Category Archives: Leadership

The #1 leadership model you’ve never heard of

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As I was trying to think of a catchy title for this piece I remembered a comment made over the weekend. The most successful management books (based on sales) usually have a number at the beginning and a link to something like a secret recipe for success at the end. The fact that most are just faddish repackaged garbage rather than insightful theory is another thing.

I hope you will forgive the click bait title and see some value in what I will briefly outline here.

At the heart of the organisational theory that I predominantly work with sits a model that I believe can help address a significant amount of issues in change management.

The organisational theory is, of course, Systems Leadership Theory; developed by Ian Macdonald, Catherine Burke, and Karl Stewart. I know Ian from a while back and I had the great pleasure of meeting both Catherine and Karl at the annual Systems Leadership Conference last weekend. The model I am referring to is the values continua.

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A core assumption of SLT is that humans have shared core values, despite race, religion, or nationality. This might on the surface seem like a preposterous assertion as we daily hear about values clashes between various groups. If we dig a bit deeper, however, we often find that the conflict between these groups is not a values clash at all. The conflicting views come from the behaviours that each group believe is a positive or negative representation of that value.

If you pay attention to the news, listen to political representatives speak about their opposition. They will undoubtedly try to position some behaviour of the other party to the right side on the values continua for one or more of the core values.

A very recent example in Australia is the sacking of Tony Abbott. People against that political move will say that Malcolm Turnbull’s behaviour was on the right side of the values continua, i.e. a combination of unfair, disrespectful, cowardly, dishonest, etc. The other side’s argument will position Turnbull’s move to the left on the values continua, suggesting it was fair, courageous, and honest.

Conflict, unless based on purely ideological grounds, usually the result of one or more of the core values being aggrieved.

So before you take that next action with your team or send that communication piece out, think about how the cohort of people on the receiving end may interpret that action and where on the values continua they would place it.

Below is a great keynote by Ian Macdonald, he talks about the values continua around 32 minutes in but well worth watching the whole thing.

 

 

Stop wasting time defining your organisation’s values!

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Many (if not most) executive teams spend at least some time defining the values of their organisation. This usually involves some external consultant reinforcing the importance of this activity and how important this activity is for organisational culture. But is it really important, or is it just another useless smoke & mirrors exercise that plagues our modern day organisations?

Value statements usually travel in packs of five or six so probably another manifestation of Miller’s Law (7 ± 2). There are many problems with these and I will raise some issues here although I am sure there are more.

Whilst we might share the same values we can have very different views when it comes to the behaviours that we think represent these values.

With five or six on the list, some will not make the cut. What about the ones not made explicit, are they less important somehow? And why does the top team get to define these for everyone else?

An organisation I know well has Safety, Pride, Accountability, Collaboration, and Excellence as its values, although referred to as behaviours. Together they neatly spell SPACE so I’m sure the exec team and the consultants were really proud of creating that mnemonic.

When values are made explicitly and the organisation does not live up to them they quickly become a running joke. You try to collaborate with colleagues online but all web collaboration tools are blocked by the Internet filter. Forget sharing a large file using Dropbox or something similar, and getting access to a shared folder is a nightmare – but hey we value collaboration! It takes 20 plus weeks to get a person recruited to a role – but we are all about excellence.

Making values explicit is according to Dave Snowden rather silly and anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Anthropology would agree that values are lost once published. They become part of the power language and often misused. [after I published this on LinkedIn I found this link to an old blog of Dave’s about this very topic]. Dave makes the point that values are best shared through parables where values are not made explicit,you have to infer what the lesson is yourself.

This view is supported by Systems Leadership Theory (SLT) which I have referred to in the past on this blog, suggests that culture is in fact created through peoples’ shared view of the behaviours that reflect positive or negative manifestations of a value.

Instead of talking about specific values SLT talks about the six universal core values which again funnily enough fits Miller’s Law. These six emerged from work done across the world and across cultures to narrow down what actually matters to people.

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If you were to use values to try to shape behaviour in your organisation you have to make sure that they are more than just platitudes. Do the systems and symbols in the organisation actually reinforce the values or work against them, do people in leadership positions actively live them and understand the role they play in behaving accordingly?

The universal core values can be a helpful lens to consider how other people might interpret your actions. How will they make sense of what is going on, where would they place this behaviour on the values continua?

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So what about the idea that values is a waste of time if all I was going to do was to come up with some new ones? I’m worried that the addiction to value statements is hard to drop cold turkey so the universal core values could be an interim step to recovery.

Of course if we have the courage to go all the way we could take a leaf from the nonviolent communication playbook and just focus our efforts on one thing:

Attending to folks’ needs.

This is the “anti-matter principle” by Bob Marshall @flowchainsensei, a principle that is making me think long and hard on many of my assumptions around organisations and work.

Is it time to bin the idea of “Change Management”?

