This is plagiarism, of course. I am stealing 13^th Century Saint, Francis of Assisi’s  line: ‘Preach the Gospel all the time. When necessary use words’. Translation, do more, talk less. Lately recycled as ‘walk the talk’. Twisted by me as ‘talk the walk’. That is, you walk first, then you explain the walk.

Yes, I think the ‘walk the talk’ order is wrong. As leader, you walk, and walk; then, you bring people along and explain the walk, whilst walking, that is.

In our organizations, we have conceptual tsunamis of values and beliefs. Most of them dwell in the corporate graveyards of annual reports, reception halls and HR systems. These are words, not behaviours. People copy behaviours, not words on walls, not bullet points in PowerPoints.

We need to agree the non-negotiable behaviours of values and beliefs so that we can ‘do them’ and exhibit them, not just explain them. Those behavioural translations are life or death.

The ‘when necessary use words’ should be the motto of so called change management processes.

The pending role model/employee/peer-to-peer revolution, will be driven by deeds, not by words.

But let’s not forget. Words certainly engage and motivate. Words are the wake-up, the alarm bells, the declaration of intentions, the intellectual vehicle and the pre-emotional triggers of action. So we’d better be good at them as well.

However:

Words are pre-social, the revolution is social.

‘The things you don’t have to say make you rich’ – William Stafford’s ^[1] (1914 – 1993)

Let’s get richer. We act more, then, when necessary we will use words.

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For a selection of my Daily Thoughts on leadership, you can buy my latest book, Camino – Leadership Notes On The Road ^[2], available from all major online bookstores ^[3].

 

Downloadable extracts: Extract Camino Chapter 1 ^[4],  Camino – Extract Chapter 2 part 1 ^[5]

 

A collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts. Camino, the Spanish for road, or way, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves. Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest. But we never reach the destination. Our character is constantly shaped by places and journeys, encounters and experiences. The only real theory of leadership is travelling. The only footprints, our actions. The only test, what we leave behind.

 

 

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 ^[6], 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.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[7], 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 ^[8] on topics covered in his Daily Thoughts and his books ^[9], and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[10].

 

At a conference I attended, the very sharp mind of Marten Mickos ^[11], CEO of HackerOne, ex HP, ex Nokia, reminded the audience that ‘the new generations are not worried about the future, but about what the older generations are leaving behind’. I thought it was a great insight in the context of discussions about what Millennials want from life, which took place in a panel of speakers where no visible Millennial had been invited to speak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children?

 

Try this: Son, I got up every day and went to the office to maximise shareholder value. I also participated in lots of Lean Teams. Ah, and I was an agile employee. In my time, our employee engagement scores went up from 4.5 to 7. Just try. Rehearse this by saying it to yourself in the mirror. Yes, what will we tell the children? That’s probably the only question that matters.

There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children? My children, your children, their children, the children. Apply wisely and broadly. Once you look them in the eyes, you’ll know straight away if the grandiose strategy you are proclaiming has any legs. What we will tell the children is ‘the red face test’ of leadership.

 

 

Extract from my book: The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management. ^[12]

Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. Management needs deprogramming. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Consistently attributed to physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who had no time for sloppy thinking, ‘not even wrong’ has become a category in its own right. It’s not bad thinking, its not even wrong! I love the concept and I love the extension of the spectrum, good to bad.   I suppose at the other extreme, there is the ‘beyond extraordinarily good’.

Somehow, good to bad was just too small a distance for Pauli. His impatience gave us the freedom to call something that is truly bad, not even wrong. And ‘not even wrong’ means it’s not even worth saying how bad it is.

It would be healthy to be able to say that some hypotheses about human behaviour, or assumptions about employee engagement, or an approach to leadership, are ‘not even wrong’. Clarity, honesty, candour are qualities in short supply in our day to day management.

The other extreme would also be fantastic. Imagine the categories ‘beyond brilliant’, ‘incredibly awesome’ or ‘astoundingly exceptional’.  ‘Remarkable’ does it for me; with my team we are in the business of building remarkable organizations.

Business language does not like hyperboles but we need some of them to deal with the rather dull business idiom. I welcome the stretches on both extremes: from ‘not even wrong’ to ‘out of this world’. Let’s experiment with this thinking.

Acknowledgement: inspired by my son who often refers to my jokes as ‘not even funny’!

There are times when you get stuck in arguments.  Discussions seem to go nowhere. You are running in circles and it’s not obvious what to do. People around you, in a meeting, for example, for very good reasons, don’t want to abandon the discussion. Despite the fact that it’s not getting anywhere, the subject is not trivial; you want to reach some sort of resolution.

