Building an RO-based organization design function in a large organization with minimal resistance

Speaker A You.

Speaker B There was a time when organizational psychologists, OD practitioners, et cetera, were convinced that the keys to organization effectiveness, if not the only keys, at least the most important ones, were group dynamics or team building, interpersonal communication effectiveness, conflict management skills and personal development, mental health and hygiene. Management style was a very important subject. Elliot Jacks came along and his response was to conclude that psychological analysis, human relations and psychotherapy, whether they were individual or group, were not the keys to organization effectiveness. He hypothesized that the organization was the key to organization effectiveness. And then he set about ways to try to find ways to identify the processes and structures of organizations and how they related one to another. His foundational proposition is just that it is the organization itself that is key to organization effectiveness, its structures and its processes. In rejecting the traditional mental health paradigm for understanding organizations, elliot did at times appear to neglect, to ignore, or even to disparage the human dimension of organizations. However, in my conversations with him, we did agree that no matter what else you might say about any organization, they were all staffed with people, every last one of them. Now, some people thought that Elliot had a negative view of people because of his emphasis on the organization itself and its assistance. But I found it to the contrary. Elliot actually had a very, very high view of people. He thought that all people were capable though variably. So when it came to conceptual abilities, skill sets, etc. But he believed that if you would put people in a supportive environment, that they were all well intended. Given that supportive environment, all people would function as well as they were able, if you will. It's a little bit like your golf handicap. Elliot didn't believe that people would ordinarily just perform up to their average. He thought they could and would perform up to their best. Now, at this point, I'd like to bring into the conversation the philosopher Emmanuel Kong. He wrote a little book called A Critique of Practical Reason. Don't confuse it with a critique of pure reason. That's a much different book.

Speaker A In The Critique of Practical Reason, he.

Speaker B Asked this question what makes human beings unique? How do we differ from all other species? Now, Kant's answer to that question was that what makes us unique as a species is that we have a conscience. And what he meant by that was that all human beings seem to have within themselves an insatiable desire to feel good about themselves and to have the other people around them also feel good about them. Now, I'm a reformed theologian. I like being a theologian in this crowd because they're not many. So I get to be unique just by having my professionals. But as a reformed theologian, I add to Kant's definition that one third quality that is unique about human beings feel good about myself, have other people feel good about me. I think it is also true that all human beings have an insatiable desire to believe that they are achieving a purpose in life that they deem worthy, doing something that they think matters. Now, where Elliot and I disagreed is in the recognition of the presence of evil. Evil. As regards organizations, I'm concerned about two expressions of evil that I believe lie at the heart of capitalism. One of those is greed, and the other is selfishness or self centeredness. In legal parlance, selfishness or self centeredness is called self interest. Theologically, we call it idolatry. Idolatry. The problem with all self made men and all self made women is that they have this tendency to worship their maker. When I was first introduced to Elliot Jackson and to his organizational theories now, I met Elliot's work 20 years earlier when I wrote my first master's thesis, which was on defining middle age. And Elliot had just finished his seminal research on middle age and he had produced this sentence middle age is not an age, but a stage in life. And that one sentence got me my first master's degree. And I've always been thankful to Elliot for it. But I didn't know Elliot had gone into organizational work. My wife was an HR manager at Imperial Oil and she invited me to come to a staff training day. The presenter was George Harding. And some of you know George is dead now. But George was presenting Elliot's work and he started by asking the question, what is work? Now, this 25, 30 people in the room, right? And they are all people who work for Imperial Law and they're pretty bright people. And I figured that they would know the answer to that question because I don't care which catechism you study it's.

Speaker C In the first ten questions.

Speaker B And if I knew everybody knew the.

Speaker A Answer to that question.

Speaker B Nobody was answering the question, they were all quiet. I decided, well what the heck, they must just be shy. So I said I'll answer that question. It's the curse of Adam, everybody knows that answer to that question.

Speaker D George didn't write anything on the newsprint.

Speaker B So I thought, well, maybe he's a Lutheran. So I'll try another answer to that question, which is what is work? Work is the gift of God, the.

Speaker A Ability to co create.

Speaker B George still didn't write the thing on the newspaper, so I thought something is miss here. He then wrote up Elliot's definition of work and I found it tremendously hopeful. In fact, all through the time that I knew Elliot worked with him, I found his definitional work amongst the most helpful things he did, bringing definition and clarity to our language, what we were talking about. And I always valued it.

Speaker D Now.

Speaker B Elliot however, was not a theologian and he was not seeking to deal with this question. And so he didn't address it much. He was trying to direct the thinking of organization studies away from psychology and psychoanalysis as such to systems analysis of organization itself. Now, if it is true, as I believe it is, that evil does exist and tempts us human beings to accumulate wealth beyond our needs and to think of our own selves to the exclusion of others, then certain human factors, that is, human attitudes and human abilities become essential for organization effectiveness. And these would be three self awareness, awareness of and sensitivity to the needs of other human beings and the ability to interact with other human beings and relate with them. These three human abilities and ways of thinking are not natural. We are not born with them. In fact, Elliot said to me once you know, people are not born little bundles of pure innocence. They are born selfish, self centered and destructive. Thank God they are small and helpless. Our survival as a species requires that we teach people how to behave differently before they grow up. Our urges require that we learn restraint and our desires for organization effectiveness require that we learn these three skills and attitudes self awareness, sensitivity to the needs of others and the ability to relate and interact with other human beings. My disagreement with Elliot was not that either of the stuff, the human factor was not important. It was Elliot's belief that getting the structures and processes requisite was sufficient. I believe that organization effectiveness requires that we attend to human beings and to the complex human dilemma and to our urges to behave in disruptive ways. I have a colleague who works with one of the major consultancies and his area of practice is corporate ethics. One of his favorite sayings is you.

Speaker C Cannot have an ethical dilemma unless you.

Speaker B First have an ethic. Kant said we all have a conscience. And assuming that he was right about the uniqueness of the human species, that we do indeed have this conscience, then our ethics themselves are not innate. That is, they are not born within us, but they grow out of our self awareness, our awareness of the needs of others and our ability to relate across that boundary that separates you from me. It is here that Cot and Freud meet around the human being's ability to negotiate the tension between our desires for autonomy and to stand as a human being alone and recognized, and secondly, to belong to a community. Kant and Freud agreed. Both would say that a basic human need and dilemma is to reconcile the tension between needing and wanting to be a unique and authentic individual at the same time be accepted by and belong to a community of other. Human beings to feel good about myself and to be thought well of by others and all the while earning a living and doing something that I believe to be worthwhile. This is what it means to be a whole human being, to live with this dilemma. And this is one of the things that organization effectiveness requires that we attend to the human beings who staff these organizations to their complex dilemma and to their human relating attitudes and abilities. With that introduction, our speakers are going to bring to the table some ways of looking at the development of managers. The first presenter is going to be Jack Fowler. Now, Jack, amongst many other things, was something that, as far as I know, he's the only person in this room of whom this is true. He, once upon a time, was a shop steward. So he has some experiences around life and about what it means to be in the workplace that some of the rest of us don't have for many other OD organizations is that the people who come to these meetings actually care about concepts and theory and agree with Kurt Lloyd that there's nothing quite so practical as a good theory. Jack, thank you very much.

Speaker A Well, the test will be whether it's a good sphere and I'm grateful for the opportunity. I'm going to talk about some stuff which I've been thinking about for a while. I started in this journey probably in the early 90s. You get this now.

Speaker D Thank you, sir.

