I find this so important that, for me, it’s not a Modern Agile principle anymore, it’s one of my core values now. Professional and personal success is not a pie. The success of other people doesn’t remove anything from the rest of us. Quite the contrary, it actually inspires a lot of people. So I just decided that whatever I can do to help people succeed is good for everyone.  

To ensure people’s success on the workplace though, there is another concept that is absolutely primordial. In this article, I would like to explore my second favorite Modern Agile guiding principle: Make Safety a Prerequisite.

What do you mean by safety?

I mean psychological safety.

Modern Agile, which was brought to life by Joshua Kerievsky, gives us a pretty general idea of what safety means :

Safety is both a basic human need and a key to unlocking high performance. We actively make safety a prerequisite by establishing safety before engaging in any hazardous work. We protect people’s time, information, reputation, money, health and relationships. And we endeavor to make our collaborations, products and services resilient and safe.

All of this, however, sounds like a given to me. I really like to go much further than this. You see, in today’s job market, people have the reflex to put on their “professional mask” when going to work. By professional mask, I mean that they feel compelled to show an image of themselves that provides multiple appearances :

• The appearance of being in control
• The appearance of knowing what they’re doing
• The appearance of not making mistakes
• The appearance of optimal performance

The reason people wear a mask is due to their perception that control, knowledge, perfection, and performance is expected of them at any given time. You’re paid a good salary, so we expect that you should be in control, know what you’re doing, make no mistakes and always be performing. Right?

Wrong.

Wrong because if we wanted this, it would be safer to go with robots or softwares. These things can’t be expected of humans at all times, it’s just not possible, and probably not even desirable.

People shouldn’t be afraid to fail

A safe work environment is an environment where people can grow and learn. And I’m sorry to break it to you, but learning is not possible if you can’t make mistakes. Actually, failing isn’t the opposite of success, it is a huge part of it. People who succeeded are probably people who made more mistakes than others.

One very good example is the story of Thomas Edison. As an inventor, Edison made thousands of attempts at creating an efficient light bulb. When asked by a reporter how it felt to fail so often, he reportedly answered this :

Whether the story behind this quote is true or not, you get the idea… And Edison was lucky enough to know what he was trying to achieve. Now, let me list a few things that wouldn’t exist if people didn’t make mistakes :

• Penicillin
• The pacemaker
• X-Rays
• Microwave ovens
• Fireworks
• Ink Jet Printers
• Post-it notes

All of these things were discovered very randomly by people who were trying to do something else. What kind of world would we be living in if mistakes were prohibited? Failure is an incredible opportunity to learn and discover. I’m not the only one to say it. This little fella was able to encapsulate this whole concept on the silver screen, recently :

As managers and colleagues, it is our duty to create an environment where failure is not something to be frown upon.

People are mostly afraid to be blamed

I think this is one of the root causes as to why some people are so afraid of making mistakes. Since pretty much forever, failure in the workplace has been seen as something terrible because people are often blamed for their mistakes.

I always ask “What do you optimize your system for?”

When people are blamed for their mistakes, it is negative reinforcement. It’s the infamous stick that sometimes comes with the carrot. The system is optimized for not making mistakes.

When people are encouraged to learn from their mistakes, it is positive reinforcement. The system is optimized for learning from a situation.

“But some mistakes cost thousands of dollars!” you might say. Fair enough. Are you telling me no one learned anything from the mistake? See it as an investment. Spontaneous training session. Unfortunately, you can’t have tax credits for this kind of training though!

So, how do I make my work environment safe?

There are many ways to achieve this. I don’t know all of them. But I know one thing: if it’s gotta be a safe environment, it’s gotta be safe for everyone, starting with management.

Managers must lead by example

If managers and executives are “always right” and if they “can do no wrong”, the system is optimized to avoid making mistakes. Management mostly set the standard in behavior.

If all managers stay late at work, not a lot of people will be comfortable leaving earlier. If your managers never take vacations, people will feel bad for asking for vacations. So if no manager ever says “I don’t know”, “I need help” and “I screwed up”, you can imagine people will probably try to hide their mistakes.

If managers can’t admit to being wrong or having to improve on something, people will not openly provide constructive feedback. It will actually sound like something very bad. If managers are known for admitting they can improve, people will feel like constructive feedback is something positive.

By admitting our own vulnerabilities, we set a standard in the workplace. We communicate the idea that not being perfect is absolutely fine.

Reward this kind of transparency

If someone admits to having made a mistake, make sure to focus on the lesson that was learned. It should be welcomed, shared and celebrated. Be mindful of not putting people on the spot too much at first. Thank them in person. When you feel people are ready for this and that the culture of safety is strong enough, you can even thank them publicly. What they learned will be useful to others.

A practical action to improve safety at work

In my work unit, we were wondering how to improve the safety of our immediate work environment. There was this idea that I’ve been carrying with me for a few years and that I never brought to reality. A colleague and I decided to make it happen.

We called it “The Wall of Enlightenment”

It could have been called the “Wall of Failure” but we didn’t want it to sound so pejorative to those alien to the concept of psychological safety.

The idea is simply to create a place where people can share their mishaps, and what they learned from them. It’s a very simple arts and craft project, with one very simple rule.

We started in February. In our weekly announcement session, we explained the concept. Managers had already started filling the first column with their own mishaps. I also explained that I went to see the CEO and made him commit to thanking each and every person who would share their adventures on the Wall of Enlightenment.

After the first month, though, only managers had posted their mishaps. I was a little disappointed, but I kept going. A few days into March, there were 2 new mishaps on the wall, and they were put there by people from the staff. I knew then that at least 2 people out of 23 feel safe in our environment. It’s a wonderful start.

So far, I’m ahead with 4 mishaps shared on this wall, some very embarrassing ones. Instead than being ashamed and hiding those mistakes, I feel safe to have a good laugh with my colleagues and discuss freely how majestic some of my failures were. My colleagues will remember and will probably avoid repeating my own mistakes in the future.

The most interesting thing is how people who visit our office are amazed by this very simple concept. Which reminds me how far we are from fixing the job market. But hey, one has to start somewhere…

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

I don’t care much about those.

I’m a practical man. I don’t care how unique you are. I want to know what you are good for. So should you: knowing what kind of role suits you better will help find a place where you can be both efficient and yourself.

I have noticed that leaders end up in one of three roles, plus one extra. Yep, for all of the uniqueness of your style, I pile leaders into a handful of heaps.

Good leaders understand one simple truth about their role: it’s not about them. It is never about them. It’s about a greater cause, which itself is usually about other people.

Keeping that thread in mind, let’s have a look at my three (plus one) heaps of leaders.

The Figurehead

A Figurehead is a human incarnation of an organization, a message or a cause.

Figureheads are important because they exist to make an abstract concept relatable. It’s also to firmly keep the attention on themselves.

Granted, many Figureheads are driven by their Mount Everest-sized egos, but the best ones stay focused on the fact that it isn’t about them. Sometimes they are mouthpieces. Sometimes they are visionaries. Sometimes they are exemplars. And sometimes they are distractions.

Startups often define themselves by their CEO, who’ll take the role of a Figurehead. His role is often less to build and grow his business than to propagate his vision and draw attention to what the startup is doing.

In a time of crisis, you will often see a Figurehead taking charge and issuing orders, acting as a focal point for people to rally around. The rest of the time they will focus their leadership on vision and high-level direction rather than day-to-day execution.

