‘Daily Thoughts’ is paused, to assess its value and its next  ‘presentation of  life’. Bear with us. In the meantime, we will post some short vignettes from Leandro Herrero’s book The Flipping Point. ^[1] Contact us if you need anything or if you wish to share any insights about how Daily Thoughts is of value to you. Thanks for being here. Don’t go away! The Chalfont Project team [email protected] ^[2]

 

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

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Trust is non linear (excuse my language). Usually it’s hard or long to gain, but it’s always one screw up away from killing it.

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Find out more about the range of books written by Leandro Herrero: Books ^[3]

Get yourself a copy of the Edelman Trust Barometer ^[4]. The Edelman company produces an excellent annual report on trust (organizations, industries, geographies…) and year after year, with some minor variations, the lowest source of internal organizational trust (for the purposes of ‘believing’ what’s going on with your company) is the CEO. Let’s be kind. It means the top hierarchy, not that absolutely charming and well-mannered CEO who is on TV from time to time. And of course, not your CEO.

The highest source of trust, however, is ‘people like me’, that’s it, people like you and me, one of us, our horizontal tribe, the ones we talk to everyday and talk football or cricket or baseball, take the children to similar schools, more or less same age, ‘my mates’; you may be one rank above me or two, or below, but that does not really matter around the water cooler, or at the cafeteria, or in the car park. My peers.

Here is the trick. If my Super Vice-President comes to me and tells me that we have to go South, I will say OK, and perhaps I may even ask why, but, I’ll go South. He thinks South is good. The CEO thinks South is good. The Strategic Plan says that South is good.  I am not sure about the South. Actually, I think South is a lousy option. Why South for goodness sake!?

If you, my peer, mate, water cooler friend, car park talker, school run sharer, co-smoker, tribal member, colleague in the same division, free mutual psychotherapist and somebody ‘I know well’ comes to me and in the middle of a football game, or school run, or holiday, or dreadful journey says to me ‘By the way, we really must go South’, then my brain may be suddenly aroused by the unexpected and I may even have one or two questions such as ‘Are you on something?’ but the chances of me considering that, at the very least, South is now a very reasonable, maybe even extraordinary destination, are very, very high indeed, a few hundred points above the same message coming from my Super Vice-President.  I expected him to support South but I did not expect you to let me know your belief in South with the same sincerity as shared in our twenty other conversations. Call it trust (Edelman does) or legitimisation or for me, comfort, South is very credible.

If on top of this you say to me ‘we really must go South’ and that you are actually going South yourself, the chances of my doing the same are even higher. And most of this process may even be unconscious.

Nothing in our traditional view of the organization, let alone the supreme representation of the corporations’ plumbing system, the organization chart, says anything about the peer-to-peer (horizontal) mechanisms. In fact, they are ignored. The emphasis is vertical. You to your direct reports, your direct reports to their direct reports and so on.  Ditto in public sector, societal campaigns: doctors to patients, social workers to dysfunctional families, priests to immigrants, and community leaders to gang members. Viral Change activists work through informal networks of recovered patient to patient, ex-dysfunctional family to dysfunctional, settled to immigrant and ex-gang member to violent groups in the streets.

The power of peer-to-peer networks is formally called to arms in our Viral Change programmes ^[5]. One of the  sub-chapters of the book Homo Imitans ^[6] reads ‘youth-to-youth, granny-to-granny’ to make the point of this transversal power.

(Good CEOs and top leaders react: fantastic! Now we know who has the power.)

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To combat the organizational impact of the pandemic, we need a behavioural counter-epidemic inside the company. This can be done but requires minds and hearts to get together in a real social movement, not the traditional ‘change programme’.

Feed Forward 90-day Programme ^[7]

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 ^[5]:

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’).

In this 90-day programme, we will guide you through and help you create sustainable behavioural and cultural change across your organization/team/department.

Format: in-person or virtual

Timing: 90 days

Price range: POA

Contact us ^[8] how to find out more information or to discuss further.

1. I trust you because I can say ‘I haven’t got a clue’ and you don’t think I am an idiot
2. I can be vulnerable and won’t be penalised
3. I can be emotional and you won’t think I am weak
4. I made a mistake and you said you did as well
5. I opened my heart and I did not regret it
6. I told you something in confidence and you kept it like this
7. I shared my doubts and I did not go down the rankings
8. I showed you my tiredness and you didn’t think I wasn’t able
9. I am not as strong as you think but you could see my strengths when I didn’t
10. You said that you’ll help me and you did
11. You said I could call you and you meant it
12. I felt overwhelmed and you did not broadcast it
13. When I screwed up, you could have avoided me, but you gave me your public hand
14. You knew how much I depended on that piece of work and you delivered it to me earlier
15. I got mad and you didn’t
16. You always keep your promises
17. You represent me and I can sleep
18. You protected me and did not send the bill
19. You always tell me the truth even when I don’t want to hear it
20. You never grow at the expense of my shrinking

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For a selection of my Daily Thoughts on leadership, you can buy my latest book, Camino – Leadership Notes On The Road ^[3], available from all major online bookstores ^[9].

 

Downloadable extracts: Extract Camino Chapter 1 ^[10],  Camino – Extract Chapter 2 part 1 ^[11]

 

A collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts. Camino, the Spanish for road, or way, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves. Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest. But we never reach the destination. Our character is constantly shaped by places and journeys, encounters and experiences. The only real theory of leadership is travelling. The only footprints, our actions. The only test, what we leave behind.

Let me share a piece of our own research that has just come up from the oven.

