A friend of mine recently quit his job and mentioned that he had an exit interview. He said, “I doubt it’s going to change anything”. This discussion started a reflection, and here I am now, challenging my HR friends’ status quo!

Following my reflection and as an hors-d’oeuvre to this article, I wanted to test the waters on the matter. I created two small (and absolutely non-scientific) surveys on Primos Populi’s Facebook page. One was made for non-HR employees, others for people in Human Resources and managers. Here’s what I gathered:

The difference in perception is nothing too surprising. People who quit their job have much less visibility on what happens next. For my part, following my last voluntary departure, I know for a fact that some changes took place 3 months later or so, following the recommendations I made in my exit interview.

The current state of things.

I kinda have to hit the nail on the head concerning the exit interviews. I’ll do it a little further in the article, but let’s start by taking a look at the trends on the market.

Some companies don’t do exit interviews

There, that’s simple. I’m not sure if it’s very common. It happened to me once. The CEO asked me “Where are you going?” and that was it. What’s not representative of the market is the fact that, after kindly asking him to be discreet about the company I was leaving for, I went back to my place and saw that the CEO sent an email to the whole organization, letting them know I was leaving for Company X. Nice guy. That’ll also teach me not to be transparent.

It is not always a matter of nonchalance or bad faith. I once heard a manager say “People come and go, and that’s how the market works”. What an effective way to get rid of any kind of responsibility! People are going to leave anyway, why try to improve the place? It’s our destiny, we might as well embrace it. I’ll push this argument a little further: clients also leave companies, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Why then should we provide customer service?

I’m fairly certain that these companies generally see departures as such: it wasn’t a good fit, she had problems, he wasn’t really performing, she was a difficult person anyway, etc.

Aren’t you mesmerized by the fact that those who left by themselves were all part of the problem? But the company wasn’t. You know, I had a few ex-girlfriends who left me in the past. Do you know what they all had in common? ME. Just a little opportunity for some introspection here…

In sum, it’s not exactly far fetched to think that companies that don’t do exit interview just don’t care about their employees. Not for those who quit, and not for those who remain. 

I’m well aware that this last statement goes against the title of this post. But let’s continue, shall we?

Many companies do exit interviews

Now that’s a little better: companies that can put their ego aside and want to improve. Very well, and it’s much to their credit. Especially organizations that have a real will to change things.

According to the survey above (which isn’t representative) and knowing what I know about companies in general (which is a little more representative but also biased), a lot of companies will take note of the problems, but won’t do anything to change things.

It appears to be a common practice but that’s taken quite lightly. I don’t know if organizations have any idea of the impact it can have to ask people what needs to be changed and do nothing about it.

While everyone is different, if a problem is serious enough for someone to leave, it is likely that others are affected as well. Especially when it comes to a draconian manager, harassment, important problems with a client, important problems with a team member.

If we meet with people, that we acknowledge the problem and do nothing about it, the situation can and will easily turn into a cynicism generator.

The real problem with exit interviews

My real problem with exit interviews is the fact that problems are acknowledged only once someone announced he’s going to leave. Oh now, all of a sudden, we care about what this employee was going through!

And that is the problem. If you suddenly care about your employees only when they leave, you deserve your turnover rate. And since I might not have been clear, here it is, on a large image.

So, I have a few questions for you:

• What are your managers doing? It’s their role to care for people, way before HR should get involved.
• Do your managers get the necessary coaching so that they can take ownership of their employees’ well being?
• Is there a collaboration between managers and HR? Are the problem acknowledged in the exit interview already known by HR, or are they a surprise every time?
• Do your managers have the necessary power to fix those problems before they turn into a departure?

Aiming at making exit interviews useless

Even if the departure is for health reasons, diverging interests, career development, none of these should go unknown by a good manager who cares for his colleagues.

For my part, I try to develop a trusting relationship with my employees. I know their aspirations, their pain points, I make sure I know where they project themselves in 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, I know their next step, and I do whatever I can to help them get there, even if their next step will get them out of the company.

The necessity for an exit interview will always represent a red flag for me, as it suggests that the relationships between managers and employees aren’t transparent, that the employees don’t receive the attention and the support they need in order to grow in the organization.

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

You’re not alone. It is a human self-preservation reflex. We all want to be recognized as someone who brings a unique and unmatched value to the company.  However being indispensable differs from being essential not only in definition but also in how to reach this state. Let’s explore those differences.

