I am very proud of my daughter, Sarah. She has made a name for herself in the very male-dominated world of historic building restoration and ornamental plastering. She uses all her skills as a sculptress and has developed a keen eye for the health of historic buildings. I was walking with her recently through the centre of Newbury, an old market town in Berkshire, UK, that boasts a fairly modern shopping centre. And she began to illustrate for me how ambiguity works in a VUCA world. (‘VUCA’ stands for an environment defined by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity.)
Ambiguity is all around us. The trouble is, by definition, we don’t recognise it.
So when Sarah suddenly objected at the sight of this wall (pictured above) it got my attention. What was wrong with it? To my untrained eye, someone had been responsible for preserving this fine building by re-pointing the wall. That was a good thing, right?
Well, no. Sarah pointed out that the traditional material to bind bricks was lime. Concrete, though less perishable, does not absorb water.
I still didn’t get it. Not absorbing water is a good thing, right?
Again I stood to be corrected. A building such as this, Sarah explained, is a living system. When it rains, where will the water go? It will seep into the most porous and also the most precious part of the structure, the timbers. It will stay there and eventually rot away the wood. In about ten years time, these ancient timbers will be rotting and need replacing. And they are irreplaceable.
This illustrated a couple of things for me about ambiguity:
It’s often experience and skill that offers us the only way of recognising ambiguity in our work. I thought the repair was a good, responsible job; my daughter knew it was a restoration crime.
The frame of reference we bring to the world matters. In this case, do we think of a building as an inert, static structure or as a living system, a system that needs to flex and breathe? Our frame of reference is how we see reality, how the world appears to us.
Our worldview conditions how the world occurs to us.
In the world of leading change, we make assumptions about people and their behaviour. For example, someone reacts with surprising hostility towards the changes we are trying to make. We can make the assumption that they are a trouble-maker, they dislike us, or that they are just a stubborn reactionary.
We need to look closer. My experience draws me towards that person, towards that conflict; it triggers exploratory, compassionate questions. And my frame of reference is that very few people are sociopaths, so there is probably another reason why this person appears unreasonable.
I look deeper, and I find that this person is going through a domestic trauma and that the only stability in their life right now seems to be their workplace. And I’m about to take away that last refuge of stability.
Suddenly their reaction begins to make sense. Now I can view them very differently. I can begin to work positively with that person.
Ambiguity in this VUCA world is all around us. The problem is, by definition, we don’t see it.
The more we grow in experience and what worldview we bring to our work, the more we challenge our own initial assumptions, the more we are likely to uncover and recognise important ambiguity.
At the weekend I came across this gem of a video posted over six years ago. Marten Mikos, the then-CEO of MySQL who sold the company to SUN Microsystems for $1 billion, gives a candid short interview during the Innovate! conference in Zaragoza, Spain, about his key learnings as an entrepreneur. It’s a nine-minute masterclass:
It caught my attention because I was recently writing about the Stockdale Paradox and its relevance to Resilient Hope. If you want to read it, sign up here.
Marten Mikos covers a number of subjects dear to my heart in this short video:
how entrepreneurs have to have unwavering faith as well as to face the brutal reality day-to-day
the tricky art of knowing when to stop something and when to keep going
the biggest challenge in growing an organisation is people, particularly oneself
the importance of being open to learning new things as well as to abandoning old ways
I’ve written recently about visual thinking, in particular referring to the work of Mike Rohde and sketchnotes. Here’s my own sketchnote from this video. It’s not perfect nor terribly arty, so I hope it’s an encouragement to you if you think you can’t draw.
As I was writing my last book Practical People Engagement, I came across Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human. I’m so glad I did. I find Daniel Pink is one of those communicators who does much of the heavy lifting for us across the social sciences, in particular in the fields of cognitive psychology. He communicates effortlessly whether speaking or writing.
In To Sell is Human he discusses a concept called the “Bank of Pitches”, standard short forms of a key message. For example, there is the Twitter Pitch (reducing your message to 140 characters or less) and the One-Word Pitch. In the video below, I discuss and illustrate the Question Pitch.
So often we are over-eager to get our argument across at the first meeting. We seem to bludgeon the other party with our proposition. That’s too fast and can backfire on us.
It’s far more honouring if we invite the other party to five their opinions first and it echoes the strategy of “dealing with the difficult”. I’ve seen it work quite powerfully.
