I had a discussion with a client recently, about the resistance to get rid of complicated processes that almost everybody agrees are, yes, too complicated, too long and even unnecessary, at least in their present forms.

The client had brought in expert management consultants to ‘inject simplicity’. Over a few weeks, they had dissected every single overweight and overgrown key process and come up with recommendations to streamline, change and even kill.

Months after that forensic expedition, a fraction of those recommendations had been implemented, and people continued to complain about the ‘growing complexity of their processes’. How come?

You can blame leadership, or a culture of ‘poor follow up’ or any other systemic ill. Not obvious, by the way, in that particular client. But chances are the reasons are more primal and only understood from an anthropological perspective.

Most inefficient processes that stay in place in defiance of logic, and that seem to be resistant to modification, may be so stable because they are very effective. And something else, their efficiency as processes may be low and frustrating, but they may be very effective as rituals.

The consultants brought in were not anthropologists, so they did not see the same world as anthropologists do. They were (very good) experts in ‘plumbing efficiency’ and discovered that the decision making pipes of the company had many of those pipes, many turns, many twists, many loops and many itineraries. They saw the process, not the ritual.

An organizational ritual provides the glue for people. Preparing a budget to present to somebody who needs the presentation to present to somebody higher, who will sanction the budget via that presentation, is a ritual. Dozens and dozens of people are involved, lots of meetings to discuss, don’t forget the rehearsals and ‘run throughs’. The involvement, the discussions, the meetings, the rehearsals, the visual representation into a corporate formatted PowerPoint, are at least as important as the content.

In ritual terms, that needs time and space. In process-efficiency terms, you could cut the whole thing easily by 50%. But if you did, you would eliminate part of the glue: people defending positions, playing their personal power-capital, testing each other, protecting the turf, enjoying deep and rational discussions (‘hard work’), establishing alliances, protecting against the enemy, performing, including some, excluding others, etc. And suppressing these would be a big problem in the absence of another platform in which all those games of power and inclusiveness could take place. Eliminating the campfire without an alternative does not sound a good idea.

Part of a ritual is its intrinsic perseverance. ‘The presentation’ (the nomadic expedition)  comes back via those twisted and convoluted pipes that the simplicity consultants hated, only to say that all is very well, good job, could you please cut the budget by 10%? That triggers ritual part 2 called ‘we need to find 5 million’. And this is a ritual as important as the previous one, now even more challenging. In fact, tribe members thrive in these alpha male and alpha female exercises where everybody talks about the difficulty of the task and the ‘hard reality of these times of budget constrains’. (I have never seen better employee engagement than a bunch of executives finding cuts in budgets).

A simple recollection of the previous 5 years of budget processes (rituals) would have shown in less than 5 minutes that, systematically, every year, the budget ‘presentation’ travels back down the pipes with a request of at least a 10% cut. I could hear the simplicity-efficient consultants shouting, for goodness sake, present three budgets: inflated by 10%, as is, and minus 10%! Wow! That would be very efficient as a process. But not as effective as a ritual.

You can’t kill a ritual easily. But you can kill a process. The question is, which of the two do you see?

If you see high ritualisation, you have to see what that ritual is effective for, and somehow cater for those needs.

In my personal experience, when I bring the topic to a table of frustrated team members, project managers and receiving leaders, and disclose the differences between (and the coexistence of) an utterly inefficient process and an incredibly robust effective ritual, eyes are often opened and we can tackle both in equal terms. Formidable conversations appear over that new campfire. Then, we improve the process big time, and we start a conversation about culture. All in one.

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For an example of the power of Viral Change and the work we do at The Chalfont Project ^[1] read about GSK Vaccines’ culture transformation: championing catalytic change. ^[2] (article written by: Hilton Barbour).

Only when you see Performance Management as rituals, you can understand why we still do them in the same unchanged way. Think Anthropology, stop talking business school dialect.

In recent times people have become more and more disenchanted with performance appraisals, or at least in the form that traditionally is done, such as once a year, perhaps twice. Some companies have announced their death and consulting groups have advocated a semi-scrap of the system.

Why are they still here and robust? Because far from doing what it is obvious that they do, they also do other things. The truth? They are rituals. Rituals are hard to change because they are at the core of keeping the glue of cultures and organizations.

In my view, Performance Appraisals have at least five functions, not one:

(1) The official, declared goal oriented function: give feedback, learn, improve/professional development, manage the troops. Fine.

(2) The (Actionable) Taxonomy functionality: classify people, put them in quadrants and boxes, corporate ‘snakes and ladders’, with the aim to reward, promote, fire. The HR entomology system love this.

(3) An often hidden ‘agency’ function: bringing a sense of belonging, exercising power, asserting authority, being a vehicle for revenge (delayed until the end of the year); these are things Agent-Managers do. Take these away, you get, lame, one-armed managers.

(4) A tribal function: the tribe(s) have here a punctuation of time: same time each year, the before and after, prepare, guidelines, report, It’s that time of year again. Here we go, Christmas is coming.

(5) A structural function: this is uniformity for all, it cannot be changed, one system and glue, good group cohesion, good for maintaining social order. As such ‘we cannot touch it, it’s global, it’s HQ’ (usually expressed as with some sort of divine or supernatural power).

