Keeping conversations inside the room

Steve Yastrow blogs his new article, The Window and the Mirror.

Whenever I ask a new or prospective client to describe the issues that confront his or her business, they inevitably describe forces from the outside world that stand in the way of success. These forces could include competitive threats, fickle customers, economic conditions, intransigent unions, the weather—you name it.

...But the biggest variable affecting your success is you. Look in the mirror and you will see the most powerful factor that determines whether you succeed or fail - you.

Steve suggests this question:

If, one year from now, you look back and see that you were not able to achieve the best case outcomes which you had identified for each of the outside forces, what would be the reason? Can you identify the internal obstacles that might prevent you from succeeding? If so, is there any excuse not to act now to preempt these obstacles?

This triggered me to reread my posting on a similar theme - Shadow Conversations. I sometimes talk about keeping conversations "inside the room" as a way of ensuring engagement. I was talking to a health sector manager about new ways of running meetings, and he told me "But how do I sell that to hard-bitten consultants who are very resistant to change?" In some ways a fair question. But once I slip into conversations about these - to me - hypothetical people and what they might think of me or my process, I find myself at sea in a world of hypothesis. And sometimes talking about change (and usually about how difficult it is) is what stops change from happening.

In this case, I took a different approach, which was something like this. I pointed out that what he'd said was a familiar experience for me in the health service, and talked about shadow conversations and their power. I then said, "We could talk about these difficult people who I've not met.. but I imagine you're asking that question because of some doubt of your own about the process - in which case, I'd prefer to talk about that. Or we could talk about your anxiety about confronting them - that's something that is here inside the room." Although he was a bit suprised by this, we did then get into a much more interesting conversation.

Change is often spoken of as something to be done elsewhere, by (or to) other people. I think the effect is to make change some hypothetical process, and perhaps to give the speakers a kind of illusory sense of power. Thus, consultants are paid to come up with programmes called "Creating a Compelling Case for Change".

A friend was once asked by a CEO to get his staff to have more engaging conversations. His inspired intervention was simply to ask the boss, "Is this an engaging conversation?" Rather Zen like, I think that captures the challenge of getting conversations into the here-and-now where I think change can happen. What Ben and Roz Zander call "possibility space".

"Neutral" election coverage

Thoughtful piece by Jay Rosen (via David Weinberger), challenging conventional coverage of the US elections.

The Every Four Years approach further pretends that the professional ideal of a neutral, fact-finding, objective and purely informational press is still the standard brand and has no serious challengers, when in fact the serious challenge is here in the presence of Fox, blogging, a rising journalism of voice, and the general fragmentation of the media market, which has made a plurality of approaches the new "standard."

I find the same pattern repeated here in Britain, with a wearysome emphasis on politics-as-horse-race.

Being ignored

Eveyln Rodriguez passes on a story from the book Hidden Messages in Water

Three separate bins of rice are kept. Each day in the house, the entire family including the kids on the way in and out the door to school participate in this "experiment." To the first bin, loving words are recited such as "I love you." To the second, nothing is said. And to the third, mean words are said, such as "You ugly fool" or any of their own favorite insults. Over time, the three bins showed markedly different stages of decay.

Which do rice bin do you think rotted right away?

The totally ignored bin suffered much worse than the one that was hurled insults. Whether you believe this experiment or not doesn't matter. What resonated with me was that this rung true.

I enjoyed the story. Like Evelyn, I'd like to steer away from focussing on whether it's true or not, and reflect on why it's so engaging. I think because it captures an experience that I recognise for myself: being ignored is often harder than being challenged. Anger can be seen as distancing, but it can also be framed as a move towards, a way of engaging. A good thing to think about when dealing with conflict.

The Art of Possibility

On a strong tip from Evelyn Rodriguez, I've just read The Art of Possibility, by Roz and Ben Zander. A delightful book which I strongly recommend. What marks it out for me is that it is genuinely inspiring, in a way so few "how-to" business books ever manage. Some of the stories moved me close to tears.

I just read this one. Ben Zander is on a concert tour with a youth orchestra. After a successful peformance, a few of the teenage players get a bit carried away and go for a night on the tiles, in some cases literally, ending up partying on the hotel roof. Curfews broken, guests and hosts upset. Everyone is nudging Ben Zander to admonish them next morning, and that's what everyone expects. They have, after all, broken a clear agreement about how they behave.

Summoned to the auditorium, the diffident young players sat as far back as possible, their teenage bodies in various positions of exhaustion and protest. Every face, innocent or malfeasant, reflected that they were to receive a well-deserved dressing down.

"Last night after the concert," I began, "a woman came to me and told me with absolute honesty that the two hours she spent listening to Mahler's Fifth Symphony had been the most beautiful two hours of her entire life. You gave a great performance last night, and she was not the only one moved and changed by it." Their faces looked blank for a moment, as though they could not hear these words that were so unexpected. After a pause, I went on, "What else did you come here to offer the Brazilian people?"

One by one, from various parts of the hall, came answers to the question: We came to show them the best of America! That great music is a way of communicating friendship and love. We came to show respect for Brazil! That teenagers can make great music! That music can be fun! That we are happy to be here!"

Zander goes on to suggest

"It was precisely our exhilaration at having participated with with so many people in great music-making that resulted in four kids being on the roof. It's just surprising that they didn't float any higher on sheer energy! But does waking hotel guests at night represent the gift we want to bring the Brazilian people? Obviously not. We got off track. You have to know where the track is to get back on, and you've all expressed that beautifully."

Awesome.

Supersize Me

I went to see Supersize Me tonight. At times funny, at times painful, it certainly socks it to the fast food industry. I left feeling quite depressed about the picture it painted of the state of the American diet. And angry at the stupidity and wastefulness inherent in marketing this stuff to us down the years, and I guess at our credulity in buying into it.

