Relume - Challenger Spirit Blog
The Challenger Spirit blog is devoted to our research project into the culture, spirit and leadership of Challenger Organisations.
Friday 13 January 2012
I remember listening with rapt attention over Xmas in 2003 for news of success for the Mars mission of Beagle 2. For those of you who don’t know the story, the craft was irreparably damaged on landing, thereby denying us the excitement of seeing the Martian landscape. It would be easy after such a bold, costly and creative venture to label this as failure. Colin Pillinger (the British scientist behind the mission) described the failure as ‘deferred success’, a wonderful Challenger outlook!
Graham Neale, a member of our Challenger community, alerted us to a recent BBC interview with Colin, conducted by Jim Al-Kahili. The interview included a contribution from Alex James, bass player with the band Blur and a neighbour of Pillinger's, who provided some of the funding.
Here are a couple of extracts in italics with my comments in between.
Alex James
You never know when your next encounter with genius is going to occur - sometimes it's someone making a dry stone wall, sometimes it's somebody making cheese - but literally I called my accountant and said I want to start a space programme and he gave me Colin's phone number. I went to his laboratory and he pulled a little rock out of his pocket and he said - Do you know what this is? And it just looked like a pebble. He said - It's a bit of Mars, it's a bit of Mars. And I was instantly spellbound. He was just so instantly compelling and engaging, really had the X factor alright. Some of the things that Colin was trying to do were about as complicated as it gets but he was able to sort of spin the whole thing as just a straightforward and obvious thing to do, he did.
I love the way that so much was communicated by so little in this interaction between two people, it reminded me of the power of symbols and artifacts in communicating hope and ambition. There is substantial meaning embedded in that pebble and it got me wondering about how we can imbue our more day to day artifacts with similar meaning for those we want to inspire with our Challenger ambition.
The pebble is simple, I can touch and feel it, it is personal, it makes me wonder about a whole host of things, it draws me to the ambition. Suddenly the hurdles and obstacles don't seem to be as great. It is saying 'come and get me'. (I know it sounds strange but I get stranger). I want to know how it got here to our planet, how we are sure it is from Mars, how I could find my own piece, what it's journey here must have been like, what it has seen along the way. I get irritated that anything would stand in my way. And will redouble my efforts to get past the 'no' wherever the bureaucrats place it. I know it is going to be difficult but somehow it doesn't smack of the completely unreasonable that so many big, hairy, audacious corporate goals do.
When you can create that kind of curiosity in your organisation you also get with it a flow of discretionary effort. Colin Pillinger recruited the best scientific minds in the world to work with him for far less than the best salaries. They gave their hearts to the mission and to a large extent the man that was leading it.
As we look forward to what we may all achieve in the next year this interview reminded me of the need for Challenger creativity and ambition, adventure and risk. It has to have some place in the world, no matter how small, even when everything around you is telling you to hunker down, play safe and small.
Al-Khalili
Is it a complete folly to spend £25 million sending a hub cap to another planet or is it what we should be doing?
Pillinger
No it's what we should be doing because every generation needs it gothic cathedrals. We shouldn't be doing things that everybody else has done already, we have to do something which is adventurous and risky, we have to do something we don't know the answer to.
Wishing you all well for your Challenger adventures in 2012.
Khurshed Dehnugara.
Link to the broadcast for those in the UK. For those not in the UK or who prefer reading then the transcript of the conversation is also obtainable through this link.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b018g5tm/
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Friday 16 December 2011
I was asked in a pitch situation last week for our favourite stories in 2011 of where we had supported aspiring leaders of Challenger organisations. I realised after trotting out a few that there was a theme connecting them. They were all about organisations that had failed in some manner. Our prospective new client made me laugh out loud by asking if there was some connection between our work and the poor results! What I was recalling though weren't trivial failures, they were heroic failures.
Executive Teams that have chosen to try and fix, grow and transform their business all at the same time when it would have been easier to narrow their scope and play small. Teams in Finance, HR, Risk, Technology who chose this most anxious time to redefine their role and contribution as being much more than checking up on people. Businesses that have had their products withdrawn or crashed and still had to make their numbers. People on the front line that have used constraint and difficulty to drive their innovation rather than as an excuse for performance. Organisations that have been forced into mergers with another and fought to keep the spirit they had worked so hard to build. Teams that have tried to keep a part of their business alive, creative and growing despite enormous pressure to cut costs and headcount.
