Brene Brown in her book ‘The Gifts of Imperfection’ quotes a certain Stuart Brown: “The opposite of play is not work—the opposite of play is depression. Respecting our biologically programmed need for play can transform work. It can bring back excitement and newness to our job“.
Playing would then be necessary in all corners or our life. How often are we playing in a professional context? Ask yourself – when that happens, how do you feel about the ongoing effort and work, and about the team of people you work with?
There are many ways to include some playing even in the most serious of our situations. In any case when you observe some kind of collective depression, you now know the remedy!
Mindfulness has been in the air for some years, in particular in California start-ups. It even seems that having a meditating practice is kind of a social obligation in the Silicon Valley these days. It has now become mainstream and has noticeably been part of the Davos summit this year, whereas it would have been quite out of question a few years ago.
Of course the boilerplate explanations include: an increasingly stressful world, compounded by smartphone addiction which really does not help putting the mind at rest. People seek a way to unplug even for a few minutes, and some recipe to manage their stress. Some others squarely seek in meditation and mindfulness a competitive advantage.
All these explanations are valid, in particular the need to learn to deal with the much increased amount of solicitations we are subjected to. Deeply I believe it also responds to the need for the individual to increasingly own its actions, and respond rather than react, even inside Industrial Age organizations that were initially designed for individuals to act like cogs in a large machine.
Mindfulness will probably spread further in organizations. We must be careful not to fall in the trendy obligation or just a way to improve well-being in daily work. It must translate into a real change of the organization’s culture.
“A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone involved” – says Ben Horowitz in his book ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’.
I have observed numerous times how cover-up cultures finally lead to disaster. The role of the leader is essential in that respect. Ben Horowitz continues: “The resulting action item for CEOs: Build a culture that rewards— not punishes— people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved“. In other words, don’t shoot the pianist!
That leadership approach is incompatible with control-and-command styles in particular when terror is part of it. It is easy to find out on what side an organization lies: just listen to people speak about senior management and whether they can be heard when they raise issues.
Of course it is also important to celebrate the good news when they happen. That should not be forgotten either, because the organization should not just look at issues. Some leaders fall in that trap as well.
Still, cover-up is not a sustainable proposal. Candidness is, and I have found over time that it is better to raise issues even if it can lead to being shot in the short term. If your leadership can’t bear bad news and goes up to dismissing you, it might not be worth staying anyway.
Simon Sinek writes in ‘Leaders Eat Last‘: “There is a pattern that exists in the organizations that achieve the greatest success, […] the ones with the highest loyalty and lowest churn and the ability to weather nearly every storm or challenge. These exceptional organizations all have cultures in which the leaders provide cover from above and the people on the ground look out for each other. This is the reason they are willing to push hard and take the kinds of risks they do. And the way any organization can achieve this is with empathy.”
Only empathy provides the comfort of a safety base for people to take risk and explore new areas, and devote themselves 150% to their tasks. Only empathy provides the linkage between people that allows them to resist successfully to hardships. I have observed too often that when people start being afraid about what could happen to them, their productivity and involvement drops abysmally – and we can’t blame them for that, because their thoughts will be fully occupied by this concern. The only way to keep people involved at their best it to provide moral security in the form of organizational empathy.
How much does your organization deploy empathy today? What can you do to increase organizational empathy?
“The most important difference between big and small companies is the amount of time running versus creating. A desire to do more creating is the right reason to want to join your [small] company” writes Ben Horowitz in book ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things‘.
Of course, creativity is essential to the success of small companies because they need to be agile and respond to the needs of the marketplace to survive. Creating something is intrinsically part of their DNA. Large companies prefer the comfort of predictability and will often discourage too highly creative endeavors even if they profess to foster innovation. This is of course an issue for creative companies that grow too fast and might become bureaucratic before they realize it. It must be a constant challenge at Facebook or Google to maintain a creative atmosphere in spite of the rapidly increasing size of the organization.
