I love words. Strange words. Rare words. Swear words. Words in three languages I speak and words in languages I do not understand. Even when does not understand a word, you can learn about its’ meaning from the context.

I especially love words in one language that have no equivalent in another language.

In French there is “connective” word “d’ailleurs”. Speak to a Frenchman or even a French woman, or read a newspaper article, or watch France 24, and that word appears again and again. It has about ten meanings, none of which I can understand. When I try to use the word, I use it improperly, much to my chagrin. D’ailleurs, I will give another example! ?

In Hebrew there an often used untranslatable word: davka. The word is used extremely frequently, in various contexts. Very few non-Hebrew speakers can understand it. Nevertheless, I will davka give it a try.

• In a contrarian fashion. As in, he davka called her at 10 PM, although he knows she goes to bed at this time.
• An unexpected contrast. As in, he davka went to the anti-government demonstration, although he voted for Bibi in the last election.
• Indication of a negative surprise. As in, I travelled half way around the city to get to the License Authority and davka they were closed.
• Indication of a positive surprise. As in “I got the Shingrix vaccine and davka felt fine; my brother was weak some time after he was vaccinated.”

I also have a thing for words that organizations use to show and hide real meaning. Most often strange words and terms both hide and show meaning. The words and terms may be code words. Or they may be words “sui generis”, one of a kind  to describe something that goes on in the organization.

Here are a few examples I have encountered over the past decades.

One t(w)o Five O. This indicates the first five members of the organization who are still around. But they are worth zero, yet hold important positions. It is indicative of management by seniority.

You saw it, you own it. This indicates a culture where in lieu of organizational clarity, issues are owned by champions, who push issues to conclusion. It is indicative of the refusal of an organization to scale.

Test for Basic Functionality.  This means, we know we promised something that can do 500 things, but really can’t. Can it do anything at all? If it can, let’s install it. This is indicative of a highly over committed organization.

Product Expert Troubleshooter. This indicates that there are product issues that very few people can solve, except for a few so called experts. The expertise, however,  often exists only because the product is undocumented, or written in spaghetti code, or those who developed it have left, except for the last Mohican, ie, the product expert troubleshooter.

Client Expectation Management This means that we are screwing our clients in the meantime, so someone needs to “cool the mark” down until we give them something beyond basic functionality.

What does all this mean for the OD consultant. If you use pre-packed OD tools, it means nothing. But if you are old-school OD, I suggest the following.

• Listen closely.
• Try not to translate new terms into your own “language”.
• Learn the context.
• Dig deeper.
• And discover the truth behind the words right under the lamplight.
• Create a dictionary, and verify it with the troops. 

D’ailleurs, if you have any questions on the methodology of creating the dictionary, click the link.

Jacques Lacan approached the unconscious via language. And you do not need to be influenced by Lacan to understand that there is a fascinating connection between our language, our actions and our thoughts.

Put aside the stories and narratives you are told when trying to understand an organization for a moment and listen to the words. You may hear words and phrases exposing the raw nerves of the company’s beliefs and DNA, as it were.

In my work, I often put together a short dictionary of a key phrases that are a part of the company’s vernacular-then work with the company to translate these words into what these words expose, and hide.

Here is an example of how this work is done. Company Y has six terms that repeat themselves in almost all meetings and chats: Challenging; Complex; Urgent; Damage Control; Sandbag; Phased Delivery.

Let’s look at the meaning. Challenging means that something is beyond our capability and/or resources. Complex means that we do not (yet) have a solution. Urgent means what we need to do today, at the expense of everything else. Damage control means catching up with our committments all at once and/or cooling off the customer with sweet talk, discounts or future functionality. Sandbag means to exaggerate the amount of time needed to do something to prevent management tasking you with more work. Phased Delivery means promising one thing, and delivering far less, and catching up in stages. Often the first phase of phased delivery is giving nothing but more promises.

Now imagine a series of discussions in a company where this dictionary is discussed, and certain terms are phased out and replaced by others.

