It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals in a room and train them on ‘something’, the job of achieving that ‘something’ will be accomplished. And if not, we will just train them again. 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

Learn more about our thinking here. [1] Or reach out to my team with specific questions via [email protected].

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm.

Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated to safety training in major corporations. One death is too many. Accidents can be avoided. The cost of time lost due to incidents is considerable. Safety training is needed, but it does not necessarily create a culture of safety. Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. A culture of safety is not one of well-trained (on safety) people but one where safety behaviours are the norm. These two things are not the same. Safety communication and training usually follow a top-down approach where facts are presented, guidelines and procedures exposed, tasks explained, and threats of noncompliance declared. It is a rational and emotional appeal cascaded down across all information channels of the organisation. It suits ‘information’, but it does not suit ‘behaviours’. Behaviours can’t be taught in the same way as a three-step process can be explained. Behaviours spread via imitation of others. Behaviours travel via social copying and emulation, sometimes unconsciously. Training and communications on safety are needed – and major corporations usually have very good educational programmes. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’. Cultures develop – sometimes very fast – by the power of person-to-person influence. “Training and communications are needed. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’.” The most powerful influence in the organisation is not hierarchical; it is peer-to-peer; it is the conscious or unconscious emulation of ‘people like us’. The Health and Safety personnel teach the rules of safety, inspection, safety implementation and improve processes and systems. However, the day-to-day social copying of good safety behaviours in the workplace, plus conversations in the canteen (that is, informal conversations with people one trusts), is what creates a culture of safety in real life. Viral Change™ is a way to create a fast and sustainable culture of safety which does not rely on the rational understanding of hundreds of people attending safety training workshops. In Viral Change™, we identify a relatively small set of ‘non-negotiable behaviours’ which, when spread across the organisation, have the power to create a behavioural fabric, a DNA of safety. We also identify a relatively small number of individuals who have a high level of influence with peers, who are well-connected, and whose behaviours are likely to have an impact on others in a multiplying mode. These people may or may not be in specific management layers but occupy various jobs across the organisation. We organise and put together these components, behaviours and influences, in a well-designed format. We let the spread and social infection go, and we back-stage the management of it. We engineer an internal social epidemic of safety behaviours that can be observable and measured. We do not ask to stop the ‘push’ of training and development! We do, however, orchestrate the ‘pull’ of connected and influential individuals and their role-modelling behaviours who engage with peers in conversations and real-life ‘doing’ and engage others in a viral manner. Viral Change™ is the only way to shape a culture of safety and maximise the potential and the investment of training and communications. Viral Change™ LLP is currently leading programmes focused on the creation of a safety culture in the way described above. For example, using these principles and methodology, a global company – which has state-of-the-art, award-winning top-down training systems – has engaged us to create a culture of safety virally, reaching and engaging 50.000 people across the world.

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

1. They don’t read blogs entitled ‘5 things very successful leaders have in common’.
2. They don’t care about lists of platitudes of the type: be yourself, know where you are going, give feed back, be proactive, listen to people and don’t leave things for tomorrow.
3. They don’t think they have anything in common with other successful leaders other than success.
4. Actually, very successful leaders have in common a pair of legs, a pair of eyes, one heart, they were all babies before, and they will all die.
5. Courage, determination, resilience, honesty and fantastic communication skills. These 5 attributes of very successful leaders, are equally found in very unsuccessful leaders .

I beg you:

Stop thinking like a printout. Stop spamming with a list of platitudes. Say something that is better than silence. Stop writing as if you have found the Meaning of the Universe. Starting the phrase with “research shows that’ does not necessarily give you credibility to your argument.

By all means, share ideas, personal and subjective. That is not the problem. On the contrary, that may be the solution to Robotic Psychological Pollution. I love biased and subjective ideas associated to a name. Then I know I am talking to a human being. I may agree or not, but I will know where people stand.

Disclosure. There are not 5 things that very successful leaders have in common. Or 10 things. Or Harvard research with the solution. These attributional lists have the solidity of a cream cake. Father Christmas is your dad. Management thinking is exhausted. We can’t milk more Google lists anymore.

Richard III update: A human and critical thinking conversation, my kingdom for a human and critical thinking conversation.

