I love sci-fi – It’s our equivalent of the ancient myths. It’s a metaphoric vehicle to make philosophical observations about the world we live in. Many of the popular sci-fi stories from the past few decades have a common theme…

The robots are taking over!

The matrix; The Terminator; I Robot; 2001 A Space Odyssey; In all cases the machines that were developed to serve us then overthrow and control us.

The machine revolution has happened…

But it doesn’t look like this…     It looks like this

Not so much like Arnie… More like Bill…

Have you or someone you know created a slide deck to be a coherent read for the people that don’t turn up, and then read it out to the people who do. Who’s running the presentation; you or the deck?

Have you ever showed up to a meeting or event that ‘appeared’ in your calendar?

Have you ever lost precious time because you were responding in a timely fashion to a landslide of email?

Who’s in charge?

The conditions you set for creative meetings, if practiced regularly, become attitude and eventually culture.

Where’s your culture on this continuum?

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Supportive:                                                          Critical

“Every contribution is valid”                           “That’s not very good”

Adventurous                                                       Fearful

“Go for it!”                                                         “Don’t screw up!”

Experimental                                                      Closed-minded

“Why not?”                                                        “Stick to the done thing”

Inclusive                                                               Elitist

“The more the merrier”                                    “They don’t need to know”

Open                                                                     Cagey

“Get it all out on the table.”                             “Play you cards close to your chest.”

We all like the feelings of stress, anxiety and paranoia, so here are four tips to make sure that your organisational culture turns reasonable people into violent psychopaths:

• Confuse knowledge with ability

By over valuing explicit knowledge you can completely ignore factors like attitude, experience, judgement and tacit ability.

When knowledgeable people can’t do, they make the mistake of thinking they don’t know enough, so they acquire more knowledge but it doesn’t help – what they need is ability which comes from unconscious competence: Road-time and a well trained gut.

You can fuel the paranoia nicely by giving them more and more overwhelming explicit information and when that doesn’t help and they can’t retain it they can begin to feel more and more phony.

• Impose ridiculous accountability

Make individuals accountable for huge dynamic systems like market conditions or the weather, and manage them against outcomes that cannot be guaranteed by an individual human being.

On a previous blog a friend commented that she was recently asked ‘Who owns culture in this organisation?’ I’m reminded of the Roman Emperor who ordered his soldiers to fight the sea – can’t remember which one, I think it was Caligula but I could be wrong – answers on a blog post…

• Critique personality

Critique people to death by focussing in on how they conduct themselves not what they achieve. It’s important to make people feel personally judged, it’s not work – it’s them as a person. Make it a fickle popularity contest, based on personality not character, and make it as much like Elizabethan Court as possible.

To add a psychotic paranoid process, add in ‘phantoms’ that can’t be directly influenced like ‘how the organisation perceives you’. You know you have achieved when people pay 90% of their attention to their PR, relationships and affiliations, and only 10% to the actual work.

• Induce fear

Make sure that the negative consequence of getting it wrong far outweighs any positive consequence of performing well. When you talk about error or mistakes, it’s important that you show a mix of terror and disapproval.

It’s also important to be afraid of things that have never happened, and things that if they did happen you don’t even know if there would be a negative consequence or not – nobody has dared to find out. Fear everything that is not squeaky-clean predictable conformity.

Enjoy your work!

When will I be fit so that I can stop going to the gym?

When will I have learnt enough so I can stop learning?

When will the values be embedded so we can move on to the next thing?

When will the change be implemented so that we can ignore it?

When will we have marketed enough to stop marketing?

When will I have enough sales to stop selling?

When will we have been creative enough to never be creative again?

When will I have enough oxygen so that I can stop breathing?

You can’t store fitness, trust or goodwill.

If it’s not something you need to do constantly, it’s probably not worth doing at all…

There is currently one concept in organisational language that concerns me more than any other… It’s almost impossible to screw up a nine-box competency framework and throw it at the waste paper bin in an HR department without bouncing off a conversation about ‘the talent agenda’ or a person with ‘talent’ in their job description.

