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This video provides a useful and at times very beautiful introduction to the topics of complexity and emergence – which offer us a very different way to think about our organisations and how we manage them.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdQgoNitl1g]
and this one takes the journey a little further:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5NRNG1r_jI]
If you want to see how you can use these ideas to improve your leadership and management then do get in touch.
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The Enterprise Coaching conference held in Derby yesterday got me reflecting again on what I have learned from 20 years experience in working with enterprise coaches and people looking to make progress in their lives. It also prompted me to re-read Ernesto Sirolli’s PhD thesis – available on the web here (PDF).
He suggests that 4 key principles should underpin the work of the enterprise coach (Sirolli calls them Enterprise Facilitators™ – a term on which he claims a trademark). These principles are:
Each of these principles stems from an approach to providing help that is genuinely person centred and responsive rather than interventions designed to achieve the policy objectives of the state.
Sirolli argues compellingly that any violation of these 4 principles may lead to a self satisfying and self serving illusion of help but will in practice inhibit the long term development of an enterprise culture in the community.
Each of these 4 principles is worth significant reflection and its implications for our practice as coaches, and perhaps more importantly service designers and managers should be careful considered.
Here are a few questions to prompt the process:
Our work needs to be grounded on principles if it is to be effective. It is not just about the techniques of coaching versus advising, mentoring or counselling. It is not just about managerial pragmatism in pursuit of the narrowly economic objectives of most funders and policy makers.
It is about our role in engaging with individuals and communities on the agendas that matter most to them.
It is about how best we can help people to engage in the rich infrastructure of services and support that is already out there if they wish to use it.
It is about how we can influence the design and delivery of these services (including mainstream business support) to ensure that they are both cost effective and relevant.
But most importantly it is about how can provide consistent and long term relationships that people can trust enough to help them as they confront the risks and challenges that come with stepping outside of the comfort zone and continuing the journey of self improvement.
Encouraging people to start on these journeys with promises of help and support, and then withdrawing that help and support when funders and policy makers shift their priorities not only destroys trust in us but also leaves our clients high and dry. If current funders are not willing or able to honour the long term commitments that serious endeavours to change the enterprise culture in communities requires then we perhaps need to find some new investors.
As George Derbyshire said – perhaps it is time to ‘Sack the Boss’.
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They usually write a lot of sense over at management issues, which is why I was a little surprised to read an article called Anger Doesn’t Pay.
In my book it is perhaps the most important driver for change and innovation. Anger serves a surprising purpose . It gives us a clue, a sign that there is something here that we can have the energy and creativity to make better. Anger pays much more than indifference which at time seems ubiquitous.
What does not pay of course is losing your temper. Shouting and displaying your anger in ways that alienate people rather than recruit them to your cause.
So value your anger, cultivate it, harness it and make progress. Just don’t let it ignite your temper!
I help accidental managers become outstanding managers – if I can help you give me a call – 0113 815 3765 (UK)
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Richard Sennett’s ‘The Craftsman‘ is well worth the considerable effort it has taken me to read it. Although very well written many of the ideas it tackles are not easy!
He makes the point that we have used tests of intelligence and education to smear citizens along a bell-shaped curve of distribution that is in fact very flat and very wide. As a result we have come to believe that ‘ability’ is not anywhere near uniformly spread through society. And this belief has been used to justify the increased public investment in the education of the most able and the relative paucity of opportunity offered to those who, in the tests, appear to be ‘less able than average’.
Sennett then argues that this is a social construction with little basis in facts, outside of educational IQ tests such as the Stanford Binet. These tests rely on questions to which there is an answer – either right or wrong. They cannot deal with questions where the answer is a matter of opinion or insight. Where the answer is contestable. This especially, argues Sennett, serves to discriminate against those whose talents might lie in developing real craft skills. Sennet is at great pains to point out that these are not just about traditional crafts but anything where learning happens over a long period of application through experience, reflection and adjustment. This includes many roles that are incredibly relevant in modern society. People who are capable of this craft type learning may do poorly on the Stanford Binet and its equivalents (SATS) and from that point on they are socialised as ‘low ability’. Or those that thrive on the assessment regime they are socialised as ‘Gifted and Talented’. It is hard to know which is more damaging!
This socialisation has little to do with true potential or inherent capability and more to do with what we choose as a society to recognise, label and invest in.