It’s the battle for Ideas, not Lists.

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For more thoughts on leadership…

 

I’ve met many top leaders in my life whose greatest merit seemed to be avoiding mistakes, by letting others make them for them. They climbed to the top on grounds of stainless purity and immaculate protection of themselves. They survived reorganizations one after another, with Darwinian perfection until the point at which the severance package was not to be refused anymore.They called this point ‘time to move on’.But having been motionless all their life, they could only end up being advisers or armchair investors or Board non execs. At this point they are incredibly skilful at pronouncing platitudes and they continue their working life with the same total lack of ‘skin in the game’ that has been their key feature until then.

 

Extract taken from my new book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management ^[3]. 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!

 

Performance appraisal or performance management are one thing. Forced ranking into an artificial normal distribution of people in the organization, is another thing. A Bell Curve/normal distribution of performance is still used in many organizations. In this way of thinking (and it is a way of thinking) a majority of people will fall into the category of (average) contributors and, then, there will be minorities on one side (excellent performance, get the big bonus), and on the other side (under performing, on the way out). I am talking in caricature, but anybody working in a medium to large organization will recognise this annual ritual, usually led by HR in order to ‘classify people’s performance’. Historically, it’s gone as far as telling managers, ‘you must have so many in the mean area, so many in one standard deviation, so many in 2 etc’. It was a ‘you must have’, not a ‘what do you have?’.

HR, and I am not directing the shots at the function only, but also to leadership of organizations, (we are all HR) needed tools to classify people and trigger professional development, pay increases, bonuses etc. So it has used for many years an intuitive and ‘logic’ tool, which has become ubiquitous.

However, the Bell Curve distribution in organizations is the wrong distribution for almost anything, even from a simple mathematical or statistical perspective. It is as irrelevant to organizations as it would be to supermarkets in order to explain the stock on its shelves. This is why.

The organization is a social network of connections. Bell Curves and social networks are as suited to each other as oil and water. Most distributions in a network are not ‘normal’ but follow a Power Law/logarithmic one. In a Power Law distribution, a few have a lot of (head), and most have few of (long tail). Translation: a relatively small number of people have high connectivity and influence, for example; a relatively large number of people have low connectivity and influence. It works for connectivity on the web (relatively few sites, compared with the huge total, enjoy high connectivity; most sites enjoy low connectivity, as compared with the total) and in any social network (scale free, is the technical level) The organization IS a social network in which many dynamics, from connectivity to power, follow Power Law principles.

You may think that this can explain connectivity and influence (see my books  ^[4]Viral Change™  and Homo Imitans) but not necessarily performance. But the only reason why we think this way is because nobody has seriously thought about Power Law and performance. It is however logical that the distribution of ‘performance’ (which after all is not a single ‘measure’) follows the same rules as other true social network distributions. So imagine a top of 100 and bottom of 0 and anything in between in a power law/logarithmic distribution/curve. This is a much better representation.

Trouble is, we are so used to Bell. The entire IQ system is based upon 100 being normal, 140 a genius and 60 a handicap. But this was a mathematical construct.

An additional problem is that HR/Bell/Forced ranking is heavily biased towards operational outcomes (read: hitting targets) and usually it says zero about other things such as connectivity, influence (positive or negative), positive deviance, experience, overall ‘market value’ etc.  You are going to tell me that Performance Management includes not only operational outcomes but also values and soft stuff. I see, ‘Performance’ is then a conglomerate. When you give conglomerates a number (and a position in a curve) you risk falling into the phenomenon that I call ‘Sumville’. ‘This is a hypothetical town with a sign at its entrance: ‘Welcome to Sumville; population 2500, 5 hotels, 20 pubs, 3 churches, 200 sheep, total 2728’. For the record, Sumville is my invention but I have seen that sign.

None of my (serious) clients use Bell/Force ranking anymore. It is an artificial distribution. A broader problem however is a similarly artificial competence system, but this is a story for another day.

People’s classifications are here to stay. It is our nature to frame things (reality, concepts, people) and make sense of them. But many of our toolkits are old. The Bell Curve applied to people performance creates more problems (including motivation and a high potential for unfairness) that it tries to solve. It is a convenient management tool, in 2020 only justifiable to provide convenience to management.

