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

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

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

Four observations

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

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

I promise. It works.

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 ‘Better Way’ Webinar Series  – now available to watch on demand

If you had the possibility of designing an ideal organizational structure or redesigning one that you already have, what would you do? Most people would probably answer first with, what they do not want to do or have. We are more aware of what we dislike than having a clear understanding of what we should have. We have our own Christmas shopping list: flexibility, no silos, perhaps most small units, etc. And as a bonus, well, less meetings.

In recent years people have been experimenting with ‘the structures’ perhaps more than before. There has been a lot of music around self-management and, with that, the structure that would come from it. What people have discovered as well is that it’s very difficult to cut and paste. Structures and ways of working that seem to have been very successful in some companies, fail miserably when transferred to others, even if one could say that there was some similarity in the business.

The concept of the ‘requisite organization’ is quite old. Basically, it says that you need to have the organization that you need to have. And this is not a joke. This position points to the direction of the inexistence of one type of organization that is universally better than another. In fact, questioning structures is not the best way to start. The real question is what functionalities you want to have and then, which barriers you will have to avoid, to precisely maintain and enhance those functionalities. Another alternative is to switch from the traditional ‘who does/needs to do what’ to the ‘who knows/needs to know what’. The outcomes are completely different.

A new organizational structure, or a redesign of an existing one, should be the outcome of assessing the relevance of some criteria for the functioning of the business, not the input or the starting point.

The post-pandemic situation brings to the table lots of questions about work, well beyond the ‘from home’ or ‘remote’ false dichotomy. It is our chronic inability to cope with ambiguity that forces people to desperately find an answer, the answer, perfect or close to it. In my view this is one of the key problems. For me, a good start is to accept that the modern company, if that concept exists at all, is at the very least one that is able to ‘host’ the coexistence under one roof of several types of structure, business models, reporting systems, ways of working and types of contracts with employees. As infuriating for management as it may be (it is easier to manage the one monolithic company) it is perhaps the way to the ‘upgrade’.

Incidentally, when structure is seen as ‘intractable’ people resort to the dictatorship of goodness. ‘I solemnly declare that Wednesday is a non-zoom day and that you can’t email over the weekend, enjoy it’.  Dictators have always known what is best for us and the benign dictatorship of ‘this will make you happy’ and ‘we are liberating you’ is not different. Some of those normative are prisons and go against the concept of diversity that the very same company may profess.

Creating Smart New Designs is a crucial leadership priority. But you will not find it in the proverbial ‘survey of CEOs’. Surprisingly, the options are enormous, so is the risk of repeating the same errors. ‘The lockdown’ digitalised many of our relationships. Those zoom days brought to digital the same bad practices that we had in analogue. We can do better. We must do better. Churchill said it: ‘We build our houses and then the houses shape us’.

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Continue the conversation…join me and my team as we explore organizational life post-Covid.

 

Next Thursday:  A Better Way to…design your organizational structures to create a remarkable organization for the future.

The new Promised Land of the so-called ‘future of work’

We know that the new organization has to be very adaptable and flexible, beyond what it has been in the past, but what are the organizational   principles that can lead to that? Is there a singular best model? Or, more importantly, can several possibly competing models coexist in one single organization? And, if so, what kind of management and leadership are to be reinvented?

27th May, 1730 BST/1830 CET

REGISTER NOW ^[1]

 

Also part of the series:

• Webinar 2: “A Better Way to…Create sustainable large scale behavioural and cultural change across your organization.”
  3rd June, 1730 BST/1830 CET

REGISTER NOW ^[1]

 

• Webinar 3: “A Better Way to…Build and enhance your collective leadership capabilities.”
  17th June, 1730 BST/1830 CET

REGISTER NOW ^[1]

‘Continuous improvement’ is part of the management furniture and something that, at face value, one could not disagree with.

But when the (operating system of the) organization becomes dysfunctional in many aspects, has unnecessary complexity, or slowness or, say, is inwards looking, the identification and fixing of some pieces may not be the solution.

People tend to fix, or attempt to fix, the obvious, and often the easy things. Which may be OK, but may also give an impression of strategic fixing, whilst it is in fact changing the oil of the failing car.

The comfort of the this (‘we are doing something about it’) may be so strong as to trigger a softening of the urgency, to seriously look at the whole thing in depth. We love ‘activities’ and ‘initiatives’ (and a project management system behind) and we get carried away with them.

At some point in the dysfunctionality, what you need is to create a ‘new agenda’ so strong that it swallows any previous deficiencies. You need to put yourself ahead of the game before people try to change the oil of the car (and look at the procurement of oil, the type of oil, and the available case studies of the use of that oil elsewhere) and question if you need a new car, or a car at all.

Most corporate dysfunctionalities are self-inflicted. Many of them are not even fully perceived by people inside. And if they do, to try to tackle it may be like asking the arsonists to be the fire brigade as well. Doable, but probably not the best idea.

