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Psychologists, 2009 AD, recessions, life

Published January 10, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Ned’s challenge

Ned has solved my dilemma about what to write about this weekend.  Commenting on my post on Hope, he asks:

How do positive psychologists quantify this information if you are no longer studying behavior? In other words, how do you maintain empiricism?

Learning to be systematic

As I said in my post on Hope that during my training as a psychologist, Hope and such moral virtues, were out-of-bounds.  Like most psychology departments at the time, we were behaviourists and positivists.  We studied what we could see, and we looked for the underlying ‘laws’ of behaviour.

Learning to watch carefully

I am still in favour of psychologists being taught in this way.  A lot of psychologists arrive from the ‘Arts’ and the ‘laboratory method’ is a good counter-balance to their prior training.  The first step in developing empathy is to recognize the ‘other’.  And even psychologists (particularly psychologists) struggle with this.  If I have to describe you, and you alone, and if I am given the challenge of describing you in exactly the same way as the next person sees you, I begin the journey of separating what I want, from what you want. And as a result, I will be a lot more effective in everything I undertake.

Practically too, quantitative questionnaire-based studies are heaps easier to do for your dissertation!

Learning to tell a story

The analytical tradition is not, though, the whole story.  When we work as psychologists, we have to learn to synthesize information about a  person.  We have to bring together all the measurements we have gathered, and understand the person as a whole.  Regrettably, even at the post-graduate level where people are training to go into practice (as doctors do in the clinical part of their training) psychologists are given little help in this formative task. They are taught, after all, by people whose university careers depend upon being analytical.

At this juncture in a psychologist’s training, people who came from the ‘Arts’ have a better time.  Our measurements need to be woven together into a coherent narrative and people who studied Literature and History at school are now at an advantage.

The new age is the age of synthesis and morality

Practising psychology has been a journey, for me, towards learning to synthesize information.  I was pleased to see that Mihalyi Cziksentmihalyi, who you probably know for his concept of Flow, has predicted that synthesis is the new science.  And more so, synthesis with a moral edge.

  • It does mattter that we can walk in other people’s shoes.
  • It does matter that we can judge the effects of our actions on others.
  • It does matter that we can understand how our actions hurt others, and how an action that seems essential to us might be repulsive, disgusting and quite repellant to other people.
  • It matters too, that we have the capacity to imagine a narrative, or story line, in which we are not at each others’ throats.  Development and world peace depends on our imagination.

We are part of the contests and conflicts of life

The difficulty with the analytical tradition is that it pretends that we are above the fray.  We are part of the story of this planet.  Thankfully.  And I intend to play my part in making the tough decisions of life.  To raise issues. To look for ways forward.  To press my case and the case of those dear to me  To negotiate. To look for common ground.  To apologize when I have it wrong.  And to go to war when necessary.  But understanding that to do so might put me in a position where I get a heap lot wrong.  I’ll try the diplomatic route first.

But above the fray, No!  Always right?  Good lord.  The only way to be always right is to be in a laboratory.   To lock oneself up and throw away the key.

Rethinking psychology

The world is not like this.  We are giving-and-taking all the time. That is life.  That’s the part I like!  Can psychology cope with it?  We need to learn an expression common in management theory.  A business is path-dependent.  It is completely unique in other words.  From studying other businesses, I can develop a sense of the possible.  I can learn to look at my situation methodically from a variety of perspectives.  But they way things turn out is not predicitable.  The way things turn out is the result of all our actions – yours, mine and people we don’t even know.  All these taken together are far too complicated to predict with any specificity.

Occupational hazards

The unknowability of life may be depressing if you are wedded to the idea that the world is predictable.  But who said that it is?  The analytical tradition asks, only, what can we predict?  Unfortunately, if you spend to much time in a psychology laboratory, being rewarded for finding phenomena that are amenable to analysis, you start to think that everything must be analysed and if it can’t be subjected to experimentation that it is not important.  An occupational hazard of being a research psychologist is that you gradually lose your capacity for synthesis under real life conditions.

Are we up for the fullness of life?

