I previously wrote about company cultures having a glue, The One Global Culture does not exist. But pretending that it does holds us together. ^[1]

The glue is sometimes, but not always, the history narrative, its own history, that is. History is accessible. In recalling it, we construct it. I said that ‘part of this narrative may be a ‘root narrative’ such as the founders, the struggles, the heroes, and the guys in a garage with a telephone’. Also that ‘the validity of this root narrative may not be terribly relevant; after all, entire tribes have been created and sustained under the root narrative of ancestors crossing rivers that did not exist, fighting wars that did not take place, or for years wandering deserts that nobody has touched.

Nationalisms know about constructing history. Independence movements often need the nationalism glue, and, in seeking it, they sometimes create their ‘against narratives’. Being against something, or somebody, is the glue. Often to the detriment of deciding what it is that they are ‘pro’, if anything.

(By the way, the victim-oppressor, for example, is a good one, because it does not have to be true, it could be constructed. Victimism is good populism. At macro level, we see it everyday in the news. At micro level we see it in our teams, our daily routines and our hierarchical ‘us and they’).

What’s the role of the leader in the construction of the history of the organization? This is in part the legacy question. One that can be addressed from a purely egocentric perspective or not. What is my legacy? It’s a question that could also be put in terms of ‘what history am I creating?’.

It’s a powerful question because, although we can always dismiss these things as soft stuff, it forces us to define the building, the one that leaders are supposed to build. And leave behind at some point, of course. But, don’t wait to the end and the retrospective. Others will judge. Construct the history as you go along. In trying, at least, you’ll have to see if what you do, see, write down makes sense or not, whether you are proud or not.

I have said many times that my favourite test is the ‘what will you tell the children?’ question.

So, here we go. What’s the story? A war story, of winners and losers ? A struggle story? Conquistadores? Terra Incognita? 3.5% increase in market share? Transforming lives? Phenomenal shareholder value? Top of the X list? OK, we could go for hours here.

Then, am I building this on my own? What’s the role of others? And how am I building it ? Ah, the how!

Don’t wait to the end. Build the picture. Write the script. Look in the mirror. Start again.

 

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.

Vocation is often defined as ‘a strong feeling’ to do something, a job, a career, an occupation, to dedicate one’s life to an idea, a trade, a craft.  Typically it is applied to professions such as nurses or doctors, or a religious life. It is agreed, in general, that following your own vocation is fantastic, and not being able to do so, a human failure, perhaps even a personal tragedy.

‘Vocation’ has Latin and then French roots. It means ‘a calling’, a ’summons’. It has a tremendous religious connotation but today we are applying the concept widely.

Vocation is not the same as a profession. It’s not the same as a job. Vocations may ‘include’ a job (exercised to fulfill that vocation). But jobs don’t have to include a vocation. It is possible, indeed frequent, that people have a job that does not match their vocation or, even, it may be in contradiction. Like the son who has a vocation for the arts but is persuaded by his father to take over a family business which has nothing do with them. The son may not lose his vocation but he will probably live a very frustrated life if he cannot fulfill it.

I think that, in business, we don’t talk enough about vocations. It’s easier to ask somebody about his job, or jobs he or she likes to do, than asking ‘what’s your vocation?’ I’ve event met many people embarrassed to ask this,  as if we, in business, don’t get into these nuances. A job is a job, a career a career and a title in the rank, a title in the rank. We don’t ask a successful CEO; ‘what’s your vocation?’ Well, not often.

But if we could (re) introduce the ‘vocation’ idea in our narratives, we would gain enormously. For example, I don’t know of any Employee Engagement system (assessment, survey) that asks plain and simple: ‘what’s your vocation?’ and ‘can you fulfill it in this job?’ (We may have many surprises!) We ask about job satisfaction, even happiness, but not vocation.

A working place where vocations can flourish, will be a place ahead of the game in any Employee Engagement framework. It may not be possible, of course, to cater for all vocations of our employees. But that does not mean that we ignore this extraordinary motivational force.

Our Employee Engagement frameworks are too mechanical. They speak the language of machinery, such as ‘going the extra mile’ or ‘discretionary efforts’. Both concepts, as well-intentioned as they may be, are horribly mechanistic; more energy, more efforts, more output. The ‘happy-place/happy-employee = better output’ is a sad view of human nature.