By all means, tackle known deficiencies but also take a hard look at the fabric behind. Fixing a hole in a dysfunctional super tank may be dangerous, complacent and a starting point towards the sinking.

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Continue the conversation…

 

 ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[2]. Have you got your copy?

 

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.

 

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 ^[3].

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[4], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[5] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[6].

 

What would be wrong with buying gazelles in the first place? The answer I hear sometimes is, ‘Well, the market has plenty of elephants, elephants are strong, have experience, particularly the ones who belong to big herds of …elephants. Besides, we have always bought elephants; we know elephants, we have a whole Department of Procurement dedicated to Elephants’.

We hire people with excellent pedigrees in Big Corporate and we put them in charge of the start-up, which assets include six months funding in the bank, three guys and a telephone.

We create a new division with lots of VPs, lots of functions, lots of titles and we ask them to ‘think differently’.

We fill all the recruitment gaps in the five management teams of the five affiliates, following the same patterns and profiles, and then we get them together for a big off site to talk about ‘culture change’.

We hire ambitious, high adrenaline, no-prisoners-taken, over-achieving, individualistic, Darwinian sales people and then we ask them to work as a team.

There are always natural windows of opportunity in the decision making of the organization beyond which, any undoing will have a significant cost. And the monetary cost is not the most significant one. Training elephants to become gazelles (or gazelles to become elephants) does not sound like a good idea. But this is what we are doing all the time. If you have a window in front of you (the chance to rethink completely whether you need elephants, gazelles or no animals at all), make sure you don’t lose it!

Incidentally, I am not suggesting that ex-Big-Corporate people cannot run start-ups. I am suggesting that it takes a particular ex-Big-Corporate mind to do it and that they often underestimate the challenges of working in an almost zero-support environment. I am saying also that you can’t have it both ways: love entrepreneurship and hire Big Corporate expertise; love diversity and hire clones; love collaboration and teamwork, and choose individual contributions.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[4], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[5] on topics covered in his Daily Thoughts and his books ^[7], and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[6].

 

There was a time, not long ago, when people got fed up with ‘change programmes’ that faded at the speed of light, strategic decisions that were slow in being implemented or never followed up, or a series of often competing ephemeral corporate initiatives, all started with great fanfare and soon disappearing into Bermuda triangles.

(Not long ago? Past tense?).

The solution was to stick the word ‘sustainable’ in front of everything: sustainable change, sustainable culture, sustainable strategies.

That wasn’t a hard job, because ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainability’ had reached adulthood and they were all over the place already: sustainable world, sustainable energy, sustainable public policies, green and sustainable, corporate social responsibility for a sustainable anything, sustainable growth and environmentally sustainable. Hard not to be sustainable.

But in the organization, we need to take a hard look at the sustainability of the word sustainable and do so with great care and critical thinking.

If sustainable strategy means, all fixed, long term, clear destination, set of implementable actions with little ongoing questioning, then, sustainability is not a good competitive advantage.

If sustainable change means we know exactly what is going to happen and we will not have deviations from the plan, then, sustainability is not a competitive advantage either.

Same applies to sustainable culture.

The risk is that sustainable becomes the equivalent to fixed, unquestioned and predictable.

But the term has, of course, intrinsic value, once we have catered for those possible mis-applications.

The real competitive advantage lies in what I call Adaptive Sustainability, which I see as a platform of processes, systems and behaviours that ensure the sustainable capability (strategies, change, culture) but can change gears and directions with zero or little hassle, yet keeping the unchangeable strong.

Here, in this form of Organizational Operating System, change-ability has taken over ‘change’ and ‘sustainable change’, for example.

One of my acid tests? Acquisitions that run smoothly, embraced by all people and with no cultural wars, which is not the same as cultural blindness or insensitivity.

Let’s sustain this discussion and the thinking behind.  Shall we?

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[4], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[5] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[6].

 

Memo to all functions and Business Partners (HR, OD, L&D, Internal/Corporate Communications, Strategy Units, Finance, Health and Safety, Branding/PR, and any other supporting tribe; apologies if we missed somebody): You are fired. But you can get back. Maybe.

If you are back, none of you should have the same configuration, purpose, jobs descriptions and Partner Business Plans as the previous year. You need to reapply for your space in the organization.  However, new functionalities are now required, and they may fall into more than one of the old functions, so don’t take it for granted that you can just get your chairs back. Lines are open. Empty Corporate Spaces are waiting.

The following functions are needed. We declare them vacant. Please apply to as many as you want. Applications need to be supported by evidence that (1) you have the skills, (2) the mental frame and (3) the appetite, to take over one or more of these. You may have heard this before: Previous performance is not indicative of future performance.

