John Scherer will receive ODN’s Lifeline Achievement Award for 2015.

This blog and my Gloria satiric blog exist because John Scherer pressured me to write. Thank you John.

The most useful critique of my global OD work and my style has come from John. His comments have had context, depth and John’s  intent is to help and support. When he speaks, I listen.

John has boundless energy. He inspires, he innovates and he learns, all the time. John has a heart of gold, a heart bigger than he is. John is a giver.His clients are very lucky.

I am a better consultant for having John as a colleague. I am enriched for having him as a friend.

And he truly deserves the recognition he is getting.

Bravo, Johnny boy, from Gloria and me.

This post will address how to go about doing OD with start ups and their founders.

At face level, there is a good match between the value proposition of OD and the needs of startups.

• Startups have talent, flexibility, a high level of engagement and do not suffer from the chronic ailments of older organizations.
• OD provides a development platform (mindset, concepts, skills) to support the new technologies/products which are being created. Sounds like a dream world to me.

However, founders are generally not receptive to OD. The very qualities of the founders that enabled them to become founders, prevent them from proper leverage of OD. The founder, who essence is breaking down the barriers of innovation, often views “organizational issues” in one of two ways:

1) Organizational issues are banal, ‘a matter of common sense”, (meaning the common sense of the founder.)

2) Organizational issues are a chance to reinvent human nature; “I will create an organization which will change the way people organize.”

The constraining forces inhibiting growth of a startup are often organizational and behavioural. Startups have ideas, technologies and great people; frequently they have a detailed road map of the development of the technological solution they are engineering. Yet founders of startups do not generally address the issue:” what type of organization do I need to develop to support these great ideas?”

Founders often react poorly to OD consultants. Not only are many founders arrogant, many OD practitioners lack the technical savvy to gain respect.  OD consultants tend to be much older than founders, which add more complexity since the OD consultant can be seen as the “parent”. (I am 71 and many of my clients are in their twenties).

Generally founders appoint the admin to be the first HR manager, along with facilities and car rental! That certainly closes the HR route to work with startups at an early stage.

Often, investors who want their founders to get grey haired organizational development support put OD consultants on the Board, or attach some strings to the money that they invest making OD “compulsory”. This approach certainly limits the trust that will develop between the founder and the OD consultant, although I remember two cases when that approach worked.

OD in startups generally begins when the founder steps aside to becomes CTO and brings on a professional CEO . The struggle between the founder and the new CEO is a great place to start an OD project. 98% of the work I do in startups began this way.

Once a project starts, I suggest the following emphases:

1-Ensure that the development of the organization parallels the development of the organization 6 months down the road

2-Develop a dialogue and an action plan around developing scalability. (Anyone who wants to know how this is done should leave contact details below).

3-Develop a plan whereby the organization does not need to either enslave itself to the initial group of employees, nor push them aside. There are many ways of doing so.

4-Develop a life cycle dialogue and action plan about people, skills, “mores” and structuring.

Follow me @AllonShevat

I am old enough to remember plenty of management fads which claimed to be elixirs for all the ills of organizing.

I probably remember “TQM” (Total Quality Management) best of all, because of its vast popularity despite it being total nonsense.  Indeed, within just a few years, “time to market” had relegated “quality” to the back seat.  And if you think quality is still a driving force, take a flight or call a mobile service provider!

I smell a new TQM skunk! In social media as well as academic journals, there is a lot of vibe about the lessening prominence of leadership as well as the need to focus on enhancing self-management for both the sophisticated nerd and the average Joe.

I have worked with many organizations which put a high premium on leaderless and self-management. Without an exception, they all “outgrew” this or died from decision paralysis and astounding mediocrity.

This short post will provide my perspective on this new religion-de-jour!

1) Leaderlessness and self-management have a manipulative basis.

•    Empowered by information technology yet bogged down by ERPs and mistrust, it may be sexy to espouse the value of self – management, but it is cunning to an extreme. It certainly does create someone to blame when the system does not work too well.
•    Power is concentrated in the hands of the ruling class, the tycoons, the powers that be or whatever. A call to “leaderlessness” and self-management sounds to me a general telling his front line troops to “develop the strategy and battle plan”, and then shooting them in the back for being cowards.

2. Self Management in the ERP hell.

In many organizations, ERP has replaced common sense and initiative, and serving the process is so dominant that there is almost no room for either good leadership or self-management. So let’s put the blame where it lies, and not promote the false messiah of self management.

3. Psychology

People need leaders to admire and hate. I see this as a self-obvious truth. Am I too old? Out of touch? Or is someone peddling a new fad?

4-Complexity

As the world of work became so complex and high speed, integration between disciplines and perspectives becomes absolutely critical. This integration does not happen by itself, because of ego, power games and bandwidth issues. Leaders drive integration by choosing the right people and leading/managing them properly.

So yes, I do see leaderlessness, holacracy and over dosing on  self management as a new fad and in many cases, pure crap, misleading, manipulative and/or irrelevant.

But it sure is going to be lucrative.

And an afterthought- Organizations and people need leaders; employees, equipped with an end to end perspective of what’s going on. That does NOT negate the fact that  yeam members must learn to  work with their peers to resolves issues without undue escalation.

There are several major reasons that organizations are not flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstance. In this post I will examine three, and suggest what needs to be done to achieve more flexibility.  (There are of course other reasons, like bad politics. which I will not deal with in this post).

1) Too much chaos

Sam, Lisl and Ethan’s company started in a garage. Sam wrote the key algorithms , Lisl raised money and Ethan looked for a strategic partner. All 3 wrote code. All decisions were made together by consensus.

