Hi, I’m Ian McClean, founder of Flow Group and Greenline Conversations. This podcast has grown out of the chaos that’s been thrust upon us, and in it, I share the best of 25 years of helping leaders in business organisations deal and cope with change. So, as you are out there busy making sense of it all, trying to cope and repurposing your organisations, I’m hoping that some of this will provide some help some of the time.
I’ll keep it deliberately short because I know you’re busy. Let’s dive in.
One thing that we’ve discovered over the years of working with organisations in the context of what they prefer and where their comfort levels lie, is that there are two sides to business. One side we call the mechanics of business, and these are things like systems and processes and procedures and strategies, structures, data projects.
All of these things are the hardware of business and necessary because without them, well things would be totally chaotic, but it’s only one half of the story. The other half of the story are all of the interactions that happen on a daily and a regular basis in order to get stuff done between people.
And this is like the oil that causes the machine to turn. I’ve yet to see a project deliver itself. And I’ve yet to see a strategy implement itself. In fact, nothing ever gets done without the oil of human interaction to move the machine forward. Yet business, in my experience, when it runs into a challenge or a difficulty, is far more comfortable with the mechanics of business than it is with the humanics of business, meaning that it’s far easier to write a report.
Conduct an investigation, tinker with the org structure, and change the organisation and the people in it around a chart. It’s far easier to do some of these things than it is to actually go and have a conversation, and I know many leaders and managers I’ve met over the years that if they could get through the day and the week without ever having to have a conversation with anybody, they’d be only too delighted and it makes sense.
Path of least resistance means it’s far easier to deal with the mechanics because they’re tangible, they’re measurable, they’re visible, as opposed to the humanics, because people, let’s be honest, are messy. One of my early mentors in the early part of my career, I remember taking me aside one day and making the observation, Ian, what you’re gonna discover in business is that the business side of business is pretty easy.
Problems typically come with hair on top or not, as I get a bit older. So as part of the Green Line Project, which has been running for over 15 years now, we began to try to understand in large organisations, how many interactions do you think happen? In an organisation over a period, on a daily basis.
We asked this question rhetorically to the clients we were working with in the early years, and everybody recognised and realised that through the various channels that we have our interactions on a daily basis across a network of a large organisation, the answer is a lot. We actually had one client who took the challenge, literally, how many interactions do you think happen on a daily basis across your organisation?
And they went out and, with their own metrics, discovered that on a daily basis, they had somewhere north of 350,000 interactions that took place in their network daily. And back to this idea of conversations being the wallpaper of life. Tell me that. The quality of those 350,000 interactions tell me that the quality of those is not having an impact on the overall business and business performance.
So we went deeper. We went deeper to try to investigate what the outcomes are that result from these conversations, and we categorise them into three basic outcomes. So in all cases, there are three possible outcomes from your conversation. The first is a little bit like the gear shift in a car. You have the conversation with the right parties, you create an agreement, people go out, they execute around the agreement, and it moves the business further on.
That’s like the D setting on your gear shift, but there’s a second outcome. The second outcome is the conversation happens. Nothing happens, and that’s like the N or the neutral on your gear shift. There’s a further possible outcome, and the third possible outcome is the OR on your gear shift, which normally stands for reverse, but in our case, we refer to it and we label it as residue.
This is a conversation where the conversation happens, but it doesn’t go very well. I. And now, as a result of that conversation, people walk away. But instead of people agreeing and executing, it spawns further conversations between various parties, not in the room, not in an official way, in the corridors, in the coffee docks, in the car parks.
Now, instead of having one agreement that people stand over and commit to, you now have a blizzard of emails, CC here, BC there, and before you know it, the head of the department needs to get involved. We call this residue. And residue is exactly like residue in the oil. So if you get pure oil and you have some residue in the oil, then what it does is it creates wear and tear on the machine, which ultimately can lead to poorer performance or ultimately breakdown.
And residue, by the way, is not something that’s malicious or malevolent necessarily. In fact, mostly it’s innocently created around things that people have that are unconscious habits that they have, that have formed that when they do get together and they have a conversation. Simple things like people not listening, people not preparing properly for the meeting people, with competing priorities.
People making assumptions. All of these things are innocent and often unconscious, but the result is it creates residue, which slows down the performance of what it is we’re trying to do in one way or another, and the slowing down a performance. When we investigated what the impact of poor conversations has and how it shows up in organizations or in the business, well, it breaks down into two ways or two categories.
Yeah, the first is a lack of clarity. So people walk away at the end and they think that they’ve got an understanding, but the understanding is different and it leads to mistakes being made, misplaced effort, people having competing agendas or different contexts, resources being wasted, inboxes, swelling, inefficiencies, et cetera.
So that’s one type of impact that residue has in the organization in terms of efficiency. The second is that it creates a loss of commitment where people just feel less committed than they, than they did, so they show less discretionary effort. As a result of the conversation, they start to miss deadlines.
It turns into the blame game where it’s your fault, not my fault. Trust gets eroded. People start to behave in a cover your ass way, and you need more oversight and more micromanagement in order to ensure that people get stuff done. Because of the lack of commitment, I. So in summary, we can’t not have conversations.
It’s the only way that stuff gets done. But there’s a percentage, even though it’s a minority of conversations that result in innocently, often a creation of residue, which hampers performance by either creating a lack of clarity or a loss of commitment. And this comes with a cost. And in part three, we’ll explore and investigate what is the cost.
