Dermod Moore has written a beautiful piece about recession. Apparently we're in one in Ireland right now - falling property prices, belt tightening, SUVs outside Lidl and Aldi and the list goes on. Dermod wonders if we might have a Great Idea for these straitened times - like the NHS in Britain emerging from the ashes of World War 2 - is there a grand project that we might apply our hearts and minds to now that we've more time on our hands and less money to while away the hours? He also talks about the value of loss and how it presents an opportunity to reimagine a different kind of future.
There's so much here that's rich and important about how we organise our lives; the stories we tell ourselves and the possibilities we imagine. There's a certain kind of 'recession chic' in Ireland right now .... Lidl and Aldi have terrific bratwurst after all and who'd have thought of shopping for that in Marks and Spencer? And let's face it, the 80s might have been grim, but the music was fabulous. Nowhere is there room for an acknowledgement of loss - of the dream of what things should be by now .. and the state we're in.
Great ideas emerge when we're dissatisfied - not when we're basking in the comfort of what is. Dermod writes eloquently about our personal and social response to recession - I wonder what the lessons for our world of work and society might be?
In our rush to offer solutions to clients’ problems we often (too often in my opinion) eschew the personal and embrace the professional. We really don’t get the value of being “ourselves” because somewhere along the line we’ve learned that to be ourselves is to not be good enough. I’m of the firm belief that there are no differences. What there are – are boundaries. People hire people because after they’ve assured themselves that you have the skill set to do the job, they want to be in a relationship with someone they like, feel comfortable with and ultimately feel safe with. All of that requires a large degree of self awareness and an ability to manage boundaries. It also requires that we be ourselves. You can try faking being personal but it won't work. It never does.
I have a number of questions I ask myself when working with clients to make sure I’m “being myself”.
What’s my emotional response to this client and to undertaking this assignment?
Would there come a time in this relationship where I could share that understanding in the service of the relationship?
Whose authority am I drawing on to make this client feel confident about working with me? My own? Or someone else’s?
How do I feel about “not knowing” in the presence of this client?
What is my motivation for working with this client? Money? Learning? Creativity? All three? something else? i.e. what's in this for me?
Those basic questions help me to keep connected to myself and more importantly, they ensure that I bring myself to the relationship. Tricks and tools are great and important sometimes, but if I’m not sure of what I’m feeling and when, I can’t reach for what I need in the service of my clients. Unlike the customer in the advertisement above, I want to feel personally connected to my clients and it’s only in that frame of mind I can grasp how best I can give them value for their money.
The most consistent web search that leads people to my blog is 'the difference between listening and hearing' and this piece originally posted in May 2007 is the most frequented on the blog. Looking through my stats for the past few months brings this to the top of the pile once again so for all of you who haven't read it I'm republishing it once again.
I don’t believe in tricks when it comes to facilitating and consulting. At the end of the day it’s me and my client(s) in a room trying to figure something out together. Yes, I have a toolkit, but it’s pretty bare in terms of stuff I can take out and wave around…I don’t do “off the shelf” solutions and I’m rarely in a position to talk with any degree of freedom about previous work, primarily because so much of it comes to me as “confidential”. It’s a dilemma…
One of the things I do bring to the table is my ability to listen and more importantly, my ability to hear. Why differentiate I hear you ask? Well there’s a critical difference from a client’s perspective in being listened to and being heard and the ability to move between one and the other is what makes for good consulting and facilitation work.
I recently worked with a client who ranted and raved for a full 45 minutes “at” me about the “uselessness” of a manager in the system. He listed out the deficiencies in this manager, quantified the losses accruing as a result of his inadequacies and was blistering in his personal attack on his peer. He wanted me to “sort this person out” so the company could get back to doing what it needed to do. His preference was for me to take this manager out of the system and give him a “bloody good talking to”.
I didn’t do as he asked…and about a week later both the manager (above) and the vilified manager were back at work, getting along better than they ever had been and productivity was on the rise again.
Listening can be a tough station. For a full 45 minutes I listened to this manager’s anger. It was clear, unambiguous and in the service of some kind of action – any kind of action….
I heard a number of unspoken things while listening to his anger. I heard the anxiety in his voice, his escalating tension as he spoke, the lack of resolution as he “dumped” on me…his insistence that I “get rid” of the problem and also his isolation in dealing with it. If only I could make this problem go away then everything would be back to normal. I was being warned not to let him down. I heard his fear that the department would be vilified by head office if he couldn’t make this department perform its task and get the staff to work better together.
So I had a choice about what to respond to, knowing that how I would respond would dictate how we might progress together. If he didn’t feel “heard” then I was going to be as vilified as the manager I was expected to “fix”.
