Show it who the boss is. Never let it do anything you have not asked for. Do not pet it. Apply strong force as the command, and when it complies, take the force away, because releasing the pressure is the reward. If it does not comply, keep pulling and keep kicking.
That was the briefing at a lakeside stable recently, before I got on the horse. The place looked like a set from a Western. Dream catchers, log cabins, cowboy hats and boots, horses called Mohawk, Cheyenne, Pekos etc. The instructors were stern but helpful, and the family had a wonderful day. None of this is a criticism of them.
It was my first time riding since my early teens, when I rode weekly for a year. What came back did not match what I was being told. We have dogs, and the way we train dogs has changed beyond recognition over the same period, so I looked up how horse training has moved.
It has moved too. My memory was fine. What I had been given was a reminiscence of the older style.
On the drive back I kept matching it to something I see constantly in organisations. Call it Horse Leadership. Most of us have worked underneath it, and some of us have spent a career passing orders down and, occasionally, carrying an answer back up.
Order givers and foot soldiers
I have worked in regional innovation models for a while. Close-knit regional societies carry their own innovation inhibitors, which is usually why somebody like me gets a call. One client, in a large regional city, had a clear hierarchy. There were order givers and there were foot soldiers. At the beginning it was very easy to work with them.
My discussion was always with the order giver, and to this day I do not know whether he understood what we were trying to achieve. As long as I orchestrated the programme through him, the resources moved and everybody was clear about what to do. I doubt the foot soldiers knew what they were building either, but for most of the project that was fine. Near completion it took a shape people could see: an innovation space, a logo, a business model and an operating team we had trained.
Just before the handover, something large shifted. The board changed its mind in a political move that neither the order giver nor my team was part of. It reached us as a change to the final specification of everything we had built.
To the board these were minor changes. To the people who had built the narrative from the ground up and folded it into the design, the business model and the recruitment drive, it was a big deal. After a long discussion among ourselves and with the order giver, we concluded that the shift needed a spec change far beyond the scope of the original contract. Our legal counsel agreed.
The order giver relayed this to the board and the response was immediate. The board understood it as his failure and he was removed from the project. We learned later that he had been banished to a remote branch for a few years as a way to “calm down” the situation, which is another way to punishment.
The client organisation averted disaster, from their perspective, by banishing the order giver and replacing him with a more obedient one. It saved face and changed nothing about how it does business. The original order giver returned to the city where his family lived after a few years.
From our perspective the programme shrank to a much smaller, simpler version of what it could have been, one that upsets nobody and asks no vital question.
Compliance cannot supply judgement
None of that was a malfunction. A force-based structure buys speed by removing the need for comprehension, which is its efficiency and not its flaw. The order giver did not have to understand what we were building for the resources to move, and while the instruction held steady the missing comprehension cost nothing. In 1960 Douglas McGregor named the belief underneath it Theory X, the assumption that people dislike work and must be coerced.
Force removes dissent as well. In the worst case it moves the perceived accountability onto the order giver, and he is the one who can be removed. The accountability never reached the board. The order followers are not totally clueless, but they have insufficient knowledge to question or counter an order they can sense is wrong (a different thing from ignorance, and worse).
A pressure-and-release system has two states, complying and resisting. When the specification changed, the structure was asked for the one thing compliance cannot supply, which is judgement. An honest legal assessment could only arrive as refusal.
Aviation paid for this in December 1978, when a United DC-8 circled near Portland while the captain worked a landing gear problem and his first officer and flight engineer told him the fuel was low. He did not respond, and ten people died. The NTSB probable cause names “the failure of the captain ... to properly respond to ... the crewmember’s advisories regarding fuel state”. Crew Resource Management came out of it, a discipline for flattening the authority gradient without dismantling the hierarchy. The order giver was in the first officer’s seat, not the captain’s.
I was brought up in a family where my parents told me to beat the dog if it did not listen. We still have dogs, and I now try my best to observe and listen, knowing the dog only wants to be loved, and look for clues about why it is struggling. L. David Mech, whose 1970 book popularised the alpha wolf, spent decades asking his publisher to withdraw it and got it out of print in 2022.
The organisation survived
The question I keep coming back to is whether these structures survive systemic hardship. A pandemic, a global slump, a disaster. Nothing that large happened here, and the answer was still yes, although surviving a mishap of this kind is not that frequent in my experience.
There was no whistleblower and no observer. The strict hierarchy did protect the business, but protection only goes as far as keeping the status quo. It is a model resilient at protecting whoever operates it and fragile at producing anything.
The client needed something extraordinary to ensure its survival in the coming decade. The diluted version will arguably come back to hurt them. Their own business has been stable and has even grown since. The region it serves is in irreversible decline. That region is the customer base the whole programme was commissioned to keep healthy.
The board did not understand that a different kind of decision was being asked for, so it defaulted to “not risking our reputation”. Much like the horse instructors.
I am not saying old is bad. Refusal to adapt usually means you have to fight all the way to the end, mostly against the need to change. Introduce change carefully and you keep what is priceless, the knowledge only experience gives you, and you combine that with new ways.
Assuming there is only one way to do something is simpler and easier to digest. Staying diligent about new ways is an effort, although that effort is almost always the more resilient. The rest of the world keeps moving towards ways of deciding that are more accountable and that produce more of what they were meant to produce. Horse Leadership once worked, and it is still running far more organisations than that direction of travel would suggest.
The method concentrates everything at the top. The responsibility to innovate, the responsibility to make the bold call, the responsibility to build the partnership, all of it arrives in one seat. That only works if the person in that seat can see everything. Nobody ever has.
The stable by the lake was in clear decline. It is a museum of what it once was.
The horse spends its life on uneven ground you have never walked, in weather you would not choose to go out in. It may see the danger before you do. Do you still want your own field of vision to be the only thing setting its course?
