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.

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.

Surviving service market collapse together!

When I (re)started my consulting career at the beginning of 2020 I was so pleased to be on my own again! The feeling of the wind in my hair, endless opportunities, and being a skipper of my own fate. After 4 years it still feels natural for me, it reflects who I am. However, these 4 years turned to be the most challenging period in my career. First due to COVID-19, and this year, 2023, due to the effect of "the most expected recession ever" when companies literally cut all budgets to their roots.

I have been working in IT industry for 20+ years: I followed a technological career path for circa 12+ years, then got involved in running teams and projects, then I evangelised all the best practices of IT, software engineering practices, starting from XP, ending at Enterprise Agility, to massive companies that were lagging behind the innovation levels of their competition. In a way similar to many IT people, I was pulled out from IT work to play a bigger, "societal" mission to help those companies catch up. And then the mission was exposed to the market conditions of 2023. 

Instead of doing purely the domain work I spent a significant portion of my time on pre-sales and marketing activities. (By the way, allow an off-topic here: this is why I claim that companies should replace hiring for positions with hiring to a distribution of roles, where, as in our personal lives, we play multiplicity of roles. Positions are oftentimes to rigid structuring limiting value generation and contributions).

Here are the lessons learnt that I feel I should share with my peers: advisors, contractors, small boutiques, expert think-tanks, etc.

1. You are still the same valuable (wo)man! Your knowledge and expertise are needed. It's not the right time of the cycle though. 

2. Don't panic. Understand and respect the market cycle. There are things you can control, things you can influence, and things that concern you (which you cannot change).

3. Invest in yourself - as countries extend their engagement in public service work during crises, you should also invest in yourself. Get ready for the new cycle! Refresh your value proposition - the market will require more in the new cycle as the overall body of knowledge grows and experiences from the past are processed and transformed into new ideas and needs. 

In my case, for example: I passed SAFe SPC certifications (never needed it - my experience was self-explanatory). I have caught up on th AI / ML trends and progressed on the Google Cloud Machine Learning Engineer Path towards Google Certified Professional exam. (it's been great fun by the way to see all the concepts that were "theoretically possible" when I was a student, implemented at an enormous scale).

4. In parallel - refresh personally: first close all open loops from the past. Process experiences, accept them. Look for what new qualities have emerged through your experiences. Find your preferred channel, reading, writing, physical activities, art, and leverage it to process the cloud of thoughts into clarity. 

In my case, my natural channel is writing (check out my Good Companies book, available on amazon) and (amateur level) sports. 

Before jumping into new endeavors, you need to understand, refresh your understanding, who you are, who you want to be, where your skills are, where your interests are, where your values call you. As they say: start with the end in mind.

5. Take special care of and pay special attention to your relation with your life partner. They may not be fully aware of the sources of your changed behaviors. Put yourself in their shoes and see how this "infected" you infects them, their stability, their roots, so that they do not lose ground under their feet - they are used to relying on you, they have relied on you for years. 

For example: I took my wife on a trip to Paris that we have been postponing for years. This was the best trip ever!

6. Network heavily - during recession there are plenty of people who lost their jobs or contracts. It's not an easy time and you may not want to go through it alone. You also may not want your peers to go through this alone. There is a certain level of pressure coming from societal norms for those labelled as "unemployed". For me, historically, the network has been the most effective source of work. 

Again, what I did in this area: I promised myself to reach out to one person I used to work with in the past every weekday. It really feels great.

p.s. I am planning a separate post on what I did with the blessing of more free time that was usually the case.

Credits: Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Whole-Mind Thinking by Alan Seale and my renaissance of Human Integrity

One of the books that took me by surprise is Alan Seale's Transformational Presence. 

I may say I have a resonating relation with this book. The book first surprised me with novelty of its narrative, then gave me relief that I was not alone, apparently not the only one who thought this way, helped me make sense of what I had sensed yet could not name for a long time, equipped me with a frame and vocabulary to use, and gave me strength to talk about the new perspective I learnt openly. 

