Caterfly Blogs

Author: Francois Knuchel

  • Embracing VUCA in business

    Embracing VUCA in business

    Embracing the opportunities of VUCA in business

    Meeting Complexity with Complexity

    Never has there been so much complexity in our world. Running institutions is proving increasingly difficult due to the complexity they are operating under. Complexity appears to have a life of its own, making it more difficult for organisations to organise themselves sustainably.

    Or is it? Is our world really becoming more complex? Or isn’t it just that the methods we are using were never designed for complexity? Isn’t it that leadership in complexity requires a different set of tools, a different mindset, different ways of working? If so, wouldn’t it be better to change our methods and mindset, rather than blaming complexity?

    In this article, I want to give an overview of a few of the key thinkers and researchers who have been exploring complexity and uncertainty in a business organisational setting.

    The Consequences of VUCA

    Complexity is one of four challenges expressed in the acronym VUCA – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. The term VUCA was first used in US military, but has largely been adopted in the business world to refer to challenges which traditional leadership models find difficult to address. There is an ever-growing awareness that the methods and mindsets that have worked well in the past do not work in our “complex and uncertain” environment.

    Many who have studied different aspects of VUCA and ‘wicked problems’ have concluded that it requires different skills, structures, modus operandi, mindsets and organisational principles from those currently taught and practised. This is true in education, politics, business, communities as well as other societal institutions. It turns out our current leadership approaches are counter-productive, even harmful, to working with uncertainty and complexity. In trying to gain control of complexities, in trying to get a grip, our management methods are actually making things worse.

    Are uncertainty and complexity new phenomena? This is unlikely, indeed they have always existed – think of parents raising children, intricately complex and unpredictable, yet generally managed quite well by most. Or think of farmers and how they have to work with changing and uncertain weather conditions. Uncertainty and complexity are not new!

    While there is nothing new about VUCA (except the acronym itself), its omnipresence appears to be increasing probably due to, on one hand, external factors like globalisation, the internet and technological interdependence. And on the other hand, I would argue that the cumulative effect of applying the wrong management practices to complexity has exacerbated the challenges of VUCA, a bit like continuously trying to put out a fire with oil instead of water.

    The Problem with Management

    Applying dehumanising command and control hierarchical management methods over 100 years has progressively made complexity more complex. Ignoring or suppressing issues like the climate crisis, has led to the world becoming ever more unstable and uncertain, to the point now where the existence of many of our institutions is threatened, if not our whole civilisation.

    This is bad news for managers and executives in organisations because it requires a complete overhaul of how organisations are run. It is also bad news for politicians, as is evident from the way our Western democracies are breaking down, with politics becoming increasingly divisive and toxic. Education also needs a complete rethink, essentially because it is teaching the wrong skills and mindset.

    The ‘natural’ management response to complexity is to do more of what created it in the first place, i.e. to fight and bring it under control, to suppress it or to ‘fix’ it, rather than to accept and work with it. What complexity requires is the forming of a complete picture of an issue (symptoms), looking at it from various angles to identify the root causes (problems), from which new patterns can emerge. Because any individual is limited by the filters or lens he/she perceives through, this can only be achieved by including and integrating the perspectives of all the people affected. Yet this is precisely what our current management structures discourage ….. and so we throw more oil onto the fire.

    Retired business strategy and one of the earlier human complexity researcher Ralph Stacey, for instance, a mathematician who spent many years working with leaders in industry before returning to academia, concludes that most management activities in organisations, like annual budgeting, planning & control and strategy development are largely meaningless in an unpredictable world, and therefore a waste. Worse, he reports senior executives often know or intuit this, yet continue to endorse these wasteful activities simply because, like religious rituals, they maintain stability in organisations and minimise the anxiety that would otherwise arise when facing the abyss of uncertainty. While Stacey has elaborated a complex theory of complexity transformation, in order to address the disconnect he essentially calls for more wide-scale conversations in the form of what he called “reflexive inquiry”, the most complex of all complexities.

    So what can we do about VUCA? How can we respond to it? And specifically, rather than fighting or fixing complexity, how can we work with it to our advantage, how can we make it our friend, and how can we embrace VUCA? What follows is the research and thinking of VUCA researchers who work practically in the field within organisations.

    Cynefin

    If you have not come across Dave Snowden‘s Cynefin sense-making model you should definitely do so when exploring complexity. The Cynefin framework offers an easy-to-understand way of looking at complexity. Most complexity research is based on mathematics, computer science, biology and physics. The Cynefin framework is one of the earlier attempts to relate complexity to leadership, culture and organisational development, by exploring the human dimension of sense-making and decision-making.

    In the Cynefin framework there are four quadrants: Simple or Obvious, Complicated, Complex and Chaos. The suggestion is that all problems or challenges fall into one of these, each quadrant requires a completely different way of solving the problem, and this framework helps decision-makers decide what kind of thinking they should apply to solve a problem.

    Graphic showing the Cynefin 4 part model: Complex, Complicated, Chaotic, Simple

    Cynefin was conceived in an IT data management context. The framework cannot always be applied in non-IT contexts, so while it is useful conceptually there is more to complexity than Cynefin, and we should also explore other avenues. Many of Dave Snowden’s presentations have been recorded and are worth listening to, if you can get past his cynicism. The name Cynefin has an interesting connotation to complexity – it is the Welsh word for habitat, but refers to one’s place of multiple belongings (cultural, family, national, religious, geographic etc.)!

    Vertical or Horizontal

    Vertical cost management, which aims to reduce costs, actually achieve the opposite, they increase costs when analysed through the systems lens of the total organisational cost rather than just myopically at the particular activities which are being cost-managed.

    Uncertainty and unpredictability have ramifications for many of our management practices. It has been shown, for instance, that our practices of vertical cost management, which aim to reduce costs, actually achieve the opposite, they increase costs when analysed through the systems lens of the total organisational cost rather than just myopically at the particular activities which are being cost-managed. This is because they divert attention away from what really matters in business, customer satisfaction, to mere cost reduction compliance. Essentially one cannot ‘improve’ the whole simply by working on the parts, indeed that is often harmful, as Russell Ackoff has repeatedly emphasised, a point often missed by financial control.

    Cost management tends to increase ‘failure demand’, a term invented by consultant John Seddon in his Vanguard Method. Failure Demand (as opposed to Value Demand) is generated when not meeting real customer needs. The failure arises from cost management methods focussing on measuring the efficiency of response to (failure) demand, rather than on working on eliminating those failures in the first place. This is also a premise of Beyond Budgeting, as well as one of its derivatives, consultant Niels Pflaeging‘s Beta Codex (see his book Organising for Complexity). Likewise Toyota and Edward Deming already recognised this 50 years ago when they famously showed how, for instance, you do not improve the quality of a product by increasing the inspection at the end of the line; rather you integrate a horizontal zero-defect ‘customer’ mindset on the shop floor, using an ‘internal customer’ outlook and tools like A3-thinking. This has proven very difficult for Western organisations to apply, because it essentially means giving thinking power back to the workers, effectively making management as we know it ‘redundant’.

    VUCA Skills

    Switching to an educational setting, researcher Dr Theo Dawson has been exploring the ‘Lexica scale’ based on people’s innate curiosity and learning ability, and by implication organisations’ ability to learn and adapt, vital in a world of VUCA. Working with VUCA requires a departure from our traditional (Darwinian?) competitive, adversarial way of thinking taught at school and practiced in politics, the courts and business. She refers to developing specific ‘VUCA skills’. VUCA skills include

    • interpersonal skills (e.g. active listening),
    • perspective coordination skills (complementarity),
    • contextual thinking skills (shifting perspectives according to context) and
    • collaboration skills (inclusive decision-making);

    so, overall the ability to integrate and coordinate solutions collectively. This is a move away from ‘either-or’ thinking towards ‘both-and’ thinking. The inclusion of different perspectives, rather than their exclusion, is what is crucial here. Our Western democracies are falling apart, because the voting system excludes minorities whose perspectives are simply excluded and ignored. By continuing to teach adversarial debating and competitive achievement skills in education we are putting more oil on the fire – resulting in our society being increasingly divided and toxic.

    VUCA requires the integration and fusion of different perspectives, and not alpha heroes with all the ‘right’ answers. Our educational testing culture, however, does not allow for ‘not knowing’ – schools teach us there is always a right answer which we should know. VUCA skills, on the other hand, suggest we have to unlearn this habit of (pretending to) knowing the answer. What we should learn, instead, is how to respond to complex problems from a vantage point of not knowing, probingly approaching inquiry with an empty mind and humility; likewise we need to learn how to integrate seemingly polar opposite perspectives collaboratively.

