Breaking the one size fits all leadership myth | #36

Welcome to Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others, a podcast about inspiring leadership. We hope to bring you grounded wisdom, stories from real leaders, and leave you feeling inspired. Let's dive in.

So welcome once again to Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others.

This is a Voices of Leadership episode where a gentleman by the name of Stephen Morris, no relation to me, I hasten to add, is joining me to talk about the antidote to a one size fits all organizational models. So, Stephen, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much, Dave. No relation, as you say, no relation.

No, I forgot we met, actually. How did we meet?

It was through a connection through Rich, I think. And then since then, we've had a number of conversations.

Right, okay. And you've written this book, Leaders, Believers and Expert Deceivers, which I've started reading.

Yes.

Do you want to just a bit briefly explain to people listening who you are, what your background is, and what's led you to writing a book with that title?

Yeah, of course, of course. So as you say, I'm Stephen. I came to that through a long career in IT originally, and notably in cloud computing organizations.

I say notably because in IT historically, things have been, I suppose, relatively predictable.

If you think about computer capacity in a company, for example, you could quite easily budget for six or 12 months or whatever it is in advance, and there was some level of control.

And there are a lot of techniques and tools out there that talk to that in a cloud space where the consumer is a lot more free to use your platform, how they will. When you go home on a Friday night, what you come into on a Monday morning is inevitably going to be different to what you expected.

So there's a technical challenge in there for how you manage that, but there's a people challenge, too. How do you organize when the sort of what would normally be the structure under your feet is continually moving?

And I suppose that sort of got me very curious in about how people and organizations operate in general. And so.

So I read a ton of books, went to all the conferences, and I drank the Kool Aid, I suppose, because I got myself into a space where I believed that there was definitely a right way to lead, a right way to operate, a right way to deliver projects, and that all I had to do was tap into the person out there somewhere that knew the answer, and I was sort of golden, as it were. But then, and I'm sure we'll go more into that, someone's burst your bubble.

On this thinking, though, haven't they, somewhere along the line?

Do you get that feeling, I think it was sort of death by a thousand cuts in a way, rather than being one immediate. It wasn't so much a bang as a series of small pops.

Because if you assume that there's a standard way of going about stuff, about going about leading, for example, or delivering projects or whatever, then you see people doing completely other things, whether they're sort of autocrats or political operators or otherwise being very successful despite not doing what is supposed to be the right thing. Or you see pivotal moments in organizations being more to do with luck.

And you know when someone says, I knew that person was going to be a success when they hired them three years ago and so on, which can't possibly be true. There's a bit of luck that that person walked in at that time, was able to do that thing.

And I think more practically, I was struggling to apply methods and ideas to situations that I was facing.

So whether that be something as simple as sort of agile thinking to projects and programs where that really wasn't the right tool and it jarred and it felt like a waste of time and I shouldn't do something different.

I think these days, see if you agree with me. People are looking for the easy answer, the right answer, the quick answer.

And we've got so much at our fingertips now that we didn't have 20 years ago in terms of trying to find those answers. But as you said, actually, are we looking for something that necessarily doesn't exist?

Because what you're talking about here is everyone needs tools, everyone needs ways of making sense of the world, finding ways to do things quicker and more efficiently, etc. But that actually doesn't tell the whole picture here. I think that's what you're saying.

There's a bigger picture here than just tools and frameworks and models. There's something else beyond that which we need to consider.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that set of. Or those sort of events led me to read a lot more and dive deeper into where this stuff came from. And that's.

Yeah.

So I was trying to understand how do we get to where we've got to? Because as you say, there's tons of stuff out there, but where did that originate from in the first place?

So how did we decide as a society almost that this is the kind of leader or this is the kind of way that we should do stuff, and then sort of extending that point about what led me to write the book was beginning to read about things that we're taught as gospel, solid truths in training courses, Things like Maslow, Tuckman's stages of team development with forming, storming and so on. And Ebbinghau.

As you read about them, you discover that there actually really isn't any proof to demonstrate that they are successful or certainly not universally successful, and nor is there anything really that actively refutes them either. So that they're just opinion pieces almost that exist in the ether that have become habitual.

Ebbinghaus, just to very specifically go down that hole for a second, Ebbinghaus, which was recently talked to my son as part of a conversation about revising for exams.

So he famously came up with this idea of the forgetting curve, this idea that within a short amount of time and something like 30 minutes of list listening to something, you forget almost half of it. And there's this very sort of power law type curve thing where you lose all your knowledge.

But of course, if I'm talking to you as I am now, I'm somehow meshing with the knowledge that you already have, for example, so when I, if I say servant leadership as a phrase, you'll already have an understanding of what that thing is. You don't need to learn from fresh. So that doesn't bear much relation to what Ebbinghaus was doing.

And yet we teach that kind of thing to people to say, well, this is how knowledge works in your brain.

I suppose the straw, if there was one that broke the camel's back, was then realising that actually you can't prove any of this stuff is successful at all. So if you take okrs is normally the example I use to illustrate this.

