Work's Not Working... Let's Fix It!

No Silver Bullet: Debunking the Quick Fix In Leadership with Steve Hearsum

Sian Harrington Season 2 Episode 6

In this episode of Work’s Not Working, Siân Harrington sits down with Steve Hearsum to debunk one of the most seductive myths in leadership and organisational change – the myth of the "silver bullet." From tales of vampires and werewolves to the Lone Ranger’s legendary single shot, Steve uses storytelling to explore why leaders are so often tempted by the idea that a single, magical solution can solve their organisation’s most complex problems.

Steve takes aim at quick fixes, challenging the traditional ways leadership development is approached and questioning why companies are still pouring millions into programmes that deliver little more than "better sameness." He highlights the flawed model of consulting firms that run on the backs of "grinders, minders and finders," revealing how this dependency perpetuates superficial change rather than real transformation. 

The conversation also tackles the role of AI in organisations, as Steve asks whether AI is being hailed as the next silver bullet – spoiler: it’s not. He explains why our obsession with technological solutions often distracts from addressing the deeper human challenges in leadership and change.

Steve doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable truths, pointing out the existential fear that drives leaders to look for certainty and quick solutions. 

Key Takeaways

  • The Myth of the Silver Bullet: Using metaphors from folklore and myth, Steve explains why the search for a single perfect solution – whether it’s in leadership or AI – fails to address the complexity of organisational challenges.
  • Grinders, Minders and Finders: Steve critiques the consulting industry’s business model, which prioritises profit over genuine capability-building, creating a cycle of dependency rather than true leadership growth.
  • The Problem with Performative Leadership Development: Many leadership programmes are disconnected from real-world challenges, focusing on theory rather than practice. Steve advocates for reflexivity and applied learning.
  • AI: Not the Next Silver Bullet: While AI has potential Steve warns against seeing it as a magic fix for organisational problems. Leaders must focus on how technology supports human intelligence, not replaces it.
  • Leadership in a Complex World: Effective leadership isn’t about following rigid frameworks, it’s about navigating uncertainty, challenging assumptions, and being willing to step into the discomfort of not knowing.
  • HR’s Role in Change: HR departments can fall prey to the allure of quick fixes, but they also mirror the wider leadership culture. Steve urges HR to ask uncomfortable questions and push for deeper, systemic change.

Throughout the episode Steve offers practical advice on how leaders can shift their mindset, develop critical thinking skills, and move away from a reliance on "fix-it-all" solutions.

Interested in insights about people leadership, HR and the future of work?
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Steve Hearsum (00:00)

What I heard from a client this week was that the senior leaders are now saying we cannot allow the story to arise that it didn't work, that it hasn't fixed things. So the idea that a leadership intervention, a development intervention has to have fixed things. And in that statement, you have part of the problem, which is the leadership of an organization assumes that this kind of change happens over there, that it is the programmer that's the answer. No, it's not. There's a deeper conversation about the assumptions and the fear that's driving that state. 

 Intro

Hey everyone, welcome to Work’s Not Working, a show about forward thinking people leaders, innovators and academics and how they think we can fix work to make it more meaningful, healthy, inclusive and sustainable. Brought to you by The People's Space. 

Siân Harrington (00:52)

I'm Siân Harrington and today we're cutting through the noise around organisational change and leadership development to tackle a pervasive problem, our fixation on quick fixes. Or as my guest, Steve Hearsum calls them, the myth of the silver bullet. 

As business leaders, we are often seduced by the allure of quick fixes. But why are we so eager to find that one perfect solution? Even when experience tells us it doesn't exist. And more importantly, how is this obsession holding us back from real progress? If you've ever found yourself frustrated by leadership programs that promise transformation but deliver little more than superficial change, then this episode is for you. Steve challenges the very foundation of how we approach organisational change, arguing that our obsession with frameworks and methodologies often leads us away from genuine change.

 In the conversation, we explore the cultural and psychological factors that drive leaders to look for simple solutions to complex problems, and why the most effective leaders aren't the ones who cling to rigid models, but are those who embrace the discomfort of uncertainty and make space for questioning. So later on, we'll discuss why the search for certainty is actually undermining your efforts to lead effectively in a complex world, why HR in particular can fall victim to the lure of the fix-it-all solution and what HR should be doing instead. And how we can shift away from the performative nature of leadership development to focus on practices that actually change how we work together. And we throw in market managerialism, the potential of AI and the importance of reflexivity and critical thinking for good measure. 

First, let me tell you a little bit about Steve. Steve Hearsum helps leaders to understand how they show up and the impact they have in the context they operate in. His work challenges leaders to go beyond better sameness and to embrace the discomfort necessary for meaningful transformation. He's worked on leadership and OD programs with global motor manufacturers, telecoms firms, the NHS and financial services providers, among others.

