Quality

We all strive for quality, in our lives, in our relationships, in our products in our services… Quality is all about value.

Values are as diverse as people are. So what does it mean to produce quality products, to provide quality services to your customers? In our modern globalized world we no longer have the luxury of understanding quality only in terms of our own value system. We cannot simply choose one set of values and base our whole production process around that set. What happens if we enter a new market? What happens if something changes in the opinion of customers?  How can you make effective decisions in a world with so many unanswered questions?

First we need to acknowledge the fact that almost every interaction in the modern world means an encounter with a different system of values from our own. This is really what it means to segment your market into different target groups.

Values change, sometimes they change of themselves, and sometimes they change as a consequence of interacting with other value systems. Understanding these dynamics means understanding what drives the changes around. This understanding enables you to achieve your own goals more effectively: you can adjust to the new situation while preserving the value of your offer to clients. In this way you can make change work for you.

Crossing Signals specializes in mapping out the dynamics of the value systems in your context. We employ a unique approach partly based on Robert Quinn’s notion of Competing Values, this makes the insights we provide immediately applicable to both your short and long term strategic goals.

Conflicting values drive change, that wisdom has been with us since antiquity. Now there is a way of making this work for you…

Identity switch

“You are the choices you make.” I don’t know who said it anymore, but it rings so very true. The choices you make lead to actions, lead to results and lead to experience that together with the success of your actions defines who you are. If you do it right, your life will be a continuous process of improvement, an incremental series of steps that improve the person you are in any area of your life. Be it in relationships, business or physical prowess.

If you want to make choices that benefit you and give you the opportunity to improve your life, one question needs to be answered before you can start making choices and act upon them. You need to ask yourself the question: “Who am I?” For without a foundation to build upon, how are you going to make choices that benefit you not only in the short term, but also in the long term? How are you going to evaluate your choices? By what standard will they be successful? For that you need to know what you stand for, what values you attach to living your life and use these as a measuring stick for your actions.

Wait a minute? My choices lead to who I am, but I need to know who I am to make valid choices? This is what is called a conundrum, the famous chicken and the egg question. The statement in the first paragraph suggests that the choices you make lead to who you are, while the question on who you are needs to be answered before you can make valid choices.

Solving it is relatively easy if we take it to a higher level of abstraction. In this case that of intention. The intention of the question in paragraph two is the right one, and by reframing it, we retain the intention while solving the conundrum. It shouldn’t be “Who am I?” It should be two questions, the first being “Who am I at this moment?” and the second being “Who do I want to be?”. “Who am I?” suggests something fixed, something that remains constant for the rest of your life. It excludes change, since change is the opposite of remaining constant. If you always remain the same, you act in a very consistent way, and consistency is the most valued trait a person can have in our society. If someone is consistent, he can be trusted and depended upon. But, what if circumstances change and the consistency of our behavior starts to be the cause of our failure to make the right choices? One definition of insanity is as follows: ”Insanity is to over and over repeat the same behavior to get new results”. Let’s not go down the road of insanity and claim that who we are is a fixed thing that never changes. We all know the fallacy of that statement.

I suggest that in order to answer both questions and thereby setting up our identity, it is crucial to know what we value in life, how we perceive our surroundings and the effects of our actions. The values we adhere to as an individual are a much more solid base for our decision making. Our behavior may change when circumstances change, but the values we strive for rarely do. Off course even your values may change over time, but it takes many years and in most cases a traumatic experience.

To know what we value in life takes introspection and reflection on our behavior. In this process, the feedback of others we trust is essential. Not only in recognizing what we value, but also in checking whether our behavior is consistent with these values. To get a clear picture of what happens around us and our impact on these surroundings, we also need more than one point of view. We need people providing us feedback through different ways of perceiving what happens. People with different world views, but who share most of our values, so we can communicate, collaborate and achieve a multidimensional (integrated) picture of what’s going on. To grow and become more and more the person we want to be and can be, we clearly need to be part of a group (team) of people we trust. Trust to help us grow through acting together and through providing feedback on our behavior and actions.

As a team of different people with different identities, the team itself will have its own identity based on the values and the goal its members share. An identity that can be made much more clear to the individual members and thereby provide a base for the team’s choices and bring focus to its efforts. In the end the team is the choices it makes and for that it needs to know its own identity.

