No Silver Bullets with Steve Hearsum

Jacqueline Conway  00:00

Nugget of gold in those first few minutes. So lovely to see you again. How are you?

Stever Hearsum  00:04

I’m all right, thank you. A bit sweltery.

Jacqueline Conway  00:07

I don’t do, yes,

Stever Hearsum  00:09

I don’t, I don’t do heat well. So this is my idea of how

Jacqueline Conway  00:16

and Is it really hot down there.

Stever Hearsum  00:18

It’s, well, it says it’s 2222 23 about 2324 but it’s warmer than that. It’s up. It’s up to kind of 2627 28

Jacqueline Conway  00:26

I can tell, oh, wow.

Stever Hearsum  00:28

You know it’s it’s definitely warmer than 24 Wow. Well,

Jacqueline Conway  00:33

I tell you what, here’s what it says here. It says it’s 18 here. There’s absolutely no chance that it’s 18 degrees here, it feels more like 14. And, oh, I

Stever Hearsum  00:45

want to swap. I want to swap, can I please? And

Jacqueline Conway  00:48

it’s crisp. It’s not, it doesn’t feel at all humid. It’s maybe slightly more than 14, in actual fact. But it doesn’t, yeah, but it’s a bit overcast. It’s not, it’s not nice, nice. So, yeah,

Stever Hearsum  01:03

I have talked to my wife about moving to Scotland. She’s she’s not convinced, but I have mentioned it before, yeah.

Jacqueline Conway  01:09

So yeah, well, yeah, we all Yeah. We all have our favorite places, don’t we? And, yeah, yeah, I can’t say that. I am hugely envying the 27 degrees and kind of humidity down there at the moment, but I do. I have actually lived down in that neck of the woods, and I did like it very much. So, um, Oh, it’s

Stever Hearsum  01:30

lovely. It’s lovely. It’s just getting increasingly snug,

Jacqueline Conway  01:34

yes, hot, yes, um, so I’m really glad to be talking to you today, because I really enjoyed our previous conversation. And also, you know, I really, I really enjoyed the book, and so much of it resonated. So I’m really looking forward to us getting into the conversation today. So the way that it works is that the beauty of audio and having a producer that kind of does his magic in the background is that if we fluff our lines or we say something that we don’t, you know, we wish we hadn’t said, we can either go back and say again, or at some later point, once he’s done his magic, we can have a listen and decide that we’re going to take it out so that, I guess, kind of takes the pressure off of the conversation, so it means that we can just be in the conversation and kind of see where it goes. And it’s an opportunity for, I mean, I think our last conversation was, I mean, it was lovely and it was kind of quite expansive, but it felt that I’d like to do a bit more of inquiring about the book and your perspectives in this conversation. So it’s a chance to kind of showcase your your thinking. So we’ll start then, Steve by if you could just introduce yourself, see who you are and and a little bit about the work that you do, just to set the context, that would be great.

Stever Hearsum  03:00

So we just start now, yes, yep, yep. So I am a consultant, a supervisor and a coach with those are the labels in terms of what I do. I think that’s probably, you know, those are the roles I perform, but the work I actually do and how I show up, I think probably is more more significant. So I sometimes say that what I do is I help grown ups to be grown up, and that it really translates often into supporting and challenging people to have conversations with each other, or indeed themselves that they’re struggling to have because they’re finding it very challenging. So the work I do falls into three main buckets. Firstly, leadership practice development. I now don’t do conventional leadership development. I think it’s a waste of time and money, and there’s a lot of evidence to support that. The second thing I do is consulting skills and consulting capability building. So whether that be for people who are externals or often internals, I’m very interested in internal practitioners of change, whether they be HR or dev or design, digital transformation, change management, it really doesn’t matter. The commonality with all of them is they are they are change practitioners. They have a practice. They are attempting to facilitate or agitate or create the conditions for change. And the third bucket is a kind of broad one, which is culture work that could be reviewing culture. It could be working with a client on helping them think about how they evolve their culture. Just tipping our hat to the moment, there is no such thing as a single, homogeneous culture. You know, it’s a living, breathing entity, or entities in most organizations. And those three buckets overlap, because you can’t do leadership practice without touching on culture and vice versa. And so the roles I said at the beginning, you know, I play those roles in all those contexts, depending on the client context or the client relationship.

Jacqueline Conway  05:00

Yeah, lovely. And so we’ll come on to those things in a little bit, and in particular about your view on leadership development, because, of course, that’s quite a provocation. So it would be great to unpack that a little bit, and I know that we will do that probably as well when we come to talk about your excellent book, no silver bullet, which I have really enjoyed. And I wonder if you could say a little bit about what the book is and why you wrote it.