My understanding is that the word ‘talent’ is typically used for the individuals considered as talented; those who shine more brightly than the rest; the most likely leaders of tomorrow, so they are a handy bunch of people to identify and nurture, but I’m not sure that ‘talent’ is a helpful label.

The meaning associated with talent is often one of ‘god-given ability’. They are just better. It’s easier for them. It’s in their DNA. The dictionary installed on my computer defines talent as ‘natural aptitude or skill’.

I’m lucky to have several friends who are elite performers in their fields – Olympic athletes, fighter pilots and entrepreneurs. Every one of them, if asked, will dismiss the idea of talent. They will all tell you of competitors who seemed to have more natural talent but squandered it. They universally attribute their success to mindset and bloody hard work.

So – here are 6 reasons why the consequence of the concept of ‘talent’ may not be helpful:

1. ‘Talent’ is a myth

Malcolm Gladwell, in his insightful book ‘Outliers’, suggests that extraordinary performance is a result of 10,000 hours of road-time. Matthew Sayd, in his excellent book, ‘bounce’ suggests that the difference is hours and hours of purposeful practice.

2. Even of it wasn’t a myth – HR systems are the least effective at identifying it.

Over the past few years I have spent a lot of time learning about performance management systems in large organisations. For the most part they reward conformity and consistency over genius and insight. A large organisation I worked with recently recognized their lack of entrepreneurial flair, so they recruited twenty real, proven, successful entrepreneurs; shakers and movers who can make things happen. None of the twenty highly paid recruits lasted a whole year. Once inside the organization they would have needed to behave in line with the culture to stay – which completely defeats the object.

3. Talent creates confirmation bias

Check out ‘The Pygmalion Effect’ or ‘The Rosenthal Effect’ for compelling evidence of how deeply our judgement is corrupted by identifying individuals as high potential – great news for those who make the cut and severely limiting for those who don’t.

4. Talent creates identity prison.

Once identified as talent you have an identity-based label that may corrupt your behaviour in several ways. You may avoid any activity within which you will not shine, so step out of activities that do not reinforce the label (like successful sports people who duck competitions if they think they will not finish on top, or successful entrepreneurs who become paralysed by protecting their success and lose their entrepreneurial ability) or they may being to ‘rest on laurels’ and apply themselves less if they are not adequately challenged.

5. Talent provokes developmental laziness

One of my friends is a schoolteacher. Within the first month of the term he identifies the top 20% of kids in the class so that he can help them to achieve excellent test results, and the bottom 20% of kids so that he can make sure they keep up and ‘get them over the line’ at the end of the year.  The middle 60% are essentially ignored and left to their own devices. He’s gaming-it to meet the governmental measures upon which he is performance managed, recognized and rewarded.

6. ‘Talent’ can become a ‘club’

I was recently working with an L&D professional who explained that their organization had spent that past 5 years asking, “What do we need to do for our talent?” “What do our talent need from us?” They have recently started asking, “Hang on a minute, what are these talented individuals doing for us? What do we get back from this investment? What are they signing up for?”

I’m probably a lone voice here (again). It would be great if you could click through to the blog and leave a comment.

In the meantime, here are a couple of ‘What if’ questions to chew over:

What if we did away with the word ‘talent’ – replaced with ‘current high-performers’? Make it less permanent – more changeable – more linked to performance than god-given abilities.

What if development activities were strictly related to what needed to be achieved in the current role (to get better at it and achieve a commercial objective) and the future role (to grow into it) and made available to everyone?

Although available to everyone, what if individuals had to self-nominate and justify or earn their involvement each development activity – so that development activities are seen as a valuable privilege not a passive ‘joy ride’?

Just a thought…

Both of the scripts below are a bit of silly fiction – but one is far more ludicrous than the other…

1.

“Hello darling, how was your day?”

“Fantastic, someone showed me some great, explicit bullet points. I remember them vividly.”

“Oh no; I thought we would read bullet points this evening but if you have been reading bullet points today you may not want to.”

“Don’t worry, bullet points are what life is about – I never tire of them.”

2.

“Hello darling, how was your day?”

