know that the art of challenging, equals not infuriating, annoying or putting people off.
3. People who have the intellectual and/or moral power, credibility, and standing.
4. Corporate useful idiots (mavericks, non conformists, radicals, rebels and self-appointed ‘different’, who are publicly exhibited by a non maverick, very conformist and non-radical-at-all organization as a sign of ‘diversity’ and open-minded innovation, although the activity of these fellows is always well under control and within reasonable non dangerous borders).
5. Professional challengers, specialty not required (also known as Yes But gene carriers)
6. People who want to improve things, get away from ‘the way things have always been done here’; usually passionate about the ‘surely, it must be a better way’. Gems, really.
7. People ( and that includes consultants) who are not afraid to say what authorities may not want to hear.
8. People who enjoy the intellectual discourse per se and play Chess with ideas. Full stop.
9. People who have bosses who genuinely ask to be challenged, pushed back and who look for alternative world views.
10. Combination and ‘others ‘ (so that my classification is complete)

The art of dissenting should be taught in management education. When we are asking for dissent or challenge, we don’t realise that our minds are saying don’t do it, conform, it is less risk, less anxiety, it’s survival.

Also too strong narratives tend to shut down the opposite, or simply alternative ones. People either conform or self-censor before daring to challenge. More to come on this.

To create a climate of openness and challenge we must go beyond words. Even beyond the ability to challenge itself. It has to do with understanding the consequences of challenging, positive or negatives.

Organizations sit somewhere in a cultural spectrum: discourage or forbid, accept, expect and promote. Where they say they are may not be where they actually are. Promoting challenge and dissent must come with a safe environment, a very visibly safe one.

Next: shutting down the opposites

 

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 ^[9], 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 ^[10] works.

 

 

In the day when Tim Crook, Apple’s CEO, had to send a note to everybody in the company reminding them that without diversity the company would not exist, and doing so on the back of his government’s ban on immigration and religion, it is good to reflect on what diversity means and, above all, how we can achieve it.

Facing of the dramatic daily events in the US, a cultural war and coup d’etat as seen on TV, an unclassifiable system takeover made by one executive order at a time, some of us may wonder if what we see has any form of preventive measure even if a slow cooking way. It may turn up that the organization, the firm, establishes itself, and remains as a laboratory of critical thinking, an unlikely sanctuary of sanity. Maybe.

Let’s start with labels: Diversity and Inclusion. Do not restrict ‘diversity and inclusion’ to diversity of gender and inclusion of minorities. The best way to inject those is to inject diversity, period. The best way to inject diversity-period it is to practice it. The best way to practice it is to adopt business process norms that, far from controversial, are directly connected with business needs. And they look unsuspicious and healthy in their own merits.

The following is a modest attempt to ‘practice diversity’, and, warning, it will look simple, small and procedural. Worse, you may say ‘we are doing that already’. And if the latter, I beg you to find out the real truth. Just check it out,will you?

Rule 1: Key positions (strategic proposals, for example) always accompanied by a least three concurrent, parallel, or divergent, from people alien to the system: anybody from a different ‘alien’ department to external world. [This is what we propose. Marketing agrees. Opinion Leaders A and B were not in favour.Manufacturing do not understand it]

Rule 2: When recommendation made, as above, still  three diverse (operational, implementation) options, one recommendation and full explanation why the other plausible two have been discarded. [What we recommend has also an option B and C. This is why we have discarded after evaluating them in their own merits]

Rule 3: Generic, strategic decision or not, everybody in a key team structure compelled to bring in specific (costumer, for example) insights gathered from people other than themselves. At every meeting. No kidding.

When the organization is used to several views, several positions, several inputs, several possibly contradictory options on many of their routine processes, it will be much easier to integrate a broader diversity and inclusion such gender, minorities etc.

