Swearing

There's been a bit of a fuss about Tory leader David Cameron swearing on the radio.

Swearing is interesting, isn't it? It only works because it offends people, if it didn't then it would no longer serve it's purpose as a means of giving emphasis. So the swearers, and the moralisers who denounce them, are in a symbiotic relationship.

And can't help thinking of a couple of classic python takes on language prudishness.

Forthcoming work

I'm looking forward to facilitating the Graduates in Partnership programme. It's co-sponsored by BT and NESTA and is largely led by recent graduates themselves. They're convening their opposite numbers working in UK companies. The aim is stimulate innovation within and between their organisations.

We'll be using a largely open space approach based on letting people with ideas and passion drive the process, with the bare minimum of formal structure.

The invitation is open to graduates working in UK based organisations. If you're interested, or know someone who might be, drop me a line or leave a comment.

The maker's schedule

I thought Paul Graham's post - Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule was really interesting.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in...

I easily identify with the Maker's schedule, I sometimes find just having a meeting scheduled for the afternoon introduces an element of anxiety to the morning, an element that I think makes me less effective.

One of the wisest observations I heard about human beings was related to pace. Someone explained that a huge number of dispute in relationships can be traced back to differences of pace. When you force a person to go too fast, or too slow, for their own comfort, you can trigger all sorts of behaviour that may be unhelpful. You can end up in thorny disputes about attitude or belief or god-knows-what and simply not notice that people like to process things at different speeds.

That's my beef with presentations, which force an audience to learn at the presenter's pace. It can be a crazy waste of people's intelligence. Likewise, so many meeting formats seem to assume that everyone should arrive at particular stages of a thought process at the same time. Madness, like the proverbial number 9 bus coming three-at-a-time.

Hat tip: David Smith's daily feed.

UPDATE: Sue Pelletier makes a great point:

Pretty much all traditional conferences are arranged mainly on a manager’s schedule, with sessions slotted in in a nice, orderly fashion. But for the makers in your audience, does this really provide a good schedule for learning?

Complexity

Over the last few days, I've been listening to Dave Snowden's recent presentation in Singapore. He's talking about complexity in government, but nearly all of it applies to a lot of other contexts.

Dave's posted slides and podcast and it's serious brain food. Although I'm increasingly familiar with his work, I really appreciated being able to process it in chunks rather than all at one go.

There are a ton of ideas here and I can't do them justice in a single post. If I had to pick single argument out, it would be this:

In nature, stability and resilience are opposed. A stable system lacks resilience and a resilient systems lacks stability. So it's ok to stabilise things if you've got certainty of future; if you've got uncertainty you can't afford stability you've actually got to introduce inefficiency.. if you don't have a degree of inefficiency in the system it loses its evolutionary potential.

I made some other notes of ideas Dave put forward. I strongly recommend hearing them all in their proper context.

High efficiency = high risk during change

Complex systems are inherently unpredictable. Eastern philosophy allows for a non-causal system.

There's isn't a reason for things to be, and next time things will only be the same by accident.

Retrospectively a complex system appears to be ordered. Retrospective coherence or the benefits of hindsight. Hindsight doesn't lead to foresight, can be a dangerous thing.

Human beings don't think in logical ways unless they're autistic. We make rapid decisions based on patterning.

Importance of weak signal detection to spot sooner emerging patterns and act accordingly.

Move from fail-safe design to safe-fail experimentation/intervention... do lots of small things and see what works.

Rigid boundaries have a tendency to become brittle.

Catalytic probes... amplification and dampening...

Complexity as a way of managing more with less

Disintermediation, decision-maker has direct contact with the raw intelligence... more layers of intepretation -> slower, higher cost

Dave says you have to give up micro-level control – (JM maybe it's about a kind of micro-sensitivity instead?)

How do we relax the constraints without destroying Singapore society? Management as relaxation of constraints and monitoring the impact

Tightening constraints creates a different type of danger, that of being surprised by unexpected events

I can't analyse this because analysing changes it

Sense making: date precedes framework; categorisation framework precedes the data

Human beings are not termites and are not birds. Human beings have multiple identities, (JM -
human identity is contextual)... so models are unreliable

“The only valid model of a complex system is the system itself” (Axelrod?)

