If you want to hear more about how we can bring some Critical Thinking and new approaches to your organization, please contact my team at [email protected].

But creating value and providing utility are two things. It just happens that business has conveniently married them. 

We hear a lot these days about ‘value missions’. Progressive and popular economist Mariana Mazzucato is talking ‘value’ all of the time, but I hear utility. Many times, ‘the value of’ seems to mean ‘the utility of’.

We have reduced most of our business universe (only business?) to a utilitarian world where all that happens needs to be useful and, preferably useful now. It’s hard to disagree with this (utilitarian) version of business and organization reality, we are all sucked in. We have been brainwashed, from kindergarten to business school. But it’s hardly the only reality. It’s simple the only accepted reality.

In this utility-reality, efficacy and predictability are key. No waste, to the point, deliver what you promised, no more, no less, in the shortest route, no room for the extra-ordinary. Effectiveness, however, needs some inefficacy, some element of waste, some unpredictability. Using their own language, the language of the Utility Warriors, that is, ‘useless’ is often ‘very useful’ because it would allow one to see things that otherwise would be invisible or hidden under the obvious utility. What is apparently useless may contain gems not yet discovered.

Even preachers of meditation or stillness fall into the trap of having to explain why these would be useful (for your mind, or calmness or to clear your head).

So here the ‘value’ of meditation becomes meditation being very ‘useful’ to calm you down.

Our organizational/business reality has no time for these philosophical nuances. It does not understand them, so it dismisses them as, err, not useful. Our organizational/business world prefers a reality that is mechanical, or mechanistic, because this world can be broken into pieces that ‘can be managed’. It’s very good at dividing, less good at uniting. The pieces have utility in themselves, can be replaced, can be paid for (a consulting programme is usually paid for by its pieces, that is, number of days, number of consultants, daily rates, etc, translating value into the aggregation of pieces and banking on the collective collusion with this absurd model), but, the worst thing you could do as a consultant is to sell your time.

Here is the paradox. Most of the great things in life that have great universal value have no utility. They are pretty useless in the managerial sense.

Try love, truth, beauty, and wonder (without their ‘utility’) and see how it feels. Stressful, isn’t it? Oh well, let’s escort them off the business premises. Problem solved.

Language is a beautiful trap.

This naivety about behavioural and cultural change is widespread in business and society and cuts across a diverse range of topics. It’s about time we learn how successful approaches have managed to mobilize large numbers of people.

We have traditionally seen it in the area of Health and Safety, where training is a requisite, and who could disagree with that? But training is a weak tool for behavioural change compared to copying and imitating others around you. Training to wear a helmet, telling people that it is a requisite, and people wearing it are three occasionally connected things. But if training is your essential tool, and you have a Full Division for it, then the old saying that ‘when the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ applies well.

In this model of hammers and nails, when there is a health and safety transgression, the ‘punishment’ may be… more training. ‘Sending people back to training’ is not just a feature of Health and Safety. In recent years it has included unethical bankers sent on courses on Ethics in apparently ethical business schools. It sometimes seems as if we were following a rule: if you misbehave, we will train you a hell of a lot.

“Training and communicating have gone from a measured and necessary intervention to a single, sufficient solution for many evils.”

We also see it more and more in the controversial area of ‘training on the unconscious bias’ to fight gender and race inequality. It’s not going to stop anytime soon until people realise that rational and even emotional training on a subject has little power in sustainable behavioural change. There is plenty of growing data on how that training may be useless, yet we keep doing it. Accepting that society’s ills are not solved in training rooms seems complicated.

“Gender and race inequality, for example, will not stop anytime soon until people realise that rational and even emotional training on a subject has little power in sustainable behavioural change.”

In the corporate world, top-down communication programmes aimed at ‘creating culture’ continue to be entirely present even when the very same people who have authority in dictating and constructing them will tell you in private that they don’t expect a massive impact. It’s, again and again, the repeat of the old tale.

Two people are talking to each other in a garden. One seems to be looking for something on the ground. The other comes along and says, ‘What are you doing?’. The first response was, ‘I’m looking for my keys’. ‘oh, sorry to hear that. Where did you lose your keys?’. The man says, ‘Over there’, pointing to the other side of the garden. The other man says, ‘Hold on, if you lost the keys over there, why are you looking at the ground here?’. The other responds, ‘Because there is more light here’.

There is certainly more light in training and communicating, but the keys are usually lost in the corridors, in the day-to-day interactions with people and in the unwritten rules of the informal organization. There is less light (but you will find your keys) in a bottom-up behavioural change approach. The one that is not conceived as a communication programme but as a grassroots movement. If there is any hope in addressing the ‘S’ in ESG (the Environmental, Social and Governance agenda), it’s not in top-down communication and training programmes to tackle ‘culture’ but in an ‘inversion of the arrow’, from top to bottom to the opposite.

“There is more “light” in training and communication campaigns, but you will find your keys in a bottom-up behavioural change approach.”

