Yesterday, I had a revealing conversation with a senior businessman. He and his colleagues were looking for a new Business Development Director. They felt cut off from the world and had disbanded their old BD team. Their solution was to bring over a retired client from the ‘dark side,’ so to speak, to use his (and it was going to be his) contacts among his former competitors in as their clients. The logic beggars belief.
I like this businessman. Let’s be clear, as politicians these days like to say. Let’s be clear. He is an amiable man who is organized, hard working and very importantly, fair. He is not a blaming type. He is definitely open to new interpretations of situations from people whom he hadn’t previously realized had a view. He’d adapt easily to a fresher more vibrant team and find a surprising and gratifying second career in a more lively atmosphere.
You have one already. You are just neglecting it.
What an outsider can see, and might dispute, is their belief that they have insufficient contacts with the outside world. True, they may have let their contacts wither on the vine. True, they might have poor procedures for making contacts and looking after them. True, the day-to-day experience in the organization might feel as musty and uncomfortable as a dirty house.
Your market and your home
This analogy will work well. If you feel no one invites you their house, maybe clean your own and invite people around. Maybe clean your house and step into the world with a spring in your step. There is nothing like a cheerful person who looks like they are enjoying life to attract good fortune. (Bring in the Feng Shui for good measure! You aren’t going anywhere very fast right now. You have nothing to lose and they are not very expensive.)
It really is as simple as making your meeting places attractive
Yes, that’s all they have to do. Just clean house. Just go around and ask people – what can we do to make this a comfortable place to meet your clients?
What can we do to make this a comfortable place to meet your clients?
I had a more complicated plan. But writing this helps. This is all that is needed! Just go around the organization and ask: what can we do to make this a comfortable place to meet your clients?
You may have read Four Hour Work Week and you might have noticed, but not paid much attention to the tagline on Tim Ferris’ blog : Experiments in lifestyle design.
Tim Ferris has many answers. And many people read his blog (and his book) for ideas and inspiration. I haven’t see too many people copy Tim Ferris in one essential aspect: he actually runs experiments on a lifestyle to see what works and what doesn’t. Tim Ferris may just seem a data nut. He is not. He experiments. He actually puts to work those laboratory lessons we learned in psychology and related disiplines.
Ready, Aim, Fire
Few other people take this approach. Creatives are willing, in Karl Weick’s terms to Ready, Fire, Aim, meaning try it, see the response, and learn what is important. They are often disciplined at using agile methods and may have groups where people stand up weekly and sum up how far their project has got in terms of {need, Approach, Benefit, Competition} (nABC).
A B experiments in web design
Google, of course, epitomizes a experimental approach. If you sign up to Google Analytics, you can test two pages in classical A B design. Which one attracts more hits?How an experimental approach differs from science
An experimental approach to life is radically different from a scientific (or pseudo scientific approach).
At university, we are trained to compare the average (actually the mean) score for two groups – say men or women. We aret trained to look for associations in cross tabs and scattergrams. We are reminded that correlation is not causality and we repeat that as a mantra. But something even worse happens. We start to confuse the statistical relationship with action. We really come to believe that if women score more than men, the answer is get more women and improvements will follow. We believe that if there is a lot of chatter about drink driving and around the same time alcohol sales fall off that in the future we only need to chatter about drink driving for alcohol sales to fall off.
No. In every case, we still have to make something happen.
Why an experimental approach helps us succeed
Oddly, an experimental approach helps us become more active. It looks like “science” that establishes “rules of life” that we can ape and be successful. But an experimental approach is more. An experimental approach draws us in to the moment and helps us concentrate on what needs to be done with the people we will be doing it with.
Our actions and judgments are not replaced by scientific laws. We exert our judgment and act on the situation in an orderly way so that we see the effects of what we do and learn more about the situation itself.
Our results don’t tell us what to do. They don’t tell anyone else what to do. Indeed, if they copy us they will fail. Our results tell us about our situation and our understanding improves. As our understanding improves so does our judgment. As our judgment improves so do our results, our resources and both our faith in others and their fath in us. We are an upward spiral begun and maintained by an open, inquiring, curious and essential positive view of life that looks for what works and celebrates what works. But we can’t be inquiring without the feedback of data. Without data we simply gossiping.
An experimental approach draws us in to the moment and helps us concentrate on what needs to be done with the people we will be doing it with.
