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Category: Business & Communities

Listening to the customer can be helpful; listening to your own voice can be revolutionary.

Published June 10, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Listen by Marcus Q via FlickrListening to the customer can be helpful; listening to your own voice can be revolutionary.

I’m not sure what Dan Pink was really trying to say in this post, but the last sentence is terrific: Listening to the customer can be helpful; listening to your own voice can be revolutionary.

Surviving kidnapping

Earlier this morning, temporarily forgetting it is June in the northern hemisphere a long way from the equator, I thought 3.30 was morning and inadvertently spent an hour listening to stories of religious people who had been kidnapped in Colombia and held for long and (more importantly in my opinion) indeterminate periods.  It was only when I wondered why BBC thought this was breakfast viewing that I realized my error.  That said, it was an interesting program.

Despite the Stockholm syndrome, the advantage of being kidnapped is that we know who the enemy is.  Often in real life, horror emanates from people we want to like.  Not knowing how long a horror will go on for is really horrible.  It’s difficult to budget one’s energy.  We cannot use the line I read about long term jail sentences: Do your time; don’t let your time do you.

It’s in that phrase that we see the value of religion in these never ending horror situations. When we say “don’t let your time do you”, we try to go on as usual.  We try not to change ourselves.

I never comprehend religious arguments.  They seem circular to me.  But what I gathered from the people speaking to BBC was a determination not to broken by the experience.  We can be changed by it, not broken.

Religious people have within their narrative the power to ‘offer’ the horrific situation to God.  Give it back.  Secular people have to reason logically.  This situation is bad but I am not.

Whatever narrative we use, the goal is to be happy within the situation.  I wonder if the programme is available on iplayer because it is difficult to repeat what the former hostages conveyed. Maybe being logical is not helpful.

Remember rather: Listening to the customer can be helpful; listening to your own voice can be revolutionary.  What is your story?  What in this story is a story you can repeat, initially to yourself?

Immoral press

The Moral Maze on BBC4 last night ‘discussed’ ostensibly the outrageous behavior of BBC and other media outlets during the Cumbria shootings.  Beginning with bad manners and utter lack of empathy, they trampled over Cumbria turning other people’s tragedies into titillating gossip for people with nothing else to watch on TV.

Immediately following trauma, we need practical help

The program veered off this point into the personal prejudices of the panelists as is the Moral Maze’s wont, but some of the brave professors who gave of their time to be ‘witnesses’ made an important point.  In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, we don’t need professional help.  Immediately, we need practical help: a blanket, a cup of tea, a working mobile phone to contact loved ones.

Professionals concentrating on emotions do more harm than good.  I know from my own lit reviews that professionals are unlikely to do better than chance (one third get better, one third get worse and one third stay the same).

Why counselors might make trauma worse

Professionals probably do harm for three reasons:

  • They distract us from the immediate needs of the situation: a blanket, a cup of tea and get in touch with loved ones
  • We rehearse the bad parts making it more likely we will remember the bad parts
  • In the immediate shock, we have no story. Our story got demolished along with the actual event and we need time to think through a coherent and positive narrative.

The last sounds as if we are making things up.  We are not.  We are making sense of what happened.  And unless we have prior experience (and a story made up in advance), it takes time to reorganize our brain just as it does when we are finding our way over any unfamiliar terrain.  We are not ready to talk because we can’t organize our thoughts coherently.  Not yet.

But to leave our story as the story written by the perpetrator, or a story written by chance and bad luck, that is madness.  To live our story as so much debris tossed around on the waves of chance and misfortune, that is madness.

Once we have had a chance to catch our breath, we remember that Listening to the customer can be helpful; listening to your own voice can be revolutionary. Being buffeted by events means we are alive.   Taking notice of events means we are sane.  Listening to our own voice is revolutionary.

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Tick Bite Fever . . . not feverish at all. A mellow read.

Published June 8, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Tales of African morality  .  .  . from African ex-patriates

Somewhere I read that the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency stories are about African morality. ‘Traditionally built” Patience Ramotswe solves every case, not only with patient detection but in a spirit of kindness and fairness.  Through each story, we are reminded of what is “good and true, better and possible”.Tick Bite Fever by David Bennun

This weekend I read David Bennun’s 2004 book Tick Bite Fever.  The book is widely praised for its humor and “mordant wit”.

