The potential of Government CX to improve social trust

Several times last week, while traveling in India, people cut in front of my family in line. And not slyly or apologetically, but gratuitously and completely obliviously, as if no norms around queuing even exist.

In this way, India reminds me of New York City. There are oodles and oodles of people, that seem to all behave aggressively - trying to get their needs met, elbowing and jockey their way through if they need to. It’s exhausting and it frays my Midwestern nerves, but I must admit that it’s rational: it’s a dog eat dog world out there, so eat or be eaten.

What I realized this trip, is that even after a few days I found myself meshing into the culture. Contrary to other trips to India, I now have children to protect. After just days, I began to armor up, ready to elbow and jockey if needed. I felt like a different person, more like a “papa bear” than merely a “papa”. like a local perhaps.

I even growled a papa bear growl - very much unlike my normal disposition. Bo, our oldest, had to go to the bathroom on our flight home so I took him. We waited in line, patiently, for the two folks ahead of us to complete their business. Then as soon as we were up, a man who joined the line a few minutes after us just moved toward the bathroom as if we had never been there waiting ahead of him

Then the papa bear in me kicked in. This is what transpired in Hindi, translated below. My tone was definitely not warm and friendly:

Me: Sir, we were here first weren’t we?

Man: I have to go to the bathroom.

Me: [I gesture toward my son and give an exasperated look]. So does he.

And then I just shuffled Bo and I into the bathroom. Elbow dropped.

But this protective instinct came at a cost. Usually, in public, I’m observant of others, ready to smile, show courteousness, and navigate through space kindly and warmly. But all the energy and attention I spent armoring up, after just days in India, left me no mind-space to think about others.

This chap who tried to cut us in line, maybe he had a stomach problem. Maybe he had been waiting to venture to the lavatory until an elderly lady sitting next to him awoke from a nap. I have no idea, because I didn’t ask or even consider the fact that this man may have had good intentions - I just assumed he was trying to selfishly cut in line.

Reflecting on this throughout the rest of the 15 hour plane ride, it clicked that this toy example of social trust that took place in the queue of an airplane bathroom reflects a broader pattern of behavior. Social distrust can have a vicious cycle:

1. Someone acts aggressively toward me

2. I feel distrust in strangers and start to armor up so that I don’t get screwed and steamrolled in public interactions

3. I spend less time thinking about, listening to, and observing the needs of others around me

4. I act even more aggressively towards strangers in public interactions, because I’m thinking less about others

And now, I’ve ratcheted up the distrust, ever so slightly, but tangibly.

The natural response to this ratcheting of social distrust is to create more rules, regulations, and centralize power in institutions. The idea being, of course, that institutions can mediate day to day interactions between people so the ratcheting of social distrust has some guardrails put upon it. When social norms can’t regulate behavior, authority steps in.

The problem with institutional power, of course, is that it’s corruptible and undermines human agency and freedom. Ratcheting up institutional power has tradeoffs of its own.

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Later during our journey home, we were waiting in another line. This time we were in a queue for processing at US Customs and Border patrol. This time, I witnessed something completely different.

A couple was coming through the line and they asked us:

Couple: Our connecting flight is boarding right now. I’m so sorry to ask this, but is it okay if we go ahead of you in line?

Us: Of course, we have much more time before our connecting flight boards. Go ahead.

Couple: [Proceeds ahead, and makes the same request to the party ahead of us].

Party ahead of us: Sorry, we’re in the same boat - our flight is boarding now. So we can’t let you cut ahead.

Couple: Okay, we totally understand.

The first interaction in line at the airplane bathroom made me feel like everyone out there was unreasonable and selfish. It undermined the trust I had in strangers.

This interaction in the customs line had the opposite effect, it left me hopeful and more trusting in strangers because everyone involved behaved considerately and reasonably.

First, the couple acknowledged the existence of a social norm and were sincerely sorry for asking us to cut the line. We were happy to break the norm since we were unaffected by a delay of an extra three minutes. And finally, when the couple ahead said no, they abided by the norm.

We were all observing, listening, and trying to help each other the best we could. In my head, I was relieved and I thought, “thank goodness not everyone’s an a**hole.

It seems to me that just as there’s a cycle that perpetuates distrust, there is also a cycle which perpetuates trust:

1. Listen and seek to understand others around you

2. Do something kind that helps them out without being self-destructive of your own needs

3. The person you were kind toward feels higher trust in strangers because of your kindness

4. The person you were kind to can now armor down ever so slightly and can listen for and observe the needs of others

And now, instead of a ratchet of distrust, we have a ratchet of more trust. Instead of being exhausting like distrust, this increase in trust is relieving and energy creating.

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At the end of the day, I want to live in a free and trusting society. If there was to be one metric that I’m trying to bend the trajectory on in my vocational life - it’s trust. I want to live in a world that’s more trusting.

