The burning platform was the greatest management invention. Now, can we move on?
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Apparently nothing can change unless there is as ‘burning platform’. Business and old change management loves that kind of drama. There was once a real burning platform, yes, many, in the oil and gas industries, and people had to jump into the ocean from the platform. Having a burning platform makes you jump. You may also die.
The funny thing is that many leaders can’t not see a burning platform around (‘this change is going to be difficult here, we don’t have a burning platform, we are doing very well in the market’ – not that infrequent to hear). Fools!
The world is a burning platform. The market is a burning platform. Sociopolitics are on burning platforms. If you don’t see one, you need an optometrist. Or maybe an electric blanket to wrap you up. Maybe there is a rehabilitation camp somewhere for managers who can’t see or feel their burning platform, where they have a few hours of electric blankets per day.
If you are doing well, congratulations first. But this is the best time for a refresh, culturally, operationally.
I have written many times and created many antibodies because of that, that readiness is a red herring. Nobody is ever ready.
So yes, it’s not that you need a burning platform. It’s that if you don’t think you have one, you should step aside as leader straight away and leave the place to those who can feel the heat.
We can help your business ‘refresh, culturally, operationally’.
Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.
As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.
This high intensity, accelerated intervention takes leadership teams of all levels through a process of discovery and identification of both stumbling blocks and enablers, will be followed by a clear ‘so-what’ and an action plan. Contrary to how this may sound, when the entire management team participates, this is an incredibly fast process. But it is also an in-depth one when using our tools which, amongst other things, shortcut weeks of discussions and pseudo-brainstorming. It results in alignment around a well crafted Game Plan that reflects where they see the organization/team/department in the short to medium term and a detailed commitment to action that can be tracked. You may or may not need us beyond that point in order to help you with the journey itself.
Format: in-person or virtual
Timing: 1 – 3 days depending on format
Audience: minimum 20 – maximum 40
Price: POA
For more information, and to discuss how Reboot! The Game Plan can support you and your business, please Contact Us[2] or email: [email protected][3]
This company will reboot itself from Friday to Saturday. Apologies, services will be limited during this period.
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I like the concept of reinvention, renewal, or transformation. But I like most the concept of rebooting! Organizations, teams, groups, entire companies, always reach some plateau at some point. The point in the curve where things are OK, but not brilliant; there is nothing wrong but also nothing very good; no particular problems but not many new ideas. Things are stable, there is no crisis, people turnover is low, all is fine, thank you. ‘You have reached the unremarkable destination’, your organizational ‘Sat Nav’ seems to say. It’s time to reboot the system.
One of the programmes I have designed under the banner of ‘Accelerators’ is called ‘Reboot!’[1]. We ask people to find the elephants in the room, the corporate taboos, the things that need urgent health checks, make an inventory of mistakes and successes etc. What one can do in a Reboot![1] is simply amazing. A Game Plan is then easy to create.
Regardless how you do it, or what you call it, you need to plan, not for ‘essential maintenance’, as many digital services and their websites do from time to time, but for a full reboot! Look inside, up and down, sideways, dust here and there, question the unquestionable, open the windows, allow fresh air, imagine, inject some disruption, reboot!
This healthy shakeup can be planned. Actually, it is a hundred times better when scheduled, as opposed to when you are forced to do it in a crisis, or under stress. Schedule some ‘reboot time[1]’ in the life cycle of your organization, no matter what, even if you are at a peak of performance. Stop, push the button, have the courage to pause, listen, then re-start.
The old lithium batteries that we used to have in older devices and phones, came with the warning: to discharge completely from time to time and then charge again, otherwise the continuous use and daily charge will make charging less and less effective. Eventually, the battery life will be minimal. Well, organizations today are still in lithium battery mode. Follow the advice. Schedule rebooting. Abandon the plateau, even if it is a comfortable one.
Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.
As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.
This high intensity, accelerated intervention takes leadership teams of all levels through a process of discovery and identification of both stumbling blocks and enablers, will be followed by a clear ‘so-what’ and an action plan. Contrary to how this may sound, when the entire management team participates, this is an incredibly fast process. But it is also an in-depth one when using our tools which, amongst other things, shortcut weeks of discussions and pseudo-brainstorming. It results in alignment around a well crafted Game Plan that reflects where they see the organization/team/department in the short to medium term and a detailed commitment to action that can be tracked. You may or may not need us beyond that point in order to help you with the journey itself.
The Returning Bomber Paradox: a case of reframing the problem. More on Critical Thinking.
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In WWII there was a curious episode of an injection of critical thinking, not entirely well publicised. Big bomber airplanes in the Allied camp were shot down more and more, and the lucky ones that returned to base did so with multiple bullet holes, all over the place in the fuselage.
It was obvious to people that this was a sign that the fuselage needed to be stronger, with more armour and protection. But heavier plates would not necessary help the performance of the airplane.
A Jewish mathematician who had fled from Hungary, Abraham Wald[4], was asked to look into the problem. I don’t know exactly why him. But the first thing he did was to sketch the distribution of the bullet holes in the returning planes. Doing so many times, he saw a pattern: the areas with more holes were wings, tail and the nose of the aircrafts, whilst others such as the cockpit and a section of the back were not. The answer was simple: these areas with the holes were the weak areas of the fuselage, the ones that needed the extra plates, the reinforcement, the thicker armour.
