The disastrous corporate love affair with ’what we don’t have’

We have such an unhealthy focus on deficit in our organizations. We have become experts in describing, mapping, measuring and ranting about what we don’t have. It’s a debilitating illness. The deficit illness.

 If you focus on the lack of employee engagement, you are going to end up with more surveys and workshops on how to improve the scores. However, you learn more from understanding why the engaged are actually engaged, not why the disengaged are not.  If you don’t understand that or bypass it because what works is taken for granted, there will be no growth and learning, even if you know a lot about a 3.2 point drop in the scores. Managing the score is for lazy managers.

 If you focus on the lack of diversity you are going to end up with rather useless quotas but a pleasing showcase and some nice box ticking.  Unless you go deeper into the diversity of ideas and participation, of ways of looking at the world, regardless of race, gender or demographics, so that any diversity can have a home. BTW ‘diversity at the top’ (in the stereotyped way) does not correlate with financial performance, small detail, and does not ensure diversity across the board.

 Ditto for inclusion. It has become another pervasive word we need to unpack. Inclusion is not universally good. I don’t want to include terrorists, people who destroy any progress, or people who spread constant negativity at the expense of those who want to move forward. Nobody will force me to include them. So, yes, I will be non-inclusive there. And for people saying, ‘we don’t mean that kind of inclusion’, my recommendation is to, at the very least, watch the language!

Most of what is considered good Organizational Development and ‘good management’, and many times what we see in organizations, in discussions, in team meetings, in programmes of any sort, is an obsessive focus on ‘what we don’t have’ or ‘what is wrong’.

It seems that in order to look heroic and enlightened in corporate land, one has to sing the song of a deficit. Even stressing the good is often seen as ‘blowing one's own trumpet’.

So, we have lack of commitment, lack of time, lack of leadership, lack of visibility, lack of discipline, lack of role models, and lack of planning. We might just as well add lack of tuna sandwiches in the vending machine and then our days would be perfect.

 Negativity is a luxury and professional negativists a type of self-inflicted toxicity in the payroll.

There are people out there (real world?) who don’t have the luxury of negativity. They do not have the resources or the space that you and I have, and focus relentlessly on building on what they have, as opposed to trying to fix the deficit. They build communities with communal assets. The external quasi-magical landing of a solution-to-their-deficit is not there. It does not mean that they reject help or solutions but they cannot afford to spend the time discussing what they don’t have. They are very aware of it but put all the energy into building.

 I would recommend reading the literature on Positive Deviance, a social phenomena born in observing that in a community full of scarcity, there are always members (mothers in the original observations on dealing with malnutrition) finding unconventional solutions and answers and ‘deviating’ from norms, but focusing on what they had available.

 ‘Professionalization’ always comes to the rescue. As Cormac Russell has beautifully put it recently, ‘if you focus on sickness you are going to end up with doctors as key actors; if you focus on well-being, you are going to end up with communities as key actors’.

Medicine is not always the solution for health, Policing is not always the solution for safer streets. Law and Order does not improve with more lawyers. Diversity in the workplace does not advance with more people having Diversity in their title. Inclusion is not solved with a parity of gender (which excludes other categories) and certainly Psychological Safety is not a question of workshops on Psychological Safety, even if it’s very psychologically safe for the organizers to ‘provide the solution’.

 Underneath all this messy, self-inflicted complexity in labelling and intellectual meandering on terms, titles and roles that some people hold to justify their existence, we have behavioural fabric(s): what people really do, don’t do, should do, would like them to do, us to do.

 I’d like to see more people asking for input and opinions to people who think differently from them. I’d like to see more people challenging others when they hear ‘accidents will always happen’. I’d like to see more people doing things because they want to, not because they are told to.

 In the three lines above I may have described ‘diversity and inclusion’, ‘safety’ and ‘agency’ but those labels are incredibly secondary to me.  Language is an incredibly beautiful trap and ‘labelling’ and ‘naming’ an unavoidable trap at a high level.

 The trouble is also that many people in senior or semi senior positions in our organizations, have fallen in love with the thermometer. There is always a number after you use it, even if the number does not tell you whether you are very healthy or have a cancer.

We are running organizations like a warehouse: low on this, high on that. On the normal or high we don’t have to do anything, or not yet. The low needs replenishment.

Is there a better way?

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