The corona virus has changed life and the changes have been painful.

Even with some of the easing of restrictions, the emerging reality is dismal: the loss of civil liberty, the face masks, ruined economies, financial stress, inability to distinguish between real and fake, no face to face time with old cronies, no swimming, no beach and lots of new technology to learn to get things done.

I have a wide set of friends and acquaintances all over the globe, thanks to my many years working globally, and I have had lots of conversations about what’s going on.

For my Israeli friends, this is just another hardship, like being bombed from Gaza, paying lots of tax and getting fucked by the government, sitting for hours in horrendous traffic jams or the stress of constant political conflict. Just another bundle on our back.

My Asian friends have a stoic resilience, which accepts albeit with resignation, that it is what it is.

The American response seems to feign positivism or even at times reek of positivism. What can we “learn from this”. “Let’s make lemons from lemonade”. Or “at least we are all in this together, forging a sense of community”. I have even heard that this is a “great window of opportunity to change our lives”.

I try not to be judgmental, although ultimately I fail. Like all Israelis, I accept the present limitations as just another hardship, but a tough one. I am 70 years old, fit, and want to enjoy the rest of my life. With the present limitations, the outlook for that is not brilliant.

I am not a stoic. I wish I were. But I am not. When stoicism was handed out, I was the last in line.

Most certainly, I do not share the worldview of my American friends and colleagues. I cannot fight against  mourning for what and whom I miss. Premature reconciliation with the loss will only serve to bite me in the bum later on. I don’t want to think about the lemonade now. I want to feel the loss. Otherwise, I will build stairs of sand and pretend to “have a nice day”.

Mourning is a basic right no one will take from me.

Soren called me today, after asking me via Whatsapp if I am free for a short call. Soren and I have worked together in the past when he was EMEA manager for a German company.

In his present capacity as Business Development Manager, Soren has acquired a software security firm with offices in Tel Aviv and Mumbai. Soren is now driving the post-merger integration team, which is encountering resistance to the implementation of changes to supply chain directives. According to the directive, local purchasing cannot sign off on any purchase more than $100, with a monthly limit of $1000. Everything else must get a sign off from corporate finance, in Britain.

Sanjeev from the India purchasing team has agreed to implement the change, and yet, exception after exception keep piling up. Soren told me “this guy invents more excuses than anyone I’ve ever managed in my 25 year career”.  Soren added, “Sanjeev often does not answer his phone when I need clarification”. Adina from the Israeli purchasing team has called the changes “pathological mistrust” and “micromanagement at its worst”. Adina has, strangely enough, complied, yet bad mouths the change and gives head office bad PR in the Israeli office. Adina sent an email to the Israeli staff saying that “I have been turned into a rubber stamp”.

I told Soren to speak with Sanjeev’s boss, who is probably lurking behind the resistance whilst Sanjeeb is the fall guy. Soren said, ‘it can’t be; he’s boss is so amenable”. So I asked Soren why he called me.

I told Soren that Adina’s resistance is only verbal and that over time, she will quiet down. The best way to gain her trust is to let execute the only right that Israelis demand-the right to complain.

It appears that this pandemic is not “one shot and you are dead”. Rather, it’s here for a long time, and even if a silver bullet is found and deployed in the near future (which won’t happen), the shock waves will last for a protracted period.

I have explained in this blog that organizational culture is formulated far more by external forces than by any other factor. True, leadership, idiosyncrasies and  luck all make a difference, yet external factors remain the dominant architects of organizational culture.

In this post, I want to point out a few external factors which will hugely impact organizational culture the longer that this plague lasts.

• Jobs will become very scarce. Very scare. Like 4 leaf clovers. And that means that it becomes an employers’ world: sans work-life balance; sans perks; sans engagement; sans paid vacation; sans lunch coupons.
• Choppy choppy is back in season; 3 jobs will become one. Three departments will become two. Six  engineers will become four. And until that happens, organizations will be war zones between people vying to be retained.
• The roles and functions focused on gender equality and diversity will be totally marginalized and wither away. It’s a world of many people drowning and very few life jackets. If the virus continues to spread, organizations may develop filters for certain types of staff during recruitment, so as to minimize risk and possible quarantine.
• This is the time for CFO’s, financiers, and risk-aversive folks to shine. Dreams, vision and big ideas will be relegated to the back burner.
• With massive, rampant, extreme, widespread poverty at the gateway, companies will need to invest in security in a similar way that airlines did after 9/11. That means bogging things down with tremendous regulation and expense, which need to come from another pocket.

For several years, I constructed case studies for analysis in the military when I was an Internal OD consultant in the Israeli army. The case of Captain Crozier caught my eye, and I have tried to read everything I can about the goings-on, which have led both to the axing of Captain Crozier and the resignation of the acting secretary of the Navy.

The case of Brett Crozier, captain of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt was axed for bypassing the chain of command by unduly escalating the outbreak of corona on his vessel. The escalation (via email) reached the press and the shit hit the fan.

Did Crozier do the right thing? Should he be reinstated? Is he a bum? Is he a victim? Is it legitimate that the chain of command be bypassed by using the press, albeit inadvertently?

