My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, when not chanting to each other in church seven times a day.

Yet, that silence needs the space in order to be heard. A while ago, they designed a garden, a sort of a maze, so that they could walk in a direction without bumping into each other. One of them, a friend for many years, goes from time to time to live completely on his own, for a week, in one of the nearby cottages, as if in a detox regime. When I asked him moons ago about ‘that need’ he looked at me puzzled: ‘wasn’t it obvious?’ When he is away, he walks down the valley every day for the communal Mass and back. When coming in, the other monks avoid him (during that week) to respect the space he has created for himself.

“There is something special about creating space”

There is something special about creating space. For me, leadership is mainly architecture: create the conditions, find the spaces, protect them, make them liveable. Architects also have maps, and compasses. The leader needs to provide maps (frameworks, such as the non negotiable behaviours) and navigation tools (a value system). But, above all, it’s about space.

Providing spaces for people to breath, to growth, to deliver something, to get better, to think critically, to interact, to collaborate, to travel together. This is all about space. Space is the psychological sister of place. Space may be only, or mainly, mental. As such, it is a precious asset. No wonder the word space has been often associated to the word sacred. As in sacred spaces. To provide space, to create and protect spaces for others, is something a good leader does. It’s a great deal of his servant-ship.

But we, sometimes, are not very good at this. We take over other people’s spaces by insisting on discussing, wanting to ‘go deeper’, being intolerant with leaving things open, dictating our own terms and providing unreasonable borders to their spaces.

At a threshold point of two people living together in one place, they may come to inhabit one single space. It requires a lot of maturity to live in one single space with others. Occupying one single place, is the easier part, space is not. Indeed, that single space may end up being too much to ask. It may be better to have separate spaces to respect, often overlap. Psychotherapists have known for many years that a temporary split, or making tangential connections for a while, may be the solution to some problems. Unbundle the spaces that have become blurred, that is.

Spaces could be rich and beautiful, or could also be toxic. In a relationship of spaces, if one is toxic, the whole may become contaminated. Also, the more personal, protected space one has, the more one can give. This is ‘the border diet’ of my old TEDx talk ^[1] – still relevant today!

Space is a good way to start a Leadership Development conversation. Much better than vision, charisma, determination or role modelling. The leader as architect is a much richer model. Architects of our own spaces, and providers and keepers of spaces for others.

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm.

Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated to safety training in major corporations. One death is too many. Accidents can be avoided. The cost of time lost due to incidents is considerable. Safety training is needed, but it does not necessarily create a culture of safety. Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. A culture of safety is not one of well-trained (on safety) people but one where safety behaviours are the norm. These two things are not the same. Safety communication and training usually follow a top-down approach where facts are presented, guidelines and procedures exposed, tasks explained, and threats of noncompliance declared. It is a rational and emotional appeal cascaded down across all information channels of the organisation. It suits ‘information’, but it does not suit ‘behaviours’. Behaviours can’t be taught in the same way as a three-step process can be explained. Behaviours spread via imitation of others. Behaviours travel via social copying and emulation, sometimes unconsciously. Training and communications on safety are needed – and major corporations usually have very good educational programmes. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’. Cultures develop – sometimes very fast – by the power of person-to-person influence. “Training and communications are needed. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’.” The most powerful influence in the organisation is not hierarchical; it is peer-to-peer; it is the conscious or unconscious emulation of ‘people like us’. The Health and Safety personnel teach the rules of safety, inspection, safety implementation and improve processes and systems. However, the day-to-day social copying of good safety behaviours in the workplace, plus conversations in the canteen (that is, informal conversations with people one trusts), is what creates a culture of safety in real life. Viral Change™ is a way to create a fast and sustainable culture of safety which does not rely on the rational understanding of hundreds of people attending safety training workshops. In Viral Change™, we identify a relatively small set of ‘non-negotiable behaviours’ which, when spread across the organisation, have the power to create a behavioural fabric, a DNA of safety. We also identify a relatively small number of individuals who have a high level of influence with peers, who are well-connected, and whose behaviours are likely to have an impact on others in a multiplying mode. These people may or may not be in specific management layers but occupy various jobs across the organisation. We organise and put together these components, behaviours and influences, in a well-designed format. We let the spread and social infection go, and we back-stage the management of it. We engineer an internal social epidemic of safety behaviours that can be observable and measured. We do not ask to stop the ‘push’ of training and development! We do, however, orchestrate the ‘pull’ of connected and influential individuals and their role-modelling behaviours who engage with peers in conversations and real-life ‘doing’ and engage others in a viral manner. Viral Change™ is the only way to shape a culture of safety and maximise the potential and the investment of training and communications. Viral Change™ LLP is currently leading programmes focused on the creation of a safety culture in the way described above. For example, using these principles and methodology, a global company – which has state-of-the-art, award-winning top-down training systems – has engaged us to create a culture of safety virally, reaching and engaging 50.000 people across the world.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [2]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

These are the symptoms. Indicators, red flags, culture makers. If you have more than 5, you are in trouble. 6 to 10, it’s serious. 11-15 life threatening. More than 15, you need a big shake up, earthquake, shock, a battalion of emperor-with-no-clothes hunters, bubble punching at a scale. A revolution.