There are many things one can do but here are three that will cost you nothing:

One: take a serious break
Two: tackle a completely different topic and come back to this one later
Three: reframe

Number three is the one I’d like to talk about here. It has to do with using new lenses and changing your mental frame of mind. The best way to start this is to use the most powerful Weapon of Mass Disruption we have in management. That is to ask the question: ‘What is the question (that we are trying to answer)?’ If you are lucky, that in itself may get you un-stuck, because a great deal of the running in circles and going nowhere may come simply from the lack of clarity about the question on the table.

If however the problem still persists, change the question. Play: ‘What if the question was different?’ What if the question was not the one we have formulated but an alternative one? We are stuck on the question of profit; what if the question was how to gain market share? We are stuck with the question of employee benefits; what if the question was employee engagement and retention? We are stuck with using a leadership model in a performance management system; what if the question was not about assessment but the way we develop these leaders?

Surrounding the original question with alternative questions, all of them close enough to the original (but not the same question just expressed through a simple twist of the language) may suddenly do the trick and provide a road map to answer all of them.

These three real examples, which I have dealt with recently in my work with clients, may seem like trivial changes in the questioning but they are not. The little reframing involved has great power to disrupt the thinking and provoke fresh ideas.

The main problem with being stuck, is being stuck. Moving in any reasonable direction is much better than running in circles. The alternative questions and the ‘what if’ will take you outside the vicious circle. Sometimes I call it ‘elevating the confusion to a higher level’. Or lower! Change the frame. It does a pretty good job.

The closest thing to designing and building an organization is the designing and building a house.

You can build a house with pre-existing replicable architectural plans. See those metastatic new towns or Clone-Villes where every house looks like the neighbours. It’s a cost effective building, predictable and with little differentiation. Many companies are built like this. There is a template of what a pharma company or a bus company looks like. The only difference with them are the products or the routes. You go inside the door and you can predict the departments that you will see. Their organizational charts are the same with different names in the boxes.

You can build one from scratch but borrowing from other models, a pick and mix architecture that may end up sublime or ridiculous. This is the building of a bit of A and a bit of B, plus perhaps something original.

You can build the house from zero, with 100% of the design for the purposes of the family. You start with a plot, a view and money in the bank. The rest is commentary. A pure start up follows that. As soon as there is a bit of growth though, it may start looking like a bigger cousin. Or it may not.

You have a house already, or sort of one, and make it better, bigger, more energy efficient, with an extension for the kids, new garden and, not to forget, that Jacuzzi in the corner. And variations. Most organizational designs start from a pre-existing structure, something already in place. Vast empires have been created from old templates. Just to remind ourselves that 3M stands for Minnesota Mining, and Manufacturing and I have not seen much of their mining recently.

You can pretend you built a new house, explain to everybody that it is a new house, but it is in fact a massive redecoration of the old one.

I will stop here with analogies. There are plenty more.

My rule number one as organization architect is that you should not start with a picture or a drawing of the house, as much as this is very attractive and the desire of the ones who will pay the bills for the building. Our building blocks at The Chalfont Project ^[13] are three different sets applied to old and new, redecorating or greenfield building:

1. An Enabling Design. A ‘structure’ so that the activities of the organization can be facilitated, enhanced, not impaired. Regardless of the ‘final look’. Many organizational structures are clearly not enabling. We know that a very hierarchical design does not foster innovation. You can’t have an army formed by totally self-managed units either.
2. An Operating System. A set of rules and (social) algorithms that make the structure work and that can cater for many ‘activities’. Decision making rights sit here, for example. Designing an operating system is more than designing processes. Anybody can design a process on the back of an envelope.

3. A Mobilizing Platform: a way to mobilize and engage people to get things done. The mobilizing platform is largely ideological (ideo-logical, that is) but has to be workable in (2) a particular operating system and (1) a particular design. Here it sits The Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform. ^[14]

A typical Organizational Development error is to assume that (1), structure/design, dictates de facto the operating system you (will) have or the way people will be engaged and mobilized. It doesn’t. You need the three legs above completely in sync. Also, touch one of them, you touch the other two even if you don’t realise it. The Fundamental Design Error is attributing to an organizational chart (structure) magical powers to ‘produce’ an operating system and a mobilizing platform.

People has asked me to write about the minimal ‘principles’ of organizational architecture. Here they are in a slim version, enough I hope to reflect and trigger some ‘so what thinking’.