“Fantastic, someone told me some amazing stories. I remember them vividly.”

“Oh no, I thought we would (watch a movie/share stories/see a play/read stories) this evening but if you have been hearing stories today you may not want to.”

“Don’t worry, stories are what life is about – I never tire of them.”

I’m often asked to help managers have ‘Coaching style’ conversations… It’s an interesting challenge.

Understandably, because they have a vested interest in the outcome, managers tend to coach in two ways:

1. Genuine Coaching: A genuine coaching conversation transforms performance by stimulating the ‘coachee’ to find a congruent, sustainable answer. The coach may be facilitating a process to reach a positive outcome, but is flexible about what the outcome is and how it is achieved.
2. Shitty Coaching: Shitty coaching is when you ask a load of closed or leading questions under the guise of a coaching style. It’s ‘suggesting’, ‘judging’, ‘imposing’ or ‘telling’ dressed up as coaching

For example:

“You are late, be on time.” Is telling

“Don’t you think that you should be on time?” Is telling dressed up as a question

“How can you be on time?” is better because it invites the coachee to generate options, but it also presupposes the outcome.

“What’s the story with the timekeeping?” Is a genuinely open question that does not impose the solution ‘be on time’, it invites a wider conversation that may introduce other possibilities like changing hours going to do something else.

Have a look at the examples below; in which cases are the question open and when is the questioner ‘leading the witness’:

• Tell me more…
• What are you trying to achieve?
• Do you think you would have a better relationship with your boss if you were more open with her?
• How can you be more politically aware?
• What happened specifically?
• Could you get here earlier?
• What could you do instead?
• Do you not think that the way you behaved was obstructive and that you should apologise?

In everyday conversation most questions presuppose the answer. Beware –

The intention of coaching and asking questions is to generate more choices – not less.

When I was young there was a kid in the playground who liked to make up quizzes.

He would come up with ten or so questions (things from his past knowledge and experience) and he would ask us the questions.

But he would play as well, and when he won having answered all of the questions correctly he would celebrate his victory and bask in his cleverness.

Now that I am older I frequently meet people who are doing the same thing – they call it research.

They design a set of questions based on what they think will happen or be observed. These questions come from their prejudices conditioned by their previous experience, knowledge, rules, and models.

This method will never provide you with…

• What’s really happening
• The counter examples to your expectations and prejudices
• Surprises, coincidences or opportunities
• Anything new

One consultant I was working with said, “I knew what the outcome would be before we began the research.” Just like the boy in the playground she was right, of course, which just serves to reinforce the delusion.

There is an alternative approach…

My friends Mike Weeks and John Grinder spend a great deal of time rock climbing. They describe a move they call ‘the crux move’; when you need to let go of the hold you have on the mountainside and fully commit to the hold you are reaching for. There is a moment where you have let go of your hold completely but have not yet reached the new hold, and there’s no going back.

My friend Jeff Grout, in his extremely popular leadership speech and seminar, asks his audience, (indirectly, via a quote) “Are you prepared to de-stabilise what you have to achieve what you desire?”

A question that I find myself asking frequently in coaching is “What prevents you?” The answer is typically a process (state), the consequence of which is to hold on to a previous success or identity or comfort.

What do you personally need to think and feel to let go and fearlessly reach for what you really want???

When I talk about beliefs I’m not referring to the things that we assume to be true so that we can get through our daily lives effectively; I’m talking the things that we are not prepared to question or challenge.

A belief that is held firmly creates a schema and organises our experience – we see the things that reinforce the belief and delete the counter-evidence. So if beliefs are self fulfilling prophecies, are we making our world smaller when we hold a belief firmly? Are we moving even further away from reality? What happens when our belief clashes with reality? Do we get emotive and irrationally defend the belief?

What if we hold beliefs more gently as an operating principle? It’s true enough for now, but I’m happy to question it…  What if we were more curious and open to new ideas that challenge our own beliefs? Does that bring us closer to reality? Does that stop us from getting into a pickle?

However – Complete disbelief can be just as unhelpful…

"I don't believe it"