Accountability and Development vs. Direction and Followers

I made a differentiation that permeated much of my work life.

• Managers manage in steady state circumstances. They are responsible for getting the work done and for ensuring their people have the knowledge and skills to get the work done.
• Leaders lead in abnormal circumstances (emergencies, war, change). They are responsible for direction (Go this way!) and ensuring that people want to go with them.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I said this, in leadership workshops, in facilitating teams of leaders implementing new strategies or organizations, or wrote it in blogposts like this one.

I can’t quite call it a silly distinction. I still believe it. It is so simple as to be as laughable as:

“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who do not.”

After all, as several people said to me,

“Hey Alan, I’m expected to both get the work done and lead change. So which am I?” or

“Hey Alan, just when is this steady state you’re talking about?”

In most organizations managers and leaders are the same person and it certainly feels like we’re experiencing continuous change. I now say these are “different and overlapping skillsets.”

Recently I have thought some about another difference between managers and leaders, the degree to which they have to deal with fear, both their own fear and the fear of others.

“I ain’t ‘fraid o’ no ghosts”

One of the folk tales that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm gathered in order to preserve German culture in the time of the Napoleon’s conquest is entitled “The youth who went forth to learn what fear was.” It was read to me as a child under the title, “The boy who couldn’t shudder.”

This boy wasn’t afraid of the dark like some in his family. He didn’t fear walking through the graveyard at night. Creepy stories failed to scare him. He didn’t refuse dangerous work like repairing the roof; he tied a rope around his waist and went about standing on the joists to replace the thatch. Enough people told him he was “too stupid to be afraid” that he began to think there was something wrong with him. He just couldn’t “shudder” like they could.

The boy asked several townspeople to help him learn to shudder. These people told him frightening tales at bedtime and he slept; they moved his bed and he slept on the floor. They impersonated ghosts and he pulled their sheets off. The hangman had him spend the night with hanged corpses. The boy put them in coffins. There were several even more tasks in the in my childhood book, involving threats from a king, a giant, lifting heavy gold, etc., but the youth never did learn to shudder. Ultimately, the fear-deficient boy married without learning to shudder, until his wife poured a bucket of cold water with a hundred small fish on him as he slept and he woke up shuddering. Then he and his wife laughed  while he dried by the fire eating porridge.

As a child I thought this was just a funny story. On reflection there are some lessons about fear:

• Fear of the unreal (ghosts, the dead) can be overcome by seeing the truth, (pulling off the sheets) combined with action, (putting dead men in coffins).
• Feeling real fear (the water and the fish, falling from the roof) is fine, no matter how unpleasant, if you can act to mitigate the risk (tie off and watch where you step) and laugh about it later.

Beyond Fairy Tales

The unpleasant emotion of fear or its lesser cousin, anxiety, has its place the world. Fear is sometimes a rational reaction to known risk. For example, it is reasonable to be afraid of heights. I am not afraid of heights; I am afraid of falling. More specifically I am afraid of landing after falling from a height of anything over about six feet.

So when I work on a step ladder I am certain the ladder is firmly positioned on a flat surface and stay off the top step. I no longer work on a roof, but when I did, I was certain to tie-off. Known risks can be prevented and most of the unpleasant consequences can be mitigated.

In change, the risks are unknown. It was a running joke between Saturday Night Live’s Mike Myers’ and Dana Carvey’s characters Wayne and Garth, “We fear change.”

People don’t really fear change. They fear unknown risks. They fear a possible loss of job, pay or status; they fear a loss of work relationships or the peace of mind that comes from knowing that today will likely be pretty much like yesterday – that feeling of “no worries – I got this.”

People react differently to unknown risks. Some freeze; some charge ahead with reckless abandon. In leading change, the leader’s responsibility is to remove the unknown where possible. For example, be as transparent as possible. “I will tell you what I know when I know it.”

Another role of the leader is, where you can, to allow choice. People are less likely to resist a change they have had input into or when it is their choice to commit to the change.

Fear of failure

Many change leaders, including me, are overly concerned that they will not be up to the task of leading others to change. We discount what we know and what skill we have and think that the world will end because of our inadequacy.

Throughout my life I have had a recurring type of dream. When I was younger I was in a classroom taking a test. I had no memory of having taken a class or read any text material for this test, but somehow my whole future depended on my test score.

Later, when I was an actor, I dreamed I was on stage in a play I had not rehearsed or even read. When I was a trainer, I was teaching something I not only didn’t know, but everyone’s life depended on it.

Even in retirement, I sometimes have such dreams. Now, they are seldom about school. I guess I’ve finally “graduated.” I am still occasionally on the stage, but mostly today these dreams are set in the work I left six years ago. I came to call these “unprepared dreams.”

I view these dreams as representations of a fear of failure, my anxiety that I have not done enough preparation or am overcommitted. The only remedy is prioritization and preparation.

