The final horseman of the apocalypse is Death (though he is not the last of the apocalyptic signs). At first glance, he seems almost superfluous, with Pestilence, War and Famine preceding him.

I think the reason why Death comes last is that he is sovereign and self-determined. When apocalypse strikes, it’s already too late to look to the root causes of strife, aggression and apathy.

Only Death determines when he’s had enough. He will continue until he is sated. He must run his course. In the Book of Revelation we are told that he will continue until he has taken a quarter of living things, but we can expect that the mathematics of doom are not so precise or predictable.

This is bad news for consultants. It suggests that failing organisations have an intrinsic momentum to their cascade of failure that will resist any amelioration or cure. It needs to run its course, there is no single, simple thing you can do to fix it – or even multiple, complex things you can do.

In my final posts this week I want to cover four inter-connected areas of work that I think show some promise of hope against the apocalyptic horsemen. They offer a real-world counter to the bi-polar disorder we threaten to slide into when things get messy. And I’m going to try to say what kind of work we should be doing as consultants to pursue that hope.

The first two of them, Authority and Capability, are intimately linked to the pervasive questions about power that run through the accounts of all four horsemen. I will look at the second two work areas, Positive Deviance and Struggle in my final two posts.

In my last post I suggested that building capabilities in an organization and in individuals is a necessary step to enable the growth of authority. Building capabilities also underpins any meaningful response to the Horsemen of Famine and Death.

Both horsemen preach despair – indeed the lethality of Famine is that it first removes the capability for self-nourishment and then removes the will to even try – it even removes the belief that this is possible.

The first and most basic capability to guarantee is the right of an employee to the information they need to do their job – which means information of the right quality, accuracy and usability. At present we treat this as more of an ideal – we know we don’t take something seriously when we use mantras and clichés to describe it: “just-in-time knowledge management” “right information to the right person, at the right time”.

Positive deviance is a concept that emerged in the field of development aid during the 1960s, and it found its initial expression among nutrition experts who wanted to find out why the children of some families were much healthier than others in a given village though they were subjected to the same poverty and the same harsh environment. Discovering what those families were doing to achieve better nutrition and health promised to be a pathway for finding sustainable solutions for malnutrition that were native to the context where they could be applied. However, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the concept was subjected to intensive field research.

A great deal of the work in positive deviance is still directed at nutrition programmes, but in recent years the principles of positive deviance have also been applied to initiatives in US hospitals to eradicate the “superbug” MRSA, prevention of human trafficking, and staff development inside organisations. In 2005 Merck used a positive deviance approach in its Mexico operations to improve the way it sold its drugs after noticing that some salesmen were much more successful than others in a very sluggish market.

The fourth and last answer to the four horsemen of the apocalypse is the absolute rebuttal of magical thinking, and of instant answers. It acknowledges the primary message that Death carries, which is that failing organisations will take their own time to move to less injurious modes of being.

Neither single and simple interventions, nor methods and technical approaches, however smartly designed, will create the transformations that are desired in the kind of negativity and powerlessness that these organisations are experiencing. But I also assert the value and the contribution of struggle towards achieving that end.

By struggle I mean a sustained effort by many people towards a positive and common goal. In many ways the “correctness” of the methods deployed in that struggle are less important than the consistency and the determination of the people engaged in the struggle, sustained over time. Again, as consultants, in our contributions we are largely marginal to the work that has to be done.

Phil Henshaw from New York (whose by line is  "it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding what's interesting in what they say") too up the challenge of contributing to this open week for the guest blot.

The 'main event' usually refers to the show at the circus that uses all three rings or the grand finale of a fireworks display that makes you gaze transfixed and forget where you are for a minute.  The 'main event' in the collision between man and earth that now seems clearly underway can be expected to the all that and a good bit more.  Most people, of course, are not even aware that anything's up at all, and see no reason why our continual doubling of resource uses, on a planet that is decidedly fixed in size, would alter any balances at all.    We just like expanding our machines for using up everything twice as fast every 20 years or so... and don't see how that would change anything.    The scientists are measuring all kinds of dramatic upsetting changes to the earth that are physically taking place.  Oddly, though, they're not quite sure whether they should tell anyone that conserved addition makes things larger, and so conserved multiplication probably would too...  We are clearly confused by something.

I would like to share with you an interesting case I worked on that involved influencing the safety culture in an industrial company. For reasons of confidentiality I cannot mention the name of the company. The case is, I believe, a good illustration of how approaching the issue of safety through the complexity paradigm can lead to a rich set of consequences that, in the eyes of top management, was unexpectedly highly successful.

