David Jones gives a good account of how consumers are able to hold businesses to account in unpredictable ways, often before companies’ PR machines have even grasped what’s going on. When Eurostar trains became stranded in the Channel Tunnel in freezing conditions at Christmas two years ago, customers were venting their anger on Twitter while Eurostar’s official Twitter account was preoccupied with promoting short breaks.

He cites statistics from research on social attitudes carried out by his company: 74 per cent of consumers think that business bears as much responsibility for driving positive social change as governments; 80 per cent think they have a responsibility to censure unethical companies by avoiding their products.  I would imagine that these would be challenging findings for many a business leader. They point to a social environment which puts the way profits are generated firmly at the centre of the contract between consumers and businesses.

Read the full post at Valoro VGW.

There’s an old joke about a banker whose plumber charged him £250 for a two-minute job to fix a leaking tap.  “I don’t earn that kind of money in the City!” the banker told the plumber.  “Yeah!” replied the plumber, “I didn’t either.  That’s why I switched to plumbing.”

The joke spoke to a pervading anxiety that the financial rewards of white collar work may be meagre compensation for the costs it exacts.  Now, along comes Matthew Crawford to rub salt in the wound with his thesis that the manual trades may also be more intrinsically rewarding.

The Case for Working with Your Hands (published in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft) owes more to Marx than I had appreciated from reading reviews of the book. Crawford provides a critique of the alienation of work in corporate capitalism. He extrapolates the trends that Marx identified in 19th Century manual labour to show how so-called ‘knowledge workers’ in contemporary capitalism are subject to the same phenomenon. The argument is not new. What differentiates this book is that, while Crawford writes from the perspective of an academic philosopher, he builds his argument from his own direct experience in the manual trades (electrician, motorcycle engineer) and desk work (a writer abstracts of academic papers, a research fellow for a Washington think tank).

Crawford finds that his experience of manual work is more intellectually challenging and more intrinsically satisfying than his experience of knowledge work. As an electrician and running his own motorcycle repair shop, he finds engagement in problem solving, in creating something and working to demonstrable and tangible standards. There is holistic pleasure in working with both hands and brains, and daily experience of failure from which one learns, accumulates tacit knowledge and acquires mastery.

He contrasts this with our normal experience of alienation from work both as workers and as consumers. At work, jobs have been overwhelmed by bureaucracy and the stripping away of much of their intellectual content as the focus of corporations becomes the creation of maximum value for shareholders rather than for end-users. As consumers, we have no interaction with the products that we purchase which are designed to ‘free’ us from the need to fix or maintain them ourselves. He cites a model of Mercedes car which does not include so much as a dipstick to check the oil. The car still needs its oil levels to be topped up regularly but the owner is expected to leave this to the service engineer.

Crawford laments that in most organisational settings, work is not so much about mastery of craft but mastery of the dynamics of the team. He argues that the focus of management is to foster a certain sensibility in employees rather than require high standards in the application of skills. He gives a powerful account of his disappointment with his first job after completing his master’s degree. Employed to write abstracts of papers, he found that this was far from being the journey into knowledge that he had imagined. It turned out to be a mutilated form of intellectual work where the quality of his output — the integrity of his summarising of authors’work — mattered less than the number of abstracts that he could produce in a day. His colleagues were damaged people — including one who used heroin on the job and took pleasure in sabotaging his work by including in his abstracts outrageous material which his employers, none the wiser, would subsequently publish.  Crawford asks:

“How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a ‘knowledge worker’ at a salary of $23,000? I hadn’t gone to graduate school for the sake of a career (rather, I wanted guidance reading some difficult books), but once I had the master’s degree I felt like I belonged to a certain order of society, and was entitled to its forms. Despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as a manual worker.”

Crawford finds it perverse that Western democracies are alert to the dangers of a concentration of political power but not to the risks of concentrated corporate power. He advocates that, as consumers, we should show apply to our purchasing sensitivity to the impact of the production of goods and services on human dignity — in the same way that many routinely consider environmental issues. At work, he favours occupations which offer face-to-face interactions rather than control by remote forces, responsibility for one’s work, and solidarity between colleagues.  Such solidarity, he argues, is derived from the respect for each other which comes from working to clear standards and seeing colleagues do the job well.

Crawford offers nothing constructive for the masses of people who work in large organisations. The consolations of the trades cannot be readily established in the office.  Crawford himself acknowledges that to address the problems he identifies would require a revolution in the regulation of large corporations. Rather than hope for this, he suggests, individuals would do better adopting a ‘Stoic’ attitude — seeking out “the cracks where individual agency and the love of knowledge can be realized today, in one’s own life.” For many people, those cracks are to be found mainly in their personal space away from work  — which is a measure of the very alienation that Crawford seeks to highlight.