Really?
Wald turned the problem and the logic upside down. The reframed question now was not where the bullet holes were in the aircrafts that returned, but where they would be in the ones that didn’t. If areas of the fuselage needed reinforcement and the extra armour, it was not the ones with the holes – the aircrafts returned after all – but the ones with no holes at all such as the cockpit and part of the back. Presumably, this is why those aircraft did not come back.
Wald reframed and inverted the problem. It did not cost anything. Certainly at that time, sophisticated simulations that would have been the order of the day today, were not available.
Seeing the problem upside down, reframing and finding ‘the other side of the coin’, is a tool within a good Critical Thinking approach.
Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.
As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.
Reboot! The Game Plan – [1] Do you feel like you and your team are stuck in the day to day doing of things and many aspects of the running of the organization don’t make the agenda?
There may or may not be anything obviously wrong. Or maybe there is. But this is not a good enough state of affairs.
This high intensity, accelerated intervention takes leadership teams of all levels through a process of discovery and identification of both stumbling blocks and enablers will be followed by a clear ‘so-what’ and an action plan. It results in alignment around a well crafted Game Plan that reflects where they see the organization/team/department in the short to medium term and a detailed commitment to action that can be tracked.
Critical Thinking[1] – Do you feel like you’re missing the time to reflect and makes changes? Do you feel like your team has fallen into bad habits, business is unproductive and no one takes ownership to change it?
In this short intervention we teach you and your team Critical Thinking Methods and Questions that will help you focus your time on the things that matter, make good and fair decisions and escape the dangers of human biases. We will also help you apply these methods to your everyday challenges in your organization.
You will learn about Strategy Acid tests and many Mind Fallacies, including various biases, and the practical Critical Thinking methods that you can use to address these.
These high impact, short interventions for senior teams, will:
challenge ways of thinking
provide immediate and trackable actions
drive change
develop a better way of functioning across the team, department or organization.
Contact us[2] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.
Redesigning the organization. This is the best time for an upgrade.
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If you had the possibility of designing an ideal organizational structure or redesigning one that you already have, what would you do? Most people would probably answer first with, what they do not want to do or have. We are more aware of what we dislike than having a clear understanding of what we should have. We have our own Christmas shopping list: flexibility, no silos, perhaps most small units, etc. And as a bonus, well, less meetings.
In recent years people have been experimenting with ‘the structures’ perhaps more than before. There has been a lot of music around self-management and, with that, the structure that would come from it. What people have discovered as well is that it’s very difficult to cut and paste. Structures and ways of working that seem to have been very successful in some companies, fail miserably when transferred to others, even if one could say that there was some similarity in the business.
The concept of the ‘requisite organization’ is quite old. Basically, it says that you need to have the organization that you need to have. And this is not a joke. This position points to the direction of the inexistence of one type of organization that is universally better than another. In fact, questioning structures is not the best way to start. The real question is what functionalities you want to have and then, which barriers you will have to avoid, to precisely maintain and enhance those functionalities. Another alternative is to switch from the traditional ‘who does/needs to do what’ to the ‘who knows/needs to know what’. The outcomes are completely different.
A new organizational structure, or a redesign of an existing one, should be the outcome of assessing the relevance of some criteria for the functioning of the business, not the input or the starting point.
The post-pandemic situation brings to the table lots of questions about work, well beyond the ‘from home’ or ‘remote’ false dichotomy. It is our chronic inability to cope with ambiguity that forces people to desperately find an answer, the answer, perfect or close to it. In my view this is one of the key problems. For me, a good start is to accept that the modern company, if that concept exists at all, is at the very least one that is able to ‘host’ the coexistence under one roof of several types of structure, business models, reporting systems, ways of working and types of contracts with employees. As infuriating for management as it may be (it is easier to manage the one monolithic company) it is perhaps the way to the ‘upgrade’.
Incidentally, when structure is seen as ‘intractable’ people resort to the dictatorship of goodness. ‘I solemnly declare that Wednesday is a non-zoom day and that you can’t email over the weekend, enjoy it’. Dictators have always known what is best for us and the benign dictatorship of ‘this will make you happy’ and ‘we are liberating you’ is not different. Some of those normative are prisons and go against the concept of diversity that the very same company may profess.
Creating Smart New Designs is a crucial leadership priority. But you will not find it in the proverbial ‘survey of CEOs’. Surprisingly, the options are enormous, so is the risk of repeating the same errors. ‘The lockdown’ digitalised many of our relationships. Those zoom days brought to digital the same bad practices that we had in analogue. We can do better. We must do better. Churchill said it: ‘We build our houses and then the houses shape us’.
Continue the conversation…join me and my team as we explore organizational life post-Covid.
Next Thursday: A Better Way to…design your organizational structures to create a remarkable organization for the future.
The new Promised Land of the so-called ‘future of work’
We know that the new organization has to be very adaptable and flexible, beyond what it has been in the past, but what are the organizational principles that can lead to that? Is there a singular best model? Or, more importantly, can several possibly competing models coexist in one single organization? And, if so, what kind of management and leadership are to be reinvented?
The company that gets better and better after disruption, disorder or chaos.
