Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong. Here are three baskets full of concepts: Basket 1: Working conditions, flexibility at work, pay and perks, reward and recognition, empowerment, good communication, people development plans, talent management, a clear vision and purpose, internal digital connections, gamification, and health & well-being programmes. Here is basket 2: Satisfaction, happiness, engagement, fun, self-belief, realization, enhancement, fulfilment, and motivation. And basket 3: Profitability, higher EPS, retention, reputation, customer satisfaction, loyalty, employer of choice, low absenteeism, safety, high quality, and resilience in adversity. Pick one from basket 1, and say that it produces something from basket 2 (pick one concept ), which, in turn, delivers something from basket 3 (pick one or two). You can’t go wrong. I bet you will always find some data with correlations between the items in each basket. Flexibility at work (basket one) creates high motivation (basket two), which leads to low absenteeism. Come on, give it a try. The combinations are great. Constructing Employee Engagement arguments is not difficult at all. There are always correlations between items from baskets 1 and 3, or 1 and 2, or 2 and 3 etc. The problem is these are correlations, not causality. Most Employee Engagement arguments that we use in organizations are semi-rich in correlations and very weak in causality. The truth is that it is hard to tell, for example, whether satisfaction delivers profitability or profitability delivers satisfaction. The fact that we may see both going together does not make the casual argument in one direction true. “Most Employee Engagement arguments that we use in organizations are semi-rich in correlations and very weak in causality.” Many Employee Engagement systems and questionnaires are based upon the assumption of something from conceptual basket 1, delivering something from basket 2 and/or 3. We have taken the argument at face value. We have converted correlation into causality. But, as the Spurious Correlations website reminds us, there is also a strong correlation between the per capita consumption of mozzarella cheese in the USA and the number of civil engineering doctorates awarded. Or the divorce rate in the state of Maine, correlating highly with the per capita consumption of margarine. “Many Employee Engagement systems and questionnaires are based upon the assumption of something from conceptual basket 1, delivering something from basket 2 and/or 3. We have converted correlation into causality.” Whilst most sensible people would not infer that feeding your son with mozzarella cheese will make it highly probable that he will get a Civil Engineering doctorate or that decrease in divorce requires banning margarine, many managers would be very happy with declaring a true causality chain the correlation between anything in basket 1 with anything in basket 2 and/or 3. The whole industry of Employee Engagement is based upon this. When I show these arguments, sometimes to large audiences in my Speaking Engagements, I get the whole spectrum of reactions. The data fundamentalists get very irritated, despite the fact that they can’t really show serious causality data. The ‘Employee Engagement people’, furnished with all their questionnaires, get even more irritated. The Cynical contingency says that what I am inferring is that we should not do anything, not bother at all about Employee Engagement initiatives because all data is flawed. But the latter is far from my position. I think we should do anything we believe will improve the company, period. It’s called Good Management, and I am all for it. But managers need to use their critical thinking more. Do as much as needed for good management, and avoid the simplistic causality interpretation of input-output: if we do more Town Hall meetings with all employees, it will give them more ‘voice’ and air time, it will improve their morale, and that will increase performance. The company is not an input-output machine. Let’s do what we believe we need to do without the constant need to justify the output! Maybe it is morally good, managerially sound and probably beneficial for the mental health of all to give employees more airtime, more voice, more saying and a more proactive role. Do you need a score in a questionnaire to tell you that you should do that? “I think we should do anything we believe will improve the company, period. It’s called Good Management, and I am all for it. But managers need to use their critical thinking more”. By the way, here is another one: the number of films Nicolas Cage appeared in correlated highly with the number of people who drowned by falling into a swimming pool. He should really stop his movie career, or else we will need to have compulsory fences around pools.

How can you really make a difference in your organization? The Viral Change™ approach always addresses specific business challenges. Sometimes these are defined by people in broad terms such as ‘the need to change the culture’, sometimes in a rather more specific one, for example ‘we need to focus on innovation’. Most broad intentions will need to be translated into specific areas of transformation. Similarly, most ‘single focus’ are probably part of broader needs. Learn more here. [1]

If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact my team at: [email protected].

Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us to do? Way number 2: I need you to approve A. We also have options B and C but would not recommend them. Way number 3: Just to let you know that we are doing A. We explored B and C, but they did not rank as high as A. These 3 ways describe 3 different concepts of empowerment, 3 different styles of leadership, also, 3 different organizations. The 3 are legitimate, but they are very different. Please don’t kid yourself; they are not simple variations. Many people still ask for permission for things that the leadership does not expect to have to approve. But they may do so because it’s now on their plate, in front of them. Many boards complain that decisions are ‘pushed up’ too much but do very little to change the situation. On the other hand, many leadership structures expect to be presented with options for the latter to make a final decision. Knowing whether ‘you are’ 1, 2 or 3, and, more importantly, whether you’d like to be 1 or 2 or 3, and which one of them your senior leadership team expects, is fundamental. These questions are, more often than not, simply not posed or articulated. In these cases, decision-making runs in automatic pilot mode, creating default positions that are never appropriately validated that, sooner or later, will drive people, top or middle or bottom, for different reasons, simply mad.

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

Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply? Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure of solid outcomes. Doing fast or slow, but sloppy and sloppier. Having strong ‘logic archetypes’ dominating airtime. Translation: the organization has pervasive ways of thinking and ‘logic’ that act as sacred cows nobody dares to touch. (Example: Six months of developing The Strategic Plan dictates short-term actions. In the last 10 years, no Strategic Plan has ever been achieved. Every year the cycle is repeated.) Repeating mistakes comes from either not learning or not unlearning fast. ‘Lessons learnt’ is a meeting ticking a box and not enough. Putting a premium value on intuitiveness, agility, entrepreneurial spirit and speed in a way that un-critically suggests that these are by definition great, no matter what, before one has even attempted to define what each concept really means. There is an ever-increasing desire for an extra supply of information on anything, even when the extra information never tends to change the course of things. Mistaking correlation with causality. Routinely assuming that if B follows A; A is the cause of B (try this with ‘great sales’ follows ‘intensive sales training’, not mentioning that the competitors screwed up their product launch). Banking too much on group discussions, group decisions, group accountability, and group thinking at the expense of individual reflection (by proxy: your calendar is full for months). Working most of the time on single-track logic, deterministic views, one way, no options, and lots of ‘therefore thinking’. [3] Particularly when this is not recognised or even denied. People equate ‘critical thinking’ with ‘common sense’. A variant: people say, ‘we are doing this already (critical thinking) all the time’. If you recognise one of them, dig deeper. Two, it’s becoming serious. Three, explore your doctor’s options. Four, Houston, you have a problem. Five or over, you need to stop and seriously look for ways to put that ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply. If ten out of ten, you are living in an artificial reality and at a high health risk. If you are successful, you are successful despite yourself. PS. Critical Thinking can be taught in the same way that your body can be re-shaped by going to a gym on a regular basis.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [4]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