Of course, there really is no failure in my retired life that has a life or death aftereffect (not that there ever was). For any goal I have I can choose to double down and persevere or choose to revise the goal.  I now realize that this was always true. Most of my fears were always self-inflicted.

I do think about leaders for whom failure has greater consequence. Leaders in wartime or safety in potentially dangerous operations, whose decisions may have injurious outcomes. Prioritization and preparation still seem like appropriate actions.

For most leading change, prioritization and preparation, signing up for the risks of change and encouraging others to choose to follow, may not eliminate fear, but it will make it more manageable. When I was first learning to facilitate leadership groups,  an old pro with whom I was co-facilitating said something I still find comforting:

“The butterflies never go away, you just teach them to fly in formation.”

‘“Be Patient?”

The first time I met Will, I remember thinking, “Now here is a guy who looks like a CEO.” Will was straight from Central Casting. He was a little older than I was at the time, late forties maybe. He was taller than me, maybe six-one and trim and wore an expensive medium gray small herringbone suit, tailored so you noticed that he worked out. Will’s hair was black with just the right amount of silver at the temples. His teeth were toothpaste-ad perfect, bright white and straight, and his jaw muscles looked like he chewed rawhide as a hobby. He had a warm smile, but when his gray -blue eyes locked on yours there seemed to be a chill in the air.

Will was the division head for major project finance at a money center bank where I conducted leadership training. Participants formed change teams during the training and then presented their progress monthly over the next ninety days.

The project finance team missed what they promised at the mid-point. Will exploded.

When I lose my temper I turn into a sputtering fool who cannot put a sentence together; Will was one of those people whose verbal acuity sharpens with anger. He eviscerated the team.

After the team left I suggested he might be more patient. Will did not take my suggestion well.

“BE PATIENT?!  THE WORLD WAS NOT BUILT BY PATIENT PEOPLE!” Will bellowed at me red-faced and stormed out.

I was still a little rattled when Bob arrived to hear the progress report from his team.

“I see you’ve met Vesuvius,”  Bob joked. Evidently Will had a reputation for volcanic eruption. Later I heard his temper derailed him from the CEO track, but I do remember that his team delivered at the next meeting.

Reflecting on Patience

This week I have been reflecting on patience. As part of my self-publishing journey, I have struggled with impatience as I learned digital user interfaces for publishing and advertising platforms. I’ve been pushing my ‘late adopter being’ to its capacity. So I thought about Will’s outburst.

I can think of many examples to support his “great men ain’t patient” case. Andrew Carnegie and his partner Henry Clay Frick built the Pittsburgh steel industry, but weren’t patient men, (just ask the Homestead Works strikers in 1892). Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor company and force behind the adoption of the assembly line, was known for many things, but patience wasn’t among them. Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Elon Musk of Tesla, have each been called many things, but “the soul-of-patience” not-so-much.

There are stories of each of these men losing their tempers. They each set extremely high standards and frequently belittled people who didn’t meet them. Could Will have been right?

Of course, these business tycoons, offered being part of building something extraordinary in exchange for their impatience. There is some relationship between that vision and others’ acceptance of their angry intolerance of delay or underperformance.

Patience and Perseverance or Persistence

Contrary to what many people think Thomas Alva Edison did not invent the light bulb. People had been burned filaments-under-glass since the late 1700s.There were several patents for incandescent lights by 1870. Edison may be given cultural credit because he commercialized the light bulb, actually made a profit selling them. He tried many different filaments.

In 1879 he hit on carbonized bamboo, which burned with an eerie orange light and lasted for a long time. When I visited his home in Fort Meyers, Florida.in the 1970s the docent told me that the chandeliers with twenty twenty-watt bulbs were “installed when the house was built almost a hundred years ago, but Mr. Edison went on to experiment with almost three hundred filaments after that.”

“Why?” I blurted out. Others on the tour laughed.

“There is no money in a lightbulb that lasts for a hundred years,” she smiled. Those same light bulbs still burn today, even if they are only turned on so tour rubes like me can ask “Why?”

Edison was a press hound. He was always giving interviews. Once in the middle of his perfect filament quest he bragged that he had examined “over two hundred different filament materials.”

“Why don’t you give up?” The reporter asked.

“Give up? NO! I now know two hundred ways Not to make a light bulb.”

Edison was persistent. He persevered and ultimately invented an improved vacuum pump so he could use carbon from a burned metal as a filament. The light bulb has become a universal symbol for an idea, which implies a flash of brilliance. Actually the history of the light bulb is one of many flashes of brilliance followed by endless testing and failure before final success.

He was persistent, but was Thomas Edison patient? If you read about his relationship with Nikola Tesla or his battle with George Westinghouse about direct current (DC) versus alternating current (AC), patient might not be the word that comes to mind. Uber-competitive maybe but patient, probably not.

