Author Archives: shevat allon

The dangers of “organizational utopianism”

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A major component of organizing is balancing mutual dependencies between people and functions.

The fulfillment of mutual dependencies is the very essence of successful organizing, yet the dependencies which enable organizing always create anxieties. I am fully aware that people skim articles, but the stuff in italics is really important! 😉

There is no way whatsoever to eliminate the inherent anxieties of organizing; they can only be mitigated. Any attempt to “cure these anxieties” is organizational Utopianism.

Political utopianism, be it communism or nationalism, has bred disaster. Bread lines, racial hatred and massive use of force are the direct results of ideologies which purport to have all the answers. (I will avoid discussing the “salvation” promised by religious Utopians.)

In the realm of OD and change management, there is plenty of Utopianism, which expresses itself in stylish one size fits all models, universal truths and so called shared values. Utopian solutions come along with high priests who implement these total solutions.

Organizational utopianism is no less dangerous than political utopianism. Utopian organizational solutions breed cynicism, disengagement, sloganeering (which castrates communication) and exploitation. Total solutions for organizing end in disaster.

Organizing is very complex at the emotional level. There are no quick fixes, none whatsoever. An awareness of the inherent anxiety bred by organizing itself is probably the most important tool in the arsenal of organizational practitioner.

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Working with highly manipulative managers

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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. 

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Have you sold your soul as an OD consultant?

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Preface:

Before you start reading: Although this is a short post, several links are provided. These links provide illustrative and satirical support for the point I am making.The links are well worth reading.

The crisis OD is facing has caused many practitioners to sell their soul. Now “selling one’s soul” is a tough thing to admit, and we all probably look at other consultants and claim that they, not I, have sold out.

So I prepared a short quiz that will indicate the degree of having sold out.

There 6 signs may indicate the severity of the sell out. I am not going to define what this means, because, like pornography, we all know it when we see it.

The Quiz:

If you agree with 3 of these statements, we know what profession you are in, so please quote the price.

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Chronic Diseases of Organizations

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 Opening Comments

Very much similar to people, organizations tend to have chronic diseases.

These diseases are a function of

  • life cycle of the organization,
  • CEO’s who have lead and founded the organization,
  • domain in which the organization operates,
  • degree of regulation,
  • random factors that we do not understand.

The goal of this post is to illustrate some of the more frequent chronic diseases and suggest ways that OD can be harnessed to address (not cure) these ills.

Many of the chronic conditions listed below may appear in all organizations, yet only a  constant recurrence of the same ailment make it chronic.

2-Chronic Diseases, Symptoms and Possible Causes

  • Constant Reorganization

Symptoms-the organization is always preparing for a reorganization, implementing a reorganization, or after an unsuccessful reorg

Possible Causes– Incompetence, buying time, creating a cloud of uncertainly to enable blaming.

Example-K has a product that is no longer competitive, although they still have one legacy product which will make them money for decades. New technology initiatives are killed on arrival. The organizations has had 7 reorganizations in three years.

  • Processes Nazism

Symptoms– constant clarification of process, roles,  responsibilities, charter and the constant pursuit of clarity as the ultimate elixir.

Possible Causes-a desire to define away complexity; inability to implement teamwork

Example-P has technical presales in Holland, Sales in each geography and Product Management in Texas. All 3 functions mistrust one another. They have been defining roles and responsibilities for 12 years.

  • Measurement-ism

Symptoms-measure everything, if possible on line

Possible Causes-mistrust, IT-gone-mad, efficiency as strategy

Example-C has been loosing 200,000 end users yearly for five years due to a change in regulation. Performance indicators of the service team have been updated 33 times in the 4 years “to find out why people are opting out” of the service.

