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 favour with a powerful stakeholder.

Unlimited “Work in Progress” in a Risk Averse Failureship Culture

Although the benefits of limiting “Work in Progress” to a sustainable level are well known, and well documented, less is said of the benefits to an individual in a risk averse failureship culture of IGNORING work in progress limits and deliberately allowing a system to be swamped with work.

Here are some of the benefits to an individual at the expense of the wider organisation of swamping a system with work in progress:

• The individual avoids accountability for delivery, or more accurately the failure to deliver on commitments, as they can always claim to be working on something of higher priority. When asked, each stakeholder will always claim that their items are higher priority than someone else.
• The individual can avoid doing things they do not want to do by claiming to be too busy.
• Being too busy avoids the need to share knowledge and skills leading to “key man dependencies“
• The individual can chose the work that benefits them the most, rather than focus on work that is most valuable to the organisation and aligned with the wider goals of the organisation.
• It makes it impossible to plan deliveries or track real progress of items. The focus is on starting things rather than completing things.
• The status of the individual is raised if others must wait for them in order to deliver a larger piece of work.
• Having too much work creates pressure to provide the individual with more resources and people, thus increasing their status which directly leads to promotions and pay rises.
• Having too much work allows individuals to hoard knowledge and withhold it from new team members creating the myth that it takes an extraordinary length of time to become effective with a system…. leading to more people and higher status.
• Being too busy means you get to say no to work you do not want to do.
• Being too busy means you are protected from your management who do not want to interfere with your work and be held accountable for your failure to deliver. Your risk averse management are afraid of being held accountable for you leaving the company.
• Being busy means autonomy and freedom.

Leaders need to address excessive work in progress if they are going to effectively risk manage in an organisation.

Addressing a swamp of excessive “Work in Progress” AT THE TEAM LEVEL

At the team level, addressing a swamp of work in progress is super easy and should take a MAXIMUM of one hour. It will take much longer than that if the team does not want to do it, often the excuse is they are too busy on important stuff that they are failing to deliver.

1. The team create a Kanban board with a queue in front of each activity.
2. The team put all the work they are currently doing on the Kanban board.
3. Where people are working on more than one item at a time, they pick one item and move the rest of the work items back to the queue in front of that item.
4. Prioritise the top few items in the Kanban board and either block the rest or move them off the kanban board and into the backlog.
5. As capacity becomes available, unblock items or pull high priority items off the backlog.

Blocked items and items in the backlog are “Not started”. Items being worked on in the system are “Work in Progress”. Completed items are “Done”. In a system that is swamped, many items are actually blocked which means they are “Not started”, however it is not possible to see which items are really “Work in Progress” and which are “Not started” (Blocked). As the items are in the system is not possible to prioritise the work easily as it is under the “control” of the system. All we do by reducing the “Work in Progress” is provide genuine transparency over whether the items in the system are actually “Work in Progress” or “Not started” (Blocked or in the backlog).

Addressing a swamp of excessive “Work in Progress” ABOVE the team level

Addressing the swamp of excessive “Work in Progress” above the team level is much more complex as it means aligning the work of all teams involved in delivering something of value to a customer. In large complex organisations, many teams may be required in order to deliver something of value to a customer. The teams will often be involved in delivering parts of investments in several different value streams. In a large complex organisation, it is easy for one or a few teams to end up with a huge amount of demand for the current period of time which leads to swamping a team. Pushy and manipulative stakeholders find it easy to push teams to take on more work than they can cope with “The manager of your sister team said it was not much work” or “I can easily spin up a team to do it for myself”. The result is a team that is swamped…. especially if the organisation has weak senior leadership who cave whenever stakeholders apply a bit of pressure.

Capacity planning is a process for limiting work in progress across an entire organisation so that no team is assigned more work than it has the capacity to finish in a period. The process is deliberately simple by design as we know we are fighting against the dispositionality of the failureship culture which wants to remain in the swamp.

1. List the candidate investments for the next quarter. Ensure that they are end to end investments that deliver value to a customer (internal or external).
2. Identify all teams required to deliver the investment. (Do not forget legal, training, business change, operations etc.). Place an “X” against each team.
3. Get each team to provide a SWAG estimate (Sweet Wild Asses Guess) in team weeks. SWAGs should take a few minutes to determine AT MOST.
4. Calculate the capacity of each team (Number of teams * Number of weeks in period * Capacity Adjustment * [100% – PercentageOfBusinessAsUsual])
5. Calculate demand on each team by summing all the SWAGs from Step 3 that are in scope
6. Compare demand with capacity (Over/Under).
7. Bring all stakeholders together to agree which items will be descoped from the next period.
8. Descope items until the demand is less than or equal to the capacity FOR ALL TEAMS!
9. Publish organisation wide backlog for the next period.
10. When stakeholders want to add items to the backlog, use the capacity plan to identify which items will not be delivered as a result.
11. At the end of the period, review the order in which items are delivered.

Capacity Plan as the “Work in Progress” Andon Cord

Applying “Work in Progress” limits at the organisation level is an exercise in creating organisational alignment. All of the stakeholders agree the best backlog for the organisation and commit to it.

Senior leaders can use the Capacity Plan as an Andon Cord. They can look at it to understand the state of the organisation, especially as it relates to whether it is swamped with “Work in progress”. From the capacity plan, leaders have transparency into the organisation’s product and delivery, and use it as a map to work out where they want to visit in GembaLand.

