Crucial Deconflations
Disentangling legacy axioms that stifle, smother, and strangle organisational innovation, agility, and adaptiveness
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” — (not) Mark Twain 1
Amongst the most insidious impediments to creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness are legacy axioms, established over many decades in the relatively stable and predictable past, which have become serious liabilities in today’s increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.2
Three of the most pernicious “things we know for sure that just ain’t so” are especially tenacious because they’re conflations — two separate elements that have become fused together to such a degree that they are mistakenly treated as equivalent.3
To tackle these effectively, they must first be deconflated.
The three crucial deconflations are:
The conflation of “leadership” with “senior executives”.
The conflation of “senior executives” with “decision making”.
The conflation of “decision making” with “hierarchy”.
1. The conflation of “leadership” with “senior executives”
Ideas about leadership remain heavily biased towards the definition from John Kotter’s influential 1996 book Leading Change:
“Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen”. 4
In this legacy view of leadership, an elite cadre of senior executives ‘define a future vision’ and ‘align’ and ‘inspire’ others to ‘make it happen’.
The defining/aligning/inspiring is done by the ‘leaders’ — and done to everyone else, the ‘followers’.
Shortly after Kotter’s book appeared, my colleague Dr Peter Senge proposed a view of leadership more relevant to our increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world:
“Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future”.5
This view of leadership doesn’t segregate people into the senior executives who do leadership, and everyone else who has it done to them.
As a consequence, instead of creating followers it develops more leaders — or, to be more precise, develops an organisation’s leadership capacity.
Kotter did eventually acknowledge this failing in his book’s 2012 update, noting in the preface: “more agility and change-friendly organisations” and “more leadership from more people, and not just top management” are increasingly vital. 6
If you want to create a future-fit culture, these old school leader-follower relationships must give way to leader-leader relationships.
How does this view that “leadership” means more than “senior executives” sit with you?
Even if you agree with the logic that Kotter himself eventually accepted, that “more leadership from more people, and not just top management” is increasingly vital, do you still feel deep down that somehow “leadership” really is about “senior executives”?
That’s the power of legacy axioms…
A Chief Operating Officer once asked me, exasperated with some of his executive team colleagues: “Why would anyone think they’re smarter than everyone?”
What made his question so memorable is that it’s so rare for a senior executive to recognise and call it out.
Senior executives have traditionally been encouraged to think of themselves as all-seeing and all-knowing.
(Interestingly, in high-tech firms, leadership is often already perceived and practiced in a more future-fit way — as diverse people co-creating new value together. It has to be, otherwise the organisation wouldn’t be able to keep pace with technological developments.) 7
Many senior executives worry, even if they only admit it privately, that Kotter’s legacy view of leadership may be too deeply entrenched to shift.
When they do, I remind them that there are few contexts where traditional leadership mindsets are more ingrained than the US military, yet this shift was successfully achieved by Captain David Marquet of the nuclear-powered submarine USS Santa Fe.
The Santa Fe went from being the worst to the best performing ship in the fleet when Marquet changed the leadership regime — they key to which is in the subtitle of his 2015 bestseller: Turn the Ship Around: A true story of turning followers into leaders.8
Marquet’s example reflects my own experience that the low risk, high leverage way to unlock greater leadership capacity in any organisation is to get the key influencers whose mindsets, attitudes and behaviours systemically affect everyone and everything else to adopt and exemplify a leader-leader mindset.9
This means that leadership development is so closely tied to the attitudes and behaviours of key influencers that it cannot be outsourced to HR, business schools or training providers.
As Marquet concluded: “We had no need of leadership development programs — the way we ran the ship was the leadership development program”. 10
The bottom line: future-fit leadership is not done by senior executives to everyone else — it’s a community capacity that senior executives must cultivate so their organisations are fit for an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable future.
2. The conflation of “senior executives” with “decision making”
Ask people where the decision making takes place in a traditional organisation, and they’ll point to the senior executives.
If you ask them where the action taking happens, they’ll point to towards the workers, the hands, the people in the body of the organisation, on the front line, at the coalface.
But ask where the sense making takes place and you’ll usually get blank stares.
It’s a vital question to explore because doing so leads to the realisation that the richest sense making happens not at the top, where decisions traditionally get made, but in the body of the organisation where the real action takes place.
There are three main reasons why the richest sense making happens in the body of the organisation:
It’s where people are in most direct contact with most customers.
It’s where people are most closely involved in day-to-day value creation and see what’s working well, what’s working less well, and what’s not working at all.
It's where the maximum diversity of people and perspectives come together, these days from maybe five generational cohorts.