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

Employee empowerment is an output, an outcome. If you start thinking of employee empowerment as an input, something you are supposed to give, you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. As an input, all the airtime will be allocated to how much to give, when, and in which circumstances. Sure, you need to think about that, but the real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? What kind of state of mind and behaviours? And why? What benefits? If there are any. The why is obviously important. Why is empowerment good? Because it is? What would happen to an organization with high levels of employee empowerment? Can you visualize it? If it is not clear, stop thinking about what to give away to empower. In this path to uncover the benefits, the argument is going to take you to the territory of ‘autonomy’, whether you call it this or not. Autonomy means a degree of control that has been gained (so yes, you now need to imagine what you will need to give away, to let go). Autonomy means self-determination, self-help, ability to conduct independently. If you had that, people in the organization will probably also gain a lot of self-esteem and confidence. Trust levels will go up. Autonomy means increased efficiency and efficacy. Usually, it also means faster reactions: markets, environment, crisis. The ‘business case’ is strong. There are five ingredients that need to be cooked to achieve this. Explicit ‘permission’ from leaders. There is something, perhaps in people’s upbringing, that makes us very dependent on ‘permissions’. Don’t underestimate the need to stress and repeat this to people. Don’t take for granted that this has been heard. Trust. Call it how you like, but you need a good dose of this for autonomy and empowerment to be real. Are you prepared? Resources. If people don’t have them, there is no point trumpeting empowerment. You can’t empower people to do the impossible. Skills and competencies. Equally, you can’t empower people to do something if they don’t know how to. A safety net of some sort. Within the compliance parameters that you may have, people need to be able to fail and not only survive but spread the learning. A working definition of empowerment from the leader’s perspective may sound like this: To give control to people who don’t have it so that you can free yourself for things only you, as the leader, can do, and, in doing so, you are creating an efficient system with high levels of trust and self-esteem. All this provided that people have the skills and resources. But the trick is to start by visualizing the kind of organization you want to see, not the theoretical view of empowerment or the things you would give away (decision rights, for example). Then you need to work backwards to see what needs to happen. If you can’t visualize the benefits in the first instance, or not yet, don’t go that route. Stop talking about it.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [4]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, there will be lots of good people traveling with you.

“A year from now, you all are here standing in front of the CEO and you say: we screwed up! Write the script for that year, what happened to take you there.” “A year from now, you all are here standing in front of the CEO and you say: we succeeded! Write the script for that year, what happened to take you there.” Vey often I run these exercises (‘Success and Failure Scenarios’ ) with parallel sub-teams of Boards, top leadership teams or management teams. Literally I ask them to write those scripts down or at least find all the pieces and assemble them as a script would have been constructed – novel, film, short story… People are incredibly good at writing these scripts (the failure scenario is invariably faster …) and can relate to them much better than an account of goals and targets as written in the Strategic Plan. The storytellers inside all of us seem to enjoy the questions and the production of answers. A long time ago, in my work with clients, I have switched from ‘Mission & Visions’ to ‘Space in the world’ and ‘Compelling narrative’. It’s not a simple change of terms. The questions are different. The emphasis is ‘What do you want to be remembered for?’ and ‘What’s the story, your story, perhaps your unique story?’ I also insist on writing down the headlines my clients would like to see in the newspapers in year one, or two, or whatever the time frame. A couple of lines, that’s all. I have seen more Executives surprise each other in this exercise than in many other times of interaction. These visual narratives are very powerful. They bring the authentic part of us to the surface. Another method I use is to ask people to answer (all in writing, again) a question posed by their children (or other children if they don’t have of their own): ‘Dad/Mum/Sir, what do you do exactly?’ The exercise always starts with some light jokes until it gets really serious. Try to articulate ‘maximize shareholder value’ to your 5 year old. It’s scripts, narratives, stories, not targets, numbers and earnings per share. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with targets, numbers and earnings per share, but the signposts are not the places themselves. If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, there will be lots of good people traveling with you.

[5]

Learn more about our Leadership and Culture interventions here [6]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

Many times, in my consulting work, I find myself facing a dilemma: Do I involve many people on the client’s side, engage them, teach them about ‘behavioural change principles’ or ‘behavioural DNA’, for example, and create a journey of many travellers to reach some conclusions or destinations? Or do I go semi-solo, reaching the same shores, with the same happy CEO, and the same professional fees? Journey 1 is perhaps painful. The organizational and behavioural side of consulting has this peculiar problem: Everybody thinks they know. People with little or no psychological background suddenly become behavioural experts overnight. Managers who have never managed to seriously create traction in the organization, suddenly say that they have been doing this – whatever ‘this’ means- for many years. I’ve never seen non-financial managers claiming huge accounting expertise, or non-engineers claiming manufacturing expertise, but I have encountered numerous people in the organization claiming to have a complete understanding of human behaviour, individual and social. Everybody seems to have some sort of unofficial PhD in Organizational Behaviour. Journey 2 – full provision of hands-on expertise, advise, active involvement, with no pretension of democratic participation or over-inclusiveness – is far easier and less stressful. I shared this dilemma some time ago with a good friend and client, excellent CEO, and he said: ‘Do what I do, go where the energy is and forget the rest’. There are choices. Bringing people along on a journey can hardly be dismissed as trivial. But one has to accept that it’s not always possible to have everybody ‘aligned’, to use a bit of managerial jargon. Inclusiveness is a noble aim which can turn into a pathology – over-inclusiveness – very easily. Some people have an extra need to embrace everybody all the time. They are not content with the few, or even with a pure ‘rational understanding’ of the issues. They need full emotional, all-on-board, and, if possible, happy, personally engaged people. And they don’t get tired in the process. Bill Clinton was this kind of man when president. For all his shortcomings, this was his fantastic strength. He did not want you just to ‘agree’ on X but to emotionally love X. I have to say, I have not seen many Clintonian leaders in organizations. Inclusiveness should not be an automatic goal, especially at the expense of bold progress. It deserves good critical thinking of what is possible and realistic. In the meantime, I recommend going where the energy is.