  • Sloganeering

Symptoms-constant window dressing and perfuming the pig to make things look better than they are, hiding and denial

Possible Causes: monopoly, government intervention, too much regulation, high level of media scrutiny

Example-a police force, loyal only to an elected official has been getting bad press for 8 years, due to racism, brutality and corruption, all which serve the mayor’s interest. Massive money is poured into internal communication and “image management”,

  • Silo-ism (the ultimate chronic disease, like back pain)

Symptoms-lack of transparency, maximization of sub systems

Possible Causes: latent or overt fear of coup, need to allocate blame, paranoia at the top, divide and conquer as a religion. measurement system, poor staffing

Example-A functional organization lacks end to end ownership of client issues. A very dominant CEO (and his father) have maintained control by “divide and conquer”. The CEO complains of siloism, although he constantly ensures that his managers squabble about ownership issues. He fires one executive every 5-6 years.

3-Guidelines for the OD practitioner

In order to address an organizations chronic illness, there are certain precautions that OD practitioners much factor into their interventions. After all, there is no need to “amputate a lung” due to chronic asthma.

Here are few guidelines that may help you treat chronic illnesses properly:

  • Understand the history of the organization
  • Understand the latent function and ongoing secondary benefit of all dysfunction, and that will be decisive in understanding if the illness is chronic or not. For example, the benefit of process Nazism is to avoid dealing with trust issues.
  • Set proper expectations, ie- mitigating the dysfunction, instead of curing it
  • Less intense care spread over time, instead of an extensive effort to drive change
  • Pain management, ie, adjustment to the pain
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Let’s look at OD like developers, not application engineers

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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.

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What does Organizational Sloganeering indicate?

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Sloganeering is the repeated use of empty words geared at influencing behaviours and/or attitudes.

Politicians use slogans all the time. Those of you who live in democracies know that slogans are often empty promises. Those of us who live in other types of regimes know how to decipher slogans and guess what the regime really means.

Organizations use slogans almost as much as politicians.

Most of us are less skilled at understanding slogans in an organization that we are in understanding political slogans.

 I want to provide possible directions of what sloganeering can indicate.

1-There is a gap between actual and desired behaviours that management does not how to bridge, so they are using slogans. Let’s call this sloganeering due to ignorance.

2-There is only a message that management wants to purvey; there  is no willingness  to commit resources to make it happen, so slogans are being used to obfuscate.Let’s call this sloganeering as malicious lipservice.

3-Instead of solving problems pragmatically, there is a corporate religion which is being promulgated, in the hope that more religion will cure the organization. Let’s call this organizational religious  fanaticism.

4-Slogans are used as imperialistic tools to conquer someone else’s territory. The massive  use of “big data” and “internet of things” are illustrations of this. Let’s call this sloganeering as weaponry.

Case Studies

  • The slogan: Worship your customer.

This company was not willing to invest in the necessary IT to serve its customers, so they invested in sloganeering internally and externally.

  • Let teamwork make it happen

This company hired managers who built empires and after several failed attempts to create more synergy, slogans are being administered, which makes “more sense” that replacing managers.

  • Quality is everybody’s job

This company makes very aggressive commitments to the market which are unachievable. So initial product releases are crap. Yet the CEO truly believes that everyone should own quality. BTW, the measurement system supports speedy releases.

In all the supervision work I do with consultants, I place a major focus on how to diagnose and use the company’s slogans to understand and deal with organizational pathologies.

One final word of caution. Has a company hired you to train its employees about how to implement its slogans? Don’t do it since the chances of being relevant are very very very (3 verys) low. But you sure can get burned!

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The Management of Blame by Senior Managers

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In the natural course of doing business, things go wrong.

For some of the things that go wrong, people assume responsibility; for other things that go wrong, blame is assigned. The management of blame is part and parcel of organizational life. Blame is part of the game at all levels of the organization.

At the very top of every organizational/business pyramid, there are people with huge egos, and the management of blame is a tool that protects the valuation of the ego and the reputation of the very senior players.

As a matter of fact, managing blame is a critical skill often ignored by the starry eyed consultants who tweet and write about leadership. Many claim that blaming is characteristic of poisonous leadership, or a dysfunctional culture. I disagree.

My experience of 35 years in 4 continents suggest to me that almost all senior leaders have (and use) a vast array of political skills, one of which is the allocation of blame to others when things go wrong. Without blaming skills, you do not reach the top. 