Only (1), the official, is often declared and talked about. But it is the 5 of them that keep the system alive. If it were only number (1), we would be doing a million other things instead.

The only way to seriously think about alternatives is to look at the five ‘functions’ in their totality and see how much each of them is Performance management supporting in your particular culture. The simple elimination or substitution of a ‘type 1’ system for a ‘more refined (1) system’ is naïve.

The clue about Performance Appraisals is in Anthropology, not in Harvard Business School.

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Let’s Join Forces!

 

Let’s join forces. We can deliver a webinar tailored to your organization and delivered to an in-house audience or a remote keynote, masterclass or roundtable on topics including: leadership, leading change, internal influencers, corporate culture and more – all delivered by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now! ^[3]

Or if you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now ^[3] – we want to hear from you!

 

If you work in a corporation with headquarters and affiliates, scattered in many places, or with international sites, you will be used to the ritual of ‘visitors’ coming from those headquarters on a regular basis. Indeed, you, yourself may be, or have been, one of those visitors.  Those visits may happen in the context of a business review, or the annual business plan, or simply as a more or less regularly scheduled visit.

Some clients, speaking from the receiving end, don’t call this ‘visiting’ but ‘descending’ from headquarters. Some pointed to me, half joking, (but only half) that they were considering setting up a proper Visitor Centre given the amount of disruption, hassle and complexity associated with dealing with these ‘visitors’. Some of course love to have visitors. It tends to end with a good evening meal, who knows, good wine, and possibly extras. Others hate it because it forces many people to focus on ‘the visit’ as opposed to ‘the business’. Preparing presentations for Gene and Tony is often an ephemeral and pointless piece of work, but …‘it’s important to keep them happy’.

You need to see these visits and the whole paraphernalia around them as a ritual. And rituals stick because they are rituals. They serve a purpose, usually not the one that is declared and apparent.

Think about what is behind the visit ritual: the whole spectrum, from genuine interest to help, for example, to waste of time and corporate tourism. And all things in between. But, above all, think about four or five non-declared reasons for those visits. See what is behind them. Try to imagine what other purposes they may serve. Do Gene and Tony need comfort (that things are going well)? Do they come to exercise a bit of power?  Do they think you need more help that you think you need? What purpose does the visit serve for them?

You will find more than four or five reasons. You need to list them and consider them on their own merits. Then, use the ritual and participate in it with deeper understanding. My advice is, in any case, don’t fight it. When rituals go, other rituals take over. Perhaps you can, gently or not, use the time to explore the value of those ‘presentations’. Perhaps you could put yourself in the shoes of Gene and Tony and imagine how ‘the visit’ allows them to exercise control. Then, ask yourself, why do they need to ‘control’. Just because they are ‘managers’? What would you do differently if you were Gene or Tony?

(At some point, maybe, a budget cut comes in – another ritual in its own right – and Gene and Tony are not coming anymore. See what is going to substitute this ritual. Something will. Of course the obvious is the conference or video call. Observe and learn how the new ‘visit’ has changed meaning. Or not? The point is to reflect, ask yourself, see what is behind or underneath all the time. Never take these visits at face value. You’ll miss a lot of meaning).

In Latin ‘Post hoc ergo propter hoc’. Free translation: B follows A, so A must be the cause of B. It’s a fallacy. We installed that piece of software; since then, the computer is very slow; that software is causing this performance issue in my PC.  We have just come back from a trip abroad; one of the kids now has a serious fever and is sick; she must have got food poisoning from that last dodgy restaurant.

Since everyday life is full of ‘post-hoc fallacies’, there is little point in giving more examples. You have, and will recognise, plenty of them. Not surprisingly, ‘post hoc fallacies’ also dominate business life.

• All people in the sales force have gone through the new, expensive sales training programme in the last six months. Our sales figures have markedly improved. That sales training did the trick.
• Joe has taken over as the new CEO, after the rather disastrous year of Peter at the helm. The stock price has rocketed. Joe is the right leader, the market always knows.
• We have gone through a one year, intensive Employee Engagement programme, with multiple initiatives at all levels, and you can see what happens: the overall company performance this year has been brilliant. And the overall employee turnover halved!  Another example of how Employee Engagement pays off.

These are three real stories from my consulting work with organizations. And ‘stories’ is the right term. Damn good ones, I have to say. But without exercising some critical thinking, these stories may remain at the stage of fallacy.

• The sales training may have been excellent, but the markedly improved sales figures could also be explained by a pathetic performance of the main competitor, who completely screwed up their greatly anticipated new product launch.
• Joe may, indeed, be what that company needs as a CEO. But the stock price success could also be explained by a cost cutting programme that Peter, the disastrous CEO, had started before he left, and which just now is showing results. No offense, Joe.
• The Employee Engagement programme is a great initiative, but instead of leading to a brilliant company performance, it could be that the brilliant company performance (based upon a series of successful launches) had shaped employee satisfaction and sense of pride. This may be why people scored so high in many parameters in the Satisfaction Questionnaire. A Halo effect.

