Expertise — a double-edged sword
A future-fit culture only emerges when people see how to create it for themselves, by themselves
“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of eternal youth, lies not in seeking new lands but in having new eyes” — Marcel Proust 1
A future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness only emerges when people in the organisation create it for and by themselves.
They’re the ones who must develop the organisational muscles, which can only happen when they do the heavy lifting.
Fortunately, much of this happens automagically once people see, clearly, with their own eyes, what’s been holding them back — and how to break free.
We knew this 30 years ago in the early days of the organisational learning movement.
But what we didn’t fully recognise was just how tenacious various obstructive legacy habits of thought and action would turn out to be.
Which is why, three decades later, the organisational landscape still hasn’t really changed all that much.
Of course, technology has moved forward in leaps and bounds — back then, none of us had ‘always on’ mobile devices in our pockets, cloud based platforms, search engines and social networks.
But despite all the technological advances, the proliferation of experts, and tens of thousands of books, articles and papers published since then, most organisations remain stuck in Groundhog Day…
Paradoxically, the problem is one of expertise.
Not that there’s a lack of it — but that it’s a double-edged sword.
And there are few places where this is more evident than in culture change.
The problem with experts
Experts see things that others don’t — that’s a significant source of the value they bring.
So, when an organisation’s culture is assessed by experts, they see things others don’t.
They can describe implications of what they see that others can’t.
They can give advice on what you ought to do about it.
But even if that advice is sound — and that’s a big if — the experts are the only ones with the eyes to see what their mental models reveal.
The people in the organisation doing the main value-creating work can’t see for themselves what needs to be done.
This prevents them from sense making and decision making, leaving them with little or no sense of agency in shaping the future of their organisation.
A future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness requires sense making, decision making, and action taking to become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
So, when people feel excluded from sense making and decision making they’re unable to co-create the culture — the way we do things round here — that the organisation needs if it’s to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
This failure further lubricates the revolving door of external experts from the $250 billion consulting industry — where no sooner has one lot left the building, the next lot is on its way in... 2
As a result, the real magic of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness never materialises because people in the organisation never embark on the true voyage of discovery to see what they need to do together, for themselves, with their own eyes.
I first recognised this problem when applying the Unwritten Rules of the Game approach to culture change 30 years ago.
I had the great fortune of working alongside its creator — my colleague, coach, and close friend Dr Peter Scott-Morgan — from the early 1990’s until his retirement in 2007. 3
We and our colleagues applied the Unwritten Rules methodology with dozens of client organisations around the world — proving its value as one of the most powerful, pragmatic approaches ever devised for designing culture change interventions.
But its main drawback — one that affects and afflicts all expert-led design methods — is that the insights it reveals are only really visible to the experts, not to people in the client organisation themselves.
By way of analogy — in the UK National Health Service (NHS) a specialist medical consultant has to complete a five-year medical degree, followed by two years of foundational training and work experience, followed by five to eight years speciality training before being fully qualified to practice.
You’d never expect a patient to pick up and apply the specialist expertise the medical consultant had developed over all that time.
In the same way, it took at least three years of apprenticeship alongside experienced Unwritten Rules colleagues to develop the necessary skills, sensitivities and “bedside manner” to be able to lead assignments — and then only for individuals who possessed the necessary systems thinking orientation and outlook at the start. 4
Once we’d spent a few weeks decoding what drove an organisation’s culture, the client could ask us how their people would respond to certain events, decisions, or interventions and we’d be able to describe with a high degree of confidence and credibility precisely what would happen.
That’s how we were able to describe to BBC Director General Greg Dyke, and his successor Mark Thompson, what drove the BBC’s culture and created certain characteristic attitudes, behaviours, actions and interactions. 5
But what we couldn’t do — for the BBC or any other client — was transfer the ability to decode the organisation’s culture to people within the organisation so they could see it for themselves.
We couldn’t give them the new eyes they needed to see for themselves.
Or rather we could, but it would have required one or more of their people learning to master the Unwritten Rules approach over several years, apprenticed to one of our experienced practitioners.
What’s more, even if someone from the client organisation did possess the basic systemic sensibilities, and spent the necessary years developing the required skills, they’d still be in the same position as our own experts — the only ones in the client organisation with the eyes to really see its culture... 6
Future fitness
Fortunately, creating a future-fit organisation doesn’t involve designing and implementing a new culture at all.
Instead, a culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness emerges naturally and automatically once the people in the organisation see, for themselves, with their own eyes, how to remove the hidden barriers currently preventing it’s unique future-fit culture from emerging and flourishing.
In fact, the very idea of designing and implementing a culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness is completely oxymoronic — because a designed culture could never unlock an organisation’s unique potential for creating continuous new value in the world.
The key to creating a future-fit culture is to create the conditions for emergence of the unique, natural, collective human capacity to continuously co-create new value that’s already innate to the organisation.
Five Fatal Habits have consistently prevented organisations from doing this for themselves, by themselves, over the past 30 years. 7
These habits have left organisations prey to the ‘one size fits all’ so-called ‘best practice methodologies’ of mainstream consulting firms who, despite their expertise, fail to deliver results in at least 70% of cases — by their own admission. 8
A culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness emerges as people in the organisation see for themselves, and tackle by themselves, the barriers preventing the organisation’s own unique future-fit culture from flourishing.
I’ve found that the most effective way to encourage this emergence involves three steps:
Step 1: Help key people in the organisation see for themselves with their own eyes the barriers getting in the way of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Step 2: Help them see for themselves what they can do to remove these barriers.
Step 3: Get out of their way.
The bottom line
Real magic is never created by what an expert can do for an organisation but by what the people in the organisation discover they’re able to create together, for and by themselves.
They just have to be able to see it with their own eyes…
“À la recherche du temps perdu” Volume V “La Prisonnière” (1923)
The Unwritten Rules of the Game book review on Goodreads.
We found that many aspiring consultants lacked this systemic sensibility and were simply too wedded to step-by-step thinking to make the grade as Unwritten Rules practitioners.
The BBC is one of the few clients I can talk about explicitly, since our work is now in the public domain following Dame Janet Smith’s report into the Savile Inquiry. Savile was able to get away with sexual abuse because in the BBC the culture of the time, some people - especially high profile on-air ‘talent’ were “more valuable than the values” (Report p20, p187).
And what’s more, they’d probably want to leave and become an external culture change expert — which would defeat the whole objective of developing internal expertise…
Download the 22-page Five Fatal Habits guide.
Consulting brand leader McKinsey made this admission here. Note they say: “We know, for example, that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support”. In fact the truth is more that “We know, for example, that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to them being led by firms like McKinsey”.