An experimental approach to training
McKinsey published a report today that brilliantly showed the return on investment of training leaders in a youth organization.
Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) did some basic reseah on their leaders. They measured each leader’s ability on 50 aspects of leadership. Then they they regressed local organizational performance onto their measures of leadership. Basically, they made a model that leadership, on the 50 aspects of leadership, leads to growth in members, funds raised, etc.
They found 4/50 aspects of leadership to ‘disproportionately’ contribute to performance: ability to build an effective board, find and pursue revenue-development strategies, use an investor’s minds-set toward programs and resource development, and lead and pursue with personal tenacity and perseverance. They built their training program around these four aspects of leadership.
Now for the experiments.
a) BGCA compared the performance of a local organization before and after a leader received training (Pre and post or AB design).
b) BCGA compared the performance of a local organization where a leader had been trained with the performance of another local organization of similar size and circumstances.
c) They triangulated their results by interviewing local board members to find out how leaders behaved differently after training.
In all, BGCA concluded that trained leaders did better than untrained leaders on every measure of organizational performance. By extrapolation, they worked out that when all 1100 leaders had been trained, they would see an increase of 2-3% increase in local funding translating into 350 000 new members and more than $100m more revenue per year for the entire organization. These improvements were more than 4x the cost of the training.
The trained leaders also varied in performance. The top 25% of leaders improved 3x to 5x more than middle pack. The most successful leaders were aspirational, set clear and quantifiable goals and taught what they learned to the rest of their organization.
Why the McKinsey study is ‘scientfic’ rather than ‘experimental’
We could give this study to a third year class and indeed, the top 25% would tear it apart, in many respects.
What I am interested in, though, is the relinquishment of responsibility. The report read as if BCGA “discovered” some secret. To be fair the article does go on to discuss the metrics that might be used in other organizations. What I would have like, though, is a description of leadership.
Who came together to discuss what mattered in the leadership of the 1100 local organizations?
Who drew up the list of leadership activities and how confident were they in the list? How did they feel about their ideas being put under the microscope?
Was this the first time they had compared the performance of all 1100 local organizations? What were people’s reactions when they saw all the data in one place?
How much did the past data vary for any one local organization from year to year?
Who decided and with whom that these aspects of leadership mattered and that they were sufficiently confident to test their ideas openly?
Once they followed through, how did leaders who were not in the top 75% feel? What happened to them when the results came out?
The data being collected here is data about these leaders. What information did these very same leaders get to guide them towards aspirational clear goals? In other words, this study helps the central leaders steer. What informaton do local leaders have to steer?
Good leadership is a narrative of who did what with whom
We can shoot holes in the analysis. We are all trained to do that. But lets do something different (and positive). Lets tell the story and the story of 1100 local organizations.
Once upon a time . . . and we were here.
Then this happpened and came together and decided to . . .
This group agreed to try this way and this group agreed to try this way.
And they further agreed to come together on this date to compare what they learned and to exchange tips.
A story did happen at BGCA. But it is concealed. We’ve carefully not been told who did what and, most importantly, who decided.
Leadership is about action.
An example of excellent leadership
If you want an example of fine management where the decision making process is super clear, watch this video of Randall Howard, the former General Secretary of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union shows you what I mean.
He gives a clear narrative of a situation, a collective decision and an action. The action itself is an incredible story of blocking arms shipments to Zimbabwe. It’s worth watching in an of itself.
Randall Howard begins speaking at about 1:55.
For more information on the stopping of the An Yue Jiang, look at Waging Nonviolence.
Importantly we see an experimental attitude.
We must do something. Do you agree?
What is our goal and what is our first step?
Do the Courts agree?
Can we serve the papers on the boat? No. Then what?
We collect data by following the vessel electronically. When that data dries up, we find alternative data and we track the vessel.
And when the story ends, we stop and say. What did we do? What path did we follow? What were our signals and how did we know how well we were doing?
Most importantly of all, we ask what did we learn about the situation. We learned about solidarity and maintaining the institutions of democracy. That’s not the same as stopping the boat.
We paid attention. We worked together. And we learned.
The economy has stop plummeting. I don’t even have to read the figures. I know because pundits are worrying about a double-dip.
Will something something catastrophic happen that flips the economy down another slide?
People are worried about the amount of money the European governments are taking out of the economy.
People are worried about developers defaulting on commercial buildings.
People are worried about house prices flat lining.
