How can we create new patterns of inter-relating at work?

I have been interested in the furore that has followed Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banning workers from working from home.  I’ve also read that Hubert Joly, the new chief at struggling retailer Best Buy has also just scrapped their Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) for their corporate employees.  Corporate staff who, until now, have been allowed to telecommute, as long as they got their results, will now be required to work at the corporate headquarters, though some managers will still have discretion to accommodate some workers.  Joly’s intention is to shift the culture to one of greater accountability.  A Best Buy spokesman said, “It makes sense to consider not just what the results are but how the work gets done.”

Think about it for a minute.

Like many, the initial assumption I leapt to was that here were those awful authoritarians: new in the job, trying to make their mark, trying desperately to cling to hierarchical power and going about it rather clumsily.  Isn’t the modern thing to show respect to workers and give them autonomy?  As long as they achieve their outputs, we don’t have to regulate their movements, right?  On further reflection and having read about the possible motivation behind the Yahoo ban, I can see it might make some sense.  What if, say, she was looking at Yahoo as a systems thinker and taking action on the system?  What if, say, she wasn’t trying to do the old-fashioned thing of managing the people?  I enjoyed the sub-heading of an article in the Guardian about Mayer’s decision: “Marissa Mayer shows she knows little about managing people with this offensive memo to Yahoo employees.”  Perhaps.  Perhaps she actually knows a lot about managing people and knows that it’s a waste of time.  Perhaps she knows that in order to get greater effectiveness in an organisation, you actually don’t spend your energies on managing the people, but you work on the system.  Maybe, as another Guardian article sets out, she is focussing on what matters for Yahoo at this moment in time and space.

Think about it.

HR consultants and originators of ROWE Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson wrote in an open letter to Mayer, “We don’t think you deliberately meant to send a message to Yahoo employees that you are an Industrial Age dictator that prefers to be a baby sitter versus a 21st century CEO that can lead a company into the future. Or did you?”  Good question.  Again, let’s suspend judgement and consider the shift in policy.  Could be that Mayer is one of those Industrial Age clock-watchers.  Might be that she is looking to make a change to Yahoo’s ecosystem in order to get more creativity and innovation going.

Might be….?

I don’t have any special insights into what Mayer was thinking, but I watch what she is doing and am reminded that in a world still dominated by the command-and-control, someone who is acting like a systems thinker might sometimes look as if they are doing the old thing.  That is because we haven’t enough “systems thinking stuff” going on to know what that actually looks like.  How, for example, would we know if a manager’s tantrum comes out control-freakery or quality-freakery?  Looks like the same tantrum, might use some of the same shouty words, but might actually come from a “we are doing crap work” mindset, not a “you are an idiot and I need to whip you into place” mindset.  I’m also not suggesting that Mayer is some kind of enlightened goddess; she is as flawed as the rest of us and perhaps her way of going about the shift in working practices was a little graceless.  I only want to say, let’s suspend our judgements until we examine a little more closely what might be behind her bold move, and observe if the shift in policy does, indeed, generate greater innovation and collaboration at Yahoo.

Interestingly, in a recent interview, Zappos’ Tony Hsieh said:

“Research has shown that companies with strong cultures outperform those without in the long-term financially. So we’re big, big believers in building strong company cultures. And I think that’s hard to do remotely.

We don’t really telecommute at Zappos. We want employees to be interacting with each other, building those personal relationships and relationships outside of work as well.

What we found is when they have those personal connections that productivity increases because there’s higher levels of trust. Employees are willing to do favours for each others because they’re not just co-workers, but also friends, and communication is better. So we’re big believers in in-person interactions.”

So am I.  I know from experience that I get a real buzz from real-life interactions and that in most cases, I find a lost mojo when I’m doing my thing in the room with someone who’s available to me and we are giving each other our attention.

One of the things to be mindful of is that a one-size-fits-all approach is not the way to go.  Just because whatever it is that works for Zappo’s and Google is good for them, it doesn’t mean that other businesses should necessarily follow suit.  A good systems thinker will become intimately familiar with their system and do what works for that system.  One of the exceptions that Guardian writer takes is that having to work in the office is inconvenient.  She describes how she manages her time and gets her articles written.  All good, I say.  Once again, it’s important to look at the details of what is happening.  In the case of a solo journalist, perhaps it would seem madness to compel her to sit at a desk in an office when she could produce quality journalism sitting at home.  If the job was to co-write an article, however, I wonder if being side-by-side with the co-writer might produce even better quality work than each one working remotely, emailing the work back and forth.  Just an idea.  The point is that we need to know what the work is…..and to consider how best to get it done.

Think about it….

Google’s workplaces are famously enviable, but I would suggest that it’s the smart thing to do to focus on the purpose, not simply on making a “fun place to work”.  How did Google’s offices happen?  Someone designs them.  Someone engineers the physical spaces and what is in them.  To make it a fun place to work?  Well, yes and no.  I would suggest that that someone did not simply design something that is “fun” for fun’s sake.  That kind of workplace is often mocked in the popular press or programmes like The Simpsons as funky and cool, but there is a hint of “…but they probably don’t do much work there”.  I would suggest that some good thought has been given over to the design of the system at Google: the working processes as well as the community that will carry them out.  What does a business like Google require?  Creativity and innovation.  “The philosophy is very simple,” Craig Nevill-Manning, Google’s Manhattan engineering director said. “Google’s success depends on innovation and collaboration. Everything we did was geared toward making it easy to talk.”  In order to get this, what would be the optimal way of engineering these things?  Draw on nature, be conscious that systems are self-organising and thrive on variety, and that, at the same time, they can be nurtured.  The ecosystem within which such fruits could flourish can be designed.  Google started with a philosophy.  They have a purpose and a way of thinking as to how to make that purpose come to life.  They are enviable because they have been designed with the work in mind, not on fun; I believe the “fun” is, in one sense, a by-product.  In any case, as Teresa Amabile, a business administration professor at Harvard Business School says, “I’ve found that people do their most creative work when they’re motivated by the work itself.”

According to John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University, studies show that people who work at home are significantly more productive but less innovative.  He says “If you want innovation, then you need interaction,” he said. “If you want productivity, then you want people working from home.”  That, to me, seems slightly simplistic, but I get the point.  Also, Tony Hsieh seems to find that productivity and working together in a shared workspace are linked, so there you go.  In any case, you don’t simply institute a ROWE because it’s what people want and seems to be one of those lovely perks that makes people happy.  You do something like that if it helps to create the ecosystem that best nurtures the work.  You craft a system that is best designed to meet the purpose of the business.

All of this speaks to me because at the heart of the work I do is sociometry.  The term was coined by Dr. J.L. Moreno and its basic tenet is that “the quality of an outcome is directly related to the quality of relationship between the people trying to achieve that outcome.”  The sociometry, or quality of relationships, within a business, affects the system and the system affects the sociometry.  It’s a reflexive relationship.  Sociometry and systems thinking are intertwined.  I encourage managers to see their role as supportive of those they purport to manage, rather than as controllers.  I encourage them to see their role as ensuring people have the resources, information and relationships they need to get on with their work.  That last bit sometimes challenges managers because as John Seddon describes, we train managers (if at all) to be good people managers.  When I say “ensure people have the relationships they require”, I don’t intend they manage people or try to keep them happy.  Odd, huh?  I intend the kind of picture that Google have: to engineer and nurture a system which facilitates people interacting with each other.  In an older article, I suggested that a good leader is a good sociometrist.  Yes, leaders (people) need to develop their relationship capabilities.  They also need to develop the bigger picture abilities that facilitate productive and purposeful working relationships to flourish all over the place.

