Tomorrow morning I head for Paris where I’m participating in my first Group Relations Conference. It’s not a traditional conference where papers are presented, workshops convened etc. Group Relations conferences are about the study of behaviour in organisations. To that end managers, consultants, students and psychotherapists from all over the world will converge in Paris to spend 7 days working together to more closely understand how leadership and organisations work and more importantly, how we contribute to the task of organising. The temporary organisation that we create over the course of the week will be the context and the purpose of our work.
There will be a number of organising tasks – as yet unknown - and as we gather and organise together over the course of a week we will be invited to look at
What roles we take up in organisations
How those roles are “assigned” through the organisation itself and by our personal stories
What authority looks like
How learning is constructed and integrated in organisations
How what is not openly acknowledged influences action
The emotional life of organising and leadership
I have a variety of feelings about participating in this conference – I’m anxious in case it descends into “group therapy”, I’m stressed because there is a strike scheduled for tomorrow so by the time I arrive at the Conference it will have already begun – will I be left behind? Will I be able to catch up? I’m excited about networking with colleagues many of whom work from a systems psychodynamic perspective as I am. The conference will be bi-lingual and I'm a bit nervous that I'll end up in the wrong working group where my French won't be adequate.
My point is that working in organisations is influenced by more than what happens when you walk in the front door – we bring a lot of stuff with us and the task of organising creates its own dynamics. Conferences such as this are structured around the process of reflection and reflexivity – two activities that I place very high on my list of essential consulting tools. The process of reflection will be the key tool for organisational learning, planning, review, evaluation and strategy.
Reflection and reflexivity mean more than navel gazing – they present a challenge to act on the basis of what is discovered. Leadership is an act, not a job title.
I’ll be attending with three hats on – as consultant, as psychotherapist and as PhD researcher and I’m looking forward to contributing and learning from each perspective. I’ll keep posting as the week evolves.
For more information on Group Relations Conferences, click here.
I'm delighted to announce that Interactions has won the contract to design and manage a consultation process for Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council to inform the first strategy for arts development in the county. We'll be working closely with the Arts Office and I'm looking forward to meeting artists, policy makers and audience members over the course of the next few months as we wonder out loud and draft a plan that speaks to the priorities for arts development in the county over the next 3 - 5 years. Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council is a new client for Interactions and we're very excited to be their chosen consultation partners for this assignment.
We're also looking forward to rolling out a creative approach to the consultation using our Dynamic Participation model. We've already used the Dynamic Participation model in our work with The Arts Council in 2005 where we designed and rolled out a national consultation process involving over 1000 people, 100 meetings and many geographically disparate locations to inform the national plan for arts development. Set against significant consultation fatigue in this sector, the consultation process was widely hailed as a successful model of public consultation and resulted in the recently published Partnership for the Arts (available on The Arts Council's website).
I spent part of this morning with a colleague who wanted some feedback on a presentation he is giving to a leadership development organisation. He’s been short listed for inclusion in an innovative programme and part of the selection process involves the inevitable power point presentation on why he’s the best candidate for the limited spaces.
As he began to run through his presentation I began to think about the hundreds and thousands of books and blogs that have been written about leadership. It has been elevated to a science and I for one, feel overwhelmed at times by my apparent lack of knowledge and qualifications.
That feeling of being overwhelmed by detail turned out to be useful in our subsequent conversation.
I know this man’s work. I know he’s a leader in his field. Why then was I drowning in the detail of his presentation? The one thing leaders need is followers and I couldn’t follow (literally and metaphorically) him. I realised that he was demonstrating his ability to manage rather than his capacity to lead. He also realised that he was defending rather than demonstrating and once we got our heads around the detail we threw it out and started again.
Leaders are managers with vision. I don’t need to know a leader can manage - I want to take that bit for granted. What I want from a leader is a demonstration of why I should follow and an invitation to join them. In order to follow I need to know “why” and once we’ve worked out the “why” I want to know what the implications are. Lots of people can manage, but leaders do things in their own inimitable way. Too many “leaders” are really managers who are preoccupied with the “how” and the “what”.
Our conversation then focussed on why this man is passionate about what he does. We talked about his vision of the world when he creates the opportunity to unleash that passion. We talked about the changes that unleashing brings about. His energy level came rising up. I couldn’t not be engaged by his enthusiasm and interest. He stopped trying to defend doing what he does and began to invite me into the world as he sees it.
He’s already a leader – it’s just he didn’t know how to tap into that bit of him because he was overwhelmed by the detail of project managing his career and his work. I never fail to be amazed by how much we already know if only we’d take the time to trust ourselves. When you find the right conversation, it all makes sense.
This great graphic is from a post over at Headrush, a blog that's become a daily read for me.
I’ve embarked on a PhD programme this year which is throwing up all kinds of challenges and delights (so far, in equal measure). I’m in that beginning phase where as each day goes by I realise what I don’t know. There are times when it’s incredibly dispiriting because I know it is going to be a long time before I can speak with any confidence about what it is I do know.
I’ve found this little tool useful in the past in helping me position myself in relation to learning and newness. It’s generally outlined in a matrix but I prefer a circular model because there’s never a point at which learning “ends”. We’re always at some point in this circle in relation to something.
Right now I’m in the unconscious incompetence phase of learning and it’s uncomfortable beyond belief. However, I‘m in the unconscious competence phase in relation to the process of learning – I have been here before and while I can experience the uncomfortableness of it, I know it will shift and abate somewhat when the time is right.
When I’m working with clients I refer to this model to help people position themselves in relation to what they “do” know. There’s so much of what we do in organisational life that we take for granted and by taking it for granted, we often dismiss it. When a learning opportunity arrives we then feel inadequate in some way instead of seeing learning as a cyclical process. Often, taking the time to sit with what we take for granted can lessen the anxiety about “starting over” with something new.
critique of the current orthodoxy that the world is changing at an ever faster rate, that organizations must adapt to this change in order to survive, and that change management techniques enable organizations to do this. There is no basis to evaluate the proposition that thewe face unprecedented rates of change, and change is not something to which organizations must respond, but is instead an outcome of organizational actions. Change management initiatives are largely failures, and the usual explanations for these failures are inadequate.
He goes on to talk about change management in these terms:
change management rests upon the conceit that it is possible systematically to control social and organisational relations, a conceit shared by the social sciences in general
The article is a great read and Johnnie offers his own take on the change process at the end with which I completely agree.
too often, conversations about change treat it as something done to other people at another time; as something that people must be talked into.
I’d offer an additional perspective which is that (a) we are always resistant to change and (b) we are always changing. So many managers and leaders I work with are grappling with having to implement or deal with the fallout from change. They enter into the relationship feeling scared, utterly inadequate and hiding in their academic understanding of the “value” of change. I have moments when I genuinely think they’ve been brainwashed into believing that it should be simple and straightforward. Which of course it’s not. How could it be when we are grappling with that paradox?
Ask anyone about the value of an academic approach to fitness, weight loss, saving for a rainy day and see how effective it is to talk at people about something they are willingly losing or giving up by not doing things the “new” way. It simply doesn’t work. Most of the time people are scared about what they are losing – sense of self, dignity, finance, position etc…our identity is completely challenged by change processes and yet…
We all change
we recover from relationships that don’t work
We learn to move on from the death of significant others
We adapt to being in relationships with others where our sense of self has to evolve and accommodate difference
We deal with our children leaving home
And somehow, at the end of it all we survive. Change processes that tap into what we already know about change, our capacity for both hating and managing together with our ability to survive and move on are the most meaningful change interventions I have seen work. I’m privileged to have been part of designing some of those processes also and like Johnnie I believe in the power of open spaces (using that technology and others) for genuine and meaningful connections between people. Safe places that address and manage power relationships are they only ways to effective real change in my humble opinion.
David Maister has an interesting post about whether or not blogging is "dead" but more critically he's talking about blogging as a relational activity also (one of my key reasons for blogging!). He asks a great question at the end of the post
Let me ask all of you out there a question: based on what you tell of my interests by reading my blog, what other blogs should I be reading regularly? It's like those reviews in music magazines - if you like this CD then you'll probably like that one. Help me out here, folks!
