Linchpin

In his most recent book Linchpin, Seth Godin takes you on an search through the hidden sides of … yourself and what you are capable of – if only you were not scared. Godin – who is an outsider to the psychoblable literature and doesn’t get caught into therapy language – talks about putting passion into your work.

A linchpin is the person who is indispensable, because they refuse to become an interchangeable part, someone who merely follows the manual. In the hardware store, the linchpin is a lightweight little piece that holds the wheel to the axle.

Emotional Labor

In the below one-minute interview, Seth Godin talks about one of the key-concepts of a linchpin: emotional labor.

You can also have a look at the wikipedia definition of emotional labor and you will find that this is one of those terms that get blurry the more you try to analyze and dissect them. My take on the subject of emotional labor is that it is that part of your work where you make a connection and a difference for the recipient of your work.

In that sense, Linchpin is a wake-up call to tell us that emotional labor is available to all of us, but is rarely exploited as a competitive advantage. In the words of Godin: “We spend the time and energy trying to perfect our craft, but we don’t focus on the skills and interactions that will allow us to stand out and become indispensable to our organization.”

To Be Or Not To Be (A Linchpin)?

In Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote: ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’. In the same way, one could say that there is no such thing as a dead-end job; but the lack of emotional labor ‘makes it so’.

In every job there’s a chance to lead, to make change, to connect and to create tiny breakthroughs. The study of hospital workers by Amy Wrzesniewski, that I mentioned in the previous article of this series, showed this very clearly.

Bringing love to work when I and my peers don’t feel like it. That is my job. And the people who do that the best keep getting rewarded for it. Hospital workers don’t get to whine about their hurting backs or mopping up vomit day-in day-out. White collar workers like us shouldn’t whine about how hard it is to be generous and creative and flexible.

To Stand Out Or To Fit In?

In a factory, doing a job that is not yours is outright dangerous. But now – in the post-industrial era, doing the thing that is not getting done is essential. Godin continues by saying that “Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process (…) but if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre”.

Emotional labor is pulling ourselves up to stand out instead of repressing ourselves in order to fit in. This requires you to lean into whatever you are doing instead of just standing by.

Art

According to Godin: “If art is a human connection that causes someone to change his mind, then you are an artist.” Art requires the emotional labor of doing something difficult, taking a risk and extending yourself. By explicitly using the word ‘art‘ Godin challenges his readers to think about their work differently.

Your labor is no longer an interchangeable commodity. It has become art because it changed the recipient of your work. When you are a customer service rep, a consultant or a team-leader and you elevate each interaction to make a difference for your recipient, you are an artist.

The art you created exists by virtue of the enormous emotional and professional risk you have taken. It takes gut to bring more humanity to your work, instead of more rules.

Marcus Aurelius

Love and work bring meaning to life. The hardest part to align them according to our strengths. Happiness turns out to be about knowing our strengths. But first things first: what is it exactly we are after?

Reframing the Question

In the last chapter of the book the Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt underscores the importance of asking the right question.  It makes sense to pause and examine the kind of answer we are expecting whenever we ask for the ‘meaning’ of something.

To ask “what is the meaning of life” is not asking to define life. Rather than expecting a direct answer, we are hoping for some enlightenment – or an aha experience. An insight in which things we have not understood before begin to make sense.

So what we are really after is not the purpose OF work but the purpose WITHIN work. So we will not get hooked into a debate on ‘do you live to work or do you work to live?’. Instead we dive a little deeper. The below paragraphs and drawings are all inspired on the last chapter of Haidt’s magnificent 2009 best-seller – more in particular: the paragraph called ‘Love and Work’.

Job, Career or Calling?

Recent research suggests that most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career or a calling.

If you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money and you tend to look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead.

If you see your work as a career you have larger goals of advancement and promotion. The pursuit of these goals often energizes you and you sometimes take work home because you want to get the job done properly. Yet at times you wonder why you work so hard.

If you see your work as a calling however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling. You see your work as contributing to a greater good. You have frequent experiences of flow during the workday and you don’t have the desire to shout ‘Thank God It’s Friday’.

Growing Instead of Fixing

Peter Senge pointed to the mechanistic mindset of change initiatives when he said “We keep bringing in mechanics–when what we need are gardeners. We keep trying to drive change–when what we need to do is cultivate change.” The same is true for work itself and the way we look at work.

When you approach employees as plants to grow  instead of robots to fix, you will easily find that you can’t fix a plant like you can fix a robot. You can only give it the right conditions: water, sun and soil and then… wait. It will do the rest.

Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants. People have this intrinsic need to contribute beyond themselves. According to Jonathan Haidt, the craving for a realization of love and work can even be found in Maslow’s pyramid as Esteem – which is mostly earned through one’s work. The question we should ask ourselves is ‘what is the best way to tap into this energy so that people can find self esteem in their work?

Aligning Instead of Alienating

The search for purpose within life turns out to be a matter of aligning love and work in your life. Getting the right relationship between you and your work is not easy. However, if you think that blue-collar workers have jobs, managers have careers and the more respected professionals (doctors, scientists and clergy) have callings, you are wrong. In his book Haidt cites research that suggests that ‘occupational self-direction‘ is the determining factor.

