PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BUILDING BLOCKS

a. OLD WORLD/ NEW WORLD

b. CYBER CONES

c. EMERGENCE!!!

PROLOGUE TO THE CAUTIONARY TALES

1. THE EMPOWERING MANAGER

2. THE TALE OF THE UNCERTAIN STRATEGIST

3. THE CUSTOMER FOCUSED MANAGER

4. THE SELF-DIRECTED TEAM LEADER

5. THE GLOBAL COMMUNICATOR

6. THE STRATEGIC PROGRAMME IMPLEMENTER

7. THE ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT MANAGER

8. THE INFORMATISED MANAGER

9. THE RE-ENGINEER

10. THE MERGED CHIEF EXECUTIVE

11. THE SELF STARTER

12. THE BUSINESS BENCH MARKER

1. Say ‘AND!’ not ‘OR’

Paradox busting

2. Assume FAIR = DIFFERENT not FAIR = EQUAL

Develop more styles

Learn to communicate Purpose

3. Change DEPENDENCE to INTERDEPENDENCE

Split Accountability from Responsibility

Bet on teams and networks and the individual

4. Do NOTHING which is of NO use

Show me the money!

Focus!

DO IT ONCE

5. Stakeholders rule OK!

Know your stakeholders

Trust first then Tit-for-tat.

Some suppliers more important than some customers

Delight and Challenge the people you work with

6. Make time fit

Make TIME = PARALLEL

Everything has sell-by dates

Do it Now!.

7. CHUNK IT OR JUNK IT!

Modularise

Make it self similar

Review too often

8. ALL CONSTRAINTS INTO MEAT SPACE

Re-invent information

Stay DIGITAL in cyberspace

Stop communicating

9. Unlearn EVERYTHING!

Every group a culture

Only learn what others don’t know!

10. Don’t change anything!

Pro-act and React

Robust or Bust

Beware the LAWS OF CHANGE

11. LOOP IT UP!

Form loops

Break loops

12. Go VIRTUAL!

Draw new mental maps

__________________________________________________________________________________________

The person standing is saying, "Thank you all for coming. I hope that you will feel comfortable to share your stories. I believe that it is only by working like this, by working with a group of people from different roles in the organisation and across different organisations that we can we all get a real insight into the patterns of the New World and perhaps some of its rules. Each of you has already told me your tale but I think that the real value of this evening will be for you to hear directly from each other." "Dialogue and discussion, not, presentation and posturing." He states flatly, checking for affirmation which he receives from twelve bobbing heads. "The Burke Lodge rules apply," he states and then as if only just realising that some people may not know what he is referring to adds, "nothing you hear here is attributable to anyone, and if you don’t want it ever repeated again outside, say so."

He stands, feet slightly apart, in front of the large bay window. His black polo neck and black jacket in the zebra striped, black and white room make him look like a shadow of himself. A shadow with a small white rectangle cut out. Cut out just next to where a left lapel would be. A bright rectangle several inches across. Within the white rectangle, just below the grass-green, geometric symbol which is obviously some sort of logo, is the word ‘Franck’. Franck looks steadily round the room, pausing at each face, waiting for a nod or a silently mouthed yes. "I will act as Moderator, asking questions and probing. But please feel free to ask questions yourselves. Try to make sure that these are questions for clarification and not for detail." He over-emphasises the word clarification and the word detail. And then with energy says, "OK guys. Lets get on with it. Lets talk straight. Let’s go to thoughts no one else has been to. Make it as interesting for each other as you made it for me. Let’s see what we discover. After each of you recounts what you told me to the rest of the group I shall make some notes on the whiteboard." He points to a large electronic whiteboard in the corner behind an empty chair. "Please don’t be distracted by what I write or draw, just keep the rhythm going." Then he raises the pitch and tempo of his voice slightly and says, "Onward into the New World!"