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Moving from the fallacy of planned, predictable change to embracing feedback driven change and the reality of unpredictability and no control.

The term “Change Management” itself has significant limitations and assumptions attached to it. Manage change sounds much like time management. No one can teach you to manage time any more than you can manage change. With time management, you can only control the actions you take and prioritise them to make the best use of the time available, and we all the get the same amount each day.

As with time, you cannot manage change per se, you can only control your actions in relation to change. Your actions will undoubtedly solicit a response and your actions will be interpreted in ways that you cannot with certainty predict in advance.

Many change management tools and frameworks seem to come from a view that all change is a top-down imposed thing that has to be “sold” to employees or it needs “buy-in” from key stakeholders.  Furthering the notion that the parties concerned have little input into the change itself and need convincing or manipulation to get into agreement. Also, there are models that reinforce the notion that this imposed change will trigger an intense feeling of loss akin to that we go through when we’ve lost a loved one. Given the levels of engagement in most workplaces, I doubt that people care that much about changes in the workplace. We’ve been fed this stuff so often and so repeatedly it has become the truth in the domain of change management.

The conventional view of Change Management is based on the assumption that you are already in a steady state and introducing change brings about a level of uncertainty, something that challenges the status quo. In most organisations this is hardly the reality. Initiatives hit business units from every direction all the time. If not internally generated restructures or process improvements then it is initiatives from HR, Safety, or Finance that are imposing changes as supporting functions often do, forgetting that they are there to in fact “support” the primary activities of the business in achieving their purpose. If we’re not dealing with internal change, then we’re dealing with changes in the marketplace or from regulatory bodies. So the steady state that many change management models talk about is more of a myth than anything else.

Many organisations, in line with their command and control mantra, dictate what tools must be used for Change Management, and in what order. Change Management is treated in the same fashion as traditional Project Management and run through various stage gates of approval. This further creates the illusion that we are in control and that projects and change in complex systems can be managed as if you were building a machine. We can design it, build the parts, and put it all together. If we get one part wrong, we can always build another and replace it with a new shiny one.

This view represents a plan-based approach to change; a view that is not very helpful when dealing with human systems, which not conform to a Newtonian-Cartesian view of the world. Change in human systems belongs in the complex domain. Niels Pflaeging suggested in a recent article that change in these systems is like pouring milk into coffee, once it’s done it changes the coffee forever, you cannot take it back and the pattern in unpredictable. This highlights the need for feedback driven change as a more appropriate approach to work with the complexity, rather than plan-driven change that assumes predictable cause and effect.

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I believe that we can significantly lift the performance of our organisations changing our approach to Change Management. In fact, I believe that real success means that the term is self, disappears into the history books of management fads as “change” becomes so embedded in our way of working that we don’t need reforms or transformation programs.

In organisations that always change how they do things, they test the value of the change against their purpose as an organisation. In those organisations there is no such thing as “change management”. People are so connected to the purpose that initiatives that are seen to further the organisations purpose emerge and get support without elaborate plans, milestones or blueprints. Which is not to say that selected models from the traditional Change Management library cannot be used, but if they are, they are pulled in as needed and not by top-down decree. My recent post referenced the book “Reinventing Organizations”, which has plenty of examples of organisations that operate this way.

We have a tremendous opportunity to shift our organisations for the better if we only are willing to challenge and critically reassess how we see the world of organisations. To achieve this, we need to shift our focus away from individuals and lift our gaze towards the systems of organisation, the systems that drive the behaviours we experience today. Once there, look further inwards to identify the underlying thinking and beliefs about people and how that has influenced the design of these systems. This is change with an undefined end point as you continuously poke the broader system to see how it responds, you make sense of the ripples you create and take further action, either dampening something or boosting something, and again sense the response.

When we start taking steps to rethink and redesign our organisation let’s engage people in co-creating their environments to set up the conditions for positive change from the start. It is an excellent way to get ownership and people tend to be more ok with things when they have been included in the decision-making process. The process outlined in Sociocracy, for example, is a great start.

Granted, we must take a Theory Y view of people and their capabilities so I guess that is going out on a limb for some. I dare you to take that step and hold the tension – you will be surprised to see what people are capable of when given the chance if you choose to see the world through a different lens. There is a real leadership challenge here for the daring one. Holding the tension when shifting your organisation or business unit from the claws of the Theory X mindset to one designed from a Theory Y perspective will certainly test your leadership capability.

Bye bye Elliott Jaques, it’s been fun but it’s time to part ways!

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What type of organisation do you see before you if I tell you that there is no top down strategy, no pre-defined roles, no budgets, no performance targets, full transparency and sharing of information (incl. financials), self-organising teams, fully decentralised decision-making, and where change management is a superfluous concept? Does a vision of some hippie commune, Kibbutz style co-operative emerge or perhaps a not-for profit charity type organisation?