The Servant-Leader

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves.” — Laozi, 6th century BCE

The Servant-Leader fundamentally understand that it’s not about him, but about others, and focus on that. Servant-leaders don’t always get the credit they deserve, but their influence can be felt wherever they go.

Servant-Leaders seems to always lead with the same question: “What can I do for you?”. They will remove impediments to other’s work, put people into learning situations for they can surpass themselves, and grow them into leaders in their own right.

Working behind the scenes, they use active listening followed by indirect action to find and remove obstacles often without anyone noticing. They try to figure out the root cause of problems rather than wasting time fixing symptoms.

Often instinctively, they will develop triadic relationships with people, meaning that instead of building one-on-one relations to control the flow of information, they will act as matchmakers between two other people who would benefit from direct contact. They build robust networks that can continue to grow without them. They mediate tough conversations. They simplify complex org chart-driven relationship by connecting humans.

Good servant-leader might do their best work discreetly, but they can have a tremendous influence over an organization. From grooming the next leaders to removing red tape and all the way to reshaping the flow of information in an organization by building networks, they can be the primary movers and shakers in the company.

All that without issuing a single direct order.

The Everyman Leader

If you don’t think you are cut to be a leader, then maybe you’d make a good Everyman Leader.

Everyman Leaders are all around you. They are the ones who see you struggle, take five minutes to teach one neat trick and show you that you can do it too. They’re the ones who will make that little bit of extra effort that will make your day. They are the ones you know you can trust when you need something done right.

Everyman Leaders can come from anywhere and do any jobs. It doesn’t matter if they handle important accounts, coordinate projects or wash dishes. They have work ethics, are genuine, helpful, and they want to make a difference, regardless of the scope of their impact.

That’s the easiest path to becoming a good leader. Just look at how you can make a difference in what you do and for the people around you. You just need to care and act.

In a time of crisis, you will notice Everyman Leaders rise to the occasion, help people around them rally and organize, and work cooperatively to resolve the part of the situation they have some influence over.

Wait, you’re missing one!

Now we come to the mysterious fourth role, the guy who barks orders and manages people.

The Boss.

During a crisis, leaders are granted authority and given control over a situation to help the organization through this challenging moment. A good leader never has to ASK for that authority: people will naturally look to the leader for guidance.

A Boss works differently. Control is the name of the game here, namely, how to achieve and keep it. To do so, they need to create situations of perpetual crisis, so they can retain their authority, and thus control, making it about them. Too much work for the capacity, predictive planning that everyone knows will be off the mark, office politics, information control, all of these are tactics to perpetuate situations of crisis artificially.

People don’t always do that consciously, and often that is how the whole organization functions. But that doesn’t change the reality of it, and that doesn’t make it right.

As such I cannot classify a Boss as a leader. Sorry. Being in charge just isn’t enough.

I know that because I was once a boss myself.

I didn’t know any better because I only operated in environments where I was tasked with keeping control over projects and teams. I wasn’t a bad boss (I’m sure opinions may differ…), but I was a crafter, planning perfect solutions and expecting proper execution. I tended to dismiss dissenting opinions, under the belief that I was in a position to know better. The organizations I worked for used all the tactics mentioned above to perpetuate states of constant crisis and trained new bosses in that environment.

I had to hit a wall before I could even realize the system was wrong. I have since dedicated my career to help organizations solve and resist crisis, to help bosses become leaders and to help people grow and develop to reach their potential.

While you don’t have to change your career as drastically as I did, you can still make a difference and become an agent of change wherever you are, in whatever position you have. Everyman Leaders do that every single day.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

You hired talented people, and yet, no matter how exhaustive and precise your work orders are, they keep delivering results that are unexciting, limp, mediocre?

Have you thought that maybe your highly detailed work orders are what’s to blame? That a bit of vagueness, that breathing room is what your talented people need to deliver bottled awesomeness?

Unleashing creativity

In “change by design,” Tim Brown discuss that briefs handed down to designers. He argues that an exhausting list of granular requirements will more often than not result in a mediocre product that’s little more than a wrapping around the specifications. Instead, giving the design team as a set of goals and a few constraints as boundaries, then working with the team to refine them during the process, has in one example led to 350 concepts, more than 60 prototypes and 3 ideas brought to development.

In “Connected Company,” Dave Gray make a similar argument for using boundaries. His organizational model called Podularity use a platform, a boundary composed of constraints, support, and shared information, in which teams plug into. They have the freedom to tackle work and emerging situation as they see fit, as long as do so within the boundaries of the platform. This strategy allows the team to react faster and find more creative solutions since most of the decisional power reside in those closest to the situation.

In both cases, the idea is to give talented individuals the freedom to use their abilities in the best way possible, while making sure they don’t go too far off track.

Using such boundaries is an excellent way to foster intrinsic motivation within employees. In “Drive,” Daniel Pink explain that in most occupations, especially more creative ones, extrinsic motivation (i.e. carrots and sticks) end up being detrimental. Intrinsic motivation, based on a desire for mastery, autonomy, and purpose, creates engagement, a high level of satisfaction and creativity.

Creating the right kind of boundaries

The boundaries you create need to unlock creativity, not continue to hinder it using a different approach. While it is entirely possible to create boundaries so well defined that there’s little to no deviation from your expectation possible, such boundaries are not going to help you much.

The best boundaries allow breathing room. They should define the extent of your tolerance, a clear message not to go outside those bounds, but as long as the team stays inside, they are free to explore solutions.

Creating empowering boundaries is not very difficult. Start by asking yourself a few questions:

• In broad strokes, what do I want?
• In broad strokes, what I want to avoid?
• Why do I want or don’t want these things?
• What’s my budget?
• What’s my timeline?
• What data or reference material can I provide to the team?
• What data/reporting do I request from the team?

Answering those simple questions will open a discussion with the team. They will want some enlightenment, some guidance, some opinions on ideas. Keep in mind that you don’t need all the answers. “I don’t know. Show me something.” is an acceptable answer and a powerful one at that. Such an answer is a request for suggestions.

Boundaries must remain alive. They will change and evolve over the course of the project, through a back and forth between you and the team. Ideas get refined, constraints get refined. It is a necessity especially when there are several great concepts to choose from.

Keep them on track

Even teams used to boundaries can sometimes get lost in their explorations and creativity. But that possibility can be avoided by simple framing constraints.

Regularly requesting new prototypes or at least seeing the constant advances of a working and evolving solution will do the trick. Not only this will give a regular update on progress, but allow for discussing the solution(s) presented, progressively refining the boundaries.

Sometimes the team will struggle:

On more straightforward work, this situation will identify a flow problem. The use of a kanban board eases the identification of such flow issues early so you and the team can address them rapidly.

On creative endeavors, it can be trickier to identify struggling as progress is not necessarily linear. It can take a bit longer before realizing that the team is chasing its tail, or lost in too many possibilities. In the first case, identifying if any particular constraint is the problem will give you the information needed to provide additional support. In the second case, a team lost in the possibilities will benefit from an additional constraint or two to bring back focus.

Boundaries invigorates relationships

Working with boundaries rather than a full set of specifications will change your relation with your team. Depending on the nature of the work, it might mean for you to more involved or less involved than before, but the dynamic of the relationship will be different.

You will see genuine collaboration emerge with your team rather than a hierarchical rapport. You won’t simply be the person who assigns work, and then either micromanages the team or nearly ignore them. You will be a partner, who’s opinions and resources will be tapped by the team to provide you with what you need.