This desire to increase trust in society is why I care so much about applying customer experience practices to Government. Government can disrupt the cycle of distrust and start the flywheel of trust in a big way - and not just between citizens and government but across broader culture and society.

Imagine this: a government agency, say the National Parks Service, listens to its constituents and redesigns its digital experience. Now more and more people feel excited about visiting a National Park and are more able to easily book reservations and be prepared for a great trip into one of our nation’s natural treasures.

So now, park visitors have more trust in the National Park Service going into their trip and are more receptive to safety alerts and preservation requests from Park Rangers. This leads to a better trip for the visitor, a better ability for Rangers to maintain the park, and a higher likelihood of referral by visitors who have a great trip. This generates new visitors and adds momentum to the flywheel.

I’m a dataset of one, but this is exactly what happened for me and my family when we’ve interacted with the National Parks’ Service new digital experience. And there’s even some data from Bill Eggers and Deloitte that is consistent with this anecdote: CX is a strong predictor of citizens’ trust in government.

And now imagine if this sort of flywheel of trust took place across every single interaction we had with local, state, and federal government. Imagine the mental load, tension, and exhaustion that would be averted and the positive affect that might replace it.

It could be truly transformational, not just with what we believe about government, but what we believe about the trustworthiness of other citizens we interact with in public settings. If we believe our democratic government - by the people and for the people - is trustworthy, that will likely help us believe that “the people” themselves are also more trustworthy. After all, Government does shape more of our. daily interactions than probably any other institution, but Government also has an outsized role in mediating our interactions with others.

Government CX is a huge opportunity that we should pursue, not only because of the improvement to delivery of government service or the improvement of trust in government. Improvement to government CX at the local, state, and federal levels could also have spillover effects which increase social trust overall. No institution has the reach and intimate relationship with people to start the flywheel of trust like customer-centric government could, at least that I can see.

Photo by George Stackpole on Unsplash

“Our freedom is inextricably linked to goodness”

This post is an excerpt from Choosing Goodness - a series of letters to my sons, that is both a memoir and a book of everyday philosophy. To find out more about this project, click here.

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Why do we need to be good people?

Photo Credit: Unsplash @jvshbk

We have two really difficult problems when we humans live in a community of others rather than in the state of nature. We have the problem of how to ensure that the community doesn't devolve into a state of violence (i.e., we have to create rules and institutions), and, we have the problem of ensuring that the corrupting influence of power doesn't cause the system of government to rot from within.

My whole adult life, until your mom and I found out we were having you, I've been reading, writing, and thinking about institutions and how to create and run them well. Take a look at our bookshelf at home, the majority of what you'll find are books about institutions in one way or another. For most of my life, I've been nutty about making institutions work better and changing the system to make sure they do.

But since I've been reflecting on fatherhood, and starting to write these letters to you, I've grown more and more confused about institutions and their role in society. I suppose I've come to see institutions more for what they are: an intentional concentration of power that is bounded by rules, controls, and systems to ensure, god willing, that it’s wielded benevolently, and without abuse. 

As I’ve challenged myself to think about institutions through the lens of power and goodness, I’ve cooled my singular focus on building better institutions. I don’t like the world that I foresee an institutions heavy approach would create, because institutions necessarily manage, regulate, and constrain freedoms.

I don’t want our world to be one where to resolve conflict, prevent violence, and deter corruption we stack rule on top of rule, penalty on top of penalty, oversight board after oversight board, and check after balance all to deal with conflict and the corrupting influence of power. I don't like the idea of a community that is so controlled and I'm not even sure that it's a strategy that would ultimately lead to less conflict, violence, and corruption.

Which makes building character, and moving toward a vision where our community and culture chooses freely to walk the path of goodness so important to me. A culture motivated by goodness deals with conflict, violence, and corruption by preventing it in the first place; character doesn't require changing institutions, it reduces the need for institutions in the first place.

To be sure, building character and a goodness-motivated culture is at least as difficult as reforming institutions. And we will always obviously need better institutions - the size of our society requires it. 

But if it were possible to make our world a place that built character and a culture of goodness, I would much rather live in that world than a world on the verge of subduing itself through laws, regulation, and an ever greater requirement to concentrate power in institutions so those laws and regulations can be enforced.

The schism here you must be feeling, as to how your individual choice to choose the work and walk the path of goodness ladders up to the community’s aggregate culture, is not lost on me. It’s hard to see how individual acts affect the broader culture. But they are connected, because our individual actions affect perceptions of normal and vice-versa.

Our decisions and actions are infectious. The actions you take don't necessarily compel others to behave a certain way, but they do have influence because our actions shape what's normal. For example if you lie, others you interact with consistently will think it is more normal to lie than they otherwise would have, had you not lied. And if you lie consistently, it will give others more implicit, social permission to lie than they otherwise would have. Over time, these seemingly little acts will generate a feedback loop which eventually will be powerful enough to shift what constitutes normal behavior around lying and telling the truth.