And I'm sure he won't mind if I ask the same question here..on the basis of what you are reading and what fires you up when you read - what blogs would you recommend that I read?
Edit: If, like me, you often lose track of where you've been commenting and when (not to mention with whom!) then this gizmo will change your life! Co-Comment is a comment aggregator - you sign up for an account then it automatically tracks and saves the comment feeds (your comments and others) and shows them all on one page...you can run it in the background and add a firefox extension...So while I'm technically asking for your recommendations of what I should be reading consider this an offer in the other direction. Thanks to Amy for the link.
On Thursday I’ll be giving a presentation at the Crafts Council of Ireland’s Information Seminar on professionalism and best practice. I’ve done several training sessions for visual artists on this topic and Thursday will be a new opportunity to meet and talk with crafts people about a similar area.
I haven’t had much of an opportunity to do “presentations” as distinct from training so I’m trying to put together a power point presentation that’s devoid of the dreaded bullet points. I’ve been taking counsel from Presentation Zen and all the great links on that site and the thing I’m realising is that a picture, not only says a thousand words, but probably says more about me than bullet pointed text.
Why I’m surprised about this shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is. I frequently work with images in my coaching and consulting practice. I’ve a fondness for metaphor and images (be they verbal or non verbal) because they reveal so much of what isn’t available to us in language.
So I have the presentation down to 13 slides, I have 20 minutes and I’ve also produced a set of notes (yes, they do include the bullet points!) for distribution afterwards. I’m surprised at how long it took me to choose the images I want to use and it’s making me realise that words are not only the default setting but the depersonalising setting sometimes as well. I’ll post both here on the blog on Thursday after I’ve made the presentation. Perhaps some clever consultant can then do a deconstruction of my choice of imagery and give me some well needed feedback!
By the way, Gareth Morgan’s book Imaginization is a great introduction to the power of image and metaphor in organisations.
Some of the bloggers I read include a "links for the day" posting where they link to four or five sites sometimes with little or no information about why those links have been chosen. I guess if you like a blogger's fare then you're likely to understand why they've chosen this particular selection.
I'm also a member of a number of listservs in relation to my research and occasionally someone will link to an article or a site and ask others what they think about it, without saying why they have selected what they have and what interests them about it.
Sometimes, depending on what mood I’m in – I’ll get a bit grumpy and say to myself “why are they posting links? Isn’t that just lazy? Expecting me to do the finding out?”
I think of blogs as curated spaces…the selection of what we choose to talk about or link to, says something considered about who each of us are. In much the same way as walking into a gallery space, there’s the individual art pieces and then there’s the selection together – what does this say about the artist’s body of work? What does it say about the curator who gathered together this particular selection of work?
I work with a lot of arts and cultural organisations and come up against the “what does it mean?” comments frequently. I’m lucky to work with people who want to make it possible to make connections between the work, where it is shown, who makes it, what it means, and how people can make their own meaning from the experience. Part of my work is to create thinking spaces for people to say “I don’t understand that” and for it to be acceptable to do so.
While I’m initially confused by the links many bloggers post, I can choose to engage with them, follow my nose (and theirs) and maybe discover something interesting for myself. I don’t need to be spoon fed the whole way. If I know something of the blogger’s interests and work then the selection tells me something more about their interests without them having to spell it all out for me. The list is an invitation – and likewise when someone is confused in a group I’m working with, their confusion is also an invitation to curiosity.
In fiction, the most powerful weapon the writer has is suggestion. I think that nearly all good writing is suggestion, and all bad writing is statement. Statement kills off the reader’s imagination. With suggestion, the reader takes up from where the writer leaves off (John McGahern 1934 - 2006)
I’m reading Saturday by Ian McEwan at the moment. Shamefully I have to admit that I only “discovered” McEwan seriously over Christmas…prior to that I was buried in non-fiction, Jane Austen and John McGahern (my two favourite writers) and even now, when I should be reading organisational theory I steal away for an hour or so to spend it with Ian...and I’m rationing our time together. The words are so eloquently and densely packed that I relish the engagement so I can read and re-read his intention, extracting from it myriad meanings depending on my mood. I don’t want our time together to end too soon.
What I love about his writing is the word-smithing. The prose is extended poetry where each word counts. His attention to the detail of each syllable, how it works with the one next door and how they add up to paint a picture of what i is precisely he wants to convey. He doesn’t accommodate; he doesn’t talk down; he doesn’t make it easy. He just “is” – comfortable with his choice of words; extending an invitation to participate (or not); confident in his own space and the consummate story teller. It’s compelling stuff.
The man has authority, it’s heady, and it is a privilege to share the space with him…and I wonder sometimes if in our haste to be all things to all people – be that “on call” 24/7 or trying to word-smith the web blurb or compose proposals do we lose the essence of who we really are? I struggle sometimes with entering into the grammar of prospective clients wondering if they will have any real idea of what it would be like to work with me. And then I take a risk and say it as it is and hope that it might fall on the right ears. Perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t – but taking my own authority is something that I make a decision about. Authority is sometimes awarded and sometimes taken. The delicate dance between when and how is the complex one that only experience informs. In McEwan’s case, he’s a master and he knows it – so do I and I’m happy to follow. Time now, for another chapter.
I generally work on my own with groups and while it’s always great to get feedback at the end of a session or in subsequent days it can be difficult to get critical feedback that can help next time out.
This week, for the first time, I invited a colleague to observe my training work and I was very interested in how I responded. I was nervous before the session (I’m generally a bit nervous but this was off the scale!), left my office without part of my equipment and had to improvise and it took me a good hour or so to forget he was in the room. As the day progressed I settled into myself a bit more.
When the session was over there was an opportunity for the participants to offer feedback and I also had some time with my colleague. Both sets of feedback focussed on different aspects of the day and I was curious to see what my colleague had made of the work I was doing. I won’t go into the detail of his comments - but what struck me as really interesting was his ability to see me working in a way that I take totally for granted. He observed me “remembering” what had happened earlier in the day and bringing it back at a relevant moment. He also watched me restructure a segment of the day when something more interesting came along and the energy of the group went there etc. These are all standard things I “do” with a group and it was so helpful for me to have them noticed.
Asking my colleague into the room is part of a series of interventions I am making around languaging and describing what I do. More recently I asked a group with whom I had worked to write up their experience of the “problem” and the “intervention” as feedback for me and again, it was huge learning and a reminder that when I move into a comfort zone I tend to “forget” what it is I’m doing – I’m in that unconscious competence place.
It takes a risk to ask for feedback because so much of what we do is personal…but so far I’ve learned a lot about how I work in ways that would have been inaccessible to me. How do you know what you do? And how well it’s working?
Maybe it's just me, but I find myself sighing when I read about "time management"...so much of what I read appears to be predicated on two things (a) there's limited amounts of it (yup, I get that bit) and (b) it's possible to operate in a linear way within a given time frame (here's where I have problems)...
My life simply doesn't work in straight lines. I can't start the day with at "to do" list, work my way systematically through it, while ignoring all other interruptions so that I can feel a self satisfied glow at the end of the day with that line of "ticks". i just can't do it!
I remember attending a talk by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips a couple of months ago. He was talking about how psychoanalysis 'works" and he described it as the theory and practice of side effects. He talked about how people come into therapy with a list of things they want to talk about and/or resolve and then something happens to derail the process and it's in attending to the derailment that the real work begins. I laughed heartily at that description because in some way it describes my approach to consulting and getting things done. I am not in the habit of missing client deadlines. My work is done on time and on budget. I get the stuff done. But I rarely get up and work though my list systematically. I wander around, I think out loud, I allow myself to be distracted, heck I even day dream. And sometimes when I'm pottering about the most interesting insights will land in my lap. I know they wouldn't arrive as fully formed if I was on a schedule and waiting patiently for them to materialise by 3.04pm.
I'm all for time management, but it needs to be congruent with the way in which we actually work and how we allow ourselves to be open to derailments that fuel our creativity and don't close it down.
I came across the following quotes from Adam Phillip' book Monogomy. I think each of these statements are as applicable to business as they are to our personal lives, particularly the idea of promiscuity..who are we loyal to in our work lives? Is it something we demand and expect of people we work with? Do we promise to be faithful to clients? Isn't the idea of "competition" a way of legitimising promiscuity? Wonderful and interesting stuff...