Organization development consultants need to pay more attention to the allocation of blame as a generic built in characteristic of leadership at the top, because senior management teams “manage” the allocation of blame all the time, looking for a place to “park the blame”, and have someone else pay the fine.

I want to point out 12 frequent types of blaming used by people in senior positions.

  1. Pushing  unrealistic commitments
  2. Demonizing a certain figure
  3. Blaming one’s predecessor
  4. Picking on one member of the team without dismissing him/her
  5. Blaming the entire senior team
  6. Blaming the regulators (over-under regulation)
  7. Constant shifting of blame, like a swan casting water off it back
  8. Lack of employee “engagement”
  9. Making ambiguous demands and then, ex post facto, expressing dissatisfaction about the results
  10. Maliciously and intentional under-resourcing
  11. Over simplification  of complex tasks
  12. Appointment of incompetent people to do complex job

I have never encountered any senior manager or senior team where some blaming dynamic is not in place. Furthermore, the blaming dynamic often reflects the pathology of the organization.

The starry eyed idealistic consultant, armed with leadership models fresh from academia, avoids discussing the blame factor, and focuses solely enhancing accountability, ownership and mutual dependencies. By ignoring the realpolitik of senior leadership , the consultant will become irrelevant.

A professional practitioner understands what part of the blaming dynamic is changeable and works to mitigate the dynamic, whilst accepting that the treatment of the blame pathology can only go so far.

One final comment. In Asia, senior management tends to vocally blame subordinates far less than in Europe and North America, due to the obligation of the leader to appear to be compassionate. Blaming does occur, but it is much more subtle.

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An OD consultant should not approach chaos like a Change Manager

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When Jean invited me to work with this management team, he had prepared a few slides to brief me on what he sees as the major issues. I have worked with Jean twice in the past, so Jean was fair enough to tell me “this is how I see things, Allon; I am not telling you how to do your work”.

Jean’s slides boiled down to three issues:

  1. Role ambiguity between Engineering and Customer Service results in lack of accountability during customer deployment
  2. Lack of priorities per department and lack of shared priorities result in constant chaos
  3. Planning not accurate results in “resource allocation as a constant ongoing negotiation” between line and staff

Jean had tried to solve these issues with his (cost effective) internal change management team, consisting of industrial managers and change managers. “Every time I think of you Allon, I think of my root canal surgeon, so you can imagine I have tried everything before having you come all this way to make my life miserable.”

I spoke with Jean’s team members, 8 in number, consisting of 2 Germans, one Israeli, and five North Americans, including one French Canadian besides Jean himself. My view of things was that Jean is running a highly innovative company in a fast moving market, and all of the 3 issues Jean had pointed out are “par for the course.”  To be more specific,

1-The product is so innovative and deployment is so early that it is indeed impossible to define what is owned by Engineering and Customer Service

2-Everything is indeed urgent; there are no firm priorities because the market is moving so quickly

3-No plan, however extensive, can be useful in a market where expected quarterly revenue runs between 4 and 90 million dollars.

The problems that I noticed are:

  1. The two Germans (Finance and Planning) and Israeli (Engineering and Deployment) had totally different coping mechanisms with the chaos, the German preferring drowning in details in attempt to conquer the chaos and the Israeli preferring making an ideology out of chaos.
  2. Each senior manager managed to juggle well within their own group, but as a senior juggling team, they were useless because they were blaming one another instead of assuming joint ownership of the juggling task.
  3. Planning and control, Finance and HR were trying to fit old economy and rigid models/mechanisms onto the organization which did not match reality.

Jean promised to fix the third issue. He also told me to coach the German and Israeli, separately and as a team. I worked with them on global competencies.

Jean asked me, how we fix 2? Joking, I told him that his purchasing department had asked me for a detailed roadmap for fixing 2 as well. And thus the work began. We focused on mutual accommodation, organizational juggling skills, teamwork and delphi prediction techniques.

