Why don’t they just …
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
The whole world is clear about leadership, apart from leaders and followers! Somehow, what is so obvious to the outside observer is suddenly less clear from the inside. Of course. Even that stuff and nonsense about people being clear about what they are trying to achieve together.
Narrative, the logic of the action, is necessary and unavoidable: people will always fill the vacuum with a story. But it comes at quite a price. The more you push the narrative the less access you have to what is going on. The narrative creates a reality for the people living it, but the more that narrative is smooth and logical and consistent the less likely it is to be true.[1] Too little and too obvious a narrative, and people can be all over the place. Too firm and definite and plausible a narrative, and people are being manipulated in their thinking. This blog is about how we might pay attention to this balance.
We can almost substitute the word legibility for narrative. A narrative of why things are the way they are can give us a way of reading a situation, of making that situation legible to us. The risk in that is probably even clearer, because we know that the requirement for legibility can in and of itself be destructive of real work. Even the gardening and nurturing view of organisational development implies a vantage point from which we know better than the people in the mud. It implies that we can recognise “better” from “worse”. IKIWISI: I’ll know it when I see it. Except that we can’t and we won’t.
Diversity and difference
When you are in the mud and someone says that they can see how to do something and you disagree, that doesn’t feel like progress, nor an asset in the search for progress. Diversity often looks like a problem.
Let’s just have a quick tour round diversity, a subject that is becoming abused. Someone banging on about diversity may be thinking of gender on a team, or of sexual orientations. They may be thinking of ethnic mix, of age and maturity, of language, or political persuasion: of many things.[2]
A colleague was presented with a client’s “diverse team” and they were all white men in their forties and on a Belbin analysis were all resource providers. But hey! each executive had a different background and their area of specialism, so that’s pretty diverse, isn’t it? Why isn’t it working?
Any real diversity means that people think differently, and it is this different reaction to the same situation that can be a resource. We mentioned Caitlin Johnstone’s blog last week, and she has another recent post about people becoming less manipulable as they lose their egocentricity. It strikes me that a key aspect of diversity-as-it-matters is whether people all get pulled into a narrative in the same way. Only if some members of a team react differently to a narrative is it possible to unpick how that valency for the narrative works. First notice and accept that you are being conned, then you can get to real work.
Another key aspect of diversity is ability to read the environment. The environment for a work team has a possibly infinite variety that needs responding to according to Conant-Ashby’s law. If different people on a team read parts of the environment differently, that is likely to result in a richer set of responses being available, and hence more control.
In one engagement, a key stakeholder arrived to an interview furious, but I couldn’t see it and was about to make things worse. Happily, my colleague was from the same culture as him, noticed the signs, and steered us away from disaster. Given gender, age, and cultural differences, neither of us was individually equipped to succeed. Together with the rest of our team, we may have had sufficient diversity of awareness and response to engage across department, company, and country cultures.[3]
In an uncharacteristic move for this blog we want to structure the argument into a recurring loop or cycle, that purports to show how narrowness and exclusion is often produced in situations that demand diversity for their solution. If you want an image for that, think about institutional racism in the Metropolitan police and how solidarity makes their job impossible.
The desire for certainty
Almost before I was born, Isabel Menzies-Lyth was documenting how unconscious anxiety in the workplace led to some strange behaviours. As I remember, she described nurses waking sleeping patients to give them their sleeping pills. To generalise that point, any situation of real work will raise anxieties that we are not able to rationalise and control. (Lots of fun flows from that.)
One of the idiocies that flows is the desire for certainty. A situation that is fundamentally and characteristically uncertain must be made to appear solid and certain. There is a quote from Marx, taken up as a book title by Marshall Berman: All that is solid melts into air. The moment we try to nail something down it transmutes into something quite else. In a similar vein a quote from the wonderfully named Ron Stamper: “if you want to change the meaning of something, apply a budget to it.”
What we want to hang onto in this argument is that it is the desire for certainty that generates misleading narratives which in turn conceal stuff that is important to the work. Our take on Menzies-Lyth is to ask what the nurses did NOT notice while they were busy rousing patients to give them their healing medications? Along with the rather obvious fact that they were asleep.
The consequent need for legibility
The prototypical management move here is to measure. To choose key indicators of the work and to measure their levels over time. Then, in their minds, there will at least be certainty about what has and has not been achieved. And we always refer back to James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, to show how powerful requests for legibility often destroy the very work itself.
I know of a major commission to have some music composed for a mega corporate jamboree, some centennial celebration. Now, music composing is a thing that does not easily get subjected to a schedule, not to say it is almost always late. So, some sympathy goes to the project managers. But these engineering types asked for a monthly submission of the work in progress, which I hope you can see is at best meaningless and at worst destructive of a creative endeavour. They couldn’t even read music.
You should be able to feel the weight of the need for certainty, the need to be able to understand what is happening, the need to be able to describe in numbers, the need to be able to report and justify. This is the heart of legibility: allowing someone in authority to believe they understand when they do not have skin in the game.