Do you have an example of gaining people’s trust by asking them a question first? Leave a comment below.
Symphony orchestra performing on dark background..
Veronica was the Head of Nursing across a large healthcare organisation that included several hospitals. She had a problem. A significant technology change was coming that she knew would be unpopular with many in nursing. It was an inconvenient and disruptive change, but necessary. She needed to get her colleagues to see beyond the pain to the gain in the future. But they were sceptical. She could persuade and get those in her immediate sphere of influence to come on board with this; to prepare before it hit them, despite full workloads. But what about the rest?
One of the biggest challenges for a leader is to scale engagement across a large group of people; that is, to reach the many affected with the right messages at the right time, to engage them in meaningful conversations, and help them co-own the change.
Often the simple reason is that the challenge is so big. And because the leader tries to do this on their own.
A client was explaining was faced her recently: engaging 1,000 people in one group, and another critical group of 60-80 people, whom they needed to enlist as key change agents, and all within a few weeks. She understood that this challenge was not feasible with full engagement. So, she had tried to do this by sending out emails. Why? Because it seemed more achievable for her.
Now, most of those individuals will consider the scale of engagement in terms of what they can personally do. The scale of this can be so intimidating, it is far more comfortable to turn their attention back to what they are familiar with, the technically-urgent tasks in hand.
This can become a sort of collective state of denial by the team of this vital engagement challenge because, without true engagement, this change will fail. It always the case.
Without true engagement change will fail. This is always the case.
This situation is better approached it a different way, using a helpful metaphor.
The Engagement Orchestra
Consider the engagement orchestra. My client is the conductor, but the orchestra has particular instruments – other members of her delivery team and wider network – that need to be brought into play at certain points, who are skilled at playing across specific relational networks with a timbre and colour that resonates with different people across those networks of trust. As many in the string section will take their cue from the lead violinist, not just the conductor, so in my client’s case, certain key influencers hold greater trust with some groups than she does.
Overall the orchestra will play a piece that produces beautiful harmonies, across two or three movements towards a satisfying climax. That piece is the engagement roadmap or strategy. The consistency of timing, of stories, of messages, give the overall engagement coherence and credibility, so work needs to be done here.
What is the music score in this metaphor? A basic “score” that we use to orchestrate such a large-scale engagement is the stakeholder engagement strategy, an approach where every team member sees which part they have to play. This is explained in my book, Practical People Engagement.
The conductor knows she need not be fully competent in each instrument. She needs to know the range of each instrument, and the tone and quality that each is capable of, and other key limits on each instrument. In an orchestra, the composer of the piece and the conductor are one. But they do need an orchestra to execute it. So, I encouraged my client to think of herself more as a conductor rather than a player.
However, the conductor does need to pay attention to the overall effect, timing and pace of the music. She focuses on bringing in key instruments at precisely the right moment. She is aware of the whole narrative of the piece and the effect it should have on the audience. Here, a communications plan becomes vital. Everyone needs to keep in step with each other. Messages heard second-hand are never positive.
Veronica, with the help of a coach, went on to identify her key groups, who had different interests and influence. For each of these groups, she was able to recruit key influencers, sometimes within the groups themselves, who brought those people ‘online’ at the right moments. She stepped back. Veronica didn’t have to do it all herself; in fact, it would have been a mistake to try. She kept the messages and the vision clear and consistent throughout the change. What began to happen was that the people affected saw the initiative no longer as top management’s change, but their change. Veronica shifted from envisioning, too empowering, too coordinating, supporting and protecting people during the change.
The lie of doing it all
Somehow, we have taken on a lie that says that, as a leader, we must do it all. No, most of the time we lead in the context of a community with other leaders. We invite others to lead. It does not diminish us; on the contrary, we all grow.
One of the key chapters in my forthcoming book, Leading Yourself: Succeeding from the Inside Out, is on Identity, the whole matter of how we see ourselves, our make-up and how we come to be unique. I believe this is pivotal because out of our own self-identity comes so much of what we do and how we do it. My self-identity is the “me” I think I bring to the world, to be unique not least to my work.
The book is about how we can do our best work in this VUCA world. When it comes to moving towards our best performance there is a real paradox: our identity is not in our performance.
