Eric vs Erica

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A study I read about started this way:

• Draw a picture of an effective leader

Almost without exception, the picture was of a man.  Ooops: what about the lady leaders? There's certainly no lack of role models in both politics and business, from Angela Merkel -- CEO of Germany -- to  Meg Whitman -- CEO of HP Enterprises

Another study had people listen in to a business meeting where actors, Eric and Erica, among others, were discussing strategy, issues, business details, etc

• Invariably, Eric was given high marks for leadership, even if the script for Erica was nearly identical 

Indeed, we learn this:

“It didn’t matter whether women spoke up 1) almost never, 2) rarely, 3) sometimes, 4) often, or 5) almost always,” Kyle Emich, a professor at Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware, and one of the authors, wrote in an email.
“Women did not gain status for speaking up, and subsequently were less likely (much less) to be considered leaders.” 

The conclusion of those who study this stuff is that we're very much influenced by stereotypes learned from an very early age. In a word: culture. And, only time and performance will change culture significantly

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Culture from the bottom up

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Almost everything written about leadership includes this idea: that leaders have the responsibility to set the cultural values of the organization and ensure such values are deployed widely.

Fair enough

But here's a case where it works in practice but not in theory:

Culture is what the organizations' disparate polity say it is, including, by the way, the ideas of the leadership. It's not exclusively given from on high. It's distributed, quite federalized, balkanized and local. In fact, it's not an "it" at all.

Here it's one thing; over there: it's another. Collectively, there are norms and themes that stitch all the differences into one large tent, and probably even a headline about the big tent could be written.

But there could be a problem: what if, as a leader, you see an imperative to change "the culture"? What then? How do you go about influencing a balkanized culture?

Not easy is the first answer.

• You need influence(s), entire strategies, a corps of ambassadors; incentives; and a compelling narrative.(*)
• You've got to get "street smart" and work the local issues, fashioning a value set that will attract a following but also be responsive to the greater narrative.
• You probably need a lot of time and patience 

At the end of the day, you can be an autocrat -- basically illiberal -- or a democrat (small "d"). Only the latter is sustainable by it's own energy. All else is inefficient, consuming more than is returned.
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(*) Narratives fall broadly into to fearful or optimistic. The latter is the easier sell. It fits well with our unthinking "flight or fight" instincts. And, our natural bias, as human beings, is to fear loss more greatly than we reach for opportunity.

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Organization by coercion

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"It is impossible to organize an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must believe in something ...."

From the book "Sapiens" by Harari

Fair enough

Now, consider that wisdom rewritten in project team terms:

It is impossible to organize a team, and expect productive outcomes, solely by top-down direction. At lease some of the team leaders and team members must believe in the team's mission and the leader's vision

 And, I submit, to be believed begins with being believable. A play on words, to be sure, but somewhere between the banal and "pie in the sky" an innovative vision and reasonable path forward must be evident:

• In pictures for the visualists
• In words for the readers
• In person for those that are attracted by charisma to a cause

If there's to be sacrifice, then an appeal to and wrapping in a higher calling--'duty, honor, country' in the military--not just money, will be in the mix. I think we all know that money speaks, but only so loudly. After a certain volume, it's "the other stuff" that makes up the culture and value system that motivates.

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Myths and mystics

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In the awesome book "Sapiens", author Yuval Harari posits three revolutions for mankind, the first of which is the "cognitive revolution" which he dates from about 70,000 years ago.

What's really important about the advent of cognition is that h.sapiens developed the ability to imagine the non-existent -- that is, the stuff that has no physical reality. Harari more or less calls all that stuff "myths".

Myths require:

• Someone to imagine them; and 
• Someone to sell them to the uninformed; and 
• The uninformed have to become believers and users and maintainers

In project parlance, myths require:

• A visionary
• A sales and marketing strategy
• Managers, practitioners, and users

 A marketing guy I worked with many years ago, long before Harari wrote his book, instructed me in the art of myth-making, the value of being mystic, and the value of encapsulation so that others couldn't see the sausage being made.

My marketing mentor asserted that myth was a force multiplier, adding power and influence. I agree. Just look around at the 'trapping' that attend power--some call it the arrogance of power .... all intended to multiply that power.