Making yourself indispensable is dangerous

I’ve been working in web software development since 2001, and I met plenty of people who became indispensable, sometimes on purpose, sometimes involuntarily.

A classic example is a developer who worked for a long time on a system that is progressively phasing out but is still in use. The rest of the company migrates towards new technology, but you need someone to maintain that legacy system since some clients are still using it.

The indispensable often volunteers nicely

There is always a volunteer who is comfortable with the legacy technology and that sees this context as an opportunity to bring unique value to the organization. This person concentrates on this work, taking care of all the demands and tasks coming his way as he becomes the sole master of the archaic system.

One day, this developer wants to go on vacation, but we realize that no one else can cover for him. That’s usually the first red flag. But some companies are still comfortable taking this risk. From that moment, things will depend on the decisions that will be taken. If the developer does nothing, he becomes a danger to the company. If the company does nothing, it becomes a danger to itself.

If the developer quits, the company can’t provide services to its clients anymore. If he stays, taking vacations will become more and more a nightmare, always preceded by very painful and urgent knowledge transfer. I’d say that this kind of situation can equally be created by both employees and companies. On purpose, or not.

The indispensable sometimes plans his act

From time to time, someone will specifically desire to become indispensable. By withholding and monopolizing information, refusing to work with others, and being very territorial with his work, his project or his product. He is a self-proclaimed expert in the matter. He will sometimes go to the point of working in very complex ways on purpose and avoid documenting anything so that others can’t do his job.

It goes without saying that it is a very unhealthy practice that will cause an impact proportional to the employee’s ego. The danger doesn’t only reside in the know-how, but also overflows in the mindset. I could absolutely not blame a company for lancing the boil and letting this person go, and then heal the wound with something else than an adhesive bandage.

The indispensable forces the company to take a decision

A company that becomes aware of the situation has a few options: coaching the employees to train one another on the archaic technology, create a rotation of employees to take care of maintenance, or simply get rid of the obsolete technology.

That last option can hurt. The employee who dedicated his last experiences to an outdated system suddenly brings much less value, and there’s no guarantee that the organization holds its employees very dear. It could very well get rid of its expert along with the old technology. It is certainly questionable, especially if the company heavily contributed to painting the employee into a corner. Be that as it may, most companies will at least consider this easy and unfortunate solution.

The indispensable brings negative value

Those who make themselves indispensable on purpose are an imminent danger to their own job and to the company they work for. Be it voluntarily or not, it is not a behavior that is viable in the long term and needs to be corrected since nobody will gain anything by waiting for the situation to go from bad to worse. The value of the indispensable is determined by how much it would cost if they leave. 

Making yourself essential is desirable

The fundamental difference with the portrait drawn above is that while the indispensable wants to become useful to an extreme, the person trying to become essential aims at being useless. The essential person believes they should share their know-how and social skills with as many people as possible.

The essential person is altruistic

One must understand that essential people are fundamentally altruistic: they do what they do because it is the right thing to do. They generally expect nothing in return. Helping others, for them, is not an effort but a habit that’s encoded in their DNA. They share their knowledge because they consider that if it’s useful to them, it will be useful to everyone.

The essential person is a leader

There are lots of style of leadership. But the essential person is what we call an everyman leader. Someone who makes the extra effort to help whoever needs it. You know, this person who walks the extra mile to make someone else’s life easier? The essential person is an agent of change, no matter the place, the role and does it every day. Very often, an employee will immediately ask for help from the essential person rather than his manager when facing a problem. This leader makes sure to stay available for the good of everyone.

And, most of all, essential people know that whatever needs to be done, nothing they do is about themselves.

The essential person aims at being useless

It is usually the hardest part to understand for some. The essential person always aims for being completely useless. The goal is to help others help themselves. The essential person wishes to be who others grow beyond. Knowledge and skills are transferred to others so that they won’t need help anymore. The essential person creates other leaders. Once others are autonomous, they will still go towards the essential person when facing new problems.

The essential person brings positive value

The essential person, far from being a danger to the organization, inspires others to become better and surpass themselves and eases the daily pains by helping whoever needs it. To the point of creating new opportunities to help their surroundings with things, they had no idea they needed help with. The essential person is last on the list of “people to let go in time of crisis”. The value of the essential person is determined by what they bring to others.

Update (May 21st, 2018)

This article was the topic of a podcast by Hacking Your Leadership on May 21st, 2018

(Episode 74: Do you know the difference between essential employees and indispensable employees?)
Access Hacking Your Leadership podcast sur iTunes.
Access Hacking Your Leadership podcast sur PodBeans.