Stever Hearsum  05:34

What is it? Really good question, because nobody’s asked me. It framed exactly like that. You’ve got me thinking already. What is it? I suppose it’s hard aside from the obvious, it’s an articulation of something that was rolling around in my head and I had to go off my chest. It’s an attempt to say to people who work in organizations, or work with organizations, which is a large number of people, whether they be leaders, employees, managers, consultants, academics and the whole plethora of helpers out there, it’s an attempt to say to them, I think we need to think a little bit more deeply about some of the decisions we make And the assumptions that underpin those when it comes to the complex challenges we face and our responses to them, we need to think a bit more deeply, and it’s probably going to be a bit uncomfortable. That’s really what what the book is, and I say that now, having had the benefit of three months of the thing being out, and people telling me what their experience has been, and the experience has been, people saying to me, it’s a bit uncomfortable. I’m starting to notice. I’ve just read the first chapter, and I’m noticing how I’m talking to my clients. So it’s having that effect, which is, which is what I hoped. So, yeah, that’s what it is, the Genesis it would be. Told you what the genesis of it was. Yes, that would be helpful. Thanks. So the Genesis was one experience about how long ago, 2024 so we’re talking maybe 2016 ish, give or take, maybe 12, 2015 actually, I met the two guys who set up corporate rebels in Holland at the time, they they’d recently left their corporate jobs, and they were virtually backpacking around the world to try and find out what it actually takes to run organizations and lead them in such a way that they are happier, more engaging and meaningful and productive places to work. And they were at a holacracy workshop in Brighton, near where where I live, and near where I worked at the time. And so at Rothley Park, we invited them twice to come and do their thing and to tell their story. And the second time, one of them said to the audience of very experienced OD and change consultants and coaches. We started our journey two or three years ago, and we thought we’d find a magic bullet, and we realized at the end of it, there isn’t one. And I thought, well, that’s entirely obvious. That wasn’t what hooked me. What hooked me was the audience two or three times saying to these guys, but there is an answer. Is it really isn’t there. There is a silver bullet. There is a magic bullet. Come on. What is it? And I said in the break, I had a word with one of them, and said, did you notice that? And they said, Yeah, we noticed it as well. And that is what hooked me. How is it that a group of very experienced, highly intelligent people who intellectually will say, of course, there’s no silver bullet for organizational challenges, behave as if there is one. And just to kind of, I suppose the kicker in that is, you know, I’ve not really met anybody with possible one, possibly one exception, who’s ever said to me, yes, there is a silver bullet for complex problems in organizations. We all know there isn’t, and yet we behave as if there is and that is what lit the fire under my inquiry.

Jacqueline Conway  09:08

Okay, okay, so I can join you in your inquiry about why is it that we seek silver bullets, these kind of simple solutions to complex problems. And I can really join in the fact that I have both been frustrated by that within client organizations that I have worked with and where I have been, there’s been an attempt to engage me in that way, or engage Walden growth in that way. And what, what a consultant does when the client has come with a kind of ready made solution that you know that you that won’t necessarily work. And. So you know, what do you do? Because I think one of the things that’s interesting about the book and about this idea of silver bullet says, Well, can we do something imperfect to start the process, or do we just say no right from the outset? Because we know that the thing that the client wants is just a million miles away and is really, in some way, a distraction from what’s really going on. I mean, can you say a little bit more about well, how do organizations kind of sort of conceptualize these silver bullets? How do they, how do they kind of make them up? Well,

Stever Hearsum  10:40

let’s just backtrack, because what you said there just reminded me of a story, which I think is in the book, you know, this idea of, you know, how do organizations respond to the idea that there isn’t one, you know? And when I was working at Roffey park, there was one client who shall not name, who approached us for some leadership, management development, and I I was given, I had the client to work with. It was my lead, and so I did this proposal for them, and they came back and they said to me, you’ve absolutely understood the issues in the organization, but you’ve understood them to the extent that you know, we know our CEO is the problem. And whilst he’s good, his behavior is actually quite damaging in some respects. But we can’t go there yet, so we’re going to go and do way and do some some more conventional management development. So I was so accurate in reflecting back the reality of their system and their lived experience, but it was unbearable, in a sense. So the conventional response is, we are not ready, or that’s the kind of thing. But I don’t think it was that. I think in that sort of situation, if that’s the challenge, if that’s the presenting problem, then you start there. You don’t go and spend loads of money on something else then, because you’re too scared to deal with it. So that’s, was what the thing that popped immediately into my mind, in terms of how people construe I mean, your question is, in a sense, how do people construe them? Silver Bullets, is there is there is something here about how we construe problems. How do we decide that something is, is a problem in and of itself, and the whole chapter two, which is all about what drives the need for certainty, one of the reasons why we construe things is simpler to resolve than they are, is because the consequences of admitting to ourselves and others that we don’t know is too unbearable. So we construe what is a really messy challenge, like CEO behavior is really a bit problematic in some areas, we’ll construe that as a simpler thing, which is the impact is on the next level of management. So let’s work on them, on the management. It’s a management development problem, so that’s a lot easier to deal with. So it’s, it’s a it’s a problem, framing issue, first of all, and it’s surprising how often, when I talk to clients, you ask them, so what’s the question you’re trying to answer? And they can’t tell you, not clearly, not in a nutshell.