In a 1200 people, pan European company, in the financial sector, we have compared the power of the five person Leadership Team, in terms of messaging and engagement, reaching other people, with the power of the top five Viral Change™ Champions, defined as top influencers and hyperconnected in the organization.  The analysis has been done blind and anonymously. All staff were asked a series of seven questions to try to identify the colleagues whom they would trust and reach out to, in order to obtain some real information, or the ones who usually reach out to them for the same communication purposes.

We analysed three steps (or ‘degrees of separation’) that can be understood like the immediate layers of connections. One layer or step equals your immediate network, second step the connections of that immediate network, third step, the connections of those connections.

The results are revealing. By step one, the Leadership Team had a reach of 21 people whilst the Viral Change™ Champions  had 104. Step 2 (connections of the immediate connections) Leadership Team 100, approximately, and Champions 3 times more, around 300 people. Step 3, 250 for the Leadership team and 450 for the Champions. By step 3, the five person Leadership Team was able to reach (tap into) 27% of the workforce, whilst the five top Viral Change™ Champions reached 49%, almost half of the workforce.

The power of this data, gathered through the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is its inclusiveness (all people in the workforce participated) and its anonymity.

The results reinforce the well established principle in Viral Change™ ^[12]  that hierarchical power is limited when compared with the one of highly connected and influent people (Champions or Activists, in the Viral Change™ methodology). Of course these Viral Change™ influencers need to be found, identified and eventually asked for help to shape a cultural transformation of some sort.

Finding the real influencers inside the organization is vital to orchestrate a bottom-up, peer-to-peer transformation (‘change’, ‘culture’, new norms, etc). It does not get better than this. Many organizations naively think that this pool of influencers match existing pools such as ‘Talent Management’, for example. This is not the case. Inside the organization, the importance of particular individuals, not in the hierarchical system, is clear. Internal, influence of the few, is well and alive.

Backstage Leadership™ is the art, performed by the formal leadership, of giving the stage to those real, distributed leaders who have approximately twice as much power as the Leadership Team when it comes to influence, messaging and communications inside the firm. Similarly these influencers shape behaviours and culture.

Our data is consistent with Edelman’s Trust Barometer that places the category ‘people like me’ (peers) twice as high as the CEO/hierarchical power.

Burn those organizational charts! Other than being a sort of Google map for who reports to whom, they don’t say anything about the real organization. Social Network Analysis ^[13] does. Then, Viral Change™ takes over to shape a culture.

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Continue the conversation…..

 

Join me and my team for our final webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series as we look at collective leadership:

 

Build and enhance your collective leadership capabilities

At The Chalfont Project, we prefer the use of the term ‘practicing leadership’ to ‘developing’ it to emphasise the real life essence of leadership. So much has been written that the world is full of recipes and techniques, examples and role models. The rich plethora of available answers obscures the need to have good questions. Reflection and introspection seem like logical ingredients for being a good leader, yet our business and organizational life treats them as luxuries that have no place in our ubiquitous ‘time famine’. Busy-ness has taken over business and leadership has been commoditised to a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in organizational life than the individual and collective leadership capabilities.

Join us on 17th June at 1730 BST/1830 CET to find out more.

REGISTER HERE ^[14]

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Do you want to know your REAL informal organizational networks?

For many years the need to understand formal and informal connections has been well understood. Now, we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

To understand your informal social networks in your organization we can work with you using our product 3CXcan – see here to find out more. ^[15]

My very good client BTG plc created a habit of getting leadership teams together to race boats for a day, in serious waters, to race, of course. The coaching team are of Olympian level, indeed some of them are now part of the British Olympic Team. They get the instructions first thing in the morning, get to do some training in the water and then racing for the rest of the day. Some people may be sportive, some may have never been in a boat before. After the long day, the dinner, the social aspect and a good night’s sleep, the next day the team is confronted with their own business situation to apply any learning from the day before. It works brilliantly.

There is an extraordinary immediate (organizational and leadership) learning from the model, which I’d like to unpack. The whole experience can be broken down into 4 components. I will explain and at the same time, I will make the comparison with what is more or less standard in our business life.

1. Minimal instructions. The early morning class on racing is beautifully done, but it is one hour, max. There you have ‘all you need to know’ from safety to rules of racing; from winds to manoeuvring; from strategy to tactics. BTG calls this the ‘get it’ part. Compare that with our obsession with having a perfect briefing, with perfect data, with all the dots in a row and boxes ticked, before we start doing anything.
2. Minimum sense making. Nobody receives the total wisdom on racing in an hour, there is no room for absolutely everything to make sense. It just makes enough sense to assume that other things will emerge. Enough sense to act. Compare this with our usual need to obtain maximum comfort. Is everybody on board? Everybody aligned? Does management support this and that? Are we sure that this is what the CEO wants? Have we double checked with the US? We spend our organizational life creating ‘packaged comfort’ before we act.
3. The magic trust comes in. If the team has a decent level of trust, between their members, the magic sparks. You trust that others will have understood, that others will know what to do, that others will help and jump in if needed. No trust, this is where it all breaks down, or at least starts showing some cracks. In our organizational life trust is also the fuel. Nobody quite knows how to create it but you’ll see it when you see it, or you won’t. In BTG racing sessions, teams with intrinsic low or poor trust in real life, perform significantly worse in the waters. Interestingly, the coaches who may not know about the teams themselves in real life, can spot and predict a bad business execution by seeing what happens in those boats. And they are always right.
4. Then you go, go, go. And recalibrate and execute. BTG calls these in several ways: to be ‘on it’, to ‘look out’ and to have the ‘appropriate bandwidth’. It is an imperfect world. As a guest, I have attended sessions where in the morning and during the training bits we have dealt with all possible winds and associated manoeuvring, to get into the race itself and find zero wind, nothing moves whatsoever. Prepared for high winds, what do you do with the lack of it. Does it sound like business as well?

