If you followed the two previous Daily Thoughts, you would have got into the idea of ‘Managing by Segmenting Around’. I have just made it up, but I believe this is the current equivalent to the old Managing by Wandering Around.

The categorisation/segmentation is not new. What is new is that we need to be serious about ‘treating’ people differently. The organization is not equalitarian, it is not a democracy. The segments matter. The categories matter. A ‘toxic-sceptical-for-no-reason-person’ and a ‘let’s-make-it-happen-person’ don’t have organizational equality. Not in terms of influence.

In the political change, political campaigning, social movement approaches, you would not survive five minutes if you were not in constant segmentation and categorisation mood. The average (business) organization is extremely poor in segmentation. We treat all people the same: same communications for everybody, usually top down. We recognise many of these categories but we often tend to treat them as an anecdote. We acknowledge the existence of the chronic sceptical, and the noise amplifier, and the high connected good role model, but we give them the same treatment particularly in terms of communication. This is nonsense.

Human Resource management, which, by the way it is not a function but all of us, means recognising those differences and acting differently with the segments and categories

In political campaigning – let’s take the US presidential elections as an easy case study – you don’t go to a 60 year old with messages on unemployment and a 27 year old with messages about Medicare. It’s the other way around. Both need to be engaged for the purpose of electing ‘him’ or ‘her’, but the clicking mechanism is miles apart. In the (business) organization we simply don’t distinguish. All our HR systems care about is performance: average, terrible, contributor, outstanding, etc. These say nothing about influence, impact, power, toxicity or injection of sanity. The performance segmentation is a machinery segmentation.

This needs to change. It’s not rocket science.

Pick a few of these categories. I’ve done this for you from the previous Daily Thought, as an example:

• Deviants (positive). Do things differently, have another playbook and succeed
• Sceptical for all seasons
• Noise amplifiers
• Making-it-happen first, then we talk
• Only One Agenda People (and it’s mine)

1. Identify these people, put names next to them
2. Make a concerted effort to know them and understand what makes them tick or not; what they want to hear, what seems to awaken them
3. Create a short a simple plan to engage with them
4. Make sure that that you have specific differentiated plans
5. Use group effects: noise amplifiers can be challenged by noise-buffers; put them in the same room
6. Test your strategy with a few of them

In The Managing by Segmenting Around school of thought, you must have at lest ten different people strategies for ten different segments. Don’t mix them up. Yes, sorry, I forgot, it’s hard. That is why we don’t do it and apply the pseudo-equality concept, married to a bizarre concept of ‘fairness’ all the time. Exactly the equivalent of warning a 27 year old US citizen about cuts in Medicare, and an 60 year old US citizen about the perils of joblessness.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation….

Our Feed Forward Webinar Series is now available to watch, on demand.

Watch our webinar: Can you put your organization through an MRI?  ^[4]

Yes you can. You can have a diagnosis. Learn how our online product 3CXcan ^[5] provides this analysis based on the highest scientific principles of network sciences. 3CXcan will identify your formal and information connections across your organization. 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.

Find more information on 3CXcan HERE ^[5].

What attendees said:

‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’

‘It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart.’ 

WATCH NOW ^[4]

These 8, self-explanatory categories of people are the natural focus of traditional HR and management systems . They are needed for good governance. They all sit in the formal organization, similarly the traditional focus of those HR/management structures.

A list
High/medium/low performer
Talent pool member
Leadership (several layers)
(dis) engaged
Pre-retirement
New hired
Next generation leaders
Team leader/management position

The next 8 categories are off the radar screen on HR/management in a range that goes from ‘I don’t know what you are talking about’ to ‘I know some of these folks, what am I supposed to do?’ and anything in between including treating them as good/bad anecdotes, necessary evils, curiosities and ‘ok, good managers know how to deal with them’.

B list
Mavericks and rebels, even without a cause
Deviants (positive). Do things differently, have another playbook and succeed
GPAs (General Pain in the Back Side; acronym non PC)
Contrarians, because they can
Nonconformists. Good ones, less good ones, but see things through glasses nobody else has
Sceptical for all seasons
Hyper-connected. Good or bad, they spread behaviours, role model at a scale, set mountains on fire and multiply anything they get their hands on
Hyper-trusted. Multiple reasons, it does not matter which ones.

Neither list is good or bad, they are two categorisations of people. Whilst the A list refers to the visible and formal, and it’s crucial as governance and overall performance management, the B list has the potential to make or brake anything.

Entire cultures are shaped by the B list whilst the A list watches the show almost hopelessly.

An entire HR/OD/culture shaping/company building platform could be set up exclusively on the B list. There are tools and processes and systems to deal with the less powerful A list, but we treat the B list as an Amusement Park.

