The Five Fatal Habits: Why most organisations fail at innovation and agility with Geoff Marlow
Find the pdf here: https://www.geoffmarlow.com/resources/
The Five Fatal Habits:
Why most organisations fail at innovation and agility
with Geoff Marlow
Find the pdf here: https://www.geoffmarlow.com/resources/
Time Stamps
00:00:00 Intro
00:02:07 Habit 1 “One Best Way” Thinking
00:03:27 Habit 2 “All or Nothing” Thinking
00:05:07 Habit 3 Leadership that Creates Followers
00:05:28 Tag David Marquet https://youtu.be/a762Kcrf2B8
00:06:02 Habit 4 Wasting People’s Strengths
00:07:33 Habit 5 Hired Help that Hinders
00:09:58 Advice for Heads of Change
00:14:27 Closing Remarks
Geoff Marlowe 5 Habits
Wed, Oct 05, 2022 8:11PM • 15:19
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
organisations, fatal, people, habit, programme, consultants, hire, consulting firms, senior executives, minders, thinking, jobs, muscles, innovation, big, physics, leaders, geoff, stay, marlow
SPEAKERS
Steve Jobs, Aidan McCullen, Geoff Marlow
Steve Jobs 00:00
Stay hungry, stay foolish. Our guest today has over 35 years experience in innovation and their resistance to innovation 30 years in organisation learning where he works alongside the great Peter saying, we caught up yesterday for a call to prepare for today. And we’d slayed it in maybe 10-15 minutes, nearly two hours later, we’re still going so didn’t bode well for today. And I’m eating up time, Geoff Marlow has done amazing amount of work in this space, vast experience. And through all that experience, what he’s going to share is the five fatal flaws that consistently pop up when he sees an organisation wanting to become agile and innovative. But these flaws continually get in the way over to you, Geoff. Well, thank you Aidan. And I guess the first first flaw to mention is I call it the five fatal habits, because they are habits that we’ve adopted and taken onboard and embedded and deeply ingrained in the way we think about organisations. And this was something that I laboured over a couple of years ago, I think it was 2019 When I first published the five fatal habits, it’s a 22 page download, you can get it off my website, or maybe even a No, put a link in the show notes. And it was you know, when people ask the question, well, we all thought 30 years ago that organisational learning was going to make a huge difference. But the reality is that, you know, in our in our more kind of cynical moments, those of us who have been involved in it all those years saying he first wrote The Fifth Discipline in 1990. We sometimes in those cynical moments say that really the only lasting influences that whereas organisations used to have training and development departments. Now they have learning and development departments. But they still do the same thing as they used to do. It’s just a change of name. So I think these five fatal habits are the reasons that I see most often why organisations have not been able to build cultures of learning cultures of innovation, cultures of adaptiveness. And so without further ado, as they say, to try and keep this as short as possible, and stay within the definition of a byte. Rather than turning this into a banquet. The first fatal habit is one best way thinking. So it’s this style of thinking that says, well, we must work out what the one best way is to do this thing. Before we start out and actually do anything, don’t take any action. And of course, the problem with this is a there isn’t one best way and be by the time you’ve gone through the process of working out what you think the best way is. And you’ve decided what action to take, the world has moved on. And now it’s not the right action to take. And so but this is so deeply ingrained, it’s fundamentally part of the what was the scientific management revolution that started or that was really kind of anchored if you like in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s book scientific management, which was published in 1911, so 111 years ago, and that has permeated management thinking for so long since and there’s a book which is a biography and a history of Taylor and scientific management written by an MIT professor, which is actually called one best way. So this is the first fatal habit organisations spent a long time trying to make sense of what they should do, and then make some decisions. And by the time they get around to taking actions, it’s all too late. And if you want innovation and agility, you’ve got to get sense making decision making and action taking tightly coupled rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation. The second fatal habit, which is linked to the first fatal habit is all or nothing thinking. So this is the idea that before you actually start any kind of programme to change your, your culture, to try and make it more innovative, adaptive, agile, you’ve got to work out the whole programme, you’ve got to have a plan for the whole programme, you’ve got to have it all nailed down from soup to nuts, because only then can you reliably execute it. And the reason it links to the first fatal habit is, you know, the idea that there’s one best way Well, if there’s one best way, then you will have worked out the whole soup to nuts or you know, all or nothing, all the way through programme. And of course, this is why consulting firms, big consulting firms, have traditionally put forward ideas and said this is best practice. Because best practice implies, it’s the best way to do it. And by the way, we’ve got our programme in the can, which we can deliver for you. So this is the second site fatal habit. It’s a legacy really of the strategic planning error of the 1960s to the 1980s. And it was kind of by the 1980s, that Mintzberg