Ryan Holiday ^[1] (media critic, stoicism vendor, marketing strategist) is ‘the bestselling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. Ryan is an editor-at-large of the Business & Technology section at the New York Observer and he lives in Austin, Texas’.

In a recent article he is asked people to stop watching news/tv/screens.

Here is a couple of fabulous paragraphs that I’d like to share with you

Facebook is not unlike a casino. You ever notice that there are no clocks in a casino? They don’t want you to know what time it is or how long you’ve been there. Facebook is sort of the same thing. It’s designed to keep you on Facebook as long as possible, clicking as many things as possible. Uploading, sharing, intertwining your life into the social network. So, on the one hand that is a large part of why we are so obsessed with the news despite our understanding of how misleading it often is.

The same goes for every other publisher or platform. Television doesn’t want you to get up and take action, they want you to sit through the commercial break. A news outlet doesn’t want you to be so outraged by an article that you do something, that you decide to change the world, they want you to be so outraged that you sign a Change.org petition and then consider it a job well done.

I have been a long-standing critic of ‘time management techniques’ perhaps because of my own inability to have a good one. Today, I am convinced that protecting time and attention, controlling where to focus energy and brain power, is the serious, ultimate competence. I think there should be Intense Rehabilitation Bootcamps about it. Book me in.

Reflective leadership has gone into progressive short supply. In an era where prescriptive answers seem to dominate reflective ones, it has become more difficult to stop and think, to question, to wonder. After all, we have ready-made 7 Habits for This and 8 Attributes for That, which seem to provide universal answers. Introspection has never been favoured by traditional management, or at least, not by ‘mass management’. Granted, some elites that have been provided access to some forms of executive development may have had the opportunity. Even in that territory, however,  self-reflection is rarely, if ever, at the top of the agenda.

An old psychological concept from the 60s may help to understand why leaders differ in their ability to self-reflect on their leadership and the impact of their actions. It’s call ‘external vs. internal locus of control’. People with a predominant ‘external locus of control’ tend to attribute events to external forces. In the opposite extreme, people with a predominant ‘internal locus of control’ will see themselves more in charge or protagonists of the events in their lives. It follows that the External People will end up blaming other people more, whilst Internal People will look more at themselves first.

This crude distinction is particularly important in areas such as Safety. In our Viral Change^TM programmes we use this parameter a lot. Safety professionals or, simply employees, with high external locus of control will tend to see safety problems as something produced mainly by others, and will focus more on somebody else’s behaviours, versus considering that it is of their own making.

Leadership can be seen through similar lenses. Some leaders seem to never contemplate the possibility that they are the problem, it’s always somebody else’s fault. If there is any reflection, it’s certainly outwards. You need a good dose of ‘internal locus of control’ to realise that maybe the problem is you.

In my consulting practice I find this leadership problem one of the hardest to solve. Internal vs external locus of control is very entrenched in personality. It’s hard, but not impossible through good coaching, for example, to turn a High External individual around. My behavioural hat has however a clear, if not answer, guidance for this: create a habit of asking the question ‘what if this (problem, what is happening, what I see) has to do with me? What if the issue is me?’ The habit of repeated questioning is a good open door for possible better reflection, and, who knows, the discovery of a new world inside of you!

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Register now! – for our free webinar series, Feed Forward – The organization now, under new management ^[2], next webinar in the series  –

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

2nd July, 1800 BST/1900 CET, with Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects.

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations.

Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for these live, free webinars as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

Join us and bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point ^[3].

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Out Now! – The Flipping Point ^[3] – Deprogramming Management by Leandro Herrero – his new booking challenging the trend for adopting absurd management ideas. Management needs deprogramming. This book of 200, tweet-sized, vignettes, looks at the other side of things – flipping the coin. It asks us to use more rigour and critical thinking in how we use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago.  Read the latest review ^[4].

You are stuck when confronted with dilemmas. Maybe contradictory business decisions, or maybe the need to choose between two evils. Stuck here, means that the forces are equal but in opposite directions. They paralyse you. You feel the tension. Not pleasant.

But you can also be stuck when your circumstances are blocking you and you don’t see an obvious way out. You don’t have (or worse, don’t feel you have) control over those circumstances. Numerous pieces of research point to the mental and physical health costs of feeling hopeless, trapped, unable to get out. The whole ‘change management’ confusion of ‘people are resistant to change’ lies here. The sentence needs to be finished: ‘when they can’t do anything about it’.

Maybe you are stuck because, as leader, you have inherited a situation, perhaps even a structure, or a team, that you can’t change, and you feel the uphill  struggle.

Maybe you are exhausted and you are stuck, or you are stuck and you realise that it is because you are exhausted. Not the same.

There is also a form of being stuck that is quite common. You were counting on somebody else to help, or a support system that you used to have, perhaps in a previous company. They are not there for you. You’ve never done it on your own. Stuck.

Being stuck is awful. It’s worse than being wrong, which can be changed to right, or less wrong, when you are confronted with a reality or a colleague, or the team. Or you see the light. Wrong is wrong in some direction. Stuck is stuck in no direction.

But you may be lucky and become unstuck.

Crisis is very good for this. Miracles as well. Suddenly the circumstances change and you move. People around you pull you out. Invisible forces push you. Combinations. That’s good. Welcome the crisis. Rahm Emanuel, when he was Chief of Staff for Obama said: ‘Never let a serious crisis go to waste’.