So okrs Objectives and Key Results is a method for effectively handling objectives and outcomes in organizations.

It's very popular in the tech space, partly because Google used them for many years and many other organizations in California and so on, and they've got some good value in them. And I could talk about those for a good amount of time.

But the point is, the guy that introduced those to Google, a guy called John Dore, who wrote a book effectively about how to use okrs. The subtitle for his book effectively says, reading between the lines.

This is the reason that Google was successful and I think mentioned some others, the Gates foundation and Bono even use these things. The thing is, of course, it's impossible to know. We've got Google that used those things and we can see their success with those practices.

But there's no Google that didn't use those things. We've got no control in the experiment to say what would have happened if they hadn't.

Indeed, it could be that they would have been even more successful if they hadn't used those things. The summary of all of that is it just got me to a point of skepticism, I suppose, about.

Not necessarily about the models themselves, because all of those will have some practical capability sometimes, but our belief in them, which is where the believers thing in my title comes from, is pervasive, I think. I think.

Well, there's a number of things that you've just triggered in my brain by talking about that.

So I think what you're saying is we need, as leaders going forward, especially in the world that we're now going into, where AI is going to be massively dominant in our world going forward, and we don't fully understand the impact of that on our lives yet. So we need to have some healthy skepticism around some of the things that we are being told is gospel. I think that's what you're saying.

So a lot of people rely on a lot of mental models because human beings need mental models to make sense of the world. Whether it's Tuckman's model of team development, whether it's.

Whatever those other models you were talking about, they all have value in terms of making sense of the world. But like you said, if we just follow these things blindly without having a healthy skepticism and curiosity to challenge, when are they appropriate?

When they're not appropriate, what's the validity behind them? Is that validity based on social science? Is it based on a data set? What is it that actually gives it some degree of validity?

Because you could probably pick holes in most things if you picked hard enough. So I think what you're saying in the book is don't just believe everything without some healthy skepticism. Think behind the use of these things.

Think the right context in which to use these things.

Yeah, I think you've caught a keyword there in context, although I would say contexts in plural.

So just to go backwards before I go forwards, very briefly with Tuckman, for example, if you take that idea that we go from sort of forming to storming, norming, performing, those are the standard four things.

I've had more than one conversation with teams where they've spoken to me and said something along the lines of, well, we haven't been together very long, we haven't started storming yet, words to that effect, as if that is an expected set of rails that they're going to be on.

So it's maybe a useful conversation starter, but it's not an answer. That whole second part, albeit I laboured the point, sorry, Dave, but that whole second part is missing.

Coming back to that other point about context, I think this is one of the fundamental things that is missing from our conversations about leadership delivery and operation in organizations is, we may say context as a throwaway thing, but we aren't often taught methods and ways of discovering what the contexts are that might be playing on the situation that we're in. You see what I mean?

So if we can establish that, then maybe we can make a more, I suppose, more appropriate decision about a practice that we might bring in because we've got a sense of. Yeah, that sounds reasonable now rather than it's defaultly correct.

Yeah, I think. I mean, I remember Rich and I having conversations when we merged our businesses together and we were talking about what.

What profiling tools should we use as a business that we both are happy with and we believe have validity and they have real practical use, because our view is if they don't have a. Of validity and they don't have practical use, we're not going to use them.

And so.

And I remember Rich and I having different, different opinions on certain things. And I remember Rich challenging me on.

I won't say which one it was, but there was a particular profiling tool where he said, I'm not even sure the theory behind that is as sound as people think it is. Yeah, and I think that's the point you're making as well. You know, how old is that theory? How actually robust is that theory?

And maybe it felt like it was robust at the time, but we're in 20, 25 now. We're not in, you know, 30 years ago, 40, whenever. Whenever that thing was created.

And I think it's useful to have that healthy skepticism and curiosity to say, just because this may or may not have been deemed to be appropriate in the past doesn't mean it's fit for purpose now. Because the context, the world we live in, is rapidly changing.

And even from 10 years ago, if you think 10 years ago, to where we are now the world's a quite a different place. Making sense of the world and context is really important.

I want to get into that in a bit, but before we get there, I also wanted to ask you a question about why do you think then in the modern world, leadership and organizational development often defaults to a single model? Why do we do that?

So I cover a few thoughts about that in the book, for sure. Fundamentally, I suppose it's easier and cheaper, at least up front.

So, you know, if you just make a decision right now, then we can get on with it and great, we're gone. We're an agile company. We're going to do that. That way all of our leaders are authentic, done, can get on, and there is some validity in that.

That reduces the cognitive load on people in the team.

It's, you know, it's harder to think about multiple things and maybe you introduce some benefits in commonality of language, I suppose some other reasons. There's certainly a sort of no one ever got sacked for buying IBM kind of thing here.

This corporate cover thing of saying, well, we used Scrum to deliver our products, it wasn't our fault or whatever it might be. The more nefarious thing actually, I suppose is the size of this industry is pretty large.

