Mind your language
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means...
“When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.” — Lewis Carroll 1
The organisational discourse is awash with seemingly straightforward terminology harbouring hidden traps, tripwires, and trouble for the unwary…
Much of our organisational language is pre-loaded with biases, assumptions, mythologies, and metaphors that confuse conversations and put people at cross purposes even before they’ve opened their mouths.
This results in endless miscommunication, misunderstanding, and misalignment as what someone seeks to say gets misinterpreted by those hearing it.
The gap between intention and interpretation has been a central feature throughout my 35 years of helping people create future-fit organisational cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
So let’s take a look at some of the most troublesome terminology, starting with a double dose of the “L” word…
Leadership
I rarely engage in purposeful conversation about leadership without first framing it within this definition from my colleague Dr Peter Senge: “Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future”. 2
The capacity of a human community to shape its future is fundamentally dependent on how, and how well, it does three things:
Making sense of itself as a community and of its ever-changing context
Making decisions about what to do & what not to do
Taking actions in the world
Traditionally, when the world was much more stable, certain, and predictable, organisations had time to do each of the above three things at relative leisure:
exploring and extrapolating trends in technology, politics, environment, economics, and societal drivers of change
interpreting the past actions and inferring likely future intentions of current competitors and potential new entrants
making considered, data-driven, evidence-based decisions
formulating strategies and operating plans
cascading the plans down the organisation for execution
monitoring deviations from the plans and taking corrective action
This leisurely approach to organisational sense making, decision making & action taking was the norm for so long, it’s typically axiomatically accepted as “just the way it is”.
In mid 1990’s, it was defined in Harvard Professor John Kotter’s bestselling book Leading Change as follows: “Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen”. 3
In this worldview, an elite few “define a future vision” and “align” and “inspire” others to “make it happen”.
The defining, aligning, and inspiring is done by the elite few — the “leaders”, to everyone else — the “followers”.
In other words, sense making and decision making were the preserve of the elite few “leaders”, whilst the action taking was mostly done by the “followers”.
This split has been around so long it may seem heretical to even suggest there could be any other way…
But there’s a big problem with this traditional notion of leadership.
In today’s increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, there isn’t time to indulge in leisurely sense making, followed by slow strategic planning and drawn out decision making before eventually finally getting around to taking action.
By the time decisions emerge from such a lengthy process, the world has moved on, rendering the decisions obsolete before they’ve even begun to be put into action.
Or, in the more colourful language of former world champion boxer Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a game plan until they get punched in the face.” 4
A few months into 2020, any organisation with a strategic game plan knew exactly what that felt like — having been punched squarely in the face by Covid-19…
Importantly, Senge’s definition doesn’t segregate leadership into “those who do it” and “those who have it done to them”.
This is crucial because in a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, sense making, decision making & action taking must become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
Leadership as a community capacity isn’t constrained by the limitations inherent in placing all the responsibility and burden for sense making and decision making on the shoulders of a few senior executives.
Kotter did eventually acknowledge these failings in his book’s 2012 update, noting: “more agility and change-friendly organisations” and “more leadership from more people, and not just top management” are increasingly vital. 5
Which brings us to the second dose of the “L” word — “leader”.
Leader
The traditional assumption here is that “leader” is synonymous with “senior executive”.
This is implicit in Kotter’s definition of leadership as something done by “leaders” to “followers”.
But if leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future, then who or what is a “leader” exactly?
Is it someone who comes up with a brilliant new idea?
What if that idea emerged in collaborative dialogue with others? Who is “the leader” then?
Or is a “leader” someone who takes the initiative in a situation?
Or is it anyone anyone who takes responsibility for their influence in the world?
When a front-line employee has a new insight into what will provide new value for customers — an act of sense making that could well be vitally important to the organisation’s long-term future — does that make them a “leader”?
I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee I'm the leader
I'm the leader
OK what shall we do?
The Leader — by Roger McGough 6
So much chaos and confusion is created in organisations because “leader” gets used in all these ways and more.
That’s why I generally avoid using the term.
If you’re ever tempted to say “leader” when what you mean is “senior executive” I’d strongly urge you to develop the practice of saying “senior executive”.
It’s much less confusing, because it’s far easier to work out who is meant by “senior executives” than “leaders”. 7
In summary, if you want to create a future-fit culture, use the term “leader” at your peril.
Hierarchy
In her seminal 1970 paper “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, feminist, political scientist, writer, and lawyer Jo Freeman describes how the early women's liberation movement attempted to avoid traditional hierarchical structures. 8
Unfortunately these attempts at structurelessness had a sinister side effect — providing “a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others”.
Freeman points out that “The idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones”.
And, “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 must remain in confusion or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.”
The key point is that hierarchies emerge even when we try to avoid them.
So the question is not “should we have a hierarchy or not?”, it's “what kind of hierarchy do we want to cultivate?”.
In a future-fit culture the hierarchy is not one of “making decisions” but of “creating conditions” — conditions in which sense making, decision making & action taking are highly coupled, iterated, embedded and distributed throughout the organisation.
This means that the more senior someone is, the more responsibility they carry for creating and sustaining conditions for success.
The hidden trap here is that “hierarchy” has been conflated with “decision rights” for so long that people usually have major difficulty disentangling the two. 9
This legacy entanglement is why the terms “senior executives” and “decision makers” are used interchangeably.
If you read the above and felt “but surely that’s what senior executives are?” you’ve just experienced the persuasive, pervasive, and perverse power of that conflation.
The key thing here is the recognition that hierarchies always emerge.
And if you don’t actively shape the kind of hierarchy you want, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get one you don’t…
The second big problem associated with hierarchy is that people tend to assume that the most influential individuals are always at the top of the formal hierarchy.
This is a massive mistake.
