I’m entering a period in which I feel the need and desire to lay out my experience to examine it. What do I take away from these years of supporting and leading companies? Am I capable of deducing principles from it, or is everything just the result of the moment, chance, intuition and luck? Am I imagining that what happened is really what happened or is it the fruit of my imagination? If that’s the case, will I be able to detect, analyze and reproduce what really happened?
Where to start?
Probably with what seems to me to be the founding principle and which I will try to call “the primary intention.”
Primary Intention
The right to make mistakes is not a call to make mistakes. It is a permission that allows us to really focus on the goal to achieve, even if it means failing. To make this possible: short time intervals in learning (iterations) or otherwise, to authorize ourselves. If we’re not authorized, we lose focus on this primary intention, to first, or at the same time, not fail. And behaviors change diametrically. It’s with this discovery, when we make it, by living this possible right to make mistakes that we realize that its greatest virtue is to allow us to orient everything toward this primary intention, to have this unique focus.
The Google teams that talk about “psychological safety” are not, in my eyes, talking about anything else. It’s about being able to fully dedicate oneself to an objective, and not fear mistakes, confrontations, doubts, troubles. This “psychological safety” doesn’t speak of kindness or well-being, it evokes this primary intention that becomes the queen of all actions and all causes.
When I observed myself succeeding (we’re not going to launch into a game about success or humility here please), or when I observed people or teams who were succeeding, I noted that there was a well-marked, frank primary intention. This primary intention must not be ambiguous. Here’s what I want, here’s what we want. One and only one primary intention. I want to succeed in making a real company that relies on the agile mindset or I want to become an essential player in this market or I want to succeed in my career or I want to succeed in the organizational transformation of my company or etc. I use “I” a lot, because “we” is the sum of “I"s and the quality of “we” depends on the homogeneity of “I"s.
The questions I ask myself and that I will systematically ask clearly in the future (this is also the idea of this structuring of my thought that I mentioned at the beginning): Does this primary intention exist, and what is it?
It must be unique, it must be sincere (naturally, but unfortunately it needs to be said). I won’t put any other constraints for now. I could specify it’s not a means, but an objective, or a principle, or a path, etc., but I’m not sure that’s a real constraint.
Too often: it’s not unique: we want to transform, but at the same time preserve this or that. I don’t observe real success if this north star, this primary and unique intention doesn’t exist. Without ambiguity. Yes it’s ultimately like this north star of metrics, but it’s not reduced to a number, it can remain an intention.
We can want to preserve this or that (this team, one’s career, economic aspects), but only if and only if we first nourish the primary intention.
The whole beauty of the thing is also to find for these other secondary objectives an elegant way to associate them with this primary intention.
You’re going to make compromises, you’re going to have to and be able to pursue other goals, but only on the condition that these are less important and always subject to the predominance of this primary intention. In case of arbitration I strongly encourage you to let it dominate all the time. That’s what makes all the difference.
All Roads Lead to Rome
That’s indeed the objective. This primary intention will give coherence or bring richness, learning to each of your actions. You can have very diverse and varied actions if each one pursues the same common objective, for example: transforming your company to adapt it to the modern world, or another more individual example: managing people with the principles I believe in. But you can’t pursue both at the same level. If you want to transform your company to adapt it to the modern world, and your convictions allow you to go there, great. But if the two aren’t compatible, you’ll have to choose, have a single primary intention.
With this primary intention, each guitar lesson brings me a different perspective on my work as a leader, each difficulty in my parent/child relationship, or each pleasure and success triggers learning for my primary intention. Everything becomes connected in a sense.
We fail at things by doing them because they have to be done, because others do them, because it looks good to do them, but deep down it’s not something we understand or desire. It’s impossible to succeed under these conditions. It’s necessary to have a strong will or a strong desire for something. And naturally in companies it’s to the people who have the levers that I’m speaking, to the senior executives.
Commitment
Commitment, so often mentioned for teams, is fundamental for (senior) executives.
If your primary intention is to generate margin, or to save on your overhead costs, or to win this or that market, or to establish well-being in the company, you’ll put the odds in your favor to succeed if you decide which of these subjects predominates over all the others. Conversely, by wanting all these objectives you take the best path to make them all capsize.
Isn’t It Complicated?
It appeared to me that everything that is complicated to state is not as difficult as that to implement, and that if it’s stated simply it’s not as obvious as that to implement.
Bringing one’s project back to a primary intention is very simple to state.
You can change your primary intention over time naturally.
I Observed
- That when I had this primary intention, the many diverse and varied things I did came to complement or intersect as if by magic to give overall coherence to my action, to my environment.
- That when I had this primary intention, my learnings like my ideas had cross-ramifications that enriched them.
- That I made better decisions, because all decisions had the same direction. That I was involved in all the decisions I made, because in each one resided a small piece of this primary intention. And that all the decisions that weren’t linked to this primary intention either I didn’t deal with them, or they indicated that I was on the wrong path.
I would like each leader to make the effort to tell themselves what their primary intention is and to organize their attitude, their decisions, and what they express around it.