Crisis = Opportunity

Here in Australia (and around the world) we have seen crisis after crisis recently. In the last 6 months or so we have seen a horrific fire season that flattened whole towns and vast areas of wilderness. We have seen a global pandemic that has devastated lives around the world. We have seen the Black Lives Matter movement sparked by events overseas, but now shining a long overdue light on the lives of our Indigenous people and their often horrific treatment by law enforcement, and society in general. So far, 2020 has been a year of constant crisis.

It's an old cliche that every crisis is an opportunity in disguise. It usually pops up on awful inspirational posters or the social media posts of people who look insufferably smug. Sadly, it seems that those posters and smug social media folks are right. A crisis provides a shock to the system. It breaks the existing order. It forces a rebuilding and that rebuilding is where the opportunity is, if we can seize it.

Coaching, LeadershipDave Martin21 July 2020leadership, positivity, organisational changeComment

Profit? Or Purpose?

What is the purpose of a company? Any company? Why do they exist? Why do they do the things they do, employ the people they employ, produce the products and services that they produce? Ask that question and most of the time you will get one answer - to make money. While that answer isn't wrong, it's also incomplete.

Legally, the directors of a company are required to maximise returns to shareholders. There are other legal requirements to make sure that a company is solvent, able to pays its bills and so on. So yes, making money is a important part of what a company does. But that's not its purpose - its reason for existing. Nothing exists just to produce money (except maybe for a mint but that's different). To be truly successful a company must fulfil some sort of other purpose - it must produce goods and services that people want to buy, and it must produce them in a way that is acceptable to the society in which they sell them. So really, an organisation's purpose is "Do XYZ, in order to be profitable". Not just "Be profitable".

Leadership, Organisational ChangeDave Martin26 May 2020purpose, leadershipComment

Physical Space Matters

One of the biggest changes the Coronavirus has made to the way we interact is that we are now interacting with each other not in the office, but in each other's homes. Their living rooms, kitchens, verandahs and home offices. The thing that strikes me about this is how personal those spaces are compared to our offices, and how comfortable people appear in their own spaces. Seeing this really brings home how much physical space matters in our work lives, and how much the design of our offices really lets us down.

Offices these days pretty much come in two flavours - the sterile cubicle farm and the modern funky. Your cube farm is the classic office layout, all beige or pastel panelling. An off white plywood desk in a tiny individual cubicle or (horror of horrors) a communal "pod". The modern funky office on the other hand is all bright colours, faux industrial chic furniture, exposed plywood, lots of communal spaces and plenty of green. This sort of office space is designed to scream out "Look at us…look how modern and funky we are!" Both of these office layouts are bad and, despite their very different appearances, for essentially the same reason.

Organisational Change, Coaching, LeadershipDave Martin12 May 2020empowerment, engagement, physical spaceComment

Moving Beyond Problem Solving

One of the most highly prized skills these days is problem solving. Being known as a problem solver is an almost surefire way to guarantee success in whatever organisation you are in. As the great Vanilla Ice once said - "If there was a problem, Yo, I'll solve it". Mind you, he did also say "Word to your mother" which is somewhat less profound. Problem solving is indeed a very valuable thing, but at the same time a very limited one. Problem solving implies finding the root cause of an issue and solving it - making sure that it doesn't occur again. But what happens when the root cause of a problem isn't something that can be fixed?

Many of the problems that confront organisations (and society as a whole) these days are not problems where you can look at the problem, see the root cause and fix the system so the problem goes away. Many of the key problems we face are caused not by an easily fixed flaw in the system, but by the system itself. They aren't really problems at all but behaviour that emerges from the operation of the system. What I'm talking about, of course, is complexity. When a system behaves in a complex way, it exhibits unexpected behaviour and we see that as a problem. But you can’t just go in and fix a complex system. Any fix you make will itself have unexpected consequences. Complex problems can't be fixed. At least not in the conventional sense of finding a root cause and applying a discreet solution. What do problem solvers do when confronted by complexity?

LeadershipDave Martin14 April 2020complexity, cynefyn, experimentationComment

Taking Responsibility

One of my favourite authors of all time is the late Sir Terry Pratchett (those of you who know me are currently making that "oh really, never would have guessed" face that people make when someone states the blindingly obvious). His books are a perfect blend of humour, absurdity, high fantasy and really, really deep insights into human behaviour. Over the last few months I have been re-reading my collection and have just reached what is probably my favourite Pratchett book of all - The Hogfather. While reading, one passage jumped out at me because I realised that I see this every day. At work and at home -

“The phrase ‘Someone ought to do something’ was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider ‘and that someone is me’.”
Terry Pratchett - The Hogfather

How often do we see this? Someone identifies a problem, points at it and says "problem over here... someone fix it", maybe raises a ticket in the appropriate ticketing system... then walks away, patting themselves on the back for a job well done. How often is the person who does that us?

