Rob's Thoughts

The New Organization - Based on Capturing the Value in the Relationship

The performance breakthrough has arrived

After more than a decade of fads and buzz words, the real new economy has arrived and is dismantling the pinnacle organizations of the traditional economy. Bookselling, general retailing, the airline industry are the early sectors where the real new economy has emerged. It’s not about the internet, though the internet is important. It’s not about knowledge, though knowledge is important. It’s not about learning, though learning is important. It is primarily about a new culture and a new operational doctrine that is the opposite of our prevailing culture and doctrine. This is why it is so difficult to “see”.

Over the last 30 years, expensive new technology has filled the modern workplace. The result? No breakthrough in performance. In fact, in spite of all this investment, there has been, in many cases, a significant increase in friction, stress and costs. Importantly, relationships between front line service providers and customers and citizens have degraded. This is especially evident in healthcare and in education. Workplace stress is now a major issue for the Public Sector (PS) and for the Canadian Forces (CF). Can we explain this paradox?

History tells us that prior to other performance breakthroughs, there is a lag as the technology arrives before the required shift in culture and in operational doctrine to implement the technology well.

A concrete example of this lag was the Victorian Royal Navy. Throughout the middle of the 19th century the Victorian navy added a series of new technologies such as steam, steel and breech loading guns onto their ships. By the 1880’s ships looked “modern”. But they weren’t. They were the Victory in disguise. Why?

Because, in spite of the new technology, the Navy held onto to the class and command culture of the age of sail and also to the core operational doctrine of close engagement. The Nelsonic class culture and the Nelsonic operational doctrine prevented the new technology from being optimized. Fisher’s breakthrough in Dreadnought was to include engineering into the command culture of the Navy and to revolutionize fighting doctrine from close engagement to long distance engagement. This was not an incremental move but a revolution.

All of this revolution in culture and doctrine converged in the design of one ship that had the power to sink the entire German Navy on its own. That was the magnitude of the performance breakthrough. Navies had no recourse but to scrap their existing fleet and to build a new fleet based on the Dreadnought model.

This is where we are now. The Public Service, and most organizations in both the public and private sector, have most of the new gear but we remain captured by the culture and the doctrine of our fathers. We have not made the leap to what is more important than the technology itself, the new culture and the new operational doctrine.

But it is 1906 all over again. A new Dreadnought has been launched. The difference in performance between the old and the new is as astounding as in 1906.

Our Nelsonic Culture and Doctrine
Our Nelsons were Henry Ford and Professor Taylor. When Henry Ford introduced mass production at the beginning of the 20th century, he not only changed how things were made, he changed the culture of the workplace. Taylor codified this approach. In this production culture, head office was the organization’s brain and it decided everything. Products were conceived, designed, produced and then marketed and sold. The enterprise pushed out from the centre. All work was routinized and essentially deskilled. The process became inviolate and no thinking or attacks on the process could be tolerated from its participants. Only a few at the top could make changes.

This model has taken over all aspects of organized life today. At its heart is a need to control the core process. Everything and everyone had to be “managed”. It was successful during a long period of relative stability. We are so imbued with this model that we mainly fail to see it for what it is – a model. Today, we have reached the design limits of this model. More efficiency cannot be squeezed out of it. The business, social and technology environments are now changing so fast that such a model cannot react fast enough. Trying to squeeze more out the old model only adds to the friction and to the stress.

The New Dreadnought
A new model has arrived. It is the reverse of the production model. Just as Dreadnought represented a shift in the relationship in warfare from close intimacy to a distant machine perspective, so the new organizational model shifts organization from a distant and machine relationship to a close and human relationship.

In the old model, value is captured is in the transaction. This is a zero sum game where the frontline linkage to the customer is adversarial. Customer choice and needs are relentlessly squeezed. Witness the Airline or Healthcare interface right now where frontline staff and passengers/patients are both miserable. Ever larger scale has enabled the distributor to limit choice and to increase “efficiency”. Until now, we all had to keep going to the hegemonic supplier. But no longer. New technology is enabling suppliers to disintermediate the hegemonic mega-scale suppliers who have built a cost structure based on their scale. With a dramatic shift in cost and choice, the customer is also experiencing a warm and not adversarial relationship

In this new model, which we can see in the actions of new adopters such as eBay, Amazon or Dell, the flow of energy is reversed and the full participation by not only the staff but the customer is desired. In this new model, the customer not the CEO sets the product agenda. It is the customer who decides what they want and who drives the production process back into, not simply into one organization, but into a network of suppliers organized by the host company. The new model works deliberately to eliminate, or significantly reduce, inventory or it carries inventory in a distributed form in the supporting federated system such as Wal*Mart and its suppliers. With very low or no inventory, they have a compelling cost advantage.

