Mobilizing minds in working life: A conversation between Eric L.

Hsu and Bo-Magnus

Salenius on corporate mobilities and organizational change in the 21st century

Accepted version for publication in forthcoming issue of Applied Mobilities

(http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rapm20)

Eric L. Hsu
University of South Australia
GPO Box 2471
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
eric.hsu@unisa.edu.au
*Corresponding author

Bo-Magnus Salenius
LearningMiles
Helsinki, Finland
bo-magnus.salenius@learningmiles.co

Keywords

Corporate mobilities; elite mobilities; social acceleration; management consultancy;

organizational change; organizational insomnia

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Bo-Magnus Salenius is in many ways not your average business management consultant. As
co-founder and chief inspirational officer of the Finnish-based business management
consultancy firm, LearningMiles, Salenius has developed a unique approach to initiating and
guiding change within companies. This approach draws from a diverse array of social science
concepts, including those developed in the new mobilities paradigm. Provocatively, Salenius
has set the task of mobilizing minds as one of the key pillars of what LearningMiles does.
Although Salienius is quick to point out that LearningMiles is a not a large outfit, around 100
organizations have procured his companys services since it was founded in 2010.
LearningMiles has worked with a diverse array of organizations, including media houses,
mining equipment companies, multi-national automobile manufacturers, and governmental
departments. A distinctive feature of LearningMiles is its engagement with social scientists.
The company counts social researchers such as Anthony Elliott and Wim Gijselaers as part of
its network of associates. Saleniuss own background may help to explain this aspect of his
company. Before joining the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki as a Lecturer in the
1990s, Salenius completed a masters degree at Hanken and was highly influenced by the
social scientific ideas he encountered, including those developed by Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckman on social constructionism.

In July 2017, I had the opportunity to speak with Salenius over a video conferencing call.
Salenius found to the time to talk with me from his summertime property in Pockar, Finland,
while I was in my office in Adelaide, Australia on the other side of the world. In our
conversation, we were able to cover a number of topics, including the origins and the
practices of LearningMiles, corporate and elite forms of mobility, and the shifting nature of
change within organizational life.

--

Dr. Eric L. Hsu is a Lecturer in the School of Communications, International Studies at the
University of South Australia. His research interests are situated in the sociology of sleep, the
temporal analysis of social acceleration, and the social theory of disasters. Hsu has recently
developed in interest in the ways that sleep, mobilities, and disasters intersect. Recent
publications include Sleep: Critical Concepts in Sociology (Routledge, 2017) and The

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Consequences of Global Disasters (Routledge, 2016), co-edited with Anthony Elliott. More
details can be found on his website: www.ericlhsu.com.

Bo-Magnus Salenius is founder of LearningMiles, a cross-disciplinary community of

experienced researchers, consultants and experts on leadership and working life. Salenius
specializes in supporting founders and other leaders of knowledge-intensive companies
sustain energy and creativity by strengthening the leadership of meaning within their
organizations.

--

Eric L Hsu (ELH): For people unfamiliar with LearningMiles, the company you founded in
2010, what would you say is your core business? How did LearningMiles begin and what did
you envision the company doing when it first started?

Bo-Magnus Salenius (BMS): What explains LearningMiles is what happened before it

existed. Previously, I spent about 10+ years in the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki
as a Lecturer in strategy and leadership. I should mention that I dont have a PhD and I was
never a researcher at Hanken in the proper sense. At Hanken, I was responsible for the
industry contacts.

During my time as a Lecturer at Hanken, the big question that was driving me and my
colleagues was under what circumstances do experienced managers change their behavior
and develop new practices for work?. A number of large development projects with large
companies in the Nordics as well as with a network of researchers from universities in
Europe and the US led us to stumble across insights about how personal understanding and
expertise gets constructed by professionals. And these insights then led us to found a venture
called The Centre for Leading Competence. This Centre ran for about 10 years, when it was
refreshed when my colleagues and I decided to start LearningMiles in 2010.

The reason for starting LearningMiles is because it made sense to go from looking at
competence from an outsiders perspective, which tends to be the norm, to a more subjective
perspective. We were interested in looking at how talent gets constructed within people in

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dialogue with others. And also, there was greater readiness for more action-oriented and
blended approaches to learning and development.

ELH: Would you be able to give some examples of the work that you and your colleagues
engage in at LearningMiles?