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‘The organization IS a social network in which many dynamics, from connectivity to power, follow Power Law principles…Bell Curves and social networks are as suited to each other as oil and water.‘

 

Do you know your REAL organization?

 

 

The organization chart tells you who reports to whom but not much else. But, who is truly connected with whom?

For many years the need to understand formal and informal connections in organizations has been well understood.  Now, we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

We can help you identify those channels.

 

 

 

3CXcan ^[5] provides a diagnosis of your formal and informal connections 

 

3CXcan is an online survey which uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for social network detection, to give you a profound understanding of your internal networks. With this data you can built effective solutions for your organizational challenges. It is a diagnostic tool which:

 

◦ Provides a picture: of the formal and informal organization and how effectively both operate.

◦ Reveals: organizational connections from strong to weak, to ineffective and broken connection.

◦ Gains insight: on the specific solutions and interventions required.

◦ Identifies: the individuals that will leverage change more effectively (ie champions).

 

Note:

• This process is totally anonymous.
• No names are ever revealed (unless there is a specific agreement)
• The data base of findings is erased soon after the debriefing has taken place

 

To find out what the results from this process look like and how it can help your business – find out more. ^[5]

For a free virtual consultation or a short walk through our demo – contact us now.; ^[6]

Scientism is taking over management, so anything that can be expressed in scores and numbers is glorified regardless of the solidity of the origin. Those living under a Benign Dictatorship of Metrics can measure anything, so garbage gets duly measured and saved in pie charts.

Scientism is taking over management. I have suggested elsewhere to read ‘The Tyranny of Metrics’ by Jerry Z Miller (2018) 

 

What can’t be measured, can’t be managed

Drucker argued that what can’t be measured can’t be managed. I now know why I can’t manage love, God, or a sunset. Thank God these were left outside management theory.

Drucker argued that what can’t be measured can’t be managed. Drucker had lots of good things to say, but not this one. Read ’The Tyranny of Metrics’ (2018) by Jerry Z Muller for a rehabilitation programme from your armchair.

 

The obsession with what is measurable, leads inevitably to blindness

The obsession with what is obviously measurable, in front of your eyes, leads inevitably to blindness to what is not in front of your eyes, what is not obviously measurable, and potentially the most important thing to track. This may sound obvious.

The obsession with what is obviously measurable, in front of your eyes. All sorts of cognitive biases, including availability heuristic, kick in when we focus on the immediately available or immediately recalled. These are part of our Applied Critical Thinking seminar.

 

Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. ^[3] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[3] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review ^[7].

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Many thanks to those of you, who were able to join our first webinar yesterday. Delighted to see so many attendees and from right across the globe. We’ve received great feedback and will be in contact with those of you, who have emailed us to claim your complimentary copy of The Flipping Book ^[3].

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

Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? ^[8]

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

 

Extract taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[3] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[3] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

The Employee Engagement industry reinforces a mechanistic worldview of the individual

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

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

 

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

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

The industry of Employee Engagement says that companies with high employee engagement are more successful (…) My view is that success creates employee engagement, not the other way around. The book The Halo Effect (2014) by Phil Rosenzweig ^[10] opened my eyes to this. I would put this book in the list of obligatory reading to anybody in management. The subtitle of the book is explicit: ‘and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers’. Rosenzweig quotes the case of the UK retailer Marks and Spencer, a company which at some point scored at the top in employee engagement rankings. Then a terrible year in business performance came up and employee engagement scores went down significantly. Not a single iota in benefits, programmes, employee care, or anything had changed. Just abysmal market performance. 

___________________________________________________________________________________________

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

Available from major online bookstores ^[11].

^[3]

Visit The Flipping Point ^[3] to learn more about the book and other services:

   Request ^[12] a keynote and Q&A on topics from the book.

  ^[13] Request ^[12] one of our webinars:

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

Some people have a hero within. They have this tremendous ability to mobilise energy, jump in when big issues present, work 24/7 on a priority project, do the extra-ordinary as ordinary, go not just an extra mile or two, but the whole run, show amazing commitment and ‘engagement’ and achieve the unexpected. These are the corporate Hercules, Perseus, Achilles or Odysseus on the payroll.  They write the epic narrative of the organization. There is mini-mythology around them. A mythology that may absorb the entire corporate narrative originated in a couple of people.