1. Storytelling and Narrative. Both top down and bottom up. Not one off, a continuous shaping. We are dumping ‘the employee of the month’ in favour of ‘the story of the month’ and a crowd sourced company narrative.
2. De-cluttering. We need to clean up, simplify, get rid of unnecessary processes and systems.
3. Keepers of the culture and the behavioural DNA. Yes, sure, the CEO does that, the Leadership Team does that, we’ve read that book too. But somebody needs to take particular ownership to make it happen across the board.
4. From Change Management to Ability to Change. Our new focus is change-ability; the creation of an organizational fabric where ‘any change’ can take place (and if possible without calling it ‘change’).
5. Curators of the fluidity of the informal organization, regular health checks. Fluidity of the informal networks, the conversations, the social chattering. We have ignored this for 20 years. We have overbooked expertise in the formal organization. We are switching the focus to the informal one.
6. Greeter/Onboarding/mentoring. For new people coming onboard, it now needs to take one third of the time to become fully functional. This needs to happen peer-to-peer. Open as to exactly how.
7. Critical thinking. Desperately need to inject this across the board. Open-minded as to how as well. But we need to see this progressively embedded in the organization.
8. Connectivity, collaboration. Facilitation of the cross-border enterprise (‘Enterprise Without Borders’) However, we are planning a Big Team Sabbatical, so this is not about ‘more teams’ and team building.
9. Health check ups, Reboot! mechanisms, Time Outs. A built-in system that self-checks and plans reinventions .
10. Space in the world, brand, internal and external seemingly connected. All behavioural, by the way. Not about logos.

These are the initial 10 offerings. For the record, we are well aware that all leaders and managers need to ‘do this’. That is not the point. We are looking, however, at leading functions within the organization, drivers of these needs, groups that are willing to take ownership and drive them.

Joint bids accepted. Rebranding and reinvention of ‘business partnerships’ welcome.

More functionalities are crafted as we speak, and successful re-appointed functions will participate in a second bid.

Lines are open.

PS. Do not infer that because you occupied an obvious space before, you will occupy the same now. Your function is not needed. Functionalities are. Do not assume you will revert to previous ‘tasks’. Hiring by HR is not inevitable. Communicating by Communications, ditto. Culture is not necessarily HR. Change may or may not be OD, etc.  None of the old or the new functionalities belongs to any particular function by law.

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Let’s Join Forces!

 

My team at The Chalfont Project  ^[4] are here to support you and your business.  We can deliver webinars, remote keynotes, masterclasses or round tables tailored to your organization – all designed by me.  Example topics include:

• leadership
• corporate culture
• informal and formal organizational networks
• leading change
• employee engagement

To find out more or speak to us about your specific requirements, contact us now! ^[6]

Or if you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by me. Contact us now ^[6] .

 

Experiment.

Not kidding. Once upon a time ‘experimenting’ was something that only scientists did. Most people would associate the word with labs and white coats.

In the old business environment, the one of the ‘get it right first time’, most things were lineal and predictable. It was a matter of, say, resources to be able to tackle challenges. The old Army model was the old business model. My tanks are bigger than yours. That kind of thing.

Today, most of the old management toolkits are redundant. Why? Because they were built, developed, sold and taught for a linear and relatively stable environment. Concepts such as risk, decision making, or information systems were largely mechanistic. It worked because it was about machines, and we had a good handle on them. Today, we have an environment that changes faster than our own internal structures, processes and systems. That is why long term strategic planning, amongst other things, is dead.

In the absence today of sure input-output models, if they ever were real, we now need to use the Weapons of Mass Instruction: test, prototype, experiment, get it wrong, try again, experiment again, keep going, here is another one I’ve made. No apologies.

If I were the chairman of the Board, I would ask for the Portfolio Of Experiments. But I am not a chairman of any Board.

It’s messy. Certainly more than the old ‘if you do A, I guarantee that you’ll get B’. Today, nobody has a clue as to how X,Y,Z will turn out. It’s a wonderful opportunity to invent, innovate, shape things. Messy, yes, but not boring.

But we need to accept that the modern organization today should look like a host of multiple experiments. Some of them will succeed, some won’t. Next, fast, new. Traditional management sees heterogeneity with horror. The idea that a Business Unit A with little structure, high risk and in unknown territory, could coexist with Business Unit B, full blown predictable, mechanistic, and productive, is not something that is well absorbed. People who tell me, ‘no, not us, we are OK with that’, tend to progress towards uniformity of structure, processes and systems at the speed of light. Give them a couple of months and the Big Consulting Group would have landed to put some order and uniformity on behalf of efficiency. These people are excellent sellers of efficiency when we need effectiveness.

Management is not wired for the messy stuff. We don’t like the messy stuff, because we were not educated for it, we were told this is a sign of bad management, and Harvard Business Review gives us daily and monthly assurances that some people, actually, are in possession of the truth. How nice.

The truth of the truth however is that you make it up as you go along, with multiple pockets of experimentation, multiple risks, multiple fast reactions, and above all, failing faster than anybody else. It’s the Buffett and Munger school of management: we are successful by making less mistakes than others.

By ‘experimenting’ here I mean trying, prototyping, launching hypothesis and testing them across the board: products, services, process, systems and structures. Also structures. All of them.

