But first, a quick digression and a reminder of Marcial Losada, whose work on the non-linear dynamics of flourishing teams has already been mentioned several times on this blog[1]. Losada’s co-author was Barbara Fredrickson of the University of Michigan, who developed the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions[2]. This theory contrasts the narrow “fight or flight” response generated by negative emotions to the much broader range of responses (such as creativity, curiosity, collaboration, engagement, exploration, play…) generated by positive emotions. The broaden-and-build theory thus explains why a pre-dominance of positive emotions leads to better outcomes in an organizational context, while Losada’s non-linear equations quantify the effect and provide the famous 3:1 positive:negative ratio that characterizes high performance teams.

Fredrickson and Losada have thus provided the academic evidence that people are far more collaborative and creative when under the influence of positive emotions. This is obviously desirable in organizations, but unfortunately, it is not always the case. We often come across the consequences of negative emotions created by a socially-constructed negative climate. Under these circumstances, the coffee-machine and lunchtime conversations are dominated by disagreement with company decisions, fears for the future and general denigration of much that management is trying to achieve.

Why does this happen and how can we ensure a more positive view is constructed instead?

One reason for the negative climate we often encounter in organizations is that it is an unintended consequence of problem-solving. Problem-solving, in spite of its proactive nature, often results in too much focus on weaknesses and threats and not enough on the opportunities and strengths of the organization. The result is the perception (or “social construction”) that the organization has serious problems. The more one talks about problems, the more there seem to be, and the more depressing the situation becomes. In the grip of negative emotions, the organization as a whole is in “fight or flight” mode and unable to see a way out.

So let’s look at an alternative approach, one that actively sets out to create a predominately positive and optimistic climate in order to get better business results, faster.

The fundamentals of “Appreciative Inquiry” (AI) were developed by David Cooperrider of the Cape Western Reserve University in the United States in the late 1980’s and the approach has since been very widely used around the world[3]. AI is a rigorous approach to managing change in organisations that differs significantly from the usual methods. Instead of focusing on what doesn’t work, and trying to fix it, the discussions are structured in order to identify what does work, in order to build on it. By setting the problems to the side and focusing on what gives life and strength to the organization, it is often possible to create new ways of working that make the problems of the past irrelevant.

Why does this approach often work better than more traditional change management?

At the heart of Appreciative Inquiry is a coherent model for engagement. The design is based on positive dialogue and the search for the “root causes of success” in order to facilitate the emergence of positive emotions and push the organization over the Losada ratio of 3:1. The inclusion of as many stakeholders as possible ensures that Ethos and Pathos are strongly emphasized alongside the emergence of a shared Logos[4]. The result is an open, collaborative, optimistic environment that is highly conducive to breakthroughs.

Talking about past successes generates energy, hope and a real collective desire to move in the direction of more success. Through engaging the employees in a positive spiral of success building on success, we can create a sense of pride and so much enthusiasm to build a better future that groups of ordinary people become extraordinary teams.

Traditional change management often fails as people defend themselves against perceived criticism and reject ideas “not invented here”. These traps are avoided by design in Appreciative Inquiry. There is no resistance to change when you invite the whole system to take part in sharing their best experiences and creating a shared vision of the future. Good ideas can come from anywhere in the organisation, and neither management nor the “experts” have all the answers. Management’s role in the process is to direct the focus on what is important, to encourage the widest possible participation and to welcome innovative ideas. These ideas must then be carefully evaluated and the best of them implemented as fast as possible.

If there is a better way to truly engage people in creating a better future for their organization, we would love to hear about it!

Another way of looking at how our use of language can affect employee engagement is through the lens of social constructionism[1]. Hidden behind this rather ugly term is the simple and indeed common-sense idea that our opinion on any given situation, i.e. the reality as we see it, is the result of all our thoughts, discussions and interactions relevant to that situation.

There are three key points to make in relation to this:

1. No two persons can have exactly the same combination of thoughts and experiences and therefore the “reality” that each of us sees is inevitably different. There are as many versions of reality as there are people: “truth” and “reality” are therefore essentially subjective. (For confirmation of this, ask a lawyer…)
2. The more we discuss the situation with others, the more our views will be colored and informed by what the others say, and (in most cases), the more our views will converge to create a dominant group consensus. The depth and diversity of our relationships therefore have a direct impact on how we see the world.
3. The whole thing is dynamic: since the situation is constantly changing and evolving, our opinions and views are subject to change as our relationships, and discussions and thoughts evolve. (Eventually, our opinions may solidify as we fall under the influence of “confirmation bias” and see all new information through the same lens, but that is another story).

This is relevant at both the micro and the macro level. At the micro level, it is easy to see that small groups that interact regularly tend to converge on a common view. (This is the origin of “groupthink”, that dangerous state of affairs where the group is no longer able to listen to dissenting points of view). However, it is the macro level that I want to develop here.

At the macro level, the attitudes and feelings of the entire organization are socially constructed, creating the organization’s current climate. Since the climate determines the level of engagement people have at any one time, it is of prime importance to leaders to understand how social construction works and how to use it to create higher levels of engagement.

So what can be done, in concrete terms, to create the right climate to drive engagement?

Since the climate is socially constructed, our best hope to influence it is to participate purposefully in the on-going organizational dialogue. There are three key things to take into account:

1. Mind your language

This was the main point in Michael’s post: the repeated use of words, metaphors and stories hard-wires your people to think and behave in particular ways. To put it another way, the words, metaphors and stories you choose are key drivers in the social construction of the climate of your organization. Better get them right! If you need collaborative behavior, don’t reward and make heroes out of individuals. If you need a more ethical stance, stop rewarding people that get results through borderline behavior. And if you want your organization to be more positive and optimistic, use positive and optimistic language. (I am going to develop this point at length in a future post on Appreciative Inquiry, a way to mobilize people for change based on accentuating the positive).