    Like learning to drive or dance at first, acquiring these integration skills can initially feel rather awkward and ‘unnatural’, and we easily revert to the old prima donna habits taught at school. Some of the ways suggested to learn these VUCA skills include design thinking and practicing Sociocracy. We should take note, however, that one cannot learn integration skills by oneself, these have to be practised and refined in groups. We therefore need to create more Communities of Practice where people can hone these new skills. Except for side activities like team sports and school plays our education rarely provides opportunities for pupils to learn these skills – again, education needs reinventing.

    Rich Interconnectivity

    While it is important to work on individual and team / community skills at the micro-level, this is insufficient without also redesigning the system and culture at the macro-level. This is why the work of practical researchers like Prof Mary Uhl-Bien is important. Building on the huge knowledge base developed in the sciences Uhl-Bien explores the human application of complexity in corporations, a distinctly non-mathematical social technology application of complexity.

    Uhl-Bien defines complexity as ‘rich interconnectivity’. Interconnecting parts become complex when the parts interacting actually influence and change each other. She gives mayonnaise as an example in that once the egg and oil atoms start interacting they influence each other and change to a point where they cannot revert back to their original state, like a butterfly never reverts to a caterpillar. This happens in human interactions, whereby people influence and change each other unconsciously – like lovers being subtly yet irrevocably transformed after falling out of love from when they first fell in love.

    The richness in interconnectivity is generated by networked parts being as diverse in outlook as possible and being constantly evolving. So while intensive project teams can be deeply effective, for instance, they need to be complemented by another mechanism which magnifies exposure to a dynamic and ever-changing multitude of perspectives.

    Uhl-Bien’s team has researched many organisations and observed most try to manage complexity by controlling it. This is precisely what makes it worse. Complexity comprises many moving and interacting parts, and the best way to work with complexity is through complexity itself in what she calls Adaptive Space. What this means is bringing in intermingling constantly reforming and interacting networks of multi-perspectivity into conversation.  In an organisation, Adaptive Space sits in between the entrepreneurial / innovative system and the result-driven / operational system. This is currently missing in the structure of most organisations.

    Adaptive Space is created by letting the many interacting parts and networks move and intermix, thereby interacting more intensively, richly. This is what enables new ways or patterns to emerge. Most organisations tend to control or terminate such moving interactions and get people to stay in their place, in teams and silos, which has the opposite effect. Uhl-Bien advocates pan-organisational Adaptive Spaces with a strong focus on interchange and connectivity, using practices like Liberating Structures and the like.

    A key part in this process is the interplay between Linking and Conflicting. Without tension and conflict, there is no flame of interactivity, but this has to be combined with linking and connecting. It is this combination that sparks new patterns, new ideas, new thinking. Adaptive space should be a safe space where both conflicting and linking can occur. To enable such spaces, a new type of leader is required, which Uhl-Bien simply refers to as ‘Adaptive Leaders’. They have (or need to learn) their own special sets of skills, which are different from entrepreneurial or from operational leadership skills. As I see it the Adaptive Leader skills required are those of, in the jargon, ‘facilitative leadership’.

    So in addition to VUCA skills, what complexity calls for are deeper conversations that matter, or as Stacey says reflexive enquiry.  However Uhl-Bien emphasises the conversations themselves should be complex bringing in multifaceted, dynamic and undirected, so not just within existing teams, departments and silos, but across the different areas of an organisation. The Adaptive Space maintains a balance between the innovative spirit of an organisation and its operational stability so that both innovation and delivery can prosper while keeping the organisation adaptive and alive.  Richness of interconnectivity creates serendipitous cross-pollination of ideas and bring in a multitude of perspectives from different parts of an organisation intermingling, forming rich exchanges, and thereby meet complexity with complexity

    This rich interactivity and emergence is precisely what Open Space Technology thrives on as well! Open Space may appear chaotic and complex, but it takes complexity to work with complexity. Harrison Owen knew it all along.

    Conclusion

    In short, overall what VUCA requires are new individual and team skills of integration and complementarity learned in groups through Communities of Practice. At an organisational level, this needs to be combined with rich interconnectivity of interchangeable networks with a diversity of perspectives brought together in Adaptive Spaces. By applying this human intermixing interactivity, with everyone fully engaged meeting complexity with complexity, organisations should be able to embrace VUCA for the new emerging opportunities it brings.

  • Why do Organisations need more trained Facilitators?

    Why do Organisations need more trained Facilitators?

    What trained Open Space Technology Facilitators could do for Organisations

    Many companies suffer from a lack of cohesion and connectedness. Managers and staff alike generally lack a holistic view of their organisation in terms of its internal flow of energy and value creation. Most people in organisations do not have a full view of what goes on across the organisation, and the executives at the top may have an overview of the various departments, but generally have little understanding of what the issues are at the shop floor level.

    This lack of a multi-disciplinary and holistic view of their own organisation is manifest in the way departments and teams often work in very entrenched silo mentalities. Silos produce poor cross-departmental collaboration and pan-organisational coherence. The situation is particularly acute in Western companies where people typically specialise in one area of work and then stay in their field – if they do move on, they tend to go on to similar work elsewhere, changing company rather than changing type of work.

    This contrasts to Asian firms, in particular Japanese, where people are routinely rotated to different departments, irrespective of their specialities, typically in 2-5 year cycles, so that as they become more senior, irrespective of position, they gain a good understanding of how the company works and in particular are sympathetic to the various perspectives as seen from different parts of the organisation – in short they also become generalists with a holistic view of the organisation and its place in society, they are the bridges and glue of the whole.

    In the West we tend to put resources in tools like process improvements, particularly at a team level. Agile implementations and moves towards business agility are examples of current day efforts to improve team effectiveness, and thus the ability to add value for customers in a speedy, flexible and iterative way. Which is all great, but this happens at a team or section level, with ‘high performing’ teams often rewarded irrespective of whether their high performance is actually beneficial to the smooth operation of the whole organisation as a whole. This is like putting a high performing Rolls Royce engine in a Volkswagen Beetle chassis – this would prove untenable, the Beetle was never designed to cope with the power of the RR engine, the whole would crumble in the long run. Likewise interventions are usually isolated and do not tackle the challenge of getting the organisation to operate more effectively and coherently as one whole.

    Moreover, an organisation is only as effective as its weakest link, so concentrating resources on some priority teams while largely ignoring others, or while not considering how this might effect the whole, can actually dampen the overall organisational effectiveness. Even with balanced high performing teams there is often no engagement model in place that guarantees that all teams are operating in tandem towards the same purpose. One often finds teams competing with each other internally, or unknowingly duplicating efforts.

    So how could we get more pan-organisational collaboration, cohesion and innovation across the organisation, without switching to an Asian style rotation system, (which would take a full generation before its benefits became apparent, so hardly feasible)? What could we do to enable more pan-organisational coherence and collaboration, and for everyone to start thinking about their organisation more holistically? Why aren’t organisations putting more resources into developing such pan-organisational cohesion?

    There may be several reasons:

    • a general lack of awareness of the need for it (it is not on people’s minds first and foremost)
    • organisations having no experience in trying to achieve coherence
    • no knowledge or expertise within the organisation on how to do it
    • nobody knowing how to “plan” the thousands of conversations that would need to happen to enable pan-organisational exchange
    • likewise nobody in the organisation knowing, for instance, how to run large-scale participatory meetings, instead only relying speaker-centered conferences or motivational talks (which by nature are non-participatory)
    • No understanding for ‘unplanning’ conversations to engender serendipitous or emergent conversations
    • in a mechanistic view of the organisation open-ended chaordic interventions seen as a waste of time, with the bureaucratic command and control approach asserting itself
    • similarly innovation viewed as something best left to the ‘innovation specialists’ – unfortunately many a bright idea from staff, coming from a place of understanding the customer, gets sidelined with this attitude.

    Clearly we need pan-organisational models of engagement. These do exist. They can be found in practices such as Presencing Theatre, World Cafe, Appreciative Enquiry, Circle Ways, The Art of Hosting and many other participatory approaches also collated in Liberating Structures. The most open-ended and engaging approach of them all, however, which really allows genuine pan-organisational conversations that matter to emerge, is Open Space Technology (commonly Open Space), the structure used in ‘Unconference’, ‘Hackathon‘ and ‘BarCamp’ events. While there are many ways to run concurrent conversations, Open Space Technology does this particularly well at scale, and is ideal in larger organisations needing cross-departmental exchange at all levels simultaneously.

