Persona?

I was doing some coaching work recently where I talked about how easy it is to adopt a behaviour and make it into an identity, or a persona. All well and good, but these personae are employees who should come up for review. For instance, I often explain to myself and others that I'm an introvert but lately I'm wondering whether this is either true or useful. And if I had a pound for every time I've heard someone say, "but that's not who I am", I could afford a lengthy bout of psychoanalysis. (In which I might be indulged in repeating my questionable self-image until I get bored of my own voice.)

I was kicking this around with James and he put me onto this clip from Fight Club. Brad Pitt makes the point in 20 seconds.

The Thunderbird Six Syndrome

Hugh's latest includes this observation:

A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with somebody very high up the global Digital Advertising foodchain. He was telling me about how once he was pitching for a ten million dollar account with a large international client. The client basically said, "I love the idea. Let's do it. But... can you scale it to a hundred million dollar spend?" My friend sadly had to confess that his idea did not scale that large.

It's a good insight into an interesting phenomenon. It reminds me of Thunderbird Six.

That was a movie I enjoyed as an eight-year-old. You can see the trailer here. (Side note: why don't the folks at MGM let me embed this clip, it would drive more traffic. I guess they're still in the walled garden mindset.)

Jeff Tracy and the team at International Rescue are up to their usual heroics. The subplot is Jeff demanding the hapless Brains come up with a sixth thunderbird. As the movie rolls on, a series of ingenious but daft models for the new machine are presented. Jeff disses each in turn, and we see each model swept off the table and breaking up like so much lego. In the end, one of the Tracy boys has to improvise a rescue with an old biplane which then gets jokingly referred to as T6.

Even aged 8, I thought this was barmy. Jeff never says what he wants the new Tbird to do, just that he must have one. Like the client Hugh talks about, he seems to think that spending money is more important than getting a result.

Poor Brains exerts much jerky, string-pulling energy in an effort to help Jeff empty his wallet. As Hugh observes, this kind of thinking creates opportunities for vendors, but today's Jeff Tracys should be made to stay logged into Twitter until they start to get the real power of the small intervention...

Talking about the shadow

You know how it is when you plan to buy a particular new car, and suddenly there seem to be a lot more of that model on the roads? I've been experiencing the same thing lately with a psychological idea. Not much use for driving around in, I know, but cheaper to run and kinder to the environment.

Sitting on the terrace in Cable Bay I spent a good part of my holiday thinking about the shadow side of life. It has remained on my mind, and on Monday I'm planning to record a podcast chat with Matt Moore and Annette Clancy to explore it further.

I've noticed stories like this about politicians running into their own shadows and thought more about people I run into who seem scared of their own shadows. Just this morning, I saw this story about a couple who discovered new lovers online with whom they finally felt able to share the misery of their marriages... only to find that their online amour was actually their real life spouse.

Even that Steve Jobs quote about being a pirate instead of joining the navy could be seen as invitiation to embrace our own shadow. Perhaps this explains the pleasures of talk like a pirate day?

And (doh) that's what Hugh's blue monster schtick is about, right? As I get it, the blue monster represents all the energy that keeps people at Microsoft despite its frustrations - and the idea that it needs to be unleashed.

And I've reflected on what parts of myself may be in shadow. The other day I twittered that I was experiencing schadenfreude and quite enjoying it. James pointed out that although we generally define schadenfreude as "taking pleasure in others misfortunes" its German origin is more like "laughter in the dark" which feels like a richer, more poetic idea, that perhaps removes the implication of meanness. I liked that because my schadenfreude felt pleasurable and not profoundly mean.

I also twittered about procrastination and I thought about how I can often procrastinate horribly about things like client phone calls. I sometimes delay or dread them as if I really don't want to make them. I stopped and let myself feel that dread for a while and started to sense that the deeper experience was not really a fear of contact, but a deep desire for it and for it to be good. And that rather more satisfying idea had - until then - been buried in my own shadow. So my next client call seemed to move from being something to be got over with to something to actually relish. I'm pretty sure the result was a lot more satisfying for the person on the other end.

If we talk about examining our shadow, it alls sounds quite scary but the actual experience can be good fun. I'm looking forward to seeing if Matt and Annette are having similar thoughts... or some darker ones?

Open Sauce, 18th Century style

I just accidentally found myself overhearing a short piece on BBC1 about Thomas Chippendale, the celebrated 18th century furniture designer.

Chippendale was very successful and his pieces are now worth a fortune. Intriguingly, the real cause of his success was not his skill as a cabinet maker, but his marketing nouse. And get this, his masterstroke was the publication of his Gentleman Cabinet Maker's Director. Apparently, this included all his designs for others to freely copy. It made him rich, because all their imitations served to heighten the appeal of his originals.

Heh... and you thought open source was a new idea?

Yeah, I liked it too

Andrew Sullivan acknowledges that YouTube sometimes maginifies and extends people's pratfalls... but it can also highlight acts of kindness. He cites this example.