Anyone who starts a business, trains for an athletic event, or engages in invention, innovation, or improvement, knows that gains come from multiple iterations, and patience, persistence, and perseverance are required.

Patient Managers? Patient Leaders?

Managers get the work done and develop people. That would seem to require patience. How could you educate, train, and create growth opportunities without patience.

Leaders work in abnormal circumstances, war, emergencies, and change. They provide direction and attract followers. These circumstances don’t always present opportunities for patience.

 “OK, ladies and gentlemen there is a fifty foot tsunami approaching and we need to get to higher ground. I know that some of you take longer to process risk than others and we want to allow time for you to become comfortable with action in this situation. Some of you run faster than others and that is totally OK. Take your time and move at your own pace, but if you are both a slow processor and a slow runner, you may have a PROBLEM!”

In urgent timeline situations leaders might be forgiven for a lack of patience.

In most organizations these days the manager who manager the day to day and the leader who leads change are the same person. Perhaps using patience to develop people can build the commitment to follow a leader and make change. Change requires persistence and perseverance and not a small amount of patience.

What a manager-leader shouldn’t be patient about

A while after Will’s explosion, but before the next team presentation he and I had a conversation.

Will said, “There is just absolutely no way I would ever make a group presentation to my boss where I was telling him for the first that I wasn’t meeting a commitment. They should have given me a ‘heads-up.’ I mean, Andy, [Will’s boss] wasn’t in the room, but he could have been. It is the ultimate sign of disrespect.”

Once again Will had a point. It didn’t excuse his anger, his explosion, nor his over-the-top dressing down of the team, and I told him so, but he wasn’t wrong about what the team should have done. Some of his impatience was justified.

I often talk about three critical elements of trust in business:

1. Share accurate information in a timely way to those who need it. Protect confidentiality,
2. Be as transparent as possible about decision making so people can understand your judgement.
3. Do what you say you are going to do, (and if you can’t see number 1).

So don’t be “patient” with violations of trust. Constructively confront them as soon as they are known.

What a manager-leader should be patient about

People are different. People are different from each other. People are different from the boss. They process information differently, learn at different rates, commit to action differently. So as far as possible without hindering business commitments or placing undue hardship on customers, or other team members, be patient with those differences. Help when you are asked to help and can help, patiently.

Be patient with yourself.

Here is what I am meditating on this week. This is the opposite of Will’s issue. Will was too patient with his own flaws. He knew his anger was a problem, but never apologized, and apparently didn’t work on it until he was fired a few years after we worked together. He was more patient with himself than he was with others.

Many people, not just me, I swear, are much more patient with others than they are with themselves. They cut others a break for being slow learners or failing to change behavior, but constantly beat themselves up for doing those things.

So . . . these are words of advice to myself . . . if they work for you too, so much the better:

Persist . . . Persevere . . . Don’t give up . . . But be aware there is little virtue in beating your head against a brick wall you could easily walk around, between struggling to learn something when you could easily hire someone who already knows how to do it.

But if you’ve committed to learn something, to do something, to solve some problem, Be Patient. Stop comparing yourself to others, instead compare yourself to your own milestones that you met this week, last week, or last decade. If you’re frustrated, step away for a while. Remember Murphy’s Law:

“Nothing is as easy as it looks. Everything takes longer than it should. And in every field of endeavor, everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, at the worst possible moment.”

And, by the way, just knowing about Murphy’s Law does NOT mean that it won’t apply.

Be Patient.

And please be patient with me as I persistently hawk my book. 

“Murder at the End of the World”

We are watching this TV program. Don’t panic. No spoiler alerts because we aren’t that far into it yet. It’s a murder mystery and a near timeline science fiction show. It was produced by FX but we are streaming it on Hulu so we have no commercials and we could binge the entire series at once, but we can’t watch that much TV at one time. Think back five or ten years and contemplate what has changed to make this paragraph possible even for a late adopter like me.

The story takes place at a hotel built by a tech mogul, Andy (Clive Owen), in Iceland. There is a “conference with a group of tech people and alternative thinkers, artists, hackers and the like there to reconceptualize life in the new climate reality.. Oh, and people begin getting killed, a sort of “Ten Little Indians” updated, (look it up).

All the attendees have been invited by Andy’s assistant Ray, who is an AI mating of scheduling and security aps such that you can actually see him. “We prefer alternative intelligence actually.”

The plot doesn’t really stretch the science fiction imagination much. There are tech giants building bunkers and cities from the ground up on California farmland today. Andy may be a little megalomaniacal, but not really compared to some of the tech moguls alive at the moment, and Ray is, a little dorky but nice. “I’m a good listener.”