David Whyte, British corporate poet, has a wonderful poem that he calls a Self-Portrait.  It begins:

“It doesn’t interest me if there is one God or many gods”

and ends

“I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat.  I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even gods speak of God.”

So while I endorse analytical training for people embarking on a career as a psychologist, training in synthesizing information is also a necessary part of our ‘clinical’ training.  At the same time, we learn to understand that it is not about our clients getting it right, or avoiding the downside of life.  It is about our clients entering the fray.  Of putting their passions at the disposal of the collective.  Of living with glory, and with defeat.  And doing so knowing that a full life for the collective and themselves depends upon they doing their job ,with their special talents, even though sometimes it feels like a ‘cross to bear’, and a ‘cross to bear’ with no certainty that we are even doing the right thing.

One age at a time

That is life.  For most twenty-somethings, this is very hard to understand.  I am happy they take the first step in understanding their personality is different from others, and that to have winners, by definition we must have losers.  Those concepts are hard enough.  They will learn more later, just as our stumbling one years olds delighted us by running like gazelles in their teenage years.

What’s next?

2009 promises to be a hard year.  The financial crisis is even worse than most people understand.  My analytical training helps me here and I am collecting visual explanations on the page Financial Crisis Visually.

This month has also been a horrible month with out-and-out conflict breaking out in Gaza (hence some of the fiercer imagery, perhaps).

But it is our year.  It is our time. And our life, in 2010, depends entirely on what we do together, now.

Come with me,

life is contested, but it is ours.

P.S.  Ned has persuaded me to re-orient this blog more to non-psychologists.  Please let me know if I am on the right path and what you think I should be doing!

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Hope: how can this touchy-feely stuff help me during the recession?

Published January 9, 2009 by Jo Jordan

“I hope so.”

How many times have you said that, and in the true spirit of England meant “I very much doubt it”, or ,”It had better, or someone must watch out.”

Hope was out of bounds

When I studied psychology, we didn’t study phenomena such as hope.  ‘Behaviour’ was ‘in’.  If we couldn’t see it, it didn’t exist.  If it didn’t respond to the experimenters’ manipulation, it was unimportant.

Character, intent, and morality were out.  Be like a rat, or psychologists wouldn’t pay any attention to you.  (Hmm, good idea perhaps?)

Virtues

Positive psychology, under the leadership of Martin Seligman, has changed all that.  Now we study virtue.  Are you zestful?  Are you prudent?

And we aren’t going to impose a menu on you either.  We’ll help you label the virtues that are dear to you, and have been dear to you for a long time.

Then we’ll help you build your life around them.

Hope

Hope is one of these virtues, but it is a tricky one.  It has a double meaning for positive psychologists as it does in lay language.  Some of us ‘specialize’ in hope as others ‘specialize’ courage, humility or love of beauty. If you want to label your ‘specialities’, you can take the virtues test here.

This is how positive psychologists define hope.

Hope [optimism, future-mindedness, future orientation]
Expecting the best in the future and working to achieve it; believing that a good future is something that can be brought about
Hope, optimism, and future-mindedness – You expect the best in the future, and you work to achieve it. You believe that the future is something that you can control.

Hope is linked to control

Sadly, this defintion does not distinguish what we can control  from what we cannot.  People who want to control everything are likely to get very frustrated.  Too much hope of this kind is likely to be anything but a strength.

Equally, we know that hope is essential to all of us.  It is not just a ‘speciality’ chosen by some.  When we have hope, we are less stressed, even when conditions, objectively, are bad.  Those of us who design organizations and institutions as part of our professional work know that leaving control in the hands of individuals is the foundation stone of a viable, vital and vibrant collective.

Torturers understand the importance of hope and deliberately take control out of people’s hands. That is the nature of terrorism, whether it is a bomb on the tube, bullying in a school or factory, or threatening to drown someone when we question them for information.  The intent is to break our will by inducing “learned helplessness”, or the collapse of hope.

Hope is not just a virtue; it is as necessary as air

And there we turn the full circle.  If we are living in the shadow of a bully who is intent on removing hope, it is so, so, important not to let them get to you.  They are likely to succeed, at least in part, because we aren’t miracle workers.  But for every glimmer of hope we retain for yourself and others around us, we are winning.  They only win if they remove hope completely.

