The Failureship Dynamic

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