Making sense of management – a conversation with Richard Claydon

KA 

Hi there. I’m restarting a series of conversations that I’d kicked off in 2014 but discontinued a year later for a variety of reasons. At that time, I’d interviewed a few interesting people who have a somewhat heretical view on things managers tend to take for granted. I thought there’s no better way to restart the series than to speak with Dr. Richard Claydon, who I have known for a few years.  Richard calls himself a management ironist and organisational misbehaviorist. Instead of going on and risking misrepresenting what he does, let me get him to jump in and tell you himself.

Welcome Richard, tell us a bit about what you do.

RC  

I position myself as having a pragmatic, realistic take on management. Most business schools have a very positivistic take on the subject, a “do A and get B” approach. On the other hand, you have a minority of academics – the critical theorists – who say, well actually if you do A, you might get B, but you also get C, D, E, F, G.  This is actually a more realistic take. However, critical management theory is full of jargon and deep theory so it’s very complex to understand. I try to position myself in the middle, between the two perspectives, because real life is actually messier than either side would like to admit.

I like to call myself a misbehaviourist because the mess in the middle is largely about misbehaviours – real but more often, perceived. Indeed, good behaviours are often misperceived as bad and bad behaviours misperceived as good. I should emphasise that my work is not about getting rid of the bad apples or performance managing people. Rather it’s about working out what people are doing and more importantly, why. And from that, probing the system and seeing if one can start effecting changes in behaviours and outcomes.

KA 

Interesting! What kind of reception do you get? In particular, is there an appetite for this kind of work – open ended with no guarantee of a results?

RC 

Six of one half a dozen or the other. I’ve noticed a greater appetite for what I do now than there was six or seven years ago. It might be that I’ve made what I do more digestible and more intelligible to people in the management space. Or it might be that people are actually recognising that what they’re currently doing isn’t working in the complex world we live in today. It’s probably a bit of both.

That said, I definitely think the shift in thinking has been accelerated by the pandemic. It’s sort of, we can’t carry on doing this anymore because it is not really helping us move forward. So, I am finding a larger proportion of people willing to explore new approaches.

KA 

Tell us a bit about the approaches you use.

RC 

As an example, I’ve used narrative analytics –   collecting micro narratives at massive scale across an organisation and then analysing them, akin to the stuff Dave Snowden does.  Basically, we collect stories across the organisation, cluster them using machine learning techniques, and then get a team of people with different perspectives to look at the clusters. This gives us multiple readings on meaning. So, the team could consist of someone with leadership expertise, someone with expertise in mental health and wellbeing, someone with a behavioural background etc.

We also use social network analysis to find how information flows within a organisation. The aim here is to identify three very different types of characters: a) blockers – those who stop information from flowing, b) facilitators of information flow, c) connectors – information hubs, the go-to people in the organisation and d) mavericks, those who are thinking differently. And if you do that, you can start identifying where interesting things are happening, where different thinking is manifesting itself, and who’s carrying that thinking across the organisation.

KA 

Interesting! What sort of scale do you do this at?

RC 

Oh, we can scale to 1000s of people – organisations that have 35000 to 40,000 people – well beyond the scale at which one can wander around and do the ethnography oneself.

KA 

How do you elicit these micro-narratives?

RC 

I’ll give you an example. For a study we did on remote working during COVID we simply wrote, when it comes to working from home in COVID, I like dot dot, dot, I don’t like dot dot, dot, I wish dot dot, dot, I wonder dot dot dot,  plus some metadata to slice and dice – age bands, gender etc.  Essentially, we try to ask a very open set of questions, to get people into a more reflective stance. That’s where you begin to get some really interesting stuff.

KA 

Can you tell us about some of the interesting things you found from this study?  The more, I guess, interesting and surprising things that you’ve seen that are  perhaps not so obvious from a cursory glance,

RC 

The one thing that was very clear from the COVID studies was that the organisation’s perception of work from home was the key to whether it actually worked or not. If management gives the impression that work from home is somehow not quite proper work, then you’re going to get a poor work from home experience for all. If management isn’t trusting a person to work from home, or isn’t trusting a team to work from home then you’ve got a problem with your management, not with your people. The bigger the trust gap, the worse the experience. Employees in such environments feel more overwhelmed, more isolated, and generally more limited and restricted in their lives. That was the really interesting finding that came out of this piece of work. 