I am incredibly sceptical of ‘sports analogies’ for business. This one works, because it is not an analogy, it is real experience of a full imperfect world, in a day with immediate, transferable. unavoidable learning.

Dealing with the imperfect, the unpredictable, the ambiguous is part of today’s business life. Part of my serious leadership development toolkits. And for the imperfect, the unpredictable and the ambiguous, people still seek perfect training, perfect guarantees and perfect comfort. That is old school.

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Managing the Covid-19 pandemic using Viral Change™ principles. 12 Rules you can apply.

 

Some further reading for the weekend….my recent paper which addresses the non-medical management of the pandemic through the lenses of large scale behavioural and cultural change principles, as practised by the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform for the last 20 years, in the area of organizational change.

 

12 Rules For A Behavioural Counter-Epidemic To Deal With Covid-19   ^[16]

 

A viral epidemic for which there is no immediate cure, only ways of managing it, can only be controlled by a counter behavioural epidemic.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[17], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[18] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[8].

His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management ^[1], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are three major sources of trust generation. Everything else is commentary:

1. The ‘keep promises’. I can rely on you, You said you would, you did. You did not let me down. You walked the talk. Some people may call it reliable, consistent, and predictable. I call it trust, trustworthy. I trust you. You’ll trust me. We will keep our promises. (Keeping promises, or lack of it, still one of the greatest sources of disengagement in organizations and reasons for leaving).
2. The ‘I can be vulnerable’. I made myself vulnerable by disclosing too much, by telling you about my weaknesses, my fault lines, my unfinished thoughts, my doubts, my hesitations, my half decisions my half truths, my insecurity. You did not take advantage. You did understand. Or not. But you did not exploit it, or gained from that, or made a killing out of my inferiority. Thanks. I am not worse off, not humiliated, actually, I am a bit of a more confident grown up.
3. The ‘diamonds in an envelope’. New York Jewish communities trading in diamonds see the backwards and forwards of them in envelopes. That’s it. Not certified, not FEDEX, not signature. If you reach the envelope practice level, you’ve done very well on trust.

The three are connected, of course.

There is a fourth one. It’s blind and emotional and halo effect. I trust this guy, not sure why, speaks well, seems authentic, is a family guy, and religious, and speaks with authority, and is credible, and intelligent, and…

This is a package of trust, for better or for worse. But it works.

Trust is the greatest organizational oil. No trust? Slow or stuck machinery.

Keep promises, allow yourself to be vulnerable and send diamonds in envelops; that is the formula. Easy.

 

 

I know it will happen. I’m certain. It’s nothing to do with trust.

 

Trust requires uncertainty. I trust that you will help me, because you have always done so, but I’m not absolutely sure that you will next time. I hope. I’m a bit uncertain, maybe. But I trust you.

 

Trust is one of these acquired management concepts we mess about with. Here we have a few things that I suggest we need to know about trust:

 

1. Trust is not linear. It’s one of the least linear things we have in organizations. It may take extraordinary efforts to reach a level of trust with an individual, group, a system, a company and, then, a relatively minor breach could get the whole thing down. It’s unfair. Non-linearity is always unfair. Small things create big things. Big things create small things. It’s messy, like life itself, the mother of all non-linear realities.

 

2. Trust is inevitably linked to promises. You keep your promises, my trust will grow almost inevitably. You said you would do something for me, or for everybody, and you do, all the time, or most of the time, trust will grow. ‘Keeping promises’ is a very recurrent theme in our Viral Change™ programmes as a behavioural currency that needs to scale up. ‘Keeping promises’ touches so many other things that, as a behavioural unit, is a little bit of a magic bullet.

 

3. Trust and vulnerability are sisters. If I made myself vulnerable by acknowledging a mistake, by saying that I don’t know, by declaring my lack of control, trust grows. I’m making myself more human, more accessible. But also I’m inviting you to do the same, I’m telling you that you can also tell me that you made a mistake, that you don’t know, or that you are in a messy type of thinking, and I will not hold it against you. You will not be penalised; you will not be labelled as weak or a muddled thinker. That is an intrinsic problem with performance management systems in organizations. We proclaim that it’s safe to make mistakes, but usually we don’t reward this. Despite the wonderful music coming from leadership, who has perhaps learned to say the right thing but not necessarily practise it.

 

The trouble with the latter is that we have mistaken that kind of vulnerability with exposure of our entire self for external consumption. The industry of expressing, sharing, venting, putting it on the table, feelings and emotions, very often done for the sake of it because it’s the politically correct thing to do, has not created more trust. It has created massive exhibitionism.

 

Instagramming our soul does not necessarily make us better human beings, inducers of trust or promoters of freedom. Most soul exhibitionism, which has gathered pandemic proportions with the selfie culture, depletes our inner self on behalf of flawed ideas of openness, honesty or transparency. We have become so transparent that anything can get through us like a penetrating sunbeam. The solidity of our soul has melted it in the air.  The late John O’Donohue expressed it beautifully when pairing ‘the sacred and the secret’. There is not much sacred left these days.

 

It always surprises me that people who are very proud of ‘controlling their boundaries’, seem to be the most prone to Instagramming about the quality of their cereals over breakfast, and Facebooking to the world with party pictures that regrettably they never delete.

 

I am digressing here, but when people tweet pictures of themselves on their own, with a beautiful sunset, holding a glass of wine, with the assertion ‘here I am with my solitude, enjoying beauty on my own, look at me, how profound and spiritual my being is’, I always wonder who takes those shots . Angels? But this is a conversation for another day.