If senior executives want to create a future-fit organisation, they need to recognise that an organisation’s ability to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable future critically depends not on the decisions they make but on how effectively they create conditions where sense making, decision making & action taking are tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation.11
Senior executives who remain stuck in the legacy perception that their role is decision making:
Discourage wider engagement that would improve decision-making;
Drive disagreements and dissenting voices underground;
Increase decision-making bottlenecks and their own stress levels;
Perpetuate the ‘all-seeing, all-knowing leader’ myth;
Undermine the leader-leader relationships that build leadership capacity;
Stifle, smother and strangle innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
3. The conflation of “decision making” with “hierarchy”.
The innovation, agility, and adaptiveness muscles that organisations need if they’re to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world won’t develop in an organisation dominated by traditional top-down, hierarchical command & control.
This was recognised many years ago in the mainstream organisational discourse, and prompted the question: “What if we got rid of hierarchy and had a flat organisation instead?”
An interesting question in theory, but in practice flat organisations don’t eliminate hierarchy, because in all human communities, hierarchies emerge in one form or another…
This was recognised more than 50 years ago by feminist, political scientist, writer, and lawyer Jo Freeman.
In her seminal paper “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, Freeman describes how the early women’s liberation movement sought to avoid hierarchical structures, which they regarded as patriarchal, adopting instead a loose informality.12
Unfortunately, whilst this encouraged participation and personal insights, it also made it hard to actually get things done.
Freeman reports that what started out as a counter to traditional structures “became a goddess in its own right” as an “intrinsic and unquestioned part of the ideology”.13
This ideological avoidance of hierarchy had a much more sinister effect — it provided “a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others”.
Freeman observed that “This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of structurelessness does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones”.
She concludes that the structureless organisation “is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.”
Since hierarchies emerge even in so-called flat organisations, the question becomes what kind of hierarchy do we want?
If we don’t address this question effectively, we’ll probably end up with a hierarchy we don’t want…
Given that a future-fit organisation is one where sense making, decision making & action taking are tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation, the higher someone is in the hierarchy, the more responsibility they bear for creating conditions where such a culture emerges and flourishes.
Crucial Deconflations
Not only are these three pernicious and tenacious legacy axioms hard to shift individually, you may have already noticed how they mutually reinforce each other:
leadership was traditionally done by senior executives
senior executives traditionally saw their role as decision making
the most important decision making took place at the top of the hierarchy.
By contrast, in the systemic shift to a future-fit organisation:
leadership is the capacity of the organisational community to shape its future
the role of senior executives is to create conditions that unblock, unlock, and unleash that capacity
the higher someone sits in the hierarchy, the more responsibility they bear for creating and sustaining these conditions.
Questions for reflection
How often do people in your organisation — or do you yourself — mistakenly use the term “leaders” to mean “senior executives”?
How much does this conflation unconsciously constrain leadership capacity within the organisation?
How often is the term “decision makers” used to mean “senior executives”?
How much does this conflation stifle innovation, agility, and adaptiveness in the organisation?
To what degree is “hierarchy” conflated with “top-down decision making”?
How much is this implicitly impeding the organisation’s progress towards becoming fit for an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable future?
The quote — “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so” — is often attributed to Mark Twain. Scholars at the Center for Mark Twain Studies of Elmira College have found no substantive evidence of this. Quote Investigator has an entry on the origins of this quote and its evolution.
The Wiktionary entry for axiom: From Ancient Greek ἀξίωμα (axíōma, “self-evident principle”). Meaning 1) A seemingly self-evident or necessary truth based on assumptions, principles, or propositions which cannot actually be proved or disproved; 2) A fundamental assumption that serves as a basis for deduction of theorems; 3) An established principle in some artistic practice or science that is universally received.
The Wiktionary entry for conflate: from Latin cōnflātus, from cōnflō (“fuse, melt, or blow together”); cōn (“with, together”) + flō (“blow”). Meaning 1) To bring (things) together and fuse (them) into a single entity; 2) To mix together different elements; 3) (by extension) To fail to properly distinguish or keep separate (things); to mistakenly treat (them) as equivalent.
John Kotter is a former professor at Harvard Business School
Peter Senge and I served together on the Global Leadership Team of the Society for Organisational Learning from 2009-2015. His definition of leadership as community capacity is in ‘The Dance of Change’ (1999 p16).
Leading Change (Kotter 2012, preface page ‘ix’).
My early experience helping senior executive clients create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness was in the high-tech sector — after a client of the open innovation lab where I then worked asked if I could “come and make our people behave more like your people”.
Marquet describes in Turn the Ship Around! how his lack of technical knowledge of the Santa Fe class of sub meant he couldn’t adopt traditional hierarchical decision making.
This 7 minute video describes how this precise, deep focus on key influencers unlocks leadership capacity.
Ibid (Turn the Ship Around p84).
This previous post links to three short videos (total viewing time 19 minutes) describing on what does and doesn’t work when creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Ibid (Tyranny of Structurelessness §2)