The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, Paul and Mary need to start working together from somewhere zero or below. The line is: This is what I am very bad at; what about you? And it’s plural, what are we very bad at; what is this company very bad at; what about you, yours? The Old School Toolkit has a saying, “we will take the best of A and the best of B in this new merged company”. However, this is a bad start. The best of A plus the best of B may still be  [1]insufficient [1]. Also, the safe discussion of ‘the best’ tends to hide the bad and the terrible for months. Take the ‘this is what I am very bad at, what about you?’ line upfront. As you can see, it is more than a line. It is an approach, an attitude, a whole jumpstart in a box. The artist Alex Grey once said: “True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s.” I think that this is a very good start to create ‘love’ in a reorg, an M&A, a whole restructuring. It should be a line and a quote for management. How about start loving fast? In a new situation (and old ones), when Peter, Paul and Mary ‘now must work together’, the three of them bring their brains, hearts, and skills and competencies with them. They also bring their inadequacies, contradictions and flaws. At the top of leadership qualities, acknowledging our own contradictions must have a strong place. We all have them. Acknowledging them is a strength. I don’t have to tell you what that approach will do for trust: you’ll see it rocketing soon. The inevitable super-hero (even if sincere) ‘this is what I/we am/are very good at’ is a starter built upon competition. My ‘very good’ is bigger than ‘your very good’ sort of thing. The ‘this is what I/we am/are very bad at, what about you?’ points straight to humanity, collaboration, cut the crap, let’s do it. Sure, you won’t see this in the PowerPoints of the Big Consulting Group Integration Plan. They never contain the how.

[2]

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [2]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

Managing uncertainty is something our brain loves to do. And it loves even more  to be helped.

At macro-macro-level, Theories-Of-Everything do the trick. Very elegantly, Nobel Prize (Medicine) Jacques Monod (1910 – 1976) ^[3], whose Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology made a significant impact on me as a young doctor in my 20s, described as ‘mythical ontogenies’ those that explain everything from religious beliefs to Theory of Man.

But, on a small scale, we can see this in every little piece of uncertainty in daily life: the difference a little decrease of that uncertainty can make is not to be ignored. Behavioural Economics, to its credit, understands this very well and creates ‘nudges’ that can, in their own simplicity, travel a million miles between the certainty and uncertainty territory, and, in doing so, decrease our anxiety and tell the brain, it’s ok, relax, it’s not that dark out there.

Here are some examples

• From you are in a queue, to you are number 6 in the queue and going down
• From flight delayed, to flight delayed by 45 minutes; new update in 10
• From queue here, to 15 mins from here to the Immigration Officer
• From waiting for the doctors (no info), to you’ll see the doctor between 10 and 11
• From maybe three months, to something no later than three months
• From open possibilities, to there are 3 options
• From questions in a survey, to you are half way through the survey
• From we will continue tomorrow, to this is what will happen tomorrow

Each second part alternative contains that little extra piece of info that tells the brain to stop worrying.

We could construct an entire management system on this basis. The zero cost question is, how can I decrease uncertainty by 10-20-50%? Perhaps 100%, because how much you need that delta reduction and how much I need it, may be very different. In other words, the anti-anxiety effect is not linear, the difference between ‘from flight delayed, to flight delayed by 45 minutes; new update in 10’ may be for me the 100% difference between complete panicking and redirecting my attention to key things with zero anxiety.

In fact, I would go further and say that, delta reduction is far more effective than a full blown ‘I have all the data’. Uncertainty avoidance (a feature described as characteristic of some national cultures) does not require full avoidance, just a dose of decreasing, that magic delta. The pursuit of total uncertainty avoidance is futile. Unless of course you want to use the management equivalent of Monod’s mythical ontogenies (I have an answer for everything, what is the question?): these are all the answers, these are all the Gantt charts, this is what reality will look like on Wednesday 27 in the afternoon. A management practice that comes well below the weather forecast in efficacy. But could also be very effective even if wrong.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Chalfont Project Academy ^[4] – these resources are for you!

 

 

If you work in change, transformation or culture, whether you are a business leader, HR/OD/Communications professional, or with a remit in people engagement, the resources in our Academy, will take you into the mobilizing world with very practical insights that will be enlightening for everybody.

The Chalfont Project Academy ^[4] is here to enable us to share our many resources developed through the work of Dr Leandro Herrero and The Chalfont Project, enabling you to gain a greater understanding of topics around large scale change, leadership and organizational design – all based upon our unique approach. Read, watch, absorb, then share, enhance, enlighten the world with what you learn, observe and engage with.

You can take our flagship course: Mobilize! Masterclass ^[5]. Enter the world of organization architecture and acquire a complete blueprint for mobilizing people whether you are working on change, transformation or shaping culture.