BMS: Sure. Were a small outfit. We have about 10 core people on the payroll and about 15
in the immediate network of associates. What we do is help leaders and management teams
work on the number one issue they have: engaging employees in learning (i.e. challenging
their mindset, their practices and building their own capacity for learning).

Just to give you an example, in 2012, we were approached by a Swedish news media group,
which owns about 30 newspapers in Sweden. And the big thing that this company needed to
re-think is how to move from paper to digital. They became the champions of local issues.
But suddenly, they found themselves being beaten by Facebook and Google and others. The
managers there approached us with a problem: how to get 30 or so different newspapers to
share a common culture and a want to change into a digital company. They had this
buzzword: everything that can be shared should be shared. The managers knew that they
wanted to have the local brands still. But they wanted our help with getting their people to
understand and embrace the new digital directions they were heading towards.

This [Northern Hemisphere] autumn, we actually are working with another media house, the
biggest group in the Nordic countries. This group has a number of sales managers who need
to develop a shared view of what it means to be a media advisor to large firms. This involves
learning how to develop a particular mindset, which is the type of mobility that I am most
interested in.

ELH: So it seems like the kind of mobility youre talking about is the mobility of ideas. You
may be working with companies and managers who feel stagnant in the way that they think
about conducting their business. But how exactly do you mobilize someones mind? What
are the sort of strategies and practices you employ to mobilize peoples thinking?

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BMS: For me, sometimes a pre-requisite for moving ones mind is to move ones body. It is
change in a persons physical location. Moving around influences your thinking. But theres
another level to all of this in that I think you can actually learn how to move your mind.

You can become skilled at learning. A good friend of mine who is a Professor at Maastricht
University says that the capacity for learning is the new competence. I was actually going to
meet with this Professor at the end of this week. Initially he had suggested that we just have a
conversation over Skype. I told him, no we cant and thats because it was important that I
actually go see him. I know that if I get the chance to sit down with him, I get things so much
more to happen with my mind, than if I just spoke to him virtually.

But coming back to the core of your question, about what it is that LearningMiles does with
our clients, what we really try to do is help clients mobilize their mindsets. One method we
use to do that revolves around an idea that was instilled into me from my mentors at the
Hanken School of Economics: the notion that the question is usually much more important
than the answer.

I actually have a beautiful example of this with one of our clients. There was a marketing
vice-president that we worked with. This vice-president went into a meeting with his staff
and started asking them what problems they had with having Key Performance Indicators
(KPIs) in marketing. This floored the people there. It left them with a lot of interesting
questions. But above all, it left them with an excitement to explore those questions further. In
my vocabulary, those peoples minds started to become mobilized.

Besides our emphasis on forming and asking questions, what we also do with clients is to get
them out to have new experiences of how their customers actually live, work, and act. We
have another motto which you may have seen: People do what they believe, and they believe
only what they have discovered. That means you, [the client], have to actually go out and
explore what is going on. For example, in the Swedish media company we have been
working with for the last five years, you have a group of journalists who get asked a tricky
question by their colleagues regarding their readership and new digital models. At
LearningMiles, we get them to out and they meet readers and what happens is that they
actually create knowledge. Even if they only meet two new people, which is not statistically
significant, these are experiences that still may influence their thinking. They [the journalists

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we work with] will come back to the room and tell us that their mind has traveled throughout
the day. This practice is what we call Customer Safari.

ELH: On the Customer Safaris that you take your clients on, what is unique about the
physical or virtual journeys that you have your clients undertake? I ask this because not all
movements are created equal. The classical German sociologist, Georg Simmel, once noted
that people in dense metropolises can develop a blas attitude when they move about a city.
We can also see this with some forms of elite corporate travel. There are some people who
can fly or travel somewhere and not really see much of it because they are sheltered by the
five star hotels they stay at. So returning back to the matter of Customer Safaris, how do you
get people to not only move but to be impacted by their movements in a significant way?

BMS: Thats actually a very good question. When you meet someone like a vice president of
a big company, you usually come across a tale of how he or she climbed the corporate ladder.
When someone goes from the bottom to the top of the corporate ladder, there are actually
many ways this upward movement occurs. People not only experience upward social
mobility, but physically they often go from the bottom of a building to the top of one. But
funnily enough, the more you move upwards, the less you move out into the world and the
less you liaise with what the company actually does.