Here is my cut.

Leadership in the army focuses on getting the job done by following a set of predefined protocols and processes which have been worked out over centuries of warfare.

Military leadership is probably more people focused than any civilian outfit that I know, albeit that armies send soldiers to their death. There is no reason to believe that anyone above Crozier wanted to see the ship become a vessel of death. So it’s not a story of a whistleblower in a cruel and malicious organization who exposes the firms’ evil.

The issue is somewhere else. There is a built in paradox between getting the job done and following a set of predefined protocols and processes. This paradox needs to be constantly managed and re calibrated, because reality (getting the job done) and predefined protocols often clash, because war is full of “unexpecteds”, and many of the plans, processes and protocols have holes in them as the enemy surprises us.

But is Corona a war? It is a very different kind of war. Not the type we were brought up to fight, but a war nonetheless. And a very dangerous one if we don’t have the insight to act as if it is a war. After all, war is not mainly what we plan, but violence that happens.

Military machines and armies have horrendous bureaucracies, because most of the time, they maintain the peace, and just train for war, not wage war. Responsiveness of these bureaucracies is faulty, because the higher up you go, the more people are invested in the status quo. A huge amount of investment at the senior level is made at looking good, not being good.

This having been said, there is no place whatsoever for populism in the making of military decisions. Military decisions cannot be made by voting by smartphone. There is no doubt about that.

So, it’s a matter of balancing the paradox between getting the job done and adhering to the chain of command. There is no text book answer. It is risk management and balancing trade-offs between conflicting priorities. That’s why commanders exist.

So hail to Captain Crozier, an American hero. I salute you.

Afterthought

In the Israeli military, there is an expression “tsalash-tarash -“צל”ש-טר”ש“, which can roughly be translated as “Either a medal of honour or demotion to First Private”.

The expression is used to describe an action involving great risk  which is taken that is judged  only by the result. When the result is success, results trump adherence. This promotes risk taking, a must for the success of military leadership.

Certainly at this point, no one knows jack shit about what is in store for organization development if and when the current plague subsides. That reminds me of what  a client  of mine (who dabbled in politics at a senior level) told me..” The public generally does not know two basic things-what will happen, and what actually happened.”.

Nevertheless, in this brief article, I want to suggest a framework for approaching our professions’ continued survival, as well as put out my neck and predict some shattering developments.

Framework

No one has a clue what will happen to organizations/the act of organizing if and when society crawls out of this black hole called corona. It makes no sense to guess if people will work from home or return to the work-place. It makes no sense to predict trends and support possible ways of recovery-unless you get your kicks that way.  What does make sense is to own the fact that no one knows anything. Because that is one of the strengths of OD-coping with ambiguity.

As the new organizational reality and changes are conceived, we will not be in the bedroom. At best,  we will be the midwife. The changes will be foisted upon us by economic reality, political change and changes in belief systems. Organization development will be able to ease this process along, by avoiding any arrogance of trying to re-mold a new order.

My friend Robin Cook wrote me that “no OD practitioner worthy of the title would dare to try to impose his or her solutions”. This is true to some extent, but the values that OD espouses do impose value loaded solutions in a passive aggressive way. Many of our core values will have to change as the world resets. OD is particularly conservative when it comes to examining our own values. Without such a value reset on our part, OD is doomed to irrelevance.

Allon foolishly sticks out his neck

And now I am going to stick out my neck and share with my readers a few of my assumptions, which may all prove to be wrong, no doubt.

1. Organizations will become like jungles than they already were with supply of jobs much smaller than demand. Salaries will tumble. Management will be more authoritarian and demanding.
2. CFO’s will call the shots for a very long time.
3. Many perks and wellness programs will be abandoned; perhaps the slogans will survive.
4. Political correctness will die. Perhaps it will be massacred. No one will forget where and how the virus started, which communities are ill and which are not. Who prepared and who denied? And the results will be ugly.
5. Social order will erode big time. The age of repression is at the gates, and this is an ill omen for our profession and its assumptions. If we don’t play our cards right, we are soon to become extinct.
6. The lower end of OD (training, empowering middle management, chicken shit products which enable change in one day) will be wiped off the map because  many organizations will have no money to waste. Internal OD will be eliminated  The only OD practitioners to be left standing will be the best consultants and the false prophets and magicians, the latter always flourishing in very bad times.

“Of course there is,” Brishen said flatly. It had started badly; it turned worse and hinted at becoming ruinous.”
― Grace Draven, Eidolon

Feeling helpless is nothing new for me.

My late wife was diagnosed with melanoma in 1986; she died in 1993. That’s good basic training in helplessness, if you ask me.

I live in the Middle East, where insoluble conflict is the leitmotif of everyday life. I have sat around for weeks with a gas mask next at my side as Saddam bombed Israel. And when Hamas bombed Israel. And when Hezbollah bombed Israel.  I have heard the explosion of 3 terror attacks: the “fridge incident” in Jerusalem, as well as a bus station and shopping centre in the suburb where I live.

