Success is not avoiding an outcome that you fear. Success is moving towards fulfilment of your purpose.
I caught myself this week defining success on a challenge as avoiding an outcome that I feared. I had tricked myself and hidden the fear in layers of other goals. I knew immediately that I needed to change the way I approached the challenge.
Running away from a fear is no guide. If all you are doing is running away how will you get where you want to go?
This is a common enough approach to work. For many people, the measures of success have a strong avoidance flavour:
achieving their targets to avoid losing their job
making enough money to avoid financial difficulty
comfortable relationships to avoid loneliness and conflict
keeping up with peers to avoiding embarrassment
minimising risk to avoid failure
Avoidance is a poor guide to what to do. Targeting safety and security often creates the exact outcome that you feared.
Avoidance is not particularly fulfilling. The absence of a risk having been realised still leaves the fear.
Having found the hidden fear, my challenge was to redefine success in terms of my purpose. When I know that I am moving towards my purpose I am more engaged. I know that I will have measurable progress somewhere that matters to me. All of a sudden the vicissitudes of the journey matter less.
Challenge your goals to ensure that they are really moving towards purpose. There are lots of places to escape fear, but you don’t want to be in most of them.
I recently shared a statistic on twitter on the need for digital transformation from a new piece of Accenture strategy and was queried by Ragnar Heil on the comparison of the Accenture recommendations to the Responsive Organisation.
Similar Rationale: Both the Accenture Digital Double Down paper and the Responsive Organisation are framed around a fundamental change in business circumstances with the rise of digital technology and particularly its ability to enable disruption, transparency of information and rapid growth. Accenture specifically challenge organisations to recognise that digital transformer’s
‘aspirations and investment plans set the pace, and the actions of these organisations should become the core assumptions of any future business strategy’
A Game Change: Accenture explicitly frame their paper around the difference between growth and efficiency orientation. This reflects broadly the characterisation of efficiency as the traditional model of management thinking in the Responsive Organisation focus. However, effectiveness and growth are not identical concepts.
Purpose vs Growth: Growth in the Accenture context is revenue growth with customers. Responsive Organisation generally discusses effectiveness in a more systemic and purposeful way. Effectiveness is an organisations ability to create new and better ways to fulfil purpose and new and better ways to manage its stakeholder relationships, including employee engagement, leveraging employee potential and engaging community.
Customer-led: Both approaches rightly highlight that digital transformation is customer-led. Accenture focuses on the customer channel transformation occurring and only briefly references new markets and value migration. Responsive Organisation is more specific on how experimentation and value creation will occur through better customer orientation across the organisation.
Recognition of Changing Organisation: The Accenture Strategy paper explicitly recognises that change will be required to the organisation though this message is carefully phrased and not a major theme of the document. In its strategic questions, the Accenture paper notes:
‘How should we organize, measure, recruit and reward in a digital world?’
Company vs Network: Accenture recognises that partnerships, external relationships and new customer engagement are important, but their model for the entity leading digital transformation is a traditional hierarchical organisation. Responsive Organisation asks organisations to look more closely at the networks within and around the organisation and how different models of value creation and working might better fulfil purpose. Accenture do not emphasize the need for innovation in management approaches as heavily as discussion of Responsive Organisation.
Planning vs Experimentation: Accenture are explicitly providing guidance to senior managers as to where investment should be allocated and what should go in strategic plans. There is no reference to experimentation, learning or other similar concepts in the recommendations of the strategy document. Increasing the autonomy of employees to collaborate, experiment and innovate is not an explicit recommendation.
Need for Change Management: Both approaches recognise that organisations face significant change to adapt to new digital transformation and new ways of working. The Accenture focus is on which senior executives should lead the transformation and how to manage senior executive support. Responsive Organisation focuses on the challenge of engaging all employees and distribution of the transformation through a more autonomous organisation.
Communicate vs Transparency: Accenture highlight that digital changes the transparency of information in and around organisations. However, their model is still one where the organisation must choose what it wishes to communicate to partners, suppliers and others.