Or start with a comprehensive collection of learning resource packages which include videos, webinars, papers and book extracts.

You’ll be able to choose from:

• Viral Change – The Principles
• Viral Change – The Key Players
• Behaviours – Part I
• Behaviours – Part II
• The Informal Organization – Part I
• The Informal Organization – Part II

• Peer to Peer Influence
• The Art of Storytelling
• Leadership Principles – Part I
• Leadership Principles – Part II
• Social Movement Principles
• Designing remarkable organizations

 

What people are saying…

Today, we are in front of daily wars of narratives: political, social, models of the world, futures, concept of Man.

In The World As It Is ^[6], a memoir of Obama’s White House by Ben Rhodes, who held several roles including Speechwriter and Deputy National Security Advisor, there is an episode in which the President seems to place storytelling  at the very top of his job description, extending it to those close to him. Literally he quotes: ‘Storytelling, that is our job’. And he was not referring to the function of speechwriting, as we know one that requires almost an alter-ego transformation to write what the leader wants to say, but not even himself knows it.

Over the years, I have become very curious and fascinated about the function of ‘speechwriter’ in USA presidencies, a function which has been held by incredibly smart people, on both sides of the USA American spectrum. Obama was a good storyteller himself, who very often would set aside the proposed speech and would hand rewrite it himself. The only thing that interfered with his storytelling abilities (did his anthropologist mother influence that?) was the strong ‘lawyer within’ which tended to put a premium in ‘explaining the logic’ and, in doing so, driving many people around him truly mad.

Storytelling wraps up intention, emotions and behavioural triggering in ways that no other leadership arsenal does. People remember stories, not bullet points.

Reflecting on storytelling as one of the five pillars of Viral Change^TM, I can see that there are some characteristics of a story-leadership narrative that work brilliantly when used in combination. These are my experiential views, not a piece of ‘scientific research’.

Compelling: convincing, attention grabbing, impossible to dismiss, it wakes people up
Surprising: there is something unexpected, unusual, unpredictable, refreshing
Not  neutral: people may like it or not, agree or disagree, but they can’t be neutral about it
Pulling: it seems to produce some traction, perhaps a sense of belonging (‘I want to be part of that’, ‘I wish I could be part of that’). People feel some attraction, the opposite of a push: I feel the weight on me, a bombardment
Aspirational: It has a future underneath, it points to the future perhaps anchoring in the past. That angle is not entirely clear in historical narratives that tend to ‘explain the past’ to perhaps justify a present but often fall short of making clear sense of a future. Entire nation narratives have been built upon stories of ancestors crossing rivers that never existed, descending from lands that were fictional and settling in territories where they never left behind any archaeological footprint
Unique: if you can take this in. I know it’s difficult but nevertheless an aspirational feature. The test is simple: does this sound like my next door neighbour? (read competitor)
Human: since humanity is not a given anymore, this feature is not to be taken for granted

BTW, as anything else in leadership, it gets better with practice.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

12 rules, based on my proven Viral Change™ methodology ^[7], to counter attack the Covid-19 pandemic. An epidemic of the right behaviours, at scale, is needed.

Downloadable PDF versions in English and Spanish available.

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[8], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[9] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[10].

His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management ^[11], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

 

Corporate speak is of course tribal. So, to belong, you have to speak the tribal idiom.

Through my work, I have run behavioural recruiting interviews for clients. My interviews are a complement to the standard recruiting interviews based upon skills, capabilities and experience. I am looking for predictive value, predictable behaviours that could be compatible with a set of values that I had also helped to craft. In behavioural terms, the best prediction of behaviours comes from previous behaviours. So, this is something I do.

During that process, I find a few candidates have a robotic repertoire ready to use no matter what the question is. I get bombarded by ‘stakeholder relationships’, ‘exceeding expectations’, ‘empowerment’, ‘alignment’ and ‘shareholder values’. Although nothing is intrinsically wrong with them and almost unavoidable at some point in our tribal-corporate conversations, the difference is the percentage of airtime taken. That level of off-the-shelf, acquired vocabulary puts me off. I need oxygen at the end. A transfusion of normality.

Corporate life has it own language and God knows each company its own dialects. I am not interested in fighting them. On the contrary, if anything else, from a selfish perspective as an organizational architect, I need to hear, see and smell all that, to make a sense of the Tribe(s). But I have to say, I sometimes wish we could inject some normal prose and a bit of poetry!

‘A poem, my corporate kingdom for a poem!’. I am not Richard III but I prefer it to horses.

