Inertia: Applying Newton's First Law to Organizational Change

During another mentoring session with @Joseph Pelrine, I shared my experience of an "Italian strike" — a deliberate slowdown launched by a "conservative wing" content with the current status quo, in response to my initiatives, with the organization aiming to minimize my influence by stretching out every task.

At one point, Joseph interjected: "Piotr, do you know Newton's first law? The law of inertia. It says that keeping things unchanged requires no time and no energy."

Honestly, the toughest aspect of the organizational coach work is to unfreeze the human system and encourage it to change. Every time I must earn it by investing enough time into relations and building trust.

Openness to change

One of my favorite commercials is a classic ad from a cellular network provider that humorously depicts our habitual reactions to change.

The scene features a bugler from St. Mary's Church in Krakow. Knowing he won't be able to play the bugle call from the church tower, he improvises. In an act of desperation and reflex to cope with life's situations, he decides to play the bugle call from his current location, where he got stuck, and transmits the signal via a mobile phone.

The bugler's resourcefulness causes a stir among a group of villagers. His actions cause a cognitive shock in them. Taken by surprise by this deviation from tradition, they instinctively cling to their old habits and resist to accept this situation as acceptable.

This commercial brilliantly illustrates a universal truth: every change begins with shock and disbelief, often followed by rejection and questioning. Many potential changes never materialize because they are dismissed during this initial stage.

Reflect on your own approach to change. How many changes do you reject outright? How many do you consider? How many do you ultimately embrace? After your initial knee-jerk reaction, what helps you move to a stage where you can at least consider the change?

Consider what strategies help you gain perspectives beyond your own. What makes it easier for you to engage in self-awareness and personal growth? By exploring these questions, you can develop a more open and adaptable mindset towards change.

Playing a role of a CIO again! Journey is everything.

Last year, I went through a period of career reflection. I summarized almost 10 years of my consulting work and, to my surprise, discovered there was a lot going on under the surface.

First, I realized I was no longer learning. Situations began to repeat themselves, and companies started to look increasingly similar. I also discovered that the thrill of being proud of advising others, which initially motivated me to start consulting, was no longer compelling or necessary for me.

Second, I felt I wasn't building anything I could own in the long term; my need for ownership was clearly unmet. Similarly, my need for belonging was unfulfilled—people and companies changed, but I always remained an outsider.

My energy was flowing in one direction only: outward, with no chance to achieve balance and get some energy back. While I helped many CTOs, PMOs, TOs, PMs, and executives, I realized I hadn't been helping myself.

In conclusion, I decided that my next mission is to focus on one thing, with the same people, and build something together for the long term.

So, I switched to a CIO position. My first impression is that it is a far better position to promote personal and systemic change than that of a Transformation Coach. It is much more effective than being an external consultant because my voice is from the inside.

Being a CIO provides me with a better ability to be effective and create a higher impact.

Playing this role comes naturally to me this time. I am finally capable of leveraging people skills, tech skills, and organizational skills. I must admit it wasn't the case the last time I held a similar role. I spent a decade maturing after acting as an IT director for the first time.

The journey is everything. I can now openly recommend myself as an IT director to any company, which was not the case ten years ago. But that's just a side effect ;) Primarily, I feel I am using my energy for the right thing. I derive my actions (again!) from my personal inner locus. This feels really good.

I enjoy reflecting on my journey and am happy to share it with you and as many people as I can influence, to leave this world a better place.

A journey of self-transcendence - towards expressing myself

Summarizing my experiences and building my own understanding of what is important, what is meaningful and what is relevant resulted in a few mini books published on Leanpub and one fully fledged book - Good Companies, published on amazon. Clearly writing is my channel of expression.

The journey took me a few years before I was able to make my own sense of reality, extract the essence of my experience and use it to switch to the forward-looking frame. In this new frame I discovered endless potential for growth and transcendence. For me personally, for companies, and for societies.

