informal coalitions

Mastery, mystery, and muddling through - 1

In a recent article, the Financial Times' political columnist, Janan Ganesh, argues that Theresa May's government is "stronger for its weakness".  In agreeing with this, Deborah Rowland comments briefly (here) that the accompanying uncertainty and 'not knowing', arising from the lack of a Commons majority, is likely to demand more collective decision-making and result in more creative solutions. She uses Keats's notion of "negative capability" to illustrate her point.

I very much support her view that strength can come from the capacity to survive and thrive in conditions of 'unknowability'. Indeed, the need and ability to do so flows directly from the complex social dynamics of human interaction, in which 'not knowing' is the norm, not the exception.

Sadly, Deborah then ends her post with a disappointingly dismissive reference to "muddling through", when talking about the required leadership response to these conditions. On this point, I disagree fundamentally. And it is this aspect of organizational dynamics and leadership practice that I want to say more about here.

“Talking the walk” as an act of everyday leadership practice

In a recent HBR blog post, entitled The Best Leaders “Talk the Walk”, Fast Company co-founder and author Bill Taylor argues,

“… the more time I spend with game-changing innovators and high-performing companies, the more I appreciate the need for leaders to “talk the walk” — that is, to be able to explain, in language that is unique to their field and compelling to their colleagues and customers, why what they do matters and how they expect to win. The only sustainable form of business leadership is thought leadership. And leaders that think differently about their business invariably talk about it differently as well.”

Taylor rightly acknowledges the importance of language to people’s understanding, motivation, and performance - whether for better or worse!  I wonder, though, if the way that he describes the notion of “talking the walk”, and the example that he uses to explain it, does it full justice. In particular, I think that he fails to highlight how, practised properly, this signals a fundamental shift in the nature of leadership communication. A shift, that is, that privileges joint sense-making and relationship building ahead of the excessive emphasis on 'getting the message across' that continues to dominate current practice.

Muddling through – with purpose, courage, and skill

Several months ago, I spoke briefly with a manager during the lunch break in a senior management workshop. This followed a presentation by the Divisional MD, in which he had comprehensively overturned the performance projections that had been presented only a few minutes earlier by the local finance managers. This sudden 'about turn' had taken managers by surprise and sparked many such informal conversations during the break.

I suggested to the manager that, despite outward appearances, what he and his colleagues were actually doing, day-in-day-out, was "muddling through"¹. And that this latest intervention was just another example of the messy reality of real-world organizational life - both a product and producer of that ongoing messiness.  Muddling through, I suggested, is simply the best that we can do, if we are to take seriously the complex and uncertain dynamics of organization in which we are all participating.

I was not meaning to suggest by this that managers can't make a difference by their actions. Clearly they can. Less still was I arguing that they should throw up their hands in despair. But I did remind him of what we'd discussed on many previous occasions: That is, that managers need to pay attention to what they actually find themselves doing in practice, rather than being overly fixated by the formal structures, rituals and routines of organization. This was, after all, the essence of our many previous discussions on what I call "the wiggly world of organization".

Making progress by paying attention to the everyday realities of leadership practice ahead of idealized prescriptions

In a new LinkedIn Group associated with the Centre for Progressive Leadership, members were recently invited to answer the following question:

"What are your top five 'must haves' if we are to see progress in the field of leadership?"

In response to this, and echoing my recent paper for the Centre entitled Taking Organisational Complexity Seriously, it seems to me that meaningful progress depends on the willingness and ability of managers to:

• understand and engage more insightfully with the complex social reality of organizational life;
• avoid the lure of simplistic, “if you do this, you’ll get that” prescriptions; and, in the words of Ralph Stacey,
• accept that "Managing and leading are exercises in the courage to go on participating creatively despite not knowing." 