Steve's a trustee and council member for the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and previously served as co-chair of the Organisation Development Network Europe. I first met Steve when he worked at Leadership Institute, Roffey Park, where I was a trustee. Steve's the author of No Silver Bullet, bursting the bubble of the organisational quick fix. So we start with unpacking exactly why complex problems require more than just ready-made solutions. 

Siân (03:42)

So Steve, delighted to have you here today. Thank you for joining us. Pleasure. As you will know, this podcast, we take issues that are broken and suggest ways to fix it. But let's get straight to the point. There aren't any quick fixes, are there? So why are we prone always to look for a quick fix when it comes to business? 

Steve (04:00)

Let's just separate two things out here. When it comes to some things, yes, there are guaranteed solutions. And if you want to call that silver bullets. Let's say you have a server that's broken down. Yes, you can unplug the broken one and plug in a new one and that's fine. What we're talking about here is complex challenges and organizations. And those are things like culture, behaviour, dealing with the unexpected or the unknown. So COVID would be a good example. You wouldn't know what to do with that or how to respond to that. It's anything to do with transformation in inverted commas. Often lots of change, human change will fall into that category. So why do we struggle with these things? 

There are a number of things that underpin the responses that people, and by people I mean typically, in the first instance senior leaders, their responses to these things. In no particular order, we're talking about the expectations that are placed on them of other leaders, of their followers, of stakeholders, shareholders, and so on and so forth. There's a speed of things, which, and yes, there is a truth today which technology makes things go faster, but this idea that we always have to be going at high speed is a myth. There's something about appropriate pace here. 

Then there's the archetypes we still live to, the idea that still leadership, we need to have heroic leaders. We see this in politics. just politics, my politics and yours aside, now Keir Starmer is primarily not initially criticized or critiqued on his policies, he's critiqued on his boringness. He doesn't fit the narrative of a heroic leader…laziness, because bluntly it's too much like hard work to think more deeply about these things and it's more uncomfortable. 

There's the whole myth of fixability, which Mark Cole and John Higgins coined as a term, which is the laziness and the assumptions we make about the nature of change. It's far easier to assume we can change something, however messy, just by whacking it with a very large metaphorical hammer of a change methodology. Fear and anxiety, the sheer existential terror of not being able to cope with not knowing what to do. And then there's other things you could weave in there like the anxiety born of privilege, the need to please that we get from our family backgrounds, stuff like that. There are many things, And that soup comes together and fuels that need for certainty. And by the way, I haven't even mentioned things like shame, ego and narcissism, which are all mixed into that as well. 

Siân (06:20)

It's extremely complex, as you said, so let's just stand. back a little bit and you've bought out a book, No Silver Bullet: Bursting the bubble of the organisational quick fix. So let's look at this concept of the silver bullet. So what exactly do you mean by that? 

Steve  (06:35)

We need to look at this first of all in terms of storytelling and myth and legend. And in different societies, historically, there are the stories and the tales of monsters, mythical monsters that need to be killed by something magical. And in the global north, in Western cultures in particular, we have the example of the vampire that is killed by the stake. We have the werewolf that is killed by the silver bullet. 

The silver bullet has become a metaphor for the thing that was guaranteed to slay that which we most fear. And I think that's a really crucial point. These are mythical beasts that are terrifying. And the correlation here to organizations is at a certain point we are terrified of what will happen if we don't actually deal with this messy thing.

The other bit of the myth just to, in the global north context, just to highlight is of course we have the Lone Ranger. And the Lone Ranger has his mythical bullet, which he uses to slay baddies. And there we have the hero with the silver bullet. So heroism is closely coupled with the idea of the silver bullet that can rid us of the thing with which we most fear. 

Siân (07:44)

We don't really look at leadership development in this way, do we? In business schools, I think you mentioned it within your book and you can clarify, but we're spending millions and millions on leadership development and the consultants. So where does that sit in this and why are we still going back to traditional ways of developing leaders? 

Steve  (08:05)

There's a longer answer, but which we don't have time for, but the shorter one. My immediate response is bluntly is because it's too flipping uncomfortable. Because if we were to sit down and go, hang on a minute. We've just spent £200,000 on a programme for the top 10 people of this organization to go to a business school. What impact has it actually had? We might not like the answer. 

And part of the problem is much leadership development is performative. And what I mean by that is that I, the consultant or facilitator, and I've done this, I've turned up at lush hotels or venues to deliver long programs. I turn up to perform in my role as the expert who knows about leadership theory and knows about change and I do my dance and the participants turn up to do their thing about being good participants to soak this stuff up. And I also possibly have my need to be liked mixed in there as well because who doesn't like to be liked? It takes a bit of self-awareness to be comfortable with the idea that is doing development of this sort. There may be moments when your clients quite frankly hate you, but actually that might be what's necessary. 

