💼🌱Part 1 of 2 - Your Company Is Not A Machine - The Living Organization Framework

I'm so excited to bring you a conversation that honestly stopped me in my tracks. My guest is Norman Wolfe, former engineer, corporate leader at Hewlett-Packard, longtime consultant, and the author of a book that I genuinely could not put down. Norman has spent decades asking one uncomfortable question: Why do so many companies fail to execute their strategies. The answer he landed on will challenge everything you think you know about leadership and organizations. He calls it the Living Organization Framework. And the core idea is that your company is not a machine. It's not a system. It's a living being with a soul, a purpose, and the people who deserve to bring their own selves through the door. Not leave them on the sidewalk. In part 1, we dig into where all this began for Norman, how the old mechanistic model of leadership is quietly killing employee engagement, and what the real reason is that 70% of companies fail to execute their strategies. We also get into what Norman calls the execution gap, and trust me, it will make you rethink what your job as a leader actually is. Now, heads up, this episode is so rich that I had to split it into two parts. Part 1 drops this week and Part 2 follows in two weeks. We will go even deeper into the specific leadership skills you need in order to be a powerhouse leader. Don't miss either one. Stay with us.

Welcome to Shedding the Corporate Bitch, the podcast that transforms today's managers into tomorrow's powerhouse leaders. Your host, Bernadette Boas, executive coach and author, brings you into a world where the corporate grind meets personal growth and success in each and every episode. Let's do this.

Norman, welcome, welcome, welcome. How are you?

Bernadette, I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I always will mention during the episodes and at the very beginning how much I love the topics that, that we bring to our listeners and our viewers. And today is no different because I all of a sudden just got lost in really wanting to understand the living organization framework. And so we're going to really get into all that. You have quite the background, which obviously led into your whole philosophy and frameworks around the living organization. You're, you're coming from a Hewlett-Packard type corporate background. You've done a lot of advisement over the years. What did you really take away from your corporate experience that led you into what you've been working on and what you now have as a major consulting platform?

I guess it comes from before Hewlett-Packard. I worked for Pratt Whitney Aircraft. That was my first job out of the university. I was in there. Now here's a young engineer, all excited, right? Going to start his career and everything's going to be wonderful. Work is, I've just been, I actually left university a year early with the degree. I was supposed to get a second degree because I wanted to get into the work world, the world of doing something, not just studying about it. So I was really excited. I got this job at Pratt Whitney. I was in the computer group and it was exciting. And I remember I came into work one day and the supervisor said, Norman, when you come to work, you leave your personal life at the door. What an interesting statement. It was actually confused me. I mentally joked, so how do I do that? Do I leave my right arm, my left arm? What do I take off? What do I leave at the door? It was literally confusing. It was called cognitive dissonance. And a few months later, we were, a group of us was talking about how much we loved the work we did and loved working with each other. And he overheard it and he said, work is supposed to be work. If it was meant to be fun, you'd pay us. This isn't Disneyland. And it's like, again, what's, what is this? So here's a young engineer literally being told, don't enjoy your job. Wow. Left Pratt Whitney Aircraft and went to Hewlett-Packard. Very different environment, right? Not so structured, not more creative, more innovative. And it was, I flourished there and I learned a lot, but yet there was still this experience of people come to work and they're not really engaged. Now, years later, Gallup came up with the statistics that only 27% of the people engaged. That was, that experience made me begin to question why. On top of that, as I got into this area of consulting and focusing on strategy and more importantly, strategy execution, right? Because having worked with clients, taking them on the offsites, doing this wonderful planning processes, and then watching nothing happen, I began to actually study it and realize that, wow, the statistics say on the average, 30% of companies succeed in executing, 70% of them fail. I began to realize doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, expecting better results in execution, expecting better levels of engagement by doing the same thing over and over again, running companies with the same mindset wasn't working. And so I decided to look at it and see if I can create something different. I was at a conference with meeting people and this woman was there asking me, what did I do for a living? And I told them, uh, consultant, executing strategy, blah, blah, blah. And she said, so what makes you different than everybody else? Wow. What a question. So I said, I, I don't know. I think it's because I look at companies different. There's something alive, like it's like a person and it's got a purpose and a soul and something that, that brings out the best in them. And she stopped and said, wow. You should write a book. There you go.

I love that.

6 years later, my first reaction was no, but the seed was planted. Sometimes you get, you just can't get away from something. 6 years later, The Living Organization. Wow. That really just began my journey. That wasn't the end of it. That just put me on a whole new path.