In this instance I took a risk and responded out of an empathy with his fear and anxiety. The look on his face was one of – “how did you know that?” but he couldn’t deny that I had heard him. He felt met, seen, listened to and heard - out of that meeting we managed to do some productive work together looking at his isolation in the system and also the expectation being piled on the new manager – most of which this new manager wasn’t aware of and couldn’t possibly respond to. Our work developed into a coaching relationship which was significant for this manager as it was the first time he had availed of any kind of professional support. I also coached the new manager helping to negotiate deliverables and ongoing professional support for him in the system. Each manager had felt unheard and was feeling pressure to respond to "unreasonable" demands from a "senior" in the organisation. Attending to what I was "hearing" allowed us to use the emotional content of the meeting to look at what was going on in that wider context. Once we'd established a relationship of trust it was possible for the situation to be resolved in a way that allowed each to hold on to their truth and their integrity. The tension in the relationship diminished, a better working environment was created and targets were met. The fact that I had heard as well as listened was a key factor in building a working alliance.
There’s a delicate dance between listening, hearing and the point at which you make an intervention to feed back what you think will make a difference. I see this as an intricate balance and this diagram goes some way to outlining the process from my perspective where the outside circle represents what I listened to and the inside what I heard.
Note: some details have been changed to protect the identity of the client and this piece has been published with the client's permission.
There are two great tragedies in life: One is not getting what one wants; the other is getting it.
Oscar Wilde
I've been thinking quite a bit about desire in the last few weeks (related, as it is, to disappointment) and Freud's dictum that desire is in excess of an object's capacity to satisfy and then I came across this interesting thread on Crooked Timber about wanting not to get what you want. Lots of interesting material here about wanting and satisfaction for example
I always want my football team to win, but if they were to win all the time it would be rather boring and I would lose interest in football. It is a condition for me to live the life of a happy football fan that they win, but not too much.
If desire is sated - does that we are undesirable or undesiring?
I've become a regular reader of Ferdinand von Prondzynski's blog. Ferdinand is the president of Dublin City University and his blog is a fascinating insight into the life, interest and times of a senior academic. DCU are about to launch a new strategy at the end of 2008 and I'm hoping that Ferdinand will blog the process. As someone with a vested interest in strategy and meaningful stakeholder consultation processes I think it would be fascinating to see a senior manager at this level talk about the reality of these processes from the inside. He describes the particular challenge of university strategies as
that they have to address the balance between the need for an overall organisational purpose and direction on the one hand, and the need to respect academic autonomy on the other. This is a very difficult balance to get right, but unless it is got right the whole planning concept cannot work.
I think that's about right for any kind of creative working environment - add in the complexity of the public sector and you have a heady mix of competing stakeholder interests.
I do hope that Ferdiand takes the plunge and tells it like it is.
In keeping with the recurring theme of emotions this past week or so today's New York Times has an impressive article by Benedict Carey You're checked out, but your brain is tuned in on the creative potential of boredom. Like so many emotions it's keeping 'bad company' ...
Scientists know plenty about boredom, too, though more as a result of poring through thickets of meaningless data than from studying the mental state itself. Much of the research on the topic has focused on the bad company it tends to keep, from depression and overeating to smoking and drug use.
but
neuroscientists have found that the brain is highly active when disengaged, consuming only about 5 percent less energy in its resting “default state” than when involved in routine tasks, according to Dr. Mark Mintun, a professor of radiology at Washington University in St. Louis.
Carey notes five positive attributes of boredom
(1) It allows the brain the creative space to seek options
(2) The brain is highly active when in a resting state-- just 5% less active than when doing routine activities
(3) It is a tool for sorting through information - a 'sensitive spam filter'
(4) It should be recognised as a legitimate emotion central to learning and creativity
(5) It is a state that demands relief therefore seeks some kind of change
So lots going on when we claim to be bored...I must remember that the next time my eyes are glazing over :)
Here's another one of those - drop everything for 20 minutes videos. Artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris creates beautiful artwork about emotion and the soul of the internet. Here's his fabulous We Feel Fine project - an exploration of emotion, in six movements. Harris created a programme that captured data and images describing feelings from blog posts and created a fantastic interactive art work from the findings. He's collected over 11 million feelings so far. unfortunately I couldn't open the site in either Sarari or Explorer (probably says more about my computer than anything else) but If you want to hear Harris talk about his work here's his TED talk
London based artist Christian Nold maps emotion. Here's his description from his website
Bio Mapping is a community mapping project in which over the last four years with more than 1500 people have taken part in. In the context of regular, local workshops and consulltations, participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-eplore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community.
How will our perceptions of our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states?
I got very excited reading Christian's website about the possible applications of this process in organisations - imagine tracking the emotional temperature of a business over the course of a day, a week or a year and then using this very visual data to have conversations about the systemic conditions in which particular kinds of emotions are generated? This would challenge the old chestnut that emotion is 'personal' rather than systemic...interesting, interesting thoughts...