2. Focus on the opinion-leaders

In my experience, the loud-mouths and trouble-makers that create the most powerful negative forces in any organization tend to have several positive features: they care deeply about the organization, they want it to be successful, they have a lot of energy and they are often influential. There are of course many exceptions but their negativity often stems more from a feeling of being ignored than from any real disagreement with the key messages. Engage with them, listen to them – they probably have some important insights to what will or won’t work at the operational level – get them involved and you may be astonished by the power of their conversion and the extent of their positive impact!

3. Dialogue, not monologue

Unless there is a genuine and immediate emergency, structure your communication as a two-way dialogue. It is far better to connect and co-create a sense of shared understanding, no matter how messy, than to remain remote and protected behind a slick PR show that convinces nobody. Forget the standard deck of 72 PowerPoint slides, and cut it down to the vital five or six, presented with full attention to ethos and pathos (for more on this, see Didier’s March 2011 post “Broadcasting is not engaging”. Follow it up immediately by an exchange with the audience. Split them into small groups and have them discuss amongst themselves. Ask the small groups to write their questions, concerns or recommendations on cards or Post-it notes that are collected for you and the management team to answer in a Q&A session. Because the cards are anonymous, people feel emboldened to ask the “real questions” [2]. Thus begins a genuine dialogue in which you can understand what people are really feeling and respond accordingly.

Michael Newman recently pointed out to me that without dialogue, we never get to learn how different our perceptions are, nor what are the gaps in individuals’ understanding of the message. Giving enough time for dialogue results in a more rounded and nuanced picture, and in people feeling more connected and respected. Through openness and exploration, dialogue helps build better common Logos; through curious questioning and active listening it role models a desired Ethos; and through the right choice of language it creates a positive spirit and energy to support the Pathos.

By minding your language, engaging with the opinion leaders and choosing dialogue over monologue, you can retain much more influence over your peoples’ opinion than if you simply broadcast the key messages.

Engagement is a socially constructed, two-way process, part of the work of every leader!

Marvin Faure

 We also believe we should not keep the best tools for ourselves. We encourage and expect participants on our programmes to give each other feedback. Those of you who have worked with us will recognise that it is often uncomfortable at first, but with practice becomes easier. Almost everyone gets huge benefit from the experience.

 When introducing feedback as a tool, it is not unusual to find ourselves receiving a challenge; “yes we understand the concept of feedback, but in  …….   (insert country here) things are very different.” This normally provokes a lively conversation about how cultures affect the application of feedback, with most people having strong views based on personal experience. Now, as a diversion to establish your own cultural awareness, let’s see how you do on the following short test:

 You have recently travelled to 5 countries (Brazil, England, Finland, South Korea, and The Netherlands) and asked the question: “What is feedback like here?” Match the answer to the country.

A. We are direct. Very Direct. Whilst we don’t actually get in a boxing ring to give feedback, the atmosphere isn’t much different. In fact we enjoy being direct about other people or mundane things so much, we sometimes miss the real issue. Did I mention how direct we are?

 B. We do give feedback. However, we use our natural politeness and the richness of our language to choose complicated phrases or convoluted sentences to give our message. In that way, we can decode very different meanings from the exchange; I can think I’ve done the right thing by giving you some feedback, and you can take whatever you like from what I’ve said and feel like a gentleman for accepting my views. We can both pretend that it’s all gone jolly well.

 C. We get feedback once a year, from our Manager, following the correct procedures.

 D. Positive feedback is part of our sociable culture. We give praise all the time because it makes us feel good and it makes our people feel good. If people are happy, energised and feel loved, there is no need for criticism; we’ll find a way to work it out together. We tried giving tough feedback once a few years back, but it took us ages to get people back together afterwards, so we’ve all agreed to only be positive.

E. Pretty okay.

The answers are at the bottom.

These are of course lazy stereotypes and in no way accurately represent any national culture. However it is very interesting how frequently generalised statements about feedback are applied to business units, whole companies, regions or even nations. When we ask participants to pay attention to these perceptions and ask deeper questions, it frequently becomes clear that stereotypes are being used, often unconsciously, to avoid giving feedback. If the story round here is that “we don’t offer feedback because…….” then it becomes socially comfortable to stay passive or neutral.

An instinctive reaction is to train people to give feedback; to learn the skills and gain the confidence to deliver high quality and timely observations. There are any number of training courses that teach people how to give feedback. Most are interesting and fun, but few make a real difference to the feedback culture in the workplace. Why?

Whilst it takes time to train people to give high quality feedback, it takes only a few seconds to condition someone to hold back or suppress their views on your behaviour.  In fact it takes little or no effort to ensure your colleagues never tell you how you are doing. How you react to feedback the first time somebody offers it to you will set the conditions for future exchanges. If you deliberately or inadvertently make it hard for people to give you feedback, not only do you tell the person they are not significant, the story will travel very rapidly to others. Poor feedback cultures can often be traced to the defensive or dismissive responses of a few senior role models, which in turn are likely to have been learned from their own bosses when they were juniors. As with many collective habits, these patterns of behaviour can be self-perpetuating.

