Organisational quick fixes with Steve Hearsum

The organisational quick fix. In this episode, David talks to Steve Hearsum, the author of the new book “No Silver Bullet, Bursting the Bubble of the Organisational Quick Fix”, which kind of gives the ending away! However if there aren’t any organisational quick fixes, what do we do?

In this podcast Steve explores this issues and problems associated for looking for organisational quick fixes and what people involved in leadership, organisational development and organisational change should be doing instead.

Listen to Steve Hearsum and David talk about – No Silver Bullet, Bursting the Bubble of the Organisational Quick Fix

Subscribe to the podcast

• Subscribe on iTunes
• Player FM
• Listen on Spotify
• Listen on Podbean
• Google Podcast

Steve Hearsum

Steve Hearsum is one of our members and is a consultant, supervisor, coach, and speaker, he’s one of the top change management voices on LinkedIn. Steve’s also a board trustee and associate consultant at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.

How to contact or connect with Steve

• Steve’s LinkedIn
• His Website

The book – No Silver Bullet, Bursting the Bubble of the Organisational Quick Fix

Get the book

• Kindle version
• Paperback version

Transcript – The issues of the organisational quick fix

[00:00:00] This is an Oxford Review, members only, research briefing podcast.
[00:00:07] David: Welcome back. Today we welcome Steve Hearsum, who’s one of our members and who is a consultant, supervisor, coach and speaker, he’s one of the top change management voices on LinkedIn. Steve’s also a board trustee and associate consultant at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.
[00:00:27] he’s just published a really fascinating book, I love it, called No Silver Bullet, Bursting the Bubble of the Organisational Quick Fix. Welcome, Steve.
[00:00:37] Steve: Lovely. Thank you, David, for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
[00:00:40] David: Yeah, no, it’s a really good book. could you just tell us a little bit more about yourself, your journey, and what’s led up to you writing the book?
[00:00:47] Steve: well, in a nutshell, without boring anybody listening, because I’m easily stalkable and findable online, I’ve been working in the field of what I would term human change for about 25 years. I had an early career [00:01:00] in telecoms. I worked at the Guardian when I launched their dating service, Soulmates, my one claim to fame in life.
[00:01:05] I launched that in 1995. and I became an internal consultant by the time Ileft the Guardian, effectively, working on process improvement. And so I’ve spent the last 20 years more and more finding my way stumbling rather than intentionally wandering into the field of organisational development.
[00:01:20] most of my work now focuses on three areas. One is, developing leadership practice. and my view is conventional leadership development is a waste of time and money. the second kind of basket is developing the consulting and change agency skills of internal practitioners often and externals, but often with internals who are the nodes through which the crazy will flow, the better they get at their jobs doing change in organisations.
[00:01:43] the third bucket simply is,culture, whether that be doing reviews of culture or helping organisations with behavioral issues, and I do that through the medium of whether it be consulting, supervision or coaching.
[00:01:55] David: Yeah, interesting. so Silver Bullets, we start [00:02:00] there.
[00:02:00] The organisational quick fix
[00:02:00] Steve: How did we get there?
[00:02:01] David: Yeah, yeah. What prompted the book No Silver Bullets?
[00:02:05] Steve: it was a, it was one moment in time. So when I used to work at Roffey Park Institute, I met at one point, him and he used to with the two guys who founded corporate rebels in Holland. I met them at a Holacracy workshop in Brighton, where I live, and we invited them to Roffy and I hosted them twice, and the second time I hosted them, the audience consisted of, 25, 30, very experienced own development and change consistency coaches.
[00:02:29] At one point, one of these guys said to the audience, we started our, tour. Two years ago, to try and find out the secret to what makes organizations healthier and more engaged and happy, and we thought we’d get to the end of it. We’d find the magic bullet. We realised there isn’t one, and that was obvious to me.
[00:02:44] I can I sat in this now. tell me something I don’t know. But the interesting David was what happened next, which was that the audience. Two or three times effectively said to whoever it was he was talking at that moment, but go on, there is one really, isn’t there? It was almost as if, [00:03:00] yes, and I checked it with, I think it was Pim who was there, I checked it with him and said, did you notice this as well?
[00:03:05] It’s not just me. He said, no, no, I spotted that as well. So here we have a group of people who are fiercely intelligent, experienced OD consults and trained practitioners and coaches who if you ask them intellectually to respond to the question, is there a silver bullet? I will guarantee you that of course there isn’t.
[00:03:19] And yes, As a group, their response was, Well, there must be one, wasn’t there? And that’s what hooked me. That’s what got me curious. So from that moment on, it was like, wait a minute, what’s that about? And it simply started as that, as an inquiry into that. And then, talking to, Dr. Graham Curtis at Roffey Park, who joined Roffey after I’d left, His idea from his PhD research around, functional collusion, Which is this idea that, Often decisions at senior level are made By people who are, the decision making process is influenced by unconscious patterns of behavior underpinned by shame and anxiety.
