I came across an interesting article last weekend
initially posted on Forbes back in July 2011.
I liked it because it further combined the message I have been pushing
about leadership versus management enveloped in organisational change driven by
understanding what is wrong in the first place, before setting out on a
journey.
“Change takes place no matter what deters it… There
must be measured laborious preparation for change to avoid chaos”- Plato
So what does Plato’s statement tell us? Well, it’s nothing new, it is deeply embedded
in our genes, and it is also what creates some of our resistance to change
like:
·
Fear of the unknown. Could change make the
situation worse? What will others think,
especially if it doesn't work?
·
Psychological egoism. Are we really always motivated by
self-interest? And if so, are these the
reasons we worry about outcomes of change related to income and status?
·
Is change forced upon us by external forces? If so, does this create automatic resistance because
it wasn't our idea?
·
Been there, done that. Maybe we tried something similar and it didn't work. Even if it did work, was it
worth the effort?
There could be many more factors, but at the end of
the day, every situation is different, and as our environment changes, so will
how we approach change. However, with a
detailed plan at hand, and innovation from within, change should be ongoing; we
may also refer to it as continuous improvement.
For more information about change and how it can affect your business in
a positive way please visit
www.chaseperformance.com
or call me on 1300 880 338.
RADICAL
MANAGEMENT: Rethinking leadership and innovation
|
“It’s
only when you drop yesterday’s assumptions that you can glimpse tomorrow’s
patterns and possibilities. To see deeper, unseen first.” Umair Haq
How
does
Wal-Mart [WMT]
unlearn its failing 20
thCentury business
model and move into the 21
st Century?
How does
GE [GE]
detach itself from the traditional management baggage that is dragging down its
share price and move into the future? How does
Cisco [CSCO]
unlearn the business model that made it for a brief time in the 20
th Century the most valuable company on the
planet and start managing itself with a successful 21
st Century business model? How does
Merck (MRK)
or the other big pharmaceutical companies escape from their trajectory of
declining returns and move, as suggested by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
in
Macrowikinomics
, into a collaborative mode
with high returns? How does the
World Bankshed
its rigid culture of hierarchical bureaucracy and acquire the agility to become
a significant player on the world stage?
Reasons
by themselves don’t lead to change
At
this point, we know
what needs to be done: focus on delighting customers and
stakeholders, managers enable self-organizing teams, accountability through
dynamic linking, values that grow the firm and horizontal communications.
We
now know precisely
how unproductive traditional management is—declining rate of
return on assets (one quarter of what it was in 1965), declining life
expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 (less than 15 years) and lack of
engagement of workers (only one in five workers is fully engaged in his or her
work.)
But
to make any of this happen, leaders and managers have to unlearn the management
practices that were so successful in the 20th Century
but so unsuccessful today. How do we unlearn the things that we still believe
in our heart of hearts are true?
Facts
and statistics don’t get the job done. Charts left listeners bemused. Prose
remains unread. Dialogue is just too laborious and slow.
By
contrast, leadership stories can get inside people’s minds and affect how they
think, worry, wonder, agonize and dream about themselves and in the process
create – and recreate – their organization. Storytelling enables the
individuals in an organization to see themselves and the organization in a
different light, and accordingly take decisions and change their behaviour in
accordance with these new perceptions, insights and identities.
Four
leadership stories are key
The
story of the future
Springboard
stories of the future
The
story of the past
The
story that explains why the story of the past is no longer viable
1.
The new business model story
The
first story is fairly obvious: it’s the story of the business model of the new
way of operating. It helps the sponsors or managers see how the business will
work when once the change is undertaken.
A
business model is a story that explains in effect “the theory of the business.”
It’s a story set in the present or near future. The narrative is tied to
numbers as the elements in the business model are quantified. The business
model answers questions like these: Who is the customer? And what does the
customer value? How do we make money in this business? What is the underlying
economic logic that shows how we can deliver value to customers at an
appropriate cost?
[i] Its validity depends on a combination
of
narrative logic—does the story hang together?—and
quantitative logic—do the numbers add up?
2.
The burning platform story
The
problem with the business model story as a rhetorical tool is that it’s a future
story. As such, it’s typically not believable to people who have operated in a
different fashion for years, perhaps even decades. It also doesn't include any
explicit reason why the organization needs to change to this strange new way of
operating.
So the second story you need is
a burning platform story, a story that explains why the way of operating in the
past that was so successful is no longer successful and is leading to disaster.
In the case of the shift from
traditional to radical management, it will be the story of two major shifts.
Over the last couple of
decades, there has been an epochal shift in the balance of power from seller to
buyer. For the first two-thirds of the 20thCentury,
oligopolies were in charge of the marketplace. These companies were successful
by pushing products at customers, and manufacturing demand through advertising.
