In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.
Czesław Miłosz
Writing
The Poetry of Change
What is poetry? How can I explain it? And how do I explain it to you in prose? At moments like these prose is a brick through the poet’s window. The fate of the poet is to ignore the broken window and make good use of the brick, and of the draft. A broken window lets in a stranger world, not a familiar outside into a familiar inside, that’s gone to ruin, but rather a type of new encounter of the mind and its art—the air is welcome, the air is unwelcome. And still there’s the poet’s conductor, the cosmic madman in the mind, urging it all to poem. – Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Driving change in organisations can feel at times a little like describing the work of poetry in prose. The change agent speaks a different language and sees a different future. You are inclined to be treated as a madman. The art and poetry of change is embrace the discomfort and to leverage the opposition and disruption to creative ends.
Ignore the Broken Window
Change means breaking things. Many things will need and deserve to be broken. Some will be the things that you don’t want to lose. Many of the most difficult breakages will come from the pressure change puts on personal relationships.
Accept this breakage or jeopardise the change.
There is real personal discomfort for a change agent in this breakage. They can see different ways and want change urgently. Often it takes a long time for others to come on the journey and to ignore the damage of the path to a new future. Things might need to feel more broken before the new ways of working are embedded and effective. If the people who aren’t coming on change are close friends or powerful players it can be quite uncomfortable.
Accept this discomfort or jeopardise the change.
A change agent understands that there is a greater purpose and benefits from better ways of working. They need to continue to act and share despite the discomfort because only conversation and example will create the path to new change. They need to communicate the change in language others can understand.
Make Good Use of the Brick and the Draft
The disruption of change will draw attention and conflict. The temptation is to seek to minimise this conflict in the approach to change. Attention is a scarce commodity. Conflict will help people focus on the changes and encourage them to understand. Don’t minimise the conflict and focus. Leverage it. Engage people in their own terms. Discuss the issues that people want to address.
Use the brick and accelerate the change.
The conflict of change is also an opportunity to leverage additional external perspective. Invite people to look outside the organisation. Let a draft of new ideas enter the organisation as people seek to understand and engage with the change. Encourage people to look to the networks outside the newly broken windows. Some of these ideas will create new conflict and new opportunities. There will be ideas there to foster and to develop new ways of working. There will be evidence and case studies that help with the arguments for change
Use the draft and accelerate the change.
Urge it all to poem
Great change takes creativity. Great change finds a new and better ways of engaging others. Change Agents need to leverage creativity in their circumstances to make a poem of their change to a world speaking prose.
The Gap & The Value: Mastery, Professionalism and Self-confidence
Mastery is important to success as a knowledge worker. However, a danger lies in the quest for improvement. Knowledge workers can confuse the road ahead with the achievement behind.
Mastery focuses on the Gap
Mastery means always looking for ways to improve performance. There is always a gap. Being self-aware means understanding where those gaps are and working hard to improve on them. This challenge of improvement is an all consuming quest for many. It is the heart of professionalism.
The challenge of an awareness of shortcomings is that it can distort perceptions. Many highly talented people undervalue their contributions because they measure against perfection not above the bar for performance. It is not uncommon to find the greater the expertise the greater the awareness of the shortcomings and the less aware people are of their unique contributions.
Performance management processes often reinforce this impact because of the economic incentives in managing down perceptions of performance and reinforcing the quest for improvement. The imposter syndrome is another consequence of awareness of shortcomings. A much more common consequence is a lack of confidence in sharing one’s work, promoting one’s expertise and the value that you bring. This can be devastating for career success when there are significant benefits to sharing your work and building a reputation for expertise.
Success requires focus on the Value
The unique value a professional knowledge worker creates is how they bring their expertise, skills and networks to bear on each problem and how this exceeds the standard of the average peer. An individual who is practising mastery will soon find themselves moving ahead of this level of performance. To understand their value, this professional must keep their eyes on the goal ahead and the bar behind. Both are moving all the time.