Leadership is here the art of running the company as a fantastic, magnetic, adventurous Big Lab.

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Continue the conversation…..

Thought leader, keynote speaker and author, Dr Leandro Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements. Find out more ^[5].

 

Leandro Herrero is frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide. He also speaks to Boards and Leadership Teams, participates in other internal company conferences as a keynote speaker, and is available to run short seminars and longer workshops.

The topics of Leandro Herrero’s presentations and workshops relate to his work as an organizational architect.

Each organization has specific needs to be addressed.  Contact us ^[8] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

 

 

At a conference I attended, the very sharp mind of Marten Mickos ^[9], CEO of HackerOne, ex HP, ex Nokia, reminded the audience that ‘the new generations are not worried about the future, but about what the older generations are leaving behind’. I thought it was a great insight in the context of discussions about what Millennials want from life, which took place in a panel of speakers where no visible Millennial had been invited to speak.

Another ‘expert in Millennials’ would assure us that ‘they’ have three distinctive characteristics: (1) They love relationships; (2) They need and follow a cause; (3) They don’t want a job.

These may be true. As caricatures go, this may be a good one. But I’m always puzzled by how these are always portrayed as almost innate and genetic of an entire generation. Are Millennials born with a relationship gene, a purpose and good cause gene, and a no job gene? Or did they all get together in a Global Millennial Alignment Convention and decide on these three features?

The truth about ‘the Millennials characteristics’ maybe more about how the non-Millennials, previous generations have shaped their world, so that the world in front, handed to them, is the only one they know.

They love relationships. Sure, they are ‘there’, in front, at a click and a like. Hyper connectivity is a global phenomenon (but not hyper-collaboration and hyper-proximity) so, they take it because they live it. What nobody really says is that their relationships may be very different from other relationships. The question is what type of relationship, if any at all, is a differentiation between us.

They want and follow a cause. Maybe the previous generations have created more and more causes to follow, so, no shortage, the supply is high. Maybe previous generations are looking at a serious purpose for the organization, having avoided full domestication under ‘the maximisation of shareholder value’, which reached a climax of Robotic Goals and proportions, until legions of people started shouting my favourite slogan: ‘surely, there must be a better way’.

They don’t want a job. Perhaps they don’t want your kind of job, or mine. Perhaps they are redefining ‘job’.

I think that, very often, we have a set of stereotypes and mental frames that we apply easily as a way to comprehend the world. That makes us (feel) more  in control. It’s easy to apply a frame of wishes, desires and predictable behaviours to an entire generation. Some of these behaviours may tell us more about our own ones, and the world that we have prepared and cooked for that generation, than something ‘intrinsic to them’.

The question about Millennials is not whether, or why, they love relationships, a cause, and ‘no jobs’, but whether, or why, we have a world that is craving for better relationships, has organizations that may have forgotten a ‘high purpose’, and jobs not worth having.

Perhaps what Millenials want is the same as we non-Millennials want, but one of us is too shy to say. I think that they are having the meal that we have cooked for them.

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There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children?

 

Try this: Son, I got up every day and went to the office to maximise shareholder value. I also participated in lots of Lean Teams. Ah, and I was an agile employee. In my time, our employee engagement scores went up from 4.5 to 7. Just try. Rehearse this by saying it to yourself in the mirror. Yes, what will we tell the children? That’s probably the only question that matters.

There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children? My children, your children, their children, the children. Apply wisely and broadly. Once you look them in the eyes, you’ll know straight away if the grandiose strategy you are proclaiming has any legs. What we will tell the children is ‘the red face test’ of leadership.

 

 

Extract from my book: The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management. ^[2]

Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. Management needs deprogramming. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

The obsession with what is measurable, leads inevitably to blindness

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

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

 

Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. ^[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 ^[10].

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Many thanks to those of you, who were able to join our first webinar yesterday. Delighted to see so many attendees and from right across the globe. We’ve received great feedback and will be in contact with those of you, who have emailed us to claim your complimentary copy of The Flipping Book ^[2].

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

Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? ^[11]

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

 

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.

 

 

We want the organizational flexibility of Lego. We recruit for the rigidity of a jigsaw

We want the organizational flexibility of Lego. We recruit for the rigidity of a jigsaw: pieces that fit perfectly in a space. When a jigsaw piece goes on maternity leave, or leaves the company, we will replace it with a similar piece that needs to fit in. Exactly. No replacement, hole is visible, jigsaw incomplete. The jigsaw gives us the comfort of the permanent structure of a castle (looks like a castle, the picture of a castle is on the box, not a dragon, or a boat, it’s that particular castle) but tomorrow we want the castle to be a gazelle, or maybe Formula 1, or perhaps something googlesque. The jigsaw needs the ‘expert pieces’, the Lego needs the re-usable pieces. The jigsaw is fixed, no dragons with the pieces of a boat. The Lego is a reconfigurable dragon today, farmhouse tomorrow. Lego or jigsaw, this is all you need to decide in organizational design. Organizational charts are the picture of jigsaws.

