SQUIRCLE: Applied to Business and Leadership

This is the third installment of our SQUIRCLE blog series, a 2020 interview of SQUIRCLE Founder Francis Cholle, conducted by Adélaïde Barbier.

If you haven’t already, visit Parts I and II of this series.

In Part I, “SQUIRCLE: A New Way to Think for A New World,” we introduced you to the definitions and principles of our work and philosophy.

In Part II, “SQUIRCLE: A Serious Game” we explored The SQUIRCLE Game and the reasons it is so essential to be playful in business.

In Part III, we will demonstrate SQUIRCLE in action by applying our methodology and activities to real-world business problems.

Why is SQUIRCLE so essential for businesses?

Using a game and letting go of strategy and outcomes remains a very foreign concept among business audiences. But it shows that when people give up the traditional agenda of willful linear efficiency when they stop resisting confusion and chaos, they start being much more receptive to their environment. They connect with a new part of themselves and can far more easily adapt to change.

This is exactly why I designed SQUIRCLE. The model shows an actionable path for people to give up the dominance of the SQUARE over the CIRCLE because it compromises our ability to thrive in a VUCA world. When we relinquish control over the process by letting go of strategy and outcomes, a deeper intelligence emerges at an individual and group level, thereby making actionable solutions clear. This deeper intelligence, called intuitive intelligence, guides the group of participants through the complexity of the challenge to its resolution.

[1] The National Institute for Play is a non-profit public benefit corporation committed to bringing the unrealized knowledge, practices, and benefits of play into public life. It was founded and is led today by Dr. Stuart Brown, who trained in general and internal medicine, psychiatry, and clinical research.

[2] You can find related data on SQUIRCLEACADEMY.com

[3] For more details, check out the work of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin which research led to the scientific publication “Heuristics, The Foundation of Adaptive Behaviors” (Oxford University Press, 2011)

What are the difficulties you observe in companies nowadays and how do you intervene?

For companies to be successful in a VUCA world, they need a culture of intrapreneurship where intuitive intelligence is key to successfully experiment; just like research scientists who operate in their lab at the frontier of what they know for sure works and what they assume could work. This assumption cannot be formulated shrewdly without some level of intuitiveness. In his biography, Steve Jobs insisted on the power of intuition and described its impact on his work at the helm of Apple. “Intuition is a very powerful thing,” he told writer Walter Isaacson, “more powerful than intellect.” One of France’s most significant mathematicians and philosophers of science, Henri Poincaré said, “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.“

When the SQUARE (logic) becomes dominant it belittles the CIRCLE (intuition) and deprives us of essential adaptive and problem-solving skills.

This is probably one of our biggest cognitive biases, yet I rarely see it discussed in the workplace.

This bias sits at the core of my advisory work with CEOs. I meet strong, driven leaders with exceptional analytical skills, strategic capacities, and often clear intuitive abilities. Yet in their organizations, complex problems and team collaboration are approached in a SQUARE dominant way more often than not. Once a CEO recognizes this and its side effects on their business, their mindset shifts, and in turn, this impacts their organizations. This is the decisive factor that allowed billion-dollar companies to succeed at reinventing themselves and overcome daunting business challenges when recommendations of even the best strategic management consulting firms had not been enough to bring forth the level of transformation needed by our clients.

Becoming aware of the dominance of the SQUARE is the pivotal process that naturally unleashes an untapped innate potential in everyone. That is key to adapting and thriving in disruption. That is key to understanding more deeply post COVID consumers whose choices are shifting towards purposeful dollar spend and engaging employees whose preferred places to work are more and more corporations that operate responsibly.

Can you give us an example of a company operating from a “free CIRCLE” perspective? What does it look like?

