With the best of intentions, to call an organization a Democracy is an abuse of the term, unless of course, the organization has been structured and functions on strict democratic principles. But what are these principles? Strictly speaking, in a democracy, all eligible members vote because power is completely distributed; laws and regulations are agreed etc. Sure, you can have a democratic organization on those principles, but it rarely fits the concept of the firm, as we know it.

Business organizations are not democracies. We should reserve the term for the Polis, for the political, civic arena.  People who, I repeat, with the best of intentions, use the word ‘democracy’ as an aspiration for a business organization, usually mean employee participation, employee voice, freedom of that voice, good representation to management etc. They want to inject a democratic flavour, ‘democratic principles’, synonymous with a healthy and participative environment. All this is very noble, but it does not make the organization a democracy.

Some people go further and describe the attributes of a democratic (business) organization. Amongst those: having a purpose, accountability, transparency, integrity, dialogue etc. I call this a Well Managed Organization.

Democracy, ‘the worst form of government except for all other forms that have been tried’ (Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1947) must remain in the socio-political arena. Even here, we could count in great numbers the institutions that, strictly speaking, are not democracies and form the fabric of a given society. Democracy is a form of civil government, not a form of corporate government (unless you chose this, of course).

To use terms such as ‘democracy’ or ‘being democratic’ in a loose way may inspire comfort, may legitimize noble goals of people participation, but may also be very misleading. By borrowing the language from the Polis, we may think that we add credibility to Employee Engagement. We don’t. What we add is a distraction.

So you have The Process and The Outcome dating. You would have thought that they are having a good time. Maybe. What kind of relationship do they have?

These are your available combinations

Model 1. The Process is the key; the outcome is secondary. This is a type of journey of experiential activity. Be clear about this. If you are serious, you need to accept unpredictable and even unwanted outcomes. Enjoy the process, nothing wrong with this. Journeys are good. To those asking you for a particular outcome, say you don’t know. The ‘how we do it’ matters to you more. Be brave and say so.

Model 2. The Outcome is king; the process is there to produce an outcome. OK. Clear. So, here, any process is a good process as long as it gives me the outcome. Now review all your processes and detach yourself from any love you may have for any of them. They don’t matter in themselves anymore. As long as you get the outcome, you should be happy. So, stop nagging about the process.

Model 3. Both Process and Outcome are equally important. Wow! Then you’d better craft the connection very well. If it’s a marriage of equals, it’s a marriage of equals, not one more equal than the other. Note: in this type of ‘I want this’, one starts very equal but soon often discovers that you care more abut one than the other. As soon as you realise this, leave model 3, and jump to any other or you’ll be very dishonest in the least and, at worse, kidding yourself, and never reaching expectations on top of it. Never Satisfied Land is a frequent destination of this model.

Model 4. Both Process and Outcome have not been weighted. They are just there. Connection is assumed. In summary you have a pretty casual view of things and a very loose approach to life. Congratulations, you have qualified for a long holiday. Goodbye.

The simplicity of the above combinations is powerful. Most people ‘want everything’: a good process, a good outcome. These people assume that the word ‘good’ miraculously links both. But it doesn’t. It is very difficult (I repeat, very) to craft the perfect connection between both.

Saint Randomness also intervenes here. Many good outcomes seem to come sometimes from pretty lazy processes. Also, pristine processes may deliver great garbage.

Make sure you apply critical thinking to Your Plan. Make sure you know where your heart is. The Outcome Junkies, will do anything in order to achieve a KPI. That may include murder. The Process Junkies, love processes so much that they marry them at any cost as well.

The leader’s role assumes a pre-existing human condition. It’s called a functioning brain preferably attached to a heart. Use your pre-existing human condition fully. Don’t kid yourself. Choose.

The historical existence of several layers of management in any organization may be related to its size. In a command and control firm of some size, managers ensure that objectives are declared, and then check what is going on from people who are doing the work. They absorb the information of the feedback loop and pass it on upwards. They asses the efficacy and effectiveness of the tasks and assign a reward. Forgive me the caricature of this ‘managerial picture’.

As channels of communication inside the firm have become multi-centric, not just top down and up again, communication is digitalised, and the inter-dependence of groups within the company becomes something almost impossible to represent in an organizational chart, ‘management’, as a function, and as boxes in that organizational chart, start looking redundant. Today, much more than just a few years ago, it is possible to have groups of individuals in the organization teaming up, perfectly capable to do jobs, with no direct command and control. Effectively they could be/are self-managed, and populated by self-assigned people. Middle management starts looking superfluous, amongst other things, because it’s less and less clear what ‘middle’ means, other than perhaps an ‘information traffic control hub’ (and then the manager being an ‘information traffic warden’)

The self-management train has left the station but it’s not short of challenges on the journey ahead. For starters, we don’t have good maps and toolkits. All management, organization and leadership development, and other ‘HR’ navigation tools, were created at a time when the business environment was more linear, the world outside the firm much more predictable and the division of labour inside in need of a strict and efficient top down, command and control information system.