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Nassim Taleb Antifragile[9] concept is perhaps one of the most attractive frames (conceptual, philosophical, practical) we have had recently. By describing antifragile as the opposite to fragile, versus, say, resilience, adaptation, flexibility or even agility, he has opened the way to understanding growth and organizational complexity. He is not an organizational developer[10] so his references to the organizational world are not as detailed or profound as in other areas. However, the doors are open. The subtitle of the book reads: ‘Things that gain from disorder’. That’s it!
A few years ago I was part of a panel discussion organised by the restless thinker and great business coach Sinan Si Alhir[11] (@SAlhir). I recommend to those unfamiliar with Antifragility to look for Si’s writings and, of course, to read the book.
One of the questions I had in my mind, which I shared with the audience, was, when in the organizational life is antifragility more, if not relevant, present or simply fundamental to understand the organization itself. I thought of three scenarios:
Daily life itself! Hard this one. But the question injected by antifragility would be (my paraphrasing), for any adaptation, response, ups and downs, resilient behaviour, does the organization come out better and stronger or just coping with and ‘adapted’? You see, whilst adaptation and flexibility need to be part of the machinery, they are not strong enough in themselves to elevate the company to its next stage of possibilities. In more prosaic words, you can adapt and show to be flexible, and learn nothing.
A crisis. A crisis is an (unwelcome) experimental situation where all energies get together, hands on decks and here we go. Again one could ‘just’ solve the crisis (and become proficient at it) or come out much better and healthier.
An artificially created stress in non-crisis. What? Yes, in my organizational consulting work I submit clients to ‘stress tests’ to simulate resilience, learning, adaptation and… antifragility capacity. One of the ways we do this is to use our one day immersion (Accelerator) called Reboot![12] where we put on the table, with no preparation by the client, 12 organizational variables that need to be addressed on the spot. It’s not a game (I don’t do business games) and it works marvellously!
The key is to explore what it would take to create an organizational DNA that has antifragility in it, that, by definition, makes the company stronger and healthier out of ‘disorder and chaos’, to use Taleb’s concept (read: challenges, crisis, disruptions, distortions, M&As, markets behaving badly and so on).
There is something important here for the new organization of the 21st Century and we need to keep exploring.
Is antifragility the new change?
Create inflection points when you don’t need one. It’s better than waiting for the inflection points to come to you.
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Crisis are/constitute inflection points. Also M&A, extraordinary organic growth, relocations, and entering new markets. Keep adding. Pain is inevitable, misery is a choice, and coming out stronger and wiser the real, real winner.
At inflection points, new possibilities arrive at the door, wanted or unwanted. It’s not business as usual. It’s not extrapolation of the immediate past. Suddenly you are running out of toolkits. Energy comes from everywhere, by nature or by force. Adrenaline is up. Brains and hearts start to connect, en masse. It’s an inflection. It’s a fork in the road. You could go one way or another, but certainly not on the same road.
These are reboot mechanisms. Mechanisms of re-alignment, reinvention, perhaps (fast) renewal. If used properly, they add tremendous energy and possibilities. Some leaders have a habit of making them a pain. Then pain multiplies and you get misery. Other leaders will grab the opportunity and will launch a call to arms. Pain also may be inevitable here, but they avoid the choice of misery, and people look up, stronger.
I suggest that (1) inflection points are good and that (2) you should not wait for them, you should create them.
Disturbing some status quo, injecting a time out, asking fundamental questions of purpose in times where these are not forced upon you, is very healthy.
The point of the inflection point is to go up the curve. To come out stronger, wiser, perhaps a bit more humble. But never the same as before.
A feature of the organization of the future, the one that has started a while ago, is the ability to reboot and perhaps self-reconfigure. Whether you want to call it vaccination against complacency (OK with me) or Innovation in the DNA (OK with me) or permanent (stay in) Beta[13] (I prefer this one), it’s all the same: inflect, inflect, inflect.
Don’t wait for the curve to come to you, you decide when abandoning the curve and go up.
Stay in beta
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The traditional organization is, amongst other things, obsessed with closure. It despises ambiguity and puts a premium on the absolute clarity of processes, systems and structures. It’s engineered on testosterone. Inputs produce outputs, and they’d better be good since all those inputs are so expensive!
It’s a military operation even when we say it isn’t. But even the military have discovered that the world around us is volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous. They have even a word for it: VUCA[14]. And if you are in this VUCA world, you can’t afford high levels of ‘uncertainty-avoidance’ (a classical cultural hallmark of many traditional organizations). That world is uncertainty in itself, so, to avoid uncertainty is to avoid the world around you. I thought many times that the military have become much better than us, i.e. people in organizations, at navigating ambiguity. The enemy is VUCA, it does not have the name of a country anymore, can you believe it?
In this moving target world (markets, competitors, technology, pace of creation/destruction, predictability of anything, Black Swans…), to have everything crafted, well structured, closed, finished, stable and strong, is suicidal. People with all the answers should be disqualified from holding leadership office. This is not in praise of chaos but more a call for a well organised, un-finished, un-settled, un-stable, not completely closed, imperfect organization, with enough room to manoeuvre and adapt at the speed of light. I call this ‘Unfinished by Design’ or ‘the Beta Organization’.
If you want to succeed, stay in beta. Lots of alpha organizations are either dead or are not feeling very well.
Framing is a leadership must (2 of 3): frame the narrative before it frames you
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I said yesterday that I would put framing at the top of the list on ‘leadership tasks’
I also said that we, in business organizations, completely underestimate the power of (mental and behavioural) framing to trigger and sustain behaviours, emotions, ways of doing etc.