So we go through this ritual, this performative ritual where everybody feels like they've done a good job. The learners have done their learning. The facilitators have done their thing, but that's not the same thing as doing learning that is applied to the real world workplace context. And that is one of the primary problems that so much leadership development is abstracted from and separated from the work itself. In order though to move to a place where you do more practice-based development, you have to let go of the idea, for example, that there is a model of leadership that might be the answer. 

And if you then flip that back, what do clients often do? They come to you and say, what's the current thinking, the best new sexy thinking when it comes to leadership? The challenges of leadership, and you know this, Sian, that the same now in many respects now as they were 30 years ago, it's social processes and it's dealing with a human mess. And underneath all that then is our assumptions about organizing and leading that are still very rigidly attached to ways of thinking about human beings and organizing that are flawed in my view.

Siân (10:10)

And you pick up on that in the book talking about grinders, minders and finders. I liked that expression. Tell us what those are. 

Steve (10:20)

This is particularly in the context of the consulting industry. We need to just separate this out slightly. So we're talking here about the large professional services firms and large consultancies. And it's the idea that the entire business model is predicated on a need to feed the machine.

So you have the finders, the partners, typically the senior people who will go out and build relationships with large organizations and win business. You have the minders who are the managers who then run teams of grinders, which are the fungible junior consultants.

And if you read some of the quotes from former consultants in the book, and there were quite a few I spoke to, there's a consistent pattern there of people leaving the industry at the point where they go, I can't do this anymore. I cannot be told to just keep on building dependency and selling more bodies and be told either tacitly or explicitly, no, don't build capability. That's not to say there aren't really great people doing good work in these organizations but the business model itself is flawed.

Siân  (11:10)
And that goes back to helping you believe that there is a fix. I liked your point and I agree so totally with it that we do love in business a model framework, something like that. And I particularly noticed that in HR actually. So do you think HR is particularly prone to looking for that quick fix? We've had quite a few debates over the years on fads and various things like that. 

Steve (11:48)

So I think I've become far more compassionate towards my brethren in HR. When I first got into this kind of work, I don't know, 12, 15 years ago, and I became more aware of what HR did and the stories around it I think I was probably lacking in compassion. My view now is that often the HR teams or the HR departments that are most criticized, what is missed is that they are actually merely a reflection of the leadership culture within which they arise. The best HR people I observe in organizations will have the backing at senior level to be more than transactional, to ask awkward questions, to probe, to maybe experiment, but the question that is not about HR, it's a wider one about how do we do the people work in organizations? And then the problem becomes to some extent the labelling. 

So if you read any of my stuff is you'll know I'm utterly agnostic about the labels. I think we're too attached to labels of HR, all development, change, They are useful in so far as it helps our clients to categorize us around our expertise. And I will collude up to a point, but the point I'm making the book is that what we effectively have is a group of guilds and tribes that are more interested ultimately in maintaining their own identity and differentiating themselves from the other tribes than anything else. And that shows up in the shadow of some of these conversations when you'll hear somebody say, or you don't need an HR person, you an org dev person. Or you don't need an org dev person, you need an org design person. My own work and my own research, and I've had conversations many times with people and organizations is the ones who are really thinking deeply about change, they don't give a monkey's about the label. They really don't. So I think the HR thing is to go back to your point is I don't think it's about HR. think HR is a mirror both of what happens in organizations, but also wider patterns of thinking about organizing in society. 

Siân (13:50)

Yeah. And so if we can't get the quick fix what we need to do is develop skills to enable us to navigate this uncertainty and to not have all the answers. So we're looking here at areas like critical thinking, having integrity, various things like these. And these are similar skills to what a lot of people, lot of the World Economic Forum and people like that are saying, are vital in today's world, full stop. They're not easy though, are they, to develop? And we certainly, I don't think, start our education looking at this sort of area. How can we help, and especially as leaders, how can we help to develop those ourselves and to help other people develop these types of skills? 

Steve (14:25)

This is actually quite a complex area because it talks to a number of dominant assumptions about learning and knowledge and what it means to be human that span not just organizations, but the people who help organizations to learn and are learning institutions more broadly, right the way through to junior and secondary education and higher education. And so I'm just going to pull on two or three threads here, because I think it's a really wide conversation. 

