You will get many offers from people saying they will read chapters for you but few actually will have the time and energy ultimately — that is understandable, but it meant I didn’t get anywhere near as much feedback as I’d hoped initially. I had to change my strategy.
As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Steve Hearsum.
Steve Hearsum is the founder of Edge + Stretch, working with brands and organisations to increase their capacity for collaboration and experimentation. He is an experienced developer of change practitioners and consultants, and a qualified Consulting and Coaching Supervisor. Steve is a trustee and Council Member for the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, previously served as Co-chair of the Organisation Development Network Europe and is also the author of No Silver Bullet: Bursting the bubble of the organisational quick fix.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
Sure. I was born in Paris in 1967, the son of an Englishman poet and outsider, and my German mother. They met in Leeds in the 1950’s part of the systemic reconciliation that saw many people marry across the boundaries of once warring countries. Sadly, we seem to be increasingly forgetting the lessons of that process. My German family is vast — we have reunions every two years than have on occasion numbered over a hundred from all over the globe. My English family is far smaller, driven by my grandfather’s desire to eschew his working-class roots and adopt a middle-class identity.
I grew up in London, and the family system was heavily influenced by the bohemian and alcohol fueled energy of my father. A fiercely intelligent and well-read man, he learned to speak umpteen languages in his life, and had a love of Greece and its people in particular. He was also an alcoholic, something he never denied interestingly, as it was part of the poetic narrative. Around the dinner table is where I learned to read what is happening in groups at a somatic, non-verbal level. For that I am grateful.
My childhood imbued me with a love of the absurd and surreal, in part through hours listening to the BBC radio programme ‘The Good Show’, and also because my father was an inveterate outsider and rebel. He taught me that the more pompous and certain someone was, particularly if that involved exerting power over others, the more absurd they were. I have that streak, and it informs my practice as well.
When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?
One of The Goons was Spike Milligan, and I read his war memoirs cover to cover many times in my teens. I was fascinated both by the historical context i.e. WW2, and the way in which Milligan told stories that had me laughing out loud and at other times left me deeply moved by the horrors of war and the human cost. Milligan’s work was essentially existential in nature: ultimately, in the face of our mortality, everything is absurd, even in the darkest moments. Years later, I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and that seemed to take me full circle, for Frankl wrote how the people who survived the horrors of the concentration camps were the ones who could find humour in the black-ist and most terrifying of circumstances.
Writing this I have been reflecting on why I chose these books to share with you, and it is probably because I am doing so at a moment in time when we are seeing a growth in populism and leadership that majors on oversimplification of complex phenomena, and often with an utter inability on the part of leaders to countenance they may, on occasion be wrong (say hello Donald Trump and Boris Johnson for example). The inability to recognise one’s own absurdity and wrongness is a sure sign, for me, that someone is in denial of something, usually an aspect of themselves and/or reality that it would be too anxiety inducing to ignore.
I do not think that one book has changed my life, ever. It has been incremental, and the above thread connects to a book a read later in my life: Being Wrong by Kathryn Shultz. This was maybe the tipping point of the above inquiry, because after that I cultivated a life position I live by to this day. I am open to the possibility in everything I do or am, that I almost certainly probably am wrong. I find that liberating, for it liberates me to be certain in what I believe until such time as I have data that I am wrong and I reassess. Given most clients and organisations crave certainty, it is a useful counterpoint and helps me stay grounded.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Oh many, many mistakes. I could share the time I found myself standing naked in the showers pool side as I sleepily forgot that they were not actually in the changing rooms and had taken my trunks off before I realized my mistake….
What pops into my mind is a moment in my mid-twenties when I worked in a telecoms company. We had a new call statistics PC installed that processed the records from all the automated call handling equipment we ran. I remember standing in front of it and feeling compelled to press a button that said pretty much ‘DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON!’. I pressed it, and proceeded to lose a lot of data that could not be retrieved (hey, it was the early 1990’s and the tech was not as good then). What did I learn? That I learn through action and making mistakes. I will read a manual only to the point where I know enough to press the metaphorical button. It was the first inkling of what would be a strengthening pattern that revealed I am an initiator and disruptor. I start shit but I may not always be the person to finish things. I like to experiment. I am curious. I will act, sometimes, in spite of being told not to. At my best that means the status quo is disrupted when it needs to be, and at my worst I had to learn when I need to moderate that tendency. Sometimes, it is better not to press the red button…
Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?