I am grateful to Alan for enabling all those above-listed personal developments of myself. 

I am also surprised what a strong mark the social formatting I received in childhood left on my mind. For years I was not aware of this transparent layer of norms through which I was perceiving the world.

Examples of my discoveries in the book are The Whole-Mind Thinking and the The Whole-Being Awareness. They are central concepts which put together define the mental frame presented. I pictured the essence of The Whole-Mind Thinking on the poster below while I leave it to you to find out what The Whole-Being Awareness is.

I used The Whole-Mind Thinking in my book Good Companies to illustrate the wholeness and architecture of human intelligence in the first transformation story: Story 1: Renaissance of Human Integrity. 

I believe Story 1 is the most natural place to start the transformation - in order to transform the world, we first need to be strong and integral ourselves. The mission we need to accomplish needs us strony and integral! 

The Integral Economy Framework

Transformative efforts in companies require a lot more than changing behaviors on the surface. Nothing new. Without a deeper change, new behaviors by themselves won't last long. Nothing new again. A more enlightened approach calls for understanding the invisible forces, principles and assumptions driving companies. They originate from the principles and assumptions of the economy. The why of the economy, in turn, originates from how societies understand the meaning of business. Finally, the meaning of business originates from our understanding of our needs as humankind.

Let this iceberg help you adjust the course. It will tell you why transformations struggle. It will open up a space to lead the dialog on the necessary change. I call this iceberg The Integral Economy Framework.

The Integral Economy Framework helps understand the visible behaviors of companies as a result and a consequence of the deeper / hidden levels of logic that we have created based on our wisdom.

Every existing model of the economy can and should be evaluated using the Integral Economy Framework, first as its validation, second to ensure transparency of all levels of its logic, not just the level of Business Behaviors of companies. Only full transparency allows to assess coherence and intentions of a particular economy model.

Conclusions. A transformation is required on a much deeper level. This transformation is not about how we do things, aka "Speed & Value", but why we do things and what the meaning of the things we do is. 

Once you can see through stereotypical biases and get it right, there is no way back. Once the deep shift happens, it becomes easy to build on the deep change, help it bubble up and manifest itself in behaviors of companies.

Throughout this year, 2023, I speak and run workshops about Good Companies Economics, based on my book, about the most important transformation, the one which is closest to my heart.

Wroclaw, Poznan, London, Amsterdam and Warsaw. Next is Scotland, and then Copenhagen.

I am thankful to these who help me spread the news.

Role of Leadership Teams at Scale

The role and nature of leadership differs depending on the size of a company.

In small companies, everyone is a leader. People have direct access to the Source - the primal purpose of the company. Oftentimes, they were among the initial cohort that founded the company, or were hired as the first after co-founders. In such an environment, it is natural to be driven by purpose and play multiple roles. Thus, it is natural for everyone to be a leader and participate in the organic dynamics of peer leadership and situational leadership, stepping in and out of this role based on skills and interests. I call this leadership dynamic, an organic leadership.

This is by far my favorite environment, which mimics life dynamics very closely. Notice that in our lives we play multiple roles, e.g., fathers or mothers, husbands or wives, shoppers, chiefs, renovators, taxi drivers for kids, romantic lovers, etc. Also notice how we share the leadership role with our partners, neighbors, and local communities.





What about leadership in big companies, a.k.a. leadership at scale? To some extent, big companies can copy the blessed dynamics of organic leadership from their smaller cousins. The divide & conquer principle is a mechanism to achieve this via tribalization and delegation.

As long as big companies understand the natural beauty of organic leadership, and would like to copy the dynamics, there are limits to this copying. The vertical structure is a clear limitation. As long as organic leadership can blossom on a single level of an organizational structure, it is difficult to replicate it across levels. Leadership at scale enforces intentional leadership - senior managers need to assume they will not be able to interact with every individual and every team directly. The techniques and tools of communication need to take this landscape characteristic into account.

