- Leandro Herrero - https://leandroherrero.com -

What I Learnt From The Monks: A Little Anthropology Of Leadership And Space On One Page

My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, when not chanting to each other in church seven times a day.

Yet, that silence needs the space in order to be heard. A while ago, they designed a garden, a sort of a maze, so that they could walk in a direction without bumping into each other. One of them, a friend for many years, goes from time to time to live completely on his own, for a week, in one of the nearby cottages, as if in a detox regime. When I asked him moons ago about ‘that need’ he looked at me puzzled: ‘wasn’t it obvious?’ When he is away, he walks down the valley every day for the communal Mass and back. When coming in, the other monks avoid him (during that week) to respect the space he has created for himself.

“There is something special about creating space”

There is something special about creating space. For me, leadership is mainly architecture: create the conditions, find the spaces, protect them, make them liveable. Architects also have maps, and compasses. The leader needs to provide maps (frameworks, such as the non negotiable behaviours) and navigation tools (a value system). But, above all, it’s about space.

Providing spaces for people to breath, to growth, to deliver something, to get better, to think critically, to interact, to collaborate, to travel together. This is all about space. Space is the psychological sister of place. Space may be only, or mainly, mental. As such, it is a precious asset. No wonder the word space has been often associated to the word sacred. As in sacred spaces. To provide space, to create and protect spaces for others, is something a good leader does. It’s a great deal of his servant-ship.

But we, sometimes, are not very good at this. We take over other people’s spaces by insisting on discussing, wanting to ‘go deeper’, being intolerant with leaving things open, dictating our own terms and providing unreasonable borders to their spaces.

At a threshold point of two people living together in one place, they may come to inhabit one single space. It requires a lot of maturity to live in one single space with others. Occupying one single place, is the easier part, space is not. Indeed, that single space may end up being too much to ask. It may be better to have separate spaces to respect, often overlap. Psychotherapists have known for many years that a temporary split, or making tangential connections for a while, may be the solution to some problems. Unbundle the spaces that have become blurred, that is.

Spaces could be rich and beautiful, or could also be toxic. In a relationship of spaces, if one is toxic, the whole may become contaminated. Also, the more personal, protected space one has, the more one can give. This is ‘the border diet’ of my old TEDx talk [1] – still relevant today!

Space is a good way to start a Leadership Development conversation. Much better than vision, charisma, determination or role modelling. The leader as architect is a much richer model. Architects of our own spaces, and providers and keepers of spaces for others.

When managing an organization’s internal complexity, is a greater problem than managing the complexity of the environment.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Building Remarkable Organizations,Complexity,Critical Thinking,Decision making,Leadership,Problem solving,Simplicity | No Comments
Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point‘. [2] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point [2] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review [3].

 

 

When managing an organization’s internal complexity, is a greater problem than managing the complexity of the environment.

When organizations grow, their systems and processes grow. When organizations grow, they are better able to address their complex, external environment. To react to that complex environment, the organization’s internal systems and processes become more complex. At some point, managing the internal complexity becomes a greater problem than managing the complexity of the environment. The airtime becomes internally consumed. The word customer is suddenly an inwards looking concept. The new, more complex internal systems attract even more internal complexity. The escalation is fast. 10 guys is a start-up. At 20, an entire HR department comes from nowhere. At 200, a new internal enterprise digital customer blah blah blah system is bought. From here on, the possibilities are endless.

I feel very strongly that these lenses explain a lot of self-inflicted problems. My solution: (1) stay in beta; (2) stay small or break up into small units [Dunbar’s number of 150? Bezos’s teams of one pizza feeding?); (3) Never try to reproduce in small what a big company is.

 

Autoimmune disease, organizations have a similar disease.

Autoimmune disease is when ‘the body produces antibodies that attack its own tissue, leading to the deterioration and sometimes the destruction of such tissue’. Organizations have a similar disease. Self-inflicted problems such as increasing complexity and ever-increasing decision-making processes. Give people on-the-spot permission to solve anything. Get 3 people, not 30, to make a decision in 3 days, not 30 days. Suppress the immune system with a high dose of common sense. In fact, listing self-inflicted problems is not that hard for any savvy manager.

Autoimmune disease. Listing self-inflicted problems is not that hard for any savvy manager. In fact, I ask clients to do this and create lists such as ‘problems that do not exist, but we seem to love to have’; ‘good problems to have’; ‘little problems with the voice of big problems’; etc.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

The Flipping Point [2] – Deprogramming Management. This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!
Available from major online bookstores [4].
[2]

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

New webinar series launching this month.

Feed Forward webinar series – the organization now, under new management

Machines work on feed-back. Minds work on feed-forward. We don’t need thermostats; we need new compasses. There is no ‘back to normal’. Normal has not been waiting for us.   Leandro Herrero

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 5, 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.

All attendees receive a complimentary copy of The Flipping Point.

Webinar topics:

  1. The myths of change.
  2. Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration?
  3. The myths of company culture.
  4. The myths of management.
  5. High touch and high tech in the digitalisation era

Request [5] more information about these webinars.

Organizational Decluttering: A crusade in waiting that may need you as leader

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Collective action,Critical Thinking,Disruptive Ideas,Simplicity,Value creation | No Comments

Einstein said, “I soon learned to scent out what was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind.”