A fallacy is only a fallacy until one looks critically at it and explores alternative thinking. Left on their own, they may be very good stories of success, but the arguments behind may or may not be true. When, in my Speaking Engagements, I challenge audiences to think of  potential fallacies in our arguments, I am conscious that I am pushing dangerous hot buttons. No Training Manager wants to hear that their programmes may or may not have the attributed impact. The same for Investor Relationships, or the Board of Directors, or HR.

Taken to the extremes – people tell me – we would not do anything, since (according to me, they say) we can’t prove much in Management. But this is a narrow view of why we should do things in management. Sales Training programmes need to take place, perhaps CEOs need a replacement, and there is nothing wrong at all with that Employee Engagement programme. We do all these things because we believe in good management and because we are paid to exercise judgement. Don’t stop them!

Exercising critical thinking and practicing good management are not in contradiction! Not all good stories of success contain a fallacy. But spotting management fallacies can only lead to a better management. The key is not to settle for a good story.

Grandiose plans get sabotaged by small things. Many years ago, I was involved in what was going to be a deep and expensive overhaul of the entire IT system of a Research and Development division of a top global pharmaceutical company. The new system would entail seamless cross-collaboration, trans-continental, real time work and simultaneous, multi-country access to a library of information bigger than the entire Library of Alexandria, if there was one today. The usual users groups and focus groups were in place to extract ‘the customer needs’.  And so we did. Number one customer need was: ‘Could you fix our laptops? They are so slow!’

In a Viral Change™ ^[4]programme that I am led in the US, we did an extensive cultural assessment with our usual focus groups, extracting behaviours and other cultural elements. The aim was culture. Ambitions were high. Number one insight that my team received was: ‘The new owners (my client) have taken away the free coffee!’. And this was driving low credibility for anything else we were trying to do. They seemed to be saying: ‘You want to talk about trust? I want to talk to you about my free coffee!’

Ignoring/neglecting the ‘small things’ is very dangerous. Many ‘small things’ have been traditionally left aside at the expense of the ‘big things’ because the thinking is: “surely this is secondary”. But it isn’t. Call it tyranny if you will but often, the ‘small things’ are in control.

Socrates said. Or Plato said Socrates said. Socrates never wrote a word. He did not trust them. They were the left overs of thinking.

Socrates would not survive any of our corporate brainstorms, or post-it management on walls, or prioritization exercises, or the net-net- or the bottom line, or the executive summary, or the take home.

We run largely anti Socratic organizations where the thought of letting our destinations be decided by the winds of our discussions would be simply terrifying. We are so eager to close the argument and allocate an action that short-cutting reflection is almost a badge of honour.

Fortunately those winds of discussion take place in corridors, canteens, and coffee machine corners,. They act as a cognitive pressure cooker valves, open to decompress some trains of thought that could not see the light otherwise. The informal organization provides the oxygen. The formal organization the structure and one or two straight jackets.

In conferences, the good discussion takes place at the breaks. Running a conference ( and perhaps running the entire company) as a long-long coffee break makes a lot of sense.

Yet, the trick for productive conversations, with oxygen, and the ‘letting of our destination being decided by the winds of our discussion’, maybe simple. Declare the spaces: for the next 45 minutes we will meander unapologetically with no clear harbour in mind; let’s us sail and see, maybe smell, certainly hear each other. And, in the next 45 minutes we will discuss X in order to make a decision on how to fix Y, which will be decided before we all go home.

Borders. High fences make good neighbours. Fenced spaces.

Don’t forget Socrates.

We are pulled to conform to the group, to participate, to contribute, to say something. Nodding is not enough. Taking notes is not enough. You need to say something. And because this is universal, it sometimes feels as if saying is more important than what you say.  Meaning evaporates soon on behalf of content.

You may have been in meetings and conferences where everybody seem compelled to intervene. May worse moment is the ‘do you have any questions moment.’ I wish they didn’t. The short showering of triviality finds you naked with no raincoat.

Many team meetings are composed by walking e-bays selling second-hand thoughts. Nothing is terribly profound or cooked. However, if a figure of status or authority is in the room, the nodding increases and the probability of more second-hand thoughts increases as well. ‘You’ve made a fascinating point Jane.’ Actually, not. BTW, ‘fascinating’ is only reserved for you Jane; otherwise ‘very interesting’ would have done it.

Mind you, this is interesting. When the Brits say ‘this is very interesting’ , chances are it is the least interesting of the things. Particularly when the sentence is left hanging as if anticipating a part 2 that never comes. Never take credit for something that a Brit has qualified as ‘very interesting.’

The trouble with group meetings, team meetings and any gathering of humans around mints and biscuits, is that the natives take the campfire very seriously. Uncooked ideas are great if you allocate time for them. Uncooked ideas at the time of serving the meal is only palatable to the few lovers of raw fish.

The best Time Management course is, of course. in Ecclesiastes 31:8:  To everything, there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to break down, and a time to build up.  A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance.

And it carries on.

Even second-hand uncooked thoughts have a time. But it is not all the time.

I am switching off for a few days over my Semana Santa, giving a chance for my thoughts to avoid falling into e-bay goods. See you after Easter. Happy Easter.

The full quote: ‘Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win’. The art of War, by  Sun Tzu. Of course.

We spend a fair amount of time in organizations fighting wrong wars, or engaged in futile battles to obtain minor benefits, often to comfort our unsettled ego.