Summary: The two approaches are very similar and reflect efforts to address the same root cause and opportunity. Accenture’s approach is perhaps better targeted to engage senior managers looking to start incremental change to digital transformation now. After all, this strategy document is a summary of their approach and content as part of a consulting sales program. As organisations move deeper into digital transformation, I expect that the two approaches may draw closer together, assuming the opportunity to move to new ways of working and greater autonomy in the organisation is not precluded by the organisational culture.
For much of the industrial era, management has been a challenge of how slavishly can you copy the recipe. We are entering an era when mastery will demand new approaches and innovation and experimentation on management.
When you start cooking, you learn to copy a recipe closely. When you start in management, you learn to copy a recipe from GM, GE or another organisation. The spreading of a linear process mindset across industries has led to the view that the successful recipe for management is known. In this mindset, the challenge is compliance. Managers need to follow the recipe and variation must be eliminated.
Experienced cooks use recipes as guides for experimenting and adapting their practice. They work out loud sharing innovations in communities, accelerating the change in practice. Experienced cooks realise that recipes are no help when circumstances change or you need to adjust to variations in ingredients or tools. At the point where things become less predictable, mastery must take over.
Management increasingly needs to adopt a mastery mindset. Management thought leaders like Gary Hamel have been calling for innovation in management. There are many seeking to connect the change agents of new ways of working. This connection offers the potential to amplify the mastery and the effectiveness of the practitioners, experts and other change agents of future ways of working.
An Example: Toyota Production System
The Toyota Production System has been credited with driving a great deal of the success of Toyota in winning share and profitability in the automobile industry. Importantly, the development of the Toyota Production System was an open and ongoing collaborative activity. It developed from the insights of Ford, Deming and other founders of management. Toyota’s approach challenged its management and employees to seek new and better ways of working.
At the same time Toyota engaged with its Detroit competitors and its supply chain partners, sharing learnings, making open its factories and listening to its competitor’s approaches. Realising it needed to innovate on management as well as products, Toyota was prepared to be open and connected.
Interestingly, many of those other organisations could not make sense of what they were seeing at Toyota. Instead of trying to innovate their own systems they copied tools from the Toyota Production System and implemented them into their own environment as transactional interventions, often to little impact. Waves of management fads are attributable to manager’s attempts to extract a transactional change from the Toyota Production system.
Mastering innovation in management
The knowledge economy has led some firms to greater awareness of the need for management innovation. Startups, professional service firms and large organisations of the digital and knowledge economies are some of the first to realise that human potential is a differentiator. They explicitly acknowledge that innovation on the tools of management are as important to their success as innovation in their processes and systems.
Increasingly the network economy is forcing organisations to look at their world and explore the more visible and accessible systems. No organisation is an island any more. Systems thinking makes it even clearer that management’s simple recipes may not address the needs of all stakeholders or complex and dynamic processes.
When you let go of the management recipes, things do get more challenging. Measures are not as precise. Interventions are not as predictable. The shift for managers is from focusing on efficiency to focusing on effectiveness. In our traditional efficiency mindset we rarely consider the human potential lost because policy prevents action or requires wasteful steps.
In a mastery approach, instead of reducing loss and ensuring compliance, managers now have the potential to drive step changes in performance by discovering and implementing new and better ways of working.
How are you challenge your managers to step away from the recipe book and innovate on new ways of working? How are you helping them develop mastery in the practice, share that with their teams and continuously build the skills to connect and learn with others as a Network Navigator?
Respect for leaders is far more volatile than ever. Leaders deal increasingly with environments where confidence quickly ebbs away. Leaders need to take a systemic approach to design, to deliver and to sustain their changes. Winning authority in networks is key.
Transactional leadership is the model of leadership that we expect. If something is broken send in a leader with a hammer. We may not agree with the actions but we see this kind of leadership as decisive and action-oriented at least initially. However, systems don’t respond well to hammers. They outlast the blows and the leader finds that confidence across the system in their ability to lead change erodes.
Leading in a system is the new challenge. In a networked world, every leader is surrounded by connections to followers, competitors and stakeholders. Much more of the system is accessible and visible. That also means that much more of the effects of a leader’s actions in the system are known, discussed and ultimately influence the leader’s authority to act. Hammer blows ring far and wide.