In earlier posts I have described this occupational self-direction as ‘job control’ and ‘job autonomy’ and came to the same conclusions. Nevertheless, I would like to quote the inspiring example he used  to state this fact. In a study of hospital workers, Amy Wrzesniewski, a psychologist at Yale University, found that the employees who cleaned bedpans and mopped up vomit, sometimes saw themselves as part of a team whose goal was to heal people. They went beyond the minimum requirements of their job description, for example by trying to brighten up the rooms of very sick patients, or by anticipating the needs of the doctors and nurses. They viewed their work as a calling, and enjoyed it far more than those who saw it as a job.

The conclusion coming out of this research in positive psychology is that most people can get more satisfaction from their work. In this respect, Haidt cites the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Vital Engagement, described as a relationship to the world that is characterized by both experiences of flow and meaning.

The first step is to know your strengths. Look for the aspects in your work that make use of your strengths. Haidt advises to re-cast and re-frame your work in order to reflect your strenghts even if that would involve some extra time. Sadly, I have experienced first-hand that the opposite is also true: focus on your weaknesses and you are spiraling downwards: zombies at work.

If you can find your strengths in your work you will find more gratification in work. If you find gratification you will shift in a more positive mind-set. Finally, it will be easier for you to see the bigger picture and the contributions you are making. Your job might turn into a calling. The meaning of work then becomes connection, engagement and commitment. 

Work done with love is the meaning within life. Love and work are crucial for human happiness because they can draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves.

Straight Talk

The book Free To Work is the first book to my knowledge that explains the history, problems, pitfalls and challenges of the Belgian labor market in human language.

The author Jan Denys is one of the few labor market experts in the Belgian and European landscape who have the authority to say something meaningful about it and the analytic view to dissect it properly.

In Free to Work, Denys carefully explains the challenges for society, government, organizations, employer organizations and trade unions. He puts the finger on the wounds on all levels and he nuances some trends the media have blown-up into unreasonable proportions (such as the threat of globalization, or conversely the false sense of security that arises from jobs-for-life).

One Step Beyond Analysis

And this is where most scholars would have stopped (and would have paralyzed me as a reader with lots of references and academic mumbo-jumbo). But Denys tops the book with two outstanding chapters: Sixty Proposals for an Open And Modern Labor Market (chapter 9), and Your Career (chapter 10). This last chapter zooms in on the individual level.

In the below One-Minute-Interview Jan Denys explains what this means for every single employee who gets ‘trapped’ into the comfort zone of a stable job: Your comfort zone should be coloring red when you find yourself loosing the external focus and ignoring the long-term perspective of your career.

Nowadays, there is no such thing as a lifelong job in one and the same organization. However, in times of economic crisis we see people digging themselves even deeper into the security of their job: comply more, don’t speak up, play-safe-games and even increase the inward focus.

Anchoring Your Career

Denys promotes the career anchors of Edgar Schein to cope with the identity crisis that may occur once an individual stares into the abyss of the labor market: it never hurts to get a clear perspective on who you are and what you want.

Career Anchors match the ‘who you are’ part with the ‘what you do’ part of your daily life. The more these two resonate with each other, the better your chances of finding your way. If you know that most of the people tend to build their career on their very first job, knowing what really matters for you may be worth finding out, for it may not be where you started your career.

Schein distinguishes the following Career Anchors:

• Technical/Functional competence: You like being good at something and will work to become a guru or expert. You like to be challenged and then use your skill to meet the challenge, doing the job properly and better than almost anyone else.
• General Managerial competence: Unlike technical/functional people, you want to manage. You like problem-solving and dealing with other people. You thrive on responsibility. To be successful, you will also need emotional competence.
• Autonomy/Independence: You have a primary need to work under your own rules. You avoid standards and prefer to work alone.
• Security/Stability: You seek stability and continuity as a primary factor of your live. You avoid risks and you generally prefer a job for life.
• Entrepreneurial Creativity: You like to invent things, be creative and, most of all, to run your own businesses. You differ from those who seek autonomy in that you will share the workload. You find ownership very important.
• Service/Dedication to a cause: You are driven by how you can help other people more than using their talents.
• Pure Challenge: Driven by challenge, you seek constant stimulation and difficult problems that you can tackle. You will change jobs when the current one gets boring.
• Lifestyle: You look at your whole pattern of living. Flexibility and the integration of life and work is key.

Who Is Driving Your Career?

The one thing you should remember about your job is that job-security is an illusion. Instead, you should be working on a career-strategy; and the best way to start is to see which career anchor resonates best with who you are.

Are you spending your working time in the area of your anchor? Well, then you have nothing to be afraid of; no reason to play safe by ‘fitting into the job’.

Fitting in will no longer safeguard your employment. Instead, build your career-strategy on this anchor, so you can stand-out in your career.

The fascinating part of being aged thirty-odd is the realization that you don’t really belong to the Digital Natives and you can even less identify with the older generation that is often nicknamed Digital Immigrants. We are the lost generation: opinionlesly born in the middle of the chasm; endlesly contemplating on whether to commit to social media or to deny instead; constantly feeling unconfortable. Too much confusion. Time for a second SOS VideoClass.

Again, the video is in Dutch (with my own Flemish accent) and you will find the English transcript below.

Native Spotting

We are here in Leuven and behind me you can see the next generation. The generation we could refer to as the Digital Natives. They are enjoying the afternoon in the park.

One thing that amazes me – and it may amaze you too – is the ease with which they handle things like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs. To them it’s like a second nature, whereas for us it is sometimes a bit frightening.