I have one hope ultimately for No Silver Bullet: that I get people to think more deeply about how and why they make decisions in response to some of the more intractable challenges we face in organisations, and arguably beyond. Within that, I am particularly keen that we have more open conversations about our fragility and how shame and anxiety, which is part of being human, is present regardless of whether we wished it were not. So much human behavior is driven by unconscious processes, of which I could shame to be key. By its very nature it is hard to talk about, yet paradoxically it is through talking about it that we can learn most and make the biggest changes. Consider for a moment how rare it is to hear a CEO, senior leader or politician — indeed anyone in a position of significant power or authority — say ‘I got that wrong’; even rarer is one who talks about shame. In the UK we have a powerful example of what happens when someone does in the form of the former government minister, Rory Stewart. My hope is that I can play a small part in helping scaffold conversations that, at the moment, we would rather leave hidden, even though they damage us, sometimes in devasting ways.
Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?
Ooooo so many! I am not sure there is a ‘most’. This is a favourite of mine though, and is an extract from the book:
Shortly before COVID hit, the SVP of Digital Transformation for a major US retail organisation invited a consultant called Thomas Wilde to become their VP of Global Trends for two years, with an invitation to see through the organisation’s response to the growing threat posed by Amazon The client proceeded to explain how, in the previous two years, they had spent $200m on digital transformation with a global consulting firm which had failed. So, another global professional service firm was engaged, and a further $400m spent.
The client told Wilde that in the first year the consultants came in and made lots of these promises, and the next year the new consultancy similarly struggled to deliver.
At this point, Wilde inquired why the client did not sue the consultants, or at the very least try to recoup some of the money spent. The answer?
“‘… there will be backlash. I can’t sue the people I bought in because I’m tethered to them’. I said, ‘Well, that sounds ridiculous. But that means there’s zero accountability.’ He said that it’s ‘like hush money because if they fail, you can’t sue them for not delivering because you were the one who signed the cheques and brought them in’.”
That plus the client believed it would mean he would never work at a senior level again if he took on one of the major consulting firms for a failure to deliver. It served both parties to keep the failure secret and hidden, if possible, to protect both their reputations. When Wilde asked whether they had carried out a post-mortem, the response was: “No, I’m not going to do that. Why would I document my failures?” At this point Wilde respectfully declined the offer of employment.
This is a psychological protection racket based on the need to maintain ego and organisation ideals. Wilde’s final comment here was particularly disheartening and damning:
“There isn’t really even a blackmail, there’s no kind of threats, there’s not even veiled threats. It’s just the way this is structured at that level of an organisation.”
In other words, this level of dysfunction, waste, incompetence, fear of failure and incredible human fragility in the face of having made mistakes, is just a given. Deal with it. It is a shame-driven version of ‘omertà’, the Mafia code of silence. A former PA Consulting consultant offered a view from the other side, that chimes uncannily:
“I was pitching some work for Goldman Sachs a few years ago. I knew one of the clients quite well, and he said, ‘I don’t mind working with you. But I can’t take the risk of bringing in PA … I’m ex-Accenture. My boss is ex-Accenture. If I go with Accenture and they fail, nobody will look at me and say you did a bad job. If I go with a new company, and they don’t deliver the value, they will look at me and say “why did you choose them?”’.”
This reflects the fragility of the consultant, the fear of being fired plus the sense that you are only as good as your last client engagement and deliverable. If the latter can be framed as having been a guaranteed success, a Silver Bullet no less, all the better. As de Vries and Miller archly put it: “An exalted self-image is usually difficult to sustain in the light of external circumstances such as disappointment and failure” (1985: 592).
Ex-consultants moving client-side (more common than the reverse) can deepen the patterns of functional collusion. As John Whittington, a consultant and facilitator who specialises in using systemic constellations as a way to map human systems, said on a workshop I attended that he led, a dysfunction in one part of the system is a perfectly functional expression of a dysfunction elsewhere. This is a shining example of that idea, for even failure is rewarded as it fulfils a function of minimising distress and shame.
What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?
The catalyst for the book was one moment in time. I met Pim De Morree and Joost Minnaar, aka the Corporate Rebels, at a Holacracy workshop in Brighton in 2016. At that time, they were two escapees from corporate life who were looking for alternatives to organisations they experienced as “characterised by inertia, bureaucracy and a lack of motivation. We simply couldn’t accept that the world of work — for far too many — is a place full of misery and despair,” as they say on their website. They set off on a trek around the globe to meet people who they hoped would inspire them to “make work more fun”.
At the time I worked at Roffey Park Institute, and we invited them to come and share their experiences. A couple of years later, we repeated the exercise, and that session was the genesis of this book.
During the session, Pim made the observation that when they had started their journey two years previously, they thought that by the end of it they would find ‘the magic bullet’. Tellingly, they rapidly concluded that there is no magic bullet — gold, silver or otherwise — but here is what caught my attention, and in turn how the energy for this book arose.
Having shared his observation, namely that there is no Silver Bullet, several times during that session members of the audience asked questions that came from a place of ‘but there is one really, isn’t there? Go on, what is it?’ After all, if you abandon serfdom and go on a quest in search of the Holy Grail, and make a noise about it, you are expected to come back with something.
