Bring out the instruments...

Another pithy post from Matt, this time on Myers-Briggs and similar ways of classifying people.

The more I am exposed to these tools, the more they remind me of MBTI and HBD approaches in personality typing - a useful place to start but a terrible place to finish.

...If facilitated with a lightness of touch and a respect for people's experiences this can lead to a useful discussion on difference and diversity.

The problem occurs when you take this stuff too seriously.

I think the fact these things are called "instruments" is a good clue to the thinking they often promote, however much their supporters protest otherwise.

Anyway, in Matt's spirit of not taking these things too seriously, better fetch the comfy chair (Don't say you didn't see this coming)

Life as a raid...

My semi-addiction to World of Warcraft continues. Over the last few weeks I've been levelling up a Feral Druid (pictured) and a Shadowpriest. Playing these has greatly extended my appreciation of the complexity and intrigue of the game.

I'm sometimes coy about mentioning Warcraft but it nearly always prompts interesting conversations. I'm now having some very interesting chats about setting up some experiments to compare WoW as a form of management training against... well against the boring sort we've all run into before.

I'm also loving the power of the party or raid in WoW. Basically, to slay the bigger dragons and visit the more interesting dungeons, you have to team up with other players in parties (up to 5) and raids (up to 40). The more I play, the more I want to party rather than go solo. And I'm struck by how meritocratic these groups are.

I guess each player has his own way of engaging but I've noticed a strong correlation between clumsy play and the offering of loud advice to other players. I'm getting fairly good at spotting early on the signs of a player who's going to be a pain (eg bullying, ninja-ing, making terrible pulls). Equally, you soon build up a list of hard tanks, super healers and nifty dps-ers it's fun to hang out with in fiery furnaces and shadow-magical charnel houses.

And the bottom line is: this a voluntary activity. If naff players don't self-destruct, fellow raiders boot them, leave or just avoid them in future. No complex infrastructure of unfair dismissal rules to worry about. Just gravitate towards the people who are fun to travel with. This is the world of the free agent.

I'm really starting to get how this reflects my preferred style for engaging with work away from the obsessive keyboard-tapping addiction of Azeroth: flexible collaborations with people. A great willingness to try stuff - group together with interesting-sounding people around the idea of a challenging-and-fun project. Minimum writing of rules. If it's fun and works, do more. If it ain't, form a different group. With core mates like James or Rob, it's pretty easy to propose a raid and drum up the necessary volunteers.

Love

I've found myself referring to love in two recent podcasts. (The latest Hugh and the Rabbi, soon to be released, and the fourth Phoric, with guest Alex Kjerulf.)

Both times I expressed my caution about banding this term around, as it seems a charged word, and one that I've seen often used to describe something more like lust or egomania. (Which sometimes provokes a bit of egomania by me in return.)

Still, I have a feeling that some form of love is what really holds together most of the collaboration in the world. Not the mission statements, goals, agendas, action points and other ephemera of management and consultancy.

And Alex's podcast is well worth a listen. Rob and I are still in the early days of the series. It's interesting how much you can learn about people and maybe life from the jumping off point of: What are your favourite YouTubes?

On a techie note, I'm hoping that followers of my podcast xml feed will now find it suitably embedded. Here's the 20min extended version.

Social banking

Antony Mayfield has an interesting post on specualtion that social banking (things like peer-to-peer lending) could account for 10% of all retail lending in a couple of years.

This comes via Jason Gardner, blogging with refreshing honesty from within Lloyds TSB. I like the idea of a banker who does thought experiments like this one:

As a thought exercise, I've been wondering if it is possible, these days, to do without a bank at all and still have a relatively normal life. And by normal, I don't mean keeping cash under the mattress. I'm talking about a proper banking relationship, but without the bank account.

Actually, I've done some work in the retail banking sector recently (sorry to be opaque but I signed a very weird NDA) and these guys are clearly paying attention to the changes all around us. Whether they can develop an effective response is a whole other question.

Who is this guy?

The good people at NESTA have posted a video of Co-Creation Rules. It's about 20 mins extracted from the 90 min workshop James and I hosted there last month.