There is a short but earnest round of applause. He moves to sit down. As he does so he passes near one of the up-lighters. The light from it reflects briefly off the top of his head. Now he, like all his companions, is sitting in a contraption which looks more like a giant black spider than a chair. It looks like a large piece of pipe-cleaner bent into the shape of the skeleton of a dead chair. There is a silence and then one of the group speaks:

<< At this point, if you were watching a film or the TV, you would expect the screen to either become misty, or for wavy, out of focus, vertical lines to invade your picture. This symbolism in the visual arts media is used to represent the fact that you are going backwards in time. The piece of film you then watch is acted in the present tense although it actually occurred a long time before. This format is a favourite of soap opera directors, directors of cheap who dunnits and occasionally, great masterpieces. I have searched hard for an equivalent symbol for use with the written word and found none. Net result:- you have to pretend that these stories are each episodes in the past of the people at the current evening gathering meeting with the facilitator, Franck.>>

THE TALE OF THE EMPOWERING MANAGER

I’d done it - I should have known better. I’d almost managed to lose my job and 300 other peoples’. But could I have known better, or should I? The way I saw it, at the start, was quite straight forward, quite clear. Business is tough. Our customers each want something different. When you operate across the world you have to deal with the things which remain the same around the globe and the things that change from country to country and from customer to customer. It was absolutely essential that we should optimise our responses to customers locally. But we also had to standardise what we did right the way across the organisation, after all, we didn’t want a customer visiting two of our operations in different towns to experience completely different levels of service. The way I saw it, was that I really only had two choices. In order to get it right both locally and right across the organisation we needed to align our overall business resources efficiently through a formal process and tackle issues as planned. This meant that we should maintain very tight controls on what people said and did across the organisation. However, on the other hand, in order to make best use of our resources, we should actually allow the individuals dealing with the problem, to respond locally and immediately to any of the issues or problems as they arise. This meant that we should empower our people, wherever they were in the organisation. The two conclusions seemed incompatible. And everyone else seemed to be keen on empowerment, so I’d decided that that was the way to go.

I’d made that decision in another place and at another time. Now and here I look across the brown, fake leather seats, over the bar and towards the door. I’m sitting in a corner of the Saracens Head. The atmosphere is stale. Old tobacco and beer haunt the air. To the left of the bar an open fire burns fiercely. Too fiercely. There is no spare fuel, wood, coal, old newspapers alongside the fire. The fierce flames and lack of fuel supplies tell me that the fire too is a fake. A fake fire powered by gas but made to look like a real open log fire. I nurse my drink and wait. I am waiting for Franck. I don’t have to wait long before the door bursts open and, with a smile as warm as the wind which sweeps in with him is cold, he charges towards my table.

"Hi there mate" he says cheerily in an accent with a slight twang, "What are you having?"

"I’ll have another one of these." I say holding my cup up so that he can see the black coffee.

"Ordered anything to eat yet?" he asks.

"No." I reply, "But I’ve had a look at the menu."

"What will it be then?"

"Under the circumstances I guess I’d better go for something healthy." "At least I have my health.," I remark under my breath, choosing a light turkey salad.

Franck takes a millisecond to make his mind up and then ends up going for the same thing as me. He steps over to the bar and in seconds the order is placed. He takes a seat next to me. "So tell me about what has brought you all this way."

"I think," I say hesitantly, "I mean, I seem to have gotten myself into a bit of trouble."

"Oh?" he says curiously.

"Well," I say, relieved at being listened to and at once launching into my story, "let me tell you what I did. I think I did every thing right but somehow..." My voice trails off.

"Take your time," he says in a soothing voice. A voice which I know is also lying. I know he has to be away to another meeting after lunch. I have an hour. Only an hour. I decide to get on with recounting my story.

"Somehow I’ve managed to get our organisation into a real mess."

"Start from the beginning," he instructs.

"It all began when we started getting customer letters. Letters of both complaint and praise about our products, services and our prices."

Franck nods sympathetically. He really seems to be concentrating on what I’m saying. It is as if he has never had to listen to a similar problem before.

"Well the problem was that the contents of the letters were completely random or at least they seemed so. Some said we were too slow, others that we were too expensive, others thanked us for providing such good products and excellent service. As a management team we didn’t know what to do about it."

"So what did you do about them?"

