Five specific ways I help orgs activate Adult-to-Adult culture in a year

Yes, you can shift out of a parent-child culture. Here are five specific things I do in the first year of a culture shift to active Adult-to-Adult mode...

Almost every organisation has some element of parent-child dynamic. Leaders making all decisions, giving instructions, selling changes, withholding information, rewarding good behaviour etc (parent mode). The result is that people and teams end up in child mode - complying or rebelling against instructions, avoiding responsibility, deferring decisions and action to more powerful people.

 

The more people act in child mode, the more leaders feel they need to take the parent role. And so the cycle continues. 

 

(If this needs more explanation, head over to my deep dive on how Transactional Analysis can play out in organisations).

What we really want is Adult-to-Adult (A2A) mode. Everyone contributing fully, taking responsibility, making decisions, taking actions, disagreeing constructively, working with reality, not getting triggered etc. As you can imagine, a LOT easier said than done.

I’ve been working with organisations on developing an A2A culture since 2005. From BBCworldwide to PizzaExpress to Mondelez to Cineworld to BP to Google to Pfizer - so many incredible projects and learnings. 

In this article, I’ll share the five things I try and do in year one, with a real life example for each.

 

People needs lots of real life practice of adult-to-adulting

Yes there’s a heap of work to be done with leaders. But my experience is that it’s not enough to make a real difference quickly. Parent-child is a reciprocal role and either part can extend a hand to an A2A dance, if they have the insight, confidence and skill. All these things come from real life experiences and practice.

So one of the first things I would do is create that practice and there is no better way I know than an Open Space Technology event (or BarCamp or Unconference > pick your flavour). As a reminder, I wrote a full guide to this decades old but hugely relevant technique.

In a nutshell, this is a simple session where the basic framework makes it easy for participants to set the agenda and make decisions themselves.

A good example were the events I designed and led in the early days at Mondelez. This was a ‘35billion dollar start up’ in the words of the new CEO, created by spinning off the snacking part of Kraft Food which itself was a combination of Cadbury Trebor Basset and a tonne of other well known brands. While the ‘grown ups’ had been hard at work smashing companies together, teams had reverted to a more childlike state. Now was the time to create a new culture together under this new brand.

We took this open space event around the company locations, with a very carefully designed format that safely guided people through the process of taking an adult role and gave them lots of practice. The most incredible A2A story came out of this, which I will share on LinkedIn sometime.

Though these ‘synthetic’ experiences are not perfect, they are a good start when there are few templates to follow in the real world and few people role modelling it well.

 

The literal and symbolic distribution of decision making 

 

A key component of A2A culture is shifting decision making as close to the action as possible. This is inevitable in conflict with the drive to standardise and SOP-ify everything. 

My favourite project around distribution of decision making was a piece work we did at PizzaExpress. Restaurants are full of casual, fast moving labour and most head office teams at that time were trying to make quality consistent by standardising service as much as possible. Twenty peas on each giardinara pizza. Three ice cubes in a coke. Greet people at the door within 7 seconds. Check back on a table when they have eaten 25% of their pizza. 

By coincidence, I had worked at PizzaExpress for several years as a student so I knew these protocols well.

The big shift was to release all these very specific rules in one symbolic move.

- No more counting peas! You're a trained chef, you know the recipe, just make a delicious pizza.

- Ok to have a beard, tattoos on show and wear jewellery (unless in the kitchen…) - you're an adult, you decide.

- If you think a customer who has had a poor experience should have their pizza free, just make the call

They chimed this with a refresh of their internal assets - crockery, cutlery, menus etc. A hugely effective shift in vibe and a genuine transfer of trust.

As the organisation offers people progressively more natural points of decision-making and accountability, this builds everyone’s A2A muscle memory.

 

 

Give your adult-to-adult work a map and a network

 

Part of the reason, it’s hard to be an adult at work is because we’re not always given a map or a strong network. 

Think about it… if you are a leader, you know what’s what, who’s who and you have all the influence. 

When BBCw asked me and my team to reinvent their induction day, we went to town on this. They inducted nearly 100 people a month so this was a chance to get new joiners into adult-to-adult mode from the start.

Rather than giving people a load of detailed information on the day when they have the least capacity to take it in (first day, nervous, thinking about how they are perceived), we flipped it and focused on helping people make sense of the world they were entering and where they fit and connecting them into the network so they had the highest possible social capital.