Obviously, readers of this blog are enlightened managers and empathic leaders who warmly embrace feedback, but you may have noticed some of your colleagues displaying one or more of the responses below. Any of these will cause people to think twice about trying to give you feedback again

• Defending intentions: “Yes, but what I was trying to do was….”
• Justifying actions:  “I needed to do it that way; it was a crisis.”
• “Post-rationalising”: “Well if you look at everything that was going on at the time, that was the only option.”
• “Dismissing: “Yeah, I always do that, people keep telling me.  That’s a habit I know I should change.”
• Trivialising: “So you didn’t like one thing I said; it’s not exactly the end of the world, is it.”
• Dramatising: “You always criticise everything I say.”
• Blaming / Diverting: “It was his fault; hasn’t his behaviour become so unreasonable recently?”
• Self pitying: “Everything is just so difficult at the moment. You just wouldn’t believe how hard things are for me, what with all the ……..”
• Fighting Back: “You finished?…. Right!  Now I’ve got something to say to you…”

If you are reading this and thinking, “OK, I’m guilty occasionally of one or two of these, but can I really turn people off that easily?”, then have a look at this clip about inducing Learned Helplessness in a class of students.

In this simple experiment the teacher, Charisse Nixon, Ph.D Developmental Psychologist at Penn State Erie, creates a situation where half of her class fails in two (impossible) tasks and then significantly underperforms when compared to their peers in a third common task. The students report feeling “stupid”, “confused”, “frustrated”, and one says “my confidence was shot”. The last student sums Learned Helplessness up neatly; “…fail once, and then (we) apply that to everything in the future”.

It is easy to see how Learned Helplessness about feedback can be created. If I value our working relationship enough to want to give you feedback in the first place, then you must be a significant person to me. Rejection from you, as significant person, is far more powerful than failure in simple tasks, so the effects will be magnified. I would need to have huge confidence and purpose to make a second or third approach if my initial ones are rejected.

So what are the principles of receiving feedback; how do you condition people to keep on giving?

• Actively listen. Listen to the words, notice the behaviour that goes with the words and read the emotion behind the message (our old friends Logos, Ethos and Pathos).
• Summarize and clarify (if needed). If you don’t understand what the person means, make your own summary to test you have the same clarity.
• Do not reject or defend. See the list of ‘don’ts’ above.
• Act on it. Nothing says “give me more feedback” like acting on the first observations. However, do not blindly do everything asked of you; if something doesn’t seem appropriate then have a discussion about what works for you both.
• Treat it as a Gift. Feedback is a real gift; it will help you improve your performance and your working relationships. Find a way to show appreciation, and you’ll keep getting gifts

Answers to the Cultural Awareness test

A The Netherlands

B England

C South Korea (has anybody got experience of the feedback culture in North Korea?)

D Brazil

E Finland

Michael Newman

Why is Pathos fundamental in business?

• As Prof. Antonio Damasio demonstrates through a simple example (see http://enablersnetwork.com/2012/why-somatic-markers-are-critical-to-a-business-leader/), rationale is not enough if we wish to move our people “from intention to action”. If having a coherent and compelling motive is needed in order to get the “intellectual buy-in” (in the short clip, one can safely assume that the patient was rationally convinced that going for lunch was the right thing to do), it is not sufficient to move us to action. Damasio explains that it is only when we can “engraft” an emotion over the rational decision that we will implement our decision. At the moment of engaging our people into a strategy shift, a reorganization, a post acquisition integration or any other change, leaders need to work both ate the “Logos” (intellectual) and “Pathos” (emotional) levels if they wish to create mobilization.
• Another important aspect of Pathos is that it is fundamental in creating the safe space (called “Trust” by Lencioni ) which will permit outstanding business results. Marcial Losada (http://enablersnetwork.com/2009/marcial-losada-explains-his-research-for-our-blog-readers/) found something very similar in his laboratory observation of senior leadership teams: appropriate behaviours were the only thing that would enable the creation of what he calls a “flourishing space”, an atmosphere which will unleash creativity, energy, focus and ultimately the right strategic decisions for a team. Go back and consider your own team meetings: are they a necessary evil or are they a strategic moment which everyone is longing for, as a truly energizing, revitalizing moment for the team members?  Pathos is the condition we, leaders, need to create in order to get our people to do and be their best.
• Linked to Pathos is the theme of Authenticity. This is one of the main drivers of the “Generation Y”. But it is equally important to all of us. A lack of authenticity will immediately give birth to cynicism and negative stories in the organization. And we all know how much such downward spiral costs to our firms.
• Pathos is one of the three essential ingredients of any true and sustainable engagement (see our book Engaging Leadership). A well crafted rationale (Logos), with impeccable behaviours (Ethos) will merely lead to pleasant and intelligent discussions. But as soon as your team will walk out of the door, expect no changes. If Logos is the GPS to our car and Ethos the skills of the driver, Pathos is nothing less that the gas to the engine!
• Losada and Fredrickson’s research supports the fact that one of the strongest levy to your EBITDA, R.O.I. or R.O.A. is Pathos… (http://www.unc.edu/peplab/publications/Fredrickson%20&%20Losada%202005.pdf)

This is not Pathos!

 Too often, senior leaders are misled in their understanding of what the emotional agenda is. It is not about hugging trees, being soft or relationship oriented. I have a profound respect for those of you and of my partners who, whilst remaining impressive “thinking machines”, determined to do what it takes to succeed and would never consider failing as an option, have nevertheless understood and developed an amazing capacity to lead on Pathos. The emotional agenda is not:

• Being inappropriate: Emotional outbursts and tantrums, public disclosures which will embarrass the audience, invading others’ privacy or “vomiting our authenticity” at the wrong time, under the wrong circumstances, in an exhibitionist manner and moved by an egocentric need, have nothing to do with leading through the emotional agenda. This is as damaging a behaviour than being an emotionless leader.
• Letting go of Logos to focus exclusively on Pathos: As we explain in our book, it is only when the three agendas are blended, that leaders can hope to create sustainable motivation.

