Are You Wearing Your Undies on the Outside This Week?

Adaptive systems that reward reactive over proactive behaviours

First off, there is no judgement here. While collectively we might complain about an operation that spends too much time in a reactive state, fighting fires on behalf of the team or organisation can be immensely satisfying and rewarding. If you take a balcony view, organisations are often perfectly designed adaptive systems to reward and reinforce this reactive state - often to the point it forms a significant part of someone's identity. However, you could argue fire fighting type behaviours share some similarities to junk food in terms of their reward.

At what cost?

Like junk food, we all know its not in the long-term best interests or the greater good to rely on it, but geeze, speaking from personal experience of both, easy said, hard to do. The long term consequence can be significant - operational performance is an obvious one, but it may also be having a detrimental effect on the experience of all of your people, particularly your heroes. Through a systemic lens, it is particularly fragile.

So what can you do if you see this in your team?

As a GM or Manager, for a bit of fun, reflect on the diversity of how the people in your organisation tend to show up each day as the mythological or symbolic archetypes (or personas). I have mentioned the archetypal hero, check. That one is easy to spot and I'd argue often over-rewarded. Have you considered some of the others? For brevity I won't provide a complete list (you can always google it) but a few examples;

• The Artist/Creator

• The Diplomat

• The Sage

• The Guardian

• The Healer

• The Outlaw

• The Jester

What levers do you have in place as part of your organisational design (please I mean this in the broadest systemic sense, not just your org structure) to recognise and reward the other archetypes when they are contributing to the more proactive and long-term sustainable objectives of your business?

What can you do if you see this in yourself?

For individuals reading this who are noticing that stepping into the role of the hero of their operation is something they perhaps are identifying with quite strongly - get curious. Reflecting on recent decisions and actions with a curiosity to experiment towards an intention can be challenging but also liberating to realise new possibilities. An observation is that if you are over-playing the hero role at work whatever the reason, it might lead to compromise in other parts of your life even if its not straight away. Having the confidence that we can all temporarily 'try-on' a role in a particular setting can even be worthwhile sharing with your team/boss/peers and asking for feedback and support.

How can Embertree help?

I’ll be blunt. It is very difficult to realise the potential of methodologies like lean or agile, or a technology transformation to unlock productivity if you don’t ‘do the work’ in this space with some curiosity, intent and some fun. Embertree is well placed to help an operation make progress from a reactive to proactive state tailored to their context using our diagnostic process to quickly identify practical opportunities. We also specialise in low-commitment engagements for busy leaders from operational contexts to enable performance and wellbeing. Reach out if you would like to discuss further