Resist shallowness. Life in the shallows is not worth living. We can do better than this. Resist. Work could be remarkable. Seriously. Get out of your Plato’s cave. Life is short.

Critical test:

1. Innovation is catching up with everybody else in the world
2. Group presentations are permanent after dinner speeches but served any time
3. Panel discussions are a parade of platitudes in 10 min slots praised as profound contributions.
4. External speakers are entertainment
5. Discussions are monologues occasionally crossing each other
6. Management talk is clichés + jargon + airport bookstore book
7. Lives are calendars
8. Continuous learning is watching a TED
9. People develop severe back and neck pain of pandemic proportions by constantly looking up to the top leaders for approval, nodding, Oracle revelations or marching orders
10. Teams are meetings
11. Diversity is the number of women on the Board
12. People refer to management as ‘they’
13. Presidents drop the P
14. Work-shops are word-shops (and occasionally war-shops)
15. Mission statements are created by word permutation software
16. PowerPoints have neither power nor points
17. Critical thinking is asking for more information
18. New Idea is one book
19. Mediocrity is rewarded
20. Not even members of the Leadership team can remember the list of values on the wall.

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New book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming management ^[3]

 

 

Feed Forward Webinar series ^[4] – Register now!

The Good Mechanics of Continuous Improvement have given us a culture of feed-back. Feed back is worshiped. There is a whole subindustry on ‘how to give feed back’. It appeals to honesty, transparency, learning, accountability, leadership, openness, performance management, and the entire Father Christmas List of Good Management. Who can argue against?

Not me. Well, a bit. Because it also leads to a rather mechanistic view of the organization that focuses on errors and fixes, on continuous improvement and natural feed back, loop learning. It’s Cybernetics as its best. And as a (very) old president of a Society of Medical Cybernetics, I can’t  really dismiss that. But very often feedback loops lead to trivial incrementalism.

My problem is the hijacking of most of management airtime in some places. I feedback to you, you feedback to me, and we declare this space honest and good. Above all, we feel good. We’ve done it. I am nor sure what we have learnt, or will do different.

I am often missing a culture of feed forward, where we look at how we are moving towards a building of a shared future. OK, OK, OK, we also need to feedback about the present, which is always about yesterday. OK. But I want to know how we are building, constructing, creating and messing around with possibilities.

That’s me. Not an Universal Law.

I think we have to many thermostats that take care of the predictable and the achievable ( nothing wrong with this)

I really think we could do with  switching off  the thermostat from time to time. Maybe we need to experience a bit the overheating or the hibernation.

PS: Here is another silly metaphor for the corporate colection: managers manage the thermostat; leaders have to secretly and furtively sabotage it, switch it off, under the cover of darkness.

Yesterday, my wife and I said goodbye to a good friend from France who works as a high level executive in the European Medicines Agency, until now based in London, and who is moving to Amsterdam like anybody else in the Agency. Having been  thrown out by Brexit, The Netherlands opened their arms.

This European agency of high prestige, founded in 1995, that looks after the efficacy and safety of the medicines we use every day, and that has a high concentration of scientists and regulators, is leaving the UK for good after the Brexit decision. Another great loss for the country. An issue which does not deserve any attention by UK politicians, let alone hard Brexiteers. In fact, according to our friend, only the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan,  has bothered to visit them to see if he could do anything.

The waste, and the absurdity, and self-harm, are not the topic of this Daily Thought. Nor is my anger towards those who have systematically lied to the public about the ‘submission of the UK’ and the ‘imminent flow of immigrants’. Nor the fact that a sector of the UK politics had invented ‘The Wall’ well before Mr Trump did. They had The Wall in their neurons.

My friend explained what I had seen in The Guardian ^[5]: the ceremony of removing the flags of the EU countries from their flagpoles, and their folding, to take them to their new home in Amsterdam. Apparently, the ceremony was moving and solemn. One civil servant from each country took care of their own flags. I did not know that each country had its own rules to fold a flag! One side, other side, that colours cannot be seen, etc.

I was moved when I saw the picture in The Guardian. It made me angry.

I was taken aback by one of my friends comments, in passing: ‘and of course we will take the British Flag with us to Amsterdam’. I thought it was so beautiful. Those highly skilled professionals taking with them a little bit of their history, and their colleagues, their flag, their symbol, as is that emotional and rational and professional connection was of a higher moral ground than all the political, social, historical, and generational vandalism produced by ‘Brexit-means-Brexit’.

How wonderful to see our plain and simple humanity in action. ‘We will take your flag with us.’ Then you will be coming with us in spirit. Part of the same family. Just as if moving house.

(But it isn’t. It’s the sad realities of tribal politics with no eyes on the common good.)