Hierarchy and structure introduce containerization and divisions, which define boundaries for organic leadership. The further up the hierarchy we take into account, the more pressure and ego are at play, and the more individuals are expected to impose their will and control to deliver the results expected by shareholders. Inevitable division between the powerful and the powerless starts to play a dominant role in defining the style of leadership.

In parallel, as another limitation of structuring, big organizations are simply addicted to imposing strict and narrow roles & responsibilities, fixing the scope of their expectations of individual contributors to be experts in one or few disciplines. This is already visible during recruitment processes, which are usually focused on hiring individuals possessing specialist skills ready to be exploited here and now. A talent-oriented approach to hiring is, in my experience, a myth. Conformance to the existing culture and leadership style is oftentimes a non-verbalized requirement.

All the circumstances above act as filters that narrow down and weaken the will and opportunities for individuals to use their organic leadership.

Accepting, for the sake of this discussion, that these aspects exist as a part of the reality of big companies, the question about the role of leadership in big companies remains relevant. Senior leadership teams still have a key role to play. It is a part of their responsibility towards each single individual who spends their irreversible time trying to contribute to a company.

In my opinion, the key role of leadership at scale is to tell a compelling story. A story of why it is important that we are all here and of what it enables in the future. The compelling story opens up and enables employees to build their identity as employees of a particular company.

Identity is one of the highest levels of the Dilts neurological levels model.

Employees driven by their identity are attracted to the goals of a company with unmatched strength. They are able to go through daily burdens and systemic crises much easier. In fact, to some extent, they are liberated from focusing on what’s not working and focusing on what needs to be done. Such reframing makes their lives easier and makes them see the meaningful goal and not the obstacles. The story enables them to grow.

Identity bonds individuals with organizations, makes it easier to socialize, to feel needed, and, in the end, to contribute. Identity is born of a compelling story provided by a leadership team. If you are a leader, start your day contemplating what story you offer to the people you lead. How do you express the story, and most importantly, how do you live this story?

The task seems simple, yet it gets obscured easily without proper attention, reflection, and action. Maintaining your ability to be consistent and persistent in sticking to the story you share requires a dedicated effort. Make sure you devote proportionally relevant time to this task individually. Make sure you devote proportionally significant time to this task as a leadership team. Invite HR people into this conversation. Make it a habit. Etc, etc. I am sure you can handle the how and have plenty of your own ideas by now.

As an executive coach or advisor, make sure to prioritize maintaining the leadership story on the leader’s agenda. It has a higher chance of paying off in the long-term than many of operational activities you need to support, like performance optimization, urgent interventions, crises management, etc. Establishing the mechanism propelling a compelling story will make your work more fulfilling, not to mention - easier. I argue that a compelling story is a necessary condition in the journey of creating a healthy organization.



Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

This article was also published on my LinkedIn page.

The Good Companies Economics - 11 Paradigm Shifts within the Integral Economy Model

Why seeking redemption, or 'giving back', has been the mantra of successful business people while they should, and promisingly could, focus on changing the game!

Really, why is that? Why are so many successful business people blind to this option? Why does it take half of a human life to realize the simple truth that the only thing that matters is to Leave This Planet a Better Place? And why, even when conscious of that, do they pursue the wrong path?

I dedicated my Good Companies book to research this, and our other surprising blind spots, and irrational actions of business world today. I come back from this journey with an overwhelming load of evidence of our foolishness, but also as a new rebuilt me, with the reinforced agenda to change it! There are many calls for us to wake up and many aspects we need to revisit.

The alternative implementation of all the levels of the Integral Economy Model, or IEM in short, I present in #goodcompanies book, offers an alternative approach. Rooted in our deepest humankind needs of fulfillment by Leaving This World a Better Place, it restores the meaning of business and the economy as tools in hands of societies, as #transformation agents and as vehicles which will drive us to a meaningful future.