Where will jobs and business opportunities come from? Economies and jobs grow in a good year at 3%. And jobs follow businesses? How long will the recession take to clear?
More, to the point, where will growth happen? Which sectors should energetic young men and women watch and prepare to join?
Will the double dip recession happen?
Not everyone thinks a double dip recession will happen. Prieur du Plessis of Seeking Alpha is one and here is his excellent summary.
But in the summary is the very reason why a double dip recession might happen.
Companies are making money hand over fist. And hanging on to it. Consumers are spending less. Demand somewhere is dropping.
How did companies make the money? And why aren’t they reinvesting it in productive activity?
du Plessis believes capital is like a dam. Fill up the dam with money and it will find a productive activity to invest in.
Maybe. I’ll watch.
What am I watching as we wait for a double dip recession?
While we wait to see if the weasel goes pop, I am watching the capital stacked up in western companies.
It’s supposed to signal productive activity. Where will future productivity lie?
A time comes in your life when you finally get it…when, in the midst of all your fears and insanity, you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out…ENOUGH!
Enough fighting and crying and blaming and struggling to hold on.
Your Awakening
Then, like a child quieting down after a tantrum, you blink back your tears and begin to look at the world through new eyes.
This is your awakening.
Acceptance
You realize it’s time to stop hoping and waiting for something to change, or for happiness, safety and security to magically appear over the next horizon. You realize that in the real world there aren’t always fairy tale endings, and that any guarantee of “happily ever after” must begin with you . . . and in the process a sense of serenity is born of acceptance.
You awaken to the fact that you are not perfect and that not everyone will always love, appreciate or approve of who or what you are . . . and that’s OK. They are entitled to their own views and opinions.
A sense of safety and security is born of self-reliance
You learn the importance of loving and championing yourself . . . and in the process a sense of new found confidence is born of self-approval. You stop complaining and blaming other people for the things they did to you – or didn’t do for you – and you learn that the only thing you can really count on is the unexpected.
You learn that people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say and that not everyone will always be there for you and that everything isn’t always about you.
So, you learn to stand on your own and to take care of yourself . . . and in the process a sense of safety and security is born of self-reliance.
Forgive
You stop judging and pointing fingers and you begin to accept people as they are and to overlook their shortcomings and human frailties . . . and in the process a sense of peace and contentment is born of forgiveness.
Be true to yourself and others
You learn to open up to new worlds and different points of view. You begin reassessing and redefining who you are and what you really stand for.
You learn the difference between wanting and needing and you begin to discard the doctrines and values you’ve outgrown, or should never have bought into to begin with.
You learn that there is power and glory in creating and contributing and you stop maneuvering through life merely as a “consumer” looking for your next fix.
You learn that principles such as honesty and integrity are not the outdated ideals of a bygone era, but the mortar that holds together the foundation upon which you must build a life.
The only cross you bear is the one you choose to carry
You learn that you don’t know everything, it’s not your job to save the world and that you can’t teach a pig to sing. You learn that the only cross to bear is the one you choose to carry and that martyrs get burned at the stake.
Then you learn about love. You learn to look at relationships as they really are and not as you would have them be. You learn that alone does not mean lonely.
You stop trying to control people, situations and outcomes. You learn to distinguish between guilt and responsibility and the importance of setting boundaries and learning to say NO.
You also stop working so hard at putting your feelings aside, smoothing things over and ignoring your needs.
Your body really is your temple
You learn that your body really is your temple. You begin to care for it and treat it with respect. You begin to eat a balanced diet, drink more water, and take more time to exercise.
You learn that being tired fuels doubt, fear, and uncertainty and so you take more time to rest. And, just as food fuels the body, laughter fuels our soul. So you take more time to laugh and to play.
You get what you believe you deserve
You learn that, for the most part, you get in life what you believe you deserve, and that much of life truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You learn that anything worth achieving is worth working for and that wishing for something to happen is different than working toward making it happen.
More importantly, you learn that in order to achieve success you need direction, discipline and perseverance. You also learn that no one can do it all alone, and that it’s OK to risk asking for help.
Step right into and through your fears
You learn the only thing you must truly fear is fear itself. You learn to step right into and through your fears because you know that whatever happens you can handle it and to give in to fear is to give away the right to live life on your own terms.
You learn to fight for your life and not to squander it living under a cloud of impending doom.