Positive psychologists often quote a concentration camp survivor who went on to train as a psychiatrist: Vaclev Havel.

“Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

Sometimes life sucks

We have to remember that sometimes life sucks, and sometimes ‘shit happens’.  And sometimes it is big stuff that we didn’t invite and cannot control.  When focus on the randomness of life, we rehearse our sense that life is nonsense.  We deny hope.  And we break our own spirt as surely as a torturer.

But what can we do instead?

How do we nurture hope?

When we start to ‘take inventory’, to ‘start close in’, we express faith that our strengths were given to us to use in the situation we find ourselves in, and that we should use them even if the situation is awful and indeed, because the situation is awful.

Hope is not belief in an end point.  Hope is belief in a beginning point.  Hope is a belief in you and in me.

Come with me

What is your beginning point?  What is the best part of being you? I need to know too.  It strengthens my hope that it will all ‘make sense regardless of the way it turns out’.

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UPDATE: For an HR Managers perspective on the Recession, I have written a summary on a new post.

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You, me and the woes of General Motors

Published January 5, 2009 by Jo Jordan

I’ve been collecting every visual and pictorial explanation of the financial crisis that I can find and storing on my page: Financial Crisis Visually.

Today, via @flowingdata, I came across this poster chart of the collapse of GM.

fallofgmwallstats545

Wouldn’t it be a good idea if every company had its strategic position boldly displayed on the canteen wall?  What internal factors matter?  Where does our money go? What external factors are we watching?

I am sure Jess would be happy to have the commission!  She is also the artist behind other visuals I have stored.

UPDATE: For an HR Managers perspective on the Recession, I have written a summary on a new post.

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I am good at dealing with recessions!

Published January 3, 2009 by Jo Jordan

or will be!

Professional responsibility can be demanding

In an earlier incarnation, I had a reputation for taking on the tough projects – multiple constituencies, vested interests, and consequences for everyone involved.  I loved that work.  It took listening, carefully; it took discretion; and it took carefully working through details to find solutions that others had missed and being very clear about the consequences we asked each party to tolerate.

During most of the time I did this work, I also taught at the local university.  Students were always surprised when I told them, usually to encourage them when they were losing heart over a project of their own, that there was a moment during every project when I felt the project was going to beat me.  There was always a moment when I had felt that this would be the one.

Running a small business is a lot scarier

Starting a small business took anxiety to a whole new level, and the question I ask myself, is why?  Why is worrying about cash flow so much more scary?

Is it because we are so much less in control?

Is it because the stakes are higher – if we mess up we may have to pack up the business?

Is it because running out of money assaults our middle class identity more severely than not acing a professional project that was regarded as difficult in the first place?

Is it because I have higher self-efficacy or self-belief in professional work?

Is it because professional work is for other people and I am less motivated to look after myself?

Psychological advice almost seems flippant

There is a lot of advice around for dealing with debilitating anxiety and I have dispensed a lot of it myself.

  • I like to be well prepared so I have no reason to be anxious.
  • I make sure I have a fall back position.
  • I remind myself of good times.
  • I value my social support – I know it helps.
  • And I make sure I get exercise, sleep, and eat sensibly.

The truth is is when we feel deep anxiety, it detracts from anything else.  We don’t feel prepared.  We don’t have a fall back position.  Good times in the past aren’t really relevant.  We’re on our own.  And now we, can’t sleep, can’t eat or eat too much, and exercise makes us feel like we will pass out.  And if we are really lucky, we have a full scale anxiety attack that looks like a heart attack to anyone watching.

Lao Tzu might have better advice

I pondered this problem for a day and equally pondered the inadequacy of our advice.  We are able to tell people how to deal with theoretical fear, not the real thing.

Then I stumbled on a saying on the Positive Psychology Daily News New Year blog (which is worth reading for itself – check out the Garbage Truck video and the Gratitude Chain).   About four authors down, Kirsten quotes the Chinese Philosoper, Lao Tzu.

Seek not happiness too greedily and be not  fearful of  unhappiness.