The Case for Working with Your Hands provides a thought-provoking critique of how we work. It offers a glimpse of a more sustaining alternative.  But it strikes me as the beginning of a discussion rather than the last word.

The Case for Working with Your Hands, by Matthew Crawford.  Available from Amazon.

Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archive.

When humans evolved into seals

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1985 novel Galápagos is a Darwinian satire on the mess humankind causes for itself as a result of having evolved big brains. Set in the late 20th Century, it charts the breakdown of society and the near extinction of the human species — caused by a cocktail of hedonism, financial crisis and viruses. The twist is that the story is narrated from the vantage point of a million years hence, from which perspective the culture and behaviour of 20th Century humans seems inexplicable. The few surviving humans of the future — a small colony that settled on the Galápagos islands — have evolved a more stable equilibrium with their environment with small brains, minimal language and a simple life in which the only concern is when to dive into the ocean to catch fish.

The novel has a fragmented narrative but is brimming with ideas. Reading it in the wake of the financial crisis of the early 21st Century, it resonates more strongly possibly than it may have at the time of publication. Vonnegut evokes the rapidity with which society can break down when people no longer believe in the value of money: a catastrophe to which we came closer than most of us care to imagine.

The crux of the book is that our brains evolved to such a size that we developed redundant capacity. Somewhere along the way, the consciousness of humans was turned away from the boredom of simply existing and reproducing and towards a variety of lifestyle choices that could make life meaningful:

Human brains back then had become such copious and irresponsible generators of suggestions as to what might be done with life that they made acting for the benefit of future generations seem one of many arbitrary suggestions which might be played by narrow enthusiasts — like poker or polo or the bond market, or the writing of science-fiction novels.

The humans of a million years in the future are descendants of a motley group of mainly women and one man who survive by luck. They escape the mainland before the rest of humankind becomes infected by a virus which terminates further reproduction, and between them they embody some genetic and cultural inheritances that help them to adapt well to the small island of rock where they run aground. Most of the group are from a primitive tribe, the Kankabono, and there’s also a Japanese baby who was born with seal-like fur.

What quickly becomes apparent in this new environment is the uselessness of the sum of knowledge of Western civilisation, which happens to have been captured for them in a computer called Mandarax which accompanies them on their voyage. When human life is stripped of culture, the simplicity of the Kankabono has more to offer than the great achievements of art and science.

Vonnegut does not deny the positive things that have emerged from human endeavour — such as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. But it’s a running gag in the book that most people were never destined to create something of such sublime significance. The achievements of human culture seem to be outweighed by the inevitability that even the most destructive and outlandish imaginings of the mind would always end up being put into effect:

That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, ‘Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It’s just fun to think about.’

And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it – have slaves fight each other to the death in the Coliseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, or so on.

Even the narrator, the soul of a 20th Century American is compromised, having shot an elderly woman in Vietnam out of vengeance when he served there as a soldier. It was an instinctive reaction to seeing his comrades killed by a hand grenade, but one which would be unimaginable to the humans of the future — whose limbs whither away to flippers and who have no need for weapons.

I chanced upon Galápagos while researching my Masters dissertation. It is quoted by the educationist and psychologist Guy Claxton in his book on consciousness, Noises from the Darkroom. Claxton argues that we give too much credit to our sense of the conscious authorship of our lives, and underplay the largely unconscious processes by which our minds work for us:

The problem is that we can pretend to claim conscious credit for our decisions only if we persist in denying the existence, or even the possibility of unconscious influences. Once we see consciousness as an intermittent and unreliable print-out from the invisible biological system that underlies it, we can no longer claim the credit with such confidence.

Vonnegut’s novel delivers a warning about where our reverence for consciousness could lead us. In his depiction of the survival of humankind as being dependent on relinquishing our big brains, he challenges what we most value in Western culture. His imagining of how humankind might evolve is a call on us to learn again how to appreciate the simplicity of just being with our unconscious experience.

Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Available from Amazon

See also Things Mean a Lot.

Image courtesy putneymark.

“We have developed into a society or culture that is afraid of silence. The noise is now so great in many public places, partly because of all the mobile phone conversations conducted in them, that I am surprised people can actually hear the others they are phoning.

“Constant noise appears to be reassuring, or at least to be thought so. That is why music or muzak plays in shops, restaurants and on aeroplanes when they are about to take off or land. But what happens when noise is so loud and ubiquitous that you can no longer hear yourself think?

“Then the thought occurs that the whole point of all this din is to stop people thinking, or confronting themselves. The scary thing about silence is that you are left with yourself; the mirror which might have been conveniently darkened or blurred is now uncomfortably clean and unforgiving.”

He’s writing in response to A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, which I’ve not read. His article resonated with my own increasing appreciation of silence.

Long before iPods, and before them Walkmans, a music soundtrack accompanied my life as much as possible. At some level, it helped my mind switch off and to become more connected with life. But the iPod finally killed this for me.

