The Plant Theory

Rot and Renewal, week nine. What I concluded about organisations in January 2020, and what six years did to that conclusion.

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The road to Riad el Solh

The uprising began on the evening of 17 October 2019, after the government announced it would tax petrol, tobacco and WhatsApp calls. I wanted to go that first night. My wife Jihane asked me not to, and I stayed home.

By the second evening staying home was not possible. I apologised to her and took the car, a Jeep Liberty assigned to me by the organisation I worked for, which turned out to be the right vehicle for that road.

I had never seen my own city look like that. Rubbish containers burning in the middle of the carriageway. Roadblocks every few hundred metres. The smell of fire and burnt tyres. Darkness, because the power was cut, so the only light came from whatever was alight. I drove at walking pace, bumping over rocks and shredded tyres and whatever else angry people had dragged into the road. There were people standing on both sides the entire way down and not one of them stopped me.

On the highway I picked up an army officer in full gear and drove him a couple of kilometres to his assigned post. He thanked me and got out. I parked a few blocks from Riad el Solh and walked in.

You could not stand in that square and keep your blood at a normal temperature. Everything that decades of humiliation and corruption and bad governance had deposited in people was finally out in the open air. I knew men and women who had lost their life savings in the banks, which in this country means losing your past and your future in the same week. Nobody has answered for it. Nobody has answered for it yet.

At half past two in the morning the army moved. I noticed the pattern change before it happened, the way the lines reorganised, and we left. Dozens were arrested once the square was cleared. We were long gone by then.

I went back, and so did hundreds of thousands of people, through November and December, into February and March. It was the longest sustained push the Lebanese have made against their own elite in my lifetime. It produced a resignation and it produced nothing.

Somewhere in those weeks I worked out why we could not produce any meaningful change, and what I arrived at is not in the books or the articles. Tents went up in Martyrs' Square and in Riad el Solh, and organisations began running seminars inside them, and watching that I concluded that we were not going to be able to coordinate at scale. Our economic production units are small. We have no culture of large scale collaboration and no instrument for steering a mass movement once one exists. We can generate momentum. That is the whole of our capacity. Momentum, and then dispersal.

I believed that in November 2019. I had it written down.

Five days in Byblos

On 2 January 2020 I drove to a hotel in Byblos to spend five days with a foreign funded organisation that works with Lebanese municipalities.

I was not the consultant. A friend was, the best facilitator I have worked with and the reason I was in that room at all. She had been hired to find out why performance was low, and she decided she wanted technical support beside her, somebody who could take a process apart.

That part I was good at. Software engineering teaches you to look at a workflow and see the gap in it, and I could draw any structure a client had, including the ones they did not know they were using. She saw organisations the other way round. She looked at people. She used to describe my mind as Soviet, meaning that I put function ahead of human need, and she meant it as a diagnosis rather than an insult.

The meeting room was about two hundred square metres with a panoramic window onto the sea. It was stormy most of that week, so the view was not always the gift it was meant to be. I arrived early every morning, as she did, because she liked to prepare, and I would put music on for the room before people came in. Management, coordinators, drivers, logistics officers, purchasing officers. All of them were there.

I did not judge them in the room. I waited until the evening, and then I categorised the entire staff. By the end of the first night I had decided that this group would never achieve excellence. I had a list of dysfunctional processes, a read on the management, and one finding sitting far above the rest: the illusion of performance. People measuring themselves against indicators that could not fail.

Then I told her.

It was not my job to profile anybody. I gave her my honest opinion as a friend, at night, before she had to walk back into that room and work with those same people for four more days. She was not happy about it, and she was right not to be. I had contaminated the judgement of the person carrying the work.

What I was doing has a name and I may as well use it. I describe people cynically instead of understanding them. I take one factual characteristic, build a verdict on it without the context or the background, and in doing that I strip the dignity out of a person. I can still arrive at one of those judgements in a single evening. What has changed, slowly and not completely, is what I do with it afterwards. Forming the judgement and saying it out loud are two separate acts, and the second one has its own timing and its own cost. In Byblos I treated them as one.

The next four days went slowly. Each evening I drew workflows in Visio, every route a document or a decision could take through that organisation, then assembled them into a single overview with the roles mapped on top. It is still some of the cleanest work I have done.

On the last day she ran an exercise with the team called the river of the workshop, which I watched her run many times in the years that followed. Something moved in me. It was not a revelation and nothing in my behaviour changed on the eighth of January. But I began to see, from my own failures more than from theirs, that projects are not delivered by structures and functions. They are delivered by people, and people are the centre of anything that works.

That lesson was correct. I needed it. It has made me better at this work than the structures alone ever did.

What I published

Three weeks later, on 31 January 2020, I wrote up my conclusion and put it on this blog under my own name. (click here to read the blog)

I said it does not matter how many books on management and structure and human resources a person absorbs, because the methods sit still while organisations are run by humans who do not. I said leaders fixate on functions and responsibilities and forget this. And I closed with a sentence I was pleased with at the time: that my view of organisations had changed from a carefully assembled mechanical apparatus into something organic, more a plant than a factory, needing care and water and sun, and that it would do all the growing by itself.

I had read Covey by then, like most people in this sector. The character ethic before the personality ethic, the private victory before the public one. That is sound advice for a person. It is not a theory of institutions, and in January 2020 I turned it into one.

The audit

Here is what I failed to notice for six years.

In the square in November I had worked out that will and anger and shared vision do not convert into structure. That a country can produce an enormous supply of care and solidarity and still have no way to steer, because nothing happening in the street makes it expensive for the people who rule the country to carry on exactly as before. I reached that about my own country, in my own words, with no book behind it.

Three weeks later I sat in a hotel in Byblos, learned a genuine lesson about human beings, and published the opposite theory about organisations.

A plant does grow by itself. That is why the metaphor is comforting and it is also why it is false. A plant has no interests. An institution is nothing but interests, and interests move when not moving becomes expensive, and not one moment before. Six months after I published that piece the port exploded. The banks had already taken everyone's money. Every organisation I was describing received care and attention and sympathy in the years that followed, and almost none of them grew by themselves.

Week six of this series: reforms survive when the forcing function comes from outside the institution. Week eight: survival is not renewal. This week adds one more. Momentum is not renewal either.

And now the part that is hardest for me to write.

I was not wrong about that staff. Some of what I decided on the first night held. The illusion of performance was real, and it was the right finding. I was right about the senior management, and that management was eventually changed. The cynical eye was accurate.

What I got wrong was what I did with the accuracy. I handed it to a colleague at the worst possible hour, and then, having been corrected for the harm in that, I concluded that the eye itself was the problem and built a gentler theory to replace it. A theory that asked nothing of anybody. A theory in which nobody has to decide anything, because the growing takes care of itself as long as the conditions are kind.

I corrected the right thing, and then I kept going well past it.

The article is still up, dated 31 January 2020, and I am leaving it there.

Everyone who works in this sector has learned something true in a room like that one. Participation. Localisation. Capacity building. Culture. Leadership. Digital transformation. All of them accurate as observations about people, and most of them now carried around as theories of how institutions change, which is not what they are.

So I will ask it the way I have had to ask it of myself. What did you learn that was true, and how far did you stretch it before it stopped being true?