“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.
Practice reduces the shifting anxieties of working out loud.
At the beginning of our practice when working out loud is new we are anxious about the risks of sharing our work: embarrassment, mistakes and consequences. This is the time of the finger that trembles to push the button on a post.
As practice of working out loud progresses we see our initial anxieties were misplaced. Bad stuff rarely happen. Great things do. Our growing body of work makes each individual contribution less significant in the judgement of others.
Our new issue is becomes the danger that nothing might happen when we work out loud. As practice grows we are anxious about our networks, the quality of our engagement with others and whether we will add value through #wol. At the same time working out loud helps provide a solution to these fears. The transparency, generosity and action helps us to improve our networks, increase our engagement with others and creat value.
Consistent practice goes further still. Now we do more than reduce our anxiety about working out loud. Mastery of working out loud reduces our anxiety about our work and our life. Facing any challenge is far easier when your capabilities are supported by rich and vibrant communities that understand you, your needs and are willing to help.
If you are anxious about your #wol, experiment and keep going. Practice does make perfect.
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.
If we focus on our organisations as places to work and learn together, two small but wicked challenges come to the fore. The design of a Big Learning system needs to help an organisation manage these challenges at scale.
Two Small Challenges
Knowing what we know: Lew Platt of HP originally coined ‘if only HP knew, what HP knows’ but the frustrations of shared knowledge have been around since the beginnings of management. We can’t achieve knowledge sharing (& shouldn’t try). However finding a more effective way is an ongoing process of evolution in any group.
Knowing what works: Since FW Taylor management has known its role is focused on isolating what works and what can be improved, but clearly this has been a challenge for as long as people gathered together in challenges. One need only look at the many thousand year history of military thinking so see an example of the evolution of approaches to effectiveness. Separating out what performs well and how to be more effective is an everyday challenge. This encompasses both what works in internal relationships and what works externally for customers, community and other partners.
The problems worth working on in life often have the characteristic that they are easy to describe but wickedly complex to solve. There are no simple transactional or universal solutions to these issues. They sum up the quest of the entire history of management and human organisation.
Many Solutions. An Evolving State
The wickedness of these two small problems is why we require a systemic response. Individual approaches can contribute to the sharing of knowledge or learning what works or both. However effectiveness and scale will require an interplay of many elements of a system and continued learning and enablement of evolution of that system. Organisations that do not focus on creating a Big Learning system that encourages its people to learn, to share and enables them to continuously improve their practices will be left behind.
There is no organisational strategy without the capability to execute it. The demands of a disruptive economy mean organisations need to create systemic approaches that scale learning through every role, Big Learning. However, organisations need to build employee capability in their interests and not just for the sake of the organisation.
Holding on to a Wooden Box
Imagine you asked a friend to hold a wooden box for you. If they are a good friend, they might hold it for an hour or so. Some will give up and take it home to return it later. A great friend might put it down and stay by for a little longer. Very few would bother with the box for more than that without some further instructions, some value to them or some better proof of the worth of the exercise.
Yet organisations continue to ask employees to learn knowledge and skills for the sake of the organisation. Worse still, these approaches to learning are often rolled out with little communication as to the value of the learning for the organisation, let alone the employee.
Consider mandatory role and compliance learning. To employees it is as mysterious as the box request and it is cannot be escaped. The signals sent remind employees that it is designed to protect the organisation as part of a compliance system, rather than helping the achievement of employee goals.
The employee is left to complete the learning for the organisation and then forget it. There’s little surprise that much learning is wasted and is not applied to help organisations achieve strategic goals.
Enable Employee Careers & Purpose
Imagine you had a friend who shared that they wanted to develop a career as a public speaker. You might explain that practice & feedback is a critical part of developing as a public speaker and you could help them see that a wooden box would let them speak at a speaker’s corner whenever they want. There’s a far greater chance your friend is going to make an effort to carry their own box.
Organisations can do more to make their key strategic learning a part of a process of creating greater career options for employees. Learning that advances employee goals first is more engaging, more effective and more likely to endure. Very few people will seek mastery in a skill that is imposed on them. Mastery requires purpose.
Working in this way begins with employees goals and enabling the employee learning journey through all their work. Learning in this approach means thinking beyond tasks & roles to lifetime needs and career lattices. In addition to specific technical skills, learning must develop portable skills that increase the diversity of an employee’s career options.
Bureaucracy has become the definition of the kind of management organisations are seeking to avoid. However, bureaucracy started as a significant step forward in management systems. As we design the future management practices we need to ensure we do not see the same overgrowth.
Here are some of the positive changes that came with bureaucracy. Without continued innovation, these practices took on a logic of their own and became overused:
Incompetence, influence and nepotism were addressed by a hiring and promotion on managerial competence and expertise. Overdone this expertise focus led to an unwillingness to learn, internal focus and new forms of abuse of power.
Inconsistency and unpredictable management decisions were addressed by leveraging policy and hierarchical review. Overdone this led to stasis and disempowered managers who couldn’t address exceptions
Ineffectiveness was addressed by the clarity of division of labour bringing clear accountabilities and measurement of work. Overdone this led to breakdowns in coordination, ability to deliver and waste.
Emergent Management Practice
The reason bureaucracy resulted in these issues is that its design allowed little room for checks on its use. The focus on predictability meant bureaucracy was not generative. It had little or any capacity for new management approaches to emerge. The only approach to issues was the application of more bureaucracy.
As we design the future of work, we must take care that the changes we make address the right issues and do not become equally overgrown:
Solve the right problems in management today: Is hierarchy really the problem? It is human nature to obsess about power and the role of hierarchy in life. Hierarchal power is only one part of how decisions get made. Many of the approaches that ‘rid organisations of hierarchy’ can’t achieve that. There is a good argument that the issues above with bureaucracy are more about learning, use of knowledge, speed and decision making than they are about power.
Simplicity over complexity: Simple practices are more likely to remain transparent. When it is easier for people to understand the practice as a whole and keep its goals in mind, it is harder for people to take individual aspects of the management practice as their own end. Bureaucracy has been bedevilled by people taking means as ends. I suspect one reason Holacracy has found most implementations are ‘Holacracy lite’ is due to the complexity of its original proprietary formulation.
Generative practice: Management practices that challenge users to look for improvements in the practice have inbuilt protection against overgrowth. I focus on the generative capability of Big Learning because the two core elements of learning and enabling work and learning keep a focus & accountability on all in the management system on how to improve the work and its outcomes.
The only way to prevent the overgrowth of new management practice is to be constantly pruning and reshaping our work in the efforts to learn and improve.
