The 16th Century Word That Gives You a Strategic Advantage

By changing the way you approach stakeholder interests, you can drive better performance. Instead of using a sequential and conflict-driven approach, you can take a different tack that promotes harmony and collaboration.

Today’s post is by Nancy Falls, author of Corporate Concinnity in the Boardroom: 10 Imperatives To Drive High Performing Companies.

The year was 1531. It was the beginning of what is known as the Age of Discovery. Humans were busy mapping the world, constructing the first rudimentary watch, building empires in Persia, China and the new world. They build St. Peter’s in Rome, the first music conservatories and made discoveries in medicine, economics and astronomy. They brought potatoes from the new world to Europe. They started transatlantic slave trade, only to denounce it 50 years later. Machiavelli declared that the ends justify the means in The Prince. And just 13 years after that someone decided he was wrong and invented a word communicating the opposite thesis, that how things are done matters very much. That word was concinnity. The year was 1531.

If you are like most English speakers you probably don’t know this word. You should learn it.

Concinnity is the skillful and harmonious fitting together of the parts of something.

Many see the word and think consensus, which must be its grammatical first cousin.   I look at the word and see lots of curves and circles. It just looks like unity to me.

And the word offers a breakthrough way to look at organizational leadership and governance.

Back in the 16^th century, musicians picked up on the word concinnity quickly. So also did the literary community. Wise politicians did as well, although perhaps referring to consensus building rather than concinnity itself for obvious reasons.

Wise leaders today would be well served by bringing this word into their vocabulary and from there into the consciousness of their organizations.

Many not-for-profit organizations believe that by just being about a mission other than profit, they embrace such things as harmony and unity. They would be wrong. Many for-profit businesses think that because their mission is profit, such concepts as those embedded in the word concinnity, are not their priority. They would be wrong too.

Perhaps what both the for profit and not for profit worlds have in common is actually an over-focus on their particular missions, be they increasing the bottom line or expanding services. In both situations the organizational culture becomes the achievement of mission at the expense of how it is achieved. In a sense they embrace their own form of Machiavellianism.

Along the way a variety of important agendas and players get left behind. If this weren’t bad enough in and of itself, in an age of blistering change and lightning communication, unhappy stakeholders left behind can become sand in the gears of progress and abscesses in the cultural health of the organization.

What both types of organizations also get wrong is the way they look at stakeholders. The good news is that the concept of multiple stakeholders is well known and commonly discussed in leadership and governance circles. But the topic of stakeholder interests is framed in the wrong way. Most often stakeholders are thought of as competing interests, with one satisfied while the other is pacified. They, and we, pit them against one another. In the process we create battlegrounds that are expensive and time consuming to navigate.

The idea of thinking about multiple and diverse stakeholders as important pieces of the whole that must be put together isn’t what people talk about. Rather, we almost try to satisfy them serially, which is a no-win situation. The word concinnity invites us to think about them as part of our whole organization that must be put together skillfully and harmoniously in a unified way.

Arguably we are in an Age of Discovery today, turbo charged by technology that enables mass and instantaneous information communication. What if we made this an age of discovery in terms of how organizations were led and governed?   I believe we are at the tip of an iceberg of leadership and governance transformation. Organizations that embrace the rapidly evolving next practices that are based on bringing together diverse and complex elements in a harmonious way will position themselves for strategic and competitive advantage. Why? Because they understand and know how to pull together the pieces and parts effectively as they execute, they will be able to find and take advantage of opportunities quickly. By not starting on a battlefield the collateral damage – literal and figurative – will be reduced.

It is worth remembering an important lesson of Machiavelli. His advice to the Italian princes of the 16^th century produced pretty short-term results. And the city-states of Italy couldn’t pull it all together into a unified country until the dawning of the 20^th century. Organizations today, businesses and others, don’t have that long. Pull your richness of diversity together. Embrace concinnity. Bring it into your C-suite, your boardroom, and your culture. It will become a powerful strategic advantage that allows you to make progress quickly, achieve better performance and improve lives in the process.

Nancy Falls is CEO of The Concinnity Company, a firm that helps companies transform the way their boards and leadership teams work together, and author of Corporate Concinnity in the Boardroom: 10 Imperatives To Drive High Performing Companies (CLICK HERE to get your copy). For more information, visit www.TheConcinnityCompany.com.

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