But conversely, if you tell the truth, and do it consistently, it will give others the implicit, social permission to tell the truth. Your actions, you see, have reverberations beyond your own life. The book How Behavior Spreads, by Damon Centola, explain this complex system dynamic of how behaviors spread from neighborhood to neighborhood. Pick up that book from our bookshelf at home for a rich discussion about this point.

This observation of how our actions affect others and how the culture affects us is especially important to keep in mind because of the time we live in. Social technologies make it easier and faster to influence what’s normal. And I've noticed that the terrible parts of our humanity are the ideas that spread wider and faster. And so our perception of normal gets skewed.

If we - and by that I mean you and me specifically, in addition to “society” - don't choose the work and walk the path of goodness, behaving with goodness will become less normal, and perhaps even become abnormal eventually. And that to me is a scary, scary world. But remember, we have the ability to shape what is normal with our own choices. Why not shape that normal to be goodness instead of the abuse of power?

I'm not much of a gambler, as you three will come to learn as you get older, but I'll make a bet with you. I bet that at some point in your life you will be in some position of power. Whether at work, at school, or volunteering - in some role, whether big or small. In some, if not all, of these positions you will have an opportunity to be corrupt, even if just in a small way. You'll have an opportunity to abuse the power you have to enrich yourself at the expense of others. And you'll have to make a decision to give into this temptation or not.

The key point here is not that you'll be in a position of power at some point in life, or that in that position you'll have a choice between goodness and power. That is all obvious, and something we've been considering together in these letters since the very beginning.

They key point, rather, is that this choice between goodness and power, between character and corruption will have a real effect on other people's lives. In that moment, when the opportunity to abuse power is thrust in front of you, how you choose to act will have real consequences. How you choose will affect what’s normal, even if it’s just in a small way that adds up over time.

If you choose to live in a community with others, the tension between power and goodness will be a constant part of your life, for your whole life. The choice is not imaginary, it’s a real choice, with real stakes that we must make.

Because we came out of the state of nature, and chose to live in communities this tension between power and goodness, between corruption and integrity will always be part of our life. It's a struggle we have inherited from our mothers and fathers before us and their mothers and fathers before them. And because we are mere mortals, and are not perfectly good, we, as a society, formed rules and institutions to help us navigate and manage that tension.

This may always be what mothers and father think as they prepare for their children to be born, but the America you are being born into seems more and more like it is consumed by a lust of power and control, which leads an ever escalating cycle of conflict, rules, the struggle to control those rules, and conflict again.

I always wondered why your Dada wanted to sacrifice everything and move to the United States. And one day he finally told me. Of course, part of what we sought was greater opportunities for prosperity – what he thought of as a better life than the poverty he experienced in his youth and early adulthood. But I’ll never forget what we hold me next.

He saw corruption in India, his motherland, and in America, his adoptive land. And that’s true. All places, I think, have some amount of corruption, albeit in different forms. But what your Dada believed to be difference between corruption in India and America was that in America the corruption didn’t affect “little people” in their everyday lives. Regular people could have a good life without having to succumb to the effects of corruption on a daily basis. In the halls of power, sure, there was corruption. But he respected that in America regular, everyday, people didn’t get squashed by it.

In the decades since I talked with your Dada about his aspirations to emigrate to America, and his view of life here, I’ve come to agree with him. Corruption is a leach. It siphons prosperity through graft and rent seeking. It saps people of their trust in each other and in institutions. It’s a disease, comparable to a cancer, that slowly eats away at a pleasant, peaceful, and prosperous society. The real enemy of any society is not a policy decision or a rival policy – we all have a stake in solving the corruption problem. To make the community a place worth living in, corruption is our common enemy.

The real practical question to me, then, is how. We have a few strategies, as we’ve seen, to address the problem of corruption. To me abundance is an enabler not a solution. Homogenization is a non-starter. That leaves only two viable strategies – building character and building institutions.

My case for “why goodness” and the need to build character into our culture boils down to this: If we choose to live in community with others, the incidence of corruption is inevitable. Accepting corruption is not an option, and neither is homogenization. We can’t depend on abundance to solve our problems, either. That leaves us with the choices to build institutions and build character, and in reality we need to do both.

But building more institutions comes at a hefty price because the more institutions we depend on, the less freedom we will have. Every rule we make constrains our future choices. That leaves goodness as our best option, even though building a society driven by goodness is extremely challenging. If we choose to leave the state of nature and live in community with others, we must also choose the work and walk the path of goodness so that we can do our part to preserve as much of our freedoms as possible.

The world I hope for me and your mother, and the world I hope to pay forward to you, my three sons, is a world that is truly free – like the freedom of heaven the renowned Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore describes in Gitanjali 35.

Instead of succumbing to a culture struggling for power, I hope you aspire to find peace in goodness and that the world ends up requiring fewer rules and institutions as time goes on, instead of more. I hope you are persuaded that our freedom, from the ever growing reach of rules and institutions, is inextricably linked to goodness. But for that to happen, more and more people have to choose the work to walk the path of goodness, rather than power. And that my sons, starts with us and the choices we make every day of our lives. We must choose.

