What is systems thinking? (Part II)

Part II (Thinking Bigger)

I reckon that we cannot truly appreciate Georges Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte” by examining the individual dots he used to compose this masterpiece.  It is not the sum of all its dots; it is the poetic relationships between them all that bring the scene to life.

In Part I of this article, I referred to worldviews: the beliefs and assumptions that shape us and our world.  We can consider a worldview, or paradigm, to be a kind of intellectual bubble within which we live.  When I said that systems thinking as a worldview is entirely different from analytical thinking, I did that for a reason.  Any new paradigm, or worldview, will include and transcend some elements of the old.  Some of the what was inside the old bubble will also sit within the new one, but there is still an essential “un-same-ness” between the old bubble and the new bubble.  If we are systems thinkers, we don’t lose the ability (or valuing of) analytical thinking; we are, however, extending ourselves in our abilities to apply both when applicable.  There may be something of a butterfly’s “essential being” that existed when it was a caterpillar, but I think we’d all agree that “caterpillar” and “butterfly” are two entirely different things.  ”Butterfly” is not merely “Caterpillar 2.0″; it is “butterfly”, incorporating some elements of, and transcending “caterpillar”, if you like.

With enough pressure of new knowledge, research, evidence and lived experience, our old paradigms reach the limits of usefulness and we are pushed to transcend our ways of thinking and being.  So while analytical thinking and systems thinking are entirely different worldviews, there are, of course, elements of analytical thinking that we can see in the systems thinking bubble.  In an effort to emphasise the point that systems thinking is not just a jazzier version of analytical thinking, I may have been a little simplistic in saying they are entirely different animals, but that’s the curious thing about mindsets.  To my mind, it’s not about choosing which one we prefer, it’s about evolution.  We are here to continually extend ourselves and once we “get” how everything in the cosmos is inextricably linked, we cannot unknow that.  When we really feel that in every cell of our beings, our worlds irretrievably change.  It’s like Neo in “The Matrix”; he realised he was “The One” once he saw what those green squiggles running down the computer screen meant, he couldn’t go on pretending that it was just a bunch of nonsensical squiggles.  They were still squiggles; that hadn’t changed…..but their meaning had changed.  After his set of beliefs had changed, he had transformed.

So systems thinking, for those who haven’t had their “Neo moment” yet, may look and sound like analytical thinking 2.0 (but it’s not, I tell you!).  For those who have had their “Neo moment”, it’s a way of seeing the world that includes and transcends analytical thinking to take us to a more sophisticated kind of thinking, because linear, analytical thinking is not sophisticated enough to help us to deal with the challenges that face us in the 21st century.  It’s time to stop looking at the world and our workplaces from an old mindset.

So why does this matter?

My own view is that growing our ability to be systems thinkers is an imperative: for individuals, for businesses and organisations, for humanity.  It is a question of whether we will survive and thrive or atrophy and die away.  It might be tempting, while we languish in our prison of “analytic thinking”, to remodel the prison in an effort to make it more comfortable, but it will still be a prison.  Our world is in crisis and our workplaces are in crisis and we urgently need to think bigger about how we address these crises because our old ways of looking at things have reached their useful limits.

Simply put, looking at something from an analytical viewpoint, we take it apart in order to understand it (the parts are primary, the whole is secondary).  However, when we take an interconnected system apart, it loses its fundamental properties.  I like a description Russell Ackoff has used: a car’s essential property is to get us from A to B.  We won’t be able to understand how it does that by taking it apart.  A car is not the sum of its parts; it is the product of the interactions of the parts.  Systems thinking, as Peter Senge writes, “is a discipline for seeing wholes….a framework for seeing inter-relationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots’”.  For me, systems thinking is fundamentally about thinking and behaving as if everything in the cosmos is connected to everything else.  Applying this to businesses, we can best understand them and surmount our stucknesses if we look at how all the elements interact, not by looking at the individual bits and pieces in isolation.  Out of this central belief flow a number of other beliefs and assumptions which make up my worldview about work:

• There are no one-offs; there are patterns of things.  If I don’t see a pattern, it just means I haven’t found it yet.
• Because everything is connected to everything else, our workplaces are complex systems, not linear machines.  This means that cause-and-effect (linear, analytical thinking) is more useful as a backward-looking descriptor of what happened, than as a forward-looking predictor of what might happen.
• The system is more influential on performance/success/outcomes than individuals.
• Networks, relationships and devolved power are more effective at achieving a business’s purpose than mechanistic command-and-control hierarchies.
• Working on “symptoms” or problems is unlikely to address underlying, systemic origins of the problems.

