Shallow lessons...

Steve Moore pointed me to this article by John Kay: Shallow lesson of business books. It's a succinct counterblast to the plethora of "do it like me" business books and sort of businessmen who double as TV stars. Money quote:

The business people whose insights I value mostly think that business is complex, that there are few universal recipes for success, and explain that much of their time is spent gently coaxing the best from people. Such entrepreneurs do not make it onto the small screen. Those who appear on television are, of necessity, people with outsized personalities who exude confidence and possess a talent for one-line answers.

Non-trivial networking

Thanks to Jon Husband for pointing out this example of the value of online social networks.

When radiation oncologist Michael Tomblyn recently saw a 21-year-old patient whose eye was protruding from its socket, he turned to his fellow physicians for help. Dozens of doctors offered suggestions, including fungal infection, HIV-associated lymphoma or a cocaine-associated sinus problem, eventually steering him toward the correct answer: rhabdomyosarcoma, a fast-growing cancer most often observed in young children.

The diagnosis didn't take place in a doctor's lounge. It happened on Sermo.com, a social-networking site for licensed physicians, which Dr. Tomblyn and 25,000 doctors like him visit regularly to consult with colleagues specializing in areas from dermatology to psychiatry.

Marching up and down...

I had a great chat with Rob Paterson on Skype today, comparing experiences of working with big organisations. We talked about how much advance planning there is for meetings. I'm not against planning per se, but a lot of it seems to be based on an assumption that the planner really does know better than the participants how the meeting should run. There's also a lack of faith in the ability of people to come together and know what's best in the moment; that's why everything needs to squared off in advance.

I think the result of this kind of obsessive planning is dead meetings where people go through the motions. And no one finds out where the real enthusiasms lie.

In my imaginary Monty Python-based training course, I'd want to show this clip of Michael Palin on top form in the Meaning of Life.

Shock, horror crisis probe

I've long disliked the Evening Standard's newstand ads. These always display hyped mystery in an effort to get me to buy the rag. So it's always "shock soccer result" rather than "Burnley defeat Man Utd".

This tactic may have worked in the past, but seems absurd now in an always-on world where we can find the news anywhere. This site lampoons the Standard's tactics brilliantly (the picture above is one of its outputs)

Hap tip: Russell Davies.

...and absolute power is even more fun

Bob Sutton reports some intriguing research which appears to support the notion that power corrupts. Two groups of people were given alternative preparatory tasks. One group were asked to think of a time when they had power over others; the second group had to think of a time when others had power over them. Then both groups were asked to paint a letter E on their forehead.

The first group were strongly inclined to draw the letter so it looked right to them in a mirror; the second group were more likely to draw it so it looked write to others but wrong to them in the mirror. Bob writes about other, similar research here.

Fascinating.

Rules or patterns

Matt has picked up on my comments about brainstorming. I particularly liked this comment he makes:

For every rule, there is a conceivable circumstance when it should be broken. Instead, there are patterns for facilitation Things that work. Sometimes. For you.

This reminds me of another pattern I'm drawn to: to favour description over prescription: pay more attention to what is happening and less to your notion of what should be happening. "I'm feeling concerned about x" feels a more useful intervention than "we shouldn't really be doing x". "I notice we seem to have moved away from talking about x and are now talking more about y" maybe be more useful than "Hey, we need to get back to the agenda!"

When I use the word useful, I suppose that's shorthand for the notion of creating more space, possibliity space I guess. By focussing on what is happening in the moment, we become more present and more alive to the subtle choices it presents. More alive, period. If we switch to abstract notions of what should be, it seems we start to close that space down.

Sure, there are times when we have good reason to close down possibilities. My experience is that it's easy to overdo it.

Making up who we are

Two other posts on Tom G's blog have caught my eye, and seem related. In this one, he describes a friend's move from Upper West side lifestyle in New York to living without electricity in the boonies of British Columbia. Sounds like such a move is not for Tom, though a little part of me quite fancies it.

In the other post, Tom talks about making myself up, day-by-day. Basically, for almost all our time on the planet, the vast majority of us followed in our parents footsteps, and those footsteps generally stayed in the same part of the world. It's only in the last few moments of man's time on earth that all this has changed.

While setting down a path in youth used to assure our predecessors of a route to the future, nothing remotely resembling that assurance exists for contemporaries. Instead of careers, we have careens, bouncing from one opportunity to the next. Some last longer than others but our expectations are always the same: this is fine for now, but something else will be coming along soon (whether I like it or not.)

Those of us who look at the current age and the future it promises with anticipation talk about these realities in grand terms like "re-inventing," making our lives sound like grand adventures. Which, in some senses, they are. Yet, we tend to downplay the more disconcerting aspects of these realities. The anxiety. The rootlessness. The discontinuity of place and relationship. The loss of history.