If this seems intimidating, maybe a workshop on modern leadership, like those from Management 3.0 (that we offer), would help. As work dynamics changes, leadership must evolve to address those changes better and make the most of these new relationships.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

It can move us, persuade us, makes us relate to another’s plight. Good narratives follow a structure that has been passed down from one generation to the next, making the most frightening things clear and somehow reassuring. Even surprise turns of events are expected and accepted.

Change management, on the other hand, is the polar opposite. Information is lacking, communication breaks down, and structure is often lacking or is indiscernible.

Intuitively people perceive the events around them as stories, and change management initiatives are too often partial stories, filled with cracks and uncertainty. The mind being a powerful storytelling tool, it will naturally fill those cracks and, being geared for survival, it will fill them with dreadful things.

Using storytelling as a means to communicate change, make people empathize with it, and fill the blanks with something a bit more positive than dread.

How can you do that?

Create context

Every story needs a frame, a context, and yours is no different. Change projects aren’t born of thin air, and people need that context to be able to ground the reasons for the change in their minds.

We often neglect to add context to avoid admitting failure or a lack of control on an external situation. We might believe it will protect us, or the employees, but people aren’t fools. Their mind fill cracks in stories with dreadful things, remember? They will expect reality to be far worse than it actually is.

Transparency can go a long way to properly frame your narrative and make people understand the purpose and the stakes. People can smell a phony, so being genuine is the best strategy here. Understanding is how you get them on board. It makes them realize that the planned change is necessary.

Think protagonists and antagonists

Stories usually follow a simple framework: a protagonist lives in a status quo, then comes an antagonist (human, thing, event) as the bringer of change, which disrupts that status quo prompting the protagonist to take action in a way that will make him change and grow.

Your story also needs protagonists and antagonists. In organizational changes, the protagonists are easy to identify: it’s your organization and the employees. The main antagonists are what forces the changes: could be a market change, could be a competitor. Protagonists and antagonist are not inherently good guys or bad guys.

In the movie The Karate Kid (I’m showing my age, I know), Daniel-san is clearly the protagonist. Johnny, the bad kid who beat Daniel early on, is the original antagonist who prompts Daniel to learn to fight. However, it’s Mr. Miyagi, a good guy, who the main antagonist of the story. The changes he brings in Daniel-san are much deeper: he teach him to fight, but he also teaches him to live. Teachers can be great positive antagonists.

As a change management consultant, I often end up in the role of an antagonist. A market shift can be your main villain, but as an agent of change, I’m also an antagonist, albeit one who works for their best interests.

Understand the role you need to play. Use context to ease the role of the antagonists.

Mind the rhythm

The three acts structure so ubiquitous in novels, plays, and movies is one of the most recognizable narrative tools. It helps structure the story and crate a parallel in how people masters new situations or new skills.

Act 1 is all about setting the table. The purpose and stakes for the change must be apparent in this act. It is also the moment to get quick wins, and both increase people’s confidence and support the initiative.

Act 2 is when things become difficult. The quick wins have passed. The real opposition begins. In change management, it is usually the moment the organization’s immune system kicks in. Those who have bought into the need for change will have to face the resistance of others. Progress is made inch by inch if there’s any noticeable progress at all. Fatigue sets in.

The Pit of Despair is the trickiest part of any change initiative. Tired people lose confidence, and it may seem that it would be better to stop now rather than sink further.

Again, the power of storytelling can come to your rescue. Everyone who have read a book or seen a movie understand that there’s that middle part where everything seems lost. The protagonists need to rally, find back their center and push through. People all have that understanding deep inside their minds, what we have to do is to wake that understanding.

Get rid of the noise, make the focus clear. Show them all that they have accomplished. Make them understand that the larger the challenge, the greater the growth. Natural leaders tend to emerge in the darkest hours. We need to help them do so.

Act 3 starts when the result of previous efforts start paying off. As people realize the benefits of what they went through, confidence comes back. It doesn’t mean it’s smooth sailing from there, but all the major hurdles should have passed.

Your story is interactive

Stories printed on dead trees or committed to film are static. Since yours is dynamic, it is bound to change and evolve as your project moves forward. This is a good thing.

A living story can be reframed as needed. Its context might evolve. The characters have a mind of their own. Use that.

Keep your planning dynamic, able to change as needed. A relatively stable frame is important, but let the details emerge. Enlist those who have bought into the purpose and stakes and made them their own’s to help you shape the next step in the developing story. Make sure the natural leaders who will emerge to guide your team out of the Pit of Despair become part of the storytellers.

Celebrate the happy ending

A story is a journey. You know where it starts, you will get surprises along the way, and at some point, it needs to end. Stories that never ends lose their meaning over time.

When that ending comes, be sure to take some time to celebrate successes with those who participated, and mourn those lost along the way. Celebrates those who stood up in the darkest hour and became leaders.

Protagonists are meant to grow from a story for it to be significant. Be sure to reflect on what happened, as a group, and learn from it. Acknowledge the leaders who emerged to help others climb out of the Pit of Despair.

This story might have ended, but the next one is just further down the road.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

Startups are a force to be reckoned with. They face hash constraints on financial, material and human resources, they begin with no name for themselves. And yet those very constraints propels them. Their products evolve faster, they generate more buzz than anyone else and they gain market shares at an amazing speed. They call it “disruption” and if they can sustain it long enough, they will hurt you.

To be clear, I’m not talking about those startups with a focus on pure growth rather than profits in order to be bought off. Those will hurt you too, but they will disappears at some point. No, I’m talking about financially viable startups. Those are the ones that will be the mainstream companies of tomorrow. But the very way they operate means that tomorrow’s way of doing business will be very different from today’s.

It is crucial for any company to understand how those successful startups operate, regardless if you are a giant multinational, an established local company or even a startup yourself.

So, what makes successful startups so special?

They can sell an idea

Having to search for capital forces startup promoters to learn to sell. Early on, they might not even have a product yet, so they harness the power of storytelling to sell a compelling idea.

You see, no one really cares about a product or its features. Customers, like investors, care about their own story and realities. Like Kathy Sierra says in her seminal book Badass: Making users awesome, people don’t care about the features of your camera: they just want to take better pictures.

Learning to sell ideas through storytelling is a powerful skill. It requires refining a number of intangible concepts into one neatly packaged idea. This brings the added bonus of clarifying what the company is all about. It gives a clearer vision to guide the company and a sharper message to draw the targeted customers.

They have focus

Limited budgets and resources force startups to keep a clear focus. If they spread too thin, nothing will get done in a timely fashion and they will run out of money too quickly.

Sounds familiar? This exact situation happens pretty much everywhere. Many companies however have pocket deep enough to withstand a surprising amount of waste before they really start noticing.Startups keep a tight focus, which helps them deliver a clear message.

They are customer-driven

Most companies repeat like a mantra that customers are their most important concern. In the case of startups, it’s far more than rhetoric: both their company’s and product’s development are absolutely driven by their customers.

Instead of planning their products or services over several years, they use what their customers are saying and doing to understand pain points and drive improvements. They do not waste time or effort on services or feature that are not wanted or necessary.

Also, startups work in the open: when the spotlight is on you, secrets have a way to get out and get blown out of proportion. If you want to reduce the damage these secrets can cause, just don’t have any. Discuss your problems openly with your customers, ask for feedback and make your community work for you.

They experiment and learn fast

Innovation is key to staying relevant, and experimentation is key to innovation.

Startups favour numerous small and controlled experiments to increase the chances of striking gold, even in unexpected ways. Most larger companies will instead carefully plan and execute long experiments in order to test a specific theory, and often discard outlying results that can turn to be more profitable than the original experiment.