Senge metaphor hearts, legs, soul is a closed-system model

A symbiotic assembly of different living organisms – Portuguese man of war

Theory-informed practice = praxis, good theory, sound experiments → sustainable development . Applying past theory or things that have worked for others, you don't get that

Aim to generate dissent; aiming for consensus reduces the range of things you scan; ritual dissent increases the scanning range

Action theatre, revisited

A lot of conversations about the need for action frustrate me, as I've blogged before. So Ton's reflections on Reboot 11, which had "action" has its theme, make a lot of sense.

He says:

To me the whole Action theme this year was about your radius of action more than actual acts... So Matt Webb talking about scope in his opening key-note was spot on for me. Matt talked about how big visions and dreams (touch the moon with your fingertip) look differently when realized in a centralized command structure or in a decentralized network-sourced effort. Calling upon the Reboot participants to give the world a new 'macroscope' by taking 100 hour steps, he brings action and change down to the level where you can act confidently now.

I really warm to this notion. I easily tire of conversations where people come up with top-down solutions which often involve lots of angst about how to make other people change. These are bad enough from people at the top of a hierarchy. Even more strange are the times I hear people doing this where I suspect the real issue is that they can't get the powers-that-be to listen to whatever grand plan they generate. The question "but what is my part in all this?" seems to be missing.

I think Ton's in similar territory when he describes two ways to frame issues so that you are impotent:

In the former, you say you would want to change but put forward a version of the problem that is simply too big to handle, allowing yourself the excuse to do nothing. In the latter you say the problem is something you can handle, but only if all others listen to you to get it done... Again this is used as excuse for inaction as 'obviously' it is impossible to get all others on board (= back to the 'too big to handle' end of the spectrum).

Yes. I think a lot of apparently virtuous demands for action could more honestly be described as demands for control. And behind the need for control is probably some vulnerability the person is either unaware of or (perhaps for very good reason) unwilling to express.

And the "person" where I'm most aware of this syndrome in action is me, by the way. So being a facilitator is good practice for me at monitoring my own inner control freak...

Life Inc

Interesting stuff: Doug Rushkoff vs Stephen Colbert:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Douglas Rushkoff
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

Thought leadership?

Related to what I just said about holding questions, I often feel anxious when people bang on about thought leadership.

There's no doubt there appears to be a huge market for big name experts, so I get the appeal.

There's something about setting out to be the expert people look up to that feels rather aggressive to me. And perhaps equally suspect are the people who make a living claiming that their life mission is to help you present yourself as one. You have to ask yourself, what game are we all playing here?

Your mileage may vary, but the people I'm most attracted to are the ones who seem fuelled by curiosity and enthusiasm. If they take strong positions on things I sense that its because they really believe it. I think I'm getting better these days at spotting the little clues that people are just striking a pose - clever jargon, the tossing of precise facts with faux-casualness etc.

And, ironically, it's when we stop trying to be clever and accidentally leave our intended audience confused rather than trying to lead them, that we may get more attention. As ever, the Pythons make this point much more effectively than I could.

Holding questions

I've learnt a lot from Chris Corrigan, and the way I've learnt it has been interesting to me.

For example, I'd hear Chris emphasise that facilitation is a practice. At first I was a bit puzzled by this idea, I got that he meant something important, had a vague sense of what it might be, and was left wondering exactly what he meant. Rather than push him for a detailed answer, I left it hanging as question. And you know what? Over time, I've found myself growing a strong sense of what it means to me and now find myself advocating it too. Being a practice - for me - is in part about commitment to the work, and to understanding that it can never be perfected. I try not make facilitation about success and getting it right, but to do it well and stay open to mistakes, failures and the learning they bring. I said similar stuff here. But I still can't give you a perfect explanation, because I still find myself exploring what this idea of facilitation-as- practice means to me.