Communicating meaning

Communication. Let us first start with defining it for the purpose of this article; Communication is the process used to convey information between people. A pre-requisite for communication is a common language that all parties involved understand. This is where it becomes tricky. What is a common language? Is it the language we speak in the country we live in? Is it the language we speak as experts in our field? Is it the language we use when explaining stuff to our children? Or, is it the body language we use to express how we feel? Depending on context any mix of the above is used to communicate between people. What we at Crossing Signals like to add to the mix is the language of metaphors.

Why metaphors? For the simple reason that when people use certain words to express themselves, others will have different values attached to those words and since we are not aware of the differences, miscommunication is almost unavoidable. Metaphors can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. A very interesting book on this subject is ‘Metaphores we live by’ by George Lakoff.

Let me give you an example. We have a group of four where one man stands up to express his vision on what needs to be done. When he uses the word vision, it is about new ideas, concepts and possibilities. When hearing the word vision, the second person expects to hear about a new structure and rules to adhere to that will improve his situation. The third expects to hear about concrete results to aim for that can be tested and validated based on facts. The fourth expects a story about values that can be achieved by working together with kindred spirits. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that these four will have a serious challenge in integrating and consolidating their wishes into a common purpose, shared goals, and dare I say it, Vision.

The same goes for many other words we use as metaphors of values we want to reach or aspire to. Truth, justice, respect, honor all are things that are perceived differently given the context you are in. “If my daughter were to be seen speaking to a man that is not her brother or her intended husband, my honor is compromised and I am justified in killing her.” Unimaginable in Western culture, but a very clear example of the same word meaning very different things depending on context. Within teams this is off course a much more subtle process, as my example on vision showed. A process that is rarely if ever addressed because it is simply not acknowledged or brought up for fear of it taking too long and delivering too little. But just imagine if we could create a vision that is grounded in a solid structure, is supported by facts and is based on and delivers values a target audience will aspire to? This would be the ideal result of collaboration between all four people in my example in the previous paragraph. It would bring an integrated vision that has something for everyone without the dreaded compromises of one dimensional approaches.

At Crossing Signals, this is one of the most important things we do. Make transparent to each team member what other members mean when they use the words (metaphors) they do! As a result, we let everybody contribute with what he or she is good at, even excels at. As a result we help teams create integrated multi-dimensional solutions that add value to all people in their target audience. We create an understanding in the teams we work with: the subtle differences in the meaning and value people address to words are essential to creating a common language and provide a solid base for trust and respect. We provide feedback on the values and worldviews underlying people’s choice of words. This in turn increases transparency, provides a clear road to a common purpose and shared goals, and improves the chances of working in your strength with others who do the same. As said, this allows everybody to do what he or she does best and to create ideal solutions grounded in a common purpose, instead of trying to be good at everything and ending up with mediocre compromises. It gives people the means to be authentic, unique and happy in the understanding that they are adding value to a team by being themselves. There is no better motivator. What is more, it helps overcome one of the most important obstacles for effective and creative teamwork, you like to be held accountable for something you are good at.

Accountability in Teams

The philosopher Nietzsche often accused his fellow Europeans of acting like pitiful herd animals. His rather negatively framed point being that the majority chooses to subordinate individual choice to the collective voice of the group they belong to. Having put his finger on an important trait of human behavior, Nietzsche focused on its bad side effect; the herds following bad leaders without thinking, letting the leaders kill original thinking in the process. Right he is, but we wouldn’t be doing it without an upside. To belong to and be protected by a group of people instead of going it alone, is what helped us survive the first one hundred thousand years of our existence as Homo Sapiens. It is therefore a very natural thing, even a biological imperative, for us to fit in and conform.

In our business, the effective functioning of teams in an innovative and creative context, we need to direct this behavior to let people fit in while retaining original thinking. An important tool to support our efforts is our collaboration scorecard. The scorecard measures what people value in relation to the context they operate in. It allows us to assign roles to the individuals of a team to let them work into their own and each other’s strengths and maximize team effectiveness. The roles capture the individual’s strengths given the context he or she needs to operate in. For example, the role of ‘coordinator’ is assigned to someone who has a natural inclination to maintain the structure and flow of a system. Someone with this role finds it important to be dependable and reliable, to work according to clear and concise processes and agreements. The role of ‘innovator’ is assigned to someone who likes to facilitate adaptation and change. An innovator sees and conceptualizes needed change; he or she makes change tangible for others in inviting ways. Two very different roles that based on different values have to work together in different ways depending on context. In a business development context, the innovator will have the lead in creating new products and business models, with the coordinator ensuring that innovations are absorbed into the standing organization as efficiently as possible. In a business process redesign context, the coordinator is in the lead, with the innovator coming up with ideas for increasing efficiency.