What if I then say that it is not only a single organisation but a suite of very successful organisations ranging in size from around 100 employees to 10s of thousands of employees, across industries and in both the not for profit and for profit sector?

Perhaps you are asking yourself how you could run a large organisation without the foundations; a clear strategy, clear roles and accountabilities, levels of authority, defined performance targets cascaded down the organisation to measure how well strategy is executed, a well-developed project management framework with its associated budgets and Gantt charts, annual performance reviews and all the other practices we’ve been conditioned to believe are essential.

In his book “Reinventing Organizations”, Frederic Laloux has researched organisations that operate from level of consciousness that represent a significant shift. He categorises the practices of organisations using a spectrum of colours to represent the level of consciousness that shapes the organisational mindset.

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Plotting the successive stages of human and organisational consciousness on a timeline, the results tell a clear story; evolution seems to be accelerating, and accelerating ever faster. We have according to Laloux never been in time where so many people operated from some many different levels of consciousness at the same time. The same is true for organisations, Red, Amber, Orange, and Green Organisations are found working side by side in the same cultures and cities.

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The difference between the organisations that Frederic Laloux has researched for this book and most other organisations today is not only stark but also incredibly exciting – not only is there is a better way, but there is plenty of evidence of its positive impact on people and its longevity.

Now here is the catch – you will only see the potential and the power of these practices if your adult development stage aligns with this worldview. As humans, we develop in stages, just as a caterpillar through sudden transformations becomes a butterfly, or a tadpole a frog. A key aspect of human development stages is that there is nothing inherently better or worst being at any level – it makes no sense saying that an adult is better than a toddler. However, depending on the task a certain stage may be a better fit. I have referred to adult development in previous posts, click here for link.

For anyone familiar with the Cynefin framework it quickly becomes evident that the practices that these organisations share are well suited for operating in complex environments. There is an incredible shared sense of purpose, which guides decision making on a day-to-day basis. There are also just a few clear and simple rules or principles that guide what is acceptable behaviour. This allows for initiatives to emerge and if there is merit in them, people will naturally support them and give them their energy. Because decision-making is so inclusive and closely tied to the organisational purpose, change does not have to be “managed” in the way we think about it in traditional organisations.

Below are some of the practices that are common and represent what Laloux refers to as Teal Organisations. If you read these and think – how crazy, could never work, maybe it is time to reflect on your view of people – are you a Theory X or a Theory Y supporter?

Each level of consciousness has brought with it some breakthroughs compared with the previous level. For Teal organisations these are; Self-management, Wholeness, and Evolutionary Purpose.

The following is quoted directly from a summary of the book by Ulrich Gerndt from Change Factory.

Self-management: operate effectively, even at a large scale, with a system based on peer relationships, without the need for either hierarchy or consensus.

Wholeness: practices that invite us to reclaim our inner wholeness and bring all of who we are to work, instead of with a narrow “professional” self / “masculine resolve” etc.

Evolutionary Purpose: organizations seen as having a life and a sense of direction of their own. Instead of trying to predict and control the future, members of the organization are invited to listen in and understand what the organization wants to become, what purpose it wants to serve.

Self Management Practices Wholeness Evolutionary Purpose
Self organizing teams Self-decorated warm spaces without status markers Organization seen as a living entity with its own evolutionary purpose
Coaches w/o P&L responsibility when needed Clear values translated into explicit ground rules, Strategy emerges organically from collective intelligence of self-managing employees
Almost no staff functions Ongoing values discussion Decision making by listening to organization‘s purpose (everyone, large group, meditations…)
Coordination and meetings ad hoc when needs arise Quiet room, meditation practices, team supervision, peer coaching Concept of competition irrelevant (embraced to pursue purpose)
Radically simplified project management, Storytelling practices to support self-disclosure and community building Growth and market share only important in as much they help achieve purpose
Minimum plans & budgets Absence of job titles and descriptions to allow selfhood to shape roles Profit as lagging indicator: will come naturally when doing the right thing
Fluid and granular roles Honest discussion about individual time commitments Inside out marketing: offer is defined by purpose
Decision making fully decentralized (advice process) Regular time devoted to address conflicts “Sense and respond“ planning/budgeting/controlling
Transparent real time information sharing incl. financials Specific meeting practices keep ego at check No or radically simplified budgets, no tracking of variance; no targets
Anybody can spend any amount of money provided advice process is respected Distributed initiatives taking “Change management“ no longer relevant as organization constantly adapts from within
Formal multi-step conflict resolution process Recruitment interviews by future colleagues, focus on fit with organization Suppliers chosen by fit with purpose
Focus on Team performance, peer-based process for individual appraisals Personal freedom for training, focus on culture-building Total transparency invites outsiders to make suggestions to better bring about purpose
Self-set salaries with peer calibration, no bonus, profit sharing Personal inquiry into one‘s learning journey and calling Conscious sensing of what mood would serve best
Caring support to turn dismissal into a learning opportunity

This book really shifted my thinking about organisations and leadership; maybe I read it at the right time in my life and/or at a juncture where my understanding of complexity was sufficient to enable this shift. Either way, it was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back with respect to my long-standing relationship with Elliott Jaques and structured hierarchy. The more I am learning about complexity the harder this relationship has become. Faced with evidence that disprove my current view – I now have to dismiss some of the concepts I have been working with and often promoted for a long time, or at least recognise their limitations in complex environments.