Accordingly, the less connected an executive is to the world of the customer or the world of
the worker, the more impactful it will be to send him out on a Customer Safari. If I sent a
sales person out to talk with actual customers, he or she would look at me and say what the
hell? I talk to customers all the time. But if I send an executive out to meet the customers, he
or she will often be worried and will tell me that it is enough for him or her to read the
customer research reports produced by others in the company. When I ask the executive if he
or she thinks the reports are good, the executive usually immediately confesses that they
dont really learn anything from them. So the impact of the Customer Safaris comes from
moving people out of their comfort zone. The pedagogues call this cognitive conflict. The
more ridiculous the Safari, the better.

Additionally theres another thing I try to do to increase the impact of the Safari. When I send
out clients such as sales persons out to meet with customers, I tell them that they are not
allowed to ask normal questions like, do you love our company? and how do you rate our

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product?. This however typically makes the clients nervous and then they wonder what
questions they are supposed to ask. I encourage them to ask questions to learn not only what
the customer thinks about the company, but what the customer does and is generally
concerned about. []

This is actually a word-for-word comment Ive gotten from a sales manager I sent on a Safari
once. He came back from interviewing customers and said that it was a fantastic experience
because we went out in a listening mode and not in a telling mode. I should note that there is
a science that actually does this, and that is anthropology. In marketing today, these
approaches [that we employ] are actually called anthropological methods. One of my great
inspirations here is Clifford Geertz, who stressed the distinction between thick and thin
descriptions. I think if you have a thick description of life, you can do a much better job of
designing your companys offerings, than if you only have a thin description, which rests on
some notes some agency has gathered for you.

ELH: I think this leads into another interesting practice that you engage in at LearningMiles.
Besides just taking clients on Customer Safaris, you also run an activity called
FutureWorks. Can you tell us something about what that involves?

BMS: Sure. These things are all linked. Typically a FutureWorks session consists of 3 days.
FutureWorks is always powered by the questions I previously mentioned. On the first day,
you might have a single person present a group of employees with a set of questions. This
group then spends about an hour or so talking about them. This might involve extending
questions, or narrowing them down.

It is important to note that we would not do what is normally done. We would not have a ton
of experts coming in with background information. In the beginning, all we need are smart
minds and the questions.

Another aspect of what we do with FutureWorks is that we prepare our clients to accept the
fact that people need to be allowed to make the question they are presented with their own.
This by the way is why strategy work in organizations normally goes to hell. Managers tend
to come in and say to their employees, weve come up with some fantastic new strategy that

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you need to work with now. Theres no opening for anything. And it can be quite
patronizing.

After the first session of brainstorming questions, what we typically do is give people
theoretical frameworks on the topics that they have raised. We invite experts to give them
tools for thinking about a particular subject. We commonly find that after the first day, people
can be pretty smug about how easy it all is [to go through a FutureWorks session]. They
might say to me, Bo, were here for three days. What the hell are we going to do with the
two other days?. My view is that they have come up with answer but more often than not, it
tends to be the textbook default answer.

On day two, we throw them out into reality, as it were, by having them go out on a Customer
Safari. People usually come back totally bewildered. They get surprised by what they see.
And they go back to the drawing board. And so beginning from the afternoon of day two and
into day three, you usually see that they have to come up with new solutions.

ELH: One of the things that seems to stand out about LearningMiles is its focus on change. I
know youve been strongly influenced by Anthony Elliotts (2013) research on reinvention,
which stresses how change has become more ever-present, but I am interested to hear your
thoughts about when change does not actually achieve its desired function. The work of the
noted French thinker, Paul Virilio, is what comes to my mind in asking this question. Virilio
has developed the concept of frenetic standstill, which is when social change can be
likened to running on a treadmill (see Rosa 2013: 15). Change, in this instance, is used to
keep pace with the speed of everyday life and it does not actually signify that anything new
has been experienced or discovered.

BMS: Thats really a good question. First of all, from a business management perspective,
change is a very old-school sort of topic. Having said that, its not. Everybody complains
about change and they hate the change word but change processes are all over the place.

Secondly, there is a very common concept called resistance to change in business

management circles. Resistance to change is always supposed to be the fault of the
management. At LearningMiles, even though we work with companies and companies are the
ones who pay our invoices and procure our services, we pride ourselves that we still work for

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the individual. I genuinely believe that people have never been more interested in changing,
in renewing themselves, and in reinventing themselves. The huge hunger there is for change
is personal.