• Delivery of value – The investments should articulate the business value they will deliver by satisfying the needs of a customer segment. For example “Grow engagement by making it easier and quicker for repeat customers to migrate from one product to another.” Where the business value (engagement), customer segment (repeat customers) or customer need/job to be done (quicker and easier migration) are not clear, the leader can go to the Gemba and ask for clarification. If it is not clear about the value to the customer, the risk is that the investment may not deliver value.
• Parts that do not deliver value – Often the investment describes a part of a solution for a customer. For example “A teabag” instead of a “Cup of tea”. This means that the investment needs to be combined with other investments before it delivers something that satisfies the needs of a customer. (Above, “Upload customer data to database” is a tea bag as it is only part of the solution)
• Missing teams – It is difficult to spot when the owner of an investment has missed a team they need to deliver. The capacity plan does make it easier though as similar investments might need capacity from “The legal team to review contracts”, “The business change team to provide training”, “The architecture team to review designs”. When one set of investments need such teams but a similar set do not, it makes it easier for the leader to spot the missing teams. Another opportunity to visit GembaLand.
• Missing customers – In large organisations, many products and services are delivering value to internal customers. In such cases, if an internal customer is not included in the investment, then it means the product or service is being shipped to shelf and will not be generating value until the customer consumes it.
• Missing SWAG estimates – This normally means that the owner of the investment has not reached out to the owner of the team to explain what the investment is about and what they need from them. This helps leaders identify investment owners who need to improve their communication. The lack of a SWAG estimate may also indicate a huge amount of uncertainty on the part of the team as to how they are going to deliver what is required. (See Yellow team above)
• Not descope items – Often the owner of a number of investments is the same as the owner of the team. If the demand is greater than the capacity, then the investment owner needs to descope items so that the team can deliver in the period. If the investment and team owner does not descope items, there is a risk that they do not take limiting their work in progress seriously and is a strong candidate for taking on too much work and not delivering on their commitments. They are also a hot contender for running a shadow backlog. (See Blue team above)
• Increase capacity – If a team owner has more demand than capacity, they address the shortfall by increasing their capacity. If the demand is 20 team weeks of work, they increase the capacity to 20 or 21 team weeks. As with “not descoping items”, these team owners do not value limiting work in progress and are candidates for not delivering, and/or running a shadow backlog. (See Green team above)
• Not engage in prioritisation – Some investment owners (or stakeholders) do not engage in prioritisation. The consequence is that they will then try to force their investments on the teams. Senior leaders should use this behaviour to identify individuals who are putting their own personal success ahead of the success of the wider organisation. The root cause of this behaviour is sometimes due to an increased sense of importance, however it is more likely due to a performance management or reward system (bonuses) etc. that is not aligned with the goals of the organisation.
• Ignore capacity plan – Some investment owners and stakeholders ignore the capacity plan and demand that their work is done by the teams. The wrong-order-o-meter will identify these at the end of the period. It can also be used during the period, however it is better if senior leaders keep close contact with teams that have constrained capacity so that any interference can be addressed swiftly.
• Ignore order of work – Teams might ignore the order of work due to their own preference, or because they are pressured to do so by an important stakeholder. Once again the wrong-order-o-meter will help leaders spot this behaviour. However generally speaking teams tend to want to do the right thing, so if it is not a rogue stakeholder, the wrong-order-o-meter will show that teams are blocked from working on the higher priority work due to either internal or external constraints.
• Take on new work – If pressured, teams will take on new work during the period. Once again, the wrong-order-o-meter will help but it is better if senior leaders reduce the power distance index so that teams feel comfortable raising issues about stakeholders behaviour.

One of the keys to successfully limiting work in progress is to ensure that the period is a quarter or less. At the end of the quarter, the organisation can reflect on the number of investments (“Wholes”) that are delivered, and the number of parts delivered (“Each team’s contribution to an investment”). It is likely that the capacity adjustment will need to addressed, probably reduced. It will also be clear where teams are working on shadow backlogs as they will have completed work that is not within scope on the capacity plan.

This makes the capacity plan an ideal Andon cord for leaders to identify where they should go to the Gemba and possibly stop the line.

The process of knowledge work is pretty simple.

1. Decide what to build or fix.
2. Assign a person to build or fix it.
3. Provide the person with the support they need to build or fix it.
4. The person(s) builds it or fixes it.
5. 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 and support of a system, and if those people are not available, the system is at huge risk of failure, and is unable to be modified with the necessary time frame.

Two of the most likely causes of a “Key man dependency” are:

• An outside context event.
• Bad risk management.

Outside context events

In 2008, The financial crisis forced banks around the world to rapidly eject toxic derivatives businesses into “bad banks”, moth ball associated systems and reduce the development teams that supported them to minimal or zero membership. In 2010, the financial markets started to recover and the banks sought to bring the systems back on-line. The people that knew the systems were all key man dependencies. The situation was caused by events outside the control of the people managing the system, an outside context event.

Similarly, several people may leave an organisation at the same time leaving a key man dependency in their wake. Being unaware that people were unhappy and likely to leave is often a symptom of a failureship with a large power distance index. In a risk managed leadership culture, the leader should be aware of the needs and aspirations of their team, and the team should see the leader as a resource to help them find a new role either inside or outside of the organisation. This gives the leader time to resolve the potential key man dependency.

