Ed Batista

Let Your Freak Flag Fly: David Rendall on Uniqueness

In "The Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness," David Rendall writes:

The three primary lessons of this manifesto:

1. There is nothing wrong with you. (Weaknesses are important clues to your strengths.)

2. You find success when you find the right fit. (You need to match your unique characteristics to situations that reward those qualities.)

3. Your weaknesses make you different. (They make you a freak and it’s good to be a freak. ) [1]

I'm struck by the parallels between Rendall's imperatives and concepts that are at the core of three texts that are fundamental to my own perspective on growth and development:

From Co-Active Coaching, by Laura Whitworth and her colleagues at the Coaches Training Institute:

The primary building block for all co-active coaching is this: Clients have the answers or they can find the answers. From the co-active coach's point of view, nothing is wrong or broken, and there is no need to fix the client. [2]

From Peter Drucker's "Managing Oneself":

Most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties. By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths? How do I perform? and, What are my values? And then they can and should decide where they belong. Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong. [3]

From Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones' Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?

Showing weakness...is typically a by-product of the authentic leader's overarching goals and passions. Because they really care about the organization, they reveal themselves...

The reason for this inevitable connection between leadership and personal risk is complex. It begins with an understanding that leadership is for a purpose. There is some superordinate desired end state, which energizes the leader who in turn gives energy to followers. Effective leaders really care about this goal. They care enough to reveal their authentic selves. [4]

A common theme I hear running through all of these texts is: Know yourself; accept yourself; be yourself. And the challenge is to do just that while also striving to learn, grow, and be more effective. They're not mutually exclusive, but so often in the world of leadership development and management education we focus on "overcoming deficits" or on "fixing problems," and don't pay enough attention to the importance of helping people know, accept and simply be themselves.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Rendall originally published "The Freak Factor" in 2008 as a ChangeThis manifesto, and it later evolved into a 2015 book of the same name that has become the foundation of his work as a speaker and teacher.

[2] Co-Active Coaching: New Skills for Coaching People Toward Success in Work and Life, (Laura Whitworth, et al, 2nd edition, 2007)

[3] Drucker's "Managing Oneself" is available as a Harvard Business Review article or reprint (1999) and as the closing chapter in his Management Challenges for the 21st Century (2001).

[4] Goffee and Jones' Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? (2006) remains one of my all-time favorites.

Updated February 2020.

Photo by rh2ox.

Technology is Soft

Given the topics I've discussed here over the last few years--leadership and management, personal and organizational development, and the effective use of technology--if you're reading this, it's a safe bet that you're someone with an interest in making change happen and that you see opportunities to help your organization or your community find better ways of doing things, particularly when technology is a factor.

So here's a mental model to help make the process of leading change easier: Technology is soft.

Let me make a brief detour in order to explain what I mean by that.  In the late 1970s Tom Peters, Bob Waterman, Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos developed a framework for analyzing organizations known as the "7s Model" which looks at different aspects of an organization and which I still find highly useful.  (The graphic at left is from BuildingBrands.)  The 7s Model is often interpreted as dividing organizations into "hard" and "soft" elements--the former category includes the three concepts in red at the top of the graphic:

• Strategy
Your high-level goals and how you plan to achieve them.

• Structure
An organization's "blueprints": how people and resources are allocated, how work and responsibilities are distributed.

• Systems
All the ropes, pulleys and gears, so to speak, that get things done in an organization.

These elements of the model are seen as "hard" because they're more easily reduced to tangible artifacts--plans and documents and infrastructure--but that designation also reflects a value judgment in our language.  "Hard" stuff can be complex and difficult, but it's also serious and important.  "Soft" stuff, in contrast, is ambiguous, unreliable, secondary.  (I hope it's apparent that I think this is bias needs to be challenged, and Tom Peters agrees.)

We've traditionally located technology among the "hard" elements of an organization, and that's what usually comes to mind when we think about "Information Technology."  We have IT plans, IT departments (or people whose responsibilities include IT), and, of course, IT systems.  Thinking about technology from this perspective may seem logical, but I believe the implications are profound, unhelpful and increasingly outdated.

Some aspects of technology will always be classic "IT": hardware, storage, connectivity.  But these are commodities.  You get the best price you can for them, and you don't expect them to add strategic value to the organization.

I believe the strategic aspects of technology that have the greatest potential to actually make a difference in an organization fit into on the other side of the 7s Model, the "soft" side:

• Staff
Not the org chart--that's part of the Structure--but the real, flesh-and-blood people, and all their strengths, weaknesses, hopes and aspirations.