‘Winning first’ has a direct translation in organization and management life.

For example in our cult of meetings and Management Committee Meetings, we have created a culture of presentationism in which what matters is the contest, the performance, the ‘one off shot at it’. The model is The Apprentice, or Dragons’ Den, or any of the myriad of ‘contests’ that have proliferated on TV.

‘Winning first’ would mean this:  to avoid convincing 20 execs in one go, in a group situation, with its own group dynamics, exposing the ‘presenting person’ to those dynamics that often have nothing to do with the topic. In a group situation, people are compelled to say something, compelled to issue a warning, compelled to be cleverly sceptic, compelled to show off.

Avoid.

Whether you are an internal employee or external consultant, resist the temptation, the flattery, to present to the entire top group, and go to war only when you have won. Spend as much time as you can individually with each member of the group, or, if not possible, most of them, or the most influential ones. That investment will pay off.

Also, read The Art of War. Prioritize it against ‘The 10 strategies of successful executives and their 20 habits’.

PS: ‘There is nothing new under the sun’, sorry, another coaching manual, this time a bit more modern, circa 400 or so BC’. Ecclesiastes 1:4-11

Yesterday, my wife and I said goodbye to a good friend from France who works as a high level executive in the European Medicines Agency, until now based in London, and who is moving to Amsterdam like anybody else in the Agency. Having been  thrown out by Brexit, The Netherlands opened their arms.

This European agency of high prestige, founded in 1995, that looks after the efficacy and safety of the medicines we use every day, and that has a high concentration of scientists and regulators, is leaving the UK for good after the Brexit decision. Another great loss for the country. An issue which does not deserve any attention by UK politicians, let alone hard Brexiteers. In fact, according to our friend, only the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan,  has bothered to visit them to see if he could do anything.

The waste, and the absurdity, and self-harm, are not the topic of this Daily Thought. Nor is my anger towards those who have systematically lied to the public about the ‘submission of the UK’ and the ‘imminent flow of immigrants’. Nor the fact that a sector of the UK politics had invented ‘The Wall’ well before Mr Trump did. They had The Wall in their neurons.

My friend explained what I had seen in The Guardian ^[5]: the ceremony of removing the flags of the EU countries from their flagpoles, and their folding, to take them to their new home in Amsterdam. Apparently, the ceremony was moving and solemn. One civil servant from each country took care of their own flags. I did not know that each country had its own rules to fold a flag! One side, other side, that colours cannot be seen, etc.

I was moved when I saw the picture in The Guardian. It made me angry.

I was taken aback by one of my friends comments, in passing: ‘and of course we will take the British Flag with us to Amsterdam’. I thought it was so beautiful. Those highly skilled professionals taking with them a little bit of their history, and their colleagues, their flag, their symbol, as is that emotional and rational and professional connection was of a higher moral ground than all the political, social, historical, and generational vandalism produced by ‘Brexit-means-Brexit’.

How wonderful to see our plain and simple humanity in action. ‘We will take your flag with us.’ Then you will be coming with us in spirit. Part of the same family. Just as if moving house.

(But it isn’t. It’s the sad realities of tribal politics with no eyes on the common good.)

May the Union Jack have a quiet place in a building in Amsterdam, surrounded by friends who respect Britain, their people, their professionals. A tiny part in our collective heart.

Even if some of us feel betrayed, deceived, and deeply unsettled by the brutal self-cantered Brexit, we know that, above all, our human relationship will always sit above that toxicity.

May we protect ourselves against that toxicity. May we all carry other people’s  flags to a place of safety, respect, reverence and shelter.

A headline in a newspaper on the 9^th of August 2018 red ‘Deutsche Bank Cuts Again. Not Even Fruit Bowls Are Safe’.

Cost cutting reaches fruits bowls and mints faster than high cost projects. I can tell you.  The ritualistic disappearance of the biscuits in the meeting room signals the Bad Times. OMG, this is bad, no peanuts! It’s an acountant thing, I am told. Like a bad fixation.

Years ago, in a large Viral Change™  project that we undertook in the transportation industry in the US, I encountered what I have called elsewhere ‘the tyranny of the small things’. The bus franchise changed ownership and the first thing they did was to  stop free coffee and milk for the drivers.

These drivers in the school transportation system are paid by the hour and at a minimum. In the old Good Days it used to be a second job for mums (or dads) or, in some areas, for example, wives of military stationed temporarily nearby. There were also many grandmothers who somehow continued to be close to the education system.

In Bad Years, well, since the Good Days, it became the (only) job for many. Withdrawing the free coffee machines in the drivers waiting room (and the peanuts) was mean and simply stupid. Moral went down. Management was discredited even before they initiated a series of beneficial measures for all.  Nothing they did could be right. The Unions had a field day. This is the first time I found a correlation between employee engagement and the availability of free peanuts.

You don’t have to have a PhD in Behavioural Economics to call the mint-peanuts-coffee disappearance-policy a stupid one. You don’t need a full Cost Benefit Analysis to show the nonsense accounting and the disproportionate negativity that it created.

In my view, if you are for a serious cost cutting, you should increase the presence of biscuits and mints. I am not joking.

‘If you are going to be miserable, you might as well enjoy it’

The word Pontifex (Pontiff in English) is the term associated with the Pope (twitter account…err.. @pontifex, what else?).