Some have misinterpreted sociometry as “developing skills to get on better with people so I can get them to do what I want them to.”  No.  Sociometry is an active exploration of the inter-relationships that exist and an uncovering of what is not seen between people, so that they can, together, create new patterns of behaviour with each other.  The result is that people work better together.  I believe that working on the sociometry is part of working on the system.  One of the insights that came to a client of ours recently, as a result of our work with their sociometry, was that they need to redesign their physical space so that they get more of the interactions that lead to the kind of innovation that sits at the heart of their business.  In their commitments to action, I see a mirror of the kind of community that Google have created.

In the modern economy, where much of the work that we do is knowledge based, relationships and networks are core.  Google’s approach is to engineer serendipity.  I enjoy oxymorons.  Like spontaneity training.  How can you possibly engineer happy accidents?  Well, we can’t make happy accidents happen, but we can nurture the ecosystem within which they are more likely to happen.

Attending to the interpersonal also cannot be underestimated.  Part of this is examining how people relate to each other and what “elephants” might sit in the room between them.  Dealing with these “elephants” is at the heart of sociometry.  People learn about themselves and the dynamic of the groups to which they belong.  They cooperatively learn how to grapple with the complexity and uncertainty of modern business life.  This occurs when a skillful sociometry practitioner assists them to discover what is happening between them and work out new structures of relating.

If creativity and collaboration are core to the business, we can craft workplaces where people are drawn together and interact about the work they are doing.  We can design spaces and ways of working where people are more likely to be stimulated to innovate together.  Maz Iqbal, in a comment on a recent article of mine wrote, “The pragmatist changes the structure of the system so that the desired behaviour is called forth.”  Yes.  He also provided a link to the work of Jeppe Hein, an artist who has created some wacky park benches which he designed to encourage more exchange between users and passers-by, giving them a much more social quality.  As well as engineering the physical environment, we can also “engineer” the interpersonal by attending to the sociometry.  Both of these are conscious systems interventions, both add value and set a business towards achieving its purpose.

Eliminate targets

“Systems thinkers know a number of counter-intuitive truths.”  John Seddon

One of these counter-intuitive truths is that “when you manage costs, your costs go up. When you learn to manage value, your costs come down.”  There is the business case for systems thinking, if one was needed.

Thanks go to David Wilson through his fitforrandomness blog for bringing a presentation by Seddon to my attention.  Makes great watching and listening.  There is so much to learn from this talk on so many levels, but when I was watching the video, I kept making the link to management, leadership and new thinking.  New thinking to me means a new set of assumptions about organisations and how they get things done.

I think Seddon accurately describes quite a lot of what happens in organisations today; doing the wrong things righter.  We have managers who set targets for activity, who then focus people on meeting activity targets.  Managers approach their work as target setters, people inspectors, people managers; when targets aren’t met, the managers try to manage individual performance.  As he says, modern managers are trained (if at all) to do one-to-one, which he calls a therapy model.  I would say he’s not far off the mark.  If we are teaching people to be good people managers, we are training their gaze to the 5%, rather than the 95%.  This is not to say there is no place for more empathy, respect and humanity in the workplace, far from it.  However, in terms of getting things done, in terms of being more effective, treating people well is not the answer on its own.  If the system is still set up for people to meet targets rather than work towards achieving purpose, we may just have a lot of lovely workplaces where people are still meaninglessly ticking boxes and shuffling bits of paper.  If the system is still command-and-control, commanding and controlling with a smile will not make much difference to organisational effectiveness and betterment.  Command-and-control with a smile is like putting a cherry on a turd.  Yes, we still need control in organisations, but not as we have understood it up till now.  Not managers controlling people, but, as Seddon says, people having control over their work.  We need management that focuses on systems, not the people.

Loathe as I am to isolate just three of Deming’s 14 points (because he meant for all 14 to be taken on board together, not as a pick-n-choose menu), when he said:

Eliminate work standards (quotas). Substitute leadership.

Eliminate management by objective. Substitute leadership.

Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

…… I believe he means substitute.  Put something in place of another.  Put leadership in place of targets, quotas and numerical goals, individual performance management, inspection and supervision of people.  I understand it to mean that we stop doing targets, individual performance management and all that other stuff that aims to control what people do.  As Deming also says, management by objective ensures mediocrity and stifles innovation.  There you go, another counter-intuitive truth that Seddon speaks of, and a modern-day heresy.  I think it’s important to really consider what kind of management would actually serve organisations better, and we need to get clearer on what leadership means, too.  I will add that I don’t think it’s making it a semantic exercise, calling managers “leaders” and getting them to keep doing the same old stuff.  The picture I have is that managers start doing management differently AND they start doing leadership as well.

Management

My understanding is that when people like Deming and Seddon advocate for the elimination of targets and performance appraisals, they are not suggesting that we eliminate management.  It can be confusing sometimes because so much is written about management and leadership and, as John Kotter and others have already observed, the two terms are often used interchangeably when they mean different things.  For example, when Deming says in his 14 points, “substitute leadership”, one could easily misinterpret that to mean he is pooh-poohing management.  He is not; he is pooh-poohing management by numbers.  Organisations still require management.  Deming himself said, ”A system must be managed. It will not manage itself.”  In our current paradigm, however, we misconstrue management to mean managing people: getting people to work to targets, inspecting them and chastising them when they miss a target.  Old-style management focuses mostly on the people, Deming’s 5%.  The 95% is the system; I’ve seen managers who manage the system and it’s far more effective at making the work work for everyone.  I see management as the set of tools and processes that people apply in their work that allow them to provide the services or make the products that the market is asking for.  Every organisation will have these tools and processes, but I think the point that Seddon and other systems thinkers try to impress upon people is that, by and large, those tools and approaches to managing are oriented to managing the wrong things.  I see this in my work, too.  So trying to integrate Seddon’s talk and Deming’s work and my own experiences, I would say that we do away with old-style management practice and replace it with the kind of management that works on the system….AND institute leadership.  Management and leadership, different things.  Both necessary.  Complementary.  Both/and, not either/or.

So what would a manager’s work look like if they were doing system-y management things, rather than control-y, target-y management things?  How would someone in a senior management role occupy themselves, then, if they didn’t have all those “HR issues” to deal with?  I feel privileged to say I used to work in a place many years ago, where the senior managers did this system-y stuff, rather than the controlling stuff.  I say privileged because it’s more than just a lovely thought experiment for me, and at the same time, I still need to sit and think about how to approach the work I do.  I want to be careful that I don’t come across to clients that I’m inferring they should drop the “management” ball and focus solely on developing their leadership.

Interestingly, when the two senior managers of my old workplace moved on, they were replaced with people who didn’t get systems thinking.  Even more interestingly, the reputation of this organisation has gone downhill, they are struggling to survive, they are struggling to attract contracts, they are seriously struggling to retain good staff.  The place has turned into a paper-shuffling nightmare with little room for autonomy, innovation or real learning.  People feel stifled and it’s not a nice place to be anymore.  Still….as far as the new managers are concerned, it’s working MUCH better than before; after all, they have everything under control, they have the people under control (…if they only knew) and everything that can be counted is being counted.

