Getting involved is a tough call these days. If we see someone in difficulty or something dodgy going down do we worry about out own safety or do we dive in?
To intervene in events is to change the event – and there are consequences. 
These are complex scenarios right? Lots of different dynamics at play, lots of different decisions that could be made – many of them with life or death consequences. There are real people involved, real forces at work and the slightest move could cause unholy catastrophe. To change anything is hard.
To change it for the better every time is an unlikely outcome but a worthy aim.
So for me the smouldering question becomes one of how to intervene without being killed, how to interpret the facts correctly so that the right decision is made (which floor to throw the foul consultant off) and how to benefit wider society sustainably as a result of the whole exercise.
Firstly I think we need to understand that we are all part of the way it works.
Yes it's all made up of individuals, including Ninjas, working to survive through their families, tribes, teams, neighbourhoods, divisions, departments, businesses and corporations, institutions and so on. Many different ways to organise. But organisations, like societies are not machines. They are living systems.
For far too long we haven't thought about them like that. We have wanted to control them, fix them with iron bars and heavy chains and force them to work continuously for us without fail – for ever. It's time we started to get to grips with today's dynamic realities.
Let's take business
Most businesses today were designed in and for a different era. That means at least a year ago. They were definitely not designed with today's dynamics or chaotic context in mind. Their people, processes and systems were deliberately baked that way – fixed into place with concrete (and now highly resistant to change) because their ambition (and idea) of success was driven by a desire for efficiency rather than flexibility.
Now imagine what's going to be needed to do to change this. What will need to be thought about? Everything right? We need dynamite.
Dynamite is an intervention. The effect of it is transformative, needs little interpretation and yet it scatters large amounts of bits and pieces all over the place. The effect of the explosion then needs to be understood again to create the new or the transformed world it has helped create. Sometimes this can be a positive disruption and sometimes a negative one. Dependent on its aim.
Most people wouldn't use dynamite to change a business.
But increasingly it is becoming a strong contender without invitation. Technological change is akin to dynamite. It has changed the way business is done, products and services get sold, value gets exchanged. It has scattered bits of some businesses all over the place and people (and the business itself) are still picking up the pieces. We had better get used to dealing with things like this.
Whether we like it or not, and within society at large, there is a maelstrom of complex and unstructured information and forces being thrown up. (Yawn) You know - social media, so called Big Data – all the old and now the new digital platforms are generating tons of stuff. So yes, there is a mind-boggling amount of data. Data is not in short supply – the intelligence upon which to act is.
As a direct result of these explosions we are talking about needing some pretty heavy (weapons-grade) capability to stand any chance of figuring it all out. So we definitely need new thinking but we also need new doing and that involves three very connected things – at the very least.
Choreography, Extensibility & Capability – Thinking That Covers Everything
Capability.
Having the capability to do things 'well' in the 21st Century certainly makes a real difference to a business – it's true in every walk of life. To make positive dynamite in the business the new leader needs to have new capabilities in the mix. These capabilities should include:
- Large dollops of critical thinking (with impartiality and objectivity as standard).
- The capability to identify marketable insights (through the patterns that are now observable).
- Some properly applied creativity and decision quality right across the enterprise.
- A business intelligence system that alerts and then continuously monitors that the best course is being taken.
- A values system and cultural sensitivity beyond the standard tick box culture of yesterday
- Customer experience and ethical product and service capability
- A crystal ball (With batteries)
OK these are just some examples. Nowadays though the REAL capabilities are much harder to define.
Things like being comfortable with chaos and ambiguity, quality design skills, the art of story-telling, curiosity of and a mastery in positive disruptive (and systemic) thinking. Add to this craft skills in data modelling, visual thinking and user interface design – these are all very rapidly becoming the new imperatives of capability.
But it is doing all these things 'best' that distinguishes the leader from the commodity, enabling him to be in the game – not just a bystander. Yet having the capability to understand and then master the new dynamics (and ultimately opportunities) of the current business world is still very rare. So creating, transferring and maintaining these newer capabilities within an enterprise is now the new battleground. This field and its practice marks out the opportunity we believe is central to the progress and performance of every business.