I often avoid books written by wazungu (white Africans).  They often make me wince.  I found Tick Bite Fever refreshing.  It is funny.  Maybe the wit is mordant.  I found it kind.  I found it humble.  I found it connected.  Could it be said that Tick Bite Fever is also an example of African morality where each situation is played out, not by heroes, but in a muddle that is resolved by restoring the dignity of everyone involved?  Can I hold my breath that there is style of literature emerging from African expatriates that is gracious and proportioned?

But even if you don’t want to think too hard, it is a good read.  If you are from that part of the world, you will recognize the lifestyle and laugh.  If you like wit, you will enjoy the keen phrase.  If you need a gentle book for curling up on a wet British weekend, this is it.  Tick Bite Fever.  Not feverish at all.  A mellow read.

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Your CV: Your story in words other people recognize

Published May 22, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Struggling to write your CV or bio?

It’s tough to write a CV, particularly when we’ve changed career slightly or done something unusual.

Learning from a twitcher

By chance, today I listened to a program on bird watching  and learned about the ‘rare man’ committee.   Apologies for the sexism, but we psychologists have something to learn from what an experienced ‘rare man’ said the qualities needed from a person who sits on the ‘rare man’ committee and ‘rules’ on the claims that fellow twitchers have seen a rare bird.

OK, I wouldn’t sit around all day looking for a rare bird, but the advice was sensible.

These are the qualities needed for someone who wants to sit on the ‘rare bird’ committee.

  • An applicant needs a track record that other bird watchers recognize
  • An applicant needs specialist knowledge to contribute the committee
  • An applicant needs awareness of their strengths and weakness that will affect their judgment

There was a fourth, I think, but it seems this is one of the few BBC programs that will not be repeated!
RGB by Mosieur J Iversion via Flickr

Why we find writing a CV difficult

Generally, I think we find the middle point relatively easy to describe. We find the third difficult.  More on that just now.

Our CV is an act of leadership

We find the 1st very difficult when we have changed our career in some way.  We are frustrated as noobes, for example, when we are asked for experience.  We are infuriated as experienced people when our experience is not recognized by people who sit in judgment on us.  When we live somewhere like the UK, we recognize inherent class bias that engenders the most off-putting blindness and bad manners.

The way the bird-man put it is helpful.  Describe your track record in terms the other party recognizes.  We need therefore to know something about what they expect.  In New Zealand, where I lived for a while, we would highlight our previous job titles and we would put our firms in a lighter weight font.  Where we worked didn’t resonate with the locals.  We also stripped off our qualifications.  If the job application asked for a degree, we didn’t elaborate.  We just said Yes.

It is astonishingly destructive to have to do this and HR departments should be on to it.  It is discriminatory, excluding and ultimately very bad for the firm.  Where there are very dissimilar tracks into an organization, it is up to HR to tell the alternative stories so their line managers understand them.

But HR departments are rarely competent.  Sorry but we know that to be true.  And because they are rarely competent, it is up to us to exercise leadership  I’ll give you an example.  Once I had a student who had come up the hard way.  I advised him to state but not emphasize his good university degree and highlight three features of his background.

  • His father was an underground miner.  He grew up around miners and he understood their concerns.
  • Because he grew up at a mine he spoke 4 languages.
  • Before he came to university, he worked as a temporary teacher.  That wouldn’t be a track record that was ‘recognized’.  But while he was a teacher in this remote rural school, he coached his school athletics team and took them as far as the Provincial championships.  That would be recognized.

He walked into a very good job on a graduate trainee in a leading multinational.  Had he not emphasized this story in his way, he would have fallen foul of class bias.

It can be hard for an individual to identify features of their background that will resonate with people they have never met in a sector where they have no experience.  It is hard for us to recognize those features in our own CV.  That’s our task, though.  To find those points where we resonate with the people we are going see.  That is the leadership task.