Leadership in systems is more adaptive. Successful paths emerge for leaders who manage both the problem, the group and their authority. There are fewer hammers blows and much more dialogue. That involves leading with regard to a much wider group of stakeholders. The path to a solution may not be as direct or as directly attributable to the leader’s vision or action. However, it is likely to be one which sustains an effective solution for the group and builds the leader’s authority.
This morning I had to get an early cab to the airport. My driver’s name began with J and he is a 29 year old looking to make a living and a better place for himself in the world. J and I spoke all the way to the airport. We exchanged otheries. There is no photo so you will need to settle for a thousand words of what I learned. Remember this all came about because in my otherie, I concentrated on what I can give.
J showed interest in me first. He wanted to know what I did. When I said I was a consultant, he wanted to know my history, goals and how I built my consulting business.
In return, I asked what he was trying to achieve over the next 5 years. J drives a cab to make some money but want to do more. He already runs a truck and driver for furniture deliveries and wants to build that business. He’s had success with online advertising on Gumtree and wants to do more. His customers are a great source of referrals. J wants to have paid off his house by age 45.
We ended up in a wide ranging conversation about entrepreneurship, learning, hard work and creating your own luck. We both saw the value of a simple approach to building business:
– focus on finding and talking to customers
– build networks to generate additional connection to customers and to referrals
– recognise that ‘doing the same thing and expecting a different result’ is the definition of insanity. Be prepared to make changes.
– Focus your changes on small simple steps that are tests of new ways of working.
– Do more of what works. Change what doesn’t
– Ask yourself ‘what can I do more, better or different?’ Keep trying new things.
– Most of all, recognise that luck is when opportunity meets preparation. Be alert and be prepared.
That advice might be simple but we often need to be reminded to focus on the basics. I need that reminder often. J liked the focus on seeing simple steps as a way to do more and do different.
J is excited. He had a few new ideas to try. I was excited because I was reminded of the power of coaching and simple practical advice.
Photo: Very happy with myself in my selfie to end 2014.
#Selfies ruled 2014
2014 was the Year of the Selfie. We took photographing ourselves to new lengths during the year. Selfies were taken around the world. Many were taken with and by celebrities. Selfies were photobombed by royalty. Some even chose some of the year’s worst disasters as a moment to share their image. We even created the selfie stick to take better photos of ourselves.
We love our own image. We know it well from our relationships with cameras and mirrors. Our self-image helps us shape our relationship with the world and the selfie was undoubtedly part of that relationship. One has only to look at all the photos of people holding smartphones before mirrors on Instagram to reflect on the significance we invest in sharing a good self-image. These images are as carefully curated illusions as the pages of most lifestyle magazines. The competition of selfies invites me to remember the useful adage about self-image: “Never compare someone else’s showreel to your cutting room floor”.
Sadly, we often forget to invest the same time and effort in others around us.
The Year of The #Otherie
What if we made 2015 the Year of the Otherie? Instead of focusing our attention and sharing on ourselves, an otherie would focus our sights on the other relationships in our life. I am inspired by the ongoing focus on the person-to-person economy of Jonathan Anthony. Jonathan is a great proponent of the selfie but he also stressed the opportunity to engage with others deeply. We are who we are not just because of our self-image but also because of those around us.
Understanding others help us to be more human and better leverage the new opportunities of our network economy. It also helps us to improve our own self-image. Internal thoughts are no match for the creative and energising potential of purposeful and personal dialogue with another. We see ourselves better through the lens of another person’s eyes.
What would change if we started to take a good hard look at the others around us? What if we focused on their self-image, their worldview, their experiences and their goals? A selfie is an momentary blast of image. An otherie will be the foundation for a growing dialogue and relationship between two people.
Go out and take an otherie, a photo of someone else. Make it a basis for a conversation about their worldview, their goals and their self-image. Share what you learn, add your #otherie tag and step by step we will turn 2015 into the Year of the Otherie.
I look forward to sharing an #otherie or several here as the year progresses.