KA 

That’s fascinating…but I guess should not be surprising in hindsight. Management attitudes play a large role in determining employee behaviours and attitudes, and one would expect this to be even more the case when there is less face-to-face interaction. This is also a nice segue into another area I’d like to get you to talk about:  the notion of organisational culture.  Could you tell us about your take on the concept?

RC 

How cynical do you want me to be?

KA 

Very, I expect nothing less!

RC 

Well, if you go back into why culture became such a big thing, the first person who talked about culture in organisations was Elliott Jaques, way back in the 50s. But it didn’t really catch on then. It became a thing in the early 80s. And how it did is a very interesting story.

Up until the early 70s, you had – in America at least – a sort of an American Dream being lived underpinned by the illusion of continuous growth.  Then came the challenges of the 70s, the oil crisis and numerous other challenges that resulted in a dramatic loss of confidence in the American system. At the same time, you had the Japanese miracle, where a country that had two nuclear bombs dropped on it thirty years earlier was, by the 1970s, the second biggest economy in the world. And there was this sort of frenzy of interest in what the Japanese were doing to create this economic miracle and, more important, what America could learn from it. There were legions of consultants and academics going back and forth between the two countries.

One of the groups that was trying to learn from the Japanese was McKinsey. But this wasn’t really helping build confidence in the US. On the contrary, this approach seemed to imply that the Japanese were in some way better, which didn’t go down particularly well with the local audience. There was certainly interest in the developments around continuous improvement,  The Toyota Way etc – around getting the workers involved with the innovation of products and processes, as well as the cultural notions around loyalty to the organisation etc.  However, that was not enough to excite an American audience.

The spark came from Peters and Waterman’s  book, In Search of  Excellence, which highlighted examples of American companies that were doing well.  The book summarised eight features that these companies had in common – these were labelled principles of a good culture and that’s where the Mckinsey Seven S model came from. It was a kind of mix of ideas pulled in from Peters/Waterman, the Japanese continuous improvement and culture stuff, all knocked together really quite quickly.  In a fortunate (for Peters and Waterman) coincidence, the US economy turned the corner at around the time that this book was published and sales took off. That said, it’s a very well written book. The first half of In Search of Excellence is stunning. If you read it you’ll see that the questions they asked then are relevant questions even today. Anyway, the book came out at exactly the right time: the economy had turned the corner, McKinsey had a Seven S model to sell and then two universities jumped into the game, Stanford and Harvard… and lo behold, organisational culture became a management buzz-phrase, and  remains so to this day.  Indeed, the idea that special cultures are driving performance has bubbled up again in recent years, especially in the tech sector. In the end, though, the notion of culture  is very much a halo effect, in that the proponents of culture tend to attribute  performance to certain characteristics (i.e. culture). The truth is that success may give rise to a culture, but there is no causal effect the other way round.

KA 

Thanks for that historical perspective. In my experience in large multinationals, I’ve found that the people who talked about culture the most were from HR. And, they were mostly concerned about enforcing a certain uniformity of thought across the organisation.  That was around that time I came across the work of some critical management scholars who you alluded to at the start of this conversation. In particular, Hugh Willmott’s, wonderful critique of organisational culture : strength is ignorance; slavery is freedom. I thought that was a brilliant take on why people tend to push back on HR driven efforts to enforce a culture mindset- the  workshops and stuff that are held to promote it. I’m surprised that people in high places continue to be enamoured by this concept when they really should know better, having come up through the ranks themselves.

RC 

Yea, the question is whether they have come through the ranks themselves. A lot of them have come through MBA programmes or have been parachuted in. This is why, when I teach in the MBA, I try to teach this wider appreciation of culture because I know what the positivists are teaching – they are telling their students that culture is a good lever to get the kind of desirable behaviours that managers want.

KA 

Totally agree, the solution is to teach diverse perspectives instead of the standard positivist party line. I try to do the same in my MBA decision-making class – that is, I challenge the positivistic mindset by drawing students’ attention to the fact that in real life, problems are not given but have to be taken from complex situations (to paraphrase Russell Ackoff). Moreover, how one frames the problem determines the kind of answer one will get. Analytical decision-making tools assume the decision problem is given, but one is never given a problem in real life. So, I spend a lot of time teaching sensemaking approaches that can help students extract problems from complex situations by building context around the situation.