The B list is the Hard List.

Are you able to identify people, particularly in the B list? Beyond the anecdote? Seriously?

OK, more on this tomorrow with an extended list. Clean your glasses, you need to see it. I will suggest a simple exercise then.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation….

Watch our Feed Forward Webinar Series ^[4]. Now available on demand.

WATCH our 5, free webinars as Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects, debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

Have your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

1. The Myths of Change ^[4]
2. Can you put your organization through an MRI? ^[4]
3. The Myths of Company Culture ^[4]
4. The Myths of Management ^[4]
5. High tech, high touch in the digitalization era ^[4]

OK, at least you’re reading. Thanks.

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

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

There are options. You can let the network produce emergent effects (spontaneous collaboration, innovation hubs, Sceptical United Group, or bunch of bloggers, or the tribe above) or you could induce and engineer some effects, not waiting, but designing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely not even the accountants can see this logic.

Choices!

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

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Here at The Chalfont Project ^[6] we undertake work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people through our Viral Change™ programme ^[7] and now we can help your business too, with our 3CXcan ^[5] product. This online survey which uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for social network detection, will give you a profound understanding of your internal networks.

With 3CXcan ^[5] we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your formal and informal networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

3CXcan  is a diagnostic tool which:

◦ PROVIDES A PICTURE: of the formal and informal organization and how effectively both operate.

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◦ IDENTIFIES the individuals that will leverage change more effectively (ie champions)

If you want to know your REAL orgaization and be able to break down silos, identify collaboration barriers, unite your organizaton after a merger and more, then 3CXcan is your solution.

To find out more or book your free virtual consultation for a short walk through our demo – contact us now! ^[5]

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Don’t miss it – our webinar TODAY – 18:00 BST/19:00 CET.  

During Covid, digital has taken the lead with remote working, virtual events and more connectivity, but have we become more collaborative & how do we keep the human factor?

Join us for this webinar on High Touch and High Tech in the Digitalization Era. It will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.

Register Now ^[8]

The snap shot of the company as pictured in an organizational chart, is probably one of the most fictitious works of management art.  Yet, it is a map of power and control that perhaps, in many cases, needs to be shown by the HR Cartography Department.

But the idea that the static display of boxes, reporting lines, solid or dotted, tells us anything about what is going on, is very naive. I don’t think many people would see it differently.

To understand what is really going on, you have to have a ‘live organizational chart’ and that could only be achieved with a live social network analysis.

For all technological advances we have at our disposal, we have a fairly prosaic, rather boring and uninformative ‘thing’ called an organization chart as a ‘representation’ of the company.  For example, it tells us nothing about three vital, fundamental components of organizational life:

Unwritten rules. The organizational chart may point to the written ones and only in so far as they are connected with the mechanism of power and reporting lines. For example, whom to escalate a problem. But not even when.

The natural influencers. The organizational chart is blind as to where in the organizational network a particular individual sits. There is no correlation between a hierarchical system and an influence system. Mrs Jones running the mail room may have three times more (cultural) influence and connections than Mrs Smith running the Strategic Unit.

The tribes. Every organization has tribes. Some are functional, and they may have their own organizational chart: IT, Operations, Finance etc. But many powerful tribes are not functional and they don’t have ‘their chart’: the youngest, the part-timers, the remote workers, the newly-acquired, the ‘women in leadership club’, the smokers or the runners/gym-lovers/wanting-to-die-healthy people. And if you don’t know about your tribes, or don’t know what to do with them, please note your Sabbatical has ended, come back.

The organizational chart is that lonely artefact that corporate archaeologists will find and frame, a relic from the divisional and Fordian organization, a Guide to Bosses for Dummies.

Although the reports of its death have been grossly exaggerated, the practice of  management as ‘organizational chart reordering and reshuffling’, is today in a rather poor state of affairs.

I despair when I see reorganization announcements solely based on new power distribution, or that say little about the possible excitement of the new structure in favour of that new chair showroom.

Some press releases are new furniture brochures, the new chairs and sofa collection. And a few beds.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

THE COMPANY IN A MRI ^[9]

Are you ready to do your organization health check? A must for the well-being of any organization. Join the conversation with us this Thursday July 2nd for our 2nd thought provoking Feed Forward webinar with Leandro Herrero ^[10], Marieke van Essen ^[11] and Carlos Escario ^[12] from The Chalfont Project ^[9]. 18.00 BST, 19.00CET. Register Now! ^[9]

Can we have a sense of the reality of communication, connectivity, and collaboration inside the company, a real sense, without simply using assumptions, or taking for granted what we see at face value?

