A  client, senior manager, mentioned to me recently that his company spent a disproportionate amount of time ‘getting ready’. He was referring to a product launch. He was critical, yet he found it difficult to push back because how could anybody argue against doing proper homework, that is, markets, competitors, own skills etc? Many colleagues shared the ‘readiness discomfort’ but nobody dared to call it out.

This is far from uncommon. I used to use a slide in my presentations showing a pie chart which represented the percentage of time we tend to spend on a topic/strategy: 25% thinking of doing; 40% planning for doing; 20% getting absolutely ready for doing, including announcing of doing; 15% doing.

The need to do the homework has not gone away. What has gone away is a clear sense of sequence: A,B,C and then D will happen. In fact the sequential world is an illusion. Woody Allen’s description of London as ‘all the seasons in one afternoon’ would be a fair representation of today’s business environment. It’s ready for A whilst doing C.

In a recent great conference under the theme ‘Organizing for Transformation’, at which I was kindly invited to deliver the keynote, I gently (and respectfully, I hope) challenged the title as somehow implying that you stop the place and organize, and then transform. Of course whoever created the title did not mean that. It was obvious. But I pointed it out as a way to uncover how our brain works and love orderly sequence. The old saying ‘flying whilst bolting the wings of the airplane’ (and its many variations) is spot on. It describes today. A,B,C is  ready for A whilst doing C.

Let me attempt to reframe:

1. Readiness is mostly a red herring. Nobody is ever truly ready. We have attached the label to a point in time in which we decided to act and act. Readiness to walk is mostly a state of people already walking.
2. Preparedness is often used as a coterminous, a synonymous of readiness. However, this term (wildly used in the military) is for me much broader and deals with all this ‘homework’ and conditions needed for ‘the plane to fly, and bolt the wings, and man the control tower, and buy parachutes’.
3. Change-ability is for me a way to shape the operating system of an organization that allows for semi-permanent state of preparedness and readiness and whatever else we can throw in.

Which means that I would put my money on change-ability, on creating organizational DNA and people/process operating systems that allows me to navigate, sail, fly and achieve without ‘constant  disruption’.

If a programme, initiative, method does not build lasting capacity, today it’s not worth the money. Change management is dead. Change-ability is a premium.

Are there any possible conditions for this?

Let me come back to you.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

There is no change unless there is behavioural change. From supporting your business as you adjust to the ‘new normal’ through our Feed Forward 90-day programme to driving large scale cultural and behavioural change that is sustainable for the long term through Viral Change™ – we are your organization architects.

 

FEED FORWARD – 90 day programme ^[1]

Feed Forward from The Chalfont Project, will help you create sustainable behavioural and cultural change across your organization/team/department.

Using the Five Disciplines of Viral Change™ we have developed Feed Forward.  Why? Because post Covid-19 to combat the organizational impact of the pandemic, we’ll need a behavioural counter-epidemic inside the company. This can be done but requires a real social movement, not the traditional ‘change programme’.

At The Chalfont Project ^[2], we have been orchestrating internal social movement in organizations for many years and we are ready to help you now, using the Five Disciplines of Viral Change™ ^[3]:

• 1. Behaviours (what are your key behaviours?)
• 2. Peer-to-peer networks (the greatest force in any organization)
• 3. Influence (identify your key influencers)
• 4. Storytelling (stories are more powerful than facts)
• 5. Leadership (which needs to own the ‘new normal’).

 

Contact The Chalfont Project team ^[4] to find out more information about Feed Forward, or to discuss how we can support your business.

 

___________________________________________________

Viral Change ™: model, method and way of life, all in one

Viral Change™ ^[5] uses the power of a small set of well-defined non-negotiable behaviours, spread by small groups of highly connected individuals within the organization. Their peer-to-peer influence – more powerful than hierarchical one – creates new norms, new ways of doing, new cultures. When groups start doing things the new way, other groups follow. Stories of success spread. Stories are memorable, behaviours are contagious… bullet points are not. There are great similarities between biological infection and idea infection. For proof, just look at any social phenomenon around you!