Profoundly committed to the better life, the promiscuous, like the monogamous, are idealists. Both are deranged by hope, in awe of reassurance, impressed by their pleasures. We should not be too quick to set them against each other. At their best, they are both the enemies of cynicism. It is the cynical who are dispiriting because they are always getting their disappointment in first.
At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness. They are easily confused.
In a society without scapegoats there would be more conflict. People feel too vulnerable without someone else to blame and punish. Similarly, a society without sexual infidelity -- or without the promiscuous going their wanton way -- could be dangerous. Who would we be fascinated by, who would we persecute?
After all, a couple without a third party are radically unprotected from each other. And when people are unprotected from each other it can go either way.
I came across Come Gather Round (via Management Craft) where there's a great post about questions (and you know me and my questions by now!). In it Dirk Richards says
What is the most significant question that you have ever been asked, or have ever asked yourself? My quest for great questions continues. These are questions that may be life-changing because they somehow address the soul. I am unsure what the exact criteria are for inclusion on my list. For now I can only say, “I know it when I see it.”
Here are the questions that so far have met my fuzzy and entirely subjective criteria:
Is my genius on pupose?
What kind of me is my work creating?
For what has my life been preparing me?
Am I making good use of my life?
Who needs my gift now?
Ooo they're great questions and I'm particularly taken with the second one "what kind of me is my work creating?" Apart from being a great coaching question it seems to me that it's one we should all be asking regardless of role, job or outlook. I'm not sure I could offer a coherent answer to that right now...I'm sure I could share an aspirational one, but one based on the reality of my work...now that's a tough and very interesting challenge.
I was thinking of writing something soulful about meaning and value - you know the difference between what we say we value and what we actually value and how that translates into relationships at work etc? Anyway, between thinking about it and hitting the keyboard I managed to devour Freaknomics (a couple of train and plane trips provided ample opportunity). Apart from being one of the smartest and funniest books I've read all year, it's also one of the most relevant. And lo and behold on page 82 Levitt and Dubner do just what I had been planning to do but in a much more readable and witty way. They're talking about internet dating and the differences between what people say they want and what they actually want based on advertisements placed and emails sent:
For instance, men who say they want a long-term relationship do much better than men looking for an occasional lover. But women looking for an occaasional lover do great. For men, a woman's looks are of paramount importance, For women, a man's income is terribly important. The richer a man is, the more e-mails he receives. But a woman's income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off. Men want to date students, artists, musicians, veterinarians, and celebrities (while avoiding secretaries, retirees and women in the military and law enforcement). Women do want to date military men, policemen and firemen (possibly the result of a 9/11 Effect....), along with lawyers and financial executives. Women avoid laborers, actors, students, and men who work in food services or hospitality. For men, being short is a big disadvantage (which is probably why so many men lie about it), but weight doesn't much matter. For women, being overweight is deadly (which is why they lie). For a man having red or curly hair is a downer, as is baldness - but a shaved head is okay. For a woman, salt and pepper hair is bad, while blond hair is very good. In the world of online dating, a headful of blond hair on a woman is worth about the same as having a college degree - and, with a $100 dye job versus a $100,000 tuition bill, an awful lot cheaper.
I do a lot of work with boards of directors and management committees wanting to take time out to review where they are and where they are going. Sometimes this involves organising and facilitating "retreats" (I use that word advisedly because in Ireland 'retreat' has religious connotations!). But I digress.. A recurring theme is often that of board composition - Who do we need? What skill base are we looking for? Do we need to think of retiring and asking others to step in etc? When it gets down to thinking about real people groups can often get stuck. Loyalties, allegiances, politics and favouritism sometimes get in the way of the task at hand.
Increasingly I'm using other methodologies for getting at what's needed and a favourite technique I use is the fantasy board game. In this, each person in the room gets to pick a person - real or imagined, alive or dead to place on the board. It's a fun brainstorming session and the more it is played the wilder the suggestions get (and you can tell a lot about someone by who they suggest!). It's easier to pick a fantasy person than name someone you might know in a personal capacity. I then do an exercise with people about why they picked the person they did - and the list of attributes and qualities simply flows! We then have a list of all of the skills and qualities needed to populate the board that will look to the future and it's not a difficult task at this point to compare that list with the skill base of people currently sitting on the board. Augmenting, changing or moving around tends to be a much more logical task once the illogical one of picking fantasy people has been completed.
There's a lot to be said for playfullness in consulting - I really enjoy these sessions, and for what it's worth Katharine Hepburn is always on my list (for everything now that I think of it). Why? She's independent, sassy, not afraid to call it as she sees it and can stand up to Humphrey Bogart in a boat while at the time being a four time academy award winner and remaining fabulously feminine. Now I wonder what that says about me eh?
Photo courtesy of rest-in-peace.info
It is interesting that for a field as collaborative as ours just how much time we spend in complete isolation. I look at my weekly time sheets and am amazed at just how much time I am alone, staring at a computer screen. Writers are confronted by a taunting empty document waiting to be filled. The editors I work with can spend as much as 60 hours a week alone in a dark room working on their AVIDs. Directors break out scripts in isolation. And even Producers with the million phone calls that must be made to get one simple shoot set up are still isolated. Long term happiness (not to mention mental health) requires a steady diet of human interaction. We are by nature social creatures... and when denied interaction by the demands of work or the allure of email, it takes it's toll.
I spend a lot of time alone - thinking, writing, planning etc and there are times when I'm in one of those contemplative moods that I have to remind myself to reach out and make contact. Solitary periods are a necessary part of my work but I contrast that with being an extroverted thinker - which means that I rarely know what's on my mind until I start talking to someone.
I don't experience solitary times as lonely but they can sometimes be isolating so my rules (for myself) around this when I know I am going into one of these phases are:
Make plans to meet friends or colleagues for lunch on a regular basis
Pick up the phone and chat with a friend or colleague either about the work or about a social matter at least once a day
Make sure to get out of the office for a walk, coffee or some other "outside" activity during the working day
Recognise the difference between needing to talk to think and needing to talk to forget!
Mind the boundary around time because it often blurrs when there's nobody to remind me the working day is over
Do you experience working on your own as isolating or lonely? How do you manage social context in oe of those phases?
I’m a bad blogger and before I go any further I want to issue a generalisation alert – you have been warned.
I have discovered in my travels through cyberspace that my blog is breaking all of the rules…I don’t offer “ultimate” solutions; “rules” for getting things done right (apart from this entry which in fact happens to be they way I do work with groups); I can’t come up with too many bullet pointed “top tips” entries and I rarely spend enough time trying to compose sure fire headlines that work. Is this rush to certainty purely an American phenomenon? I say this because I see stark differences between the ways in which many American and European business bloggers approach their craft. We appear to be less comfortable offering certainty on this side of the pond – it’s a bit more conversational, less hard sell. What happens when you are so used to being offered the ultimate, no holds barred, sure fire, guaranteed solution to every problem? Do you become immune? What does the more conversational – let’s co-create something together approaches evoke? Do we look touchy-feely in a world that demands certainty? I don’t know….I have found it interesting to explore various voices on this blog but ultimately I don’t believe in certainty. I don’t believe there’s a 10 step plan to achieving anything you want to achieve that is simple to execute and follows in a logical progression.
The bit that is always missing in these foul-proof plans is emotion. Emotion is a no go area in business for a good reason – it’s the thing that makes or breaks plans. Our decisions, while they may look on the surface to be rational and planned are fuelled, contextualised and informed by emotion and there’s no 10 step bullet pointed approach to putting manners on how we feel. It requires work, it requires bespoke interventions; it requires listening and storytelling, it requires expertise; it requires process, it requires courage. That’s if you want the solutions to stick.
If emotion didn’t matter then we’d all be fit, slim, non-smoking, world travelling, happy camper workers and family people with not a care in the world and a bullet pointed map to get us there. Does that sound like anyone you know?
