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:
- Increase the power distance index by strengthening the chain of command
- Compliance or “Work to rule”
- Non compliance / Too busy
- Misunderstand
- Denial of service
- Bike shedding
- The Cucumber
- Focus on the wrong thing (cost not return) / Details about what instead of why
- Delivery of things, not value
- 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
The IT Risk Manager 
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