There were quite a few points I wanted to pick Emma up on, in the nicest possible way. First of these was her surprise at Apple’s apparent introduction of stern social media protocols, given the money it makes from handheld devices that encourage ‘the free-flowing ideas of the individuals on the payroll’. Once some of the world had stopped loading candle apps on their iPads and leaving £400’s worth of hi-tech equipment outside shops to mourn Steve Jobs (I’m no accountant, but a tea-light would have said the same, and been far cheaper and less of a personal data security risk), I got the impression that the control-freak tendencies of the recently deceased were aired more freely than previously. And Apple, for all the design savvy of its products (for which thanks should strictly speaking go to Johnny Ive), is a company that makes it very hard to dig beneath the OS, install open source software, and is very keen that we load our (very profitable) new toys with apps, tunes, books, movies and so on bought from an online store that very much runs by their rules. Apple’s version of the world is impeccably stylish, but pretty tightly closed. I’m not sure everyone wants to rule the world, but Apple is keener than most: their internal application of the tendency didn’t surprise me in the least.

The second point at which I paused mentally was her final point:

Responsible staff understand that for a group of individuals to function together in an effective way, there needs to be an agreed set of protocols. If these are developed in consultation and respect for the impact on valued employees, then their feeling of involvement and ownership can be maintained, even grown.”

The opening words generated a reflex wince: I can’t read that without thinking that “Responsible staff understand” is the kind of opening to a sentence that leaves the firm impression that a) the author considers themselves to speak from a position of authority, and b) has no intention of being disagreed with. When I encountered “for the impact on valued employees” in the next sentence, I’m afraid I winced again. I’m not inclined to be irresponsible or unvalued, but the tacit condescension the paragraph – I hope unintentionally – left me feeling that I might be more inclined to be so if I was on the receiving end of too many more sentences. Surely if HR want people to feel involved and to have a sense of ownership, dividing the responsible from the irresponsible and the valued from the chaff isn’t the most optimistic first step? Some of the people I’ve worked with over the years might have said something quite unpleasant about the horse she rode in on.

But I’m being discourteous to someone I’ve never met, so I’ll apologise. The article’s central argument – that there should be a trade off between protocols, rules and procedures on one hand and creativity on the other, and the tone of delivery of the message is critically important – is an important one, and one that should be central to innovation. But I think the article missed two bigger points.

The first can’t be made without being sweepingly rude about HR as an entire profession, but here goes … I strongly suspect that a large percentage of the working population of the UK routinely does things that HR have issued memos, guidelines, handbooks, procedural documents and entire intranets sternly warning them against doing. There, I said it. Civilisation didn’t end, the ceiling is still intact, and no-one got struck by lightning. Most people are too far from the watchful eyes of HR most of the time to be policed, monitored and cajoled to the nth degree. While the cats are safely occupied in their office on the 6^th floor, guess what the mice will get up to?

HR communications might perhaps give a message – intentional or otherwise – that anything that strays from written diktats will lead to the massacre of the first-born, and people with immense latent creativity might move on to more agreeable shores. But, in most organisations, I don’t think HR is close enough to the action to actually stifle innovation.

The second, rather bigger point that Emma’s article missed was, with due respect, an open goal. Indeed, the point was sitting right there in its title: actually stimulating innovation never quite made an appearance. The argument began and ended with “There have to be some rules: anyone sensible knows that”, but what the rules were to achieve didn’t quite heave into view. Given the distance between HR and day-to-day working life, that’s perhaps not so surprising. But another article – published in McKinsey Quarterly – seemed to strike nearer the mark, addressing the behaviour of people who might rather more directly impact on the working life of others: How leaders kill meaning at work. The opening paragraph makes its point pretty directly:

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle, found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.”

I’m not sure that McKinsey got the target group for its message entirely right: the most powerful influence on workplace behaviour – and learning (application), work satisfaction, engagement and more besides – is the line manager, rather than the ‘Senior Executive’ per se, although McKinsey can perhaps be forgiven for addressing its most probable readership. Indeed, they acknowledge this in a later, important paragraph that – to my mind – came rather closer to identifying where many organisations stifle, rather than stimulate, innovation:

[…] managers at all levels routinely—and unwittingly—undermine the meaningfulness of work for their direct subordinates through everyday words and actions. These include dismissing the importance of subordinates’ work or ideas, destroying a sense of ownership by switching people off project teams before work is finalized, shifting goals so frequently that people despair that their work will ever see the light of day, and neglecting to keep subordinates up to date on changing priorities for customers.”

And perhaps it’s mere coincidence, but their points also echo findings into the most common factors that enhance workplace engagement (feeling that you are making a valued contribution, having a sense of ‘voice’ and the opportunity to take ownership of tasks or responsibilities that you can develop).

The same is true of some of the more important factors that work against successful transfer and application of learning, where a lack of opportunity to practise and a lack of line manager support and encouragement make the Workplace Environment group of learning transfer factors among the least frequently used. If you’d like to read more, you can request a copy of the Learning Transfer 2010 Report – the findings of the first national survey into learning transfer practice in the UK. As one of the respondents to the survey was moved to comment:

I would estimate that millions of pounds are wasted on training in the UK where learners are unable to put what has been learned to use due to other more pressing matters or managers’ lack of support in encouraging learners to apply their freshly invigorated skills-sets back in the workplace. Enlightened leaders are aware of this and challenge their staff to apply new skills and share knew knowledge straight away.”

