Value, as usually used, means transactional monetary value. Usually it doesn’t mean intrinsic value, or value per se. For example, ‘the value of employee engagement’ means in reality, ‘the utility of employee engagement’ (productivity etc).  ´Shareholder value´ means ´shareholder monetary returns´. ‘Value added’ means some sort of numerical increase, a delta versus a previous situation. All ends in a Bank of some sort. But creating value and providing utility are two things. It just happens that business has conveniently married them.  We hear a lot these days about ‘value missions’. Progressive and popular economist Mariana Mazzucato is talking ‘value’ all of the time, but I hear utility. Many times, ‘the value of’ seems to mean ‘the utility of’. We have reduced most of our business universe (only business?) to a utilitarian world where all that happens needs to be useful and, preferably useful now. It’s hard to disagree with this (utilitarian) version of business and organization reality, we are all sucked in. We have been brainwashed, from kindergarten to business school. But it’s hardly the only reality. It’s simple the only accepted reality. In this utility-reality, efficacy and predictability are key. No waste, to the point, deliver what you promised, no more, no less, in the shortest route, no room for the extra-ordinary. Effectiveness, however, needs some inefficacy, some element of waste, some unpredictability. Using their own language, the language of the Utility Warriors, that is, ‘useless’ is often ‘very useful’ because it would allow one to see things that otherwise would be invisible or hidden under the obvious utility. What is apparently useless may contain gems not yet discovered. Even preachers of meditation or stillness fall into the trap of having to explain why these would be useful (for your mind, or calmness or to clear your head). So here the ‘value’ of meditation becomes meditation being very ‘useful’ to calm you down. Our organizational/business reality has no time for these philosophical nuances. It does not understand them, so it dismisses them as, err, not useful. Our organizational/business world prefers a reality that is mechanical, or mechanistic, because this world can be broken into pieces that ‘can be managed’. It’s very good at dividing, less good at uniting. The pieces have utility in themselves, can be replaced, can be paid for (a consulting programme is usually paid for by its pieces, that is, number of days, number of consultants, daily rates, etc, translating value into the aggregation of pieces and banking on the collective collusion with this absurd model), but, the worst thing you could do as a consultant is to sell your time. Here is the paradox. Most of the great things in life that have great universal value have no utility. They are pretty useless in the managerial sense. Try love, truth, beauty, and wonder (without their ‘utility’) and see how it feels. Stressful, isn’t it? Oh well, let’s escort them off the business premises. Problem solved. Language is a beautiful trap.

You can learn and discover a lot when exploring your values, behaviours and organizational culture.  If you want to change elements of your company culture but need expert guidance and hands-on-support, feel free to contact my team at: [email protected].

1. They don’t read blogs entitled ‘5 things very successful leaders have in common’.
2. They don’t care about lists of platitudes of the type: be yourself, know where you are going, give feed back, be proactive, listen to people and don’t leave things for tomorrow.
3. They don’t think they have anything in common with other successful leaders other than success.
4. Actually, very successful leaders have in common a pair of legs, a pair of eyes, one heart, they were all babies before, and they will all die.
5. Courage, determination, resilience, honesty and fantastic communication skills. These 5 attributes of very successful leaders, are equally found in very unsuccessful leaders .

I beg you:

Stop thinking like a printout. Stop spamming with a list of platitudes. Say something that is better than silence. Stop writing as if you have found the Meaning of the Universe. Starting the phrase with “research shows that’ does not necessarily give you credibility to your argument.

By all means, share ideas, personal and subjective. That is not the problem. On the contrary, that may be the solution to Robotic Psychological Pollution. I love biased and subjective ideas associated to a name. Then I know I am talking to a human being. I may agree or not, but I will know where people stand.

Disclosure. There are not 5 things that very successful leaders have in common. Or 10 things. Or Harvard research with the solution. These attributional lists have the solidity of a cream cake. Father Christmas is your dad. Management thinking is exhausted. We can’t milk more Google lists anymore.

Richard III update: A human and critical thinking conversation, my kingdom for a human and critical thinking conversation.

It’s the battle for Ideas, not Lists.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

For more thoughts on leadership…

 

I’ve met many top leaders in my life whose greatest merit seemed to be avoiding mistakes, by letting others make them for them. They climbed to the top on grounds of stainless purity and immaculate protection of themselves. They survived reorganizations one after another, with Darwinian perfection until the point at which the severance package was not to be refused anymore.They called this point ‘time to move on’.But having been motionless all their life, they could only end up being advisers or armchair investors or Board non execs. At this point they are incredibly skilful at pronouncing platitudes and they continue their working life with the same total lack of ‘skin in the game’ that has been their key feature until then.