Even now, one year after the Good Companies book was published, I resist removing a weekly reminder in my calendar that I set years ago in order to shape and define the rhythm of my efforts. Clearly the journey has transformed me and became a cornerstone of who I am, of my identity.

What's for you in my story?
1. Hear your inner voice, grow up to your mission, let it become the source of your actions.
2. Find your natural channel of expression
3. Let the change happen despite the associated feeling of "losing control" and departing from what you are used to and how it used to be, from your comfort zone.

A refreshing switch from enterprise to small scale

During my first weeks of work that I had started recently, my family and colleagues were empathizing with me asking about how I found the company. I came up with two metaphors that I feel are describing my thoughts quite accurately. To give you the context I started my career in small startup companies, spent the last decade with enterprise size companies, and joined a small company a month ago.

Boeing vs light plane. Joining a small company of 40+ persons after working in enterprise size companies feels like switching from piloting a Boeing intercontinental to piloting a light recreational plane designed to carry two persons. It feels light, agile and lean - every manoeuvre is possible! A decision made in seconds? Yes! Talk to a person responsible directly? Yes! Find a spot for a meeting today in calendars? Yes! Talk to the CEO? Surely, yes! :) This feels absolutely amazing! 
Also, activities like planning a workshop for the product team a week ahead is possible. Defining the strategy for IT department, nominating chapter leaders is doable darn fast! And so on.

City habitants vs villagers. Another change when changing the scale so rapidly is the change in interactions with people. Interactions are direct. There are no line managers, hierarchies, etc. Awesome, easy. Yet the most significant change is in how people present themselves. What do I mean by that? Enterprise makes people feel and behave as if they were anonymous, similarly to how I find habitants of big cities. One interacts with a shoal of anonymous, similar people. One cannot have time to distinguish them by investing in building individual relations. In a small scale the interaction is of a completely different nature. It resembles the interaction between habitants of a small village. Firstly, everyone knows each one - there is no anonymity. That's how I like it! There is no thing that your colleagues will not know about you. Also, personal characters are fully visible. I say the characters are sharply cut from wood by a talented artist. Everyone has a personal cut. The same applies to me, too!

Overall, this change of daily experience feels refreshing to me. Real people and high decision power to create reality every day! Sounds awesome, doesn't it?!

The leader's compass when joining a company

What should be your first steps principles when joining a new company in a leadership role? What should you focus on? How should you seek to be impactful? An attempt to summarize my experience.

I have recently joined a small yet well-recognized company, in a role of an Interim CTO, to help them make sense of digital product development. Let's say that historically there are a few blank spaces in the value creation equation. In spite of strong business vision the company could not sort out its value delivery and was drowning in frustration of the crew that led to personal conflicts. Quite typical, nothing unusual, definitely nothing to be ashamed of, and a lot to be proud of! So I found myself in my comfort zone.

I realized I had enough comfort and space to consciously focus on how I am going to lead. I always aspired to such conscious approach, but as many, never could fully implement it ;) There was a thought in the back of my mind: "Finally I got my chance!". In parallel, there was also a debt in my mind, debt towards myself, a debt that I got myself into during the last time I was playing a role of an IT Director. Let's just say, I could have done a few things differently back then. When I was looking for my next engagement I was determined to step into the management role again, because I thought about myself that I never felt more ready to play the role of IT Director again.

So I joined with a strong need to use the opportunity to learn. It is a small company and much less complex than enterprises I used to work with in the past. After a few days of the initial observations, listening and orientation I asked myself about cardinal principles I would follow as a base in my role. 

The leader's compass when joining a company:

1. Click with people, gain their hearts. 
   Remember that the initial credit of trust, a.k.a. riding on a free fuel, will end in a few months. Similarly, your unique perspective, so different and thus so valuable, because coming from outside of an organization will evaporate. Use the time wisely to proof in action that you are a trustworthy person.
   
   
2. Build a map of a landscape of the organization in your mind.
   Listen more than talk. Ask the right questions. Observe. Seek patterns and anti-patterns. 
   
