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Yet again I turn to my 'rules of thumb for change agents' first printed, as far as I know, in Organization Development Practitioner in November 1975. The author was Herbert A Shepard who was according to the introduction on the Herbert Shepard Foundation website.

A pioneering thinker in the Organization Development movement, an engaging teacher and mentor of exceptional depth, scope and humility with a gift for recognizing and nurturing the potential of others. His unselfishness, utter sincerity, compassion and unwavering commitment touched lives, forged lasting friendships and helped shape the careers of a generation of leaders and social scientists. He held faculty posts at several universities including M.I.T., where he received his doctorate in Industrial Economics. He founded and directed the first doctoral program in Organization Development at Case Western; developed a residency in administrative psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, and was also President of The Gestalt Institute of Cleveland.

I'm interested in his work for two reasons: immediately because with a colleague yesterday we ran a workshop that, about an hour before the start time we changed the design of fairly radically. Why? Because the internal noise we were getting about the session reached a crescendo about midday (the session was scheduled for 2 hours in the late afternoon). I went to discuss the situation with two of the people who'd expressed their concern. In different ways, and for different reasons, they were very anxious about the session – the number of people involved in session design (not many) and the number invited (lots), the lack of communication and information on session content including who 'owned the meeting, the perceived value of the session judged on the value people attributed to previous similar sessions (not highly valued), etc.

So listening to these views and in partnership with one of the two people we redesigned the second half of the session. This meant that 5 minutes before kick off I was still amending slides and handouts. Was it worthwhile? Should I have stuck to the original design as, after the event, my colleague said I should? That's when I brought out the rules of thumb that had guided my decision. This time the one I had in mind was 'Start where the system is' Shepard explains this as follows:

Starting where the system is can be called the Empathy Rule. To communicate effectively, to obtain a basis for building sound strategy, you need to understand how clients see themselves and their situation, and you need to understand the culture of the system. Establishing the required rapport does not mean that the change agent who wants to work in a traditional industrial setting should refrain from growing a
beard. It does mean that, if he has a beard, the beard is likely to determine where the client is when they first meet, and the client's curiosity needs to be dealt with. Similarly, the rule does not mean that a female change agent in a male organization should try to act like one of the boys, or that a young change agent should try to act like a senior executive. One thing it does mean is that sometimes where the client is,
is wondering where the change agent is. Rarely is the client in anyone place at anyone time. That is, he/she may be ready to pursue any of several paths. The task is to walk together on the most promising path. Even unwitting or accidental violations of the empathy rule can destroy the situation…

To my thinking going with the originally conceived design would have violated the Empathy Rule. There may be all sorts of sound(ish) reasons for doing so like 'taking the client out of their comfort zones' or 'challenging their beliefs' to force change, but is this a good thing to do? Perhaps I'd also been influenced by Peter Block's questions in the introduction to the second edition of his book Flawless Consulting in which he asks:

Is it even legitimate to call ourselves 'change agents'? It is common for consultants to talk about how to 'intervene' in order to achieve change in an organization. It may feel fine for us to intervene in another's world, but which of us wants to be intervened upon? If we are change agents who are we trying to change? We can claim we are trying to change systems, but systems are still people in various formations. The mind-set that we can change another is risky business. And what about the common phrase "change management"? Can change be managed, and if it can, is it not someone else that we have in mind?

He ends the introduction commenting that

the core of consulting is about social contracting and managing in a self-managing world. It will take only minor shifts in language for line managers to apply most of the methods in the book to their own challenges of supervision.

Changing the workshop design in line with what I was listening to seemed to be to be less of a violation of the empathy rule than ploughing on regardless. The outcome of the session for me was lessons learned, and points taken for future use. Ultimately the session itself had a good outcome which will bear fruit at the follow up session next month.

The second reason I am interested in Herbert Shepard is because he was one of the founding fathers of organization development and on this count will be part of the research I am doing for a chapter of a book on organization development to be published next year.

During the training courses in Shanghai last week I was asked what a typical day in my working life was like. Given that I was classifying myself as an organization development consultant I thought I would see if I could describe one of my days taking Monday November 15 as a 'typical day'. It was typical in that I was not traveling anywhere and I had the normal number of scheduled meetings.

I began the day with a self-reflection exercise as I'm enrolled on a month of self reflection with the To Do Institute. It's interesting in that it has the same underlying premise expressed by Peter Block in his book Flawless Consulting. In this he says 'An authentic consultant, is not any oxymoron, but a compelling competitive advantage, if unfortunately a rare one.' Block talks about authenticity in terms of 'simply being honest with ourselves and being direct and honest with others.' The self-reflection program is partly about developing that authenticity.