For those who want both: you need to at least settle for a percentage of reconfigurable Lego structures in the company. Leading jigsaw organizations are leading prisons, even if they look like golden cages. And you always, always drop that piece in the corridor. Finding the replacement is exhausting.

 

If you have a choice, (re) design an organization on the basis of  ‘who needs to know what’.

If you have a choice to (re) design an organization on the basis of ‘who needs to do what’ or ‘who needs to know what’, always start with ‘who needs to know what’. Then, match against the alternative design based on the former ‘who needs to do what’. If there is no good match, you have just discovered a problem and saved thousands on consulting fees to rescue an unworkable organizational structure.

Organizational design, as usually practiced, is quite irrational. Mostly it’s based upon a military concept of command and control. It is only when alternative designs based upon different criteria are let to compete with each other conceptually, that one can see the pros and cons of each and the kind of trade-offs one is prepared to make.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

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 ^[3].

^[2]

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New webinar series launching in June.

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 ^[13] more information about these webinars.

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.

 

Demonising hierarchy is easy and politically correct but not terribly efficient.

Demonising hierarchy is easy and politically correct but not terribly efficient, unless you have a serious alternative. Most alternatives are simply a type of trade-off. From the hard dictatorship of the top leaders to the benign dictatorship of team leaders. From the benign dictatorship of team leaders, to the invisible dictatorship of the pseudo-democratic ‘we don’t have managers here’. Then, the power to those who shout more. Then, back to ‘I think we need good leaders’. Then, back to some sanitised hierarchical structure. Then up again. It’s merry-go-round management. The only question is when is best to stop the music for a while. Where the best trade-off is.

My very first article on management topics, after my time as a clinical psychiatrist, was entitled ‘Kings or Cousins’. Get rid of the tyranny of the king, but get the tyranny of cousins, barons and local leaders. It’s a choice. Hierarchy will never go away, no matter how attractive and money making for consultants that idea may be. Fighting hierarchy is fighting our natural world, our own animal nature. Hierarchy belongs to the category of the certainty of ‘Death and taxes’. The practical thing to do is to decide on the type of hierarchy, quality and quantity. The dichotomy hierarchical versus non-hierarchical organizations has been fabricated in Academia and Consulting because it’s sexy, forward looking and a good topic for an article in Harvard Business Review.

To preach de-hierarchical-isation is to preach de-humanisation, not the opposite.

To preach de-hierarchical-isation is to preach de-humanisation, not the opposite. When you reframe hierarchies as the problem into hierarchies as the solution, then you’re in business. They can facilitate, resource, create, give permission to act and buffer continuity and reassurance. Those fundamentalists who fight hierarchy as a principle tend to be the ones who are less smart at making good use of it.

The reframing of hierarchy from problem to solution may not make me very popular but I believe that we have created so many antibodies that we have become a bit blind. I am very suspicious of the de-hierarchical-isation movement as a fashion on the catwalk of management.

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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 ^[3].

^[2]

Visit The Flipping Point ^[2] to learn more about the book and other services:

   Request ^[13] a keynote and Q&A on topics from the book.

  ^[14] Request ^[13] one of our webinars:

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

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.

There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children?

There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children? Try this: Son, I got up every day and went to the office to maximise shareholder value. I also participated in lots of Lean Teams. Ah, and I was an agile employee. In my time, our employee engagement scores went up from 4.5 to 7. Just try. Rehearse this by saying it to yourself in the mirror. Yes, what will we tell the children. That’s probably the only question that matters.

 My children, your children, their children, the children. Apply wisely and broadly. Once you look them in the eyes, you’ll know straight away if the grandiose strategy you are proclaiming has any legs. What we will tell the children is ‘the red face test’ of leadership.

If the company is overheating and has no thermostat, every day without an explosion is pure luck.

If the company is overheating and has no thermostat, every day without an explosion is pure luck. Leaders are the thermostats. Amongst other things.

Inspired by the very readable anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen ^[15]. I love his book ‘Small Places, Large Issues’ which has had several editions. His ‘Overheating: an anthropology of Accelerated Change’ was published in 2016. If you read one single book on Anthropology, read his ‘Small Places’.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

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 ^[3].

^[2]

Visit The Flipping Point ^[2] to learn more about the book and other services:

   Request ^[13] a keynote and Q&A on topics from the book.

  ^[14] Request ^[13] one of our webinars:

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

Many organizations seem to run layers of parallel initiatives, all directed at noble goals, and in many cases, without talking to each other. My retrospective and un-scientific count on these in my clients of the last 10 years, which I did a while ago, showed an average of 7 per organization.  I identified Communication programmes, Employee Engagement, Values and Leadership model/programmes, Continuous Improvement, Talent Management, Change Management, Cultural Change, Innovation programme, Idea Management, ERP implementation, Corporate Social Responsibility programmes, Diversity and Inclusion, Six-Sigma, Simplicity Programmes, Agile and several others. The situation has not changed much over the years.

