Sensemaking Under The Confusion Tax | Richard Claydon

Strategy fails in the gap between the plan and the lived reality of work, and that gap is where most leaders burn out. We sit down with Richard Claydon, an organisational theorist focused on leadership in complex and ambiguous environments, to name what’s really happening when teams feel overloaded, stuck and quietly cynical despite “doing everything right”. 

We dig into the confusion tax: the hidden cost that appears when run work, serve work and change work become tightly entangled. That’s when the coordinating middle gets squeezed, sensemaking time disappears, and only operational delivery looks visible or legitimate. Richard offers a sharp lens on the lived experience as stretch, tangle and drift, and we challenge the false fixes that turn into theatre, from extra boards and reporting to superficial wellbeing initiatives that never touch the underlying system. 

From there, we build a practical model of leadership that goes beyond direction and care. Richard explains three leadership grammars: sovereignty (decisions and clarity), solidarity (trust and commitment) and the missing piece, sensemaking (reading conditions, aligning interpretations and choosing moves the system can bear). We also explore “Maya”, an amalgamation of effective leaders, to show how sensemaking becomes action through interpretation, mobilisation across stakeholders and small bounded experiments that create islands of coherence you can scale. 

If you care about leadership development, organisational complexity, systems thinking and strategy execution that actually works, this conversation will give you language and methods you can use immediately. Subscribe for more, share this with a leader who needs breathing room, and leave a review with the biggest source of confusion tax in your organisation.

Find Richard's work here: 
Substack: https://richardclaydon.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drrichardclaydon/

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Transcript

Strategy Meets Reality Cold Open

Mike Jones 0:00

Most people do think of strategy that way. Developing a new strategy.

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Strategic blind spots.

Mike Jones 0:05

When strategy meets reality and innovation in the strategy world.

Welcome And Meet Richard Claydon

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Drive their strategic goals.

Mike Jones 0:10

And welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. Welcome back to the Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. I'm delighted to be joined by Richard Claydon today. We had your colleague on here a few weeks ago, Stefan Laval. So Richard, it's great to have you on and welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on. I I really enjoyed Stefan, so I'm I'm happy to be following it up.

The Confusion Tax Of Entangled Work

Mike Jones 0:34

Awesome. So just before we get into that, um, do you mind giving a bit of um background about yourself and a bit of context about what you've been up to lately for our listeners?

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Yeah, so ultimately I have a PhD in organizational theory and have specialized in the leadership area of organisational theory and very specialised in how do you develop leaders to thrive and create value in complex and ambiguous organisational environments, especially ones that are fast changing. The work I do with Stefan it relates to how that might happen in contemporary organizational environments where the complexity and ambiguity kind of Stefan wraps up in his term confusion tax, which is the the um kind of argument that there's so much entanglement, and the language he used was run work, serve work, and change work, there's so much entanglement between them that everybody gets confused. And how do you how do you start creating value in those kind of conditions? How do you how do you lead in in those kind of conditions? And I found that a really useful shorthand way of of kind of getting people to to get into the understanding of complexity and ambiguity and and and and a kind of constant change. They they kind of really can wrap their heads around the idea of entangled loads and confusion tax.

Mike Jones 1:51

That's great, and it and I I see it often where leaders almost look for this utopia. They want they want this utopia where everything's perfect, they've got the perfect org design, everything's how they envision it to be. Um, but it's never like that. There's there's always going to be things that are broken, you're not always going to get the resources that you would like. Um, you know, it's not going to be perfect. So, you know, when they're when they haven't got that perfect org design, or they haven't gone down that world where Stefan's talking about they do the redesign, they ain't got the appetite. What should leaders do?

Stretch Tangle Drift In The Middle

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Well, I think I think first of all, they have to give up the idea of utopia. And I think actually you're probably talking about almost a theoretically informed leader, someone who hasn't worked in the trenches, that they've possibly come up through business schools and and consultancies and have been parachuted into the top jobs and they think they can just do top-down design. That's not necessarily my audience. My audience is I I would call it the coordinating middle. And so, and again, in Stefan's language, that's the people who do serve work, they're they're coordinating between all the various stakeholders and functions and they're carrying that load, but they're also translating the change into executional reality. And I don't think they would ever recognise the utopian design principle. They they would they would love if the organization was designed that way. But they would say, and I think this is where where some of the differences between Stefan and I sit, I would love it as well if we could do that design. Yeah but there's no budget for it most of the time. There's no appetite for it. The people at the top just assume that the middle will work, and then they argue that the problem it's not working is because we don't have good enough people, and and these people in that coordinating middle aren't doing the work properly. But I would argue they're under a lot of pressure, but they're also in these entangled conditions. Um the conditions are hard to read, they're hard to survive, they're they're very hard to disentangle. So they are being asked to do lots and lots of run work, keep the operation going. They're being asked to do all the coordinating work between the stakeholders and the functions and that that the coordinating load. They're being asked to translate change. It's all being wrapped into one. And that very often um kind of opens up into like 14-hour days because that that you know, they there's so much work that the the only work that's really visible is the is the run work, and all the work other stuff has to be packaged around the outside or done in the evening or over the weekend, etc. And I would suggest that the lived experience of that is very intense for lots of people. And I again I have three terms, I I tend to keep on sticking to three terms. So we we talk about run, serve, and change, but the lived experience is stretch, tangle, and drift. So they're either stretched to kind of like do more, do more, do more, run faster, run faster, add more on, keep on being the hero. They're tangled where they've got this stakeholder wants one thing, another stakeholder wants another thing, a third stakeholder wants something else. They can't serve all three of them at the same time. Um, and then they're also drifting because you've got all of this change piled upon them.

