Sand
Amazing art form encapsulates everything about organizational leadership.
If you are short on time please watch the short video, then scroll down and read “Physical Layout.”
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My jaw hit the floor when I saw this video because it is a visual representation of several ideas I have tried to apply and popularize.
This guy must be the laziest artist I’ve ever seen. All he’s doing is rubbing some rubber balls on a metal plate, but the sand becomes organized in a creepily symmetrical way, like magic. Imagine how much longer would it take him to use a brush and a straight edge to sweep the individual grains into order. It would 100x (1000x?) longer to arrange the grains to get just one design of equal symmetry for one design. This guy does three unique designs in under 2 minutes without really doing anything!
In many ways, this is exactly how one should think about leadership of large organizations.
Trying to Pull a Train
One of the hardest working officers I ever worked with was named David B. He was an assistant Operations Officer when I was a company commander. This man did not sleep and always looked exhausted. When my wife saw a picture of us together on the battalion Facebook page, she immediately assigned him the nickname “Sleepy Dave.” Sleepy Dave had a motor like no one else I’ve ever met. He worked constantly. I was blown away by how much he worked and how much pressure he put on himself.
The problem with Dave, and I told him this frequently, was that a lot of his efforts were completely unnecessary; he would do work just for the sake of doing work. And he acted like if he didn’t do that work that the whole battalion would come to a halt.
Dave was the type of person who would use a brush and straight edge to arrange the grains of sand. And if the commander demanded that the design of the sand be changed halfway through him arranging it, Dave would have started on the new design without any complaints. But I often tried to show him that he could accomplish the same design by simply rubbing some rubber balls against the metal plate, rather than trying to arrange every grain.
One day I was so fed up with how much wasted effort he displayed that I pulled him aside and said, “Dave, let me explain something. I want you to imagine a train pulled by an engine chugging up a mountain. On the front of that engine is a big platform with a stationary bike on it, but that stationary bike isn’t attached to or powering anything. You my friend are on that bike peddling your little heart out, and it feels like you are pulling that train up the mountain by yourself. But Dave, the train doesn’t give a f*ck about you and doesn’t even know you’re there. If you were to stop peddling the train wouldn’t know the difference. It’s gonna get over the mountain regardless of what you do or don’t do.”
My delivery was a lot more lighthearted and jovial than it sounds in print. Dave got my point, but he didn’t change a thing. The fact that Dave was obsessed with working didn’t make him a bad leader, it just made him a sleepy leader. He was brilliant and he knew what he was doing. Fortunately, the work he did somehow didn’t create work for others. If it had, my tone with him would have been a lot more heavy-handed, and decidedly less jovial.
You can be a great leader and make great designs in the sand with a brush and a straight edge, it just boggles my mind that anyone would want to do that. Especially if you can get the same sandy outcome by just rubbing a plate.
Physical Layout
Of course, you can’t just show up to lead an organization and start causing vibrations on the existing surface. The artist wouldn’t be able to do this if the surface he was working on was made of concrete or paper. He’s working on a unique physical surface that allows the vibrations to resonate in such a way that it brings order to the sand. Before you can make designs in such a lazy way, you have to make sure you are working on the right surface.
In Development Part 2 I told the fictional story of someone trying to grow carrots in sand. Our aspiring gardener consults his friend, complaining that the problem must be with the seeds. His friend examines the garden of sand and politely suggests that the problem is not with the seeds, water, or sunlight, but with the soil. My point in that essay was that leader development is often about the environment in which leader development is occurring, rather than with any specific aspect of a leader development program. But the same is true of organizational leadership more broadly.
As I wrote about in my essay Process, processes are (usually) not things that should be designed and implemented from the top-down. Rather, a leader should set the conditions for orderly processes to emerge naturally. A huge part of setting those conditions is the physical way in which people are arranged in a workspace.
In his masterful book The Timeless Way of Building (and his other books that I’ve not yet read) architect Christopher Alexander argues that architecture has an enormous impact on society. The way that we build buildings and towns dictates a lot about how we live our lives. One of his main points is that houses that are built en masse with prefabricated materials and cookie-cutter designs are detrimental to our individual psychologies and overall social cohesion. Towns, in his view, should not be centrally planned and controlled through zoning. Rather, basic guidelines should be in place to allow towns to emerge naturally. If you want to build a strong community, it begins with the physical infrastructure.
The same is true for our workplaces. If you want to build a strong organization, it begins with how the people are physically arranged in office buildings, and how those building are constructed in relation to one another. For example, when Bill Gates was building Microsoft, he quickly learned that some of the most important work and best ideas occurred people saw each other in common areas, rather than in organized meetings. Because of that, he had white boards installed in many different areas like hallways and break rooms.
When I was a young captain, I quickly realized that the physical layout of our offices was having a detrimental impact on the unit. The operations officer and the intelligence officer were on opposite ends of the office with a maze of cubicles in between. The logistics and personnel officers were separated from operations and intelligence by a locked security wall! And we wondered why there was so little crosstalk amongst the staff. Everyone on the staff felt like they were overworked and there was confusion and finger pointing in meetings about who was responsible for what. Efforts were frequently duplicated while other tasks got dropped completely. When I brought this to the attention of the battalion commander and suggested he consider reshuffling the office, he thought it was a neat idea, but ultimately things stayed the same.
The physical layout of that office made each individual feel like Sisyphus, and even simple or routine things felt like they required enormous amounts of energy to accomplish. This was the equivalent of a sand artist trying to organize the grains of sand using a brush and a straight edge on a concrete surface. In that kind environment, leaders are never in a position to be lazy—they have to work constantly to keep the organization running.
If you want to arrange sand using sound waves the first thing you have to do is put the sand on the right surface. Likewise, if you want an organization to be self-organizing in a way that allows processes to emerge in accordance with your vision, it begins with the physical layout of the workplace.
No Negative Waves!
Once you organize your physical space, it’s time to send out waves, baby, waves. The waves are the shakers and movers in your organization. They are the people who can make things happen. I’ve written about this theme several times.
In Development Part 1 I wrote:
Your leaders are crucial nodes in your network because their actions often have larger effects on the organization than the actions of individual soldiers. People are generally more dependent on the actions of leaders, and the interactions between the people under leaders create collective behaviors. If you want healthy collective behaviors, and if you want your organization to be as effective as it can be, then focusing on the behaviors of your leaders is critically important.
And in Organization I wrote:
The performance of a battalion isn’t determined by summing up the actions of all the individual people. The performance of the battalion is what emerges as individual people work together and interact. How people work together and interact is largely a product of how they are managed and led.
Your subordinate leaders and the people in your organization are not necessarily the grains of sand in the artistic metaphor of the video. The sand is the representation of the emergent properties of the organization — The systems and processes, the culture, the effectiveness, the displays of self-correction are what we see in the sand. The people are an inherent part of of this mosaic, but individual grains of sand certainly do not reflect individual people.
That’s why it is important to understand that your key leaders and personalities are your vibration waves. You send the waves out with the understanding that, as long as they are synchronized, that something beautiful will emerge. If you are trying to send out waves, and the sand is not transforming, the waves might not be carrying the message.
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People really do underestimate the impact of the environment on efficiency and morale. Inevitably, problems get blamed on leadership, or "not enough leadership". This hits hard in the Canadian winter. Have we considered that troops arrive before sunrise, leave after sunset, and less than 10% of the unit have windows where they work? This *may* have an impact on morale.