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Don’t Miss Our Free Webinar This Thursday!

The Myths of Management

 

Join myself and Anett Helling ^[19] for our free webinar with Q&A this Thursday.  Leadership traits, employee engagement, empowerment and more – old traditional management thinking will not win in the post Covid-19 scenario. So, what will the ‘new management’ look like? Which elephants do we need to see in the management room? Register Now! ^[20]  Thursday, 30th July – 18:00 BST/19:00 CET.

 

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

 

Attendees eligible for a FREE copy of my new book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management ^[1].

 

 

Being open about mistakes, own mistakes, team mistakes, has always being considered a driver for trust. If I as leader can say ‘I got that wrong’, then I am sending signals of permission to others to also acknowledge errors and therefore learn for the next time.

Years ago I used to promote a ‘Hall of Fame of Mistakes’ in  organizations, where the publicity of those mistakes sent those ‘permissions’ and also created a true psychological safe space. This is the only way to avoid the usual lip services stance of ‘it’s OK to make mistakes’ that can be however followed by being punished. And you should read and interpret ‘punish’ in a broad sense. It’s not capital punishment but reputation, not being promoted, etc.

It turns out that mistake-sharing may not only be a source of trust, as above described, but a a source of increased collaboration and productivity. Prof Nicholas Christakis ran some experiments in Yale where people were working in small groups with some ‘humanoid robots’. Some of those robots were programmed to make mistakes and acknowledge them. Literally they would say ‘Sorry guys, I made a mistake this round, (…) I know it may be hard to believe but robots make mistakes too’. In other groups the robots were programmed to make bland statements. The groups with ‘confessional robots’ performed much better. They also laughed more and consoled each other. They collaborated better, well above the others.

Not entirely surprising but a good experimental proof that integrating mistakes and ‘confessions’ is much better than keeping them under the carpet. The robots brought the psychologically  safe space, and that paid off.

In the absence of humanoid robots in your teams (but have you checked that Peter is not…? mmm.) managers can create those spaces.

Go from the employee of the month (who is still doing that?)  to the mistake of the week. Try it. Zero cost. Just courage.

An 18 year old paper in social anthropology by Marilyn Strathern (then at Cambridge) had the intriguing title of ‘The Tyranny of Transparency’. I suspect it will not be well known in management circles because Social Anthropology is seen here as Exotic Travel that ends in a book, followed, if you are lucky, by doing consumer research for Uniliver.

Strathern did indeed do exotic travel. She spent a lot of time in Papua New Guinea, place that has surely seen more anthropologists than indigenous people, and then came back to also exotic United Kingdom where she lectured and wrote. That paper shoots at the nineties government-enlightening discovery of league tables and targets. In particular, for her, the  measurement of the efficiency of university education via number of publications (outputs), quotations (position in the social network of academics) and pupils who want to join a discipline (market demand).

The mantra was, and is, to ‘make it visible’. ‘It’ being the whole complexity of academic life and accompaniment of students with their emotions, feelings, journeys, discoveries, frustrations, rebellions, aha moments, passions, imagination, experiences and learning. The invisible translated into number of publications. And that was even before the current full tripadvisorization of society

It does not take much to draw a parallel with organizational life where Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are dominant, a sign of rigour and a proxy for success of failure. But beyond these shared points with academia and league tables of anything, there was, and is, also the dominant language of ‘transparency’.

In those and other territories, transparency suddenly gets glorified to not least than a key value in itself. We then aim for transparency, so we ask for KPSs. We want the invisible to be visible, and we ask for what can be visible.  But anthropologists, clever observant of the invisible,  may tell you that transparency may in fact conceal reality, a thought almost impossible to conceive in an MBA curriculum.

I have not been in Papua New Guinea myself but have spent years amongst exotic people in the payroll and I have developed a few rules of thumb (let’s call them heuristics to sound smarter), for example:  for everything said, what is the unsaid. As organization architect, I am terribly interested in what is never said, or discussed, or on the table, perhaps taboos with small t or big T. So, for everything transparent, what is that has been concealed? What ‘transparent outcomes’ have in fact let people off the hook, not having to dig into the invisible, perhaps more real?

One of the advantages of Social Anthropology is that it does not owe anything to  managerial logic. So a social anthropologist would tell you without a blink that asking for transparency means trust is low. This logic is not the managerial logic where asking for transparency means ‘evidence’, which means, visibility, which means measuring, usually  what is both measurable and visible. Allow me to provoke this corollary: the more transparency you ask for, the more invisible things you’ll miss; there will be more proxies and more vicarious life. Transparency will be indeed tyrannical, as  Strathern called it. Trust will be eroded, not boosted.

We may be here in the same ‘Organizations wired wrong’ paradoxes of yesterday where input and output are mistaken.

Before you send me to Papua New Guinea for good, let me call it out: transparency is an outcome, a desired state, an output. As outcome, it requires amongst other things high trust. Boost trust, get transparency and you won’t even have to name it. Ask too much for transparency, get  the tyranny of the visible and the concealed realty for which KPIs are the safe solution to management un-thinking.

Wish me safe travels

PS1. For the record, I have never said, I am defending opacity.

PS2. If you make any good of these Daily Thoughts, ‘tell others to tell others’ to subscribe to this list. It’s free. As I said yesterday, you could be annoyed and you are not obliged to agree. But you won’t remain neutral to the topic. That’s the goal. Promise.

 

English not being my mother tongue, I always take the liberty of using terms that polite English people don’t use lightly, or if they do, they tend to whisper, or lower the voice. Bullshit is one of them.

