Joy.
Long after the December tinsel and baubles have been boxed…
Deep into January, then February and into the far reaches of the year when desperates are vainly trying to capture the spirit of the season with Christmas in July…
I will survive and smile on the beautiful feeling of having worked with clever, curious, creative, kind people who seek to make things well, and better.
The pure Joy.
Thank you - each of you.
Defining Moments.
A hand went up in the audience.
‘Yes?’
‘Our organisation’s Mission Statement is ‘Innovation and Excellence’. And yet when I asked to go to an international conference on ‘Innovation’ in my field, I was told it was too expensive.’
‘How much?’ I asked.
‘$25,000 airfare, conference fee, and accommodation,’ he said.
‘Then your employer has defined what Innovation it wants. You think it’s worth $25,000. Your employer doesn’t agree.’
Make decisions on the assumption that they advance your organisation’s vision or mission statement.
See what your organisation does in response.
Adjust your understanding of what ‘excellence’ means, accordingly.
The Same Set of Facts.
The secret to running a successful business is to make sure that all key decision-makers in that business have access to the same set of facts.
- Jack Welch
A critic is often someone who does not possess the same set of facts.
A criticism is ‘Hey! Based on my understanding of the facts, you’re not acting in accordance with my expectations of how you said you would act.’
Therefore, criticism is an opportunity for both parties to compare their sets of facts and for one or both to change their understanding of the facts.
And potentially to share that change with the rest of the organisation.
As the first job of a leader is to define reality, criticism is not a threat to the leader.
It’s an invitation to lead.
Indeed - criticism can be the origin of leadership: accompanying someone towards new facts they otherwise would never have considered.
Criticism, if given and received in service of the widget, is at least a gift.
And at its best - an act of love.
Pay Attention.
Employment is an employer paying for us to pay attention to the employer’s widget for eight hours a day, five days a week.
If we’re not paying attention to the employer’s widget - that’s a conflict of interest.
Pay attention.
Cogs Are Less Threatening.
The fact is, many organisations, and a lot of managers want cogs. Cogs are less threatening. Cogs on some level are more dependable. They do exactly what you expect every single time. So the argument I’ve been making for fifteen or twenty years is that the future belongs to organisations that are resilient. That can deal with change. That can do things that are magical that can’t easily be outsourced. That can’t easily be turned into AI. That is the job of a Linchpin. A group of people who care enough to write the manual instead of following the manual.
But - and it’s a very big But - we’re in the middle of a generations long transition away from the industrial era. And if you work at an institution where people are rewarded for being compliant cogs, don’t be surprised when they’re not happy when you act like a Linchpin.
One thing I can share with you, is that early in my career after a year of some of the best work of my life, one of my managers tried to get me fired. He didn’t try to get me fired because he disliked me as a person. He tried to get me fired because it was too difficult for him to manage seven people where one of them was intent on breaking rules, making rules, figuring out how things work, and six of them wanted to follow the manual.
What I figured out in that moment, was that I could stay in the organisation by working with and for other people who got the joke. Who needed what I could provide. But if those people aren’t around, that’s a signal that maybe you need to look somewhere else. Because the worst thing you can do is pretend to be a cog. The worst thing you can do is just give up and become compliant, and ask what to do next, and simply follow the manual.
Because if you do that, then you will be just like everyone else, and you’ll be easily replaceable. And the goal when we do our work is to make things better by making better things.
Lack of Curiosity.
‘In hindsight, it looks like a lack of curiosity.’
-Kathryn Campbell, Secretary of the Department of Human Services, explaining how the Department came to operate the unlawful robodebt scheme.
‘[We are] concerned that there has been a sustained lack of curiosity and action from Defence [to using data to inform suicide prevention measures].’
-Interim Report of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide.
‘The Inquiry report indicates that while there is no indicator of knowledge or intent to contribute to alleged unlawful behaviours … that there’s a responsibility to know, to be curious to understand what is going on in your organisation.’
-General Angus Campbell, Chief of the Defence Force, responding to questions why senior officers didn’t know about war crimes.
Good decision making in three words:
Be attentively curious.
(Why ‘attentively’? It adds a level of intention and attention and process.)
Bad things routinely happen because good and competent people were not curious. They didn’t think or ask ‘Why are you doing this?’ ‘What made that happen?’ ‘What did you learn from that?’ Good and competent people will, by default, accept things on face value.
Which is why we must direct good and competent people to Be Attentively Curious.
The wonderful thing about curiosity is it doesn’t require expertise or positional power or inclusion in your job description, or permission.
