Environment Success Ownership
The Leadership Challenge 2025 - Part 3
Technological advances always lead to changes in human society. From the stone axe and the wheel, to the printing press and the steam engine, and onward, technology has always been a key driver of societal change.
Further, if a technological change enhances human communications, the greater the societal change is likely to be. And, right now, the latest tech advances, which include but are far from limited to major communications advances, are so all-encompassing as to be catapulting the human race through its greatest shift in both individual behaviour and group social organization in several thousand years.
By virtue of its universality and application-ubiquity, digital technology and, hence, digitalization, is a hugely powerful change agent: so much so that, although it has already reshaped the world, we know that we are currently only on the nursery slopes of its potential.
Digitalization does get discussed. Of course it does. But in the business world the conversation is almost always about top-line influences. “Wow, look at what we can now do to keep people constantly updated.” “Wow, this new platform brings more efficiency, more service, more value, at lower cost.” “Wow, AI can now do … (insert smart new action of your choice).”
Whereas, less attention is devoted to what we might call the local-local domain. We know there are issues. We know, for example, that the digital world brings with it a simultaneous ‘cohesion & fragmentation’ phenomenon for humans that all too often leads to mental confusion, particularly but not exclusively in young people.
Consequently, there is one area in particular, a strikingly fundamental one, that seems to be woefully neglected and screaming out for our attention. I refer to a more general area: a review of the role and behaviour of groups of people … you, me, and those around us … from the bottom-up perspective.
In Part 2 of this series, I introduced three hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1. When people come together to work on a project they will:
A) clarify the scope of what they find themselves dealing with.
B) approach the task by taking small steps.
C) tend to be naturally constructive and try to avoid conflict in the process.
Hypothesis 2. The primary personal concerns of people coming together in a work environments are:
A) concern about their own personal future.
B) concern about the the future of their children and others close to them.
C) concern about the direct and indirect effects of any fallings-out that might occur.
Hypothesis 3. Where ever-more top-down systems are imposed on people in working environments:
A) they will, at some point, react against those systems.
B) there is an increased likelihood of leaders, consciously or subconsciously, acting in stereotypical ways including the prioritization of their own positions.
C) individually, the people will want to contribute their ideas but, if overwrought systems make them feel there is no place for them to do so, they will mentally withdraw from the project.
Keep these in mind while we investigate the situation under a newly coined heading …
ENVIRONMENT SUCCESS OWNERSHIP (ESO)
Yes, I know, yet another initialism! But it really is important. Why? Because the emerging digital world has disproportionately gifted power to the top echelon in any endeavour - the so-called top leadership.
The top-down obsession is a control thing, based on the supposition that there is always ‘the right way’ to do something. Consequently, there can be no toleration of deviation from ‘the right way’ because it would, at a minimum, reduce efficiency and, worse, might lead to complete anarchic dysfunction.
However, that insistence may not only lead to sub-optimal business outcomes, it risks diminishing the humanity in any situation.
To be clear, the concern here is for the bottom-up perspective. Imagine you and a bunch of people set out to achieve something. What then goes on from the perspective of your group?
It’s where ESO becomes a must-have capability for the assured success of any group venture; valid in all human endeavours from small businesses to large corporations; something that leaders need to be aware of and cultivate.
The fundamental principle underpinning ESO is that there is integral value within any group – value that, if it is allowed to do so, spontaneously reveals itself when people are in physical and/or mental proximity with one another.
This potentially enormous value is blocked at great cost. What’s more, blocking and/or ignoring it not only limits the potential success of the group but actually causes direct harms to the health of those in the group.
Frankly, if you’re going to create anything where you demand that the participants behave like automata, you might as well go the whole hog and just employ robots.
Why? Because anyone setting out to achieve anything with other people, real people, wants to carry those people along with them. Of course they do. What they want, were they to think about it in these terms, is that as many as possible of the people involved would spontaneously answer in the affirmative were they to be asked: “Do you feel that we are all moving forward together?”
Yet, today, more and more enterprises operate on a basis that leads to the negation of this outcome – one where people feel dominated, disconnected, diminished.
To discuss the situation we need to go back to basics.
Bonfire of the fallacies
Right now, courtesy of the rise and rise of digitalization, the human race is going through what is probably the greatest shift in individual behaviour and human social organization in a couple of millennia.
To understand ENVIRONMENT SUCCESS OWNERSHIP and its advantages we need to think about this shift.
For a start, we need to think about where we had got to by the end of the pre-digital era and how things have changed and are changing since we launched headlong into digitalization.
By the time business organizations reached maturity after the spectacular advances of the 19th and 20th centuries, a fallacy had become fossilized within them. It was something that was staring us in the face that we had not properly identified and did not understand, making it impossible, therefore, to acknowledge. But if we want to achieve success we sure need to confront it now.