LeadershipDave Martin31 March 2020responsibility, process improvement, leadershipComment

No One Comes To Work To Do Bad Things

No one comes in to work and deliberately tries to make your day bad. Actually, let me amend that slightly - very, very few people come in to work and deliberately try to make your day bad. There is a very small percentage of people who are vindictive, hateful, small minded, petty people (or just plain old psychopaths) who will deliberately come in to work and delight in spreading misery and pain wherever they go. Whether it's to make everyone else feel as miserable as them, or whether it's because they get joy from other's misery, whatever the reason, these people are few and far between. We are not concerned with them.

What we are concerned with are the other 99.99% of the population who aren't raving psychopaths. Who are genuinely nice people, who care about others and would never dream of inflicting pain and suffering; but who proceed to come in to work and make your day rotten anyway. Why would they do that? What turns normal, caring, decent people into mobile misery factories? What makes them hinder, block and frustrate us at every turn?

LeadershipDave Martin19 November 2019leadership, measurement, culture, systems, processComment

Our Need To Be Right

The meeting has become a little heated. Battle lines have been drawn. The argument has been going for a while now. Neither side is backing down. But then you see it! A chink in their logical armour. A flaw in their argument. This is your chance. You marshal your thoughts and go in for the kill! The argument is yours! It will be your proposal that gets accepted, not theirs. I mean, sure, their proposal had some good points, but yours was clearly superior. Clearly. Probably a good thing they didn't pick up in that bit where you had to fudge some numbers to make things look better… like you did with theirs.

OK. How often have we sat on the sidelines watching others slug it out and thought about how the argument has gone on way past the point where it is about getting a good outcome and become about winning the argument instead? Regardless of the quality of the outcome? How often have we been in this sort of situation ourselves and thought about how important it is to win the argument? So why does this happen? Why can we see how silly it is when we watch others but can't see that same behaviour in ourselves?

LeadershipDave Martin7 November 2019communication, coaching, personal growthComment

Empowerment and Control

One of the most common complaints I hear when speaking to senior leaders is around a lack of empowerment in their teams. More specifically, the leader is trying to empower their people but the people are not responding - "I have told them they are empowered, but they still come to me for every little decision". Empowerment is a tricky thing. Telling people that they are empowered is easy, getting them to behave in an empowered way is a very different matter. The problem here is that we are looking at empowerment the wrong way round. Empowerment is not something you can just give to someone. While the giving of empowerment is important, it's not the only step. Empowerment only works when the receiver accepts it. You can give empowerment all you like, but if the intended recipient doesn't accept that empowerment, nothing will happen.

But why wouldn't someone accept empowerment? Everyone wants to be empowered don't they? Why don't they jump at the chance? Many years ago I worked for a very large engineering company and the management wanted to try out this brand new (It was a long time ago) empowerment thing. So they gave every employee an "empowerment card" with a statement from the CEO on it that said that anyone in the organisation was empowered to make any decision required. The idea was that if you wanted to seize empowerment by the horns and make a decision that was out of your normal role, you could whip out your card, toss it on the table and say "The CEO has empowered me to make this decision", and away you go. Sounds great doesn't it? Trouble is, not one person used it. Out of the 150,000 people in the company, not one person used one. Zero. Why?

Organisational Change, LeadershipDave Martin22 October 2019leadership, empowerment, controlComment

Decision Making and A Culture of Trust

Last time we looked at the Advice Process as a simple (in principal) 4 step decision making technique -

Decide who should decide
Make a proposal
Seek advice
Decide.

While the process itself is very simple, getting it working in most organisations is very tricky because it completely upends a number of pretty baked in cultural conventions - use of hierarchical authority, undermining consensus to get your own way, lack of trust requiring approvals and so on. The existing culture will fight this process every inch of the way. But, if the organisation is really serious, really puts some resources into this and pushes it forward, it can act as a significant catalyst to cultural change. By changing the way decisions are made, the cultural conventions around decision making can be transformed.

Leadership, Organisational ChangeDave Martin8 October 2019trust, leadership, decision making, decentralisingComment