I don’t live in a bite sized world and while I would love to believe that there’s a bullet pointed list out there with my name on it I simply don’t buy it….My world is richer, more complex, operates on myriad levels, attends to conscious and unconscious processes, is rational as well as emotional. I assume the worlds of my clients are equally sophisticated. And yes, I do get results and yes I do get asked back to work with clients so something works about an approach that doesn't offer false hope.
So now I need to go away and write a snappy headline for this post that will get me noticed ..any ideas?
Are creatives really all that special? Mark seems to think so and has a post outlining the top 10 characteristics of creative personalities. Looking through the list each of the ten have one thing in common – an ability to manage ambivalence. Now before I go any further, I am one of those people who believes that everyone is creative – it’s a matter of finding out how your creativity manifests itself that’s the tricky bit (and that’s also very doable). So many people spend their lives working at creatively draining pursuits which reinforces the stereotype that there are certain professions where creativity lies and others where it doesn’t.
Put it like this – a successful bank robber is a pretty creative individual in my humble opinion, as are obsessive and neurotic people who have to choose an outlet to express themselves in that way. But I digress.
The point I was attempting to make before I got side tracked is that the ability to manage ambivalence i.e. recognise that perfection doesn’t exist – is a central characteristic of maturity. Think about it for a minute – perfectionists are only perfect at one thing – being imperfect…the rest of us muddle along making decisions; weighing up options; managing the fantasies and realities – all of that is a creative edeavour and I would venture so far as to say that maturity is an expression of that creative ability to be in the multi-coloured pieces between the black and white edges. The real trick is finding an outlet for that ability and that’s where coaching can be really helpful. Mark coaches creative types and I wonder if he’d ever admit to meeting non creative types in the creative industries? I know I have, and I’ve also met amazingly creative and resourceful people in the “non” creative industries. Our creativity doesn’t have anything to do with what we “do” – it can do, but aligning personal and occupational creativity is the real challenge and one that I love when working with clients. How many people do you know that live between the black and white edges?
PS: Speaking of creativity I've added a link to my Flickr photos in the side bar!
Apologies for the light posting this week - I've been juggling a quite a few different types of work in a variety of locations. I spent today in Castlebar running a workshop for the Mayo County Enterprise Board. Soon to be blogger and Chief Executive Frank Fullard invited me there to meet with artists about the commissioning process and I thoroughly enjoyed the day. 16 artists from a variety of disciplines put me through my paces, the conversations were vibrant, the questions were challenging and I'm hoping at the end of it all it was useful for those who participated. I was amazed at the generosity of the participants in sharing their experience (both good and bad) which really contributed to the success of the day. Frank Fullard is also one set of brains behind Irish Business Women - it's a fantastic resource for female entrepreneurs and I recommend heading over there for some good advice and support.
I’ve beens spending time with artists over the last few weeks and one of the conversations we’ve been having concerns skills deficits – particularly in the practice management area. So may artists I meet have an anxiety about managing money, others don’t want to involve themselves in administration because they feel they don’t have the skills and others would love to buy in professional administration support but can’t afford it. But why buy when you can barter? Many colleagues of mine regularly barter or trade their skills with other professionals and it can be really liberating to take money out of the equation and place a value on the work for its own sake. I’ve recently worked for a colleague on an assignment he is engaged in and some time in the future I’m sure I’ll call on his skills. I know arts administrators who will trade their professional skills for work from artists who are interested in working with them – in the latter case neither may be in a position to afford the creative output of the other.
I’d love more opportunities to barter instead of buy – I wonder how many of you have created those kinds of relationships?
Paige's comment on my last post reminded me that sometimes we have to look for good news stories rather than focussing on the ever present bad news ones. A young person of my acquaintence once said to me that she wanted to be like Posh Spice when she grew up - I replied by asking her why she would set her standards so low? If we expect little in return then maybe we get what we ask for? So in the spirit of asking for more and seeking the positive, I wonder (apart from Paige and me) how many of you have had a good business experience recently (be it customer support or something else) that you'd care to share...let's get the Christmas spirit up and running a bit earlier this year.
Every single person has at least one secret that would break your heart. If we could just remember this, I think there would be a lot more compassion and tolerance in the world
I've become such a lurker over at Post Secret. It's a community arts project where people mail in a secret on a home made postcard to the author. Some of the images and sentiments are extraordinary. Coming, as I do, from a predominantly Catholic country, and as a therapist, the confessional nature of both is familiar to me but there’s something so powerful in the visual representation of unmentionables...more powerful than words alone, more creative than confession and absolution.
Funny how cyberspace is no different to real life when it comes to silence. In cyberspace silence is often construed as absence – if I don’t post then perhaps I don’t exist? I, like many other bloggers, rush in to explain the absence, to remind my readers that I’m still here, to reassure myself that I’m still here.
Life offline is no different…silence can be persecutory. It’s invariably construed as “absence” as “not paying attention” or as some kind of negative…yet offline I love silence. I feel more connected when I have the space and time to reflect and more often than not I do that on my own or in a way that might look like I’m “not there”.
I wonder what the world of work would look like if we built in more silence, more reflection and more time to be and to think rather than the busyness of constantly doing?
Over at Anecdote there's an interesting post about Organisational Stories and how organisational myths are a great way of understanding the culture of the system.
Finding an organisation’s myths helps you understand the boundaries and constraints for any new interventions you might have planned. I’ve discovered that myth discovery is simply a matter of asking for stories that lots of people know.
I've shaped many of my interventions and consulting assignments on the basis of unheard organisational stories which have been generated in informal contexts. Sometimes it's important to find a way of telling those stories more publicly but in a way that's respectful of the content and context. I've found that working with professional actors - particularly those who are skilled at devising - is a fantastic way to present those stories back to groups in a way that generates very significant conversation.
In presenting a theatre piece, devised by actors, I'm hoping that the group I'm working with will know that their concerns have been heard and as a result we don't have to open up a difficult conversation that may close down the work rather than open it up.
To date the feedback I'm getting is really positive and clients have spoken about how significant it is to have their "reality" reflected back to them in a dramatic way. I'm looking forward to developing this methodology further and creating more bespoke interventions in organisational contexts.
Hat tip to Johnnie for finding the following in Phil Dourado’s free book chapter for February:
Tim Collins, a career soldier, rose to prominence when an impromptu speech he gave to the Irish regiment he commanded in Iraq ended up in newspapers all over the world. Collins says…that “to lead effectively, you have to love people”. Collins goes on to explain ‘love’ as knowing and caring about what motivates people and what is important to them, and helping them fulfil those aspirations at work. This, he says, is a foundation of leadership.
Sharing knowledge, looking after employees’ wellbeing, giving people your time and attention, respecting and acknowledging the contribution of others, all are incontrovertible aspects of good leadership. It only becomes controversial when the ‘L’ word is applied.
"Leadership is emotional. Leadership deals with feelings. Leadership is made up of dreams, inspiration, excitement, desire, pride, care, passion, and love. The areas of our lives where we show the strongest leadership – including our communities, families, organizations, products, services, hobbies, and customers - are where we're most in love." (Jim Clemmer)
Ben Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, was faced with the same problem every year for 25 years: Teaching students who were in such a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance, they were reluctant to take creative risks. One night, he sat down with his partner Roz Stone Zander, a therapist, to try to find a solution. They decided the best approach would be to give everyone an A, at the beginning of the course. The A was not intended as a way to measure someone's performance against standards, but as an instrument to open them up to new possibilities.
This didn’t mean students could slack off for the rest of the semester. Students were required to write a letter that began with “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because…” and they had to describe in as much detail as possible, how they came to achieve this “extraordinary grade.”
In writing their letters, Zander said students must “place themselves in the future, looking back, and report on all the insights they acquired and the milestones they attained during the year, as if those accomplishments were already in the past. Everything must be written in the past tense. Phrases such as ‘I hope,’ ‘I intend,’ or ‘I will’ must not appear.”
Zander asserts “the A is an invention that creates possibilities for both mentor and student, manager and employee, or for any human interaction.” The A allows teams to accomplish what is possible, and reduces “the disparity in power between them can become a distraction and an inhibitor, drawing energy away from productivity and development.”
Zander doesn’t say what happens to the A when his students don’t pull their weight. His point here is to help people we work with to remove the barriers that block achievement--and to embrace the mindset of giving an A, by letting go of rigid mindsets that keep people pegged.