Interested to see that McDonalds bought the last advertising slot before the movie to publicise their UK "supersizeme-thedebate" website - catchphrase "a balanced diet, a balanced debate". Not much of a debate here really, just a smoothly worded rebuttal. For me it lacks the dry humour of Morgan Spurlock. I find it very hard to feel any sympathy for McDonalds after being reminded of their vast investment in promoting junk food to kids for decades. Of course, it would be ludicrous to expect McD's to have any blogs or genuinely interactive forum for a debate about this.

Amazing what can happen in 35 minutes

David Wilcox writes

Can 200 people work out what they are interested in, find others with shared concerns, form groups, and decide what to do next - all in 35 minutes? I now know the answer.

An inspiring story unfolds in David's blog. Well done, David - isn't it great what people can do when facilitators give them a simple nudge and then let them get on with it? And for me, that's the thing about much really great facilitation, it has the gentleness that David personifies.

More Friends in Low Places

I know I'm getting a bit carried away posting today. But I want to share another dollop of James Willis' generously shared wisdom. I've just read this and felt very touched... then very amused. It from Chapter 7 of Friends in Low Places.

A charming and courteous gentleman of the old school, a remarkable amateur naturalist whose encyclopaedic knowledge of plant names was slowly and tragically deserting him, stood with me in his hall ten minutes after he had found his wife dead in their shower. In his thread-bare tweed jacket he swayed a little against his stick as he contemplated the fact that he had drawn the longer of the two straws they had held together for so many years. Slightly the longer.

‘The sun has gone in. I always called her my sunshine.’

What can I say?

When words fail, we use analogy. An analogy has to be a word or phrase of which we know we already share an understanding with the listener. Thus we all understand the enormously rich complex of ideas and feelings evoked by the word ‘sunshine’ and understand deeply the significance of this description when applied by husband to his beloved wife...

When the poet says ‘My love… is like a red, red rose’, he is taking two concepts that he knows the listener already has and inviting him to allow them to interact... The poet continues by enhancing the image of his love by exposing it to further patterns of ideas: ‘melody… sweetly played… in tune…’

How could any listener fail to understand what makes the poet so enthusiastic about his love?

How much richer a means of communication this is than if he had said, ‘My girlfriend is incredibly wonderful!’.

But how infinitely richer than saying ‘My girlfriend is more wonderful than 99.97% of the female population aged between sixteen and thirty four in Chipping Norton and surrounding parishes.’!

But the last method is the one by which the increasingly reductionist, literal, mechanical, artificial world in which we live has to communicate its ideas.

I think I might pushback a little on the very last sentence, as I believe the perception of the world as "increasingly reductionist" is a little pessimistic... I do feel I have some choice and influence in how reductionist my own world is.

Loving brands?

Well, I've laid off Lovemarks for a few weeks now, so it's good to see Hugh at Gaping Void taking up the cudgels.

Advice to marketeers: Stop worrying whether people you don't know love your brand or not. Stop worrying if your brand conforms to an ideal in a business/marketing book written by a clever guy you've never met. Worry instead about how much you and the people you know, love and respect love it. I mean REALLY love it. Be brutally honest.

Friends in Low Places

Clarke Ching's enthusiastic response to my earler post about Friends in Low Places provoked me to read further. Dr James Willis has put his book online. Here's a sample of his thinking: Chapter 6 -Everything in life is relative. Willis points out that over-regulation of the medical profession means Doctors have to break the rules in order to give good care. Indeed, the rules become so overwhelming that no sane person can observe them all to the letter.

Society as a whole is now being confronted with that reality for the first time, because for the first time it has the machines and the systems which it thinks it can use to control life at the individual level. So the hidden cop-out is being revealed. The shabby posture of media scale society has been to rely on individuals for the slippage upon which life is utterly dependent. And yet, when instances of that slippage are exposed on the media stage, the individual is ruthlessly sacrificed.

By permitting slippage within the National Health Service, GPs act, in a sense, like the cut-throats whom the outwardly noble Macbeth secretly employed to do his dirty work for him. We follow our personal judgement, educated as it is, rather than the rules we are nominally meant to follow. Thus we provide the essential discontinuity on the logical road which, in an increasingly litigious world, would otherwise lead every patient with a headache to the brain scanner.

In order to do this we have to take a series of more or less carefully balanced risks, all expressed in relative terms. In other words we use common sense. But if society continues to denigrate this process and begins to expect perfection, as judged by the false perceptions of the media scale, then doctors are not going to let themselves be rewarded in the way that Macbeth rewarded his servants. We will eventually be forced to work to rule and not to life, in order to defend ourselves. And society will be the poorer.

How American am I?

Well, for an English guy I make a good Bleeding Heart Liberal American, apparently...

Thanks to Adam Curry for the link.

The wisdom of football crowds

Fascinating article in The Times today, sadly already sequestered behind paid registration, about WebFootballClub.com in France. Here's the SP.

The club is managed by fans via its website. Most fans don't go to games but watch online. Every one gets a vote and votes are weighted by track record in making effective choices (don't ask me to explain). There is a club coach, but "all he can do is shout at the team and determine substitutions during matches". Soon, even substitutions will be done by fans watching live webcasts. Fierce debates take place in online forums.

Result? The club went from the fifth division of the Caen district to the second, in back-to-back championship wins. And went undefeated last season.

And how about this for loyalty, all you frequent flier manipulators?

Corinne Teissier, a 26-year old primary school teacher, was amongst the supporters who could take credit for the triumph. She saw all the games on the internet and acquired enough points to join the most influential grade of decision-makers. "I know everything about the players, except those that have joined this season, but I will be watching them very carefully."

She goes on to a detailed discussion of the club's prospects.

I love the sound of this. Talk about engaging the passion of fans. And I've always felt sceptical of the manger-centric tone of much football analysis, all very much in the heroic leader model of the world. What could other brands and businesses learn from this?