The difference between the two approaches is that between making many small bets and making a large one. With many small bets, you maximize your chance of having some success, and you drastically increase your learning opportunities.

They respond to change quickly

By innovating quickly and constantly using customers to test their products and drive their company, startups will change their plans quickly. Add a few other startups in the same space and the market itself will change quickly.

While this may sound like a nightmare to many is business as usual for startups. In fact, it is a good environment for them as they are built to adapt and they know that most other companies are not.

How fast can they adapt? Many startups working in software development will release into production several times a week to a few times daily. Those in the service industry use a franchise model internally to safely distribute decisional power across the company and provide customized reactions to events in real time.

They bet on engaged people

Most startups can’t afford to have an army of drones to execute senseless actions. They need people with initiative, who are creative enough to quickly find solutions to the problems that will inevitably rear their ugly heads.

Since they also cannot afford to have long chains of command, decisions are often taken locally. That means those running a startup must be able to trust your people to make the right decisions themselves with only the people around them to discuss it. That requires quality people and engaged people. And that, in turn, requires investing in people through mentoring, training and support.

There’s something exhilarating about working in a startup: to be part of something that grows and draws that kind of attention, to face a continuous stream of challenges and surmounting them.

People don’t join startups because of the hiring package. They join because they want to. They stay in the face of adversity because they feel they belong.

But… can we do that too?

Yes. Yes, you can.

Those characteristics can be capitalized on by all companies, regardless of the size, age, or revenue bracket. However, that capitalization will be done differently and at different level according to each company’s specific context.

All companies can become more reactive, collaborate with their customers, make their own employees amazing assets and true leaders. But it does require some change.

For companies who are using a model straight out of the industrial age, the change will be significant. Companies that are already people-first, developmental, podular, Agile or Lean will adapt much more quickly and easily. Still any company willing to undertake those changes can gain the vitality of a startup.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

What I notice is that what differentiate these models is often far less interesting than what they have in common. We can see these commonality in their approaches to evolution and in their application in real companies.

A portrait of the new face of 21st century organizations is slowly emerging through the fog of competing models. At its core are the elements shared across several models, often completed by individual elements taken from different models to better customize the approach to a particular business context.

Characteristics of the 21st century organization

People-driven

Human beings come to the forefront of modern organizations. Employees now emerge as assets to leverage rather than resources to manipulate. This is made possible by energizing employee development and fostering leadership across the organization.

Employee development has moved from being an afterthought to being a core business strategy. Direct mentoring and coaching (two different things) are replacing the occasional two-days training seminar. Employees are exposed to a variety of situations and tasks, often across several domains, so they can learn from practice and increase their awareness of all facets of the organization. The more versatile M-shaped generalists and T-shaped specialists are replacing the I-shaped super specialists.

Such employees, with a better understanding of the organization’s realities and goals, need far less supervision to work toward the organization’s vision and are better suited to self-organize. The tendency is to start seeing them as adults rather than children, and to entrust them with the power to make their own decisions for the greater good of the organization.

It is the duty of every leader to foster the development of new leaders across the organization. With increased accountability (different from increased responsibilities, i.e. more tasks), motivation and talent comes into better focus, and emerging leaders can be mentored properly.

These new leaders are not necessarily moved to management positions. There is a tremendous advantage of having an organization strewn with leaders in every type of positions. It creates a more independent organization, better able to manage itself and react to change without the need for heavy rules and bureaucratic supervision.

User-centric

All work, regardless of its nature, is done for the benefit of another party. That party is called the user, a term coming from software development. Delivering value to users now becomes the focal point of our endeavours.

Users also becomes the driving force behind innovation: users have pain points and innovation efforts are meant to address them through user-centred design. Most approaches calls for a closer relationship with users to better understand their needs and some, such as Design Thinking and Lean Startup, advocate sending people to follow users on-site to better empathize with their experience.

The net benefit from going user-centric is to limit waste by avoiding doing work nobody needs (and different from doing what they want).

Evolving organisms

The metaphor of the company as a machine is done. People are not replaceable cogs and machines do not evolve and adapt: they become obsolete.

Companies are now seen as evolving ecosystems. Rather than fixed five-years plans, growth and direction are set much more organically. Growth occurs to follow markets and opportunities, and unproductive areas shrink naturally. That evolution is not necessarily the result of top-driven initiatives, but usually is the product of a multitude of micro-decisions taken at the local level to respond to market changes. The result is a constant adaptation and evolution, less traumatic to an organization.

Same goes for jobs and positions. The idea of flexible, transitory roles rather than fixed jobs is slowly emerging. These roles are like hats, worn by the best person for it at the moment. They are meant to move to another person as the context changes. People are hired for cultural compatibility and talent, and then developed for them to fit a variety of roles. Traditional management positions are absorbed by those roles, and managerial roles adopt a servant-leadership approach and focus on removing obstacles and managing systems rather micro-managing people or work.

Network of communities with distributed leadership

People organize in interconnected networks, not into neat hierarchies. Even in bureaucratic organizations, the most powerful relationships are not hierarchical: they are your connexions to the right people.

Modern organizations recognize that fact and organize themselves in small networked communities (teams, workgroups, friends), who interconnect with other groups along organic lines. Individuals can be members of several communities at once and act as natural bridges between them.

In such a model, leadership and decision-making is distributed across the organization. It does not mean that there is not a place for the people traditionally known as upper management. Their role however has a more outward focus, guiding the organization across far-ranging decisions in the face of market realities. While the final decision on important issues still lies with them, voices from the whole organization can be heard.

Self-management through platforms

Self-organization of individuals and small groups has been championed by agile approaches since the very beginning. As teams move from 3–7 people squads to semi-autonomous 10–15 people communities, both self-organization and self-management become a necessity. Communities are free (and accountable) to manage their own finances, personnel, and day-to-day activities. This allows for much faster response to emerging situations.

To give governance to those self-managed communities, a model similar to franchising is slowly appearing. A controlling entity (headquarters, board of director, or head of division) creates a platform consisting of boundaries, constraints, shared information and tools. Dependent communities “plug in” into this platform, adopting its rules, and are otherwise free to self-manage. Platforms can be stacked: an organization can create a platform for its communities, and some of those communities can create their own to regulate what liberties individual members can take.

The beauty of this system is its adaptability: scale can range from small teams to large companies, the level of control can range from broad strokes to very precise, and staked platforms can easily respect the boundaries of parent platforms. However, the platforms are not set in stone: the system works if the groups using those platforms can influence its evolution through a feedback loop.

Small scale experiments for innovation and risk management

Innovation and creativity are the lifeblood of business success. In our volatile, rapidly changing world, innovation is not a luxury but rather the path to continuous relevance and growth. However, innovation is traditionally seen as risky and many organizations either limit it in a debilitating way or avoid it altogether. An alternative approach? Think small.

The era of large tasks is definitively gone, and while large-scale endeavours are still being undertaken, they are conceived as small mostly independent pieces that each bring tangible value.

Little or no dependancies remove the risk of catastrophic, cascading failure. Reduced size reduces risks associated with costs. These factors allow for a greater resilience to the occasional failure, a faster recovery speed and thus a better tolerance for innovation-driving experiments.

Degrees of change

While all of these characteristics can be seen as desirable, not all organizations have the willingness or tolerance to adopt them all, especially at once.

Many of the approaches named in the introduction call for a complete adoption of all of their characteristics. This creates a severe trauma on even the best prepared organizations. The reaction seen all too often is the lip service adoption of these new precepts as an additional layer over the old structure.

