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Leadership transformation consulting looks superficially like a scam: fake yoga, brain words, and "it's very hard to measure impact". I left the industry a cynic. But it does work, and I think the reason is so simple that it almost doesn't matter how stupid it is.
Leadership transformation consulting looks superficially like a scam: fake yoga, brain words, and “it’s very hard to measure impact”. I left the industry a cynic. But it does work, and I think the reason is so simple that it almost doesn’t matter how stupid it is.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/leadership-consulting-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/leadership-consulting.
Stuff I mentioned:
Related stuff:
A brain scientist talking about (better) patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. One pattern, one podcast—you see if it works for you. The btrmt. lectures, with Dr Dorian Minors. (btrmt.—said "betterment.")
Welcome to the Betterment Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and
if there's one thing I've learnt as a brain scientist, it's that
there's no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there
are patterns. Patterns of thought, of feeling, patterns of action,
because that's the job of the brain: creating the patterns that
gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life. So let me
teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you choose if it
works for you.
From cynic to something sweeter
Before I came to teach here at the Military Academy at Sandhurst, I
spent a bit of time doing leadership consulting. I was training to
be a brain scientist, doing my PhD at Cambridge, and [neuroscience
washing](https://btr.mt/analects/neuroscience-confidence-trick) was,
and frankly still is, very trendy. So they liked me to come into
their workshops and their retreats and wow everybody with brain
words. And because leadership development—or leadership
transformation—is really just a fancy way of saying behavioural
intervention, and I trained in psychology, eventually they started
getting me to sort out their methods and their theories of change as
well.
All throughout that process, I became very cynical about leadership
transformation. I'll talk about it in great detail today, and I'll
link to an article
where I spent a lot of time denigrating it, because honestly it
seems like a bunch of fluff, superficially. I left the enterprise
very sceptical.
But now I've come back to teaching it here at Sandhurst, and my
thoughts have developed a little bit. I think it's worth talking
about again since my last articles on it, because I'm a little bit
sweeter on it. And in particular, I'm sweeter on it because I think
the solutions to leadership development, leadership transformation,
are so simple that it almost doesn't matter if it's superficial.
So that's what I want to talk about today. The magic of leadership
consulting, fluffy or not. Let's get into it.
Three kinds of consulting
We ought to start off by defining leadership consulting. It's a kind
of management consulting, and there are three rough categories of
management consulting you can think of when you hear of firms like
McKinsey or Bain or Accenture. Three categories of things that they
do for businesses.
The first one is the most tangible. You have operations consulting.
It's a technical delivery. You might say something like, "I don't
have enough money to run my company." And an operations consultant
would come in and say things like, "Fire these 50 people," or,
"Refinance these assets." And then they'll smile at you and point
out that now your cash flow is much better, and you'll use some of
that improved cash flow to pay them. That's operations consulting.
Very tangible, very practical outcomes.
The next category is strategy consulting, which is a bit more
abstract. Here you might say something like, "My product isn't
selling very well anymore." And strategy consultants would come in
and say things like, "Well, why don't you market your product in
this new way, to this new market segment?" Or, "Why don't you
rebrand, so you become relevant again?" Or it could bleed into
operations: "Your supply chain produces widgets for this target
market, but that same supply chain could also produce widgets for
this other one. So with the same stuff, you could produce two
products for two markets." And whatever they've advised you to do,
they'll smile at you and point out that now you're making heaps more
money from a bunch more people, and you'll use that money to pay
them.
So, two categories. Operations consulting: very tangible, very
practical benefit to the company. Strategy consulting: a little bit
more abstract, but still a practical benefit to the company. And
then you have leadership transformation, or leadership development
consulting, which in comparison seems like a little bit of a scam.
Because you're going to come to these people and say, "My leadership
team is fucked. They don't know what they're doing, or they don't
have a vision, or they're not leading very well." And unlike the
other two categories, where they tell you to do things that make you
more money, this group don't often measure what it is that they're
doing. You'll ask them—like I've asked many times—"How do you
measure impact?" And they'll say, like they're all reading from the
same textbook, "It's very hard to measure impact."
So while the other groups will smile and point out how much money
they're making you, and you'll use some of that money to pay them,
these people you just pay, and you hope that your leaders are
better.
