Failing at Failing Fast
A tale of self-fulfilling prophecy of transformation failure
We’ve all heard the buzz words that have taken the corporate world by storm and that revolve around Future of Work, that ubiquitous term with massively broad shoulders that means everything from remote working to the gig economy to whether robots will take our jobs away.
Starting with the desire for businesses to become more “agile”, to adopt the “lean start-up” approach or the fail-fast mentality or anything and everything in between in this self-proclaimed “VUCA” world — all of those were en vogue well before 2020, but the sanitary crisis has fast-tracked the movement and catapulted them near the top of the trend wave, giving leaders the impression they could ride it by embracing things like remote working instantly and seamlessly.
The wave seems inevitable, and it comes at us from all angles — because Corporate finds itself attracted to those sexy concepts . Those models that have (mostly) emerged in tech startups and have ended up in the cubicles of conglomerates — they represent something that big companies desperately aspire to be: nimble, resilient, fast moving, disruptively innovative, adaptive.
As they paddle towards the wave, leaders think “from now on, we’re going to be less hierarchical and innovation will go faster; failing fast seems like a cool thing to try, so does using slack; and allowing employees to work remotely even positions us well in the media!” Just like that. A switch has been flipped.
What I’ve observed over the last years, but even more so in 2020, is a sort of hybrid model that is turning into a bi-headed monster fueled by a growing dichotomy — right in this uncomfortable space between the old way of doing things, the hierarchical rigid structures, and the evolutionary and self-managed new; a dichotomy that manifests itself as a willingness to test new working models on the surface but not at the expense of letting the old structures and processes go.
In a way, the corporate appetite for adopting new models and concepts that should bring more agility and adaptivity is as committed as the fiance(e) who still goes out on dates hiding their engagement ring, “just to see”. The result is new models nonchalantly and briefly put to the test, with one foot in the old world, “just in case”.
Hierarchy? We’re working on flattening that out, in fact we claim to be level-less. But of course our executives’ offices remain on a different floor and all approvals will continue to follow the multi-layered decision-making powers as per our matrix org chart.
All-hands meetings are a thing? Let’s have those. But we should make sure only the boss will speak because our culture wouldn’t allow a self-managed session, full of unscripted surprises that could derail the meeting — and possibly our entire culture.
OK, What about Ask Me Anything sessions? Let’s turn those into monologue presentations on a subject (maybe even our trustworthy culture) and ensure there are no tricky questions.
SLAM teams, squads or communities of practice? Let’s create them but ensure that only members of our own department join them — and without giving them any real decision-making powers.
Innovative ideas? Let’s welcome those but only if they come to us through the right channels, from the people with the right titles and circles of influence, following the prescribed narrative and the right PowerPoint format.
Do you sense a pattern here? Do you see where a lukewarm commitment can lead?
This is not the type of engagement that will transform how we work. This is testing for the sake of testing to ensure we can go back to how we did things before, or taking the shiny bits of the “agile world” and leaving the real work out. This is following a trend rather than a real desire to experiment with new ways of working; this hybrid, morphed from a rigid hierarchical model with fragments of a flatter, more adaptive one, is detracting, counter-productive and disappointing.
In fact, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that will lead to failure. In the words of Henry Ford: “whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right”.
Transforming a team, a department, or a whole org requires commitment, patience and a willingness to really go for the ride to see where it might lead, what we might learn and what we can build upon next time. While transitions are never easy, things will be even more challenging if two parallel universes are colliding; if the new world crashes into, and clashes with, the old one.
When we ’re half committed, half enabled, yes, we fail fast. But we fail at the wrong things. In a way, we’re failing at failing — and at truly adapting.
We can pat ourselves on the shoulder for trying and then move on. We’ll probably end up regretting it — the day an adaptive org surpasses what we do best.
Until then, the only thing we’ll have truly learned is to fulfill our very own prophecy.
