Society and Reality

I have been having some trouble with noises from the right front of my car. Several mechanics looked into it and none of them could come up with a diagnosis. The best guess seemed to be the right front strut. Putting all the pieces together I concluded that hitting a speed bump at 25 MPH damaged the hardware above the strut.

So after getting some quotes I picked Pep Boys to install new struts and hardware. After the work was completed, all the noises where still there. The mechanic actually did a diagnosis and determined that some hardware above the strut was bad. The problem was I got a quote for replacing “all” the hardware, or so I thought. What I really got was a quote for the typical hardware that is replaced. I also got a mechanic that did not inspect the non-typical hardware. Go Murphy!

The problem was the person taking the order had preconceived ideas of what to replace and my emphasis of “all” and my description of “hitting a speed bump” could not penetrate his preconceived ideas. So now I have to go to the dealer and order the remaining hardware. The option of buying complete strut kits is past, and my overall cost will be more than it would have been had “all” mean all.

This sort of problem occurs in business all the time. The anecdote is inclusion of other people in decisions so that preconceptions are tested. Unfortunately, like at the repair shop, people in charge don’t include others in decisions. In the shop case it is not practical, so those managing the desk need to listen with care to their customers. In business, managers need to listen with care to their subordinates, moreover, they need to solicit and reward participation in decision making.

The big offender in business is the command and control management style of the industrial age. This works fine with an ignorant workforce that are cogs in a machine, because you are trying to create and maintain order. But when creativity and knowledge are the core competence of employees, command and control becomes the enemy of success.

So managers listen up, preconceived ideas and lack of inclusion in decision making will cost your company dearly. Put aside your ego and accept that you are omnipotent, nor are you expected to be.

The complexity of our current economic crisis is really quite simple from a values point of view: people got greedy. Take a look at this description of weakness from Spiral Dynamics. ORANGE is the vMEME that “calculates the actions that will maximize his or her own advantages and leverage competitive opportunities.”

The pitfall of ORANGE is that the efforts to maximize individual gains often consume so much material and energy that the source of the work itself is destroyed. Mega-dollar sports stars and greedy owners are putting the games at risk when they begin to ignore their client fans and concentrate, instead, on comparing their own egos. The collapse of the U.S. Savings & Loan Industry also illustrates the point that a few elites with excessive ORANGE can demand so much cream it kills the cow. 1996

There are several possible responses to the excess:

• Negotiate some rules to limit the excess, perhaps by brining back the up-tick rule and increasing the capital requirements of banks, etc
• Re-energize some BLUE vMEMEs by bringing back duty and cooperation into our vocabulary
• Push up to GREEN and emphasize sharing and caring

Last week Chris Lowney gave a leadership talk that basically called out the bad boys and their poor leadership. The talk and his book preach Heroic Leadership, which I quoted in a previous post. It is clear to me that the book’s frame of reference is BLUE or BLUE/orange. On page 90 there is a list of leadership values:

1. Teaching and learning
2. Molding
3. Perseverance
4. Heroic goals
5. Innovate
6. Excellence
7. Openness
8. Honor truth
9. Influence by example

And on 91 the “stereotypical” dominate values:

1. Leader is person in charge
2. Produces direct results
3. Defining moments and battles

Listening to Chris’ speach does not lead me to think he is rock solid BLUE. There is no fundamentalism or religeous myth, but all the BLUE elements are there. There is a sense of WE over I, serving a transcendent idea, and high value place on truth. And the dominate values are pure ORANGE: take charge, make it happen, and fight to win. The book was written in 2003 well before the crisis, so his time on Wallstreet was enough generate a reaction.

At the Angle Capital Summit Anita Burke went the opposite direction towards GREEN. Perhaps she is ORANGE/green. It is hard to say from one speach; I don’t know her or have any writings to study. Here  is somethink like the Wombat Video: Look guys, we are running out of energy, I’m a mom, I want to feed my chidren and bounce my grand kids on my knee, so get your act together and cooporate and solve the problems for the kids. We are all in this together, if you keep competing, we all loose.