Management Is Shifting From Leadership to Authorship

It’s not that management is about to change at a fundamental level. What I’d propose is that it already has changed, but we just haven’t noticed it yet.

I predict that we will start noticing dramatic change in management practices within the next 10 years, because Covid-19 accelerated two trends that have been brewing for the previous quarter century: the digitization of internal firm communications, and, the adoption of Agile management practices.

What’s the fundamental change that’s happened in management?

In a sentence, the way I think about this fundamental change is that management is shifting its primary paradigm from “leadership” to “authorship”.

The paradigm of leadership is that there are leaders and followers. In a world oriented toward leadership, the manager is responsible for delivering results, making the efforts of the team exceed the sum of its parts, and aligning the team’s efforts so they contribute to the goals of the larger enterprise. The leader-manager takes on the role of structuring the vision, process, and the management structures for the team to hit its goals. The leader is directly responsible for their direct reports and accountable for their results. The leader-manager paradigm is effective in environments that call for centralization, control, consistency, and accountability.

The paradigm of authorship is that there are customers and needs to fulfill, that everyone is ultimately responsible for in their own way. In a world oriented toward authorship the manager is responsible for understanding a valuable need, setting a clear and compelling objective, and creating clear lanes for others to contribute. The author-manager takes on the role of finding the right objectives, communicating a simple and compelling story about them, and creating a platform for shared accountability rather than scripting how coordination will occur. The author-manager paradigm is effective in environments that call for dynamism, responsiveness, and multi-disciplinary problem solving.

This distinction really becomes clearer when thinking about the skills and capabilities critical to authorship. To be successful as an author-manager one must be incredibly good at really understanding a customer, and articulating how to serve them in an inspiring and compelling way. The author-manager has to create simple, cohesive narratives and share them. The author-manager needs to build relationships across an entire enterprise (and perhaps outside the firm) to bring skills and talents to a compelling problem, much as a lighting rod attracts lighting. The author-manager needs to create systems and platforms for teams to manage themselves and then step out of the way of progress. This set of capabilities is very different than the core MBA curriculum of strategy, marketing, operations, accounting, statistics, and finance.

In both paradigms, management fundamentals still matter. Both postures of management - leadership and authorship - require great skill, are important, and are difficult to do well. I don’t mean to imply that “leadership” is without value. The relative value of each, however, depends on the context in which they are being used. And for us, here in 2022, the context has definitely shifted.

How has the context related to the internal organizations of firms shifted?

In a sentence, firms are shifting from hierarchies to networks.

I’d note before any further discussion that this is idea of shifting from hierarchies to networks is not a new idea. General Stanley McChrystal saw this shift happening while fighting terrorist networks. Marc Andreessen and other guests on the Farnam Street Knowledge Project podcast also hint at this shift directly or indirectly. So do progressive thinkers on management, like Steven Denning. I’m not the first to the party here, but there’s some context I would add to help explain the shift in a bit more detail.

After the industrial revolution, as economies and global markets began to liberalize in the 20th Century, companies got big. Economies of scale and fixed cost leverage started to matter a lot. Multinationals started popping up. Globalization happened. Lots of forces converged and all these large corporations and institutions came into existence and needed to be managed effectively.

Hierarchical bureaucracies filled this need. In these hierarchical bureaucracies, tiers of leader-managers worked at the behest of a firm’s senior management team, to help them exert their vision and influence on a global scale. The vision and strategy were set at the top, and the layers of managers implemented this vision.

I think of it like water moving through a system of pipes In a hierarchy, it is the job of the executive team to create pressure, urgency, and direction and push that “water” down to the next layer. Then the next layer down added their own pressure and pushed the water down to the next layer, and so on, until the employees on the front line were coordinated and in line with the vision of the executive team. This was the MO in the 20th and early 21st Century.

A network operates quite differently, it functions on objectives, stories, and clearly articulated roles. In a network an author-manager sees a need that a customer or stakeholder has. Then, they figure out how to communicate it as an objective - with a clear purpose, intended outcome, measure for success, and rules of engagement for working together. This exercise is not like that of the hierarchy where the manager exerts pressure downward and aims for compliance to the vision. In a network what matters is putting out a clear and compelling bat signal, and then giving the people who engage the principles and parameters to self-organize and execute.

Both approaches - hierarchies and networks - are effective in the right circumstances. But a trade off surely exists: put briefly, the trade-off between hierarchies and networks is a trade-off between control and dynamism.

Why is this change happening?

In the 20th century, control mattered a lot. These were large, global companies that needed to deliver results. But then, digital infrastructures (i.e., internet and computing) started to make information to flow faster. Economic policies become more liberal so goods and people also started to flow faster. And all these changes led to consumers having more choice, information, and therefore more power. Again, this was not my idea, John Hagel, John Seeley Brown, Lang Davison, and Deloitte’s Center for the Edge articulated “The Big Shift” in a monumental report almost 15 years ago.