May the Union Jack have a quiet place in a building in Amsterdam, surrounded by friends who respect Britain, their people, their professionals. A tiny part in our collective heart.

Even if some of us feel betrayed, deceived, and deeply unsettled by the brutal self-cantered Brexit, we know that, above all, our human relationship will always sit above that toxicity.

May we protect ourselves against that toxicity. May we all carry other people’s  flags to a place of safety, respect, reverence and shelter.

I owe this phrase to John Kerry whom I had the privilege of seeing on his London tour promoting his latest  book ‘Every Day is Extra’

He was making a point.  Our dislike for the other, the one who does not think  like us, wear like us, pray like is, looks like us ,is something that we learn. We are not born haters. Our tribal membership comes later. It is learnt, not in the DNA. Un-learning is hard but not impossible.

We could start by suspending judgement. Perhaps putting ourselves in somebody else’s shoes. See the world differently.

I am not Pollyanna. All this is not straight forward. I am very intolerant for some things and very tolerant for others. I often surprise myself a posteriori. Why did I get so irritated with that incredible piece of mediocrity, and was so casual about that person who did not deliver? It’s all in my mind, my mental frames.

The world is more polarised than ever. Them and us. Me and the rest. Intolerance is growing. I find solace and comfort in places or institutions that could not simply survive without tolerance and care. The Health Service is one of those places. We criticise the systems, the delays, the bureaucracies, and rightly so. But these places are factories of kindness and compassion. Christian churches are other. Beleaguered sometimes, unfashionable frequently, their soups in the food banks of the streets of rich cities, still go daily with a smile and no questions.

I have a theory, a semi-Pollyanna one, perhaps. Many  of our business organizations, where we spend most of our time, could be incubators of those values of  tolerance and respect. Many of those organizations have ‘respect’ in their value system. Respect breeds listening; listening brings new ideas; new ideas bring business success. Do you want me to calculate an ROI for this? I can do it in 5 min.

And what would be the ROI of kindness for society?

Good and bad habits are formed at work. Work is the school of values for the rest of the day. Good or bad. Work is a gym for behaviours. If you want diversity, start with diversity of ideas, then you’ll get to other diversities. If you want equality, start with universal respect  to others in the organization, then you will get to other equalities.

All this,  many years after you hated the broccoli . Maybe that was the beginning. But it does not have to be the end.

For many non-American, non-Anglo-saxon organizations the idea of fun is ‘that American thing’. It’s a bit unfair and reductionistic. I know Brits and Dutch and French embracing the idea of ‘fun in the ‘workplace’  as well. But there is something intrinsically New World in the ‘how are you?’ always answered with a high decibel ‘Fantastic!’ no matter how dreadful the day is. American optimism has no limits.

‘Have fun’ or ‘enjoy!’ is much embedded in a today largely  Western-American-corporatized world. The kind of Fukuyama’s End of History ( when all is inevitably converted into capitalist liberalism in a post socialist and communist world, so ‘history ends’) but in management. So here, The End of Management History, where all is convergent into anglo-saxon-business-school-models of thinking. But this is a conversation for another day.

Conventional management thinking has always asserted  that (sense of) fulfilment is perhaps the greatest anchor for employees in organizations. Each of us translates the word fulfilment into our own personal value system and mental filters. What is fulfilment for me may not be for you. Nor the complexity or intellectual charge of the task is a direct prediction of fulfilment. Small things, big things, don’t correlate with its magnitude. Sense of achievement, sense of worth and personal realization are as personal as your unique fingerprints. In other words, it can’t  be generalised, let alone imposed.

For something that can’t be imposed and is so personalised, it’s strange how much judgement we enforce on others. We  ( and therefore managers) seem to know how others may reach fulfilment and how they won’t. Similar sense of imposition comes with fun. We must have fun. Fun has become an obligatory goal of End-of-Management History corporate world.

In my organizational consulting world with clients, when we establish a set of non negotiable behaviours, particularly in the context of Viral Change™ programmes, I find more and more ‘requirements’ that we add fun to the set. As in, be accountable, let’s be customer centric and …we have to have fun. I am paraphrasing. But not much.

Philosopher  Zygmunt Bauman suggested that the hedonistic epidemic (my words) in consumerism may have percolated into the workforce ethos, where fun may substitute fulfilment.  If this is the case, or may become the case, it would be another trivialization of management, of the kind we are not short of. I can theoretically conceive in my mind somebody who joins a company ‘to have fun’ and I can also immediately conceive that I wouldn’t  personally hire this person. Which may raise eyebrows and make me gain a masochistic reputation, something that I hope my friends would refute immediately with a big smile.

There is no contradiction (as many of you maybe already thinking) between fun and fulfilment. But I am against the pseudo-hedonistic goal of fun as a corporate goal. Yet, I want places to be as fun as people may want. But we can’t impose fun at the cost of not digging into the real ins and outs of fulfilment. Just because the place is fun it does not mean it’s a place of fulfilment. Similarly, for some people, what they do is not particularly fun, yet fulfilment is enormous. Ask somebody in the field with Medecins Sans Frontieres. Our aseptic and clinical corporations may crave for fun, but millions of people have no fun at all and people working with them reach fulfilment.

