The Leader's Guide to Radical Management

The most beautiful statistics in the world

A lot of people loved my blog post on the most beautiful blog in the world. So here's another shot: the world's most beautiful statistics. Statistics come to life when Swedish academic superstar Hans Rosling graphically illustrates global development in 200 countries over the last 200 years in just 4 minutes. For once, 120,000 numbers look clear, meaningful and, let's face it, beautiful. Wow!

See also:

The most beautiful blog in the world.

The most beautiful fonts in the world

The most beautiful building in the world

More or less innovation? Duh?

In relation to my previous post on Patrick Lencioni’s astonishing call for “less innovation”, a colleague challenged me:  Could the job of a checkout clerk at a supermarket ever be transformed into a job that would be innovative?

At the outset, I am willing to concede that this job, as traditionally designed, has low knowledge content. Hence the difference between the best and the worst performance is likely to be quite small. The potential gains from innovation in that particular job will be constrained by this fact.

Yet a moment’s reflection will also show that the traditional role of a checkout clerk is one to which intelligence has yet to be applied. In my local Safeway, this position is becoming increasingly unnecessary as the task of holding products in front of a scanner is something that the customers themselves do. Instead of standing in a tedious queue watching a bored checkout clerk stumble through the work, now I do it myself: I am no longer bored and I get the job done faster. The job of the checkout clerk then becomes one of helping customers master the task, resolving any problems, gathering intelligence about what customers would really like from the supermarket, and finding new ways to delight clients—including not bothering those who prefer to shop in silence.

This leads on to the Toyota principle: there is no such thing as unskilled labor; there is only work to which intelligence has yet to be applied. When intelligence is applied to any job, it can become innovative.

Then the discussion moves on to whether we WANT a world in which every job is innovative. When I read the defenses of traditional management carefully, I get the distinct feeling that these people ENJOY a world in which only a few people are seen to have the brains to be innovative, and everyone else just follows orders. They don’t really want to change the status quo, in part because they have so much invested in it.

So it was with medieval medicine. Medicine in medieval times consisted of blood-letting, exorcism of devils, spells, incantations, and a proscription of bathing. It didn't work. In fact, like traditional management, it made things worse. Doctors who had been taught to do it believed in it. The establishment defended it. The universities kept teaching it. So people went on doing it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It took hundreds of years before these counter-productive practices were set aside in favor of modern medicine. Eventually, people awoke from their collective delusion.

So it is with traditional management. We have known for some time the social and moral disasters that it leads to. It is only recently that we have been able to quantify the astonishing amount of economic damage that it is doing, with the rate of return on assets of US firms only a quarter of what it was in 1965, and the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 now down to 15 years and heading towards 5 years, if we continue on this path: The Power of Pull.

The underlying economics will eventually force change, whether those who have so much invested in the status quo want it or not. The dynamics reflected in these remarkable statistics will force a transition to continuous innovation, whether entrenched interests defend the status quo or not. The only question is whether it will happen elegantly and intelligently and quickly, or slowly and clumsily and painfully.

For those who want to learn how to make the change happen elegantly and intelligently and quickly, learn more about radical management:

http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

Is it possible to unsee, to unlearn?

“It's only when you drop yesterday's assumptions that you can glimpse tomorrow's patterns and possibilities. To see deeper, unsee first.”

                                             Umair Haq

Is it possible to unlearn the things we absolutely know to be true?

This odd but interesting question emerged in a series of Twitter posts in the last day or so.

Umair Haq kicked it off when he wrote the above sentence on Twitter: That seemed like an interesting thought. So I retweeted it, with a link to other posts on radical management.

Shawn Callahan shot back (from Australia): “Any suggestions on how to help people unsee?”

I replied (in Twitterese): “How to help people unsee? Good question! 1. Humility. 2 Curiosity. 3. Listen . 4. Story. More tomorrow.” Well, it’s now tomorrow and here are some further thoughts.

In the meantime, Shawn replied to his own question: “I suspect it's impossible to unsee. Rather we replace one seeing (a story) with another. E.g. Robert Keagan's work.” [i]

To understand the issue, we need to distinguish two kinds of situations. One is where we learn something about a subject on which we had no strong habits, opinions or feelings. If I were to study, say, rocket science, I would learn a lot of new things, but it wouldn’t change my existing view of the world significantly. There would be little or nothing to “unsee”.

The other situation is where I learn something new about a subject on which I and others have strong habits, opinions and feelings, many of which are so deep within me that I hardly know they are there. In this situation, my experience is that it is difficult to absorb the new learning, unless I come to terms with the habits, opinions and feelings that I had about my old way of looking at things.