This is very much like Franklin Rooseveldt”s “there is nothing to fear but fear itself”, but it says more.  It does not suggest that we should dismiss negative emotions, or try to arrange our life to avoid them.

A full life includes the positive and the negative, all four seasons, spring, summer, autumn, winter, and we need to be competent in managing all of them.  To think of winter as the absence or negative of summer, distracts us from learning how to deal with winter, and more importantly, how to enjoy it.

The idea of happiness promoted by Losada’s work on the dynamics of happiness makes us think of emotional space that includes joy and grieving, linked together on a trajectory shaped like a three dimensional butterfly.  It is just as healthy to be in a place of grieving or fear, as one of joy and pleasure, provided it is a place we are passing through and approached  in a spirit of inquiry, inclusion and emphasis on what works.

After reading the Lao Tzu quote, the mental trick I found useful was to think of myself inside fear – not looking at it, but being inside it, looking at it around me.  That seems to restore a sense of what I am doing.

I have to get good at this!

It is not accepting unhappiness, which one reading of the quotation might suggest, but seeing myself dealing competently and effectively with negative situations.

I hope that this helps anyone else who faces perilous decisions this year!

UPDATE: For an HR Managers perspective on the Recession, I have written a summary on a new post.

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Lighten your personal burden for navigating 2009

Published December 31, 2008 by Jo Jordan

A tumultuous year ends

So we come to December 31st, the arbitrary marker of one year ending and another beginning.  What a rough road the year has been.   The emperor’s clothes of the financial system has shocked us, as has our previous collective unwillingness to call what we all knew.  The generational baton has passed from Baby Boomers to Gen X with the gripping election of Barack Obama.  In other parts of the world, change has happened, and sometimes of equal significance, change has not happened.  It seems that where ever we live, we have reached a fork in the road, and we are unclear about what lies ahead or how to commit our energy.

Anxiety competing with optimism

So as we approach 2009, we have a nasty knawing feeling in our stomachs.  If I commit myself to optimism, we think privately, will pessimism turn out to be the better route?  Or, vice versa?

Together into the unknown

The reality is that this is a false dilemma and a false choice.  We don’t know what is on the road ahead and whether it is to be feared or not.  We don’t know if the roads will fork again, or even if the forks we see will rejoin themselves shortly.

All we can really do, is gather ourselves up, surround ourselves with people we like, and set off with a spring in our step.

What we need on the journey along an unknown road

  • to stick together, to remain within sight and sound of each other
  • to keep our resources safe and focus on navigating the road
  • to keep spirits up, lest we drift to that emotional place of bargaining with choices that aren’t real.

In organizations we know

For some of us, the journey ahead may not be quite so obviously into the unknownn.  We may be in a viable business that we own, or that employs us.  For you, I am happy to say, the most popular post on this blog on the last day of 2008,  is one I wrote when the recession seemed likely: a positive approach to HR in the recession.

I made three very similar points back in July about the role of the Human Resources team during recession.

  • Our own health. Our first priority is to ensure that the HR team has plenty of emotional R&R (rest & recreation).   Emotions are contagious and if we have low grade depression, we in HR will spread our low spirits like a forest fire!
  • Positive goals all round. Our overiding programme is to help each and every person in the organization develop explicit & positive goals and we stop, only, when everyone is brimming with enthusiasm for the year ahead.
  • Healthy leaders. The chief item in our contingency budget is a lot of time to nurture the emotional health of the leaders.  If they are not in good shape, they will be not detect opportunities and we are all sunk.

If you aren’t in HR, or don’t have an HR department, you may want to delegate one person to take charge of this brief.

Into a year of the unknown

For those of us facing the unknown, maybe our businesses are new or our careers are unstable, our work follows the same parallels.