Jacqueline Conway  13:17

And so when they did that, did you take the assignment?

Stever Hearsum  13:23

No, they went away. It was too it was there was so my, my story is that they were very appreciative. They said, No, you really have understood exactly what is going on here. But it was so unbearable, they had to go away and do something else, right? And they never came back. Okay,

Jacqueline Conway  13:40

okay, and so therein that lies the dilemma, isn’t it? Because that if we can, if we construe the problem that the client faces, not one of misdiagnosis, but of one of them being in a in a psychological or other state of unreadiness, and yet the presenting problem is there, then how do we grapple with it in a way that’s helpful to the client? How do we join, you know, in a way, because, I guess, I mean, let me be honest, Steve, you know, some clients have come to us and they’ve said, right, we’ve got this problem here. We think the solution is this, can you come along and do a half day and and perhaps somewhat with a bit of red energy, and somewhat pejoratively, I’ve said, Well, we’re not dial a facilitator. We’re we’re not doing that work, and I have have turned people away on that basis. And I think in some ways, that’s the right thing to do, and then other times, I think that’s not the right thing to do, because we have to start somewhere so, but you have to be really careful that you’re not. Alluding with the client in misdiagnosing it and doing some sort of pseudo work that replaces actually the real work that needs to be done. And sometimes going along and doing half a day and giving them a sense that you come in peace, that that you can do. You can do something that the journey of, you know, a long journey, starts with a single step, and perhaps it’s a single step, but these are all quite gnarly things that you have to grapple with in order to help a client.

Stever Hearsum  15:35

So I think that there’s what you’ve just revealed there is, and it’s a really useful way of describing it is, is that I think it’s a it’s it’s a little bit more complex than it first appears. Now, why do I say this? So I would turn right you I would turn away a client that basically was asking for something that I think flew in the face of reality. You know, we want a quick fix to something that’s really messy. And the perfect example of that is an organization a few years ago that one of my colleagues was working with who basically wanted what was the equivalent of a two day Leadership Development Program in a two hour workshop. And I kid you not. Okay, so there you do not collude. Now the next question is, let’s, let’s assume for a moment that you as a consultant make an assessment that the client is saying, I’m a bit way of doing anything too, too risky, but I’m up for trying something. So you make the assessment that, okay, this is a client that needs a little bit of, as you say, let’s run something to see how they are with it. That presupposes that you as the consultant are ethical enough to know that that is what you’re doing, and what happens if you, if you decide, actually this client isn’t ready, but they are going to I could actually milk them. I could actually run loads of interventions which actually are not going to make any difference in my assessment, because it’s very performative. And you I would argue that much of the leadership and management development industry sell stuff that is performative, that isn’t really making a difference, but everybody pretends it is. So I think what you’re, what you’re you’re kind of highlighting there is it actually raises an ethical question for us as consultants, as practitioners. Indeed, it’s, it’s the risk here is we make it all about the client and their fear and anxiety. It’s not your word, you know the word collusion you used earlier on. It’s collusive. And how where am I of the extent to which I’m choosing to collude or not? Yes, I don’t think we talk about that enough.

Jacqueline Conway  17:35

And so some of the below the surface dynamics that you talk about in the book, that you’ve alluded to there, that goes on for the client also goes on for the consultants, doesn’t it? And so that’s where the collusion happens, where the thing that’s happening above the surface, which looks like, you know, they contracted me to do X, I did X. It was all fine. And below the surface, we know that you’re containing anxiety, and you’re working with all sorts of kind of messy, kind of messy, psycho dynamic. But above the surface, you know, you kind of, you put your invoice in and, you know, you keep your kids and shoes and things like that. So there’s all of that going on. But so, so yeah, I get your ethical point, let me, let me step back and ask you a couple of other questions about about simple problems or simple solutions to complex problems, and using some of the insights that you have gathered in the book, Which, I say I thought was excellent. I really enjoyed it. You know what? What sense you make of these, these particular things happening. So the first is a an example of, I think I might have spoken about it on the podcast before, is, so I’m in an executive team, and I’m observing them as a team coach, and they raise a gnarly issue that comes up, which is anxiety provoking for them. So there isn’t a simple solution that I can see, and I’m not invested in it being simple or complex. I’m just observing and and yet the quality of the conversation, the messiness, the depth, the length of time that they take, the circling back to it doesn’t seem to match the complexity of the issue that I’m observing. And one of the things that I’ve seen happen, you know, many more times than just once, is that they say, well, let’s just do X so they find a relatively kind of straightforward, off the shelf solution to that thing. And then what you can visibly see in the room is the anxiety dissipates, the shoulders draw. Up, as they have given themselves a sense of, Well, we’ve moved into action, even if the action is wrong action, and what I’m keen to hear so, I mean, I’m presuming that you can identify with that scenario, so that that is the classic sort of find any solution, and that in those situations, the problem solving is as much an anxiety management strategy as as a problem solving strategy. What’s what are the dynamics that are at play the year, what’s going on in the individuals in the system that allows them to do that without, I mean, these are highly intelligent, able people, sometimes very, very emotionally intelligent, with a whole sort of battery of potential ways of, kind of solving issues at their disposal. And yet they reach to this. Now, not suggesting that all teams reach for all of the time, but when they do what’s going on?