Leading on the emotional agenda is about:

• Being engaged: you can’t engage others if you are not engaged yourself. In a meeting with your team, being engaged means being present (and not on your bloody laptop, mobile phone or lost in side conversations) and creating conditions for your people to do and be their best (as ex-IMD faculty C. Parker used to define leadership)…
• Being connected: a connected leader reduces the distance between his people and himself. He does not behave superior. As you hear us frequently say: “Seniority is not superiority!”. She is approachable and maintains her door open rather than hides behind a fortress of assistants.
• Being Passionate: such leaders display a permanent interest and curiosity for their business. They are the embodiment of the company values. They permanently connect Logos, Ethos and Pathos.

How does one start to practice their Pathos?

 We, human beings, are social animals. A lot of the recent research in neurosciences tends to demonstrate that we are far from being as rational as we would like to think: Most humans are, in principle, able to have emotions (psychopaths are described by their inability to have or show emotions) and feel for themselves and others. And in time of decision making, we rarely choose the objective criteria alone… Pathos is something built-in us. It is not something we need to integrate from outside. Rather, it is something we need to learn to unleash, let out…

• Empathy: A good way to start creating a Pathos atmosphere with your team, is to start listening and summarizing what you heard at two levels: intellectual (usually conscious and explicit to and by the speaker) and emotional (often unconscious and implicit). Listening with empathy is “listening for understanding”, it is about letting go, momentaneously, of my own mental model or opinion and seeking to put myself in the shoes of my team member. I listen without judgment.
• Feedback: Most leaders know how to give feedback (sometimes in a damaging or punishing way, but it is still better than pretending all is nice and rosy). And in order to practice our Pathos, we need to learn to ask for, encourage feedback from our subordinates.
• Curiosity: Practicing Pathos is also being honestly curious and respectful of dissenting or unorthodox opinions from our subordinates. This certainly does not mean agreeing with everything they say, but it suggests showing interest and respect for their engagement in thinking out of the box.
• Low guard: Pathos driven leaders learn how not to be distant and defensive. As we all know, “It takes a very strong man or woman to show their vulnerability”. Lower your guard and the respect of your people will increase.

 I have shown this clip one year ago, so many of you know it by now… But the attitude, behaviour and mimics of Leonhard Bernstein on this short clip represent a moving image of the Pathos driven Leader.

Lots of desk work this week and two short visits in Paris and Geneva… Wish you all a nice week.

Didier

Sometimes however, there may be such a project on the curriculum for all sorts of good (“Let us give the participants a chance to practice what we taught”) or less good (“Because we also had a project in our MBA at IMD 20 years ago”) reasons. For the motives expressed before, they usually collapse or fail to raise a lot of energy… People feel they have been trapped and will do it without passion.

A program on which I had been invited was heading for a similar rough time. When the participants presented their ideas for such projects and were shot down in flame by members of the Board, it felt even worse than the usual neutrality surrounding such kind of efforts. People left, understandably bitter and disappointed from both sides. We felt we had failed to adequately prepare both participants and Board.

When participants came back a few weeks later, we were impressed by the amount of work, research and analysis that they had produced. In order to repeat the same mistake, we had decided to spend ample time preparing their meeting with the Board. But something struck us: whereas the PowerPoints were near to perfect and the depth of the Logos content undebatable, something didn’t feel right… A vague anxiety was still there. Suddenly the penny dropped: How would they engage their Board? We, who advise boards and executives on how to engage their subordinates had failed to reflect with the participants on how they could engage their bosses.

So preparation time moved radically away from polishing almost perfect content to creating the right context.

Participants worked at five levels from that moment:

• Type of Meeting: clarify for themselves and their guests whether the meeting would be about exploring jointly, defining a problem, generate option or make a decision
• Logos: instead of presenting a long power-point based monologue, finds ways to engage the Board into co-creating clarity, meaning and ownership. Don’t make them passive consumers
• Ethos: exemplify the behaviour you want to see from your bosses. Don’t expect them to start.
• Pathos: use a set-up conducive to co-creation (get rid of the U shape, tables etc…), use powerful images and symbols. Don’t hope that previous settings will do the work.
• Content: Respect the rule of three key points supporting the key message. Identify what is the “Noble Cause”, the purpose of your project and share it upfront.

I confess never to have seen anything like the meeting that followed. Serious and brilliant managers became creative, engaged and engaging, their bosses immediately rolled their sleeves up and we witnessed a high level strategic dialogue between business partners and not between school boys & girls and school masters… Upon leaving the place with my partners, my brain was playing and replaying the clip here below: In 12 angry men, Henry Fonda plays the role of a juror who, alone against his 11 colleagues, will through the quality of the context he sets-up, manage to engage them, then convince them, one by one to change their minds. “I just want to talk” (hear I just want to explore before we conclude) is the strong stand he takes at the start.

Useful eye opener for us and for you all as well I hope. Do we spend enough time setting the context of our presentation or do we dedicate all of our resources to the content? When seeking to engage our people into profound changes, how much attention do we give in setting the conditions for success versus spending it on the “perfect” organizational chart, processes or strategy?

If you haven’t seen the movie 12 angry men, I recommend you buy it. It is a fantastic classic.

Lost somewhere in a wonderful place around Rio de Janeiro with one of the most amazing team of high flying finance wizzards I ever met. A week of meetings and contacts in São-Paulo ahead then flying to my “Brazilian home”: Bahia!!! Have a good week all, Didier

“I am little sad of the passing of Kodak. Some of us, of a certain age, have piles of Kodak slides and snaps, uniquely connecting us to our childhood, and personal histories. Hearing about Kodak’s recent demise, filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy, also got me thinking about the current woes, of other organizations and industries that are struggling and failing as they are unable to adjust to what is to them an ambiguous world.