Leaving models aside, it is possible for an organization to gauge its interest and capacity to adopt the six characteristics above. Sometimes only a handful of small changes can bring a lot of value to an organization and prepare it better for further changes down the line.

One thing to keep in mind is that organizational change works much better by subtraction than addition: removing bureaucratic hurdles, red tape, and unnecessary processes and regulations is far easier and less traumatic on the organization than adding layers of new processes. It also has the advantage of better preparing the space for new ideas and approaches.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

But it does not have to be that way. Very large companies such as Google, Apple, GE, Lockheed-Martin and so many others make good use of intrapreneurs to innovate in a manner similar to startups, without as many risks.

Intrapreneurs share the thirst for exploration and strange waters that their entrepreneur cousins have, while also enjoying breaking the rules of the calcified organizations they work for. Back in the early ’80s, Apple’s Macintosh team took up the pirate imagery and followed the maxim “Better to be a pirate than join the Navy”. That same renegade spirit inhabit intrapreneur teams everywhere to this day.

What are intrapreneurs and why should you care?

Intrapreneurs are people inside an organization who act with the creative freedom and low red tape environment of startups. Intrapreneurs are most often used as R&D teams, but the mindset can be powerful even elsewhere in a company.

Any kind of companies can use intrapreneur groups. The idea is to create a semi-autonomous cell unaffected by the processes, politics and scrutiny of the rest of the organization. In essence, intrapreneurs give any company the best aspects of a startup. It is no wonder Lockheed-Martin maintains its Skunkworks experimental group since the ’60s despite following a very traditional manufacturing model for the rest of the company or for GE to swear by their FastWork teams to drive innovation while the rest of the company still follow rigid Six Sigma principles.

Find the right people

Not everyone can make a good intrapreneur. Most people who function well within a large company will have trouble operating as an intrapreneur, even if they believe otherwise.

The characteristics of a good intrapreneur are similar to those of a good pirate:

They crave freedom and brotherhood. Some people need to make their own way. Independence is a defining trait of an intrapreneur, but lone wolves will be a problem. You need to identify creative troublemakers with a knack for gathering like-minded people. They are your pirates.

They enjoy chaos. Good intrapreneurs focus on results, experiments and thrive on changes of plans. Routine bores them.

They’re not afraid to fight. Intrapreneurs will constantly have to justify their existence, fight for budget and even debate approaches within their group. Sparks will fly. That’s good. They need that energy.

They sail into storms laughing. Intrapreneurs will constantly face challenges, sometimes insurmountable ones. It is not enough for them to be unafraid of these challenge. They need to actually enjoy rough waters.

They deliver. For all their freedom and chaos, a pirate who does not follow the rules or does not deliver will end up marooned somewhere. Same goes for their captain: a captain who does not deliver on riches will face an abrupt change in management.

For many a manager, putting together a team of intrapreneurs will feel like gathering all the nightmare employees. Whoever will be their point of contact with the rest of the company needs to share at least some of the characteristics of intrapreneurs.

In all cases, avoid imposing the entrepreneur lifestyle to someone who doesn’t want it. Many workers today are creature of habit, order and comfort.

Give them what they need

Above all, pirates need freedom and the open sea. Your intrapreneurs are no different. You cannot force your intrapreneurs to deal with the typical processes and hierarchy of your company. They need freedom and space to operate.

Funding the team is an issue. As long as the team can deliver for the budget they are granted, they should be left alone. However funding the team in the traditional way will draw the attention of finance people. Finance requires order, has a low tolerance for the necessary chaos of the innovation process. If the intrapreneur team is in itself an experiment, then I recommend funding it off discretionary budgets.

It can be a good idea to set up the team in a different building so they are cut-off from unwanted attention and to make it very clear that the team exists in a pocket universe of sorts. It helps them focus and detach themselves from corporate habits that kill innovation. It also removes them from the scrutiny of envious co-workers, scheming executives and overzealous auditors. You do not want to attract the corporate immune response. The natural enemies of intrapreneurs are jealous people and bean-counters.

Finally they need to understand the best approaches for this kind of work. Agile thinking is highly recommended as it gives the right mindset to thrive in such an environment. Lean Startup is a lightweight exploratory process framework that fits perfectly intrapreneur teams as it mixes the chaos of exploration with just enough structure and discipline to produce valuable data and tangible results. Training in either, or better in both, does not take much time or budget. However, while these theoretical frameworks can be learned quickly, the real learning will be done in practice. Coaches are a good way to help new teams adjust to these radically different ways of working and can be a good investment to help a team pick up steam quickly.

Make them suffer a little

While it is important to give the team what they need, there can be a big difference between want and need. Intrapreneur teams do not need a nice office, brand new equipment or infinite budgets. Do not be soft on milestones either: People work better when some constraints are in play. They need to be creative to deal with these constraints and still produce what you ask of them. For having lived it a few time, I believe that the ambiance provided by squeaky chairs, second-hand tools and leaky pipes help feed the roguish adventurer vibe you will find in many startups. Think of it that way: If your people want to play pirates, they need to learn to live like pirates, scurvy and all.

It should not come as a surprise: the theory of constraints tells us that a reduced number of small limiting factors help us focus and achieve more. The key is to be able to identify constraints who will act as propulsors for the team and those who will be useless inhibitors.

Don’t pamper your intrapreneurs, but don’t torture them for no reason either. After all, you want them to succeed. Setting ridiculous deadlines and goals designed to be beyond the team’s reach, constantly shuffling the team’s composition, micromanaging the team or forcing them to multitask are not helping them in any way. These constraints only help an insecure incompetent boss feeling self-important.

Making them suffer a bit has the additional effect of deflecting attention from your intrapreneurs. Their position, even if they benefit from special treatment, will not seem enviable. Of course, your pirates won’t have it any other way.

Manage the system, not their work

It is extremely important that you do not try to manage either your intrapreneurs or their work. Let them self-organize. If needed, a training on agile thinking will teach them how.

What you need to do is create boundaries. Set some rules. Grant them a fixed budget and some milestones. Schedule regular presentations so they can show their progress. Beyond that, cut the red tape and get out of their way. Remain available in case you are needed.

These boundaries and rules create a platform to support their work. Change the platform if needed, but don’t bend those rules. Projects are expected to go over budget or to require more time. Innovation teams are usually under far more scrutiny than others and have to defend their very existence. While other groups can afford to be late or go over budget, your intrapreneur team cannot.

Again, the analogy with pirates can be useful here. Privateers for examples were pirates sanctioned by governments through letter of marque, legitimizing their activities as long as they restricted themselves to attack only enemy ships. The Republic of Pirates that thrived in Nassau in the 18th century is another example of how simple boundaries can allow highly individualistic teams to work for a common goal.

It is possible that at first your team will miss a milestone simply because they are not used to self-organizing efficiently and respect constraints. The team needs to understand that those light constraints are the price to pay for their level of freedom.

Give them clear milestones

An intrapreneurially team is not an out-of-view playground where people and money disappear to, hopefully, come out with something useful. Make sure intrapreneur are accountable for their work. “Success” in a team who’s devoted to experimentation is not necessary a functional product. Sometimes the only result will be learning quickly that an idea should be discarded.

Intrapreneur are accountable to answer three simple questions, who act as milestones. Those answers are “yes/no”, backed with explanation. A “no” to any of those questions means that this particular endeavour needs to stop right away.

It is important for the intrapreneurs to focus on one of these questions at a time, and in the right order.