 

Extract taken from my new book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management ^[1]. Available Now!

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs deprogramming. This book of 200, tweet-sized, vignettes, looks at the other side of things – flipping the coin. It asks us to use more rigour and critical thinking in how we use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago.

 

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

 

Discovering’ an old article that I wrote years ago, when I used to have a management column in a monthly pharmaceutical magazine, I can see how some of the themes that were pertinent then, are still relevant today. Remember the noise about the ‘knowledge economy’? Who would challenge this today?

Here is the story I told then. A rich American lady visits the most famous hat maker in Paris. She sees a beautiful, exquisite, long ribbon and immediately falls in love with it. The hat maker takes the ribbon in his hands, does a few twists with it and creates a stunning hat. Brilliant! The lady grabs it immediately. How much is it? she says. Five thousand Euros, the hat maker says. Five thousand Euros! the lady exclaims, but, it’s just a ribbon! Madam, the hat maker says, the ribbon is free.

The consulting world, where I navigate today, is a terrible place for hat makers. I’ll explain. ‘Consulting’ has developed a market focused on the quantifiable delivery of ribbons (pink, red, small, big, 20, 200, 1 consultant, 3 consultants, 300 consultants, 300 hours etc.…) ‘Delivery’ has become part of the language.

I am a Procurement Department’s nightmare because I challenge the daily rate, the number of days, the number of members of my team, the quantification of the ribbons. I provide the knowledge and the skills to work together with the client focused on an outcome. Madam, the workshop is free. I can understand, that if you sell boxes of biscuits, you would do so on the basis of the number of boxes and the number of biscuits, and, perhaps, the cost of the lorry to get the biscuits to you. But I challenge the application of ‘the delivery model’ to strategic advice, leadership development, organizational strategy and working closely with a team to make it successful. But this is only a 20-page report! Madam, the report is free. But this is only half a day with the team! Madam the meeting is free.

Am I alone in this? Surgeons, schools fees, works of arts, brand creation, executive search, these are examples of work done and priced on value, not on effort and ‘units of work’.

Just because the number of hours, number of days and number of anything is easily quantifiable, whilst  ‘value’ is much harder to measure, it does not mean that we have to take the easy route.

Starting with ‘the value question’ is the right start: employees, partners, activities etc. When I got immersed in Decision Analysis many moons ago, I learnt that people can distinguish well between preferences, and that, in doing so they are ‘measuring’ their reality.  I prefer this kind of value to that kind of value is as solid as a numerical comparison. It’s worth making the effort of comparing the value of various options: of doing A vs. doing B; of doing X vs. not doing it at all. I have come back to the ‘Madam the ribbon is free’ approach many times in my life. It has always kept me on track to keep my focus on value, to see it, to smell it, to decide on it. Not necessarily on numbers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This contrarian do-less will pay off.

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

 

(from Disruptive Ideas ^[2])

Management Theory (if there is one) and management practice are not physics. We don’t have very solid data about what leads to what. We have plenty of correlations, a myriad of assumptions and, mostly, ‘half truths’ and conventional wisdom that has become elevated to the status of dogma.

Things may change with the use of Big Data, but this is only available to large companies that have adopted a very data-driven, evidence-based approach to management. Google is one of them. But even here the focus, for example in human resources, is on predicting employee performance or successful leadership. Predicting successful leaders in Google is very good for Google, but hardly a recipe to be copied by non-Google companies. It may tell Google what a successful leader looks like in their environment, but, (1) this is hardly replicable and (2) it does not equate to crafting the concept of Leadership itself.

There is both good news and bad news here. The good news is that many things could work well in the organization, and that you should be open to exploring and creating your own way. The bad news is the same as the good news with the added warning of the risk of trying to copy and replicate. Back to the good news: look at exciting examples of performance and leadership, imagine A, B and C in your organization, learn from what seems to work or not. Bad news again: don’t copy the entire thing, the entire model, the entire system pretending that you will be a mini-case of that Very Successful Company.

Management practices could do with more authenticity and more effort to ‘find your own way’, and less obsession with adopting entire ‘models of change’, ‘types of engagement’ or off-the-shelf designs.

Learning from examples is wonderful, provided one keeps an objective critical view of the whole picture and does not get too carried away. For each compilation of the top 20 high performing companies which did X, Y and Z, there are dozens of unwritten books about the hundreds of companies which also did X,Y and Z and failed.