I make the point nowadays to business leaders that it is unethical and immoral to leave people
be. Those guys who are not up on their feet and not moving, they are not the ones who are
getting the jobs. The recruiters today are recruiting for attitude and training for skills. This is
happening more and more. So if you leave your employees as they are in a stagnant state,
then that is a really unethical behavior. I see this really going on in the world. To make a very
populistic comment, this is the biggest problem with Donald Trump. He is telling 1/3 of the
US population that they do not need to do anything: Somebody is going to take care of it.
Theres always going to be a factory that you go in and out of.

ELH: I think what youve just described is a problem that some business managers are
increasingly facing: how to institute change at the organizational level. But I would to flip the
script and ask you about when organizations change too much. There are a group of scholars
from Switzerland and Germany who have developed the concept of organizational
insomnia (Schoeneborn, et al. 2013), which describes when some organizations are too
switched on and engaged with the outside world. I am curious how organizational insomnia
factors into your experience with the companies you work with.

BMS: I can safely say that I dont know the literature around organizational insomnia. But
I can definitely recognize organizations that are sort of hysteric in that sense. Theres another
word that exists which I havent heard much of in the past few years, and thats when
companies implode, which I have seen happen.

However, I also wonder if we not only have to look at it at the organizational level but also at
the level of individuals. A surprisingly small number of individuals can cause a lot of
devastation within a company. I can recall an example of this. I once worked with a group of
five or six managers and two of these managers were insomniac as persons. They never
rested and were always bringing in new ideas like crazy. As result, this made the
management team dysfunctional. The other managers wanted to follow another approach.
They were more wanting to figure out the question of who we are first. But the managers
who were insomniac would always say, we dont have time for that. Or they would say,

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even if we figured out who we are, we would be someone different tomorrow, which is
actually BS. Its something that is more clever than it actually is.

But whats happening now is that work is getting so much more individualized. The role of
teams are not what they used to be before. Work is now being driven by individuals. You
sometimes have people with four or five managers. And often it is up to them to know whom
to contact and what to do. The time when the manager knew exactly what their subordinates
were doing is long gone.

So what Im wondering then is if there are some industries like in media or technology which
are more prone to organizational insomnia because they are more individualized.

ELH: I think what youre describing is an interesting sociological insight: that social trends
tend to be unevenly distributed within society. Some phenomena like social acceleration and
organizational insomnia might apply to some groups more than it does to others, which is
both an empirical finding and theoretical insight that I and others have developed (e.g., Hsu
2014).

Shifting gears a bit, I wanted to get your thoughts on a related issue. Im curious what causes
companies to procure your services. I know there is certainly variation between your clients
and you offer bespoke management training strategies, but are there any commonalities that
youve noticed about why companies come to see you?

BMS: Speed is a big reason why we get hired. Programmatic change which is cascading
takes too long today. Instead of relying on having 5 persons change, which is then meant to
initiate change in 5 other people, and so on and so forth, companies need a more effective
process. And so they approach us and ask us to help them mobilize their minds on a broader
and faster scale.

The second and less good reason why we get hired is when company HR directors call and
tell us that they have had a leadership program that theyve run for a million years and
theyve decided they want to do it differently. This happens because employees do not like to
sit in classrooms that much anymore. The HR directors then give us 20 or 30 people out of
like a million to work with and they tell us that these people are the ones with talent and they

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are the ones who deserved to be lifted up. We do our best with these people and many of
these people are indeed fantastic. But why I do not like this very much is because if you ask
me it does not really produce organizational change. That in my view is treadmill stuff.

ELH: Research undertaken in the new mobilities paradigm has found that being physically
mobile is something people are increasingly expected to do in their corporate working lives.
Do you find this to be the case with the companies you work with? Also what do you make of
the finding that business travel is seen as being less beneficial and glamourous as it once was.
The German sociologist, Sven Kesselring (2015), has written a fair bit about this. Once
people have the expectation to travel for work, Kesselring observes that people may become
disenchanted with what he calls the promise of physical mobility.

BMS: The short answer is yes. There is an increased expectation of travel. But also firms and
management in companies have become clearly more conscious of the time that travel takes.
They are extremely wary of having people doing senseless things which waste time. A more
pragmatic approach to business travel has emerged. If you can avoid, you avoid it. But you
dont suggest that to anybody. You wouldnt tell others that it takes too long to come to see
you. Thats a no-no. But you still want the travel to make sense.