If being diverse in thinking is the norm, not as a theory, a policy, a dictation form the top, but day to day DNA practice, then the organization is vaccinated against tunnel vision, groupthink and individualistic alpha male and female liner thinking. Diversity of anything is the oxygen of the organization. It is now the time to buy extra oxygen cylinders for every corner of the room

Practicing diversity, as opposed to preaching it, will spread those behavioiurs that will then be entrenched in HR hiring policies (recruitment for example) and management practices. If all this diversity is embraced behaviourally, and at internal epidemic level, and you manage to align everybody, then you have true employee engagement at its best.

Crook quoted Luther King: ‘We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now’. Employee engagement pioneer?

 

In the day when Tim Crook, Apple’s CEO, had to send a note to everybody in the company reminding them that without diversity the company would not exist, doing so on the back of his US government ban on immigration and religion, it is good to reflect on what diversity means and, above all, how we can achieve it.

Diversity of … anything has always been, will always be the organization’s oxygen. It’s now time to buy extra oxygen cylinders for every corner of the firm.

Faced with the dramatic daily events in the US, a cultural war and coup d’etat, an unclassifiable system takeover by one executive order at a time, many of us may wonder is what we see has any form of preventive measure even if a slow cooking way. It may turn up that the organization, the firm, establishes itself and remains a laboratory of critical thinking, an unlikely sanctuary of sanity. Maybe.

Let’s start with labels: Diversity and Inclusion. Do not restrict ‘diversity and inclusion’ to diversity of gender and inclusion of minorities. The best way to inject those is to inject diversity, period. The best way to inject diversity-period it is to practice it. The best way to practice it is to adopt business process norms that, far from controversial, are directly connected with business needs. And they look unsuspicious and healthy in their own merits. Then, multiply.

The following is a modest attempt to ‘practice diversity’, and, warning, it will look simple, small and procedural. Worse, you may say ‘we are doing that already’. And if the latter, I beg you to find out the real truth. Just double check, will you?

Rule 1: Key positions (strategic proposals, for example) always accompanied by a least three concurrent, parallel, or divergent, from people alien to the system: anybody from a different ‘alien’ department to external world. [This is what we should do. Marketing agrees. Opinion Leaders A and B think differently.This is what they said. We’ve check it out]

Rule 2: When the recommendation is made, none of those strategies, big S, small s, without three diverse operational options, one recommendation and full explanation why the other plausible two have been discarded [From what we propose to do, as above, there are also options B and C. This is why we don’t recommend them]

Rule 3: Different form above, everybody in a key team structure compelled to bring in specific (costumer, for example) insights gathered from people other than themselves.

Now, multiply this.

When the organization is used to several views, several positions, several inputs, several possibly contradictory options on many of their routine processes, it will be much easier to integrate a broader diversity and inclusion such gender, minorities etc.

If being diverse in thinking is the norm, not as a theory, a policy, a dictation form the top, but day to day DNA practice, then the organization is vaccinated against tunnel vision, groupthink and individualistic alpha male and female liner thinking. Diversity needs daily mental gym.

Practicing diversity, as opposed to preaching it, will spread those behavioiurs which will be then entrenched in HR hiring policies (such as recruitment) and management practices. If all this diversity is embraced behaviourally, and at internal epidemic level, and you manage to align everybody, then you have true employee engagement at its best.

Crook quoted Luther King: ‘We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now’. Employee engagement pioneer?

 

We naturally retreat to comfort zones. If we didn’t, we would not survive, physically or psychologically. We live in Confirmation Bias Land: we hear what we want to hear, and have fixed ideas that we want to be endorsed. It’s all pretty unconscious. It’s survival.

When it comes to information, we surround ourselves with what confirms our views of the world. Many years ago, pre-digital, when newspapers were still the main source of information and hook to the world, people red or subscribed to their tribal ones. There were ( as they are still today) right wing, and left wing, and middle of the road newspapers. They were easily classified as liberal or conservative or ultra-something.

Then Mr Digital came to town. Clever baby digital allowed you to choose what the system would filter for you. Big news outlets promised you not to bombard your inbox with anything you did not want. Tick here and here and you will never know about the unticked boxes. You could literally create you Daily Me and keep warm and safe.