Well, we would have ignored the letters but we’d fallen behind slightly on our revenue targets and quite significantly on our net profit targets. So, we felt that there was a need to increase the amount of selling on, and also to retain customers who had shown interest in us."

Franck nods his balding head rhythmically "Sounds like a good sound strategy to me," he remarks supportively.

"We decided to look at ways of making the front-line staff more responsive and flexible. We thought, ‘Sure, if the customers want a lower price they can have it but we’ll cut back on the speed of service and the related costs and keep up the margins. And sure, if they wanted a faster response they could have it but we would flex the prices upwards to match."

Franck is listening intently, his eyebrows furrowed above hawk-like eyes.

"Just as we were coming to that conclusion we realised that we also had a problem with the development of new products and services. We had received a ‘pipeline’ report from head office in Seattle informing us of the number of new products and services in the corporate development pipeline. There was a real problem. The bulk of the products were designed for their local market and wouldn’t sell in ours without significant adaptation." I moan, "Bloody typical of head office, always parochial, always just looking at everything from their own point of view. So we realised that we needed both new ideas for products and new ideas on how to adapt the pipeline products to our local markets."

"So you needed to adapt the pipeline products to our local markets."

"Yes," I say, encouraged by his intervention, "and that was when the third problem hit us. If we were to carry out any further development or project activity we needed more managers. Well, actually, after discussion we concluded that we needed more leaders. But how were we to get more leaders? Our head count budget was frozen. And anyway the last time we had attempted to recruit anyone to help lead internal change we had drawn a blank. It was almost as if there was no one out there. Almost as if there was a global shortage of leaders."

"Let me just check that I’ve understood your problems. You need to be capable of responding to each customer in a personalised and tailored way."

I nod.

"At the same time you need to develop new product and service offerings and you have neither the ideas nor the people to lead the implementation of any ideas you do get?" The pitch of his voice rises to confirm that this is a question.

I nod firmly. "You’ve got it," I say, pleased he is following my argument. "So you see the three problems came together at just about the same time and with a flash of inspiration we solved all three simultaneously."

Franck interrupts, "By ‘we’ I guess you mean ‘I’?"

I refuse to take all the credit. "It was a sort of group thing," I declare, playing it down. "‘We’, means the top fifteen senior managers and a couple of our young management cadre. We had an Away-Day to discuss what to do. After a lot of discussion we decided that the way to get round all three problems was empowerment."

Franck looks blank. I guess the solution isn’t as obvious a solution as I’d thought.

"Don’t you see?" I say imploringly "Empowerment. Empowered front-line staff can handle each customer on their merits without having to refer back up a long chain of command for any change to the SOP."

"SOP?"

"Standard operating procedure," I respond for clarification. Empowered staff can be asked and encouraged to modify the existing product and service offerings providing all the new ideas we need for the gap in the pipeline. And empowered staff have the accountability for delivering the implementation of the new ideas."

Franck is nodding. "Very neat," he says, "A very neat solution indeed. He almost applauds. "Sounds to me like you discovered a perfect solution to your problems." He lets his last statement hang in the air as if waiting for me to make sense of it for him.

I say, "I was delighted too. We were about to embark on a trendy modern management solution but not just as a fad but instead as a real solution to real problems we had identified."

Franck has a quizzical expression on his face. It is as if he wishes to ask me something really obvious but is far too polite to do so. For once my intuition works. I guess what’s going on. "I know what you’re thinking," I say. "You’re wondering why I wanted to speak to you?"

"Mm yes," he replies cautiously.

"In theory it should all have worked out fine but the current situation is that we’ve lost a dozen of our best staff and we are about to be sued for four million pounds. All this on top of the worst profitability figures we’ve seen for years."

"What happened?" he asks. "What went wrong?"

"You tell me," I say. "It all started just right. We launched an Empowerment initiative. We didn’t want to over raise expectations so we started with the cover page of our in-house mag. We got no response from that so we organised a manager’s briefing. Normal affair, nothing complex. I remembered your advice about people’s reactions to change and the third Law of Change and I was really careful to present the problem and give an opportunity for the managers to invent the solutions."