Many years ago, I got into Decision Analysis at the hands of my good friend Larry Philips of the London School of Economics. I learnt not just the techniques but also a whole conceptual and philosophical framework. One thing, above all, got stuck in my brain: the relentless need to seek, bring and assess options. Suddenly I learnt that the world before me was richer than it appeared, in the rather matter of fact business environment. It may not sound like a big deal, but options were understated in the scientific environment in which I was working at that time within the pharmaceutical industry. How come? You may ask.  Bear with me.

If I had to write a ‘Theory of Everything’, section on ‘Views of the World’, chapter on ‘Decision Making’, and I had very limited space, this is what I would say. There are two types of people: ‘Therefore People’ and ‘However People’. The ‘Therefore People’ think this way: ‘We’ve got data on A, the results on B, the views of C, what we have learnt before from D, and resources E, therefore we must do X’. The ‘However People’ think this way: ‘We’ve got data on A, the results on B, the views of C, what we have learnt before from D, and resources E, therefore it looks like we should do X’ – at this point, 3:45 pm, there is great hope in the room that the meeting will finish just in time to catch the 6pm plane back home – ‘However, we could consider X and Y, because although all the variables are solid, we have not taken into account other criteria. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have options, we don’t have to just do X!’.

Needless to say ‘Therefore People’ and ‘However People’ tend to drive each other mad. [By the way, always beware of the 3:45 pm syndrome. This is that point in the agenda, the final part of the day, when somebody launches a grenade such as ‘I think the question we have been trying to answer since 9 in the morning is the wrong question’, or even one more bazooka style ‘But what is the strategy? We don’t seem to have one!’].

In my experience, for every ‘However’ person I find three or more ‘Therefore’ ones. Some scientific and technological environments are ‘Therefore Cultures’ (believe me, it sounds counterintuitive). Some corporate environments fuel the ‘Therefore’ further with the collective obsession with ‘closure’, to ‘get a resolution’, ‘make a decision’, ‘reduce uncertainty at all costs’. In a Therefore Benign Dictatorship, ‘However’ people are very irritating and a bit of a second-class citizens.

I wish I could claim here that there is a ‘Therefore’ gene and a ‘However’ gene that would explain the differences between people. I am cynically sympathetic to the idea. But I know that there will be hundreds of social factors that would shape the way our brain heuristics work, and that would happen as early as our primary education.

My favourite word for my work with organizations is ‘possibilities’. Possibilities need ‘However’ thinking: the need to look at options, to expect some contrarian views, to re-frame questions and anything else that prevents you from the trap of the single-track; one view, one path.

Perhaps we could just accept that, in many circumstances, there is only a clear ‘therefore’ in waiting. That would be sensible. However…

Many years ago, I learnt from the UNHCR, the UN refugee Agency based in Denmark, that many global NGOs of that kind, had invented the art of employee engagement at a distance.

We were discussing organizational models and a Director of UNHCR was with us. The conversation evolved towards decentralized operations, the pros and cons of ‘control’, and the challenges of managing a workforce that’s remote and that you don’t see. The director looked at us with an incredulous look and said: “This is what we do all the time.”  So the formula was (paraphrasing), clear directions, lots of trust, get reports when you can, send feed back.

That organization, and similar ones of this sort, did not have the time or opportunity to ponder about levels of control (on the ground): control was near zero in some instances.

It has always fascinated me how, if business was smart enough to look for models outside their mental frameworks, there would be constant learning. I have written here before about ‘the movie model’ ^[15], one of many examples we could benefit from digging into.

Large, field based NGOs are also a good start. Not just for organizational models per se, but also for learnings about leadership, employee engagement, decision making.

There was a time when the logic of things started with a ‘why’, followed with a ‘what’ and ended in a ‘how’. The logic has now been inverted. The colossal availability of the ‘how’ invites you to bypass the original sequence. The new sequence is ‘how’, ‘what’, and sometimes ‘why’. The ‘how-to takeover’ ^[16] has created a culture of solutionism. It’s embedded in education: how to answer an academic question is a click away in Google, you don’t need to know why the question is there in the first place.

For every problem, there is a how-to-YouTube-answer (my teenagers seem to imply). In fact, there is a whole industry of how-to-do-things, from getting fit to fixing a boiler.

Management is not immune. The doer culture is a premium. We recruit solutionists in greater numbers than thinkers, let alone critical thinkers. But, who can blame anybody for wishing to have people who provide solutions? After all, if I have a problem with the boiler, I’ll try to get hold of a professional fixer, not somebody who thinks about the physics of water and electricity, let alone asking me why I want to have hot water (and send me a bill for the question).