Responsible for these old toolkits were the Academia and the Big Consulting Companies, pretty much the same people who now predicate a rethinking, or a revolution, or even the death of management. They have a great track record in teaching how to manage an organization, but hardly any, how to deal with an organism. The modern firm is a social organism. We have very few good toolkits, and the good ones won’t pass the paternity test of Academia or Big Consulting. Management education continues to de-educate with old toolkits.

One of the main problems of the self-management train is that, in many cases, self-management may be imposed in the firm as a fashion, mantra or copycat of another firm where it seems to work. Get ready for some shocks when companies want to be a version of Zappos. However, the direction is inexorable and I strongly recommend at least some level of experimentation in your organization. The sky will not fall. The potential is enormous.

Although people are hearing the self-management music, many of those same people become very confused.  For example, ‘self-management’ has zero to do with ‘leaderless’. Any social (animal) grouping will have leaders, if not formally implanted, emergent. Self-management requires different leadership.

One year ago, my team and I started the formal work that we call ‘Building Remarkable Organizations’. One of the ten ‘Lego pieces’ of the building is the self-management progression. Let me share my number one rule: since self-management is a ‘when’ question, not an ‘if’ question, eyes closing or head in the sand are not good strategies. It’s time to understand the itinerary of that train so that one can figure out at which stations it may be possible to catch it. It does not have to be the next one.

I must confess I have never been 100% comfortable with the traditional distinction by Warren Bennis ^[1] between leaders and managers which I always thought too stereotyped:  ‘Managers do things right, leaders do the right thing’.  However, you read it, ‘leaders seem to win’…

But there is a point in distinguishing between management and leadership.

I have my own three distinctions:

Managers make sure that the operational machinery works. Leaders make sure that there is an operational machinery that’s fit for purpose.
Managers take care of the healthy functioning of processes and systems. Leaders ask the question, why do we need these processes and systems?
Managers push stuff. Leaders pull stuff.

An overweight managerial system reigns when most of the airtime is given over to processes, systems and procedures. Note that I am not saying this focus on processes, systems and procedures is wrong. I am saying it could be given too much weight and steal the entire airtime. When this problem is visible, it tends to correlate with a slim leadership system that does not have enough glucose, enough weight to stand up and ask strategic questions.

The exaggeration of an overweight managerial system leads to managerial pathological obesity, with ‘managing the inevitable’ being the main symptom (i.e. all time is spent managing things that would otherwise happen).

Oversized management on a diet, coupled with slim leadership eating healthier and not skipping meals, sounds like a plan. There you are, the CEO as Chief Dietician Officer!

The unwritten rules of the organization tell you more about its culture than all powerpoionts of its leadership programmes. The unwritten rules are direct representations of styles, what is permissible or not, the differences between visible vocal and invisible action.

In Viral Safety™, for example,  we focus on those unwritten rules. The often ‘getting away with murder’ when the compliance system is not watching. A system that depends on compliance, whether safety in Oil and Gas, or a trader’s desk in a financial institution has always embedded the possibility of non compliance when people can hide or bypass the norms.

Compliance systems are needed, but have little power to shape a culture in a sustainable way. A culture effort needs to supplement compliance with voluntarism. In the absence of a magic pill or a substance put in the power supply of the company, we need to engineer the spread of positive behaviours. And the only way to do that seriously is peer-to-peer engagement and bottom-up change.

People do what they do for three reasons:

1. They are told to
2. They want to
3. Others do

Compliance works on (1) but does not touch (2). Viral Change™ and Viral Safety™ engineers (3) by finding people who start! Eventually (2) may come in and make (1) a bit redundant.

As a test, imagine a culture with no (need for) compliance system. What it would look like?  That is your model.

 

1. Culture is the difference between 30 people making a decision in 30 days, and 3 people making the same decision in 3 days
2. Culture is the difference between taking accountability, and passing the monkey down the hierarchy
3. Culture is the difference between waiting to be told, and taking the initiative
4. Culture is the difference between bringing things in the open, and criticising everybody in the toilets after the meeting has ended and decisions made
5. Culture is the difference between implementing decisions, and deferring them or waiting hoping that those decisions may be changed
6. Culture is the difference between losing 20% of recruits after a recent recruitment investment, and having people knocking at the door wanting to join
7. Culture is the difference between recycling orphan ideas, and making things happen
8. Culture is the difference between making things happen first and fixing the broken system afterwards, and paralysing all to fix the system first so things can happen after

Dear leader who thinks culture is fluffy and woolly and soft.  Do you want me to run an ROI on these, or would your imagination do it for now?

