What makes us better people? I’m starting to think it’s mostly not our character.

Disclaimer: for the purpose of this post I am using the word ‘system’ broadly and imprecisely to mean ‘mechanism for getting stuff done’. It can be very large or very small. This post is not about complex systems, although many of the systems to which I refer are complex.

Most organisational consultants like leadership development better than almost anything. This is partly because working with people on their personal development is utterly utterly fascinating, but (I think) it is even more because it feels like a useful thing to be doing. Surely helping someone to be a better leader will have a highly positive effect on the world around them?

I’ve done a fair bit of leadership development and it is indeed utterly utterly fascinating. But recently I found myself saying, “I don’t think leadership development is very useful, because in my experience leaders do not get very far in their development before they find themselves at odds with the system within which they work.”

When the leaders I’ve worked with have decided that fulfilling their potential is their highest priority, they have mostly ended up leaving the organisation quite quickly, because they’ve realised that they can’t be their best self there.

I think that most people are neither really good nor really evil. There’s a lot that we can do to make ourselves better. (Some thoughts on this here.) If you are really unhappy or messed up, this is probably a good focus for your attention. But most people are not really unhappy or messed up. So for most people, it might be that our environment is the single biggest determinant of how well we are doing.

In most organisations, leaders do not tend to have great influence over the systems, structure, processes and culture. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, most of these are often determined centrally and leaders don’t tend to have power beyond their role. (Put differently, the people right at the top can change these things, but the people lower down can’t, and most organisational leaders are not right at the top.) Secondly, they are intrinsically hard to change and there is usually a lot of resistance to change. Thirdly, it is very hard to build systems, structures, processes and culture that really do enable people to be at their best. Fourthly, I don’t think many people realise how important and critical they are to how well we do, both as individuals and as organisations.

I am spending a lot of time thinking about what characterises systems that set people up to do well, and systems that set people up to do less well. My current showcase system is single queuing. People behave better when there is a single queuing system in place, and they are much more relaxed. In parallel queues, they twitch in case the other queue is moving more quickly or someone jumps in or they are in the wrong place and will miss their turn. Their behaviour is more defensive and less kind.

Systems have properties. The other day I noticed a pregnant lady on the tube getting more and more upset because no-one would offer her a seat. I felt a great deal of sympathy, but I also really wanted to say to her, “I know that people are supposed to offer you a seat, but the London Underground system is set up for people to go into their own world and that’s what happens. We read the paper or a book or rest or daydream or listen to music. It’s a property of the system. If you need a seat, you are going to have to ask, and then lots of people will feel lousy about themselves and compete to be the person who gives you somewhere to sit. But left to themselves they will not notice. They are not ignoring you deliberately. The system is set up that way.”

It’s easier to fix post office queuing than the national health service. But in their fundamental nature, both problems are the same. They are systems that create experiences for people that lead to painful feelings and hence problematic behaviour.

Systems are made up of people. People are not susceptible to rational analysis, and when we get together into systems of people then the system develops new and unintended properties as a result of our strange and wonderful nature. This is very hard to plan for, and when you see it going wrong then it is hard to fix.

This is one of the most powerful and telling stories I have ever read. Please read it. I think this should be on every curriculum in the world.

Another great example is Philip Zimbardo’s work on Abu Ghraib. He is unusual among psychologists in his willingness to theorise beyond the individual and into the environment, and I admire him for it.

Most complex systems have properties that make life better and easier for people and also properties that make life worse and harder. A great example is the Internet. Because of the Internet, we help strangers with unbearable burdens – and we find new ways to harm people we know. Because of the Internet, the prevalence of sex addiction has soared – and, because of the Internet, people who don’t live in a major city can now find treatment for it. Et cetera. Similarly, my (debatable) thoughts on the Christian church are here.

How do you build a system that has more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff? Perhaps even more importantly, how do you change an existing system to get more of the good stuff and lose its bad stuff?

A generalisation from single queuing that might help: look for rule sets that (a) are clear, and (b) demonstrate fairness.

A generalisation from the London Underground that might help: look for ways to maximise person-to-person contact. (We seem to have gone the other way in a lot of our organisational systems, and I don’t think that’s helping us. They’re actually connected: one of the problems with electronic problem-solving is that people have no evidence that they are being heard, which is not a good way to bring out the best in people.)

That said, I think it’s very hard to design any system with an outcome in mind. My best example here is Jesus Christ, who said ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘blessed are the meek’ and ‘let he who is without sin throw the first stone’, and look at some of the unintended consequences of that one.

My best guess – and it is mostly a guess; I have rarely seen it done – is that the best way to build or change a system that brings out the best in people (employees, clients, users) is to use good system design. Appreciative Inquiry is still the most effective I’ve seen, but I’m sure there are other ways.

My current best guess for what’s most likely to help:

(a) involving a wide range of people in the design (and above all those who are closest to the client / user) and putting collaboration at the heart of every process.

(b) real democracy, in which everyone is heard, and all voices count. (This should really have its own post, but for me the ur-management textbook is the Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is the best guide to human relations I have ever seen.)

(c) feedback loops that work.

(d) principles rather than outcomes, and the ability to flex outcomes to these principles. No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

(e) fair and transparent allocation of resources. (I am still thinking about the Big Society. In this post, I said that I didn’t think the Big Society could work whilst so many people are feeling squeezed, but I also think that this is wildly exacerbated by the sense of unfairness that so many feel. I think our human need for justice is very deep and compelling. I wonder if we would find it easier to seek new ways to collaborate if we really did believe that we are ‘all in it together’? (It is worth noting that fairness is socially constructed and two people can feel just as hard-done-by – or just as fortunate – from the same allocation of resources between them. So this is hard.)

(f) as much devolved decision-making as it’s possible to have, within the above-mentioned principles.

I will end this post with a quote from David Cooperrider, the founder of Appreciative Inquiry:

The best path to the good society, we believe, is the construction of great organisations.

I really do believe this, and it’s where I want to keep working. My PhD is on the individual work (alignment to purpose, self, care, self-awareness, self-regulation, self-transcendence), and this is important too. I’m glad I’m doing it. But the system-level work is even more important.

Maybe it’s not possible to have one without the other. Perhaps the most useful line of enquiry is understanding how they fit together – and when I know that, I will understand what I do in life.

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