What about framing of the overall narrative of the organization.
Well, here are some frames:
Enhance shareholder value
Solve health problems|
Improve quality of life
Transform the way medicine works
Enhance life
Provide innovative medicines
Discover new treatments
Make drug treatment affordable
Save lives
I have deliberately taken an example of a pharmaceutical company to make the point that
All of the above are theoretically compatible
But the frames are different, what you do is different, your priorities are different, the people you attract is different. All the frames are like roads taking you to different places.
It’s not a simple question of ‘language’. It’s a view of the world, a concept of the world, in fact, a ‘space in the world’ (my preferred frame) that is different. Use the excuse ‘it’s all the same’ at your peril. It’s not.
Using the same example of a pharma company, I personally would like to hear how many lives you save, how many people are treated, how many kids are vaccinated, for example, as opposed to, say, how many R&D plants you have and how many people worldwide you employ. But that is just me.
These frames are completely different: solving, creating, building, modifying, inventing, providing, reforming, reorganizing etc. Choose your frame before the frame (by default chooses you. Then you are stuck with it.
That words matters is not a novel idea. However we treat narratives as aesthetic statements in their own right, not as triggers of behaviours.
For me. ‘building’ always wins. I am genetically unable to get up in the morning to ‘reform’ or to ‘increase shareholder value’. Yet, these may be serious needs for many.
I respect that. But don’t wake me up.
The tyranny of knowledge. Seeking unpredictable answers
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The ‘tyranny of knowledge’ is one of these phrases used in a diversity of contexts. It means amongst other things that you are trapped in what you know.
Knowledge is freedom but also a prison. The freedom bit is obvious. I’m interested in the prison thing.
The more one has a defined territory of expertise, populated by people whom you know more or less well, a knowledge club you all belong to, the more of a possible tyranny of knowledge in that territory. Those people (colleagues, team mates, advisory board) provide more predictable answers that you may think.
When the methods to find things are set, and the places to look for things also set, and the questions to ask are known, the chances of very successful answers are very high. So are their possible irrelevance. Your mind will trick you with confirmation bias to see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear. And that will happen even if you shield yourself against it wearing some sort of scientific uniform.
The way out is not rocket science, but so obvious that we don’t do it.
Bring to the party equal number of experts and aliens.
Find people whose views you can’t guess and run your ideas by them.
Keep your mind in refresh mode. Read alternative topics, even very distant from your expertise.
Invert the questions, ask lots of ‘what if’, re-frame the problems ( a good critical thinking training may help)
Be prepared to irritate lots of people by all of the above
Yes, it’s a pain
All of this pays off.
Innovation has to do with seeking unpredictable answers. The others are already taken
‘Sustainable but not too much’ is the best state of the healthy organization
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Sustainability of change, of cultural initiatives, of well intentioned corporate improvements is the key challenge. We are all quite energetic at initiating, creating a good push, setting great bonfires, and then quietly resigning to a prolonged fading. It’s the tyranny of the one-off, of the big push, of the country house/convention centre jamboree, the ritual of the entire tribe praying for rain.
All those are the easy part. The hard part is to develop, scale and sustain. As obvious as night follows day, we don’t pay a lot of attention to that.
In the absence of a good track record of ‘sustaining’ in the world of organizational change and transformation, it may sound silly to promote the ‘not too much sustainable’ idea. When we have zero, it seems stupid to promote a ‘please do not overdo it’.
However, it needs to be said. Sustainability per se, a great breakthrough compared with what we have now, is not a desired state either. Too sustainable cultures are rigid cultures, where written rules dominate and flexibility is poor. The ‘sustainability but not too much’ implies that a sustainable-like change has built in reboot mechanisms, reality checks, self-calibrating measures, and healthy deviations.
‘Healthy sustainable’ today is a beta state where stuff happens, things move, achievements take place, it’s not a rehearsal, but not everything is finished, done, accounted for, mapped and run like a piece of machinery.
The unfinished, beta, evolving, journey-like, state of the organization is a healthier one. The state of ‘sustainable but not too much’ needs to cater for slack, ambiguity, rapid reaction, experimentation, imperfection and emergent.
Plus a good supply of valium for the old guard.
Corporate Change is Corporate Rafting. And Heraclitus knew a thing or two about rivers (tip: change is not ‘created’)
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Heraclitus[15] (535 BCE) was probably the father of change management.
Two quotes:
‘There is nothing permanent except change’
‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man’
When you put both together you realise that the traditional ‘management of change’ approaches, methods and philosophies, full of many good intentions, but also full of many flaws, have in common one flaw, the mother of all: the almost hidden, unspoken assumption that management of change starts from a static, zero base, immobile (bad), or at least a plateau situation. Then, after a period of assessment, also assumed as a static, zero base, and immobile situation, ‘the change method’ kicks in and it all starts moving.
How foolish, Heraclitus tells us from the Hellenistic apartments of the heavens. It’s a river, stupid! It can’t stop! By the time you have done all cultural assessments, all stakeholder management, all investigations about readiness, all redesigning of templates and workshopsterone kicks in, the river is not that river, and, when you step in, you get wet with different water.
