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The
Corporate Fool and the
Search for Healthy Organisations
by David Firth |
Organisations are intellectual products. They are
complex webs of beliefs and knowledge, the result of how
people agree to think about such things as customers,
the future, business processes, buildings, competition.
Organisations are also social creations - they are webs
of convention, rules and behaviour, the result of how
people agree to relate to each other. To change an
organisation you need to challenge both the intellectual
and social assumptions that underpin it.
One of the preferred ways of
changing companies is leadership – getting someone to
model the new way of doing things. The trouble is that
transformational leaders are few and far between. By the
time people rise to true levels of power and influence,
their instinct to burn down the house has left them.
After all, bring in big changes and what might happen to
their stock options? How many directors sitting on the
board only five years from retirement are still taking
the sort of risks that got them there?
But if you can't change the
people, change the people! Thus another way to energise
an organisation is to redesign its recruitment policy.
Sadly, organisations rarely resist our basic human urge
to mix with those who are like us and so they end up
hiring people who 'fit the bill' - mould? - bringing in
more employees recruited precisely in their own image.
It's tremendously friendly, comfortable and safe, of
course, but nothing much changes. And you certainly make
no impact on the company's habits of thinking and
behaving.
In these ways, organisations
thrive on conventional thinking and are deeply
suspicious of the bizarre or unorthodox. Furthermore,
organisations depend on people not being brave enough to
challenge the status quo. They rely for their survival,
their maintenance, on people who are happy, literally to
continue what came before. ('Continue' is derived from
Latin words which mean 'to hold together' whereas
management guru Charles Handy's famous hope for
'discontinuous thinking in discontinuous change' would
threaten to break things apart).
We need as a role model someone
who already has lots of experience of thinking and
acting in an unconventional way and, just as crucially,
someone who is not afraid to speak up about it. Here is
such a model: The Corporate Fool.
Fools have existed in all world
cultures throughout history. Fools speak out against
those who have power, question accepted wisdom, embody
controversy and taboo, cast doubt in the face of
certainty, bring chaos to order, point out the obvious
when everybody else is apparently too scared to, throw a
spanner in the proverbial works, turn the world upside
down. It's the best job spec you'll ever read - unless
you happen to be a Bad King.
But what would a Fool (as
opposed to a fool - the distinction is important!) do
all day in a modern organisation? Well, here are nine
roles that we badly need in times of change and which we
always seem to leave to somebody else (with the result
that nobody ends up doing them). They are nine
challenges to the intellectual and social traditions
which obstruct change and which manifest the Shadow side
of organisations.
The Fool causes a company to
face its Shadow in these ways:
Alienator
This role the Fool plays merely
by virtue of his presence: he is, by definition, a
representative of otherness. Human beings are social
animals, coming together to solve problems and to serve
a common purpose when working in organisations. The Fool
reinforces what is unique about our group - and also
symbolises everything we are not but might be.
At the same time, the Alienator
is the conduit for different information, contexts and
trends from outside the organisation, even outside the
industry. He challenges us to expand our thinking to
welcome unconventional - and therefore potentially
creative - inputs.
The Fool is the Vice President
in charge of Being Other.
Confidante
The King has the Fool's ear -
he can confide in him and he can trust him, often with
private thoughts that couldn't be expressed to anyone
else. This is the 'armchair consultant' - the sounding
board that doesn't judge, won't laugh and can't use it
against him. Just as the Fool needs the King for support
and protection, so the King needs the Fool for comfort
and advice. What if there were such 'safe space'
relationships existed throughout the organisation, where
people could talk from the place of instinct and emotion
without being judged?
The Fool is the Vice President
in charge of Being the King's Pal.
Contrarian
The Fool is the challenger of
the norms. He just doesn't agree. With anything. Whoever
says whatever, the Fool will say the opposite, out of
cussed obligation. Every idea is challenged, every
decision questioned, every suggestion reconceived as
alternatives. This is a discipline of challenge, which
posits that if ideas can't prevail in a fair fight, they
can't be very robust. Too often people withold challenge
for fear of losing face; they therefore put individual
wellbeing ahead of the whole. A Fool wouldn't care to do
this, since he can't be promoted anyway...