I then went to the new office to see how the people who had moved over the weekend were doing, and chatted to them about any traumas of the move (none to speak of) and the excellent service provided by the IT department in getting everyone up and running the moment they reached their desks. Kudos to the IT team.

Once at the new building I participated in two meetings one after the other, both about the move. The meetings had very different feels, one informal with just three of us, and one much more formal with several people in the room and several more dialing in from other locations. I left at lunchtime to go and work from home but during the afternoon I dialed in to two other meetings, one on teleworking and one on communication.

These different meetings caused me to think about whether some meeting forums were better than others. (In one of the meetings we also discussed Telepresence). Is it 'better', i.e. more productive to have face to face or dial in meetings. What is the value of the face to face-ness? This is a substantive question as we are ramping up teleworking (mobile working). I'm wondering if there are any criteria that can be applied to help people decide this. In what circumstances does 'presence' in a physical sense add value to a meeting? A quick interrogation of Capella University's extensive on-line library, that I have access to as an adjunct faculty member, showed me that there's a significant amount of research on the comparison of team effectiveness in virtual with face to face stuations.

Two articles that I skimmed through on the topic were The Impact Of Team Empowerment On Virtual Team Performance: The Moderating Role Of Face-To-Face Interaction. By: Kirkman, Bradley L.; Rosen, Benson; Tesluk, Paul E.; Gibson, Cristina B.. Academy of Management Journal, April 2004, and Individual Swift Trust and Knowledge-Based Trust in Face-to-Face and Virtual Team Members. by Robert Jr., Lionel P.; Dennis, Alan R.; Hung, Yu-Ting Caisy. Journal of Management Information Systems, Fall2009, Vol. 26 Issue 2.

My challenge is to convert the various academic findings into practical and relevant recommendations for managers who are wrestling with building a sense of community accountability and productivity among their work teams who are increasingly working off the office site.

Leaving that aside I started prepare a one day workshop on the topic of teleworking. Getting the balance of behaviors, skills, and technologies for confident teleworkers was the order of the day. The program is being developed for intact work teams, not for individual teleworking though that forms a part of the section on organizing yourself for teleworking.

A couple of 1:1 phone calls had similar themes – in that in both we were reviewing presentations to check that their messages and approach would, as far as we can judge, work with the stakeholder group. Getting presentations right is a real art. At the training program last week I gave out a piece on how to construct an effective 10 minute presentation that seemed to go down well with the audience. The slight disconnect is that the narrative on how to do a good presentation is wordy and densely packed – the opposite of what the writer says a good presentation should be, nevertheless it has useful pointers.

Additional phone calls were a) to discuss the logistics for the telework training b) to ask someone to send some info regarding a meeting I didn't get to last week c) to check on a policy. In all cases I made the decision to call rather than email or IM – why? It was the quickest and easiest method in the time and resource (not by my computer at that moment) – assuming the person I needed to speak to answered and they all did!

Beyond the meetings and phone calls I answered in the order of 50 emails on a range of topics including an office community garden, conference room booking protocols, meeting scheduling, coasters for the conference rooms, and leadership development programs.

So another typical day passes. One of the fascinating facts in the ToDo self reflection course is that the average lifespan is 30,000 days. One of the questions to reflect on is how do you want to spend the number of days left to you. I'm pondering this as I reflect on my typical day.

On the programs I was running in Shanghai last week I was asked by several participants at different points and in different contexts to explain the differences between coaching, counseling, mentoring, and consulting.

On the flight back to the US I was thinking about this and wondering what the best way to answer was. In the course of this musing I wondered if there was a cultural distinction. Did the US/UK language have four different variations of what is essentially the same thing – advising people about a course of action, either by helping the individual come to his own approach or by telling him/her what to do. And does Mandarin only have one word for these multiple advising approaches?

This took me into the world of ethnoliguistics and I read an interesting piece on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis on the University of Minnesota's Cultural Anthropology website. No, I had never heard of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis either, but I had read Smilla's Sense of Snow, by Peter Hoeg in which I think I first read about the way Greenlanders have many names for the different types of snow. (Initially I looked at another book with snow that I'd read, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, but realized that probably didn't have the ethnolinguistic snippet. They're both books I enjoyed though).