SPEAKER_02 5:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

And they're like, oh, you know, I I I just don't have the energy or the enthusiasm to believe in this working anymore. So I'm disengaging and I'm drifting and I'm I'm cynical and I'm apathetic, in order just to cope with that being piled on top of the other stuff that I'm already doing. So most of them, they're all still leaders, they're leading functions, they're leading projects, they're they're all still leading, but they're following people higher up who are quite detached from that work.

unknown 5:36

Yeah.

Why Thinking Looks Like Not Working

SPEAKER_00 5:36

And lots of them, in my experience, are sort of thiving rather than thriving. And because of that, they can't develop. The system is is kind of consuming all of the development time that they might have. So they're constantly just running to stand still. So they're just overspending all of their energy just to remain functional, not to actually do better work in in these systems.

Mike Jones 6:00

Yeah, yeah. And you see it, even even go down to very simplest thing, like you know, having time to actually pause and just reflect on what's going on is is an absolute premium. Because you see it all the time. They're just constantly on back-to-back teams meetings, there's another meeting they have to go to, there's another board, there's another thing that happens. They didn't even get that time to to sit there and just reflect and think, well, you know, what what is happening? You know, is this the best use of what needs to be done? They didn't even get that because it's just is like you said, it's that that pressure of all the run stuff um is getting too much.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

Yeah, and and yeah, I mean, not sitting down and thinking, and I've had this very conversation with with some C-suite guys, I mean, people higher in higher positions generally. And they said, Look, if I if my CEO asked me what I did this morning, and I said I I sat and thought, he said, I'll just lose my job. Because I'm not delivering, I'm not running.

SPEAKER_02 7:01

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

I'm thinking about how to do the serve work or how to do the change work. So, you know, he's he's he was always and and he was someone who was really quite anxious, despite being very successful. He had that anxiety sitting behind him all the time. Um, yeah, and then that's so that's a big challenge. So again, it's kind of thinking and serve work and change work, because it's not visible, is coded very often, either internally or externally. So either either you your lived experience, your your felt experience is this is not work, because it's not being seen as visible work. And so you're wrestling with the anxiety of what needs to be done isn't actually work.

SPEAKER_02 7:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

But actually, that's the leadership work that you're you don't have time to do. And the run work is not necessarily the leadership work because or it's a very narrow slither of what leadership looks like. So that that that I come across that all the time with the with the people I work with, is is they're going, this isn't work. This is this this or doesn't get seen as work. No, so you have to give them opportunities to craft out a space where where they can do that work and that work becomes visible and they don't feel guilty about shifting some of the rum work somewhere else.

Mike Jones 8:14

Yeah, it's the same with planning when you go for that uh strategy into execution, you do that planning work. Again, that the we don't value time and space that because it didn't feel like it's work, it feels like it's a necessary. Oh, we've made a decision, let's just go. And you hear people going, we just need to be faster, we need to be more more agile, and yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Yeah, there's something to that. I mean, I think you I think if you split work into a into into different tempos around this type of work. So if we if you look at your the planning and then the execution, um yeah, planning is slower, it should be slow in the execution, but very often the planning is like we do that fast and then we'll do the execution fast, and that's great. But what the actual data shows is if you do the planning slowly, the execution speeds up because in the planning you you've kind of identified where where lots of the execution problems might be, the clarity's there, the coherence is there, everybody can kind of go off and and and and deliver. But it could be sped up. There are methodologies that could make the planning quicker and more enjoyable.

SPEAKER_02 9:16

Yeah.

When Failure Reviews Become Theatre

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Where there could be a huge competitive advantage. Because at the moment, say it takes, you know, to plan well, maybe it takes a month in order to get the speed down the line with the execution guys. But what happens if you could do exactly the same quality of work in a week? Yes. Against your competitors who spend a month to six to six weeks doing it. And and there are all kinds of methodologies that can enable that, but they're all part of kind of the serve work and the change work that that's seen by most of the kind of the leadership development or the managerial work as not work, as not mainstream, as not the way things are done around here.

Mike Jones 9:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's it's that dominance of the operational, that run work. I think it's in the way. Um and i and then you're thinking about with the with the and I was reflecting on this because there was um a recent thing at the at the moment with um um ARQ uh can't even say his name now, but the the guy that murdered the children at um in um cardiovascular. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, in Southport, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

And they they've just I was I was 15 minutes away the day that happened. I was I was in For I was in Formby, yeah. Wow, it's where my parents live, yeah.