The hack: move! Yes, you can always move. The problem is your fear of moving in the wrong direction. You know what? It does not matter. It’s the wrong fear. Wrong is better than stuck. If you move in the right direction, bingo! If you move in the wrong one, you have a much better chance of redirecting yourself than if you don’t move. No movement, zero chances, stuck.

Translations of move: don’t go to the office, watch that entire Netflix series, start a new project, change the frame, change the circumstances, put yourself, your being, somewhere else, maybe alien, maybe banal. Hack 2: Don’t fight it. Or not yet. Allow the pulling forces (as above) to work.

Have a love pact. OK, you may not want to call it this in the office. Have a few colleagues, top level, medium level, any level, who have agreed to the following: if you see me stuck, shout. If I don’t move, shout louder. Tell me to move. And when I am saying that I worry about going in the wrong direction, tell me that any direction is better than no direction.

In the ideal world, have your Mutual Unstuck-ing Group ready, like a Rapid Reaction Force. It’s worth all the effort. And, if it is mutual, it creates lasting friendships.

The Business English language (yes, there is one) uses the word ‘accountability’ often associated to the word ‘taking’, as in ‘taking accountability’. This is different from accountability itself, or giving accountability, or seeking it. Taking means that, go and take. Although it could be assumed that it is taken because it is being given, the nuances of the language mean something more proactive: take it! Go and take it. “I am taking accountability’ has a built in spirit of proactivity.

Taking? Where from? There are the ones listed in your job description, for starters. However, your job description may be a bit geriatric, a bit in need of plastic surgery, a bit forgetful. And perhaps you also forgot about it, since it seems to have changed after the second day in the company.

Other than ‘your list’, the company is full of grey areas that don’t really quite belong to anybody, projects or ideas for projects that nobody seems to own fully, gaps and holes in need of care.

A sign of collective leadership is when managers and leaders ‘jump in’ and ‘take accountability’. No permission sought. In fact a good sign of collective leadership is when people don’t need many permissions.

Taking accountability, plus no permission asked, is high-octane fuel for the organization. If you get this right, you are in great place.

Unfortunately you can’t expect this to happen. Leaders going around saying, come on buddy, take accountability, does not work either.

Do you know how it works? Somebody (a true hero) starts doing it, other people copy, more people do that, suddenly it is the norm and ‘accepted’.

Top leaders that nurture this kind of environment, and rewards the takers, the adopters, the gap fillers, get it 100% right. ‘Accountability Takers’ are a gem. Don’t lose them.

Otherwise, if the company looks like an orphanage of good ideas, leadership has gone fishing. Don’t blame the orphans.

Back in June 2016, people could walk over floating piers on Lake Iseo (Italy), all covered with yellow material, one of the ‘wrapping’ projects by Christo ^[5]. Other projects have included the wrapping of Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin and The Gates in New York City’s Central Park.

Christo, an artist who ‘does not have any art work that survives’, does this sort of thing as a pure, transitory ‘aesthetic impact’. Apparently only sketches and original drawings survive.

And many critics say ‘what is the point?’; why waste that money and effort? (by the way no member of the public pays a penny for the visit or the ‘use’, there are no postcards, t-shirts or memorabilia). Surely, effort could be directed to more noble goals.

But, what is the point of a painting? What is the point of Mahler’s Fifth? What is the point of Picasso’s blue and not blue period? What is the point of meditating?

There isn’t one. They are what they are, an expression of possibilities that do not even pretend to convince you of anything. Courageous for many, pointless for others, the eighteen days of ‘walking on water’ are there for you, free, for your imagination and your own emotions.

There is a much broader issue here, regardless of our artistic taste. It is one of ‘making a point’ or not.

If absolutely everything, small or big, artistic or not, intellectual, behavioural, emotional must have a point (a clear goal, a clear purpose, a ranking in an index of efficacy and effectiveness) you are a prisoner. In the other extreme, if nothing of what you do has a point, you may be very sick.

I believe that injecting a healthy percentage of pointless elements of life is a condition for good mental health. Trust me, I used to be a psychiatrist.

Because we have commoditized everything and tagged a tangible outcome to all, we feel very uncomfortable with pointless things.

In managerial life, it is even worse because we have declared waste to the pointless. But there is no waste necessarily, just oxygen and possibilities.

Sometimes, if the answer to ‘what is the point?’ is there isn’t any, you may just be in good mental health. Bring your smile, unapologetically. You don’t need to make a point.

Find your little uncompromising, pointless, pier floating, Ponte-Neuf wrapping in your life. You’ll live longer.

The historical existence of several layers of management in any organization may be related to its size. In a command and control firm of some size, managers ensure that objectives are declared, and then check what is going on from people who are doing the work. They absorb the information of the feedback loop and pass it on upwards. They asses the efficacy and effectiveness of the tasks and assign a reward. Forgive me the caricature of this ‘managerial picture’.

