Johnnie Moore's Weblog

Cake

I revisited this article about Baba Shiv's research on how easily our brain tires of rational processing.

In one experiment, led by Baba Shiv at Stanford University, several dozen undergraduates were divided into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.

Not much of a difference you might think. But

The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Prof. Shiv, is that those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain—they were a "cognitive load"—making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the prefrontal cortex is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation.

So the next time you allow people to bore each other to death with powerpoint, just bear in mind all the unchecked impulses you're setting up for. And don't ask why your Q and A session ends up being so fragmented and tiresome.

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Meetings about meetings

Another good post by Chris Rodgers, about talking instead of systems. In his usual precise if dense style, he unpicks how we often talk about organisations in ways that effectively disconnect us from reality.

And so, instead of thinking in terms of imaginary systems and seeking to act on imaginary wholes, we might choose instead to focus on the complex reality of the conversations and interactions in which we are actually engaged. These are both products of and contributors to the contingent circumstances in which we find ourselves in the present.

One version of this I encounter a lot is "meetings about meetings". People gather to talk about what they want to happen at some future event, often using big abstractions about engagement, action, authenticity etc. And yet this planning meeting itself often lacks those very qualities. We're, in effect, indulging in a fantasy about the future and lose connection to the present. Which is where all the action really is.

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Two things that aren't as easy as they sound

I often use Open Space working with groups. I suspect that we often choose approaches that have something to teach us... a bit like the saying, We all teach what we most need to learn.

Or as I say, the cobbler's children may well have holes in their shoes.. but that doesn't make him a bad cobbler.

Anyhow, as with all processes, Open Space has its fans and its detractors. But one of the things I find exciting about it is that it asks people - including me - to do two things that sound simple, but in practice can be quite difficult.

First, it asks: what is it we really want? That sounds simple but I know I often lose track of what I really want, and end up sucked into routines and habits that aren't very enlivening. And like other human beings, when I get to this place I often get frustrated and start demanding things that I probably don't really want at all.

Second, it then suggests that we ask for what we want in a reasonably direct way. And that's also harder than it sounds. We live in a culture that often seems to prize indirectness, hinting and manipulation. Being clear about what we want increases the risk of rejection, and it makes us stand out. In some organisations, it can be quite unrealistic to expect people to take this risk.

In my subjective experience, the best offers in open space are the unadorned and the rough edged. I suspect we have a good ear for other people's inauthenticity, even if not our own.

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Playing down the process

I wrote the other day about the dangers of facilitators who are in love with their process. When that happens, I think they're actually relating to their idea, rather than to the people in front of them. It's a mistake I've caught myself making many times. I have a feeling that it's better to play down the process and play up the potential of the audience to make something of it.

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Not the best days of my life

Roger Schank looks at what google searches have led people to his blog. It's both funny and sad. It leads him to this statement, and I pretty much agree.

Most kids are miserable in school. We need to stop teaching the silly stuff we teach in high school and stop creating high schools that make students miserable. Apparently we do this in most every country.

I was just chatting with a friend today about how much I enjoy things like yoga and swimming, and how everything about physical education at my school had the opposite effect on me. And I think the assumptions made in all areas of school curricular are in large part responsible for why so many organisational meetings are so terrible.

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Just talking is not necessarily that simple

Nancy Dixon has a meaty post up about some of the things that undermine group conversations. I'm often inclined to say "can't we just talk" when offered a complicated way of organising things, but of course it's not as simple as that, as Nancy's post elaborates.

I was particularly interested in the bits about how power(status) differentials diminish the effectiveness of groups. It reminded me of Matthew May's story which really dramatised this point.

I also liked this reference to research Nancy found:

Culture is localized. It is not the culture of the organization that encourages or discourages the learning behaviors needed for effective reflection on complex issues, it is the culture developed within each specific team.

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Shit facilitators say

Dave Snowden talks about Nancy Dixon's challenge to his recent speech at a KM conference.

Nancy Dixon, in response to my keynote yesterday, expressed a preference for getting people together to talk about things rather than gathering narrative into a database which "spits out the patterns".

He goes on to talk about her, and David Gurteen's, arguments for conversational approaches.

The same preference was clear in David Gurteen's slides for his talk today. There was a picture of excited happy people in a knowledge cafe, followed by one of people slumped in boredom or asleep in a lecture theatre. I suspect he was trying to argue for the former over the latter. Now I've seen as many people going through the motions in a workshop as I have asleep in a lecture. I've also seen people animated and excited in a lecture (both as receiver and giver). There isn't one right way I'm afraid, its a little more subtle than a crude dichotomy.