Mike Jones 10:37

Yeah, it's it's absolutely shocking. Um but the thing they just put out all the the reflections from the review of all the failings that happened, and obviously the same thing comes out again. Oh, there was silos, it silos this. And I said, but the problem is you'll all that's gonna happen from it is the same thing that then creates more burden for leaders because they're not going to look at like we're talking about some of the structural stuff around um, you know, what you know how are these things split and lumped together, you know, what's the decision rights, what's the coordination with it. What they'll do is they'll now create a performance board, they'll create a team of people to that will add more reporting, so they'll be expecting the leaders now to do more reporting to demonstrate how they're now communicating across these boundaries that exist. Um, then there'll be PBR boards and more boards which create more meetings, which don't actually solve the problem, they just make an appearance that they are solving the problem. It just creates a theatre that they're doing something rather than actually um doing something, and that might just be me being cynical, but I don't know. What's your reflections?

Sovereignty Solidarity And Sensemaking

SPEAKER_00 11:50

Well, uh yeah, I mean, I think you you kind of take you're you're taking me into I think what once you've got people past just surviving and you're trying to help them thrive, you're I think I think you're moving towards what thriving might begin to look like because you're you're you're showing what non-thriving looks like. Okay, something goes wrong, and then you have all of these analytical reviews about it, someone somewhere is going to get blamed and lose their job, but it's probably not just gonna be their fault, they're gonna be scapegoated, and you kind of get rid of that person, and you then and the whole point of the scapegoat is all the evils go with them, and then the organisation is fine again. But I would argue that actually there's there are something missing in how we think about leadership and how we develop leaders that is causal of this. So um again, I'm gonna I've I've got three three bits of three acronyms that or or shortenings to to talk about this. So I I would argue that leadership is arranged around three different um dimensions. One is sovereignty. So sovereignty is does the leader provide direction, clarity, authority, decisions, etc. And now there's a huge amount of training around that. And I think the leader that you've kind of identified at the beginning, this hypothetical leader, believes that if he just does that, everything's kind of going to fall into place and the organization's gonna work, gonna work fine. You then got a solidarity grammar for leadership, which is around trust, commitment, care, and alignment, which is it's very big in leadership theory, but it doesn't necessarily translate into these higher echelons of leadership, but you see it embedded in the organization. You see an awful lot of leaders in the middle kind of going, well, I care about my teams and I want to look after them, etc. So that's a second part. Now I think those two parts are trained all the time. They are what people think of when they think of leadership: sovereignty, decisions, direction, solidarity, trust, commitment, care, etc. But both assume that the situation is always intelligible. So both assume is that we can direct it and then we can create we we can create care for people doing it at the same time. But if the if the system isn't intelligible, if the system is being misread, the better direction is going to intensify the errors. And the better alignment, it can help people endure the error more gracefully. So the sovereignty can become very blunt, and solidarity can become compensatory to the this is how you cope. So I think the language that is that the grammar that is missing is a sense-making grammar. So to go back to your point, and really Stefan's point as well around the coordinating serve layer, the change layer, that's where the sense-making grammar sits. How do you sense make what your part of the organization is doing and how they're interpreting it versus another part of the organization versus another part of the organization? How do you move across those boundaries and kind of do some meta-sense making and say, right, okay, let's do this. Do I get your agreement? Do I get your agreement, etc.? How do we need to change all of this around before we act? And then also, well, okay, if we're going to go and do it, we also need to sense make what the change is doing. Is the change that we that we've kind of agreed that we're going to try, is that working the way that we expect it? So there's a bunch of questions really that you're looking at. And I don't say that sense making, and I think one of the big challenges with the the complexity in systems thinking discourse is that sense making replaces sovereignty and solidarity, and you don't need those aspects of leadership. And I wouldn't make that argument. I would say you still need that. But I think that sense making is is vital because it it helps the leader know what kind of work is happening, what kind of strains are present, what the role's being asked to hold, and what moves the systems can bear next. And if we're not asking that, if we're not sense making around that and connecting the organization around that, yet the sovereignty and the solidarity can both go wrong. And they go wrong, I think, in exactly the ways I've heard you talk about, is that the strategy moves off in the wrong direction and all the execution and you're executing on the wrong things, and then everybody's doing care theatre just to try and help them hold the loads a little bit more. But nothing is holding it together, nothing is is pulling the pieces together. So that that would be my argument is you've you've got to have a trigotomy of sense of leadership grammars. Solidarity for direction, sorry, sovereignty for direction, solidarity for care, and then sense making for okay, what the understanding, what actually is going on here.

Mike Jones 16:29

Yeah, yeah. And you and you can see that the um sometimes the sovereignty and the solidarity can come out of tension, uh a really tough tension that a lot a lot of people try to manage, and also on a sort of personal level, you know, people have a higher sort of um preference towards being more in the sort of solidarity than may do the direction. But I I do I do see that all the stuff that you know I talked about with Stefan and we've talked about here that you're right with the the sovereignty uh not sovereignty, the solid solitary solidarity. There we go. Um that it can it comes as a sort of a stick in plaster in the wrong way because everyone's stress, so they're going right, we need to do more stuff about well-being, and then we'll then do tabletop yoga, or we'll go off and do like go Ape or something, um, you know, to try and um mass that, and then the people on there, you know, they probably would like those things, but in the back of their mind, the stress is going, I've got so much to catch up on, I've got so much to do. Well, I think that you're right with that that sense making. I think and it it links back to what we're talking about earlier around that space to just sit and think. That sense making is very much a you know thinking, it's uh exercise to to have a look and go, is this what is this what we intended it to do? Are we seeing the outcomes that we were expecting to do? If not, then what needs to adjust, which links back to the sovereignty? What what what new direction do we need to get and so on? And I think that's is a really crucial point. And I think sometimes, and I think you alluded to about the complexity theory and systems, I sort of agree. I think some of the complexity stuff, unfortunately, is going in this very, very unusable hand wavery world where actually what you're talking about is really tangible stuff that right, yes, we understand it's complex, but how how do we actually enable people to navigate it rather than just talk about it?