There is a world of models, ideas, examples, and styles out there. Look and learn. Don’t benchmark. Benchmarking is a race against somebody who has already won.

 

1. Culture is the difference between 30 people making a decision in 30 days, and 3 people making the same decision in 3 days
2. Culture is the difference between taking accountability, and passing the monkey down the hierarchy
3. Culture is the difference between waiting to be told, and taking the initiative
4. Culture is the difference between bringing things in the open, and criticising everybody in the toilets after the meeting has ended and decisions made
5. Culture is the difference between implementing decisions, and deferring them or waiting hoping that those decisions may be changed
6. Culture is the difference between losing 20% of recruits after a recent recruitment investment, and having people knocking at the door wanting to join
7. Culture is the difference between recycling orphan ideas, and making things happen
8. Culture is the difference between making things happen first and fixing the broken system afterwards, and paralysing all to fix the system first so things can happen after

Dear leader who thinks culture is fluffy and woolly and soft.  Do you want me to run an ROI on these, or would your imagination do it for now?

PS: Finance is soft, very, very soft. Culture is hard. But fixable, and exciting, and strategic, and meaningful, and a business driver, big time, provided that you stop that ‘soft, fluffy, fuzzy’ thing.

PS2: I insist, I can run an ROI on this for you in no time.

I am back to one of my favourites: measuring value. One of my oldest Daily Thoughts told this story.

A rich American lady visits the most famous hat maker (milliner) in Paris. She sees a beautiful, exquisite, long ribbon and immediately falls in love with it. She asks the milliner to make a hat for her. The hat maker takes the ribbon in his hands, does a few twists with it and creates a stunning hat. Brilliant! The lady comes back the following day and grabs it immediately. Exquisite! How much is it? she says. Five hundred Euros, the hat maker says. Five hundred Euros! the lady exclaims, but, it’s just a ribbon! Madam, the hat maker says, the ribbon is free.

The consulting world, where I navigate today, is a terrible place for hat makers. I’ll explain. ‘Consulting’ has developed a market focused on the quantifiable delivery of ribbons (pink, red, small, big, 20, 200, 1 consultant, 3 consultants, 300 consultants, 300 hours etc.…) ‘Delivery’ has become part of the language.

I am a Procurement Department’s nightmare because I tell them that I don’t deliver anything. As in Pizza delivery. I challenge the daily rate, the number of days, the number of members of my team involved, the quantification of the ribbons. We provide the knowledge, the experience, the expertise and the skills to work together with the client focused on outcomes. We work on a whatever-it-takes-to-outcomes model. And when I tell them that a one hour keynote and a three hour extended keynote costs the same they look at me in disbelief.

Madam, the workshop is free. I can understand that if you sell boxes of biscuits, you would do so on the basis of the number of boxes and the number of biscuits, and, perhaps, the cost of the lorry to get the biscuits to you. But I challenge the application of ‘the delivery model’ to strategic advice, leadership development, organizational change, organizational strategy and working closely with a team to make it successful. But this is a 20 pages report! Madam, the report is free. But this is only half a day with the team! Madam the meeting is free.

Am I alone in this? I feel strongly: never sell your time. Why is it so hard to understand in the consulting world? Surgeons, schools fees, works of art, brand creation, executive search, there are examples of work done and priced on value, not on effort and ‘units of work’.

Would you like a 3 hour appendectomy or a 1 hr one? Would you like the full education or half education?  Would you like any creative director needed for the new brand or do you want the brand to be created by one project manager?  The real Matisse or a photocopy?

Just because the number of hours, number of days and number of anything is easily quantifiable, whilst  ‘value’ is much harder to measure, it does not mean that we have to take the easy route. But Big Consulting has educated the market with a military manual: 200 MBAs will descend to you for 30 workshops, 15 countries, 10 reports.

Starting with ‘the value question’ is the right start: employees, partners, activities etc. When I got immersed in Decision Analysis many moons ago, I learnt that people can distinguish well between preferences, and that, in doing so, they are ‘measuring’ their reality with great accuracy.  ‘I prefer this kind of value to that kind of value’ is as solid as a numerical comparison. What is the value of doing A vs. doing B; of doing X vs. not doing it at all. People get these things very well.

The Parisian ‘Madam the ribbon is free’ approach has always kept me on track to keep focused on value, to see it, to smell it, to decide on it.

 

Teamocracy may be the worst form of people collaboration  except for all those other forms that have been tried from time-to-time. Churchill said that of democracy  as a form of government.