Many corporate initiatives compete for airtime in the employees’ hearts and minds. Unnecessary organisational complexity and its associated terminology is a significant feature of modern corporate life. You don’t need re-engineering, but simple, ruthless and urgent un-cluttering. Clean up, do less.

Organisational life is cluttered. There are calendars full of activities and meetings fill the day. The internal cycles (strategic plan, business plan, next year’s budget) sometimes seem to have a life of their own. People exclaim, “I am doing the planning, the budget, the presentations… When am I going to do my actual job?”

People also need to attend training courses, professional development programmes, maybe even a leadership initiative or a work-life balance programme. And perhaps they also need to be part of a Task Force addressing the latest not-so-good results from an Employee Satisfaction survey.

And this is just daily life; just an average random Wednesday in the life of the company. On top of all this, ‘higher level’ corporate frameworks do exist: there is a set of values, a set of leadership behaviours, a credo, etc. Operationally, the CEO has set the six key objectives for the year and everybody is re-drafting their goals and objectives to fit in with those. Many companies seem to be run on the basis that 90% of the focus is on managing internally/inwards and only 10% on the customer side/outwards.

All those initiatives create a corporate ‘mille-feuille’ with layers that don’t usually talk to each other. Sometimes their only commonality is the fact they all compete for airtime. Confronted with this often overwhelming richness of corporate life, the average employee throws in the towel and switches off, unwilling to put some effort in trying to understand the connection between all the different things.

When I look through my client portfolio of the last five years, I could say that the average client has at least five or six major competing initiatives running ‘in parallel’, cluttering the airtime (not to mention an additional dozen or so minor, local or functional ones).

Decluttering is a truly disruptive ‘anti-initiative’ initiative that shouts “Time out!” and forces you to review what’s going on and to make sense of it all.

Decluttering can be done now. If you are in a senior management position, you could declare yourself to be the Chief Decluttering Officer and you would do your organisation a big favour. It doesn’t cost much and the sky won’t fall down. Sure, you might upset some people with a vested interest in the cluttering, but that’s a small price to pay.

This contrarian do-less will pay off.

If this could be copied by others and if each department or group had a decluttering objective in their goals, the business transformation would be truly significant.

 

(from Disruptive Ideas [6])

Organizations: The Enemy Within (1/3). There is no ‘war on talent’

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Building Remarkable Organizations,Complexity,Models and frames,Performance,Simplicity | No Comments

When years ago McKinsey consultants produced a book entitled “The war for talent”, they successfully created the impression that talent was something “out there” that one had to fight for. Implicitly, that was, you don’t have it, or don’t have it enough, or it is in short supply. So, go to war to get it, fight hard against your competitors before it is too late. The one who fights a better war, gets the talent, and this is it! I am deliberately caricaturing the thesis, but I am not far away from the intention.

The McKinsey claim was misleading or at least missing the point. The reality is that the problem is not how to get the talent, but how to host it. The issue is how to retain the talent that you have seduced, when, perhaps, people realise after a while inside the tent that there is a whole paraphernalia of bureaucracy, corporate stiffness, opaque systems or command and control processes in which talent is often developed despite, not thanks to that culture. Seducing talent in is the easy part, surviving in the fry afterwards is the problem.

John Seddon, a UK management consultant who has gained some prominence by vocally challenging the UK government  in the past in some of his policies, has made the point that training and development of people is a waste and, again, a way of missing the point. The statement is unusual enough to make you read beyond headlines or to find out more about the background for this.  What Seddon is actually saying is that, to have a workforce that is fully trained, and, investing an arm and a leg per employee on this, is a total waste if the company has processes and systems that block any skill development. I agree with Seddon in that a command and control way of management, instead of enhancing the individual, blocks any brain from functioning more than 10% all the time.

Both of the above examples have something in common. Your worst enemies are usually within. Look inside! Put your house in order first, look at your ability to host talent or at the processes, systems and structures that you have, the behavioural fabric of your organisation, and then go for wars outside or, by all means, invest on those training programmes.

It reminds me of the late Irish philosopher John O’Donohue, who criticised people travelling East on a spiritual quest, meditating in the Himalayas or doing lots of New Age stuff under the banner of “spiritual journeys”. He says that the real spiritual journey is about 2 inches long: that is, going down your scalp, inside you. In corporations there is something similar. We have been taught to look outside, look at the market, listen to customers, compete, outsmart others, bring in the best people, steal them from competitors if you can etc. And that’s all very well intentioned and logical, provided, your own house is in order. Until now it has been managerially incorrect to talk a too internal-driven language. Outward looking management (usually blurred with customer-driven language) is “in”, inward looking approaches (usually mixed up with internal process language) have been out. The bimodal world we are in, forces you to choose, one or another. In the worst of the cases people tend to say you should look outside and leave the inside for HR!

R&D/Product Development organisations or divisions suffer from similar syndrome. Yes, the environment is tougher, regulations have increased, everything is disrupted, costs rocketed, time development complicated, and the external world is demanding more, bjy and more on almost everything: safety, information, transparency and higher returns on investments and shareholder values.

Lets be clear. The worst enemy  is within. It is in the form of organisational structures that have hardly changed in fifty years and that are a carbon copy of each other. I work a lot with ‘regulated industries’ such as Finance, Insurance and Pharmaceuticals. Still today I hear a lot about ‘oh, we could not do that, we are a regulated industry’. I don’t take pleasure in pushing back hard: there is nothing in ‘The Regulations’ that says that you must  be slow, painful, masochistic and with zero creativity. That you need to have 30 people taking a decision in 30 days when the same decision could be taken by 3 people in 3 days.