PS: Finance is soft, very, very soft. Culture is hard. But fixable, and exciting, and strategic, and meaningful, and a business driver, big time, provided that you stop that ‘soft, fluffy, fuzzy’ thing.

PS2: I insist, I can run an ROI on this for you in no time.

I have never found a client that says we don’t need evidence, or data, or facts, or hard measures. Most of the professions I have encountered in those companies claim that territory.

Accountants are quick to tell you that they live for and with numbers and hard data. Clinicians and doctors say they are evidence-based. Engineers claim to have a rational mind and request the numbers. Commercial people need, they say, the numbers. No numbers, no measure; no measure no management. Give me the numbers! Make the numbers!  Scientific R&D people would tell you upfront they don’t navigate on soft stuff so they need data, evidence, hard measures, all of the above and well designed processes. They don’t get the soft stuff.

Accountants think that they are the ones pure data driven, not like doctors and others. R&D people think they are the only ones like that, not like their colleagues in Commercial. And in pharmaceutical R&D (where I served my time for years), they claim the ‘truth of things’, not like Commercial or the medics. OK, accountants do as well, they say, but this is because of their brains not having imagination. Everybody reclaims the uniqueness of the rational based on hard data and evidence.

You would have thought that we have a professional zoo of Defenders of the Real Data, Hard facts and Evidence Based world. Not defenders, sorry, that is nothing, real practitioners, 24/7.

In this area, organizations are run on a Colossal Attribution Bias operating system. It may be just me, restless and ranting mind, progressively less tolerant to BS, but, over the years, I have found lots and lots and lots of accountants, R&D heads, Commercial Die Hard people, clinicians, medics and engineers who were incredibly sloppy, ready to cut corners, full of confirmation bias (seen the world as one wants to see it), economical with the truth, compromises of quality and, in general, not that hard-data-junkies. At all. In fact they were worse than other professions not claiming the territory.

Next time I’ll hear a client say, you see, Leandro, here we work on evidence, I will say, me too, show me yours first and nobody will get hurt.

Back in 2015 I wrote this. In the context of some recent conversations, I went to review the validity of these statements. I have made a couple  of modifications but, generally speaking, this world is one that has not changed.

10 ways to fool everybody as an organization expert: They guarantee some attention and all have been tried and tested, somewhere. These 10 positions provide organizational solutions with guarantee of some good reception. All of them are ‘possible’. If you want a case study, you’ll find it. Chose one or as many. You can’t go wrong. Well, not yet.

1. Top down is bad, but bottom up may be crazy. What about a more benign top down? OK,  let’s have a bit of bottom up. Lets do more workshops South or the equatorial line in the organizational chart. (Reality: bottom up is not more workshops at the bottom of the organization)
2. Digitalise. Let’s just connect everybody with everybody. Yes we can. You can have videos as well. And an app. And hot desks. And working from home. Flexible! Work-life balance! Hurrah! And we can even write a book: ‘From P2P (peer to peer) to S2S (screen to screen)’ (reality: Hyper-connectivity is not hyper-collaboration)
3. Disrupt. Disrupt is good. Well, just a bit. (Reality: some times it feels like Disruptive is anything that we have no done yet. Right?)
4. Passion, passion. My kingdom for a bit of passion. If we are passionate, we will reinvent the enterprise. Just need to figure out a few hundred steps. (Reality: passion is overrated, hard work is the trick)
5. ‘The marketing of rebellion’ (of curse there is a book with this title, but not talking about this): rebels, mavericks, people who want change, disruptors, innovators. Give them a proper playground and something good will come up. (Reality: Yes, a magnificent waste of energy directed into low impact high noise activities, and a proliferation of useful idiots that conservative management can 6. exhibit as sign of forward thinking. Ok, that was harsh, my colleague says, sorry!)
6. Get rid of command and control. (Reality: Just stick to control. It’s shorter.)
7. It’s all networks, and actually there are so many pretty graphs. Not sure what to do, but the slides look great. (Realty: I’ve just seen a YouTube in which a management guru has revealed the death of the organization chart and the rise of networks which have two parts, the centre and the periphery. And it looked as if he had been highly paid for that corporate speech. Sorry, for clarification, yes, this was a 2015 YouTube)
8. Process and systems are the problem. Reengineer (well, let’s call it something else, there is a lit bit of baggage here). (Reality: Inject anything with the word agile, even if you don’t know much about it, other than the word. Yes, there are agile experts, but they are so complicated!)
9. It’s the house. Dismantle the Lego. Do another one, a dragon this time, with less pieces. (Reality: Mary, could you get me the McKinsey number?)
10. Let’s get rid of management, no titles, no supervisors. It’s cool. (Reality:We’ll have other people in charge though, but won’t call them managers.)
No, I am not really playing Dilbert. All those scenarios are real and I have encountered them in my organizational consulting life. The issue is that all those scenarios have some sort of ‘half truth within’. They may reflect, indeed, something that may be needed for a particular organization. My contention is with the ‘pret-a-porter’ management solution driven by the latest guru offer and based upon zero critical thinking.