The fun cult  is the perverse take over of fun. It’s a convenient reason not to discuss real fulfilment. It is a Micky Mouse trivialization of management. Fun, like employee engagement, is an output, not an input. It’s something you get due to the conditions that leaders have orchestrated. It’s a consequence.

I find the fun  cult almost unstoppable ,and perhaps  my little battle is a bit trivial. But I am having some fun writing about it.

One of my favourite sets of Team Rules. Real life. Not invented. One of my best clients.

1. Always curious
2. No bullshit
3. All thoughts in the open, good or bad (no whinging in the toilets)
4. My time is not elastic. Yours?
5. Team’s success is mine. My success is the team’s success
6. Eyes on destination, the road is bumpy
7. Navel gazing is neither aesthetic nor productive
8. Mistakes are OK. No, really, they are.
9. People with all the answers are overqualified to work here
10. Call it out, name it, stop the nonsense
11. Ask for help, offer help, you are not on your own
12. We laugh a lot, and that’s a promise

Can you match that?

And those which are maybe less dangerous than those who aren’t.

In an old 2005 study, which findings are very similar to others of the same type, 84% of medical doctors in a particular set up had seen other health care colleagues taking dangerous shortcuts but did not say anything. 88% of doctors said they worked with people who showed ‘poor clinical judgement’, but they did not say anything. The percentage of clinical staff, including physicians and nurses who called out these things and confronted colleagues did not reach 10%.

In my consulting experience with financial services, I have seen data that showed that some ‘internal tribes’ in a particular banking institution (and I have reasons to believe that, at that time,  it was similar in others) run on an unspoken silence scheme. In particular the ‘trading desks’ that functioned as an institution within the institution and crossed the ethical borders as easy as getting a sandwich for lunch, with many co-workers seeing it but never escalating the issue or even flagging it.

Although in many instances of institutional child abuse the cases remain tragically private, it is clear that also in many cases ‘people knew’ but kept quiet. History contains multiple examples of widespread atrocities that although perpetrated by an elite of some sort, were well known by a silent large population.

You can get as psychoanalytic as you want and present a deep and complicated theory of complex repressed sexuality (child abuse), or a theory of hidden collective hatred (holocaust, crimes against humanity), or collective relinquished responsibility, or a conspiracy, or coverup (traders, health care) but, as far as I am concerned, it all has a common glue word: power. And a tag line: and getting away with it because its reinforced daily by silence.

It’s not sex, it’s power. It’s not ‘lack of training in ethics’, its power. (At some point a large financial institute announced with big media noise that it was sending thousand of executives to a well known business school to attend courses on ethics. Fascinating!).

Those who abuse power also abuse people. Those abused have usually little power. But everybody else ‘who knows’ has the power to call out, to challenge the toxic attitudes and behaviours. As behaviours, these interventions would be contagious, would be copied, imitated, spread. All it takes is for somebody to start.

I have given this recommendation a million times: don’t do it on your own. This is where it gets very hard and fails to spread. Challenging the boss, the colleague, the elder, the senior, the expert, the never challenged, etc, may be heroic. Very simply, don’t play hero here. Join forces with others, even if very small. Maybe a duo, a trio.

The problem with silent minorities is the silent majority they live within. And there are silent minorities who are power-abused in our business organizations, in the Church, in the macrosocial arena, in private homes and public spheres, in the entertainment industry and in the non-entertainment industry. Everywhere.

But all it takes is to challenge those toxicities. It’s pure behavioural change, not conceptual indoctrination and training. If you want leadership, spread the ‘speak up’ behaviour.

A glitch in the system yesterday meant there was a duplication in the Daily Thoughts posts.  Please accept our apologies – today we are re-sending the following one, which should have been posted today.  Normal Daily Thoughts  flow will resume – along with the rain!  

The Daily Thoughts Support Team    

The national leader has not come exactly from nowhere, but certainly he was not fully present in the political forecast for the country. Ideologically, to say the least, he is not very strong, but his populism is magnetic. He portrays himself as The Saviour in a situation of moral, social and political decline. He seems unstoppable.

There is no doubt he is at the very right of the political spectrum, but, right or left is not here or there for him. He is who he is. God’s answer to Moses’s irritating question about his identity, ‘I am who I am’, applies here.

The real right wing ideologues love this guy . They can believe their luck. The Saviour has arrived and offers them a formal home, a permanent audience, open doors. The religious love him, bless him, pray with him and for him. They really believe, and fully broadcast to the brotherhood accordingly, that he has been anointed by God, therefore giving him supreme authority on almost anything.

The supreme leader is not a saint but the ideologues and the church are very much willing to condone anything troublesome on behalf of the greater good. And for that greater good to come as Great Kingdom, the world around has to be simplified. Whatever pretentious critical thinking people may think, it’s very simple: you are with us or against us. And in that divine ‘I am who I am’ world, there is actually no ‘us’. Him or the deluge, and he has just saved us, the ‘bases’ say. The country was already polarised but, he elevates polarization to is highest level.