I love this term for what it means. Historically this has been equal to High Priest in the Roman culture, a position occupied by patricians, never a plebeian, until 254 BCE according to my search. But the etymology, the origins of the word, is fascinating . It’s a combination of ‘pons’ (bridge) and ‘fex’ (maker or producer). So, literally, what it means is ‘one who builds bridges’

In my shopping list for new leaders, circa 2018, I want this in: bridge builder, broker between A and B, connecting ideas and people. OK, let’s stretch it: making impossible associations, declaring and seeking connection, not isolation, mastering broker-ship, unifier.

Most good pontifex-leaders I know seem to work in the background. They are not the  usual suspects with the PowerPoint pack. In some cases  that I know well, they are ‘the second’, not the first. The ones who facilitate the human encounters behind the Visible First

Social Network Analysis (SNA),  as we practice it, finds these individuals sometimes hidden more or less somewhere in the organizational chart jungle. Semi invisible trees that the forest hide.

Whatever their position in the social network (which any organization is), what I have called in Homo Imitans our social GPS), bridge builders (pontifex) are a gem. A few of them solve an enormous amount of organizational dysfunctions.

Being at the very top, or close by, in the organization will make that broker-ship more visible and it’s bound to be imitated as role model of good leadership.

Yes, there are, of course,  the bridge-builders and the bridge-burners, I know. But building is for me the quintessence of leadership. When many moons ago we in The Chalfont Project chose to call ourselves ‘Organization Architects’, I had more than one eyebrow raised around me, friends and colleagues. It was for a reason. Very simply, my obsession with ‘building’, as opposed to solving, fixing, changing, transforming or any other term in the Organizational Development Thesaurus.

I am not a natural networker, as in cocktail networking. And this characteristic in my list is not about this. I am not talking about the multiple and skillful networker,  navigator in the jungle of weak and strong ties of ten new networ-kracies. These are by definition the new employees, the sailors in the new idea of ‘work’. Leadership goes beyond that. Perhaps from the visible tribal coctail campfires, to the less visibly connecting the unconnected key people.

Perhaps I could say that Bridge Building is ‘making it happen’ by closing the encounter of otherwise distant people. And distant may be next door office, or somebody in New Zealand, or tow people/clusters/units/organizations that did not know they could connect, or did not feel the need, or combinations.

Bring the bridge engineers in anyway.

No offense to questionnaires. These are legitimate tools to know what is going on! People may argue that in a large organization there is no other way to consolidate data (engagement, attitudes, preferences) than issuing these ‘things’.

I am not against questionnaires. I am against managers who rely on them as a sole source of insight at the expense of not looking at anybody in the eyes. Questionnaires taking over face-to-face conversations is decaffeinated management.

Guru of all gurus Tom Peters has been hammering around for (feels like) a hundred years the Managing by Wandering Around. Which of course has its acronym MBWA. He was right then. He is right now. There is no substitute for the floor, the desk, the cafeteria, the workstation, the watercooler. In the era of Big Data, leaders need Small data. In the era of Social Media, leaders need Social Skills.

Managers who rely on the annual Employee Engagement Survey to know what is going on (and of course dully react with the tsunami of post-results workshops) are lazy managers. Bad managers. Punto.

Depending on the goal, a questionnaire may be inevitable. But the discipline of questioning its value and looking for alternatives, is in short supply.

Show me that you have good insights on those close to you and I will accept that you need to have a bigger picture of the whole, and then the famous questionnaire may be needed. The absence  of your personal demonstration of MBWA, will  make me suspect that the system (that includes you) is lazy.

The best leaders I have ever met, wander around, see people, eat with them, visit workplaces when nobody really does (e.g night shifts).

They have a hidden anthropological gene and go around seeing, hearing, feeling and smelling. They are my heroes.

I must say, a minority. The rest become proficient at talking to a screen.

 

Donald Winnicott (1896- 1971) was a brilliant British psychoanalyst. And you won’t find many instances of my praising psychoanalysis, a wonderful method of magical thinking that developed into multiple tribes and dialects. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t use magical thinking as a pejorative term. There are tons of them in Literature, thanks God, so we don’t have to stick to PowerPoints. Some Strategic Plans, also fall into the same category.

Amongst many ideas and concepts that Winnicott created, I always loved the one of transitional objects. These are critical objects in which we could make safe transactions. Translation. Kids playing with toys can make the toys talk to each other, even bring dragons or dinosaurs to the play, kill people or kiss them, all in safe place. There are not them doing these things, but the dinosaurs and the princes. These artefacts produce a safe psychological space.

Like the comfort blankets and teddy bears. According to a survey by Travelodge, (2011)  about 35 percent of British adults still sleep with a teddy bear. And what about that ‘security blanket’ in the Peanuts characters?

That’s is why simulation is such a powerful management tool. You are not anymore fighting your fellow VP or stepping into that Director’s shoes. You are just playing with scenarios and the software usually tells you who is killed in the game. Not you, the simulation tool.

