Crisis, What Crisis?

Working on a project for a client last week I came across the short film “Overview“.  It describes the effect of seeing Earth from the outside:  The realisation, for astronauts, that we are sustained on a tiny bubble in a vast universe and seeing Earth as a single organism on which we are all cells co-creating the future of our bubble.  What kind of future do we choose to create?

Much of that choice is defined by our identification, calibration and decisions in crisis.  Crisis is a place in which we change – either by choice or not.

If we take the current situation in Turkey as an example.  Some people saw the impending destruction of a park in Istanbul as a crisis, enough of a crisis to choose to change into protestors.  Many others may have agreed with the sentiment, but did not calibrate it as a crisis.  Others may have disagreed with the sentiment, but also not calibrated it as a crisis.  Still others also calibrated it as a crisis and chose to turn into agressors.

In any change situation there are four types of participant, reflected in the above calibration.  Enthusiastic supporters, cautious supporters, cautious defenders and enthusiastic defenders.  Participants are nearly always in the minority, there is a far wider group of more or less neutral observers and a still wider group of ignorers.

In leading any kind of change the first step is to identify the crisis, for ourselves and also for our constituents.  The constituents who calibrate the situation to be a crisis will be the participants.  We are manipulated daily to become participants by those who have an interest in a crisis.  This happens at all levels of politics, business, community and family. Very often those at either extreme of supporters and defenders “collaborate” to raise the profile of a crisis to enrol more people in it – ideally at their end of the spectrum.

Crisis is a reason to change.  If we are able to persuade enough people that there is a crisis we will create change.  Whether we create the change that we want will depend on the balance of supporters and defenders that participate in the change.  Too few on the opposite end of the spectrum from us and it may not be seen as a crisis at all.  To few on our side of the spectrum and it may go the other way.

The view of those astronauts from space is that Earth is a living thing, that we are all part of the same organism, that we have a responsibility for the wellbeing of that organism and that we may be failing to discharge that responsibility.

The view from the Earth naturally has a far narrower perspective.  We can only see our immediate surroundings.  In most cases, although we may perceive changes, they are happening slowly enough that we would not calibrate them as a crisis.  What we do see more clearly is our own daily challenges stresses and desires and until any crisis rises above that noise we will continue to focus on those.

Our calibration and how we prioritise the myriad crises we can choose from drives a good deal of our behaviour.    Virtually all of the crises we face as a society and in business and many of the crises we face as individuals are the consequence of decisions taken by people.  If we want to have fewer, or at least less serious crises to deal with we must get better at taking decisions.

The first stage of better decisions is to start by focussing on where we want to get to, before we even consider how we get there.  The second is to involve deliberately diverse stakeholders.   The third is to co-create the plan to get there taking account of values and winners and losers over the long term.

We must get better at taking decisions in order to have fewer crises and to protect our fragile bubble.

Choice is one of the most powerful things we exercise as people.  How often do we start with vision rather than the process?  How often do we deliberately include diverse stakeholders in our decisions?

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A critical part of leadership – availability

Busyness is endemic to most senior roles these days – is it a habit, a fashion or a plague?

Leadership is a critical skill in our society.  It could be argued that leadership is THE critical skill.  That very many of the challenges we face in poverty, education, corruption, conflict, crime and so on are to do with inadequate leadership somewhere.  It is very much in all of our interests to upgrade our leadership.  Both our own leadership and the people we choose to follow.

We need to promote and follow leaders with integrity, humility, who pursue the greater good, and perhaps more prosaically, we also need leaders who know how to be available.

The typical progression is that someone is good at their job and they get promoted, until they are responsible for a group of people and then maybe responsible for people who are themselves responsible for people and so on.

Usually people are promoted almost as a reward for being good at whatever it is that they do – whether it is sales or engineering or law or finance or IT or whatever.  It is relatively rare for organisations to promote people specifically for being good at leadership.