Don’t look for the enemy outside. You’ll see plenty of potential ones but you won’t fight them unless you look first inside the tent.

Next: Organizations: The Enemy Within (2/3). What the real enemies look like.

 

 

 

 

 

Why getting rid of inefficient processes in the organization is so hard. Anthropology explains it.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Culture,Rituals,Simplicity | No Comments

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.

The garbage collection problem (in organizations)

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Complexity,Performance,Simplicity | No Comments

Analogy stolen from the brilliant The Systems Bible [7] (John Gall, 2003).

We tend to look at problems from the angles of potential solutions, and we tend to see best solutions as the best fit for a problem, like a glove perfectly fitting in the hand, made for each other. We are in fact proud of the solution.

We are less interested in seeing the liabilities of the solution itself.

Let’s say we have a garbage collection problem. The solution is a system of lorries and collectors as we see in any major city. But bringing this solution also brings additional problems. Here are some of them: the need for a definition of garbage, the classification of the types of garbage, the quality characteristics of the containers for the different types of garbage, the use of lorries, their time restrictions and the traffic congestion created in some streets, the recruitment of drivers, the procurement of containers, issue of licenses to collect garbage, a penalty system for non compliant households, health and safety of the system and Union negotiations to agree on drivers hours and pay.

The solution itself is not problem free. In fact the solution creates a great number of problems.

Organizational problems are similar to the garbage collection problem. Solutions to tackle complexity often bring more complexity in themselves. We tend to see the solution but not the new problems that we did not have before. This should not stop us from bringing the solution but it would be foolish to think that this is problem free, and more foolish not to identify the liabilities.

We are all traders of comfort, no matter the degree of uncertainty in our worlds

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Complexity,Critical Thinking,It’s Personal!,Language,Simplicity | No Comments

A specialist nephrologist I know well says to me: I get very nervous with all this heart stuff, I don’t know what they do well, but if you tell me to get a kidney out, sure, no problem.

As a trained and once upon a time practicing psychiatrist, I found specialties such as endocrinology and metabolic diseases, highly complicated and fascinating. I thought Psychiatry was pretty straight forward. My colleagues from other specialties felt that (serious) Psychiatry was something really hard,and that one had to have very special skills.

The financial analyst, the trader, and the risk manager think that what they do is something concrete, evidence driven and not that complicated. The HR specialist, the psychotherapist and the designer would not touch those areas and declare them opaque and unintelligible.

Each of us carve out the world around by areas of comfort. Within that area, ‘our certainty’ is high. It may not mean one single predictable outcome, but ‘the specialist’ knows how to navigate and what to expect within a margin of probabilities. The alien to those worlds would feel very uncomfortable because he can’t predict, he can’t be more or less certain. So we mix up certainty and comfort. But they are not the same, just good sisters. In fact, whilst certainty or uncertainty, per se, are pretty fixed, comfort can be crafted in different ways.

When your people feel ‘uncertainty’ (your team, your client) the question is not to pretend that the degree of certainty, or the lack of it, can be changed (they may be as they are) but to ask, how you can provide comfort. You cannot change uncertainty but you can generate many ways to produce comfort.

Comfort is intrinsically both (a) personal and (b) social. Personally, the question is what the other may want to hear that (being the truth) can produce comfort. (See my Daily thought: I want to import this act of kindness) [8]. Socially, it is more a case of how the group dynamics (management team, committee, board) will work. In a group situation, comfort is 90% group dynamics (‘political’, some may say), and 10% topic-related.

Never, ever, go in front of a management committee, board, or leadership team to present or sell a complex idea without having a perfect map of the levels of individual comfort required. You may find yourself in a lion’s cage and be slaughtered 5 minutes later. Spend individual time, providing individual comfort, with people of that ‘decision structure’ before ‘presenting’. I know there is Dragons Den and 5 minute pitches for many things. If you want to play that game, fine. But these are artificial, if visible and photogenic set ups, hardly the vehicles for rational discussion.

As an ideas generator, solutions proposer, consultant, or potential business partner, you are in the business of providing comfort, not to change the fixed uncertainty of the world, or let alone pretending that you can do that.

‘Problem Three’ appears when we treat complexity with more complexity. Many organizations breed it. The UK NHS is caught in it.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Antifragile,Complexity,Corporate pathologies,Critical Thinking,Decision making,Governance,Organization architecture,Reboot!,Simplicity | No Comments

At some point of the organization’s growth, complexity kicks in. Before that threshold, you had two problems: managing growth and managing the complexity of the business that comes with growth. Then, at a crucial tipping point, you have not two, but three problems: (1) managing growth, (2) managing the complexity of the new business situation and (3) managing the complexity of the complexity in itself. I have written about this before (‘Every successful company’s growth contains seeds of failure. At some point, organizational complexity could outweigh the business benefits’) [9]

The third problem is the hardest and may overtake in importance (effort, airtime, resources) the other two. That leads to the familiar picture of large and complex organizations becoming progressively inwards looking, consumed by the internal processes, systems and structures that they themselves have created. It is the equivalent of a Formula 1 driver looking at the engine instead of looking at the road ahead. Ouch! That hurts!

‘Problem Three’, as I call it, that is, managing the complexity of the complexity, is manly self-inflicted. It has a high degree of predictability, yet either warnings are ignored or reactions to address it come too late.