So, it’s not about getting rid of management in favour of leadership; organisations need both.  The role of someone in a management position, however, is to provide the kind of support that people need in order to do their jobs well, not to keep tabs on them while they do it.  Taking away targets does not mean living in lovely fluffy, cloud-land. It doesn’t mean, for example, that people stop having fierce conversations with one another.  It’s just that they stop being fierce about which numerical targets people haven’t reached yet and which behaviours they need to stop and, instead, are fierce about quality.  Quality freakery, not control freakery.

If we get managers to take up that system-y support role (making sure everyone has what they need blah blah blah), we can get rid of the target-y stuff.  I like the roundabout/traffic light analogy.  If the traffic people build a roundabout, they are implying, “We trust that drivers have all the information, experience and training they need to make the right decisions about who goes next.”  The role of the traffic mangers, then, is to ensure that the system is built and maintained that promotes good flow and that people have learnt what they need to about responsible driving etiquette.  Their job is not to keep tabs on individual drivers.  Traffic lights, however, infer that drivers don’t need to do anything but what they’re told.  Red means stop, green means go and amber means speed up or else you’ll have to wait for the next green.  They then set up cameras to inspect whether or not people are breaking the rules and if they do, they get a fine in the post.

So management is about making sure people have all the knowledge, information, learning, resources and relationships necessary to get the job done and that the system is designed to make the stuff or provide the services that the market actually wants.  If you haven’t yet, watch that Seddon video to hear some good examples of what shouldn’t be happening and what is starting to happen differently, illustrating how costs come down as the work gets done better for the benefit of the “market”.

Leadership

So what is the leadership stuff?  In my old workplace, the senior managers managed like systems thinkers (working on the system, not on the people) and they also role modelled leadership stuff.  Leadership is often associated with providing a vision.  Once again, the assumption is often that the few people “at the top” will craft that vision and then apply a bunch of management techniques (individual performance management, targets, standards) to get people to do stuff.  I believe there is a disconnect.  Why should the senior managers have the joy of working to achieve a grander purpose while all the workers get to see is their activity targets?  Even if those “at the top” put together a vision, it will not necessarily come to fruition just because we tell people, “This is what you have to do.”  I believe it comes to fruition when everyone in the business is a part of it, when everyone connects with it, when everyone is enlisted into it.  I will do something really well if my will is engaged in it, not just because I have to.  Best way of engaging my will?  Include me in something bigger and bolder than a numerical target.  In any case, if I’m a good boy, I may just try to meet my target and go no further or I may try to find creative ways to play with the numbers so it looks like I’ve met my targets.

To get leadership, I believe we need to emphasise purpose: what are we here to achieve for our “market”?  Depending on the organisation,the market is someone buying our products and services or a social housing tenant who needs repairs done or a patient who needs good treatment.  If targets are set, then, as Seddon suggests, the people work as if their purpose is to meet the targets.  I believe organisations have other, more useful things as their purpose.  I’ve used the example before of grave-diggers.  The activity they engage in is digging and tending graves.  However, I believe they are part of a wider system whose purpose is to assist families through bereavement.  It is not just semantics; it makes a difference to how they carry out their work.  It also makes a difference if they are connected to that purpose because rather than have to be carrotted or sticked to do their jobs well, they can see how they add value to the purpose, how they add value to those they are there to serve.   The purpose, then, is not about meeting targets for how many graves they have to dig or tend.  They already know how to do that well and don’t need beaten to make it happen.  If the managers spend their time working on the system to make sure the grave-diggers have everything they need to do their jobs and the processes are clear, they can let them get on with it, and if there is leadership, everyone will be connected to purpose: making a difference to families in distress.

As Gregory Gull says, leadership must transcend self-interest.  That, to me, seems self-evident.  If someone is “doing leadership”, they are cognisant of those around them and the wider system.  Operating purely out of self-interest is self-defeating in the long run.  Good leadership is about seeing possibility; having the vision of how things could be.  It’s about making a difference to others; having a deeper sense of why everyone really comes to work.  Gull also says that leadership is related to one’s personhood, not one’s position.  I believe the same.  Good leadership development is good personal development.

I agree with John Kotter, that there are very very few organisations that have sufficient leadership.  They may have managers who have re-styled themselves as “leaders” because it’s just what you call yourself these days.  Without a shift in thinking, however, what we end up with a bunch of “leaders” still applying old management tools and looking for the people to blame when things don’t get any better.

Am I adding anything to the wider conversation?  Not sure, but pondering and reflecting on all these things has helped me to get clearer in myself.  As I’ve said before, I primarily write for myself; to help me integrate and seek to be of some use to clients.  I do, however, welcome comments that build on this conversation and which may give me pause for further thought.

Manage the system, not silos

I’ve heard that if you cut a hologram into pieces, each piece contains all the information of the whole.  I’ve never tried it, but I like the idea that each part is a microcosm of the whole thing.

In working with three senior teams in three entirely different sectors over the past month, I’ve heard someone in each of these teams, during the course of the work, utter these words, “We are a microcosm of what is going on in the rest of the business.”  They elaborate, “If we don’t get our house in order, how can we expect the rest of the business to work better together?”  The theme is silos at work and making efforts to work more collaboratively and cooperatively.  In each of these contexts, I shared one of my favourite analogies for silos; it’s as if the organs within my body are fighting each other for primacy.  They are inextricably linked and interdependent, each having their own specialisation and each requiring the other to be at their best, however it’s bizarre to imagine that one organ is more important than the other and that if I had the healthiest heart in the world, the whole of my body would functioning at its optimal level.  In the past, I have heard those who interface directly with customers say to folks who don’t, “If it wasn’t for us doing the real work, you wouldn’t have jobs.”  Imagine my digestive tract saying to my heart, “If I didn’t take in nourishment, you wouldn’t have a job.”  Pshaw.

I believe, from my experience, it’s a shift in consciousness that needs to come to people before they see the connection.  A change in their mindsets.  A whole new perspective.  In many businesses, senior managers grapple with effectiveness and train their gaze on the bits of the business that are dysfunctional, rather than see the whole……rather than see that the health of the parts is directly related to the health of the whole…..rather than see that the health of the whole is directly related to the healthy relatedness between the parts.  When one person makes that statement about microcosms and everyone else stares blankly, I reckon the rest of the senior team has an opportunity to learn how to think bigger if they want to go further.

I don’t believe the case needs to be made for the elimination of silos at work.  I have met nobody who thinks they are a good idea and multitudes who find them ineffective and frustrating.  The question people struggle with is, “How do we get rid of them?”  I think part of that lies with shifting the thinking that got us here in the first place.  To say that silos are ineffective is not to say that specialisation is ineffective.  After all, as we develop into fully-fledged humans in-utero, our cells gradually organise according to their specialisations.  However, our various specialised systems do not, over time, develop ways of functioning in isolation to anything else in our bodies.  They also do not work out ways to operate more optimally at the expense of other parts of the body.  I would not suggest, therefore, that businesses need to throw the specialisation baby out with the silo-ed bath water.  To clarify that last statement, I would not suggest that everyone should learn how to do everything and be generalists who excel at every specialisation.  I’m not suggesting that people’s jobs are determined by simply drawing a role from a hat, regardless of expertise, passion and talent.  Specialisation matters; silos do not.  It simply does not follow that just because we need people with special talents and expertise, the best way to bring these out is to corral them into functionally-aligned departments and fit them with blinkers so they only see their departmental targets.