FaceCrime

What we often see is that we trust adult people of our age – the working generation – to go to the bank, to obtain a loan, to buy a house or to raise a family. However, once we come to work, we are treated like children. No LinkedIn, No Twitter, No blogs. And no Social Media. They are building a safe firewall around us.

This makes me think of the book 1984, written by George Orwell in 1949 and mandatory reading when I was at school. In chapter 5 Orwell introduces the concept of FaceCrime – a term that sounds a little like Facebook. It is a crime you commit by demonstrating too much of your personality, by displaying too much emotion and by giving away too much of your authenticity.

Today we can observe that social media has penetrated 76% of the population. For the people behind me this percentage will probably be way higher than that. Just imagine: 76% of your customers, your suppliers and foremost: your workforce is using social media.

Nuts

To me this means that you have to be nuts as a company not to be present on that market. That you have to be out of your mind to lock your workforce out of that space. Particularly if you take note of the fact that we operate in a knowledge economy here in Belgium: We have no natural resources; We cannot produce something with added value faster or cheaper than the countries surrounding us – let alone the countries that are further away. Our raw material is knowledge; we’re smart – and that’s what we need to take advantage of.

Changing the way we look at things

The added value of knowledge increases the more it is shared and the more it is exchanged. What our economy needs at this very moment is more knowledge that evolves faster. And that is the reason why we have placed the lifebuoy right here, in the safe and protected kindergarten: it is time to stop overprotecting people. It is time to take both feet off the breaks. It is time to see social media no longer as a threat but as an opportunity.

The video is in Dutch (with my own Flemish accent) and you will find the English transcript below. So there you go: my thoughts on film and a free language course in one article!

I have an SAP background and some experience in large scale SAP projects. SAP is software that typically impacts the complete organization and a lot of users at the same time, and there is a great need for training. Last year the plant manager of a big plant came to see me. The fact that the return for the people on the SAP training sessions was disappointingly low caused some frustration.
What happened here? The organization thought that sending people to the SAP training was enough in order for them to be prepared for the day-to-day work with SAP. Together with that plant manager I discovered that people remember maximum 10% of what was taught in the training sessions.

In my opinion that’s normal because 90% of the things you need to know in order to perform your work cannot be taught in the classroom; you learn it when you need to solve a problem, when you receive the right communication and whenever you are obliged to take some actions in practice. Training managers need to be aware of that. 90% of what is needed for my job is situated in the field, so as a training manager I need to be in the field.

Bicycle?

Let’s suppose that we agree on me teaching you to ride your bicycle. I will prepare thoroughly and I will tell you all about the mechanical aspects of a bicycle. Next, I will tell you all about the laws of gravity. Then I will tell you about the organ of balance because it is the critical success factor for riding a bicycle without falling over. Finally, I will even make the training practical by showing you a real bicycle and I will even ride some laps so you can see what cycling is.

At the end of the day I expect you to be capable of riding a bicycle because you know all about cycling from A to Z.

This may sound absurd but is the current state of training and development: we teach people how to ride a bicycle by showing them PowerPoint slides. When they come out of the classroom we are surprised that “the thing isn’t working”.

Cause?

What went wrong with the bicycle training? I made the mistake of looking at the training as a purpose in itself:
- I prepared the best materials;
- I showed the most beautiful bicycle;
- I may even have invited Lance Armstrong as a guest speaker.

While doing so I focus too much on the satisfaction of the participants. And what happens when the participants are happy? All of a sudden the training was brilliant in achieving its goals! All of a sudden whether or not you are able to ride a bicycle has become irrelevant. That’s immensely frustrating.

Solution

How are we going to solve this bicycle problem? I will alter my starting point towards what is needed for you in order to cycle. As a consequence:
- I will ask you to bring your own bicycle;
- Instead of preparing manuals, I will prepare a safe trail for you to drive around;
- Instead of standing in front the whole day animating and telling you how to ride a bicycle, I will be standing behind you to catch you if you fall.

Hunger

Whenever I conduct a training I ask the participants to state their personal objectives in the beginning of the day: ‘what is it exactly that you want to be better at when the day is over?’. At the end of the day we turn back to these objectives on the whiteboard and we evaluate whether the participants reached their goals.

The message here is clear: as a participant it is your responsibility to use me as a trainer in order to reach your objectives. That’s the best way of going through the day. It’s important to sharpen the training hunger so the participants are fully aware of what they want to get out of that day.

Interaction

I am aware that participants only remember about 10% of what I tell them or show them and therefore I trigger their own experiences as much as I possibly can.

My task is to ask the right questions and then to frame the answers that I receive. So I will not be standing in front too much of the time. Rather, I will be standing behind the participants to motivate them to come up with those answers.

Island

I often come across project managers complaining that people are stupid. When I ask them why they think so, they show me their slides and then they say: ‘my slides are very clear, don’t you think? I couldn’t possibly be clearer that that?’

But it’s not about the slides! At best those slides contain 10% of what a participant needs in order to perform his job in practice. The last 90% is situated in the field: in the middle of conflicts and problems. That’s where we need to be heading. That is exactly the reason why we are standing next to this lifebuoy: for the project leaders and training managers who desperately need to leave their PowerPoint Island.

