2/97 Banksia Street
Botany NSW 2019
Australia
Speaker A In response to the question of how banal ro appears to people when you respond to them. I mean, there's one overarching concept that once you actually have got a fundamental insight about things, it always appears simple. Getting to that point is actually quite difficult and also one undermines dramatically. Even simple ideas are extraordinarily complex to put in place. I think there's another hidden variable there is that if you have a simple concept like authority and accountability should be aligned at one level, it appears that that oh yeah, well that's sensible. But there's a hidden point missed is that human beings actually for thousands and thousands of years in their evolutionary development have not had contractual relationships with each other. They've had long term permanent human relationships with each other. And the concepts of authority and accountability are brand new human constructs that cut across the fact that I actually don't really want to have accountability to you. I'm not sure that I want authority to be exercised over me. What I'd like to have is a long term, continuous, loving relationship rather than a contractual relationship, which at the end of the day contract was designed for relationships between strangers. And I don't want to have a relationship between strangers. I want to have a relationship between somebody who isn't a stranger, who takes me as a whole person, not because of what I can contractually do for them. So even though the idea of let's get authority and accountability aligned at first sight appears to be a no brainer, it actually goes against human nature quite dramatically. Which explain one, it's banal because it's a no brainer, but two, it massively underestimates how difficult it is to get it resolved. You then are faced with the clarity that a contract provides in a relationship. And the clarity cuts two ways. The clarity is a about contract and holding me as a subordinate accountable for something that which I'm actually not that keen on in a lot of ways. And the clarity also eliminates the leader or the manager's degrees of freedom. And managers want degrees of freedom. And the degrees of freedom they want aren't necessarily pleasant degrees of freedom for the subordinates. Because I suspect we have also in our biology a predisposition to domination. So part of Elliott's work is actually structuring institutions to reduce the ability of managers to dominate and coerce their subordinates. With managers once removed and having a relationship to your subordinates and a whole bunch of other processes that say no, you can't dominate and coerce your subordinates in a way that you might want to. So from a leadership perspective or a manager's perspective, elliot's work reduces their degrees of freedom, quote and they might not always be nice freedoms. And from a subordinate's perspective, it brings up this bitters of accountability in a contractual relationship. And I actually don't want to have a contractual relationship. I want to be loved for what I am once you've actually got there and you've been through quite a lot of difficulty getting there. Then the actual experience of the requisite state where you see that in fact the manager support and relationship is less capricious than it might be otherwise. That where you see that there is enough space between you and the manager to use your full capability. Then the actual daily experience of that starts to kick in and people says hey this isn't so bad. But simultaneously there is like a force of gravity that also says I don't like all this structure, I don't like all this contractual stuff. Contracts are for strangers. I don't want to be a stranger to you, I don't want you to be a stranger to me. So on the one hand this is paradoxical basically. On the one hand there's this sense and recognition that this structure just like driving on one side of the road versus any side of the road actually helps out. On the other hand, I mean we've probably all figured out that driving on one side rather than other is sustainably good idea. But on the other hand in relationships because we go home to relationships are quite different and we have relationships with our peers that are quite different. I'm not too sure that I want this relationship the way it's the way it's contained in this way so I can see a benefit to it. And I also am sort of in a way reluctant to receive that benefit as well. Well you then get into the question of how you make this stuff sustainable and especially into the issue of how is it sustainable with a new chief executive coming in. Now first of all, let's focus on the chief executive. When a new chief executive comes in, can you imagine a new chief executive coming in and saying well everything's great around here, it's just slickety dick, it's the best thing I've ever seen. Well not really. Right? So all chief executives are impelled for their own ego reasons apart from anything else to change stuff and to in a way unfortunately deny the stuff that went before them. And that's on one case. Another case, most chief executives also they want human relationships as I was talking about before. They don't want contractual relationships either. They talk about loyalty, they talk about in the trenches together with David or with Paul and we've worked together before and we trust each other and all those sorts of things which should and could be a derivative of requisite organization. But in fact they received those relationships and those benefits of the relationships not through requisite organization historically, potentially they received them through other forms of relationship. So the chief executive rocks up one, they have to do something. And it's not just chief executives. Put another guy into the marketing department and your brand's at risk, he's not going to leave the brand alone. And you go god I've just spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this brand, and this turkey wants to actually change it. And it's the same with chief executives. So they're impelled to change. So is part of the system. They might change that then. From a subordinate's point of view, if the Chief executive comes in and the subordinates say, we really like requisite organization, they're, in a way, again, constraining the Chief Executive's degrees of freedom. Chief executive says, I'm here to make change. I'm here to improve. These guys are holding me in a pattern. Well, I'm not going to do that. And anyway, and this is the harsh truth is that 99.99% recurring of the world is not using requisite organization. And they're muddling their way through pretty damn well. So it's quite understandable if they come up with a different model. And Sam.