The challenge of living in an ambiguous world

When faced with disruptive ambiguity few embrace that ambiguity, to understand it, to listen deeply and think very hard about transformation — how to transform, and how to design for transformation. This is a challenging thing to do and few do it well, and increasingly more organizations are vicariously living in the groan zone as we transition from a linear world to a non-linear one.

I would argue that our industrial world has reached the edge of its adaptive range, Kodak, Nokia, the banking crisis, pensions, venture capital, the NHS are all examples. We are witness to a systemic failure of many of the institutions that have brought us so much prosperity, health and the promise of better future and it is this convergence of failures that requires us to understand the challenge from a new perspective.

The trilemma of our current age

The institutions, organizations and systems that we still use were designed and built for a less complex world. Consequently, fault lines are running through our society as we are overwhelmed by a trilemma of social, economic and organizational complexity. The design challenge involved in resolving these questions comes because this non-linearity is causing a comprehensive restructuring of society at large.

But still there is deep institutional and cultural resistance to real change. And, as the forces of disruption increase, often the resistance of organizations under threat does not abate but intensifies, until flailing against this unknown or misunderstood enemy they exhaust themselves — take your pick from the slew of industry and organizational failures.

My challenge to organizations is that they need to reflect mindfully on the significant shifts in our society today, although new technologies are the tools for change — our research shows that this is a social revolution where in the face of institutional failure people are learning to get what they need from each other. So what do we need? Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants asks, ‘what does technology want?’ and his answer, ‘it wants what we want’; greater opportunity and freedom, empowerment, mutualism, diversity, efficiency, diversity and even beauty.

A new organizational / social / economic model

What is emergent is a new model that demonstrates those ambitions, a car company created as a community that can build cars 5 times faster at 100 times less than capital cost, or a VC firm that says it’s a venture community and that the next Silicon Valley is not a place but a platform that already has 11,000 members in 200 countries which argues everyone should be funding startups, or at the other end of the scale, a firm in Dalston, East London, lending to some the 6m+ people in the UK that do not have access to a bank account because the banks will not lend to them, but whose customers pay back 95% of their loans, or a service that helps patients better manage their chronic health care? Which has proven to reduce; wrong diagnosis, over prescription of drugs, clogging up hospitals and specialist time. Or an entire healthcare service in the territory of Ontario, when faced with significant challenges in how to run its healthcare system, used what is called ‘participatory leadership’ to ensure their best possible future was evolved and developed by those that used and ran that service — a very different scenario to our own current NHS woes.

Each of these examples are demonstrations of how to design around the needs of humanity rather than around the needs and orthodoxies of an industrial world. They prove that people are not motivated purely by commercial need, that people can be producers, co-creators, consumers, investors and evangelists, and that we can design better for societies, organizations, and commerce — all at the same time.

They also point to a sustainable future in which what we have worked out is that a better world is shaped by what we share; wealth, knowledge, resources, and culture. And, that we now have the possibility to truly transform our world, to be more resilient, to be more relevant to us both personally and collectively, socially cohesive, sustainable, economically vibrant and humane, through the tools, capabilities, language and processes at our fingertips.

Avoiding your last Kodak moment

So if organizations do not want to experience their own unique last Kodak moment they need to do 6 things:

1. Accept the uncertainties of an ambiguous world and become master of them. Requiring deep listening and some humility.
2. Explore how to become adaptive and agile. This ability to upgrade constantly in hardware, software, organizational structures, business models is required at least for the time being. To be adaptive we must be constantly creating, collaborating, critiquing, communicating, by identifying key drivers we can better evaluate, and it enables the development of a new literacy.
3. Learn how living and working in an open culture / economy can be hugely beneficial
4. Embrace participatory cultures as a sustainable form of economics, innovation, organization and leadership
5. Become comfortable with the idea of craftsmanship as a personal and internal culture: the Craftsman is always in beta, consistently using “PLAY” as a process for discovery, the development of new insight, technique and creativity
6. Learn how to design for transformation by having the vision, the courage and the conviction to seek and implement lasting change.

The benefits of adopting these principles is a more resilient forward thinking organizational culture that is now capable of strong creative and conceptual thinking with the ability to realistically and meaningfully operate in today’s non-linear world.”

Thank you Alan for this generous sharing, in the spirit of the G.R.A.V.I.T.A.S. values of the Open Source Economy.

Between São-Paulo & Rio this week. Have a great week all

Didier

So what is “Bridging”? It is far less instinctive and somewhat counter-intuitive than “Bonding”. Bridging is accepting to move out of my comfort zone and connect with the other(s). It is about empathy, refusing to hide in my shell and attending the needs, concerns and questions of the others. Bridging, like the famous Positive vs. Negative behaviours of Losada (see post http://enablersnetwork.com/2009/%E2%80%9Cwhy-it-takes-a-focused-effort-to-create-a-value-building-environment%E2%80%9D/), takes far more thinking, effort and energy than bonding.