Anyway, we’ve been going for quite a bit, there’s one thing I absolutely must touch upon before we close this conversation – the use of irony in management. I know, your PhD work was around this concept, and it’s kind of an unusual take. I’m sure my readers would be very interested to hear more about your take on irony and why it’s useful in management.

RC 

I think we’ve set the stage quite nicely in terms of the cultural discussion. So what I was looking at in my PhD was a massive cultural change in an Australian company, a steelworks. We had unfettered access to the company for six and a half years, which is kind of unheard of. So anyway, one of the interesting things we noticed during our fieldwork was that everybody was identifying the same group of people as being the ones that were giving them the best information, were the easiest to talk, had the most  useful data sources, etc.

We then noticed that these people seemed to have an ironic sensibility. What does that mean? Well, they poked fun at themselves, their teammates, managers and the organisation…and indeed, even our research, but in very subtle ways. However, these people were also doing their work exceptionally well: they had more knowledge about what the hell was going on than anybody else in the company. Everybody liked them, everybody wanted to work with them, everybody was coming to them as problem solvers. You know, they had all of this interesting stuff happening around them.

So, what does it mean to have an ironic stance or an ironic sensibility in the midst of a shifting culture while doing quite complex work in challenging conditions? Well, there are three elements to it, firstly there’s there’s a perspective that you take, secondly there’s a performance that you give, and thirdly there’s a personality or character you develop.

The ironic perspective is that you see the gap between the rhetoric and reality, you see the gaps that most others do not. Then you’ve got this feeling that maybe it’s only you that sees the gap, and that can be quite scary. Especially if you’re trying to transmit that there’s a gap to powerful people who haven’t seen it,  and may even think everything’s going well.

How do you do this without losing your head?  And I mean that both literally (as in going crazy) and metaphorically as in losing your job.

That’s where the ironic performance comes in  – you say one thing while actually meaning something else. You’re trying to get people to deconstruct your message and work out where the gap is for themselves rather than confronting them with it and saying, “look, here is the gap”. So, this is where all the witticisms and the play on words and the humour come in. These are devices through which this message is transmitted in a way that helps the ironist keep her head – both metaphorically and in terms of her own sanity. These people are critical to the organisation because they call things out in a way that is acceptable. Moreover, since such people also tend to be good at what they do, they tend to have an outsized influence on their peers as well as on management.

So, our argument was that these folks with an ironic sensibility, they’re not just useful to have around they’re absolutely vital, and you should do everything you can to find them and look after them in the contemporary organisation.

KA 

So, there’s a clear distinction between a cynical and an ironic personality, because the cynic will call it out quite bluntly, in a way that puts people off. The ironists get away with it because they call it out in a very subtle way that could be even construed as not calling it out. It requires a certain skill and talent to do that.

RC 

Yes, and there’s a different emotional response as well. The cynic calls it out and hates it; the ironist expects it and takes joy in its absurdity.

KA 

So, the ironist is a bit like the court jester of yore: given licence to call out bullshit in palatable, even entertaining ways.

RC 

I like that. The original ironist was Socrates – pretending to be this bumbling fool but actually ridiculously sharp. The pretence is aimed at exposing an inconsistency in the others’ thinking, and to start a dialogue about it. That’s the role the ironist plays in achieving change.

KA 

That’s fascinating because it ties in with something I’ve noticed in my travels through various organisations. I do a lot of dialogic work with groups – trying to use conversations to frame different perspectives on complex situations. When doing so I’ve often found that the people with the most interesting things to say will have this ironic sensibility – they are able to call out bullshit using a memorable one-liner or gentle humour, in a way that doesn’t kill a conversation but actually encourages it.  There is this important dialogic element to irony.

RC 

It’s what they call the soft irony of Socrates – the witticisms and the elegance that keeps a difficult conversation going for long enough to surface different perspectives. The thing is you can keep going because in a complex situation there isn’t a single truth or just one right way of acting.

KA 

It gets to a possible way of acting. In complex situations there are multiple viable paths and the aim of dialogue is to open up different perspectives so that these different paths become apparent. I see that irony can be used to draw attention to these in a memorable way.  These ironists are revolutionaries of sorts, they have a gift of the gab, they’re charismatic, they are fun to talk to. People open up to them and engage with them, in contrast to cynics whose bitterness tends to shut down dialogue completely.