All of these guide how I approach my work.  Rather than take out my microscope and zoom in on a “part of a business”, I look at the whole thing and examine it holistically.  In a lot of conversations I have with business leaders, I hear about business “problems”.  You know the old saying, “We cannot solve problems with the same thinking that we used when we created them.”  Well, it’s not just a cool-sounding thing that Einstein is supposed to have said; it’s a fundamental shift in how we look at business issues and how to find solutions for the challenges businesses face.  In quite a lot of what I read on the internet, I see old (analytical) thinking being dressed up as something new and improved, but all the new-and-improved-ness won’t make any difference if the old mental model remains the same.  For example, I see people offering up the latest tips and tricks on how to “hire better” and failing to see “hiring” as part of a wider system of peoplecapabilitytalentengagement.  It all sounds just lovely, but it’s just a re-wording of what’s already been said and it reduces “hiring” as if it can be isolated from the rest of what is going on in the business.  Yet, managers still behave like this.  Mao’s fiasco with the sparrows is still being replicated in businesses all over the place.  It matters because applying an analytical mindset to concerns which are essentially systemic is like dealing with the liver failure of an obese alcoholic by simply transplanting a new liver into his body and not addressing the wider lifestyle concerns that caused the liver to fail in the first place.

How does systems thinking work?

It’s about working with things as integral wholes.  It’s about thinking bigger.  Water is inherently wet.  We cannot understand water’s wetness by breaking it down into its component parts; oxygen and hydrogen.  Neither of those elements has an inherent quality of “wetness”.  Similarly, with businesses, we cannot get a truly comprehensive understanding of them simply by breaking them down into their component parts.  Everything is connected to everything else and we are limited in our abilities to manage them effectively if we isolate “problem parts”.  Making a holistic assessment of the system will give us a bigger picture view that highlights strengths, inter-relationships, tensions, the forces at work (both from within and without the system) and areas of hope (where intervention can be applied).

In my experience of applying systems thinking and making interventions in a whole, integrated system, we make work work from an entirely different viewpoint, not by “fixing” individual issues but by exploring symptoms and phenomena of a whole living entity.  The issue of engagement, for example, cannot be properly addressed, in my view, by breaking it down into “hiring and recruitment”, “retention”, “remuneration”, “performance management” and looking at these parts individually.  Gamification, for instance, is not an antidote to falling engagement to my  mind; it’s like putting a band-aid on a lesion in the hope that the cancer will be cured.

Engagement is part of a system which is a synthesis of how a business hires, how it views human motivation, how it shares knowledge, how it encourages cooperation, how it facilitates learning and development…..everything connected to everything else.  When taking a systems thinking approach, the interventions are often surprising, seemingly counter-intuitive and not linear or cause-and-effect.

Systems thinking requires us to be more comfortable with interconnectedness, uncertainty, emergence and dynamism.  We need to set ourselves free of the expectations of predictability, cause-and-effect and certainty.  I read a slightly tongue-in-cheek definition of systems thinking on Twitter which pretty much sums it up: “resources by which it is possible to become less completely clueless about stuff rather than deludedly certain”.  Paradoxically, it will allow us to know more about what is going on, but we may be less certain about it.

Acting as if the business is a whole means we will radically revise how the business does business.

The idea that we can tackle business problems by breaking them down permeates all aspects of the workplace.  A more humane, integrated and organic worldview is at our disposal.  In the arena of peoplecapabilitytalentengagement, for instance, we can see how it influences what we do.  We isolate bits and try to fix them.  Here is just one example:

How do we hire people? Hire for competencies?  Hire because they look nice?  Hire because they interviewed well?  Hire because they come out great on all those psychofiddle-faddle tests?  For a kick off, examining your hiring practices might be a red herring anyway, because it’s only part of a wider system of “people, capability, talent”.  Why focus on “hiring” when Deming’s 95% rule says that the system is where we should place our attention.  Think bigger about peoplecapabilitytalentengagement: do you need to see CVs?…do you interview (and how do you do this?)….do you carry out an orientation (or is it more like an initiation?)….how do people grow and learn?…..what is your “exit interview” process like?…why do people stay?   There might be things that go on when people are hired to make sure they fit into the culture, but if the culture is sick, in some senses it doesn’t matter who you hire.  They’ll eventually get shoe-horned into your sick culture whether they are good or bad (and if they don’t fit in, it says more about your system than the “bad” hire!).  The system will affect their ability to work well.  What I’m saying is that if there is a pattern of people not performing well, why put hiring practices under the microscope?  Think bigger and look at the whole.