Franck nods approvingly, looking impressed at my skill as a change leader.

"I guess the biggest surprise at the briefing was the attitude of the managers. Most of them were very negative about the idea. I couldn’t work this out. As the briefing progressed it turned into a full blown complaints session about the poor quality of training and development provided by the organisation. There was also another vein on the lack of recognition of the loyalty people had shown towards the organisation. And that the loyal ones were always left to fix problems that the organisation had created for itself. It was bizarre. Here we were offering a suggestion which would solve some major problems and safeguard all our futures and instead all we were getting was resistance. We decided that if we were not getting interest and enthusiasm at that level, we should take the message right down the organisation ourselves. By ‘ourselves’ I mean the gang of 15 who had hatched the idea."

"I can see how you would have come to that conclusion," he interjects. "So did you?"

"Yes we did," I state. "We tried. But the response at that level was even more baffling. Here were we offering them a chance for self determination, to be able to influence their own futures and there was a high level of disinterest. And all the questions were of the W.I.I.F.M. variety."

"WIIFM?" he repeats pronouncing the acronym as I just had, as if it were one word.

"What’s in it for me," I reply. "Well I’d have thought it was obvious what was in it for them, greater influence over their work etc. But they all only really seemed to be interested in getting more money."

Lunch arrives on a round wooden tray. "Coffee, Orange juice, Turkey salad, Turkey salad." utters the waiter solemnly like a teacher in a roll call.

Franck looks up and says, "Thanks Roger," reading the young man’s name off his name badge. I say, "Roger, can we have another coffee, black, just the poison, but in a mug rather than in a cup. In about fifteen minutes."

Roger looks aghast. His initial reaction of terror, to hearing his name spoken out loud, has been followed by a look of confusion and perplexity about Franck’s request. He replies, "I’m not sure that we are allowed to give you mugs. All the mugs are in the restaurant bar section."

Franck is being unhelpful, he is simply staring at Roger. Roger is now stammering over his words. "The coffee comes from the machine. It gets poured once I put in the order," he explains. "If I wait fifteen minutes it will be cold."

Franck is now grinning mysteriously. "Don’t worry about it Roger," he says. "Just bring it as it comes, when it comes." Roger leaves with our money.

"What was that about?" I ask.

Franck waves his right hand dismissively and says, "Never mind. Let’s get back to your problem with empowerment."

"Well I think we went over the top. We knew that providing monetary incentives was the wrong way to go because all that would happen would be that we would simply give away any extra money made. And we were putting ourselves at a disadvantage up for the future. Would we have to pay for all future changes and improvements? So instead we went into a sales pitch even inviting outside speakers to come and talk to staff about the joys and benefits of being empowered. The speakers were very good they drove home the message of empowerment and the need to improve things"

"And?"

It seemed to work. Over about a month we had adapted one of the new products to our market place and it was selling like hot cakes. Also our customer satisfaction index rose from 76% to 82%."

"Sounds like success to me."

"Yes it seemed so. Some customers even went so far as to suggest other additional products and services we could provide to them. They really seemed to be building a good relationship with us. It wasn’t until much later that we discovered that the new suggested offerings weren’t very good for business profitability."

Franck is nodding and then he asks, "Did any other changes happen which did not help improvement to the bottom line?"

"Mmm," I say, thinking briefly "not really."

Franck seems slightly surprised. "Did your staff do anything to ‘improve’ things like changing the furniture or printing brochures or..."

"Thinking about it again, yes they did." Yes, it’s true. As the whole thing started to roll we kept getting ideas from the staff. Some we weren’t so keen on but we didn’t know how to turn them down without turning them off. So we went with them. We let them through as long as they were improvements."

"Improvements, eh?"

"Yes," I reply, unaware that I have just walked into a trap.

"And how did you know if something was an improvement?"

"Well," I remark, "it made things better."

"Better eh?" comments Franck raising a right eyebrow and tilting his head quizzically to the left.

"Yes. Better," I say.

"Carry on," he says, so I do.