I had an exchange with Jurgen Appelo a few months ago where we debated the idea of levels of work in manager – subordinate relationships. Jurgen has for a long time argued that management is too important to leave to the managers, I now feel that I have a much better idea of where he is coming from.

I still maintain that people have different levels of capability and that a successful outcome is to some extent dependent on a good match between complexity and capability. However, this does not have to be formalised through a hierarchy with defined role vested authority and accountability, personally earned authority seems to suffice. Collectively we are smarter than any individual is and not many complex tasks are completed in isolation from everyone else in the organisation.

The sad part of the research findings that underpins the book (although not surprising) is that Frederic was not able to point to any examples of organisations shifting and sustaining Teal practices without the following two conditions:

  1. “Top leadership: The founder or top leader (let’s call him the CEO for lack of a better term), must have integrated a worldview and psychological development consistent with the Teal development level. Several examples show that it is helpful, but not necessary, to have a critical mass of leaders operating at that stage. .

  2. Ownership: Owners of the organisation must also understand and embrace Evolutionary Teal worldviews. Board members that “don’t get it,” experiences shows, can temporarily give a Teal leader free rein when their methods deliver outstanding results. But when the organisation hits a rough patch or faces a critical choice, owners will want to get things under control in the only way they know that makes sense to them – through top-down, hierarchical command and control mechanisms”

Reinventing Organizations – Frederic Laloux

All the adult development theories I have come across suggest that only a relatively small percentage of the adult population is at a post-conventional or in a later developmental stage akin to that of Teal Organisations. Possibly even fewer in leadership positions where they could affect any change. Most operate from a conventional stage and hence we have so many of the achievement driven organisations we see and potentially work in today.

So perhaps given that last paragraph I should not totally give up on all of the ideas and concepts from RO and Systems Leadership Theory, some may have a place in making orange and green organisations better in some ways even if they will not guide us into Teal territory.

Hopefully the pace of development truly is accelerating, as that is a prerequisite for more Teal organisations to emerge that more people get to the later stages of adult development. Even now we can start to see the how younger generations prefer to operate, it is in a similar fashion to what Gary Hamel, in his book “What Matters Now”,  notes are common practice on the web:

  • No one can kill a good idea
  • Everyone can pitch in
  • Anyone can lead
  • No one can dictate
  • You get to choose your cause
  • You can easily build on top of what others have done
  • You don’t have to put up with bullies and tyrants
  • Agitators don’t get marginalized
  • Excellence usually wins (and mediocrity doesn’t)
  • Passion-killing policies get reversed
  • Great contributions get recognized and celebrated

Interestingly though the language in the title of the book is very much from an Orange Achievement lens rather than a Teal one. Perhaps children growing up in today’s hyper connected, peer sharing world will be naturally drawn to organisations where Teal practices are in place? For my own son’s sanity I really hope he does not have to suffer through the same level of corporate BS that his parents have (and are still dealing with).

For a summary of the book visit www.reinventingorganizations.com or for a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcS04BI2sbk

the silly practice of performance reviews

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For Deming performance appraisals and the often subsequent, employee ranking, is one of the seven deadly diseases of management. He also insightfully told us to get rid of numerical targets and work quotas, clever fellow Dr D.

As you may know I am a big fan of Elliot Jaques and his seminal work developing a comprehensive coherent organisational theory.

Regarding this topic however, Elliot Jaques’ states:

“An individual’s performance is the relationship between targeted output and achieved output.”

I’m afraid it just does not stack up, it is way too simplistic in today’s complex business environment. Firstly all targets are arbitrary so measuring performance relative to an arbitrary target is just as arbitrary. Secondly, I most likely work in a system that has been designed by someone else (if at all, it may just have emerged over time) so it constrains my ability to perform, meaning there is inherent unfairness in assessing my individual performance as measured by output. Dr Deming’s 95-5 rule highlights the impact of the system on performance vs. the impact of the individual. Of course this is not a literal rule but it is clear where the greatest leverage for improvement is.

I agree wholeheartedly that feedback is essential but I think annual reviews should be banned; they have no place in a modern organisation. I really do wonder for whom they are valuable, not once have I heard a manager nor a staff member even hint at getting any value from them. Someone in HR however, most likely with a nonsense target about how many have been done, harasses anyone who still has not completed this complete waste of time.

Often the design of performance management systems are delegated not only to HR, but to a level in HR that is too low to understand the true complexity of the task. We end up with a process-laden system that assumes there is true objectivity in numbers and targets as measurements of performance.