Another reason is that it is more difficult to work as a cross functional team in large organizations that in small companies, and you need to ask permission before doing anything like this. Creativity comes from mixing ideas and viewpoints, hence it is fostered naturally in small organizations where everyone works together.
Finally, creative people will then possibly find more satisfaction when working in small organizational structures. With the Fourth Revolution, small organizational structures become much more viable. Hence staying creative will remain easier in the Collaborative Age.
“An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project. […][Even] Small, seemingly minor hesitations can cause fatal delays” says Ben Horowitz in book ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things‘.
I have the same experience and I find this quote very much to the point. In my executive and consulting years I have had much experience in large organizations of situations where an entire team wanted to change something, only to get rebuffed by a single person generally in a position of authority, or even a member of the team just not doing her work.
The decision to stop was generally taken for inadequate reasons – from selfish career considerations to belief that the person was more competent than the entire team proposing the change.
What should a leader do when a team comes up with enthusiasm with a proposal for a change that should greatly help the organization moving forward? In my view, give the keys and the responsibility to the team to implement that change, making sure that the interests of the rest of the organizations are protected. Empowering people is the best way to get great things done.
This bears a lesson for change managers – one of the most critical actions is to identify early those people that will slow down or even stop change. Sometimes they are easy to identify, sometimes they are hidden. Sometimes they are in positions of authority, sometimes they are not. Still they are always the cause for most change derailment in large organizations. Focus of change management should be to make sure they do not impede transformation.
Basically employees have no more title, they have temporary positions and they need to operate more like entrepreneurs on an internal market (quite contrary, by the way, to the traditional theory of the firm that states that companies are there because they minimize the cost of internal transactions compared to the open market – so why do we keep a formal organization?).
The funny thing is that it is the number of rigid rules in the holacracy concept that seem to stop employees in their tracks. Instead of having a fluid organization with increased freedom it seems on the contrary, to stop people’s creativity and engagement.
Finally, according to the article, “Zappos executives […] explain that Holacracy is, for now, a catalyst but may not be the long-term solution in moving toward self-organization.” At the same time it is a great source of positive PR for Zappos.
I doubt whether implementing strict rules (as developed by a technical person) can resolve all organizational problems. While developing people’s entrepreneurship they need to get more freedom and not be constrained too much by rules. Let’s continue to follow what happens!
As consultant I have seen two extremes when it comes to consulting interventions regarding enterprise transformation:
The ’embedded consulting’ with one or two ‘trusted advisors’ to Senior Management, most of the work done by employees temporarily assigned to the project and a very limited number of specialized consultants focused on specific capabilities that are lacking in the organization,
A large team of consultants coming in and doing most of the work , delivering finished products (typically the business model of large consulting firms).
Should the consultant be the player or the person supporting the player?
There are a few intermediate options still in general it is possible to recognize the pattern of one or the other extreme.
I have observed that the first approach was by far superior when it comes to sustainable results in the organization.
The reasons for this are actually quite straightforward:
In option 1, the organization shows actual commitment by assigning resources to the transformation project. It shows commitment of the top of the organization, that management walks the talk and this can only be favorable to actual implementation,
The employees directly involved in devising the transformation are the best spokespersons for what they have setup. As they are demobilized from the transformation project and come back to their usual position they instantly become a strong network of proponents of change embedded in the organization,
As changes are devised by employees for the benefit of the organization, they are in general more pragmatic and closer to the needs of the organization.
Option 2 remains valid in cases in other projects where the organization’s DNA and culture is not directly touched. For enterprise transformation projects it does not seem to be the best solution, although it might appeal to the senior executives through the power of the brand of some large consulting companies.
A common argument is that only option 2 can deliver disruptive transformation. I do not agree, because employees are often open, much more creative and knowledgeable on what could be done, and their talent can be released by a specific, punctual intervention opening new possibilities.