Choreography: Most situations businesses find themselves in are paradoxically highly the same and highly unique.
For example they demand the distinction and differentiation of their position and brand – yet they are dealing with the same marketplaces, multiplicity of channels and critical systems/resources as most of the competition. They want to solve their specific problem – but these problems are very similar in nature to those of every other business – cultural, behavioural, leadership, decision making quality and so on.
Choreography, unlike concretised best practice is therefore a far more powerful way of thinking - orchestrating all these moving parts into unique combinations of other collections (sets) of moving parts or solutions – in rapid time.
“Even in the same organization, if one were to try to re-apply an intervention that worked once at at a different time, it would produce different results because the component parts and the relationships which constitute it have changed. Furthermore, the relationship between the organization and its environment will have changed as well. So the imposition of the intervention is not only likely to fail, but likely to produce entirely unpredictable and surprising results.”
Extensibility: Extensibility on the other hand is a way to deal with the future now. But central and woven within both capability and choreography. By thinking differently and imaginatively about what patterns we see (or have experienced and can calculate) we can 'engineer' smarter pieces into the way the business should think, build and work that will enable far less risk and cost than if we added them at a later date.
The thing is though – who is actually going to do this work – causing the intervention in the first place then having the right capability to do anything creative with it? Looking for the elusive needle of an insight against which to change the course of things. Building the right frame within which to think and develop it.
This level of impartial capability is scarce. Intervention done for a specific outcome is easier to spot – it quickly gets exposed and the agenda gets busted. That’s good. Interpretation is also of course just that – someone's lens is pressed against the data and 'hey-presto' a not entirely impartial answer emerges. Is that the best interpretation?
The big questions now are around who is skilled at this stuff – who has the capability - how do we get to be confident about the dynamics, the stuff, the data, how to constantly improve the quality of it and how to federate the discoveries that are made. I want to give a big credit to Michael Yanakiev whose great writing I am riffing with below.
“One reason why so many change efforts fail in large organization? Many “change efforts” are lead by the big consulting firms, who take “best practice” examples from a few textbook cases or from other clients and then re-purpose them from one company to another, ad infinitum, at a healthy profit. This would work fine if organizations were like machines – machines for which we had the blueprints – and if changing one lever would produce the same effect every time you pulled it.” - Michael Yanakiev
So who can we trust and who has the required capability?
Well there is no doubt that there are great consultants out there – we know many of them. The problem with the intervention and then translation is that the 'frames' through which the answer emerges is not entirely neutral. The core of this is the fact that when anyone takes a brief about a problem the definition of that problem is biased by that expertise and therefore also partial.
When I ran a part of a large business I found it very hard to step back far enough and see the whole picture within which the system actually lived and the other problem is that people view the system as a very fixed enterprise that everything revolves around rather than the other way around.
“Our governments, companies and organizations really aren’t like big machines, and that the theory required to interact with them effectively requires a fundamental re-assessment of the very notion of concepts such as “best practice”. The only responsible thing that one can do when operating in this domain is to test, sense, interpret, theorize, test, sense, interpret, theorize, etc., all the while producing highly specific and temporally contingent local results (hat tip to Dave Snowden and the sense-making guys for this terminology).”- Michael Yanakiev
In summary…
Whatever you decide, your capability in intervening to make change happen had better be good, or it will do more harm than good. The frame you use to think had better be the right one. You will be dealing with real human beings. Emotion filled – high energy – high maintenance assets. Their resistance to any change; to do things differently is readily observable and happily so are the remedies.
- Individuals need motivation and conscious engagement – giving them real meaning.
- Do it with an integrity of intention. Superficiality no longer cuts it. Get real and include the truth.
- Ensure sustained evidence/proof of the logic. This is going to have to play out in the real world. Make it so or change it. People get that.
- The continued inspiration of the leadership. Inspire, motivate and have the courage to be humble.
- A recognition of the achievability of the purpose. If it's a long way off tell folk - don't try to fool people. You will be busted.
- Simplicity of all of the interactions required – but not simplistic. Plain English and keep it simple. Just engage and inform people if you can't include them directly in the strategy or change thinking.
Not simple though right?
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