Our strengths and weaknesses

Oh, how questions about strengths and weaknesses make us shy.  But I will tell you why.  The question is always asked in a frontal way.  Very, very rude of interviewers to do that.  They need to probe what your strengths will be in their team and what will be your weaknesses.  But that is their job.  You cannot know because you have not been in the situation before.  By the time you know, you will be ready for the next challenge.

Thinking about the referees of rare bird sightings helps, I think.  An applicant would know where they think they would want to play a leading or substantial role and where they would take a following or lagging role.  It can be help, possibly to think about where you think you might speak up and where you would be listening hard.

Whatever, when an interviewer is frontal, remember that it is their bad manners not yours.  Take a deep breath.   Exercise leadership.

  • Orient yourself: Repeat the common & shared goal.
  • Remind yourself of why you want to be with these people: Repeat their three contributions.
  • Steady your audience:  State your contribution and state your main agenda as you see it.

Your goal is not to answer their question.  Your goal is to bring everyone together.  Leadership.

Thank you rare bird man.  If anyone heard the fourth criterion, do let me know.

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Get done 2x as much (or more) by doing less. Some facts.

Published May 20, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Professors, productive?

Laughing by a4gpa via Flickr

I am sure none of us thought we could learn anything about productivity from our lecturers and professors at uni.  I can almost hear you falling off your chair laughing at the idea.

Surprises in classical research on the productivity of professors

All good research surprises.  Boice’s work on the productivity of “New Faculty” packs the surprises.

What you didn’t know about academic life

First, some basics.  Academic life is amazingly brutal and competitive.  Young academics are supposed to write academic articles and get them published.  The whole process takes forever and it is hard to know how well you are doing.  But if you don’t succeed in publishing a handful of articles every year, you will lose your job, be quite unable to get another one, and have to start another career at the bottom of the ladder.

In short, you have to do difficult work, you have to “sell” it in a long process that takes years, and you are gambling everything. How would you feel?  What would you do?

Trying too hard

The typical young academic panics.  They promise themselves that they will work very, very hard.  Day 1:  the alarm goes off at 5am.  Maybe they get up; maybe they don’t.  If they do, they stumble to their desk and stare at their work.  Their confidence plummets and they don’t do a lot.

Never mind.  They promise themselves they will catch up at the weekend.  They refuse to go out and on Saturday evening, they sit down at their desk, and stare at their work . . .

Oh, you know what happens next. You’ve been there.  This goes on-and-on until a deadline forces them to get going and then they pull several all-nighters, make the deadline just in time, and blame the typos and shoddy writing on running out of time.

Guess what?  This is a “hiding to nowhere”.  And the problem is not lack of discipline.  The problem is trying to do too much.  This is binge-working based on a romantic notion of work.

Get over it!  Work is work.  Did you hear that? Work is work.  You aren’t brilliant. You aren’t capable of massive amounts of work.

Very successful people work playfully.  Little-and-often

You are capable of doing your work and loving it.

Boice studied academics, young and old, often watching them when they work.  Productive academics look lazy.  (They do, don’t they?)  They move around in a relaxed fashion often because they have a little secret.

They do get up early, but so they can spend an hour or so writing every day while the house is still quiet.

They don’t jump to writing the finished article all at once though.

They get up. They sit down.

If they feel unmoved to work, they free-write.  They will probably tear up what they have written tomorrow, but they get the creative juices going.

Tomorrow they come and carry on.

By working every day, they don’t have to remember where they got up to and they just carry on, adding stuff, deleting stuff, structuring and editing.

Slowly and painlessly, the work clocks up without any binge-working or panic.

With that casual hour done, they can afford to be relaxed with people, to do admin work, to be friendly to students, to read, to do lab work, to discuss ideas.

What can other-workers learn from professors?

Other work is no different.

Agile is simply the same process.  We work on one project at a time. We define what needs to be done and we concentrate on it.  Other priorities are shut out until it is done.  But despite the rugby-terminology of scrum and sprint, we don’t rush.  Burn-down is for tasks.  Burn-out takes us nowhere.

If working little-and-often is so right, why don’t we all do it?