Here’s the top-level punchline: the internet showed up, consumers got a lot more power because of it, the global marketplace was disrupted, and firms started to have to be much more responsive to consumers’ needs. The trade-off between control and dynamism tilted toward dynamism.

What I’d suggest is that these same force that affected the global market also affected the inner world of firms. That influence on the firm is what’s tilting the balance from leadership and hierarchy to authorship and networks.

To start, digital infrastructures like the internet didn’t just change information flows in the market, it changed information flows inside the firm. Before, information had to flow through cascades of people and analog communication channels. The leader-manager layer of the organization was the mediator of internal firm communications. In the pre-digital world, there was no other way to transmit information from senior executives to the front-line - the only option was playing telephone, figuratively and literally.

But now, that’s different. Anyone in a company can now communicate with anyone else if they choose to. We don’t even just have email anymore. Thanks to Covid-19, the use of digital communication channels like Zoom, Slack, and MS Teams are widely adopted. We now have internal company social networks and apps that work on any smartphone and actually reach front-line employees. We have easy and cheap ways to make videos and other visualizations of complex messages and share them with anyone, in any language, across the world. Just like eCommerce retailers can circumvent traditional distribution channels and sell directly to consumers, people inside companies can circumvent middle managers and talk directly to the colleagues they most want to engage.

Now, more than ever, putting out a bat signal that attracts people with diverse skills and experience from across a firm to solve a problem actually can happen. Before, there was no other choice but to operate as a hierarchy - middle level managers were needed as go-between because direct communication was not possible or cheap. But now that’s different, any person - whether it’s the CEO or a front-line customer service rep - can use digital communication channels to interact with any other node in the firm’s network if they choose to.

I’ve lived this change personally. When I started as a Human Capital Consultant in 2009, we used to think about communicating through cascaded emails from executives, to directors, to managers, to front-line employees. Now, when I work on communicating strategy and vision across global enterprises, our small but mighty communications team works directly with front-line mangers who run plants and stores. We might actually avoid working through layers of hierarchy because it slow and our message ends up getting diluted anyway. Working through a network is better and faster than depending on a hierarchy to “cascade the message down.”

Agile management practices have also enabled the shift from hierarchies to network occur. Agile was formally introduced shortly after the turn of the 21st century as a set of principles to use in software development and project management. There’s lots of experts on Agile, SCRUM and other related methodologies, but what I find relevant to this discussion is that Agile practices allow teams to work more modularly and therefore more dynamically than typical teams. Working in two week sprints with a clear output scoped out, for example, makes it so that new people can more easily plug in and out of a team’s workflow.

What that means in practice is that the guidance, direction, accountability, and pressure of a hierarchy is no longer necessary to get work done. Teams with clarity on their customer, their intended outcome, and their objectives can manage work themselves without the need for centralized leadership from the focal point of a hierarchy. Agile practices allow networks of people to form, work, and dissolve fluidly around objectives instead of rigid functional responsibilities. Especially when you add in the influence of Peter Drucker’s Management by Objective in the 1950s and the OKR framework developed at Intel in the 1970’s, working in networks is now possible in ways that weren’t even 25 years ago. For the first time, maybe ever, large enterprises don’t absolutely need hierarchical management.

I lived this reality out when our team hosted an intern this summer. I was part of a team which was using Agile principles to manage itself. Our team’s intern was able to integrate into a bi-weekly sprint and start contributing within hours, rather than after days or weeks of orientation. Instead of needing a long ramp up and searching for a role, he just took a few analytical tasks at a sprint review and started running. Even though I’m biased as a true-believer of Agile, I was shocked at how easily he was able to plug in and out of our team over the course of his summer internship, and how quickly he was able to contribute something meaningful.

Even 20 years ago, this modular, networked way of working was much harder because nobody had invented it yet, or at a minimum these practices weren’t widely adopted. Now, these two ideas of Agile and OKR are baked into dozens, maybe hundreds, of software tools used by teams and enterprises all around the world. It’s not that these new, more network-oriented ways of working are going to hit the mainstream, they already have.

The adoption of digital communication tools and Agile practices inside firms has been stewing for a long time. Covid merely accelerated the adoption and the culture change that was already occurring.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the landscape could be entirely different a decade from now if and when blockchain and smart contracts emerge, further blurring the boundaries of the firm and it’s ecosystem. It’s not that management is going to shift, it already has, and it will continue to.

Why does it all matter?

I wrote and thought about this piece because I’ve observed some firms become more successful than their competitors, and I’ve observed some managers become more successful than their peers. I’ve been trying to explain why so I could share my observations with others.

And the simple reason is, some firms and some managers are embracing authorship and networks, while their less successful peers are holding tight to traditional leadership and hierarchy.