Second example: Chris would talk about "holding questions". Again, my first reaction was: eh? It sounded a bit crazy to me, but just sensible enough to leave me with this puzzle, what would be good about that?. I was probably only just on the curious side of cynical. And again over time, I've started to get clearer, and more enthusiastic about the idea of sitting with questions instead of always anxiously demanding answers. Today, Chris write a bit more about the practice of holding questions, which is, you'll probably have noticed, what this post is all about.

We're often very attached to certainty, and to ending meetings with "definite outcomes" and sometimes end up with matching language. (My friend James quips about a meeting where everyone agreed that what they needed was a "measurable, implementable, deliverable"). Sometimes leaving with a good question is much more engaging, even if at first it's a bit frustrating.

What they're really telling men and women...

This Mitchell and Webb clip made me laugh and hits the nail on the head.

Hat tip: Will Humphrey

Pigeonholes are for pigeons

I got an email about Primary Colour Assessment this morning. At a loose end, I took a look.

It's one of those things where you answer a load of multiple choice questions and then it tells you what Animal/Philosopher/Military-Leader/Tropical-Fruit/Soft-Cheese/Ladies-Underwear you are.

In this case, as the astute among you will have guessed, you get to be a colour.

Sadly, I couldn't quite find the colour on their chart for "You are the sort of person who occasionally fills in surveys like this to be reminded how much you dislike them".

A while back, I wrote about a wonderful clip from Fight Club, since helpfully deleted by the wonderful people at Fox.

Ed Norton has just met Brad Pitt on a plane, and is having a good time.

Norton (to Pitt) "You are by far the the most interesting single serving friend I've ever met."

Pitt stares silently at Norton.

Norton: You see I have this thing, everything on a plane is single serving, even the...

Pitt (interrupting). "Oh I get it. It's very clever."

Norton: "Thank you."

Pitt: "How's that working out for you?"

Norton: "What?"

Pitt: "Being clever?"

Norton (unconvincingly) "Great."

Pitt (dismissively) "Keep it up then."

I love this scene as it's a great reminder of how our thoughts about ourselves easily become scripts that we stick to without really seeing if they're true, or thinking about how they limit us.

Tests like Colour Assessment present us with a series of familiar stereotypes about ourselves and invite us to reaffirm our established view of who we are. Then they congratulate us on our place in the world, with some platitudes about maybe exploring being a little more Elephantine/Aristotelean/Napoleonic/Guavan/Bolivian-yaks-cheese/Marks-and-Spencer.

It's all so cognitive and thinkerly. It's based on the idea that we are who we think we are. But is all this thinking about it going to set us free or just reinforce our self-stereotyping?

I sometimes catch myself explaining to people that I'm an introvert, and I want to give that up because it so easily just becomes what Eric Berne called a wooden leg. It ignores the variety of contexts in which I can be very outgoing and engaged, and limits the possibilities I see in situations.

As humans, we appear to be somewhat blind to context and prone to ascribing far too much of what happens to character. (The fundamental attribution error). When you look at statements in these tests, they're all stripped of any kind of context.

In the end I think they reinforce a weird, somewhat American, faux individualism that really just sticks us in a box. This is supposed to be empowering, but I find it rather joyless.

Conversational innovation

Lloyd reports on his latest experiment bringing a conversational approach to a consulting gig. (Thanks for the props in there, Lloyd.)

Everyone is creative, capable of creation in one way or another. Categorising people as creatives or managers is fake and doesn’t serve us well, especially in a space where we require innovation and change. People are amazing.

It is possible to bring thirty people together and have a productive conversation without constantly telling them what to do.

Control

Mark sums up a great deal of the material he's gathered over the years.

We really are very poor at changing human behaviour...Much poorer than anyone of us would like to admit (to ourselves or anyone else).

I agree, though I might phrase it differently.

I think change is easy, we're changing each other's behaviour all the time, often quite unconsciously.

(If you doubt this, find a willing partner and sit facing each other and carry out this assignment: for the next 60 seconds, do not influence each other in any way. What are you going to do? Get up and walk away from them? And you think you're walking out will have no impact? Remain poker-faced? And that won't have an impact?)

