Leadership: solving the ‘wicked’ problem of compliance

Some regulatory obligations appear on the surface to bemanageable, but this can be deceptive. A more nuancedunderstanding of organisational dynamics is required;Keith Grint probes and inverts common assumptionsabout culture.

Keith Grint isemeritus professorat Warwick Business School, University of Warwick(keith.grint@wbs.ac.uk). Books and an article on leadership he has authored maybe found at https://global.oup.com/academic/search?q=grint+mutiny&cc=gb&lang=enand https://ilaglobalnetwork.org/time-for-leadership/.

I once facilitated a day’s workshop with aninternational publishing company with the title ‘Leadership, Ethics andCompliance’. My plan was to give an hour’s input setting out what WickedProblems were (problems we had not faced before or had been unable to resolve)and how they generated an array of paradoxes that needed a collaborativeresponse, because compliance to a set of ethical procedures and legalregulations was seldom a Tame Problem – that is, one that we knew how to dealwith. I was about five minutes into my presentation when someone stood up andinsisted that the 25-page ethical procedure policy that they had just writtenwas perfectly self-evident, that all people had to do was read and enact them,and that this workshop was a total waste of everyone’s time and the company’smoney. As I struggled to think how best to respond to this, a participant stoodup and suggested that the procedures worked fine in HQ, where there were nocustomers, no government officials waiting for the customary bribe, and nocompetition already deeply ensconced in the customary layers of corruption.That recalcitrant was followed by about four more, each uttering the samedisconsolate reality check to the writer of the ethical procedure policy – whopicked up their belongings and left.