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 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

You’ve read a whole lot of books on the subject. You devoured a bunch of blog post too.

You know it is now time for an organizational change in your organization. You’re ready and willing. You’re pumped!

So… how do you proceed?

Change is a difficult subject to tackle, especially since people are a bit (okay, a LOT) weary about change. With good reasons too.

It’s hard for a company to reinvent its architecture. It’s even harder to implement a new one. The endeavor will face the full brunt of the organization’s immune system, competing personal agendas, danger from unexpected context changes, and the mighty power of truly apathetic people. Fun times.

Here are three strategies for change management. Each has their specific uses and knowing which one will save you lots of pain.

Big Top-Down Change

This strategy is a popular one. Not because it’s the best, not because it’s the safest and not because it’s the least traumatizing one. No, it’s the most popular because:

• It can be managed just like a project, with big planning committees, lots of predictive planning, and good excuses to scrap the whole thing when it goes awry.
• Many consulting firms prefer to work this way: big endeavor means you’ll need more help, and thus more revenues for the firm.
• It’s a great way to focus attention. It can be on yourself. It can be away from something else. If your company is large enough, it can even be newsworthy! Perfect to hide something.
• It keeps you in control.

This doesn’t mean that it can’t be the most appropriate form of change in many situations. It’s just that the bigger you go, the riskier it gets. If you want to go that route, then make sure you do it for the right reasons.

Use this strategy when:

When an organization needs to implement something across the board and do so in a specific manner, a Big Top-down change might be the way to go. Ex: A new governmental constraint for example or a new company initiative.

When the organization needs to do a major pivot quickly, this strategy may be appropriate. Pivots will cover changes in vision, or organization and maybe even the very nature of the work being done. In theses cases, there might now be a better way to implement the change. Mind the risks, however.

Avoid this strategy when:

Avoid this strategy if you can use another. Big top-down change seems safer because a lot of Very Intelligent People talked and planned and produced solid documents. They still often fail because the employees (and even people in upper management) don’t buy-in on the change and will resist it actively or passively.

Know the risks:

It is easy to plan such strategy and still fail miserably to communicate to the organization why it is important and why it has to be done this way. Communication is key here because any Big Top-down change is assured to elicit the most aggressive organizational immune response.

This risk can be mitigated by exchanging with the affected people well in advance, not just to inform them of what’s to come, but to allow them to express themselves and maybe even contribute in making the change less traumatizing for them. Getting any measure of buy-in from them will go a long way toward the success of the change endeavor.

Never underestimate the power of a large group of people dragging their feet.

Bottom-up

When you want real change, but are very conscious of limiting the possible damage if something goes wrong, the bottom-up strategy allows you to drive small change increments and observing results before committing at a larger scale.

Use this strategy when:

If your organization already follow a kanban approach, then this will be the way to go, as kanban prefer small but constant improvement over large wide-scale efforts. That’s one way of looking at bottom-up changes; there are two others.

The second one is the small, controlled experiment approach. That’s the one favored by Modern Agile. Find a group willing to participate, ask them to adopt a small change for a set amount of time, then debrief with them and choose to permanently adopt it, drop it or tweak it and retry the experiment. This participatory way of conducting change doesn’t require a huge plan and will give you a lot of data moving forward. When you are done with one change, move on to the next.

The last type of bottom-up change is the grassroots effort. That’s when the people affected by the change request it and drives it. You can’t get better ownership than that, and you get it right from the start. Grassroots efforts can be fragile, however, especially when they cannot get the buy-in from higher-ups.

Avoid this strategy when:

When the buy-in from higher-ups is necessary and won’t be possible, don’t waste your time with the bottom-up approach.

Know the risks:

A lack of buy-in from decision-makers within the organization will doom any bottom-up change efforts. Same goes for lack of buy-in from those asked to participate.

“Weak” buy-in from decision-makers, that is a verbal support that isn’t backed by actions will only drive the organization’s immune system to target the change effort and squash it. Over the years, I saw many department directors asking for change but unwilling to ask HR, finances, PMOs and other such groups to allow for the exemptions to the standard rules needed for the change to be successful. I saw people courageously agreeing to step into a new demanding role just to be told later than that all duties from their old role were still expected of them.

Organic cohorts

Writers such as Frederick Laloux and Dave Gray and others argue in favor of a much more organic approach to change in an organization, even if the two have significantly different takes on it.