[5]

Talking about behaviours and culture, this is a good opportunity to look at how you can reshape your culture, and we have a simple vehicle to achieve this. Start your journey here. [7]

If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact my team at: [email protected].

For more than 30 years I have been involved in ‘change’ in organizations. Again and again, some fundamental principles, and often inconvenient truths were popping up all the time. Recently, I put them all together – resulting in 40 ‘universal rules of change’. These ‘rules’ were emerging from the practical work that I was doing with my team, not from the theory of books or ‘change models’ or ‘change methods’. In fact, I have done a lot of challenging to the conventional management thinking in this area. Let me tell you in this short video, why I think a focus on “assets and strengths base” is one powerful driver of successful (organizational) change.

[8]

The business organization seems to be obsessed with deficit: what we don’t have, does not work, we are low in. Tons of energy is used in fixing, less in building. Employee engagement surveys tell you what you are lacking, where your scorers are low. OK, also the high ones, but management attention is insignificant compared to the call to arms to investigate the lower-than-benchmark scores. Quite a lot of (macro social) community development in society, starts at the opposite end: banking on strengths, focusing on what we have and how we use, what we are good at, where the energy is. Organizations can learn from that.

If you want to hear more about the full set of rules, my team and I have a great opportunity coming up very soon. Let us know if you would like to know more here [9] or via [email protected].

Whether you are sitting in HR, Organizational Development or any other corporate function, or simply in a position of management and leadership, there is no way, today, that a single discipline will provide you with the theoretical and practical background that was once assumed as the solid ground behind your praxis.

Traditional Psychology has a hard time explaining and Behavioural Economics has set things upside down. Must read, must learn.

Risk management stops being standard and ‘rational’ and needs to cater for Black Swans, if that is possible at all.

Employee Engagement as understood today is a weak approach unless it embraces the logic behind social movements, something that many organizations still see as esoteric.

The richness of the day to day ‘informal organization’ and peer to peer work (and influence) can only be understood with a high dose of Network Theory. What do you mean you don’t do maths?

The traditional disciplines took a view, a while ago, that reality was ‘interdisciplinary’. That was the buzzword. This is not enough today. The answers today come from meta-disciplines, not just a semantic trick. Meta-disciplines are not simply the old inter-disciplinary pick and mix, but frameworks to understand things elevating the approach to a completely new territory, theory and practice. Example: digital activism. I know, not something too close to day to day management (really?). Digital activism meets network theory, meets social anthropology, meets political marketing, meets social movements, meets Big Data, etc. It’s not the sum, it is beyond the sum.

I have pointed out to the new disciplines of management, ‘The New Classics ^[10]’, as a way to tap into territories that, although not new, have not been the traditional source of management and leadership.

Of course, one can ignore all this and the sky may not fall, but, if you are serious, your reading list should be scarily long by now.

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For more on organizational design from Leandro and his team of Organization Architects – watch our webinar on:

 

The new Promised Land of the so-called ‘future of work’

We know that the new organization has to be very adaptable and flexible, beyond what it has been in the past, but what are the organizational   principles that can lead to that? Is there a singular best model? Or, more importantly, can several possibly competing models coexist in one single organization? And, if so, what kind of management and leadership are to be reinvented?

This webinar has now taken place. Please click on the link below to visit our On Demand page.

View for FREE On Demand ^[11]

 

Following on from Wednesday’s ^[10] proposition, the new disciplines of management, ‘The New Classics’ are these 10:

1. Behavioural Economics
2. Political Marketing
3. Network Theory
4. Viral Change
5. Social Movements
6. Social/Corporate Anthropology
7. Digital Activism
8. Generation (and urban) anthropology
9. Social Media technologies
10. Critical Thinking

I introduced on Wednesday ^[10], very briefly, 1 and 2

As before, I will mention one single area in each, as an example, from where we can draw immediate learning and applications. It’s just one example of a rich learning from all of them, and by focusing on one aspect, I am conscious of trivialising too much. I am pointing to tips of icebergs.

3. Network Theory. Amongst other things it tells us that a Bell curve, normal distribution in the organization does not exist other than in an HR mind. Everything inside the organization (a network) follows a Power Law distribution. For example, there is a relatively small number of people with high influence and connectivity, and a large number of people with very little influence and connectivity. This can no longer be ignored. Don’t try to find a Bell curve of influence. It does not exist.

4. Viral Change. ^[1] This is a trans-discipline that explains how to mobilize people: bottom up (not top down), behaviours-based (not information based), peer-to-peer (not hierarchical channels), bottom up storytelling (not top down ‘stories from above’) and Backstage Leadership, the art of supporting from the back, not upfront with PowerPoints. Plenty of this here.

5. Social Movements. Organizational culture is an ‘internal social movement’, or isn’t. So we’d better learn from people who have run these. Key learning: you have to cater for a multitude of motivations, but be very clear about the non-negotiable (behaviours). In traditional management, our obsessive ‘alignment’ needs to be redefined. Also, ‘Rebels’ need a cause and a direction, as opposed to the fashionable thinking that having passionate people, rebels and mavericks in a room, will change the company. Yes, but you may not be able to recognise it.

6. Social/Corporate Anthropology. Hardly new. However, life in the organization can be understood in terms of rituals, tribes, identities, kinship and other anthropological concepts. And, suddenly, it all makes sense! Anthropology is the forgotten discipline in management. A beautiful discipline if it were not for the anthropologists who often speak an incomprehensible language. Corporate Anthropology is also a forgotten discipline, more complex than doing a PhD on South Seas tribes to be followed by a post in consumer behaviour for Unilever.