If you notice that retention is low, this is just a pattern that points to something bigger and more hidden.  To my mind, psychometric quizzes are just another “band-aid on cancer”.  If we leap to the conclusion that we are making hiring mistakes, we may not have asked the right questions about performance…or learning….or meaningful work….or…..  Hire anyone.  Hire people you think are wrong.  You might even take Bob Marshall‘s advice, which I quite like, and try hiring without relying on a traditional CV as your safety blanket (the #noCV alternative).  I tend to go along with Bob when he says that “job interviews suck”.  How you hire doesn’t really matter until and unless you discover that the bigger questions you are asking about the whole of the business are the right ones.  In a nutshell, is “How do we hire people?” the right question?

We need to get ourselves unstuck from disabling thought patterns that stifle creativity and re-learn more expansive patterns of thinking.  Systems thinking is a fundamental change to business orthodoxy.  The assumptions we hold about the business of business mostly orient us to measure things that don’t matter and attack problems that are only really indicators of a systemic pattern.  We try to find answers for questions that are often irrelevant.  Time to think bigger.

…more to come in Part III.

Stop de-motivating people

Fresh from running a workshop on responsible leadership, I’m feeling buoyant that the participants entered into the conversation with gusto and were open to the idea that humans engage in their work because they seek out meaning, mastery and autonomy.  To a large extent, I was not only preaching to the converted but taking the lead from them.  Their work is based on a developmental, strengths-based worldview and they do it because they see the real difference that it makes to their clients.  When I proposed that McGregor’s Theory XY and the work of Daniel Pink was providing us with a compelling case for re-visioning how we “do” leadership, there seemed to be general approval.  They seemed thrilled that there has been significant theory and research on what makes work work.  One person excitedly told the story of her previous workplace that had got to a crisis point, completely revamped its management practice and leadership approach by adopting a Theory Y attitude and turned their business around.  Similarly, we at Quantum Shift are working with a client who also views people through a Theory Y lens and is in the middle of a deep transformation of how their business is organised and the light at the end of the transformation tunnel is clear and bright.

Then my heart sinks a little as I read in this morning’s New Zealand Herald, an article entitled “Fear, greed and vanity are excellent staff motivators.”  I couldn’t resist reading, it tempted me in, much as those faux science documentaries in which the narrator at some point intones mysteriously, “Was Darwin wrong?”  This invariably causes me to exclaim, “NO!” in frustration at the thrall in which ancient myths and fairy stories still grip us.  To give the writer of that piece his due, he does start his argument with “in my opinion”, however we are on shaky ground if we base management and leadership of our organisations purely on opinion.  Haven’t we learnt that research and study goes a long way to correcting long-held beliefs that get in the way of good practice?

He closes his article by saying, “…all other things being equal, an engaged workforce is more productive than a disengaged one – but the pyramids were built with the whip. We should not forget that.”  Reminds me of that quote by Deming, “Beat horses and they will run faster….for a while.”  While it may be that the pyramids were built with the whip (although I learnt when I was in Egypt recently that new archaeological discoveries are showing that it was not slave labour that built the pyramids after all), it also used to be the case that children were used as chimney sweeps, women were burnt at the stake for witchcraft and leeches were considered cutting edge medicine.  While everyone is entitled to their prejudices (for that’s all Theory X is as far as I’m concerned), it’s more than a little frustrating when someone is given air time in the business column of a national newspaper to reinforce something backed by no evidence, bar his experience as a company liquidator.  Theory X is one which is being challenged by contemporary research into what motivates people.  If we take as long to update our perspective on this as we did to acknowledge that the sun is the centre of the solar system, I predict that it will take until the year 2110 before we find workplaces everywhere have at last unleashed people’s genuine desire to do something meaningful and that work will have long since ceased to be paid-for slave labour (or that we need gamification to help us pretend otherwise).

In the meantime, we still have conversations about how to motivate employees.  Way back in 2006, a piece appeared in the Harvard Management Update entitled “Stop Demotivating your Employees”.  It came out of some research that showed that when people join organisations they are initially enthusiastic, but that they very quickly lose motivation due to management behaviours and styles.  This research, by the way, was conducted with 1.2 million employees at 52 businesses, so it’s not simply the opinion of the three authors.  The question, then, is not about finding ways to motivate and engage people.  It’s about letting them get on with it, stopping demotivating them.