But when it comes to management and leadership, if we reduce everything to problem solving, and reward this above everything else, we will create a culture of problems, crisis and proficiency in dealing with them. I have expressed this before in these Daily Thoughts.

Management needs to protect itself against the epidemic of the inverted logic of the ‘how-what-why’. It needs to resist temptation for a culture of solutionism, and put a premium on the ‘why-what-how’. Obvious as it may seem, the silent takeover of the new logic clouds our mind and gives us an illusion of control because we have become proficient on the ‘how’.

Not resisting this, will end up suppressing the primacy of the ‘why’.  Achieving this milestone will trigger the terminal illness of the lack of critical thinking. In that disease, anything goes as long as we know how to do many things, as many as possible, as busy as possible, and as irrelevant as they may be. Logic will be deleted from the corporate DNA.

There is a period in child development when children start asking the question ’why?’. They usually seem unsatisfied with one answer only and keep asking, ‘but, why?’. Education is supposed to take those ‘whys’ and amplify them, use that early explosion of curiosity in the mind, make sure that it’s welcomed and nurtured, and guarantee that this curiosity stays for ever, beyond the initial big bang.

Bad education, however, misses this opportunity completely and, instead of pushing for a permanent ‘why?’, rushes to offer a great quantity of ready-made answers that seem to progressively decrease the need for more ‘why?’. The mind says: ‘There seems to be answers everywhere, particularly from that long, rectangular space on the screen called Google search, so perhaps I should not worry so much’… Neil Postman (1931-2003) ^[17], a US educator, put it as sharply and as unkindly as: ‘Children come to school as a question mark and leave school as a full stop!’.

There is a point in the child’s education when the ‘why?’ loses the battle and the ‘how to’ becomes king: this is how you answer the question, this is how you do it, this is how you solve the problem, the riddle, the challenge. At some tragic point, the ‘I know how to answer this’, in the child’s homework, becomes totally independent of the question.

I call this the point of inflection, when the ‘why?’ enters into prolonged agony, even exile, and the ‘how to’ takes over, The Big ‘How To’ takeover.

Education, from the Latin educere, means to extract from within, to take out, to come to light, to set the ‘why?’ free. I call the opposite of this de-education: to give all the answers beforehand and promote ‘the how-to’ over the ‘why?’. De-education teaches how to produce beautiful answers, regardless of whether they are answers to the wrong questions.

Given our education system, it should not surprise us that there is a whole industry of ‘ how to’ products and services, from publications to consulting and life coaching: how to be happy, how to be successful, how to be a good parent, how to bake a cake, how to deal with rejection and a myriad more.

In that context, it should not surprise us either that, in organizational life (a reflection of society, after all), we are working mostly with the ‘how to’ currency. Skills, competences, entire HR systems of performance management, are designed to deal with people who know ‘how to’ do things.  The ‘Why are we doing this?’ is in flagrant short supply. The reasons why we do what we do are assumed: there is a strategy, a dictation, goals, a process.  The focus is on how to deliver. Some people told me: ‘I am paid for doing stuff; nobody has ever suggested to me that I am paid, or will be paid, for asking why.’

The problem accumulated is certainly not the richness of the ‘how to’ but the poverty of the ‘why’. Asking ‘why are we doing this?’, even if it requires the courage to confront dozens of pairs of eyes looking at you in disbelief, is a disruptive idea, a provocative, healthy intervention for which one should get a good bonus.

Let me share with you my 3Ss, where I suggest you put your money:

1. Synthesis. My followers, readers, clients, know that I keep coming back to this. We have populated our organizations with Super Analytical Tribes that are able to dissect an elephant into many pieces and create beautiful PhDs, Strategic Planning and Competitor Analyses of legs, trunks, tusks, ears etc. We’ve got competitive skills based on these specialised abilities: ‘My trunk experts are the best in the industry’, ‘this is the place that attracts the top tusk specialists’, etc. However, we need people who are able to see an elephant when they have an elephant before them. Perhaps shout: ‘Psst! It’s an elephant!’ Then we also need people who can reconstruct the elephant once the Dissectors (not Directors) have done their job.

2.  Sense: Inundated with information, data, options, and the complexity of business life, organizations and their leaders have progressive difficulties in distinguishing between noise and signal. Sometimes, everything looks like a priority. Everything seems to make sense (but it doesn’t). Choices are difficult to make. Our ‘prioritizing’ tools are primitive. Huge brainstorms are often followed by a reductionist approach that ends up focusing on doing what is doable, under our control and looks like providing immediate benefit: quick wins. However, what may make real sense is to focus on what seems not doable, things we can’t fully control and for which the benefits are yet to be defined. The key is, what has been left out. Making sense of it all, above and beyond the apparent pseudo-logic of the priority setting exercise, is a skill in short supply. Sense making, sound judgement, identifying the signal, please bring them all. Don’t stop the prioritization and brainstorming but remember the brain attached to the storm.