When you see vocations in actions, you invariably see something as well: happiness. I personally have never seen happier people than those who are in full blown exercising of their vocations. And I know some.

Just trying to rescue the concept a little bit more,  may help us to understand better the whole motivational enigma. The one that is today dominated by a very poor input-output model.

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

It’s a military operation even when we say it isn’t. But even the military have discovered that the world around us is volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous. They have even a word for it: VUCA ^[2]. And if you are in this VUCA world, you can’t afford high levels of ‘uncertainty-avoidance’ (a classical cultural hallmark of many traditional organizations). That world is uncertainty in itself, so, to avoid uncertainty is to avoid the world around you. I thought many times that the military have become much better than us, i.e. people in organizations, at navigating ambiguity. The enemy is VUCA, it does not have the name of a country anymore, can you believe it?

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

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

Many people, many of them in high managerial positions, succeed by avoiding failure. They become unmemorable by design. A new head teacher was appointed in an important school. The press went back to past pupils and asked what they remembered of him: ‘he fell downstairs once’. A new pharma R&D leader is nicknamed “The Chronic Survivor” because everybody else in his top team have left or been fired but he managed to survive unscathed from all the storms. People can’t remember any mistakes he has ever made. People can’t remember anything, period, other than the fact that he survives.

These two vignettes are real and part of my past experience. Many leaders may remain unnoticed and in the unmemorable category. They are squatters in the organizational chart. ‘What do you want to be remembered for?’ is a crucial question we don’t ask often enough.

A few years ago, the BBC broadcast a series called ‘How we built Britain’, presented by the veteran David Dimbleby. In the episode dedicated to the Victorians, he said something, almost in passing, which has stuck in my mind since: ‘For every problem, the Victorians had a building’. Growing local government? OK, here we are, big City Halls (Manchester, Leeds… ) Actually, Manchester thought of itself as the new Florence. Mental illness? Sure, the big asylums are built in the form of ‘mini-towns’ (all services included) which the great Canadian sociologist, Erving Goffman (1922-1982), would call ‘Total Institutions’. Mass transportation? No problem, railways and their cathedral-like train stations appear. Add also big churches, big shopping malls (probably not called this) and big leisure centres. ‘The building’ was the answer. And the bigger, the better.

‘Management’ is the ‘Victorian Architecture’ of the modern organization. For every problem we create a structure: a new business unit, a new franchise, a new committee, a new task force, a new merger of A and B, a new management team, a restructuring, a new structural or functional conceptual building as ‘the answer’. We have become very good at providing structural solutions to problems that may, for example, require behavioural rather than structural answers. A typical scenario is amalgamating A and B into C because A and B do not talk to each other. We create a new building C, but people still are not talking to each other. (Mind you, we have saved a Sr VP salary).

The Big Ones of the consulting industry have sold us ‘(re)structure’ as the answer to everything. In part because Organization Chart Permutations are an easy thing to do.  If you want to be seen doing something, change the structure. Small detail, ‘the building‘ may not be the answer. In fact, ‘the new building’ may be a big distraction and create an illusion of ‘problem solved’ and control.

I am bound to say this because of my background and my own work, but, for every managerial problem, we should look first for a behavioural answer. It’s a good bet.

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Leadership has traditional sources of learning, reflection, role modelling and a ‘body of knowledge’. There are four that dominate. This is my humble classification: The military, Corporations, Civic and Religious models, and Sports.

Where do organizations borrow from for leadership models? The military source is mostly about language (as opposed to individuals). The language of war is well embedded in organizational and business thinking: killing the competition, price wars, winning and losing markets etc. Occasionally there is reference to true military strategy and leadership, but not too frequently.  Civic and religious leadership is also referred to, but here instead, only with the accent on individuals. ‘I have a dream’ and Luther King must be the most admired example. Business organizations love sports analogies which, in my opinion, are over-rated and oversized.

There is a point here, however. There are multiple sources from which to learn, mirror, copy, study, draw conclusions about Leadership.  Multiple models and examples. It was in this context that some time ago, I was taken aback when invited to participate in a round table on the topic at a prestigious global business school. The Head of Research presented their five year research data on the future of leadership. It consisted of in depth interviews with most of the chairmen and CEOs of top FTSE 500 companies and from this he claimed that they now knew what the future of leadership looked like. That was it!