Managers who want to be successful act differently. If the world has become more dynamic, managers can’t stick with the same old posture of leadership and clutching the remnants of a hierarchical world. What managers have to do instead is lean into authorship and learn to operate effectively in networked ecosystems.

But I think the stakes are much larger than the career advancement and professional success of managers. What’s more significant to appreciate is the huge mismatch many organizations have between their management paradigm and their operating environment.

The way I see it, enterprises that are stuck in the 20th Century mindset of leadership and hierarchy rather than authorship and networks are missing huge opportunities to create value for their stakeholders. If you’re part of an organization that’s stuck in the past, prepare to be beat by those who’ve embraced authorship, networks, and agility.

But more than that, this mismatch prevents forward progress, not just for individual enterprises, but for our entire society. Management scholar Gary Hamel estimates this bureaucracy tax to be three trillion dollars.

For most people, thinking about management structure is burning and pedantic, but I disagree. Modernizing the practice of management is just as important as upgrading an enterprise’s information technology and doing so successfully leads to a huge windfall gain of value. To progress our society, we have to fix this mismatch so that the management practices deployed widely in the organizational world are the best possible approaches for solving the most critical challenges our teams, companies, NGOs, and governments face. I honestly don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say this: the welfare of future generations depends, in part, on us shifting management from leadership and hierarchy to authorship and networks.

To make faster progress - whether at the level of a team, a firm, or an institution - embracing this fundamental shift in management from leadership and hierarchy to authorship and networks is non-negotiable. Remember, it’s not that this shift is going to happen, it already has.

Photo from Unsplash, by @deepmind

Measuring the American Dream

In America, during elections, we talk a lot about policies. Which candidate is for this or against that, and so on.

But policies are not a vision for a country. Policies are tools for achieving the dream, not the American Dream itself. Policies are means, not ends.

I’m desperate for political leaders at every level - neighborhood, city, county, state, country, planet - to articulate a vision, a vivid description of the sort of community they want to create, rather than merely describing a set of policies during elections.

This is hard. I know because I’ve tried. Even at the neighborhood level, the level where I engage in politics, it’s hard to articulate a vision for what we want the neighborhood to look like, feel like, and be like 10-15 years from now.

Ideally, political leaders could describe this vision and what a typical day in the community would be like in excruciating detail, like a great novelist sets the scene at the beginning of a book to make the reader feel like they’ve transported into the text.

What are you envisioning an average Monday to be like in 2053? I need to feel it in my bones.

Admittedly, this is really hard. So what’s an alternative?

Metrics.

I’m a big fan of metrics to help run enterprises, because choosing what to measure makes teams get specific about their dreams and what they’re willing to sacrifice.

Imagine if the Congress and the White House came up with a non-partisan set of metrics that we were going to set targets for and measure progress against for decades at a time? That would provide the beginnings of a common vision across party, geography, and agency that everyone could focus on relentlessly.

This is the sort of government management I want, so I took a shot at it. If I was a player in setting the vision for the country, this would be a pretty close set of my top 15 metrics to measure and commit to making progress on as a country.

This was a challenging exercise, here are a few interesting learnings:

• It’s hard to pick just 15. But it creates a lot of clarity. Setting a limit forces real talk and hard choices.

• It pays to to be clever. If you go to narrow, you don’t have spillover effects. It’s more impactful to pick metrics that if solved, would have lots of other externalities and problems that would be solved along the way. For example, if we committed to reducing gun deaths, we’d necessarily have to make an impact in other areas, such as: community relationships, trust with law enforcement, healthcare costs, and access to mental health services.

• You have to think about everybody. Making tough choices on metrics for everyone, makes the architect think about our common issues, needs, and dreams. It’s an exercise that can’t be finished unless it’s inclusive.

• You have to think BIG. Metrics that are too narrow, are more easily hijacked by special interests. Metrics that are big, hairy, and audacious make it more difficult to politicize the metric and the target.

Setting up a scorecard, with current state measures and future targets would be a transformative exercise to do at any level of government: from neighborhood to state to nation to planet.

It’s not so important whether my metrics are “right” or if yours are, per se. What matters is we co-create the metrics and are committed to them.

Let’s do it.

Getting Process Out of the Black Box

The first three weeks after Emmett (our third son) was born, were unusually smooth. And then I went back to work.

Maybe I’m just a novice and I should’ve expected brother-brother conflict while our two older sons, Bo and Myles, jockeyed for new roles in the family. But when I went back to work, and perhaps coincidentally perhaps not, snap. The good times were over and their relationship flipped, seemingly overnight.

This rattled me. I don’t have a sibling and I was resentful toward my sons - that they didn’t realize how lucky they were. I made this known to them and performed several other magnificent feats of faux-parenting, including yelling, calling out mistakes, ignoring the bad behavior, ordering them to “work it out” - and probably several embarrassing and obviously ineffective strategies.

I was particularly frustrated with our older son, who was more frequently the instigator of conflict. Why doesn’t he get it? How is he not learning from this?, I thought.