Stever Hearsum  21:09

Well, I would suggest that that talks to their need for certainty. They’re trying to find something to you talked about. They are trying to manage their anxiety. So how are they how are they doing this? Well, they’re trying to find some something that they can look at my hands, they can grasp hold of, that they can feel, places them on solid ground. Well, what drives that need for certainty, then, is the question. So is it? Now, talk about this in the book, there’s a number of things. So it’s the expectations they’re placing on themselves that others are placing on them, that their stakeholders or shareholders are placing on them. There’s pace. I mean, it’s interesting how pace tends to be framed in organizations as a euphemism for speed. But actually, there’s something about appropriate pace. If you’re if you’re a neurosurgeon doing a 12 hour operation, you take things slowly. So, so there’s that at play. There’s the archetypes that people have, the stories they tell about great leadership, which is all about fast, decisive, confident, heroic, charismatic leaders, and all this stuff is there as a kind of background to the kind of imagined leadership team you’re describing. Add into the suffering, the fear, anxiety about failureship. You know what? If I’m discovered or revealed not to be as omniscient or omniscient or omnipotent as I imagine myself to be, I’ll be found out. You know that it’s huge. And the biggie in all of this is simply the anxiety and the inability of being able to cope with not knowing, not knowing what to do or why something has happened, or what will happen if I do or don’t act? And when you think about that, that situation you just described, I would argue, all that is going on. It’s all there. The question is, how, to what extent is it being contained, and to what extent is it actually even in awareness? And so that, I would argue, is the word proper. It’s to what extent are you in a place and have you contracted with a client to potentially just signpost to them where in that mess they might need to first, first move. I’m not saying, by the way, that you dive headlong into it, you do it all. That’s not what I’m saying, but that’s the kind of soup of stuff that’s there

Jacqueline Conway  23:25

and yet. So taking that client perspective for a minute, I think one of the if we were to look at the alternative to a silver bullet in the complexity space that I have been working in for a really long time, one of the criticisms of the space, which I completely agree with, in actual fact, is that you know what’s the alternative that you sit around and talk about, you know your deep fears and anxieties, and you know that you don’t actually get anything done and that you know that doing something is oftentimes better than doing nothing. I mean that complexity actually that there isn’t enough solid ground that complexity consultants allow their clients to occupy, that that is a suitable enough alternative to finding a solution that looks like it might be imperfect, but perhaps good enough

Stever Hearsum  24:27

see what I notice, an immediate reaction in myself.

Jacqueline Conway  24:31

I could see your face. It’s a shame we’re not on video. Steve, yeah, it’s even

Stever Hearsum  24:36

the notion of a complexity consultant, because it presupposes that there’s a particular set of assumptions and beliefs. Complexity is a complexity theory and an extreme. It becomes a thought collective and a religion. So complexity is one lens for looking at things, and I guess in some client contexts, raising their awareness. Of just how messy and complex thing, thing, things are, is a useful thing to do at other moments. Yes, maybe the experiment that needed is needed is something to move them to action, just so that you see whether something shifts the risk inherent in what in I’m not saying this is your intent, but there was, I could it be interpreted as such? Is that it’s turned into a binary either or whereas in reality, it’s about the art of dancing. So if the if a complexity lens doesn’t work, then try something else. And again this, let’s move to the practice side. You know, I have a whole chapter in the book about how the fields of practice are a bit like the guilds in Terry Pratchett’s novels. You know, they’re thought collectives that are more concerned with self, differentiating themselves from each other, which talks to our anxiety as practices and consultants says nothing about our clients. So what’s needed is this idea that comes from Holland. There they have something which is called the craft of change, and I think it is more about that when we’re working with clients, it’s an artisan process. It’s not a scientific process, and it’s inherently messy, and you draw on multiple different materials and tools and instruments to attempt to work with what is going on. But that doesn’t meet the needs of clients, to be able to categorize and label us as practitioners neatly, and it doesn’t help us, some of us consultants, because some of us also want to be labeled really neatly, because we also have our own egos and our need to identify Does

Jacqueline Conway  26:37

that make sense? Yes, it does. And and so I love this idea of the artisan and and yet it doesn’t always match. Because if you’re, if you’re if you’re looking at the difference between the artisan and the scientific most organizations are still modeling themselves on some sort of version of scientific management, some some sort of ideas that Brits stem from the kind of industrial revolution and they

Stever Hearsum  27:07

present as that. But that is not what they are.