You learn to build bridges when others build walls
You learn that life isn’t always fair, you don’t always get what you think you deserve and that sometimes bad things happen to unsuspecting, good people . . . and you learn not to always take it personally.
You learn that nobody’s punishing you and everything isn’t always somebody’s fault. It’s just life happening. You learn to admit when you are wrong and to build bridges instead of walls.
You explore your negative feelings rather than hang onto them
You learn that negative feelings such as anger, envy and resentment must be understood and redirected or they will suffocate the life out of you and poison the universe that surrounds you.
And revel in your positive feelings however small
You learn to be thankful and to take comfort in many of the simple things we take for granted, things that millions of people upon the earth can only dream about: a full refrigerator, clean running water, a soft warm bed, a long hot shower.
Promise never to betray yourself and act the way you think appropriate no matter the provocation
Then, you begin to take responsibility for yourself by yourself and you make yourself a promise to never betray yourself and to never, ever settle for less than your heart’s desire.
You make it a point to keep smiling, to keep trusting, and to stay open to every wonderful possibility.
You hang a wind chime outside your window so you can listen to the wind.
Begin to design the life you want to live as best you can
Finally, with courage in your heart, you take a stand, you take a deep breath, and you begin to design the life you want to live as best you can.
I was marveling this morning about a client who sucks the life out of us. They are difficult to deal with. They change their minds. They are arrogant. They are rude. Goodwill rapidly spins into the black hole of lack of expectation. If our despair was contained to our dealings with them, it might be OK. But we rapidly feel tired and lack energy even for tasks we love.
Mood hoovers. . . I hadn’t heard that expression before I came to the UK. As I pondered my mood, and wondered my options, I also wondered if mood hoovering isn’t a normal activity in UK. Do you see where despair takes you? In the blink of an eye, we are into the “personal, permanent and pervasive“.
Do we swear differently in different countries?
Then I pondered the nature of expletives in different countries.
Expletives in a multi-lingual coutry
I come from a country where two languages dominate the workplace. As a first year student, our lecturers would deliberately expose us to cultural behaviors that might shock us. Actually we had a civil war going on at the time, and they might deliberately say things that are so provocative, and often my first impulse was to dive under the desk for cover in case war broke out in the classroom too.
One of the things I learned was by accident. The lecturer was demonstrating subliminal attention and its effect on action. This is an important effect, so listen up. But the results in a multi-cultural setting were quite funny.
He flashed up various words on what is called a tachistoscope. A willing student stared down a tube and called out the words.
Up came an expletive, or taboo word, or swear word, and the “subject” would take markedly longer to call out the word. It’s like having a test at the optician. They would “report” that they hadn’t actually seen it.
Not so with expletives across the language line. We call out each others expletives just as fast as we call out ordinary words.
That wasn’t what the lecturer meant to demonstrate but hey, unwanted side effects are sometimes serendipitously useful.
Some expletives are harsh and aggressive
Getting back to expletives, my language group would use the harsh expletives of Europe. But by the time these ugly words had crossed the language line they changed their meaning slightly, we got sentences like this quotation I received from a tradesman:
If I fuck it up, you pay me bugger all.
Well that was clear! Actually quite charming in its sincerity and engagement and had not a hint of aggression. I doubt he knew he used words that we regard as rude.
Some expletives are soft and including
Two cherished expletives that crossed the line to us were
Whatiichiii?
and
Eish!
I marvel at the softness of sound. I marvel at the simple statement of “I am surprised”. I like the gentle chiding of “you aren’t making sense” in the form of “this is disappointing me”.
I like the pulling oneself together in “Eish!”
I felt better when I tweeted, “Eisshhhhh!”
What do your expletives do for you?
What do your expletives do for you?
Do they make the situation worse?
Or do they encourage you to engage once more with a smile on your face, hope in your heart, curiosity in your questions, respect for others and a willingness to move on?
A long time ago, a British Professor visiting Zimbabwe goggled at our 15% inflation rate and said, “How do you cope?’
Twenty years later, 15% seemed like heaven. And coping had turned into a lifestyle. Oddly though, you can still attend an HRM conference in Harare infinitely more sophisticated than you will in London. Lunch might be peculiar but ideas continue.
The power might go off repeatedly but a Zimbabwean firm has rolled out a 3G network. Living in the UK, I have copper cables that were replaced twenty years ago in Harare and my mobile reception is so dodgy that I can’t use it for internet.