There’s plenty of good reading to be had about how innovation comes about, and ways in which it can be helped to blossom – one starting point might be our earlier review of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From. There’s excellent reading in Gwyn Teatro’s blog post Encouraging Innovation & The Story of the 5 Monkeys (where one of the commenters points out a more valuable side of Steve Jobs, triggered by an interest in calligraphy and a belief that things could be beautiful). The idea of allowing people the space and latitude to be creative is undoubtedly important: as we commented in an online Q&A session with Peter Cook:

There’s an argument that ‘play’ means more that celebrating success and creating great places to work – that it involves giving people the space and the permission to experiment a little, or to extemporise from processes and procedures. Through play, through loose rather than strict interpretation, can come ‘happy accidents’ – serendipitous moments that provide real breakthroughs and insights. These are essential by-products of the quirkiness of people: if human capital is the golden goose, these are the free-range eggs.”

But, to answer Emma Littmoden’s rhetorical question, an HR team that’s aware that innovation needs stimulating within its organisation might want to consider talking to the managers rather than just revising the rules for the employees. It might be not the rules that need changing, but the nature and culture of the game.

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It helped to draw me in that the first two dysfunctions he tackled were lack of trust and avoiding conflict, themes and experiences that chimed with my own thoughts and frustrations when dealing with many global senior managers and executives. Won over by the style and approach, I read on through the remaining dysfunctions and found myself appreciating a very satisfying read. (Satisfied enough to turn to some of his other works, where I found rich material on a range of approaches and ideas to free up thinking, manage meetings and handle change.)

His most recent book, Getting Naked: A Business Fable about shedding the Three Fears that Sabotage Client Loyalty, differs from his earlier output. Rather than the global CEO/CIO population, Lencioni has aimed this book at “anyone whose success is tied to building loyal and creating sticky relationships with the people they serve” – including not just service providers of many stripes but also people in his own trade: consultants.

At the heart of this book is the message and learning point that we help others (and ourselves) more effectively by allowing ourselves to be vulnerable. Lencioni’s argument is that, as service providers, we will get better results if we let go of our basic fears – fear of feeling (or looking) inferior, of being embarrassed, and of losing the client. The last of those is, of course, what all too easily leads us to behave in ways that doesn’t serve them – and, by extension, us – at all. There’s a human logic to us doing that, but it’s not one that serves business logic well. Nor does it really serve either the supplier or client.

As the author himself said in an interview about the book with the Willow Creek Association:

So many service providers and consultants feel the need to demonstrate that they have the right answers and that they don’t make mistakes. Not only do clients see this as inauthentic, they often feel that they are being condescended to and manipulated. We’ve found that what clients really want is honesty and humility.”

Lencioni’s lesson here is that if you can overcome your fear of losing the business, you can find the confidence and honesty to tell them the truth they need to hear – something that any good Trusted Advisor would advocate. (And something that the client is almost certainly not only dependent on hearing, but willing to pay for.) You’d probably also take a short-term cut in fees to maintain the relationship in the longer term, and tackle the awkward or difficult situations that will inevitably turn up at some point rather than circling round them, avoiding the very things that need to be addressed.

Most of us are so obsessed about avoiding being embarrassed that it triggers behaviour that work against us. Afraid of making a momentary mistake or misjudgment, we withhold our suggestions. As a result, dialogue is hampered and ideas don’t flow. Too embarrassed to acknowledge mistakes, we do everything we can to avoid making them – and learn a great deal less as a result. And our anxiety to have our expert status acknowledged, we duck chances to do simple things that would genuinely help where we’ve (wrongly) drawn the conclusion that doing them would somehow be ‘beneath us’.  Ultimately, we’re so busy avoiding making a dozen little mistakes that we wind up making two or three enormous ones.

This is a book whose themes of truth and authenticity have applications that go far beyond the consultant/client relationship. Honest, well-meant truths are things that should be more plentiful in all our relationships: all we need do is overcome our fears – which are mostly fears of being ourselves. If you start off by brushing yourself under a metaphorical carpet, you can all too easily wind up weaving ever big rugs to hide all the problems under: hardly the most productive use of anyone’s time and energy.

In my view, this book represents a great start in the right direction on a whole number of levels, advocating a healthy pragmatism and addressing a whole number of leadership and business management taboos.

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The word fable has come to us from the Latin, and just means a little story, but one that is intended to impart a moral lesson. (Myths and parables fall into the same category, and the technical differences need not worry us for the point we’re making here.) But the idea of the fable – a short, memorable tale with an equally memorable learning point – didn’t just come from the Romans. Cultures around the world used fables both as part of the oral, storytelling tradition and as a way of passing on valuable lessons. There are fables in The Bible, for example. The Arabian Nights stories are fables, and we get the idea of The Tortoise and The Hare from one of history’s most famous fabulists, Aesop.

In the modern age, we tend to think of fables as children’s stories – not unfairly, as writing and delivering them were part of the education of Ancient Greek and Roman children. But the power of the fable to memorably get across an important point isn’t something that needs to be restricted to a young audience: George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a fable too. If you know the expression “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”, it’s because the fable served its purpose: you have remembered the point.

Business being an arena of time pressures, an endless array of things to learn and a need to communicate clearly and concisely, it’s not surprising that the business fable has started to become a recognisable genre of business book. If you’ve read Kotter’s Our Iceberg is Melting or many of Patrick Lencioni’s books (we recently reviewed his The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and a review of Getting Naked is coming shortly), you’ve read a business fable. Some have achieved the level of fame that invites parody: Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese triggered both huge sales and a slew of send-ups, not all of them affectionate. Some – Phil Jesson’s Piranhas in the Bidet, for example – are less well known, but deserve a wider readership (read Anton Franckeiss’ review).

Business fables combine our human love of narrative – something we seek in our own lives (as Richard Sennett has pointed out) and enjoy in hearing from others – with the worklife equivalent of stories we heard as children sitting on a grandparent’s knee. Fables taught something to open learning too: that you make learning accessible and meaningful by linking it to everyday life: the story is the sugar-coating on the educational pill. A point not lost on business leaders, to cite a quote from an article at USA Today:

Timberland CEO Jeffrey Swartz says he reads only Bible parables but sees how a story would possess power. Entire brands such as Nike are built more on myth than on their product, and Timberland finds more success selling “the notion of sitting around the campfire at the end of the day” than hiking boots, he says.”