Simulation and in some instances brainstorming (although we have made a mess of that) in which we are throwing ideas, including bad ones, not to somebody else spaces, but to a blank flipchart, are key transitional objects in  organization life. We usually don’t bring blankets and dinosaurs, but the flipchart will do just fine. Once used, the flipchart then gets semi-forgotten, The flipchart is the greatest corporate graveyard of ideas. But, hey, it was a great canvas for 20 pairs of eyes to look at, instead of looking at each other. So safe.

Winnicott would have agreed. I hope

Ever since glorious Michael O’Leary CEO of Ryanair was told to control himself and get close to the customer (I know that his heart rate went to dangerous peak when he heard that) and accept that the company was going to have a brand new sophisticated CRM system, and he said what he said, I have been thinking about this.

O’Leary actually said, we are going to get really, really, seriously close to customers; we are going to have a new CRM system and then we will CRM them a hell of a lot. And I thought it was the most wonderful management line I have ever heard on the topic. I found myself singing Queen’s ‘we will we will rock you’ with new lyrics, ‘we will we will CRM you’.

Well, we have our own organizational weapons to shoot to employees ‘a hell of a lot’. I know how unpopular I make myself with my friends in HR/OD and L&D global tribes when I say that the 360 degree feedback system in management and leadership development is often used as a weapon. Something is gone wrong, or ‘funny’, or whatever, and suddenly we are asking 10 people to feed back ‘constructively’ to Peter on this wonderful system called ‘a 360’. OK, you’ll say, but we don’t ‘do this to Peter’ but to the entire management team (which includes Peter) so it’s nothing personal.

The 360 degree feedback system is an incredibly convenient, highly efficient, professionally crafted, psychologically flawed way of  missing the point. Also a cathartic ritual. The point being, for every 360 input, there is a face to face, frank conversation that did not take place. Of course it is convenient. So it’s Expedia or AirB&B. There are lots of very convenient things in managerial life. That does not make them right.

My ranting in this topic, is only second to the one of Employee Engagement Surveys. In many years as organizational consultant I have yet to see one single, serious 360 feedback process that made a real change in the individual. None. Zero. No even when I instructed them being in leadership positions in global compnaies. Note I am not saying it did not make life easier for the manager.

The 360 system is in reality a Capability Supermarket Inventory Management by Crowdsourcing. Dear Peter, you are a bit low in communication; OK in attitude; vision? not really, not very clear; but good team player although below average in trust. Re-stock your shelves please. And that’s it. OK, we will help you with  a Certified Replenishment Coach. And frankly, you are not doing terrible well on total scores (against an artificially created norm that has decided what is good, what is balanced, and what is desirable) , so that promotion form grade 4 to grade 5, forget it. Thanks.

You have – I know you have –  plenty of examples that contradict my gloomy view of those ‘technologies’. I appreciate that. I have also plenty of those examples where ‘the technology’ has been misused, commoditised, trivialised, robotisized, and, also, yes, used as weapon, a justification, a pseudo-scientific intervention, a diversion from a human to human conversation, a legitimization ‘by the data’ of a course of action that needed go be taken, an alibi for managerial incompetence.

I am warning about the excesses. About 360-ing you, or CRM-ing you.

So many subjective, gratuitous and pointless things can be done on behalf of ‘objectivity’. Organizational life is not immune. I want to reclaim the conversation that does not need a questionnaire.

Here you are. 25 identities for Project Leaders/Product Developers/Team leaders etc.

Some you’ll like, some you won’t. Some you’ll think have nothing to do with you, but others you’ll think, this is you. And vice versa.

Be careful with choosing/playing your identities. This is what people see. Choose, before they pick you.

1. Leader! As in Project Leader! (?)
2. Project Manager (but called leader?)
3. Information traffic warden, most days
4. Super secretary (denied)
5. Recording officer
6. Journalist writing down what happens (and reinventing a bit)
7. Firefighter
8. Rapid Reaction commando
9. Psychotherapist, calming everybody down
10. Killer question detective
11. Dragon’s Den pitcher
12. Comfort provider to nervous senior leadership (Valium for the Board)
13. Trust generator
14. Navigator of the system’s deficiency
15. Broker
16. Blame sponge (blame generator?)
17. Communicator, messenger (good news, bad news)
18. ‘Making it work first’ guy, fixing the system later
19. Machiavelli in the payroll
20. Difficult questions generator
21. Critical Thinker
22. God
23. Father, mother, grandpa, grandma
24. Headmaster
25. The person with the powerpoints

 

I had a discussion with a client recently, about the resistance to get rid of complicated processes that almost everybody agrees are, yes, too complicated, too long and even unnecessary, at least in their present forms.

The client had brought in expert management consultants to ‘inject simplicity’. Over a few weeks, they had dissected every single overweight and overgrown key process and come up with recommendations to streamline, change and even kill.

Months after that forensic expedition, a fraction of those recommendations had been implemented, and people continued to complain about the ‘growing complexity of their processes’. How come?

You can blame leadership, or a culture of ‘poor follow up’ or any other systemic ill. Not obvious, by the way, in that particular client. But chances are the reasons are more primal and only understood from an anthropological perspective.

Most inefficient processes that stay in place in defiance of logic, and that seem to be resistant to modification, may be so stable because they are very effective. And something else, their efficiency as processes may be low and frustrating, but they may be very effective as rituals.

