Think back to the last time you joined a new organisation. What was your onboarding like? “Hi, here's your laptop. Here's where the toilets are. Here is the printer. Here is the cupboard with the pens. Here are a whole bunch of people whose names you won't remember for weeks. Here's a technical introduction to the work. Here are your logins to the tools you will need. Off you go.” There might be a welcome lunch to help you get to know the people you will be working with, or some sort of ritual embarrassment at the next all hands meeting so they can "get to know you" a bit better (what's one thing about you that no one knows...). There will probably be some mandatory, cover-our-legal-butts "training" in health and safety and various HR policies that will leave you feeling dumber than when you started.

I suspect most people around the world have similar onboarding experiences in just about every organisation. It's the way things are done. And it's wrong. Not so much for what it includes, but for what it leaves out. The traditional onboarding experience misses some crucial things that help new people get settled into a new role in a new organisation. While it might give you the basic mechanics of your job, it doesn't help you integrate into the new organisation. You are left to discover all the hidden little things all by yourself. The fact that we can't raise that topic in meetings because of last time. The fact that while the process says this, what we actually do is something else because of history. Or the fact that, given a choice between this and that, we always chose this because that's what is important to the organisation. In short, what traditional onboarding doesn't do is introduce you to the culture of the organisation you have just joined.

We all carry within us a picture of how we would like reality to be. Then there is the objective reality that surrounds us. When those two do not agree, an uncomfortable tension is built up and it is this tension that creates the desire for change. Our imagined state is usually a much happier/more productive/more complete state than the one we actually find ourselves in. How many times have you said to yourself something like "I wish I could be more..." or even more commonly "I wish work could be more like...."? The difference between our dreams and aspirations and where we find ourselves creates a mental tension and this drives the desire to change.

Mental tension is uncomfortable. It needs to be resolved. It won't resolve itself - something needs to change to resolve that tension. There are only two things that can change here, either we make changes to make the world we live in more like the one we aspire to, or we lower our aspirations to make our dreams more like reality. Either we change the world, or the world changes us. Unfortunately, it is often much easier to adjust our aspirations downwards than to make real change in the world.

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".

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?

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.

Last time we looked at some of the problems organisations face around decision making using traditional top down or consensus based techniques. We also introduced the idea of collaborative non consensus as a decision making technique - where everyone can discuss the decision but not everyone has to agree to the decision for it to be ratified. These can range from fairly simple systems where people can say “yes”, “no” or "can live it it" which allows them to raise an objection but not veto the whole decision, right up to fairly involved systems based around the idea of principles and objections - objections based not on just not liking an idea but on violating some fundamental principle that the organisation lives by.

While principled systems work well for organisations that are deeply in touch with their principles, other organisations may need a more structured approach. One such approach is the Advice Process which was developed at an organisation called AES many years ago and was documented in Frederic Laloux's wonderful book Reinventing Organisations. The Advice process is a simple, structured decision making process that involves 4 steps -

• Deciding who decides

• The Proposal

• Seeking Advice

• The Decision

Probably the least understood (or most misunderstood) lean principle is "decide as late as possible". I have seen it used to justify all sorts of weird decision-making policies that generally involve never making decisions, because surely as late as possible means leaving it until the absolute last possible moment, or even later. I have seldom, if ever, seen it applied correctly. So let's take a look at this principle and see what it really means.

The other way to express this principle is "defer decisions until the last responsible moment". There are two points of confusion here. The first is what is the last responsible moment? The other is what exactly do we mean by deferring decisions? Let's look at the last responsible moment. What is the last responsible moment? Does it mean the absolute last minute? Do we leave all decisions until we are absolutely forced to make one because otherwise the whole endeavour will fall flat? No. That makes no sense at all. Leaving decisions until they are forced upon you is hardly being responsible. Does it mean making decisions early because that's the responsible thing to do? Again, no. Making decisions early isn't using the last responsible moment. The last responsible moment is a really hard thing to define, so let's not try. Let's re-word it instead. The intent of the last responsible moment is to make decisions with the maximum possible information.

"We need to harden this process...make it more robust. Too many things are slipping through the cracks". How many times have you heard statements like that? Things that don't fit the process take extra time to resolve, so we make sure that the process covers as much as possible. As issues arise, we tighten the process still further. Spell out the entry criteria. Map the process steps in great detail. The problem is, of course, that no matter how much detail we have in the process, things still don't always fit so we document and harden even more.

We create processes and because we are humans working with incomplete information, there are gaps. Our natural instinct then is to fill in the gaps. Tighten the process. Specify, document, enforce. The problem is that this simply doesn't work. The real world conspires against us. Customers don't always want the standard product. You may have a carefully documented 30 day SLA but that doesn't help a bit when a key customer rings up and says "We know it's usually 30 days but we really need it in 10, can you please help? If not, your competitor has said they can do it in 10 days." You may only sell in lots of 100 but what happens if a good customer rings up and asks for an extra 35 because they have had a spike in sales but don't have the space to store another full hundred? The more rigid we make our processes the more often they break down.

There has been a lot of talk at work about increasing empowerment and employee engagement. The common complaint I get from management is that "we have empowered our people but they just won't make use of it". It's a common story. Management gives empowerment but nothing at all happens. Things go on as they did before - everyone looks to management for direction. No one takes initiative. No one takes ownership. No one is empowered.

Empowerment takes more than a few words from management. You can't just tell people they are empowered and lo and behold, they are empowered. Empowerment is something people can't be given. They need to take it, it isn't something you can give. It is something people need to become. Management can't give empowerment. What they need to do is create an environment that allows people to become empowered.