Tutaetoko

How to be successful in 2012 and beyond (II)

2012-01-02T17:11:00.001+13:00

Pervasive belief in individualistic self-improvement, goal achievement, profligate consumption and bullshit opulence was the target of my previous post: the tongue-in-cheek rant “How to be successful in 2012 and beyond” .

The satire was too subtle (or maybe too long) for some. For instance a friend commented on Facebook, "Hey Steve, it's not that I don't believe in what you say... but I've had one hell of a 2011, and none of it was planned. Happy New Year and very best for 2012, planned or not."

I replied, “ My (satirical) point precisely. I'd say you have had a very successful year "dancing in the moment".

The thing is that he and we all seem to have become so accustomed, so programmed to the mantra of individualistic self-improvement and goal achievement that we tend not to see or value other forms of success.

This was highlighted for me in 2011 when as business development coach I “went back on the tools” a couple or three days per week to provide some flexible trades capacity in a client’s property maintenance business while we set it up for growth.

Not surprisingly the growth strategy includes niche-focusing, differentiating, and enhancing the value of his services, so to increase the price.

Turns out that the first task was to rebuild his concept of the value of what he does. His belief was that his service is manual work and therefore low status, low value, competing on price.

I can understand his belief. You don’t have to look far to see that success is widely regarded as not-doing manual work. It’s indicated by graduating from manual to administrative work. The further you are removed from the manual work into administrating it the higher the financial rewards and status. High paid people don’t get their hands dirty. This is I think grotesquely apparent in the differential between shop-floor and CEO remuneration.

I set out to convince him that despite the virtualisation of many aspects of contemporary life and the reification of financial services, administration and “knowledge work”, people still dwell in bricks and mortar. They depend on built-in utility equipment and services that suffer wear and tear. At the same time, the skills and knowledge needed to maintain and renovate these things, or even to install them properly in the first place, are increasingly alien to most.

The value of that skill and knowledge becomes acutely apparent with hard times, natural disaster, and environmental degradation when maintenance and renovation become a favourable alternative to profligate consumption.

Another thing I discovered with working on the tools was that I quickly got fit. There’s something about sustained physical activity that can’t be achieved in a thrice weekly, intense, hour-long gym workout, no matter how hard you go.

It wasn’t only the physical health but also the mental health of directly creative activity and tangible product – such a contrast to sedentary intellectual work in a typically manipulative bureaucratic setting.

I mentioned my re-evaluation of manual work to a surgeon friend who replied that surgery is labour. This was confirmed when a paediatrician friend confirmed that surgeons have lower status in medical circles than other medical specialists because they are the plumbers, fitters, carpenters and decorators.

To return to the opening topic: in contemporary life it seems that success has become such a narrow and distorted belief that it rules out pretty much all people and activity except being on target to become or being a Glossy-model-looking CEO in “knowledge work” living at peak-consumption.

That has got to be sick. My successful business clients, in terms of profitability, health and contribution to society, have overcome that programming to find a much more fruitful concept of success. It’s about finding hope, joy, and peace in doing good things together: in collaborative enterprise.

That’s practically the antithesis of individualistic self-improvement and goal achievement.

How to be successful in 2012 and beyond.

2011-12-31T11:44:00.010+13:00

According to many who (by the popular definition) are successful and according to the many popular analysts of success, achieving it is as “simple” as sticking to a regime like:

Step 1: (re)picture what success will look like in 10 years. Be sure to think Big, Hairy, and Audacious (Thank you Jim C) ; beyond your imagination of how to get there.

Step 2: decide up to three main 3-5yr thrusts that will take you towards that 10yr vision.

Step 3. set an goals for 2012 that will addresses the highest priority action within those 3-5 yr. thrusts

Step 4: set up to five actions for the first quarter

Step 5: Take action and monitor your progress and focus weekly, monthly quarterly and review your goals annually.

Interestingly, by this definition most people are not successful, arguably because in reality they don’t stick to the regime. This begs the questions: 1) Are most people therefore failures? 2) Are there grades of success?

At dinner parties and other gatherings this summer we’ve played the game “Who’s the most successful?” That game is always on, but seldom explicitly. So we decided to put it on the table.

We discovered, as you might expect that personal notions of success seem strongly affected by life experience.

According to one summary circulating in the email, notions of success are broadly age related and a kind of cycle of life:

We found that politically, people seem to vote for government that they believe will assist them to achieve success on their terms and thus increase their chances of winning – or at least getting a good grade.

We found that people whose children are "successful”, but are “unsuccessful” themselves tended to measure their success in terms of their children’s material success if the kids are rich, or creative success if they’re artistic, or got “good jobs” if none of the above. Or it might be reproductive success if they’re producing lovely children.

Some argued that success is belonging, contributing and growing according to one’s strengths. (Liberal).

Others argued that success is to do God’s will to further his kingdom on earth. (Religious).

Success seems to vary between cultures. For instance a Chinese lad from Taiwan observed that in his community the “top dog” has the biggest house and flashest car. He observed that in Kiwi culture the “top dog” cooks the BBQ. Maybe that’s why Kiwi’s are regarded as less commercially aggressive
.
Anyway, it quickly became clear that people tend to define success pretty much to suit themselves (or get very depressed). This can be a problem when a modern economy, especially in the current recessionary climate, needs economic growth to prosper; needs people produce and buy more stuff: needs success to be materially measured.

We figured therefore that the best policy is to foster materially measured success by nationally standardising success measures along materialistic lines: to have National Success Standards; that these be administered by a dispassionate bureaucracy, preferably an already established one to avoid set-up costs.

In New Zealand, achievement standards are administered by the New Zealand Qualification Authority (NZQA). NZQA administrators will likely be very pleased to acquire the increased span of control.

NZQA’s hold over NZ education is also an advantage because if we have National Success Standards and we want everyone to have equal opportunity to be successful (egalitarian) we must have widely available education for success.

Because we need a quick return on the education investment we can’t wait for kids to qualify in Success and work their way into the corporate workforce. We must educate the existing workforce starting NOW.

So we must rapidly develop and deploy a programme of tertiary level courses in Success which would necessarily be night classes at universities and polytechnics.

That way working people could study to qualify in Success while they continue to work during the day. Along the way they could apply their learnings to their workplace and families and whole workplaces and families could become successful!

If we act quick enough, 2012 can be a huge success for everyone! ;-)

Manager or Leader: red-herring

2011-08-05T11:14:00.003+12:00

Should bosses be managers or leaders? Is there a difference? Can leaders be managers? Can managers be leaders? Whatever, it’s irrelevant. The debate’s a red herring.

It was maybe relevant in industrial-age 20thcentury when the boss’s prerogative was simply to control workers either by inspiring (leading) or manipulating (managing) them; when leaders and top managers (executives) were the unquestioned priests of the church of Industrial Management.

It’s time to break the spell. It served the industrial age well but it’s an albatross round the neck of business in the post industrial age: where rates of change are exponentially increasing and high-wage economies and maybe ecological survival depend on people being radically creative, passionately engaged, deeply committed and highly collaborative; where everyone’s a marketer because everyone in the organisation vitally affects the customers’ experience.

This new world needs a fresh understanding of leadership that enables diverse personal strengths to flourish in rich, close, open collaboration; that enables each member to lead according to their strengths.

We need a new understanding that charismatic leadership is just one of many forms of leadership: that, for instance, an introverted analyst can lead precision and attention to fine detail; an independent egotistical salesperson can captain sales effort; a systematic, reliable process improver can lead quality assurance.

It’s time for the “leaders and drivers” to allow the rest to actively and vitally engage in leadership. Trouble is, everything in conventional experience tells us, leaders and led, that that’s courting disaster: inviting anarchy; presiding over descent from control into chaos.

Yet conventional leaders and managers who deliberately learn to allow other forms of leadership to flourish, experience almost miraculous results. The learning’s not easy. It feels risky: like managerial suicide. It’s counter intuitive. But with wise support and professional coaching it happens. Not overnight but typically over 2-3 years with early signs of success clearly evident in 12 months.

This change isn’t something that leaders and managers do to others. It’s fundamentally what leaders and managers do to and amongst themselves. It’s about the systematic changes they make to their interpersonal behaviour and expectations.

It’s about the changed responses that they receive in a spiral of change from mechanical co-operation to dynamic, interpersonal collaboration. It’s about organisation changing from “boxes and wires” structures to rich webs of interpersonal relationships between people with diverse talents and strengths and deeply shared purpose.

This is the new key to competitive success in the 21st century. Are you up for it?

Will you dismiss it as “crazy-idealistic” dreaming considering the sort of people you have to work with? OK. Carry on as usual. Maybe your market will stay locked in the 20th century. If it doesn’t, get ready to eat the dust from your competitors who make the change.

Also published on MPS Pegasus

Who do you think you are?

2011-04-18T12:04:00.003+12:00

Who you think you are is affected by the context you’re in and it affects the behaviour of those around you. Who you think you are at work is affected by your assumptions about what your work role means and the cultural dynamics of the organisation.

This was highlighted for me recently by a client’s story:

For as long as I’ve known him my client’s been disappointed with the performance of his sales manager. The sales manager hasn’t achieved the potential indicated by his personality profile and successes outside work. He’s good but not great.

Yet recently he showed brilliance, but not in the usual work context. He and my client were at a supplier’s international conference. My client, unable to cope himself with all the relationship building opportunity and expectation, totally delegated half of that to his sales manager.

The sales manager’s performance in that context was vastly improved from normal. Had my client not known the sales manager’s underlying personality profile, he’d have been worried that his sales manager was on drugs of some kind.

My analysis: that goes to show what’s possible if you can change the organisational context. Next step is to raise the experience to consciousness and deliberately seek to change the local (internal) context to enable that brilliant performance back home.

I recommended my client tell his sales manager how amazingly effective he had been in that outside setting. Then ask him how they could together work to change their behaviours and assumptions to enable the sales manager to tap that previously hidden strength.

He’s done that. The sales manager was surprised and pleased to have been caught being brilliant. They are deliberately working to change their relationship and the organisational dynamics. My client is taking the lead by being accountable to his sales manager for changing his own behaviour.

Who you think you are can turn innovative, curious, dynamic and effective people into comparatively conventional, apathetic, dull and ineffective drones; turn considerate, reflective and humane people into insensitive, bullying manipulators (and vice versa). (For more on bullying see What to do about workplace bullying)

You are just as susceptible to those affects as those around you. Reading about and understanding that effect won’t immunise you. If you’re the boss and your people are behaving badly or unproductively then the change starts with you deliberately changing the way you behave.

That’s probably going to be difficult because who you think you are is deeply engrained. (For more on that see Why good people behave badly in organisations). The good news is that it’s difficult for everyone so you don’t have to become a saint overnight to steal the march on the competition.

How to Radically Change Business Teaching and Learning

2011-03-21T15:00:00.003+13:00

Public education is failing to produce people skilled at collaborating in enterprise; at bringing their particular strengths and passions together to collaboratively, dramatically exceed the possibilities of their individual strengths and limitations. Conventional organisation, management and research have failed to produce new practice.

To get a feel for the problem, go to Fernando Reimers on HBR and the TED LinkedIn discussion, Our Education System is Failing . . . . (more popular than WikiLeaks).

There is no shortage of ideas, research and recommendation on what should be done about it. There’re even maverick teachers creating and delivering programmes that can and do produce people who know their passions and strengths and naturally, actively collaborate instead of merely (dysfunctionally) co-operate.

The barrier these mavericks face is to sustain and grow their innovations in organisations and markets that have little concept of education other than as experienced: typically industrial age, conveyor belt, control focused, uniformity and standardisation by process and qualification.

The good news is that sooner or later opportunities pop up to achieve deep, widespread change. One such opportunity may be in New Zealand high school Business education. There is an acknowledged need to produce graduates with the skills and behaviours to radically improve the effectiveness of New Zealand business enterprise. In response, the high school Business curriculum is in process of radical revision with radically different teaching an learning processes in mind.

The challenge is to spread the experience of the radically different ways of managing learning that bring this new curriculum to life. That’s not only about making room for teachers to experience new ways, then enact them. It’s also a matter of addressing the typically conventional assessment models and other education management systems and processes designed to control teachers in much the same way as they are expected to control their students.

A collaboration of organisations and people passionate to achieve such a transformation was recently formed to tackle this set of problems in a radically different way. It came together from concept to action over the first three months of 2011, with initial financial support and international research interest confirmed in mid March. It doesn’t even have public website yet and intentionally probably won’t for a while yet.

It's a collaboration of Omnicom OCC Ltd with the Faculty of Creative Industries and Business of Unitec Institute of Technology, and Unitec Falkenstein Trust, a Business education trust associated with Unitec but established by successful business entrepreneur Tony Falkenstein.

The collaboration’s first project, a pilot weekend-intensive workshop with follow-through coaching for a diverse range of invited participants, is booked for early May. Although the focus is initially local, the hope and plan, if the pilot is successful is to go national, and eventually international.

The intention is to generate transformative change by exposing seasoned (in this case, high school Business) teachers to the new experience and possibilities of a radically different way of managing learning; then to coach them in their efforts to collaboratively enact their new experience within their respective institutions.

The way that the process is organised and operated is crucial because the purpose is to interrupt conventional behavioural loops: to achieve a transformation, not an intellectualised, incremental modification in teacher and learner behaviour. One way of seeing the transformation is from control-centred management and experience of learning to learning managed and experienced collaboratively.

The teaching and learning model that initially influences the thinking and action in this teaching and learning transformation process was conceived and developed by Roger Putzel, St Michaels College, Vermont and subsequently further developed and operated in multiple sites around the world including in New Zealand.

Putzel’s approach, called XB, was developed for transformative teaching and learning in Business related subject areas. So it seems an ideal platform to transform Business teachers, Business teaching, Business students and the business of education for business.

But that’s not all. The same basic model can be applied to teaching and learning anything, anywhere: even in a commercially focused learning organisation. In fact it can be easier to implement there than in institutional education . . . . . . .

Measuring a “pound of flesh”

2011-03-14T10:58:00.006+13:00

TEU’s Nigel Haworth is probably right to pejoratively call University of Auckland VC, Stuart McCutcheon a Managerialist.

In this latest stoush with the Tertiary Education union McCutcheon claims the rational high ground (NZ Herald). But to Haworth and many others he’s behaving like an industrial Shylock demanding his pound of flesh; his stance smacking of conventional managerial thinking and arrogance: underpinned by a particular set of unquestioned assumptions about how to measure and get better performance.

Of course in his mind McCutcheon is simply being rational; more rational than fellow academic Haworth, and denies wanting a “pound of flesh”. But to Harworth and the significant proportion of university employed academics in the union it clearly feels like that.

The thing is, there are far more productive measures of performance and satisfaction than those that demand or seem like they demand “pounds of flesh”.

Steve Denning commented in a recent communication:

“As I look back on my many years as a manager, I can see that one of the things that kept management grinding along on its death march was the measurement system. So long as the managers used a measurement system that kept tracking "things", it meant that "people" and "teams and "storytelling" inevitably got the short end of stick.

So managers often talked a good game about people and teams, but at the end of the day, what really mattered was whether you made your numbers.”

Traditional management will keep grinding onwards unless and until we change the things we measure and crucially, the way that we measure them.

We must pay attention to the people elements, not just the "things" or "outputs" that an organization produces.

Steve’s doing a 5 part series in his Forbes blog on measuring what really matters. Part 4 on measuring time has links to the previous 3 parts. Part 5 is in the pipeline.

And the forecast is: Wrong

2011-02-25T12:34:00.008+13:00

The Business Herald in the New Zealand Herald this morning (Friday 25 Feb 2011) features an edited extract from Dan Gardner's new book "Future Babble". In the excerpt Gardner writes mostly about how "we" continue to believe experts' predictions about the future when they are notoriously, conclusively, consistently wrong. According to Gardner this is because our minds are hard wired to seek simplification and certainty. But it doesn't work! Gardner's excerpt ends where I think the real problem lies:

"And that leads to the ultimate conclusion, which is one we do not want to accept but must: There are no crystal balls, no style of thinking, no technique, no model will ever eliminate uncertainty. The future will forever be shrouded in darkness. Only if we accept and embrace this fundamental fact can we hope to be prepared for the inevitable surprises that lie ahead."

The excerpt offers no clue on how we might "embrace" this uncertainty but the Christchurch earthquake and aftermath this week and ongoing, dramatically indicates how. The key to survival, recovery and prosperity lies in our capacity to collaborate.

But command style management, focus on dispassionate information, and individualistic reward systems ensure that most of us seldom, if ever experience collaboration. At best we experience co-operation only.

The key to thriving in a climate of uncertainty is unity through shared vision in culture that constantly questions and tests its assumptions. To get that we have to engage diverse perspectives. Conventional management practice requires compliant uniformity, often called "alignment".

It seems pretty clear to me what has to change. Education, especially Business education, for one, has to change: not so much what is taught and learned, but HOW it's taught and learned (and assessed): collaboratively.

That said, the problem then becomes how to change education. How do we do that when bad education is endemic:

Students expect “add water and stir” education. They just want a recognised qualification at lowest cost.

Universities want to deliver recognised qualifications at lowest cost.
Employers want recruits with recognised qualifications, like they got when they were at university because that’s the easiest criteria to winnow the applicants.
University teachers are up to their eyes administrating and researching. Why would they upgrade their pedagogy when the markets accept what they currently produce?

It’s a single loop system. It can’t learn/change because there is no way for disconfirming data to enter the control process. The system has no concept of what could be. The individuals within it possibly do, but the organisational system is self-sealing, impervious. The way it is managed has got to change.

Industrial era management practice is the main blockage in commerce too. Take the Borders failure. Check out Forbes blog for more on that.

Industrial era management ideology and practice is so endemic it doesn't get questioned. It's like water to a fish. We're immersed in it - hierarchy and compliance. Question it! Encourage others to question it. If you're a manager, encourage them to question you.

Stop investing in what was, when the answer is in what could be. Stop using tools and technology to shore up the status quo. Together risk finding a radically new way to manage.

To manage the risk and grow your courage, hire an experienced change-coach, learn from people and industries that have already done it. Start with books like: Umair Haque The New Capitalist Manifesto; John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison The Power of Pull; Ranjay Gulati Reorganize for Resilience; Rod Collins Leadership in a Wiki World; and Carol Sanford The Responsible Business.

For a comprehensive account of the rise and fall of 20th Century management as well as an account of the principles and practices underlying the reinvention of management, read Steve Denning 's The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (Jossey-Bass 2010).

The rare joy of collaboration at work and how to get it.

2011-02-02T12:02:00.006+13:00

For me, one of the biggest joys summer holidays is collaborative living: together engaging in expeditions, construction projects, food preparation, and eating all organised through conversation; a fluid interaction of strengths, talents and giftings born out of established, open relationships, valued difference and shared expectations; the lead taken by various individuals depending on the situation. I seldom experience such collaboration anywhere else. Cooperation yes: operating alongside others; interacting in standardised ways to complete tasks, but very seldom the joy of collaboration.

Increasingly such collaboration is acknowledged as the secret to personal joy and individual and organisational effectiveness. People learn, grow and contribute best in relationship with others: collaborative relationships of mutual trust and respect within shared understanding and aspiration.

The problem is that the way we typically organise and manage our education and industrial systems and processes didn’t evolve for that. It evolved for industrial-age efficient mass production and replication. It doesn’t work for the innovative, highly adaptive, knowledge intensive collaboration that’s the key to success in the world today.

Management (practice and ideology) as-we-know-it is stuffed, but few can envisage even the possibility of something different. It can be a difficult slow process to begin to conceive that it could be different, let alone conceptualise what it could be. Concepts of how to organise and manage are deeply engrained in our unconscious through our experience of education and work life. But achieving that breakthrough in understanding, difficult as it usually is, is less than half the battle. The main challenge is to achieve the change: to transform to management not-as-we-know-it.

