Soft Skills for Hard People: Embracing Modern Leadership
[Author’s Note: This talk is adapted from a keynote I’ve given a few times in 2019. It covers a lot of what I emphasize in my leadership coaching sessions and teach in my Technology Leadership Masterclass. If you would like me to speak at your organization, please reach out about available dates and speaking fees.]
Our story begins just after dusk, with the light of the setting sun slowly fading over the windswept plains of the Eurasian Steppe. It’s about 10,000 years ago, and a small band of Neolithic nomads have pitched camp after following the herds, on whose meat they sustain themselves, across the mountains and plains of the continent for several weeks.
Now, after a grueling day’s walk, everyone has had their fill of the evening meal, and they gather around the cooking fire to listen with rapt attention to the stories of an elder. Her hair is gray, and her form is frail from her advanced years. But her eyes are bright and youthful, her mind as sharp as the onyx blades the hunters use to skin and butcher their game. As the crowd gathers closer to the warmth of the fire, they hush so that all may hear the elder’s tales of heroes past, who faced the many trials presented by gods and spirits of the sky, the forest, the rivers, and the mountains.
Believing Is Seeing
As the citizens of this early human culture listen carefully, reality for them is literally shaped in their minds by the stories of the elder. For a people whose world is quite a bit smaller than our own, whose boundaries represent real dangers of bodily harm from natural forces, strict adherence to the wisdom of the elder is ignored at the cost of life itself.
The stories then form a kind of situational awareness that ossifies in the social mind as the very stuff of reality. The rules of behavior, whether around hunting, gathering, mating, births, and deaths, are all circumscribed by the boundaries illustrated in parables imparted from elders.
For them, there is no objective reality beyond the belief systems that all share about life, death, morality and custom that hold this unit together for their mutual survival. The very concept of an individual is in fact alien to them, for how could any individual survive without the mutual cooperation of all, and indeed the benevolent protection, or at least the benign indifference, of those gods and spirits with whom only the elder has the power to communicate or transact.
Our Stories Matter
Words hold extraordinary power over the human psyche, and always have. The great Joseph Campbell, prolific scholar and progenitor of a concept from literature you’d probably recognize as The Hero’s Journey, considered all mythology from every culture on earth to be telling us basically the same universal story.
In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, released in 1949, Campbell charts a grand narrative through a seemingly endless archive of story and myth from human cultures spanning the globe and all of written and oral history. The story varies in an infinite number of ways, but retains a certain set of patterns that persist across all civilizations:
The world starting out normal is threatened by some outside force.
A hero must answer the call to adventure by leaving that world behind, whether temporarily or permanently, and venturing into the unknown to face the threat.
The hero then faces a series of trials through which they themselves undergo fundamental changes.
At the nadir of the hero’s darkest fears, a choice must be made, often a kind of sacrifice, bargain, or personal transformation, that finally enables the hero to overcome the adversary. The adversary may be a villain, nature, or him/herself.
The hero then may return to the home of their birth, but is now irrevocably changed by the experience. In some cases, the hero dies, only further emphasizing their separation from the normal home world of their past.
The Hero as Psyche
Still deeper, Campbell connects the persistent thread of the hero’s journey with the psychological transformation of an individual pursuing enlightenment. Mythology becomes a metaphor for the human experience. The hero is the ego personified, the journey a representation of the transformation from secular experience to the ego dissolution of divine transcendence. The home village stands in for the known world, while the forbidding boundaries of the dark forest or the raging seas represent the unknown depths of our own mind — our subconscious. Through the trials, the hero is tested in their ability to dive into this unknown world, face their fears, and overcome them.
The elder holding court at the edge of the campfire is a shaman, a priest, or guide to the spiritual realm beyond the known world. These figures, keepers of the secret knowledge beyond the mundane realities of daily life, have themselves experienced the hero’s journey, and returned to weave the lessons gained from experience into the cultural fabric of the village. The lessons and parables of how to live are derived from these stories whereby the villagers follow the teachings of the elder without themselves having made the journey. Lacking a true point of personal reference, they must accept the lessons of the elder (a hero from a previous story) on blind faith.
Process As Dogma
All too often then, a schism develops between those who have experienced first-hand the ego-shattering power of the journey beyond, and those who only hear the tales secondhand and must do their best to interpret the lessons into practical daily life. For so powerful is the transcendent experience for the individual, words and pictures fail to fully transcribe the full experience of transcendence.
For centuries, cultures have been structured around the stories of the heroes of their time, each one braving the journey of self-annihilation and rebirth, only to return home and impart tales of their experience to an audience that cannot possibly relate to them. Lacking any experiential point of reference, the uninitiated satisfy themselves with prescriptive interpretations of the story, desperately trying to honor the spirit of the lessons learned outside the boundaries of normal experience, but without any real understanding of them.
All innovation moves from stories to best practices to strict rules and procedures.
Still further from the experience, others learn the transcribed experiences and through layers of retelling and reinterpretation, losing the original meaning of transcendence inside a mountain of procedures, rituals, and to-do lists. Eventually, all links to the original experience of the hero are severed, leaving only books and binders, protocols and rule sets, without any embedded cultural appreciation of their original meaning.
Innovation: A Hero’s Journey
Organizations are structured groups of people with their own culture, stories, rituals, and procedures. Changes within an organization are thus governed by this same process of a hero’s journey steadily eroded of its original significance through the imposition of stale and rigid practice.
All new practices and methodologies face this outcome unless vigilance is exercised in making sure the newly initiated experience their own hero’s journey, rather than merely aping the behaviors described in the rules and procedures that are handed down. That is why Agile transformations that are imposed from above (or indeed from outside) as a pre-baked process— rather than a set of principles that have to be taught, personally experienced, and adapted by the individuals and teams who will be implementing them in their work — tend overwhelmingly to fail the organizations who attempt them.
Inertia within organizations, the tendency to resist change, is very powerful. As has been written extensively elsewhere, the structure and behavior of modern organizations is overwhelmingly influenced by the 100-year-old dictates from Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor, typified in the commonplace separation of those who do (workers) from those who think and plan (managers), and the strict imposition of hierarchy in decision-making.
Even as ground-breaking luminaries like W Edwards Deming and Taiichi Ohno started chipping away at Taylor’s doctrine way back in the middle of the 20th century, such enlightened approaches such as “Respect People” and “Inspect and Adapt” have still failed to penetrate the upper reaches of most organizations. As such, even when “radical” approaches to product development such as Lean Startup or Agile or Design Thinking are introduced, they are paradoxically presented by fiat and command-and-control approaches, draining them of their creative and inspirational potential and too often turning would-be enthusiasts at the individual contributor level into resentful avoiders and resisters.
Source: Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash
Dan Pink’s “Drive”, which introduced us to the importance of intrinsic motivation in knowledge work (and captured perfectly in his phrase: “autonomy, mastery, and purpose”), resonates strongly with Deming’s and Ohno’s assertions that the more autonomy you give workers to make their own decisions the better are the business outcomes. Stanley McChrystal’s “Team of Teams” and David Marquet’s “Turn the Ship Around” further reinforce the same concepts of driving authority down to where the information is.
These are widely read works. Drive alone has 4.4 stars and 1100 ratings on Amazon as of this writing, and 150k up-votes on Goodreads. So, somebody is obviously reading it. Why haven’t senior managers, it seems? Why are so many organizations still leading from Taylor’s top-down playbook?
There is something critical that we’re missing as change makers in organizations, and Joseph Campbell gave us at least one of the keys to understanding it. Modern neuroscience holds the other.