    Open Space Technology, commonly Open Space, is a method for hosting highly participatory, large group, whole-system collaboration based on self-organisation in which participants themselves co-create the agenda, experience and outcomes that matter to them. Click here to see our article What is Open Space Technology?

    The components of Open Space graphic

    Open Space Technology is described in more detail elsewhere. My purpose here is to encourage larger organisations to use Open Space Technology much more frequently and for them to hire or train a few internal facilitators who can actually run Open Space Tech events within their organisation. There is no reason why an Open Space Tech event should be a one-off occasion. If organisations want genuine agility in their organisations, then running Open Space events should be a regular occurrence.

    Open Space Technology has many benefits (see Beyond unConferences) but in the context of pan-organisational collaboration, innovation and coherence Open Space Technology enables cross-fertilisation of ideas and cross-collaboration across departments in a highly interactive environment at once on a massive scale. An Open Space event can lead collectively to a holistic re-energising of the whole organisation, creating conditions for the organisation to thrive organically. Moreover it can be a massive and long-lasting boost to staff engagement and morale, largely because deep conversations that matter to them can take place. These vital conversations are rarely had in organisations, and yet are hugely necessary for people within the organisation to flourish.

    The benefits of using pan-organisational Open Space Tech for organisations are:

    • it helps bridge departments, and thus breaks down silos, encouraging collaboration rather than internal competition
    • it stimulates over time a systems view of the organisation amongst all staff, thus facilitating constructive dialogue between different parts of the organisation
    • it shifts everyone into an ‘innovation mode‘ and elevates the creativity of the whole organisation; this enables complex problem-solving and disruptive innovation
    • it is a brilliant basis for invitation-based culture change
    • it represents a highly effective model of engagement, rejuvenating staff co-creativity
    • it enables expanded stakeholder dialogues to take place involving the wider organisation
    • it enables conversations to emerge which could never have been planned
    • it encourages the emergence of new ideas and concepts otherwise inconceivable
    • Its self-organising, autonomous and peer-learning format forms the basis for creating a learning organisation.

    Ultimately Open Space Tech enables thousands of meaningful conversations to happen serendipitously at scale and across the organisation that otherwise would never have happened and would have been impossible to plan, all within a limited time scale (1-2 days)

    So given Open Space Technology has so many advantages, why is it not used more frequently in organisations? What are the stumbling blocks? Some have already been mentioned earlier, but here are few as more:

    • it can be logistically demanding, the larger the number of invitees, the better, but also the more demanding it is to organise; Open Space Tech has no limit to size (other than the capacity of venue)
    • a general lack of awareness, or a perceived weirdness of the process
    • poor quality of facilitators (wanting to ‘manage’ the process, combine it or trying to ‘improve’ it)
    • unpredictable outcome can be scary
    • perceived costs (in fact Open Space Tech is a lot cheaper, but like a plane crash it sounds big when it happens)
    • for most managers not having a clear agenda feels rather frightening.

    Facilitator introduces an Open Space event. Martin GrimshawThis lack of a clear agenda (the agenda is created by the participants on the spot at the start of an Open Space Event) is probably the biggest stumbling block within commercial organisations, as managers and sponsors are often expected to state clearly what the anticipated outcomes of such a meeting should be (in order to justify the funding for it, for instance). Yet that is precisely the catch 22. Open Space Technology relies on emergence, serendipity and new creative solutions to whatever challenges brought the people together to the Open Space event in the first place. Agendas pre-define solutions, they pre-determine outcomes and as such they stifle emergence. The whole point of Open Space Technology without pre-set agendas is to enable issues to emerge which would otherwise never have arisen.

    Agendas kill emergence and thereby also stifle innovation and motivation. People feel caged in by (other people’s) agendas. Yet for managers coming from a mechanical view of business, “agendalessness” is most difficult to fathom. Managers will almost always want to interfere and include some agenda. It is ironic that in our times when leaders are crying for more staff engagement, collaboration, participation, accountability and innovation, they are also imposing more agendas, the very thing that kills all those virtues. Agendas create precisely those conditions which disengage people. The only agenda that works is one created by ALL those participating there and then, in the here and now, in a free market-place where people can opt in and out of the authentic conversations.

    To be blunt: As a manager you can either have engagement and innovation, or you can have agendas and outcomes, but you cannot have both – they cancel each other out. So if agendas and outcomes are what you want, fine, don’t use Open Space Technology, but don’t expect engagement and innovation either. If engagement and innovation are what you want, however, then you have to be willing to let go of any agenda, or rather let the staff and workers determine and deliberate their own issues.
    The Law Of Two Feet as butterfly wings and rainbow colours
    Annette Zera: The Law of Two Feet

    For this reason, it is important that some people in the organisation know how to run Open Space Technology events. In particular they need to fully understand the issues around invitations, agendas, co-creation and emergence. It needs people who can resist what many managers want, such as adding items to an agenda in advance. Because Open Space Tech meetings operate on the basis of opt-in invitation, people will only feel inspired to join a meeting, if it is about an issue that concerns them, is burning for them, and is not laden with pre-conceived solutions which do not address their perspective. Open Space Tech facilitators need to have a thorough understanding of the role of invitation (versus imposition) and the effect of agendas on the matter.

    There is a general need for organisations to have more facilitators and facilitative leaders, if organisations are to thrive (through innovation and collaboration). But they should also have an Open Space Tech facilitator or two at hand. While more general facilitators or organisational development practitioners are in a good position to introduce people-centric participatory next stage ways of organising and working to the organisation, there should ideally be someone who is specifically able to bring about a pan-organisational, cross-functional and holistic understanding of, and engagement in, the organisation through Open Space Technology. What is needed are facilitators who can bring about internal flexibility and agility by calling Open Space events at short notice, while also understanding the importance of creating a safe and transparent environment for emergence to happen, opening and holding the space.

    In the long run Open Space Technology can set some foundations for the organisation to shift from a mechanical command-and-control perspective to a more living, organic and responsive one, one able tocontinuously adapt and learn. Larger organisations should therefore have one or two internal Open Space Tech facilitators. Ideally organisations should be operating in a permanent Open Space Tech mode or mindset all the time, and having an Open Space Tech facilitator on board who can keep that spirit alive would be nothing but beneficial.

     

  • The Issue with Hierarchy

    The Issue with Hierarchy

    First published at Medium https://medium.com/@f12uk/the-issue-with-hierarchy-a986f62963a5

     

    Nowadays discussions about hierarchy abound, especially in organisations, some arguing you need hierarchy to run an organisation, otherwise you have chaos, while others deploring the negative effects of hierarchy, such as stifling innovation, or treating humans as mechanical cogs. These debates have come to the fore with the advent of self-organising structures, self-managing organisations and more recently the hubbub around companies without bosses, networks without hierarchies, and so on.

    There is no doubt that militaristic hierarchy can be toxic, especially when fostering independent creativity, innovation and autonomous problem-solving, (and I’m fully aligned with those who have a natural aversion to hierarchy as it is often applied.) Yet it seems to me just abolishing hierarchy, as many movements are trying to do, is somewhat misguided, missing the point, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

    Hierarchy can fundamentally be viewed as a thought tool or a cognitive skill, which enables humans to group things, ideas and concepts into categories. This ability to categorise allows us to build new constructs and prioritise things. Anyone who has ever tried to have a discussion with someone who sees the world as if it were flat, unable to distinguish between different levels of thinking, comparing dogs with animals, knows what I mean.

    In fact our ability to categorise into meta-levels and create higher and lower orders of categories is a fundamental feature of our human ability to think, it is what has enabled science and technology to progress, it is what has enabled humans to evolve, for better or worse. Hierarchies represent different levels of abstraction. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with hierarchy per se.

    Where things have gone pear-shaped, however, is where hierarchy has been hijacked by bullies seeking power. Associating power with hierarchy is probably related to Christian body-mind split, and the view that the mind is of a ‘higher order’ needing to control the body, treating the body as if it were some mindless loose morass which would run amok if not controlled.

    Views have changed, and there is a societal awareness of the toxicity and counter-productivity of this hierarchical power paradigm. It is hence not surprising that so many people are skeptical of anything that smacks of hierarchy. And when associated with power, justifiably so. However, when blindly rejecting hierarchy indiscriminately on that basis, there is a danger that we do throw the human baby and our core ability to think & prioritise out with the water at the same time.