When I first got an iPod, I uploaded my entire music collection and more or less listened to all of it over several months as I cycled to and from work. I found I didn’t much like most of the collection and still less did I like constant noise in the background. Where before, a soundtrack helped me relax, now it was becoming a source of distraction and stress.

More recently, I’ve noticed that I opt for silence by default. For as many years as I can remember, the start of my day was arranged to the rhythms of the Today programme on the radio. It connected me with the world beyond. My childhood and teenage memories of Today are of civilised, sophisticated and affable presenters whom it was a pleasure to invite to your breakfast table. But through the years that I was working at the BBC, the mix became more toxic.  The political culture seemed to demand a more austere diet of aggressive interrogation of guests. It felt like a civic and professional duty to listen, but no longer one that was wholesome. I was surprised how quickly the habit of listening fell away once I left the corporation. Nowadays, I’ve already checked the headlines on my phone before I even switch on the radio and as often as not I forget to switch it on at all.

Similarly, when driving I surprise myself by driving long distances in silence where before I couldn’t contemplate travelling without a playlist of podcasts or some music to alleviate the boredom. I currently need to drive to Oxford reasonably frequently and look forward to the opportunity to be with my thoughts and to take in the hills of the Chilterns as I speed through.

Silence lets us connect with ourselves in ways which are too infrequent in contemporary life. I notice this with my coaching clients. One of the greatest gifts you can give as a coach requires no particular skill or training; just the discipline to ask a question and then shut up. To experience the time and space to explore one’s thoughts is such a contrast to the demanding busyness of normal everyday life that it’s almost a value in itself. The icing on the cake is that it refreshes the mind, helps us see things in new ways and ultimately fosters a more grounded and measured approach to life.

Image courtesy ell brown.

This week I’ve been refreshing my GTD system: reviewing my horizons of focus, tidying up my project lists, and emptying my collection baskets.

If that doesn’t mean anything to you, perhaps it’s time you were inculcated to the cult of Getting Things Done – a book on how to organise yourself and manage all the stuff in your life with the minimum of stress.

Getting Things Done, by David Allen, must be one of the most blogged about of books so I hesitate to add to the cacophony. But, since I find myself recommending it to clients with increasing frequency, I feel a need to explain its particular appeal to me.

David Allen’s great achievement in my opinion was to notice the kind of things we tend to do all the time, when trying to process and get through the cascade of responsibilities that we all face, and order them into a set of routines which, if adhered to, remove much of the friction around being productive. Instead of prescribing a time management system which tries to slot your work into rigid structures of prioritisation, GTD – as it’s known to its friends – offers a more natural, fluid process of keeping track of your commitments and following your energy in deciding what needs to be done.

It’s difficult to do justice to the elegance of the approach in a single blog post so let me confine myself to some of the elements that I find particularly helpful.

A trusted system for collecting your commitments. Instead of relying on your memory, and writing things down in diverse places, GTD encourages you to have a single system that you can use wherever you are for capturing your thoughts, action points, to-dos and so on. This can be as simple as a notebook or a pile of index cards which you can toss into an in-tray, or it can be more sophisticated like an app on your phone that syncs to the web or your computer. The key is to have always on hand the tools which will enable you to note down something you need to do and get the note to a single, consistent destination. Typically, we carry a lot this stuff around in our heads. But there’s only so much that your mind can hold at any one time and the things we have to do recede from grasp. If you can trust that all the stuff that you accumulate through the course of a day will end up in a place where you can later work out what to do with it, you free your mind from having to remember everything and your ‘psychic RAM’, as Allen describes it, can be put to better use.

Workflow for keeping your inbox clear. Don’t treat your inbox as a to-do list in which things that need your attention accumulate. If you do, you will constantly have to filter through stuff that has been sitting there for some time and new items that need your attention. So your mind will be constantly processing what to do with each item. David Allen offers a process for clearing your inbox methodically. You go through each item and give it your attention only once – deciding whether to delete it, file it or take action. If the item is actionable, your options boil down to three choices: deal with it straight away, if it can be done in two minutes; delegate it; or defer it.

Organise your stuff into projects and next actions. Having processed your inbox, you end up with a pile of stuff that is actionable. You need to turn this from a bunch of stuff that demands your attention in some vague way into defined projects and actions which make it clear what you need to do next. David Allen is refreshingly uncomplicated about this. An action is the next thing you need to do on a task to move it forward and a project is any task that requires more than one action to complete it. The important thing about an action is to write it as an instruction that makes clear what you have to do so that, when it comes to the doing, you don’t have to think about what the task requires of you – e.g. Call the garage to arrange a car service (and for this to be a next action, you’ll need to know the number of the garage, otherwise the next action is: Find the phone number for the garage). Often we fail to make progress with a task because we haven’t recognised that it’s a project and not an action. The solution is to think about the outcome you want to achieve and then work back to what is the very next thing you need to do to move you towards that outcome.