I was engaged by the company to provide leadership courses for their junior and senior managers. About a month before one of the leadership courses, I was asked to meet with the HR director at the company’s head quarters. I was told that the company had experienced quite a few industrial accidents that involved fatalities. The trend was disturbing and despite repeated ‘requests’ from top management, an onslaught of powerpoint presentations by safety officers and top management, not to mention intranet publications about the need for safe behaviors, the safety record was barely improving. I was told that something was wrong with the safety culture and it was imperative that I spent a morning on this subject in the course. “Please design a session so that our employees understand the importance of safety.”

In many of the companies where I am involved as an advisor or consultant, managing improvement is an inherent part of running the business. A common mistake executives make while trying to manage improvement is that they localize their improvement focus and don’t connect their improvement efforts to the organization as a whole. The net effect of such an approach is that it lowers the performance of the organization as a whole.

Another sin I often see in companies, is that executives focus improvements on what they don’t want, rather than what they do want. There are two reasons why this is wrong. First, if you eliminate what you don’t want, you don’t necessarily get what you do want. Second, by focusing on what you don’t want, your solution space is much smaller compared to when you focus on what you do want.

With the US economy getting worse every day, many executives have started to cut their budgets. Cost reduction for many companies is now number one on the priority list. As logical as it may seem, this is a great mistake. Why? In yesterday’s contribution I pointed out that any improvement must be focused on what you want. Therefore, if the economy goes south and you want to improve your business results, you must be focused on what you want. What top management should want and be focused on is to increase the value for its stakeholders. This is markedly different from focusing employees on cost reduction.

At the root of my second story on the organization considered as a whole and consisting of many (interdependent) parts, lies a dilemma that many executives experience: How to optimize their own department or function versus optimizing the process (that creates the whole of an organization) in which their department or function participates?

Recently I started doing some work with a major hospital and in preparing my first intervention I reviewed some of the earlier work I did in the health care industry, which included working with executives from the Alexandra Hospital in Singapore. To update myself I also explored their website and found out that they are using a publicly accessible webcam for their Emergency Services waiting room. Why would you want to do that?

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal I read two articles that at first glance seemed unrelated to each other. The first article is about China’s role in manufacturing raw heparin, a key ingredient in blood-thinning medicine that because of suspected impurities may be responsible for allergic reactions with 350 patients and the death of four. The second article discussed the fact that the U.S Department of Agriculture claimed that some 50 million pounds, roughly one-third of the 143 million pounds of California beef that was recalled last week, went to schools and that 20 million pounds of those 50 had already been eaten.

I am going to suggest that both cases have something in common. Bureaucrats and executives alike, believe that quality control systems and detailed knowledge about supply chains can guarantee quality. And that addressing these two aspects will make the problem go away. They are, of course, dead wrong.

I want to thank Dave for kindly inviting me to be the guest blogger for Cognitive-Edge this past week. I will end my blog series with a topic he is also researching: Improving management of chronic illnesses in today’s society. Five years ago I became involved in researching how people with diabetes can be better supported with their diabetes (self-)management by the professional healthcare community. While this is based on research in progress, I do want to present two points: 1) Healthcare professionals are still, by and large, stuck in a conventional expert normative paradigm of treatment, “tell and explain” and ignoring a naturalistic approach -- discovering the context in which the patient operates to collaboratively tailor effective solutions. 2) Ironically through default of the healthcare community, patients are leading the way in exploring innovative approaches to managing diabetes as chronic illness.

Greetings from Belfast. My relationship with Cognitive Edge goes back a while. I used to work in family therapy practice a long time ago mainly using systems approaches. I then moved into organisational development specialising in leadership, strategy and change. As my thinking and work developed systems thinking did not provide me with the conceptual frameworks to plan useful interventions for complex space.

"That was a gorilla I missed..." Have heard a few public sector/third sector leaders in Belfast use this coded phrase this since they were at Dave's Masterclass on the 15th. Gorillas in many guises. Right under our noses. At least people now know they are there.

Belfast is beautiful today. Spring is kicking winter into touch. I went out for a run along the river Lagan at lunchtime. I was thinking about a piece in the HBR which I had been reading this morning about medical diagnostic mistakes due to "poor thinking" and the benefits and risks of what they describe as heuristics. It reminded me of a recent experience.

Hugh Connor director of social work in the eastern area of N Ireland said to me a couple of years ago that child protection is a very weak chain. He said the links are broken by two things in particular: poor professional practice and breakdowns in the relationships between the adults who are meant to be caring for the child or young person.

Can't think of an exception to this rule. The chain is fragile in the first place because children have a very weak voice in society.