   
3. Identify your allias
   There are teams and individuals in the organization who were waiting your arrival as dessert awaits rain, suppressing hopes for their ideas to be implemented and their will to contribute to be understood, appreciated, and encouraged. Usually, these people are among the most valuable people in the organization. You cannot afford to lose them.
   
   
4. Share your initial observations frequently. 
   Your initial observations as as fresh and as refreshing as spring vegetables, or oranges during winter (I live in Poland atm). Feeding your observations back to the organization serves as a mirror, causes a reflection and at the same time lets your colleagues to get to know you.
   
   
5. Help individuals get to know yourself. Introduce your personal style by revealing what you value and what mindset you are driven by. This is far more important than jumping into action immediately.
   
   
6. Share your plans frequently. Don't let uncertainty to slip in and disperse the initial energy and credit of trust. People need direction.
   
   
7. Set expectations by setting a timeframe. When I joined everyone was expecting a significant change. As we know the change lasts in time and cannot be pushed. Yet timeframe matters. By sharing timeframe of how you envisage your first weeks and months lets your colleagues align their plans and expectations.
   
   
8. Hold the pressure to conform to the existing ways of how we do things here (culture).
   You are a hope to change the existing culture. Otherwise, you are most probably a hiring mistake. You were hired for a reason and in the leadership positions this reason is more than tackling with the operational issues. It is usually about introducing a systemic change. Mature organizations understand that, and definitely mature hiring managers understand that. Make sure to communicate your need to assess "how we do things here" and consciously click into the existing one or your votum separatum to the existing culture.  
   
   
9. Select your first battles carefully. Not every battle is worth fighting. Perform consequence analysis. There certainly exist issues to be worked on yet in your first steps people expect a look forward not a look backwards.  
   
   
10. Avoid manual interventions.
    Treat the current state of how things work as a legacy. This is the lagging world. Do not waste your effort on trying to change the old habits and thinking - sometimes its better to let them die out. I prefer to focus on strategic themes first. The leading question is "how will we work together" (new culture)?
    Still there is value in interventions. Do not hesitate to intervene when you spot an intervention that would make it easier for everyone to understand what you value and where your thinking is rooted.
    
    
11. Be inclusive. Invite people to co-create the NEW. 
    Do I need to say anything about it?
    
    
12. Find a mentor or a coach. Or both. Depending on your situation you may need a domain advice or help in making sense of the reality.
    
    
13. Join peer communities. CIOs / CTOs.
    Leverage knowledge exchange.
     
14. Remember a few quotes
1. If you want to go fast - go alone, if you need to reach far, go together" a.k.a. The Leader's Dilemma
2. Build leaders not followers (David Marquet)
3. Build a system that is independent from yourself (David Marquet)
   
   
15. Focus. Use a systemic approach. Now, finally!, you are set up to act! There is always more to do than it is possible to handle. You need to use your time wisely. What will you focus on? How will you seek the biggest impact? Where will you look for smells? How will you improve? 
    Personally I am a big fan of The Douglas Talbot's Creating Extraordinary Organizations and the Organizational Engineering Model.

Good luck, share your experience with me!

Leadership in times of "Agile is Dead" awakening

 When I hear someone says "Agile is Dead" I hear a disappointment, nostalgia that the time has come to say goodbye to something highly valued and meaningful, and also I hear hope there is a way to save Agile. 

Do not mix commoditization of ideas (i.e. Kano model) with their death. On the contrary, commoditization means the ideas become ubiquitous. Your business model may be dead, but not the ideas.

On the level of "Agile" buzzword - I don't care. It's probably better that it is dead. Personally, I hope that certifications are dead - all these 2 days trainings for thousands of dollars need to disappear. The quality of those trainings was tragic, their impact - negative. The existence of those trainings clearly reflected the existence of the Agile bubble. A word of mouth and an appealing productivity boost story caused the irrational pressure both on individual level and inside companies to follow the herd. This is how myths and cargo cults are created. Pragmatism and practical daily routines, e.g. XP, design thinking, coaching, is what counts for me. Cutting through the smalltalk and buzzwords, making decisions, getting things done count. Getting the best out of people and empathy count.