Tangential PS. This great Times article makes me an ardent supporter of... The Guardian, which manages to succeed whilst making vast swathes of its content available free, with none of the hassle of The Times.

Getting blog traffic

I've been thinking about Robert Scoble's piece on encouraging traffic to weblogs, and Burningbird's quite persuasive response. The gist of her reply is, write for yourself, about the things you care about, and don't try too hard to lure your audience. I think they're both right, Scoble has some good tips and Burningbird is right about authenticity.

I just checked the search phrases that have brought people to my site this month. The top ones are:

sunny delight 9.1 %
john moore 3.4 %
narcissism 2.9 %
lovemarks 2.5 %
the gherkin 1.8 %
yotel 1.8 %
johnnie moore 1.8 %
unjobbing 1.6 %
spam bayes 1.6 %
high resolution atom.gif 1.6 %
houston it s worth it 1.3 %
modesty 1.2 %
pcmdoncall 1.2%

The unpredictability of this list amuses me. My rants on Sunny Delight were not written to appeal to anyone really, just to get something off my chest. Unjobbing, spam bayes and houston-it's-worth-it are all plaudits for smart stuff from other people. I have no clue what pcmdoncall has to do with my site.

I so often find that posts which I think are rather super but get no apparent response, whilst others dashed off in a hurry get a flurry of interest.

I keep coming back to this less-than-totally-reliable rule of thumb for a complex world: please yourself.

World on Fire

Please watch Sarah McLaughlin's video. (via Chris Corrigan)

Tom Peters Yang

Evelyn posts a brilliant pushback (or is it an integrating welcome?) to Tom Peters - Tom Says Yang, So Let's Integrate

Peace is an unshakable sense of moment-to-moment power - akin to the power of water that sculpted the Grand Canyon. Peace does not keep the soul in chains nor... Hold back life. PEACE is definitely NOT = BORING = STATUS QUO = STATIC = DEAD.

Rock on Evelyn.

Site tinkering

I've been tinkering with my website this afternoon. This doesn't affect the blog much, but I have revised the pages relating to things people might buy from me. With the aim of encouraging them to buy a bit more! I've tried to strip out some of the clutter from those pages and get a bit clearer about what I do. This seems to be a continuing process of exploration...

Relationship Audits

I've been reflecting on the day spent learning about the Relationships Foundation's new tool, the Relationship Health Audit. It's based on a model of organisational relationships which looks at five broad aspects of the health of a relationship.

Commonality - valuing similarity and difference

Parity - the use and abuse of power

Multiplexity - breadth of knowledge

Continuity - shared time over time

Directness - the quality of the communication process

That framework is explained in more detail here.In order to pursue this, I had to park my own mental model (ie prejudice) about words like "tools" to describe things to do with managing people and the limits of psychometrics etc.

Actually, I thought their approach made a lot of sense and may prove a simple, non-threatening way for organisations to pay attention to the quality of their relationships, instead of the traditional focus only on the transactions within them. I think the word "audit" gives a somewhat misleading idea of what this process does. "Audit" is normally associated with putting fixed values on things, many of which are highly un-fixed and intangible. On the other hand, its origins are in the idea of hearing, which is a lot more human sounding.

The Foundation argues that this approach is more appealing to organisations which are wary of "touchy-feely" approaches to human isuses. That makes sense, though I think there is something a bit mythical about the idea that most people in organisations are very attached to purely mechanistic ideas of how to organise things. (More on this later.)

Anyhow, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and people in the session with me found that the Audit approach did help them identify relationship issues they'd not thought about before. And the idea is that the Audit assessment is not really an attempt to measure the health of a relationship - more a way of starting a conversation about it, which seems fairly practical to me.

MT host survey

Elise is running an online survey on MT-friendly (or not) web hosts. Elise offers a lot help getting the most out of Movable Type so I'm happy to promote her research!

Pitfalls of explicit learning

Once upon a time, a millipede met a management consultant. (These insects do sometimes run into each other.)

The consultant admires the amazing walk of the millipede and says, "That's a remarkable skill you have there, the way you coordinate all those legs so beautifully. What a marvellous metaphor for organisations! Will you let me model it? Then I can sell the idea to my clients and transform the world of work!"

So the consultant spends hours with the insect, making it examine the minute details of its actions. After which, the consultant has a massive best-selling book and training course with which to amaze and mystify his clients: "The Seven Management Secrets of the Millipede - Maximising Profits for 21st Century Organisations." Meanwhile, the creature is so stressed at the sudden realisation of how complicated its legs are... that it can't walk properly anymore.

This story came to mind reading a fascinating observation from the website of Dr James Willis, drawn from a review of his book, Friends in Low Places

The author quotes a wonderful piece of research which found that people are half as good at remembering a face in a photograph, if they've tried to describe it when they first see it. If we only trust our innate and wordless ability to remember a face, we are twice as likely to remember it: a metaphor for general practice. Doctors are being constrained not to rely on their hard-won experience, knowledge and skill, their unarticulated sense of what needs to be done. But instead always to use their conscious brain function to work out a solution. Thus quite possibly reducing their effectiveness by half.

Jack Vinson - who spotted this fascinating item - comments

When a person knows their work so well, they don't need to articulate how they know it. This blurb suggests that in some cases, asking someone to explain their thinking actually reduces the value of their unconscious knowledge by forcing them to consider how it is they know something.

Taking this a bit further, there's a popular model of learning that looks like this:

With the idea that we start at bottom left and proceed clockwise to bottom right. Quite a reasonable model but I think it ignores a whole lot of stuff that skips straight from 1 to 4 and doesn't trouble with going into the world of the explicit at all. Including most of what infants learn from their parents. Or if I think of learning to fly, some of my learning did follow a clockwise path, but a lot was not like that at all; it was more intuitive, picked up as I went along but not an explicit process.