Ask Google

When you lead a team – big or small – you feel responsible for the outcomes and sure as hell you want those outcomes to be successful by all possible measures. Maybe you got elected into this position, maybe you fought your way up or you started from scratch and built your own team step by step. It doesn’t matter, because sooner or later you will be looking for tips and tricks to increase your performance as a leader. How To’s, Cookbooks, do’s and don’ts, MBA courses and leadership master classes.

Have a look at Google as you type the word ‘leadership’ and the system returns the most popular searches that people have done before you. Turns out that you are not the only one eager to find out HOW to lead.

Unfortunately all these sources turn out to be a disappointment when I look at the return on knowledge I have gotten out of them:

- An increased sense of control that turns out to be an illusion

- A clever and witty language to explain and hide my faults

- A whole range of case studies to prove the leadership models IN HINDSIGHT

Duh. Not really getting any closer to the secret of leadership.

Surf TED Talks

Guess I’d better listen to some music or watch some TED video’s instead. And that’s what I did. (Note: If you don’t know the TED talks, this is a good time to dive in) As a starter, have a look at the below talk of Itay Talgam on leadership of the great conductors and prepare for some flipping insights on leadership.

Not About You

Talgam hits the nail on the head when he talks about the small gesture of the conductor. He continues: ‘And suddenly, out of the chaos, order. Noise becomes music. And this is fantastic. And it’s so tempting to think that it’s all about me.’

He then analyzes different leadership styles and immediately you can see the difference between a Muti style (talented, clear, controlling and commanding), a Strauss style (pure execution), a von Karajan style (…), a Kleiber style (creating the conditions for people to co-create) and finally a Bernstein style (doing without doing).

Leadership Redefined

This video definitely flipped my beliefs on the job of a leader and made it less tangible and controllable at the same time. Turns out that it’s all about enabling instead of controlling.

And if that is so we desparately need an alternative to the long checklists and cookbooks on leadership. To begin I propose a two step remedy:

Step 1: There is nothing to fix and it’s OK to be happy. So leave Mr. Grumpy home.

Step 2: Your leadership is about enabling other people’s stories to be heard at the same time. So: be the space instead of the hero. Create the conditions instead of controlling the outcome. As Talgam states: ‘You have the story of the orchestra as a professional body. You have the story of the audience as a community. You have the stories of the individuals in the orchestra and in the audience. And then you have other stories, unseen. People who build this wonderful concert hall. People who made those Stradivarius, Amati, all those beautiful instruments. And all those stories are being heard at the same time. This is the true experience of a live concert.‘

The Moral

Once you replace controlling the outcome by creating the conditions you will be amazed by the power and the passion that you light up in people. The only thing you need to do is ask yourself the question: “who am I being that their eyes aren’t shining?” as the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) of your leadership.

So who are you being and what has to become of your job as a leader? You are the holder of a space that enables things that are fare greater than you. Trying to control the outcomes will only reduce the performance (and make you more tired).

Instead your real power lies in the being moved and passionate about the scores of your organization and this determines the strength of the space you create for your people. Passion, not power. In the below video Bernstein explains his passion through the expressivity of music and the ability of people to respond to that.

As a finishing note, Bernstein says: ‘It is metaphor that most produces knowledge.‘ He talks about music as a sense-making language, a compelling story that communicates things that are beyond your reach.

No place for Ego there. That may be exactly why we get more ‘how to lead‘ cues from observing conductors and indulging in their music than from any other book or professor.

Dull libraries on leadership, knowledge management and communication came to action right in front of me.  It all happened as the musicians performed their scores at the rehearsal of the prestigious B’rock ensemble.

So…?

In this rehearsal B’rock gathered for the forthcoming ‘Adieu to the pleasures’ performance. Nothing spectacular about this rehearsal you may think, except from a management point-of-view.

As a management consultant I spend most of my time between shopfloor, project cockpit and boardroom. When you travel that path long enough you will find that management speak and lengthy checklists melt down to their essence.  For example: ‘always remember the 3 C’s: communication, communication, communication‘. Damned if you do – damned if you don’t.

I was curious to find out how the musicians were going to pull it off, given their limited time, budget and different nationalities involved (sounds like a real project, doesn’t it?). Almost immediately I was struck by their effortless communication. So I took my camera and captured what the 3 C’s look like from a B’rock perspective. Have a look…

1. Tuning

This is the first part of any teamwork of musicians – be it a rehearsal or a real concert. They tune their instruments and make sure everyone is on the same wavelength BEFORE they start playing. Have a look at the video below. These musicians are saying: hey this is my bottom line – what is yours?

In management speak: they are setting up a service level agreement (SLA). And they do it BEFORE they start to play. There is a lesson in there: an SLA is negotiated upfront to create a common understanding about services, priorities and responsibilities.

Tuning is not a quick-fix for a troubled relationship in the middle of the play: the relationship is tuned upfront. And yes: that makes an awkward and unusual sound.

2. Feedback

Once the instruments are tuned, the ensemble is ready to kick off. For the first time they play the scores that each musician has carefully prepared at home. For the first time they hear how they sound within the group. Have a look at the fragment below to see how that works.

You will note that the ‘project leader’ behind the harpsichord defines the context and shapes the meaning of the piece they are performing (at 00′:30″). Although every musician knows the scores and plays outstanding as an individual, they now feed-back to one another how they can make teamwork happen (as of 01′:30″). Note that during the break one of the musicians revealed to me that the most important instrument during a rehearsal is actually a musician’s pencil!