So firstly, if we look at the education system, and I have a 17 year old daughter who at the moment is visiting universities, they have an education system, an HE system, which again, politics aside, but reality, the most recent government in the UK has effectively decimated anything other than the kind of scientific STEM-based subjects. Anything outside of that is just decimated. To give you just one fractal of this, last year, I believe it was, there were only 200 students from state secondary schools who got a music A level. That is how decimated the arts sector has been in education. So then ask, so what Steve, what's that matter? Because the way in which kids are taught and which young adults are taught is they're being taught to acquire knowledge, not to question. It's about knowledge consumption. So these young people are going into the world of work, being taught that actually the thing to do is to consume learning. You don't ask questions. You take things at face value. 

Let's step out into the world of organizations. What is the dominant assumption about the way we organize that permeates every single business school and every organization that does executive education and indeed the wider ecosystem of people who help organizations learn. The dominant model and theory for how we organize is we do it through market managerialism. And market managerialism assumes that power works in particular ways, that money flows in particular ways, and we organize in particular ways.

Which is why I love Martin Parker's work, who's an academic from Bristol, his book, Shut Down the Business School, because he basically posits a very simple thought experiment. He says we should basically bulldoze all the business schools because they only teach based on assumption that market managerism is the way that we organize, when in reality there are hundreds and hundreds of different ways of organizing. What do we replace them with, he suggests, schools for organizing. Now, that's never going to happen, but I'm profoundly sympathetic with the thought experiment that we are so wedded to the idea that this is the only way in which we can do things that we have, in a sense, driven ourselves down a cul-de-sac.

Siân (17:20)

Can you for people who may not know just explain a bit more about what you mean by market managerialism? 

Steve  (17:26)

In simple terms, you could say it's capitalism. It's that we run our economy and therefore our organizations in particular ways. So we have strategy departments, we have senior leaders and the assumption that in commercial organizations, but even in the public sector, that the people at the top by definition need to earn multiple amounts of money more than other people.

So just to give you an example of why that may not follow, there is a whole foods collective and distributor called Suma based in up in the North, which Martin writes about in his book. And there, and I'm assuming they still do this, everybody earns the same amount of money, whether you're moving things around the warehouse or doing marketing. Because the assumption there is we're here in a collective endeavour. So the person who's marketing the cans of beans that are going to be distributed is no more important than the person who's getting the flipping things onto the lorry to drive them around the country.

He uses another example of, I think it was a soft drinks manufacturer in Germany, where they were approached by a large organization that said, look, we've got greater buying power, so will you give us better rates? And this company went away and thought about it. They came back and said, no, actually, because you're already big enough and profitable enough. what you have helped us do is realize we need to go and offer better value to the smaller clients we have.

So there you can hear the inverse in the thinking that we don't just assume that scale is best or that power has to work in particular ways. It's a wider conversation and it is political with a small P. But in organizations, if we're talking about things like self-management and how do we create great autonomy and more empowerment for people, then you do rub up against questions of how power works and therefore our assumptions about how we organize.

Siân (19:15)

Yeah, it reminds me actually of a former publication I used to work on where having the front cover was the place to be in the market. And it was quite expensive in the day to have that. But the big boys, the really big manufacturers would say, we want to buy 12 of those a year, so we should get them at a reduced rate. And actually the policy of the business was, no, it's a set cost so that small companies have just as much ability to buy it as you do. Yeah, maybe slightly different principles. bet they don't do that anymore. 

Steve (19:50)

There's an interesting thing you've just sparked for me, Siân, which is this question about the power that large entities wield and the assumptions we make about why they are a safer bet. So if we look at the organisations that look to say, by consultancy services, the classic thing about nobody ever got fired for hiring PwC and McKinsey's etc. It's actually a very risky assumption because the assumption is that those organizations by definition will do good work, by definition are better. And that then goes back to what drives the need for certainty and why do leaders assume that certain people or things or solutions are going to work and it's more about managing their anxiety and their risk than it is about how best to address a challenge.

Siân (20:40)

And the whole debate around the arts as well, think that's really interesting. Again, I used to work in a company where we had a few publications in the educational sector. And I do remember a good lunch once with the editor of one of those. At that stage, I was arguing that university degrees should prepare you for work. And he was arguing, No, the learning and the questioning and the ability to just do that degree. Education should be seen in a wider perspective. And with hindsight, I think I was just being a bit argumentative as well, because we could be, but with hindsight, that's absolutely right. 

Steve (21:28)

Yeah, I buy this will work. And it just isn't an aside, and I have to just maintain confidentiality here. But someone I know well is just exiting a university. If universities are supposed to be bastions of knowledge about how to do things well and afford by the best and latest thinking on in this instance, how to lead and organize. It is one of the most anxiety-driven, shame-riven, totalitarian and commander control leadership cultures that I've come across in a long time. 

It is the antithesis of everything that the leadership theories and books that the in their case, their own business school, would probably be saying organizations would need to follow. So there's a huge contradiction here and an inability to actually say, what are we doing that might not be working and what is wrong here? And if we then take that into other organizations, I'll ask a simple question and I'd be interested in your answer, Siân. How many times have you heard a senior leader say in public, in their organization, I was wrong?

