Four flavours of folly
Favoured ways to fail at creating future-fit cultures
“To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom”. — Horace 1
If organisations are to thrive in today’s increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, they must break their addiction to the outdated legacy governance approach of devising a strategy, developing a plan, executing the plan, measuring the outcomes, taking corrective action, before rinsing and repeating the cycle.
That may sound heretical but it’s just being pragmatic. There simply isn’t time any more to complete the above legacy cycle before you have to start it again.
And with each passing year, month, and day, the time available within which to squish the cycle gets ever shorter.
The only solution to this predicament is to embed a culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness where sense making, decision making, and action taking are tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
That’s not a particularly novel insight — organisations started recognising the need to make this shift decades ago.
They have been trying and failing to make it happen ever since... 2
The reason for this persistent failure is that the approaches organisations reach for are themselves anchored in the old linear “strategy → plan → execute → measure → correct” legacy mindset.
It’s not surprising that remaining stuck in ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking of the past prevents organisation becoming fit for a very different future.
The four most frequent ways organisations fail to create future-fit cultures are:
1. Hiring a “Big Con” management consulting firm to “help”
2. Producing purpose, vision, mission, or values statements
3. Sheep-dip training people throughout the organisation
4. Engaging an executive coach for the top team
Let’s take a look at why each of these fails to help create a future-fit culture.
1. Hiring a “Big Con” management consulting firm
The Big Con problem is neatly summarised in the subtitle of Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington’s book “The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies”.
The fundamental, unavoidable reason Big Con firms not only fail to help but actively undermine client organisations is simple: the Big Con business model.
Known within consulting circles as the finders, minders, grinders business model, this relies on mobilising large numbers of junior consultants. It’s deeply baked into the very fabric of Big Con firms, having originated back when consulting firms provided a useful service — research-based advice to help senior executive clients make better-informed decisions. However, with the rise of the internet, this information became more universally and readily accessible.
Arguably, this should have resulted in the demise of the Big Con firms. But rather than disband so their people could go off and do something useful and societally valuable with their time and talents, instead the consulting industry went rogue… 3
The bottom line is this: You can only create a future-fit culture when the people in the organisations do the heavy lifting themselves.
So, when bunch of outsiders are shipped in to do the heavy lifting, new future-fit culture muscles don’t get built inside the client organisation.
For more on the deeply systemic, highly toxic, self-perpetuating manner in which Big Con firms have consistently killed organisational efforts to improve innovation, check out my free 22-page guide to the Five Fatal Habits. 4
2. Producing some nice-sounding but unconvincing words
The problem with purposes, visions, missions, and values is not that they don’t matter.
It’s just that the only ones that do matter are the ones people actually embrace, embody, and enact in their day-to-day actions and interactions. 5
You don’t need to look much further than your own embodied, real-world experience to see that we pick these things up from our day to day experience of the organisation, not from posters in passageways, or the plexiglass plaque in reception. 6
Look inside yourself and feel your way to answering this: “In the organisational settings in which I’ve worked, how did I come to understand ‘the way we do things round here’?
Those seven words — ‘the way we do things round here’ — encapsulate the embodied human experience of the organisational culture. It’s typically acquired by immersion and osmosis within a few months of shifting to a new organisational setting.
So, looking at your own embodied experience, what clues, cues, signs, and signals did you actually draw upon, in practice, to figure out ‘the way we do things round here’?
If you’re like the hundreds of people I’ve explored these themes with over the past 40 years, it won’t have been the organisation’s published purpose, vision, mission, and values statements, but various clues, cues, signs, and signals picked up via the seven channels of culture. 7
3. Sheep-dip training everyone
You’ve probably had the experience of being obliged to attend standardised training sessions — generically referred to as sheep-dip training.
Why sheep-dip?
Well, in these sessions people get briefly immersed in a supposed “solution”, come out on the other side of the session, shake themselves off, and go back to whatever they were doing before.
Sheep-dipping not only doesn’t work, but actively makes things worse as follows:
Firstly, when someone has been in an organisation for any length of time, they inevitably form a personal, biased, limited, one-sided, and incomplete “2D” perspective on what needs fixing. 8
No generic ‘one-size-fits-all’ sheep-dip can adequately address everyone’s individual personal pet peeves and, as a result, these frustrations fester.