Bad risk management

In failureship cultures it is common to find systems supported by teams that contain one or more key man dependencies. Individuals hoard knowledge and experience with a system to gain personal advantage at the expense of the organisation. The advantages to the individual include, but are not limited to:

• Job security – Being known as a “key man dependency” means that a person is unlikely to be let go by an organisation.
• Money – Becoming a “key man dependency” means that a person is more valuable to an organisation and the organisation are prepared to pay a higher salary and bonus to the person.
• Status – Being known as the “go to” person to fix problems or get things done can lead to elevated status in the organisation, with senior stakeholders demanding trusted junior staff being present in important meetings simply because they are the only people “who know where the bodies are buried”.
• Promotion – Increased status leads to increased chance of promotion and ultimately more power in the organisation.
• Autonomy – Individuals who are key man dependencies are often given more autonomy as the organisation does not want to frustrate them by micromanaging them.

Without proper risk management, the dispositionality of a failureship organisation is for every individual in the organisation to become a “key man dependency”. Each individual will seek to become the only expert on a part of system, to be the “owner” of some critical component… To be the “go to” person to fix, build or enhance a particular item. An organisation with a risk averse failureship culture will focus entirely on the pursuit of value with no consideration of risk. Everyone in a failureship will be over utilized and have more work than they can do. Every task will be urgent with no time to address risk management through knowledge transfer. If Bob is the expert on component “X”, then all work on component “X” will be done by Bob, even if that means waiting for Bob to come back from holiday to fix it, build it or enhance it. Even better if Bob needs to be interrupted on holiday, thus reinforcing Bob’s status and value.

Without proper risk management, “key man dependencies” will naturally occur in an organisation with a failureship culture. Even worse, failureship cultures intentionally or unintentionally ENCOURAGE AND REWARD individuals who can establish themselves as a “key man dependency”.

Addressing “Key man dependencies” in a Risk Averse Failureship Culture

The dominant strategies for addressing “Key man dependencies” in a risk averse failureship culture are to wait for them to occur and then adopt one or more of the following strategies aimed at making sure that the individual who is a “key man dependency” does not leave the organisation:

• A senior leader explains to the person how important that they are and gives them special attention. (Increase JOB SECURITY and STATUS of the individual)
• A retention bonus is put in place to make sure the individual does not leave. (Increase MONEY). This bonus can then used by the individual to increase their package at a company they would move to thus increasing their disposition to leave the organisation as a move would permanently lock in the value of their unshared knowledge.
• A bonus is paid on the effective transfer of knowledge to other people in the organisation (Increase MONEY). The organisation has now introduced a bonus scheme to encourage people to become “key man dependencies”. Join a team, learn all the knowledge, behave badly so that the other key experts leave, receive bonus.
• The “key man dependency” is promoted. The individual is given more power and influence whilst doing the same job badly. The failureship has sent the strongest possible signal that the path to success is bad behaviour and incompetence.
• The individual is given more freedom and autonomy so that they can cause damage in another part of the organisation.

All of the intervention strategies to address “key man dependencies” in a risk averse failureship culture increase the risk of a key man dependency.

As an amusing aside, the WORST intervention I ever encountered was two decades ago. The original team who built a trading system had left the organisation leaving only two developers who understood how the whole system worked. The manager in charge of the system was one of those two developers and was post technical. Their manager pointed out that there was effectively only one developer left in the team who could make significant changes. The manager asked the developer out to lunch at an exclusive (and expensive) restaurant to explain how important the developer was to the organisation. At the end of the lunch, the manager also explained that there was no money and the developer would have to pay for their own lunch.

I leave you to your own conclusions as to whether risk averse strategies for managing “Key man dependency” will address the problem or encourage others to emerge.

Addressing “Key man dependencies” in a Risk Managed Leadership Culture

There are two concerns, first mitigating the “key man dependency” and second ensuring that “key man dependencies” do not occur in the future.

“Key man dependencies” normally arise because the organisation is risk averse, ignoring risk, and does not understand or value the mitigation of risk. The organisation seeks to push it on to another person or organisation regardless of whether that other organisation is competent to manage the risk. The most obvious example is organisations who engage consultancies with a track record of failure in a capability so that they can blame them when things go wrong.

Establish the priority of Risk

The first mitigation step is to establish the importance of key man dependency risk. The general priority of work for a team should be:

1. Support. Ensure that the system operates as expected, and fix it when it doesn’t.
2. Risk. Ensure that the system continues to operate as expected and can cope with any outage event.
3. New investments.

Support work and New investments result in visible manifestations that stakeholders and manager can see. Risk is invisible. Stand in a street in front of two hotels. One is insured and the other isn’t. Can you tell the difference? Which one would you stay in? The only way to tell the difference is actively look for the attitude towards risk management (Does the bowl of M&Ms in the dressing room have any blue ones in it?).

Managing risk needs to be a primary concern of the organisation, not just support or new investments.

Mitigating a “Key man dependency”

The first thing that needs to be assessed is whether the “Key man dependency” was created by an “Outside context event” or “Bad risk management”.

If a team was very small and grew very fast due to unprecedented demand that the organisation could not control, the cause may be considered an “outside context demand”. If the team is large and/or the situation has been allowed to occur slowly over time, then the cause is likely to be “Bad risk management”.

If the “Key man dependency” is created by an “outside context event”, then the team need to be supported to resolve the situation. It normally means that forces outside the control of the team have forced the situation on them and the team needs be empowered and supported to push back on those forces. Another indicator of “Bad risk management” is an organisation that does not control its “Work in Progress” and takes on more work than it has capacity to deliver, often in “shadow backlogs” outside of the organisation’s normal prioritisation process.

If the “Key man dependency” is created by “Bad risk management”, then a management intervention of some kind may be necessary. It indicates that one or more individuals is not experienced enough in risk management for the responsibilities they have been given.

