We all have a collection of things in our lives that we would like to change. When it comes to change, we often find that it's a lot harder than we expect it to be. Even small things turn out to be much more difficult that we think they should be. The problem comes down to control.

In order to change something to be exactly the way you want it, you need to control it. If you try to change something you have no control over, you will fail. A lot of coaches and consultants will get you to draw diagrams showing the things you control vs the things you don't. The message is that you can change the things you control and can only influence the things you don’t. If you want to change something the way to do that is to expand your sphere of control - try to gain control of the thing you want to change. Unfortunately, 99% of those diagrams are completely wrong. We generally have control over far less than we think we do.

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?

For the last few weeks (interrupted briefly by the holiday break) we have been looking at executive coaching. We have taken a look at some of the big problems executives face and at some of the ways we can use agile tools to help resolve them. We have looked at resource planning, controlling financial spend and estimating ROI. All these things, though, are manifestations of a more fundamental problem - the problem of control. Control is a real issue for executives. They are responsible for a P&L. They have business goals to meet. They have people under them to meet those goals. They are expected to be in control.

In a traditional environment they maintain control through their position as central decision maker. Any significant decision will be funneled up through them. In an agile environment we recognise that centralised decision making is slow and inefficient, so we decentralise the decision making for efficiency. The problem is that, to the exec, we have taken away their decision making (and therefore their control) and not given them any other control mechanism to replace it. Without some alternative control mechanism, execs in an agile environment will continue to rely on their old control mechanism - centralised decision making - to the detriment of the agility of the group. All the unnecessary steering committees, status reports, executive briefings, financial controls, and so on are all manifestations of this fundamental problem - how does an executive maintain control when they are no longer the one making all the key decisions?