As channels of communication inside the firm have become multi-centric, not just top down and up again, communication is digitalised, and the inter-dependence of groups within the company becomes something almost impossible to represent in an organizational chart, ‘management’, as a function, and as boxes in that organizational chart, start looking redundant. Today, much more than just a few years ago, it is possible to have groups of individuals in the organization teaming up, perfectly capable to do jobs, with no direct command and control. Effectively they could be/are self-managed, and populated by self-assigned people. Middle management starts looking superfluous, amongst other things, because it’s less and less clear what ‘middle’ means, other than perhaps an ‘information traffic control hub’ (and then the manager being an ‘information traffic warden’)

The self-management train has left the station but it’s not short of challenges on the journey ahead. For starters, we don’t have good maps and toolkits. All management, organization and leadership development, and other ‘HR’ navigation tools, were created at a time when the business environment was more linear, the world outside the firm much more predictable and the division of labour inside in need of a strict and efficient top down, command and control information system.

Responsible for these old toolkits were the Academia and the Big Consulting Companies, pretty much the same people who now predicate a rethinking, or a revolution, or even the death of management. They have a great track record in teaching how to manage an organization, but hardly any, how to deal with an organism. The modern firm is a social organism. We have very few good toolkits, and the good ones won’t pass the paternity test of Academia or Big Consulting. Management education continues to de-educate with old toolkits.

One of the main problems of the self-management train is that, in many cases, self-management may be imposed in the firm as a fashion, mantra or copycat of another firm where it seems to work. Get ready for some shocks when companies want to be a version of Zappos. However, the direction is inexorable and I strongly recommend at least some level of experimentation in your organization. The sky will not fall. The potential is enormous.

Although people are hearing the self-management music, many of those same people become very confused.  For example, ‘self-management’ has zero to do with ‘leaderless’. Any social (animal) grouping will have leaders, if not formally implanted, emergent. Self-management requires different leadership.

One year ago, my team and I started the formal work that we call ‘Building Remarkable Organizations’. One of the ten ‘Lego pieces’ of the building is the self-management progression. Let me share my number one rule: since self-management is a ‘when’ question, not an ‘if’ question, eyes closing or head in the sand are not good strategies. It’s time to understand the itinerary of that train so that one can figure out at which stations it may be possible to catch it. It does not have to be the next one.

Try my Border Diet: A diet to protect yourself against persistent Full Disclosure that the digital world forces upon you. The late John O’Donohue, in another context, spoke of  ‘inner eviction and outer exile’ of ourselves. I think this is an epidemic in need of serious warning. Sherry Turkle ^[6] of MIT has written about this, with the wonderful title: “Alone Together’. My point is: don’t get sucked into Total Transparency, Total Disclosure, I-Have-No-Secrets philosophy. It has consequences…

So this is my Border Diet:

1. Have a list of secrets, make an inventory, keep them. Review them monthly. Having no secrets is a symptom of Self depletion. There are sacred secrets of your soul and in your soul. They are your real friends, because they are the closest to you.
2. Take social media sabbaticals. Make yourself not just ‘unavailable’ (this is the analogue term) but ‘undiscoverable’ (digital). Or choose selectively to whom you make your Self discoverable. And how much, and for how long.
3. Drop Pilates, take Pascal classes. Pascal said that ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone’. That has not changed since the 17th Century, if anything today it is incredibly difficult. The 21st Century human can’t ‘sit’: we have become restless, attention deficient beings.
4. Make an inventory of assets you can give to others: start with time, ideas, attention and care. Keep stocks high. Make sure you don’t give too much at a time.
5. Practice daily silence. Start simply: radio off, earphones off. Despite common belief, it is possible. Silence will help you listen to your Self, and who knows, beyond. Not for nothing silence has been called God’s language.
6. Practice stillness. Stop moving, jogging, going to the gym. Well, not all the time. Don’t do anything, I repeat, anything, for a good 30 min a day. Try. It won’t kill you. Notice I have not said meditation. Meditation is doing something.
7. You would not choose to be in a room full of smoke or a contaminated nuclear area. Mental pollution is much worse than those. It’s the greatest digital health hazard. Avoid systematic mental exposure to trivia much as you would avoid breathing smoke.
8. Don’t be open, transparent and exhibitionist. You are fooled by your ego. Hard as it is to accept for many people, nobody really cares about you checking in at the airport of X, having cereals Y for breakfast today or just changing your cover photo in Z. You are mainly reporting to yourself what your Self  already knows .
9. Reconcile with your borders, protect your distances, go back to your inner house. Then you can give from within. But you need to protect your Self from all open windows, and all open doors. The Self may catch a cold
10. Then, go back to number one.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s impossible to listen in a noisy room.  If you want to listen to your breathing, you need silence. You can’t listen in busy-ness mode; we hear lots of things, we listen too few.

Listening to music through your earphones when walking around is more hearing the music than listening to it.

We hear other people, we hear the CEO, we hear the news, we hear our team members, we hear complaints, we hear people suffering. It does not follow that we listen to any of them.

Listening is becoming a rare quality. It requires active willingness to do it.

There are four magic questions for leaders about listening: (1) What am I saying? (2) Am I being heard? (3) Is anybody listening? (4) How do I know any of the above?  In The Leader with Seven Faces ^[7], one of my books and the basis for my Leadership Programmes, language is face number one. The above questions are key leadership’s hearing aids.