As I go about the business of making myself up day-by-day I experience both the exhilaration and fear associated with the engine of that project: creativity. Living a life imaginatively, creatively, is to be in constant motion. And, as we all remember from our trips to the amusement park, constant motion can be dizzying.

Direct rule for soccer fans

I've brought out my dalek picture again, in response to finding MyFootballClub via Tom Guariello. Tom explains:

To become a member, a visitor pays £35 (about $70). Membership privileges include the right to own one share of a British Premiereship League football team. So far, the site has 50,000 registered visitors and over 39,000 members, having collected £1,375,000. Oh, and them members also get to vote on which team they'll bid on. So far, the top three are Leeds United, Nottingham Forest and Cambridge United.

Sounds fun, and a bit like the French WebFootballClub (which I blogged here).

Brainstorming

My evil twin brother Matt is running some interesting posts on brainstorming. I'm a bit sceptical about most of the luggage that goes with brainstorms and said so. Matt rightly challenged me to be a bit more helpful, so I posted this comment. I think it just about bears repetition here.

If you put a gun to my head and asked for a formula, I'd probably talk about the power of invitation. Set everything up as voluntary; avoid insisting people attend, frame it all as an invitation. So if I ever do a warm up game, I always say one way to play is just to sit out and observe (funnily enough, it seems that then more people are willing to join in).

Generally, it seems more fun to work with volunteers and I'm not particularly big on the idea that certain stakeholders "must" be there. If the invitation is right, they'd want to be. And if they don't want to be there, I'm happy to make what progress I can with those who do.

Then as you slip off the safety lock, I'd probably splutter about Harrison Owen's motto of "one less thing" if you're facilitating. See how little you need to do to guide the group, organise less, and practice sitting with "awkward silences". We tend to associate creativity with adrenalin and inspiration with stimulation. In one of the most satisfying groups I worked with recently, we had lots of natural pauses for reflection, as well as long breaks. Those pauses are often punctuated by someone with something really interesting to say - usually much better than any facilitatory effort I might make.

As I hear your finger twitching on the trigger, I'd say it's good to pulsate between whole group work and smaller groups - and also risk suggesting some time for working alone (eg on a sunny day, go for a walk alone to reflect). In a brainstorming context, if there's time, maybe get people to do writing activity alone. I think introverts tend to get excluded by loud, frantic workstyles and if we give them a more reflective approach, it's more inclusive.

Just before that little red flag pops out saying "BANG", I'd probably invoke the improv principle of Yes, And. I try to Yes, And as much as I can when facilitating. Most "disruptions" can be welcomed.

My default response in difficult situations is "Can you say more about that?" Not infallible, but very nearly. Genuine curiosity works wonders, especially when applied instead of eg "That's not relevant to this discussion!"

Finally, I suppose I'd invoke Gandhi on being the change you want to see in the world, and being aware and present to what the group is doing, reflecting some of that awareness back to the group; tending to avoid setting myself up as the deliverer of outcomes so the group shares responsibility for what happens.

(Associated to that, I almost never make myself the person who writes down ideas. In fact, I think the ritual of writing every idea on a flip chart is a bit tiresome and misleading. If someone hits on an actionable idea, they'll probably take responsibility for recording it. I might set up a space for people to do that and if stays empty, it stays empty.)

Chances are, I'd go the whole hog and suggest an Open Space which embodies most of this stuff anyway.

Presence or something

Chris Corrigan quotes Harrison Owen talking about presence and Open Space. This is my favourite bit:

Presence is our way of being in the great circle(s) of life. This may be a grudging presence, a distracted presence, a frantic presence, or something approaching a full, intentional, appreciative presence in which the infinite possibilities (good and bad) of life are acknowledged and engaged. To a certain extent the nature of our presence is a matter of choice, but no matter the choices made or the constraints encountered there is always the possibility of an expanded presence in the great open circle of life. I think.

And Open Space Technology? For me every Open Space gathering becomes an opportunity to practice our presence, should we choose to do so. On the surface it will appear that important issues are raised, problems solved, plans made, organization grown, products designed. All important, and for most participants probably sufficient to meet expectations, or not. But beneath (above?) it all I experience a practice of presence – becoming more fully engaged with our selves, our fellows, and our world. Just living more intentionally in the great open circle of life. Or something.

I agree that Open Space, and facilitation generally, is almost all about presence. I share that sense that something goes on that is beyond the explicit discussions and action and I enjoyed Harrison's description of the different kinds of presence we might experience.

I also like the way these paragraphs end with qualifiers ("I think" and "Or something") I also find that presence is is the hardest thing to write about without sounding pretentious, or contradictory. The words can point to the idea of presence but can't ever really capture it. Whenever I try to talk about I end up saying something like Harrison's Or Something

Qual v Quant

Chris Corrigan pointed me to this post by Bob Sutton: Evidence-Based Management Doesn’t Mean Just Quantitative Evidence. The post, and the comments added, make lots of sense to me. I read one of Sutton's previous books, The Knowing-Doing Gap but hadn't realised he's also responsible for Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense and The No-Asshole Rule.

