soap box

On the radio the other day I heard a sports commentator interviewing a football pundit on a recent game between two top European clubs, one English and the other Italian - the English club had lost the game. "Why," the interviewer asked, "with all the money that's been poured into the club over the past years and all the top talent that's been brought in, did the team lose?"  "It's all about the relationships," said the expert, "the manager needs to get the relationships right and until he does this the players and the club will continue to struggle."

These players are some of the top earners in the country and yet here is a public discussion focusing on relationships as being the key factor in deciding whether or not this group of highly skilled individuals can perform at their best.

What is true of football, and indeed of all sports, must also, surely, be true in other areas of life. Business, for instance. Business also depends on its relationships. Many business people put an awful lot of effort into establishing wide relationship networks outside of the organisation, where, either physically or virtually, people get together for mutual advantage and support. But what about inside the organisation? Are the internal relationships as carefully regarded as the external ones? Not always, I suspect, especially when the drive for efficiency and economy is so great that it dominates other areas of endeavour. Yet these are the times when the importance of maintaining good and trusting relationships throughout the organisation are crucial.

When the business leader, as the football manager, gets the relationships right the advantages are many. People are happier for a start. Does that matter? Yes. Because people who are happy at work are more effective. Their energy is high, as is their morale; there is trust, communications are better, and people are more willing to share their creative ideas with one another. People who work together in this way show fewer of the relational problems that more dysfunctional groups exhibit. This means that the manager can focus on running the business without being diverted by unnecessary behavioural distractions.

This is what good bosses do - they get the relationships right and allow everybody to play their best game.

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Writer and management consultant, Meg Wheatley, during a recent interview with Strategy+Business was asked, "If the situation is so grim and pressured, how can you expect people to rethink the way they operate?" She answered, "It's more interesting to reverse that question. Because the situation is so grim and pressured, why aren't we rethinking how we operate? We are at a turning point. Either we continue to descend into incompetence and failing solutions or we realize where we are and see new ways of thinking and acting."

Education expert and commentator, Sir Ken Robinson, has a recurring theme in his talks and appearances: we need to change the way we do things, we especially need to change the way we educate and prepare young people for work and for life and move away from the restrictive, industrial, nineteenth century view of things and prepare people to live useful, self-fulfilled, creative lives in a world very different from the industrial landscape of the recent past.

Psychiatrist, Iain McGhilchrist, in his book The Master and his Emissary, shows how the Western world's increasing dependence on the left brain's perception of the world is taking us down a path towards ever-increasing regulation, bureaucracy, monitoring and control.

They are all saying the same thing in their different ways: we need to stop and think, and re-think what we are doing. Meg Wheatley has a quote from the 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi: "Sit down and be quiet. You are drunk, and this is the edge of the roof."

These three share other themes, when talking about what happens to people operating in conditions of command and control, when the emphasis of leadership is on monitoring processes, cutting resources, doing more with less, reducing autonomy - they lose the sense of community, a shared feeling of participation, they are denied time for reflection; and they lose contact with the right brain's sense of meaning, of context and of purpose.

Yet who is listening to these people, Wheatley, Robinson and McGhilchrist, and others like them? Are they merely preaching to the converted? Are the only people listening and taking note those who are already thinking along the same lines? This is a small group, I suspect, and one with neither the influence or the power to make change happen. Unfortunately, the people with the power, who should be taking heed, seem to be too busy holding onto the reins, trying to control a stampeding horse rapidly approaching a five-bar fence, to pause and listen to any voice other than the internal one screaming at them "Control, control, control!"

But until they do stop and take heed, what are we to expect? More of the same until, as Wheatley says, we descend into incompetence and failing solutions? I've just read in an HR Review about a report that's showing that a third of employees think their bosses are ineffective, 60% of respondents said that their self-esteem is damaged by their bosses sometimes, most of the time or always and that 53% said they would be 20% - 60% more productive if their bosses were as good as their best ever boss.

This bears out what Wheatley, Robinson and McGhilchrist are saying: bosses matter. Good leadership matters. Study after study has shown that it matters. When we are well led, when we are shown empathy and respect, when we are involved and our contribution is valued, we respond with our best efforts. It shouldn't be that hard a concept to grasp.

The trouble is, to grasp an argument you have to be open to it and unfortunately so many leaders in positions of power and influence today seem to be too busy transmitting to stop and switch over to receive mode. Either that or they are constrained by pressures from above and forced to employ measures that they know will not work in order to satisfy board-level directives.

