Ubiquitous Wisdom – Page 6 – It's everywhere … if you look for it.

The Artful Nudge

[This post was co-authored with Alan Engelstad and Karl Moore, and was previously published in shorter form under the title Nudging Your Way to Real Change at Forbes.com. Alan is an adjunct professor at McGill’s Desaultel Faculty of Management where he teaches this approach at the International Masters for Health Leadership. Karl is a professor at the Desautels Faculty, McGill University in Montreal and an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford University. His blog, “Rethinking Leadership,” appears regularly at Forbes.com.]

The second oldest profession must be that of Change Management Guru. As early as the6^th century BC, the philosopher Heraclitus might have been speaking to the ancient Greek equivalent of a corporate client when he said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” A century later, another Greek philosopher, Diogenes, propounded, “Bury me on my face;” and when asked why,replied, “Because in a little while everything will be turned upside down.” Eight or more of Aesop’s Fables have been construed as advice on dealing with change. Change was clearly a force that had to be reckoned with, and dealing with change required a lot of sage advice.

Machiavelli took things to a whole new level in the 15^thcentury when he wrote, “It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult tocarry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things.” You almost get the sense that Nicolo was priming a client for a good consulting gig, putting forward the notion that change is hard to manage.

Moreover, in the past four decades, academic study of change and change management has grown explosively. Thousands of books on change and management have been published. Each author focuses on different approaches and offers different perspectives. Yet, with all of this advice to choose from, more than two out of three organizational change efforts fails. What is wrong with this picture?

Harvard professor emeritus John P. Kotter, one of the leading authorities on leadership and change, noted for his 8-step process for implementing successful transformations, might suggest that it is the failure of organizational leaders to create a sense of urgency around the need to change. Kotter’s Harvard colleague, Michael Beer might advise that it is the failure to effectively reconcile and integrate Theory E and Theory O approaches that trips up those trying to carry out change efforts. (Theory E supports top-down, planned change for economic value, while Theory O supports emergent, capacity building developmental change.) Harold L. Sirkin and his colleagues from Boston Consulting Group would probably cite research that indicates too much emphasis on “soft” factors — such as culture, leadership and motivation — at the expense of focus on “hard” factors – effort duration, people’s capabilities, executive commitment, and stamina — as a principal reason for change effort failures.

With all due respect to these noted academics and practitioners, they may not only be missing the boat, they are probably trying to sail in the wrong ocean. All of the underlying theories imply that change that takes months or years. What if change happened spontaneously? Could anyone distinguish the emergent from the programmatic, emphasize coping over culture, or keep communication flowing to fan urgency? If change happened quickly on its own and in the right direction, these things wouldn’t matter.

Whenever we’ve put this suggestion to a group, we get three typical responses:

Nonsense!
If only it were possible….
I knew it didn’t need to be so difficult!

Yes, it is nonsense to think that change can happen spontaneously if we look at it through the familiar Newtonian lens that views stability as the default setting of the universe, with change requiring force. But it becomes entirely possible when we understand from complexity science that change is actually the default setting. Change is constantly released unless it is constrained.

It is much easier to alter just one or two constraints to release change than to identify and manage every factor, every aspect, and every bit of commitment, belief, skill, knowledge and communication. But, when you intervene in a complex system, you want to be sure you are taming the tiger, not simply poking it with a stick.

For the past two decades, the groundbreaking work of our colleague, Oxford philosopherand scientist Dr. James Wilk, has enabled delivery of quick, effective results to organizations facing seemingly intractable problems, through the design and implementation of what he calls Minimalist Interventions or Nudges. Unlike the large scale change efforts typically prescribed, these catalytic interventions rarely involve more than one or two carefully designed communications or simple actions that quickly – sometimes seemingly instantly – deliver the desired outcome.

Admittedly, it isn’t easy to find that one, perfect nudge to release exactly the change desired. More often than not, the nudge is used in areas seemingly irrelevant to the problem at hand. The actions designed must be highly leveraged. If they fail, no one notices. If they succeed, no one notices how it was done or even who was responsible.