Just one word of warning, however. Fables should be relatively simple, but never patronising. Like any kind of communication, individual audience members will respond differently. (One of the hallmarks of fables is that they enable the reader or listener to arrive at a conclusion, rather than having one broadcast at them.) As USA Today pointed out, the CEO who loves a fable so much he orders a copy for everyone in the company may not have the impact that he or she imagines, or hopes for,

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams says parables rank among the top 10 reader complaints in his e-mail. Workers feel “terribly insulted,” he says.”

Any kind of communication needs to be informed by its audience: what do they want and need to hear (nb: these are almost certainly two very different things!), what will hold their interest, and what will lose it. Bear those things in mind while you formulate your story, and you should recognise the difference between a page-turner and a stomach-turner.

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The first contentious point is its portrayal – in what has to be acknowledged as an acting masterclass of the highest order from Meryl Streep (and I’m not even a fan) – of the former Prime Minister as an ageing dementia sufferer. Publicly admitted for the first time in 2008 by her daughter Carol, it is the ‘publicly’ that bothers some: an article written by Amanda Platell at the time clearly considers that the daughter’s actions are disrespectful. Others have had different viewpoints: an Alzheimer’s Society press release made the point that “By speaking openly about the effects of dementia, we will begin to tackle some of the stigma that still surrounds the condition …” As the child of a (now sadly deceased) dementia sufferer, I’m personally inclined to the latter argument – acknowledging the illness does not diminish the sufferer’s earlier years, and helps those providing the caring by removing the taboo. I was interested to find myself in agreement with Matthew Parris, writing about the film in The Times (article behind The Times paywall), whose view was that her legacy is public property, that the film never mocks or insults, and that “She and her reputation can take it.” (Streep’s portrayal of the behavioural ticks of dementia – the fading in and out of focus, the mixture of clarity and fog, and the slightly bewildered look in the eyes – is also accurate to the point of being disturbing.)

My major problem with the film – which most reviewers seem to have shared – is that it is a stunning performance in search of a purpose. While we see critical events in her life – the influence of her father, the difficulty of an unmarried woman (and a grocer’s daughter, lest we forget) seeking a Conservative seat to adopt her as candidate, marriage to Denis, the image makeover after her decision to run for Party leader – there is a nagging feeling that we are watching a life with the politics largely removed. For a woman who lived and breathed politics, the omission is especially odd. Nor is this the only thing that is strikingly absent: Sir Keith Joseph, Neil Kinnock and Ken Livingstone have somehow vaporised, along with any other female politician and – as Parris also points out – “no man is allowed a look-in as a policymaker.”

If this is a film about iron, it’s about iron will – as its central character spent decades demonstrating in spades. One of the film’s subtly overt ironies is that it allows its audience to see that, even in capable hands, a spade can wind up digging its wielder’s own metaphorical grave. (Given its criticality in triggering her downfall as Prime Minister, the film might also have given a few more seconds of its screen time to Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech. Even dead sheep can have rather sharp teeth.)

These criticisms are, however, of attempting to view the film as a historical record. As Thatcher’s life is seen in flashback, it is also seen as the surfacing memories of a fading and mentally frail woman and the framing device allows for considerable poetic license – the young Denis was actually 10 years her elder, the Miners Strike came after the Falklands War, Thatcher was not a witness to Airey Neave’s assassination. Scriptwriter Abi Morgan (in an article in the Telegraph) has said that the film is “neither a documentary nor a biopic, but a work of the imagination”, although it seems counter-intuitive to suggest that an audience will attend with that in mind. Such is the nature of the central character and her (very public) legacy, that the expectation will be for one or other of the former. And on these grounds, inevitably, the film falls short: any film that is largely “Thatcher without Thatcherism” can do little else.

I saw it with a large group of friends whose ages ranged from 24 to 70: for the older of them, there were subtle references (the price of milk, son Mark’s wayward absences) that were lost on the younger members of the party, who were left wondering more than their elders quite what the film was trying to say or achieve. As one of those elders commented afterwards, a film about Lady Thatcher that lacks the courage of its convictions is surely an irony too far?

Yet even here, some better placed than I may disagree. To return to Matthew Parris’ Times article, he makes the point that:

.. I’d have liked to see a strange contradiction that matters historically reflected more keenly. The real Thatcher was both hesitant and decisive”

Some of the more robust examinations of her period as Prime Minister might share this analysis: examination of the actions rather than the rhetoric reveals a political leader whose own application of Thatcherism was less than consistent. Iron might, as the film shows, rust, but it is also a malleable, ductile metal. That ‘iron lady’ might have been more appropriate than many of us thought at the time. There are yet more ironies. A woman who espoused action rather than debate and posturing and overcame the very real disadvantages of her gender and class might never have reached party leadership (let alone Downing Street – as she herself said publicly at the time, doubting it would ever happen) without, of all things, an image makeover provided by some very wealthy men.

There are both political and life lessons to draw from The Iron Lady if you’re so inclined: that immense resolve can be both a strength and a weakness; that faith in others can be misplaced (for all her doting on Mark, it is daughter Carol who stays loyal); that overcoming the stigma and hurdle of ‘not being one of us’ might inspire you not to apply the same treatment to others once you’ve ascended the slippery pole; that mothers and fathers experience juggling the demands of working life differently. Or even simply that glory years are, for most people, things that we live beyond – and must then live with. (There’s surely an important lesson about the importance succession planning in this life story.) Some of these lessons, however, might depend on greater knowledge of the events of Lady Thatcher’s years in Downing Street than the film will provide.

