In July 1967 The Beatles released a non-album single titled All You Need Is LoveIt lights up the geek part of my brain to learn that this song was used for the first even live global television link (thank you, Wikipedia).
It’s really important to me that you know that I’m not a big The Beatles fan. I find some of their songs catchy, and I certainly respect their commercial success. They did much better at music and the music business than I ever did.
Of this song I can say that it is… certainly a song. Take this inspiring lyric:
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
An arresting observation:
Or take this civilization-destroying nugget:
There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known
Then they must have plagiarized this song. They couldn’t have known it before they knew it, but from what they say, it was already known by someone before they knew it. Which means someone else must have written it. This calls the whole scientific enterprise into question.
Right now, you’re probably thinking that I’m very fun at parties. Once you’re done getting off my lawn, make sure that you’ve subscribed so that I can keep pouring water on your blankets.
That lyric captures the hubris that makes transformation difficult. “If something were good, we’d already know about it.”
It turns out that, in fact, you need more than love. A study was recently done that found that to succeed, you also need to have things expected of you. Let’s plot love and expectation on not the world’s first ever 2D chart:
High love and low expectation get you a frat house. No one takes improvement seriously because you’ve signaled that improvement doesn’t matter. It may or may not be pleasant depending on the random mix of people you have, but you will lose market share over time to organizations that signal concern for improvement.
Low love and no expectation gives you Gotham City or maybe Lord of the Flies. I hope you find your Batman.
Low love and high expectation create fear, and a culture of fear will destroy your business. You’ll never know the true state of the world because your people will be afraid to tell you.
But high love and high expectation, now you’re talking. “We expect the world of each other, and we’ll go side-by-side to achieve it.” This combination sees errors as opportunities to learn, but then has the structure in place to make the learning happen. It extends grace to mistakes, but doesn’t tolerate sabotage. It invites inquiry, teaching that disagreement is an opportunity to experiment together to prove ideas out.
Not everyone wants to be in this kind of a system, so managers do their duty of managing, recognizing and respecting people’s decisions. They coach those who want coaching and help those that don’t find another organization where they’d be happier.
But organizations that operate this way outperform their peers, and they’re accelerating away from their peers at the same time. This is one of the conclusions reached by Forsgren et al. in Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Operations.
Tomorrow we’ll go through the signs that will help you know which quadrant you’re in.