But the show is stretching my brain a bit more than the usual whodunnit, I think because of some non-fiction reading I’ve done lately:

• The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology, by Juliette Powell and Art Kleiner
• Unthink: All You Have to Do is Nothing, by Dr. Erik Zabiegalski
• Fluke: Chaos and Why Everything Matters, by Brian Klaas
• Becoming Unbelievably Successful, By John Knotts

These books are seemingly unrelated. I didn’t pick them because of a single line of research, but I think that together with the picture of the near future in “Murders at the End of the World” they connect with ideas for leaders to cope with the chaos of the twenty-first century.

The AI Dilemma     

This book is really about how we, leaders in business and government,  and just regular folk, need to get a handle on artificial intelligence before it gets a self-organizing learning-machine control mechanism on humanity, our institutions, and the world. It may not be the SkyNet of the Terminator movie series, but AI might mess up our life if we leave it alone to be “developed because we can” without enough thought and oversight.

The seven principles that Powell and Kleiner propose would seem to be a solution, if anyone is listening:

1. Be Intentional about risk to humans – Loss of privacy, defamation, medical procedures, or nuclear missile responses run without human oversight.
2. Open the closed box – algorithms that people don’t understand before they start learning might be unpredictable
3. Reclaim Data Rights to People – control over what information we share and to what purpose (opt in or out) may not be enough to stop the AI juggernaut but it’s a start.
4. Confront and Question Bias -There are almost 200 known human cognitive biases. Are we just programming AI so that we can make Belief Bias, Confirmation Bias, Reactive Devaluation Bias, Gambler’s Fallacy Bias decisions (etc.) infinitely faster.
5. Hold stakeholders accountable – there may need to be different defamation law, or negligence law, but it starts with confronting tech developers, politicians, and just poor users of technology before damage is done.
6. Favor loosely coupled systems – I did a lot of work in my career encouraging leaders to build “aligned organizations,” where systems, procedures, culture and leadership practice aligned with and supported strategy. This is critical to get things done, but doesn’t allow opportunity to challenge, rethink and pivot. When we’re talking about systems without human oversight, too much alignment is problematic, thus loose coupling.”
7. Embrace creative friction – bringing together multiple points of view, (Like Andy has done in my TV show) means that conflict will ensue. There is a lot of evidence that managing this kind of conflict leads to better decisions

Sound principles all, for managing the progress of artificial intelligence, but also for leadership in chaotic times.

 Unthink

 Zabiegalski outlines two different thinking processes, “exploitation: doing the same thing over and over again, improving the process by eliminating waste and distraction, and “exploration,” gathering new data, researching seemingly unrelated topics, asking “what if?” or “in what ways might we?”

 He recommends that as individuals we stop periodically and ask what kind of thinking is required. He suggests that leaders build ambidextrous organizations capable of both kinds of thinking. This process of “unthinking” is what Powell and Kleiner suggest for managing development of AI.

 Zabiegalski was very influenced by the work of David Bohm about how things are interconnected at a subatomic level. Quantum entanglement, the demonstrated connection that Bohm demonstrated by changing spin between two particles at a distance, show that our actions have consequences that we may not ever imagine.

 Fluke

 First let me confess that I’ve only bought this book; I haven’t read it yet. I read an article that Brian Klaas wrote in the Atlantic. In the article Klaas gave several examples of how world event were shaped by completely random events.

• Hiroshima was bombed, not Kiyoto because a general and his wife had had a great vacation in Kiyoto twenty years earlier.
• The Arab Spring started because a Tunisian vegetable vendor set himself on fire.
• An oscillation in the Ohrt Cloud in distant space threw a big rock our way and wiped out the dinosaurs and somehow micro-organisms were left in the sea, which grew into fish to amphibians with legs and through an incredible accident to live birth in mammals or people might have laid eggs.
• Covid came from a bat or some other source and one person carried it to the United States prompting a two year lockdown and changing the way people viewed work for the immediate future.

Chaos theory studies the impact of randomness in complex systems and show that small changes in initial conditions can have immense effects. This has been called the “butterfly effect,” a butterfly flapping it’s wings in Hong Kong can cause a tornado in Oklahoma. This is presumably illustrative, not factual, but you never know.

Becoming Unbelievably Successful

John Knotts wrote what is a book about self-leadership. He advocates becoming successful by first determining what success means for you and determining your purpose. This book is like many others except for the fifteen Universal Laws that Knotts includes in these self-analyses. The Law of Vibration sounds like the Bohm principles that Zabiegalski quotes. Knotts emphasizes the power of thought that Klaas points to in understanding the potential impact of seemingly random actions and that Zabiegalski alludes to with his prescription for “unthinking your way to a balance of exploration and exploitation..

One of the universal laws Knotts quotes is the Law of Gestation, life, ideas, technologies take a while being born. Like fine wine matures in fermentation, but must age till the time it is ready, some things must bubble and steep longer than others.

Connections

We live in a turbulent time. Look at any aspect of life right now – world geopolitics, technological innovation, weather, business, communications, attitudes towards work post Covid. What you see is Change and not just small improvement tweaks, huge potentially life altering step change. What do these four perspectives teach leaders about coping with and thriving in this level of change?