[00:03:51] my original hypothesis together with that, and it was like, Oh, this is interesting. So I then spent three or four years researching into whether or not now you [00:04:00] joined Heath Robinson, Frankenstein’s monster of a hypothesis, whether it actually held together.
[00:04:06] David: Right. So, how do you define a silver bullet?
[00:04:11] Steve: it is as simple as, in a sense, from a mythological standpoint and folklore, there is something large hairy that we find scary, whether it be a werewolf, or, poor behavior in an organizational culture, we seek something that will guarantee to slay it, or fix it. An organisational quick fix.
[00:04:28] it’s the myth of fixability. it’s this idea that, its lazy thinking, which is what Mark Cole and John Higgins talked about in their book last year or the year before. if we look hard enough, there will be something that will just take the pain away.
[00:04:40] David: Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting.
[00:04:43] So I’ve been doing quite a lot of work around a cognitive laziness and there’s a psychological Phenomenon known as the need for cognition. So we find that there’s this kind of range of people at one end there’s a group of people who really don’t want to be thinking They find it [00:05:00] very difficult and they just like to be told they’re fairly dependent.
[00:05:03] And at the other end, there’s a group of people who enjoy thinking and enjoy the pain of conundrums and realising that there’s uncertainty and nothing’s tied down. And there’s a lot of complexity and it’s messy and horrible. And they enjoy that kind of side of things.
[00:05:18] Steve: they do. one of my unfolding kind of sort of the threads of inquiry that’s dangling off the back of the book is.
[00:05:25] And it’s sharpening as I have conversations like this with you. It’s interesting how many practitioners and consultants I talk to when we start to get into a conversation about their own fragility and their own, interactions with clients. Partly when they, get exposed to some of my questions in the book that kind of have been saying to me, I’m starting to notice my unconscious patterns of behavior and how I might be colluding and how is it I’m offering silver bullets when I know they don’t exist, but I’m behaving as if they do. The organisational quick fix
[00:05:58] And I have a hunch that in [00:06:00] our field, people like you and me Dave, when we are in our consulting modes, we’re a little bit more caught up in this than we realize.
[00:06:06] David: I think there’s a joint collusion with clients and we kind of patch. what they’re hoping for and they want. And quite often consultants, coaches and, big consultancies, end up with the narrative, of the client, which is, give me a solution. That we can do. And, large consultancies make absolute fortunes on that idea that there is a solution.
[00:06:33] Steve: One of the things that strikes me about large consulting firms, and a few people have said to me in the last couple of years that I’m quite, unkind to the large consulting firms in terms of what I post and I’ve tried in the book to be quite even handed, but to challenge and I hope not unfairly, and I hope It’s a substantiated case. The reason why I think actually the challenge needs to be quite hard. If I just [00:07:00] think of one particular example, there was a really good BBC radio series last year called Magic Consultants, which is, have you listened to that?
[00:07:07] David: Yes, that is really good.
[00:07:08] Steve: so, yeah, the fifth episode, you remember, there’s this lovely moment where the journalist or the presenter says, we asked the six of the largest professional services firms in the UK to either contribute or respond to themes from this series.
[00:07:21] And they either declined. to answer or didn’t respond at all. And he leaves it hanging. And there, that to me goes right to the heart of the problem. Because the only voice from within the system ofconsultancieswas the CEO of the Management Consulting Association, who basically was not having any of this stuff about there being a problem, our clients love us.
[00:07:43] It’s the utter absence of reflexivity and willingness to engage in inquiry about the possibility that things may be not black and white, but it’s really troubling.
[00:07:52] David: Yeah, I agree. And the number of times with the work that we do on the Oxford Review, we end up, being asked about a [00:08:00] particular model or something.
[00:08:01] We then go into the model and find that there’s absolutely no validity whatsoever for the model. And when you start to look at where it’s come from, it seems to be written on the back of an envelope by some consultancy somewhere. And there’s nothing sat behind it. And they say they’ve tested it, but there’s no data and they refuse to provide any data.
[00:08:18] you just say, right, okay,
[00:08:20] Steve: which actually, and I didn’t write about this in the book, but it’s, I wish I had done. there is the interesting question about how is it even that we come up with ideas and turn them into models and at what point do we label them as having validity and who does that labeling?
[00:08:39] And it’s almost as if in the entire thought leadership industry, which we’ve talked about before, you and I, We’ve bypassed the critical thinking bit when we actually might more rigorously look at what is the validity of this thing that I’ve just decided might be a good idea.
