Part 3: Meritocracy, competition, and complacency – the death of good products.
Meritocracy = Mediocracy
Part 2: Wholeness and connection.
Part 3: Meritocracy, competition, and complacency – the death of good products.
Part 5: Product, leadership, Change
Complacency
I have got a little feedback from the last post. Not nearly as much as from the first post. I am making up that this shows me how much we are all still entrenched in the I. The mind. In the battle of daily corporate life. Most of us simply don’t care, don’t want to know, or see how connection is relevant.
We intellectually understand we should have more love, more connection at work, but we either lack the knowledge of how to do it, or the courage to open ourselves. Perhaps we fear not being taken seriously, or not being effective, or being rejected or not seen. I actually suspect that many of us have never actually experienced unconditional positive regard and simply don’t even know that they haven’t got it. They think they have but don’t know what it feels like.
The roots of disengagement and mediocracy
Most children become disengaged at school. There has been numerous studies in how children start off as creative geniuses (98% at the age of 5 years), and by the time we are 18, less than 2% are 1.
Much of our schooling suffocates our enthusiasm and creativity. By the time we enter the work force we are often cynical, guarded, and conservative. Many of us mask our true nature as it has not been acceptable. We simply wait to be told what to do. Anything that was left is suffocated at work through cultural inertia.
The attributes that gain hierarchy and monetary rewards are very much that of ‘professionalism’ and ‘meritocracy’. Both of these traits create a hierarchy of conformism and normalcy that alienates most people, and continues to stifle creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurism.
It is based on getting it right first time and output volume. Good luck competing on those terms as AI takes your place.
Product and Product Owners
I was going to write about the practical steps of building product competency in this post. Something I expect will resonate with the majority of people, but I feel that we are not there on this small connective journey we are on; with wholeness.
As we have discussed in previous articles, the organisation doesn’t actually exist in anything other than in our minds. It is a mental construct built upon other mental constructs.
Making decisions about what to build, how to build it, what risks to take, and what relationships to maintain, is all in our heads. Sometimes a collective agreement that resides and is shared, but it still exists in our heads.
If the majority of people are switched off, unconnected, disengaged, and simply don’t care, how does that play out for an organisation that exists only in the minds of those who don’t care much?
How is this effecting your products and services?
The minds of your people is the limit of product capability.
The problem and the cure
The problem is that we rely on a meritocracy that rewards the very mental constructs that are limiting our entrepreneurship, innovation, and collaboration. Our meritocracy leads to mediocrity.
The types of thinking that is takes to fit in and quickly make decisions, drive for output, and to navigate the extreme individualism that comes with corporate life is exactly the opposite of what is needed to create, collaborate, and to take the right kind of collective risks. Risks that are designed to be asymmetrical in their reward versus failure rates.
Asymmetric payoff is detailed in my book Change. (see below for a link).
Good product delivery requires people to collaborate and try things out together. The vast majority of new ideas won’t work.
A corporate culture that rewards constant success and output over outcome is not going to produce entrepreneurial product owners. Staff operating in a hierarchy in a culture of meritocracy have been conditioned not to take risks.
A shift in mental construct away from meritocracy and towards entrepreneurism is required for product development.
This shift requires two things:
a) People are safe enough and aware enough to try things and have them fail in the right way. (culture upgrade)
b) People are educated enough to make asymmetric payoff decisions so that the 1 out of 10 things that do work provide 100 times the pay-out. (skills upgrade)
And finally, the organisation and delivery work needs to be structured in a way that supports the product delivery cycle to enable multiple parallel delivery streams that can be cancelled immediately as they don’t work, and people’s attention redeployed on new profit streams that might work. This was at the heart of agility but got sorely missed, because a) and b) didn’t happen and neither did a proper restructure of work or people.
More in this series to follow
References
1. https://twentyonetoys.com/blogs/teaching-21st-century-skills/creative-genius-divergent-thinking
You can now read Part 4: How people learn
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My book
In August 2023, I published my first book. It is called Change. It is a practical guide that helps you change not only organisations, but also yourself.
You can buy my book on any Amazon site. Here is the link to Change. on the UK Amazon site, and you can change the Amazon domain and the link still works in any region.