The roots of these otherwise irrational behaviors are located in our value systems, i.e. in the Mental Model of Humankind, in the Societal Meaning of Business, and in the Mental Model of Companies. In order to change the behaviors, we need to start transforming ourselves as humankind on these three invisible levels of the iceberg.

For example, we are trapped by our understanding of success, and by its relation to happiness, purpose and fulfillment in life. We are trapped by our understanding of the role of companies, business and the economy for societies. Also, we are trapped by our anxiety, a.k.a. the Civilizational Debt, caused by the pace of change on this planet. Yet, predominantly we are trapped by the belief of our impotence - that we are too small, and the system has been too dominant for us to change it.

The choices our grandfathers took when they were building their world are no longer helpful. It is time to contribute our generation's best and update these choices for the sake of the future generations.

Otti, thanks for the inspiration for this post in your post. p.s. Well-designed personas, I must say! - a medieval baron, a lawyer, and a businessman. A representative set indeed 😂

Two Transformation Intention Checks

I think we all deserve a dose of vaccination against glorification of "arbitrarily chosen shared values" as the pivotal transformation axis.

What resonates strongly with me in Otti's post are the two elements that open up space for trust and prove the intentions of originators of a transformation, namely

1. the need for redistribution of power and wealth, and
2. the goal of mitigation of the root causes vs taking the risk of reinforcing a rotten system

These two Intention Checks, as I decide to call them, are core to bear in mind, strive for, track and validate continuously when designing and leading a transformation.

These two Intention Checks are also promising candidates for becoming the pivotal transformation axis, and for becoming an explicit element of a transformation contract.

And also, these two are the litmus paper test, or smell sensors, of openness so necessary in organizations.

See also LI posts to read the whole discussion.

The Joseph Pelrine's Mentoring Codes

About a year ago Joseph Pelrine shared his thoughts and reflections on mentoring in this LI post. 

After a year I find myself coming back to it regularly. The mental frame is generous, developmental, and resonating. I copy it here to spread the word and, honestly, for easier reference for myself. In the same spirit of easy referencing I dared to coin the name for this frame.

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further due, here is the copy of the original post of Joseph. 

The Joseph Pelrine's Mentoring Codes 

Some thoughts on mentoring. During a recent conversation with a young friend, I was saddened and shocked to hear that they were looking for someone to mentor them, but all the people they asked demanded lots of money to do so (n.b. they work in a completely different field, so I can’t help them). 

I guess I’m stupid. I could have earned a lot of money from the people I’ve mentored. But I don’t work like that. For me, 

helping others is a social norm and a moral responsibility

My mentoring doesn’t come free of charge, though. I ask for 4 things from the people I mentor: 

1. Make me proud of you. Always strive to do your best. You won’t always succeed, but I’ll help you learn from your failures so that you get better. 

2. Don’t go dark on me. Stay in touch with me and let me know how you’re doing, especially if you’re not doing well. Sometimes we can pick up subtle clues to potential problems that will help us get better. 

3. Look for opportunities for us to work together. Even though I’m not asking you for any money, I don’t mind if your company or your client supports our work financially 

 

4. Pay forward. I’ve only gotten to where I am because my mentors gave freely of their knowledge, and only asked of me what I’m asking of you. As Edith Piaf (supposedly) once said: "when you've reached the top, send the elevator back down for the others".

p.s. Joseph has remained our guru since the dawn of resonate. 

Leadership and management by Henry Minzberg

I am throwing at you a few thoughts on leadership and management that I selected from the interview with Henry Minzberg. There is more in the interview and I encourage you to spend more time on it. 

Quotes:

The trouble with leadership is that it implies an individual. When you say leader, you do not mean a group, you do not mean a community, you don't mean several people, you mean someone. And it's hyper individualistic. And what we need is a community shift not leadership.

