The Bonfire of the Platypi

I’ve recently been re-reading Lucy Kueng (Küng) ’s excellent ‘Hearts and Minds ’ publication, which focusses on the digital transformation efforts of the world’s leading newsrooms.

There’s a section where Lucy writes of the increasing incidence of ‘Platypi’ people in newsrooms – that is, people doing roles that defy ‘traditional’ categorisation. Here’s Lucy Kueng (Küng) :

“New roles … bring some of the biggest talent challenges. These individuals are hybrids – combining classic journalistic skills with data science, coding, developing, etc., and need to be closely integrated into work processes. Individuals in this subgroup have a variety of names – Platypi, blended journalists, nonbinary journalists. They have high market value, highly transferable skills, and often high levels of frustration, partly because of the volume of subtle legacy obstacles to them achieving what they should, and partly because their roles are not understood”.

I love the ‘Platypus’ designation. A Platypus is an egg-laying mammal found in eastern Australia, that is so unusual that when British scientists first got their hands on one in 1799, they were convinced it was a hoax, with its duck’s bill and otter’s body.

Evidently, newsrooms have Platypi – but Big Media has an increasing population of Platypi, too, of a different species, to be sure, but still met with the same confusion and derision that beset English zoologist George Shaw upon his first encounter with a Platypus.

Big Media’s Platypi are not so much the mix-skilled type like newsrooms’ hybrid journalists are. Big Media’s Platypi are the roles that operate along the organisational fissures of today’s chaotically disrupted Big Media companies, seemingly belonging to no single function, and with titles or responsibilities that look unusual. ?

The frontlines of strategic change

The ‘organisational fissures’ I refer to are the frontlines of a Big Media company’s attempts to drive strategic change, to effect some sort of forced-adaptation from ‘old’ to ‘new’. It might be the shifting of a business model from licensing-led model to a ‘direct to consumer’-led model (and back again!), or the shifting of an operating model from a local/regional-led model to a centrally driven operating model (and back again!). It might be change brought about by a material new (or materially changed) distribution partnership, or the merging of business units and their associated consumer brands, or the consolidation of internal technology platforms, or the consolidation of heretofore separately staffed revenue sources into a merged revenue organisation. And, it could be all of the above, at the same time.

Any type of change like this creates organisational fissures. There may suddenly be organisational gaps, or organisational overlaps, or new organisational activity, without any precedent at that company – and these are the most fraught areas of an organisation. Gaps give rise to a blame game, as ‘balls get dropped’ in the change, with no team feeling responsible. Overlaps create hostility and resentment, when two (or more!) departments or functions feel fervently that they each have responsibility for the same decision or initiative. The sudden arrival of an organisational activity or initiative without precedent creates suspicion and resistance.

None of these emotions - blame, hostility, resentment, suspicion, and resistance - are good for effective strategic change, and the organisational situations giving rise to these emotions generally will not resolve themselves without some form of intervention.

“Just restructure!” I hear you say. Well, perhaps. Restructuring can get you some of the way, for sure. There are situations where you can formally extend a team's accountabilities to cover a gap; or formally appoint one team the decision maker in a 'contested zone', and you can do all sorts of internal comms chicanery to explain a new initiative and roll out a new structure that (you hope) embodies the new initiative. Indeed, all of this is necessary - but a good organisation will have already done this, anyway, and still be left with multiple fissure vents pocking the organisation. If left unmanaged, the tension in these areas will fester and slow the pace and effectiveness of the desired change - and will quickly become toxic to the company’s culture.?

Tension by design

But the conundrum is that the organisational tension is designed into the system and is necessary and ultimately constructive, in spite of its potential to bring about toxic shock if left unattended. To bring this ‘tension by design’ theme to life a bit, let's zoom away from Big Media for a minute and look at an adjacent sector.

Matthew Ball recently published an essay, “Parallel Bets, Microsoft, and AI Strategies” that describes how Microsoft in the 80s and 90s deliberately set its teams and business units against one another.

Microsoft could not be sure where the market for operating systems on personal devices was heading and concluded that it needed to have several 'parallel bets' whilst a market direction emerged. Matthew Ball writes:

Despite Microsoft’s success throughout the 1980s, the company’s founder and CEO, Bill Gates, suspected that DOS was approaching its end…[and]… it was not hard to predict that platform-level changes might soon occur. If so, secondary and tertiary changes were inevitable, too. ?

In other words, Microsoft faced not just the prospect of new competitors, some of which were current licensors, but also potential disruption in its OS licensing business model, all of which threatened its growth, investment, and product strategy and might alter industry profit pools as well. ?

To manage this uncertainty, Microsoft undertook a portfolio of?bets throughout the 1980s and early 1990s?that were often competitive with one another (or had competing premises) but collectively replicated the diversity, unpredictability, and dynamism of the market at large, thereby maximizing Microsoft’s odds?of success in any future state.

The parallels with today's media environment are there. One of the major challenges 'Big Media' has grappled with for at least 10 years, and the last 5 years in earnest, is simply not knowing where the market is heading. The collision of ‘smarter’ TVs, better broadband, insurgent tech platforms setting up as video aggregators, consumer attention being sapped away by continuous waves of social media innovation, and the seemingly never-ending consolidation of the competitive set, has meant an 'end state' for Big Media has been impossible to predict.