7. Digital Activism. This teaches us about rapid mobilization and large scale effects. Also about the differences between champions, ambassadors, advocates (and click-tivists), and activists. These are differences that we don’t understand or use well in the traditional view of corporate life, where these concepts have been commoditised. I don’t want more ambassadors. The company is not an Internal  Diplomatic Service. Personally, give me activists, who actually act. But the only time we use the term (other than in Viral Change ^[1]) is to refer to employees engaging externally on behalf of the employer. Activists are not ambassadors who click and ‘like’ and say how good my company is.

8. Generation (and urban) anthropology. There is less difference between a Chinese teenager and a French teenager, than a Chinese company and a French company. In organizations we are still stuck in rather old ‘cultural (national) distinctions’ and frames which don’t predict much anymore. How you handle Millennials, for example, is today more important than understanding ‘German’s power distance’.

9. Social Media technologies. Digital is not a suit of toys. We need to distinguish between building an audience and building a community, between push and pull mechanisms, and the differences between connectivity and collaboration.

10. Critical Thinking. ^[12] Two things here: (1) It can be taught, and (2) in the traditional management of organizations we are in very short supply. At the very least it is about (a) learning the art of questioning, how to be disciplined in inquiring and (b) avoiding/managing fallacies and biases. It’s a praxis. It gets better and better when practising and when establishing some of these practices across the organization, at a scale.

 

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Critical Thinking ^[12] Accelerator from The Chalfont Project:

 

Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.

As Michelangelo said: ‘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’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.

 

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At The Chalfont Project, we have crafted a short intervention on Critical Thinking ^[12]:

• Do you feel like you’re missing the time to reflect and makes changes?
• Do you feel like your team has fallen into bad habits, business is unproductive and no one takes ownership to change it?

In this short intervention we teach you and your team Critical Thinking methods and questions that will help you focus your time on the things that matter, make good and fair decisions and escape the dangers of human biases. We will also help you apply these methods to your everyday challenges in your organization.

You will learn about strategy acid tests and many mind fallacies, including various biases, and the practical Critical Thinking methods that you can use to address these.

 

This high impact, short intervention will:

• – challenge ways of thinking
• – provide immediate and trackable actions
• – drive change
• – develop a better way of functioning across the team, department or organization.

 

Contact us ^[9] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

Amongst the challenges that management has in the 21^st Century, which are shared, of course, by specific functions such as Communications and HR, this one represents perhaps the best summary I can think of. How can we master each of these four areas and the connection between them? (1) Messaging, Communicating (2) Triggering behaviours (3) Sustaining actions, and (4) Shaping cultures. We have been stuck for a long time on the first, and people are reasonably good at it. Indeed, this (1), Messaging, would be the core of Communications for many people. Also, triggering behaviours via our communications is not bad. But we are not sure when and how it happens, Sustaining anything, however, is far from mastered. What we have become Masters of are the One Offs (communication, event, Town Hall, offsite, powerpoint stack). Beyond sustaining, shaping/creating new cultures, is even more of a question mark. Be careful you know ‘which box you are in’; you can’t shape cultures (4) remaining in the Messaging (1) area.

The problem is that the answers to all these, in isolation or combination, are hardly to be found in the traditional management disciplines. These, and their toolkits, were crafted in a time when business life was predictable and relatively stable. In the new fast moving environment, we don’t have very good toolkits. So we are applying the old ones to the new problems, new pace and new scope of today’s business life.

Where to go for an upgrade? There are 10 disciplines that I call ‘The New Classics’. Some are, strictly speaking, far from ‘new’. But they are new for us in management and the communication /HR/other functions. They are not completely off the radar screen, we have not done much about them. In fact, many people would see them as alien to the kinds of things ‘we do’ inside organizations.

These are ‘The New Classics’. I will mention one single area in each, as an example, from where we can draw immediate learning and applications. It’s just one example of a rich learning from all of them.

I will mention 2 today, and the rest on Friday:

1. Behavioural Economics. Born from the failure of traditional economics to explain and deal with irrational behaviour, this new discipline is rich in content. Reframing messages is a big deal in Behavioural Economics. The classical example is the switch from ‘Don’t use towels that you don’t need’ (hotel rooms) to ‘The last people in this room used only one towel’. Caricature as it may sound, the second message triggers significant behavioural change whilst the former does not. Reframing and triggering behaviours, all in one. Some reframing works, some do not, and we know quite a lot about this, even if we don’t apply it. This is a bad caricature of the whole Behavioural Economics field but wanted to point towards the ‘irrational behaviour’ area (of insights and knowledge), which is now a New Classic. Many of our HR systems and processes are still the equivalent of Neoclassical Economics that assumes rationality and logic.

2. Political Marketing. Segmentation of people inside the organization, other than by performance, is almost zero. We have one single top down vision, mission and narrative that is ‘good for everybody’. Here we go. You would not survive one week in Political Marketing where all messages are segmented. In the US, for example, you don’t talk to a 25 year old about Medicare, and you don’t talk to a 65 year old about job creation. In our organizations, we talk about everything to everybody, for some peculiar views about ‘equity’ and ‘democracy’ which are completely misplaced. Most activity within the organization is tribal.

More next on:

3. Network Theory.
4. Viral Change
5. Social Movements.
6. Social Anthropology.
7. Digital Activism.
8. Generation (and urban) anthropology.
9. Social Media technologies
10. Critical Thinking

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For more insights, discussions and thoughts on management, behavioural & cultural change, leadership and organizational design – watch our free on demand webinars led by Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects. 

 

‘A Better Way’ Series ^[13]

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

 

Feed Forward Webinar Series ^[14]

WATCH our 5, free webinars as Dr Leandro Herrero 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.

 

Camino Book Launch Webinar  ^[15]

Leandro Herrero discusses leadership themes from his new book and reflects on leadership as a continuously evolving praxis. ‘Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest’. He is joined by senior consultants from The Chalfont Project – Organization Architects ^[16] Anett Helling and Jayne Lewis, ACC.

