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