The important point is to view specialisation through systems thinking eyes, not mechanistic eyes.  If I’m a departmental manager in an organisation where silo-ed thinking dominates, I will do my best to ensure that those who report to me reach the targets I set.  If I see the business this way, I will use the words “my team” to mean the folks I manage.

Silos are not simply how an organisation behaves.  If it was that simple, people would have stopped working in silos long ago and started behaving differently.  They spring out of a mentality, a set of assumptions.  Like everything that goes on, what happens happens because there are some assumptions that underly things.  There’s where the work of getting rid of silos begins.  As I’ve written before, most of these assumptions are unconscious and unquestioned.  In silo-ed organisations, there are some assumptions related to the best way of doing things: work is best organised according to functional specialisation, work is optimised when we have reporting hierarchies that monitor achievement of targets, targets are good.  Time to question these assumptions.

If sales are down, it’s the fault of the sales department.  If the work of the creative team is sub-standard, it’s the fault of the creative team.  If clients are unhappy with the service they are getting, it’s the fault of the account management team.  Perhaps.  Perhaps.  Firstly, though, how about looking at lower sales, poor quality creative work or dissatisfied clients as noise in the wider system.  Then the senior team can work together to work out how to act on the whole system, rather than on individual departments.  Rather than being the responsibility of an individual department, perhaps it’s related to the lack of interconnectedness and flow, which is determined by the business structure.  The structure that comes out of the mindset.

Getting out of a silo-ed mentality is about shifting assumptions and perceptions of how a business’s problems are perceived.  I believe this shift is happening when someone in the senior executive team pipes up and says, “We are a microcosm of the whole business and we have to operate better before the whole business will operate better.”  They are beginning to perceive the work of the senior team as making decisions collectively, rather than arguing their corner from their departmental specialisation….rather than fighting for better resources for their department….rather than pointing fingers at other people’s departments.  They are also beginning to see the senior team as “their team”.

The design of a business is heavily influenced by the mindsets and assumptions we bring to it as to how it works best.  When the mindset is that a business is a machine and the job of management is to control it, it is then reasonable that one would design something that is controllable.  Functionally-based departments with hierarchical reporting lines.  This is why I propose that silos are not simply something that happens despite our desire for it not to; we get silos because our beliefs about how businesses best operate design them into being.

It’s a telling comment when I hear an executive team member talk about “their team” and they mean the folks they manage.  I would suggest that for the members of the executive team, “their team” is their peers.  The other members of the executive team; not the people they manage.  When they hear their staff say “that stuff over there (in that other department) has nothing to do with us”, there is the opportunity to reflect on how that silo-ed attitude might be replicated within their senior team.  If they then take it this next step and make the “microcosm” observation, things have begun to change.  When the executive team gets to this place, the opportunity for re-working the work is there.  ”My team is the rest of you executive team members.  We need to flow better together.  We need to work together to create value.”  Then maybe they can get to: “How do we need to re-organise the system so that it is creating value for our customers, not our managers?”

Drawing on expertise and people’s specialisations, then, can happen when there is a re-organising of the business structure; when people work together, across disciplines.  Because if people’s jobs are to respond to customer demand and not management control (another example of a mindset thingy), then perhaps structuring the work to be more responsive to customers is a better way to go.  Perhaps.  Maybe getting teams to clump together according to what would best serve the customer might be a better way to organise things.  Perhaps.  Maybe getting teams to consist of, say, a creative specialist, an accounts specialist, a production specialist and a sales specialist could be a better way to organise things at work.  Perhaps.  Rather than have all the creatives clumped together, all the accounts folks clumped together and so on.  In silos.

Perhaps.

Do we really need performance management?

Individual performance management is rubbish.  Not only that, it’s patronising and disabling.  I’ve said it before.  When people aren’t performing, it’s extremely probable that it’s not a behavioural problem; it’s the system.  It’s not that performance management as a concept has been sullied because it’s been ineptly carried out.  It’s just that it’s pointless and in some cases counter-productive to actually getting good performance.  Deming’s 95% percent rule.

Sure, some people are not performing well enough.  They aren’t doing their tasks.  They are not meeting targets.  Targets.  That’s another, connected conversation.  Stop looking at the individuals and look at the whole.

There is a mindset that says, “an individual’s performance must be monitored/managed/reviewed”.  What’s a mindset?  I like Bob Marshall’s treatment of this: “a set of ideas, assumptions, beliefs, heuristics, etc. (e.g. memes) which interact to reinforce each other.”   In most cases, we are unconscious of the mindsets out of which we operate and see the world.  We just behave out of them.  So there are a whole set of these (mostly) unconscious things that coalesce in our minds.  It’s a reflexive thing, too.  We have a set of beliefs and assumptions, we then have a bunch of experiences.  We give meaning to these experiences out of the beliefs and assumptions that we bring, which in turn reinforces those assumptions.  An example of a self-preserving, self-reinforcing mindset:

“Why do you keep that rabbit’s foot?”

“Because it keeps the elephants away.”

“But there are no elephants anywhere near here.”

“See?  It works.”

Like Bob, I believe that “attempting to simply swap out selected memes, one for another, on an incremental basis appears infeasible.”  Granted, this also comes out of my own mindset and I could be shooting myself in the foot by saying this.  At the same time, I have come from “individual-performance-management-land” and it was found wanting.  Back in the old days when all this was fields, I also used to assume that someone had to monitor and manage my performance because that’s just what happens in the workplace.  Then I grew up and realised I don’t like being “told off”; it’s demoralising, it’s disrespectful, it’s limiting.  Counter-productive to being productive because it often leads people to withhold any kind of effort beyond what they are instructed to do by the all-knowing, all-seeing bossman (though in one case for me it was a woman).

The “individual performance management” meme was also blown out of the water by experience.  Many years ago, I had first hand experience of “effectiveness-land” and it worked.  By this I mean that the work was far more satisfying for everyone, we were incredibly effective at what we did and we all brought our creativity to the table, making for a culture of genuine continuous improvement.  We knew we were effective, not because our managers told us we were or that we achieved X% of our KPIs.  We knew we were effective because our stakeholders told us so.  They included the clients we worked with directly, the statutory government agencies to whom the agency reported, the media and our peers in other agencies.  And if the quality of our work was substandard, we had good feedback systems in place and were told about it, and because we already had in place a culture of learning, we sought to adjust our working practices….

…..and we talked about our performance all the time.

In recent years, with growing awareness of the need to humanise workplaces, some have advocated for a more humanised performance management process.  This means, in many cases, that managers have been trained to structure performance reviews as more of a mutual conversation than a top-down, Manager-driven assessment of performance against a pre-determined set of targets.  Often, though,the mindset has still not changed.  Forms are filled out, the conversation revolves around targets and KPIs, only the employee is invited to speak first and evaluate themselves against the same old criteria.  The assumption that monitoring individual performance is essential still underlies what goes on, it’s just done in a friendlier way.  I’ve used the expression before: you can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.