Maybe get confirmation bias out of the window and have a good diagnosis of what is going on, whether we like the outcomes or not. It can be done. And it may save you millions in reorganizations or reshuffling that may not be needed. Or, yes, it validates your intentions.

Let’s put the company in an MRI and find out so that any course of action is informed. (Would you have an operation without X-rays and perhaps MRI?).

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of Leandro Herrero’s new book: The Flipping Point ^[13].  Read a recent review ^[14].

Consistently over the years, the Edelman’s Trust Barometer has told us that the greatest source of trust inside the organization belongs to the category ‘people like me’.

‘People like me’ means my peers, my mates, colleagues who share similar problems and send kids to similar schools. We may or may not share political ideas, or support the same football team! We may or may not be in the same managerial layer, but, still, ‘they are like me’.

In the organization, trust is tribal and horizontal first, then vertical (hierarchical). Outside the organization, in the macro-social world the phenomenon is similar. Trust is loaded on your network members, perhaps Facebook ‘ friends’. Websites such as ‘patients like me’ ^[15]where you can ask others ‘like you’ before going to the doctor (who is not like you) are drawing more and more traffic and attention. There are increasing numbers of ‘tribal sites’. Mumset ^[16] for example describes itself as ‘by parents for parents’, and its frank and sometimes explicit sharing has gained the site some controversy.

Back to the organization, ‘peer-to-peer influence’ between ‘people like me’ is the strongest engine of trust, leadership and behavioural change. Most of the unwritten rules and culture shaping exist and takes place in the informal organization. Trust and influence are crafted in peer-to-peer mode. It’s what you see and feel around you, what others say and do, what shapes a culture, not a declaration from the top.

Viral Change™ ^[17]  uses peer-to-peer influence, the informal organization and a strong behavioural focus to create large scale behavioural change.  It works both in the organization and the macro-social arena.

Culture and sub-cultures are tribal. Trust is tribal. Influence is tribal. Power and control, loyalty, sense of belonging, all are tribal. If you understand the internal tribes, you understand the organization.

Suddenly, a Chief Anthropologist Officer sound like a good idea.

Said Wittgenstein ^[18]. Language in business and organizations creates frames, but also limitations. And we have lots of these frames. ‘Employee Engagement’, ‘Talent Management’, ‘Change Management’ for example, are common frames for anybody in business, but, for an alien they are far from clear conceptual entities. By using a particular language we infer that everybody will have a common understanding of what is meant, but some of these ‘concepts’ have many varying interpretations.

‘Change management’ is perhaps at the top of the abuse charts. It’s use in IT puts a simple accent on ‘making the new IT system live’. It’s use in project management, in mergers & acquisitions and in cultural change has however very different meanings. By calling something ‘change management’, far from creating shared understanding, we are creating a limitation of understanding. This limitation of the language creates in itself, limitations in the world of management.

Other bits of management dialect that have set up permanent camp in the organizational landscape, have become standard jargon which, because of their progressive lack of meaning, as before, create limitations in the world of management. Try to have a conversation these days on ‘empowerment’ and you’ll see the smiles of people around begging for a definition of some sort. And better that, than continuing the conversation assuming that everybody ‘knows what we are talking about’

Tribal language – and business language is tribal – can’t be suppressed, only substituted. An injection of clarity and plain language would do us all a favour.

Continuing my revised 12 laws of social change at a scale. ^[19] Very simple laws apply to any large scale change including the one inside organizations, cultural change and transformation.

Yesterday ^[19], I launched the first 6 laws:

1. Cater for many motivations, but establish non negotiable behaviours
2. Create a compelling narrative that explains ‘the cause’ and ‘success’
3. Segment, segment and segment. Then segment again. One single monolithic, top down message works in North Korea only (but may corporations don’t get it)
4. Above all, engage the hyper connected
5. Fix role assumptions, expectations, labels. Activists, advocates, volunteers…These tribes are very different
6. Passion per se is overrated. It’s hard work first!

Here are the rest:

7. It’s grassroots, or it isn’t. These ‘nice words’ ( a grassroots movement) won’t generate a bottom up system per se. The greatest force of influence is peer-to-peer, but it needs to be orchestrated; it needs to be organized. ‘People-like-me’ plus organization (platform) is the change dynamite equivalent.
8. Leadership is needed. Big discovery! But not any thing leadership. There are at least 2 types. The top down –leadership needs to support, endorse and provide resources. That’s their first hat. Their second hat is Backstage Leadership, the art of supporting the distributed peer-to-peer network in an invisible (backstage) way.
9. ‘Readiness’ is a red herring. No revolution started when everybody could be ready for it. In fact, most likely, not many people may have been ready. Don’t wait for full alignment, full endorsement and full support unless, that is, if you have a second and third life in mind. If you work on this one, go, go, go; people will get ready then.
10. Build in a tracking process, but be careful what you measure, it may be irrelevant. Be clear what you want to see, then figure out how you can capture and extract meaning.
11. Master bottom-up storytelling at a scale. Impactful, even game changing stories are often small and prosaic, but an indication that progress is made. Make sure they are not hidden, a kind of precious secret. Get them out. Big heroic stories are overrated. They don’t speak to ‘people like me’.
12. Recalibrate all the time. Stay in beta. Don’t aim at perfection, or you’ll be perfectly dead soon.