At present, there is a wide gap between the established ways in which people understand and talk about organizational leadership, and the current reality of what leaders actually do in practice. Rather than prescribing some idealized future state based on prescriptive 'must haves', therefore, I thought I would respond to the question by offering five ‘already haves’. That is, five ways (amongst others) in which people's experienced reality of organizational life and leaders' actual behaviours already run counter to the ways in which these are supposed to operate according to conventional management 'wisdom' and common discourse.

These five 'already haves' are reproduced below.

More on the psychological and emotional impacts of change

In a previous post, I commented on Stephen Billing’s interesting and informative series of posts on the work of Patricia Benner. In them, he draws insights for the leadership of organizational change from Benner’s work on patient care. This explores the practice of professionals in dealing with people’s experience of health and illness, growth and loss. And, as Billing points out, people going through change similarly experience growth and loss.

In my commentary, I suggested that I could see parallels between the dynamics of change as set out in Informal Coalitions and Benner’s four "aspects of humanness" (embodied intelligence, background meaning, concerns, and situation) that informed Billing’s posts. And I want to explore those further here.

The 'vision thing' in organizational leadership

In his latest blog post, You Don’t Need A Vision, Stephen Billing questions the popular belief that crafting an organizational vision is an essential leadership task. Indeed, he goes further by suggesting that "a clearly articulated vision … can actually get in the way of the change you want to achieve".

I take a similarly sceptical view of the value of organizations spending time and effort on creating what in Informal Coalitions I have called an end-state vision. That is, a Vision with a capital ‘V’.

The felt need to create a Vision Statement (and, often, an accompanying set of Values) has become the clichéd response whenever a formal change programme is put together. Even if it were possible to express a Vision in terms that remained meaningful and compelling into the longer term, the challenge of turning this into operational reality would still remain. Too often such Visions and Values are greeted with scepticism or cynicism, as the idealised statements come 'face-to-face' with the tangible reality of people’s everyday experience of organizational life. 

But what, if anything, should leaders do instead?

Solutions Focus and the dynamics of organizational change

Andy Smith’s “Practical EQ” weblog, provides an interesting and useful overview of the latest edition of Jackson and McKergow’s book, Solutions Focus. As someone who has used the Solutions Focus (SF) approach in individual and team coaching interventions, I share Andy’s attraction to the method. The shift in focus that it facilitates – from what needs fixing to what’s already going well that can be built upon – can provide a powerful form of reframing during performance improvement conversations of one form or another.

Mobilizing commitment - The motive, means and opportunity to excel

As a youngster, I used to play a card game called "I Commit" (opposite), which was originally devised in the 1930s. During the game, players competed to collect sets of three cards which would enable them to ‘commit a crime’. I should add that, to redress the moral balance, they also strove to collect 'policemen' to thwart the criminal activities of their opponents!  In essence, before a player could say “I commit ...”, they needed to show that they had the motive, the means and the opportunity to do so.

So what has a 1930s parlour game got to do with mobilizing commitment in 21st century organizations? Well, if people are (figuratively speaking) to say "I commit" in relation to their everyday roles and relationships at work, then they too need the motive, means and opportunity to do so. 

Gareth Morgan's 'plantpot solutions'

Picture the scene. A man is on his knees, arms spread wide and eyes cast skyward. People are seated in front of him, looking on attentively and listening intently to his words. A book lies open by his side.

This was the picture presented to us by Gareth Morgan, at a workshop on metaphor, paradox and change that he ran in London around ten years ago. "What is the man," he asked, "and what is he doing?"

Gianfranco Zola and some thoughts on organizational vision

I've just returned from speaking about Informal Coalitions to a group of London-based management consultants.  The event was held at Chelsea's Stamford Bridge stadium. When I arrived, I was directed to the Zola Suite, nestled in the upper reaches of the West Stand. The walls were decked out with pictures of Gianfranco Zola in action. One sequence showed the past-master turning West Ham United's Julian Dicks 'inside out', before scoring another of his spectacular goals.  Zola had vision. And providing vision is an important element of the change-leadership agenda set out in Informal Coalitions.