Listening is sometimes an anxious request! Listen to me! Would you listen! One of the oldest Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and Leadership Manuals in the world is The Rule of Saint Benedict, written in the 6^th Century for monks in monasteries, although there were other similar Rules even before. For centuries, it has inspired religious and non-religious life. It caters for all needs in the community and provides guidance and ‘solutions’ to potential problems. Still today this Rule, with its modern adaptation, is in place in all Benedictine communities around the world. Benedict of Nursia, patron saint of Europe, wrote his Rule in ordinary Latin. It has a Prologue and seventy-three chapters, not bad for an SOP!  The Rule starts with one single latin word, on its own: ‘Ausculta’, that is, Listen!

 

Perhaps he did anticipate modern organizational life.

A recent senior hire in a client company commented to me that the thing that most impressed her in the round of interviews was that everybody seemed to be themselves. She had the perception that nobody was trying to project a particular ‘party line’, or being different from how they really were. Some were very nice, others less. It was, paraphrasing that person, an invitation to be oneself in that particular company. There was something fresh and appealing. She did join.

I had a similar experience many years ago when working for a big multinational. The HQ environment was stiff, corporatized. It was a cloning machine, with its own dialect, a language not spoken outside those walls by any other human being. Headhunted to another company, I went for the round of interviews. Regardless of the content related to the job in question, I thought: ‘Oh God, these people actually speak and act normally’. It was refreshing. I joined.

Authenticity is precious but it is often difficult to describe. However, when you see it, you know it. The great sociologist Erving Goffman, using theater comparisons, wrote about how we try to control human interaction in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ^[8]. Our personas are our own versions of the Self, and they may vary. However, authenticity beats any artificial persona, and certainly always wins over the ‘corporate persona’.

Authentic comes after all from autos (self) and hentes (doer and being). Fake it and you’ll be found out.

Flat organizations, part of the Pancake Revolution (got the patent pending) that we have gone through, trimming management layers and getting very very very agile, have a geographical problem. The (corporate) ladder has become a small kitchen stool so the way up is very limited.

Clever consultants and academics said that this was very good because then people could progress, develop and advance in the company transversally, horizontally. But some forgot to build the bridge between the silos so there is no way to go sideways without a pilot license and a parachute.

No way up, no ladder, and no bridge sideways, it feels lonely and frustrating. Having a map of the opportunities would help. Where to go, if I have  reached a level with no prospects above? But we forgot the maps as well.

Then we tell people that they should be very happy for their role in the pancake. And by the way, we are installing self-management by decree, isn’t fascinating? How wonderful to live in these times.

I’ve seen many scratching their heads and wondering if this is a sort of fools day joke, or indeed it is so sexy that they should feel incapacitated to see the beauty of that Nirvana: self management, no up, no right, no left, and same salary. Come on! What a treat!

My forecast is that we will be going backwards  a bit,  rediscovering that those middle managers were not, after all, the waste of space and time that we thought. That when they left the company, so the company could be a pancake instead of a soufflé, they took with them their relationships, a very, very small detail.

Self Management Pancakes are great. But without any syrup at all? Hola Crazy!

PS. I have written before about self-management being an inevitable trend, that the train had left the station. But in any case I did not mention the destination. But mea culpa anyway.

There was a time, I am told, when before starting a programme or initiative within the company, you made sure that you had all information, all buy in, all processes mapped, all planning in place, all project management ready to go, most eventualities worked out, a Plan B, and C, and full ‘stakeholder management’ sorted. And then you went off.

I have not seen one of these for a while. Today we go with imperfect data, good enough planning, some systems support, key stakeholders on board (but sometimes only a minority of them), not all eventualities looked at and not Plan B.

Which one is better? The rational me, and probably you,  says the former, of course, but it is very unrealistic. The pace of events, attention span of senior management, competing initiatives, and perhaps a (healthy) experimental attempt to, say, ‘change things now’, all contain a high dose of uncertainty and ambiguity. Those two, uncertainty and ambiguity,  drive some people nuts.

But the navigation in ambiguity and the embracing of a dose of uncertainty are key skills today, not teachable in any business school.

Interestingly enough, many people who rationally, and in public, declare their embracing of uncertainty and ambiguity as a desired thing, as a something to be welcome, ask lots and lots of questions geared towards fixing ambiguity and decrease uncertainty. You can’t have it boy ways.

We ask senior management to ‘let it go’ but people below hang on their toys unashamedly. As said of  ‘change’, let it go is great, you go first’.

Partial, imperfect, not even good enough world, is often the real life territory of the organization. The only method to learn to let go is to let go. The only method to navigate ambiguity and uncertainty is keep going. Trust in others would also be a nice oil for the machine.

People in the ‘change industry’ tend to talk about ‘state of readiness’ as something that does exist, should exist, need to be crafted. But ‘readiness’ is a red herring. Evolutions, revolutions, social movements and people mobilizations at a scale were probably ‘ready’ for a long time before all went off of for real. And some went off with lots of people not ready.

To succeed in an imperfect, partial data, ambiguous, not fully supported by all leaders, question mark rich state, there is only one strategy: go, go, go.

OK, at least you a reading. Thanks.

The organization is a network. Networks have emergent properties. Translation: things come up from the randomness of interactions in a way not entirely predictable. Super-nodes, for example, behaving as a single node. More translations: that group of connected, yet not formally related individuals that ‘create’ a tribe (group of common interest or habits) that starts having a single and similar view of the world. Nobody set out to achieve this; it happened, it emerged, good or bad.