In his book The Connected Company, Dave Gray describe a model where self-organized groups (called “pods”) plug into a platform that defines the boundaries of what they can do independently and what is expected of them in return, creating a networked company. Called Podularity, the model essentially calls for the creation of franchise-like entities within your company.

This strategy calls for testing the change strategy in a receptive target group (your first pod), see how it goes, broadcast the benefits to reassure the organization. You then readjust your strategy based on what you have learned, and start with a second receptive target group.

You will notice that the platform will constantly grow and change based on the result of practice, observation and back and forth between the pods and management. If your organization is a bit larger, maybe you will end up with more than a single platform. That is totally fine.

This approach will create a living dynamic between upper management and the pods. The platform will stabilize after a while but will always keep this ability to grow and change to better adapt to your current reality in a far more natural way than initiation big changes.

Use this strategy when:

When you want to evolve your company toward a more self-organized, decentralized and adaptative model, this strategy truly shines. It turns upper management into stewards of a sort, rather than taskmasters. It creates more autonomous and engaged employees, who will be better at responding to any situation that is local to them.

Avoid this strategy when:

Organic cohorts change people. Avoid this strategy when you require only a temporary change and plan to go back to normal after a while. It would create a traumatic effect even more important as a Big Top-down change as your employees will feel betrayed to have been granted autonomy only to see it recanted without cause.

Know the risks:

Going toward self-organization and autonomy changes people and the dynamics of the social contract between employer and employees. While this isn’t a problem in itself, it can be a risk to an organization who doesn’t realize the depth of the change in expectation about the dynamics within the organization. Understand what these kinds of changes mean and start on this path only if you feel that you can live with them.

It’s important that your pods get their constraints from the platform and not from the usual sources from the rest of the organization. The reason for that if you ask a group to change but still forces them to conform to all the same rules and requirements as before, you are not only sending a mixed message but in many cases you are preventing the change from succeeding.

We see this situation with Agile transformation all the time: the company request that a group becomes Agile but instead of gathering to their specific needs they still force the group to conform to traditional financing models, conventional project management models, and so on. The Agile transition fails to deliver on its promises simply there was never a real change, just a chaotic mess of contradicting rules.

Getting Help

Change management isn’t easy, and it’s certainly not second nature to most people. Getting professional help is advisable. To that end, many organization hires external consultants (like me).

Getting the right help can be tricky. Many consultants are familiar with only a specific approach to change management and might not be equipped to advise you properly. Look for a versatile one with experience, rather than one branded to a specific approach.

Don’t hire a consultant to drive the change for you. Your organization should take ownership of the change, and the actual work should be done by internal people. This is the only way that the consultant’s expertise will pass on to your organization and allows you to reinforce and maintain the change over time without depending on the consultant.

Don’t keep the consultant for too long. The value of an external consultant over an internal change manager is as much the different perspective brought in than the expertise. Perspective needs to be constantly nourished by different experiences and will weaken when deprived of that diversity. I wrote a blog post on that very subject.

Getting rid of change management

Change management will always be traumatic to an organization, even when that trauma is lessened by using the right strategy. The only way to getting rid of it to move away from change management.

Continuous improvement is a different type of strategy to approach change. Kanban and agile teams are already using this concept, but nothing limits it to them.

In continuous improvement, every group, no matter its size, strives to improve itself, its members and the benefits it brings to the company. It’s an entirely decentralized approach to change and adaptation that allows an organization to adapt and evolve as needed to better respond to its context while still following a vision.

I’ll discuss more organizational continuous improvement soon, so stay tuned!

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

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

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

Please keep in mind that I’m not advocating the use of these tools above the ones you might currently be using. I am not disparaging any other tools either. Context is everything, and the right tool to use will depend on that context.

Modern Agile

Agility has been around for a bit over 15 years now. Modern Agile, presented by Industrial Logic’s CEO Joshua Kerievsky, acknowledges what has been done in the field in that time and the lessons that were learned. It moves away from frameworks, roles and artifacts to bring back agility to four principles to act as True North; the direction we should strive to keep.

Make People Awesome: “People” includes customers (yes, YOU have to make THEM awesome), employees, managers, clients. When you aim to make people awesome they will want to work with you or for you, and stay.

Make Safety a Prerequisite: Safety is the foundation on which everything else can be build. We protect people’s time, information, reputation, money, health and relationships. Without Safety people don’t dare to experiment, take any kind of risk or speak up against problems.