Once someone is promoted, if they are lucky, they get the opportunity to learn leadership.  If they (and their team) are less lucky, they are just expected to get on with it.  Either way what many of us do at this point is to carry on our previous activities and just add a bit of leadership/management on top.  It is difficult to let go of something we are good at and confident in, especially when it is the thing we have been promoted for, and devote our time to learning and practicing the new skill of leadership, but if we want to succeed as leaders, letting go is exactly what we need to do.

Leaders need to devote at least 80% of their time to leadership.  And leadership does not mean creating grand visions, devising strategies or taking decisions ourselves.  Leadership means leading others through the challenges and processes of creating grand, visions, devising strategies and making decisions.  Leadership does not mean doing these things, just as it does not mean making the sales or writing the contracts, it means making sure these things get done in the best possible way, by the best possible people.

Part of the reason that leaders need to work this way is to make sure that the best people available are doing the job and feeling motivated and engaged in doing it.  Another part of the reason for working this way is to ensure that leaders are available.  Leaders need to have spare capacity.  It is when leaders are too busy that things go wrong.  Leaders need to have the bandwidth and the sensitivity to notice the subtle signs of tension or changes in the environment or anything that might affect the team or organisations ability to be effective.

Far too many organisations end up with leaders piling more and more work on themselves;  accepting responsibility that has been delegated upwards and tasks that have been delegated downwards.  Part of the skill of leadership is to navigate these pressures to clear enough diary space to truly lead.

In this regard two skills are a must for truly effective leadership:

1 – proactive diary management:  Far to many of us allow our diary to be filled by others who want a bit of our time.  Leaders need to proactively prioritise the things that they need to do and put that time into the diary – even if it is wandering around the office saying “Hi” to people or taking time to think.  If you don’t take control of your diary someone else will, and who is to say that their prioritisation is better than yours?

2 – delegation:  Be really clear about delegating anything that is not something that you alone can do.  A pre-requisite of delegation is to have a team of trusted and capable people to work with – to share decision making, workload, ideas and creativity.  This means there is a requirement to prioritise investing time in building the team and the relationships to the point where delegation is successful.

The loneliness of leadership is a myth.  Leaders need to be among the team ensuring collaboration, taking decisions collectively and making sure things get done and being available if things go wrong, all without interfering.

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Humble Leadership

I was recently reminded of one of my favourite jobs.  The job was in Rome and the brief was to use Roman history as a backdrop to discuss “hubris and the fall of empires”.  Before the event I did a good deal of research reading up on Rome and Roman history, but even as I arrived I didn’t have a clear idea about what I would do.

I arrived on a Sunday afternoon, with the client arriving the following day.  I rushed out and raced around the Forum, when I bought the ticket with only half an hour before closing they asked if I was serious. I toured the Palatine, saw the Circus Maximus, went on to the Pantheon, saw Caesar’s Forum, Trajan’s Arch, The Colosseum and on my way back to the hotel noticed the signs for what was left of Ner0′s Domus Aurea, hidden under a park close to the Colosseum.

When I got back to the hotel I read up on everything I had seen trying to put together a coherent story for the leadership team from Microsoft who were arriving the next day.

We spent most of the first day doing more normal leadership and team work stuff at the hotel and towards the end of the day we headed out for our “hubris and the fall of empires” session.

We first went to the site of the Domus Aurea.  Nero built “The Golden House” as his own private pleasure palace.  It was vast, covering the entire area of the Colosseum and more.  It included a courtyard in which there was a lake large enough for a galley and a 30 metre high statue of Nero, from which the Colosseum may have taken it’s name.  Within 70 years of his death, there was no trace of the building left, until a local fell through a pothole in the hillside in the fifteenth century and found himself in one of the palaces many halls, long buried.

We explored the Colosseum itself, the Forum, The Palatine hill, we overlooked the Circus Maximus and finally ended up at the Pantheon.  At the Pantheon we discussed how the palace built to glorify an individual had lasted only 70 years, while the Pantheon built to the glory of all of the gods still stands 2000 years later.

Whenever an individual gets to the point of believing that they are somehow superior to others, immune from responsibility or blame they are at risk of hubris. When that person is a leader of a business or in politics, that risk is not just personal, but for all of those subject to their decisions.