I myself have at least one foot in the Gurteen/Dixon camp but I think Dave makes a fair point. Conversations can be awesome, but they can be pretty tame and tedious too, much depends on the risks participants feel willing or able to take. Equally, I sometimes get lost in the detail of Dave's more elaborate diagrams and strongly suspect his workshop participants do too, but may not want to admit it. Does that mean he should dumb it down? Not necessarily...

All facilitators are prone to having their favourite approach and to championing it. But every intervention casts a shadow. It if does some things, it will prevent others. We should probably practice acknowledging the downsides of our favourite methods. And try to resist resorting to defences like

1 It would have worked if it had been done properly
2 It would have worked if people had done it for long enough
3 It would have worked if someone hadn't sabotaged it
4 Ah, all those terrible short term effects just a small price to pay for the long term benefits that all my other clients have seen

I'm sure you can add others of your own.

I suspect no method can be as smart or creative as the people in the room. And a facilitator who is certain of his approach is almost certainly going to come across as patronising to the crowd.

Like several friends, I have to cringe as well as laugh at the twitter hashtag #shitfacilitatorssay. Almost everything we could say might fit in here. I suspect the real evil is not the words, or the technique, but the attitude of a facilitator acting like they are really in control of things.

Similarly, we can probably also avoid donning sackcloth and ashes on the occasions things transparently don't go to plan. To paraphrase Eric Morecambe, all methods work, but not necessarily in the way intended.

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Better meetings, the online course

Now we've done the book, Viv and I are turning our minds to other ways of spreading the word... that meetings don't have to be awful.

So we're happy to be developing an online course with James Allen of Creative Huddle. He is a top bloke who really practices what he preaches when it comes to collaboration.

This is going to complement the book and we're aiming to keep it concise, low cost and fun. Like James, we're keen to experiment with ways of making these ideas accessible to anyone. Full details here, including a nice little discount for registering early. Or watch below and fill in the box.

Fill out my Wufoo form!

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Forcing monologues

David Gurteen (via Keith de la Rue) spots an interesting piece of research on the effect of group size on the kinds of conversations that happen. Here's a snippet from the paper:

The experiments reported in this paper show that in small, 5-person groups, the communication is like dialogue and members are influenced most by those with whom they interact in the discussion. However, in large, 10-person groups, the communication is like monologue and members are influenced most by the dominant speaker.

Makes sense to me.

And if you go to the trouble and expense of getting people into a room together, it is very hard to justify monologues as a way of engaging. People who really want to hear a monologue can get it online without showing up in person. It frustrates me that so many meetings default to formats that support monologues.

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Start anywhere. Welcome confusion. Forget magic formulae.

Viv is out in Papua New Guinea doing facilitation training. We sometimes do this together, and I know it's harder doing it on your own. It's not surprising we agree on lots of things, including this:

If I’m learning to be a facilitator, I probably want to learn the how (processes, techniques, tip and tricks) first. Then I’d want to know about application, when and why I would use one and not the other. Problem is, learning is not linear. It happens in loops and leaps, in small moments of clarity, in confusion and messiness. In other words, learning, and meaning, emerges. It can’t be structured in a way that makes sense to everyone because everyone learns differently (and no, I’m not thinking learning styles – that’s been well and truly debunked).

I think most of us were brought up in education systems that fed the fantasy of linear learning. Standard sized chunks of content, delivered in predictable order, measured in orderly ways, to tidily organised numbers of people of the same age. The notion that things should go in straight lines is hard to shake off.

In corporate life, training often conform to a similar stereotype. We're tempted to focus on the juicy chunks of content ('you will learn, blob, blob, blob').

The thing is, if someone's interested, they can suck down no end of content from the web, without having to pay a trainer to dress it up for them.

As Viv says, people come to these trainings hoping to learn techniques and that's fair enough. They also want to have the recipes for all the tricky situations they've experienced in the past or fear in the future. The temptation to serve up recipes, and perpetuate the teacher trance, is strong.

It should be resisted.

I find in the end that participants are more relieved when I say there is no magic formula and that the job is inevitably confusing and stressful sometimes. That feels like reality, and most people can deal with reality ok. But if they think there's a holy grail, then the search will exhaust them.

If you want to talk with people about how to work with people, I reckon the running order is unimportant. Start anywhere. It's all connected anyway, and in much more interesting ways than any "five steps" formula of finely honed agenda.

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On the edge

Anthony Mayfield reflects on the joys of liminal thinking. It's a subject that really interests me.