Steve Denning puts it very nicely in a recent post to the open discussion Revolutionizing the World of Work: a criticism of Management guru John Cotter’s 2007 list of eight things that leaders who successfully transform businesses do right and do in the right order. (Harvard Business Review - Jan. 2007 pg. 96-103). Here’s the list:

1. Establishing a Sense of Urgency
2. Forming a Powerful Guiding Coalition
3. Creating a Vision
4. Communicating the Vision
5. Empowering Others to Act on the Vision
6. Planning for and Creating Short-Term Wins
7. Consolidating Improvements and Producing Still More Change
8. Institutionalizing New Approaches

Denning points out that recipes like this, interpreted and enacted by managers, are what got the world economy into the crap that it’s currently in. He not only calls for and describes the desperately needed radical change from that kind of management but also describes how to achieve it.

Referring Chapter 11 of his 2010 book The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management he writes:

Thought therefore must be given, before heading pell-mell into the implementation of radical management, not only to the principles of radical management, but also to the principles of radical change management. If you have mastered the arguments of this book so far, you will have already guessed that radical change management is not an eight-step top-down hierarchical rollout of a program, embodying a preconceived idea, articulated in some back room by outsiders, and then imposed with one-way communications that tell people what to do.

You will know that that kind of thinking and acting is precisely what has brought us to the current impasse. You will expect it to be a process that gives due respect to the interests not only of the organization but also of those doing the work and of those for whom the work is done. You will intuit that communications will be interactive and respectful of the individuals involved while giving due attention to productivity and innovation.

And you will be certain of one thing: that radical change management will not be a simple recipe that you can wrap up and take back to your organization to apply without modification tomorrow morning, with any expectation of success. You know that you will have to create a story of your own—one that fits your own context—its possibilities and its constraints. You also know that you will have to adapt the story on the fly as conditions shift.

What's wrong with Kotter's stuff is not the eight step program per se. It's the top-down spirit with which it is articulated and often implemented.

If you took Kotter's eight step program and implemented it with "due respect to the interests not only of the organization but also of those doing the work and of those for whom the work is done" and with communications that are" interactive and respectful of the individuals involved while giving due attention to productivity and innovation", you might still get a good result.

It's all about the heart.

Yet if you say that to managers, they tend to think that you are soft in the head.

Denning doesn’t leave it there. He gives his most recent summary of the “spirit” of what’s needed for successful change process: 18 specific practices. Not three, or eight or 10, and not in any particular order: a list of almost “Tom Peters” proportions: definitely not conventional Management!

1. *Make the change happen organically*: Change begins when a single individual takes responsibility for the future and decides to make it happen. The individual may be the CEO. In a large organization, it is more typically someone in middle management. The individual begins inspiring other people. In turn, they become champions and inspire still others.

2. *Launch a small high-performance team: *A small high-performance team will be needed to inspire and guide implementation. Dutiful or representative performance won’t get the job done. This will be a group that is creative and energized, trusts one another, passionately believes in the cause and is willing to do whatever it takes.

*3. **Do it quickly*: The change happens quickly or not all. Once organizational change takes off, the process will be viral in nature. The idea is either growing, spreading, and propagating itself, or dying and de-energizing people and spawning new constraints. A top-down process that is grinding it out, step by step, unit by unit, is usually generating antibodies that lead to mediocre implementation or total failure.

4. *Let the change idea evolve*: The change idea itself will steadily evolve. This is not a matter of crafting a vision and then rolling it out across the organization. This is about continuously adapting the idea to the evolving circumstances of the organization. As the organization and everyone in it adapts the story of change to their own context, each individual comes to own it. The process of adaptation never ends.

5. *Run the change process on human passion: *The change process will run on human passion—a firm belief in the clarity and worth of the idea and the courage to stand up and fight for it. No template or detailed rollout plan can inspire the energy, passion, and excitement that are needed to make deep change happen.

6. *Focus the passion*: It will be focused, disciplined passion. This is not an approach where anything goes. There will be a tight focus on the goal and continuing alertness to head off the diffusion of energy into related or alternative goals. Progress is assessed and adjustments made based on what has been learned. There will be systematic feedback on what value is being added. There will be freedom to create, but within clearly delineated, adjustable limits.

7. *Get outside help but don’t rely on it*: Outside help will be used but not depended on. Intellectual energy is generated by cognitive diversity and interactions with people with different backgrounds and ways of looking at the world. The external advice will be received, evaluated, and adapted to local needs. In the process of adaptation, the idea will become owned. Things are not done simply because outsiders say so; they will be done because they make sense for this context.

8. *The top of the organization must support it and be supported: *Although implementation cannot be accomplished by top-down directives or rollout programs, the support of the very top of the organization is key to creating the umbrella for change, for setting direction and heading off the inevitable threats to the idea. Yet the top alone cannot make it happen. In a large organization, the top will need many others to communicate the idea throughout the organization in an authentic way.

9. *The idea is more important than any individual*: Top-down change programs typically die when the manager leaves. The replacement manager sweeps clean what has gone before. By contrast, when a change has taken root in an organic fashion, the idea continues to live because it is owned by wide array of people.

10. *Form a strong nucleus to lead the charge*: A high-performance team will be needed to inspire and guide implementation. Dutiful or representative performance won’t get the job done. This will be a group that is creative and energized, trusts one another, and is willing to do whatever it takes.

11. *Proceed through conversations: *One person starts talking to and inspiring other people, who in turn have the courage, determination, and communication skills to fire up fresh groups of people to imagine and implement a different future. In turn, they become champions and inspire others.

12. *Establish a beachhead*: All of the successful large-scale implementations had at least some people on hand who had seen it and done it before and could say, “I’ve seen this work!” Creating a beachhead of such people is thus an important early step.

13. *Begin in a safe space*: In the first few iterations, bumps and bruises are to be expected. Until people get the hang of it, some missteps are likely. It is therefore prudent to try it out in the first instance in a relatively safe and low-profile space.

14. *Agree on a common terminology*: When fundamentally different ideas are being introduced, confusions and misunderstandings are inevitable. To the extent that a common terminology can be defined, made easily accessible, and consistently used, the transition will be easier.

15. *Communicate the Idea through stories*: Springboard stories communicate the spirit of an idea and generate new stories in the minds of the listeners, which drive them into action and spark more stories that are told to others. Rehearse your story before you get to making a presentation. Be ready when the opportunity calls.

16. *Practice total openness*. Just as the workplace depends on radical transparency, so does the change process itself. For example in the transition at Salesforce.com, all of the daily meetings were held in a public place so that everyone could see how things were progressing. A task board was displayed on the public lunch room wall so that everyone had access to what was going on. The willingness to share information with everyone enabled people to adapt on a daily basis to what was happening.

17. *Generate dramatic surges in progress*: As Seth Kahan explains in *Getting Change Right*(2010), creating high-profile face-to-face events can accelerate progress. Creating gatherings that bring players together in high-value experiences can push the transition forward in leaps and bounds.

18. *Work sustainable hours*: Although occasional crises may require extended working periods, regularly working long hours is highly unproductive and leads to low-quality output. Long working hours are a sign of serious management malfunction.

In the end, the gains are accomplished by a transition from a focus on processes that produce things (goods, services, money) to a focus on people. A successful transformation requires the firm to adopt a people-centered goal, a people-centered role for managers, a people-centered coordination mechanism, people-centered values and people-centered communication–so as to focus the firm on the people who are its customers.

You may think you’re already people centred. Most managers do. If you do, then you’re probably deluded. It’s endemic. Recognise that and get deliberate about radically changing. Read The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management for a start and get help!

What is & what produces organisational health?

2010-12-17T09:53:00.001+13:00

The GFC highlighted that what we measure, for organisational health, determines what we get. As Colin Price, Director, McKinsey & Company, puts it in his Dec 14 2010 blog on MIX: “Focusing exclusively on performance simply does not produce long-term shareholder value, sustainable competitive advantage, or an ability to achieve the mandates of the organization in the public sector.”

Price proposes instead that organisational health is: “the ability to get aligned, to execute at a world-class level, and to renew.” I’ll go for that. Those are the abilities I want, but I’m still left with the problem of what to do to produce that kind of health.

Achieving that health requires us to see our organisations in a revolutionary new way: not as bureaucratic hierarchical machines but as communities of collaborating people. Seen in that light, the fundamental purpose of all the policies, procedures, systems, processes is to enable, to free people to collaborate better.

Thus organisational health has its roots in the health of the interrelationships between the people that comprise the organisation. So what are healthy interrelationships and how do you get them?

Some useful perspectives can be drawn from the field of population health: the qualities of interrelationships that produce community wellness and productivity, and conversely illness and dysfunction are fairly well known and are evident, for instance, in the recovery approach to mental illness.

To achieve the kind of organisational health that Price proposes we have to revolutionise the way we see and manage our organisations: the purpose, nature and content of our organisational communication and interrelationships. That requires concerted, deliberate action to change the detail of the way we communicate with each other at work.

For more on this see How to Fix a Mental Organisation (December 2009) and my more recent blogs (December 2010).

Communication compulsory in only 50% of NZ undergraduate Business degrees when employers want skilled communicators

2010-12-16T13:21:00.003+13:00

Research by Sandra Barnett & Susan O'Rourke, published in the December 2010 issue of the Communication Journal of New Zealand, shows that although employers want graduates skilled in communication, business communication is compulsory in only 50% of Business degrees from major NZ tertiary education institutions. On top of that, it's very difficult for employers to gauge what graduates may have gained from any communication courses that they did complete.

In contrast to USA & Europe, New Zealand undergraduate business education grew largely out of the accountancy field. As a result most Bachelors of Commerce have not included business communication. It has long been included in the NZ Diploma of Business but focused on skills seen as appropriate to the relatively narrow requirements of the accounting profession rather than to business in the wider sense.

With recent writers in the business management field calling for a transformation in management and organisational communication (see Stephen Denning, The death & reinvention of management. Nov 2010) it seems clear that a transformation in communication education is overdue.

Further indication of the importance of sophisticated communication skill is in the December 2010 McKinsey Quarterly. In “The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday” McKinsey report research showing that firms are experiencing measurable benefits in increased speed of access to knowledge, effectiveness of marketing, reduced communication costs and increased customer satisfaction.

I issued a challenge to communication educators at the December 2010 annual conference of the New Zealand Communication Association, to transform the way they organise and do communication education. Actually I challenge them to transform the way that business education generally is organised and done. Read my challenge here: Wanted: communication educators for management revolution.

WANTED: Communication educators for management revolution

2010-12-02T11:54:00.007+13:00

Being able to collaborate better than the competition is gold in today’s globally competitive market: the most valuable differentiator; the greatest competitive advantage a firm can have; hard to copy or replicate. But such collaboration is pretty well impossible for conventional firms to achieve because the essential behaviours and attitudes are culturally alien; beyond the experience of people in most modern workplaces; contrary to the assumptions and practices of management. To achieve collaboration requires the end of Management and the key to that is in transforming the way that people communicate at work.

As Garry Hamel says:
“Management was originally invented to solve two problems: the first—getting semiskilled employees to perform repetitive activities competently, diligently, and efficiently; the second—coordinating those efforts in ways that enabled complex goods and services to be produced in large quantities.

In a nutshell, the problems were efficiency and scale, and the solution was bureaucracy, with its hierarchical structure, cascading goals, precise role definitions, and elaborate rules and procedures. Equipping organizations to tackle the future would require a management revolution no less momentous than the one that spawned modern industry.”

If we accept that Garry Hamel is right, and I most certainly do, then the problem is how do we achieve that revolution; that transformation? The firm conclusion I’ve come to over a couple of decades of leading learning in Business Schools and coaching business owners for change and growth, is that a large part of the solution lies in transforming the way we manage and do education; transforming it from what it has determinedly become over the last couple of decades. That’s the opportunity for Communication educators: their mission, should they accept it.

As change leader for university business students and SME owners and managers I realised that deep learning and change was continually derailed by deep seated tacit assumptions about knowledge and how to behave in organisations; how to behave at work; how to organise work.

I realised that I and my students, colleagues and clients are deeply imbued with a picture or organisation that is imprinted, learned and reinforced through industrial-age, synchronised education where experts have authority over “children”, requiring compliance in prescribed, synchronised, trivial ‘work’.

What we learn most powerfully from that education: what remains after we’ve forgotten everything we were taught, is how to organise and behave at work.

That unconscious imprinting, which begins at around year 7 at school when children leave the ‘learning nest’ environment of pre-school and primer years, is reinforced and ingrained right through University. It’s a major reason why we unthinkingly perpetuate the mechanistic bureaucratic, hierarchical systems in which people are cooperating, synchronised machine parts; organisations are structures; and processes are engineered sequences. This is absurd when we increasingly need people to be highly engaged collaborative agents for change and innovation, dynamically linked through rich, diverse interrelationships in pursuit of shared aspirations and goals.

To be a successful entrepreneur it apparently pays to leave the industrial education process early. Many successful entrepreneurs did: before the imprinting process was complete; likely because they didn’t fit that process.

In the academic world, Business Schools have long been criticised for perpetuating outmoded, ineffective organisational behaviours, assumptions and practices. It’s only recently however, most noticeably post 2008 crash, that the more popular literature, The Wall Street Journal for example, has pronounced the “End of Management” and begun to seriously criticise and question the underpinning assumptions and the revered Harvard MBA model of business education has come in for public scrutiny and even some scorn.

Steve Denning, an author whom I stumbled across a couple of years ago and have since become a big fan of, even participating in the editorial process of his latest book The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (Oct 2010), puts it well in his draft article on The Death and Reinvention of Management. Here I summarise some of the main points with excerpts from that draft:

What are we to make of a rash of recent books suggesting that management as we know it today is seriously problematic? According to Matthew Stewart, management is “a myth”. Professor Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School tells us that management has “failed”. According to Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, we are looking at “the end of management”, while CEO Jo Owen has written about “the death of management”.

“[In the USA] ROA is 25% of what it was in 1965; life expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 is down to 15 years, only one in five workers are passionate about their work. Moreover established firms are not creating new jobs: Friedman, T. “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts” New York Times, April 3, 2010”

“This is why business leaders and writers are increasingly exploring a fundamental rethinking of the basic tenets of management. Among the most important changes proposed are five basic shifts, in terms of the firm’s goal (a shift from inside-out to outside-in), the role of managers (a shift from control to enablement), the mode of coordination (from bureaucracy to dynamic linking), the values being practiced (a shift from value to values) and communications (a shift from command to conversation).”

“Individually, none of these shifts is new. Each shift has been pursued individually in some organizations for some years. However what we have learned is that when one of these shifts is pursued on its own, without the others, it tends to be unsustainable because it runs into conflicts with the attitudes and practices of traditional management.”

“When the five shifts are undertaken simultaneously, the result is sustainable change that is radically more productive for the organization, more congenial to innovation, and more satisfying both for those doing the work and those for whom the work is done.”

“The challenge for managers today is that in trying to elicit the energies, imagination, and creativity of their workers, they need to communicate predominantly through the language of social norms, against a history in organizations of relationships dominated by hierarchy and to a lesser extent by market pricing.”

“. . . . . management in the 21st Century requires a shift in the mode of communication from command to conversation, with adult-to-adult interactions, human being to human being, using stories, metaphors and open-ended questions. Authentic leadership storytelling has an important role to play, particularly in dealing with social media.”

So, on the one hand we have a dawning realisation that high collaboration is crucial to competitive advantage, but on the other a generally weak experience and scarce knowledge of what it is, could be, and how to get it; and organisational settings that militate against that learning. Ironically, education institutions are among the organisations where this problem is most chronic.

But here’s the thing: Communication educators, researchers and practitioners as a profession are potentially among the best equipped to lead this transformation because they presumably know of what collaboration is, can be, and how to get it. That’s because, by my understanding at least, Communication is about what happens between individuals: the shared meaning that they create.

That’s the key to the transformation. Communication educators, this is your opportunity. Your mission, should you accept it, is to focus on enabling people to experience collaboration through changing the detail of their communication behaviour; changing the way they communicate with each other; the way that they generate shared meaning; the way they produce and implement organisational knowledge.

So that’s the opportunity. That’s the challenge. Now let’s consider the organisational and pedagogical detail of how you might go about that: how you can be and produce organisational Recovery Support Workers in the recovery of organisations, currently so dysfunctional that they are effectively insane, to competitive advantage (see previous blog: "How to Fix a Mental Organisation" ).

I’m not talking about a Communication course or even a Communication programme. I’m talking about the pedagogical foundations of all courses and programmes including Communication programmes. I’m talking course process, not content. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to Communication professionals.

The aim is to radically change the learning context, which is the organisational experience, from individualistic to collaborative. Remember that student’s individualistic and content-based assumptions about achievement and learning will be deeply engrained and largely unconscious. They will find the transformation process deeply disturbing, at least initially. Expect them to project their anxiety, confusion, anger, and blame on to you. This anxiety and confusion is a necessary precursor to the transformation you aim to achieve.

Expect to feel and behave similarly yourself as you learn to collaborate deeply with your colleagues. You aren’t just going to do this to your students. You’re doing it to yourself too. Denning’s five shifts have to occur simultaneously at both levels.

So if you’re highly averse to conflict and have a history of conflict avoidance, maybe don’t try this approach. Whatever, you need a well informed process plan and supporting supervision; you need to collaborate. That will be a learning experience for you too.

Because students (and employees) typically adopt a highly instrumental approach to their work (that’s the way they’ve been trained) you must radically redesign the tasks and measures to specifically reward collaborative behaviour (as mutually assessed by team members). The effect of this is to motivate teams to move beyond the usual fake-team division of tasks.

Because students (and employees) will tend to revert to accustomed child, instead of adult behaviour, wanting to be spoon fed processed information, remove yourself from the direct teaching (management) process and ban trivialised information.

I predict that you will find, as I did, that students (and employees, and you) will be amazed at the quality they (and you) can achieve together and that they become natural collaborators without realising how different they are from conventional graduates. Issues such as racial bigotry, dependence of trivialised information (PowerPoint), passive/aggressive behaviour, withdrawal, boredom, laziness and shallow instrumentality, melt away and behaviour actually changes (real, deep learning). Students achieve real insight.

You will find that when your graduates enter employment their employers credit them with exceptional “intuition”, marvel at how rapidly they become project leaders and how engaged their project teams are. They seem to adapt to and flourish in their workplaces three times faster that A grade honours graduates in their fields: in 6-8 months they are achieving what conventionally taught graduates take two years to achieve. When they enter a new situation they don’t look to the boss for a clear set of instructions. They assume that they’re to figure that out through collaboration.

It’s those radically different fundamental assumptions about communication that make these people so valuable. Yes they need subject specific knowledge, but it’s organisationally useless unless it can be productively, collaboratively shared.

As Noshir Contractor posited in The New Handbook of Organisational Communication (2001), knowledge doesn’t exist in the nodes; it exists in the web. In other words, organisational knowledge exists only between individuals as shared understanding. The most crucial skills are in generating a rich and productive shared understanding in the messy dynamics of interpersonal communication relationships.

That’s your opportunity and your challenge. You can do it.

The Restructure Ritual

2010-10-04T15:00:00.004+13:00

I found out from my hairdresser why corporates continually restructure: it’s a ritual!
I saw the writing on the wall while I was lying back having my shampoo and colour. Kerastase, Paris offers range of rituals. Here’re just a few:

Reconstructing Ritual (for after restructure)
Strengthening Ritual
Rejuvenating Ritual
Clarifying Ritual
Replenishing Ritual

Judging by the ecstasy on the faces of the photographed models, these rituals are stunningly effective therapy for people who are at their wits end trying to make something great of hard-to-manage, unruly, dull, lifeless, worn out human assets.
There’s comfort in rituals and they buy time. They’re what you do when you have to do something but can’t think what else to do. They are time honoured practices, their origins typically forgotten, that bring kudos to the priestly caste who administer them: high managers and hairdressers.
Some corporate rituals involve brutal sacrifice for purification and to appease the gods.
The metaphor has many more possibilities which I leave to you to explore. For the moment I simply reaffirm two long-known things: you can learn a lot from your hairdresser, and organisational life is rich in unquestioned rituals that look like action, bring short term gratification and superficial improvement but fail to address the underlying issues.
Despite overwhelming evidence that restructuring almost never achieves improved ROI, corporates keep on doing it.
Let’s face it, long term success depends on the quality of our interrelationships, but ritual clearly helps us feel better about things without having to actually fundamentally relate any differently.
It’s time to question ritual and make detailed, deliberate changes in the way we interrelate and what we interrelate about.