The UK National Heath Service (NHS) is a good example of massive Problem Three. To deal with the massive cost increase of a (socialised, or as the American Republican Party would call, socialist) public health system, dealing with logarithmic challenges in terms of demographics, UK governments of different political inclination have imposed different ‘solutions’. First a massive new managerial structure: invasion of professional managers to manage the progressively unmanageable. Then, outcomes targets (health targets, waiting lists) imposed under the naïve assumption that the existence of targets, by itself, would trigger managerial effectiveness. What these targets in fact triggered was the need to have more managers to manage the targets. Then the decentralisation of decision making was imposed, devolving locally what it was held centrally, under the assumption that this would be more manageable and efficient. In fact it was a gigantic ‘passing the monkey’ to structures (local, general practitioners) with very limited skills to do so. Now, another managerial tsunami is in place: a enormous system of internal competition (what I call a Gran Bazaar strategy) which de facto  breeds another huge system of ‘internal bidding’ and converts old collaborators into new competitors.

Increasing layers of self-inflicted complexity try to deal with the previous complexity in a colossal Entropic Catch Up, which has very limited future life in its current format. If the NHS was a civilization, it would be close to collapse and disappearance.

An article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian (If the way the NHS is organised seems absurd, that’s because it is) [10] is revealing. An interviewed senior Finance Director who is giving up and taking early retirement reveals the absurdities of what he calls ‘a permanent Maoist revolution’ inside. He has to deal with more than 100 contracts with ‘internal and external providers’ and shows some examples of external (private) ones competing on cost, not quality and being clearly worse than the old existing internal mechanisms. Nurses and junior doctors leave the NHS to join external agencies that send them back at higher costs, exactly more than double the equivalent staff in the case of  doctors.

Problem Three needs a completely different solution from Problems One and Two. Problem Three is dangerously close to a Wicked Problem [11].

The main treatment of Problem Three is prevention. After prevention, if unsuccessful, it comes Reboot. If unsuccessful, it is system collapse. The rest is archaeology.

If you marry a summary, you’ll breed bullet points. Life becomes much easier, if hardily real.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Communication,Complexity,Critical Thinking,Disruptive Ideas,Ideology,Models and frames,Simplicity | No Comments

‘The exercise was very rich, everybody participated deeply, the walls were full of flipcharts with stuff. So may ideas floating around! It proves that, when we ask people, there is no shortage of innovation in their heads. We have very bright people in the company; we are blessed with that.

Many angles were explored. In particular, the guy from Sales in the South brought fresh thinking about the competitor situation, a complex one. We ended with a full complex, new picture of the enormous challenges we face, and I have never seen so much fresh and good material coming from the participation of everybody.

Due to the time constrains of two hours, we asked two people to give us the two key points coming from a maximum of two flipcharts. Each point could have max two bullet points. And here is the attachment, 2MB’.

And the above paradox repeats itself hundred times per second in meeting rooms across all corporations. The fear of not capturing a rich world (and above all to be seen as unable to do so by others) leads to a simplification and reductionist exercise that inevitably focus on the most tangible and concrete, the most manageable and the most consensual. To put stickers on the wall and rank statements is easy. To grab the unexpected, the un-categorised and unmanageable is difficult.

Over the exercise, the richness of the origins gets progressively slimmed down to a manageable version of life which is more comfortable, predictable and more easily associated to an action bullet point. I have never, ever been part of any of these ‘sessions’ that ended with ‘and for this, we don’t know what to do with it’. The horror of the unclassified and the irritatingly undefined leads to ‘closure’ at any cost. This is how traditional management thinking has told us to do.

What is left behind in that immense intellectual idea-graveyard of the flipchart is perhaps written down as ‘other points’, if lucky. What we take with us to the car park is a summary

If you marry a summary, you’ll breed bullet points. Life is much easier, if hardily real. But it can pay the mortgage and even give you a promotion. We manage organizations with unreal pictures, filtered realities and dwarf versions of issues. There is title in traditional management education that helps you to avoid this.

These two positions may be part o the solution: ‘Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler’ (attributed to Einstein) and ‘It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away’, by Antoine de Saint Exupery. We, in management, have a long way to go to reach a reasonable point of critical thinking in which we acknowledge the complexity and resist the reality on a diet.

I wish leaders could stop requesting ‘the summary’ and start asking for ‘your enlarged version of things’. That would be a bit disruptive. If longer.

10 ways to fool everybody as an organization expert. They guarantee some attention and all have been tried and tested, somewhere.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Building Remarkable Organizations,Critical Thinking,Governance,Ideology,Management of Change,Management Thinking and Innovation,Models and frames,Peer to peer infuence,Simplicity,Strategy,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments

These 10 positions provide organizational solutions with guarantee of some good reception. All of them are ‘possible’. If you want a case study, you’ll find it. Chose one or as many. You can’t go wrong. Well, not yet.

