It was the day I realized just how hard it would be to unwind old organizational habits. Even though it was over 10 years ago, I remember as if it was yesterday.
I was a relatively new manager and was about to attend my first leadership offsite meeting. One of the topics of discussion was should we allow Casual Fridays or not? While not a big deal these days…back then and for this company, this was an important decision. Already, some people were “going rogue” and wearing jeans so we needed to get a handle on this, didn’t we?
It was quickly decided we should go ahead and make it official to allow casual attire on Fridays but the plot thickens. Someone stood up, grabbed a marker, and stated, “We need some rules.”
For a few minutes, the marker admirably kept up with the flow of new rules emerging from the excited room full of managers. No T-shirts, no shorts, no flip-flops, no sweat pants…on and on. As the list of regulations filled the page someone finally realized where this was heading and spoke up.
“How about just having one rule…use your best judgement.” That’s it. Simple.
After a period of silence, heads began to nod and this group of well-intentioned leaders caught themselves from falling into a trap many fall into. Turning what should be a positive and rewarding change into something opposite – a complex, bureaucratic, non-trusting mess.
I learned something valuable that day. For change to stick, for change to be meaningful…it must be kept painfully simple.
Keeping things simple often goes against our instincts. It seems we are always ready to add more and more rules and constraints wrapped with more and more process.
But perhaps we can learn a lesson from nature.
I was recently watching a documentary called “The Code ” from the BBC. A segment of the show began talking about a flock of starlings making their annual migration from southern Europe to Scandinavia. You can watch it here.
As you can see from the video, thousands of starlings create hypnotic and beautiful formations, ever-changing in the evening sky.
How can the starlings predict where the others will go? How do they keep from knocking in to each other? How can something so seemingly chaotic become an engaging pattern to behold?
As it turns out, the movements of the starlings can be recreated using a computer to simulate their formations. And all it takes is three simple rules.
The first rule is to fly at the same speed. The second rule is to stay close to your neighbor. The third rule is to go in a different direction if you see a predator. The documentary mentions that even in a flock of hundreds of thousands of starlings each starling just needs to keep track of its seven closest neighbors.
Three rules to turn chaos into something beautiful. That’s it. Simple. Thanks nature.
You may be wondering how all of this fits in with organizations developing a more agile culture. Well, me too. It’s become a personal challenge to myself to simplify my approach to coaching organizational change. And it’s not easy.
We have all felt the impact of historical complexity and the burden of process (especially defensive processes). While listening in to a recent town hall, I heard a CEO state, “Customers love our products but not working with our company. Our processes and systems have become too complex. The process owns us!”
Ouch. The problem with complexity is it breeds more complexity. Complex systems demand oversight and governance. Before long, an organization begins to identify with “completing the process” as their measure for success. When they reach this point, they have officially become an inward-focused organization. They spend more time worrying about themselves than on those they serve – customers.
And this includes many organizations using “Agile” as its guiding light.
I believe we (fellow change catalysts and coaches) need to hold each other accountable by committing to break this pattern. The benefits to breaking our addiction to complexity and control are plentiful but a few fascinating behaviors have begun to emerge from my experiments with simplicity over the past year.
Some of these behaviors include groups of people inside organizations who are:
Generating collective awareness. Everyone becomes focused on our present situation and current threats. This is not one person’s responsibility or only expected from a group of leaders. Every person is keenly focused outward with a heighten sense of their surroundings.
Instead of creating structure and implementing process, leaders are now charted with teaching and coaching EVERYONE how to be customer focused and competitively aware. We spend less time thinking about how we work and we start to really think about what we are working on.
As coaches, we become designers of lightweight and transparent systems and we teach others how to design lightweight and transparent systems.
Finding freedom. What do we do with our new-found collective awareness? We use simple systems to liberate. We unlock people from the chains of process and give them the opportunity to:
Think. We have the time to ponder about where we are and where we need to be. As Jeff Bezos once said, “We should be heavy on vision but light on tactics.” So heavy time is spent on creating a compelling vision and we let our people think about how to bring the vision to life.
Explore. We have the ability to try things and move down roads not normally travelled. Open spaces are created to allow people to have an adventurer mentality.
Be creative. We have space to solve old problems with fresh ideas. Coloring outside of the lines is rewarded and cherished.
Act. We have a natural tendency to build things. Nothing else matters but bringing the vision to life.
As coaches, any system we design must give the space and freedom to think, explore, be creative, and to act as essential elements to it. Everything else is overhead.
Perform unrehearsed maneuvers. And the most important of them all, simplicity allows organizations to improvise. This improvisation is often orchestrated around just a simple set of rules. Some rules are mandatory (legal and regulatory, for example) but the others are there to keep us flying in formation or to keep us from danger. That’s it.
As coaches, we design systems with few limitations – then we let go of the steering wheel. People are not waiting for someone to tell them to change or to tell them what to do or what process to follow. They learn to react and respond. To assess and go. It’s a philosophy of non-interference.
Easy to say and hard to do I know but I have found the struggle to be worth every ounce of sweat and effort.
The earlier post, “Change or Else!,” ended with a sneak peek into how there may just be a way to change large organizations with a heart of simplicity at the core. The purpose of this post is to inspire you to challenge your existing paradigms around change “management” and begin from a place of simplicity. Freedom awaits. More to come…
S.D.G.
3 replies on “Bird Flocks and Simple Change”
[…] ⬅ Bird Flocks and Simple Change […]
Hi Len,
I really enjoyed this post, however it is really difficult to remove process as it is seen as a safety net (no need to think, procrastination), for accountability (blame, pointing fingers) and when the scaling up (even using Agile) it quite often means falling back into more process (bad habits). As someone who is not in charge (of the process), any advice on bottom up process removal?
Thanks
[…] around. Because of the gravitational forces pulling them toward their manager, people have lost the ability to sense predators or have the ability to react quickly when something is sensed. People in many organizations are […]