I discussed this with Pim and his colleagues in the break, and they’d noticed that pattern as well. So here we had a group of Organisation Development, Change and HR practitioners — consultants, coaches and facilitators all — and even here defaulting to a hope that somewhere, out there, there is a guaranteed answer or a quick fix. The hook was not that there is no Silver Bullet for complex problems — pretty much everyone I talk to knows that; but people behave still as if there were… And that behaviour fascinated me.
Without sharing specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
Not sure I have a cause per se, more an intention to get us to think and feel more deeply. So what has pleased me are the messages I have had from people who have started the book and said things like [I am] “realizing my shortfalls around wanting to please, to be respected etc. leading to anxiety of my perceived feeling of being viewed as a failure that is feeding my desire for silver bullets”. This is the kind of shift that matters, as it signifies not just the capacity to reflect critically, rather it talks to reflexivity. Unless we engage in serious work to understand how we actually show up and the impact we have, nothing changes. That is the territory that I hope to catalyze a shift and individual level.
At a macro level, I would love it if the consulting industry, for example, actually engaged with some of the ethical and social implications of how they operate that the questions I ask the book raise. Indeed, others have raised similar questions but there is never a serious attempt to enter into dialogue in my view.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
Be open to the possibility you may be wrong. 80% of conflict in organisations is down to the stories and assumptions people make up and the fact they do not check them out. If we were all more willing to check out whether we are, in fact, right, the world would be a lot better place.
Prioritise dialogue and inquiry above all else, and couple that with developing the skills and capabilities to do that well.
Work on your own sh*t, specifically your shadow, and in particular your shame.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
I don’t. Thingification is endemic in organisations and theories about them, and ‘management speak’ is dripping with abstractions and nominalisations (verbs solidified into abstract nouns), e.g.:
Organisation — take away the people and it ceases to exist;
Culture — the whole construct of ‘culture change’ is arguably a fallacy as it assumes culture is both homogeneous and a thing;
Change — ‘land the change’, ‘drive change’, etc. The notion of ‘driving change’ is problematic, as it requires a selected group to enforce the change on those who might harbour reservations, reluctance or resistance in the face of a plan crafted elsewhere and visited unthinkingly upon them;
Management — bye-bye to managing, hello to management consultants, education and training;
Leadership — what was once the practice of leading has been similarly commodified.
I favour a constructivist approach, for it is ‘inside-out’. Here the learner learns through experience rather than swallowing whole. They notice, recognise or discover; realise and acknowledge, and then make sense of their own experience. The data of evidence is interpreted subjectively in relation to the experience and the significance of the research-practitioner’s findings in order to choose what to do next. So leadership is a construct we have coined that makes it easier to discuss and pontificate over, and that has resulted in a disconnection with the practice of leading.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? Please share a story or example for each.
If you don’t finish the book, it will be an incomplete Gestalt — it took me three years of writing to realize this, that if I did not finish it, I would be left with the shame and disgruntlement of not completing it. So I decided to finish it even if it was crap.
CEOs really do not want to talk about their shame — kinda obvious really but it was striking how hard it was to get senior leaders to talk about the subject I was researching.
You will get many offers from people saying they will read chapters for you but few actually will have the time and energy ultimately — that is understandable, but it meant I didn’t get anywhere near as much feedback as I’d hoped initially. I had to change my strategy.
Global pandemics are useful but not sufficient fir the writing process — you think you will have time, but all the existential angst doesn’t really help the creative process.
All the ‘how to write and publish your own book’ books and website not useful unless you a) find your mojo and b) write in your voice. The more I paid attention to these two things, the easier it got and, I think, the better the final manuscript became.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I don’t really do inspirational quotes, I am afraid. Too often they fuel the oversimplification of complexity and what we get are thought leaders offering gobbets of their wisdom in easy to consume slugs that make us feel better without really changing anything substantive. If pushed, though, one line from a book I read at a hard time in my life was catalytic. I had just started therapy for the first time, been made redundant and split with my then girlfriend. The line in the book that stayed with me: “:There are two questions [one] needs to answer in life. One is ‘where am I going?’ and the other is ‘who am I going with?’ Get those in the wrong order, and you are in trouble.” As someone who, until that point in my life — namely my mid-thirties — had made my partners the answer to my direction and tended to lose my own sense of self to an unhealthy degree at points, that hit home.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Jacinda Ardern, the former PM of NZ, or Rory Stewart — he is in the same country so could be easier.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Sure. A good place is LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevehearsum/. I am also at www.hearsum.com and in my business incarnation www.edgeandstretch.com. You can also find out more about my new book No Silver Bullet: Bursting the bubble of the organisational quick fix here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silver-Bullet-Solutions-Psychology-Management/dp/1738553809.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Social Impact Authors: How & Why Steve Hearsum of Edge + Stretch Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.