The theory is complex, but the application and results are fascinating. If you think we’re kidding, here is a sampler of nudge-like interventions we helped design:

A mortgage company experiencing rapidly growing losses from administrative errors in processing and packaging contracts for resale to investors, in spite of efforts by project teams and a special task force, turned things around within a month, nudged toward vastly improved risk management after the company president used a new approach to talking about the problem with his senior managers.
Top producing salespeople paid lip service to the company’s policy of aggressive internal cross-selling, while lining their pockets via side-deals with competitors. The nudge to finally get internal cross-selling to take off? It was getting the most conspicuous violator to become a sudden champion by having the CEO offer him a special non-sales assignment.
A company desperate to preserve retail prices in the face of widespread discounting by competitors re-energized its sales force and preserved prices on over 80% of all business written. What was the nudge? The CEO delivered a powerful metaphor at a sales meeting that changed the way the sales force viewed their relationship with their customers .
A company’s misallocation of risk capital across business segments was driving poor decisions about business expansion due to inappropriate reporting of segment ROE — but entrenched interests seemed to make changes impossible. The chain of events that corrected the situation was triggered when a key senior executive stopped eating lunch at his desk every day.
A sector-changing merger was in jeopardy because of turf wars between the finance functions of the merger partners. Special incentives and threats proved useless. The merger succeeded only when the CFO nudged the situation away from fear and distrust by sending a simple e-mail request inquiring after local schools.

All of these examples are real, documented cases. No culture change; no large-scale training programs; no programs at all. Carefully designed, small nudge-like interventions led to dramatic improvement.

Finding the operative constraints and choosing which to nudge involves carefully describing the desired outcome and using that as a complexity filter. Determining how to nudge a target constraint to get precisely the outcome desired is a collaborative design process involving many iterations. It’s a tough discipline to master, but it can be done.

The Minimalist Intervention approach offers a new paradigm for dealing with change, flying in the face of conventional wisdom on change management. We’ve seen the approach work with remarkable consistency, both as executives facing difficult problems and as analysts working alongside Wilk to design minimalist interventions. Kotter, Beer and Sorkin would probably laugh at the suggestion that minimalist intervention can do what is suggested here. But “they” laughed at Galileo about the orbits of the planets; and at Lister about antiseptic medicine; and at the innovators who came up with countless other paradigm shifting theories. Wilk may have the last laugh when it comes to dealing with change.

A Belated Thank You

Twenty years ago I went to a leadership development program called LeaderLab at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. We spent a week in Greensboro, then worked on our leadership action plan back at the office for about three months, then reconvened in Greensboro for a week to revisit and revise our action plans, went back to work on our revised plans for about two and a half months, then back to Greensboro for a final week together. During the periods between the sessions in Greensboro, I worked with an executive coach named Martha Tilyard, who, though I didn’t realize it at the time, helped me learn one of life’s most important lessons.

Like all of the LeaderLab participants, I kept a Learning Journal, where I recorded my daily thoughts on whatever it was that I was trying to accomplish as a leader. I recorded careful reflections along with idle thoughts and passing fancies. I even wrote down what I remembered of some dreams I was having at the time – real nighttime dreams, not daydreams, though I did some daydreaming, too. Every two weeks I would dutifully photocopy the pages from my Learning Journal from the past fourteen days and fax them to Martha. Then we’d have a phone call for an hour or so to discuss what I had written and what I was thinking.

Martha was a skilled counselor, as were all of the coaches assigned to LeaderLab participants, and after only one or two sessions she focused on a pattern she had observed in the way I described what I was doing and, more importantly, the words I used to describe why I did things. More often than not, I wrote about all of the things that I “needed to” do, so Martha asked me why I “needed to” do things. Who was giving me all of those instructions about what I needed to do? As we discussed the situation, it became evident that I was listening to my own special, internal martinet. I was taking orders from a self-created boss, and that boss preyed on a somewhat misplaced sense of duty.

Martha helped me understand that everything I did, I did because I made a choice to do it. I could rationalize the choice away, and try to avoid responsibility for my choice, by turning the situation into one where “I needed to,” as if I really didn’t have a choice in the matter. But I was only fooling myself, and hurting myself in the process.

Rather than worrying about a diagnosis of the disquieting source of my sense that I “needed to” do things, Martha chose, instead, to suggest that I make a caricature of the internal voice telling me that I had to. I called it Little Mom [probably because my Mom was always reminding me of all the things I needed to do]. I imagined that Little Mom sat on my left shoulder and whispered into my ear, telling me, “You need to do this; you need to do that!”