As someone who was a young undergraduate at the time of the 1979 Election and lived mostly in London working for various public sector bodies (including education quangos) during ‘the Thatcher Years’, the film only hints at a highly politicised era in recent British history. The film succeeded more for me in its portrayal of the fading of memories and the inversion of family relationships that frail old age typically bring: in parts, it’s a surprisingly sensitive film about dementia. As a portrayal of its central character, its fictionalised nature makes judgement difficult: how, in any case, am I to know how truthful it is?

Any portrayal of a public figure who has been so divisive for so long will probably always struggle to satisfy, and the fictionalisation is equally a strength (in allowing the audience to sidestep some of their preconceptions) and an evasion. I’d recommend that you see it – but see it as a magnificent acting performance. If you want to learn interesting lessons in politics, leadership or the story of a ground-breaking woman, you might be better served by the shelves of biographies that have already been published.

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Dark November brings the fog/Should not do it to a dog.
Freezing wet December, then/Bloody January again!

My own take on resolutions is probably closer in spirit to an Oscar Wilde quote – “The basis of optimism is sheer terror”. The spur to think about changing things springs predominantly from the horror of the idea of more of the same old same old. Which in turn requires a modicum of awareness that things could at the very least be different, and possibly better. Faced with thinking or feeling “Uh oh, here we go again”, one answer is to go somewhere different.

It’s a train of thought that reminds me of another quote, from a man who passed away in the final days of 2011. Profiled in last year’s ASK Journal‡ when we looked at twelve examples of people that epitomised different leadership attributes, Vaclav Havel was highlighted for his courage. Were they more frequently cited as leadership strengths, we might equally have picked his keen humour or his sense of the absurd. Having found himself President of Czechoslovakia, he was in turn found scampering between Prague Palace meeting rooms on a scooter belonging to his secretary, whereby hung a tale unlikely to be attached to any other widely admired leader:

An early profile described his secretary as “a busty hippy in a skintight, purple mini-dress, with filigreed white stockings, lace-up boots and funkily mismatched earrings”. But this, after all, was Bara Stepanova, one of the heroines of the Society for a Merrier Present, a Dadaish troupe given to posing as riot police in the November demonstrations, and threatening the crowd with cucumbers and salamis. When she produced the scooter, Havel, then still secretary-less, hired her on the spot.”

I’m not proposing that we should all emulate Havel’s recruitment strategy – or certainly until we’ve had time to acquire shares in a scooter manufacturing company – but an outlook that believes in the possibility of ‘a Merrier Present’ isn’t something to so lightly dismiss. Havel may have had a sense of the absurd, but he was hardly a man to be described as silly. Someone merely silly would not have said the following:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Think of hope as a doorstep. The optimist uses the step to launch themselves forward, the pessimist to sniff the air and assess the chance of rain. (And the realist, presumably, uses it as somewhere to store an umbrella and a map.)

But what about learning? Colleen Wilcox, Executive Director of the Alliance for Teaching, is clearly a woman who sees a doorstep as the first step of many, having once said that:

Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.”

If you ignore the gloomy Sartre quote that starts the posting, the rather alarming illustration and the ‘none darker’ colour scheme, Nick Shackleton-Jones’s recent Disruption article (on his aConventional blog) shares that optimism – and echoes my own thought about the wisdom of driving yourself away from the same old same old:

What do learning and beauty have in common? In their most essential form both are disruptive experiences. Experiences where reality crashes in upon us, disrupting our constructs, forcing us off the rails, opening us up to the possibility of being reshaped. Of course, not all learning or beauty is experienced in this way – but there is something to be learned by considering their essential character.”

I read it shortly after reading another blog in the general HR/learning arena, Rob Jones’s Masters or Bust, where Rob – a good read on pretty much any occasion – was having his own go at future gazing. I am, of course, quoting out of context (for which apologies to Rob), and his general tone is far more Opti-Mystic than Pessi-Mystic Meg, but I stubbed a mental toe on one of his points:

9. Black will be the new black
Some things will become less useful; others will be the next big thing but throughout all of this most of things that make life plod along will continue to be the things that make life plod along.”

In the greater scheme of things, I couldn’t agree more. Feeling that I’ve seen uncountable bandwagons trundle through life on their way to nowhere much isn’t a symptom of cynicism as much as of age: I’m simply old enough to have seen a lot of bandwagons. (I tried pondering them after re-reading that Havel quote and wound up thinking they all too often represent optimism without hope – shortly before I decided more tea and a couple of paracetamol was a more productive approach. I can’t know for sure they’ll cure the headache, but taking them makes sense …)

Black probably will be the new black, but in a year that it seems even the most tambourine-shakingly euphoric among us think is going to be at least slightly challenging, part of me wants to ask if a splash of colour palette might not be so bad. 2012 could turn out to be pretty grinding, and opportunities to make a difference – even if in hope rather than in full-blown optimism – feel like something that should be applauded. Still waters may well run deep, but we don’t live in still times: we live in turbulent times that might outpace us all too easily. As L&D professionals, 2012 could be a perfect year to drop some well thought-through rocks into some organisational pools – even those who don’t respond directly to some positive disruption may be able to surf a little on the ripples.

We might even try a little positive disruption of those around us. There’s an excellent article about the benefits of coaching at the New Yorker website written by a surgeon and journalist: Atul Gawande’s Personal Best: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you? Realising that even Rafa Nadal has a coach – and discovering that virtuoso violinists and singers do too, confounding his previous view that, like medicine, these were fields where training was something you completed some time ago – he hired his own to act as external eyes and ears on his own performance:

He had new pointers for me. He wanted me to let the residents struggle thirty seconds more when I asked them to help with a task. I tended to give them precise instructions as soon as progress slowed. “No, use the DeBakey forceps,” I’d say, or “Move the retractor first.” Osteen’s advice: “Get them to think.” It’s the only way people learn.”