Siân (22:38)

I doubt I've ever heard that if I'd have to think back but I'm sure I wouldn't. And we talk a lot about the importance of vulnerability today in leadership and in business, but that's not easy coming back to your heroic leader who has to have the answers. Yeah, I think it's quite rare.

Steve (22:56)

I have, this is part of my current inquiry, which has fallen out of the back of the book. So I think vulnerability is only part of the story and I'm starting to suspect that we talk about vulnerability as a way to avoid having to talk about something more profound. Talk about how vulnerable I am. I'll share a bit of what I'm really feeling, my rawness. Actually, vulnerability is just a doorway, a window into my wider fragility. And we are quite comfortable talking about the vulnerability often of our clients. We're less comfortable talking about the vulnerability of practitioners. We're even less comfortable talking about the fragility of our clients and we sure as hell won't talk about what happens when the fragility of the practical consultant meets the fragility of the client. It doesn't get talked about. 

Siân (23:40)

Interesting. One place where we see a slightly different approach perhaps is something I alluded to earlier, which is taking that more evidence-based approach that we do see in areas like medicine, but it's always been hard to bring it into areas like leadership and HR. We seem to struggle with this and I know practitioners of evidence-based HR make a big point about the fact that you don't know all the answers and there's different places you look for that evidence and it isn't all about the numbers part of the evidence. There's a wider thing there. Why do you think that's difficult for people to do? 

Steve (24:20)

Simple terms, because it's a lot easier for me to make a decision and move based on my assumptions and not look for contra data that might mean I'm wrong if I just can go for it, then I don't have to deal with the anxiety that I might be wrong that I don't know the answer. If I go and talk to somebody who's got information that might contradict me, then I might be faced with the reality that my cunning plan is not so cunning after all. And if I locate that in one very specific, simple area, it's not simple but high profile part of the rhetoric and language around organizational change.

Let's take this whole thing about change resistance, which is really problematic. And it's the most sweet example of the thing you're talking about, because the most common pattern I see is organizations saying we have these people, this department, this function, that is resistant to change. Whereas more often than not, or many times, the people who are resistant to change, one, they care, they're not apathetic. Two, they've probably got data you haven't got. Three, have you gone and tried to find out why it is they think your cunning plan might be bonkers? And that is a lovely example of how organizations don't like evidence because if they were interested in evidence they'd have to move towards inquiry. That's not to say that sometimes people are not resistant and causing problems for reasons that might result in people having to leave an organization. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that too often the label of resistance to change is a neat way of managing my anxiety by othering others.

Siân (25:54)

We do seem very incapable of actually asking the people who do the work to come up with ideas. We put in ways to do this: feedback, surveys, whatever, but we don't really get to actual day-to-day,  we've been talking for six months about how rubbish that system is, but nobody's listening to us. All you need to do is X.

Steve (26:19)

So it reminds me of two things. One, and this is in the book, you probably watched Undercover Boss, the TV series. The single lesson from every episode is every business owner or CEO at the end basically says I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't gone and talked to the people who doing the job. Every episode, that is the single message. 

And then it also reminds me of early in my career, I worked in a big magazine publishers and we were several times trying to get in a new sales order processing system. And there was one magazine, a heavy metal magazine that totally bypassed every single process. To place your advert, Siân, for your heavy metal band, let's say you wanted a new lead singer for your band, you phoned Ken on a London number and Ken will take your credit card details and get your 30 word ad into the magazine. Bypassing all data protection stuff, bypassing all payment stuff. Your ad will probably go in but there's a good chance your money won't be taken because it's Heath Robinson. And the reason this carried on for years is because nobody is going to ask people how they are doing the work then that organization, their minds are blown when they discover this and they're horrified, but they just haven't been asking the questions. 

 Siân (27:37)

Interesting, isn't it? So that brings me to gurus. know you're not a guru. yeah, confession. I've used that word. I actually launched the HR Most Influential list when I was back at HR magazine. We did talk about our thought leaders, our gurus. It's a nice, easy short word in the world of journalism when you need to do it. And now can get the dot guru for your website if you want it. Why aren't you going to be buying here some dot guru? 

Steve (28:06)

I think the term is really problematic. We need to look at where it comes from. The genesis of thought leadership, does come, it comes from the consulting industry, largely. Large consultancies getting their senior partners or their senior consultants to write books and to write blogs that popularize and raise the profile of their ideas, their models and their approaches to change and leadership such that their clients will see them and hopefully buy. 

