And his childhood companion Coco.
Chris is an acclaimed culture speaker – and a decent all-around guy – but a recent LinkedIn post created one of those earworms that bounced around my head like a ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel all day.
Chris was talking about having simplified his “roadwarrior” life to the point of having duplicates of his clothes, shoes, toiletries and what sounds like a collection of Mission Impossible Ethan Hunt-style “go bag” in his closet.
His key element being simplification.
Simple as in repeatable.
Simple as in requiring the lowest amount of mental energy.
Simple as in enabling speed, dexterity, responsiveness and adaptability.
Simple as the complete opposite to the cloying, bewildering, confusing, soul-destroying, energy sapping, growth-preventing, mind-numbing way we still create our organizations and our cultures.
You know the Anti-Simple I’m talking about. Sound off if any of these moments, big or small, happen in your organization.
Email chains of Reply All where the purpose and desired outcome was lost 15 Replies ago.
Cast of hundreds in Zoom meetings that have no leader, no agenda, no synopsis and no Next Steps.
Transformation programs that are a list of To-Do’s, GANT Charts and Messaging Matrices but fail to consider the humans and human behaviours that need to change first.
Corporate Communications so dense, verbose and confusing that our employees – and our partners, vendors and customers – quit engaging and go take a long nap.
The Onboarding booklet – or Quarterly Compliance videos – that provide an exhaustive list of Verboten activities while reminding you that Permission to make any decision lies at the end of an intranet portal form that gets reviewed in triplicate.
The default reaction is to cry out “Bloody Bureaucracy” and start listing any number of government agencies and not-for-profits that have proven to be agonizing slow, prone to screwing up, massively overfunded by our hard-earned tax dollars, bloated beyond all measure, filled with nepotism and cronyism…
And that an enormous flamethrower and mass firing of thousands of those individuals is the answer.
No, its not.
<The image above is what our friends at Area.ai generate. Gotta love their spelling of Bureaucracy.>
It’s just too easy to point fingers at the people, and some people warrant that, while we blatantly ignore that, too often, it’s the environment, the processes, the culture that are to blame.
The culture that adds five steps to a process rather than seeking to remove two. The culture that promotes hiring more people because status directly correlates to department size (#2). The culture that mistakes tenure and title for influence and believes an org chart is how information and ideas flow (#3). The culture that digitizes an outdated, broken way of working rather than employing Zero-Based Thinking as the real path to Digital Transformation (#4). The culture that ignores the emotions of our people – good and bad – and seeks to understand, address and channel that energy (#5).
It's the culture piece
The solution – if I’m being simplistic – lies in answering two basic questions.
#1 - Have we made the expectations as clear, unambiguous and simple as we can?
And the kicker follow-up…
#2 - Have we made the accountability as clear, unambiguous and simple as we can?
This was the earworm that Chris set off with his LinkedIn post this morning.
Yes, we can do everything to focus on simplicity. Hack away at layers, remove barriers, furiously edit our communications, eradicate redundancy, chant efficiency, efficiency, efficiency in every social media post. These are important pursuits.
But…if we don’t put the same laser-level of energy into accountability are we any better off?
Who owns this? Who must we collaborate with? Can we justifiably ignore someone because they add unnecessary complexity? Do we understand the difference between collaboration and consensus? And which helps and which hinders us? Where does the buck stop…and where does it start?
I’m seeing so much energy being expended on efficiencies but I’m not seeing as many conversations about making accountability just as obvious and just as simple.
If your culture is ultimately about how your people behave and make decisions, is there anything more important than making accountability, not just simplicity, the real goal?
Might we be focused on entirely the wrong part of this exercise?
Could I be making this too simple myself?
My go-to earworm is ABBA’s “Money Money Money”. If there’s a more simple one than that, you gotta tell me. Now that’s bouncing around your head, you can thank me later.
References
1. The iconic Steve Jobs black turtleneck outfit was supposedly driven by Job’s desire to not spend time thinking about trivial things – like what to wear – when he had more important places to put his mental energy.
2. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini published a brilliant book that is the antidote to big, bad, bloated Bureaucracy. It’s called Humanocracy and their Bureacratic Mass Index tool is sublime…and simple.
3. The brilliant folks at Innovisor are experts in identifying and activating the true catalysts of change and transformation in any organization. The 3% of folks who are Informal Influencers and drive 90% of transformation adoption. Ignore this group at your peril.
4. Rod Banner, an old boss and dear friend, has the coolest title on LinkedIn – AI Czar – and one of the biggest brains I’ve been lucky enough to meet. Read his post about Zero-based Thinking to get a flavour of the idea.
5. Jeremy Dean, founder of Riders & Elephants, has created this beautiful tool called “The Emotional Culture Deck” – there is no simpler way to understand the emotions that are driving your leaders, your teams and your organizations than this. You have to use this tool if you aren’t already.