If physics and engineering worked with the same rigour as ‘management solutions’, bridges will fall down, electric grids will have daily  blackouts and airplanes would never take off.

Type One: This is messy. Accountabilities are not clear. The process sucks. Too many people involved. The issue to address is complex. There are at least 5 people  who should have done  X,Y,Z  but did not.  We need to fix the process, define accountabilities and explain why those 5 did not do X,Y,Z.  Then, we will be in a position to address the issue.

Type Two: This is messy. Accountabilities are not clear. The process sucks. Too many people involved. The issue to address is complex. There are at least 5 people  who should have done  X,Y,Z  but did not.  We solve the issue, we make it work first, now. No  matter what. Then (after)  we look back, we fix the process, define accountabilities and explain everything that needed to be explained. Then we will have learnt, and we will have neat things in place.

Which one you want? 9 out of 10 of cases, people go for Type One. It is completely rational. Which is exactly the problem. The rationality implies that you have the luxury of stopping time, and then, once all has been sorted out, you address the problem. Not real life.

Remarkable organizations work on Type Two mode. Many people may say they do too. But in my experience this is not the case. We do really stop time and get paralyze until all possible accountabilitis have been articulated properly. Then we act. Fooled by the rationality of the argument.

 

Can we work on the collective and reward the individualistic? Well, sure you can, it happens every day. But it’s a bit crazy. The organization, the corporation, the company, is collectivist in nature. It is not a collection of units doing individual things. It’s a collective for a reason. It’s supposed to do things that the individuals on their own can’t.

The contribution to goals and outcomes has two faces. On one hand, there is the individual: things I am supposed to do, and only me. On the other hand, precisely because the individual cannot reach goals on their own and needs others, the collective collaborative, joining forces, is a primary engine. So far so good.

But we hire individualistic agents and we tell them to ‘work as a team’. OK. What’s that? The individualistic cum laude says. When they manage to learn to ‘work as a team’, we reward them for their individual contributions, so we are reinforcing the original idea. Confusing the troops, we are.

At the other end of the spectrum, everybody gets the same reward on a collective achievement regardless the individual contribution. Read, universal bonus.

Behaviourists would have a problem with either end of the spectrum. The universal reward may address a sense of belonging (‘we are all here together ’) but this is more romantic than real in behavioural terms. In those behavioural terms, the strongest reward is the one in which the individual can see a direct connection between his individual contribution and an outcome. That outcome may be collective. The greater the distance between what I can do, personally, and reward, the weaker the reinforcement effect.

A mix is of course OK. Some general pool reward and a strong personal one connecting me and the outcome, may be a good combination. But be careful what you are aiming for, you may get it. Be careful what you are rewarding, sure you’ll get it. Reward everything, get nothing.

Next time you want a compensation scheme, you need a careful behavioural sciences approach. Let’s say that you need something to be done in strict collaborative terms. You need to reward the collaboration at least equal to the output. You may of course reward both, but, if so, collaboration needs to be stronger. So that it’s not about achieving X, but about achieving it by collaborating with A,B,C. Not rocket science, but we very often forget the ‘by collaborating’ when pretending that we are rewarding collaboration. There is a name for this: very high dose of decaffeinated espresso.

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?

 

Years ago, I persuaded a pharmaceutical client to make three bold moves in one:

(1)   To create a New Product Incubator Unit (NPI) in charge of fast assessment/fast fail of very early stage development of medicines, including those offered for in-licencing by outsiders. The client was slow in this crucial filtering phase of the value chain, and applied to this well-known bottleneck in medicines development the same laws and management criteria used in the rest of the company. We created an Incubator from what it was a Slow Incinerator.

