A Touch of Leadership Success

My partner is a renowned and recognized expert in consumer insight. She tells me that the key to successful marketing is to understand the often unspoken need, want, or desire among consumers, irrespective of whether it is obviously related to the product or service. It is the job of the promotion campaign to make the connection, essentially saying to the consumer, “You have this need? This want? This desire? Our brand can help you with that!” While working in the CPG (that’s Consumer Packaged Goods) industry, her ability to bring these deep, insightful understandings to the marketing team has ultimately led to brand turnarounds, immensely successful marketing campaigns, and occasionally, killing what might appear to be a delightfully (or not so delightfully) creative ad campaign because it doesn’t actually result in the intended effect on consumers, nor on business results. The best consumer insight directly links the intended effect on the consumer to their needs/wants/desires, to the action of the promotional campaign, to business results.

In my professional world that focuses on enabling great leadership and healthy, engaged organization culture, carefully noting the distinction between having a great piece of creative advertising or a fabulous campaign, and the actual effect the promotion has on the consumer – and the ultimate outcome of increasing sales – is a useful one. How often does it happen that specific objectives intended to accomplish aspects of an organization’s mission actually miss the mark with respect to creating the desired effect among the organization’s customers or indeed, internal members of the organization? There is an almost ubiquitous question on employee engagement surveys that asks about the degree to which an individual’s work contributes, in their opinion, to the overall intention of the organization. This direct and personal appreciation for the utility of each person’s work in contributing to the higher purpose of their organization is a key determinant of engagement, and from that, productivity, innovation, retention, and overall happiness in their life. In short, people want to feel that their work matters.

Many modern leaders believe that their organization is animated by its vision, that manifests as its mission, which sets the agenda for annual objectives, that are decomposed into individual goals… [deep inhalation] that are checked off in annual performance reviews (to which NO ONE looks forward!). Despite almost being a requirement for the thoroughly modern organization, vision and mission statements are completely useless if they do not inspire, animate, and directly inform day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, and year-to-year decision making. And even if the mission is a top-of-mind consideration among all staff – and that isn’t necessarily accomplished by reproducing it on a laminated poster in the reception area and having it printed on the stationary – there are few cues that enable managers and leaders to circle back to determine whether or not the actual effects of a decision or action serve the mission or detract from it.

Think of an ad campaign for some consumer good or service. The intended outcome of that ad for the business might be to entice new customers to become users. Or, it might be to encourage current customers to expand their usage. Those would be the business objectives. Why would a person decide to become a new user, or expand their usage? Marketing insight suggests unarticulated need, want, or desire to which the ad somehow appeals. This is the intended effect of that ad—how it touches the would-be consumer. Essentially, effects speak to motivating factors; goals or outcomes speak to what happens when someone is so motivated.

Similar things happen in organizations with respect to their various constituencies, both internal and external. When goals and outcomes are explicitly connected to the intended effects of decisions – those effects that are experienced by employees, customers, and the community at large – managers and workers alike can know whether initiatives are actually effective in furthering the organization’s cause. While initiatives are unfolding, managers can detect whether the effects that emerge are moving towards, or away from, those that were intended. It’s far easier to course correct sooner rather than waiting until all sorts of “unintended consequences” become apparent. And, best of all, one doesn’t have to hang around until the so-called post mortem to understand whether the original objectives and goals were appropriate, useful, and accomplish what was actually intended. Navigating for effects enables managers to understand in real time not only that initiatives are working, but that they are actually accomplishing what was intended, as opposed to an objective that might have originally seemed to be appropriate, but has since been surpassed by intervening events, new information, and the inevitably complex dynamics of the business and social worlds in which we now exist.

Tactility – explicitly understanding who we are going to touch and how we intend to touch them – augments vision in a way that is both appropriate and useful for contemporary times. If vision is what we see in the organization’s future, tactility is what happens along the way. A brand – especially the brand promise – implements tactility in the market. Appreciative management practices effect tactility among the organization’s members, thereby increasing motivation, engagement, and all the good things that come from highly engaged, high performing teams.

At the time of year when everyone’s thoughts – after holiday parties, ugly seasonal sweaters, and popping corks for 2016 – are beginning to focus on strategies and plans, performance reviews and annual objectives, perhaps a good place to start is with the question, who did we touch to great and beneficial effect in 2015? How did we touch them, and how, in turn, did that touch affect their success?

Then: Are those the types of effects we intend to sustain? How can we create more of those great effects, possibly among even more constituencies? What additional intention would be useful for those we touch? And one more: When we’re successful at touching someone with intended effect, what would that look like? Sound like? And most important since we’re talking about tactility, feel like?

And remember, I’m talking about effects for all concerned, since one cannot touch without being touched oneself. In a world that is constantly in connected relationship, that observation alone suggests Tactility is the new Vision, especially for the 21st century.

Deal with Humans? Deal with Resources? You need to understand the Connected Relationship Organization

What is Organization?

A simple question—with a not-so-simple answer. Many answers boil down to this: a group of people who come together to accomplish a common purpose, often articulated as the organization’s “mission.” “Purpose,” it seems, is the organization’s driving force, its primary consideration in both tactical and strategic decisions. Indeed, this conclusion is borne out in on-the-ground organizational practices among countless organizations. In particular, when it comes to resource deployment – especially human resource deployment,

If purpose is primary, then people necessarily become secondary.

A provocative conclusion, I realize. But consider the myriad “difficult decisions” management teams face as a matter of pragmatic fact, week in and week out. In the vast majority of modern organizations, when it becomes a choice between, say, what seems to be an economic imperative and people-related considerations, which inevitably wins? But is it necessary that this is almost always the case? Is there another way of looking at this tension between purpose and people—a tension that is, in actuality, a construct of modern management practice? Such questions become especially relevant in truly contemporary organizations, and among organizations with aspirations to transform themselves into 21st-century enterprises.

What if “purpose” is not the purpose of organization? What if “purpose” comes out of the organization’s people and their interactions? In other, more technical, words, what if “purpose” is an emergent property of the contemporary organization’s open system dynamics in the complex environment that is today’s world? To put it more simply: Bring people together. Have them interact among more than economic considerations and the purpose of that organization will emerge. If one considers the massive successes of both recently created organizations and those which have sustained multiple transitions over their history, irrespective of their size, it’s not difficult to see that this idea, in most cases, describes the history of contemporary success and the successful commercialization of disruptive ideas—those that create a quantum leap in user/consumer experience, often transforming markets and industries.

Back to the first question: What is Organization in this context of contemporary organizational design and behaviour? Of course, that raises a precursor question: What is the context that best captures the underlying dynamics of our contemporary world? Whether one describes the practical complexity of today as the “Pull Economy,” (beautifully described and elucidated by John Seely Brown & John Hagel III) or as VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) – a term that originated in the US military, since co-opted by American business which never met a militaristic metaphor it didn’t like – this ain’t your grandfather’s organizational environment.

I prefer to think of today’s conditions as being Ubiquitously Connected – always connected to everyone, everything, and everywhere, whether we realize it or explicitly choose to participate in it, or not – and therefore, Pervasively Proximate – always next to, or in relationship with, everyone, everything, and everywhere. Always connected, and always in relationship. Thus, our ideal model of organization in our contemporary context could be characterized as a Connected Relationship Organization.