  • We shape the collective. In hard times, we may be very tempted to go it alone.  And I include here whining about other people not helping us sufficiently.  If we imagine ourselves walking along a road, as confused as everyone else around us, this is the time to talk to others.  This is the time to take care to include everyone we meet.  This is the time to take time, and to spend precious resources, on little rituals that celebrate  the commonness of our journey, our guts, our gumption, our hope, and that we are on the road together.  We may be very reluctant to do this because budgets are tight and we feel resources are limited but this is the time.  This is the time to be clear about the collective in our own minds, and through our clarity, help others keep the wellbeing of us all in the front of their minds too.  I can make you this promise. The half-an-hour you spend today quietly thinking about who is around you on your journey into 2009 will bring you unparalleled dividends in the year ahead.
  • We cherish individualism. With the need to protect the collective, we might become overly demanding and even whiny about the responsibilities of others.   The collective depends not on what individuals give to it, but what it gives to individuals.  To be effective, a collective celebrates the strengths of its members, and makes room for people to have quiet time alone and with intimates to recover their breath and keep their own dreams alive.  How much empathy do we have for others around us?  Do we understand the shoes in which they walk? Importantly, are we leaving enough time in our day and our transactions to stop and listen and think and understand the people around us?  How could we make a quiet half-an-hour each day to slow down and cherish the people around us?
  • We trade tasks and lessen the burden. A burden shared is more than halved.  There can be a temptation to go it alone on the one hand, or to try to use people to do our work on the other and to become demanding and bossy.  Organizing is a little different.  We identify tasks that are important to the collective and we make sure everyone has a real and respected role to protect the well-being of the group. To extend the metaphor of an unknown road, we put the good map readers onto to reading the map, we put the active and restless to scouting ahead, we put the cooks on to cooking, and the story tellers onto entertainment.  Can we make time, once a week or once a month, to stop and think about what must be done, who is the natural person to do it, and what we will do for them while they are doing that for us?

And when it seems hopeless or too hard

And so what if we are new to a place, or in an unpleasant place, with no collective spirit and evil leadership?  I know this is hard.  I am a pseudo-refugee after all.  My advice is to take it step-by-step.

  • Think through what you need to go down the road, and understand that everyone else needs exactly what you need.
  • Talk to each person you meet and understand their journey.
  • Once you understand their strengths, ask them to trade with you what they do well and easily, with what you can do for them.
  • Set up the time when you will swap.
  • And continue adding people, all the time keeping the ‘swapping time’ positive, when you also celebrate collective well-being.

Lighten your personal burden for navigating 2009, as and when the opportunity arises, and through your needs, come to celebrate the journeys and strengths of others.

2009: A year of leadership?

In western ritual, we don’t have a year of  this or that.  Maybe this is the year of leadership?

In years like this, as we walk along an unknown road, we need leaders

  • who think through what needs to be done
  • who have the emotional energy to understand and celebrate the journeys that other people are taking
  • who form the collective as an umbrella
  • who delegate tasks to protect the collective
  • who keep commitment to the collective with a vibrant emotional space where we come to recharge rather than be depleted.

I’ll be interested in your stories as the year unfolds.  Here’s to a fun, happy and unexpectedly prosperous 2009!

UPDATE: For an HR Managers perspective on the Recession, I have written a summary on a new post.




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Mindfully in the recession

Published December 24, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Exploration as holiday

Two days before Christmas, all the younger generation in our family are away, exploring new parts of the world, as we often do in early adulthood.  The “grand tour”, or what Kiwis call “OE”, is a venerated tradition to see the world and to cope with unfamiliarity and surprise.  Some people travel “to find themselves”.  Others are drawn by challenge & adventure.

Exploration as necessity

Real challenges, though, when there is no safety net, and lasting, damaging failure is possible, are altogether different.  We are often paralysed by fear, and we come to know too well the phrase ‘there is nothing to fear but fear itself’.  This really means, there is everything to fear, so much so that we cannot afford to indulge emotions that distract us from dealing with threat.

Am I suggesting that we “get hard”, or be Polyanna, and smile?

Julian Carron, a professor of theology at the University of Milan suggests we are all beggars and that to live our lives purposefully, in good times and bad, we must be conscious of our needs, aware of reality, and aware of our needs in our reality, whatever it is.

“The beggar has only one option: asking.”

“So the beggar is not the one who is most naive, but who is most realistic.  And, consequently, as we begin to defeat the confusion that surrounds and penetrates us, nothing can hinder us from become aware of ourselves in the the present moment.”

Like monsters in the dark, what is the unspoken need that panics you to name?

Is there not comfort in saying  “I ask for  .  .  .”?