I would argue that there is a unconscious process there. I'm not sure the extent to which consultancies are aware they're doing this, but I would argue this is what's happening is that simultaneously what goes on is it feeds the anxiety in clients. If you do not do this or follow that, if you are not thinking about this, then you will be missing something. But don't worry, Clive, don't worry CEO Siân. If you come and talk to me as a consultancy, we will educate you, help you, bring our model to you, whatever. So it's a form of, on the one hand, you could argue managing anxiety, but simultaneously evoking anxiety. So the entire construct of the reason it came to being, I think, starts off in a poor place. 

So let's be slightly less scathing of it and say, what's the utility of it? What we're saying is that there are people here who we think have got really useful and interesting ideas and we want to somehow rather shine a light on them because it's worth others understanding them. Let's just look at the language for a moment. So thought leader, our obsession and our attraction to, in the technical term, is dominance dynamics. The need for us to place somebody into a position of dominance over us who has in the hierarchy the best ideas, is nested in the name we've chosen for the people who we value as having big ideas. So I think it's problematic for a number of reasons. 

So if we then break down a little further, some thought leaders or people who ascribe that label to themselves or have it ascribed to them are brilliant. They have got really great ideas. Listen to them, read their books. Absolutely. Sometimes people take on the label because they see it as a form of marketing and you see this on LinkedIn and places. I've done it. You do a search for thought leader in the search engine. It's fascinating what comes up. So it is about ego as well as an ego thing there. But there's also then from the client side, why would I go and look for a thought leader? What are my assumptions when I say I need to go and find one? 

So I think we need to think about thought leadership and thought leaders far more critically than we currently do and ask ourselves why somebody who is, I would say the more that they use the term and market themselves is actually a reason not to go and talk to them. That be my stance. 

Siân (30:59)

I guess, the thought leader, the guru is probably the ultimate purveyor of this silver bullet. What, if you can reveal, what do you think has been the most over-egged theory or the most destructive theory that we've had in HR or business leadership. yeah, making yourself unpopular now, I expect. 

Steve (31:22)

I was chewing on this and I think it's less individual theories. It's more patterns. And I'm not dodging the question here because genuinely I was trying to think about which ones do I find most damaging. And there are a couple I'm going to offer, but at a high level, I would say anything that presents itself as new and sexy needs to be questioned quite carefully because there is very little that is genuinely novel. So at the book launch for this thing, said, and apparently one two people said they were surprised I said it, I said, there is nothing novel in this book. If there is any novelty, it's that I may be the first person who's taken these threads together and woven this particular braid. But the ideas within it, I'm quite comfortable with that. I don't think there's anything particularly novel in what I'm saying.

The second most overhyped thing, and this is more social and political, I think is market managerialism. Not that it is per se bad, but that we still hold to the idea that the way in which we teach about organizing and leading is wedded to that as a theory. I would say, and this comes from what was provoked in my own thinking from Matthew Stewart and his book, The Management Myth. He talks about how the whole idea of management thinking is only the best part of a 100 years old. And we've got far more to learn from centuries of creativity and philosophy than we do from a 100 years of apparent professionalization of management thinking. So I would argue probably at the top of my list, I'd put management theory would be my first thing.

If I had to pick a couple of others, I would say type-based psychometrics like MBTI, things that put people into boxes but are not necessarily evidence-based. And again, not because it doesn't have utility. But because how it's been latched onto and turned into something that is now a silver bullet is the growth mindset stuff. I think it's a really nice example of this. It's a lot more complicated than it looks at face value.

And I'd add one other thing. Your question was about ideas but I give an example of one stat. One idea that causes huge damage. And that is this total idiocy of 70% of all change programmes fail because if you look at the history of that, and I encourage people listening to the podcast to go and read David Wilkinson from the Oxford Review, what he's written and said about this, he traces the history of where that comes from. And it is a total myth. 

Siân (33:54)

Talking of new and sexy, let's talk about AI. AI, in the age of AI, we might be finding that we think that AI is a silver bullet. So that could be one of the things that comes up. But on the other hand, one problem that you identify in the book,  with the reliance on consultants, is that we often don't know where to find information in our own businesses. And actually AI might be a tool to enable us to be able to do that. So where do you see AI sitting in this whole concept of fixes, bullets, information, etc? 

Steve (34:30)

Well, I think we have to separate out least two things here. Firstly, there is the technology itself and then secondly, how we construe it. So let's take the technology at face value. And parking for a moment, the whole, is it a good thing/ bad thing notion beause I think about oversimplifies it. I was reading something yesterday, which said they, they would, they'd done some research around, I think it was the accuracy of AI compared to human beings at summarizing data. And the AI was half as effective as human beings. It was about 40 odd percent to 81% that the humans were more accurate in terms of summarizing data. 