Zander applied this kind of thinking to his conducting and it transformed him from being a dictator, to an orchestrator of collaboration. This approach opened the door for musicians to speak more freely with him about their concerns -- about the way a piece of music ought to be played, for example, and he discovered that "the player who looks the least engaged may be the most committed member of the group." This new openness in communication had a huge effect on the morale of the orchestra, improving the performance of both conductor and players.
Edit: Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander will be at the Burren Leadership Forum on 21 and 22 July 2007.
Saturday’s New York Times (subscription required) carries a story about the 102 year-old Louis Padnos Iron and Metal Company a family owned business who have come up with their own unique solution to the sucession challenge.
The problem for the Padnoses is an age gap. Third-generation members who run the scrap metal company, which employs about 400 people and has annual sales of about $300 million, are in their 50s. They want to work less. But the fourth-generation Padnoses who might someday want to run the place are still only in their teens.
The company hired a philosophy professor to help them
groom six hired managers to become, well, more Padnos-like.
The article goes on to outline the differences between the founding family (politically liberal, middle class and Jewish) and the managers (conservative, working class and from Protestant backgrounds) and the policy adopted by the Padnoses to encourage the new managers to be “part of the family”
The managers were assigned readings of Thoreau, Sophocles and a recent essay on Freud. They spent a long weekend in Chicago seeing plays, touring exhibitions of art and architecture and eating at fancy restaurants. And in recent weeks they have debated how to give away $40,000 of the Padnoses’ money, an exercise in becoming philanthropists.
The article also goes on to say that although the managers are encouraged to think more like the family they are also denied some of the financial information that would give them more of the family’s power and this is where it becomes really interesting from my perspective.
Family businesses are complex places – you can’t avoid the personal because, well family is personal. On one level this looks like a sensible and somewhat philanthropic gesture on the part of the Padnoses on another it could be a way of them never letting go of the family’s way of doing business. How can you act like an owner if you are not an owner? How can you take the responsibility if you’re not given the authority? Family businesses are fascinating places because the sometimes underlying personal relationships that inform all businesses are much more visible - particularly those that affect competition and leadership. It will be interesting to see what happens in this company when the elder generation have truly moved on and that teenage generation are ready to take over..
Mayo County Enterprise Board are holding an event on Achieving Your Potential to mark International Womens' Day on 8 March. The location for the event is Pontoon Bridge Hotel. I'll be one of three keynote speakers and the focus of my presentation will be on the emotional factors that help (and sometimes hinder) our ability to achieve our potential. The other two speakers are
Darina Loakman, who runs I am a WHAM who will talk about: Achieving Your Potential: Working From Home
and
Aideen Kane, Television Producer, of GMTV, who will talk about: Achieving Your Potential: The Working Woman
There's a nice video piece here promoting the event created by Darina and the Western People picked up the event this week also.
If you are interested in coming along to the workshop you can contact Nicola Fitzpatrick on 094 9047597 or at nfitzpat@mayococo.ie. Don't forget to say hello if you are there on the night!
The latest edition of the Blog Carnival of Management tips (to which I've contributed this post) is over at Mabel and Harry - there are some great posts and I'm realising what a great idea carnivals are for gathering like minded bloggers around communities of interest. Carnivals are where
There are Carnivals for every conceivable topic and the site is a great place to meet new bloggers, gather creative ideas around a specific topic and hopefully have some good conversations along the way.
I've just come across a superb blog from Mark McGuinness called Wishful Thinking. Mark coaches creative professionals and his blog is a fabulous resource of articles, posts and insightful thinking about management in the creative industries. Mark is undertaking a Masters Degree and he has posted a lot of his research material (interviews etc) here and it's a very generous resource waiting to be tapped.
I particularly liked this quote from Mark about why he works with creative professionals:
So if the special “creative person” is a myth, why do I focus on working with creatives? Having worked with professional artists and creatives for over 10 years, as well as with many other types of client, I would say there are basically three differences between them and many other people.
1. They think of themselves as “creative”. I’ve come across many people who are perfectly capable of coming up with original ideas - but who keep blocking themselves by saying “I’m not creative”. Even when it is pointed out to them that they have done creative things, they resist the label, and clearly feel uncomfortable with it. The “creatives” on the other hand, are quite happy to think of themselves as creative, and don’t create this kind of internal obstacle to their natural creativity.
2. They love doing creative work. Because they enjoy creative work more than most people, they spend more time doing it. Which means they get better at it. Which means they enjoy it more. Which means they do more of it… and so on. This is not to say they don’t enjoy money, status, recognition or other rewards, but these are not as important to them as the pleasure of creativity itself.
3. They put themselves in an environment where creativity is encouraged. I once ran a seminar and set a group of managers the task of finding the “second right answer” to a question (based on Roger von Oech’s excellent creativity book A Whack on the Side of the Head). A couple of minutes into the activity, I noticed they were looking very uncomfortable. When I asked them what was wrong, they said it felt very unsafe, as they were constantly told by senior management that mistakes were unacceptable and they had to get things “right”. No wonder their creativity was inhibited! Creative types on the other hand, gravitate to situations where creativity is not only encouraged but expected of them - art schools, ad agencies, design studios, artists’ quarters, writer’s colonies, film sets and ‘clusters’ of creative businesses. By surrounding themselves with others engaged in creative work, they immerse themselves in the latest ideas and developments in their field - and some of that creativity rubs off.
These three factors help them develop their raw creative talent into accomplished skills. This is not to deny that some of us are naturally “gifted” with more talent than others, but this is a matter of degree rather than kind - and talent is nothing unless you put it to work.
Over at Wishful Thinking Mark is pointing out the differences as he sees them between Coaching and Counselling. He's making the traditional distinctions but I would take issue about the assumptions on which they are based and have posted here about this difference before (I’ll repeat some of it in this post). Mark says:
Counselling and therapy deal with personal problems - Coaching addresses workplace performance.
The idea that our personal and professional lives are separate and distinctive is not something I agree with. Organisations don't exist - they are networks of human relationships and as such are emotional and emotion generating environments. We don't come to work and leave our personal selves at the door and I don't know about you - but I have rarely heard someone come home from work talking about "the bottom line" - if they do they are expressing their feelings about the bottom line. Workplace performance is interconnected with personal issues and problems and vice versa. When I am coaching I am always observing why someone brings this problem (personal and professional) to me at this time. The permission I seek to inquire, and the level at which I work is what differentiates coaching from counselling and psychotherapy.
Counselling begins with a problem - Coaching can begin with a goal or aspiration
and
Counselling is sought by people having difficulties - Coaching is used by high achievers as much as beginners or people who are stuck.
People can often come to counselling or therapy with a goal that is framed as a problem. Nobody I have ever worked with has come to therapy to purely talk about problems - they are there to understand and resolve that problem. I have also worked with people who come to counselling and therapy to gain a better understanding of themselves - not just when a problem manifests. And I have also worked with coaching clients who have come and been referred because there is a problem with their workplace performance, so this distinction doesn't stack up for me.
Many (but not all) forms of Counselling focus on the past and the origins of problems - Coaching focuses on the future and developing a workable solution.
Many forms of counselling and therapy seek to understand the past as it impacts on the present. It's essential (in my view) to understand transference - living the past in the present - if you are going to change the future. You can't come up with a 10 point plan and expect it to be implemented overnight if you don't understand what is driving the behaviour in the first place. If this were doable then we'd all be rational only entities with no bad habits.
Mark's differences are the standard ones I have seen when coaches want to differentiate themselves from therapists and it speaks to me of the anxiety many coaches have about the training therapists undergo to understand the unconscious and how that impacts on the present behaviour both in and out of the workplace.