Just as a by the way on this mini-research project I did come across another website that told me that "Everybody has heard that the Eskimos have over forty different words for snow; quite a few people also know that this is an urban legend. What you probably did not know, however, is that Finnish does have over 40 words for snow — at least if we stretch the definition a bit to include all forms of frozen precipitation." Then neatly listed are the forty words. Since I don't know Finnish I don't know if the writer is accurate but I won't go into that except to say that it reminded me of an article I read (also on the plane from Shanghai to DC) in Atlantic on whether to believe what you read. The article was called Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science, by David Freedman.

Finished the musing, I tackled the distinctions using a home-grown variation of Andrew Campbell's tests. (Nine tests of organization design, in Goold, Michael and Andrew Campbell " Do You Have a Well-Designed Organisation?", Harvard Business Review, pp 117-124, March 2002, and four tests of decision making instincts )

So my tests ran:

Is it a formal form of advising i.e. with set dates, objectives/goals, timescale, and payment involved?

Is it a formal form of advising for teams/groups or is it solely 1:1?

Is it a formal form of advising related to a specific performance issue or problem or generalized 'improvement'?

Is it an informal advising with no specific dates, goals/objectives but an 'as needed' discussion?

As I was running through these I thought I could try a flow chart but didn't have enough paper on the flight to experiment and start again if the flow got blocked somewhere along the line.

In any event it seemed that it could work without a flow chart as follows:

Coaching: 1:1 or team, formal with or without payment, to generally improve performance but may be specific on certain goals or outcomes to be achieved. Examples include – coaching a football team to improve overall performance but maybe with specific attention being paid to passing, coaching a senior executive to improve scenario planning and strategic thinking but may be focused on resolving a strategic issue or problem – current or potential. (But what's the difference between coaching and training?). Coaches are often certified: see the International Coaching Federation for more on this

Counselling: Most frequently 1:1 with an emotional or therapeutic element. Generally best left to skilled practioners. May well be formal with payment and goals, but may also be generally developmental. See the American Psychological Association or the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy

Consulting: Advising in an expert or collaborative (process) consultant role on an organizational issue or opportunity that will bring organization improvement. Focused more on whole organization performance (or part of it), than on individuals, teams or groups. Consultants may be certified by one of the members of the International Council of Management Consulting Institutes as a Certified Management Consultant.

Mentoring: Usually informal (though many companies have mentoring programs). I have not come across any certifications specifically in mentoring, and there seems to be an idea that anyone can be a mentor if they have the 'right' attitudes. A book I read years ago Everyone Needs a Mentor by David Clutterbuck was excellent on the topic. Looking for it just now I see it was first published in 1991 and seems to have been superseded by Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring by David Clutterbuck and David Megginson. That's now on my wish list.

The fact that coaching and mentoring are now mentioned in the same book title illustrates the fact that there are overlaps among all four advising roles: they all require curiosity and an open mind, they all need practitioners skilled in open questions and non-directive approaches, they all require attentive listening skills, and a good sense of self. Beyond that they segment by focus – individual(s) or organization, formal or informal, therapeutic or developmental, specific goals or open ended. Categorizing the type of thing issue is may ultimately be less important than choosing the person with the right skills to work with the issue(s).

Flawless Consulting, by Peter Block, has been a long-time favorite of mine. Thursday and Friday this week I was using it as a 'course text' for the consulting skills program I was facilitating in Shanghai so I was paying particular attention to its content and relevance. A number of things caught my attention. (I was using the second edition but someone told me there is now a third edition which I just looked up and discover that it becomes available in March 2011).

First was the way he allocated discussion to the phases of consulting. He notes on page 6 that: "each consulting project, whether it lasts ten minutes or ten months goes through five phases". He then overviews the five – entry and contracting, discovery and dialogue, feedback and the decision to act, engagement and implementation, extension, recycle or terminate. All good so far.

What's fascinating is that he doesn't get to implementation until chapter 15, of 19 where he gaily says "when I wrote the first edition of this book I devoted exactly two pages to implementation", that's ok because he does cover some aspects of implementation and engagement. However, there's nothing at all on phase five extension, recycle or terminate, and this is a critical area of work that demands a particular set of consulting skills to do effectively and that is far too often neglected – but without doing a good job of this phase how else do we get any organizational learning? It'll be interesting to see if the third edition has anything on this.

Second it was interesting to see the book being interpreted through the eyes of a predominantly Chinese group new to consulting, with a background in HR (some with a lot of experience and some just starting their HR careers). One of the challenges was the focus on the relationship aspect of the book. Block says up front that "A major objective of the book is to encourage you to focus on and value the affective, or interpersonal aspect, of the relationship between the client and the consultant." This focus led to questions around how to manage power differentials in the client/consultant situation, how do develop assertiveness and influencing skills, what exactly to say in certain situations – like if someone challenges the validity of the data. It seemed to me that the set of cultural assumptions inherent in Block's book around organizational power and personal styles were quite a struggle for the participants I was working with to get to grips with.