My revised 12 rules of social change at a scale.  These very simple laws apply to any large scale change including the one inside organizations, cultural change and transformation and any other labels.

1. Cater for many motivations. Don’t kid yourself everybody will join in with the same motives. Super-alignment is overrated. You need to aim at ‘compatible dreams’. But, be very clear and ruthless about the non negotiable, no matter what motivations may be behind. A good focus for the non negotiable is behaviours.
2. Create a compelling narrative, one that explains ‘the cause’ and ‘the success’. In organizational terms, use ‘the cause’ as well as term to frame purpose and direction. Success does not have to be articulated in numbers (only).
3. Segment, segment and segment. One single overriding, top down narrative of mission/vision/strategy that comes down from the top in monolithic form does not make sense. Be aware of the tribal listening. Who expects to hear what? This is normal in political marketing, and very unusual in organizational internal marketing.
4. Engage as many people as you want but the key ones, if you are into scale (and you should be) are the hyper connected, the ones who have a natural pull effect, and can influence many. It has nothing to do with hierarchy. If you don’t know who these people are, you have a big problem.
5. Fix role assumptions, expectations, labels. Advocates, activists, volunteers, passionate, mavericks, rebels, doers… these are very different types of people. Obvious as that may seem, we mistake them all the time
6. Passion per se is overrated. It’s hard work first! 50 passionate people in the room exhibiting passion won’t change many things. Passion is a great bonus when associated to 24/7 commitments

The other half tomorrow, to end the little list of social change rules.

Something for the weekend. Written back in 2017 but still rings true today!

We naturally retreat to comfort zones. If we didn’t, we would not survive, physically or psychologically. We live in Confirmation Bias Land: we hear what we want to hear, and have fixed ideas that we want to be endorsed. It’s all pretty unconscious. It’s survival.

When it comes to information, we surround ourselves with what confirms our views of the world. Many years ago, pre-digital, when newspapers were still the main source of information and hook to the world, people read or subscribed to their tribal ones. There were ( as they are still today) right wing, and left wing, and middle of the road newspapers. They were easily classified as liberal or conservative or ultra-something.

Then Mr Digital came to town. Clever baby digital allowed you to choose what the system would filter for you. Big news outlets promised you not to bombard your inbox with anything you did not want. Tick here and here and you will never know about the unticked boxes. You could literally create you Daily Me and keep warm and safe.

Mr Digital entered adolescence and then stopped asking you. The algorithms, which I liked to picture as hundreds of little digital men crawling your webpages, would know what you want. Today they know you, indeed, follow you, and miraculously keep offering you that shirt that you saw online but never really wanted to buy. Whether you are in a theatre ticket site, or the weather forecast or a sports feed, that shirt never goes away. Recently, I surrendered miserably and did buy that shirt, but the algorithms, those idiots, kept offering it to me.

Forget Big Brother. I am not talking about that. I know I have one. We need the other siblings, brothers, sisters, and also cousins. The Daily Me is now a Me by The Minute. It is Bubble World. Obama put it nicely in his farewell speech:

For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighbourhoods or college campuses or places of worship or our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. The rise of naked partisanship, increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste – all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we accept only information, whether true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that’s out there.

There is only one way to be saved. Get exposed to as many sources and inputs as possible. Diversity of news is OK, but not enough. It is diversity of topics. For me, as alien as possible.

My rule of thumb: at least 50% of what to read, be exposed to, should have little or nothing to do with your job/business area. That increases the probability of avoiding unconscious filtering since you would have less preconceived ideas. And your mind would welcome the Spring Cleaning and fresh air.

My only limit to this is toxicity. You would not want to be in a room full of smokers smoking. So, living in the UK, I stay away from the Daily Mail.

On one side, taxes are good, big government, social welfare, fighting for social justice and social mobility, human rights, women rights, pro-abortion, pro gay marriage, pro LGBT, piss off bankers, pro immigration, diversity and inclusion, and transgender education in schools. Ah, climate change is big and a green world is a super super priority.