Our organizations have become teamocracies. Teams appear like mushrooms and stay for ever. Our default ‘concept-form’ of human collaboration is the team.  We have equated team to a structure, which components and org chart can be powerpointed. Worse, we then equate the whole ‘team-concept-structure’ to a ‘meeting’. ‘Let’s bring this to the team’, often really means ‘let’s bring this to the meeting’. ‘Team equals meeting’ is a cancer. Team and meeting are forced marriage. The best team is the one that does not need to meet.

In the glorification of ‘team-the-noun-the-structure’, we have forgotten the verb teaming-up. We have been trapped in the structure ‘team’ for too long. We don’t need more teams, but we need more teaming up

‘Team concept’  feels very much at home in the sports arena. Also in the military and other places. But not all that collaborates and joins up is a team. Jesus Christ did not create a team of 12  apostles, not a high performance team certainly with a bunch of rather hopeless fishermen.  There is no such thing as a team of monks in an abbey.  Or a team of a mother, father and 3 kids. We usually don’t refer to the family as a team. Except when the mother has left the father on his own with the 3 kids for the weekend to go and visit her mum, and the father and the kids welcome her back with ‘we are a good team’. Which means we have just survived.

A sales team may be the least of a team you have. But the label accredits a bunch of possible individualistic employees, possibly paid by their individualist performance, with something bigger and glorious. Oh! Teamocracies! They rule the organizational and business world. We love them.

But here is the truth. Teamocracy is exhausted. But it does not dare to admit it.  I suggest we give teamocracies a break, perhaps a sabbatical, dare I say prepare a retirement party.

There is plenty of evidence that a lot of good stuff takes place in the informal  networks of the organization, not in the teams.  If teamocracy is looking for a retirement package,  networcracy comes in. It’s the network stupid.

‘We need a team to do X’, is the wrong start. ‘We need to do X, what behaviours do we need to have in place for that to happen?’, is the right one. Then, who needs to get involved, (which includes skills). Then processes. Then structure, with an open mind: from a bunch of people teaming up, to a network across the company, to (include) individuals tackling X with limited connectivity, to, yes, maybe, a new team. The team must not be the default, automatic pilot  answer without critical thinking.

Can we put a moratorium on automatic new teams?

Trapped by the structure, freed by behaviours. Start with behaviours, and you will have a greater chance to decide if you need a team. Start with team, you’ll be a prisoner. There is a choice: team, the noun, the structure, or teaming up, the verb, the behaviour.

(1) We plan operations, change, leadership, anything, with intended consequences in mind. These are often translated into KPIs, milestones, and ‘deliverables’. This language is so contaminated that I always try to stir the conversation towards a plain English ‘so what do you want to see by March?, what do we want to see by mid summer?,  what do we want to see before Christmas?. Most people relate better to live events and personal calendars. People remember Christmas not Key Performance Indicator 4.1.1

(2) Too excessive focus on the intended, often the only thing that people are going to be judged for, makes us blind to see the unintended, good or bad. In my previous corporate life I was penalized (ok, just a bit) for underspending at the end of the year. I ran a Cost Centre (read, R&D) so I was supposed to come in ‘on budget’ (read expend it all), not under. That would irritate the accountants enormously. The absurdity is still nagging me. The unintended may be very good, for example, having built a communications bridge with division X as a result of a joint project. ‘Building a bridge’ may not have ever been in the KPIs. So you may not be rewarded!

(3) The extended consequences go well beyond the expected (declared) and unintended. In our Viral Change programmes, the focus may be ‘transformation’, for example, with specific aims. But, after a while, the fact that this has required peer-to-peer work, has taught the organization to generate spontaneous peer-to-peer networks now dealing with a plethora of things not in the original Viral Change™ shopping list. Very often, pride is one of those ‘extended consequences’, even if we never said we were aiming at that. In my world, the extended consequences have often the greatest impact.

These three sisters, intended, unintended and extended, always travel together. But often people are partially blind, focused as they may haven been asked to be on a ‘measurable’ and pre-ordered wish list. We are not managerially well educated to welcome the unplanned, the emergent, the unexpected. We respond with either panic or ignorance. It’s a crisis or an anecdote.

Optometrists welcome.