There you are: outstanding performers rely on each other in order to adapt their scores for the benefit of team performance. In this setting it would be absurd if they didn’t. Yet, where I come from I see most of the good performers touting their horn so loud that the team performance suffers.

The musician later added: ‘you feel when it’s your turn to say something‘. And that’s exactly what it felt like: this was no feedback as we know it; what I witnessed was feed-forward. Not as a task or an obligation, but rather as a game bringing the performance forward.

3. Performing

This is when the communication rubber meets the road. After individual preparation, tuning of the instruments and adapting the scores for team performance it is time to give it a go. I invite you to look at the below fragment twice: once with the sound on and once with the sound off.

There are two things that you can see clearer when the sound is off. First, the musicians don’t stop communicating when they perform. Continuously they look up from their scores to exchange cues. Second, as a result of this exchange you can actually see the resonance among the musicians.

Although they are all playing their individual score you can see that they are in resonance. One of the musicians saw this resonance as a growing process as he reported: ‘during the intense days of rehearsing you kind of grow into the performance’.

The Moral

Preparation, tuning, adaptation and continuous exchange of cues results in good performance. The moral of this story isn’t hard to fetch – but it may be hard to swallow for those of us who have their MBA education tattooed all over. This rehearsal reframes the question: why does management education exist? None of these musicians has ever studied, examined or attended a course in communication, teamwork or feedback.

Think of what we said last week about barefoot running: your company is not broken by default – just like your feet are just fine the way they are. Once you go barefoot your body automatically adjusts. Effortless.  In terms of management education B’rock musicians go barefoot. And they go a long way.

By the way …

This goes without saying that B’rock is a project-based organization (in management speak): the performance at hand determines the staffing, their level of commitment and … their leadership style.

In case you wonder how I got into that setting in the first place… well … together with B’rock and other top-notch musical ensembles we are discovering Arts-based Learning. I’m quite proud to be scouting learning methods and workshop possibilities in this exclusive and (until now) closed setting. A bizar experience … that’s why the initiative is called BizzArts.

Below you can see B’rock performing Vivaldi ‘for real’.

No doubt about it: Belgian finest Baroque can only be performed when excellence & passion are mixed with barefoot empowerment. And now you have a witness.

See also: Music and Leadership

In 60 seconds he tells us what good sex and good training have in common: they both come in three distinct but essential parts: the foreplay, the intercourse and the ‘afterplay’. In other words: good training events run the full training & development cycle.

I like this metaphor a lot because it puts the training issue in a very sharp perspective. For example, as a training manager you could ask yourself the following questions:

- How many times did I not engage with participants last year? (equals: “no foreplay - just sex”)

- How many times did I deliver a standard of-the-shelf training last year? (equals: “boring sex”)

- How many times did I force people to go to a training over the past year? (equals: “abuse”)

- How many times did I deliver a training when the real need was leadership? (equals: “sex in response to a need for love”)

- How many times did I let people fill out evaluation sheets and then do nothing with it? (equals: “call you later - yeah right…”)

Your imagination may be richer than mine so I’m pretty sure you can think of more lively questions to complete this list.

Just remember: Thinking more about sex at work may actually result in better training.

Until recently I thought that there was no alternative for ‘consulting as we know it’: onsite, full-time, fixed-rate, and mostly during office-hours. As it happens my net value as a knowledge worker varies according to the challenge at hand: sometimes I am solving a problem; other times I am filling a gap in operations and sometimes I invoice idle time (that frustrates the hell out of me).

The Switch

Knowledge follows different rules than a tangible product. If we want to get more value out of my services as a knowledge worker, we should use it differently: by means of a ‘subscription’ instead of a ‘contract’.

Let’s have a different look at the way knowledge workers go to market. In management science the elements of the marketing mix are often referred to as ‘the four Ps’: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Because this model came into existence for selling tangible products, I have added a different emphasis as I address the 4 P’s below:

1. Product: Knowledge

Building a stock of knowledge made sense in a stable world. But in this rapdly changing world an inventory of knowledge gathers dust: the problems we face today cannot be solved with the knowledge of yesterday. The warehouse value of knowledge is close to 0.

The good news: knowledge gets better when it is shared and used where you need it and when you need it.

What if we used consultants no longer for building an inventory of knowledge and more for solving today’s problems?

2. Price: Value in Hindsight

For consulting, training and facilitation you can’t know in advance whether an intervention will create value. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes it exceeds expectations. The value of knowledge always appears in hindsight.

What if we agreed on the price of consulting after delivery? The price you pay is the value in hindsight. Instead of a proposal upfront we agree on added value afterwards.

3. Place: Plug-in

Let’s face it: most knowledge workers are not performing 100% every hour of the day. But at specific moments we perform 200% or 300%. That’s when we make the difference.

What if you could hire consultants at the moments when they make a difference? Plug-in when peak performance is needed, both onsite and online.

4. Promotion: Only the Knowledge you Care for

Customers who are satisfied with my services tell their friends. Don’t tell your friends when you paid me too much for a problem that was not fixed. Tell me. I will learn and in return you don’t pay.

What if you only paid when you were satisfied? ‘No cure, no pay’; that is: zero for online work and only the expenses for onsite work.

Old Wine in New Bottles

OK, now let’s imagine - only for a second - that this model would work and that the mainstream of all self-employed knowledge workers would switch over to consulting 2.0. What would be the consequences?