Jacqueline Conway  27:14

But they’re holding a frame for that that makes it harder again artisan to step into it and be acceptable.

Stever Hearsum  27:22

So you don’t, you don’t present as something as left field as that. And I’m not saying you walk in there with a, you know, with an artist hat on and a paint palette and a series of brushes, but, you know, there, I think the word collusion is in the book this is this term functional collusion, which is from the work of Graham Curtis and and functional collusion, he describes it as a largely unconscious, unconscious process driven by shame and anxiety between different parties. But I think there’s also, there are, there are usefully conscious, collusive processes I can collude with my client up to a point. Up to a point I’ll collude with them that maybe they need to not go somewhere on the provider that they know. They’re going to have to go there at some point, you know. But there’s what, to what extent are we really owning where we’re colluding and to what and are we really clear about at the point which will stop colluding, would be my question. And a really sharp way into that, just to be really clear, is, do you work with clients to build capability or dependency, or do you build capability only so far, but you always want to make sure that’s dependent on you to an extent, so that they keep coming back to you. And then we loop back to the ethical question.

Jacqueline Conway  28:53

Yeah, yeah. So I think that the ethical thing is absolutely huge. But I think what sits alongside the ethical thing is also about competence, isn’t it? So you’ve talked about like, what, what lens are you looking at the world through? And if you’re looking at the world through a coaching lens or a kind of leadership development lens, or whatever it might be, then that’s the that’s the hammer for every nail. And so it might be that that that what the consultants not been able to do is to take a more holistic diagnosis of what the client’s issues are because of their area of specialization.

Stever Hearsum  29:42

So me. So you mean that they because they’re placing so much emphasis on the specialism of the consultant that kind of limits their capacity to think about the other, the other, the other possibilities? Yes, yeah. And what I was just just hunting for in my head. Head was, I think that links to what was going on in my head, which is, this is the, this is the the performative stuff that happens in consulting, but also in leadership development. So you know Richard Hale, who somebody I interviewed for the book, who’s a really interesting guy who does work around action research and inquiry based and question based development. One of the things he said, and I’ll quote him here, he argues that quote trainers and consultants in this field, and here he’s talking about leadership development, are often performative, perfecting the art of being liked, entertaining and tricking their audiences into believing they have a silver bullet in the form of a new taxonomy or a colorful psychometric, liking or even loving an entertainer, should not be confused with learning from them. UNQUOTE, and there, for me is the potential collusive nature of the relationship between consultant and

Jacqueline Conway  30:52

client. So let’s go to that. Then let’s go to leadership development, because you mentioned it right at the top of the conversation, and I said, I wanted to come back. You had a kind of provocative statement that you felt that most leadership development was unethical, didn’t work. Say more about that. Say more about what it is specifically about leadership development that you think is wrong or bad, notwithstanding the quote that you’ve just said, where it’s performative and but, but what do you believe about the leadership development that you have? I mean, presumably, earlier in your career, you were designing in good faith leadership development programs and delivering them. So you weren’t, you weren’t colluding. You were in good faith doing something at some point that changed your mind about it. So what was going on there and what shifted for you? You’re

