Writing

Ancient Pharaohs built elaborate pyramids and sacrificed hundreds of lives in rituals designed to ensure the changes of death had little impact on their lifestyles and to guarantee their future relevance. Our corporate change rituals are no less elaborate, no less dangerous and no more effective.

The Rituals of Change

Fiona Tribe started a conversation on twitter yesterday about change with this question:

https://twitter.com/white_owly/status/1056789400137326592

Answering the question led me to reflect on how many organisations are closed to change. In fact, the more closed an organisation is to change, the more expensive its change rituals.

We know the standard rituals of Change (I will use the Capitalised Noun to indicate its abstract nature):

• Make an elaborate announcement of the Change vision, supported with expensive multimedia resources
• Hire a large well-qualified team to lead the Change project over an extended time period
• Buy the Change technology with much hoopla
• Begin running the Change processes and creating the Change documentation
• Build a Change Lab as the centre of Change worship
• Create elaborate workshops, training exercises and other activities to enable participation and engagement in the Change
• Appoint champions as high priests of the Change
• Issue regular Change communications to encourage belief in the Change.

Belief in the Change is critical. The important point of Ritual Change is that it cannot be criticised as doing change to people. It is Change in purely a metaphysical realm. There is no connection between all these Change Rituals and the actual organisation or business activity.

No wonder the other members of the organisation look on bemused. They see all this Change as a waste of time and money that could be spent solving actual problems. Activities like these contribute to disengagement. Worse still they waste human lives and at times the money and effort wasted on Change can even threaten the entire purpose of the organisation and the lives of its employees.

Because this is purely an exercise in metaphysics and belief, success is also easy.  All it takes to declare success is ardent belief. There are no real world consequences of Change and so no way to test effectiveness.

The cost of all this activity and its scale is important. The level of investment and wasted effort absolves people of the guilt that nothing is actually changing. The CEO gets to look on all the pharaonic investments with the satisfaction that Change has forestalled their own irrelevance.

Real Change is A Conversation

We know what real change looks like. Real change is when behaviours and mindsets in the organisation are different.  That takes conversations, learning, practice and lots of encouragement to persist through the difficulties. It takes an openness and an outward orientation to learn and to grow.

This kind of change can happen quickly or slowly, but it occurs at a human level where the work is occurring.  It occurs through every day activities like conversations, role modelling, practice and coaching.

If you want to survive, prosper and be remembered, don’t build empty monuments to Change. Embed your legacy in the conversations within your organisation.  The positive impacts of better conversations and better learning will long out last you.

Utopias are tempting to change enthusiasts. Gathering a group of advocates and creating a community in isolation is tempting. We must remember that change occurs at the point of contact with the old system. We must remain engaged.

The Danger of Utopias

Khurshed Dehnugara, who wrote the book Challenger Spirit and runs the consulting business Relume, made the insightful comment on LinkedIn that

Challengers can’t afford to lose contact with those they are alienating.

When you are advocating for change, it can be easy to fall in love with the vision of change that you want to create. If you connect with a community who share that vision, your thoughts can quickly move to developing that vision and bringing it to life. Living in a Utopia and realising that vision can be enticing.

However, most Utopias fail.  A common reason for this failure is that like any closed system these perfect utopias suffer from entropy. Without new energy and recruits from contact with the world, they begin to decline, wrapping themselves in ever less productive activity within their community.

Isolation can be valuable for connecting people in change and envisioning and nurturing the future. This is well highlighted in the Berkana Two Loops model of change. However, any change advocated needs to remember that while isolation might enable initiation, isolation is not where change is perfected.

Hard Contact for Hard Change

Change is perfected in contact with the real issues of its opponents. When we are enraptured by uotopian visions, the work of engaging opponents can feel frustrating and like compromise.

However, real world solutions meet the needs of diverse stakeholders. As frustrating as these positions may be they are issues that need to be engaged in change. We cannot ignore them. We are far better to use them as opportunities to refine and develop our thinking. That refinement only happens in dialogue with the world. We will not find it in the gardens of Utopia.