During the last year, we have collected quite a body of evidence and one interesting pattern keeps emerging. Two roles rarely, if ever, surface as an individual’s dominant role. These ‘unpopular’ roles have to do with enforcing team discipline and providing feedback on the behavior of group members. In other words, they are about accountability; confronting people with the consequences of their actions. It appears that very few people have a natural inclination to take these roles within a team. At first we thought this pattern showed a cultural bias. Since most of our clients are Dutch, we assumed that this avoidance of confrontational behavior is a typical aspect of Dutch culture. In the Netherlands, people embrace a conciliatory style of cooperation, where consensus is an important goal and people’s sensitivities are taken very seriously. This behavior is such an integral part of our culture, that we have introduced a special word for it: the verb “polderen”. As it turns out the emerging pattern is more than just a cultural thing.

Patrick Lencioni is an author and entrepreneur with a longstanding interest in teams and team performance, and he has published several books on the subject. Recent research conducted by his company The Table Group seems to corroborate the pattern we have been observing (here). Team members find it very difficult to confront each other with counter-productive or undesirable behavior (68% of participants identify accountability as a problem in their team). The reality is that people would rather not rock the boat, and this behavior is not limited to the Netherlands. Teams that operate higher up in the organizational hierarchy are even more afflicted by this type off ineffective behavior (80%).

Based on our own experience and the findings of The Table Group we have decided to put an even greater emphasis on the part of our services where we create a context that allows difficult and confrontational forms of feedback. To make sure a team and its individuals are empowered enough to hold themselves accountable for their actions and thereby becoming far more effective. Individual sensitivities are real and play an important role in team processes, and at the same time the team needs to works together in order to achieve a common purpose and create results. To make accountability an integral part of a team’s make up, we will continue to reflect on the differing individual perceptions of the value of results and focus on the integration of these values into a common purpose as the essence of collaboration. It is well worth the effort to invest in improving the openness, mutual understanding and focus of a team in this manner. Isn’t teamwork all about communication after all?

Creative Conflict

We came to the realization recently that the essence of what we are trying to do can be called creative conflict. Our approach to teambuilding is looking for the differences and potential conflicts in the worldviews and value-systems of the team members. We make these differences explicit with our Collaboration Scorecard, this instrument enables us to compose teams that contain the kind of differences and contrast that are helpful within the context in which they operate. The method we use to do problem solving with client teams is a ‘soft system’ application of classical TRIZ. For those readers who are unfamiliar with TRIZ: TRIZ is a theory that describes a systematic way in which to do problem solving (TRIZ is a Russian acronym meaning “theory of inventive problem solving”). Innovation is all about problem solving, which makes TRIZ a very powerful way to do innovation. More on TRIZ, examples and applications can be found at www.xtriz.com.

Recently I had a chance to learn more about this method at a special workshop where we discussed an extension of classical TRIZ called OTSM-TRIZ, which has been used to teach pre-schoolers and elementary school students this method of thinking by developing and playing games. OTSM-TRIZ is another Russian acronym that basically translates into “theory of powerful thinking”. Powerful thinking… it felt like I was doing philosophy again (I was educated as a philosopher, more here. More on this particular workshop here.

This morning we taught another class at the Johan Cruyff University, which is a special program within the Hogeschool van Amsterdam which offers a masters degree in international sports management. We decided to teach the students something about creative conflict, emphasizing the idea that differences are useful provided you have an approach to complex issues and problems. Since the students of the Johan Cruyff University receive the most benefits from ideas and skills that they can apply in concrete ways, we tried to limit the conceptual stuff and spend half the time on practicing the method together with the students.