Why Leadership Theory Misses Complexity

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Yeah, and I think that's one of the core challenges that the two literatures don't talk to each other. Leadership studies was born out of the desire to develop leaders to handle more complex organisations in the 1960s. I mean, it's a very, very clear hypothesis or at call to action. Organisations are getting to getting more complex. We have macho control style managers who are not capable of leading in complexity. How do we deliver, how do we develop um people who can hold the complexity? Um, and they've moved into I mean you'll be aware of this the stuff, the transformational leader and the authentic leader and the servant leader. It's it's all best intention models to hold the complexity that don't work.

Mike Jones 19:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

Because they're they're just partial. Um so you've got and then you've got systems thinking and complexity, and they've gone the opposite way. They've gone, right, we need to sense make the organizations and either let the organizations emerge through the sense making or design it kind of top down through our own set sense making, and then they're having wars in between themselves about whether it should be fully emergent or fully top-down or hybrid or yeah, and but the two the disciplines, the leaders don't understand that. They are either just kind of I I need to be this transformational kind of hero, hold this messiah. I mean, one of one of my favourite theorists, Simon Weston, talks about it as a messiah leadership model, that that they hold all of the all of the tensions themselves. They're almost these superheroic figures that sit right at the top of the organization and hold all of the complexity. Absolutely nonsensical. That that's an impossibility for anybody. But it's a very s seductive discourse. If you again, it's that stretch. If you just work hard enough, you too can become this superheroic figure who can hold the complexity. It's just a it's just a pipe dream. And it lacks it lacks the sense-making grammar. It just it's just not part of the discourse. It's all around motivating others to do the work, it's all around, it's not even around, you've even got lots of the sovereignty stuff disappears. They just sit there as these incredible moral and motivational figures sitting above the organization and using that charismatic value. I mean, the way we talked about leaders in the 1800s, kind of charismatic presence to somehow pull all the complexity together into this one figure. And I just think it's an absolute nonsense. And I I see it developed so often. And and you just think, well, you're spending all of this money on chasing something that is an impossibility.

Mike Jones 21:20

Yeah, and they and you see it, you you've got two real core things. One is more explicitly talk talked about, which is what you're talking about, the which I suppose does the solidarity really bad. The is the this really humble, loving, you know, you know, it's it's the same, it's just the crap that Simon Snett goes about all the time. And those sort of people, you know, you're a you're a leader, not a boss, or you know, that you're a leader, not a manager. And they they put this leader as this, like you said, Messiah figure, that is this this absolute angel that loves everyone, that you know, comes out and gives gives the the peasants, you know, the sandwiches at a lunchtime. But they've got this other part that's not really explicitly talked about but shows up a lot in the sort of the social this so definitely social media world where about it's it's it's this constant grind. It's all about the grind, you need to just be there, you know, you need to take control, give the answers, and and you see it reflected into politicians where they're they're expected to have the answer for absolutely everything. And if they don't have the the answer for that, then they're their people are calling for their blood. And this is the sort of sublimable stuff that's on the sideline that people are trapped between this do I need to be this messiah or do I need to be this person that needs to know absolutely everything, have all the answers and control the situation. And I could see how leaders are.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

I think they're I think it's two two sides of the same coin. So one one side, I mean, I think I think you've described kind of servant or ethical leadership um in your in your kind of the one that cares and and and does all of that that work. So that you that they're very much part, it's it's part of the mor the moral dimension of leadership. So mor the if if we're looking at soft uh at the solidarity grammar, the moral moral version of that is the most recent within the theories. It's like the leader has to be this authentic moral figure that sits uh that that everybody can follow because they they display their moral value all the time. But one form of morality is the grind. No matter how hard it is, I get it done.

SPEAKER_02 23:38

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

No matter how difficult it is, I find the answer. So it's it's still a perception that leadership is uh uh is coded through morality, and that actually the great the great leaders have these two sides of their morality, they care about everybody, and they they're almost omnipotent in their capacity to to absorb and hold the complexity of what's going on on their shoulders.

Maya And Islands Of Coherence

Mike Jones 24:02

Yeah, yeah. So I know in your your writing you use a protagonist in there called Maya, so people aren't aware. I I will share Richard's work, but you use fictional characters to prove your point in the or not to prove your point, but to place your point in there, and one of them's Maya, and you may or Maya, I don't know. But the how how you pronounce it, but you use something in her which about well when it's not perfect, what what can you actually do as a leader to be able to navigate that? Do you mind explaining about that?

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Yeah, I will. So so Maya Maya, I mean, she's not purely fictional, she she's uh an amalgamation of effective leaders I've worked with that I so so one of one of the challenges in writing leadership research and organizational research nowadays is how much you have to disguise everything. Yeah. Because you you know, you've you uh there there's stuff that I I can talk about, but I can't reveal anything about what organization it is or who I'm talking about. So she's a an amalgamation of quite a lot of people in quite a lot of organizations, so it's it's constantly disguised like a regional leader in a professional services firm.