All have remarkably sensitive customer interfaces where, at best, individual customer profiles, preferences and accrued activity and trust are maintained in real time such as by Amazon, eBay and Dell. Or where community profiles are held in aggregate such as at Wal*Mart.

The New Rules
This is not simply a re-engineering of the process but a shift in culture. If an organization wishes to adopt this revolution in deployment and process, it involves working to radically change how everyone “sees” themselves and the organization. It demands a revolution in the very nature of relationships from an oligarchy to a democracy. No small change!

It involves the giving up of the idea that the market and the world can be controlled by head office. Head office in these organizations does not pretend to be able to predict customer behaviour, instead it works to have the best sensory system possible. It uses this acutely sensitive information system to track trends and to react immediately. As a result, the customer experience has been transformed from an outward push to an inward acceptance. Consequently the customer interface has become a good place to be for both the customer and for the staff. It is fun to fly Southwest as well as being inexpensive. Why/ Because the staff have a lot of control. Amazon provides a community of book reviewers that pulls the customer into the primary sales position in the firm. Wal*Mart greats each customer and so on. The customer gets what they want rather than only what the firm will give them.

Why has this shift occurred? In a world where most of have all that we need, in terms of things, this putting the customer into the driver’s seat give them the potential for the experience of control and participation that the old system prohibits. This is the key to understanding the new model. Its value is in the experience of control and participation given to the customer. For the first time, the customer is in control and not the corporation. Once customers have experienced this, they do not go back! Conversely, in the new organization, to give the customer control and participation, head office has had to give the front line control, and participation as well. Once employees have had a taste of this they too do not want to go back.

To pull this off, these organizations have pushed a remarkable amount of decision making power out to the front line. Floor clerks in Wal*Mart can move material around the store and each store has a computer assisted re-order model that enables the store to track orders to the unique preferences of its own community. At Dell your PC and you have a unique identifier enabling you to have the machine serviced throughout its life. At Amazon you have a personal webpage that reflects what you do and what you look at. You are a market of one. At eBay the buyers and sellers deal direct. The best practioners of the new model deliberately support the creation of customer communities. So at eBay the golfers run their part of the enterprise. At Amazon, the unpaid reviewers provide the marketing.

The result of this giving up of conventional control is a radical reduction of costs. The direct costs that are reduced are in inventory and in HR such as employee health, turnover and absenteeism costs. The indirect costs are in speed and effectiveness in making the right decisions and in reacting to changes in the environment. None of these structural advantages are available to the traditional organization. To reduce costs, they have to cut people and cut service delivery or be bought or buy another to increase scale even more. The outcome? A more unhappy workforce, a more cynical customer and more friction and drag. Thus making their service more vulnerable to those who can offer the new alternative.

If you are a competitor of one of these new model firms and you are still using the old model, you will fail. You cannot deliver the costs and you cannot deliver the customer experience. So we see the icons of the old model struggling or even moving into bankruptcy. United Airlines, AMR Air Canada; Kmart, Home Depot; and most small booksellers and Indigo and Chapters. eBay is on track to dominate the second hand car market. Dell can take on any competition and is moving into other sectors beyond PC’s.

In the old model, you could compete by applying a simple concept – more money. By gaining access to more resources, you could use increased scale to push prices and costs down and use your increased hegemony to have power over the consumer and over your staff. This is why the trend in the old model is for more scale. But now scale will not help United Airlines or Home Depot. The new model demands that you kill off your old culture, the culture that made you successful and which you know so well.

Just as all the benefits in the 20th century accrued to those organizations that adopted the Ford model well and early, so in our time, the advantages will accrue to those that understand and apply the new relationship model.

The essence of peer to peer

Great article
The best paper yet on the essence of the relationship economy

Moving from Alchemy to Chemistry - The workplace today Part 1

Why is the workplace becoming more stressful? This is the question that Brian Chambers and I have been struggling with for more than three years. We think that we have stumbled upon some insights that might help you if you share this question.