So, like Microsoft before them, many of the Big Media and Big Tech platforms are running multiple initiatives that are often seemingly incompatible - by design.

For people in these organisations, they’re showing up every day to an environment of Deliberate, Persistent Tension. It's deliberate because it arises from a conflict between two (or more) organisational priorities that both/each must take precedence; and it's persistent because, for the foreseeable future, the tension between these competing priorities will remain legitimate and necessary.

(If you want an auditory immersion on the ins and outs of tension, have a listen to this podcast from Jocko Willink : “Jocko Underground: If You Think Tension Is Bad, You Might Be Wrong”, 2nd October 2023 .)

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The Trenches of Tension

This strategy of ‘parallel bets’ probably sounds exhilarating to an MBA student cocooned in their case studies, but the 'on the ground' organisational reality of ‘parallel bets’ can be pretty dire, especially in the ‘trenches of tension’ boundary lines between conflicting business priorities / units. And of course, there are no 'boundary lines' – there are only 'boundary people'.

In a company running parallel bets, some of these ‘boundary people’ can be the most critical to a company’s efforts to ‘read the market’. These people are the one that interfacing with the everchanging market or audience, who are seeing where their respective segment of the market is going and evangelising - often against one another - about what the company should be doing in response. This is precisely what the company needs - it needs coalface feedback, and it needs that contest of viewpoints and competing opportunities to really test the best path forward.???

If you're in Big Media today, you'll see it everywhere. Brand vs brand, streaming vs broadcast, free vs pay, marketing objectives vs commercial objectives, licensing vs retaining; d2c distribution vs b2b distribution, theatrical/broadcast-first vs streaming-first; ARPU vs reach, Head office vs regional/local office - the list is a long one. These are all, correctly, hotly debated and constantly shifting lines within a Big Media company.

But these contests can be especially draining for people, and company culture. How individuals in these trenches of tension conduct themselves is how a company's culture is shaped. Proscribed values or mission statements don’t define a company's culture – it’s the behaviours seen along these lines of 'conflict' that sets the culture.

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Enter the Platypus

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To prevent the onset of toxicity at the boundary lines, and to ensure strategic imperatives keep moving though the organisation, some actual people must work the boundaries, in the No Man’s Land between the trenches, gently but persistently pushing for detail instead of functional slogans, data points over emotion, cooler heads over hotter heads, commitment over platitudes, and all the while packaging all this up into some form of consensus documentation for executive decision making.

[Side note: I’ve very rarely seen an organisation show the requisite intent and understanding in appointing someone into this type of role; oftentimes people are appointed into a role and suddenly (and horrifyingly) realise they’ve been thrown into an organisational No Man’s Land.]

Operating in organisational No Mans Land is dangerous stuff – you’ll get shot at from both sides, and those sent there need to be capable of carrying it off. In my experience before you put anyone into a role like this, you need to check them for three traits:

1.?????? ‘Technical’ credibility, AKA a Mix of New Skills and Old Skills: ?the person needs a fluency in the ‘new’ and the ‘old’. They need to have some experience of the ‘new’, so they can know what sort of end state management aspires to get to, and the skills and structures and practices that come with it; BUT they need some fluency in the ‘old’. They need to be able to talk to and understand some of the existing practices and in doing so gain the trust and respect of the people and roles that are affected by the change. Whilst this skill mix is essential, it does render the role misunderstood from the outset, as they don’t look wholly familiar to the surrounding functions, the new or the old; to each they look like a half-formed version of the other – Big Media’s own Platypus.

2.?????? Systems thinker / bigger picture: the person needs an appreciation of – and critically, a curiosity for - the wider organisational perspective, of the connectedness of the whole, as they will be dealing with teams who are incentivised to be fixated on their own area and single-mindedly protecting their own functional interests. He or she needs to be able to ‘read’ the situation in real time, because the role, even whilst its primary function is to ‘gather and package’, must also be able to act with some agency and to be able operate confidently in a decentralised and autonomous way. ???

3.?????? Temperament: The person needs to be aware that they are operating in an area of boundary tension, where emotions can run high and mistrust even higher. They then have to thread through these boundary dynamics without giving the impression that they themselves are seeking to take decisions or that they themselves are ‘pushing an agenda’. They therefore must be a low-ego personality, but be sufficiently resilient and self-assured to stay the course as their efforts to bring warring parties ‘to the table’ will sometimes be met with avoidance, obfuscation or outright resistance. Above all, they need to be good listeners, with a listen : talk ratio of greater than 2:1.

They will need to be well developed in these characteristics to just to survive along the trenches. Succeeding is a loftier, and perhaps unattainable goal. Remember, as a rule, these are highly talented individuals, so as a manager or leader, not breaking them should be your first concern.

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Two out of three is bad

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It is a unique individual who can encompass these traits, and they are Big Media’s Platypi. As I say, having three of these traits is table stakes and may still lead to role failure. With apologies to Meatloaf, having only two of these three traits will assuredly be a misfire. Having only one of these traits will be a disaster, hopefully a short-lived one, but one that management is culpable for, not the individual. ???