Weekly review. To my mind, this is one of the most valuable aspects of GTD and the one that can feel the hardest to justify in the heat of the moment. This is about making a weekly commitment to yourself to go through your lists of projects and actions so as to review progress and anticipate what needs to be done in the week ahead. This can take a good two hours to do well and there’s a great temptation to skip it. But time spent up front getting on top of your workload and ensuring that you understand what to do is more than repaid in the effectiveness by which you operate subsequently. If you don’t carve out a weekly period to review your commitments, you’ll end up doing this iteratively on the fly anyway.

Mindful approach to doing. David Allen recommends that you organise all your actions into lists for different contexts – phone calls to make, things you have to do on the computer, errands for when you’re out and about, and so on. You then refer to these to work out what you need to do depending on the context in which you find yourself. I have to say that I don’t gain a great deal by filtering my actions by context, perhaps because my contexts are not very varied. I tend to focus much more on what I want to get done today across a variety of contexts. The bigger point though is to be guided by where your energy lies. At some point in the day, you may not feel like doing a lot of thinking work but may be attracted to rattling through a few phone calls. You need to be able to use your system quickly to find the tasks that correspond to what you have the energy, will and resources to accomplish in the moment.

Distilled down, Getting Things Done is about doing in a disciplined way the things you need to do in any event to keep on top of your workload. If you don’t acquire the disciplines, you still end up doing having to go through the same thought processes about how to approach your work but you’ll do this in a piecemeal way that absorbs more of your mental capacity.

The great thing is that it’s not an all-or-nothing edifice that is hard to integrate into your life. You can make a difference to your effectiveness by adopting any one of these practices. As you embed it, it begins to free you up to achieve more; then you can build on this by taking on another aspect of the GTD approach. Ultimately, as you get more competent at dealing with your immediate commitments and responsibilities, you find your mind begins to shift to the bigger, more long-term questions about what you’re doing with your life.

Beware, this thing has existential implications.

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Available from Amazon

Image courtesy koalazymonkey

A fractal

Book review: Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley

Between the mysterious, almost inconceivable science of quantum physics and the mundane experience of working in a large organisation it would be hard to think of realms that are further apart. So Leadership and the New Science, by Margaret Wheatley, which seeks to apply insights derived from contemporary science to organisational life, is a book I approached with some scepticism. What possible relevance to the world of work could be found in the fundamental science of how matter functions below the level of the atom or how everything in the universe is inter-connected? These seem such big and incomprehensible questions that daily life is able to get along just fine without reference to them.

Reading the book, though, I soon realised that it was precisely because my thinking was shaped by the insights of traditional science that I couldn’t see the relevance of looking at quantum mechanics. If the world is more complex and mysterious than traditional science described, why is management still drawing on analogies informed by eighteenth and nineteenth century concepts. Might not organisations be more complex and mysterious than traditional management theory describes? By the time I’d finished the book, I had the impression that it had come about half a century too late.

It helped that I came to the book having not long before caught up with the absorbing TV series Atom in which Professor Jim Al-Khalili provided both a history and an explanation of atomic science that my layman’s brain could just about understand. Bringing the story right up to date, the series brought home to me how much science has moved on even in my lifetime, how different the world is from what scientists understood just a few decades ago.

And that is the nub of Margaret Wheatley’s book. Our organisational analogies need to catch up with how scientists now undertand the world.  She contrasts the new science with the Newtonian physics that preceded it. It’s not that Newton’s science has been rendered obsolete but that it doesn’t tell the whole story. Nor, therefore, does the broader thinking that science inspires. Mental constructs derived from traditional physics are all around us. We see the world as the sum of its parts which work together in an efficient machine: a largely linear process of cause and effect between one part and another.

As Wheatley observes how this kind of thinking pervades business life:

Responsibilities have been organised into functions. People have been organised into roles. Page after page of organisational charts depict the workings of the machine: the number of pieces, what fits where, who the most important pieces are. The 1990s revealed these deeply embedded beliefs about organisations as machines when “reengineering” became the dominant solution for organisational ills. Its costly failures were later acknowledged to have stemmed in large part from processes and beliefs that paid no attention to the human (or living) dimensions of organisational life.

She overstates, I think, the extent to which this kind of thinking has been superceded and its “costly failures” acknowledged. To appreciate the gap, we need only look at the alternative that she constructs.

Wheatley looks at developments not just in physics but across scientific disciplines. But it seems to me that quantum mechanics is the precursor to the rest, since it posits a radically different and challenging way of conceiving of things which provides the springboard for the other developments she explores such as chaos theory and self-organising systems.

In place of the large machine, with its processes and parts, comes a holistic way of viewing things. It’s not the rigid stucture itself that matters so much as the entity as a whole; not so much the parts in the structure as the relationships between them. Instead of a stable, material universe, we have a dynamic, fluid system in which order is constantly created out of chaos.