Third the learners were looking for detailed 'how to', so they found the checklists Block dots through the text the most helpful thing about the book. In fact, for the purposes of the program just extracting the checklists and building one for the omitted fifth phase would, in retrospect, have been a sensible thing for me to do. Many of the examples in the narrative just didn't seem to have any resonance with the group members – a sentence like "If you are feeling expansive, you can even say to the client, "It looks like we agree on how to proceed. I am really happy about that, " seemed to be something of a concept and language disconnect. (What is expansive? Do you really want to reveal your feelings to a client?)

Fourth Block's orientation is that consulting assignments are messy, unpredictable, and somewhat chaotic. Thus they rely heavily for success on the consultant being self-aware, authentic, and able to deal with ambiguity in the workplace. Again discussion with participants seemed to suggest that order is what organizations are based on, and that ambiguity is ironed out as much as possible. So it seems that many of the consultant characteristicsBlock discusses would take great courage (one of the characteristics not listed in the interpersonal skills list on p9) to deploy in the workplaces the participants were familiar with. Nevertheless, the role playing we did and the discussion we had around stepping out of your comfort zone met with enthusiasm. We had great fun with an influencing skills exercise using playing cards where people act to the level on their card and others have to guess what number their card is. It's a game I learned years ago from Jo Ellen Grzyb of the Impact Factory when I attended one of her influencing skills courses.

So over the last two days working on consulting skills here in Shanghai I've learned a lot about my clients (i.e. the participants) expectations, and how I can adapt and improve the program to meet their needs more closely. It's going to take a more detailed thought process/evaluation to come up with something that I think is better but it'll be a good challenge to my own assumptions on what internal consulting is.

Day 2 of the Organization Development program raised a lot more questions from the participants. The deep interest in the topic from the group members is fantastic, and really caused me to think more about the content of the program. Three questions I thought might merit a whole session in any revised version were:

How do you get OD work as an internal consultant? Oddly, this question was raised by a colleague of mine a couple of weeks ago. What the questioner wanted to know was should he wait for line managers to call him because they had a problem or opportunity that they thought he could help them with, or should he go out into the organization and actively search for work. And if the latter how do you do this?

My tack has always been to go out and search for work within the organization myself on the basis that if I find work, and do a good job, then others will hear about this and I will eventually get called on. And, in the course of events, this has been what happens. Opening this up to general discussion we talked about the skills of marketing, and selling OD services within and organization and the type of knowledge you'd have to have to be convincing and credible.

Oddly marketing skills are not one of the competences commonly associated with internal OD consultants. The CIPD HR Profession Map does not mention them, although they are mentioned in the OD Network's list of competences as follows:

MARKETING
An effective organization development (OD) practitioner can . . .
1. Be aware of systems wanting to change
2. Be known to those needing you
3. Match skills with potential client profile
4. Convey qualifications in a credible manner
5. Quickly grasp the nature of the system
6. Determine appropriate decision makers
7. Determine appropriate processes

The next thing the group came up with as a necessary competence was a deep knowledge of the business: its operating context, the pressures and constraints it faces, the opportunities it could seize, and so on. It's unfortunate that many OD consultants lack this business savvy coming typically from a background in HR, learning and development, or social sciences. But in this case the CIPD's HR Profession Map is clear that this is a required competence, whereas the OD Network's list is silent on business savvy.

So the CIPD tells us that an OD consultant must:

Know how the organisation makes money, how it is structured, who its competitors and customers are and how the teams work together to optimise performance, and is conversant with the range of products and services provided by the organisation.

Have a good understanding of the organisation's strategy, performance goals and drivers, and understands the sector in which the organisation operates and the market factors that impact performance, including customers, competitors, and so on.

Have a deep understanding of the organisation's strategy, performance goals and drivers and understands the sector in which the organisation operates and the market factors that impact performance, including customers, competitors, globalisation, demographics, and so on.

Understand and speak the 'language of the business'

Realizing these two skills – marketing and business savvy – are essential to developing credibility, participants wanted to know how to develop them. I remember years ago when I worked at Prudential going on a sales course (I won't go into the sales v marketing discussion) – one that the Prudential sales force took – and learning a lot from that. So taking a course is one option. Discussing this with the group one of them came up with an action to get herself seconded to a sales team for a three month period so she learn what it was all about.