Simply put, the difference is whether the organisation should be allowed to manage the mitigation on its own with support, or whether the mitigation should be overseen by an external responsible party.

Specific tasks, skills and knowledge

“Key man dependencies” normally refer to the importance of an individual to the organisation. They do not refer to the specific tasks, skills and responsibilities that the person needs to perform. The first step to addressing a “key man dependency” is to identify the specific tasks, skills and knowledge that the person has that no one else in the organisation has. Often perception is different from reality and although the individual is the only person known to stakeholders and senior leaders, there may be many others in the team that are not known.

The skills matrix is a powerful tool for seeing this detail.

As well as seeing the current situation, it can be used to see the impact of people leaving or being unavailable.

It is important to identify all of the skills and tasks done in the team, especially the individuals who are identified as a “Key man dependency”. As well as working on components and tasks on the system, they may have “softer” skills and activities that require someone else to acquire as well. Some of these are skill based, some experience based and some require authorisation. Most will require practice to be competent. For example:

• Engage with stakeholders. (Skill & Practice)
• Represent organisation at steering committees and forums. (Experience, Practice & Preparation)
• Prioritize backlog. (Permission)
• Present at events. (Skill, Practice & Preparation)
• Submit budget. (Know process and people, and Experience)
• Escalate issue with Senior Management. (Experience)

There are often people in the team who can do the technical things, the key man dependency occurs because the individual is seen as the interface to the team. When they are away and another member of the team presents status at a steering committee, they do a bad job because they do not know what is expected. The stakeholders and senior manager lose confidence in the teams ability and assign competence to the missing “key man dependency”. They blame the “stand in” for not being able to do the task rather than blame the “key man dependency” for not training and preparing a “stand in”.

Once the detail of the missing skills have been identified, the team can address the skills liquidity (here and here). If the issue was an “outside context problem”, the team can be left to address the mitigation of the key man dependency. If the issue was “Bad risk management”, then an external agent should mentor and monitor the organisation as the risk is mitigated. At one organisation, management started by setting the quarter end target for someone to train two other people in support. They ignored the target and were subsequently removed from the support rota. They continued to fix issues. Eventually their access to the systems was revoked and they could not fix problems directly, they were only able to answer questions by those on support.

Motivating the risk management of “Key man dependencies”

In the mid 1990s I was shocked to hear that Bill Gates had said “If only one person knows about one part of an application, I sack them because I want to have control on when that issue needs to be addressed”. (Based on my very poor memory and I cannot find a reference). The message was clear, if you become a key man dependency, you will be sacked and other people will be forced to learn about what you do immediately.

Thirty years later I understand the wisdom of the statement. Bill Gates understood the dispositionality of large organisations towards “Key man dependencies” and instigated a policy that whilst appearing to to be incredibly risky actually ensured that “Key man dependencies” did not arise in the first place.

Inspirational as Bill Gate’s approach might be, a more measured approach might be to give the “Key man dependency” three months to mitigate the risk.

A key point to understand about “Key man dependencies” is that their value to the organisation is often related to the specific context of the organisation that they work in. In other words, they are probably paid above their market worth, more than other organisation would pay them for their general levels of skill and experience. Should they move to another organisation at the elevated level, their lack of skills and experience will probably be discovered during their probation period, especially risk management skills if they move to an organisation with a “risk managed” leadership culture.

External Support

The main value of the external support is to help the organisation establish the priority of risk management. They should help the organisation push back on new requests so that the “Key man dependency” risk can be mitigated.

Given the desire to look good to stakeholders at the expense of the wider organisation, the external monitor should ensure that the “Key man dependency” risk is removed before it is removed from the organisation’s risk register. Given the desire to remove the “unnecessary” constraint of the external support, individuals may be “encouraged” to claim to have greater proficiency than they actually have. In this case, the external monitor may require someone to prove their competence in a skill or at a task in the system (Paying down technical debt on their own is a good test).

It is generally good practice for organisations to require ALL employees to have a two week holiday every year. During the holiday the employee should have no contact with colleagues at the organisation or log into any systems. Regulators enforce this on employees of Financial services firms following the Sumitomo Copper Trading scandal where a rogue trader had not had a holiday for a decade and their market manipulation was only discovered when they were taken ill.

Failureship Counter Measures

As soon as a team is asked to create or to change the way they work to pay down “Key man dependency” risk, there will be a backlash from the organisation and some of their powerful stakeholders complaining that value is being delayed. Be ready for uninformed, fearful and powerful individuals intervening to protect their favorite “key man dependency” from being forced to share.

The Andon Cord

There is no Andon Cord. Senior Leaders instead should manage the negative space.

Instead of “Familiar faces in familiar spaces”, they should expect those familiar faces to step back and allow other faces to become familiar. Rather than “Why isn’t Bob at this meeting”, it should be “Why is it only Bob that is present at this meeting? Where are the other team members?”. Look for the negative space rather than always have the same positive space. You may discover that the story is not consistent.

Encourage teams to publish their skills matrix and support them by pushing back on stakeholders if they want to address knowledge transfer concerns. Once again, look for the negative space. Which teams have not published a skills matrix?

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 top and the people at the gemba is controlled by the frozen middle. Information that is not to the advantage of the frozen middle tends to travel slowly if at all up the organisation, AND even slower down the organisation.

Organisations with a leadership culture establish mechanisms to allow effective communication from the bottom to the top, and across the organisation. The Andon cord in Lean Manufacturing is a mechanism for any individual on the Gemba to signal that the system is failing and needs to be stopped until it is moved back to safety.

