Recycled Bullsh-IT

I’m sure you are all fed up with the war analogies being bandied around about fighting the pandemic this year. So, here’s another one. Having used ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’ in How to Pick the Perfect PM, consider German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder’s other famous quote: “Strategy is a system of expedients”. Bit more of a head scratcher, admittedly, but bear with me.

 Most mature organisations, such as governments, become quite hide-bound over time, accreting processes, procedures, and power in the centre. This leaves them vulnerable to change, especially black swan (or bat sushi) events. They then rely on lakes of (incomplete, out-of-date, and erroneous) data sucked in and misinterpreted to come to obsolete and flawed conclusions and actions (See my rant on It’s Not Data Science). Their reaction to a major shock is either to pretend everything’s fine or start issuing micro-managing diktats from their bunker. You may have spotted some of this behaviour through the year… 

This approach rarely works. The people on the front line eventually get sick and tired of the paralysis and nonsense coming down the chain of command and do their own thing because they can see what needs doing now and have the knowledge and ability to do it. The leadershit then panics and either sacks/reprimands/flogs the rebels, or issues even more ludicrous laws or policies that make matters worse.

Going back to my gnomic quote above, a better approach is to provide:

• Clear objectives and outcomes required
• Systems of understanding and tools of change to get things done
• Talented and trained local managers with the ethos and ability to make and execute tactical decisions
• Horizontal and vertical channels of communication to allow good and bad results to be identified and fed back to other teams to stop the failing efforts and reinforce the successful practices

Local empowerment has always been part of the Inverted Leadership Pyramid approach to management. This puts the workers at the top supported by their managers and leaders to enable them to achieve their best for their customers and ultimately the organisation that they work for. Accountability and decision-making are shared, and the feedback loop is tight, with enough distributed autonomy to fix local problems rapidly.

Your own organisation may have come around to at least a partial understanding or implementation of something similar. Most of the ones that didn’t do this, haven’t made it, or won’t survive. 

Welcome to the empower-demic.

John ‘Tiers are Not Enough” Moe