 

This is model 4 of the series ^[17].  The concept is simple. Imagine that you, as an employee, are in reality an investor. Not of money, but of another form of capital: your own human (intellectual) capital. The employer pays you for the use of that capital with a promise to grow it. Employers are Intellectual Capital Fund Managers.

Good Fund Managers will deliver good returns. At the end of the year you should expect a return on your (human) capital that has been invested: better skills, personal and professional enhancement, greater ‘market value’ and ‘market-ability’, more knowledge, new experience… You define your expected returns. After all, you are the investor.

Nobody (invests) gives capital to Fund Managers with a poor track record. You should not expect a year-end with no growth (or indeed, loss of capital!). The deal with your employer is that the contract is for the use and growth of your Human Capital. So, the one who is really in charge here is actually you. Novel concept. HR departments become ‘Human Capital Investment Fund Brokers’. The company is a big investment fund.

The idea is old and I have written about this several times before, for example in Disruptive Ideas. ^[18] For various reasons, it has not obtained great visibility.

There is a connection here with ‘The Alliance’, by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh. These authors propose an employee-employer form of ‘contract’, with mutually beneficial rules of the game over a period of agreed time (not a forever relationship) that they baptise as ‘Tours of Duty’, which I think is an unfortunate name. But these ‘Tours of Duty’ are not the same as the relationships in the ‘Investors Metaphor’.

Pros. The Investors metaphor model is a smart way to reposition the power of the employee. Engagement is high! How could it be otherwise if you are the investor? Why would you invest in a mediocre way, or half hearted effort?

Cons. It’s highly disruptive in terms of organizational models. Companies may be shouting at you: ‘Investor in what?’. I have seen reactions to this in the past, from my own client work, of the type: ‘Interesting!’ (which is an English expression that translates into  anything from ‘I don’t believe you’ to ‘nonsense’, but never, ever truly ‘interesting’). Proponents of the ‘Build to last’ old school of thinking are restless about models that don’t shoot for long(er) term stability. The ‘Investors Metaphor’ may seem like one of these but it’s not. You’ll invest for as long as (a) you have something to invest (so if you are poor in Human Capital, or becoming poorer, you have a problem) and (b) the return on your investment is worth it.

So what? The ‘Investors Metaphor’ makes you think. A lot. It’s a legitimate model of employee engagement, although hardly referred to. Use it in combination with other ingredients and the cooking looks (and smells) promising. More to come.

Next: a very novel concept. What if Employee Engagement (as opposed to non-engagement) was morally right on its own merits?  Period.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[2], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ ^[1], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations.

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project ^[9] or email: [email protected]. ^[19]

For more information visit: The Chalfont Project Speaking Bureau ^[20]

 

I read a while ago this story. Within the highly structured and hierarchical (by design) Catholic church, a Religious Order (an internal formal community of brothers) had been waiting for centuries for Rome to lift the ‘in excommunicationem’ status (ex-communication) or maximum penalty for gross deviation from the dogma, of one of its medieval brothers, a top German theologian at the time, once a high teacher and scholar in La Sorbonne in Paris. He had been, and is still today, highly regarded and influential across a broad spectrum of spiritual practices, beyond the Catholic church, but had over centuries the big weight of his unorthodox thinking and preaching on his shoulders. His battles with the official defenders of the orthodoxy only ended by his natural death, fortunately before the planned final ideological tribunal in Avignon.

Just very recently, a ‘more friendly’ new Vatican administration, and after a polite reminder by the new Head of the Order, replied finally that there was no case for the ‘excommunication’ to be lifted because, in fact, the brother preacher at La Sorbonne had never been  excommunicated in the first place. The news apparently took centuries to reach them.

Now imagine that, in the real world, present day, you were waiting for permission to act. OK, not as historically glorious as the German medieval brother. Let’s say more prosaic waiting, from the boss or boss’ bosses. Imagine, that you get the news that the permission is not coming because you never needed it; you had it already.

Would that not be sort of embarrassing?

OK, don’t wait for natural death as the brother in Avignon. Get up and move. Catch up with the time lost.

Here is a list of permissions that you should check whether you actually never needed them. Please do so before brain degeneration (or pension) kicks in:

1. To push the boundaries and abandon default positions
2. To open Pandora boxes, to uncover mysteries and deal with cans of worms
3. To get fellow travellers not in your teams, not in your formal structures, working with you
4. To get ready for the unpredictable and prepare yourself with constant learning
5. To make it happen, and fix it later
6. To tell others, to tell others to work across boundaries
7. To do great things that are not in your job description
8. To engage other bosses not in your direct hierarchical line
9. To initiate change and create traction
10. To talk, engage, team up, with absolutely anybody, anywhere in the organization regardless rank and geographies. Use of the phone included.

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Leadership is a term that describes a relationship. No relationship, no leadership. Leadership can only be defined in terms of followers. No followers, no leadership. Cut across this apparent platitude for a minute and suspend judgement.

The early desert hermits were not great leaders at the time. Then, some of their writings were diffused over centuries. Some are considered thought leaders today, even if they never had troops around. Can a hermit be a leader? If he has followers, yes he can. What would describe them as leaders is not a sort of intrinsic set of characteristics (wisdom, humility, vision) but the existence of a relationship which entails people following them.

Harrison White ^[21], (e.g Identity and Control, 1992, 2008) one of the greatest living sociologists, has been very clear about what he considers the error of attributing traits to ‘leadership’, despite the thousands of books that do so. These are not universal here. It’s not something that you have. It’s what you practice and the how.

For every set of attributes associated to a good leader (or a good company, or successful organization for that matter) one has to see if some or all of those attributes are also found in not so good leaders (or unsuccessful organizations).

We know more about the liabilities of not having something than the benefits of having it. Translation: we know that a leader that is not honest, that has little integrity, that treats people like commodities and has an ego bigger than the Sun, is bad news. He will have that negative influence, will run the organization in a particular way, will be a disaster.

Now, let’s have the opposite. A leader that is very honest, has tremendous integrity, treats people with high respect and is humble, a servant, is surely a gem to have. Do the combination of all these make him a good leader? No, sorry. It makes him a great human being. Those ‘good attributes’ are not exclusive of that category/concept called ‘leadership’. But it’s great to have this around.