I have described such an organization in terms of five Valence (connecting, combining, interacting, uniting) relationships, namely: Economic, Affective, Identity, Knowledge, and Ecological (there’s much more about Valence Theory, its derivation and application here). Defining organization in these terms has all sorts of interesting consequences that have the potential to transform the way we hire and manage people, the ways in which we enact organizational culture, how we create business models, form strategy, and enable innovation, and even understand the practice of leadership itself. Based on reconceiving Organization as an emergent entity arising from Valence-relationship interactions among people, our mindframe about all sorts of practical issues can shift. For example, in a Valence conception:

• Relationship & Effects—The purpose of organization is simply to bring people into relationship, specifically to express the effects of these five valence relationships among its various constituencies;
• "Purpose" & Mission—The “purpose” or mission of any particular organization is emergent from the members (whether they represent internal or external constituencies) and the unique organizational dynamics enabled and enacted; which means,
• Human Non-fungibility—People are not interchangeable based on skills, competencies, or prior experience (nominally) doing the same job for which you hired them; besides the implication that every new hire creates their job in their own image, so to speak, this principle of human non-fungibility suggests that,
• Hiring is a Transformational Act—Every new hire and every employee departure necessarily transforms the organization because the nature of the relationships among people and with the organization itself necessarily change as the people change; and finally,
• Leadership & An Alternate Future—Contemporary leadership is not about “leading” in the conventional conception of that word. Rather, the contemporary leader creates a conducive environment in which an organization’s members share experiences in effecting these valence relationships, and from these shared experiences an alternate future becomes possible.

“An alternate future becomes possible.”

A leader in a contemporary organization enables the possibility of an alternate future for the organization, its members, their relationships, and the ensuing effects. Enabling this possibility, as well as the reality that every new hire and each departure is a transformative act, creates new imperatives for all members, and particularly for the Human Resources function. Among them: Hire for the organization you want to become, not the organization you are today. As I suggested in my last post, the key hiring question in a contemporary organization is no longer, "what skills do we need to replace or fill?" but rather, "who, what, and how do we want to become as an organization?"

All of this is well and fine with respect to the new person who is, whether they realize it or not, an agent of change the moment they sign back the offer of employment. But what of those members who are there to welcome (aka, “onboard”) that new addition? What of those who remain after someone departs—or worse, after many someones depart, for instance, after a major restructuring? A focus on reconstituting the Valence relationships to enable intentional and desired transformation creates brand new, 21st-century opportunities for the HR function. Such intentionality when it comes to re-establishing key relationships can be augmented by specialists invited into the organization who can provide unique expertise in transformational coaching for individuals and teams, humanistic organization development interventions, and “inplacement” services (the complement of “outplacement”) in which individuals about to arrive in an organization receive specific coaching that will enable them to bring their best in their new assignment.

In a world that is now all about the transformative effects of connected relationship organizations, isn’t it a worthwhile investment to specifically focus on making those relationships the most effective they can be?

Transforming an Organization, Even When that Organization is a Country

As most of the world knows, Canada has a (hot) new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, who was sworn in with his cabinet yesterday. Notable among his appointees to Her Majesty's Privy Council (that is, ministers of cabinet), is the fact that there is a 50:50 gender split, and strong representation of New Canadians, an aboriginal woman as Justice Minister (who also happens to have been an experienced Crown attorney), an amputee in the Veteran's Affairs post, and - demonstrating the new PM's wry sense of humour - a former astronaut as Transport Minister.
In stark contrast to his predecessor's governance-by-imperial-fiat style, PM Justin serves notice: "Government by cabinet is back".... baby! (I feel an Austin Powers moment coming on here.)

As I've discussed in a previous post, industrial age organizations (as in, most throughout the 20th century) hire human "resources" as one might consider replaceable machine parts. On the other hand,  contemporary organizations intentionally hire individuals who can enable the type of organizational transformation needed for whatever contemporary circumstances the organization intends to navigate. Put another way, hire for the organization you want to become, not the organization you are today. Skills, knowledge, and experience are important, to be sure. Contrary to almost ubiquitous hiring practices, resume-parsed skills, knowledge, and experience aren't the be-all and end-all—the exclusive "gold standard" of hiring.

Since every new hire – every new person who accepts an organizational role – effects a unique transformation in the interpersonal dynamics emerging from the "connection (i.e. valence) relationships" they create, it is the individual's potential for organizational transformation that really counts. Unpacking that complex sounding idea: Everyone in an organization connects to everyone else via a set of valence (uniting, combining, reacting) relationships. Change a person and you necessarily change the interactions among those relationships. Change the quality and nature of those interacting relationships and you change the organization. Thus every new arrival and every fresh departure is a transformational act. Contemporary hiring strategy is less of "what skills do we need?" and more of "who, what, and how do we want to become?"

Trudeau's cabinet effects a message of transformation for government, for parliament, and for the country as a whole.

Fifteen years into the 21st century, it's about time!

Authentic Acknowledgement and the Roots of Engagement

With employee engagement becoming the prime focus of today’s “Talent Management Business Partners” among many large corporations, the question of what truly drives engagement comes to the fore. It’s widely accepted that acknowledgement is a key facilitator of engaged employees. Being thanked for one’s work is a good start. Being recognized as one of the contributors to a project’s success is a useful follow-on. In fact, we see this all the time in formal, staged political events when the leader specifically names some otherwise obscure individual who has supposedly contributed a good idea, inspiration, or venue to the good fight being celebrated at the podium.(This has become a standard trope in American politics, for instance.)

It makes sense, then, that the opposite should prove to foster disengagement and demotivation: not being explicitly recognized for one’s contribution. (And, here I’m not considering the egregious and borderline sociopathic behaviour of a manager claiming personal credit for one of their underling’s work.) Indeed, fostering an environment of non-appreciation clearly does nothing for boosting morale, enthusiasm, and commitment. But there is an act of omission that proves to be even worse for undermining motivation and fomenting toxic dissatisfaction, so-called active disengagement.

Imagine that you’ve worked long hours developing and delivering a great analysis that potentially has significant strategic importance for the business. You’ve created a dynamite presentation and won the kudos and plaudits of key decision makers in the organization. Acknowledgement emails flow in through the next day from everyone concerned. And then…

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Not a single thing changes as a result of your fantastic effort. The recommendations – widely acknowledged as being tremendously insightful and useful – languish and people’s attention move on to the next fire drill. How do you feel?

Authentic acknowledgement is the basis upon which leaders create trust and enable true engagement. That authenticity necessarily requires demonstrable appreciation. To feel demonstrably appreciated – as opposed to receiving some euphemistic synonym of simply being thanked – individuals must be able to viscerally perceive the results of their effort in affecting the course of the enterprise. In other words, it’s all about the effect—if what I do has a perceptible effect, I know that what I’ve done has value, and therefore I feel valued. Feeling valued (which, according to Valence Theory is the Economic-ba relationship) is the effect of authentic acknowledgement, and therefore is the true driver of employee engagement.

Bottom line: If you want truly engaged employees – and believe me, you do – ensure that what you ask of them demonstrably shows up in the strategy and tactics of your business.

Predicting Organizational Dynamics—Empirical Validity of Valence Theory

Good theory does three things:

1. It explains observed phenomena and behaviours.
2. It makes (testable) predictions of future behaviour.
3. It enables one to derive new behaviours and phenomena in response to new circumstances.

(You might ask, what’s the difference between thing 2 and thing 3? The second case predictions are based on situations that one could anticipate or conceive. The third case deals with situations that are completely from out of the blue, which is increasingly what we face in our contemporary world.)

As organizations and intra-organization behaviour have become more complex, academics, organization development practitioners, consultants, and managers seek new models to explain, predict, and derive what happens, will happen, and could happen in organizational contexts. Over the past fifteen years or so, it is increasingly common to use the metaphor of communications networks – roughly modelled on the Internet – to describe organizational dynamics. Information flows within organizations no longer strictly follow the hierarchical chain-of-command first described by Henri Fayol back in 1916 (in French; 1949 when translated into English as General and Industrial Administration). To model the complex, interconnected feedback and feedforward loops that occur throughout most large organizations, and indeed, the social graphs of informal teams or spheres of influence, adopting a network theory of contemporary organizations seems to be a useful thing to do.

As an aside, there are two complementary thoughts on theory: The first says that, although all models (theories) are wrong, some are useful. The second says that all models (theories) are right—until they’re not. It is indeed useful to bear both of these in mind so that one resists the temptation to substitute the model for reality (leading to very problematic “abstract empiricism”), and understands that any model has its limits of applicability (i.e., the trick is to know when to stop).