Change in the organization does not need to be created, it is already there. It can’t be ‘managed’ from a stop-world position. You think that you have a battalion of Big Consulting Group consultants invading the corridors, and 250 powerpoints later, you will know what is going on. The river! The river! Heraclitus shouts.
Change can be steered, directed, disrupted, distorted, but not managed from a static form, as in a train in the station that, at a given time, the doors shut and leaves in a predefined direction.
The ‘methodological’ implications are clear. Any method, approach, formula, particularly the heavy sequential ones with lots of Gantt charts, and the ones with lots of pre-conditions (readiness, total leadership alignment) which claim will ‘manage change’ (even worse ‘will deliver change’) is bound to fail. The river of the first conversation did not stop; the river of the cultural assessment is different; the river of the leadership readiness is different, and the original templates are now very wet.
‘Change’ does not cope well with ‘methods’. It needs a platform that takes into account all the water under the bridge, that is not sequential, that accounts also for the emergent and continuous re-calibration. The modern word for ‘corporate change’ is ‘corporate rafting’ and the platforms are like big, big inflatable kayaks. You won’t be surprised if I say that Viral Change™[16] is that big kayak.
And the frog said, next time buy yourself a thermometer
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The old tale of ‘Boiling Frogs’ says that there are too basic ways to boil a frog. One, the frog is thrown into a boiling water pan. The frog jumps out one millisecond later. Close to first degree burns, but alive. And learns the lesson.
The second way is to put the frog in a pan with cold water, turn on the heat, slowly, and wait. The frog, the tale says, likes the warm bath at first, the cosiness of that lake around him, the delight of the warm feeling. So delighted the frog is that does not notice that the water gets warmer and warmer. And warmer. And hot and boiling. The rest is a funeral.
At some point of the heating up, the frog would have tried to resist and adapt. Maybe. After a tipping point, the original adaptation becomes a liability.
Welcome to the Slow Cooking School of Management. We sometimes don’t realize that adaptation and robustness and resilience may provide some sort of blindness. By the time we realize, it may be too late. The (management) pan may be full of warm cosy water. We don’t notice the heat. We are cooked. Some people are cooked in the 30s, some in their 40s, some later. All of them may have been very adaptive and resilient.
Most slow cooking is self-inflicted. We need organizational thermometers that tell us the changes in temperature. Waiting for the 100 degrees Celsius to turn up does not seem like a great strategy.
In the land of prone-to-warm-water frogs, crisis is welcome. Stress to the system[17] must be welcome. Reboot mechanisms[18] as well. Nassim Taleb (I keep quoting) would say that then opposite to fragile is not robust or resilient. Actually he could not find a word, so he created ‘antifragile’: ‘things that gain from disorder’, as the subtitle of his book says. In his typical Taleb way he also says: ‘The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much’. That is the problem with robustness, including a ‘robust culture’; it turns us blind, complacent and insensitive.
Switching from frogs to cultures, for me, one of then most useful organizational thermometers are the Broken Windows that I have written about[19]. These are the relatively innocent failures in compliance, the not too strident signs of weak accountability, not life or death promises that are not kept, the windows a bit broke n that nobody fixes. These not so tragic, not so visible, not so disturbing signs of organizational graffiti and broken windows, flood the organization, one day at a time, without anybody bothering so much because, as we say, in the great scheme of things, these are not a big thing.
But these are degrees up and up in the thermometer. Actually, they are telling us that the patient has temperature. I know, I know, not sweating and shivering yet, so a little analgesic and a chicken soup may be just ok. Watch the funeral.
Apocalyptic? Tell that to the warmer frog.
We must have our own non negotiable. Still today I get pushed back on this language when we talk about ‘non negotiable behaviours’ in cultural programmes powered by Viral Change™[16] . Well, I’ll keep the language. It’s a sort of thermometer. I will not compromise with fevers.
When everything pushes forward, disruptive innovation may also entail going backwards
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A short piece in The Guardian announces quietly that Mercedes Benz is replacing some robots with humans.[20] Not the other way around. The Technology masters have decided that some tasks are ‘too complex for robots’ and are better carried out by humans. Later in the piece the author gives us a sort of after thought in the last lines after: it’s not only Mercedes Benz, Toyota and others have been gone into this reverse mode for a while.
Going beyond the clever headline ‘Human replaces robots’ is easier to understand the logic. In their case, the techno masters are not talking about total replacement but the replacement of the big isolated do-it-all robot by smaller robots that can act at a human command. Literally it says: ‘Car makers switch to smaller and safer robots working alongside humans for greater flexibility’
I find these news fascinating and deserving a full page of the newspaper, instead of the ones about how a particular journalist with no particular credentials pontificates about the merit of something which she obviously does not understand, whoch leaves me at her last paragraphs with two expressions, often heard loudly by my family at the other side of the room: Really? Seriously?
Going forward into a particular innovation direction can certainly side-line or totally supress an ancestor. This is true for the fax machine, for example, a piece of equipment that I keep in the museum corner of my office, and which had prompted in the past my teenagers to say things such as ‘but where is the keypad?’ or ‘what is the point?’.
Nobody expects to go back and communicate via telegraph either, or use those ‘portable telephones’ the size of a shoebox with a black thing sticking out. But it would be equally naïve to think that everything forward always uses the same pattern.
There are a few marktwainian ‘deaths largely exaggerated’ here. And one of particular delight to me is the book, the physical book, which sales are actually going up.