The idea that AI is accurate is questionable to some extent. However, it is getting more accurate, would seem to be a reasonable assumption to make. It has got potential. My brother who works in the legal profession, he's in the government legal service. He's said to me for ages he's just waiting for the day when the large parts of his work is redundant. He's already accepting that and he's thinking about his next career move. And AI applied to legal work I think could be really useful, sorting through the equivalent of boxes and boxes of data to find out what was going on to do with something to then enable the people doing the legal work to argue cases backwards and forwards is possibly a good thing. 

In the medical profession, there's evidence that using technology to read scans for cancer, so breast cancer or brain cancer, that AI and technology does it better because it's not as subject to individual interpretation. The concerns for me are more around the fact that we think about it as somehow neutral when it's not. And there's plenty of stuff out there about how it's just reflecting our biases and prejudices. So all that has to be worked through. To me, that's one big mess at the moment, and it's going to unfold in various different ways. 

But there's another assumption I think is really interesting. There's two, in fact, I want to pick up on. One, the assumption that AI is going to make organizations more efficient and therefore people will have more leisure time. Okay. All I've seen so far is evidence that AI is replacing human beings and human beings, there's nothing, there's no benefit to them. Their jobs are just gone. 

I'm going to give you an example of how history repeats itself and why these patterns are not new. In 1982 or three, when I was a secondary school student doing my O levels, we had the Industrial Society in my secondary school and we had representatives from unions and one or two other people. And the people from business were saying -  this was at the point where Citroen was starting to use robots to build cars - and the guy from the industrial society was basically saying, brilliant, we'll bring in more automation and robots and people will have more leisure time. And I'm a bit confused because what I see is people will, yes, be replaced by robots but unless money is then given to people to pay for them to use their leisure time they'll just be in poverty. I'm paraphrasing here. The guy from the union simply sat back and went, I couldn't have it better myself. And I think that's the conversation we're in now. It's not purely about economics. It is about universal basic income and stuff like that. 

But there's one other slight problem when we come to organizations. There's two. One is organization seeing as a silver bullet. And two, here we come to a very specific case. Last year I had to sort out power of attorney access to my mother's bank account. She's still with us, but we were sorting out power of attorney and I had to do it with two banks. So we'll give Santander the credit here because they did it brilliantly. So Santander, kudos, you handled that credibly efficiently. One of the reasons was because I could talk to a human being. The other bank has replaced every single human contact point with chat or with automated AI or bots technology. The only point you get to a talk to a human being is when you're about to go apoplectic and go and doorstep and stalk the CEO because you've been sent slowly mad. 

And what I observed was that the reason why it was such a torturous process that resulted in me getting £200 compensation, because it would be so flipping appalling, was because whilst they put the technology in, which did its job, at no point have they ensured that the people in between or indeed the technology at any point was clearly instructed to take accountability and responsibility for things when they went wrong. So stuff was falling between the cracks left, right and centre. And that I think is one of the other problems that AI is going to be seen as a fire and forget. It's not going to be thought about as an integrated part of a wider system.

 Siân (39:30)

So talking of all of this, tell me a bit about how you came up with the idea for the book. Did you have some sort of 'aha' moment in your life where you thought, goodness, look, everyone's looking for these quick fixes, these silver bullets? Was there a particular episode that you thought, that's it, I can't do anymore? 

Steve (39:46)

There were two things really that happened. When I was at Roffey Park, where you were on the board, in around about 2014, 2015, I met Pim and Joost, who founded the Corporate Rebels, at a holacracy workshop in Brighton, where I live. And got chatting to them, got to know them a bit and we invited them to Roffey and they came twice and I hosted them both times. The second time they came, at one point, one of them said to the audience, which was a mix of very experienced OD, change, HR people, consultants, coaches, the whole mix. They said, we started our journey two years ago and by the end of it, we thought we'd find the magic bullet and we realized there isn't one. And that wasn't news to me, Siân. was like, yeah, tell me something I don't know. 

But what was interesting was how the audience two or three times after that kind of went, but go on, there is one, isn't there? And I caught this. So I had a word with them during the break. said, did you notice that as well? And they said, yes. And it wasn't just me. It wasn't just my projection. They experienced this kind of questioning from the audience, but there must be an answer. And that hooked me. So I started to just reflect on why is it people know that there is no silver bullet. There is no magic bullet but they want one. What's that about? So that started my inquiry. 

The second, I suppose the thing that then accelerated it and deepened the inquiry was one of the early interviews I did was with Graham Curtis, who's also ex-Roffey now recently left. And his PhD, which is worth a read if you like reading long PhD theses, but he's going to be publishing  a book soon, I believe. So people can look out for that. He talks about this idea of functional collusion, which is shame and anxiety driven decision-making, driven as it is by patterns of shame and anxiety that exist in human systems. And this idea of functional collusion really energized me because suddenly it gave me something to hang my hypothesis off. Why is it that people are still attracted to quick fixes and simple solutions? It's because they cannot bear coping with and not knowing with the anxiety and the shame. It offered me an explanation for it. And so that really was the genesis of it. 