Sure. And I'm, and that's why I was so drawn to it. Because I've used the, my experience of, I always felt like a robot.

That's right.

In companies. Like I was told the same thing that you were told, leave your, leave your personal life at the door and they wanted robots.

That's right.

And it's, it was suffocating. It was just absolutely suffocating that I was having to turn off a large part of myself in order to be successful in the workplace. I, you say something, read it in one of the many readings I did around you, and I loved it. It said, we see the organization as a living being versus a living system.

Yes. Let me talk for a second of why people feel so disengaged. Your comment about you felt like a robot. In the existing paradigm, which I like to frame, and others have said the same thing, it's a mechanistic or a machine paradigm. We think of the organization very simply. It's a black box, takes inputs, converts to outputs. And the leader's role is to design the guts of that box so it's as efficient as possible as converting inputs to outputs. That's the existing paradigm. And so everything inside the box is just a component. We talk about people are our most important assets. People are the the most important stakeholder. These are phrases that we recognize there's importance that people play in the organization, but they're just fundamentally through this framework. And when you live inside a paradigm, you cannot see that you're thinking a certain way. You just think that way. You have to step out of it to see what's happening, which is what I try to help people do. But in that paradigm or that framework, people are just component parts. So the goal is to make it efficient. So what do you do when you wanna make it efficient is you look at process improvements and things of that nature. But if there's a better component that comes along, a robot or AI in today's world, wow, I got a new, better component. Let's replace the people with this new component that doesn't have all the complexities of people. That's the machine paradigm. A lot of people are talking about looking at a new model and it's usually based on living systems. And living systems have to do with looking at the way nature works. The way nature works has a lot of really benefits that we would like to see in organizations, such as resilience, such as adaptability to the environment, such as being part of an ecosystem. So that's in the right direction, but here's the difference between machines living systems from what I call the living organization or seeing the organization as a person. In the machine, the way the machine responds to the events it faces is based on the programming of the machine by the leader, right? It's the instruction set on how I respond to an event that I face is done by how the machine is programmed. In the living systems, they also have a mechanism, an operating system, if you will, on how they're gonna respond to events. And it's primarily based on their DNA, their genetic makeup. An oak tree is gonna drop acorns and the acorns are gonna grow into oak trees. And that's just the way they're designed to respond to various events in life. People are part of living systems, but people have an overlay component to how they respond to life, and it has to do with what I call psychic DNA. The way we create narratives that make us feel safe and successful. The experiences we have, we learn how to give meaning to them through narratives, through stories. We associate behaviors to those meanings. So we know when I walk into the supermarket and I meet somebody, this is the appropriate way to behave to get me the kind of result I want. I don't go in and yell at somebody. I don't, I just respond in a way that I learn how to get what I, makes me successful in my engagement. People have an operating system that they design themselves by the stories they tell. And that's really what we mean in the Living Organization Framework by our context. And organizations grow up and as they grow up, they tell these stories about how we do things around here. We call that their culture by the narratives they create, which is embedded in the context. So they have a collective context. So to deal with an organization as a living system assumes that it's gonna operate by its nature-based genetic coding. And it doesn't because it's a person and we operate sometimes in opposition to what we know is right because of our narratives. So that's the difference.

I love the whole thing about stories.

Oh yeah.

And it, it does get into, and we'll talk about it in a bit, around some of the skills you mentioned leaders need to have being stories, storytelling, and ritual. But staying on this point that you just mentioned about stories are the fabric of life, right? And so give us, help us really get our arms around what are, what are those stories other than how we do things, but what are the stories you're hoping that leaders and their people bring to the context of the business and the development of the organization or the maturity of the organization?