Brian was the Chair of the Veterans Appeal Board. He was witnessing an ever larger parade of young soldiers who had become disabled in their work asking to be pensioned off. Brian wanted to find out what was the real pressure that was causing this? Why did the obvious fix of providing more medical intervention to soldiers not seem to help? He asked this question about the military just as the Public Service itself had put the issue of the workplace near the top of its agenda as well. Surveys had revealed a growing morale problem based on what seemed to be workload and non supportive management. Plans for significant interventions were put in motion. These plans were largely based on introducing more flexibility into the workplace and in helping staff become more healthy

I had been the SVP for HR for CIBC. Back in 1991, in response to our own perception of growing stress in our workplace I too had brought in the "Mother of all Workplace Programs". We had flex, leaves of all sorts, part time benefits, fitness support. We brought in a brilliant young occupational health doctor, David Brown to help and to coach the senior executives. We had all the fixes that the Public Service were now espousing.

My problem in 2000 was that I knew something that many in the public service did not. I knew that I had failed to halt the slide by using these conventional fixes.

By 1993, we knew that we were not only not making headway but we were sliding into a pit. I knew this because we looked the real numbers - the banker in me. We found that our total cost for everything related to workplace stress, illness, absence, back fills and drugs was then $200 million a year. We ran the numbers out into 2000 and found that unless we did something that worked our stress-related costs would be in the region of $500 million. This got the Chairman's attention. His instruction to us was to find the real reasons why people were breaking down and to find a real fix.

I left shortly after to join Dr Fraser Mustard at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and it was David Brown who carried the CIBC torch and who subsequently had much of the breakthroughs that shifted our understanding of this problem from a dependence of beliefs with no science behind them, Alchemy, to a set of principles deeply rooted in 30 years of scientific research, Chemistry.

But before I review with you what we learned from David, and then from the US Army, BP and New York City, we want to add our own view of the context for action. At CIBC we introduced these programs in 1991 because we thought that somehow it would help us look good. After all, who likes the Banks? It was only in 1993 that CIBC woke up to the numbers involved and CIBC got really serious from a core business perspective.

So we asked, was this a nice to have issue or was it more serious than that. For a year, we tried to get the numbers but we failed in that. The task was too complex for the accounting system of the Public Service. At least from our end of it. So we did the next best thing and looked into the future. There was already a intuitive sense in the PS that the current workplace and hiring was going to be an issue. There is the famous, maybe apocryphal, story of the Clerk being told at the dinner table by his own children that they would never consider working for the PS.

Brian and I had arguably a more extreme context for action. We could see a near future that meant that having a more responsive workplace was not a nice to have but a survival issue. We could see a "vice" of powerful forces that were going to intersect in 10 years that would possibly cause the collapse of traditional organizations. By 2003 in the areas of airlines, book-selling, retailing we can see the first effects of the radically new organization confronting the traditional.

1. Who would we hire after the boomers retired? In 2016, Canada will have fewer young than all G8 countries. Not only fewer in number but fewer in quality as our education system is also in tatters with up to 40% of kids either not graduating or leaving school with very poor literacy and social skills.

2. A shift in values that reject the corporate world We have observed a radical shift in values by most of the best of the young who cannot find the freedom and self-expression that they demand in conventional workplaces. Consequently they drift, work for themselves or work for non-conventional employers.

3. The impact of new technology There is a disruptive power emerging in many technology sectors. In essence the need to have a large organization to own major tools is becoming passé. A band can make a CD, mix and edit it and distribute it without the need for a record label. This technology dis-intermediation is taking place all over the economy.

4. The acceleration of the pace and power of change. It is hard to believe that the internet has only been a presence since 1994. It is now ubiquitous. This process took 70 years for the telephone. Moore's law is still working. We can anticipate computing power costing $1000 to include most what is totally available today in 20 years. It is impossible to comprehend what this will mean.

Maybe, we asked, it was the inability of the rigid structures and the culture of the traditional command and control organization to cope and respond effectively to these forces that was the deeper issue. Maybe we have been working on the symptoms. We could see greenfield organizations thriving at the expense of traditional organizations. Could we find any evidence of some traditional organizations that were adapting?