"I was pleased with progress. So pleased in fact that I e-mailed Corporate in Seattle explaining the progress we had made with our localised services. And then it turned pear shaped."

Franck silently tilts his head to the right whilst raising his eyebrows. The impression is a definite ‘Keep talking.’ He is munching away hungrily.

"I’d been hearing good reports about how the staff were feeling and how positively customers were responding to our new approach and then one evening I took home the sales reports to study them in detail. In general there was a lag of about a month between receiving volume sales information and receiving the financials. Looking at the sales report I noticed that the volume of sales was up significantly but so were the costs and at the same time the revenues were down. But the costs were all in really unusual categories. It was as if our staff were bending over backwards to give the customers what they wanted, often by spending from other budgets. They also seemed to be delighting the customer using the most basic technique of simply giving the money away by dropping prices at the least hint of customer pressure."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing at first. I thought it best to talk to the others to see what they thought. I arranged a meeting for the day after. It was then that the first bomb shell struck."

"Bomb shell?"

"I discovered that one of our empowered staff had committed us to a $300,000 purchase without securing the customer order first. And that the customer had decided not to buy from us."

"Oops!" says Franck.

I react. "No, not Oops!" I exclaim. "Catastrophe!"

"It’s the most bizarre thing ever. You tell people that they are empowered and they interpret that as; ‘I can do what I want without telling anyone else.’" I shake my head in despair. If they had asked Credit Control they would have discovered that the customer had been on the ‘at risk’ register for a fortnight. It was unlikely that they would or could actually buy anything costing that much".

"So you want to talk to me about how to fix the problem."

"No, I think I can fix it. What I want to know is how I could have avoided getting myself into this mess. You see the reasons we went for empowerment are still there, so we either need to make it work or we’re back where we started. No, we are back," I struggle for the right words, "worse than where we started."

Franck looks thoughtful for a moment. Then for a moment too long. I realise that he is trying to finish off his mouthful, and then he says "You said first bomb shell."

"Yes," I reply, guessing what’s coming next.

"That implies more than one," he says insightfully, but without having to use any intellectual power.

"The second is a bit embarrassing. We fired him immediately but he is threatening an unfair dismissal claim."

"What happened?"

"Well in a nutshell, one of our managers managed to reduce the costs of one of our raw materials by ten percent."

"And you fired him?" questions Franck in disbelief.

"Only because he handed the contract to one of his friends and as a result, we discovered, got himself a free holiday in Spain."

"I can see why he is threatening unfair dismissal"

I hang my head despondently. "It all looked so promising. It was exactly what all the theory says. We freed people, gave them the opportunity to achieve their potential and look what’s happened. I think I’ve lost all my faith in human nature," I say in a flat monotone.

I notice that Franck is glancing at his watch pretending hard not to. I look pointedly at mine. We have about half an hour left. He gestures towards my untouched salad. "I’m glad that I ordered something cold, a hot meal would have been inedible by now. Can I try summarising just to make sure that I’ve understood what you’re saying? It sounds to me as if you carried out a set of actions to empower your staff but as a result a whole new set of problems and issues have emerged which you hadn’t anticipated."

I nod. It’s my turn to stay silent and munch. "Do you know why this sort of thing happens?"

I shake my head. This salad tastes a lot better than it looks. It must be the dressing.

"Do you remember saying how bizarre it was that when you started talking to the managers you had expected support for the idea and instead you got resistance?"

"Yes," I mumble.

"You were carrying out a single action and you expected that single action to cause just one effect, that of getting support from your managers."

I nod again.

"Instead it caused many effects, one of which was to heighten their level of insecurity. Your actions made them worried. Worried that you intended to replace them and their jobs with your other staff and that if it all went wrong you would be hands off and leave them with the problem to fix."

I nod again, but slower this time, now realising what had led to the bizarre behaviour.

"And later you told me of the high levels of enthusiasm which some customers had towards what you were doing and how they had begun to suggest other service offerings you could provide, although unfortunately the costs of these were high by comparison to the returns."

I nod again, jerkily this time, not quite knowing where this part of the conversation leading.