On the other side, not to abortion, any, individual achievement, ‘there is no such a thing as society’, taxes are bad, government to the minimum, freedom of the individual, traditional family, piss off transgender education in schools (trans what?),  low taxes, no immigrants.  Ah, and climate change not sure, really, overrated at least, and green  world, well, I am already doing my recycling.

I have no idea which side I am anymore. I have been offered every single day a polarized, binary, Manichean world, and I’m am supposed to tick all the boxes to ‘belong’.

I am of an age that this polarization annoys me enormously, but I can navigate. The new generations are offered a package. Package One or Package Two.

The problem is that there is an insidious,  cognitive halo effect that is unconscious. If you care for the environment and social justice, great. Automatically you will be pro-abortion and big taxes. I have never understood what abortion and taxes have to do with each other, or pro LGBT and climate change for that matter.

If you defend the traditional family and declare yourself pro-life, you must surely want no taxes and think that climate change is a hoax.

Try to choose the bits you want and you’ll find yourself orphan.

Sad that, if you vote, you’ll need to choose the less-evil.

Polarity is the new slavery of the mind.

Most of our organizational problems are behavioural

Structural answers hardly solve behavioural problems. Amalgamating A and B because A and B don’t talk to each other, or have mixed up overlapping roles, or blame each other, or pass the monkey between them, backwards and forward, and thinking that the new A+B =C will get rid of these dysfunctionalities, is naïve wisdom thinking.  A and B may have now a single head, a single home, a single reporting line and a single payroll, and still will blame each other, will pass the monkey and will continue to enjoy a dysfunctional and tribal mixed up of responsibilities.

Most of the dysfunctionalities around communications and roles are behavioural. It’s about what people do or don’t. And this is where the energy has to go.

Also some of those dysfunctionalities  between A and B are perpetuated because they are simple survival mechanisms. Pure social anthropology. A and B need some form or rivalry, of tribal relationship and friction, of preservation of identities, and, above all, victimhood. If you took victimhood out of the equation, groups and organizations would fall apart, would not have anybody to blame (OK, that it’s not true, they will find others) and many political positions will melt in the air.

I’d love to create a global movement #youarenotavictim and a sister one #iamnotyourenemy. But this is a conversation for another day.

Myy advise is keep A and B in their tents as much as you can, and spend your energy defining rules of the game and a few, key non negotiable behaviours. Then watch. ‘We will always tell the truth to each other’, for example, is not near as threatening ( and naïve) as ‘I am going to amalgamate you both and then you will speak the truth’.

There is however a caveat to this, an important one. It may well be that the mere existence of a separate A and B is a gross institutional disability in itself. Period. In that case, of course it makes sense to look at the structural problem as well. The keyword is ‘as well’. Because the structural (amalgamating) solution will not get rid of accumulated behavioural problems .

In my experience, for any case of true ‘bad design’, there are dozens of pseudo-structural-problems. And for any case of amalgamation-as-a-solution, there are dozens of missing opportunities to look at the behavioural fabric underneath.

‘Smoking kills’, or ‘Don’t Drink and Drive’ or ‘Get the Flu Vaccine’ are wonderful attempts to warn your fellow citizens of the high risk of a behaviour or lack of it.

Small detail, communication warnings are not great at changing behaviours. Not great does not mean useless. Nobody is saying don’t do it. It creates awareness, there is a moral obligation to warn people,  and some, perhaps many, will change.

But if this is the only thing we do, then a colossal  invasion of those warnings on screens, roads and towns would  have done the trick already. A million billboards perhaps?

The reasons why it does  not work, at a scale, are multiple.  People may not see immediate risk.  People like getting away with murder. People have their channels saturated and at the third time a ’smoking kills’ sign is in font of our eyes, our Protective Filters kick in. Zero. Nothing. I am a frequent flyer and suffer the safety instructions each time (and British Airways new safety videos are pretentious, silly and unbearable. Recently I looked in desperation to a cabin crew member. She smiled. Then, at the serving of drinks, whispered to me ‘imagine those four times a day’. OK, I am digressing. But my hypothesis is that the more frequent flyer you are, the greater safety risk your are as well, to yourself and the rest of the cabin. Still digressing)

All those push, communication efforts (‘World I’, in my book Homo Imitans ^[20] and Viral Change™ programmes ^[17] ) have limited power if not accompanied by a pull, magnifying effect (‘World II”) such as (a)  not many people around you smoke these days; your peers don’t  (b) most of your friends at the dinner party have arranged for transport post drinks, and (c) most of your neighbours  seem to talk about vaccines, done or not. Or equivalent. It’s social stupidity.

There is a corporate/internal communications equivalent of ‘Smoking Kills’ in our organizations. It reads or sounds like this.