The Fool is the Vice President
in charge of Being Contrary.
Midwife
When change is measured and
gentle, we can use our left brain - logical, rational,
linear thinking will be fine for processing information.
We can leave our right brain to be nurtured doing the
gardening or painting; in times of incremental change
the right brain is for recreation. But when change is
constant, enormous, punctuated, unpredictable, we need
to find ways of thinking that mimic and reflect that
trend. We need to use both our left and our right brain
to solve the problems and create the solutions that will
decide the survival and success of our business. The
information age has brought with it the age of
bewilderment, where things themselves are no longer as
important as the possible connections between things –
and making, creating and imagining new connections is
the realm of creativity. Holistic, creative thinking is
becoming a source of competitive edge. And, as we're not
very good at it, we need some help.
The Fool is the Vice President
in charge of Creative Problem Solving.
Jester
The only animal on Earth that
has the ability to laugh is the human being - and the
one place he struggles to exercise that ability is at
work. That's why organisations can simultaneously be
both perilously busy and as dull as dish water. The
Jester-Fool encourages us to laugh because he knows it
is good for our health and for the performance of our
work. Humour humanises, and is thus an important
requisite in building trust and healthy communication.
He also knows, as did the social iconoclast Ivan Illich,
that 'real revolutionaries are people who look with a
deep sense of humour upon their institutions.' Besides,
whoever said that change shouldn't be fun?
The Fool is the Vice President
in charge of Making People Laugh.
Mapper
Often the problem isn't that
nobody knows. It's that nobody knows who knows. Where in
the organisation is the knowledge? Who holds what
understanding? The Fool is in a perfect place to find
out. As the sniffer-about in all the corners of the
company, he is developing a conceptual map of who knows
what and where they are. He is then in the best place to
draw together the necessary connections when we need it.
This is a role he carries out when people ask him to,
but also when he suspects they'd prefer him not to.
Hoarding of information was always a power play in
traditional organisations. In the information age,
hoarding is probably a treasonable crime.
The Fool is the Vice President
in charge of Knowing Who Knows.
Mediator
Just as we have organised our
way of doing business, so we have organised structures
to govern our communication: we have codes of language
and grammar and all sorts of cultural protocols. The key
to understanding communication is to recognise that none
of the symbols that we have adopted means anything in
any objective sense. It is quite possible to imagine a
world just like our own in which shaking hands means
'goodbye' or 'no' or even 'your mother is a fat
warthog.' The signs and signals which make up our
communication have an entirely arbitrary relationship
with the things to which we are actually referring.
'Dog' and 'God' mean, respectively, 'four-legged
creature' and 'supreme being' only because we have
agreed that they will.
The inherent subjectivity of
communication can be great fun if we want to play mind
games. But if we want to re-connect our fragmented
businesses in any meaningful way, we have to get beyond
our easy misunderstandings in order to renegotiate past
perceptions.
The Fool is the Vice President
in charge of Mediating Meaning
Satirist
Our organisations are funny and
they are ridiculous and somebody needs to say so.
The Satirist-Fool looks around
the workplace and sees all the inflated balloons of ego
and indulgence and self-importance that fly around our
heads and he deflates them. He clears the air and
relieves the tension. He makes what is absurd seem so.
Why? Not just because pomposity
is vulgar and silly in any self-respecting workplace,
but because pomposity is an outward show of utter
certainty - and in times of tremendous instability we
cannot afford to be that sure about anything.
The Fool is the Vice President
in charge of Pricking Pomposity
Truthseeker
The Fool knows that not being
truthful usually leads to complications (note that in
that early Fool Myth The Emperor's New Clothes, the
Emperor doesn't just end up looking stupid because he
insists on being surrounded by liars; he gets seriously
robbed by his tailors into the bargain). The Fool knows
the truth is a very simple solution to most business
problems. But we don't use it. And then the project
collapses and everyone crawls out of the wreckage and
says 'I knew that would happen'.