"It seems to me," he states, "that you have experienced emergence." He makes it sound like an encounter with extraterrestrials.

"Emergence?" I repeat with an inflection to highlight my lack of comprehension.

"People are only confused by emergence because they assume 1:1 linear causality in all actions and don’t realise that other causes mix in with their plans and create often un-obvious, complex but predictable results."

"Huh?" I grunt with my mouth full.

"Don’t worry about the general case, let’s just deal with your specific problem in the time we have available. "May I ask you a very personal question?" he says curiously.

I’m unsure about the change in the tone of the discussion but, like most people, I like to act as if I have nothing to hide so I say, "Yeah sure."

"When," he asks, "was the last time someone actually said to you that they thought you could or could not be left to make your own decisions?"

I think momentarily. I can’t think of any point where that has happened at work. "Can’t think of any time at work," I reply.

"Not just at work and perhaps not even in recent years."

I pause. "In that case I can’t think of anything remotely like it, at least not since I was a teenager."

"Precisely!" he replies delighted. "That’s it. That is exactly it. As a teenager, the fights and struggles were because you had spent all your life dependent on others. Dependent on your parents and now you wanted to demonstrate that you were independent."

I nod. I can’t see where this is going.

"Your organisation hires people and then for the next 40 years of their lives controls them, telling them what they can and can’t do. Sets the time for bedtime and such. Makes them get permission even to spend £20. Convincing them that someone somewhere up the organisation knows all the answers is part of the process. And then, all of a sudden, out of the blue Your ‘parents’ announce that you have to fend for yourself. How would you feel?"

"Terrified," I reply, still not sure what this has to do with my problem."

"Would you definitely embrace the announcement with open arms?"

I begin to see his point. Not completely surprising that we did not receive overwhelming support for offering empowerment.

Franck is still talking. "I think that when your colleagues at work finally heard what you were saying, they heard it as something new, uncharted territory and so reached back to see if they had ever had a similar experience of breaking free. And there it was, teenage rebellion. The move from having to do as your parents said, to completely ignoring them and doing your own thing."

Franck is being obscure again. I say, "So?"

"You said that a simple phone call to the credit controllers would have avoided one of your problems."

"I don’t get it," I say flatly.

"You say ‘empowerment’, so they hear ‘empowerment’, they hear it and interpret it as a move away from dependency to being independent. Whereas what you were after was a shift from dependence to interdependence. Interdependence; a recognition that our organisation is a linked system and that we really only succeed if others succeed. Instead they act like teenagers and instead of working together they simply try to do it all on their own."

"Shoot!" I whistle softly as the realisation dawns.

"Now add that to the fact that you forgot to tell them what they were empowered to do. That the name of the game was to make money, not to generate ideas or customer satisfaction. You forgot to mention that customer satisfaction was a means to the end of making money. A great means but not the end itself. You forgot to tell them how to check if an idea was any good by checking whether it made money or not. Remember a change is an alteration whilst an improvement is an action which takes you closer to your goals. Change and improvement are not the same thing. Without telling them what the goals were, they never stood a chance."

I think I have my mouth open. My brain is concentrating on what I’m hearing and has forgotten to send ‘close’ signals to my jaw muscles.

Franck notices the effect he is having on me and checks I’m still with him. I nod slack jawed to indicate that I am. "For empowerment to work your people need to have personal accountability. Remember how taken aback Roger was by me using his name. I don’t think he saw himself as empowered."

"I wondered why you were using his name. Was all that discussion with him just to prove your point?"

"Yes. But it was more than one point. Not only did I use his name to discover how much accountability he felt comfortable with, but also I wanted to check his capability."

"Capability?"

"Can they do what they are being asked to do? Do they have the skills and capability? It must also be clear that any risk they enter into on behalf of the organisation is as much of a risk to them. And finally can they be trusted not to operate in a criminal way?"

I listen, knowing that what Franck is saying all adds up. I listen knowing that that he has explained the causes of my current crisis. Like always, I wish we’d spoken sooner. "I don’t know what to say," I say apologetically. The way you dissect my problems it makes it all seem so obvious. That was really useful, how can I repay you?"