Like the signs I remember on the Montreal Metro: Dit pas “le weekend; dit la fin de semaine. (This encouraged the proper use of the French language)

And thus, over time, language and actions become more accurate and less obtuse, internally and with the client.

Yes with the client as well. Whether this is good or bad is the subject of another post.

Kim Philby, the master-spy for the USSR who was a very senior officer in MI6 in charge of Russian counterintelligence  🙂  said that if you have a very important item that needs to be investigated, it is best given to a junior officer.  Senior officers are not always ready to work hard, they have system perspectives more than event perspectives and they don’t want to shake up the boat.

Philby’s logic is very relevant for organizational problems as well. Via 3 short stories, I shall illustrate this.

Howard is an electrical engineer who wants to leave his job because he’s been offered 600 USD more at a competing firm. Pierre, Howard’s boss, know that it could take up to a year to replace Howard. And if he cannot be replaced, his function will need to be outsourced at a huge cost to an overseas firm. Norma, VP HR, is please that Howard may be leaving because if the organization kowtows to Howard’s demands, the whole salary structure will be shattered.

Sam is a senior software engineer who has been asked to estimate the time need to develop a certain feature. Sam’s time estimate is 4 months for 4 engineers. Sam’s estimates have never been off target by more than 2 weeks. The CEO did not like Sam’s estimate, so he gave it to Ze’ev, Sam’s boss and VP R&D for a second opinion. Ze’ev said the work “can probably get done in 6 weeks, with just a few odds and ends to be cleaned up at the customer site”. When the rubber hit the road, the project took 5 months.

Hadassah, a customer service engineer, is frustrated because spare mechanical parts (needed to fix a broken piece of equipment) are not available due to supply chain issues. Martin, VP Supply Chain has presented an optimistic report that supply chain delays are down 12% in Q2. Hadassah reports that the client will uninstall equipment, and indeed this is what happened.

Yes, the view from below can be a parochial one, with limited scope. But analysis and decisions made at the top can be flawed, distorted and painfully wrong.

The key to getting this right is to solicit input  both from below and above, make decisions NOT necessarily based on hierarchy, but rather on risk mitigation. 

PS and PPS

Thanks to Eike Spengler for the input to the initial draft.

Kim Philby was probably the best spy in modern history. His motive was purely ideological and driven by his abhorence of fascism. I recommend this book for those interested.

Who would have thought that in order to buy a train ticket or movie ticket, board a plane, or set up an appointment with a doctor, or know when your car is ready at the garage after a tune up-you need a telephone.

And the telephone is expensive and needs replacing. Often.

And if you don’t buy a phone, your goose is cooked. You can do nothing. Nada. Rien de tout.

Organizations are same same, just different. Hidden from the new employee hide a series of hurdles, and if you don’t have the right “access platform”, you may be out of luck.

When one joins an organization, you need to acquire a new language. For example, an impossible deadline becomes a challenge; employee dissatisfaction becomes churn rate, piss-poor managers are go-getters, politics is self-advocacy.

It gets worse.

You may be asked to feign agreement, kiss your bosses’ arse, attend meetings and read memos concerned with gender politics. You may even be asked to celebrate events that run against your beliefs.

Eventually like in the  the Beatles Elinor Rigby,  you learn to wear “a face that you keep in a jar at the door”. At times you may feel like a character in Black Mirror.

So no, you do not need to buy a phone. You just need to fake it.

And espouse authenticity.

I speak 3 languages very well: Hebrew French and English. I can understand articles Spanish (but cannot speak)  and when I hear a conversation in Arabic, I understand the gist most of the time.

However, if I hear Russian, I cannot understand a word. Since the immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel, I hear a lot of Russian. All the time. For decades. But I do not understand one word. And, for whatever reason, I cannot pick it up.

Which started me thinking-what does management hear, and not pick up? Using two French words to explain myself…what does management hear (ecouter), but does not hear and “get it” (entendre).

Here is my try at answering that question:

1) The timetables are very aggressive.  The present schedules are wishful non-thinking.