So what's the answer? How do we get the message across that more of the same is not the solution and that, if anything, more of the same can only make the position worse? One of the qualities of the creative leader is the ability to stand up and challenge the accepted view. Two recent IBM surveys have shown that creativity is going to be crucial to leaders in the future if they are to lead their organisations to success. So it seems that people accept the need for different creative approaches intellectually but are unable, or unwilling, to make the necessary changes in behaviour to make it happen. But until they do, we are indeed in danger of falling off the roof.

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The other night I had this really interesting conversation about social mobility. I was struck by a point that Government Policy has a real difficulty in bringing about social mobility as the professional classes generally succeed and resolve issues through their informal social and professional networks. This is something that people outside the professional classes have difficulty having access to and engaging in - and thus achieving social mobility.

This got me thinking about organisations which in effect are complex social networks, however, also socially hierarchical. Think about it - the "Directors", the "Professional Managers" and the "Skilled/Unskilled Workers". How much easier it is for the "Professional Managers" to be organisationally socially mobile over the "Skilled/Unskilled Workers".

If we want our organisations to be fully effective in this economic climate, we have to change our attitudes and give access to all members of the organisation. Let's assume the majority of staff in an organisation are in the "Skilled/Unskilled Worker" group - say 75%. This is a major resource for change and creativity that often lies untapped through attitudes based on Victorian work, power and control principles that are totally irrelevant to the 21st Century. I think it is an expensive assumption to make that people leave their brains at home when they come to work. This is often a "management" assumption, more about maintaining status and power than organisational success. Tony Cooper

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Thomas Suarez is twelve years old and he designs apps for the Apple iPad. There's a short presentation by him on the TED network at http://youtu.be/ehDAP1OQ9Zw  In the talk he says some interesting things, about how he started and how he helps other kids learn how to design and write apps programs, how his school is helping students develop their talents in this area. Something thing he says in this talk strikes me as being apposite to the work we do at the Open Arena. He says that "these days students usually know a little bit more than the teachers, with the technology-so this is a resource for teachers; and educators should recognise this resource and make good use of it".

Now this, surely, is turning the traditional relationship between student and teacher on its head. Surely it's the teachers' responsibility to know and the students' to learn; the direction and flow of information from one party to the other is decidedly one-way. How can it be otherwise?

Yet this is exactly our point when we talk about the flow of ideas in organisations. Why should it be a one-way street, with ideas and initiatives travelling in one direction from top to bottom, from leaders to led? Just as the student can inform and instruct the teacher, why can't the lowly staff member bring forward ideas to inform and instruct managers and leaders to the benefit of the organisation?

The simple answer to that is that very often there is no effective mechanism to do this, or where there are systems in place, they, like as not, fail to produce anything meaningful. If Thomas Suarez's teachers are smart, they'll adapt and learn and change the system. It's time organisations, big and small learned to do the same. Ideas are a resource. Leaders should recognise this and make good use of it.

Take part the Open Arena's short ideas survey. Let's build a picture of what happens to ideas in today's organisations.

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On the TED network this week there was an RSA animation of a talk given by Iain McGilchrist on brain function. His new book is called: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. In the talk he explains how the practice of describing the left and right hemispheres of the brain as having largely separate and distinct functions has been discredited, that we should no longer think of the left side of the brain being solely responsible for reason, logic and language and the right side being responsible for emotions and creativity, but that the brain, though certainly divided, is none-the-less connected and that each side contributes to the functions of the other.

This division needs to be explained. His theory is that the left side looks after the things that are known, the specific things that we need to pay attention to, while the right is responsible for what is not known. He sites the example of a bird pecking at a seed in the ground. The left brain concentrates on what needs to be done in order to get the seed while the right keeps an eye out for any signs of predators or competitors. The left's focus is narrow and specific, the right's focus is wider and more openly receptive.

He says a lot and if you have a spare ten minutes it's worth a look. (There's a link to the piece on our 'Links' page.) But towards the end of the talk he makes the point that where once upon a time humans lived with a balance between the two hemispheres, there has been a tendency over the past few hundred years to favour the left hemisphere's view of the world where we prioritise the real rather than the virtual, the technical becomes important and bureaucracy flourishes, all leading towards more control and regulation. Over time this left-brain tendency has learnt to dominate. It has a wonderful trick of rationalisation by cutting off the right's influence and denying its existence.

This looks remarkably like the way so many organisations are run, with ever increasing levels of control being imposed on people, survival strategies depending on what is known and the capacity for risk and innovation being restricted and denied.

The more rewarding solution is surely to try to restore the balance between the left and right hemispheres, where vision, imagination, freedom from constraints and the ability to connect ideas can work alongside the controlling forces of the left without being dominated by it. This is the way for organisations to free themselves from the grip of economic turmoil, by liberating creativity, not by constraining it.

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