I couldn’t allow Little Mom to do her dirty work without something to counterbalance his effort. So, I imagined another voice, who sat on my right shoulder and whispered in my ear that that I could choose to do what I wanted to do, and that it was absolutely okay to make those choices, as long as I was willing to live with the consequences. I never gave the other voice a name, but, like Jiminy Cricket in the movie “Pinnochio,” where he whispered in Pinocchio’s ears telling him to do the right thing, while Honest John, Gideon and Lampwick were egging Pinocchio on to do something bad, that other voice was my constant reminder that I didn’t “need to, ” but it was OK to choose to do things.

That was a long time ago. After a few years, choosing to choose became a habit, and Little Mom and the other voice were retired. I had taken to heart the lesson Martha taught me: When I freely choose to do something, rather than doing it because I have a duty to perform, I am liberated and empowered.

Sorry it took me so long to get around to it, but thanks, Martha, for the great lesson.

Running in Place

Here’s a proposition: Purpose is the ACT of consciously applying our motivated strength and resources to people and projects that move us and in which we believe.

That’s more than a mouthful to swallow in one bite, so let’s parse it into edible chunks. It’s an “act”, so it implies that we have to DO something, not just think about it. We apply our “motivated strength,” that power within us that derives from truly desiring to accomplish something that matters to us. And we apply that power, along with other resources we possess, to influence other people, when we need the help of others, to achieve our goals, successfully completing those “projects” that give meaning to our lives.

Suppose that proposition is true. If that’s the case, it’s possible that stagnation on life’s journey may simply be the result of a clouding of one’s sense of purpose. If your conscious attention is focused on nothing more than “getting through the day,” all of your energy keeps you “running in place” rather than “finishing the race.”

Are you running in place?

In Praise of Curmudgeons

In response to one of my recent blog posts, a friend suggested that I was becoming a curmudgeon. I wasn’t really sure whether I should feel insulted by the comment. I decided to look the word up in the dictionary.

According to the Miriam–Webster Dictionary, a curmudgeon is “a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man.” Wiktionary, the free dictionary on the internet, enhances the definition by adding the concept that the curmudgeon is “… full of stubborn ideas or opinions.” (I find it fascinating that curmudgeons are always male. As I pondered this point, I found it difficult, nay, impossible, to come up with a single example of a female curmudgeon.) The word has been with us for quite a while. While its origin is unknown, its first known use was in the late 16th century.

To get a better sense of what it may mean to be a curmudgeon, I explored its synonyms. Curmudgeons are said to be bellyachers, complainers, crabs, cranks and sourpusses. Curmudgeons grouch, fuss, gripe, growl, grumble, murmur, mutter and whine.
It’s not a pretty picture that the dictionary paints. Curmudgeons, at least of the type matching the dictionary definition, are certainly not people you’d want to invite to a dinner party.

Historically, though, the true curmudgeon seemed to incorporate an element of eloquence and wit into his utterances, chastising while at the same time being charming. H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton are perfect examples. They were not simply grumpy old men — though the photo of Chesterton on the official G.K.Chesterton website shows a face that looks like it hadn’t cracked a smile in many decades.. These talented curmudgeons were offended by what they saw as stupid or absurd behavior, and rather than simply ignore it, they called it for what it was.

When I think of modern day curmudgeons, Andy Rooney immediately springs to mind. Rooney, now 92 years old, is best known for his weekly broadcast “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney,” a part of the CBS News program 60 Minutes since 1978. Even if Andy Rooney never spoke, his gruff appearance and big bushy eyebrows are a dead giveaway–Rooney is a classic curmudgeon. (His appearance reminds me of the old men, Statler and Waldorf, on The Muppet Show, shown in the image, above.) He’s crusty, comes across as impatient if not ill-tempered, and he certainly is old. But, every once in a while, when he is reciting one of his lists, or discussing something like shoe laces or nutcrackers, I find myself smiling and agreeing with him.

My favorite living curmudgeon, though, is Lewis Black. Black is a good bit younger than Rooney; in fact, Lewis Black and I were born in the same year. (I’m not sure if that makes Lewis Black young or me old.) Best known for his standup comedy, Black appears to be a man who, dealing with life’s absurdities, is always approaching his personal limits of sanity. His combination of sarcasm, hyperbole, profanity, shouting, and his trademark finger-shaking let you know that he is clearly angry about what he decries as absurdity and stupidity, particularly in the contemporary political arena. I’ve seen Lewis Black in concert a number of times, and I even had a chance to meet him and talk to him one night after a concert. He comes across as a very smart person, inordinately exasperated by the irrational, illogical, senselessly stupid behavior of so many of his fellow human beings.