Is it feasible? is the very first question to answer. The timeframe to get that answer must be kept relatively small, from two to eight weeks. “Yes” requires the team to have some sort of working proof-of-concept prototype. If after two months there is no prototype, it’s time to look elsewhere. That constrain can be adjusted but I advise to keep it tight.

Is it viable? Making a product commercially viable is the goal of a business. A process that creates diamonds from seawater in “only” 5000 years, a 3000$ disposable camera, an environmentally-friendly cleaning product using a manufacturing process with the carbon-footprint of a small country or super-silent break pads made of material that can only be mined on a asteroid can be valuable from an academic point of view, but are not viable from a business standpoint. This second questions should arrive quickly after the first.

Is it scalable? or can we turn a profit with it? Unit viability does not mean that it can be produced in enough quantity to be profitable at the business level. Scalable means different things for different businesses: an artisan bread-maker and a disposable plastic cup manufacturer will have wildly different interpretations of the word. But in both cases the question remains valid. If the business is not able to produce enough at a reasonable cost to turn a profit, then even the best of ideas is nothing but dead weight. Again, keep the time between the second and the third milestone question short.

It might sound counter-productive, but as a business you want your intrapreneurs to answer “no” to these questions. Each “no” is potentially millions of dollars saved on a product that will not be profitable. Every time they cannot answer “no” to any of those questions, then you have good potential product.

Once you get a “Yes” to each of these milestone questions, then it is time for them to build a complete prototype, so the kinks can be identified and smoothed, and potential risks clearly identified and remedied before actual production starts. The time required for this milestone will vary greatly depending of what you are building.

The time to sail is now

Intrapreneur teams are cheap and easy to set up, as they should. This means that there are very few risks in experimenting with them. Intrapreneur teams do not start perfect, and aside from Agile thinking and the Lean Startup process, there is little formal training that can teach them to run efficiently. Most of their processes will be learned by doing, so the sooner they start the better. There is no better time than the present.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

From toxic start to soured safety

Toxic safety usually stems from a misunderstanding of what safety is. People coming from organizations that were run by fear often overcompensate when they come in contact with the idea of a safe environment. Their focus is on trying to make themselves safe rather than creating a safe environment for all. At other times, herd anonymity or aligning to a shared “party line” is confounded with safety.

A well-meant but clumsy implementation and overcompensation are responsible for a large number of toxic starts. It is also common to see in “reformed” organizations the original culture of fear being covered with a fresh coat of paint. The same (or worse) practices are still used “for your own safety”.

In other cases, a safety culture can become toxic over time. I call that souring. It is a rarer event, but it can happen if there is a large change of people coupled with poor understanding or poor adhesion to the culture. Souring can also be done deliberately by a strong manipulator.

The four types of toxic safety

I have encountered my fair share of toxic safety in my career. Over the years I started to lump them into four categories I named the Möbius Ring, the Untouchables, the Dead Flame and the Kumbaya Effect.

The Möbius Ring

Whether they are run by committee or whether decision-making requires consensus, some organizations seems to talk in circle forever with accountability to move anything forward. I call this type of safety The Möbius Ring since no matter where you try to go, you always end up in the same place.

The toxic safety in the Möbius Ring resides in the large number of “decision-makers”. Meetings filled with scores of people, committees within committees, large number of people with veto, and the comfort of anonymity that comes from being hidden in a large group of people.

Meetings are all-important in Möbius Ring organizations. These meetings gobble up most, if not all, time that should be spent of doing things. To the end of my days I’ll get hives attacks every time I hear “This is a meeting. It’s neither the time nor the place to decide anything”.

Open organizations (like Red Hat or closer to home, Quantum Monkeys) rely on debates of ideas to function well, but open themselves to the dangers of spiraling arguments that never get resolved. This is a form of Möbius Ring. These organizations need people who keep an eye on these arguments and who can break them when they stop being productive.

Luckily, the Möbius Ring is not very damaging to people. It’s worst problem is terrible inefficiency which can, however, be fatal to organizations. Arguing oneself to death is the sad fate of many well-meaning socially-conscious groups who adopt egalitarian or blameless management systems.

The Untouchables

A little over 2000 years ago, in the Roman republic, the tribune of the pleb was a political office open to commoners. The pleb had the power to convene and preside over people’s assembly, intervene on the behalf of the people on legal matters and to veto the consuls and other magistrates (who were nobles) when the interests of the common people were endangered. As progressive as it was for the era, the tribune of the plebs was not a very popular man with noble politicians. To make sure the tribune would live for more than five minutes after being nominated, he was made sacrosanct, meaning that anyone harming him or preventing him from moving freely (most of his powers required him to be physically present at the scene) could be put to death. Now that’s power!

Untouchables-style toxic safety grants almost similar powers to people. Under this type of culture, people are not only never blamed but also never held accountable for anything. It can quickly become seen as a right rather than a privilege, turning any discussion following a problem into debates about the necessity to protect people from the consequences of their actions.

The right to fail is crucial in a a culture of safety. But accountability is also crucial. Without it, the organization will stop being inviting for people who want to accomplish things and become a haven for those who wishes to hide behind a shield.

This type of culture is not truly safe. It almost always leads to heavy micromanagement since if you cannot hold people accountable, at least make sure they never do anything wrong. It often creates tensions between upper management and the rest of the company, sometimes degenerating into an open war and the annihilation of any sense of safety for anyone.

The Dead Flame

Sometimes safety is confused with an aversion to risk. Experiments are forbidden, best practices are imposed, countless studies are required before any changes are green-lighted, review committees roams the land and mediocrity becomes the enforced norm.

Mediocrity can be defined as something “just above unacceptable”. Mediocre is the worst anyone can be before getting in trouble. It might not sound that bad, but most people do not want to dedicate their lives to being “just above unacceptable” in something they love to do. Those who will settle for mediocrity are likely not the kind of people you want to hire.

A risk-aversion culture also kills innovation. It is not anti-innovation, but sees innovation as something done by someone else (dumb enough to take risks) and that you copy after it has proven itself.

The Dead Flame takes its name because it will inexorably grind to oblivion any passion, creativity, interest and will. You end up with office zombies so dead inside they won’t even bother looking for brains.

The Kumbaya Effect

Ever met an organization where the culture looks so safe, understanding, warm and fuzzy that it is almost too good to be true? Sorry: it is probably the case.

I named the Kumbaya Effect after a well-known gospel-turned-campfire song, popular in scout circles. It is nice and soothing and helps create that feeling of oneness within the group. It draws people in by playing on their desire to be included and appreciated, and keeps them there by fear of exclusion from this safe cocoon. It is so seductive that I believe it to be the most dangerous of all toxic safety cultures.

Environments under the Kumbaya Effect can be quite nice: lots of very helpful people, lots of love and understanding, lots on bonding and lots of harmony. It is very nurturing. Unfortunately, it also has absolutely no tolerance for dissension.

In groups under the Kumbaya Effect, every member is free to have his own opinions, as long as those opinions follow the group-think. Dissension is viewed as something bad, and reactions can range from pity to incomprehension. Still, the group will react with love and support. There will be displays of patience for this bad behavior, accompanied with offers of counselling and coaching to cure those heretical ideas and rejoin the group-think.

In the most benign of groups under the Kymbaya Effects, all members are genuinely well-meaning. They truly believe in the good of their high level of harmony and reinforce those ideas with peer pressure. With a bit of luck they will simply be ineffective and stifle personal growth.

In other groups, the Kumbaya Effect takes a darker side. All it needs is a manipulative individual who will use the Kumbaya Effect to control the group and squash any dissension with love and peer pressure rather brute force. That’s the modus operandi of cult leaders.