Change is inevitable, get ready, we need to change.
Be customer centric
Behave like an owner, be an entrepreneur
We need to change our mindset in the company
Embrace ambiguity, be flexible|
Shorten your processes, be agile
The company needs to transform itself
We need to make hard decisions
We need a will to win
Too many meetings kill

So, yes, smoking kills.

Now you know

^[21]

Click to access about 5 hours masterclass in 28 chapters. Trailer and introductory chapter are free to watch.

The ‘tyranny of knowledge’ is one of these phrases used in a diversity of contexts. It means amongst other things that you are trapped in what you know.

Knowledge is freedom but also a prison. The freedom bit is obvious. I’m interested in the prison thing.

The more one has a defined territory of expertise, populated by people whom you know more or less well, a knowledge club you all belong to, the more of a possible tyranny of knowledge in that territory. Those people (colleagues, team mates, advisory board) provide  more predictable answers that you may think.

When the methods to find things are set, and the places to look for things also set, and the questions to ask are known, the chances of  very successful answers are very high. So are their possible irrelevance.  Your mind will trick you with confirmation bias to see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear. And that will happen even if you shield yourself against it wearing some sort of scientific uniform.

The way out is not rocket science, but so obvious that we don’t do it.

Bring to the party equal number of experts and aliens.
Find people whose views you can’t guess and  run your ideas by them.
Keep your mind in refresh mode. Read alternative topics, even very distant from your expertise.
Invert the questions, ask lots of ‘what if’, re-frame the problems ( a good critical thinking training may help)
Be prepared to irritate lots of people by all of the above
Yes, it’s a pain

All of this pays off.

Innovation has to do with seeking unpredictable answers. The others are already taken

For as long as anybody can remember in management history, the team has been highlighted as the unquestionable form of collaborative structure. Teams grow in organizations like mushrooms in wild forests. It has been ‘the answer’ to collaboration and performance. We have created  teamocracies.

The team is usually a vehicle for the fostering of strong ties, the ones formed with people you know well, and better and better all the time. The more you know your team mates, the more predictable they are. The more predictable the environment, the less room for the unexpected and the random. The least room for those, the less innovation. Strong ties are great to work together and get things done. But if you want something new and unpredictable, the teamocracy is not the best platform.

As far back as 1973, Mark Granovetter, American sociologist, wrote an article entitled ‘The Strength of the Weak Ties’. He postulated that are the weak ties, in fact, not the strong ones, the ones that have the power. In one of his experiments he showed how people were more likely to get a job via a recommendation when that recommendation  came from a weak tie, than a strong tie. Counterintuitive then, counterintuitive now.

The real powerful organizational structure is the network, not the team. The quality and quantity of your relationships in the social network, defines your own social capital. What somebody with a weak tie to you in the network thinks is more unpredictable (and full of possibilities) than the thinking coming from  strong ties. And this is good, amongst other things, for innovation.

Today, networkracies have taken over, but a new set of skills and competencies are required to navigate there, including network theory. An entire new Organisational Development discipline is needed.

In the meantime, form as many weak ties as you can: loosely connected people who you don’t know very well. You’ll be surprised how rich they make you.

Reinventing management to deal with the complexities of the world and, therefore, the complexities of business challenges is something that, so far, seems unlikely to come from Business Schools.

Traditional management education has its roots in the past, more predictable and stable times. If you look at the entire encyclopaedia of tools, frames, and methods, you’ll see that they all look today like a brave attempt to capture a reality that is moving faster than one can handle. It’s not that they are useless or inefficient, but that they feel a bit old and tired. They do not sit well in Silicon Valley, or many other valleys for that matter. Of course, Deans of Business Schools may beg to differ.

The traditional human capital oriented functions such as HR, OD, L&D, Internal/External Communications are stuck. Communications a bit less, if anything because the digital toys force that tribe to its upgrade and to play differently.

If you look at the HR/OD/L&D worldwide conferences, you’ll have a déjà vu. A slightly more elaborate Employee Engagement questionnaire, a sharing of the world ideas to reward employees plus, yet another praise of the work-life balance world, do not seem to me like ‘progress’. The tribe continues to talk to the tribe members. And they feel good about it.

‘Specialisation’ will have to start considering its own reinvention since no single discipline is anymore capable of answering a business or organisational challenge. The ‘Neo-Generalist’ (Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin, 2016) with a broad and mature formation, seems a better answer for the skill set that is new required.

Here are two examples of areas where ‘the answers’ now come from non-traditional business territories.