It's a strange experience watching myself on video. I'm left wondering: hmm, who is this guy? I sort of recognise him and what he says is all very familiar... but there's something a bit odd about him. Part of it is that I look more confident on the outside than I feel on the inside.

I remember a friend once pointing out that each of us is "myself" to just one person; we're "other" to everyone else. She asked, provocatively: "what if we go with the majority view?"

Seeing yourself as "the other" is quite sobering and somehow comforting... in the same way that looking up at the stars and sensing your tininess in the great scheme of things is comforting.

Leadership...

James emailed me a link to this entertaining article. Does Your Leadership Development Strategy Include World of Warcraft? Obviously as a WoW addict I am biased but I think there's something in it. I especially like the sharp dig at the current vogue for identifying "high potentials" in business.

It links to this video, about which I have mixed feelings. I think Prof Hill has some perfectly sensible things to say in this...

...but I found the format comically reminiscent of pre-Robin Day interviews with our political masters. (When the most daring question asked of the Prime Minister was "is there anything you'd care to tell us about your recent visit to (insert name of obscure outpost of the British Empire)") The question itself, "Where will we find tomorrow's leaders?" seems a touch neurotic. I guess I'm just very wary of anything that suggests leadership is a mysterious calling and that we should be worried about finding it. I'm underwhelmed that Harvard thinks it's on the cutting edge with stuff like this.

Coaching

I've been doing more coaching work lately and I'd quite like some more. I also find it quite hard to descibe my approach and feel wary of some of the supposed coaching models I read about online.

Most of the time when I try to describe it I become self-conscious and self-critical. This morning, a friend asked me to at least try to explain myself and I got in the mood for what I'd call a fire-and-forget email. That's when I think it's better to take a stab and put it out there and know it's not quite right, rather than just sit with writer's block.

Having bashed this out for my mate, I thought I'd extend my neck an inch or two further and share it with you, my dear readers. Be kind.

I’d describe my approach to coaching as humanistic. In the sense that a lot of business processes aim for standardisation, there’s a tendency to expect everyone to be the same, and to be efficient. For every kind of business situation, there are books and manuals offering standard solutions … you know: seven steps for this, the four secrets of that, the three best practices for the other...

Actually, I think this ignores the most significant thing about being human which is our humanity: that we’re flesh and blood, with sometimes unpredictable feelings and secretly very few of us really feel at home in a world of standardised mission statements. Which means many of us are left strugging to fit in, and then either blaming everyone else or blaming ourselves.

So where if a coach arrives with a standard model (eg GROW) he is quite likely to increase that sense of disconnect, not make it better. I think models and techniques are of limited importance in effective coaching, and often actually get in the way.

Timothy Gallwey, author of the “Inner Game” points out that coaches who come in with solutions for clients actually tend to reinforce their client’s sense of incompetence. Richard Farson, a great writer on management, also suggests that standard training has the same effect – it actually disables the recipients confidence in their own talent and ability to work out solutions. Like Farson, I think it's better to practice getting comfortable with ambiguity in work, rather than painting over the cracks with a standard process.

Research on what actually works in any kind of person-to-person relationship where there is some goal of personal change concludes that there is one key factor in success, and it isn’t the technique used. It’s that both participants have faith and trust in each other and share some optimism about the outcome. That creates the context in which the client can figure out for himself the best way forward. This gives him the joy of disovery and an inherent sense of ownership.

One of the reasons I offer a free chemistry session is because I think clients should shop around and find the coach they feel comfortable working with. The one who is best able to create a relationship with them.

Having knocked techniques, let me give a bit of information about some of the work that does influence me.

I trained in humanistic psychotherapy, broadly speaking an approach that argues that the relationship between practitioner and client is at the heart of change. So I’ve done a lot of experiential work, one-to-one and in groups where the empahsis is on attending to “what’s happening here”. I think that means I am more than averagely attentive to clients, pick up nuances faster and seem to create more trusting relationships. I’m also a believer in improvisation, a willingness to experiment and try new things out without getting overly attached to getting it right. I’m good at helping clients figure out new, more exciting choices open to them in what first seemed like impossible situations.