On his (or His?)  right,  the conservative, the right, the religious, the pro this and that, the defenders of perennial values, and the real representatives of ‘the people’. On his left, the left, the socialists, the Marxists, the atheists, the destroyers of values, the against this and that, the liberals, and the sexually deviant determined to brainwash our children.

The party of the Supreme Leader, his ‘base’, and the ideological machinery that supports him, because he did not have one of his own, despises ‘the intellectual’  unless he or she has declared full allegiance. Soon there is only one version of the truth. The rest is a conspiracy.  Conspirators will be oppressed and suppressed. Pain will be inevitable but, hey, it’s all God will.

There is a long standing consensus to described the above. It’s called dictatorship and/or fascism.

I was reading about all the above at the end of my holiday. That dreadful, scary, nightmarish, unbelievable, lasting scenario. How on earth did we get into that?

That book about my country’s Civil War in the Spain of 1936-1939 and beyond was really good.

This almost one year old Daily Thought has done the rounds of social media many times over!  I replicate it here partially in this part 1 of 3 to address the topic of ‘seeing’ the characters of the organization. I will refine the list further tomorrow. And will suggest an exercise…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The B list is the Hard List.

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

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

The original  is here: TED talk: Why the only future worth building includes everyone ^[6]. By Pope Francis.

1. “The Future You:” the future is made of you(s), it is made of encounters, because life flows through our relations with others. Quite a few years of life have strengthened my conviction that each and everyone’s existence is deeply tied to that of others: life is not time merely passing by, life is about interactions.

2. As I meet, or lend an ear to those who are sick, to the migrants who face terrible hardships in search of a brighter future, to prison inmates who carry a hell of pain inside their hearts, and to those, many of them young, who cannot find a job, I often find myself wondering: “Why them and not me?
   
3. I would love it if this meeting could help to remind us that we all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent “I,” separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone. We don’t think about it often, but everything is connected, and we need to restore our connections to a healthy state. Even the harsh judgment I hold in my heart against my brother or my sister, the open wound that was never cured, the offense that was never forgiven, the rancor that is only going to hurt me, are all instances of a fight that I carry within me, a flare deep in my heart that needs to be extinguished before it goes up in flames, leaving only ashes behind.

4. Happiness can only be discovered as a gift of harmony between the whole and each single component

5. How wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion. How wonderful would it be, while we discover faraway planets, to rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters orbiting around us. How wonderful would it be if solidarity, this beautiful and, at times, inconvenient word, were not simply reduced to social work, and became, instead, the default attitude in political, economic and scientific choices, as well as in the relationships among individuals, peoples and countries.

6. In order to do good, we need memory, we need courage and we need creativity. And I know that TED gathers many creative minds. Yes, love does require a creative, concrete and ingenious attitude. Good intentions and conventional formulas, so often used to appease our conscience, are not enough. Let us help each other, all together, to remember that the other is not a statistic or a number. The other has a face. The “you” is always a real presence, a person to take care of.

7. A single individual is enough for hope to exist, and that individual can be you. And then there will be another “you,” and another “you,” and it turns into an “us.” And so, does hope begin when we have an “us?” No. Hope began with one “you.” When there is an “us,” there begins a revolution.

8. The third message I would like to share today is, indeed, about revolution: the revolution of tenderness. Tenderness is the language of the young children, of those who need the other. A child’s love for mom and dad grows through their touch, their gaze, their voice, their tenderness. I like when I hear parents talk to their babies, adapting to the little child, sharing the same level of communication.
9. Yes, tenderness is the path of choice for the strongest, most courageous men and women. Tenderness is not weakness; it is fortitude. It is the path of solidarity, the path of humility. Please, allow me to say it loud and clear: the more powerful you are, the more your actions will have an impact on people, the more responsible you are to act humbly. If you don’t, your power will ruin you, and you will ruin the other. There is a saying in Argentina: “Power is like drinking gin on an empty stomach.” You feel dizzy, you get drunk, you lose your balance, and you will end up hurting yourself and those around you, if you don’t connect your power with humility and tenderness.

10. The future of humankind isn’t exclusively in the hands of politicians, of great leaders, of big companies. Yes, they do hold an enormous responsibility. But the future is, most of all, in the hands of those people who recognize the other as a “you” and themselves as part of an “us.” We all need each other. And so, please, think of me as well with tenderness, so that I can fulfill the task I have been given for the good of the other, of each and every one, of all of you, of all of us.

I am borrowing Ronald Reagan’s lines to remind ourselves that, as leaders in an organization, we must visualize a future. He did. And we must do so with two caveats:

1. We must be invitational. We may visualize a future that is in our heads, a glorious and perhaps even enlightened one. But don’t forget to invite. It is the ‘come with me’ that is often missing. Invitational language is often forgotten in leadership. The factual display of bullet points assumes that what needs to be done is obvious, and that the reader/recipient will read it as marching military orders. But it usually fails the invite test. The explicit one. ‘I am going there, come with me, I need you, will you?’ Than those bullet points look suddenly attractive.