I read a while ago this story. Within the highly structured and hierarchical (by design) Catholic church, a Religious Order (an internal formal community of brothers)  had been waiting for centuries for Rome to lift the ‘in excommunicationem’ status (ex-communication) or maximum penalty for gross deviation from the dogma, of one of his medieval brothers, top German theologian at the time, once high teacher and scholar in La Sorbonne in Paris. He had been, and is still today, highly regarded and influential across a broad spectrum of spiritual practices, beyond the Catholic, but had had over centuries the big weight of his unorthodox thinking and preaching on his shoulders. His battles with the official defenders of the orthodoxy only ended by his natural dead, fortunately before the planned final ideological tribunal in Avignon.

Just very recently, a ‘more friendly’ Vatican new administration, and after a polite reminder by the new Head of the Order, replied finally that there was no case for the ‘excommunication’ to be lifted because, in fact, the brother preacher at La Sorbonne had never been  excommunicated in the first place. The news apparently took centuries to reach.

Now imagine that, in real world present day, you were waiting for a permission to act. OK, not as historically glorious as the German medieval brother. Let’s say more prosaic waiting from the boss or boss’ bosses. Imagine that you get the news that the permission is not coming because you never needed it; you had that already.

Would that not be sort of embarrassing?

OK, don’t wait for natural dead as the brother in Avignon. Get up and move. Catch up with the time lost.

Here is a list of permissions that you should check whether you actually never needed them. Please do so  before brain degeneration (or pension) kicks in:

1. To push the boundaries and abandon default positions
2. To open Pandora boxes, to uncover mysteries and deal with cans of worms
3. To get fellow travellers not in your teams, not in your formal structures, working with you
4. To get ready for the unpredictable and prepare yourself with constant learning
5. To make it happen, and fix it later
6. To tell others to tell others to work across boundaries
7. To do great things that are not in your job description
8. To engage other bosses not in your direct hierarchy line
9. To initiate change and create traction
10. To talk, engage, team up, with absolutely anybody, anywhere in the organization regardless rank and geographies. Use of the phone included.

 

 

Did you fall in love after reading case studies and using benchmarking data?  Did you see the Mona Lisa in The Louvre, or Picasso’s Guernica in Reina Sofia in Madrid?

Did you give Leonardo a 5 star? Picasso a 4, because the painting is to messy?

Did you go to the concert, for that Beethoven’s 9^th? Did you leave a feed back form with your views that the fifth movement is too loud and the second a bit slow and boring? Did you advise the conductor to next time compress the five movements into the top three, please?

How do you rate a sunset, 1 to 10? The ocean, loud or not, in a decibels scale?

The litany of absurd measurements could continue. I have written hours ago about the tyranny of tripadvisorization of life. The obsession with feed back. The ludicrousness of measuring the irrelevant. The stupidity of measuring what is in front to measure and can be measured, for the only reason of its mesure-ability.

I imagine you can gather that I am not ‘anti-measurement’. I am anti-noise. Good, rigorous, needed, crucial, inescapable measuring gets clouded by the tsunami of unnecessary ‘measures’ and data points that we gather in organizational life. When one is confronted with an overwhelming Mother of all Dashboards (or even worse, the constant dripping of ‘measures’) there is no way to distinguish signal and noise.

The next real, good, relevant, perhaps game changing piece of insight comes accompanied by a myriad of spurious, easy to get, attention grabbing ‘data’.

I am sorry to say that distinguishing noise and signal comes with practice. Becoming a connoisseur of the truth and the relevant comes from their relentless praxis.

But a way to start is to at least question the need for those KPIs and ‘hard data outcomes’ that nobody have ever questioned. By polishing and refining and discarding lots of them, you’ll  get closer to the ones that really mean something.

PS: also, start with insights (‘hey, what is new in the customer side?’) then get to the spreadsheet.

 

What if your unintended consequences were as big as the intended ones? This happens in our Viral Change™  programmes all the time and could happen in any other of your organizational initiatives. I am not sure we always capture them.

If nobody sees them is perhaps because they were not in the KPI list.

Intended consequences of a particular Viral Change™ programme: to create a culture of X , by scaling up a particular set of behaviours.  Large scale behavioural and cultural change with objectives X,Y,X

Unintended consequences, end of year 1 (never explicit in day 1 or declared objectives), all real, none theoretical:

 

Pride
Sense of belonging
Spontaneous collaboration
Can I help you? Multiplied like hell
Sense of ‘agency’ (I can do that)
Readiness to change, again and again
Employee engagement, the real one, not the crap one
Legacy: this is what I leave behind
This is what I will tell my children
Now I believe in this company
I don’t need permission anymore
Peer to peer power
Collective leadership
No tolerance for negativity anymore. It’s not a managerial issue, it’s a peer issue
It’s for us, not just the company
Fulfillment
The best I’ve done

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apologies for the delay in Daily Thoughts posts this week, we have been having some technical issues! We are now back up and running, thanks for your patience. We hope you enjoy this post, originally published back in May last year… 

It’s been a while now since the world of HR/OD/Management/Consulting has realised that ‘top down’ (stuff) is not politically correct anymore. Top down apparently is only welcome now by farmers when hoping for rain.