Superficially fluffy
If you've ever paid attention to any trade magazines—the Harvard
Business Review, or the Atlantic, or some of the pieces in things
like The Economist or the Financial Times—you'll find the
superficially fluffy aspects of leadership development consulting
everywhere. Concepts I complain about a lot, and I'll link some
examples because I don't want to spend too long on these old
complaints of mine: concepts like [emotional
intelligence](https://btr.mt/analects/overengineering-calming-down),
or [the chimp brain, the lizard
brain](https://btr.mt/analects/overengineering-calming-down-lecture),
[the amygdala being the fear centre of the
brain](https://btr.mt/analects/the-amygdala-is-not-the-fear-centre),
[evolutionary narratives about how we're poorly designed for the
modern world](https://btr.mt/analects/atavism-isnt-the-answer). All
of this stuff comes from the leadership transformation world. And
all of it, once you penetrate past the surface, is superficially
fluffy.
So the question is: why do people pay for this kind of material
when, unlike the other two categories of consulting, this one has no
obvious financial benefit?
A narrative for problems nobody can solve
I've written about this before, but the reasons are manifold. The
first is that leadership transformation actually has a pretty clear
value proposition for organisations undergoing any kind of complex
change, any kind of uncertainty, or facing complexity.
I used to work in particular in [sustainability
transformation](https://btr.mt/analects/circularity-of-sustainability)
consulting. Sustainability isn't as trendy as it was just a couple
of years ago—2021, 2022, I guess. Back then, everybody really cared
about sustainability. And it didn't matter whether the business
leaders cared, because all the other stakeholders did. Governments
wanted them to be more sustainable. Special interest groups and
consumers wanted sustainability from the businesses they bought
from. Shareholders too. And even to recruit and keep top talent
internally, you'd often need some sort of narrative around
sustainability. So just pragmatically, it was something businesses
had to engage with.
It's different now, for some reason. Even as very scary reports are
being put out by, for example, [the government in the
UK](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nature-security-assessment-on-global-biodiversity-loss-ecosystem-collapse-and-national-security),
which I'll link to, the public narrative is very quiet about climate. I have
some ideas about that. I might relegate those to a footnote.
But it's a perfect example of complexity, because even when
everybody did care, business leaders wouldn't know what to do.
Firstly, because working out what sustainable changes a business
could make that would actually have an impact is something nobody
really had a good idea about. The features contributing to the
climate crisis, and the facets of social inequality that feed into
this kind of problem, are complex dynamical systems that are really
not very well understood. So for business leaders trying to solve
this problem, there aren't even very many good questions, never mind
good answers to those questions.
And secondly, the expectations of any multi-stakeholder group will
often be in tension. This is a good example. Governments want
sustainability for certain reasons, which are not the same as the
reasons consumers might want sustainability, which is not the same
as what top talent might be interested in. And all of these things
might be at odds with the financial interests of shareholders and
the business itself, even if those groups also wanted
sustainability. They might not want the same kind of sustainability,
even if each was a useful, sustainable direction to move in.
So it's a very complex issue for leaders to grapple with. A lack of
direction from the problem of sustainability itself, and then the
troublesome desires of all these different stakeholders, meant that
even if business leaders tried to implement some sort of package of
sustainable change, it was going to come out lightweight and
unsatisfactory.
Now, the point of leadership transformation consulting, in the face
of a problem like this, isn't to solve sustainability as a hard
problem, because there aren't many people doing a good job of that.
What it can do is help leaders get a handle on a narrative that
gives them a starting point. The leaders might not know exactly what
they're trying to achieve, but with the help of leadership
transformation consulting they can come up with a narrative that
helps them move forward. It helps them gather the organisation
around a vision of the future and start moving in a direction,
communicating with stakeholders, making sure they can move towards
answers as and when they find them.
That has its own sort of value. It's not a financial value, but it
is a felt value for the leaders of an organisation. They're facing a
challenge, and they step away from an intervention like this with a
capability to address the most important aspect of that problem:
how are we going to lead people in the face of an uncertain future?
All of this without necessarily knowing what the answer to that
uncertain future is.
Education as entertainment
In addition to that, you also have entertainment value. Again, I
have an article on this
that I'll link to, but a lot of education is now just
entertainment. Think of the pop psychology books that populate
airport bookstores. The pop psychology I'm talking about is
exemplified in the work of Malcolm Gladwell, who, for those who
don't know, is a journalist who writes fantastic narratives that
trigger these sort of aha moments in you when you're reading his
books.