You don’t get a flower to grow by pulling on it.  You create the conditions within which it will flourish and do what comes naturally to it.  If we hold to a Theory X mindset, then we will be oriented towards a carrot and stick approach to getting better performance.  If we hold to a Theory Y mindset, then we will be oriented to crafting a structure within which people will flourish and do well.  I read a very short but very delightful article this week by systemthinkingforgirls entitled, “The only question a manager should ask in an appraisal.”  That question is, “What stops you from doing a good job?”  Behind this question sits the mindset that it is the system which stops people from doing well at work, not their individual skills, knowledge and attitudes.  Performance appraisals as we currently understand them focus on people’s individual stuff.  Tarting them up so that they aren’t as scary or rejigging them so they are “two-way conversations” still doesn’t address the underlying assumption that they are useful.

This notwithstanding, I am not suggesting that managers suddenly stop talking to anyone about anything they do at work.  I’m also not suggesting that people just stop having conversations about performance.  I’m suggesting that conversations that presume managing and monitoring an individual’s performance is essential will not necessarily lead to effectiveness or a high-performing organisation.  It’s specious logic to say that we’ve always done it, look at that business there, they do it and they are successful, therefore….  That’s Monty Python logic:  we’ll throw her in the pond and if she floats, she must be made of wood and therefore, a witch.

Perhaps a more useful performance conversation is done with a view to offer coaching and support or to detect noise in the wider system.  ”What stops you from doing a good job?”  Lack of knowledge or technical expertise?  Poor relationships with peers?  Inadequate or impenetrable policies and procedures?  Outdated or insufficient information?  Poor resourcing?  Lack of experience in the organisation?  Breakdowns in communication between different parts of the organisation?  All of these questions point to the clues as to where we would find the barriers to high performance, and it’s more than likely it’s not an individual’s inadequacies.  Deming’s 95% rule.

By poo-pooing individual performance management, is the inference that I’m anti-performance, anti-effectiveness, pro-lovey-dovey-nicey-nicey?  You might as well say I’m pro-crime because I think our current criminal justice system is broken.  I realise it’s heresy to suggest that managing individual performance is useless.  To reference Bob again, he wrote a great list of invalid premises that businesses would do well to jettison, one of which is that an individual’s productivity and performance is down to the individual.  Related, yes, for if you have someone in a job who doesn’t have the technical skills necessary to carry it out, they are likely to do poorly.  ”Related”, but not “down to”.  If the system is screwy, it will be hard for any individual to excel.

A bad system will beat a good person….every time.  Deming

Let’s get good performance, yes.  Let’s also look at how we get it and examine the assumptions we make about how it happens.  Are we doing the wrong thing righter?  Or are we establishing the fertile ground from which high performance will spring?  Let’s have performance conversations, yes.  Let’s look for the systemic causes of poor performance in the organisation.  Let’s talk about the organisation’s performance, not that of individuals.

What do we do if individual performance management is abolished?

What would we find in a high-performing organisation, then?  A 2007 AMA study, “How to Build a High-Performance Organisation”, sets out five domains they observed in their survey of businesses that excel.  It acknowledges that external factors impact on performance and looks at what they do to navigate an environment which is volatile, uncertain, ambiguous and complex.  The five drivers that most heavily influence performance are:

• Strategic approach: clear vision supported by flexible plans
• Customer approach: clear focus on engaging and maintaining good customer relationships
• Leadership approach: clear goal-setting, coaching and mentoring when necessary and appropriate, ensuring people have a clear line of sight that that vision stuff
• Processes and structure:  ”good enough” policies and procedures that facilitate the work, not create busy work that takes people away from their real work.  Structure that eases information flow and good relationships across businesses
• Values and beliefs:  easily understood set of values that are lived by everyone, not laminated

If we default to old mindsets, some might read in there that we still need to manage individual performance, otherwise, how would we achieve that stuff?  I believe it’s more about creating the conditions within which let people do well.  If we could substitute leadership for performance management, perhaps we would get there.  If those who lead the business did some reflection and committed themselves to adopting Theory Y as their touchstone, perhaps energy would be spent on making sure people had all they need to do their jobs well and then getting out of their way.

I am the Walrus

Know how you have an experience and some song lyrics pop into your head that seem to have been written especially for it?  ”Expert textpert, choking smoker, don’t you think the joker laughs at you?”  Parallel process.  Happens to me all the time when I’m working.  I suddenly notice that what the client is doing, what they act out, is exactly what I’m being drawn into and I respond out of a parallel mindset.  I might have thought of “..caught in a trap…I can’t walk out…” but I’m not an Elvis fan.  And I’m working with a business that is stuck because of a highly dependent culture.  The creativity of the people is not being unleashed as it could be.  And how do they relate to me?  As the expert: dependent for the “expert advice”.  And what do I do?  Show off some daft diagram like some kind of expert.

I’ve been stuck on the phenomenon of inertia lately (no pun intended).  Fascinated as I am by physics, I have been noticing this phenomenon in the area of how people operate both individually and in teams.  Not wanting to teach anyone to suck eggs, inertia states simply that any object that is stationary will remain so unless acted upon by another force and any object that is in motion will remain so unless acted upon by another force.  What I see in many situations is people and organisations bound by inertia.  Without wanting to place a value judgement on inertia per se, in many of these cases, there is a “stuckness” which is unsatisfying for the person or business concerned and something new is needed to get them out of their rut.

In our work, we apply the concept of a “conserve”.  Jakob Moreno set out a cycle of spontaneity, creativity and cultural conserve.  Spontaneity  sparks creativity which leads to the creation of a conserve.  Conserves abound in our world.  Handel’s Messiah.  The Mona Lisa.  Gangnam Style.  Bugs Bunny.  Antiseptic.  The internet.  Artefacts and menefacts that come about as a result of a creative act, spurred on by the spontaneity state that arises in us when we warm up to it.  This new thing becomes the conserve off of which the next creative act springboards into life, so, for example, Web 1.0 was the jumping-off place for Web 2.0, the iPhone 3 begat 3GS which begat 4 which begat the 5.  As long as the conserve is viewed as the starting place for the next thing, it’s all good, but if the conserve becomes too conserved, it can become a rut.  Artefacts and mentefacts.  Mindsets are just as much a conserve as any creative act.

As I’ve written earlier, I’m on a health kick this year.  Moreno believed that one key to health was creativity.  When I think about how living systems tend towards entropy, this makes sense to me.  If organisations are to counteract the “heat-death of the universe” (thanks to @thinkingpurpose for that expression), they need to add more stuff into the system.  Businesses, like each of us individually, can get stuck in ruts, subject to inertia.  If we don’t inject something new into our systems, we carry on as we have been.  Creativity is a superb way to bring in new stuff.  The Morenian method sets out to challenge people to be more creative by developing greater spontaneity, which is the spark that sets creativity alight.  Furthermore, the method calls on people to work together to develop new role responses to life’s challenges, rather than remain in isolation and continue to operate out of a limited repertoire of responses.

I mentioned four synchronous conversations with four different clients in a recent article.  Synchronous because all four identified some things that they are sick and tired of and ready to shift.  One of these things they are trying to grow is a greater sense of WE and, hand in hand with that is a move away from their cultures of dependency.  The two are inextricably linked for these four businesses.  If we get greater WE and we act out of mutuality and interdependency, rather than silos and dependency, we can unleash something new and mitigate for the inexorable slide towards extinction and ultimate disorder.  We need both: WE-ness and mutuality.