The Kumbaya Effect creates a toxic safety by railroading your thought and by-eroding your individuality and critical sense. It accomplishes that by giving you that sense of group acceptance, appreciation, love and harmony we are all looking for. The Kumbaya Effect kills you, and you thank it for the opportunity. It is that seductive. It is that dangerous.

Reacting to toxic culture

Caught early, toxic safety can be redeemed, especially when it is the result or clumsiness or misunderstanding. It is important that people in a safety culture stay vigilant for signs of problems.

Swift reaction is necessary. Keep in mind that while the best reaction is bringing the issue to the group, a toxic safety culture is never really safe. Being a whistleblower can expose you to the same kind of dangerous attention that will get you in trouble in a culture of fear.

If you notice a problem, chances are you are not the only one. Find allies first, then try to rectify the situation. Since most of the time the toxicity is a matter of misunderstanding or clumsiness, change does not have to be belligerent. Improving education and awareness can go a long way.

Living in a toxic culture?

I outlined four types of toxic cultures, but you might have encountered different ones. I am always interested in discovering new types of cultures as well as how they are handled by organizations.

Feel free to use the comment below to make us discover different types of toxic cultures, or discuss your experiences with these types of cultures.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

Still, we see many of our corporate clients dismiss the idea of creating a safe culture, lest their employees would have free reign and would avoid accountability for their actions. Employers would lose control! Chaos and pandemonium would ensue!

The problem is that safety is often confused with immunity or absolution. In an unsafe environment, where failure leads to witch hunts and retributions, it can be easy to make that jump.

In this post I will go into what safety is and how it differs from immunity and absolution. The idea of safety is not … ahem… “a hippy concept not fit for a real business”. It is, in fact, a powerful tool that can be leveraged to spur innovation, excellence, engagement and ownership.

To create a good work culture, safety is not an option. That’s why Joshua Kerievsky lists make safety as a prerequisite as one of Modern Agile’s guiding principles. That’s also why Jurgen Appelo makes it a central argument in his books Management 3.0 and Managing for Happiness, and why writers such as Daniel Pink, Dave Grey, Frederic Laloux, Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Kegan spend a large portion of their arguments on it. And yet, not one of them argue for a culture of immunity to consequences or absolution.

A culture of safety

Let’s start by defining what is a culture of safety.

In a nutshell, a culture of safety is a culture where members of the team do not have to hide for fear of retribution because of who they are, what they think or what they do.

In a safe culture you will see people readily admitting to failures or mistakes. As a result, remedy to problems happens much faster and are much more efficient since no ones tries to save himself. Education about those issues can be shared across the company, raising awareness and reducing the risk that the same mistake will happen again.

In a safe culture, people will speak their mind and ideas will be debated, leading to better solutions. “Sparks must fly”, says James M. Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, in his book The Open Organization. A bit of friction while debating ideas is a good sign that people care about the subject and want the best outcome. But stay vigilant that those debates do not degenerate in spiralling arguments. Still, an occasional spiralling argument is much better than no argument at all.

In a safe organization, people feel safe to be transparent about their strengths and weaknesses, making it easier to get help working on weaknesses and raising one’s overall usefulness to the organization.

As desirable as safety might be, no organization will reach that state naturally. It requires the right conditions, time and a concerted effort. The very first step is actually the hardest one to take: get rid of the blame.

Stop the blame

When something goes wrong, it is important to react to it. React. Note that I haven’t said either how to react nor who should react. What is important is that there is a reaction to something going badly.

In a blaming culture, the first reaction is either finding out who is to blame or making sure someone else will be blamed. Neither reaction addresses the problem, nor do they lower the chances of the failure happening again. The goal in this scenario is for individuals to protect themselves.

In a blameless culture, there is little need to react with self-preservation. The reactions tend to be swifter, as no one is trying to cover their tracks. The reaction is first focused on fixing the issue, then making sure it does not happen again.

Etsy has such blameless culture, where it is common for employees to receive a communication along the lines of “I messed up. Here’s what happened. Here’s how we reacted. Here’s what to watch out for”. They even have a good-natured annual three-armed sweater award given to the most surprising failure of the year, awarded in a ceremony and accompanied with the testimonies of the people involved on how they handled it and what has been learned. The goal here is not to humiliate them, but to spread lessons learned and raise awareness.

The only purpose of blame is to bring fear of consequences, from share to loss of employment.. It is no wonder then that in a blame-based environment, many employees opt to never try anything, to do the strict minimum, and often waiting until they get direct orders from a manager so their tracks are covered and they can divert the blame toward the manager when the results end up being unsatisfactory.

React appropriately

There are three types of failures: Smart failures, accidental failures and negligence failures. Each comes with their own type of reactions. These reactions are consequences of sorts, but with the aim of making things better.

Smart failures are, as far as failures go, the type you should aim for. If you are careful with your actions, including your experiments, you should plan to limit the impact of a possible failure, discuss it beforehand with people who might be impacted, act carefully and react swiftly when the worse happens. If you approach experiments in this way, then failure can be turned into a valuable learning experience for the whole organization. Someone who is able to experiment, fail and handle the recovery properly is an asset that should be celebrated. Blaming people for a smart failure would be absolutely counter-productive.

Someone who fails accidentally, through an oversight, a lack or knowledge or sheer bad luck should own it, and act swiftly to help with the recovery. Accidental failures happen all the time and should be seen as part of doing business. When an accidental failure happens, review what happened, derive some action points to help reduce the chances it will happen again, and move on. Again, blaming would not improve anything.

In either case, if you are responsible for the failure, own your mess and be part of the effort to clean it up. If your are not, avoid assigning blame as it does not bring any value except perpetuating an unwillingness to try for fear of failure and blame.

Failures caused by sheer negligence, pig-headedness or straight malevolence should be dealt with seriously. There should be consequences for these kinds of failure, but again they are not about blame. Often, having a talk with the person in a safe space will reveal some issues that can be addressed so this does not happen again. At other times, especially for a repeated offense, the best course of action might be getting rid of the bad apple.

Or not: Some deliberately developmental organizations such as Next Jump have a no fire policy and will salvage you no matter what. Still, we are not arguing for either immunity or absolution: follow-up actions, or consequences, are part of the deal.

Working with self-organized groups makes this system easier to use. Teams share success and failure and even more, they share effort. When an organization wonders how it should react to a situation, the best course of action is to ask the team involved. Disaster recovery, lessons learned and recommendations as well as how to react to the person at the core of the problem can all be dictated by the team.

Safety isn’t just about you

When Joshua Kerievsky developed Anzeneering in 2014 — his approach to a culture of safety — he described this work culture as something your are responsible for upholding rather than something that should be owed to you.

It should be every individual’s responsibility to ensure that coworkers are safe from a bad environment, that your organization is safe from your actions, that users are safe to use the work you produce, and so on. Nothing about that mindset is about making yousafe, it’s all about making others safe. You become protected too when the mindset spreads across the organization.

That is an amazing approach: look at safety as a gift you freely give to others.

Towards a culture of responsibility and ownership

A culture of safety is not meant to exist by itself. It goes hand in hand with a culture of responsibility and ownership.

Modern Agile puts make safety as a prerequisite to remove the fear of failure and blame we so often see in organizations. As we’ve seen, fear leads to an understandable lack of desire for ownership and responsibilities. Without this fear, we are better able to reach our potential.

The other three principles of Modern Agile are the key to unlocking that potential.

