Dante’s Inferno and change consultants

I’m currently crawling my way through Dante’s Inferno (in English, obviously) and have just met those souls doomed to walk forever with their heads facing the wrong way. Walking forward but facing backwards, these are the futurologists; those who were so presumptuous as to try and foresee and foretell the future. Considering that they’re in valley 4 of circle 8 and a long way further down than the heretics, gluttons, pimps and money lenders, I thought this was a bit harsh. Especially as I myself have spent a good deal of my work life trying to envision the future. And so I wondered what this meant for change consultants.

Traditional change consultants tend to impose change on organisations. They pre-cook their solutions off site and then heat them up before serving their often unpalatable offerings onto an unwilling workforce. It is often a case of replacing tried and tested but unfashionable systems with untried and untested fashionable systems. The result is like tipping the chess board over and trying to carry on the game with fewer players all of which are out of position.

The new breed approach change radically differently. For a start, they often have few processes. What they try to do is create a climate in which change happens naturally. By encouraging dialogue and co-creation they aim to make change evolutionary and thereby sustainable. So they are not trying to impose a future per se, but enabling an organisation and its people to see things differently.

I passionately believe that most organisations know that it doesn’t have to be like this. Surely if we had a chance to start again then we would never allow society and its institutions become what they’ve become. Current levels of consumption are unsustainable; risk and reward are out of kilter; people are working far too hard and under too much pressure. Within work people are often constrained by legacy processes, and ingrained behaviours and attitudes. The ratio between productive and unproductive work seems wrong, with so much time given over to internal meetings and endless powerpoint presentations. For many work is dominated by large amounts of input and output, and outcome, actually achieving something, remains a distant memory. Scratch the surface and many people will admit that they’re not happy with their work lives. But what to do about it?

There is also a new breed of leaders coming through who recognise that life doesn’t have to be like this. They are recognising the power of social media to help to change radically the way that their organisations function. Principally, they see that command and control is no longer effective. But they also see the enormous benefits of embracing the new communications technology to encourage co-creation and collaboration. They recognise that the new organisations will not be hide-bound by processes, silos, divisions and, most of all, by hierarchies or status. They know that empowered employees can help them create the organisations they wish they had.

So perhaps it is less about envisioning the future than in changing the present. What would Dante think of that? I’ll let you know when I reach Paradise. But before I get there I have to pass the corrupt advisors. Now I wonder who they might be?

Leadership without a title

At the church in the village where I live is a plaque which commemorates Thomas Howard Esquire, son of the Honourable Sir Robert Howard, and grandson of the Right Honourable Thomas, Earl of Berkshire, who died on the fourth day of April, 1701. I’ve often wondered why Thomas Howard (assuming that it was him who chose his own memorial, as was common in those days) felt it important that people knew him not as who he was himself, but rather as the son of an Honourable Baronet and, more importantly, the grandson of a Right Honourable Earl. To be fair, his father was a famous playwright but I’ve always felt curious that even in death Thomas Howard seemed to be conscious of titles. Perhaps he was grumpy that the principle of primogeniture had ennobled his cousins but left him to make his own way with no handle to hold onto.

The same is true in business with many organisations still stratified along hierarchical lines, meaning that titles and status have become very important. Reward packages, holiday entitlements, engagement survey’s, and even desk space, all seem to be determined by grade or a work level. To a certain extent some form of graduated authority is inevitable, but there are some big issues at play. Firstly, some people start to believe in their own status. They begin to define themselves by their job title and find it difficult to recognise their real self beyond what it says on their business card. These are the people most resistant to change. They have spent twenty years investing in their career, missing school plays and anniversaries as they make their way up the greasy pole. The last thing that they are going to do is to accept new ways of working that threaten their access to the executive washroom. These are the people who are being challenged by both the arrival of generation Y with their new views and values and also by social media which allows information (after all, knowledge used to be power) to flow horizontally across organisations rather than vertically through layers of management.

There is, however, one fundamental truth which many people in business today miss: you do not need a title to be a leader. Indeed, you don’t need people to be a leader. Leadership is not about telling people what to do. It is not about doing things, executing things, and generating things. It is about nurturing and creating the climate in which things can be done. True leadership doesn’t need titles or status. True leadership comes from being authentic and knowing who you are. With that comes a powerful sense of knowing what’s important and what, like titles, isn’t. And if you are true to yourself then people will gravitate towards you. And that really is leadership.