The gap from average performance is unique value. A professional knowledge worker needs to understand this well and capable of being articulated. Self-awareness demands an understanding of both strengths and shortcomings. This self-awareness helps measure the value that is the basis of rewards to knowledge work.
The value and quality of knowledge work can be hard to assess. Price, reputation, networks and confidence all play a role in assessing the quality of knowledge work. Many talented knowledge workers are frustrated that less capable people have higher returns and bigger reputations. Unsurprisingly the difference is usually self-confidence and a willingness to promote. Nobody will believe in your value if you don’t.
Confidence in this value is an important foundation of success because it will influence your ability to argue for the value of your work and promote your achievements. Measure yourself not just against the road ahead but also by the achievement behind.
Reflections on Mastery & MCO
photo credit: Melbourne Chamber Orchestra Photo of Bill Hennessy, Artistic Director
Tonight was the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra’s celebration of a wonderful year. I was honoured to join the event as a board member. 2014 was a year in which the orchestra performed more than the prior two years combined, covered the distance from Melbourne to Mackay in its regional touring program inside the state of Victoria and entertained over 10,000 people with the artistry of their music.
Mastery
Discussing the year with Bill Hennessy, the Artistic Director, and the other artists, I was not surprised that the conversations often turned to a discussion of mastery of one form or another. To choose a career in music is to choose a quest for mastery with the associated joys and frustrations.
This is a group that knows well that mastery is not a designation or a destination, but endless determination. Artists understand that they must practice, rehearse, find more new ways to perform, share their expertise and constantly push themselves to better their art. The Melbourne Chamber Orchestra is only one vehicle in their quest but an important opportunity to perform, to explore the chamber music repertoire and to learn from others.
Mastery & Flow
The most remarkable rewards of this effort are the experience of flow. That moment when a greater challenge matches rising skills and pushes them further forward. The struggles drop away and there is an intensity of focus on performance itself.
Sharing that experience with others, both artists and audience, is a remarkable event. The music generated makes the hair on your neck stand with its artistry, passion, energy and intimacy. An MCO concert or any chamber music concert is an opportunity to see, hear and feel this in action.
Mastery & Community
In pursuit of mastery and a life, Musicians are freelancers in a global economy of talent. Artist there tonight will be performing around Australia and the world before the next MCO performance begins the 2015 season. Their success depends on patrons, networks but above all the ever growing quality of their performances. We are lucky that they choose to base themselves in Melbourne to share their talents with us and to contribute to Melbourne’s rich musical community.
As the world of work changes, there is much we can learn from these artists on the importance of the quest for mastery. Our work is never done. We can get better. We must practice, learn and work. We need greater challenges to perform better. Our work can flow. Most of all we need communities who support us to perform at our best.
To learn more about MCO and its 2015 season, see mco.org.au
We are Us
We are Us.
We lose this simple truth too often. We see groups of people as having inherent characteristics that create forces external to the individuals involved. From time to time, we begin to believe that our companies, groups and organisations make us into something we don’t want to be. These forces in groups are those we choose to accept. Power, history, culture, ideologies, politics, values and the way we do things around here only persist because we are not working to change them.
We are Us.
If we want our organisation to care for us, we need to care for each other. If we want our organisations to be more aware, we must be more self-aware and share what we see. If we want to find the purpose of an organisation, we must start looking at our own purposes and how they are shared with others. If we want an organisation to learn better, faster or more, then we must change our own approaches to learning and work. If we want an organisation to change, it begins with changes in our actions.
We are Us.
If we don’t change our organisations when needed, they will fail. We will no longer be a group that shares a future together. The impacts of that failure will fall not on some abstract organisation but on each the individuals involved.
We are Us.
Every individual has a role to play to help the group change. Every individual has a right to shape the group through their participation. The influences in a group are a sum of individual interactions. There is nobody else to do the work of change.
