Life is Strong / Life is Fragile

This photo comes from my garden. I am so amazed by the beauty and simplicity of life. A very very small seed that has been enclosed in an envelope sometimes for years is able to grow like this zucchini in a few days !
In a time where most urban modern people have lost their deep connection with nature, this kind of tiny miracle of life can easily be overlooked. But it is repeated again and again everywhere on the surface of the globe.
When we think about organizations, maybe we ought to reflect a little more about the implications of this wonderful impulse that brings life. How many times do managers act as gardeners of social systems ? Do they see their task as a careful and patient taking care of life wherever it appears ?
I am not one of those people who consider nature as a kind of Goddess we have to revere. But I think that we’d better be cautious about what we do with (or often without !) her. Resilience also exist in people and in organizations, but if life is strong, it is also very fragile. There is a point of exhaustion and over-exploitation of our social eco-systems (be they communities, teams, families,…) after which coming back to a normal state is very costly.
Let’s not forget our responsibility in caring for life through our daily actions.

 

Prototypes or Quick Wins ?

In the typical Change Management orthodoxy, there is this notion that you have to identify so called “quick wins” in order to gain momentum for your initiative. I do not deny the importance of such early successes : it develops self-confidence in any project team and it builds credibility for the change program itself.

Nevertheless, I observe that it is much more challenging (and efficient) to design appropriate prototypes. In the way T. Brown from IDEO defines them, prototypes allow space for a real learning attitude, which include the possibility of mistakes and even failure. By promising quick wins, any change team puts itself in a position where there is no other option but to deliver performance – and only performance. This can lead to a level of stress that impedes learning dramatically.

In addition to that, if early results happen to be present, the cult syndrom  can be feared, where a core team starts to believe that 1) it owns a definitive truth and 2) that what has been demonstrated at a usually small scale can be easily amplified to the large scale (which is never the case).

One of my clients often says : (S)he is right the one who is right at the end. And what we want is results – at the end. Even if during the journey and because of learning, results are not as beautiful as expected.

Enjoyment is Key to Learning

A few weeks ago, I had a very good meeting at APM (a French community of 5000 leaders) to help them framing new learning approaches for their members. It was very interesting to me because I have had few opportunities to express all what I know and what I sense about the topic. It was as if the meeting helped me going through all the theories and practices discovered and experienced over the last 10 years to try to formulate my own synthesis. J. Dewey, P. Freire, K. Lewin, M. Polanyi, I. Nonaka, I. Cunningham, P. Senge, D. Schön, C. Argyris, P. Carré… all these authors came in the conversation at the right time, but what was really key to me (and somehow new) was the importance of enjoyment when it comes to learning. If we do not reconnect with that (childish ?) kind of fun when we are engaged in a learning activity, then I doubt that we do more than just consolidating what’s already there, instead of living the Aha ! that comes with deep learning.

Book Review : One From Many, Dee Hock

Well, this is a book that many people recommended me over the last years. But the word “chaordic” – invented by Dee Hock to describe new kinds of organizations – seemed to me so much like a typical consultant buzzword that I never read it. I could never be grateful enough to my colleague Sanna for her suggestion to add it to our joint reading list for our team learning contract : this is a MUST-READ book for anyone interested in organizations in the 21st Century !

Dee Hock is the originator and served as the first President of VISA International, the global payment system and one of the most recognized brand in the world.

What is so interesting in this book ?