3. Simplicity. Simplicity does not mean reducing something complex to digestible pieces (the elephant above), but more so, it means decluttering processes, systems and procedures. It’s about being mindful of the overgrown garden that nobody seems to tidy up; the overgrown grass and shrubs that everybody seems to be happy about. Simplicity can coexist with complex business provided that the complexity has been decluttered and the unnecessary removed. In our corporate world, simplicity is often understood as reductionism: the bullet points, the executive summary, the elevator pitch. These things make us feel good but may not solve complexity. Indeed, we may be fooled by the ‘reduced amount of information’ and by the pristine, reduced ‘summary’.

Most of these 3Ss can be found somewhere in my previous books, particularly ‘New Leaders Wanted, Now Hiring’ ^[18]. The topics come back to me again and again.

The 3Ss are still largely unresolved although we kid ourselves that we have: elephant cutting, post-it prioritizing, executive summaries.

Change management, or management of change. Thank God there can only be two permutations, because they are the most over-used terms in organizations. But, there are three very different models of change.

Model one, I call a ‘Destination Model’. Here it’s all about going from A to Z. Z is fixed, usually some sort of Promised Land; and A is the departure, and invariably a worse place than Z. This model of change is concerned with getting to Z. The language is one of milestones, timeframes, costs, and Key Performance Indicators. In other words, there’s a method. I call people in this model “The Methodists’.

I call model two a ‘Journey Model’. Model two also has its destinations but here it’s more about the ‘how’ you get there, what you learn in the process, the experience, perhaps the engagement of people. Model two people are mostly ‘travellers’. People who use Appreciative Inquiry, for example dwell here.

There is a model three. It’s the ‘Building Model’. This is about the building of the company’s DNA. In this model, there are destinations and journeys as well, but the key focus is not just on reaching Z, or, on the journey as you’re going to Z, but on the new DNA that is being created. A lasting environment, an organization that has, not just changed (model one) or has had a good change experience (model two) but has created a new competence: change-ability. These people are builders.

The three models are very different. Traditional management uses model one. That’s why we have an industry of ‘change management’, which is, in reality, more project or programme management with proliferation of Gantt Charts. Today however, model one, for all its merits of reaching Z (and getting yourself rewarded in the process) misses the point of sustainability. Then comes model two, or ‘the journey,’ which some management still treat as “New Age Stuff’ with lower credibility.

The goal of model three is to make the word ‘change’ redundant. In model three, ‘Change Management’ has become ‘management’. It’s a permanent ability based on a particular behavioural DNA.

If model one is milestones and model two is experience, model three is behaviours and culture.  Model one is a one–off. Model two is learning, which may or may not be one-off. Model three is creating the long term fabric, culture, change-ability of the organization, as opposed to just going from A to Z (but still you get to Z).

There are choices. Be clear. Forget ‘change management’. Reach a destination, learn from the journey, but if you don’t create long term DNA and culture, you’ve lost a great deal of opportunities and possibilities.

Said Wittgenstein ^[19]. Language in business and organizations creates frames, but also limitations. And we have lots of these frames. ‘Employee Engagement’, ‘Talent Management’, ‘Change Management’ for example, are common frames for anybody in business, but, for an alien they are far from clear conceptual entities. By using a particular language we infer that everybody will have a common understanding of what is meant, but some of these ‘concepts’ have many varying interpretations.

‘Change management’ is perhaps at the top of the abuse charts. It’s use in IT puts a simple accent on ‘making the new IT system live’. It’s use in project management, in mergers & acquisitions and in cultural change has however very different meanings. By calling something ‘change management’, far from creating shared understanding, we are creating a limitation of understanding. This limitation of the language creates in itself, limitations in the world of management.

Other bits of management dialect that have set up permanent camp in the organizational landscape, have become standard jargon which, because of their progressive lack of meaning, as before, create limitations in the world of management. Try to have a conversation these days on ‘empowerment’ and you’ll see the smiles of people around begging for a definition of some sort. And better that, than continuing the conversation assuming that everybody ‘knows what we are talking about’

Tribal language – and business language is tribal – can’t be suppressed, only substituted. An injection of clarity and plain language would do us all a favour.