Mr Digital entered adolescence and then stopped asking you. The algorithms, which I liked to picture as hundreds of little digital men crawling your webpages, would know what you want. Today they know you, indeed, follow you, and miraculously keep offering you that shirt that you saw online but never really wanted to buy. Whether you are in a theater ticket site, or the weather forecast or a sports feed, that shirt never goes away. Recently, I surrendered miserably and did buy that shirt, but the algorithms, those idiots, kept offering it to me.

Forget Big Brother. I am not talking about that. I know I have one. We need the other siblings, brothers, sisters, and also cousins. The Daily Me is now a Me by The Minute. It is Bubble World. Obama put it nicely in his farewell speech:

For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighbourhoods or college campuses or places of worship or our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. The rise of naked partisanship, increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste – all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we accept only information, whether true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that’s out there.

There is only one way to be saved. Get exposed to as many sources and inputs as possible. Diversity of news is OK, but not enough. It is diversity of topics. For me, as alien as possible.

My rule of thumb: at least 50% of what to read, be exposed to, should have little or nothing to do with your job/business area. That increases the probability of avoiding unconscious filtering since you would have less preconceived ideas. And your mind would welcome the Spring Cleaning and fresh air.

My only limit to this is toxicity. You would not want to be in a room full of smokers smoking. So, living in the UK, I stay away from the Daily Mail.

In our Viral Change™ Programmes, members of the community (company) of activists, invariably ask questions such as, what shall we do with people who are negative? What do we do with those colleagues who are not engaging with me in the conversation? How can I keep the motivation of my peers going? Etc.

In the early days of Viral Change™, we worried about this a lot. By ‘we’ I mean us as consultants, the sponsor/client, the project team members, all the above. We felt compelled to have ready-made answers, a library of FAQs. So, we did.

But quickly we learnt that our answers were not as good as the answers of the champions/activists themselves, and, if they were, champions/activists paid more attention to the answers coming from ‘people like them’, that is, other champions.

We soon switched the emphasis and diverted those questions to the community itself. Answers came back in the form of ‘this is what I did’ or ‘this is how I would do it’, followed by a stream of other people agreeing (‘me too’) or disagreeing (‘that would never work for me, however…’).

It was much better!

There is a broader reflection on leadership here. The leader is not an FAQ machine, an answerphone. The leader however must have enough insights about what is going on and how people do and solve things to say ‘this is how other colleagues of yours have dealt with it’. And then, it is OK to say, ‘I would also suggest’. But the power of the peer-to-peer engagement and cross fertilization is never matched by the mighty leader delivering ‘the right answer’.

You as leader do not have to have all the answers. In fact, I would be suspicious of the one who does. My rule of thumb is ‘the answer is in this room somewhere’. Most of the time, this is the plain truth.

Yuval Noah Harari uses this term in his excellent Homo Deus ^[11] book to describe the narrow view that we have about minds and consciousness. We know far less, or very little, about other non WEIRD parts of mankind when it comes to studies in this area. In short, we have a very biased view of the human condition.

This narrow bias could be extended to pretty much everything. Certainly, when it comes to management education and models, our view is equally WEIRD.

Have we learnt anything from other parts of the world, other forms of, say, mobilization of people, other ways of organizing? A bit, but not mainstream. Anthropology could have been a good provider to organizational ‘business’. Transcultural studies could have opened the windows a little bit more, but only provided lots of anecdotes. So, yes, we are a bit stuck in WEIRD. Not a big thing if your company operates in WEIRD countries, but not terribly satisfactory if you call yourself ‘global’. But of course, most of the time we are not really global, we are just WEIRD.

The top  business schools are WEIRD, the world of management is WEIRD and you are probably WEIRD too.

I know you won’t lose sleep about this. But Harari made me think about how narrow our world is. Yes, my clients are WEIRD and I am WEIRD but we need to be braver in our understanding of the human condition, even if we are practicing in WEIRD territories.

How WEIRD is it to talk about this?

Have you ever thought of this? We speak Zoology language in management. We have more animals that one would have expected statistically. Do we think we have a zoo?