Of course we all need to know what is expected of us in our role and how we are going. That bit goes without saying and I think your 8 questions go some way to improve the feedback process and as you point out make it a more frequent occurrence. Discussing performance and the role is something that can and should happen continuously. Context changes and subsequently roles may need to be adjusted to better reflex these changes so the role description can be a live document. It is also critical that the role description outline what the expected good behaviours are for the different elements that the role is accountable for. I like that your questions are based on manager’s using their own judgments to assess performance. An often overlooked role in performance systems is the role of the MoR who plays a critical part of the overall system in that their role is to make sure the manager-subordinate relationship is fair.

If you subscribe to the idea that systems drive behaviour, you have to, as a manager dig a bit deeper than the individual if you see undesired or unproductive behaviours emerge in the organisation.

I wrote this entry as a response to Michael Cardus’ post on performance appraisals.

performance target, friend or foe?

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I subscribe to Stacy Barr’s blog on performance measures and the other day she posted an entry on targets. Since I am working towards removing targets all together I posted a reply.  

Stacey’s post is available on http://staceybarr.com/measure-up/targets-that-are-shoulding-you-in-the-foot/

My reply is published below and I’ll be interested in Stacey’s reply.

Hi Stacey, I’ve commented on this topic before and in my view targets are a complete waste of time – we should not become friends with them we should abolish them. The negative consequences of targets and a target setting culture are quite astonishing.

What is wrong with just measuring performance with the intent of learning and improving? What value does the numerical target add to this, especially since it will be an arbitrary number anyway? Any number you put up could be questioned, we need to improve by 10%, why not 11% or 9%? – the real question is by what method will we improve our performance? 

Even in safety with Zero harm targets which on the surface sounds admirable, the danger is that people do not report things as it will ruin the reporting.

Targets motivate people – if so where is the evidence for this claim? I’ve seen much evidence to suggest the contrary, targets demotivating staff and creating a de facto purpose to reach the target regardless of broader impact, all sorts of creativity comes into play to manipulate data to reach the target. A recent report from House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) into allegations of police mis-recording of crime statistics highlight this.

Simon Guilfoyle’s blog and link to the report is available on http://inspguilfoyle.wordpress.com/2014/04/09/incontrovertible-evidence/

I’ve borrowed this marvellous image from Simon’s twitter feed.

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Targets sets direction – surely a well defined sense of purpose already does this. If people do not know why they are doing something that is a critical failing of leadership.

Stacey, you know your statistics so when I say that there are only three places a target can reside on a control chart you know what I talk about (assuming a stable process). It will either be below the LCL (in which case you will always meet the target), it will be in between the UCL and LCL (in which case it will be hit and miss due to common cause), or it will be above the UCL (in which case you will never reach it with the current method).

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Your example of reducing the time from 24 hours to 12 hours is an interesting one, why is the average time important? A couple of complex cases and your average can blow out. You have spoken before about the need to shift the process capability and that’s a way to understand if any real improvement has been achieved. The value is as you know not in the average as such.

Targets and target setting is the thinking of the command and control manager in a organisation where decision-making is separated from work. As the complexity of organisations increase and more and more work is knowledge work, managers have had to abandon the attempt to control the individual activities of their staff and stop using target-setting to try to control the organisation.

is levels of work an outdated concept?

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Recently I engaged in an email exchange with Jurgen Appelo (author of Management 3.0 http://www.management30.com) regarding levels of work. It was sparked by an email or tweet about some research Jurgen was doing on how to structure salaries and I asked if he had come across Jaques’ work on felt-fair-pay.

Jurgen had not seen this research but thought little of Jaques’ work in general – complete nonsense, old-school thinking etc were some of the comments. Being a fan of Jaques I of course had to probe to find out more. Like many of the detractors Jurgen had not read much of Jaques’ work and found the little he had read poorly written and not worthy of additional investment in time.

Fair enough regarding the writing piece, some of the material is hard to get through but there are plenty of resources that are better that could be used to understand the core concepts.

The exchange inspired Jurgen to write a blog post to which I of course had to post a reply.

http://www.noop.nl/2014/02/why-managers-are-smarter.html

Whilst I completely disagree with Jurgen about levels of work it did make me think about the changing nature of work and my recent readings on sociocracy. Our younger generations grow up in a world of collaboration and information sharing across borders and timezones. What impacts might this have on organisational structures and leadership moving forward? The sociocratic principle of decision making through consent for policy decisions is very appealing and I wonder if this is something we might see more of in the future. The function of management is essential in any purposeful system, but how that function is designed is the question. With Jaques it sits in specific roles, in sociocracy it works like this (from http://www.sociocracy.info)

“The sociocratic organizational structure distributes decision-making power to semi-autonomous, self-organizing teams called “circles.” Circles include all members of a work unit or department. Circle members function as equals in determining the policies that will guide their work.  These policies must be in harmony with those of the larger organization, and they guide the circle leader in making day to day operations decisions.