Viral Change™ ^[5] is a way to understand the organization as an organism instead of a machine. It is a method to create large scale change to meet specific business objectives. It is also a day-to-day way of life in the organization in a permanent state of readiness. If you want to master any of these, we’ll be there to guide and work with you.

 

Contact us ^[4] today to find out more about Viral Change™.

 

Ryan Holiday ^[6] (media critic, stoicism vendor, marketing strategist) is ‘the bestselling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. Ryan is an editor-at-large of the Business & Technology section at the New York Observer and he lives in Austin, Texas’.

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

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

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

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

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

What about the leader as a designer of spaces, a social architect that creates places (physical) and spaces? Not hard to imagine, but I think it is an underestimated concept, perhaps lost in the rhetoric, in the analogy.

Leaders need to create space for employee voices. For that read opportunities, platforms (digital and analogue), vehicles, processes and systems if needed, and, above all, the encouragement of behaviours: speak up, make yourself heard, provide an input, contribute, not just ‘doing your job’. This is the first space.

The second space is the informal organization, the one that does not ‘contain’ teams, committees, task forces, fixed conference calls and any other formal structure. Here, read the corridors, the buffer time, the cafeteria, the informal brainstorm. The informal organization is the oxygen of the company. Shrink that supply at your peril.  This second space is also a mixture of physical and psychological spaces. Table tennis in a corner is not enough if there is not a culture of informal conversations, or if the culture sees them – those spaces, those semi-artificial break outs – as a waste.

The third space is personal. The space to think and reflect, to look at things with a critical view, to digest and compare, to form an opinion, to open yourself to the possible aha! To say, “I have a Wednesday afternoon free for this”, does not work. It must be embedded in the culture. A culture of 24/7 busy-ness does not provide that space.

The fourth space is also personal. It is the space of professional and personal development. It includes, of course, formal courses and training but goes well beyond these to mentoring, to time to shadow somebody, to do something that is not in the job description, or well beyond these, stretching people’s skills and imagination. This space requires the leader to not only accept, but create some slack in the system, some redundancy, some buffer that is not considered a waste. ‘Personal’ and ‘professional’ are blurred here. The thing not to do is to be obsessed with the ROI, with how doing this could have an immediate return. As soon as you start counting these beans, the desired effect goes out of the window.

The fifth space is collective. It’s the space for experimentation with ideas, the generation of as many bad ones as possible, the mental prototyping of possibilities, the playing with ‘unfinished thoughts’ and half-baked opportunities. Many leaders hate this. These are the ones putting off employees by saying, “come back when you have a perfect business case”. Since there is no such thing, people never go back.

Yes, leaders need to see themselves as architects, as space designers, creators, and implementors. This is an area where, what the leader says counts less than what the leader does in this social engineering. It is therefore very silent, but the spaces will be very visible and the legacy will be enormous.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

‘The informal organization is the oxygen of the company. Shrink that supply at your peril.’

 

3CXCAN ^[7] PROVIDES A DIAGNOSIS OF YOUR

FORMAL AND INFORMAL ORGANIZATIONAL NETWORKS

 

Do you want to know how your employees truly collaborate with each other? Or how informal conversations take place in your organization?

Well you can with 3CXcan ^[7] – an online survey that reveals your formal and informal connections. We have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality. Find out more. ^[7]

Contact us now ^[4] for a free virtual consultation or for a short walk through our demonstration.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a Norwegian Anthropology professor that has achieved more than any of his fellow anthropologists: you only need to read his books once.

His books are gems. My favourite is ‘Small Places — Large Issues’ ^[8], followed by The Tyranny of the Moment ^[9].

And we have a lot of this tyranny in management. The book feels dated more than a decade after written, but its principles are sound and even more prominent today. For example the argument in favour of ‘private periods’ of thinking without interruption. Have you heard about that one?