So that perhaps that's not you and I, but people with a significant chunk of that revenue are very much interested in telling you that, yeah, this is the model that you should be using and we want to use that and spread that language as much as we possibly can. More practically, I think is just that there's a, a lot of people don't know.

In my list of leadership frameworks, I'm up to well over 130 now of different frameworks for leadership.

But if you go onto LinkedIn, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's either servant leadership or authentic because those are the only things really that ever get kind of talked about. So I suppose there are always lots of reasons where we might. The question, I suppose is if we do that thing, at what cost?

So is the measure of success in our organization that all of our leaders lead in the same way or that all of our projects get delivered in a certain way? You know, the classic how agile am I as a, as a leader or as a, as a program person?

But what about the actual value that comes out of the other end of this thing.

What do you mean by. What do you mean by lead in the same.

I think that's worth picking up on because obviously there's an argument, I think quite rightly, that if you're going to decide in your business, this is what leadership looks like inside our business and that should be based on your company values. It should be based on the company vision and the purpose of the company. So there's a number of things informed.

This is how we want leadership to look like in our business. Then you want to be consistent that your leaders basically marry up to those things, don't you?

But what you're not saying is you don't want a load of automatons that are all just facsimiles of each other, basically.

Yeah, that's why I kind of pick on the point of where do you want the value?

So I've seen, for example, an organization that I worked with a little while ago who had very wholeheartedly embraced servant leadership as their thing. They were absolutely convinced that that was the right thing to do.

Had kind of read the books just by the way, as an aside, people can't agree on what servant leadership is anyway, so the different books disagree. But anyway, parking that. But they'd agreed that that was the way to do things.

So the way that it was announced and talked about was that that was the way to lead and that doing anything else was effectively a failure. You must serve your teams. You must have a sort of a strong moral backbone.

These sort of things were being in the organisation, they wanted their leaders to be people of character.

This sort of stuff, which is kind of fair enough, but practically what that ended up doing for some people, and actually ironically for people that probably didn't need this in the first place, it was very successful. So it seems that used their relationship with their leader as a catalyst for success rather than as any kind of authority or instruction.

They were there to almost be part of the team in many different ways who were autonomous in the first place. They said, brilliant, you know, affirmative will carry on the way that we, you know, want to be playing.

But then you had other teams that weren't ready for that, weren't used to operating in that way. Certainly, you know, suddenly being. It's like giving the keys. If, if I gave the keys to my.

Of my car to my 13 year old, I'm sure he'd want to have a go, but he probably needs a little bit of instruction before he goes very far with it. So you've Got teams that are challenged. But then I'm observing leader behaviors saying well what do I do?

Do I step in and mentor and actually teach and tell my team what to do? But I'm not supposed to do that, am I? Because I'm now this other kind of leader in this organization.

I'm supposed to just be standing back and asking them what they think, even though I know the answer, but I've got to let them know what you know and so on.

And you get this sort of dichotomy when the, the principle of that form of leadership is taken so literally and so seriously as the way in an organization. In that case, the ex leaders got frustrated because they were watching their teams which they knew they could help fail.

Teams were getting frustrated because they were not getting the guidance which they clearly realized they needed. And of course the organization as a whole was losing out because well, that team is no longer as effective anymore.

So I mean in that group they've now talked more about different styles and so on. But this is a simple illustration of context.

I suppose to say that that that method and that approach to leadership definitely has value and has operating, has validity in circumstances, but it's not a universal, especially in an organization that's not necessarily ready for it.

That gets even more complex of course, if you're then multinational because that standard in a culture that is more reverential to leaders, for example, is even less effective because you're fighting against a national culture as well as an organizational one.

You make a good point. Because leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens inside a context, doesn't it?

That'd be a culture inside a business, that'd be the environment. And every business is different.

So take your point about if we have a business that is traditional, quite autocratic in the way it works, but realizes actually that's probably not going to serve us well going forward. We need to change the way we do the leadership inside our business.

Jumping straight to a taking that example, you've given a servant leadership approach that's not going to happen overnight. You're not going to suddenly flick a switch and you've dropped the autocratic way of doing things. You're now much more servant orientated.

That is going to take time and it's going to take learning probably some new skills, changing some mindsets which don't often change overnight either. There's a whole raft of process, learning process you've got to go through to make that a reality. And that that takes time.

You can't short Circuit that process often.

Agreed.

But the other point you made, and this is where, when Rich and I created our framework, Connected Leadership, the whole point about connected leadership is it's not a one size fits all. It's a framework to understand what good leadership looks like, but it's very much context driven.

So your point about there's a time actually to be autocratic.

There's a time and what I mean by that is there's a time when as a leader, particularly if you're a senior leader, that I need to take and use the power I need to just give people direction and tell them this is what we're doing.

Yeah, but there's also a time contextually when that's not the right thing to do, when I need to adopt a more servant orientated approach where I just empower others, I ask questions, I listen and I don't get in their way. And that's very, very context specific.

There's lots of nuance to this, which I think where you probably are railing against is the nuance in these models, which is missing sometimes. Or, or not just the nuance in the model. It's missing. It's the way they're implemented, which is where the nuance is missing.

