Courage in the C-Suite
Who are the forward-thinking executives in your organisation?
“It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity. It is when we all play safe that fatality will lead us to our doom. It is in the dark shade of courage alone that the spell can be broken.” — Dag Hammarskjöld 1
Imagine you’re a forward-thinking C-Suite executive in a large organisation.
You recognise that the future is increasingly uncertain and unpredictable and that the old traditional ways of running organisations are no longer fit for purpose. 2
You intuitively resonate with the wisdom in Peter Senge’s definition that leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future. 3
You understand that maximising the capacity to shape its future depends on how — and how effectively — the organisation makes sense of itself and its context, makes decisions about what to do and not do, and takes actions based on those decisions.
You realise that the organisation can only thrive when sense making, decision making, and action taking become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
You get that this is more about developing new muscles than designing new models, and that this organisational muscle-building can only happen when it’s the people within the organisation themselves who do the heavy lifting.
You understand that the primary role of C-Suite executives like yourself is to create conditions conducive to the development of these future-fit muscles throughout the body of the organisation.
Unfortunately, some — perhaps most — of your C-Suite colleagues retain a more traditional mindset.
They see themselves as “decision makers” and those lower down the organisation as “action takers”.
Sense making is something they do intuitively or, when unsure, hire a big consulting firm to “help”.
The consultants scurry around interviewing people in the body of the organisation, because they know that’s where the real sense making happens in an organisation. 4
They then pull together a slick PowerPoint deck, sprinkled with sufficient spin to sell the next phase of consulting work, and present the “findings” back to the C-Suite.
It takes a lot of courage for a forward-thinking executive to go against the flow of this old-school approach and instead take effective action to progressively unlock ever more of the capacity of the organisation to shape its own future.
And it’s not just the courage it takes to step out from behind your digital dashboard and actually work with the human beings in the organisation to build its future-fit muscles amidst the messy day-to-day realities of organisational life.
It’s also the even greater courage it takes to do so against the gravitational pull of other C-Suite colleagues content to perpetuate the practices of the past, even if it means the steady decline of the organisation into irrelevance and eventually its demise.
Where the courageous, forward-thinking C-Suite executive sees the future success of the organisation as paramount, more mercenary role occupants see the organisation primarily as a vehicle for their own career progression.
That’s why the latter are so ready to bung big bucks to consulting firms instead of developing the internal capacity for future-fitness in the organisation whose future they’re supposed to secure. 5
It requires no courage to chuck the organisation’s cash at big consulting to take the challenge off your hands…
Why do so many C-Suite executives do that?
Well, if the board asks what you’re doing to secure the future of the organisation you can point to the consultants and say “I’ve hired these guys”.
The thing is, whether the consulting project actually improves things or not doesn’t really matter.
Because if things go pear-shaped you can always say “Don’t blame me, I hired this well-known big consulting firm”.
And, as an added bonus, while the consulting firm is “helping” your current organisation, you’re freed up to work on your move to bigger and better things at the next one.
Courageous, forward-thinking executives have the best interests of their organisations at heart, not just their own careers.
Do some of these hire big consulting firms because they believe the latter can help them create a future-fit organisation?
Absolutely.
But when the penny drops that creating a future-fit organisation is more about muscles than models, more about people than PowerPoint, and the only people to develop muscles are the ones who do the heavy lifting, it becomes obvious why a big consulting firm can never help you achieve that goal.
The finders, minders, grinders structure baked into the very heart of the big consulting business model fundamentally depends for its profitability on deploying as many junior consulting grinders for as long as the client can be persuaded to foot the bill. 6
And with all those junior consultants running around doing the lifting, how will any new muscles to be developed by anyone in your organisation..?
Hiring a big consulting firm to help you create a future-fit organisation is as crazy as hiring someone to go to the gym on your behalf and then wondering why, months later, your muscles still aren’t any stronger...
Questions for reflection
Who are the courageous, forward-thinking C-Suite executives in your organisation?
How well are they maintaining their focus on creating a future-fit organisation amidst the gravitational pull back to the past exerted by more traditionalist colleagues?
Is there a big consulting firm — or more than one — “helping” the organisation shape its future?
What are you doing to help ensure sense making, decision making, and action taking become deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation?
Dag Hammarskjöld, Servant of Peace: A Selection of the Speeches and Statements of Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations (1962) p107.
For more detail see this previous article From Strategy to Sense Making
The Dance of Change (1999) p 16.
For more on why the best sense making happens in the body of an organisation, see this previous article Decisions that don’t make sense.
For more, see this previous article on Creating Conditions for Emergence.
For more on the finders, minders, grinders structure at the heart of the big consulting firm business model, see pages 14 to 16 of The Five Fatal Habits — my 22 page guide to why organisations have consistently failed to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness despite all their efforts over the past 30 years.