  1. Top down is bad, but bottom up may be crazy. What about a more benign top down? OK,  let’s have a bit of bottom up. Lets do more workshops South or the equatorial line in the organizational chart.
  1. Digitalise. Let’s just connect everybody with everybody. Yes we can. You can have videos as well. And an app. And hot desks. And working from home. Flexible! Work-life balance! Hurrah! And we can even write a book: ‘From P2P (peer to peer) to S2S (screen to screen)’
  1. Disrupt. Disrupt is good. Well, just a bit. Disruptive is anything that we have no done yet. Right?
  1. Let’s get rid of management, no titles, no supervisors. It’s cool. We’ll have other people in charge though, but won’t call them managers.
  1. Passion, passion. My kingdom for a bit of passion. If we are passionate, we will reinvent the enterprise. Just need to figure out a few hundred steps.
  1. ‘The marketing of rebellion’ (of curse there is a book with this title, but not talking about this): rebels, mavericks, people who want change, disruptors, innovators. Give them a proper playground and something good will come up. (Yes, a magnificent waste of energy directed into low impact high noise activities, and a proliferation of useful idiots that conservative management can exhibit as sign of forward thinking. Ok, that was harsh, my colleague says, sorry!)
  1. Get rid of command and control. Just stick to control. It’s shorter.
  1. It’s all networks, and actually there are so many pretty graphs. Not sure what to do, but the slides look great. (I’ve just seen a YouTube in which a management guru has revealed the death of the organization chart and the rise of networks which have two parts, the centre and the periphery. And it looked as if he had been highly paid for that corporate speech. Sorry, for clarification, yes, this was a 2015 YouTube)
  1. Process and systems are the problem. Reengineer (well, let’s call it something else, there is a lit bit of baggage here). Inject anything with the word agile, even if you don’t know much about it, other than the word. Yes, there are agile experts, but they are so complicated!
  1. It’s the house. Dismantle the Lego. Do another one, a dragon this time, with less pieces. Mary, could you get me the McKinsey number?

No, I am not really playing Dilbert. All those scenarios are real and I have encountered them in my organizational consulting life. The issue is that all those scenarios have some sort of ‘half truth within’. They may reflect, indeed, something that may be needed for a particular organization. My contention is with the ‘pret-a-porter’ management solution driven by the latest guru offer and based upon zero critical thinking.

If physics and engineering worked with the same rigour as ‘management solutions’, bridges will fall down, electric grids will have daily  blackouts and airplanes would never take off.

Q: ‘What’s the best innovation in Medicine in recent years? A: ‘The chair’

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Communication,Innovation,Purpose,Simplicity | No Comments

That’s how Gregorio Maranon put it.

Maranon (1887-1960) was a Spanish physician of the ‘humanistic school’. Meaning, more than a physician: also scientist, historian philosopher and writer.

The question was put to him in an interview. It was recorded at the time that Gregorio Maranon, who was seen then as the greatest thought leader in Spanish Medicine, paused for a bit before answering. The interviewer was expecting a technological answer of some sort. Maranon put it clearly: it’s about listening to patients, about being human, about using the chair.

The chair still remains today the greatest innovation. Although it is becoming a disruptive innovation!

Sitting, listening. Listening? Do you really mean that? Wow!

What an invention.

The chair, my friend, it’s the chair.

 

 

 

“There are two types of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets”

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Critical Thinking,Decision making,Models and frames,Simplicity,Strategy | No Comments

What type are you?

How our mental models work is part of the Minimal Introspection, something we tend to overlook, because we have not too much time to introspect.

With practice, perhaps experience, perhaps maturity, perhaps …life, I don’t know, people get better at ‘the heuristics of the world’. Apologies for the pomp. This is, how to avoid using all possible mental algorithms, have all possible data, and look at all possible choices, before making a decision.

The brain can’t compete with a superfast computer in looking at all possibilities. Humans were created unfinished, imperfect, with a great brain, which is great precisely because it’s not completely algorithmic, completely able to explore all avenues, all the time (unless you suffer from some particular mental illness).

Heuristics bypasses ‘all the data’, works with the available and possible, and jumps in. The liability is called risk. Risk of getting it wrong. But the alternative is the full exploration of all data and all possibilities. This is slow death.

So whilst some people may be naturally better than others at taking risks and making imperfect decisions with imperfect data, and win because of that, this can be learn. As always, by practicing.

So, yes, “There are two types of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets”

 

 

Organizational Decluttering: A crusade in waiting that may need you as leader

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Accelerators,Disruptive Ideas,Performance,Simplicity | No Comments

Slide1

Einstein said, “I soon learned to scent out what was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind.”

Many corporate initiatives compete for airtime in the employees’ hearts and minds. Unnecessary organisational complexity and its associated terminology is a significant feature of modern corporate life. You don’t need re-engineering, but simple, ruthless and urgent un-cluttering. Clean up, do less.

The organisational life is cluttered. There are calendars full of activities and meetings fill the day. The internal cycles (strategic plan, business plan, next year’s budget) sometimes seem to have a life of their own. People exclaim, “I am doing the planning, the budget, the presentations… When am I going to do my actual job?”

People also need to attend training courses, professional development programmes, maybe even a leadership initiative or a work-life balance programme. And perhaps they also need to be part of a Task Force addressing the latest not-so-good results from an Employee Satisfaction survey.

And this is just daily life; just an average random Wednesday in the life of the company. On top of all this, ‘higher level’ corporate frameworks do exist: there is a set of values, a set of leadership behaviours, a credo, etc. Operationally, the CEO has set the six key objectives for the year and everybody is re-drafting their goals and objectives to fit in with those. Many companies seem to be run on the basis that 90% of the focus is on managing internally/inwards and only 10% on the customer side/outwards.