"You could come to a New World exploration meeting I’m planning next month."

"Done," I agree.

Now he is looking directly at his watch. No more sneaky sideways glances. "I’m afraid," he says, "that I have to be somewhere else. With that he rises, in one smooth movement turns, pull his jacket on and motions, with his head, towards the door. I rise and leave the table just behind him. We burst though the fake wood doors into the real sunshine outside. I think it’s turning out beautifully again.

<<Wavy lines again and back into the present.>>

Franck rises from his seat, walks up to the electronic copy-board in the corner of the room and writes:

linking - loops

other people - not alone

And!

purpose - change vs. improvement Money making

and then he sits down again. There is a murmur as the people present try to make sense of his notes. He gives them no time to reflect and simply barks, ‘Next?" an order disguised as a question.

THE TALE OF THE UNCERTAIN STRATEGIST

Two billion pound turnover and one of the fastest growing businesses in Europe and I’d blown it. How could any one fail with built-in advantages like that? I had. I feel such an idiot.

I’m sitting in the departure lounge at Heathrow opposite a balding man. And for some reason, pouring out my heart to him. I don’t usually tell almost complete strangers all about the things I’ve done wrong but Franck seems so genuinely interested and supportive that he has fooled me into dropping my guard. My attention strays and I turn slightly to my left looking out of a wall-sized window at a white and red 737 taxiing gracefully past us.

"And so what happened next?" he asks.

I have just told him the background to my sorry state. I’ve explained how, in spite of our explosive growth in volume, our margins started to shrink and I was given the job of ‘thinking about what to do about it all’. "Well," I say immediately, "it seemed that the market was less and less interested in paying for the services we’d been supplying. When we started, the main competition was one large organisation. In the past we had studied their weaknesses and focused on how to satisfy the customer in those specific areas. As a result, Bingo! We now had a £2bn organisation. The competition, who had been a sleeping, lumbering giant, seemed to have got their act together, so that service levels which two years previously were legendary, were now commonplace. If we were to make any money now and in the future we would have to concentrate on doing even better what we already did well today. This would mean that we would have to concentrate all our best people and key resources on improving the service offering we currently provide."

On the face of it, this was an obvious option. We already had in place all the performance and appraisal infrastructure which had kept us growing so effectively. What we really needed to do was to get the message out that we needed to be ahead again and to encourage people to look again for chinks in the armour of our traditional competition.

There was one wrinkle though. Perhaps more like a big crease. Some of our business was not only being lost to our traditional competitors but also to new emergent competitors. The difference with the new competitors was that they weren’t playing fair. They weren’t competing head to head. For example, whilst we were offering customers purely service, their service was backed up with comprehensive guarantees. But the worst part was that because they were using the new technologies to provide the new services they had a completely different cost base to us and whereas we made money directly from the customer they also made money by distributing hardware on behalf of OEMs. This was what frightened us. It meant that they could continue competing the margins down way below the level at which we would cease to be profitable and by creating a commodity business could drive us out of business. This meant that in order to make money both now and in the future we would have to find ways of doing things significantly differently. In order to achieve this we would have to focus the efforts of all our best people and resources on creating solutions for the future."

I finally pause, waiting for a reaction. Franck says, "What a dilemma. Stay with your core traditional business and risk the chance of losing to an emergent industry or concentrate on creating a new industry and risk losing out to your traditional competitors. What a bummer!"

He has summarised the problem very well. "You’ve summarised that very well," I say in a congratulatory tone. Suddenly the airport Tannoy cuts in announcing a flight. I pause to wait for the announcement to end. It’s not my flight and judging from the look of disinterest on Franck’s face it’s not his either.

_________________________________________________________

Gail Sheehy

"Children love ‘And!’. Can I have the chocolate cake with my dinner. Parents love Or. Why? I believe that the very simple reason is that, ‘And!’ can be terribly wasteful ‘And!’ can lead to food left on the plate. ‘And!’ can lead to leftover dinner and sometimes left over chocolate cake.