It’s called the Shirky principle, after Clay Shirky, prolific American author of bestsellers such as ‘Here comes everybody’(2008)  and ‘Cognitive Surplus’(2010),  who writes and consults on the impact of the internet and other social topics. It reads: ‘Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution’.

Commentators on the Shirky’s principle, which was articulated in 2010, often associated it with other ‘paradoxical’ principles. The one I really like is Upton Sinclair’s (1878-1968): ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it’.

Some organizational cultures are solutions focused. They pride themselves in solving problems. So, they have lots of them. They need them, obviously. Dedication to problems (to solving them) could result in admiring them. In admiring them, problems may be prolonged, perhaps perpetuated. So, they can be solved. This is how systems work. In a funny way, you could say.

It’s easy to create a structure around problem solving, and the structure then becomes the problem itself. Just to refer to one example from the hundreds you will find on simple reflection, the matrix organization was created as a way to solve the problem of Divisional and Functional groups or Units not talking to each other. When the matrix became a mantra, a form of organization that ‘everybody should have’, it also became the real problem based on its own complexity. But it perpetuated itself because it was ‘the solution’ to an older problem.

Structures, process, systems and ‘functions’ in organizations tend to preserve their own existence. This is not even conscious or malicious. It’s an automatic mechanism in a large system such as medium and large enterprises. The issue is not to criticise this, but to acknowledge that this is ‘always’ happening.

Bureaucracy, group think, recycling of data, over inclusiveness, are all potential symptoms of ‘problem preservation’. They are in front of us all the time. We don’t need a doctor to tell us that we have the symptoms. But the Upton Sinclair principle may apply: we may blind ourselves because of our own interests.

Only self-reflection, critical thinking, the ability to think ‘maybe the problem is now us’, can provide the health of the system.

We need to question ourselves whether the structure that we have created to address a problem or a challenge is becoming a bigger problem than the one we are supposed to solve. Perhaps, sometimes, a problem unsolved is a better place than a whole structure trying to solve it.

Management Theory (if there is one) and management practice are not physics. We don’t have very solid data about what leads to what. We have plenty of correlations, a myriad of assumptions and, mostly, ‘half truths’ and conventional wisdom that has become elevated to the status of dogma.

Things may change with the use of Big Data, but this is only available to large companies that have adopted a very data-driven, evidence-based approach to management. Google is one of them. But even here the focus, for example in human resources, is on predicting employee performance or successful leadership. Predicting successful leaders in Google is very good for Google, but hardly a recipe to be copied by non-Google companies. It may tell Google what a successful leader looks like in their environment, but, (1) this is hardly replicable and (2) it does not equate to crafting the concept of Leadership itself.

There is both good news and bad news here. The good news is that many things could work well in the organization, and that you should be open to exploring and creating your own way. The bad news is the same as the good news with the added warning of the risk of trying to copy and replicate. Back to the good news: look at exciting examples of performance and leadership, imagine A, B and C in your organization, learn from what seems to work or not. Bad news again: don’t copy the entire thing, the entire model, the entire system pretending that you will be a mini-case of that Very Successful Company.

Management practices could do with more authenticity and more effort to ‘find your own way’, and less obsession with adopting entire ‘models of change’, ‘types of engagement’ or off-the-shelf designs.

Learning from examples is wonderful, provided one keeps an objective critical view of the whole picture and does not get too carried away. For each compilation of the top 20 high performing companies which did X, Y and Z, there are dozens of unwritten books about the hundreds of companies which also did X,Y and Z and failed.

There is a world of models, ideas, examples, and styles out there. Look and learn. Don’t benchmark. Benchmarking is a race against somebody who has already won.

No system can be fully understood within the system. No, this is not an esoteric statement but a simple, common principle that (the old General) Systems Theory has stated for a long term. Take individual behaviour, for example. We have the whole body of Psychology to explain it. But, at some point, individual behaviours can’t be easily explained ‘within Psychology’ because they need the social context. Ok, this is why we have Social Psychology to explain this. And it does. But at some point, it runs out of gas and needs ‘the higher system’ of Sociology as macro-framework.

Sociology will do the same but, in turn, at some point, it will need Economics. Economics comes in but will run out of ‘explanations’ until it hits the Political arena. That is why we are using hybrid terms such as ‘socio-political’ or ‘socio-economic’ all the time, because we are not sure where the issue belongs. ‘The Political’ will soon need Geopolitics. Geopolitics will need… Mmm. We are now running out of frameworks at an even higher level.

If you add a teleological dimension to this, that is, ‘what is the final purpose of X’, you will hit at some point Top Level Explanations or “Theories of Everything’. Here you have Marxism, Capitalism, and the organised religions.

