Decrapify Work or Die (it’s just an illusion)
Together in electric dreams
Whilst the battles still continue between the ‘back to the office’ brigade and the more enlightened ‘work anywhere’ movement, as far as I’m concerned the war is over. We are moving to widespread adoption of flexible working practices.
So I wonder if we are inevitably moving towards self-organising?
I have been an advocate of self-organisation for some time. It’s how we live our lives and it’s pretty much how I worked for most of my career. I’m sold on it.
I always though that the main obstacle to it, however, is that managers and ‘leaders’ want to hold onto their power and the illusion of control. It would be hard for them to embrace something that their job, and indeed their identity, relied on them repelling.
A widespread series a damascene conversions was highly unlikely, so I thought we’d have to wait for people to die out, retire or get sacked. COVID, however, has rather changed the picture.
“Hybrid success is about letting go” is the headline of Bruce Daisley’s newsletter and I’m sure he’s right. COVID forced organisations to trust their people and give them more autonomy and some, like Unilever, are looking to build upon that to release the latent potential in their people.
But letting go is also the necessary pre-condition of self-organisation. Now the dam has been burst, it’s obvious where the water will flow.
It will probably be dressed up as a move to ‘agile working’ or some such that doesn’t sound too threatening and allows those at the top to maintain some illusion of control and relevance. But we have passed the tipping point, in my view.
Accidents can happen
I came across a great phrase the other day, ‘Management by Accident’ that perfectly expressed how many organisations have operated in the past. We see this in the various fairy tales we hear about how serendipity leads to innovation, or how co-location leads to collaboration, or how open plan office encourage interactions and relationship-building. These are all variants of the ‘put a bunch a people together and see what happens’ approach to getting the outcomes you want from complex human interactions.
It is basically relying on accidents to happen and hoping enough of then have positive impacts. If you throw the dice enough times, you’ll get a double six.
There’s a lack of understanding, and also curiosity, about how things actually work and how innovation, creativity and collaboration occur. Instead of doing the hard work of exploring these things and taking deliberate actions to enable them, ‘leaders’ tell themselves these fairy stories and then claim the happy accident were what they intended all along.
Anyone who’s worked in a large organisation will tell you that the way the bosses think things work and the way things actually get done are often entirely different. It’s the ironist who highlights this gap and points out the absurdity but often frequently pays a heavy price (as I can testify!). Instead, as Dr. Richard Claydon insists, they should be listened to and praised, and action taken to close the gap they have drawn attention to.
Because ‘Management by Accident’ is not a sustainable strategy. In fact, it’s laughable, isn’t it?
What’s the story?
I often refer to corporate life as ‘the great enchantment’, where we all believe things that are palpably (and sometime painfully) ridiculous once you step outside.
This mass delusion is, of course, created by the business fairy tales that we tell each other. About how teams work, about what is important for leadership, about how culture is created, about what is going to happen in the next year or five.
I’ve just started ‘The Culture Code’ by Daniel Coyle where he points out that we have a whole story about what makes a great team that’s built around the quality of the people and the way they approach the work and the qualities of the leader but actually these are not the things that matter. What really makes a difference is the establishment of psychological safety and a sense of belonging and these are built through the often unconscious interactions and signals between the team members. An effective leader is, in fact, nothing like the story we tell ourselves about how leaders have to be.
I’ve recently been involved in a bunch of conversations online about leadership development that have concluded that the reason it doesn’t work is that what we tell ourselves is important about leadership isn’t what really matters - which rather backs up Coyle’s analysis. However, a multi-billion dollar industry exist on the basis of these stories.
Leadership is a favourite topic of the Harvard Business Review, which also talks a lot about personality, identity and culture. This creates a self-reinforcing bubble of conversation where we talk about what is popular, which is popular because we talk about it. We mistake the noise for importance. In fact, this is another set of stories that are about an imaginary world, so we believe that if we can spot the right personalities and create the right culture, the organisation will succeed. In reality, it is power and and the interactions of the collective that affect what is happening in organisations and that’s really what we need to understand and engage with.
I think much of the crisis we feel we are in at the moment is that the stories of the past no longer hold us as they did. We may not be fully aware of it yet but we sense that they are not true, that they are detached from reality. The enchantment is broken, even if the illusion has not yet dispersed.
What we are seeking is a new narrative. This is the opportunity that we have, to tell new stories that are grounded in and connected to reality, that will persist as the ancient tales that have been passed down to us have. They have longevity because they reflect the reality of the human experience. If we want to re-humanise the workplace (which is the desired outcome of Decrapify Work), then our stories must reflect that reality too.
Football’s coming home
Yes, I will be glued to the telly on Tuesday night as England come up against Germany, our footballing nemesis of recent decades. If there’s ever an arena in which the stories we tell ourselves are detached from reality, then it’s football.
England always start out with ‘a great chance to win’, come up against ‘plucky’ opponents (e.g. smaller countries), ‘battle through’, only to come unstuck on penalties, which the Germans score with ‘teutonic efficiency’.
There’s a dark side to all this as well, of course, with misplaced ‘patriotism’ leading some fans to fight with opponents and the inevitable framing of Tuesday’s encounter as a proxy for re-fighting the Second World War.
I follow England with mixed emotions. I am appalled at what the thugs and authoritarian politicans project onto them and carry out in their name. However, I am proud of the multiculturalism of this team and their social conscience, epitomised by Raheem Sterling, Marcus Rashford and the manager, Gareth Southgate and the way they have spoken out courageously about what they believe is right. They are determined to write a different story about what being an England footballer, and by extension, being English, is all about.
Three lions on my shirt …