This question lead us back to David Brown and to my old friends at CIBC

Moving from Alchemy to Chemistry - The workplace today Part 2

A myth in science is that great insights occur as a result of linear application of effort and experiment. Most of the great insights have occurred serendipitously in the bath, Archimedes, or after a long walk with a friend, Einstein. It seems that the preconditions are having an open mind and having thought about a problem for a long time.

Brian and I make no claims to be original. We happen to be wide eyed observers. We went looking for answers and for insight. We spent the next year meeting with people much more thoughtful than us and reading about those that were making a real difference. Taken together we saw a pattern.

Changing to the new state that fits the turbulent world that we now live versus the relatively stable world of the 20th and 19th century requires a two step process. We have found that you have to change the workplace culture first and then you have to change the way that you organize. Culture first. What culture you may ask. Please read on and we will explore this map in detail.

Our first call was to David Brown and his partner Dr. Andrew Clarke to catch up with what was happening with their practice and at CIBC. I had heard that they had made progress but I knew none of the details. What we learned got us excited. After 3 or 4 years of frustration and failure in applying the conventional wisdom - much of it by trying to intervene medically earlier and with more power, David and Andrew broke through their own acculturation as physicians. Their insight was that workplace illness is not an illness in itself. It is a symptom. Workplace illness is a symptom of a stress in the relationship between the manager and the managed. While the illness manifest itself in medical terms or in disability, it cannot be "cured" unless the underlying cause - stress in the relationship is dealt with.

David and Andrew took this insight and built a measurement tool an intervention tool based on the managerial relationship and persuaded John Hunkin, the then new Chairman, to give it a try. John was embarking on a massive restructuring and had to take $500 million of costs out of the bank and to shift the culture in the retail operation with 35,000 employees, mainly middle-aged women, to sales. He wanted to find something that would work in providing some stability in a very turbulent time. In simple terms they used a simple tool to track the frequency and duration of absence and illness. In this new context of managerial relationship, regular absence is the first smoke that tells you that fire is brewing. Very few employees are inherently slackers. When an employee is regularly ill, these are the flames. The "cure" was to bring in an outside and neutral Facilitator who worked with the manager and the employee face to face until the real issues were on the table and were resolved. The cure was to broker a real conversation where both sides could be heard. In this short paper there is not space to provide you with a full description of what tis process really involves. The main point is that the cure is in the conversation. A conversation that cannot take place with out a neutral facilitator.

John Hunkin's priority was not science but results. He got them. $8,000,000 was saved in the first 9 months and the disability rate was cut by 40%. In two years, in the midst of the restructuring, CIBC was rated on of th top 35 companies to work for in Canada and the savings rate had continued to build.

So an important insight was gained by reconnecting to David and Andrew.We piled back into the research that supported the idea that the core issue in workplace illness and stress was relational. Michael Marmot's Whitehall Studies are critically helpful in this regard. His study of the British Civil Service shows that workplace illness is found on a gradient in the hierarchy. Those at the bottom with no voice or control had 4 times the amount of illness and even accidents than those at the top. His insight, there will always be hierarchies. The issue is the culture in them. Is it closed or open? Linda Duxbury is close to seeing this as well. She has deduced that the issue that drives most illness, absence and acting out is behaviour of the manager. She is also clear that all the conventional cures such as flex etc do not work in the unreformed organization. A valuable find was the Institute for Work and Health. Their work in the automotive industry shows conclusively that most of the back injuries in factories were related to the amount of control and voice that employees had and were only loosely connected to ergonomics. There is a mass of similar research supporting the issue that stress at work is a product of the managerial culture. An additional aha for us was more research in an entirely different field. Dr Doug Wilms at UNB, and a fellow of the CIAR, has been working on why so many of our children are vulnerable. The conventional wisdom is that poverty is the main driver for poor attainment. Wilms contradicts this. He has found that it is parenting culture not income that is the main driver. The most damaging parental culture? Very authoritarian culture. The same pattern.

So if culture, managerial culture was the key to workplace stress and illness, why did the facilitator seem to work so well to fix it and was this the holy grail or did we need to learn more?