Being unique is not about what I do. Who I am is not what I do nor is it how well I do it. This is crucial. If we cannot separate the two we become addicted to our work, and our self-worth suffers if events don’t go so well. Another manifestation of this confusion is the high mortality among people within a year of their retirement. No job, no identity. No, health comes through knowing who we are independent of our work.
We must find a way of discovering our true identity apart from our performance.
We must find a way of knowing our true selves independent of our performance. We must find a value in ourselves that transcends what we do.
I have come to realise that for each of us our identity is in at least two parts: the general and the unique.
For example, regarding my own general identity, I am British. I am growing a deeper appreciation of this as I travel around the world. I am a post-war baby boomer, which has meant I’ve carried around some generational baggage, such as a scarcity mentality. (I was born during rationing, and it informed the value system I was raised in.)
Also, being a post-war Englishman meant I was vulnerable to a post-imperial mentality, where we seemed to live in the shadow of America, marginal to much of what we used to lead. I have, to a degree, grown out of both of these limitations. I now appreciate a positive, abundance frame of reference as being a more real and healthy one. Also, over the last eighteen months, I have been privileged to work with the outcomes of a new kind of Britain, with such clients as the British Antarctic Survey, with various British research bodies and universities producing truly excellent science and learning. In the UK, we seem to have a knack of producing excellence on a shoestring. All this, at a general level, informs the identity I bring to clients all over the world.
The British seem to have a knack of producing excellence on a shoestring.
For our unique identity, we need to look elsewhere. The title of this post is taken from a BBC TV series of the same name. In each episode a particular media personality is shown discovering their family roots and ancestral lineage. This can be a powerful means of understanding part of our unique identity. But that is by no means the sum of where our uniqueness comes from.
I’m pretty comfortable with that, but it’s real value to me is that it leads me to an awareness of aspects of my personality that I had hitherto taken for granted. More and more, I have the freedom to play to my strengths, rather than work on my weakness. Out of this comes true performance and fulfilment.
So, my conviction is that Solomon was right, Plato was right, Jesus was right.
Having a right understanding of who we are really, really matters.
What examples do you have of connecting with your unique self? What has helped you?
And how has a greater sense of your self-identity helped you?
One of the delegates on one of my recent Agile workshops, who came from the Health Sector, spoke of her finding one of the most techno-phobic clinicians.
So she decided to appoint him as her business ambassador. !
Initially, this seemed to me like asking Basil Fawlty to lead a customer care programme.
She said it was difficult at first, but this stakeholder was much more influential with his peers when he had been won over. Everybody could see the conversion.
I can imagine.
This Road to Damascus’ engagement strategy seems to be high risk one. And it is risky unless there are a number of things in place in the change leader and the sceptical customer: genuine affinity, honesty and trust. Often the objections in such a relationship can be much more openly and honestly expressed. At the same time, these objections are discussed with some mutual respect.
This can open the way for a breakthrough. This is far less the case, perhaps, where there is a stakeholder who feels they should or ought to be an advocate of this, but they don’t really believe in it or cannot afford the time to engage with the change. In such cases, the objection might not be surfaced early enough.
If we shorten the distance between us and them, an agreement becomes more likely.
As with my advice recently about dealing with the difficult, this is a case where the aim is for both parties to look together at the objections or difficulties together. The objections are not personalised.
If you can shorten the distance between you and the other person most obstacles can be overcome.
What have been your experiences of winning over sceptics? How is this done? Leave a comment at the bottom of this post.
At the BCS Business Change SIG last night in London, we had a great conversation. I expected we would, but I wasn’t sure what turn it would take. But isn’t that the way of all great conversations?
We were exploring the concept of Resilient Hope. In the discussion following my presentation, one person mentioned he’d be reading Daniel Kahneman’s seminal work, Thinking Fast, Think Slow, and he referenced what Kahneman had identified as the Loss Aversion Bias, the tendency we all have for protecting our decisions and investments even if they might be wrong and we are losing, by investing, even more, to shore them up. We don’t like losing. This works itself out in public, for example, by major projects and programmes, where clearly the business case is failing or has gone, but such is the investment that has gone into it, we pour good money after bad because we don’t want to face the fact that we might have backed the wrong horse.
Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear.
Dean Ornish
The conversation led on to talk about the climate of negativity in many of our work cultures and why that is.