Speaker A One day, it was in 1997 I had just spent time with Pete Collette and some of his colleagues in South Africa. I was sitting in the foyer of the Courtyard Hotel in Rosebank in Johannesburg, and a light bulb went off and was inside my head and it kind of blinded me for a while. Took me a wee while to see what it was that the light bulb was showing me. And that night it should have been our silver wedding anniversary. Isabel and I spent half the night drawing diagrams and writing things up to see whether I understood what I thought I did. And what it's about is the notion of attractive patterns which appear right through all living systems. And I'm going to talk about that. And that's the reason why this stuff is called attractive leadership. It's not because short, fat Scots people think that. They know that there are qualifications for abilities to claim that. So let me just talk about attractors very quickly and I'll try and rush through this. There are basically four attractor types that appear in the natural sciences and physics and so on. And the first one is called a point attractor. And basically what that's about is that there are processes going on which all revolve around a point. You think of a giant pendulum. No matter how far out you push it, it always takes the same length of time actually to do that and it always comes back to rest over the point. The attractor is the gravity underneath it and things come to a point. And essentially, I'm going to argue that we can think of that as a very good, at least metaphor, although I think it's more than that for level one work. The next one is called a limit cycle. And a limit cycle is an aggregation of point tractors which have got bounded conditions under which they can actually exist. Okay? So let's just draw a bit like that, which is how the kind of hieroglyph that is generally used. And inside this would be points. And these points could all exist as long as they don't go outside the bounded condition. And I'm going to argue or hypothesize, this is a very good way of thinking about what level two work is. Level two work, if you think about it in terms of, say, management, counter, you're allowed to do your accountancy as long as it's within these bounded conditions. We have rules, we have regulations, we have conditions which we apply similarly for engineering, for all the disciplines. We have conditions. If you're a manager who has a significant process to run, then you allow many degrees of freedom and discretion within that, but it's bounded and you don't go outside that condition or you're not actually still in the club, still in the team. The next one, the third level is called a taurus. Now, the taurus level was starting to move into much higher levels of sophistication in terms of the modeling, and I'm going to draw something here which might look to you like two circles, but it's actually meant to be three dimensional. And within that are contained each of the limit cycles that form this system. Because my drawing is not very good and I decided that it'd be easier for you if I showed you a real taurus. Taurus is just a Greek word for a ring. Okay? So this is taurus. Now I'm drawing this thing two dimensionally inside this, actually, in reality, as well as in my little metaphor here, there's loads of energy transactions going on. There are energy state changes going on all the time. They're all going on inside the ring. None of them are, very few of them are actually escaping from the ring. They're in there and they're contained within there and they relate to one another in there. And if this is an immaculately shaped bagel that's perfectly round and very elegant, then people are really pleased with it. If it's kind of like that and a bit messy and maybe even a bit twisted, et cetera, when people really don't like that quite so much. And the constant effort when you're managing a system like this, and guess what level I'm going to say this is three constant effort is to try and reduce the transactional energy losses in each one of your limit cycles. So you're trying to get your limit cycle to move from being a fuzzy mess to being something that's more like that. And actually, if you do total quality management and if you do lots of other things, you're actually trying to tighten it down. And if you're doing six sigma, you're actually trying to say, well, it's a really narrow range, that's appropriate for that to be there. So you then have that condition in here and you're trying to reduce the dissipated energy losses, the transactional costs of running the system, so that basically you got a neat system at the limit cycle, which then hands over to the next part of the process, something like that. And if you can get that really unique and have a very, very elegant system, then basically you practice it. It costs very little to run organizations or to run systems that are doing that, and this requires, of course, a lot of energy. But here's a problem, when you got in the natural world, this thing here that's been going along for a long time and the environmental conditions change, the world of Bagels is threatened, something needs to happen, there needs to be adaptation, there needs to be change, and somehow that needs to happen in the scientific world. It happens because of what we call chaos and bifurcate. There's loads of words in here which you can throw around, but essentially it's about the fact that some of this flips off transmutates, transmogrifies into something different, and then there is a set of rules that you can take from Epigenetics which will then tell you which of these are likely to survive. Let's say you're running an organization. Sorry. And I'll just draw for you what that kind of looks like, and you'll probably recognize something like this. You know, the butterfly effect. All familiar with that sort of concept. Well, it's very elegant when you see it in the book, and it looks like that, but actually, it can be like that's. The same thing at this fourth level. But the interesting thing is that it all actually eventually settles into a pattern, it's a curious thing, light does settle into a pattern that might be a very, very convoluted, very messy pattern, but it does actually settle into pattern, and this thing here is usually called the Lorentz attractor or the Strange attractor. So there I was sitting in the courtyard hotel, recognizing I'll write it up here, L-O-R-E-N-T-Z. So there I was, sitting in the courtyard hotel, thinking about this and realizing that one of the things that human beings can do, which is not possible in the rest of the living world, is we can induce mentally fractals, we can imagine fractals. They don't have to be presented to us. We can actually develop them. We can recursively generate new iterations of realities that we see before us. So if there's an IP system that we know about, we can say, hey, that IP system could be different, and it's not a real IP system, and we might not even understand IP or Codification or anything. You can say it could be like that, it could be something different and we can imagine it, and it could be one of these. This is an imaginary bagel, this is a real bagel. This bagel is going to die, because you know what? The customers have said that three years from now, five years from now, their requirements are going to change, the environment is going to shift. So we start thinking, what could the new bagel be? And it may be that we don't even know it's going to be a bagel. We have no idea what this new thing is going to be. But eventually, we have to conceive it and then start to develop it and energize it, put shape and form on it and reduce the uncertainties until we're confident that we can actually start to move into something. And eventually, if this was a very elegant Lorentz attractor, it would look something like that, there'd be very little fuzziness in it. And of course, that's what we do at organizations. We get McKinsey's in, we get somebody in, we say, we've got these fuzzy thoughts, help us shape it up, and people refine down and refine down. They help us develop the arguments, they test hypothesis, we work with people, we talk to folk in other companies, we do whatever it is we can do to reduce the uncertainties. But you know what? You can never predict whether it will work. So we take a bet on whether it will work just like you do in any other living system. And eventually, what we're trying to do, basically, and now the bagels are inedible, is we're trying to do something like that, where we approximately bring this new imagined world closer and closer into here until actually it replaces it when you improved system. And my hypothesis is that this is actually a very interesting way to think of that. How organizations emerge at level four, that when people start to have the capacity to conceive this stuff, to play with the ideas in their head. Now, I call this the teddy bear space because Winniecott says a teddy bear is a transitional object, and Winniecot was a pediatric psychologist in London. So a transitional object is something where you project onto it fears, hopes, aspirations, rehearsals of potential futures, et cetera. Your strategic plan is a typical transitional object. It's not real, it's just a teddy bear, right? So you try and create these sorts of things, and then because we've got this fractaling capability, we can mentally create fractals. We can reimage something at a higher level of what we in this group would call abstraction. We can revisit this first level. We can actually get round to saying, so that this first level up. Here the point, actually, let's be a fractal of the point. But in an organizational sense, we don't say, what's the point of your job? We're saying now, what's the point of your organization? What's the point of your organization? Now, that's the classic purpose statement that kicks in at level five for real, becomes very significant for that level. So that's the thing. Now, how do I come to have the view that there could be a point at that level when certainly in physics and biology, nobody says that there is that sort of thing. Because what I imagined in that little sort of foyer was that Anne Stevens is HR Director in the minimum condition. Comes up and says to me as CEO, Jack, you know what, we're doing great stuff here in Executive development, but what we did in the past, the old bagel isn't what's going to help us in the future. I've got this new agenda, a new scenario, and I need you, CEO, to help me give discretionary, energy, resources, time, feedback, conditions, support, desire, passion, to help me get through this transitional phase here. There's going to be a nasty space in there when people are going to lose jobs, strange people are going to get promoted, we're going to have to spend money. We're going to have to tour Canada, whatever. Sorry, Anne. So fresh in my mind, just as Anne's leaving the door, john comes in and says, hey, I'm a company theologian. We have an ethics set like that just now, and that's been okay. But you know what? Global warning, sustainability agenda, political shifts, immigration, terrorism, fundamentalism. I've got a story to tell you that says that we're going to need a new bagel. The old bagel doesn't work or it won't work in the future. So you're going to have to give me some resources, Jack, to help me get through this process here. And by the way, this is going to be really messy and painful for all of us. Do you understand that, Jack?

Speaker E And I say yes.