What’s wrong with a culture of dependency?  From the perspective of those who lead these businesses, this is manifest by the guys at the top saying to me, “If I didn’t look over their shoulder/do it/nag, it wouldn’t get done.”  They don’t like this.  They relate to me their concern that people aren’t bringing all of their creativity to work.  For these businesses, a culture of dependency means that people don’t take initiative.   It means that the managers have to cajole, berate or get grumpy.  It means that people take up little responsibility, let alone accountability, for in their cultures of dependency, accountability lies with the bosses.  In other words, they are left with a mentefact of Industrial Age organisation. “The boss has the answers, the boss knows best, if something went wrong, it wasn’t my fault, it was the boss’s fault .”  Blaming and excuse-making reigns in a dependency culture.  ”You didn’t get me the right tools.”  ”You didn’t tell me the right way to do it.”  ”If you’d given me the afternoon off yesterday, I wouldn’t be so tired today.”

To head towards the responsibility-taking, initiative-taking culture of WE, something needs to work on their inertia which keeps them in cultures of dependency.  Looking at structure and relationships would help.  I’m pondering next steps with one client who, when I simply showed this diagram:

…took up a defensive position, seeming to lecture me on how important structure was, otherwise there would be disorder (failing to see that both pictures illustrate a structure, just that the one on the right was weird and alien).  With regards this particular organisation, one thought that popped into mind was, “..and disorder would be a BAD thing??”  The second thought that popped into mind was, “…and explain to me how you would class the way things run around here as ‘order’”.  When I stopped thinking facetious thoughts, I took a step back and noticed that the response was exactly what the hierarchical system in which they exist would expect them to say.  I had a little flash to that awful, car crash of a reality programme, “The Hotel Inspector”.  Some poor unfortunate hotelier, whose business is going down the gurgler, calls in an expert, someone who has years of top hotel experience, to help them turn their business around.  The expert comes in, berates the unfortunate for doing it all wrong, gives them advice on what they need to do instead and goes away for a few weeks to see if they put it into practice.  As I watch, I’m on the side of the expert, purely because for dramatic tension (presumably because TV producers can no longer afford to pay proper dramatic writers and actors for decent TV any more), they choose a hotelier who is utterly hopeless.  For added tension, the besieged hotelier proceeds to argue with the expert.  So I wonder, “Why on Earth did you ask for expert advice if you just wanted to rebut everything they said??  Why on Earth did you invite them in to your establishment if all you wanted to do was justify why you were right and they were wrong??”

See what I’m getting at?  A business calls you in to be the “outside eye” and make some observations about their organisation and its culture and when you make an observation (an observation, mind, not advice), they are stuck in the mindset that defines their current culture (inertia again) to explain why anything outside their normal ken is just fantastical.  There are ways and ways to introduce that “something new” into the system, however.

Now, I’ve made mention in previous articles that I write to help me digest and reflect on experiences I have in my work.  My thinking is already a little clearer than it was when I started writing this one, and if even one reader is still with me, thank you immensely for bearing with my narcissistic reflections.  The way forward with this client is to take a much more softly, softly approach.  They are 2D creatures and can’t make sense of this 3D blob that’s appeared before them.  There is a process of slowly uncovering what they don’t yet see about themselves.  This follows on very nicely (I love synchronicity) from Dan Oestreich’s comments on my previous article: “Genuine learning implies… birthing new consciousness; looking and really seeing…and therein lies a problem….as raw conscious awareness can be painful.”  And what do we human animals do when we are in pain?  We fight, we flee or we freeze.  The CEO who took such exception to my simple diagram (even though I’d indicated no preference, harboured no advice, pointed out no likeness) saw himself and his organisation in the mirror.  And it hurt.

Silly me.

His response was a perfect response from someone at the head of a culture infused with dependency.  Defer or defy.  That’s what you do with an authority figure.  Either defer utterly to authority or defend yourself from the authority’s complete idiocy.  In this instance, I was the “authority” in his eyes.  Someone from outside with some so-called expertise.  Dependency:  I’ll wait for the leader to tell me what to do, even though I’m a free-thinking, intelligent human animal who manages to run all other aspects of my life without referring to someone else for permission.  OR  If it goes pear-shaped, it’s because the leader didn’t tell me how to do it, didn’t tell me how to do it properly, didn’t tell me to stop doing what I was already doing.

So I am sitting with this phrase rolling around my head, “Sociatrist, heal thyself.”  I care deeply about this particular organisation, they do some amazing, truly life-changing work in their world.  I like the CEO immensely, I have known him for over 15 years.  If I am to be of any assistance, I need to role reverse much better with him and the others in his senior team.  I need to notice my response to his response and observe the parallel process at play.  You know the old adages, “You teach best what you most need to learn,” “Your work is your work”, etc etc.  In my first facetious thoughts, I am tuning into the dependency in the air and doing what those awful Hotel Inspectors do.  If I really care about making a difference, I need to come alongside my client in a way which assists them to gently see themselves better and warms up THEIR spontaneity to a new creative act.  If I didn’t care about this client, I could continue to bully them into seeing things they aren’t yet ready to see.  I see a dependency culture.  If I am to be with them as they shift it, I need to become more aware of myself and what my role is in that.  Do I relate to them as some kind of expert?  Maybe I did when I flashed that diagram.  In their eyes, it might have looked like that.  That’s not what a organisation caught in the inertia of dependency needs.

So, I am left to ponder my own warm up, how to I warm up my own spontaneity to my own creativity and meet them quite differently next time.  Having said what I’ve said, I do believe that cultures of dependency in organisations are not healthy.  I will continue my work with this client for as long as I can.  But I need to be more cognisant of myself and how I approach them so I don’t trigger a dependency response in them.  It is so easy to fall into the trap of being the expert, exacerbated by a business that is bound by its own inertia and can’t see another way yet.

…..and do you know what the team asked me at the end of this session?  ”So, are there some things about us you need to tell us?”  Not going to fall into that.  I want to companion them, to assist them to observe themselves and not to do the dependent thing.  They are highly talented and creative individuals.  With a little nudging, they can shift to a place where they make observations of themselves.  So easy to give in to the invitation to be “the expert”.  It’s not what the world needs now.

A Matter of Life and Death

from “The Ruins of Detroit” by Marchand and Meffre

Why would the whole of the Universe be a complex, self-organising and interdependent system, and a business be a top-down, controlled machine?  Why would the entire Universe be subject to the laws of Nature, and business, not?  It’s almost as some businesses they think they exist in some bubble, where the laws of nature are turned away by some bouncer: “You can’t come in here with that gravity.  Second Law of Thermodynamics?  Not in here, sunny Jim.”

My favourite programmes on telly are the ones about the universe and how it came to be.  One I was watching recently had a theme of complexity and order: how order arose out of the chaos of the Big Bang and formed some of the most beautiful sights in our solar system, such as Saturn’s rings.  The narrator kept describing the wonders of the solar system as complex and marvelled at how it organised itself over many billions of years, subject to the forces of nature.  As I watched, I was making connections to life here on Earth.  The point he made in the final minutes of the programme was that we are part of the same complex and wonderful solar system and subject to its same laws.   I made the link to organisations, to one client in particular and to one particular phenomenon of systems (you can’t tell a systems thinker to stop being a systems thinker in their free time, sorry).  I had a moment of thinking how many who “run” businesses think they are immune from laws of nature, or certainly behave like they do, acting out of old myths like some kind of Flat-Earther.