RC 

Yeah, and the conversation can continue even when the ironists depart. As an extreme example, Socrates chose to die in the final, ironic act of his life. Sure he was old and his time was coming anyway, but the way he chose to go highlighted the gap between principles and practice in Athens in an emphatic way. So emphatic that we talk about it now, millenia later.   

The roll call is long:  Socrates drank hemlock, Cicero was murdered, Voltaire was exiled, Oscar Wilde went to jail, Jonathan Swift was sent to a parish in the middle of Ireland – and so on. All were silenced so that they wouldn’t cause any more trouble. So there’s always a risk that however witty, however elegant your rhetoric, and however hard you try to keep these conversations going and get people to see the gap, there’s always a risk that a sword will be plunged into your abdomen.

KA 

The system will get you in the end, but the conversation will continue! I think that’s a great note on which to conclude our chat.  Thanks very much for your time, Richard.  I really enjoyed the conversation and learnt a few things, as I always do when chatting with you.

RC 

It’s been a pleasure, always wonderful to talk to you.

The Heretic’s Guide to Management – understanding ambiguity in the corporate world

I am delighted to announce that my new business book, The Heretic’s Guide to Management: The Art of Harnessing Ambiguity, is now available in e-book and print formats. The book, co-written with Paul Culmsee, is a loose sequel to our previous tome, The Heretics Guide to Best Practices.

Many reviewers liked the writing style of our first book, which combined rigour with humour. This book continues in the same vein, so if you enjoyed the first one we hope you might like this one too. The new book is half the size of the first one and I considerably less idealistic too. In terms of subject matter, I could say “Ambiguity, Teddy Bears and Fetishes” and leave it at that…but that might leave you thinking that it’s not the kind of book you would want anyone to see on your desk!

Rest assured, The Heretic’s Guide to Management is not a corporate version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Instead, it aims to delve into the complex but fascinating ways in which ambiguity affects human behaviour. More importantly, it discusses how ambiguity can be harnessed in ways that achieve positive outcomes.  Most management techniques (ranging from strategic planning to operational budgeting) attempt to reduce ambiguity and thereby provide clarity. It is a profound irony of modern corporate life that they often end up doing the opposite: increasing ambiguity rather than reducing it.

On the surface, it is easy enough to understand why: organizations are complex entities so it is unreasonable to expect management models, such as those that fit neatly into a 2*2 matrix or a predetermined checklist, to work in the real world. In fact, expecting them to work as advertised is like colouring a paint-by-numbers Mona Lisa, expecting to recreate Da Vinci’s masterpiece. Ambiguity therefore invariably remains untamed, and reality reimposes itself no matter how alluring the model is.

It turns out that most of us have a deep aversion to situations that involve even a hint of ambiguity. Recent research in neuroscience has revealed the reason for this: ambiguity is processed in the parts of the brain which regulate our emotional responses. As a result, many people associate it with feelings of anxiety. When kids feel anxious, they turn to transitional objects such as teddy bears or security blankets. These objects provide them with a sense of stability when situations or events seem overwhelming. In this book, we show that as grown-ups we don’t stop using teddy bears – it is just that the teddies we use take a different, more corporate, form. Drawing on research, we discuss how management models, fads and frameworks are actually akin to teddy bears. They provide the same sense of comfort and certainty to corporate managers and minions as real teddies do to distressed kids.

A Plain Teddy

Most children usually outgrow their need for teddies as they mature and learn to cope with their childhood fears. However, if development is disrupted or arrested in some way, the transitional object can become a fetish – an object that is held on to with a pathological intensity, simply for the comfort that it offers in the face of ambiguity. The corporate reliance on simplistic solutions for the complex challenges faced is akin to little Johnny believing that everything will be OK provided he clings on to Teddy.

When this happens, the trick is finding ways to help Johnny overcome his fear of ambiguity.

Ambiguity is a primal force that drives much of our behaviour. It is typically viewed negatively, something to be avoided or to be controlled.

A Sith Teddy

The truth, however, is that ambiguity is a force that can be used in positive ways too. The Force that gave the Dark Side their power in the Star Wars movies was harnessed by the Jedi in positive ways.

A Jedi Teddy

Our book shows you how ambiguity, so common in the corporate world, can be harnessed to achieve the results you want.

The e-book is available via popular online outlets. Here are links to some:

Amazon Kindle

Google Play

Kobo

For those who prefer paperbacks, the print version is available here.