A great deal of so-called research, which in pop-business-culture is often translated into those ’10 habits’, ’10 characteristics’, ’10 things’, ’10 attributes’, is flawed. That does not make it ‘not interesting’ and, for sure, it does not seem a disadvantage to write a book about it.

Leadership is not something that one has or not, is something that one practices in a social context and that translates into patterns of behaviours and relationships. Our  ‘individual interest’ is out of focus.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[2], 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 ^[22] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[9].

His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management ^[23], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

Nothing is more rewarding than having a CEO who says world-changing things in the news and who produces bold, enlightened and progressive quotes for all admirers to see. That organization is lucky to have one of these. The logic says that all those enlightened statements about trust, empowerment, humanity and purpose, will be percolated down the system and will inform and shape behaviours in the milfeulle of management layers below.

I take a view, observed many times, that this is wishful thinking. In fact, quite the opposite, I have seen more than once how management below devolves all greatness to the top, happily, whilst ignoring it and playing games in very opposite directions. Having the very good and clever and enlightened people at the top is a relief for them.  They don’t have to pretend that they are as well, so they can exercise their ‘practical power’ with more freedom. That enlightened department is covered in the system and the corporate showcase guaranteed.

The distance between the top and the next layer down may not be great in organizational chart terms, yet the top may not have a clue that there is a behavioural fabric mismatch just a few centimetres down in the organization chart.

I used to think years ago, when I was older, that a front page top notch leader stressing human values provided a safe shelter against inhuman values for his/her organization below. I am not so sure today. In fact, my alarm bell system goes mad when I see too much charismatic, purpose driven, top leadership talk. I simply smell lots of alibis below. And I often find them. After all, there is usually little room for many Good Cops.

Yet, I very much welcome the headline grabbing by powerful business people who stress human values and purpose, and a quest for a decent world. The alternative would be sad. I don’t want them to stop that. But let’s not fool ourselves about how much of that truly represents their organizations. In many cases it represents them.

I guess it all goes back, again, to the grossly overrated Role Model Power attributed to the leadership of organizations, a relic of traditional thinking, well-linked to the Big Man Theory of history. Years of Edelman’s Trust Barometer, never attributing the CEO with more than 30% of the trust stock in the organization, have not convinced people that the ‘looking up’ is just a small part of the story. What happens in organizations has a far more powerful ‘looking sideways’ traction: manager to manager, employee to employee. Lots of ritualistic dis-empowering management practices can sit very nicely under the umbrella of a high empowerment narrative at the top and nobody would care much. The top floor music and the music coming from the floor below, and below, are parallel universes.

Traditional management and MBA thinking has told us that if this is the case, the dysfunctionality of the system will force it to break down. My view is the opposite. The system survives nicely under those contradictions. In fact it needs them.

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Continue the conversation…

 

 ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[23]. Have you got your copy?

 

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[23], 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 ^[24].

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[2], 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 ^[22] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[9].

 

Reinventing management to deal with the complexities of the world and, therefore, the complexities of business challenges is something that, so far, seems unlikely to come from Business Schools.

Traditional management education has its roots in the past, more predictable and stable times. If you look at the entire encyclopaedia of tools, frames, and methods, you’ll see that they all look today like a brave attempt to capture a reality that is moving faster than one can handle. It’s not that they are useless or inefficient, but that they feel a bit old and tired. They do not sit well in Silicon Valley, or many other valleys for that matter. Of course, Deans of Business Schools may beg to differ.

The traditional human capital oriented functions such as HR, OD, L&D, Internal/External Communications are stuck. Communications a bit less, if anything because the digital toys force that tribe to upgrade and to play differently.

If you look at the HR/OD/L&D worldwide conferences, you’ll have déjà vu. A slightly more elaborate Employee Engagement questionnaire, a sharing of the world ideas to reward employees plus, yet another praise of the work-life balance world, do not seem to me like ‘progress’. The tribe continues to talk to the tribe members. And they feel good about it.

‘Specialisation’ will have to start considering its own reinvention since no single discipline is anymore capable of answering a business or organisational challenge. The Neo-Generalist (Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin, 2016) with a broad and mature formation, seems a better answer for the skill set that is new required.

Here are two examples of areas where ‘the answers’ now come from non-traditional business territories.

People’s motivation, triggering new behaviours and understanding the balance rationality/irrationality of decisions, can be better served from Behavioural Economics. Yet, not many HR/OD/L&D would know about this beyond the anecdote (and if I infer from recent meetings where I have been a keynote speaker, not even the term).

Culture change and shaping, and large scale change in general, can be better served and understood from the area of Social Movements and other ‘disciplines’ (praxis, in fact) where people mobilization is the ABC, such as political marketing. This is what Viral Change^TM does.

‘Look outside’ is the motto of New Management. There is no Plan B for that.

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Our Feed Forward Webinar Series is now available to watch on demand.

Watch our webinar on The Myths of Management ^[14]

 

Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid-19 scenario. Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’.

Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’. We have been running enterprises with very tired concepts of empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged pillars.  The truth is that there is mythology embedded in all those concepts. Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid-19 scenario. So, what will the ‘new management’ look like? Which elephants do we need to see in the management room?

 

 

What attendees said:

‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’

 

‘It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart.’ 

 

WATCH NOW ^[14]

1. The following are not the same:
   • What you want to measure
   • What you need to measure
   • What you have been told that you have to measure
   • What people expected to measure in similar circumstances
   • What you think you should measure
2. You can measure anything. You just need to define the word measure. The managerial default is a score, or a number on a spreadsheet, which leaves out very legitimate qualitative measurements and preferential ones. For example, in ‘I always prefer the beach over the mountains, and always prefer diving over the beach’, Utility Theory says that you always prefer diving over the beach. This rationality has been challenged, but it is an example of how I have not used any number and have however expressed my measurement in preferential terms
3. Just because it can be measured doesn’t mean it’s relevant
4. Just because there is a tool ready, doesn’t mean it measures what you need to measure (Employee Engagement industry, please re-think)
5. The measurement is not the reality but, a measurement of the reality (don’t ‘manage the score’)
6. Tracking progress must be multi-measurable, hard and soft
7. ‘Activity’ is an easy data point, mostly useless (e.g number of workshops)
8. The only thing worth measuring is what you care about. Start with that question.
9. Measuring is close to a dogma, dogmas require serious critical thinking
10. ‘What can’t be measured can’t be managed’ contains high levels of uncritical thinking. Some things may not be measurable, or it may be difficult to do so. The statement that we repeat like parrots in managerial land, may lead to diverting the attention to things that are easy (easier) to measure, regardless of their relevance.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[2], 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 ^[22] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[9].

