Confidence

A CEO decided that he wanted to "shake up" his rather stodgy company to turn it into an outward-looking innovative juggernaut. The industry had been so comfortable for so long that innovation had not been necessary for survival. With the market upended and significant pressure on margins, the CEO thought that the innovation imperative would be evident to all. He envisioned a company where a question from Asia would find an answer in France, and where people who didn't know each other would collaborate to innovate. He put a team in charge of innovation, reporting directly to him, and bypassed the IT department to launch an enterprise social network (ESN).  

He acted fast and decisively, and expected quick results - an enthusiastic snowball effect of sorts. What he did not foresee, however, was that instead of rising to the challenge of the transformation, the majority decided to either 'wait and see' or to oppose him outright. In particular, there was strong resistance among second and third-line managers against the ESN. An idea that seemed obvious at HQ failed in the hands of the people it was supposed to help.  

What happened? 

For one, this is a classic case of "transformation by bus". The tools are deployed in the hope that people will use them. There is no clearly articulated and desirable target that the organization will reach by using this tool, and the employees have not formulated a need for the tool as a means to reach the target.  

  

Further, signing up for the ESN was an individual initiative for each employee. In a culture steeped in conservatism, that was already a stretch. Some staff resisted using a tool for which they were not specifically trained.  

More disturbingly, some second and third-line managers actively forbade their direct reports from using or engaging in discussions on the ESN. Upon inquiry, three things stand out:  

• the time spent collaborating and innovating (through the ESN or not) could not be clearly tallied towards the objectives guiding the managers' decisions. Nobody was going to get a bonus for or by using the ESN - it was "a waste of time". 
• the managers seem to have perceived the ESN as the threat to their authority. Specifically, if their reports could bypass them to engage directly with others in the company, they might discover that their bosses were less competent than previously believed. Alternatively, if someone had to ask the ESN for help, it might reflect poorly on the manager who, it would be assumed, had not provided the answer or guidance.  
• the managers also perceived, in a less explicit way, that an informed workforce requires leaders, rather than managers - that is to say bosses that inspire and facilitate rather than know and control. Ill-trained (or untrained) for this new responsibility, they could not take it on. 

We see here that this attempt to free knowledge and information in the corporate organization was thwarted by fear; fear of being exposed as less-than-competent and fear of actually being unprepared for one's new tasks. This fear, obviously, is just that: most of the managers are actually competent, and it results from lack of confidence. 

Confidence both in oneself and in the goodwill of others is a crucial ingredient for success that appears to have been lacking at the individual and corporate levels. To "develop individual initiative and individual ability to work with each other" in particular through the liberation of information flows within the organization - the ESN's purported objective - we need to ensure that the staff understands and buys into the shifts required in their positions, prerogatives and responsibilities. I propose that one way that this can happen is if those affected by the changes are :  

1. sufficiently self-confident that they accept to challenge the status quo and their position therein 

2. convinced that their management, peers, and reports will treat their experimentations and questions (and potential failure) with goodwill and that they will be given the necessary training and support to succeed.  

Treating employees with kindness, trust and respect is a good place to start building  self-confidence and corporate goodwill. Almost more importantly, giving employees the freedom to err, and even to fail, is the highest show of confidence and encouragement to their ability to make decisions - to take initiative.

Managing transformation - going up the mountain

Every organization reaches a time in its existence when change becomes imperative – a matter of survival. The appropriate manager must then formulate a desirable target for the transformation: a target that will yield benefits to those who will transform themselves. At this point, the hardest task remains: the transformation itself.

Transforming an organization and its people is like climbing a mountain. The manager has three options for leading the way up: the bus, the sleigh and the adventure.

In the bus, the manager’s people can sleep or passively watch the scenery while the manager drives. When they reach the top of the mountain, they will likely enjoy the view but probably find that it’s a bit cold. Soon enough, they’ll glide back down to the valley. Indeed, reaching the top of the mountain required no commitment or personal investment – no skin in the game – and has little value to them. 

The manager who chooses to use a sleigh will harness his people and whip them mercilessly until they reach the top of the mountain. When they arrive, most will be dead and the survivors will hate him (and possibly their job, or each other, etc…). The results might be durable, but hardly desirable. It is likely that the scars will never heal.

The manager who challenges his people to leverage their collective intelligence to devise a path that they will willingly travel up the mountain will initiate a lasting and fruitful transformation. This adventure becomes a liberating and synergistic shared experience, a founding myth of the new organization. The adventure must be organized in such a way that those who transform themselves are climbing the mountain in short stages, with the applause and benevolent support of their manager and domain experts.  When they reach the top of the mountain, they will own the transformation and form a new organization born of the journey. 

The new power lines

A waste-free society is definitely "the" new frontier.  It is not a traditional frontier anymore: the new terra incognita are not far away in space or time but within each of us: we are the frontier!

Individual accomplishment in a society, moving from an economy of scale to an economy of scarce, is involving a radical shift of our old routines, the way we act, and the way we think.

Finding growth for everyone in a waste-free world will require us to be cooperative and smart, Kinder and Wiser.

Kinder. Suppressing the frontiers of time and space has left open the last frontier: human interactions. New wealth will come from our ability to combine our skills to find and implement new and better ways. Cooperation is a keystone. And it starts with respect: including all the players and their aspirations unto the game: it is not about being nice, it is about recognising the fact that we are all part of the world’s destiny and we depend on each other's intelligence to create waste-less growth. A french philosopher* used to say: "believing in someone's intelligence will help it grow, but denying it will destroy it".  If it was nice in the past to be powerful and kind, being kinder may be a new source of power.

Wiser. The challenge is to create new products and services with a frugal use of non-renewable resources and also a leveraged use of ever-renewable resources like people intelligence and learning capacities. Developing these smart resources will increase our ability to address and share the right questions; our capacity to draw re-use and recycle the necessary resources and deliver  smart and waste-free products and solutions. Being wiser is already a new resource to feed the  new power lines! 

*Jean Guéhenno