One of the main strategies to avoid responsibility for delivery, and to avoid risk management of a process is to allow the system to be swamped by work, often shadow work that is not aligned to the goals of the organisation. Incompetent risk averse managers in a failureship culture engage in classic “child” behaviour of blaming stakeholders for forcing them to do more work than the system can cope with (“They made me do it, its not my fault”). In reality, it is exactly the fault of the person who allowed more work to be pushed onto the system than it can cope with in order to gain individual f ..read more

The process of knowledge work is pretty simple. Decide what to build or fix. Assign a person to build or fix it. Provide the person with the support they need to build or fix it. The person(s) builds it or fixes it. Learn, reflect, and go back to step 1. One of the key risks in knowledge work is the “Key man dependency” or “bus count”. The bus count is the number of people in the team at a bus stop that a bus would need to take out in order for the team to be unable to support the system. A “key man dependency” is where one or a very small number of individuals are vital for the development ..read more

Quality only emerges if people care. That was one of the conclusions of Robert M. Persig’s “Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintainance”. In organisations, there are two types of people. Those that care more about the organisation more than their career, and those that care more about their career than the organisation. It is clear that those who care more about their career rise faster in organisations. Between the owners at the top of the organisation and the workers at the Gemba, there is a layer of people commonly referred to as the “frozen middle”. Communication between the people at the ..read more

The best metaphor for a new leader in an organisation with a failureship culture is Doctor Who (New Leader) and his relationship with the Tardis (The organisation). Doctor Who frantically rushes around the Tardis altering controls and pulling levers, none of which has any impact and the Tardis takes Doctor Who wherever it wants him to be. Unless a new leader creates transparency to make sense of the risk averse organisation, it will simply take the leader where it wants them to be and give them the comforting illusion that they are in control. This is particularly risky for super smart new lea ..read more

When leading a failureship on the journey from a risk averse to a risk managed culture, there are two entangled parts of the culture that need to be addressed… “Uncertainty avoidance” and “Power distance index”. How these are addressed will determine whether the leader achieves the transparency they need in order to identify and address the real issues in the organisation. Any leader new to an organisation wants to find the “dead bodies” as soon as possible so that they can be rightly identified as the consequence of the previous regime. They know that after a certain period of time, they wil ..read more

One of the most profound discoveries during the study and practice of failureship has been that Eric Berne’s transaction analysis is ideally suited to understand the failureship dynamic. Whereas previously I thought the “leadership” of an organisation determined whether a leadership (risk managed) or failureship (risk averse) culture emerged, our study of failureship has revealed that it is the interaction between the leader and the organisation that determines the culture. Understanding that transaction analysis describes these interactions gives us a clue as to how to address a failureship c ..read more

Nigel Thurlow wrote a linkedIn post stating that the Kanban used in Agile Software Development is not the same as the Kanban used in manufacturing. Nigel is the most knowledgeable person I know on Kanban in manufacturing, based on his many years as a practitioner in Toyota. Nigel explains that his knowledge of the Kanban used in software is based on training software. Nigel is correct. This is my “Yes, and…” Kanban in Manufacturing As Nigel states, the purpose of Kanban in manufacturing is to ensure that supply meets the demand of customers. In front of each work station is a pile of input goo ..read more

David Snowden recently gave a Complexity Lounge talk about the new Estuarine Framework. The Estuarine Framework is starting to incorporate real options, even if its creators are unaware of the fact. If we strip away the fluff and Stevian language, the meat of the framework is the presentation of options on a consultant’s two by two grid with a Y-Axis of “energy” and an X-Axis of “time”. We are told that “C” level leaders are more likely to engage with options that have low energy and time, and high energy and time options are “Counter-factuals” as they won’t happen. Below is a screen shot of t ..read more

Sir Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police Commissioner gave a masterclass in Failureship on Newsnight. This is a link to the interview that Sir Mark Rowley shared himself on LinkedIn. Click on the photo to go to Sir Mark Rowley’s LinkedIn Post about his Newsnight Interview Sir Mark Rowley’s response to a whistleblower calling out horrific behaviour is: I’m currently building and launching a massive new team, an Anti-Corruption and Abuse Command No commitment to the results, only a commitment to action. Classic failureship response to focus on a solution rather than a deeper understanding of the pro ..read more

Thirty years ago I moved to London from the North of England. To fill my empty dance card I took night classes in short short story writing. Thirty years later the one thing we were taught that is still seared into my memory is “Show, don’t tell”. The example the teacher gave was, rather than “He was an obsessive about hygiene”, instead use “He brushed his teeth so often that he caused his gums to bleed”. It turns out “Show, don’t tell” is an effective strategy for leading change. The failureship adopt the opposite strategy… they simply tell. Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash Over a decade ago ..read more