In the 24/7 regime we live in, the instant is a premium. Forget instant coffee, it is instant knowledge and instant answers. It is instant broadcasting, and posting, and liking it, and requesting an (instant) answer. Prisoners of the moment, our concept of space and time is changing fast.

The world is split between the ones who say that we are going in the wrong direction, the ones who say this is great, and the other third who say, what the hell are you talking about? The later is Age Related Incomprehension to ridiculous dilemmas.

There is a tyranny of the moment in our management lives. You’ll find it in the Outlook calendar booked weeks in advance, the secretary responding with the usual, I don’t know if this will be possible until (read here months in advance, even) and the Overall Kingdom of Busyness for the Sake of It.

Again, another leadership, little reflection. Much of this may be self-inflicted. This is bad enough. But as leaders, we are inflicting that tyranny on those working for us. Surely, we must stop and think.

(Wait a minute, did you mean now? In this very moment? What a Tyrant!).

Perhaps there is a form of Liberating Leadership waiting for a book.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Let’s Join Forces!

 

The team at The Chalfont Project ^[2] 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 Dr Leandro Herrero.  Example topics include:

• leadership
• corporate culture
• internal influencers
• leading change
• employee engagement

To find out more or speak to us about your specific requirements, contact us now! ^[4]

Or if you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now ^[4] .

 

Nuccio Ordine, ^[10] an Italian professor, has written an essay of this title, to my knowledge not translated into English. It talks about the usefulness of knowledge which has no immediate translation into specific, practical benefits. Perhaps the type of things that make us better humans but don’t have a strict, immediate material pay off. He is talking about the Humanities, or philosophy, or those disciplines that are disconnected within the obvious ‘making money out of it’. He talks about the concept of ‘useful’ being only understood as something that has to do with a profession, with an application and, above all, an application with monetary outcome. He says that ” the modern man, who no longer has time to dwell on useless things, is bound to become a soulless machine”.

If there is a sector of society where this concept of utility is taken to these extremes, it is perhaps business and the business organization. The traditional ‘effective’ organization, conceived as a machine, is obsessed with effectiveness. Therefore anything that has no obvious ‘utility’ is bound to generate antibodies. Here is a list: informal conversations, duplications of or shared roles, debates, free floating time, etc. Even ‘brainstorming’ conceived as a free space of ideas, requires from us an immediate summary and prioritisation. Fear of leaving things with ‘no closure’ is high, even a sign of ‘bad management’. We are supposed to be effective, concrete, practical, sharp, simple, outcome driven, conclusive and decisive. There is no room for the ‘use-less’ time where there is no obvious practical outcome. It is simply, at the very least, politically incorrect to behave that way.

The constrained, machinery-like approach to organizational life is missing the point. It kills creativity and innovation. Detractors of the ‘use-less’, ‘no obvious-outcome-yet’, say that the risk is inefficiency and waste. They tend to see the issue in black and white, where only a type of black is good management. But the presence of some ‘use-less’ space and time may be the clue for the ultimate usefulness. Leaders should protect ‘use-less’ spaces as much as an organism needs oxygen.

Back in June 2016, people could walk over floating piers on Lake Iseo (Italy), all covered with yellow material, one of the ‘wrapping’ projects by Christo ^[11]. Other projects have included the wrapping of Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin and The Gates in New York City’s Central Park.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New units:

• Certificate of existence = 280 characters (Twitter)
• Presentation of ideas, maximum attention span = 18 mins (TED)
• Digital reading, maximum attention space = 1 or 2 max smartphone screens. (Not a long time ago we used something called ‘one page’, as in, ‘I’ll send you a one-page summary’. It was a unit in its own right. This is now a smartphone screen with the exceptional allowance of a bit of scrolling down).
• Business time unit = a quarter (long time in existence substituting the Gregorian calendar)
• A dialogue = a digital chat (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Text message, etc)
• Business reality: whatever can fit on a PowerPoint slide and bullet-pointed (like this text, of course).
• A book page = a kindle screen.
• Busy-ness score = number of emails in my inbox.
• What your boss needs to know = Executive summary (most likely she will never read the 30 pages behind it).

