Upside Down
It is a paradox that the way to address complexity is with simplicity.
I don’t mean presenting simple solutions to complex problems, the modus operandi of Big Consultancies and populists politicians. They either ignore the complexity completely and pretend the problem is simple, or pretend it is complicated and therefore needs a complicated (and reassuringly expensive) solution. Once people have bought in (to either approach) then the con is in and they are unable to disengage.
What I mean is that you address the complexity by applying clear principles. You take action, evaluate the outcome, modify or change your approach, and iterate. Simple, right?
I was watching the latest episode of Taskmaster last night (if you don’t already watch it, do yourself a favour and catch it on Channel 4). For those who don’t know, a panel of comedians undertake ridiculous challenges, the tasks, for which they get awarded points. It’s very silly and extremely funny.
One of last nights tasks was the Pea-lympics, which consisted of five challenges involving peas (I told you it was silly). The first was to find a pea that was hidden under one of the 26 pillows arranged on the floor (in a fractal pattern, incidentally. There’s a lot of that sort of lateral thinking and in-jokes). The one who did it turning over the least number of pillows would be the winner.
My wife immediately said “It will be under the pillow that is P” and she was right. If you gave each pillow a letter of the alphabet, which they helpfully did on screen for the audience, the one that corresponded to P was the right one. If you spotted this (like I said, there’s a lot of lateral thinking and signposted shortcuts that the contestants mostly miss, with hilarious consequences), then you would get it in one or two attempts (you might count from the wrong end of the spiral).
However, no-one spotted this and so they all just randomly turned over pillows until they found the pea. One of them actually went to right pillow first time but that was pure chance.
“What’s the point of this anecdote, Colin?” I hear you ask. “This is supposed to be an insightful newsletter about work, not a TV review column. Or are you randomly turning over sentences in the hope of uncovering a pea of insight?”
The point is that with a complex problem there is no short cut. No amount of lateral thinking will allow you to figure out the answer, you’ll never be able to deduce which pillow the pea is under. The only thing you can do is simply apply a basic principle. If I turn over a pillow, I will know if there’s a pea underneath. If there isn’t, I turn over another pillow. Eventually, I will find the pea.
You might, in this process, modify your approach. Perhaps you start turning over two pillows at a time, which will reduce the number of turns you take. But you are still applying a simple principle and iterating until you get a solution, an outcome that moves you forward.
Decrapifying work, making work better, is a complex problem but it can be achieved by the relentless application of some simple principles. Trust your people, treat them with dignity and respect, be open in communication, share as much information as possible, devolve authority (or sense-making, decision-making and action-taking, as my mate Geoff Marlow puts it) down as far as possible. Give your people clear direction, make it clear what is expected of them, reward them for impact and effectiveness.
It so simple that many senior managers just don’t believe it can work.
Rubber Bullets
It was with interest, then, that I read a post by Michele Zanini, co-founder of MLab and co-author of ‘Humanocracy’, on Michelin’s decade of change aimed at:
‘distributing decision-making and accountability across the organization. The aim was to tap into the latent initiative and ingenuity of its 117,000-strong workforce while recognizing every employee’s right to meaningful work and growth.’
Michelin called this responsabilisation, a French term that connotes both autonomy and accountability.
The aims are laudable, are they not? And they make you kind of ask why would a company not want to do this? We’ll come to that later. In the meantime, it’s worth reading the article, it’s quite short and has a good set of cartoons that Michelin used to communicate the approach.
In summary, then, Michelin applied the following principles:
Customers Up Close
Putting customers at the centre sharpens up everyone’s focus on creating value. (Echoes of Haier’s ‘zero distance to customer’ principle)
Results That Matter
Redefining accountability around actual impact, not completion of procedures and following process. Allowing Teams to adapt methods as long as they deliver results.
Teams in Charge
Compact, autonomous teams form the backbone of entrepreneurial organisations. They can act decisively while maintaining clear collective responsibility.
Leaders Who Enable
When teams take real ownership, their managers must discover new ways to add value and learn to shift from controlling to supporting their teams.
Growth on Your Own Terms
People, not the system, shape their futures and build careers around skills and impact rather than climbing predetermined ladders.
Rewards Based on Contribution
Teams assess contributions, rewards mirror collective wins, and value creation outweighs hitting a myriad of preset KPIs.
Decentralisation That Delivers
Allow the teams doing the actual work play a bigger role in the design and execution, gradually shifting more decision-making power from the centre to the front lines.
Radical Transparency
Frontline teams can’t make good decisions without access to the data that matters. This means moving from restricted information flows to open sharing, supported by collaborative tools.
Pretty simple principles, right? They’re not a million miles away from my own stab at what a ‘Decrapified Workplace’ would look like. Or Haier’s RenDanHeYi philosophy. Or Buurtzorg’s approach. Or … well, there’s a lot of commonality across all the organisations that are doing it better.
That’s not to say these simple principles are easy to apply. Precisely because they are contrary to the way the status quo has operated for ages, the process of change is challenging. For example, the paternalistic approach to career progression had been part of Michelin’s DNA for several decades, embedded in the culture at its Clermont-Ferrand HQ. That sort of thing is very hard to move away from.
But Michelin has and continues to evolve. They know they are not there yet, still a work in progress (in fact, there is no ‘there’ to reach, it’s a constant evolution). It’s not only making them more attractive as an employer, it’s delivering hard results too. They say that between 2017 and 2020, responsabilisation generated over half a billion dollars in manufacturing improvements alone.