Asking at every level - ‘Help me to understand’ is often all it takes to prevent harm.
Even if you think do understand - it’s interesting to ask someone else their understanding. To ask them to talk you through their understanding.
If good and competent people know that at least one superior or subordinate may randomly ask ‘Help me to understand…’ they are more likely to pay attention to their decision making, and the decision making of those who report to them.
If they know they may be asked to explain their decision, they may adopt a conscious process such as the Five Steps to a Good Decision so they can show their working out, if asked. They are less likely to rely on positional power, or cronyism, or justify their inaction after an event with ‘I didn’t know …’.
We may not be a decision maker. But if an organisation makes it part of its culture to ask ‘Help me to understand …’ we support those who make decisions, and those who report to them. We become dozens or hundreds or thousands of random auditors of our organisation.
Our curiosity helps others to be curious.
Three words to transform any organisation:
Be attentively curious.
Meeting Budget.
If a boss conscripts 18 punters to a two hour meeting, they're spending the equivalent of one person doing an entire week's work.
Does anyone keep score?
Is it anyone’s job to say ‘In hindsight… that wasn’t a good investment of time’?
I suspect HR would spring into action if a punter failed to turn up to work for a week.
Why isn’t it one of the jobs of HR - Human Resources - to track how effectively an organisation uses its humans? To keep a record of every meeting, the times, the number of participants, and ask for a report from every boss in a week, month, or year of the return on investment of every meeting?
If bosses knew they had to report on this quarterly, would bosses give more thought to whether a meeting was as effective as an email, or post on the organisation’s platform of choice?
Should HR - Human Resources - advise and support bosses on how to improve their use of the humans based on their meeting reports?
Could bosses’ bonuses be tied to the money they saved by not having meetings?
Could each boss’s budget include a Meeting Budget - where a boss had to predict how many meetings and thus a salary equivalent they planned to spend? If bosses were required to do this by HR - Human Resources - would that encourage bosses to plan their year better, based on their budgeted number of meetings?
Imagine it: a month before the end of the financial year the boss emails telling the punters they’d expended their meeting budget and they had to make some meeting cutbacks.
Oh the cheering …
The Reality of Today.
Identify where you are. Pitilessly
- Henry Kissinger.
The great risk of goal setting and vision stating and promoting and marketing and PR-ing and the other many aspirational declarations to the world of what we aspire to be tomorrow - is we overlook the reality of where we are today.
Which is usually messier and more uncomfortable than where we want to be. Which may be the reason we loudly shout where we intend to be tomorrow.
We tend to ignore or reject any evidence or voice about today, choosing to direct attention to where we are headed.
We may also point to where we were yesterday. Our noble and righteous history and journey, and the saints and martyrs and pioneers who sacrificed to get us here.
The result is we ignore the problems of today by spending today acting as if we live in an idealistic tomorrow or yesterday. When tomorrow comes, we act as if it’s the next day.
Until inevitably, maybe not tomorrow or the next day, or year - the reality of today punches us in the face.
What You Felt.
You’ve given a lot of evidence about what you felt. I want to know what she said or what she did, which you said amounted to obstruction …
- Justice Michael Lee, Federal Court of Australia Lehrmann v Network Ten
In Step 1 of the Five Steps to a Good Decision we give ourselves permission to turn inward and feel all the messy and irrational emotions swirling inside in response to an event demanding our decision. It’s a selfish, mostly internal act of retreat.
Once largely purged of our ‘I feel’, in Step 1, we liberate ourselves to turn outward in Steps 2 to 5.
To see, hear, and serve others, in a visible, process of showing our working out.
Critical Friend.
Appoint a ‘critical friend’ outsider to help your team or organisation make decisions at your annual offsite retreat.
Or…
Create and maintain a workplace where everyone - workers and bosses and volunteers - feels informed and knowledgeable and confident and safe and respectful and respected and expected to criticise any time.
Attend.
The Federal Court of Australia live streams some trials attracting public interest.
At the beginning of each sitting day, the presiding Justice makes the following statement:
‘Just a reminder to people who are WATCHING of an Order I made … that members of the public who ATTEND the hearing via the Youtube platform available on the online Court List do so on the condition that they …’ etc.
The Federal Court recognises that in 2023, the interest of justice requires the public to ATTEND a court and witness its proceedings via electronic means. The Court does not see itself and thus Justice limited by the size of the courtroom or the number of seats within it. That’s just geography.