 

Stage 1: The Accidental Management team. The team is composed by whoever reports to the top. You are in that place, at that time? You are part of the management team. Period. Well, not quite a team but a juxtaposition of direct reports to the boss. The team members don’t talk to each other much (other than in meetings) because they don’t have to. The team is managed via one-one-ones, which the boss sort of likes. The team is a collection of binary relationships with the boss.

Stage 2: The Utilitarian Management Team: As above, but some alliances are formed and two or three members work together when needed, if needed, if they feel like it. That excludes the more useless members who are still consoled by the monthly one-one-one. Collaboration does exist, don’t get me wrong, but as long as I can benefit from somebody else.

Stage 3: The Maturing Management Team, SPAMETO model. The dynamics of the members are in all directions; cross collaboration takes place; all starts looking like a proper team. Small detail, everybody is equal but Some People Are More Equal Than Others (SPAMETO). Yes, Finance, Sales and Marketing dominate the airtime in meetings, whilst HR, IT and R&D look at emails in monastic silence. And I am committing here the sin I hate most. I am equating team and meeting. But, frankly, in the Stage 3, most activity is ‘in meetings.’

Stage 4: The Balanced Management Team. Cross collaboration and fertilization takes place. Performance is the focus. Everybody is contributing. everybody counts and everybody accounts. They may be ‘high performance’ or not depending on what you call performance. Well-balanced and high performance, is not a bad place to be.

Stage 5: The Leadership Team. There is a bit of jump here. Maybe more than a bit. The team leads the organization. The functional, operational and business representation is clear: as in Stage 4, there may be a CEO, CFO, COO, Head of R& D etc. But they have switched the ‘direction of the representational arrow’. They don’t represent anymore their areas into the company, they represent the company into the areas, the functions, business units, operations. No switch of ‘the direction of the arrow’ (in mind and heart), no Leadership Team, no Stage 5.

Stage 6: Collective Leadership. As above but members share the collective drive. They are interchangeable, with the only limitation of their skill base, not the area of ‘expertise’. The Head of HR may not be able to run Finance, but must be able to present to the entire company, if needed, the financial results or the budget. The Head of Finance may not be able to run HR, but must be able to stand up and articulate the Human Capital Plan for the company in full detail, etc. One of the tests for this stage is The Empty Chair Test. Mr or Mrs X, member of the team, has disappeared for 3 month to run an acquisition, or to look deep into a project, but nobody has noticed. The empty chair (functional, operational, or otherwise) is largely invisible outside the team itself. Mr or Mrs X job has been naturally absorbed by others, temporarily, and the sky is not falling at all. If this has happened, it is not because the CEO said so, but because the reallocation was spontaneous, natural, and with no fuss.

Not all management teams reach high levels. Not reaching high levels does not mean poor performance. How far to progress, what speed, where to target, are choices. But the conversation must take place.

(Copyright policy: please disseminate, copy, forward, print, use).

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Let’s Join Forces!

 

The team at The Chalfont Project  ^[2] are here to support you and your business.  We can deliver webinars, remote keynotes, masterclasses or round tables tailored to your organization – all designed by Dr Leandro Herrero.  Example topics include:

• leadership
• corporate culture
• internal influencers
• leading change
• employee engagement

To find out more or speak to us about your specific requirements, contact us now! ^[9]

Or if you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now ^[9] .

 

 

Following on from one of the topics discussed during yesterday’s thought-provoking webinar on The Myths of Management – leadership and control. Thank you to everyone who joined us, from all corners of the globe!

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Fear of losing control is a funny thing. It does not seem to correlate with how much control you have in the first place.

I find that leaders who in fact have very little control, but who think this is not the case, fear losing control and talk a lot about it. Typically my teams encounter this in the context of a Viral Change™  programme, in which the engine of change is in the grassroots, and leadership is distributed in the form of highly connected ‘activists’ who are shaping the organization in an orchestrated, bottom up, peer-to-peer way. The contrast with a traditional ‘change programme’ of top down communication type, with lots of cascading workshops through the hierarchical lines, is striking.

Very often leaders feel that, in the old-fashioned top down way, they are in control, and that in Viral Change™  they lose/may lose/will lose control. This is actually not a hard one for us to redirect because it’s exactly the opposite.  The only control you have in top down systems is the number of workshops, the number of people attending and the content. Once this is done, you close your eyes and pray. You have very little control on what happens next, even from the time of people returning to the car park.

In the Viral Change™ antipode territory, the pool of highly connected people engaged and leading, working with us, (activists, champions, connectors) are so close to the ground on a day-to-day basis that you know what is going on, by the minute if you wanted. Paradoxically, Viral Change™ provides higher levels of control than the traditional top-down change systems.

But this is not the topic. The topic is how many leaders kid themselves thinking that they have great control in the first place, something that they fear they may lose, which is unsettling to them. But to lose something you have to have it first, and, believe me, this is not always the case.

Control is often, in fact, ‘an illusion of control’ only fuelled by the times you see an input and output working. You asked people to attend a seminar, they did. You prepare a communication package and digitalised it in powerpoints, and it has been cascaded down to all. Is this control? Only of the information tsunami. Try the same with changing behaviours.

My rule of thump is to always ask my clients to reflect on ‘how much (control) they have’ before addressing the ‘how much they will lose’. Never allow the conversation into losing without knowing how much is in the bank.

A wonderful way to stop worrying about losing control is to realise that you don’t have much in the first place. Then to figure out the level of control ‘required’. This is a conversation for another day.

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The ultimate role of the leader is to lose control. The more control you lose, the more you actually have. If you can’t afford to lose control ‘because it may cause chaos’, the problem is you. In the best case, you don’t have the right structure behind you. So, the problem is you. Or you inherited it. Still you. In the worst case, you have created that structure. The problem is you big time. Leadership development equals bits of control I want to lose per month. 