We first spend some time understanding that different individuals bring different perspectives to a situation, and integrating these perspectives helps you gain a better understanding of where you are and what you want. Then I presented the group with a short overview of the history of dialectics, from Socrates, through Hegel and Marx to Genrich Altshuller (who I consider to be a philosopher). The point was to show them how opposites (contradictions) can help you find breakthrough solutions. In the technological realm the new Samsung Upstage is a good example. The phone has twice the surface of similar models, without an increase in size. The contradiction between wanting a phone with more surface area (for a large screen and enough room for buttons) that is still small enough to function as a cellphone. In other words the phone needed to be big (in terms of surface) and small (in terms of size and weight). The TRIZ trained Samsung engineers created a solution that is both effective and elegant because of its sheer simplicity, and it looks like this.
We spent the last half of the class on working with a specific case, and this was the challenging part. I presented the group with Ajax as the case. Ajax is Amsterdam’s famous Soccer club, and it is facing a number of problems, not in the least with their performance in the competition (Ajax is supposed to be national champion, and it’s not). Some of the basic steps in problem solving using OTSM-TRIZ are identifying the relevant or most interesting parameters, the ‘properties’ of your system, and then proceeding to look for contradictions within this parameters. Conceptually this is rather abstract stuff, and the challenge was to make these concepts meaningful in a practical application. To my surprise, despite the short introduction and the abstract level of the ideas, we were pretty effective at applying the ideas to Ajax. We took some time to identify some relevant parameters, and the students came up with a couple of good ones: the organizational structure, the european context where Ajax is competing against clubs with a lot more resources, the technical level of soccer that is being taught and trained and a few more. We took the first aspect (the organization) and tried to look for the contradiction within that aspect of the whole complex entity that is Ajax. It didn’t take too long to open up some new doors. One of the students mentioned the fact that the professional management of the organization has little affinity with soccer, while the rest of the organization is passionate about soccer. That is somewhat of a contradiction. Just phrasing it in this way led to someone else mentioning that it may still be a good idea to have a professional management, with the rise of professional soccer the (financial) risks have increased, so it is a good idea to have competent decision makers on your staff. Formulating it in this way suggests a solution to the situation that integrates the different aspects, rather than forces one to choose. A simple compromise would be to just fire the management and replace them with former soccer players, and such a compromise may carry a whole new set of problems with it. The real win-win may be in looking at it as a communication problem between the management professionals and the soccer professionals. What is the added value of a professional management? What legitimizes the way the organization is currently run? How can the management professionals show their contribution and value to the rest of the organization and the stakeholders?

In this way we produced some interesting strategic questionsby just applying a limited set of OTSM-TRIZ principles to a complex case, and taking a good 20 minutes investigating the problems with a group of fresh students on an average monday morning. It was an example of really leveraging the different perspectives each of the students brought to the situation, and getting some rapid results using a systematic way to think about your problem.

Solving Problems

For quite some time, we’ve been involved with a network of people, active citizens, who have formed a platform to contribute to changing the way our society and political system works. The platform calls itself De Publieke Zaak.

Political systems are set up to provide stability and are adverse to change, as by logical extension are the decision makers inside these systems. They derive their power from the investment they have made in using the system to become successful. So much so, that the system provides the basis for their power and legitimizes it. Change is therefore not to be expected from inside incumbent political systems. The facts prove this seemingly universal truth time and time again.

Recently I was invited to join a think tank within De Publieke Zaak. This think tank is to contribute to a report on how to change and improve the functioning of the Dutch government. Part of our discussion was in a number of small groups, which was interesting and fun. There was a connection and the sense of a shared goal. Another part was a kind of idea selection process, dictated by a software system that claims to effectively manage and evaluate large amounts of creative input. We were put in cubicles and each of us had to respond to given questions with ideas. This, to me, was a huge disappointment, suddenly the whole interactive and dare I say collaborative spirit was out the window. Like a group of assembly line workers all my fellow Publieke Zaak enthousiasts were busily typing away behind their screens in the confines of their assigned cubicles. It filled me with horror!

The software system dictating my decision process had a paralyzing effect on me, which lasted for a minute or two, after which I got into a reflective mode. I abandoned my given assignment and started doing something else which I found much more useful; increasing my knowledge of post-modern philosophy. The results confirmed my suspicion on the effectiveness of the chosen software supported selection process. One of the facilitators proclaimed proudly that we had generated over 2000 ideas in the session. 2000 different ideas is no solution to any problem. It is in itself a problem, because which idea do you choose, and for what reason? Disappointment filled me from top to toe.

Then things got worse. After the software stuff a debate about the issues was started with three panel members (including former Minister Pieter Winsemius), with little interaction with the audience. The goal of the debate was to find a road to consensus. On 2000 ideas??? This shocked me. It is impossible to think that this can produce anything good, for the simple reason that a debate produces a winner and a loser. In a debate, by definition, someone always loses. One opinion is victorious over another, like a joust or a boxing match. This is the complete and utter opposite of consensus. In consensus you get everybody, no matter how different opinions may be, to share the same view. How can you dismiss the viewpoint of the one who loses the debate, and at the same time try to reach a consensus which includes that viewpoint? It cannot be done. By definition!