If we want to move on to a higher level of leadership, where our leaders embrace responsibility and contribute to a sustainable future, humility must be one of the key attributes of the leaders we choose to follow.

A leader is not a leader without followers.

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How to be mediocre

Last week my brilliant friend and colleague Paula Boyle shared a list of ways to ensure a mediocre life and career with the group we were working with:

1 – Stay in your Comfort Zone

Our comfort zone is a space where we feel safe and relatively competent.  The space beyond mediocrity requires a journey through risk, discomfort and learning new skills on the way to excellence.  Unless we are willing to embrace the discomfort zone, we will never find it.

2 – Partly believe in yourself, but remember to criticise yourself regularly

If we don’t believe in ourselves, why would anyone else?  These first two on this list create a catch 22, that we have to break out of.  If we stay in our comfort zone it makes it harder to create the evidence of something for ourselves or others to believe in.  If we don’t believe in ourselves there does not seem to be much point in going out of our comfort zone.  We have to regularly break out of this catch 22 to make this experiment called life worth pursuing.

2- Blame other people for your problems / feelings / experience / life

Every time we blame others, we fail to recognise responsibility and every time we fail to recognise our own responsibility for our problems or feelings we fail to learn.  Every time we fail to learn we are condemned to going around that problem/feeling/experience/life loop again until we learn the lesson it is sharing with us.  Each time around the loop the lesson typically gets harsher and more painful.  The more sensitised we can become to the learning opportunities the less pain we will experience.

3 – Work at a job you don’t like because it pays the mortgage / your family and friends approve / it will look good on your CV

I wrote a whole book about this ten years ago – remarkably it is still available.  Suffice to quote Steve Jobs inspirational speech at Stamford – “You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”.  If you have not seen it yet – or for a while – watch it here.

4 – Never, ever stand out or draw attention to yourself

Most of us were taught pretty successfully at school that standing out was a route to ridicule and exclusion.  This is a lesson everyone who has been excellent at anything has either unlearned or avoided.  It is not about being attention seeking, but it is absolutely about being willing to stand out when the situation demands it or when the opportunity arises.  We are all faced with situations where we can choose to step up or to step back, every time we step up we grow as a person, every time we step back we shrink – unless we learn not to step back next time.

5 – When you fail, don’t ever try again

Honda, Churchill and Eddison are all quoted on the essential importance of moving on from failures and trying again.  There is a good reason why people we regards as icons of excellence show signs of determination, even pig headedness – there is great value in persisting with something that we believe in passionately, in learning the lessons from every failure adapting and trying again.  There is very little value in just giving up and deciding that something is either impossible or we are not capable from the evidence or just a few failures.

6 – Refuse to believe that you are more powerful, talented and capable than you could ever imagine.

The simple act of believing makes an immense difference on its own.  Belief is transformative and in most cases has to come before reality or change.  As Henry Ford said – “If you think you can, or you think you can’t – you are probably right.”

7 – Do believe that anyone who thinks you are brilliant is an idiot and not to be trusted.

In most cases when people are critical of us, they are talking about themselves not us.  People who are genuinely thinking of us and have some valuable advice for us will find a kind and constructive (not critical) way of communicating it.  Listen to those who are teaching us from a place of love and positiveness, avoid believing those who are trying to make themselves feel more confident, by making others look bad.

8 – Wholeheartedly believe that people generally, and you specifically, can’t really change

Anyone who is not a psychopath can change.  All we need to do to change is to take responsibility for our feelings and experiences, be willing to learn from them and to replace habits that do not work for us with new habits based on what we have learned.

9 – Try to be perfect

Perfection is an illusion.  Striving for it makes failure inevitable every time and while we must not be beaten by failure, it is demoralising, especially if there is no way of avoiding it.  Replace perfection with “the best I can do right now” and then be willing to learn, develop and improve.  The flip of this is that when we do delude ourselves into believing that we have achieved perfection – there is no longer any room for improvement, hubris sets in and, ultimately, we fail.