A related question to "How do you get work?" was "How do you sell the concepts and practical value of organization development to skeptical line managers?" This question is one that is hard to answer and even when you think you know how to do it can be a hard sell (even with good selling skills!) as OD work is very rarely measured or evaluated in ways that make business sense, or that are expressed in return on investment terms. Any pitch that doesn't include some reference to financial reward is likely to fall on deaf ears as this example, I came across later in the day from the REEB Mobility Marketing Playbook illustrates

Corporate real estate says to BU Manager

1.We will redesign your floor plan to create new collaborative synergies!
2. We'll cater our approach to your needs!
3. We'll help you relax constraining policies on who works where and when!
4. You'll enjoy better talent attraction and retention among the new generation of workers!

BU Manager hears
Your workspace will be disrupted by a serious remodeling effort.
2. We'll disguise our one-size-fits-all model.
3. We're going to introduce anarchy into your employee management.
4. We're going to install a couple of football tables and some funky lamps.

So two things to consider putting into any revamped Organization Development program, which might mean cutting out something that's currently in there. I've got time to think about this as the next program isn't till sometime next year.

Today was day one of a two-day training program on organization development (OD) that I'm facilitating in Shanghai. There are thirty-five participants in the room all with varying levels of skills and knowledge about organization development and also varying English language proficiencies. I find it a difficult call to design these because I have to make a number of decisions related to the following questions:

How much content should be theory and how much practice?
Participants want case studies, tools, and practical tips, and at the same time they want to know why definitions of OD have a 'science' bent, for example:

"Organization development is a system-wide application of behavioral science knowledge to the planned development and reinforcement of organizational strategies, structures, and processes for improving an organization's effectiveness." Cummings, T.G, and Worley, C.G. (2005)

And having seen a definition like this, they want to know what a 'system' is. Both these queries relate to some theories of organization development. Then there's the question of the various lenses through which organizations can be viewed. One of my favorite books on this is Images of Organization, by Gareth Morgan, with his discussions of organizations as machines, organisms, brains, psychic prisons, political systems, cultures, as flux and transformation, as instruments of domination, but that's not really a practitioner guide, more an academic treatise. And anyway, I wonder if the time is right for a different set of images of organization given the numbers of new business models and the advances in technology since Morgan first wrote the book.

What aspects of OD should I concentrate on? There are many possibilities on this:
In the two days available should I look at the OD practitioner's role, skills, competences, and what a typical day in the life of an OD consultant is like. Indeed, is there a typical day, and is there a distinction between being a 'OD practitioner' and an 'OD consultant'.

Alternatively we could cover the role of OD in an organization compared with the role of HR, and where OD should 'sit' and who should 'own' it, all hot potatoes.

Another possibility is to consider various OD methods and approaches, both soft and hard e.g. appreciative inquiry, action research, Future Search, World Café, lean techniques, and process improvements.

What level shall I pitch at? The UK's Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, in its HR Profession Map conveniently considers four bands of OD practitioner. Should I make some assumptions about the participants' levels of skills and knowledge? Even with pre course questionnaires this is a tricky one. Some of the participants here are senior HR Directors tasked with introducing OD into their organizations – OD being in the early stages of appearance in Chinese companies. They may not ultimately be involved in OD interventions but managing people who are. Equally there are usually people in the group who may be relatively junior in the organization and are wondering whether and how to make OD their career path.

How much should I cover the future of OD? Given that it's a relatively new concept in China, I wonder how much I should be talking about how OD is practiced in well established predominantly western multinationals, and how much I should be encouraging discussion and thought about how it could develop as a very different discipline in emerging market companies, and what roles the people participating in the Shanghai program could take in giving OD a radically different look. But then I wonder how I would do this given my western experience, assumptions, knowledge, and perspectives. (I guess I could treat it as an OD intervention itself). It seems plausible that if emerging markets can leapfrog for example from virtually no telecoms to massive cell phone use without having the legacies of wired phone systems, then they could leapfrog traditional theories and methods about how to effectively develop organizations. (And, indeed, I think that would be healthy). The HR Profession map does not, for example, mention OD practitioners needing competencies in triple bottom line, sustainability, social media, or virtual organizations – all aspects that I think they need proficiency in.

So as I wonder about today I'm starting to think if and how I would design the program differently next time. I'd like to involve today's participants in shaping something that provided a real challenge to current thinking on OD but at the same time built their confidence and skills in their current roles as OD consultants – which is what most of them are looking for.

One of the rules of thumb for change agents is 'never work uphill'. I mentioned this to someone who I was talking with last week who in a general conversation said how upset she was that there was massive change going on in her department, no-one at her level knew what was going on, rumor was rife, and when she'd asked her manager what the story was she'd been told that it was not a discussable topic with people below a certain grade.

