The Art of Defying Organizational Drift

In this Thinkers50 interview, Steve Goldbach and Geoff Tuff explore the ideas behind Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. They discuss why organizations lose their way, how leaders can influence behavior through better-designed systems, and what it takes to stay focused amid rapid technological, economic, and geopolitical change. A timely conversation about purpose, leadership, and navigating uncertainty.

Transcript:

Des Dearlove: 

So the new book is the third you’ve written together, Detonate, Provoke, Hone. Did you plan it as a trilogy? 

Geoff Tuff: 

I would say anything but. Had you, if we could rewind the clock and look at Steve and me eight years ago, I think we were just hoping we might be able to make it through the first one. But the way things have played out, each time we finished a book, though we’ve taken a bit of a break afterwards, we have had reason to want to continue the story and to continue to engage some of our readers. And there’s a logical flow to it, I won’t tell you about all the books right now, but thankfully, we can now retrospectively call it a trilogy, but it was never the plan. I can definitely tell you that.

Des Dearlove: 

Well, it’s nice to hear you admit it. Steve, your earlier books, Detonate and Provoke, challenge leaders to break free from outdated playbooks and embrace bold action. How does Hone build on that, and to what extent does it diverge from that set of ideas? 

Steven Goldbach: 

Yeah, I think Detonate was all about a call to action, and Provoke was the start of a methodology towards dealing with exponential change. So, it was about anticipating, thinking about when trends become matters of when they’ll come to fruition rather than if. Hone is a further exploration of how you drive change in an exponential world, and it’s about focusing on behavior. It’s about behavior really being the subatomic element of everything that leadership has to drive. And it’s also about how you shape behavior through the changing of management systems, which are all the incentives that exist in organization to drive that behavior. 

Des Dearlove: 

I also think the subtitle is very powerful, How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift, and what you’re saying is that purposeful leaders can defy drift. What does drift look like in organizations today and why is it such a pervasive challenge for leaders? 

Geoff Tuff: 

The way that Steve and I talked about it, when we were first conceiving of this idea, is that when you’re out on a boat, let’s say you’re sailing, usually, you have a set of coordinates that you’re sailing to or there’s a point in land that you can keep your eye on on the horizon, and you can keep on track. You can avoid drifting even though you’re being impacted by weather and wind and waves and current and tides and all those things. You have the ability through either steering or adjusting the sail or what have you to stay on track. In business, unfortunately, you don’t have set coordinates, you don’t have a set point on land. You have something in your head, in terms of an objective or a mission or a vision or what have you. But it’s really easy to be knocked off course bit by bit by competitive entries or regulatory shifts or new technologies arriving on the scene, where suddenly at some point you can pick up your head and say, after dealing with these day-to-day emergencies for some period of time, you can say, “Whoa, I’m way off course from where I intended to be at this point in time,” and that’s the point at which it gets really difficult to get back on track. 

Des Dearlove: 

Many leaders talk about purpose, but you frame it as a discipline to be honed. How are purposeful leaders different?

Steven Goldbach: 

So purpose in here does have intentional double meaning. So, we do think that business has a greater purpose. So, I think the notion that businesses that only care about shareholder returns is in itself its own fallacy, because when you only care about one stakeholder at the expense of others, you rarely get the shareholder returns that you want. So we do think that the role of purpose is important, but purpose also means, in this context, being purposeful about what I am moving towards. As Geoff said, what am I avoiding drift from? And that is by this constant honing that we describe. It’s constantly looking at that behavior that I want to drive and making sure that all the actors in the system that I’m responsible for are acting in a way that’s consistent with the objective of that purpose. So, it’s really being focused on that part, Des. 

Des Dearlove: 

From your perspective, how can regenerative business models, those that restore and renew rather than simply extract or even sustain it, I guess, reshape the way organizations think about growth and long-term value creation? And how does that link to the book? 

Geoff Tuff: 

Well, in some ways that really though it was not intended this way, that is the central thesis behind Hone, which is, and I think you probably know, we borrowed the idea from the title from a friend of Steve’s originally, Flannery, who we profile in the book as Chef. And Steve asked her at one point, “Why do you sharpen your knives before cooking every single meal?” And she said, “No, no, no, Steve, I’m not sharpening. I’m honing,” because when you sharpen a knife, you’re actually removing steel from a blade and you’re destroying it, you’re not being regenerative. With honing, you’re realigning them into an edge that actually is fit for purpose. And so, as we write about in Hone, the entire objective behind Hone is not to have to go through massive transformations episodically, but instead, take the action day in, day out, to make sure that you can stay on track and that you don’t have to go through some sort of great act of shift that may end up destroying some part of the company, whether it’s part of the culture or part of the purpose or even part of the organization itself because of the nature of change. In my mind, one aspect of being regenerative is to actually keep intact the good things that you have within the company to be able to continue on down your path. 

Des Dearlove:

There are some great stories in this book. I mean, not necessarily the usual suspects, these are stories from outside. The film director, Sam Pollard, for example; the rock band, Our Lady Peace. Where do you get these stories from? Where do you find them? 

Steven Goldbach: 

So, we’ve always wanted to bring in our network into our writing. We want to draw on lessons from our own personal lives. And oftentimes in Provoke and Detonate, that has been stories about Geoff and me. We profiled three provocateurs at the end and we thought, let’s look to the world of artisans for inspiration here, outside of the business arena. And so, Geoff knows Ana from his personal life, they are nearby neighbors in Rhode Island. Sam, we met through some work that we’re doing in the documentary filmmaking space. And Geoff as a longtime rock fanatic just happens to know the bass player of Our Lady Peace. And so we thought these are wonderful stories. There were other artisans that we were thinking about, and these are the four that made the cut. 

