Over the years, I have worked with clients who have verbally disagreed with ideas with which I presented  them, yet implemented these very ideas as if there had been no verbal disagreement.I can give hundreds of examples but one will suffice.

Example: CEO Herb told me that CFO Garry undermines him in management meetings. I suggested to Herb that he co-opt Garry into planning these meetings together. Herb disagreed yet a month later, I walked into Herb’s office and there sat Herb and Garry planning a management meeting.

I believe that there are several explanations for this phenomenon

1. Change happens somewhat chaotically. So this phenomenon may not have a clear reason.
2. Face saving. This behaviour allows the client to face save and not rely on “tips” from a consultant. This may be true, but it is too easy an explanation.
3. Herb thinks he is tricking Garry, not co-opting him. So the consultants’ idea is being implemented but within a different context.
4. People who get to the top learn to take credit for themselves without even realizing it. So Herb may not know how to manage Garry, but he sure knows how to manage the consultant!
5. In the process of learning, there is a pro versus con, “back and forth” dynamic in the thinking process of the client.  Herb’s choice may have developed after the “no” and Herb had not bothered updating the consultant.
6. Clients often say things and do the opposite.

I am sure that all readers know that there are clients who feign implementation….but that is the next post.

The commercialization and productization of OD (as performed by magicians or wonder-consultants)  has masked some of the real issues that an OD practitioner faces. The OD “vendors” are reticent to discuss the hardest issues they face, like a surgeon who does not want to discuss how many died under his or her knife.

This is not a blog written to promote my profession, so I allow myself to deal with the “dirt under the finger nails”.  So……

Strategies for dealing with very difficult organizational problems which are almost insoluble are the subject of this post.

First I shall illustrate two such problems.

• A senior team has been in place for 12 years with more or less the same leaders. They are located in 3 continents. There is a low level of transparency, very poor teamwork, and having worked together for so long, there is a lot of mutual contempt. The company that they run is very profitable.

• There is constant bad blood between Customer Service and Development teams. Due to market conditions, a company has released a very immature product to the market, against the recommendation of the Development Team. The clients are furious. Customer Service does not know how to handle customer complaints, so they demand that the Development Team deal with the customers. The developers refuse to see customer demanding that management must “give us time to write the bloody code, not deal with customers who are justifiably angry.”

Now let’s look at a few strategies.

First there is a matter of mindset. 

• The superman “I can fix it all” mindset which many snake oil consultants use leads to nowhere, except great revenue for the consultant.
• The mindset of impotence and despair, whilst rationally justified perhaps, obviously makes no sense. The appropriate mindset is being pragmatic, avoid wow-wowing to maintain credibility and risk mitigation.

Now let’s address the question of how much intervention is needed. My suggestion is that for very difficult organizational problems, the best intervention is of low intensity spread over a long time, as opposed to intense happenings, like a quarterly offsite.

The role of the consultant in such a mess is primum non nocere (“foremost do no harm”. ) Great damage can be inflicted by applying snake oil to severe problems. For example, a teamwork session for the senior team mentioned above is counter-indicated.

I also  suggest a focus on containment of pain with compassion and humour, if possible  addressing issues whilst managing appropriate expectations and keeping things from getting much worse.

“Siloism” is the maximization of one set of goals to the detriment of a wider common good, the assumption being that teamwork and synergy (not siloism) achieves common good via optimization and integration of all subsets of goals.

Leaders, consultants and trainers fight combat organizational siloism with slogans, training programs and many other weapons de jour.

Yet siloism remains rampant, since the average Joe in the trenches believes that organizations are war zones, and if he does not watch out for his own ass, no one else will do so. And often this is true, since in bad times, management maximizes its own survival goals and shafts the Joes-of-the-world via massive downsizing and outsourcing.

Brexit is an example of political siloism. Not enough Brits saw the value of what they saw as  subjugating their countries’ goals to larger “common good”. In other words, the benefits of larger common good did not filter down to enough people.

It is very hard to market a lot of what the EU has to offer in the short run, ie the next 100 years, beyond the life time of many voters. When you lose your job to a robot or an offshore location and view at your doorstep the massive amounts of illegal immigration from the melt-down in the Middle East,  it is no surprise that the common European good did not sell well. 

In my work with hundreds of organizations fighting siloism, I have learnt to respect the voice of the silo builder, who has a rationale for his behaviour. I do not agree with the motives for siloism, but I understand these motives. The same must be said of the Brexit. Were I British, I would have voted Remain. I believe in  a pan EU. But I am a member of the elite which benefits from things like this.

Leaders would be wise to respect not only the vote, but accept the motivations behind the vote. The first stage to combating solo-ism is empathy with the silo builder.

I live in a country in which many people are both religious and very right wing. I am secular (totally atheistic) and very, very left wing. Yet many of my clients and a few of my close friends have a very different belief system than mine. People who know me are aware that I am by  no means a patient person. Yet the dialogue with people who have very different opinions has both enriched and mellowed me. I make every effort to understand the consistency and world view of ideas different from mine.

Following the social media as best as I can as an agile 66 year old, it would appear that organizations are undergoing a radical revolution.

• Hierarchies are being replaced by holocracies and adhocratic configurations.
• Leadership strives to engage.
• HR has shrieked “Eureka” having embraced data analytics as the ultimate elixir.
• Talent needs to be titillated and won over, or else there will be severe intense and painful retention problems.

What am I missing?