Stever Hearsum  31:45

the first person who’s actually picked up on that and actually reflected it back at me, which I think is brilliant, because I think it needs to be asked. So yeah, it goes back to, in a sense, as a participant on leadership development programs, that’s where it starts. So early in my career, when I was working at The Guardian, you know, I think that’s a really good example of of the type of ritualizing of leadership development you get. So when I was at The Guardian, first of all, you do, you do MBTI, then you do a, you know, maybe an entry level management development program. Then I went on a specialist negotiating skills course. Then I get sent off to a to another very nice kind of country house with loads of other of my peers to do something a bit more meaningful around my my skills and talent as a as a putative leader. And then we have that ritual of the of the retreat, of the leadership retreat, where somebody comes from senior leadership to break bread over dinner. And there’s that kind of moment where everybody’s, if not, jockeying for jockeying for position, but there’s certainly, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re wanting to impress this person who’s deemed to come and talk talk with you and and then you start to hear about places like Ashridge Holt and about side business school and London Business School and all these places that that are held up as being the places you go to to develop yourself and become an even better leader. And you there’s MBAs, there’s so there’s a mythology and a mythologizing about, if you like, the journey, there you go, the journey of leadership. We have a whole suite of linguistic terms for this, and metaphors and symbols, and one of those is the very comfort, comfy Leadership Program run and off site, which I did many and it’s not to say that I don’t think I did good work and my colleagues didn’t do good work on occasions. What I am saying is, if you look at much of the evidence for the impact of that type of leadership development, it is pretty weak. If you look at the evidence for what actually works, it tends to be leadership development, or leadership work that is very much grounded on developing leaders practice in direct relation to the context in which they work, not divorced from it, and that will takes you into the space, the space of action research and stuff like that. But action research is the antithesis of an expert led Leadership Development Program. So I would argue that most off the sharply, off the shelf leadership development. And again, you’re right. I’ve developed, I’ve done this. You know, you start with leading, with self, lead, leading others, leading system or organization. There we go. There’s the building blocks. And everybody you see many programs that do that, but that there’s an underlying assumption that we need to name there that is presupposing an outside in form of leadership development, where I, the expert in leadership development, believe that you the learner, needs to learn in this way, that this is what you need to pay attention to, and you. Over time, I’ve come to the view, which is now based not only in what I’ve read, but also my own direct experience, that I’ve seen far bigger shifts in in organizations, from doing practice based leadership development, where people are working on the mess that they are faced with, and doing action research and doing action learning and being helped to develop their capacity to have deeper dialog than anything I ever did on a two or three day or longer leadership retreat. It’s it’s massively different.

Jacqueline Conway  35:33

So I completely agree, and I think I mean, that is the work that we do, is that we work with the kind of live issues that the executive leaders are facing. And we do, we do the development so the development is interwoven with the contextual problem, which is interwoven with the development. So, and that takes a very different sort of consultant to be able to know their trade as it were, and to be able to draw on thinking approaches, models and frameworks, if that’s helpful, or to be able to kind of sit with the discomfort whatever’s needed in the moment. So I guess, to be attuned to what the client needs, and to give the client what they want. That’s a very different thing from I’m a trainer in inverted commas, and I’m going to come along with my rolled up piece of flip charts that I’ve already written elsewhere, and I’m just going to kind of put them on the wall so that the they’re they’re two very different things, aren’t they? That the kind of people that do those kind of things are lumped in the same bucket as it were, but actually could be miles apart in terms of the capacities that they have to hold for the client, both the compact, the capacity to contain the anxiety of the Client and to contain and to be attuned to the client as they grapple with the mess, and also to have a sufficiency of helpful ways of thinking about the world that, you know, because sometimes those models or frameworks are really helpful. It’s, it’s the sort of transitional object that the client can hold on to, to say, Oh yeah, that that makes sense for me. And although it’s not about that thing, that’s a way in for them to help. So you have to, you have to have both so, so I guess it’s back to that thing around. Well, different people are offering different things, but if you’re not able to go to that place, then of course, you’re going to offer the kind of, you know, the kind of Jolly two days where at 10 past two, you’re going to be doing X exercise that’s going to take you 35 minutes. And you know, if it takes more than 35 minutes, then you’re rushing to catch up on the next thing. It’s totally unattuned to what the particular group needs, isn’t it? What

Stever Hearsum  37:57

do you just? You’ve just, I’ve just had a little kind of light bulb moment, a little realization about something I’ve always been deeply irritated by being asked to do delivery on programs where there are incredibly tight facilitators, notes and In some cases, to the point where they’re scripted and I don’t know why I haven’t thought about this before, because it’s entirely obvious now it’s coming to my awareness. You know, that is just another manifestation of both the anxiety at play in both parties and also the collusion, the idea that if I say these words in exactly the sequence this is going to have the impact that the learning objectives say that needs to have, really, it flies. It flies in the face of everything that actually happens in a learning space. I mean, the other thing that I think we have to to kind of just point out here is that there’s also a disconnect between the people who are commissioning and paying for interventions and the people who are actually on the end of them. And there is a kind of, what’s the word performative aspect to the purchasing of development opportunity development initiatives, which is Alan, D or HR, will look at a portfolio of programs and say, Yes, this meets the requirement. There’s a piece of work that I’ve just finished. I’m just finishing off doing with one of the consultancies I work with. I think I mentioned this in the book where we won this piece of work last summer, when I said to my colleague, the client, basically the client had asked for a two page document, document on our approach leadership development. I said to my colleague, are you up to doing something different? And he said, Yes, because he kind of knows the way I think, what were you thinking of Steve, I liked us to do our paper on why conventional leadership development is a waste of time and money. And he went, Okay, then, so that’s what we did. And. And it came down to a head to head between us and a more conventional supplier. And the client decided to go with us because they wanted to be challenged. But even when they told us, the person who told us that we’d got the business, I could almost hear the kind of just leaning into, yeah, we’ll do that this time. It was, you know, been recommended by other colleagues. There was a rump of people who really wanted to do it, but the seat at a senior level not even really quite understanding the implications of the decision that he just made. So there’s a whole lot of stuff there that I think gets overlooked as well.