Meet Will Gompertz. He isn't funny. So he signed up for a 10-week comedy course - and then tried his gags out on a paying audience. He relives a terrifying ordeal
I can't tell a joke. That's OK: I can't remove an appendix or parse a Latin sentence either; you just learn to avoid the things you can't do. But sometimes you get mugged. It happened to me recently when I signed up to give some lectures on contemporary art on a P&O cruise ship. (By day, I'm director of Tate Media, the arm of the galleries that makes TV programmes, runs the website and produces public events.) P&O wanted my talk to include some "laughs". Laughs? In an art lecture? But it was too late: I'd signed the contract. So I enrolled on a stand-up comedy course.
For the next 10 weeks, every Wednesday evening, in a room above a pub in central London, I learned how to be funny. My tutor was called Chris, and he was the spitting image of Neil from The Young Ones. My fellow students were a mixed bag: wannabe comedians, writers, ad agency types - eight of us in all. Chris provided a microphone that didn't plug in, a tiny whiteboard you could barely read, and a dog-eared print-out listing the contents of each lesson. There was a relaxed, almost romantic feel to the whole enterprise - until I read through the notes to lesson 10. For lesson 10, we had to perform a real live stand-up gig, in a real venue, in front of a real, paying audience. I hadn't signed up for this. It's one thing using jokes to liven up an art lecture; it's quite another performing in front of a bunch of beered-up hedonists who have paid hard cash.
I know I couldn't/wouldn't go this far but this is what Will Gompertz, Director of Tate Media did what would you do to enliven your presentations? For the full story head over to the Guardian Arts Section.
Arthur Ganson has been called the Samuel Beckett of sculpture. He makes beautiful objects that explore existential ideas. Objects that are about the joy of their own triviality. There are some beautiful objects and even more beautiful thoughts expressed in this video from a man who searched for a way to turn thoughts into concrete ideas by working with his hands.
Whether or not there is a gene for worrying -- or indeed a gene for being a geneticist -- a psychoanalytic story about worrying would try to persuade people to see that by worrying they are doing a number of interesting things, many of which may not have even occurred to them.
First, worry is an ironic form of hope. It is a way of looking forward to something -- even if it's something awful -- and that implies a belief in the future. So worrying is a version of desiring; when we worry, we anticipate.
Second, each person has a very specific history of worrying that evolves over time. Each of us chooses certain things to worry about and chooses whom, if anybody, we will tell.
And the way our worries were received when we were children -- whether our parents seemed horrified or indifferent or only too keen to hear about them -- will leave us with a mostly unconscious set of expectations about what we can say and to whom. Worries, like secrets, are part of the essential currency of intimacy.
Last, but not least, worrying is a form of thinking. At one end of some imaginary spectrum, there is something akin to creative rumination. At the other end, there is the stalled thought of obsession. If worrying can persecute us, it can also work for us, as self-preparation. No stage fright, no performance.
In other words, if we can lop off the worry gene, what else might go with it? People without worries are people without self-doubt. And we know what people are capable of in states of ultimate conviction.
The BBC are asking you to share your experience of costliest mistakes. Like Johnnie I was interested in the range and depth of emotion on display. I was also fascinated that although the example given by the BBC concerned an object and its monetary value many of the examples given by members of the public are about personal and relationship issues that sometimes cost in financial terms but not always. The primary cost was emotional.
Useful learning here about working with the emotional impact of 'mistakes' in organisations. We spend time learning how not to make the same mistakes again but it's doubtful if we spend enough time learning about the range of feeling and emotion evoked when we don't 'get it right'.
As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.
This thought resonated very strongly with me this week as I sat on an interview panel for the appointment of a senior arts manager position here in Ireland. Many people told us how important the arts were and how better off we would all be with increased access and better funding. I don't play golf. But I have heard seasoned golfers talk about the impact golf has on their lives. I don't like it when I'm told (albeit in a roundabout way) that my life is somewhat deficient because I don't own a set of clubs. It seems to me that many of us who work in and around the arts make the same claims - our lives are touched because we have seen the light. I don't think so. Access isn't about the arts - it's about the choice to participate - or not - if people so desire. In the meantime I exercise my choice to refrain from the seduction of the golf course and hope that I can make meaning elsewhere. Golf isn't special - neither is art.
I really enjoyed this from Johnnie (including the pic).
It's funny how we instantly think of meetings as boring and pointless. I recently asked a group to do a round of introductions by recounting the best and worst meetings they'd been to. The consensus seemed to be that the more formal the meeting the more likely it was to enter the worst camp.