Things are starting to feel like we are running in two directions, but Anita points out a demographic that is going to change the direction in her favor. See here.

What we need is a healthy spiral. The good news about Lowney is he is not a wacky fundamentalist. His tone sounds more like a call to fix the foundation, not a call to regression. My profound hope is we repair the foundation, repair capitalism, so that a healthy GREEN can emerge. Gen-We will take power, but they may not be equipped to fix the foundation. The current generation has to fix the foundation so they can stand on our shoulders.

I have read a lot of leadership books lately that focus on leadership behaviors. I always walk away with an uneasy feeling that they are all dancing around the problem, only addressing surface issues. “Heroic Leadership” takes a different approach that resonates more with my experience:

…a leader’s most compelling leadership tool is who he or she is: a person who understands what he or she values and wants, who is anchored by certain principles, and who faces the world with a consistent outlook. Leadership behavior develops naturally once this internal foundation has been laid. If it hasn’t been, mere technique can never compensate.

A leader’s greatest power is his or her personal vision, communicated by the example of his or her daily life. Vision in this sense refers not to vague messages and mottoes adopted from the corporate lexicon… instead vision is intensely personal, the hard-won product of self-reflection: What do I care about? What do I want? How do I fit into the world.

Heroic Leadership, Chris Lowney

I have met leaders that are quiet as a mouse, and leaders that storm the castle. Lowney’s view of leadership explains why leaders can have different temperaments and lead. It also hints at corporate vision problems. If the vision of a group has to come from self reflection, then a cultural foundation has to lay itself down, and that is a slow process that can be interrupted by strong individual; strong individuals can influence the laying down of the group vision.

I suggest that individual leaders are not so much an issue as authoritarians. Authoritarianism can interrupt group reflection. When this happens group vision fails to develop and behavior will not be in alignment with personal visions, but in alignment with the authority.

The first take away is that organizational alignment is not magic dust that an authority can sprinkle on followers. Alignment is an outcome of group reflection guided by a respected leader. The second take away is that if an organization becomes aligned with a failed strategy, there will be no quick fix and a temptation to use authority.

In many ways, we already know what powerful organizers fields can be. We have moved deeper into understanding these invisible allies with the recent focus on organizational culture, values, and purpose. We see that these are important, even when we don’t quite know why. Robert Haas, CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., calls these the “conceptual controls…It’s the ideas of a business that are controlling, not some manager with authority”. If we understand ideas as real forces in the organization, as fields, I believe we have a better image for understanding why concepts control as well as they do.

Let us remember that space is never empty. If it is filled with harmonious voices, a song arises that is strong and potent. If it is filled with conflict, the dissonance drives us away and we don’t want to be there. When we pretend that it doesn’t matter whether there is harmony, when we believe we don’t have to “walk our talk,” we lose far more than personal integrity. We lose the partnership of a field-rich space that can help bring order to our lives.

There is an irony here. Those who try to convince us to lead from values and vision, rather than from traditional forms of authority, don’t seem to have enough substance. Their advice seems devoid of the structure and management controls that ensure order. Values, vision, ethics–these are too soft, too ethereal, to serve as management tools. How can they create the kind of order we need in the face of chaos? Newton’s world justified those fears because it was a world with no internal coherence. Individual pieces spun off wildly on their individual trajectories. But if we look past Newton, if we change our field of vision, we see a world of more subtle ordering processes.

Leadership and the New Science — Wheatley

As newtonian reality is emergent from quantum reality, so our hierarchical and authority based management is emergent from social reality. But as long as the emergence of a Newtonian social physics is not complete, we can disemerge it and take another path.

In the engineering world where I live, hardware developers seem the most caught up in Newtonian thinking, because their raw material responds to it. It is probably only natural to apply that to process and management as well. The software world has tried to follow suit, with limited success. It is the software world that seems to challenge this style thinking, Google in particular.

I am reading Alistair Cockburn’s Agile Software Development and the first chapter deals with all the problems of perception and shared experience that Newtonian social thinking takes for granted. I wonder if hardware developers should be reading this.