Disruptive Innovations coming up strong:

• The book (hardback is more innovation-disruptive)
• A physical letter (handwritten even more disruptive; try to write one to your children, it’s a perfect start)
• A face-to-face conversation (incredibly disruptive, if with a loved one and a bottle of wine, but also works with colleagues at work, loved or not)
• A briefing document with no Executive Summary
• Presentation with no slides (this disruptive innovation has been in the making for years, but it has not quite made it yet)
• Bookshop and library browsing
• Silence (included in my ‘Border Diet ^[12]’)
• Banning the word ‘Basically’ at the start of a sentence.

(Sorry, I am running out of screen…)

Forget work-life balance. It was a good concept that did a lot of good but has now retired. It cannot any longer  survive in the digital world.

This is not an apocalyptic warning of a permanent state of work slavery. In fact, on the contrary, the end of the world in this area has been permanently postponed. But it forces us to deconstruct the building of the original idea and reconstruct one with perhaps some of the old bricks, but looking very differently.

The first thing to go is the arithmetic. The ‘balance’ implied a number. How much of work? How much of life? Was 50/50 OK? Or perhaps 40/60?

Also, work-life antithesis promoted an automatic and unconscious judgement: life became the opposite of work, so work equals not life. Perhaps here the expression ‘get a life’?

Today, the current ‘imbalanced slavery’, if any, means 24/7 attached to the server. Or in the cloud. How did we get to this?

For starters, some managers expected it and even demanded it. But this is old stuff. I have known many who clearly and openly stated ‘I expect you to answer my e-mail within 4 hours’. I remember vividly a particularly highly paid super leader of a highly complex organization, admittedly with an ego highly hyper-developed. All his direct reports were terrified. I am talking many moons ago. So, yes, there were, and are, leaders expecting this.

But then, the smartphone came in. They (we) don’t need to be that vocal now. All they (we) have to do is to fire emails, or texts, at 2 am, or every hour, or half an hour, so that the world knows that they (we) are active, ‘at the helm’, hard workers and committed corporate citizens. Nobody needs to say respond. People just do, because everybody is online anyway, so the circle perpetuates itself.

This tale of villainous bosses and heroe employees looks today increasingly rubbish. When humankind walks around looking down, bended towards a screen, and a sophisticated and overpriced watch can bip you every few seconds with an alert, friend’s text, a news alert, or your pulse, the old blame game does not hold anymore. We are all victims. We all are villains.

Imposed bans on ‘hours of email’ or weekends blackout are increasingly dated, if not absurd. Many people want to do work emails on weekends so that they can feel ‘free’ on Monday morning, For those, the slavery is the prohibition.

Today, the individual needs to lead the on and off switch. Always on is bad. Always off is bad. Maybe. You find out. (But, as leader, what you do or not, is not just personal, it has implications as a role model).

The work-life balance today and the one just a very few years ago have little to do with each other. The dichotomy concept does not make sense anymore. The question is not that balance anymore. The only question, one that the new young generations seem to be rather proficient at, is, what kind of Life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Borders. High fences make good neighbours. Fenced spaces.

Don’t forget Socrates.

[1] January starts around the 10^th of the month. February is shorter and boring. Unless you go skiing, which half of the office does. March is promising at first, but too close to Easter to think seriously. April is either pre Easter, Easter or post Easter, so no good to start anything. May is too close to the summer break. June has more people than predicted on holidays, a pain. July and August, forget it, no full house on anything. September properly starts mid way. Holidays are really tiring. October is budget, no other life. But lots of conferences, so no real time. November is performance management and budget approvals. Too exciting. December has the most challenging of tasks: to decide on Christmas parties. December is not a proper month, it’s a simple excuse and long prelude to New Year’s Eve.