Because we wanted to try this out in the Canadian Forces, we thought we should find a military testbed. So we turned to the work of General Gordon Sullivan (Retired Chief of the Army) and Colonel Mike Harper. To our surprise we found an entirely different route to the same destination. David and Andrew's insight at CIBC is well understood in the US Army and a different process, but with the same DNA, has been in play for over a decade. But we found a new issue. That you can be successful in changing a culture but if you don't also change the main operational doctrine, you are still stuck.

Moving from Alchemy to Chemistry - The workplace today Part 3

It's a paradox that the organization that gave us Command and Control is an organization that has done so much to find a new way of doing things. What was General Sullivan's context for understanding that Command and Control had to go?

As we have witnessed in the last decade, the modern battlefield is now incredibly complex. There is simply no way that all the information can be fed back to the command, understood and then relayed back to units. Everyone has to be in the loop at the same time and those at the front have to have the maximum liberty to take action with no call back for orders or more information. The issue for distributing all this information and power of command is not directly technology. It is culture. If you have a culture of command and control you can't use the new technology.

This is actually every "General's" context whether she runs Hewlett Packard or he is the Clerk of the House. The complexity of our world is increasing exponentially.

The principal tool in the Army's portfolio for culture change is a deceptively simple process called the After Action Review. The AAR works like this. After any task those involved time out and WITH A FACILITATOR, have a discussion about what really happened and what they should learn from this. Does the AAR work? The US Army may not be the exemplars of peacekeeping but their tactical performance in the Middle East was breathtaking. The AAR is recognized as the most important tool in unlocking the culture and enabling this type of tactical flexibility. Brigadier General W (Scott) Wallace, formerly in command of the NTC, has observed that the AARs have "instilled a discipline of relentlessly questioning everything we do.
Above all, it has re-socialised three generations of officers to move away from a command-and-control style of leadership to one that takes advantage of distributed intelligence. It has enabled us to learn that we can never become too wedded to our script for combat and that we have to remain versatile enough to exploit the 'broken plays' that inevitably develop in the confusion of battle.“

Let's play with this for a moment. Do you have real and frank discussions about what is really going on? Do you have junior folks speak in front of you telling you what you did wrong? Do you have junior folks acting as the thought leaders in the group? I doubt it. The key? The Facilitator. Here is where the pattern started to become clear to us.

Culture is embodied in voice. At the heart of the managerial relationship is the issue of voice. Stress as Marmot says visits those of us most that have no voice or who feel that we have no voice. Having a voice does not mean that everyone is in charge. The US Army is still firmly attached to the chain of command. Having a voice means that our opinion is taking seriously. Having a voice as a leader means that we speak the truth.

How we speak to each other is the culture in action. If we have a habitual way of speaking we cannot change this on our own. If you are the DM, or the general, you have a certain type of dialogue with junior folks and they expect this and also speak their side of the deal. To speak differently demands that there is a neutral broker, as in the CIBC or the AAR, to level the playing field. Both the CIBC process and the AAR in their DNA open up the conversation between the leader and the led. They have to use a neutral facilitator to pull this off because we have all be trained too well to play the old conversation.

The central figure in the development and deployment of the AAR is a remarkable man. Col (RTD) Ed Guthrie. Ed was not only the staff man for Sullivan on this file but has since his second retirement, Sullivan called him back to be the AAR guy for 13 years after he had retired, has gone on to make a substantive difference at BP. It was in speaking directly to Ed that we began to see that finding ways to shift the culture were not enough. There was another step that we had missed. Unless you then change the main operational doctrine, you are still bridging two worlds - you are not in the new yet.

Moving from Alchemy to Chemistry - The workplace today Part 4

Our conversations with Ed took place in the context of the political war going on between Secretary Rumsfeld and the Army just prior to the second shooting war wit Iraq. Ed gave us a deep insight as to the blind spot in the Army. They were hanging onto the structure required for the cold War - the Armored division and the "Big 5 Weapon Set" developed for the European theatre and for the Soviets. As Rumsfeld and the Army fought, Ed was providing us with the meaning.

Rumsfeld is deeply influenced by the thoughts of the military genius of the late 20th century the late Col John Boyd USAF Rtd. Boyd is a huge topic himself. One of Boyd's main ideas is that speed itself is the competitive issue. His great thinking tool is called OODA. In layman's terms is is about how fast you can "see" what is really going, understand it, decide what to do and then act. Applying OODA well in today's complex world where we don't see or understand a lot is the difference in whether you win or lose in any competitive situation whether in war, business or in government.