The corporate environment is today pretty cluttered. Leaders of each initiative have a vested interest in each of them, and tend to look at them in isolation. Years ago, I challenged a VP of Safety about how ‘our’ programme should have an impact on innovation. He said, ‘Maybe, but I am not in charge of Innovation’. I regularly gather similar examples in my work.

Unfortunately, it’s very frequent to find that nobody, certainly not even the CEO, is able to put all these initiatives together into a single strategy. To make sense of them all together. I ask the question many times ‘Where is the glue?’ but often I am met with a smile. Also, each initiative runs at its own pace, some travel very fast, some slow, some are transient, some appear and disappear for a while, resuscitating again at a later point in time.

The effect of this situation on the average employee is multiple. Some good (it may provide additional sources of employee engagement), some bad (mistaking the initiative as a tool with the overall company strategy in itself) But the most worrying effect is the saturation of channels. At some point, the mind switches off. It has enough. All becomes ‘noise’ and the ‘signal’ is indistinguishable. Not only is this bad, on its own merit, for all the respective initiatives, but it also injects a great, new stumbling block. From that point on, any new ‘serious’ initiative will have a big mountain to climb and may be mentally written off before it has even started. ‘Here we go again’ becomes the default thinking position.

I have written many times (Disruptive Ideas) that one of the key functions of top leadership is to de-clutter. De-cluttering is a stronger term than simplifying. It literally means killing initiatives. The slight problem is that we are asking the same leaders who clutter the environment, to de-clutter it. That said, de-cluttering should be well rewarded. It keeps communication channels with employees very clean and active, so that the magic currency of ‘attention’ can actually flow, is key to engagement, then the price to pay is to list initiatives and one by one submit them to serious scrutiny. I call it Corporate Spring Cleaning. It works. And it has huge therapeutic effects.

The traditional thinking about divisional and functional structures within organizations, which were born of the need for specialization and a clear division of labour, is that these divisions, functions, or structures are well defined. The presumption is that people will have a clear understanding of the borders between them and a clear agreement of roles and responsibilities. Cake divided, all clear.

But take a modern organization. Let’s say it is a multinational business with territorial presence and multiple support functions across the board. Nowadays, other than the geography (if you are in charge of France and not, say, Italy, this is as clear as it gets) many other boundaries are far from clear.

Support functions have often far less clarity and more question marks around their identity. Corporate PR and Communication functions are challenged by Marketing. ‘This is our territory’, they may say, ‘we don’t need you’. These functions then challenge Marketing on brand communications. “We are the ones who know how to communicate’.  Social media comes along and challenges everybody. ‘Where do I sit, guys?’ Internal communications is challenged by modern HR and HR is in turn challenged by Internal communications on Employee Engagement. ‘It’s mine’; ‘no it’s mine’. R&D and Corporate or Business Development are often parallel competitors for The Product. ‘We will make it’ says R&D. ‘No, we will buy it; it’s cheaper than paying your salaries and we get a more decent return’. If your corporation has a Strategic Function, the Business Units, may say to that function: ‘Who do you think you are?’ In a multinational client, last year, I counted seven distinct functions who, during my interviews, claimed to me to be in charge of Strategy.

We are spending a lot of time on the ‘this is mine, this is yours’ game, because the borders are open and there is no point any more in appointing Border Guards – nobody will take them seriously.

Since there is no right or wrong, only capabilities, my suggestion: Occupy The Street!  Plant your tent, light the fire, display your banners. After occupying, behave like occupiers with a mission, and quickly start delivering.

When I push my clients on the idea of ‘occupy the space’ – and, believe me, I do – I often hear ‘ but surely, it is not up to us; they must tell us what space we can occupy’. ‘They’, the magic corporate ‘they’, is usually those guys on the Executive 10^th floor (who, the assumption goes),  have all the answers. ‘They’ either don’t tell you, or play a strange guessing game. But the main reason why ‘they’ don’t tell you, is because ‘they’ don’t have a clue (because nobody has, because there is no right or wrong, because these rules have not been written).

One thing ‘they’ (and, incidentally, you as well) don’t like, is empty space. My unwritten Law of Corporate Thermodynamics says that ‘Any free space will be filled so that all the little boxes in the organization chart can take care of everything and deliver comfort to leaders’. So, before the Law is applied, occupy the space, occupy the street, take charge and show the value of getting things done. ‘They’ may not have the appetite to send in the troupes to take the tents down. Who knows, ‘they’ may even welcome the whole thing and showcase you as an example of ‘taking accountability’.

Occupy it! If you don’t, somebody will.

Cost cutting, cutting to the bone, cutting resources down to the bare minimum is praised as efficient. But it’s not. Once all the resources have been reduced to a minimum, a series of unintended consequences are seen. People who used to interface with 5 others, now have to do so with 15. Personal touch or intervention becomes mechanical. A sense of exploitation decreases employee engagement. Corporate memory disappears. Knowledge transfer is impossible. I can list 20 or more negative consequences.