2) If we release this latest “version” too early, our reputation may take a hit.

3) We cannot recruit because our salary entry level is too low.

4) A few key players are on the net looking for jobs. This is serious. People are our greatest asset.

5) Folks in the latest company we acquired a year ago are checking out mentally.

6) If we do not “sell” this decision to the people on the line, it ain’t gonna happen.

7) Diversity is good for the bottom line.

8) The cooperation between units A and B is not because of role definition: it’s a trust issue.

9) It is very hard to restore trust. If we tell don’t tell the truth to our staff, they won’t trust us for a very long time.

10) After we downsize, the best people in the company will start to look for a job. They fear that they are next.

*Psalms 115 6-7

They have ears, but cannot hear, and noses, but cannot smell.  They have hands, but cannot feel, and feet, but cannot walk; they cannot make a sound.

So much has been written on what effective leaders do and do not do.

Much of what has been written is pie-in-the-sky. Recently I even read something about the selflessness of leaders, which I thought was science fiction or humour.

Leadership is not only impacted by the personality of the leader. 

Leadership is also very much impacted by unrealistic and dangerous expectations of followers. These expectations forge leaders’ behaviour, in the same way that a tweet (as opposed to a fact) impacts the response of many current politicians.

In this brief post, I want to point out the most salient dangerous expectations that followers have from leaders and how the leaders REACT to these expectations and themselves follow the mob.

• Resolve complex issues of what constitutes moral behaviour
• Mitigate ambiguity when it is impossible to do so
• Provide “meaning” for random events
• Recreate a sense of preserving greatness or uniqueness that perhaps never was
• Perfuming pigs
• Focusing hatred externally

And I can go on and on.

We tend to focus on what leaders do to garner influence. But leaders are often led, and kowtow to the desires of the followers for their own ego needs. This type of leadership is very very common. 

I think it is time to talk a bit about the ways followers create dysfunctional leadership with misplaced expectations. And to put all this in a proper cultural perspective.

Oh yes, the cultural context of leadership. How heretic this is for traditional OD which assumes that everyone wants or needs democracy. Egypt, Yemen, Eye-raq, Afghanistan, Russia, China.

But that is another story, widely addressed in other blog posts and articles of mine.

Does anyone remember the TQM (total quality management) craze, which was a cure-all for everything from faulty service, poor recruitment, shitty products and poor planning? *

What ever happened to JIT-just in time-the  Olympic gold-medal planning process, rendered totally irrelevant by changing circumstance?**

And MBO, management by objectives-a scheme which died of a heart attack cum stroke when things started changing so quickly that goals are now defined almost ex post facto.***

If you storm forward, you either become a war hero or come home in a box. If you wait a while, you lose the financial benefits that many early adapters get, but when the going goes sour, you don’t sink with the ship. And the going ALWAYS goes sour. ALWAYS. No wars end all war; all total solutions fails and breed a new set of problems.

AI does not replace human intelligence. It’s a change and  a meaningful one. But it is just another change. But it is not a game changer for the complexity of human organizing.

I prefer to wait and see what damage AI does, and help clean up the mess. I do not want to be vaseline used admister AI. For me, that is not OD.

*The software industry taught us that releasing products that don’t work well is a very good business.

**Oh yes, disruptions to global supply chain can occur. It takes years and years to fix. Wars also break out, which ruin all assumptions.

***I do not know of one industry that can define goals a year in advance and stick to them.

Recently my car was stolen, as were another 43 Hyundai vehicles the same night in the “Sharon Area” just north east of Tel Aviv.

The cars were stolen at 22.00 (10 PM)  and appeared on a security camera at 22.14 in the Palestinian town of Qalqilya, where the cars disappeared and were dismantled, with the spare parts sold back to Israeli garages the very next day in a rare form of Palestinian/Israeli cooperation.

Getting reimbursed and re-equipped with a new car turned out to be a major challenge. The bureaucracies of the (almost brain dead) Israeli police, the insurance company, the Ministry of Transportation and the various authorities was a nightmare.