Rumsfeld's problem was that the Army doctrine was wedded to an organization that was by design too slow and too ponderous for the political issues confronting the US. He needed a quick and successful war. But the way that the Army was organized was in the way.

In the US Army operational culture, real generals drive armoured divisions with a huge tail. While the Army had made great progress in changing the command and control internal culture, they still saw gigantism and the Armored Division as how they did things. So the 1st Armored Division could not deploy in Kosovo, the roads and bridges could not fit them. Nor could they deploy the Blackhawk either as it was too expensive to lose and too vulnerable to a sophisticated enemy. Rumsfeld's frustration with the Army in Iraq is that they wanted to take another 6 months in bringing up the stuff. So he forced the issue and got his way. While the political aftermath is a mess and the Army's lack of suitability of peacekeeping is self evident. Their tactical achievement is outstanding. They surprised themselves!

Shock and Awe a Boyd concept where you defeat your enemy in his mind by your speed and flexibility was proved out in the field. Rumsfeld's latest attack on the Armor Generals is the appointment of a new new Chief of the Army who is a retired Special Forces General.

So our study of the US Army had shown us that it was not enough to find a way to change the internal culture. If a large traditional organization was going to make the shift, it would have to change its core operational doctrine as well. The history of technical change and its proper deployment in the military has become a field of study itself. Each new development is introduced in the operational context of a previous era. Long Bows had been in action for a century before they were deployed properly at Crecy. It took 3 years for leaders in the US Civil war to acknowledge that you cannot deploy men in line as you did with muskets in front of rifles. It took until late 1917 to acknowledge that courage was not enough when confronted with a machine gun. The history of arms is only an illustration of the point that when a disruptive new technology emerges, our only context for its deployment is how we used to do things. Hence the Dot com bubble.

Ed lead us to another large organization that had tackled both its internal culture and its operational discipline. BP.

Moving from Alchemy to Chemistry - The workplace today Part 5

BP's story is well documented in Chris Collinson excellent book Learning to Fly. Beyond learning much from the book, it was a thrill for us to have direct contact with Ed Guthrie who played such a key role in the first steps of the transformation that Lord Browne is pulling off at BP.

Understanding what BP, a 100,000 strong organization of mainly male engineers many of whom are Scots, is doing gives us some hope that a traditional bureaucracy can transform. We do not believe that all traditional organizations can transform. Look at the airlines' response to discounters or Kmart's response to Wal*Mart. We are saying that with the right leadership, transformation may be possible.

So what was Lord Browne's context for change? He and his team recognized that they were in the "End Game" for oil. All the easy oil had been found. All the oil in cheap geological structures, in easy political environments, in easy environmental areas has been found. Only the tough oil was left. He and the team recognized that it would take all of BP's energy and intellectual capital to stay in the game and to be close to winning it. What a daunting challenge! But then someone pointed out "What if we win the end game for oil and miss the point - that the future may be hydrogen, wind or something that we don't see '

Well they thought they had a problem but now they had a crisis. How were they going to do their day job in oil and be competitive in the alternative game? The alternative game was a real game. the stakes were survival. BP had to become a leader in the alternative game while still be a contender in the End game for Oil. Who could teach them all these new skills? How could they crank out enough earnings in the oil game to pay for the early days in the new game?

The only answer that they could come up with was that they were going to have to rely only on themselves. There was no one out there that could help. How could they learn enough quickly enough? All the jargon about being a learning Organization now made sense. being a learning organization had nothing to do with credentials, it was all about reacting appropriately to changes in the environment. Being a Learning (OODA)?Organization is a an evolutionary concept. Observe, learn and adapt or perish. (OODA) BP had two strikes against them. They had an exceptionally male engineering culture where not knowing something was not acceptable and asking for help an impossibility. How can you learn if you cannot accept that you don't know? How can you learn if you cannot ask for help? They also were organized by departments and by geography. They were a silo-based organization where crossing departmental or geographic boundaries was in effect impossible. How could you learn if you could not access the full knowledge embedded in the global organization?