Let me rehearse again John Egan managing the construction of the Heathrow Express. In the tunnelling phase, underneath the airport (feel the risk!) his legibility scheme was to look at the surface subsidence above the progressing tunnel. There was a maximum subsidence set as a trigger to take remedial action. And the reports to him were showing subsidence at that maximum for a week. He didn’t react and the tunnel did collapse.
The curse of accidental success
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain
The best thing that can happen when you grasp for certainty via legibility is that you find out fairly quickly that you are barking up the wrong tree. (Or that you’re just barking.) The worst thing that can happen is accidental success, a constellation that provides a compelling narrative that you knew what you are doing and that it worked as predicted.
One of our clients went to replace a core system and soon found themselves replacing their main application, their version of Windows, their infrastructure, etc. all in a single massive project. It mostly worked, and the ‘mostly’ is important. Had it failed, so too would have the company. Had it gone smoothly, they would’ve thought themselves to be bulletproof.
Someone in a class gets top marks. Some company grows the fastest. Some girl gets all the dates. Does that mean they are doing something right? Well let’s unpick that.
It is said that if an army had to fight anything other than another army it would go really badly for them. That is there is still a winner even when everyone is doing things really badly. So someone in the class gets top marks but the marks may all be awful. Been there.
Then there’s the question of what success looks like. Who is judging something to be a success? What is their value system? Is the way marks are gained or lost a meaningful gauge of anything that matters? I used to be able to get top marks in multiple choice exams for which I knew very little of the content by decoding the psychology of the question-setter.
This being football/soccer world-cup season, it’s worth noting that last time around, the England manager got sacked for losing to Iceland. This week, Iceland held mighty Argentina to a draw. Pub-goers were heard to comment that what had seemed an inconceivable defeat was now understandable; maybe the Iceland side is better than they’d thought. But the interesting thing is that, of course, Iceland had reached the same point in the competition as had England. By the rules of merit, that makes them equally skilled, equally worthy of potentially continuing to the next round. Whichever team wins the trophy will be held up as having earned it through skill, not mere chance. We’re not much for sports metaphors, but there are definitely narratives to be found in the fandom.
Then, as in last week’s blog, there is the question about what the master narrative is and whether the scale of success is only there to distract attention really. Sometimes winning is just failing to notice that you are losing.[4] The cream of UK undergraduate students who get snapped up by the big consultancies and worked to death (sometimes literally) are dupes in my mind. And the universities, yes Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick, et al who deliver them into a nasty fate are failing in their duty of education and care by not warning them.
Just note here that accidental success is a necessary outcome of setting up a legibility scheme. Someone, sometime, will seem to have powerfully succeeded.
Codification
Having found out how to do the job properly, the next thing is to make sure everyone does it that way! Why don’t we look at all the legible steps that led inexorably to our wonderful success, and codify them so that other people can follow the recipe.
Notice that this is a bigger change than it may seem. Since people now “know” the right thing to do, trying something different becomes a problem. Just at the very point when diversity might have been important to discover what has been achieved and what has not been achieved, it gets squeezed out of the system. You could say with some justification that the POSIWID of this work system is to produce a false sense of security, and rocking the boat will not be welcome.
When people feel discomfort and a lack of control, their instinct is to reduce the scope of their endeavours and to reduce the diversity of points of view brought to bear. This is to return to the “desire for certainty” heading above and to go ‘round the loop’ again. You should be able to feel that there is nothing in this loop that is self-correcting, no way to escape the treadmill. The escapes all involve harnessing diversity to be able to see different realities than the one that has been constructed and then locked in by codification.
Leadership again
The very notion of leadership as we know it as followers is locked into the inside of this loop. Leadership as we know it is about creating a joint reality, and that is what this loop does. And “lack of leadership” is about the loss of direction and consequent extreme discomfort when we look at the alternative realities.
We think that the best skill of a real leader, one prepared to do real work, is to avoid being pulled into the dynamics of this loop. A leader who refuses to lead in that way. What is that called, for heavens sake? Precisely not leading, when leading means narrowing down, premature commitment, kowtowing to measurement as mediating the world, the prestige of followers being grateful. It probably takes real leadership skill to avoid followers creating in you the wrong sort of leadership, that sort of leadership that allows people not to learn. Anti-leadership is the real leadership.
Diversity looks like a problem and leadership looks like a solution. For real work, diversity is the only route out and leadership is the trait that most often closes the gate on that solution.
[1] Indeed, one indication of whether someone is thinking or just regurgitating is the smoothness of their delivery, the coherence of their narrative. Unfortunately, as a society we value confidence and consistency over real engagement.
[2] Of sailing ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, etc.
[3] For those of you playing along at home, there were 8 different departments represented: 3 French, 3 Japanese, 1 English, and 1 German
[4] I saw a tweet today from Simon Wardley, in response to someone saying that IBM should do whatever they’re doing faster. If you haven’t noticed the death spiral, going faster might seem like a good idea…