I Iook at the Challengers that were a part of these stories and see in them a character worthy of great respect. Taking on the established way of doing things, often meaning they had to go outside of process and established structure for a while at the beginning. Seeing that taking no risk would keep them safe during a volatile time but that it was also an abdication of leadership responsibility. Using every difficulty, breakdown and missed target as a source of learning for themselves, their team, their relationships. Using the tough times to become more connected to each other rather than reaching for the blame list. Getting up the morning after news broke of their problems and still staying true to their cause, values and beliefs about how businesses need to be led. Doing all of this and still holding on to their resilience, humour and energy.
Their character wasn't just present in the big moments though, maybe even more importantly it was present in the small moments, day by day, conversation by conversation. Every time we watch the news, read the paper or browse the web we are inundated with how difficult the business environment is and how much worse it's going to get. In these undeniably tough times it is too easy to succumb to the anxiety around us. Yet these Challengers have not allowed themselves to be frozen by this, they have found ways of dealing both with their own anxiety and that of those around them. They have not done this by pretending that they know the answers, nor by creating a false sense of certainty, nor by trying to control everything that they can, nor by denying how they feel. They have found a much more vibrant way of living with the anxiety and using it as a source of stimulation and growth.
This is the character of the Challengers we have worked with and we are proud to have stood with many of you through the year. We wish you a peaceful Christmas and New Year break with time for some recovery and renewal. Have a great holiday.
Khurshed Dehnugara.
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Wednesday 16 November 2011
Who would have thought that the simple act of holding the inaugural two day meeting of a global leadership team, without using Powerpoint, could have such a profound effect? Challenger cultures thrive on disturbance as a source of renewal and contention and it is too easy, at least for me, to imagine that this disturbance must be substantial and ‘loud’; along the lines of a major reorganisation or a new product line. But I have been noticing more and more that it is often the seemingly small acts that create the most immediate difference and discomfort. The little things, that fuel stories, which add together to ‘the way that things are done around here’.
The common threads in those who achieve this disturbance and create a positive outcome appear to be courage, persistence and intention. Courage to step away from the status quo; persistence in holding the uncomfortable ground of unfamiliarity long enough for new possibility to emerge; intention to cause something particular, which distinguishes it from a random act. The unpredictability of the outcome is matched by the determination to keep going, to resist the tried and tested approach.
In this case, the intention of the leader of this team, Jen, was very clear. She was inviting all those attending to step forward, to express their views, to help form an ambition for their future… together. This was a very different pattern of behaviour from the existing organisational culture in which people expected to be told what to do. It took courage from Jen to try something different.
Jen and her smaller group of direct reports had prepared themselves for this uncertain ground. They had spent many hours together to understand what was important for each of them, their disappointments and fears, their hopes and ambitions, which so often go unspoken. And yet, the moment when we began this meeting with the wider group, when Jen declared that there would be no set agenda and no Powerpoint, was genuinely difficult. There was a lot of shifting uncomfortably on seats, a silence, a sense of disappointment, palpable apprehension; an unasked question - have we travelled all this way to discover that we don’t know exactly how we will spend the next 2 days together? I used the word courage earlier. Standing for something different, in the way that Jen did, when the prevailing mood was to revert to the familiar.
There was a growing sense of frustration and confusion in the room during the course of the first day together: “When will we stop mucking around and get on with the real content?”, “It’s time for you to reveal exactly what this team will be doing”. And then gradually, very gradually, things began to change. Curiosity replaced frustration: “This feels different, we are actually talking about the things we only usually talk about in corridors once the meeting is over.”
A couple of moments really stood out for me. The first was when one of the leaders present was brave enough to admit publicly that he realised how he depended on Powerpoint and tightly controlled agendas, to put up the safety barriers as protection against more difficult topics that might emerge. Others agreed and began to talk about their own habitual behaviour.
The second was towards the end of the meeting when Jen produced a single Powerpoint slide. Everyone in the room burst into spontaneous applause followed by immediate and uproarious laughter. The group enjoyed and celebrated the moment, laughing at themselves and their determination to stay with the familiar; a tiny act of difference, which had created a substantial amount of awareness. The ‘Powerpoint moment’ became a powerful symbol of change.
Asher Rickayzen, Relume Ltd.
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