An extra and obvious problem with training in large organizations is that you soon start running out of bodies. You train (and communicate to) leaders, the top layer and a few layers down, and then the system closes its eyes, hoping that the miracle of scale will take place. This mental model suggests that large scale is small scale repeated several times, which is the equivalent of thinking that if you just put large piles of bricks together, you’ll get a cathedral.

Cultural change is on all tables today, corporate, society, education… It’s about time we learn how successful approaches have managed to mobilize large numbers of people. No revolution has started in a classroom

Or reach out to my team with specific questions via [email protected].

The ideogram of the old city is the enclosure; the ideogram of the old organization is the organization chart. The ideogram of the new city is the underground map, the rail network or the highway chart; the ideogram of the new organization is the network.

The citizen of the old organization lives in a box on the organization chart, only occasionally getting out of the box to talk to another resident in a bigger box called ‘team’. The citizen of the new organization is a rider of the network, moving around and talking to other loose connections, some with stronger ties than others. Three ‘B’s reign in the old organization: boss, boundaries and bonuses. Three ‘Is’ reign in the new organization: influence, inter-dependence and innovation.

Having acknowledged that the hierarchical organization with its functional silos (which can be visible in companies of 5 million or 50 employees) had a bit of a problem in cross-communication, but not willing to kill the power silos altogether, the invention of the matrix as a cross-functional way of working was inevitable. It became a language key (we have a matrix system) and a clever hierarchical plot (I have two bosses: one local and the other global). And the matrix became a very, very large petri dish for team meetings.

It was invented as a way to force people out of their dwellings to work together with other people (who were also forced out of their dwellings). It sometimes seemed that the conversation between them was temporary and long enough for somebody to look at his watch and exclaim: “Oh, my God, so late already! I need to get back; bye!” And back to their boxes, they went…

“We don’t need more team players. We need riders and navigators. Big time!”

What does this mean? Well, riders of the network navigate through connections inside and outside the organization. They lead from their own connectivity and ability to imagine their world as a vast, mostly undiscovered space. They are relationship builders, not team builders. They may not have a problem with teams and may even belong to some. But they tend to regard teams as the new silos.

Riders have meetings as well: 365/24/7 meetings. They are ‘meeting up’ all the time. It is their very ‘raison d’être’. Riders want networkracy, not teamocracy. These new leaders will take the organization to territories where ‘the answers’ might be found and will do so via relationships, not through processes and systems. They are social-intelligent: a rare characteristic, often invisible in many layers of management or even in top leadership.

This is how you advertise for Riders:

“We’ve done the team stuff. We have lots of it, and it works well, thank you.

We are looking for (social-intelligent) people who can establish a web of internal and external relationships. Management has promised to keep a relatively low profile and let them roam freely.

We acknowledge that, occasionally, we will have the temptation to declare some of them ’a team’, but we promise we will refrain.

We are particularly interested in people who founded a club at 11 or created a football team at 17.” 

Or something like that.

Or reach out to my team with specific questions via [email protected].

1. Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure of solid outcomes.
2. Doing fast or slow, but sloppy and sloppier.
3. 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.)
4. Repeating mistakes comes from either not learning or not unlearning fast. ‘Lessons learnt’ is a meeting ticking a box and not enough.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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).
8. 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).
9. Working most of the time on single-track logic, deterministic views, one way, no options, and lots of ‘therefore thinking’. ^[4] Particularly when this is not recognised or even denied.
10. 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.

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

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

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

The Old School Toolkit has a saying, “we will take the best of A and the best of B in this new merged company”. However, this is a bad start. The best of A plus the best of B may still be  ^[6]insufficient ^[6]. Also, the safe discussion of ‘the best’ tends to hide the bad and the terrible for months.

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

The artist Alex Grey once said: “True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s.”

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

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

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

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

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

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

“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.

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

These are 3 self-sabotage systems to be aware of:

1. Inner civil wars

Internal fighting is a potential feature of any complex organization, business or not. We see the caricature of this, and its high cost, in political parties or social movements. Usually, we see the features of the inner civil war in newspaper headlines or on our television screens. Often it triggers a feeling of ‘how stupid can these people be? they are killing it’ in us. And sometimes they do. In business organizations the mechanics of inner civil war are the same. The ones that worry me most are those that do not have 100% visibility: the hidden turf wars, the passive-aggressive reactions between corporate functions, the by-design unhelpful collaboration, the cynical comments expressed in the corridor, restrooms, by perhaps senior people, against senior people.

2. Employee disengagement

The industry of Employee Engagement (and there is one) tries to measure a mixture of satisfaction, happiness, and willingness to run the extra mile. Year after year the rankings, for whatever they are worth, are terrible. We know more about the diagnosis than the treatment. I have written about the difference between being engaged with the company or within the company. The within (doing lots of stuff to make people ‘happy’) is a distraction. However, you define engagement, running the system with high degrees of a ‘lack of it’, is pure self-sabotage.