Not arrogant? Not powerful.

But in the competitive project space, myths attend competitors -- are they really 10 feet tall, and should we go up against them, or not?

There is a larger consequence, however, that I found fascinating in Harari's telling of the cognitive revolution:

• Cognition of non-real things, like organization and social structure, behavior norms, and beliefs -- even if not realizable, enabled large scale socialization among strangers and mechanisms of command and control that extends far beyond any personal relationship.
• Harari asserts that one person can have personal effective interaction with up to 150 people. Up to that limit, organizations can be totally flat, informal, almost structureless. To get beyond the 150 limit, you need myths and mythology that enable the unreal.
• With myths, you can have world-wide religious beliefs, large corporations, continental governments, etc. 
• Thus, societies, and to a lesser extent, projects can scale almost limitlessly44

What a concept! Myths -- you've got to love it!
 

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Shared values or power relationships?

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John Traphagan has a different idea on organizational culture.
"A common set of shared values" has always been my working definition, though I admit that, like multiple "identities" at home and work, there is a culture at work and there is a culture at home, and they may not be the same, and thus the "sharing thing" may have -- likely has -- borders.

But Traphagan goes further. He asserts that trying to impose or enforce a sharing of values thus to make a common culture is possibly a divider rather than a unifier. (There's a rebel or a rogue in us all)

Have a read from an essay he wrote:

Fundamentally, a culture is not a set of (marginally) shared values; it’s a web of power relationships in which people are embedded and that they use to meet both personal and collective goals but that can also restrict their ability to achieve goals.

Those power relationships can function to pull people together, but they also can pull them apart because they are the product of differential access to resources. And differences in power influence how we respond to and think about values espoused as being shared by members of a group.

That's certainly different than the way I've thought about organizational culture. Doesn't sound like sharing, commonality, or other attributes are present, or certainly not dominant.

Of course, Traphagan works in an academic environment. It's been my experience that on the teaching side -- different from the university business -- such is somewhat feudal and not at all common.

Which is not to say that there's not value competition within projects and the business generally -- to be sure there are. And power webs certainly exist. But my experience is that there is an arching culture even over the largest organizations that sets tone, ethics, morality, etc for the organization.

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Innovation or efficiency

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For F.W. Taylor, the scientific management guy, success was to be found in efficiency. He was the guy with the process stop watch and the job descriptions. But recently, efficiency has given way to innovation, even in PM. Traditional methods, honed and efficient, have been displaced by agile and empirical methods, not particularly efficient they are, but resilient with failure, to be sure.

WW II  and innovation
Now, it may seem that a war that ended some 60 years ago this summer is a bit distant to connect to contemporary dots. But no! WW II ushered profound changes into the culture and society of the United States that is fuel for the innovation fire.

• WW II empowered 50% of our workforce for the first time. Women entered the workforce in large numbers doing jobs never open to them before. They have never looked back
  
  WW II beget the 'GI Bill' that sent millions to college and all but invented the modern middle class from which yet more innovation, inventiveness, and entrepreneurship has arisen.
  

The scope of WW II projects was unprecedented, leading to the military-industrial complex that defined and codified program management, system engineering, risk management, analog simulation, and a host of other project practices heretofore unknown or undefined.

• WW II unleashed innovation as no other world event. The modern research university was empowered. During the war, the laboratories at MIT and CalTech and Stanford were at the forefront of new ideas, inventions, and applications. Since then, a multitude of research universities have been drivers of the innovation explosion in the United States.
• Although the war drove atomic science, atomic science drove quantum mechanics, an understanding of the sub-atomic structure. From this we have all manner of semiconductors that have in turn been the underpinning of the information age.

Throughput won the war
The enormous industrialization of WW II all but put defined process control on the map. Repeatable process and process control gave us unprecedented throughput. Who knew you could build 55K ships and 600K aircraft in four years?

And now, we have "throughput accounting" which many say is the only way to value projects: the value is in the "add", ignoring the infrastructure and permanent staff sustaining cost that gets allocated into the project overhead.

The "good" war?
It sounds like "...there's nothing like a good war".  But that's not the case.  The emergency of warfare has always raised the bar.