Speaker A I do. I can see that. And just as John's leaving the door, paul McDowell comes in and says, I'm the It guy here. Any idea how bad our systems are going to be once all this stuff starts to change? So we have a number of these things going on, and every one of them sees it's. A clear agenda and an imagined future. My job as the CEO, essentially, is to weave these things together. To weave these together. And this is the organizational point. This in here, the new future organization, which is going to take five to seven to ten to however many years to create, where we do actually migrate all of these things together into an integrated piece, that's going to be the organizational point. And I can go and show you this. Once you have many of these, let's call these a business unit, whatever. Once you have business units like that, what will the next one be? There's a fractal of that one called Organizational Point. Next one's going to be the organizational limit cycle. And this is where Joe's got six of these to manage. I'm one of them. But he's got me saying, hey, I've got all this messiness and fuzziness going on in my organization, and I'm trying to get that right. But he's got another one doing that there and then there's the Argentinian operation, there's the Brazilian operation, all doing that. But is it bounded by what is the nature of our organization? What are the limits to what we stand for, our ethical position, our belief piece, how it is the time?

Speaker D You got about four minutes.

Speaker A About four minutes. Okay, in that case I'll stop.

Speaker D Yes.

Speaker A Let me quickly move to something that I was introduced as a consultant. I actually spend less than 5% of my time in consultancy. I'm involved in directing a couple of companies and so on. And I spend a fair bit of my time talking to academic groups and working in the nonprofit sector. This is one of the things that my daughter developed for me. I'm ashamed to say that you're the first audience I've ever seen this. And we did it in 2005. One of the reasons I'm doing it is because Paul McDowell shamed me into doing it. And Chris Steele, I think, and Mark are the only other people who know who ever served this before. Chris from her kitchen and Marcus from a very dark nightclub in London. So this notion that there should be more balls in here bouncing around. But the idea that the second level is you're just containing the different things. If this is a task or a job or whatever, or a mini process, whatever, then this is about how you hold these things together at the third level. And this isn't a very good representation of a taurus, but it's to give you a clue about what we're trying to do in terms of the transactions in the system, that there's a bundle of these level two limit cycles. And we're trying to get the handover from my level two thing to John's level two thing to be neatly like that with minimal transactional losses in the system. And he works on his process, hands it over to next one and he within his little part is minimizing the clutter, is fixing the thing, is addressing the issues that he has and so on. And somebody at level three is actually encouraging us all to make that happen effectively. Well, I can quickly skip through this because in a sense the graphic shows level four. We're doing this and eventually one of these ones from this side leaks into the other side and you get this tension. The wonderful things about level four work and why nearly everybody gets rid of the level fours in a merger or acquisition is because level fours don't actually look like they're adding value in the short term and they shouldn't be. But the main thing that they're doing actually is holding the present anxiety while developing the future. And nobody gives them credit for containing the anxiety that we currently have while we play with the future. The marketing director who maintains an excellent marketing operation while thinking about how to change that in the future is the true level four value added. We don't see that often. I've bought companies and sold companies. I've involved in mergers and acquisitions. It's so easy to walk in and see that and have it disaffect or be destroyed. Hopefully all these things are still doing what they did at level one, but they're now doing it within a more complex environment. And of course, if we just move up to level seven, what's level seven going to look like? It's going to be in a bagel light because it says taurus up there. But what's in here is the cluster of organizations because each one of these is now a strategic business unit or a country operation or whatever held within some group process, all held together in a corporate hole that may be a regulatory hole. And I'm speaking with a W here in case those of you are defeated by my accent, who I know there are regulatory holes that we can all stumble down that difference to that. But that's the kind of way that I think of these things and that's the way I'm modular. Now, you'll notice that although I have actually suggested that this relates to Elliot's.

Speaker D Work, there's no reason why it should, it just does.

Speaker A And I actually came at it, although I'd always been familiar with Elliot's work, I came at this entirely independently of Elliot's thinking about levels. And it's just wonderful that it actually maps straight across. And I mean, it may be hocus pocus and smoke mirrors or it may be a reason for us to have some confidence that Elliot, in what he observed, empirically observed and described, was actually right. So let me quickly flash through this and this stuff will essentially what I'm going to do here show you the trackers going along here. And I'm going to suggest a name for the leadership type up here and some of the consequences of that. I'm sorry, it's going to take another couple of minutes, john, is that okay? First level? Formational. Why formational? Because of the French word, formattion has always interested me. I used to sit in International Gas Union training Committee for the World and it was just interesting that the French had a different notion that the word just seemed to capture something for me about what you're doing at Level one. If you're a leader at level One, you're helping form the people, apprenticing them, developing them and shaping them in a way that other things, like supervising and stuff, just don't say. Looking over somebody is not the same as forming them. So formatium seems to me to be the right word. And also, as it happens, it's handy in terms of these fractals and recursions. Second level, you're essentially telling people the limits. And I call that transmissional. It's not a good word, it's not a good word. But basically it's about telling people what we're trying to achieve, why you have to behave this way and why you're not allowed to. Behave that way. The one thing I did that I really disagree with Mackenzie on is that culture is the way we do things around here. Culture is the way we do things around here and the way we don't do things around here. So this is about that, transmitting those.

Speaker E Types of values and so on.

Speaker A At the third level, you've already heard me talk about transactional costs a lot. Transactional leadership is what we need in level three. Now I know that word is used, that transformational. And I actually think that this is a better way to think about those concepts. But what's missing in the transformational transactional debate? And in the UK, by the way, that goes transactional bad, transformational good. That's kind of the way that that discussion goes in the HR world. And of course, that seems to me.

Speaker F To be a nonsense.

Speaker A Transformational is the recursion or the quintave in Elliot's language, a fractal of the first level? What's the point of the organization rather than what's the point of the job? The 6th level, you're transmitting values and purpose and so on, but you're doing it at a transcultural level. For me, the essence of level sixness is diverse culture. You can't lift and lay from this culture to that culture to that culture. It's not level six if it's all six business units doing roughly the same thing. That's just lots of level five stuff together because it's convenient financially. There may be some cost savings. It doesn't make it harder work.

Speaker B If I don't interrupt you.

Speaker A Well, this will be on the web anyway. Okay. There are values that flow up there and thank you for your time.

Speaker B Affirmations. Jack, say anything you say amen to.

Speaker A What are they?

Speaker D I think the conceptual structure that has.

Speaker B Come up with here clicks for me.

Speaker D And helps me understand things that I've seen before, things that I'm dealing with today, and would enable me to approach them with a greater level of clarity.

Speaker A From the beginning.

Speaker G Your level eight connects with, for me, with Hillary Lawson's concept of openness. And.

Speaker E Well, there's a recursiveness in here that makes me see the connection with Stafford Beers.

Speaker A Yes, absolutely.

Speaker B I'm sorry, did you say that louder?

Speaker E The recursiveness in this shows the connection with Stafford Beers viable system modeling much clearer than I've had in my book.

Speaker A And for those of you who don't understand the clinic, remember that Stafford Beers and Elliot were together at Brunelli University.

Speaker B Challenges, things you heard Jack say, that you say, wait a minute, any challenges, things you're not clear about was a bagel.

Speaker A But anyway.

Speaker B It'S just a whole other way. It's not like here's this point I'm.

Speaker D Unclear about, but it's a whole new framework of thinking.

Speaker B So I need to spend time I'm.

Speaker A Trying to think, what the hell am.

Speaker B I going to say in a summary about okay, thanks.

Speaker E This 360 degree inventory that I started developing, why the heck did I do this? I had a colleague that was using a 360 degree inventory. He wasn't satisfied with it. He felt that it didn't was nothing.

Speaker A That held it together.