• Style
Management style, or organizational culture: The tacit norms that govern how work gets done and how people interact.

• Skills
The full range of competencies possessed by an organization, including interpersonal skills, learning.

Thinking about technology as "soft," as an aspect of an organization's staff, style and skills, may seem counterintuitive, but increasingly this is where it truly resides (and it's where you'll have the greatest leverage when driving technology-related change.)

Let me illustrate this approach with an story from my work at Stanford's Graduate School of Business:  As a Leadership Coach at the Center for Leadership Development and Research, I'm a member of a team with many interdependent sub-teams that often collaborate virtually on long-term projects involving multiple sets of stakeholders.  When I started at the beginning of 2007, the tools available to support these collaborations were 1) email and 2) shared network drives.  These tools met our most basic needs, but they were hardly optimal, and we found ourselves frustrated with their limitations.

It was the perfect opportunity to introduce a wiki, and as the unofficial techie on our staff of executive coaches and organizational development consultants, I was in a position to make that change happen.  But in retrospect I can see that I focused on the "hard" elements of the 7s Model.  I developed a strategic IT plan that included a wiki, I explored in great detail how the wiki would be used and how it would fit into our existing organizational structure, and I spent a good bit of time exploring various wiki platforms to find the best system to meet our needs.

I was able to get it up and running, but adoption by my non-technical colleagues was hit-or-miss.  Some people loved it, but others found it confusing or didn't really understand how  it was an improvement over email.  I think part of the problem was the language I used to introduce it.  I'd say, "I have a new system that'll help us collaborate more effectively."   Well, when you say "new," people hear "change," and they realize that means "more work," at least in the short run.  And when you say "system," people  hear "IT," and they know that means, "someone else's responsibility."  So when you say "new system," what people really hear is "more work that shouldn't be my responsibility in the first place."   Not exactly an appealing message.

So as we were about to begin a new academic year last Fall, I took a new approach.  I stopped worrying about the strategic IT plan--I didn't even update it.  I stopped thinking about how the wiki fit into our organizational structure.  And with the system already in place, I didn't have any technical work to do at all.

Instead, I starting thinking about the "soft" side of the organization.  I thought about my colleagues as individuals.  What were they like?  What were their needs?  How did they work?

I thought about our organizational culture.  Although Stanford has a certain culture, and the business school has yet another culture all its own, the Center where I work is a small, informal, entrepreneurial place where we can't do things by the book because it hasn't been written yet.

I thought about our collective skills--not just (or even primarily) technical skills, but our interpersonal skills.  How do we connect with each other?  How do we collaborate?

So rather than asking my colleagues to conform to a "hard" plan, I began asking how "soft" technology like a wiki could conform to them.  And rather than trying to "train" them on this new system, I began having a series of short conversations--sometimes just 5 minutes--about how they were working and what they were doing.  I took advantage of every small opportunity to help people think about the wiki as an integrated element in our organizational culture, and as an extension of their collaborative skills.

Today, just a few months later, we're the most intensive wiki users in the business school, and we're probably among the most intensive non-technical wiki users in the entire university.  I had to lay the "hard" groundwork to initiate the project, but my sustained focus on the strategic plan, the structure, and the system actually delayed our progress, and the wiki's ultimate success is directly related to its integration with the organization's "soft" side.

The 7th circle at the center of the 7s Model represents Shared Values, the commonly-held aspirations that give an organization a collective spirit, a sense of mission.  And if you value the effective use of technology, and you want your organization to adopt and embody that value, I encourage you to remember this the next time you're seeking to promote change: Technology is soft.

Photo by fotologic.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

7s Model graphic by BuildingBrands.

This post was adapted from remarks I made on May 12, 2008, to the second graduating class of ZeroDivide Fellows.  Congratulations and good luck to all the past and current Fellows, and thanks to ZeroDivide for having me.

Double-Loop Learning

Most learning can be described as "single-loop." We start with a set of goals, values and strategies that yield results. We assess the results, refine our techniques, and try again. One loop.

But our goals, values and strategies rest on a set of underlying assumptions that are implicit and unchallenged. Single-loop learning can help us pursue a goal more effectively by altering our methods, but it doesn't help us determine whether the goal is worth pursuing in the first place.

As I wrote in 2006,

In most circumstances, the learning we undertake is aimed at improving our performance relative to a set of goals and other factors that are taken for granted. Feedback from our performance (or "learning from our mistakes") typically cycles immediately back into our analysis of the strategies, tactics or techniques that led to our performance. This is important work, but it's inherently limited by those initial factors that are taken for granted at the outset and that remain unchallenged by an assessment of the performance results.