Apply this thinking to organisational life, and you soon arrive at a radically different view than prevails in most people’s experience of work. Instead of the command and control frameworks mapped out on organisation charts, we have complex networks where nodes of influence are distributed and found in unexpected places – not just among those formally invested with authority but also among those who hold informal influence. These may be people who are highly respected professionally, or who are sources of gossip or are subversive forces within the organisation.

Instead of the division of labour, deskilled production lines and micro-management of people’s working lives, the new science leads one to expect fluid, emergent ways of organising work to be more effective. Instead of crude financial incentives which produce perverse results, better to focus on creating a clear and shared sense of direction and purpose at work, and then leave people to use their initiative and potential to collaborate together in common cause.

We treat organisations as objective structures with a life of their own, but they exist only in so far as people come together and participate in them. It is more accurate to think of an organisation as a process rather than a structure.

If you do so, you find you need a different model of leadership – one that is both more challenging for and easier on leaders, because it recognises the limits of their ability to command and control. In the organisation-as-process, leaders can really only facilitate. They achieve by nurturing achievement in others. This necessitates an adult-to-adult relationship with those they aspire to lead – helping the organisation to understand its values and to become – in Wheatley’s phrase – the standard it has set itself. Instead of information being regarded as a source of power, to be controlled, it is seen as the lifeblood of the organisation and made to flow freely. And when times are tough, this calls for honesty about the future and engagement with the innate intelligence and expertise of the team about the way forward.

This brings me to a significant point about Leadership and the New Science. While it was written a good decade before the current recession, its passionate advocacy of a more human dimension in organisations does not feel appropriate only for the best of times. In fact, Wheatley intimates that it is in the most difficult of times that this kind of leadership must come to the fore:

As organisations continue to experience so many momentous challenges, we do a great disservice to one another if we try to get through these times by staying at a superficial level or believing we are motivated only by self-interest. We have a great need to understand from a larger perspective why we are confronted with dislocation and loss. We have to be willing to speak about events from this deeper level of meaning…  When leaders honour us with opportunities to know the truth of what is occurring and support us to explore the deeper meaning of events, we instinctively reach out to them.

I found Leadership and the New Science an invigorating read as I found myself coming home to ideas I had already known, but forgotten; finding them afresh through a new route. My degree at university was in sociology and this gave me a view of organisations as arenas in which relatio
nships are acted out. Yet somehow, in years of organisational life, I lost track of this insight and became mired in the organisation as a structure with a life of its own. Nor did anything I learned at business school challenge this mechanistic view of the workplace.

After I left organisational life to become self-employed, some my previous worldview began to re-emerge and I began to view my time in the organisation as a pathological experience. Deep down, while working inside the organisation, I had found many of its processes and structures dysfunctional but had somehow accepted them as the natural order of bureaucracies. But even at the time I could see that it was possible for the organisation to succeed despite itself. Little pools of creativity and innovation would cluster together and find ways around the system. People would ignore the established structures and find ways to make things happen.

The big insight for me from reading Leadership and the New Science was that the processes that subvert authority are part of the necessary and natural order of events. Chaos and order go hand in hand, in organisations every bit as much as in natural systems. They need change and instability to renew themselves and survive.

If an organisation is no more nor less than the people who participate in it, then simply to act within it is to change it. Since most of us are followers, even if we are also leaders, this is a very empowering message. It means we have it within ourselves to lead, to take ownership of the organisation and move it. We are all, in fact, leaders, even if we are also followers. We don’t need to wait for the bosses – whoever they may be – to get the message.

Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley.

Available from Amazon.

Image courtesy Santa Rosa OLD SKOOL.

A difficult meeting

As a practitioner in medialand, I learned the value of creative behaviours – ways to open up thinking and new ideas in order to develop better products.  I particularly admired a book called Sticky Wisdom by ?What If!, a group of consultants who – while challenged with punctuation – cut through the fog regarding innovation.  Sticky Wisdom demonstrates that creativity needn’t be the preserve of a particularly talented cadre of employees.  It can be cultivated through techniques and exercises to encourage freshness of thinking, open mindedness, and a determination to incubate abstract proposals to tangible reality.

The book seems to point to a more attractive way of being in organisations.  It provides ways to challenge the bureaucratic reflex which closes down ideas with criticism before they have even had a chance to develop, and it shows how to facilitate behaviours which display respect to one another.  So it is perhaps not surprising that organisations have drawn on creative behaviours and tried to apply them more widely.  As a freelance consultant, I have been struck to find the ?What If! model and others like it being adopted as templates for meeting behaviours in general.