Elephants (on the room): there are but we refuse to see them, to talk about them. But there are just big elephants in front of us

Sacred cows: can’t touch them! Applied to people, ideas, whole departments or products.

Boiling frogs: two ways to boil a frog, (a) cold water, the frog has a nice swim, does not feel any problem, suddenly is warmer, suddenly is boiled; (b) thrown into hot water, the frog jumps out and saves himself. This is ‘of course’ a Employee Engagement analogy

Tortoises: yes we do have

Monkeys, as in pass the monkey. Yes we do, we send problems down and up. Usually up

Laggards: they don’t like change, slow to move, slow to adopt

Hedgehog s and foxes.. The fox knows many things. The fox is a very astute ‘able to devise a myriad of complex strategies to sneak attack upon hedgehog’. ‘The hedgehog knows one big thing, rolling up into a perfect little ball thus becoming a sphere of sharp spikes, pointing outward in all directions. The hedgehog always wins despite the different tactics the fox uses’.

Snakes, oh yes, we do have snakes

I suspect the list is far for comprehensive

Funny enough I did not incorporate Zoology into the new Disciplines of Management ^[12]. Am I missing something?

 

 

If you were to list your most important people assets, above the best set of skills and competences, above the best track records, I would suggest that inquiring, inquisitive and restless minds are your top. Without that, everything fails.

Inquiring, inquisitive and restless minds could be a pain. They could question everything and they may do so for the sake of it, so, they are not good inquiring, inquisitive and restless minds, or they can genuinely see different angles, being unsettled by default positions and ‘un-examined life’, and think critically. If so, they are a gem. And as such, you do have headcount for them. Must have.

The ability to seriously seek, seduce and give home to those inquiring, inquisitive and restless minds is a fundamental function of the leadership of the organization.

In the old days, whatever that may mean today beyond one week, these kinds of minds were assumed to be the ones of people in Research and Development, or Science for that matter. Today, this is bread and butter for all functions, all staff, all layers of management and leadership.

If you get this right, if you recruit the right people and you train old and new in Critical Thinking, you are providing the fuel for innovation. Winning and moving forward, reinventing the organization or simply being ahead of the game require those ‘skills’. Without that in your DNA, you are on the path of McDonaldization, slow or fast. Incidentally, McDonald’s is a successful model. The most successful if you run a McDonald’s franchise.

 

 

 

People creating ‘diversity and inclusion’ programmes often  have a hard time. The programme for the concert is brilliant, the music well chosen, the orchestra is first class, people congratulate themselves for being so lucky to have such a programme and such an orchestra, but nobody turns up for the concert.

Next stage after the no-show is the authority saying ’ You will turn up for the concert. It’s the law, it’s your quota’. So compliance goes up. For a bit, until the concert is forgotten.

With my behavioural hat on, I offer a long(er) term plan for the gender/race/diversity programme. Forget gender and race (I know this is easy to say and that you’ll have pressing issues that you need to address; I understand, do what you have to do) and promote like mad diversity of ideas, diversity of views, diversity of interventions, collaborations, participations, inclusions of thoughts and worldviews.

Find people who are influential in the organization and ask them for help. Ask them to do the following: systematically bring others with them (to meetings, group work, team work, public presentations) who follow these rules.

• For any proposal, always bring 3 options, at least.
• Always show that you have created that strategy by including 5 completely alien points of view, from people who were far from close to you.
• Don’t accept any proposal, small or big, that has less than 3 options, has less than 5 aliens looking at it, and less than 3 bad ideas (expressed) left behind. Explain all that. Explain again.
• Multiply the points of view.
• Make a point of asking one by one in meetings of 15-20 people what they think. You Peter, what about you Mary. Not to the whole group (only some will talk) but one by one. The vocals, the shy, the sleepers and all the rest. All
• Be uncompromising about diversity of thinking and views.
• Make yourself rich, immensely rich of ideas or points of views.
• To the ones who say ‘too much, too much waste’, calm them down. Buy them a beer.