In particular, a network theory of organization would predict that if a person becomes a blockage or impediment in information flow or effectiveness, the network would “route around” – that is, avoid involving – that person. Indeed, that is what often happens. It follows that if that obstreperous person (and their department, if they are a manager) were eliminated, the adapted flow would simply continue and the organization itself would not be expected to undergo any substantial change. After all, the information flowed before; it can flow afterwards, relatively unchanged and unimpeded, all other things being equal.

Valence Theory predicts something else. Valence Theory defines organization as “that emergent entity resulting from two or more individuals, or two or more organizations, or both, that share multiple valence relationships at particular strengths, with particular pervasiveness, among its component elements at any point in time.” The five Valence relationships are: Economic, Affective (socio-psychological), Knowledge, Identity, and Ecological. There are two forms of each valence – fungible and ba – that respectively account for more traditional, bureaucratic, administratively controlled, and hierarchical organizations, and “connected relationship” organizations that are more consistent with the ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate reality in which we live.

A Valence Theory conceived organization is potentially always in flux based on the precise nature of the relationships at play at any time (and the relationships themselves interact in ways that are not deterministically predictable). In a practical sense, however, given a more-or-less stable cohort of actors (staff personnel and those external actors with whom they interact), and more-or-less established relationships, the organization would usually exist in a state of stable homeostasis. One of the predictions that Valence Theory makes has to do with changing members: When people arrive or leave the organization, relationships and their interactions necessarily change. Valence Theory predicts that the organization itself necessarily changes, even in the absence of any other change-initiating impetus.

One could see an organization changing if, for example, a relatively (hierarchically) senior person were to change. Conventional thinking would say that a relatively lower-level (again, hierarchically speaking) person coming or going would not be considered as important enough to initiate a substantive organizational change—even though complexity thinking might suggest otherwise (based on the principle that in a complex system, small perturbations can initiate substantial systemic effects). Valence Theory, on the other hand, predicts that any change of members necessarily changes the organization because the nature and quality of (the Valence) relationships necessarily change.

Consider the case of the aforementioned troublesome person around whom information flow re-routes. Valence Theory would predict that if that person were to leave, the relationships would necessarily realign to such an extent (because they had been, colloquially speaking, so bent out of shape that they would have no choice but to realign) that the organization would experience a clearly observable change. That change would occur seemingly of its own volition without the organization having to undergo an explicit change initiative or a formal re-organization (which often changes very little, in actuality—deck chairs, meet Titanic...).

I recently had opportunity to observe this precise phenomenon occurring in a live environment. At the “Fair Contest” company, there was a mid-level manager who was responsible for a support function, nominally acting as an internal supplier to the line business departments. This manager happened to possess characteristics that, taken together, would characterize that person as a “dark triad personality.” For numerous reasons, people in other departments learned, over time, to effectively marginalize that person and avoid using that manager’s department or resources, choosing instead to “route around” that department and obtain their own, usually external, suppliers. Suffice it to say that the department enjoyed very little credibility at Fair Contest.

A network model of organization would predict that the departure of the dark-triad manager should not necessarily result in a substantive change, since the other, relatively autonomous managers would continue to use the services they had come to know and rely upon. (Note that budget was not a determining factor between using internal and external resources.) Valence Theory, on the other hand, would predict a substantive change in organizational trajectory because of the resulting major realignment of relationships, and consequential organizational reconfiguration of valence relationship dynamics.

Last fall, the dark-triad manager was, in fact, fired for cause (apparently not directly related to their narcissism, psychopathy, or Machiavellianism). In the relatively short period between then and now, there has been a significant, beneficial shift in organizational trajectory in both tactical operations and strategic positioning even though none of the many changes which occurred had been specifically planned. In fact, they can be well explained as the result of realigned valence relationships among members that, in turn, reconfigured organizational dynamics. The departed manager – true to their narcissistic character – was heard to say that the Fair Contest Company had made a big mistake in letting them go. Nothing could be further from the truth, even though no one had anticipated the magnitude and positive significance of the ensuing changes. No one, that is, except Valence Theory.

Valence Theory called it.

A Brief, 3,000-Year History of Organization

One question that periodically surfaces among my leader-clients is, “how did we ever get into the leadership mess we’re in these days?” What often passes for leadership is often bull-headedness, the ability to drive to accomplish a goal with almost obsessive determination, and the overarching drive to win at any and all costs. The C-suite seems to be overrun with dark-triad personalities. Organizations tend to create elaborate shields of willful ignorance so long as the leader in question – and it doesn’t necessarily have to be the hierarchically most senior person – continues to bring in the results.

In other words, how did we get to here?

A Brief, 3,000-Year History of Organization takes a stab at answering that very question. It begins with a foundational premise of human interactions: the dominant way in which we communicate with each other as a society enables the structuring institutions of that society. It is an argument that implicates technologies throughout Western history, but is not technological determinism, the doctrine that says technological advances drive everything with an unwavering inevitability. Rather, drawing from the arguments of people like Eric Havelock, Harold Adam Innis, and Marshall McLuhan, I would suggest that throughout history, communication technology enables environments that tend to favour structuring institutions of society most consistent with the way in which people interact with each other. That is, “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Which brings us to the history of those great, structuring institutions, organizations. The paper traces the way Athenian democracy organized itself in a remarkable contemporary way, promoting inclusiveness, participation, knowledge sharing, and prevention of concentrated power in the hands of a few, privileged men. As communication technology changed, so too did the organizational institution: bureaucratic power emerged very much concentrated in the hands of a few, very privileged men at the top of the Roman Catholic Church in the 11th and 12th centuries. The manuscript culture that drove the Church gave way to a culture driven by mechanized print that enabled the Enlightenment, early modernity, and paved the path to Industrial Age organizations and management. This, of course, gave us the industrial and mechanistic 20th century and the foundations of modern management.

In the paper, I argue that the 20th-century organizational story takes two, parallel paths, one that creates the managerialist worldview, another that provides a more humanistic approach. If 20th-century management (and most MBA education) served the purposes of the former approach, the latter is emerging as better serving the complex challenges of relationship-oriented organizations in the 21st century. Finally, I introduce Valence Theory as a foundational, contemporary theory of organization that both accounts for the past 3,000 years (including the 20th century), and explains the complex, emergent, and downright weird organization forms and dynamics that we have seen more recently.

A Brief, 3,000-Year History of Organization. Download the paper here.

Academic Freedom is Not the Issue - It's Poor Leadership

There was a general consensus, at least among the usual suspect commentators, that University of Saskatchewan’s recent conflagration over the firing of professor and Dean of the School of Public Health, Robert Buckingham had an inherent duality. On one hand, Professor Buckingham had the protection of tenure that enabled him to speak out about a dubious plan to consolidate the Schools of Medicine, Dentistry, and Public Health into one, super health-care school. On the other hand, now former university president, Ilene Busch-Vishniac made it very clear that, “Leaders [i.e. senior academic administrators and managers] have opportunities to express personal opinions in leadership discussions. Once decisions are made, all leaders are expected to support the university’s directions.” According to Professor Buckingham, President Busch-Vishniac told the deans and vice-presidents that their tenure would be in jeopardy if they spoke out against the cost-cutting decision to consolidate the three schools.

Professor Buckingham did just that in an open letter entitled, “The Silence of the Deans.” He was summarily fired both as dean and as professor, contravening the long-held tradition of tenure in which a professor has job protection against losing his or her position based on what they say, write, or research. A firestorm ensued. The university administration quickly backtracked on the loss of the tenured position, but not on reinstatement of his deanship. The Provost, Brett Fairbairn, was made the scapegoat and resigned over the incident. The president, claiming that “I came here to accomplish some things. I think we've been making some progress on them,” refused to step down. In at least one radio interview on CBC’s As It Happens, she was (in my opinion) rather glib and somewhat revisionist about the incident and circumstances. However, the damage to the university’s reputation continued to expand with the university’s students protesting, academics around the world widely condemning the move, and the whole kerfuffle attracting the notice of the provincial government.

