The public in social media and enterprise social media gets all the attention. However often the greatest connection goes on out of view.
With social media channels inside and outside organisations comes the direct message and the private message. These are key parts of the value created by a network.
Private messages are the communication channels that are most comfortable for many users. These messages don’t offer the value of full working out loud but they can play key roles:
– creating access
– building and deepening relationships begun in public
– exchanging confidential information or additional context
– coaching users
– helping connect community management and community leaders.
In the passion of adopting new public ways of working, we cannot overlook the value of integrated private messages. After all some times the first step to working out loud is sharing something with just one other person.
“By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co- exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.” – Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
What exactly is the power in your company’s hierarchy?
A Culture of Consent
Debates over structure, governance and power dominate management. We want to get the right balance between command and autonomy as if this is a formula that can be designed externally and imposed. The realities of power in organisations are simpler than we perceive.
An organisation is not a state. Despite their orders, minions, wealth and luxurious surrounds, senior managers are not rulers. There is no army, no police force and no jail. Shareholders are not voters to provide legitimacy to coercion. Security guards have limits on their ability to apply force and is rarely constructive. Coercive power is in organisations is rather like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Senior managers know this well because daily they experience the limits of their ability to order.
Organisations have one form of power – exclusion through exile or ostracism. Senior management have security guards to escort you from the building. Management can encourage others to turn on you. They can deprive you of this source of income and relationships in a community of peers, but have no other power. Look closely, they probably can’t even deprive you of resources, as these are usually under the day-to-day management of your peers. You already work around that issue daily as you make your organisation’s budgeting work.
All the power of the hierarchical leaders of organisations is given to them by the culture within the organisation. It is social influence, not power backed by force. Like the greengrocer in Vaclav Havel’s example above, you either live within that culture (and sustain its power) or you don’t (and become a dissident or rebel).
If the Emperor of Management has no clothes..
Change is closer than you think. Start to create new influence or question the sources and approaches of power and you are already leading change, potentially far more quickly than you realise.
Management are not a blocker outside the system preventing change. They are a part of the same system and equally aware of its issues. Encourage them to adapt management practice through conversations about influence, culture and the practices of power.
Network with like minded peers discuss and debate what needs to change. How should influence be structured in your organisation?
Culture is not a project just for the HR team. The consequences of the real cultural norms are far wider and far more important than a poster of values. Culture will shape what the organisation perceives and how it is able to respond.
Living in reality and being more human is harder than you think. First, you must separate reality from the views that you have chosen to believe. Second, you must continue to engage with the reality of the situation without the warm support of culture.
The future models of power in your organisation are a discussion for the community. Adopting elaborate models of autonomy and decision making without this discussion is swapping one naked emperor for another. If you adopting a new model, what is it about this model that makes it closer to the reality of influence in your organisation?
The ability to survive and restart reduces the threat of management power. That means a sense of personal purpose, savings of six to twelve months of living expenses, marketable capabilities and good external networks. Removing the danger from exile and strengthening purpose against ostracism frees the rebel to lead change.
“For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if it has been here for a long time already and only our own blindness and weakness and has prevented us from seeing it around and within us and prevented us from developing it?” – Vaclav Havel
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – Thomas Jefferson
Caution is fine with large change. Taking care with change is important. However, not all change can be approached gradually. Major societal changes will be binary when they enable new human potential.
Softly Softly
The softly softly approach works until it doesn’t. Caution breaks down when change is at a scale that sits outside the normal gradual evolution because it dramatically enables human potential. These step changes have consequences beyond work for business, society and our lives. These social changes give rise to new actors, new behaviours, new approaches and new values.
Nobody will be perfect. Thomas Jefferson wrote those stirring words on an inalienable right to liberty while owning slaves. His plantation ran on the backs of slaves. The Founding fathers of the United States were aware of the conflict slavery represented. Confronted with conflicting values, they chose to move cautiously. To this day, it remains a mark on Jefferson’s otherwise extraordinary reputation
Take care standing against changes that enable increasing human potential in work and society. When these values change, we look back and think “what were they thinking?”. Arguments constructed in historical logic fail the new tests of humanity. The historical examples are many: slavery, racism, the emancipation and equality of women, child protection, factory working conditions, civil and political rights, indigenous affairs, etc.
Many of these changes are not yet fully resolved. Newer battles for human potential are playing out across the future of work and society as we decide what kind of future we want. Whenever we stand against enabling others’ potential or pursuit of happiness, we would be wise to consider the potential for rapid shifts in social values.
Take care with the big social changes in human potential. Once you stand on the wrong side of history, the future will not forgive.
How long would it take for you to organise a conversation to save your company?