Ok, here we go. What about:

Landscapes of ideas
Tapestry of behaviours
Beauty of a plan
Adventure into new markets
Hospitality for the imagination
Sheltering the creative minds

OK. I get the message. I’ll get real.

Your language will shape you. ‘The limits of your language are the limits of your world’, Wittgenstein ^[12] dixit. No wonder we are so limited in our corporate narratives.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation…

 

Watch Leandro’s latest Webinar Series. ^[13] Leandro and his team of organizational architects, debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

 ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[11]. Have you got your copy?

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[11], contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

 

This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Available from major online bookstores ^[14].

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[8], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[9] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[10].

 

The following line will short cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, start-up get-to-know, redeployment of people, culture integration, collective leadership build up, and any situation in which Peter, Paul and Mary need to start working together from somewhere zero, or below.

And this is perhaps after a restructuring, or M&A, or transitory team, new team, the mother of all task forces included. Also, anytime when you can’t afford low building of trust, slow development, slow diagnosis, slow ‘it will take months before we are a team’, etc., that is, never.

The line is: This is what I am very bad at, what about you?

And it’s plural, what we are very bad at; what this company is very bad at; what about you, yours?

The Old School Toolkit has a saying: we will take the best of A and the best of B in this new merged company. But this is a bad start. The best of A plus the best of B may still be crap. Also, the safe discussion of ‘the best’ tends to hide the bad and the terrible for months.

Take the ‘this is what I am very bad at, what about you?’ line upfront. As you can see, it is more than a line. It is an approach, an attitude, a whole jumpstart in a box.

The artist Alex Grey ^[15], somebody I confess I had not heard of until a recent article quoting him – for which I am grateful; unfortunately I can’t remember anything else from that article – said: ‘True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s’.

I think that this is a very good start to create ‘love’ in a reorg, an M&A, a whole restructuring. It should be a line and a quote for management. How about start loving fast?

In a new situation (and old ones) when Peter and Paul and Mary ‘now must work together’, the three of them bring their brains, their hearts, and with them, their skills and competencies. But they also bring their inadequacies, contradictions and flaws. At the top of leadership qualities, acknowledging our own contradictions must have a strong place. We all have them. Acknowledging them is a strength.

And I don’t have to tell you what that approach will do for trust: you’ll be see it rocketing soon.

The inevitable superhero (even if sincere) ‘this is what I/we am/are very good at’ is a starter built upon competition. My ‘very good’ is bigger than ‘your very good’, sort of thing. The ‘this is what I/we am/are very bad at, what about you? Points straight to humanity, collaboration, cut the crap, let’s do it.

Sure, you won’t see this in the Powerpoints of the Big Consulting Group Integration Plan. They never contain the how.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[8], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[9] on topics covered in his Daily Thoughts and his books ^[16], and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[10].

 

We need to improve communication is not the same as, this is what we need to do to improve communication, and not the same as, this is what I am going to do to improve communication. In fact, these things are miles away from each other.

Life in organizations is often lived at the level of diagnosis. Oh God, how good we are at diagnosis. Sometimes people spend the day hopping from one meeting to another and providing an assessment, a view, a piece of diagnosis. Meeting one: we need to fix the supply issue. Meeting two: the product recall is a fiasco. Meeting three: we need to make sure we get the candidate right. With coffee in between. But who is going to at least start addressing the problem? You would have thought that somebody in the room. But what if the rest of the meeting participants are equally good at diagnosing but nobody really jumps in?

It may be that:

a. They don’t have the authority (but somebody has it somewhere)

b. They don’t need the authority but they don’t take accountability

c. They feel they need permission to take the accountability

And another hundred or so reasons.

The diagnosis life, without action, is exhausting.

The organization whose main core competence is admiring problems, is equally wearing.

It’s Ok if you don’t have a solution but you point to them. But if you start with ‘the problem is’, please don’t use a full stop after the description of the problem. The word ‘and’ is required.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[8], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[9] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[10].

 

I don’t know where this quote comes from, but I have always seen it as a source of reflection on leadership. It describes the leadership journey in which true understanding is emergent, even for the leader who thought he understood himself very well in the fist place.

It tells us that leadership is social, a praxis, something that one learns, something one becomes. Becoming a leader is a better term than being a leader. We are always becoming and, in that journey, sometimes we have to tell ‘them’ three times so that we understand, finally.

I worry about the kind of leadership that has all the answers, that has ‘arrived at the destination’ as if there was an organizational Sat Nav, a Leadership Tom Tom, or Garmin, or Google map, that takes you exactly to a GPS destination point.

Leadership is not real leadership without an invitation. The invitation is to others to navigate and find better ways, better success, better lands. But it requires this human, humble element of ‘understanding together’.

Perhaps at the third time!