Outside the temples of the explicit

Of course, it often very interesting to bring to light hitherto unconscious processes. But it can't be the whole story. It strikes me that most business bookshelves are temples to the explicit, articulating an assumption that somehow if we get explicit knowledge, all will be well.

I think a pitfall of the ways we assess training and faciliation is to depend too much on feedback forms and respond to the pressure for people to leave the room "with a clear idea of how things will apply to their daily lives". But what if they learnt a whole lot implicitly? ..if they did, then our demand for "proof" may actually undermine what was learnt.

I leave the last words to the same review posted on the James Willis website:

We are trapped in a culture in search of certainty, seeking to abolish uncertainty even. We are in a culture which attempts to deny and abolish the wonder and glory of chaos and serendipity and chance – in the education of children, in the care of the sick. We are trained by the media, by our masters, to have zero tolerance of risk due to a belief that the end of uncertainty is in sight. This leads to the horror expressed by our masters that half of all doctors are of below average performance, and to their instruction that everyone and everything must show excellence. We need a few lessons in the use and abuse of the English language.

I would add: we are a culture which has lost its spiritual base, and is therefore trying to construct one out of shaky models. Those in control make models. They then constrain us to live and work within those models. The model becomes the master. Oh dear, I’m getting as worked up as James does himself.

[Thanks to Richard Gayle for his part in linking to this]

Questionable thoughts on off-sites

Over at Fast Company, Heath Row reflects on offsites. He shares Cheryl Dahle's article Can This Off-Site be Saved?. I'm a sceptic about offsites; it's all too easy to go away from the office, have a wildly different experience, then return to the office and get straight back to business as usual. Maybe we'd do better to ask ourselves: what is so wrong with our office environment what we can't create engagement on-site?

The article gives a lot of interesting ideas about what works and doesn't and certainly confirms that offsites are often perceived as a waste of time. There are some provocative ideas in here for ways to disrupt conventional thinking and engage people's attention. And I'd like to push back on one or two of the injunctions.

Because many offsites aren't satisfying, there's an understandable desire for a sense of purpose. Thus we get

"People who are involved in planning off-sites aim too low," says Brenda Williams, a founding partner of the Lab, a Chicago-based branding firm. "They see them as a chance for people to get to know each other, to get away, or to share information. These planners aren't thinking strategically: What problem will this event solve? What decision will it help people make? What new ideas will it produce? You have to anchor an off-site with goals that actually mean something to the business."

I undertand the concern, but I dislike the implication that getting to know each other is somehow a lower order priority. It depends on where people are coming from. For instance in a workaholic culture, the chance to relax and engage with each other with less urgency strikes me as a rather important thing. Indeed, the most profound creative challenge for some people is to have to stop and create relationship instead of rushing around demanding instant action.

Again, consider this:

Take-away #1: Agree on a definition of victory that matters

In many ways a sensible-sounding idea but where is the space for suprising ideas to emerge if we have to go in to a room agreeing where we're all going to come out? What if we start the event putting faith in those attending to create engagement and get what they want instead of assuming they have to be carefully choreographed to do it?

Or this:

Take-away #3: If you want mind-blowing results, expose people to mind-blowing ideas

That may sometimes work, but if your organisation is highly adrenalised already, maybe what it needs to create new thinking is to destress and become more sensitive? It's too easy to fixate on the final moment of a creative process, where the "big idea" pops out, without noticing the web of conversations and rambling enquiries that may have set the scene for it. I can think of several conferences I've seen where the leaders "mind blowing experience" is received merely as bullying or wildly distracting.

There are several digs at "ropes" courses and I absoutely get this point

Sin #2: Placing too much trust in trust-building exercises. "You can see it in people's faces the minute they get the schedule: 'Oh God, not the ropes thing again,' " says Brenda Williams, a founding partner of the Lab, a branding agency in Chicago. Adds Donna Thompson, chief operating officer of Fusion Productions, which organizes events for major companies and associations: "Whether someone can climb a tree has nothing to do with whether they know how to market a product. Besides, people would rather be home with their families than playing games with their boss."

But that so much depends on the way the games are played and how people are facilitated. That's where game-playing often goes awry; in the failure to connect the exercise to people's daily lives. And then again, a certain amount of disruption and frustration are inherent in a learning process. I have often been thrilled at the enthusiasm with which supposedly straight-laced people engage with allegedly simple Improv activities - and learn from them.

And I certainly agree with Sins 3 and 4

Sin #3: Investing too much power in PowerPoint. "If I could, I would enforce a worldwide ban on that software," Thompson says. "Every time we work with executives, we try to get them to do without slides. It's like getting a toddler to give up his blanket."

Sin #4: Giving too much time to Mr. Big. The best way to lose energy at an off-site is to turn over the podium to executives who aren't invested in the event. John Coné, formerly of Dell, calls it the "parade of kings" -- and it drives him nuts: "The event devolves into a PowerPoint marathon presented by senior managers."

Loyalty, schmoyalty

Good to see Jennifer Rice is back blogging with some interesting thoughts on Loyalty programs and how deeply unconvincing they can be.

Jen quotes a McKinsey article Better Rewards for Hotel Loyalty. (Free registration required, but I prefer bugmenot.) It's a guide to making loyalty cards work better. Like so many of these pieces it reveals slabs of data interepreted with little imagination and a fair amount of implicit cynicism.

I think McKinsey are stuck in a very limiting paradigm, the one that sees loyalty as something to be bought; their fixation is only with buying it cheaper, eg

Chains should limit the number of their reward partnerships in order to control costs and retain as much money as possible.

Fair enough I suppose, but what about the worldview implied by

In fact, a hotel can learn a good deal by conducting a better dialogue with its guests and by giving frontline staff members an incentive to note their observations. Someone who uses a credit card affiliated with a frequent-flier program or another hotel chain, for example, is clearly worth courting.