People’s motivation, triggering new behaviours and understanding the balance rationality/irrationality of decisions, can be better served from Behavioural Economics. Yet, not many HR/OD/L&D would know about this beyond the anecdote (and if I infer from recent meetings where I have been a keynote speaker, not even the term)

Culture change and shaping, and large scale change in general, can be better served and understood from the area of Social Movements and other ‘disciplines’ (praxis, in fact) where people mobilization is the ABC, such as political marketing. This is what Viral Change™ does.

‘Look outside’ is the motto of New Management. There is no Plan B for that.

The second of this week’s revisited posts – this one was first published in June 2016 (check back tomorrow for part 2)

My revised 12 rules of social change at a scale.  These very simple laws apply to any large scale change including the one inside organizations, cultural change and transformation and any other labels.

1. Cater for many motivations. Don’t kid yourself everybody will join in with the same motives. Super-alignment is overrated. You need to aim at ‘compatible dreams’. But, be very clear and ruthless about the non negotiable, no matter what motivations may be behind. A good focus for the non negotiable is behaviours.
2. Create a compelling narrative, one that explains ‘the cause’ and ‘the success’. In organizational terms, use ‘the cause’ as well as term to frame purpose and direction. Success does not have to be articulated in numbers (only).
3. Segment, segment and segment. One single overriding, top down narrative of mission/vision/strategy that comes down from the top in monolithic form does not make sense. Be aware of the tribal listening. Who expects to hear what? This is normal in political marketing, and very unusual in organizational internal marketing.
4. Engage as many people as you want but the key ones, if you are into scale (and you should be) are the hyper connected, the ones who have a natural pull effect, and can influence many. It has nothing to do with hierarchy. If you don’t know who these people are, you have a big problem.
5. Fix role assumptions, expectations, labels. Advocates, activists, volunteers, passionate, mavericks, rebels, doers… these are very different types of people. Obvious as that may seem, we mistake them all the time
6. Passion per se is overrated. It’s hard work first! 50 passionate people in the room exhibiting passion won’t change many things. Passion is a great bonus when associated to 24/7 commitments

The other half tomorrow, to end the little list of social change rules.

As Dr Leandro Herrero is away, the Daily Thoughts will be taking a short “pause” this week. In the meantime, Daily Thoughts HQ has picked some of the top posts on social movements for you to enjoy. The following post was first published in March 2016…

Scholars of social movements have noticed and described how people often create a stronger and faster sense of association and belonging when they are united not necessarily by high purpose strategic goals but by tactics. For example, there are people who ‘like’ demonstrations, or strikes, or mega-mailing campaigns, or a particular type of community activities, or digital campaigns on ‘anything’.

Said like that it sounds like an offense to the high purpose, a way of dismissing the overarching narrative. But this is of course not the intention. On the contrary, it is healthy to accept that ‘the cause’ may in fact attract multiple motivations. It is naïve to think that there is a full, single alignment ‘on topic’ in any given social movement.

The case of street demonstrations, not a social movement on its own, of course, is a good example. An ‘anti-war’ demonstration will host anti-war people, anti-capitalists (perhaps), greens (perhaps), genuine people wanting to reform society, people who have not much to do that day, angry-with-the-government people, and people who join pretty much any demonstration available.

‘United by tactics’ is the misunderstood other side of the coin of ‘united for a cause’.

We see this micro-scale inside the organization. There are people who thrive in some presentation rituals; people who are very prone to meetings, and, in general, people who have the ‘what and how’ to do at a higher level than the ‘why’.

In particular, the rituals of monthly reviews and reports, fixed time staff meetings, budget cycles, review boards and overscheduled conference calls, tend to take over organizational life, and become very stable (because they are effective glue-rituals even if not very efficacious). A significant number of people in the organization are connected by the dynamics of the cyclical presentations and other tribal activities, and get ‘hooked on them’, the organizational equivalent of the ‘hooked on tactics’ of collective action in the macro social world.

‘Collective action’ is always a surprising laboratory of human dynamics. Within the organization, our process-rituals, needed as they may be, tend to suck energy and resources. But also people, ‘hooked on the process’.

Only our good dose of emotional and social intelligence could come to the rescue, not to destroy those processes or tribal rituals, but to identify them and, at the very least, be very clear on what they are supposed to do, why they were created in the first place, and how effective and/or efficacious they may be.

Part 2 of 2, first published November 2015

Yesterday I offered 10 types of people that challenge the status quo in organizations ^[22]. I also mentioned that our mind tends to protect us against ‘difficulties’ by saying don’t, conform, it’s OK. And its cousins: what is the point? Don’t fight those battles.