One reason that the organisers of social change spend so much time designing contact with the forces opposing them is that they understand the leverage of these moments. The attention and energy of the conflict of change is a source of momentum to our change.  It energises our community and markets our vision of change to the wider world. Hiding out in a Utopia will not achieve this advocacy. We need to draw others to our vision to succeed and that will only happen if we continuously engage for good and bad in the world. We won’t convince everyone, but perhaps we can convince enough.

I’ll admit I have had my doubts on the trendiness of thought leadership. There’s such a vast amount of content marketing and content marketers claiming the term that I doubted it actually even existed. Not every thought can be a leading thought and not everyone who thinks can inspire actions of others. Too many thought leaders are simply entertainers with large audiences, but no influence at all.

However, I recently came across this useful discussion of what a thought leader might actually do:

Thought leaders advance the marketplace of ideas by positing actionable, commercially relevant, research-backed, new points of view. They engage in “blue ocean strategy” thinking on behalf of themselves and their clients, as opposed to simply churning out product-focused, brand-centric white papers or curated content that shares or mimics others’ ideas.
– Craig Badings and Liz Alexander

I like this definition as a test of thought leadership.  It is specific, resonates with value and because most of what I see purporting to be thought leadership fails this high bar. The five elements of the test are elements of value in the quality of the ideas that many self-proclaimed thought leaders fail to deliver:

• Actionable: Ideas are great and can be entertaining but actions get results. Actions are where the real work is. For an idea to be actionable you actually have to have taken some effort to have put it into action. Preaching is fine but walking the talk is more persuasive.
• Commercially Relevant: Dreams are plentiful. Utopias are delightful thought experiments. Most people are looking for something that helps them in a way that delivers actual value to their business or life. If you are trying to make a living from ‘thought leadership’ start with this.
• Research-backed: Evidence is in short supply in the thought leadership industry. Reverse engineering case studies of popular companies to fit a hypothesis is not research. On brand messages and marketing is not thought leadership.
• New: Oddly, your ability to say what everyone else has already said is not that valuable. A thought leader is not a mimic. They must have something novel to say or why say it. This is particularly the case when in repeating an idea you simplify or remove an idea from its context, evidence or effectiveness.
• Point of View: Surprisingly, many self-proclaimed thought leaders don’t actually take a position on anything. They are so busy expressing the common platitudes and not offending anyone that they express every view of an issue. Taking a point of view matters because it is how you are proved right or wrong.

Importantly, there’s not a single element of that definition that depends on the size of your audience, your social media following or the blurbs on the jacket of your book. Thought leadership is about what you do, not who is watching.

Also, when I consider that definition, I come to the view that the few ‘thought leaders’ who might satisfy that definition are the rare, effective and innovative consultants, research analysts and academics who are able to capture new insights from their practical work with a variety of clients and distill that experience and insight into new plans of action. Each of those roles can meet the criteria but each work in different ways to do so.  Thought leadership in that context isn’t one thing and is better described by each of those other terms. So I guess we didn’t need the term thought leader after all.

If thought leadership is just about a status, then we don’t need the term. Thought leadership has thought led itself out of business.  This aligns itself to a broader trend the world needs a lot less focus on status and talk and a lot more focus on value in action.

Our fears creep.

They linger in shadows.

They grow as we feed them, practising their pouncing, unsettling our nerves.

These monsters won’t hurt us

As much as the hopes we ignore.

I have to admit it was a rant. I saw yet another post from a familiar self-help thought leader inviting me to ‘crush it’. Inspired by the rants that are common in that genre, I tweeted my own:

The tweet even has the typo that signals a rant. This tweet has got a far greater reaction than anything else I have shared. Why? People don’t want to ‘crush it’ – whatever that bro-speak means. The commonest comment is thanking me for being real and speaking a widely shared truth. People want to be real. They want real connection. The commodity that is most missed in this era of hype and instant fame is the simplest & potentially the easiest to achieve- purposeful work in respectful relationships with people from whom we can learn.

Purposeful Work

What the thought leader crowd don’t get is that achievement is fleeting. It is why they are so needy. If you have to be number one or if you have to monetise there is always a threat to your success. It cannot endure. Someone will always crush it better than you eventually.