Talk about scarcity thinking. What a miserable view of humanity that assumes receptionists would only want to create engagement with guests if they are incentivised? And nothing makes me hate hotels more than my sense that I am not a person to be welcomed, just a wallet to be "courted".

Consider the mindset that comes up with the idea that it's about offering

tangible, easily attained incentives to lock them into the hotel's program

and

Incentives and status levels should be recalibrated to keep the interest of these sought-after guests, to reduce their proclivity to play the field.

Why bother with a loyalty card, McKinsey? Why not just buy some padlocks and lock us in the rooms! That'll deal with our nasty, emotional "proclivities" to "play the field". In fact, let's go the whole hog and bring in the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Then there's this:

Free meals aren't much of an incentive to anyone on an expense account. Instead, these customers want their rewards to be personalized with things that matter to them: benefits such as upgrades to concierge floors or offerings (including free movies or minibar items) not covered by their expense policies

Still stuck in the desperate effort to "buy" loyalty, we find the cyncism inherent in some of these programs. Basically, let's bribe our guests to spend their employers' money with us. I expect that a good few of the corporates being bilked in this way are McKinsey clients.

Incentives are often counter productive as Jennifer points out. That's an insight that appears lost on the author of this less-than-wonderful McKinsey article.

Innovation is at the Edges

Synchronicity or what. Dave Pollard on The Medici Effect:

...most innovations occur in intersections (the 'spaces' where different disciplines, cultures or specialized domains of knowledge meet.

Meanwhile, Evelyn Rodriguez says Breakthroughs Occur at the Crossroads

...the ENTIRE point of the conference is to stretch your thinking, explore the boundaries and interfaces of your world and expose you to other worlds! To look at the intersection of different fields - this year at the crossroads of virtual and physical - and purposefully put these people in a room together for a few days. Something akin to magic happens when you do that.

I also liked Dave's list based on the Medici book:

Much of the book describes processes and techniques to break down the barriers that prevent us from seeing and entering intersections. These techniques include:

getting exposure to different cultures
broadening one's knowledge and learning capacity
encouraging curiosity
reversing assumptions (e.g. imagining what would happen if a restaurant had no menus, didn't charge for food, and didn't serve food)
taking different perspectives and points of view (e.g. how would X view this situation)
randomly combining concepts (e.g. the craze for Magic The Gathering was generated by combining attributes of gaming with attributes of collectibles)
learning to be mentally prepared to see opportunities at the intersection when they present themselves (I am especially appreciative of this point because it is the hardest thing I ever learned to do) -- I have written about this before when I described how the learning of how butterfly wings display colour even though they have no pigment has been applied to counterfeir-protecting banknotes
undertaking a variety of diverse occupations
interacting with diverse groups of people
looking for connections in unlikely places
producing a continuous, large quantity of ideas
striking a learning balance between sufficient depth and maximum breadth of knowledge subject-matter
reading prodigiously and listening attentively and openly
brainstorming (starting with individual idea generation to prevent groupthink and premature discarding of 'crazy' ideas)
allowing time for ideas to be properly considered (Johansson dispels the myth that deadlines and time pressure encourage innovation)

Pretty much the ideas that make Improv rock. And if you wanna experience THAT get yourself to San Francisco mid-October.

On a lighter note

From Letterman:Top Ten Messages Left on Cat Stevens' Answering Machine Some of this didn't translate so well over the Atlantic but I liked

7. "It's Johnnie Cochran. Without a trial in court, you must not deport. Call me."

6. "I'm calling from CBS News to confirm reports of a cat that can fly a plane."

Health in Relationships

Ok, back home from the Relationship Audit day. Will post some thoughts on that soon. But I have to admit the highlight of the day for me was the train ride back to London with fellow delegate Minette Coetzee. She is a Nurse-Lecturer (love that idea by the way!) from South Africa and she shared a series of wonderful stories and insights about the role of relationship in health and healing. She contrasted the standard medical paradigm, the one that treats diseases following a well-documented and not very intuitive process of labelling the illness and then following programmed steps to defeat it... with a relational approach that is based on connecting to the sufferer. The latter approach tends to avoid words like "patient" as it is based on a more equal idea of the relationship a healer might have with someone wanting healing.

Can't document the whole conversation. In fact, I'll just pick this insight. Take the case of a nurse holding a child and comforting the child until it can sleep. The breakthrough for the nurse is not in noticing the healing effect of her contact on the child. It is in appreciating the healing effect on her/him of holding the child until it sleeps. Thus healing is not a one-way process. Minette also shared the story of the nurse whose breakthrough in working with AIDS sufferers came when she had an image of sharing the disease with the patient. At that point, her whole way of engaging with AIDS sufferers changed. I often talk about the need to show up to relationships. This is a marvellous example of just that.

We also talked about how the archtitecture of health care often plays to a reductionist view, with patients divided into compartments, isolated from each other and from the nursing staff. In contrast, she told me of a hospital in Nairobi built on the principle of the circle, with nursing stations and a social area in the centre providing focus and connection for the sick children around them. (As a fan of Open Space and Improv, I have a lot of enthusiasm for the impact of arranging people in circles...)

Oh and PS if you like this post, you'll probably also enjoy Rob Paterson's on relative status in health.

Can relationships be audited?

I'm just off to the Relationships Foundation this morning, to learn about the Relationship Audit tool. This should be an interesting challenge to my own mental models as I'm wary of the language of "tools" in business and of measurement in relationships. On the other hand, I like the spirit behind the Relationships Foundation and feel there are things I can learn here. I'll let you know how I get on...