All those initiatives create a corporate ‘mille-feuille’ with layers that don’t usually talk to each other. Sometimes their only commonality is the fact they all compete for air time. Confronted with this often overwhelming richness of corporate life, the average employee throws in the towel and switches off, unwilling to put some effort in trying to understand the connection between all the different things.

When I look through my client portfolio of the last five years, I could say that the average client has at least five or six major competing initiatives running ‘in parallel’, cluttering the airtime (not to mention an additional dozen or so minor, local or functional ones).

Decluttering is a truly disruptive ‘anti-initiative’ initiative that shouts “Time out!” and forces you to review what’s going on and to make sense of it all.

Decluttering can be done now. If you are in a senior management position, you could declare yourself to be the Chief Decluttering Officer and you would do your organisation a big favour. It doesn’t cost much and the sky won’t fall down. Sure, you might upset some people with a vested interest in the cluttering, but that’s a small price to pay.

This contrarian do-less will pay off.

If this could be copied by others and if each department or group had an decluttering objective in their goals, the business transformation would be truly significant.

 

(from Disruptive Ideas [6])

‘Grasps the facts, misses the meaning’: The Leadership Dyslexia upon us

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Complexity,It’s Personal!,Language,Leadership,Management Education,Simplicity,Talent, Skills, Human Capital | No Comments

Did we ever, ever have more facts around us? Certainly not. We talk about Big Data. It is of course Colossal Data, monstrous, whatever we can call it.

In this overwhelming availability of facts, there is a type of manager, leader and executive that grasps the facts, but misses the meaning. It’s a type of leadership dyslexia of some sort. From all the attributes of leadership, the ones people write down, the ones that I myself have criticised as ‘the impossible list’, if I were to chose one single word, juts one, it would be meaning. Meaning for himself or herself first, and then for all, for the followers, for the organization.

In day to day management, we spend a lot of time accumulating facts. Inevitable. Desirable, if you think of the alterative. But we have come to fooling ourselves that the presence of rich facts equals meaning. In an old Daily Thoughts, just about one year ago, I said that there was a battle for the 3S: Synthesis, Sense and Simplicity. [12] Sense, making sense, providing meaning, this is the gem. The rest is commentary.

This leadership dyslexia with abundance of facts and missing of the meaning, may be even go unnoticed, unseen. The Digital Tsunami will not be tolerant; will not wait for meaning until a second wave. It does not stop. IT assumes you filter noise and signal. And this is a hell of an assumption.

At the very least, we need to redirect our Leadership Programmes to provide the abilities, perhaps the toolkits, for an anti dyslexic operation. The size of the dysfunction is enormous. Off-the-shelf, ‘this is how you lead in circumstances X’, will not do the trick.

So, what do we do?

(Thanks for continuing  checking in. This summer slower motion of Daily Thoughts is meant to trigger a short (long?) reflection. Pass it on)

The company that gets better and better after disruption, disorder or chaos.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Accelerators,Antifragile,Building Remarkable Organizations,Complexity,Disruptive Ideas,Identity and brand,Innovation,Management of Change,Models and frames,Reboot!,Simplicity | 1 Comment

Nassim Taleb Antifragile [13] concept is perhaps one of the most attractive frames (conceptual, philosophical, practical) we have had recently. By describing antifragile as the opposite to fragile, versus, say, resilience, adaptation, flexibility or even agility, he has open the way to understanding growth and organizational complexity. He is not an organizational developer [14] so his references to the organizational world are not as detailed or profound as in other areas. However, the doors are open. The subtitle of the book reads: ‘Things than gain from disorder’. That’s it!

I have been part of a panel discussion organised by the restless thinker and great business coach Sinan Si Alhir [15] (@SAlhir) which recording can be found here [16]. I recommend to those unfamiliar with Antifragility to look for Si’s writings and, of course, to read the book.

One of the questions I had in my mind, which I shared with the audience, was, when in the organizational life is antifragility more, if not relevant, present or simply fundamental to understand the organization itself. I thought of three scenarios:

  1. Daily life itself! Hard this one. But the question injected by antifragilty would be (my paraphrasing), for any adaptation, response, ups and downs, resilient behaviour, does the organization come out better and stronger or just coping with and ‘adapted’? You see, whilst adaptation and flexibility need to be part of the machinery, they are not strong enough in themselves to elevate the company to its next stage of possibilities. In more prosaic words, you can adapt and show to be flexible, and learn nothing.
  2. A crisis. A crisis is an (unwelcome) experimental situation where all energies get together, hands on decks and here we go. Again one could ‘just’ solve the crisis (and become proficient at it [17]) or come out much better and healthy.
  3. An artificially created stress in non-crisis. What? Yes, in my organizational consulting work I submit clients to ‘stress tests’ to simulate resilience, learning, adaptation and… antifragilty capacity. (‘The Company on a treadmill: devise routine stress tests [17]’) One of the ways we do this is to use our one day immersion (Accelerator) called Reboot! [18] where we put on the table, with no preparation by the client, 12 organizational variables that need to be addressed on spot. It’s not a game (I don’t do business games) and it works marvelously!

The key is to explore what would  take to create an organizational DNA that has antifragilty in it, that, by definition, makes the company stronger and healthier out of ‘disorder and chaos’, to use Teleb’ concept (read: challenges, crisis, disruptions, distortions, M&As, markets behaving badly and so on)

There is something important here for the new organization of the 21sr Century and we need to keep exploring.

Is antifragility the new change?