No it's control that's problematic. Even if we try to dress it up as "change management."

Singing from the same songsheet

[Dept of unapologetic recycling of blog posts]

Some time ago I posted about a paper on wicked problems. The paper seems to have vanished from its online space, but I kept these images from it.

They show first, the idealised, project manager's view of how problems get solved:

And then the researchers looked at a how a successful, real-world design team actually thought about a problem. They plotted the first designer's thought process against the same graph:

And then they added the second designer's thought process:

As I concluded at the time

Many meetings fail because we try to follow the linear agenda and stop people from "wandering off the point". The trouble is, most of us need to wander off the point to follow our natural manner of figuring stuff out. And the bigger the meeting, the greater the likelihood of people being frustrated by what one person is focussing on. (This is part of why so many conferences suck.)

What's needed is a willingness to allow more of the apparent chaos. One simple example is Open Space facilitation, which creates enormous freedom for people to wander around and join or create conversations about the part of an issue they most want to focus on, moment-by-moment.

Of course, for some people the "chaos" of open space is too much to bear. But then consider the alternative, perfectly captured in this effort by some outpost of Ernst and Young. If anyone advocates getting "everyone singing from the same songsheet" feel free to make them sit through this. (I know I blogged this before, too, but it remains cringe-makingly hilarious.)

Have a happy day, if you're so inclined...

Being average

As I mentioned in a recent post, I didn't much like In Search of Excellence when it came out all those years ago. It's only in more recent times that I discovered Keith Johnstone's articulare celebration of the benefits of being average. Viv has a nice post reminding me of his wisdom.

Avoiding presentations

Lloyd Davis has a good post exploring how people group themselves at conferences.

I see two basic models of how people can talk to each other at events like this. There are conference rooms where the speaker to listener ratio is between 1:50 and 1:700 (not including those watching live on the web) and the other “Coffee Track” mode of people speaking in pairs, joined by a third which gives the opportunity for one of the original pair to slip away and for a new pair to get talking. Of course there are other mutations and variations that spring up around the place but they don’t live for long, the ecosystem keeps returning to two dominant, parallel states, the very large and the very small.

It's interesting that when people are left to their own devices, there is a natural preference to gather in small groups. How odd then so many events assume that the top down, one-to-many mode is best.

These days, I avoid almost all presentations, talks, panels, no matter how brilliant or engaging the presenters/panellists promise to be. I'm slightly ashamed to admit this as I feel I must be breaking some deep social convention.

My own hunch is that our education system has a huge amount to answer for. School was an extraordinarily rigorous drilling in the idea we should sit in serried ranks, at the behest of others. Any interaction was to be at the whim, and following the instructions, of the leader.

I'm mostly bored of presentations because, however brilliant, they are nearly always the prepared and established thoughts of the presenter delivered at his pace. If I'm interested in his content, far better to have it online where I can control the pace, rewind, fast-forward skip so that I can properly engage in a way that suits my own learning style.

If I'm going to present with real people, surely this is the time for fresh ideas to emerge, the way they do naturally, in conversation.

The other day I wrote about how easy it is think we're being innovative when really we're being superficial. A vast number of events I've been too claim to be introducing interaction whilst rigrously maintaining a top-down model.

Panels are presented as conversational but they're usually contrived and still allow a small number of people to talk and the majority only to listen.

Q & A sessions are usually more agonising than the speeches that precede them. A few people in the audience grab their paltry share of airtime but we're still stuck in a rigid mode of one person talking and loads just listening.

If there are breakouts, the organisers often think they get to tell us who to mix with and set us patronising tasks, methods and rules as if we're not to be trusted to work things out for ourselves.

So much of this is based on crude ideas that large groups are all after the same thing at the same time in the same way. Approaches that respond to the real diversity of views and energies in the room get dismissed as chaotic simply because they expose the falseness of the notion that we're just cogs in some big machine.

Lloyd reports on an excellent experiment he carried out where he used a very simple invitation to generate a much more conversational experience. Well done.