Leaders need to spend time on this, but it’s not about ‘improving a ranking’ but about gaining a deep understating of the motivation and ‘the chattering in the corridors’. It’s seeing and feeling. Some leaders can, others meet budgets.

For more on Employee Engagement see my article here ^[9].

3. Dysfunctional leadership

For any functional and aligned Leadership Team I’ve met through my consulting work, there will be four or five dysfunctional ones. Most of them look like juxtapositions of people reporting to somebody, but not a single entity ‘collective leadership’ type. It’s a journey, though. You don’t achieve high levels of sophisticated leadership in a week. But you have to work on it. I don’t have a big problem encountering dysfunctional leadership teams, but I do worry when six months later they have not moved a bit. Or it seems they have via multiple changes and ‘musical chairs’.

These 3 areas – the inner wars, the hidden or not-that-hidden disengagement, and dysfunctional top leadership – are particularly toxic. The sad part is that they tend to come together like brothers and sisters in a dysfunctional family.

If any of this sounds familiar, to stop and think would be a great investment.

PS. Don’t try to correlate success. Some successful organizations are dysfunctional. Some functional ones are not successful. The issue for the successful ones working with high self-sabotaging levels is about opportunity costs; it’s about how more successful could they be.

Start your journey here. ^[10]

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.

Start your journey here. ^[10]

Very rarely will they express what is not for change, which is just as important as working out what can be changed.

“Nobody says, ‘this will not change’.”

Let me explain more in this short video.

My team and I wish you all a wonderful Christmas break and a happy new year. We hope we can create positive organizational changes with you in 2023.

If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of work, the post-pandemic work, the overrated ‘back to normal’, don’t start with hybrid versus non-hybrid, flexible versus non-flexible, zooms or not zooms, work from home or work from anywhere. It’s the wrong start!

The conversation is about the culture you have, want, need, hate, or want to re-shape.

Company culture is the petri dish where everything grows, good or bad. Focus on culture. This is the real driver. This is the true conversation.

The culture of your company is your workplace now.

If the post-pandemic triggers any ‘future of work’ conversation at all, culture is the literature. Workplace is the grammar.

The culture of your company is your workplace now.

If anything, the workplace (the place and space of work) is within the culture. Culture is not something within the workplace.

Culture first, number of zooms and number of days within the office walls, second.

I for one, think that those physical walls and corridors are incredibly important. But this is, of course, a grammatical issue.

Start your journey here. ^[10]

People asked how Viral Change™ compared with another, say Kotter, methodology. But today, many years later, the focus on ‘change methodology only’ would be misleading. Yet, we are still using the word change, even if it is so contaminated that it is increasingly difficult to have a meaningful conversation around it. But there is a different emphasis.

After years of successful implementations in industries such as Pharmaceuticals, Vaccine manufacturing Financial Services, Transportation, Public Government and Oil and Gas, and other Viral Change™  has become, and it’s better described, as a social platform to mobilize people at scale.

A platform is more than a method to go from A to B. It is a map of a transformation or a journey with key principles and, yes, a methodology behind. But it’s not a ‘change methodology’ per se, or not only, unless we call change anything that moves.

Viral Change™ is a people’s mobilizing platform for the organization.

Viral Change™ is in fact the orchestration of a social movement and not a ‘linear’ process such as the Kotter steps, whether the original sequential 8 steps or the ‘you can have it all in parallel’ after his 2012 Damascus Revelation and consequent Late Vocation and conversion to non-linearity, ‘to accelerate things’.

Our Viral Change™ programmes may not have Viral Change™ title. They are not a programme or project, strictly speaking. Although the language is also sometimes inevitable. They are specific organizational transformations to solve organizational problems.

Viral Change™ is the engine-solution to an organizational pain that entails large scale behavioural change across the board.

Viral Change™ is in fact a social transformation platform with specific ways of doing, track record and outcomes.

• A set of principles around behavioural primacy and bottom up drive
• A particular view on, and conception of the organization as a non-linear structure which is closer to an organism than an organization
• Five pillars: behaviours, peer-to-peer influence, the informal organization, storytelling and backstage leadership
• A specific well crafted methodology to be adapted to each business situation. Challenge A solution, ‘powered by Viral Change™, not Viral Change™ method first, fitting the problem second.
• Built-in mechanisms of rapid adaptation
• An emphasis on change-ability as opposed to change
• An entirely innovative ‘operating system’ for the organization
• A new and permanent model of Employee Engagement based upon internal activism
• An internal ‘tempo’ in which cultural-like transformations happen fast
• An ability to host, tackle, address, operate both on traditional A to Z change (traditionally understood as a one off event, or ‘project’) and unconventional ‘change-inside’ (‘Viral Change™ inside’ mode) – AKA ‘culture’

Much more to come….

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

If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact me at: [email protected] and my team will arrange a suitable time for us.