 

SEE SOME CURATED content from my previous Daily Thoughts in the areas of

Nassim Taleb
Organizational ‘Stress tests’ [19]

The cost of doing something versus the cost of not doing it. The second half is often missing.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Corporate pathologies,Critical Thinking,Decision making,Disruptive Ideas,Performance,Simplicity | No Comments

Confronted with options and strategies, the cost of doing things is very often the first thing that comes to our mind. We make decisions all the time on the basis of affordability. This is sensible. Then, we perhaps continue with the decision making process, formal or not, in terms of ‘opportunity costs’: what other things could be done or implemented with similar costs.

The missing piece in those mental algorithms is also often ‘the cost of not doing something’. The pair ‘the cost of doing A + the cost of not doing A’ should be elevated to the category of requirement (business planning, business process, decision making).

As usual, this is so obvious that people tend to switch off and assume that it is on the table. After all, a strategic or business plan contains strategies, actions and priorities targeted to the goals and objectives. So, asking about ‘the cost of not doing them’ sounds silly. But it isn’t.

The cost of not doing something (strategically sound) is not the simple negative mirror of the cost of doing it. By asking the question, systematically, a whole universe of ideas, risks, perhaps new angles will emerge. It will be rich, not a pain (unless you decide that it has to be painful).

It is not unusual to find unpredictable angles once the question is posed, and, with them, options of doing something different.

The questioning is also basic if you want to inject some Critical Thinking: the cost of not hiring X, the cost of not starting Y yet, the cost of not investing in Z. The cost of not tackling leadership development in depth; the cost of not addressing culture yet; the cost of not exposing the organization to some new ideas.

Try. Have a list of 5 to 10 strategic priorities. They could be simple or even small. They may even be unquestionable. Or on the contrary, not decided yet. Ask some members of your team, for example, to explore and articulate, fully, the cost of not doing them. Visualize the resulting organization. What it may look like.

The cost of not asking ‘what’s the cost of not doing’ is very high. So high that the absence of the questioning is true mismanagement.

 

 

 

Chose your problems, before they chose you. We never solve problems; it’s a question of working on the best trade off.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Complexity,Decision making,Simplicity | No Comments

Since we never solve problems completely, only make tradeoffs between them, it would be good to choose problems before they choose you.

Some people are very excited about problems. Particularly mathematicians and managers who want to be seen as Solvers. You can have problems of any size and shape, any day, any minute. Nobody is short of them. So, it’s easy to be in font of them.

Some people would go as far as defining the life of the organization as a continuous problem solving. I am personally sceptical of the Turbo-Problem-Solver type of manager because they have always that unconscious need to create one in order to solve it. A moon or two ago I worked with a Very Senior Leader whose single skill was to generate problems that only him could solve. I used to call him John the Saviour. But this is a story for another day.

If you accept the trade-off reality ( we never solve problems, it’s a question of working on the best trade off) then, the skill is about choosing them before they find you. It works, believe me.

Look at the options in front. It’s 8 a.m. Imagine the supermarket of problems with the doors about to be open. Some problems are good to have. Leave them aside for when they come live. Some are not good. Choose the best trade-off, then the next. You may never solve any problem (sorry) but you will learn to deal with the best trade-offs which is the closest thing you have to seriously winning. Progressively, the delta of the problem will decrease and you will live with the skinny ones.

Pilot or pastor? From the No-nonsense Francis School of Leadership

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Change, Leadership and Society,Leadership,Models and frames,Simplicity | No Comments

Pope Francis has done it again. I mean, his probably weekly plain English (well, Italian or Spanish) bit of nudging to his troupes. And, as it is now normal, a new piece of wisdom and un-sophisticated, un-complicated guidance, is out for the collection.

This plain, off the cuff talking drives his holy apparatus nuts, and is often seen (mostly heard) with horror by the ones who expect the Catholic Pope to speak not other than extremely complicated and theologically unintelligible language. But many people, even those not near close to the Catholic Church, also systematically receive it as fresh air.

Francis authenticity is so raw material that many people think of it as the calculated, spin trick, of a ‘super skilled politician’. We have come to believe that authenticity is suspicious. Who could blame the thinkers? After all, we are short of that authenticity, so seen a real Endangered Species live, next to us, shocks us.

Francis was this time talking to the Italian Bishops about the importance of the laity. Read normal people not in the church hierarchy. He told them that they did not need a bishop-pilot (‘to assume their responsibilities at all levels, political, social, economic or legislative’) but a bishop-pastor. The implication was: you are too much piloting. So, pilot or pastor?

Everybody knows what a pilot is. The ones who do the job, take you places, whilst you sit behind in comfortable (of some sort) seats, often going off to sleep. Pilot-leadership style is similar. ‘They’ at the top will do, decide, will tell us what to do. The CEO is the pilot, the COO the co-pilot, the CFO the second co-pilot and so on.

Pastor and pastoral care has not only a religious connotation in itself, but a broader meaning of ‘emotional and spiritual support’. In the UK in particular, the term ‘pastoral care’ is used [20] in education in a non-religious way, to refer to ‘the practice of looking after the personal and social well-being of children or students under the care of a teacher or rabbi. It can encompass a wide variety of issues including health, social and moral education, behavior management and emotional support.’