Speaker E There was no theory, it was just somebody bubbled through something. So he kept nagging at me that I should do something about it. But I was a bit reluctant. And I think one of the reasons that was reluctant was that I read some of that Elliot, that said that, well, 360 degree instruments are evil because it's the manager who is responsible for giving the feedback. I thought about that, well, the manager of the manager is the one who is held accountable for that feedback. That was my decision. And then we can start making some sort of instrument around this. And then I sat, well, why should I reinvent the wheel? There's such a lot of them. So I got hold of about six or seven fairly commonly available instruments, some Swedish, some North American looked at them and I thought, well, they're very different, aren't they? If I were to do something in this, would it be organized somehow? So I took a large sheet of paper, split it up into eight squares, put some labels on them and thought, well, if I was going to do something that was sort of more requisite, like, what topics would I have in it? And I started pasting bits and pieces up. Then I realized that several things which I considered most important, they weren't there at all. And that was one conclusion. And the second conclusion was that each of these instruments that I looked at, they tend to be clustered in some parts. And while I was doing this and I started out with eight, but I had to add two OD bins below my paperwork. And there was a lot of things there that didn't really fit into the theory that ended up down there. That was the background. So what was my purpose? A good idea really, that if you're going to have a 360 degree instrument, it should really be based on some sort of sound theory. Well, sound from my point of view, and as some of you already know, I work in Sweden, and in Sweden this is just another theory sort of thing. But requisite it's very difficult to start explaining all of it. So thought, well, this might be some way of getting a foot into the door and sneaking theory onto people and then maybe sort of expanding on that once you start getting the hold of that, well, this is very interesting. Tell us more about the theory. Now then, what did I base this on? Because obviously, at least obviously to me, was that creating an instrument like this could not replace the CIP, or CIP would not say anything about dissipate level, it would have to be general, fit into any sort of level, and an appreciation of how does a person do that work on this oral level. So what was my inspiration? Well, my inspiration was this picture. I think it's both Elliot and bias material that anybody at any level needs to understand the context that they're in. By the way, you'll be getting a hand out of this. So you don't need to make notes copiously. You have to do your own work and you have to explain the context of others. Well, Sweden started out very bias oriented, so I've been very much introduced to the trifle of leadership by my colleagues. So this has influenced me very much. And also some years ago I had a visit to the States, had a session with Elliot, and we had a very interesting discussion about context setting and what he called information chunking. I don't know if you've encountered that about the information chunking was an important revelation for me, made me think about I don't know what. Warren Kinston has got some very interesting thoughts about Monads, how several lakes at Strata are involved in doing a job, changing something and so on. And one of my colleagues had a copy of a copy of a material developed at Shell in Canada, Michael Fryer, which was a highly structured way of analyzing the work of people. So that's in my background. And then I started. Well, what are the main feedback areas? Well, a 360 degree instrument. Usually there's a self assessment. What do my subordinates say about me? What do my colleagues say about me? And what does my boss say about me? So we gather all the opinions about this. How does this guy or doll understand the big picture? Do they see the context in which they work? So as a subordinate, do I feel that my manager understands a large consequence of the company? Does the manager do his or her own work, that is, defining the unit, et cetera? Does the manager explain give a context to their people, the people in this term? Does the manager allow discretion? Just give the framework people allow them to go ahead. Within that, can you create relations to individuals, build groups, build trust and team? Very much inspired by the Mona thinking. And we're thinking about what to do with this taurus. No matter what level you are, you always have to work with change. No wonder of the most important works of first line manager is really working with change, but at the same time creating stability for their staff. So how do they initiate and drive and evaluate change? How do they work with interpersonal relation that it has conflict, handling of differences and so on. And then there's two additional groups where there's some things about thinking about the CIP triangle, which I saw for the first time today, the other day, thinking about this, about values, what do you have the drive and will to do things and taking decisions to build trust. And the final group there we find things about writing clear documents but I think a very important thing for most managers that they have to be very clear in writing document careful about how to use the manual. So there's a number of points like that as well. So those are the main areas and how does we work with this? Practically there's a web based interface at the moment I haven't had the time or resources really to build it up properly. I've used one of the commercial available sites or surveys. So what I do there's four links that are sent out to those involved depending on what direction they're applying in. They do this and I take the date out and I push it into a FileMaker database and create the reports. Now, reports are an interesting thing in the sense that I've realized that people, different consultants and different people have ease to understand different types of graphs. What I'm doing really with this is well, I haven't done it myself. My idea is really to make this available for other consultants. So it has to be consultants have to be understand it, those that use it have to understand it. Then the report complete report is 13 pages. First page is a radar diagram, diagram with different colors depending on which group it is. Now, the guy who asked me to develop this, he doesn't understand that type of diagram at all. So it's followed by two more pages for each of the ten groups with the data for what your self assessment, what does your manager say, what your colleagues say and what is your support.

Speaker A Here I want to make one point.

Speaker E As well is that there's two versions of the reports. One version there the manager's manager is included with the managerial colleagues, that is what is usually discussed at some sort of team meeting. And then the manager's manager gets the reports with his or her own data about the support and manager and takes that at the personal meeting because that's where the moment when the manager's manager is accountable for the conversation and the text of it. I think it's absolutely wrong to.

Speaker B Can.

Speaker E We ever face losing situation if you're in a meeting with your colleague and that you get the truth about what your manager thinks about it can be an absolute disaster. There has to be settled in context and also the manager's manager has to be able to interpret the data. As I say, your support and it's disappointing about you, I beg to differ because I think you're doing a good job and I think you're doing the right sort of thing but you maybe have to think about how you could communicate. That's why it's important you've got the ten areas and then for each area you've got one page. There's five questions in each page to get the span. What's the minimum, what's the maximum and what's the average for subordinates colleagues? And just adopt for yourself and your manager. This is still in the fairly early prototype stage. We have my colleague Michael Brander, who is here as well, but not in this room, has been working for about a year with the Nordic, part of a European travel company. So in the Nordic Council they've got about 1500 employees and subsidiaries in four countries and ranges, all aeroplanes destinations and so forth. And so far they've worked with the management team for the Nordic operations and it management teams and then they're continuing with all the rest here. I say they're satisfied with what Michael says is that Michael is very fond of Kakabatz's theories or opinions about that saying that a management team where you've got an openness and everybody sees the big picture, that management team creates better results. And Michael's opinion is that well, this instrument creates a discussion about the right sort of things. It focuses and the managing director of the Nordic operation was also very satisfied because he also felt that you got a discussion about what he thought was the right sort of things. And early, late this spring they needed to have a sort of talent pool discussion. Not a requisite organization talent pool discussion, but a two day retreat. When they talked through everybody in the mutual recognition unit and this sort of set the topics which were to be discussed with he was so satisfied because he felt that they talked about the right sort of things some practicalities as it is right now. There's a web based Interforce. I have to create the reports manually but I'm going to be moving next year sometime probably to something where everything is administered by the web. On the web there's no certification. My personal opinion about certifications is that the one who decides if a consultant is good or not is the customer. And I've met so many consultants, I've certified in so many things that are absolutely lousy consultants. I don't want to take part in that sort of game. My presence is in English and Swedish. Next week you'll be able to Finnish and later on in English and Norwegian as well. Hear about the pricing, 1000 crore per person and there's a minimum price.

Speaker A I'm really keen that the wider community around Ro doesn't become fixated with avoiding the human part. And certainly from my bias space, things like tasking, trusting, intending and all that stuff seem to be absolutely critical to make this stuff humanized and not just seem like a systematic mechanistic thing visited upon poor unsuspecting employees because that's how many people perceive it from the outside. And if we can come in through doors like you said, which are about people who are concerned about deeply human issues but they then get in a very intelligent, well synthesized way of doing that and I think that's really.

Speaker B Challenges.

Speaker F How about, you know, the 360 degrees survey? Many times you don't know who is saying what so about your peers and your subordinates. You cannot find further answers after the 360 analysis or survey so many times I think that it should raise some paranoid feelings in the person who has been observed in 360 exercise. They say for example you are rough and why am I rough? And I have no answers about that because I cannot track who said that. So I have had 360 exercises during my career and sometimes they are.

Speaker B You.

Speaker F Feel helpless because they are saying things that you cannot understand why they are said.

Speaker E I agree completely with you there. I think it has to be used with the sensibility. I've seen organizations from the outside where my wife has worked and other people where there's been an organization that hasn't been healthy and they've carried out some sort of survey like a 360 degree and people have manipulated it to try to get rid of a manager that they don't like and that's shocking. So that's where I have my doubts about this sort of thing. One has to be very careful about when one uses and what to negative. If there's a large T in an organization it should not be used because there'll be manual things that I consult.

Speaker B So one of the difficulties with the technology that we use whatever technology we use the gap that occurs when feedback is anonymous or unidentifiable in part you know and I know that who says something makes a great deal of difference as to what the meaning of what was said. I used to travel a lot. And I would go places like this where I would get a lot of food and I would come home, and my youngest daughter always would run up and I pick her up and hold her in my arms and we'd squeeze each other and she'd say, My fat daddy. And I loved it. But later that night if I walked into the bedroom and started getting undressed my wife would say put on a few pounds while you were away, didn't you? Very different meaning who says it is critical and I think that we need.