I've also done a lot of work facilitating groups which has been a constant re-education in the value of having faith in people to come up with ideas and to avoid the egotistical urge to "make things happen". I think I know how to get out of people's way whilst still letting them know that I'm interested in, and optimistic about their abilities to create something new.

Words, words..

For those who occasionally imply that words don't count, the power of just one - sorry - is demonstrated by Gavin Heaton.

Touch

Matt highlight's Patrick Lambe's post: Touch. Patrick is focussed on actual physical touch and the way it's pretty much excluded from conversations about change. It really is a giant elephant in the corner. I might add that the notion of touch in the sense of being moved is another such elephant. Here's a snippet:

And we treat everything as if it’s something that happens in the head, or between heads and heads (involving soundwaves) or heads and text in various forms. Specifically, I don’t see us anywhere talking about the importance of touch. This is not unique to knowledge management – it’s true of management science in general. “Touch” is as crudely understood as knowledge is, notwithstanding the equally subtle and sophisticated ways that we use touch socially. In fact, it’s largely avoided; the role of a bureaucratic organization is to inhibit touch as far as it is possible to do so while still working with humans.

We are, for example, much more comfortable thinking and talking about touching things (to control them), than we are about touching people. Touch screens, touch pads, excite our enthusiasm. Talking about touching our colleagues is deemed improper, inappropriate even.

I think Patrick alludes to a yawning gap in the way many folks think and right write about organisations. So often people emphasise deliverables, outcomes, sticking to the agenda, as if we've forgotten that we're flesh and blood.

As Matt notes, the comments veer to concerns about touch-as-abuse. I think that's sad and maybe a distraction. Especially if we think about touching in the broader sense. Let's not have an argument about whether-or-not-to-touch; maybe we could talk about how we are touched.

Hugh and the Rabbi

Hugh Macleod has put up a podcast of a chat he had with me, Mark Earls and Pinny Gniwisch. We kick around a few different ideas, starting with the debate about influencers.

Towards the end, I squeeze in an anecdote about Charles Laughton. Listening, I realised I didn't quite get the end line as I first heard it, so I'll recapitulate.

Laughton, the famed movie actor, is at a Christmas dinner. The household is into creating its own entertainment, so everyone is invited to perform a piece that embodies, for them, the spirt of Christmas. When it comes to his turn, Laughton recites the 23rd Psalm (The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want), to his audience's delight. Later in the round, an aged aunt who has been dozing through much of the evening is prompted for her contribution. Not having heard the great actor, she too recites the psalm.

Though initially embarrassed by the repetition, the way in which she speaks soon stills her listeners, and a tear comes to everyone's eye. Even Laughton is deeply moved and his host quietly asks him how this old lady has managed such an impact. Laughton replies: "I know the psalm, but she knows the shepherd".

Download the Podcast

Social politics

Rob Paterson decided to challenge a government pseudo-consultation about child education. Just using blogging and facebook, he has helped put a spanner in the works. He seems to be getting somewhere and I like his interim conclusion:

It's early days and it is not all clear. But what is clear to me is that having a few bureaucrats do what they want is going to get hard for them.

Until now, a typical government consultation was to have what you wanted already decided and have a couple of hours with the punters - everything was decided in the back room.

Well this is just not viable anymore.

Brick wall or campfire

I made a new friend today, Jeremy Sweeney. Here's something from his site that might indicate why: Brick wall or camp fire organisation.

Brick walls help build structures. Camp fires stimulate a desire to connect and co-operate.

Business science and managements tend to emphasise 'brick wall' type structural solutions to the challenges of growth, recruitment, retention and scale.

Most peoples response to brick walls is to either want to escape or rebel.

At the same time consumers, staff and other stakeholders are tending to want more of the 'camp fire' in their lives.

It's not an either/or but I know where I'd go for comfort most of the time.

VRM

Adriana has been beavering away furiously on VRM for months now and it's exciting to see it bearing fruit.

More peer-to-peer lending

A tweet from Jevon pointed to this: Canada gets its first peer-to-peer lending company. I've written/podcast on this theme a few times before and I'm glad to see the idea is spreading (absolutely no causal link implied!).