From Eric Zabiegalski’s  Unthink  I learn that we must stop and examine our thinking. What aspects of our lives require exploration? What parts of the problems we face do we know roughly what to do, but we need to use exploitation, act measure improve and act, measure and improve again?

Brian Klaas’s Fluke, counsels us to prepare for randomness for anticipating unforeseen consequences. When I worked with clients on strategy and when I worked with clients on improving safety, I always recommended building in some redundancy, a buffer, a contingency plan, something to give you time to deal with the unpredictable.

John Knotts writes about planning your career, purposefully, but one could easily apply his principles to starting and building a business. Knotts emphasizes learning, building new capability and connections as a path to success. He includes a chapter on volunteering, giving back to others as a requisite for success.

Powell and Kleiner’s book, The AI Dilemma, is about how we should react to one particular technological change, but their seven principles require very little rewriting to be a prescription for leading in turbulent times.

1. Be Intentional about risk to humans – Shouldn’t this be applied to a peace, process, actions on climate change, healthcare, financial inequity?
2. Open the closed box – Should transparency and the opportunity for input from those affected by any change be foundational?
3. Reclaim [Data] Rights to People – rights to privacy, visible fair process, equal opportunity, basics for survival -access to food, shelter, and safety.
4. Confront and Question Bias -While Powell and Kleiner discuss decision bias, shouldn’t leaders also confront “Otherism,” that demeans any individual or group such that it justifies mistreatment of those viewed as “less than?”
5. Hold stakeholders accountable – Leaders should start by holding themselves accountable, but stand up for these values, “speak truth to power, and refuse to follow leaders who violate a human centered view of change.
6. Favor loosely coupled systems – and plan for randomness and unintended consequences.
7. Embrace creative friction – “none of us is as smart as all of us.” IT is a truism that bringing together people with radically different points of view produces a better solution, but believe me it ain’t easy. Managing creative friction, takes a strong process that ensure that everyone is heard. In my experience that requires leaders and all participants to put a damper on their egos and follow some agreed upon ground rules.

Now that brings me back to “Murder at the End of the World.“  Andy has assembled a group of radically different thinkers, but someone is eliminating the diverse points of view. That isn’t what I mean by “managing creative friction.” I know, it’s a TV show, but all too frequently, “in order to move ahead,” or because we ‘must sing off the same hymn sheet,” leaders belittle the disagreeable,  and stifle dissent.

That won’t work for solving the problems facing us today. For that we’ll need to Unthink, plan to Become Unbelievably Successful,  prepare for Flukes, and follow 7 Principles for Responsible Leadership.

I bought this book a year ago, scanned it, and put it aside. I was too wrapped up in finishing  and self-publishing my own book and my “too cool for the people” cynicism kicked in every time, I picked it up.

I am not really the target market for this book. I’m 76 and comfortably retired, not really in the becoming unbelievably successful game. And yet . . .

. . . I got a great deal out of it. I especially liked and am revisiting the description of success defined, ikigai, how to think about and find purpose, and the Universal Laws.

John Knots’ story is kind of amazing, from not-so-great student to sergeant in the Air Force to many, many letters after his name, certifications and degrees, working on a doctorate. He’s started businesses and charities and does excellent work helping veterans with PTSD using horses, equine therapy. John still doesn’t call himself unbelievably successful, only says he is “on the path.”

I bought this book because I’ve met the author and because I was writing a book on how to be successful in a career (Traveling the Consulting Road: Career wisdom for new consultants, candidates, and their mentors), so John Knotts and I have something in common. We both want  to share what we’ve learned to make others’ path easier.

This is a book about self-leadership, about taking responsibility for your life and creating the life you want. I have in my life been this proactive and I have also just let life happen to me. In my experience being proactive works better. This is a lesson, I relearned far too many times, but finally got right. Would this book have helped me? Maybe.

There is a great deal in this book that will help someone become successful and it is clear that it is better if you start earlier rather than later. But I think John believes that if someone is the kind of high school student he describes himself as being (or that I was), that this book would be extraordinarily helpful. It would, but I doubt that I would ever have read it. If a parent or mentor bought it for me, I might have read it, but not in a way that I’d have gotten much out of it.

You see this is a workbook. John Knotts shares some very interesting ideas, some genuinely helpful ones in fact, but first you have to have thought about what success means to you, which probably means experiencing a little success and a little failure, even vicariously. Then you have to sit down to do the work. This book contains a helpful framework for the work.

The two most important chapters are Chapter 4, defining what success means for you, and Chapter 7, creating the plan. John has questions at the end of each chapter, but those questions aren’t all equal. He has recall questions to stimulate your memory, which are important, but “teachy.” The most important questions are the ones that deal with your application of the concepts to your life.