Tip: this is not about having more meetings and more ‘representatives’ of everybody on earth. It is about fast, broad, non-bureaucratic input. You figure out how. But it’s not 200 emails.

When, and only when, you have created an organization where diversity of thinking , diversity of ideas, diversity of options (small o, big O) has become the norm, at the same level as talking about football in the corridor, something nobody questions, then, my friend, you have a culture that will embrace race and gender without even mentioning these two words.

Diversity-Full-Stop in the water supply of the company, will create diversity and inclusion in the way your ‘programmes’ will not.

 

‘Familiarity breeds contempt’, the proverb says. But in management, it also breeds lost of content and satisfied people.

We are sometimes too close to the problem and the solution, to close to the dynamics of the team, too close to a culture which we don’t question anymore.

‘Confirmation bias’, ^[13] makes us see the world in the way we have decided it needs to be seen. We are too close to its patterns, to its rules.

We tend to do whatever is next in the way we have always done it and, frankly, if successful, who is to blame? We are generally not detached; we are told we need to be very engaged, focused, committed, even passionate, far from indifferent. So we are close.

We are all a bit of Icarus ignoring his father’s advise of not to fly too low or to high. We get closer and closer to our everyday Sun. Low, low. And we melt a bit every time.

Bring the aliens

Bring to the teams people who are very distant from the topic. Bring to leadership people with the right leadership strengths but who perhaps are aliens to the domain, to the function, to the issues.

It’s hard. It sounds like a waste. With so many experts around, why would you not bring them? Perhaps because they are too experts.

Bring in the aliens, the detached, the ones who have nothing to lose, the ones who ask uncomfortable questions ( such as ‘why does it need to take two months?), the non familiar, the not close to ‘it’. Ask them to assess the project plan, to challenge the strategy, to ask many stupid questions.

Uncomfortable? Yes, for a more mechanistic and predictable internal talent management and for traditional succession planning, but it works wonders if well managed.

It’s not the introduction of the alien (new staff, new leader, new team member) for the sake of it, but with a mission to provide critical thinking and ask more questions than anybody else in a detached way.

You can prove almost anything you want in Management Theory but, for whatever is worth, a recent article ^[14] supports the hypothesis that CEOs who are ‘dissimilar’ to the culture of the organization, tend to end up running a better performing one. In the trade this is called ‘the dissimilarity hypothesis’.

Bring in the aliens, the dissimilar aliens. Together with the indigenous, it may be a win-win. The indigenous have expertise, the aliens will ask inconvenient questions.

 

Management evolution has overdone it in some species and is has become weak, even in survival mode in others,. Here is a list of 12 Protected Species that you need to take extreme care of, and also find and integrate. Note that the order above is correct. I did not start by saying ‘having a headcount to fill’. There should be permanent unfilled openings for these Species.

1. Re-constructors of Elephants. You probably have already in the payroll all experts you could have in cutting the elephant into pieces. As a big animal, it was declared unmanageable, so it was dissected into trunks, tusks, ears, skin, tails and feet. And you have become proficiency in Parts-Management. But there is nobidy in the organization anymore able to recognise an elephant. You need those people. Analytical skills is a given, synthesis skills is Premium Luxury.

2. Signal Spotters. Flooded within 24/7 information, your brain has lost the ability to distinguish between signal and noise. All seems urgent, important, needing a reaction. Noise in the system looks like signal, and real signals get buried into noise. You need Signal Spotters brave enough to say, that is noise, irrelevant, secondary, distracting, diverting energy. Even if the CEO does not see it.

3. Space and time architects. Time is stolen every day. It’s not malicious. It is just how the system works. Space and time to think and to be oneself is destroyed but almost never not re-created. When it’s gone, it’s gone. You need people who can protect their own space and time, and build and protect the ones of people working for them. Imagine this two-sentence role description: I build spaces. I create time. If you see them hire them, no questions asked.