2. That future must not be closed. Full picture, all done. I have all the answers. If there is no discovery in the journey, no room for the emergent, that future is unlikely to be as rich as it could. Reagan did not say this is exactly what those best days look like, or what exactly you’ll be  proud of, or what achievements we are talking about. And it did not give it an ROI, by the way.

Reagan said what it said referring to America (that part of the world that most of us call The United States, not the entire continent, but hey) We could say, must say  the same of our organizations, our companies, our plans.

In some parts of the Zen tradition, ‘the beginner’s mind’ is a full, philosophical  position, a world view. Hence the expression: ‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.’

‘Perpetual beginner’ may be understood by zen-loving executives, but hard-wired MBA warriors may have a hard time with ‘that stuff’.  But all it means is that possibilities always emerge, and that the key is how to work hard on a well crafted journey that allows for that ‘look out’, that new aha!, a new discovery that may even question a bit of the path. Or even the whole.

Only on that ‘best days are yet to come (…) proudest moments yet to be (…)most glorious achievements are just ahead’ mentality, one can navigate a future that is truly rich and full of possibilities.

Invite, always invite.

And send a RSVP!

Invitations assume an answer: Yes, no, of course, maybe, or my god, or whatever. But you’ll know where people are on that journey, because they are part of it. So you can deal with excited fellow travellers, passive bystanders, high cylinder leaders, filibusters, slow walkers, sprinters and pure passengers or voyeurs.  As you deal with all of them, always remember, best days yet to come, proudest moments yet to be, and most glorious achievements are just ahead. Then, with that in mind,  the filibusters are just a small local difficulty.

 

I got this insight from one of our Viral Change™  clients in the health care sector. We were talking about values and behaviours in a hospital setting and how these affect the life of patients whilst within those walls. We have been working on this for many months now and the Viral Change™  Mobilizing Platform is working extraordinary well. We all, clients and ourselves, are very proud of that.

But this colleague was pointing out something as obvious as often overlooked. She said, ‘the patient is with  us for a week…we have a week to make a difference in the other 51’. And she did not mean medically or health wise only. I know her well, and she meant difference in the set of life values that we were working on all the time: feeling valued, compassion, care, dignity, perhaps hope, respect, certainly kindness and the whole set of ‘the humanity package’. In a week.

I was struck by the power of looking at what happens next versus what we are doing now, what is left behind versus what is now on the table, the day after versus the D-Day.

It’s an incredible powerful way of thinking. Some people, like that health care worker, are blessed with this . But it can be learnt. We can force ourselves to think like this.

What happens after the seminar, leadership programme or offsite meeting, is far more important than what happens at the time. In Viral Change™  we put together very carefully peer-selected champions/activists in intense 2 days immersions that we call Boot Camps. But these are vehicles to launch what happens that day after, and then that goes for months. In themselves are just vehicles, not an end. Yet, I find often difficult to force people to think on day 3 of a 2 day Bootcamp. It is the rest of the non-Boot Camps dates that matter, when the entire diffusion of behaviours and shaping of the social movement takes place. It’s the 51 weeks, not the 1 week, as that colleague said.

This re-framing is powerful, it has zero cost, it focus your energy.

From now, I will call it the 51 week problem.

 

Nothing is more rewarding than having a CEO who says world-changing things in the news, and who produces bold, enlightened and progressive quotes for all admirers to be. That organization is lucky to have one of these. The logic says that all those enlightened statements about trust, empowerment, humanity and purpose, will be percolated down the system,  and will inform and shape behaviours in the milfeulle of management layers below.

I take a view, observed many times, that this is wishful thinking. In fact, quite the opposite, I have seen more than once how management below devolves all greatness to the top, happily, whilst ignoring it and playing games in very opposite directions. Having the very good and clever and enlightened people at the top is a relief for them.  They don’t have to pretend that they are as well, so they can exercise their ‘practical power’ with more freedom. That enlightened  department is covered in the system, and the corporate showcase guaranteed.

The distance between the top and the next layer down may not be great in organizational chart terms, yet the top may not have a clue that there is a behavioural fabric mismatch just a few centimeters down in the organization chat.

I used to think years ago, when I was older, that a front page top notch leader stressing human values provided a safe shelter against inhuman values for his/her organization below. I am not so sure today. In fact, my alarm bell system goes mad when I see too much charismatic, purpose driven, top leadership talk. I simply smell lots of alibis below. And I often find them. After all, there is usually no much room for many Good Cops

Yet, I very much welcome the headline grabbing by powerful business people who stress human values, and purpose, and a quest for a decent world. The alternative would be sad. I don’t want them to stop that. But let’s not fool ourselves about how much of that truly represents their organizations. In many cases it represents them.