The similarities between both are important to note:
• All individuals who work with a coach or a therapist are interested in a “better” future
• Therapy and Coaching offer skills and possibilities for that future – the methodologies employed are different
• The quality of the relationship is the essential mechanism by which change is effected
• Self awareness on the part of the coach and therapist is essential for successful work with clients
• Unconditional positive regard, empathy and a person-centred approach are key to both approaches
While I apply psychodynamic thinking to my coaching relationships the key difference is about the permission sought to inquire into a client’s personal story and how that information is worked with in the coaching relationship. There are times when it is helpful to know more about family of origin – it may help to understand a dynamic being played out in organisational contexts. But unless a coach is trained to work with this material they run the risk of opening up emotional responses that may be difficult to contain. It’s also essential to know when to refer a coaching client to a therapist. Very often this is when a repeating pattern of unhelpful behaviour, rooted in unresolved personal relationships in the past, is unhelpful in the present.
As a therapist and a coach I bring distinctive skills to the client relationship that are based on my psychodynamic training and which allow me to:
• Meet a client in an authentic person-to-person encounter.
• Process my own feelings in the coaching relationship and to use them as constructive interventions.
• Spot a client who may need a therapeutic relationship and to refer on appropriately.
• Translate psychodynamic insights into powerful work related interventions that impact on work performance and behaviour.
Welcome to the March 19, 2007 edition of emotion at work. (The first edition in fact) and thanks to everyone who submitted a post. I'm fascinated to see what a topic like "emotion at work" has evoked - there are really interesting and different approaches to the topic here that echo much of the management discourse around emotion as something that needs to be valued in its own right (my own view) or controlled in the service of organisational harmony. I'm also curious about the fact that no women submitted posts around this topic and wonder what might be going on there that's interesting.
Mark McGuinness presents 7 Ways to Tap into Enthusiasm posted at Wishful Thinking. Mark talks about tapping into your natural enthusiasm and how reconnecting with your curiosity is a critical first step in banishing procrastination and keeping the creative juices flowing.
Erik Mazzone presents Deciding to Quit your Job posted at Erik Mazzone's Blog. Erik advocates tapping into your feelings as distinct from your rationale when you have to make a decision to stay in or quit a job.
Alan presents There is always a way posted at Made to Be Great. Alan advocates stillness as a way of connecting with the sense of what’s possible and he also talks about reframing problems as potential solutions (something I’m a huge advocate for).
The Positivity Blog presents 5 life-changing keys to overcoming your fear posted at Henrik Edberg. Henrik offers some strategies for overcoming fear which are useful for work and personal life beginning with a non-judgemental approach.
Noel Kuhlman presents How To Destroy The Lazy Drones In Your Team posted at Self Help Can Be Fun. Noel offers some no nonsense approaches to co-dependency in the workplace. The title is challenging but I think he’s addressing the way in which we enable people to adopt less than helpful roles in the workplace and he asks us what our part in that is.
Craig Harper presents A Letter to all Blokes.... posted at Renovate your life with Craig. Craig invites blokes to reconnect with their emotions in a witty and “bloke-friendly way”. I'd like to hear Craig's view on the relationship between blokes, their emotion and the world of work as I imagine he'd have an interesting take on that subject.
The Silicone Valley Blogger presents Work Place Drama Ends In More Money at The Digerati Life which is an interesting piece on how the organisation in the mind (or the boss in our mind) is very often out of kilter with the external experience and how our emotions are central to that experience.
Scott Young presents Introduction - Emotional Mastery (Series) posted at Scott H Young. Scott offers an introductory blog post on the "secrets to emotional mastery". The rest of his series focusses on the issue of control and emotion.
That concludes this edition. Thanks to everyone who submitted an article for this first carnival. Submit your blog article to the next edition of emotion at work using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
There is a stupid rumour going around that intelligence is essentially rational, and that hard problems are invariably best tackled as explicitly, clearly, logically and articulately as possible. It's not true...logical clarity is one form of intelligence, but to assume that it is always the best, and the more of it the better, is as daft as to say that running is always the best way of getting aound, or a screwdriver is always the best tool. The rumour is stupid because it makes you less intelligent, mistaking one useful faculty of mind for the whole repertoire of useful mind states and modes. People who are good at being articulate and analytical, but who confuse this with being all-round intelligent are, we might say, 'clever' - but clever is not the same as smart.
I'm taking the opportunity here in New York to catch up with some colleagues who practice in a similar way to myself (not a lot of us back in Ireland!). Over lunch this week I had a fascinating conversation with one colleague about how consultants (particularly those of us who are psychodynamically inclined) participate in listserves. The impulse if you're a psychodynamic consultant is to wonder about the question or dilemma rather than answer a question. Very often in business settings it's that ability to step back that generates interesting material - don't take the obvious for granted etc. But when a group of consultants gather on a listserve there is often more energy devoted to exploring the question rather than offering an answer.
This got me thinking about the power of interpretation. A consultant is given, and accepts tremendous power in organisational systems to interpret what others can't make sense of. How that interpretation is done can be a very creative endeavour - but ultimately it's the interpretation that a consultant is being hired to offer. The permission that is sought and received to interpret is a delicate negotiation. When a group of consultants gather in virtual space to converse it can be a different matter - the jump to interpret is somehow assumed rather than negotiated and this makes me rather uncomfortable because I think this needs to be made explicit. I may ask a question of you as a colleague but that's not the same as inviting you to interpret as a consultant.
Ultimately this is a boundary issue which arises all the time in work settings - am I interpreting from a coaching? counselling? consulting? perspective? Am I throwing my weight around to show how smart I am? Am I endeavouring to close down any difference in the discussion by using my interpretative authority to say it "as it is"?
The lunch time discussion offered so many interesting perspectives that I'll be ruminating over them for quite some time to come - but it has made me consider the explicit and not so explicit ways I negotiate with clients and colleagues and the assumption of authority which each brings.
I attended a Tribeca Talks panel discussion this week on Cinema 2.0: Me, Myself and iPod – essentially a discussion on the impact of social media on the production of art (notably cinema and literature). The line up of panellists included
and moderator Georg Szalai (NY bureau chief and business editor at The Hollywood Reporter)
There were a lot of pertinent points raised about the relationship between the old, the new and the vast space in between.
I can’t do justice to the 90 minute discussion (and subsequent questions and answers) but I did capture a few points which I think it’s worth mentioning here – particularly in the context of Irish arts and cultural organisations – some of whom are out there using social media, many others of whom are ambivalent about the impact on the production of their artistic artefact.
The panellists addressed the issue of giving work away for free, particularly if you’re struggling to make a living in the first place. Kathleen Grace and her crew have created a soap opera about Williamsburg which is viewable free and online. They decided to forget about pitching to the studios at the outset and are hoping that it will be picked up (before they drown in credit card debt I imagine). It’s given them a direct outlet for the creation of their art and an instant audience for the work.
Novelist Jonathan Lentham created The Promiscious Materials Project which was specifically designed to distribute his work (at the cost of $1).
I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing my stories adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced in other voices, and I'm a fan of adaptations, apropriations, collage, and sampling.
Lentham described his online activity as an “analogue gesture in a digital cloak” because he is very clear that he creates the artefact and then allows it to be discussed, modified, mashed-up etc once that creative act has taken place.
Leadbetter posted 11 chapters of his book online and sought feedback and comments – he is incorporating some of those into the final draft and will credit those whose work he includes.
The panellists were in general agreement that creativity is a collaboration, and while the origination of the artefact (book, sculpture, video etc) may be the work of one person – the conversation that surrounds it (both before and after) is the way of entwining both spaces and expanding on the relationship between artist and community.
There was a lot of discussion about the future of the business of social media, particularly from Futurist Jerry Paffendorf (whom I could have listened to all evening and who focusses on ROA Return on Awesome rather than ROI..) on how online worlds are evolving and changing (virtual worlds are increasingly “opt in” and the mantra is “Don’t have sex with Google”) and and notably Brent Weinstein who heads up a division at United Talent Agency that specifically handles artists working in/with new media. There is money to be made and business models are evolving but Paffendorf described it well when he said
The currency we are using doesn’t know how to quantify what we are making
I really enjoyed the discussion, it got my own creative juices flowing and I came away with the following which I think are going to be pertinent issues for Irish arts and cultural organisations.
1 There’s no going back. An active, updated, interactive online presence is a must if you are a creative and it’s about driving traffic to where you will get paid even if in the short term it’s unlikely that you are making money.
2 Circling the wagons and adopting a defensive approach to creativity is self defeating. In the old days (6 months ago as Weinstein suggested) retaining and restraining may have worked – in this new era of social media community is where it’s at.