[2] On top of the above calendar of wholly unsuitable months, if you are in Spain you get extra 44 days of no work, fully paid, on top of  Saturdays and Sundays, that is. About 30 in Germany or Ireland, 27 in Switzerland and 28 in the UK. France 36, although it always feels like 56. (In the US the concept does not exist, no statutory duty, employers can do whatever they want)

[3] And the week. Ah the week! If you think about it, Mondays are just the thing before Tuesdays, not an entity on their own, but they shape what happens on Tuesdays since there has been a full day to prepare.  I am never sure about Wednesdays since they look dangerously similar to Tuesdays. Besides they are treacherously in the middle so we can’t get a proper three days together on anything.  You might as well skip them and get into Thursdays which are the only serious days of the week. Fridays have a named restaurant chain (Thanks God It’s Friday, TGIF) as a form of gratitude to heavens for the end of the previous torture. Friday is a shorter day anyway, and you must wear casual, so it’s not the real thing.  Saturdays and Sundays only exist because their religious connotations that could not fit in during the very busy week.  And football.

[4] In summary, there is simply no time to do anything, so I do to know why people complain that things are not done.  The miracle is that some things are done. Let Microsoft Outlook be injected by Artificial Intelligence to see if we can fix all this. I mean, to work even less, because most people are tired and, according to Gallup, disengaged. What Gallup does not seem to grasp is that  employee engagement is low because we don’t have time to engage.

PS: I know somebody ( so a true story) who works as a tour guide in Ireland, who makes a case to convince American tourists (that is, the tourists) that they don’t have Wednesdays in the country. They simple skip Wednesdays and go straight from Tuesdays to Thursdays, to make a nice, shorter, manageable week. At the first incredulous look, he says, not to worry, they have an extra month so they can catch up. It’s called Febrensdury, just after February. So it’s all good. It started as a joke, perhaps to get attention, but he is always taken aback by the number of tourists who challenge him: ‘Hold on! Wait a minute! That’s not good. If you do that, you still loose days’, whilst reaching for the calculator in the smartphone and start computing, sometimes as a couple. ‘You see, the numbers don’t tally, man!’

PS2. Time is only in your mind. Not a real thing. We are in a Matrix, anyway. Don’t fight it.

Ryan Holiday (media critic, stoicism vendor, marketing strategist) is ‘the best-selling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. Ryan is an editor-at-large for the Observer, and he lives in Austin, Texas’.

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

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

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

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

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

This is a straight quote from Nassim Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile)

A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

It’s a excellent reflection.

My antilibrary is of Alexandrian proportions.

But Taleb’s ones are in the library.

I am convinced that the books in my library talk to each other during the night and decide between them what ideas I should pursue the next day. There is a nocturnal conspiracy around me. I just know.

 

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

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

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

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

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

Winnicott would have agreed. I hope

Forget work-life balance. It was a good concept that did a lot of good but has now retired. It cannot  any longer  survive in the digital world.

This is not an apocalyptic warning of a permanent state of work slavery. In fact, on the contrary, the end of the world in this area has been permanently postponed. But it forces us to deconstruct the building of the original idea and reconstruct one with perhaps with some of the old bricks, but looking very differently.

The first thing to go is the arithmetic. The ‘balance’ implied a number. How much of work? How much of life? Was 50/50 OK? Or perhaps 40/60?

Also, work-life antithesis promoted an automatic and unconscious judgment: life became the opposite of work, so work equals not life. Perhaps here the expression ‘get a life’?

Today, the current ‘imbalanced slavery’, if any, means 24/7 attached to the server. Or in the cloud. How did we get to this?