Ten truths of leadership

2010-08-20T15:49:00.006+12:00

Of course there’d have to be ten, not nine or 13 or a Tom-Peters list of around 37. Ten is nice and neat; makes a tidy package; one tattoo for the back of each finger to remind us as we type our emails.

A recent LinkedIn Group update featuring Ten Truths of Leadership got me going. James Kouzes and Barry Posner have published another book on leadership. I guess they have to make a living. Their ten truths are true all right. No doubt about that. And yes they’re almost as old as the hills; Biblical even.

A leader who consistently achieved all of them would doubtless be absolutely inspiring.

But I doubt “Ten Truths” will change anything much. They will be tweeted and quoted and everything will go on pretty much as normal.

It’d be interesting to see how many leaders do consistently achieve even half of them, in the eyes of their supposed followers that is.

I’ve worked with many leaders who truly believed that they behaved or at least earnestly, consistently tried to behave like that. I used a very simple method to show them very clearly that they were dreaming.

I got them to record a work conversation with a peer or report, transcribe ten minutes from that tape into the right hand column of a page with their corresponding thoughts on the left hand column (an approach devised by Chris Argyris for his seminal work back in the 70s). Then we’d take a look at the variation between what they were thinking and what they actually said at that time. We invariably found significant contradiction, betraying that they were manipulative, controlling, closed minded, distrusting, and their ‘values’ conveniently flexible.

They were predictably aghast and embarrassed. I assured them that they were normal but that that norm isn’t acceptable in a successful contemporary learning organisation.

As we began the process of change, the biggest obstacle was that they knew, from hard experience, that actually behaving as “Ten Truths” suggest is very risky because the first one to do it risks being done over by “the others”.

I assured them that unless the leader takes that risk, then no one else will. Then tentatively I coached them to risk new communication behaviours then reflect on the process and the results. Slowly they became more confident to break the mould; to become conscious of the gap between their espoused behaviour and their behaviour-in-action and with the help of their peers and reports, close the gap through changed communication behaviour.

It’s a slow process, but it consistently works where lists of truths consistently fail to make a difference.

Impatient? Go get a new leader. Tempt him with an obscenely high salary and benefits. He’ll likely screw you over just the same.

Why good people behave badly in organisations

2010-08-14T18:49:00.005+12:00

We behave badly because we’ve been trained to behave badly from about age 11 in industrial education processes for industrial work. We’re imprinted with that classroom model of authority, hierarchy, knowledge, expertise, compliance, manipulation, control and work, right from when we leave the nursery school for the conventional school classroom.

That imprint is then reinforced at every level of education and on into employment. No wonder we find it difficult to conceptualise, let alone be anything else. We perpetuate the model unthinkingly. There is a saying that education is what’s left after you forget all that you (explicitly) learned. Entrepreneurs typically leave formal education early.

That industrial concept of organisation is very sticky and there’s little reason to challenge or change it unless the world changes and innovation becomes the key to survival. Then it becomes imperative to access and maximise individual and collaborative potential that is unwittingly squandered, eroded and destroyed by industrial organisation and management.

To survive we need to dispel the climates of fear, cynicism and disengagement that so often prevail; break the cycle of bad behaviour that is so toxic for emotional and mental health and sabotages engagement and productivity.

We need to resolve our double lives: break the spell of industrial age thinking and open our work and institutional life to what we know from that life beyond work.

Since the industrial revolution, when work arguably became seriously separated from the rest of life, most working adults live second lives at church, school, or home.

The question isn’t so much whether we lead double lives but how can we translate our knowledge of that ‘other life’ into our work and institutional behaviour? That’s difficult because much of our organisational behaviour is driven by unconscious assumptions and reflex behaviours tacitly learned during ‘industrial’ schooling and tacitly confirmed by our experience since.

The roots of industrial age production and education are in the thinking and practices that became prominent in the 1940s through 60s and still dominate many business improvement books. Industrial organisations had many characteristics of machines. They were formed around machines. Machines have since replaced many of the jobs in those organisations.

The machine model of organisation, still appropriate in some contexts, is characterised by structures; job breakdowns; lines of communication, job delineation; objectification; linear causal thinking. There is a sense of un-emotional rigidity and inexorability about it. Performance failures are fixed by replacing parts (people) or in extreme, restructuring. The ‘system’ reigns supreme.

In the 70s a new image of organisation emerged: organisations as intelligent organisms with interdependent functions and organs, striving to survive, responding to stimuli, adapting to changing environment, evolving to fit niche environments, the fittest surviving.

In the 80s people became the focus in the notion of organisation as culture comprised of cultures. Values, attitudes, beliefs, rituals, artefacts, normalised and normative behaviours became the centre of attention.

The 90s saw a return to the machine metaphor but this time the machine is a computer and computer networks: a hi-tech version of the earlier industrial machine. “Process re-engineering” was all the rage. People were mysterious, unreliable repositories of knowledge which is best extracted, digitised, then stored and managed in computerised files and networked information systems. Restructuring resurges, sometime dressed as process re-engineering. People are nodes in networks.

In the new millennium the World Wide Web enabled an explosion in relationships, shaking knowledge structures. The notion of knowledge and organisations as webs of relationships takes form. Hierarchy dissolves in the web and industrial style surveillance and control is impossible (Contractor, 2002).

The image of organisation as a web of relationships begins to make sense. But still the sticky industrial structures and controlling behaviours persist. People see the seeming ambiguity, openness, absence of command structures, and reliance on relationships as risky.

Leaders must risk openness, admit not knowing, focus on the detail of interpersonal relationships, build trust in long term relationships for mutual learning and growth.

Most bosses would claim that they do this already. Ask their reports. Most reports would claim that they can be trusted with responsibility. Ask their managers. It’s time we all stopped blaming, shaming and justifying and collaborated to change -bosses first.

Start by seeking honest, open feedback about your own behaviour. Talk to people other than your direct reports. Then deliberately and openly attempt to change your behaviour. Invite observations of your progress. Then expect your reports to do the same. Help and encourage them. They will be sure that this is managerial suicide.

For more in this radical vein go to Steve Denning: Does asking smart questions make you a radical manager?

Contractor, N. S. 2002. New media and organising. In L. Lievrow & S. Livingstone (Eds.). The Handbook of New Media (pp. 203-205). London: Sage.

Tse, S. & Barnett, S. 2009. Recovery Oriented Services. In Chris Lloyd, Robert King, Frank Deane, and Kevin Gournay (Eds.). Clinical Management in Mental Health Services. Chapter 7, (pp. 94 -114). Blackwell: London.

How to be understood

2010-06-20T14:27:00.004+12:00

Rule # 1: expect to be misunderstood. Mostly, we assume that understanding is normal. Wrong. Ask any spouse, sibling, parent, or lover.

Successful service-sales and service-delivery people for instance, have woken up to this through competitive pressure, grinding experience, and objective analysis. Then by deliberate, focused action they have changed their assumptions and their behaviour.

They know the cost and risk of misunderstanding is high. They manage that risk by specialising and standardising their processes; by building durable interpersonal customer-relationships for learning and forgiveness; and continually seeking to delight the customer. It becomes second nature – tacit.

But put those same sales and service people in a changed environment, even slightly different, and they can easily come unstuck. That now-tacit knowledge that has served them so proudly may well not work in the new environment.

This has been highlighted for me in my health service business development work. The New Zealand health services sector is in turmoil: yet another major government policy driven re-organisation; around the sixth in eight years.

This time it’s to vertically and horizontally merge and integrate health services. This when competition has been king and professional collaboration suspected as feather bedding; fear and loathing have become strong undercurrents in relationships between health professionals and their managers, between managers and between the managers of different organisations.

Competitors have become entrenched in their niches, adapted and fine tuned to the bureaucratic motivations and behaviour of their health sector customers, while the health professionals immersed themselves in their consumer relationships.

Suddenly these competitors have to merge and join up. Can they communicate to achieve that productively and innovatively? Fat chance! Misunderstanding reaches new heights: evidence, real and imagined, of defamation, misinformation and skulduggery is everywhere in an environment of fear and loathing. Even longstanding trusting relationships are suspect.

Mergers and join-ups that do occur are suspected as, and at least some are, driven by self interest and political gain, and as a result are slow to be productive in the essentially collaborative, professional, vocational world of health service.

So what can be done? Answer: expect to be misunderstood and take the time and trouble to find shared understanding in shared metaphor (stories) and experience; shared purpose; joint projects. Trust is found in action not argument.

Share your perspectives and reflections on that joint action by sharing stories. Be more than two dimensional “role holders.” Share stories about yourselves.
Remember you are dating with marriage in mind. The time to invest in the durability, mutual productivity, and enjoyment of that potential relationship is at the outset. Sacrifice “task” progress to build shared understanding.

The guy/woman you find so frustrating may not be a linear analytical, task oriented, conventional high achiever like you. He/she may think in pictures, think laterally to solve puzzles and make sense of seeming confusion; thinking that’s likely not crucial in the production environment that you have excelled in, but is crucial in a fast changing environment.

Are you crazy?!

2010-06-08T20:38:00.004+12:00

You’re a senior executive under pressure. You sense things are getting out of your control. Things are going wrong unexpectedly despite all your strategic planning, focused KPI’s, and reporting systems. Solutions that worked in the past no longer seem reliable.

But you can’t admit it because you’re an executive and executives know what to do. You anxiously work longer and harder but the stress and anxiety begins to erode your resilience. You can’t sleep. You can’t relax without a drink.

What do you do. You can’t admit that you’re ‘losing it’. That would be managerial suicide. If you go to your GP and get diagnosed with stress disorder you’ll be uninsurable. It’s like you’ve caught the modern equivalent of leprosy.

So you try to fix yourself: self medicate, read self-help books; look cheerful; stay positive; fight harder; focus. You have no option because if you can’t fix it you’re done for. You career is stuffed.

Conservative estimates have 20% of the population, executives included, suffering such health damaging stress and the related physical and mental effects. Realistically the figure’s around 50%.

If you’re one of those 50%, what can you do? Where can you go? The good news is that you can get well without a psychiatrist. If you take action before you crash you can recover quickly and fully.

There’s no single fix. You need to tackle the problem from several different angles. Quite likely you need skilled confidential advice and coaching. Maybe you have a good friend you can confide in. Many high achievers don’t have friends that good.

The Recovery approach to wellness is a practical, holistic, proven effective way to not just cope but to quickly be even more effective than you have ever been before.

News: Executive Depression on Increase - Corin Dann interviews Challenge Trust CEO, Clive Plucknett on NZI Business Breakfast TV (click this link)

In step with Management.

2010-06-07T12:39:00.004+12:00

Left, right, left, right, left. Is good management Left or Right?

Neither ‘of course’. Management is apolitical! Right? Management objectively, dispassionately maximises value for shareholders.

In a recently broadcast video clip from a few years back, BP’s CEO, addressing what looks like an MBA seminar, says “BP has spent too much time saving the world and it’s time to get back to maximising value to shareholders.”

A super lucky survivor of the BP’s recent deep-sea rig explosion and fire (he jumped 100’ from the rig into the oil covered burning sea because the life boats had already gone) reported that despite clear evidence that the rubber blow-out seal had been seriously damaged, with consequent serious risk of blow-out and fire, Management decided not to stop and fix it. There was pressure to be ready for BP officials due to visit the rig to celebrate the success and recognise the project’s safety record! It’s like a re-run of the Challenger disaster but massively more destructive.

The survivor reported officials were on the rig when it blew up. Maybe it was the officials who broke strict protocol and abandoned ship (and many crew including the captain) before accounting for everyone.

Managers are in charge, right? They have authority to hire and fire right? Who’s anatomy’s on the line if things go wrong? The manager’s, right? Who makes the decisions? Managers, right? Who’s job is it to know and be right? Managers’, right? If you’re wrong or you don’t know you’re not fit to be a manager right? Right! Yeah, right.

These assumptions are endemic in many (perhaps most) organisations despite espousals and ‘systems’ to the contrary. They are made by both managers and managed alike. These assumptions persist despite overwhelming evidence that they are not only unproductive but are destructive except perhaps in large scale replication where people are no more than substitute machine parts.

Are these characteristics and attributes of capital “M” for Management hallmarks of the (political) Right? Are the critics of Management lackeys of the Left?

For instance, those who question the wisdom of Management are typically assumed to be questioning established authority; to be ‘bolshie’ – politically Left.

Management tends to favour maintaining established values and hierarchy: characteristics typically regarded as politically Right.

Those who advocate and live collaboration, sharing, and collective responsibility are typically regarded as politically Left.

Management practice generally promotes individual responsibility and reward; characteristics typically regarded as politically Right.

Even Christianity seems somehow to be identified with the political Right even though Christianity questions authority and promotes sharing community, at the same time as it promotes traditional values and individual responsibility.

It seems to me that good management and Christianity are neither Left nor Right and may actually have a lot in common.

Much of contemporary popular management literature effectively plagiarises Biblical wisdom. Take for instance vision and purpose led business; discovering and playing to individuals’ strengths; discovering the engaging, innovating power of doing good things together; selling goods and services and optimising supply chains through genuine, mutually serving relationships and collaboration; individuals’ responsibility to maximise the value of their talents.

The sooner we remove the blinkers of political stereotyping and get seriously down to the work of turning the Word or words into living reality, the better.

How many environmental and economic catastrophes does it take for interrelational behaviour-change to be explicit in every organisation’s top five strategic priorities? When will specific interpersonal behaviour-change figure in everyone’s KPIs?

Pretty damn soon I hope.

99.9% of the time a miracle will happen

2010-03-15T22:24:00.005+13:00

99.9% of the time a miracle will happen – says a mathematician acquaintance.

Trouble is, 99.8% of the time we don’t see, don’t recognise, don’t make room for miracles, little or big – too driven by managerial accountability systems, individualistic endeavour, and social mis/disconnection (despite ‘social media’).

Stressed out we anxiously push, drive, and control to achieve success. The greater our responsibility and desire to succeed the more we stress and the fewer miracles we experience.

The thing about miracles is that we can’t make them happen, least of all by ourselves.

I’m excited that I seem to be developing ‘miracle-sight’: I’m seeing the recent tipping point; peripety; watershed in my work life as the product of a of complex continuum of interacting stories, events and relationships that I could never have achieved myself; a miracle, out of a web of miracles that I would doubtlessly have confounded by engineered efforts.

My story seems to turn on a long-planned 10-day wilderness adventure with old (in every sense) friends in the pristine coastal forest near West Cape, Fiordland, New Zealand.

In a brief hour from nearly-nowhere we fly: a flimsy shuddering noisy spec thwacking across the grand diorama of massive monoliths; skimming stag-lined razor ridges rising rapidly to meet us, then cutting straight to gut-dropping, sphincter clenching precipices.

When the mountain fortress opens to coastal plain we yaw and swing along the unnamed gorge finally slewing and settling on our Google-Earth-familiar gravel bank; the storm-surged, crashing cove’s tide stained red-amber by the tannin-rich river.

Abruptly abandoned by the clattering chopper, the noisy silence of our ancient new world’s a rough cut from one life to another.

The prospect and consummation of this adventure are lever and fulcrum into a new narrative phase where past work-life loose ends and abandoned threads seem touched with new meaning, new possibilities, and an excitement of renewed hope.

Chapter end; new chapter; watershed; new terrain; new horizon; new life in a new organisational setting, renewed purpose anchored in deeply held values, ruled by passion for service over personal success.

It’s with Challenge Trust. There’s hope in that name.

Opposing views:

Top: View from the river mouth, tide out, over the shingle-bank across our cove during a gale at sea.

Bottom: View on a brighter, calm day, half tide on the flow, from a promontory at mid-right in the top photo across our cove towards the shingle-bank. Our base-camp (not visible) is centre right amongst the larger trees behind the foreshore scrub. The beach is about 300m long.

The hidden cost of employee commitment.

2010-02-19T11:55:00.007+13:00

The cost, especially in economic upturn, is the loss of your best employees: the ones you didn’t make redundant; those that stuck with you despite your anxious, distracted, terse, unreasonableness and slim rewards; those who’ve been quietly observing you and deciding that given opportunity, they’ll leave.

You’re not a bad person. You want to be successful in a successful enterprise. You dream of commanding the committed engaged effort of your people. You actively seek out and use a variety of managerial strategies, tools and methods to get 'buy-in' and thus engineer commitment and engagement.

But in the end you can’t control everything and when you don't deliver on your end of the bargain the integrity of your strategy is clearly compromised. Resulting shock waves of betrayal and disappointment can reflect, refract and reverberate through your organisation and your supply chain reinforcing endemic cynicism in your upstream and downstream markets.

That damaging compromise has its roots in your ‘knowing’ that despite all the bullshit to the contrary, employees can’t be trusted to comply with managers’ designs and demands unless managers get and maintain ‘buy-in’. So you get and maintain buy-in by manipulative management communication processes: by strategically 'positioning' your message to engineer willing compliance.

What most managers either don’t know or don’t really believe is that most ‘reports’ actually want to be committed to and engaged in worthwhile enterprise with other engaged committed people.

The best are so keen to taste the fruit of engagement that, full of hope and despite previous disappointment and betrayals they will risk going to extraordinary lengths to get it. They will buy in: they will ignore selfish, manipulative manager behaviour; go the extra mile; live the espoused values; believe the vision; accentuate the positive; create; collaborate and invest emotion and time.

But in time (usually between 18-30 months) through the course of events and economic (mis)fortune, it becomes increasingly apparent to them that despite the hoopla, what rules in practice is individual self interest and that's what's rewarded. Individual self interest is best served through filtering and limiting communication, through manipulative communication and cultivated dependency.

Cynicism grows, resentment spreads, engagement wanes and from those who gave, more is taken: their satisfactions, hopes, spark, power, and pride eroded; accelerated when they are blamed for their predicament.

Separation follows. Angry, sad, and disappointed they take their knowledge and their potential with them leaving those who precipitated it: kings over their small domains of the cynical and still-hopeful.

The good news for those little kings is that they have another chance to deeply believe that their best bet individually and collectively is to stop manipulating and get out of the way of people who desperately want to be committed to and fully engaged in doing good things together.

If you’re one of those kings, how can you ensure that you will behave differently this time? Clue, you can’t do it on your own. Ask some of those committed ‘serfs’ to help you. Do you have the balls to do that?

Slow motion serendipity

2010-02-13T18:42:00.002+13:00

Several weeks ago in Poetry at Work I contemplated the jolting transition from profoundly poetic to harshly prosaic.

Then suddenly I plunge into turbid work-waters, seeking uncontrived rhyme, rhythm, and reunion. Instead jolted by proudly, profoundly prosaic hard harsh habits, I struggle to rescue the dream from resigned remembrance and to surface, to breathe.

Now thankfully buoyed by miraculously new-found and re-found relationships, carried by the tidal flows that touch and disturb even dammed work-waters, I find poetry resurgent enough for shade and sustenance.

That abstract painting uncannily resolved, unfolded in time since: change and challenge in photographic clarity. Doors closing and doors opening in slow motion serendipity; results crystallised in retrospect.

Therein lies a riddle clear to some, resolved for others in weeks to come.

Truth is some dammed work-waters can drown even a buoyant psyche.

Salvation lies in the deep tidal flows that despite our plans and protestations lead us resurgent to unexpected places. . . . . .

Will 2010 Be As You Like It?

2010-01-28T22:45:00.003+13:00

‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” says Bill Shakespeare’s character Jacques in As You Like It, Act II Sc vii,

To what story, what climax, what denouement have you renewed your commitment, passion and determination this year?

The evidence is clear that if you set your goal then commit to it by focusing on completing specific actions towards that goal, then you have a very high probability of achieving it. It gets messier if you can’t do it on your own; if you need others to commit and focus on it too.

How can you get those others to want what you want? How can you get them to “buy into” it; to play your game, run your race, act in your theatre; accept your rules and judgement?

Typically you cast yourself as the master puppeteer: as lord of the dance; you pull the strings. A lot depends on your skill and alacrity at manipulating strings: at management.

No wonder then that managers have such a major influence on businesses: by some reports over 70% of employee behaviour is determined by the actions of managers (I wonder who determines managers’ behaviour).