Before the U.S. civil war in the mid 19th century, railroads as a means for tactical support for forces was unheard of; so also electronic messaging ... the telegraph in those days ... changed not only the timeliness of reporting, it changed forever the influence of "high command" on the tactics of the moment.

What we can say:
Innovation, as a consequence of great national emergency, is the sidebar that always gets a boost.

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Don't let routine make you fragile

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Jurgen Appelo has some decent advice in his blog post "Don't let Scrum make you fragile". Of course, Appelo's taking some of Nassim Taleb's philosophy, as expressed in his new book "Antifragile", and porting it to the Scum domain. But that's ok. I agree, that's a valid porting.

Here's the main point, in Appelo's words, but really driven by Taleb's recent expressions (some of which Appelo quotes in his blog posting):

Every regular practice works, until it doesn’t. Are the daily standups losing value? Try daily water cooler talks. Are people getting too comfortable sitting together? Move them around. Are the retrospectives not working? Buy them some drinks at Starbucks. Is a team too dependent on its task board? Hide it in the kitchen. Force people to do Scrum not by the book, and change things unexpectedly without notice. As I wrote before, ScrumButs are the best part of Scrum.

A complex system that gets too comfortable with certain behaviors runs the risk of becoming complacent, stagnant, and fragile.

Jurgen Appello
 

You can try this at home
Now, for my own part, I experiment regularly with driving different routes to get somewhere. With my trusty GPS mapping app I no longer get lost, though I do sometimes wonder why I'm wandering about where I am. Nevertheless, it's stood me in good stead: when there's a traffic disaster, I'm equipped to not follow the herd.

In all aspects of life we experience the effects of getting stale from repetition, and we unwittingly risk the hazard of not knowing or experiencing alternatives, especially before there are needed on short notice. That's the essence of antifragile: to be able to absorb shock -- up to a point -- without structural failure.

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Kotter on leading change

John P. Kotter is a change guy. I've been going through his 1996 classic "Leading Change"

Here's my take: it's a good book, but a little long on the narrative since the essentials are right up front: 8 leadership steps towards change management.

Now, admittedly, this is more aimed at the business readiness swim lane, and the foreplay necesssary to get the business and the customer ready, than it is aimed at some of the change management tactics for scope control. Nevertheless, here's my paraphrase of Kotter's 8:

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1. Put a value on short term versus long term
2. Gather a coalition of the willing
3. Develop the vision, goals, and strategy
4. Communicate
5. Push action to the practitioners
6. Be incremental
7. Consolidate gains
8. Leverage culture

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Now, in Kotter's actual formulation for point #1, he wrote more about creating a sense of urgency than simply putting a value on the short term. But, actually, I'm not a fan of crying wolf on urgency just to get the team moving. Frankly, I'm more about finding a legitimate reason to value a short term goal; with that in hand, you should be able to get some action going.

His point about #5 was the ole "empowerment" thing. It was probably less worn in 1996 that it is 15 years later. The issue is that the empowered may not know how to use their power. That hasn't changed since power and empowerment were invented:

Those with the power have no experience

Those with the experience have no power

General Sir John Dill

Placentia Bay Conference, August 1941

I really like the last one about culture. We've mused on culture a few times here. Just click here to get a sense of where I'm coming from.

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National cultures

I've been consulting a bit on change management, offering some advice and in turn learning some things.

 

One of the things I learned is that Geert Hofstede has a pretty informative website on national cultures.

 

If you ever worked virtual teams internationally, as I have, you'll understand immediately the importance of understanding culture: e.g. that one person's aggressive plan may be another person's failure to plan enough.

 

Hofstede defines culture this way:

“Culture is the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others”

 

He has developed dimensions for cultural properties. There are six:

1. Power Distance (PDI)
2. Individualism versus Collectivism (IDV)
3. Masculinity versus Femininity (MAS)
4. Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI)
5. Long term orientation (LTO)
6. Indulgence vs restraint

What he has done with this is conduct interviews and analysis of the cultural properties of  dozens countries around the globe and given scores for each according to the dimensions.

On his website, his data and conclusions are available for interactive query. You can pick a country from a drop and pick up the scores of each of the dimensions.

Pretty engaging stuff if you're going to doing business internationally.

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