But for that to happen, a network was needed (ok, it was there), connectivity ( they actually could use the internal Yammer group) and a progressive sense of belonging formed by seeing and feeling that they were sharing similar stories. For example. They did not have rules imposed. They were not given constrains and, frankly, for pretty much all the time, they were left alone and invisible.

There are options. You can let the network to produce emergent effects (spontaneous collaboration, innovation hubs, Sceptical United Group, or bunch of bloggers, or the tribe above) or you could induce and engineer some effects, no waiting, but designing.

Spontaneity, emergent collaboration and idea sharing either come from a network effect, or need to be engineered. Engineering means creating the conditions, seeding the possibilities, giving and publicising permissions, producing safety nets and broadcasting the business impact. If you want spontaneous collaboration, wait for it, or buy water coolers and sofas. Also bring engineers from the fifth floor to sit in front of the commercial guys in the second floor, and the other way around. The physical movement was engineered, the mind sharing is not.

Design forms of social-ability and don’t worry about their potential misuse. Increase interactivity and stop worrying about ‘meeting rules’. Don’t worry about internal Face-booking-waste-of-time. If waste, it will dilute itself. Believe me, this is the least of your worries.

But this is not what many people do. Because they fear the lack of control, they start putting borders.

Here is your team, be innovating, think out of the box, collaborate, be autonomous, be entrepreneur and be productive. This is the membership of team, this the Product Leader, this is the Product Managers, this is the core and this is the extended. This is your budget; you’ll need to report the first Wednesday of the month. Take risks but not too many, and better if they pay off. Challenge the default positions of the company but don’t touch A, B or C. Be creative but make sure it is productive. You are free my friends, be happy.

Freedom in a straight jacket is the closest thing we have in many organizations. Designing the informality of the network is key. Internal Communications people have a role. HR has a role. Business leaders have a role. IT has to curate

Because of the (on purpose) apparent contradiction in terms (‘All that must be spontaneous must be engineered’) people react in horror. That is good! How can that be? But it can. We plan for formality: teams, committees, reporting. We similarly must plan for informality: emergent clusters, emergent social networks, increased connectivity, peer-to-peer engagement and work, barriers down, let it go.

It’s not one or the other (I can hear) but both.

The point is, we spend 75% of the time designing formality that produces 25% of the goods, and 25% of the time designing for informality that produces 75% of the best innovation, the best employee engagement, the best culture to be proud of and the best overall effectiveness.

Surely not even the accountants can see this logic.

Choices!

All that you want to come up as spontaneous must be engineered in their conditions for that to happen.

 

Employee empowerment is an output, an outcome. If you start thinking of employee empowerment as an input, something you are supposed to give, you’ll focus on the wrong side. As an input, all the airtime will be allocated to how much to give, when, in which circumstances. Sure, you need to think about that but the real question is, what do you want to see happening that you can say ‘people are empowered’, what kind of state of mind and behaviours, and why; what benefits, if any.

The why is obviously important. Why is empowerment good? Because it is? What would happen to an organization with high levels of employee empowerment? Can you visualize it? If it is not clear, stop thinking what to give away to empower.

In this path to uncover the benefits, the argument is going to take you to the territory of ‘autonomy’, whether you call it like this or not. Autonomy means a degree of control that has been gained (so yes, you now need to imagine what you will need to give away, to let go). Autonomy means self-determination, self-help, ability to conduct independently.

If you had that, people in the organization will probably also gain a lot of self esteem and confidence. Trust levels will go high. Autonomy means increased efficiency and efficacy. Usually it also means fastest reactions: markets, environment, crisis. The ‘business case’ is strong.

There are five ingredients that need to be cooked to achieve this

Explicit ‘permission’ from leaders. There is something perhaps in people’s upbringing that makes us very dependent on ‘permissions’. Don’t underestimate the need to stress and repeat this to people. Don’t take for granted that this has been heard.

Trust. Call it how you like, but you need a good dose of this for autonomy and empowerment to be real. Are you prepared?

Resources. If people don’t have them, there is no point to trumpet empowerment. You cant empower people to do he impossible.

Skills and competences. Equally, you can’t empower people to do something if they don’t know how.

A safety net of some sort. Within the compliance parameters that you may have, people need to able to fail and not only survive but spread the learning.

A working definition of empowerment from the leaders perspective may sound like this: To give control to people who don’t have it, so that you can free yourself for things only you as leader can do, and, in doing so you are creating an efficient system with high levels of trust and self esteem. All this provided that people have the skills and resources.

But the trick is to start from visualizing the kind of organization you want to see, not the theoretical view of empowerment or the things you would give away (decisions rights for example). Then you need to work backwards to see what needs to happen. If you can’t visualize the benefits in the first instance, or not yet, don’t go that route. Stop talking about it.

 

 

 

Command and control management has less and less friends, and it’s quite terminally ill as well. The heirs are fighting for a piece of the estate, not quite sure what to take. It’s the time to replace the organizational model, but not with just another one.

The history of management is the history of managing time, effort, and outcomes. It’s a history of control that started with very good intentions. In the beginning, it was a case of making work more ‘scientific’ which was a premise to make it efficient, predictable and replicable.