What about parasites?

What if customers abuse you in order to get the value and then rate your services as bad so they can catch free rides? Rationally speaking I would be selling myself out of the market in no time.

But I’m an economist and I happen to remember Adam Smith, who is widely cited as the father of modern economics. In his work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, he critically examined the moral thinking of the time and suggested that conscience arises from social relationships.

In short: customers who are satisfied may give you a hard time, some will take a free-ride, but the majority will gracefully put the money where their mouth is.

And the other customers? You let them go as they continue to build a bad reputation for themselves.

Market dynamics

In these times of ‘open source’, ‘open code’, ‘open access’, ‘open licenses’, etc. I consider it rather dangerous to go to the market with a ‘closed’ mindset.

‘Open contract’ is the answer for launching consulting 2.0. Again, this is not a new idea as the same Adam Smith mentioned it in 1776. That’s when he published The Wealth of Nations, in which he introduced the idea of an invisible hand to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace.

The point is that ‘open contracts’ will remove impediments for the market to tell you what you are good at. As an example, take the partner of a big consulting company that I met about a year ago. His philosophy is to say yes to every customer request for services, ‘and then I work my way out, because the customer will pay anyway’. This person is in for hard times in the new pricing model: No cure, no pay.

The market will tell you what you are good at and vice versa. To put it in the words of Adam Smith:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

Related articles:
- Good Lemonade - February 16th, 2008
- Web 2.0 includes Invisible Hand - June 29th, 2009

Important note:
All the credits for this idea go to Martijn Aslander, a guy from the Netherlands who calls himself a lifehacker.

! ! ! EXPERIMENT ! ! !
Contribute to a mindmap on Consulting 2.0
- 04-Dec-2009 -

This article has caught the attention of a lot of people who came back with tons of questions. Seems I hit a nail but did not get to the bottom of the concept.

Therefore:
- Do you want to edit the mindmap online and lean in on the discussion? Let me know your email address and you’ll receive a mail with the link to EDIT the mindmap on the MindMeister platform;
- Are you skeptical but curious anyway? Let me know your email address and you’ll receive a mail with the link to VIEW the mindmap on the same platform

And here is my word: I will not use your email for any other purpose than having you access the MindMeister platform.

Thanks!
luc[dot]galoppin[at]reply-mc[dot]com

People don’t resist change, they resist being controlled. And if we are smart enough to involve people in every step of the project lifecycle, they will be the best drivers of change we could possibly hope for.

In her research she distinguishes 6 primary concerns for change:

1. Information concerns. People respond when they know what you know, see what you see, understand what you understand.

2. Personal concerns: what’s in it for me? Will I win or lose? Will I look good? Is this a picture of the future I can succeed in?

3. Implementation concerns: where can I get help?

4. Impact concerns: will the change make any difference?

5. Collaboration: how do we get everyone involved?

6. Refinement and improvement concerns

Finally she also challenges us to redefine how we look at “concerns”: they are not negative, they are just unanswered questions!

Related articles:
- Know-Feel-Do = Bottom Line of Communication - December 28th, 2008
- Music and Leadership - July 20th, 2008
- It’s About Involvement, Stupid! - June 1st, 2007

Symptoms
‘When will accurate expertise recognition lead to effective utilization?’ Gardner went out to identify and examine the critical factor that influences team members’ willingness and ability to perform. She focused on a sample of 82 accounting and consulting project teams from a Big 4 audit firm. Gardner’s research findings suggest that teams facing performance pressures tend to default to high-status peers at the expense of using team members with deep knowledge of the client, resulting in poor team performance. She concludes by stating that there is a paradox affecting teams’ use of members’ knowledge: ‘the more important the project, the less effective the team’.

This research is a painful reminder of something every consultant knows: the customer would be better of if we wouldn’t be so shortsighted, egocentric and above all: hierarchically conditioned. For example, Gardner’s research highlights that the extent to which consultants master client-specific expertise is significantly related to customer retention. This includes all the skills and interpersonal relationships that are associated with a particular client and knowledge of the business!

Diagnosis
The trouble is that this deficiency seems to be built in - just like a deficient chromosome of the consulting gene. A consultant needs to be the ‘best individual’ in order to make a good career within a firm. This deficiency, which is instigated by the classic ‘up-or-out’ virus that is commonly known as the ‘one best way’ to manage a professional services firm, works against the dynamic of sharing knowledge among peers and connecting with the customer. In the end, consultants become exactly the way their companies hire, manage, appraise, reward and develop: smart individuals with an underdeveloped literacy on the level of knowledge sharing and customer involvement - not to mention: a lack of PASSION!

Therapy for the deficient consultant gene
What should consulting companies and customers do in the face of this diagnosis? Using the Michigan model of HRM, this diagnosis is easily translated into a cure.
1.) Selection: Hire smart consultants, not their ego: Teams that more effectively utilize their members’ general professional expertise will have higher client satisfaction;
2.) Performance: Make them work hand in hand with the customer: project and team organization matters! Teams that more effectively utilize their members’ client-specific expertise will have higher client satisfaction
3.) Appraisal and Rewarding: Set performance indicators that measure and reward team performance, community participation and customer retention instead of individual performance or individual certification in any domain.
4.) Development: It is no secret anymore that being a social architect is valued more and better in terms of customer satisfaction and overall project performance than being the expert. So the investment on the level of learning should be at least as high in consulting skills as in subject matter expertise.