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Don’t miss our next free webinar on 2nd July.

Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? ^[17]

Yes we can. You can have a diagnosis. Learn how 3CXcan provides this analysis based on the highest scientific principles of network sciences. In the current environment it’s important to base the recovery and the post Covid-19 organization with full understanding of its formal and informal connections, communication channels and internal collaboration. Suspend judgement about your assumptions and find the truth. This webinar will show real examples of this kind of diagnosis performed in real companies. Understanding the real organization, which may or may not be the one you assume it is, will show a completely new baseline upon which to navigate the future.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of Leandro Herrero’s new book: The Flipping Point ^[11]

Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. ^[11] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[11] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review ^[18].

 

 

Non-magic: what is the latest intelligence and new data? Magic: what’s the story?

Non-magic: give me feedback from the strategy meeting today. Magic: so, what’s the story? Non-magic: mum, could you explain to me again how the dragon leveraged his competitive advantage to get to the princess? (don’t worry, it’s not going to happen).

Non-magic: what is the latest intelligence and new data? Magic: what’s the story? The magic, non magic collection would go for ever. I have always hated the sanitised corporate language. The exaggerated and disruptive language of Ronald D Laing ^[19], a British psychiatrist who died in 1989, father of the then called ‘antipsychiatry movement’ and a figure who all of us, standard and medicalised psychiatrists in white coats, hated at that time, because it was ‘the right thing to do’, said in his complaining and critical mode: ‘Gone is any language of joy, delight, passion, sex, violence. The language is that of the boardroom.’ The last bit stuck in my head.

 

Non-magic question: what’s the cost of doing this? Magic question: what would be the cost of not doing this?

Non-magic question: what are the goals and objectives? Magic question: what do we want to see by? Non-magic question: what are the outcomes? Magic question: what do we want to be proud of? Non-magic question: what’s the cost of doing this? Magic question: what would be the cost of not doing this?

Non-magic question: what are the goals and objectives? Reframing questions is at the core of Critical Thinking training, something that we do in my company.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

The Flipping Point ^[11] – Deprogramming Management. This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Available from major online bookstores ^[14].

^[11]

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

New webinar series – Register Now! ^[13]

Feed Forward webinar series – the organization now, under new management

Machines work on feed-back. Minds work on feed-forward. We don’t need thermostats; we need new compasses. There is no ‘back to normal’. Normal has not been waiting for us.   Leandro Herrero

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for these 5, free webinars as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment. Join us and bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point. ^[11]

Webinar topics:

1. The myths of change.
2. Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration?
3. The myths of company culture.
4. The myths of management.
5. High touch and high tech in the digitalisation era

 

Extract taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[11] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[11] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

The Employee Engagement industry reinforces a mechanistic worldview of the individual

The Employee Engagement industry has managed to reinforce a mechanistic worldview of the individual in which the language of inputs and outputs dominates. Here, Employee Engagement is only good or important as long as it results in more productive employees. ‘Happy cows produce better milk’ is a book title in this area. Seriously. Good luck with it. It will never satisfy everybody. Question: what if engaging employees were simply morally right?

This sub-industry is totally dominated by an input-output model in which we discuss the nature of ‘the feeding of the cows in order to obtain better milk’. The production model is simply wrong. It reduces the individual to a machine. It’s immensely degrading. The ‘better engaged employees produce better results’ is shameful, lacks moral authority and trivialises the nature of work. But I will never win this one.

 

If you want high employee engagement, run a successful organization.

The industry of Employee Engagement (and there is a big one) says that companies with high employee engagement (as measured by some kind of artificial tool) are more successful. And produces ‘studies’ to prove it. Employee engagement is clearly portrayed as the reason for success, so the path is clear: how can we get more of it? My view is that success creates employee engagement, not the other way around. If you want high employee engagement, run a successful organization. I know it’s rather inconvenient to think this way.

The industry of Employee Engagement says that companies with high employee engagement are more successful (…) My view is that success creates employee engagement, not the other way around. The book The Halo Effect (2014) by Phil Rosenzweig ^[20] opened my eyes to this. I would put this book in the list of obligatory reading to anybody in management. The subtitle of the book is explicit: ‘and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers’. Rosenzweig quotes the case of the UK retailer Marks and Spencer, a company which at some point scored at the top in employee engagement rankings. Then a terrible year in business performance came up and employee engagement scores went down significantly. Not a single iota in benefits, programmes, employee care, or anything had changed. Just abysmal market performance. 

___________________________________________________________________________________________

This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Available from major online bookstores ^[14].

^[11]

Visit The Flipping Point ^[11] to learn more about the book and other services:

   Request ^[21] a keynote and Q&A on topics from the book.