Dissent and challenge is more difficult when the overall narrative is strong; when there is a presiding, overall logic of ideas and their implications, nicely linked. Some narratives (political, for sure, but also macro-social and ‘micro’, such as ‘the company’) become semi untouchable. After all, in the political arena, that is the point of ideology. A dominant ideology (idea-logic) is self-reinforcing. More and more people ‘within’ will write or say something that is consistent with ‘the package’.

Have you noticed that those narratives come in (political) bundles? They follow the same principle you see in the online shops: people who bought this also bought that. So if you like this, you also like that, because otherwise it is a pick and mix, not acceptable. Which is  kind of another imperialistic narrative: with us in all or against us in all. So you may end up feeling guilty of agreeing with A but having reservations about B. It’s easier to agree with B as well.

Literally these narratives shut down the alternatives or the opposite. And often they blame each other for the same behaviour. A rather old, if still in place, Western, ex French Revolution ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, follows that rule: pick one, you get a bundle of idea-logic connections. People who like this, also like that.

Small state, don’t interfere with the market, the individual is the agent on the Right; the market needs to be domesticated, bigger role for government to the Left. But, you see, people who like this, also like that: so in the Left you also need to be pro-abortion rights, pro-redistribution of wealth and pro-suppression or reduction of social inequalities. Suddenly, you did not know, and have other things in the Left or Right package: gender issues, mums at home or not, believing in God and fox hunting. How did that happen? Well, it’s simple; people who like this also like that, so you are not going to be an exception are you? Etc. These are caricatures to make the point.

There are not a lot of differences in the organization even if we don’t talk about this in the same way. There is a narrative (whether you use the term or not) and it may be ‘all embracing’. And because of that you have halo effects that may even make you ‘the most admired corporation’, or not. Admired? On what? All 40 parameter? Wow! Can we unbundle please? No you can’t.

An artificial, if wonderfully pragmatic distinction between story and narrative looks as follows. Stories are self contained, beginning and end, that’s it. Narratives are open ended. They may contain stories but the narrative is constantly in creation. Narratives are journeys, stories are locations.

The Social Idea-Logic of the organization needs a narrative that allows for dissent, that is still open, that makes people feel they are crafting it, not imposed from the top.

Yes, people who like this also like that, but what if they didn’t? This is a leadership question.

My experience of several health care delivery systems, both as a patient and as external consultant, is that they function in onion mode. Translation. There are professional layers one on top of each other giving an appearance of single entity but operating almost independently.

For example, the nursing layer has a system; the doctors layer has another. The doctors have ‘doctors notes’ and the nurses ‘nurses notes’.  If you are ‘handed over’ to theatre (the anglosaxon term for operating room, and note the Fedex/DHL terminology) you discover another layer of the onion. Their internal tribes (anesthetists, theatre nurses, etc) operate in their own world within its own borders: those doors beyond which serious stuff happens.

The versions of what happens according to the different layers of the onion are also different. In my very recent and very short (hours) stay in hospital for a minor intervention, I encountered five different versions of what ‘will happen’ and all this in the space of 4 hours.

Every single tribe member (admin/receptionists, ward nurses, doctors, anesthetists and theatre nurses) gave me a completely different sense of timing, logic or expectations. All without exception were extremely kind. All without exception introduced themselves by name. The late Dr Kate Grange ^[23]who created the #hellomynameis campaign would be proud. I have no complain.

What the patient/user/consumer/person  (one has to be careful these days how to call oneself) sees as one system is not.

In the space of four hours, I was asked health-related questions five times, all more or less the same, all but one on written paper. In a couple of them, out of tediousness, I left blank several rather key questions with no answer, but nobody seemed to have noticed because I never saw back again the enquirer. It’s fair to say they were not read.

I was asked five times by five different tribe members about the last time I had eaten anything. Any information was obviously not recorded in a single place.

I don’t know whether you need a full multi-million Lean-Sigma-Agile-Whatever programme to realize the nonsense, the waste.

Not many years ago my young son was hospitalized for a couple of weeks. Same pattern. I remember a morning when a young doctor come to see me out of courtesy, perhaps knowing that I was a medical doctor myself by background: ‘Dr Herrero, we are waiting for yesterday’s blood results for your son’. ‘No, we are not, I said, they arrived in the evening and are in the notes, page 17’. Believe me, this was a very minor onion layer disconnect compared with others, all compounded by the fact that, due to my son’s age he was ‘under the care of the paediatricians’ but occupying a bed in a non pediatric one and taken care by other tribe. Did they talk? Not much.

Who is going to put an order on this?  Do we seriously need ‘case managers’ in the places they do not exist to see the whole of the individual?

Are we so comfortable in our own parallel universes that we don’t connect between ‘layers’ unless we have a crisis of some sort?

Onions! Perhaps if you peel them, you start to cry.