So this is to the classic up-or-out managers that’ are populating the senior ranks of today’s consulting companies: you are so dead! - and my gut feeling says that this working paper is only the beginning of scientific evidence!
________________
Source:
Feeling the heat: The effects of performance pressure on teams’ knowledge use and performance, by Heidi K. Gardner - Working Paper 09-126 - Harvard Business School.

Related articles:
- Music and Management Consulting - September 27th, 2008
- Open Letter To My Colleagues (Incl. Myself) - August 13th, 2007
- One, Two, Three, Seven?! - April 15th, 2008
- 2008 … Highway To Hell - January 5th, 2008

6 Thinking Hats

I have used this brainstorming technique in a variety of different settings: to generate ideas, to solve complex problems, etc.  The Six Thinking Hats method provides a way for groups to think together more effectively. ‘Together’ is the absolute key word here: instead of having individuals reacting their own way (as usual), the group agrees to deliberately step into each possible ‘way of thinking’ sequentially. There are 6 different types of thinking or hats one can wear in a discussion:

* Neutrality (white) - considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
* Feeling (Red) - instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
* Negative judgment (Black) - logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
* Positive Judgment (Yellow) - logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
* Creative thinking (Green) - statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
* Process control (Blue) - thinking about thinking

In my experience until last week - the Six Thinking Hats was a powerful tool to generate ideas and solve complex problems through parallel thinking. On top of that it creates a greater feeling of momentum in team that otherwise would be cluttered in a ‘being right’ discussion.

6 hats on Web 2.0??

By now most readers of this blog must have noticed that I am making my first babysteps into the Web 2.0 communities. One of them is LinkedIn, where I am lucky enough to manage the Organizational Change Practitioners group (4.722 members subscribed at the time of writing). Recently I decided to have ask the members contribute in which subgroups we would create in this forum.

What I witnessed next was multi-thinking at different dimensions at the same time. One of the most beautiful examples of Six Thinking Hats I have ever witnessed from close by!  At the time of writing, there were over 85 reactions that demonstrated the six thinking styles:

* Neutrality: people responding directly to the question at hand (e.g.:”I suggest to creat a subgroup on human behavior“)
* Feeling: people volunteering to become a subgroup manager (e.g.: “Great idea, Luc. If you need help, I would be ready to facilitate/moderate the Web 2.0 group“)
* Negative judgement (Black): people opposing to the idea of subgroups (e.g.:”Seems to me the additional structure may add bureaucracy rather than make it easier to navigate and participate.”)
* Positive Judgement (Yellow): people supporting the idea (e.g.: “I think having focused discussions would be great so that when dealing with a particular issue, you wouldn’t be all over the place.”)
* Creative thinking (Green): people suggesting additional ideas (e.g.:”Maybe a poll would be a good idea to select the final five“)
* Process control (Blue): people looking at this process happening (e.g.: “watching and participating in a wonderful new (to me at least) process: asynchronous, large-group virtual conversation and decision making“); one participant even Twittered this discussion thread!

Invisible Hand

The most fascinating observation however, was that the discussion thread almost chronologically went through all of these hats. In the same way as during brainstorming sessions each thinking hat is triggered by one reaction, which sparks a range of reactions that belong to the same thinking type.

Coincidence? Not in a million years. But then, what caused this to happen? How did the group trigger a specific hat, go to a climax of reactions, a decline and then moved on to a next hat? How did the group decide the order of the hats to think by? Honestly - I DON’T KNOW. But I did experience that we were parallel thinking! We simply cannot deny that there is some kind of invisible hand doing some fine work.

Resistance means:
- People care about the stuff;
- People are brave enough to tell you they disagree;
- People have a backbone and guts;
- People are being authenthic.

The below graph paints the picture the way I see it. 

Some additional notes:

1. The dimensions: INTENT versus BEHAVIOR
The vertical axis describes the intention we have inside of us and horizontal axis describes the behavior that we demonstrate on the outside.

2. The four quadrants

• Commitment: what happens when your intention is willing and your behavior follows your intentions. Let’s say this is an authentic ‘yes’;
• Resistance: what happens when your intention is unwilling and when it is in resonance with your behavior. In his book on Flawless Consulting, Peter Block lists some common types of resistance that are abundant during the lifecycle of an organizational change, they are: Need more detail, Giving a lot of detail, Not enough time, Impracticality, Confusion, Silence, Moralizing and Press for solutions. These behaviors demonstrate a ‘no’, but an authentic ‘no’.
• The Stockholm Syndrome: The Stockholm Syndrome describes the behavior of hostages who become sympathetic to their hostage-takers. The name derives from a 1973 hostage incident in Stockholm, when several victims began to identify with their hostage-takers as a coping strategy. It is the same kind of fear of repercussions that we can find in some organizations. People lose their perspective as if they were in a hostage situation and start to act against their unwilling intent. From the outside they gladly execute, commit to the commandments that were made, so the behavior is a false ‘yes’.
• The Otis Redding Syndrome: I borrow this one from Bob Sutton, who recalls the line from Otis Redding’s old song: Sitting By the Dock of the Bay, “Can’t do what ten people tell me to do, so I guess I’ll remain the same”. Clearly, this describes people with a good intention who are somehow hindered to follow their intention. In this model I will call this a false ‘no’.