I came to learn (the hard way) that success, whether in business or life, is first about clear direction. Knowing where you are going and what you want to achieve is critical. Then it is about building capability, knowledge, skills, and support system to get you there. And it is about connections, the people who can help you on your path. This book covers all that and much more.

But it’s a workbook; it won’t work unless you do the work.

Please forgive the crass commercialism. I haven’t figured out how to attract sales for my book without hawking it. 😊 – Alan

“You think weird!”

Fred, my client, was being complimentary. He was explaining why he liked having me around. “No really, I mean it. You see third and fourth level consequences that I would never think about. You understand multiple connections and five ways to solve a problem, when I’m lucky to see one. You think weird,, and I like that.”

At that moment we were in the middle of integrating an acquisition, and people from both companies were already pretty freaked out. The two companies had different fiscal years and therefore different performance appraisal schedules. Synchronizing appraisal schedules seemed like a quick win to Fred. I suggested that accelerating some performance reviews and delaying others before the new organization was complete might be misinterpreted. It didn’t seem like rocket science, but he was too close to it until I spelled it out.

In fairness this wasn’t the first or last time I was told I think weird. I have an intuitive way of taking in information. Where some like to process in an order A-Z, 1-10, I am quite comfortable starting at 4 and 6 and not only inferring 5, but also 1,2 and 3. Sometimes if my brain and my mouth aren’t in sync, I start talking skipping those inferred numbers and strange connections and people respond with, “Huh?”

Luckily, I have learned (mostly) to slow down and specify inferences and unseen connections. My wife keeps me straight at home and a colleague, the late Dr. Richard Taylor, used to keep me straight at work.

Two kinds of thinking

I worked with groups on innovation or continuous improvement initiatives. While the objectives of these two types of initiatives are different there are many similarities between them including a requirement to separate divergent thinking from convergent thinking.

The objective of divergent thinking is to generate a quantity of ideas. It employs intuitive connections, thinking in analogies, or contrarian thinking (“What is it NOT like?”). Brainstorming and Edward de Bono’s Six Hats are well-known techniques.

The objective of convergent thinking is the best idea . .  implemented. This invo9lves evaluation, risk assessment, measurement, and planning. Divergent thinking is much more prevalent in business. Managers and leaders learn to analyze, evaluate, measure, plan, and do

The key is not to mix them. Just as it is destructive during brainstorming to say, “That’s a dumb idea,” it is equally destructive during implementation to say, “here’s another idea.”

Unthink

I recent read Dr. Eric Zabiegalski’s book Unthink: All You Have to Do Is Nothing.  Dr. Zabiegalski  describes two mental processes “Exploration” and “Exploitation.” These are roughly correlative to divergent and convergent thinking. Exploitative process is more common in business he says.  People learn how to take an idea and wring the most value from it to deliver profit. Explorative process is rarer. Explorers look for new and unserved needs, apply new technologies to novel uses, try things that have never been done before. Dr. Zabiegalski makes a strong case that as individuals and organizations we need to stop and use explorative thinking more.

High Performing Organizations

In 2002, I was a principal at Katzenbach Partners, a small McKinsey spinoff, started by Jon Katzenbach (the Wisdom of Teams guy) with two partners from McKinsey. The idea behind Katzenbach’s firm was to work at the intersection between strategy and organization, combining both content and process consulting. I worked at three firms who had this idea. It always sounds so great, but it never works. Content consultants are masters of convergent thinking. Process consultants stick around and implement more and are more likely to use and encourage clients to use both types of thinking.

For a firm offsite, I was asked to do a one hour presentation on High Performing Organizations. I was given a strong hint that McKinsey had done significant research in this arena. Reading Eric Zabiegalski’s book led me to look up that old presentation.

Twenty-years later I was surprised by the congruence of my presentation with Dr. Zagiegalski’s research. I summarized the research to date, by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman, Jim Collins, David Nadler, Warner Burke and George Litwin, Jay Galbraith, and Jon Katzenbach himself.

I pointed out that all the major organization models including the much vaunted  McKinsey High Performing Organization model and the evolving Katzenbach Partners model had several characteristics:

• Strategy or goal driven

• Not just structure, many elements:
  • The formal and planned – structure, systems, processes, management, leadership
  • The informal and serendipitous – networks, flexible units, culture
  • Alignment and integration are critical success factors

These models are alignment models, where formal and informal elements are aligned, and work together. In Dr. Zabiegalski’s words they are exploitation models. They operate like a high speed train on rails. I described that train on rails as a “beautiful thing. . .  until it wasn’t. The disruptive forces of the 21^st century required a different capability -innovation, the ability to know when and how to reinvent our organization.

  I described how innovation was a critical capability that needed to be baked into organizations or aligned high performance would turn into disaster very quickly.

