leadership

This blog entry on Open Forum got me thinking.  Specifically this paragraph:

"Find some truth tellers. The first thing every CEO must realize is that everyone is lying to him (her too). It just happens. They didn’t coin the phrase “shoot the messenger” for no reason. There are many wonderful organizations out there for CEOs that provide truth-telling services. Vistage is an international group whose tag line is something like “Have your answers questioned.” It’s pretty clear that their ideal customer is the CEO who recognizes that even people who are closest to them might shield them from important information and feedback. "

One of our key offerings is creating "upward" communication channels in organisations offering CEO's and executives the opportunity to access un-filtered narrative fragments, giving them a view of the inner dialogue happening in the organisation. A key question for us is: Do you really know what people are saying about your strategy, your team and the organisation when they're standing around the water cooler? ....

I came across this little anecdote in and article in the latest edition of Strategy + Business.  It illustrates how savvy leaders know how to use metaphors and symbols to get their point across effectively and strengthen company culture.  David Ogilvy is the founder of Ogilvy & Mather, one of the most successful advertising agencies in the world. 

"... it wasn’t just what David Ogilvy said that made his principles special; it was also how he said it. ... Ogilvy communicated his principles in speeches and memos, then went beyond words, using quirky flourishes — like the Russian matryoshka dolls that directors found at their seats at one board meeting. Opening the nesting dolls, each smaller than the one before, every director found the same message typed on a piece of paper inside the tiniest doll: “If you hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If you hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.”

Turbulence. We know the feeling: it starts out with a little shaking. The captain switches on the seatbelt sign, and just as you’re about to click the belt buckle in place, the plane hits an air pocket and it feels as if the bottom of the plane is going to fall out. Then, a few seconds later, the plane stabilizes and your stomach returns to its usual anatomical position. ...

When a system is overconstrained (i.e. there are too many rules or too much bureaucracy) it often folds back into chaos i.e. order collapses.  For example, too much bureaucracy forces employees to find all kinds of work-arounds to get their work done, leading to a collapse of discipline.  Once a system is in chaos, order is often imposed by a despotic leader.  All goes well for a while, but slowly the bureaucracy creeps in again, and in an attempt to avoid the chaos ("that will not happen again on OUR watch syndrome") stricter policies are implemented, more oversight etc etc until the system becomes overconstrained again, and back we go to chaos.  It becomes a never-ending pendulum, unless a visionary leader manages to break out of this pattern. ...

We often need to explain to people what a heuristic is.  Usually we tell them that it's similar to a "rule of thumb" and then try to give examples. 

I came across this great example on Bob Sutton's blog ...

During a really interesting meeting this morning, it was said: You never hear about "accountability struggles".  Power is highly desired, accountability not so.

This line articulated a pattern we see often in culture audits.  Manager's hesitance to accept responsibility and accountability for decisions often lead to inertia and a "pass the buck" mentality that is detrimental to the productivity and morale of employees.  I wonder how much of this is caused by a general intolerance to failure in an organisation.  If a mistake can be potentially career limiting, a natural tendency would be to avoid making incorrect decisions. ...

TGIF is an informal gathering of like-minded people who meets every Friday to discuss interesting topics.  The invitation they sent out this week really got me thinking.  Here it is (emphasis added)...

We attended an interesting public workshop on Mine Health and Safety today.  One of the speakers said the following:  Zero harm should be a value, not a slogan.

This made me wonder,  how many supposed "values" are nothing more than slogans? ...

Following on from my previous post where we used the metaphor of Starfish and Spiders to look at distributed vs centralised organisations or complex vs ordered problems, let's explore how one would go about dealing with Starfish problems.

Using old-fashioned frontal or direct assault techniques when attacking a Starfish problem or organisation actually strengthens it, making it more open and more decentralised.  Death-blows are temporary, and in the end makes matters worse as it doubles the threat.  There are several reasons for this, one of which being that a key characteristic of a Starfish organisation is that collective knowledge is stored in a diffused manner throughout the system, this decentalisation makes it highly adaptive and very difficult to destroy.

Another feature of a Starfish structure, is that the structure promotes the formation of splinter, franchise and copycat groups, all operating under one ideology - often with slightly modified strategies, but using the same tactics.

So, how do we go about defeating a Starfish? ... 

I recently heard someone use this metaphor for the first time, and found it really interesting. 

In essense, spiders and starfish may look alike, both being multi-legged creatures, but upon investigation prove to be very different.  Cut a leg off a spider, and you get a slightly disabled seven-legged (less effective) creature; cut off its head and you have a dead spider. In contrast, if you cut off the arm of a starfish, it will grow a new one. Even more amazing, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body.  So, where injury disables on kills a spider, it actually allows a starfish to replicate itself.  The reason why starfish are able to do this is because unlike spiders, they are decentralized; every major organ is replicated across each arm.

Normally, this metaphor is used to describe two different organisational structures.  Hierarchical Spider organisations, have a central command and control (head), and dependent parts (legs). Although relatively strong, it is easy to devise a strategy for attacking and destroying a Spider; survival is impossible without a head.  In contrast, Starfish organisations, on the other hand, have limited central command and control. Typically they have an inspirational leader (or catalyst), and a decentralized, adaptive, organizational structure that is often difficult to define. Because of this, despite a superficial resemblance to a spider, each "leg" is mostly autonomous. So, just like in nature, when a starfish organisation loses a leg, the base will regenerate the leg, and the leg can grow into a new starfish.

I want to suggest that this is also an excellent metaphor for the nature of problems, and making sense of them.  Here's why ...