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that these ‘heroes’ create a sense of possibilities, they show that making great efforts is something that happens inside the firm, that it’s possible, and they provide some glorious role models that may be very useful during more depressed times in the firm.

The bad news is that if people want to mirror their behaviour and convert the company into an epic 24/7, permanent state of busy-ness (as opposed to business) and adopt heroic behaviour as a prototype, we may end up with collective high adrenaline which may or may not deliver good outcomes. The reason is here below in this story from the Martial Arts:

A young boy travelled across Japan to study with a famous martial art teacher. The master asked him what he wanted.  The young boy told him he wanted to be the finest martial artist in the land and asked how long he had to study. “Ten years at least”, the master answered.  “But what if I studied twice as hard as all your other students” the young boy responded. “Twenty years”, the master replied. “Twenty years! What if I practice day and night with all my effort?”.  “Thirty years”, was the master’s reply. The boy was thoroughly confused. “How is it that each time I say I will work harder, you tell me that it will take longer?”, the boy asked. The Master replied, “The answer is clear. When one eye is fixed upon your destination, there is only one eye left with which to find the Way”. (Joe Hyams, Zen in the Martial Arts)

Extra-ordinary efforts may not always bring extra-ordinary results. Organizations have a bad habit of rewarding efforts as opposed to rewarding outcomes. As in the young apprentice boy above, extra-ordinary, heroic efforts may confuse the mind, particularly the collective mind. Heroic role modelling on a grand scale is not a good way to run an organization. Or a Martial Arts school, apparently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting expectations, exceeding expectations and all that jazz! It’s often said that success equals performance minus expectations. Three comments on expectations:

1. “Exceed customer expectations’. This mantra has made it into business jargon. We know what it means, but it sounds a bit tired. It clearly depends on what the expectations were in the first place. It also has a quantitative flavour. I expect a 5, I got a 7, exceeded. Ok. And? I prefer ‘Surprise the customer, who did not expect any surprises, in a way that you will become memorable’. Memorable is one of my favourite words.

2. Corporate citizens with a Business Plan, forecast below possibilities so that they can always exceed. The ones who are truly honest often get caught in that honesty and get penalised for not achieving what was a very stretched, perhaps unreasonable budget. They learn the lesson and they promise less next time. The game is a game only if ‘gaming’ is the way to play corporate politics. If the atmosphere is one of true openness and honesty, then there is no game. My second favourite word here is honesty, and shared possibilities. OK, maths are not my forte.

3. Uniformity in the reward system is far from fair, as many people claim and justify. If a division in a very difficult environment achieves 85% of targets, it may deserve more reward than another division in a very easy environment achieving 100%. Expectations need a big qualification to make sense. I don’t believe in a uniform system of expectations. My third favourite word here is fairness is not equality. OK, four words

On the whole, I am always back to my number one favourite: memorable. Given our shorter and shorter memory capacity, with a world of information and communication competing for space 24/7, ‘memorable’ becomes a truly beautiful word.

We spend more time on preparing for doing than in doing. That would be good if we were just talking about preparing for action. Preparatory work is the key to a successful action. Ask lawyers, architects or the military.

But we in the organization may have elevated this to the highest level of sophistication. We spend a lot of time thinking of doing, preparing for doing, presenting what we are planning to do, reviewing the plans for doing, obtaining the permission for doing and, who knows, presenting again a Strategic Plan for Doing (which when approved at the highest level, will descend back to the troops)

The entire system and sequence of events looks like a massive rehearsal exercise. The organization literally goes into rehearsal mode for the majority of time.

You may argue that in a ‘doer organization’ populated by doers and run by doers (and a great percentage of my clients could fall into this category), this is not the case and the problem, if any, may be just the opposite: not much critical thinking and action, 1,2,3, results. But in reality, the same sequence takes place, just very fast. Or faster.

The issue is simply one of airtime. If we spend most of the time thinking of doing and preparing for doing, our competences will grow and grow in the area of thinking of doing and preparing for doing. We will become proficient in Rehearsal Management, not on outcomes. When an organization reaches this strategic capability, Rehearsal Management, people apply the full system to anything, small problem, big problem, small action, big action. They are so good at preparing, that preparing is what they do best.