    My view is that hierarchy should be allowed to live, even in human structures, as long it is used as a tool, and not as a rule (or as a way to rule). As I said, it is not hierarchy itself which intrinsically bad, but the misuse of it to serve the personal purposes of some domineering people.

    Unfortunately organisational hierarchy is normally illustrated with the boss at the top reigning over the various branches, the ‘subordinates’, who replicate the same structure further below. I prefer to draw organisational diagrams, if at all, the other way round, with the ‘highest’ level at the bottom, branching upwards, holding space and nurturing the ‘lower’ levels at the top, where the main value creating activities of the organisation are performed. This way customers, shop-floor staff and suppliers are no longer governed by corporate bosses and shareholders ruling at the top, but are themselves the main players, supported by co-ordinating stewards now at the bottom.

    The purpose of hierarchy in human organising became very clear to me from the work of Edwin John in India with his Children’s and Neighbourhood parliaments. Edwin John has spent a lifetime empowering both children and local communities through local ‘parliaments’. These neighbourhood parliaments get together regular to make their own decisions about things affecting their communities.

    Imagine a village, a street, and a neighbourhood say of 20 houses, whose residents meet regularly to determine key aspects in the community (street cleaning, education, sewage etc). With 200 houses in the street there may thus be around 20 such community parliaments. Let’s say now there is a matter concerning the whole street, this affects the other 20 neighbourhood parliaments, and all communities in the street have to be involved in the decision-making. It is difficult to have meetings of 200 households — the more people involved, the more cumbersome meetings become.

    So what Edwin John has done is to have each community elect a representative of each circle, of each neighbourhood parliament. The representatives of each community then meet to decide at a street level, each representative representing their community who elected them, thus creating a meta-circle. By nature this is now a new ‘higher’ level of hierarchy.

    This does not automatically mean, however, that the meta-level has power over the community they represent. Indeed to ensure this does not happen Edwin John has given each community the right to recall their representative and elect someone else, if they feel he or she is no longer representing the community. Not in 4 year’s time, but immediately! This is very different from the kind of representation UK parliamentary representatives see themselves taking on, who once elected seem to take things into own hands. In Edwin John’s neighbourhood hierarchy the essence of governance is still very much at the local level, and hierarchy is used as a bridging tool between communities.

    So we have here an example where hierarchy is being used benevolently, with huge positive effect. So when thinking of hierarchy, rather than throwing the baby out with bathwater, I invite you to use this example to reframe the way we use hierarchy in human organisations. This is in my view closer to the kind of cognitive hierarchy I mentioned at the beginning.

    This is not always easy, but whenever we get stuck, or start falling into the trap of treating hierarchy as power-over rather than power-with or different levels of abstraction, we should remind ourselves of the purpose of the hierarchy, starting from the local. Turn the hierarchy upside down, so that the visionaries “at the top” are now stewards at the bottom serving the community, the shop-floor and the ‘locals’ adding value.

    The recall button is key to keeping hierarchy away from the hungry wolves. Rather than just throwing hierarchy out completely and losing our baby, let’s ask ourselves who is serving whose needs. And if it is not the community’s needs, just recall the elected representative, immediately!

     

  • Open Space Agility Group

    As mentioned here, here and here, Caterfly’s Open Smart Transformation is a derivative of Prime-OS, from which the specific and elaborate work and practice of Open Space Agile adoptions by Daniel Mezick is derived.  Caterfly applies the same principles and practices which have been developed in detail for implementing Agile at scale in organisations to any form of organisational systems adoption or transformation (e.g. lean, teal, creative economy, sociocracy, holacracy, responsive etc).  The Open Space frame is the same, just the content, what is being implemented through coaching and co-creative iterations, is different.

    OpenSpace Agilility FacebookAnyone exploring any form of organisational transformation should find it useful follow recent developments in the agile adoption world.  You may also want to explore and join THE OPENSPACE AGILITY Facebook page, as well as follow Daniel Mezick’s blog and the OpenSpace Agility blog.

    More significantly, if you’re involved in adoptions or transformations, agile in particular, then you should read The Open Space Agility Handbook. This is an excellent clear and easy to follow how-to guide, which I have described in more detail in my book review and my blog.

    Daniel Mezick, his group and many associated agile coaches are organising and running various intensive courses in Open Space Agile Adoption processes, which cover both the theory and practice of agile adoptions using the invite and co-create approach in the USA and Canada, such as the next one in Montreal.  To get updates on courses on offer please refer to the course schedule.

    Finally nothing better than hearing managers within companies who have witnessed and experienced the process and led massive transformations within their organisations themselves using the process.  There are excellent video interviews available, but Daniel also occasionally runs live telephone 90-minute introductory discussions on Open Space Agility with one of the client managers participating as guest, so people can hear and ask those giving testimonials questions directly.  If you wish to join one of these telephone discussions, please check the training schedule.

    Finally to get a complete overview of all the resources available through Open Space Agility, it is best to check out the home overview page.

  • Ask, Then Invite to Co-create Change

    Ask, Then Invite to Co-create Change

    Scaled System Transformations in Organisations

    Have you ever been in an organisation where you were good at your job, efficient and productive, satisfied by what you achieved, hopeful about future prospects, respected in your expertise, and really feeling part of a good team? ……. and then all of a sudden, one day, out of the blue, you are told that some changes were going to happen; ……. and that a that a team of consultants were coming in to bring about these changes and introduce a new system (SAP, agile, lean………). This team then devotes time and energy explaining the purpose of the change, the why and how, and it all makes perfect logical sense, indeed the proposed changes are not dissimilar to changes you had proposed to your manager in the past. And yet, despite not disagreeing with the reasons for the change, your heart feels crushed, you somehow feel totally betrayed, utterly let down, completely undermined, leaving you shattered and dispirited.

    Dilbert embrace change

    Why? Because nobody in the organisation, none of your superiors, ever bothered to ask you. The changes touch on the essence of your work, and still you were not even consulted. Instead someone at the top decided this was a good idea, let’s bring in some change experts in to implement it, and the team of consultants, who know nothing about the operational side of the work you do, are brought in to tell you what to do. Why aren’t you, as a long-time loyal employee, dedicated to achieving the aims of the organisation, being at least asked about the matter, never mind consulted? Obviously you feel disrespected and undermined, but also angry – your self-esteem is under attack. Suddenly this new system seems alien to you.

    While on reflection you would have been quite an enthusiastic proponent of the changes being proposed, because they were brought on over your head without your consent and without your views being heard, suddenly you feel estranged, and this new system appears alien. You lose motivation, you don’t want to be part of it, and you start silently resisting the change. Not because you disagree fundamentally or logically, but because of the manner this was done over your head. You were never given a say in the matter, nor a choice to opt in or out. You no longer feel respected and esteemed, you become cynical, and you, perhaps unconsciously, resist passively.

    Consequently you are now branded a change resister, and it is deemed you need to be “managed” with care. You are singled out as a laggard and for now ignored. It becomes a double blow, not only do you feel betrayed and undermined by the initial imposition, now you start losing confidence, your professional competence is called into question, you no longer feel part of the team, indeed resentment becomes stronger and stronger, you no longer want to listen, and a vicious cycle builds up. Suddenly you are a serious resister, an enemy of change, you are no longer for us but against “them”. While the consultants work on the more amenable employees, you become “the” problem, and your survival in the organisation becomes questionable, gradually instigating fear and a destructive atmosphere.

    And all because, initially, you were never asked. You were not invited to contribute to the new way forward, it was simply imposed on you from above. You feel alienated, because you were not invited to co-create the organisation’s future, and you no longer feel part of the team.

    Not consulting, not listening to, and not inviting those who do the work, those closest to the products/services and the users, and those most connected to the processes that create value, not bringing them in into the change process, not inviting them to co-create the change, are all prescriptions for failure. They reflect distrust and disrespect of an organisation’s own people. And yet this scenario happens again and again, person after person, time after time, organisation after organisation. What a waste of good resources! What a waste of energy! What a waste of great talent!

    The solution ‘should be’ fairly straight-forward, do exactly what’s missing: ASK! Invite the affected employees to co-create the change and thereby make it their own. Why don’t so many organisations follow this most basic of human leadership principles? Possibly a legacy of the command and control management attitudes of the last century? Possibly due to an inherent unconscious management distrust (and disrespect) of employees. Possibly due to lack of awareness of the inhumaneness of mandation, an unintended consequence of classical intervention. Possibly due to worries about having to “manage” large numbers of employees invited to co-create the change. And possibly simply, it has to be said, due to a lack of know-how – managers may know that engaging the workforce might be important, but they just don’t know how to go about it. The challenge is how to do it at scale.