It's nice to run into a B School professor type with a clear preference for Anglo-Saxon over Latin. I've added his blog to my aggregator!

Travel update

I'm back from New Zealand (where my blogging was pretty light, as you may have noticed). I'm starting to think of it as my second home. It's a remarkably uncrowded place, a massive contrast to London life. Each time I've flown into Christchurch, the first person I've seen on the airbridge is a uniformed official. I suppose she's part of of immigration control, but it seems like her unofficial job is just to stand there smiling warmly at everyone to make them feel welcome. That's the effect she had on me.

On a previous trip, the next thing I saw was an ad suggesting I think about moving there to live. No doubt there are fancy economic explanations, but it all contributes to my sense of a very welcoming place.

The winter weather this year was stunning, and it seems I've missed nothing but rain at home.

I'm usually a bit erratic about taking holidays and I'm very glad I made sure to take this one.

All I need to do now is shake off the major league jetlag!

Virgin flight

PSFK's report on the first Virgin America flight from LAX to SFO makes it sound pretty good.

Finding personal meaning

Nick Smith has a good post challenging conventional wisdom on leadership and team building. This particularly caught my attention:

Instead of pursuing the impossible task of getting everyone to commit to a common goal that may or may not happen in the future why not help them find satisfaction right now? I've found that if people are able to find their own meaning, and know they are valued for who they are and what they bring to the table, then that's all the glue that's needed for a team to gel. Finding personal meaning trumps shared vision every time.

Dawkins unweaves

After spending a couple of days wondering in the mysterious world of Jung's shadow, I felt like a blast of something more sceptical. So I picked up Richard Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow. Dawkins says that the hard facts science reveals about our universe are actually far more awe-inspiring than the notions created by superstition, and I pretty much agree. I've not read much Dawkins before and I found him a surprisingly funny, human writer (and quite clearly he's a very intelligent bloke too).

Quite apart from his eloquent putdowns of things like astrology, which I loved, he has some great material exploring perception. He illustrates how our minds create virtual reality out of the world around us and how some optical illusions give us occasional flashes of what's happening. For instance, from a distance we see the inside of a mask as if we're seeing the outside, so that the nose, which is actually facing away from us looks like it's pointing out at us. That's because our brains are wired to find faces (hence the frequency of people seeing the face of Jesus in a washcloth).

It reminds me of Dan Gilbert's explanation of our unreliable memory, where we don't really remember as much as we think, just highlight and then our mind fills in the blanks for us.

Slowing down to innovate

Carman Pirie points to this articulate and thought-provoking ChangeThis Manifesto by Matthew May: Mind of the Innovator: Taming the Traps of Traditional Thinking.

May makes his argument really well with some very practical demonstrations. Some ideas particularly interested me. I enjoyed his experiment where he gave several teams a practical exercise but added a twist. He secretly gave the right answers to the lowest-status person in each group. And not one group ended up with the right answers, because people didn't really listen to the low-status person. I have a feeling a lot of innovation gets missed because someone who already has the answer hasn't been noticed.

May also suggests that we (in the west at least) are better at some steps of innovation than others: we like designing and executing, but we're not so good at a first stage (investigation, where we try to make sure we really understand the issue and are asking the right question) and a final stage, a sobre post-mortem (we'd rather just celebrate our success). Related to that, he talks about the wisdom of reflection, not rushing to the answer but allowing time for ideas to emerge. That makes lots of sense to me - I get very anxious in meetings where people kick off by saying its very important to take action.

May also notes Bill Gates' practice of retreats:

Think Week is the now-legendary solitary sabbatical taken twice yearly by Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates. In his tiny lakeside cottage hideaway, he ponders the past, present and future of his company, of technology and of his industry. He takes long walks along the lake shore in contemplation to quiet his mind.

Funnily enough that's pretty much what I'm doing here in Cable Bay (though I don't think Bill need worry about any competitive threat from me). What I notice is that for the first few days of relative solitude I've feel a bit fidgety but now I feel like I'm thinking more deeply and clearly.

When corporate blogging gets tough...

Johnson & Johnson are suing the Red Cross over the use of the Red Cross. Ah, good morning Mr Bull, may I show you this large red rag?

Well, actually they're suing because the Red Cross is licensing other for-profits to use the cross in areas where, JNJ claim, they have exclusive rights. Well, that's my short version, anyway.

J&J are blogging about it, and dealing with some fairly harsh - and some surprisingly supportive, comments online. As J&J's Ray Jordan admits

So, I’ve now lived a classic corporate public affairs nightmare: announcing a lawsuit against the American Red Cross. Would I have chosen this exercise as a reputation-building opportunity for Johnson & Johnson? No, of course not.