4. Rightbrainers. You have probably hired all Leftbrainers who moved in front of you. You have everybody coming in on the basis of logic, analytical skills, fact based thinking and computational brains power. Your competitors have done the same, so the Leftbrainers with creativity and imagination, who can visualize things and think in a more holistic way, are a very rare, kind of species. You need to put a premium on those. Unless you think hat they only belong to an advertising agency. But even the Leftbrainers have infiltrated the agencies.

5. Human Capital Investment Managers. I did not say Human Resources people. People bring in their human and social capital. You call it capital, right? You need the capitalists, Investment Fund Managers who can grow that capital by x % annual, unstoppable way. No individual growth, very bad investment. HR needs to reinvent itself as Human Capital Investment Fund Managers. I know, a mouthful.

6. Lead(brok)ers. The absolute interdependence of things (people, systems, companies, countries) makes broker-ship a priority. Leader as broker is now essential. Broker and consensus-creating have nothing to do with each other. Find the definition of a broker and translate it into your managerial and leadership competencies. Even very senior people could simply spend all their time as brokers. That would be much better than attending powerpoint presentations.

To continue in the nest Daily Thought

(Original full version in New Leaders wanted, now hiring ^[15], Leandro Herrero, meetingminds 2007)

Henry Ford said that you could have ‘any colours of a car as long as it’s black’. The colour to avoid in leadership is actually white. Our consensus systems (of management, of leadership, of project management, of ‘culture of’) are white. White from the start, sometimes. The ancient colour of purity.

We need Newton. He brought it a prism and demonstrated that white light was actually a combination of the rest of the colours. You just did not see it. If we lead in white, we miss all the colours. White is the colour of total alignment and consensus, a clean a pristine colour with a lot of happiness around. This is what you see. Without a prism.

I wrote just a few hours ago about ‘In praise of tension. Consensus as permanent state in the organization, is collective coma’ ^[16]. This Daily Thought, together with 3 Inconvenient truths about leadership and change ^[17], have rocketed in readership and comments like never before, including Linkedin Pulse. This says, issue of leadership still bother us. And, consensus, in particular, is a hot leadership issue: how to reach it and how to avoid it, at which times. Ah! The tension.

In the last hours, consensus has been reached in the Paris talks on Climate Change. Not widely publicized, this little note in The Guardian ^[18], gives us some insights into some of the ‘mechanisms’ used to reach that consensus.

The French hosts have adopted a traditional South African negotiating format to speed up decision-making and bring opposing countries together in Paris.

Zulu and Xhosa communities use “indabas” to give everyone equal opportunity to voice their opinions in order to work toward consensus.

They were first used in UN climate talks in Durban in 2011 when, with the talks deadlocked and the summit just minutes from collapse, the South African presidency asked the main countries to form a standing circle in the middle of hundreds of delegates and to talk directly to each other.

Instead of repeating stated positions, diplomats were encouraged to talk personally and quietly about their “red lines” and to propose solutions to each other.

By including everyone and allowing often hostile countries to speak in earshot of observers, it achieved a remarkable breakthrough within 30 minutes.

In Paris the indaba format was used by France to narrow differences between countries behind closed doors. It is said to have rapidly slimmed down a ballooning text with hundreds of potential points of disagreements.

By Wednesday with agreement still far away, French prime minister Laurent Fabius futher refined the indaba by splitting groups into two.

“It is a very effective way to streamline negotiations and bridge differences. .It has the advantage of being participatory yet fair”, said one West African diplomat. “It should be used much more when no way through a problem can be found.”

‘To form a standing circle in the middle of hundreds of delegates and to talk directly to each other’: I would call that a no-escape strategy. The circle was the Newton prism. All the colours could be seen. Eventually there was a white. At least for now.

Leadership can’t afford colour blindness, after all. The organization is rainbow. Keep it like this. Much better than pure white.

 

In a recent conference, the very sharp mind of Marten Mickos, CEO of HackerOne, ex HP, ex Nokia, reminded the audience that ‘the new generations are not worried about the future, but about what the older generations are living behind’. I thought it was a great insight in the context of discussions about what Millennials want from life, which took place in a panel of speakers where no visible Millennial had been invited to speak.