Wednesday evening, the university’s Board of Governors lowered the boom on President Busch-Vishniac and summarily dismissed her (although, in a move that was rather poetic I think, said that she could be rehired as a professor).

I believe the Board of Governors moved swiftly on both the urging of the government and the wider academic community in order to salvage the university’s reputation. However, it points to a possible sea change in contemporary management and leadership. Traditionally, there was an implicit (sometimes explicit) mentality of noblesse oblige among managers, and especially senior managers and executives (who today are euphemistically called “leaders”). They made decisions and everyone else was required to comply or face dire consequences, irrespective of the merit of the decision, or its logic, ethics, practicality, expected consequences, or effects be they intended or unintended. This mode of operations is established in an instrumental, industrialized view of organization that considers its people as replaceable machine components, and therefore expendable. (I contend that it originally came from the very first, pre-modern, administrative bureaucracy, the Catholic Church, stemming from the time of Pope Gregory VII).

No longer, it seems. The expectation that managers and workers will simply fall into line with decisions of top executives may be going the way of the telegraph, wired line telephone system, and daily milk delivery. Today’s organizations whose dynamics are based on emergent interactions among multiple relationships require inclusive participation, active listening among multiple constituencies, and consensus-building processes that enable true leadership to occur. To enable individual autonomy and agency in an environment that encourages collective responsibility in an environment of mutual accountability. Simply put, absent a culture of silencing fear (which is, sadly, all too prevalent among many modern organizations), senior managers can no longer expect to order their subordinate managers and employees around without consequences. In the case of University of Saskatchewan and the decision to "TransformUS" by consolidating three health-related schools against the advice of their respective deans, and silencing all dissenters through overt threats to their livelihood, the leadership failure happened long before Professor Buckingham's firing. Executives can no longer exert such arbitrary - dare I say regal - power. They may not meet the dire end of former-President Busch-Vishniac at University of Saskatchewan. Nonetheless, they will be entirely unable to fulfil their mandate of accomplishing whatever the organization intends to accomplish, never mind the more lofty objectives of leadership, innovation, and creating great environments of engaged workers.

Owner Capitalism. The New Absentee Landlords

I’ve never quite subscribed to the fictitious idea that contemporary shareholders of public companies are truly “owners.” They may own the company’s stock, and by virtue of placing a bet on an arcane future outcome based on an alchemic expectation (and actual delivery) of future profits, relative degree of satisfaction or disappointment (irrespective of actual success), and what Apple or Google have recently announced (or perhaps literally, the price of tea in China), may be entitled to a financial reward from time to time. But that reward is more akin to a bet at the craps table in the casino called Bay Street, Wall Street, NASDAQ, or similar. The overwhelming majority of company stock purchases are simply about money making more money based solely on the movement of money. Aside from angel investors and venture capitalists investing in start-ups, long gone are the days when a so-called investor is authentically investing in the success of the enterprise, as opposed to the financial return of the supposed investment itself.

This premise is the basis of a new book by Yvan Allaire and Mihaela Firsirotu, A Capitalism of Owners, reviewed today in the Globe and Mail.

In an era where companies must be flexible and strive for change, the authors say corporate leaders face a stressful paradox. The more competitive the markets for goods and services, the more businesses need time to adapt, innovating and putting in place new strategies (as Ms. Nooyi was attempting) without speculators breathing down their necks.

“Yet, in these very times of a raging competitive battle, contemporary financial markets, the supposed ‘company owners,’ pile on widely held publicly listed companies, bullying them for short-term results and then exit the stock en masse, leaving the place to speculators, financial jackals, and buzzards,” the authors note.

Note the phrase “supposed” owners. Under capitalism, ownership belongs to the holders of shares. But the authors question whether today’s stockholders are share owners or share flippers, speculating on the market. They note that in the 1960s, a share was held, on average, for seven years by its owner. Today, on the New York Stock Exchange, shares are held for less than a year – roughly the level at the time of the 1929 market crash, the authors note. Other major exchanges have seen a similar transformation.

Exactly my point. Taking a more theoretically grounded approach to the analysis, I would argue that, according to Valence Theory, most shareholders are not even members of the organization; how on earth could they be considered “owners” qualified to participate in decision making? Indeed, the company’s customers have stronger, more pervasive ties to the organization and would theoretically be better qualified to contribute to good decision making on behalf of all constituencies.

We all know the problem with absentee landlords. Owner capitalism is equivalently problematic, and far more pernicious in its effects on society in general.

How - Not Who - Do You Hire?

Like most people whose digiSelf has a presence on LinkedIn, I receive the periodic “Jobs You May Be Interested In” email. Not that I’m actively looking to relocate at the moment (fans of the proposed M.LODC program can breathe again!), but there’s the whole “make me an offer that I can’t refuse thing,” too. In this week’s edition, there was a notice for a “Senior Manager, Leadership Development Strategy” position at Scotiabank. Reading through the description, I came to the conclusion that I would be eminently qualified, and completely unhireable for that position.

Let me explain: First, I lack the number one desired qualification, namely, “at least 5+ years experience within the financial services industry.” Reframing this qualification suggests that leadership within the financial services industry is somehow uniquely different than leadership within any other industry segment. In other words, according to Scotiabank’s standpoint, leadership is fundamentally instrumental in nature as opposed to transcending the instrumental to become – as I argue – environmental. Moreover, this Scotiabank position is intended to, “oversee the Bank´s approach to Executive Recruitment.” (As an aside, I think their choice use of capitalizations is interesting in the way it transforms certain abstractions into proper nouns; but I digress.) It is clear that the “Bank” considers hiring somewhat more traditionally, as an instrumental exercise to find the right candidate who best meets the job description and requirements. Or, expressed another way, an exercise to find the machine component whose specifications most closely match those preconceived by the industrial machine itself.

Clearly, I would be a disaster in that role. For me – and for UCaPP organizations – recruitment and hiring is far less about the candidate directly, and much more about the aspirational intentions of the organization itself.

Say what?

Let’s unpack that last idea: According to Valence Theory, organizations are fundamentally emergent entities that arise from the relationships (of which there are five) among the people (or more generally, the member constituencies). Change the people and you necessarily change the nature and quality of the relationships. Therefore, each new hire irrevocably changes the organization. Although it seems relatively obvious that if you change, say, a major persona at a relatively higher hierarchical level in the organization – the CEO or a senior director, for instance – you’ll create a change in the organization, it is also true that introducing any personnel change effects emergent, transformational change – most often subtle change – in the organization. The so-called ripple effects of changing even a hierarchically low-level position introduces the potential for large systemic transformation throughout the complex system that is the organization.

Here’s a somewhat, but not entirely, contrived example that illustrates the point: An organization hires someone for an entry-level position who happens to be really enthusiastic about softball, or cycling, or possibly even salsa dancing. That person takes the initiative to organize social events that feature their interest which, in turn, brings people together in a social environment who previously may never have directly interacted. That recreational interaction in turn recreates the nature and quality of their workplace interactions and stuff happens that enables new, and unexpected, business-related effects. As I said, the so-called ripple effects of changing even a hierarchically low-level position introduces the potential for large systemic transformation throughout the complex system that is the organization.

Thus, the question of hiring becomes (among other things) a question about what we, as an organization, want to become. Into what do we aspire to transform and evolve? What effects to we intend to create and enable among our member constituencies and how will that new person contribute that creation and enablement? Or, more succinctly, what is our tactility? Hiring decisions are, in effect, organizational evolution and tactility decisions—how will we touch the person we are inviting into organization, and how will that person will touch us? The hiring process is about enculturation—how will that individual assimilate and embody our organizational culture, and how will our organizational culture embody the effects introduced by that individual?

