Introduction

This is a story and a dream that started many years ago.  It is about the search for the Holy Grail, the key to unleashing the potential energy in leaders, teams and organisations.

The journey will cover a new understanding and importance of system energy, how to measure it and most importantly, how to change it.

The journey covers three decades of invention, design and application, linking art and science with new theory, tools and practice that can be applied successfully by coaches, consultants and leaders in any language, anywhere in the world.

The Elephant in the Organisational Room and the Six Factor Perfect Storm

In the early nineties I headed up the Strategy Unit of an International Consultancy.  We did surveys, we had meetings and we wrote detailed reports.  But there was a problem.  Nothing ever really changed in the organisation.  In particular leaders seldom, if ever, changed their behaviour.  The good ones remained good and the bad ones remained bad.

And now the organisational landscape is even more turbulent.  Consider the following factors that are all combining to create the perfect storm. 

Our Current Perfect Storm

Worldwide coaches and consultants are facing a perfect storm in 2022.  It is blindingly obvious that our historical methods, tools and experience are no longer effective.  It is time for a radical revolution.

The six factor perfect storm outlined below qualifies as an existential crisis.  If we do not evolve and adapt rapidly to the changing landscape us coaches and consultants may struggle to remain relevant.

• 75% of all change management efforts end in failure. What everyone gets wrong about change management.

• 87% of employees don’t trust and don’t like their bosses. 

• The 356 billion dollar global training and development expenditure is a complete failure.  The investment is largely a waste of time and money.  Clearly there is a crisis in knowing how to change behaviour.  (My blogs will address this.) Why leadership training fails and what to do about it.

• Corporate lifespans are crashing uncontrollably.  The average lifespan of a US S&P 500 company has fallen by 80% in the last 80 years – from 67 to 15 years.  76% of UK FTSE 100 companies have disappeared in the last 30 years.   How winning organisations last 100 years.

• Globally the half-life of organisations has declined to ten years or less.  Based on work by Geoffrey West and Scale.

• The Great Resignation.  Since the Covid pandemic this unexpected phenomenon has spread plague-like across the planet.  Various surveys show that at least 40% of employees plan to resign from their current jobs .

Launching our new Energy Hypothesis

In 1993 I resigned my position as Director Strategy to start my own practice, with one determined goal.  To apply scientific thinking to generate sustainable and repeatable improvements in leadership behaviour and organisational performance.

This goal and purpose has become even more urgent today in the light of our current perfect storm.

Before my stint at the International Consultancy I had spent several years at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa.  Here I was fortunate to meet many highly intelligent people and to have many endless creative conversations which focused on the following emergent themes that provided the foundation for our work on energy in systems.

• The emerging science of systems and the systems theory of management.  Organisations were complex and dynamic systems made up of many interlinked subsystems that all worked together.  A change to any one subsystem would lead to a change in the overall system.

• The advent of mainframe computers allowed new levels of simulation work and the emergence of Cybernetics, the scientific study of complex systems, including organisations.

• In the 1970’s this led to the pioneering work of The Club of Rome and their seminal book “Limits to Growth” which showed how we were consuming resources faster than they were being replaced.  It was time to start applying the new systems intelligence to the planet itself.

• Alexander Humboldt the great naturalist first mooted a warning to humanity two centuries ago, where he showed that the planet is an integrated , living, complex and dynamic system where everything is connected.  He called this Cosmos.  One hundred and fifty years later James Lovelock popularised Humboldt’s warning in his book Gaia.

All of the above emergent themes have provided us with a deeper understanding of human and natural systems and the importance of their integration.

Why does this matter to coaches today?  Advice from Michel Serres

Michel Serres.  Genius.  Philosopher.  Systems thinker.  In his remarkably prescient book Times of Crisis Serres outlines a practical model for our and the planet’s survival.

He explains that our current economic and corporate models of exponential growth are clearly unsustainable on a finite planet.  He shows clearly that this model has evolved as a two-player game of geopolitics and economics and that rules of this game are based on the ancient triad of priests-warriors-and wealth creators.  (The current crisis in Ukraine is a perfect manifestation of this.)

As a solution he offers a three-player game that places our planet at the centre of human culture and economic activity. For millennia homo sapiens has been the dominant Subject and earth the inert Object, there for our eternal abuse and consumption.  However things are now changing.  Earth is rapidly becoming the Subject and us soon-to-be the obedient Object.

Instead of the two-player game of geopolitics and economics he advocates the new three-player triad of Biogea – Science – Society.  Biogea is his term for the living planet, including all fauna and flora.

Should you like more detail on this important subject please see my recent blog.  It’s time to explode our bronze age leadership model.

Coaches and consultants need to make an important decision.  We live in an existing world firmly placed in the Serres defined world of priests – warriors – wealth generators,  supported by a false assumption of infinite exponential growth and an Orwellian organisational lexicon that is both cult-like and brooks no debate.