Where we fail is that we don’t have the guts to work little-and-often.  The secret is a good mentor who can act as a pace-maker.  But we don’t always have a good mentor.  So we need to get into the habit early of working a little on our main project every morning.

Here is a set of slides I put together for first-year students with some of his observations. I link to Boice’s book is below. I do recommend it. It is a stunning piece of research about productivity with real insights on how to join that small group of people who achieved 700% of what we achieve.  After that it is up-to-you.

Try it this way  perhaps.  If you haven’t made progress during the week, on Saturday evening, don’t cancel your plans.  But before you go out, free write for 20 minutes. That’s all.  Just write what is in your head for 20 minutes.  Then go out.   And get Boice’s book.  I promise you that you will be surprised, relieved and unburdened.

How hard should I work?

View more presentations from Jo Jordan.

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Time for some evidence-based management in UK

Published May 17, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Global Warming Ice Cream Van queue at Studland by Watt_Dabney via FlickrGet a lot more done by focusing intensely on a goal

One of the stunning results of psychological research of the second half of the 20th century is that goals and feedback raise performance dramatically.

Depending on our starting point, we can raise our performance between 10% and several hundred percent by focusing on a fixed target and getting timely feedback about how close we are to our goal.

Target & box-ticking culture in the UK

In Britain, goals and feedback have been adopted widely and are known here as targets and box-ticking.   Some people intuitively grasp there is something wrong with the system.  Others believe that we are somehow able to control doctors, nurses, teachers and police officers and GET MORE DONE.

What is wrong with targets & box-ticking?

You have to look no further than the work of British psychologist, John Seddon, to understand what has gone wrong.

Why do goals and feedback dramatically increase our performance?

A goal gives us a fixed point to aim at and an environment where we learn what makes a difference.  Feedback about our progress to our goals, preferably built into the task itself, helps us work out what works and what doesn’t.

Why do targets and box-ticking dramatically fail to raise our performance?

Targets (and box ticking) are not a system of goals and feedback. They are a plain old fashioned assembly line in which we perform simple movements at a set pace.

An assembly line was innovative in 1910 but it was overtaken by Toyota in the 50’s when they realised they could work much more effectively by throwing out the set pace “do it like this” methods and charging each person with investigating for themselves what works and what doesn’t.

University students routinely play the the “beer game” (and its descendants) to learn an important fact about assembly lines.  Fixed ways of doing things don’t fit the natural variety of life.  Too often what we do does not fit what is required.  Fixed ways of doing things generates errors.  Fixing errors is expensive.  Before long, we have a mess and our budgets are way out of control.

Would I try to drive from London to Edinburgh at a fixed speed?

Let’s take a simple example.  If I decide to drive from London to Edinburgh at a fixed speed, I quickly run into frustration I am much better off responding to variations in traffic conditions as I go.

Having a person plan my trip from an office in Cardiff, for example, might look good on paper but it doesn’t work.  It is far better to give me good maps, a sat nav, and breaking news about traffic conditions.

I can take a break earlier than intended to escape a tail back, for example. I can take a detour along back roads and drive further faster.   And other days, my trip will go smoothly along the full length of the M1, and I will arrive early.

That’s life. And it is cheaper, more enjoyable, and much more efficient that excessive planning.

Turning our GP’s and kindergartens in to assembly lines is so 1910

The attempt to turn every feature of Britain from GP’s offices to the kindergarten into an assembly line is very simply 100 years out of date.  It is time to supply the person doing the job with the information they need to do it.  They still need training, yes. They will value coaching; of course.  They could use data to explore their own effectiveness.

The job of a manager is to provide the information they need in a timely way.  The job of management is to provide data that tells us about coordination.  Where is the tail back?  Where is traffic heavy and about to cause another tail back?  Managers have (or should have) the overview that the person on the job, or driving the single car, does not have, and cannot have because they are busy driving.

Managers are responsible for the outcome of our collective decisions.  They are responsible for tail backs.  They cannot make decisions for each of us though.  They cannot.  It is not practical. And it does not work because the only way to tell us all what to do, is to tell us all to do the same thing.  And then our collective behaviour is not sufficiently flexible and adaptive and we get the very tailback that we were trying to avoid.