So, hiring me, for example, into an organization means that the organization has some pretty inspired, far-thinking, and unconventional aspirations for the future of its leadership. Just the sorts of things we’re playing with here in the Faculty of Leadership and Organization at Adler Graduate Professional School.

Leadership in Complexity at the Public Service of Canada National Managers Community Forum 2012

The past two days, I had the great pleasure of performing two playshops on Leadership in Complexity at the 2012 National Managers Community Forum in Winnipeg. This is the same session that I did with the Canadian Organization Development Institute a year ago. Between the two sessions, over 200 participants experienced an introduction to complexity theory as applied to organizational leadership, beginning with answering the time-honoured question, “how are contemporary organizations like the Newfoundland cod fishery?” (Answer: Neither is complicated, although both are typically treated as such; in fact, they both are complex.) We listened to music from Sun Ra as an example of what complexity sounds like (although my son, the composer, suggested that we could have equally listened to an excerpt from John Cage’s 4’33”).

A large part of being able to perceive a complex system AS a complex system comes from being able to perceive the relationships among effects relative to a variety of contexts (or grounds) that provide the environment in which those relationships are enacted. Of course, given my McLuhan background, I suggest that the Laws of Media tetrads are among the best thinking frameworks to be able to enable that perception. This, of course leads to all sorts of applications including better brainstorming, or what I now refer to as “Emergence Brainstorming.”

Naturally, I introduced the participants to Valence Theory and referred them to the complementary talk to this session, “Take Me to Your Leaders.” And, as a cap to the entire afternoon, we developed tactility statements for the public service on each day:

Day 1: “The Public Service of Canada shares and transfers knowledge to create and support policy to enable regulations regarding social services via communications and media.”

Day 2: “The Public Service of Canada supports social identity and diversity as well as knowledge sharing through excellent governance to accomplish safety and security of the people and the environment, in addition to economic growth, stability, and health, through providing people support services.”

All in all, an enjoying and stimulating session for me and, I hope, for the participants. The notes for the session are available for download in English and in French.

Don’t Manage Conflict, Engage It (and each other)!

Responding to the detailed design document for our proposed Master’s in Leadership and Organization, Development and Coaching, friend and collaborator, Cinnie Noble notes the seeming absence of topics covering conflict management. She appropriately observes that,

Conflict costs organizations – financially (through litigation, grievances, absenteeism, retention etc.), AND in other ways such as the impact that ill-managed conflict has on morale, productivity, the ability to make decisions, problem solve, and be creative. Most organizations (and people) are reactive when it comes to conflict, and OD and coaching principles and practice have the potential for providing proactive approaches that prevent unnecessary conflict and help make effective conflict engagement the norm rather than something to be avoided – until it is too late.

Effective conflict management is not commonly identified as a core competency for leaders, and there is a paucity of information about what constitutes conflict competent leaders and organizations. Much leadership coaching work however, is focused on helping leaders develop the knowledge, skills and abilities to engage more effectively in conflict and better manage interpersonal and other disputes.

Mission statements and codes of conduct are commonly subject to interpretation and often do not consider cultural differences. Some expectations about how staff are supposed to ‘behave’ are otherwise unspoken and unwritten. In any case there are many problems about trying to instil respectful ways of interacting. In actuality, the results of such efforts are the 'stuff' of grievances, the need for mediation, investigations, human rights complaints and so on. In the well-meaning efforts to provide a framework for staffs' communications, many workplaces do not provide the requisite training, coaching or modelling to effectively implement and sustain ‘good’ behaviour. What is more, they do not provide the ways and means for staff to easily access assistance.

Conflict has yet to be fully embraced as an opportunity for organizations to achieve more positive outcomes. Such outcomes are for instance, to examine disparate ideas in order to innovate and create new ways to solve problems, to explore possibilities based on opposing views and differences, to improve relationships so that productivity increases and staff are healthy contributors.

Imagine if we, as leaders, were able to create an environment in which the nature of conversations that occur in that environment preclude what we term as “interpersonal disputes,” disgruntlement, and generally bad behaviours; an environment in which mission statements (which I think are relatively counter-productive in most cases) and codes of conduct (ditto, especially with a disparity between espoused and in-use theories of action) are not converted into weapons with the intention of beating recalcitrant employees into submission.

Our proposed master’s program is designed with this effect in mind. For example, one of the key objectives of our Human Thriving course is to enable leaders – right from the program get-go – to begin to think about the nature of what I would call fractal thriving: a concept recognizing that thriving people create thriving organizations create thriving societies. This leads to a fundamental, complexity-based question that can be more or less framed as, “what environmental conditions will most effectively enable the types of organizational relationships that support individuals’ ability to thrive over time?” With these guiding notions in mind, we can then begin to reconsider and reconstruct organizational practices from the ground up with these precepts as foundational design principles (which happens to be consistent with a Valence Theory conception of organization – interesting how that works! ;)

Raising and mindfully (re)considering the topic of conflict management is exceptionally useful and important because it helps us understand with a new clarity what is fundamentally important about this new program we are proposing. Additionally, it assists to emphasize what I believe must be a core value that pervades all aspects of our curriculum narrative. I’m hoping that the specific seminars on Positive Leadership principles and Appreciative Management practices in the Human Thriving course will set the tone early on. I’m also hoping – more than hoping; we’re planning for it, actually – that proactive leadership, coaching, and OD practices and principles enable organizational environments in which effective engagement among all members becomes the norm, rather than the exception, over time.

Through our program, we will plant the seeds—essentially creating an appropriately conducive environment for our participants in which whatever is to emerge that enacts these values will emerge. I am trusting in the capacity of those whom we will attract to the program to bring forth conversations that perhaps none of us can specifically conceive of from the outset. We will encourage the juxtaposition of diverse contexts (and understanding the intrinsic value in such diversity), provide a wide range of analytical tools that enable useful thinking about polarity issues, and primarily focus on the multiple ways in which a healthy human and organizational ecology can be created, enabled, and actively encouraged out in the world, especially starting from the societal mess in which we collectively find ourselves. In these ways, conflict management may well become a thing of the past, replaced by its more effective counterpart, positive conflict engagement.

Take Me to Your Leaders

A few weeks ago, I led a colloquium at Adler based on my popular keynote, Take Me to Your Leaders. During the talk, I explore the notion that it's time to rethink what it means to lead in the contemporary context of highly collaborative – and highly effective – organizations.

Throughout history, the concept of "organization" evolved according to conditions of society at the time. Unquestionably, today's conditions have changed significantly since the Industrial Age model that shaped the 20th century, and thereby shaped management education over the last hundred years. In a contemporary organization, conceived in a world that is ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate, I contend that the role of leadership is no longer to “lead” in a conventional sense (that is, create a vision, execute a mission, provide incentives to keep everyone in line), but to bring people together to create a shared experience in which an alternative future becomes possible. This realization raises a fascinating question: what does it mean to be a leader when it is no longer to lead?

More on The End of Vision

I’ve received some considerable feedback about my article on the Linked 2 Leadership blog, “The End of Vision.” Almost all of the feedback expresses appreciation for introducing the idea of tactility—understanding the intentional and mindful, sustained effects throughout the wider social, material, and natural environments among an organization’s various constituencies.

I distinguish tactility from vision – an imagining of objectives to be attained in the unknowable (and most certainly uncontrollable) future. I argue that vision is obsolescent in the contemporary, UCaPP world; that the pervasive proximity which is characteristic of our times precludes vision as a useful sensory metaphor because it is our only sense that necessarily requires distance and separation to work. Tactility, on the other hand, is our most proximate of senses, the one that best corresponds to today’s reality.