Circles are linked in a “circular” hierarchy that includes the whole organization. A circular hierarchy is one in which power flows from the top to the bottom and also flows the bottom to the top. This structure ensures the clear communications and control required for encouraging independent thinking, strong leadership, and unified focus on a mission.”

I don’t see a conflict with sociocracy and levels of work as the various circles can have different foci, some are operational and deliver value in the present, others focus on innovation and the top one on values which amongst other things means policy setting that sets the boundaries for policy in all other circles. The top circle can be compared with system 5 in VSM language in the highest level of recursion. The big difference is the process by which policy decisions are made.

I should also mention that I am generally a fan of Jurgen’s work and that we agree on many other topics. Jurgen is working hard to make organisations better which is an honourable quest indeed.

understanding the work part 2

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understanding the work part 2

In my last post when I spoke about systems of work, I also made a point that many Managers don’t really understand the system of work that they are accountable for. In this post I want to dig a bit deeper into this topic.

As you move vertically through the management structure of an organisation the work being done is different (or at least it should be). It is important to understand what is different about the work at different levels of management and that it is not just more of the same or more difficult work technically.

Complexity

So what is it that is different, what do we look for to make this distinction? The answer is – (as it usually is…) it depends. It depends on the level of work, as it is both the focus of the work and the complexity of the work that should shift as you move vertically in the organisation. Gillian Stamp from BIOSS developed a helpful framework to distinguish the difference that makes a difference with respect to the work at different levels of management. The product of this thinking is the idea of Work Domains and it builds on Jaques’ idea of  “levels of work” and I think presents it in a better way. Stamp and Elliot did work together for some time at BIOSS so no surprise that they share this view.

domainsincolour

Three Tools of Leadership

Increasing complexity means you as a Manager need a broader set of tools to work with. At lower levels your own behaviour is your main tool to influence the team together with and understanding of team dynamics (i.e. team leadership). Understanding and being aware of how your interpersonal leadership style impacts performance and how your team work together is of course critical at all levels of leadership but a lower levels i.e. supervisor and/or first level team leader the authority and accountability for organisational systems are not there so as leader you can only influence these, not authorise changes to them.

There is a saying that I first came across when working with a global mining company many years ago that had a great impact on me. They used it in the context of safety issues but it is applicable in a broader context:

“The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”

In other word, your actions or inaction as a leader when unproductive or undesirable behaviours occur within the team sets the tone for what is accepted.

However, as we move up through the hierarchy relying on your interpersonal skills alone is no longer sufficient because you will no longer be able to have a personal relationship with everyone in the organisation.

So what other tools might leaders in more senior positions require?

Systems Leadership suggests that there are three tools; systems, symbols, and behaviour, that successful managers understand and use.

So whilst, role modelling is critical for challenging unproductive behaviours, it is not enough for sustainable change. You also need to align the systems and symbols of the organisation.  Having said that, if you as a leader cannot be bothered to actually live and behave in way that is consistent with what you want staff to do you might as well throw your change initiative in the bin straight away.

When I said earlier that many managers do not understand the system of work they work in or are accountable for this is exactly what I mean. There is lack of understanding of how the system is shaping and driving the behaviour of the people and overall performance. Without a theory for understanding this, changing it becomes a terribly difficult task.

The desire is of course for the authorised systems to be productive. Often they are either not as productive as they could be or they are productive despite of the manifest design. In other words the extant (or real) system is different from the official authorised system, usually became staff develop unauthorised “workarounds” to produce good customer outcomes.

Systems_Matrix_2

For senior executives it is essential to understand how systems work so that they can design appropriate organisations systems to deliver on the purpose of the organisation. Designing the organisation is the role of senior management; a role that I often see being delegated way down in the HR function to someone with no real authority, often lack the capability to do this level of work, and often with no real understanding of organisational design theories or organisational systems.

A helpful theory for understanding the critical functions in an organisation and the relationships between them is Stafford Beer’s work in Management Cybernetics – The Viable System Model. In a previous post there is a video by Javier Livas explaining the Universal Management System, which is the VSM in less complex language. If you want to watch an in-depth video of the VSM by Javier, you can email him to request access details from his YouTube account. I thoroughly recommend doing so it you can find the time to view the full 2 hour video.

In short, the VSM views an organisation as a system that requires five key functions to remain viable (i.e. maintain its existence). The five systems are recursive (or nested in each other like a Russian doll) so every system one is in turn made up by the five key functions:

System 1 – Operations

System 2 – Coordination

System 3 – Management

System 3* – Audit & Monitoring

System 4 – Development

System 5 – Policy

I will not go on in detail about the VSM as many other better writers and thinkers have done a great job of this already, Beer alone wrote at many books on the topic: The Brain of the Firm, The Heart of Enterprise, Diagnosing the System of Organisation to name a few.