So if your marionettes are not responding as planned, do you become an even better puppeteer: do you contrive with the latest tools, systems and processes to increase control by adding more ‘invisible’ strings?

Or do you seek to breathe life into your marionettes; into their wooden minds, hearts and limbs; risk letting them influence the dance, the narrative, and the score? Do you risk letting them be the stars?

Will they want to stay with your small show? Will they perform like you? Will they covet your role?

Do they understand the play? Does it speak to them? Do they relate emotionally to their roles and to each other. Are the roles shallow, 2 dimensional or are they ‘character’ roles.

Does the play have a universal quality that appeals on multiple levels to different players and its audience? Or is it a cheap circus that abuses its talent?

What are you playing at?

Poetry at Work.

2010-01-21T09:55:00.003+13:00

Last week lone-sailing Seascape, my 12 foot, clinker-style dinghy; hushed breeze rushing, bow splashing and wake boiling, I slipped and sliced, suspended on chrome-smooth sky-tinted surfaces, ruffled, disturbed, even annoyed by mercurially agitated warm humid breezes. Mind in neutral, senses wired for sudden shifts, body and boat commune, response-merged pursuing purpose.

Then suddenly I plunge into turbid work-waters, seeking uncontrived rhyme, rhythm, and reunion. Instead jolted by proudly, profoundly prosaic hard harsh habits, I struggle to rescue the dream from resigned remembrance and to surface, to breathe.

Now thankfully buoyed by miraculously new-found and re-found relationships, carried by the tidal flows that touch and disturb even dammed work-waters, I find poetry resurgent enough for shade and sustenance.

Life and purpose renewed

2010-01-06T09:53:00.002+13:00

I just returned from our regular Christmas pilgrimage to the New Zealand bush: dating back to the late 1970s when a group of friends purchased 150 acres (60 ha) of rugged bush country on the Tutaetoko river near Opotiki. We call the place St Jude’s. How we arrived at that name is another story but coincidentally perhaps St Jude is traditionally the patron saint of lost or impossible causes.

In many ways, St Jude’s bush camp is an unlikely cause; a collaboration for recovery: respite, reflection, reconnection, recreation, rejuvenation and inspiration; therapeutic activity, friendship and durable relationship spanning life’s changes; a materially very simple environment cut off by high-ridge, river and rugged terrain from electricity and mobile phone; the moist musk fragrance and entrancing sounds of New Zealand bush unfiltered, unframed, unmitigated; an antidote to the disconnection of contemporary life and work.

The pace is easy but the essence of life and relationship strong and obvious in the activity of provisioning, cooking, hospitality, construction and adventure. Firewood must be collected and cut and fires tended to produce hot water and food. Food safety, fresh water and waste management are everyday issues. Provisioning, cooking and eating are communal in the the high-gabled, open-walled, wharenui style communal shelter: rustic corrugated-iron roof and fireplace and crucially, long table.

The river rules: its course changing with each winter’s rain; its soothing chuckling waters made turbid torrents by summer-storms cutting camp from road and storm winds wreaking havoc amongst poorly pitched tents; overseen by the deep-gullied bush that dispassionately disorients and injures unwary adventurers.

But, in the shelter, on warm breathless nights, open-laughing faces glow by unflickered candle light and the coals of the cooking fire. Beyond, in soft darkness, campfire-lit figures reflect, intimately cocooned by the benign brooding milky-way come down to the ridge-tops.

Good Bastards & the Spirit of Christmas

2009-12-23T11:12:00.003+13:00

The Christmas message of joy in discovering new life and new hope came together surprisingly for me last week in a business meeting of diverse minds, perspectives and strengths in a common purpose.

I opportunistically (for that is my way) introduced my friends and clients at Challenge Trust (Mental Health Service providers) to my friends and former colleagues at The Social & Community Health Section of the University of Auckland (UoA) School of Population Health (SoPH). My hope and expectation was of new and exciting collaboration.

My role with Challenge Trust is about achieving business growth & development. My connection with SoPH stems from collaborating with them as a faculty member of UoA Business School when it had a division on the same Tamaki campus as SoPH. That collaboration grew out of a sense that the issues in social and community health are congruent with those in businesses and institutions and a passion to do something with that.

The meeting confirmed the expected and discovered unexpected potential for new, exciting collaboration and relationships in common purpose and passion: to make social and business communities healthy and therefore sustainably more productive places to live and work.

We got to talking about Challenge Trust’s dramatically successful model for recovery that they apply to themselves and their professional interrelationships as well as to their clients and their client communities. Their model has six essential elements that must be addressed together:

1. Clinical Health

2. Emotional Health

3. Spiritual/Cultural Health

4. Environmental Health

5. Physical Health

6. Economic Health

We got to talking about how organisations are inherently fundamentally dysfunctional and how through a recovery approach they can become “high functioning”. We got to talking about how individual and organisational recovery relates to resilience and “human resource” sustainability.

This brought to my mind a story that I told them to illustrate how a firm without specific knowledge of Recovery, but seeking to sustainably engage it’s employees and delight its customers, had begun to implement what in many ways amounts to the Recovery model:

A labour hire firm were seeking to identify an inspiring, engaging common purpose or goal; one that would profitably differentiate them from their competition. They tried typical business goals like being the preferred supplier to the top/largest/best operators in the construction industry with decade-spanning interpersonal customer relationships. But it didn’t catch on. Too much bicycle, not enough frog?

So back to the drawing board they went and realised that what they would really like to be is “Good Bastards who do business with Good Bastards”. A good bastard is NZ vernacular for a rugged individual with a good heart, who looks out for his mates and, all said and done, loves them, has their welfare at heart and would do anything for them.

They then imagined what a firm of good bastards would be proud to look like in 10 years if it was a raging success. They decided that they would be proud to be in the news for having flown an A320 full of their people (150) into a disaster zone for a week long recovery mission where their people volunteered their time and the firm paid the rest of the costs. That would require them to be a successful business, largish and most importantly be a community of really good bastards. This big hairy audacious goal (Jim Collins) caught on fast.

Building the capability to respond at the drop of a hat to such a disaster clearly required long term action that started right away. So they began by collaborating with their banker’s employees to clean up three local beaches and have a BBQ together.

To begin recognising good bastard behaviour they implemented a quarterly Good Bastard Award for clients and one for employees.

They decided that good bastards are safe bastards: they look out for their workmates; an important behaviour in construction site safety. So they began a programme of sponsored safety promotion events on client sites and included aspects of safety and safety awareness in their quarterly surveys of employees and clients.

This firm is The Labour Exchange and to me that’s the spirit of Christmas in action in business.

The meeting of minds and purpose where I told that story is also the spirit of Christmas in action: joy in discovering new life and new hope.

Best wishes for Christmas: peace & goodwill, new life and new hope.

Steve

Bicycle or Frog? Kiss . . . . .

2009-12-19T19:41:00.006+13:00

Did the pricess kiss a frog to get her prince, or was it a bicycle?

To borrow Alistair Mant’s bicycle/frog analogy: we continue to treat organisations as if they are bicycles when these days they are more likely frogs.

You can take a bicycle apart, lay out and polish all the bits, modify and replace them, and when you put it back together and oil it, you have a bicycle. If you do that to a frog, when you put it back together you don’t have a frog. There’s something missing: life. A bicycle is a machine. A frog is a living thing.

Ever come out of a management team meeting feeling disappointed, flat; not excited, but can’t quite put your finger on why. Sure the usual personalities were there, the usual predictable behaviours and perspectives, but you know you can rise above that if there’s something really worth doing together, everyone’s working to their strengths, and the results are blowing you and your clients away.

It’s not that you were intentionally being negative or difficult. You actually wanted to be energised and inspired; to energise and inspire. But the usually effective process of reviewing progress and performance against the various KPIs, reviewing priorities then agreeing who, what and when for the next period somehow lacked life.

Ever felt like that? I have.

Maybe you’re tired and depressed by energy sapping stuff happening in the rest of your life. Maybe some wandering virus is having a go at you. Maybe you lost your sense of purpose. Maybe its just been a long hard year. Whatever, life seems to have gone out of work. It seems mechanical; a job.

Work’s like this for about 55% of the workforce (Marcus Buckingham): The Disengaged. They’d much rather be in high performing teams (if they could imagine what it’d be like). They and/or their managers may even be into the paraphernalia, tactics and techniques of “high performing teams”: but it’s just not sparking.

There’s a good chance that’s because the paraphernalia is little more than a set of managerial tools used mechanically and dutifully in the belief that tools magically transform disengaged workers into engaged ones; even into high performing teams.

I won’t work. Partly because “everyone knows” that these tools are just more management bullshit: for over a century managers have been using systems and structures to get things done as expected; "to control people and play on their fears; systems and processes that suppress rather than reveal and ignite the emotions that energise and inspire" (Steve Denning, see below); that achieve machine like predictability and reliability.

With a frog approach we would use those same tools differently. As the saying goes: it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. So instead of using the tools to increase predictability and mechanical reliability we could use them to delightfully surprise ourselves and our clients: to energise and inspire continual, iterative learning to delight; with each delight revealing new possibilities. Kiss the frog to get a transformation.

If you want the real oil on achieving such a radically different approach to management; such delightfully inspiring and energising workplaces and people, be sure to grab a copy of Steve Denning’s new book when it comes out around November 2010. I’ve had a peek. It’s good! Radical, with it’s roots in his previous work.

How to fix a “mental” organisation.

2009-12-12T12:44:00.004+13:00

It’s not that hard to understand how to transform a "mental" organisation (see Is your firm “mental”? Probably) into an engaged, innovative, exciting, satisfying one. But the evidence shows that it’s clearly hard to actually do it. Harder even than changing a golf swing.

That’s because its usually a manager who’s “fixing” the managed. Trying to “get buy-in”: to argue, sweet talk, trick or command the managed to change their “swing”: their dysfunctional habits. It doesn’t work! That manager behaviour is perhaps the main barrier to recovery. Recovery isn’t a “fix”. It’s a way of life (for managers particularly).

Leading edge practitioners and their fortunate patients in the field of mental health – recovery from psychiatric dysfunction - know this and have developed an effective approach to achieving recovery.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to “do recovery”. It’s “common sense”. Communities and ordinary people can do it. In deed, they are the ones who do it. Perhaps the biggest impediment to recovery in the mental health field is the “mental” organisations that practitioners and patients are obliged to inhabit and deal with and the pervasive “industrial” management assumptions and habits that “drive” those organisations.

In Is your firm “mental”? Probably and Organisational Therapy I observe that organisations are normally “mental” and point out how the Recovery Approach to treating psychiatric dysfunction can be adapted to treating “mental” organisations.

In It’s OK we’re not OK . . . . I address the 1st of the 14 facilitating environmental factors for recovery : “promoting accurate and positive portrayals of [interpersonal dysfunction]”:

I outline some simple group activities that initiate recovery process. The activities facilitate participants’ surfacing, recognising and discussing different interactive styles and the consequences of different styles, and then productively portraying them to transform interpersonal and organisational dysfunction into engagement, innovation and satisfaction.

Surprisingly perhaps, that simple set of activities (that teams intrinsically enjoy) actually address all the remaining 13 environmental factors too. Here they are again:

Focusing on strengths

Using language of hope and possibility

Developing and pursuing individually defined . . . . goals

Offering a range of “wellness strategies”, options for treatment, rehabilitation and support

Supporting risk-taking even when failure is a possibility

Actively involving [customers], family members, and other natural support in interventions planning and implementation

Providing individually-tailored services taking one’s culture and interests into consideration

Encouraging users participation in advocacy activities

Helping to develop connections with community

Systematically addressing illness-related factors that impede recovery

Promoting valued [organisational &] social roles, and interests

Enabling participation in meaningful activities

Building supportive relationships

Here’s the thing: that simple set of activities is just a beginning. The key to success is in the ongoing execution of the plan: rhythmic daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually meeting to share change stories, acknowledge contribution and celebrate success, identify blockages then review and agree who will do what tomorrow and through the week, month, quarter, and year to continue the progress; and review and agree how individual and team contribution and progress will be measured .

It’s OK we’re not OK . . . . . . .

2009-12-05T12:17:00.003+13:00

What a relief it’s OK that we’re not OK: to discover, experience and learn that we are deeply different from each other and that that’s OK; that it’s good that we perceive, interpret and react “the world” fundamentally differently; that mobilising those differences to achieve something good together, something we couldn’t do on our own, is deeply satisfying and miraculously effective.

I see this relief when a team realises that we are each ‘slack’ (de-energised) about some aspects of our work and ‘keen’ (energised) about other aspects; that that’s not only OK but excellent provided we recognise and get clear about those differences then make room where we can, for them to flourish and complement each other.

It’s not a competition to excel at everything, not a race to be the most OK, but a quest to learn together to continually delight others and ourselves by what we accomplish together.

This realisation can be powerfully achieved when team member’s together disclose their personality profiles and openly discuss how their attributes relate to the roles they play in the team.

I’ve found that a good way to kick-off this process is for the team to map members’ personality profiles on a big sheet of paper between them on a table. (Extended DISC profiles work very well).

Then share stories of personal attributes at play in their respective role behaviours, in what they enjoy and want to develop about those roles, and what they get nagged and badgered about. Relate this new awareness to the purpose, responsibilities and performance measures of their roles.

Next discuss what they could begin to change in their roles and behaviours to mitigate dysfunction within the team (Patrick Lencioni’s “Five Dysfunctions of a Team” are a useful framework here).

Finally agree a plan, beginning with who will do what tomorrow and through the week, month, quarter, and year. Be sure to also agree how progress and change will be measured and to commit to a meeting rhythm for review and sharing change-stories.

Organisational therapy

2009-12-04T23:15:00.003+13:00

Diversity in teams is arguably essential for innovation and change, but tends to be a nightmare for interpersonal relationships. Misunderstanding and conflict are probable, even desirable when diverse perspectives and personalities interact for change. You could say then, that teams and organisations of diverse individuals are probably intrinsically interpersonally dysfunctional: can never be truly “sane” but can, with support, be “high functioning”.

I used this mental health analogy in my post “Is your firm mental? Probably.” Though the concept was first published a year ago* I was reminded of it in a conversation with a client mental-health NGO about the possibility of offering organisational therapy service to firms wanting to generate high-performing teams.

To get a feel for the applicability of the recovery approach, consider the following list titled “Recovery as a process: Environmental factors facilitating recovery”*. Notice how, with a few minor [edits] to shift the tenor from psychiatric to interpersonal dysfunction, the list seems eerily familiar . . . . . . and applicable to treating interpersonal dysfunction in an organisation.

Promoting accurate and positive portrayals of [interpersonal dysfunction].
Focusing on strengths
Using language of hope and possibility
Developing and pursuing individually defined . . . . goals
Offering a range of “wellness strategies”, options for treatment, rehabilitation and support
Supporting risk-taking even when failure is a possibility
Actively involving [customers], family members, and other natural support in interventions planning and implementation
Providing individually-tailored services taking one’s culture and interests into consideration
Encouraging users participation in advocacy activities
Helping to develop connections with community
Systematically addressing illness-related factors that impede recovery
Promoting valued [organisational &] social roles, and interests
Enabling participation in meaningful activities
Building supportive relationships

* Tse, S. & Barnett S. Recovery Oriented Services. Clinical Management in Mental Health Services. December 2008. Blackwell: London. Figure 8.3. Recovery as a process and outcomes (adapted from: Mancini et al., 2005; O’Connell et al., 2005; Roe et al., 2007)

Is your firm “mental”? Probably.

2009-11-23T18:06:00.003+13:00

Have you ever noticed how dysfunctional relationships between the people in organisations commonly are?

Have you noticed the apparently endemic scheming, manipulating, back-biting, bullying, blaming and shaming, personality clashes and communication breakdowns? Have you ever felt angry or depressed about that? No? Then maybe you work in an exceptional organisation, or in splendid isolation, or you are on “happy pills”.

After “quite a few” years in corporate, institutional and business life I’ve come to the view that the average firm is “mental”; meaning it is dysfunctional: a psychologically unhealthy place to be.

Dysfunctionality isn’t OK but it is normal, so it’s what’s expected and tolerated. We can effectively deny it’s an issue until the competition pays attention to it and begins to overcome it. Then, if we are to survive, we too must seek to become a “high functioning organisation”.

Several years ago I got to work with academics and practitioners in the mental health sector and became acquainted with the Recovery Approach to individual and community mental health. Out of that interaction I co-wrote chapter 7 in Clinical Management in Mental Health Services. December 2008. Blackwell: London.

There Samson Tse and I outlined for mental health practitioners how they could relate and apply their clinical knowledge and methodology, the Recovery Approach, to their dysfunctional mental health service organisations.

When I recently began working with an NGO in the mental health sector this piece of work once again became prominent for me. So much so perhaps that when I was recently asked “What is your profession?” I replied, “Organisational Therapist”! The ensuing conversation inspired my previous blog post “What to do about bullying.”

Check out the Recovery Approach. You may find, as I have, that although it’s designed as a treatment for people who are ill, it’s broadly speaking an interpersonal-relationship and community-based way to keep people well and foster creativity, collaboration and engagement in shared purpose. That’s what contemporary organisations need to compete by continuous innovation in the world today.

What to do about workplace bullying

2009-11-16T13:53:00.001+13:00

The other day a prospective business-owner client asked me what to do about workplace bullying. My advice: act immediately to change the culture and isolate the bully. Bullies kill engagement, big time. They cost you heaps in diverted energy and focus and unnecessary staff turnover. They drive their victims, potentially your most promising people out, or mad, or both. Though they may seem competent and nice as pie they are typically operating well beyond their competence and their influence is effectively evil. You can’t fix a bully. They have to go. Here’s a strategy that works:

Start MBWA (Managing By Walking About)immediately .

Bullies thrive in bureaucratic hierarchies where they can control the flow of information both upward and downward. Bureaucratic hierarchies aren’t the preserve of large organisations. They are common in organisations of all sizes and kinds. Open up communication and loosen up the hierarchy by establishing direct, focused conversation with a range of individuals at different levels in the organisation. Share your knowledge with them. They’ll return the trust.

Establish purposeful responsibility.

Bullies manipulate roles and expectations to their personal advantage, typically to obscure their own incompetence. To counter that, execute a strategy to clarify the organisation’s values, purpose and long term goals. Within that framework, work with individuals and teams to clarify responsibilities, accountabilities and action priorities. Make them widely known (including yours).

Establish a widespread habit of regular, frequent meetings to openly discuss individual and team progress and blockages in executing those priorities. People thrive on shared purposeful responsibility plus frequent open discussion of progress foils a bully’s manipulative strategy. Expect the bully to resist and attempt to subvert this regular, open reflection and review process.

Isolate the bully.

Regular, frequent open review of progress on personal and team accountabilities will isolate the bully’s performance and break the bully’s hold on information flow. Better informed, other team members will become more bold, convincing and successful in their arguments and actions. The bully will become clearly and contrastingly less competent and isolated.

You may be surprised who the bully turns out to be. After all they’ve been making a career of ingratiating themselves with you: agreeing with you, bolstering your ego and maybe even dealing with a few of your tough HR issues, while creating an engagement-killing climate of fear and favour to isolate and silence their critics. Bullies are experts at hiding their incompetence and bad behaviour. Victim’s attempts to draw attention to the bullying will likely be cast by the bully as whinging justification for poor performance.

Openly confront the bully.

When you have plenty of solid evidence of the bully’s incompetence and lies, personally confront the bully. Be ready for angry denial and counter attack. They will attempt to bypass you and ingratiate themselves with a higher authority. The bully will be very reluctant to admit their bad behaviour and incompetence even to themselves, even though it is by now widely and openly known.

If the bully doesn’t leave on his/her own accord then you already have clear justification and support to dismiss them for unsatisfactory performance in their specific role.

FREEDOM = purposeful responsibility

2009-11-04T12:31:00.002+13:00

“People are unique. Combinations are even more unique. The successful companies tend [to] communicate and apply [“the 7 habits”] in unique manners that match their unique dreams and goals and strengths. That's when earth-shattering experiences are created, delivered, experienced.”

Zane Safrit makes this interesting observation in a RESULTS.com on Linkedin discussion about David G. Thomson’s Business Week article The Seven Essentials of High Growth Companies.