I am still very active as a consultant although I put aside one day a week to study history. And I have just not seen all the above happening in the field. Here is what I do see-

• I see organizations as political  war zones as the amount of jobs recedes. People cooperate less as they strive to maintain their positioning to retain the power-to-be-employed.
• Leaders appear to me over reliant or enslaved to IT driven idiotic practices. People abscond responsibility more than ever.
• HR is as sycophantic and bureaucratic as it ever was.
• Lots of lip-service to talent. People don’t matter; they are a replaceable commodity.

So what am I missing?

I cannot count the number of times that clients have contacted me because “we have a problem of ownership”. Typically a crisis with clients or suppliers triggers a compelling event which launches an OD project to enhance ownership.
Just last month, a CEO called me in because a very strategic supplier had refused a huge contract because “it takes 6 months and 200 emails to get paid, and no one seems to own paying us”.
Dealing with ownership issues effectively necessitates a very accurate diagnosis, in order to prevent the solution from turning into just another engagement plan.
In this short post, I want to share what I have found to be the root cause of “lack of ownership”.

1) ERP has been implemented brainlessly, eliminating common sense and closing all by-passes. This is by far the most common reason behind lack of ownership.
2) Irrational and non-achievable commitments have been made, and as a result, no one wants to be stuck with the dirty end of the stick, guilty of non-delivery.
3) There is an overemphasis (NOT an under-emphasis) on role clarity. Many problems need to be jointly owned (eg by Development and Customer Service) and not arbitrarily pinned on someone who is powerless.
4) Recent downsizing almost always drives a collapse of ownership. This is almost always incurable in the short term.
5) Too much data can cause a lack of ownership! For each slide and for every chart showing lack of ownership and poor responsiveness, employees learn to hide even better to make the charts look betters. (Eg, call centers which answer the phone within 2 seconds and cut off the call).

Enhancing ownership means addressing these issues at their core. It is root canal work, not a mere filling. Here are 3 tips on how to be effective in such projects.
1) Make sure that your project has a clear owner, because often the ownership of the OD project replicates the ownership problem of the organization.
2) Work from the micro to the macro. Start with delving into cases, not studying charts.
3) Get lots of input from the front line. Speak to the soldiers much more than the generals.
4) Learn the IT system and its constraints.

For many reasons which are beyond the scope of this post, Israel and Israelis tend to have a survivor mind set which manifests itself in various domains such as internal politics, policy making and external affairs.

In this post, I will relate to the ways that the survivor mentality manifests itself in organizational behaviour, which is the domain of this blog.

Since there is a lot of deviation within any given population vis a vis specific behaviours, not every Israeli or Israeli organization will display these characteristics.

However I am dealing here with generalizations which are frequent enough to merit mention.

• Emotional (life is a struggle)
• Insider-outsider dynamic,or us or against us (friend or enemy?)
• Paranoid about other’s hidden agendas (can you be trusted?)
• Fast and responsive (matter of life and death)
• Lots of argument about minute points; trees are as important as forests; not expedient (it is all about principle, not priority)
• High level of involvement and commitment (it’s a war)
• Very pragmatic and action oriented– do anything that works; hands on (shoot, don’t talk)
• Extremely adverse to planning, preference to improvisation (hush hush about intentions)
• Points of agreement constantly re-opened and negotiated (win, not win win)
• Entertainment of parallel strategies all the time; not consistent (one upsmanship)
• Speed as strategy ; build first and scale later, sloppy (slow and steady looses)
• Challenge authority constantly but highly loyal in the crunch (commando)

So, what are the keys to being effective when you work with Israelis? The answer is a post in and of itself so I will leave you with 5 tips in the meantime.

1. Talking on the phone is more effective than email.
2. Be strong and negotiate all the time.
3. Avoid expediency which is seen as a near fatal weakness.
4. Don’t try to buy performance (Your bonus depends on this.)
5. Discuss underlying trust issues openly. Israel ain’t Japan and the more open you are, the better.

This post is dedicated to my 4^th grand daughter Rona, a 5^th generation Israeli, born at 9 am this morning after a prolonged 8 minute labour! Speed as strategy.

Organizational changing involves periods of ambiguity, during which it may not be clear what needs to be done and/or how to implement the changing.

When consultants are brought in, they often bring along process, trust-enhancement between divergent functions, and tools for bottom up involvement. Sometimes they work tailor made, and too often they use pre-packaged crappy tools with apparent effectiveness only.

In my consulting experience, I have found that I have created the most value for my clients by focusing on their basic assumptions about the ambiguity and the anxiety encountered in the changing process.

Here are several issues that my clients and I discuss. Introspecting working through these issues, they have reported a feeling of more competence in dealing with changing.

• Which parameters are ambiguous? Which are not? Do we need a reality check?
• What threat does the ambiguity create for me as a leader? What is my knee jerk reaction to ambiguity and anxiety? How effective has this been?
• How does my anxiety about the ambiguity impact my assumptions about what is expected from me as well as what I expect from others?
• How much tolerance for ambiguity is needed? How much is expected from me? How do I bridge the gap?

Here are five examples of how leaders have benefited from these discussions.

• Ed’s level of anxiety is very low. And he has a huge tolerance for prolonged ambiguity. Often his troops believe he is lost, albeit that this is not the case at all.
• Smadar is very practical and fast moving. She has little tolerance for “too much definition”. At first, she saw her style as very adaptive to changing but ex post facto, lots of change she has led have failed.
• Vlad assumed that ambiguity needs to be as short as possible and anxiety can be mitigated by appearing to be strong. He has often been pushed aside by senior management during complex changes.
• Ngai Lam’s belief is that a leader needs to protect her team from the unknown. She is very much respected by local employees but her remote staff believes she lacks the credibility to manage change.

OD’s major value is not extricating leadership from the unknown. The bang for the buck from OD is exploring with clients the parameters of the unknown and its implication on anxiety and leadership.