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CHAPTER 6

Leading brainy teams

I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep.

I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.

Alexander the Great

We began by comparing four postures for the emerging relationship with man/woman and machines. We now move on to consider intelligent teams. Will we face the War of the Worlds scenario? This would be a full-on competitive approach with unhealthy competition between team members and a ghetto protectionist mentality toward the use of machines to enhance human potential for the good of the individuals, teams and society. Or will we opt for the Man-Machine approach? We would see teams working in an integrated way with machines, using machines for what they do best and human skills when they are of greatest advantage. Teams network their EQ, human skills, creativities and idiosyncrasies and augment themselves with machines and AI to make the best use of their time on planet Earth. The choice is in our hands and this relies crucially on leading brainy teams, which is where we begin.

My early experience was in leading and managing R&D teams in new pharmaceutical product development. Together we innovated in bringing human insulin safely to diabetes sufferers and the first HIV/AIDS treatment to the world. I considered myself very privileged at having been entrusted to do this work. The urgency and importance of the task was brought home to me as my best friend from school had contracted HIV and, of course, we had no idea as to what the future would hold for sufferers from this disease at the time. The project involved working with a bunch of pharmacists, chemists and regulatory people to deliver the AZT/Zidovudine/Retrovir drug safely to the patient in record time against a background of a highly regulated pharmaceutical environment. This was essentially a challenge of leading teams of brainy people to do things quickly, when our normal modus operandi would have been to work deliberately but perhaps more slowly. Paradoxically, intelligent teams need someone to help them keep focused on goals, harness human capabilities, make relationships work between opposites and so on. Good leadership and management are needed even more for brainy teams than ones that face simple tasks and where simple obedience and adherence to procedure is the order of the day. In particular scientists are good at unvarnished conversations that sometimes pay little heed to the emotional lives of their fellow team members. This, when combined with the undoubted passions and commitment inherent within the not-for-profit environment of The Wellcome Foundation made the need for skilful team leadership of prime importance.

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Management is all about optimising a system, in other words, efficiency, whereas leadership is about changing the system, in other words, effectiveness. Of course, both management, leadership, effectiveness and efficiency are needed in most situations but the balance of these ingredients varies. Some people’s jobs comprise more management than leadership and most people’s jobs require some elements of self-leadership, especially in an age where work may happen across enterprises, much of it with people who do not share the same physical space or deep relationships. So management and leadership will need to change in the Man-Machine age from ideas of control and command toward those of community and commitment.

Leadership is both what I call a digital and analogue activity. It is digital, because wise leaders use facts and data rather than just hunch and lunch (intuition, gut feeling) to inform decisions and behaviour. It is analogue because human beings are hugely individual in their motivations and also occasionally illogical in their decisions and behaviour. This requires leaders to adjust, flex and finesse their strategies to the people they lead, sometimes on a completely personalised basis. We know well from our discussion about bra holsters and conkers in Dialogue I that data and logic do not always inform human behaviour and any leader operating only with the bounded rationality inside their head is likely to be ineffective at reaching the emotional core of those they lead. Perhaps this explains the old adage, “You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps”.

Views of leadership have changed over the ages, from ideas about war propounded by Sun Tzu and Machiavelli’s treatment via The Prince which focused on questions of influence and manipulation, through to the beginnings of a psychological approach around 100 years ago. It could be said that leadership thinking has mirrored the age in which the ideas were put forward. At the height of the industrial age, Frederick Taylor put forward the idea of scientific management, which focused on the organisation of work in the best way to gain output from workers. Henry Ford was a great advocate of Taylorism and believed that his factories could be organised along the lines of scientific management and detailed work study. Fordism tended to ignore the influence of the human being but was clearly a grand design for the industrial age when leaders could operate through command and control and, to some extent, the employees could be treated as units of production. As an aside, we may be re-entering that era through the current obsession with gig economy working, Uber jobs, zero-hour contracts and the like.

Later on in the 20th century, Fordism and Taylorism were superseded by sociocultural ideas about leadership and notions that the leader was the most important variable and could flex and bend their style to fit the situation. This eventually produced theories and models of Situational Leadership and the desirable notion of being a 9 : 9 leader, meaning a leader who is outstanding at balancing concern for the task (9) with concern for the people (9). After all, who would want to be a 5 : 7 leader or worse? Desirable though it might seem that we can be all things to all people, more recently the issue of authenticity has begun to take hold as a major idea in modern leadership thinking. This is perhaps because of the perceived decline in trust levels in modern business and a recognition that the leadership talents involved in modern enterprises do not always reside in one single individual. In the last 20 or so years, the task of leadership has also shifted focus toward the management of complexity, uncertainty and the unknowable through the seminal work of Ralph Stacey and Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework, which offered five domains to help business leaders decide on the best approach to make sense of their own behaviour and that of others: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic and disorder. There is overlap with our exploration of VUCA issues here and leaders need to prepare to manage these habitats in business.