I guess it all goes back, again, to the grossly overrated Role Model Power attributed to the leadership of organizations, a relic of traditional thinking, well linked to the Big Man Theory of history. Years of Edelman’s Trust Barometer, never attributing the CEO more than 30% of the trust stock in the organization, have not convinced people that the ‘looking up’ is just a small part of the story. What happens in organizations has a far more powerful ‘looking sideways’ traction: manager to manager, employee to employee. Lots of ritualistic dis-empowering management practices can site very nicely under the umbrella of a high empowerment narrative at the top, and nobody would care much. The top floor music and the music coming from the floor below, and below, are parallel universes.

Traditional management  and MBA thinking has told us that if this is the case, the dysfunctionality of the system will force it to break down. My view is the opposite. The system survives nicely under those contradictions. In fact it needs them.

Uniqueness is a tough concept. I’ve got countless examples of clients pushing back  over the years. ‘Come on, this is a manufacturing line, we don’t reinvent the wheel, this is how plastic bottles, or drug capsules, are made, everywhere. I don’t need creativity’. That one has been very common!

But the argument is almost always flawed. We are mixing uniqueness (maximum differentiation) with creativity (alternative ways, but not necessarily unique) with innovation (different, not tried application of ideas).

The robots… will take care of many repetitive, mechanical, unique or not, processes.  That we know. They will also take care, via Artificial Intelligence, of a lot of thinking. And if the idiot machines can learn, and master the master of all algorithms, then, well, Mars is probably a good option.

Seriously, I am obsessed with uniqueness of product or services as an aspiration, not always reachable. If in my company we did not aspire to uniqueness, I would perhaps not be here, writing my Daily Thoughts.

For me, there is no limit as to how unique you want to be, whether it’s possible or not. It is the Michelangelo aspiration quoted a million times: ‘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’.

Besides, should we really dismiss uniqueness as aspiration when we are each of us a live representation of the concept of ‘unique’? There is no other like you, not even your twin brother.

Here are five areas of uniqueness to explore:

• Making unique the otherwise repetitive
• Aspiring  to be unique in an particular area/topic/expertise
• Creating truly unique experiences (with customers, colleagues, stakeholders)
• Making your personal contribution unique
• Interviewing new people in a unique way

To me, the magic question is ‘what would it take to achieve it?’ It may not be obvious. It may be hard. It may be easy to dismiss. But the question is one of the strongest one can ask in the professional world.

How can I/we be unique on X,Y.Z?

What would it take?

Prevention is the only serious approach. The extra problem is that all these five tracks may be partially invisible, used by people largely silent, disappearing from sight before one is looking.

1. Deception. What was anticipated (personal success, particular organizational climate or culture) is not there anymore. The (leaders) video and audio don’t match anymore. Walk the talk is a joke. The deception may be ‘objectively small’ but may also touch sensitive chords. As in trust, nothing is linear here. The intensity of the trigger does not correlate with the intensity of the response. Short term deception does exist, but a series of it may simply escalate your erosion of hope. Deception is one of the most terrible blows to your mind and soul. Feeling betrayed is rarely a neutral or stable state. Either you react with aggression (of many sorts) or you enter a depressive path.
2. Demotivation. You get there, of course, via multiple ways. The only way to understand people’s demotivation is to understand what motivates them in the first place. A big mistake is to assume that people should be motivated, given A,B,C, a series of very good things. These may not mean much to many. As I have written many times, the key to insights is not ‘why did you leave?’ the organization but ‘why are you still here?’.
3. Loss of agency. Agency is ‘the capacity to act’, the ability to have a say, to control destiny, to see and feel your personal impact, the connection between what you do and what happens in the environment (work, project, company). When the sense of agency is lost, your human nature is deeply attacked and the only survival mechanism is to transform yourself into a semi-vegetable-like entity. Even a semi-vegetable-like entity on the payroll. You first don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, you end saying ‘tunnel, which tunnel?
4. Alienation and abandonment. Suddenly or not, you are now second class citizens, the abandoned class, the ones with less or no airtime. Entire social classes suffer this. Entire sectors of some organizations suffer this. In the organization, your acid test question is: ‘who am I leaving behind, by doing this?’.
5. Permanent survival state. A permanent state of catching up does not leave any room for hope. It is not the same as permanent battling, which could be part of the deal, or part of the strategy. It is the sense that, although the battle has been won, the war is permanent, and the battling does not make your capacity better every time. Many organizational survival states are incredibly consuming.

These are my top five, as seen in the organizations I work with. The scary part is that many of these are unaware of them. The worse cases are always the silent and slow cooking ones.

 

Here we go again. I keep sounding gloomy these days. I don’t mean to. Promise.

The Era of Anger ^[7], the Guardian writer calls it. The revolt of the unheard, the anti-establishment, the Black Swans of Trump and Brexit (and the associated inability of ‘predicting’ anything). Everywhere, I don’t need to tell you, there is some form of un-predicted backlash that puzzles us, surprises us, and leaves us with a feeling of ‘lack of control’. Add fake news, courtesy of Facebook, and post-Truth, and we seem to be living in a bad dream. We will wake up soon and all will be alright, the last mad man says.