(2)   To give the NPI complete autonomy with different governance from the mainstream company, for example, allowing different reporting system and different levels of risk management (read: high). In many companies, uniformity and homogeneity of process, systems and reporting, sold as quintessence of, otherwise flawed, good management efficiency, is the only way to go. To carve out spaces (we call it ‘cohabitation of spaces’ in our Organizational Design method) with different laws and rules of the game, seems sometimes to management like a non-affordable nightmare. But the only reasons for the non-affordability, though, are simply of the managerial convenience type. It is indeed more difficult and painful to manage an organization which de facto works as a host of different designs, units, and rules of the game, a diversity of spaces, not a one mansion with all the windows and toilets looking the same.

(3)   To put in charge somebody with a technology/engineering background, not medical or pharmaceutical. This bright gentleman, out of ignorance, started asking all sort of uncomfortable questions about speed, decision making, risk levels, resources and deliverables. The client anticipated a big backlash from ‘the professionals’ but, in fact, we had next to nothing of it, ‘professionals’ largely welcoming the alien and his awkward questions that nobody else had asked before.

This all-in-one bold move worked extraordinarily well in all counts. It got rid of all backlog of assessment of molecules. It attracted bright people wanted to join in. In fact, its permanent headcount was low, but we had a long queue of good brains wanted to join as secondments from other parts of the company. The NPI was ‘the place to be’. It was fast moving, high risk, work intense, stimulating, high output, thought provoking environment. And did delivered big time.

When later on the company was acquired by a Big-All-Things-Corporation, it took the new owners just a few days to dismantle this alien, avant-garde, magnetic structure. None of the new acquiring executives descending from heaven with a McKinsey cookbook understood this apparent madness, and the most successful experimentation in the long history of the company, going back to the 50s, died unceremoniously.

I made a big mistake at the beginning. I took for granted that success would always be protected, proven innovation would always win, and even Big Consulting Thinking would always acknowledge bold moves. I am slightly less stupid now.

Organizations can have the flu. And it can become epidemic. The epidemic of consensus is one.

The conversation often starts like this: ‘this culture is a culture of consensus’. Blib, blip, blip. This is a bad sign. Nobody has ever installed a culture of consensus. This is probably slow or fast behavioural contamination under a ‘cultural archetype’.

Translation. What it often means is that responsibilities and accountabilities are loose and everybody is checking with everybody else before moving. OK, I am sure there are genuine cases of seeking lots of people ideas and reaching a common denominator, but in 4 out 5 cases, in my experience, what we see is pseudo-consensus. That is a bad habit of epidemic proportions in which people pretend they are seeking consensus but, in reality, they’re recycling unfinished arguments, reinforcing insecurity, slowness, terrible decision making process and a huge dose of navel gazing when the world outside is moving at the speed of light.

This pseudo-consensus pathology also breeds two dysfunctional children:

Over-inclusiveness. Everybody needs to be part of, copied on, called to, counted and heard. Many of these things sound good and democratic but their excesses constitute a big liability. Over-inclusiveness is a good selling but eventually those who have been invited to the inclusion complain of too many meetings, too many emails, too many calls, and too many requests for input.

The over-included wants to be included, until he has been included. Over-inclusiveness is more often than not a dysfunctionality of the organization not a merit to be proud of.

Loose follow up. Decisions are made (eventually) but the collective psyche of the organization says hang on, that may change, wait a bit to see if sticks. Multiply that times ( pick a number) and you have a slow motion decision system.

‘Culture of consensus’ is an attribute of some national cultures, scholars tells us. I am sure there is a good reason for that, and tons of research handy to explain it. I am sceptical about that, not because I don’t believe there is essence in the transcultural propositions, but because I think it is a bad start in your thinking, particularly when working on the organizational life. Culturalists will hate me for this but, my rule of thumb is, never start from a premise of ‘national culture’. if you do, you will be wearing some specific glasses and all you’ll see what you want to see. By the way, there is a term for this: confirmation bias.

All the beauty of true consensus can be destroyed in five minutes if you start with the proposition that ‘it must be consensus’, always, at any cost, so get ready for lengthy discussions, slow decision making, interminable recycling and sheer resignation with ‘the way things will be here’.

Personally, I regret not having challenged the imposed ‘consensus archetype’ many times.

This is a pattern that I encounter with many of my clients. Top and less top leadership, of the progressive type, broadcasts what seems sincere views: you are empowered, be agile, make decisions, don’t escalate to us all the time, take risks, make mistakes, learn from them, take accountability, and act with ownership.

That is the audio. A good audio.

The video shows people who don’t feel empowered and see the company as an elephant; make decisions but expect that many won’t be implemented, escalate to the top (in part because the top likes to receive the escalation), doesn’t take many risks, see mistakes as … mistakes (see what happened to Mary), doesn’t learn from them, takes little accountability, and doesn’t ‘act with ownership’ because they never understood what that meant, not being owners of the company.

So, where is the problem in this lack of sync between the video and the audio?