10 – Be cynical, and share your cynicism with everyone you meet

Cynicism is the enemy of belief (see above).  It kills belief in ourselves and in others.  Be aware of and sensitive to your own cynicism.  If you catch yourself being cynical stop yourself and replace it with being constructive.  If you find cynicism in others – challenge it or just avoid the cynics and find more constructive collaborators.

If you think this is helpful – please share it as widely as you can.  A world where everyone learned these simple tenets and made them into habits would be a better place.

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Pluralist Manifesto

It could be argued that the social/economic stalling of so many of the older economies is reflective of a parallel political stalling.  For over 1600 years, from the end of the Roman Republic until the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in England political/social/economic progress was very slow.  Autocratic Kings and their courts across Europe and much of the world pursued a policy of self interest, largely at the expense of their populations.

After a long build up (including Magna Carta and the English Civil War) in 1688 the English Parliament overthrew King James II and appointed King William and Queen Mary in his place under a constitution, which made it clear that unlike previous monarchs they were not appointed by God and that they were responsible to Parliament.

The 1688 devolution of power from an individual to the beginnings of a representative Parliament was enough of a shift to pluralism to create fertile conditions for innovation and the Industrial Revolution followed within 50 years.  The pluralism and inclusiveness of the British system of government has generally increased – perhaps up to the 1980′s and the end of grammar schools.

Since then there appears to have been a trend towards ever more powerful elites and away from pluralism.  Disempowering the widest part of the social/economic pyramid, even by a little, massively reduces the overall economic and social contribution of the population.  Currently most developed economies are empowering their elites at the expense of the widest part of the pyramid, leading to stagnating economies.

 

Autocracy is largely innovation phobic, in autocratic systems there is an intrinsic centre of gravity around maintaining the status quo – ie maintaining the autocrat and their ruling elite.  Autocratic systems can be very good at playing catch-up and innovating in narrow, usually military, ways that support their rule, but fear, and therefore limit, the kind of social liberty that fosters social, technical and commercial innovation.

Much of the economic /social development we see happening in less pluralistic societies like China and in the Middle East is “catch-up” not breakthrough innovation.

What is true for societies is also true for business. Autocratic and hierarchical business cultures inhibit innovation, while inclusive and pluralistic cultures will foster it.

The way to get our economies going again is to back away from elitism and return to progressive pluralism.  We need more people taking more responsibility for our collective future – not less.  We need more entrepreneurs, we need more people going into sciences, engineering and even politics.

To achieve this we need a state education system that churns out leaders willing to take responsibility for some aspect of our society and we need adults in our society willing to invest in them.  Families and schools are necessarily (to some extent) autocratic environments, however we need to teach our young adults that autocracy, and the submission to it, is a phase they need to grow out of in order to become fully responsible adults.

Pluralistic innovation is essential to our future, because it is not centralised government innovation or elites that will save us from climate change, it is distributed innovation coming from businesses and other inventors.  We urgently need to train, empower and invest in a new generation of leaders and at the same time we need to reverse our slide towards elitism and return to pluralism.  We also need to make use of technology to return our democracy to the path of pluralism that it was on for 300 years.

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Role Models in business

The improvement journey does not end, there are always ways to get better at what we do.  However to get better at anything we also have to have the humility admit we are not perfect and the to learn from others.  The opportunity is to learn not only from those we are similar to ourselves or where there are direct comparisons, but also from others where we need to look for more tangential learning.

Below are are a few examples of role model companies from whom most businesses could learn something.  It is far from being an exhaustive list – please add your own examples via the comments thread.

Environment – Interface Carpets – Over the last ten years or so many companies have started to take environmental concerns seriously, few as seriously as Interface Carpets.  In his book “Mid Course Correction” Interface founder, the late Ray Anderson describes the realisation that his company was contributing to environmental damage as being like an arrow to his heart.  He subsequently set the company on a twenty year journey to zero environmental footprint through a combination of leasing, recycling and renewable energy.  In one of his two TED talks, Anderson also made the business case for sustainability, explaining how good “Mission Zero” has been for business.  Interface Inc is a public corporation.