Jacqueline Conway  40:39

Yeah And yet, earlier, you said something really interesting about leadership development doesn’t meet the objectives for which it’s or the outcomes, and actually isn’t part of the issue about the outcomes, because I have, in the past and and again, I, you know, I’ve, I’ve learned to sort of temper my red energy about the answers to these questions when they’ll say, what is the impact of this, this, this on, on bottom line. And it’s like, well, actually, that’s a category error, because we’re not doing a piece of work that’s about bottom line and and are we not in the in our in our industry, more generally, not strong enough in being able to see what this work has the potential to offer and the potential not to offer. Because if we were much more measured and modest about the fact that a two day leadership development retreat could have the impact of loosening up a leader’s tightly held views about the way that they need to go about their task and and provide for them enough confidence to experiment with Different ways of thinking, acting, being, doing, relating in the organization, that that would be enough, but that, but we’re frightened that that doesn’t sound enough, and therefore we have to see some other sort of nonsense that doesn’t bear any Real resemblance to what the thing will actually deliver.

Stever Hearsum  42:22

Well, your point about impact is interesting. There’s There’s Dr Wendy Shepherd, who’s based at Cranfield, has done some really interesting research into impact, and I interviewed her, and she, she talks about how, for example, you know, if you’re developing people mid to range or slightly above mid range, and you’re not, you’re not actually paying attention to the behaviors and performance of the people at a more senior level, then you’re setting yourself up to fail. And I think part of the problem with impact is, is that it tends to be construed in a at the level of the cohort community that is being developed was there’s some really interesting research that shows that even if you have a brilliant development program, I mean one that I would look at with my own biases and go, that’s brilliant. You know, it’s doing the work it needs to that, unless you attend to the context within which they’re coming back to work, and that means the senior leadership context and culture, over time, they will revert. So it’s a waste of money and it’s not having any impact. So what do organizations mean when they say impact? Because I have a hunch that often it’s thought of in a quite siloed way. We want this group of people to behave in this way, but without paying attention to how they then will interact with other parts of the system.

Jacqueline Conway  43:49

So, I mean, I completely agree with that, and that’s one of the reasons why in Walden Croft, we work with senior leadership communities, the executive team and the next level, because I’ve seen other parts of my career where we’ve tried to operate at the other level and, or other levels and, and it really, it really hasn’t had the impact that we wanted it to have, because there was something going on at more senior levels. So I completely, I completely get that. But of course, we can’t all, you know, we can’t all just work at that level, and we can’t all just be doing stuff with the senior team. You know, there is an enormous cohort of people who, in some ways, are still, maybe it’s despite the leadership development industry in inverted commas set up that that, or flaws that, despite these flaws that actually, some leaders are still developing. You know, I am still pleasantly surprised, not not even surprised. I’m not surprised by it. I’m still, you know, kind of my heart swells when I go into. Organizations, and I find brilliant people at all levels, and I find people who still say, Oh, I went on that management development program, and it really changed me. And there still are people who say that. And although I in the past have held maybe more more closely to where you are. I think I’m holding it more lightly now that sort of, well, they can’t really mean that, because it’s all nonsense. And it’s like, no, it’s not, because some of some people are really saying that those things were enormously helpful for where they were at. And so there is something that we need to do to help to develop people in the entire across the entire organization, that as imperfect as it might be, is still better than doing absolutely nothing, because it because it can’t be done sort of part way.

Stever Hearsum  45:56

I’ll meet I’ll meet you part way, because I think both things can be true. So what I mean by that is, you could run a program that actually, in the wider context, is not having a massive impact, but has massive impact at individual level and maybe at a local team level, absolutely. I guess my my counter to that would be, at what point do we then kind of have to go, are we actually really colluding with maintaining a status quo and an artificial sense of change

Jacqueline Conway  46:28

instead?

Stever Hearsum  46:31

Personally, I think it starts with with with having more honest conversations with clients and being really clear about what it is you will and won’t do and why. Now that requires us as helpers, as people who provide these services, to to clients, to potentially walk away from work or to make ourselves maybe a little bit too uncomfortable. And I know that not all of us wants to want to do that. I totally, totally get that. But in a sense, that’s what my entire book is about. We have a choice how, at what point does does collusion, however functional, become delusion and dishonest, and is doing more harm than good, even if we all feel quite comfortable taking the money and doing the work and clients feel happy because it feels as if they are doing change, but they’re not really