To solve this, we have added the opposite to the language, that is, ‘bottom up’, the other side of the coin, supposedly the troops taking more charge.

So now it’s easy to hear, far more than a year ago, ‘bottom up this’, ‘bottom up that’, which hopes to give an automatic legitimization to the opposite of top down.

But the language of ‘bottom down’ does nor ensure that this is what it is. In fact, I find more and more people saying that they had something to do and ‘decided not to do it top down, so they had 100 workshops bottom up’.

But these workshops were not bottom up. They were 100 top down workshops done at the bottom. The geography has changed, nothing else. You still push down, and sideways, and in quantity, but there is not emergent, real bottom up creation. It is created for you by the top and deployed at the bottom.

I am afraid we will have to do better than this to create a culture of real grassroots/bottom up. The change of geography in the activity is not enough.

I have described before the role of managers in many ways, often pointing to the risk of becoming ‘information traffic wardens’. The ones managing the valves of the pipes that carry information across the organization. Sometimes they open the valves and the stuff flows. Sometimes the close them, or a little bit, and the information gets stuck.

Indeed this is a pejorative view, but nonetheless a frequent representation of the reality. Valves open or closed, we all are a sort of ‘information traffic warden’. The question I often ask myself is whether in the effort to ‘share’, the sharing itself, a mechanism of the type I-do-because-I-can, takes over the meaning or even the intention of some sort of impact.

Jessica Helfand, designer, artist, academic and  author, struck a cord when reading her beautiful book ‘Design: The invention of desire’. In one of her chapter she says:

And just what is it we’re sharing? Regurgitated content produced by others? In many cases, we  don’t share; we re-share, positioning ourselves not so much as makers but as carriers, aligning ourselves as the purveyors of so much trivia, supporters of the eminently forgettable, participants in a spontaneous assembly line, a delivery mechanism of any number of random things—for what is more  terrifying than being alone, staring at a blank screen or empty page, peering head-on into a creative void? Far easier to redesign and retrofit, to appropriate and go from there.

The figure and the concept of ‘the carrier’ made me think. We all are carriers of ideas (good or bad) or behaviours (good or bad). We all share, certainly, as Jessica says, re-share. The alternative is vegetative status, or, in today’s world ‘non participant’. Perhaps a modern version of the idiot, a word that in Old Greece meant ‘non participant’ (in the public life), as opposed to ‘the citizen’, before it degenerated into something related to intelligence.

Moder professionals, idiots we are not, participants and ‘sharers’, yes sir. But what do we carry? How much re-share or the share we do?

Are we carried away by that effortless possibility at the cost of original thoughts? Just wondering.

And still I get lots of people who raise eyebrows, people who look at me with a conspiracy-like smile (‘you don’t really mean that, but it sounds big’), and people who would filter it all, going straight into their junk folder in the brain.

But I am not a politician, a Policy Guru from The X institution, or a professional philanthropist. I don’t command armies, or run a Footsie, or are invited to Davos. Or will make it to Mar-O-Lago, or will be given an OBE by Her Majesty, or will be called to mediate between warriors, or run a global NGO

And if you are reading this, chances are you fall into the same category. So how come?

When I was older I used to buy the story of the one thing at a time, the small change leads to big change, and the first change yourself logic.

I was told to be patient, which is the equivalent of explaining the merits of sprinting to a tortoise.  I was told not to put the carts before the horses, but the advise always seemed to come so late that carts and horses had already left. I was told that those ambitions were only for the super heroes, the writers of Hollywood scripts or the visio-luminaires a la Steve Jobs, and, by the way, that category was very small.

But, now that I am younger, I don’t see the point of aiming low and achieving,  versus aiming high and possibly failing (Michelangelo dixit) .

When you look around and see the truth and the lie being treated as equally moral; when you read the low employee engagement figures across countries and industries; when you see trust at its lowest (pick a concept of it, pick a country, pick a profession), what is there left that deserves ‘small change’?

‘We don’t do small change’, I put in some of the new company slides (more eyebrows raising). My company does not aim at incrementalism, yet that may be a very legitimate goal. We have painfully walked away from clients who did not understand that we did not want to sell our time, but share our expertise; that we were very asymmetrical with them in terms of P&L, but expected to be very symmetrical in collaboration.