Those who took issue with my rather emphatic negation of vision as continuing to provide useful guidance for leaders unanimously point to the ability of vision to inspire. For example, as Dr. Tom Cocklereese notes, “vision statements have motivated people to move heaven and earth to achieve new heights.” Another commenter observes that vision provides, “passion and energy and ultimately what engages and motivates others.” Without question, I agree that passion, energy, and motivation are vital to inspiring organization members to innovate, achieve greatness, and change the(ir) world. An inspiring vision may contribute to helping people discover their passion—Dr. Tom points to the inspiring visions of Moses, Kennedy, and King Jr. But it would be a grave mistake to conflate vision with passion, inspiration, and motivation. The two are not equivalent, or even necessarily connected.

And that’s the problem: Too many organizational leaders assume that the vision statement they (and perhaps several others at the top of the organization) craft will necessarily, if not automatically, inspire passion and greatness. Sadly, often bleak organizational realities might inspire only cynicism, mistrust, and – let’s face it – mediocrity. How many of our leaders – corporate and otherwise – are truly able to inspire genuine passion that can move nations like those to whom Dr. Tom refers?

Have a look at a sampling of vision statements from well-known companies. Many of them read like the laundry list of next year’s key performance indicators, written in bland corporatese. Some of them are downright aggressive and negative, using words like “destroy” and “crush.” They might inspire the sociopaths that often tend to occupy “executive row,” but as an inspirational vision for today’s world...? The majority of them have a vision to “dominate,” or to “be the best,” or to be the “world leader,” and my favourite nonsensical and useless vision-statement phrase, to “exceed expectations” (as if the organization’s leaders have any clue whatsoever what those amorphous expectations might actually be, whether they are reasonable or rational, whether exceeding them is actually what will benefit their constituencies, and so forth). Especially when committed to paper (or screen), they are almost unanimously devoid of passion, absent of inspiration, stripped of their ability to transform cynical compliance to engaged commitment.

More important, as I point out in my article, in most cases organizational vision becomes a type of blinkered vision, with a single-minded focus on achieving the goals and objectives the vision describes. We have all experienced the destruction and dysfunction throughout the world wrought by single-minded corporate, political, xenophobic, and megalomaniacal visions over the past several decades. We have learned that what might have seemed like a good idea at the time turns out disastrously—made considerably worse by a leadership determined to “stay the course,” even in the face of so-called unintended consequences, code for “unanticipated effects.”

No one could reasonably argue against the premise that today’s world is extraordinarily complex. By definition, this means that nothing of significance in our world is deterministically predictable. Today’s “vision” that certain goals and objectives are right, and appropriate, and true may turn out to be tomorrow’s folly. The direction inspired by vision may create unforeseen, emergent effects that may be worse than unintended—they may be considerably at odds with the fundamental values of the organization, and the values of the organization’s members (which is precisely what I found in my research: in traditional bureaucratic, administratively controlled, hierarchical organizations, “individual humanity scales to collective collective callousness”).

Vision was the appropriate sensory metaphor for organizational guidance in an age that was deterministic, more predictable, more linearly explainable by clockwork, industrialized models. In other words, it was appropriate for the 19th and 20th centuries. Even though the reality of our environment has already transformed to become the UCaPP world that we now experience, people take a long time to catch up (about 300 years from the time the dominant form of communications changes; by my estimation, we’re about 168 years through the transition). Vision has had its day; it’s time to embrace the immediacy and presence of tactility in its stead.

So here’s my suggestion: Find your own tactility. Whom are you going to touch and how are you going to touch them today—and each and every day hereafter? Craft that into a statement which expresses what it is that you do that inspires you, motivates you, and most of all, expresses your passion. Take that personal tactility statement with you wherever you go. Embrace it. Live it authentically. Use is as the answer to the cocktail party question, “so what do you do?” Combine it with the tactilities of those with whom you collaborate in your workplace, enabling your organizational tactility to emerge. Most of all, be mindful of the effects you enable and create throughout your world. (For those who are interested, here’s considerably more on Vision, Values, Tactility, and Mission.)

P.S. Here’s mine: “I enable and create great environments of engagement.” And, I say it with passion!

"Personal Value Proposition?" Not so fast

The HBR Blog has a post that suggests,

"Executives set value propositions for their products — the target market segments, the benefits they provide, and their prices. It's why a target customer should buy the product.But value propositions go beyond just products. Your personal value proposition (PVP) is at the heart of your career strategy. It's the foundation for everything in a job search and career progression — targeting potential employers, attracting the help of others, and explaining why you're the one to pick. It's why to hire you, not someone else.

On the surface, it seems to make good sense. After all, knowing the unique value one can provide to a potential employer or organization that may wish to engage her/him is an important aspect of both understanding oneself and getting hired.

However...

As I describe in my popular keynote, "Take me to Your Leaders: Collaborative leadership and trust," the models we create and the language we use are not only descriptive, they are generative. In other words, they generate the institutions that in turn generate our society and the world in which we live.

With articles like this one posted on the HBR blog, I have to step back and question whether the use of corporate/business vocabulary, metaphors, and clichés like "personal value proposition" are appropriate for human connections and interactions in our contemporary context. When we adopt this sort of framing, we contribute to the subtle but systemic dehumanizing effects that characterize corporate colonizing of the life-world. It's not surprising that a corporatist/managerialist institution like HBR would promote business language in the context of personal development and realizing what one can provide that is of value.

Nonetheless, I think it is incumbent on those of us who actively promote a more humanistic, relationship-based construction of society - a construction of society that is more consistent with the complex reality of the contemporary UCaPP world - to mindfully transform the discourse. Exchange of value is but one of the five valence relationships (that is, Economic Valence). There are four others - Socio-psychological, Knowledge, Identity, and Ecological - that we should all strive to "build" without giving dominant preference to any one of them. A healthy organization based on healthy relationships strives to balance the valence relationships, in order to make not only better decisions, but more holistic, balanced, effective decisions.To do so means transforming the language we use throughout our daily interactions, especially in workplaces.

Narrative Coaching and Organization Transformation

I’ve just spent two days attending a Narrative Coaching workshop offered by David Drake (and the newly formed Canadian Centre for Narrative Coaching). The premise that underlies this particular modality of coaching is, “we are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves.” If we want to change ourselves and overcome obstacles that appear to be blocking our learning, our growth, our development, and (as so often seems to happen) our success, the first step is to change our story. It’s a tremendously useful and powerful technique, and one that is quite comfortable to me, since it aligns quite well with my prior work.

Besides being reminded that I can be a pretty effective coach in my own right (and thanks to the many participants who offered me the privilege of helping them make sense of their challenges), I was struck by the realization of how relevant Valence Theory is to helping organizations make sense of themselves, and of the changing environment to which they must adapt, in the context of narrative coaching. Valence Theory enables organizations to “instantly” transform their story, from an objective- and goal-based, mission-oriented-at-all-costs machine, to an organic, vital, responsive, and naturally adaptive organism comprised of people, environments, constituencies, and most important of all, relationships. This change in the framing of an organization’s story enables its members to make a different sense of their organization’s place in the world, and the effects that they enable and enact—as well as the goals they achieve along the way.

Among the things that excites me about the new master’s degree program we are creating here at the Adler Graduate Professional School is that the program will be internally consistent with the theories of organization, leadership, and coaching that we will espouse via our curriculum and course syllabi. This means that we intend to walk our talk, so to speak, and regularly check-in with ourselves and our member constituencies to ensure that, indeed, the story we are telling ourselves as we progress is one that best serves all of us. This aspect alone, it seems to me, will allow us to set our degree program apart from those that are offered at other schools. Most important, it will enable us to attract both the right students and the right faculty that will contribute their experiences and perceptions, and transform them into knowledge that will inform a very particular practice of leadership and organization development and coaching: praxis that will transform and heal organizations, and beneficially serve contemporary society.