John Seely Brown has written amusingly about this on my sister website, http://www.creatingthe21stcentury.org

Learning to unlearn

 The curious thing is that with these exponential changes, so much of what we currently know is just getting to be wrong. So many of our assumptions are getting to be wrong. And so, as we move forward, not only is it going to be a question of learning but it is also going to be a question of unlearning. In fact, a lot of us who are struggling in large corporations know first hand that the hardest task is to get the corporate mind to start to unlearn some of the gospels that have made them successful in the past and that no longer will actually work in the future

 It turns out that this learning to unlearn may be a lot trickier than a lot of us at first think. Because if you look at knowledge, and look at least two different dimensions of knowledge, the explicit dimension and the tacit dimension, the explicit dimension probably represents a tiny fraction of what we really do know, the explicit being the concept, the facts, the theories, the explicit things that live in our head. And the tacit turns out to be much more the practices that we actually use to get things done with.

In fact we need to think about the brilliant distinction that Bruner created some time ago called “learning to be”. It’s easy to learn about something. The tacit is learning to be. There is a tremendous difference between reading a physics book and knowing all the laws of physics. It is something else to being a physicist. And learning to be is what we are talking about when we are talking about this tacit game. 

 Now the problem is that an awful lot of the learning that we need to do is obviously building up this body of knowledge, but even more so the unlearning that we need to do has to do with challenging the tacit. The problem is that most of us can’t easily get a grip on. It is very hard to reflect on the tacit because you don’t even know that you know. And in fact, what you do know is often just dead wrong. And it is almost impossible to change your beliefs about something that is in the tacit and is different from what you happen to think.

    Bringing tacit knowledge up to the surface so that you can do something about it is incredibly complicated. Not only do we in our bodies encode tacit knowledge but our organizations encode tacit knowledge. And so as we try to change the way organizations are run, we are actually trying to change the tacit as well as the explicit, and the trouble with tacit knowledge is that it is almost impossible to get hold of it, reflect on it, and work with it. 

    And of course, part of the power of stories, part of the power of the narrative, is actually creating a framework that our mind seems to understand. You can at least begin to think about how to challenge some of this type of knowledge that is tacit.

Unlearning push

Here’s a recent example. Lang Davison, a co-author of The Power of Pull (2010) was telling me recently about the workshops that were run by the Deloitte’s Center for the Edge with their startling new findings, such as that the rate of return on assets of US companies is one quarter of what it was in 1965. The executives were unwilling to take the studies seriously. “They are living a delusion,” Lang said, “and it’s all the more powerful as it’s a collective delusion, as reflected by the capital markets. We even heard executives say, in response to our findings about declining ROA, that it couldn’t be that bad if the equity markets still value corporate institutions so highly.”

These executives can’t absorb the new learning until they have begun to unlearn what they absolutely and definitely “know”. They have to unlearn. This is difficult because so much of the knowledge is tacit. The knowledge constitutes a kind of spectacles through which we view the world and we are not even conscious that we are wearing them.

Unlearning traditional management

A similar situation that I am grappling with right now is communicating the idea of radical management, which involves a way of thinking, speaking and acting in the workplace that is fundamentally different from traditional management. The differences can be easily summarized in the table below.

I had no success in even communicating the idea of radical management until I managed to describe the characteristics of traditional management, and point out the specific differences. Before I did that, when I talked about the new ideas involved in radical management, people would say things like, “What’s new about that?” Or “We’re already doing that,” when it was obvious to any observer that they weren’t.

How does unlearning happen?

How does unlearning or unseeing take place? As I suggested in the Twitter post, humility, curiosity and listening are a big part of it. Story, as Shawn also points out, is also a huge part. It’s about not just learning the new story (explicit knowledge), but also living the new story (tacit knowledge) until it becomes part of you. It’s not just understanding why the old story is false. That helps, but you have to go beyond that. You have to live the new story.

Teaching other people how and why the old story is false can also be a huge help in learning to unlearn.

But 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. I speak about “engineering” a change, instead of inspiring a change; I speak of the “HR Department”, instead of the people department; I salute “the bottom line”, while ignoring “bad profits”; and so on.

And as I edit a second edition of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling , a book I wrote in 2005, I keep coming across sentences that reek of traditional management. Weeding out this anachronistic vocabulary is an arduous job. That’s because it’s the language used in organizations, in business schools, and in management textbooks. And it’s the language that I used as a manager for several decades.

But arduous or easy, the unlearning has to happen. Unless it happens, we will continue to live the old story.

To learn more about radical management, go here.
http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

i/  I don't know about Robert Keagan's work (Kegan?) I will leave this one to Shawn to expand on. 

Radical Management vs Traditional Management

Radical management is a fundamentally different way of organizing, thinking, speaking and acting in the workplace. The differences between radical management and traditional management are summarized in the following table:

	Traditional management	Radical management
Goal	The purpose of work is to produce goods or services.	The purpose of work is continuous value innovation that delights clients.
How work is organized	Work is done by individuals reporting to bosses.	Do work through self-organizing teams.
Plan	Work is done in accordance with a comprehensive plan.	Do work in client-driven iterations aimed at continuous innovation.
Measuring progress	As work proceeds, provide progress reports of what is under way.	Deliver value to clients at each iteration.
What is communicated	Communications cover what people need to know.	Total openness about impediments: everyone levels with everyone.
Improvement	Bosses are responsible for productivity.	Continuous self-improvement by the team itself.
How it is communicated	One way communication: send people messages and tell them what to do.	Interactive communication: stories, questions, conversations.