Change management and mistaking green for gold

A few years back, a well-known consultancy business decided to abandon its dress convention of dark suits and white shirts and said folks could dress casual. But quite soon, they decided to make it a bit clearer just what counted as casual and what was unacceptably scruffy. They thought they'd changed, cos people were no longer wearing the boring suits. But just below the surface, they remained a company fixated on telling people how to dress.

So often in life, we confuse surface novelty with real change. We bore ourselves and friends with some version of "Yes, but this time I've cracked it".

We celebrate our discovery of gold, when in fact we've only produced some green.

I was reminded of this when reading this McKinsey article: The irrational side of change management. (Thanks to Shawn Callahan for tweeting it.)

It kicks off with John Kotter's finding that only 30% of change management programmes succeed and goes on to explore how human foibles, cognitive biases and so forth derail so many of them.

It takes shots at the tired idea of change being about creating a compelling story. It suggests managers often overlook that different people find different things compelling. And they sometimes make their stories too weighted on the negative (depressing) or postive (implausible).

It says that leaders think they are exemplars of Gandhi's "be the change" mantra, but (like the rest of us) are delusional about their own merits.

And Mark will be pleased with McKinsey's debunking of influentials:

Our experiences working with change programs suggest that success depends less on how persuasive a few selected leaders are and more on how receptive the “society” is to the idea. In practice it is often unexpected members of the rank and file who feel compelled to step up and make a difference in driving change.

And I loved this nugget of psychology, used to encourage managers to let people create their own change ideas and not just impose them:

In a famous behavioral experiment, half the participants are randomly assigned a lottery ticket number while the others are asked to write down any number they would like on a blank ticket. Just before drawing the winning number, the researchers offer to buy back the tickets from their holders. The result: no matter what geography or demographic environment the experiment has taken place in, researchers have always found that they have to pay at least five times more to those who came up with their own number.

All interesting stuff. Which makes me wonder..

Why do I feel so frustrated with this article?

It's the tedious management consultant tropes in here that raise my hackles.

There's the fetishisation of numbers:

This relatively simple shift in approach lifted employee motivation measures from 35.4 percent to 57.1 percent in a month, and the program went on to achieve 10 percent efficiency improvements in the first year

I loathe this kind of fake precision about intangible beliefs and feelings. It seems endemic to the likes of McKinsey and it invents a delusional parallel universe that has nothing to do with gritty reality. Any conversation in which this sort of thing is spouted and someone doesn't at least grind their teeth is going to go somewhere daft.

And I also detect an implicit reverence for hierarchy, even amidst the suggestions about empowerment (my italics):

Look at Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer’s approach of asking each of his top 75, “What should I do differently?”

Consider the top team of a national insurance company who routinely employed what they called the circle of fire during their change program

This finding has profound implications for leaders

Then there's the drab, schoolmarmish tone of passages like this:

We advocate a number of enhancements to traditional training approaches in order to hardwire day-to-day practice into capability-building processes. First, training should not be a one-off event. Instead, a “field and forum” approach should be taken, in which classroom training is spread over a series of learning forums and fieldwork is assigned in between. Second, we suggest creating fieldwork assignments that link directly to the day jobs of participants, requiring them to put into practice new mind-sets and skills in ways that are hardwired into their responsibilities. These assignments should have quantifiable, outcome-based measures that indicate levels of competence gained and certification that recognizes and rewards the skills attained.

Jeez, would you want to work for someone who can take the language of Shakespeare and produce this kind of numbing dreariness?

And then, in a piece that at times dares to point to the complexity of managing human beings, we conclude with a paragraph that sounds oddly panglossian:

In the same way that the field of economics has been transformed by an understanding of uniquely human social, cognitive, and emotional biases, so too is the practice of change management in need of a transformation through an improved understanding of how humans interpret their environment and choose to act.

Translation: If we really, really work hard, all the complexity of human experience can be reduced to something that clever people (namely, us) can finally tame. Purest green.