Practices Makes (Im)perfect Organizational Transformation

I am in the process of outlining my next book, Conversations with Nishida: Organization, Leadership, and Transformation in a Complex World. In thinking through some of the themes to do with Transformation, I wrote,

Transformation is fundamentally distinct and different from mere change. All transformation reflects change; not all change is transformative. In these Conversations, it is crucial to maintain a clear distinction between the two. BAH can change and remain BAH. In fact, the overwhelming majority of change in the BAH organization – change that is managed through explicit change management interventions, modelled by such programs as Six Sigma, LEAN, or Agile, guided by a preconceived and targeted outcomes as opposed to effects – these changes rarely, if ever, effect organizational transformation, although the changes themselves usually have a significant effect on the organization and its members.


Organizational transformation, in the sense of these Conversations, is ontological—transformative change that affects the organization’s state of being in the world. Transformative change fundamentally shifts how an organization regards itself in relation to its various constituencies, and how its members constitute themselves in relation to each other…

As I reflect on the challenges of organizational transformation, I’m thinking about an organization that is in the midst of a major transformation of its organizational culture. As part of its evolution, the organization is beginning to adopt what I call Appreciative Practices (AP) to inform many of its collective and individual behaviours with respect to development, coaching, and correction. Appreciative Practices are derived from Appreciative Inquiry, a form of organization development intervention that focuses exclusively on strengths, and positive approaches to effect change. (Note: I link to Jackie Kelm’s site because the project in which I was involved used materials that she co-developed.)

In my work with the organization in question, I suggested that the content of their current practice of disciplinary action (that, as in most organizations, is characterized by a suitably ironic euphemism) could be replaced with an application of AP. The benefits are clear: using AP is more readily “hearable” by members who need coaching and/or correction; it focuses on improvements and specific desirable outcomes and effects, rather than errors and wrong actions (as in that old chestnut, “don’t think of an elephant” that makes you think of an elephant); and perhaps most important, it is less stressful and easier to deliver for the manager.

To my surprise, several people in the organization said that they could happily adopt AP for development and annual reviews, but discipline had to be… well, disciplinary! AP just doesn’t feel like an errant employee is being punished, and it is mandatory that they feel that they’ve done wrong.

In this instance, the transition from conventional discipline to AP in correcting and coaching seems to be not so much about changing the employee, but rather more about asserting legitimated organizational authority. Thus, part of effecting a transformation of a traditional organizational culture to one that is more consistent with the aims of AP (and more UCaPP as well!), involves understanding the power dynamics within the traditional structures, and how they must be equally and simultaneously transformed.

In traditional, BAH organizations, the control-resistance power paradigm is a closed, recursive, and iterative loop. Employee does wrong. Manager disciplines. Employee resents. Repeat. (Add the complication of a grievance loop in a unionized environment.) The more control, the more resistance, the more errant behaviours, the more discipline and control, and on it goes. (This, for example, captures the dynamics of the Toronto Transit Commission, and many government workers across all three levels.)

How to break out of this seemingly never-ending loop of power-control-resistance that is fuelled by conventional disciplinary actions, and threatens to stifle the transformed culture? In organizational transformation, the members must first transform their construction of identity, that is the Identity-valence relationship that they mutually create with the organization among its various constituencies. When one constructs oneself as a surrogate for an authority figure (think, “parent” or “teacher”) that metes out discipline, it is unavoidable that a manager will easily give up this fungible aspect of Identity-valence. However, enabling members to first transform towards Identity-ba – one who creates an environment of shared values, sensibilities, and volition to common action – enables an environment in which Appreciative Practices will create the desired behavioural changes without coercion. More important, as the overall environment changes, “misbehaving” employees who choose not to change will soon realize that they do not belong. Employing traditional disciplinary actions in the midst of a BAH-to-UCaPP culture transformation undermines the process by signalling an ambivalence, that the transformational culture is merely nominal, only words with no substance.

Another reason that organizational culture transformation must begin with the leadership.

Would You Read This Book?

I'm planning to spend a good part of the summer writing. The book, tentatively entitled, Conversations with Nishida: Organization, Leadership, and Transformation in a Complex World, will address questions such as: What is organization? What does it mean to lead in the contemporary world? How can we effect organizational transformation, both in the microcosm of individual groups and in the macrocosm of society at large?

The style of the book would be a series of conversations with a Zen master character, based loosely on the Japanese philosopher, Nishida Kitaro, from whom I obtained the idea of ba - a place of common sensibility, common understanding, common values and common volition to action - that I use in my work. My question to YOU is, would you read a book that deals with these questions, based on this reasoning:

Human behaviour and the social conditions in which we act are often considered as conforming to some “law,” almost as if people’s interactions are subject to a seemingly immutable law of nature. Human social systems – education, business, politics, and the like – are often modelled after such behaviours-as-laws that seek to explain and predict why and how people will interact in specific ways under particular circumstances. However, in human social systems there are no laws of gravity, thermodynamics, or relativity—laws that explain human phenomena that exist outside of, apart, and separate from the people that enact them. At one time in history, the dominant thinking asserted that the Sun travelled around the Earth; much to the chagrin of the medieval Church, the Sun (not to mention other natural systems) did not quite care about the dictates of the Pope (nor the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, for that matter!). Quantum entanglement notwithstanding, natural systems exist and behave quite apart from our limited, all-too-human understanding of them.


On the other hand, models and conceptions of human systems care very much about the dominant thinking of humans who participate in them. In this sense, our social systems of business and commerce, knowledge and education, politics and governance, and organization and leadership are self-generative: in other words, the way we think about our social systems actually creates those social systems. What has been especially true throughout the millennia is that, as society’s means of social engagement and interaction have changed, so too have the fundamental structuring institutions – the aforementioned social systems – of that society likewise changed. Further, as these social systems change and become more widely adopted and increasingly taken for granted as aspects of “human nature,” the formerly dominant systems – those institutions that simultaneously defined and were defined by the way things were – seem increasingly anachronistic and out-of-place in the contemporary world.


We can each, individually and collectively, simply accept the changes that seem to be washing over, and imposing their will upon us. We can accept the interpretation and implications of these changes asserted by corporate, political, and other powerful interests that may or may not be beneficial for humankind overall. Alternatively, we can become aware of the transformative effects emerging throughout our contemporary world and begin to correspondingly transform our mental models of human behaviours throughout the social systems that define a society. In other words, we have the power and ability to reshape our understanding of organization, leadership, and the nature of transformation. We therefore have the ability to reshape our world.

So, is there any interest out there to read more about this?

10 Lessons of Organizational Culture Transformation

If you're not familiar with my writing, a few notes of explanation. UCaPP is an acronym representing the phrase, "Ubiquitous Connectivity and Pervasive Proximity," (or "ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate," depending on usage), the description I use to characterize contemporary societal conditions. BAH refers to "Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled, and Hierarchical," a description of traditional management and organizations. UCaPP organizations are mostly described as "collaborative" in the literature, but they are much more than that. For more details, you are invited to visit the wiki site for Valence Theory of Organization - after reading this post, of course!

I’m finishing up a seven-month contract that helped to initiate an organizational culture transformation in a newly acquired Toronto subsidiary of a large American organization. The American organization’s culture is strongly towards the UCaPP end of the BAH-UCaPP organization typology spectrum. On the other hand, the Toronto organization was strongly BAH when I was first introduced to it, and demonstrated many attributes and behaviours that would qualify them for organizational healing—being able to strongly benefit from my practice as an organizational therapist.

Although the formal educational program was prescribed by the parent organization, the Toronto site had specific needs that went well beyond those addressed by the otherwise excellent and insightful formal materials. Nonetheless, the results have been nothing short of outstanding: by the beginning of the program’s sixth month, overall productivity – units out the door – increased by 70%, with customer complaints down to a small fraction of what they were in January. Employment growth in new production staff has been nothing short of explosive, and the line and middle management ranks – initially fearful of what such growth would mean relative to the old ways of doing supervision – are (mostly) feeling quite good about how well they’re coping.