Cultural shifts, technological tectonic plates movements and dissolution of a standard classification of skills in favour of mixed, unpredictable and constant new ones, have made command a control not a bad or terrible thing but simply something not as effective as before. Even traditional full blown command and control structures such as armies have to embed some non-control and non-command mechanisms, such as the VUCA (Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) military concepts of the 90’s.

In the other extremes of the spectrum, the love for self management has increased. Self- management it not the absence of management but another form or it, certainly the opposite of command and control, yet not always understood as ‘a form of management’.  I’ve written about the trade offs before (see my now 15 year old article Kings or Cousins ^[9])

As in any pendulum in history, the fancy guys now are the extreme self-management, represented by the iconic Halocracy, embraced by the likes of Zappos, and far form a plain sailing ^[10] shift and implementation. It would be simply naïve to think that this can be implemented anywhere and with no liabilities.

We know that command and control is, at the very least, in intensive care unit, and it may not make it after all. But we are less clear as to its real replacement. Empowerment, devolution, self-management, all go in the opposite direction. The problem is how much of this is fit for purpose in any particular organization.

The clue is probably close to what I call ‘cohabitation’ of different models inside the firm, the coexistence of different ‘collaborative spaces’, form tight to lose management (and control), instead of a single overriding model. (Building remarkable organizations ^[11])

Another clue has to do with experimentation, the trying and prototyping of models. There are areas, pockets, units that could experiment with models of management without compromising the entire ‘unity’ of the firm. As with ‘cohabitation’, this requires a bit of courage and a lot of trust.

Leadership today must come with the request for experimentation. There is poor trial and error, and poor prototyping of organizational models in the modern company . We are obsessed with uniformity and with ‘the model’. The best model may be the one that has many models under one model, excuse the semantic trick.

Imagine a near nirvana, perfect scenario in which you have the right and the best people in the organization, intellectually, in terms of gravitas and commitment, and at the highest level of engagement and motivation. Imagine that they also have at their disposal the right level of resources. Imagine now how much ‘management’ you will need to put in place.

My guess is that you will be close to what I call the 3/3Fs: 1/3 fixed and 2/3 fuzzy. You will probably agree on two things: strategy and accountabilities. The rest would be commentary.

Here is where we go, here is what each of us is accountable for, end of organizational development discussion. I am of course exaggerating for an ideal scenario. The day to day, real life, is usually not ideal. We spend a lot of time fixing the 2/3 fuzzy: reporting lines, team structures, performance reporting, strict divisions of the cake, my role description/your role description, my department/your department. At the end, 3/3 non-fuzzy organizations come out. Please, now (by decree) be agile, think out of the box, and love innovation.

We have come to equate clarity and order with absolute crafting of all day to day details. Have a new group coming together to address something and 1 hour later they will report back on their preliminary conclusions: we will have a conference call every Wednesday at 3, and will meet face to face quarterly; we will disseminate the minutes, and, by the way, we have a core team and an extended team. Right!

You may not be able to reach the caricature of one of my Disruptive Ideas, ‘Fix accountabilities and forget the rest ^[12]’. But, in reality, you as leader don’t have to (don’t have to, should not have to, must strive for not having to ) craft all the details of the ‘how’.

This is an example of how not to create a new Project Team. Dear project team, this is the composition, this is the money, this is your leader, this is the goal, you’ll meet monthly and report ; these are the decisions that you can make, these are the ones you can’t; you are empowered, very empowered, be agile, be flexible, but, above all, be focused. Ah, I forgot, be focused but see the whole picture and have a helicopter view.

(Be focused, take a helicopter view, concentrate on what you do, see the whole picture. Be sane as well?)

Your good scenario as leader is the one where you have the luxury of fixing a small percentage of things, defining the non negotiable, and then relying on your teams for the how (structural, process, rules of the game, operational stuff).

There are not too many ‘answers to this’. If the answer is, ‘are you kidding? It would be chaos’, the problem is on you, or the organization you have created, or the people you have hired (inherited?) or in combinations. But your goal as leader is to retain the ‘minimum possible control’, that is, the 1/3 fixed and non negotiable that leaves the other 2/3 fuzzy.

Visualize fro a moment a culture of ownership. It does not work with all 3/3 fixed. Scary as it may sound, the whole plan fits on a one PowerPoint slide: This is the strategy, these are our accountabilities, now, how can we make this happen?

I wrote about Zappos and Holacracy here ^[13], and got lots of questions. This is take two.

In my work on Remarkable Organizations, that I hope to make public later this year, (little video vignette here ^[14], and some explanations here ^[15] ), I set out 10 organizational principles that, although will not unsure you ‘remarkability’, may put you in the right path, if you have a good architect.

One of these 10 is ‘Cohabitation’. It means the coexistence of different organizational models under one roof, versus the obsession within the entire company being structured in one single organizational model. There is nothing intrinsically wrong, indeed I will argue, it is a fundamental element of future remarkability, with hosting different organizational models under one umbrella. The company is the host. There are ‘organizational spaces’ inside, within the big tent, that are looser than others, tighter than others. There are clusters and ‘cells’ that may work pretty much self-managed whilst others may be closer to a more structure command. Pieces should be fit for purpose. More trouble to manage? Yes, sure. I thought we were paid for that.