Complexity, ambiguity, dynamic change and uncertainty are not the new normal; they have been around since the Big Bang.  They are part of the fabric of the universe.  We have just been (unconsciously) shielding ourselves from the forces of nature by pretending we weren’t a part of it.  From the days of lords and serfs to the time we set out on the “scientific management” path, we have applied top-down control mechanisms on people to get them to work, like so many bits of a wind-up clock.  Many are finally acknowledging that complexity, ambiguity and so on are part of the fabric of organisational life.  Accordingly, we must adjust our ways of doing business to take account of these phenomena of Nature.

Just as, 1000 years ago, we “KNEW” that the Sun went around the Earth, just as we “KNEW” the Earth was flat, just as we “KNEW” that trepanation was a good cure for headaches , many organisations seem to “KNOW” that top-down command-and-control mechanistic structures, with a select few pulling the levers, are the best ways to run things.  I believe that if we don’t “unknow” some of the nonsense we still unconsciously adhere to, the forces of Nature will present us with some unpleasant surprises.  Even if we continue to “KNOW” that our business is a machine, it does not make it any less true that it is a living system, and thus subject to the laws of living systems.

Entropy

A client who I described in a previous article was reflecting on 2012 recently and observed that they had made some progress in their business over the year.  By progress, he meant that

• people were beginning to take up more responsibility and initiative without having to wait for the boss to tell them what to do
• there was more discussion amongst the staff as to how to manage some of the day-to-day challenges they meet and less referring to the boss for the “answer”
• mistakes were being used as entry points to examining business processes and working out how they could be improved
• they had a clearer idea of their collective purpose and how important relationship is to achieving that purpose
• the leaders were devoting more of their time to ensuring the conditions and structures of the business were optimised so that people could get on with their jobs (and less time micro-managing operational tasks).

Thrilling stuff.  He also reflected on how shifting the focus away from “behavioural problems” as isolated events and onto the business as a whole living system seemed to have injected some new life (his words, not mine) into the business: that they were actually going somewhere.  Here was an example of the practical benefits of applying systems thinking to overcoming business “stuckness”.  They started the year stagnating, with things getting worse, they injected some new learning into the system, they are now moving to another level of effectiveness.

Here’s the link to that TV programme and this client’s business: entropy.  As a living system, my client’s business is subject to the same laws that pertain to the rest of the universe.  One of these is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a corollary of which is entropy.  Entropy, crudely speaking, is the tendency towards death.  Social entropy, which applies to organisations, is a ”measure of the natural decay of the structure or of the disappearance of distinctions within a social system.”  (Krippendorff)  As the whole of the universe tends towards randomness, or death, so do all the elements within it.  This is not to take a fatalistic approach and say “Why bother doing anything, then?”  There are forces that also act to retard entropy. Like with other living systems, some energy needs to go into the pot in order to counteract it.  My cup of hot tea will naturally cool down as heat is transferred away from it, but I can re-heat it by applying energy in the from of a microwave oven.

What does entropy look like in the business world?

Kodak.

How do we counteract entropy?

If a business is succumbing to natural entropy and feels like it’s losing track or going nowhere, how can we reheat it?  Let’s look to Nature.  How do other living systems in Nature counteract entropy?  They bring in more stuff.  Living systems find loopholes to counteract entropy.  In the context of the natural world, this shows itself as adaptation.  In the context of business, this means learning.  Closed systems that spend their energy simply on maintaining themselves in survival mode eventually spend themselves out.  If a business is spending too much of its time on hunting for food, and not enough on learning new ways to hunt for food, it will succumb to entropy.  Vibrant and open living systems naturally tend to greater complexity, experiment often, are driven to what is possible and seek new opportunities which destabilise them until they restablise in a renewed way.  They look for more stuff to put into the system to renew it.

 “Systems thinking is a response to the failure of mechanistic thinking in the attempt to explain social and biological phenomena.”  Lars Skyttner

Purpose, not anatomy

If something is not working, look at the bigger picture: purpose, relationships and interconnectedness of the elements.  Because entropy (a phenomenon of living systems) is affecting the business, taking a systems thinking approach will be the path to finding its counter-measures.  Merely looking at the anatomy of a business is not going to help us solve 21st century problems.  As Skytnner writes, the emergence of a holistic approach came about in an effort to provide us “an outlook to see better, a network to understand better and a platform to act better.”  This is something that is dear to my heart.  Systems thinking gives us a real-life, practical way to actually craft the way we do things better and more effectively, not simply some intellectual exercise that sounds lovely.

Systems thinking is not a prescription or method, it’s more of a perspective or way of approaching problems.  Systems thinking can help us to look for patterns within businesses, to see fundamental structures and their impact on the elements (the people, the departments, the sub-groups) within the business as well as on the relationships between those elements.

When living systems, such as a business, get to a certain point, they begin to entropy.  Unless something new is added to the system, it will tend towards death.  If we continue to apply the same-old, same-old solutions to address this problem, we are not bringing anything new into the system.  ”Something new” requires learning.  Learn what is working well.  Learn what is not working well.  Learn where the connections are within the business.  Learn where the disconnects are.  Learn from the customer.

A business will not have sustainable life unless it is infused with energy from outside itself.  For a business to operate as a closed system, starving itself of innovation and creativity of its own people or ignorant of its customers and environment, entropy takes over.  It will tend towards death.  A “she’ll be right”, “it’ll sort itself out” attitude will lead to greater mess, greater randomness, and without new energy in the system to help deal with the mess, it will die away.  Things do not sort themselves out.  If I don’t maintain my house, it’ll eventually crumble over time.  This is a real example of how the Second Law of Thermodynamics affects us.  A hot cup of coffee will tend, over time, to lose heat.  A living system starved of nourishment will eventually cease to exist.  A business led by managers who see their role as nothing more than “competent supervision” will tend towards disintegration and eventually have a “Kodak moment” (not the picturesque kind).  To be successful, a business must adapt to its ever-changing environment and to its own ever-changing internal dynamics that emerge out of the interactions between all the elements within in.  A successful business must gain nourishment from outside its steady state: from innovation and creativity, from market information, from ongoing learning.  When a business applies systems thinking, it can find new ways to renew itself.

Businesses that will do well in this networked age will overcome the natural phenomenon of entropy by becoming open to what could be and taking steps to do something different.  They will learn to think bigger.  They will see learning and renewal of their business processes as part of their new culture of continuous improvement.  They will see the business as a living system and not a machine.  They will see mistakes as opportunities for learning and renewal, rather than through the old lens as a “disciplinary issue”.

When Harold Jarche says work is learning and learning is the work, I think he’s suggesting that for a business to thrive, it must place learning at the heart of everything it does.  Purposeful learning.  Learning that is not “training” as we have visioned it up till now.  Any training that is disconnected from the people is not sufficient.  Learning that is not about the work is not sufficient.  Real 21st century learning must change how we think, behave and interact with each other, as well as what we know.  It must be relevant to purpose, activity and relationships.  Not just one of those: all three.  A business, which is a living system, requires relevant learning in order to subvert that thing which happens to all living systems: entropy.

How do we get to WE?

There is something in the air.  Call it my natural human tendency to find patterns in things, but two recent conversations with two different clients in two different cities have reminded me of two other completely different clients in two completely different countries.  The parallels are striking.  It could be my bias towards systems thinking, but it has reinforced my belief in unus mundus, the underlying unified reality that interconnects all things.