I was intrigued but the almost synchronized publications of two good books on truth: ‘Post Truth: the new War on Truth,  by Matthew D’Ancona and ‘Post-Truth: why we have reached peak  bullshit’ by Evan Davis, both formidable British journalists. Then I did a bit of drive-through-research (aka googling) and found that the topic of bullshit was dully studied in 1986 by a philosopher called Harry Frankfurt, who converted it  into a book of the same title in 2005. A very long journey indeed since today the average gap between a Harvard Business Review article and a book of the same title seems to be a week or so (and the process is called intellectual elongation – trademark pending – since the book is the same article extended in 200 pages)

The definition of bullshit that the Wikipedia entry provides goes like this: ‘Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade (a.k.a. rhetoric), without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn’t care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether or not their listener is persuaded’.

This year we have entered an era of sophisticated language about truth: there is truth indeed, then post-truth, also non-truth, and then of course facts, alternative facts and fake news. The US new presidency has contributed enormously to these layers of semantics floating around. We have never had it so rich to describe a reality. Thank you.

Bullshit is of course nothing new. Science has had it at the door for a long time. Carl Sagan(1934– 1996) wrote a Baloney Detection Kit to differentiate science and pseudo-science. An issue that struck me is how naïve I have been for many years thinking that bullshit is in fact so … bullshit that nobody could get away with murder on that topic and that bullshit would be after all always called out.

But we are seeing today is that bullshit it not only not called out but digested with a mixture of incredulity and silence so it is becoming normal. Bullshitting is now part of daily politics, for example. Full stop.

When I look back at my client list of many years, I find that, on the whole, the organization was reasonably equipped to detect bullshit. Perhaps my years in pharmaceutical R&D contributed as well to bring some rigour to the party. However, they have always been some people, some individual leaders, who seemed to master bullshit quite well. They usually used their position of authority to elevate bullshit to the category of high strategic thinking and convinced many in the process. And in some occasions, their bullshit had immediate managerial consequences. In a case I remember well, a entire multimillion dollar drug clinical trial was born from a piece of bullshit expressed in the corridor by a mighty R&D leader who was a master bullshitter.

For reasons that I don’t quite understand, I have now become more sensitised to bullshit, more intolerant to mediocre thinking and of people who can get away with half truths and arguments solid as a meringue. So, I am not having a great time, since the world around is abundant of those.

One of the first Daily Thoughts of the year was entitled ‘Invitation: The year of Bullshit Detection’. The invitation still stands but I am not sure, quite frankly, how much progress we have made.

 Edelman Trust barometer is out again. Extraordinary piece of work.

The highlights? Trust is at its lowest, everywhere ^[21]. The media in particular is at the bottom. In the organization, ‘people like me’ (‘a person like yourself’) represents the highest source of trust; the lowest, the CEO, a proxy for the top authority of the system.

This pattern has been consistent for years and is at the core of our peer-to-peer orchestration in our Viral Change™ programmes. ^[22]

Edelman says: “A person like yourself” is now as credible as an academic or technical expert, and far more credible than a CEO or government official, implying that the primary axis of communications is now horizontal or peer-to-peer, evidence of dispersion of authority to friends and family.

Interesting that Edelman brings in ‘horizontality’. This is how I put it just days ago, before the 2017 results: Trust is (mostly) horizontal. Our organizations are (mostly) vertical. No wonder… ^[23]

Managing the peer-to-peer networks in the organization sounds like management, full stop.

The Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform is the most robust type of operating system for the modern, complex organization. It has peer-to-peer work as its engine of action. So we are on track, with the times, and ahead of the times.

I take no pleasure in the dismal levels of overall trust in the world, but I am delighted that we at our company of Organization Architects are working with the highest source of this currency to create large scale, behavioural and cultural change, that is social movements, powered by Viral Change™.

When it comes to trust – peers one, hierarchy nil.

This is not a call to the funeral of hierarchy. Its death has been largely exaggerated. It is a call to leadership to go to the optometrist, get a new pair of glasses, and get real. There are 30 or so points of trust distance between you and the hierarchy, and zero trust distance between you and your mates, colleagues, peers, tribe members, ‘people like you’.

This gap has existed for years and years. Curiously, optometrists have also been available during that time. How interesting!

In our Viral Change™ Programmes, members of the community (company) of activists, invariably ask questions such as, what shall we do with people who are negative? What do we do with those colleagues who are not engaging with me in the conversation? How can I keep the motivation of my peers going? Etc.

In the early days of Viral Change™, we worried about this a lot. By ‘we’ I mean us as consultants, the sponsor/client, the project team members, all the above. We felt compelled to have ready-made answers, a library of FAQs. So, we did.

But quickly we learnt that our answers were not as good as the answers of the champions/activists themselves, and, if they were, champions/activists paid more attention to the answers coming from ‘people like them’, that is, other champions.

We soon switched the emphasis and diverted those questions to the community itself. Answers came back in the form of ‘this is what I did’ or ‘this is how I would do it’, followed by a stream of other people agreeing (‘me too’) or disagreeing (‘that would never work for me, however…’).

It was much better!

There is a broader reflection on leadership here. The leader is not an FAQ machine, an answerphone. The leader however must have enough insights about what is going on and how people do and solve things to say ‘this is how other colleagues of yours have dealt with it’. And then, it is OK to say, ‘I would also suggest’. But the power of the peer-to-peer engagement and cross fertilization is never matched by the mighty leader delivering ‘the right answer’.

You as leader do not have to have all the answers. In fact, I would be suspicious of the one who does. My rule of thumb is ‘the answer is in this room somewhere’. Most of the time, this is the plain truth.