It is the fallacious idea that …
… business enterprises create value for themselves and their customers in a specific, predictable and controllable way via a direct and rigid Aspirations ▶ to ▶ Results process that goes like this:
Taking account of market, shareholder and analyst expectations, competitive demands, and what they personally want the business to achieve, the CEO and executive team of an enterprise decide upon a set of aspirations for the business.
The aspirations are then translated into results that the enterprise must and will achieve.
Organizational structures and business and management tools are then put in place to help the organization achieve the stated results.
The leadership mandate, and the structures and tools, lead directly to decisions being taken in the enterprise that are aligned with the chosen aspirations and stated results.
All these decisions, along with the tools, structures, and aspirations, lead to behaviours of people throughout the organization that are actually aligned with achieving the stated results.
Outcome? The results are achieved.
There’s only one problem with all this … it is fallacious … it is nonsensical … it is hogwash.
This rigid, top-down-imposed model of the way things work came about because of a management obsession with control, predictability and efficiency. However, in the real world, things don’t work that way.
In the real world, ‘the world’ and ‘people’ get in the way, rendering the logic invalid. We’re usually quite good at estimating the impact of ‘macro’ factors like technological developments, global competition and new working practices. We are nowhere near as good at estimating - or even thinking about - ‘micro’ factors such as local-local conditions and even the state of mind of specific individuals. Which mean that things run, to a greater or lesser extent, out of control.
However, in pre-digital times, this wasn’t as important as it now is because it was offset, to some extent at least, by an informal system of people just being people.
Back then, day in and day out, moment by moment, people, individually and in groups, influenced what went on far more than they are able to do today. This fact was overlooked because it was ‘invisible’; it was just the way things were, people working in close proximity with one another and spontaneously making contributions in the workplace, in the local community, even within the family.
Insofar as this sub-system was noticed at all, it’s probably true to say that it got more attention when negative inputs were made; when, for example, someone got labelled ‘a member of the awkward squad’. This was just ‘normal’, a part of life, as ubiquitous and ordinary as the air that we breathe … and arguably just as vital to human flourishing on both the individual and societal levels.
This unregarded phenomenon occurred spontaneously precisely because companies in pre-digital times were more compact, in the sense that functions were situated in closer proximity to one another, and more overtly people-dependent.
One place where the phenomenon was actually recognized and formalized was Japan, where the practices of kaizen, nemawashi and consensus-building were developed.
Digitally Driven Deindustrialization
And then along came digital. One of the first things Business did, when digital technology became sufficiently mature to enable it, was to promote corporate fragmentation.
It wasn’t called that, of course. Rather, it was called Outsourcing. Throughout the 1990s and, particularly, the 2000s, Western countries used this means to deindustrialize.
It was the essential groundwork of the globalization project that those who are now called elites dreamed of.
Mind you, back when Western nations were offloading work to other countries as fast as they could, some people did question the sense of it all: “Shouldn’t we first think about this policy?”
The answer came back confidently and would brook no dissent. It was summed up by Tony Blair, British prime minister in 2005, in his speech to the Labour Party conference that year:
I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalization. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.
So, on went the march of deindustrialization, unabated. The chief victims of the policy were working class people in Western countries - ironically, in Britain, the constituency that Tony Blair’s Labour Party was originally founded to support and protect.
By the 2010s the new resulting reality was being reviewed, not always favorably. Here are three comments on the topic. The first is from a French publication in 2019:
Entire areas of production in the West have still collapsed, though, especially in textiles, footwear, household appliances, chemicals, timber, plastics and rubber. Thirty years of political passivity have produced a less rosy outcome than that promised by champions of pain-free deindustrialisation. France has had a trade deficit since 2004; the surplus in services does not compensate for the deficit in manufactured goods. Factory closures have turned whole regions into jobless deserts where technical skills have been lost. Service sector salaries, which were supposed to make up for job losses in industry, are on average 20% lower than those in manufacturing. ... Some French manufacturers have been bringing production back home — ski manufacturer Rossignol, Kusmi Tea, clothing companies Paraboot and Le Coq Sportif — which shows delocalisation can be reversed. 1
And, here, from a U.S. publication in 2019:
Dependence on imports has virtually eliminated the nation’s ability to manufacture large flat-screen displays, smartphones, many advanced materials and packaged semiconductors. The U.S. now lacks the capacity to manufacture many next-generation and emerging technologies. This is to say nothing of the human suffering and sociopolitical upheaval that have resulted from the hollowing out of entire regional economies. Once vibrant communities in the so-called Rust Belt have lost population and income as large factories and their many supporting suppliers have closed. ... In terms of long-term competitiveness, the biggest strategic consequence of this profound decline in American manufacturing might be the loss of our ability to innovate—that is, to translate inventions into production. We have lost much of our capacity to physically build what results from our world-leading investments in research and development. A study of 150 production-related hardware startups that emerged from research at MIT found that most of them scaled up production offshore to get access to production capabilities, suppliers and lead customers.2
And, finally on this theme, here’s a comment from 2016 relating to Britain:
Once there were enormous industrial estates along the thundering lines into London, thumping tracks wider than the Thames. Railway cars would unload ton upon ton of Sheffield steel and Durham coal. These were the big mass jobs where, in the 1950s, the Jamaicans and the Irish became British: working on huge lines in the plants with other men who got you to go to the football or the pub. But those industrial estates have almost all shuttered. There are no more production lines in Harlesden now: Poles, Somalis, Nigerians – these men work alone, atomized as pickers, drivers, cleaners, builders.3
Some offshoring might well have been a good thing but the unquestioned and unquestionable stampede has surely been … questionable. After all, it has long since become clear that China has no intention of rolling over and adopting Western-style politics. Nor has Russia. Nor have many other countries.