If radical means to be back to roots, maybe we are.

And I know that we are not  alone in this thinking. Far from it. That there are many, like you,  who don’t want to do small change anymore;  who seriously question the little tweak here and there, whether in HR policies or organizational development, or L&D.

We live in times of scale. Large scale behavioural and cultural change (Viral Change™ ) for example. Not small scale management team alignment, with zero implications for the rest of the organization.

“Changing the world’, for you and for me, may start with changing the rules of the game in the organization, the way people collaborate (for example from teams to peer to peer networks), the building of collective leadership. May be it is ‘a world at a time’ after all. Wait I minute? Did I?

When listening to the news, or looking at the twitter feed, I just have this urge to use the Michelangelo test all the time: ‘the greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’.

Will we? Who else is there?

Michelle Obama’s line in the US elections, ‘when they go low, we go high’, was for me a Michelangelo-like moment, I confess. When we see all going lower and lower, whether in the politics of selfishness or the disrespect for truthfulness, or an increasing Homo Homini Lupus fabric of society, thiat  ‘man-is-wolf-to-man’ world, I am  left only with an option: higher and higher.

Change the world, I suppose.

You?

True thought leadership is not about conveying new ideas, showing directions for innovation and offloading the latest trends. There is a term for that: journalism.

Management gurus, whether from a Harvard pulpit or a Consulting Firm, who pontificate about trends or show their latest ‘research’ after interviewing 50 CEOs, and provide tons of valuable data (legitimized by their brand) but do not make people think, think differently, or advance in their possibilities, are glorified journalists. And we have lots of them.

A lot of what comes to us from such prestigious business pulpits is of inferior quality to what can be found in the pages of the FT or The New York Times.

‘It made me think’ is the most rewarding testimonial you can get, whether you are running a 50 people, a 500 or a 5,000 people organization. Or you consult for them.

Mind you, you don’t need thought leadership for your intellectual living all the time. You watch the news, read the Twitter feed and subscribe to those trend reports. We need all of them. But let’s call thought leadership exactly what it is, what it says on the can.

Although I understand the temptation, it always amazes me to see those resumes/CVs on professional pages, digital or otherwise, that start with ‘a thought leader, passionate for X,Y,Z’. And I often wonder where the title comes from. Self-attribution of thought leadership is a risky affair.

Personally, I have two other additional attributes to thought leadership, which I don’t expect other people to agree with.

My real, personal and possibly un-transferable trio of thought leadership is (1) It makes me think; (2) It provides me with some hope; (3) It pushes me to be bolder.

Now, that is for me the Thought Leadership Premium Package.

This is a pattern that I encounter with many of my clients. Top and less top leadership, of the progressive type, broadcasts what seems sincere views: you are empowered, be agile, make decisions, don’t escalate to us all the time, take risks, make mistakes, learn from them, take accountability, and act with ownership.

That is the audio. A good audio.

The video shows people who don’t feel empowered and see the company as an elephant; make decisions but expect that many won’t be implemented, escalate to the top (in part because the top likes to receive the escalation), doesn’t take many risks, see mistakes as … mistakes (see what happened to Mary), doesn’t learn from them, takes little accountability, and doesn’t ‘act with ownership’ because they never understood what that meant, not being owners of the company.

So, where is the problem in this lack of sync between the video and the audio?

Possibilities are:

1. Top leadership is insincere and disingenuous. Not my experience. I have not found one of them that does not mean it.
2. The troupes do not believe them because:
   • Their overall credibility is low. Again, not my experience.
   • What they see is leadership doing the contrary to what they say. Complex reporting systems are growing. Decision-making is welcome up the ladder through several new Review Bodies near the top or at the top. Mistakes have been semi-tolerated and in some cases, being fatal for the people involved. This is my experience. What leadership says is sincere but how it behaves does not match.
3. Still sharing my very personal experience, I would add that in almost all cases that I know, leadership is completely oblivious to this video/audio mismatch. What is also infuriating is that they would defend their actions and still would blame people down the system as ‘not taking enough accountability or ownership’.

This pattern is very common and does not require special skills to be spotted. Yet, it is pervasive. It affects good companies, with good people and with successful achievements. But this video-audio synchronization problem is a frustrating part of their life. People spend days and days discussing complexity, ownership, accountability, risk, agility and decision-making, often without focusing on the obvious: ‘it’s behaviours, stupid’.