was starting to say well, you know, the rise and fall of strategic planning and actually organisations do a strategy, but what they actually do in practice is to respond to the world as they encounter it. And the strategy may or may not be post hoc, rationalised certainly seen lots of organisations that would would say our strategy was define what it was they did rather than say our strategy is because they kind of were sensing the world was getting more unpredictable and uncertain. That leads us to a third fatal habit. And this is one that I think people find probably the most challenging, which is leadership that creates followers. And there’s a very deeply ingrained belief that if you’ve got leaders, you must have followers. But actually, the best leadership corrects more leaders or in fact, would say correct, a greater leadership capacity in the organisation. And in the five fatal habits, I cite a wonderful book by the US Navy Captain David Marquette, who was assigned the USS Santa Fe, which was the worst performing submarine in the US Navy. He turned that books called turn the ship around, and the subtitle is the true story of turning followers into leaders. And what he does is he creates conditions in which people come forward with their ideas and their suggestions about what to do whether to put the bad planes down 15 degrees, you know, all this sort of stuff. And he would question them. And once he was satisfied that they’ve done their thinking he would pretty much like Shawn Luc Picard on the Starship Enterprise would say, make it so fatal. Habit number four, I guess follows on from the previous three, which is wasting people’s strengths. And Peter Drucker, who is of course, the great founder of pretty much everything to do with management scholarship, really started the game off, you know, and he had a 6060 odd year career in this game. And one of the things that he really repeated again, and again, is the best organisations and he said this in various different ways, but the best organisations create conditions where people play to their strengths in such a way that their weaknesses are irrelevant. So rather than appointing people to jobs and saying, Okay, here’s the job specification, and when it comes to your performance evaluation will look at you and say, Well, you know what, Aiden, you’re pretty good at these things here. And in fact, you’re brilliant at that one there. But this thing over here, you’re not very good at. So we’re going to send you on training to do this thing that you’re not very good at. And actually you’re not really interested in. But the job spec says that you should do that. Well, Drucker was completely adamant that this was the wrong way to operate. The right way to operate is to say, Okay, if those are your strengths, there are some weaknesses that we have to compensate for, but we don’t compensate for them in you, we make sure that the team has someone in it, who loves doing that thing that you’re no good at. Because that way we compensate for each other’s weaknesses, we can’t eliminate them because we’re all fallible human beings. So this is Habit number four, it’s deeply embedded in HR practices. And as I say, it’s anchored in habit, one one best way, habit to all or nothing and habit three leadership that creates followers, which brings us on to the granddaddy. And if you like, the systemic underpinning of all the other four, which is the fatal habit five, which is hired help that hinders. And the reason that this is so much of a problem is when executives find themselves in difficulty in organisations and find themselves in challenging circumstances, the knee jerk thing that they will do is go go and hire a big consulting firm. And when they do that, that big consulting firm will sell them their best practice methodology, which as I already mentioned, is predicated on one best way and all on our think they will ensure that the senior executives continue to think of themselves as decision makers, because the worst thing for external consulting firms is if the senior executives start to engage and connect up the sensemaking in the body of their organisation with decision making, because then there would be no need for the consultants to come in and do that for them. So that reinforces the idea that senior executives are leaders, and that senior executives, therefore make the decisions. And it also reinforces the idea that people should fit into the particular jobs that the consultants have identified in their assessment that they have produced. But first of all, the reason that I think that we really the deepest reason why we don’t have innovation, agility and learning is that they are all things that you learn by doing, and they’re like muscles that you build and you only build the muscles if you do the heavy lifting. And the big consulting business model, the finders mind grinders model is predicated on senior people selling assignments. They’re the finders a few mid ranking people looking after the assignments, making sure things stay on track. And they’re the minders. And then a vast busload of junior consultants who are very bright but very inexperienced, who do all the legwork, you know, 80 hour weeks, 100 hour weeks, four or five years till they’re burnt out. And then they either leave or become if they’re lucky, or maybe unlucky. One of the Minders and those are the grinders. So the when the consultants are the ones that do the heavy lifting, if any muscles get built, they get built in the consulting firm, not in the client organisation. So in essence, that’s the kind of argument that I put together in the five favourite habits. There’s also a little bit at the end about what you might do Badgett I wouldn’t less