The 'Phoric

Rob Paterson and I have come up with an idea for a series of podcasts we're calling The 'Phoric. That's phoric as in euphoric, metaphoric and maybe some other phorics too.

The idea: One guest per podcast who chooses three video clips that inspire them and say something about the way the world is or could be. We talk for 10mins max, and post the podcast and the clips to The 'Phoric.

Rob and I have gone first. Predictably, I've gone down memory lane with Monty Python. Rob has some inspired thoughts based on this classic scence from The Magnifcent Seven

... as well as Witness and The 13th Warrior.

Go check it out, and let us know if you'd like to be a guest...

Scarf of delight

Patti Digh writes a blog that delights me. This post is a case in point. Snippet:

I could barely focus on what Donna was saying to me, or her friend, either. I know I’ve written many times—and very recently!—about simplicity and not owning a lot of things and the evils of rampant materialism and how things keep us from being free and who we are—but honestly, you weren’t there. You cannot know how utterly and completely perfect that woman’s scarf was for me. My life would be complete, I knew in a hot blinding instant, if that scarf were around my neck and not hers. “That scarf is so gorgeous,” I gushed, plotting how to pull one end of it, twirl her out of it like a mummy, and then run screaming up the aisle for the exit. Screw Mary Oliver and her precious Rumi translating friend. I would run like the wind with that scarf blowing behind me, out into the dark, dark night.

A model or a practice?

I've been thinking lately about the difference between business based on a model, and based on a practice. And I think I want a practice, not a model.

I've been wanting to write a super-coherent essay about this but I've noticed that nothing happens when I set that goal. So instead, I'll just blog a few of the ideas associated with this in the hopes I might later make them a bit more coherent. Or maybe one of you will!

I've been influenced a lot by two books. Dan Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness and Phil Rosenzweig's The Halo Effect. Gilbert gives a cook's tour of many of the ways in which we delude ourselves about our experience. He does this in the context of finding out what makes us happy, and suggests we're actually rather bad at figuring it out. Rosenzweig does something similar for our understanding of organisational success: basically, we're prone to a whole series of delusions about what actually works.

We end up massively overstating the influence of heroic leaders and failing to understand the influence of context: what appeared to work in one situation simply doesn't map easily to another. We busily try to "train" people to do things based on some deeply imperfect understanding of what actually works. (There was a nice story - I can't source it at the moment - about Andre Agassi teaching someone how to serve based on his own mistaken sense of what his secret was. Only stop motion photography revealed to Agassi that what he thought he did when serving was not what he actally did.)

Now there are some big incentives to having a model for business. In the training/faciliation area, if you have a model, some people find it easier to spend money. They get a list of confident bullet points about "what you will learn". They think they're actually buying something real. (Ironic, really). And of course, if you have a model, you can industrialise it: you can licence it, get others to teach it and you make money in your sleep etc. There's some connection for me to the choice between open source and conventional software: do you try to make money from freezing ideas and selling them, or from your ability to continue to develop them and make them of service to people?

Here's a few related thoughts I might explore further later.

- As Mark argues, a lot of human behaviour does not change in response to instructions or programming. We're not computers. A lot of our behaviour seems to be based on copying. If we practice what we believe it may be more impactful than going round telling people what we believe. (And, as hinted above, what our rational explanations of our behaviour may be pretty dodgy anyway).

- The idea of practice gives me permission to fail and learn. We all the know the saying that life isn't a rehearsal. I think I prefer to think of it all as rehearsal, all a chance to try things and see what works.

- I often feel that folks with models, whether Myers Briggs or NLP or Shareholder Value Analysis are always going to be filtering for what fits their model. They'll see the model but not the people; the safe and secure but not the new life and emergence.

- Research on what works in therapy seems to suggest that the relationship between client and therapist is crucial, and that the model is secondary.

Hat tip to Chris Corrigan who's really into the notion of practice.

Podcast: Expert insight or human engagement?

A couple of days ago, I blogged about two posts by Sean Howard and Piers Fawkes. They seemed to have a common thread of dissatisfaction with business-as-usual (in stakeholder research for Sean, and trendspotting for Piers).