I suddenly remembered a birthday card I’d posted this morning to a friend. As she’s a senior professional in a University School of Education, the caption had seemed light-hearted and witty:

It was a pretty tough day in the office. All the computers went down and everyone had to learn how to think for themselves all over again.”

Suddenly I wasn’t so sure it was that funny, except in ‘damn and blast the ******* machines’ sort of way’, but I could certainly see that a bit of disruption that spurs us on a little might not be such a bad thing. Or, as Atul Gawande put it:

In the past year, I’ve thought nothing of asking my hospital to spend some hundred thousand dollars to upgrade the surgical equipment I use, in the vague hope of giving me finer precision and reducing complications. Avoiding just one major complication saves, on average, fourteen thousand dollars in medical costs—not to mention harm to a human being. So it seems worth it. But the three or four hours I’ve spent with Osteen each month have almost certainly added more to my capabilities than any of this.”

So, welcome to 2012. Now make some ripples.

‡ The 2012 ASK Journal is now available, and this year’s theme is Loyal Lieutenants – those who serve other than by leading. If you’d like to receive a copy, click here.

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As a former President and Board member of the Institute For The Future, Bob Johansen should be as qualified a guide to what lies ahead as we are likely to find, drawing on four decades of experience of future casting for some of the world’s largest organisations. By its very nature, the future has always been uncertain; recently, the level of uncertainty seems to be increasing and leaders can no more be immune for anxiously wonder what it will mean for them than anyone else. Books such as Leaders Make The Future are, perhaps, only to be expected: that Johansen is one of a small number of authors essaying serious attempts to address this audience is to be welcomed.

The subject area is one where repeatedly quoting McLuhan is quite tricky, but one quote seems especially pertinent:

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.”

Extending the scopes to an attempt to understand the tools and concepts that will be required for tomorrow’s job can only ramp up the audience’s anxiety, and Johansen outlines ten skills that he identifies as key requirements for leaders in the future as he anticipates it.

As a read, the book has both strengths and weaknesses. The greatest of its strengths are its introductory outlining of potential future change drivers – diasporas, the future shape of civic society, access to food, ecosystems and ‘amplified individuals’ (the biological application of medical science and technology), and the three overarching messages outlined in the preface:

• The VUCA world of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity will get worse in the future
• The VUCA world will have both danger and opportunity
• Leaders must learn new skills in order to make a better future.”

For this reader, however, there are two important weaknesses. Firstly, that the crispness of the introductory section is not carried through into the chapters focusing on the skills that Johansen identifies: this is a book in need of re-editing to provide not so much clarity (although there is material here that could, to the book’s benefit, be cut) so much as flow. This is a book that contains many valuable nuggets and examples, but it requires the reader to undertake the mining and panning as they read.

The second is that some the ‘skills’ are either not new, or are repackaged versions of existing ideas, trends or concepts. Smart mobs, commons creativity, rapid prototyping and bio-empathy (read ‘green thinking’) are topics that have been heavily explored and promoted, in the latter case for some considerable time. While they may be fresh ideas to some rising leaders, it suggests a failure to read beyond the business pages if this is the case. Given the authors’ working milieu, it’s reasonable to assume he has a good understanding of his audience, but a more general message to read beyond the business pages and to ‘look over the hedge’ more often and more widely might then have been an important over-riding message of the book.

This is a common point to make on the ‘futurology’ genre in general. While we will all experience the same future at a ‘broad brush’ level, our specific futures – both as we experience them and as we work to create or shape them – will be more differentiated. While the emergence of green practices and corporate social responsibility have actively encouraged businesses and their leaders to consider their impact on the world around them, most leaders – and their organisations – would surely benefit from taking a longer and more analytical view of the world around them and how its changes will impact on them.

The drivers that Johansen highlights won’t only impact directly on organisations: they will also impact on individuals and on societies – the workforces and marketplaces of the same organisations. As he points out in his conclusion:

A forecast, whether or not you agree with it, is a great way to provoke thinking, which can lead to insight. In the next generation of the Internet age, everyone will know what’s new. The challenge for leaders will be to derive insight from the messiness around them and sense what’s important.”

Reading the book at the end of 2011, two years after it was written, some recent events both amplify or query some of its central points. If we look not just to the Arab World but to Greece and Italy, leaders with one view of the future have seen themselves unseated by events, and by popular pressure from those whose paradigms are fundamentally different: in their very different ways, Arabic street crowds and market traders have both acted as ‘smart mobs’ that have mobilised to achieve their desired objectives. In 2009, many hoped or believed that the world – or at least the Western, industrialised world, would quickly find ways of returning to 2007; in 2011, there is a greater understanding that we must inevitably go forward.

We also, perhaps, have a greater understanding of unforeseen or previously unconsidered impacts of events or actions. (I’m thinking not so much of the impacts of the ‘financial crisis’ as of things like Mary Portas’ review and proposals for the British High Street. E-commerce and out-of-town retail parks don’t just change the patterns of shopping and impact on retailers. High Streets have also been the traditional social core of towns: changing retail patterns have impacted on our models of civic society.) As the world around us changes, it’s not just our tools and concepts that we need to adjust; the paradigms that sit at the heart of our organisational cultures need to be reviewed too (as Chris Rogers pointed out in another recent post.)

Ultimately, like any futurology work, the book’s real significance lies not so much in the thoughts of the author (though many are valuable and informative) as in the thoughts – and actions – it invokes in its readers. Like many of the most valuable books (and not just for leaders), its merits are not in the answers that some of its readers will hope that it conveniently provides on a plate, but in the questions it inspires them to seek answers to – a sentiment I suspect its author would share.