    This is exactly the issue and the know-how a new book just silently published recently seeks to address. It is called The Open Space Agility Handbook. It is written and conceived by Daniel Mezick, respected senior agile coach in the Boston area, author of Culture Games, together with a team of experts, Mark Sheffield, Deborah Pontes, Louise Kold-Taylor, Harold Shinsato and OpenSpace Technology founder, Harrison Owen. ‘Agile’, for those of you not from the IT or software development world, is a working practice applied by software engineers, derived from ‘Lean’, which enables software development teams to be much closer to customers and to respond to their needs nimbly, thus being agile. The practice is anchored in the Agile Manifesto.

    openspaceagility_big_picture
    This diagram is copied directly from the Open Space Agility website. and represents an overview road map of OSA used in the book.
    1. Graphic (c) 2015 www.OpenSpaceAgility.com (OSA),
    2. All rights reserved; provided by permission of OSA.

    While this new book focusses on ‘Agile’, it is really about organisational transformation. The title, The Open Space Agility Handbook, sounds pretty technical and unobtrusive. And in one sense that’s all it is, as the title says, it’s a handbook on how to adopt agile practices, using a double Open Space Technology frame. What the book’s title doesn’t betray, however, is the transformative power of its approach. On one hand the book is simply a step by step guide on implementing agile. On the other hand it presents a revolutionary approach to agile adoptions, and beyond, in fact it tackles head-on one of the key challenges of organisational interventions and change management itself. As innocuous as the book may seem, don’t be fooled by its simplicity. It describes a simple solution to one of the most difficult challenges of management, that of scaled organisational change.

    While the handbook concentrates on agile only, the principles and philosophy behind the invitation approach is applicable beyond agile – you can replace “agile” with “lean”, “conscious” or “responsive”. The approach could just as easily apply to lean, teal, responsive, peer-to-peer learning, distributed leadership, conscious business, environmental sustainability, beyond budgeting, sociocracy and indeed any other form of organisational transformation. Thus whether you like agile or not, if you are involved in adoptions, implementations or transformations, this book is for you. Instead of mandating change from above, which leads to resistance or internal sabotage, the approach urges organisations to ask and invite the relevant work-force to co-create the change together, as a collaborative iterative effort, rather than imposing from above.

    The approach is based asking those doing the work about proposed adoptions or change and inviting them to co-create transformation together, using a combination of Open Space Technology and standard coaching iterative methods, ….. and thereby avoiding the tremendous waste of talent and resources arising from the imposition of change. As the concepts of INVITATION (as opposed to directed or imposed), PEER-BASED SELF-ORGANISED LEARNING (SOLE) and CHANGE CO-CREATION become increasingly understood and appreciated in organisations, so this simple how-to book will find a growing audience in and beyond agile. The approach is completely in line with what the Stanford and London Business School guru Gary Hamel has termed the ‘change platform’.

    _______________________________

    More details of the approach can be found here.

    This blog was first published in Medium on 21 December 2016
  • Book Review: The Open Space Agility Handbook

    Book Review: The Open Space Agility Handbook

    Handbook Cover
    Book Cover

    This is a brilliant how-to book. It addresses the problem of resistance and poor engagement in agile adoptions and organisational change. Why is it, for instance, that the majority of agile adoptions, despite huge investments, fail? The approach presented resolves root causes and offers a completely fresh and novel way of implementing agile. And while this new book focuses on ‘agile’, it applies equally to organisational transformation overall.

    The title, The Open Space Agility Handbook, sounds pretty inconspicuous and unobtrusive. And in one sense that’s all it is, as the title says it’s a handbook on how to adopt agile practices, using an Open Space Technology framework; a step by step how to guide on implementing agile. What the book’s title does not betray, however, is the transformative power of its approach. It represents a revolutionary approach to large scale agile adoptions, and beyond; it tackles head on one of the key challenges of organisational interventions and change management itself. As innocuous as the book may seem, don’t be fooled by its simplicity. It describes an elegant solution to one of the most difficult challenges of management, that of scaled organisational change. What’s more, it is completely fit for purpose in the age of distributed leadership, it follows the principles of opt-in and it walks the talk of self-organisation.

    On the surface the book is for agile coaches, trainers and leaders wanting to implement agile into their organisations, using a scalable process of invitation and co-creation, rather than dilapidating mandation and imposition. The book describes in immaculate detail, yet in very clear easy to understand language, how this can be done. The book is supported by beautiful diagrams step by step in a highly practical way, with very easy to follow hands-on instructions. The diagrams all form part of a larger diagram representing the overall road map. As a guide it is beautifully presented.

    On a deeper level it is far more than a handbook. While the book illustrates the how, it represents a fresh way of adopting agile. Although concentrating on agile only, the principles and philosophy behind it have ramifications beyond agile, and the book should appeal to a wider corporate audience, in fact to anyone seeking to introduce system change in an organisation. The approach could just as easily apply to the adoption of lean, teal, peer-to-peer learning, distributed leadership, conscious business, environmental sustainability, beyond budgeting, reinventing organisations or indeed any other form of organisational transformation.

    But why do we need a different approach to agile, lean, teal etc adoptions, or to change management? Simply put, because the majority of agile adoptions, lean implementations or change management interventions don’t work (the statistics vary from 60% – 80% failure rates depending on how one defines failure, anything from simply not achieving expected results to catastrophic breakdown). One reason is that these interventions are mandated or imposed, without consulting those doing the work. This leads to unintended consequences of resistance at best, silent internal sabotage at worst.

    In the case of agile those doing the work are software engineers, people who are both   very intelligent as well as often introvert in nature: they resist imposed change, but do not articulate their views. Instead they either simply ignore directives (‘internal sabotage’) or walk away completely (and they can afford to).   Corrective notions of “improving communications” and “achieving better buy-in” completely miss the point. What is needed is to invite the relevant work-force to co-create the change together, as a collaborative iterative effort, with everyone’s perspective valued.

    How can one invite a whole department or even a whole large company to co-create change at scale? Through a process of self-organisation in a framed structure of iterations and experimentations, which fully engage the relevant workforce constructively in the process. This is achieved by applying the principles of Open Space Technology at the beginning and the end of the timed iterations. Open Space Technology is a self-organising large scale counter-intuitive meeting of minds format which has been tried and tested over the last 30 years in over 150 countries, always with great success. However, if you want to know the details of how it all works and how to do adaptions and transformations, read the book!

    _____________________________________________

    This review was originally posted as a review on Amazon on 17 Dec 2015

  • Beyond ‘UnConferencing’: Fresh Uses of Open Space

    Tuesday 21 July 15, Victoria, London: Shift, a participant-led Open Space event
    Why aren’t organisations shifting? www.events.caterfly.co.uk

    Applications of Open Space Technology in 21st Century
    self-organising network organisations

    Open Space Technology (OST) has been around for almost 30 years, has been applied in 150 countries, with 300,000+ groups or events, involving millions of people having unique experiences through OST.  OST (Open Space Technology) has been used:

    • as a participant-led alternative to conferences (hence “unconference”)
    • for conflict resolution (in large scale peace deliberations)
    • for stakeholder dialogues in a variety of contexts and disciplines

    … and many situations involving deep discussions, where there is a burning issue, high levels of passion and no preconceived outcome.  OST works beautifully because it fulfils some of the conditions for participant engagement, such as connection, communication and meaning.  OST has also been used extensively for various intra-organisational purposes within organisations with huge success.

    Despite the successes, ZenLarge however, OST has rarely become mainstream practice within organisations.  This may be because it does not sit well with the planned, budgeted, command & control management style of most organisations.  Moreover OST does not create legacies, i.e. it does not lend itself to anyone taking credit for successful outcomes, because success is collective.  So  as Steve Denning of Forbes laments in his Drucker Forum 2015 blog “… despite almost a century of fine management writing …. about the humanist strand of management thinking that celebrates team and collaboration through respect for customers and workers as human beings  ……. , the ugly truth is that its lasting impact on general management has been limited.”  … so it is with OST, too.

    Nevertheless, over the last few years, as the nature of organisations has gradually been changing, or is being forced to shift through the internet and social technologies, so the demand for OST is on the increase.  As we see from some of the thriving pioneering new organisations (as described for instance in Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations), the definition and purpose of organisations are changing from linear, mechanical, predictability-based, controlled and top-down structures to fluid, organic, emergent, distributed and self-organising networks.