Yeah. The way that they're implemented, the way that they're sold, which is the deceivers, by the way, in the.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

That's pointed very much at those as being the answer to things, you know, this is the way to do. But exactly as you say, if you take success of a team, let's say it's not absolutely in the hands of the leader.

Clearly there is, there's a leader, there is a team of people in flatter organisations that leadership indeed may move around within that team in any case. And even in autocratic teams, individuals will take leadership of certain components in there anyhow.

But then you have the situation that you're in, which as you say, could be one of the cultures that might exist in an organization, the kind of customer that you're facing off against right now, what's happening in the economy. And the list goes on almost endlessly. So back to your question earlier about why people do it in that sort of world.

Of course it's easier to just say that all of our leaders work in this way. You approach situations in this way because cognitively that's an easy thing to do and you can kind of tick the box.

I suppose the alternative of trying to understand layers of that other stuff that are going on so that you make more contextual choices is clearly of more work. But the argument that I try to make in the book, and as I say, it's not just leadership, it's across delivery and operations and so on as well.

Choosing the wrong thing, acknowledging that it's difficult to know whether or not you were right anyway, but choosing something which is, to your point, a very autocratic style in a very creative space, or the opposite, the building is on the fire. So let's sit down and have a chat about what we're going to do tomorrow. You know, clearly that's wrong.

So spending a little bit of time understanding those contexts and making a better decision is effectively what I argue for in the book.

So let's move this conversation on from We've talked about why one size fits all is potential problem. We understand why people do it, but actually it probably there isn't a quick answer to a lot of these things anyway.

Let's talk about sense making in context. So if it's not one size fits all and you're making a good case for actually it shouldn't be that, what should leaders be doing instead then?

So what's the sort of approach that leaders need to take going forward?

So if I answer that or start with an analogy, I suppose I'm a fairly keen gardener outside of other things. And in my shed I've got a large collection of different tools for different tasks, but I've also got, I suppose, enough understanding of the.

The garden to know when to use certain tools for certain jobs. So, yeah, I'm certainly not going to use a spade for absolutely everything. And that's a bit of a childish example, but you get the.

I get the point you're making. Yeah.

So the. Almost all lead. Well, leaders generally, people generally likewise have a tool for, sorry, a shed full of tools.

They've got things that they can use and apply.

The bit that we, I think we don't get taught enough about and credit with enough value in an organization is discovering what the task is so that you can deploy the kind of right kind of tool, as it were.

Expand that a bit. What do you mean by.

So if you think about.

Go back to my equation thing, that rough thing I gave a second ago of saying that sort of value is this combination of a leader, a team and a situation that you're in. There are contexts which are going to affect the leader, the team and the situation that you're in.

And they can be anything from a leader being asked to deliver in a way that they're not comfortable with or have no experience in a team being affected by the dispositions of the leader, by the kind of customer that they're working with, their relationship with senior leadership and other leaders in the organization, the relationships between people.

You know, no leadership framework out there legislates for a member of the team getting into a relationship with another member of the team and the ramifications that that has, for example. And then the situation itself can be broadly just about anything. That's the marketplace and so on.

So all of what I'm describing there is a very complicated picture. In aggregate, it probably is very complex. That is, you can't apply just a template or a recipe over that and know you're going to get a success.

You've got to be able to sort of adapt and flow with what's there. But I think if I speak to people in a.

Say, if that's the situation that's sort of going on around you, what tools have you got in your pocket to work out what it is that's going on here?

Yeah, I think so.

Rich and I have talked on our podcast before about stop thinking of your organization as a machine, where you can press a few buttons and some predictable outcomes happen. Organizations are not like machines a lot of the time, but there may be parts of our processes that are quite mechanized.

But if you think of your whole organization as an ecosystem, and it's very complex. Ecosystems are very, very complex. Our bodies are ecosystem or gardens to take your energy. Our ecosystems, yes. And they're very complex ecosystems.

And the human body, even just the human brain, is a complex ecosystem. A garden is actually, although it looks quite anodyne from the outside, is a very, very complex ecosystem.

So I think what you're saying here, correct me if I'm wrong, is one of the key things for leaders is to step back, stop looking for just tools, just processes, just methodologies on their own, and spend a bit more time understanding the context in which you're using them. And those, those will be complex systems. So it's not, it's not necessarily an easy job to do as it, it takes a bit of. Take a step back, think.

Am I on the right lines where you're coming from?

Yeah, absolutely. So let me give you, I'll give you an example of something that I've been using for years. So one of the sense making tools.

So we should talk more about sense making in.

Yeah, yeah.

As a thing anyhow, and perhaps come back to that in a minute. But. So one of the tools, one of the sense making tools that I use Often is a thing called Cynefin.

Yes.

Which is spelled, if anyone wants to look it up, C, Y, N, E, F, I, N. It was created by a guy called Dave Snowden and a well recommended person to follow and read some of his work.

So Cynefin is a tool that he created to effectively help discover situational context, I suppose, the kind of the disposition of the environment that you're working in. Yeah, it's based broadly on a sort of natural sciences sort of idea. Sorry, I say natural sciences.