For example, one of his books is called
Outliers, and the idea is
that there's no such thing as talent, really. Take all the people we
think are talented. Bill Gates is an example he uses: he seems like
an outlier, a technological prodigy. But when you investigate Bill
Gates, you find he had this long and deep and unusual history of
access to technology before everybody else did. At a young age, he
was working with computers through—I can't remember—his
father's company or something like this. So actually, it's not so
much that Bill Gates was talented, but that he had opportunities
other people didn't. And the book goes through multiple examples of
this, demolishing our idea of talent.
A lot of leadership transformation consulting is like this kind of
airport psychology book. And there's a sociologist, Professor [Murray
Davis](https://doi.org/10.1177/004839317100100211), who wanted to come up with a sociology of the
interesting. He
tells us exactly what's going on in this kind of airport psychology
book, which is the same thing you see in a lot of leadership
transformation consulting.
What Murray Davis says is that the theories of the world—the
academic theories of the world—that we find interesting aren't
necessarily the theories that are true. The theories we find
interesting are the ones that violate our weakly held beliefs.
They're hot takes on stuff we don't really care that much about. And
the reason these are interesting is that if I tell you something you
already know, you're not really going to be impressed by it. You'll
just nod along and forget what I told you; you already knew it. And
if I tell you something that violates your strongly held beliefs,
you're going to have a hard time accepting what I'm saying. But if I
tell you something that shocks you—it violates your expectations,
but you don't really care that much about it—then you're going to
walk away with an aha moment. This feeling that you know something
new, that your view of the world has changed. And that is the stuff
we find interesting.
That's the Malcolm Gladwell secret sauce, and it completely
saturates the leadership transformation world. What these
organisations do is take leaders away, make them do some fake yoga,
some fake meditation, some strange and bizarre activities, and feed
them this kind of violation of their weakly held beliefs. So they
come away feeling smarter, as well as having this capability to
communicate around whatever complex issue they need to communicate.
It's like [the company theatre
pass](https://btr.mt/analects/education-is-entertainment#management-consulting-as-modern-theatre),
I think I wrote in a previous article. And that's worth paying for, I
think.
A charisma-based product
The last thing I'll point out, and it's related to these other two
features of the landscape, is that leadership transformation is
almost entirely charisma-based. I said this before, but nobody was
really measuring what they were doing. People will talk about
measurement these days. They'll often do culture measurements, for
example—culture being the sort of general bin that organisations
put problems in when they don't know what the problems are. If you
don't know what's wrong with your organisation, it's a culture
problem. So a lot of these leadership transformation firms will try
to do culture measurements, but serious measurement is uncommon.
So nobody had a methodology that anyone could say worked, because
nobody was measuring it. What all these methodologies were, were
things people believed in. And they believed in them because of the
leaders of these leadership transformation firms. I worked for a
firm called Imagine, which was founded in part by Paul Polman, this
sort of sustainability guru, ex-CEO of Unilever. And what people
were buying was less the Imagine method and more Paul Polman and the
other co-founders. They were buying the charisma of these people.
And again, I think that's worth paying for. You want to be charmed.
You want to see yourself reflected in the other. You want to benefit
from the successes of the people you look up to. I'm not saying any
of these things are a bad thing.
And yet it works
Why I'm saying all of this is because, if all of it is true, then
leadership transformation shouldn't work. It should just be a
product of superficial fluffiness that solves these three problems,
and it shouldn't actually help leaders be better leaders.
What's interesting is that it does. It does work, despite the
fluffiness. It does work despite the fact that it doesn't solve the
problems; it just gives people a language to talk about them. And it
does work despite the fact that nobody's really measuring it, not
within their organisations. But when you look across the board at
leadership development, you find that leaders are better leaders.
That surprised me. And it surprised me until I got here and started
studying it in earnest. I think I know why, and I think the solution
to this strange paradox is actually very simple. That's what I want
to talk about today.
Development is not transformation
There's something important to tease apart here, because there's a
distinction between leadership development and transformation
consulting.
