Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.
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My dive to 101m in 2010 raised funds for paediatric medicine research after my little daughter’s recovery from serious illness.
Flowing on from that difficult time, I have supported Together for Short Lives for many years and this year they have allowed me to run the London Marathon for them!
TfSL support babies, children and young people living with life limiting conditions, their families and the professionals that care for them. And you can support them too if you could spare a moment to sponsor my marathon run here.
Thought of the Week
“When authority to own the Decision and Action is unclear, capable people stop thinking and start complying.”
“Permission to speak, Sir?”: Milgram, Stanford Prison and Your Strategy.
In 2016 I was engaged by London’s Met Police. Whilst there, an officer asked me for ideas to fix the problem of people not reporting suspicious activity on the Tube. It was a fascinating chat, but we didn’t solve the problem.
Later that year, however, that officer and their team made an astonishing breakthrough, creating a global case study in giving people permission to change (or, to be precise, in using behavioural economics to address a wicked problem in a dynamic, complex system).
You can apply the same thinking in the delivery of your strategy – to give people permission to help you win.
Conformity and Compliance with the System.
To execute your strategy, you need people wanting to take new Decisions and Actions to deliver new Results, far away from you in space and time.
That’s the central task of the CEO and executive team in leading transformation.
But decades of research, including Milgram, the Stanford Prison Experiment, Nuremberg Trial research, etc, show that when authority to own the Decision and Action is unclear, capable people stop thinking and start complying. They comply with either the norms of the herd or with the perceived desires of authority.
Humans need permission to Decide and Act differently in a community.
Around 4 million people use the London Tube each day: many more witnesses than criminals. However, everybody strives to blend in on the Tube. Apart from standing to the right on an escalator, it’s the main rule of the system.
Criminals rely on that system working: eyes down, nobody speaks, nobody is willing to stand out, nobody intervenes, nobody thinks it’s their place to act or that it’s their personal problem to solve.
Conformity and a lack of permission to break from the herd were the problems the Met Police faced. And their solution was a stroke of genius:
“See it. Say it. Sorted.”
In one line, the police gave every passenger:
Permission: It gives permission to stand out and act (and makes the action easy).
Purpose: You could ‘sort’ a potential disaster
New Norms of Conformity: It hints that ‘most people’ do the right thing and that changes what conformity looks like.
The Met have spread that now ubiquitous message consistently for a decade, creating a mantra every Londoner can recite.
Since the launch of See it. Say it. Sorted., more than one million reports have been sent by passengers to British Transport Police, with annual reporting increasing over eight-fold — turning London commuters from zombies (yes, I was one too) into an active safety network.
(If you don’t want to conform to the inaccurate narrative about how unsafe my great home city of London is, try the facts instead as set out in last week’s Economist)
How Accidents Happen – Permission in Gas and Nuclear Plants.
In 2023 I shared a stage at a safety conference with Mark Byard, Director of Safety and Howard Forster, COO of Cadent Gas, the UK’s biggest distributor of natural gas and one of the largest energy infrastructure operators in the UK.
Howard explained that ALL of the accidents he had seen in his long, distinguished career (apart from a few he could count on the fingers of one hand) could have been prevented IF a person who saw the problem in advance felt they had the permission to speak up.
In other words, almost all accidents were preventable but systems generated conformity and people felt they did not have permission to intervene.
He contrasted that with seeing an overalled shift worker at a nuclear power plant shouting up to a suited VIP Politician visitor being escorted by the CEO that he should be holding the handrail of the high gantry he was walking along.
On that site, Permission, Purpose and new Norms of Conformity had been established.
And Your Strategy?
The question as we turn to your strategy is, yes, how do you create the permission? But fast on its heels: how do you role model it?
Most people’s experience is that shouting instructions to the VIP client visitor is not welcomed by the CEO escorting them. Contracting the Exec and Top 100 to the new way so they can react well in the moment is critical. Without it, a poster proclaiming permission to act is, justifiably, ammunition for your cynics.
My Fortnight
It’s SKO time so I have been travelling and speaking which has been an absolute delight. Thank you to all who have invited me to your wonderful events.
The most thought provoking presentation I have seen during this time was not in an exotic SKO location, but in Nottingham, UK.
Herman Visagie, an English teacher and housemaster from Michaelhouse School in South Africa, delivered the most extraordinarily insightful presentation about compliance and speaking out in the school pupil community, citing Milgram and the Stanford Prison Experiment and his own careful research.
Herman’s thoughtful presentation prompted me to address how we give permission to challenge conformity in the system this week.
Book Of The Fortnight
In Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein show that people in a system rarely change behaviour because they’ve been persuaded. They change because the environment makes a different action easier, safer, and more socially acceptable.
By carefully designing a “choice architecture” — the cues, defaults, and signals around a decision, leaders can shift behaviour without mandates or motivation – where ‘command and control’ is simply not an option.
The insight is simple but profound: when action is clear, low-risk, and normalised, people act.
This is why interventions like See it. Say it. Sorted. work, giving explicit permission and a frictionless path to do what people sense is the right thing.
Write YOUR story 🖋️
Jim