Secondly, being dragged away from your real work — which you still have to get done, probably by working unpaid overtime — to participate in what feels a totally pointless exercise, encourages deep cynicism.
It’s also very, very, very, annoying.
4. Engaging an executive coach for the top team
Executive coaching definitely has its place, and I do plenty of it myself. But “coaching the top team” doesn’t work as an approach to creating a future-fit culture because it overlooks other key influencers not on the top team.
In all the organisations I and my colleagues worked with over the past 40 years, there’s never been a single one where all the key influencers were on the top team. 9
The widely-held but dangerously simplistic view is that the more senior someone is, the more influence they have.
But this isn’t how organisations actually work in the real world.
Yes, it’s true that “the buck stops at the top”. But talk with CEOs and other senior executives who’ve struggled with transformational change and many will admit, if only in private, they don’t have as much power to change things as their position on the organisation chart might suggest.
In reality, most people in the body of an organisation are far more affected by cues, clues, signs, and signals from key influencers who don’t sit at — or often anywhere near — the “top table”.
Why these approaches all fail
Ultimately, the common fundamental flaw in all four of these favoured approaches is they all fail to focus precisely enough and deeply enough on ensuring that the actual key influencers in the organisation escape the trap of their narrow 2D perspectives. 10
The attitudes and behaviours of these few pivotal people — again, not always in the most senior positions — systemically affect everyone and everything else, blocking the cultivation of the 2D3D mindsets at the heart of a future-fit culture. 11
Given the failures of all these traditional approaches, organisations often get attracted by alluring quick fixes — including innovation labs, AI platforms, and open innovation partnerships.
However, the innovative, agile, adaptive mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours required at the heart of a future-fit culture can’t be bolted-on to a legacy organisation.
Any attempts to do so are inevitably doomed to fail so long as key influencers remain trapped in their narrow 2D perspectives. 12
Every organisation has its own unique set of key influencers whose attitudes and behaviours systemically affect everyone and everything else.
This means that the most pragmatic way to cultivate a systemic, organisation-wide shift to innovative 2D3D mindsets is by focusing, precisely and deeply, on shifting key influencer mindsets. 13
The systemic impact of key influencer mindsets is huge. So much so that once they adopt innovative mindsets, everything changes.
But if they don’t undergo the required shift, it doesn’t matter what other steps you take, forces lurking in the dark, murky depths of the organisation will ensure that all the old problems of the past come back to haunt you.
And, what’s more, they’ll almost certainly bring new friends…
Ready to take action?
My website provides a range of free resources to help support your efforts to create a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. 14
Contact me to keynote at your next leadership conference or executive retreat, book one of my popular 90-minute "pick Geoff’s brains" sessions for senior executives, or tailor a custom coaching package for your development as a future-fit culture catalyst.
Click below to find out more about my upcoming self-paced online foundation course to help you develop the cognition, competence, and character traits of a world-class catalyst of future-fit organisational cultures.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65 BCE- 8 BCE), commonly know as Horace, was a leading lyric poet. This quote is from Epistles, Book I, epistle 1, line 41
I first became personally involved in the organisational learning movement in 1992, and this stepped up a gear in 1995, when Arthur D. Little (ADL) acquired Innovation Associates (IA). For more on this see the previous post No Learning, No Future.
Check out this previous article on how mainstream management consulting went rogue. The article also references “The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies” — by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington
See this previous post on the Toxic Myth of Culture as Shared Values.
How people form their embodied understanding of the real vision, mission, and values is described in this previous post on The Secret Everyone Already Knows.
Find out more about these channels and how they inform people’s awareness of “the way we do things round here” in this previous article The seven channels of culture.
For more on 2D perspectives see this previous article on Unlocking the innovative mindset.
For more on this topic, see this previous article: Focus on key influencers
Ibid (2D perspectives). Also see this previous article on the Seeing-Being Traps that make it hard to escape our own 2D perspectives.
For more on culture and in particular future-fit culture, see this previous article.
Ibid (Seeing-Being Traps).
For more on this topic, see this previous article: Leverage for systemic change
For example, these FREE videos, these FREE articles, and this FREE download of my 22-page Five Fatal Habits report.