Speaker A To look at the technology two hands.

Speaker H Up with rejective mine's a question that.

Speaker G May be a challenge. You said there's no certification but I was wondering in terms of the people who give the feedback is there training? Because in terms of the people who give the feedback do you have training or can just anybody take the report and feed it back? Because I have a concern about how people interpret and feedback. An instrument also makes a lot of difference of how it's used and how the person receiving it perceives it.

Speaker E The receiving person?

Speaker G No, the person giving the feedback. So it's a web based instrument. Just anybody, any consultant so they get a training on how they feed back.

Speaker E To the person receiving it office yeah.

Speaker G My question wasn't a question actually it was an observation. Was going to pick up on what had been said before about 360s, it helps not to have heard the presentation because you will find government people at senior levels are never inhibited by lack of knowledge. So having no idea exactly what went on. Let me say, though, the 360 issue is a very real issue. But what worked for me and worked in a lot of different places, I have to say, is translating that stuff by getting the people who gave feedback or a sample of them into the room with me and saying, what shall I start doing? What should I stop doing? What should I keep doing? And they have a conversation. And I don't know who said what, who gave me feedback, but if, for example, being rough with people is a really big deal, what I do is get the stuff collected. I've never had more than 1215 direct reports. You can get a sample of the others and then you have a conversation and they can give you each of them can have a different my stop list may be ten, my start list may be ten, my keep list may be ten. And I say, well, all right, I can't do ten. I can undertake to stop one or two. I can undertake to start one. I can undertake to try and keep all the ones that there's a keep. So if we're going to do one stop, which 01:00 a.m. I going to do, and then have a conversation and then I find out whether being rough with people, if that's it is a common thing and I can undertake or not undertake as the manager to do it or not do it, and then I can say, all right, we're going to grieve this. How are you going to help me? Because I got to change behavior and I can't change behavior without having now you don't have to help me individually. Now, I have no idea whether that helps or harms, but I think I'm.

Speaker B Hearing you say that an add on to the technology is to have actual human beings in the room to answer the question, once you've got feedback, so what? And having a conversation with those people makes that so what conversation much more meaningful. I have a hand here, another hand there and a hand here. So if we could get those three and then take a break here's the fourth. All right, let's start way over here.

Speaker C I'm in a conflict conflict. Why would the manager need the instruments.

Speaker A To get feedback in terms of practicing the organization?

Speaker C Just a challenge.

Speaker B Got it. Why do we need actually, let's pick one here.

Speaker F Yeah, well, my question is close to that.

Speaker A How does this fit or not fit with the Ro theory?

Speaker F And that's one of the question. What's the quality of communication in a trust inducing organization? That's one. Well, there's another point. There's feedback from direct manager to subordinate, which is strictly related to doing the work. And that's unique in respect to all the rest of possible feedback channels.

Speaker A Okay, super.

Speaker H I would like to make an affirmation specifically with 360 Tool and find it's a tool. But it has huge capacity when you integrate it, like Lucy mentioned, because what we're doing in Bell, Canada, is we're using it for development. We're integrating the conversations to look at managers and look at leaders. How can we increase their awareness? Because what we're trying to do is achieve behavioral change. So we need to ensure that they have a level of awareness. And we believe that having the aggregated information sometimes helps, but we have to facilitate those discussions. And we're really focusing on, if I have a strength as a manager, how can I maximize that strength? So it's not used as I have all these fatal flaws, what am I going to do? And it's a mechanism to get rid of me, but how can I go to the next level or as a leader, how can I bring about some level of self awareness so I can be motivated to make that change? So it's really what we try to do is introduce it at different stages. And it's not so much just about getting because we're really fundamentally stressing. It's not about just achieving the results, but how we get there and the behaviors. So giving people a level of awareness about their behaviors, those are very supportive.

Speaker D John, one of the things that struck me as this discussion was going on, really starting from the beginning of the gentleman right behind the last speaker, was the whole question of creating a context. 360 is a tool. 360 is predominantly, I hate to say it because I am one an HR tool, and we can impose it in an organization. I've seen and used 361 of the worst possible outcomes, for example, is when a manager is accused of being rough in a context of a business turnaround. And I ask myself, how do you make the omelet without breaking the egg? And haven't we created a context in which this person is actually accountable to some degree for making change which inevitably will be perceived as rough by some of the people subjected to it? So I think it's a wonderful tool used developmentally, and I think the great benefit here is putting the Ro compact on it, using it a more systemic way in the aggregate.

Speaker B We're going to continue this conversation.

Speaker C Permit at home, send it home.

Speaker B At best.

Speaker C I think Ro people tend to intellectualize temperament. They rationalize it, and they refuse to sort of admit that it can be as much of a factor in getting requisite to go anywhere as IPC. And I think we do Elliot's concepts of disservice, and Elliot and I talked about this, which led to his advice, well, do the temperamental stuff as requisitely as you can.

Speaker B Could you define temperament, please?

Speaker C I would go even further. Let me sketch the framework. I would go even further. And say that IPC and temperament are absolutely fundamental in terms of really understanding what goes on in organizations. If you're not willing to address the temperament piece and acknowledge that it's in the House, then what we hear is this constant complaint at these conferences, well, these ideas are great, but I can't sell them. I can't get CEOs to buy them. Typically, when CEOs call me, they don't call about an Ro problem, a structural problem, or an IPC problem. They call about temperament, all of these kinds of issues. And I can't sort of say, well, your problem is structural. As someone said yesterday, I have to go where they are. And usually where a lot of them are is at temperament. So I have to go in in a credible way and address temperament and lead them to an understanding of how temperament and IPC and values and skill, knowledge and experience relate to each other, but also a clear understanding. That if you get the IPC and the structure stuff right and you pretend the temperament stuff will just walk over the place, you're doing yourself a disservice.

Speaker A Ken, could you just remind us for IPC stuff?

Speaker C Sorry. Information processing capacity. Elliot's old phrase for that was cognitive capacity. In his last book, he changed it to IPC.

Speaker A No.

Speaker G The last one was complexity of information processing.

Speaker C CIP. CIP. Sorry. I'm dyslexic if you listen to some of the comments the CEOs made yesterday, they talked about what I learned was the need to make the hard calls earlier. Knowing the guy in the corner office and having confidence in him, being comfortable with my style and being able to be myself, having more courage, understanding that the change dynamics and the defensiveness that arise out of role changes and the introduction of accountability takes longer. It's harder, and it's a much bigger deal than most of us understand going into it. I got fired or retired due to the threat that I posed or due to the chemistry and temperament issues between myself and someone else who had a very significant impact on my capacity to be the CEO. I distrust one source of information. In fact, I distrust getting information only from my direct reports. People relate differently to me when I'm in the corner office. Only 15% of CEOs get it, would do it, would stick with it, and aren't fad surfing. Well, I hear a whole lot of temperament in there, and I think to ignore some of that does us a disservice. So when we think about temperament, I think we're thinking about a vertical and a horizontal continuum on the vertical. And I'm absolutely with John on this. To pretend that there aren't some bad people out there is to ignore 20th century history and most human history and to pretend that they only show up running places like Germany and Japan and Iraq and little organizations like that, and they never show up inside your companies. To me, is lead. There's a whole lot of folks that will lie to you, will tell you I didn't do it, are sincere, can sell unethical concepts and practices to organizations, and have no guilt complex about it. If you disbelieve that, I recommend a few hours with any major legal firm in this country, and they will assure you that there's a huge amount of psychopathology out there in organizations. The lawyers don't label it that way, but I can tell you it represents a huge amount of human energy out in our organizations and societies. And there's also some very dysfunctional behavior. We shouldn't forget that one in ten people in our society is actively chemically dependent. We shouldn't forget that one in five people in the society have grown up with those people. So there's a whole lot of behavior out there that can be very disruptive and dysfunctional. If you don't believe that, you might want to have a look at this just out on the Enron disaster. Now, the problem with this stuff is pretending it's not there. Or the notion that you say to.

Speaker A People.