UPDATE: I loved Patti Digh's comments (see trackbacks) especially this bit: "It wasn't that he was standing right next to this young girl--he had to journey from his comfortable place in the stands to get there. It wasn't that he's a great singer. It's that he's a great coach, a caring soul, someone who lifts people up when they need it." And look at what he does at the end: he steps back out of the way. Great job.

Personal authority

Andrew Sullivan quotes Simone Weil

... those to whom destiny lends might, perish for having relied too much upon it. It is impossible that they should not perish. For they never think of their own strength as a limited quantity, nor of their relations with others as an equilibrium of unequal powers. Other men do not impose upon their acts that moment for pausing from which alone our consideration for our fellows proceeds: they conclude from this that destiny has given all licence to them and none to their inferiors.

Henceforth they go beyond the measure of their strength, inevitably so, because they do not know its limit. Thus they are delivered up helpless before chance, and things no longer obey them. Sometimes chance serves them, at other times it hinders, and here they are, exposed, naked before misfortune without that armour of might which protected their souls, without anything any more to separate them from tears..

Andrew points at Dick Cheney with this in mind; it made me think of the Ceaucescu clip I've referred to before. (It's the Rumanian dictator's last speech and the most stunning example I can recall of seeing power slip from someone's hand in a few seconds.)

I sometimes show this to people to suggest thinking about two kinds of power in organisations. There's the power of office, the kind Simone Weil fingers above. It's attractive; many of us see progress in life as the accumulation of it. And if you're trying to relate to someone who's got a lot of it, it sometimes seems as if your hands are tied. I often find people telling me they'd like to do something different, but their boss... (you can fill in the blank).

Fortunately, not all bosses are tyrants. These are the folks you find in organisations who seem to get ahead - or maybe just get along - without relying too much on their formal title. Maybe they're more in touch with a second kind of power, which I suppose I could call personal authority. Perhaps they're more in touch with the value of influence, rather than control. My hunch is that they're sensitive and grounded; they are open to being affected by others without being overwhelmed. The sensitivity stops them from tipping into grandiosity and hubris; the groundedness means they're able to hold a position when needed.

More to follow...

Rock in a hard place

There's been quite a scare over the Bank of England providing emergency lending to Northern Rock bank. Out of curiosity, I wondered how my building society, the Chelsea, might be responding online. High on the home page was the link shown here:

And what about Northern Rock itself? Absolutely nothing on the home page, except a scrolling reference to possible delays in processing online transactions. If you dig deeper, there's just the po-faced press release about market conditions.

Good grief. Here's a bank who's shares have plummeted 30%, with customers lining up at branches this morning. Do they have no clue about damage limitation? Do they not get that by not really acknowledging what's happening and talking to customers about it, they make the situation worse?

Now if they'd had a corporate blog, they might have had someone in there with the wit to write something in plain English that could have been reassuring. But no, it's the stony silence of denial. That just adds to my sense of their incompetence.

Sighing Disclosure: Years ago, I got a small windfall of shares when I used to be a customer of Northern Rock. Easy come, easy go, eh?

UPDATE (16 September) Northern Rock has got its act together at least a little, with a prominent link on the home page to a pdf file Q&A. Pity they couldn't have made it a webpage too; surely they want this to be accessible as possible? Again, I think an inhouse blogger might have known better...

Going to Banff

I've just booked a great adventure for November. I'm off to the Applied Improv Conference in Banff, Canada. I skipped the conference last year, but the combination of a horde of Improv fans plus the Canadian Rockies is too good to miss. I'm going to add on a trip elsewhere in North America as well I reckon.

Thought for today

I don't suppose Bertrand Russell was into Improv, but it looks like he'd have got it:

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

We're connected...

NESTA have had some interesting events lately. They're clearly into what Steve Moore calls "the convening power of the brand" as they assemble groups of people and interesting speakers, usually relying on word-of-mouth through social networks to get the right people in the room.

Last night, they had short talks by Howard Rheingold and Mark Earls, around a theme of mass collaboration. Howard pointed us to his site, Cooperation Commons which includes some intriguing research summaries. He mentioned one study in particular, which shows that

Altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together - by distributing and internalizing policing of free-riding, solving the second-order social dilemma that is an obstacle to collective action

Mark was on good form and I enjoyed being reminded of some of the core ideas in his book, which I pretty much solidly agree with. We seem overfond in Europe/North America of an individualistic worldview that assumes change is made by individuals as a result of rational persuasion. We don't seem to notice that a lot of the time we're just copying each other, and often rationalisation follows behaviour. And small interventions have interesting impacts; for instance if you stick a picture of a pair of eyes over an honesty box, the takings go up significantly. Quoting someone-or-other, he says we're people who respond to the context of other people's responses to the context of other people's responses.

Interestingly, I've just re-read Robert Cialdin's classic book on Influence, which is full of the ways in which simple tricks can be used to get us to do things. My favourite story is of a study done in California. Researchers visit suburban homes and ask to put a billboard on the lawn saying "Drive Safely". They don't have many takers. But then they tried a twist: two weeks before the billboard request, a separate operator visits the homes and asks them to sign a petition supporting better road safety. Those who sign the petition become way more likely to take a billboard. Cialdini classifies this as the power of small commitments and gives many more examples.