McKinsey appear to be all about change, but I fear they really want a lot of things to stay the same. And be in charge of them.

So what's the alternative?

Glad you asked.

In the little world of advertising, where I used to work, everyone would get very excited about the occasional brilliant ad they'd seen. It seems like the narrative around advertising was skewed to a few good ones so that we seem to forget that the vast majority of what's produced is patronising, devious, intrusive drivel. Clients keep trying to emulate Apple's 1984 triumph and ignore the massive statistical probability that their advertising will be rubbish. Why not forget advertising and do something more interesting instead?

So if most change programmes fail, do we really want to go through another attempt to hire the high rent Baldricks and their latest even more cunning plan?

When I graduated, I could never quite relate to my contemporaries who trotted off to the consulting firms and enthused about that wretched book, "In Search of Excellence". With the confidence of middle age, I suppose I can say that I find people who blather about excellence are mostly ego maniacs and control freaks. If you wanna be excellent that's great. Why not get on with it and stop trying to make everyone else live up to some ideals you want to impose?

And the further I read articles like this, the more at sea I find myself. I think it relates to the stuff about the Knowing-Doing Gap. Somehow leadership and management keeps being claimed by people who can churn out the clever writing and statistics... but real life just doesn't work like this.

When I read this article, I find some good ideas but basically I fear the deeper narrative remains the same... we must have leaders who hire thinkerly consultants so that we can succeed.

If a company addicted to spending money on bad advertising one days stops, it's not going to be easy. They're not going to know what to do. Maybe they have to keep their nerve and realise now they're going to take some real risks, makes some new mistakes and hopefully figure out a better way of doing things for themselves.

And the business that dares to just give up on the lexicon of change management is likewise going to have sit with the huge discomfort that comes when we admit we don't really have an easy answer.

Maybe most of the conversations around change management fail because management and leadership are over-rated? And beneath the hygienic statistics and competitive cleverness lurk much more interesting, much less comfortable questions about who has real power around here, and why?

The best thing about best practice...

.. is the practice.

The "best"? Not so much.

I usually panic a little when people ask me about best practice in facilitation. I found myself emailing this to a client the other day (he was asking about training facilitators): People often say they want best practice as if there is a safe and official way to run meetings whereas I believe everything is contextual. On the whole I don't really like giving people recipe cards; I prefer them to see the excitement and challenge of facilitation is to be willing to try new things, not rely on established formulae, and each time be willing to "fail" as gracefully as possible, and carry on.

I have a similar response to models. As a wise man once said, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Following preset methods for running meetings may blinker us in the same way. I met an open source software developer a while ago. He said if he invented a hammer today, he wouldn't suggest it was a tool for hitting nails; he'd have to give it to people and watch what they do with it with an open mind. There's a moral in there somewhere.

So for me, facilitation is a practice. As in, you never stop experimenting, you never stop learning. And one of the things you get to keep practicing is making mistakes and not allowing that to stop you trying new stuff.

Natural organisation

This is a great five-minute video from Rob Paterson.

Chris Corrigan and Rob compare a meadow next to a ploughed field. It's a pretty compelling metaphor for the difference between a natural community and a conventional organisation. It had me hooked the moment Chris steps from one to the other and discovers an eight-inch difference in the height - a pretty clear signal about the health of one versus the other.

So many people planning meetings seem trapped in a ploughed field mindset, in which a superficial tidyness is confused with productivity. Our education system is probably a profound training in that kind of thinking. Meetings that are more like the meadow - where lots of different conversations are going on, where things are not linear - are sweepingly dismissed.

You'll hear them described as chaotic. Often the critic will make some angry statement about the "need for action" as if nothing is happening in these animated conversations. The irony is that the critic is actually terrified of the action happening all around them. They don't really want action, they want control. And as they can't seem to exert much control over their own state they want to control what everyone else is doing instead. Given too much sway, these people would create more ploughed fields where vitality is slowly sapped.

Of course, like most human beings, I can be like that too. Doing lots of facilitation is great for me because it gives me lots of practice in sitting with that kind of panic but resisting the urge to control.