I put it to them that they had completely missed the point and the views of the chairman of Coca Cola, for example, (with all due respect to the Chairman of Coca Cola) were hardly relevant to day to day leadership in organizations. There is a myriad – I pointed out – of small or not so small enterprises that are full of people ‘leading’ from day to day, navigating through life, with different degrees of resilience, and most of them without a golden parachute should they screw up. ‘Where was that data?’ I inquired.

I didn’t like the way he looked at me and I realised I was turning into a Martian for them. I am sure that ‘the research team’ enjoyed a pleasant travel budget and found the research rewarding, but to call this the latest on the leadership of the future was slightly insulting to say the least.

Every day we miss the reality that is there in front of our eyes, in favour of the big names and big label position papers and reports. For leadership, it’s easy: look around. Don’t look up at The Big Names. Or don’t look at them only. Try schools, neighbourhoods, community leaders, small companies, medium and big, churches, public servants, good CEOs even if not those on the front page of the newspapers. We are rich in examples of good leadership. As rich as we are poor in so called ‘research’.

Sorry, it’s not about what the CEOs of the FTSE 500 think. Leadership, good or bad, is all around us, because it’s a praxis. If we are serious about research in leadership, we need to come down to earth and do a whole lot better than interviewing the usual suspects.

Update: I keep waiting for an invitation to another of their roundtables – but they haven’t called me.

Communicating, triggering behaviours, sustaining them and creating a culture, are all connected, interdependent, overlapping and parts of the chain of social change. But, they are completely different things. The trouble is the wrong expectations from the wrong approaches. Don’t expect lasting behavioural change or shaping a culture from activities that deal with messaging or even nudging. That should not stop you from messaging (sending communications and key information anchors) but don’t kid yourself thinking that you are modifying a culture in a lasting way.

Social change, and I use this term to include both internal (to the organization) cultural change and external (societal), has its own socio-behavioural rules. You would not run a Finance department with people who don’t understand accounting, but people run lots of ‘transformation and change’ with folk ideas about how personal and social change takes place.

When, for my new clients, I examine projects and programmes that have failed in their past, which creates a funny mixture of hope (‘surely there must be a better way’) and hurdle (‘here we go again’ effect), one key factor, above others, tend to be present: lack of provision, or even thinking, about the scale-up effect. I find a mixture of naïve approaches and plainly wrong behavioural assumptions.

From the former, naïve approaches, in particular the idea that leadership programmes, even broad ones across the board, have in themselves the power to create large scale behavioural and cultural change. People wonder why after a 3 year roll out of leadership workshops, nothing much happens other than creating a better educated and enlightened leader population. The equivalent in a political campaign would be educating activists on activism, and then hoping that the candidate will be miraculously elected.

On the later, the simply wrong assumptions, I find no one but multiple root causes of failure. For example:

The assumption that ‘Pulse shots’, particularly one off shots (off site motivational exercises and team building, what I have often called corporate flash mobs) have a lasting effect in a large population.

The excessive hope in rational explanations and exposures to arguments , even with a dose of (emotional) motivational salt and pepper. Unless there is a follow up mechanism and a ‘change platform’, it is unlikely to see large scale effects

The conscious or unconscious dissociation between ‘business’ (some times, day one of ‘the conference’) and ‘the soft stuff’, such as change or leadership or ‘motivational speeches’ (often afterwards day 2, or secondary) which perpetuates the idea that culture, leadership and people engagement are a nice add on.

Social change is large scale behavioural change that requires mechanisms of ‘scale up and sustain’ for those behaviours, and a clear understanding of the organization as an organism, as a network, not a top down piping system.

The Nudge approach of ‘behavioural economics’ originated in the Chicago School, has gained ground amongst policy makers who have understood that helping people making decisions easier (such as filling up tax forms) is good for everybody. ‘Nudge’ is far weaker in the sustainability of the effect, but has the same attraction of the simple one-off triggering, that seems more manageable than large scale sustained effects.

I feel strongly that Leadership Development needs to embrace behavioural and social sciences if it intends to produce scale-up effects. Team alignment is great, but the trick is how to embrace the other 2000 employees…Leadership in organizations is leadership of social change.