All in all, I made three trips from Tel Aviv to Geneva and Zurich, and the entire project took ten days. Not one single day was devoted to either role clarity or reaching agreement on one firm list of shared priorities.

In our final meeting, all members of the team said that the learning experience and change had been phenomenal, and they invited me out to my favourite steak house, and we ate and drank, and drank.

The greatest compliment came from the German who told me, “you did not change anything, but every”z”ing changed.

Follow me @AllonShevat and follow Gloria at @GRamsbottom

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Emotional detachment and the calling of OD

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One definition of a calling is simply a vocation, trade and or profession. Another dimension of a calling is a strong impulse, inner yearning and/or beckoning to practise a certain profession.

Certainly there is a lot to be said for viewing ones’ profession as a calling: enjoyment, fulfillment and self-expression, and not simply a “bag”. (old slang for a way to earn a few bucks).

Organization Development is a compatible calling for many sorts of people driven by values and the desire to make a difference: practised well, OD is meaningful, powerful, interdisciplinary and very hard to get right. Although it is sisyphic, it has a huge impact on the quality of relationships and outputs in the workplace.

Beyond the positives that can attract folks to practice OD as a calling, I want to point out one of the less discussed, obscure and counter-intuitive motivations to the OD trade: it is a profession which can provide a people-interaction platform for those of us with emotional detachment. 

  • It is the very “numbing” so characteristic of emotional detachment that allows the practitioner to distance himself/herself from a situation and thus provide value-added meaning and perspective. This numbing provides value in diagnosis, intervention and monitors energy levels. 
  • The emotional detachment allows the practioner to develop a practice with a wide range of clients, all of which are contract-based and limited in time. The contract and the time limitation allow the emotionally detached consultant to give more, with less personal anxiety.

There are many reasons that I love doing OD work. First and foremost, it is because it is interdisciplinary and very hard work to do well. However, I easily admit that OD has provided a loner with a playing field to interact with people. Had I not chosen OD as a calling, I may well have had gone into a field more akin to the nerds of today. In many ways, I have made my handicap into an advantage.

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OD needs to stop cross-dressing as Change Management in order to support the chaos of organizational life

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Organizational life is characterized by a high degree of chaos, a chaos which creates a complex painful reality at the system, personal and interpersonal level.

Organizations pretend to deny/avoid the chaos via ERPs, structural changes and well defined processes, but the chaos bites them in the ass all the more, manifesting itself in a plethora of post-modern pathologies, such as collapse of trust, massive disengagement, toxic leadership and subjugation of common sense to grotesque IT dictated business processes.

Despite the need that exists to better cope with the brutality inflicted by chaos, OD is no longer a major player in this domain. OD sold its soul as it went through a vast array of changes and  these changes have negatively impacted  OD’s ability to survive. A few of the changes-

  • Commercialization
  • Productization
  • Dumbing
  • Crawling into bed with change management

OD rendered itself irrelevant in the very area in which it has most value. OD became a side show.

Why did these changes not position OD to move into the chaos pain mitigation domain more effectively?  Well, chaos is chaos. Coping with the complexities of chaos cannot be done by dumbed practitioners, using scalable models which promise the predefined deliverables a la change management.

The alternative to the commercialized OD product crap is not easy. Selling and practising the less structured, semi chaotic art of OD is real tough. OD that deals with coping with chaos is hard to define to the client. There is lots of artistic and eclectic improvisation on the way, and the output of such an OD effort is unmeasurable; the changes OD makes eventually creep into the system and people, alleviating a lot of the side effects of excess chaos. However, there is no “deliverable” as an output, enter-able into an ERP purchase request.

By conforming to the clients’ pathology instead of confronting it, we sold our soul.OD knows how to deliver a change in the critical underlying dynamics which sabotage flexibility. There is no need to pretend to be something else.

So where do we go from here? I believe that before OD supports clients’ chaos, we need to loosen up and deal with our own anxiety driven over-structuring. 

In the meantime, OD practitioners who want to help their clients cope with chaos would be wise to avoid all OD models, avoid the flight to spiritualism and desist from cross dressing as change managers.

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