My second misgiving is about the desire towards consensus. One of the panel members mentioned how important it is to reach consensus on certain important values. Reach consensus on certain values? Mmmmm. Again, I don’t think this can be done. What makes people unique is the differences in their value systems. Different people, even within the same culture, company or family, have different underlying values. And we at Crossing Signals believe that this is a good thing. These differences are exactly what makes great teams so effective at innovation; they are able to understand their fundamental differences, and use that to gain more insight into the problem at hand, this produces integral and by definition better solutions. When you start generating ideas and in trying to select the right ones, you don’t want consensus, you want diversity. There is also the obvious argument that in a complex environment interests and agendas are so diverse that consensus even on simple issues is simply never reached.

In a discussion with one of the facilitators at the end of the session, he asked me what I would suggest if debate and consensus are so problematic. That was an easy question. It is all about creating dialogue and generating solutions where everybody wins. “Debate” should be substituted with ”dialogue”, where the goal is understanding each other’s differences rather than establishing the illusion of one victorious truth. In a dialogue the differences between people add to the solution instead of subtract from the solution space. Consensus can play a part in getting others to commit to solutions, never in creating solutions. Solutions created on consensus have the benefit of providing the illusion of stability, but they rarely if ever rise above a compromise. And what is the definition of a compromise? A solution that everybody can live with on the short term, but nobody is happy with in the long term.

Sports and Innovation

Last Tuesday we went to a meeting sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs (EZ in short) and hosted by The Netherlands Office of Science and Technology. The meeting was on Innovation in Sports Technology and from the moment we entered the meeting we knew there was something different going on here than what we generally experience.

On stage was Erika Terpstra, former Olympic Athlete, former member of Dutch Parliament and current member of the Netherlands Olympic Committee. I hope I am not insulting her when I say that she doesn’t show how smart she is. Actually, on stage, she doesn’t take herself very serious at all. She jokes about her own short comings with abandon, but there is no lack of ambition and passion when it comes to what she has come here to say. She takes her message seriously: Sports unite people!

The atmosphere during the breaks and in the afternoon break-out sessions is relaxed, informal and enthusiastic. Everybody is passionate about sports and it shows. People are open and willing to communicate with each other, there seem to be no, or far less hidden agenda’s. A breath of fresh air compared to the frantic, ‘In your face’ atmosphere of a business context. On most business seminars people are openly hunting and for most there is a lack of passion for what they do. Most attendants keep their cards close to their chest; so unlike the sports context which is clearly about more than the bottom line! However vague the goal essentially is, everybody wants to improve the enjoyment of sports. Sports is about being active and doing something that acknowledges your body and thereby yourself and your team mates.That experience unites the room.

We talked with two American Professors (MIT and Virginia Tech), and two Europeans, one from Austria and one from Germany. The funny thing was that the American professors who have to work in a competitive environment were very open about what they did and we should call them anytime to discuss and share ideas. The professors from Austria and Germany, who are used to working in a collaborative and government supported environment were cautious and had both had bad experiences where people stole their ideas and left them in the cold. If ever there was a contradiction. Funny thing is, the American Professors are jealous of the European way of doing government sponsored research, in stead of their 80% business sponsored research model that is more and more characterized by fighting over IPR’s instead of doing valuable research. Apparently they hadn’t talked to their European colleagues yet.

Coincidence? I am afraid not. In the US model you need to constantly prove that your research can improve the bottom line of the funding companies. A nice statistic is that US universities make much more money on ‘selling’ research than they do on IPR’s, 80% to be exact. Even including Stanford and Google. In Europe mixing business and research is a taboo, and therefore can never be about improving the bottom line but has to be research that stimulates the European Knowledge economy. This is pretty vague, so who decides whether it does? Civil servants off course! Based on Government and EU policy. That makes getting funded about two things. Knowing how the system works and knowing what the politicians and by extension their civil servants find interesting. A good idea that is not politically favourable doesn’t stand a chance. Suddenly it is about doing research that helps a politician gain or retain power. Call me a cynic, but if you are a person with a good idea, in Europe, you will always see the big companies get the big subsidies. Hundred and fifty million (yes, 150.000.000€) from a Dutch innovation fund to a marketing campaign for the Philips Senseo tea springs to mind.

Europe shouldn’t copy the US system, it is far from perfect. At the moment, Universities are more and more fighting over IPR’s with research funding companies. All with the hope of owning the IPR’s for the next Google. This is highly illogical in face of the earlier mentioned statistic. For Europe, I am of a mind to compromise between the two systems.

