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ManagementSpeak: We have an opportunity for you.

Translation: We want you to take on more responsibilities without having to pay you more for taking them on.

Ironically enough, Richard Adams took on the responsibility of contributing this excellent example of ManagementSpeak, without my having to pay him for taking it on.

I have a new set of hearing aids. In the instruction manual, well before the explanation of how to change amplification and programming, is this:

You are not allowed to operate the equipment within 20 km of the centre of Ny Ålesund, Norway.

There’s no explanation for the rule, just the fact, which is why my wife and I were briefly tempted to burn some frequent flier miles, just to break it.

But cooler heads prevailed. Actually, colder heads — we live in Minnesota, which we figured is bad enough (Google Maps reveals Ny Ålesund is on an island roughly 1,000 km due north of Lapland).

Which gets us to another disadvantage of relying on policies, standards, and enforcement to make sure how you want everyone to do things around here becomes how everyone actually does do things around here, beyond those mentioned last week: You have to explain your reasons, which makes your policies and standards burdensomely long. If you don’t, you’ll tempt employees to violate the ones that make no apparent sense, just to see what happens.

Changing the culture simply works better. When enough people internalize how we do things around here, peer pressure becomes your primary means of enforcement.

How to change it? You’ll find a detailed account in Leading IT: <Still> The Toughest Job in the World. Glad you asked.

The short version is to change your own behavior, because culture is the learned behavior people exhibit in response to their environment, and leader behavior is the dominant aspect of their environment.

Before you do, you have to describe the culture you want, and there’s a gotcha. The temptation in describing “how we do things around here” is to be procedural: “When someone contacts the service desk, we first identify the caller, next assign a ticket number, then get a description of their issue,” and so on.

But culture isn’t a matter of procedure. It’s a reflection of shared attitudes. Your behavioral description of culture should reflect this — something like, “When someone contacts the service desk we assume they’re experiencing a real problem, and we take ownership of it.”

<SnideComment>Given my experience with service desks, and in particular with my current mailing service after many subscribers received five copies of last week’s column, I’d say this would represent a radical cultural shift in far too many.</SnideComment>

To change your culture you have to describe both the culture you have and the culture you want. You have to figure out what about how you currently behave results in the culture you currently have, and how you’ll need to behave to get the culture you want.

If there are other managers between you and the employees whose behavior you want to change, you have to pay close attention to how those managers are behaving, how you want them to behave, and what you have to do so they’ll behave that way.

A few subscribers asked if there’s a way to change the culture quickly.

The answer is yes. Actually, there are two.

The first is to lay off a significant number of the employees you have and hire to the new culture. It’s unpleasant to say the least — unpleasant for you, more unpleasant for the surviving employees, and … and I hope this is obvious … even more unpleasant for the dear departed.

Although to be fair, on the pleasantness scale the employees you hire as replacements might very well find the change quite positive, all in all.

Anyway, massive layoffs are quick-culture-change tactic #1. The second one is slightly less draconian — fire all of the managers whose behavior seems to be driving the old culture and replace them with managers who seem to have the attitude you’re looking for.

Yes, it’s ugly. No, I don’t generally recommend it. But if you need to turn around a seriously dysfunctional culture quickly, this is your most efficient alternative.

Start with the ringleader, and perhaps his/her chief acolyte. Reason #1: Fire all the managers at once and the disruption will be too great. Reason #2: Persuading HR to go along will be a challenge. Reason #3: Do you really want to be that kind of person? And most important, Reason #4: Once you’ve fired one or two, the rest will usually figure out you’re serious and change their behavior to match what you’re looking for.

And, in case this isn’t clear, you still have to change your behavior (and attitudes) too. Otherwise, the culture will gradually revert back to the one you say you don’t like.

And you’ll have to go through the unpleasantness all over again.

* * *

Four years ago in Keep the Joint Running, Gartner predicted that in just two short years, 20% of all companies would have no IT assets of their own — it will all have moved to third parties and the cloud. KJR’s rebuttal was suitably pungent.

And eight years ago you read about a popular technique for manipulating people.

What do self-driving cars have to do with IT governance?

As it turns out, quite a lot.

Start with (self-promotion alert #1) the phrase “IT governance.” As long-time (and, I hope, short-time) readers know, in KJR-land there’s no such thing as an IT project — an idea so important Dave Kaiser and I named our soon-to-be-available book after it.

You’d give a perfect self-driving car your destination and let it figure out whether the best solution is to drive you there, to fly … at which point it would book your tickets and drop you at the airport … or make some other arrangements. Self-driving car governance should be transportation governance, just as IT governance should be business change governance.

More important than even this is how badly many designers of all forms of corporate governance ignore one of the most basic elements of delegation.

The element in question is the difference between delegating goals and delegating tasks. You’ll find (self-promotion alert #2!) what you need on this subject in Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World. Put simply, the most effective leaders only delegate tasks when they can’t trust the person they’re delegating to enough to delegate the goal and leave the details to the delegate.

Look at it from the perspective of a self-driving car’s owner, who, even if the current state of the art doesn’t include booking tickets for some other mode of transportation, should be able to enter the destination and let the car handle the rest.

Except that no self-driving car is reliable and adaptable enough to handle all the details without human supervision. Humans metaphorically delegate driving tasks to the car but … and this is the essential point … can’t trust the car to handle the job without oversight.

Take a look at business governance as usually practiced and you’ll find distrust is baked into the heart of it. Governance is all about controls. Some controls are useful — they make sure processes are … well … in control.

They’re fine. But then there’s the other kind — approvals, to make sure those who have a job to do lack the authority to screw it up by just doing it, by requiring one or more signatures first.

This doesn’t mean organizations should become free-for-alls. No, organizations should prescribe their processes and practices clearly enough, and educate their managers and supervisors enough that those responsible for doing stuff know when there’s a corporate recipe in place because, for example, legal and regulatory requirements don’t leave room for creativity.

They should prescribe processes and practices in detail when the company’s systems and process management would be messed up if everyone accomplished similar goals in radically different ways.

That’s all fine. What isn’t so fine is when what’s prescribed is, in self-driving car terms, turn-by-turn directions, each turn of which requires someone’s signature.

Because that’s what controls end up looking like — the need for outside approval of each step managers, supervisors, and employees need to take to get their jobs done.

Governance by controls, which is what we’re talking about, has three major disadvantages. The first: it slows things down, because each approval takes actual time, which incurs delays.

The second: It adds to the workload of already up-to-their-eyeballs-in-more-important-matters executives. This doesn’t have to be overly onerous, so long as the executives in question are willing to just rubber-stamp the decisions in question. But if they rubber-stamp everything, what’s point of requiring their signature?

The third disadvantage? It’s demoralizing. I worked with a company a number of years ago that wanted to revamp its capital approval process. Something my team learned along the way was that the smallest decisions required the most signatures (six), and each signatory except the last resented being second-guessed.

What we heard, over and over again, was the same complaint: “If the company doesn’t trust me to make a decision like this, why did they hire me?”

Which might (and, I hope, did) lead you to ask, if governance isn’t to operate through controls, what’s the superior alternative?

The self-promotion-opportunity #3 answer: As Scott Lee and I point out in The Cognitive Enterprise, culture is (or should be) the new governance.

That is, for self-driving cars, culture provides, metaphorically, the lane markers. Controls are the guardrails, something self-driving cars that stay in their lanes will never make contact with.

The parallel? Governance bodies should spend most of their time instituting a culture that makes most controls unnecessary.

Oh, and I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings by comparing you to a car.