Siân (42:03)

Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. I do some work with the improv guy, Neil Mullurkey and you've probably seen him at Roffey cause he's done some- I've actually seen him. I've heard of his stuff. Yeah. And again, a lot of that is around that uncertainty and being put into positions where you just don't know and you're uncertain and how you can harness that. You actually have to accept that and how you can use it. So I think in today's business environment, we're seeing more and more uncertain people, perhaps because AI is coming in and technology and things are changing in that respect. And so we're going to face more and more of this. And it'll be interesting to see if people can take and understand that or whether we're going to be looking for more and more silver bullets.

Steve (42:50)

One of the people who was deeply influential in the book was Simon Cavicchia. And one of the things Simon talks about is how moments of self-doubt and not knowing and being uncertain are just part of everyday life. We need to normalize this. The idea that leaders are not going to be anxious or not going to be uncertain or going to always have the answer is frankly absurd and denies both reality and humanity. Part of my intent in writing the book, if nothing else is I hope it encourages people to get a little bit more used to the idea that they're not perfect and that there are for some things, or many things actually, no silver bullets, but that also creates an opportunity.

Siân (42:46)

Normalizing it is one thing and, as we've come to the end of the podcast, obviously you can't give us any quick fixes or silver bullets, but I  ust wondered, could you sum up maybe three things people could do or questions they should ask to help us to move our mindset away from this temptation of always seeking that silver bullet? 

 Steve (44:00)

Yeah, I'm going offer you three things plus an implication. So I'm going to stretch it slightly. So the first one is we need to develop reflexivity. And I'm making the distinction here between reflexivity and critical thinking and critical reflection. It's all very well being critically reflective and going and spending a weekend gazing on your navel and coming to the conclusion that the reason you're not a very good consultant or you're a terrible leader is because of your relationship, say with your father or something or whatever, you've done the work. But if you don't go and apply that and then go back to your reflective space and try and make sense of what happened, even if it went terribly, then it doesn't really matter how deeply critical reflective you've been. 

So reflexivity is about doing the critical reflection and critical thinking, then going and trying stuff, seeing what happens, however terribly or wonderfully it goes, then coming back, inquiring again and going through cycles of inquiry, deepening your understanding of how you sharpen the world and the impact you have. So that's the first thing. But this is why it links to practice. Practice-based development requires reflexivity. It's why I bang on about it. 

The second thing is we need to develop more both-and thinking. If you look at political discourse and the discourse in the media, everything is binary. You either for something or against something. We have to take positions on everything. There was a really lovely program on Radio 4 a few years ago, which is all about how it's not okay to be ambivalent about anything anymore. So I think we need to not only cultivate both-and, we also need to be far more understanding and able to hold nuance and ambivalence. I'm ambivalent about a lot of things and I'm quite comfortable saying that but it's not actually something that we typically talk about. 

The third thing is this requires we have to become far better at asking questions of ourselves and each other and asking questions that are both open-ended but also potentially quite discomforting. I talk in my work about creating useful discomfort in service of learning and I do that through asking questions and I'm known for being able to and being willing to go to that level of discomfort because my experience is anything that you, Siân, I'd be surprised if you say anything different. expect anything you've learned about yourself and your life has probably been preceded by a bit of a wriggle and a wrestle beforehand. Asking questions that create the conditions for that. And so the implication of all of this, and you used a word earlier on, is we have to be prepared to experiment. We have to be prepared to take risks. And the only failed experiment is one you don't learn from.

Siân (46:36)

Great way to end. Thank you very much. A lot to think about, but I think given that we know we're spending, I think it was something like over 3 billion on leadership development, we talk about productivity not moving. We talk about other measures, diversity and inclusion, not changing much. Everything we're investing in, we're not getting results. So if anything, that shows the quick fix approach hasn't worked. So thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed the discussion. Thank you for having me. 

 Siân (47:07)

That was Steve Hearsum on the dangers of the quick fix and why leadership development needs a fundamental rethink. If you take just one thing away from today's episode, let it be this meaningful change doesn't come from chasing the latest trend or methodology. comes from embracing complexity, asking difficult questions and being willing to sit with uncertainty.

So thank you for tuning into this week's episode. If you found our discussion insightful, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow me on LinkedIn at Sian Harrington, The People Space for more thought-provoking conversations on the future of work. You can also explore more insights and resources at www.thepeoplespace.com. This episode was produced by Nigel Pritchard and you've been listening to Works Not Working, Let's Fix It. See you next time.

 

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