Central to this is re-visioning the role of a manager.  Much of what a manager does gets in the way and leads to situations where they then ponder how to motivate and engage.  As Bob Marshall puts it in “Lay off the Managers”, we need management, but much of what managers do is dysfunctional.  If we do away with the old Theory X prejudice and embrace the science behind Theory Y, the flow on from this is that the job of managing will look and feel quite different.  Some of the things that go on in some of the businesses to which I consult include:

• Policies and procedures that try to mitigate for every possible contingency and overwhelm people with the sheer scale of information they are required to know before actually doing their jobs.
• Micro-managers who need to oversee not only what people do but how they do it.
• Command-and-control hierarchies that centralise decision-making away from the point at which the decisions could more ably be made.
• Managers who hoard power and operate out of a need to be in control of things (and when they can’t, sabotage the hard work of others).

As Deming states in this short video clip, “one is born with intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity, cooperation, curiosity, a yearning for learning.”  These are crushed out by “forces of destruction” throughout our lives.  He wonders out loud, “Why crush them out? Why not nurture them?”  Indeed.  He goes on to say that mere change will not do it.  ”We cannot just  remodel the prison.”  He is talking about transformation, not mere patchwork, not tinkering round the edges.

Backed by research, I believe that Theory Y is in an ascendancy, albeit a slow one (cf. Copernicus).  Symptomatic of this, many managers have cottoned on to this new-fangled thing called “engagement”.  It seems that some studies have shown that businesses with motivated and engaged staff are far more productive and effective at what they do.  That’s pretty compelling.  So in the name of creating happier workers, some go through a PR makeover, adopting some kind of newspeak so that people think things have actually changed.  That, or they induce people and customers to “like” them by trying to make the same old work seem more fun and interesting.  I’m not so sure this is transformation.

Deming talks about transformation as a new kind of reward, but not one that gives you points on a leader board, an extra staff party or an incentive bonus in your pay packet.  He talks about restoring the individual.  This kind of transformation will unleash the power of human resourcefulness contained in intrinsic motivation and which people are born with.  That’s meaning, mastery and autonomy for you Daniel Pink fans.  Or self-actualisation for you Maslow fans.  Dispensing with extrinsic motivators and transforming business to release people’s intrinsic motivation can lead to less competition and greater cooperation which, in time, will lead to greater innovation, greater service, greater material reward for everyone, joy in work, joy in learning.  There is the new kind of reward.  Everyone will win in this transformation.

It truly boggles my mind that folks like the author of that NZ Herald article would consider themselves as hardworking and motivated by success yet presume others are inherently lazy, selfish and greedy.  Certainly, these are human qualities and ones which we all possess in some measure.  We are not slaves to them, however, and in my experience, under the right conditions, we will just as easily bring out the best of ourselves.  Under the kind of conditions that model and condone laziness and selfishness, however, I can understand why would people would fail to engage themselves fully.  Genuine transformation of business, therefore, is essential; this means a real systemic shift in attitudes and beliefs about people.  Getting the “right conditions” for people to flourish is a pre-condition for them to bring their whole selves to work.

In my understanding of McGregor’s Theory Y, those marvellous things he outlines will come to fruition under the right conditions.  This is important.  The conditions must be right for people to flourish just as soil must be fertile in order for plants to flourish.  If you salt the earth, nothing will grow; if you behave like Stalin (while spouting Theory Y newspeak for good PR), your people will disengage or leave or both.  As I said, the question to be asking, then, is not “How can I motivate my staff?” but “How do I need to be so that I don’t demotivate people around me?”  Some of it is related to transforming how the business organises itself, but this is inextricably linked to transforming ourselves: our beliefs and attitudes about human nature and how we relate to people.

What is required of us then?

Listening to people.  Adopt the practice of genuinely listening to people.  Acting on what you hear is part of this, too.  Come at conversations with the mindset that they will tell you something you don’t already know, something which may challenge your own beliefs or something which may teach you a lesson.  Turn off that inner monologue and consider their reality is just as valid as yours.

Enabling them to get on with it.  There are a number of enabling behaviours I set out in a previous article, “Leaders: get out of the way”.  I would strongly suggest it is more than behaviour change; once again, it is personal transformation that flows out of a meaningful shift in our beliefs and attitudes.

Acknowledging people.  This is not about praise.  Managers who steal the credit for good work are demotivators.  Acknowledging means giving people their due and recognising the contributions they make to the whole.  It means noticing when people have been of good service to others.  It means assisting people to see that their unique contributions and who they are add something invaluable.

Facilitating the easy flow of information and unimpeded access to the proper resources to do the job.  At a very basic level, a manager would do well to see themselves as the one who eases and unblocks information flow.  Hoarding information is an act of the power-hungry.

Enrolling people into a vision of something greater than the sum of everyone’s daily tasks.  Declaring a clear purpose for the business, apart from increased shareholder return or higher profit.  Keep hold of a single-minded purpose and make sure everyone has a clear line of sight to it.  What is your business contributing to the well-being of the world?