The way to avoid tailbacks is to keep each of us making our own decisions on the basis of relevant up-to-date information.

It’s harsh to say it, but if a manager does not understand that standardisation causes chaos, they should never have been appointed.  This is MGMT101.  It is taught in first year in university.  We learn it in the boy scouts.  We learn it when we organize a sleep-over.

A GP, for example, needs information on the state of health of their entire patient group.  Then they can allocate resources sensibly. Discretion to spend half-an-hour with a patient might lead to a well thought health programme that resolves dozens of problems.  Equally a frequent user might be distracted from unnecessary visits by non-medical interventions, such as family meeting.

A GP is highly motivated to work flexibly precisely because it helps them eliminate the queues.  No system thought out elsewhere will achieve that.  Instead, it creates dissatisfied patients who are not getting their issues dealt with and who then return to the system for more attention.

A goal of keeping these 2000 patients in good health is very different from a target of seeing 30 or so patients a day.  Feedback about the health of 2000 patients is very different from filling in forms about whom one has seen.

If GPS’s get everything done and every one healthy and go home early, is that wrong?  Emergency calls can still be routed to them at home.

It really is time to demand some “evidence based management”. If a government department wants targets, then let it set up properly conducted trials to compare their method with methods recommended by psychologists.  Not just Seddon. All psychologists.  It is time.

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Does it only take giving credit where it is due?

Published May 11, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Unfamiliarity or lack of collective efficacy

I’m fascinated by the panic induced by the ‘hung parliament’ in the UK.

Turning our urban soullessness into a village square

Earlier today, I went shopping in the TESCO superstore.  Those superstores are soulless and too big to shop in comfortably but in theory, everything is thereHat tip by deepglamour via Flickr.  My logic in darkening their doorway is that they have a fresh fish counter and I can find the rarer items, like popcorn and sea salt, that I can’t get in my local Co-0p.

The reality though, is that the marketers have taken possession of the store and goods are not longer in categories.  I wanted little capers and following the logic that older English people might have cooked  a fish pie in a forgotten world, I picked on elderly shoppers to ask if they had seen any.  The first person was looking for poppy seeds; the next was looking for butter beans.  I sent the second to speak to the first – he found his beans.  Then he helped me find vanilla extract for my porridge (next to the flour not next herbs and spices – that’s where you find vanilla pod).

What is the point of my repeating his minutiae of English living?  Well, it is this – when we work together, we both enjoy the shopping experience and complete it more successfully.  I also learned a lot about older people’s use of computers, family finances and the English diaspora.  Many English people have children and grand-children living abroad.

Do the English like being alienated?

And I learned about attitudes to politics.

As a general rule, English people don’t want to know about politics.  They change channels when politics come on.  They think I am daft for thinking the current negotiations in Westminster are very healthy.

When in doubt though, I think that when we put our minds together we can work anything out. And it is fun, too.  I would prefer to be wrong for trying to get people together than to wallow in learned helplessness.

But then maybe I don’t get. After all I was feeling depressed about the political system on election day and it is the current process that makes me feel the system work.  I could be wrong again.

The psychologically powerful factor called collective efficacy

Psychologically, trusting other people is a spiral-effect.  We trust, we act together, we succeed, we trust more.

Collective efficacy is immensely powerful.  Extending research in schools and the work of management theorists at Case Western, just emphasizing where we are competent and where we believe each other to be competent, will give us an economic boost.

Think 10%.  That’s a lot.  No amount of money thrown at a problem produces that effect.

But to get that effect, we have to take the first step.  We have to acknowledge each others competence.

We know other people are not good at everything. They don’t need to be.

We just have to hat tip what they are good at.

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To have created a window of opportunity is the British genius as producing Obama was the American genius

Published May 8, 2010 by Jo Jordan

A very British hang over!

Today, we still have a hang over. We agonized about how to vote and we trudged off to vote with sinking hearts.  Few of us voted for someone we really wanted to represent us.  We voted to hang parliament.  And we achieved our goal.  Somewhat improbably I think.  In a surprising example of the possibilities of crowd sourcing without central control, a highly irritated British electorate set out to hang parliament and achieved its goal.