Mike Jones 25:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

Um and that and you know, Maya, one of the reasons she's called Maya is you can't even geographically locate the name Maya. There's so many different uh countries that have Maya as a name, that so she's kind of geographically uh anonymous as well. There are other reasons she's called Maya because of the the extinction of the Mayan civilization, that kind of break between the old and the new. And she's the mother of Hermes, the trickster trickster god. So there's a whole bunch of reasons because I want she's giving birth to a different form of leadership uh that seems like trickery to those who are not versed in it.

SPEAKER_02 25:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

But yeah, that that that's kind of the the the reasons for her. And and so really, she is somebody who does represent someone who can hold all three of the leadership grammars together. She is a she does have a level of sovereignty, she has a definite solidarity with with the people she works with, but she's exceptional at sense making. And I'd break the sense making down into three things that she does. And this is, you know, the the Mayers that I've worked with, most of the work is around building up and developing the capacity to do these three things. So the first one is to create conditions where she and her team, so we'll just use Maya as the avatar. So Maya and her team can read the conditions properly, so they can diagnose the confusion tax and they can disentangle the role tangles, they can name their hidden burdens, and then they stop turning the structural problems into personal failings. And by doing that, they can go, all right, here's the the situation comes first. Let's let's work out are we serving, are we changing, are we running, which of us actually has the right capacity to start to actually have the authority to say, no, this is a this is a change problem, and it's a change problem related to this, and therefore I'm going to take most of the ownership of it because it's something I know more about than everybody else on the team. That might not be Maya. Maya might be saying, okay, right, you're you're leading this now. And most of the Mayers I work with, they end up having the people reporting to them leading these subprojects. And also, it rather than just having an executive leadership meeting where they hear about each of the projects for five minutes, they will have all of the executive leadership team to hear about one of the projects for maybe an hour and a half. So it becomes a kind of a narrative about what's going on. They all ask questions, they can work out how it might scale into the work they're doing. So that that situational ownership ripples through um the rest of the team, and they can start saying, Oh, you know, 80% of that aligns with or coheres with this, and it only means that that reduces the workload I've I've got here by 80%, because I've only got to change 20% of it for my local context. So that there's that going on. Um and that's where her that's where Maya's sovereignty and and solidarity comes in. She gets the sense making, she puts structures in and directions in. This is how we're gonna run meetings, we're gonna stop doing that, we're gonna start doing this, and then she constantly develops people to have the confidence to it's your agenda. Okay, how do you do how do you design agenda? How do you design this kind of meeting? How do you go out and do the work? So you've got that going on at the same time. So she initially has that interpretive practice, which is the first some grammar of sense making. That's within her team, usually. Now then she has to go beyond a team. So a team has done the interpretation, they've worked out what they think is going on. Um, but it what is going on is serve work, so it's cross-functional, or it's change work, which needs uh a bunch of sponsors to actually kind of say yes, you can do this, or no, you can't. So you know, Stefan would just say, Oh, well, that should just be a local decision, but it isn't, so you've got to go and you've got to go and do the the the work. And that moves into mobilization. So mobilization is moving into the network. So when you're looking at networks and complex networks and complex complexity science, it's going into the organizational network and say, okay, let's create a network map. Who who are the stakeholders here? If we do this, who is it going to impact?

SPEAKER_02 29:28

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

Can I get their agreement before I do it? What do I have to change in what I've currently planned to get their agreement? If I have to change something after I've got somebody else's agreement, then I've got to go back and socialise it with them. So you still have to do work that Stefan would say is too slow and it could be turned into architecture. And I don't disagree. It could be.

SPEAKER_02 29:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

But at the moment, in most cases, it's not. So they go and do that work. Or they go, or and this would be this would be what Maya is doing, not her team. So this is Maya working with peers or seniors, doing the politics, getting alliances, working out where the power is to get the kind of sponsorship that she needs, but also being able to talk different languages. Because if she's talking to ops or marketing or uh a project team or finance, she's got to frame what she's doing through language that they understand, which is not necessarily the same, the same out. So the whole thing is you you don't go into the network with an argument. You go in with stories that get people on your side. So you're building alliances and you're building legitimacy in order to get sponsorship and support for the work that you're trying to do. And then I think the most important thing that that they actually do, so they've they've they've worked out the situation and they've they've done that interpretation works, they've mobilised enough of the rest of the organization to get the sponsorship and support, so they've legitimized it, they've got enough allies. And then she's going to change something. And it's going to be something not insignificant, but not organisation-wide. I mean, it's still going to be affecting maybe a a part of the region with um, you know, maybe three or four functions involved. And this is a realization that most leaders need to really grapple with. You can't, most of you don't have enough power to even contemplate trying to redesign the entire system. And even if you do, most of the time it's a pipe dream, unless you're lucky enough to get someone like Stefan to actually start asking you the right questions about how it might happen. So, what does redesign actually look like? Well, it looks like creating an island of coherence. So the island of coherence is both your own team, which is capable of the interpretive work, the allies and the sponsors, and then some kind of bounded space where you can experiment in a way that reduces the confusion and improves coordination for all of the allies and the people that you've agreed with. Now, if you've created that island of coherence and it works, you've then got enough legitimacy and kind of sponsorship power to say, well, we could do the same thing over here, and we could do the same thing over there. So you're beginning to scale from these small experimental, and initially it might just be somebody noticing something in your team saying, This doesn't seem to be and it and that ripples upwards into a scaling opportunity. So that that's kind of the process that I work through. All of the processes still have that solidarity and sovereignty grammar. She still is always showing that she cares and she's still always using her positional power to create direction and to put structures in place, etc. That never goes away. But that sense-making work, it's not just us sitting in a room sense-making and then directing. It's us sense-making, mobilizing that interpretation, experimenting with it, creating a some bounded cohesion, and then if that works, then we can look at scale.