I have found the VSM to be an outstanding theory to work with when diagnosing organisations. It provides immense value and insights and I can discuss the insights with clients without getting into the underlying theory in too much detail. The beauty of the VSM in my view is the recursive nature of the model, which means it is applicable for systems at any levels and Managers across an organisation, can all get value from it. It does require some investment in time to get your head around but it is well worth the investment.

Another “theory” I am a big fan of is the Vanguard Method. Its use in service organisations and it has greatly influenced my thinking and my work. Like any method it is not all-encompassing and I have found the mix of The Vanguard Method, Systems Leadership and The Viable System Model to be very powerful and insightful across multiple levels of organisational complexity.

In a service organisation, one of the quickest ways to make value creating more difficult, is to functionalise the work. This is just one of the many issues that emerge when applying tools and ideas that were designed to solve manufacturing issues in a service or knowledge environment. Functionalization of work is based on the assumption that someone with specialist skills will perform a task faster and to a higher quality. Whilst this seems to make sense it fails to account for the flow of the work and is based on Tayloristic view of the workplace.

If you read up on articles or books by John Seddon you will find that he keeps banging on about the damage from the “economies of scale” mentality that permeates most organisations. His point is that they should shift to understanding demand and design the flow of work accordingly. Seddon is trying to shift ingrained mental models of how organisations operate many of which came about due to Taylor’s theory becoming the mainstream one and the ideas of others such as Mary Parker Follett, were less successful at the time. Only now after the failings of the mechanistic view of organisations are we starting to embrace her ideas employee engagement and power with rather than power over. This is not to say that Taylor’s ideas were useless, they did help the industrialisation of the world. We can only guess how different the world of work might have been if Follett’s more humanistic ideas had been the dominant ones.

In the spirit of economies of scale we tend to measure activity (because being busy and high utilisation of our time is important…seemingly regardless of what we are doing) instead of measuring how well we deliver on what matter to the customer, treat all demand the same. John Seddon made life a bit easier by coining the term “failure demand” as he gave word and enhanced meaning to something I had come across many times but just treated as COPQ (cost of poor quality or rework). Its significance as leverage for improvement quickly became evident through Seddon’s work. For me earliest time I can remember identifying this was at a when doing some work to understand the complaints process in a public housing organisation where we came across an unreasonable amount of plumbing issues in relation to the amount of properties owned by the organisation. The practice was to just log the complaints about poor work, no shows and rescheduled visits as new jobs. This hid away the true volume of value work amongst all of the failure demand – i.e. demand created by a failure of doing the right thing for the customer the first time or failing to do it at all.

What Vanguard does really well is providing a method “Check –Plan – Do” for understanding the flow of the primary activities (System 1 in VSM language) at the level of recursion where the customer interaction occurs. For me the gap with the Vanguard method relates to how to embed constructive leadership behaviours and models to support a new way of thinking (and subsequently a new way of working) such as the decision making model and the task assignment model I outlined in a previous post. At higher levels in the organisations the work is more focussed on how all the other systems across multiple recursions are meant to work together to support value creation for customers.

Usually the feedback systems are in terms of hard numbers such as “productivity measures” or process output measures. More often than not, they are looking at the wrong things and provide little if any understanding of the system of work. Activity measures are in place to measure performance with a complete disregard for the inherent variety in demand that comes in and failure demand is treated as value demand.

Understanding demand, understanding variation, understanding the connections and feedback loops in “your” level of recursion (as part of the VSM), understanding the systems, symbols and behaviours that reinforce or contradict the desired culture are all important aspects for Managers to consider when they grapple with the difficult task of “understanding the work”.

It is not easy, it is a complex task but with some good theories and models it becomes less challenging.

understanding the work part 1

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Understanding the Work 

 “We humans are first of all beings in a situation, we cannot be distinguished from our situations, for they form us and decide our possibilities”

My interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s (paraphrased) statement is that the environment shapes the situation and our possible choices are governed by the situation. Kurt Lewin the famous psychologist outlined the following equation to describe this.

Behaviour = ƒ(environment, personality)

When we think about organisation and how they operate the default position for most organisations is to focus solely on the person as if the person needs to be fixed.  Very few organisations understand that working on the people is working on the 5%. There is so much more leverage in working on the system.

Systems Leadership succinctly says, “Systems drive behaviour”.

I often refer to a fish tank analogy to make this point. You can keep polishing the fish when they appear “sick” or perhaps unmotivated, send them on a training course etc,  but unless you fix the water (i.e. environment) that is making the fish sick in the first place, you will at some point end up with fish floating around belly up, or they might make a break for it and jump into another fish tank.

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To do a good job as a manager you must understand the system of work that you are accountable for. How else could you improve or transform it? Understanding and knowing how a system operates and why it behaves in the way it does is fundamental for good management. So there is no surprise that the first part of Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK) is: appreciation of a system.