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Leaders can derive power and authority from a number of places:

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Each of these elements of power can be used in a positive way (give) or in terms of withholding (take) in more Machiavellian styles of leadership, such as negotiation, co-option, explicit or implicit or coercion. Whereas it was once true that leaders could rely on those things that an enterprise could give them (principally position power and resource power) to maintain authority, the basis of leadership is being challenged around the world. Portfolio working and gig economy jobs often leave us without any enterprise-given sources of power. In any case leaders are no longer respected for position or resource power alone, as people challenge the norms of authority. We see this in everyday life where there is reduced deference to powerful people, celebrities and/or people with titles, such as monarchs, presidents and politicians. Leaders in a Brain Based Economy must command respect through authority earned rather than given. So, power gained from your professional expertise, networks, information and charisma are the main building blocks of your platform of authority as a leader, with information mastery as the rising star in the Brain Based Economy. This is a very different way of leading. A word or two on the vexed question of charisma is also worth spending time on.

Although there is probably little proof in evidential terms that charisma, personal power or SQ is a ‘thing’, most of us know when we have been in a room with someone who possesses it. Having met Sir Richard Branson, Roberta Flack, Nadine Hack, Bob Geldof, Gina Miller, Professor Charles Handy et al., it is quite clear that these people have whatever ‘it’ is, even if you do not like or agree with anything they say. It is quite telling to watch Branson speaking to people in a packed room. To the person he is speaking with it seems as if they are the only person in the room. I am told by network colleagues that Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, Michelle Obama, Prince, Lady Diana Spencer, Lady Gaga, Steve Jobs, Madonna and Anita Roddick also possess this quality.

Charisma, personal power or SQ is the quality that causes people to walk over hot coals to deliver for you. Of course, this has a positive and potentially negative quality in terms of getting people to do their best and brainwashing them to consider doing their worst. We need the former.

It takes two: dialogue

It takes two to know one.

Gregory Bateson

What will the art of conversation mean in a connected world? Will chatbots who bite replace ladies who latte? Will we cease to use language to communicate and replace it with direct thought transmission? What will the workplace look like from the point of view of the physical and psychological environment? Will we still geolocate to cross-pollinate? How will we make technology work to our advantage? How will we avoid a dystopian future where we lose our grip on humanity and our human potential? Here we will look at the changing notions of conversation, dialogue, debate and discussion across time zones, geographies and species.

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We have already tried some simple communication experiments working with machines. From using two tin cans and a piece of string to communicate, we are used to signing into our phone with our face, iris or fingerprint. I used to let my Toyota Hybrid park itself before insurance companies intervened to place artificial legal obstacles in the way of AI. Domino’s Pizza use virtual assistants to handle orders. We have also seen some fairly disastrous attempts in trying to do human things using inhuman approaches, such as sacking people by text or messenger as The Accident Group found out – it was no accident, however, just a reputational car crash! As we automate, leaders would do well to double their education in humanity and the humanities. What then can we learn from psychology, sociology and anthropology about the value of analogue conversation in a digital world?

The word dialogue is derived from the Greek word διάλογος meaning conversation through speech. We are much more used to the words debate or discussion in modern business. I was once told that discussion comes from the root form of the words percussion and concussion, ‘to beat around’ or ‘break things up’ and this is an abiding experience for some meetings we have attended in corporate life. Whether or not the derivation is true is, perhaps, unimportant; it is certainly true that many meetings are effectively mass debates. These often result in what I call ‘psychic concussion’, a mind-numbing experience for all and one that devalues the purpose and experience of work for individuals, teams and the enterprise. There are important differences in the meaning of dialogue. Teams need to focus on dialogue rather than debate and discussion to reach better conversation levels in BBEs.

Physicist David Bohm wrote extensively on dialogue or ‘skilful conversation’ as a means of accessing much deeper thought patterns than is usual in social intercourse. I have been privileged to attend several dialogue sessions at creativity retreats at The Centre for Management Creativity and the experience is well worth having. Some of the principles behind dialogue have been at the heart of some of the more ‘difficult conversations’ on the world stage, such as Nelson Mandela’s transition to power, the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland and Sir Richard Branson’s ‘Elders’ group, which seeks to develop thought leadership on wicked problems that face the world and influence world leaders to make wise choices on such matters.

The ‘rules for dialogue’ are both deceptively simple and also potentially terrifying for leaders and managers.

. . . and so on.

In this sense we still have some way to go with Siri, Alexa and other chatbots, as they can only give you ‘answers’. Many of our current online devices are guided toward what can be described as ‘relational thinking’; for example, Amazon always suggests items you might like based on your purchasing history. While this might be good for sales, it is rather less useful for strategic thinking, novelty and innovation, which are really about marking out your enterprise’s offering in a unique and compellingly different way. As with all things, we need meetings for those things where there is need for short-term decisions and actions. We also need dialogue and extended conversation to help us resolve wicked problems, see the future and position ourselves opportunistically to take appropriate advantage of it.

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We must have an empty space where we are not obliged to anything, nor to come to any conclusions, nor to say anything or not say anything.