SPEAKER_02 33:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

So it's kind of the same argument Stefan's making, but from a we're coming at it from different angles.

SPEAKER_02 33:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:10

So Stefan's coming at it from an organizational design angle where he's got full sponsorship from entire C-suite to go through a process, yeah, XYZ process, which is perfectly and utterly legitimate. And it would be a much better world if we did have organizations and senior leadership looking at it through his diagnostic approach. My approach is well, what does it mean in the lived reality for most people in the coordinating middle to do this level of work?

SPEAKER_02 33:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

Given very, very few are trained to do it, how do you quickly upskill them to do this level of work and not collapse in the process?

Mike Jones 33:49

Yeah. Because you you you highlighted some really key elements here. Is that you know, first one that I think is fundamental that underpins it all, is that you as a team do have agency to a point because too many teams and leaders look at the thing and I think they overwhelm themselves with the whole system, and they're like, We're so constrained, like we're you know, it's just not working. But they they they focus so much on those constraints and get overwhelmed by the the whole they don't look for their freedoms. Like what what what freedoms do we actually have? I think that's the underlying piece, and then there's the bit around the sense making that that opportunity to take space away. But I think we're too too sort of in that solidarity space where when we get a team day, it's a team day we go off and do go eight, but it's good, and it builds familiarity, that's cool, but there needs to be a time where you make space to understand the situation, how's it affecting us?

SPEAKER_00 34:46

I really sense I would reject I reject out of hand any leadership development programs that says, Oh, we're gonna go and do some managed fun. I'm like, no, no, no, we're gonna Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're gonna go and have it. If you want to go and do something afterwards together, go to a nice restaurant and eat and something, that's fine. What we we need to work with the work. Yes, okay, it needs to actually have meaning and seriousness, and and we can have fun with the work. So that that's one of the things I always struggle to get across the line. That wrestling with the work's gonna be fun because I'm gonna give you methodologies to do it that speeds up all of your sense making and gives you a route forward to doing it. Yeah, but of course, lots of people are like, oh, I just want to escape from the work for a day and just uh and and that that can be a challenge.

Mike Jones 35:34

Yeah, I think so. And you I think there's more, there's better with the spontaneous uh spontaneous nature afterwards to go for a beer. I I just really get frustrated when I see these um things where go, we've got a team session and they've got bloody Lego, they've got bloody marshmallows, or or they're taking the tyres off a Formula One car. I'm thinking, come on. Where really what you're thinking about, I think we're aligned in that sense, is that actually you can have it fun, and it's all also quite cathartic in the sense making sense-making part is actually what what you know what is the situation? What what are the are the sort of internal factors that are making it more difficult? What are the external factors that make it more difficult for us right now? You know, what are the risks that we're facing to really get that that part to do it now? I don't think people value that that time away to really do that sort of sense-making work. And the other part is around you you're brought up around the language. Now, we always say in the you know, in in the systems world, you know, boundaries create difference, difference creates boundaries, and that means that people are going to interpret things completely differently. And your whole point around, I'm not going into the other team or the other ops director and going, you're not doing any work, you need to do this. I need to understand what the the the language difference is.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

Like what's what's what from their perspective, how can I how can I share this challenge that is understandable so they can have space to interpret why I'm gonna see so that that's I mean there is a way to do it, but it's a very difficult way to articulate because I mean the the the classic way of thinking about it is how do I put this in their functional language? Now, as soon as you do that, you're dead. Because there's no way that you can present finance to a way that is not going to be dominated by someone who's in finance.

Mike Jones 37:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

That that they will just know too much, and so if they don't want something to happen and you're you're making a financial argument for it, you're going to lose.