Am I Crazy? Or Is It The Whole Firm Where I Work?

A reader in France wrote to me yesterday:

 

“It is refreshing to see some organisations do actually 'get it' - that employees are people rather than things, or in my own organisation 'posts' to be filled or swopped around at imperial will. The 'saying / doing' gap is just so great that sometimes I despair and wonder if it is really me that has got it wrong - your blogs are a reassuring boost.”

 

What do you do, when you are talking sense and everyone around you is thinking, speaking and acting in ways that are utterly counter-productive?

A century hence, when historians come to write the history of the current age (assuming our species survives so long), they will, I believe, be puzzled as to why so many people managed—and so many more people allowed themselves to be managed—in ways that were known to be unproductive, crimped the spirits of those doing the work, and frustrated those for whom the work was being done. Why, they will wonder, did this continue for so long on such a wide scale?

One school of historians may focus on the pervasive feeling of complacency.

 

Another may marvel at the superficiality of popular proposals to deal with it, such as by contriving “a sense of urgency,” with measures like: conspiring to create “crises”, canceling luxurious perks, using consultants to force more open discussion, banning senior management “happy talk” or bombarding workers with information about opportunities.[i] These really are bandages on a cancer. It’s really “more of the same,” only doing it faster.

 

Still others may dwell on the sense of resignation felt by most of those involved—the feeling that no matter what is done, it won’t make any difference. After all, how could traditional managers avoid turning radical management into a mirror image of the very practices they were supposedly trying to change?

 

In other spheres of human activity, when we look back over history, we can see times when whole societies acted in ways that in retrospect look utterly misguided. What did someone with sense think and say during the Hundred Years War? Most wars are spasms of craziness. But when it goes on for several generations, what could reasonable people have been thinking during all that bloodshed?

 

Or during the time of slavery in the Ante-Bellum South in the US? If anyone said at the time that this was not only wrong but not a very unproductive way to run a society, the statement wasn’t exactly greeted with enthusiasm. That’s because the statement threatened a whole way of life. That way of life was about to change fundamentally, but the thought of the change was unthinkable to most of those living in that society.

The reality is that big disruptive changes are never embraced at once, no matter how sensible and rational they are. For instance, the principles of science were figured out by people like Francis Bacon in the early 1600s. But it wasn’t until a number of decades later—1660—that the Royal Society was founded in London and modern science really began to get under way. For a couple of generations, scientists couldn’t make their voice heard. The universities were the worst. They fought it bitterly, because they had such a stake in the status quo. Much of what they were teaching would have to be thrown out. Unthinkable!

 

Similarly if you go into business schools today and tell them much of what they are teaching is upside down, and leading to counterproductive results, and that almost all the management textbooks will have to be substantially rewritten, you should not expect to be greeted as a hero. Instead, you will be told, if you are listened to at all, that your heterodox thoughts will lead to chaos, or worse.

Lang Davison, a co-author of The Power of Pull (2010) was telling me recently about the workshops that were run by the Deloitte’s Center for the Edge with their startling new findings, based on a study of 20,000 companies, such as that the rate of return on assets of US companies is one quarter of what it was in 1965. The executives were unwilling to take the studies seriously. Lang told me: “We even heard executives say, in response to our findings about declining ROA, that it couldn’t be that bad if the equity markets still value corporate institutions so highly. They are living a delusion, as reflected by the capital markets. It’s all the more powerful as it’s a collective delusion.”

 

So the change won’t be easy and it may not be quick.  But the economics makes it inexorable. Firms successfully implementing radical management will be two- to four-times more productive than traditional firms, even on traditional metrics. And so the traditional firms will be steadily put out of business, even faster than they are today (i.e. life expectancy of a Fortune 500 firm is now down to 15 years, and heading towards 5 years.)

 

Where do the gains in productivity from radical management come from? One aspect is that much of what big bureaucratic firms do isn’t wanted or needed by customers: by listening more closely to customers, firms stop wasting time on things that aren’t valued. Another is that by fully mobilizing the energies and talents of people in the workforce, the firm has a lot more ideas to work with. A third is by introducing radical transparency, long-standing problems get identified and solved—something doesn’t happen in most established bureaucracies: problems can fester there for decades without getting resolved.  A fourth is that by working short cycles, the firm becomes more agile: as the marketplace changes, it can change direction at a moment’s notice. Finally, by insisting on value at the end of each cycle, the “queues” which are endemic in bureaucracy tend to be eliminated.

 

So for all these reasons, a new world is being born, willy-nilly. Radical management is coming to your organization. The only question is when, not whether. You can help it along by spreading the word!

To learn more about radical management, go here:

http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

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[i] Kotter, J. A Sense of Urgency. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2009.