Again, this is not an argument against good preparation. But the Thorough Preparation Argument, often hides over-analysis, and over-analysis often hides risk aversion. Risk aversion in turn may hide lack of confidence, or fear of failure, or avoiding mistakes.  Carry on? Avoiding mistakes may hide preventing getting your fingers burnt and end up like Peter, ‘leaving the company to spend more time with his family’.

A super-prepared organization that thrives on rehearsal may not be a thorough and solid thinking organization, but a dysfunctional one. Maybe.

The healthiest thing to do is to literally map the activities and sequences that took you from A to B, and attach time to them. It may be revealing.

Defenders of ‘the logic of things’ will argue that everything has a process that needs to be followed if one wants to be efficient. This is not against any logic. On the contrary. However, I will bring in Mr Einstein once more. Recently whilst in Berlin, I came across a greeting card in a bookshop. Under a silhouette of Albert, it reads: ‘Logic will get you from A-Z; imagination will get you everywhere’.

I can’t remember where I saw this. This is part of the point. It could have been anywhere. But I am sure it was in a prestigious business journal, one of the few must reads for fear of missing that important business wisdom assertion, that could change the route of your business forever. I am sure the statement is correct because I noted it down: ‘Companies that outperform have strong values, sense of purpose and excellent execution’. There you are. Strong, unequivocal findings from that Research on the Most Whatever Companies Global Study. I found it in a note in an old, small yellow notepad which tells me it must have been written down in a US airport on one of my recent travels.  Then I wrote something below, this time from my own thinking and to add to the ‘findings’ (to improve them…!)  ‘They also have toilets, car parks and a coffee shop’. It must have been my irritation with the so called ‘research’ that floods management thinking. Anything can be proven, anything that suits your need for logic. Ephemeral findings such as this, dominate ‘management’. ‘Strong values, sense of purpose and excellent execution? Sure, I’ll take it. Outperform the ones with weaker values, no sense of purpose and bad execution? Sure! And your point is? I am sure there is a case study coming up. After all business case studies are a bad form of journalism. Oh, people in the outperforming companies have mostly two legs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know leaders who are obsessed with this: the systematic use of feed back between managers and staff, between people. ‘We want ‘a culture of feed back’. ‘We want one of these’.

It always sounded as a great management idea. A way to learn, particularly from mistakes (since western management thinking has always underestimated learning from success).

But it became a mantra, an obsession, a cultural expectation associated to good management.

In the extreme, it became a pure top down managerial tool to manage machine-like staff. Too much of this, too little of that, too early, too late, too aggressive, or not assertive enough, to unresponsive, or too fast in jumping in, understands the customer, not, he doesn’t, very creative, not creative enough, in the  clouds, down to  earth, does not communicate, ok, does communicate, good them player, not a team player. And all those HR-loved boxes are filled in. And the manager saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning–the sixth day.

All that often diagnosed by managers with no endowment other than their GPS position in the organization chart.

We need a constant two way, three way, four way, all way conversation. A de-tripadvisorization of management. A human dialogue that looks more like a non-robotic interchange, and less like a plan to replenish supermarket competency shelves: you are low on that stock, high on the other.

This is not a call to suppress feed back but to make it part of an ongoing  human conversation, not a process, not a checklist, not a controlling tool. As many thinks in managerial life, one can only get away with them in ‘business’. In doubt, try this: ask you wife (or husband), ‘darling can I give you some feed back?’

Good luck!

BTW, I prefer feed-forward loops

Organizational life can go on, driven by management, without asking people about their motivations. These are assumed in a rather generic way: everybody likes money, bonus are always good, target sales need to be incentivised monetarily. Even outside the extrinsic motivations repertoire, we still know better: making a difference, being autonomous, grow as professional, a good work-life balance.

The reality is that, whilst there is plenty of survey data in support or against those incentives, we apply those ‘findings’ in an universal way. Nobody has asked Peter, or John, or Mary what is specific for them. They will get what everybody will.