Speaker C Just keep it at home or send it home assumes some things. You're assuming, first of all, that people are aware of their behavior. 360 would suggest that's a big assumption. Two, you're assuming that I'm actually willing to leave it at home. In these categories, people look for countries and organizations to use as vehicles for whatever their particular issue happens to be. Again, I refer you to the Enron book. It assumes that I'm able to leave it at home. It assumes that you have management that are actually willing to tell me there's something to be left at home. It assumes that management will even hold me accountable and discuss consequences of my behavior. And finally, it assumes that if I don't act or change, management will do something about it. In my experience in organizations, those are huge assumptions. We're assuming that management is self aware. We're assuming that management can give feedback. We're assuming that management can confront in an assertive and appropriate way. We're assuming that management can deal with conflict. And we're also assuming that when you have to say to a subordinate or somebody that you've hired that you don't fit or you're not working out, management can deal with what Harry Levinson called the guilt of acknowledging that I screwed up. It's not just you the subordinate, it's me. And I make a really great living with managers who don't want to admit that at the end of the day, they made the mistake. And so it's better not to fix it, because if you don't fix it, you didn't make it in the first place. Now, that's what I call minus T. You've got some temperament stuff which is dysfunctional, where the fit's wrong. The person is derailed for any number of different reasons it can be. You get a person who's an outstanding individual contributor in a management role. And they're failing. You get someone with exceptionally high information, whatever you call it up here, this stuff. But they can't deal with people. You get people who go through situations either at home or at work, a difficult boss, an illness, marital problems, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this has a big impact on temperament. My experience with this piece is it can go either way for you. It can end up over in that column or with the appropriate attention and intervention, it can go over here, where it becomes potentially a plus. T. You've got some coaching opportunities, style issues, the work on Typology. I think Nancy and I found that there's a strong unscientific correlation between people who score very high in what Jung calls the sensory dimension and the levels one and two and the lower three work, and people who score very high in the more conceptual side, like intuitive, who are more comfortable in the levels five and six and above. And if you don't understand how to balance information processing style, the aptitude, all of these things to help coach somebody to get in the right place where they can succeed, then what they can do is end up heading this way. If you pay attention to this, they can either develop some compensatory behaviors or they can get into a role that's a better fit for their particular temperament and succeed. And then you get some folks that, as Maslow said, are your peak performers, which in my view, is the marriage of information processing capacity and temperament. So you get someone who's got you listened to Bob yesterday. You listened to Joe, you listen to the CEOs. I lost your first name, forgive Ruth. You know, one of the things you could hear up on that platform is some very mentally healthy people, some people who forget the IPC. It was pretty obvious there was lots.

Speaker B Of that up there.

Speaker C But these are all people you'd probably say, look, I'd work for one of those people. Well, what do you see? You see self awareness. You see an openness to feedback. You see someone who can delegate the stuff they're not good at. Rather than blaming other people or rather than saying, hey, I don't have a problem.

Speaker B I'm at the top.

Speaker C And if I have a deficiency, it's not my problem. And the sensitivity to others, which John talked about earlier, to me, this is plus team. And if we don't pay attention to that whole continuum, my experience is we do ourselves a disservice in the interest of time. I'm just going to leave you herb that's the bucket. So this is the horizontal, there's the vertical, and it's a big bucket, but management is a big bucket. And if we're assuming that the higher you go in organizations, you should have more information processing capacity. Well, I think you should have the information processing capacity to understand something about human behavior, because it's not a simple bucket. And any one of those drivers, in my experience, are hugely predictive, and particularly, and I hope Joe gets a few minutes to address this IPC being equal, give me a management group where the roles are clear, the accountabilities are clear, they're at the right level, and minus T doesn't walk out the door. They're still not minus T, but T opportunities to get better don't necessarily disappear, in my experience. How does it connect with some of Elliot's pieces? First of all, the four criteria for fit, skill, knowledge, and experience. What are we calling it? CIP temperament. And do you value the role? I think Elliot frankly made a mistake, god rest his soul, and I love the man. He was like a second father to me. But to throw temperament off that list and leave it with three items misses the point. So I think we need all four of these. And what I do with managers is talk to them about the four and say, these are the four criteria you should think about to decide whether you're in the right role, and then sit down with your subordinates and ask them, based on those four, would you agree you're in the right role? And what I love about this is there's no secret about it. I do this all the time in my practice is sit down and explain the four criteria for fit and say, do you think you're in the right job? And people in most cases can say, you know what the problem is? I don't value it or it's over my head, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker F Excuse me, can you repeat the goal?

Speaker C Well, it's skill, knowledge, and experience, CIP, temperament, and valuing the work. So that's the first piece. When we get into 360, what we're about 25% of a management group overestimate.

Speaker B Themselves.

Speaker C That they think they're a cross between Mother Teresa and Jack Welsh, and they can do just about anything. And the feedback comes back and says, you'd be a better cross between Attila Hun and the folks at Worldcon. That's actual these are real. I don't do a lot of theory. All my stuff is some, okay, this is also overestimation where the person thinks they're terrific.

Speaker B Actually, let me back up.

Speaker C This is closer to a congruent profile, which would represent about 50% of a management group where basically how I see myself and how others view me is similar. It doesn't mean it's adaptive. If I think I'm an autocrat and you all agree, guess what? The good news is no one here is in denial. The question is, is being an autocrat going to get you what you want in terms of optimizing the organization? And you get 25% of a management.

Speaker G Team.