Pastor-leadership is therefore more about creating the conditions, the environment, the space. It’s about care (same root as cure, and in other languages as dear or loved)

Many well meaning leadership teams embrace progressively increasing levels of piloting without even being conscious of that. The pilot model is very visible in organizational cultures where top leadership or to management teams have a disproportionate amount of topics to ‘approve and decide’ in their agenda. These groups and teams are so busy piloting from the fith or tenth floor HQ cockpit that have no time to come down to the pastures and do some pastoral stuff.

 

Mathematize: the 9 things you need to know about things that start with numbers

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Critical Thinking,General,Models and frames,Simplicity | No Comments

Mathematizable thinking is like soldiers building a frontier with razor wired walls. There is an enclosed world and a world outside. Here are ‘the 10 things that X people do’. That’s it. Ten.

Mathematizable thinking provides the comfort of the solidity provided by numbers. ‘Various reasons’ cannot compete with the assurance of ‘the three reasons why’. ‘A road to success’ cannot compete with ‘the 4 steps to’.

We have the 7 habits of successful people, the 8 steps to change management, the 10 things that X people will never do.

Litsmania is an obsession with lists. Media loves this: the top 10, the top 40… Order, ranking, lists, all this provides comfort and a sense of robust thinking, or argument, or research, or voting…

Bloggers are told (‘research shows’ style) that a title with an odd number will be read many times more than then one with an even one. 15 reasons to do X will draw many times more attention than the 12 reasons or say, 14 reasons. Pity Moses did not get 9 Commandments, perhaps they would have been more effective than the 10.

Then, after ‘mathematizable’, the issue is the magical number. 10 things are too many. 5 is much better. But if you want to remember, say 3. As in 3 bullet points. To prioritize, chose 3 as well. And if you want to push it, ask for ‘the one thing’

The ‘number of things’ is a powerful frame, used and misused. We need to be aware of how we use frames and understand that, when it comes to the agreement of how much is much, or many is many, it’s all pretty much cultural. Business culture is compelled to say that ‘10 of something’ is too much, ‘can we have just 3’? It seems that the collective memory is in need of an upgrade. Lengthy debates take place around ‘the right number of’, with no logic or critical thinking behind preferences.

‘If you were to give me just 1 thing…’ ‘But I was planning to give you 7’ ‘Give me 1’

The number upfront is a frame, a border, a reassurance of concrete reality, an invitation to grab it: a 5 point strategy, a 10 point truce plan. There is no logic for ‘the 3 things’ being better than , say, 6. But how we frame and mathematize is part of the art of communicating. I’ll finish here to have 9 paragraphs instead of 10. ‘Research  shows’ that it will be read better.

If skimming is the new reading, critical thinking in organizations will become even harder. Start your own ‘Read-it-all-Movement’.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Communications,Corporate pathologies,Disruptive Ideas,Language,Simplicity | No Comments

There are plenty of studies trying to figure out the differences between digital reading and reading a (physical ) book, for example. A good review can be found in a piece in The New Yorker, on July 16 last year by Maria Konnikova: ‘Being a better online reader’ [21]. One source quoted is Ziming Liu, a professor at San Jose State University, who has analyzed the digital reading experience in a myriad of ways.. One of his statements is that ‘skimming is the new reading’. And he says that ‘the more we read online, the more likely we were to move quickly, without stopping to ponder any one thought’.

Skimming is certainly a child of digital/online reading, often jumping trough the inevitable series of hyperlinks, that sometimes are absolutely needed, and other times people put in to either show some credibility, or naively think that it will connect the author to some kind of Pan Galactic Brotherhood where everything is connected.

Skimming may be a child of digital but not the firstborn child. Skimming was invented a long time ago and, cynically, I’d like to propose that it was invented in business management. It has always felt as if the business executive is an exhausted chap whose brain can’t handle more than 2 A4 pages (‘write me a one page on…’) or with such an Attention Deficit Disorder that requires a good dose of Ritalin to read a proper briefing.

And, then, we invented the Executive Summary. The Wikipedia entry for its definition reads: ‘An executive summary, or management summary, is a short document or section of a document, produced for business purposes, that summarizes a longer report or proposal or a group of related reports in such a way that readers can rapidly become acquainted with a large body of material without having to read it all’.

If the bullet points were too much, we then ‘invented’ skimming. People literally say, ‘could you please skim through and see what you think?’ Said in a rather apologetic tome.

When digital came (50% of the readers of these Daily Thoughts do so on their smartphone, according to my little robots at the back end of the system), skimming became faster and in multiple directions.

The progressive reduction of the reduction of the reduction, to a digested and reduced text that it is ‘skimmed through’, will make comprehension and critical thinking more difficult. The endpoint may be an epidemic of Non Sense.

I am convinced that, today, if you want people to read something properly, grasp the meaning, and provoke some informed thoughts, you have to write a proper briefing. Be brave! Challenge the Tyranny of The One Page. Send a note attachment with the request: ‘please read the full version, read it from top to bottom, do not skim through;  if you can, make notes with your pen (there must still be some around) and then let me know’.

Even more brave, but I can thoroughly recommend it from my heart, send a physical copy. A highly disruptive, how-many-pages document, stack of paper, that can be put on a table. I am sorry, I don’t buy the forest argument if used as an automatic pilot, smokescreen for perpetuating ephemeral digital non-reading.

For the record, I stopped writing Executive Summaries in my consulting proposals many years ago.

(And, yes, I am writing this in digital, but compiling most of it on a physical book that I hope to launch in days! There you go.)