Skill transfer on leadership training is pretty good. And that
doesn't rely on any of the stuff I just talked about: whether people
like the course, whether they're inspired by the charisma of the
trainers, whether they get these aha moments or not. I'll [link to
some literature](https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000241) on this, but leaders become better leaders when
they're trained in leadership, typically. You could probably bet on
that result, as long as you keep in mind the standard caveats. The
further they get from the classroom, the more the effects of
training shrink. The more open the skills, the more sensitive they
are to the work environment: if you're working on emotional
intelligence, or visionary leadership, or something like that, the
actual work context is going to have a huge effect on how much that
new skill transfers to the workplace. And of course, it's probably
true that the leadership programmes that offer themselves up for
this kind of measurement are going to be more effective than the
ones that didn't agree to be measured. But all of that aside,
training leadership skills is, in general, very doable and very
measurable.
The transformation side of things is a more oblique proposition,
because transformation consulting is not so much teaching leaders
how to do leadership as teaching leaders how to be different kinds
of leaders. Transformative leaders, inspiring leaders, visionaries.
This kind of collective vision, discovery and delivery I was talking
about at the beginning. These programmes are the ones that
accumulate the kind of fluff people notice. I'll link here to a
couple of trade magazine pieces
(HBR,
McKinsey) that demonstrate what I'm talking
about, because I'm not the only person who's noticed the fluffiness.
You take a group of leaders, whatever their skill set, who are
facing a problem. You put them somewhere. Something happens to them
to help them gather around a collective vision of the future. And
then they come back into their organisation and they themselves are
inspired. They themselves feel more capable of handling that complex
and uncertain future, irrespective of their individual leadership
skills. That's the distinction I think is important.
If that's what leadership transformation consulting is about, then
there are two very coarse mechanisms that explain why it doesn't
matter how fluffy it is. That explain how this kind of extraordinary
change happens very naturally when you take a bunch of people away
for what's essentially a grown-up summer camp. These transformation
retreats. And that's what I want to talk about, because I think a
lot of people could benefit from using these two things to solve
really complicated problems—in their organisations, but also in
their personal lives, with friends, with family.
The nervous system is an input–output machine
The first one, because I'm a brain scientist, is to me the most
compelling. It's one of the basic properties of the nervous system.
Nervous systems include the brain, but I'm talking about the nerves
throughout your entire body: the peripheral nervous system, this
more ancient system of the spine coordinating your reflexes, and your
central nervous system, this more evolutionarily recent system
perched on top of the spinal cord that does much more complicated
stuff. The whole thing is, at its core, an input–output machine. It
takes the environment in through the senses, through the
perceptions. It draws that in through the spinal cord, up into the
brain. It does some kind of processing and transforms that input
into an appropriate, evolutionarily adaptive response. You see
something being thrown at your head; those impulses come into your
nervous system and get transformed into the motor response to dodge
out of the way.
And almost all human behaviour—I can't confidently say all human
behaviour, because we can't explain all human behaviour, or even
all animal behaviour—but a substantial proportion of it is this
transformation of input, what comes in through your senses, into
output, how you behave, how you respond as a result.
A lot of the nervous system's architecture is designed to make this
process really, really streamlined. When you practise something,
what you're doing is practising a certain transformation until it
becomes really rigid. You can see this in the development of white
matter in the brain. Think of the rough distinction between grey
matter—neurons, nerve cells, the actual things that send messages
to prompt your responses—and white matter, these sort of fatty
cells that live all around the grey matter, all around the neurons,
and are responsible for speeding up processing. Helping things work
faster, respond faster, not get interrupted. What you see is that the
more you practise something, the more white matter grows around that
particular route from input to output. What's happening is the brain
is saying, "This thing we do all the time—let's designate a bunch
of infrastructure to it, to help that thing work faster and better."
Which is one of the reasons [changing habits is so
hard](https://btr.mt/analects/say-do-gap). You have all this
infrastructure around your old way of doing things.
We love to change the mapping
So this is one of the fundamental properties of the brain:
transforming input into output, taking perceptions and making them
into actions. And what we love to do, to try to change how we
behave, is to intervene on this transformation of input to output.
That mapping of perception to action. We like to try to change the
ways we think and respond to stimuli.
Go back to Stoicism, for example. According to
Epictetus, we're
disturbed not by things, but by our judgements about them. And what
we should try to do is stop judging, accept things the way they are.