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As the end of year reviews descend upon us, the BBC is not alone in wondering if the tumults of 2011 will mark its place in history alongside such iconic years as 1956, 1968 or 1989. The future is no more ours to see than anyone else’s, but there’s a practical and sensible rejoinder to the Beeb’s musings.

Whether these now legendary years really were significant turning points or not, life did go on afterwards – even if no-one is currently proposing documentaries about 1957, 1969 or 1990. 1957, for example, gave us the birth of the European Common Market, the launch of Sputnik I, the introduction of the S&P 500 stock market, the resignation of Anthony Eden, and the re-opening of the Suez Canal. And two Scousers called Lennon and McCartney apparently met on a bus.

1969 was even flatter: men walked on the moon, 2 computers exchanged messages over ARPAnet (later to evolve into the Internet), France withdrew from NATO, the UK abolished the death penalty, the first American troops withdrew from Saigon, the US Supreme Court ordered immediate desegregation, and Harvard University scientists announced the isolation of a single gene. Nothing to see here, move along now …

2012 will undoubtedly bring each of us new challenges to face, new situations to understand, adapt to and operate within, but if we are looking for the remarkable we should focus not on the year but on the people about to enter it.

There are two enduring elements of Christmas Day in the UK: the Queen’s Speech and a special edition of Doctor Who. Age, long service and wisdom aside – none of which we should flippantly discount, even in light entertainment – these two seemingly wholly different beings share in a common message: their belief in the ability of people to achieve remarkable things and inspire others to do likewise. As The Doctor said in one recent episode:

There’s no such thing as an ordinary human.”

Watching it, I was transported from my sofa to a business meeting some years ago where a team of external consultants from different suppliers and disciplines had been gathered to help the company in question wrestle order and direction from the jaws of apparent chaos. The company’s MD was admirably candid in his assessment of the current situation, while remaining delighted – if surprised – at the quality of the work that the team produced. To which an occupational psychologist replied (with the compassionate perception of Her Majesty or The Doctor):

But they’re people. And people do the most remarkable things, given half a chance!”

Indeed they do; the human race has been doing remarkable things for centuries, whether or not the year in question has been a historic landmark. As the working year draws to an end, you may not have an audience of over 10 million for any closing words you may feel moved to offer, but we’d suggest building on the seasonal tradition of goodwill.

Take a few moments to acknowledge the efforts of those around you, congratulate them on the remarkable things – good or small – that they have achieved and that they have helped others to achieve. And may we all welcome 2012 as an opportunity to be remarkable and encourage others to be remarkable too.

Through the years 
We all will be together,
If the Fates allow
Hang a shining star upon the highest bough
And have yourself
A merry little Christmas now.

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I also couldn’t help but think – possibly as a measure of the prevailing lack of other stimulation at the time – that it was interesting that the other strand of alchemy had somehow dropped out of the equation. To quote everyone’s favourite wise friend (Wikipedia): “In general alchemists believe in a natural and symbolic unity of humanity with the cosmos.” This spiritual and philosophical strand was an integral element of alchemy, but one that fell by the wayside as the scientific discipline of chemistry evolved and displaced its metaphorical parent.

As I toyed with one difficult decision (mince pies or tarte au chocolat), my wandering mind wondered if the evolution of HR might be following a similar ‘philosophy to science’ route. If you search this blog for ‘raw materials’ (or just click here for one we prepared earlier), we’ve been sceptical about applying a materials science approach to HR before: for instance, when we said:

Unlike chefs, artists, builders or countless other workers with an enormous variety of materials at their disposals, as managers of ‘human resources’ we face a unique challenge: handled inexpertly, insensitively or so as not to achieve the best outcome, our materials may spontaneously decline to take part in our work anymore.”

That’s not to say there’s anything fundamentally wrong with ‘the appliance of science’, just that it helps to remember what you’re applying it to. And to remember that the nature and manner of the application can be more critical to the outcome than the scientific process or method. The leap from ‘six step approach to …’ to actually doing is more complex that the written word (or flowchart, or process diagram) can lead you to believe – something memorably expressed in a Richard Thompson song, Read About Love:

I do everything I’m supposed to do
If something’s wrong, then it must be you
I know the ways of a woman
I’ve read about love
When I touch you there it’s supposed to feel nice
That’s what it said in reader’s advice”

If you insist on doing it by the book, so to speak, then pick the book very carefully, be prepared to interpret as well as implement – and possibly practice on some cartoon characters before you wrestle with flesh and blood. And remind yourself that the situation you are addressing will evolve and change over the time: despite these changes, the advice in the book will stay the same. In a demanding world, there’s an understandable comfort in something that presents itself as a simple route map to salvation, even if an inner alarm bell about gift horses and looking in their mouths ought to be ringing. (The price label on the ‘gift’ should come as a further alarm too, surely?)

Meanwhile, back with the alchemists … Am I the only one wondering quite what the obsession was with turning everything into gold? It’s not so much the lessons from King Midas I’m thinking about as much as the desirability of turning everything into just the one thing. We wrote about monocultures in the early days of this blog, but the warning – that monocultures are more vulnerable to external events – stands. The much misunderstood ‘fittest’ that Darwin taught us stand the best chance of survival are not the strongest: he meant those best adapted to changing circumstance.

Gold has many desirable qualities: it’s easily worked, highly malleable and can be beaten till it can be spread incredibly thinly. All qualities many organisations would seek in a workforce. But it’s also expensive and hugely attractive to thieves. (Shades of the talent war there, perhaps.) I understand that gold is an allegory – gold medals, gold stars, gold awards – but allegories are supposed to be supplements to understanding, not substitutes for it. Over-indulging in allegories is a route to delusion. And for too many organisations, ‘the best’ is automatically equated with leadership. We’re always going to need wise, talented and inspiring leaders, but they’re going to need something to lead.