So why is it so critical for us, business leaders?: Some years ago, a colleague of ours had been called by a the Board of a client. They had invested a fortune over a wiz kids team in Research & Development. The group was located far from headquarters as per their request: they wanted to stay in their country of origin. But, little by little, distance, followed by doubts and finally mistrust, creep in. The angels had clearly fallen from Grace and the suspicion was that they were using the funds that the company was investing on them and their work, to prepare their own start-up… Our colleague was the last call. His job was to go , meet those people and subsequently advise the Board on what to do with that team. To his surprise, he discovered that behind the “Bella Figura” window dressing, the team was in shamble: they felt the heat of the expectations’ pressure and feared they would not be able to deliver. Cracks had appeared between themselves and some were not in speaking terms with each other… They hid their suffering behind a bonding reflex: “Let us not talk about our doubts and internal struggle to HQ!”… And little by little, from their side as well, mistrust grew against their leaders: “They just hired us to weaken the companies we worked for. They never had the intention to do something great… We do not have the resources anyway”…

Sometimes, as we see from this example, Bonding vs. Bridging is played by our subordinates and it can be damageable. But far worse are the cases when we, as senior leaders, fall into the same trap. After almost 20 years in this job, I found three common cases:

• Isolation: In times of uncertainty (merger, reorganization, strategy shift), leaders tend to isolate themselves from their people… They have many good reasons for that: the new organization is not yet totally defined, they haven’t decided yet who will be nominated for the key jobs, think that they can’t go and share their doubts and hesitations with their people, as it could make things worse… The fact is that, as we say in French. “The Nature abhors a vacuum”… So people will fill the communication and engagement gap… Very quickly, negative fantasies and rumours will emerge. The energy of people will drift from fighting into the market towards guessing my next step, colluding with people in power to try and get advanced information about the new organization or strategy… How many mergers & acquisitions, how many new strategic intents have paid a heavy price for that bonding reflex of the leaders in charge when, in fact, these should have left their unintended ivory tower and gone bridging, reassuring, re-energizing their people, admitting their “temporary incompetence”…
• Distance & perceived elitism: With the tidal wave of “generation Y”, many leaders feel a bit tight and constrained: these “kids” are extremely well educated and technically/scientifically prepared. They don’t play the game the way we do and don’t seem to value the same references as ours… Consequently, we see senior leadership teams isolating themselves in order to try and preserve the illusion of being still in control… You may think: “Not in our organization!”… I would challenge you: When was the last time your top leadership team dedicated time and resources to its own education and professional update? How open is your team vis a vis younger leaders? How welcoming and curious is it towards those who are challenging orthodoxies and thinking in different ways? Are you in a “Seniority is Superiority” mode or is your team really connecting, listening to learn and understand, humble and lowering the guard in front of its own people? In other terms, is your team bonding/Closing on itself or is it reaching out/bridging towards its people?
• Politics & value destruction: When it is the leadership team (and not a remote R&D team on their island) who is undermined by internal tensions, rivalry and politics the impact is far worse on the whole organization. I am always surprised by the candor with which leaders in such cases still believe that “nobody outside this room knows about our minor disagreements”… And admitting the misalignment is a great step forward: most dysfunctional leadership teams simply deny being in that state… The problem is that everybody in the organization knows… Bonding is an unhealthy defense mechanism. People affected by it have lower energy; they are in a reactive or egocentric mode instead of being purposeful. They think that they left their dissent behind closed doors but can’t help letting out criticism, cynicism or disillusion. People pick it up and multiply those micro-behaviours by ten at their level (“Since the role models are entitled to mistrust and have a go at each other, why shouldn’t we?”)

I hope this makes it clearer why the distinction between bonding and bridging is critical and how many great leaders and their team fall in that trap, believing that nobody saw it… Bonding at Board, Exco, Comex, Codir, Diretoria level is one of the biggest cause of shareholder value destruction…

On my way to São-Paulo/Rio for three fascinating weeks of work, and a fourth one with my wife and daughter in our Bahia paradise. Have a good week all

Didier

The theme of this week’s blog is how we learn and how our decisions are powerfully shaped by the things we talk about and pay attention to. The blog was triggered when I saw a connection between two very different pieces of work that were sent to me by colleagues. If the hypotheses outlined below are true, I was able to see the connection precisely because I had been paying attention to different parts of our profession and had been immersed in very different client engagements over the last month. The mental links I was making every day made it easier for me to notice other hard to see connections.

David Rock (an author, consultant and lecturer) and Jeffrey Schwartz (a research psychiatrist) presented a webinar in 2006 called the Neuroscience of Leadership. http://www.strategy-business.com/webinars/webinar/webinar-neuro_lead?gko=37c54  In this, and in the accompanying article, they explain how neurons in our brain communicate with each other through an electrochemical signal driven by the movement of sodium, potassium and calcium ions. The communication channels are little more than one ion wide and therefore follow the rules of Quantum Mechanics. Quantum theory tells us that when you pay attention to something its state does not change; the metaphorical ‘watched pot that never boils’. This, in very broad terms, is the wonderfully named Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE).

Further research by the authors explored what happened when close or repeated attention in one’s mind was paid to a particular thought, experience or insight. The attention “kept a circuit or link open and dynamically alive”. Over time the links “became not just chemical links but stable, physical changes in the brain’s structure”. These changes are why “people who practice a specialty every day literally think differently, through a different set of connections, to people who do not practice the specialty”.  Rock and Schwartz spell it out for business: “Professionals in different functions – Legal, Operations, Finance, R&D, Marketing, Design, HR, have physiological differences that prevent them from seeing things the same way”.

So next time you are at a meeting and the idiots from the other functions just don’t seem to ‘get it’, it could well be that their brains are wired differently and they are processing assumptions and data in completely different ways. It is equally likely that the criteria they use for decision making bear no relation to you own ‘flawless and impartial’ logic.

So how do the heroes of the 7^th Cavalry ride into this movie to save us from the chaos caused by the QZE tribe? Unfortunately, this story may not have the predictable happy Hollywood ending…..

Robert Bateman is an Officer in the famous US 7^th Cavalry who wrote in The Washington Post about a worrying trend he was seeing in the US military. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/inteldump/2008/09/soldiers_and_warriors.html

He entitled his piece ‘Soldiers and Warriors’ and it spoke of the increased use of the word ‘Warriors’ in place of ‘Soldiers’ in the Army and Marine Corps.³ So why should this be cause for concern?