All in all, I think curmudgeons are getting the short end of the stick. Jon Winokur got it right in his introduction to the 1987 book, The Portable Curmudgeon, which he compiled and edited. Winokur wrote:

” A curmudgeon’s reputation for malevolence is undeserved. They’re neither warped nor evil at heart. They don’t hate mankind, just mankind’s excesses. They’re just as sensitive and soft-hearted as the next guy, but they hide their vulnerability beneath a crust of misanthropy. They ease the pain by turning hurt into humor. They snarl at pretense and bite at hypocrisy out of a healthy sense of outrage. They attack maudlinism because it devalues genuine sentiment. They hurl polemical thunderbolts at middle-class values and pop culture in order to preserve their sanity. Nature, having failed to equip them with a servicable denial mechanism, has endowed them with astute perception and sly wit.

Curmudgeons are mockers and debunkers whose bitterness is a symptom rather than a disease. They can’t compromise their standards and can’t manage the suspension of disbelief necessary for feigned cheerfulness. Their awareness is a curse.

Perhaps curmudgeons have gotten a bad rap in the same way that the messenger is blamed for the message: They have the temerity to comment on the human condition without apology. They not only refuse to applaud mediocrity, they howl it down with morose glee. Their versions of the truth unsettle us, and we hold it against them, even though they soften it with humor.”

So, go ahead and call me a curmudgeon. It’s a label I will wear proudly. [Meanwhile, you might want to join me as a follower of Winokur, who tweets as @Daily Curmugeon.]

Trade-Offs

How often do you find yourself confronted by a situation where you have to make a choice, and none of the options under consideration seems to be a perfect fit for your current needs or desires? It happens all of the time.

Examples abound, and we need look no further than the disturbing political three-ring circus that took place in the US Congress this summer, where the main act in the center ring was the debt ceiling, with deficit reduction and tax cuts running as part of the sideshow. Partisan argument for absolutist positions made compromise a dirty word, and while last minute maneuvering avoided the “crisis,” the whole negotiation process was an embarrassment for American democracy.

Margaret Heffernan wrote an interesting article for BNET last month, titled “Do Tough Decisions Require Making Trade-Offs?” Heffernan argues that the conventional wisdom about trade-offs – where compromise is always necessary and realists have an advantage in accepting this — is often wrong, sometimes dangerously wrong. She cites the excellent book, “The Opposable Mind,” by Roger Martin, dean at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, wherein Martin explores the skill of brilliant leaders that he calls integrative thinking, which he defines as:

“…the ability to hold two opposing ideas in their mind at once, and then reach a synthesis that contains elements of both but actually improves on each.”

Martin is certainly not the first person to consider this concept. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Crack-Up” originally published in Esquire magazine seventy-five years ago:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

Martin, however, unlike Fitzgerald, doesn’t limit integrative thinking to those few of us fortunate enough to have a “first-rate intelligence.” He considers integrative thinking a skill that can be learned through practice and experience, with perhaps the key ingredient being the willingness to examine the way we think about the choices and decisions we make. We have to be willing to reflect on what we do, and more importantly why we do what we do. It’s a practice that flies in the face of the all-too-human tendency to simply think, then do, and then forget about it while we head off to think-and-do all over again.

To break out of this trap, you have to think about how you think. When confronted with a situation where you have to “decide,” where do you focus first? If you look within, to your own beliefs and values, you may have learned to trust them so much that you get an answer from within yourself, and then stop looking. That’s likely a fast road to failure. It’s important to learn to trust yourself; but not so much that you don’t look outside yourself for answers. Test, check, examine, validate, and above all reflect on what you’re thinking before you jump into action.

In any given situation, try asking yourself some of these questions to see if they help shed light, or lead to new ways of thinking about old issues:

Who are the players?
What do they bring to the table?
Where are the conflicts?
What are the consequences? How critical are they?
What if…?
Why not…?

If all of this starts to feel like you’re on some kind of mental carnival spinning-wheel ride, follow the advice one of my first managers offered as guidance when faced with a very tough decision: call triple-A. Not the AAA synonymous with roadside assistance , but the three keys for coping with disequilibrium

Awareness – knowing what you know and, as important, what you don’t know about the situation;
Acknowledgement – recognizing that making good decisions is difficult, and the one you are about to make may be less than perfect; and
Adaptation – taking the best that the situation offers, using all available resources to make the best decision possible.

With all of the seemingly intractable problems facing us today, it’s certainly worth the effort to try to think differently, to refuse to settle for the mediocrity that usually accompanies compromises and trade-offs.

We Talk Too Much

We all talk too much. I’m not referring to intelligent conversation, rational argument, intellectual debate, or anything of that ilk. I’m thinking about all of the idle chit-chat, meaningless prattle and idle bulls**t that pollutes our auditory system on an almost never-ending basis. We have Talk Shows on TV. When we get in the car and turn on the radio, Talk Radio of every imaginable variety blasts out of the speakers. Where do we turn for some peace and quiet?

I don’t want to get sidetracked into a rant about politically-oriented talk radio, but I do find it interesting that in the USA, the popularity of talk radio exploded during the 1990s due to the repeal in 1987 of the Federal Communications Commission’s post war Fairness Doctrine of 1949. The agenda of the Fairness Doctrine was to ensure that audiences were exposed to a diversity of viewpoints. While it never required that equal time be given to opposing views, it had required the holders of broadcast licenses to “present controversial issues of public importance” and to do so in a manner that was, in the Commission’s view, “honest, equitable and balanced”. Repeal provided an opportunity for the kind of partisan political programming that had not previously existed, and offered a commercially viable platform for the Rush Limbaughs, Glen Becks and Al Frankens of the world to fill the airwaves with their singularly partisan viewpoints.

I’m reminded of a quote from Albert Einstein:

“If A is success in life, then A equals X plus Y plus Z. Work is X, Y is Play, and Z is keeping your mouth shut.”

Why don’t we follow Einstein’s advice? He was, after all, one of the great geniuses of history. What is it that seemingly compels us to fill the air with the sound of our own voice.

Perhaps it is because, in Western cultures, people find that is is difficult to interpret the message being sent by a person being silent (i.e. not speaking). It can mean anger, hostility, disinterest, or any number of other emotions. Because of this, people in Western cultures may feel uneasy when one party is silent and will frequently try their best to fill up the silence with small talk. Of course, small talk has value in many circumstances. It serves as a social lubricant. It helps fill the uncomfortable silence gaps, and can be used to ease into and out of important conversation. But when ALL talk is SMALL talk, something is definitely out of kilter.

Perhaps all of this talking is the result of decades of parents teaching their children to “speak their mind,” in contrast to the “children should be seen and not heard” mentality that pervaded the child-rearing practices of my generation’s parents. The idea of speaking your mind freely seems to make sense, especially when you are trying to encourage children to feel good about themselves and who they are. But it doesn’t work when they habitually press the gas pedal to the mouth without engaging the clutch to the thinking centers of the brain.

Could it be that we have we forgotten the value of contemplative thought? Do we no longer feel the necessity for consideration and reflection as a path to insight and learning?

While most of us aren’t cut out to be hermits, we might learn something from the Carthusian Monks. The Carthusians embrace silence as an important part of their way of life. The Carthusians lay great importance on silence yet, contrary to popular belief, do not require a vow of silence. Silence is such an integral part of their lifestyle that no such vow is necessary. A Carthusian monk spends a great deal of his time alone in his hermitage, where there is no occasion to speak. Much of the rest of his time will be spent in church, where personal conversation is also not called for. And apart from two important recreational periods every week, specially set aside for the monks to talk to each other, he will avoid all but the most necessary speech.

Whether their silence is a gift or a penance no doubt depends on the individual, and at different times it could be either or both. But it was obviously considered a rare and precious commodity even in the 11th Century when the Carthusian Orders was founded and now 1,000 years later its special value for some people has hardly diminished. Silence lies at the centre of Carthusian spirituality.

There is a real power in silence. One of the best pieces on the power of silence I have read recently, titled “Silence,” was authored by Daniel Tenner and posted on his blog swombat.com. Tenner gives some powerful personal examples showing how habitually listening and reflecting before speaking caused people to really pay attention to what he wanted to say.

The next time we feel that we have something important to say, something that can’t possibly wait for a better time, something that the universe demands be spoken right now, we should consider the words of Will Durant, the noted historian/philosopher and author of the 11-volume masterwork, “The Story of Civilization,” who advised that:

“One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.”

Teamwork – and All That Jazz

Let me make this clear right up front. I’m not a music critic, and certainly not a jazz critic. I like some jazz music, but I’m not a raving fan. Nonetheless, when my good friend, Doc Gruver, invited my wife Debbie and me to join him and his wife Linda at the Sunset Jazz at Newport concert, we agreed. Doc, a real jazz lover, was very excited about the opportunity to hear Jeff Hamilton and John Clayton playing live in concert. Besides, we owed Doc some payback for having dragged him to a U2 concert at Angels Stadium in June.

So, this past Wednesday evening we headed to the Marriott at Fashion Island in Newport Beach, California for the concert, not knowing exactly what to expect. What we got was a wonderful evening, sharing a few hours with the Graham Dechter Quartet – Graham Dechter on guitar, Jeff Hamilton on drums, John Clayton on bass and Tamir Hendelman on piano. I’d never heard of any of them, other than Doc’s reference to Jeff Hamilton as a fabulous drummer in the Gene Krupa/Buddy Rich class, and John Clayton as a great bassist and long-time friend of Hamilton’s.

Hamilton, Clayton and Handelman are long-established jazz stars. They have played all over the world for decades. Graham Dechter is a relatively new arrival on the jazz scene, a 23-year old guitarist with amazing musical chops. He’s from a family of musicians, and grew up in the music world, learning from some of the finest jazz musicians around. His first album, “Right on Time,” is terrific. [We learned that evening that Graham and the rest of the group are going to the recording studio next week to cut a new album, to be titled “Takin’ It There.”]

I had the chance to talk with Dechter between sets, and he seems to be a gracious and unassuming young man. His smile beamed when I told him his playing reminded me of Wes Montgomery, who was one of the first jazz musicians I became familiar with during my college years. [During the second set, Dechter paid a tribute to Montgomery and noted that he considered Wes Montgomery to be one of his musical mentors.] And when I asked Dechter what it felt like to be playing with acknowledged greats like Jeff Hamilton and John Clayton, he said it was like a dream coming true every day.

For me, though, it was a chance to watch a spectacular display of teamwork in action. Despite his relative youth and the generational differences of the members of the group [Hamilton and Clayton are Baby Boomers, Handelman is a Gen X-er and Dechter is a member of Generation Y], Dechter was clearly the leader of the group. He did the introductions, told the cute little stories between songs, and truly shone during his solo efforts. In fact, all of the musicians performed brilliantly during their featured solos. But great jazz is not simply great individual performances. Within the framework of the music’s arrangement, jazz performers have to be able to provide the soft and subtle backup lines that propel the soloist to greater heights, collaborating to elevate the overall performance to an almost transcendent level. Each musician has to be able to lead when required, and follow or support when it’s his time to play in the background. Watching the live performance, I could see the four of them playing off of each other, giving and following musical, visual and verbal cues; working together to combine their individual talents into something greater than the sum of the parts. It was a thrill to see it, hear it and be a part of it. Great teamwork. Great jazz.

Perhaps there’s a lesson or two here for anyone hoping to be a team player, be it in music, in sport, in business, maybe even in government.

Of Castles and Cultures

A number of years ago I attended a seminar on Power and Influence delivered by Charles Dwyer, a long-time faculty member at the Wharton School. Dr. Dwyer argued that organizations don’t have any life force, so they can’t have missions, values, visions goals objectives or purposes. Only PEOPLE can have these things, because only people have intellects. He went on to state that there is no such thing as Organizational Culture. In Dr. Dwyer’s view, the use of the term is a misapplication of an anthropological concept.

His argument was premised on the proposition that an organization is merely a tool utilized by humans to help further the pursuit of what they value. Thus, according to Dr. Dwyer:

“…an organization can no more have a mission, values or vision than a hammer or a wineglass can have objectives, goals or purposes.”

Perhaps, if you take a very highly filtered, mechanistic view of the term organization, limiting the scope of the concept to a narrow range of physical artifacts that represent aspects of on organization’s structure – such as organization charts, job descriptions, etc. – thinking of an organization as nothing more than a tool might make sense. Moreover, within the context of power and influence, the concept of ”organization as tool” might be effectively used to support the notion that power and influence have to be applied to human beings, as individual thinking and behaving entities, and can’t be effectively applied to an abstract entity like an organization.

In the end, though, this mechanistic view of organizations doesn’t work for me. I’ve been a part of organizations of various kinds my whole life — school classes, Boy Scout troops, Little League baseball teams, college fraternity, US Navy units, public companies and not-for-profits, the list could go on — and each of them had an influence on how I behaved. Something about each of the organizations almost compelled me to fall into line with a common set of behavioral norms, specific to that particular entity. These norms helped to define what the organization was all about. For lack of a better descriptor I have to call it the organization’s culture.

In some ways, culture to an organization seems to be like personality to an individual. Some organizations can be characterized as warm and caring while others are seen as cold and heartless. Some organizations are seen to be innovative and aggressive while others come across as stodgy and passive. Some organizations act carefully and professionally at all times, while others are so lackadaisical that it’s a wonder that they can stay in business.

Of course, in all of the above examples, you can argue that it is, in fact, the human beings that are a part of these organizations that are warm and caring, cold and heartless, innovative and aggressive, stodgy and passive, careful and professional, or lackadaisical. And you’d be correct. But there is something going on beneath the surface, some set of rules or constraints – mostly unwritten – that drives behavior of an organization’s members into a recognizable pattern. That, in my view, is organizational culture doing its work.

Unfortunately, the cultures that can be observed in organizations aren’t universally positive and functional. Negative and dysfunctional organizational cultures are so common that it isn’t worth the effort to list examples. Make up our own list if you need one. What I wonder about is how and why these undesirable cultures come about.

The best take of many observers is that cultures are like forts or castles. They don’t suddenly appear, fully formed out of the ether. They are built, a stone at a time, a beam at a time, a brick at a time, until the structure is completed. And the purpose is clear. Keep others out; protect those within. Given this view of organizational culture, it is no wonder that the mere idea of changing an organization’s culture is enough to send otherwise stalwart CEO’s into a quavering panic, anticipating an expensive and lengthy effort involving large-scale and long-term consulting engagements, mass meetings, sloganeering etc., all ultimately to no avail.

I have a different metaphor in mind; one that makes the idea of changing an organization’s culture significantly less daunting. Rather than viewing culture as the castle that preserves the system of behavior, I think of culture operating a lot like lymphocytes, the class of white blood cells that protect the body by surrounding, sequestering and removing threats [such as tumors and viruses] to the body’s continued functioning. In addition to these designated Culture Cops, there are, of course, many other elements that help protect the existing culture, but I think you get the idea; culture preservation is more about unseen elements than highly visible protective walls and battlements.

The culture of an organization works largely behind the scenes, invisible to the naked eye, with its Culture Cops patrolling and looking for intruders – those whose behavior doesn’t fit within the prevailing behavioral rules and strictures of the organization. [Of course, the Culture Cops don’t wear uniforms and badges designating their special roles. In most cases, they are simply helpful members of the organization who explain, “This is how we do things here” to aid newcomers in the process of adaptation and fitting in.]

Given this view, the simplest path* to changing an organization’s culture may lie in:

first, defining what the “new” or “replacement” cultural aspects would be, in idiosyncratic, behavioral terms;
then, identifying those aspects of the existing pattern of behavior within the organization that are or have become dysfunctional and should be changed;
and, searching out the constraints that seem to bind the behavior into the undesirable pattern;
followed by, identifying the levers necessary to shift the constraints as needed to create the new pattern; and
finally, designing the smallest possible catalytic set of actions necessary to deliver the desired outcome.

[*This approach is based on my colleague Dr James Wilk’s groundbreaking work on Minimalist Intervention . You can learn more about Dr Wilk and Minimalist Intervention at www.interchangeassociates.com.]

So, when faced with the challenge of changing the castle of culture, consider laying aside the siege engines and instead, looking for the lymphocytes, and figuring out how to use them to do the work of culture change.

Stuck?

We all know what it’s like to get really STUCK when working on an issue or a problem. Sometimes when it happens to me, I feel like I’m stalling out, as if I had been digging a hole and hit a big rock. The rock is too heavy to move; too large to get around it. It occurs to me that I should try to feel what’s it like when I actually touch the rock. Maybe even lie down on it.

But I don’t think that will work. I think the rock that is holding me back is another world unto itself. [The image conjured by Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte’s The Castle of the Pyrenees always comes to mind when I start on this particular chain of thought.] I can’t break the rock up into pieces or control it in any meaningful way. Maybe I should try to understand it. To do that, though, I have to make myself small. Very small. So small that I can penetrate the world that is the rock, almost swim inside the world that is the rock. I have to get inside and explore it.