My train of thought didn’t get much further when I switched tracks to another metal that turns up in a lot of management allegories: steel. I think what we mean by referring to steel is something like integrity, determination, resoluteness, although there are also implications of coldness and – more disquietingly – a hard rigidity. This is the age of flexibility: for all the macho appeal, steel isn’t the only thing we would want to construct an organisation or a workforce from.

Looking at most organisations, the people that comprise them need a diversity of qualities to best perform their different roles. Leaders must inspire and engage, often through storytelling: apart from their other skills and knowledge, the ability to not just communicate but motivate is essential. Finance directors need an emotional sang froid, a dispassionate calm, but they need more than enhanced numeracy: they need to be able to interpret financial data in the context of the situation. It’s not all data handling: it’s interpretation too. I might be the only one old enough to remember the Marvel Comics Metal Men series – where Platinum was always being precious in more senses than one, and Lead spent half his time in a metaphorical dunce’s hat – but even a kid’s cartoon had grasped that it was a matter of horses for courses.

Every quality has its time and place, and they can work together to complement each other’s best features. Tin may not be gold, but it still shines with a little TLC and a bit of polishing. And even where qualities are amalgamated, you don’t want everyone to be the same metaphorical alloy. The idea of the panacea is just as much a hopeful folly as the daydream of the philosopher’s stone. There’s nothing wrong in HR teams wanting their organisations to be as successful as JK Rowling but Harry Potter was a kid’s story, not a management blueprint.

Similarly, organisational life isn’t a chemistry set to play with, enjoying the sparks, explosions and the colourful smoke. Physical Sciences saw alchemy evolve into chemistry and materials science. For HR, alchemy also needs to evolve. If the 21^st century is a time for innovation, isn’t the time ripe to invent a new discipline: Human Materials Science?

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While any HR practitioners who haven’t already clicked away have no doubt started to bristle, indulge me briefly while I note some of the other objections that have been raised. Writing at the Management Information Exchange site, Luc Galoppin essays an opinion that will do nothing to unruffled HR feathers, arguing – among many other points, all worth reading – that HR is a force for continuity, not change:

HR Doesn’t Drive Organizational Change. Let’s face it: By their very nature, the fundamental HR processes are aimed at safeguarding stability. But when you ask HR managers about the core competencies of their departments, they will tell you that the management of organizational change is at the forefront. They are wrong.”

Some commentators have been even less civil on the topic.

The Critical HRM blog, for example, drew this less than tactfully delivered conclusion:

HR people are not shut out of the ‘Top Table’, they just haven’t got long enough legs to get on the chair.”

But what I hope is the ‘just being generally human’ side of me can also see a more elemental flaw in the logic of expecting to have your point taken on board because you think it’s vitally important. To someone else, there’s a fair chance that you are going to sound demanding, self-centred, or just plain needy. That’s not to say that the argument is flawed or wrong: it should be abundantly clear from the posts on this blog over the last couple of years that we firmly believe that focusing on ‘the people aspects’ is critically important. But insisting that someone ‘gets it’ might not be as effective as inviting them to, or giving them the opportunity.

There’s another time old truism that says that, wherever you might want to get to, you can only start from where you are. (And the ‘I wouldn’t start from here’ gags belong in another posting.) When it comes to HR and the top table, that’s a topic that Jim Kirkpatrick recently picked up on in The Official Kirkpatrick Blog:

My encouragement to you is to set your own table rather than waiting to be invited to the big table. Once success is achieved through your grassroots collaboration, you will likely get invited to the big table.”

Speaking of truisms, ‘nothing succeeds like success’ is pretty relevant here: in terms of getting the attention of those at higher levels of the organisational structure/food-chain, being really successful is one of the more fool-proof methods. Just be mindful that it’s only one of the steps in the more sophisticated dance known as ‘speaking their language’: as we’ve commented before, HR needs something to sell and someone to sell it to.

And, returning to that basic human level, remember that most of us invite the people who – one way or another – present an attractive proposition for doing so. The festive season might oblige us to ‘enjoy’ the company of relatives when we are tempted to jab a fork in our leg as a distraction from the pleasure, but few workplace functions are in a structural/functional position where they feel obligated to invite HR. (Some of us have read too many allegedly amusing emails about HR and office parties to feel tempted: for some of us, it would be like deciding our lives would be better if only we lived under the gaze of even more CCTV cameras.) There’s a related problem, which is another aspect of HR’s perception elsewhere in the business. An earlier post here picked up on the reader comment kerfuffle that kicked off when The Guardian published a feature article called: “HR: your friend or foe”: similar thoughts have crossed other minds too. Commenting on the possible perception of HR as they emerge from meetings in the C-Suite, Luc Gallopin mused:

[…] as they get out of that room, HR will have lost all credibility as a fallback or buffer between workforce and management. The first thing people will ask as HR is still recovering from their C-suite domination is “whose side are you on anyway?”

Singling out any particular group to be the butt of jokes is, of course, something that HR should strive to stamp out: indeed, it’s an aspect of their work where personal experience might be used to good effect. But surely it’s not the only challenge they face where their professional skills should be their advantage.

The important challenge for HR is to engage senior management to recognise the importance of ‘soft’ issues, and to see that they are not only not separate from other aspects of organisational strategy but actually integral. The location – or grandeur – of the table around which that engaging conversation takes place is, to be blunt, irrelevant. Would we really have ignored Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have A Dream Speech” if he’d delivered it outside a branch of Starbucks rather than from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? (By way of underlining that point, I had to Google to find out where he did deliver it: the message has hit home across the decades, but the physical backdrop has faded from memory. So much for iconic, eh?)