I remember interviewing a senior executive at one of the largest global pharmaceutical companies. He was running the portfolio of all over-the-counter drugs. Because it was the least strategic and least profitable part of the company’s portfolio, his bosses were not paying much attention to his way of driving the business. So he and his team felt certain independence and developed real autonomy. Unlike the rest of the offices, they painted theirs in bright colors, had a new logo designed, worked different flexible hours to accommodate all personal situations. They spontaneously created a new work culture.

Over four consecutive years, they grew their top line by 40% although the global president admitted that they had repeatedly made mistakes in elaborating their strategy. Yet what made them successful was their ability to systematically pivot quickly. The pressure they felt coming from the C-suite was low, they became rather autonomous thinkers and created their own culture. That’s how the global president explained their success despite the repeated strategic misjudgments.

This speaks to Peter Drucker’s famous conviction that “culture eats strategy at breakfast.” In my 15 years of management consulting, I have repeatedly seen culture save groups or on the contrary dangerously compromise success.

So, if culture is key to the success of a company in an unstable environment, how do you change it? How do you concretely help organizations transform themselves and gain agility?

Over the years, I have worked with several companies that had to reinvent their business models due to disruption by pure digital players, in industries like sports and entertainment or media, for instance. In my experience, it is rarely wise to try to change the culture of an organization head-on, but there are ways to influence it.

To do so, our approach is very pragmatic. The work starts with a proprietary assessment that I developed. It evaluates how an individual, a team, or a whole organization is positioned to deliver on their strategy and reach their goals, as well as innovate and adapt in a fast-changing environment of unknown and uncertainty.

In the same vein as the seminal work of MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Edgar Schein on Culture and Leadership, our assessment analyzes the way executives make decisions through seventeen parameters. The outcome enables people to focus on their strengths and be wary of their blind spots, the shadow side of their strengths. It makes diversity actionable and encourages organizations to value outliers, leverage untapped resources, and seize overlooked opportunities in their work culture. It awakens an innate human potential — deep human thinking — that looks at problems with a renewed perspective that doesn’t shy away from complexity.

When we avoid complexity, we oversimplify.

Sometimes it is necessary but at best this leads to incremental change and more often than not to the status quo. It is only when we embrace the complexity that we can access the deeper solutions needed to address the challenges of today’s disruptive environment.

We designed a workshop for complex problem solving where participants are not afraid of getting lost in the process. Actually, after experiencing the SQUIRCLE Game they know in their hearts and minds that losing sight of any logical understanding of a situation is a sure sign of getting closer to a breakthrough idea. Eventually, they look forward to that critical moment. By then you know you’re on a path to cultural evolution.

You mentioned an assessment you developed and use, can you give more info about it?

The SQUIRCLE test is based on a proven assessment I invented — The Intuitive Compass® — that helped 250,000 senior executives and students at some of the most successful companies and most prestigious business schools in the world. It gives respondents insights into their thinking preference for either a SQUARE, a CIRCLE, or an EVEN approach to situations and decisions.

The purpose of the SQUIRCLE test is not to assign you to a specific profile or category. It is meant to foster self-reflection and promote open discussion with others. Whether your preference is for a SQUARE or a CIRCLE approach, we all need to recognize:

• The importance of CIRCLE in re-inventing our organizations, our modes of leadership, and decision-making.
• The great contribution of SQUARE in analyzing, bringing facts and frameworks of reference, as long as it doesn’t become dominant, like an ideology that suppresses critical and creative thinking.

Based on a decade of empirical observations, we can say that a large majority of people favor a SQUARE approach. So it makes a big difference once people recognize their inclination and can better appreciate others’ differences or similarities. It’s not how many CIRCLE people you have in your organization that matters. It is how well you understand and support those with a CIRCLE preference.

SQUIRCLE is really for everyone.

In Part IV, “SQUIRCLE: The Future of Business Requires Reinvention,” we will dive into the work Francis has faced at the helm of The SQUIRCLE Academy, walking you through case studies and the reinvention of world-renowned businesses.

Read the next installment of the SQURICLE blog series here.