Speaker C Who just literally beat the hell out of themselves. Now, I'm not talking frontline people. I deal mainly with VP, president, CEO level folks, and there's 25% out there that are so tough on themselves, they underestimate how good they are. And the feedback comes back and says, look, you've got a lot more going for you if you stop second guessing yourself. Now, if 50% of the management population sees themselves the way they are, and 50% of them see something different, it represents an enormous opportunity in terms of tightening up some of those communication layers. So where Elliot's work becomes extremely informative is on 360. What some of that looks like is first of all, underemployment. We see 360 that comes back and says somebody sees themselves and or is viewed by others as restless, bored, cynical, a sniper, someone who doesn't suffer fools, someone who intimidates peers and management, someone who's abrasive, condescending, arrogant, disengaged, not result oriented. We see a lot of politics, power, trying to do other people's work. We see energy directed either positively outside the organization. I have a client whose part time hobbies being the mayor of his city, just a small little part time job, or running the United Way, or having an enormous hobby. We see also unused capacity being used very negatively. These are often the presidents of unions. I had one client where the president of the union was a guy that management told you'd never be a good manager. So he's now president of the union and beating the hell out of management overemployment. Second big area for Elliot. What we see on a temperament level is micromanagement perfectionism. I have to be right, it's got to be my way. A lot of conventionality just give me the rulebook, someone tell me what I'm supposed to do. Constant request for more resources, people and money. Lots of blame, either self or others. A tendency to be avoidant, frozen on the job or retired on the job. When we look at the four minimum levels of authority and as someone said yesterday, boy, organizations get real stiff around accountability, task assignments, selecting, reviewing, performance and removal. You start asking managers to do that stuff and you can see a whole lot of interesting temperamental behavior occurring around. I have to make these decisions. My judgment is binding. Here we start looking at high potentials, and what 360 often tells us is these people are hard to manage, often because of either exceptional temperament or exceptional CIP. They're thoroughbreds rather than plow horses, and they need to be understood, but they also need to understand their impact on the organization. And that impact is often temperamental as much as IPC. We see high professionals, people who get stuck in the management roles because that's where the money and the status are, who are not good managers. They're idea people. The geologist example from the other day, they're just fabulous new business development, creative people, problem solvers, SWAT team managers. They can't manage a department of people. We see a lot of interesting temperament around derailment people. To derail people are almost as interesting as watching what management does with them. And again, I'm assuming CIP being equal, give me a manager who knows somebody's derail. I sat down with the president of a $10 billion company whose products almost everyone in the room eats, and pleaded with him that he has somebody who is probably one of the brightest people in his organization, who just a can't manage and has a really abrasive style. And I said, give this guy a big project somewhere, stop letting him manage people. And he said, Ken, I agree with you, the guy's terrific. But if I give him this great big project, all the other managers are going to be jealous. And besides the fact that he's abrasive gives them a reason to continue to be jealous. And I said, well, if you give him something that's a real challenge, he might be less abrasive. I doubt it's going to go away, but at least give him something he can do and let the organization accept that. You have a culture of niceness here. Everyone is supposed to be nice to each other. And what happens is you can't deal with someone who's maybe not as nice, but happens to be brilliant. When we look at succession planning and talent pool in Elliott's World and start looking at the impact of temperament, first of all, I see a huge confusion between what are we measuring? And management always seems to struggle between differentiating CIP and temperament. And when they mix those two up, what they tend to do is misdiagnose. Now if we just take temperament off the table altogether and say, well, if it's a problem, send it home, otherwise it's none of anyone's business, guess what? You can seriously undermine a coherent discussion about potential. The group dynamics in succession planning is a whole lot more than information processing. It's got a lot to do with temperament. The halo effect candor people who are overly critical, people who get into groupthink. They will only select people like themselves in Gearing meetings. The whole issue around, if we agree that he can't do the work. And you've got six months, if he's ranked low on the Gearing chart, to get him to mid, which means he's performing, or get him down to the next level where he can be capable, or get him into a completely different role, or get him out of the organization and six months later, you show up at your next talent pool meeting and the person's still sitting in low. Don't tell me that's not about temperament transitions, people coming into new roles, people leaving anytime. I see this particularly with men, but you get a guy who's older, who's been in a very senior level role for a long time, and I see either incredible grace when they get to that point in their life. Where they say, you know what? It's time to give the keys to the car to somebody else, and I'm going to go and do some other things. And I see King Lear to beat the band. It's one or the other. And I'll tell you what, there's a lot more King Lear out there. No one can do it as well as I do. Subordinates who in talent pool discussions when the guy was under 60 were wonderful. All of a sudden, as he's looking at retirement and his own mortality, these people are washed out, they can't do anything. And there are huge issues around passing the baton in organizations that, in my view, have a whole lot to do with temperament, tiers, cross functional working relationships. And all of a sudden you want to get some clarity in those areas which, as people said yesterday, we're really talking about defining and sharing power. Well, you start getting on those circular graphs, we measure a need for power. Some people are very passive, they're not assertive, they won't confront, they're indirect. Some people can be appropriately assertive, they can say yes or no. And some people are going to take as much as they can get independent of CIP. So in tears, you've really got to pay attention as you start to implement that, just saying to somebody, well, you have monitoring authority or you have advising authority, you got to pay attention to. Did all of the people involved in that actually have the conversation? So many times they say, well, yeah, I told him how much authority he has. I talked to him, he doesn't have a clue. I talked to the person he's supposed to be talking to or working with. His manager hasn't said a thing. And the two managers who should have decided how much authority the task required aren't even on speaking terms. But there's not much temperament. Temperament in situations the CCL model, startups turnarounds, dealing with tough people, growing something, managing change, innovating. Those are stress situations which for some people are you stress. It brings out the best in them. And for other people they are very, very difficult. I have a lot of senior managers who are fabulous in a stable, consistent, predictable environment. And you throw them into an environment where there's change. And it's not that they don't understand their problem, but temperamentally, they just don't want to go there. I even have clients where the senior officer knows they're in over their head. They surround themselves with people who are more capable, so they actually have the right solution to the problem. But then they're terrified psychologically of the consequences of making change. They don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, that they don't want to upset the Apple car. And it's not that they don't have the CIP to understand their problem, but the temperamental stuff gets in the way. So in my view, if you work with the four criteria of fifth and talk to people and talk to management about how all of them are necessary, none of them are sufficient. And to minimize any one of them, I think is a huge mistake. And I think Requisite would have a much bigger audience. It would be much more credible and much more saleable if we stop pretending that the temperamental elephant has left the room. Thank you very much.

Speaker A Thank um.

Speaker C All right. That is speaker.

Speaker B Okay. Affirmations of what you heard.

Speaker F Well, I think this presentation by Ken brings up some very fundamental issues about what Ro theory is about. And Arrow theory is an extremely bold theory. It states that social systems have such a powerful influence upon people that they can bring out both the best and the worst. Does it deny the existence of evil? It does not. Does it say that evil can be brought down to completely manageable positions, that it is possible to be trusting organization?

Speaker D Yes, it does.

Speaker F Now, point is this true or is this wrong? And I don't want to advocate for this being true or wrong, but I think the point we should have in mind is what are the conditions for this question to be answered? Is it right or is it wrong? What arrow theory says. And I would say that Ken's presentation does contain an implicit answer, and the answer is no. The answer is this is wrong. Now, how do you know whether this is right or wrong? Because if Arrow theory is right, then this would not be necessary, as Jack said all the time. And how does this work? What we often find and I have found this all the time along the years, and I'm sure many of you have, too is that people attempt to invalidate our old theory through observations made under nonrequisite situations. And this happens all the time. Now, how does science work in progress? Someone has hypothesis, and the proof of that hypothesis maybe, perhaps takes rare and costly situations to prove. Now, the fact that this happens, of course, does not invalidate the hypothesis. I mean, if it's hard to prove, if it's unusual, well, that is still a scientific hypothesis. Now, how do we bring this into a field? We have to create requisite conditions and then observe and then prove Jackson's right or Jackson's wrong. Now, what often happens and I feel this how could I say this? Fields of practice of organization and human resources. There are many things that are, quote, good. Why are they good? Because they make disaster less disasters in that way.

Speaker D It is good.

Speaker F I mean, you have a sales force. Should you pay commissions on sales? Well, if you give up leadership entirely, then you're probably better off paying commissions than not paying commissions. You have to evaluate performance. Should you use this long list with factors and weights and so on, and end up with a number? Well, if you have bosses who cannot evaluate because the organization is simply wrong, then it's best to have those than not to have them at all.

Speaker A Wow.

Speaker F Two points. There's an implicit answer to this question. Second point how is this question answered?

Speaker B Thank you. There were a couple of hands over here.

Speaker E I think what you bring up is very important in the sense that most consultants assumes normality in the organizations that they go into and they're not trained to recognize the effects of dysfunctionality because the effect of what people are familiarizing is incredible.

Speaker D Really.

Speaker E You can't do anything normal until you address the dysfunctionality.

Speaker B Joe, you were going to say something? Yes, I would like to agree. Coming from the business side of it.

Speaker C Not the academic side, I think that minus T is probably one of the greatest of the four out there, not.

Speaker B The one to be cast aside. And I've got a lot of experiences.

Speaker C I've had direct reports, I've had my position, I've had peers. That minus T is a greater derailleur than valuing the role in skill, knowledge and CIP.

Speaker B Let's chat.

Speaker A I think I'm speaking here partly as somebody who's run companies and partly from a theoretical viewpoint. Chits and Mahali's work which Jerry and Stamp translated into the flow diagrams I think most of you will be familiar with them show pretty clearly that or suggest that's probably the best way to put it. That people who are under or over challenged in terms of their mental processing capacity or whatever label APQ 37 that you put on it, whatever label you put on that if they're overstretched, then they have to diminish the size of the role. In order to do that, they have to diminish everybody around them. How they achieve that? Maybe through issues of some of these dimensions of temperament. If they're under challenged they have to create enough complexity in order to make life worth living. How do they do that? How do you induce complexity in an organization? Well, a simple way is get political, makes life interesting, makes life fun, fills your need for stress. So there's a sense in there in which if we work using requisite theories and we're looking at people who are not in what the work here is flow reasonably well balanced in terms of challenge versus capacity, then yeah, you're going to see dysfunctional behaviors of all kinds all the time. It's quite extraordinary how quickly some of these people are healed by a job change and magical changes happen virtually overnight when they move into a different project. Like the one that Ken was saying give the guy the irrational guy a different project.

Speaker F I'm not going to talk again. Just a small we speak of minus T. As many of you may know that in his latest year Jax dropped minus T and he replaced it with RB which stands for Requires Behavior. So he made personality even less important than a person.

Speaker D But I think it was the King James version of Requisite that had wisdom in it.

Speaker A Steve Clements still sticks to that.

Speaker D So he has a fifth component I.

Speaker B Just want to throw out to the room. I postulate. Does RB absorb minus t and w.

Speaker A Because I think Elliot struggled with the.

Speaker D Fact that he had too few variables. And I'll just throw out to the room, does wisdom account?

Speaker E Should it?

Speaker D Or does it account for the other dimension we'd like to talk about?

Speaker F Tex told me once he dropped Wisdom because it confused people.

Speaker A If that's useful.