With all these assertions that understanding systems is important you might ask why this is and where is the evidence for these outrageous claims?  Why can’t we just keep going as we have been? Surely it is all about getting good people in place?  And what do you actually mean when you say system, another IT “solution”?

One would be foolish enough to think we could start with defining what a system is. This task, however, is bigger than Ben Hur. The fantastic LinkedIn group Systems Thinking World, has a great number of remarkably bright thinkers in the field of systems thinking. Yet they cannot agree on a definition of what constitutes a system. Unfortunately the discourse about this often ends up being a competition of who’s smarter than whom and the language often becomes violent (from a nonviolent communications perspective).

I am of the school of thought that considers systems to be mental constructs; we choose what we define as a system by the boundaries we set and what we choose to include and they can change depending of what we are trying to achieve by doing so.

Having said all that, we still need to understand what it is that we are supposed to appreciate if we are to get a handle of Deming’s first point.  Since we are dealing with organisations we need a definition that is pragmatic for this field.

The definition of a system in Systems Leadership Theory is:

“A specific methodology for organising activities in order to achieve a purpose”

This involves directing flows of work, information, money, people, materials and equipment. The system provides the framework within which these flows take place.  An addition to make here is that we are discussing Organisational Systems not natural systems, so there will be a defined purpose for the system, be it the organisation as a whole, the recruitment system, or an operational system (if the defined purpose it is achieved or not is a different question).

A more general definition of a system:

1. A set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole, in particular.

2. A set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network.

(a quick point to make about the second definition is that there is a huge difference working on a mechanistic system and a networked system)

For a definition of what systems thinking is about, the host of STW Gene Bellinger makes a very succinct statement and explains it with one word – AND!

There are many reasons why a shift in thinking is required. For one, we now understand that the mechanistic view of organisations, where analysis (without synthesis) and improvement of the parts in isolation, is not a good fit with the reality of organisational life.

Deming demonstrated the importance through the Red Bead experiment. The Red Bead experiment shows that performance (in this case quality of output) is a function of the system rather than the skills or capability of the individual. Deming even went as far as claiming that the variation in performance was to 95% down to the system, hence the 95-5 rule. Even if those numbers should not be taken literally for every single system, they certainly provide some insight to where the greatest leverage for improvement is.

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Image Courtesy of Gaping Void

This is obviously a very simple system but it ought to make the point pretty clear and more complex systems have even more complex behaviour. Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework (pronounced kuh-nev-in) is very helpful for framing your thinking on how to best proceed based on the type of system you are operating in.  We will come back to this later but before we do let’s get some sage advice on what constitutes a system and systems thinking in this video of Russell Ackoff.

Ackoff is an authority on the topic of systems, and systems thinking in particular. He focused mainly on systems thinking in an organisational context so his thinking is very relevant.

To further elaborate on Ackoff’s point about shifting our thinking and the value of this shift. I cannot remember where I came across this equations but I think it is a great way of highlighting the importance of how our mental models influence what we see in organisations and how we think about performance and productivity.

Organisational Performance = ƒ(organisational mindset)

What I hope becomes clear with the function above is the validity of the old (paraphrased) Einstein statement:

“the problems of today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them”

John Seddon from Vanguard Consulting makes the point in the simple model below.

Thinking_System_Performance

In most of the organisations I work with there is a pretty poor understanding of the work. I don’t mean that people have no idea what customers want or that they lack technical competency in what they are doing. It is more in the sense of why things are happening the way they are.  In my next post we will dig into this a bit deeper as understanding the work is fundamental for all good Managers.

I’m ok, you’re ok – let’s fix the system (borrowed from Michelle Malay Carter)

robust performance conversations

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Robust Performance Conversations

Without clarity of expectations, both in terms of roles and in terms of tasks you cannot with good conscience hold a person to account for their performance.

In addition, without a culture where blame is non-existent and a genuine desire of leaders to create great working relationships, I really question how effective our organisations will be. I predict the gap between actual performance and potential performance will continue to be very wide and just a distant dream for many.

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Developing your skills to have productive conversations is very important, not only in the workplace but for all relationships. In my last post I discussed the importance of social process skills.  So we know it is important but how do we build our capability to do it well?

Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent CommunicationTM (NVC) is a fantastic method for communicating without judging and meeting everyone’s needs. Now I am very much a Jackal trying to shift to a Giraffe so I am not the right person to write about how to apply this so here are two links to better material, Martha Lasley’s paper Difficult Conversations: Authentic Communication Leads to Greater Productivity and a video featuring Marshall Rosenberg introducing NVC – the analogy of Jackal and Giraffe will make sense if you watch the video, which I sincerely hope you invest some time in.

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Image courtesy of Sven Hartenstein

In my next post I will discuss “understanding the work” the middle element of the framework around which all other elements are centred.