Fit Isn't It

Kai Adams: Managing Partner, Head of Civil Society & Government (Executive Search) at Green Park

My wife is really into puzzles. My daughters are addicted too. To the super-hard ones. 1000-piece ones showing a bowl of baked beans or Brussel sprouts. Two sided. Ones that bend your head inside out.

Impossipuzzles.

Why am I telling you this?

Because I think many of my clients are addicted to puzzles too. Put it this way, if I had a quid for every time someone tells me this or that appointment is ‘the last piece of the puzzle’, I’d not need to be a headhunter anymore.

I think that’s the wrong frame of reference.

I think it needs to change.

Puzzles, however difficult, have defined borders. They have only one solution. Sometimes the solution is really, really hard. Sometimes one baked bean looks much like another one. To find ‘the last piece of the puzzle’ implies finding the precise missing piece. You can’t fudge it. The gap is pre-defined. You can’t wedge something else in there and hope it works. A bright green Brussel sprout is going to look kind of odd wedged in amongst the orangey beans.

Puzzles demand ‘fit’.

And fit, folks, isn’t it.

When putting together Boards and leadership teams, if we focus on ‘fit’, only the gap matters. Nothing else works in that space. Your options are reduced. You’re also more likely to come up with a more homogeneous group. People who do things the way you do them, who dovetail with your thinking, and who slot into your pattern of ideas. Who disappear into your bowl of baked beans or Brussel sprouts.

Nope. Fit isn’t it.

My frame of reference?

Lego.

Fun. Innovative. Unbounded and unframed. Different coloured and shaped bricks that can be connected in myriad different ways.

You can build – and that word is operative when discussing teams, too – pretty much whatever you like, limited only by your imagination.

Yes, Lego pieces also ‘fit’ together, but there are many different alternatives to how they do so. Lego is less about ‘fit’ and more about ‘add’. Lego speaks more to diversity than puzzles do. And as an aside for those of you who have ever stepped on a Lego piece in bare feet, I’ll accept that, just as with diversity, there are painful moments before it comes good.

Like all groups of people, Boards and senior leadership teams are fluid. Changeable.

Not fixed.

So why do we often think of them as such?

When one person leaves or joins a group, the human dynamics change. Every time.

Yet we all too often worry about how we’ll fill the ‘gap’.

We think about the person leaving and the role they play. We suffer from functional fixedness. We don’t think about the whole formation, the shape of the collective.

What if we just reorganised the bricks – all the colours and shapes we already have – in a different way?

Each part would still be interconnected, but it would bear a slightly different load and play a slightly different role. And the new piece would have added new context, colour, or dimensions.

Puzzles are hard. Sometimes they’re near impossible. They require patience, diligence, and a good eye for detail and the ability to spot patterns. But the rules – framework, edges, shapes, pieces – are fairly straightforward. Limiting, even.

Lego is hard too. For different reasons. It requires imagination, the ability to see things in different dimensions, the capacity to adapt, the willingness to do something new. You can choose to build all in one colour, or to mix it up. You can make an X-Wing or a Swamp Thing, a mansion or a mouse.

Stick to the plan or come off script.

An early Lego slogan was, “what will you make?”

Pick your bricks.

You decide.