 

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

This quote from anthropologist Margaret Mead has been used a million times. I have used it a million times myself. It speaks to the power of people mobilization; the power of true change that starts from the bottom, or from many places but not necessarily from the top; to the power of social movements.

I agree.

I use it all the time to explain change in organizations, my natural organizational consulting territory. It’s at the core of the type of bottom up mobilization that is orchestrated in our Viral Change™, ^[5] programme and our Mobilize! Masterclass. ^[6]

But there is a problem. There is one word missing. One word that makes all the difference. This word is ‘organized’. That is: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, organized citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Margaret Mead was not wrong. She did not need to make the point. It was perhaps implicit in her context of ‘thoughtful’ and ‘committed’ citizens.

But I need to change that version now, with focus on change in organizations. Why? Because there is a growing, if naïve belief that all you need is a lot of passion, a lot of commitment, a lot of good intentions and lots of mavericks, rebels, disruptors, contrarians and challengers and, alas, change will happen. It won’t. Noise will. Well, it may be change, but God knows in which direction.

Mavericks, rebels, disruptors, contrarians and challengers without an ‘organization’, without a clear platform for change and sustainability of the change, are a sad waste. It would be similar to a political campaign gathering committed and energized activists in a room, and then letting them loose, closing your eyes and saying, go, my children, go and evangelize, and make sure that guy is elected. It may sound too silly, but it is scarily true in sectors of the ‘world of change’ in organizations.

I have written before, in harsh words, that there is a risk that all those mavericks, rebels, disruptors, contrarians and challengers, without an organized platform and clear long term strategy became ‘useful idiots’. A political term invented in the Marxist movement to describe the manipulated people who serve a cause but are cynically used by the leaders. Forgive me again my harsh words, but I have seen many of those ‘examples of critics’, ‘examples of mavericks’ and ‘examples of challengers’ exhibited by a very conservative, even static organization as a sign of progressive thinking.

Digression left.

Don’t underestimate the need to orchestrate (no apologies for the term) a good mobilizing platform. I prefer silent and efficient change to loud and inefficient contrarians; organized, not terribly visible employee-activists to disorganized, loose-canons-rebels; driven, back-stage change champions working on a semi-invisible per-to-peer model, to front row, blessed corporate ambassadors with a stack of powerpoints.

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Some people in organizations believe that they are working in a very bureaucratic, hierarchical, political and rigid environment. Many of them, not all, have not worked in an even more bureaucratic, hierarchical, political and rigid company, so what they see is their standard of dysfunctionality. Nobody is possibly as complicated, and rigid, and hierarchical, than us, they may say.

If they have the misfortune of moving to a really more bureaucratic, hierarchical, political and rigid company, then they see the past with nostalgia. But, how could they possibly have joined a more bureaucratic, hierarchical, political and rigid company?

Scenario 1: they did not think it was, did not look like, did not sound like, and the move was a promotion, by the way.
Scenario 2: It is actually not much different than the previous one, but suddenly ‘the grass looked greener’ over there.
Scenario 3: It is true, it’s worse. Punto.
Scenario 4: Actually both are objectively not that bad, at all, but the employee does not know better, it has no extra references.
Scenario? Please carry on, combine or imagine

Point is, we all have our own perception and bias towards what we see in front, a form of ‘availability bias’, which is also very much influenced by the sets of values and beliefs and narratives: this company is such and such. Collective belief that ;we are very hierarchical’, for example, does not make a hierarchical organization. Not necessarily.

Actually, it can also go the other way. And I have seen it many times: here we are not political, not bureaucratic, not opaque, not rigid. But, by God they are.

That is why relying on what the employee say, including their leadership, is not near as efficient as observing what they actually do. ‘Forget what they say, observe what they do’, is a pretty good heuristic rule.

At the core, a bit deep, but not much, is also a belief that your own organization is unique, one way or another. And that has been tested experimentally, although the study is a bit old. It ended up being called ‘the uniqueness paradox’: the strong belief that we are, err, unique. This is a variation of the more prosaic, ‘this can only happen to me’, which is of course almost impossible. Employees tend to overestimate the uniqueness of their company, the same as people tend to overestimate their skills. If you are interested in these findings, ask Mr Google, he’ll find them for you in seconds.