Years ago at a wedding, a primary school teacher explained a problem they had with some children. The children were a nightmare in the class room but when the teacher spoke to the parent, the parents protested that their child was an angel at home and refused to believe the teacher. The only way to resolve the inconsistency was for the teacher to sneak the parents into school so that they could secretly observe the child. In a risk averse (parent-child) culture, the child might be perfectly behaved to the parent (Manager) but behave very badly when they are not observed by them. A common behaviour in organisations is for people to use the resources of the organisation to benefit their career at the expense of the organisation. A manager with one or more teams might divert resources to work on a “shadow backlog” in order to gain favour with a powerful stakeholder who should not have access to those resources. The manager controlling the resources in effect can benefit from building a stronger relationship with a powerful stakeholder (behave badly) by the misallocation of resources because the senior leadership has no visibility of the gemba. If a person on the gemba attempted to alert senior leadership of this activity, they are the only people who can see it after all, their career within the organisation would be at risk as they would not only upset their direct management, but also the manager’s powerful stakeholder. Obviously at some point the investment will be revealed to the organisation, however the goal is to hide the investment long enough so that the “sunk cost” is big enough that the next level up in the organisation cannot stop the investment without them appearing incompetent, with an organisation that is “out of control”.

Leaders need to create an “Andon Cord” so that workers at the Gemba can signal that the organisation has moved from safety and needs to stop so that it can move back to safety.

In a failureship, the most risky career move is to ignore the power distance index and either challenge your direct manager, or go above the head of your manager. Reducing the power distance index is only something that is possible from above, it is career limiting to attempt to reduce the power distance index from below. In other words, senior leaders can “Go to the Gemba” but those on the Gemba cannot alert senior leaders that they should “Go to the Gemba”.

Those people working at the Gemba are normally the closest to the customers, and as a result often have the best understanding of the customer. Once again, it is career limiting for someone at the Gemba to by-pass their direct manager if they disagree with them. The manager may want to build something for ideological, egotistical, or political reasons and ignore feedback from customers. For example, a manager in an energy company might build a coal fired power station even though the customers wants green energy, however the manager considers green energy to be “woke” due to their political beliefs.

Those working on the Gemba CANNOT REACH UP SAFELY in a risk averse failureship culture. Leadership need to reach down by collapsing the power distance index and by creating a number of “Andon Cords” so that those working at the Gemba can invite the leadership to go to the Gemba.

Next, what do “Andon Cords” look like in knowledge work?

Image from Swamp Thing 31 by Alan Moore, Rick Weitch and John Totleben.

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 leaders who have only worked in successful risk managed leadership cultures as they will not be familiar with the mind sets and behaviour that subtly create a gilded cage of ignorance for them to operate in.

An organisation with a “Risk Averse” failureship culture will resist a move to a transparent “Risk Managed” leadership culture. There are many strategies that it will deploy to thwart the new leader and move them from an adult ego state to a parent (or child) ego state. Transformation leaders need to be aware of these strategies and be ready to address them when they detect them.

Some of these strategies include:

1. Increase the power distance index by strengthening the chain of command
2. Compliance or “Work to rule”
3. Non compliance / Too busy
4. Misunderstand
5. Denial of service
6. Bike shedding
7. The Cucumber
8. Focus on the wrong thing (cost not return) / Details about what instead of why
9. Delivery of things, not value
10. Trusted advisors

None of these strategies are new. They are well understood and documented. Understanding that collapsing the power distance index as a strategy to address all of these is less well known, probably because management consultancies do not want new leaders to know their Achilles heal.

These are not distinct strategies. There are normally several in operation at any moment in time. The middle management layers are not trying to thwart the leader out of malice or bad intent. Quite the opposite, they are trying to protect (Parent ego state) the new leader (Child ego state) and do so out of genuine love and good intention. Given how well coordinated these actions are, it can appear to a new leader introducing change that there is a conspiracy where none actually exists…. they are simply encountering a risk averse failureship culture.

Increase the power distance index by strengthening the chain of command

In order to reduce confusion for a new leader, an organisation with a failureship culture will help them out by ensure they have a single, easily understood reality to operate with. They will strengthen the chain of command to ensure that “confusing” information is filtered out.

A leader in an organisation with a risk managed leadership culture understands that risk arises out of the confusion and multiple realities that exist. They seek to “make sense” (as described by Karl Weick in Managing the Unexpected and Sensemaking in Organisations) of the organisation by engaging with the multiple realities and the people who have the most detailed, accurate and unfiltered understanding of those realities…. the people at the Gemba.

The new leader needs to counter the (Parent) caring inclination of middle management to treat them as a child and empower and encourage the entire organisation to present risks and alternate realities.

For example, a project may claim success. The project may announce that a new system is in production. This is true. What is not stated in the filtered and carefully created reality is that no customers are using the system.

The new leader will need to create a sense making framework to “make sense” of the organisation so that they understand it well enough to act and see the consequences of those actions.

Alternatively, they can live a very pleasant life in the current culture, safe in the knowledge that no information will make it into the comfortable gilded cage that challenges their SAFe version of reality. Plausible deniability is the key.

Compliance or “Work to rule”

The organisation does exactly as the new leader asks. They do things EXACTLY as the new leader asks. For example, if the new leader asks for a coffee with a spoon of sugar. If the organisation only has table spoons, they will provide a table spoon of sugar in the coffee as that “is the way things are done around here”. They will not attempt to understand what the new leader is trying to achieve but rather simply interpret the request according to their context.

