MORE TYGERS...

Shortly before Christmas, I was talking to my friend Alison about creativity. Before we knew how we'd got there, we found ourselves scheming a Creativity Workshop which included Alison's friend Tess, an accomplished portrait artist.

"We'll call it Freeing the Tiger", said Alison.

I baulked silently - don't tigers eat people? Well yes, but perhaps so do some ideas. And in any case, tigers are rather beautiful, majestic creatures. And wouldn't one look great at the top of an email persuading organisations to part with their cash?

And then it struck me how ideas and tigers have something else in common: they don't thrive in captivity. Ideas are at their best when they can leap from one mind to the next, feed and grow, and move on. Take their freedom away and you lose the essence of what it is to be a tiger. Same for ideas - look at how Tim Berners-Lee's idea has the freedom to change the world. Imagine the world today if his idea had been unable to roam at will.

Well I couldn't be so thoughtful about tigers as a metaphor for ideas without consulting William Blake who waxed lyrical on tigers - even though he couldn't spell it!

So here is my second link in as many weeks to his great poem.

Tech Tip: If the words are too small to read, type ctrl+ to zoom in and ctrl- to zoom out again.

POSSESSION vs RELATION

I listen to Radio 4 in the morning - I can't stand music that early in the day. I'm generally not that enamoured of Thought for the Day either - but it thankfully only lasts a couple of minutes.

Now a few weeks ago I was listening to a typically preachy TftD when, right at the end, the speaker compared the notion of possessing something (and by implication someone) to relating to it.

A large penny dropped as I realised that, at times, I have put great energy into possessing things (and possibly people too), when relating to them instead would have been so much more rewarding.

I'm not suggesting that possession is bad and relation good - just that each has its place. And, of course, they're not mutually exclusive.

For me this has huge ramifications from house ownership to intimate relationships. So thank you TftD, though it still makes me wince.

THE SYMMETRICAL TYGER

William Blake wrote, painted and drew some great stuff.

Tyger! Tyger! explores the Beauty and Cruelty of the tiger as a perfect symmetry.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he says:

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

I think these abstract concepts have huge practical implications. They tell us not to be overly concerned with a single polarity. In any case, polarities have great difficulty in surviving on their own: cut a magnet in half and see what happens.

I had a salutary reminder of this the other day when a workshop I was facilitating got into choppy waters. Frustration and resentment against senior management, who were not present, built to fever pitch. I felt an urge to move on to more 'productive' territory where we'd started (the other polarity), but experience told me to embrace the sentiment in the room. We even got to the point where I invited the most disenchanted to leave if they thought that further debate was pointless. I should point out I put this to them in a constructive and positive way, with no edge or animosity.

At the end of the meeting the group resolved to make a formal representation to management and disclose everything that had been discussed. But the big win was that they all declared, to a man, that they now felt themselves to be a team, understood one another and were united in their common objectives. Not bad for a team comprising several different contractors and a council with a track record of poor collaboration.

NEGATIVE SUGGESTION

Tonight I watched Derren Brown's Trick or Treat 2 (episode 2) again. It shows young children opening a box they've been asked not to. It also features a young woman who is asked not to press a button that would electrocute a kitten. Guess what? She presses the button. Just like you clicked on the link to get here, even though you were asked not to.

Is it possible that when 'those that know' implore us not to do the very thing that we know is wrong, we do it anyway?

Could that explain why John and Edward get votes for their toe-curling performances...

and why the BNP get votes for their toe-curling policies?

And why some organisations have great difficulty controlling staff behaviour?

STAR PRESIDENT

President Obama hosted a 'Star Party' on October 9. This is where lots of amateur astronomers get together with their telescopes and look at stars and planets. These events go on all the time - but not on the White House Lawn. What I really liked was Obama's challenge:

"Galileo changed the world when he pointed his telescope to the sky, and now it's your turn. We need you to study, do well in school, explore everything from the infinite reaches of space to the microscopic smallness of the atom. We need you to think bigger and to dig deeper and to reach higher. And we need your restless curiosity and your boundless hope and imagination. Our future depends on it.
So, don't let anybody tell you that there isn't more to discover. Don't let anybody tell you that there's knowledge that's beyond your reach. There's something out there for each and every one of you to discover. And seeing how it's a beautiful night, and we've got a bunch of telescopes out on the lawn, let's get started together."

So the president of the USA looks beyond our own tiny world and encourages us to do the same. And not just with telescopes, but with our minds too.
See more here

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY FOR DOCTORS

If you've been unlucky enough to visit your doctor recently, you may have seen a sign reporting how many appointments were missed last month - and possibly how much this was costing. The idea being to shame you, as a potential no-show, into not doing it again. The bigger the figure, the deeper the shame and the stronger the resolve to mend your ways.