I mean the sort of states of matter idea where you've got things in your organization or things in your project which are solids, where it's very predictable and you can nail those things down with very efficient process through to things which are gases which you're very unlikely to strike gold if you apply a standard template. You really need to be very experimental and very adaptive at that end.

It's quite a good analogy actually. If I had to think of your business, isn't it as having those states of matter? Actually I quite like that.

I think this is a point we need to come back to, is that businesses are all of those things all of the time in lesser or greater degrees.

So as an example with Cynefin, if you take a project, for example, that I've done, and it wasn't a particularly deep one, it was about the change of a company intranet from where it was to some new thing. Yeah, we've clearly got some tasks to do on that, ranging from choices of vendors through to technical decisions about features, through to timing.

You can quite easily create a long list of things rather than just take those things and stick them into a project plan and say go either in a very agile way or a more of a waterfall, predictable, top down sort of thing.

Instead, we spent some time with the various teams involved using Cynefin to understand that environment better and map out some of the tasks that we understood using Cynefin. So what you end up with, as I say, is you end up with all of it in all of them.

So each of the teams had a picture where they had some things which were more predictable and less. And then another team will have a slightly different one that encouraged some conversation to understand why people put things where they were.

And we broadly ended up with a consensus sort of picture to say this is basically how we think this project would look, this is how it is disposed. In that case, a good percentage of it was effectively fairly simplistic, fairly predictable stuff.

So it made a good deal of sense therefore to major waterfall style project approach to deliver that project. There were a few bits that were a lot more complex.

Complex being that you don't actually know what's going to happen until you've done it and you don't really know the cause of events. So a few of those things needed separate spun up projects.

The point that I'm trying to illustrate through that and the use of this tool is rather than sort of starting with a, we're an organization that uses waterfall, let's say, or we use agile or whatever. Now what's the question? We're using that sort of sense making exercise to start with a. So what's the question?

And therefore what's the best answer that we know about? And back to context.

Of course there are questions in that if you do something like that, but then you discover that in your organization you don't have anybody that's very good at running projects in a very agile way. Why would you adopt that practice in the first place anyway?

So context comes in at sort of different, different angles but there are lots of tools like that out there that help you look at different kinds of contexts.

So, so it's interesting this, because in, you know, you probably experienced this with the people you work with. We certainly experience it as well.

We're, we're in a world now where people are quite time poor, they've got huge amounts on their plate, often feel a bit overwhelmed and we just need to get a tool or a model or a methodology and we need to apply it to the problems we've got and crack on. Y and that's quite an operational way of thinking. What you're advocating is, hang on a minute guys, that may not work.

You need to step back, you need to prioritize some time which you're saying you're time poor, but you need to prioritize some time to make sense of the environment and the context that you're working in to then choose the right way forward. It's almost like I'm going back a step to go three steps forward.

And in the current climate where people are so time poor and looking for quick answers, there's almost like a dichotomy here, isn't it actually?

How do we get people to understand that good leadership is about making sense of your environment and really doing some work to understand context to then choose the right way forward? Because I don't think that's how businesses that we work with often operate.

No, and this is kind of, this is the challenge because I would certainly assert, and I can demonstrate with some of the projects and the teams that I've worked with that spending some time thinking about context up front prevented significant waste.

Yeah, yeah.

Effectively. Because back to my garden analogy, I haven't gone to dig a hole with a hammer.

I've gone out there with something that's appropriate for the task at hand.

Can you quantify the waste that there's the waste that you saved with those types of. Have you been to Sort of.

Because obviously senior people, particularly if you say it's going to save you 3 million quid, they're going to listen, aren't they? It's going to save you 20 grand. They might not list and I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. And so the cards on the table, that's where this is really difficult.

Back to a point that I made earlier about saying that the Google example with okrs, we don't know what that organization would have been if it had done something else. And there's no absolute way of knowing. What I can do though is illustrate with examples.

So one team for example, and I've spoken quite a bit about agile in here, but a team that I worked with a little while ago were.

So it was a project team that were under pressure because the distinction between project outcomes, this is a team of project managers as effectively doing the same kind of client projects but the distinction between those projects in terms of the cost and time had a very high variability to the order of sort of millions of dollars difference between Project Manager A and Project Manager B, for example. Oh, right, okay.

Yeah.

And there was a thrown out question which was well hang on a minute, why aren't those. Unfortunately it came from quite an autocratic place in the first place of fix the people that aren't doing as well as the other people please.

And the person that came to me that started the conversation said we've heard a bit about this Agile stuff, we think it might be able to help and effectively.

The brief on the table was come and teach us some stuff about Agile and help our project managers use agility and particularly in this case this was a company using Scrum help us use that in this circumstance. And I managed to say, well almost humor me, let's do one workshop together first before we do any of that and just spend a few hours together.

What we did is it's sort of Cynefin inspired but it was based more on we created our own framework or I created my own framework for this where I had if you imagine a sort of an X and Y axis of the cost on one and volatility on the other.

