=================
“The belief that the commonplace is really worth looking at, and the courage to look at it with a minimum of theorizing”
John Szarkowski
================
This is about business culture collaboration in business, organizational structure and customer relationships. What do they all have in common? If you treat them in a transactional way, you will not only have limited value you will have fixed value.
“Transactional relationships have a fixed value (i.e. the end goal) and an expiration date (i.e. when the end goal is achieved – or not). There is nothing beyond them. Change value for values and a transformation takes place because it adds a common, shared fluidity to them.”
David Amerland
This may sound obvious, but I would bet 90% of middle management exists in a transactional relationship world (albeit couched in structural, cultural verbiage). Heck. I would bet 75% of senior leadership thrives in a transactional relationship mindset.
We talk a good game on ‘soft skills’ and ‘the importance of culture’ and any number of non cause-effect measurable sales/revenue topics, but the reality is most of business is transactional – do this by then, what is ROI, KPI index, etc., i.e., simplistic cause-effect. Why? Its easier. Its ‘measurable’ (albeit sometimes dubiously measured). This is incredibly dangerous. Dangerous because in a complex business world an effect could be the result of multiple causes and an individual ‘cause’ can create multiple, often ripples, effects.
Here is the issue. A lesson I believe marketers, customer-centric, branders, organizational, etc. should ponder more often. While cause-effect is simpler, reality is much more fluid.
The former is finite value. The latter is infinite value.
I several thoughts:
Hopes and fears
Look. We promise according to our hopes; we perform according to our fears. This important from a finite AND infinite standpoint.
Somewhere along the way they began to see fears as assets and hopes as liabilities. That’s because, in a transactional world, fears drove measurable finite game type results and hopes seemed immeasurable in finite and too distant, 
transactionally, in the infinite
The fear of ‘death’ (failure) is the affirmation of the finite.
“From where you are you can hear their dreams. The dismays and despairs and flight and fall and big seas of their dreams.”
Dylan Thomas
Somewhere along the way business, addicted to measurement & short term results (the finiteness of business), fear became the organizational emotional energy. That is bad. That is transactional. That is a fixed value relationship with people and time. I will say fixed value is limiting and un-fixed value is limitless.
Collaboration
I’ve always argued forced collaboration was waste of time. Why? Because, in today’s business world, more often than not its transactional.
We have entered a new age. I could argue as business organizations modeling has entered into a new age (grudgingly so), collaboration has also. Unfortunately, business, as business does, has mostly failed to shift attitudes, and modes of, toward collaboration as their organizations have shifted. We continue to supply the same flawed remedies for a new disease.
The truth is that real collaboration creates opportunities to escape the constraints and perceived barriers to address complex issues and access expertise on a broad scale. Yes. Using technology, business can certainly re-imagine collaboration. But (and this is a big but) to create the conditions in which collaboration can occur a business has to shed a transactional relationship with collaboration. Yeah. I just said that. Yeah. I seriously doubt any business will embrace that.
The truth is that, as Hamel & Prahalad said (in Competing for the Future, 1994), management needs to shift as systems shifts – and business has failed miserably on this front. One of the consequences to this failure is a continuing failure in Collaboration.
The promise of collaboration, in a technology world, is that it can occur across functional teams within an organization or across organizations. To realize the promise of collaboration, leaders and collaborators alike, need to learn to think strategically and critically about the most appropriate ways to choose tools, adapt processes and work in virtual spaces. Part of that challenge is there is no formula in that the tools, and collaboration itself, changes how we work as well as we change how the tools work for us.
I will admit that components of collaboration should meet ‘finite game’ business needs (leaning toward a transactional need), but collaboration should be emergent, therefore, not transactional in and of itself, but rather opportunistically result driven.
Organizational structure
As Stowe Boyd said: ‘Designing culture’ that has taken hold in the short-circuited world of startup entrepreneurialism. It’s now a given – not subject to discussion or reflection – that
- organizational culture is an object, a thing subject to design and crafting,
- leadership should decide what the business culture ought to be,
- and impose that idea on the organization like an architect designing and constructing an airport, a hospital, or a shopping mall.