But according to Danny Finkelstein's Radio 4 offering, Persuading us to be good, this is precisely the wrong approach. The logic goes that we want to feel part of a group, not isolated. Now being part of the group of patients that don't show is still being part of a group. And the bigger that group, the better it is to be part of. The stigma of having missed your appointment and wasted NHS time, money and resources isn't the main behavioural driver, association with others is. In fact one surgery reported a huge increase in no-shows as soon as they started to make this figure public.

The answer: tell people how many showed up for their appointment, implying that the no-shows are a minority of social outcasts and losers, not even worth a statistic.

I'm not sure just how watertight this approach is, but I do like the realisation that the instinctive, knee-jerk reaction can exacerbate exactly the problem it's meant to solve. And that being in a bad group is better than not being in a group at all.

THE INBRED ORGANISATION

Warren Buffet cites 3 qualities to look out for when recruiting: Integrity, Intelligence and Energy. Now tell me, how do you assess these using a cv? Answer: you can't. A cv will give you a measure of experience, but little else - and that's assuming the candidate has integrity.

Whenever I've recruited, I've really only been interested in these 3 qualities, with experience coming in fourth. You can train skills - you can't train attitude.

So why on earth does the recruitment industry, aided and abetted by HR departments, persist in judging candidates by their cvs alone? And why do they shortlist only those that match the job spec as closely as possible when the result is to maintain the status quo, promote stagnation and inhibit change and evolution?

My hunch is that this behaviour is driven by fear - fear that a decision based on intangibles cannot be supported by evidence. Evidence provides a firewall against criticism, it defends judgement and protects the hapless decision-maker.

The crying shame is that each time a recruiter opts for safety, another chance for the organisation to evolve goes out of the window.

FACILITATION MADE EASY

This is the slightly tautological title of a short paper that I've just written. I found writing it both cathartic and illuminating. I had to quickly let go of the idea that it could cover the whole subject - not just because there would be a lot to say, but also because the boundaries of facilitation as a concept or discipline are fuzzy to say the least.

I also had to dispense with the idea that I could define it in any rigorous fashion. The engineer in me protested: how can you write about something that you can't define? Well I can define it, but how does that help if someone else's definition is different - and maybe just as valid?

In the end, I've just written a series of observations and conclusions on some of the aspects of facilitation that interest me. It is non-linear, it is not intellectually disciplined - in fact in some ways it bears resemblance to some of the conversations that I've facilitated. It is certainly open to rebuttal and I'm sure that you may disagree with some of my points.

I'm happy with that as questions and uncertainty are often more powerful than answers.

If you want a copy, just go to http://www.clarityspace.co.uk/ and fill in the form.

If you have a copy, post your comments on this blog!

MARSHMALLOWS AND FACILITATION

I was reminded by The Times how deferred gratification applies to facilitation:

Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology, tested whether children could resist eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes if they were promised two after that time. After being left alone, a third of the children ate the marshmallow straight away, a third cracked during the 15 minutes and a third successfully resisted temptation. Those who refrained did better academically on the whole.

I think I see something akin to this when working with groups on strategy. Many individuals and groups are understandably keen to solve the problems that meetings inevitably identify. After all, if you've found an issue that needs dealing with, why waste time, why not get on and devise a solution? Metaphorically, if you have a marshmallow in front of you and you're hungry, why not eat it?

Strategically, a period of reflection interposed between identifying an issue and agreeing a resolution, is critical. Firstly, it allows the problem to be explored by the whole team, making it a shared issue. Secondly, it allows the team's thinking to develop, moving from symptoms to causes; intervention at a causal level is more likely to succeed whereas intervention at the level of effects can be counter-productive. Thirdly, it helps restore the balance between process and outcome - see previous blog entry.

As I write, I'm aware that the marshmallow metaphor is far from perfect and can't support much further comparison with facilitation - but I will take some marshmallows to my next strategy session anyway.

WINNING HURTS

Great article by Matthew Syed in the Times last month on Victoria Pendleton's olympic win:

Steve Peters, the cycling team’s psychiatrist, has said that many other Olympic champions — as well as some among the support teams — have also struggled with depression since Beijing. “This is true not just in cycling but across the sports I’ve worked with,” he said. “A number of people I’ve been in touch with following the Olympics, people who’d succeeded, said the same. They felt quite depressed, almost like a sense of loss"

Matthew then goes on to suggest that this crippling anticlimax is an evolutionary mechanism to ensure that the struggle to be best is not abandoned to feelings of satisfaction.

Here I struggle too. I suspect this is more about over-investing in the outcome rather than the journey. I think there's a cultural fixation with outcomes which undervalues the process of attainment - the journey. And that depression is an evolutionary mechanism telling us that something's out of kilter.