And then we did a similar sort of exercise that I was talking about earlier, but to plot the kind of the core tasks that existed within these projects onto that. So some things didn't cost very much money if they went wrong and weren't very volatile either. So they were brilliant.

We can put those in a box this afternoon. And then there were other things which were obviously very volatile and very cost problematic if things went wrong.

And this is why I cite it as an example, because for all of those things in the sort of very easy box, what we would have done was immediately put overhead on every single one of those tasks by applying agile practices to them, including them in regular conversations, regularly checking in on them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Consistent or continuously planning would have cost us an amount of effort over there.

But then at the other end of the scale, for things that were truly volatile, that Scrum based approach would also have been inappropriate because Scrum is based on the idea that you've got an understanding of where you want to get to and you iterate towards the thing that you're trying to get to. It doesn't work very well when the thing you're trying to get to changes. True volatility is out there.

So what the team were therefore able to do after that session was for all of those sort of more straightforward tasks, they were locked down and proceduralized both in terms of practice and also in terms of training and onboarding. So this is how we do these ones when we know that we do those those ways. And then we used different practices for other things.

So more regular sort of sensing conversations for the more volatile things at the other end. So can I tell you that that was better than using Scrum across all of their programs? I'm.

I'm very confident that it is, but I haven't got another organization with exactly the same people. I haven't got a wormhole to go back and say, no, no, no, use Scrum and let's then let's compare the two.

But I'm absolutely certain that that team was about to bulldoze straight into a ton of waste for a high percentage of their workload because they wanted to sort of follow a trend.

Yeah, yeah. And because they hadn't thought about taking some step back to understand the context and make sense of the context as much as they needed to.

And that's the point you're making in the book, isn't it?

I think the point you're making on this podcast is actually we need to prioritize time for sense making and understanding context, and we don't do enough of that.

But just to be clear, for that particular client that I was working with, I charged four hours of my time to facilitate that session, to create and facilitate that session.

So when you talk about people being time poor, okay, we had to have the whole team together for a couple of hours in that workshop, but the resulting actions out of the back of that easily paid for that amount of time for me and for that team to run through that exercise. I would sort of say the other way. If you're time poor, then classic challenge, isn't it?

But if you're time poor, you want to be making better decisions. You want to be making decisions where you've got a good sense that that's the right direction to travel in.

And that's where these sense making tools, I think, really, really earn their money.

Have you got another sense? Make it so I like. I like the Welsh sounding tough again. How did you spell it?

How did you pronounce. Sorry. It means habitat in Welsh. That's why you chose the name. So basically it's like homes, you know, you've got different. Yeah, different homes.

That's the idea.

I like the idea of that and the analogy you gave around solids and one ending gas at the other end. I like the way of thinking about your business.

Have you got another tool that you talk about in the book that you can also bring this to life with that's involved in sensing sense making in context?

Yeah. So another that I've used quite often is so another name in the world of sense making beyond Dave Snowden is a lady called Cynthia Kurtz.

She's written a lot about this and she did a lot of work. So did Dave Snowden, actually. I think they worked together for a while on stories.

So collecting data in the form of stories in organizations and so on. So there are probably two quick answer or two quick examples. The stories thing for a start.

I've used that method several times where you ask effectively open, clean questions of audiences about how they made decisions.

So if you imagine like a user community or something for a product, you might ask them to, for example, plot how they made certain decisions or how they answered certain questions on a triangle where you've got sort of the three options in the corners and they can sort of move their answer to different places to collect some sort of statistical view, but then invite them to just provide a few sentences of narrative to describe that sort of thing. We sort of Know this already from user research anyway. But if one person just says this is how I use the product, that's one thing.

But if you've got a hundred of those sort of stories about how people are operating, how people are working, then there is insight within that, especially if you then talk to different communities about what, what you've got. So frames like that as far, those are very much created by you.

But as a model that Kurt's put together, another one that I've used is a thing called Confluence.

I think it comes from her book of the same name, which is a fascinating read anyhow, that provides a lens where you're looking at organizations in terms of fixed and sort of movable parts. So if you think about a city, it's probably the easiest example.

Within a city you've got an amount of infrastructure there, which is the buildings, the roads, all of those sort of things.

And then you've got the significantly less fixed things like the people that are walking around that city and the behaviors of people that are walking around that city and operating.

Clearly though, over time, if you don't continue to invest and work on the infrastructure, those parts sometimes will collapse and will change and the way that people use the city will change over time and so on.

But if you apply that same sort of visual as it were, and run an exercise thinking about how an organization is operating, that can help you make a decision sometimes about which parts of your organization are fixed and absolutely solid infrastructure that we need to kind of control and make sure are solid and fundamental and which things that we are going to acknowledge will move around and understand in our kind of an organization.

It's somewhat difficult in a way to describe those in that sort of openly, but hopefully I've begun to illustrate the point that the analogy that I sometimes use is that you can't play chess without a board.