Bateman is clear in his answer: “This is a bad sign, because calling us warriors is not only inaccurate, it displays an ignorance about what a warrior is all about. The bottom line is that a real “warrior” is really just about himself. Indeed, the key difference between a Soldier (or a Marine, or an Airman) and a “warrior” is almost that simple. A serviceman does his job as a part of a complex human system, he does so with discipline and selflessness as his hallmarks. Courage also matters, of course, but it is only one of several values that are needed. The serviceman is the product of a Western society which, while it values individualism intrinsically, values subordination in pursuit of a collective objective as well. A warrior, on the other hand, is the product of a culture or subculture which is essentially purely honor-driven. That is not a good thing.”

He goes on to examine the honor culture: “…the behaviors of individuals are driven almost exclusively by the need to gain and then to protect, their personal honor. In an honor culture, honor is seen as a commodity. Honor is almost a material thing which must be accumulated. It can only be won by action. And because it is a commodity, it can also be taken away. In both cases this is an individual’s responsibility, he must gather honor as he can, and he must defend both his own honor and the honor of his family.”

The message from Bateman, and the vast majority of those commenting on his article, is explicit; we must not let the warrior ethos and honor culture take over from the creed of the professional soldier who puts service before self. But hang on a moment… how can simply replacing one word with another undermine the proud history of the US military? Step forward the Quantum Zeno Effect. When you are exposed, from day one of Basic Training or Officer School all the way through to your first firefight in the Combat Zone to the lexicon of the warrior, you become hardwired to process information and make decisions in a very different way. You are being set up to behave in a way that is not congruent with the needs of a modern combat force.

Of course, Bateman could as easily be writing about some of the characters involved in various corporate meltdowns in the last few years. In fact, if you look at politics, sport, or many other human endeavors you will see the soldier versus warrior dynamic at work.

So it is not just the military who are hardwiring their people through the repeated use of words, metaphors or stories. What about your workplace? Are the heroes that are talked about in your organization the warriors? Is the behaviour that elicits praise all about toughness…honour…deliver or die? What words have you chosen for your new strategy, and are they inadvertently undermining your desire for collective creativity? Could your intentions to stimulate collaboration be struggling to take off because the words in everyday use signal that it is unwelcome – and maybe you could focus on changing your language rather than creating a fiendishly complicated cross-functional bonus matrix.  Change won’t happen overnight, but when the words and metaphors you use are fully aligned with your strategic intent, and if you keep on using those messages, you are helping to create the conditions for the unconscious minds of your people to support your goals.

The good news is that, by consciously directing your attention, you can literally re-wire your brain to experience things differently⁴. That enables us to unlock some of the negative impact of tough experiences from the past by re-writing the stories that we tell ourselves. Our negative, or inappropriately positive, somatic markers (see past blogs) can be challenged, helping us to make better quality decisions. Most importantly, when we embrace the fact that we can alter how our brain is wired, we create many more opportunities to enjoy ourselves and achieve more of what we want in life.

Michael Newman

1. No, not the name of a low-budget science fiction movie. Although I was listening to the radio on the way to the airport this morning, and the presenters were asking listeners to send in their ideas for ludicrous movie mash-ups. My favourite was: “Predator versus Bridget Jones; The Musical”. The piece was great fun to listen to and I bet some of the ideas might just make it in Hollywood.

2. Creative Collision is a technique used by Nick van Heck of Executive Learning Partnership; http://www.elpnetwork.com/ to bring together apparently unrelated topics. Often, after analysis, the themes do stay unconnected, but occasionally a real value creating insight leaps out. This forcing together of ideas is a stimulating element of workshops where disruption and complexity are on the agenda.

3. Thanks to Ben Clayton-Jolly for passing this to me. The article also resonated strongly with his personal experiences of military and business leaders.

4. Those of you who have seen me this winter will have noticed I have been running my own QZE experiment. I have been traveling without a coat, wearing a light t-shirt in temperatures down to -5C, constantly telling myself that “I am not feeling cold”. I know the temperature is low, and supporting evidence is provided by hat, coat and scarf wearing fellow travelers, not to mention the snow on the ground. However I do not experience the temperature as uncomfortable. Warning: If you are going to try something similar, please don’t follow the example of a colleague by foolishly going out running when it’s -20C. Take it easy and give your brain time to build those connections.

“The unusual feature of this study was that the participants were all known to be highly motivated amateur cyclists in their private lives: the sort of people that cycle 8000 – 10,000 km per year and think nothing of cycling up and over several Alpine passes before breakfast… The average age of the group was 42 and they were nearly all in employment, so it is interesting to see to what extent and under what conditions their extraordinary motivation can be transferred to the workplace.

The conclusions are quite clear: people are most highly motivated when they get deeply involved in doing something they love, and when they feel they are making real progress in things that are important to them. There is nothing more satisfying than to be totally engrossed in succeeding at something challenging. One forgets everything else in total concentration on the task at hand, while time seems to flash by.

These conclusions remind us strongly of the seminal work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In his book Flow[1], first published in 1990, Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “cheek-sent-me-high”) first popularized the notion that people are happiest and most productive when they are in “flow”. He defined this as being when people are able to lose themselves in a challenging activity which stretches their skills and in which the goals are clear and they get regular feedback. He also noted that when people are in “flow”, their perception of time is altered: sometimes hours can seem to pass by in minutes, while at other moments time seems to stand still as they focus intently on achieving something very skillful.

In Csikszentmihalyi’s words: “The best moments [in our lives] usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”

Looked at this way, every enlightened manager surely dreams of her people (and herself) being in permanent flow! Think of Apple: one of the remarkable talents of Steve Jobs was to create the conditions where his product development teams could get into flow.