Sennett’s argument (again assuming that yours truly has understood it) is that capability is MUCH more evenly distributed – we just might need to search for it with a much more open and creative mind. Many more of us are capable of doing ‘good work’. This insight would have enormous implications for how we organise education. Sennett says;
“Motivation is a more important issue than talent in consummating craftsmanship”
Socialisation serves to disconnect many of us from our talents as they are neither recognised not valued. The capabilities remain, but our motivation is eroded. Re-establishing motivation then becomes more important than extant talent. Indeed the key motivation required to renew the search for potential and to enter into a period of ‘craft type’ learning action, reflection and adjustment, often over a period of years until the capability becomes a craft.
Another leading academic Nobel prize wining Amartya Sen also talks about capability, its recognition and development as a central tool in poverty reduction. He also recognises the structural processes that serve to justify the enormous gaps between the haves and the have nots on a global scale.
Perhaps one of the vital roles of the enterprise coach is to help people to challenge the way that society has shaped them and to renew the search for ‘capability’ – the potential of those who use our services that has often been suppressed by societies warped, distorted and narrow perceptions of ability.
This is the Craft of the Enterprise Coach. And it may have nothing to do with starting a business.
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More often than not ‘entrepreneur’ is used to describe both a passing phase of ‘start up’ and a lasting role of ‘business management and development’. The two roles overlap to some degree but demand different dispositions and skills.
In the start up phase the entrepreneur is frequently working alone developing a personal vision and finding ways to make it work, in theory. They are finding investors and developing plans. They are researching and shaping their still very malleable ideas until finally they have something on paper that ‘works’. They talk with advisers and potential customers. But the business is just an idea. It is not yet a demanding child; a long term commitment.
Sooner rather than later the infant business develops different needs; sales, management (especially financial management) and systems. The emphasis shifts from the energy and drive of start up to a different vibe of business development. Energy and drive are still required but so too is discipline and routine. The business is no longer on paper where numbers can be changed at the stroke of a key. It is now a real thing where to ‘change a number’ takes real work and often hard cash. And the business is there, demanding, all day and every day.
Instead of a single person driving a personal vision it now may require teamwork and people management. The entrepreneur has to morph into a cocktail that includes some or all of; sales, management, bookkeeper, product/service development, operations management and leadership. A very few make this transition with relish. But for most it proves difficult.
Many entrepreneurs learn to move on with grace. The passion, skills and energy that help them bring the businesses into life are not well suited to the more methodical and disciplined demands of business development. Having been responsible for conception they leave the parenting to others. They bring in professional ‘management’ while they move on. This IS the entrepreneur.
But for the majority, who are venturing into entrepreneurship for the first time, this early exit to business ownership is not seriously considered. The business is set up from the start as a vehicle in which the ‘entrepreneur’ can pursue their trade (social media guru, web designer, window cleaner, whatever). There is no exit. They have had what Gerber calls the ‘entrepreneurial seizure’.
Gerber recognised that most people who choose to start a business aren’t really ‘entrepreneurs’ as described above. Instead, they are technicians, craftsmen or artisans who have had what he called “an entrepreneurial seizure“. They have become fed-up with their boss, disillusioned by their employer, made redundant, or increasingly have never been employed and decide to start out on their own ‘Enterprise Fairytale’.
This is the entrepreneurial seizure, and critical decisions must now be taken. Get them right and the transition to ‘entrepreneur’, and ‘business owner’ may be made. Get them wrong and the entrepreneurial seizure may be prolonged, expensive and painful. Society may still label you ‘an entrepreneur’ but you will be both boss and labourer, technician, craftsman or artisan. What once felt like tremendous progress may soon turn into a trap.
If you learn your entrepreneurial skills at one of the worlds leading business schools you will be taught the skills of starting and owning a business. You will be taught to avoid the entrepreneurial seizure. If you learn your entrepreneurial skills in more prosaic settings this lesson may not be taught. Indeed the working assumption may be that helping you into an entrepreneurial seizure could be as good as it gets.
It might be perfect for you – but it is not really entrepreneurship.
And when the policy makers lament our ability in the UK to start businesses that consistently achieve global scale, I believe it is because we trap so many of our ‘could be’ entrepreneurs in their own entrepreneurial seizures.