    These new organisations thrive on continuous reconfiguration, plasticity, responsive innovation, synchronicity, eco-centricity, co-creativity and mindful empathy.  They are self-organising (and continuously self-re-organising) iterative learning network cultures that are ‘wirearchical’, locally attuned and able to adapt to the prevailing fast changing, diverse and highly complex conditions.  All of which is not possible unless “led” bottom-up with all employees or members fully engaged and empowered, and with ‘teams of teams’ exploring and cross-communicating.

    teamsofteams

    It is in these new kinds of organisations that OST could become more common, especially where cross-functional alignment and coordination is sought. OST thrives on unpredictability, fluidity and complexity, where the more conventional interventions of “managing” all of the factors do not work. Assigning people to solve highly complex problems can be self-defeating, for instance, because the very selection predetermines certain outcomes which often turn out to be counterproductive.  OST on the other hand provides a platform for self-selection (opt-in),  cross border serendipity and self-organisation.  In particular OST is superb at enabling what MIT’s Human Dynamics Lab research has found to be one of the necessary ingredients for high perfoming teams: regularly exploring information outside one’s team and usual circle of colleagues. OST excels at holistic cross-functional interactions.

    As OST within organisations expands, so will the need grow for more skilled OST facilitators who are able to “hold space” without disrupting the interaction flow, and create “containers” within which authentic cross-fertilising exchanges and deep dialogue can occur.  They will also need to be able to create peer-based self-organising learning environments, which will form the source of an organisation’s client- or user-connectivity, iterations and innovations.

    OST is the face to face synchronous counterpart to digital networks and social technologies (as used in intra-organisational online networks).  While online asynchronous connectivity plays an expanding role in these organisations, people still need direct human contact and serendipitous interaction, and OST excels at this.  Indeed recent research at MIT’s Media Lab has shown that face to face communication far exceeds video-conferencing or email in enhancing team performance, so direct interaction will increasingly neeed to supplement digitalisation.  It is for these more organisation types or modes of operation that new applications for OST will emerge, all involving larger numbers of people from across different parts of the organisation coming together and communicating across borders.  Let me list just a few fresh applications of OST:

    • As a tool for bottom-up culture change, exploring new ways of working and interacting, establishing collective values and practices through experimentation and co-creativity
    • For strategy development, adjustment and alignment across the whole organisation (somewhat akin to Hoshin Kanri), with a stronger emphasis on implementation.
    • For R & D product/service design and development, periodic consolidation and synchronisation (possibly combined with ‘big room’ Obeya)
    • As a complex problem-solving tool, involving multiple stakeholders with diverse perspectives and no predictable solutions (a more self-organised version of S. Beer’s cybernetic Syntegrity)
    • As a way for organic organisational reconfiguration (bottom-up re-organisation) to respond to changing circumstances (rewiring team networks)
    • To enable cross-party collaboration, e.g. prototyping with designers/ developers, customers/users and producers/suppliers (horizontal feedback)
    • To create learning organisations through pan-organisational peer-based learning environments which are self-managed and self-regenerating

    Crowd wisdom accuracy james surowieckiFor many, if not most organisations today, a lot of the above may seem obscure, abstract and remote, far from the current reality.  In fact most organisations today are still run in a predict, command and control fashion.  At the same time, however, there is an understanding amongst leaders this needs to change.  Even though little has changed so far, some leaders are talking of an organisational paradigm shift.   Yet many of them have little clue how to go about this.  This may partly be because their leadership style stands in the way of culture change: as Einstein said, “you cannot solve problems with the same solutions that created them”.  Awaiting a generation change is probably not an option.

    My take:  Do not even try!  You cannot plan, command and micro-manage this shift.  Instead let the workers, employees and members of the organisation configure the change through emergence.  Give the organisation a platform for letting this happen.  Stand back, let go and let it happen.  This is exactly where OST can work its wonders.  Whatever emerges is the right thing to emerge.  Leaders should not try to be heroes and do it themselves, rather let the whole workforce authentically engage, experiment and co-create the shift together.  Let Open Space Technology do what it does best.  This is probably the most important application of OST currently needed – as a tool for organisational transformation and paradigm shift.  Let transformation happen. Let open space begin.

     

    See also What is Open Space?

    The Problem With Change Management

    Innovation and Kaizen

    Open Agile Testimonials

     

  • Do change mandates work?

    Do change mandates work?

    Do Organisational Change Mandates Work?

     

    It has been my contention for a long time that one of the reasons change mandates experience a 60%-80% failure rate (depending on definition, metrics etc) is not because there is anything wrong with the new system or working practice an organisation is implementing, nor because of poor communication or persuasion skills of the executives or consultants charged with the intervention, but rather very simply because the employees affected are often not asked nor consulted in the matter. They are simply informed of the changes as a fait accompli, they are not invited to co-create the future of the organisation. This in turns leads to disengagement, disenchantment or even cynicism, which can create a block in the change being implemented.

    Resistance to Change?

    This block is often expressed as “resistance” to change, and most change management programs are often about “managing” this alleged “resistance”.  Actually, however, in most cases it is not change itself people are resisting, but rather the imposition of a system or practice in which they had no involvement in creating, and is thus alien. Margaret Wheatley put it this way:

    [People don’t] … accept imposed solutions, pre-determined designs, or well-articulated plans that have been generated somewhere else.  Too often, we interpret their refusal as resistance.  We say that people innately resist change.  But the resistance we experience from others is not to change itself. It is to the particular process of change that believes in imposition rather than creation.  It is the resistance of a living system to being treated as a non-living thing.”

    Or as Peter Senge says: “People don’t resist change, they resist being changed.”

    In other words the problem with change and the alleged resistance to change is not change itself, but rather the imposition or mandation of change from above. Japanese organisations have no problem with change, it is part of their culture. This is outwardly reflected in the agility of their buildings to adapt to changing environmental circumstances (typhoons, earthquakes), in traditional shrines being ‘rebuilt’ periodically, and in the fluidity between inner and outer space. In my experience Japanese organisations are continuously re-organising themselves according to changing circumstances, and this is done by all employees, down to the shop-floor, who are taught how to solve problems and how to adapt nimbly. Management consultancies hardly exist in Japan (yes, the McKinseys have plush show offices in Tokyo, but their clients are largely expatriate companies) – you do not need expensive change consultants when you can self-organise and change yourself.  Change in Japan is not something thought out at the top, but rather everyone in the organisation is engaged in co-creating the changes.

    The problem with Western organisational change, as I see it, is having too rigid organisational structures in the first place (inflexibility by design), imposing change from above without asking those doing the work first, and not giving the workforce the tools and authority to solve their own problems, and hence to co-create change when and as it is required.

    The Zappos Case

    Recently Zappos, the unique online shoe retailer based in Nevada, has been in the news about a memo from its CEO, Tony Hsieh, to its employees in which he offers all of them severance pay if they wish to leave the company because they are not comfortable in its new management environment. In the last 18 months the 1,500 strong company has been embarking on a massive change program, converting from a ‘command and control’ management structure, to one without formal managers, giving all employees equivalent decision-making powers to elect people to specific needs-based tasks or roles in a self-managed manner. The approach is known as ‘holacracy’, a derivative of the Dutch Quaker creation ‘sociocracy’ (find out more here). This full scale adoption of holacracy is the largest of its kind to date, hence many are following the story with keen interest.

    The implementation requires a “roll-out” of a substantial amount of training (running meetings, consent decision-making, circle formations), and the program is now running to a first completion stage. It is clear that it has faced certain difficulties, both successes as well departures by disenchanted staff. Here are a few links to recent reports:

    The Zappos story is actually a more interesting case, in my view, than most change programs: in a manner of speaking management here is mandating to abolish itself.  The self-organising aspect of holacracy is, in my view, somewhat similar to Japanese management styles. True Japanese firms have managers in a hierarchy, but managers are more like mentors who attribute authority to solutions their staff have come up with and consented to.  Moreover the fundamental information flow is horizontal working towards satisfying customers, rather than vertically serving shareholders.  Prof Kichiro Hayashi (Tokyo Aoyama University) has referred to Japanese (and Oriental in general) management as organic.  This organic style is very flexible and agile at adapting to changing circumstances, yet rather inefficient and seemingly disorganised in a static world; whereas Western ‘mechanical’ management is super-efficient in a stable world, but lacks the capacity to self-organise and self-change.

    Ordering no more Orders

    The Zappos story is thus to me an interesting Western attempt to address this, and in light of the perceived need to transform our capitalism it is being observed by many with keen interest.  You might expect employees to embrace the opportunity to take on more responsibility, without having to be accountable to the eccentricities of a boss. Many do. But as Erich Fromm has shown, many also fear freedom. For some, in a world where they have been used to receiving orders, operating without them is scary and may create in them profound disorientation.