If the author of that NZ Herald article was moved to write what he did because he has witnessed indolence and selfishness in the workplace, I would suggest that it has as much to do with the kind of cynicism people bring to work when they witness their managers exhibit the same cynical behaviours and attitudes.  That Harvard Management Update found that people start a job full of enthusiasm, which, like Deming, I would say is our default setting.  The rot sets in when systemic inhumanity within the business infects them and their natural motivation is crushed.  I would also suggest it has much to do with organisations which have not put “the right conditions” in place that would allow creativity, autonomy and responsibility to flourish.  It’s also to do with managers and leaders who hold on to an obsolete view of human nature.  So it’s no surprise to me that a company liquidator would encounter people who do their best to be their worst.

Don’t play games with people

One of the most satisfying contracts I’ve had involved working with a group of team leaders on a manufacturing line back in 2005.  We had an introductory tour of the factory floor before we engaged with them and I saw what you would expect to see on an assembly line.  Articles being put together in sequence in order to turn out a finished product.  Repetitive, time-pressured, loud and VERY hot.  Upon meeting with this group and getting to know them, I was astounded to learn that most of them had been with the company for over 10 years, the longest serving being about 25 years.  Much to my shame, I will admit that my astonishment was based on a prejudice I had about repetitive work: that it is personally unrewarding, it provides little room for personal development and offered little real challenge to those who carried it out.  I never imagined that in this day and age, people would voluntarily choose to stay in a job that involved doing much the same thing, day in and day out, for mediocre financial reward.  How wrong I was and how much I learnt from these folks, and their company, about satisfaction and engagement.  We were contracted to do some development work which would assist them to grow, not just as team leaders, but as people.  This should have given me a clue that this manufacturing company was different from most workplaces.

My memories of this arose thanks to Bob Marshall’s recent post, The Games People Play.  The first line really grabbed me: “Gamification bugs me.”  I, too, feel uneasy about gamification.  I recalled this factory floor and the people who made it run and remembered that engagement at work is not about making it all fun fun fun.  While I’m certainly no puritan and I accept that work is better if it’s fun, I would suggest that trying to dilute the meaningless of some jobs by gamifying it is missing the mark entirely.    Sure, people are more productive when they’re having fun, but I contend that fun is not about “silly dress-up day” or paper airplane contests.  I googled “how to make work fun” and I was disappointed (but not too surprised) to see it was all stuff aimed at brightening up your day, bringing humour into the workplace and having fun, but I couldn’t see anything that was related to actually changing the business on a deeper level so that the work itself became engaging.  I believe that gamification sits within the old mindset of those who ascribe to Theory X: that people are inherently work-shy, unmotivated and uncreative and need to be motivated by the old carrot and stick.  In other words, if you reward a behaviour, you get more of it or if you punish a behaviour you get less of it.  Trying to turn dull, silo-ed work into a game is just another bright shiny thing, to my mind.

Just as genuine engagement is not about trying to window-dress tedium with toys, neither is engagement about enticing people with pots of money.  That manufacturing company did not apply the carrot and stick to get people to stay engaged.  They did something bigger.  Firstly, to borrow a phrase from Daniel Pink, they paid people enough so that they took money off the table.  I’ll add that they don’t earn a fortune, but they earn enough so that it’s not an issue.  Once money was dispensed with as a motivator, they applied themselves to growing a workplace where people can achieve something even better, something that Daniel Pink and others assert creates real engagement: meaning, mastery and autonomy (MMA).  I recommend watching this compelling ten-minute clip of Daniel Pink discussing motivation at work, where he sets these ideas out.

As Pink states in that clip, the science shows that we humans care about mastery very very deeply.  The science shows that we want to be self-directed.  THE SCIENCE SHOWS.  I don’t think I’m making it up when I say that people want to be successful in their lives.  People want to do something they feel is connected to something bigger than themselves.  People want to learn and to keep learning to do better.  People want to feel in control of what goes on in their lives and to have real input into workplace decisions that affect them.  People want all these things from their work and unless businesses change, the gamifying fad will quickly lose its lustre as people wake up and realise that nothing has really changed.  And nothing will have really changed for the business either; they’ll have to find the next bright shiny thing……unless they take the courageous path and transform how they do business.

There are no shortcuts and no magic bullets to creating engagement.  Now, though, in the mistaken belief that there is, some businesses are trying to divert people’s attention from repetitiveness and routine and make work fun.  Everything has to be fun fun fun.  Was Huxley right when he foretold how the human race would be kept placid and compliant by a daily dose of soma?  For soma, read gamification.