Running away from collapse
I left Zimbabwe and came ultimately to UK because I didn’t want to cope with those circumstances. I had lived through Smith’s UDI and figured that “I had already done” war and sanctions. It was time for alternative experiences.
A psychological model of collective responses to despair
Around six months before I left Zimbabwe, just after the Presidential elections, I tried to make a psychological model of what would happen. I figured that everyone would make up their minds what they were going to do. Then they would test their plan. And after 6 months they would re-evaluate.
Of course, we had a definitive unambiguous event that marked a cross-roads. Mostly we don’t have such a call for decisiveness and we procrastinate.
Then we were surrounded by people making tough decisions but amiably accepting that we differed in our needs and values and might go our separate ways.
And we knew we were jumping out into the unknown. We might find our new lives hostile but few of us left a path to return preferring rather to “shake the dust from their feet and not look back”.
The Zimbabwean diaspora and the Zimbabwean survival
So 3-4 million people left Zimbabwe. I got on a plane. Others walked and with no exaggeration, dodged border guards, swam across a river infested with crocodiles, cut their way through fences and threw themselves on the streets of cities larger than anything they had ever seen before.
But 10-11 million people stayed. They were the old, the young, the sick and the infirm. They were those who stayed to look after the old, the young, the sick and the infirm. They were also those who had fought for the liberation of Zimbabwe and were continuing in their quest. They were those who lived “outside” last time around and “had done that” and now took the alternative route. And there were the energetic and entrepreneurial who make a go of anything.
Zimbabwe has suffered. There is no doubt. It is uncomfortable being there. But it has survived. And it is this survival that I want to write about.
People don’t curl up and die because the economists and politicians and pundits say they should. They pursue their ends as they see them. They experiment and revise. They keep going.
So Zimbabwe didn’t die. The currency shattered all records for inflation and it remained the currency of choice long after economists said it would disappear. It has gone now but probably more because of pressure on the German government by activists made printing it more difficult.
Simply, action matters; not theory and not prediction. People will not stop living just because we think we wouldn’t be bothered in their shoes.
African universities don’t die either
I’ll make this point again using another story.
A decade ago, I was part of a team reviewing the staffing situation in African universities for World Bank. Briefly, the a priori thesis was that Africa suffered a brain drain. Coopted belatedly on to the team, when I was briefed, I burst out laughing. “You can’t get rid of us,” I guffawed.
So how do universities run when they have bullet holes in the walls (one in our sample did) and havelittle money to pay academics?
Yes, universities suffer from “not on seat”, a Nigerian expression that someone came in, left his jacket and went out to do his own business. But despite one university paying its staff the equivalent of one chicken a month, staff kept pitching up, kept teaching, kept examining. They keep doing what they do. I know it sounds improbable, but it is your theory that is wrong; not the world!
But maybe Western economies began to die
Today I came across another story in Global Guerillas that illustrates the point again.
Pick up any HRM textbook in UK, Australia or NZ, and it is all about smashing the unions. Thatcherism was a dramatic struggle against labour power. And Thatcherism won. It liberated the economy from the tyranny of unions!
That maybe so but smashing the “working classes”, or the middle classes as they are called in the USA, also concentrated economic surplus in the hands of corporates. And we see the results now. Oh, you might have drifted off when I put it like this. Read on.
People don’t sit on their hands just because you told them they were worth nothing. They carry on living their lives. Instead of achieving their life goals by making more money by being more productive, they continued achieving their life goals and put their energies into other schemes – like second houses or just flipping their first. The goals stay. The energy to progress is diverted.
We will not put our lives on hold because you want us to. It simply doesn’t work like that.
A good system provides opportunities for us to achieve our own goals within a collective mutually beneficial framework. We need a system where each of us can see a promotion on the horizon and has access to learning experiences and training that allows us to seek promotion. As soon as the system says “nothing for you here”, we will divert our attention elsewhere but we won’t do nothing. Don’t say this is not possible; this is called HRM. And don’t laugh. Who hired the HR Manager you have?
Where will individuals put their energy in the UK now?
In a country as big and diverse as the UK, it can be hard to see what might happen next. The choices are not obvious.
Certainly, at an individual level, the prize will go to those who envisage positive goals in depressing circumstances and who continue seeing opportunity while those around them become panicky and depressed. But we will each do what makes sense to us at the moment that we do it.