Leadership in Transformation
A common topic of debate in the Responsive Organization movement is whether an organization can become responsive or it must be born that way.
Undoubtedly many of the leading case studies of future of work organizations are organizations created or rebirthed from near death by charismatic founders. Some use this as evidence that the elements of a responsive organization must be present from the beginning. In a previous post, I pointed out that we cannot rely on transparency alone to make change occur for us. The power structures in a traditional organisation will prevent most radical change.
I am unambiguously in the optimist camp. I am not alone and the company in the optimist camp inspires me. I have seen organizations change enough to not recognise their former selves. Change to more responsive ways of working is possible. The question is how.
What gets in the way
Chris Argyris’ classic article Teaching Smart People to Learn is a rich source of observations of what gets in the way of a Responsive Organization transformation. In particular, Argyris notes that:
… There seems to be a universal human tendency to design one’s actions consistently according to four basic values:
1. To remain in unilateral control;
2. To maximize “winning” and minimize “losing”;
3. To suppress negative feelings; and
4. To be as “rational” as possible—by which people mean defining clear objectives and evaluating their behavior in terms of whether or not they have achieved them.
The purpose of all these values is to avoid embarrassment or threat, feeling vulnerable or incompetent. In this respect, the master program that most people use is profoundly defensive. Defensive reasoning encourages individuals to keep private the premises, inferences, and conclusions that shape their behavior and to avoid testing them in a truly independent, objective fashion.
These hidden values in most organisation get in the way of the transparency-led transformation that many hope to see. The Responsive Organization poses a threat to control, a threat of losing and negative feelings. Importantly the delegation of authority in a Responsive Organization may cause people anxiety as to objectives and rationale for action.
The role of leadership is to act as a counterbalance these natural human values and shift the behaviours to that of a Responsive Organization. We need to create rationales for action more powerful than embarrassment. We need to create community to generate trust, support and connection. We need to enable learning through conflict and experimentation.
Purpose:
Leaders must create a strong rationale for the transformation. In cases of crisis, startup or near death of organizations, this rationale can often be imposed by a charismatic individual. The external circumstances enable a threat based narrative to bind people together in a defensive rationale for change.
However, most organizations are successful to their own terms. As Argyris notes, we want to feel successful even if our results don’t pass external muster.
Leaders need to leverage two elements to create a strong rationale for change in this context:
- The Purpose of the organization: a purpose is the ultimate rationale for why people come together in an endeavour. It defines the common impact the group of people wish to have on the world. As a higher agenda, it is the perfect rationale for change for even the most successful organisations. Purpose is a mastery quest. Very few organizations have the capability to completely fulfil their purpose. They can however strive to better realise it.
- External orientation: No closed system will find a rationale for change. External orientation is where organizations find the challenges and opportunities that define the purpose into specific improvement opportunities. Leaders need to relentlessly focus the organization on its customers and community to see transparently the challenges and opportunities that exist for change. Well defined external impacts in this community will be what can drive the autonomy of teams in the organization. Using customer and community data in line with Purpose, also enables change agents to overcome embarrassment-based resistance in the organization.
Community:
Individuals will need support to take on the risks of a Responsive Organization. The role of leaders is to create the sense of community that will support an individual through that change. At the heart of that community will be engagement with others and a growing sense of mutual trust. Leaders set the tone for any community. They must also work hard to reinforce these key community behaviours
- Engagement: Engagement begins with transparency and connection. I cannot truly care about the others in my community until I know who they are and understand their purposes, concerns and circumstances. Leaders need to create the conditions to enable people to be more social, to connect, to solve and to share their work challenges together.
- Trust: Engagement will build trust as it builds understanding. Transparency will reinforce trust. However, leaders need to take on the role of fostering responsibility and accountability as engines of growing trust in the organization. When people see that individuals and teams are accountable for driving change then they will have greater trust in the change agenda.