Management and culture – WL Gore (the makers of Gore-Tex)

WL Gore has a flat, lattice-like organizational structure where everyone shares the same title of “associate.” There are neither chains of command nor predetermined channels of communication. Leaders replace the idea of “bosses.” Associates choose to follow leaders rather than have bosses assigned to them. Associate contribution reviews are based on a peer-level rating system.

Bill Gore articulated four culture principles that he called freedom, fairness, commitment and waterline:

• Associates have the freedom to encourage, help, and allow other associates to grow in knowledge, skill, and scope of responsibility
• Associates should demonstrate fairness to each other and everyone with whom they come in contact
• Associates are provided the ability to make one’s own commitments and are expected to keep them
• A waterline situation involves consultation with other associates before undertaking actions that could impact the reputation or profitability of the company and otherwise “sink the ship.”

In the lattice organization, associates are encouraged to communicate directly with each other and are accountable to fellow members of their teams. Hands-on product innovation and prototyping are encouraged. Teams typically organize around opportunities, new product concepts, or businesses. As teams evolve, leaders frequently emerge as they gain followership. This unusual organizational structure and culture has been shown to be a significant contributor to associate satisfaction and retention. (Source Wikipedia) WL Gore is a private corporation with 9,000 employees and nearly $3Bn in sales in 2010.

Culture Change – Ford –  These days, increasingly, people understand the importance of culture, but understanding how to design and sustain the kind of culture that leads to success is significantly harder.  When Alan Mullaly arrived at Ford, he a came to a company that was on a trajectory to irrelevance.  The company had become very siloed with desperate political infighting at the top of the business.  Mullaly, fresh from saving Boeing, set about culture change from the top, instituting a top down leadership culture change.  He did not go for wholesale replacement, but instead set up a new and far more collaborative set of working protocols, which he required his top executives to comply with – some left – but the results have been a significant reversal of fortunes with the company now being on a far firmer footing for the future; bonds have shifted from junk to investment status,  union relations have gone from toxic and highly expensive to more collaborative and products have become higher quality and more diverse after being over reliant on SUVs.  Bryce Hoffman wrote an excellent book on this transformation.

Please share your ideas of role model companies in these and any other categories you are inspired by.   Please comment and discuss here - click on the blog title and scroll to the bottom to find the comment box.

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Purpose lead business

I am delighted to say that the idea of purpose is becoming more fashionable among businesses these days.  Historically many businesses, especially corporations, felt that “Delivering Shareholder Value” was sufficient purpose.

More and more companies are realising that while this has the benefit of simplicity it is not necessarily the most effective way to achieve it.  The problem with having “delivering shareholder value” as a purpose is that it is only really motivating to one group of stakeholders.  And while this might include some of the senior management, it rarely includes the staff who are most in need of motivating.  It will not include most customers, suppliers, partners or other stakeholders.  Few if any of these stakeholders, if any, will be significantly motivated by making another group of stakeholders, who are probably richer than they are, even richer.

What these companies are recognising is that they need a purpose that will engage and motivate a far broader group of stakeholders.  A purpose that will help build relations with customers, regulators, media, staff, partners, suppliers etc.

The problem is that in most cases, even businesses with a purpose statement that is inspiring to all stakeholders, still run the business based mostly on measurements of revenue.  They still set targets and base rewards and recognition  on the basis of revenue or profit.

This is like trying to drive a racing car in a race while only looking at the speedometer.  Sure revenue and profits are key metrics to use to judge the health of the business, but they offer very little by way of understanding its relationships with customers, its effectiveness as a business or many other key measures.

Imagine the difference if your business was truly purpose lead.  The business has a purpose which is inspiring and delivers value to all stakeholders.  The purpose is profound and meaningful for people within the business and delivering on purpose is one of the key metrics of success and reward.

I believe being truly purpose led is transformational for business.  It significantly reduces reputational risk, increases staff motivation and customer loyalty.

It might even increase revenue and profits, returns to shareholders and even the share price.

What do you think?   Please comment and discuss here - click on the blog title and scroll to the bottom to find the comment box.

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