  ^[22] Request ^[21] one of our webinars:

• The myths of change. How traditional management and academic thinking is responsible for the colossal failure of change programmes. Debunking uncontested assumptions. Looking at the alternatives.
• The myths of company culture. Stuck in old concepts. How we have made cultural change hard and often impossible. The failure of communication programmes. The key to successful mobilizing of people for a purpose.
• The myths of management. Empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged ideas.  Non-management myths. What new management may look like.

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[11] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[11] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

 

 

The Saint Francis School of Management – ‘when necessary use words’.

The Saint Francis School of Management is at the top of my personal ranking. It was created in the 13^th Century in Assisi, Italy, and had one single amalgamated course on communications, change, leadership and organizational development. The course was very short. In fact, the training book contained one single page with a single sentence: ‘Preach the Gospel all the time; when necessary use words.’ An entire worldview, an entire lifestyle, an entire leadership system, from this ‘use words when necessary’.

‘Preach the Gospel all the time; when necessary use words.’ In many organizations, the motto seems to be ‘preach the thing all the time, and if necessary, preach again, don’t stop preaching, preaching is good. They need to get it’

 

 

People often say, organizations have a big communication problem.

People often say, organizations have a big communication problem. I agree. But the problem is not that they communicate too little, but that they communicate too much. Channels are saturated.  People don’t distinguish between signal and noise anymore. The greater the communicating, the bigger the noise.  Several corporate functions and their initiatives are competing for airtime, and it’s only Wednesday afternoon. If you want to improve communication, want to have a healthy communication strategy, communicate less.

It’s a disturbing thought, but we overcommunicate. We have been told ‘communicate, communicate, communicate, never cease to communicate’.  Which is, in itself, a form of overcommunication. We overcommunicate because we lack imagination and putting things on fancy PowerPoints comes in very handy. If we communicated less, we might even get more attention.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Available from major online bookstores ^[14].

^[11]

Visit The Flipping Point ^[11] to learn more about the book and other services:

   Request ^[21] a keynote and Q&A on topics from the book.

  ^[22] Request ^[21] one of our webinars:

• The myths of change. How traditional management and academic thinking is responsible for the colossal failure of change programmes. Debunking uncontested assumptions. Looking at the alternatives.
• The myths of company culture. Stuck in old concepts. How we have made cultural change hard and often impossible. The failure of communication programmes. The key to successful mobilizing of people for a purpose.
• The myths of management. Empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged ideas.  Non-management myths. What new management may look like.

I miss the sight of the very important people, the super-men and super-women of the British Airways business lounge in Heathrow Terminal 5.

They walk briskly backwards and forwards in front of you, from the croissant corner to the mineral water corner and back, and again, speaking loudly, wearing white Apple AirPods, and making sure you understand that the meeting in Singapore went well, but the deal is on the agenda for tomorrow in Brussels, could you please bring Mary up to speed, yes, I know, I know, it’s John’s last day, poor chap.

This variety of very important, confident, and homo-very-erectus peripatetic people, are often seen holding a glass of prosecco at 7:45 am. They walk miles in the lounge. Unfortunately, in front of you. Even when you thought, at some point, that they had disappeared, and that the previous parade was just a spate of bad luck, they reappear again, still on the Singapore thing, with a fuller glass of prosecco. Still very loud. Now coming from the East of the room. How did they do that?

I have, a few times, been just close enough to interrupt their public State of The Union broadcast and tell them to get a life. But, in general, I tend to retreat to a safer corner of the lounge where concerned-looking, screen-glued, silent followers of a Reuters feed on their laptops have their mouth occupied with the Mini Wheats. And this is safe. Very safe.

Loud things in airport lounges used to be an American thing. That is how they speak in Tennessee. God bless them. I love them actually. I know what to expect and they are invariably polite and always bringing a ‘terrific’, ‘fantastic’ or ‘have a good day’ to the conversation, which is miles more therapeutic than the news from the Singapore deal. Today, the nomadic self-important alpha-male and alpha-female of the BA business lounge of Terminal 5, are of all nationalities and accents.

Maybe, in their defence, wireless AirPods make you think that you need to shout more to the phone. The cable is gone after all. I’ve noticed the same in video conferences. You shout at the screen because the other guy is in Copenhagen and, hey, there is a hell of a distance.

I miss my anthropological field visits to the business lounge of Terminal 5. Coronavirus has told me to stay at home just when I had been given my Gold card for life, which now allows me to choose between the British national dish, chicken tikka masala, and industrialised triangles of ham sandwiches with a drop of mustard in the middle. Great timing.