That's the basic Stoic promise. I mention Stoicism not just because
it's trendy at the moment, but because it's the ancestor of one of
the most dominant forms of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioural
therapy. Ellis and Beck both [acknowledged the
debt](https://www.routledge.com/The-Philosophy-of-Cognitive-Behavioural-Therapy-CBT-Stoic-Philosophy-as-Rational-and-Cognitive-Psychotherapy/Robertson/p/book/9780367219147) to Stoicism that
informs CBT, and CBT is much the same thing. You go to the CBT
therapist and they'll say, "You have these automatic patterns of
thinking and behaving, and what we want to do is intervene on them
and change them." Your automatic cognitions, your automatic
behaviours: how can we change these things?
The related Buddhist-inspired revolution of [mindfulness-based
practices](https://btr.mt/analects/meditation-lecture) is the same
thing. You sit, you observe the way your patterns of thought happen,
and you try to distance yourself from them so that you can adopt new
patterns. Whether you're talking about meditation or more new-age
retreats, it's often focused on this: observe the transformation of
input to output, and see if you can change it.
Psychodynamic therapy is very similar: reinterpreting present
experience in light of its origins. Where did it come from? Why does
it lead us to behave this way? How can we change that? Or, outside
the therapeutic modalities, think of stress inoculation or growth
mindset or resilience programmes, which are super popular in the
military and the high-performance space that surrounds it. A lot of
the stuff I'm getting inundated with now looks at how these things
affect you, how they produce these automatic behaviours, and how you
can concentrate on the opportunities for growth and resilience
rather than responding the ways you're accustomed to.
It's even the point of pharmacotherapy. SSRIs and anxiolytics
literally adjust the transformation of inputs: you're chemically
changing the processing of your nervous system so that it produces
different responses. And I could go on. Reframing, gratitude
journalling, affirmations, critical thinking and [moral reasoning
training](https://btr.mt/analects/practical-ethics) like the lectures
I deliver, media literacy. Any of this stuff is trying to help you
adjust the way your perceptions are transformed by the nervous
system into responses.
What's interesting is that in all of these domains, it's really not
very effective. It's very hard to teach, and it's very hard to get
effective change. I'm going to have to link some references, or at
least give you an AI prompt or something so you can interrogate it
yourself, because it can be kind of complicated to compare
methodologies. I've listed a whole bunch of intervention programmes,
and comparing them all is not straightforward. But if you'll allow
me to be a little rough, you're looking at something like 10 to 20
point changes over things like placebos or ordinary care, or
whatever already existed. What that means is something like one to
two people in every ten will get better at whatever they're trying
to get better at because of this kind of intervention, who wouldn't
have if you'd just left them alone. And in psychotherapies
specifically, something like half will relapse within a couple of
years. I don't have an intuition about what this looks like in
non-psychotherapeutic interventions—coaching or education or
resilience training or whatever—but I imagine it's going to be very
similar to the psychotherapeutic outcomes.
So we love to intervene on this transformation of input to output.
It's the main thing we try to do when we try to change human
behaviour, even though it's very difficult to do.
Change the inputs instead
And there is an easier solution. I just think we're kind of scared
of it. The easiest solution is that we could just change the inputs.
We could just change the environments that are producing these
outputs. Rather than trying to change the transformation of input to
output, you just change the input altogether, and the input–output
mapping starts to break down. You have to develop new ways of
thinking and behaving, because the inputs are different.
This can be remarkably effective. Think of rehab, for example. If
you look at any statistics around rehab, while people are in rehab
it's incredible at changing behaviour. Or think of [Alcoholics
Anonymous](https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD012880.pub2), which beats cognitive behavioural therapy—the most
popular form of therapy—by something like 25 per cent for keeping
people sober for a year. And the difference between AA and CBT, even
though AA isn't necessarily clinically informed, is that AA works
mostly by keeping you going to meetings. You've got new people, new
places, new routines that are being maintained. This changed
environment persists, and that's the thing that helps maintain the
new behaviours.
You can find a lot of examples where just changing the environment
seems to be an extraordinarily effective way to change behaviour.