There was a certain sense in this during times of growth.  When opportunities were plentiful and the environment fast-changing, leaders needed to foster innovation and nimbleness to stay competitive.  But I’m beginning to find that emulating creativity behaviours doesn’t work quite so well in the downturn when hard choices and prioritisation replace the land-grab as the modus operandi.  If people are feeling uncertain about their future, and contemplating cuts in their operations, the playfulness and sense of possibility in creative behaviours sit uneasily with the rigour and decisiveness that the situation demands.  The environment is still fast-changing and uncertain.  It still calls for innovation and flexibility.  But the cost of making the wrong call is now demonstrably high.  The challenge is how to retain the courage to take creative risks while being guided by a robust assessment of the context.

There’s still a place for thinking imaginatively but this is as likely to be focussed on brainstorming ways to strip out cost as to develop new things. For management teams who have to think through the implications of a financial shock, it is important to identify which of the creativity behaviours can still be helpful and what other kinds of meeting behaviours need to be encouraged.

Three creativity behaviours advocated by ?What If! are still worth drawing upon for this kind of meeting: freshness, signalling and courage.

Freshness is all about thinking about your issue from different perspectives. When people are experiencing changes which threaten their own or their organisation’s security, they are inclined to hold to what they know. So it can be useful to find ways to re-imagine what you do and how you do it as this can open up productive thoughts about how to meet the challenge of the recession.

Signalling is about conveying how you want people to engage with your ideas – whether you want them to suspend judgment to build the ideas creatively or to provide critical evaluation to test the ideas in the business context. It seems likely that there will be more of the latter going on in the present climate.  But sometimes you will want people to suspend judgment.  So they need to know which mode they are expected to be in at any given time

Courage in relation to creativity is about stepping up with your ideas and taking risks to realise them. Hard choices and cutbacks demand a different kind of courage of management teams – to face up to reality with honesty and to be candid about the potential consequences of different options. Only with this kind of honesty can they make good decisions about how to proceed.

These behaviours are particularly helpful at the start of the thinking process, when there’s a premium on generating new ideas and fresh perspectives.  When it gets to the point where difficult decisions have to be made, it’s no longer about opening up ideas but filtering down.  Here are some behaviours which would be helpful in that context.

Help to solve problems – This is about driving towards clarity and direction. Teams which have cultivated ways to open up thinking may find it difficult to recognise when this needs to stop. Possibilities need to be nudged towards decisions by filtering against pertinent criteria: the strategic context, the organisation’s purpose and its priorities.

Keep to the point – When people are feeling insecure, they can be tempted to bring into the discussion issues which are not strictly relevant to the matter in hand. It is important to give people space to surface how they are feeling and to report wider concerns, but these shouldn’t be allowed to overwhelm the main agenda.

Negotiate your dual role – Management meetings bring together people who simultaneously form a team of their own and represent the teams that they lead. They need to help each other to work together well – overcoming baronial thinking in order to collaborate and share responsibility while also representing their people effectively.

Everybody speaks, one at a time – It is vital to find ways to ensure that everyone contributes and that they are heard without interruption. It is partly the responsibility of each individual to speak up but it is also important to find ways to channel the discussion in varied ways. Typically in whole group discussions there will be one or two individuals who usually occupy the airtime, so breaking up into smaller groups can elicit contributions from those who are normally more reserved.

Acknowledge viewpoints – This is the counterpart to freshness and signalling. It concerns keeping an open mind to what you hear and showing receptiveness to ideas and, when judgment is required, exercising it constructively so that people’s contributions are respected. This is particularly important in a time of crisis when emotions may be running high.

Set groundrules – Establish expectations about meeting behaviour at the start of each meeting. Mark Horstman and Michael Auzenne at Manager Tools offer a wealth of resources on running effective meetings and setting groundrules is one of their top maxims.  Their suggestions include: keep to time and switch mobiles to silent.  How people use technology in meetings is a vexed issue.  I was at a meeting recently of a well-regarded national institution where about a third of the people round the table were sitting behind laptops.  This might be an aid to personal productivity, but it is really bad for group dynamics.  Laptops create barriers around the table and when people use them to multitask they say that the subject of the meeting is not important to them.  A culture of respect is the prerequisite for effective meetings.  Groundrules help bring this about.

Image courtesy sbblackley.

Barack Obama, Iowa, November 2007

When Barack Obama is inaugurated as US President on Tuesday he will usher in not just a break with the eight years of the Bush Administration, but a distincitively modern humanistic style of leadership which has never been tested at this level. If his presidency is a success, it will have a profound impact on how leaders everywhere perceive themselves and how to be effective in the 21st Century.

One of Obama’s most striking chracteristics is the way he draws on ways of being as a leader which have been advocated as best practice for thirty years or more, but which he synthesises into a style which seems strikingly authentic and demonstrably impactful. He comes across as a man who is grounded, at ease with himself, totally focussed, and able to connect with people with integrity.