[00:08:53] David: Yeah, yeah. And this comes back to this whole idea of the collusion and the idea that Alvison and Spicer came up with [00:09:00] is of functional stupidity.
[00:09:02] We’ll talk about that a little bit later on. Can I just kind of pull back a little bit and kind of just go, because there was something when I was reading the book that kind of caught me by surprise because I’d never really thought about it was this idea about the life cycle of a silver bullet, right?
[00:09:18] But I never thought, well, what? Yeah. Do you want to explain a little bit about
[00:09:22] Steve: so what I was doing. My research, there was this question about is a silver bullet in organizations different to any other and a couple of people around the same time. forwarded to me something that pointed to an article written by a woman in a wonderful journal called the Journal of Defense Software Engineering, where she attempted to codify it.
[00:09:48] And to describe, the trajectory that many of these silver bullets take from the moment where they come into somebody’s idea, somebody’s mind, through to the point they then are found out to be [00:10:00] actually nowhere near as flipping useful as they apparently were being sold as. And the next one comes along.
[00:10:05] And so what she attempted to do was codify the initial need, the point at which. you understand you have to come up with some kind of response to an act and there may often be some success. This is the interesting thing. Often there will be a genuine success. You’ve experimented. Oh my goodness, this works. The organisational quick fix
[00:10:24] But here we get to the next bit, which talked to the thought leadership and consulting industry. So let’s codify that. Let’s turn it into a model and a salable entity or thing. Let’s publicise it and write about it. Let’s type it. It gets more, more recognition. And then we get the first replications of it, which might initially be, Oh, well, I’ve tried this and this is good.
[00:10:43] Well, it’s kind of close, but it’s more or less successful. It gets standardised and copied. And over time the returns diminish, because actually what works in one context will not work in exactly the same way in another context. And eventually we get to blame the method. Oh, that one didn’t work, so let’s go find another one.
[00:10:59] And it’s [00:11:00] ironic that you and I are talking at a point where The NHS has just come up with the whole new well led approach to leadership in the NHS, which given over the last 40 years, every other time they’ve tried to codify the answer to leadership in the NHS, is the most wonderful example of the life cycle of a silver bullet.
[00:11:20] David: Yeah, nice. Yeah. Andit’s interesting. And itgoes back to this thing. In fact, this was going to be my next question, and we’ve already touched on this, at the beginning of the book, you have a brief word on stupidity. And as I mentioned, this idea in organizations that people collude, Often unknowingly, but sometimes with kind of malice of forethought, because actually it promotes them or because there’s a whole theory around kind of this idea of like leaders rising to their level of incompetence.
[00:11:52] and actually creating kind of functional stupidity, creating a lot of chaos, like stops the spotlight [00:12:00] coming on them and their shortcomings. so they collude not just to dumb things down, but to actually stop thinking and in particular, stop being reflective, reflexive, and to dial back on critical thinking.
[00:12:12] and it’s a social. It’s a kind of a thing that happens in groups within organizations. it’s a social phenomenon. and I just wondered what your take on stupidity, what stupidity is from your perspective, particularly from the perspective of the Silver Bullet, within organization.
[00:12:29] Steve: Yeah, I, I’ve got that book and I have not read it fully, but I kind of read it for what I needed to make sense of it and reference it because.
[00:12:38] David: That’s the stupidity paradox.
[00:12:40] Steve: Yeah, the stupidity paradox. and I suppose the first thing to say is, as somebody who’s profoundly familiar with his own stupidity and daftness, as my wife frequently tells me, that my own take on it is we have to start I guess from the basis we all have the capacity to be idiots and to be stupid and lurking in this [00:13:00] is to be wrong.
[00:13:02] So one of the huge failings in organizations and leadership is that we have lost the capacity to even acknowledge the possibility that you might be wrong. And if we are, to accept this and then to learn from it. And we don’t allow other people to be wrong as the other kicker for leaders. there’s no permission to fail.
[00:13:21] So I guess my take on the stupidity thing is. There’s a difference between being stupid and behaving stupidly. we all have the capacity to make daft decisions. And my take on it, I is how is it that collectively we are co creating environments where the invitation to move towards wise action is increasingly dialed down?
[00:13:47] And the space to make decisions or to step into spaces where there is not really a mission to think more deeply, it’s huge. there is very little that is in the way of [00:14:00] people, that will stop them in some respects making stupid decisions. Now, I’m catching myself, David, because I could hear other people saying, but surely isn’t that what good governance is about?
[00:14:09] Isn’t that what organizations do, but when I think about some of the leadership teams I work with and how, the number of times I’ve heard leadership team say to me individually, the thing we need to get better at is being founded without each other and talking about the things that are difficult for us to talk about. The organisational quick fix