At a collective level, it seems to me that we really must strengthen what Britain called the working classes. And the best way to do that is for people who have power to limit themselves.
Instead of running around asking for 25%-30% indicative cuts, Ministers should be talking to everyone with power or unusually high incomes (and I include the unions and the local drug barons). Ask them rather, what can you do to make the middle level guys better off. What can you do to free them up from worrying about housing and heating, food and chidren’s clothing? What can you do to help them feel secure about their future (to aged 90) and their children’s future and prospects?
Those with power and resources must settle down those who will otherwise divert their energy where they must – looking after me and my own. And the politicians must lead.
Instead of indicative cuts, come back to us with indicative solutions. Look us in the eye when you announce them. If our eyes light up, you are on to something. If we howl with laughter, deliver a sharp smack to your powerful mates.
When I was an undergraduate, the hardest tasks were to format essays in Harvard or APA style, to write references out correctly, and to wade through incomprensible tomes.
We got good at all three tasks, of course ,and after two years of graduate school, I had developed good habits of checking references as a I read. I was taking in
the words
the structure
the mental map of the people and history of a field
all at the same time.
Intellectual skills in the internet age
Reading on the internet is hard because even with two screens, we can’t flip back and forth between the text, contents and references quite so fast. We also can’t take notes so easily or highlight text quite so physically and memorably.
Copy Gen Y
When I first started teaching Gen Y, I read around and saw references to their ability to organize information without a structure. It didn’t take me long to realize that this observation was accurate. They have their own skills born out of the internet age for checking the provenance of information and updating their mental maps.
More to the point, they don’t want structure and they don’t want “received opinions” from on high. University lecturers brought up in another time are disconcerted by their apparently “personal” view of the world.
Publishing is the new literacy
What Gen Y are doing, without being told by us, is stepping in to the what Clay Shirky and others call the new literacy.
If reading and writing became common place after the invention of the printing press, publishing is common place today. Everyone does it, more or less.
Just as being able to write well affects our performance in many subjects over and above English or whatever language we speak, publishing underlies our performance in every area too. We are each responsible now for judging the quality and value of information and making it available to other people. Just as we still have writers, we will still have publishers par excellence. Just as we have people who “don’t write” and “don’t read”, we will have people who don’t publish either. But publishing as a skill is now as commonplace as other activities that were once reserved . . . like international travel for example.
When, and how, will Universities catch up?
Universities know and understand this. At least, educational scholars do. I saw a good presentation from someone at Open University on slideshare a few days ago.
But a fully ‘constructionist’ view of education is still seen as dippy or at best innovatory. It is neither. It is essential. And we have many changes to make in the way we organize classes, assess assignments and understand what is knowledge.
The wheels are not just coming off the old industrial structures of banks and oil companies. The time for decrying industrial age education is gone. We are past that stage. We are in the thick of building the education system of the new age. We need to be part of it. We need to publish to our own account. That’s how we will learn, not just personally, but as a collective.
The point is that a “personal” view of the world is not a mark of a spoiled generation. It is an essential skill and Gen Y has grasped its necessity, intuitively perhaps, but they have grasped it. We have to catch up.
I was talking to someone in one of the many branches of the public service yesterday. “And we get a lot of time-wasters”, he said.
This is a narrative, of course. It is the way we speak rather than any statement of fact. But it raises the question, “Why do we regard the public as wasting our time?”
Or is our time wasted by management who are poorly trained?
Sadly, targets are the culprits.
This is the psychology.
A target creates a goal. Yup, that is what was intended.
Goals create feedback loops. Yes, we all know targets distract people from their jobs. We have been complaining for years.
And there are two further points I would like to add.
Simplifying life slightly, we have fast feedback loops and slow feedback loops.
Public servants have infinitely slow feedback loops. Slower than “Mum” who runs a house and who cleans the house today and cooks your dinner, and cleans the house tomorrow, and cooks your dinner. In short, the work of those who serve is never done. It is very reactive, too. In plain English, public servants hang around a lot. That is their job and it takes a special temperament to be able to do that without fabricating a crises or two for stimulation and entertainment.
Slow feedback loops does not mean the work is unskilled. Slow feedback loops mean the opposite. The work is highly skilled. You have to work “by the book”. “Mum” cleans the house whether guests are coming or not. The pilot checks the entire pre-flight checklist whether they anticipate a problem or not. They do work and they do it without anything changing visibly and without applause or immediate reward. You and I can’t do that. We get bored and become disruptive.
