Mandarin stand-up: why the org chart is only a suggestion

I walked up St. Catherine's Hill in Winchester recently and did the Mizmaze, one of only eight surviving historic turf mazes in the country. It occurred to me, as I wended my way around the chalky groove, that I was ridiculously choosing to follow the path rather than step over to the middle--which is what the group that arrived five minutes into my adventure did after becoming frustrated 30 seconds in (Twitter generation?).

Rules and conventions being overturned or reinterpreted is central to the advancement of culture, as observed by Lewis Hyde in "Trickster Makes This World" - a great read and a great recommendation by Cynthia Kurtz. And it starts with our perception.

Around 2008, the CTO I was working under at the time--the very approachable, transparent and likeable Jeff Hughes--was talking to a group of us about a recent reorganisation and taking questions in a makeshift conference area. Someone asked about lines of communication, who they should be talking to as this seemed to have changed since the reorg, and Jeff floored us with a simple pithy comment, delivered in his Texas drawl, played up to good effect:

"You know, y'all, the org chart is only a suggestion."

Jeff's comment had a profound affect on me. It was called to mind recently when I saw responded to this post by Adam Grant (click through to see my repost and comments):

While I sympathise with what Adam is trying to convey, and there is considerable truth to it, it feels disempowering to think we are at the mercy of people above us in a hierarchy. I have witnessed, and played an active role in fomenting, bottom-up change at a previous organisation. Yes, certain conditions can be necessary but less than you might expect. Indeed if we were just victims to pecking order and hierarchy how could we move forward at all? And we are not robots--things would not end well for us if we were. This was something Helmuth Von Moltke observed when fighting Napoleon:

Slipping the trap of orthodoxy

Central to the debate perhaps are the notions of habit, risk and agency. We are all prone to ingrained behaviour, acting out a script born of past experience. And some people are inherently more rule (or convention)-oriented than other, and these sorts of people can do very well. And indeed by following rules and heuristics we can make the best of our cognitive limitations. This can lead to people towing the reporting lines and agreed conventions in terms of communications and in deference to pecking order.

Companies like Amazon recognise the groupthink risk inherent in this cultural stagnation, hence their famous disagree and commit maxim (that actually dates back to Scott McNealy CEO of Sun Microsystems). But this has a built-in limitation. Much like the Roman festival of Saturnalia, when masters and slaves traded places for a day, or the Japanese afterwork drinking tradition of Nomikai, normal service in terms of power orthodoxy is soon reestablished. Indeed Lewis Hyde [ibid] argues these temporary reversals actually reinforce the hegemony by providing temporary relief to those at the bottom, thus curtailing dissent.

If power is involved, and therefore threat, then to break the chains of convention carries personal risk. If you haven't noticed already, rules often apply in different ways depending on where we sit in a hierarchy. Just ask Boris.

So how do we, to use Lewis Hyde's phrase, slip this trap? Agency. What is within our gift is surprisingly empowering and disruptive if we are prepared to think outside the box. And whether you are a big disruptor or want to reapportion your lot in a smaller ways, personal agency is your friend. So get creative with it.

Go large

As Chris Smalls, founder of the Amazon Labour Union, discovered when he was fired on an alleged Coronavirus violation, we can expect existing power structures to defend their turf when something threatens. But Chris broke with convention and ultimately prevailed. Success has a lot to do with timing. And you have to be prepared to risk everything and fail.

The great resignation is another example of going large- rejecting what you have and finding something better.

Go medium

To some extent the Guildcraft work I did at Centrica was in this category. We weren't forming a union as Chris Smalls did, but we did play around with boundaries and found empowerment in our org-within-an-org that allowed us to further causes that were both important to us as professionals and to the growth of the company. It was particularly helpful for that awkward transformational category of things that help in the long term but are disruptive to the existing power structures and value chains in the short-med term.

This does not need to be insubordination: internal disruption is important to keep companies vital. Indeed, management guru Stan McCrystal, in his book Team of Teams, describes how he deliberately disrupted his own org structure from the top to shake it out of an ossified state to something more vibrant and creative.

Start small

Small is beautiful. There are so many things we can do to make a difference at the small scale no matter how hard our circumstances. Indeed, the plays made here are, I argue, often more interesting and transformational than obvious manoeuvres from a position of strength.

Houdini famously found an edge when escaping from a strait-jacket by puffing out his chest before the straps were tightened. Later when escaping from his bonds this small extra space came in very handy.

Our lives throw up a myriad of opportunities to apply this wisdom and gain a small edge. And even looking for these edges keens our senses and improves our morale. I have wells of untapped agency no matter what my circumstances. I can choose, for example:

• How I react to things
• How I interact with people
• What I focus on

And by making small changes here I can improve the circumstances for myself and others.

Reversing the flow of culture

I embraced the small recently working with some some international teams in my current role. My team are primarily from Poland and excellent English speakers. Our customers' staff are based in mainland China, some of them have western alternative names and they can sometimes be shy. We hold daily sprints--by convention in English. Over the weeks working together, it felt to me that language and culture barriers were getting in the way, like we had the upper hand far too often, considering the additional cognitive load my customers had speaking English.

A recent post by Rob England on this topic:

I had been working to warm things up and told my team: patience, compassion. I struck up a friendship with Xin, one of my Chinese customers. He was a character and when asked if he needed anything at the end of one of our sessions he replied with a chuckle “less pressure”. Game on. Knowing there was a fellow trickster in the house, we spoke that night about my interest in I Ching, his in other aspects of Chinese culture. "What’s your mother tongue?" I asked - "Cantonese," was the response through most of his team spoke Mandarin. A plot was hatched: so the following Wednesday we held the stand-up in Mandarin with Xin giving us three Confucius quotes followed by a demo by colleague Sissy, narrated in Mandarin, that he translated for the benefit of me and my bewildered Polish colleagues. The rise in energy levels of this group of shy and quiet non-native English speakers was off the charts. I cried. A mail went round, it caused a stir. I started the next meeting with the traditional Chinese greeting: 欢迎光临?huān?yíng?guāng?lín.

What we did was small, it was within our agency, and it made a difference. And like Jeff's org chart, convention turned out to only be a suggestion also. Now that is Guildcraft.

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