Deliver value continuously forces us to revise how we approach work. To be able to deliver any kind of work in a continuous fashion, we need to divide it in smaller, independent chunks. That approach is very important. Smaller chunks means that if we fail or miss the mark with a chunk, the damage remains small and the issue can be resolved quickly. By making these chunks independent, we make sure a failure will not spread or contaminate other chunks (ours or somebody else’s), thus limiting the impact of the failure. Small, self-contained chunks drastically reduce overall risks by making each failure insignificant. Without fear, and with insignificant risks, experiment and learn rapidly becomes a very powerful tool. It allows us to figure out solutions empirically, work out kinks to provide better quality and stimulate innovation. New discoveries are far more often the result of failed experimentation than of planned design.

With safety from reprisal and blame, with work habits that reduce the risk and the impact of failure and with constant learning from practical experimentation, we make people awesome by giving the environment they need to be stimulated by what they do, to take ownership of their work and to become the assets everyone, deep inside, wish to be. In turn, they can see it as their responsibility to spread that culture and help newcomers feel safe enough to participate and grow.

The Modern Agile logo is a wheel. I believe that to be very deliberate: each aspect builds into the next one and keeps the whole wheel turning.

Too rosy a picture?

In this blog, we saw what is intended with a culture of safety. Put in place properly, it can propel any organization and its members to new heights.

However, it is possible for the ideals of such a culture to be corrupted. Toxic safety is a very real danger, and one we should watch for. We will explore its forms in my next blog post: When safety turns toxic.

See you then!

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

We often had conversations and debates, trying to learn from one another and finding ways to overcome roadblocks. During one of those conversation one of the coaches, who was at that client for several months at that time, was arguing strategy until a more senior coach, who was visiting us, said:

“You’re pickling. I’m not hearing you, I’m hearing your client. Their excuses have become your excuses. You are an agent of change, but you are adopting their mindset. You have been marinating in their juices for too long.”

At the moment it made me smile, but it also made me think. Was I pickling? Of course I wasn’t (I was) and I was certainly aware enough to realize if I’d ever start to pickle (I wasn’t). I felt full of certainties that were not based on any experimentation. To me, that is a clear indicator that something was amiss. So, true to my values, I had no choice but to conduct some experiments.

I start paying attention to the words used by coaches around me and by myself. Two words stood out: “context” and “reality”. “Reality” is a red flag: when someone does not want to change, variations of that word get tossed around a lot — “let’s get real”, “in real life”, “in our reality”, etc.. While “context” usually describes something external (like the market), “reality” ends up describing internal organizational impediments or culture. I noticed that coaches who were just beginning working with the client used that term far less often than those who were there the longest.

This let me to observe the differences between newer coaches and those who had been with the company for a long time. I started bringing some specific conversation topics to elicit “pickled” responses. I was comparing what I thought was the right course of action and what other agile thinkers were saying. Over the next few months, I observed the slow pickling of every coaches. I had trouble evaluating my own pickling, but that was to be expected. It just meant that my experiments were not over yet.

After I ended my contract a few months later, I tried to throw myself in a context that was the complete opposite of what I had experienced during the previous nine months. I would love to pretend that I deliberately took more numerous but smaller commitments or devoured as many books as I could to expose myself to new ideas, but the facts are that I was thrown in the maelstrom of life in a startup company and I was spinning in all those smaller commitments and new ideas in a very chaotic fashion.

The ridiculous amount of new experiences in a short time de-pickled me very rapidly and made me aware of just how much I had pickled. It also made me realize exactly what being pickled meant and what I could do about it.

Why We Hire Consultants

External consultant of any type, including agile coaches, bring two things with them: EXPERTISE and PERSPECTIVE.

We are usually hired based on our expertise. We have knowledge and experience and our role is to either transfer that expertise to our client, use it to his benefit, or both. Expertise grows over time, as we learn new things and put them to practice.

We also bring perspective with us, and sometimes are hired especially for that. Perspective is the state of our understanding based on the number and diversity of our experiences. Perspective is dynamic and volatile: perspective absorbs new experiences easily and reframes itself constantly.

A good consultant needs a balance of both expertise and perspective. Expertise without enough perspective sets us on an unchanging path because WE KNOW. Perspective without enough expertise forces us into a very chaotic trial and error pattern. A balance helps us learn through controlled experiments.

We pickle when we are exposed to a limited number of contexts, limiting the diversity of our experiences. Our perspective adapts to this new reality and starts losing its flexibility. This is akin to tunnel vision, when we are so focused on one thing that we lose sight of everything else.

The Effects of Pickling

Pickling can be desirable. You want new employees to adopt your company’s culture, processes and dynamics, and that is done by pickling. The new employee needs to soak in your company for a while before he becomes truly “one of us”.

For an external consultant, that is dangerous. Since perspective is half of what we can offer, losing it to pickling greatly reduce our value. The worst is that we pickle without realizing it.

Many clients argue with me that they want a consultant that really understands their context and their realities, so he can assist them better. I do not agree with that. Without enough perspective, we end up really bringing only a small subset of our total expertise that fits with the clients current reality.

An external consultant should not be a yes man. It is our duty to challenge what the client is doing, not necessarily to change it but to make sure he understand why he is doing things this way. That understanding will expose him to new perspectives now, and allow him to sense when a situation is evolving in the future. If we lack perspective, we are not able to do that.

What Can We Do About It?

The prevalent business model in agile coaching is to send one or more coaches to a client, as full-time as possible, for extended periods of time. It provides steady income for the coach and makes the client feel safer by having an expert on-site. This is also the perfect scenario for rapid pickling.

When we realized those dangers, we, at Quantum Monkeys, started to re-evaluate our approach. At what speed is someone pickling? What’s the progressive loss of value for a client? How much effort does it take to un-pickle a coach after an assignment? How can we prevent pickling in the first place.

We found part of the solution by observing executives and life coaches: their business model revolves around a much smaller involvement and rely less on their own expertise than in developing their client by exposing him to new expertise and perspectives. It inspired us to remodel our coaching approach to a much lighter one, devoted to making our client ready to handle change and transition by himself. It also allows the coach to continue to be exposed to a large variety of contexts at once, reinforcing his perspective and providing a better value.

This approach to our services is not enough in all clients, so we developed other services as well. In our overall approach, the more time-intensive the service, the shorter its total duration will be. That way we make sure we do not stay long enough to pickle or, if we maintain long-term relationship, each coach will maintain several such relationships with several clients, keeping his perspective fresh.

Even internally we opted to make exposition to new ideas, debates, sharing experiences and placing people out of their comfort zone part of our culture.

What About Internal Coaches?

There is a trend lately of either hiring permanent agile coaches or bringing scrum masters to coach positions. This has some benefits, but also raises the dangers of pickling. Internal coaches will pickle quickly and lose perspective. They lose perspective, but still retain all their expertise. Since they are paid far less than external consultants and they stay with you to spread their expertise over time, they can be a very good trade-off.

Internal coaches can be moved around within the company with the hope of avoiding pickling, but since they still marinate in the company’s culture this strategy has limited success. I suggest that internal coaches could benefit greatly from having a coaching relationship with an external coach. A relationship that follows a model closer to executive coaching rather than the typical agile coaching. The cost is very limited, and the external coach will be able to challenge the assumptions of the internal coach and expose him to different points of views, thus limiting the impact of pickling.

The TL;DR Version

External consultants bring both expertise and perspective. Limiting their amount of new experiences by leaving them at a client for too long “pickles” them into the client’s culture and process, making them lose perspective. This can be fixed by shorter and more diverse assignments.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca