If you had just one hour with a group of young people what would you teach them?

…asked a post on LinkedIn recently. What made it interesting for me was the thought that, when I worked as a Supply Teacher, there were many times when I had exactly that! Just an hour (usually only 50mins!) with a classful of young people; just that short segment on the clock to try and impart some knowledge, do some good, interrupt the conditioning – theirs and the system’s – that seeks to define.

A great many examples spring to mind, but one in particular…

I was working as a Drama teacher. The school had arranged a Careers day for Year 10 – lots of group activities to try and enthuse students for the world of work, as well as individual interviews by local business-people who had kindly volunteered their time.

Shortly after morning registration, there was a knock at my door and the Head of Yr10 entered. Could she ask a favour? As I have no lesson Period 3 would I mind “looking after” a group? Of course. …they’re… well, let’s face it, they’re not going to get anything out of today. Oh? Just keep them in here where they can’t cause any trouble, play some games with them or something.

At a personal level, this stung because it revealed just how little the HoY10 valued the Drama dept. But far more than that, it was the weary, conditioned dismissal of these “Trouble-makers” that set alarm bells ringing in my head. I was determined to do more than just “play games”.

3rd Period came and the group entered. They were, as anticipated, a rough bunch. Sauntering in like delinquent stereotypes, shirts untucked and ties hanging half-undone, combat boots, chewing gum, hair across one eye or shaved to the skull, one even proudly (though oh-so-coolly) carrying his Crash-helmet. OK, whatever. I asked them how they had been enjoying the day so far? …shrugs, grunts and giggles.

4th Period would be the Interviews. I told them that in the next hour I was going to make them awesome interviewees. They laughed. One hour to push back against all those teachers, parents, peers who had told them they might as well give up. So we talked… We talked about how to turn up – shirts were tucked and ties done up. We talked about how to shake hands. We talked about confident body-language, confident voice, eye-contact. We talked about considering the question, not rushing to answer. We talked about small-talk, about politeness. And we talked about the way we talk to ourselves!

The hour was over quickly. And I sent them on their way.

At lunchtime, the HoY10 sought me out. So you didn’t play games? No. What did you do? I told her. She then told me that every single one of “my” students had aced their interview. Every one. And more than that, she had received a slew of compliments about those students and their attitude. Hah!

I say this, not to blow my own trumpet, but to highlight how our conditioned responses affect ourselves and others; and to point out that those responses are not definitive. They are absolutely malleable. In my work now, as coach, as consultant, I find myself, very often addressing the conditioning to which individuals, teams, departments, businesses(!) have surrendered themselves or have been forced to submit.

Schools, like businesses, are systems. Networks of individuals bound together by common purpose. In interactions of all sorts, all day, every day we are bringing our conditioned responses to bear on people, on relationships, on expectations and rather than seeing each situation as discrete, as different, from what has gone before and allowing the unfolding moment to shape what is happening, we attempt to pigeonhole them – often to the detriment of the interaction. Of course, it’s easy to point these things out from the outside, in the midst of the maelstrom it’s almost impossible to see. And that’s why it is so important to have that external supervision, that outside pair of eyes. To remind us. That we can shake off the conditioning. That we can be more than we have been told (than we tell ourselves) we are. That we can choose to allow the moment to guide us and not stay entrenched in some idea of “how things should be”. Those conditioned ideas? You don’t have to accept them. Talk to them.

My answer to the LinkedIn question was: [I would teach them] the power of internal monologue (for good or ill!) The things we say to ourselves shape the world we see so speak beautifully to yourself.

Have you ever been on a march or a rally? It can be quite an intoxicating feeling, walking side by side hundreds if not thousands of others. All of you heading in the same direction with a common intention – it might be highlight climate change, in support of the #MeToo movement, or for many other social or political causes. It is perhaps one of the few times we find ourselves united around a common purpose.

There is a Japanese phrase, used in Buddhism, itai doshin, which means “many in body, one in mind”. The 13th Century monk, Nichiren, wrote,

“If itai doshin (many in body, one in mind) prevails among the people, they will achieve all their goals, whereas in dotai ishin (one in body, different in mind), they can achieve nothing remarkable.”

In my work as an organisation consultant and coach, I see a lot of teams and organisations that are decidedly in dotai ishin. Whether this if from a lack of or a confusion of the vision, values, ethics, mission or purpose, the underlying issue is often around a failure to unify around a common intent.

What precipitates this is often a misunderstanding of organisation culture and the belief, that by defining it one changes it. Edgar Schein’s iceberg model is a timely reminder that the “how we do things round here” is deeply rooted in the patterns of meaning created by trying to make sense of espoused values and themes and their actual manifestation in behaviours and conversations. Many organisations, particularly mechanistic or Command and Control ones, often develop “work arounds”, “blame avoidance” and other coping strategies to keep things going.

Professor Joanne Martin of Stanford University goes further, concluding that there is rarely one unifying culture in an organisation. Every site, every department, every team will have developed their own rules, their own “work arounds” and accepted behaviours. An organisation is therefore an amalgam of many diverse, sometimes collaborative sometimes combative, cultures.

This rings true to me from my experience. Organisations are made of people. People are diverse – it is one of their strengths. And with that comes diverse views, diverse styles of working. In our ever-connected world, life, and not just organisational life, is becoming more complex. Mission statements and declarations of company values are well intentioned but often ignore what is really happening in the organisation, what people do and think. And when these statements are given from on high by the executive, it is easy for those beneath or at the side-lines to think, “Yeah. Nice words. But its not how it works round here.”

If italic doshin is our desired outcome, it means we must find a different approach to finding a common purpose around which everyone can unite.

This is a question of adaptation not of technical or process re-engineering. As the pressures of society, technology, and economics assail us all, those who do not face up to the challenge of change and adapt will fail. Just look at Nokia and Kodak – two infamous examples..

And, as Schein, Martin and many others remind us, culture develops over time. It is an accretion of call and response and sense-making within.

I would go further to say that it can best be achieved through an emergent, inquiry-based approach. People rarely like to be told how to think or feel. Asking them how they think and feel, and then engaging them in wider conversations with others recognizes both the similarities and the differences. Recognizing both is vital. Individuals need to be heard and respected. From an open sharing of and inquiring into views, a common understanding and a unifying intention and purpose can emerge.

In a rapidly changing world, this is more important than ever. As my colleague, Dr Alexandra Stubbings recently wrote in an article about the new world of AI,

“Connecting to purpose is how we remain relevant and resilient. It requires finding out what matters to us personally, finding the intersection between the social and environmental challenges you can see – of which there is no shortage and many will be in your backyard – and the value you can bring to them through your skills and expertise. You don’t need to wear a cape and tights (that’s optional, your call), it could simply mean questioning how you do what you do today and adjusting course to ensure the results of your efforts are net positive for the people and the world around you. My hunch is that it’s in asking ourselves these questions, and doing this work, that we’ll prove relevant and resilient for the long-term, and give ourselves less cause to be worried.”

Itai doshin means many in body, one in mind. It does not mean that we all must think the same thing but that we need to be moving in the same direction with a shared purpose.

And we need that now more than ever.

References
Organizational Culture and Leadership: Edgar H. Schein.
Jossey-Bass business & management series originally published 1985, third edition 2004
Connecting to purpose in a world of bots. Why finding the human matters in the AI age: Alexandra Stubbings, 2018. Article for AB Communications.
Organizational culture: mapping the terrain: Joanne Martin. Sage Publications, 2002

There’s lots being said about mindfulness in the workplace: there’s good evidence that personal mindfulness meditation practice reduces stress and improves wellbeing. There’s a clear instant appeal for leaders as it’s an obvious truism that resilience improves a leader’s effectiveness. But we think a significant opportunity is often missed regarding mindfulness at a group, rather than just an individual level.

Those who’ve engaged in mindfulness practice find that the REAL juice is their increased awareness of their emotional reactions. This offers them opportunity for active choice rather than automatic reaction. Mindfulness helps people to “think slow” when there’s no immediate need to “think fast” and it’s another truism that the kind of meaningful change often sought by leaders is unlikely to come from their automatically reacting in the ways they’ve reacted before.

This is especially important given that leaders do what they do IN RELATION to others. The leader’s role is to bring the best out of each individual in service of the team or organisation but few can really explain the nature of this art. In many ways, the way the ‘group mind’ works is similar to the way the ‘individual mind’ works. It then follows that, as we understand how our own mind works, we begin to see how the group mind works also.

We are social beings and the reason we work together is because this enables us to pool resources to achieve shared goals that, in turn, give us what we need. When we feel others around us are working for the collective interests of the group, we can be less vigilant about protecting our own interests. This enables us to focus on what we need to do because we don’t need to look out for ourselves. This is how humans regulate emotions in a group and this, in turn, conserves energy that individuals can then dedicate to getting stuff done. These are the kinds of conditions that make effective leadership possible, all the more so during the kinds of organisational change that necessarily provoke emotional reactions.

Whereas most leadership development approaches to mindfulness focus on developing the individual, our experience and research indicate that significantly higher impact can come from groups developing their mindfulness skills whilst working together. A group in which multiple members model to each other how they can listen, regulate their emotions and maintain group social cohesion has a significantly higher chance of being resilient than one in which all that is left to the leader.

So, to take these issues of leadership and organisational change seriously, we’ve stepped up to develop and validate interventions both to develop group mindfulness and to teach others how to do it. How will you and your group(s) take advantage of group mindfulness?

Designing organisations to deliver their purpose and strategy is one of the trickiest challenges that managers face. Why? Because typically we’re encouraged to take a ‘technical’ approach to an ‘adaptive’ problem. Let me explain…

On the one hand there is a rational linear sequence to organisation design – start with your purpose and strategy, determine your business model, and from that your operating model and organisational structure should flow. We use this sequence ourselves all the time. But of course, you are never designing from a blank slate. You are always designing into a context, one made up of people with histories, values, predilections, prior relationships and habits. Such context is very far from rational and we have to respond to the vagaries of that.

What’s needed is a methodology that designs organisations to be relevant to their markets and audiences; resilient in their supply chains and core processes; and inclusive of their people in ways that help them and the whole organisation to flourish.

Adaptive Organisation Design is a movement from a ‘dark arts’ approach of design based on algorithms, esoteric language and boxes on charts, towards an inclusive and participative process of facilitated dialogue, that engages as much of the ‘system’ as possible in open discourse on values, beliefs, hopes and fears, and crucially, purpose – individual and organisational. It’s a movement from treating people like machines, to treating them like they matter.

Over the coming weeks I will be exploring and developing these themes of Adaptive Organisation Design – the concept and methodology – in some depth. We’ll look at some of the tools and ideas and how we apply them. In the meantime if you’d like to share your own thoughts or are keen to know more now, get in touch!

“How can we be more innovative?” is a question many clients ask us. It’s not one that’s simple to answer, not least because it addresses so many more questions than “how do we have new ideas?” (questions around such topics as decision-making, risk appetite, performance management, interpersonal dynamics, organisational brand/identity, culture and many more besides).

Even at the level of idea generation, “being more innovative” is tough when it is already explicitly or tacitly known who an organisation’s ‘innovators’ and ‘non-innovators’ are. This division between the innovation ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ can be reinforced through the introduction of many of the creativity techniques favoured by consultants. These can continue to play to the extroverted, right-brained strengths of those already seen as able to make great leaps of innovative imagination.

For balance, some more introverted, left-brained small-leap techniques are required so we offer our stepwise 1-2-3 process. Sure, it delivers ideas, but, perhaps more importantly, it provides opportunity for those with different strengths to contribute to innovation in a way that’s as easy as 1-2-3. Do it as a team on or your own.

1. Start at 1, not 0: Don’t feel compelled by the tyranny of ‘starting at zero’ with a blank sheet of paper/blue sky/blue ocean. Feel free to start with that perhaps not very innovative idea you just can’t quite shake. As long as you follow 1-2-3 to use that idea to generate others, rather than getting seduced into thinking you’ve found the silver bullet, you’ll do OK.
2. Turn the 1 into a 2: Do this by finding a way to characterise that 1 idea such that you can think of what the opposite/alternative characteristic might be. A recent client looking to launch an app in the education market was so keen on a go-to-market strategy that involved putting the app directly in the hands of customers and staging competitions with cash prizes that they found it hard to think of alternatives. But as soon as they were able to characterise their strategy as “push” we could instantly think about “pull” strategies like inviting the Times Educational Supplement to feature their story. Furthermore, characterising that as an “old media” strategy prompts thought about what would be a “new media” strategy. And so on. We call this process ‘unfolding’, like peeling apart a folded sheet of painted paper to reveal the left and right hand sides of the butterfly/Rorschach ink blot test within…. And then doing it again and again. And then going back to all the interesting characteristics we’ve developed to see if they stimulate us to think of even more innovative strategies.
3. Fill a 2 with a 3: Between some of those opposite/alternative characteristics, there may be interesting ‘middle characteristics’. Perhaps there are ‘excluded middles’: between “new media” and “old media” are “now media” and “no media.” What ideas do they provoke? Perhaps there are ‘included middles’: between the “big picture” and the “small picture” should be the “middle picture.” Our work with a logistics start-up identified that although it had compelling “big picture” aims and some patented “small picture” enabling technologies, it had something of a blind spot around the “middle picture” engineering and business systems thinking to connect the two.

So, see if a 1-2-3 approach works for you, either in groups or individually, in full or in part. We’d love it if you’d give us a shout to ask for help or let us know how you got on.

By way of a blog, we’d like to introduce to you a new Talik Strategic Partner: Mark Leonard.

Mark’s into bringing together social process, somatic awareness and the cognitive principles of mindfulness meditation to organisational culture. We’re excited to have him on board

Find out more about him and his background here

Check out Mark’s fascinating take on the role mindfulness could play in addressing climate change here:

http://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org/explorations/blogs/198-can-mindfulness-save-us-from-ourselves

How is sustainability framed in organisations? How do alternative framings enable or inhibit action on sustainability challenges? It seems the research we carried out five years ago at Ashridge is as relevant, if not more so, today. The questions we pose still fresh. Of the 24 organisations we spoke to, from Unilever and M&S, to Natural England and Sainsbury, the majority are doing more than ever to blaze a trail for sustainable business. Interesting those who appear to have struggled (mentioning no specific names here) seem to have started with more of an ‘avoidance of harm’ framing than an ‘exciting opportunity to innovate’ one, or even a ‘this is just good business’ one. But I don’t want to generalise too much.

What’s most notably changed is that the appreciation of the complexity of sustainability issues – particularly the systemic interdependencies between them – is compelling efforts to collaborate across organisational boundaries as never before. The publication of the SDGs is directing businesses’ attention to their core purpose and encouraging new more socially purposeful business models that address the issues the SDGs highlight – poverty, water and sanitation, energy, oceans, education and so on.

All of which makes the heart of the Talik systems change model – the work of sense-making and reframing – more figural than ever. Because without the fundamental dialogic work of seeking to understand other viewpoints, values and mental models, we cannot hope to find common ground from which to design collective endeavours.

Three quarters of an hour into a coaching session today, my “coachee” – in the midst of some deep, appreciative, soul-searching – suddenly lifted his head and laughed, “I thought this was supposed to be Presentation coaching!”

You’re right. I responded. It is.

I think clients are often surprised at the way I ask them to think, or to question themselves. What does their new hobby or their favourite subject at school have to do with “being a better presenter”?

It’s all related.

Nothing in our lives exists in a vacuum (except perhaps that MASSIVE spider you were too afraid to get with a glass and a postcard!) all the parts of you that go into making up the whole that is you have an impact on the way you think, stand, gesture, speak…

If you don’t believe me, by all means go and look up the Reticulo-spinal Tract. In Medical School they refer to it as “the scientific basis for body-language”. It is constantly relaying information between the postural and emotional areas of the brain. And is the reason you might cross your arms when defending your argument, or point one foot to the door when the conversation becomes tedious.

And voice is no different. Voice is intrinsically linked to our sense of self; to our emotions. Our earliest vocal sounds are the deeply-rooted, guttural cries and squeals of childhood that wordlessly seek to express our hunger, fear, sorrow, anger, joy, love!

With time and interaction, we acquire language the means by which to describe the abstract. Our appetites, our phobias, our melancholy, rage, elation and desires suddenly have newfound release. And with increased experience we layer expectation – personal, interpersonal, social, societal, generational, historical etc. etc. etc. – on top of our external expressions of belief and craft them to be not merely acceptable but celebrated.

All those layers of expectation, all that history – without even touching on self-doubt, censure, parental criticism etc. etc. – are there in you; invisibly documenting your history like the hidden rings of a tree. When we stand up in front of even one other person and seek to tell a story (of whatever kind) all those layers have a profound impact on the sound we make and the impression we give.

A big part of what I do requires looking at those hidden/forgotten influences and exploring with you how they affect your impact. For example… If my client suddenly reveals that, “Actually, d’you know what? Knitting makes me SO relaxed…” well, that is something we can use. I’m not precious about how we find answers. It’s coaching, not problem solving. I give you some exercises, some guidance, we talk, and we find the path that is right for you. If 2minutes of knitting enables you to find centred, deep breathing and a resonant delivery (unlikely, but I’m running with the thread!) then bring your needles! It doesn’t mean I’m going to advocate that you sit in front of the Board knitting a scarf but it’s useful information – for you as much as me!

It’s an holistic approach for sure. But that’s how it really should be done – not just “bolting on” a couple of handy mnemonics. And if you’re the kind of person who shudders at the thought of having to stand up in front of people and present – in whatever capacity – there are very few quick fixes. As the saying goes: You can either do the job quickly or do the job right. So let’s do it right. Start from the ground up and you’ll not only see, but feel, the changes.

It’s remarkable how often you’ll hear people say “We need to communicate better” or “It’s a communication issue” as if saying that alone will fix the multitudinous ills that plague them. Of course it’s a communication issue, the sad truth is, it’s ALWAYS a communication issue. Somehow, somewhere, someone isn’t communicating clearly and the butterfly effect amplifies that tiny wingbeat into the full-scale hurricane descending on some hapless soul elsewhere! Ok, I’m torturing the metaphor, but you get my point.

So, what can we do to communicate better? Well, we all know that delicious cliché, the one about listening to hear, not listening to reply – BUT let’s not let the fact that it’s a cliché rob it of its truth! It is a cliché for a very valid reason. And there’s another great irritant… BUT! That word alone must be the cause for more divorces and relationship breakdowns – of all sorts – than probably any other! The great negator: BUT. “I really don’t want to have to do this BUT…” “I know you’ve worked really hard on this BUT…” “I’d love to give you a raise BUT…” Well, we all know how these play out – and it’s hard not to feel the blood rise as you read them!

In EVERY interaction people are bringing their own agenda to bear, the reasons are legion, it could be a personal preference, a positional responsibility, a fiscal necessity; the prolific “whys” divide and multiply like a virus on a microscope slide. And it’s so hard to hear those reasons and not hear them as excuses. So hard to listen.

In Adaptive Leadership there is a useful, simple tool: Faction Mapping, to try and gain some insight into these difficult exchanges, to try and uncover the various agendas being brought to the table. Adaptive Leadership suggests that these interactions can be viewed from the perspective of participants’ Values, Loyalties and Losses.

Faction Mapping is a very similar tool to the sort of “prep” work I often do as an actor. Just as the playwright crafts a scene and includes the characters pertinent to the action of the play, Faction Mapping asks us to consider which stakeholders are relevant to a particular situation, and to consider: what their Values might be, to whom do they owe Loyalty, and importantly, what do they stand to Lose? When we put ourselves in those people’s shoes, when we attempt to view the situation from their standpoint we’re not simply being empathic for the sake of it, we begin to see how people – who, really, are just like us – are being influenced by their own pressures, being steered by forces, often, beyond their control and to begin to make some sense of their sometimes unfortunate (or downright vicious) decisions. And by recognising those pressures, experiencing their viewpoint, sometimes – while it may not make the taste in our mouth any less bitter – it provides us with an opportunity to see that these people are not monsters; they simply have their own stuff that they’re dealing with too.

And that’s not to take away from the people who ARE monsters! Some people are. There certainly are psychopaths wandering around. BUT (see what I did there?!) they are, thankfully, very few and far between. And part of good communication is (has to be), remaining objective, keeping a level head. It’s easy to let our own agenda colour our interactions – if someone has denied us before we may assume they will again, if someone has been rude we may well hold a grudge, if someone has patronized us its surprising just how effortlessly we can slide into Rebellious Child – however, if we can keep our heads when all others are losing theirs… then we have a chance to make something better. To communicate.

So practice listening to hear. Follow the flow of the conversation, see where it leads. And if – for example – you’re in a meeting and something presents itself that pulls on your mind to veer off… pause, jot it down and come back to it when this particular stream of consciousness has exhausted itself. It’s a respectful and relational way of being.

WEF thinks business is having a ‘morality moment’. They come around every so often, generally triggered by the public pronouncement of some less than savoury action by a multi-national company. The ensuing self-reflection features some hand-wringing, perhaps even the ritualistic loss of a high-profile head, but it’s uncommon for any meaningful soul-searching, let along real systemic change to take place. We shouldn’t be at all surprised. After all, the underlying values and fundamental purpose of the company remain unchallenged.

Privately owned companies, and family businesses in particular, have some advantages over their publicly owned counterparts however when it comes to creating such root and branch transformation. They are better equipped (though for reasons they might not themselves consider beneficial) to deal with questions of ethical business conduct and can take a longer view on what business morality really means. The intergenerational nature of family businesses particularly lends itself to taking a long view, but it’s a little more nuanced than that. Let’s take three reasons that family businesses could be better equipped to engage with moral issues:

Firstly, you tend to care a whole lot more when your name is above the door. We heard last month at Edie’s Sustainability Leaders’ Forum that Michael Dell, eponymous founder, Chairman and CEO of DellEMC, had a Ray Anderson-like personal epiphany whilst walking on an African beach when he saw e-waste amongst the sand-dunes with his own name on it. Now that’s a wake-up call! Since then he’s been spearheading an industry-leading campaign for DellEMC to design “with the whole lifecycle in mind”, to close the loop on material use in their supply chain and use recycled plastics in their products. They reckon this approach is showing a net benefit of a 44% saving on natural capital values compared to using virgin plastics. Arguably of course it’s a whole lot easier to make high-impact strategic decisions like this when you own the company, but Dell still had an extended system of stakeholders who had to be engaged and convinced. What he has provided more widely though, as impassioned advocate as well as business-owner, is a high-profile conduit for channelling a bigger debate on the moral issues of technology – in design, in manufacture, in use and in end-of-life.

Secondly as a family business you likely have an inbuilt interest in real sustainability – the long-term preservation and resilience of your business and the world it inhabits for future generations. If you plan to hand on your business to your children you want to know it is pretty robust and future-proof. In the family businesses I’ve been engaged with Millennials are starting to ask some difficult questions about the companies they’re due to inherit. They’re checking the back teeth of the gift horse and asking whether it’s worth the effort to learn to ride it. Who can blame them? As legislation tightens on issues like bribery and corruption, labour practices, pollution and resource provenance, the likelihood of infringement, purely through a failure to update policy and practice, increases. Particularly in a long-established business that is slow to embrace change. SMEs generally benefit from operating under the public opinion radar, and family businesses even more so. The reporting requirements on them are less stringent than for PLCs and they’re less likely to be challenged by campaign groups. As a result, the current generation of owner-management may see enticing cost-benefits in dragging their heels. The future owners, however, might just refuse to inherit the mess. Most of us would probably agree it’s harder to dupe your own family than strangers; so whilst they may not appreciate it, family businesses have an advantage in having shareholders who can eyeball you over your cornflakes and pin you down on your carbon emissions strategy.

Thirdly, it’s generally much harder to sack family members, especially if they are shareholders too, so you have to find ways to work through differences in values and priorities to reach an outcome acceptable to all. The family commitment to each other means members cannot just walk away or shirk responsibility; they can’t hide behind legalities or articles of association to defend themselves. They have to confront directly the real and potential consequences of their actions. They have to stay present and engaged in true dialogue, acknowledging differences and working through seemingly intractable conflicts. These are valuable skills for addressing moral challenges because beyond compliance with statutory regulation, ethical policy quickly enters a world of subjectivity, cultural norms and lived values, not technical, binary decisions. As such the advice of lawyers and accountants, whilst it absolutely has its place, may be too starkly black and white to resolve tricky moral questions in business. The ability to stick with such subjective discussion, not rush to conclusion or use status and authority to close down debate are critical to hold open the space for questions of morality.

The advantages of being a family business for addressing moral issues are not purely structural; the experience of being part of a family business develops skills that lend themselves to ethical discussion also. Practicing these skills – in the top teams of private, family or public companies – may enable business to engage with moral concerns for more than another fleeting moment.