Airport lounges are incredibly more interesting than field trips to a remote tribe in Polynesia or Africa. Not that I have experienced the latter, a privilege for Anthropology graduates who must spend six months in the jungle as a way to get their degree before becoming market research managers for Unilever.

Years ago, immediately after the ascension of Trump to the White House, a group of Americans (by the croissant corner) were loudly expressing their disgust and disbelief. Another group of Americans (by the mineral water corner) heard them (not a difficult task) and joined them. Both groups stood up in the middle of the lounge. There must have been a total of 15 or so Tennessee, Kansas and De Moines citizens. They noticed that we all looked at them. They found themselves in the spotlight. With their unique sense of humour, one of them looked at all of us and shouted: “sorry folks, can I have your attention please, we would like to apologise…” Of course, I was convinced they were referring to them talking so loudly. “We would like to apologise for having elected Trump…” And then a series of adjectives and other descriptions that should not be reproduced on paper followed. I am not making this up.

I miss you Terminal 5. But, I have to say, I much prefer my kitchen now. I just worry about that Singapore deal. Did it happen?

I don’t know about you, but I have used the expression ‘in the grand scheme of things’ many times in my life as a way to put into perspective my own discomfort. ‘In the grand scheme of things’ our daily inconveniences seem nothing compared with the populations with no food or great poverty. ‘In the grand scheme of things’ the extra burden of today is small compared with the daily burden of others. ‘In the grand scheme of things’, having to stay at home is nothing compared with those health care workers on the front line.

‘In the grand scheme of things’ works as a mechanism of consolation. Self-generated and free, at the expense of somebody else’s problem. It works.

But, as useful as it is for our self-conviction that our problems are minor, it opens the door to the arithmetic of suffering.  And this is dangerous territory.

I learnt this in the trade. In my early years as a clinical psychiatrist, I soon understood that the official classification of mental suffering was flawed. We catalogued some anxiety disorders as minor compared (‘in the grand scheme of things’) with, say, schizophrenia. My clinical reality told me otherwise. Some schizophrenics were out of touch with reality, undoubtedly a terrible situation, but they may not have even been able to feel their own trouble and disconnect. However, that young woman who could not leave the house because of extreme paralysing anxiety, was officially classified as a minor trouble. The metrics seemed to be flawed and unfair.

Maybe that is why today I have a natural dislike for the advocates of moral equivalence or comparative suffering.

We seem to possess some strange power of measuring other people’s lives. Our language has also created similar tricks. For example, when we talk to somebody who has suffered a loss, we say: ‘I know how terrible this may be’ or (even more assertively) ‘I know how you feel’. No, you don’t. Even if you had gone through a similar tragedy before, you can’t compare suffering A with suffering B.

Suffering is at least as subjective as physical pain. Professionals like doctors or physiotherapists will ask you: on a scale of 1 to 10, what is your pain today?’ The professionals can only trust you. That is the only thing they can do. Your answer by the way, only starts to have some value when asked again another day, and another day. You going from 9 to 6 is good, and going from 3 to 7 is bad. That’s it. That is the science.

Suffering does not have a thermometer. It does not come in half a litre or 1 litre. It’s neither pink, nor black. It’s not 8, or 7, or 1.

Since we are natural incubators of feelings, not content with suffering just a bit (‘in the grand scheme of things’), we add a bit of salt and pepper in the form of guilt. The worker that now has to work from home feels guilty that others have to expose themselves to the vagaries of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Feelings don’t have thermometers either. Could you imagine, ‘I love you 4.5’?

Feeling compassion or empathy is one thing, adding the comparative arithmetic is not good. In this Covid-19 crisis, the best we can do is to respect each other’s feelings, feel unrestricted sympathy, empathy, and leave the tape measure in the drawer.

 

Interrogated by a journalist: ‘Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization?’, Mr Gandhi answered:  ‘I think that it would be nice.’

Here are some translations for us in companies:

What do you think of our Culture?
What do you think of our Corporate Social Responsibility?
What do you think of our Company Values?
What do you think of our Identity?

These and other questions share something in common. They each have a label. But the label is no guarantee of anything.  Values, identity, responsibility, culture are all ‘concepts’ full of rich language. It’s not until you de-construct them that you can see the reality of what is behind them. In the absence of doing that, they should remain in the ‘it would be nice’ category. Yes, it would be nice to have one of these, so now let’s figure out what exactly we mean by this.

Language is a beautiful thing. It is also a deceiver. In our organizations, we need to have the courage to define what we mean by things. That is one of the reasons (only one) why in my organizational work we focus obsessively on behaviours: concrete, visible, with unequivocal meaning.