After a particularly bad episode, involving a modest but intention punch to a defenseless brother’s chest, I accidentally had a small breakthrough. I AAR’d my son.

An AAR is an After-action review that I learned about when reading some books about the US Army’s approach to leadership. Basically, a unit should debrief right after a mission using four simple questions. These questions vary depending on where you read about it but they’re roughly this:

• What did we intend?

• What actually happened?

• Why?

• What should we do differently next time?

It turns out, even at 4 years old, Bo was pretty responsive to the AAR. He was capable of thinking through these questions with some modest support and he actually learned something. But the takeaway of this story is deeper than to “AAR your kids.” The real lesson is that important “processes” like helping my sons learn from a mistake shouldn’t be improvised; for the important stuff I shouldn’t be winging it.

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Let’s simplify the world and say there are two kinds of organizational processes, explicit processes and implicit processes. I’m going to start with family stuff as an example, but as we’ll see shortly it applies to professional life as well.

Explicit processes are ones that are worked out, down to specific, simple steps. Explicit processes are the sorts of activities that everyone in our family has a mental checklist or process map for in their heads. In some instances, we even have simple diagrams drawn up on a whiteboard in our kitchen.

Here are some examples of explicit organizational processes in our family:

• The routine at dinner / bedtime

• The routine for how we get ready in the morning

• The routine for how we get ready when we have to leave the house

• The routine for drop-off and pick-up from school

• The routine for cleaning up toys

• The routine for feeding the dog

• The meal plan for the week

To be sure, we don’t have perfect processes worked out for all these routines - we’re always learning and improving. But having any process that are explicitly understood to the entire family does two things: 1) we avoid rookie mistakes (and at least some toddler meltdowns), and, 2) we have a starting point for process improvement. For explicit processes, we’re decidedly not winging it. We have a plan that is explicitly known to everyone.

Implicit processes are the situations that we haven’t thought through in advance or taken the time to make specific, simple, or known to everyone. The way these processes work is in the metaphorical black box - they happen, but it’s not clear how or why - we’re essentially winging it on these. Some examples in our family, past and present, are:

• How we coach our kids when they make mistakes

• How we share information with our kids and family

• How we learn and adjust as parents

• How we resolve sibling conflict (and when we intervene as parents and when we don’t)

• How we determine how much of a plate needs to be eaten before dessert is allowed.

Most of these are at least a little squishy in our household. But during the heart of Covid Robyn and I took something implicit - how we communicate a day-care Covid exposure and quarantine - and made it explicit. By working through the process and trying to make it simple, clear, and essentially into a checklist a few really good things happened:

• We were calmer (because we had a plan to lean on)

• We executed faster (because we knew our roles, and cut out unnecessary steps)

• We executed better (because we didn’t panic and forget really important, but easy to miss steps like getting complete information from our day care provider about the exposure)

Making the implicit process explicit is a game changer, because routines that are made simpler and clearer go much better than when we wing it. And as I mentioned previously, explicit processes are much easier to improve iteratively.

Of course, in our professional lives not every implicit process is consequential enough to make implicit (e.g., it’s probably okay to wing it when picking a spot for the quarterly happy hour). But in my experience lots of really consequential processes in organizations are ones where most of us are essentially winging it. Or worse, the processes are explicit but are complex, bloated, or shoddily communicated…and as a result outcomes are actually worse than winging it.

Here are some examples - how many of these are explicit processes in your organization? How many are implicit?

• How we learn from a failed project

• How we manage in a crisis

• How we hire, interview, fire, or promote fairly

• How we react to changing consumer or market trends

• How we coach and develop employees

• How we support new managers or employees

• How we make a big decision

• How we plan or facilitate meetings

• How we communicate major decisions or enterprise strategy

• How we set goals and measure KPIs 

• How we scope out, form the right team, and launch a strategic initiative

• How we make adjustments to the strategy or plan

How many of these should be simple, clear, and well understood? How many of these are okay to wing it? 

It seems to me that a simple, relatively cheap way to radically change the performance of an organization - whether at work or at home - is to take consequential processes that are implicit and make them simple, clear, and explicit.

Is the company designed fairly?

Would I be willing to switch jobs with anyone in the company? For real, would I?

To the philosophically inclined reader this question rightly feels familiar. It’s a version of the Rawlsian thought experiment which utilizes the “veil of ignorance” to examine the design of a society.

Rawls was a 20th century political philosopher who was interested in ideas about justice. His most discussed work was A Theory of Justice. That work explores whether a society is just, not enterprises, but the idea is still helpful for corporate types like me.

The idea, in broad strokes, basically goes like this.

Let’s imagine that we were designing a society from scratch, with a totally blank slate. We’d have to make all these decisions about how people are treated, how the economy works, and who has what rights and privileges. Really important stuff to decide, right?