For starters, some managers expected it and even demanded it. But this is old stuff. I have known many who clearly and openly stated ‘I expect you to answer my e-mail within 4 hours’. I remember vividly a particularly highly paid super leader of a highly complex organization, admittedly with an ego highly hyper-developed. All his direct reports were terrified. I am talking many moons ago. So, yes, there were, and are, leaders expecting this.

But then, the smartphone came in. They (we) don’t need to be that vocal now. All they (we) have to do is to fire emails, or texts, at 2 am, or every hour, or half an hour, so that the world knows that they (we) are active, ‘at the helm’, hard workers and committed corporate citizens. Nobody needs to say respond. People just do, because everybody is online anyway, so the circle perpetuates itself.

This tale of villain bosses and heroes employees looks today increasingly rubbish. When humankind walks around looking down, bended towards a screen, and a sophisticated and overpriced watch can bip you every few seconds with an alert, friend’s text, a news alert, or your pulse, the old blame game does not hold anymore. We are all victims. We all are villains.

Imposed bans on ‘hours of email’ or week-ends blackout are increasingly dated, if not absurd. Many people want to do work emails on weekends so that they can feel ‘free’ on Monday morning, For those, the slavery is the prohibition.

Today, the individual needs to lead the on and off switch. Always on is bad. Always off is bad. Maybe. You find out. (But, as leader, what you do or not, is not just personal, it has implications as a role model).

The work-life balance today and the one just a very few years ago have little to do with each other. The dichotomy concept does not make sense anymore. The question is not that balance anymore. The only question, one that the new young generations seem to be rather proficient at, is, what kind of Life.

 

 

Entire organizations are kept alive and kicking by the glass-half-full-people whilst the glass-half-empty-people spend their time feeling sorry for themselves.

The reality is the same for both types. One of them drive the future, the other is anchored in either complaining about the present or blaming the past. A team of glass-half-full people can deal with challenges, cope with limitations and conduct a search for opportunities.

Where are those people? Most likely around you or in front of you. It’s not as simple as looking for the optimists and the extroverts. These people build strategies with not-100-per-cent-perfect-data; see the opportunities when others see shortcomings; and, one of my favourite types that I keep talking about, they get things done first even if in a broken process and then step back and try to fix the process, in that order.

The glass is probably never full anyway (I know, I know, clever people say it is always full at least of air, thanks) so it is always interesting to know what side of the content people are.

One of my favourite diagnostic kits has to do with time. Time being the same for a group of people, some say ‘there is no much time for this, only 2 hours’, whilst others say ‘we have as much as 2 hours to do this’. Both have two hours.

As both have the same glass, the same reality. Funny enough, both the glass-always-half-empty people and the glass-always-half-full people, are paid the same. How come?

Is this affiliation to one side of the content natural? Who knows. What I can certify is that the perception of the glass is significantly filtered by your peers.

A working environment in which the default position is to call out all the time ‘what we don’t have’ (we don’t have the  money, we are not that kind of company, we are not mature enough, we are not entrepreneurial, we don’t have the proper processes and systems) is as contagious as the opposite.

If you hire lots of glass-always-half-empty people and you put them to work together, don’t  expect miracles of collective positivism. Social transplant of active members of the opposite tribe is the only solution.

Yes, we are in the era of ‘elevator pitches’, of one page formulations, a clear summary, a 140 character message and one screen max this-is-the-latest of. OK. I get that.

So we are in Dragons’ Den territory, like the BBC programme in which ‘budding entrepreneurs get three minutes to pitch their business ideas to five multi-millionaires who are willing to invest their own cash to kick-start the businesses in the original “Shark Tank”. It is performance, clarity of the pitch, convincing arguments, chemistry, data ready, killer-question-proof presentation, one off chance, there we go, here is the money. Or not. The one chance.

Considering this is not a BBC programme but the British version of Money Tigers originated in Japan, and now running in 30 countries, that gives you an idea of how widespread the ‘pitching attraction’ is. Give us dragons or lions and a few human beings. It’s entertaining. Romans knew that.