I use the ‘Gandhi’s question’ often with clients. It always works well. It helps us to come down to earth and look seriously at the reality, good or bad. If the answer is, ‘well, it would be nice to have one of these’, we may just be on the right path to finding.

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.

I am of course paraphrasing Mario Cuomo’s ^[23] ‘You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose’.

Cuomo (1932-2015) was an American lawyer, a Democrat, a devout Catholic, a Governor of New York (1983-1994) and very fond of phrases. He did ‘Poetry’ a lot. He once said: ‘I talk and talk and talk, and I haven’t taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week’. Mario Cuomo did talk. Perhaps the Italian genes.

For all his visible and memorable ‘Poetry’, the Poetry of ‘Yes-We-Can’ and ‘Hope’, Obama, another lawyer, had to be coached and coerced into Poetry by his formidable team of political campaigners. Believe it or not, Obama was (is?) more comfortable with Prose. It’s the lawyer within. He would much prefer to give long and articulated explanations of the reason for a particular policy, than summaries and power-lines; driving his Communicators and Advisers nuts.

He was asked to be concise many times during the 2012 campaign, in particular, and he failed miserably at the beginning, for example in his first TV debate with Romney. He had to be reminded again and again (and to the point of people around being close to resigning in desperation) that, as leader, he needed to continue with the Poetry.

After the elections, he used to complain to David Axelrod, ^[24] his key campaign architect saying: ‘I am not campaigning anymore!’, meaning, I can leave the Poetry and get into the Prose – his long Harvard lawyer explanations on social justice for example. He was told, as firmly as a friendship of many years could handle, that he was very wrong. ‘You are campaigning all the time’, Axelrod shouted at him. (David Axelrod, ‘Believer’, Penguin Press 2015)

It would be a mistake to equate Poetry with spin. ‘Poetry’ means here, inspiration, purpose, drive, making sense, driving commitment, inviting to a place, a dream, a goal, elevating the logic to a higher purpose. Leadership Poetry can be (must be) sincere and honest, but has to elevate the narrative to a place of destiny; I don’t mind small d or big D.

The same honesty and sincerity applies to Prose. Prose means the day to day managing, governing, making things happen, driving to results. After all, ‘manage’ has its roots in the Latin ‘manus’ (hands). Hands on things happening, that is.

The problem arises when a natural Prose-person holds a top leadership position, and when a top leader Poet is sent to manage the troops. I know, I know, this is too black and white, too binary, particularly for those who always say ‘you-have-to-have both’ (a Deus Ex Machina we all have handy when we want to kill a good debate). But it makes the point for me.

As leader, never stop the Poetry. Small p, big P, it does not matter. Even if you are also comfortable in the War and Peace side of writing.

Prose makes things happen. Poetry explains why.

Some organisations, or groups inside the organisation, suffer from lack of self belief. You could say weak self esteem. The belief system there is often contaminated by a narrative of impossibility. We are too small. We are too big. We are conservative, or old, or too young. Or we don’t have the money. Or we could, but the culture will never change. Or it will be hard, slow and painful.

The narrative dominates the thinking that, in turns, dominates the triggers for behaviours and behaviours itself. No point taking risks, or being adventurous. Not here. For example.

Good leadership can change the narrative of the belief system. Being aspirational and inspirational, at the same time being realistic and honest about possibilities, is a good formula.

Leadership has a choice. It’s called setting the bar. My favourite is the Michelangelo bar: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’.

Very often the true conversation on beliefs and expectations does not exist. Leaders need to hear what it is that is unsaid. They need to go beyond what they hear and see if this is said because people are trying to please you. This is not even cynical, malicious or manipulative. Many people genuinely want to please leaders that they consider good ones, made of human DNA, not robotic.

Ask. What do you think? Can we make it? Is this doable? And, by the way, speaking of risk, is this risky enough? For example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Management cultures, particularly Anglo Saxon, love acronyms. This is something new employees need to learn. If coming from another industry, it’s even worse. But the learning is not particularly painful. Acronyms are part of the tribe’s language that one needs to master to navigate through rituals, and this happens fast. By day three in the new job, corporate speak is incorporated.

Soon one will learn that PTSD is not Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but a Project Team Strategy and Development, and PMT is not a physiological state but a Portfolio Management Team.

You can have a quick and dirty diagnosis of the organization by looking at some of their acronyms. If the top team is a CoDir (‘committee of directors’ in France/Spain) or ExCom (Executive Committee) it is not exactly the same as a LT (leadership team), for example. It’s more than simply semantics.

Of course it’s not only business. Medicine loves acronyms. It makes it more inaccessible so that the qualified Chiefs can keep an appropriate power distance.

Acronyms also elevate an entity to a higher level. If it deserves an acronym, it must be very important.