1. It is first and foremost a fascinating story where a very exceptional context (the crisis of the first card payment system in the U.S.) is intertwined with the personal quest of a humble (but quite unconventional) Seattle bank executive. Having a glimpse into such an intimate view is remarkable. Dee Hock describes with a lot of enjoyable details the ups and downs of this amazing  adventure : creating a single entity with thousands of financial organizations around the world without any of them having more power than the other. The story itself is like a thriller with beautifully painted characters (like Hock’s boss – Mr Carlson – who closes every meeting with the attentive address : “Young man, did this meeting serve your purpose ?”).
2. One from Many is also a book about wisdom. Dee Hock wrote it in 1999,  30 years after the beginning of the whole story. It is not a business case built and made up just a few years after the events it depicts. The book has this flavour of time, of long hours of reflections, without complacency but also without bitterness. Despite the seeming success of VISA, Dee Hock is not quite satisfied with the final result. So the book is not about declaring how beautiful VISA has become, it is about the difficulty to bring into life organizations as they ought to be, rather than just as they are or as they could be. This story is a story of life : how can your deepest personal quest resist adversity ? how can an idea(l) find its way through reality ? In a Fast Company interview in 1998, D. Hock says :“[The chaordic organization] idea is a baby, like a daughter or a son. We can have a vision of what it will eventually be. But we won’t see that in our lifetime.” 
3. This book enlarges our vision of what organizations can possibly be.  Chaordic organizations is a concept that draws a lot on nature and the way it blends competition and cooperation at the same time. For D. Hock, “chaordic” means “the behavior of any self-organizing and self-governing organism, organization, or system that harmoniously blends characteristics of chaos and order” (p.13)  Creating chaordic organizations has a lot to do with design : clarifying and making purpose and principles explicit, as well as caring for processes. This is how, at VISA,  the power of one single stakeholder (Bank of America) who used to be licensing its own card and brands to other banks, would be turned into a system (with a constitution) where no one – even the VISA staff or board – had a view of the whole nor more power on other entities. It all resulted both from democratic processes (like regional elected boards) AND from freedom of action of each entity within the guiding principles and purpose of VISA. The efficiency of such a system is really fascinating, for example, when D. Hock recalls the speed of adoption of the VISA name and logo.
4. Finally, I was really impressed by the view of leadership that emerges from this book. D. Hock is a really great leader, and despite his humility I very much doubt that VISA would exist as it is without his vision and persuasion skills. What is impressive in him is the alliance of a very (very, very) ambitious vision and down-to-earth pragmatism. Circumstances, obstacles or failures are seen as opportunities to grow and to learn. Confidence in the power of others is as huge as distrust in bureaucracy. Let me share with you one tasty quote :

In the beginning, there were no titles at NBI [first name of VISA]. When recruiting new people accustomed to the old ways, the question of titles would inevitably come up. In my desk was a long, typed list. With a serious expression, I would explain it was our custom to have each employee select their own title, which they could change from time to time if it failed to meet their needs. On the list was a rich selection : Grand Duke, Lord, Lady, Prince, Queen, Princess, King, Duchess, Ayatollah, Bishop, etc. If employees wished to add a descriptive addition, that would be all right. They could use Ayatollah of Advertising or the Grand Duke of Accounting. The only requirement was that the title must be used on all occasions. No one accepted.

Using the same logic, we had no job descriptions. I was often asked : ‘How will people know what I do ?’ – “If what you do is not readily apparent to everyone, that becomes a very interesting question” I would reply. (p. 245)

One From Many has never been so relevant as today. Maybe because Dee Hock sowed the chaordic concept like he sowed hundreds of trees in his land after he retired from Visa, he sees its development and putting into practice as very slow. Will the current crises accelerate the emergence of the type of organizations that he described more than 10 years ago  ? Or will it take – as Thomas Kuhn teached us – a whole generation to really live the paradigm shift and experiment the Chaordic Age ? Whatever the answer may be to these questions, the legacy of Dee Hock for all of us who look for more human organizations is enormous. As Renaissance people used to say : “we are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants”. Dee Hock is one of these giants.

More on Dee Hock and Visa story > Fast Company article, 1995

About the Purchasing Habit in Companies

With a multi-cultural team of managers I am coaching in a large company, I have been very impressed by the capacity that we all have to transform instinctively a challenge into a buying process. The team was in charge of finding ways to develop internal networks. On their exploration journey, they discovered a vendor of “Enterprise Social Networks”. Despite the fact that every other company they had benchmarked told them about the secondary relevance of tools as compared with the importance of culture and management acceptance, it was as if they were mesmerized by the tool – even when they could have find one for free on the Web for their prototyping purpose. Isn’t getting so quickly into our purchasing habit an evil that companies have built in us for consumption but that now works against common sense in the workplace ?