The consultants brought in were not anthropologists, so they did not see the same world as anthropologists do. They were (very good) experts in ‘plumbing efficiency’ and discovered that the decision making pipes of the company had many of those pipes, many turns, many twists, many loops and many itineraries. They saw the process, not the ritual.

An organizational ritual provides the glue for people. Preparing a budget to present to somebody who needs the presentation to present to somebody higher, who will sanction the budget via that presentation, is a ritual. Dozens and dozens of people are involved, lots of meetings to discuss, don’t forget the rehearsals and ‘run throughs’. The involvement, the discussions, the meetings, the rehearsals, the visual representation into a corporate formatted PowerPoint, are at least as important as the content.

In ritual terms, that needs time and space. In process-efficiency terms, you could cut the whole thing easily by 50%. But if you did, you would eliminate part of the glue: people defending positions, playing their personal power-capital, testing each other, protecting the turf, enjoying deep and rational discussions (‘hard work’), establishing alliances, protecting against the enemy, performing, including some, excluding others, etc. And suppressing these would be a big problem in the absence of another platform in which all those games of power and inclusiveness could take place. Eliminating the campfire without an alternative does not sound a good idea.

Part of a ritual is its intrinsic perseverance. ‘The presentation’ (the nomadic expedition)  comes back via those twisted and convoluted pipes that the simplicity consultants hated, only to say that all is very well, good job, could you please cut the budget by 10%? That triggers ritual part 2 called ‘we need to find 5 million’. And this is a ritual as important as the previous one, now even more challenging. In fact, tribe members thrive in these alpha male and alpha female exercises where everybody  talks about the difficulty of the task and the ‘hard reality of these times of budget constrains’. (I have never seen better employee engagement than a bunch of executives finding cuts in budgets).

A simple recollection of the previous 5 years of budget processes (rituals) would have shown in less than 5 minutes that, systematically, every year, the budget ‘presentation’ travels back down the pipes with a request of at least a 10% cut. I could hear the simplicity-efficient consultants shouting, for goodness sake, present three budgets: inflated by 10%, as is, and minus 10%! Wow! That would be very efficient as a process. But not as effective as a ritual.

In fact, that would be the equivalent of saying to the chiefs, for goodness sake, stop dancing around the fire praying for rain; have you not seen the weather forecast? It will rain on Thursday.

You can’t kill a ritual easily. But you can kill a process. The question is, which of the two do you see?

If you see high ritualization, you have to see what that ritual is effective for, and somehow cater for those needs.

In my personal experience, when I bring the topic to a table of frustrated team members, project managers and receiving leaders, and disclose the differences between (and the coexistence of) an utterly inefficient process and an incredibly robust effective ritual, eyes are often opened and we can tackle both in equal terms. Formidable conversations appear over that new campfire. Then, we improve the process big time, and we start a conversation about culture. All in one.

I am back with a favourite theme: hierarchies and power.

The first law of organizational hierarchical power is my version of the law of conservation of energy (‘the total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another, but cannot be created or destroyed’)

So here it is: organizational hierarchical power can be transformed from one form to another, but cannot be created or destroyed.

Translation:

If top down hierarchical power diminishes, somewhere down in the organization, power generation will emerge and increase. Maybe the Project Leaders, the semi-autonomous teams, the field or customer facing people. Power is never gone, just hiding first and re-emerging later.

Also, top hierarchy never disappears, it takes a nap, or even hibernates, but remains somewhere perhaps in benign forms.

Corollary: If this is so, non-hierarchical organizations are an oxymoron. Hierarchy has been transformed but not disappeared. It’s the law.

In ancient times, kings may have been killed, only to see the emergence of the barons. My very first management article in a publication now defunct, was entitled ‘Kings or Cousins? ^[6]’ The question is how smart we are to choose the right trade off.

Stretching it now: don’t try to create a non-hierarchical culture. It does not exist. The question is what kind of hierarchy. And if you shoot for zero, ok, kill the king, but tell me where the cousins are. There may be more powerful than the king, even if now called team leader, or completely-self-contained-and-self-managed-team-member-coordinator.

Choices.

Power can be transformed, it never disappears.

It’s the law.

The nostalgic executive, refers constantly to the past. What they did in their previous company, how they managed to build X and how the company eventually called McKinsey (one of the Four Horsemen) and, yes, how they still keep a template that would be just what you need now. Like nostalgic exiled people who keep souvenirs and paraphernalia, the exiled executive keeps templates and workbooks.

The nostalgic executive may also have a tendency to reconstruct (reinvent) the reality of the past in a way that provides safer memories. In that new reality, their mind may filter here and there so that the new version, Previous-Company v.02 takes over. This reconstructing history is as old as mankind so it should not be a surprise.

The nostalgic executive suffers from maladie du pays, which is French for homesickness and sounds much better

The nomadic executive is also in exile but more content with their new status. Some have decided to be truly nomadic and will set temporary corporate tents here and there with no intention of staying too long. Actually, some subtype of nomadic executives seem to be in state of Permanent Gap Year.

The nomadic type may or may not travel light, and, who knows, they may have one or two McKinsey templates as well. But their focus is the travel ahead. Some nomadics are just temporary job holders (actually they don’t hold a job, the job holds them) and others are more of a builder type who want to leave a visible legacy beyond the fraternal pictures of the Gap Year.