And all of these things, whether Cynefin, Confluence, Dervin's sense making model, Gary Klein's naturalistic decision making stuff, and all of these other things, even in fact for that something like Tuckman for example, may be a useful sense making tool where you can have a conversation about a team. All that these things are doing is helping you to have some sort of useful conversation about what's going on for you.

The bit I think that we need to develop in leadership is helping leaders to understand that these tools exist and when you might use them. So if I'm leading a team, I've got a library of these things and I'll go to them when I need Them and it's very easy.

But I been taught how to use them and I've been using them for a while. Many of the leaders I work with, they unfortunately don't have that yet. Experience yet. And I'd like to do something about that.

Yeah, I think you're very much. Your thought process there is very much aligned to how rich and I see things is that. And it goes back to your analogy about the garden shed.

You know, in your garden shed, you're a keen gardener, you've got a whole raft of power tools, hand tools, you know, whatever it might be that you use. Leadership is like that. You should have a range of tools, whatever that range looks like, and you should use them situationally, appropriately.

But to do that you've got to spend some time understanding and making sense of the context and the situation in which you're using them totally.

And you can extend that as well with. I'm not trying to say that anything I'm talking about here is new or sort of unusual to human beings. We make sense naturally.

You know, you get lost in a city, you use queues and so on, and you talk to people to work out what it is that's going on around you. I think the thing is we don't do it.

It's fairly rare that I see it being done sort of consciously in an organization where we say, hang on a minute, let's just step back a minute to use your phrase, and then let's have a look at this thing before we jump in with both feet.

And you know what, what resonates with me on this? I'm thinking of some of the things I've done in my own life in recent years.

But I found myself more in recent years using my natural curiosity, which has been in me since I was a child, to almost like actually challenge what I think I know. And actually, what is it not? Is it not? What is it I know because I kind of know what I know, if that makes sense.

What is it I don't know, or I think I know, but might be wrong.

It's almost like I. I'm almost permanently now challenging myself to think there's got to be stuff I don't know, or I've got stuff I think I know, but I got it wrong. So I'm actually. So this, this kind of sense making and understanding, context bearing in mind the world around me is rapidly changing.

That to me, I've done more and more of that as the years have gone on. Not in my private life as well as My professional life as well. And I don't again, do people do enough of that?

Are we taking time to step back and think? Actually, yeah. What is it I don't know that I'd like to know more about. What is it I think I know that I may have got wrong.

There's definitely always power in reflection. And indeed so to bring that to sense making for a second, another name that people really should look up is Carl Weick.

W E I C K. So he's probably labeled as one of the parents alongside Snowden and Kurtz and Dervin, other people I've mentioned. One of my favorite sentences of his, which is a beautiful thing, is how can I know what I think until I see what I say? And it's one of those things.

I had to sort of sit and think about it for a little while. But the how we make how humans make sense of the world is directly linked to effectively the actions that we take.

So as I'm talking to you now, both of us will come out of this conversation with a slightly different perception of the world because our sense has been slightly shifted by the discourse that we've had in the first place. Yeah, but the probably more profound thing that he said was to me was the fact that sense making never starts.

Because wherever you are, you're making sense of a long chain of previous sense making, as it were, on what it is that's going on around you. A long way of getting around. To answer your question, how much time do we spent consciously doing that? Probably very little.

Consciously trying to think about what's happened to us and so on and so on. Maybe there's less of that. But humans can't avoid making sense of the things that are happening around them. It's just programmed to do that.

We need to make sense of the world around us to operate, don't we? There's a lovely affirmation on the back of your book. We live in a very content driven world now, don't we?

Everyone's trying to create content, push content out. And this affirmation on your book, it says it's a compelling read. This book brilliantly demonstrates that context matters more than content.

Through engaging examples and stories, Stephen articulates complex and often misunderstood ideas with humor and clarity.

But that point about context mattering more than content almost seems to be anathema to what's actually going on out there in the world where content seems to be king. And actually context is getting forgotten completely.

If I may an indulgence, I suppose I just like to talk a little bit about Vuca if I could, because it's one of my hated things. But that's another one of those things that you can kind of throw a dice and you guarantee on LinkedIn you'll see something about Vuca somewhere.

But Vuca, so Vuca was something that was developed in the 80s by the US Army War College, I think, and it's a collection of terms, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous to effectively invite sense making, which of course I'm going to advocate all day. And I'm going to say that's the thing, the thing that you definitely should do.

Because if you take Vuca for a second, I would argue very strongly that you would use a different response for something that's volatile than something that's ambiguous or a different. And so on. So you might try to think of a good example for you of what I mean by that.

So in a complex situation, you're really in the world of experiments. So you need to be trying things to see what it is that might happen.

Where in a volatile space, your actions are probably more protectionist because you're trying to maintain what you might have already. Or in ambiguity, for example, you might be more interested in ambiguity. You might just wait and see what happens.

That's a very different strategy, is basically the point that I'm making, but to the point about content. The way that Vuca is used in conversation is it's often used as a threat.

Your organization need to adopt this kind of leadership or this kind of practice. Because we're in a VUCA world. No, we're not. We're in a world that contains all sorts of contexts.

