Month: July 2016

We're having an ongoing conversation about how we can 'transform' the organisation. We're pretty much agreed that things have to change. But there is some disagreement on whether there is the 'burning platform' or whether we even need one of these in order to 'transform'.

I think a 'burning platform' is a competitor for Lucy Kellaway's guffipedia (in fact, I just suggested it) and go along with Chip Heath's view that: 'That is one of the silliest pieces of business jargon. The idea of the burning platform is that people only change when they're scared. But fear, as an emotion, creates tunnel vision'.

Failing being able to see the burning platform our other tack is to keep asking each other 'what problem are we trying to solve here?' This is almost as pointless as searching for the burning platform, especially when things aren't 'wrong', but are in, my brother's phrase, 'bumping along'.

If there are no burning platforms, and we can't adequately answer 'what problem are we trying to solve?' Are we fine as we are?

Well, no. As I said, we are in agreement that things need to change. But the scale ranges from 'smoothing out the bumps' to 'let's be extremely radical'. No-one thinks 'let's do nothing'. In order to get to some agreement on what needs to change and/or transform we ask the question, 'What does good look like?'

This isn't a very helpful question as there isn't a whole lot of consensus on what it would look like even at the level of just trying to smooth out the bumps and if we want transformation it is even less worth asking as, 'the overall goal of transformation is not just to execute a defined change -— but to reinvent the organization and discover a new or revised business model based on a vision for the future. It's much more unpredictable, iterative, and experimental. It entails much higher risk.' (Ron Ashkenas). Using this definition it is impossible to answer 'What does good look like?' because it emerges through the process of transforming.

So what might work to help us decide how far down the continuum we want to travel? Over the last several weeks as I've worked with this, four important principles have emerged:

Engage in the history of the organisation. This is often over-looked by reformists who come in as 'new blood' intent on changing stuff. In a conversation last week someone referred to Chesterton's fence effectively saying that 'reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood'. (It's from G K Chesterton's 1929 book 'The Thing' and delightfully explained by him. Reforming zeal can turn off otherwise kindly people if they feel their history is being ignored.

Listen generously to different views and perspectives. This is hard (I am practicing) but worth doing . Here's one person's description of it. 'To listen generously is to give of oneself to another, to let go of assumptions conceived outside of this particular evolving relationship. It means to be aware of different worldviews and meet another in a safe-enough space where true listening occurs. Generous listening allows us to move away from the positivist tendency towards criticism and into a space where we allow other's questions to help guide our own journeys.' Generous listening allows space for people to build relationships and learn from different perspectives.

Check you are speaking the same language – or have a common understanding of the words you are using. We've found that there are words that we think we understand when someone else uses them but we don't. Technical jargon is fairly off-putting if you're not in that technical discipline but even more commonly used words – 'service', 'customer', 'product' etc. mean different things to different people.

If you are the consultant in a transformation process – learn to be a good adviser, that is:

• Know how and where to go and find reliable knowledge,
• Be skilled at assessing the expertise of others at its true worth,
• Be able to spot the strong and weak points in any situation at short notice
• Be credible in advising how to handle a complex situation

(Adapted from Sir Edward Bridges, Head of the Civil Service, 'Portrait of a Profession: 1950' )

How do you get a 'transformation' discussion going if there is no 'burning platform', things are 'bumping along nicely' and you can't know what good looks like? Let me know.

There's an inherent promise in the idea that 'big data' will help us unlock various mysteries, solve all types of problems, and see or understand things from new perspectives. At a meeting I was at last week on 'Big Data in organisation design, development and workforce planning' this seemed to be the line we were taking.

By 'big data' I think we meant the vast amounts of structured and unstructured information amenable to being captured and coded into a computer where it is stored, manipulated and analysed through skills of data scientists who have expertise in machine learning, computational analysis, maths and statistics. But don't worry if you aren't sure what 'big data' is – take a look at an article that offers the varied definitions from 40 big data scientists.