Regretting that we did it our way?

This would be story enough but I noticed today that the #ukelection #ge2010 stream on Twitter is jumpy and nervous.   The politicians are doing their thing.  They seem to be acting responsibly.  Though the press have tried to exaggerate the odd moment, no one has made a rash intemperate move.   Talks are continuing.  Leaders and party members are consulting.  Discussants on programs like Any Questions are providing good thoughtful background pieces.

Why are those of us who wanted a hung parliament panicking now that we have it?

Making sense of success and failure is hard

I once did some research with a then-student, Phil Mlambo, on student politicians who elbow their way onto committees and don’t do what they promised.  This is a fascinating psychological phenomenon.  When we have gone to such trouble and made promises publicly, we should be motivated to do what we said we would do.  Though in many ways the opposite to pursuing a hung parliament and panicking when we get one, we may have something to learn from what Phil discovered.

Phil did a fantastic piece of fieldwork.  He tracked 50 student politicians who had made a public promise to do something for their group the very next day.  And he interviewed them again the following evening.  They had all started. They had all set off confidently with no doubt that they would do what they promised.   But only 50% succeeded.  The 50% who succeeded remained confident.  The 50% who failed were disconcerted and unsure how to interpret their experience.  Disappointed, frustrated & embarrassed, they felt they were to blame.

Phil took down the full story of their day and as we untangled events,  in every case, there was no sign of laziness.  Nor was there any sign of undue external events.  There was simply daily life mixed with inexperience and unexpected conditions.  The students had assumed the person they had wanted to see would be available. They had assumed goods they wanted to buy would be available in the quantity and sizes that they imagined.  In all cases of failure, students had been thwarted by a mixture of chance and an absence of contingent  thinking.

So here we are.  Surprised  by our success and alarmed by our success.  Are we just inexperienced and startled that we moved into the next stage of negotiation quite so easily?  Are we surprised that Plan A worked and now find ourselves without Plan A2?

Reflected best self

As a relative newcomer to the UK, I must say that I am impressed.  Migrants took a battering in this election and it might surprise Brits to know what migrants think of you.  OK, I tease a little.  Positive organizational scholarship has an interesting technique called “reflected best self” – RBS – not to be confused with the bank, of course.

In reflective best self, we take the good things that people say about us, and ponder on them.

A long standing migrant, who is now a  British citizen, told me that although the English are very inefficient (you do know people say that about you?), though the English are notoriously inefficient, when it matters they come through.

We have a very short election season here of 6 weeks.  I noticed  the quality of debate did pick up markedly but it was still weak.  By the time election day came around, I felt depressed.  I dragged myself to the polling booth bribing myself with the chance to use a pencil tied to a piece of string (yes, that’s true).

But when I woke late on Friday and heard the balance in power had been achieved, my first thought was “We have given ourselves a chance.”  I felt relieved.

Most of all I was amazed that the electorate had done what it said it would do.  That was a difficult feat.  I felt proud for the British.  My estimation of their ability, character and judgment shot up.   My sense of collective efficacy, my sense that people around me can and will do what they say, shot up.

To have created a window of opportunity is the British genius as producing Obama was the American genius

I am relaxed about the political discussions going on right now.  For the first time, I feel that the British political system works.  Yes, we have a period of hard negotiation to get through.  But to have created a window of opportunity is the British genius as producing Obama was the American genius.

I feel good, not in that heady I feeeel  gooood way that presages a fall.  I feel good in that way we feel when we are rolling up our sleeves and getting down to work.

Well done, Britain.  We are proud of you!

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Bad job descriptions . . . norm and embarrassment

Published April 29, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Do you want traffic to your blog?  Write about bad job descriptions!  I mean it ~ bad job descriptions.  See, I know how to do SEO.  Bad job descriptions.  People put bad job descriptions into Google.

Amazing.  But they don’t have to search far. Job descriptions are uniformly bad, spinny and scammy and show woeful lack of understanding of the purpose of a job.