You read Cialdini as a guidebook on making people do stuff, or (as he intends) how to protect yourself from being manipulated into doing stuff by others. On another level, I see it as more evidence that we're not the rational creatures we think we are, and that even our smallest actions influence each other. Sometimes, we can spot that influence and use it but I suspect a lot of the time it's going on without any of us knowing.

I'm not bored, I'm empathetic

Here's one Mark will appreciate: Contagious Yawn "Sign of Empathy". Apparently neuroscience suggests that people who yawn a lot are more empathetic. In the research the Beeb report,

Psychology students were more susceptible to contagious yawning, and scored significantly higher on the empathy test than did the engineering students.

The tyranny of the ideal

Dave Snowden's on good form here:

...autocratic managers and the dark side of management consultancy have discovered how to keep their penny and still eat the bun.

The way it works is this. You spend a lot of money putting in control systems based on idealised process flows and ways of working. This applies in customer relationship management and health & safety alike along with many other fields. It looks really good on the flow charts. However the day to day reality of dealing with customers, or doing the job (say on an oil rig) means that people have to break the rules. Your business depends on their doing so and as long as it has a good outcome you ignore it. However if something goes wrong, you bring out that rule book and the idealised model and now you have someone to blame: the poor smuck who has been making your business work for you.

Sharing

Oli Barrett has a great post remembering Robert Davies, who, a few months before his death, wrote this:

Our lives are all too short not to share what and who we know so the world can profit and the journey to sutainability can be shortened.

Oli also invokes Theodore Zeldin's notion that life is a search for people, an idea I find quite appealing today.

Consulting 2.0 cont.

I like a good rant so I enjoyed Adriana's post: MasterSlave Relationship.

It is the a warped belief of where they belong in the universe that makes companies’ efforts online stand out like a sore thumb.

They bring their dysfunctional master-slave worldview with them and assume that a) we should be grateful for their very existence, services, products (see all the faux social networks being created by agencies and brands); b) we shall eagerly pounce on any offerings that they hype to be ‘for our benefit or entertainment’ (ditto plus various viral campaigns and faux blogs); c) we shall pay good money to them and only them, even if we can get it free elsewhere (news, movies and music etc); d) answer surveys, fill in questionnaires, share our information, profile, contacts (media websites, any new social network etc).

Adriana also links to this very handy wiki set up by Ross Mayfield: Cases 2.0.

Matt's faces

I like Matt's post about identity on Facebook. Matt's blog is way up my must-read scale because he's in touch with his own shadow. Key quote:

My take is that our identities are to some extent manufactured anyway. We have some influence over how we look and what we do (but not total control). But these identities are also co-created with those around us. We perform ourselves (to an extent). And others feedback to us whether they buy our performances or not through performances of their own...

Human beings have always indulged in hypocrisy and double-standards. They enable us to survive. New technologies mean that we must invent new forms of hypocrisy and innovative double-standards to continue surviving. Because let's face it, we're certainly not going to be honest with each other.

Consulting 2.0

This KPMG report has prompted some renewed thinking by Headshift, Euan and Jon, about the role of consultancy in a world of social media.

Here's my two cents on Consulting 2.0. The best idea in Steven Covey's writing is the distinction between one's "circle of influence" and one's "circle of concern". It's all to easy to have a circle of concern way bigger than one's actual influence, and at a personal level this is a formula for distress.

However, in business, there are big financial rewards for identifying whopping circles of concern and then exaggerating one's circle of influence: ie here's a huge problem and we're have the solution.

Online, it seems to me, that kind of exaggeration is more open to attack. And the joy of social media is the way stuff emerges from accidental interactions instead of being master-planned from on high. But there's an awful lot of money to be made by affecting the master-planner role....

I didn't like Sundays...

As a child, I was forced to go to church on Sunday. So empty and repetitive was the ritual that I would borrow my dad's watch and just watch the second hand going round. That was more interesting than the melancholic chanting of the same old script time after time.

I suppose I was too young at the time to make the obvious intellectual challenge to my parents: if they were taking me to church because of their faith in its value to me, how come they were willing to collude in my spiritual absence by letting me stare at the second hand of a goddam watch?

In the absence of intellect, I resorted to stubbornness. One Sunday morning, at age 11, I simply locked myself in the bathroom and refused to come out. To my parents' credit, they caved in and that was the end of chuchgoing for me.

It was only many years later that my mother admitted explicitly that she didn't believe in god. I still feel a mixture of shock and sadness as I reflect on that.

Even after my successful revolt, Sundays were always miserable days. Probably for two reasons: school was looming the next day and that meant homework. And the Sunday trading laws of the time seemed to impose a total deadness on the world around me. I nearly always got headaches on Sundays; and little wonder.

Now Sundays are cool, but I'd quite like to invent the term Sunday Syndrome to stand for the oppressive impact of pious regulation which takes the place of genuine faith and spontaneity. I see plenty of that in "best practices" and quite a lot in many prescriptions for how to be successful in life.

And thanks to Dave Snowden for reminding me of yet another classic Python clip, to be added to the Python School of Management in that parallel universe. Further evidence that we're rationalising, not rational, beings....