In a lot of cases, when I see some kind of game element embedded in a retention or marketing strategy, what I actually hear is, “What I sell/ask people to do is intrinsically dull so I’ll use a little smoke and mirrors to get you to engage with my product/my service/my company/your job.”  If the premise is that people enjoy playing games more than they enjoy work, then trying to gamify boring work is looking at the symptom, not the cause.  And if your product or brand is lacklustre and uninspiring, gamifying it will not change its intrinsic dullness.

I don’t want to come across as some old fuddy-duddy.  I enjoy games.  I have games on my iPhone and I enjoy an boys’ night with beers and PS3.  When I’m in the world of Angry Birds or Assassin’s Creed, I find what any good game developer knows makes a good game: autonomy, mastery and meaning.  I also find MMA in a cryptic crossword, so it’s not a new phenomenon.  But I find these things within the world of the game.  It is specious logic to say, then, that just because an engaging game will have these three ingredients, that you can generate these three things in your customers or employees by turning what you do into a game.

When we wake up in the morning, how magnificent if our first thoughts are “I wonder what I can learn today?” or “I wonder how I can enhance someone else’s life today?” or “I wonder what joy I can find in my day today?” or even “I wonder if I will experience some things, good or bad, that stretch me or challenge me today?”   NOT  ”I can’t wait to get to work so I can earn more badges, points or move up the leaderboard,” or “Oh great! It’s cupcake day.”

We want meaning in our daily lives.

We want to master something in our daily lives.

We want to be self-directed in our daily lives.

Turning routine chores or repetitive tasks into some sort of game may make the hours pass by quicker, but it does not provide meaning to this work.  But somehow, that manufacturing company found ways for people to find MMA in their repetitive assembly line work.  How did they do it?  Short answer: they changed the business.  Even back in 2005, what I saw was evidence of a culture of engagement, participation and continuous improvement.  They haven’t stopped manufacturing the same product they had manufactured since the 1800s.  They changed (and continue to change) how they ran the business.  To me, they are a living response to Deming’s quote, “It is not necessary to change.  Survival is not mandatory.”  They are interested in surviving and thriving, so they have embarked down the path of business transformation.  The culture they are careful to steward is one that emphasises effectiveness and ensures that people who work there gain meaning, mastery and autonomy from their work.  Any systems thinker would say that these things are all connected.

• People on the factory floor are encouraged to see the bigger picture.  Even though they may be responsible for one part of the assembly line, the focus is on the effectiveness of the whole.  The focus is kept on the quality of the whole finished product, the customer and the company brand.  Because they see that they are contributing to something bigger than the efficiency of their small part, they do this rather old-fashioned thing and take pride in their work.  Poor quality work is a concern for the whole business, not just one part.  Talking to some of those people from the factory floor back in 2005 and I found they actually cared how effective everyone else was because they knew it affected them too.
• People have the opportunity to challenge themselves.  They are encouraged to move to other parts of the assembly line, to learn about other processes that go on and to develop themselves technically.  People who show leadership potential are encouraged and supported to extend themselves, take greater responsibility and receive leadership development in the form of mentoring and formal learning.  The business provides opportunities for people to learn (and to fail).  Even while monitoring high standards, this business views “failure” as an opportunity for the whole business to learn and re-tool itself.  The whole of the business, the factory floor included, is infused with the ethic of continuous improvement.
• People are encouraged to participate.  Workers’ fora, genuine consultation, devolved decision-making all happen.  This business knows that the best problem-solving will happen amongst the people it directly affects, with the input (but not the coercion) of management.

Trying to turn repetitive work into some sort of game in order to increase engagement is just Snake Oil 2.0.  It misses the point.  It’s trickery to try to get people engaged in something which instrinsically adds nothing to their lives.  It sits within the old carrot and stick school of motivation, which sits nicely alongside Theory X.

Gamification, or trying to change behaviour at work by turning everything into a game, is a practice rooted within the Theory X assumption that is just not true, but that most organisations operate under.  I’m sticking my neck out, obviously, by using that word “true”.  However, when Copernicus challenged the “truth” of an Earth-centric universe, his “heresy” was actually true.  It just took a while until it could be proven and then another little while for people to believe it.  I am satisfied enough with the work of people such as Douglas McGregor, Martin Seligman and Daniel Pink to say that Theory X is just plain wrong.  It is more true to say that people will instead self-motivate under the right conditions.  To me, however, the right conditions are not built on flimsy gamification.

Theory X and Theory Y are not polar opposites.  They are two different beasts.  ”Carrot and stick” and MMA do not sit at opposite ends of a continuum of motivation in the same way that doorknobs and breakfast cereal do not sit at opposite ends of a continuum.  They are entirely different things related to entirely different paradigms.  As Bob Marshall says, gamification is doing the wrong things righter.  It is tinkering with a bad model.