David Bohm

The emphasis in dialogue is to see things anew and find new meanings. In that sense it shares one of the ‘rules for creativity’ in brainstorming, that of building on conversation rather than attempting to make judgements, close down expansive thinking or converge to a point. Think of a table tennis match for 40 people where the goal is to keep the ball in the air for as long as possible and not score points against your opponents. Of course, such behaviour is in conflict with the human tendency to compete to win. This is why dialogue sessions and wicked problem resolution require professional facilitation and management. The principles of dialogue also apply to Dialectic Conversation, except that in this form, there is some deliberate attempt to set up a creative tension/conflict of ideas using the ancient Greek tradition of ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’. However Dialectic Conversation differs from debate in so far as there is a deliberate attempt to use opposing viewpoints in order to create something new via the process of ‘synthesis’. A modern version of Dialectic Conversation is what I call ‘Non-Linear Conversation’ (NLC).

NCLs work on the principle of setting up a ‘thesis’, contrasting this with an ‘antithesis’ or something completely irrelevant and then attempting to ‘synthesise’ the two together to a higher ground rather than a compromise or lower order level. NLCs are non-logical in the sense that they ask people to ensure that the next idea is not linked to the previous one and they encourage random interventions. They therefore tend to break the cycle of analysis and logic. Because such conversations require the acceptance of cognitive dissonance as a basic rite of passage, it is essential that they are accompanied by the use of dialogue as a methodology of conversation. A ‘micro-lite’ version of NLCs is the technique known as the wildest idea method, where people are asked to come up with the most unusual idea for a period in an innovative thinking session. The NLC approach is more useful if ‘stronger medicine’ is needed.

We need to seriously up our game in the area of nuanced conversation in a complex world. We are also some way off being able to have a counselling session with a chatbot, apart from at a superficial level. The reason for this is that language is complicated. We have cleverly invented words that have multiple meanings in our language, which presents real challenges for digital assistants/assistance. In any case language often only ever represents the ‘headlines’ of our thinking. Apart from this, humans are pretty good at understanding what others mean, even when communications are not expressed well. I am sure you will have noticed this when people spell entire sentences incorrectly and when the words are jumbled up. Machines are not currently as adept at such nuance, as you might have noticed when using autocorrect on your smartphone. However, some machines are smart and they offer us the opportunity to collaborate to advantage to do things that could not be previously done as this next example demonstrates.

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Intelligent team collaboration

q-bot develops intelligent tools for the built environment, that turn difficult, disruptive and dirty jobs into clean, efficient and safe processes. The company was formed as a result of a 3-hour chance meeting on the Red Sea between Professor Peter Childs and Tom Lipinski, an architect, after Tom mentioned that he had a problem getting into tight spaces. It so happened that Professor Childs had been a locksmith in much earlier life and after some conversation it transpired that being a locksmith also required similar skills. He had experienced using lots of gadgets in the 1980s using bicycle cables to access difficult spaces and places. The conversation, over a bottle of wine, led to the drafting of six patents.

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q-bot has been successful at getting councils engaged via a clever combination of market research and economic analysis. The company has persuaded several councils to offer what it calls ‘Warmth on prescription’ since it has demonstrated health benefits arising from warm housing, which is greater than remedial impact on Health and Social Services.

q-bot began its life in Imperial College London and has grown to 19 people as a start-up. Tom was interested in sustainable technologies. There are lots of things you can do to your home to make it more environmentally friendly, but one of the least known ones is underfloor insulation, which offers a much greater payback than what most people think are the best options, e.g. double glazing, boiler insulation, loft insulation, etc. Underfloor insulation is painful to do. You have to remove the floor, fill a cavity and if you do not fill it all it might not be that effective. q-bot’s robots are single-task robots that perform tasks that humans cannot do, but do it completely and in ways that can be verified.

The principal market is retrofit of Victorian housing stock, which has a fairly small cavity, which is inaccessible by humans. At this time the company specialises in this area, although there are clearly many other applications of the q-bot technology, e.g. in hazardous environments, etc. With q-bot, a robot can be inserted through an air vent, deploy within the void and, without even the need to enter the property, apply insulation to the underside of the floorboards. This keeps the floor warm and dry while still allowing the ground to breath.

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Although the main benefits are economic and environmental we noticed that many rooms show up to a four degree Celsius thermal gradient between the ceiling and the floor. This is why many people say that they experience ‘warm feet’ after the floor is insulated. This is an important side benefit of the process. The payback period is years and not decades. This is evident in significant reductions in energy bills.

Professor Peter Childs

Throughflow is important in terms of the number of exchanges of air per hour to avoid sick building syndrome through off-gassing of things we use on a daily basis.

The first q-bot prototype was made with wheels from a golfing trolley, which gave the company press attention. The basic design has been reduced in size by 75% since that time. The robots have vision so they can survey the terrain but also so they can verify complete filling of the cavity. This is an important benefit with respect to insurance and so on.

The q-bot example offers us insights into intelligent team collaboration using small cells of people and the augmentation of human capability to devise completely new services, which could not be performed by a human being. This offers us a vision that we will find new things to do with the advent of machines and AI. Teams need sensitive guidance and facilitation in order to gain the best from them and we next look at the subject of facilitating brainy teams.