Their company now has 50  people with 4 major  subcontractors. All decisions go up to Sam Lisl and Ethan who still manage the company like 3 nerds in a garage. Decision making is a nightmare, locked in the free-spirited “we-all-decide-everything” mode. (Last week they had a one day meeting about with which travel agency to work).

In essence, their company has become the very essence of rigidity, with decisions lagging by 4 months.

2) Too much bureaucracy

I will not use a case study to illustrate this type of rigidity in a large  company . We all know it all too well. These organizations have an ERP which has replaced common sense. The work flow  is a nightmare. Every minor issue generates tens to hundreds of emails, as anxious staff make sure that they serve the process and transfer blame backwards or forwards. It is very hard to do very simple things, and impossible to do anything creative. Everything takes much much longer than it should, and the organization (often assisted by internal OD) is obsessed with process improvement.

3) Organizations which have adopted agile methodologies.

Prompted by “best practices”, blind emulation of technology and pure stupidity, there are a plethora of “agile methodologies” available to organizations who want to apply agile coding practices to the art of organization. (In some ways this reminds me of western politicians who want to promote liberal democracy in the Middle East).

An agile methodology is an oxymoron, like thought leadership. In the quest to loosen up from too much or too little order in order to gain more flexibility, organizations embrace yet another cause of rigidity,  a “methodology”.

Summary

Organizations are rigid because they have too much or too little “order”.

An agile methodology is self defeating.

Organizations whose rigidity stems from chaos need order.

Organizations with too much order need less IT driven processes, digital detox and massive injections of common sense. Yes, common sense.  Ni plus ni moins.

Agile organizational methodologies should be replaced with smart hires, lot of room for common sense, and small teams (as geographically consolidated as possible) that meet face to face with their smartphones off.

Often senior managers are highly skilled in the act of manipulation.  As a matter of fact, it  is one of the very reasons that senior people reach the top.

Highly manipulative leaders/manager often commission consultants when manipulation is no longer effective. Most frequently this happens upon being promoted, or when there is a need for rapid change.

Influence and manipulation may look similar but there are major differences-

• lack of intentional functional transparency
• lack of consistency, e.g, measuring X and demanding Y. (Talk quality and measure speed)
• built in need for escalation to get things done (very very common)

I do not want to quibble about what manipulation is because, like pornography, we know it when see it.

In this post I will give 6 guidelines about how to work with highly manipulative managers who commission consulting work.

1. Be open about your own agenda. (I want to make money. I want to build my reputation, I hate failure) Exposing agendas models migrating away from manipulation.
2. Do not be judgmental about manipulation. The client must understand that while manipulation may no longer work, it is not useful to  knock what he/she thinks brought him up through the ranks.
3. Use the here and how to “expose” each and every manipulation that your client uses with you.
4. I have found use of paradoxical interventions most useful with this population
5. Provide useful  alternatives to manipulation, acknowledging that the alternatives to manipulation have unwanted side effects. (Kipnis and Pois are still relevant).
6. Be fully transparent. Transparency is the ultimate mitigation mechanism of manipulation.

Case-

Helmut commissioned me to work with him on implementing an organizational change which is moving too slowly. Helmut has been  CEO for 6 months, and previously he was head of the European Sales Division.

Helmut has succeeded in every role he has had until now. His results have been  impeccable. This is no longer the case.

Helmut plays his various team members against once another. He gives the same task to  5 different people.He is purposely vague so that everyone is always guessing what he means.

In our initial meetings, Helmut was vague about what he wanted. Two other OD consultants were also involved, all with vague overlapping mandates. Helmut blamed me that I was not practical. In a long and heated 2 hour discussion, I called him on his manipulation and resigned. He re-hired me two days later, and he even  oked that I publish this post. Things are moving.  But I watch my back. 

One of the lessons I have learnt in my decades of OD work with high tech companies is that the “next generation” of products and services does not usually emerge from the same people/teams working on the present breadwinner.

A power structure develops around breadwinning products  whose role it is to preserve the centrality of the mind sets and skill sets which gain value from the breadwinners’  predominance. Hence, new ideas which challenge the current paradigm are often resisted.

The same phenomenon effects OD. The current version of OD is “stuck”, yet protected by the dominant practitioners, gurus and universities who benefit from the present versions of OD.

OD will not renew itself by gawking at the past or fiddling around with new packaging of old ideas, nor via peddling “applications” based on the same “core code” of the old OD, a professional dominated from day one by western values and western assumptions about human behaviour.

There are several core issues that can hasten the “realignment of OD with future reality”.

   1-The acutely diverse nature of the global organization which simply cannot adapt itself to western values. (openness, authenticity, personal development, empowerment)

   2-The massive dysfunction stemming from a severe overdose of IT driven business processes. (At present, OD cross dresses as change managers, ramming these processes into place).

   3-The alienation of the soul in the work place. (The engagement products which OD provides to deal with this are a pathetic bad joke)

Next generation OD will not be conceived in universities. My experience is that learning OD in academia is almost useless, at best. Nor will OD be reinvented by most current practitioners, who serve as “application engineers”, administering OD products, often mindlessly. naively, cynically or out of self preservation.

I believe that OD can benefit from emulating other professions which focus on anticipating future needs, not serve as an order taker for elixirs which address current aches and pains. In other words, renewing OD is an exercise in system architecture, not engineering.

These are very initial thoughts, and I will modify this post as my thoughts become clearer.