Leaders Operate With Myths and Illusions Rather Than Reality

A disturbing fact worth remembering – leaders operate with myth and illusion more that with the realities of the world.

The financial meltdown is more evidence than we need for the validity of that assertion.

So an ongoing practice to surface the beliefs, and theories we have that are not valid is a must, especially given we have a bias to look for evidence to confirm that we are right, even when we are not.

It is worth asking, "What happens if some of our beliefs and theories about leadership, organization, management and work are just plain wrong – and how would we know?" Compare these assertions with your own beliefs:

1. Forecasting and planning are not reliable strategy development tools – especially if the intention is to be a market leader innovating market altering products and services
2. Command and control is out of date – if you are still getting away with it, it's because you have succeeded in suppressing the initiative and creativity of your people
3. You are not the smartest person in the organization, really – get over it
4. Change is part of the world you now live in, it is unlikely to be a predictable world ever again (if it ever really was)
5. You are dealing with autonomous intelligent people, not machine parts or boxes on an org chart – forget it and the price is paid in lost creativity, lost talent, and ultimately descent into irrelevance
6. Uncertainty and confusion is not evidence of something wrong – just an appropriate and natural response to an unfamiliar and complex, ever changing, world
7. Complex problems/dilemmas have single solutions
8. 360s and annual performance review processes are out of date and don't acknowledge the realities of real time, all the time, interconnectedness
9. Knowing is over-rated and not-knowing is hugely underexploited
10. Failure is an underexploited opportunity for new learning and for breakthroughs.

So the question becomes, "What practice will you initiate that will help you surface unexamined assumptions, out-of-date theories, limiting beliefs and constraining perspectives?"  

Seek Out and Promote the Disruptors & Out-of-the-Box Thinkers

Most of us have grown up in life, and especially in life-at-work, in which the unspoken, and often spoken, mantra is conform – don't rock the boat, be a team player, our way or the highway...

Starting from kindergarten or earlier, with advice like "don't paint outside the lines!", to work, with onboarding advice like "this is the way we do it around here", and instructions like, "follow the rules", it is a wonder to me that we have as many disruptors as we do. And yet, in organization after organization we see evidence that we don't have enough disruptors. We see too many instances where being called a disruptor is not a validation of what is wanted and needed but a criticism of behavior that needs to be corrected.

In spite of the rhetoric, we see too many managers and leaders who discourage thinking and acting outside-the-box. They discourage it by the way people are incentivized; by the way new ideas are dealt with; by the way the organization responds to failed experiments, and in so many other implicit and explicit ways.

Isn't it interesting that so many significant market disruptions do not come from the market leaders, for example:

1. Zipcar with car sharing. The obvious contenders for new ways to serve car rental customers were Hertz, Avis and Enterprise. However, when you have an unquestioned paradigm that includes things like rentals by the day, from a company authorized locations, with document signing before taking the car, and so on, it is not surprising that Hertz Connect and Enterprise WeCar were late to the Zipcar model and are now followers.
2. Apple has caused so many disruptions that they are now without equal: We would have expected the music industry to have created iTunes; or Sony to have invented the iPod; or Motorola or Nokia to have invented the iPhone; or HP or Dell to have invented the iPad...

So if there is a commitment to nurture and develop disruptors are there any useful things to do to increase the odds that your organization will be the one that creates the next breakthrough in your market? We think so, here are a few:

1. Make sure everyone in your organization understands the paradigm you operate in –  yes you operate in a paradigm not what most people call reality. Make sure people know that paradigms include a host of elements that, left unexamined, will limit and constrain what people can see and what people can do
2. Have regular and rich conversations for possibility and make sure people understand the difference between possibility and pipe-dream
3. Design the mission and strategy in such a way that it calls for breakthroughs – and together, they are an unequivocal invitation to people to invent, generate and discover how to realize the strategy as a means to make the vision a reality
4. Connect people with their passions, their vitality, their enthusiasm, their hunger to make a difference, to contribute, to be acknowledge as players in a game really worth playing – unleashed you'll have genius
5. And remember, organizations are not mechanisms – you are not dealing with head-counts, with bodies, or any of the other dehumanizing HR speak – organizations are complex, adaptive, intelligent, human, social systems. So practice being less or a controller and more of an attractor for out-of-the-box ideas that translate into a market altering impact that brings your collective vision closer to realization.
6. Oh, and make it a fun experience!