It’s official. Well, it has been now for a little while. “Post-truth” has been named Oxford Dictionaries’ 2016 international word of the year ^[24], ^[25]

It has an authorised definition: ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. So, anything goes.

I love Jennifer Senior’s (The New York Times) comment: ‘An aide to Donald J. Trump, our president-elect, recently declared on NPR ^[26], “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts.” (Or grammar, apparently.)’

We need to get used to it. Add it to Fake News, courtesy of Facebook. Add it to plain lies deliberately expressed to an entire nation in the UK Brexit.

Is it the right time to promote our ‘Critical Thinking Accelerator’ (course, masterclass, immersion, training, all of the above)?

I must admit that, being trained moons ago in the scientific method (although I am not sure Medicine and Psychiatry completely qualify for that) I have been caught by surprise. The surprise for me is not the fact that Post Truth infections took place/take place, but that the world is incredibly silent.

Would tomorrow’s news that a Martian has landed in Arizona be treated with full respect as ‘just an opinion’? If we go this way, the old and tired creationists-evolutionists controversy was a sort of mild rehearsal.

Carl Sagan’s (1934–1996) Baloney Detection Kit was fresh air at the time. Amongst the almost banal statements there are these:  seek independent confirmation of alleged facts; encourage an open debate about the issue and the available evidence; come up with a variety of competing hypotheses explaining a given outcome; etc.

During the recent US presidential elections, any reputable newspaper (that excludes the UK tabloids in both counts of words) had its own ‘Fact Checker’ division, competing on analysing the reality of statements. I did try to follow one of them but it was so overwhelming that I gave up. I thought that a computer generated statements in the Trump side could not have done better.

Then, you get used to it.

Seriously dangerous territory. I do worry about it. We need a little counter-epidemic of truth. I never thought until now that we needed one. If critical thinking has not been the greatest of management competencies, we now need to invent the way of putting it in the water supply of the company. And the school. And the agora.

 

 

This is Rule number 13 of the just published, new book ‘Rules for Revolutionaries- how Big Organizing can change everything’, by Becky Bond and Zack Exley.

Both were Bernie Sanders’ organisers of his grassroots movement which was incredible successful if not, as we know, enough to win the Democratic nomination in the US recent presidential Elections.

They say:

Nursing as a profession is based on the values of caring, compassion, and community, and nurses are powerful allies who will attract countless others to your cause. They possess a down-to-earth professionalism that is sincere and authentic, and they have first-hand knowledge of the life-or-death stakes of the most urgent issues of the day, from income inequality to immigration reform to climate change.

Becky goes on to say:

I ‘m serious when I say that if there are no nurses, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. In poll after poll, nursing is named by Americans as the most trusted profession. No other profession is even close. Meanwhile, there’s a four-way tie for the least-trusted professions: lobbyists, members of Congress, telemarketers, and car salespeople.

I find it incredible interesting that this is a whole rule number 13, of the 22 rules. Banking on an entire profession is unusual. You could say that this reflects some of the peculiar dynamics in the US, but they just published their rules are universal.

And the universal behind the universal rule is the engagement of people who are trusted.

French writer Alexandre Dumas wrote the famous line ‘Cherchez la Femme’, that is, ‘look for the woman’, since then extended and used as ‘always look for the woman and you’ll hit the root causes’ (‘There is a woman in every affair; as soon as someone brings me a report, I say, “Look for the woman!”)

In organizations, we need a ‘look for trust, for people trustworthy’.  Everything goes back to that. And the only people in a position to declare you ‘somebody I trust’ are your peers, not your bosses, or the HR system.

If the power of the nursing tribe lies in their trust-generator capacity, we need to look for similar mechanisms in the organization. Since peer-to-peer networks of commitment inside the organization are the most powerful engine of action, finding these individuals with high trust and high connectivity in the networks, becomes one of the most important tasks of any culture or transformation effort. And this pool of individuals does nor correlate with the hierarchical system or a ‘talent management’ pool.

Revolutions a la Becky and Zack may be to nurses, what organizational change may be to highly connected Viral Change™ ^[22] activists.

When in the not too distant future, cultural digital archaeologists will dig into the remains of the legacy of sexual predators and large scale sexual abusers such as the UK entertainer and charity champion, Sir Jimmy Saville (1926-2011), Order of the British Empire, Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory, they will find something at the engine of it all, and it’s not sex.

When we do the same with the human disaster around abuse at the hands of religious ministers (Catholic Church, Anglican Church, many other churches) , we will also find something as a common currency, and it’s not sex.

When the same digging takes place in all cases of sexual harassment, abuse, rape and combinations in universities ( as just now highlighted in the media), any campuses, undergraduate colleges and, for ever known boarding schools, we will equally find the same currency, again and again. And it’s not sex.

When the likes of Donald Trump have been scrutinized in a more forensic way, and people have really come to terms with his expressed on tape views on women being a target for anything; to be more precise ‘you can do anything to women; grab them by ( sorry, censured in Daily Thoughts), and I don’t even wait, when you’re a star’, we will find the same absence of sex as the main motivator.

Yes, there is sex in all of this, but, focusing on sex would be a fantastic smokescreen.

It is almost impossible to say this without upsetting anybody remotely close to the suffers, who saw sex, suffered sex and are still traumatized by sex.

But it’s not sex. It’s power. It’s all about power, the cultural digital archaeologists will tell us. Power over others, power over intimacy, power to access a body and a soul and get away with it in the name of power. Power that was exercised and self-reinforced because it worked. Power that could not be disputed or challenged. Power that made the sufferers guilty of not accepting it.