To give you an idea of how we did this.

- The opener was designed to get everyone meaningful connecting with at least 10 others in the room. This gave them the foundations of a great network and a reason to stay in touch. It's easy to act in 'adult' mode if you feel you have a network - allies, agency etc.

- The next session was about figuring out their place in the bigger BBCw world. We literally put a map of this world on the wall and invited people to talk through where they fit. Same again - not knowing how things fit together puts us in child mode. So we fixed that on day one.

- Later in the induction day, we put a senior leader on a stool for an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session - before AMA was a thing! - and asked everyone to grab a chair and gather round informally. We wanted people to be able to probe the map - what’s normal, what’s acceptable, what is this world really like? We did not want a senior leader doing a chalk and talk session with their agenda and then simply asking ‘any questions?’ at the end. We wanted the new joiners to be in the driving seat and feel like adults around their new bosses.

This was a hugely successful format and BBCworldwide explain more about what we did on the CIPD podcast (my company was called Onefish Twofish then). 

 

Create a radical decree that confers a real and valuable freedom

At the early stages of developing an A2A culture, it’s ok to do big top down stuff if it conveys a freedom. Non-meeting days are a good example. But I also loved this one.

Back to Mondelez. The new CEO in 2012 gave a mandate. No powerpoint in meetings. (Or rather no requirement to use powerpoint in meetings). 

This was massive! Until then, Sunday afternoons for most people at Mondelez were spent preparing their 70-slide deck for their 10am Monday meeting. The volume of slides was the culturally accepted measure of the quality of their work and thinking. The CEO’s mandate freed them from that expectation and set the tone - things are different now. 

Please don’t confuse a fake freedom with a real liberating freedom.

I’m looking at you, survey called “Have your say” 👀 (the most parent-child comms line I can think of).

 

 

Humour is the off-ramp from a parent-child dynamic

 

Ok final thing I would use in that first year. The parent/child dynamic is a reciprocal role. The more one party plays one role, the more the other party plays the opposite role. It’s a positive feedback loop i.e. not a good thing! 

You need an off-ramp and one to consider is humour. (same in all relationships - if you're having The Dishwasher Fight over and over, the quick off-ramp next time is  “uh oh, we’re doing that thing again where you carefully load the dishwasher and I take it alllll out and load it all over again 🤦‍♀️😂😂😂 " <--- this is the most effective way to instantly get out of a criticising/feeling criticised reciprocal role).

Quick example - I did a piece of work at Google where we needed to tell people some semi-legal stuff, like what was and wasn't appropriate. We used cartoons to get the point across clearly and to enable us to get VERY specific without the parent-child vibe. 

So that’s your first year:

1. Give people A2A practice
2. Literally and symbolically distribute power
3. Give people a map and a network 
4. Deliver a (liberating) radical decree
5. Weave humour into everyone’s toolkit

 

 

A coupla reflections to finish with.

(A couple? I mean, this topic is vast and I've barely scratched the surface!)

There is a maturity curve to shifting to A2A - you can’t just skip a load of steps. For example, suddenly shifting massive decisions and responsibility to people is destabilising. Muscle memory builds progressively and there is a huge maturing process on all sides - both those who previously were in parent mode and those who have been in child mode. 

Also the thing about reciprocal roles is we can all play BOTH roles. If we receive 'parent', one response is to act in 'child'. But we also learn to operate in parent ourselves and we can flip roles with our own team members. All this takes a lot of maturing out of. 

It’s worth expecting patchy results at first. I ran a disruptive and expansive Open Space Technology session for 300 people at a coffee company. On paper it was amazing. The energy was incredible, the work product created in the groups was off the scale and a huge decision and commitment related to sustainability came out of the session that felt like a big, big moment.

The feedback scores told an interesting story though. Half the attendees gave it 4 or 5 stars. They found it a wonderful, fresh, energetic session that allowed them to discuss the unthinkable and take crucial matters into their own hands. The other half hated it - too noisy, too unstructured, chaotic, impossible to make progress, waste of time. 1 or 2 stars. Ouch! 

At the time, I felt - frustration, shame, disappointment. Especially as I had been commissioned to do a disruptive A2A session by someone I really respected and I wanted to do a fantastic job for her. With hindsight - for sure, I could have thought about the acoustics better and it was logically very ambitious! - but in reality, this session held up a mirror to where they were as an organisation and I trust that it was part of their journey - somehow.