Reading about Obama in the days after his election victory, I was struck repeatedly by stories which marked him out as someone who is practised in active listening. This is a means of giving focussed attention to people who are talking to you and of validating what they say by showing that you have heard their message. On paper, this sounds simply like another way to describe conversation. But, in fact, active listening disrupts the rhythms of normal discourse in which, so often, we do not hear what others say to us but simply use the pause in their words to inject our own input into the conversation. Active listening honours people with the space to express themselves and confers the respect which flows from being understood. I was introduced to active listening in my training as a coach and will for ever be trying to perfect the technique. For Barack Obama, it is his modus operandi.

There are many examples to be found in a lengthy biographical article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. He describes how Obama cut his teeth as a community organiser in Chicago by “spending hours with individuals at a time to hear the full story of their lives”. As a student, Obama became the first black President of the Harvard Law Review thanks in part to the way he engendered the trust of conservatives:

They did not agree with him on the issues, but they were impressed that he truly listened to them, that he seemed to take them seriously. On one occasion, he made a speech defending affirmative action that effectively articulated the objections to it. Rightwingers believed Obama had shown them deep understanding and respect.

He went on to teach law at the University of Chicago where students warmed to his ability to present controversial subjects like race without “thrusting his own beliefs on them.” According to his professor at the university, Douglas Baird:

He always listens, and he might not agree with you, but you never felt he was brushing you off.

This is a style Obama has carried with him into political life. There’s a telling description in Freedland’s piece of how the Senator for Illinois would formulate policy:

He would ask his policy advisers to convene the top experts in a given field for a dinner. Obama would make introductory remarks, then sit back and listen — hard. Similarly, when convening his own staff for a key decision, he might stretch out on a couch on his office, his eyes closed, listening. According to one account, “he asked everybody in the room to take turns sharing their advice, insisting on the participation of even his most quiet, junior staffers”. He particularly encouraged internal argument among his advisers, thrashing out both sides of an argument.

This approach evokes the methods advocated by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline. Writing in 1990, Senge saw the challenge of leadership as being to generate a learning culture which could respond flexibly and adaptively to rapid change. Central to his ideas was the need to foster dialogue as well as discussion: dialogue being “the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine ‘thinking together’.” Senge recognised that there were also times when discussion was appropriate: when participants should argue clearly for their position. But it was through dialogue that learning cultures would access a collective, larger intelligence.

The account of Obama’s style with his senatorial team displays sensitivity to these insights. And some of his comments and decisions since becoming elected President last November suggest every commitment to continue in this vein. He has assembled around him a cabinet of politicians drawn from among his allies and rivals alike. Many hold views which are notably different from his own and from each other’s. It’s precisely this sense of difference on which he’s relying to find his own effectiveness as a leader. On announcing the appointment of his rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, and the retention of George Bush’s Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, Obama told reporters:

One of the dangers in the White House, in my reading of history, is that you can get wrapped up in group-think. There is no discussion and no dissenting views… I assembled this team because I am a strong believer in strong personalities and opinions. I think that’s how the best decisions are made.

It’s difficult to overstate the exceptional nature of these leadership qualities – particularly when compared with the generality of Western politicians, who tend to be preoccupied with short term presentational issues and adherence to a consistent line among the team. So it was interesting to come across an article from the Bangkok Post by a writer called Nash Siamwalla, who was a close contemporary of Obama at Harvard Law School. He articulated something of the excitement that the prospect of Obama’s presidency is generating around the world, and explained it from a Buddhist perspective:

Looking at Obama’s historic campaign, what strikes us most is how consistently mindful this candidate has been. By mindfulness, Buddhism refers to the ability to be totally aware of the nature of things as they are, in the present moment, without pre-formed judgment or emotional partiality.

Obama, as we saw, was always able to remain calm and composed in any situation. He was always mindful of his thoughts, his words and his deeds. He never showed hate or anger. The only time he allowed himself to show his human side is only when he talked passionately about the well-being of his family.

Even when the political process got heated with the opponent’s campaign throwing aggressive comments at him, Obama refused to retaliate in a similar manner. Repeatedly, he made it clear he would not take, in his own words, “the low road.”

My own view is that Obama’s extraordinary calm and composure are manifestations of having travelled a disciplined, reflective journey through which he has made sense of his values and his life’s purpose. In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he describes settling into an austere routine – involving reflective journalling and three-mile runs every day – shortly after graduating in his early twenties. By all accounts, he has maintained this lifestyle ever since. As a senator in Washington, he was famously unclubbable, living ascetically during the week and rushing home to Chicago each weekend to return to his wife and daughters.

Dreams from My Father itself is an account of his reflective journey. It’s a work of great candour, such as we are not used to seeing in politicians of high office. It describes the complex interplay between his mixed race heritage and his growing identification with the African-American community. He expresses a sense of loss at not having shared the experience of his black brethren in the inner-cities, but draws on his own experience of hardship and the moral values handed down by his parents to make his own identification with the downtrodden.