When there is something serious in the world, from a natural disaster to a terrorist threat, the UK government has something called COBRA. The TV newsreader would proclaim solemnly that ‘the Prime Minister (PM, when in writing, because Prime Minister is too long) has called a meeting of COBRA for tomorrow morning’. COBRA sounds very serious. It’s the name of a venomous snake. It sounds like an attack system, a big reaction in the making. However, COBRA stands for ‘Cabinet Office Briefing Room A’, which is something of an anti-climax. (In the US – I am told – COBRA  stands for the Consolidated Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1986)

Back to the organization, I think there is a case for handing out a contract to a new employee with an acronyms glossary attached, as part of the induction programme.

Most of speech is tribal, life in organizations is tribal, the acronyms are here to stay. GUTIT! (Get used to it!).

Is LinkedIn a Digital Rolodex? A digital Resume/CV Library? Do you connect with people who have already given you the business card, sort of? Some LinkedIn members adhere to the rule of not accepting connections from people they don’t know. Indeed this is a LinkedIn recommendation and part of the system, as they describe and explain.  Other people accept everybody who asks. Obviously, these are two very different interpretations of ‘linking in’. For the former, LinkedIn is a controlled acceptance of being part of my ‘library’. For the latter, it is partially the same, but the primary goal, stated or not, is to increase the size of the network. And this increase is likely to take place via people you don’t know, that is a, ‘Weak Link In’.

‘Weak Links’ (technically ‘Weak Ties’), are an old sociological concept that has proven very valuable. They are the opposite to  ‘Strong Links’ (technically ‘Strong Ties’)

In 1973, the sociologist Mark Granovetter ^[25], wrote a very important article with the title: ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. The title says it all. Your weak ties (people you don’t know well, a bit distant, not strong connections, but certainly not zero) open your horizons. In Granovetter’s research, the chances of getting recommended for a job are greater when coming from weak ties (people who don’t know you well) than from strong ties (people who know you well; too well?). That was a counter-intuitive finding at the time, as much as today.

LinkedIn is obviously a spectrum of Weak and Strong Ties. People very protective of their connections, who will never accept anybody who is not ‘known to them’, create a digital Rolodex and, in the extreme, miss the point completely in terms of the Granovetter factor.  Other people on the other side of the spectrum, create a wealth of Weak Ties (the Strong Ties are a given, but may be a small part) and they are higher in ‘connectivity  strength’, using Granovetter’s concept.

I think there is a case for a Linked Out (as in out in the world) system. Social networking today is the vehicle for Strong and Weak ties. Concepts are now completely redefined in digital terms. We need more research to define which ones are more powerful. My gut feeling is that Granovetter still wins today.

Jerry B Harvey’s 1974 article “The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement’, contains this vignette.

On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas , the family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests that they take a trip to Abilene [53 miles north] for dinner. The wife says, “Sounds like a great idea.” The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, “Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go.” The mother-in-law then says, “Of course I want to go. I haven’t been to Abilene in a long time.”

The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad as the drive. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.

One of them dishonestly says, “It was a great trip, wasn’t it?” The mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home, but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, “I wasn’t delighted to be doing what we were doing. I only went to satisfy the rest of you.” The wife says, “I just went along to keep you happy. I would have had to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that.” The father-in-law then says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

The group sits back, perplexed that together they decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably at home, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.

This is the author’s example of what happens when we don’t have what he calls a good ‘management of agreement’.

It forms part of a broad group of social/collective assessment of the reality, followed by decision making that is self-influenced. Groupthink, a term created 20 years earlier than Harvey’s Abilene, overlaps with this, of course. And since then, there have been very public Abilenes including Watergate, US attempted invasion of Cuba in the Bay of Pigs and BPs little problems plus many more.

The striking side of this is how, today, we are still all going to Abilene sometimes, when individually we don’t really want to go to Abilene. Although Harvey elaborates on symptoms, causes and prevention, the reality is that we need our management and leadership teams to have people who speak up in public and express their deep desires. Full stop.

As an organizational consultant working with many Boards and Leadership Teams of sorts, I am always restless with perfect agreements and ‘in full alignment’ declarations of mutual love. I ask people, once I have introduced the Abilene Paradox, to at least call lots of time-out and shout: ‘hold on an minute, is this an Abilene moment by any chance? That at least makes them laugh a bit, become more human, and say things such as ‘actually, I am not really sure I agree with …’.

Forget dysfunctionality of teams. We are all humans that need to conform, belong, not disappoint, and reach closure. Ah, closure! Who invented that? Who can be against it, and who is brave enough to say ‘hold on, are we really, really, really sure we want to go to Abilene for dinner’. It’s self inflicted