3 As one producer (in the Q & A) described it - people are in control of their ipod screens, their computer screens, their TV screens and ultimately their cinema screens. This model of drag and drop cultural consumption is only going to increase and impact on all other areas of media/cultural production. If creatives aren’t driving that traffic then they’re going to get stuck in a traffic jam that’s going nowhere fast.
4 There are no residuals on the internet so new ways of creating work and more importantly commissioning opportunities for this medium are going to have to evolve, particularly in countries like Ireland where we have a grant-aid culture.
5 Commerce, community and creativity co-exist in an internet age – the challenge for many creatives is how to make that relationship work for them.
The Tribeca Film Festival broadcasts a daily webcast on Youtube
Both the patient and the analyst are the recipients of these side effects, of all the things said and implied and unintended and alluded to as the patient speaks as freely as he is able, and begins to understand the ingenuities of the censorship he imposes on himself…Psychoanalysis, essentially, is an attempt to redescribe the whole notion of concentration (Side Effects, p.xi).
Phillips’ suggests that you can only be distracted if you have a plan and in attending to the distractions our plans (ones we may not even be aware of) are revealed. So when people ask me “how I work” and “what I do” I refer them to Phillips because his accessible interpretation of psychoanalysis (and indeed, pscychodynamic approaches to working in general) make sense of the ways in which my interest is captured by “oddness” and incidents and issues that somehow “don’t fit in”. Working below the surface of organisations and with people, means drawing clients attention to their plans – the ones that are unspoken and unconscious. Very often those unconscious plans derail the conscious ones and getting to the heart of that difference (very often exposing it for the first time) is the key to unlocking blockages in the system.
If I am working with a group then there’s the “group” plan; the conscious plans of the individual members of the group and the myriad unconscious plans of the group that nobody may be aware of. Add to this the consultant or coach’s plans – conscious and otherwise and there’s a lot going on. All of these agendas are organised in different ways depending on the life stories of participants and the organisational system in which they work. It’s complex work and finding the right time for a client to hear an interpretation of what’s going on is also an important factor in the mix.
So distractions and interruptions are very welcome intrusions into my work space because they help reveal the agendas and plans of a group and as such are such fantastic resources to work with. Phillips also talked about anxiety – and how anxiety leads people to try and engineer pleasure – distractions may be part of that coping mechanism…so attending to distractions generally means we are getting closer to the issue at hand. But pleasure is such an ephemeral thing – can we engineer pleasure? Phillips doesn’t think so – at one point he talked about dinner parties and how we can’t engineer the perfect dinner party – we can only create the context in which it might happen - therefore anxiety – the calcuation of pleasure is the bridge and negotiation between pain and pleasure and as such a wonderfully rich place to begin to understand our fears and desires in a business context.
I’ll leave the final word on this one to Phillips:
If someone were to invent a drug – say, in this context, a psychotropic drug, one that is designed to improve people’s mental health - and to say that the point of this drug, the whole value of it was its unpredictable side effects, there would be a public outcry. (Side Effectrs p. xii)
The full interview with Adam Phillips (in which yours truly is heard asking about collusion among psychoanalysts and about Woody Allen) is available as an audio download at the NYPL website. Pic of Phillips and Holdengräber from NYPL.
There are 71 million blogs and a new Blog is created every half second. 499, 760 of those blogs (at the time of writing) mention or refer to poetry. All over cyberspace poets and poetry lovers are engaged in passionate conversations about the work. Why is it that so few Irish arts organisations and artists currently recognise the centrality of an online presence as part of their development strategy?
If you are an artist, then you want an audience. If you are an artist working in a niche art form area then that audience may be small and diminishing. No amount of investment in marketing strategies, audience development, outreach and education initiatives will impact on the size of that audience in the short term. How do you start conversations about your art form? How do you get critical feedback about what works and what doesn’t? How do you talk to your peers? Meet new ones? Make a living?
You give your work away. Yes…..you heard me correctly…Blogs and other social media platforms such as Wikis and Podcasting are essential tools for artists wishing to connect with an audience. Blogs are curated and conversational spaces designed to share ideas, expertise, creativity and opinion with a community of interest. Blogs are based on giving stuff away. If you can’t bear the idea of sharing your ideas then blogging isn’t for you. However if you imagine for a moment that the audience and community for poetry is global and not geographically bound by the rim of this island then blogging starts to make complete sense as a way of developing the conversation. Online life is full of great writers, fabulous opinions and now, a mechanism for publishing. Blogging puts you in a conversation with people who (a) have something to say and (b) care about what you have to say. It’s a totally different relationship with peers and audience than can be created in any other static medium.
Blogging, like all conversations, requires commitment. You need to show up, you need to participate and critically you need to have something to say. Publishing your thoughts and ideas is one side of the conversation – making space (through a comments thread and commenting on other people’s blogs) is the other. The technology provides simple ways (through RSS,Tagging and Aggregators) for you to be found and to find others with whom you want to converse. Of course there are questions and issues – copyright, freedom of speech; time spent reading and commenting; technical stuff about how to get online/maintain a Blog and not to mention the dreaded “Blogger’s block”.
In a media savvy society – shouldn’t you be aware of what people are saying about you? Shouldn’t you contribute to or start that discussion? Here are 10 ideas to get you started.
10. Ask readers how they want to engage with your work – online discussions with artists? Advance notice of booking options? Use the medium as an idea generation space.
I've just created a Library page on the site that includes PDF copies of papers that I hope will be useful to clients and readers. You can reach the library via the link in the sidebar or from the main page of the website. Enjoy!
Over on Presentation Zen there’s a fantastic piece entitled “Jazz and the art of connecting”. If ever there was (another) argument for the value of an arts education, this is it.
“Jazz is inspiring to me; it's lessons can be applied to other aspects of life”
There are quotes from 11 great Jazz musicians that can be applied, in a heartbeat, to any area of life, even (and most particularly) business. Can you apply any of these to your business? I know I certainly can.
“The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.” (Duke-Ellington)
“Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.” (Paul-Desmond)
“Don’t bullshit… just play.” (Wynton-Marsalis)
“If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit!” (Louis-Armstrong)
“Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.” (Charlie-Parker)
“It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” (Dizzy-Gillespie)
“You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.” (John-Coltrane)
"When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them." (Don Cherry)
“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” (Charles Mingus)
“I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music..." (Billie-Holiday)
“A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.”
(Herbie-Hancock)
September 2005, quit his job as a computer programmer and, with his wife’s guarded blessing, became a full-time singer and songwriter. He set a quixotic goal for himself: for the next year, he would write and record a song each week, posting each one to his blog
The piece goes on to say that
More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as “a reasonable middle-class living” — between $3,000 and $5,000 a month — by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site.
This is a reprint of a post I published on 25 May 2006 and I think it has a real resonance for many of us attending the Irish Business Women Conference in Mayo later this week the theme of which is Thinking bigger - what are we waiting for?
One of the central themes at the workshop I ran recently was the issue of self confidence and self worth. The room was full of bright and talented people and most spoke at some point during the day about the crippling plight of low self esteem and how, even with inputs from people like me and others, it gets in the way of taking action. Where this really emerged was around the issue of charging for work. Now this is something I have grappled with myself – how much is enough? How much is too much? And more importantly – how much is too little? All the market research in the world isn’t going to help if, at the end of the day, we don’t think we’re worth what we think we should be charging for what it is we have to offer.
I spent a lot of time during my training as a therapist grappling with this issue. How could you charge someone for being with them? Wasn’t that akin to prostitution in some way? And then, as a client, I would have gladly paid twice over for the insights I received along the way...so the paradox was very live for me about how we value worth.
I think the conclusions we came to were that if we are waiting for someone else to assign worth to us then we’ll be waiting for ever. In the inimitable words of Dr Phil “we teach people how to treat us” and I’m total agreement with him (even if he is cognitive behavioural and I’m not!)..but somewhere along the line we have to draw some boundaries around how we value ourselves and how, in turn, that is translated into value for a client, a customer or a commissioner. We need to communicate our value system first and hope to attract people with whom it resonates, or say “no” to people with whom it doesn’t. And all of that takes self confidence and courage.