Why does having only two of these traits guarantee failure? If the person has technical competence and sees the bigger picture but struggles to act in a low ego way – they likely will unsettle the boundary dynamic even further by injecting another perceived ‘actor’ into the already threatening situation. If they have low ego and can see the bigger picture but have no hands-on technical fluency – they won’t gain the respect of the teams they’re seeking to bridge. If they have technical fluency and operate with a low ego but don’t have a good grasp of the wider business context, they won’t be able to test and counter competing perspectives in real time, and progress will be too slow and incremental with too much managerial oversight required.

In each case, if a person has been put into the role with only two of the three traits required, management is culpable, not the individual. Nevertheless, that individual will bear the scars of their inevitable failure in the role. It will be their confidence that gets damaged, their vitality that gets depleted, and their organisational reputation that gets sullied. ?????

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Meanwhile, back in the real world

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Of course, in reality, no one person will be the complete package across these traits. A good fit will be someone who has enough of each trait, but even for that person, what they do have will likely be applied inconsistently. At times they may be required to navigate some parts of the business where their ‘technical’ fluency is not as strong as another part of the business. Other times there may be areas of organisational context they are more distant from, or political dynamics they are not privy to, meaning their ‘big picture’ will at times be incomplete, leading to missteps. And even a low-ego person with a modicum of self-respect can be provoked by particularly fractious situations and cantankerous or malign behaviour.????

This is why effective leadership of Platypi is so crucial. Yet in Big Media, proper care and leadership for these people can be absent.

Why is this? One reason is that the ‘trenches of tension’ mostly run through the middle of the organisation. Real frontline Platypus roles are likely to be middle-org people, managed by middle-upper-org people, and in Big Media there is little to no effective focus on equipping the ‘middle’ with the self-leadership skills required to operate in this environment, despite ‘the middle’ being where the progress of strategic change is happening (or not happening).

And whilst the upper ranks of the organisation may spend time on developing their leadership skills through company funded 1:1 coaching or leadership intensives, this doesn’t seem to be equipping senior people with the skills to lead their highly talented Platypi.

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How to help your Platypus

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If you’re managing a Platypus today or may be in future (or if you suspect you are a Platypus, without anyone ever making it explicit to you… very common…) then these are some leadership principles to be aware of:

1.?????? Know what you’re asking of your Platypus: if you’re going to ask a highly-talented, mid-career individual to head to No Man’s Land between your company’s Trenches of Tension – the very least you can do is understand what you’re asking them to do. Know what difficulties they may encounter; help them understand where the flash points may be and why. Do your own homework on the situation before sending them ‘in’.?

2.?????? Clear their path: Once you have done your homework on the environment you are sending your Platypus into – you need to get out into the organisation and tell key people about who your Platypus is, what you’re expecting of them, and what ultimately they and you are trying to achieve. Remember; your Platypus is going to look odd to the other teams / functions. The person is going to have a role (and maybe a title) that likely hasn’t been seen before. They are going to be asking functional groups for detail that hasn’t been the business of someone outside of that function. Do not let them have to explain themselves to sceptical teams and do not make them hack through all the organisational undergrowth themselves. As best you can, enlist the senior leaders of those functions to communicate to their teams – and support, in front of their teams – what the Platypus is trying to do.??

3.?????? Steel them for failure: Yes, for failure. Or, rather, set a very low bar for success, and one that is grounded in personal development and skills development, rather than organisational outcomes. Depending on which part of the disrupted organisation they’re being ‘posted’ to, it’s highly likely that in a short amount of time, the organisation will change priorities, or another operating model reset will see whole structures change (again), changing the nature of the trenches of tension. The work they do can feel pointless, unless you can help them see that each day, the fire of the “legacy obstacles” they are facing is hardening them into a better, more resilient media executive. ?

4.?????? Give them your full trust (but intervene quickly): Finally, being a Platypus is a confidence game. There’ll be more down days than up days, more awkward meetings than aligned meetings, and the one thing that may keep your Platypus going is knowing that their leader is engaged, fully trusts them and has their back. Any chinks in this, and the Platypus is liable to crumple. But what a leader must also do, is intervene quickly when the Platypus has been caught in an organisational riptide, where attempts to build a consensus narrative have unravelled (not their fault) and things are getting toxic; do not let them sit in that. Quickly find a subtle way to get them out of the situation without undermining them and regroup.

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My general point here, is that in today’s absurdly disrupted Big Media companies, ‘the middle’ matters more than ever, and yet there is a paucity of investment in effective skills development for ‘the middle’. More than that, there is only an underdeveloped understanding of what is being expected of ‘the middle’ during these severely changeable times. Platypi roles are most exposed in this environment, but such is the pervasiveness of the organisational upheaval in Big Media that nearly all functional roles in ‘the middle’ are within touching distance of a trench of tension and need help developing ways of managing themselves. In the meantime, leaders can step up and take better responsibility for their teams, and, if they are lucky enough to have them, their Platypi. ????