Simply, public servants look like they are sitting around but they do “hard work”. It is hard to know that the workis done well unless you really know what you are doing.
The public are not time-wasters. Well they maybe, but we waste a lot more time angsting about time-wasters.
The public aren’t experts in the work done by public servants. Public servants start to take their skill for granted (as we do) and forget they can make a judgment that we will just get wrong. We could do with their wisdom.
Much of the time, the public is worried they are supposed to be doing something. Good counsel from a policeman or front-line worker reads the request in context and advises the right course of action. The right course of action might be do nothing (take two aspirin and have a good night’s sleep, etc.) and it is useful to know that. We rarely think that doing nothing is doing good. Public servants with with their slow feedback loops are masters of “let events unfold”. Let them make the call.
Rushing people who are worried slows them down. When we treat each request as seriously as the next or the last, people calm down and our work speeds up.
That’s not to say that we don’t do triage. Triage is part of taking people seriously. People aren’t cattle queuing up at the slaughter house. If it is better to take one person ahead of others, just tell them. When we have a good reason, everyone will understand, particularly if we can estimate when we will see them and give them back some control over their lives. They calm down and work goes faster.
Successful ways of working with people is often counter-intuitive
It is possible to treat each person as an individual. But when we go 8 hours/x people makes y minutes. Suddenly there isn’t enough time.
One. We waste time scheduling. Try not scheduling and see what happens. I once went to a doctor who simply gave 10 people an appointment on each hour. He called them in turn but saw whoever was there. Isn’t that what we do anyway? And if we a running late to get there for 9, for example, there is no need to panic, because we are in a buffer.
Two. We have time-wasted between appointments. I was given an appointment at 9:06 last week. Admirable precision. Pity the internal paper-work wasn’t ready for her and her printer wasn’t working.
Three. There is simply a simple rule of management. Make sure management doesn’t cost more than what is being managed. What would happen if we would remove the management and organization? Often little but saving time and saving heaps of money? Of course, skilled management that helps us be more productive would be cool to have particularly when it is inexpensive.
We often get more done by being patient. I know the arithmetic doesn’t suggest so. But arithmetic is not the right analytical tool for this problem. I am a numbers person but turning everything into “3 men dig a trench . . .” simply tells me your arithmetical training stopped when you were 11. My that is harsh . . but you asked for it.
Using arithmetic to solve the distribution of public service is a constellation of intellectual errors. And you know it is wrong because it doesn’t work. If feels wrong. Stop repeating yourself and try another way!
The language of morality, character and virtue is back!
And gratitude is one of the most popular concepts to be given wholehearted support by Martin Seligman and positive psychologists.
Write a gratitude diary daily (or at least weekly), we feel a positive mood more often, we detect more easily positive events in the noise of negativity, and we fell more energetic and hopeful.
Tipping our hat to the positive, not matter how bad the negative, is fun and gives us the energy to cope with whatever the world throws at us.
But this is motherhood and apple pie, as Americans would say. What of the opposite?
The test of morality is the desirability of immorality
Positive psychologists don’t like talking about the opposite of morality, character and virtue because many of them are clinical psychologists, and they are, well, sick of that stuff.
But what will the absence of gratitude, or ingratitude, do to you?
Ingratitude is sooner or later fatal to its author.
Maths of chaos theory
Chaos theory will predict just so. Initial conditions predict final conditions. In mathematical language, x at time 2 is equal to x at time 1 plus/minus or times/divide something.
When we start out ungrateful, we will continue ungrateful until something changes. We may simply make our lives so unpleasant that we decide to mend our fences and start to say thank you.
Phase states
Sadly, chaos theory also predicts that when we are in a sufficiently sour mood, we change states from one where we can recover, and will recover, to one where we move into a narrow space that is hard to get out of. Ultimately we might reach a third state which is a dark cell of solitary confinement of our own design.
Simply put, we cannot expect ourselves to be infinitely resilient. Shit happens, but sufficient shit overpowers our ability to cope. The moral of this observation is not to make life harder for ourselves. It is hard enough already.
Kindness is not self-indulgence
There is no point in beating ourselves up, though, for being ungrateful. Sometimes we are. We know we shouldn’t be careless or resentful but when we are irritated for some reason, we may find our generous spirit has left us.