Help someone else and they stay helped. Nobody can take away your impact. It’s not a race or a competition. It is a human contribution that helps make a rich human life.

Respectful Relationships

There is a shortage of both respect and genuine relationships at the moment. Both are deeply needed for our souls and our sanity. When shouting is the way to get attention, we all appreciate the quiet voice of respect.

Relationships are more than transactions. They are based in deep understanding and they endure. They are rich with human qualities like trust and generosity. It doesn’t matter whether these respectful relationships are online or offline, at home or at work, in business or in civil society. We need more in all arenas.

A Chance to Learn.

Nobody is born perfect. Nobody has realised their full human potential. Realising potential is a shared human endeavour.

We need to learn and grow in communities. We need the support and collaboration of others to achieve anything close to our potential.

We need less crushing it and empty noise. We need to focus our efforts on our purpose, our relationships and realising our human potential. It’s as simple and as complex as that. The response to my tweet suggests that the desire to do that work is widespread.

One of the challenges in traditional management processes is that goal setting is a one-way process. The cascade of goals down through the silos of an organisation without feedback and adaptation inevitably results in misalignment.

Consider the implementation of a collaboration solution. The overall business goals that justify the project are likely to be high level, ranging from supporting cultural change to specific improvements in customer experience, innovation and efficiency. However in designing a project for implementation these goals end up becoming soloed. Technology has a launch date and costs. Employee communications end up with a goal of user adoption. All the other goals are either cascaded to people too busy to care or are assumed to flow. Not long after users start to wonder why all technology wants is to give them the solution and all employee communications seems to want is for them to use it. By defining the goals in terms of the technology, the business loses its original outcomes and users lose reasons to use the system.

The approach of division of outcomes mean that the business has little opportunity to adapt to change or new opportunities. Budgets are set. Goals are fixed and tied to employee performance. This often results in the situation where the goals of one silo, say a launch date & costs, conflict with the goals of another, say adoption. Because these goals are baked into unchangeable and undiscussable plans, people push ahead knowing they are doing the wrong thing. The strategy becomes ‘we’ll fix it later’, but the next plan rarely allows that.

Roger L Martin, a leading strategist and a former business school dean, has highlighted in a series of books that the best strategies are adaptive. They allow for conversations up and down the chain from goals to actions and adaptation based on the lessons from conversations and action. If you want to prevent your business strategy turning into soloed nonsense then allow two-way conversations about goals and approaches. Better yet, use your collaboration platform as a hub of this learning and adaptation.

Scrolling through social threads today, I came across a criticism than an action was virtue-signalling. At first the phrase slipped by without reflection. Virtue-signalling is one of those phrases that gets thrown around in politics, particularly the subdivision of politics that is the culture wars. In those dialogues, it lives with a range of phrases from the left and right of politics, like political correctness, cultural appropriation and so on, that often had a specific meaning, but are now widely used as criticisms with loose, if any definition. I was about to go on reading but then I stopped and asked myself “What does that mean? What is wrong with signalling virtues?”.

Virtues are demonstrations of high moral standards.  Those standards are only standards and recognised as positives if they are shared in community.  An effective civil society needs some foundation of shared virtues. Virtues aren’t virtues in theory. You might source your virtues from a religious text, an ancient philosopher or lived experience. They become societal virtues when they are shared with others. A society comes to share virtues as a result of actions in line with those virtues. Actions that help those virtues become shared may be demonstrations of those virtues publicly or they may be creating signals that the virtues are required and will be rewarded. Of course, as with anything human, this is not a perfect process. Some of those signals may be false, flawed or hypocritical. The signals still contribute to creating the community standard that underpins the virtue. In fact, some of the strongest signals are when people suffer consequences for false, flawed or hypocritical demonstration of virtues. The problem with the problem of virtue signalling is you don’t have virtues without signalling.