Management has challenges on its hands. The traditional pillars of management are breaking down as David Holzmer recently outlined. At the same time the demands on management increase. In seeking a new course we need to engage the creativity of human potential. After all, human potential got us here in the first place.
We must remember in the tens of thousands of years of history of human culture the industrial model of activity covers only the last roughly 150. Industrial management models have been enormously productive and transformed our society. However, it has been at the cost of valuing process over personality. As the industrial model frays we have an opportunity to experiment anew with new more human ways of working.
Reading Mark Pagel’s Wired for Culture has reminded me of the power of the diverse potential of humanity. However to engage this potential we must allow people the latitude to express diverse talents and solutions. Pagel makes the point that:
‘…social learning is to ideas what natural selection is to genes. Both are ways of picking good solutions from a sea of variety’.
We must engage people to experiment with the potential of autonomy, purpose and mastery. We will need people to do this in large numbers, in diverse ways, using diverse talents and with sharing of practice to enable connected social learning. From these approaches new adaptations will be found. There won’t be an easy linear recipe. However, human creativity given its freedom is a powerful problem solving engine.
Organisations go to great effort to hire the most talented employees and to align them to the goals of the organisation. Why not let them use those talents to adapt and change the system? Perhaps it is time to trust in the potential of those well chosen people to create new and better ways of working. Better still connect, enable and hold people accountable for this creativity. Supply the adaptive leadership to help them realise even more.
I go looking for a leadership echo chamber when I hear that question asked about a decision. Inexplicably bad decisions are the product of logic of leaders disconnected from reality.
The corporate ‘yes man’ has been much derided. Leaders who surround themselves with sycophants know and deserve what they get. In exchange for ego support, they will find no challenge to their ideas, even the dangerously bad ones. However, most people are aware of the danger of ‘yes men’. The derision of the ‘yes men’ pushes sycophancy underground into a more subtle form of danger.
The echo chamber of leadership is a more subtle danger to organisations. An echo chamber may not say yes immediately. There may be extensive debate and analysis. However debate is structured within the defines of the logic and information of the leader. Those who would disagree or might introduce additional information know or learn to stay silent. Tragically many leaders hear later, ‘I knew it wouldn’t work but I didn’t say anything because you clearly wanted it’.
An echo chamber may have debate but it will carefully reflect the pros and cons inherent in the decision already made. Without the ability to extend the discussion, a bad decision will not be challenged and may even be strengthened by this groupthink. A group with limited goals and strong focus in discussions may not see how far their actions are from common sense to their stakeholders. In many cases, busy with the challenges of achievement, the group may not even be aware of how limited their considerations were.
Silence the echo
The simplest way to change the dynamic of an echo chamber conversation is to introduce new information from outside the group into the discussion. That new information may be new language, a new point of data, a new argument, more time for reflection or the perspective of an external stakeholder. Asking the group to step outside the logic of their decision and see it from an additional perspective can help breakdown the echoes of the leader’s thinking.
Another important challenge to the echo chamber is to ask people to explain the logic for the decision in the simplest language. Strip away the internal jargon and the internal logic also is more easily exposed.
A critical role for any leader in an organisation is to bring in fresh external perspectives to decision making from the system in and around the organisation. Network connections can help offer this additional perspective. Inexplicable decisions are a symptom of this flow of information becoming a stale echo chamber. The role of leaders is to watch for these reactions, extend the networks and change the group discussion.
We are relationship busy. Life is short. Communication technologies fill our lives with more people than ever.
Weak network links enable us to do extraordinary things. Strong relationships help make us the people who do extraordinary things.
Strong relationships listen and seek to understand us. Strong relationships push, challenge and make demands of us. Strong relationships support, care and give.
Relationships become and stay strong through time and effort. In a world of buzzing connections, relationships not growing stronger are fading away.
Don’t let the demands of life or the swirl of relationships interfere in your effort to connect with those who matter to you. We cannot leave our strong relationships to circumstances or chance. Build your strongest relationships as you work to create your future.
Treasure your precious relationships. Give them a gift of your time and attention. Your strongest relationships help make you who you will be.