Good leadership is the one able to hold it all together, to provide the glue, to make sense, without going nuts. And many managers would go nuts at the simple idea of even conceiving different coexisting models ‘inside the tent’. After all, we are told, good management means uniformity (?). So we have one set of values (OK); one set of process and systems (why?); one set of accounts (OK, the City or the Stock wants one set? Let the accountants provide one set. It does not mean one internal simultaneous system to make the accountants life easy. Last time I checked, the latter has never figured out too high in strategic objectives; or has it?); one set of reporting systems (again, why?); one set of structures (why?why,why?). A rich system of cohabitation (of models) will allow constant experimentation, leading to another of my 10 principles which is called ‘Stay in beta’.

The problem with the Zappos journey to the apparent Holy Grail of total Holacracy is that the transition in Zappos looks like a fundamentalist approach. I don’t work in Zappos, nor I have first hand knowledge, but much has been publicised about the Holacracy conversion to be able to hold an opinion, obviously biased. (I do have and write biased opinions, the non biased are already in management books). And conversion may be the right word because there is something intrinsically intense in Zappos philosophy and history. It’s almost religiously revealing in its all or nothing, born-again-management.

Self management is a journey, and I have written about the inevitability of the direction. ^[16] The question is the speed of the travel, the vehicle, the intermediate destinations and the travellers themselves. Morning Star, a Californian producer of tomatoes (far less sexy than online apparel, including shoes/zapatos/zappos, and not bought by Amazon) has been in self management mode for years, but has not attracted the visibility of Zappos Holacracy, not they needed a term to travel. They even run a self-management institute. ^[17]

I have no conceptual problem with Holacracy. As many friends and readers have reminded me in the last hours after my first Daily Thought on this topic, many of the Viral Change principles ^[18] that I described in 2006 and 2008, would click very well with the self-management element. More to come on this. But my worry, from a distance, from my bias, and through my glasses, is that Zappos leadership has gone more and more ‘black and white’. There may be a merit for this, but I don’t believe that the complete cut and paste of an organizational model ever works.

Perhaps the drop that triggered my little tsunami of ‘Zappos without the zapatos: not all inmates want to take over the asylum’ ^[13]was the realization that Zappos is consulting/has consulted with Holacracy ‘gurus-cum-book’, who, I know, have never managed any organizational transitions themselves.

(Respected David Snowden of Cognitive Edge has no time for the cookbook ^[19] that everybody in Zappos need to comply with /read/chose to reject (in your way out): Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness. ^[20] David, unceremoniously, calls it ‘one of the most trivial management books I have read in a long time’)

If Zappos conversion in the road to Self-Management Damascus results in a cut and paste of an off-the-shelf, ready made, fully blesseed, guru-cum-book organizational model, then, yes, biased or not, I have a big problem. It’s called Uncritical Thinking.

Zappos, (from zapatos, Spanish for shoe) has gone self-management. If you have not heard about Zappos, it does not mean that you don’t like shoes, or don’t buy apparel online. But it means you have been in a sabbatical in managerial and organizational terms. Ask Mr Google, he did not go on a sabbatical.

Zappos, represents for many the quintessence of avant-garde management, the pinnacle of employee engagement (they have ‘happiness’ in the water supply) and almost an icon of what a modern culture ‘should’ look like. Being at that spotlight of management thinking (and unthinking) must be hard.

So Zappos decided that, having mastered the brand of ‘happiness’, being bought by Amazon even if Amazon did not need their online platform or their zapatos, and relocated to Las Vegas recreating a Zappos eco-family-eco-system-eco-company, was not enough. They need a further reinvention and that looked like full, unreserved, self-management. Not any type of self-management, but the latest ready made, out of a net box, called Holacracy. Yes, you should Google as well, if needed.

The transition is proving painful and as many as 200 employees are leaving ‘en masse’, proportionally a significant exodus.

The Wall Street Journal has been explicit: ‘At Zappos, Banishing the Bosses Brings Confusion. After quirky retailer adopted no-titles ‘self-management’ system, more than 200 workers decided it wasn’t for them’

Reams will be written dissecting the why of all this. Here are the ingredients for the cooking of the arguments/your own arguments:

Holacracy was copied blindly. The siren sang too loudly, and they heard her.

Holacracy needed a transition and this did not go well. Translation: the transition to self-management needs strong non-self management.

Holacracy is naïve

Holacracy is naïve and full of logical holes

Imposing self-management in an organization is not even like the ‘lunatics taking over the asylum’ syndrome, but the doctors imposing to the lunatics to take over. With my apologies for the silly analogy

Combinations and/or all of the above

Will Zappos get some of its zapatos back, or will there be sandals and blisters all over?

 

We have been exploring briefly in the last days the Steering system of the company under the formula: (1) Space in the World (Purpose) + (2) Core Beliefs + (3) Non negotiable Behaviours + (4) Organization Logic (Basic People Algorithms) = (5) Company Constitution

A few words on Core Beliefs:

This terms substitutes Values. As I mentioned in the first Daily Thought of this miniseries, we can change the labels of things gratuitously or for a purpose. There is noting wrong with Values, not a bit. Unfortunately, the language of values attract the common suspects of Honesty, Integrity, Teamwork and Accountability that are of the unhelpful type, because they also are of the type ‘difficult to disagree with’.