In an environment of stability, an environment where you can forecast the next few weeks or months relatively accurately, in an environment where most if not all customers are satisfied with the same things, in an environment where you can learn faster than the world changes, you would have to be dumb not to try to be as efficient as possible. Efficiency means better profits. Choosing to do one thing over another eliminates redundancy, forces repeats and increases efficiency. Perhaps that is why the Old World valued the consistent use of or."

"Recently I was working with a group of managers discussing IT strategy. The organisation had decided to move from windows 3.11 to windows 95. It had steam rollered the change across the whole organisation, leaving behind a trail of disruption and despondency. The discussion was heated. Some of the executives who had been responsible for the decision were in the session. First there was discussion about the merits of 3.11 then discussion about the merits of 95. Then one executive commented with these programs now branded by year does that mean we have to throw everything away each year and start again? The debate was loud and furious. Finally I managed to get a word in I asked "Tell me, How could we have applied an And? There was silence and then raucous laughter. You see there is no law which says you can’t have both on the same machine. This could actually suit some users. Then one executive said, "But that would cost a fortune. Kitting everyone out with both, doubling the license fee. I replied then, that perhaps only using one New World rule was the problem. But now, I’m going to refer you to the second New World rule: ‘fair = different’, That rule will expose the Old world flaw in the executive’s thinking. For now we need to carry on discussing ‘And!’.

The New World turns things on its head. In doing so it creates mental puzzles for us. Puzzles which appear insoluble, paradoxes. Or to be more accurate, paralysing New World paradoxes.

Last year working in collaboration with one of my clients I worked on one of the few public/ open events I have done in recent years. It was an evening of open discussion. We called it ‘Overcoming the New World Paradoxes’ I have been actively collecting New World paradoxes for the past four years and working out ways to break the paradoxes. I have kept quite quiet about my work on paradoxes largely because in the late Eighties and early nineties it was very trendy in management circles to write books and articles with the word paradox in the title. I was afraid that my work would simply be lumped in with that great body of management material. And yet there is a Real World problem. A good paradox appears internally self consistent. It offers two distinct choices. Each choice mutually exclusive of the other. I’ll give you an example. It’s my favourite one:

All these words can be replaced by the simple diagram below:

No! Don’t go for a compromise. Tell me, are not our key priorities the few things which we can benefit from now And! yet they provide a bridge or platform to the future?

We must almost over prioritise such actions and studiously ignore, unless compelled to things which will not help us now or in the future, paying little more attention to the things which us now or in the future. Future proofing, making our actions more resistant to the future and what it brings can be delivered effectively through ‘And!’. ‘And!’ is a very effective paradox buster. There are other ways of busting paradoxes"

"Isn’t it a bit wasteful to do things which may be completely redundant? Asks the business benchmarker in a voice which betrays that his question is actually a statement. He has already made his mind up.

"Of course it’s wasteful," replies Franck "What would you rather have in a new world environment the efficient delivery of a product which no one buys because it is obsolete, or two wasted prototypes and reasonable sales?"

The benchmarker nods.

"The paradox exists because there appears to be no overlap between the two choices. ‘And!’ helps you find where two courses of action overlap. Does that make sense?"

The benchmarker nods vigorously.

"Do you recognise any of these others from the tales? Do you have them in your organisation? How could you bust them?

Did you recognise any? Could you bust them? It is often worth listening out for other paradoxes your organisation faces. Often, the way to business success involves clearly describing the paradox, perhaps using my model of balanced scales, and then busting them.

Each paradox has the ability to both paralyse the organisation or to over emphasise one group of actions. Remember being paralysed in the New world brings real risks. The rapid pace of change means that a month of indecision is an Old world year of dithering. As you wait paralysed many things fill the time. Each a surprise. Now don’t forget how human beings are programmed

The continuos change is perceived as a threat to our security which in turn creates an emotional response from us, usually fear. The turbulence raises the emotional temperature since surprises lurk round every corner, The only way to survive it is to work in a New World way AND! have fun. Fun is the best antidote to emotional pressures.

OK, well I can smell bacon, so I guess breakfast must be here. Should we eat?"