If a new leader asks… “How many people work in my organisation?”. They will be told the number of permanent employees. If they ask for the number of contractors, they will be told the number of contractors but not consultants. If they ask for consultants, they will be told the number of people working for consultancy companies but not software providers. If the asks for the number of people on their budget they will not be told about the people paid for by other departments, or are seconded, or are part of a maintenance contract.

The failureship organisation will answer their question accurately as they interpret it but not necessarily so that the new leader can make sense or act upon the information.

Non compliance / Too busy

EVERYONE in a failureship culture is busy. Everyone has more work than they can do, work that has been agreed and committed to with their manager. Everyone in a failureship culture works long hours and weekends. They justify their value to the organisation by being busy.

When a new leader asks for something, the organisation either fails to deliver it, delivers it badly (in production but no customers) or does not do it at all.

When the new leader asks why it hasn’t been delivered, the organisation responds that it is too busy or that it has had to deliver something else, normally something else the new leader requested.

Being too busy, having more work than they can deliver gives teams and individuals in the organisation the ability to choose what they work on, and as a result ignore doing things they do not want to do.

The new leader will eventually need to get the organisation to commit to things they can deliver. This is only possible if individuals and teams feel comfortable pushing back to their managers when new items will mean they are over capacity. This in turn is only possible if the power distance index is reduced and individuals and teams take back responsibility for their own capacity ( Child to Adult ) and the manager gives up responsibility for managing the capacity of other people ( Parent to Adult ). When all managers know that they should not assign work items to members of the team, instead they will move individuals in and out teams rather than move the work to the teams and break work in progress limits. It is an infinite game of “whack a mole” until they move from parent ego state to adult ego state.

Having too much work and responsibility means that key individuals ( it is never the whole team ) can act as dragon slayers rushing from crisis to crisis. Dragon slayers are so busy that they never have time for effective knowledge transfer so that others can put out fires or slay dragons, or address the root causes of the crises.

Too busy is addressed by limiting the work in progress for each team and individual in the organisation. That is only possible if the new leader clearly and transparently prioritizes work. The new leader will need to ensure no two work items have the same priority.

Non compliance / Mutiny

They can’t sack us all.

Individuals in the failureship might refuse to perform a task (child ego state) if a number of them do not perform it. If only one does not do something, the new leader can focus on them. If a number of them do not perform the requested task, they can feel safe that the new leader cannot address them all individually. If a number of people do not do as asked it becomes a huge sink of time and effort for a new leader, time and effort they may prefer to focus elsewhere on more positive and rewarding activities. The failureship organisation is acting passive aggressive (child ego state)

At some point, the organisation accepts the new responsibility ( child to adult ) or the new leader gives up ( adult to parent ) because they decide it is easier to do the thing themselves or cave in to the demands of the organisation position “That’s not how we do things around here”.

Misunderstand

Guardians of the Galaxy II has a wonderful scene where Yondu and Rocket ask Baby Groot to fetch the control helm for the deadly arrow weapon. Being ever so keen to please, Baby Groot fetches a number of wrong items. The deep feeling of frustration that Yondu feels is the same as any new leader asking a failureship to do something new. Eventually the new leader gives up and adopts the existing practice.

Distributed Denial of service

One of the most common ways that an organisation ensure that a new leader does not change things is to make sure they are too busy to introduce change.

An organisation with a failureship culture ensures that the new leader is buried in important meetings with leaders, peers, customers, stakeholders. The new leader will have a diary that is triple and quadruple booked for every slice of the day so that the new leader does not have time or the cognitive or emotional capacity to make sense of the organisation or plan how to make sense of it. If the new leader does not make sense of the organisation for themselves, they will have to accept the carefully curated reality that they are presented with. A new leader with three or four meetings to choose from will find it easy to pick one of them but harder to realize that they should not be in any of them, and they should be using the time to think, act or find the people they need to make sense of the organisation and create their own reality

An organisation with a failureship culture (Parent-Child) will find it particularly easy to bury a new leader in unnecessary detail as the child asks the parent to make decisions that they should make themselves, forcing the new leader to learn unnecessary detail. Unaccustomed to the new organisation, a leader from a risk managed ( adult-adult ) culture will assume that the questions they are being asked are important, especially when it is explained to them why the individual is not allowed to make the decision in the failureship culture.

Crisis Mode

Nothing distracts and engages a new leader than a crisis. In an attempt to show that they are in control and a safe pair of hands at the helm, they relish the chance to demonstrate that control and they become sucked into the detail of one or more crises.

Crises present the chance for new leaders to show have the right stuff. Crises are easy to generate in an organisation with a failureship culture because it has an entire army of dragon slayers generating dragons both large and small.

Bike shedding

Bike shedding is a great distraction technique. Focus on the unimportant stuff so that there is not enough time to discuss the important stuff. This allows the organisation to work on the important stuff without the leader needing to be involved.

It would appear on initial inspection that bike shedding would be easy to address. They simply change the agenda order for a meeting. However the way the agenda items are sold “Lost customers” and “Project Update” hides the fact the customers are not important but the project update means an extra $50million are needed. The only way the new leader can interpret the agenda is if they make sense of their own reality.

The Cucumber

Jabe Bloom’s Lean Agile Scotland talk on Cucumbers explains that cucumbers become pickled but the vinegar does not become cucumbered.

In order to see the problems in an organisation, a new leader needs to retain an outsiders view until the organisation has changed to adopt their view. This is emotionally very difficult and most leaders will adopt aspects of the failureship culture in the organisation to gain empathy and report with the organisation.