I add that not only are combinations of people unique but combinations of opportunities are too. The effects of these unique combinations are always more or less unexpected. Organisations that thrive on the unexpected are those that thrive today.

So perhaps it would be useful to consider how communicating the “7 habits” might enable organisations to encounter, recognise, take and profit from unexpected opportunities.

One quality that seems to pervade the “7 habits” is diversity of people at all levels in and around the organisation. Not just having the diversity but recognising it and utilising it within a unifying sense of cohesive purpose and shared vision. Effective interpersonal communication is the key to that.

At a practical level, I find that a major blockage in that communication process is the common sense that a job is a series of tasks. That’s an industrial concept founded in people as machine parts in a process. My role frequently includes helping people to re-conceive their job as a purposeful role in a collaborative project; a role defined by mutually interdependent responsibilities and indicative accountabilities rather than tasks. Almost invariably this is scary and confusing for them.

It’s rather like having been in prison for years then being released to “freedom” and unable to cope with the responsibility. It’s not that people don’t want responsibility or cannot be responsible. Responsibility is something that most people desire. Being given responsibility is an indication of trust, competency, standing, worth, esteem, regard.

Here’s the thing: people can’t re-conceive their jobs as roles by themselves any more that they can pull themselves up by their own boot laces. They need the help of an “outsider’s” perspective to generate the new imagery.

As the “outsider” I walk people through the process of defining their role in 120 words or less beginning with a fresh descriptive title, then the purpose of the role within the greater scheme; a summary responsibility in a sentence and up to five specific responsibilities; their overall accountability in a sentence and up to five specific indicative responsibilities with goals (KPIs).

Once they’ve described their own role with me I encourage them to attempt the process with their reports and so on. It’s got a high probability of being effective, purposeful interpersonal communication between unique individuals.

What are you racing for? Why?

2009-10-29T23:27:00.003+13:00

Last weekend we had perhaps the best Coastal Classic Yacht Race ever: fine, 20-28 knots SW; we averaged 7.3 knots peaking at 12.2 surfing the following sea towards the Hen and Chicks, dropping to zero at Cape Brett around midnight.

12.2 knots (22.5 km/hr) may seem kind of slow. But for a 29’ (8.8m) Wagstaff designed, GRP skinned timber sloop High Spirits, that’s a cracking pace with her gear loaded to the max: her gennaker sheet so tight it’s plinking at the winch like ukulele string; the helmsman pumping for 1.5 minute rides on following waves.

After dark, still doing 8 knots, cans of Red Bull keep us awake and slugs of Old Brown sherry straight from the bottle stave off the pre-dawn cold; the coastal skyline silhouetted by sickle moon in cloudless sky.

16 hrs 22 minutes without sleep to cover that 118 nm, finishing mid-fleet (16th) in Division 4; equivalent to 6th amongst our peers in Division 5.

At 4am, anchored and snacked, we fall asleep on the sails below in our full wet weather gear and boots, waking at 7 to thaw out in the morning sun.

Did we achieve our goal? Damn right we did. We pushed little High Spirits to her limits; adapting rapidly to the unexpected, without injury other than bruises, without damage other than a few near shredded lines, to achieve a respectable result amongst her peers.

Best of all, we were in it together relishing the feel of that little boat straining and surging in the stiff breeze, and silently slipping in light airs, finally savouring completion and sweet reunion with shore-crew partners and friends at beautiful Russell in the Bay of Islands.

Sailing & shore crews enjoy sunset BBQ at an early settler cottage Russell, Bay of Islands NZ

It was a race for friendship, courage, for companionship, collaboration and community; a race to live: a race against complacency, predictability, and the ordinary.

What are you racing for? Why?

The power of really being in it together

2009-10-19T13:59:00.001+13:00

Why would anyone choose the most uncomfortable sleepless way to travel?

I ought to know because that’s what I and maybe a thousand others are doing this weekend in the Coastal Classic (an overnight coastal sailboat race from Auckland to Russell in the Bay of Islands New Zealand).

I’m crewing on the precocious 29 foot sloop High Spirits. We’ll be awake for between 16 and 20 hours sailing hard all day and through the night, sleeping tethered on the rail to add our weight to windward.

The last couple of times I sailed this race on a 50 footer in three watches – actually slept in a bunk for four hours. Last year the weather was atrocious and half the fleet of a couple of hundred craft turned back. Everyone was seasick.

Nevertheless this year I turned down a berth of the 50 footer for more risk and more discomfort!

It just goes to show what some people will do for a challenge: together pitting themselves against the elements; the chance of winning (even with a tough handicap).

The crew have been sailing together all winter and invested in extra safety equipment and gear. We each have our roles and they overlap. We’re dependent on each other for our safety and for success.

Yet many business managers persistently assume that money is the main motivator and people do nothing unless pushed.

Never underestimate the human imperative to do good things together.

Wonky-shots and staplers of the mind

2009-10-11T16:39:00.001+13:00

Henry my architect friend, in exploring my iPhone camera, inadvertently captures two partially obscured, wonky images of himself. Then ‘working with what he got’ he abstracts the images with provocative effect.

It occurs to me that his using these “accidental” images is thinking entrepreneurially: trying out new things for unexpected effect. Then taking the effect to another level by imaginatively working with what he’s got.

This is so different to what's taught and assessed in schools: beginning with the specified result figure out causative chain that produced it; understand, document, standardise and learn it then organise a linear process to reliably replicate it.

The latter approach (linear causal thinking) is the world of the stapler, the folder and the file. For more on that try Your Stapler is Making Assumptions: about how the objects and designs around us represent and determine our logic.

In most of the business contexts that I work in, the stapler reigns. Especially amongst the educated. In contrast the entrepreneurs probably succeeded at being ejected from school: avoiding being conventionally schooled.

No wonder it’s so difficult to get employees to think like businesspeople: way more fundamental than “getting buy-in”. It’s about food for thought: a diet of wonky-shots instead of staplers for the mind.

That prompts a little spur-of-the-moment poem:

Staple diet.

I feel so much better

When I’ve followed to the letter

The procedures that I learned

At school

When the information

Is properly tabulated

The pages neatly stapled

And filed

When I’ve aligned my goals

With my grandest aspirations

Stapled them in A3 to

The wall

Then all I need’s a job

With the incumbent tasks prescribed

And a clear secure route to

The top.

Learn fast: things aren’t (ever) returning to “normal”.

2009-10-04T21:25:00.001+13:00

New Zealand business managers and educators have got to transform their thinking and practice or NZ can say goodbye to “high” living standards: already down to 23^rd in the OECD and in imminent danger of being overtaken by Czechoslovakia.

That was the main message I took from National Bank (NZ) Chief Economist Cameron Bagrey’s lunchtime address last Tuesday to the national conference of New Zealand Applied Business educators. They’re tertiary (but not university) educators on undergraduate Applied Business diploma and Applied Business degree programmes. I sneaked in on the coattails of my wife Sandra Barnett, an innovator and author in Applied Business education (Communication).

Bagrey confessed he’s embarrassed that his profession’s consistently got it wrong: failed to predict the current recession and doesn’t have a clue how to fix.

He says only one thing’s for certain: we can’t go back to the way it was. Anyone who thinks that things will return to “normal” is stupid. The policy makers are determined it won’t; determined we figure out new ways to do, manage and teach business and the economy. Previous answers are wrong.

He didn’t have new answers except to say that boiled down, it’s the responsibility of individuals to generate and implement new ways. He didn’t have any special advice for business educators.

I agree with Bagrey that the solution lies with individuals, though I add: individuals in collaboration not isolation, generating and learning new ways together.

I seriously doubt NZ Business Education can change from its prescriptive right-answer model any time soon, hobbled as it is by administrators and their anti-professional, centralised rules and controls, and know-no-better student and employer market.

I’m sceptical too that NZ business managers can abandon their manager-knows-best, right-answer approach any time soon: go deeper than recite the superficial lists of “secrets” peddled in popular business management literature.

Actually the answers have been there for more than 20 years (e.g. Drucker and Senge), effectively ignored: except perhaps in Business student essays and Management band-aids, quick fixes, and fads.

Here’s the guts: (really) involve everyone; confess ignorance (starting at the top); spend time together generating a long term goal that everyone’s passionate about but not sure how to achieve; get very clear on the medium term strategy and short term goals that stand to take you towards the long term; openly generate and agree clear individual and collective accountabilities in achieving the change; openly measure progress to keep individuals and groups (at all levels) openly accountable for their contribution; continually review and revise in the light of individual and collective experience; take every opportunity to talk about the long term goal and the actual action and progress towards it.

And another thing: get long-term (2 yr) outside help from experienced change execution specialists. Be sure that they too are accountable for progress.

Will provincial values count in the new virtual community?

2009-09-20T13:31:00.005+12:00

In provincial New Zealand markets, provincial brand still carries weight . Will the new social media erode or reinforce that differentiator?

I’m a country boy – New Zealand “cow cocky” stock: breaking in the land. Genuine folk – what you saw was what you got. It had to be that way, struggling together; #8 wire, good-enough, ingenuity and resourcefulness.

That’s the roots of provincial New Zealand; still relevant in provincial commerce today where folks have probably become more suspicious and wary of increasingly individualistic “big-city” folks.

For example, a provincial professional firm (my client) recently negotiated to acquire a business in Wellington. Although the capital city of New Zealand, Wellington has many characteristics of a provincial town. Being clearly provincial contributed to my client winning preferred purchaser status and to acceptance by existing staff.

Here’s a prediction: the new social media will magnify the “provincial” brand differentiators because despite the apparent anonymity of the web the new social media, like village community anywhere, lives on genuineness and authenticity: deep interpersonal connection and reputation.

I reckon my provincial clients can do well in this new environment, and they are. Although it may become virtual, “local” will still be the web of relationships between people who are well known to, in continual contact with, and of value to each other, one way or another.

Bad news for the fakes, cons, bullies and manipulators. So watch out for identity theft. Your identity, in the broadest, deepest sense may be even more valuable than now. What will your identity be? Who are you and what will you be?

Brings to mind Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes who’s in a rush to catch the next boat to Paris:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
William Shakespeare. Hamlet Act 1, scene 3, 78–82

Polonius has in mind something much more Elizabethan than the New Age self-knowledge that the phrase now suggests. (Macrone, Michael. "To thine own self be true." Brush Up Your Shakespeare. Cader Company, 1990. eNotes.com. 2007. 19 Sep, 2009)

Goals for Change

2009-09-17T20:48:00.002+12:00

Sign of the times?: Missed achieving the quarterly goals again. Individuals’ performance on supporting actions weak again?

The goal’s good – revenue; profit; prospects in sales pipeline. The supporting priority actions are logical.

So what’s wrong? Lack of focus? Lack of accountability? Lack of leadership? Unrealistic goals? Lack of buy-in?

Could have been any or all of those. Or it could be that the world’s changed and the assumptions that used to apply, the relationships that used to work, the habits that used to be effective aren’t/don’t any more.

The reflex response is typically to increase the focus and accountability; increase “buy-in” by consultation; do it harder! WRONG.

If your firm’s past the 1st flush of pioneer passion and settled into routine with a dollop of cynicism born of frustrated aspirations and broken promises, and on top of that the world has changed, doing it harder won’t work.

It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it: you have to change the way you do it; do things in new, unfamiliar ways that feel as strange as a new golf swing. How do you achieve that when you don’t have a clue what those new ways feel like!? Even understanding those new ways won’t do it. You have to know them (deeply)

You need to experience new ways of behaving; to surface and examine assumptions; to develop and experience new ways of interrelating and repeat them until they are new habits.

It’s not buy-in you need, its engagement.You need a change-project: NOT simply a sequence of agreed tasks with time/quality/cost KPIs. You need a project where the learning is achieved by the whole team; to together develop and practice new ways of achieving those same simple goals.

You need a project with scope that’s wide enough to provide real, strength-fitting action for each team member and a compelling shared purpose that increases your capability to adapt to change and achieve your simple goals at the same time.

If it feels strange then you’re probably on the right track. Most managers, including project managers have never experienced an organisational change project. That’s OK. Don’t pretend. Bullshit kills learning.

Business Friday: Grand Brand Bang.

2009-09-11T16:53:00.002+12:00

Instead of dressing down on Fridays the creatives at a large successful advertising agency amuse themselves by dressing up and behaving as Business people: they call it Business Friday. An essential element of Business Friday is PowerPoint presentations with bullets, words flying in, fades, sound effects: the whole palaver.

It’s true! PowerPoint is absurd Business uniform!

Since I last blogged, conversation streams about Brand; Ideas that Stick; and Targeting the Message were brought into comic relief by a single PowerPointed seminar failure.

Mark Gallagher’s compilation “Brand is . . . .”

Verne Harnish quoting his Uncle Wally and Chip Heath on Ideas That Stick.

Stephen Lynch quoting Bob Eckert, featured in Fortune magazine, on Targeting the Message.

The seminar, about business planning and implementation, packaged in PowerPoint to standardise delivery in various locations by various presenters, was a tool for building relationships with prospective clients to help sell professional service.

This particular seminar failed because the ideas that stuck - the impression communicated were predominantly though not overwhelmingly negative. It failed to achieve purpose. Yet the seminar had worked fine for the guy who produced the slides.

I’d experienced similar failed attempts to control seminar quality while teaching General Management at the University of Auckland: the course, part of a new innovative degree in Business and Information Management, was delivered on 3 different campuses. The course seminars were packaged as PowerPoint presentations and printed copies of the slides were included in course-books for students.

The presenters and students believed that the knowledge was the PowerPoint slides: linear, hierarchical, shallow, un-provocative, boring. Learning was stumped not stimulated. Read Edward Tufte The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (now in 2^nd edition) to learn how PowerPoint regiments and limits thought, kills presentations and stops learning.

The thing is, content doesn’t make a seminar and regimenting content, especially by PowerPoint, reduces seminar quality. The message, which is bigger than the content, and hence the brand is blunted and distorted by the medium. It becomes Business-like, boring, uniform, more of the same.

Jack Daly doesn’t use PowerPoint in his seminars. People complain about Tom Peters’ slides because they can’t understand them: nothing boring, uniform about those guys.

Never be upstaged by your slides or your other props.

Social media: hype or hope?

2009-08-31T08:06:00.002+12:00

Call me slow but I’m kind of puzzled by the hype, especially in marketing circles, around “social media”. A provocative discussion “Does social media work, or is it just a time drain?” (in RESULTS.com group on LinkedIn) got me thinking.

To me FaceBook was like just another step along from email, group discussion forums, and Chat rooms: another way to “stay in touch”; a new place for conversation; a place to exchange ideas, think, express, be, grow, get to know, belong, hang-out; a place with Face; a place for community in a world of failing community, disconnection and alienation.

So it didn’t surprise me that people found it and began using it; that the more who found it, the more wanted to find it, intrigued, not wanting to miss out; that it became the place to be, to be seen - a global fashion phenomenon. Most seem to use it to talk to people they personally know; to make friends through people they know; to engage; to belong, be useful, known, valued; to be.

“Social media” is kind of like the new grapevine and village meeting place rolled into one – the new virtual market square of community “on speed”: community apparently offering new scope to be; for new beyond-the-village identity. No wonder people are flocking there.

But fundamentally we’re village people and the commerce of the market square is natural, integral to our community. So why the hype and hoopla? Seems to maybe come from folks who want to make a quid as experts on the new market square; to somehow claim it for their own.

For all that, it’s about people, relationships, and trust. The communication rules haven’t changed, though literacy is an advantage in what’s currently still mainly textual media. Old skills really, maybe needing a little reinterpretation and a lot of re-learning.

In my work I’ve found that people who for whatever reason aren’t confident at talking with others, prefer a textual medium. It gives them time to digest what’s been said, to compose a response. And the internet has an added power-levelling effect: as an English-as-second-language student once said of me, “When Steve enters the chat room he gives up his power.”

It levels the playing field and they get to try being themselves, to communicate with new others. Pretty soon they are demanding to speak, to know who they’re talking to, and be known; demanding order in the chaos of random conversation.

It’s my hope that beyond the hype and hoopla, with winnowing of wheat from the chaff, the new social media will help release and connect diverse talent; help release entrepreneurial spirit from the psychic prison (Gareth Morgan. 1986. Images of Organization) of conventional organisation.

PS I’m a mature extrovert: a Rational Inventor (Myers Briggs); an Influencer (EDISC)

Can you get knowledge off the web?

2009-08-29T11:28:00.003+12:00

It’s really cool living the communication media revolution: no packaged answers. Experimenting is everything. Good for entrepreneurs. Not so good for causal thinkers (the rest).

Information’s free - heaps of it. Some enlightened universities even publish their courses free on the web. So, indeed, why physically attend a university to get knowledge when information’s free online?

Because information isn’t knowledge, that’s why. It’s just “stuff” until a person or people make sense of it for and between themselves. The most effective way to communicate knowledge; to transfer it between people, is interactively. (The universities spent a fortune on failed “distance learning” over the last decade or so to begin to realise that.)

An organisation’s knowledge exists in the web of relationships between its people not in the nodes ( the hard drives and experts). It is evident in interpersonal behaviour. It exists as organisational knowledge only in as much as it is communicated.

Learning is a complex interactive process. Rich interaction produces deep (behaviour changing) learning. Rich organisational knowledge exists and develops in rich interrelationships.

So what can we learn over the internet? What organisational knowledge can exist in the internet? Answer: it depends on the richness and depth of interrelationship.

I don’t know about you but for me nothing beats real person 2 person communication on that score. And whatever virtual communication medium best approximates P2P is the next best thing.

So until the internet can fully reproduce a meeting virtually, I’ll go to university, fly to conferences, visit my clients, go home to my wife and kids, go to church, go out to the pub, the theatre and to parties.

In between those real meetings I’ll maintain conversation by phone, Skype, email, blog, LinkedIn, FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, whatever. But I’ll go easy on it and try to make my communication relevant and meaningful to my connections or they’ll get sick of my intrusions and I’ll get sick of theirs.

How am I doing? How are you doing? How rich is your personal and organisational communication? Are you leading learning?

A Tasteful Fable of Leading Change

2009-08-22T13:36:00.003+12:00

Thanks to the leadership of Penfolds employee Max Schubert, Penfolds Grange survived for me and my wine-aficionado friends to taste the 20 year old 1989 vintage last week, along with seven other reputable 6-11 yr old South Australian reds.

Even though 1989 wasn’t an exceptional year for Grange, and this bottle had been cellared roughly, the wine had all the colour and fruit of its youth plus the richness and subtlety of advancing age. The younger (1998-99) worthy competitors in the line-up had, comparatively prematurely, lost their youthful qualities.

What do they do at Grange, I wonder, that gives their wine such outstanding, durable qualities?

Clearly there is more to it than a recipe; more than process control; more than operations management. There is a long established culture of leadership that survived the machinations of Management.

Grange was born of the vision, passion, skill, and persistence of an employee of Penfolds wines: winemaker Max Schubert. A bottle of his original vintage sold at auction in 2004 for just over A$50,000. However back in the 50’s, when Aussies thought wine was port or sherry, this powerful still wine was panned by the wine critics and in 1957 Penfolds management forbid Schubert from producing it.

But Schubert persisted in secret through 1959 and as the initial vintages aged, their true value came to be appreciated. In 1960 the management instructed Schubert to re-start production, oblivious to the fact that he had not missed a vintage.

Unlike most expensive Old World wines, which are from single vineyards or even blocks within vineyards, Grange is made from grapes harvested over a wide area. Yet despite the vagaries of grape sourcing and vintage variation due to growing conditions, there is arguably a consistent and recognisable "Penfolds Grange" style and quality.

The renowned Penfolds Grange brand is the result of Max Shubert’s passionate, visionary and persistent leadership as an employee.

This story brings to my mind Peter Senge’s comments in The Dance of Change (p. 15):

“In business today, the word “leader” has become synonymous for top manager. . . . Those who are not in top management positions . . . . . . don’t become leaders until they reach a senior management position of authority.”

Senge’s links this view of leadership to change-failure. He prefers to view leadership as:

“the capacity of a human community to shape its future, and specifically to sustain the significant processes of change required to do so.”