And now, Corona!

Everything has changed;  there is absolutely nothing that I can do. Total helplessness. No swimming. No history studies, no Friday concerts, no Wednesday morning lectures on dreams,  my clients are in lock down, and unlike 99% of social media users, I am not working remotely. (Nor do I plan to, nor do I like to)

So where is the meat? Or is there any meat? It really depends on what you call meat.

Being helpless is a very different thing than feeling helpless. Once you accept helplessness, it is an act of spiritual liberation, since you are freed from trying to gain control. And giving up control can help banish worrying.

I have struggled with “worrying” for as long as I can remember, yet the more I experience helplessness, the less I worry. That has been the major gift I have taken away from the present crisis.

I was to have had cataract surgery on 26.3. I waited 7 months for the top surgeon in Israel. My surgery was cancelled two days beforehand. No worry. It will happen, or it won’t. So I won’t drive at night. But what if I have to? Don’t think about it.

Free at last.

Many dictators have maintained  power by limiting freedom of speech, even to the extent of trying to censor mass media, ban Whatsapp, imprison journalists, and what have you.

Not in Israel. The Israeli needs one basic freedom, after which he can be easily repressed-that freedom is the “Right to Complain” .

Let us say whatever we want, and then you can repress us.

Israelis will pay 50% income tax, sit for hours and hours in traffic jams, and accept a Minister of Health who fights for the rights of religious women to go to a public ritual bath in the days of corona. The Israeli when allowed to complain, will spend three or four times the price for food and lodging-as long as freedom of speech continues.

By the way, government  ensures that mobile phones are cheap, so they complain all the time. (9 dollars a month, unlimited use)

Let’s look at why this happens.

First, Israeli culture differentiates between words and action, relegating words to “just words”.

Words have always been mitigated in Zionist (not Jewish) history. Ben Gurion once said that it is important what Israel does, not what the UN says. And an entire faction of the Zionist movement focused on doing not saying, in order to create` `facts in the field“ עובדות בשטח .

The manner is which Israelis worked against  Kennedy and with Johnson on the Dimona Nuclear Project illustrates the lack of importance associated with words in this critical juncture in Zionist history, the establishment of Israel as the strongest military power by far In the Middle East.

it is easier for Israelis to commit to an idea after they have ripped it apart. I know that for many people; this is very hard to understand. It can be likened to learning to live someone by understanding all their shortcomings, thereby accepting them.

Allowing  Israelis to complain binds and pits them against one another, simultaneously. them among themselves,  making them easier to control. No one understands this better than the accused criminal Benyamin Netanyahu.

So now let’s look at the components of Israel health policy at the moment: ritual baths (corona infection pits) for the ladies open, a very partial curfew enforcement exists in religious and minority areas, we are all kept 100 meters near  home because some idiots went to the beach. We are forced to accept a totally inept health care management team consisting of a useless, sectarian, pathetic ultra-Orthodox hack as Minister of Health (who may eventually go to jail for assisting pedophiles  to escape justice) as well as his managing director, a third rate economist with no medical background.

Just let “em complain.

Today is the first day that one cannot stray more than 330 feet, or 100 meters from your home.

Of course, let’s not quibble. Israel is known for its lack of enforcement; our society’s bark is much louder than its bite. So I was not surprised when I discovered on my daily walk that the enforcement of this law is, well let’s say, somewhat partial. More or like the way cops relate to the smell of grass in a Tel Aviv cafe.

In Israel, it is not infrequent to argue with the police about a traffic violation, ask for compassion from a parking meter maid, or knock on the window of your bank after it’s closed because of a delay due to a traffic jam; the only thing that Netanyahu neglected more than health was public transportation. Nothing is enforced to the letter of the law. 0.

Rules are not made to be broken; rather they are mean to be bent. Almost any rule can be bent. Just the other day, I got my monthly medications (not too many), and asked for 2 months supply. During the virus outbreak, this is not permitted. “No”, said the pharmacist. I know this pharmacist well. She is an Arab Israeli with a severe medical condition. I asked her in Arabic how she was feeling; I got an answer, and another month’s supply. This type of occurrence is very common.

Why is there so much lack of enforcement? I do not all the answers, but I can name a few. Life here is not easy: regional violence, extreme heat, bad traffic, piss-poor government and doing simple things is often difficult. So people give one another a break. (One example of the difficulty of doing simple things is a yearly road-readiness car test often done by a corrupt garage, which takes a good half day.)

Furthermore, only the veneer of our society is western, Israel is much more like China or Thailand-it is based on relationships. That includes showing other people that “we know that the system does not work, so I am helping you”. Everything, everything is done here via relationships. So doing a favour is garnering credit.

Finally, historically Jews have not ruled themselves until very recently, With Netanyahu’s performance, it is fair to ask if this is still not the case. At any rate, “the system” belongs to someone else, as it were. So it can be toyed with.

And finally, there is our culture of constant bargaining. Can 100 meters become 150? No? Ok-140, in 3 payments.

PS This having been said, Israel does enforce tax collection very, very well,