🌿🧭🌳 OD105: Managerial Paradoxes 🪢

Curated resources on Strategy ∙ Org Design ∙ Org Development ∙ Adjacent fields

Starters

1 of 4 / John Cutler: Short and powerful LinkedIn post about relying too much on engagement surveys to understand what is happening in your company.

He briefly explains 9 of the factors that are at play: 1. Feedback Saturation; 2. Emotional Exhaustion; 3. Acclimatization; 4. Cognitive Dissonance; 5. Shifted Expectations; 6. Localized Tolerance; 7. Locus of Control; 8. Fear of Repercussions; 9. Hedonic Treadmill.

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2 of 4 / Sam Rye: Furthering Experimentation Practice - Part 1. “This "portfolio-of-experimentation" is an increasingly necessary and accepted approach to change work (…) as we accept the implications of complexity science.” and “experimentation practice can be used across a spectrum:”

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3 of 4 / strategy+business: How to help your employees own your strategy. Elizabeth Doty shares the perspective of chartering teams instead of cascading information, when it comes to the socialization of strategy.

(…) As a result, the typical strategy cascade often fails to generate the level of clarity, commitment, and action required to move a new strategy forward.

To take ownership, teams need more than information or inspiration — they need a specific, personalized license to act.

Without clarity on what they are responsible for, which decision rights they own, what inputs they can count on, and who is depending on them to deliver, they cannot move confidently into action.

That sort of clarity and commitment requires mutual information-sharing, negotiation, and problem-solving, none of which is the focus in a cascade. It is, however, the hallmark of what I call the chartering approach.

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4 of 4 / Implications: Strange Ways AI Disrupts Business Models. Scott Belsky explores “business models likely to become antiquated as AI proliferates in more industries”:

• Increasing perversion of certain business models that are liable to be gamed or constrained by AI: “We’re shifting from a world where data analysis required long cycles (…) to a new world of real-time optimization and insights (AI will mine the data to surface insights and make optimization decisions in real-time). But when businesses start optimizing themselves, all sorts of crazy things might start happening (or at least be suggested by the AI).”

• Time-based business models are liable for disruption via a value-based overhaul of compensation.

• AI will threaten subjectivity in purchase decisions, and with it the sway of brand and marketing.

• The business of traditional entertainment creation will evolve, but not as we expect.

• Mechanisms that help match the best talent with the right opportunities will drive more creative meritocracy - and challenge “old boy” networks.

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Main

Managerial Paradoxes 🪢

In his excellent essay on Reframing What it Means to be an Executive, Tom Critchlow shares 7 managerial paradoxes from the CEO Strategies for Managing Paradox paper by Tobias Fredberg:

Paradox: Paradox of location 🪢
Manager’s problem: How to combine the need to be present with empowering the leaders in my organization?
Paradoxical tension: You need to be omnipresent, but at the same time stay away.
Example of resolution: You need to be present to talk about the big issues and to listen in on current concerns in the organization, but you need to stay out of operational issues.

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Paradox: Paradox of change 🪢
Manager’s problem: The more initiatives I try to drive, the less seems to happen.
Paradoxical tension: To create change, you need to stay the same.
Example of resolution: Success in changing an organization comes from persistently staying with only a few messages and tasks, no matter how boring that may be for the leader personally.

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Paradox: Paradox of creativity 🪢
Manager’s problem: I was hired to bring fresh ideas, but the more I try, the less people listen.
Paradoxical tension: The more ideas you launch, the less ideas will succeed.
Example of resolution: Although a leader may have many ideas, a large organization is only receptive to a few ideas at a time. A leader needs to pace initiatives to refrain from overloading the organization.

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Paradox: Paradox of diversity 🪢
Manager’s problem: Diversity improves problem solving and creative work, but culture clashes rip the organization apart.
Paradoxical tension: You need to become more heterogeneous and homogenous at the same time.
Example of resolution: The organization’s purpose is used to unite people. New relationships are built through co creation. Celebrate the diversity in multiple ways, and do not accept it as an explanation for conflict.

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Paradox: Paradox of direction 🪢
Manager’s problem: I want to empower people, but at the same time I need to be sure that they follow our direction.
Paradoxical tension: Direction and independent action needs to be combined.
Example of resolution: Strategic priorities are clear, and managers are given high degrees of freedom in executing the strategy, including acting across units. This is enabled by a broadly involving strategy process that allows also harsh feedback on the strategy to reach top management.

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Paradox: Paradox of innovation 🪢
Manager’s problem: I need to both deliver short term results, and invest in innovation and entrepreneurial initiatives.
Paradoxical tension: Operational excellence needs to exist simultaneously with innovation and entrepreneurial initiative taking.
Example of resolution: Only in a high trust culture with a clear direction do people feel that they have the possibility to drive initiatives outside a predefined agenda, and only then can the leader be sure that operational excellence and new initiatives are not at odds.

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Paradox: Paradox of globalization 🪢
Manager’s problem: I need to create both local market adoption, but make use of the potential synergies in the global organization.
Paradoxical tension: Success builds on becoming more global and local at the same time.
Example of resolution: Global integration and local adaptation works best if they are combined with a dense social network where people across markets know and trust each other.

How are you dealing with paradoxes in your own work?

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Chef’s Special

Knowledge sharing session on Monday

🧭 Properly using the information available in a specific context is key for strategic thinking and making better decisions about your way forward in that context. For career decisions, project decisions, business decisions and so forth. 🧭

Join Bülent for a 1h knowledge sharing session on Monday about learning to deal with lots of varied information at work. Details and sign up here.
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Dessert

1 of 2 / Biomimicry Institute: Disappearing Freaks of Nature—and the Secrets Going With Them. Learning from nature: “With these oddest of deep-sea residents, new approaches to manipulating light can be integrated into innovative materials with applications ranging from telescopes to solar panels.”

2 of 2 / Scientific American: Grammar Changes How We See, an Australian Language Shows.

And more recently, many researchers have been troubled by the fact that most work on universal properties of language and language processing has been carried out using English and a few other familiar languages—a group that probably represents less than 5 percent of the world's language diversity. (…) the search for universals took place in only one corner of the language universe.

(…) Yet it is also true that in varying ways a language may shape the attention and thoughts of its speakers. Language and culture form a feedback loop, or rather they form many, many feedback loops.

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Bon appétit!

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Menu created for people who lead organizations and for those who help them do this in a better way, by knowledge chefs ✨ Raluca and Bülent Duagi 🌿.

As the Sense & Change team, we’re working as Strategy & Organization advisers to General Managers, Managing Directors and Heads of Divisions in mid and large 🇷🇴 Tech companies to help them make more impact through applied strategic thinking.

See also: LinkedIn / Personal Strategy newsletter / Affiliations: IASP, APF, EODF, IAF