The problem is that having been crafted under the banner of ‘efficiency’, it becomes politically incorrect to challenge it.

Overlapping jobs, shadow roles, some slack, even some reasonable duplication, may in reality be very efficient. It provides the cushion needed for knowledge transfer, organizational learning, contingencies, rapid reaction to customers and, above all, a fluid human fabric that can be employed in a flexible way.

The ‘centralisation’ of services ‘at any cost’,  the avoidance of duplications even small, the resourcing with no slack of any kind, is a fundamentalist view of the organization that only people who have never run organizations (and you can find lots of them in Big Consulting Groups) can recommend. It’s a nonsense mantra that only pleases people who mistake the company for a spreadsheet.

The cost savings can result in a very poor ROI. A very, very, very efficient company with no slack, would not have my money.

I am your customer, you are my customer. When I need to provide you with something, you are my customer. When you need to do the same for me, I am your customer. I am marketing, you, finance, are my customer when you ask me for data.  I am corporate finance, you, country finance, are my customers. I am R&D, my customer is marketing and sales. I am sales, my customers are the consumers. I am information management, the rest of the company is my customer.

The customer-centric mantra that has been in place for many years has created this muddle. Not pronouncing the word ‘customer’ is so politically incorrect that we tend to pollinate our thinking and our language with it, to make sure we don’t miss it. There is an historical point and reason behind this. Many organizations work in silo mode with low grade cross-communication and cross-collaboration, so, it made sense at some point to inject a bit of ‘consumer mentality’ to make the point that we are all serving each other, in one way or another, within the organization. However, by over customer-izing the language, the real customer gets lost or neglected. There is only one customer, the ones who pays the bill. This is the external customer – an individual in Business to Customer (B2C) a company in Business to Business (B2B). Anything else is muddled thinking.

I encourage my clients to make language choices. The internal “I serve you, you serve me’ may need a different language: call it client, business partner, co-workers, co-dependents, chums, internal service providers… I am playing silly language games here on purpose. Find a way, other than ‘customer,’ so that we can have a real conversation about the real customer. So, a simple rule such as ‘the customer is always external’ could do the trick. Of course, there may be more than one external customer, of course.

Cleaning up internal language is important. Customer-izing the internal organization may be nice and rewarding. It may create a good feeling of cooperation, but it dilutes the external focus. And since many companies spend 90% of their time looking inwards and 10% outwards, a bit of ‘externalization of the customer language’ would do nicely.

The trouble with consensus is that it contains all the risks of poor thinking and all the possible cognitive biases, all in one. Yet, I am not saying we don’t need consensus, or that consensus is bad. We all have experienced the blessing of achieving it, and its anxiolytic properties. Something inside us is telling us, this is a good thing. But let’s try this.

If you start with consensus in mind as the uniquely desired outcome, your mind will try to avoid conflict as fast as possible. If you avoid conflict, you’ll miss the real issue very soon. You’ll be poorer. But perhaps happier.

When we reach consensus, we give consent to each other (this is the root): consent to agree, to feel good and proud, to feel that the debate was good, and, above all, that we are such great people who can achieve this, unlike the other terrible ones who are still discussing, and ‘can never agree’.

The role of the leader is to avoid consensus, not to create it; to make sure that there is tension, that people pulling in different directions can really pull. There is a false concept of leadership which equates leadership with conflict resolution. The leader in an organization is not a Chief Negotiator in Peace Talks. Tension is good. We need more. But we fear it, don’t like it, and we dress it up with adjectives such as ‘creative tension’. That, apparently, dilutes the toxicity a bit.

You may now be on the path of being perplexed reading this. I am stretching the argument by polarising the extremes. I am avoiding reaching an easy and early consensus with you. Please don’t agree with me. Not yet.

More. If you ran a product oriented organization, say, with Marketing, Sales, R&D and Manufacturing, you want each of these functions to be in tension, not in consensus. Sales wants as many forms and shapes and prices for the product as possible. R&D wants one that works. Marketing only the ones that sell. Manufacturing wants one version, one box, one size, one colour. The CFO wants the cheapest. Etc. If you start from consensus, probably nobody is doing a good job. Let the functions pull out. That is the only way to see, hear and feel the merits of each argument.

At some point, at some magic milestone, somebody, somewhere (hello leadership) has to put an end to tension and call a decision. The decision will be based on data plus judgement. The decision(s) may be individual, may be collective. That point of decision may or may not be equal to consensus. On the contrary the tensions may remain. But decisions are made. Here we go. Disconnect agreement from consensus at all costs.

The art of the leader is to navigate the tensions, not to suppress them, and to do so with imagination, humanity, respect, encouragement of openness, allowing displays of passions (not suppressing them) and making sure that everybody is at his or her very best. That is by definition messy. The leader needs to master the messy stuff to allow all expressions, all the tensions, and yet, maintain humanity and sanity.