And I love the word. I love that you use the term maturity. We'll probably get to that in more detail. So if you look at a framework or a paradigm, it's really the, for people, which all of us are, leaders are people, they're operating within a certain narrative, a certain set of framings or stories about how life works. And so in the narrative, as I explained, the byproduct of that narrative is we unconsciously, and I really want to emphasize that this is not intentional. Leaders are not bad people. They're not trying to do bad things to people, to employees, but they are unconsciously responding and saying things and responding to employees' comments or whatever. They're behaving based on a narrative that says, I'm the leader. I have certain responsibilities. I'm supposed to tell people what to do so they can be successful. The problem with that particular narrative is it keeps people in a, I'll say metaphorically speaking, in a childlike manner. They depend on the parent, again metaphorically, in this case the leader, to be the ones telling them what to do. So they never learn to grow up on their own. In our model, what we really want to achieve is organizations where the people are choosing to want to do what the organization needs to have done. They're not coming in and doing it because they get a paycheck, but getting a paycheck is obviously important. Don't get me wrong. They're not going to do it for free, but they're in the place where they understand what the organization wants and they go, I really want to do that. That's one of the things I got from HP is they gave me enough freedom to, to be at choice. But in so many situations, we don't give employees the choice. And there's a lot of reasons for that. We can spend a whole show on just that. That's for sure. On Joel and diving really deep into that. But just think about, I as a leader had the burden of all these people looking to me to figure out what I have to do and how I have to make the, and how can I set it up so they do what I need them to do. When if you step back and you think about it, if I just invited them and say, look, this is what we need to have done. Is this something you want to do? And they said, yes, I'm excited about that. Just think of what kind of organization you're going to have. Most leaders can't even think that way because they're stuck in this other way of thinking.

And that also opens up what you say, a dialogue, that it should they be leaning to, well, I'm not sure, apprehensive because I might not have the skills. That just leads to a very good developmental coaching type of conversation between manager and employee, right?

Absolutely. And you use the word developmental. Right? If you think about the machine paradigm and how it works, the leader sets the goals, the goals are handed to the employees. They didn't choose them. They didn't give the goals. We play this game of, we're going to let you have an input, but really everybody knows I'm telling you what to do. And I'm going to evaluate you at the end. In our model, we go, here's what we want to have done. Will you engage in that? Yes, we do have that coaching conversation that you said. And get to a real level of commitment. Somebody says, and they told me recently, oh, the living organization is, you're looking for commitment, not compliance. That's a really big difference, right? And then instead of evaluating them at the end, we're inviting them to look at what they've accomplished and what worked and what didn't and what can they learn. So we're helping them grow up. Not, not being in an evaluation position where, okay, it's time to evaluate you. I don't want to sit in judgment, but it's my job. So I'm going to tell you what you have to do and what you did wrong and how you can improve. And that sets up this defensive thing that everybody hates. So shifting the paradigm and think of the organization as a person, not just the way you deal with individuals, but the collective. I had a client who was struggling with a very complex situation, many moving parts, lots of departments. And I said, look, why don't you think of it like this? Your sales department, your branch offices, and your operations department are just 3 people. Forget all the dynamics, people, individual people, but think of them as 3 people who are being in relationship with each other. How do you want that relationship to look? And so we began to set what we would call the context of the new strategy and identified the behavioral relationships between the department as if they were people having to communicate with each other and live with each other and work together. And it eliminated all of the complexity about Sam over here and Bill over there and Susan over here and Jill over here. And oh my God. And it just How do I get this one in this branch office to do that? And this one's thinking this way and— stop. That's grief-making.

Yeah, we make it so hard on ourselves, don't we?

We really do. When you think of an organization, a collective of people as a person, and you think about what is their persona, what is their personality, what is their context, why are they behaving collectively the way they are? It makes it so much easier for the leader to be able to navigate through a much more complex world. If you go down into the nitty-bitty, it's like, I may have to get down to the cells of my heart, but I'm probably going to look at my heart as an organism in and of itself, and how is that performing collectively. I'm not going to look at every little blood cell in my heart, and I'm going to look at how my heart interacts with my my lungs, and is that interaction healthy? Unfortunately, in our healthcare system, we don't do that. The heart person looks at the heart.

Yeah.

We basically treat humans in the healthcare system like silos because that's the mechanistic framework we live in. The reality is in holistic medicine, in integrative medicine, looks at the heart's doing okay, the lungs are doing okay individually, but something's going on in the interaction between them. It's the same thing. My sales department's doing okay. My operations department is doing okay. There's something not going on in the interaction. We don't look at it from that point of view.

And I would say a lot of that, like the commitment versus compliance, what you talked about in regards to just really working to shift the paradigm, that is also trying to get a leader to shift from having a controlling means of management as opposed to really creating the conditions, as you call it, for ownership.