Adriana Lucas, who's helped J&J get in the blogging groove, says:

The price for getting your story out there is losing control over where it ends and who adds to it. The ‘reward’ is the ability to bypass the media, an unmediated and more human reach to those who care about the whole story, not just the outrage of the day in the papers.

Yes, with blogging your fingers get more dirt on them, but you do stand a chance to get a more real engagement. This is a quite a shift for any PR and I give credit to JNJ for blogging it with a human voice. The comments there make very interesting reading - you realise there are many different perspectives on what's happening and that JNJ are willing to have the conversation, not try and skirt round it.

Disclosure: I've also worked with J&J thanks to Adriana, so I'm horribly biased.

A rambling post about the shadow side

Here in Cable Bay, the brilliant winter sunshine of the past few days has been replaced by blustery, cloudy weather. It might be my fault, for picking up my friend's copy of a book called Meeting the Shadow.

FYI, the wikipdedia explanation of the shadow, as conceived by Jung, is here.

I feel pretty ambivalent writing a post about Shadow work, not least because hey, this is not what someone on holiday should be seen as doing is it? Also, because I think the whole notion of the shadow sometimes seems to lead to rather spooky and mystical new-age-at-its-worst conversations. On top of that, there's only such much of the Jungian world view I can take before needing to go for a swim to get away from the headiness of it all.

(I wonder if it would be more helpful to think of the shade rather than the shadow, to get away from the polarities of light and shadow. That might create more space for embracing more of our experience.)

Some of the best essays in the book are the ones showing how many gurus and cults create darkness by apparently evangelising the light. The search for purity leads to the repression and denial of our less admirable qualities, so that they are become hidden and split off rather than dealt with. The book predates the War on Terror, but I'd cite that as pretty good example of the concept of a disowned shadow being projected out onto the world.

Anyway, the essay I've just read is by W Brugh Joy and tells of his experience at the Findhorn community. He gives a talk in which he voices some concerns and fears about what he sees there. This provokes a massive backlash which stigmatises him as some kind of power-obsessed American. It sounds like people just dumped a whole lot of rage on him, and he recounts how he managed to sit there and not defend himself but frame it as healthy vent for the community.

This struck a chord with me as I've occasionally found myself having to do the same in my day job as a facilitator. I remember one particular occasion where I tried to facilitate a discussion on branding in an organisation. It was one of those gigs where you realise you've walked into a minefield of suspicion and distrust. You make a few inadvertent remarks and realise that you're no longer the facilitator of your imagination, but the blundering interfering consultant of the group's. Your offhand remark is actually the last straw on the camel's back. And as an outsider, you offer a much safer target for people's wrath than the real powers that be in the organisation.

I remember taking a lunch break and realising that this was one of those days when my job was probably to go down in flames so the group could vent its anger and reunite - ostensibly on getting the task done despite my ineptitude. Which they did, quite satisfactorily I think. They got to be angry without having to challenge the authority of management. You could argue that this wasn't very authentic or rational, but I'd say it got the job done and led to useful progress. For me, it was good practice at getting out of the way, but not the sort of thing that gets repeat business.

In praise of inconsistency

Brian Oberkirch likes this post by Umair and so do I. Like them, I loathe the notion of one-word-equity. The other day, James highlighted the wisdom of Etsy's Robert Kalin, which feels way more sane and humane. Here's Kalin:

There is no “Etsy” in the monolithic sense of a single identity or being. Etsy is the several dozen employees of Etsy, Inc. and even more, the several hundred thousand members of the community. As I see it, large corporations try to sanitize all their outgoing messages for the sake of keeping face. It is very easy to identify this kind of behavior.

Whenever you read something and it sounds like a series of pre-made phrases strung together, instead of a human being speaking, this is sanitized communication. To me, this stuff sounds inhuman.I want Etsy to stay human. This means allowing each person’s voice to be heard, even if it’s squeaky or loud or soft. I will not put a glossy layer of PR over what we do. If we trip, let us learn from it instead of trying to hide it; when we leap, let’s show others how to leap.

Chaos rules

Viv McWaters points to this cheering slideshow from Inc: Chaos Rules. As a raging intuitive, it's music to my ears.

Off on hols

I'm blogging this from Heathrow where I'm en route to New Zealand for a holiday away from it all. I'm looking forward to watching the tide go in and out of Cable Bay near Nelson. I'll probably be visiting Wellington briefly to see Dr Yan and then having a few days in Christchurch.

Connecteness

Chris Corrigan points to this fascinating documentary - Tribe Badongo Iboga - in which explorer, Bruce Perry, is initiated into an African tribe and goes on a psychotropic trip into his past... to discover how everything is connected.