Why top-down reflexes are so hard to suppress

Three tips to help you get rid of top-down reflexes

Last week I met up with a former colleague of mine, who is now working for a family-owned business of approximately 500 people as a project manager. He told me: “Lesley, we really are trying with co-creation. Our CEO is an open-minded leader who likes to involve his staff in strategic discussions and he allows people a great deal of autonomy. But frankly, it’s disappointing. Six months ago, our CEO launched a number of themes into the organization and asked executives who were interested to come up with new ideas. A number of diverse project groups worked for months on new strategic approaches in regards to these themes. They presented their plans to the board which discarded their ideas as not radical and innovative enough. The CEO felt he had to take over and a general feeling of frustration was the result. Why are we struggling so hard?”

How bad can things get?! We have a leader here who clearly believes in his employees and would love for them to show entrepreneurship and help shape the future of the organization. But things do not seem to be working out. Do we have to conclude that co-creation is a fraud? That shared leadership is more an ideal than something that can actually be achieved in reality?

I strongly disagree! I do agree however that integrating co-creation and self-management in organizations is a development process. One of the reasons that co-creation can be so hard to practice is both simple and unsettling: we have been programmed for thousands of years into linear thinking to survive. Out of A follows B.

Almost no situation is quite as simple and certainly none of the complex issues we have to deal with in organizations nowadays can be caught with such simplicity. But we like to fool ourselves and tell ourselves that we can. Suppressing linear thinking and the related top-down approach is hard. It’s much like a cart on a sandy country lane. The carts that have passed there earlier have eroded the earth into distinctive tracks. Keeping the wheels out of the tracks takes utter concentration.

Only in the last fifty years, people like Karl Weick have introduced system thinking, allowing a much more complex model for reality than the linear one. In the meantime, linear thinking still is everywhere: in our schools, our families, our workplaces, our leisure clubs etc. We have a hard time changing our mindset from top-down thinking to co-creation. Top-down thinking is literary everywhere and top-down reflexes are not so easy to suppress. Furthermore, if managers do succeed in suppressing them, they don’t know what to replace these reflexes with. I quote Wierdsma when I say: “Even though research shows time and time again that linear thinking is simply not fit to capture our complex world, system thinking has not yet made it into mainstream management thinking.”

If you want to help yourself get rid of top-down reflexes, here are some tips:

1. Read books by authors like Otto Scharmer, Marvin Weisbord, Tonnie van der Zouwen and André Wierdsma. I wouldn’t suggest Karl Weick, even though he’s fantastic. It took me two months to digest his classic, “The social psychology of organizations.”

2. Meet up with system thinkers at least once a month to challenge your top-down thinking in your current projects.

3. Experience the six principles of co-creation by attending a tasting workshop and in doing so, connect with other managers who are looking for alternatives for top-down thinking.

In conclusion, I can say that co-creation and shared leadership can be developed within an organization. It is a learning process however and as a leader, you are not alone in case you are struggling. In my next blog, I’ll hand you a practical framework: six principles of co-creation. Another idea is to invite me to lunch sometime, I’ll be glad to challenge your top-down reflexes, hahaha!!!!​

You can order the book Co-creation is … 13 Myths debunked via lesley.Vanleke@VanlekeAdvies.be or call me at +32 478 51 96 66