A while ago a senior HR person said to me ‘imagine if we had to ask one by one what they want!’. I did not understand what ‘we’ meant. Certainly I did not mean HR, which would be bound to address the problem via another blank  survey. I was talking abut managers and leaders who should be able to know, must know.

The issue is in fact broader. The level of (staff) segmentation in organizations is minimal: rank, demographics and performance. That’s it. We treat the organization as a uniform entity. Communications are standardized for example. It is assumed that the messaging would be equally pertinent for new employees or long serving, technology functions or commercial, part timers ore full timers, men or women, people involved in rich social life or not, digital hermits or gregarious souls. Who cares?

In the socio-political arena, for example, we would not survive five minutes with those assumptions. Messaging, engagement, conversations and call to action are segmented and tailored. You don’t talk to a 60 year old about job creation, or certainly at the same level as to a 25 year old. Single parents and pensioners need different messages. They click with different things. This is not rocket sciences, yet, in the organization, we ignore it completely. We forget to ask, so we send them all the same goods.

This has become a mantra used by many leaders to express the desire that people take seriously their commitments ‘as if they owned the place’.

‘Act as if you were the owner’, say managers who have stock options to those who haven’t . No, I am not an owner, you are.  I am an employee on the payroll. I own myself, my time, my mind and my hands.

‘Act as if you were the owner’ say managers who can’t articulate ‘act as if it is in the best interest of the company’. What’s wrong with that? Is that so hard?

‘Act as if you were the owner’ is a twisted concept  of ‘ownership,  as in taking accountability, be responsible,  follow through.

‘Act as if you were the owner’ assumes that owners are the best actors. Many owners of business are terrible leaders and make lousy decisions until they sell. In many cases, the best thing to do is to act as if you were not the owner.

‘Act as if you were the owner’ assumes ‘skin in the game’, personal involvement  with consequences if things go wrong. If we have to count on ‘acting as if you were the owner’ to ensure skin in the game by people, we would be running pretty weak, carrot and stick organizations. Do we seriously think we have to be owners to be fully committed?

‘Act as if you were the owner’ is almost never an intelligent proxy for accountability, ownership, taking charge, keep promises, go the extra mile, do what you said, and all the rest of well-meaning desires to perform.

Find something better to say. ‘Act as if you were the owner’ is  a very cheap shortcut.

A  client, senior manager, mentioned to me recently that his company spent a disproportionate amount of time ‘getting ready’. He was referring to a product launch. He was critical, yet he found it difficult to push back because how could anybody argue against doing a proper homework, that is, markets, competitors, own skills etc? Many colleagues shared the ‘readiness discomfort’ but nobody dared to call it out.

This is far from uncommon. I used to use a slide in my presentations showing a pie chart which represented the percentage of time we tend to spend on a topic/strategy: 25% thinking of doing; 40% planning for doing; 20% getting absolutely ready for doing, including announcing of doing; 15% doing.

The need to do the homework has not gone away. What has gone away is a clear sense of sequence: A,B,C and then D will happen. In fact the sequential world is an illusion. Woody Allen’s description of London as ‘all the seasons in one afternoon’ would be a fair representation of today’s business environment. It’s ready for A whilst doing C.

In a recent great conference under the theme ‘Organizing for Transformation’, at which I was kindly invited to deliver the keynote, I gently (and respectfully, I hope) challenged the title as somehow implying that you stop the place and organize, and then transform. Of course whoever created the title did not mean that. It was obvious. But I pointed it out as a way to uncover how our brain works and love orderly sequence. The  old saying ‘flying whilst bolting the wings of the airplane’ (and its many variations) is spot on. It describes today. A,B,C is  ready for A whilst doing C.

Let me attempt to reframe:

1. Readiness is mostly a red herring. Nobody is ever truly ready. We have attached the label to a point in time in which we decided to act and act. Readiness to walk is mostly a state of people already walking.
2. Preparedness is often used as a coterminous, a synonymous of readiness. However, this term (wildly used in the military) is for me much broader and deals with all those ‘homework’ and conditions needed for ‘the plane to fly, and bolt the wings, and man the control tower, and buy parachutes’.
3. Change-ability is for me a way to shape the operating system of an organization that allows for semi-permanent state of preparedness and readiness and whatever else we can throw in.