What emerges is a man who has unusual clarity about where he has come from and how he draws on that as a leader today. I think this explains how he was able to stay so firmly on course when opponents tried to dredge up embarrassing vignettes from his past. Instead of dissembling, he could locate such incidents in the narrative of his life and explain their contribution to the man he is now. This kind of authenticity is the hallmark of precisely the kind of leadership that the writers Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones say is needed to inspire people in contemporary culture.

Obama is at his strongest when he points to his ordinary failings as a human. Take this from his acceptance speech the night he was elected:

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can’t solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.

That he takes office at a time when the United States – and the Western world more generally – faces its gravest crisis in decades is no coincidence. The time for platidudinous promises and easy certainties has passed and Obama marks a break with these. He offers himself, his seriousness of purpose, and his commitment to listen to all comers. If his style fares well in office, he will define what it means to be a leader for a generation.

Image courtesy Joe Crimmings.

Loch Lomond, Scotland

Book review: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit writes non-fiction as if it were a work of poetry. A Field Guide to Getting Lost is part cultural history, part philosophy: a meditation on loss and being lost.

The meaning of these experiences – the familiar falling away and the unfamiliar appearing – is different today than it was in the past.  19th century travellers thought nothing of being off course for days at a time; for us, anxiety sets in within minutes of losing our way.  People had the skills to navigate the natural landscape and with this came a sense of optimism about their ability to find their way and survive.  Today,  even those who walk in the wilderness lack this familiarity with the landscape and rely on mobile phones to get them out of trouble.

For Rebecca Solnit, to live this way is to miss something of the very essence of life: “Never to get lost is not to live.”  Indeed, her theme is less the hazards of getting lost and more a hymn to losing oneself – the life of discovery that comes with living with uncertainty.

One chapter explores the mythology of captives who come to embrace the culture that enslaves them.  Such as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who went to America as a Spanish conquistador, one of only four survivors of a ship that landed in Florida in 1528.  He tried to travel west but he and his men gradually fell to illness and exposure, eventually being held for several years by Native Americans, escaping finally to reach not just his destination but also a respect and sympathy for the people he had initially come to conquer:

He had gone about naked, shed his skin like a snake, had lost his greed, his fear, been stripped of almost everything a human being could lose and live, but he had learned several languages, he had become a healer, he had come to admire and identify with the Native nations among whom he lived; he was not who he had been…  The terms in which to describe the extraordinary metamorphosis of the soul did not exist, at least for him.  He was among the first, and the first to come back and tell the tale, of Europeans lost in the Americas, and like many of them he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

The story pre-figures the American narrative of settler children who were captured by the Natives and became “adopted” by them.  Many of these – despite witnessing the murder of their families – became attached to their new culture and resisted attempts to “rescue” them, so far did they travel from their previous life, identity and values.

All this may seem distant, too, from contemporary life, but Solnit suggests that each of us routinely faces similar existential challenge – if, mostly, in less extreme form:

Reading these stories, it’s tempting to think that the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigating, skills of survival and escape.  Even in the everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them.  But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms.   There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next.  These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in everyday life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were.  Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in everyday life.  Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists.  Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment.  And some people travel far more than others.  There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far.  Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

Towards the end of the book she relates, through the voice of a follower of Buddhism, the story of Turtle Man, who was blind and hustled a living selling chocolates around the streets of San Francisco.  When he would reach street corners, Turtle Man would shout out for help to cross the road – not knowing who was around and simply waiting for someone to show up.  The narrator imagines what it would be like to live with the only certainty that each day would bring barriers which you would need help to negotiate.  And he reflects that it might hold lessons for the rest of us:

It’s okay to become like Turtle Man, it’s okay sometimes to experience not knowing what to do next, to run into a barrier.  It’s okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped.  Sometimes we’re offering help, and then this hostile world becomes a very different place.  It is a world where there is help being received and help being given, and in such a world this compelling urgent world according to me loses some of its urgency and desperation.  It’s not so necessary in a generous world, in a world where help is available, to be so adamant about the world according to me.

Rebecca Solnit describes herself as an activist.  In other words, she’s someone who is dissatisfied with the world as it is.  There’s an aura of loneliness, as well as solitude, which pervades this book.  Reflecting on the death of her friend, Marine, when they were both young women, she recognises that even in death Marine had made choices which opened her to experience in life and which could have ended differently, at a time when Solnit herself closed off options.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost disrupts the continuities which inform our sense of self.  To find our way in the world, we must not simply tolerate uncertainty, we should embrace it.  There’s discomfort and pain on this path, to be sure.  But there’s also magnaminity and ease with life.  For Solnit, to be open to loss is the only way to know what it is to be human.  Equally, it is impossible to experience loss and stay the same.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.

Available from Amazon.