Further, coaches and consultants are facing the perfect storm outlined above.

The choice is simple.  Ignore the perfect storm and, head in sand, wait for it to blow away? Or make a bold decision to move to the Serres’ infinitely more intelligent model, centred on the survival of our planet, incorporating both science and society.

As coaches and consultants we can no longer defend the indefensible.

Our Energy Hypothesis for Organisations

In the mid-nineties we developed and polished our Energy Hypothesis as follows.  This was based on both systems and scientific thinking at the time, as outlined above.  We were also looking for something new, practical, effective and revolutionary.

Our hypothesis was as follows.

“Every organisation is a complex and dynamic system that can gain or lose energy over time.  High energy systems will be more motivated, innovative, competitive and profitable than low energy systems.

Further, leadership is the primary source of all organisational energy and performance.  There will be two ways to change the system energy level.  Change the behaviour and intelligence of existing leaders, or change the leaders.”

We now had our hypothesis.  We needed two things to validate it.  A new tool to measure organisational energy and a new methodology to increase system energy.

Designing the Organisational Energy Assessment Tool

“Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”
― Yuval Noah Harari

We know that organisations are complex hybrid systems linking the real world of people, products and services with our imaginary world of brands, emotions and suppositions.  Effectively an organisation is a system with no physical boundary.  If it has a boundary it is a living and ever-changing one in the minds of people – hence imaginary.

Based on this assumption we decided to design our assessment tool based on the perceptions and assumptions of employees.  (Customer perceptions would be added later.)

We used a system framework based on inputs – leadership, skills, and  technology – processes – methods, tools, teamwork, culture – and outputs  – customer service and financial performance.

After a range of trial projects we submitted our data for factor analysis and validity testing with the Professor of Statistics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.  The results were positive and most encouraging.

Our First Big Test

In 1995 we were fortunate to be invited to work with the top 300 leaders in a major bank in South Africa.  They employed thirty thousand people across the country and overseas.

We sampled our Organisational Energy instrument across the system, processed our report and system’s analysis and readied ourselves to present to a highly charged room of 300 senior bankers.  We were encouraged by the then CEO to be direct, call a spade a spade, and don’t try to be nice.

I remember standing on that stage with just a microphone and two five meter by five meter projection screens behind me.

We used just one slide showing the system’s current energy level – 55%, and the level we suggested would be required to meet the organisation’s strategic objectives – 75%.

I remember thinking – well here goes.  If this doesn’t work we could all go farming!

The lights were dimmed and our slide went up on the screens.  They looked magnificent and strangely ethereal as if the system attractors showing the energy levels were floating in four dimensional space.

You could have heard a pin drop.  Then off I went.  I explained our energy hypothesis, the evolution of a system’s energy level and cultural DNA, and the essential role of leadership.

We then gave them very direct feedback.  Their system energy level was a critically low 55%.  This indicated high levels of internal politics, distrust, poor motivation, low care of customer, low competitive capability, and low profitability potential.  I gave them two choices.  Continue to play internal politics, or change the DNA, and increase the system energy and system capability to compete and succeed. 

(Note.  They chose the latter option and became the best company to work for a few years later.  More detail on the systemic action steps they took in the workshop in future blogs.)

Hypothesis Confirmed

We worked closely with the organisation after this key workshop.  We broke the Organisational Energy levels down into key divisions and departments across the country.  We now had energy levels by department ranked from highest to lowest.  Together with their internal facilitators we added two columns.  One on profitability and one for quality of leadership.

As expected the correlation was extremely positive.  There were a few exceptions where, for example a new high performing leader had recently been appointed to a low performing department.  However we were able to predict the future impact of such a leader through a specific Entropy Index  built into our assessment tool.  (More detail later.)

In principle therefore, based on prima facie evidence our hypothesis on this project was confirmed, together with the potential validity of our Organisational Energy instrument.

We had introduced our newly minted methodology for changing leadership behaviour to increase system energy and feedback was genuinely positive.

What we needed now was to consolidate the methodology and test it elsewhere.  We wanted to show the coaching and consulting world that there was a new and better way to apply systems and scientific thinking that could be applied successfully to leaders, teams and organisations.

Connect with John Raddall, Quanta Consulting via LinkedIn

John founded Quanta Consulting in 1993 after completing a stint as Strategy Director of an International Consultancy.  He is an enthusiastic and determined game changer who loves the challenge of helping clients to do the impossible.

His energy is always focused on finding new and better ways of doing things and is never satisfied with conventional wisdom.  He is happiest inventing new methods that can be implemented in practice to improve both knowledge and performance in organisations.

He has a genuine love of working with high-energy and creative individuals to co-design new and original solutions that work in practice.

He is the architect of several original methods from energy assessments to techniques for changing behaviour and performance.  He consults to clients both in South Africa and Europe.

He writes many articles on his work, lectures on Executive Development Programmes internationally, gives expert talks, and has also outlined his philosophy in a TEDx talk in Prague