Which means that I would put my money on change-ability, on creating organizational DNA and people/process operating systems that allows me to navigate, sail, fly and achieve without a ‘constant  disruption’.

If a programme, initiative, method does not build lasting capacity, today it’s not worth the money. Change management is dead. Change-ability is a premium.

Are there any possible conditions for this?

Let me come back to you.

 

 

 

Our managerial training and praxis has been quite successful at making us guilty of not focusing enough on a task or topic. Focus, focus, focus, has been the mantra of multiple managerial recipes, entire manuals of strategy, and overpaid coaching sessions.

Who could deny its logic? Well, some wild people who think we may have too much logic, too early.  ‘Tell them to focus on one thing, the one, the one that will make a difference’, the Management Oracle advises. ‘Prioritize the top 3. Give me the one thing. Focus, for goodness sake!’

Out of guilt of not focusing, and  out of the external demand to focus, one thing surely happens: we focus. Which may mean missing a hell of a lot of things by surrendering  too soon to the magnetic, in front of me, thing I can do and ‘focus on’.

The problem is not that we need to focus – let’s agree to agree – but that we don’t prepare ourselves for ‘it’, and then we uncritically hook with whatever moves in front of us.

Leonard Mlodinow’ book ‘Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World’ is a shot of fresh air. A serious theoretical physicist, enters the cognitive territory and the airport bookshelves.  Amongst other things,  he encourages us (my paraphrasing) to look at our states of mind ‘before the focus’. Steven Poole’s review in The Guardian says it nicely:

It turns out that we might approach problems more creatively if our executive, conscious brain is exhausted from having focused on lots of boring choices: so a few hours doing your accounts might help you write a better sonnet afterwards. Alternatively, if you find the world to be a fuzzy place in the mornings due to sleep inertia, which Mlodinow charmingly admits is true of him (“in my morning stupor I have done things like crack an egg into the sink and then start to fry the shell”), you will do your best writing soon after waking up.

I have plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this. But I will go beyond that. Very creative minds are often not completely focused on the creation itself ‘before it’. It may look like ‘preparing your mind’ for what comes next by not focusing on that too much. I love Werner Herzog’s Masterclass on film making in the fabulous masterclass.com. He spends a fair bit of his intro explaining how before starting the big day, first day of filming, he spends hours and hours listening to classical music, which will have nothing to do with the script of the movie. So he is preparing himself for the big day by not preparing for the big day. In fact, in the early chapters of that masterclass, he seems completely carried away reading some Nordic poems and asking the learner/user to reflect and digest, almost making you feel for a second that you have clicked into the wrong class.

I have no MRI data, or cognitive sciences studies to show,  but I am convinced that exploring completely different worlds, ‘alien to the task’, focus then comes out  much better.

We are becoming poor readers. The new generations are small screen generations. On the face of it, these are very focused.  But the brain has not learnt well how to distinguish noise and signal. We fall in love for the signal and we want to apply the learning straight away to something, or we will feel guilty of un-focusing and non-delivering. We may just have to learn to give our brains a break by abandoning the push for the small here and now, the quick googling as ‘re-search’ (that is, search twice in Google) and perhaps allowing our minds to wander more before the end of wandering.

I wish these Daily Thoughts did a bit of that magic by transporting you somewhere else for a quick stop before you start your ‘day focusing’. Nothing would make me happier.

Accustomed as we are to create plans to succeed  on something, this may sound counterintuitive. Creating (serious) plans for failure is a much stronger source of creativity. The key question is simply, ’how can we make this fail, big time?’

It’s not a joke, or a light exercise. It is actually very useful.

Over the years, I have used this technique to keep leadership teams thinking. Divided the team into two groups, one is tasked with creating a (high level) plan to succeed. The other is tasked with the opposite, an incredibly good plan to fail.