Human may become a disruptive innovation for robots. Physical books may be disruptive innovation for the digital and e-stuff-to-be-read epidemic.Fface to face conversations is already serious disruptive innovation for social media and screen to screen. A letter, a physical letter, OMG, the most disruptive of all.
‘Reverse disruptive innovation’ may be an interesting territory, after all.
‘Problem Three’ appears when we treat complexity with more complexity. Many organizations breed it. The UK NHS is caught in it.
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At some point of the organization’s growth, complexity kicks in. Before that threshold, you had two problems: managing growth and managing the complexity of the business that comes with growth. Then, at a crucial tipping point, you have not two, but three problems: (1) managing growth, (2) managing the complexity of the new business situation and (3) managing the complexity of the complexity in itself. I have written about this before (‘Every successful company’s growth contains seeds of failure. At some point, organizational complexity could outweigh the business benefits’)[21]
The third problem is the hardest and may overtake in importance (effort, airtime, resources) the other two. That leads to the familiar picture of large and complex organizations becoming progressively inwards looking, consumed by the internal processes, systems and structures that they themselves have created. It is the equivalent of a Formula 1 driver looking at the engine instead of looking at the road ahead. Ouch! That hurts!
‘Problem Three’, as I call it, that is, managing the complexity of the complexity, is manly self-inflicted. It has a high degree of predictability, yet either warnings are ignored or reactions to address it come too late.
The UK National Heath Service (NHS) is a good example of massive Problem Three. To deal with the massive cost increase of a (socialised, or as the American Republican Party would call, socialist) public health system, dealing with logarithmic challenges in terms of demographics, UK governments of different political inclination have imposed different ‘solutions’. First a massive new managerial structure: invasion of professional managers to manage the progressively unmanageable. Then, outcomes targets (health targets, waiting lists) imposed under the naïve assumption that the existence of targets, by itself, would trigger managerial effectiveness. What these targets in fact triggered was the need to have more managers to manage the targets. Then the decentralisation of decision making was imposed, devolving locally what it was held centrally, under the assumption that this would be more manageable and efficient. In fact it was a gigantic ‘passing the monkey’ to structures (local, general practitioners) with very limited skills to do so. Now, another managerial tsunami is in place: a enormous system of internal competition (what I call a Gran Bazaar strategy) which de facto breeds another huge system of ‘internal bidding’ and converts old collaborators into new competitors.
Increasing layers of self-inflicted complexity try to deal with the previous complexity in a colossal Entropic Catch Up, which has very limited future life in its current format. If the NHS was a civilization, it would be close to collapse and disappearance.
An article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian (If the way the NHS is organised seems absurd, that’s because it is)[22] is revealing. An interviewed senior Finance Director who is giving up and taking early retirement reveals the absurdities of what he calls ‘a permanent Maoist revolution’ inside. He has to deal with more than 100 contracts with ‘internal and external providers’ and shows some examples of external (private) ones competing on cost, not quality and being clearly worse than the old existing internal mechanisms. Nurses and junior doctors leave the NHS to join external agencies that send them back at higher costs, exactly more than double the equivalent staff in the case of doctors.
Problem Three needs a completely different solution from Problems One and Two. Problem Three is dangerously close to a Wicked Problem[23].
The main treatment of Problem Three is prevention. After prevention, if unsuccessful, it comes Reboot. If unsuccessful, it is system collapse. The rest is archaeology.
Have you heard the one about the three envelopes? There is a whole Theory of Management behind.
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This is an old joke and a current non-joke. Here is the story copied from one of the multiple write ups available (Huffingtonpost, 2012)
The story of three envelopes is a business classic for dysfunctional organizations. It starts with an incoming manager replacing a recently fired outgoing manager. On his way out, the outgoing manager hands the new manager three envelopes and remarks, “when things get tough, open these one at a time.”
About three months goes by and things start to get rough. The manager opens his drawer where he keeps the three envelopes and opens #1. It reads: “Blame your predecessor.” So he does and it works like a charm.
Another three months passes and things are growing difficult again so the manger figures to try #2. It reads, “reorganize.” Again, his predecessor’s advice works like magic.
Finally, about nine months into the new job, things are getting really sticky. The manager figures it worked before, why not try again. So he opens the envelope drawer one last time and opens #3. It reads…”prepare three envelopes.”
But it is not a joke. It is a whole Theory Of Management
Here are some alternatives for the content of the envelopes
Number 3 is always ‘prepare 3 envelopes’. But number one and two work as well with
Centralize – decentralize
Reorganize – keep reorganizing you have not gone far enough
Call BIG (Big Consulting Group) – Fire BIG, call SBIG (Second Big Consulting Group)
Go back to your roots – get out of your roots, disrupt
And many others.
The sad part of the joke is that it represents real life in many places.
I could imagine a start up that creates pre-prepared envelopes and sells them to management teams but in bulk: three buckets of envelops, number one with a variety of options, number 2 with another random set from books on ‘strategy’ and number 3 with envelopes with the (unknown) same content: prepare 3.
Kickstarter, I am coming
Invitation: The year of Bullshit Detection
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I declare myself allowed to use the word bullshit, which official definition is nonsense, lies, exaggeration, foolish talk, pretentious talk, in other words, bullshit. Yes, slang, inelegant, and politically incorrect in print, but real. As real as the bulls themselves, who never thought of making such a great contribution to language.