They overcame all these barriers and then some. BP did three things well. Browne helped everyone understand what the context was for their future. He had mainly got the job as CEO because if his demonstrated skills as a communicator.as a division leader. A shared context is the opening move in playing the evolutionary game well. Secondly he brought in a world class teacher, Ed Guthrie to work on the culture with the introduction of the AAR. Ed's job was to make it OK to ask for help and to capture the learning. Browne recognized that he had to break down the barriers for conversation before he invested in any technology that may broaden the conversation beyond face to face and hence to tap into the full distributed intelligence of all of BP. Thirdly BP created a new sub organization - the Community of Practice. BP still has the organization that we all recognize in org charts. But BP has a second organization that it is intensely stable. That is global and which even lasts after retirement. It is based on the reality that shared interests are more stable that conventional structures. If you are a driller, drilling is your real organization. being located in the North Sea or in South east Asia does not matter if you are connected to all the drillers. if you are retired you are still a driller and you may know stuff that the younger drillers may find valuable. You are still a player. The mundane gas station COI saved $700 million in 3 years by applying all their learning repeatedly to each new station construction.

The key to effective COI's? A FACILITATOR!. BP found that groups need to be brokered to ensure that the right type of conversation takes place. To work well COI's have to have the right type of conversation. Again voice emerges as a key. Underlying voice is the human relationship that voice establishes. A conversation is essentially human. being human it is attractive and it drives enquiry, challenge and response. It gives the speaker a place in the tribe and status that no official organization can give. The authoritarian voice dos not allow conversation. It is essentially a one way deal. it shuts down the receiver. It closes down the child. It impoverishes the organization

So what does all of this mean? Is there a silver bullet? Is there a Red Pill that we can take that will reveal the Matrix. No but there are perhaps a few principles which any organization could use to transform itself.

Moving from Alchemy to Chemistry - The workplace today Part 6

So what do we know? Could it help you?

1. We think we know a few things about the context of our time. By 2010, tomorrow, we will live through the convergence of a powerful series of vectors that will make staying as we are impossible. While we have mentioned 4 vectors in the Vice that we are sure of, we have not added any environmental or extraordinary factor such as war, a financial bifurcation or an energy crisis. Our point is that we do not have to be right in any detail about these vectors to know that we live in times that are so complex as to be beyond the prediction of mortal man. Only organizations and individuals that are exceptional at reading the times and reacting to them will survive.

2. We are prisoners of our mindsets Our mindsets affect two critical paths. They affect our relational culture or how we as individuals fit into an organization or into society. Currently we are locked into a parental command and control pattern which is evidenced by the corporate voice. This voice is not human and most people know that it is not real. At one end it is the voice of spin and the other the voice of dependency. Only organizations and individuals that speak with a human voice, that have conversations, will learn enough to keep up and to attract the best of the best. We know that the only way to change these voices is to use a facilitator. We are too embedded to do this on our own. We know that only if we can change our voice can we "see" enough to consider changing our operational doctrine.

3. Only a change in operational doctrine will complete the transformation. It was when Fisher did both in Dreadnought that 60 years of technical development in the Victorian Navy bore fruit. eBay would be our Dreadnought today.

4. There are no silver bullets. There are a number of good tools. What is needed above all is an understanding of the context and great leadership. We found many good tools at CIBC, in the US Army and at BP, But the key is not tools per se but intellectual and moral leadership. We are still bemused that most of the research that tells us that command and control is the problem, is not widely know. We suspect that it is easier to act using the conventional wisdom than to do the work to find out what science has to offer. Our greatest risk is to confuse action with understanding and acting for the sake of acting with courage.

Which brings us back to our beginning. Like the medieval world, we seem attracted to a set of beliefs that have no foundation except that they are conventional wisdom. We continue to discuss the issue of "workload" as if this is the accepted definition of the problem. We mandate managers to be supportive, without seeing the irony. We continue to see health as a product of physical issues which only require the application of medicine to be cured. We see being competitive in the future as about the application of technology alone. We think that knowledge is a thing. This is "Alchemy". None of these beliefs have any basis in observation, science or reality.

Science tells us that stress in the workplace is directly related to lack of voice and powerlessness. Science tells us that hierarchy is an essential part of nature and cannot be replaced but that its character can be changed. Science tells us that we cannot change ingrained behaviour by fiat but only by the gentle modelling of a peer or a facilitator. Science tells us that health is driven by our immune system which in in turn is driven by our coping ability which in turn is driven by how supportive our social environment is. Science tells us that to competitive a species or a group or an individual has to be able to observe, learn and adapt to changes in their environment. This is the chemistry of human relations. They are based in rigour and in observation and have been established for many years.