Leadership for me is also an intrinsic part of management. They are not separate. In order to manage you need to lead. In order to lead you have to manage. Managers who don't lead are boring. Leaders who do not manage don't know what's going on. So those two things are intricately tied together. But we need to get to the community shift - we need to get to this idea that organisations are great because people are truly pulling together. By paying CEO 300 times more than an employee you are not sending this message, you are sending an opposite message.

Years ago I used to go around giving talks about what’s wrong with MBA programs. And finally people started asking: what are you doing about this? And I used to answer I am an academic, I am not supposed to do anything about anything, I am only supposed to complain.

I maintain that MBAs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences. The wrong people because at the beginning the assumption is they are going to create managers or leaders. Nobody has ever created a leader in a classroom. Nobody has ever created a manager in a classroom. Just as nobody ever created a swimmer in a classroom. You learn to swim in the water. And managers learn to swim by being managers. And only there they can be developed. So we need much more of an involvement and learning from experience.

To learn management, forget learning leadership, nobody learns leadership, start with people who understand management, and then emphasize not the science of management, of which there is little, but the art of management, and particularly the craft of management. Management is about experience. Sit around the table, share the experience, reflect on experience, and learn from each other.

Full material, thanks to Antoinette and Otti from goodorganisations.com is available on their website.


p.s. There is also an interesting continuation into how managers should approach their learning, based on example of strategy formulation following the leadership section which has a selection of beautiful and refreshing thoughts. E.g. Ikea strategy invention, analysis vs synthesis approach, etc. It starts right after the leadership section, approximately 1:30 hours into the interview.

Contractor's fate - characteristics of entrepreneurial approach to career

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

For those of you who are considering becoming a contractor or already are contractors and looking for peer stories this is a very personal glimpse of my experience after a decade of being a contractor.

• Energy (in)balance. It is hard to maintain the energy balanse. This job is really about radiating your energy. I need to cumulate the energy and then radiate it into the human system of the client. I invest in others, both in individuals in companies, I help them grow, I help them achieve success. Lots of people I helped got a career boost thanks to what we did together and thanks to my contribution. Some are grateful, some others are not, assigning success to themselves. Once the job is done the split of benefits is drastically unequal: career advances vs a time to leave for me.  I enjoy that I helped them yet also wish there was something long term in it for me. No, there is nothing long term for me except satisfaction. It is difficult to absorb some of the energy back to compensate for the energy invested. Only a fraction of clients calls again. 

• Yes, it feels lonely sometimes. I work with some of my best friends at resonate.company yet we rarely work together at the same client. Working together is exactly what made us friends and we knew we wanted to repeat this experience, but it is not so easy. So, the synergy effect suffers.

• Lifetime adjourning. It feels lonely also because I have initiated a lot of Communities of Practice within client organizations and enjoyed being the "founding "leader" and then I had to leave them. So, I know a lot of friendly people in companies, yet I have to adjourn to make space for them to grow and become leaders.

• It is you who needs to pull the trigger and leave. For hygiene I tend not to work with the same client for more than 18 months. The power of the external perspective I bring deteriorates with time and I feel I become trapped in the internal perspective as everyone else. At the same time diversity of your exposure to various clients is what makes you attractive and appealing for clients, so even when it is tempting to stay, you should leave to build your value proposition.

• Long-term sense of ownership. As long as there is plentiful of high energy emotions during client engagements, engagements are usually short term, in months, sometimes a year. There is nothing that extends for 5, 10, 20 years and you can say it is your child, your creation. No product, no business unit, no company. They all have new owners. Except for my company, the one I continuously create, of course. That is why I am a part of a bigger digital boutique together with my friends. Our company is something that will outlive me hopefully. And, except for other assets you create - a book for instance, or other acting in addition to your regular contracts. I authored a few books and that is what heals my sense of long-term ownership. As you can see, the long-term ownership becomes your own duty. You cannot rely on a ready to use logo that simply is there and invites you to build long-term ownership simply by identifying with it. By the way, this need for long-term authoring is sometimes perceived by sponsors of contracts as "not engaged enough". I find such framings very unjust, narrow, and missing the understanding. Contractor's duty to develop her own company deserves respect in the same way as a full-time employee's commitment to spend their lifetime in one company. They both look for fulfillment through contribution to something bigger than themselves individually.