There's a famous example: [the Katrina
parolees](https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240907400308). I'll link to this in
the show notes—a 2010 paper or thereabouts. People's
neighbourhoods were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and parolees who
moved away as a result reoffended less than parolees who stayed. A
similar programme in the US, [Moving to
Opportunity](https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1103216), gave families
vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighbourhoods, and what you saw
were extraordinary changes in obesity and diabetes. And children, I
believe, ended up earning substantially more as adults than the ones
who didn't move. I'll find some links to those so you can double-check
my work.
One of the things we teach here is [the Good Samaritan
study](https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034449), a
famous study from the '70s. The experimenters put a slumped person
in a hallway where they knew seminarians on their way to their next
class would see them—a person who obviously needed help. And
whether these seminarians stopped to help depended mainly on whether
they were in a hurry, not on their religiosity. What's kind of funny
is that they were even on their way to talk about the Good
Samaritan. Now, I don't know if that study survived the replication
crisis. It's notable that I don't know of anything like it since
1973. But the general effect remains. When you look at experiments
that have these outsized impacts, it has nothing to do with the
intervention. And even some of the problems with the [replication
crisis](https://btr.mt/analects/the-scientific-ritual) come from the
fact that what was being changed was not the intervention, but the
environment.
So changing the environment is an extraordinary way to transform
people's behaviour, because it means those input–output mappings
have to change. Rather than concentrating on the transformation of
input to output, if we just concentrate on producing a different
environment, of course you're going to see change.
What the retreat is really doing
I think that's what leadership transformation retreats are
fundamentally based on. You're taking a bunch of leaders out of an
environment that forces them into these deeply trodden input–output
mappings, these cultural patterns of behaviour that are very strong.
Organisational culture, what it means to be a leader, people looking
up to them. And the more senior you are as a leader, the more deeply
entrenched these patterns of behaviour are.
But you take these people and you put them somewhere new. On the top
of a mountain, sitting on a sheepskin, as we used to do at Imagine.
Or even just a conference room in a different city, a different
place. And you get them to do different stuff. This fake yoga, this
fake meditation, stuff they don't ordinarily do. Take their socks
off and touch grass. Weird stuff. Superficially, it all looks very
fluffy. But by changing the environment in such a dramatic fashion,
you're going to get different ways of responding to the world.
Different patterns of thinking and behaving, different input–output
mappings. And so long as you're any kind of good facilitator, and you
can direct those changes towards the problem they're trying to solve,
it would be very surprising to me if you didn't come up with new
ways of thinking and behaving around that problem. Whatever they
were stuck on, they're much less likely to be stuck as a result.
Why it doesn't stick
And then there's the difficulty of leadership transformation. One of
the big critiques is that it doesn't stick. It doesn't stick around
and make an impact over the long term. In fact, that's one of the
reasons it's so hard to measure: measuring over the long term is
really not in the interests of leadership transformation companies.
And if I'm right, and all leadership transformation is this kind of
environmental change, it's fully explained by this.
You take people to rehab, and they're remarkably successful at
recovering from their addiction. But as soon as you put that person
back into the old environment, whatever fragile web of new patterns
of thinking and behaving they've developed is completely demolished
by the old inputs produced in the old environment, and so by the old
input–output mappings. It's the same with leadership
transformation. It's the same with whatever yoga retreat you go away
for. It's the same with training transfer from programmes. The
insights you generate in these places, the new patterns of thinking
and behaving, wither on the vine, because they're completely
overridden by whatever that old environment produces.
So you need to capture that somehow. You need to create a framework
in which those kinds of fragile insights are maintained over the
long term. I'll talk about that in a bit, because I think one of the
reasons I've been successful in delivering that kind of change, in
the organisations I've been a part of and in the stuff I teach here
at Sandhurst, is just as comprehensible. But I'll talk about that in
a moment.
I just want to point out that this trick of changing someone's
environment to transform their behaviour, to help them develop new
input–output mappings, is possibly the most powerful tool in the
arsenal of human behaviour change. And if it's the reason leadership
transformation can be so superficially fluffy and nonsensical and
still deliver outcomes, then it almost doesn't matter what you do.
You just need to make sure you direct those interrupted patterns of
thought and behaviour—the result of changing the environment,
changing those inputs—towards the right thing, and you'll come up
with some sort of insight,
some sort of solution to the problem you face.
But then you've got to capture it.