What does this have to do with us in organizations and business? Well, it tells us that any organizational work (leadership, change, management development, organizational effectiveness) of narrow focus, will hit a ceiling at some point, unless one invokes the higher-level system. Working on the effectiveness of one management team cannot be done successfully in isolation of the wider organization that this management team belongs to. That does not mean that it is not worth doing anything ‘within the system’. It just means that we need to be mindful of the ‘system above’, perhaps, dare I say, influencing it.

In fact, it would be foolish to become paralysed at one level, waiting for the higher level to decide, or to change. Yet, this has been, and still is, conventional wisdom in organizations: ‘we can’t do anything until the top leadership does, or until they change, or until we fix the problem at a company level’.

Influencing the system upwards is not only possible but desirable. Back to the example above, whilst individual Psychology will hit an explanation ceiling and will need to call Social Psychology to the rescue, Social Psychology will need the principles of Individual Psychology to make full sense of it itself.

In organizational terms, innovative transformations of management teams or groups, when part of a culture that is not terribly innovative, can lead (and frequently do lead) to ‘upward transformations’, influencing, for example, the views of top leadership, perhaps even, becoming a social role model.  In my consulting work, I have examples of this kind all the time, which I sometimes wish I could show to the Doom and Gloom brigades running many companies.

Ultimately, ‘the top ceiling’ in organizational terms, is Culture. Again, becoming paralysed, waiting to ‘fix the corporate culture’ does not make sense. Fixing subcultures (‘within their own system’) is not only possible but, most of the time, a good place to start. Today, any successful cultural shaping or cultural transformation is bottom-up. Top down cultural dictation is a waste of time and money.

It is, what I term, a Russian Dolls system, where each level looks self-contained but is in fact part of a higher level. If the paint has gone in a small Russian Doll, you can’t fix it by re-painting the bigger one. But maybe, there is a general problem with the quality of the painting of those Russian Dolls that you have just bought, and what has happened to the Little Doll may also happen to the others. Being aware of this possibility would be wise.

I am stressing the need for awareness, both in terms of limitations and possibilities, because the history of management thinking and management practices has plenty of deceiving propositions. Some Quality and Continuous Improvement movements have focused too much on ‘fixing problems within the system’ and, at the same time, claiming that this will change the culture. But if honest, the culture is never changed by these fixes. People just become highly proficient at fixing problems. They never go beyond the Little Doll.

Powerful oversimplifications’ was the term used by Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to define the matrixes, templates and models that the consulting firm had created to help frame business problems. The ‘Experience Curve’ and ‘BCG Growth Matrix’ are examples. BCG more or less invented the concept with the obvious aim of tackling complex situations via frames that could be understood, used and remembered.

A lot of business consulting and ‘Management’ followed this approach. There are dozens of books on Strategy or Operations that compile literally hundreds of ready-made models and frames. Management education, exemplified by MBA, became based upon the proficient use of those models. Eventually, ‘consultant’ and ‘template’ was an associated pair, always coming together.

Frames and models are great as long as they remain frames and models, that is, tools. The problem with the ‘powerful oversimplification’ concept is the word powerful. We get carried away by many 2 x 2 pristine matrixes that host a series of logical content in each of its quadrants.

Every single area of management, from strategy to operations, from human resources to culture, can be trapped into the fallacy of the ‘powerful oversimplification’ that is, model or frame first, then we try to fit the reality in, not the other way around.

Combine frames and models (and templates) with solid critical thinking and you will have a solid approach. Don’t have critical thinking and the model, frame, template, or consulting ‘powerful oversimplification’ will take over. job done, great PowerPoint, everybody happy.

So, the models may be good, their use with no critical thinking is certainly bad, and leaving them behind as permanent explanation for everything is ugly.

These ‘oversimplifications’ have a life of their own. It took many years for people to start criticising and pointing to the limitations of Michael Porter’s Five Forces. That was a perfect example of people trying to fit the reality into the model with low criticism. On the other hand, the old Seven S (Strategy, Structure, Systems, Shared values, Skills, Staff and Style) is still today as useful as when presented in the late 70’s by McKinsey consultants Thomas J. Peters (who was still Thomas and not ‘Tom Peters’!) and Robert H. Waterman. Its simplicity has endured.

Thinking tools are brilliant, provided that the word tool does not take over the thinking. In fact, the best thinking tool is the one that you create for yourself to help you think critically. Temporary borrowing of ‘powerful oversimplifications’ (‘one was made earlier’) could be very healthy. The single word of caution is: beware of the squatters in your mind; they came as visitors, now you can’t get rid of them.