Max Shubert was clearly a leader in the Penfolds community.

Reference for history of Penfolds Grange: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penfolds_Grange 22-08-2009

Sugar Party Hangover

2009-08-16T08:57:00.003+12:00

I’ve had it with the barrage of packaged advice from business gurus, icons and stars – axioms and aphorisms on how to be successful: summary lists that pretend to make simple the complexities of human collaboration. It clearly sells business books, newspapers, seminars and fills the e-waves. But to little tangible effect that I’ve seen.

It’s not that the advice is bad. It’s more the way it’s communicated and consumed like candy for sugar hungry kid’s at a party: a lolly scramble, a sugar rush, a burst of high excitement, energy and frantic bonhomie, then back to normal.

The main learning’s how to scramble to win the most lollies; that the most lollies equals the most fun.

This was highlighted for me over the last couple of weeks beginning with a whole day of Jack Daly, the sales phenomenon extraordinaire (see my last week’s blog ). Then there was my colleague Stephen Lynch’s RESULTS.com Business Growth Tip summarising New York Times 4th April “Corner Office” interview with John Donahoe, president and chief executive of eBay .

For me the key learning to be had from Jack Daly and John Donahoe isn’t in how they made themselves successful but in how others enabled them to be successful and how they in turn enabled others.

For instance, half of jack Daly’s seminar was about how to create a climate in which others can excel.

The main theme of John Donahoe’s reflection and the key to his leadership is what he communicates and the way he communicates it so that others can learn, and how he learned to do that.

He says that feedback from six monthly performance reviews was powerfully effective in his formation and development. He espouses and practices candid communication. He enables people to discover and play to their strengths and passions.

Jack and John didn’t make themselves, overnight. They didn’t just swallow the magic lollies that their audiences crave. Sure, they had a big hand in their own development but they were hugely fortunate to have wise others who guided, enabled and facilitated that slow learning process.

John Donahoe recalls that every six months or so he’d get a rigorous performance review (in latter years 20 pages thick) that included everything he could possibly do better. He came to regard the feedback as liberating; a gift, and wasn’t afraid of it.

He found that a third of the feedback would be no surprise: for his long-term attention and change - still an issue the next year and the year after.

A third of it would be insight into his blind spots for himself and others – new awareness of areas for change .

A third of it he would ignore ignore and keep doing what he wanted to do.

From that experience he learned to “try to do the same for the people around me, and give them open, objective feedback offered in a constructive way.”

The focus here is on manager/leader communication behaviour. There is no magic pill. These guys learned to communicate the hard way. Yet how many firms who heard Tom Peters’ fervent exhortation six months ago in Auckland to implement communication training, if nothing else, have done that? I’ll wager <3%. The audience craved sugar pills.

Got culture?

2009-08-09T09:56:00.001+12:00

How does your culture smell? Honestly. Is your culture able to change? Do you have the radical transparency needed to change: to produce high performing sales teams, production teams, design teams, management teams . . . . . . . or are you still stuck in the age of bullsh*t; still demanding engagement.

Last week I spent a day at a seminar by the super sales guy Jack Daly: story teller, successful ironman, richman, golfer, husband, grandfather, not-gardener. Jack super energetically dealt with “how to sell more” then he (just as energetically but more seriously) got down to “how to get others to sell more”. His focus was “culture”.

Jack quoted John Kotter’s (Corporate Culture and Performance. 1992) 10 yr study of 12 firms showing the massive difference in revenue, stock price, net income and job growth that attention to culture produces.

As Jack observes culture normally gets overlooked in the usual business rush because it’s not urgent. I’d add that it’s also because managers and the managed are typically blind to culture and anyway, culture change is too slow to achieve inside an annual plan.

Every organisation has a culture. Even a new organisation has one. It came with the people who joined the organisation. Culture is unconscious reflex assumptions, beliefs and attitudes. Culture is self-sealing. What we see and experience tends to confirm what we already “know”: our assumptions, beliefs and attitudes.

How hard is it to change culture? Consider changing the culture of Samoa for instance. Well the early Christian missionaries did it. It took a magnetic, compelling vision; the right people in the right place; and their collective purpose and conviction (strong organisational culture): their passion to make a particular difference.

The aftermath of a crisis is a great opportunity to initiate a culture change. The window doesn’t last long (see The emperor has no clothes). It’s not long before people shut up because they “know what’s good for them”(see Learning for change feels risky). If you don’t have a crisis, then create one to engender a sense of urgency (John Kotter. A Sense of Urgency. 2008).

Mindful simplification

2009-07-31T13:40:00.002+12:00

Today on Radio New Zealand National Sir Howard Davies, Director of the London School of Economics was asked “How do we recover from the recession?” Especially interesting to me was that he pointed to the blindness (astounding in hindsight) of banks and government advisors that got us into it. They were blind because they didn’t see the signals of impending “brutal audit”. Their KPIs effectively blinkered their vision.

I see this happening to one degree or another in pretty much every organisation I’ve owned, worked for or worked with.

I’m very critical of many KPI/performance measurement systems because they frequently erode collaboration, promote and perpetuate bad management behaviour, and blinker perception. On the other hand I’m also an enthusiast for intimacy with valid, relevant data.

I’m am enthusiast for simplification for focused action. On the other hand I’m also very critical of mindless compliance and groupthink that’s frequently the consequence of simplistic analysis, rules, procedures, and expectations.

Not surprisingly perhaps, some find it hard to figure “whose side I’m on”.

I’m an Edwards-Deming fan (kind of like being a member of a dead poets’ society). Deming’s lifelong passion was collaboration to achieve quality. Not in a fuzzy, feel-good sense but in a logical, objective sense: informed by valid, relevant data. A statistician, he understood how quality is determined by systems of thought, practice and organisation. Not individuals. He was very successful in Japan. His countrymen in USA have been very slow learners.

KPI systems are inevitably simplistic and biased: a selective abstract of reality based on a particular set of assumptions. So they inevitably distort or leave out potentially crucial aspects of complex reality.

The problem is how to collectively commit to a set of goals and performance measures yet remain mindful that that very commitment will blinker us to potentially crucial information.

This may not matter much in a predictable environment. But in an uncertain, fast-changing environment its a big issue. That’s because fast adaptation and innovation are triggered and driven by information from outside our normal frame of reference – our established KPIs.

Nimble organisations maintain clear purpose and operate simple strategies to achieve that, continually reviewing their KPIs for validity and relevance to that purpose. Statistically significant exceptions and failures are seized as opportunities for learning. Mindful, collaborative experimentation is a valued source of innovation.

The Emperor Has No Clothes!

2009-07-27T08:30:00.004+12:00

This last week, while I experimented at applying my reading of Weick and Sutcliffe’s Managing the Unexpected to my own current organisational experiences, Steve Denning surprised and impressed me with his piece: Radical transparency vs The age of bullsh*t . He damns Management, as epitomised by the career behaviours of recently late Robert McNamara, with causing the current recession.

Coming on top of the similarly critical series of articles in the June HBR (mentioned in my blog last week) it was like a triple whammy.

What sprang to mind for me was Weick and Sutcliffe’s quote from Charles O’Reilly’s 1989 California Management Review article “Corporations, Culture , and Commitment” :

In the chaos of the battlefield there is a tendency of all ranks to combine and recast the story of their achievements into a shape which will satisfy the susceptibilities of national and regimental vain-glory . . . . . On the actual day of battle naked truths may be picked up for the asking. But by the following morning they have already begun to get into their uniforms.

Denning’s piece seems to me like a naked truth, spoken in the wake of battle.

Half expecting some to be clothing that truth already, I hasten to point out that this isn’t a cloth-cap Marxist rant against Management. I’m not arguing against management (small m) and I don’t think any of the writers mentioned here are. The argument is against a set of pervasive assumptions about how organisations should be managed: against the “ism” managerialism.

For instance, though I may rant and rail against stupidly simplistic (mindless) obsession with goals and KPIs, I am a passionate advocate for mindful, statistically sound use of valid, reliable objective and subjective data in controlling operations. I’m firmly with Edwards-Deming on that.

The argument is that we must seize this opportunity to learn from what Weick and Sutcliffe would call the “brutal audit “ of the last year. We must seize this opportunity to learn to be sensitive to signals of impending failure that contradict our convenient, simplistic assumptions about cause–and-effect and relevance. We must learn to incorporate that mindfulness into our organisational infrastructure.

I reckon that perhaps the best place to pick up and act on those naked truths is in entrepreneur owned and led, small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). There the boss is more able, more likely to engage directly with high performing teams in a marriage of strategic simplicity and operational complexity through radically transparent interrelationships.

If you want a how-to list on recognising and picking up those naked truths then take the above link to Steve Denning’s article. Don’t expect bullet points. He’s into stories.

Keep it complex stupid!

2009-07-15T22:20:00.004+12:00

I just returned from a brief break in a quiet corner (Naqalia Lodge) of Waya Lailai island in the Yasawa islands, Fiji. Expecting to do a little reading I took Weick and Sutcliffe’s Managing the Unexpected 2nd edition (2007) with me.

Serendipitously the June HBR caught my eye in the airport bookstore (along with The New Scientist and Scientific American). HBR’s June focus was Rebuilding Trust. I was interested that interpersonal communication was the key common element.

O’Toole and Bennis argue that “What’s Needed Next [is] A Culture of Candour”, arguing that “we won’t be able to rebuild trust in institutions until leaders learn how to communicate honestly – and create organizations where that’s the norm”.

Then I got into my hammock with Weick and Sutcliffe.

After I adjusted of their denser writing style, I appreciated the depth and complexity compared to the popular HBR style. When I finished I enjoyed the new cohering sense it gave to the HBR articles about building trust, not trusting too much, achieving innovation, being a good boss, and the deep failure of business schools.

Interestingly, between the 2001 1st edition and the 2007 2nd edition the subtitle changed from “Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity” to “Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty” reflecting the continuing Richter 5+ seismic shifts in organisational environment. What’s impressive is that their thesis seems more powerful in the light of recent events.

Of course Weick and Sutcliffe write about communication too but unlike the HBR articles they have room to go beyond description and exhortation to update and further demonstrate their 2001 thesis about mindful action.

They provide excellent argument against fashionable simplification, focus and strategising being the ways to achieve success in this day and age. This is particularly true for businesses operating complex technical systems in dynamic, ambiguous contexts. They argue for mindful infrastructure. They contrast this with mindless infrastructure, which typically attends to success, simplicities, strategy, planning and status. They argue very convincingly that attention to success confirms the status quo; simplification rules out crucial information and diverse perspectives; attention to strategy and planning ignores operational reality and attention to status erodes and ignores expertise.

They argue that the keys to success today are attention to failure, context, operations, resilience, and expertise. They recommend managers lead change by opportunistically demonstrating changed communication behaviour: candidly reporting and discussing failure; including and rewarding diverse perspectives; being intimate with actual operational experience rather than ideas and generalisations; pushing analysis and decision-making downwards; deferring to expertise (which exists between people) not authority, so that others can begin to see what mindful work looks and feels like. Out of that experience emerges changed values, attitudes, and beliefs – changed culture.

Very convincing. Though I guess that one reason I find it so is because it confirms my own analyses and makes useful sense of my own experience in and with organisations over that last decade or so.

I can see this providing me with a rich resource for thought, analysis, action and blogging . . . . . . .

You can’t demand engagement, only court it.

2009-07-05T16:57:00.001+12:00

A tweet and email from my RESULTS.com colleague Stephen Lynch about a 26 June article in Forbes on employee engagement triggered this post. The story’s about Douglas Conant turning Campbell Soup Co around by engaging the employees!

Successfully turning the organisation around is news in itself, but it’s the way he did it that grabs me. He did it by seeking engagement, not alignment! Maybe this means that “engagement” is superseding “alignment”. Alleluia!

To me it’s no surprise that Conant’s engagement-focused leadership achieved amazing results. What particularly interests me is that he apparently had to get rid of 300 out of 350 Campbell’s managers to do it. I wonder why?

My guess is that that was the quickest way to interrupt the established patterns of communication: to create room for changed organisational communication. That would generate enough organisational uncertainty and anxiety for the long-believed unspeakable to be spoken and heard; for people to discover that their opinions matter and for them to experience, perhaps for the 1^st time ever, the spirit of doing good things together– to experience release from the psychic prison of defensive manipulation.

But what’s the difference between Conant’s approach and conventional restructuring, which almost always fails to improve productivity? Was he just a lucky bastard? Or is there magic in this engagement thing?

I reckon there’s much more to it than luck. I reckon that Conant somehow had the sense to break the Managerial spell to free employees to begin to figure out together how to do Campbell Soup Co better. I reckon he had faith that Campbell’s employees could do great things together if only they could get a chance to begin to really experience collaboration.

That contrasts with most restructures which are effectively exercises in defensive manipulation based on the assumption that, if allowed, employees will hijack any freedom for their selfish, ignorant, if not downright destructive purposes. Managers know this from hard-won experience of trying to get inevitably reluctant employees to do what managers want (know best). Result: “plus la change” (more of the same).

Actual organisational change begins in crisis so if there is no crisis, create one. Then it’s not so much what you do with the crisis, but the way that you do it.

Conant restructured, but the way that he did it was inspired. Effectively his purpose in restructuring and in the attendant uncertainty was to enable new communication, new interrelationships, and attendant insight. In short: engagement. You can’t demand engagement - only court it.

Marcus Buckingham gave “engagement” wings with the Gallup research that defined it and identified 12 reliable indicators and drivers of it. That led Buckingham on to his work in strengths-focused education and management: the complete opposite of conventional weakness-focused education and management.

To gauge whether your organisation is engaging or not ask your employees to rate these 12 statements (1, low – 5, high). If the mean score is better than 4 you’re getting close.

Bullet points kill learning for change

2009-06-27T09:42:00.003+12:00

Glowing, PowerPoint-projected in light-dimmed rooms, bullet-point-prompts cue presenters to elaborate with yet more bullet points. Bullet points dominate executive presentations and university lectures. Executives, managers, the managed and students insist on them, make decisions based on them, and demonstrate knowledge by repeating them.

Bullet points have come to represent knowledge laid bare: high impact: stripped of the flannel and waffle; complexity distilled; quick, no-nonsense, unequivocal, definitive; knowledge in a second; the preferred “learning style” of many managers and their managed.

But a bullet point is a summary: a skeletally brief abstract; often cliché or jargon; (wrongly) assumed to effectively represent (communicate) complex intellectual and emotional meaning forged in the messy dynamics of interactive conversation, discussion and debate.

There’s slim chance of those few words effectively communicating rich new meaning to anyone who wasn’t part of the formative interactive process; slim chance that those bullets will effectively communicate any more than trivial, mechanical or mundane meaning, even to the in-crowd.

There’s even less chance of achieving richly shared meaning if the meaning is new: outside or on the edges of the experience of the listener. Bullet points reinforce groupthink.

To a story teller, a bullet point is a symbol of the meaning of the process that conceived it: the candid discussion, debate, conversation and winnowing that produced a consensus. A consensus based on the shared understanding of what was left out and what was given prominence; of what’s behind the brief words: the story they represent.

That story must be told. Told well, with passion; capturing of the tension and relief, sadness and elation, conflict and reconciliation of its conception.

Without that story, the bullet point could mean almost anything. Like: “They don’t listen.” “My opinions don’t count.” “That’s simple.” “That’s right.” “I won.” “I lost.” “Yeah, right!” “I know.” “This is great.” “This is crap.” “This is so profound” “This is inane.” “Blah, blah.” “More slogans” “In a nutshell.”

Effective communication creates shared meaning. Bullet points are at least very unreliable at that especially if the meaning is new as it inevitably is in learning for organisational change.

What a difference a place makes

2009-06-23T12:17:00.004+12:00

Last weekend I was in a team of seven, leading a weekend retreat of around 40 guys. It was an inspirational weekend of new, deeper friendships, insight and change. The place was ‘magic’.

It took five months of part-time robust communication for the leading team to co-generate a plan for the weekend: a deeply shared concept of purpose and process. During that time we got to know each other quite well. We prepared deeply but held our plans lightly, ready to follow unexpected opportunities. There were plenty.

The place we chose for the retreat was deliberately remote: a coastal wilderness - only 42km from downtown Auckland but separated from the city by rugged bush-covered hills penetrated by the narrow hill-clinging gravel road that ends at the lodge in earshot of the black sanded wilderness west coast surf.

Clustered insignificantly in a corner of a vast expanse of dune and marsh, beneath high conglomerate-rock remnants of an ancient, massive caldera rim – are the historic wooden buildings that are the lodge. They once housed an early settler timber milling family and workers as they stripped the land of its mighty coastal forests (now regenerated somewhat). The spaces are basic living spaces, wilderness spaces, and ocean spaces.

Twice before I’d stayed at the lodge and been amazed at the depth, breadth and openness of conversation that the place seemed to produce. This weekend was no exception.

The place itself breaks the rules, breaks down the walls: presents new possibilities, new perspectives within architecture and landscape that are both disturbing and comforting, both challenging and confirming, intimate and lonely. People have to figure afresh how to relate. Out of that come new conversations, insight and change.

We can easily overlook the pervasive determining influence of the meeting place. Its nature and design can deeply determine the results: hinder or help learning and change. University lecture theatres, conventional classrooms, and similar spaces evoke assumptions, behaviours and expectations that are good for achieving compliance and qualifications but counter-productive for organisational learning and change: counterproductive for experiencing and learning new ways of interrelating; of transformed, more effective organisational relationships.

What’s your place good for? What are you trying to achieve?

Leading learning for change feels risky.

2009-06-14T16:45:00.005+12:00

You may understand, even know how destructive defensive communication (blaming, shaming and justifying) is for learning to behave differently as an organisation. If you do and you’re an enlightened manager, you may exhort others to cease blaming, shaming and justifying; to express perspectives openly; to have the courage to tell the truth as they see it. But that doesn’t work.

Someone, a leader, has to noticeably; outrageously do it: dare to openly speak the unspoken, discuss the un-discussable; be deliberately, robustly candid; and genuinely encourage others to be the same by actively listening and acknowledging their perspectives.

Usually this doesn’t happen until there’s some sort of crisis: the stock answers and standard procedures clearly aren’t effective; apparently no-one really knows. Then individuals are more likely to speak out. And they are more likely to be heard.

Last week, for perhaps the 1st time in several years, I dared do it in my “own” organisation: the one that’s my main employer. Believe me; it’s very different from advising or coaching someone else to do it, or doing it in someone else’s organisation.

It was with some trepidation that I published my frustration at a recent incident. Once I’d published in the group discussion forum there was nothing I could do to influence the response. I had given away control. That’s scary! I waited anxiously.

I suspected that some would be pleased I’d spoken; some would take it as personal criticism; some would wonder what I was trying to say and some would think I was an idiot.

I guessed that some would respond to me privately; a few publically, but that most, if they responded at all, would limit their response to off-line private conversations within their various groups.

At one point after some personal off-line response from senior managers, I was considering killing the initiative. But it was too late. The “cat was out of the bag and amongst the pigeons”.

On reflection I remembered my purpose and my previous experiences and observations of how the best learning opportunities can be found in critical incidents and the heightened emotions that follow; when norms are disturbed; when individuals are perturbed.

So I girded my loins and continued with my communication strategy. I framed my frustration as the opening phase of a story: the brutal facts; the bad news. Then I painted the vision: the glorious envisaged future. Finally I pointed to our strengths and opportunities and proposed my strategy to get there: by risking open communication; speaking the unspoken, discussing the un-discussable; participating in robust, candid conversations about the guts of what we do.

I used our real-time actual shared experience as the basis for learning and change; I risked open communication; I encouraged others to candidly contribute their perspectives and acknowledged them when they did. I’ll look for more opportunities to continue the story, new incidents, new feedback, and new perspectives.

That, in my knowledge and experience is leading learning for change.

It’s all about interpersonal and organisational communication

2009-06-05T15:06:00.005+12:00

Have you read any of Steve Denning’s books? More particularly are you following his latest campaign towards his forthcoming book on High Performance Teams? I bought and read his previous most recent book The Secret Language of Leadership. I have to say the word “secret” in the title put me off, but it sells books. . . . . . .