On the level of an idea - I do care. Agile is not dead. First, we barely touched agility as the whole thing (take the Integral Agility perspective to understand my point of view). Second, there are ideas building on agility that can take us to the next level. By us I mean not only companies, but in the first place individuals, societies, and the whole humanity. 

For those who narrow down the meaning of Agile to organizational effectiveness (aka performance machine), this may sound like claptrap, and I expect them to be among those preachers of 'Agile is Dead'. Don't worry abut these guys - they represent the fixed mindset, and clearly have not appreciated all the lessons learnt from two decades of the Agile era. If you paid them for leading you through Agility journey, I can imagine you find yourself disappointed - leaders abandon you once their business model, i.e. evangelizing without responsibility, collapses. That's the worst thing one can expect from a leader...

Personally, I was processing all the signs of disintegration of the idea of Agile, all the corruption and manipulation that led to the 'Agile is Dead' slogan very carefully. I wrote a few mini-books sharing my perspective on the phenomenon (see Agile 2020s - The Great Retrospective). First of the books were focusing on sharing experiences from the trenches, from the enterprise companies (see The Secret Ingredients of Agile Transformations, or The Landscape of Enterprise Agile Transformations). The latest book, Good Companies, takes a different stand. I have drawn an inspirational future of what is possible if we really care. It took a deep personal journey to discover all the beauty, and all the burden necessary to let the beauty shine, of where we can be if we focus our potential on what is important.

I strongly encourage you to find your own answers, coin your own meaning, and shape your own path, preserving a proper distance from the mainstream mourning of the Agile is Dead' transition.

As a side note, let me brief you with a bit of my personal transformation. If Agile is really dead, that would mean we are able to masacre even the most valuable ideas. I isolate myself from such thinking. I see it differently: we are so trapped in the wrong framing, we do not even realize there is one, and as a result we lost the ability to follow what is important to us. The reductionist frame and the group biases don't let us assess the situation clearly. 

A breakthrough is required, and possible as presented in Good Companies, to offer the world the best of who we, humans, are. A journey starts from the current state of how we interact with the world, i.e. Careless Exploitation and leads to state of the Caring Guardianship. It is a state where an independent observer, e.g. one of the species inhabiting the Earth can call our interactions with the world a caring guardianship. I believe this is the best of us that we owe to offer to this world. Whether we can make it will be the ultimate answer of meaning of our existence. 

This shift in understanding our role here results in shifts in cardinal aspects of how we understand the meaning of business, the mental model of economy, the relation between societies and the economy, etc. We have not yet started the journey! In my case the triggering event for opening the quest for Good Companies were the observations from many companies that I worked with, and the existing frictions not addressed, not even recognized(!) by digital and agile transformations.

Loose birthday morning thoughts

Even people who write about an alternative thought framework of economics, the relationship between business and society, and those who would like to see this entire system based on and derived from the mission of humanity [please wait for this! ...] keep arguing, exercise pecking ordering, fight for the primacy of their ideas.

Writing the Good Companies book was wonderfully liberating and helped me make sense of the mess around. I learned a lot and it taught me a lot. It also has given me a few important lessons. And as you can guess, it had both positive and negative consequences. 

That's what happens if one pursuits her/his self-developmental path: breaks from the socialized mind, discovers the self-authoring mind, and explores the self-transcendant mind. 

With regard to family life, I have always been on a path to build multi-generational family that has roots in one place where kids, with their kids, meet for family events. I am far from achieving it. But it remains my dream.

p.s. I called a friend with whom I attended my secondary school and a few years at university. Feels really good investment of time at my birthday. A follow up planned.