First, whomever funds the research gets the IPR! Let us copy the open sports mentality. Off course the individual athlete doesn’t like his improved shoe, skate or training methods known to other athletes before he has won some medals, come to think of it, he probably won’t like it until he has won them all. But, he also knows that if it improves the whole of his sport, there will be more spectators, more opportunities for sponsoring and more money to be made in his relatively short professional life. Some even want a level playing field in order to really show they are the best. In the end isn’t it about the record books? We all still remember Bob Beamon! So, let’s offer the athlete who contributes to successful research a sponsorship to last him the rest of his short career. He’ll love it, takes his mind off of sponsors, management and on to the task at hand, improving and winning. I see some nice parallels with universities here. They are good at research so let’s keep them focused on doing their job instead of managing IPR’s.

Second to this openness, let us also copy the approach of sports towards innovation. It is about teamwork and involving as many disciplines as possible. An athlete in the current environment can not win alone. Not even Roger Federer can do without a trainer and a coach during the Grand Slams. Roger is a team effort. The team can not be copied! Don’t go for point solutions, go for integrated ones that are much harder to copy and by extension have a much longer life cycle.

Third, and this is something I think is also already happening in Sports, combine the power of governments to improve the infrastructure for education and research (providing the people with places to do sports), with the power of business to select ideas with potential and fund them on an individual basis (sponsor the talent they believe in and fits their image). Ideally that would mean 50/50 funding between government and business so government facilitates and business helps to choose, both supporting development in their own way.

But I am probably just pissing everybody off for inviting the Devil to dinner. The US universities for having to share power with the ever untrustworthy government (didn’t George W. Bush singlehandedly prohibit stem cell research?) and European Universities for reducing their independence from the ever untrustworthy business. Still I have some hopes, because all professors I have spoken to this year are jealous of the other continent’s success. Funny thing, human nature.

Same emperor, new clothes

It’s a grey gloomy Tuesday morning in October, and we are on our way to the Dutch bible belt. We are again invited to Cordys’s annual Cordial meeting at Kasteel Vanenburg in Putten; a day full of networking and lots of tech talk on the frontier where technology meets business. Location and catering are again impeccable, and though we can’t escape the feeling that there are less people each year, a good crowd has shown up for this year’s meeting. Last year was all about Service Oriented Architecture, this year the emphasis is on Business Process Management. A different take on essentially the same solution.

Cordys is a Dutch producer of Business Process Management software based on a Service Oriented Architecture. It’s headed by Jan Baan, former CEO of Baan, the ERP software producer that notoriously went bust in the late nineties. He is one of the keynote speakers this morning, and presents us with a history lesson. Baan is eager to show that history has some tough lessons to teach. His vision on business process management software, he confesses, was “naïve” (he uses the word four times) and has taught him lessons that have off course been incorporated in the Cordys solution. Monolithic systems are a thing of the past (take that, Oracle and SAP!), it is about flexibility and has to be human-centric. I will return to the human-centric demand! He seems remarkably open as he speaks of the mistakes of yesterday and the pain of today, he even mentions his time in prison.

It is interesting to see how content driven this guy is. He really sees, understands, and cares about the complexities of his models. Here is a salesman with a passion for the product he’s selling. It’s a rather unique combination, and it’s convincing. The Cordys Suite (an all in one SOA and BPM solution) wraps all of your existing data and applications. It is a solution to a stubborn and expensive problem; legacy software. The solution is flexible, modular, and can be used to design any uniquely structured process without having to give up on existing investments. It really puts the user in charge. Or does it?

After a number of other speakers and plenty of complex diagrams I am struck by a fairly obvious absence of the knowledge worker in all of this. The term ‘human-centric’ is used, but it is being used to refer to tasks that can be set before the user and managed using the system. Tasks are not people! That is what you get with a process oriented approach; a focus on tasks and activities, not on people. The only one addressing the fact that people are event driven and not process driven is Hans van Grieken of Capgemini. I am afraid though that nobody in the room got the difference. We are not driven by having a mobile communication service, we are driven by the phone ringing.

We share Cordys’ vision on the importance of reality driving the software design process, and not the other way around. ICT is a means to an end, and in the end business considerations are what counts. Flexibility is a crucial aspect of the applications of the future. The days when knowledge workers are forced to adapt their preferred way of doing things to the design limitations of their software tools are behind us (and we’re all much better off because of it). Technology should serve not dictate the work process.