Identity leadership
[The article this podcast is based
on](https://btr.mt/analects/leadership-consulting) details the
process by which it was captured: my generalisation of the pattern I
thought worked in capturing these kinds of insights and actually
delivering them after the retreat was over. What's interesting, as I
return to it, is how neatly it overlaps with my more general
interest in destructive cults
and mundane cults, as well
as my specific interest here at Sandhurst in ethical leadership and
the [catastrophic group
behaviour](https://btr.mt/analects/catastrophic-leadership-is-hard)
that so concerns the military. So I'll link to the previous article,
but I want to summarise it in new terms here.
I want to talk about a fairly new academic concept called [identity
leadership](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2014.05.002). It's a contested concept, but I think it's a very useful
frame for thinking about how groups encourage each other to maintain
behaviours, how those behaviours and norms of group behaviour can
change, and how we can intervene on these things to produce—in the
military, ethical behaviour, but outside the military, just
on-target behaviour. The kind of things you want people around you
to do. And the way you do that is by identifying the social identity
of the group.
The concept of [social
identity](https://btr.mt/analects/social-identity-theory) comes from
a deeply technical literature, and I don't want to get into the
weeds, but the concept is fairly intuitive at its most superficial
level. Our social identity is who we are when we're a member of a
group: who we see ourselves as being, who we want to be. What kind
of person would be a part of this group, and how much of that kind
of person do we want to be? It's different from our personal
identity. Our personal identity is very messy, and it's changeable
from group to group; we change the aspects of ourselves that we
represent to each group. But a social identity is who we are and who
we want to be, and it's reflected by the groups we're a part of.
What identity leadership talks about is that some members of a group
end up embodying this generic sense of who people want to be when
they're part of the group. There are certain people we look to, when
we're in a group, to figure out how to communicate that we're a part
of it. In the military, this is often the non-commissioned officers
rather than the officers themselves. In the workplace, it's the
people you go to talk to over the water cooler, the popular ones. In
high school, it's the trendsetters. You know who these people are.
Whoever it is in your group that you look to, to figure out how to
be. The people you look to and say, "If I want to be more of a
member of this group, I need to be more like that person." That's
the identity leader.
And identity leaders have no obligation to be the actual formal
leaders of a group. In the military they're often not: platoon
commanders and command responsibilities rotate through in a way that
doesn't allow them to embody the identity of really local groups.
It's often the case in organisations too, particularly big ones,
where leaders are rotated from country to country or business unit
to business unit. Identity leaders are people who are more stable,
more plugged into the local goings-on. The people everybody looks up
to. And what's interesting about identity leadership is that these
people are the ones who determine the norms of behaviour that
everybody follows.
What cults teach us about identity leaders
I want to take this back to cults to make it really concrete,
because I have a series on what I call [successful
prophets](https://btr.mt/analects/successful-prophets-lecture). We
love, in destructive cults in particular, to focus on the
narcissistic, charismatic leader. We say, "How could people have
been led so astray, if it wasn't for this supernaturally charismatic
leader who doesn't care about people and makes them do his bidding
until they kill themselves, or commit murder, or do a bunch of
crimes?" And when you look very closely at these groups, the leader
actually had nothing to do with it.
What really happened is that the leader, or the values the leader
represents, gets taken up by a bunch of individuals in the group. A
bunch of people who represent those values and hide the terrible
behaviour of the leader themselves. And in doing this, they embody
the social identity of the group. They become identity leaders. They
become the people everybody looks to for how you should think and
behave. The leader themselves is almost secondary, because it's not
the leader people are paying attention to. It's the emblem the
leader represents—the values the leader represents—embodied in
this second group of people, often a cadre of individuals deepest in
the organisation. And they're the ones who create the behavioural
norms that end up with these cults engaging in such destructive
behaviour. The successful prophet is the leader who's sublimated
themselves to the identity of the group. I'll link to an article and
a podcast on that too. But the point is that the formal leader is
not what's important. The identity leader is what's important.
Making the change stick
So, back to the point. How do you make a behavioural change—a
pattern of thinking and behaving formed on one of these leadership
retreats—stick?
Well, you have to identify the identity leaders among the group, the
ones everybody looks to for how to think and behave. And all you need
to do is get these people invested in the idea. In my [previous
article](https://btr.mt/analects/leadership-consulting), I talked
about my sort of mercenary approach to sustainability, because often
these business leaders don't particularly care about sustainability.