I described a high performing organization as a study in balance, between the critical capabilities of alignment and innovation. Dr. Zabiegalski’s words, exploitation and exploration, better describe the thinking and acting processes than my words of alignment and innovation. Further he describes the end state as an ambidextrous organization, which is is the subject of his doctoral research and his first book. Whichever words we use the concept of balancing these two ways of thinking and acting individually and organizationally are consequential in our tumultuous times.

I write this post to explain the resonance I feel with Dr, Zabiegalski’s work, not to imply any comparison between my small thought project and the depth or his doctoral research and not one but two books on the subject would be in anyway justified.

It all began with the Big Bang

“And now for something completely different” as they used to say on Monty Python, and to demonstrate how truly weird my brain is:

When I was thinking about this I was also thinking about the American television comedy series, The Big Bang Theory.

For those from other countries or just not interested in silly situation comedies, this show is about the lives of four Caltech scientist researchers, a theoretical physicist, and experimental physicist, an astrophysicist, and a space engineer. These twenty-somethings are socially inept nerds, and the show centers on their attempts to grow up and find female companionship. The main character is Dr. Sheldon Cooper, a theoretical physicist looking to develop the Theory of Everything from a String Theory base. Sheldon is probably the smartest of the four and he knows it. He is also the most annoying and socially awkward and he doesn’t know that. He dreams of the Nobel Prize. Sheldon’s girlfriend is Dr. Amy Farah Fowler, a neuro biologist who is as obnoxiously nerdy as he is.

Spoiler Alert:

In the eleventh of twelve seasons, through a series of silly connections Sheldon and Amy hit upon a Theory of Super Asymmetry for which they win the Nobel prize in the finale of season twelve.

The Big Bang Theory was written with the greatest respect for actual science. The research and theories that were discussed are real and accurate, but Super Asymmetry is fiction. It’s based upon Super Symmetry, which is is a documented theory of paired particles that explains what Einstein called “spooky movement at a distance,” unseen connections at the quantum level between  particles. This was first demonstrated by Dr. David Bohm and later verified with the Hadron supercollider at Cern, Switzerland.

But Super Asymmetry is the creation of Dr, David Saltzberg, the show’s science expert advisor. There is a lot of online fan banter that the character of Amy doesn’t deserve to share the Nobel because it is a theoretical physics discovery and Amy is a neurobiologist. (I know, I know, it’s TV show!) I remember some dialogue about how Sheldon was making the comparison of the Heisinger Uncertainty Principle and Schrodinger’s Cat being alive and dead at the same time. Then something his religious East Texas Mom believed that he thought untrue, but found could be true and untrue at the same time. Amy relayed how the synapses in the brain fired along the same neural pathways in the brain until suddenly they didn’t, making different connections between right or left hemispheres and the amygdala. Super Asymmetry is present in nature, in the brain, physical and quantum levels.  It has a kind of sciencey truthiness, but its fake.

Well, says I, if there are connections at the quantum level, particle pairings (Super Symmetry -the real one) and nature embraces both symmetry and asymmetry, then Super Asymmetry  the fictional one) might be true. I wonder.

If Super Asymmetry were true then what is the neuroscience relationship between conscious, subconscious, and collective unconscious,  and connections in the physical and quantum worlds, both symmetrical and asymmetrical?

How does that relate to balancing exploration and exploitation by causing our busy brains to stop to engage our intuition, Unthink, as it were. And if Individuals could do that then maybe they might build self-organizing ambidextrous organizations to do the same and we might get through the kind of earth-shaking change in store for us in this century.

Did I mention I’m retired? 😊

Fred, you’re right. I think weird!

A Tale of Two Towns

To the hawk the two lands were not far. A few hours of hard flight perhaps, but with many updrafts for circling and trees on even the tallest ridges if the winds were not right and a rest was required, it could be pleasant. It was a flight the hawk took often, more in the summer than in the winter. There was good hunting for the hawk in the mountains. Even in winter, the rabbits and voles did not expect him.

For people in the two valleys the journey between the lands was arduous. There were no east to west passes through the mountains and the peaks had snow upon them even during the hottest summers. There were deep crevasses and high cliffs that made the trek seem foolhardy.

Unlike the hawk, few people made the journey over the mountain ridge that ran between the rivers all the way to the sea. Traveling was easier following the rivers. It was a long trip down the river valley from either land. The streams sources were at the ice field high above the laird’s house in each country and each ran away from the ridge, southwest in the western land and southeast in the eastern land, before curving back toward the ridge as they neared the sea.

It was said that these two lands had been to war in time beyond counting. The young laughed when the olds would tell the tale their olds had told them in their youth. “Where would they have fought? Hanging off ropes on the cliff? Or at the bottom of some bottomless crevasse?”

Traders would sometimes bring news between these communities, coming up one river from the sea, telling how they had braved the bandits in the foothills on beside the ridge. When traders came to Westland, they would speak of the yellow-glow of the sun on the ridge in the early hours of the Eastland day. Travelers to Eastland would tell of the red-glow on the Westland ridge at night. Mostlythough, these traders would tell how different Eastland and Westland were.