Interview (in Polish): KRYZYS WARTOŚCI w nowoczesnym świecie - jak się ODNALEŹĆ? | Piotr Trojanowski

W dzisiejszym dynamicznie zmieniającym się świecie, gdzie technologia i biznes ewoluują w zaskakującym tempie, często zapominamy o podstawowych wartościach i równowadze między życiem zawodowym a prywatnym. W tym odcinku "Kryzys Wartości w Nowoczesnym Świecie", zgłębiamy tematykę holistycznego podejścia do życia i pracy. Rozmawiam z Piotrem Trojanowskim o tym, jak zarówno liderzy biznesowi, jak i każdy z nas może odnaleźć harmonię i sens w codzienności. Poruszamy kwestie sztucznej inteligencji, transformacji biznesowej i znaczenia pełni człowieczeństwa w nowoczesnym świecie. Dołącz do nas, aby odkryć, jak możemy razem budować bardziej świadomą i zrównoważoną przyszłość. *W filmie poruszymy tematy* Redefinicja Sukcesu: Jak nowoczesne spojrzenie na sukces wpływa na nasze życie zawodowe i osobiste. Rola AI w Biznesie i Życiu: Zrozumienie wpływu sztucznej inteligencji na decyzje biznesowe i codzienne życie. Zmiany w Edukacji i Biznesie: Jak adaptować się do przewidywanych rewolucji w szkołach i firmach. Wyzwania Transformacji Biznesowej: Przejście od status quo do innowacji i autonomii pracowników. Społeczne Skutki Technologicznej Ery: Dyskusja o nowym układzie społecznym w obliczu zmian technologicznych. Holokracja i Nowoczesne Organizacje: Eksploracja nowych modeli organizacji biznesowych. Równowaga Pracy i Życia: Jak znaleźć balans między karierą a życiem prywatnym w świecie pełnym presji. Duchowe i Emocjonalne Aspekty Biznesu: Znaczenie wartości, duchowości i emocji w podejmowaniu decyzji biznesowych.

Future of Work Talks S3E1: Janusz Leski: Focus on Collective Leadership Effectiveness

Focus on Collective Leadership Effectiveness

Organisations - including both corporations and start-ups - are usually established for a specific goal or purpose. Very rarely entrepreneurs want to build an organisation simply to have it. They want to accomplish something meaningful and important. Organisation’s purpose, more noble than to generate profits, is critical for its sustainability and for the impact it can have on its customers, employees and the society. We assess organisation accomplishments through its business performance or business effectiveness which should not be reduced to financial profitability. Organisation’s achievements can be assessed by the way it brings its noble purpose or vision closer to reality. This is also important from the point of view of the organisation’s sustainability. Business effectiveness is correlated with leadership effectiveness. Leadership Circle Profile methodology analyses leader’s effectiveness in relation to leader’s natural, protective or reactive tendencies, and creative competencies. Effective leaders have certain sets of both. The biggest impact on business effectiveness has not leadership effectiveness of individual leaders but, and this is extremely important, collective leadership effectiveness of the leadership team. I will explain why this is so important especially in modern organisations which are Complex Adaptive Systems. I will also analyse what it means to be a team - to be a good or effective leadership team. I will propose creation of a Deliberately Developmental Ecosystem (DDE) or Deliberately Developmental Organisation (DDO) as a way to build effective leadership teams. After describing the nature of DDE and DDO, I will explain why this is not an easy journey and what can help us to be successful on the way.

Janusz Leski (ICE-EC) is Transformation Leadership Coach, Enterprise Agile Coach, Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) and Collective Leadership Assessment (CLA) Practitioner. Janusz helps leaders to grow and transform their organisations. Currently he is Senior Agile Coach at Ørsted, a company with a vision to create a world that runs entirely on green energy. Previously Janusz led from the start an agile transformation in a large financial institution. He transforms organisation leadership and culture to make organisations more successful and resilient in the Volatile Uncertain Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world. He assists organisations with becoming more value focused, increasing collaboration and supporting people development. He stands for being an authentic and integral leader. Janusz serves our shared humanity - we can be human only together.