Possibilities are:

1. Top leadership is insincere and disingenuous. Not my experience. I have not found one of them that does not mean it.
2. The troupes do not believe them because:
   • Their overall credibility is low. Again, not my experience.
   • What they see is leadership doing the contrary to what they say. Complex reporting systems are growing. Decision-making is welcome up the ladder through several new Review Bodies near the top or at the top. Mistakes have been semi-tolerated and in some cases, being fatal for the people involved. This is my experience. What leadership says is sincere but how it behaves does not match.
3. Still sharing my very personal experience, I would add that in almost all cases that I know, leadership is completely oblivious to this video/audio mismatch. What is also infuriating is that they would defend their actions and still would blame people down the system as ‘not taking enough accountability or ownership’.

This pattern is very common and does not require special skills to be spotted. Yet, it is pervasive. It affects good companies, with good people and with successful achievements. But this video-audio synchronization problem is a frustrating part of their life. People spend days and days discussing complexity, ownership, accountability, risk, agility and decision-making, often without focusing on the obvious: ‘it’s behaviours, stupid’.

Most of the answers to the sync problem are behavioural. They do not necessarily require workshops on agility, training on accountability, a new risk management system, decision-making processes or a new Review Body. In fact, these would be expensive distractions. Behaviours are the only things that will restore the sync.

 

 

According to The Telegraph, Mr Jeremy Hunt, Health Secretary of Her Majesty’s British Government has declared that doctors and nurses should run the National Health Service as opposed to ‘managers with no front line experience’. According to him, the creation of management layers in the 80s was a mistake.

Very popular, perhaps, but bonkers.

Front line experience does not give anybody managerial or leadership capacity. If we were to apply the Hunt Bonkers Rule 1, many CEOs of companies would be declared unsuitable. Many of them come from a finance background, or R&D, or strategy, and, equally, not many of them have been salesmen of first line marketers. There are entire multinational corporate affiliates run by ex-manufacturing people and global commercial pharmaceuticals run by ex-heads of R&D. Whoever is skilled and qualified, is the right one, whether a doctor or not, a nurse or not, plus any of the unnamed, physiotherapists, clinical psychologists, HR heads and Chief Porters.

That was Bonkers 1. Bonkers 2 reads ‘An MBA is to be created so clinicians can study leadership’. MBA is the last place in the world to ‘study’ leadership. The Health Secretary can send anybody to do an MBA and I am sure they will benefit from what an MBA can give. But this will be equally valuable, or not, to clinicians, procurement administrators, dentists, ambulance services directors and accountants. MBAs are not the main source of leadership.

Bonkers 3 is ‘Doctors and nurses will be sent to universities, including Yale, to prepare them for management positions’. Very good luck to all. The idea that universities prepare for management positions at that level is naive to say the least. OK, more than that, it is bonkers. Also, if I were the head of UK universities (I realize there isn’t one, but let’s pretend) I would be very annoyed with the ‘including Yale’. Somebody has been selling something to him.

And probably all of that will be unchallenged because it will be popular. Managers are bad, poor doctors and nurses, if they could just be given the keys of the kingdom. Speaking as somebody who holds both an MD and an MBA, I would argue that the logic of banking on these ‘front line professions’ is, well, bonkers. Some doctors have no managerial ability, nor they want one. Some specialists work in a rather isolated world. An excellent ‘front line’ cardiologist may be both a Nobel Prize candidate and the last person you’d like to see in charge of a hospital. Some physicians are delightfully sensitive to the human condition, others have the emotional intelligence of a fish cake. And fish cake is not a condition of leadership. You don’t have be a psychiatrist to run a psychiatric hospital, nor the asylum should be run by inmates. You do not need to have led a platoon in Afghanistan to be Defense Minister.

I would prefer hundred times a brilliant leader with zero front line experience than a mediocre leader with hundred points of frontline stuff. Nurses and doctors have a trust advantage ^[2]over all other possible professions  in the country. Some of them may be excellent formal leaders (I think Mr Hunt is thinking  administrators, though), others would be excellent role models and high influencers over the entire workforce and the public. The trust advantage does nor necessarily lead to administrative and managerial advantage.

And yet, it would take very little for Mr Hunt to look deeper inside the shop. The NHS has incredible hidden and un-used capacities. Some hospitals run in a incredibly innovative way, but not well publicized because ‘good’ does not make headlines in the British Daily Mail. Internal, central Transformation groups in the NHS are state of the art in people mobilization. There is a myriad of other pockets of excellence. Let them do, flourish, lead, scale. Led by nurses, doctors, physiotherapists, psychologists, accountants or porters if any can lead. Mr Hunt should perhaps look inside, not in Yale.  ‘Straitjacket Removal’ is the key competence, if you want one.

