The Imagination of Change

I read the post by @goonth (thanks @ArnoldBeekes) on ‘The Power of Not Knowing’. It was one of those articles that makes you read it twice and once more for good measure.

The call to action for me was the challenge to ‘call bullshit on ourselves’.

This is a rare thing to see.

In today’s reading world we often come across the excellence of this and the awesomeness of that. And as often as not there is something excellent and awesome to find. Which is why we read stuff on the interweb.

It’s a rare article to ask me to call out the bullshit of something. And the stinkiest bullshit is always your own.

Which is what made this particular call to arms so memorable.

I thought about the ever decreasing circles of the ‘known’ within legacy organisations. The imperative to ‘continuous improvement’ and fine-tuning repeatable work processes.

The faster the world changes, the slower legacy managerialism acts upon the world’s problems. It’s a scary dynamic to observe.

@leadershipABC) introduced to me the idea of the liminal state. It’s a handy shorthand for the problems faced by the management cadre.

We need to be careful with our theories of what’s going on. Even the lean start up philosophy runs into problems if seized upon too completely.

Beware of what you believe is an important lesson for us all.

The idea that not knowing something is a good thing isn't a happy prospect to legacy managerialism

If you don’t know something, then the question becomes ‘what are you employed for’? This is an extension of the idea that people can be swapped in and out of roles.

People as commodities.

This is a terrible place to be if you have pretensions to leadership. Commodities don’t exercise choice. Followers make leaders.

The great thing about not knowing is that you find yourself at the edge of learning. Not knowing something is awesome.

Because it’s when you explore the unknown that you find growth. We’re on earth to learn as the saying goes.

The idea that not knowing something is bad isn't a good sign if the learned response to ask for another human please.

(And make sure the next one follows orders).

So knowing stuff is the basis of power in legacy managerialism. @sinofsky wrote:

“Management of these knowledge-centric organizations happened through an ever-increasing network of middle managers… Middle management grew to spend their time researching, tabulating, reporting and reconciling the information sources available. Information spanned from quantitative to qualitative and the successful leaders were expert or well versed in not just navigating or validating information, but in using it to effectively influence the organisation as a whole. Knowledge is power in this environment. Management took over the role of resource allocation from owners and focused on decision-making as the primary effort, using knowledge and the skills of middle management to inform those choices”

The bullshit part here is when we, as managers and leaders, put up thin abstractions or elaborate justifications to explain what is going on within our organisation that just doesn’t make sense.

We need to shake ourselves out of the industrial-era paradigm and get real. A handy first step for anyone interested in such things is to read @simonsinek ‘Leaders Eat Last’:

“Leaders are the ones who run headfirst into the unknown. They rush toward the danger. They put their own interests aside to protect us or to pull us into the future. Leaders would sooner sacrifice what is theirs to save what is ours. And they would never sacrifice what is ours to save what is theirs”

This is about taking ownership for the imagination of change. About recognizing what isn't working and trying to find something that does work.

Which involves extending past what you know and do well already

I think @goonth is asking us to remember when we've tried things that didn’t work. So we can get a sense of what isn't likely to work going forward.

This is where the liminal state idea comes back into play. What saved you yesterday will bury you tomorrow.

And today is the place to start figuring out how to avoid getting buried

The problem managers face is we aren't rewarded to learn about what we don’t know.

If we do make that effort, we end up introducing variation into the system and that’s rarely welcomed.

“What did you do today?”

“Well, I found something really interesting that makes things harder”.

Not a great way to meet your incentives.

Focusing on knowing what not to do in a liminal state means the thing that might save everyone’s asses could be several degrees of separation away.

And we won’t even know if it pays off until several months down the line.

That’s a serious risk in a command-and-control environment that is all about deliverables.

Now.

This is the real tragedy. As digital destroys legacy companies, the focus on repeatable processes is akin to perserveration:

“the pathological, persistent repetition of a word, gesture, or act”

Or, we do this stuff because we've been doing this stuff because that’s the stuff we do. So go and do that stuff.

Now.

The making of the same mistakes based on what we think we know is about end-of-life management theories tapping their heads against the wall wondering why the door won’t open.

This is the sort of blind managerialism that needs to be cast aside.

As @goonth reminds us, what we know has given over to how we think, and who we know has given over to who we can connect to.

For me, this is the interesting bit.

It makes the expert even more dangerous than they used to be. Hence the growing calls for generalists who practice critical thinking.

As for the last word on not knowing, I leave that to Lao Tzu (D C Lau translation 1963):

The way that can be spoken of

Is not the constant way

The name that can be named

Is not the constant name