Does not compassion for yourself awake in you compassion for others, whoever they are, and whatever their circumstances?

UPDATE:  The message that is delivered again and again by poets, philosophers and priests is that we must be able to talk to ourselves about our vulnerabilities; and it is only when we do that we can calm down pay attention.  When we refuse to acknowledge our predicaments, we become very anxious and cannot think straight.  Oddly, when we have not choice but to confront the threats against us, we often calm done and start to deal with them.

UPDATE: For an HR Managers perspective on the Recession, I have written a summary on a new post.

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Poetry in HR?

Published December 18, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Psychology and no poetry

I studied psychology and taught work psychology for many years.  I arrived in psychology from the physical sciences and found the hard core experimental and measurement approach quite familiar.  Indeed as a youngster, I might have fled had I been asked to deal with poetry.  Literature had been my worst subject at school by quite a long way and I simply lacked the frameworks for understanding what poetry offered.

Poetry in management theory

One of the pleasures of the school of positive organizational scholarship is that it embraces poetry.  Indeed, poetic language is one of the five original principles of appreciative inquiry.  Leading exponent, David Cooperrider, coins many a melodic expression, the best known being: the good, the true, the better and the possible.

Poetry in government

As he accepted his nomination for Secretary of Energy, I was delighted to see Nobel Prize winning physicist Stephen Chu quoting the words spoken by William Faulkner when he won his Nobel Prize in 1950.  Speaking to a world concerned about the ramifications of nuclear power and nuclear bombs, Faulkner said:

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.

It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.

The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Poetry in business and HR?

If this is good enough for the Secretary for Energy and the White House, then it is good enough for factories, banks, shops and insurance brokers!

Do you employ a poet and an artist?  Do you think a style of HR that lifts hearts, reminds us of courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of our past and are the glory of our present and our future, together?

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Singing hearts 2009

Published December 11, 2008 by Jo Jordan

It begins

Earlier today, I asked a professional services provider why I was unable to book for Monday.   She inquired of her superiors and that is how she found out that she had been made redundant.

Shortfly afterwards,  I completed a planned trip to Woolworth’s, and stocked up on stationery in their closing down sale.  It really felt rotten paying.  I got brilliant service by-the-way.  If you are looking for good talented  people in the Milton Keynes area, pop into the Newton Pagnell branch.

We stutter

@Pistachio, who is an astonishingly interesting tweeter given to pithy phrases, asked today:  what is the one thing you would change if you could?

This is what I would change: the lack of a coordinated collective, community response to redundancies.  People should not be left on their own.

But do we fall?

Yesterday, I started persuading my village to join Twitter.  If we are all on Twitter, traders will be able to communicate with us more easily, and we will benefit.   For example, yesterday the Coop had carrots at 50p.  Had you known that before you left home, you would have arrived with ideas on how to make carrot-based dishes.

When I heard my provider had been made redundant, I undertook to find out rents and to investigate whether we cannot hire her independently.

And what help would I value  from you?

I do appreciate people who pop by this blog and make a comment.  I am very appreciative of people who’ve helped me settle well in the UK.

I want you to answer @Pistachio‘s question, but slightly differently.  I want you to think what you want for 2009.  Not what you commit to do as a type of New Year’s Resolution, but what you want.  I want to know what would make your heart sing and your spirits soar?

And then, flick Ian Jeanes a message.  Ian is organizing people with like dreams, and I will help him.

What is your dream for 2009?

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Why some people stay cheerful in spite of the recession

Published December 10, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Psychology of loss and gain

Economists who study behavior will tell you that we value something we lose, much more, than we value something we gain.

This is a pertinent emotion during a recession.   Most of us will lose something.  We may not get the  increase in salary we worked so hard for, or we might make less profit.  We might suffer a large loss, such as our job, or our business.  Some of our possessions may get repossessed.  We could even lose our houses that we saved and skimped and spent many weekends working on.  What chumps we will feel!

Loss is devasting, and distracts us from possibility.

Tom Peters today passed on a fabulous anecdote about Kurt Vonnegut,  Joseph Heller and a hedgefund manager.

“At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, ‘Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.'”