The Fosbury Flop

Another great post by Rob Paterson: Why change is difficult - The story of the Fosbury Flop. Reminds me of the Machiavelli quote

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things; because the innovator will have for enemies all who have done well under the old conditions and only lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new

Telling stories

I've been enjoying Jon Strande's Storyblog and finally got round to sending him a story I liked (The Rabbi's Gift). There are a few different versions online, but I decided to write my own version because... well because I felt like it I suppose. This took a lot longer than just sending a link to an existing version, but was quite fun to do. One of the nice things about storytelling is that everyone can add, consciously or not, their own spin. They can put a little of themselves into the story. Comparing my effort with others, it's interesting to see the little differences of emphasis. Big lesson here for brands - are you leaving people the space to put their own riff on your story?

After sending Jon the story, I went out for lunch with my copy of the Art of Possibility. Resuming reading, after two pages I came across... Ben and Roz Zander's version of the same story. Cue music from the Twilight Zone.

The answer to how is yes

A friend emailed me this short blurb about a book by Peter Block - The Answer to How is Yes. I'll probably never get round to the book but this summary engages me:

According to Peter Block, people keep asking "how?" as a defense against living their life. In The Answer to How is Yes! , Peter Block puts the "how to" craze in perspective and teaches individuals, workers and managers ways to act on what they know, and reclaim their freedom and capacity to create a world they want to live in. It shows that many of our solutions and efforts to improve keep us paralyzed. Much of our training is not needed. Asking "how?" is waiting for our life to start. The question of "how?" has pre-empted questions of "why?" Most of the existing literature feeds our dependency. The Answer to How is Yes.

For me it links to thoughts expressed by Katherine Stone earlier today against prescriptive marketing.

Branding politics

Steve Yastrow on the Tom Peters blog highlights this US News article on Yahoo: Kerry's muddled message. Here's Steve's take:

Those who support John Kerry are frustrated with his campaign, and those that support Bush are elated with Kerry's campaign. This article describes, essentially, how Kerry's brand is muddled through a series of disjointed, dissonant messages, while GWB's messages are much more in sync.

Irony ... in 1992 Clinton crafted a very clear brand while Bush the elder couldn't weave together a clear and compelling story.

I get that Kerry is not doing too well at the moment, but there's something about this way of talking about politics that I find troubling. Partly, I distrust the narrative which emphasises the role of the candidate in creating the "compelling story"; I'm not sure it's really in their power, I suspect it's a more chaotic process. Second, I just don't like the ideas of branding applied to politics, the assumption that the message must be simplistic to work, as if the population is not capable of nuance. This way of talking about politics depresses me. It reduces it to a business game and seems to get away from focussing on what we actually believe in favour of what, allegedly, "works".

So the irrepressible Hugh Macleod weighs in with

Kerry should learn about Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's.

Kroc's big credo was what is still referred by the company as "QSCV" i.e. Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value.

Obviously, if you're the service business (and Kerry is, let's not forget), you don't need "cleanliness" the way a restaurant needs it.

So you replace it with "Clarity", the mental equivalent of cleanliness. Bingo!

Kerry lacks clarity.

Politics as McDonalds. Governance as business. Well, that's one way of talking about it but not one that energises me. And whatever may be wrong with Kerry's campaign, I hope to god he doesn't look for a McAnswer to the question.

Department of Whatever Next

Rich from Hello World had his camera handy at Jo'burg airport.

Proof that you can brand absolutely anything

I was going through the x-rays at Johannesburg International Airport yesterday and noticed the strangest thing: branded (logo'd, nothing else) x-ray trays. I can see the conversation the agency had at Ford HQ:

Brand manager, "Oh poo. We have lots of those dang stickers left."

Creative whizz, "Fear not, I have a winning branding plan, lets stick them on the trays at the airport where people throw their keys and small change when it goes through the x-ray machines"

STUNNED SILENCE

Brand manager, "Brilliant, if that doesn't sell more cars, nothing will!"

Risks and piano legs.

Evelyn Rodriguez asks, in a comment to my post on Ampage in Conversation

"But I'd like more ampage...taking risks ..."

I know that's a common viewpoint, but I wonder why it's so...why we think that being ourselves is taking a "risk"? Does anyone consider the higher risks they take by squelching and stifling themselves?

That's a good question. As with most comments about risk, I guess it's all relative. Shut down and hide yourself too much, and you avoid the "risk" of exposure, but increase the risk of being cut off from reality. Cells that become rigid, die. Brands that hide behind their grandiose propositions tend to get cut off from reality and don't get taken seriously.

Once or twice today, I caught myself doing more "people pleasing" than is good for me. Trying to make the other person happy, based on pure guesswork about what they might like. Politeness is not always a virtue and can make for lifeless conversation.

Apparently the Victorians worked themselves into such a lather about lude exposure that they started putting covers on piano legs. Needless to say the shadow side of Victorian life was a lot more interesting.

Changing mental models

Evelyn Rodriguez reflects on Flexing Mental Muscles. Perhaps the nub is two paragraphs quoted from The Power of Impossible Thinking.

"The first kind of learning, which is far more common and more easily achieved, is to deepen our knowledge within an existing mental model or discipline."

"The second kind of learning is focused on new mental models and shifting from one to another. It does not deepen knowledge in a specific model but rather looks at the world outside the model and adopts or develops new models to make sense of this broader world...Learning about new mental models is much more challenging and complex, but crucial in an environment of rapid change and uncertainty."

This makes a great deal of sense to me, and I realise it's so easy to get stuck in a mental model without noticing that you're stuck. Just watch any political debate - or pub argument - and mostly you will see rigid mental models bouncing off each other.

David Bohm's Dialogue proposal contains some deep thinking about ways to become aware of the mental models themselves. Here's the key passage

To further clarify this approach, we propose that, with the aid of a little close attention, even that which we call rational thinking can be see to consist largely of responses conditioned and biased by previous thought. If we look carefully at what we generally take to be reality we begin to see that it includes a collection of concepts, memories and reflexes colored by our personal needs, fears, and desires, all of which are limited and distorted by the boundaries of language and the habits of our history, sex and culture. It is extremely difficult to disassemble this mixture or to ever be certain whether what we are perceiving - or what we may think about those perceptions - is at all accurate.