Free People to Express Their Full Contribution - The Organizations Vitality Depends On It

If we keep in mind that organizations are complex, adaptive, intelligent, human, social systems and not mechanism we are on the right track.

Karl Popper the philosopher had a wonderful admonition that leaders would be wise to take to heart. He said, don't confuse clock with clouds. To paraphrase him, he said clocks you can take apart, examine, rebuild, make bigger, more complicated with more features... Clouds on the other hand don't work that way, they need be dealt with as a whole, they are complex, self-organizing, adaptive systems not mechanisms. You can't deal with clouds with the same thinking and methods as you deal with clocks.

Any system that includes people needs to be thought of more as clouds than clocks. This is how we will unleash/harness the complex, adaptive, intelligent, human social system to self-organize around the organization's mission, strategic intent and values. Do this well and the system is ever expanding to take advantage of opportunities in the market and will be self-repairing in the event of loss of key parts (people) of the system – knowing that a clockwork/mechanistic approach wont do it.

In the last few months I have been in conversations with clients about succession planning. My counsel:
don't waste time on these kinds of planning exercises. Instead create a culture and a set of practices for ongoing talent development so that you are home growing people to step into new accountabilities as the business needs them to.


Here are sone perspectives I work with that will take the conversation about talent development and succession development from the theoretical to the day-to-day very practical.

LPR's perspective is we need to think from a different place about talent development and about succession, even about how we organize to get things done – here are some examples:

1. Have the dominant organizing model be a network of accountabilities not roles and responsibilities inside a hierarchy of people in boxes.
2. In an accountability organizing model each person is accountable to a specific person to produce specific measurable desired results in time – all cascaded from the CEO – and all in service of the mission, strategic intent and values 
3. Functions (the roles in boxes) stay in place but as a subordinate operating model - principally as centers of excellence, example, finance, HR, manufacturing. Authorities and responsibilities that usually go with a role in a function are now part of specific accountabilities 
4. Individuals ability to contribute to an organization (and advance in importance and stature) and in turn have more of a share of voice and a larger share of rewards becomes tied to the range of their accountabilities and the importance of those accountabilities. Promotion opportunities are no tied to the possibility that a box in the org chart will become vacant 
5. People are supported and encouraged to expand their accountabilities – each person will have a personal development plan – they will also have a coaching plan, a coach, mentor and a number of supporting buddies 
6. The personal performance and development plan is one vehicle to identify areas for personal expansion alongside a practice of regular after action reviews and performance reviews some, like this example, initiated by the accountability holder and some by the person to whom they are accountable – in most settings still called manager. 
7. This means, in an accountability framework, everyone at some point is a manager – they are managing their accountabilities and the people they are counting on so as to be able to fulfill on their accountabilities. So the CEO and the President will be being held to account by people who in a hierarchical organization would only engage with the CEO and President in a one way authority/command and control, top down mode. 

Talent development is a part of everyones accountabilities – everyone is accountable to see that every outcome they are accountable to produce - both the qualitative and quantitative ones - can be effectively carried out by one or more people they have trained. Everyone has, as part of their accountabilities, to be a coach, mentor, and buddy to people they are developing to assume their accountabilities when called on to do so.

The traditional regular (annual of bi-annual) performance review and succession planning events, become more a review that talent development and succession development is on track - even a certification point if that is a practice that is empowering.

There are a series of other cultural perspectives that either forward or constrain an accountability based talent development model I will develop later. For example:

1. Augmenting knowledge sharing/knowledge management with ignorance management – the practices for surfacing areas of ignorance to be the trigger event for ideation 
2. Distinguishing carelessness events from failure – the former to be minimized to 7 sigma or better the latter to be encouraged - the access to learning, growth and development 
3. Existence systems – to manage requests, promises, and offers as part of supporting individuals become more reliable in taking on and delivering every larger accountabilities 
4. Practices to improve the performance of teamwork and collaboration – managing dependencies become even more important
5. How to effectively surface and deal with conflict – both the conflict built in to strategy and the conflict generated as a function of differing perspectives and personalities
6. How the organization goes about declaring breakdowns and moving the breakdown to breakthrough 
7. How to have difficult conversations with colleagues 
8. How to managing multiple commitments (accountabilities) in time to an array of stakeholders 
9. The need to surface and eliminate structural (mostly historical) constraints - policies, rules, and procedures that no longer serve their design purpose, or the design purpose is no longer relevant or useful