I said yesterday that for large scale mobilization of people (AKA social movements, AKA company culture), it needs a platform. They don’t need a ‘change management method’ . Viral Change™ is our mobilizing platform.

So what is a platform? An ecosystem of rules of the game, social algorithms (logic, as in idea-logic or ideology) and communication mechanisms that all together form an operating  system. A mobilizing platform is an operating system.

It contains (or hosts) at least 10 components

1. An overall compelling narrative that glues the whole thing and that it’s also divided into several narratives all relevant to different segments of the population (e.g, don’t talk to the 25 year old about pensions and 60 year old about unemployment.  Believe it or not this is precisely what we do in corporate life; we have close to zero segmentation)
2. Behaviours: Translate as much as you can into them. No behaviours, no currency
3. Peer-to-peer networks: the most powerful form of teaming up. Forget teams, we have enough of them
4. No multiplication, no social movement. It’s about how many people you engage and how many in turn do engage with others.
5. Focus on the highly connected people in the network (yes, you need to find them)
6. Clarity of roles: an advocate is  not an activist; an activist is not an ambassador; a volunteer may or may not be either. Champions may be anything until you define them.This area is conceptually messy, and it should not be
7. A healthy 24/7 storytelling system must dominate the airtime
8. Leadership support, including Backstage Leadership (tip: how to lead people do no report to you and without powerpoints)
9. Metrics and Insights (AKA knowing what the hell is going on)
10. A strong core team orchestrating all from the back, no apologies for the words.

Now you can test your ‘change management methods’ and your eight steps against this.

The new, emerging organizations, many people would agree, are more collaborative, more leadership-distributed, less top-down, with more levels of empowerment etc. There is a universal view that the traditional command and control model is exhausted. Everybody sees its liability and wants something different. Even armies are experimenting with models where ‘command and control’ still exists, but it coexists with new levels of autonomy, particularly in situations where it is impossible to always reach the ultimate authority and decision maker in the chain.

So we want to substitute ‘command and control’. The question is with what? Many ‘new models’ are certainly richer in ‘devolving control’ down to the organization, creating self-managed groups, or ‘circles’, or semi autonomous units. In many cases, command and control  has not disappeared, it has simply been shifted down. That’s an achievement in itself, many people would agree. But there are still people commanding a lot of control in self-contained autonomous units. Even in the most fluid forms or self-management, there is still control in the form of peer pressure, team leaders and experts etc. Also, ‘no command and control’ is not equal to ‘no hassle’, ‘no pain’. It’s a different pain, more palatable.

So you could say in a cynical way that command and control never disappears, only transforms itself. I wrote about this in 2000 in an article entitled ’Kings or cousins’, and reviewing my notes today, I can say little has changed.

I took this idea by learning from history and cultural anthropology. I then said  that, in his magnificent book, Conditions of Liberty, published a year before his death, Ernest Gellner, former Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge, described something which in my opinion was of great value to management. ‘Traditional man can sometimes escape the tyranny of kings, but only at the cost of falling under the tyranny of cousins, and of ritual… Roughly, the general sociological law of agrarian society states that man must be subject to either kings or cousins, though quite often, of course, he is subject to both.’ The king is dead, God save the king! But this does not mean freedom – other forms of dependence take over. For example, the submission to the control of kinship, of social subgroups, networks of power, Mafia-like organisations, etc.

That was a reflection in year 2000. 14 years later, the cousins are getting stronger although the dead of the king was greatly exaggerated.  Self-management will continue to progress as a natural evolution. There is a parallel with child development. At some point, forms of autonomy not seen in previous stages, will take over. It’s inevitable in the child and inevitable in the organization.

But we don’t quite know what these new forms look like (other than ‘the unique cases’) so, when leaving the room and switching the lights off, let make sure we have a good lantern. Darkness is not a good scenario for creativity.

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

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

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

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

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

Pros. The model brings back some conversation about ‘purpose’, in which people may agree or disagree, but still, the conversation will be in the air. I still use with my clients a 1990 lecture from the great Charles Handy, with the title ‘What is a company for?’ ^[20], which challenged many assumptions at the time and which continues to be relevant today.

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

So what?  Purpose is back, it’s the new black ^[21]. Purpose is not the same as this ‘Employee Engagement as moral imperative’, but they are sisters. This model says: when you look at all models, all possibilities, all surveys, all rankings, all happy cows, all air time, could you slot in a possibility that work in itself should be enhancing and (the corollary), if this is the case, then management needs to look at employee engagement also as a employee enhancement? What if we added a moral obligation here, in this model? Would the sky fall?

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