[00:14:26] And you can wait months for them to actually move to naming the things they struggle to talk about. let’s go back to stupidity. If I’m about to do something that’s really that. What’s the chances one of my colleagues is going to be, in an appropriate and human way, say to me, Steve, you’re about to drop a clanger.
[00:14:45] That’s not great, my dear mate.
[00:14:47] there is, the combination of honesty, rigor, and kindness that is required to prevent this happening as much as it does.
[00:14:55] David: Yeah, exactly. And in fact, there was a really interesting series of [00:15:00] research that stunned empirical research. So this whole idea about functional stupidity, as we were talking about, was, came out in a series of papers and then this book, The Stupidity Paradox by, Matt Selvason and, Andre Spicer.
[00:15:12] And, but the papers were largely theoretical, though it was inductive. They’d seen all this stuff in organizations, but what’s been happening, particularly since about 2017, 2007, that kind of era, there’s been a whole load of empirical studies starting to be done around this whole idea of stupidity.
[00:15:31] And one of the things that’s come out. So Paulson’s Started to get a name in this area and he wrote a paper in 2017 that kind of talked about the dynamics that were going on with functional stupidity one of the interesting dynamics is that.the kind of language in the narrative of stupidity that kind of, buzzwords that are meaningless and ideas that have no,models and things that actuallyhave no validity from a [00:16:00] scientific point of view if you even started to just question it, like you say, in an honest way, and we’ll come back to this, even if you just stand up and go, I don’t know what’s going on, which people are very scared to talk about, what they found was that people within organizations quite often take up these narratives in what they termed as stupidity self management.
[00:16:21] And that it limited internal reflectivity and reflection by cutting short internal conversations that were heuristics for stopping having the conversation and that it spreads across the organization. But what these do, and this is the functional part of stupidity, is that it reduces doubt.
[00:16:43] within the organisation. So they call it marginalisation of doubt. So it kind of pushes doubt out because these are the narratives of certainty that it pushes a sense of coherence, even when there isn’t any, it feels like things are coherent and flowing. The [00:17:00] ambiguity is repressed. so there’s, it feels like there’s less uncertainty.
[00:17:05] Because these things feel more certain and that it gives a false sense of certainty across the organization, which kind of in a way helps people to move on.
[00:17:18] Steve: Well, yeah, because it’s a social defense against anxiety. If I admit that things are not as Well thought through, efficient, healthy, productive, perfect, as they appear to be.
[00:17:30] Then I have to deal with reality. And what popped into my head as I heard you talking was about, how long ago was it? Must have been about 10, 12 years ago. I was talking to a consultant who had been involved in what was then the early days of the kind of 111 rollout of the NHS, non emergency telephone services, where you could phone up.
[00:17:52] And you could get your results looking for procedures and stuff like that. It was all that kind of thing. And I can’t remember what the first number was, but it was [00:18:00] the first iteration of 110111. And what this guy said to me was, He simply did in a spreadsheet the calculation of how many patients there were who would need to make certain types of calls and extrapolated number of calls, length of calls across time to number of call handlers you’d need.
[00:18:21] If you remember, there was a huge hoo ha about this, and there was, I think, one of the companies involved in this eventually said, can’t be done. But this is what was interesting. What this guy said to me was, he was in the organisation going, I’ve done the numbers. This is not going to work and nobody in the organisation could, and I use the word very deliberately, bear to engage with the reality.
[00:18:45] So effectively they kept on ignoring the data, ignoring what he was saying, because it was too anxiety inducing to admit That it simply wouldn’t work, and eventually it simply collapsed.
[00:18:59] David: And there are [00:19:00] lots of, examples of this in organisations. Ooh. this, functional stupidity going on.
[00:19:05] Yeah. And actually what’s interesting is Paulson goes a bit further and he says that there’s an antecedence to this. There are predictors of
[00:19:12] Oh, okay.
[00:19:12] A social thing. and two of these dimensions have been validated, and the other one is. The definition’s not right. So the two that are validated is that people get to a place in the organisation of despair and cynicism.
[00:19:26] So those two things then require a rationale from the individual in order then for them to move into an unreflective mode, to just accept what the heck’s going on. And that there’s a whole load of rationales around, constructivism, defeatism, Ethics, work ethic, this idea about, I don’t want to be involved in politics, I’ll just put my head down. The organisational quick fix
[00:19:50] and what happens is they end up without realising it, they end up in a society of a lack of reflection and thinking, just accepting what the heck’s going [00:20:00] on.
[00:20:00] Steve: which is, a form of learned helplessness.
[00:20:02] David: Yeah, exactly. And, there are a whole series of kind of concepts.
