What Comes After Must Win Battles?

To answer your questions Anders each company has to find its own way with these organisational innovations given its own history and culture. There are no templates just some general lessons.... Purpose and self management - you're right, purpose is all important. It's less about companies 'giving purpose' though and more about setting out what it believes its contribution to society is so that it acts as a 'calling' - like a vocation. The problem is too many purpose statements aren't couched in these terms because they're created from the old paradigm and narrowly focus on shareholder value or being No. 1 or 'the best' at whatever. Such statements don't speak to social or environmental usefulness and the crucial role the company believes its customers, employees and supply chains can play. They don't inspire or compel people to act. But when they do self-management becomes an obvious thing to do - why would you want the extra cost and delay a management hierarchy brings if your teams feel highly motivated to deliver something they think is really important and valuable? Wholeness - as the word implies, is for everyone. The way decisions are made, roles are allocated in a team or disagreements settled applies to the MD as much as it does each worker in a team. The lesson seems to be same rule applies to all. Evolutionary purpose - I understand your concern; it's shared by many! This is not about staying stuck but responding quickly in lots of small ways to what a situation needs. Companies let their future unfold. Think of it on a personal level - if we're so focused on achieving a particular goal we try to control things to make sure we get to where we want to be. But there's a cost to this - we're often not open to new information, we listen to others selectively - only for that which advances our goal - our quality of communication and understanding is limited by the way we've framed the future we want. So we show up as distracted not fully present. Yet if we were more present we'd be more connected to colleagues, we'd discover more about what's really happening such that our goal could be revised upwards (or downwards if expectations need to be reset.) In other words by living a life guided by our ability to 'sense and respond' in the present we're not as limited as we are in a life premised on the assumption we can 'predict and control' the future. At the organisational level both prediction and control can be very useful - especially to a forecast thirsty investment community. In these faster changing times they can be problematic though and lead to unintended consequences. For example, social media can shift opinions about what's happening or happened in a single tweet. We've seen here in the UK how a hospital that tightly controlled its finances forgot to care for its patients and killed many of them unnecessarily. We've seen news reporters break the law by hacking people's private messages to make sure their story gets published and they get to keep their job. I imagine you too could quote from what seems a growing list of corporate scandals worldwide. Scandals arise because leaders are trying to solve new world problems (Twitter storms from outraged members of the public) using old world methods (more rules, regulations and controls.) The alternative is about trusting employees to do what's right for the client in light of the company's overall purpose. To help them 'perform' rather than 'conform', Practically it means sales people focusing on what the client is really concerned about and not being distracted by having to hit this month's sales target. It means using time wisely to make the right rather than a rushed decision. Or having a general rather than detailed plan for the future. Hope this helps. Roger

Anders - you raise some very important questions here. I'd like to respond to two - on paradigms and what comes next. The language of 'battles' and '3-5 year strategic plans' is itself representative of a paradigm based on assumptions about scarcity, the need to compete and the threat of loss or extinction. As you suggest, the 'burning platform' is a bit tired now and not what gets most people out of bed in the morning. So what will? I note when leaders think deeply about 'what' they're leading it helps them question the paradigm their working from. For example, think of an organisation as though it's a profit making machine and you understandably end up in one place. Think of it as a space where social and environmental good can flourish and you end up somewhere else. Such thinking of course can show up as threatening to the existing paradigm. But handled carefully it needn’t. There’s a growing body of evidence that points to how companies around the world deliver greater value through delivering socially useful products and services. The business case for being part of the solution (and not the problem) to many of the difficulties we collectively face is worth a closer look. But the business case alone is only part of the story. A paradigm shift is ultimately personal because it asks each of us to see the world in a different way. I help leaders make these kind of breakthroughs by understanding how their mind works one way and why it’s designed to help them succeed. With this understanding, grounded in their own personal experience, I see them start doing new things. For example - downplaying their ego, acknowledging others’ contexts and realities more readily and getting the insights they need to make what may once have seemed like courageous decisions, but now show up as wise and obvious things to do. Conscious of the challenges societies and their company face, they think abundance not scarcity. From this vantage point ‘what’s next’ becomes much clearer. The best way to generalise this is offered by Frederic LaLoux’s new book – Reinventing Organisations. He points to how over time new forms of organisation have always evolved (think from tribe to feudal agriculture to church and army-like structures and onto the meritocracies most work in today) and new ones emerge because they innovate compared to their predecessors: they can do things their predecessors can’t. Laloux suggest we’re currently witnessing three new innovations in how we think about organising. First, ‘self-management’ – no management hierarchy. The organisation has an interconnected cell like (team) structure responsible directly to ‘their’ external customer base. Second, ‘wholeness’ – people bring all of themselves to work and develop productive ways to do very human things like disagree, make decisions, celebrate, feel connected and hold each other to account. Finally ‘evolutionary purpose’ – sensing and responding to what’s needed now, team by team, customer by customer, not predicting the future and then controlling current activity via performance management systems and the like to make that future come true. Early evidence suggests these new forms of organisation can grow fast, act quickly and deliver at a fraction of the cost. They have employees who work for them out of ‘love’ more than a sense of duty or just for the pay cheque. We’re living through the dawn of a new paradigm. These are interesting and engaging times. And as your articles usefully suggest, we just need more of us to see it!

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