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.

West End Lane, NW6 - home to a dozen cafes and a library

Camden Council in north London, where I live, is considering changing the ethos of its libraries – to allow people to bring in food and drink and use their mobile phones.  The intention is to make libraries more appealing to young people.

As both a library user and the parent of a young person, this strikes me as an unfortunate and misguided idea.  Libraries are one of the few public spaces in the inner city to which people can turn for quiet.  Swiss Cottage, in the borough, hosts one of the best public libraries in the capital.  Young people constitute a significant proportion of the users.  They go there to find space where they can give unashamed attention to learning.  It’s a place of thought, study and contemplation.  It is wholly unsuited to be a stage for mobile phone conversations or snacking.  Urban life provides an abundance of venues for these activities.  The library offers an alternative realm.

Camden’s proposal loses sight of local councils’mission in providing public libraries.  Their role is as custodian of a value: of access to knowledge, embodied not just in the provision of books and reference facilities but in the creation of an atmosphere conducive to engaging intelligently with them.  If councils are concerned about falling attendances, they might consider a remedy which is aligned with the public value of libraries rather than capitulation to the coffee shop.  This would entail improving the intrinsic appeal of library collections and promoting respect for them.

Victoria Coren – a columnist at The Observer – is a  fellow Camden resident who is also alarmed by the council’s proposal.  She links it to a more general shift in policy in Whitehall.  Only two years ago, the Culture Minister, David Lammy, was telling us “Books are fundamentally important to what libraries are about.”  Now the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, insists that libraries must “look beyond the bookcase”.  Coren believes the contrary:

Burnham says that more library funding would ‘not be realistic in the current climate’. Cobblers. In ‘the current climate’, people need, more than ever, to know about the world. To think laterally and have ideas. To develop an internal life, as an alternative to clubbing and jet-setting. To study history and learn how we’ve got out of trouble before.

The man who thinks that books are a luxury to be cut back in times of recession is a man who doesn’t understand that knowledge is the key to everything and must be at the centre of everything.

Burnham’s approach is in line with a prevailing view that libraries are no longer relevant to the era of Amazon and Google – a view well-expressed by Jemima Lewis in The Telegraph:

People no longer want, or need, to borrow books. Public libraries were invented for the benefit of an aspirational working class – for autodidacts who could not afford the books they craved, at a time when books were really the only source of information.

Many is the clever child who clambered his way out of poverty with the help of a library card. But these days, as the Kaiser Chiefs sing, “it’s cool to know nothing”. Brave indeed is the child at a sink estate school who follows his inner swot. And if the urge to learn proves irresistible, he is probably better off on the internet, where nobody need know that he isn’t surfing porn.

This strikes me as a view which is wholly rooted in a culture – of affluent and ignorant consumerism – which is disintegrating more rapidly than we can comprehend.  As we’re all forced to review our spending, many will be delighted to find that libraries are more than equipped to meet the same need as impulse orders on Amazon address – but at a fraction of the cost.

Victoria Coren is surely right to suggest that libraries could find a new relevance in the impending period of austerity.  Could it be that preserving a space which exemplifies the ethos of concentration might serve young people better than pandering to an assumption that everything must defer to a culture of instant gratification?

Lehman Brothers staff, London, 16 September 2008

When I talk to people in the financial sector, I understand the meaning of the current turmoil being a crisis unprecedented in our lifetimes.  The experience of redundancy is  unlike that any of us are likely to have come across before.  With banking institutions disappearing at a rate of knots, others laying off staff in their thousands and many of the remainder uninterested in hiring, the impression of alternative options rapidly closing down throughout the world can only compound the sense of shock for those who have suddenly lost their jobs.

I’ve seen plenty of advice to bankers along the lines of: polish up your CV and interviewing skills, tap into your network and be prepared to move.  There may be a place for these tried and tested career tactics.  But I wonder whether it is adequate to the moment to rely wholly on this approach.  When people suffer a shocking loss, they typically go through experiences such as denial, anger and depression before they feel able to accept the situation and engage with it constructively.  The slightly frenetic character of well-intentioned advice on job search skills seems to me to risk encouraging people into activities which – for some of them, at least – may be counter-productive.

There are suggestions that this is a crisis that is concentrated on the big financial centres, and that there are still banking opportunities to be found in places beyond London and New York.  But the impression I’m gaining from people who have lost their jobs is that it is the same story wherever they look.  Wise heads I know who have been through City slowdowns in the past are digging in for this one to last possibly five or six years.  If that’s a realistic assessment, it may be a recipe for despondency to go chasing after leads at a time when you are likely to be oscillating through a number of powerful emotions which may be preventing you from thinking straight.

As Lucy Kellaway has observed in the FT, “Unemployed bankers are in a world that has gone beyond pat advice.”  She suggests the best thing to do is to sit tight and take stock:

As an agony aunt, my advice to those who lost their jobs – at least to those with some money in their pockets – is to spend the immediate future on rest and play…  Don’t start chasing leads today. Have a bit of a think and work out if you really want to move to Dubai, or retrain as a priest, before doing anything silly.

I agree with this.  Even for those who don’t have a strong financial cushion, the chances of making a good decision are likely to be improved if they can find time and space to approach the situation more reflectively.  She’s right too to advocate thinking hard before instigating radical change.  But if ever there was a time to think laterally, this is it.

Many people who work in the City never intended to make this their life.  They had other dreams to which they intended to turn once they’d amassed sufficient wealth.  But in the shock of redundancy it can be hard to conceive of an alternative life for oneself.  Looking on this from the outside, I find it slightly bewildering to hear clever and talented people struggle to imagine their capabilities as marketable in contexts other than the ones they have most recently left.  But, on the other hand, I’ve been possessed of this mindset myself.  I ploughed quite specialised niches in broadcasting and – close to the action – could see my career prospects only in terms of the template in which I was cast.

Taking some time to luxuriate in breaking free of the template can open one’s mind to the broader options one faces.  David Freud, an investment banker who lost his job in the downturn of the 1990s, hints at this in discussing research which suggests that even the experience of depression can ultimately be a catalyst for a fulfilling transformation.  This is because it forces a reassessment of goals:

This makes particular sense for City workers. Many have been lured into their careers by the huge money on offer, but they may have little affinity for the work. And when you need to put so much time and emotional intensity into an activity, you do have to enjoy it to persevere.

Personal discontent can be disguised in an upturn but the pressures of a downturn – the firings, the up-ending of networks, the loss of autonomy, survivor guilt – means the misery can come back at full force. In these circumstances depression may be a safety valve, forcing the individual to give up the chase.

It’s not necessary to have felt discontented with the job you have lost to benefit from taking stock to think more broadly about one’s options.  There may be a holding pattern you could pursue until things pick up again.  Or, for someone with unexpected time on their hands, now might be the ideal opportunity to fulfil some long-held ambition.

It’s hard to see the upside when one is coming to terms with an unexpected job loss.  And I’m not suggesting that it’s helpful to don a sense of false optimism.  But disruption to one’s career brings possibilities as well as setback and being open to those possibilities can increase the chances of making a good landing.

Image courtesy conorwithonen.