[00:20:06] I’ve got a whole thing here around, we’re thinking about doing an encyclopedia of organizational stupidity actually on the back of some of this stuff that we’re doing. And looking, we’ve been looking at all the kind of related concepts, things like willful blindness, bureaucratic inertia, conformity, groupthink, organisational silence, where people see things going on,
[00:20:27] path dependence and things like that. One of the things that actually came out of it, which was interesting was as we started, cause we get quite a lot of requests around this whole idea of psychological safety. And at first when that popped up as a related concept, I was like, what? How come?
[00:20:44] And then I started to realise what was going on with this. Which is, this is a silver bullet thing as well.The original idea of psychological safety was a group phenomenon, that people within a team or a group would feel safe enough to [00:21:00] criticise, to try things out, to take risks, and as you were saying, to fail.
[00:21:04] Yeah. To try, they’re safe enough to do that. What’s happened is, it’s turned into, The narrative, both within the research, particularly in HR and organisational research, but also within organisations, it’s turned it from a group phenomenon into an individual phenomenon where you feel safe not to be challenged or not to feel uncomfortable.
[00:21:26] Steve: Yeah. It was never meant to be. Well, no, and also it’s, and we’re into kind of the details of practice almost here, which is to what extent can we have a promised total psychological safety? And I think that’s a myth. I can commit to, to attempting to create the conditions for enough psychological safety such that, It might give you permission or a sense you can take risks, but I can’t legislate for how uncomfortable you might feel in doing that.
[00:21:53] And I wonder increasingly whether or not the term psychological safety has become disconnected from the idea of containment. [00:22:00] Really what we’re talking about with psychological safety is containment. And if you then say, well, actually, what do we mean by containment? Containment is a process related directly to anxiety.
[00:22:09] This is what we’re really talking about. And this does relate to the themes in the book. Now, when we are sufficiently contained, levels of anxiety are bearable. Now, we can function well. We can collaborate with others. We can view our conflict. We can access our thinking. We can bring the best of ourselves to the task, even if It’s a bit hairy.
[00:22:26] I mean, that’s the rider that or the kind of coder on this is the idea that we’re that when you’re working well, by definition, you’re happy. No, it can be a bit messy as well. But if lacking, that’s where we get dysfunction. That’s where we get toxicity. So insofar as that word has validity. and poor behaviors only sustain where there’s a lack of containment.
[00:22:48] David: Yeah.
[00:22:48] Steve: But if you then ask people. Well, okay. How do we co create containment? And there’s the clue. It has to be co created. and I wonder whether or not part of the reason why we [00:23:00] still look for quick fixes and certain solutions is because, well, I don’t wonder, I very strongly believe this is the case, is because we can’t bear our anxiety.
[00:23:10] it’s the existential fear. I need believe that somebody has got the answer. That’s what contains my anxiety, the hope, the belief that there is a magical bullet.
[00:23:21] David: Yes, yeah, in order to contain that anxiety. Because if there isn’t, oh my god. Yeah, we’ve got to then live with the messiness of the real world.
[00:23:31] Yeah, The organisational quick fix
[00:23:32] Steve: and just to get ever so slightly political for a moment, the ultimate absurdist example of this is, is the idea that, the answer to the mess of Brexit is oven ready.
[00:23:43] David: Yes, I know, I know, simple solutions to complex problems.
[00:23:48] Yeah. It’s always a red flag.
[00:23:50] Yeah. So can I just go back to the book? because there was a chapter that I was kind of jumping up and down with joy [00:24:00] about,so in the book and in my opinion, you take like square aim at leadership development and what goes on in business schools. And you’ve seen them, we’ve produced quite a number of research briefings about this.
[00:24:13] And I’m interested to hear your take on the role of leadership development programs and processes on developing silver bullet thinking.
[00:24:21] Steve: Well, I increasingly think it’s quite simple. So, and this is not, one of the things I think is really important to say is the book is also a synthesis of many other people’s ideas, including yours, as I spoke to you, and it’s really important to say that because, I don’t want my thinking to be elevated in a way where somehow rather than I’m perceived to be the person who’s got this answer and this stuff.
[00:24:42] first of all, leadership development, has only been around for a vest. What? 80, 90 years. as a professionalised field. It also is underpinned by a whole set of assumptions, which are often not really that clear,around what constitutes great or good leadership. if you look for [00:25:00] archetypes, despite lots of the rhetoric and the growth of things like servant leadership and fellowship and so on, we still seem pretty addicted to heroic leadership.
[00:25:08] Now that still holds us in its very hairy Mastian grip.andOne of the conversations I had that really just nailed the problem with it for me was an exchange I had with Richard Hale, where he basically said the problem with leadership development is largely performative.