One of the advantages of my job as organization architect is that it comes with a vaccination against that ‘uniqueness paradox’. Working with organizations of any size, any sector and anywhere, I can see more than fifty shades of green grass. I also see rigidity when I see it, and freedom when I see it.

Uniqueness is not a good idea as a point of departure, but it is excellent as aspirational destination. The difference is far from subtle. As a departure, you start by assuming the uniqueness and rest in its laurels. As a destination the question is not what is that makes us unique ( and we have to preserve it), but what will make us unique, more unique, dare I say, always unique?

From time to time you see the occasional and mostly not very solid comparisons between ‘the company’ and a religion. It is usually done in the context of explaining the need for extraordinary commitment, a sort of Mother of All Employee Engagement models. These comparisons are not taken very seriously and it’s easy to understand why.

Another model of engagement has compared the commitment of employees to the military ‘tour of duty’. A kind of time-limited mutual contract in which for the commitment to the ‘tour’, the employee gets compensation, protection and skilling.

I think that new generations of employees are pointing us to a different direction. Even if it is a gross generalization to talk about ‘new generations’, Millennial for example, it is true that there is a shift towards ‘purpose’ and being part of it. Equally tempting and risky is the generalization towards ‘purpose’, particularly social purpose and societal impact. However, all these shifts, overestimated or not, should makes us think of the reasons why employees may join an enterprise in future. The modern enterprise, and the one described in textbooks, or even the one in existence until recently, is not anymore a solid model for the future. There is little ‘built to last’ around, but little excitement as well for ‘maximising shareholder value’ as the Mother of All Motivations.

I believe ‘the cause’ may give us better clues. Joining a cause, small or being, is joining a common sense of purpose and a shared commitment to action. Asking ourselves about ‘the cause’ that may be behind what we do in organizations, goes well beyond the rather cold description of missions and visions. The problem is that many leaders may have difficulties in articulating their cause, their company cause. They don’t think in these terms. Take this as an example.

Is the cause of pharmaceutical company X to (a) develop a medicine for Y; (b) cure Y; (c) eradicate Y; (d) transform the way Medicine is practiced when dealing with Y; (e) bring total health to Y sufferers; (f) prevent Y; (g) have and give immense joy and fun for employees working there; (g) enhance the shareholder value of people putting money in?

At this point, our minds get uncomfortable with the multiple choice and start looking for the comfort behind ‘surely some of them; they are not incompatible’. But I think this is a trick. Other than possible incompatibilities (e.g. the company is simply not set up to fully prevent Y), this is not a true ‘pick your own’. One or some are the cause, the rest is music. Pick one. Which one? Which two? What is the real, real, real cause? Well, you’d better have a clear idea and a clear answer for people joining you.

I deeply believe that these are not simply semantic games and that we need more clarity on ‘causes’, or the lack of them. I would welcome the fact that this makes some people uncomfortable and dismissive, if this is a trigger to take it seriously. If not, not serious, complete dismissal or sheer inability to articulate the real cause, I am very sorry for you, have a pain-controlled decline.

PS. Spare me the ‘to make money’. Drug dealers make money; human traffic makes money; corrupted governments make money.

Here is a ‘very novel’ concept. Employee Engagement is needed because… it’s good in and of itself. Because work enhances human nature. Because engaging people with their work is a moral obligation of both, providers and takers of work, as part of human enhancement. In this model, meaningful, enhancement, enrichment from work is a moral imperative. If engagement is morally right, it also means work that matters to the individual beyond the benefit of the organization. Full stop.

This thinking is so alien to business that it’s likely to be dismissed by many. After all, many people sustain that the organization per se, and in particular the business organization, is an amoral entity. It has undergone moral surgery. It imperative is not to deal with any morality other than the purpose of the firm and the goals of the owners. Shareholder value is shareholder value. If the firm has a value system, it’s up to management to figure out how to increase that shareholder value within the corporate value frame. Employee/people’s enhancement as human beings, in this thinking, is not here nor there, unless expressed specifically in relation to the value system itself.

For people who don’t ascribe to this model, the above statement ‘engaging people with their work is a moral obligation as part of creating human enhancement’ is a leftist fairy tale.