    Nevertheless with support and coaching most people could easily get used to the new approach, though the bigger the organisation the more difficult it is to do. At the same time, however, there is a felt contradiction in the CEO being required to order that there would be no orders from hence on. To be fair to holacracy, its website says this about this apparent paradox of the CEO needing power to adopt holacracy: “Holacracy is a fundamental shift of authority: it changes the seat of power from the CEO to the Holacracy Constitution, which then distributes that power through specific processes. You cannot shift the seat of power without the CEO’s approval (and shouldn’t be able to). …, you need a formal agreement from that CEO to vest her/his power into something else — in this case the Holacracy Constitution. Without this formal agreement, you would just be “pretending” to work differently”

    So what is it, then, that is causing the CEO to posit such an ultimatum “self-organize or leave the company”? Why is this change program evoking such drastic measures? True, the severance package is very generous, yet the dictum feels a little like a dictator forcing subjects to participate, initiate (with their own views) and be engaged. I cannot speak for holacracy, but that would defeat the purpose of its parent methodology, sociocracy, which envisions “people working together as different, unique persons on the basis of mutual equivalence in decision-making” – yet seemingly no differences are allowed at Zappos.  This contravenes the desirability for diversity in order to create richness in decision-making. Unintentionally I suspect, it does look like Zappos want clones of each other. Yet can you really offer severance packages to family members?

    So why resistance?

    So why is there resistance, what is it some staff are riling against? The issue I believe is that holacracy was mandated or imposed. Staff were never asked or consulted whether they wanted holacracy, nor were they invited to co-develop the holacracy transformation. It was simply imposed on them. Somewhat paradoxically, but imposed nevertheless. What people are really rejecting is not holacracy itself, but being forced to change without consultation. This comes back to what I said initially, it is not the system or new behaviour that people are resisting, but the way it is being mandated and imposed. Holacracy may be a great idea, but mandating it doesn’t work. In the case of Zappos, this was already predicted a year ago in March 2014 in the blog “The Mandate of Holacracy at Zappos” by Daniel Mezick, author of Culture Games and agile coach, who was investigating why it was that 80% of agile adoptions were considered unsuccessful.

    In short it is mandation which is the problem, not holacracy nor resistance to change in general. This is what we at Caterfly are trying to address with the Open Smart Transformation model, involving a special framework of two Open Space Technology events, where all affected personnel are invited to hold deep dialogues about the change. The two events also demark a period of 3 – 6 months, a cocoon of iterations, in which all employees are trained and coached in the new approach, are asked to suspend judgement and instead apply the new way on a trial and error basis, learning and prototyping, enabling all affected to be involved and engaged in the transformation process. This open ended playful period ends with a second Open Space event where everyone can work on sorting out what worked, what needs adapting and what to reject. In other words the new approach thereby becomes customised to the particular organisation, rather than being something off the shelf, and this work is all done collaboratively by the staff.  Consequently they own the change, it is no longer an alien system, they all co-created the transformation together.

    This process was initially developed and applied with great success fo agile adoptions where typically 70 – 80% failed. We realised that the fundamental principles of the new approach are true beyond just agile. They apply to adopting lean, responsive, management 3.0, conscious capitalism, environmental management, and holacracy/sociocracy too, and indeed of any new systems implementation or organisational transformation / change management. While what Tony Hsieh is trying to do is not only extremely noble and brave, and is being done with a great deal of generosity and candidness, it is a great pity it had been mandated initially. I am sure he could have avoided this “accept holacracy or get out” dilemma, if Zappos had invited the staff to co-create the change rather than imposing it on them. However generous the severance package offer may be, it now puts Tony Hsieh in a difficult position – some staff may see him, in trepidation, as the ultimate arbiter of who is to stay and who is to go.

    Change Platform

    In short, mandation or imposition does not work well! This is also summarised in Gary Hammel’s McKinsey article late 2014 “Build a Change Platform, not a Change Program”. Caterfly’s iterative cocoon-forming double open-space framework and follow up is such a platform, we believe, or at the very least helps establish one. Fundamentally we need to change change itself from a mandation mind-set to one of invitation: inviting all affected persons to co-create the new order of things, and thereby co-own it.  Open Space Technology, doubled to form an iterative cocoon platform, is the only offline synchronous platform I am aware of that enables this to scale with large numbers of people, effectively, rapidly and sustainably.


    Come join us at Shift: Why Aren’t Organisations Shifting? 21 July 2015, London
    Details www.caterfly.co.uk/events

    Further reading:
    Why telling people what to do doesn’t work – click
    The problem with change management – click

     

     

  • Massive collaborative self-organised learning experience

    Experience: Massive Collaborative Self-organised Learning with Theory U

    From Ego to Eco: Transforming Business, Society, and Self

    Recently I was among 15,000+ ‘change makers’ from 180 countries who participated in a large MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) learning experiment initiated by MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Professor Otto Scharmer, author of ‘Theory U‘ and ‘Leading from the Emergent Future, From Ego-System to Eco-System Economics‘.

    The course is heralding a new style of education, which I would call ‘the internet of learning‘, and which happens to also align well with our approach here at Caterfly. As it turns out, though not by design, the education style applies many of the principles of SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments – that I have previously written about here) and Open Space Technology (which is a pillar of our work at Caterfly and our Open Smart Transformation model) to achieve something that so far has largely been lacking in most MOOCs: interactivity, intensive group work and peer learning.

    Here is the course description for U.Lab: Transforming Business, Society, and Self:

    Learn how to create profound innovation in a time of disruptive change by leading from the emerging future. This highly experiential course is based on Theory U, a framework, method, and way of connecting to the more authentic aspects of our self. It introduces the variable of consciousness into management and the social sciences, and proposes that the quality of the results that we create in any kind of social system is a function of the quality of awareness, attention or consciousness that the participants in the system operate from.

    The course has operated as an experience on three levels:

    1) Why isn’t fundamental change happening?
    It addressed the issues of societal and business change and transformation currently in the Zeitgeist, exploring why it is that there is a sense of great changes in the air, yet in practice actually very little is changing. It explored the deeper source levels of disconnects, which could lead to catastrophic outcomes if not dealt with, and how these could be resolved in a more collaborative and harmonious manner. The fundamental premise is that all transformation has to start with the self.

    2) Going round the curve: Theory U and mindful emergence
    The course examined the U-Theory process itself. Theory U, as espoused by Otto Scharmer and colleagues, is a process of many steps that allows one and teams to build towards emerging futures through listening to deeper levels of inner wisdom and through co-sensing a new future trying to be born, while co-creating prototypes adaptable and responsive to the future that emerges. At first the 25 or so steps to achieve this appeared to me to be highly convoluted; however, this is why I joined the course, to learn more about this famous U-process without prejudice, and I must admit what I found was quite enlightening and encouraging (many of the steps are actually just refinements of five main processes), if only listening to one’s and others’ hearts with open mind and will.

    3) Collaborative, self-organised, peer-learning
    The third level was the learning process itself, the SOLE+Open Space-like aspect already alluded to above. The structure followed a similar MOOCs type of sequence commonly found in EdX, Coursera and Udacity courses, with video presentations, readings, assignments and a forum where one could engage in written posts, comments, questions etc, all in itself an interesting way of presenting new academic material. At the same time, however, the ULAB course had a unique interactive component which was developed at the authors’ own website at the Presencing Institute. This allowed the 15,000 participants (or at least those actively following the course) to form into local hubs which would meet, either in person or online, to discuss certain aspects of the course, and moreover to form ‘Coaching Circles’ about which I’ll talk more further on.

    There were also three live presentations of 1.5 hours each with the whole ULAB team present and many of the 15,000 participants doing some journalling and deep listening exercises together at the same time. In many cases the hubs met in different cities around the world to view the live presentations together and to discuss the content afterwards, although because people were operating on different 24 hour time zones in many cases the hubs met at other times. There was also a real commitment and energy from the Ulab team. This was demonstrated in the second live broadcast which happened to be exactly on the day when Boston (where MIT is based) experienced one of the worst snow storms it has ever experienced, with all transportation and schools being closed; the team had to get special permission to stay overnight in the closed university to be able to run the live global broadcast the following morning.

    The hubs and coaching circles were completely self-organised (with the assistance of the Presencing Institute website platform which enabled this) in terms of who joined which hub or circle, when and where they met, how they communicated and what they did. The Ulab team had provided some guidelines as to how the hubs might form and facilitate their meetings, but it was essentially completely self-initiated and self-organised.