The Fool is the Vice President
in charge of Telling the Truth.
The strong companies of the
near future will be those who seek out and nurture
Fool-like skills in all their people. No-one will have
the job title, perhaps, but we can all learn the
behaviours. The Fool is the ultimate 'change agent', and
mastering change is the core competence of the age. We
do not have time in this accelerating world for Naked
Emperors and Sacred Cows of the past. Imagine: whole
ranks of internal corporate Fools seeing things as they
are and then challenging them creatively. It's an
immense, mad, shocking challenge to organisational
culture and only a Fool would say it. But he must.
Find the crazy people in your
organisation and listen to them
-David Butler
Finally, it must be pointed out
that the Fool plays a valuable iconoclast role, breaking
down the old walls of traditional thinking. But he or
she also leads us towards something powerful, beyond
those walls. I'd like to end by sharing my vision of a
healthy organisation:
A Healthy
Organisation:
answers the questions 'who are
we?' and 'how do we connect?'
is populated by living human beings
faces everything and avoids nothing
learns so that change is growth and not pain
sees the customer relationship as sacred
In all Tarot packs the Fool is
pictured gazing off into the distance, towards the sun.
Maybe this vision is something of what he sees there?
David Firth is a consultant,
writer and conference speaker specialising in the
psychology of human change, communication and in
corporate cultures. He was listed last year as one of
‘Twenty People to Watch for the Future’ by Business
Life magazine. He is also featured in a new book A
Freethinker’s A-Z of the New World of Business as
one of the ‘different people working in different
organisations in different ways...’
David has been a Visiting
Lecturer in Corporate Communications at Strathclyde
Business School and a guest speaker on the Senior
Executive Programme at Sundridge Park Management School.
He is an Associate Member of The Wentworth Management
Programme.
David’s vision is to help
create the next generation of healthy organisations. As
such, his company Treefrog Ltd works in many areas of
organisational life - communication, ‘trust-building,’
innovation and learning communities. David works with
companies and individuals open to change and innovation;
his most recent projects include co-facilitating a
leadership development forum for the Top 25 European
directors at Ethicon and being key note presenter at
Kingfisher’s Top 100 conference. Other clients include
AMP (Australia & UK), Barclays Bank, BA, Gartner
Group, IPC Magazines, Marks & Spencer, PWC and
Unilever, though he is increasingly co-creating the
future with internet start-ups and related companies.
David’s The Corporate
Fool: saying the unsayable, doing the undoable
(co-authored with Alan Leigh) was nominated for
the MCA Book Prize. The Corporate Fool is a model for a
new business professional: not in the court, but not
quite out of it either, the Fool is in the best place
both to tell the truth and to offer very unconventional
- or, even, very obvious - solutions. David’s follow
up The Transformation Fieldbook: how Fools create
change from the inside out, will be published later
this year.
David also wrote the best
selling How to make work Fun! for Gower
(nominated for the Financial Times Book of the Year
competition); David is currently working on its sequel
Business: The Movie, but it’s not much more than a
great title at the moment, to be honest. His work in fun
at work and Fooling has been featured extensively in the
media. David also wrote Sacred Business, a book
about spirit, heart and community in business, with
Heather Campbell (a shamanic medicine woman).
He is the Consultant Editor of
the SMART series of management books published by
Capstone and wrote the launch edition, SMART
Things to Know About CHANGE.
For eight years during the
eighties, David ran an award-winning physical theatre
company, The Lords of Misrule, and toured to Japan,
America, Africa, Korea and Singapore. David began his
business career with The LEK Partnership and Young &
Rubicam, before co-founding his first consultancy, LFA,
in 1990.
He lives in Yorkshire with his
wife and two young sons.
David's books: "Sacred Business,"
"The Corporate Fool," and "Smart Things to Know About
Change" are available through the publisher Capstone
at a 25% discount on the list. Visit www.capstone.co.uk
to order. To order "How to make work
Fun," email David at david@foolweb.com
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