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

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, 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 - or, how do we unleash/harness the complex, adaptive, intelligent, human social system to self-organize around the organization's purpose, mission, strategies and values, so that the system is ever expanding to take advantage of opportunities in the market and be self-repairing in the event of loss of key parts of the system – knowing that a clockwork/mechanistic approach won't do it?

I am often 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 habits for ongoing talent development so that people are continually growing readying themselves to step into new roles with new accountabilities as the business needs them to.

At Perret Roche Partners our perspective is that we need to think from a different place about talent development, about succession, even about how we organize to get things done day-to-day – here are some examples:

• Have the dominant organizing model be a network of accountabilities - with each person accountable to a specific person(s) to produce specific measurable desired results in time – all cascaded from the leader's accountability – being the source of  the purpose, mission, strategies, and values of the organization
• Functions stay in place as centers of excellence, example, finance, IT, manufacturing
• In a self-organizing, distributed leadership organizing model personal growth is part of everyone's role and that means always getting ready to take on larger accountabilities
• Regular after-action reviews and the practice of giving and receiving feedback is the most effective way of continually preparing people for larger roles and accountabilities.

Here are some cultural perspectives that forward/constrain succession development. For example:

Augmenting knowledge sharing/knowledge management with ignorance management – the practices for surfacing areas of ignorance to be the trigger event for ideation

Distinguishing carelessness from failure – the former to be minimized, the latter to be encouraged 

Manage requests, promises, and offers as part of supporting individuals become more reliable in taking on and delivering ever larger accountabilities.