SPEAKER_02 37:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

So you're you're in that kind of antagonistic clash here because you're trying to use their language. So and I and and I think there is a way of doing it, but it's not something that I mean I I say some of my some people who who work with me really love it, but most people find it quite difficult. But I I would argue that there are five social worlds within all organisations. So the first social world, and I think we've we've probably already touched on it, but the first social world is is is kind of meaning and morality, yeah, and the purpose here. What what what you know, and some of this could be solidarity or you know, but some of it could be meaning and morality could be uh stakeholder uh shareholder value. The only thing that matters here is shareholder value. That's still a moral moral position. If you believe that shareholder value creates value for everybody in the organization and and the wider world, and and that's you know, that's an ethical position, that's that's fine. I don't have to agree with that, but you're taking an ethical stance. Um, so that's the first social world. So if you're talking to somebody in that social world, which is quite often strategists, senior leaders, HR might be in that social world as well because they they believe in in the morality space. Well, you have to be creating a moral picture and a picture full of meaning, replete with meaning. Then you've got four other social worlds, and I won't go into them in in so much depth, but it's the same challenge. How do I how do I talk to people inhabiting this social world? So the second one is structure and order. So, you know, how do we actually have to change the way the hierarchy is or the the system? So systems thinkers might sit there. The third one is enterprise and livelihood, literally the people doing the work. The next one is narrative and legitimacy. How, if we do this, are we going to tell stories that grab people's attention and um and then the final one is um is innovation and or emergence and disruption. How you know is this new? Is this stuff that's that's right on the edge? And how do we how you know how if you're you're talking to an innovation team or somebody who thinks they're you know that they're super living on the edge of what the organizer, how do you talk to them? So you've got to, and so in the mobilization part of the sense-making grammar, you have to kind of go, well, okay, this these these people, you've almost got to think of it. I want to get alliances, but I know that they're gonna defend the structure and the order. I know I'm gonna have to show them that it's not gonna break what they think good structure looks like. Whereas this person is going to resist because they're gonna say, well, this puts an extra five or six hours of work on my me and my team every day uh every week, and we already stretched to the limit because that's the enterprise and livelihood issue. Or somebody else is gonna um use the disruption argument and say, well, that's not radical enough, you know, we need to go further. How how upfront do you think about all of these social worlds you're gonna move into? Now, these are very, very old arguments. This is not new stuff, yeah, but it's been forgotten by organisations that that this is going because the organizations have moved into one culture, one organization, everybody's supposed to be thinking the same way. And the idea that there are different languages and different social worlds going on, and you have you actually have to understand them is is just lost. As I say, for most people, I haven't really been able to articulate it well enough for people to grap just to kind of grapple with it and grasp onto it and say, Yes, I understand that. Whereas the the the group the leadership grammars and and and you know stretch, tangle, and drift and and run surf change, people get all of that.

Mike Jones 41:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:13

But that that further step of how do I do this well is uh something I'm still working on to all level.

Mike Jones 41:19

I think it's because um partly it's not wholly, but partly that the um the idea of silos are are seen as a a toxicity that needs to be rooted out rather than a natural occurrence due to boundaries. So the fact that as soon as you you you can you can sat there sit there as a leader and think naively that if I set one set of values and all this stuff, the whole organization will be the same. It's not because as soon as you split something, you create a boundary within that boundary, you create difference, you create different language, different perspectives, and that's what we need to to worry about and concern ourselves with was that what what is their language? Like, I'm not gonna go to France well, I do because I'm English, so I'll just go speak English in France. But ideally, if you want to do well, you wouldn't. You will understand um from theirs and think about I'm not gonna be as perfect to them, but I'm gonna have found a a way of of of commonality to be able to think. I think that yeah, I think this idea that um they don't realise that silos actually exist for a reason.

SPEAKER_00 42:28

Yeah, I mean, and I think that I think you've when you said toxicity, I mean that that's a word I really struggle with in organisations because and I think I mean Stefan made the point in your last podcast, most people just want to do the work well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um and and actually the toxicity is caused by I think the entanglement.

Mike Jones 42:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:51

People don't have time. And so when somebody doesn't hear them or or or you know, you go to another department who and you can't make the argument to them, you need them to do some work to help you. But you don't have the capacity to make the argument to them because you don't understand their social world, you don't understand what they're going through. Um, and you ask them to do it, and they just go, No, don't have time. Go so you you go back to your own department and go, they're toxic assholes.

SPEAKER_02 43:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:17

But but they're not. You haven't you've come to them, you're a stranger in their town, and you've said, do this because it's important. Well, what you expect's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_02 43:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:35

I think work lots of organizations create toxicity, and people people are responding to toxic structures, but it there's no there's just no data that I've ever been able to find that suggests that more than kind of ten, twelve percent of people are naturally inclined towards toxic behaviours. I mean, we're we're just not bad as a species. So it's a design it's It's a design response. So, you know, and I agree, the silos, you know, if you can actually activate the the differences between silos and you have that mobilization capacity, you've got a huge advantage over your opposition. But just to assume you can dissolve them is um is is almost nonsensical. Certainly without doing a massive org redesign in the manner that Stefan envisages, which again, great, great if organizations want to do that. But you can't just say we've got all these silos, we're gonna dissolve them, everything's gonna be fine, because that's not reality.

Mike Jones 44:39

No, they'll they'll do a let's work better together session, which will inevitably never work. But I I'm conscious of time, I just wanted to ask one quick one before we do the final bit.

What Leadership Development Overlooks

SPEAKER_02 44:49

But yeah.

Mike Jones 44:50

What um in the leadership development space, what do you think is is often overlooked?

SPEAKER_00 44:58

I mean, there's so much.

Mike Jones 45:00

Yeah, yeah. When I was thinking about this question, I was thinking, yeah. But anyway, like the key things.