For organisation design work using 'big data' and data visualisation is useful for developing scenarios and models, costing changes, assessing impacts of various changes that could be made and so on (See Rupert Morrison's book Data Driven Organisation Design for more on this.)

However, we have to be careful if we rely on the 'big data' interpretations and analysis as our only source of decisions about organisational design. Data based logic has both negative and positive possibilities. A striking 'graphic manifesto' from Jonathan Harris points to this.

It opens with the sentences. 'Data will help us remember, but will it let us forget? It will help politicians get elected, but will it help them lead?' It continues through a series of haunting questions which, months after the exhibition where I saw this, are still alive in my mind.

Although some of the ethical and moral implications of big data (see, for example, the US Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society for more on this) are being researched, less explored seems to be the impact of the data scientist's cultural orientation and design thinking that must have a bearing on how the data is captured, manipulated and analysed. The way we manipulate and present big data isn't neutral. It has a level of subjectivity that can keep important questions at bay: 'It will help farmers engineer crops to produce bigger yields, but will it keep corporations from patenting our food?'

In Jonathan Harris's words 'in fields ranging from education, to government, to healthcare, to advertising, to dating, to science, to war, we're abandoning timeless decision-making tools like wisdom, morality, and personal experience for a new kind of logic which simply says: "show me the data."'

A couple of FutureLearn course that I've taken (Big Data: from data to decisions, and Big Data: data visualisations) both of which are excellent in many respects lack the mention of the moral, ethical or subjective limitations of making decisions based on big data interpretation, or of visualizing data in a particular way.

As a small group of us, at the meeting I mentioned above, discussed big data in organisation design we focused on the limitations of a simply data driven approach. 'Evidence' is not enough to balance intuition, hunches, experiences, emotions, political machinations, and all the stuff that contributes to an organisation design but is not capturable.

In a previous role I had where we were using Decision Lens (a data driven tool) to support our organisation design work I had to laugh when we went through the whole data based decision making process and came up with 'the answer', only to have one of the leadership team say – 'Well my hunch is that this is the wrong answer. I don't think we should go with it.'

Big data can inform us and it can leave us uninformed. Let us be aware of the downsides of trying to data-ify subjectivity or shelve the pathways of wisdom, morality, philosophy, and human experiences in helping us make careful organisation design choices. Let us be aware of the inherent risks in relying on just big data to give us good insightful information that lead to human and high-performing organisations.

What's your view on Big Data as an organisation design tool? Let me know.

The opposite of a systems approach to organisation design and development is a 'thingifying' approach. (And many thanks to Fiona for giving me the word). This considers viewing something problematic going on in an organisation as a 'thing' to be addressed. Philosopher Theodore Gendlin explaining, another philosopher, Martin Heidegger's essay 'What is a thing?' says:

'The "thing," as we have things today, is a certain sort of explanatory scheme, a certain sort of approach to anything studied. … It is an approach that renders whatever we study as some thing in space, located over there, subsisting separate from and over against us and having certain properties of its own. It is as obvious as "that orange-colored chair over there," or "an atom," "a cell," "a self," "a sense datum," "a body."'

I come across thingifying a lot in my day to day working life, particularly in relationship to leadership and culture. If we think of leadership as a 'thing' in the definition above we reach for 'tools' to fix it. You can get any number of leadership tools. Here's one that you can use to assess your leadership skills. You score yourself and depending on your score get some ideas to improve your skills. For example if you score between 35 and 52

'You're doing OK as a leader, but you have the potential to do much better. While you've built the foundation of effective leadership, this is your opportunity to improve your skills, and become the best you can be. Examine the areas where you lost points, and determine what you can do to develop skills in these areas'.

As one of my colleagues noted 'tools can be handy', but quantifying and scoring are not going to give information on the experience of being led by someone whose score you know is 39 (or necessarily change your own leadership style and interactions if you know your own score is 39).

Similar tools exist to assess 'culture'. A commonly used one is Human Synergistics Organizational Culture Inventory. The info on it tells us that 'Quantifying and managing organizational culture is critical for bringing an organization's values "to life," supporting the implementation of its strategies, and promoting adaptation, goal attainment, and sustainability.' I made the point in my book on organisation culture that 'An organisation's culture is not a 'thing' where a label suffices to 'tell it how it is', nor is it a set of discrete elements that can be manipulated either separately or together to get a desired outcome. Nevertheless people want still want thingify culture or leadership in order to solve a problem with it.

If the problem at hand is treated only or mainly as a 'thing' little value will come from any activity associated with trying to solve it. This week's Economist has an article on immigration 'What's the Point?' It discusses a points system for work permit allocation. Immigration, treated in this way has become a 'thing'. In all the countries discussed (Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Denmark, Singapore) the discovery was the same treating immigration as a 'thing' didn't work for anyone.

Given as Gendlin puts it 'The thing-model is, despite our current attitudes on getting beyond mere models by appealing to the wider context of ordinary living, still second nature to us' what can we do to over-ride our thingifying tendencies in favour of better approaches to look at leadership or culture or other similar organisational preoccupations (employee engagement, customer experience, etc)?

Heidegger (via Gendlin) offers three suggestions:

• First is not stop at thingifying it (the organisational issue)
• Second is to consider the attitudes, procedures, context, norms and expectations regarding the organisational issue that you have thingified
• Third is to inquire on 'the totality of these two in interdependence'

However, taking these three steps makes addressing an issue complicated and risks alienating people who want a quick 'answer' as in 42 is the meaning of life, the universe and everything ( Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). But organisational issues are not amenable to solving through 'thingifying '– they are part of a wider system. As the immigration points people found: 'Migration systems are complicated because people are complicated'.

What's your view on thingifying? Let me know.

One of my colleagues has posed us the question 'What can and can't we do in the service of creating a more human and high performing organisation?' I started by wondering what she meant by 'creating', 'more human' and 'high performing'. That got me nowhere but led me to a different question: can organisations be human without being high performing or high performing without being human? I think so. (And I don't mean 'being human' as in the TV series). The issue lies in being both human and high performing.

My book on organisational health covers a lot of ground on this and so do several of my blogs. Looking back through them one I wrote in 2011 is still relevant. It is about creating and using positive energies and emotions. Positivity leads to individual and organization health and high performance.

5 years ago in that blog, I referenced Margaret Wheatley's interview in strategy+business. This reinforced my view that creating positivity requires leadership activity. She made the point that 'In a time like this of economic and emotional distress, every organization needs leaders who can help people regain their capacity, energy and desire to contribute'.

2016 and we are again/still in a time of distress. Sadly, in 2011, Wheatley also said that people are reporting that 'mean-spiritedness is on the rise in their companies. And there seems to be a growing climate of disrespect for individual experience and competence.' My observation is that this trend has accelerated since she wrote 5 years ago.

At that point she thought that mean-spiritedness was due to the uncharted territory that we (individuals and organizations) are in. It leads us to 'running scared'.

Today there are lots of things which are making us 'run scared'. Take your pick by looking at newspaper headlines and social media. But Wheatley has some antidotes to this response including taking time to reflect, making informed – rather than pure emotional – choices, and learning how to find the place beyond hope and fear.

In another article (2009) of hers she quotes Rudolf Bahro, a prominent German activist and iconoclast: 'When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.' Bahro offers insecurity as a positive trait, 'especially necessary in times of disintegration.'

Howard Zinn, a historian, in The Optimism of Uncertainty mines a similar vein. He says 'In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?' He answers this saying: 'I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. … The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.'

I'm with Wheatley, Bahro and Zinn. At all times, and even more so in times of uncertainty and insecurity I think all of us working in organisation design and development must defy mean-spiritedness and power playing. Instead we must act for trust, respect, shared decent values, and positive and energizing relationships. Only by doing this is there the hope – but not the guarantee – of developing human and high-performing organisations.

What's your view? Let me know.