Bloomberg has a wonderful The Pessimist’s Guide to 2017 ^[8] which I think you should read because it draws scary scenarios. Each year this list is scary but I don’t take it completely seriously. This year I do.

I am not pessimist about the future. I am pessimist about our ability to imagine it, to get ready, to take it on. I am optimistic about the human condition, but not about blindness as a disease.

Yet, we have all signs in front of us: what was unimaginable, has taken place. Uncertainty has become a commodity term not more interesting than white, or black, or cold, or hot.

Celine Schillinger, a pharma executive and serious thought leader in Employee Engagement, tweets, ‘Backlash against an out-of-touch establishment could happen in companies too if leadership doesn’t evolve’. Are you serious? Is this a joke? An easy extrapolation? I don’t think so.

Corporate life lives in a bubble. We may not want to admit it, but we do. We think that the forces upon us are the invisible hands of markets, of course the political life, and our own internal capability of producing the appropriate products and services. What we see on TV screens about people’s anger, anti-establishment, out-of-touch leaders caught in a siesta, is ‘out there’. We, people in the payroll, are OK. The revolution will not come to the CEO’s Town Hall meeting.

All that would take is for a large corporation to see employees revolting, bottom up challenging leaders in mass (pick a reason, do you need a menu?) and literally (literally) starting a revolution, an ‘occupy this street’ movement, a serious challenge to policies, to leadership, to anything, for other companies to follow. ‘Employee activism’ is a term used so far as employees actively promoting the company. A bit of a joke and cheeky appropriation or readily available semantics. The real activism would be plain, simple, unexpected, noisy, massive, revolt. As in an Arab Spring in the company corridors.

I know, I know, this is nuts. Not in corporate. We don’t do these things.

Oh well, then, we will be alright.

 

 

 

I have found myself in full philosophical mode, taking stock. End of year I suppose. This is like a blood test without the blood to find compatibilities and antibodies, all in one. It does not describe me, but what that ‘me’ can take, look for or reject bitterly.

It’s personal by the way! Here we are:

PLUS
My top 3 in the character side are:

Loyalty: this one keeps coming up top all the time, no matter what

Generosity: when you are the receiver of a gift that did not have to come, from somebody who has the habit of sending them to you.

Compassion: genuine concern for others (that includes me). When you see it, you’ll never forget anymore.

 

MINUS
My top 3 in the high antibody generation category are:

Mediocrity: usually associated (I don’t know why) with people who think they are genius.

Arrogance: from people who think they are of a higher league, everybody else being second class citizen.

Carelessness: quick and dirty and un-thought and half baked, and, they don’t care. Of course!

 

MY 3 GRR! REALLY GRR!

Taken for granted: emotionally, professionally, personally, in relationships, you name it. It includes the feeling of entitlement that some people exhibit.

Nombrilisme: which is the French name for navel-gazing, but it sounds much better. Since we are in a Me-Era, it is not difficult to find people (and organizations!) who are just looking at themselves with pride.

The oblivious: it’s kind of included above but my grr! comes from the deep frustration of seeing people who have no clue about what is going on around them. And that includes many managers and leaders I know.

What I found interesting (and I suggest you can test it with yourself) is how long it took me to come up with this 3+3+3. I don’t think it reached the 10 seconds mark. I think that if one pauses and looks at the self-tests, it should not be difficult to answer the questions: what is my 3+3+3?

So, let me ask you, what are yours?

This is plagiarism, of course. I am stealing 13^th Century saint, Francis of Assisi’s  line: ‘Preach the Gospel all the time. When necessary use words’. Translation, do more, talk less. Lately recycled as ‘walk the talk’. Twisted by me as ‘talk the walk’. That is, you walk first, then you explain the walk.

Yes, I think the walk the talk order is wrong. As leader, you walk, and walk; then, you bring people along and explain the walk, whilst walking, that is.

In our organizations, we have conceptual tsunamis of values and beliefs. Most of them dwell in the corporate graveyards of annual reports, reception halls and HR systems. These are words, not behaviours. People copy behaviours, not words on walls, not bullet points in powerpoints.

We need to agree the non-negotiable behaviours of values and beliefs so that we can ‘do them’ and exhibit them, not just explain them. Those behavioural translations are life or death.

The ‘when necessary use words’ should be the motto of so called change management processes.

The pending role model/employee/ peer-to-peer revolution, will be driven by deeds, not by words.

But let’s not forget. Words certainly engage, and motivate. Words are the wake-up, the alarm bells, the declaration of intentions, the intellectual vehicle and the pre-emotional triggers of action. So we’d better be good at them as well.

However:

Words are pre-social, the revolution is social.

‘The things you don’t have to say make you rich’ – William Stafford’s (1914 – 1993)

Let’s get richer. We act more, then, when necessary we will use words.