Learning:
This post is deliberately not titled like a listicle e.g. ’The 3 or 6 things to transform an organisation’. Even a basic familiarity with change highlights that formulas will work only up to a point. Leadership needs to be adaptive to enable any system to change in a sustainable way.
To be true to their purpose and stakeholders, to leverage the potential of their community, each organization will take an unique path through change. The role of leaders is facilitate the individual and organizational learning required:
- Experimentation: creating a culture of rapid iteration to address challenges and opportunities will accelerate the cycle of learning in the organization. Leaders must help this experimentation culture to overcome the resistance identified by Argyris and also to spread and have a wider influence in the organization. Lessons learned must become new truths which will take a sense-making role for leaders in the wider organization and mean leaders must champion new ways of working when they arise, whatever the personal costs.
- Conflict: The biggest reason that organizational transformations fail is an unwillingness of the leadership of the organisation to allow uncertainty and conflict. Conflict will happen. The uncertainty associated with conflict is inevitable. Efforts to suppress this will either undermine transparency, the rationale for change, engagement or learning. Failure to embrace conflict takes many names: politeness, bureaucracy, politics, corporate speak, history, culture, etc. Failure to embrace conflict is an unwillingness to learn and improve. There will always be resistance when change comes and it must be addressed. Leaders need to create and sustain the right kinds of constructive conflict – driven by purpose, based in facts from an external orientation & experimentation, mediated through an engaged community.
Change is Coming. Lead.
I have seen the potential of purpose, external orientation, engagement, trust experimentation and conflict to drive change. Supported by leadership these are the elements of each organization’s transformation. These elements are critical to a Responsive Organization.
Throughout this post I have referred to leaders and leadership. This need not be hierarchical leadership. Clearly it helps if leadership and power are aligned in an organization in reinforcing the need for change. However, the changes described above are not capable of being implemented by top-down edicts. These changes must come as individuals and groups discover their power and are influenced as a result, This kind of leadership relies on influence and can begin bottom up or even from the middle management so often scorned in organizations.
Change is possible. Change is coming. Smart people can learn. Your people and your organisation can better realise their potential and their purpose. A Responsive Organization transformation will occur if you are prepared to lead the change.
Lead.
Share the delta
Knowledge grows & iterates. Share the changes.
Imagine you could write a blog post that perfectly encapsulates all that you know. You would need to write it again tomorrow. In each day there are learnings and insights that shift your knowledge, experience, skills and perspectives.
We can’t write that one perfect post. There is no point when it is immediately out of date. Besides the short attention spans of blog audiences indicate nobody but your biggest fan would read it.
However, there is another way to share what you know. Share the changes in your knowledge, the delta. Work out loud on how your knowledge grows. Sharing this delta consistently will draw all that you know into the conversation over time. Build a new discipline. This process of sharing will accelerate your learning and iteration. You won’t have one perfect post, but over time you will build a web of interwoven posts.
Share the delta.
Transparency is a Disinfectant
‘Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants’ Louis Brandeis
Transparency is a disinfectant. Openness highlights the need for change. Just as hygiene enables but does not deliver good health, transparency alone will not change the behaviours in an organisation.
From Transparency to Transformation
Many people hoped the transparency of social business would transform organisations. We are now in an era when an organisation is more transparent internally and externally than ever. Networks & conversations reach across organisational boundaries. Opportunities exist to connect, to share information about opportunities and issues and solve problems together.
Many hoped that with this new transparency would mean organisations followed a path that looked something like this:
Transparency > Greater awareness of issues> Experiments towards a Solution > Autonomous leadership
In this model, increasing the transparency and connection across the organisation highlights the problems. The visibility of problems enables individuals to experiment with new models to address the issues. Those experiments foster the evidence and the leadership to complete the transformation.