I am making up this %, but I would bet 90% of business culture is grounded in a transactional web of connective tissue. There will be values & ethics & a bunch of vision/Purpose-like narrative, but productivity, or proof or performance, is what connects it all. For good or for bad, the default state of any business is ‘we produce or die.’ Yes. That is, at its core, a transactional relationship. Yes. That means business, by default, seeks a fixed value state (which seems kind of nuts when viewed). Organizational structure IS shifting, systems are shifting, but I would argue the transactional tissue is viewed as the glue by leadership. That, my friends, is like putting a governor on a potential Lamborghini engine. That, my friends, is nuts.
Lastly.
Customer relationships
Business has talked about ‘loyalty’ forever. The value of ongoing relationships. Yet. If you tear off all the pretty packaging almost every business views customer relationships through a transactional relationship lens. Its 
grounded in a “maximize each interaction” mentality. That, in and of itself, ensures a transactional fixed value. Just ponder.
In the end.
All successful organizations adapt by effectively deciding what is necessary to preserve and what should be let go. This is next to impossible to do if the business survives on ongoing transactional relationship mentality – thru culture, thru collaboration, thru structure, thru customer relationships. Period.
uncertainty. It is within the lack of full information, some of which is called a ‘mystery’ or ‘crisis’, which permits everyone to play detective and theorist for a day. This uncertainty also creates opportunities for people with existing agendas to dwell on their favorite themes <take a moment and think about this in business, i.e., that ambitious fool in the cubicle across the floor seeking an opportunity to move ahead in the wretched in between of the event and final truth>.
Uhm. Trouble. Those three things imply 
business people also have an unhealthy relationship with tried & true systems & processes, mitigate risk taking to such an extreme level that change almost seems indiscernible and views any change as something that needs to be analyzed from every view imaginable before undertaking it
resources, money & time in order to meet executional demands and adaptation opportunities <therein lies a significant portion of the ‘tense-anxiety’ dynamic of a dynamic organization.
Well. There is no lack of articles on generational gaps in business and, yet, almost every one of them focuses on simplistic “generational characteristics”, “old versus young” and “what millennials want” and shit like that. Sure. Useful but I would argue all young people have always wanted a version of the same thing “do good meaningful shit without all the old people bullshit.”
Please note … I am not suggesting these 50somethings have to be as good as the young at technology or whatever new innovative techniques out there yet to be discovered, in fact, it may benefit them to not be or even try. Their value is in their heads and experience and the nudging of ‘what can be’ using selected knowledge from ‘what was.’
exponentially challenged with change and are not dealing with it very well <i.e., not letting go very well>. I believe it was a French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, who developed a psychographic method to establish different socio-cultural groupings <I believe it is called the Sinus Milieu>. Anyway. Basically it is a model that challenges us to think about behavior, preferences and cultural practices. The main premise behind the model is called ‘the lock-in principle.’ The principle simply states that if we get used to something we do not want to change our habits <or attitudes an beliefs> even if we are presented with something new or different that might be better. Simplistically it consistently shows <to a point that it is almost an unequivocal behavioral truth> that habit is stronger than the desire for improvement.
replaced with complicated constructs that leave most people in the dark.
trying to convince us reality is not reality, perceptions are what he and his merry band of liars say are truth, alternative facts exist and there is some alternative universe that he, and they, can only see.
not die on their own. In fact … as you gain more experience you actually find that bad ideas can often be incredibly hard to kill –they may actually have more than nine lives.
earth moving way way down under your feet.
to.
Each thinker will have a slightly different emphasis and a slightly different style attached to that emphasis.
Now. I debate with many people that these currents don’t run any faster Now than they did Then. That said. I do believe the currents can be a little more fluid & free in its flow and that there are more possible traction points than what have been available in the past.