They're doing this sustainable development leadership transformation
retreat because they've been told to—by the government, by their
shareholders, by somebody important. They've decided they need to do
something on sustainability, even if they don't care. So you need to
find a reason to make them care.
With sustainability, it was often as simple as connecting it with
their own child's passion for recycling. Or emphasising the space
for competition with their peers, by being the better sustainable
leader. Or finding out whatever hobby they're into—cycling,
running—and igniting their passion for the natural world through
that hobby. Getting them invested in the idea of sustainability for
whatever personal reasons motivate them. And all you're looking for
is that aha moment. That Malcolm Gladwell moment of making something
click for them: why this complex issue should matter to them, why
they should buy into it.
And once you have them bought into the problem at hand, you've taken
them from somebody who's been sent away on a retreat to somebody
who's interested in what's happening at the retreat. Then you have
the means of making the behaviour stick, because these are the
people everybody looks to for the norms of behaviour. All you have to
do is facilitate that personal insight into some kind of collective
vision. Get all of these influential nodes, these identity leaders,
with their personal reasons to care, and simply have them talk to
each other until they settle on some new norm of behaviour. Some new
norm of talking about this problem that satisfies their own personal
interests, but also lets them communicate that message to the
people who aren't there at the retreat.
What you're doing here is protecting this fragile new way of
thinking and behaving from the normative culture it's going to
return to. These environment changes fall apart when people go back,
because the old environment takes over. The old patterns of thinking
and behaving take over. But if you make the people responsible for
that normative culture back home care about this new way of thinking
and behaving, then you're going to have that old system adopt the
new way of thinking and behaving, and it's much more likely to
survive.
I'm not sure how well I explained that, if I'm honest, but what I'll
do is wrap things up and then let you go.
Two ingredients
I set up this podcast talking about how fluffy and superficially
silly leadership transformation consulting seems. Something I've
written about before, complained about a lot. An industry I stepped
out of very sceptical and cynical about, but one I'm becoming
sweeter on as I start to teach leadership here at Sandhurst, as I
start to re-engage with high-performance organisational cultures.
And the reason I'm becoming sweeter on it is that I think the core
of transforming the behaviour of groups—this thread I've been
tugging on over the last few articles and podcasts—is actually
extraordinarily simple, and relies almost not at all on people's
individual skill at delivering transformation, or on the activities
they do to deliver it.
I think the core of transforming any group's behaviour—in the
catastrophic group behaviour I talk about when I'm teaching, in the
organisations I've worked with, and even often in individuals—is a
combination of two things.
First, they've stopped trying to change their input–output
mappings, to intervene on their patterns of thinking and behaving.
Instead, the change comes from the environment. You change the
environment, and all of a sudden you have to change your patterns of
thinking and behaving, because they don't work anymore. They're in
the wrong environment. That behaviour isn't as adaptive. You have to
come up with new ones.
But then, to protect that, you need to do something else. The most
successful change I've seen comes from changing the norms of
behaviour that go back to the old environment. The old environment
is just going to produce the same old patterns, and the new, fragile
way of thinking and behaving is going to wither on the vine. But if,
when you've taken these people to the new environment, you can get
the identity leaders—the norm setters, the people everybody looks
to—to individually buy into the idea, and then give them a
collective vision, a common language to talk about this new way of
thinking and behaving, then when you send them back to the old
environment, that new pattern starts to propagate there. Because
it's part of the norms. It's coming from the norm setters.
If those two ingredients are present, it almost doesn't matter to me
what happens on these leadership retreats. Which is hopefully a
breath of fresh air for anybody who's looking to change their
organisation, to become a better leader, or even just to change their
personal life, their personal groups, their personal patterns of
thinking and behaving. It almost doesn't matter what you do, as long
as when you do it you change the environment, and you put in place
the people who are going to help you maintain those new norms when
you go back to the old one.
I think that's a very tractable problem to solve. In a world faced
with so many complex problems and uncertainties—from social media,
to AI, to climate change, to the changing face of war fighting,
affecting militaries and the civilian world alike—I don't know,
it's something of a relief for a poor little teacher just doing his
best to try to make change in the world. Hopefully I've convinced you
of that too. But whatever the case, I'm going to leave it there.
Until next time.