Our organizations have a fair dose of Dragons’ Den processes. We have proposals to present to internal Boards, and innovation ideas in front on an investment panel. We are given 20 minutes for this and 10 minutes for that. Everybody is busy, everybody needs airtime, airtime is limited, you get 10 minutes to convince me. Sharp, fast, to the point, equals good management and good thinking. Does it?

To the credit of the Dragons’ Den millionaires, they pay great attention to the pitch (in the episodes I’ve seen) more can be said in our organizations, where many ‘panellists’ and ‘board members’ look at emails on their iPhones.

I know of organizations that run decision making, resource allocation, investment decisions, go/no go decisions or any other form of sanctioning from the top, in permanent Dragons’ Den mode.

I disagree with the idea that this is good management. But I know I am in a minority because most people think that the art of sharpening a convincing performance is the skill needed to succeed as manager or leader. And because this is what we promote, reflection time suffers and critical thinking is not the greatest of our managerial skills.

It sounds as if criticizing Dragon’s Den Management means supporting long and windy presentations and interminable meetings and debates. Far from it. That is the problem of our binary world: either you go for the elevator pitch or the assumption is inefficiency and bad thinking.

I remain behind one of my old Daily Thoughts : Nothing that requires to be pitched in an elevator, is worth pitching. ^[13]

It would be nice if we could just sit in the middle of the two in-trays, right and left, and let the time pass.

Time is not bad at problem solving, as anybody who has gone on holiday for a while without looking at emails, and has realised that the sky has not fallen, could assert. In the extreme this is a laissez-faire joke, a cynical view of events and a universal anecdote that you could attribute to any leader you know who seem to take advantage of the god Chronos.

There is however some serious merit just a little bit underneath the joke. It’s called reflection And it’s becoming something on a short supply. In fact, we react too much.

We react to an employee engagement survey, now, or we will be seen as inconsiderate to the workforce. The reactive activity seems to be more important than the non-digested meaning

We react to customer satisfaction surveys, and net promote scores and, owners of outlets to tripadvisor stars.

Well, is that not the point?

It is, but between the ‘time will solve’ in-tray and the ‘time has solved one’, should be another one called ‘can I have a break please?’ in-tray. Just a small one.

In fact, romancing Chronos is the best managerial skill one can have. If Chronos is your real friend, Ares, the god of war will have to wait; Hygiea, the goddess of health will be incredibly happy, and Nike, the god of strength, speed and victory will tell you ‘just do it’ exactly at the right time.

Many people have asked me repeatedly which ones of my Daily Thoughts are my best or favourites. Hard to say. There are 727 Daily Thoughts in the website www.leandroherrero.com ^[14] all around people and organizations. Most, but not all, are also posted in Linkedin Pulse but their visibility there depends exclusively on LinkedIn algorithms (and perhaps humans). What gets super-noticed does not seem to correlate 100% with my own views of importance!

This is one of about a year ago that I still refer to and find constant relevance. So one of my top, yes.  Let me share it again.

Winston Churchill said, referring to the Houses of Parliament in the UK, ‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’.

For building, read our companies, not just the walls (or lack of) and the physical environment, but also that beast of elusive presence called culture. We are sophisticated copying machines (Homo Imitans ^[15]) and, whether we like it or not, we are incredibly influenced by what is around us, what happens around us, and the airtime given to things. Big deal? Yes, it is a big deal. Because we don’t like it. We, arrogant Homo Sapiens, can’t accept Homo Imitans that easily. We say, not me! I know what I am doing. I am not going with the pack. I am different.

Then routine kicks in, inertia kicks in, we have a mundane and predictable day, and hope that the next one, some sort of divine miracle will occur and all will be just fantastic.

The ‘Change From Within Preachers’ must have an unconditional faith in the human condition but, for every Road of Damascus conversion and internal epiphanies that gear us into some direction, there are hundreds of day to day mundane circumstances that shape that thing in front of us called ‘tomorrow’.