My decision has greatly been helped by seeing it in print in a prestigious journal, ‘Judgment and Decision Making’, which in its November 2015 issue contains an article entitled ‘On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit’.
The article refers to a series of experiments where randomly, computer generated statements such as ‘Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty’ are put to the test, and people find them ‘profound’. Then, they swapped those statements for Deepak Chopra’s twitter feed, and saw similar results. The article is an attack on Mr Chopra, somebody equally venerated and despised by legions. Possibly not other human being can host in the same brain ( and business, and public figure, and books) alternative medicine, quantum physics, spirituality, yoga, holistic-anything, theology, mind-body stuff, medical anthropology and of course being a close friend of Chopra. That dense forest is bound to hide the two or three little trees that may be worth paying some attention to. His Wikipedia entry states that ‘The medical and scientific communities’ opinion of him ranges from dismissive to damning; criticism includes statements that his approach could lure sick people away from effective treatments’.
But as much as debating the wisdom of Deepak Chopra may be a reasonable thing to do over a couple of beers, if nothing else better to do, this Daily Thought is not about him.
It is about the fantastic machinery of bullshit generation that we have in the history, and day to day reality, of management. This is a statement picked at random from one of million ‘management writings’: ‘Studies have shown that committing to a goal can help improve employee performance. But more specifically, research reveals that setting challenging and specific goals can further enhance employee engagement in attaining those goals’.
Profound. Very. Seriously profound.
Profound statements can also be seen in LinkedIn posts usually following a direct correlation between the number of views and likes and the ‘profound nature’ of things like the one written above. Some big, big, management guru names (my lawyer discourages me from going further) use this technique of Profound Statements ad libitum, obtaining multi thousand views, thousand likes and hundred of equally profound comments such as ‘I could not agree more’, or ‘thanks again for sharing your wisdom, Sir’. Linkedin algorithms love it.
Here is my hope and my invitation. May 2016 be a year of profound bullshit detection in our organizations, a year of conceptual clean up, de-cluttering the ‘profound’ language of management and leadership, the triumph of sanity and the little worship of Critical Thinking. That kingdom come. Amen.
‘We are building’ vs. ‘We are solving’. One shapes your future, the other fixes the past.
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Facts: abysmal sales in the supermarket chain, strong competitor activity, decrease customer loyalty.
Guess what, new CEO
Analysis: old fashion shops, excessive and confusing number of brands, buyer experience all time down, management practices out of date, huge complacency.
Plans: drastic redesign of shops with focus on customer experience, reduced number of brands, replacement of layers of managers
Communication to the public:
Type 1. Due to adverse market conditions, we have created a programme of continuous improvement in our supermarkets; we will make easy for you to shop, we have identified 12 areas of problems that we are addressing straight away including giving you more points in the shopping basket.
Type 2: The time has come for us to build a new kind of supermarket, an exciting experience with great prices. We are creating a new concept of shopping, online and in our places. Come and see it for yourself on January 1st. Thanks for being one of the 3 million loyal customers.
Type 1 says: These guys have a big problem and are desperate. 12 areas? I can give them a 13 one. And they are bribing us with more points. I have heard in the news about their troubles. They are reacting by fixing things, but it will be more of the same. Plus the cost of the management consultants!
Type 2 says: These people are into something. I wonder what that may be. They don’t have 3 million customers for nothing. I have heard in the news about their troubles. They are reacting by building something different. Good for them!
Same facts, same analysis, same plans, two frames.
Frame 1 is a fixing frame, a catch up frame, a ‘continuous improvement’ (so where they before discontinuous?), a change in the oil in the noisy car. It repeats negatives.
Frame 2 is a building frame, it does not talk about fixing, it does not repeat negatives. It’s intriguing; it’s saying ‘trust me’.
These may be caricatures, but you have seen many Type 1 and Type 2 in your organizational life. Because the facts, the analysis and the plans are the same, the communication is the real differentiator.
I personally feel strongly that we, in management, have over-learnt ‘problem solving’ and equate that to ‘good management’. I think we need to un-learn that, and learn fast the building mode, the building frame.
Any reorganization, big or small; any process and system change, any tackling of serious problems, shortcomings, or other deficits; any ‘transformation’ can be framed as a solving problem or as a building adventure. Building is the one that shapes the future. The other is a rear mirror strategy that will always need to catch up.
Unless you think in your heart that you are not building anything (a situation for which I would have equal dose of admiration for your frankness, and being sorry for you declared prolonged agony) always try the building narrative. Entire tribes, nations, and movements have used it. Why not you?
PS. In the building plans, include all the fixing that needs to be done, but only the ones that shape the new thing. Fix, but don’t talk too much about it.
Create inflection points when you don’t need one. It’s better than waiting for the inflection points to come to you.
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Crisis are/constitute inflection points. Also M&A, extraordinary organic growth, relocations, and entering new markets. Keep adding. Pain is inevitable, misery is a choice, and coming out stronger and wiser the real, real winner.
At inflection points, new possibilities arrive at the door, wanted or unwanted. It’s no business as usual. It’s not extrapolation of the immediate past. Suddenly you are running out of toolkits. Energy comes from everywhere, by nature or by force. Adrenaline is up. Brains and hearts start to connect, en masse. It’s an inflection. It’s fork in the road. You could go one way or another, but certainly not in the same road.