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Double-loop learning occurs when we expand the analytical frame to explicitly identify and then challenge any underlying assumptions that support our stated goals, values and strategies.

Rather than only ask, "How can we achieve our goals more effectively?", we look deeper and also ask...

• What assumptions support our goals, values and strategies?
• How can we test these assumptions?
• Having tested these assumptions, should we change our goals, values or strategies?

Again, as I wrote in 2006,

In contrast, if we can pull back and expand the frame of our analysis, we begin to call into question some of the factors that we usually take for granted. Our performance results aren't simply used to assess the strategies that have been derived from those factors--they question the factors themselves.

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If this seems too abstract, it may be useful to refer to my earlier posts that discuss double-loop learning in the context of meta-work, executive coaching and feedback. I've also found Mark Smith's essay on double-loop learning at Informal Education extremely valuable.

Many thanks to Chris Argyris, who first developed the concept of double-loop learning, and whose thoughts on theories of action and organizational learning inform my own work on a regular basis. And here's a 2-slide PowerPoint file of the images above.

Organizational Effectiveness

What makes organizations effective? For that matter, what do we even mean by effectiveness?

I love the Peters/Waterman/McKinsey "7s" Model, and we can extend it in two directions: Looking within an organization we can reduce the model to its most essential elements, leaving People (or Staff, in the 7s Model) and Culture (an amalgam of Style, Skills and Shared Values.)  And looking beyond the organization, if we ask why it exists and whether it's fulfilling its purpose we begin to assess its Impact, which includes not only profitability and financial sustainability but also the value created for any stakeholders.

 

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My focus on these three elements is also due to their tightly interrelated nature--each element affects the other two in fundamental ways.

 

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The relationship between an organization's people and its culture is often poorly understood. Sometimes it's difficult to even know where to draw a boundary between the two: Where do I stop and where do my contributions to the culture around me begin? In part, this is why so many organizations operate without a clear understanding of their culture. (And every organization has a culture: "When you've decided you don't have a culture, you've got one...")

But what's most important to recognize is the dialectical nature of this relationship. An organization's founders create the initial culture, which then exerts its influence on them in turn. Future colleagues are attracted to the pre-existing culture because in some way it meets their needs, and so they reinforce it.

 

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People and Culture are the primary drivers of an organization's Impact. This isn't to say that other factors are irrelevant, but ultimately people implement an organization's plans, and the culture in which they operate helps them or hinders them. Talented people can overcome misguided strategies and suboptimal systems, but they can't outrun a dysfunctional culture (not for long, anyway.)

 

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An organization's Impact--its ability to achieve its goals, fulfill its purpose and create value for stakeholders--directly affects its ability to attract and retain effective people and to build and sustain a high-performance culture.

 

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Having mapped out the relationships that exist among these three elements, what does each one stand for in practice? How might we define People, Culture and Impact in effective organizations?

 

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Here's my definition of effectiveness as it pertains to People. I emphasize connections with Culture and Impact; interpersonal skills and accountability; self-development and growth.

 

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Here's my definition of an effective Culture. I emphasize distributed leadership, continuous learning, openness, and decentralization. The final quote from Tom Peters deserves further explanation: The 7s Model is sometimes divided into "Hard" elements (Strategy, Structure and Systems) and "Soft" elements (Skills, Staff, Style and Shared Values). Our business culture tends to value the former and dismiss the latter, and Peters thinks this is entirely ass-backwards. The "hard" stuff, from strategic plans to complex financial structures, is actually pretty fuzzy and surprisingly easy to fake. The "soft" stuff--relationships, leadership, interpersonal skills (in short, culture)--is actually pretty resilient and surprisingly difficult to get right.  Hard is soft, soft is hard.

 

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I don't believe there's a universal definition of Impact--organizations define value-creation in different ways, and they're answerable to different sets of stakeholders. But I do believe that effective organizations share the characteristics listed above, which enable them to understand, measure and communicate their impact, and to use that information to drive decision-making (cf. Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer's Hard Facts.) At the same time, they reality-check regularly and don't let data dictate decisions.

Effective organizations also know when to give up and move on. They take a pragmatic approach and never let sunk costs fuel persistence--instead, they've mastered the art of strategic quitting. Finally, effective organizations have a vision of victory that they're driving toward. What would it look like to win? For some organizations, ultimate victory means putting themselves out of business because they've succeeded in fully and permanently meeting the need that they were created to fulfill.

 

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Here's a PowerPoint file of the graphs in this post.