Power is power. The power of the uniform, the cassock, the pinstripe suit, the semi naked holy man, live coach, cultural celebrity, divine representation, prestige professor, life guru, or formal authority. Exercising power, because one can, is the real primal motivator of this rather flawed evolutionary product called Homo Sapiens.  Who also does sex.

In psychoanalytic terms, it’s not Freud (sex) but Adler (power) who understood humanity. But we never paid attention to Adler as much as we did to Freud. The Freud anthropological concept of man, was more exhilarating, more headline grabbing, I suppose.  Maybe the diggers will have to tell us why.

The same power mechanisms rule in any association of individuals, any organizational dynamics, any relationship between management and staff, any corporate rituals between those with hierarchical power and those with any other power, or no power at all.

Some would think that the comparison of the rotten part of the managerial world with those horrors of abuse is too risky and disproportionate. And that would be another fantastic mixture of alibi and smokescreen. It’s the some power, but I am not making any assumptions about the severity of the human impact, benign, malignant or terminal.

Power is at the core of any human relationship. I don’t think we need any cultural digital archaeologist to tell us. But anybody involved in any form of collective action, and managers, leaders, HR/OD tribes and others are, who want to make sense of what is going on, must leave the cultural-accepted sex glasses, or any other, on the table,  and wear the power glasses. Believe me,  these will serve to see reality with 20/20 vision. If you start with power analysis, you will have a head start. Then add in any other layer such as trust, empowerment, or any theory of leadership. Fine. But don’t lose the power glasses.

Perhaps it’s so simple, so obvious, so palpable, so present, that the big risk is the use of another so: so what? It’s human nature, people say.

But we are not condemned to this kind of humanity. We don’t have to. There is power for good as well, a topic for another day.

There is a whole industry about ‘emotional intelligence’. I want a bigger industry about power intelligence. Then, we will be talking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am more interested in employee disengagement than employee engagement. The journey of disenchantment intrigues me more, and interests me more, than the whole industry of employee engagement surveys leading to employee engagement Gantt charts and employee engagement workshops.

As a self proclaimed armchair scholar of social movements, under the conviction that this field of collective action has more to say about running business organizations than all business schools HR/OD courses, I found here a parallel. Also here there is more written about engagement of people in the movement than its opposite.

I have no hard data to support this hypothesis but my own categorization of the causes of disengagement look like this:

1. The video and the audio don’t match. Suddenly (or not that suddenly) what I hear being said, not just by the leadership itself but the overall narrative that inundates the place, and what I see, are out of sync, like those videos or TV broadcasts where the mouth of the speaker seems to be on a different planet. This out-of-sync, not-matching does not have to be dramatic. In fact, it is more dangerous when subtle, when recurrent disconnects tell my brain that trust is getting a bit rusty.
2. Personal gratification has become insufficient. Monetary or not, (probably not monetary is more common) I am not getting my brain dopamine working as much as before (apologies for the clumsy neurobabble)
3. Declining commitment is now socially infected. Look around and you’ll see commitments of many sort going down. A social copying mechanism has kicked off, God knows when, and the new norm for (dis)enchantment is now below threshold. It’s not me, it’s the place, you see?
4. Some catalyst event has contaminated the place (and me). Often ‘the event’ has no personal, direct implication. The Head of the Division has been fired, a mini group has left, a written-on-the-wall-for-a-long-time partial restructuring has taken place, and hey, this place is not what it used to be. In my experience, the fact that the place may now be objectively much better matters less than the sense of intrusion, disruption and invasion of the territory.

These, and undoubtedly other factors, may be at the core of disengagement, which, as the above 4 scenarios show are a mixture of (a) personal experience and (b) social contagion.

Standard Employee Engagement surveys, which are constructed for the purposes of generating numerical data from large samples, are notoriously poor in contextual insights. It is usually left to the post-survey results analysis to have a post-hoc frame: of course Finance is low this year, they have their second SVP in a year. Which has the same intellectual strength as saying that the survey was carried out in a particular bad weather week.

Part 2 to follow…

 

 

A less spoken feature of great leadership is the art of managing the disappointments created by that same leadership. I call it the art of explaining ‘no, we can’t’. Or we couldn’t. ‘Yes we can’ is motivational and inspirational. ‘No, we can’t’, is its inconvenient ugly sister.

There will be disappointed people. I can assure you: the ambitions that could not be fulfilled completely; the compromises that others may find unpalatable.

Some people will feel you did not go far enough. Other people may feel you went too far. Dealing with satisfied followers is the easy part. Explaining to the dissatisfied is harder, but a noble feature of strong leadership.

There maybe trade offs to explain. Chances are some may have been invisible. There may be emergent barriers. Perhaps we were more resource constrained than we thought. Perhaps there was a high expectation of achieving X and we did not. But X is still the aim. Maybe some goals need postponing.

Explaining the disappointments is not the end of the story, but will embrace an extra percentage of people who will see honesty, courage, and guts; perhaps boldness. The winner of acknowledging and explaining disappointments is trust.

For each ‘yes we can’, find and explain the ‘we cannot, however’. This yin yang of expectations is powerful, often overlooked.

Throw embarrassment out of the window. Practice the humble act of saying no, explaining why, and describing what ‘we can however do’ and will do. You coming with me?

That is the trouble of many well-intentioned ‘crowd-sourced’ rounds of input in the form of focus groups or similar. We do a lot of work with clients on embedding a value system and their behavioural translation into the culture by using our Viral Change Mobilizing Platform ^[22]. There is always a temptation to go deep and broad in the organization asking for input on key behaviours that eventually may make a final set. The good news is that this in itself is a very good form of people engagement. The bad news is that it could easily create a population of frustrated people when they see that ‘their ideas’ have not been taken into account.