I’ve compiled ten lessons learned from this remarkably successful organizational culture transformation that, not surprisingly, are consistent with the predictions of Valence Theory. See how many might be useful to you as you reflect on navigating your organization through the complexities of today’s environment of uncertainty:

1. Culture comes from values; values obviate vision as the organization’s source of impetus. When people work from a place that aligns fundamental values among all members, shared knowledge of where to head is a natural outcome. On the other hand, a vision imposed by an small, elite group at the top of the organization necessitates continual reinforcement (and enforcement) through ever-growing, extrinsic incentive plans.
2. Like learning a new language, culture change venue scripts seem artificial at first, become more comfortable with practice, and evolve into the organization’s lingua franca. The challenge is to ensure that those who are not directly involved in the “language lessons” that serve to inculcate the new culture are nonetheless given opportunities to participate in the new vocabulary of practices, behaviours, and attitudes.
3. Relying on training as the sole or primary mechanism to effect culture change is completely ineffective. On the other hand, continual peer reinforcement on-the-job, coupled with a concerted program of individual coaching and counselling for key members, with a limited amount of well-contextualized education, are essential to begin the process. Notice I said, “begin.” The process of transformation necessarily continues long after the formal program has been completed.
4. There will be an occasion – and usually no more than two – in which the new culture’s principles will have to be violated in order to demonstrate the seriousness of the new culture’s principles. This usually results in one or two people being asked to find other employment. As I have pointed out elsewhere, “it is perhaps ironic that coercive, legitimated, and hierarchical leadership is occasionally needed to enforce the transformation away from coercive, legitimated, and hierarchical leadership.”
5. Embracing and committing to the new culture is always a matter of individual choice. What is not a choice is the tight coupling between embracing the culture and sustaining one’s membership (e.g., employment) in the organization.
6. The person who, in the past, has been identified by legitimated management (i.e., those who are most vested in the “way we do things around here”) as the trouble-maker, malcontent, or the one-most-likely-to-be-written-up-for-disciplinary-action, is likely your best ally in identifying necessary changes, and effecting culture change—as long as you can overcome his/her legitimate cynicism and long-reinforced distrust of management-imposed “change.”
7. In a UCaPP organization, compensation is at least partially – and ideally completely – decoupled from job performance. The more strongly extrinsic motivators influence an individual’s contribution to the organization, the more BAH the organization necessarily becomes, and the less committed is the individual to the organization’s values as its primary impetus.
8. In a UCaPP environment, no one is required to give “110%.” Instead, more productivity is paradoxically experienced as needing less expended effort. Conversely, in a BAH environment, 50% (or more) of the organization’s potential is wasted in counter-productive, energy-consuming behaviours and well-rehearsed defensive scripts.
9. Blindly adopting so-called best practices in a bid to become as successful as some arbitrary industry leader is a management cargo cult. Transformative education is founded on experiential learning, not plagiarism.
10. The vast majority of benefits of organizational culture transformation are necessarily qualitative, not quantitative. However, there are consequential, indirect benefits – some of them economic – that are measurable, although one cannot usually establish clear, deterministic, causal connections. This means that one cannot “prove” a priori, tangible benefits of organizational culture transformation, much to the chagrin of traditionally trained managers. Remember—when it comes to effecting sustainable, truly beneficial change throughout an organization and among its members, complexity is your friend.

Transformation of an Activist Organization

Volunteer groups are often the most challenging in which to effect organizational transformation, since people don’t “have to” be there (as in, they aren’t earning a paycheque), and those who do come bring with them long-vested and entrenched ideas about how organizations are run. Most of them, after all, are members of well-established organizations from which they are earning a paycheque, and those organizations almost invariably locate themselves towards the BAH end of the Valence Theory typological spectrum. So, it is fascinating to observe (even more so to have the privilege to facilitate) the transformation of such an organization.

Last weekend, for the second time, I facilitated the annual retreat of a volunteer-run, activist organization. This group has been established for a very long time, although most of its currently active members are relatively recent (as in, joining within the past three to four years or less). In reviewing the intended activities and objectives decided at last year’s retreat, as I usually do, I took a page from Appreciative Practices to ask three key questions that I commonly ask of each planned initiative: What worked well? What didn’t work as well as it might have? What was missing that might have improved the experience? The current chair of the group was a bit wary of the first question; she says that one of the group’s shortcomings is that they consider that they do everything well, and lay blame at the feet of external actors and circumstances!

Despite her misgivings, (and this is part of the art of my facilitation, of course), I never allow a group to look for blame, but rather, learning. What the group learned through this part of their retreat day can be summed up in two important principles of Valence Theory. The first is embodied in the idea of Effective Theory of Action: it is important to differentiate between achieving the desired and intended effects for a given situation, and achieving the nominal objectives or goals of an initiative. In one instance in particular, an initiative that had been designated as the group’s secondary focus for the year, had accomplished pretty much none of its objectives. However, when we answered the question, “what worked well?” with respect to this initiative, it was clear that a whole bunch of desired effects had been created—in fact, far more than the group could even have imagined a year earlier. Was the initiative a success? According to conventional measures of effectiveness, no. But when considered from the ground of Valence Theory and effectiveness – focusing on effects enabled and rippling through the complex system of human interactions – the initiative was considered to be tremendously successful.

Through the first half of the day, the group struggled with the paradoxes of more and less formal leadership and structure, the need to coordinate and keep track of certain activities while allowing sufficient flexibility for people to jump in and take up responsibility for tasks of their own volition. They realized that for those projects in which there were common values, common understanding, common sensibility, and a common volition to action – characteristics that describe ba – things happened well, including outreach and engagement with “external” organizations. People felt a sense of individual autonomy and agency, and worked not independently (nor strictly interdependently, which suggests tight-coupling), but rather with a sense of collective responsibility and mutual accountability. The conclusion they came to – although I didn’t suggest the specific language – was that their organization functioned better in an environment of organization-ba. To this end, the group decided to recast its traditional governance model of a formal executive with a designated Chair in charge (including taking ownership of meeting agendas and running meetings, a very strong measure of control). Instead, the group’s governance has moved to a contemplative consensus model, with a coordinating committee to tend to the coordination and “business” aspects of the group’s operation, and rotating facilitators managing agendas and meetings (in which the facilitator attends to process and cannot speak to content).

I will be working with the group to facilitate a revisitation of their values to provide fundamental guidance for future decisions, and to help the cadre of future facilitators to learn and practice their craft in a way that is consistent with their transformed governance. And, I anticipate that I will be invited a year hence to once again facilitate their annual retreat. I am most interested to see the successes that the group will be able to effect operating now as a more-UCaPP organization, one that is consistent with the conditions of today’s world.

Views on the Future of Corporation

Even though this video is a year old (which is, like, fo'evah in Internet ticks...), the notions from various Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and thinkers are interesting, instructive, and possibly offer some inspiration (and even more possibly, some hope). People like John Hagel of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, David Weekly of PBWorks, Brian Phillips, formerly of Thread.com, Jerry Michalski of sociate.com, and Dan Olsen of yourversion.com relate their observations from the midst of the UCaPP transformation of organizations with a number of aspects of figure - stuff that we can notice. What strikes me about how each of these men (notably, no women!) relate their experiences is how consistent they all are with the ground of the UCaPP organizational transformation, which is in my view, Valence Theory (big surprise, right? :)

As many of you know, I am not big at all (to say the least) on emulating so-called best practices. At best, it leads to happenstance success without the understanding and learning that makes success sustainable. At worst, it is like taking someone else's prescription for an ailment not completely understood or diagnosed. Nonetheless,  suggestions and ideas that are consistent with balancing the five valence relationships are not a bad thing to do, so long as one does it with mindful appreciation for, and reconnection with, fundamental human interactions.

As it turns out, this happens to be the major theme of my keynote at the Cybergarden 2011 Conference, Transgressing the senses: Culture, technology, and technomind, later this week in Katowice, Poland.