But there’s a catch. We don’t know what our own role in this new society will be. We could become a street sweeper, a musician, a stay-at-home-dad, a CEO, or a veteran wounded in war. As Rawls puts it, we’re designing this society from behind a “veil of ignorance” because we don’t know what our specific situation will be while we’re making all these decisions.

Rawls’s thought experiment isn’t a proposal for how to design a society - it’s obviously not practical and basically impossible to actually deploy. But it is a good test. In the society we’re designing, would we be okay with essentially being randomly assigned to a role? If so, the society is probably just because it is fair.

Which is where the question opening this post comes in, it’s loosely based on Rawls’s veil of ignorance thought experiment: if I would be willing to switch jobs with anyone in the company, the enterprise is probably designed fairly.

Just about every organization I’ve observed or been part of fail this fairness test, though I suppose some are more “fair” than others.

What would have to be true for a company to be “fair” and “just”?

In my experience, the main points of contention around fairness and justice in companies are between front-line employees and management. The paragraph below is how I imagine many front-line employees view the managers and executives of their company. And I’ll own it - this paragraph is absolutely informed by own experiences, from my first job slinging popcorn at a movie theater to being a middle-level manager in a fairly large enterprise today.

I would love to switch places with those people at corporate. They don’t do any of the “real” work in this company. People like us make the products and services for the customer. People like us are on the front-lines generating all the real sales to the customer. If the people who “manage” or work hum-drum desk jobs left, the company would keep running. If we left, the company would fall apart at the seams.

And yet, we are the ones getting screwed. We are the ones who bust our bodies in factories and do hard physical labor. We’re the ones getting yelled at by customers. We’re the ones working nights and weekends. And of course, we’re the ones who get paid less. We don’t get stock options, bonuses, or generous benefits. We’re also the ones who get cut first in a recession, unlike the people working at the headquarters.

And on top of all this, we are disrespected. In the company, people don’t even share news of what’s going on and they talk to us like we’re dumb. The higher-ups are condescending towards us. And, society itself looks down at us, even though, again, we’re doing all the real work to make the things they buy at the store.

It’d be one thing to deal with all this nonsense, too, if the higher ups actually knew that they were doing. They don’t. We’re the ones who know what all the problems are, and those corporate people just come up with their own ideas and never listen. They make bad decisions which get us into problems all the time. And I’ve hardly ever had a “good manager” in my whole career, and for all this talk about “leadership development”, nothing changes. People like me are held accountable for our job, and we get fired if we’re not cutting it. But nobody holds them accountable for being bad managers.

So yeah, if you ask me if this company is designed fairly, I’d say absolutely not.

Obviously, that passage is fictitious and a bit on the nose. But I do think it hits on a lot of the tensions that make enterprises unfair and even unjust. People who work on the front line have extremely difficult jobs, but they’re often paid much less or at a minimum are disrespected. People with cushier setups get paid a lot more, have much higher status, and yet they often aren’t held to a high standard.

I am not above reproach on these issues, though I hope my errors are not intentional or gratuitous. To me the lesson is pretty straightforward, and applies largely to people, like me, who are in the management class of organizations.

If I am lucky enough to work a cushy job with cushy benefits, I have to hold myself to a higher standard. I have to earn those spoils. I have to be good at my job, I have to always treat others with the utmost respect. I have to make good decisions. I have to lead and develop others. I have to take responsibility for the team’s success and be held accountable for bad calls.

Perhaps there’s an argument to be made that managers and executives don’t get a fair shake, but I think that’s unlikely. It’s also not unreasonable to argue that if people get into management positions via a fair process, it’s not the company’s fault that opportunities in society are unevenly distributed. And again, the veil of ignorance is simply a thought experiment and not a practical strategy, regardless of whether it’s applied to designing societies or designing enterprises. All this is to say, my setup here isn’t squeaky clean or clear cut - I acknowledge that.

But I don’t think the conclusions of the exercise are unreasonable either: we should treat people with respect, we should compensate people fairly, and if we’ve got a cushier setup than average, we should earn it by holding ourselves to a commensurately high standard. 

Those takeaways apply to managers and executives (myself included) more than anyone.

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Reactions Make Culture

Typically, at work…

When a project goes “red” the team is usually made to feel embarrassed. What if the executive sponsor thanked them for raising the problem quickly instead?

When someone is promoted there’s often a department wide email talking about their accomplishments and new role. What if we celebrated their mentors just as vigorously?

When someone goes out on vacation they usually leave an out of office message. What if the email administrator turned off their email access while they were away as a matter of protocol, too?

Email signatures usually include a job title. What if that line was instead used a sentence about the team’s purpose or why the sender is personally invested in the organization’s mission?

Project meetings often start with some version of a status update. What if they started with, “what’s something important we learned this week” instead?

Maybe it’s not always clear whether it’s better to light a candle or curse the darkness. But the lesson remains: how we react shapes, defines, and amplifies the culture.

And not just at work, but in families, churches, book clubs, soccer leagues, marriages, and political discourse too.