I have no problem with Value statements but my behavioural hat needs two things: one is behavioural translations and then other is beliefs translations.

The behavioural translations may find their way into ‘Non-negotiable behaviours’, the subject of yesterdays Daily Thoughts. The belief piece of the Steering system needs to articulate, err… beliefs! ‘We believe in Integrity, honesty and Team work’ is not a good articulation of beliefs. I believe in them too. I hope you do as well.

A core belief system may read like this (ignore either the stiffness or the laxity of the language, I’m not doing the literature for you, just showing the grammar)

Several views on an issue are always better than a single one. ‘Nobody of us is smarter than all of us’. We believe in always bringing to the table diverse views and never make decision on a ‘single track’ thinking.
Peer-to-peer engagement is a stronger engine of change in the organization. We believe in the power of bottom up activities as a better engagement of people.
Self management is a more sophisticated way of managing the organization. We believe in progressing towards self-management at pace that will suit us.
For empowerment to work, we need people who want to be empowered
Looking at things exclusively short term does not do any good to us. Killing long-term success by focusing on short-term success is nothing but blindness
Nothing is more important than safety, not profits, not timelines, not targets

These are practical and real examples. Compare these ‘core beliefs’ with more traditional value explanations of the type I describe in a previous Daily Thoughts.

Again, this work on (a) belief systems, (b) non negotiable behaviours, (c) organizational logic and (d) “space in the world’ is not something that can be done in the back of an envelop. I will require several iterations and a lot of critical thinking to avoid the simple playing with words. However, the effort is worthwhile.

Space in the world

As for the “Space in the world’, then concepts forces us to go beyond the traditional mission and vision to articulate our uniqueness, if we can. To refer to the usual suspects, Apple occupies a ‘design space’ (more than a technology one); Google occupies ‘a data space’ (not just a search one); Amazon occupies a ‘customer space’, perhaps a ‘technology space’, not a store space. To continue with other suspects, Zappos has positioned itself in the ‘happiness’ space and progressing towards the ‘self-management’ space, much more than selling shoes or other merchandises. Valve may produce video games, but it has gained a position in the ‘self-management space’ as well, so is Morning Star, a producer of tomatoes in California, which receives visitors form all over the management world for anything but tomatoes.

I have done a helicopter trip on something that requires an intercontinental flight. I am not even sure I have done any justice to the ideas of the last days, ideas very close to my heart and my daily consulting work as organizational architect.

I have tried to open a window to what may seem a simple change of words, and in reality is a totally different frame. I must leave it here or the risk of another helicopter ride will increase.

I am advocating these shifts:

From Mission and vision to finding your ‘Space in the World (Purpose)
From traditional Value systems to the articulation of Core Beliefs AND Non Negotiable Behaviours
Adding Organisational Logic (Basic People Algorithm) underneath the traditional Governance
Putting all together as a Company Constitution.

Although this work has been going on for years, I am now packaging and accelerating these processes in a systematic way and in the shortest possible time.

 I am not convinced I have articulated well this ‘miniseries’ of the last 4 Daily Thoughts on Structure and the Steering of the Organization in 2015. And I am quite frustrated about it. I have open some windows. I’ll be back on these themes at some point.

 

Is working from home ‘a matter of trust’? The Guardian supplement on ‘Top Employers Uk’ (28 February 2015) says so. But trust on what? On work being done? Well, that’s easy to see. And working non-from-home does not ensure ‘work done’. People working together in the same floor, or next door office, may not get ‘the work done’. Proximity is not a guarantee of efficiency for sure.

So, what trust is it? Presenteism? The idea that you are paid to be present? Well, if you are going to pay your people for showing off, then it is a sad state of affairs.

Is it then the problem one of ‘effectiveness’? Not really. Working from home may be more effective in some cases. People say, I am less distracted, more focused, nobody is nagging and distracting me. Bot working at the office is nor necessarily and always innefective!

Working ‘from home’ or ‘not from home’ may be good or bad. But the single impossible-to-disagree variable is the existence, or not, of human interaction. If you care for this, then you will be biased towards the ‘physical presence’. People will argue that there can be as much human interaction when ‘from home’. The reality is that unless you have a very sophisticated system at home, such as tele-presence, the interactions become screen-to-screen or voice-to-voice.

Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, created havoc when a couple of years ago announced the end of the ‘working from home’ policy. But her point was about collaboration and human interaction. It was a lousy announcement in the way it was done, and required lots of ‘explanations’ afterwards. The noise was incredible, considering that the policy would affect a tiny part of Yahoo work force.

Marissa Mayer had a point.

I have this dream that when everybody will work from home, the ‘competitive advantage’ will be easy to achieve. It will come from those working face to face.

The ‘working from home’ discussion is politically (correctness) charged. It has become a bit of a mantra/sacred cow, a sign of flexibility. But flexibility for what? Can we compare writing a piece of report, or writing code, or reviewing materials with discussing a new project, exploring options or brainstorming? Let alone, literally working together on something? What about looking at each other’s eyes? What? You don’t do that in your business?

The topic may suck too much energy and loose its proper discussion. Personally, I have the two extremes of experience on people working for me: from extraordinary accomplishments of people on a eight hour time difference, to disappearance in a Bermuda Triangle of people living 10 minutes from my office.