Information and communication technology should be and in the future will be as flexible as the whims and desires of the knowledge worker. Our children, the next generation of knowledge workers, are growing up with the internet and mobile technology everywhere. They will have completely different and much higher expectations of the software tools they work with. These technologies will need to provide them with instant information on what they are working on, and instant access to friends, family and other knowledge workers (even those not working for your company). Their social lives will inevitably blend with their business activities. Get used to the idea! There is nothing you can do to stop it! Whether you block Skype, Facebook or MSN, or are open about it will become a reason not to work for you in the future. These new communication tools are how young people gain information and exchange experiences and they expect its myriad possibilities from their future workplace.

These kids will not only be your new workforce, but your customers as well. Most of the process and client knowledge resides in the heads of your current knowledge workers. In our view it is not necessary to make a great effort extracting this knowledge from the knowledge worker in order to feed it into some kind of system. The best thing to do is to facilitate and support the knowledge worker herself, empower her to be flexible about what the software can do so that she is in control of the customer experience and not the system. The system is not as flexible as a human being and will not be so in our lifetime. Help your employees by providing better insight in customer behaviour and the best products they can offer a specific customer, but let them decide based on their experience and customer contact. You are better off training your workforce to trust their instinct then to put them in process driven straight jackets that will make them lose interest, become indifferent to your customer’s needs and burn them out. You may win a couple of thousand euros a year on efficiency, but will loose millions in missed opportunities and reintegration costs for burned out employees.

The Cordys pitch very explicitly addresses issues of control, the main concerns of management, not the knowledge worker. In the end the main motivation behind using the Cordys suite is realizing a steady flow of real-time, up-to-date, reliable information, so that management can control and optimize processes. If you have had SAP experts over at your company, this must sound terribly familiar. Efficiency and management information are still the main selling points. The software primarily addresses and solves problems important to management. Even though the Cordys software has the potential to empower the individual knowledge worker, making them more effective in addition to being efficient, these needs are not addressed. It is a one dimensional approach and shows a top-down, efficiency driven, old school, industrialized perspective on organizations and processes. The globalised world can not be conquered with a one-dimensional approach. The best you can do is prolong your suffering while slowly dying out like the dinosaur you are.

We see the market catching on to a number of important work related trends. ICT systems need to be designed around existing realities and processes, and need to be based on a client focus. Flexibility is key, which is what mass customization means. But it is still wrapped in old-school values. Your knowledge workers need much more control over what the systems can do for them, not just for you as a manager. They are closest to your clients, they have the most valuable knowledge, and ICT solutions should really be planned around their needs. This requires a bottom-up approach next to the top-down approach Cordys promotes. Both are needed and management needs to bring focus to enabling and facilitating next to monitoring and controlling. We see the need for a fundamental change in how organizations are structured, how and where decisions are made, and what it means to be a global knowledge based service provider. Network organization 2.0 anyone?

The Cordys technology responds to some of these needs, yet it is also clear that the Cordys proposition is based on the old paradigm. Power and control in the top and little attention to the needs of people and how to get the most value out of them. There is a lot of work for us to do still…

To affinity and beyond; Paradoxical Leadership

Peter Drucker said: “Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things.” Doing things right is easily measured. All you need to do is define criteria for efficiency, cost reduction, etc. and put a reward structure in place for meeting these criteria. Doing the right things is another matter entirely. There are no easily measurable criteria that I know of; the bottom line seems to be the only one in use. The quintessential question for leadership few managers ask themselves is: “What are the right things to do and am I doing them?” Answering this question and actually doing the right things is what sets leaders apart. The knack of knowing what things to do and acting upon this knowledge is not given to everybody.

There also is this other part to leadership. The decisions about what to do cannot be delegated; someone has to make them, on his/her own. If they are the right decisions: you are revered as a champion, if they are not, you are likely to fall hard. Either way you are in a very lonely position. There are plenty of choices about what to do in today’s world, and the risks involved in actually choosing and acting upon the choices made are continuously increasing. That is why we have so very few leaders, not many men or women would take the burden of today’s complex choices and increasing risks and bear them alone.

Let us go back to management. There is an old saying: “If all you have is a hammer, all your problems become nails.” Let me add: “If you are in a hole, stop digging!” Most managers today seem to combine the two and are only using shovels, so all their problems are converted to needing bigger holes. They are getting rewarded because they meet all criteria of good management, but they’re not being judged on doing the right things. For the sake of space I will not go into examples. You know what I mean, and if you don’t, just open any business oriented newspaper or magazine and look at the amount of money that is being rewarded for shoddy work. (Enron, Parmalat, Ahold come to mind). At some point in time digging is not the best thing to be doing, filling the hole might have been a better idea.