Thanks for your support 🙂

Conditions over causes: towards an emergent approach to building high-performance teams

Introduction

Much of the work that goes on in organisations is done by groups of people who work together in order to achieve shared objectives. Given this, it is no surprise that researchers have expended a great deal of effort in building theories about how teams work. However, as Richard Hackman noted in this paper,  more than 70 years of research (of ever-increasing sophistication) has not resulted in a true understanding of the factors that give rise to high-performing teams.  The main reason for this failure is that:

“…groups are social systems. They redefine objective reality, they create new realities (both for their members and in their system contexts), and they evolve their own purposes and strategies for pursuing those purposes. Groups are not mere assemblies of multiple cause–effect relationships; instead, they exhibit emergent and dynamic properties that are not well captured by standard causal models.”

Hackman had a particular interest in leadership as a causal factor in team performance.  One of the things he established is that leadership matters a whole lot less than is believed…or, more correctly, it matters for reasons that are not immediately obvious. As he noted:

“…60 per cent of the difference in how well a group eventually does is determined by the quality of the condition-setting pre-work the leader does. 30 per cent is determined by how the initial launch of the group goes. And only 10 per cent is determined by what the leader does after the group is already underway with its work. This view stands in stark contrast to popular images of group leadership—the conductor waving a baton throughout a musical performance or an athletic coach shouting instructions from the sidelines during a game.”

Although the numbers quoted above can be contested, the fact is that as far as team performance is concerned, conditions matter more than the quality of leadership. In this post, I draw on Hackman’s paper as well as my work (done in collaboration with Paul Culmsee) to argue that the real work of leaders is not to lead (in the conventional sense of the word) but to create the conditions in which teams can thrive.

The fundamental attribution error

Poor performance of teams is often attributed to a failure of leadership. A common example of this is when the coach of a sporting team is fired after a below par season. On the flip side, CxOs can earn big-buck dollar bonuses when their companies make or exceed their financial targets because they are seen as being directly responsible for the result.

Attributing the blame or credit for the failure or success of a team to a specific individual is called the leadership attribution error. Hackman suggested that this error is a manifestation of a human tendency to assign greater causal priority to factors that are more visible than those that are not: leaders tend to be in the limelight more than their teams and are therefore seen as being responsible for their teams’ successes and failures.

This leader-as-hero (or villain!)  perspective has fueled major research efforts aimed at pinning down those elusive leadership skills and qualities that can magically transform teams into super-performing ensembles.  This has been accompanied by a burgeoning industry of executive training programmes to impart these “scientifically proven” skills to masses of managers. These programmes, often clothed in the doublespeak of organisation culture, are but subtle methods of control that serve to establish directive approaches to leadership. Such methods rarely (if ever) result in high-performing organisations or teams.

An alternate approach to understanding team performance

The failure to find direct causal relationships between such factors and team performance led Hackman to propose a perspective that focuses on structural conditions instead. The basic idea in this alternate approach is to focus on the organisational and social conditions that enable the team to perform well.

This notion of  conditions over causes is relevant in other related areas too. Here are a couple of examples:

1. Innovation: Most attempts to foster innovation focus on exhorting people to be creative and/or instituting innovation training programmes (causal approach). Such approaches usually result in  innovation of an incremental kind at best.  Instead, establishing a low pressure environment that enables people to think for themselves and follow-up on their ideas without fear of failure generally meets with more success (structural approach).
2. Collaboration: Organisations generally recognise the importance of collaboration. Yet, they attempt to foster in the worst possible way: via the establishment of cross-functional teams without clear mandates or goals and/or forced team-building exercises that have the opposite effect to the one intended (causal approach).  The alternate approach is to simplify reporting lines, encourage open communication across departments  and generally make it easy for people from different specialisations to work together in informal groups (structural approach). A particularly vexing intra-departmental separation that I have come across recently is the artificial division of responsibilities between information systems development and delivery. Such a separation results in reduced collaboration and increased finger pointing.