 3. Systems thinking

One of the basic laws of system thinking is ‘The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back’. The same is true for resistance - in an awkward way: the resistance will go underground and on the surface indifference will appear. As a result you have lost every bit of visibility on resistance - but that’s not the worst thing.

The point is that indifference is never positive and always energy-draining. And that is the last thing you want to create whenever you are performing a big organizational change…

So thank God for resistance and always suspect yourself first!

Examples include: Greet coworkers personally. Remember to say thank you. For meetings you convene, be the first to sit down and the last to get up. Welcome visitors by name. Answer your own telephone. Give away recognition when things go well; hoard responsibility when they don’t. Convey bad news in person. When you make a mistake, admit it and apologize.

When it comes to this last one - apologizing - I just finished an interesting chapter that matches last week’s post particularly well: Executive Humility Decencies. In that chapter, Harrison explains that apologies are serious business.

All or Nothing

He even cites a research by Jennifer Robbennolt, Professor of Law and Psychology at the University of Illinois College of Law. In two studies, participants, ages 21 to 70, read a scenario describing a pedestrian-bicycle accident. They were asked to take on the role of the injured person and evaluate a settlement offer from the other party, based on information about the injuries, the other party’s conduct, and each party’s responsibility for causing the accident.

Professor Robbennolt found that when a full apology was given, 73% of the respondents would accept the settlement offer. When no apology was given, 52% would accept, but when a partial apology was given, only 35% would accept. Even when she changed the scenario and made the evidence of fault less clear, a partial apology was still often perceived no different to no apology at all. Results also showed that the severity of the injury mattered: the more severe the injury, the more the need to fully apologize. It seems that a late or a bad apology is WORSE than no apology at all.

The 4 R’s

Not surprisingly, when we dig a little deeper in order to find out more about the anatomy of an effective apology, we end up in the field of medicine. Apparently, a lot of health care providers understand and practice what to do after unexpected outcomes - to apologize (*). Most of them use the 4 “R”s of Apology:

Recognition: knowing when an apology is in order. An apology needs to ensure that the injured party knows that you understand specifically what you did wrong.

Regret: responding empathetically. This is an indication that you accept personal responsibility for the injury. Here it is important to remember that an expression of regret is not an admission of guilt or fault.

Responsibility: owning up to what’s happened. Be accountable for the problem, even if it was unforeseeable. This is the part where most apologies end up being partial expressions of regret, impoverished by exceptions and ‘but’ statements. As the above research of Professor Robbennolt points out, a bad apology is worse than no apology at all.

Remedy: making it right. Explain to what’s being done to correct the problem and express your commitment to not make the same mistake in the future.

Finally, back to Harrison’s book, from which I’d like to quote how he links apologizing and vulnerability to leadership:

“During the course of his or her career, every leader will be tested by adversity, and sometimes the leader will fail. At these times, employees and other stakeholders are watching very carefully. When they see the leader as a fallible person who makes mistakes and has the decency to acknowledge them, take responsibility, and apologize if appropriate, the will not abandon the leader. Followers demand neither flawlessness nor omniscience. (…) In the end, followers demand leaders who are worthy of being followed.”
__________
(*) Source: Healing Words: The Power Of Apology In Medicine, by Michael S Woods, Jason Isaac Star, Hilda J Bruckner

To summarize these articles, one could say that we’ve tackled two dimensions of communication: 
1. The FORMAT: there is an optimal anatomy for effective communication, it’s called Know-Feel- Do.
2. The QUANTITY: more information is not always better; one should underscore certain boundaries and then explore the topic within those boundaries.

Ok - fair enough - but how about the QUALITY of communication?

What should be the result of succesful communication?

At first you may think this is a rethoric question - one that needs no answer; a statement. We communicate in order to get our point across. Period. So that’s what we do - day in, day out, presenting, advertising, emailing, meeting, etc.  But when we measure the success of those communications at the receiver’s end, a strange pattern seems to unfold.

It seems that the quality of a communication is determined by the extent to which the receiver feels understood and involved, rather than by the amount or the quality of information. In other words: it is the relationship, rather than the content which determines the quality of a communication.

It’s hidden in the word: “Communication” requires “community” in order to work, so any exchange of information that does not result into being in relationship is actually non-communication. In that sense, good communication is more about receiving and acknowledging  than about sending. Stephen Covey warns that giving out advice before having empathetically understood a person and their situation will likely result in rejection of that advice. He makes this point pretty well in his 1989 book The Seven Habits Highly Effective People when he declares Habit 5″ - Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood. 

What does this mean for organizational change practitioners?

In the course of organizational change programs it is even more important to ensure your message gets across. The messages you need to convey are not always the most desired or positive ones, and yet we need to ensure to take the shortest path to people’s hearts, minds and hands.

The below picture was drawn in a discussion on this topic. We take the Kuebler-Ross cycle of change as a given. This is a natural process that all of us go through when we are confronted with any change. The point is that people need time to make sense of the change pains. It’s a fact of life (or should I say ‘death’ instead?).

Of course we want to increase the speed of change.  People - and that includes you and me - will only do what they understand, and they will be even more likely to follow your advice when they feel understood.  This means we should be as creative as we possibly can in involving them and making them a co-sensemaker and a co-creator of the new reality you need to put in place.

Accelerating sense-making means shutting up, listening, acknowledging the communication so as to create a relationship with the receiver.