This model has the appeal that people need do little. Simply add technology to make the organisations more transparent and change begins. However we have learned that organisations are communities of humans and that greater transparency is a positive, but it not enough to catalyse transformation. There are real human forces like power holding us back from this change.
Transparency is a Prerequisite not a Solution
Speak to any change agent and you will hear a common refrain: ‘My organisation can see the problem but it still won’t do anything’.
Transparency is essential to highlight problems & opportunities. Transparency in networks is good at finding new issues that have been hidden by historical ways of seeing things. Customers and community can raise their issues directly, often for the first time. Employees can share frustrations. People can use the new transparent organisation to find those with the ability to make a difference to the issue. What transparency doesn’t do is guarantee that person does anything.
Brandeis is right that transparency is a wonderful disinfectant. Transparency also changes behaviours. When people are aware that their actions are transparent they are more likely to consider others and feel the accountability of the community. The rarity of bad behaviour in enterprise social networks is a case in point.
However, more likely does not mean a guarantee. Transparency will not overcome the wilfully blind leader, the resort to arguments, justifications and excuses or the use of power to enforce an exception. Each of these may be seen by all but they also might be accepted in the culture of the organisation. When organisations have strong cultural or power forces that resist the issues, people may see something but still refuse to acknowledge, to discuss or act on it.
Transformation takes Transparency, Accountability and Leadership
Organisations need transparency. Effective organisations thrive on it and particularly on the most difficult forms of opening their organisation up to external parties like partners, customers and the community. These organisations make accountability to respond to what flows from transparency part of their leadership conversation.
The sunshine of transparency helps create safer and more human organisations. Accountability and leadership leverage that transparency to complete the transformation.
A future post will describe the characteristics of an organisation’s leadership conversation that leverage transparency to foster transformation of organisations.
Give Purpose, Autonomy & Mastery, Not Direction
Last night I came across a reference to A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard, which was once an influential essay describing a model of personal leadership. The essay reflects its origins at the turn of the 19th century, particularly in its description of manager & employee relations. However, a determined & talented employee who displays personal leadership and asks no questions is the goal for many organisations.
The essay contrasts between Rowan’s personal leadership & responses of other hypothetical examples. In describing these examples there is one difference that Elbert Hubbard missed. This missed difference highlights why so many employees might still disappoint when assigned tasks. The difference is the leadership involved in assigning the task.
President McKinley’s request is not the assignment of a mere task. His actions are far more powerful as acts of a leader than Hubbard’s own examples. McKinley allows Rowan to complete the task with purpose, autonomy and mastery:
- McKinley assigns Rowan a whole & heroic task to deliver a message to an uncontactable General in unknown terrain. This is done where the purpose of this task is extremely clear to all involved – his country needs his unique talents to achieve an important goal in a difficult war.
- Rowan is given autonomy. There is no direction on how to achieve the task, because he knows he is best placed to achieve it. There is no request for progress updates and no expectation that Rowan do more than achieve it. Once Rowan accepts the message, the outcome it is his to achieve (or to fail).
- Mastery is inherent in the selection of Rowan. He knows he has been chosen for his talents, his ability to improvise, to perserve and to improve to achieve a purpose beyond the capabilities of others. Rowan asks no questions because he knows it is his mastery that the others need.
Consider in contrast, Elbert Hubbard’s example of asking a clerk to write a memorandum on the life of Correggio. The task is arbitrary and hence purposeless. The only reason it is being done is that the employer asked for it. The lack of purpose also limits the autonomy. The memorandum fits in some plan not shared with the employee, rightly creating an expectation that further instruction or steps will be forthcoming. Unless the clerk is a scholar of Italian Renaissance painters, of writing or of biography, the memorandum is unlikely to match some arena of personal mastery.
Leadership in every role is a key refrain in the future of work. The world cries out for someone who can ‘get a message to Garcia’. More importantly, the world cries out for leaders who knows how to ask in ways that allow purpose, autonomy and mastery.