Speaker B We have an added benefit, and that Joe's joined us in this group today, and he comes at this question of developing managerial leadership and changing managerial behavior, not as a consultant, but as an accountable senior manager of a bunch of folks who are supposed to be carrying out all of this manager period. And Joe, you've agreed to say a few things.

Speaker D Experience I would like being an acquisition and a theorist and all that stuff is interesting. But all I had at the end of the day, something had to work. I just had to be able to apply it and get that stuff to work. There may be five, there may be three, there may be four. It really is what works for me. What can I do to help people, John? See themselves. Really see themselves and understand themselves, and then understand others, and then understand a bit how to interact. And as I started looking at requisite organization, I came to the conclusion fairly early that I had a lot of people who valued a role. They had the I call it IPC information processing capability, who had the IPC right. And they had certainly the knowledge, skills, and experience, and they still had mutual disrespect. They just weren't working as well together as I thought they should be working. So I did a 360 feedback on myself, and can you believe what those clowns that I have been working with told me? They said, we can't trust you. I said, Give me a break. If there's one thing I value as honesty, it's clarity. Tell me a time when you couldn't trust me. And Synergistics has an instrument called Synergistics level Three, which I think is sort of where a guy wakes up in the morning. The level one is who I think I bring to work, how I manage a guy that wakes up in the morning. And level two is the people get to tell you who really shows up at work. Well, this guy took me by the collar figuratively and said, let's look at this guy who wakes up in the morning and who comes to work. High people values, right? You really do have high people values. Yeah, I agree with that. You're a border. You'd rather run than fight. You don't like confrontation. It just doesn't seem useful. You'd rather not confront unless you have to. And a little high on the perfection scale, quite high standards. So he says, I'm working for you. I mess up. What do you do? Most likely no. You probably come to my office and you tell me for 30 minutes how great everything you can think about good to tell me about me? You tell me. And as you're slipping out the door, walking out the door, you may slip under the thing. Oh, by the way, you might think about now you're my boss. My selective listening is and your subsequent actions, are they consistent? No, not at all. So once I could get my brain around the real me that was playing out, my motives weren't what my guys thought they were. My motives were pretty good, as a matter of fact. But the dynamics of that, as it played out, were not as good as they could be. He said to me, it's a good thing, your reason to be right, because otherwise you'd ruin this company. And he was right. What I did is got him to undress me in front of my staff. And we talked about me. We talked a lot about me. I could give you examples. We talked a lot about some other people. But it gave all of us a permission to talk to each other and to ask each other to hold us accountable. I had a very brilliant CFO, son of a minister, just the greatest soul you've ever seen. You'd love a guy, sarcastic as could be, just absolutely put down, and he's off the scale in opposition. And he finally said, Guys, I don't mean it.

Speaker B Don't take it personal.

Speaker D He said, I've come to realize I cannot help the first thought that comes to my mind, no matter what you say. The first thought that comes to my mind is, you're wrong. He said, But I can do something about that thought that comes to my mind. And he would sometimes literally put his hand over his mouth in staff meetings just to keep from saying things. We began to understand him better. I'm a visionary. Time starts in the future. It's what could be and moves forward from that. Now, we made an edible product made from three most dangerous chemicals known to men. Hydrogen cyanide was the easiest to handle of the three raw materials made by that product. Now, before I understood any of this stuff, I had enough sense to hire an Admiral Rick overtrained submarine driver to run that plant. And he and I used to have mutual disrespect. I would say, don't you realize you can't keep doing the same thing over and over and over again? We do have a significant advantage over competition, but they're working hard, too. You've got to keep moving that plant forward. And he'd roll his eyes and said, don't you realize what would happen if.

Speaker A A cup full of that spilled?

Speaker D We'd wipe the city out. Don't you understand that? Well, guess what? When we took this who wakes up in the morning test. I am at the 80th percentile of visionaries, Joe and I. And I'm at about 30 in halfway to get there and about 30th percentile in the here and now. Guess where Joe is? 80th percentile here and now and 30 over here. Well, we were able to turn mutual disrespect into mutual respect. And by doing those kinds of things, by expanding the window, whether it's Manosy or whether it's wisdom or whatever, but by expanding the window and getting another window to look at the way we were interacting and to stop telling the bad stories. When you do something that I don't like, the first thing I'm apt to.

Speaker B Do is to tell the bad story.

Speaker D I have to go to your motive. I'm apt to assume what your motive is. So once I tell the bad story about you to me, then it's a lot harder for me to appreciate you and to work together with you. So that's the way this stuff played out for us. And even after getting the IPC and the values and the knowledge, skills and experience right, this took us to a next level. I made it a condition of employment that everyone came to work for us, had a conversation. You see, the answer to these tests are only marks on paper. But what you can do is use the results, the answers as a forum for talking about things. You're still your own CEO. So this test can say that you or whatever you're oppositional, you can say, I know that I've been dealing with it all my life. Do you have any better ideas of how I might manage me if the first thought that comes to my mind is negative? Or you can say, that's not me, it really isn't, I'll say, Ask your wife, she'll decide whether you're right or scores are right. Or you may say, I never thought of me quite that perfectionist. But now that you say that, I can see that about me, so I can manage me a little differently, more perfectly.

Speaker A Okay.

Speaker D But I just find it can take the effectiveness of a group of people to another level to take a look at that and to have an adult conversation, a respectful conversation about that. Now, I must confess I'm susceptible to these type of people. I don't live my life for crooks to protect myself against crooks. I live my life to deal with other people. So I start from the point of view that everybody's bad, and occasionally I'd get bit by these kind of people. I don't find this instrument very helpful in sorting out that. So you just have whatever window you can find to look over that.

Speaker B Thanks. Joe organization Kurt, has been listening to us, and in a few minutes he's going to come up here and give us some of his reflections and guide us into a continued conversation until 12:00. I'm going to give you the last part of my presentation, which is the whole person at work. I split it into two parts. I wanted to save this last part because it seemed to fit better here at the end than at the beginning. One. Way to summarize what we are about as executives, managers and people who advise and consult with executives and managers is that we are in the business of taking everything we know about human beings and what they require and taking everything we know about the work at hand and what it requires. Putting the two together, the people in the work so that the work gets done effectively and productively and the people come out hope and help. Workplace safety and workers compensation happens to be an area in which I have consulted for a number of years. And one of the conversations that has begun even today. It is not law yet. But I have a suspicion we are going to see laws in the lifetime of my grandchildren which will say that one of the conditions. Of having the right to have employees is that an employer will have to guarantee that the people they employ will be as employable at the end of their employment as they were at the beginning. As a society, I think we're going to make that demand as a condition to have the right for employment. Now, the title of this session is Changing Managerial Behavior and I believe that title itself is misleading, if you will. I believe the idea of changing managerial behavior causes not only problems, but brings about failure of much of our management development efforts. The assumption behind the words changing managerial behavior might best be summed up by this phrase come here, let me straighten you out. The problem with that message is that it assumes, first of all, that the managers with whom we are working need to be straightened out, that there's something crooked about them. And that is where Elliot and I think would be in total agreement about this business of human beings in the workplace. We have no such right to make that assumption. Therein lies the problem. We are making the assumption that it's the other person who has something wrong with them, but we don't have anything wrong with ourselves and we're going to straighten them out. The issue, if you will, is not changing managerial behavior but specifying the required managerial performance and providing managers the resources necessary to achieve that performance. And I would hold that that would include with you on, is the organization requisite. First of all, defining the performance, making certain that everyone who works in a managerial role is absolutely clear of what is expected of them. Second, I think providing timely feedback as to how well they are performing in the role and thirdly, providing any training or support needed to help those people achieve the required performance. Now, I think it is true that we provide managers with clear performance standards, timely feedback on their performance, and any necessary training and support that will in fact lead to changes in managerial behavior. However, the issue, and I think the focus of our development effort is not changing managers behavior, the issue is organizational effectiveness and enabling managers to achieve it while retaining their capability to continue to achieve in the future. Whatever else we might say about managers, organization effectiveness requires that we recognize that they are human beings, and so are we. We have no right to change managers to straighten the magnet. We have a moral obligation, however, to provide managers all the support necessary for achieving the performance.

Speaker A Sam. Sam.