The ‘ethics of work’ (not the same as the ethics of business) is not precisely a new topic. It’s just that business organizations are busy ‘making other plans’ (as in John Lennon’s ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’).

We have three strong pillars in our modern history. (1) Max Weber’s ‘The Protestant Ethic’. (2) The Catholic Social Teaching, a scattered series of documents with detailed development on seven principles: life and the dignity of the human person; call to family, community and participation; solidarity; dignity of work; rights and responsibilities’; options for the poor and vulnerable; and care for God’s creation. Most of them address ‘work’ one way or another. (3) The Right to Work is treasured within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These three pillars have, both, followers and critics.

Pros. The model brings back some conversation about ‘purpose’, in which people may agree or disagree, but still, the conversation will be in the air. I still use with my clients a 1990 lecture from the great Charles Handy, with the title ‘What is a company for?’ ^[8], which challenged many assumptions at the time and which continues to be relevant today.

Cons. It’s hard to bring this conversation in the context of ‘busy people making other plans’. But, if we can have a Cow Model (number 2) I don’t see why we could not have a moral model.

So what?  Purpose is back, it’s the new black ^[9]. Purpose is not the same as this ‘Employee Engagement as moral imperative’, but they are sisters. This model says: when you look at all models, all possibilities, all surveys, all rankings, all happy cows, all air time, could you slot in a possibility that work in itself should be enhancing and (the corollary), if this is the case, then management needs to look at employee engagement also as a employee enhancement? What if we added a moral obligation here, in this model? Would the sky fall?

Next, the final model: (Real) Activists on the payroll. And a summary.

There must be a better way than having 200 consultants landing in my company and doing the stuff for me, even if they are the brightest graduates of their class, and have an MBA or two.

There must be a better way of connecting and chatting with people I know, without having to put up with stupid adverts inciting me to buy shoes or talk to singles in my area.

There must be a better way of expressing something successfully, without the straightjacket of 140 characters.

There must be a better way of changing things in my organization without a paralysing, or deploying expensive ‘change management programme’ based upon methodologies that have 75% failure rate.

There must be a better way of conducting meaningful group meetings and establishing high class dialogue, without people around the table looking constantly at their smartphone screens.

There must be a better way of talking about Diversity in the workplace, without focusing only on the number of women on the Board.

There must be a better way of engaging people in our companies, without creating incentives around flexible work and buying a dozen table tennis tables for the corridors.

There must be a better way of creating real innovation without creating an Innovation Committee.

There must be a better way of being on the ball, without having our Outlook calendars full until 2020.

There must be a better way of talking about business, without reverting to the language of wars and killing of the competition, domination of markets, termination of people and military strategies.

There must be a better way of ending your association with people, without escorting them to the front door with their box full of belongings for fear of them running off with a hard disc full of data.

There must be a better way of hiring people, other than doing so uniquely on the basis that a person ‘has done the job before’, so you just implant experience from somewhere else.

I have very good news. Actually, yes, there are much, much better ways. And you and I  know them.

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.

On one side, taxes are good, big government, social welfare, fighting for social justice and social mobility, human rights, women rights, pro-abortion, pro gay marriage, pro LGBT, piss off bankers, pro immigration, diversity and inclusion, and transgender education in schools. Ah, climate change is big and a green world is a super super priority.

On the other side, not to abortion, any, individual achievement, ‘there is no such a thing as society’, taxes are bad, government to the minimum, freedom of the individual, traditional family, piss off transgender education in schools (trans what?),  low taxes, no immigrants.  Ah, and climate change not sure, really, overrated at least, and green  world, well, I am already doing my recycling.

I have no idea which side I am anymore. I have been offered every single day a polarized, binary, Manichean world, and I’m am supposed to tick all the boxes to ‘belong’.

I am of an age that this polarization annoys me enormously, but I can navigate. The new generations are offered a package. Package One or Package Two.

The problem is that there is an insidious,  cognitive halo effect that is unconscious. If you care for the environment and social justice, great. Automatically you will be pro-abortion and big taxes. I have never understood what abortion and taxes have to do with each other, or pro LGBT and climate change for that matter.

If you defend the traditional family and declare yourself pro-life, you must surely want no taxes and think that climate change is a hoax.

Try to choose the bits you want and you’ll find yourself orphan.