Amen!
And thank you, John Bogle!
(And Judith Ellis.)

Coping with loss

It’s really difficult not to focus on loss when it happens.  Indeed, we shouldn’t move on too soon.  Grieving has its place.

I find the advice from the 5 stages of group formation useful: forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning.   The leader’s task during ‘adjourning’ is to help an individual break their tie with the group, and to proceed back into the world quite happily as an individual.

Applying that advice to the horrible events that happen in recessions, we have three broad steps.  We need

  • Signal that change is going to happen in sufficient time
  • Plan a rite of passage (like a graduation ceremony)
  • Get people visualizing life without the group (or house or whatever).

No, that’s not quite right.  To talk about ‘life without’ brings our attention back to what we have lost.

Endpoint

We need to talk about our story, all the good times we have had, and gradually get to the point that we see jobs, companies, businesses, not as the end in themselves – just as ENOUGH.  They are there to help us get what we want.

What do we want?  And how are those projects going!  Incredibly hard to focus on those things when confronted with loss – the economists tell us so!

UPDATE: For an HR Managers perspective on the Recession, I have written a summary on a new post.

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3 characteristics of recession-lovers

Published December 8, 2008 by Jo Jordan

I need your help

This is a serious post and I would love some of the heavy hitters out there like Jon Ingham, Scott MacArthur,  Bay Jordan and Jon Husband to critique it. Others please join in!

I am a work psychologist. That means I am as much concerned about work as I am about psychology. I do a lot of background reading about management, organizations, new work like nanotechnology, etc.

McKinsey’s advice on management & organization in a recession

McKinsey have just circulated an old report 2002 report on risk and resilience in recessions.

They argue that firms that come out of a recession in the upper quartile, differ significantly from other firms.  The winning group, lets call them “recession-lovers”, either hung on to their upper quartile position, or came up from below.

The McKinsey report has a few sentences I find ambiguous. They are also talking about firms that make the UQ. They aren’t talking about firms who climb from LQ to Median say, so we should be careful not to over-extrapolate.

3 winning characteristics in a recession

I have found THREE characteristics of the ‘recession lovers’.

1.  ‘Recession-lovers’ surge ahead because they were always clearly focused on what they are doing. Prior to the recession, recession-lovers are involved in less acquisition activity than their rivals. Recession-lovers maintain their acquisition activity during a recession, while others drop acquisition activity to the steady level of the recession-lovers.

Can we conclude that firms who are less successful during a recession were involved in shakier business prior to the recession?

2.  Recession-lovers make 33% more sales per employee than their rivals. During the recession, they maintain this ratio by spending MORE money on sales and general costs. To do this, they absorb lower margins (TESCO’s just announced this I think).

Can we conclude that more successful firms move to protect and maintain their central markets?

Can we conclude that less successful firms are willing to jeopardize their market position by taking quicker profits?

3.  Recession-lovers spend more money on R&D and double this expenditure during the recession.

Can we conclude that rivals had thought that their markets and products were stable and by cutting back further believe that markets will be essentially unchanged after the recession?

3 thought-provoking questions for HR Managers to ask

If I have summarized this report correctly, then there are hard questions HR Managers should be asking as they consider redundancies, cutbacks, etc.

1.  When we hired staff, we assured them of their importance, and the value and importance of the products and services they would deliver.  What has changed?

2.  Now the market is tougher, surely we should give staff  more, not fewer,  resources to do their work and to sell our products and services.   If we don’t allocate more resources, than why?    Was our previous allocation of resources thoughtless, or,  is the market is worth protecting, in which case .  .  .  What are the ethical and legal implications of what we are saying?

3.  If we are making less provision for R&D, then are we saying that the demand for our products and services will be stable into the future?  Is so, why not write long-term contracts for staff on those lines?

What’s your take?

I would like to phrase these questions as constructively as possible and I don’t want to overreach.

How can we improve our understanding of a business so that in the future we can ask the right questions earlier?

Where do young HR managers in UK develop and test their understanding, BTW?  Which are universities and firms known for turning out HR Managers with solid business sense?

UPDATE: For an HR Managers perspective on the Recession, I have written a summary on a new post.

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