That said, let’s take a look at Hackman’s advice on how to create an environment conducive to teamwork.  Hackman identified the following five conditions that tend to correlate well with improved team performance:

• The group must be a real team– i.e. it must have clear boundaries (clarity as to who is a member and who isn’t), interdependence (the performance of every individual in the team must in some way depend on others in the team) and stability (membership of the team should be stable over time).
• Compelling direction– the team must have a goal that is clear and worth pursuing. Moreover, and this is important, the team must be allowed to determine how the goal is to be achieved – the end should be prescribed, not the means.
• The structure must enable teamwork– The team should be structured in a way that allows members to work together. This consists of a couple of factors: 1) The team must be of the right size – as small and diverse as possible (large, homogenous teams are found to be ineffective), and 2) There must be clear norms of conduct. Note that Hackman lists these two as separate points in his paper.
• Supportive organizational context– the team must have the organisational resources that enable it to carry out its work. For example, access to the information needed for the team to carry out its work and access to technical and subject matter experts.  In addition, there should be a transparent reward system that provides recognition for good work.
• Coaching– the team must have access to a mentor or coach who understands and has the confidence of the team. Apart from helping team members tide over difficult situations, a good coach should be able to help them navigate organizational politics and identify emerging threats and opportunities that may not be obvious to them.

To reiterate, these are structural rather than causal factors in that they do not enhance team performance directly. Instead, when present, they tend to encourage behaviours that enhance team performance and suppress those that don’t. 

Another interesting point is that some of these factors are more important than others. For example, Ruth Wageman found that team design (the constitution and structure of the team) is about four times more important than coaching in affecting the team’s ability to manage itself and forty times as powerful in affecting team performance (see this paper for details). Although the numbers should not be taken at face value, Wageman’s claim reiterates the main theme of this article: that structural factors matter more than causal ones.

The notion of a holding environment

One of the things I noticed when I first read Hackman’s approach is that it has some similarities to the one that Paul and I advocated in our book, The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices.

The Heretic’s Guide is largely about collaborative approaches to managing (as opposed to solving!) complex problems in organisations. Our claim is that the most intractable problems in organisations are consequences of social rather than technical issues. For example, the problem of determining the “right” strategy for an organisation cannot be settled on objective grounds because the individuals involved will have diverse opinions on what the organisation’s focus should be.  The process of arriving at a consensual strategy is, therefore, more a matter of dealing with this diversity than reaching an objectively right outcome.  In other words, it is largely about achieving a common view of what the strategy should be and then building a shared commitment to executing it.

The key point is that there is no set process for achieving a shared understanding of a problem. Rather, one needs to have the right environment (structure!) in which contentious issues can be discussed openly without fear.  In our book we used the term holding environment to describe a safe space in which such open dialogue can take place.

The theory of communicative rationality formulated by the German philosopher, Juergen Habermas, outlines the norms that operate within a holding environment. It would be too long a detour to discuss Habermas’ work in any detail – see this paper or chapter 7 of our book to find out more. What is important to note is that an ideal holding environment has the following norms:

1. Inclusion
2. Autonomy
3. Empathy
4. Power neutrality
5. Transparency

Problem is, some of these are easier to achieve than others. Inclusion, autonomy and power neutrality can be encouraged by putting in place appropriate organisational structures and rules. Empathy and transparency, however, are typically up to the individual. Nevertheless, conditions that enable the former will also encourage (though not guarantee) the latter.

In our book we discuss how such a holding environment can be approximated in multi-organisational settings such as large projects.  It would take me too far afield to get into specifics of the approach here. The point I wish to make, however, is that the notion of a holding environment is in line with Hackman’s thoughts on the importance of environmental or structural factors.

In closing

Some will argue that this article merely sets up and tears down a straw man, and that modern managers are well  aware of the pitfalls of a directive approach to leading teams. Granted, much has been written about the importance of setting the right conditions (such as autonomy)…and it is possible that many managers are aware of it too. The point I would make is that this awareness, if it exists at all, has not been translated into action often enough.  As a result, the gap between the rhetoric and reality of leadership remains as wide as ever – managers talk the talk of leadership, but do not walk it.

Perhaps this is because many (most?) managers are reluctant let go the reins of control when they know they will be held responsible if things were to go belly-up.  The few who manage to overcome their fears know that it requires the ability to trust others, as well as the courage and integrity to absorb the blame  when things go wrong (as they inevitably will from time to time). These all too rare qualities are essential for the approach described here to truly take root and flourish.  In conclusion, I think it is fair to say that the  biggest challenges associated with building high-performance teams are ethical rather than technical ones.

Further Reading

Don’t miss Paul Culmsee’s entertaining and informative posts on the conditions over causes approach in enterprise IT and project management.