We recently got a request for helping a department of a big consumer electronics firm to adapt its management style to what its employees expect, thereby empowering them and making optimal use of their unique talents and abilities. Different cultures were also part of the equation, but for the sake of convenience I will leave that part out of this picture. Most people associate management style with finding your affinity as a manager, bringing out the ‘you’ in your behaviour as it were. They believe that congruent behaviour (authentic and predictable) will help you develop a style that is effective and suits both you and your employees. If style where such a simple thing as being friendly, being tough or being thoughtful, or any other one dimensional trait, there would be a point to all this albeit a very limited one. But consider this: all your employees want you to be friendly to them. They also want you to be tough on people who step out of line. Come to think of it all your employees want you to think things through, for them.

Unfortunately life is not this simple, being everything at the same time to everybody is impossible. In our world the context changes continuously and so should the accompanying management style. Every context requires a different approach and so does every employee you have. The question is not whether your management style fits you, but whether it fits your context. Management style is not about you it is about how you respond to what is happening around you. Context is superior in the relation you have with it, reality drives all events, so don’t let your ego get in the way.

Now we come to the central point of this piece. To us Management style is context dependent and is about your ability to show the right style given the context you are in. Every individual has certain affinities, preferences for dealing with situations. Some managers like to control a situation whereas other managers would rather provide the freedom to act. These managers do see when a context is better dealt with through control or freedom, but under pressure they will act according to their affinities and go with what they feel instead of what they know they should be doing. The point is, that your natural affinities will make you effective in one situation, thereby successful, but those very same affinities might prove disastrous in another situation. If the context requires control and the person’s first inclination is to give people freedom . . . . . Well you can paint the picture yourself. The wisdom in leadership is in understanding these two things: is your natural affinity (‘style’) effective for this context, and if not, can you produce the appropriate style or do you need someone else? Someone that is preferably already a member of your team!

This is where Paradoxical leadership comes in, recognizing how to act given your context and who to put in charge given this context. As the manager of a team of people, you should always keep an eye out for people’s egos taking on contexts that should be dealt with by those better equipped to deal with this context. That is why you need to know the affinities of the team of people you are leading and let them deal with contexts they have affinities for. Not only does this solve the “It’s lonely at the top” aspect of leadership – you are delegating your leadership according to who is best suited to deal with the situation – it also solves the earlier mentioned department’s empowerment issue and the use of its team’s unique talents and abilities. Three flies in one stroke!

Paradoxical leadership is about reflection on what is happening around you and acting accordingly, even if your actions seem to contradict earlier actions. This reflection is much easier if done with a diverse group of people, as is the subsequent delegation process of leadership. There are very few leaders who do the right thing in any context, because the individual that sees any context for what it is, is a very unique individual indeed. Under pressure we all revert to our natural affinity, which means that most people will use their hammer even when their problem is a hole. The solution in this case is very simple; build a team of people with different affinities that has the ability to choose and adapt as a whole!

Let us take a start-up as an example. First you need the freedom to generate ideas, structure them into concepts, package them into products that you can sell, sell them and make money. Second, you need to put rational goals in place to grow your business. Third you need to set up internal processes to improve efficiency, control the flow of money and manage the risks. Fourth, if you grow big enough, you need to support your employees with career opportunities, training, et cetera. The first is about freedom and focus on the market, the second is about control and focus on the market, the third is about control and internal focus and the fourth is about freedom and internal focus. The challenge is, that though these are phases, certainly by the time you reach the fourth they all happen at the same time. Paradoxical leadership is not only phase dependent, that would make it easy, it is about adapting to the challenges you meet when confronting them all at the same time.
Back to the manager stuck in a hole. Why not help him gather teams around him with the ability to look at the same situation from different viewpoints, with different tools to adapt and in the process give him an opportunity to continuously adapt his leadership to the given context? In other words make a paradoxical leader out of him!

Behoudziekte

De verbureaucratiseerde mens
in de pluralistische
egalitaire
vergadercultuur
produceert slechts woorden.
Argumenten zonder kracht
die slechts leiden to afleiding
vullen het vacuüm
met leegte.

De sprekers komen tot
beslissingen
die niet leiden
tot actie
niet voortkomen
uit toewijding
noch verbinden
noch inspireren.

Het platgeslagen
van inhoud ontdane
compromis
regeert,
alsof de eeuwige
behoudzucht
ons bestaan
met zin
vervult.

De toekomst wacht
en luistert
en hoort
van ons
slechts onmacht,
vervreemding.
De verdwaalde massa
produceert
een onthand
en roerloos
zwijgen.