Tell me again, why is it so hard to decrapify work?
It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday
To the question of why more organisations aren’t doing what Michelin are doing, I suggest some of the reasons are as follows:
As I’ve already mentioned, senior managers just don’t believe it can be that simple. They have risen to their position partly through technical excellence, they have mastered the complexity of their discipline and of the parts of the organisation they have run. For a manufacturer like Michelin, the production process is extremely complex and harnesses a lot of science and technology. Surely, making it better is going to need even more complexity (which they happen to be good at)?
The mistake here is that making the organisation better (or improving the culture, as they probably frame it) is a complex problem. They are treating it as a complicated problem (egged on by BigCon, who have loads of complicated solutions to sell them).
Besides, if the answer is that ‘simple’, doesn’t that make them look really stupid?
Another problem is that it threatens their power and status. You see, these are not new insights. In the 1950s, Eric Trist (co-founder of the Tavistock Institute and leading figure in Organisational Development) was asked by the National Coal Board in the UK to look at working methods in the coal mines. They wanted to understand the wide disparity in productivity between different pits, with the view to applying the best methods across all pits.
Trist found there were two approached to working. One was based on clear roles and delineation of work, and a hierarchical structure of authority. Each worker on the shift has a defined role and were instructed on what to do by their supervisor. Furthermore, the roles were interchangeable, so the personnel on shifts changed regularly.
In the other approach, the shift teams organised the work themselves, covering each others roles when required. They also share the productivity bonuses equally amongst the members of the shift, who remained the same team from shift to shift. Role boundaries and lines of authority were more fluid and less rigid.
Now, you’ll never guess which one was more productive, will you? It was the second one by miles. So obviously, the National Coal Board implemented that way of working across all their pits, didn’t they?
No, of course they didn’t. They rejected Trist’s findings. They couldn’t countenance giving that much autonomy and control to the men, to allowing the mere workers to have so much power. Instead, they doubled down in their rigid, command and control approach. They made sure shift teams changed regularly so that they would not start to organise themselves. They ensured the bosses remained in control.
Nothing has changed today, as we can see by the desperate attempts by some CEOs to get people to return to the office despite the proven benefits of hybrid working, just so tey can reassert their power and authroity and affirm their status.
And my third reason is that this is just too hard. Making these sorts of changes is difficult and it is work that doesn’t fit their skill set. They have risen to the top because they are good at processes and tasks, hitting targets, technical competence and a fair bit of politicking (as I explained a few weeks ago). This requires working with people, messy and imperfect experiments, uncertain and ambiguous outcomes. It means moving from planning and control to sensing and reacting.
It’s much easier to stay in their comfort zone and stick with what they know. They won’t get criticised for doing what has always been done (the ‘no-one gets sacked for buying IBM/hiring McKinsey’s’ syndrome), whereas if they change then the could become a target. Their board are thinking the same. Indeed, it’s only when they have no alternative that they will consider change, as Bayer did by hiring Bill Anderson from Roche and implementing the ‘Dynamic Shared Ownership’ model that he has produced to reverse what had become an inexorable decline.
Bayer’s employees are fully behind the change, engagement is up, gains in effectiveness are beginning to appear, but the share price has fallen to a 20-year low and losses have risen. Though due to market headwinds as well as the costs of the change, the benefits have yet to flow trough to the financial. That’s caused a short term adverse investor reaction that would be a big problem for many CEOs, especially if they lacked the whole-hearted support of their board that Anderson enjoys.
All in all, it just looks too risky for most CEOs. Why not just sit tight for the 2 of 3 years of their stint, pull the usual tricks to pump up the stock, grab their bonuses and run?
The Right Thing
I’ve always felt that right bunch of people, with the right intent and a clear objective can perform and deliver regardless of the organisational structure. People are amazing, if you let them be.
Decrapifying work is really about enabling people to be amazing. Most organisations are set up to do the opposite.
Those that decide to set their people free will excel, they will be the winners. Those that don’t will struggle along in mediocrity, or perish altogether.
It’s that simple.
Save Yourself
I’m starting a new Substack called ‘No-one’s coming to save you!’, and it’s for people who are struggling with corporate life, or have been ejected and are coping with the aftermath and trying to recover.
I’m going to share my experience of getting chewed up and spat out by the corporate meat grinder and stumbling through the long and messy process of recovery. I’ve learnt a lot along the way, made sense of some of it and have come to terms with the rest. I hope to show people that the they are not alone in the pain and discomfort that they feel, that it’s a normal reaction to the insanity and toxicity of corporate life. I want to help them avoid the traps I’ve fallen into and the blind alleys I’ve gone down so they don’t have to go through what I’ve been through.
It’s also a warning about how dangerous corporate life can be and how you must take the time and effort to protect yourself agains harm.
If that sounds like some you’d be interested in, then you can sign up here. It won’t be a weekly post, it will be ‘as and when’. The first post is up, you can read it on the home page.
Absolutely nailed it my friend. It’s not rocket science but allowing the innate human capacity to co-create continuous new value challenges the self-perception of those who consider themselves very important. There are three categories of this: 1) those who consider themselves “experts” (and therefore believe they should dominate sense making); 2) those who consider themselves “in charge” (and therefore believe they should dominate decision making), and those who consider themselves “gatekeepers” (and therefore believe they should make action taking as difficult as possible in case “wrong” action is taken and they get blamed). In a nutshell that’s why sense making, decision making, and action taking never become tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
Great post Colin. The old ways are damn sticky …