Those new leaders that do not adopt the failureship culture will find themselves surrounded by individuals (pickled) who present them with the reality that they want to see. They will carefully and discreetly filter out people that the new leader should not see.

This is why a leader with a team is likely to be more successful that a lone individual. It is harder to pickle a group of people than it is an individual.

Focus on the wrong thing (cost not return) / Details about what instead of why

All organisations have their own definition of success. Organisations with a failureship culture tend to focus on things that are built or created rather than value those things create. Where value delivered by investments is discussed it is in monetary terms like profit, revenue or cost. The problem with profit, revenue and cost is that they are very difficult to attribute directly to a specific investment and they often do not have an impact for months or years after the investment. This means that success is subjective and determined as much by the relationship between the person delivering the investment and the person holding them to account.

Investments tend to be large and strategic which are difficult to cancel or redirect with a value statement based on cost or possibility risk reduction.

Rather than discuss whether value has been delivered, the discussion will focus on the costs, status and accounting for the investment. Any attempt to address the costs and accounting will result in the new leader being sucked in to the labyrinthine processes designed to prevent any common sense understanding.

In other words, organisation with failureship cultures will drown the new leader in information about the delivery of things, with no information about the value delivered.

Trusted Advisors

Most large organisations engage with many different consultancies and trusted advisors. They can help a new leader gather insights and information about the organisation, present it in a easily consumable format (with very pretty powerpoint slides) so that the new leader can make sense of the organisation.

Trusted advisors are only valuable if they have the competence to make sense of the organisation, and they have no vested interests that distort there view of reality. At one organisation I worked, a large famous consultancy spend several months assessing the organisations ability with agile and presented their findings to the board. They recommended to the board members that one team was selected and then that one team should try Scrum. At the time of the recommendation, the organisation had several THOUSAND teams operating using Scrum. Navigating an organisation for months and failing to find a single team using Scrum demonstrated phenominal skill.

The consultancies normally have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. They will likely recommend a solution but they are unlikely to want to kill the golden goose by solving the problem so that they are no longer needed.

A new leader looking to shift an organisation from a risk averse failureship culture to a risk managed leadership culture will need to address the culture as well as the processes and the people.

Part 1 – The failureship dynamic

Part 2 – Leadership strategies to address failureship

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 will be held accountable for them. I was complaining to the business manager of the trading desk about a system I managed. The business manager stopped me and said “After three months, there is no legacy portfolio”. An organisation that has been taught NOT to officially show the leader the real problems to ensure plausible deniability for the leader (possibly by communicating only solutions) will thwart such attempts by doing exactly as they are asked to do. They adopt either the child ego state “You asked for coloured widgets, not the black and white ones”, or the parent ego state “You are asking the wrong problem, ask for the coloured widgets”. For the best interest of plausible deniability, often out of loyalty to the previous (current) regime, the organisation will make sure that the leader does not receive the information they need. The game of cat and mouse between new leaders trying to unearth actionable information and an organisation’s attempts to thwart that discovery is the subject of many classic dramas and comedies including:

• Brubaker with Robert Redford – The ultimate “Go to the Gemba” as the new warden goes into the prison as an inmate to understand what really goes on. The warden literally digs up the dead bodies in this classic movie.
• Yes Minister / Prime Minister – A British politician attempts to modernize the British Civil Service but runs afoul of Sir Humphrey and the establishment.
• Erin Brochovich – A legal assistant uncovers a conspiracy because no one initially suspects what she is digging into.
• Please add any others to the comment below.

The point being made is that this is well established problem in organisations. Leaders are thwarted because they rely on those working with them directly who are trying to protect them from the truth (Child ego state). Those working directly for the leaders ensure that the leader never encounters someone who can tell them an alternative reality to the one they are presented with. “Going to the Gemba” is not enough. The leader has to make those at the Gemba feel safe coming directly to them. They need to protect them from their management who might feel undermined that their version of reality has been undermined. To illustrate why “Going to the Gemba” is not enough, a leader in New York might decide to visit a team in London. By the time they get to London, the management of the team in London have carefully rehearsed what everyone will say to the new leader and ensured that troublesome elements are “out of the office” for the day. A comedian once joked that “The king thinks the world smells of paint because one hundred feet ahead of him a decorator is slapping paint on the wall”, in other words the King is saved from the reality of the places that he visits so that he does not have to acknowledge that reality.

“Creating a more real reality”

There are a number of things that a new leader needs to do to collapse the power distance index and address uncertainty avoidance.