So maybe there is a silver bullet. You can choose to stick with Alchemy or you can choose Chemistry.

How do Virtual Teams work?

Note to me follow this link For the Wikipedia case study referenced by Ross

Graffiti

Here is an article from Land of Six Peoples

The Meaning of Graffiti
Before his transformation into New York's symbol of recovery from the terrror attacks, Rudolph Giuliani earned a special mention in that city's history as the mayor who halved the number of crimes committed in the city and cut the murder rate by nearly two-thirds. Before Giuliani, crime had reached "epidemic" proportions in some parts of New York. The drug trade and its attendant violence turned certain areas into no-go zones each night and violent crime had become so commonplace that a fatalistic acceptance of the city's new character was emerging.

The famous "zero tolerance" policy worked from the premise that small crimes encourage larger ones. So, while the police could not directly control the rate of murders, rapes and other violent crime, they could alter the context or "culture" in which these took place by suppressing the petty crimes which framed them. This theory was based on the work of two criminologists who said that indifference to small deviations from a desirable norm (such as broken windows that were left unrepaired) encouraged larger transgressions such as street crime and drug dealing. One of them wrote: "[m]uggers and robbers, whether opportunistic or professional, believe they reduce their chances of being caught or even identified if they operate on streets where potential victims are already intimidated by prevailing conditions. If the neighbourhood cannot keep a bothersome panhandler from annoying passersby, the thief may reason, it is even less likely to call the police to identify a potential mugger or to interfere if the mugging actually takes place."

Writing about the success of this approach in a wonderful little book called The Tipping Point, the New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell traced the evolution of "zero-tolerance" from the city's subway system which decided to eliminate grafitti from its cars and then to crack down on fare-beating (an estimated 170, 000 people avoided paying a token each day). Police had avoided arresting fare-beaters because of the amount of time they wasted doing it (the paperwork usually took a whole day to complete). After thinking hard about the problem, Transit Police chief William Bratton improved his staff's facilities, reducing this time to an hour. Then he chose several high-profile stations and made a large number of arrests as publicly as possible.

One in seven fare-beaters had outstanding warrants for previous offences and one in twenty was carrying some kind of weapon. Fewer armed men meant fewer violent confrontations and eventually, the likelihood of being stopped and searched discouraged many potential felons from walking around with any kind of weapon. The fare-beating arrests therefore had a significant knock-on effect on other crimes. Transit Police arrests quintupled between 1990 and 1994 (the year Giuliani was elected) and Bratton became head of the New York Police Department which then implemented the subway strategies on a much wider scale. The policy was a great success, but it was not done with a wave of a wand. Incremental changes in the subway "culture" combined with improved policing and long term administrative support to produce the sharp drop in crime rates.

Since then "zero tolerance" has been touted as a quick fix for any city with a crime problem. Mexico City, for example, recently signed a US$ 4.3 million contract with Giuliani's consulting firm for advice on how to lessen the city's chaos and carry out similar law enforcement reforms. Whether Mexico's very different economy and public culture will be able to underwrite the kind of change Giuliani is being asked to deliver is anyone's guess, but some locals are doubtful. The Christian Science Monitor reports: "Only 3 percent of Mexicans have confidence in the police. 'The difference is, in the US, people aspire to be law-abiding citizens,' says Mario Arroyo, a researcher at the International Center for Safety Studies in Mexico City. 'Here in Mexico, respect goes to those who evade the law.'"

Could "zero tolerance" work in Guyana? Maybe, but probably not as it ought to. How much radical change is possible given the erosion of our civic norms? Blocked drains and unweeded parapets, potholes, decrepit public buildings, people urinating in public, speeding minibuses, overloud music, traffic lights that don't always work, casual littering, spitting and obscenity - these create "streets in which potential victims are already intimidated by prevailing conditions." Our society has defaulted to "full tolerance" - and easy cures are a fantasy. Giving policemen bigger guns or faster cars is not the only way to tackle a crime problem. We must also consider their salaries and training, and the wider public context of our many "broken windows". We should not blame them for our failure to address the poverty and despair which underlie so much of the recent violence. The recent shutdown of businesses showed that crime cannot occur in a vacuum. Neither can solutions.