We’re not saying HR should rebrand the CEO as Santa, pin their fur-trimmed stockings on their cubicle dividers and tempt him with a mince pie and a schooner of sherry. (And the thought of all that compliance paperwork to excuse the schooner of sherry isn’t the biggest problem with that little scenario.) But – armed with their understanding of people skills and their awareness of audience, impact and communication – an informal gathering late in December where you’d be honoured to have the CEO’s presence is a more attractive proposition to them than an insistence on being invited to their meetings.

Remember that you’re addressing a small audience: unlike Dr King, 200,000 marches and a national monument aren’t required. Think more along the lines of vol au vents, relaxed professionalism and, playing in the background a propos of nothing in particular, a PowerPoint showing a clear link between HR initiatives and organisational performance. Use your ears as much as your mouths, and it might be a finer opportunity to informally and subtly get across a few messages that may get a more profitable approach snowballing into action when the New Year rolls around.

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Explaining things in ways that the unfamiliar can readily grasp is a proven pedagogic technique that I’m not decrying. But oversimplifying things so people think they’ve grasped something they’ve completed misunderstood is a different kettle of fish. It can be done comic effect, such as Alan Coren’s commentary on the density of the Belgian population –

For the same reason, the sprout was developed by Brussels agronomists, this being the largest cabbage a housewife could possibly carry through the teeming streets.”

but an awareness of the dangers of being taken seriously is a handy thing in any comedian.

If you want to make a comparison between even the largest corporation and a national economy, you might want to be aware of a barrier to entry. Paul Krugman – Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and 2008 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences – beat you to it 15 years ago. His 1996 Harvard Business Review article, A Country Is Not a Company, is now even published as a Harvard Business Review Classics paperback. (In the interests of keeping your costs down, you can read the text free online.)

Citing many counterblasts against a simplistic analogy (complexity, business and economics are different disciplines, economies are closed-systems, nation states are infinitely more diverse than even the largest corporation, the feedback loops or business and economics are fundamentally different …), it reads mostly as a talisman against hubris – a leadership malaise we’ve explored before. There’s also an element of a professional economist defending his discipline against another:

In the scientific world, the syndrome known as “great man’s disease” happens when a famous researcher in one field develops strong opinions about another field that he or she does not understand, such as a chemist who decides that he is an expert in medicine or a physicist who decides that he is an expert in cognitive science. The same syndrome is apparent in some business leaders who have been promoted to economic advisers: They have trouble accepting that they must go back to school before they can make pronouncements in a new field.

The general principles on which an economy must be run are different – not harder to understand, but different – from those that apply to a business. An executive who is thoroughly comfortable with business accounting does not automatically know how to read national income accounts, which measure different things and use different concepts. […] A business leader who wants to become an economic manager or expert must learn a new vocabulary and set of concepts, some of them unavoidably mathematical.”

Beyond Prof Krugman’s well-argued points, it’s also worth saying that a country isn’t just its economy: it’s a language, a complex web of social cultures, customs and habits, a cuisine, a cultural history … These things can’t simply be bought and sold: we might make a buck or two on it, but we can’t sell Shakespeare to the Chinese even if we can sell them books, t-shirts, open-top bus tours of Stratford-upon-Avon and so on. If the figures showed that Cornwall was under-performing, we couldn’t just put it up for sale. Nor could we merge Derbyshire with Devon, or acquire Corsica. Well, not without some stern commentary from the rest of the world. And even if Greece were to be declared officially bankrupt, the Greeks would still be – well, Greek.

It’s one of those scenarios where there’s a lot of fun to be had with the analogy. I thought about joyous flag-waving and how people spend a fortune on little plastic ensigns whenever a major international football tournament breaks out. It struck me that I couldn’t – at least offhand – think of a company whose staff would dash to a shop to spend their own money on a company flag to wave spontaneously or use as an impromptu bedspread, and how companies have to engineer that kind of thing. And then I remembered not just Nicolae Ceaucescu but also the co-ordinated planning behind the crowds that greeted Tony Blair’s first election victory. (As Buzzle.com commented in its profile of the former PM, he “not only lived in interesting times, but has stage-managed many of them too”.)

Others attempt to focus on individual aspects are just as fraught: what counts as recruitment at one level winds up as immigration at another – and then gets caught up in arguments about relative skill levels, the potential damage of applying caps and much more. I tried thinking about the national equivalent of an EVP, and got no further than thinking ‘maybe it’s be some kind of Quality of Life’ index before my head hurt. Other elements of talent management don’t fair even more smoothly: how exactly would you implement a national version of an employee engagement survey? It’s not as if you can decide that anyone not cheering on the national team will be exported, however you might feel about ‘the cricket test’.

Prof Krugman returned to his original theme in a recent New York Times article, underlining his point thus (amongst other underlinings):

[…] companies — even if they have relatively decentralized management — are top-down organizations in which people do what they’re told. Market economies are free-for-alls, in which the job of policy is largely to provide incentives to do things (and yes, that’s true even if we’re talking about monetary policy and fiscal stimulus).”

But I’ll leave the final word to the Office for National Statistics, whose Business Demography 2010 Statistical Bulletin (download as a PDF) has just been published. If watching the news – or waking up with Evan Davis – is getting you down, give a few minutes to ponder how’d you feel if the prospects for the national economy were in line with the following:

The UK five-year survival rate for businesses born in 2005 and still active in 2010 was 44.4 per cent. By region, the highest five-year survival rate was in Northern Ireland at 54.0 per cent, while the lowest was in London at 39.7 per cent. By broad industry, some notably high five-year survival rates include health with a survival rate of 58.3 per cent and education with a survival rate of 55.5 per cent. Hotels & catering was the lowest with only 33.6 per cent of businesses surviving for five years.”

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