Extract taken from my new book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management ^[23]. Available Now!

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs deprogramming. This book of 200, tweet-sized, vignettes, looks at the other side of things – flipping the coin. It asks us to use more rigour and critical thinking in how we 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!

 

 

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Join forces with us!

Contact us ^[9] if you’re interested in a tailored webinar, based on topics from our Feed Forward Series, delivered to your team or organization by me and The Chalfont Project team.

Mastering healthy tension between them, or surrendering to an ‘impossible alignment’ is a choice for leaders and managers. The worse case is to ignore them, to pretend that they do not exist, Even worse: ‘we need both’, as the default answer.

Mastering starts with a modest acknowledgement of the existence of the tension. Here they are:

1. We have management and leadership development focused on a number of troops, a bigger team or teams, a higher department, more people. But we need a management development based on how to influence without the hierarchical authority. Most of our (need for) influence will be directed towards people who do not report to us.

2. We are taught how to manage resources that one can control: my budget, my piece of the strategic and business plan. A good manager, we are told, is a manager who uses his resources wisely, makes budget and delivers on his budget line. But the real life challenge is how to obtain and use resources we do not control, that do not belong to us. ‘Managing’ resources outside our direct control is the trick.

3. We put a premium on analytical skills and the ability to ‘focus’. We desperately need synthesis skills and the ability to see the whole picture.

4. We master the formal organization, and its formal and visible structures such as teams and committees. But most of the good stuff (innovation, spontaneous collaboration, crowd-creation, meaningful conversations) takes place in the informal, invisible organization.

5. We have learnt to ‘manage change’ in a top down way, shooting for a final ‘destination’ or desired state. We assume predictability and linearity. But the organization is not linear, with high unpredictability. Top-down management of change is not working anymore.

6. To be effective, we are expected to create and sustain predictable, repeatable, reliable, and reproducible processes. But innovation requires ‘unpredictable answers, a ‘beta state’ and restless and unstable processes.

7. Equally we are told to aim at ‘zero defects’ and ‘doing it right first time’. But innovation requires lots of prototyping, testing and trial and error. I am not talking about ‘products’ necessarily.

8. Good managers are expected to be quite rational, predictable, reliable and ‘safe’. Reinvention and competitive advantage today requires a lot of unconventional thinking, irrational, unreasonable and contrarian managers that can deliver whilst at the same time disrupting the default position.
9. We are told that efficient management has no slack, duplication, overlapping of responsibilities, ‘no waste’. Same people praise the 15% ‘free time’ in Google or 3M (or interpretations of them). We don’t tolerate buffer times, we have calendars saturated, but we expect people ‘to think’ and innovate. Innovation needs some ‘inefficient slack ‘in the system. Good management hates it.

Attack plan:

1. Acknowledge the contradictions
2. Imagine worlds in each extreme
3. Imagine living in world A whilst progressing to World B. Progressing, moving, travelling, is a good thing
4. Choose, then choose and choose again. Most likely, living in both worlds simultaneously (‘we need both’) is conceptually very comfortable but you will not advance an inch
5. Choose the amount of pain you are prepared to take and live with, by moving to the uncomfortable side. Go to number 2, ‘imagine worlds’
6. Repeat
7. Move, don’t get stuck in the analysis
8. If it’s messy and a bit uncomfortable, it’s OK
9. If too scary, say this is all a lot of crap and stay where you are. Don’t think. Carry on.
10. Good luck if in number 9

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Continue the conversation. Join Leandro and his team for the next free webinar with Q&A, as they debunk The Myths of Management ^[14] – Thursday, 30th July.

Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid19 scenario. Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’. Register now! ^[14]   30th July, 18:00 BST/19:00 CET – for my free, live webinar with Q&A.

We have been running enterprises with very tired concepts of empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged pillars.  The truth is that there is mythology embedded in all those concepts. Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid-19 scenario. So, what will the ‘new management’ look like? Which elephants do we need to see in the management room?

All attendees will be eligible to receive one complimentary copy of Leandro’s new book, The Flipping Point ^[23].

The Good Mechanics of Continuous Improvement have given us a culture of feedback. Feedback is worshipped. There is a whole sub industry on ‘how to give feedback’. It appeals to honesty, transparency, learning, accountability, leadership, openness, performance management, and the entire Father Christmas List of Good Management. Who can argue against it?

Not me. Well, a bit. Because it also leads to a rather mechanistic view of the organization that focuses on errors and fixes, on continuous improvement and natural feedback, loop learning. It’s Cybernetics as its best. And as a (very) old president of a Society of Medical Cybernetics, I can’t really dismiss that. But very often feedback loops lead to trivial incrementalism.

My problem is the hijacking of most of management airtime in some places. I feedback to you, you feedback to me, and we declare this space honest and good. Above all, we feel good. We’ve done it. I am not sure what we have learnt, or will do differently.

I am often missing a culture of feed forward, where we look at how we are moving towards a building of a shared future. OK, OK, OK, we also need to feedback about the present, which is always about yesterday. OK. But I want to know how we are building, constructing, creating and messing around with possibilities.

That’s me. Not a Universal Law.

I think we have too many thermostats that take care of the predictable and the achievable ( nothing wrong with this).

I really think we could do with  switching off  the thermostat from time to time. Maybe we need to experience a bit of the overheating or the hibernation.

PS: Here is another silly metaphor for the corporate collection: managers manage the thermostat; leaders have to secretly and furtively sabotage it, switch it off, under the cover of darkness.

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Continue the conversation, by joining my live webinar on 30th July, as I debunk The Myths of Management. ^[14]

 

Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid19 scenario. Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’. Join me and my team on 30th July, 18:00 BST/19:00 CET – for my free, live webinar with Q&A.

 

We have been running enterprises with very tired concepts of empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged pillars.  The truth is that there is mythology embedded in all those concepts. Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid-19 scenario. So, what will the ‘new management’ look like? Which elephants do we need to see in the management room?

 

Register now! ^[14]    PLUS attendees will be eligible to receive one complimentary copy of Leandro’s new book, The Flipping Point ^[23].