In the context of creative and strategic thinking, the liminal state is what you find yourself in just before you have a breakthrough, or just before you fully understand something, make it yours. For instance, if you can recall trying to learn your lines for a play, the liminal state is where you are just before the words settle and take up residence in your memory – and then you can start using them, adding your inflections and emotions, making them your own.

Of course, when you're in that uncomfortable place you don't know if you're about to have a breakthrough or not. So the temptation to panic, and either give up or makesomething happen is pretty strong.

That temptation often leads us to adopt standard tools and processes in the hope of "managing" creativity better. I've come to think that there is just no substitute for accepting, even welcoming the discomfort, and staying on our edge.

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Creative Facilitation - The Workshop

Viv and I will be hosting a one day workshop on Creative Facilitation. It's on Monday July 15th, at Wallacespace St Pancras.

We've offered this training in various formats as far afield as Bangkok, Melbourne and the Solomon Islands. We draw on the ideas explored in our recent ebook - with an emphasis on discovery and experimentation. It'll be first time Viv and I have offered this training together in Europe.

We both think meetings have great potential to engage and motivate participants, and we'll be sharing how we've mangaged this in a variety of different contexts. We'll also explore how to dig yourself out of sticky situations, and avoid falling into some stereotypical facilitator traps.

You're invited to join us for breakfast 8.30am and the workshop proper starts at 9.30 and ends at 5pm. Breakfast, lunch, teas/coffees included, along with a proper printed copy of the book.

Early bird slots are £225 including VAT.

Full details and bookings page. Tell your friends!

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Summer Season...

When I moved to Cambridge last year, my dream was to get a place where I could have people stay. All through the winter I sat in the house wondering if I was insane.

But now that there are glimmers of spring, it looks like things are shaping up. Viv is going to stay at my place from July to September. And now Ton Zjilstra and Elmine Wijnia are going to join us here for the month of August. We are already talking about the socialising we can organise together. I'd better learn how to punt with at least the semblance of confidence.

I'm looking forward to a highly entertaining few months. Let's hope they can cope with all the bad habits I've accumulated living on my own over the years!

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Inner game of tennis

After rereading Tim Gallwey's The Inner Game of Work, I picked up its predecessor, The Inner Game of Tennis. It's a delightfully slim book and so far it might be even better.

He tells a lovely story about coaching a businessman who struggles with his backhand. He tells Gallway that he keeps raising his arm too high on the backswing. He knows he does. Five previous coaches have told him. In a practice, session, Gallwey sees this for himself.

So Gallwey, on a whim, invites the guy to try again this time looking at his reflection in a pane of glass. "Oh," he says, "I really do raise my backswing high!" Soon after this experience, with no further instructions, his backhands begin to get a lot better.

Gallwey is really onto the shadow games that go on in teaching or coaching relationships. Pupil has to play the role of ignorant learner while teacher plays knowledgeable and often condescending expert. The pupil overtly honours the set up by dutifully repeating the lessons as truth - in this case saying "I know my backswing is too high". Turns out that he doesn't really know that at all! My guess is that he's really just trying to conform to the pupil-teacher game by playing obediently.

Only when he get to see it for himself, does something shift.

The guy goes on to thank Gallwey effusively. Gallwey asks him what he taught him. The guy replies that he doesn't know. I felt quite touched by Gallwey's conclusion:

I can't describe how good I felt at that moment, or why. Tears even began to come to my eyes. I had learned and he had learned, but there was no-one there to take credit.There was only the glimmer of a realization that we had both participated in a wonderful process.

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Just remembering...

I get to use the Cambridge University Library these days, which I have to say is a pretty nice privilege if you can swing it. Perhaps that's why i seem to be reminiscing more about student days.

I seem to remember that back in the day, we students seemed to organise all sorts of interesting things, many very successful. Some were just for fun, others were pretty serious, the best had some of both. There was a lot of energy and a pretty good amount of conversation, and a lot was organised. Somehow, a bunch of bright and not pliable characters could collaborate effectively.

I can't remember anyone talking much about either leadership* and even less about management. There might be complaints about people and things, but no discussions about these ideas as abstractions.. And yet things seemed to get done. To this day, I find long discussions about these supposed qualities tedious. A lot of the time they seem to involve suggesting that people can be easily manipulated. I instinctively distrust anyone who seems to think he/she is good at either.

*Well actually, student politicians would throw the word around, but usually it was just a code for people they approved of (they had it); or to support unpopular ideas they wanted to impose (they were just being leaders!). That sort of thing.

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