These are Reboot! mechanisms[24]. Mechanisms of re-alignment, reinvention, perhaps (fast) renewal. If used properly, they add tremendous energy and possibilities. Some leaders have a habit of making them a pain. Then pain multiplies and you get misery. Other leaders will grab the opportunity and will launch a call to arms. Pain also may be inevitable here, but they avoid the choice of misery, and people look up, stronger.
I suggest that (1) inflection points are good and that (2) you should not wait for them, you should create them.
Disturbing some status quo, injecting a time out, asking fundamental questions of purpose in times where these are not forced upon you, is very healthy.
The point of the inflection point is to go up the curve. To come out stronger, wiser, perhaps a bit more humble. But never the same as before.
A feature of the organization of the future, the one that has started a while ago, is the ability to reboot and perhaps self-reconfigure. Whether you want to call it vaccination against complacency (OK with me) or Innovation in the DNA (OK with me) or permanent (stay in) Beta [25](I prefer this one), it’s all the same: inflect, inflect, inflect.
Don’t wait for the curve to come to you, you decide when abandoning the curve and go up.
The company that gets better and better after disruption, disorder or chaos.
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Nassim Taleb Antifragile[9] concept is perhaps one of the most attractive frames (conceptual, philosophical, practical) we have had recently. By describing antifragile as the opposite to fragile, versus, say, resilience, adaptation, flexibility or even agility, he has open the way to understanding growth and organizational complexity. He is not an organizational developer[26] so his references to the organizational world are not as detailed or profound as in other areas. However, the doors are open. The subtitle of the book reads: ‘Things than gain from disorder’. That’s it!
I have been part of a panel discussion organised by the restless thinker and great business coach Sinan Si Alhir[27] (@SAlhir) which recording can be found here[28]. I recommend to those unfamiliar with Antifragility to look for Si’s writings and, of course, to read the book.
One of the questions I had in my mind, which I shared with the audience, was, when in the organizational life is antifragility more, if not relevant, present or simply fundamental to understand the organization itself. I thought of three scenarios:
Daily life itself! Hard this one. But the question injected by antifragilty would be (my paraphrasing), for any adaptation, response, ups and downs, resilient behaviour, does the organization come out better and stronger or just coping with and ‘adapted’? You see, whilst adaptation and flexibility need to be part of the machinery, they are not strong enough in themselves to elevate the company to its next stage of possibilities. In more prosaic words, you can adapt and show to be flexible, and learn nothing.
A crisis. A crisis is an (unwelcome) experimental situation where all energies get together, hands on decks and here we go. Again one could ‘just’ solve the crisis (and become proficient at it[29]) or come out much better and healthy.
An artificially created stress in non-crisis. What? Yes, in my organizational consulting work I submit clients to ‘stress tests’ to simulate resilience, learning, adaptation and… antifragilty capacity. (‘The Company on a treadmill: devise routine stress tests[29]’) One of the ways we do this is to use our one day immersion (Accelerator) called Reboot![30] where we put on the table, with no preparation by the client, 12 organizational variables that need to be addressed on spot. It’s not a game (I don’t do business games) and it works marvelously!
The key is to explore what would take to create an organizational DNA that has antifragilty in it, that, by definition, makes the company stronger and healthier out of ‘disorder and chaos’, to use Teleb’ concept (read: challenges, crisis, disruptions, distortions, M&As, markets behaving badly and so on)
There is something important here for the new organization of the 21sr Century and we need to keep exploring.
Is antifragility the new change?
SEE SOME CURATED content from my previous Daily Thoughts in the areas of
From airplane cabin temperature control: warmer to sleep, colder to awake. A culture thermostat lesson for organizations.
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Temperature control of the cabin is used by airlines in transatlantic flights as a way to change behaviour. It may not be articulated like that! Oh, the comfort of passengers, of course. Sure.
But if you want to get more sleepy people (less requests for that extra coffee, and less annoying questions about the dysfunctional flight entertainment system) all you have to do is to increase the cabin temperature. I don’t know how much of that they do but I assume a couple of degrees up would do it. Come the time for serving and eating, you want as many people awake as possible. Temperature down wakes them up , even those in cosy premium seats.
Behavioural change by temperature, that’s it.
The organizational and business analogies would be simplistic but perhaps powerful. If you have a sleepy organization (in metaphoric terms) you may want to inject some cool air to wake up. In fact the famous ‘burning platform’ is perhaps more a freezing platform.
Think in these analogical terms. How can we wake up people, all of us, perhaps from that long siesta? Imagine yourself at the front of the airplane by the cabin temperature control panel. Imagine turning down the numbers. What would be your equivalent?
Think waking up, but don’t mistake waking up with injecting stress and anxiety. Those can still weak up people but, after a threshold, will block them.
Also,the famous burning platform of ‘change management’ assumes injecting sense of urgency (because the lack of it) which usually is translated into ‘the sky is falling’. The possibly original burning platform was an oil platform in flames that left not room for thinking and the person jumped into the sea. Behind the burning platform model is survival instincts.
But if we leave things untouched until survival kicks in, you may be in a sad state of affairs. And late, very late. Don’t wait for a crisis. Our Reboot! accelerator[32] has also that wake up functionality and we use it all the time in organizations that are not necessarily in any type of crisis. Other initiatives may be also useful.