This afternoon, I lured them both onto Skype to kick this around a bit more. We had a good chat about the need to more engaging ways of helping companies adapt. The old ways of expert reporting feel increasingly inauthentic and don't seem to support real change... so what could take it's place? Social networking is clearly part of the answer!

Here it is as a podcast - and many thanks to Sean and Piers for taking part!

Download the Podcast - 20m - MP3 (7 MB)

Podcast RSS feed.

Show notes

Usual boilerplate: timings are approximate and this is my paraphrasing of what was said. Don't take them it too literally.

0.00 Introductions

0 25 Piers summarises his recent post on the failings of the trendspotting industry. We're in an era of data-is-free and much of the industry ignores that, packaging up ancient information and selling it for large amounts of money. A lot of trends information is just opinion, and there is a lack of transparency in the business. There's an arrogance, a sense of "we know the secrets and you know nothing. We know who the cool kids are and you're in trouble." We shouldn't be scaring our clients.

4 25 Sean talks about his post about what's wrong with the way companies use stakeholder research to support change. Are we just optimising or are we innovating? Too many 400 page reports sitting on shelves. We can point the finger at clients too for their part in this.

5 10 Johnnie picks up on the theme of engagement. The old ways lay claim to secret insight from a black box. But there's a sense that it's fake and lacks real spirit. What might be better is a willingness to step into the unknown.

6 05 Sean and Piers talk about innovation: how do you get organisations to actually change in response to insight? Clients want to know: what do we actually do with all this information?

8 05 Sean talks about whether work is just to provide insight or can it inspire and can the way it's done support greater engagement within the organisation. Can we make the process of discovery more participatory?

8 45 Johnnie has another go at the notion of intermediaries and experts in favour of things like social networks with real world human conversation.

9 30 Piers: We need to move to more participation just because of the speed of change. There's not enough time for the study to be produced and then react. Need a system to keep organisation more in touch with the marketplace day-by-day. Maybe there's no more big ideas, but lots of good ideas.

10 10 Sean describes an experiment he's running for an organisation where people within an organisation use social networks to contribute their intelligence and ideas. They don't just input, they comment on other people's input. Allow the organisation to analyse itself.

11 20 Piers likes the sound of that. Johnnie digs for more information. Sean elaborates on the use of video gizmos to let people capture and share experience. Getting beyond text-based. Johnnie asks if this could this be Seesmic-like? I wish, says Sean... but even with 5 or 10% participation, we're getting triple the engagement we'd get from traditional stakeholder interviews.

13 40 Piers: we have some elements of participation in our work but maybe we can do more to use social networks in delivering ideas/inspiration to clients. Johnnie thinks that's a good idea, a way of providing more in-the-moment sensing of what's happening.

15 00 Sean on the gap between inspiration and innovation. Piers: the market still relies too much on the control of data, need to get beyond that.

15 50 We would think this, being bloggers, says Johnnie but data wants to be free; efforts to own/control it are going to suck the life and spirit out of a system.

16 15 Sean likes the bit in Piers' post about ad agencies being in the game of making ads. Do ad agencies really have their heart in a different approach?

17 00 Sean: ad agencies need to watch out for the design companies like IDEO who really get participatory design.

17 50 Parting thoughts from Piers, Sean and Johnnie.

19 50 Ends

Marketing loses its cool

Tom Guarriello has a wonderfully irreverent post about marketing and the angst about monetising social networks. Here's a snippet but read it all if you can.

OK. So, keeping that as a backdrop, I show up at today's C-level restricted attendance session of the BRITE Conference. In the front of the room, several really smart people talking about very cool things. Lots of energy to create new ideas. Lots of exhortations to think big. Lots of buzzy references to all things social media.

And, what happened? No offense, but, big hat, no cattle.

None of the ideas generated from the floor wowed anybody. Nothing there was any more innovative than what'd you'd find in an afternoon in the blogosphere. It was obvious that some (several? many? most?) of the C-level marketing executives in attendance had never read a blog post. Probably never commented on one. Certainly never posted one.