In the throes of a general election, Britain, home of satire, has produced this wonderful spoof of the typical HRM effort at describing what we do at work. Jobsgopublic.

It’s funny, very funny, but not so much for the HR profession. When will we lift our game?

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Meeting of hopes & dreams: will that happen in this General Election?

Published April 27, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Affect images and political campaigns

“for the student who seeks to learn; the voter who demands to be heard; the innocent who longs to be free; and the oppressed who yearns to be equal.”

I badly want to hear candidates in the general election describe “we the voters”.  I so badly want to hear.

I want to feel the “throbbing resonance” of shared beliefs, shared purpose and shared hopes.  I want to feel the protection of an arm around me as we whisper our fears.

As a relative newcomer to UK, I want to hear the shared mythology that long time residents share and reassure them we are in this together. I want to see their shoulders relax and their eyes light up.

We are a different place from the US and we are on a different journey.  And maybe in my noobe status, I am not hearing what is being said.

Maybe though we are going to have big surprises when the results are announced.  Maybe too social movements like Hang_em will take off.

What do you think about the connection between the politicians and the voters?  I’d love to know.

QUOTATION FROM: Barack Obama addressing the United Nations Wednesday 23 September 2009

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5 competences for space creators in our networked world

Published April 26, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Entrepreneur, leader, space creator

The great desk tidy continues.  Professional organizational designers will instantly recognize what I am going to describe as Level 2 or C Band in Paterson parlance.

Understanding what is needed when

Let’s imagine a mechanic.  He, and increasingly she, has served an apprenticeship, gone to college, and worked on lots of cars under the supervision of experienced mechanics.

A car arrives.  They look at it.  The learn of symptoms from the driver.  They make some investigations in a manner that any other trained mechanic would recognize as methodical (or haphazard).  They take action.

From time-to-time though, the bundle of symptoms is out-of-pattern.  It may be a rare case that they haven’t encountered before   It may be a complicated case where feedback to the basic tests they carry out is obscured and muddies the decision making process.  The case may be complicated by factors not really to do with the car itself.  Spare parts might be short or the car might be needed in less time than the mechanics need to do everything as well as they would like.

When the job becomes complicated, a more experienced colleague steps in “reads the situation” and explains the priorities to the skilled but inexperienced worker.  Now that they are oriented again to a set of tasks that they know how to do, they can pick up the task from there.

In time, of course, they become experienced themselves and mentor others.

Directing traffic

In an organization, the role of the experienced worker is sometimes played by a controller who cannot do the job themselves.  The archtypical example is the Air Traffic Controller, who prioritizes aircraft and coordinates them with each other and resources on the ground.  The controller is not the aircraft Captain’s boss.  But does give orders of a kind.

The intersections of networks

In networked industries, the role of the controller is likely to become more common.  They may have rudimentary grasp of the skills they coordinate – they may have the equivalent of a light aircraft license, they could join in firefighting in elementary roles, they can do elementary electronics – but they are specialized in control.  They have the mindset to concentrate on what is in front of them for long periods.   They have good mental maps which they keep up-to-date.  They are important enough for psychologists to study them in depth.  Indeed many of the advances in applied cognitive psychology have come from studying air traffic controllers.

And so it will be with “managers” of the future.  Though that term has developed so many connotations that we may have to drop it.

We will have people skilled at managing “space” where people come together to get things done.

People in this line of work will probably start early.  We will see them organizing conventional clubs at school, working online and developing mental models about how to create cooperative spaces in a networked world.

Five competences for space creators in our networked world

As I am on a great clean up of my paper world, I want to write down five competences that the “space creators” of the 21st century will have.

#1 What needs to be done

#2 Emotional energy to connect

#3 Form a collective umbrella

#4 Delegate tasks to protect the collective

#5 Keep commitments to positive emotional space

Sort of abstract but it follows a logic to be: what needs to be done, why are we bothered and how or why would this be our priority, what is the space that we need to work together, what are the important tasks to maintain this space and who will do them, are we having fun here?

How do we learn these skills?  A post for another day, I think.  First, any comment on the competences?

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