Working out loud, social business, flat management structures, autonomy and many other practices enable your disruptive competitors to share information, debate issues and make decisions quickly. Your competitors will discuss and decide today.
If it will take you at least a week, a fortnight or even a month to send emails asking for a meeting, arrange the meeting in diaries and circulate the papers, you will be behind on every cycle of decision making.
Speed isn’t everything. Many bad decisions have been made in haste. However the effects of slow decision making accumulate.
The most urgent conversation in business is how to discuss what needs to be discussed today.
The paths of management are littered with clever research, elegant theories and efforts at intellectual rigour that are largely unused. Management is a pragmatic discipline. Action prevails over ideas and idealism. Even bad action is preferred to ideas. Change Agents must reconcile pragmatic action with movement to a better future.
Unicorns and Rainbows
The temptation for those arguing for change is to advocate for the perfect future. Many models of leadership and change begin with communicating a compelling vision. The test of these visions is usually their beauty, their completeness and their intellectual robustness. To be explicit, that means the test of a good vision is how little it resembles the reality of day-to-day management.
Idealist is a term of abuse in management. In the heavy day-to-day pressures of management sadly thinking sits a long way back from the accountability to do. There’s a good reason many managers first reaction to an elegant vision for change is to scoff. Not all that scoffing can be disregarded as cynicism.
Change visions will have thought out the peaks of the future experience. Fewer visions have considered the low and difficult paths required to be traversed in the change. The pragmatic audience that needs to lead that change knows those dark corridors too well. They know the system is complex and many of the changes proposed might not deliver as expected. They know they will be held to account for the results regardless of the quality of change path.
Hard Won Change
The best utopia is a working model. It is far harder for management to scoff at the tangible outcomes of action. Effective change agents know that their work begins not with dreams or theory but with action and the resulting adaptive learning of what works. Theory can guide the action but success will be determined by outcomes of action in real life, not the theory.
Start where the problem is. Start working on making change where it matters. Pretty powerpoint can come later. So can the expensive systems, the processes and the policies. Successful change is developed from what works, not imposed from what should work.
The best thing for a change agent to do is to start making change. Responding to a problem that needs fixing or an opportunity that needs to be realised will provide the first impetus. Theories, visions and support will come as you act. The good ones can be adopted as support. The mediocre ones adapted to your needs. However, you won’t find our what works unless you act.
Superheroes are dumb ideas — big, bold, brightly-colored dumb ideas. They are what happens when pure, unfettered imagination encounters our world as it is, finds it wanting, and conjures something to fix it. Something joyous and colorful, something that can perform astounding feats, something that – crucially – is looking out for us. That’s all a superhero is: something wonderful that’s got our backs. – Glen Weldon ‘Floating Eyeballs, Trained Bees: History’s Most Cringeworthy Crusaders’
Change Agents can often feel that they are expected to be superheroes. Organisations can create unrealistic expectations of those leading change. Change Agents aren’t super heroes. They are ordinary humans who do unlikely things together for the benefits of all.
Leap Buildings in a Single Bound
Change Agents like superheroes see the world find it wanting and conjure up something to fix it. They need extraordinary capabilities because they step forward to take on the tough challenges. They look out for others and in so doing take on awesome responsibilities.
The difference with a superhero is that the extraordinary capabilities in a Change Agent are not physical ones that can be “big bold brightly coloured dumb ideas”. The extraordinary capabilities of a change agent are spirit, compassion, intelligence, purpose and initiative.
Change Agents are the people who act when others won’t. They act when permission is ambiguous or even absent. That takes a robust spirit & all the nous you can muster.
Bulletproof
Superheroes have a lot of capabilities to stand and defeat their enemies’ bullets. Change Agents aren’t that lucky. They have only one choice. Don’t get hit. Stop people firing and if they must fire then move fast out of the way.
Change Agents sign up for the challenge knowing that at some point the bullets will hit. They hope they can get far enough down the path for the damage to be minimal or at least the project to survive the bruising impacts. Bullets are inevitable. The success of the project depends on momentum and agility.
Mutant Powers with an Unlikely Source
I ran a transformation program and a member of my team started referring to my influence in stakeholder engagement as ‘Jedi mind tricks’. I wasn’t relying on the midi-chlorians of the Force to warp people’s minds. The reality was far more mundane. Most of the influence came from three simple features of those conversations:
I prepared for each conversation by seeking to understand the stakeholders position first
I listened carefully, questioned and probed for common ground
I had confidence in my project, its purpose and the work we had done
Sadly these features of conversation may be uncommon but they are not a rare mutation. Every Change Agent I have met has similar sources of their extraordinary effectiveness in driving change. They do the little uncommon things consistently well. They focus on and leverage the human potential to make change.