• Yes, it feels great to be on my own! No boss, not an aspirational one, not a stupid one. Would I exchange it for a full-time job engagement? May be. It depends :) For sure it would need to be a full-time job with friends and with a high dose of autonomy. It happened to me that my old friends have hired me as a contractor to help them with some topics and it felt really good. I did not care what form the collaboration took formally: a contract or full-time position. It was of secondary importance as long as I could be collaborating and co-creating with friends. 

• Jealous full-timers? I meet lots of people who initially feel a bit jealous of the freedom that is associated with contracting. Many people never had the courage to try, which I fully understand - it takes a characterological profile and a mixture of courage, stupidity, and risk appetite. Sometimes it just takes a coincidence. In my case, it happened naturally, as my first job back in 1998 was remote and in a small company so it did have aspects of contracting. And, by the way, if it makes it easier for you - I never thought I would be a contractor. Some people still say I have the worst profile for a contractor ever. The truth is that I start every job with a thought at the back of my mind that it is going to last for a lifetime. Coming back to my point - being jealous says a lot about the person who is jealous, about some lack, about an unfulfilled need, about questioning whether her style of investing time and building career, and sometimes about the need to go wild. Let me say, that as a contractor I experience jealousy in the same frame but in the opposite direction - I am sometimes jealous about stability, long-term focus, and ownership, about personal development budgets, about weeks of paid holidays, about paid sick leaves, etc. Again, let's appreciate we are just humans trying to contribute and fulfill our lives, and let's respect each other.

Human Purpose is the next Big Time Transformation

Are good products most important? Is Business Agility most important? Is Collaborative culture most important? Well, not anymore. Not to mention frameworks, projects, or technology... Those all are just the hygiene levels, the necessary conditions for companies of today to survive. They are important, and we need to keep mastering them, yet those are not sufficient conditions for companies of the future. 

The next decades will bring a shift towards Good Companies, as I call them. Good Companies will drive us to a meaningful future by helping us to fulfill our humankind mission: to leave the world better than it is now. To respond and to internalise this new meaning of their existence is the necessary condition for companies to survive in the future. 

As the first step we will need to restore our own integrity and meaning to be strong enough to create such companies. This task requires us to redefine the current societal meaning of business and the mental model of the economy. It is high time for us to update all the legacy we inherited from our grandparents and create our own response to the living conditions of today. 

p.s. See also the full EvoMap here.

Three distinctive features of SAFe which I highly appreciate

Three distinctive features I highly appreciate about SAFe are:

• Dual operating model: decoupling of org structures from value streams. Honestly, in many companies it was a real cracker to start transformation promptly as the restructuring efforts of the functional hierarchy was a fragile topic. The org structure usually represented decades history of how senior managers were building the organization according to their vision, and yes some of them were also building their kingdoms, trying to shape the organization by how they thought was best for it. Thanks to the decoupling of these two aspects, it is possible to start a transformation swiftly while giving the re-structurization as much time and respect for people, their ambitions, and visions, as it needs. From my perspective the nature of these two processes: organizing around value and organizing functionally is indeed of a different nature, and the timelines are of different magnitute, and as such it deserves to be treated separately.
• Organizing into operational value streams. Designing the value streams, as described by SAFe is logical and elegant. It is an exercise I recommend to all organizations, even to those that think they have it sorted. Why? Because it will add transparency to why we organized the way we organized. I believe, to know this logic is highly important to everybody in the organization. Not only will people understand that it is an act of conscious design, but they will also respect it. Trying to design the value streams surface the choices that have to be made and the multitude of options there usually are to choose from. People quickly realize there is a degree to which the design decisions are tough as there usually are multiple equally good designs. On the other hand, the usual lack of such transparency weakens the belief that leadership knows what they do when they announce a re-org to employees, causing people to spend too much time divagating. 
• PI Planning. Planning at scale always seemed a daunting task to me. All those hundreds of people on one hand and the will to invite them all into the planning process, to make sure decisions are made where knowledge is. That has always been a challenge in my career. And here SAFe offers invaluable help for me. It offers me a template of a facilitation scheme for the PI Planning event that does exactly that. Whatever people say, I rarely see such great support.