And as we've talked about several times on here, applying one response to a world which is full of context is only going to disadvantage you if you're going somewhere. You know, when you go on holiday, you pack differently depending on your destination. Why on earth don't we do that more in an organization?

Yeah.

So saying that's all Vuca is madness to me.

It's interesting you mentioned the Vuca thing because I recently did a podcast where I spoke to Ann Herman, who heads up the Herman International organization where whole brain thinking comes from. A fascinating podcast to listen to. She, she makes some really brilliant points in that podcast and she said actually Vuca is a bit old hat now.

There's more up to date frameworks. And she talked about one which is called, she called Bani, which is brittle, anxious, non linear and incomprehensible.

She said that's much more how the world is now than the Vuca thing was of its time, but actually the world's moved on. But like you say, all of these things are just another way of making sense of what the hell's going on around us.

But I would say with bani or rupt. That's another one.

Yeah.

With all of those things, maybe that's an invitation to anybody that listens to this. Is that always remember that there's at least one other letter in front of or beyond those, which is.

It's predictable and I know what's going to happen, so we don't need to worry about all of that stuff. You know, it's that classic thing. You know, we have wartime prime ministers and peacetime prime ministers. Not everything is rupt.

Not everything is vuca, especially to use them as a noun like that. To say that a thing is Vuca. No, it's not. That's so lazy. It's easy.

And when the very sharp suited consultant is on the stage trying to sell you something, it sounds great, but how does it really help you if you then transform your whole organization into something which is now context independent? It doesn't care about context. We just work like this.

Yeah. So I think, I mean, we could talk for hours on this, but I'm gonna have to wrap the butt the podcast up.

Of course.

But before we get on to your sort of practical lessons and reflections, where can people find out more about you and the work you do? Where can they get a copy of your book? Because I think the book's really worth reading.

Thank you. The easiest place is just on my website. So it's Stephen with a ph emorris.com.

so if you just go there, there is various articles and bits and pieces and you can find the links to the book. You can listen to it for free on there as well, if you choose to. So that's probably the easiest place to find me. Go there.

Or just search for Stephen e. Morris on LinkedIn and find me that way.

And you can buy the book from Amazon, because I did.

Yes, you can.

Leaders, Believers and Expert Deceivers by Stephen E. Morris is available. It's all good bookshops as well. I hope it is.

So. Yes and no. So things like Waterstones and places like that will carry it, but you're unlikely to find it in your local Tesco's. So online is the way.

Just because I've got the opportunity to say so, I'm Stephen E. Morris, just because otherwise I'm the drummer in new order. Stephen Morris is That person. So it was just. It sounds pretentious, but I'm just trying to make it easier to find me, which is maybe pretentious.

I don't know.

That's.

Different conversation.

Different conversation.

So just as a sort of final reflection for listeners listening to this podcast today, what's the one thing they could do tomorrow to start to understand their context better and make better sense of the world that they're operating in?

So probably the first thing is to be curious, maybe just as simple as that, to say the world that you're living in is more than one context and those contexts are shifting all of the time.

I talk about 15 different types of context in the book, but that and some of the sense making stuff is very academic at times, which makes it quite difficult maybe to get into. The main point is that I'm trying to get across with the book is that there definitely isn't an absolute right answer to this stuff.

Especially when a salesperson is in front of you saying that if you take our thing, then you're going to be successful and that's the end of the conversation. Hopefully this and through the book and otherwise, this conversation might just inspire you to ask some questions.

Talk to me about how these methods have been useful in my context. What do you actually understand about my context? And so on and so on and so on might be useful.

The second more practical thing is that there's probably just the importance of conversation and the importance of diversity of thinking and idea in conversation.

No matter who you are, you've got a probably fairly set view of what the world looks like, which has been built through the many years that have brought you to this point. But so is everybody else in that room.

Every single person you're talking to has a completely different journey with different ideas and different whatevers and whatevers.

There is some real gold in sharing and comparing those sort of experiences and those ideas and sense making templates effectively help you to do that.

Yeah, I think it's a brilliant, brilliant final thought. I mean, there's no doubt that the best leaders are humble, they're curious and they're adaptable. I'm sure you agree with me on that.

So this has been a fascinating conversation. I also think, you know, for people out there listening to this thinking, I'm looking for the right answer.

Yeah, there are things out there that can help you, but what does your own intuition tell? You know, we don't sometimes put enough store on intuition. That's a whole different topic for another podcast.

But actually trust your intuition sometimes, you know, what is it that your, your gut is telling you? Yeah, totally.

More data doesn't mean better decisions.

No, no, absolutely. So, Stephen, thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.

I like conversations that, you know, stir the ocean up a little bit and get us thinking in a different way.

And I, I do totally agree with you that actually spending more time on making sense of the world and understanding context is probably a really good thing for all of us.

Thank you, Dave. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for taking the time. I'm really grateful.

And we'll be back with another podcast next week. But in the meantime, thank you, Stephen, and thank you to everyone who's listened today.