Getting bigger doesn’t help. Backing away to “get perspective” doesn’t help. There’s a world there that simply isn’t visible from where I stand, shovel in hand, digging the hole. To make progress, I’ll need to get make myself small, literally get inside the problem world that has me stuck, so I can finally see what’s really going on, in all of its idiosyncratic detail. It may not be only the devil that’s in the details; the answer may also be hiding in the details.

Maybe this approach will work for you. Maybe not. Maybe some “problems” are just not amenable to solutions. Perhaps, as William Burroughs wrote:

“There are certain things human beings are not permitted to know — like what we’re doing.”

I prefer to think that Burroughs had it wrong, and the quote, attributed to Albert Einstein, gives the proper guidance when you get stuck:

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Like a Nautilus

I have learned that I am not a continuous learner. I learn in sometimes dazzling bursts. But then I go through a phase of consolidation and integration. It’s as if I need some time to rest, refresh, renew, and maybe even reshape my view of the world, before blazing into another flaming glory of learning.

Excuse the lapse into somewhat poetic language, but the imagery works really well for me. Another image that captures my sense of non-continuous learning is the chambered nautilus (nautilus pompilius). Before I get into that imagery, I’d like to delve a bit deeper into the backstory of the nautilus.

The nautilus is a mollusk, distantly related to clams, oysters and mussels, and a cephalopod, the class of the animal kingdom that includes the squid and the octopus – all creatures whose heads are attached to their feet. The nautilus has been around for over 400 million years, and is considered by many to be a living fossil, having changed very little over the vast lifetime of the species. (Perhaps that label explains some of my personal attachment to the nautilus.)

Besides being really old, the nautilus is a bit odd. (Another reason for me to like the nautilus.) It lives in very deep water, coming up to shallow water to feed on coral reefs at night It has eyes with no lenses, so its vision system operates like a pinhole camera, severely limiting it’s eyesight. The nautilus compensates by using its sense of smell to search out food – it eats only about once a month, so who’s to say how good it’s olfactory system has to be. It also sniffs out a mate when it is ready to propagate. Although, like other cephalopods the nautilus uses jet propulsion to attain speeds of up to two knots, it’s the only cephalopod with a shell. And it’s that SHELL that is the real story.

The beautiful shell of the chambered nautilus is counter shaded to help avoid predators, light-colored on the bottom and dark-colored on the top, so when seen from above it blends with the darkness of the sea bottom, and when seen from below it blends with the light from above. The nautilus shell, when bisected, presents a nearly perfect equiangular or logarithmic spiral. The beauty of the shell has been recognized for centuries. As far back as the Renaissance, goldsmiths created elaborate ornamental drinking cups from nautilus shells, and ornamental nautilus shells found their way into many private, natural history collections, commonly known as cabinets of curiosities.

The nautilus shell is divided into chambers. Scientists aren’t exactly certain, but believe that newly hatched nautili start their lives with four to seven chambers. Each chamber is individually sealed and filled with gas, providing buoyancy. The nautilus can regulate its density by injecting water into or draining water out of the chambers through a series of tubes, allowing it to dive or ascend through the ocean depths. It was certainly this feature of nautilus physiology that inspired Jules Verne, when writing his classic novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, to name Captain Nemo’s sub-marine vessel the Nautilus.
As it grows, the nautilus will add new chambers to it’s shell, each chamber larger than the last, allowing the opening of the shell to grow continually larger to accommodate the ever larger nautilus living within. This is what I find compelling about the chambered nautilus as an image to represent my growth as a learner.

It helps me understand a bit of my own behavior, in particular my periodic withdrawal, while I try to enlarge that shell, so that when I re-emerge, there’s more room than there was before. I hope that’s what I’m doing. And maybe someday I won’t need that shell, because I’ll understand what it is I fear; why I need the protective cover. When I can face down those fears, I’ll be able to give up the shell.

Alas, I’m not the first great thinker to make this allusion. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a physician, professor and author, [not to be confused with his son, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.] who was considered by his peers to be one of the finest writers of the 19th century, penned the poem, The Chambered Nautilus, more than 150 years ago. In the poem, Holmes compared the nautilus and its shell to human intellectual growth. He believed that humans can eventually outgrow their protective shells and discard them completely. I hope that Holmes was right about that, when he wrote so beautifully in the final stanza of his poem

“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!”