I’m drawn to Denning because of his communication-based perspective on leadership and change. I don’t think he has all the answers though he perhaps pretends to because that’s what the Business book market wants.

To me it’s the communication angle that’s the key. Denning’s big thing is deliberate, designed story telling. I have coached clients in his basic story telling process and they almost always find that it’s very effective. I use it myself with success.

I like Denning’s confronting conventional Management wisdom such as when he states outright that Richard Hackman is wrong in asserting (in a May 2009 HBR interview) that leaders can’t guarantee to produce a high performance team. Denning admits that it’s hard and a radically different way of acting from the way most organizations are run today. Interactive communication is an essential ingredient and so is not-Management.

He sums up “[It’s about] creating exhilaration in the workplace, igniting lots of shining eyes and delight, and in the end inspiring people to reinvent themselves. Because of the results it is producing, a radical new way of managing work is emerging. It involves a different way of thinking about work, a different way of managing work, and a different way of participating in work. It isn’t a quick fix. It isn’t an incremental change or a shift at the periphery. When fully implemented, it affects everything in the organization. It entails fundamental change.”

Denning to me is one of the current applied versions of the seminal 1970s and following work of Chris Argyris, further developed by the likes of Peter Senge in the 1990s. It clearly takes a long while for a new good idea to get traction! Maybe GM’s bankruptcy will add weight the sea-change in Management thinking and practice. I hope so but I'm sceptical.

I’m re-reading Senge and Co’s “The Fifth Discipline Field Book” and subsequent “The Dance of Change” - good "how to" in there but not a pop read for the busy executive (the one who needs to change first).

For heavy-weight logic and argument I like Karl Weick. His latest book (2007) is Managing the Unexpected. I like the way Weick is comfortable with "un-organisation". That, to me, is real project life: real business life; especially small business life.

The inherent unkindness of organisations

2009-06-01T20:05:00.005+12:00

In his May 27 blog Word-of-Mouth Starts with Kindness Zane Safrit states unequivocally that

“Kindness is inherent in all of us. Unfortunately, we encounter too many obstacles, of our individual and collective making.”

I think I agree with Zane though I’d put it like this: The attribute most ignored, even denied in organisations is our passionate desire to do good things together.

Most people just LOVE to do good things together. They’ll even do it for free if the vision is “good” enough and process “together” enough.

That love is kind of like the Higgs Boson of community: the force that gives substance to community; that brings community into being.

Community materialises out of interpersonal space through communication relationships. The quality of community is dependent on the quality of communication.

Viewed that way the obstacles to achieving good things together are the bad communication habits and the associated assumptions that we first learned at school, developed at university, and now typically unconsciously perpetuate at work as managers and subordinates:

Success is essentially individualistic and competitive; collaboration is a burden; the manager knows the right answers; communication is from the manager; work is tasks; knowledge is information and information is power; and individuals are to blame for their own success and failure.

In truth, vital community and vital business depend on kindness, thoughtfulness, helpfulness, openness, and forgiveness; and on collaboration to generate good data, to interpret it into information, to comprehend it into knowledge and to practice it wisely and imaginatively.

So the challenge is to unlearn the communication habits and the assumptions about organisation that first imprinted us at school where industrial-mode education determines that we are organised in rows, facing and obediently receiving our training from the authority at the front who demands that we produce our ‘own work’ to the specified nature and standard.

Then, as managers and subordinates we perpetuate that model of unkindness and wonder why our organisations lack community (call it lack of engagement if you like). . . . . . . . . .

It’s no secret: mantras, slogans and recipes don’t work!

2009-05-30T11:30:00.005+12:00

In his May 28 Business Growth Tip , RESULTS.com COO Stephen Lynch says that he’s “become a bit jaded” with the many business books he reads. “Gimmicky book titles that promise much but deliver no actionable value, empty platitudes presented as if they were profound and original ideas, the so-called “secrets” of celebrity leaders. . . . . . . ”

I’m with Stephen. To me the popular literature on business, leadership, and management seems to pander to the gullible market for success-magic. It has little effect on actual organisational behaviour; on business execution; on actually doing things differently to get a different result.

The academic literature isn’t helpful either: typically descriptive with narrow causal analysis, it may be fine for increasing understanding (amongst academics at least) but if there was any direct link between understanding and changed behaviour then university Business Schools would rule the business world.

Even the best of the popular Business Management literature seems to bang away monotonously at the KPI mantra –repackaged management-by-objectives (MBO).

Mantras, slogans and recipes don’t work! There is no short list of steps that will actually change your business. That’s because change is opportunistic: the opportunities are in the chaotic, ambiguous reality that surges and flows around and under the apparently orderly surface of conventional business practice. That’s the world of interpersonal communication.

In a recent professional coaching conversation we discovered, once we got beneath the stock answers and platitudes, that the keys to business coaching success are in insight and transformation (discontinuous shifts in perception and behaviour). These phenomena are serendipitous, not the product of hard-grind managerial planning and control systems.

That’s not to dismiss planning and control. It’s to say that if business success lies in change then the key is in whatever enables us to swim gracefully and purposefully in comparative chaos and ambiguity.

And that’s where the management literature, popular or otherwise, doesn’t seem to go. It’s stuck in a simplistic model of science: of laws and formulae, of controlled, deductive, causal reasoning. That’s not sufficient in the dynamic, complex world of interpersonal relationships that are at the heart of business and change. It’s interpersonally that people actually make new sense of chaos and ambiguity.

But how often in “Business” books do you see any mention of interpersonal communication strategy? Seldom, I reckon. There’s plenty of attention to ‘positioned’ communication in sales and marketing, but scant attention to interpersonal communication at home except perhaps in putting policies-and-procedures-in-place.

Here are a few tips: pay attention to the verbatim detail of communication behaviour. Reflect together on the detail of what people said compared to what they thought. Learn to communicate assertively. It’s an art that's not normal in Management. Assertive communication behaviours can be learned but the process is slow and determined and you'll need all the help you can get from your work-mates.

Effective “people-skills” are not the same as “being-nice skills”.

2009-05-22T19:20:00.003+12:00

It seems that Verne Harnish, like many, may equate people-skills with being nice. If so, then he's mistaken. Effective people-skills are about effective communication – skills that many managers and subordinates don’t have regardless of whether they are nice or not.

In his Insights newsletter this morning Verne Harnish quotes NY Times columnist David Brooks' article on some recent research on CEO effectiveness that apparently indicates that people skills are overrated and execution/persistence more important.

Verne seems to take that to mean that effective CEO’s are not-nice. For instance he cautions that the data is about “big company CEOs" whereas owners of “smaller firms often have to be nicer to people in order to attract and keep top talent” he says.

Does that mean that people are so keen to work for big firms that they put up with and are unaffected by bad behaviour that they wouldn’t tolerate in a smaller firm? I doubt it.

Effective “people skills” are about effective communication and effective communication isn’t “being nice”. In fact it can be so tough that “nice people” can’t bring themselves to communicate effectively. Instead they skirt around the real issues, manoeuvre and manipulate, expecting others to somehow “get it”.

Being an effective communicator is about being assertive; being not-manipulative; it’s about persistence and execution. Unfortunately most communication in work organisations is way less effective than it could be. The result is dissatisfaction, distress, disengagement.

Learn how to communicate more effectively. Don’t be nice. Be effective: be purposeful; know your audience; persistently interact to establish shared understanding; identify and check all assumptions; listen.

Whiteboarding for outliers

2009-05-12T14:26:00.003+12:00

Whiteboarding can be a good way to generate shared understanding between people in a business (if you know what you’re doing).

Business is collaboration; is interpersonal communication. A successful business or business network is comprised of people who have an adaptable shared understanding of who they individually and collectively are; of what they’re endeavouring to achieve together and why; of how they’re endeavouring to achieve it together; and of their progress together.

That shared-understanding exists between them. It’s a dynamic, living thing that they generate through skilful, purposeful interpersonal communication: navigating the complexities and dynamics of individual perception and emotion in interpersonal relationships. Whiteboarding can represent that emerging, changing, developing shared-understanding.

Beware; everyone will assume that the whiteboard is a “power” tool. You will have to deliberately break that classroom spell. Deliberately use the whiteboard as a think-space and to express the emerging shared understanding between the people. To emphasise that, encourage everyone to physically enter the think-space by writing on it; thinking ‘aloud’ on it; sticking post-its on it; drawing on it; expressing their perspective and understanding on it.

Even put the whiteboard on the table between the people.

If that’s too weird for you, substitute paper for whiteboard and for increased visibility use a document projector to throw the image on a wall and/or to pipe it down the web to those unfortunate off-site participants. SmartBoards are also good for projecting, manipulating, transmitting and writing over images of actual documents.

Don’t abstract documents into PowerPoint bullets: highlight and write on the real documents; get your actual fingers in the picture (thrown on the wall by the document projector).

Don’t write minutes of the meeting. Save or photograph the ‘raw’ whiteboards and distribute those. They’ll be meaningful to those who were there and it’s a waste of time trying to communicate what happened to someone who wasn’t.

When you’re working with shared understanding, being there may not be everything, but its way ahead of whatever’s in second place.

Picture your organisation

2009-05-09T17:19:00.005+12:00

When you picture your organsiation, is it a heap of job-titled boxes, connected by wires? If so, hit delete and relearn to communicate (unless your organisation is a machine or a computer and the people are cogs or components). If you’re the boss, it starts with you.

That picture says a thousand words and it's all bad. It confirms what “everyone” tacitly knows: despite talk of empowerment, engagement, collaboration and the like, the organisation is a top down framework of authority connecting specific jobs. Its purpose is compliance.

An innovative, adaptable, vital, vibrant, creative and collaborative organisation isn’t boxes and wires. It’s a dynamic network of complex communication relationships between people doing good things well together.

The ever-changing pattern, content and purpose of their interpersonal communication is a product of their roles, personalities, skills and knowledge and the (business) environment. Any similarity to the conventional formal organisational structure is more likely coincidental than intentional.

The following case shows how this works:

A client asked me to help him restructure his organisation. When asked why, he answered that internal communication wasn’t working well.

I suggested that we set aside the ‘structure thing’ and simply take a look at who needed to communicate with whom and which communication relationships seemed to be the problem.

He described what seemed to him to be the problem relationships; we theorised why, bearing in mind the Extended DISC personality profiles of those involved. Then I coached him in telling the individuals how their communication appeared to him, why, what he would like to change and asking them what they thought. Then I coached him to do the same with the interacting pairs of individuals.

The ‘structural’ problem melted away and the work climate improved measurably.

Conventional organisational charts are at least industrial anachronisms and at worst promote unproductive manager/subordinate behaviours.

Got the picture?

Learning to change; changing to learn

2009-05-05T17:34:00.002+12:00

Habit-changing learning happens in the heat of real events, crises even; when the answer can only be achieved by inspired collaboration – the one thing that is not-taught and not-learned by the conventional teaching and learning model that dominates our high schools, colleges, universities board meetings, training sessions, coaching meetings, and management meetings.

In an interview with Jim Collins in Inc Jim argues that we are in the age of entrepreneurship and it can be learned. He points to the proliferation of courses and programmes in Entrepreneurship. Peter Bregman in HBR gives some good basic advice on “How to Counter Resistance to Change”: how to communicate effectively to achieve change.

To me these two articles revolve around the same problem: how to learn to communicate effectively to achieve change.

The problem is that no amount of observational, analytical research and generalisation of entrepreneurship and communication coupled with conventional teaching and learning will produce effective entrepreneurs and communicators. That’s because people in typical education settings learn not-effective communication and not-entrepreneurial behaviours. That’s because the main message is the medium – the way they are taught. Everything about the medium: experts out front armed with whiteboard, PowerPoint and grades in classrooms and, worse still, lecture theatres, is about abstraction, authority, hierarchy, personal expertise and self.

No wonder, despite the inappropriateness of conventional hierarchical bureaucracy to SMEs and MLEs, these models of organisation continue to predominate. It’s because everyone goes to school and everyone is imprinted with this industrial organisational model from the moment they become organisationally conscious until they graduate: with that knowledge refined to absurdity by the university.

This isn’t a crazy rant. I’ve taught in those places. I’ve employed those graduates. I work with SME and LME owners and managers. Listen to Ricardo Semler. He has too.

Every time we stand up front, expert with a whiteboard and PowerPoint, with our clients sitting attentively facing the front, we invoke the ‘magic’ of the classroom: the right-answer oriented, hierarchical, parent/child relationships and concepts of learning and knowledge that produce qualifications at best.

No wonder we typically fail to achieve change.

The secret of successful execution

2009-04-26T18:14:00.005+12:00

The secret is effective interpersonal communication.

It bugs me that hardly any firms deliberately develop specific interpersonal communication skills and climate. It’s as if the notion of Communication is missing from collective management consciousness (except perhaps as ‘clear communication’).

What ‘got me going again’ was a client who having ‘done’ the soft ‘HR’ stuff: resolving toxic relationships in admin; management agreeing to design jobs and ‘organisational structure’ around their best people rather than expecting the reverse; and management agreeing a recruitment and succession plan and budget, decided that the next step is to focus on; get hard-nosed about; kick butt on KPIs (performance).

There seems to me to be a yawning gap in that sequence: a gap, which pervades management thinking, between the intention and actually achieving high performance. The gap is effective communication; communication that achieves purpose.

Plenty of attention seems to be paid to communicating numbers: accounts, sales, production. Enlightened managers even pay attention to identifying shared values, determining responsibilities and accountabilities (KPIs) and reviewing performance (Verne Harnish). Enlightened salespeople pay attention to building interpersonal communication relationships with current and prospective customers (Neil Rackham).

But typically the actual, specific interpersonal communication behaviours, patterns, attitudes and beliefs inherent in those activities receive little if any deliberate, specific attention. It’s as if there’s a widespread unconscious assumption that effective communication somehow magically happens if you get the right people with the right values, clear about the right responsibilities and accountabilities and they meet with the right frequency and the right task focus.

Well, clearly it typically doesn’t magically happen except perhaps for some people who fortunately are ‘naturally’ effective communicators just like some are naturally effective entrepreneurs. Just as entrepreneurship can be understood and learned (Jim Collins) so too can effective communication (What do they hear?) but where and how can we learn it?

Though Jim assumes that Entrepreneurship is learned in the many university business school courses and programmes, I disagree. At university business schools people typically learn to analyse and describe business, not to do it. The one thing that Business Schools typically don’t have and can’t teach is business sense and that’s at the core of entrepreneurship. It’s similar for communication.

Communication is learned by guided (coached) reflection on actual shared communication experience – on the job, in the role. Not in a ‘learning’ institution. Modern universities disable and discourage effective communication simply by the way they are organised (administrative bureaucracy). It takes a special organisational climate to enable reflective practice: one that’s rare in our X type Management dominated world (Telco allergy).

Get an experienced communication coach to work with you to enable you to learn together to communicate more effectively.

Easter reflection

2009-04-19T12:55:00.005+12:00

““And God created the Organisation and gave it dominion over man.”
Genesis 1, 30A, subparagraph VIII.” (Robert Townsend. 1970. Up the Organization)

This Easter I’ve reflected on how our lives are too often distorted, disfigured and diminished by the organisations we inhabit; how some (usually small) organisations grow people instead of distorting, disfiguring and diminishing them.

Over Easter my wife took timeout from our workday organisational routines for two short adventures:

First we retreated to the Opotiki bush block that we’ve owned and congregated on with friends for over 30 years. For us all, including our children who spent every summer there from before birth into to their 20s, the place is a trig point in our individual and collective identities. Gatherings usually include a building project, an adventure and much feasting, talking and laughing. This Easter was no exception. By day, we hand-made and laid 6m3 of concrete together to ford a stream. By night we celebrated with communally prepared food and wine.

The place, the purpose, and the people have produced a successful and enduring collaboration (small on organisation and big on community) of individuals whose multiple diverse talents interact, flourish, revive, and reorient in the verdant quiet of chuckling steams, moss carpeted waterfalls, giant native forest trees, ponga and mamaku tree ferns and nikau palms.

Next we toured the Otago NZ wine growing region where some of our favourite Pinot Noir wines are produced. We visited small vineyards and wineries to get acquainted with the places and people in the wine. In dry rocky historic landscapes we talked wine and history with vineyard owners passionate about their vines and their wines; real people, real emotion, excellent wine: small organisations in big communities. The wine industry in New Zealand is renowned for collaboration.

The spirit of creativity, growth and change in a collaboration (small on Management, big on distributed leadership), is perhaps symbolised by the koru which in Maori art symbolises creation, origin, perpetual movement and the way in which life both changes and stays the same.

Telco allergy

2009-04-19T12:13:00.003+12:00

I just wish that I could deal with my telco allergy the same way as I dealt with my bee sting allergy.

I used to keep bees for a hobby but I developed a bee sting allergy. So I gave up bee keeping. I wasn't dependent on bees . . . . .

I’ve been tracking my symptoms and I think that maybe my allergy’s not to telcos per se, but to large scale bureaucracies (LSBs).

It seems that I only get an allergic reaction when I rub up against these organisations and that happens when I initiate change that doesn’t neatly fit their established patterns and habits. I can avoid intimate contact by complying with their bureaucratic systems; accepting whatever they deliver.

When I don’t, the seeming self-sealing, impervious, impersonality of the LSB response “gets under my skin”. I can feel my allergic reaction building, aggravated, rather than soothed by each interaction.

My allergy flared up recently when I decided to switch telcos on a now-or-never offer of faster internet, lower phone charges and a once only rebate. I was a bit twitchy about the now-or-never pressure but it seemed like a good deal and the agreement allowed a week to cancel.

I won’t give you a blow by blow account; enough to say that within five days my ‘new’ telco – a young-minded progressive firm, if their advertisements are to be believed – screwed up twice, victims of their own departmentalisation. Then expected me to be impressed by how fast they reversed the screw-ups!

Defensively they cast me as unreasonable and urged me to forgive, forget and enjoy their wonderful world of fashionable, functional technology. I figured I’d witnessed their LSB spots and cancelled.

Is there something about the telecoms industry that breeds LSBs? Is it possible to be a telco and not behave like an LSB? I suppose the bureaucratic heritage runs deep in the industry. But there are signs that smaller firms emerging in the deregulated ‘unbundled’ NZ telco environment under inspired new leaders are different. . . . .

I’m re-reading Robert Townsend’s “Up the Organisation”: radical experience-forged advice on how to break the bureaucratic spell. Unfortunately, so little has changed in the nearly 40 years since he wrote it that it’s still radical today.

It’s nearer 50 years since Townsend’s inspiration, Douglas McGregor (1960. "The Human Side of Enterprise"), optimistically predicted the end of conventional Management by 1980. But ‘X’ type Management is still the default mode, even in small organisations. Maybe the current economic upheaval is the first real opportunity for transformation since McGregor?

Lexicon? What’s that?

2009-04-03T22:19:00.000+13:00

It’s our language that enables us to have and manipulate ideas; determines our capacity to conceptualise, think and change. In these times it is crucial for individuals and organisations to change – to transform even. Yet many are crippled; locked in by the language of Management.

This was once again highlighted for me in a recent discussion around the purpose of business-team coaching. I objected to the apparently widespread unquestioned assumption that business development coaching is to achieve “alignment”. I explained that “In my lexicon, “alignment” has strong associations with “staying in line”, compliance, groupthink: some of the least productive aspects of Managerial behaviour and expectation.”

On reflection that objection was potentially risky behaviour with the MD leading the discussion and several senior managers participating in the conversation: I was apparently questioning an almost unquestionable Managerial prerogative - compliance. On top of that I seemed to imply almost heretically that Management is wrong. As if that wasn’t enough I had the temerity to use strange language: “lexicon”.

“What’s lexicon?" the MD demanded. "A company name?” .

When I later explained that my lexicon is the language that I think with, he joked, “Well I guess lexicon’s not in my lexicon.” But of course, by that stage it was.

Particularly interesting to me was that that discussion was part of a process to reconceptualise; to find new language to express the concept and practice of business development coaching. Language was essential to the change process.

Working against that change was the spirit of Managerial control: arguably achieved in large part through control of language. Managers can require that ideas and argument are communicated in language that they readily understand, as they understand it, so reinforcing convention. Jargon becomes a means of exclusion and of enhancing knowledge-power.