My favourite answer for best meeting was the guy who said "meeting my girlfriend". That disrupted the usual trance in which we evaluate meetings as if they are only the boring things we do at work
I'm in a down town, crowded trendy bar a couple of nights ago and I find myself talking with a charming New Yorker who, on discovering my surname, asks if it hails from a small town in the north west of Ireland (it does). And on proffering his own in return (which is also from the same part of Ireland as mine) he reveals that he spent his summer holidays in the same small townland as I did. We probably bumped into each other in the empty streets of the local village.
In a networked and wired world it's easy to see how we're all just 6 degrees from somebody else. But it's also nice to know that the old fashioned face to face communication with strangers can sometimes yield the most surprising synchronicities and in this case it's not 6 degrees but perhaps closer to 2.
I've written about conductor, teacher, speaker and writer (The Art of Possibility) Benjamin Zanderherebefore - and in this superb TED talk Zander outlines his philosophy of possibility in a passionate and witty presentation that had me smiling all the way through. Using a Chopin prelude (the one with a B and 4 sads...) he takes the audience through an engaging and emotional journey about leadership.
Here's what I took from his presentation
Real leaders have no doubt about the capacity of people to realise their vision - the passion and conviction with which that vision is communicated is key
It matters what we say - will what we utter stand the test of time if it's our last utterance - can what we say be a possibility we live in to?
Not knowing is a place of possibility, not a punative place of doubt - creating a context in which we can articulate our not knowing is the place from which real creativity springs.
Spend 18 minutes with Zander in this TED talk and see for yourself
Oh I love this - go on, indulge yourself for 4 minutes, just because it's Tuesday...makes me want to pack my bags and get on a plane..this is truly gorgeous.
Playwright Tom Stoppard gave a public interview at this year's Dublin Writers' Festival in which he waxed lyrical about the tyranny of Beckett's stage directions - referring at one point to them as 'control freakery'. The witty and erudite writer described Beckett's fastidious stage directions as an attempt to control a future event that has yet to happen.
And of course he is right. But it's not just Beckett. All of us who work in and with organisations (and particularly those of us involved in strategic planning processes) are up to our own Beckettian activities. All plans are about trying to control a future event that has yet to happen or at least to create some context in which the future will be manageable and controllable. It's doubtful as to whether we can succeed in that endeavour or not and many a planning process is really about creating a context in the present to imagine and re-imagine the future in a safe way.
Stoppard went on to talk about wanting to be present for first productions of his new work but after that he sends it out into the world for directors to do as they wish. So of course he's really talking about succession and our willingness to pass on the torch for reinvention by a new generation as distinct from passing on an artefact that needs to be taken into custodial care. It got me thinking - I wonder what Beckett would have been like as CEO of an organisation; what kind of management style would he have had? and I wonder if Stoppard will go on the management lecturing route any of these days to pass on his wisdom in that context?
I have been having far too much fun with this new application which turns text into a word cloud. Just for laughs I inputted a 15,000 word document I wrote on my research topic of disappointment and Wordle created this lovely image - it's totally addictive - you can change colours, shapes, sizes...go on over there and try it..
I'll be appearing on the Ryan Tubridy show on RTE Radio 1 next Monday morning talking to Ryan about relationships at work - personal and social ones; how we manage them and don't; the 'rules' and boundaries etc. I'll post some of my thoughts here and a link to the podcast next week. In the meantime if anyone has any comments or thoughts on the subject I'd be delighted to hear from you.
Update: The podcast is here (date 16th June) and I appear at around 44 mins in (you'll need Real Player to listen). Ryan and I talked about negotiating boundaries (formally and informally) and the importance of establishing how much information we're willing to reveal about ourselves and more importantly (some times) how much we're willing to hear. I told a story about one work situation where I was unwittingly involved in a boss's affair by having to tell his wife when she called that he was 'at lunch' - very often it's this type of situation that contributes to difficult personal relationships at work.
We also talked about the importance of personal relationships particularly when work is stressful or dangerous and as a way of decompressing from work place anxiety. If my life is in your hands the chances are we are going to be very close and intimate at work. The reality is though that many of those kinds of intense relationships don't transition long term. But work relationships are about work most of the time and the work context will take precedence over personal - chances are if we're friends we may be competing for the same job one of these days and our friendship may take a battering if we're both after the same position.
Work is a social situation and it wouldn't work without personal relationships but I'm becoming increasingly interested in the splitting that goes on where we have highly formalised 'rules' for good behaviour in the work place contrasted with an 'anything goes' attitude outside of work particularly on social networking sites - as though it's possible to keep both separate. Ultimately I wouldn't want to do anything on Facebook that I wouldn't be comfortable doing in front of friends and family. But it's interesting to me that we can even imagine that we can be 'all good' or 'all bad' and separate and contained in those ways.
We just touched on these and other issues - it would be great to continue that conversation in some way - the feedback and emails I've received since the show have been fascinating .. it seems to be an issue many are interested in.
