Although I am Middle East based OD consultant, I do lot of my work in Asia and the US.

The goal of this post is to compare the challenges I face communicating in the different environments.

Asia:-

Although today at the ripe old age of 66, I am very proficient in communicating with various populations in Asia, this proficiency was not easily acquired. Here are some brief highlights of the major communication lessons I have learnt.

• Khun Som from Bangkok taught me just how much content can be communicated by evasiveness.
• Mitsumi from Osaka taught me that in some instances, it takes years to formulate an answer and in the meantime, it is best to be silent.
• Emma from Malaysia and Felipe from the Philippines have taught me that it is far better not to talk about certain things…so that communication can continue. 
• Hsiao from Shanghai explained to me how `lying “can be very truthful. 
• Sivan from Tel Aiv  taught me that when she stops arguing with me, she no longer cares.

My Asian clients always understood how different I am and never tried to convert me. We almost thrive on our difficulty to communicate!

America:-

• It is possible to do business without a deep personal relationship using a contract used to hedge lack of initial trust. This setup enables expediency of communication. And it is critical to be expedient so as not to waste time. Expediency is an acquired skill for the non westerner.
• The emphasis of expediency (which enables speed and a competitive edge) leads to view conflicts as something to be solved.
• An American generally will expect the other side to adapt him/her self because there is one right way of communicating, our way. Once people “develop” and transcend hang ups, we can communicate, our way.

My background and values are somewhat more western than eastern, and I feel the western style of communication comes is more “natural” for me.

However, I feel more comfortable communicating in Asia because I feel that there is an enhanced awareness of the acutely diverse assumptions about communication, and less attempt to impose one style.

Whilst standing at a traffic light in downtown Budapest today (Sept 6th) , I saw a most shocking site. I was on my way for a coffee at the well known Cafe New York. (New York Kávéház)

It all started with the honking of horns at the Blaha Luzja Ter intersection as cars from all directions applied their brakes. Then there was yelling and screaming and yelping and shouting and the sound of people running or is it a stampede? What is making so much noise?

And right into the intersection they ran , limped and hobbled….thousands of women and children and men and infants with absolutely nothing….I looked in their eyes and saw hell. I gasped for breath and my eyes filled with tears.  

Across Blaha junction they streamed as the locals looked on with anger, fear, disgust or compassion and detachment. 

It was too much: the juxtaposed reality of civilized Budapest, thousands of Syrian refugees flowing thru right next to Cafe New York and  all this less than a mile from where the Jews of Hungary were deported to Auschwitz or killed and thrown into the Danube. Was that a few decades ago..or yesterday?

It really does not matter how this problem came to be, it is a massive system problem that needs to be addressed. In terms of OD, the refugees are a powerless constituency used as a football which can be kicked around. And indeed this is what is happening.

Coffee and cake at the New York Cafe in Budapest are highly recommended.

                                                   New York Cafe, Budapest

I received this email (shortened and edited) 3 weeks ago.

“Allon,

I found out about you from your irritating but hilarious Gloria satire.

I manage a team of 12 HR people in (name withheld), an Anglo-Dutch-Spanish company with operations in Europe and Japan.

I really want my team to development partnership with their managers, yet several of my staff remind me too much of your Gloria: control, sloganeering and fear of confronting poor managers.

Can you give a talk to my staff (one hour) on what you as an OD consultant consider to be the guiding principles for partnering with management that HR should embrace.

Kindly suggest a time we can talk.

Name withheld”

I gave the talk last evening and in this post, I would like to share my main points .

• The achievements of “homo sapiens at work” stem from our ability to consciously cooperate, “imagining” a future state to which all work in a degree of unison.
• Powerful factors drive people to poor cooperation, due to flaws in the present economic model, the impact of IT technology on the art of communication and the superficiality caused by the high speed of business.
• The essence of mighty challenge all of us in the “people professions” face is the need to foster far more cooperation and lessen the growing alienation (anomie) in the workplace.
• HR seems to have several tools at its disposal: rewards, recruitment, development processes, guardian of the culture, business partnership.
• Cooperation however is evasive. Too much use of culture-as-a religion promotes rebellion against religious organizational doctrine. Using rewards may work up till a point, only to become a bargaining process of paying for performance. Recruitment is a crap shoot;  all processes have a human “work around”.
• Thus, there is no “protocol” to enhance cooperation, only trial, error, common sense, pragmatism, luck, and massive investment in mitigating trust issues between with people, within projects and between teams.
• One needs to focus solely on the cooperation to the exclusion of almost everything else. If what you do does not build cooperation, you are not being effective.
• You cannot cook an omelet without breaking eggs. Afraid of confrontation? You chose the wrong career.
• Be very careful not to overdose on measurement. Data can be used to provide an indication; I suggest  not obsessing about measurement. When we start measuring, we like to be accurate, which leads the measurer to change what we are measuring. The act of measuring often negatively impacts he/she who measures to ignore the all too important abstract.
• Don’t be afraid to sound irrelevant if you believe you are in the right direction. Don’t cave in and “please”. Persevere.

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.