Sad that, if you vote, you’ll need to choose the less-evil.

Polarity is the new slavery of the mind.

I was used to the concept of catastrophic failure, but not catastrophic success, until I read an article in the New York Times qualifying the latest Brexit saga as catastrophic success. That was the UK government having lost the vote in the Parliament on the model of exit from the EU, and days later having won a vote of confidence in the same UK government. Leaving the EU, as planned, will be a catastrophic success. But as the UK Prime Minister keeps saying, ‘the country wants to get on with it’.

Catastrophic success is what we have when everybody feels we have achieved something, jointly, consensual, after hard work and discussions, that is however a disaster. The disaster element seems to have less weight than the hard work and the spirit of collaboration.

We see this in organizations every day. The complacency on overall success, as compared with themselves, their previous success, that would be a disaster if compared with the market.

The achievement of common grounds, middle of the road, compromises, highlighted as big successes, which are in fact catastrophic mediocrity.

The deadlock and de facto close down of the US government at the time of writing, is a catastrophic success of resilience by the US administration.

And so on.

Great corporate successes may contain some elements of catastrophic disaster just hidden enough from daylight.

Catastrophic successes bother me more than catastrophic failures. The latter become so obvious that it would be impossible to be passive. The former may even have celebration parties.

As with many modern clever quotes, there is more than one author claiming this. Symptoms of potentially ‘all fools in the same room’:

1. Most people think the same, agree on anything. There is a name for this: Groupthink. Invasion of Cuba/missile crisis (Bay Pigs), NASA space shuttle, Swissair collapse and a few wars
2. A minority looks like a majority. All the fools are in the other side, the one that does not see it. That is actually very easy. A vocal minority  can easily play the role of indisputable majority. All you need is :
   • To craft  narratives of the type: ‘the country feels’, ‘the country wishes’, ‘the company wants’, ‘all employees would agree that’ ( and ‘the country has decided’)
   • To consume as much airtime as possible so that there is no space for alternatives
   • To plainly distort he reality, declare a tragedy, declare yourself as Saviour. From Saviours, libera nos Domine.

The numbers game is an old game.

In the organization, there are a few safeguards that can be put in place. Zero cost.

• Never accept less than 3 options
• Always explain the options you have discarded
• Test assumptions with aliens (anybody not in your close team(s))
• Make the point to ask different constituencies all the time
• Bring more women to a ‘council of men’ and more men to ‘a council of women’
• Obsessively hire/bring to the team people with different views (‘if you have two people who think the same, fire one of them’)

Always remember when confronted with ‘ a majority of’: sometimes it just means that all the fools are on that side of things.

‘Work conquers all’, or ‘steady work overcomes all things’ Virgil dixit. For many, the time of post-break is approaching, if not already landed. Back to it. Some more tanned than others.

I have  a lot of respect for people who can compartmentalize ‘work’ and ‘break’, which is not the same as the work-life balance, that assumes that work is not life.

Bertrand Russell said that “one of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster”. General Charles De Gaulle said that ‘cemeteries are full of indispensable people’.

Same thing.

Most of my clients today (but not all) do not sit in such a moral indispensable place. And take summer holidays. And in those non EU countries with less holidays, people enjoy that the others are on holiday. It’s a kind of holiday,

In  many companies, the rituals of ‘Quarter 4’ are approaching. For example budget planning and approval and conference season.

You can approach the ‘quarter in front’ as an extrapolation of the previous months of perhaps injecting a bit of reflection. There is plenty of data that suggests that how you start your morning shapes the rest of the day. Starting with a very early frenzy of solving dramatic problems is not a very good idea, and you don’t need a Cognitive Neuroscientist to tell you. The mind is a formidable framing machinery. If it decides that it’s about pain, difficulties and heroic management, that is what you will get for the rest of the day, no matter what.

If the consequences of a bad framing were only private, that will be one thing. But if you lead others, or work with others (so everybody but hermits), the way you frame the ‘post-break’ has big consequences.

Be invitational. This always win.

Let’s finish this thing that we left in the air, let’s do it fast.
Join me/us to address that hanging issue that we have been postponing
Let’s make a firm decision on that one
Let’s agree what we want  to see by Christmas.
Now that we are fresh, let’s tackle that assignment.
Let’s treat this as Day one, shall we?