There’s more to it, too, than just the outsourcing.
Concurrently, the digital revolution threw some old-fashioned spanners into the works … cunningly disguised as helpful actions. For example, digitization enabled assured higher quality … provided that a rigid, top-down methodology was adhered to. It was meant to ensure that the number of errors was minimized … but it also severely restricted the possibility of spontaneous bottom-up interventions.
It’s the basis of the old joke …
“How many people does it take to run a factory?”
“One man and a fierce dog.”
“What’s the fierce dog there for?”
“To make sure the man doesn’t touch anything.”
The belief that came along with this digitally-governed ‘best practice’ methodology was that function systems in a digital environment could actually rule the world - particularly via the economic function system.
The globalization drive, promoted since 1990 was also supported by several other supposedly unstoppable factors.
For example, jobs would, in any event, be replaced by technology, robotic or otherwise. So the jobs in the West would not even exist in a decade or two, anyway.
What were we supposed to make of this? All these soon-to-be-non-existent jobs? Oh, might as well throw them over the wall in the direction of China, India and the rest
Was it W Edwards Deming or Peter Drucker who said, “Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean you should”? Whichever, it’s a telling point. And right now we are awash in a sea of digitally-enabled data.
The net result is that digital resources are universally assumed to be infallible and are accorded something approaching absolute power.
The counterpoint to this is an inevitable down-playing of direct, spontaneous human contributions and interaction. And this may get more sharply demarcated still with the march of AI. The phenomenon of ‘cognitive offloading’4 is already discussed.
But this isn’t the way that humans flourish. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s bad for people. Potentially, very bad indeed.
Disconnect from disconnection
So, does all of the foregoing give one pause for thought that maybe, just maybe, there is an alternative explanation for some of the acknowledged human problems that seem more and more to beset us?
Take, for example, the description that comes up when one Googles ‘disconnection from work’ …
"Disconnection from work," or the "right to disconnect," refers to an employee's ability to disengage from work communications and responsibilities outside of their contracted working hours without facing negative consequences. It's crucial for maintaining a healthy work-life balance, reducing burnout, and improving overall well-being.
I suggest this is as fallacious as the old Aspirations ▶ to ▶ Results sequence discussed earlier.
The actual problem is that, particularly over the past twenty years, people have inexorably been disconnected from their work via their required adherence to and measurement by the rule of digital regimes over fragmented workforces.
Consequently, in more and more situations, any relational dynamics and flow are staunched and people are forced to suppress their natural human reactions and just ‘do as you’re damned well told’.
For a very long time the idea that people were just ‘cogs in the machine’ was regarded as a negative outcome. Way back in 1936 Charlie Chaplin made a great film about it, Modern Times, but, ironically, it is really only now that the ‘cog in the machine’ reality has become more embedded and real than ever.
The way to achieve ‘burnout prevention’, and, even, ‘healthier work-life balance’ is by re-activating the human spark and promoting Environment Success Ownership.
Just ask yourself, in your organization, on a scale of 1 to 7, how well do you feel that you and your colleagues are moving forward together?
More on this theme, and specifically about ESO, in the next post in this series.
Thanks for reading.
Image at top: Shutterstock.
Laura Raim. Le Monde Diplomatique (July 2019)
Sridhar Kota and Tom Mahoney. Reinventing Competitiveness, American Affairs Journal, Fall 2019. Volume III, Number 3.
Ben Judah. This is London (2016)
A Google search results in: “Cognitive offloading is the strategy of using external tools or actions to reduce the mental workload or cognitive demand of a task, effectively transferring information processing from the brain to an external resource.”
For discussion around ‘cognitive offloading’, view the work of Jef Teugels.