Even if we accept that virtue-signalling is problematic, are we next going to suggest that evil-condemnation is also morally complex? If people can be unworthy to signal virtue, surely they can be unworthy to condemn evil. While I haven’t yet seen anyone explicitly throw that term as a pejorative, there are plenty of examples in our discourse as a society where people have cast doubt on (a) someone’s right to condemn evil (b) whether the way evil was condemned is adequate, (c) whether the evil is truly evil in some narrower or broader context and finally (d) whether evil is truly evil if it there is doubt as to intent, to means or to consequence. When we look the criticism of virtue-signalling, we see the intent is often not to address the issue of how best to promote virtue or suppress evil. The issue is a desire to silence others. Nobody is perfect. We know that. If we demand perfection as the standard for comment or action. Nobody gets to meet the mark. Only those with the power to speak anyway will get to discuss the issue.

One thing we learn from totalitarianism and other systems that leverage propaganda is that they master the art of taking phrases emptying them of their actual meaning and then twisting them to the purposes of control and power. We have to continue to question any phrases, subject them to discussion and query their role as criticisms and barriers to people to engage in civil society. Civil society needs more real debate, not less.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” – George Orwell, 1984

Our organisations learn how to manage human behaviour to productive ends from many aspects of society. The history of management shows many examples where it has borrowed from coercive human relationships, such as the organisational structures of military, the practices of slavery or the corrections system, because of the shared themes of control and coping with the complexities of human relationships at scale. If we are to create workplaces that have the necessary degrees of freedom to enable people to address the complex challenges of digital networks and realise their human potential, we need to be aware of these influences and to challenge control for its own sake.

This post examines an example of how the influence runs in both directions.  The tide in business press is running against the supposed productivity of open plan offices. At the same time we welcome an open plan prison.

Your Cubicle For Life

If anyone doubted the parallels between the modern office environment and a security state, the NSW Government just opened a new high security prison in Cessnock in the Hunter Valley. The facility has 400 beds in dormitory pods. The radical innovation of the new facility, which has been borrowed from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, is that it has done away with cell walls and with privacy. Anyone will recognise the formats of those pods as cubicle arrays in an open plan office.

Photo Credit: ABC News

As with any open plan office, the facility has no privacy and a focus on monitoring of behaviour.

Correctional officers monitor inmates around the clock from first-floor corridors overlooking the pods and with infra-red cameras for night monitoring; and Immediate Action Team officers are stationed within the facility to provide a 24/7 response to critical incidents. – Cessnock Advertiser

A key focus of the new facility is to use the new openness and flexible spaces to foster interaction and relationships between inmates.  From sensory deprivation, the inmates will now need deal with an excess of human interaction

“For many that is culture change. The previous thinking has been minimal interaction with inmates.” – Newcastle Herald

The pitch is not that different from co-working giant, WeWork’s own residential facilities, WeLive. Of course, WeLive facilities have a colour scheme that includes colours other than grey.

From mailrooms and laundry rooms that double as bars and event spaces to communal kitchens, roof decks, and hot tubs, WeLive challenges traditional apartment living through physical spaces that foster meaningful relationships. Life is better when we are part of something greater than ourselves. Whether short term or long term, WeLive has flexible options designed to meet your needs.

Employee Engagement is the focus of the new office. Productive use of time will be carefully managed in this new open plan environment.  Employees will be guaranteed 5 hours of productive work, which is more than most open plan environments:

The inmates’ days have been carefully structured in a way that focuses on intense participation and access to education, employment, programs and activities. – Cessnock Advertiser

Recruitment processes for this new office will also be intensive to ensure an appropriate cultural fit and to sustain the desired levels of engagement in a vibrant collaborative culture. Like any good employee fit process, those who fail the test are subject to exile but we won’t discuss where.

Mr Severin said inmates will be carefully screened – and if they don’t fit the profile, will be placed elsewhere. – Cessnock Advertiser

The real rationale for the new office appears to be its low cost and rapid construction. Never let real human relationships interfere with a low cost property strategy.

It is only a matter of time before the innovations in Cessnock cross back into our living and working. Expect to see technology giants leading the way removing flexible working, requiring their employees to use their working for greater productivity and to restore human relationships.  Is it such a distant step to living facilities in a subtle elegant shade of metallic grey? or to WeWork’s laundry room bars? We will just need to remember that privacy terms and conditions apply and this lifestyle will be available to only approved applicants.

Simon Terry will be speaking at Disrupt Sydney 2018 to elaborate on these themes in his talk “If your company was a country, would you live there?”