By the way, the NHS ‘problem’ is a wicked problem, ^[3] and no amount of managerial training for  ‘front line’ people, or anybody in isolation,  will solve it per se.

Mr Hunt’s Bonkers Idea summary is that Manichean, populist, naïve, uncritical thinking, and intellectual flawed one of ‘managers are bad, doctors are good’. How smart to alienate your entire managerial population.

The problem is that one gets used to Bonkers Ideology. It’s the new black. In the era of post-truth, the world is flat, and trumpism logic, anything goes and rationale would remain unchallenged. And I am afraid Mr Hunt’s (Bonkers) prescriptions will be incredibly popular. Maybe not as a Mexican wall, but, hey, who knows.

If politicians could have some critical thinking and common sense, we would have a better health service in the UK. I am not optimistic on that assumption.

Here you are. 25 identities for Project Leaders/Product Developers/Team leaders etc.

Some you’ll like, some you won’t. Some you’ll think have nothing to do with you, but others you’ll think, this is you. And vice versa.

Be careful with choosing/playing your identities. This is what people see. Choose, before they pick you.

1. Leader! As in Project Leader! (?)
2. Project Manager (but called leader?)
3. Information traffic warden, most days
4. Super secretary (denied)
5. Recording officer
6. Journalist writing down what happens (and reinventing a bit)
7. Firefighter
8. Rapid Reaction commando
9. Psychotherapist, calming everybody down
10. Killer question detective
11. Dragon’s Den pitcher
12. Comfort provider to nervous senior leadership (Valium for the Board)
13. Trust generator
14. Navigator of the system’s deficiency
15. Broker
16. Blame sponge (blame generator?)
17. Communicator, messenger (good news, bad news)
18. ‘Making it work first’ guy, fixing the system later
19. Machiavelli in the payroll
20. Difficult questions generator
21. Critical Thinker
22. God
23. Father, mother, grandpa, grandma
24. Headmaster
25. The person with the powerpoints

 

Reorganisations often follow these phases: smell, gossip, announcement and implementation. The period between announcement and implementation is when most emotions are cooked. It’s also often one of unnecessary prolonged agony.

Management of change(s) may be hard enough as to add unnecessary anxiety. But this is what we have many times: a prolonged period of uncertainty when everything slows down and batteries are just about functioning.

If anybody could calculate the monetary cost of the prolonged agony period, the perpetrators of the gap announcement-implementation would be horrified.

But there is perhaps something powerful about announcing and opening the doors of collective anxiety. And power is addictive.

Prolonged agony is simply bad management. Full stop. Reasonable periods of unsettlement and reasonable doses of uncertainty have nothing to do with that, toxic, unnecessary prolonged agony of months if not years. And asking the organization not to drop performance, and stay ‘focused’, at the same time, is madness.

Unnecessary, prolonged agony in reorganizations is unacceptable. A terribly bad deal for owners, stake and shareholders, let alone for employees.

And then, we say ‘people are resistant to change’.

I wrote a couple of days ago that the traditional model of change ‘A to Z’ or ‘destination’ is in itself a wasted opportunity to create ‘capacity for change’. It has low learning pay off and low building of long term capabilities. See here previous post The end of the One Off Change Management Method ^[4].

The high learning, high capacity for change-ability lies in ‘a platform’ in the sense we use in Viral Change™ .

A platform is more than a method, is a way of life, a concept of the 21^st C organization in real life.

A platform, described here as the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform, is a set of

• Organizational principles (such as ‘peer to peer power is greater than hierarchical one’ for some aspects of organizational life)
• Behavioural rules, such how behaviours scale up via social copying and not training
• Types of people interactions and collaboration (for example the special role of the highly connected individuals within the social network)
• Crafted communications and narratives (for example, the link between a top down narrative and bottom up storytelling)
• A Leadership mode (such as the distinctive roles of distributed and Backstage Leadership™ )

that when combined and synchronized [orchestrated] creates

• An ecosystem of sustained ability to change. This ecosystem has its own ‘social algorithms’ ( when A, we do X) and ‘protocols’ (when to stop asking for more data, for example
• A type of company governance that is dynamic, agile, fast reacting and in high state of ‘readiness’ (‘capacity building’).Formal and informal organization work together in sync.
• A grassroots driven collective action that is not dependent on constant top-down hierarchical dictations
• The ongoing shaping and re-calibration of a particular culture. ‘Culture’ is never a destination achieved or even semi-achieved
• A way to solve any specific business challenges that require large scale behavioural and cultural change [‘method inside’].