But this situation changed. Today customers have instant access to reliable
information and have options: they can choose firms who delight them and avoid
companies whose principal objective is taking money from our wallets and
putting in their own. The result is a fundamental shift in power in the
marketplace from the seller to the buyer: not only do customers not appreciate
being treated as “demand” to be manufactured: now they can do something about
it. If they are not delighted, they can and do go elsewhere.
The second is a fundamental
shift in the workplace where the nature of work has shifted from semi-skilled
to knowledge work. Meeting the business imperative of delighting customers can
only be accomplished if the knowledge workers contribute their full talents and
energy to contribute continuous innovation. Treating employees as “human
resources” to be manipulated undermines the workforce commitment that is
needed.
As a result, the 20th Century management system—the goose that laid America’s
golden egg—stopped delivering. There is thus a need to change.
3. The springboard story
The weakness of the business
model story as a rhetorical tool is that it isn't believable because it’s a
future story. Future stories are inherently unbelievable.
The weakness of the burning
platform story is that it’s negative. And negative stories get people worried
but they don’t generate positive action.
To get action you also need a
story that will move people into the future: a springboard story.
The springboard story is a
story about the past—something that’s already happened. So the story is easy to
tell. There’s no need to invent anything. And because it has already happened,
it is very believable. Because it is positive, it tends to spark action.
I first come across this at the
World Bank in the mid-1990s when I was trying to get people to support efforts
at knowledge management—a strange notion in the organization at the time. I had
no success until I stumbled on the following story:
In June of 1995, a health
worker in a tiny town in Zambia went to the Web site of the Centers for Disease
Control and got the answer to a question about the treatment of malaria. Remember
that this was in Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world, and it was
in a tiny place six hundred kilometres from the capital city. But the most
striking thing about this picture, at least for us, is that the World Bank isn't in it. Despite our know-how on all kinds of poverty-related issues, that
knowledge isn't available to the millions of people who could use it. Imagine
if it were. Think what an organization we could become!
This simple story helped World
Bank staff and managers envision a different kind of future for the
organization. When knowledge management later became an official corporate
priority, I used similar stories to maintain the momentum.
A springboard story elicits a
future story in the minds of the listeners—the listeners start to imagine what
the future could be like if they implemented the relevant change idea embodied
in the story in their own contexts. Consequently it’s the listeners who do the
hard work of inventing the future. Even while the speaker is talking, the
audience is soundlessly generating future stories tailor-made to their own
situations, and hence grounded in reality. What’s more, as the future unfolds,
the listeners continuously update the stories they have generated so as to fit
the new reality. The springboard story itself doesn't need updating because it doesn't change: it’s already happened.
Moreover, because the
springboard story’s listeners invent the future for themselves, they are much
more likely to find that future alluring than if some stranger had dreamed it
up for them. The springboard story thus sidesteps the problem of telling a
compelling future story.
Not all stories have the
springboard effect. Thus springboard stories need to be told from the
perspective of a single protagonist who was in a predicament that is
prototypical of the organization’s business. The predicament of the explicit
story is familiar to the particular audience, and indeed, it is the very
predicament that the change proposal is meant to solve. The stories have a degree
of strangeness or incongruity for the listeners, so that it captures their
attention and stimulates their imaginations.
To communicate the idea of
radical management, stories might be drawn from successful implementers, such
as Apple [AAPL], Amazon [AMZN] or Salesforce.com [CRM].
4. The story of the past
The final story that you need
is the least obvious—the story of how the organization is functioning today.
One might think that this wouldn't be needed because everybody already knows
how the organization currently operates. However much of this knowledge is
tacit: it exists in the unspoken attitudes and assumptions that are like the
water that fish swim in. These attitudes assumptions are so ever-present that
they are no longer visible. They are so much part of perceived reality that it
is impossible to imagine the world in any other way.
So unless you can describe it
and remind people of set of explicit assumptions and attitudes, and in effect
drag from the tacit to the explicit, there is no way to get a handle on it. It
will keep undermining any change effort.
John Seely Brown has written
amusingly about this on my sister website about his efforts to break bad habits
on
how to drive a motor bike. Until he understood how he
was driving the motor bike the wrong way, there was no way that he was able to
learn the right way. The old way kept re-emerging.
Similarly, I had little success
in communicating the idea of radical management until I nailed the
characteristics of traditional management, and was able to point to the
specific differences.
The
unlearning (or unseeing) doesn’t happen instantly. Even as I evangelize about
the new kind of workplace, where people are treated as people, and firm focuses
on delighting clients, I often find myself unwittingly slipping into the
vocabulary of traditional management.
But
arduous or easy, the unlearning has to happen. Unless it happens, we will
continue to live the old story.
_________________
[i] Magretta, J. “Why Business Models Matter.” Harvard Business Review, May
2002, pp. 87–92..