It’s easy to create an impression of democratic work but just as easy to disappoint people.

What is the answer?

1. Don’t do the rounds (bad idea, people’s input counts!)
2. Be very clear that input will be used but may not be reflected exactly in a final agreement
3. Be very clear that somebody, somewhere, will have to make a judgement (in our case, usually the leadership team)
4. Explain how the input will be used
5. Never, ever make it a scientific experiment. Asking for broad input and identifying trends is not science, but it works

In the early days of Viral Change™ , about 15 years ago at least, we identified a behaviour that we called ‘blind input’: ‘I give my input, but I don’t see the impact, I don’t receive feedback, I hope somebody will do something with it’. This is still a persistent pattern to take care of.

Don’t play limbo with people’s views. Bad idea.

Yes to all. All of the above. Who could disagree? Certainly not the leadership development sub-industry.

We want the good guys, well behaved, morally sound, positively visible and value speakers/value presenters/value behaving, at the top. I have no problem with this. When I have a problem is when we stop the conversation there, and we all go for a walk as if the engagement of the other 14980 people in the company depended on that.

Stop looking up. Look sideways, a bit down. What matters is the social copying of each other in the day-to-day, transversal, horizontal, peer-to-peer, tribal organization. And that may or may not correlate with ‘life at the top’. Nobody says the top does not count. What I say is that it is often an alibi for management inaction. A not terribly functional top leadership is often blamed for not terribly functional operations even if these two do not have anything to do with each other.

A healthy organization is one where the top is a model, yes, but life does not depend on it. Usually, in a large or medium organization there will be several layers of leadership and management. All of them count as much, if not more. How 100 supervisors behave may be more crucial than the 10 guys at the top.

What happens at the level of what the Edelman Trust Barometer calls ‘people like me’ is what shapes organizations. ‘People like me’  (peers, colleagues, mates, tribe members) represnet the highest source of internal trust. It’s the day to day interactions at all levels that shape a culture, not the powerpoints from the leadership team.

Looking up all the time is a distraction, a diversion, a convenient out of focus that is used to explain everything, even if ‘the explanation’ is here and down, say, at managerial and supervisory level.

And another thing, looking up too much will also give you chronic neck pain.

If you push me for a articulation of human relationships, everything is transactional. But in a more specific way, transactional means an interchange, whether goods, money, services or favours. Whilst all is transactional at its core, from a mother’s love to an exchange of services, you would probably not characterize the former as ‘a transaction’.

When it comes to life in the organization, the transactional model dominates. Not just because the business organisation has surely something to sell, and has customers, and stakeholders, but because it has extended the transactional model to all things internal as well.  An ill-conceived concept of the ‘internal customer’ sees relationships between people, with management, within the company, between departments, as transactions.

I wrote a while ago that about this misleading language: ^[27]

I am your customer, you are my customer. When I need to provide you with something, you are my customer. When you need to do the same for me, I am your customer. I am marketing, you, finance, are my customer when you ask me for data.  I am corporate finance, you, country finance, are my customers. I am R&D, my customer is marketing and sales. I am sales, my customers are the consumers. I am information management, the rest of the company is my customer. The customer-centric mantra that has been in place for many years has created this muddle. Not pronouncing the word ‘customer’ is so politically incorrect that we tend to pollinate our thinking and our language with it, to make sure we don’t miss it.

But, then I said, there is only one customer and it is the one that pays the bills ^[27].

The organization is not a Grand Bazaar, certainly not with internal buyers and sellers, with internal market transactions. It is an organism of connections and relationships, a relationship engine, a relationship factory, an instrument of collaboration that facilitates the Drucker-ite miracle of ‘ordinary people doing extraordinary things together’. Drucker did not say, being pan-directional-customer-centric. A mercantile model of the internal people relationships misses the point.

As soon as you leave this Relationship Model and manage and lead instead a Grand Bazaar with give and take, quid pro quo, and internal customers and markets, you are in serious risk of ever shaping a single sense of belonging, a common purpose.

In the Grand Bazaar model, I belong to my shop, or chain or shops, and I have my goods to sell and my benefits to achieve. Employees and groups are merchants. There is nothing wrong with managing and leading a Grand Bazaar. It may even be useful if what you want is to promote ‘internal competition’, a mantra sold to us as intrinsically good, with no much critical thinking attached. Fine, is this is what you want. Please, don’t pay consultants for a big ‘One Company’ Project. There isn’t one. Nobody belongs to the Grand Bazaar, their loyalties are to the tribes, to the traders, to the stands and shops. By the way, the obsession with the internal customer mercantile and transactional operating system ends up stealing air time from the real customer, who is outside.

As for external consultants, particularly in the strategic and organizational arena, if you wear the shoes of Bazaar (goods) Provider, you will never leave those shoes and you will compete with other Bazaar Providers only on cost, unlikely on value.

I, and my company, do not work for any client that sees us as ‘vendors’, or that we see them as buyers. I deeply hate the feeling of consultants seen as the enemies, or necessary evils, working only on self interest. Granted, the industry has created this monster. It is a big one, and it is in good health. It is a self inflicted problem of very difficult solution, when fortunes have been amassed by feeding the monster.

I, for one, am out of that. Any potential client conversation that does not contain ‘We want you to help us’ at the beginning, and ‘I’d love to help you’ at the end, is out of the system. 2016 resolution. I must say, overdue. I am done with the bazaar model. Our clients pay for our expertise and unconditional commitment to  a joint cause, not for the number of pages of a PowerPoint report or the numbers of days we have showed up.