    I actually took part in several hubs, one for London which met several times, one for the UK which also met centrally in Leamington Spa, one for Europe, which was more informal, and I was also part of an international hub, which we called the Cloud Hub, which met online only. This Cloud Hub was the most active (of the four), had about 30 participants, from India, Finland, Holland, Spain, UK, Canada, USA, Brasil, Chile and Argentina. We communicated by email, WhatsApp chat, Skype, Google Hangouts, Facebook (we created a Facebook page) and Google Drive for sharing documents, and the Presencing Institute site itself has some communication tools which were useful for sharing things with the whole ULab community.

    The ULab team had set an appropriate online environment and conditions for the hubs and coaching circles to form by themselves, and most of the learning happened from peer learning. The deepest learning occurred in the coaching circles. The coaching circles consisted of maximum 5 people who met weekly for 90 minutes, to go through one of our member’s ‘case’. This was a highly structured process which was self-managed using an instruction sheet and a time-keeper. Unlike traditional coaching, the emphasis in these peer-coaching exercises was on supporting the case-giver by holding back from reactions and advice, instead allowing deeper levels of understanding, empathy and wisdom to emerge for collective learning. The exercise engendered a deep form of listening and conversing, both individually and collectively, which enabled far richer conversations to occur than is normally the case. The coaching circles formed some deep conversations which I have otherwise only come across naturally in Open Space events.

    Other group tasks included paying attention to the different levels of listening we operate at, journalling, empathy walks, collective mindfulness and later prototyping. The latter is really about going beyond the deep listening and collective wisdom towards co-creating or birthing a new world, by a process of trial and error or build, test out and reform. This process allows the collective to be responsive to changing circumstances. This is a very different type of transformation approach from the planned (based on the past) and enforced or rolled out change interventions usually applied by change makers, and which often cascade top-down through hierarchies. In the past the typical mode has been about making change (following a pre-planned blueprint), often without asking (with the ensuing natural resistance), rather than letting change happen (with a vision of the desired future) and constantly adapting this to the actually emergent future through a prototyping mind-set.

    The key learnings I got from this course are: It demonstrated a prototype of a new kind of learning using online digital tools, which relies on and works on the principle of online SOLE – Self-Organised Learning Environments, with a particular focus on peer learning. Fundamentally the same principles are at work as in Open Space meetings – and indeed one of the key words Professor Otto Scharmer kept on referring to was, as change-makers, to “hold the space” to allow the deeper conversations to happen, without which any real organisational transformation is not possible – just as you cannot force people and organisations to learn, so you cannot coerce them to change!

    I am not sure how easy it would be to scale the U-lab approach to whole organisations (businesses, government agencies, educational institutions) who are undergoing a transformation, but the one thing I am even more convinced of now is that it is absolutely paramount that the employees and affected personnel in any transformation must be involved in very deep conversations about the desired change at its initiation, in order to co-sense it and co-create it. Change is absolutely not something that can be imposed or mandated up or down as has traditionally been practiced in the past. Indeed change management itself needs to change. And the key to these deep conversations is enabling an environment, holding the space, so people can listen empathetically, mindfully and constructively to each other to co-create the change. The Open Space event format enables this space to be held, and is thus the easiest and most efficient way to invite large numbers of people into the process in the same space simultaneously, so that they can create the transformation together.

    Further information

    Theory U: Wikipedia, Otto Scharmer’s publications

    Presencing Institute

    From Ego to Eco:
    – Future Considerations book review
    – Otto Scharmer presentation at Wisdom 2.0 Business conference

    List of available free MOOC courses at MOOC List

    SOLE – Self-Organised Learning Environments

    What is Open Space Technology?

  • The problem with change management

    The problem with change management

    The Problem with Change Management

    As a coach I have always steered away from ‘change management’, even though it is a huge industry and I would probably have done quite well in it. Intuitively change management has always struck me as unfair or oppressive, even when it was well-intentioned and perfectly rational. It has appeared to me one-sided, often with senior management wanting to enforce a new system or a new way of working, yet were themselves unwilling to change their own habits or behaviours. I even felt this sense of unease when I was a ‘senior manager’ myself!  ‘Change management’ renders an air of blame, injecting fear, and when things are not working it’s ‘because the staff are incompetent, or lazy, or otherwise doing things wrong – they need to change’. It is not a genuinely collaborative effort.

    Change has often seemed to me to be imposed. Moreover it is rarely ever on a level playing field, and seldom a two-way process. I have observed so many situations in companies, for instance, where improvements have been suggested by more junior staff which have then simply been brushed off as ‘get on with your work’, ‘that’s not your job’ or ‘we know what we are doing’. The voices of staff are often ignored, even though they are the ones actually doing the work and would be in a better position to know. The Stafford hospital scandal is a typical case where staff were not listened to – after all “what do nurses know about management?” I personally experienced the inner sarcasm felt by the Heathrow T5 staff before the new terminal opened, who knew exactly where all the problems were long before the opening, but were simply ignored – the ensuing fiasco could well have been avoided, if they had been listened to.

    Even where there is a recognition that some form of consultation needs to take place, more often than not this is done only after the major decisions have already been taken, and there is little influence staff can have. Instead senior executives are advised by consultants that they need to brush up their communication skills, the reason change is not working is because staff have not been informed well enough about the purpose of the change, what it will look like and who is responsible for what. Malfunctioning change programs are often blamed on poor communication, as if better persuasive skills would make the change work.

    “People don’t resist change, they resist being changed.” Peter Senge

    Overall I agree with Ron Ashkenas in his Harvard Business Review blog Change Management Needs to Change that the poor success rate of change management initiatives lies less in the content or strategy of change, but in the poor preparation and skills of the senior executives in implementing the change. Implementation is often delegated down to an army of ‘consultants’ and ‘champions’. For every 100 business books on strategy, 98 are on strategy development and only 2 on implementation. We are sorely lacking in implementation skills and the way implementation itself will and should inform strategy. Not surprisingly this gives rise to the deep disconnect between managers and the managed, between politicians and the electorate, between “the system” and its participants.

    The same fundamental problem exists in day to day operations, never mind change management, in ordinary decisions. Decisions are taken without consulting the affected staff; these are then poorly executed or sometimes even simply sabotaged by the staff – fundamentally because they were never asked. It never ceases to amaze me how corporate decisions are made without even asking, never mind eliciting suggestions from, the staff affected, those who actually do the work. Executives expect the decisions to somehow be carried out, as if mechanically, and are then surprised when things do not get done, blaming the reticence of staff. Executives spurt out strategies and wonderful soundbites left right galore, but when it comes to implementation they are rather thin on the ground.

    “Separating knowledge and decision making authority leads to bad decisions.” Mark Seuffert

    The basic problem is simple: people are not asked. Strategies and change programs are developed by executives behind closed doors, and then mandated. What should be happening is that those affected need to be invited into the process, invited to co-author the new story. This is often viewed as time-consuming and unnecessary, despite statistical evidence to the contrary, even though there exist good processes or practices (like Open Space Technology) which can make this very effective. Adoptions need to involve the whole workforce, and not a few elite making the decisions and ‘rolling’ them out. All staff need to be invited, to explore what, how and why change or improvement could be executed, how we can all work on it together, and most importantly to truly listen to all the suggestions, ideas and different perspectives from the workforce.

    You cannot impose (command) participation or engagement, it’s a contradiction of terms – yet this is precisely what many change management programs still try to do. Words like ‘buy-in’ send a cringe down my spine – it implies being sold to, being had or manipulated, without a real equivalent discussion. ‘Empowerment’ implies that someone has power and passes some of it on – what an insult! Even change programs which are supposed to distribute decision-making among the work force, like agile or holacracy, have been mandated, often with resulting unexpected high staff turnover. As a lean-kaizen and sociocratic coach I also need to be very careful not to impose these brilliant systems on others, but rather to invite all into the process. It is not the quality of the new system which is in question, but the quality of the collaboration, implementation and initial consent. Invitation is the key – inviting all affected to co-create the change.  The simplest, yet most difficult, thing to do is simply to ask.

    Wouldn’t you like to be invited and consulted every time those around you change something?

    Find out more about how we use the power of invitation and collaborative transformation at Caterfly.

    Further reading:
    More on the Stafford hospital crisis and simple shifts for more effective working and inclusion – click
    Why telling people what to do doesn’t work – click
    What is Open Space? – click