The mobilizing platform, as is the case for a technology platform, is there ready (‘installed’) to absorb anything new, any new challenge, ‘change programme’, rapid acquisition, re-structuring, deployment of a new set of values, specific business targets ( such as becoming customer-centric, agile or, say, ‘culture of safety’) or anything big or small where the key is large scale mobilization of people for a purpose, particularly when a behavioural focus is prominent.

This concept of a ‘mobilizing platform’ is not the same as the ‘business platform’ in which consumers and producers meet under a set of rules (Uber, e-Bay, Airbnb, Paypal or even iTunes), something that is ‘neither a market not a company’ but both, as Kevin Kelly would put it (‘The Inevitable’, 2016). However, booth types of platforms share similar principles on how an ecosystem is organised, and, equally, the Mobilizing Platform is neitehr a methiod nor a rigid organziational structure.

The whole industry of ‘change management’ is uncomfortably disrupted, but there is no way back to ‘the method’ other than for the specifics of ‘project management’ which is somehow the grammar, but not the literature.

After 10 years of practising what we preach in the form of Viral Change™ programmes across two continents, several industries and consulting engagements involving anything from 500 to 50000 people at the time, we are enhancing the incredibly successful platform with everything we have learnt  from our activists: high tech executives to pharma marketers, insurers, school bus drivers, manufacturing plants, oil and gas engineers, telecoms people, managers, leaders, blue collar and white collar…

There are incredibly universal laws of people mobilization, that we have now added to Viral Change™ 2.0 .

Love to have a conversation.

My kingdom, my budget, my P&L, my operating expenses, my pot of money. Traditional financial management is about the efficacy and effectiveness of my dealing with resources that have my name at the top of the spreadsheet. The trick today, though, is how to make yourself rich and tap into resources you don’t own: shared, secondments, virtual pots of money, free services, Peter’s budget, you name it.

Our kingdom, our commons, we are all here together, my resources are yours, yours are mine, can we talk? That is not mainstream financial business school management. It’s simple day one of being a manager in a modern company.

Independence is dead. We are all interdependent. Even a cost centre can increase its resources with secondments from other departments, summer interns, graduate students, PhD projects. Rule of thump is managers are probably richer than they think.

Not rocket science, but why not map all possible resources and sources and see how we can tap into them, regardless what the line in the budget spreadsheet says?

‘Coming on budget’ used to be the standard of good management. In my previous life in pharmaceutical R&D ‘I always was’ a cost centre. The accountants loved it when I ‘came on budget’ meaning I spent it all. They were less happy when I spent less. That was the unpredictability they did not like. That was traditional business school, linear, logical rational thinking. They proved to me that these people did not distinguish between good or bad surprises. They just did not like any. But that was my previous life.

Today: here is your budget, I expect you to find resources you can tap into that are not in the spreadsheet; I expect you to start conversations now, pronto, with your peer leaders who also have a spreadsheet with their name at the top, on how you can pull it all together; I expect you to see the sum as greater than all those individual pieces. You’ll be recognized for that, big time. Managing your budget is a given, not a big deal; managing the budget is why I see you as leader. Go on. You are rich.

 

 

These 8, self-explanatory categories of people are the natural focus of traditional HR and management systems . They are needed for good governance. They all sit in the formal organization, similarly the traditional focus of those HR/management structures.

A list
High/medium/low performer
Talent pool member
Leadership (several layers)
(dis) engaged
Pre-retirement
Newly hired
Next generation leaders
Team leader/management position

The next  8 categories are off the radar of HR/management in a range that goes from ‘I don’t know what you are talking about’ to ‘I know some of these folks, what am I supposed to do?’ and anything in-between including treating them as good/bad anecdotes, necessary evils, curiosities and ‘ok, good managers know how to deal with them’.

B list
Mavericks and rebels, even without a cause
Deviants (positive). Do things differently, have another playbook and succeed
GPAs (General Pain in the Back Side; acronym non PC)
Contrarians, because they can
Nonconformists. Good ones, less good ones, but see things through glasses nobody else has
Sceptical for all seasons
Hyper-connected. Good or bad, they spread behaviours, role model at a scale, set mountains on fire and multiply anything they get their hands on
Hyper-trusted. Multiple reasons, it does not matter which ones

Neither list is good or bad, they are two categorizations of people. Whilst the A list refers to the visible and formal, and it’s crucial as governance and overall performance management, the B list has the potential to make or break anything.

Entire cultures are shaped by the B list whilst the A list watches the show almost hopelessly. An entire HR/OD/culture shaping/company building platform could be set up exclusively on the B list. There are tools and processes and systems to deal with the less powerful A list, but we treat the B list as an Amusement Park.

The B list is the Hard List.