I've been thinking about collective intelligence and the idea of "group mind" - the sort of thing that many of us experience, albeit fleetingly, in teams and groups, when we sense a level of connection beyond the norm. Traditional models of group thinking seem based on me trying to cement my well-formed brick of thought to your well-formed brick. Increasingly, I find much more satisfaction in sharing the less-formed ideas and responses I have to conversations. I sense that by doing so, it's possible to create some sense of joint intelligence that can get beyond existing mental models.

I suppose that my blogging process tends towards bricks, as I write down ideas and get to tweak and edit them and improve them, to make them more palatable to the outside world.

A bit like Evelyn, I'm not sure that I can really explain this in a blog, but hey, I tried. Of course, if you'd like to Skype me we could explore it together...

Volts and Amps in conversations

During yesterday's Skype call with Rob Paterson, he came up with a good metaphor about conversations. It reminded me of the schoolboy rhyme "Volts jolts, mills (milliamps)kills". You can have a lot of voltage and create excitement, but without ampage, there's not so much impact.

I realise that a ton of conversations I see and take part in are high voltage, lots of "talking and reloading" or colourful language. Most marketing is high voltage (hype). But I'd like more ampage, which for me is about bring more of ourselves into the conversation, taking risks, showing more of ourselves...

Update: See Rob's extended entry on the same point posted today.

Skype!

Just spent an hour catching up with Robert Paterson, thanks to Skype. Rob's just installed it. Like most first-timers, I think he was surprised by the quality of the sound. If you haven't got Skype yet, I really recommend giving it a try; it makes the world a smaller place. I want to start using the conference facility more - start putting together some global conversations. I also might run an online Improv session - any takers, let me know!

Dog vs Man

I enjoyed this interactive exercise in comparative anatomy from fellow improviser
Chris Yukna.

Unfortunately, our researchers have not completed their investigation of male of the human species. We thought with your extensive and intimate knowledge of this subject you could piece together a reasonable facsimile.

Dog Brain

Man Brain

Stepping out of cyberspace

I'm gonna be meeting a lot of bloggers for real in the next four weeks. Tonight I'm having a drink with Suw Charman and dinner with among others Martin Roell, ahead of a Blogwalk tomorrow in London. Then in October I'm meeting Mark Brady of fouroboros fame in DC, along with (hopefully) Jon Strande. And then Evelyn Rodriguez in San Francisco. All these great real world connections would never have come about without a bit of cyber-courting. Oh, and anyone in Australia and New Zealand, it's your turn next.

Theory X Marketing

Evelyn Rodriguez posts her frustration with Theory X Marketing:

I'll be fairly honest and say I come away from marketing meetings depressed about how the majority of marketers view people. It's Theory X marketing.

For instance, the discussion on blogs last night seemed to stress the "uncontrollability" of what customers could say about your product and the risks inherent with amplified word-of-mouth. With moblogs, the power to snap a picture of your lemon and post it on the Internet - hey, look it broke down in just 3 days. Consumer generated media is a double-edged sword, of course. I continue to be surprised by the fear around consumers gaining a voice. It would be nice to see some confidence in the products we sell and a company's ability to right any wrongs.

Actual comment. What if someone posts a comment on your own blog that's negative? Can we delete it? Edit it?

The only inspiring marketing example I heard during the evening was one that Volvo conducted. Every new customer gets an email a few weeks (or thereabouts, I forget exact timeframe) after their car purchase. The email contains a video welcome message from the CEO encouraging them to call in to customer service to relate their experience of the car so far and share their impressions. Fifteen percent do phone in and it's proven to be valuable one-on-one feedback that Volvo has used to enhance the car's features and the entire buying experience. It's a model built on respect and trust and interest in a new customer's perspective that makes the customer feel valued and is leveraged for future customer's purchases and experiences.

Then someone in the audience raises a hand: Do you know if there is any attempt to cross-sell accessories?

If these people were dancers, they'd be pushing their customers backwards across the dancefloor and pinning them to the wall. And then wondering why weren't getting those customer satisfaction ratings.

New Balance

Alan Moore has a good post on New Balance, which has achieved great sales without much of the marketing hype normally associated with the training shoe sector. Here's a snippet:

In an age of NO LOGO anti-corporate exploitation rage, New Balance has also become the ethical shoe.

Manufactured in the US and Cumbria the company produces 40 pairs of shoes per worker per day. Whereas the industry norm in South East-Asia is 3.5 pairs a day.

Jim Davis... says

"We're not selling an ideal of perfection refracted through celebrities or world-class athletes, we're selling shoes for real people, that's where the hype comes from – satisfied customers. Our market is discerning people, not the 12 -13-year-old kid who's got to be seen in the latest Nkes. We make sportswear for discriminating consumers – that's our USP"

Paddling canoes, responsibility and systems thinking

I was touched and excited by Robert Paterson's post yesterday - In the Canoe Together. It's a rich weaving together of a story of a humbling personal experience and insights from systems thinkers.

Among many gems, it contains this eloquent passage on the limits of mechanistic models

Most of us believe that the universe is like a predictable machine. We can plan for it and we can make it more efficient by crafting the parts to fit better. We apply this machine metaphor to all aspects of our life today. It is embedded in our educational system and into all our organizations both business and government. At the top of this machine metaphor stands man, separate from nature and in charge.

If we are honest with ourselves, we can see that these assumptions help us maintain the illusion that we are in control. Is not control one of our greatest needs? Are not so many of our assumptions rooted in our need to keep everything orderly? I think that most of us think that the “Environment” is a thing. Something to be controlled. Something “out there” separate from our daily lives. A place. An item of property. A place that we can control.

In a machine, which by definition is dependent on outside sources of power, the concept of “Sustainability” does not exist. For there is no such thing as a sustainable machine. All machines require an external source of energy. All machines have to be efficient. All machines need to be controlled by us.