I’m reminded of a great book by Dr Brené Brown, called Daring Greatly. Dr Brown is known for her research on shame, vulnerability and scarcity, but what emerges from her work, her interviews with parents and others is something transcendently positive. She is able to identify health by connecting with joy through gratitude. However, she has remarked that we find joy “terrifying.” She has identified a mental narrative that most of us recognise called foreboding joy. Foreboding joy is where we catch ourselves in joy, and immediately fear that we will pay for it, or fear that something will come along to snatch it away.
However, she has remarked that we find joy “terrifying.” She has identified a mental narrative that most of us recognise called foreboding joy. Foreboding joy` is where we catch ourselves in joy, and immediately fear that we will pay for it, or fear that something will come along to snatch it away.
This is perfectly irrational of course. People do prevail in joy. Look at this Oprah Winfrey interview with Brené Brown:
In my presentation, I quoted from Dr Dean Ornish, the leader of a breakthrough programme in leading behavioural change for chronically ill patients from lifestyle-induced illness. He said, “Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear.” Indeed it was, as people soon began to see and feel health benefits from a radical and repeated regime. Rather than be motivated by “do this or you will die” sort of counsel, they connected with joy and through that resilient hope emerged.
Maybe we need to take more care of joy in our lives and not snuff it out too quickly.
Earlier this year I was running a Stakeholder Engagement Workshop in the Netherlands. Towards the end of the workshop, I began to reference one of the most popular, but contentious sections in my book Practical People Engagement about ‘Dealing with Difficult Stakeholders.’ One of the delegates suggested that if I label someone as ‘difficult’ immediately that label creates a barrier between me and them.
He is, of course, quite right. It is not positioning me to call out the gold in that person if I have already written them off as ‘difficult’ as part of their essential identity. It adds yet another barrier between us.
It would be more helpful and more accurate to regard the relationship as difficult, and so to work on the relationship. In fact, the strategy I set out in the book does recognise that. Ultimately, good negotiation in difficult contexts is about shortening the social distance between us and them. We aim to look at the problem that creates the difficulty from the perspective of being shoulder-to-shoulder with that person. If we can look at the issue together it paves the way to a probable agreement.
In a previous post, I wrote about calling out the gold in people. How exactly is perceiving someone as ‘difficult’ helping me to do that?
Well, it isn’t. By labelling people ‘difficult’, I may have created an eye-catching headline, but it is not necessarily honouring their true identity and so creates an unseen barrier for me in moving towards them.
So, thank you to my client. (You know who you are.)
If you would like a more detailed version of a checklist I have developed, please click the link below and I will be glad to send it to you.
Perhaps many of our stakeholder challenges are of our own making, more than we would like to think.
Note About Dealing with Difficult Relationships
What has worked for you in resolving difficult relationships? Leave your tips below in the comments section.
Have you ever found yourself influencing people to change and found that there was more than a lack of motivation, there was a lack of belief in the proposed change?
Next week I’m speaking at the BCS Business Change SIG in London to this title. I’ve discovered a real power in hope when it is applied to business change.
However, this kind of hope does not mean this:
Wishful thinking in a pessimistic frame of mind. We often use the word hope in this way. “I hope so, but I fear otherwise.” This has little expectancy about it. This has nothing back it.
Blind Optimism. I will be referencing the Stockdale Paradox in my presentation, that Jim Collins explores in his book, Good to Great. Sometimes unrealistic optimism ca be actively destructive.
No, what I will explore is something rarely mentioned in change management literature that I call resilient hope.
Have you ever seen hope rise in a change you have been part of? How did that happen? Let me know.
Someone once said that life was like learning to play the piano in a public concert. I think I know what they mean. We all feel vulnerable when we make mistakes. Nobody likes being seen making a mistake. So we try to do this secretly, don’t we?
When it comes to the area of project management and strategic change, this works itself out in a different way: it is very hard to see good case studies. Why? Because a “warts and all” account might show the organisation or people within it in a poor light. They would not publish such a report.
This is a pity because the rest of us could learn valuable lessons. We could learn from their mistakes and so avoid failure in those areas.
But that is not going to happen. Organisations can suffer reputational damage, even damage to their stock prices if some juicy failure leaks into the public domain. As a result, there is a dearth of learning.