Geoff Tuff: 

But the thing I’d add to that, if I may, is that first of all, it’s no great secret that these types of stories are sometimes more entertaining than all the business stuff that Steve and I talk about. But as we got into exploring their stories and exploring how what they have done with their careers over time fit or didn’t fit with the analogy that we were trying to create in Hone, it’s amazing how many of the lessons from their lives actually transferred over into the business world into something that really is actually quite meaty. 

Des Dearlove: 

We used to, some people still do, talk about the VUCA world; volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, but I hear people now talking about a BANI world; brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible. With geopolitical uncertainty, technological disruption, climate pressures, all of that going on, drift can almost feel inevitable. So, what practical steps can leaders take to stay on purpose without becoming overly rigid? 

Geoff Tuff: 

I think that’s all just a reaction to accelerating uncertainty. I don’t think the conditions of a VUCA world have changed all that much, it’s our reactions to that VUCA world that have. And so the very first thing that companies and people within companies need to do is just to have the humility that we’re no longer in a position where we can predict what’s going to happen in the future. We should stop pretending that we can use past data to try to understand the way the future is going to unfold. And instead, think like scenario planners think and actually accept that we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we can actually start to frame some stories about the future that will allow us to operate as we continue to move forward every single day and hone what we’re doing. We can still keep the big picture in mind, but we don’t have to pick which of those futures is the reality today. We need to have an understanding of the direction we’re going, but really, what we need to be focusing on is the here and now. 

Steven Goldbach: 

And if I might add, one thing that I think is a relevant story from… the three of us happened to be at the same dinner last night. And someone at some point was lamenting the fact that customers aren’t doing the thing that they really want them to do, they’re not. In this particular case, it was paying a premium for greener products. And I think the thing that you can do in a BANI world, is just get back, as Geoff says, focus on the future and what the future might bring. But also bring a mindset of… if I want that future, I need to create it and the thing I need to focus on is the behavior change that I want to be the driver of. And rather than lamenting that people aren’t doing the thing that you want them to do, start to ask yourself, well, how do I get them to behave and start to experiment and say, “What are the things that I can do that are in my control that will drive the behavior that I want to have in that uncertain world?” 

Des Dearlove: 

What are the key leadership takeaways from the book, and indeed, from the trilogy? 

Steven Goldbach: 

If there’s one thing, it’s focus on behavior. I think we often in leadership say we want to focus on changing people’s minds, and I think that really, it’s about changing the collective action of an organization and really, really focusing on that behavior. And then similarly, not judging people by perhaps what they think, but actually just what they do would be probably one, but let me let you add-

Geoff Tuff: 

Well, I think related to that, and this actually is a thread that carries through all the books, but as a leader, to be an effective leader, you have to be deeply curious about people. Not people in the organization, not dots on the org chart, but actually the people in the organization and outside the organization to understand what is it that motivates them that drives their behavior. And ultimately, you are trying to understand that in part so that you can affect that behavior. But the more curious you are about people, inevitably the more you actually have to engage with them. And the more human an operating environment, a business environment we end up creating. 

Steven Goldbach: 

And maybe that’s the draw, the connection between the artisans and the leadership that we want to draw. And I think artisans, by their nature, are designers. And our view of leadership is that you need to design the system that promotes the behavior. So remember the cheese last night, there was a table of 20 and they put two cheese plates in random spots and nobody was eating the cheese because people were confused about was the cheese for someone, was it for someone else? But the problem was that that was a poor design. Had they put four cheese plates because there were four sections of a table, people would’ve said, “Oh, that’s for sharing,” but instead it was in two random spots and people didn’t understand it. So, leaders have to design something that makes it clear. And so that was just an example of bad design in a very, very small and in an unimportant way.

Des Dearlove: 

Again, one of the things that I really like about the books is this emphasis on management systems, that management systems weren’t created, we create them. We can design them for a purpose, and different leaders with different priorities can influence behavior through the management systems. And I think that runs all the way through the three books. 

Geoff Tuff: 

Yeah. Well, and as we talk about in Hone, there are formal management systems, which we’ve known about for a long time and sometimes we use them well, sometimes we don’t. We hope some of the guidance in Hone will help them be used better. But it’s the informal management systems that we’ve been semi-obsessed about in all three books. The orthodoxies, the conventional wisdom, just the stuff in the ether that makes us act the way we do that we actually think may in the long run be more powerful in impacting the way people act and organizations unfold. 

Steven Goldbach: 

That’s why we are sick of hearing culture eats strategy for breakfast. And we know that that’s a business orthodoxy, it’s something that leaders love to say. And the problem with that is it puts culture as if this is something out of a leader’s control, right? Oh, we just can’t change the culture around here. And actually, the whole point is that management systems are something within the leader’s control. It is something that they design, and in management systems are all the tools that you use to change culture. It’s not about posters on the wall. So we would love to get rid of that phrase and introduce, it was like design the culture that you want to create the behaviors that you want. 

Des Dearlove: 

So last question. The trilogy is complete. What happens? What’s next for you two? 

Steven Goldbach: 

Maybe have a drink and enjoy life a little bit. 

Geoff Tuff: 

Yeah, sail off into the sunset. We will do, I would imagine what we always do, which is take a little break from thinking and writing and not really each other, we see each other almost every single day. But inevitably, there will be more ideas. Whether they manifest in a book form or in some other form, I think is still TBD. 

Des Dearlove: 

Well, we look forward to seeing the fruits of your continued collaboration. Steve. Geoff, thank you. 

Steven Goldbach: 

Thank you, guys.

Geoff Tuff: 

Thank you.