I have a slightly different take on that. You can't take a leader's control away. The challenge for leaders is they're trying to control it at the wrong level because they see it as a machine with component parts. They're trying to optimize all of the parts. Step back and look at the pattern of a human being interacting with another human being. So my sales department and all the component parts in it and how it's structured is not something I as a leader should worry about. Let me worry about the thing that's causing them to behave the way they are. Let me look at the pattern of behaviors or the individual behaviors, right? Let me step back and I end up having much more control over the organization. With doing a lot less chaotic work, trying to manage a very complex entity. I, when I was at HP, I was, a friend of mine, his name was Mark, and I, we went up through the organization. I got promoted, then he got promoted, then I got promoted, and he got promoted. So we both reached the pinnacle of the region where we were running different organizations within the sales region. I was running the administrative organization. He was running the systems engineering organization. Organization. And he came to me one day and he said, Norman, how do you do it? And I said, how do I do what? He says, you seem so calm about, you know, how you go about things. And I'm going nuts. I'm just, I can't, I feel overwhelmed. And I said to him, Mark, we're managing now. We're no longer at the district level. We're at the regional level and we're managing a much more complex organization. It's like a supertanker. And we're like its tugboats. And our job is to guide the supertanker in the right place. You're, what the way you're operating is you're running up and down the supertanker, pushing here, doing this, doing that. He said, what I do, I step back, I look at where it's going, I go to the prow and I do a little push, and then I step back and I walk. And then I go to this mid, midsection, and then I go back to the bow, and then I go back to the stern, and I let things have a pace to them and I know how to read the rhythm. He said, I gotta learn how to do that. That's what happens with leaders is they get so wrapped up in the machine and the mechanic trying to figure out which levers to push. They're not looking at what's really driving the organization.

Well, and a lot of this leads to or lends itself, I'll say, lends itself to what you, what I've read you believe in regards to the execution gap. Now, before we get there though, what I want to make sure everyone understands is I've had a lot of conversations with leaders recently over the last 3 or 4 weeks, all about them spending too much time doing. And like you said, like too much time doing what Mark did, running up and down the tanker, as opposed to sitting back and putting things in place, but then sitting back and watching for how that change impacted the operation. So help us understand what you mean by the execution gap, but more so how that doesn't mean that we need them to be doing more, like we don't need them to be doing.

Yeah. The execution gap is that we develop our strategies and we communicate them and we get people aligned and we set the KPIs and we do all the things we need to. We do our assessments, we do our marketplace studies. And we come up with the strategy and then we have it all communicated and assign responsibilities and accountabilities and metrics and all of that. And we assume, again, thinking of it through the lens of a machine, that's all we need to do. We push the button and the machine is off and running. And then over time, we experience as leaders, we're missing targets, we're going over budget, We're finding delays, people are getting sidetracked, et cetera, et cetera. And that's what I mean by the execution gap is there's a gap between actually developing the plan, the strategy, go forward, and the ability to actually execute. There's a huge gap there. And the gap is based on thinking of it as a machine instead of asking the question, how do I really engage the people in doing this? And one of the biggest issues, and you mentioned the word maturity earlier, and I said we'd probably come back to it. We think in terms of people, because they're component parts, we think of them in terms of their skills, right? Technical skills mostly. Are they good at marketing? Are they good at programming? Are they good at sales? And we look at things from that lens because after all, that's what we hired is components. Salespeople and marketing people and operations people. People's capability to execute, as I like to say, you know, an organization's capability is a function of, yes, their skills, what we call their capabilities, but their maturity. Maturity is an aspect of people, not an aspect of machines. And it's a key aspect. It's the capacity to deal with complexity. To deal with change, to deal with uncertainty. It's the capacity to enter into relationships with people who are very different from themselves, work in a heterogeneous environment rather than a homogeneous, be able to deal with different points of view and see how each person's points of view can be of value to the mission at hand. And it's the capability to be self-reflective and take ownership and make a commitment and acknowledge mistakes and learn from the mistakes and all of those. Those are the three dimensions of maturity that I've identified. Dealing with complexity, dealing with complex different relationships, and dealing with self-reflection or growth. When you have that in place, the higher you are on the maturity, the more you can delegate. To people to do on their own because they'll understand how their decisions fits into the bigger picture and they'll be making decisions in that way. So we've created this to help people understand that we've created this concept called the Virtuous Cycle of Growth, and it works like this. People need a challenge to grow. If you, if they're already doing what they know how to do, they're doing what they know how to do, and they can become very good at doing that, but they're just doing what they wanna do. New challenges, do things differently, sets up the challenges of doing something different, sets up the catalyst to develop the people. And if I develop both the capability and the maturity of the people, I've increased the capacity of the organization to increase greater goals, which we set new goals, which are bigger goals, which means we're growing, which means I challenge people to grow more and you get this virtuous cycle. But to do that, you have to have a different focus of what strategy execution is about. Yes, it's about achieving the goals, but most importantly, it's about using the desire to achieve the goals as the catalyst and the vehicle to develop people. So as a leader, my job is setting the strategy and setting the goals. Is just the beginning of my job, not the end of it. And I'm not there to measure how they're doing. I'm there to help them learn from the challenges I've set before them and help them grow and develop, which means I'm shifting from leader as plan, organize, lead, and control to leader as set the context, develop the people, build a community, and be of service by delivering what we promise. So it's a very different role in leadership. But that's how you close, that's how you really close the execution gap. And that's how you change the 70%, 30% to 30% failing and 70% succeeding.