Tom asks if marketing is a discipline in crisis. Well I can see a crisis for the marketing professionals, but not for us punters. Mrs Beeton, in her famous book, had a very different notion of marketing than the defaul definition today. Here's her reference to it:

It will be one of the duties of the housekeeper to attend to the marketing, in the absence of either a house steward or man cook.

So for her, marketing was done by the purchaser, not the vendor, and not a high-status cleverclogs thing, but the business of getting a decent price.

IN MARKETING, THAT THE BEST ARTICLES ARE THE CHEAPEST, may be laid down as a rule

I love Tom's post for it's knocking of the high status of CMOs... and rather like the idea of marketing as a nice thing that we all get to do, and not a high-falutin' thing done to us.

Measuring

I think Matt's post on measuring the complex is a nice example of a simple idea, lightly held.

No more grand narrative?

After Sean let fly at the market research business, I'm pleased to see Piers doing the same for the trendspotters.

For me, there's a message linking both: can we get away from putting our faith in magic feathers and soothsayers? I think if we do, we could move to much less grandiose but fertile territory.

Coming clean

Sean challenges me (and a few others) to come clean about our shameful past. Specifically, our shameful past in playing along with half-hearted/half-baked customer research.

Let's face it, this particular process has become the method by which we cheat our clients into believing that there is unique value in our approach and engaging them in a "process". But are they really engaged? Do we really utilize what we learn?...

I should qualify this by pointing a finger at not only ourselves and the industry but also at our clients. They yearn to be cheated in this way. Hell, they often demand it. Project owners want their organization to be "engaged" but in a "safe" and "controlled" way (read: un-empowered).

Yeah, been there, done that, acquired tea towel etc. I gave up doing market research because I became so dissatisfied with it's deadening effect. Researchers have an investment in presenting themselves as the expert psychologist. "We listen to what you customers say and expertly divine from this what they really mean, and then we tell you." Translation: we get in the way.

And with the best will in the world, a research report gives a company only a rationalised, stripped down version of what a real live engagment provides. And quite a few times, I'd realise clients didn't even want that dessicated version of the truth. As Sean suggests, very often the voluminous research leads the agency/client to do... just what they wanted to do anyway.

My most painful experience of this was when I tested an ad campaign that totally bombed in research. The agency fiddled with the logo colour and carried on regardless. At a sales conference, they trumpted how thoroughly it had been researched (but not how terribly it had researched).

I think you could do a lot worse than cancelling at least half your research budget and spending more time in the online forums reading the unedited versions of the conversations about your product.

For myself, I gave up the research business and now ply my trade as a facilitator. That role no doubt has its own share of delusions, but it does at least theoretically understand the notion of getting out of people's way!

Interruption

Shawn spotted this in The Onion.

NASHVILLE—In what onlookers described as an epic war for conversational dominance, girlfriend Amy Soisson, 28, clawed, battled, and interrupted her way to complete control of an anecdote started Wednesday by her boyfriend, Greg Harvey, 29. According to sources, Harvey was in strong command of the tale's settings and plot points until a brief hiccup in detail gave Soisson an opening to pry custody of the anecdote from Harvey's still gaping mouth. After several futile attempts to recapture the story at its climax, a weary and broken Harvey fell again and again to his girlfriend's ruthless strategy of speaking over him in increasingly louder tones. The long and arduous contest of wills reportedly concluded with Soisson ascending to the rank of sole storyteller, forcing Harvey to retreat to the kitchen and share the anecdote with friends there.

This made me laugh. I'm often struck at how easy it us for us to interrupt each other and I know I'm guilty too. What a difference it makes when we give each other a bit more space.

Currency...

Chris Corrigan spotted this interesting thought from Jack/Zen:

What’s interesting is that anonymous monetary currency doesn’t build community. It only, as Jean suggests, “outsources connections.” When I trade my time helping someone start a wiki website for their business for their time doing plumbing or editing for me, a relationship builds. When I hand someone ten dollars for an item at Target or Whole Foods, no relationship builds in that transaction. In a monetary currency economy, flow occurs without the building of relationship. In a gift and barter economy, relationship is formed.

Enough already

Oli Barrett has two related posts about not over-doing things. In that spirit, my blogging activity for today will consist of pointing to them.