p.s. Give any tool to bureaucrats and they will turn it into a heavy process that will make people suffer

p.p.s. Give any tool to skeptics and they will prove it does not work in our case

Attribution: Photo by Tony Hand on Unsplash

Big Dipper Org Constellation

Each time I see an org structure like this I take a deep breath and pause for a while... Omg, that is a vanity show! How do I influence such organization... The Warren Buffet's ABC of Business Decay is in front of my eyes... 

• Should I bother? As they say: do not change what is there, focus on the new, the old will need to adapt or extinct
• How many levels are there between the vision maker and the implementers? What does it tell me about the culture of this organization?
• What is the agenda of the middle layers? Can it be anything else than politics and kingdom wars?
• What is the domain knowledge decay curve across these layers of bureaucracy? Usually, team managers and above have insufficient skills to be active knowledge contributors. They happen to be structural proxies.
• What happened to the inverted pyramid model? Ah, sorry, wrong question - they have not heard about it most probably. 
• What happened to the hands-on leadership by example role modelling? But we don't have time, we have more important strategic topics on our agenda... Don't believe that - it is the usual excuse.
• How to evangelize for 0-layer onion structure? It's going to be controversial for some, but I am still going to say it: this is why I like the dual operating metaphor of SAFe as it cuts off the kingdom wars from value streams!
• How to dismantle the egos? You don't. Usually, it's too late. 
• How to connect teams with the source of truth? Through Value Streams!
• How to celebrate real doers? Locally, in value streams. Accept the fact the hierarchy will always get a higher bonus and career development opportunities.
• How not to disconnect? I would like to hear it from you! I saw multiple ways, people are creative.
• etc

Kate Raworth - economy designed to thrive not to grow! TED talk

I am apparently a few years after the pioneers, still trying to catch up, even with the whole research I did for the Good Companies book... :) And it still feels good that my ideas are genuine so that I can contribute them to the world! What a year that was - the Pinker's book and Raworth's book published!

Here goes the summary of Kate Raworth TED talk.

• It is time to reimagine the shape of the progress curve - do we need economies that grow, whether or not they make us thrive?
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) invented in 1930s and very soon became the overriding goals of policymaking
• Governments still think that the solution to their economic problems lies in more growth
• W.W. Rostow,  The Stages of Economic Growth, 1960 book installs the believe that growth is necessary for something beyond than itself, like national dignity or better life for children
• Roster left us flying into the sunset of mass consumerism. Yet the plane can never land. He knew this, and left us with the unanswered question:

What to do when the increase in real income itself loses its charm?

• We are financially, politically and societally addicted to unending growth, through ROI in business, GDP in politics, and a century of consumerism propaganda in societal dimension, respectively.
• GDP is 10x biger than it was in 1950s, brought prosperity to billions of people. Yet economy became devisive - 1% rich problem, degenerative - destabilizing this delicately balanced planet on which all our lives depend, 
• Politicians offer new destinations of growth, yet

    I think it's time to choose a higher ambition, a far bigger one: to meet the needs of all people within the means of this extraordinary, unique, living planet so that we and the rest of nature can thrive.

