In Pursuit of an Acceptance of Human Nature

Written by Jamie Tuesday, 24 January 2012 10:21

In 1980, Geert Hofstede published a book called Culture’s Consequences.  He had been lucky enough to gain access to a huge survey that IBM had carried out against its employees.  Hofstede was able to draw some conclusions about different countries, including the distance between ‘the man on the street’ and a member of the ruling class.  He called this the Power Distance and compared countries to each other in what he called the Power Distance Index.  This is what he had to say about leaders from different countries:

In low PDI countries, power is something of which power holders are almost ashamed and which they will try to underplay.  I heard a Swedish university official state that in order to exercise power, he tries not to look powerful.  This theory definitely does not hold in Belgium or France.  I once met the Dutch prime minister with his caravan on a camping site in Portugal; I could not very well see his French or Italian colleague in that situation. (Culture's Consquences, 2nd Edition, p. 97.)

Another dimension that Hofstede studied was uncertainty.  He compiled The Uncertainty Avoidance Index.  This index is of course interesting, with Germany and Greece, conservative countries, scoring high, and the United Kingdom and Holland, scoring relatively low.  However, what is more interesting to the modern manager or leader are the questions that were used in the IBM survey.  Understanding the questions is key, for example, to a successful agile transformation.  The three questions were:

1)  How often do you feel nervous at work?

2)  How strongly do you agree with this statement ‘Company rules should not be broken - even when the employee thinks it is in the company’s best interest’?

3)  How long do you intend to stay at the company?  (Hofstede et al. p. 190)

A person who is nervous at work is not likely to introduce unnecessary ambiguity.  Therefore, even though it could be good for the company, this person would never break the rules.  A person who doesn’t change employers regularly is also afraid of ambiguity.  Any team, then, whose mean score to these questions is high, is likely to be conservative.  (Hofstede et al. p. 191)  If it’s a conservative team, it is likely to resist change.

What Can One Do With This Information?
A good strategy for a company that is transforming to a more agile way of working is to get one team fully functional.  A team that lives by its principles leads to what Jim Collins calls ‘inspired motivation’.  This one team goes onto inspire the other teams.  The answers to the three questions can be used when thinking about the composition of this team.  It is better to staff the team with the opposite of conservatives, i.e. to staff it with radicals, because radicals always reject what is in favour for what can be.  They are, therefore, powerful, and often fearless, agents and leaders of change.

Another strategy for a company that is transforming to a more agile way of working is to fire all the conservatives.  This is an option most people ignore.  Many people are caught up in a collective denial of human nature; they assume that people are flexible.  This is obvious from the proliferation of two-day training courses, which are superficial by design, and by the enormous amount of literature that speaks of transformation but never speaks of firing people.  In his book, From Good to Great, Collins says a cornerstone of success is to ‘get the right people on the bus’.  There is a logical corollary to this: get the wrong people off the bus.

Conclusion
Humans hate uncertainty.  We’ve invented technology to try and remove the uncertainty associated with the weather.  We’ve invented the law to try and remove the uncertainty associated with other people.  This is a fact that we have to look in the face.  To help us with that, we can let people like Hofstede guide us.  His work is uniquely powerful.  It inspires us, as engineers and managers, not to deny human nature but to accept and work with it.  It affords us the courage to reject the out-dated and, frankly, wrong modes of transformation that have become the tools of choice for so many consultants, the cornerstones of so many failures.  And finally, Hofstede re-reminds us of what Collins, in Great by Choice, says: ‘[the best performers] don’t favor analysis over action; they favor empiricism as the foundation for decisive action’.

Further Reading
I adapted the Hofstede’s questions from the third edition of Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind.  Great By Choice is written by Collins and Hansen and it’s a half decent meditation on the choices we can make as managers, engineers and leaders.

For those without the books, I would encourage you to follow these links to ‘Uncertainty Avoidance’ and ‘Power Distance Indexes’.

Last year I used Handy’s Understanding Organizations and I am still happy with the chapter on power and influence.