1. Acknowledge that there is no single reality. A single reality only exists when that reality has been carefully curated by the organisation to hide the “dead bodies” and give you plausible deniability. If you are presented with a single coherent version of reality, you are not looking at reality. You need to start digging and protecting those who provide the truth.
2. Meet people at the Gemba in unplanned spontaneous ways. Get past orchestrated trips to the Gemba that smell of paint, and avoid “Meet the troops sessions” and “Leadership breakfasts” with carefully screened attendees. Try the following:
   • Chat to people in the coffee area next to your office ( Mark Gillett at Skype )
   • Interview EVERYONE one on one before they join ( Al-Noor Ramji at DrKW )
   • Surgery hour every evening in the bar opposite the office (JP Rangaswami at DrKW )
   • Randomly choose a desk and chat to the people you meet ( BoA Group CIO ).
3. Create a structure that provides transparency. Most risk averse organisations will evolve to a state where the “Parent” is unable to construct an actionable reality from the information provided by the “Child” organisation. As a result, a new leader who wants transparency will need to introduce a system to provide that transparency. Now it is possible that the responsibilities are so inter-twined that the leader will need to re-organize. The re-organization is not necessarily to improve delivery but rather to provide transparency. Once the leader has transparency, they may need to re-organize again to improve delivery.
4. Focus on the delivery of value. Focus on how investments satisfy needs for customers and the resulting value for the organisation. Even though some investments may be internally focused on cost reduction and risk reduction, there should be a balance which includes increasing return by focusing on customers.
5. Go to the Gemba. Once the new leader has transparency into the organization, they can go to the Gemba. Not formal pre-arranged visits that are chaperoned by a minder to ensure no information leaks, but rather impromptu visits. Walking over to the team or picking up the phone (teams/zoom) and speaking directly to the people involved, potentially with no middle management present to act as “translator”. I like Jabe Bloom’s suggestion that executive dashboards should not support decisions but rather act as “An invitation to the Gemba”.
6. Bring a team. Successful transformation leaders bring a team of people who understand how they want things done. They act as ambassadors pointing out what is expected, especially when agents of the “risk averse” culture state that something cannot be done, or is “impossible”. “Impossible” means “Impossible for me” or “I can’t do that so I’ll oppose it”. Al-Noor Ramji took a team from Swiss Bank to DrKW, and then from DrKW to Qwest. It was not his “leadership team” but rather a “team of leaders” at all levels of the organisation.

New leaders should be aware that the failureship culture will fight back. Next we will look at the Failureship culture’s counter measures.

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 culture. It also helps us understand why leaders who lead a successful leadership culture in one organisation, often fail to succeed with a failureship culture in another organisation.

In transaction analysis, there are three ego states, “adult”, “parent” and “child”. Transaction analysis helps us understand two stable sets of dynamics. (Note that this is similar to David Marquet’s leader-leader and leader-follower model in “Turn the ship around”)

Adult – Adult dynamic

The leadership dynamic is “adult – adult” where the leader and the organisation both manage the risks associated with their responsibilities and ensure that the other party has the information needed to manage the risks that they are responsible for. In an “adult-adult” relationship, the responsibilities are dynamic, often transferring between the parties or held by both in the best interests of the organisation. Whereas ownership or control of people, processes and resources are MECE (Mutually Exclusive Covers Everything), ownership of risk is NOT mutually exclusive and many parties can be held accountable for the same risk.

Parent – Child dynamic

The failureship dynamic is “parent – child” where each individual seeks to minimise the risk that they are responsible for, whilst at the same time maximise mutually exclusive (MECE) ownership and control of individuals, processes and resources. The parent takes the responsibility of the child, even when they should not, especially when the child is a teenager. The child will seek to pass the responsibility for managing the risk to the parent, even when it is inappropriate.

A parent will withhold information from a child, thinking it is in their best interest not to know about certain dangers. A child, especially a teenager, will seek to hide information from the parent in order to hide failure or gain greater freedoms. A child will hide information to avoid embarrassment. The parent will ignore that the child is hiding information to avoid having to act and to ensure that they have plausible deniability about knowing what is going on. In fact, it is possible for the child to provide information informally or unofficially to the parent so that the parent can protect themselves from the consequences AND refuse to provide the same information officially so that the child protects the parent from having to act to fulfill their responsibilities.

Rather than a controlling relationship, the parent-child dynamic is a collaboration by both parties to ensure that they do not have to fulfill their responsibilities to the wider organisation.

Stable and Unstable Relationships

Both parent-child and adult-adult relationships are stable low energy states that are easy to maintain in the long term. Adult-child and Adult-parent are unstable and require a great deal of energy to maintain by the person in the adult role. The lowest energy route to stability from Adult-child or Adult-parent is for the adult to adopt the parent or child ego state respectively.

The child-child dynamic can persist but results in failure that is visible from outside the relationship. The parent-parent dynamic results in conflict as each attempts to gain supremacy, a conflict that once again attracts the attention from outside the relationship.

A stable adult-adult dynamic (risk managed culture) can be disrupted if one of the participants goes into the child or parent ego state, thus forcing an unprepared adult into the counter role.

A stable parent-child dynamic (risk averse culture) can be disrupted if one of the participants moves into the adult ego state and remains there until the other party moves into the adult state. This requires a huge amount of energy on the part of the adult, and requires active removal of the scaffolds that the parent-child (risk-averse) culture has erected. The quickest and easiest way for the adult to remove the scaffolds is to collapse the power distance index, something that is easy for someone at the top of the power hierarchy but career threatening for someone at the bottom of the power hierarchy. One of the practices of collapsing the power distance hierarchy is “Go to the gemba” which is a core practice in many management philosophies.

Another practice is to directly address toxic belief systems within the organisation that act as scaffold to the parent-child (risk averse culture) dynamic. For example, one such toxic belief promoted by consultancies is “Never go to management with a problem, always go with a solution”. There are two particularly nasty elements to this belief. The first is that you should delay reporting a problem to management until you have a solution, one that is filtered by your capabilities and preference. The delay can reduce the options available to the manager. The second is that you focus the management on the solution and make it easier to restate success as introducing the solution rather than fixing the problem. Once again, a busy executive in parent ego state cannot then blame you if the problem is not solved. This belief restates “We need to solve this problem” to “Do you want us to implement this solution to solve this problem?”. The unwary leader can easily step into a risk averse relationship. Consultancies love this approach because they get the credit for successfully implement several solutions without solving the problem (The Golden Goose).

One way for a leader to disrupt a stable parent-child, risk averse failureship culture is to collapse the power distance index. More in the next post.

Part 2 – Leadership strategies to address failureship

Part 3 – Failureship counter measures