If you have a project to transform or upgrade your organization, prefer to involve your employees supported by a limited number of senior and specialized consultants. With ’embedded consulting’ the transformation will be sustainable, much better accepted and overall much more successful.
We need to remember that salaried work in large corporations as we know it is an invention of the Industrial Age. Before that, most craftsmen were on their own, selling their services. They learnt by being an apprentice for a while and by travelling around places to gather the best practices.
Like the craftsman in the middle ages, the KEEN is nomadic independent worker
What is happening now on the labor market can be seen in fact as a return to a situation quite akin to the previous Agricultural Age for learned ans skilled labor: independent craftsmen that move from project to project and learn through experience and travel.
Of course there are quite a few differences: many valuable crafts are now intellectual and not necessarily manual, a much larger proportion of total population is sufficiently learned to enter the category, apprenticeship still exists in a somewhat less formal way in the form of years of experience and mentoring, etc.
The interesting part is the similarities: craftsmen need to know how to market themselves and not just be good at their craft; their value increases with international exposure and nomadic habits; they are engaged on a project basis rather than a continuous basis; and this creates a higher inequality in compensation, where common skills become a commodity and rare skills are highly valued.
Salaried work in large organizations governed by scientific management methods is what we consider normal employment. In fact it will just be a blip in the history of labor relations. Let’s make the best of it and look in the future of the independent craftsmen that join to realize incredible projects like the cathedral builders of old!
As I was preparing a presentation lately discussing about the strategy role in organizations, I realized that what great strategy people do is making sense of the complex world so as to enable decision-making – developing and presenting a reading grid of the world so as to make decisions as to where to go possible and natural. Showing the path in the midst of the dark, unpredictable jungle.
Strategy is making sense of complexity to show the way
Good strategies are defined by clear-cut directions that are followed by the organization to realize value; the best strategies can sometimes be wholly different directions from the current effort. “Visionary” leaders are people that have a certain understanding of the world and follow a path that is clearly marked for them.
It is only possible to determine a clear path if one makes sense of the organization environment. This environment’s main characteristic is its complexity, which leads to the usual consequence of unpredictability. And as the world becomes more and more complex, the need for good strategists increases.
How good is the strategic thinking in your organization? How well does it make sense of the complexity of the surrounding environment? Does it really provide vision of a clear path that can be followed through the jungle?
There is a great slideshow on ‘How Google Works’ by Eric Schmidt & al that is a good inspiration on how organizations will work in the Collaborative Age.
The key message of the presentation revolves about how to attract and foster great work from “Smart Creatives”. I like the concept in how it represents the key value creation of the Collaborative Age. Of course, the slideshow also revolved around such usual topics like failing often and well, and how to create the right company culture to get creative people to create and not to produce powerpoints and MBA type business plans.
A working, effective Business Model is probably one of the ultimate creative endeavors. It is often the result of a long-winded development effort, including many trials and errors. It reflects a relationship between a number of stakeholders with the aim of creating value to most of them. It can be shown and described like a piece of art. And it is a practical, real-life invention.
The Business Model Framework from the book Business Model Generation
The interesting observation here is that as a creative endeavor, the most successful, disrupting business models are those that go beyond the conventional, that reflect ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking. Thus those that develop those business models need to be somewhat unconventional and able to see beyond the obvious practice.
It also requires the business model generation process to be highly creative, without bounds, and highly iterative as well. Specific brainstorming situations need to be created accompanied by data retrieval or generation. It can sometimes take years to come up with a workable business model, and many trials and iterations.
And when it works, what a marvelous creation! And what really makes it an ultimate creation, for me, is how it creates value for a large number of stakeholders, not to mention that fact that it creates strong links and experiences for the same many people!
A business plan is one of the most powerful contemporary works of art.
Playing would then be necessary in all corners or our life. How often are we playing in a professional context? Ask yourself – when that happens, how do you feel about the ongoing effort and work, and about the team of people you work with?