How then can we introduce new language and with it new concepts, new ideas, new possibilities?

Reading is one way, but most popular writers use conventional language because it is readily understood and that’s what sells. Nobody except academics read academic literature.

In my experience, the best way to introduce new language is in context, in conversation. Then the initial difficulties and misunderstandings can be explored: illustrated by real, shared experience.

Unfettered brainstorming is an effective way to break the Managerial spell and let the language flow, unhindered by evaluation and qualification: formal, colloquial, slang, foreign, technical, expert, outrageous, boring, relevant, irrelevant, reverent, irreverent, dangerous, and tame language.

PS My closest colleagues in that organisation have affectionately given me a new nickname: “Prof”. I’m not sure if that’s helpful or not. But it is a mark of affection. That’s good.

The "secret" to leadership in uncertain times (3)

2009-03-29T22:23:00.000+13:00

In uncertain times like these, anxiety and uncertainty abound because what we thought were the answers, what we thought was logical and reliable, has failed. People we trusted to know clearly don’t know. Things we thought were sensible clearly don’t make sense any more.

The climate of uncertainty is ripe for the soothsayers, snake-oil salesmen and quack doctors who are out in force - this time let loose in the virtual communication space of the internet as well as in the usual success-secret shelves of the bookstore.

As the cacophony of chatter and advice in virtual communication space reaches a seeming white-noise crescendo, it all seems to me increasingly unlikely to yield transformation. All manner of self-proclaimed, self-promoting experts are in there looking to make a killing in the confusion: peddling their various solution lists; tools and levers without engines; re-packaged, re-positioned versions of failed recipes of the last 30 years.

I find it difficult to find anything new, any significant discussion even. The twittering social networking phenomenon looks to me increasingly hysterical: like a throng mesmerised in a Matrix-Reloaded-like stream of often uncritically repeated information, misnamed “knowledge”.

My experience is that the knowledge that enables and feeds collaboration exists only between people in relationship – as interactively generated shared-meaning. At its best, in a high performing team, it is dynamic, changing, growing through the robustly shared experiences of diverse team members - in an open, supportive communication climate where people have learnt to trust each other enough to tell, listen to and face the brutal facts as they see them.

An effective leader helps the team learn new things by reflecting on practice in the light of new perspectives; encourages the team members to discover new perspectives, bring them to the team and use them to make new, rich sense together of what they’re doing.

There is no band aid – no quick fix. The healing process is richly systemic. The result is the miracle of a “team on fire”: doing good things together.

It’s like Irish singer Bono says (quoted by writer Bob Gass): "I would be terrified to be on my own as a solo singer… I surround myself with… a band, a family of very spunky kids, and a wife who's smarter than anyone… you're only as good as the arguments you get. So maybe the reason why the band hasn't split up is that people might get this: even though I'm only one quarter of U2, I'm more than I could be if I was one whole of something else."

The “secret” to leadership in uncertain times (2)

2009-03-25T13:01:00.000+13:00

The secret to effective leadership in uncertain times is a relationship-based rather than performance-based climate: where you don’t rely primarily on an external system of rules to 'keep people in line' but on deeply shared purpose, generated and implemented through gutsy, open relationships between people; powered by the shared heartfelt desire to do good stuff together.

That’s the spirit of community and of high performance teams; where leadership is endemic, not restricted to 'a leader'; relationship is the driver; performance is an outcome; performance measurement provides data about the effectiveness of collaboration.

As writer Bob Gass puts it: effective teams share a “sense of belonging. Members extend trust to one another. Initially it's a risk because trust can be violated and you can get hurt. At the same time as each team member gives trust, each must conduct themselves in a way that earns the trust of others by holding themselves to a high standard.

When everyone gives freely and bonds of trust develop and are tested over time, they begin to have faith in one another. They believe that the people next to them will act with consistency, keep commitments, maintain confidences and support each other. The stronger their sense of belonging becomes, the greater their potential to work together.

All teams have disagreements. The mark of community is not the absence of conflict; it's the presence of a spirit of reconciliation. It’s not about people hiding their concerns to protect a false notion of unity. It’s about the ability to have a rough-and-tumble meeting with someone, but because we're committed to each other in shared purpose we can leave, slapping each other on the back, saying, 'I'm glad we're still on the same team'."

The leader’s role in a community like that is to lead by example (be 1st at):

risking emotion and intimacy in leader/follower relationships;
risking robust, open communication;
risking walking into a meeting without already knowing the answer;
risking sharing performance data;
risking following;
risking apologising;
risking letting the team decide the performance standards and manage the accountabilities;
risking performance appraisal by followers.

Tip: use the performance appraisal for feedback on the observed frequency of that risk-taking.

The “secret” to leadership in uncertain times (1)

2009-03-22T13:31:00.000+13:00

There’s a lot of talk these days about customer experience such as airline crews who sing to their passengers; thoughtfulness in interpersonal relationships; and business success that stems from an inside advantage (Robert Bloom ) where everyone in the organisation is fully engaged (Markus Buckingham).

It’s all very interesting, sensible and even exciting but actually getting it to happen in your organisation is another story: a leadership story (Steve Denning). Leadership isn’t so much about planning and control as it is about communication: what you communicate, who you communicate it to and, most importantly, how you communicate it.

We don't see much in popular Management about that. Maybe because communication is complex and variable and difficult to learn and change by conventional analytical process. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t figure in most business education aside maybe from a bit of 1960s theory applied to a case study or two and stuff on meetings.

One important reason why Bob Bloom’s process for developing the inside advantage is so effective is that its done by brainstorming. Brainstorming requires and generates a relationship and leadership climate that’s ideal in uncertain times.

The spirit of that leadership climate is captured for me by writer Bob Gass: “Have you ever watched someone walking a dog on a leash when the dog doesn't want to go where its owner is going? The owner is constantly tugging on the leash, pulling the dog from here and there, telling it to "stop that" and "come back here". . . . That's the way a lot of us live.

Our lives consist of "Stop that; come back here; don't do that". . . . . . What a difference when you see a dog and its owner that have a strong relationship. The dog doesn't need a leash to go for a walk. Its owner can just speak a word and the dog responds.

We're not comparing ourselves to dogs and dog owners. We're comparing performance-based living to relationship-based living. Big, big difference!”

Genuine Bob-Bloom-style brainstorming to generate shared purpose is an excellent way to grow a relationship-based climate that’s exciting, satisfying and profitable. (More on this next blog)

How to get a breakthrough idea and make it happen

2009-03-13T15:18:00.000+13:00

Want to stand up and stand out with an offering that’s special and rare?

Want the energy and focus of people keenly doing really excellent, standout stuff together?

Had it with a work climate that’s impersonal, dispassionate, routine and closely structured; where there’s little real pride and people aren’t really doing it together?

You need to breakthrough to a new passionate, personal, exciting, shared understanding of what you collectively are and do, who you do that for, and how you do it. You need transformation: collective breakthrough understanding of the uniquely special aspects of what you can do and of doing it together.

And the same time you need to imbue the whole organisation with the new understanding so that everyone eagerly learns to live it normally, naturally.

That’s a tough call for most organisations because they aren’t set up for transformation. They’re set up to efficiently replicate a product or service; where managers know the answers, hold the power and authority, use it to gain compliance, and people do jobs rather than live roles.

Even incremental change is hard to achieve in a climate like that – let alone breakthrough. An ideas competition won’t produce do it. A management think tank won’t do it. A consultant won’t do it. Brainstorming won’t work either, because the managers will want to control it and the rest will expect them to.

Nevertheless brainstorming is the key because it can allow the unspeakable, the outrageous, the boring, the weird, and the stupid – the new ‘answers’ - to be spoken and heard along with the ‘right answers’. It can enable people to get to know each other deeper: to strengthen the relationships that will be crucial to implementation. It can lead to a widely supported “best answer”.

To brainstorm your way out of mediocrity and get run over in the rush to do really excellent, standout stuff together, try this:

Get an outside facilitator to lead the brainstorm
Make a team competition of getting the most unique ideas on the board.
Give each team its own colour pad of post-it labels to stick its ideas on the board. No duplicates
Make a time limit.
The effect is a chaotic environment where new ideas can emerge through word association and lack of boundaries. Managers should risk looking stupid early as runners rather than writers or thinkers.
Together, move the post-its into emergent clusters.
In this process the meanings of words, ideas and concepts are discovered and explored.
In teams generate sentences and paragraphs that express the concepts, ideas and sentiments of the clusters.
Share the teams’ ideas and reach consensus on single outcomes.

Run separate brainstorms to achieve breakthrough, in your own words, on “who we do it for”, “what we do” and “how we do it”; look for the unique, special aspects that your customers will love you, and no one else, for; then get specialist copywriters to translate into marketing speak.

You’ll get better with each brainstorm; as people risk trusting the process.

The process itself is the transformation.

Do we really want to know?

2009-03-11T14:26:00.000+13:00

I'm thinking on what role the virtual networking explosion of the last several years might have in transformation to the post global-economic-&-financial-crisis (call it GEFC) world.

The social networking phenomenon seems in many ways to be superficial and egotistical: Look at me: I am; I have friends; I am respected, recommended.

It seems kind of desperate in its extreme with individuals’ networks too big to sustain significant depth: almost like a web of shorthand relationships; more about connection than deep change or collaboration.

In New Zealand the TXT phenomenon is huge amongst young people who continually TXT each other. With an iPhone they can be constantly connected to their virtual world.

I wonder if this phenomenon will wither or flourish with GEFC. Wither with a realisation that depth is essential to productive relationships, or flourish with increased need to talk; to relate in crisis.

I ‘m reflecting on why I began this blog; why I’m on Facebook and LinkedIn: what am I trying to achieve? Am I and others fundamentally seeking connectedness in a deeply disconnected world?

Maybe we can discover new organisational modes, themes, tunes, rhythms and harmonies in the possibility-rich, apparent-noise of transmission and interconnection.

Through my sometime association with Computer Clubhouse in New Zealand (http://www.clubhouse274.org.nz/ ) I can appreciate how connectedness is fundamental to community and individual health and creativity: opportunity for empathy, relationship, learning, growth and innovation.

Problem is, I have way more information coming at me than I can productively utilise; way more opportunity to connect than I can respond to, let alone develop into productive relationships.

I have to decide which to attend to; which to pursue; to somehow achieve a balance of confirming and disconfirming influence so that I am challenged but not destroyed; to leave room for serendipity rather than attempt to control it all myself. . . . . . . . . . . I also need silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

How to communicate more effectively

2009-03-09T16:26:00.000+13:00

If this relationships and communication stuff really is a breakthrough key to future success in commerce, leadership, organisation, change and learning then you better get on to it.

Diary note: “find a communication course for my people to do”.

WRONG. Two reasons:

1. A course or three in communication won’t do it.

Most courses focus on understanding why and how to communicate. But understanding doesn’t affect behaviour. For instance, noticed that University Business Schools can’t actually do Business?

Communication’s similar. Understanding doesn’t change behaviour because the way we communicate is mainly determined by reflex and habit: unconscious norms and untested assumptions.

We can “put on a good show”, but when tired, under pressure or in familiar contexts we typically quickly revert to habit and reflex behaviour.

Another thing: we usually aren’t conscious of our communication behaviour. Others typically don’t want to upset us by telling us, unless they are upset themselves. That’s called a fight. Fights don’t fix communication behaviour. They make it worse.

2. It starts with you. Not them.

The only communication behaviour you can change is yours. You have to risk changing first. The leader risks first.

If you stop blaming, shaming and justifying; start communicating in ways least likely to provoke a defensive reaction, then you and those you relate to can begin to learn: new perspectives, insights, new shared purpose, new relationships, new organisation.

Try this:

1. Give 5-10 of the people you relate to (choose from above, below and along-side you in the hierarchy plus suppliers and customers) a chance to give you feedback, anonymous to begin with, on the way you communicate.

2. Ask them to identify three of your helpful communicating behaviours (strengths) and two corresponding unhelpful ones (weaknesses).

3. Pick a couple of strengths and one weakness and ask those 10 people to observe how often you do the helpful stuff and how often the unhelpful stuff.

4. Try to do the helpful stuff more often and the unhelpful stuff less often. Share your progress with your ten “coaches”.

5. When you’ve substantially improved (it may take 3 months or more) pick the next three.

6. Suggest to your 10 that they do the same, making you one of their ten.

This can turn into an administrative nightmare that outweighs the benefits, so consider an on-line feedback system to make regular (quarterly) feedback do-able.

The end of the Age of Alignment?

2009-03-06T20:41:00.000+13:00

Yesterday on New Zealand National Radio, Jerry L. Jordan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland from March 1992 to January 2003, described the current global financial and economic crisis as “The falling off of a cliff: a disconnect with what has happened before”.
(Audio: “Economic and financial crisis - how long will it last?”)

Does the crisis herald a major sea change; a transformation of the economic landscape; of the way things are; the end of the Age of Alignment: the reign of the language, logic and values of Management?

“Alignment”, epitome of Management: the objective, scientific, one dimensional power and simplicity of a vector; pure direction.

Management by alignment: all on track; aligned in thinking, acting, and speaking; suppressing and ejecting out-of-line views 'till they cease to exist; moving forward, driving, leveraging in a one-track, rigid pattern of thought and action; into a slow motion train wreck.

Maybe the new model is leadership, unity: shared purpose amidst diverse thinking, seeing and speaking; moving tentatively into strange awsome landscape, learning and discovering, in intimate relationship.

Are we off-track for change?

The age of relationships at last?

2009-02-28T15:39:00.000+13:00

I have to say that I’m very “chuffed” that the sort of stuff that I’ve been working for, on, in and with particularly the last decade or so, like collaboration; specific patterns of behaviour that spell caring in interpersonal communication; and against the stupidity of most received Management ‘wisdom’, seem to be fast becoming almost de rigueur in popular advice on how to survive the global financial system meltdown.

It seems that everything does have its season and this is the season for intimacy in leadership; knowing who and what we uniquely are and fearlessly standing out for that in our all organisational relationships.

Suddenly it’s right, good, and financially advantageous to actually, really treat employees as valued customers; to be emotional in business and organisational relationships and to leave personality in problem solving (along with the ‘facts’); to be a manager and openly not-know; to trust that the best business strategy comes out of best interpersonal relationships.

Hallelujah! Thank God for the financial crisis! At last we have a real chance to really “keep it real” – for management and leadership to un-stick from 100 year old industrial assumptions and practices: for the age of relationships – where being fully functioning human beings is the greatest personal and commercial advantage.

Making mistakes

2009-02-26T08:11:00.000+13:00

I was fortunate to see Leonard Cohen perform in Auckland earlier this year - a welcome antidote to the market obsession with Youth. Baby boomers filled the stadium.

A line from his song/poem "Anthem" stuck with me, hauntingly appropriate to these times: "Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

These times, more than ever, require experimenting: to abandon the quest for the “right answer”; to abandon the pretence of knowing; to risk listening to those we usually ignore; risk voicing ideas and observations that may seem 'odd' or challenging; to risk new action that may fail.

More than ever we need to learn to communicate in ways least likely to trigger defence; that enable collaboration.

In my recent past I taught Project Management and Communication in The University of Auckland. I risked abandoning lecturing completely. I set up the class (of 80) as its own organisation to plan a major (real) change project in the University Business School. To do that they had to find out together (learn) about project management and communication – a learning project - to simultaneously manage the project to plan the main change project; three simultaneous projects.

We defined the main product of this organisation to be 1st time mistakes. Members were rewarded for making these mistakes. We set ambitious targets for 1st time mistakes produced.

My primary role in this process was to coach the members to communicate more effectively by shared reflection on their communication behaviour in their project teams and organisational roles.

The result was 'miraculous'. They blew their own socks off. They discovered a myriad of talents in their midst. It was a revelation for those Business students: explicitly experiencing collaboration and real (deep) learning for the 1st time in their formal organisational lives.

The Business School managers tried to shut it down – too risky – but the result was a triumph for stakeholder engagement.

Most of us have never experienced collaboration explicitly like that in our education or in our working lives. Will we risk it? What's the alternative?

Doing good things together

2009-02-24T21:58:00.000+13:00

I am reminded, in my conversations with clients today, that people's desire to do good things together is the imperative perhaps most overlooked, ignored, even denied by conventional managers.

One outstanding example: an SME owner was astounded at the response by his employees when he annonced to his senior managers that unfortunately, due to the current downturn, he needed to make two staff redundant.

They implored him not to. They went to their people and returned with the consensus proposal that the whole workforce (of 10) reduce to a 4 day week and thereby retain the valuable, very productive interrelationships that they had built. They argued that that way they would be better prepared to sieze opportunities for recovery and growth and respond in their characteristically outstandingly quick and competent manner.

What a crew!

Coaching from within

2009-02-23T14:01:00.000+13:00

Reflecting further on my encounter with Tom Peters, with fellow Results.com coaches today . . . . Tom is like a super coach to the Results organisation – he can do what I can’t do because I am effectively part of the Results organisation. He’s not. He’s Tom Peters! He’s his own person. He’s also an excellent speaker, fluent in his discipline, wise and well read!

He communicated what I had tried to communicate for almost 2 years but I failed mostly because, although I’m a leading coach, I can’t coach an organisation from within. The relational assumptions and dynamics won’t allow it.

After Tom’s address, a Results.com (NZ) Partner commented that I seemed to be getting better at expressing myself. No doubt there’s truth in that but equally at least, having heard Tom, the Partner was now more able to listen to me. We had a new shared experience and language to communicate with.

I am delighted. I feel like the windows have been thrown open and the light is flooding in.

Next step: collaborate to implement the insights, starting today, with the advantage of new shared experience and language.

What do they hear?

2009-02-21T13:16:00.000+13:00

I gotta wonder what others heard when Tom Peters spoke to NZ SME owners at an Auckland seminar on Thur 19 Feb 2009 and to a conference of Results.com (NZ) partners, coaches, administrators and BDMs the next day.

If Voxy (American Business Guru Tom Peters Offers Hope to Kiwi Companies During Visit on Voxy) and the NZ Herald (Tom Peters Top tips: To pull through the recession) are a good indication then what seemed to me to be Tom's key message seems to have been lost in the panic. It's all the usual managerial stuff.

Tom's emphasis on interrelationships between people seems to have been lost in translation and selective listening.

My take on what he said is that interpersonal communication and relationships are the key: upstream and downstream of the business and particularly inside it. For instance, he emphasised several times that he would be very disappointed if there was as a single firm in the room (350 people) that didn’t, as a result of his seminar, implement a programme to develop listening and talking skills and behaviours of its people. (I'd put money on no more than a hand-full doing anything more than a token action).

That’s how fundamental he thinks effective communication is to business survival and growth. He even ventured that business strategy isn’t the prime issue - communication and relationships are: if the relationships and communication are effective then effective strategy will emerge and be implemented; that learning and change will happen and that ability to learn, change and innovate is the crucial competitive advantage in this economic climate.

In other words, the interrelationships within and around the owner and his firm are perhaps his greatest asset. . But the interrelationships probably receive the least direct attention, certainly aren’t on the balance sheet, and probably aren’t measured! (If Tom's right, then maybe it'd be a different story if the owner is a woman)

As Tom said, effective communication can be learned and interrelationships made more effective.

Trouble is that the usual managerial actions to send the people to a course on “Effective Presentations” and/or “Handling Difficult People” won’t do it. Making it a KPI won’t do it. Making it someone else’s responsibility won’t do it.

It’s a slow process that begins by the boss by changing his/her behaviour. They have to work with others to do it. They have to learn to communicate better to do it. They have to learn new communication habits. They have to be personal, emotional, and intimate: messy qualities and behaviours typically avoided in “business”.

There are some “obvious” things that can be done to begin to improve the quality of communication like revisit your BHAG (Jim Collins) and building emotion and passion into those Rockefeller habits (Verne Harnish). They can recruit communicators. They can create opportunities for themselves and their people to be ‘real’.

They can pay attention to the little thoughtful things that Tom demonstrated achieve apparently miraculous effect. And there are many other important, focused strategies they can implement to develop and get the best return on their relational asset.

Will they get it? I reckon that some will, with some excellent coaching.