The opposite can also be true: an organisation innovates, makes a breakthrough, a disruptive change. As a result, that firm makes huge inroads into a market previously dominated by its competitors. So is it going to share how it achieved the breakthrough? Senior management gets uneasy. Surely this would erode their competitive advantage. Better to keep it under wraps. And so more potential learning is kept from us all.
An Outstanding Exception
There is an outstanding exception to this pattern. And this exception has played a significant part in my own career. The exception is the public sector best practices; particularly, the UK Central Government. Here we have a government that is subject to intense, and sometimes very public scrutiny.
In the area of major public projects, over the three decades from the 1960’s, there were some major failures: such as Trident, TSR2, and Nimrod. The UK Central Government began to set about identifying and defining what it called project management “best practice.” It codified it, first into a methodology called PROMPT, then PRINCE®, and finally PRINCE2®.
And it did this publicly.
Private sector consultants were not ready to praise these efforts too quickly. Some were even quite critical, in fact, but the truth was we all benefited from this sharing.
A Rude Awakening
For the early part of my career, I worked in the public sector in the UK, in local government across three different bodies in 15 years. After this, I made the transition to the private sector.
At that time, we were watching TV programmes like, “Yes, Minister.” (See this post’s feature image.) I believed the stereotypes. Public bodies were extremely bureaucratic, stuffy, hierarchical, formal, and conservative, whilst private sector organisations were all entrepreneurial, more casual in dealing with each other, and, above all, innovative.
In 1990 I made the transition to the private sector.
I was in for a rude awakening.
I found the organisation I had joined was far more hierarchical, bureaucratic, self-indulgent and inert than I had experienced in the public sector. My government days felt positively entrepreneurial. This was counter to all the stereotypes.
The truth was, and still is, that within central Government there is much progressive, innovative work. This had to come forth when the public was seeing so much waste on major projects. Excellence emerged.
Much of my career has centred around progressive management approaches such as PRINCE2®, MSP™, P3O® and more recently, Better Business Cases™. These have all helped UK public programmes succeed more often than not. Partly driven by HM Treasury, partly by the Cabinet Office, and partly by the National Audit Office, the UK Government has raised its game in programme and project management significantly. And all this in the context of a fairly hostile national press and intense political scrutiny through the Public Accounts Committee.
Managing Successful Programmes™
With MSP (Managing Successful Programmes), I recently was part of the panel on a Webinar, hosted by Axelos the owners of MSP, and I noticed keen interest from all over the world. This framework is, in many ways, ahead of its time. For example, I was asked: “Can you make MSP agile?” My answer, in brief, was, “It already is agile.” And I went on to explain why.
The year before the Rio Olympics, the Banco Central do Brasil invited me to speak at a conference in Brasilia on MSP programme management. I used the London Olympics Case Study. You can imagine, only months away from the Rio Olympics they were all ears. I am continuing to discover other countries benefiting from the wealth of good practice coming out of the UK Central Government.
Better Business Cases
Better Business Cases (BBC) is another gem. Pioneered out of Whitehall and the Welsh Government, BBC takes the business case and turns it into a strategic tool that develops in a most appropriate way throughout the start and life of a project. We hear of the UK’s NHS using this to good effect.
Say “business case” to most project managers, and you can watch their eyes glaze over. BBC turbo-charges the approach and handling of the business case.
So, all’s well then?
So, is all well then with UK Government “best practices”? I’m not so sure. Not so long ago the Cabinet Office effectively sold off its ownership of most of these management methods and practice to a private concern, Axelos. To give them credit, it seems that Axelos is making gains in scaling adoption across the globe but I’m not sure that the development of these products will be as vigorous, rigorous and authentic as it was when it clearly came out of public sector ownership.
Also, major government projects now have the Major Projects Leadership Academy (MPLA). Several of my clients have been through this programme and speak very highly of it. One of my associates has actually worked with the faculty. However, there is strong protection by Oxford University’s Said Business School of its intellectual property. This is a traditional academic value system of protecting and hoarding intellectual capital, and this School has a particularly assertive commercial agenda. So the rest of us are not likely to benefit from some of the key learning within the Academy as much as we might from a more generous, sharing approach.
It seems that the more Central Government outsources, no doubt for otherwise good reasons, there is a loss in helping better practice more generally, that nobody in the private sector can give.
Question:
What are your views and experiences on this? Leave your comment below.