wouldn’t leave her audience hanging like that, Jeff, because many of them do work in those consultants. Some of them are our grinders, some of them are minders. Some of them are at the top of the food chain. Many are lone wolf consultants as well, which are often as you know, well overlooked, because they are not that safe of a hire sometimes, even though they might have so much knowledge moat, so much muscle built up themselves from doing a lot of heavy lifting in organisations. But for those people who are working in the roles that would often hire people like you and I, those people who are frustrated and often get frustrated by Well, I said that, but the consultants coming in, you’re listening to them, what would you say to those people? It’s tough, it really is tough, because, you know, when you’ve got real experience, and you’ve, you’ve been down in the trenches, and you’ve, you’ve been in the battles, and you’ve seen what works, and you’ve seen what doesn’t, it is so frustrating to have these. Lucy Callaway used to call them brains on sticks. So there’s really bright people, they’ve got no muscles, because they’ve not developed any, they’ve never been in the situation before, to come in and talk to you and to take the the insights and the knowledge that you’ve had packaged up in a presentation, feed it back to the senior executive team with of course a bit of spin so they can sell the next consulting assignment. I mean, that’s the game, right? And the game is something which a lot of senior executives go into in a I think it’s semi conscious, if not an unconscious way. Because what they’re doing is they’re thinking it’s all scary stuff. And I don’t really know how to pull this off. I’ve never created this kind of culture before. But you know, what if I hire one of the big name consulting firms, you know, whether it’s McKinsey PricewaterhouseCoopers, Booz Allen, you know, BCG, Accenture, well, you know, the names, the chances are, if anything goes wrong with the programme, and because I’m not confident that I can pull it off, there’s always a chance that will go wrong. When the board says to me, why did it go wrong? I can say, well, you know, I don’t know. I mean, we hired the best guys, you know, we hired the brand leaders. And so it’s a kind of shoo in for them. And I have to tell you that usually, if I’m brought into the organisation, or have been in the past, it’s often it’s often a sort of head of department or business unit manager, or vice president who’s brought me in, and at some point, they will go and want to show me pass me under the radar of the CEO, right. And I can guarantee that seven times out of 10, I know exactly what the CEOs question is going to be. Why should I hire you? When I could hire McKinsey, or, you know, pick whoever it’s usually because because they’re clearly the brand leader. And all they say to them is if what you wanted to do was what they’re good at, which is Analysis Reporting, coming up with a really rigorous, logical argument for why you should invest in a certain thing, or really come up with a good argument that you can justify with lots of data, then why would you not hire people like that? That’s what they’ve been doing for 100 years, 96 years in Mackenzie’s case. But if what you want to do is to build a culture of innovation, agility, you must develop the muscles in your own organisation. And so that, usually at that point, they’ve kind of got why that seems most appropriate. And they kind of only wanted to kick the tires anyway, because they knew that their guy had hired someone that they wanted to hire. So yeah, it is frustrating. And a lot of people suffer from that frustration. I don’t think there’s an easy solution. I think it only it’s only aware. You know, there’s a thing in physics where there was Max Planck, who was the founding father of quantum mechanics. And one of his famous quotes is that new theories do not get accepted in physics simply because they explain phenomena better. what eventually happens is the people in charge of the physics community eventually die. And the people who take their jobs are already familiar with the new theories. And I see an increasing number of people in executive positions, who are familiar with ideas around organisational learning, innovation, agility, and so there are more receptive audience so I would say hang in there. I’ve been I’m 63 I’ve been hanging in there for 35 years. And I’m quite excited that we might just be you know, on the cusp of some big change in this area. Mind you, I’ve been excited like that before so that I get the faith. Yeah, for people who want to find out more about you I’m sure we’ll be refund again, you have multitude of articles and resources on your website. But for people that want to find them, where can they find them? Geoffmarlow.com I mean, you can see here on the screen how you do Geoffmarlow if you if you do Jeff and the American spelling, J.E, double f as a stand up comedian, this quite is quite good. But if you go down that rabbit hole, you’ll probably never come back to my website. So on the resources page on my website, there’s a few links to various things I write a weekly substack which has got a link on there, there’s some videos and stuff there. And in fact, there’s a link to download the five fatal habits also on the on the resources page, so that’s probably a good place to go and you know if we’re not connected already on LinkedIn. That’s my social media platform of choice I, I’ve got a Twitter account, but I think it was probably before the pandemic when I last did a tweet. So LinkedIn is where you find the author of the five fatal habits. Geoff Marlow, thank you for joining us. Thank you Aidan, very much for inviting me.