Most of the answers to the sync problem are behavioural. They do not necessarily require workshops on agility, training on accountability, a new risk management system, decision-making processes or a new Review Body. In fact, these would be expensive distractions. Behaviours are the only things that will restore the sync.

 

 

‘Lasting capacity’ must be a keyword for change management and its methods. The issue today is less about how to go from A to Z,  and more how, in doing so, the project, programme, process etc, is or is not, building long term capacity for change.

Methods take you from A to Z but not necessarily build any learning capacity, other than perhaps paying some lip service. Platforms, however, include a method but ‘leave behind’ a capacity, new competences, new ways of working and perhaps a new style of leadership.

What we have learnt from many years of Viral Change™ is precisely that. Outstanding clients were always the first to point it out: now we know how to work peer-to-peer, how to use the informal organization, how to do storytelling, how to identify and use influencers, how to distinguish and manage behaviours, and, ultimately, how our leadership model got small and we needed to grow it in order to integrate ‘backstage leadership’, for example.

There you are, Santa got them all, when in reality we just wanted to go from A to Z.

Today, ‘change methods’ that do not focus on legacy, and that still are presented and sold as the mechanics of going from A to Z, are not worth the money.

Once the objectives of the ‘change’ has been declared achieved (perhaps a reorganization, a deployment of values, a customer-centric change programme), if all we can say is that those goals have been achieved, but we have little to say about what has changed forever in the operating system of the organization, or what we have learnt, we have, sorry to say, failed miserably.

Reaching the (change) destination is a pass, a baseline. Learning about the journey and establishing a long term platform for change (change-ability) is the real goal.

We must leave behind more than an expensive set of powerpoints and dozens, if not hundreds of meetings, powered by workshopsterone.

When I first read Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ a long time ago, I was impacted by a little paragraph at the beginning of the book. Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), left wing leader, despised by the radical right even today, considered the father of community activism in the US, was recalling his answers to angry students in 1968 to his proposals to ‘work within the system’.

The father of rules for radicalization and activism, which for years have been perceived by the right as the evil of all evils, and have haunted Obama and Clinton under the accusation of being ‘followers of those rules’, actually said the following: ‘Do one of three things: One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing – but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates’. He was referring to the next Democratic convention which his angry students complained  it had not listened or learnt.

I think there is a big lesson here. The Black Swans have landed. Trump’s triumph had been dismissed (he is so this and so that, nobody will pay attention, you know, there are not black swans) via the greatest groupthink phenomena in history, the map of the US is almost completely red, unless you cut it by age and then, below some age, it is completely blue; and the candidate who won the popular vote (the one most people wanted) will not be elected President of the USA.  This is a tsunami, and we are noticing the waves miles and miles away.

But, we need to fight the value system behind the winning anti-decency rhetoric. And it’s not on the streets. Well, some streets.

I went back to Churchill’s one of his three key speeches given to the UK parliament between May and June of 1940. And I have taken the liberty of editing Winston… and adding my bits in bold.

We shall fight on the schools and the education beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds of our organizations, our jobs, our communities, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets of our civic society, we shall fight in the hills of our leadership development programmes and change management; we shall never surrender to the imposition of post-truth and inhumanity as the new normal.

PS. Your organization has no immunity barrier.

I think the current life cycle of a ‘best practice’ is a month or so. And this is benevolent. In the old days ‘best practice’ was a way to copy the good things that others have done. Like benchmarking, they were rear view mirrors of a race already won by somebody else. Today, if you navigate in ‘best practice’ and ‘benchmarking’ mode, you’ll perhaps be able to stay afloat, but will never win the race.

OK, these concepts are not going to disappear. But they will not come up any more in the format of big conferences, big retrospective dossiers and other forms of rear view mirror management.

You see ‘best practices’ by reading them in social media, by reading some books, by subscribing to cool newsletters and blogs, by having lots of free Google alerts. They are there in front of you in great quantity, for you to seal, copy, get inspired, frustrated, dismiss them or fall in love, all in one afternoon if you wish.

If you are still fond of these two sisters, Best Practice and Benchmarking, invite them for dinner, have a chat, see what they have to say, have some fun, and call it a day. Don’t let them live with you permanently. They are charming and other people may fall in love with them. Before you know it, they will take over the house.

A key strategic question for you (company, group, team, individual) is: are we benchmarkable? Would anybody see this as best practice?

If the answer is yes to all, congratulations, but remember it won’t last. Plan your next ‘ahead of the game’ move.

If the answer is no, I am very sorry to hear that, my condolences, let me know the time and place for the funeral.