[00:25:27] And this is performative because participants turn up at venues to form in their role as learners where they are offered models and archetypes and ideas of what looks like great leadership and invited to take these on as new clothes. And I’ve done this in either consultant or facilitator turn up form in a way where I hope they might like me, regard me as credible, give them the benefit of the fruits of my supposed expertise. The organisational quick fix
[00:25:52] And we all leave at the end of the day or days agreeing that they’ve gone through a process whereby they now have an idea about what effective leadership looks like. [00:26:00] Firstly, there’s lots of evidence that shows that even with a brilliant leadership development program, unless you attend to the context within which people reenter an organisation over time, the learning will evaporate and they’ll revert to the norm.
[00:26:11] And secondly, and this is the big. Big, big issue. It is typically utterly divorced from practice. It’s a form of outside in development, not inside out. It assumes that the person who is devising or designing the leadership development intervention knows what the learner needs, which is fundamentally flawed.
[00:26:32] So I refuse to do conventional leadership development anymore. And by conventional, I mean this kind of typically programmatic, let’s wheel out a particular model. unless. There’s a kind of pull from the group in terms of a utility of something. What I’m interested in is the kind of thing that Richard talks about and the consultancy Maeve and I did quite a bit of work with and really skilled at Is practice based leadership development, which looks at [00:27:00] helping leaders as they work on real world messy issues in their workplace.
[00:27:06] It talks to them about how they show up and the impact they have in the context they work in and what they might need to do to evolve and change that. Without that, what’s the relationship between learning and what actually happens in an organisation? It’s, it is purely performative. I don’t see how you can do leadership development without really getting into This question about how you show up and impact. The organisation quick fix
[00:27:34] what’s going on for them in that moment.
[00:27:37] Otherwise, all we’re doing is we’re talking about emotional, ideas and aspirational assets of leadership. I think that leading in this way is a great thing. I think leadership should be fair and just. I’m sure we can all agree on that. Do you show up as fair and just, Steve?
[00:27:50] I don’t know. Are you open to hearing what your colleagues think about whether you show up as fair and just?
[00:27:55] David: Oh, okay.
[00:27:57] Steve: Well, that conversation is a bit [00:28:00] crunchy. Does that give you the answer?
[00:28:03] David: Yeah, I think so. I think there’s, well, there’s a whole load of kind of angles to have a pop up leadership development, particularly leadership development programs.
[00:28:14] there’s an awful lot of research showing that they’re really not very effective. There’s an awful lot of good evidence to show that what goes on in business schools actually is not only isn’t very effective, But is based on really old theory and things and that they’re not really up to date, which is a pop that I quite often have at them.
[00:28:32] which should probably get me sacked out of the three that I teach in at the moment. It depends on who’s listening to this, I suppose. and I agree completely with this idea about, because just from a practical point of view, the program kind of overloads and front loads a whole load of theory of people that’s divorced from practice.
[00:28:54] And we did a big thing around CPD, so continual professional development. And one of the big moves in CPD [00:29:00] is to get that development into the workplace. At the moment that people are making decisions so that they can learn how to think about the decision, but also, and this comes back to the thing that we started talking about a little bit earlier, that they can also just put their hand up, even if it’s only to themselves and think and just say to themselves, I don’t know what’s going on here because that act alone, then opens them up. The organisational quick fix.
[00:29:25] To then starting to find out what is going on here, rather than making the assumption about what is going on here. And, example that I make, and I say that because my research area is to do with the psychology of uncertainty. We’ve talked a lot about that. But that action of a leader, because leaders feel like they’re paid for knowing. The organisation quick fix
[00:29:48] And they feel like they, they’re paid for leading people. And therefore they should know in order to lead, they’ve got to lead from the front rather than facilitate something and go, actually, [00:30:00] nobody knows what’s going on here. And I certainly don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t understand what’s just happened here.
[00:30:06] We need to go and find out. So I did a piece of research quite a few years ago, looking at the difference between problem solving in organisations and entrepreneurial problem solving. What I discovered was that largely, not always, it depends on who it is, obviously, but within organizations, if you look at what problem solving means, it actually means to get back to how it was before the problem occurred.
[00:30:31] When you look at their definition of a problem, it’s actually the symptoms. It’s not the problem. And I kind of define the difference.you start thinking about, you’ve got a stomach ache to you. That’s the problem. When you go to the doctor, the doctor knows that’s just One of the symptoms they’ve got to kind of somehow backtrack to find out what the problem, what created this and this whole idea that actually whenever a problem occurs, you never notice it anyway, it just happens.