The same can be argued for attendance at school in 2023. The best interests of students should not be constrained by where they live, or the ability of their school to attract good teachers, or the size of their classroom or playground or oval or gym.
Students should be able to attend school by means other than sitting at their desks.
It’s just geography.
Deeds are Dear.
With rare exceptions, you can recognise what an organisation values least:
Listen to what it talks about.
Because talk is cheap.
Committed to. Totally committed to. The paramount concern. 110% committed to…
‘But my organisation does live its deeds!’ I hear you protest. Lucky you.
Or it might be its talk is drowned out by its deeds.
Good Decisions Are Not Made in Meetings.
Step 1: Step Back. In a meeting, there is nowhere to step back. Meetings are the workplace equivalent of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Performance spaces. Most often occupied by one person – the ‘leader’ – reciting a soliloquy. The rest of us sink back into our chairs - assuming we’re not at a Standup - (did Standups survive Covid?) behind our poker faces. There’s nowhere to wallow and scream ‘Why me?!’
Step 2: Define the Issue. It should be in the UN Convention on Human Rights that to call a meeting without defining the issue to attendees beforehand is a Crime Against Humanity. Forget Agendas. They’re overrated. Think about the Widget. What do we need to do to make our Widget? Begin the email with: ‘You are invited to meet to help me to decide whether…’. Sounds clunky? Yes. Three reasons: One, we don’t get invitations like that. Two: meeting convenors are uncomfortable about being open that they are decision makers because people in organisations are not used to being decision makers and to say as such sounds pompous. Three (and most importantly): Meetings are not held to make decisions. They are most often a power flex.
Step 3: Assess the Information. Information can be collected at meetings by the decision maker convenor. It can be assessed through discussion. Combining the two is not ideal. Information is being collected via the attendees and assessment has already begun in everyone’s minds. Usually Jack will say something and Jill will respond, often before Jack has finished. Or at the very least, Jill will be rehearsing her response in her mind, slowly disembowelling Jack’s speech while it’s still alive. Jack will often produce new information (otherwise, why is he here?) that may trigger a response in Jill where she needs to Step 1 – Step Back. She can’t. She needs to perform. She responds with her thinly veiled emotion. The rest of us are being entertained. Or bored.
Step 4: Check for Bias. Meetings could be like filtration plants where biases, conflicts of interest, prejudices and prejudgements are exposed and named and acknowledged and purged. People have to feel very safe in meetings for this to happen. As meetings are where we get to see each other stride along the catwalk while we size each other up, we’ve all got our best makeup on our serious faces and stomachs pulled in and we’re not going to show our blemishes. Finally, meetings are the breeding places of Groupthink.
Step 5: Give a Hearing. Meetings could be an opportunity for a person likely to be affected by a decision to be heard on why it shouldn’t be made. But this smacks of ganging up. ‘Hey, Fred! What are your thoughts on the office restructure that will result in you losing half your staff?’ Poor Fred just wants to Step Back and do a job search on LinkedIn. He’s in no fit state to contribute to his survival.
A meeting might be part of Step 2 or Step 3.
But only with an exceptional list of attendees should a decision be made in a meeting.
Sinner.
'If another lawyer checked your boss's work as closely as your boss checks yours, they'd find as many if not more mistakes.'
- Advice from a senior lawyer to articled clerks.
'I might be wrong.'
- Abbot Placid Spearritt at the beginning and end of every speech.
'Remember - we're all sinners.'
- Advice from the former Anglican Archbishop of Perth, Roger Herft
''Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?" "I am a sinner. This the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner." '
- Pope Francis
Weakened by Power.
And so it was a fundamental change culturally. Because before that the aristocracy of JSOC had been measured by their machismo or their strength. And very quickly your value was largely determined by your willingness and ability to think through the problem. We had to become the smart guys.
A sign of intelligence is the ability to recognise the better argument than your own.
You can’t recognise the superior argument to yours, if you don’t know what your argument is. An argument requires two parties. Argument helps refine our position.
Positional power, if routinely deployed, removes the need to think. It thus weakens the ability to think, and thus to argue. Decisions are made based on positional power, which inevitably sows seeds of discontent, conflict, complaint, and open challenge.
Threats loom large and are defended with positional power. Internally and externally.
With every response from strength, we grow, (both individually and organisationally) intellectually and morally weaker. Requiring more positional power to be deployed to quell disquiet.
Inevitably, a threat materialises from a higher power. A better argument.
Collapse.
This is the story of empires. Of organisations. Of people.
Weakened by power.