If you think that what you do is essentially un-engaging, stop trying to dope people up with their daily dose of soma and take a good hard look at how you structure your business instead.  Great work is fun.  We feel good when we do well.  We feel good when we are enabled to do well, too.

Why not craft a work culture where MMA is inherent in the company structure?  Why not take up real leadership and transform what you do and how you do it so that it is truly something people want to engage with?  Why not make your product or service so bloody good that people actually want it?

Theory X? Why?

I speak with managers who describe their frustrations at dealing with people they call “stupid”.  They get angry at people who are clumsy and fail to learn from mistakes, who don’t share their passion for the work, who are slow and indifferent, who try to get away with the barest minimum of effort, who exhibit little curiosity or desire to learn.  I’m no apologist for willful sabotage, maliciousness or indolence at work, but there is another way of looking at these behaviours and attributes.  When I similarly find myself getting impatient with people who don’t live up to my standards of work, I have to remind myself that perhaps they are not deliberately performing poorly.  If we hold on to the idea that workplaces are machines and the people within them just parts of the machine, then I suppose it makes sense to label “inefficient” ones as stupid.  Also, if we still hold on to the idea that we can use words like “efficient” to describe humans at work, we will continue to get angry at their individual performance.  My suggestion is not to get angry at “stupid” people, but to think bigger.  Think bigger by eliminating blindness to the system; see how the system will affect people’s performance at work.  Think bigger, also, by viewing people you lead as humans, not resources.

People such as Maslow and Glasser posited that we are driven by some basic needs.  Without getting into a critique of the details of Maslow’s or Glasser’s work, the essence is similar.  We behave in ways that attempt to meet our needs for:

• survival (food, shelter, clothing)
• belonging (love, affection, relationships)
• significance (power, self-esteem, competence)
• personal development (fun, learning and fulfillment)
• freedom (autonomy, independence, self-mastery)

It beggars belief that, if a manager is willing to acknowledge that they, themselves, are driven by these needs, they would hold an entirely different view of those they purport to manage.  The work of Harvard Professor Douglas McGregor has something to add here.  His XY Theory describes what motivates humans at work.  In “The Human Side of Enterprise”, he proposed that a manager will view workers in one of two ways: that they are inherently averse to work and that rigid systems of control are required in order to get them to do what you want them to do (Theory X) or that they are naturally ambitious and, given the right conditions, they will be self-motivated and contribute willingly to the success and effectiveness of their workplaces (Theory Y).  Whether a manager ascribes to Theory X or Theory Y will influence their style of management; authoritarian and controlling or enabling and facilitative.  McGregor set out Theory XY over 50 years ago, however some managers are still possessed with the idea that people are inherently lazy and are solely motivated by threats, intimidation and reward schemes.  Time to update.  Even in the realm of dog training, many of us long ago disposed of Barbara Woodhouse’s old ‘choke chain’ as inhumane and unnecessary.  As Deming observed, you can beat a horse to make it go faster, but only for a short while.  Threats and micro-managing might work on some level, but eventually the business will hit the laws of physics and diseconomies of scale will kick in.  Time to dispose of the view that managing is simply about getting people to do what you want them to do.

I find Theory X and Theory Y of great relevance to the challenges of the 21st century.  Continuing to see the world through Theory X leads to a tayloristic style of management, which has become increasingly redundant.  It is a theory which says that humans are only as creative as they need to be to find a work-avoidance scheme.  It says that a prime motivator is money or fear of loss of money.  To my thinking, it breeds cultures of cynicism, selfishness and short-termism.  If we now believe that slavery is an abomination, why would we continue to believe that paid-for slavery is acceptable?  Furthermore, why would any leader who wants their business to succeed in the modern world want to believe the worst about people?

Even Frederick Taylor knew that workers have a vested interest in their own well-being, but if we view motivation according to Theory X, we will naturally translate some ‘well-being-maximising’ behaviours as “malingering”, “loafing” or “getting through the day”.  If the system is screwy, why blame people for playing by its rules?  If you emphasise measurements on an individual’s performance, as opposed to their wider contribution to something bigger, why be surprised when people just do the “bare minimum”?  If you fail to steward a culture which values diversity, creativity and contribution to the whole, why scorn people for being disengaged from the purpose of the business?

Theory Y holds that people look for meaning in their lives and in their work.  It maintains that under the right conditions, people will find joy in their work.  Under the right conditions, people will also use their work as a vehicle to express their creativity and realise their potential.  I will borrow this quote (thanks to Louise Altman) from Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, “For me, my role is about unleashing what people already have inside them that are maybe suppressed in most work environments.”   Makes good sense to me.  He seems to know what goes on in most work environments and is interested in updating what goes on at work.