One of the more interesting things I noticed was that how few people really cared about the issue at hand. Rather, they cared about filling out the various screens and not getting in trouble. Nearly no one gave a flying fuck about me.

For example: to get reimbursed, I need to provide a copy of my stolen car license. But the license was in the car’s glove compartment. And the Ministry of Transportation would not issue me a copy because “the car appears to have been stolen. Please contact out help desk”, where no help was available “for this specific issue”.

Another example: I needed to provide a copy of a receipt for the last time my car was in a tune up, detailing what work had been done in order to access the state of the automobile. When I called the garage I was told that “due to the long line of people waiting now, please drop by the ( לקפוץ) garage in person and we will try to assist you”. The aforementioned garage has a severe parking problem; extracting the receipt and job order took me 4 hours.

Each step of the way, it was clear to me that no one cared. No one wanted to advocate for me. Why? Because a system has been put in place to prevent proper customer care. The customer is no longer a customer, but a pain in the ass. The maintenance of the system, however stupid, is the customer.  A new form of Leninism. The centrality of the Party, or in this case, the system.

It seems to me that people who care for the customer are people must be willing to take on their own organization, fight their own employer tooth and nail, in order to give service. They need to care about the customer, not the system, to get things done.

Like the lady from the parking meter company. I called her to cancel my parking meter subscription for my old car and transfer it to my new car. Her system was down, but she promised to call me back-and she did. “In the meantime, if someone uses your parking meter, I’ll strIke off the bill. Don’t worry. Here is my email if something slips through the net. I’m not supposed to do it, but I see you waited 25 minutes waiting for me and I’m sorry for that”.

Or the insurance agent who told me that “I’ll make sure that you are reimbursed without that God dammed car license. The insurance company is trying to get you to do their work”.

What actually is caring? In this case it is

• Over-extending your role as needed to get the job done
• Putting the client’s legitimate needs first
• Following up on your own initiative
• Using common sense when the system does not work
• Challenging the system when needed

And I wonder just how many companies recruit for a caring attitude? I am sure that very few. Customer care is really not in anyone’s interest. You only get cared for by caring people.

Your flight is 4 hours late? You have a problem. Call our agent, in Budapest at 3 euros per minute.

You haven’t saved your receipts from 1999? You have another problem? No refund.

You changed credit cards and cannot remember the last 4 numbers of your previous card? You have a yet another problem. You cannot stop paying for something you did not buy.

Your car was stolen? Welcome to a digital hell.

And so on and so forth.

Oh yes: you need to talk to a customer service agent: wait until you have listened to entire irrelevant voice menu, then press 9 and you will be told to “please call later, as all our attendants are presently busy”.

You do not need to be a rocket scientist to get the drift of why this had happened. All you need to do is read this post, albeit I myself am not a rocket scientist: just an old OD consultant with a brain that still works.

Here we go:

• The voice menu-which not only directs you where you need to go, but also makes sure that it is very hard to reach an attendant.
• Digitalization erects a firewall of business processes which always seems not to work, or, not address that specific problem that you encounter.
• Working from home which eventually lessens the bond between the service provider and the sense of belonging to the company that provides the service.
• The culture of “shadow work”, whereby the service provider gets you to work for them. “Do you see that red cable under your router? It’s green? Ok. Take it out and put it in the yellow hole. You don’t have a yellow hole? Take a picture and send me a picture of what your router looks like”.
• The low cost of goods. You bought a ticket from Rome to Copenhagen for 40 Euro return. You get what you pay for.
• The low level of solidarity between brands and their customer base as well as employees and their company.
• Good service and customer loyalty are not worth it in the short run. And in the long run? Who cares, really? Yes, we say we care but actually we don’t. Most businesses don’t give a shit anymore.

What can OD do? Nothing for the most. It’s a societal trend much more powerful than we are. The only thing we can do is help develop niche businesses who are interested in truly serving their clients. In action, this is a very small market.