Kesselring, I think, is absolutely right when he says that there is no more glamour left in
business travel. I suppose this might be an age thing also. Perhaps there is some glamour [in
business travel] at the start of a business mans or business womans career. But I think that
normally fades the first five or six years in. It becomes just another day at work.

ELH: At LearningMiles, I understand that you primarily help clients with how they approach
and behave in their working life. And yet, I imagine this might be a somewhat difficult task.
There is growing body of literature which observes how the boundary between work and
home life is becoming more blurred. Im wondering then to what extent this has factored into
what you do with your clients. Are you really just changing how people act in the workplace
or is there something broader thats going on?

BMS: Yes. Life is absolutely more intertwined. The old notion of work/life balance, where
you have to be unreachable for a period of time, this notion for the type of people we
encounter [at LearningMiles] is going. Having said this, every person still takes his or her

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leave for things like summer vacation, but there is a growing readiness to mix work and
leisure time.

I keep coming back to the word, pragmatic. There is sort of a sense of pragmatism around
work. The smart people who have developed an understanding for what is going on have
realized that a lot of produced is programmed. In bigger companies, there has got to be a
schedule. They know that producing products and services is reliant on other parts of the
company and other subcontractors. They know that certain things have to be taken care of.
Interestingly, just 10/15 years ago, this big picture understanding of work was reserved for
the big bosses. I would say that the big picture now has travelled down the organizational
ladder, so that average sales engineers are more savvy about how things get done. These
persons can be reached when they are away but if they are phoned while they are on vacation
with a ridiculous question, they will not be mad. But they will begin to ask around why the
issue they were presented with was not solved in some other way or on some other time.

ELH: The last question I have for you has to do with the issue of relevancy. Scholars,
especially those in the social sciences, want to know how their work can have applicability
especially within industry and organizations. You strike me as a unique person in your field
in that you bring social scientific ideas, especially those from sociology, into your practices
and the discussions you have with your clients. Would you mind saying something about how
this might happen for others?

BMS: What working life and business life is lacking are good concepts. If all you have is a
hammer, everything starts to become a nail and this is what is happening with the concepts
that businesses frequently use. But I would like to however bring more complex concepts
over.

To give you some insight into my thinking here, let me tell you about how I met and began
working with Anthony [Elliott]. About 10 years or so ago, I was actually in Manchester on
my way home [to Finland], after holding a workshop in the UK for a British firm. At the
time, I was really frustrated. I had this sense that we need better clients. I thought why is
everyone else so stupid around me?. But I knew when you feel like that, its important to
look into the mirror because more often than not the problem will be there.

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I had extra time at the airport and so I walked into the bookstore and I came across Anthonys
book, the New Individualism (2005) [co-authored with Charles Lemert]. I started to read it
and after 15 or so pages, I thought, this guy really knows why things are happening. So
when I went home, I sent Anthony an e-mail. I told him that I wanted to connect with him but
I didnt know if he could easily get here. Afterwards, Anthony pretty much immediately sent
back an email telling me that it was no problem for him to come over. And the rest is history.

Why Anthony did it and this is very important is because he is curious. You cant assume
companies should find you worthwhile and important. You need to be interested in them.

Business life and academia never have got a proper dialogue going. But there should be that
mutual curiosity. My suggestion is that it should really be more question driven. Academics
should engage with managers and companies to learn more about what makes them tick.
What are the questions they are struggling with? By working on these questions, there might
be the possibility for a much more meaningful dialogue.

References

Elliott, A. 2013. Reinvention. London and New York: Routledge.

Elliott, A., and Lemert, C. 2006. The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of
Globalization. London and New York: Routledge.
Hsu, E. L. 2014. The sociology of sleep and the measure of social acceleration. Time &
Society 23(2), 212-234.
Kesselring, S. 2015. Corporate mobilities regimes. Mobility, power and the socio-
geographical structurations of mobile work. Mobilities 10(4), 571-591.
Rosa, H. 2013. Social acceleration: a theory of modernity. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Schoeneborn, D., Blaschke, S., & Kaufmann, I. M. 2013. Recontextualizing anthropomorphic
metaphors in organization studies: The pathology of organizational insomnia. Journal
of Management Inquiry 22(4), 435-450.

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