Learn & Experiment Rapidly: This is a combination of Classic Agile’s Continuous Improvement and of Lean Startup’s short experimentation loop. Making it safe to fail is a prerequisite here. Small, controlled experiments will help you learn fast at the cost of very little risk.

Deliver Value Continuously: To make people safe or awesome, value needs to be available for consumption. It is not about scaling up anymore, it is about rethinking how we architecture work so we can scale OUT, and deliver value continuously from everywhere without having to deal with dependences. The faster you deliver and the smaller your deliveries, the smaller the risks taken.

Because they are very high-level, those four principles can be applied to different domains from different industry. The goal of this approach is to foster a better culture and guide agility across the whole organization.

For more about Modern Agile see www.modernagile.org.

VUCA

The world is not only accelerating: it becomes more complex and far less predictable than ever before. That is why Context & Situational Awareness are essential survival skills to have. You need to know where you stand and understand what is happening around you.The changes are constant, so your efforts to understand your context should be constant as well.

VUCA (for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) is a technique developed by the US military to quickly make sense of any given situation. It helps soldiers figure out how much of a situation they might not understand as well as how fast and drastically that situation can change. It is a handy technique to master when everything around you can quite literally blow up in your face.

The VUCA approach has since been adopted in diplomacy and business. A high VUCA world is now seen as the “new normal” and that new reality is well represented in Quantum Monkey’s trainings.

Antifragility

In his book Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests that the opposite of fragility is not resilience but antifragility.

In a nutshell, a system that is damaged by stress is fragile. A system that is not bothered too much by stress is resilient. A system that thrives and grows from stress is antifragile. The quest for efficiency and predictability has led us to fragile systems and a lot of self-delusion. We suggest that rather than trying to predict variability, let us make sure we can survive and benefit from the unexpected.

Again, the reflex of so many companies is to scale up, which creates more and more fragility by adding steps and work dependancies. It is trying to solve a tower’s instability by adding more, wider floors on top of the existing ones.

The key steps to resilience are relearning how to organize effort to scale out, removing system dependencies, partitioning work in much smaller independent doses and making sure one group’s problems do not contaminate others. Antifragility goes one step further by adding short learning loops and a strategy for constant, relentless improvements across the board.

Networked Organisms

In The connected company, Dave Gray brings the notion that complex systems should not be seen and designed as machines (efficient but prone to obsolescence and too complex to truly be controlled), but rather as networked organisms or ecosystems, to be grown and guided rather than controlled.

He presents Podularity, an organizational model that uses the notion of platforms to grant more leeway to connected groups and to enable a true form of distributed leadership without compromising the company’s safety

Platforms bring tools, services, expectations and boundaries in one system. Smaller systems (such as teams), called pods, can adopt the platform and are free to self-organize independently within the boundaries set by the platform. This grants a lot of freedom to these pods while controlling the risks. The learning done by any of these pods can improve the platform to the benefit of all. Even the catastrophic failure of a pod will positively improve the platform rather than contaminate other pods.

Not only does this approach help bring antifragility to a large organism (like a whole division or an entire company), but it can also be implemented at a small scale first and spread progressively across the organization.

Triadic Relationships and Networked Leadership

The Triadic Relationships of Tribal Leadership is a great approach to create those networked connections and balance relationships and the spread of information by making relations and conversations three-way rather than two-way affairs. It makes systems more resilient by improving transparency. It also fosters safety and fast learning, two key elements in making people awesome. Awesome people form into awesome groups, or tribes, that have a better attitude and can accomplish a lot more. The role of a leader is to create other leaders, and networks of leaders across the organization. By doing that, they create a widely distributed system of decision-making that is faster and better by virtue of being closer to the problem, and still be accomplished by trusted people.

The saying “too many chiefs and not enough indians” does not apply here. A leader is not a boss: the former empowers others while the latter concentrates power. A bellhop can be a leader even if he has no one to lead but himself: all that is required is initiative and reliability, an inquisitive and open mind, trust and trustworthiness as well as the desire to make others reach their potential.

Where to Go From Here

Networked relationships & systems, situational awareness, experimenting & growing from challenges, distributed leadership, safety: these ideas are not new, but they matter now more than ever.

If you want to experiment with these ideas, do not hesitate. Most of these concepts are high level and you can explore them within your context with little effort and little risk, as long as you follow the Learn & Experiment Rapidly principle: small scale, well-defined experiments with clear goals within a limited time frame.

For larger experiment or organizational transformations, make sure to talk to a professional first. A bit of planning can go a long way to ensure success and reduce risk, stress and trauma on a system.

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