She did not know that I had several conversations with the head of her department during the summer. What he wanted to do was change the way the physical space was used in order to accommodate a large team of people (80) coming to work on a long-term project, and to establish a physical and on-line library for shared documents and materials. When I told her she asked why I hadn't been able to do something to make the Department Head's approach more effective.

At the time his plan was to do this without commandeering more space than he had, although this was an option but would incur costs. When I first talked to him he was enthusiastic about the possibilities of encouraging people to work differently, to telework more, to share space, and to give up having their own copies of things when they could access them from a physical and an on-line library.

My suggestions to him included involving all the staff – about 200 – in helping decide how the space should be used, how they would work differently, and what would make a smooth transition to doing this. I volunteered to run some lunchtime sessions to start an engagement and communication process. Following these first few meetings nothing happened from his side to start down this path in terms of dates, or agreement with the outline I sent for the sessions. So then I suggested coming to his all-staff meeting the first week of September to give an overview of the upcoming change and the participation process. He agreed to this, only to cancel the day before, saying they now had too much on the agenda.

At that point I sent him an email saying that alarm bells were ringing for me, and if he continued down the path of changing things without involving the staff he would be likely to have disastrous results. He didn't reply to this. And invoking the rule of 'never work uphill'. I moved on to other things.

So, I was not surprised to hear that things were not going well. Learning more about what was going on I saw a catalogue of failure centered around belief that leaders make the right choices, that engaging staff in decision making is not necessary, and that people will do what leaders tell them to do.

This brought to mind an article I read years ago in the Harvard Business Review Reaching and Changing Frontline Employees, by T. J. Larkin and Sandar Larkin. It's a bit dated now (no mention of social media) but the messages are enduring. In it they say:

Not communicating to employees during major organizational change is the worst mistake a company can make. Consider the conclusions from three important studies on communication during mergers and acquisitions: In periods of high stress and uncertainty, people fill communication voids with rumors; rumors end up attributing the worst possible motives to those in control; and communication lowers employees' stress and anxiety even when the news is bad. In other words, uncertainty is more painful than bad news.

The authors go on to talk about

"the astonishing speed with which rumors spread in large companies. But how? Who schedules the rumor meetings? Without temps and overtime, how do employees find time to pass on the rumor? Who prints the rumors onto overhead transparencies? And where are the trainers providing supervisors with refresher courses in rumor-communication skills?

The truth is there, but we refuse to see it. Corporate videos, publications, and meetings don't move information through companies; they inhibit it. The most effective way to communicate is informally, face-to-face, one-on-one. The problem with rumors is their inaccuracy. That is why face-to-face communication must be grounded in fact and in print. But understand this about rumors: The transmission method is perfect."

So when I walked up to the department and happened to bump into the head I asked him how things were going. His terse response was 'they could be better'. When I suggested that we could discuss taking some remedial action now he said that 'it's all happening this week'.

My choices in this situation? Three things come immediately to mind:

1. Invoke the lesson 'never work uphill'
2. Work with the person I was talking with and see if she can influence from an insider – albeit not a senior management – position
3. Offer to come back in three months and see what everyone has learned from the exercise.

Other suggestions would be welcome.

POST SCRIPT: The day after posting this I heard that the head of department had cancelled this week's scheduled whole department staff meeting.

Yesterday was my day for thinking about space andorganizational performance. First, I listened to a webinar hosted by the Real Estate Executive Board. It was called the Headquarter Relocation Strategy Playbook and billed as:

"Another addition to REEB's collection of playbooks; this teleconference lays out a road map on the best way to tackle a headquarter relocation. Filled with case studies, actionable tools, and time-saving templates, this playbook should be your first stop when creating your own internal strategy."

Did it live up to the billing? I thought it was worth the hour spent on it, although the presenter galloped through the ten steps and 70 slides without a pause – skipping over several 'in the interests of time'. However, the material is available and my question after the webinar was answered within the hour.

The message of the webinar was that Corporate Read Estate (CRE) has long been associated with 'facilities' and the price per square foot of property, but in the playbook Richard Evans, Director, Worldwide Real Estate, GlaxoSmithKline plc is quoted as saying

"Now, we have the opportunity to help the business determine its strategic direction. The challenge is developing the right framework to engage the business on the right considerations."