On Transformational Learning

A very short post to comment a quote from Robert Kegan in Contemporary Theories of Learning, Editor Knud Illeris, Routeledge, 2008 :

Adult educators with an interest in transformational learning may need a better understanding of their students’ current epistemologies so as not to create learning designs that unwittingly presuppose the very capacity in the students their designs might seek to promote.

It may surprise you, but this quote came to me as a big insight. For several years now, I have been trying to introduce self-managed learning practices in organizations. I have always noticed a huge difficulty for people to engage in such an approach because it is so different from all what they may have experimented as learning methods before.

So what does this mean practically. What we “seek to promote” in self-managed team learning is a way of learning that is at the same time very personal and reflective (individual learning contracts, for example), but also based on social interaction (learning sets, for example). Both of these attitudes are different from “current epistemologies” :

1. At school, but also in organizations, people are not asked to go too deep into self inquiry. What prevail – even in high level education or corporate training – are tools, methods and recipes.
2. Most of the time, people think about learning as if it was a solitary activity (if not a solitary pleasure…). Evaluation systems and their link to compensation systems in corporation do rarely make space for team learning and team preformance.

Thus, if we want to promote self-managed team learning, we need to start with (and pay attention to) activities and practice that satisfy these habits or mental models (“epistemologies”) such as  formal explanation of immediately useful tools and rewards for individual efforts.

Maybe this sounds very obvious to you… For me, it has implied many years and a few rather difficult experiences to understand. But as Johannes Partanen, the founder of Team Academy says : Learning is always slower than what we believe.

Nine Coaching Lessons from “The King’s Speech”

It’s been quite a while since I saw the beautiful movie “The King’s Speech“. Many comments have been made about this work, but I’d like to focus on nine lessons that this story gives us about the office of a coach.

 

1. Chose your field

Lionel Logue – Bertie’s (the future King George VI) coach – does not accept to go to the royal palace for the coaching sessions. He works in an environment he knows, and with the rules he sets. Sometimes, as coaches, we accept conditions (space, time,…) that we know we shouldn’t. Is this because we believe that the client is king ?

2. Aknowledge your mistakes

At some point in the movie, Logue pushes his client to an extreme. The scene is quite violent and the relationship seems to be broken. Only Logue’s deep and authentic humility (He tells the King : “I’ve been too far” ) can restore the confidence. It is only when we accept and do not hide our own limitations that we are believable as coaches.

Top 10 Books of the Last Twelve Months

Summertime is great for reading. I’d like to share with you and recommend 10 books I have read over the past twelve months. I’d be glad to hear from you : what nuggets  have you discovered lately ?

This book is really cool. You travel from studio to studio of 20 contemporary painters and you discover how they work : daily routines, material they use, etc. This is like going in the kitchen of a great restaurant. Wizardry stands in the middle of apparently ordinary spaces and tools. But these have been crafted and customized to serve a unique purpose.

Edgar Schein’s last book is both simple and profound. If you are looking for fresh view on how to give and receive help, this is for you. Schein main point is that what makes whatever helping relationship so touchy is that it creates an imbalance between people. How can we deal with this imbalance subtly ? Find out more in this beautiful book of a wise old man.

Wow !!! I just loved this book. You may have seen Sir Ken Robinson in one of his TED talks, but The Element is different. It shows you through examples of real people how important it is for you to play “in the zone” – i.e. to find your Element.  This goes beyond what you’ve learned about emotional intelligence or creativity, it is about a lifelong quest to find where you will give the very best of who you are. And Robinson’s good news is that there is no age limit for this quest !!!

If you’ve never read a book from Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Stress might be a good way to start. You will find many of Gallwey’s main themes and concepts, but framed to help you deal with stress. This legendary coach fights against many managerial myths. For instance, he tells us that stress is NOT good  and that stability is essential for performance. Now, you have to find your inner stability. And that’s where practical tools like drawing your “Tree of Resources” is so valuable. This book helped me a lot in a recent stressfull time, so I highly recommend it.

Is it necessary to present Nancy Duarte ? Probably not. Her last book his a jewel. Not only because it is so beautifully designed and illustrated, but also because it contains the results of years of research and experience. This really personal view of how to tell stories that resonate with your audience has wide implications for anybody who has a message to deliver – be it a simple presentation to your team or a public speech with a large audience. Nancy’s core message is simple : speak from your heart so that you can touch people’s hearts. But this means for you to be very clear about the future that you want to create. A special mention for the deep analysis of Steve Jobs’ and Martin Luther King’s well known speeches.