The tone in the tavern in each land was always incredulous, “I can’t believe it! Why would anyone live like that?”

On the surface, both lands looked alike. There was farmland in the plateau and valley,  with somewhat rocky soil on the ridge plateau and richer loam in the valley closer to the river. The laird’s house was built into the side of the mountain overlooking the village and farmland. One difference was that Eastland’s Lairdhouse was built of stone with a tower and Westland’s Lairdhouse was built in a half-timbered style. Each was larger house than any in land, but that was accepted. The laird’s family first cleared the land and invited others to farm it.

Over time both Eastland and Westland farmers had come to “own” their land and their homes they built upon it. They paid the laird a “debt of gratitude,”  a percentage of each harvest. The population was like many towns. Most everyone farmed, at least enough to pay the debt of gratitude and feed themselves,  but there were some merchants, who bought and sold surpluses and interacted with the traveling traders. There were tradesmen, builders, a metalsmith, and a few woodsmiths, who made furniture, staircases for those wealthy enough for a second story, and carved signs.

Both communities had a plethora of beautifully carved wooden signs. There were signs for business names. street names, and to identify who lived in a particular dwelling, but many of the most skillfully carved signs extolled particular virtues. Most of those exquisitely carved signs were paid for by the laird or esteemed elders in the village. There was a small competition in both Eastland and Westland to see which carver was most sought-after, based upon his or her carving skill with the laird’s signs.

There were indeed many similarities between Eastland and Westland. There first indicator of difference travelers would notice were the signs. The signs in both communities were carved from the local woods and while one carver or another might have a particularly creative flourish, overall the signs looked similar. However, the messages on the signs were quite different.

In Eastland the carved signs read:

• Self-Reliance
• Discipline
• Personal Responsibility

In Westland the signs said:

• Teamwork
• Compassion
• Community

Traders who travelled often to both villages heard of other differences between the settlements:

In Eastland the debt of gratitude, paid to the laird was low, about 10 % of crops or livestock, and the same on service or trade, and everyone paid the same percentage. In Westland the debt of gratitude varied depending on how good a farmer’s harvest was or the service or trade amount transacted. Some paid 5% some paid as much as 25%.

In Westland there was a disaster-kitty funded by the debt of gratitude payments. This  flood and fire relief was administered by the village council of elders. In Eastland, someone whose crop flooded, or house burned down could apply to the laird for a loan at interest below the debt of gratitude rate, but might have to forfeit property rights if the loan was not repaid.

In Eastland crop surpluses were sold to the traders who came from down river. In Westland surpluses were also traded, but after the Food Fair Exchange was held. The Food Fair Exchange was an Eastland festival where farmers brought surplus to barter for what they didn’t grow or for volunteer labor.

Some traders said that Eastlanders complained a bit about the “size of the laird’s house” and how “some town council members got extraordinary benefits.”  Other traders said that Westlanders complained about “freeloaders” and the size of the debt of gratitude payment in good years. Most years, Eastland and Westland were equally prosperous and everyone seemed happy.

The hawk flew back and forth across the ridge, not hunting now, just gliding up with the warm afternoon air rising from each side. He flew high eyeing the rivers in the valleys on both sides. The hawk played in the air currents rising from each side, circling, swooping, all the way down the ridge until he felt the cool sea wind. The hawk pulled up against the spray where the sea roared against the cliff and scented the woodsmoke rising from the building near the cliff, before climbing back, back to his nest in the tall fir just below the summer snowline.

Traders often met at the Ridgecliffe Inn, on the path over the ridge close to the sea where you could see the delta ports on both the Eastland and Westland rivers. Ridgecliffe was a gathering place for traders and anyone traveling between the two communities. In the tavern of the Inn, traders traded stories of their travels and often bantered about the signs.

“I was up at Eastland and saw a new sign, “The Truth is the Truth, no matter if it hurts.”

“Yeah, well his cousin in Westland carved “Tact! People have feelings.”

Hard to beat the Eastlands sign, “Be Excellent!”

“Does the Westland sign ‘Be Excellent to Each Other’” mean the same thing?”

“Different, I think.” Like Eastlands “Judgement: Do What is Right!” is different from Westland’s “Judgement: Explain your thinking.”

“You know I saw one sign in both places ‘Honor, Duty, Sacrifice.”

“You can bet those signs have different meanings.”

There were many  nods and smiles around the tavern.

The oldest trader spoke, “You know my favorite signs:

Eastland: ‘The early bird gets the worm.’”

Westland: ‘The second mouse gets the cheese.’” *

Everyone laughed.

“Great to be a woodcarver in either place.”

“That’s for sure. Say – where would you settle down if you’d a mind to?”

The traders all expressed their views and were quite surprised that they didn’t agree.

Where would you settle down if you’d a mind to?

*Thanks to Brad Martin for this line.