[00:30:53] There’s always a lag between the problem occurring and symptoms occurring. That’s not how entrepreneurs solve problems. [00:31:00] Entrepreneurs look at the issue and go, okay, I’m not defining this as a problem. What I’m wanting to know now is what the reality of this situation is. So they go out fact finding, and there’s a really nice example of this in the film, the big short, where at the start of the financial crisis.
[00:31:17] There was a group of financiers. These were the people who made the billions out of the financial crisis. They started noticing something odd was happening. And what they didn’t do was go and interview and talk to other financiers. They went out and started talking to hairdressers, car mechanics, people out on the street.
[00:31:34] And they found there’s a scene in the thing where they interviewed this hairdresser, who’s got three mortgages and four houses. and they go, how do you afford that? And they went, well, I can’t, so I’m just using that mortgage in order to pay that. And as they go around, and this is the point about problem solving that good entrepreneurs do, is they’re not actually solving the problem.
[00:31:56] Steve: What they’re doing is trying to find out what’s actually happening, the reality [00:32:00] from the position of, I don’t know. And then what they do is go, right, This is the reality. How can we leverage this? What can we do with this? Which is a completely different way of viewing problem solving. And yeah.
[00:32:13] And if I had to nutshell one of the key messages from the book, it’s, you don’t tend to look for silver bullet solutions if you’re comfortable with not knowing. Yes, exactly. And to engage in,and also the other thing you’re alluding to there is inquiry. And again, that’s the other thing that if you want to really wrestle with complex problems, you have to be able to create the conditions for inquiry.
[00:32:35] I was talking to somebody, was it yesterday or today? And we had this conversation where we were trying to think of the last time we’d heard a high profile leader or a story of a senior leader, A CEO or a politician or something like that who very publicly has been asked something and they’ve gone, I don’t know. The organisation quick fix
[00:32:56] And I can’t think of one. the only time I’ve seen [00:33:00] something with that kind of powerful response was a very senior guy at an HR conference about 10 years ago doing the panel thing. And typically panelists always expected to know. And he was asked a question by somebody in the front row or near the front row.
[00:33:14] And he did this lovely thing where he paused and he went, that’s a really good question. I don’t know. What do you think? And the ripple in the room as the kind of focus shifted, this is not playing the game. We don’t play this game. So not knowing thing I think is right from the center of this stuff.
[00:33:33] David: Yeah. And I think that sense of knowing that as a consultant, I should know the answer. So I’ll make one up or as a business school. I don’t know, but I’ll make one up. I’ll create a model. I’ll do something as a leader that we need answers. And therefore we need answers.
[00:33:53] I think you’re spot on here and spot on with the book is that this is [00:34:00] part of the problem with silver bullets. This is how they get created.
[00:34:04] Steve: One of the things that popped into my head when you were talking there, I was thinking about a conversation I had with a client earlier this year, CEO of a very large financial institution.
[00:34:13] And we just spent best part of three days working together. And he said to me at the end of it, to me and my colleague, this has been great, I’ve just come back from 10 days at an international business school on a CEO retreat with loads of other CEOs. It’s great. It was really good.
[00:34:30] And here was the kicker though. He said, I’ve learned more in three days with you than I did in 10 days there. Now, I can take the stroke in that. So let’s just, I’m not just saying that to kind of blow smoke at myself, but from a learning point of view, this is the question. How is it that we create learning spaces for very senior people and organisations that take 10 days where they come out of it and feel, Beautifully coddled and valued, but it took him spending three days with two people who were actually less [00:35:00] interested in stroking his ego and more interested in creating a space for the conversations that actually this group needed to have.
[00:35:06] And provoking
[00:35:07] David: thinking.
[00:35:08] Steve: Yeah. And I know there are brilliant people that work at some of these institutions. So let’s be really clear. I know great people who work at the business schools, yourself included David. but systemically, how are we helping if the emphasis is on, ensuring that clients are left feeling comfortable enough that we can reassure ourselves that they’re going to come back next time.
[00:35:33] That’s not the same thing as answering the question, how do I be most of most service to this client to ensure that they go back into the organization and do useful work? Totally different questions.
[00:35:43] David: Yeah, and it’s the primacy of knowledge. We’ve got to a place where we value knowing things and knowledge rather than thinking about things and not knowing things.
[00:35:55] And that’s exactly what you were talking about good inquiry. [00:36:00] What actually is going on here?