Most sensible people respond well to invitations, If your frame is a positive invitation, that positivity will stay.

OK, not to work. It’s Day One.

No medium to large size company has a single culture.  No medium to large size French, or British or American company has a single French, or British or American culture. There are sub-cultures all over the place. Chances are you have a manufacturing culture, an R&D culture and, say, a San Francisco operating unit culture. Chances are you live in a Switzerland type organization not in a North Korean type one. Why so many leaders want a North Korean organization? It’s handy for them.

You have two choices: recognise this diversity and find a way to glue the organization under some magic that adds value to the whole, or desperately  try to ‘align’ and pretend that you have one uniform company, or that you can in fact dictate and have ‘one company’.

For years, the latter quest has been in place under an ill-formed idea of (global) leadership. ‘Across the board alignment’ has been promoted not as an organizational need but as leaders-at-the-top need. When I hear about sudden One Company Programmes, I hear more about the vulnerability and weakness of its leadership than a sort of collective cry for unsolicited uniformity.

If you want ‘one company’, the best thing you can do is not to say it, and work towards finding the glue and the reasons why people would want to have ‘that one’. The more you publicise ‘the one company’, the more you are saying you don’t have one. Not a good frame to start. Most ‘one company programmes’ I know of, are created for and by leaders who have not managed to create a sense of belonging. They now want  belonging by dictation.  Good luck.

Historically, my team and myself have been involved in such programmes, but the best results have always correlated with the speed we managed to stop talking about it and did our best to create a behavioural fabric which everybody could click with.

One of our first  projects, a few centuries ago,  started with the top leader in a large  R&D bombarding everybody with a clever ‘R&D is one word’. It meant, you research guys better align with you development guys. Or else.  And the more he said, the more it seemed that the distance was getting longer. On this particular case, for a number or reasons, we managed to create a structure that we called ‘New Products Incubator’. Behind the semantic twist it was the reality of new ways of working under a shared set of behaviours, new concept of risk, nee sense of urgency, new rules of the game and new sense of collective, bottom up identity and belonging. People literally queued  to  be part of it. Literally. And the leader stopped the mantra. ‘And he saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning-the sixth day’. (Unfortunately on the Seventh Creation Day the company was bought by a super-tanker, one which by the skillful hand of a Big Consulting Company,  seemed to have one single goal: to destroy all that worked well.  But this is a story for another day.)

As in all examples of this miniseries of ‘mistaken identity’, when inputs and outputs get confused, this last one, number 5,  follows the same pattern. If you want ‘one company’, treat that as an outcome of what you do, not as communication input, as something to be injected, a magic coin for the slot machine that will deliver the goods in the receptacle at the bottom.  Or, in simple terms, if you want One Company, don’t ask for one, make it.

I shared yesterday three types of employees I want for the modern organization. Different characters on the payroll. If there is a payroll. These are the second trio:

4. Synthesizers

I suggest you stop hiring for analytical skills, salami cutting experts and extreme specialists of little bits. Whether it’s big data, small data or in between data, what we are lacking is people who can make sense, extract meaning, not who can read the parts and pontificate. We are seriously  short of synthesizers (not the keyboard things)  We don’t distinguish signal and noise any more. These people do exist, but are hard to find. Our education systems do not produce them.

5. Designers

Of ideas, departments, products, services, teams, campaigns, social movements, structures, networks, dialogues ,conversations, processes, HR policies, strategy. Also buildings. It is a mentality. A way of seeing . Certainly not a commercialised process. At the cost of annoying friends and irritate people -I know that for a fact- I confess my inability to understand the glorified surge of ‘Design Thinking’. Believe me, I  have tried.

6. Re-inventors of wheels

Oh boy! How annoying this may be! How many times I have heard, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. How many times I have used this expression myself. I have changed my mind. I think the wheel needs to be reinvented as a counter-epidemic of Cut-And-Paste. Cut-And-Paste ideas, presentations, off the shelf answers, the-ways-we-have-always-done-it, templates, SOPs, follow the process. I want people who can reinvent a wheel. Who can look at alternatives and reinventions. Who can come back and say, I have tried to reinvent that wheel, and, you know what, our wheel seems pretty good, so we should keep it.