What do you find the core challenge to leaders in making that shift?

Fear of the unknown. Let's face it. I spent Take a typical leader, 40 to 60. So they spend 20 to 40 years of their working career achieving a certain level of success, doing it a certain way, being invited to think about doing it from a whole different framework, a whole different paradigm. Intellectually, I get a lot of people saying yes, but honestly, and even myself, I've struggled with it even since writing the book. Trying to work with clients, falling into what I call the paradigm trap. It's so easy to go to what's comfortable.

Do you accept from your clients the excuse that, oh, they just, we just have no time, my workload, my to-do list, you know, my money, my, yeah. So how do you address that head on with a client? When you know that yes, this is going to get uncomfortable for a while. This is going to be new. It's going to be different. But yet, if you get to the other side, it'll actually make your life and the organization and your career so much better.

How do I deal with it? First of all, I deal with it compassionately. I've been there. I understand. I work with them to the degree I can, but eventually it's either, are we going to do this or not?. And it's a choice. Just like I ask people to have it. I ask the leaders to learn how to give their people a choice. I give my clients a choice. Look, you don't have to do this. If you want to keep fighting the battle the way you've always fought it, and you want to be exhausted by it, and you want to go home depleted, and you want to feel frustrated by the people aren't just stepping up, and why do they always call me? And why can't they work together? Why do they operate in silos? And you're just gonna keep asking those questions over and over again, being frustrated. That's your choice. It's up to you. But if you want a way out, the way out is not to want something different, but do the same things over and over again. The way out is you gotta struggle through doing it differently. And yes, it's gonna be scary. And yes, I am there to help you. And yes, I will work through your fears and everything that's gonna come up. I mean, they will come up, but it's your choice. Do you want to make life easier for yourself? Do you want to create an organization that can execute more effectively? Right. Here's the path.

Norman has spent decades watching leaders choose the familiar over the effective. And today he gave us the language to finally understand why. And for everyone listening, if this conversation made you uncomfortable in the best possible way, That's exactly the point. Part 2, we are getting into the good stuff. The 4 specific skills that Norman teaches leaders to make this framework real inside their organizations. We're talking about heart-centering communications, storytelling and rituals to reframe your culture, an improv mindset for navigating uncertainty, and lastly, the balancing of opposites. These are not soft skills. These are the missing skills you need to be a powerhouse leader. Norman also has a book, The Living Organization, which is available free at thelivingorganization.com/book1. His second book, Leading a Living Organization, will be out later this year. So links will be available in the show notes as to how you can stay in touch with Norman. To understand when that release will be. And here's your homework before part 2 in 2 weeks. I want you to sit with one question that Norman planted today. Are you leading a machine or a living organization? Because your answer to that question changes everything about what comes next. If you're not already subscribed to Shedding the Corporate Bitch, do it right now, wherever you're listening. Hit follow, hit subscribe, turn on your notifications because you don't want to miss part 2. Go to ballofirecoaching.com/podcast. I'm Bernadette. Thank you for being here for part 1.

Bye.

Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Shedding the Corporate Bitch. Every journey taken together is another step towards unleashing the powerhouse leader within you. Don't miss any of our weekly episodes. Subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen. And for those who thrive on visual content, catch us on our Shedding the Bitch YouTube channel. Wanna dive deeper with Bernadette on becoming a powerhouse leader? Visit balloffirecoaching.com to learn more about how she helps professionals, HR executives, and team leaders elevate overall team performance. You've been listening to Shedding the Corporate Bitch with Bernadette Boas. Until next time, keep shedding, keep growing, and keep leading.