Then the gratitude diary comes into play again. It is quite surprising what good things are happening around us while we are taken up with inconvenient, churlish and distasteful aspects of our lives.
And sadly, when a gratitude diary is not a discipline that we do whether we feel like it or not, we might go days without writing it, our mood lowering and the rubbish in our lives slowly displacing the good.
When we have got it bad, then, as poet David Whyte says, “The truth is found in a walk around the lake.” It is time to gain perspective and we do that from getting back in touch with nature and the good in our lives.
The discipline to respect the positive in the world is an important discipline. We cannot, and do not function without it.
Mandelbrot
And apparently off the point but not, TED has posted Mandelbrot talking about his career. Gratitude is in the same class of phenomena as cauliflowers (yes it is!). To get an inkling of the maths, watch the video. To get a sense of what mathematicians do for a living, watch the video. To get a sense of enormous gratitude and humility in a career that could have been frustrating other than for attitude, watch the video!
And then watch the second on African fractals! Mandelbrot worked on fractals and they are seen all over Africa in design of buildings, artwork and . . . democracy. Go on . . . watch it!
Paulo Coelho tweeted today (and he does many time a day)
My internal GPS uses faith, intuition and discipline every day to calculate my position
It’s presumptious to re-phrase his words but I know a lot of people who are bothered by poetic language and who might find “faith, intuition and discipline” so “unscientific” and “contradictory” that they tune-out.
Let me provide some behavioural examples
Faith
Imagine that I am doing a piece of work that I dislike. It doesn’t engage my attention. It is unchallenging. It’s not sociable. I learn little. I don’t think it adds value to the world. These conditions seriously challenge my ‘faith’ and fill me with ‘despair’.
In “History of the World in 100 things” running on BBC Radio 4 at the moment, I heard instructions given to icon-makers. Say a prayer. Forgive your enemies and remember God is watching you at work . . .
This is apt when we have a dreary task, not so? Clear my mind of other grievances (my lousy work is grievance enough). And then start my work imaging that “my god”, or my destiny, is watching me.
Feeling “my god” watching me do whatever it is that I do, will bring all that I value to that work, however awful or even terrible that it is. Thinking that “my god” is watching, having a conversation with “my god”, helps me concentrate and shape the work more in the image I believe appropriate.
If you scientific in your thinking, then test the idea. Try it. Do you not have a mental image, however abstract of what is right about the world? Doesn’t bring that image into the room with you help you find value, not matter how dreary the circumstances?
Intuition
I understand intuition to mean very simply that our brain processes information at many different levels. Much of our processing is unconscious and much is actually . . . inaccurate. It helps to take a moment to let the whirring of my brain catch up with itself and to determine what I think and why.
If I don’t make time, I am likely to be confused (not become confused, be confused) and take wrong turns.
I need to slow down. I need to take time to close my eyes and listen for the furthest sound. I need to label your emotions an let it all come together. What is the rush anyway? Ah the clock, the boss! Funny how we always have time to do things twice but never have time to get it right the first time. I tested what I am saying by staring at those old ropes, Instead of feeling mild irritation, I became clear about what I would do and why.
Slow down and get sorted. And don’t forget to close my eyes and incorporate the most distant sounds.
Discipline
I am not to sure what Paulo Coelho meant by discipline and I deeply suspect that the meaning I learned in childhood is wrong. I’ll take a stab at it and put it this way.
Most of the time, when we are out of sorts, we think the world is not being kind to us. The secret is this. The world is not about us. The mountain is there whether we are here or not. The mountain doesn’t care so much about us.
Discipline, possibly, means mindfulness and being in touch with what is happening around us. It helps to feel the carpet beneath our feet and the keyboard below our fingers. What is happening around us? Then we know what we need to do.
I’ve always regarded myself as disciplined. I keep my promises. I do my share of unpleasant tasks. I put in extra work. But goal orientation and conscientiousness isn’t discipline, I think. Respecting the right of everything to have its own existence, independent of mine. Respecting everything around me rather than ignoring what does not serve my goal – that is possibly the discipline of which Paolo Coelho speaks.
What do you think?
My internal GPS uses faith, intuition and discipline every day to calculate my position.
I am here. It is right that I am here. All the things I perceive make sense, if only I take time to sort them out. And everything else has a right to be here too.
Please get us a market. Quickly.