I note how Theory Y says that people will be autonomous and responsible given the right conditions.  Here is where a leader’s responsibility lies: in stewarding the right conditions.  How can a leader contribute to putting the right conditions in place?  One of these managers I regularly talk with (I’ll call him Manager Y) has cottoned on to the idea that humans and human systems are complex beings that cannot be analysed or managed from an outdated, mechanistic paradigm.  He has become more interested in creating the right conditions so that frustration decreases while effectiveness increases.  He has been updating his view of himself and his job, so he is more orientated to leading people than managing ‘stuff‘.  He has acknowledged that he is succeeding in creating the right conditions because he has changed who he is and how he is.  He has courageously decided to look at himself and how his role responses to people used to create the ‘wrong conditions’ for people to work effectively.  In this, he has undertaken to develop new roles for himself.

One of the roles he has refined is that of Boundary-Setter.  Like most of us, he has always been aware that systems and processes are necessary at work, but his attitude towards them was a little skewed.  To his mind, systems and processes equated to an authoritarian style of management.  He was uncomfortable with the idea that he might be one of those types of managers, so he compensated by managing people on an ad hoc basis.  He has realised, however, that systems and processes are not a bad thing.  The modern manager enacts their Boundary-Setter role and applies systems and processes with a lighter touch than in the old days.  Effective systems and processes are not arbitrary nor exhaustive.  Done effectively, they are the boundaries within which people can operate comfortably and safely.  Useful systems and processes will be robust, simply communicated, easily understood and not so restrictive that they inhibit autonomy or individual creativity.   Manager Y was labouring under an idea that systems and processes might be too confining, however, in an attempt to become less of a hard-nosed, taylorian manager, threw the baby out with the bath water, dispensed with a consistent set of guidelines and ended up being seen as a push-over.  Now, he is growing consistency balanced with personal responsibility.  Just like Goldilocks’ porridge, businesses need systems and processes that are “just right”.

Another role Manager Y has been developing is Appreciator-of-People.  This role thinks, feels and behaves in ways which promote self-esteem and confidence in others.  He knows for a fact that people know exactly how to do their jobs.  He knows for a fact that they are capable (for he has seen it in the past with his own eyes, so neither he nor they can pretend they don’t know what they’re doing).  His starting point has now shifted from “they’re lazy and they need me to stay on their backs” to “they know what they’re doing, how can I get out of their way?”  This significant shift in his attitude means that he now demonstrates trust and respect.

In the role of Trusting Auxiliary, Manager Y is honing his capabilities around supporting and coaching.  He is letting people have more space to do their jobs and after a short, initial period of adjustment, people are filling this space with responsibility-taking and team-based problem-solving.  He continues to have regular catch-ups with his team, but has changed the tone of those.  No longer is he one of the Spanish Inquisition endlessly asking why something didn’t get done.  Instead, he asks what gets in the way of people working well or how he can assist.  This is no mere lip-service exercise.  Herein is how he has changed who he is because he has adopted a genuine curiosity and naiveté to his questioning.  People know if you are questioning them to catch them out or if you are questioning them to find the answer to a question.  People know if you ask them a question which you have already answered in your head.  He also starts with what they are doing well, rather than what they’re not doing well enough.  This means that people are becoming less fearful about discussing mistakes because his approach is orientated to learning, not punishment.

Just as I will keep banging on about coaching people from a strengths-based mindset, I will keep banging on about how important it is for leaders to re-cast themselves as Systems Stewards.  In this role, Manager Y has found his job less burdensome because he is concerning himself less with micro-managing and making sure things “get done” than he is with creating boundaries of effective work behaviour, doing that big picture “vision stuff” (daydreaming, looking into the future, wish-listing, strategising, networking and influencing) and making sure that communication channels are open and transparent.

Let’s please stop seeing people as inherently lazy, irresponsible and inefficient and, instead, take Tony Hsieh’s or Manager Y’s approach and see them as complex humans with a natural drive to learn, self-actualise and thrive.  If we must continue using things like Key Performance Indicators, let’s keep them in perspective.  They are just that: merely an indicator and a limited one at best.  It indicates, it points to:  it doesn’t give the full picture of what is going on.  It indicates that something you are narrowly measuring is either doing OK or it is not.  An indicator such as this does not, however, indicate whether a person’s performance is related to a badly-led culture.  It does not indicate whether someone is fully supported and resourced to do their job effectively.  It does not indicate whether someone’s intrinsic human needs are being realised.  Time for an update.