Tuesdays carry a high dose of probability of being shaped by Mondays. Routine, inertia, default position, mood contamination, repetition, extrapolation, they all are bad friends waiting to be invited to dinner.

If you are stuck on a Wednesday, declare the next day a Friday, don’t get up on Thursday mode and wait for things to happen. Shape them. No, this is not New Age, self-help stuff (which comes in all sort of shapes, good and bad by the way), it is plain and simple behavioural-take-charge.

It may or may not be possible but there is a repertoire of possibilities to bypass Wednesdays (or Thursdays or Fridays…): take (deliberately) a wrong train, wear Sunday clothes, miss a meeting on purpose, have a haircut, meet somebody scheduled for the following week, have that meeting with your team all standing and in an unpredictable place, bring in your birthday cake (only if it’s not your birthday), disappear for a few hours and don’t tell anybody, combinations.

Warning: you may think this is a bit of a joke. I’ve never been more serious. Nothing of the above is a joke. Message is, do not let the day be a consequence of yesterday, intellectually or emotionally. Reject life as a constant extrapolation.

You don’t need to intellectualise this too much. Change the scenery and the scenario. Fast forward. You’ll live much longer

 

 

Read the following pairs. Notice which ones make you more comfortable.

‘You’re in a queue/line and we will respond to you shortly’, vs. ‘You are number 7 and moving up the queue’

‘Plane delayed’ vs. ‘Plane delayed by 45 minutes’

No sign ( a queue/line) vs. ‘ From here it is 15 minutes’

Pages in a survey going on and on, vs. ‘You are halfway now, thanks for your patience’

‘We’ll get something to you asap’, vs. ‘We’ll get something to you no later than Tuesday’

‘Delay in this doctor’s waiting room, apologies ‘ vs. ‘The doctor will see you between 10 and 11’

‘Your breakdown recovery people have been informed’, vs. ‘Peter will be with you between 5 and 5:45 and has your cell phone number’

 If you are like me or many other mortals, the second parts are incredibly more reassuring and comforting. Let’s assume for a second that both parts refer to the same identical situation. Only one, the second, brings uncertainty down.

Dealing with certainty is something we don’t always have the luxury to do, but, when we can, it takes very little effort to provide it. In all examples above, all data, the same data, was available underneath. The first sentence had high uncertainty (did not use the available data) whilst the second added that certainty bit, not made up, real.

Cheap solutions. We need to ask ourselves how much uncertainty we are providing to others and how much we can reduce it by very simple measures. The difference is a few words, but in impact terms, as much as night and day.

Have you heard of speed yoga? Me neither. Although Mr Google points to some YouTube videos that in fact are yoga classes shown at high speed.

Speed yoga, or speed meditation, would be a contradiction in terms. I suppose the same as a slow marathon. ‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens’, the Christian book of Ecclesiastes says. And a clock will help.

I often think we don’t have a good sense of time in the life of organizations. We rush key decisions and agonize on the trivial ones . This is speed yoga and slow marathons.

Time is a funny thing. 30 minutes are 30 minutes, but for some people this is ‘we only have 30 minutes’, whilst for others is ‘we have plenty of time, we still have 30 minutes’.

Given the very subjective perception of time, a rather artificial but reasonable, and agreed, time frame is more than legitimate. For example, ‘this is a two day discussion and decision’, ‘we will give this a week, no more’ or ‘let’s have a 45 minutes brainstorm, we will end sharp at that point’ etc.

In fact, on the latter, in the heat of heavy and difficult discussions, it is often very useful to inject an artificial pause. For example, ‘the next 45 minutes, we will forget where we are and everybody can say anything and throw in any good or bad idea’

Managing time is not ‘time management’, it is about perception and protection of time,  but fit-for-purpose. By trying this, progressively, you’ll have more slow yoga and fast marathons.

Buy the clock.