Jacqueline Conway  47:24

okay. So I mean, I’m loving all of that, and I’m going to offer you a provocation, because I think, you know, we’re in, we’re in a place where we can absolutely do that with each other. So you so here’s my provocation. So you’re saying, well, if it’s if it’s the individual that that makes a shift. We can’t possibly extrapolate that to the organizational level, and therefore we’re not we can’t make promises. But surely, if we’re operating from a place that accepts that complexity is a reality in organizations, that that it is messy and that it is complex, that we have to accept that the kind of the the butterfly effect, of the butterfly flapping its wings in one part of organ, that, you know, the one part of the world that creates a, you know, a kind of tornado in another part that that we have to accept that that Our work will create ripples that we don’t know how that will create, and therefore that, in some ways, trying to do more as really going the other way as you’re suggesting, and doing it in a much more planful way. That says this is the presenting problem, and I’m going to work with the presenting problem in and of itself, is counter to a complexity approach, because there is a saying in complexity, which is, you never tackle a complex problem directly. You know that there’s always other ways, because the system will the impacts and the ripples are, by their very nature, unpredictable.

Stever Hearsum  49:01

I agree total 100% I actually don’t think I’m saying anything different to you. What I’m saying is so I agree totally. You can have individuals who start to show up differently, and stuff begins to happen. I can think of people I’ve worked with where I’ve gone away going brilliant. I know stuff’s happening around that person. Superb. I guess what I’m saying is, if you look at, look at the patterns overall, what is the dominant pattern when it comes to the types of program that are still being sold, that’s a problem. What is the dominant nature of Con in terms of the pattern of the conversation? It is still a collusive one. It is still going along with the idea that these types of interventions actually work in inverted commas, rather than opening up a conversation about what is the work proper that we need to do. So I agree 100% with you. I’m arguing for a more honest conversation in the round. I’m saying that I don’t think I think we. We can, we can say, we can say that, yes, some interventions are not necessarily going to be taking stuff head on, but we know that in a more we do that in a more knowing and accepting way. What I’m suggesting is, is that there’s a hell of a lot of dishonesty about some of the interventions that are being sold and commissioned and delivered, and we need to rebalance it.

Jacqueline Conway  50:23

Okay, Okay, final question for me in that case, so, so sometimes everyone in that system, who’s who is commissioning, proposing, delivering, attending, these, whatever these things might be. Know that that’s part of the game, but the system holds the game in place, that it’s so as an individual like, what amount of agency do you really have to change the whole game? Or do you just try and make an incremental shift in being, perhaps a little bit more nudging the system in the direction that you want it to. I mean, what do you say to that? What do you say to the fact that you can have really well meaning people who would like to do things differently, and yet the system is configured in a way that makes it, if not impossible, extremely difficult.

Stever Hearsum  51:26

So when I work with internals and I do consulting skills for internals, there’s a question I normally end up asking them, and I say to them, there are two questions you’re going to need to answer, and sometimes they’re going to be in direct opposition, and there’s no right or wrong to this. One question you need to answer is, how do I progress and move up in this organization? The second question is, how do I be of most service? And that is a really personal, subjective response. There’s no right or wrong to it. You may your personal circumstances may be you need to keep the job and pay the mortgage because you’ve got a baby on the way or whatever, right? So that then talks to the nature of the the individual ethical choice relative to the system of context you find yourself in. If we take it to another example, another change context, whistleblowers, okay, what does it take for a whistleblower? This is just a version of the scenario you just described. They are agents for change. Going something here in this care home or in this hospital is wrong, or late noughties subprime mortgages are just bonkers. I need to tell the board, they make no sense. And from what I remember of reading up about, you know, whistleblowing, and what it what really drives whistleblowers is that often for them, the thing that pushes them in the most extremely dangerous circumstances for themselves in an organizational system, what pushes them to speak is they have a the moral tear. The ethical tear for them of not speaking is so great they have to go bleh and name it. So my answer to you, in a sense, is it’s an incredibly personal and subjective choice that somebody has to make in response to the system, to the context they sit within. And I don’t think any of us can tell somebody what they should or shouldn’t do. But what’s interesting to me is how so much gets projected onto those individuals who then do make themselves visible, and there’s a abdication of responsibility, often from those people, I suspect, in leadership positions for their part in CO creating that very dynamic so that that’s the so. So, you know, the whistle blow is symptomatic of the systemic pattern. They are not actually

Jacqueline Conway  53:53

the issue. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. Steve, where can people find your book? And where can they find you.

Stever Hearsum  54:02

They can find the book on Amazon or in the UK. They can order it through any bookshop. It’s also available for order through bookshop. I’m not so big and famous that I have stacks of them sitting in bookshops or Waterstones or anywhere like that, so you do have to order it in but yeah, you can order it on Amazon, and probably the easiest place to find me is is hearsome.com or on LinkedIn. That’s where I hang out. Well,

Jacqueline Conway  54:28

thank you so much. I’ve loved this conversation. I’m feeling like we need a part two at some point, because we just scratched the surface, didn’t we? I’m up for it, definitely. Well, let’s do that. Thanks, Steve. Take care, right? So we’ll just, I’m goin