Other nomadic ones may see the new post-exile status as a form of rehabilitation for all sins and suffering of the past.

These two little vignettes of corporate anthropology may be very helpful to get to know your corporate fellow travellers and understand what they may be up to. Who knows, you may be exiled yourself, a corporate immigrant.

Let’s face it, since we were born, we are all in exile.

 

 

If any business executive, head of communications function, HR messenger or communications agency for that matter, has any doubt about the ephemeral nature of top down communications, I suggest he/she reflects on the safety briefing in airplanes.

Presumably many of them will be frequent flyers. I am for sure one of them with an average of a flight a week. That makes 52 safety briefings per year, all pretty similar in any airline. All of them explain to you what to do in an emergency, what positions to take, how to inflate the life jacket and what to do and not to do at the exit doors. I have probably received hundreds of those over the years and, in most cases, politely abandoned my book or newspaper or device to look at the acrobatics of the flight attendants.

By now I should be proficient, if not super graduated in airline passenger safety. My problem is that given an emergency I am pretty sure I will not know what to do and will look at fellow travellers to copy. Why? My channels are saturated and my mind has decided a long time ago to filter anything that has to do with yellow life jackets, brace-brace positions and ‘breath normally. I have been over-communicated for years, which leaves me probably hopeless.

If you want to do a little zero cost experiment, ask yourself, or better a member of your team, to look at you in the eyes and describe his watch. That is, his watch. Numbers? Roman numerals? 12 hour number?  Just 4? Date little window? Background colour?All that stuff. I bet many people are unable to describe it fully, 100%. Why? We look at the watch all the time and the mind has given up  storing a boring, repetitive set of data.

Top down communication systems of any sort tend to assume, somehow magically, that they are always at zero base, that the new thing is really new, that it deserves attention and it will get it, and that a bit of reinforcement is necessary. Communicate, communicate, communicate, we have been told, never cease to communicate. Well, if that’s the case, good luck with effectiveness. You may have a Yellow Life jacket Problem.

The trick of effective communications is to communicate less, to keep healthy non-saturated channels and to master the trick of attention in the first instance. If the reaction is similar to my mind’s ‘oh no, another yellow life jacket’, then you have a problem.

Less communication may be the real trick for effective communication.

My very good client BTG plc has created a habit of getting leadership teams together into racing boats for a day, in serious waters, to race, of course. The coach team are of Olympian level, indeed some of them now part of the British Olympic Team. They get the instructions first thing in the morning, get to do some training in the water and then racing for the rest of the day. Some people may be sportive, some may have never been in a boat before. After the long day, the dinner, the social aspect and a goof night sleep, the next day the team is confronted with their own business situation to apply any learning form the day before. It works brilliantly.

There is an extraordinary immediate (organisational and leadership) learning from the model, which I’d like to unpack. The whole experience, can be unbounded into 4 components. I will explain, and, at the same time, I will make the comparison with what is more or less standard in our business life.

1. Minimal instructions. The early morning class on racing is beautifully done, but it is one hour, max. There you have ‘all you need to know’ from safety to rules of racing; from winds to maneuvering; from strategy to tactics. BTG calls this the ‘get it’ part. Compare that with our obsession with having a perfect briefing with perfect data with all the dots in a row and boxes ticked, before we start doing anything.
2. Minimum sense making. Nobody receives the total wisdom on racing in an hour, There is no room for absolutely, everything to make sense. It just makes enough sense to assume that that other things will emerge. Enough sense to act. Compare with our usual need to obtain maximum comfort. Is everybody on board? Everybody aligned? Does management support this and that? Are we sure that this is what he CEO wants? Have we double checked with the US? We spend our organization life creating ‘packaged comfort’ before we act.
3. The magic trust comes in. If the team has a decent level of trust, between their members, the magic sparks. You trust that others will have understood, that others will know what to do, that others will help and jump if needed. No trust, this is where all breaks down, or at least starts having some cracks. In our organizational life trust is also the fuel. Nobody quite knows how to create it but you’ll see it when you’ll see it, or you wont. In BTG racing sessions, teams with intrinsic low or poor trust in real life, perform significanlty worse in the waters. Interestingly, the coaches who may not know about the teams themselves in rewal life, can spot and predict a bad business execution but seeing what happens in those boats. And they are always right.
4. Then you go, go, go. And recalibrate, and execute. BTG calls these in several ways: to be ‘on it’, to ‘look out’ and to have the ‘appropriate bandwidth’. It is an imperfect world. As a guest, I have attended sessions where in the morning and during the training bits we have dealt with all possible winds and associated manoeuvring, to get into the race itself and find zero wind, nothing moves whatsoever. Prepared for high winds, what do you do with lack of it. Does it sounds business as well?

I am incredible skeptical of ‘sports analogies’ for business. This one works, because it is not an analogy, it is real experience of an full imperfect world in a day with immediate, transferable. unavoidable learning.

Dealing with the imperfect, the unpredictable, the ambiguous is part of todays business life. Part of my serious leadership development toolkits. And for the imperfect, the unpredictable, and the ambiguous, people still seek perfect training, perfect guarantees and perfect comfort. Old school that is.