• No economist from the recent century saw this picture (of the current state), so why would we imagine that their theories would be up for taking up its challenges? We need ideas of our own because we are the first generation to see this, and probably the last with a real chance of turning this story around.
• The new economy must be regenerative by design and distributive by design. 
• We intuitively understand that when something tries to grow forever within a healthy, living, thriving system, it's a threat to the health of the whole. So why would we imagine that our economies could be one system that can buck this trend and succeed by growing forever?
• We need to overcome the structural dependency on growth so we can instead focus on thriving and balance
• It is boundaries that unleash our potential

John Vervaeke - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

 Thanks to Mariusz Kreft I have recently discovered the series of lectures by John Vervaeke, Awakening from The Meaning Crisis. 

It is the most powerful material I heard so far on why there is so much human disintegrity, we feel so much of absurdity and are so disconnected from the reality.

What is wisdom, what is meaning, how do we pursue it, what is the vehicle that awakens our virtues, how do we become the most human, how do we fulfil ourselves?

Please find here a sample transcript as a teaser for the series:

Aristotle points out that there is this deep form of foolishness that comes from a lack of character. He calls it AKRASIA. Akrasia is when you know what the right thing to do is, but you don't do the right thing. 

Why you behave foolishly? Ignorance is when you do the wrong thing because you don't know. A part of foolishness is when you know what the right thing to do is and you still do the wrong thing. Here's Aristotle answer: You do the wrong thing because although you have the right beliefs (aka impotence of beliefs), you don't have sufficient character. 

You have not trained things, skills, sensitivities, you have not created the virtual engine that is regulating your growth and development, such as you will not live up to your potential. For Aristotle you become a good person if you actualize, if you in-form your being with a virtu-al engine that realizes those things that are distinctive of our humanity.

What makes us different from the plants, the animals, and other species with minds? a.k.a. Why am I more valuable more than this table? What are those characteristics that are unique to us? Here is where Aristotle gives the axial revolution his answer: Your capacity for overcoming self-deception, your capacity for cultivating your character, for realizing wisdom, and for enhancing the structure of your psyche and your contact with reality. That's what rational means. 

Your purpose is to become as fully human as possible. How are you cultivating your character to do so? This is what Aristotle is going to ask you again and again. How much your live is dedicated to recognizing and cultivating those rational capacities, those things that make you most human in contrast to all the other things around you.

by John Vervaeke.

Wandering vs efficiency by Jeff Bezos

I treat this quote from Jeff Bezos as another recognition of value of intelligence beyond rational intelligence and problem solving at work. Very much aligned with the direction I have been evangelizing towards :)

Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.

Source: 2018 Letter to Shareholders

Leadership Development programs - the vicious cycle of solving the wrong problem...

 Why does the business world put so much effort and attention into the Leadership Development programs? Seriously. Have you ever wondered what problem these try to solve?

 

Let's do a round of all stakeholers involved to understand their perspectives and expected value. Clearly the intention of Sponsors is to develop leaders to be better leaders, to perform better, to be more effective and to build a stronger organization. For Participants, it's nobilitating to belong to the leadership cohort, they feel special and rewarded. For Trainers and Coaches, training leaders is nobilitating as well, it brings a lot of self-esteem, so they feel special and rewarded, not to mention remuneration aspect. Indeed I met whole flocks of consultants who dreamt about getting access to the leadership development level programs. This is the level where one can feel impactful. In this vicious cycle everyone feels happy, so it lasts.

My challenge is: Leaders know what to do, they do not need special trainings. We, human, are good and justice and ethical by nature, by design, we are equipped to make right decisions. The real question is why leaders cannot apply all the goodness and the knowledge in their organizations? Why do leadership efforts not blossom, and do not stick in spite of best intentions?

Here is my perspective: leaders cannot apply their natural goodness and wisdom, because the goal and the rules of the game of companies are different, leaders' goodness does not apply in this game, and is neither compatible nor usable in the context of the current purpose of companies. 

My call today is: Trust your leaders, do not try to change them, instead change the environment you need them to operate within - change the companies instead. Transform companies into good citizens of the world by redefining their social meaning and purpose.

Photo by Mathias Jensen on Unsplash