Four observations

1. The scenarios ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are almost never a mirror of each other (as one may have expected). There is of course an overlap but there are a lot more new angles in each of them, than simply the inverse of each other. It seems that in people’s minds, failing is not exactly the opposite of succeeding. And vice versa
2. Invariably, the ‘failure scenario plan team’ is by far much faster than the other in coming up with a plan. It seems that we know more about how to screw up than achieving positively.
3. Although of course I don’t do this as an academic exercise, and both success and failure will be anchored to a specific situation (e.g deliver the strategic plan), I tend to avoid a very precise definition of success or failure upfront. I ask the teams to figure out those definitions by themselves.
4. This is one of my preferred methods to start uncovering the behavioural DNA for Viral Change™ programme. However ‘behaviours’ are not easy to uncover for people who don’t do that very often, or for a living. Most of the first answers to the above questions come in the form of ‘process and systems answers’: that did not happen, R&D was late, project management did not coordinate, the pricing was wrong, etc. I then use those first answers to do my archaeological work and dig in to understand what behaviours were underneath those process and systems.

Inverting the question, from ‘what is the best way to achieve those results?’, to ‘what would it take to screw up completely?’ should be standard practice of any planning.

I promise. It works.

(1) We plan operations, change, leadership, anything, with intended consequences in mind. These are often translated into KPIs, milestones, and ‘deliverables’. This language is so contaminated that I always try to stir the conversation towards a plain English ‘so what do you want to see by March?, what do we want to see by mid summer?,  what do we want to see before Christmas?. Most people relate better to live events and personal calendars. People remember Christmas not Key Performance Indicator 4.1.1

(2) Too excessive focus on the intended, often the only thing that people are going to be judged for, makes us blind to see the unintended, good or bad. In my previous corporate life I was penalized (ok, just a bit) for underspending at the end of the year. I ran a Cost Centre (read, R&D) so I was supposed to come in ‘on budget’ (read expend it all), not under. That would irritate the accountants enormously. The absurdity is still nagging me. The unintended may be very good, for example, having built a communications bridge with division X as a result of a joint project. ‘Building a bridge’ may not have ever been in the KPIs. So you may not be rewarded!

(3) The extended consequences go well beyond the expected (declared) and unintended. In our Viral Change programmes, the focus may be ‘transformation’, for example, with specific aims. But, after a while, the fact that this has required peer-to-peer work, has taught the organization to generate spontaneous peer-to-peer networks now dealing with a plethora of things not in the original Viral Change™ shopping list. Very often, pride is one of those ‘extended consequences’, even if we never said we were aiming at that. In my world, the extended consequences have often the greatest impact.

These three sisters, intended, unintended and extended, always travel together. But often people are partially blind, focused as they may haven been asked to be on a ‘measurable’ and pre-ordered wish list. We are not managerially well educated to welcome the unplanned, the emergent, the unexpected. We respond with either panic or ignorance. It’s a crisis or an anecdote.

Optometrists welcome.

The problem with super efficacy and super efficiency is that what works for a Swiss watch does not work for an organism. The organization is actually an organism, more than an organization.

I have written many times in these posts that you need to be a bit inefficient in order to be very effective.  Whilst efficiency will give you predictability (‘does what it says in the can’, the expression goes) it will never give you effectiveness. Being effective is achieving beyond expectations and solving problems you did not know you had to solve. So, an effective outcome may simply not be the one that was predicted ‘in an efficient way’, but one that actually is much better.

This argument positions predictive performance and innovation in a collision course. All that is needed in efficiency and ‘performance’ (predictability, replicability/reliability, no waste) is a problem for innovation, where you need unpredictable answers and the ability to have slack in the system, that’s it, to be not-very-efficient). By the way, my definition of an innovative culture is one where people seek unpredictable answers, the predictable ones are already taken by the Very Efficient Company.

The tension is actually healthy and leadership must have the ability to navigate that tension, that journey backwards and forwards in the spectrum

But, there is no alternative. No slack, no buffer, not a bit of repetition, no shadow jobs, no overlapping roles (all those things  that traditionally we have been told,  at some point in our careers,  that were symptoms of bad management), no innovation, no adaptation, no effectiveness.

I love the always refreshing Rory Sutherland when saying:

The reason to avoid communism is not because it is inefficient, but because it tries to be too intelligent. Communism might be able to build a boring bridge or lathe factory, but it could never have created Red Bull: no bureaucracy could ever muster the level of insanity necessary to try charging £2 for a slightly disgusting drink in a tiny can. Its popularity defies explanation: it is the duck-billed platypus of the carbonated drinks world.

There you are.