SPEAKER_00 45:07

I mean, I I I think we've we've kind of talked about the things that that that's most often overlooked, which is the sense-making stuff. I mean, it's just not it's just not embedded in the literature. So when you're looking at the idea that that leadership studies began out of an attempt to interrogate complexity and develop people who could carry complexity, that the sense-making stuff moved into the systems world rather than into the leadership world. So you could actually argue that what is missing is sense-making, systems thinking, and complexity science. Now I, because I'm an organizational theorist, I have somewhat of an understanding of it. Again, I'm no expert in any of these three spaces. Um I would I most of the sense-making stuff I've I've read, which which was kind of embedded in the organizational literature of the uh sort of sixties and seventies and eighties, maybe even the nineties, but that's kind of moved off into these the system thinking and the complexity sciences disciplines. You don't find it too much in in in in kind of the the stuff which the organizational stuff that connects it with leadership. And so the gap's grown. So I think that's missing. But I think to kind of reverse your question, what is over-emphasized? Well, what is over-emphasized is a narrow belief about this authentic inner self that if only you could uncover it, it's it's this pure wonderful thing that if you uncovered it, this natural leadership essence will flow out of you and you will be amazing. Um and that that is that's everywhere.

Mike Jones 46:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:46

And I I just don't think that's what it is like to be human. The human is the opposite. We are we are we've got our light sides and our dark sides. We don't have a pure essence, but we have to play roles, and the leadership role is a role we have to play. And I think that's also missing. We don't talk about it as a role. I mean, we've talked about the leader the leadership role for 8,000 years. We've talked about the leadership self, really, only since the seven, but all of the that's all of the stuff, how to play the role within the context of the system. So the idea that you're a self playing a role in a system is as as a coherent whole is missing. Because the focus is on the self, all the sense making has gone into the system, and the role is almost unexplored.

Mike Jones 47:34

Yes, yeah, I I I really agree. Um, in this whole authenticity thing, I was saying, like, who who you being authentic to? But you're right about the sense making. I just think that you know I'm a I'm a systems thinker, so Stefan, and we're in there, we we we do a lot of our work on the viable systems model, and it even that relates to humans, and there's a whole point in there that Stafford Beer was getting across, which is that is about that capacity to to look outside and beyond that sort of sense making. It's it's all about how do we sense make and then how does that then drive in. But if you look at majority of things that I see in leadership development, especially literature, but also how the operating rhythm of an organization, it is not valued in any of those spaces, which I think is yeah, yeah, I would agree. Yeah, which is is dangerous, definitely when you're thinking about I'm I'm a strategist, and strategy predominantly is about sense making, it's about orientation, it's about you know looking uh trying to look at the differences between what I believe to be true and what's actually happening in reality, you know, it's a is it's tough, but it involves that that conceptual sense making.

SPEAKER_00 48:50

Well, I think sense making's been stripped out of a lot of strategy work as well. Oh, yeah. I mean, the stuff the stuff that I find interesting in the strategy field versus what I hear out in the world are I mean, they're so far apart, it's crazy because it doesn't seem the sense making in the in that I come across or the strategy that I come across seems lacking the sense making. It's just a set of targets. Yeah, and I'm like, well, that that's not a strategy, that's just a goal.

Final Takeaways And Closing Request

Mike Jones 49:16

Yeah, but even the tools, even the tools, everyone's rushing to breaking frameworks to fill in boxes. Where's the sense making in that? You know, you just you're narrowing the focus of the fill boxes in, um, rather than actually understand the situation, look at the you know, the organization and um and so on. But uh yeah, I think we could probably have a whole episode just going on like that. But um, before you for what would you like to leave the listeners to think about from this episode?

SPEAKER_00 49:45

Well, I've kind of got three things again. I think it kind of sums up what I've been talking about. So the first one is that most leaders in the coordinating middle that the lived experience is being stretched, it's being tangled, it's drifting. So you're surviving rather than thriving. And that makes it very difficult to make the developmental deeps that are required to do high-quality leadership work in that space. Whether you get formal leadership development or whether you go and buy some airport books or even some slightly better airport books and airport books, um, you're probably going to come across the traditional leadership grammars of direction and care or sovereignty and solidarity. They are both still important, but they're not enough if the situation that you're being lead you're being asked to lead in is being misread, and because of run, serve and change and the confusion checks, that the chances are it is. So, where I think you have to look at developing yourself is uh and the growth opportunity is somehow to become aware of the sense-making practices and uh processes. So, how do you interpret the conditions of work better? How do you mobilize allies and sponsors? Or can you run bounded experiments that create these islands of coherence that ultimately you can try to scale? So that's what I've leave people with, those kind of three points.

Mike Jones 51:06

Yeah, perfect. And that gives a lot of people really good stuff to reflect on. And I will share your substack into the show notes because you write some um fantastic articles about this, and I really like the way that you use the characters in there. I won't call them fictional characters anymore. Characters breath from writing. Amalgamations to really hit home the point that you're using. Um, I think you do that very well. But Richard, thank you so much for being a fantastic guest.

SPEAKER_00 51:38

Absolute pleasure.

Mike Jones 51:39

Yeah, I I've loved our conversation, and this is the the challenge with this podcast, is that you know I'd keep you on here for three hours, but unfortunately we have to cut it short there. But if you for the listeners, if you've liked this episode as much as I have, please like and share so that other people can get value from this, and especially value from Richard's work. I think in the leadership world, there's there's a lot to be done, and I think um Richard, you're doing a good job on uh on stretching us there. Thank you for so much. Cool, take care of