Another ‘expert in Millennials’ would assure us that ‘they’ have three distinctive characteristics: (1) They love relationships; (2) They need and follow a cause; (3) They don’t want a job.

These may be true. As caricatures go, this may be a good one. But I’m always puzzled by how these are always portrayed as almost innate and genetic of an entire generation. Are Millennias born with a relationship gene, a purpose and good cause gene, and a no job gene? Or did they all get together in a Global Millennial Alignment Convention and decide about these three features?

The truth about ‘the Millennials characteristics’ maybe more on how the non-Millennials, previous generations have shaped their world, so that the world in front, handed to them, is the only one they know.

They love relationships. Sure, there are ‘there’, in front, at a click and a like. Hyper connectivity is a global phenomenon (but not hyper-collaboration and hyper-proximity) so, they take it because they live it. What nobody really says is that their relationships may be very different from other relationships. The question is what type of relationship, if any at all, is a differentiation between us.

They want and follow a cause. Maybe the previous generations have created more and more causes to follow, so, no shortage,  the supply is high. Maybe previous generations are looking at a serious purpose for the organization, having avoided full domestication under ‘the maximization of shareholder value’, witch reached a climax of Robotic Goals and proportions, until legions of people started shouting my favorite slogan: ‘surely, it must be a better way’.

They don’t want a job. Perhaps they don’t want your kind of job, or mine. Perhaps they are redefining ‘job’.

I think that, very often, we have a set of stereotypes and mental frames that we apply easily as a way to comprehend the world. That makes us more (feel) in control. It’s easy to apply a frame of wishes, desires and predictable behaviors to an entire generation. Some of these behaviors may tell us more about our own ones, and the world that we have prepared and cooked for that generation, than something ‘intrinsic to them’.

The question about Millennials is not whether, or why, they love relationships, a cause, and ‘no jobs’, but whether, or why, we have a world that is craving for better relationships, has organizations that may have forgotten a ‘high purpose’, and jobs not worth having.

Perhaps what Millenials want is the same as we non-Millennials want, but one of us is shy to tell. I think that they are having the meal that we have cooked for them.

How many times I’ve seen in my clients the high expectations about new people. Not just the new hires but the ones that come from a fresh acquisition. Particularly when self-belief is at low levels, the hope is that new people will bring new ideas, new lenses, perhaps new urgencies, or a different way to think and act. And that may be the case, indeed.

Or maybe not. New people often bring with them their own old ideas, so you inherit both the bodies and the minds. Surely the more ‘alien’ the acquisition is, for example a different business model, a different size of organization, a different concentration of new-to-you types of professionals, the greater the chance for you to have that fresh injection. But don’t bank on that and take it as face value.

Some ‘new people’ spend an often interminable time referring to their previous employer. The sentences tend to start always in the same way: ‘When I was in X, we did such and such’. And after a few weeks of this, you start thinking if a friendly invitation to go back to X, where surely he or she is greatly missed, would be just appropriate.

Because of that inheritance, good or bad, new people, who need perhaps to establish some credibility and some standing, tend to produce higher levels of prediction than ‘older’ people. ‘We did that in X, but we called it Y, and did not work’. That’s it, sentence given, in a sentence.

Or they have an answer in the form of a toolkit ‘used in X’. Years ago I was offered by some ‘new people’ coming to my client, the entire set of McKinsey slides ‘on the topic’, introduced to us with with the ‘when I was in X’. Unfortunately, they (the people) did not make it to our joint consultants-client project team, so we missed those slides. The project was a great success.

Our own ‘new’ or ‘old’ has less to do with employers and experience than our ability to Spring-clean our minds from time to time. Dee Hoc, founder of Visa, the card company that does not issue cards, said it better than many others: ‘The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it’.

Which applies to the old employee, the new one, the hired, the acquired and the founders.

You don’t want to prevent people from bringing in ‘their experiences’ . What you want is to put them in the pot where critical thinking is going to have a go.

I love new people coming in and asking ‘what’s for breakfast?’ instead of saying ‘Breakfast? this is the kind of breakfast I had when I was in X’.