And it was refreshing to see and hear throughout the webinar stakeholder maps, engagement and communication strategies, and change management techniques along with several good case studies and pointers towards further information on the topic of space planning and business performance

Later in the day I was sent a presentation on a similar topic "Workforce & Workspace Sustainability" in which the presenter made the point that

"Real Estate plays a key role in the performance relationship between how buildings work and work performance."

He went on to say that

The foundation of this is the information utility, or the next generation building information network. In addition to the plumbing, piping, and wiring in your building, we now add a single, secure, common collaboration and communications platform to the fabric of a building. Not much unlike the other utilities, we lay the groundwork to design and install systems that will interact with and communicate over this one IP network. A single, secure communications and collaboration platform helps to make the user more productive while intensifying the use of your real estate. By converging and providing among other technologies, high speed internet, telephony, visitor management (remote receptionist), audio and video conferencing, web-conferencing, rich media, and digital signage, one can support collaboration and productivity of the workforce and users of the building."

This interaction between physical building and present/mobile workforce members is possible because the newer 'pipework' and other techonologies are converging to make the way space is used an integral part of delivery of the business strategy.

Cisco is one of the leaders in this field – both itself practicing what it preaches, and pioneering in the arena of work space and work performance strategies. Fast Company reported in February 2010 that Cisco had been appointed to become:

New Songdo's exclusive supplier of digital plumbing. More than simply installing routers and switches — or even something so banal as citywide Wi-Fi — Cisco is expected to wire every square inch of the city with synapses. From the trunk lines running beneath the streets to the filaments branching through every wall and fixture, it promises this city will "run on information." Cisco's control room will be New Songdo's brain stem.

New Songdo is a city being built from scratch in South Korea.

"It has been hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. A green city, it was LEED-certified from the get-go, designed to emit a third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size (about 300,000 people during the day). It's an "international business district" and an "aerotropolis" — a Western-oriented city more focused on the airport and China beyond than on Seoul."

Looking at the website it's clear that the city is being planned to exemplify the interactions of physical space with new collaborative and other technologies. Exciting times for space planners and another milestone in the march towards utopia. Let's hope that the outcome of both new ways of office planning and of city planning in fact have positive outcomes for citizens. It twill take time before we know whether these approaches work or whether Jane Jacobs would turn over in her grave and pick up cudgels again.

NOTE Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) "was an urban writer and activist who championed new, community-based approaches to planning for over 40 years. Her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, became perhaps the most influential American text about the inner workings and failings of cities".

Wednesday (yesterday) seems to have been my day for thinking about leadership. I had brushes with ideas on leadership during the day. The first was with someone with whom I was discussing possible reasons for organizational inertia. The second was with someone who was perplexed that people in the organization kept saying that they couldn't act because they didn't have the right level of leadership support. The third was an email that invited me to a lunchtime discussion on "Courage – The Essential Leadership Competency". The fourth was a piece of writing the author had sent me titled "Leadership in the Petaclasm" with his response to my response on that piece. So I'll take a brief look at each of the four pieces in turn.

Possible reasons for organizational inertia are, in the view of the person I was talking with, due to difficulties in communication between the top, middle, and bottom layers of an organization. She mentioned Barry Oshry's work on "Tops, Middles, and Bottoms", a notion that is developed in his article Total System Power and in an article on his website, Silo Breakthroughs: Creating a Powerful Middle Team, written by Marcia Hyatt, and Ginny Belden-Charles. In this article the authors:

"Examine the "middle space" in organizations. "Middles" in a system are those who are in the middle of the hierarchy or those caught between conflicting demands. The ones in an organization who experience this the most are the management layers between top executives and front line workers. In some systems this could mean 4-8 layers of management. They look at the conditions that exist in the middle and the common systemic patterns that these conditions create.

Failing to act without the 'right level of leadership support' seems to me to be a symptom of fear of failure in a punitive hierarchy typical of government bureaucracies. In a refreshing article in Government Executive, Martha Johnson, Administrator, GSA, rejects

'the "great man on top" theory, in which an omniscient leader issues directives from on high. In the age of social media, Johnson says that strategy "just doesn't work anymore." "People can be in connection with each other now in a way that we always used to control in our silos," she says. "With information technology, everyone shares everyone's ideas. Leading as if you're controlling doesn't work; it's just sheer arrogance to think you can." Her view is that "We have to learn to take risks, and perhaps fail, but fail fast, fail forward and fail fruitfully."

Given that taking risks requires courage it was timely that I learned from the flyer on the lunchtime seminar "Courage – The Essential Leadership Competency" that there are six types of courage. The seminar is led by Paul Deeprose who wrote an article on these. He talks about:

The Courage to Believe: Have the courage to aim high and embrace the positive challenges you will undoubtedly face.