The organisational quick fix.
[00:36:01] Steve: But
[00:36:02] David: it’s uncomfortable, messy stuff.
[00:36:04] Steve: Well, it is. And so one of the things I know about myself is I’ve been told over the years, David, I come across as incredibly certain, in my pronouncements and what I say, but what is not obvious sometimes to make it really explicit is that I read a book called Being Wrong by Katherine Schultz
[00:36:20] David: about The organisation quick fix
[00:36:21] Steve: 10, 12 years ago.
[00:36:22] And ever since I read that book, I now operate with a, a kind of, what’s the word? If you write code, it’s one of the kind of coded assumptions that’s in my programming, which is I’m open to the possibility. I almost certainly probably am wrong. You know, I know it can be wrong, which frees me up to be totally certain until such point.

 The organisational quick fix
[00:36:42] And somebody points out why I’m being stupid, but that strikes me as being unusual. And my own reflections of that is because I’ve got close enough to my own absurdity and I know my own. aspects of myself, which evoke my own sense [00:37:00] of shame. And I’m quite comfortable with that.
[00:37:02] Therefore, for me, it’s not hugely anxiety inducing. It’s not always comfortable. It’s not, but it won’t destroy me when somebody points out I’m being a numpty
[00:37:11] David: That may be the thing. I’m laughing because there’s a quote in a paper. So I was talking about this guy who was doing empirical studies on functional stupidity, and he’s got a piece in one of his, paper in 2017.
[00:37:22] I’ll just read it out. And basically it says this, the moment you start thinking about your own stupidity, you’re no longer practicing it. Which I think. Yes. Yeah.
[00:37:30][00:37:31] Steve: I’m a great believer in the importance of blundering into things occasionally, because it’s how you learn. I mean, again, if we just take something really gnarly.
[00:37:39] Right.and I don’t talk about this in the book much because there was so much else I wanted to talk about. I could have done a whole chapter on nothing else, but, equality, diversity, and inclusion. And how, there’s a quest easy stuff there. And I’ve done, I run sessions with people within the OD community around difference and race and stuff.
[00:37:56] And one of the things that’s really clear to me is that there’s some [00:38:00] conversations that are just soundly uncomfortable. That if you are going to have a conversation with a group, just get a group of white people together and ask them to talk about what they really think about other cultures and other ethnicities.
[00:38:13] And if you really create a space for people to talk about their prejudices and biases, you can’t sanitize that. but I noticed a slight kind of dis, well, not slight, there is a dissonance, if you like, between the rhetoric of some practice, let’s take OD, OD is a field which is, very so called justifiably inflated and where people could reflect on, and yes, we can be.
[00:38:37] David: But I equally noticed just how hard it is still for people who identify as OD practitioners still to move sometimes into really uncomfortable places, which is what we ask our clients to do. Yeah. And this is the difference between selling certainty and selling uncertainty. Yeah. It’s easier to sell certainty than uncertainty because people don’t like being uncomfortable.
[00:38:58] exactly. [00:39:00] So there’s a big question that kind of comes out of all of this. it’s this what’s to be done about it. How can the myth of the silver bullet in a messy world be challenged in your view? how can something more realistic and evidence based replace the narrative of the silver bullet?
[00:39:16] The organisational quick fix.
[00:39:18] Steve: it’s a really uncomfortable one in a sense because I don’t know how you disrupt the current patterns around this stuff without more people being prepared to create some useful discomfort. If that means some strange man from Brighton writing a 320 page book about there’s no such thing as a bullet or you, putting out.
[00:39:44] Provocations from the Oxford Review that are kind of going, like your wonderful one around, the myth of the 70 percent change failure rate. it’s going to require multiple people to go, hang on a minute, can we think about this a bit more deeply? The question for me is, [00:40:00] Unless we get figures who are of, I’m almost hating myself saying this, we need people who have got, who are in influential positions who are prepared to model some of this stuff.
[00:40:09] one good example of somebody who’s done that recently is Rory Stewart. If you read his autobiography and what he’s saying, he is somebody who’s basically going, It’s messy. It’s actually nowhere near as certain as we think it is. This stuff doesn’t work. And he even has the temerity to talk about shame, his own and others.
[00:40:26] It means more of that. So in a sense, I guess what I’m arguing for is there needs to be a willingness to have Deeper inquiry at scale, and this is the kicker, and this flies in the face of much of the discourse at the moment. We need to remind ourselves that actually ambivalence and nuance is not a bad thing.
[00:40:48] That the continual invitation to be the for or against something is really not that helpful. Not when it comes to the stuff we’re talking about here.
[00:40:57] David: it’s been part of the [00:41:00] conversation and that the conversation is a continual thing and where our thinking is continually developing, and that there are no facts in any of this stuff.
[00:41:08] Steve: Yeah.
[00:41:09] David: and it’s one of the points that I make, so when I teach critical thinking at the university, and one of the things that the students discover is kind of the things that we. Yeah. thought were correct 50 and a hundred years ago. We’d no longer think a correct and therefore the things we think correct right now, probably in 1500 years time, people are going to laugh at.
[00:41:30] So, get real here. This is messy. It’s horrible. and it’s probably not right. Whatever it is, you may think it is, but it’s not. And it’s kind of living in a world of uncertainty really.
[00:41:42] Steve: Which actually is really interesting, isn’t it? Because so much of what is written and about or sold as part of the kind of functional collusion of the buying and selling of super bullets is done with such certainty. The organisation quick fix
[00:41:53] I mean, how could you possibly imagine that this thing wouldn’t work? And you then take that and you compare it to something like the scientific [00:42:00] method, which is, it’s predicated on the assumption. We believe this to be true until there is evidence that it isn’t. But that’s not the kind of feel you get from much of what myself and others do when we sell, to be really honest.
[00:42:13] We sell with the certainty that of course you need this, David, because we’ve done this before. Of course it works. It’s
[00:42:19] David: a solution.
[00:42:20] Steve: Yeah. And, one of the really subtle things about the word solution, I think It’s become oversimplified and we forget that in chemistry that of course a solution is a combination of different elements and different things.

Be impressively well informed

Get the very latest research intelligence briefings, video research briefings, infographics and more sent direct to you as they are published

Be the most impressively well-informed and up-to-date person around...

Success! Now check your email to confirm that we got your email right. If you don't get an email in the next 4-5 minutes something went wrong: 1. Check your junk folder just in case 🙁 2. If it's not there either, you may have accidentally mistyped your email address (it happens). Have another go. Many thanks

There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again.

First Name

Email Address

We use this field to detect spam bots. If you fill this in, you will be marked as a spammer.

I'd like to receive the free email course. Yes Please Powered by Kit