And yes, for the record, there may be a healthy consensus! Consensus is perhaps at its best when it is a silent outcome with no label, a destination reached without knowing that you were travelling there.

The words consensus and agreement cannot be allowed to become the normal every day status. With the best of intentions, they may be the modern organizational barbiturates.

‘The exercise was very rich, everybody participated deeply, the walls were full of flipcharts with stuff. So many 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 a 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 focuses 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 what 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 hardly real. But it can pay the mortgage and even give you a promotion. We manage organizations with unreal pictures, filtered realities and dwarfed versions of issues. There is a title in traditional management education that helps you to avoid this.

These two positions may be part of 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.

Chinese proverb that is, what else?

I wish we could be as crystal clear when it comes to the characteristics required to be a good manager, or a top leader. But we don’t have this criteria. Well, we do, of course, in the form of lists and pieces of ‘research’.

Google’s famous 8 characteristics for a good manager comes in the form of ’behaviours’ (the quote/unquote is needed because mad behavioural-ists like myself would object that these are not real behaviours):

1. Be a good coach
2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage
3. Express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being
4. Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented
5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team
6. Help your employees with career development
7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team

It sounds to me, like a plan to ensure you have really, really, good… guys around you. Sorry, managers.

Seriously. If you want lists, I can give you lists. And books. And pieces of research (so you can start the line with ‘research says’). They are all there. But leaders in organizations, with or without external help, need to make up their minds about what is needed here today and here tomorrow. Two different things by the way.

If you tell me that what you need is good communication skills, teamwork, accountability, people who go the extra mile, open people, and people who listen, I would say, great, these are characteristics without which you must not open the shop. That’s your smiling face package.

Now tell me how this is going to work, when the shop is open, when you have gathered all your people with smiling faces.

You must park that list, next flip chart, and start serious discussion about the kind of people who will open the shop again and again, and the new shop 3 years from now.

One single pointer as an example: control. Start with control. Who should control what and why. Lots of control? Not much? What is the control atmosphere index in your organization? If it is high and you want to lower it, for example, then what kind of people do you need, and what kind of non negotiable behaviours? Because the 8 Google-ite characteristics above could in theory work well in different levels of control. So, you want all the smiling faces now to start smiling on their own? Without Smiling Manager? For example.

OK, we are opening a little Pandora box here.

There is a big difference between copying and reverse engineering. Many people in business wish they could copy the great successes, the visible achievers. Perhaps not the Google, Apple, Amazon etc., but other models and ways. After all, we have been told for years that ‘Best Practices’ are the most important source of learning. In the old days, we were told we needed to copy the GE workouts, or the Japanese Quality circles, or the Kaizen ways. Today, other models such as Agility, or Holacracy and Zappos, or both, all in one, reach the headlines of the ‘latest in management’.

There is an intrinsic difficulty in many models: their surprising lack of transferability. Some are more transferable than others, but most of the time doing the transplant is a dangerous business.

I think that reverse engineering and pausing (deconstruct, unbundle, think critically about what you see) has greater merit than the ‘model transplant’. Reverse engineering allows you to find out the principles before the outcomes, the rules of the game before the endgame, the deeper human dynamics before the organization chart.

When I launched Viral Change™ ^[16] formally in 2006, we were already on a continuous process of reverse engineering people mobilization. And the two places to start the unbundling were unconventional (for management standards) : social movements and network theory. Close to 2008 and then until 2012 and beyond, it was obvious to me that we were missing the greatest source of knowledge for people mobilization: political (science, movement) marketing. You’ll recognise the milestones as the US presidential campaigns. Since then, we have been dissecting and reverse engineering the political mobilization platforms, including digital activism. This is what has given the Viral Change Mobilizing Platform the ability to host and provide an ‘operating system’ for things as diverse as ‘standard’ change management, employee engagement or cultural change. Viral Change is today a fully fleshed out mobilizing platform as opposed to a ‘change method’. (it has methods inside).

I see again and again in my consulting practice the presence of some organizational designs, in small or in big, that have been ‘installed’ in particular organizations with the hope that, being a mirror, or a copy, of what other successful people have done (typically in manufacturing) they per se will become the vehicle of success. Risky business, when deprived from context and culture. A good idea in A does not make the same good idea for B.

The old Best Practices and its sister Benchmarking were successful at pointing to what other people had achieved, but often created an illusion of solution by transplanting them or copying them. If I had to trace back my very early interest in the organizational world, coming from clinical psychiatry and academia, about hundred moons ago, I would say it was this question: how is it possible that organization A and B share more or less the same resources in size and market, similar culture, similar product portfolio, similar industry sector, but whilst A is extremely successful, B fails miserably?

Pretending to become A when you are B is the wrong way to approach it. Deconstructing success and reverse-engineering both, their success and our own failure, is a good start.