Change Agents deal with greater complexity of change than your average superhero. There is no single villain or arch-enemy. Challenges don’t come one at a time. Changing systems is far more complex than saving the world in the pages of a comic. Why? Because the people involved in changing those systems are real three-dimensional people with their own complex agendas, histories and needs.
League of Justice
Superheroes are a lonely lot. Sure they have a few sidekicks. Occasionally they band together to form a quarrelsome league or a partnership where there is more often conflict within than without. Extraordinary physical gifts are isolating and often create extraordinary egos. There’s plenty of literature on the similarity of our superhero fantasies and the fantasies of the dictators of our totalitarian states.
Change Agents understand that networks are their best ally and a great way to overcome personal limitations. They seek to leverage all the human potential that they can to create change. They inspire and lead movements to bring others to help with changing the world. More importantly they are in service of the purpose of the network, not dictating it. Change Agents have everyone’s back too.
Creating super hero expectations for Change Agents is dangerous for the individuals and for the change. Treat them like humans but support their extraordinary powers for change.
Some days I wonder how much of what we call management theory is piling on new practices to treat the symptoms of the last practice we implemented. Let’s break the management spiral.
The Management Spiral
Let’s assume we are a traditional organisation run in line with prevailing management practices. Here’s one example of what we might experience:
We hire to match fixed definitions of expertise and because we don’t help our people to learn & adapt so we don’t trust them to deliver alone.
Because we don’t trust our employees to be able to work unguided, we have a strict processes & policies.
The policies and processes don’t cover all situations or all decisions, so we have hierarchy to lead, sort issues & coordinate.
Our hierarchy doesn’t do that work because human nature means hierarchical leaders become invested in their power and expertise which disengages people, so we run a complicated scheme of performance management and incentives.
The performance system isn’t perfect and worsens performance by creating conflict, waste and misalignment so we need to resort to layoffs, restructures, outsourcing and automation in an effort to restore performance.
Now that we are letting expert people go, it’s clear that we can’t trust anyone and there’s no point investing in people so we are back at the beginning again and need better compliance with policies and process, more effective hierarchy and a new performance management system.
This is a simple linear story. Even small organisations are far more complex than this example with interplay between each of these factors and a range of personal, political and human issues influencing performance. For example, there’s a reason engagement is low across many industries and countries as every one of the bullets above affects engagement.
We can’t go on adding bandaids to the symptoms of our previous management practices.
Breaking the Spiral
To break this spiral we need to change two key elements of the modern management paradigm:
From knowing to learning: Expertise won’t cut it anymore. We need to embrace the pace of knowledge in a connected economy and focus on flows of knowledge, not stocks. Organisations need to ensure that they have Big Learning, where every role is building capability and contributing to the potential of the organisation. It also means means change & growth is inherent in every role and each role has a responsibility to fix, to improve and to share.
From controlling to enabling: If the world is dynamic, we can’t specify in advance. We can’t dictate the process at the detail required. We can’t anticipate every customer need or every community demand. We need to focus instead on enabling the person best placed to make the call and realising value through enabling those outside the organisation. We need to manage to realise and enable our collective potential, the potential of employees, customers and community.
These two concepts seem to be at the heart of many of the new practices developed to help enhance the future of work. Let’s hope better practices will help us to better manage the system and break the spiral.
The status quo isn’t predetermined. It is just where we go back when the conflict of change ends. The status quo doesn’t exist without the conflict of change and doesn’t end until the change succeeds.
The etymology of phrases can be an arid occupation but it can also deliver up the odd insight. The Latin phrase ‘In statu quo res errant ante bellum’ was the source of our phrase ‘status quo’. It means ‘in the state in which things were before the war’ and was used through history as a way of restoring the pre-existing order of things in treaties following conflict.
There’s two points of significance there:
you need conflict to have a status quo
you go back until you go forward
These days we often use the phrase status quo loosely as if it is somehow a pre-derermined state. It isn’t. The status quo is defined by the attempted change. The conflict of change creates “the way things were before”. That way is simply an aggregation of all the previous changes.
There’s no point worrying about why the status quo in the systems we are seeking to change resists change or why there may be conflict. The status quo is just a status. It doesn’t have any ideas, a say or any actions. Those belong to the people in the system. Once a change in the system is started by some of those people, that conflict continues until there is no return by everyone to the status quo.
Embrace the conflict as part of the change process, use it to learn how the change needs to be improved and recognise that conflct will be there until the changes become the “way things are”. The desire of change agents to bring about a better system will ensure that.
Change agents deprive the status quo of its power and status.
