Let down by outdated 'support'
The legacy roles that reinforce retrograde organisational habits
“A nail is driven out by another nail, habit is overcome by habit.” — Erasmus 1
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, organisations have developed the increasingly nasty habit of treating people as human resources rather than human beings.
Organisations consistently fail to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness as long as they treat people as replaceable cogs in the organisational machine.
But such deeply embedded attitudes prove surprisingly hard to shift — not least because they’re consistently reinforced by mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours embodied in legacy roles that were invented to support the old industrial order.
An obvious example is the Human Resources industry, which emerged because organisations didn’t actually want whole human beings — they wanted “hands”.
But hands inevitably — some would say unfortunately — come attached to humans…
So the Human Resources support function was invented to mop up the messily human aspects of employees that otherwise got in the way of their ability to perform their allotted functions as efficiently as the organisational machine required.
Closely allied to Human Resources is the Training & Development support function — rebadged Learning & Development (L&D) in the wake of the organisational learning movement of the 1990’s. 2
The L&D industry features myriad providers — varying from large organisations, through boutiques, and countless freelance trainers, coaches, facilitators, etc.
Then there’s a whole swathe of certification bodies, institutes, and federations dispensing HR and L&D diplomas, titles, and badges in return for subscriptions, supervision, and membership fees.
Supporting all these supporters is a humungous, ever-growing HR software industry — providing platforms, services, apps, and dashboards for payroll, benefits, shared services, employee monitoring, and so-called “performance management solutions". 3
As well as this extensive HR & L&D industry, there's the global business school industry churning out thousands of MBAs per year, where students pay fat tuition fees in the hope of fast track careers to big jobs with big hats and big bucks.
And, last but by no means least, there's the $900 billion management consulting industry4 whose continued existence is wholly dependent on keeping senior executives trapped in roles that constrain decision making, stifle, smother, and strangle innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. 5
This entrapment keeps the client-consultant co-dependency gravy train chugging along. 6
All these industries grew to support mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours that were central to the operation of organisations as machines.
And, just as traditional industrial organisations continue to pollute the ecosystems in which they operate — with disastrous effects on the environment — traditional support industries continue to pollute emergent organisational ecosystems by perpetuating toxic mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours. 7
So why don’t they change?
One reason is there are still similarly trapped buyers for their services.
A more subtle and pervasive reason is that it's almost impossible for people in these support industries to see how their well-meaning efforts thwart the emergence of thriving future-fit cultures.
That’s because, as Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It's difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it”. 8
So, what can you do instead?
Here are five things to get started:
Stop relying on any external “support” that fails to genuinely build the capacity of your own people to create a thriving future-fit culture.
Remain alert to the language of traditional thinking polluting the organisation, such as: leaders as opposed to leadership; values as a synonym for cultural glue; culture assumed to be singular, homogenous, and uncontested; agile assumed to be synonymous with agility; and magical panaceas such as holocracy, teal, psychological safety, etc. (Psychological Safety is an emergent property of a systemic culture of learning, and can’t be sprinkled like pixie dust on top of a dysfunctional organisation). 9
Focus fully on enabling sense making, decision making & action taking to become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation. 10
Be very wary of any off-the-shelf so-called “best-practice solution”.
Stay well clear of anyone whose “help” will perpetuate the poisonous habit of a few folks in corner offices hogging organisational decision making. 11
Questions for reflection
Which “support” functions in your organisation are perpetuating outdated mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours from the industrial era?
Where does you organisation rely on external “help” that inadvertently reinforces the traditional mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours of the past?
How are you ensuring that efforts to create a future-fit organisation aren’t being undermined, stifled, and polluted by toxic legacy mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours?
“Clavus clavo pellitur, consuetudo consuetudine vincitur” — Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536) was a Dutch humanist, theologian, educationalist, satirist, philosopher, and one of the most influential thinkers of the Northern Renaissance. The quote is from his 1529 colloquy Diluculum (The Early Rising) Nephalius and Philypnus, the former encouraging the latter to get up earlier in the morning…
In our more cynical moments, those of us who were involved in the organisational learning movement back in the 1990s observe that the most lasting visible evidence of it is that Training & Development has been rebadged Learning & Development.
“Managing performance” of remote workers via digital monitoring and surveillance technologies became a big issue during the covid pandemic. The 2021 EU report Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in the Workplace concluded that these practices “raise a variety of ethical issues”. You can download the report here.
According to Berkshire Hathaway’s BusinessWire the global consulting industry was worth $895Bn in 2021.
See the previous article How management consulting went rogue — morphing from a professional service into a marketing machine…
For more on the co-dependent relationship between old-school senior executives and partners in Big Con mainstream management consulting firms, see The Five Fatal Habits pages 14-16.
There are few more toxic examples than the notion that an organisation’s cultural glue is its supposedly “shared values”.
Upton Sinclair “I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked” (1935). University of California Press, 1994, p. 109.
For more details, see the previous article “Seeing Culture”.
For more on the problem of senior executives seeing their role as “decision makers” see the previous article “Senior executives must give up their decision rights”.