Unfortunately, in most companies the opportunities to achieve flow at work are all too rare, and the “real world” constantly creeps in. As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer point out in their recent McKinsey Quarterly article “How Leaders Kill Meaning at Work[2]”, “senior executives routinely undermine creativity, productivity, and commitment by damaging the inner work lives of their employees in […] avoidable ways.” They don’t mention flow or Csikszentmihalyi but list some of the ways that managers effectively prevent their subordinates from getting in to flow, such as belittling their work or ideas, taking people off project teams before the work is finished and frequently changing either the goals or even the goalposts. Amabile and Kramer list four traps that senior executives are prone to fall in to:

1. Mediocrity signals: for example, espousing innovation and growth while in reality focusing on cost-cutting and avoiding risk;
2. Strategic “attention deficit disorder”: launching frequent new initiatives that are never carried through;
3. Corporate “Keystone Kops”: creating chaos through complex matrix organizations where roles and responsibilities are unclear;
4. Misbegotten “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals”: setting high financial targets to which people have no emotional connection.

Each one of these traps taken individually effectively destroys any real chance of people getting into flow on meaningful work (let alone all four together).

So what can be done?  There are no easy short cuts. As a manager, you must think long and hard about what are you really trying to achieve, and how best to do so. We sometimes remind managers that you are paid for what your people do, not for what you do. The obvious conclusion is that a large part of your time should be focused on making it easy for your people to do their best work.

A good starting point might be to ask yourself the following questions:

• How much of your work in the past month truly helped your people get into flow (i.e. become productively focused on doing their best work),
• How much of what you did hindered your people from getting into flow?
• How meaningful is their work, not to you, but to them? What could you do to help them find more meaning in it?
• How can you cut down the distractions and the time-wasting activities that prevent them from concentrating on creating real value?

Motivation is a complex and controversial subject. One of the few things the experts agree on, however, is that intrinsic motivation (the sort that comes from within, from the desire or pleasure in doing something for its own sake) is far superior in the long run than extrinsic motivation (the sort that comes from an external reward or punishment). All the millions of hours spent on fine-tuning bonus plans might be far more profitably spent on finding ways to increase the opportunities for people to get into “flow” at work.”

Marvin Faure

One aspect, in particular, touches the topic of decision making. More concretely, to us business leaders, how do we “move our people from intention to action”? In other terms, what conditions do we need to create to engage our people into following us in the new strategy, organization, culture or post acquisition integration we have designed for them?

For those of you who know us well, we strongly believe that leaders need to act at three levels (intellectual, behavioural and emotional) through three levers: Logos, Ethos and Pathos. For memory:

• Logos: is about co-creating clarity, meaning and ownership about the change we intend to engage our people in.
• Ethos: is about behaving in ways that are coherent with our stated intention.
• Pathos: is about anchoring the change through powerful “emotional markers” (via spectacular symbols, profound stories or powerful metaphors).

For us, a critical condition for engagement (see our book “Engaging Leadership“) is for the leaders to work on those three agendas at the exclusion of none.

I published a post (“People don’t buy what you do!“), on Simon Sinek’s theory, following which people buy why we make a product or service instead of what it is and how it functions. In the long version of his clip, Sinek explains that, in his view, the analytical part of our brain (Neo Cortex) acts as a powerful filter. But what moves customers from the intention to buy to the purchasing act, is when the product or service, after passing the rational test of the Neo Cortex, connects, resonates with the emotional, limbic part of our brain (this is what our partner, Nick van Heck calls the “Resonating Focus”).

In another post (“We think of our future as anticipated memories“), I summarized one of the strong points of Nobel Prize of Economy 2002, Daniel Kahneman, whose work seem to demonstrate that our emotional memory takes over from our factual memory. This is fundamental to the principle of engagement: people will not necessarily be convinced by our factual logic but far more by the emotions attached to the decision that we invite them to support.

This bring us to Damasio and his “Somatic Markers”: In the short clip here below, Damasio talks about one of his patients who was a “normally” intelligent person but whose emotional memory had been seriously impaired. Just the mundane fact of choosing a restaurant was becoming an endless task for this man, constantly reasoning, weighing the pros and cons but incapable of linking the decision for one or the other places, to any emotional memory. “It is emotions that allow us to mark things as good, bad or indifferent” explains Damasio. It is only when facts and analysis (taking place in the Neo Cortex) and emotions are matching that we move from paralysis or intention to real engagement. Damasio calls those powerful emotional memories “Somatic Markers”.

What does this mean for business? Imagine how people, who lost their job in a previous merger, are taking the news of a new one? How do people who have attached the name of “reorganization” to discomfort and suffering, welcome the news of another one? As we are not the famous “Men in Black”, able to miraculously wipe-out all of the negative memories of our people’ mind, we need to build for them alternative, positive, authentic and constructive “Somatic Markers” who will allow them to choose, consciously or not, between a negative of a positive memory which they can attach to the intended change. The article from Christophe Lachnit on our blog confirms that, following Damasio, symbols, stories and metaphors find their way straight to the emotional center of our brain.

It seems that many of us are/will be deeply involved into selling their new strategy, reorganizing their company, trying to inspire a new culture or seeking to merge as rapidly as possible several organizations (and maybe doing those four at the same time). Convincing through cold analysis, data presentation and powerpoint indigestion will definitely not be enough if we wish to get our people to rapidly and wholeheartedly engaged into change and back to creating value for the customer. It will be our duty to behave in a way that matches our declared intention. And it will be fundamental to understand how to build those somatic markers in the minds of our people…

Another busy week ahead around Paris and Amsterdam. Enjoy yours!

Didier