The Courage to Innovate: "Courage disposes people not to just think outside the box, but to live outside the box." Try new things!

The Courage to Speak Up: Express opinions, give feedback and trust your judgement. You have unique talents; share them.

The Courage to Trust: Be trusting first, don't force people to earn your trust. Relax your control; trust that others are capable and want to do a good job. Work with integrity, humility, openness and honesty.

The Courage to Make Mistakes: Too few mistakes highlights complacency. Try things, make mistakes and learn from them.

The Courage to Take Action: Step over the line, build safety nets and the joy of success will far outweigh the fear of failure.

Once we have courageous leaders at the top, middle, and bottom will they be capable of Leadership in the Petaclasm? Only, if I'm reading Nigel Cameron correctly, if they have the additional characteristic of being a bridge builder and importantly:

First, a bridge to the future. And the faster change takes place, the more central this becomes. That is to say, leadership that is both innovative and constantly embracing of innovation.

Second, a bridge across the silos, disciplines, communities; a networking that draws on ever more diverse sources in the midst of the data deluge and the growing inter-connectedness. Leadership through innovation through networks of knowledge.

So yesterday brought lots of leadership stuff to think about and I'm now working through the patterns that are beginning to emerge. A project that came my way later in the day was one where the department was described as having been leaderless for years, and the task of the newly appointed leader was to fix what was broken and get the department to high performance and high customer satisfaction as quickly as possible. Paying attention to the middles, enabling them to act without deferring to him, showing courage, recognizing the value of knowledge networks and developing capability to work with a mindset that is future looking not hindsight looking could be a sensible way forward.

I get the Merriam Webster word of the day every day and find that some I know and some I don't. Most weeks I learn a few new words but rarely keep them long enough in my memory to use them in speech or writing.

This week I've come across new words in emails sent to me. First is copacetic (everything is ok) and the other is TMI (textspeak for Too Much Information) both I had to look up. I mentioned copacetic to someone and he instantly said it was the title of a 'rubbish song'. So I then had to look that up and found that

"Copacetic is an album by Velocity Girl, an American indie rock band formed in 1989 in College Park, Maryland, although it was generally known as a Washington, DC-area band. The band released three albums before splitting up in 1996."

Moving to a new organization brings a sudden vocabulary increase since every organization has not only a host of acronyms but usually a set of commonly used phrases or technical jargon that is specific to that organization.

One of the things I've noticed in my current organization is the punitive language that seems to stop people doing things. They are afraid of being 'written up', or 'rebuked', or 'reprimanded'. They don't want to make decisions without consulting their 'supervisor', and they ask each other 'who is your supervisor?'.

Not only that they describe each other in terms of level in the system. 'She's a grade xxx', or 'He can't have that information because he's only a grade yyy.' The preoccupation with management and hierarchy seems to preclude any hope of 'decision making at the lowest level', 'empowerment', or 'taking initiative' which is what other organizations look for from their staff. And which we are now seeking from our staff.

So would changing the language of the organization change the system, or would changing the system change the language, or would doing both (plus other things) need to happen simultaneously if things were to change. Going back to text messaging – the technology changed the language, because it's quicker to type in shorthand than whole words. Now people use text style shorthand in emails, SMS messages, and other quick written exchanges with people. I find myself doing it – and the language of texting is changing the way people use language and symbols. (I can't bring myself to use emoticoms or similar symbols yet).

I was discussing organizational language use today with someone and suggested that we try collapsing the grades from the current 21 to something more in the order of 5. Without the all the grade numbers people wouldn't be able to talk the same way. On this topic, sitting on my bookshelf is a book I haven't yet read that I bought earlier this year – a time when I was also mulling over the notions of language and work. It's called How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation and it's by Robert Kegan, and Lisa Laskow Lahey. The editorial review of the book on Amazon says that:

"Language is the primary tool by which we communicate. Kegan and Lahey argue, though, that the words we use do more than represent feelings and attitudes. The very choice itself of one word or expression over another can determine feelings and attitudes and–most importantly–actions."

So I'm now thinking that I will start a conscious attempt to change the language of the organization (I'll read the book first!). Simultaneously I'll lobby to collapse the grade structure to see if that moves us away from punitive language towards more equitable language. I've already – a few months ago – started to change the language a bit by getting the word 'transformation' to supersede the word 'modernization' in the wide-ranging project that I'm involved in; but even changing that one word has proved an uphill battle. I haven't yet managed to change the word 'reprimand' to 'praise' but when I do maybe everything will be copacetic.