It’s true that the key influencers almost always include some senior executives.
But it’s hardly ever the case that all the senior executives are key influencers.
And it’s just about inevitable that some key influencers are not senior executives at all — and are often invisible to the formal hierarchy. 10
Far too many approaches to culture change fall foul of the false assumption that the most influential people are always in the most senior positions.
What’s more, the pattern and structure of key influencers is unique to each organisation — which is why the one-size-fits-all approaches so beloved of finders, minders, grinders consulting firms inevitably prove to be this-size-doesn’t-fit-us.
The pattern and structure of key influencers therefore needs to be unpacked carefully to identify both i) the leverage points for change, and ii) where immunity to change is anchored within the organisation.
Fail to do this effectively and you’re setting yourself up for unpleasant surprises…
Culture & Values
After 35 years focused on helping organisations create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, I’ve run into all sorts of assumptions about what culture is, how to understand it, how to influence it, where to find leverage for change etc.
Most people agree that culture is experienced as “the way we do things around here”.
But when people talk about culture change they almost always overlook the fact that culture is an embodied experience.
The biggest culture change train wrecks I’ve ever seen all stemmed from adopting a theory of culture that failed to take adequate account of its inherently embodied nature. 11
Conversation about culture don’t usually get far before encountering the assumption that an organization's culture is its allegedly shared values.
It's still widely accepted as axiomatic that a set of organisational values defined by senior executives can be imposed on everyone else as a kind of normative behaviour control methodology — hence the notion of “cultural fit”.
Whilst having everyone the same shape may have theoretically had some utility as a way of controlling behaviour in a stable and predictable world, in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, organisations need more diversity not less.
And, even more fundamentally, it's simply not possible to get everyone to adopt the same values.
That very notion turns out to have been a convenient, highly lucrative and toxic myth plucked out of thin air and injected over 40 years ago into the organisation discourse, where it continues to fester to this day... 12
One of the reasons the myth of “culture as shared values” is so sticky is the power we experience from living in congruence with our own genuine personal values.
That’s the real value of values — bringing our own genuine, innate, unique personal values more consistently into our actions and interactions. 13
When we do this, we become clearer about, and more confident in, our perspectives whilst encouraging, by example, others to do the same.
This is how future-fit organisations cultivate widespread adoption of the 2D3D mindsets at the heart of a culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. 14
At the opposite extreme to imposing a set of corporate values are vague impractical definitions of culture like this: “Corporate culture can be compared to natural forces such as winds and tides which are there in the background — sometimes unnoticed, sometimes obvious. Made of instinctive repetitive habits and emotional responses, a company's culture is a collection of self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing that determines the way we do things round here”.
That's actually put forward as a supposedly serious definition by an organisation established by a leading management consultancy that calls itself “The experts on organisational culture, teaming, and informal organisation”. 15
Such a wishy-washy way of conceptualising “culture” completely undermines the possibility of seeing, finding, and focusing on systemic leverage for change:
How might you influence “forces that are unnoticed in the background”?
How could you change “instinctive repetitive habits and emotional responses”?
How would you shift “self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking and believing”?
Caveat emptor…
Innovation
Organisations have been talking about the need for more innovation for at least 30 years.
But what does that mean specifically?
new products and services?
new business models?
new ways of doing things?
x% of profits coming from things introduced in the last y months?
Most organisational efforts to improve innovation focus on the ‘fuzzy front-end’ — generating new ideas, screening and ranking them to pick the “winners”.
This is done with the implicit assumption that if the winning ideas are any good, the organisation will readily align itself around them, ensuring successful exploitation.
Unfortunately, the fuzzy front-end of innovation turns out to be a walk in the park compared to the corridor-stalking, innovation-killing, progress-sapping swampland of the boggy back-end. 16
The boggy back-end is like an organisational immune system, serving to protect the status quo from alien ideas, initiatives, and innovations that threaten homeostasis.
The immunity to change is the cumulative effect of people feeling threatened by changes that must occur if new ideas are to be successfully realised in the world.
And the more compellingly innovative and blockbusting the idea, the greater the threat to the status quo, so the boggier your back-end becomes...
Efforts to improve innovation without focusing serious attention on the boggy back-end are a recipe for disaster.
Strategy
This is the thing that senior executives used to do, typically guided by strategy consulting firms, following the leisurely laid back process of sense making and decision making described above.
But as sense making, decision making, and action taking need to be more dynamically embedded and distributed throughout the organisation, the focus must shift from strategy to ever-evolving, dynamic, distributed sense making. 17
Questions for reflection
How are the words leadership, leaders, hierarchy, culture, values, innovation, and strategy typically understood within your organisation?
What other words currently compromise future fitness?
How do these words need reinterpretation to create a future fit culture?
Through the Looking Glass Chapter 6 Humpty Dumpty. The quote in the subtitle “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means...” is from the cult classic movie The Princess Bride.
The Dance of Change (Senge et al 1999 p16).
Leading Change (John P Kotter, 1996).
Iron Mike on being punched in the face.
Leading Change (John P Kotter, revised 2012, preface).
Often found in the corner offices - which is why some of them don’t like WFH…
I explored the challenge of hierarchy in their earlier post - which also links to Jo Freeman’s 1970 paper.
In this earlier piece I explain why senior executives must give up their “decision rights”.
For more on key influencers see this seven minute video.
That culture is an embodied experience is the secret everyone already knows.
I explored the origin of the toxic myth of culture and shared values in a previous article.
I describe how you can get a grip on on your own personal values in this previous piece.
For more on the 2D3D mindset see this previous post.
For more on definitions of culture that work and don't work see this earlier post.
For more on the boggy back-end see this previous article.
For more on shifting from strategy to sense making see this earlier piece.