I read this book last summer and I can say that it truly changed many views I had about business in general and marketing in particular. The ambition and reach of The Power of Pull are wider, though. Seely Brown, Hagel and Davison embark us on a journey towards our present and future society. What they say is that new technologies – social media particularly – have changed the rules of the game : we leave the world of “Push” logic and behaviours for a world of “Pull”. Implications are enormous in many fields (business, education, science,…) but they require very different skills and attitudes from us. The authors invite us to take part in this flow of discovering where our passion is, sharing our knowledge, connecting with the tribes that are relevant to us – both locally and globally.

OK, Guy Kawasaki is not only an expert in the art of Enchantment but also in the art of Recycling (former books, articles or posts…) BUT his talent lies in his ability to deliver very practical wisdom… to live your life fully. His point is that whatever client or boss (or reader or family or …) you have, you can enchant their lives. And this is a GREAT purpose. Guy believes in it. Guy genuinely inspires us. Guy gives down-to-earth advice. I loved this book because it is actually a book on leadership in the age of disenchantment (a wink to Max Weber) and I think that our times desperately need such leaders.

This could have been an Appendix or a special Bonus of  The Power of Pull (see above). But I think it is much more than that. John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas decifer the new way of learning in our world of social media. Playing (like in World of Warcraft), writing a blog, following experts on Twitter,… All these activities show us new ways of learning that are essentially social (within a community), linked with passion and building on our ability for imagination and play. Learning becomes a truly lifelong activity and Seely Brown and Thomas provide usefull keys to understand how this shift changes our current mindsets and practices. A must read.

Fish ! is a simple little book that opens your mind on the potential that is already present within your current workplace. It is not because the work of your team is ordinary that you cannot transform your days through joy, fun and meaning. Fish ! describes the change of a boring and execrable workplace to a sensible and joyful one. Why not giving it a try ?

In the spirit of changing the workplace for happiness, Henry Steward – happy CEO of Happy People (Great place to Work 2010 in the UK) – proposes us a tale about the transformation of a manager. It all starts on the beach, where this poor guy is not able to enjoy any minute of his holiday… Step by step, he learns how to let his team do the work (without him having to command and control). This book is full of practical insights and you can tell that they come from Henry‘s experience – not from a consultant’s utopia. As Isaac Getz puts it : Freedom works !

Reflections after Lift 2011 Conference in Marseille

From July 6th to 9th, Fing hosted in Marseille an excellent Lift conference (feel the atmosphere here) with a terrific name : “Be radical !”. As one young entrepreneur put it on a funny slide, “radical” comes from Latin radis – which means root. In a forum full of techies, it was pretty interesting to see how innovation could relate to roots. Two main insights for me :

1. Problems are the same everywhere
2. Technology does not change our desire of authentic relationships

Bullshitting Customers is Dangerous

Horrible customer experience last week at my Mercedes agency. I am renting a car there for nearly 4 years. To be precise, my contract is a 48 months one. When I suscribed this contract, I also asked for an assistance contract in order to plan better my maintenance expenses.

What happened ? I discovered last week that my assistance contract lasts only 47 months…and not 48 like my car !!! Which means practically that instead of having my costs covered normally by my contract, I had to pay more than 500 euros for the maintenance and the repair of the air conditioning that had some problems.

With a beautiful “commercial” smile, the Mercedes representative told me that “it [was] really a pitty !”, especially given the fact that had I made this visit 12 days before then I would not have to pay anything.

Sometimes I have a feeling that Umair Haque is overstating his criticisms towards what capitalism has become. But in cases like this one, I can only accept that what he calls “zombie economy” is pervasive. Has a brand like Mercedes any intention to survive in 21st century, while behaving like this with its customers ??? People don’t like being bullshitted. I don’t like it either. And I will tell it to that company very simply : just by stopping buying from it.

For all of us a WARNING : before trying to recruit new customers, are we sure that we behave in a way that will keep our current customers loyal ? It all depends on our consistency in delivering what we have promised them.