I enjoyed Robert's opening story of his experience paddling a canoe with his son in treacherous waters. It reminded me of my only attempt at water skiing many years ago.

It was explained to me that you can't have a gentle start to water-skiing. The boats goes fast and you have to hold on to get the requisite acceleration to pull you out of the water. (By the way, if I've got this bit wrong, do tell me... you'll have guessed that I'm pants at water skiing in practice so my theory maybe wrong too!)

The second thing I didn't realise at the time is that fast boats don't brake like cars. They take a while to slow down.

So here I am, floating nervously in cold water, holding onto the bar, telling myself "Hold on tight, hold on tight!". The motor kicks in, the boats zooms and I'm suddenly being jerked through the water. My legs having their customary sense of independence, I am not suddenly acquaplaning. Instead I am flat out, buffted by waves, my skis far behind me.

Scared. And angry. With my hands still following the original orders, indeed in my panic following them ever more strongly, I am flying across the water's surface manically wondering "Why don't they stop the ****ing boat!?" And the more I'm blaming them in the boat, the more angrily I'm holding onto the bar. Until I suddenly realise, "Err, why don't I let go of the bar?".

There are several morals to this tale, and I think Robert's wonderful essay picks them out more eloquently than I could.

More on banks and branding

Following on from my post yesterday, I found this item in today's Private Eye.

HSBC's current ad campaign continues its theme of "The World's Local Bank." But it's just another of those empty oxymorons beloved of financial institutions who have nothing interesting, different or persuasive to offer customers but need to show their marketing muscle to keep up with the other banks.

Given that in March HSBC announced a clean profit of £7.7bn.. and given that just five fat-cat staffers split £30m between them, a simple 'sorry' would have sufficed. But that's not how banking or advertising work.

HSBC's most recent spot shows a motorbike rider touring South America using the internationally-recognised "I'm okay" signal with circled thumb and index finger, before eating at a Brazilian cafe where the gesture is met with horror. "We never underestimate the importance of local knowledge," says the voiceover.

In fact, in this instance HSBC and its agency Lowe (now sacked) didn't have any local knowledge at all: Brazilians also understand the gesture to be affirmative. It's only when it's reversed, with the back, not the palm of the hand facing outwards, that it becomes offensive. Presumably the world's local bankers were too busy splitting the booty to notice.

I don't object in principal to HSBC making enormous profits, but I think they lay themselves open to this kind of attack by running what I think is rather narcissistic advertising.

They made a mistake in their ad. Now we all make mistakes, what makes me (and others) enjoy taking a dig at them for this one? Because of our irritation with their way of talking to us. We all want to see Gilderoy Lockhart brought down a peg. This is what I think of as the unmeasured cost of narcissistic branding: I imagine HSBC's marketing department have many statistics to show how these ads have built awareness and so on; but how do they measure the consequences for credibility?

In addition, I keep wanting to ask: how does this kind of communication affect the quality of communication inside HSBC? Does it support a culture in which assumptions can be tested and challenged? What does it tell us about HSBC that this ad can run for months with this sort of error, unchallenged? (I'm assuming Private Eye is correct - but if I'm wrong I can challenged right now by using the comment button. I wonder what the equivalent is in HSBC's marketing?)

Vain branding does not, I think, connect an organisation to its customers. Instead it builds a barrier. By presenting a kind of superiority, it gives an illusion of invulnerability - but in fact, it makes a brand brittle and more fragile.

Branding gone mad?

Two posts today highlight some examples of superficiality in the world of brands. These stories always remind me of Arabella Weir's Fast Show alter ego - a female whose sole obsession in all situations is with her appearance, and one aspect of it in particular.

In the first, it's good to see Ben McConnell in full rant mode: Up Next: The Accenture State of the State Address. Prompted by the idea of the state of Illinois creating "an official state beverage" as a way of scooping millions of dollars in sponsorship.

Ben thinks this is taking branding to ridiculous lengths, and rightly questions the integrity of government if such thinking continues.

Ben asks

Should this distasteful idea pass, what to expect next?

* "The Chrysler Department of Motor Vehicles"
* "The Accenture State of the State Address"
* "The Deloitte Touche State Comptroller's Office"
* "The Tap Pharmaceuticals/Illinois House of Representatives"
* "Trojan, the official sponsor of (former) senatorial candidate Jack Ryan"

I'd add that I suspect the integrity of the product suffers too in these sorts of sponsorship. The trouble is, increases in awareness and sales are easily measured; loss of integrity is not so easily tracked but may be more damaging long term.

For instance, when Chase Manhattan sponsor the US Open Tennis, are they simply trying to buy-in some kudos? I can't help feeling they'd do better to channel their money into being better at what they actually do rather than preening their public image. When Barclays bank sponsors the Premiership Football here in the UK, what are they really saying? Are they bored of being bankers? Don't they have something to say about banking that might be more useful to me? It's a bit like gettting a spam phone call where the caller does that unconvincing small talk about "how's the weather in London?" : we know that there's an ulterior motive and if we want small talk, we've got our friends and neighbours for that.

I'd contrast this atttitude with a brands like Pret a Manger. They seem to find plenty of enthusiasm to just talk about what they do and how they do it. Like there's some real pride in what they do. I somehow don't think Pret would fancy being the official sandwich of the London Borough of Islington!

Oh, and here's a good post on the Tom Peters site by Steve Yastrow:

Accenture claims that their ads featuring Tiger Woods are designed to reinforce their promise to help clients become high-performance busineses. The ads show Tiger Woods in different situations on the golf course with the tagline "Go, Be a Tiger."

I don't think the ads make this connection very well, and I think that to most people it must look like a gratuitous exercise in celebrity worship. (I'd bet big bucks that the contract between Tiger Woods and Accenture includes guaranteed opportunities for Accenture executives to meet and hang out with Tiger Woods.)