What is the common thread?  All four of these businesses are sick and tired of being sick.  And tired.  Like, really tired.  All four are nearing their “breaking point.”  That is, they have tried just about everything they know to shift workplace behaviour and engagement.  They are running out of options as to how to get people to take up personal responsibility.  All four of these clients are right at the threshold of making significant shifts in how they do their business.  The scales are falling from their eyes and they are seeing their businesses as whole entities and not viewing symptoms of ineffectiveness as separate from the whole or problems to be solved piecemeal.  They are ready to get to grips with new ways of dealing with their problems.  The clever onion behind the thinkpurpose blog writes, “When you change what you think about how the work works, then you will begin to change how you act, this will change the way work is set out and happens and how people act in the work place.”  These four businesses are right at the place of changing how they think about what works.

Essential to seeing their business as whole entities is being able to see the webs that weave everyone together.  Frustrated with old ways of trying to get people to do things, they are beginning to acknowledge that simply dealing with individual performance is futile.  They understand that the system impacts too much on individual performance to waste their efforts solely on individuals.  They know that the quality of their outcome will be directly correlated to the quality of relationships that they forge.  As David Wilson writes in his blog, fitforrandomness ”Imagine assessing the robustness of the electricity grid with data on power stations but not on the power lines connecting them.”  In order to assess the strength and fitness of an organisation, we need to examine both the individual elements that make up that systems as well as the relationships between them.  To work with only the individuals within a business without also working on their connections is a nonsense.  It’s both a delicate and a heroic undertaking.

What’s wrong with what they’ve got now?  Not much, it turns out.  They have a lot going for them.  They have senior teams with an enormous amount of experience and technical ability.  They are personable and friendly.  They believe in the purpose of their businesses.  They are robust and intelligent.  Put the senior team in a room together, however, and they aren’t sure how to work truly collectively.  Put oxygen and hydrogen in a bucket together and they don’t miraculously coalesce and become water.  Some energy needs to go into the bucket to create H2O.

I’ve written before on the power of WE in business.  Bringing in the theme of my last article about developing consciousness, there is something that can catalyse this WE-ness for business.  Many aspire to it, but we often get stuck when it comes to actually doing it.  How do we become a WE?  It’s not enough to go away and make commitments to each other.  Just like a marriage, it’s not just what happens on the wedding day when you promise some things to each other that makes it a good marriage.  The good marriage comes about through a shift in consciousness from “you and me” to WE.  A good partnership comes about because each party understands that what you want as an individual and what I want as an individual may not necessarily deepen nor be for the good of our relationship.  A good, mutual partnership comes about because effort and energy have been invested in strengthening that web that weaves us together.

A shift in consciousness is required.  That is, greater awareness of what we are currently doing in order to move towards the thing we want to be doing.  Is how you relate, behave and engage with one another assisting you to create the WE?  In working with one senior team, we coached them to become observant of themselves in order to create this new consciousness.  This requires them to develop the role of Observant Team-Player.  For many of us, we operate out of a “selfish” mindset.  In other words, we look at what we do and how we do it with a view to doing our best.  We sometimes lose sight of the fact that others are trying to do the same, and sometimes this means that we might be working at cross purposes.  I’m doing my best, you’re doing your best, but in our “doing-my-best-ness”, we haven’t worked out how to synthesise this into a “WE are doing our best”.  In common parlance, this is operating in silos.

Here’s what it might look like.  In our regular team meeting, I contribute to conversations on the agenda, but I do this while wearing one of two hats: my personal hat or my operational hat.  I am both trying to be a good person and trying to optimise the work, but from MY perspective.  Wearing my personal hat, I am saying (unconsciously, of course):

• “How do I make myself look good?”
• “How can I get people to notice me?”
• “How can I garner praise?”
• “How can I get people to like me?”
• “How can I prove I’m valuable?”

All human things, these.

Wearing my operational hat, I contribute things which demonstrate my technical abilities and knowledge.  If I’m a financial guy, I will speak on any of the agenda items from a financial perspective.  If I’m a marketing guy, I will speak about things from a marketing perspective.  All necessary and important.  I may contribute little or nothing to conversations that I believe have “nothing to do with me”.  Doing this, however, may not develop the sense of “team-ness” that we all need to synthesise together if we are to achieve our common purpose.  If I keep speaking from my operational perspective, I may be reasonably successful in achieving the operational purpose of my silo.  Remember, though, that optimising one part of the system will lead to sub-optimisation of the whole, so if I do MY very best and if everyone is doing THEIR very best in their silos, it doesn’t follow that the whole will be doing its very best.

There is something missing.

If I participate in the meeting wearing only my personal or operational hats, I miss the opportunity to develop the life of the whole team.  I need to put on my team member hat.  When I wear this, I become conscious of myself, I become conscious of when I have an impulse to speak and what I feel moved to say, I observe others’ contributions and I make an assessment as to whether what is going on is furthering the life of the group.  Is what I say coming from a “Me” perspective, a “Me-doing-my-work-well” perspective or a “WE” perspective?  When each member of a team has developed the ability to observe the dynamics of the team, they will learn how to interrupt someone who is “fighting their corner” if they are doing it to the detriment of the effectiveness of the whole.  If they feel that someone is warming up to speak out of their silo, they will challenge people to stop and consider what they are about to contribute: “Is what you are about to say going to progress the life of this team as a whole?”

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

If I’m operating with my WE hat on, I will see that all of the agenda items pertain to me in some way, because they pertain to the effectiveness of the whole business.  Furthermore, if I can’t work out how it pertains to me, there is an opportunity to find out how it does.  Because it does.  Trust me.  If I’m wearing my WE hat, I will see that my technical expertise is best applied when in concert with everyone else’s and vice versa.  Having said all this, I bring all my hats to meetings, I can’t simply focus my efforts on developing a good team feeling.  The expanded consciousness that gets us to WE incorporates and transcends everything we already know and do.

For one of these businesses, who is more than ready and willing to do this “WE” thing, they have an idea of what they want to become, but don’t know how to do it consistently.  This is not unusual, in my experience.  They haven’t yet had enough moments of “felt experience” to be able to say they’ve got there, but what they have tasted so far makes the effort worthwhile.  While a lot of businesses have talked about teamwork and the team effect for years, the investment required in order to really achieve it has been patchy.  Investment in catalysing this team effect is like energy is to the hydrogen and oxygen in the bucket.  Sometimes, it seems that we find ourselves in fantastic teams and it feels great, but I would suggest this is sometimes down to good luck.  We spot each other, we have each other’s back.  Relationships are genuinely mutual and go beyond “what can you do for me and what can I do for you.”  Such teams go beyond collaboration.  They cooperate.  No quid pro quo.  We have a consciousness of operating out of a mindset that furthers the life of the whole.  Just as an architect may sacrifice the optimisation of one room of a house in order to achieve a more satisfying whole, we may quite easily sacrifice something that is of special interest to us for the benefit of the whole.  When we are operating as a WE, we have stopped thinking about people as bodies to do transactions or deals with, we enjoy being with each other and we achieve more as individuals because of the chemistry that is created by the whole.

Getting to WE is not an event, it’s a process.  It doesn’t happen in a moment, it happens over many moments.  It’s not “step 1, step 2…”  Like other mindfulness disciplines, it takes practice, attention and commitment.  I find it heartening that it’s finally in the air and that some businesses are taking the steps to get there.