Looking back over my coaching career in particular I’m struck by how much of the time I have spent with people has been around helping them take a step into the unknown…helping them to garner the courage to take just one step. So much of that work is acknowledging fear - and being scared (regardless of what word you use to describe it) is something that affects everyone. If we're not scared then that means we're happy with the status quo. Being scared means we're hovering on the edges of change and any kind of "next step" will take us out of that comfort zone.
If we can trust ourselves to manage ourselves instead of fretting about how someone else will see us, then that’s real empowerment…and real power comes from within, it is never awarded from without.
In another of the superb TED podcastsKen Robinson gives a riveting (and very witty) presentation on the value of creativity and how our western education system is teaching us how to use our bodies as glorified transportation systems for our heads. He advocates a shift in the education system that values creativity for its own sake and for its impact on innovation. A timely reminder perhaps of a general election looming in about a week or so? I would be very interested to hear what our public representatives would make of Robinson's thoughts..
The following is the short paper I prepared for the Irish Business Women's Conference in Mayo last week called "Anyone for Pizza?". As it turned out the paper wasn't presented because I offered the time slot for an extended Q & A with delegates It is available as a PDF download by clicking here. (The paper has also been added to the Library on the main site).
Do any of these sound familiar?
You’ve a business idea that’s been cooking away in your head for years..you have an opportunity to make it happen but can’t seem to take the leap…it just doesn’t seem to be the “right time”.
You’ve decided to go it alone as a self-employed person after years of thinking about it .. there’s more work than you can handle and you need to employ someone .. just before you hire that assistant all that work seems to dry up and suddenly there’s no need for anyone else.
You’ve worked hard on the diet, cross-trained, spinned, walked miles and cut back on the carbs…you’re 5 pounds from your goal and you decide to celebrate – anyone for pizza?
If any of these sound familiar then meet your inner saboteur. Self-sabotage is more common than you think and most of us have a familiar set of fears in our head that steps in right at the moment when we want to make a change, take a risk or do something different and very often sends us off track.
But if we’ve worked so hard, harboured those dreams and really want to be different – why on earth do we stop at the last hurdle? What possible function could an inner saboteur have? There’s a long answer and a short answer (let’s look at both). The short answer is – we decide that the saboteur’s voice is the more sensible view - the long answer is – well … let’s meet the F Words.
I teach my clients how to to say “no”. Many are simply overwhelmed by the task of managing and leading to garner the resources to tell others that they are simply not available. So many managers I know feel guilty about saying “no”. I think it’s one of the most liberating words in the English language and used effectively it’s one of the most empowering.
We’re so conditioned in business to saying “yes” - to being available 24/7 to meet the client’s needs that saying “no” evokes anxiety and fear. But what does constantly saying “yes” set up?
Exhausted and worn out executives
Excessive demands from clients
A never-good-enough culture
Lousy boundaries
Saying “no” on the other hand fosters
Empowered and sane executives
Good boundaries
Realistic expectations and deliverables
So saying "no" in this instance is really saying "yes" to something that's defined by healthy boundaries
Think for a moment about small children. At the age of 2 they discover the “no” word and apart from the frustration it causes, it’s a pivotal moment in a child’s life when they realise they are empowered to get what they want. It creates a negotiating position and forces parents to be more creative about their demands. “Pick your battles” is the advice from those who have been there before. And it’s wise advice. If you can’t use the word “no” then every demand and expectation assumes the same importance as every other. Using the “no” word judiciously invites others to choose what’s important and approach accordingly.
Good boundaries make good neighbours and I encourage my coaching clients to examine what they are setting up for themselves by constantly “being available”. Sometimes we have to take responsibility for the demands we place on ourselves before we look to those being awarded by others.
If you are an artist, arts organisation or work in the creative industries in Ireland and are interested in blogging then sign up for the Poetry Ireland seminar on Tuesday 12 June, 11 - 2pm in Dublin where I'll be running a seminar on the arts and blogging. We'll be looking at why artists and arts organisations should consider blogging and podcasting as tools for production as well as promotion and there will also be time to talk about the basics - like "what's a blog?"; "podcasting??"and "how do I start?". I'll be joined in the endeavour by blogger and podcaster Conn O'Muineachain from Edgecast Media .
Admission is free and you can book by calling 01 4789974 or emailing management@poetryireland.ie. If you're going to be there drop me a mail or leave a comment.
The way you enter an organisation has a big impact on how you perceive the place you work. The recruitment process (really part of staff induction) creates a range of expectations and if these expectations are unmet a subtle erosion of trust occurs—not what you want on day 1. A common view of staff induction is that it all happens the day you start and mostly over within a week. A typical induction involves being taken around the floor by you manager to meet your new colleagues and shown the places to eat, then the new employee sits through a session with a group of other new starters where senior people tell what they think you should know—strategy, policies, who's who in the zoo. Invariably there is too much information to take in on day 1.
That's from a great post from Shawn over at Anecdote and he goes on to outline a model of staff induction and learning that might roll out over a year. At the heart of his post is the idea that induction is a learning process - learning how to enter, how to belong, how to reflect on the learning and how to pass it on to someone else entering. It's a balance between formal and informal learning and also creating spaces for people to share their stories and experiences of belonging.
I think this is so important because very often people like me are called in to work with people about not belonging - perhaps it's because a team isn't functioning as well as it might; or there's a disjoin between theory and practice or someone isn't "fitting in" in all the creative ways that we don't "fit in". Shawn's model is an ongoing one where reflection is a critical part of creating the active story of belonging. I wonder what might happen if spaces were created to tell stories of belonging instead of creating mechanisms for helping people fit in?
Another great entry over at Andrew Taylor's archies. about measurement in the arts. How do you measure quality? creativity? value for money etc? Taylor has this to say:
During the recent Grantmakers in the Arts conference in Boston, the issue of measurement continued to rise and fall in various sessions. After all, if arts grantmakers are in the business of positive change (or sustaining positive things), they inevitably wonder how they're doing in delivering on that promise. Such evaluation requires both a target and a measure of progress toward that target.
The challenge is in applying existing metrics (dollars, headcounts, activity, test scores) to such complex and hazy goals (truth, beauty, pleasure, wisdom). To this task I humbly submit the following metrics, already spinning around the world for other purposes.
• hedon - a single unit of pleasure, already used in ethical mathematics (don't ask, I don't know)
• milliHelen the amount of physical beauty required to launch one ship
• warhol a unit of fame or hype lasting exactly fifteen minutes. Some useful multiples from the Wikipedia include:
• kilowarhol -- famous for 15,000 minutes, or 10.42 days. A sort of metric "nine day wonder."
• megawarhol -- famous for 15 million minutes, or 28.5 years. The type of person your parents talk about all the time, but of whom you've never heard from anyone else.
If we really hunker down, we could suggest a USRDA for each of the above (U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance). And each cultural production could publicly post the detailed value of its contents: ''Tonight's performance of Romeo and Juliet contains 250 hedons, 950 milliHelens, and 14.9 megawarhols.''
It got me wondering about what other kinds of sector/industry specific measurement tools could be invented..I particularly like this piece from that WIkipedia entry
Vodka index
The Vodka index is the relation between the price of a liter of standard vodka, and the mean price of a hardbound book in a particular country. While somewhat jocular, it is purported to evince how well literacy fares in a given country.
So much of the art of facilitation is simply getting out of the way. The more I get out of my client's way, the more they generate the content they really want heard. I'm sure there's a mathematical formula or a two by two of some kind to quantify the relationship between the facilitator's activity and the creativity of the group. I'm learning this more and more every time I work with a client group. I'm also realising that the real role of the facilitator is about minding three things
Task
The big picture and the overall reason for the gathering. I have this in my mind as the day goes on. My role is to make sure we achieve the task we have set ourselves.
Time
There's a finite amount of time available to us and within that there are choices about how that time is managed and used. My role is make sure the time boundaries are adhered to and the use of the time is consciously acknowledged. If a group decides to use the time in a different way then they need to take responsibility for that in the moment.
Territory
Making sure we have a safe conceptual space and a good enough physical space in which to work (and ensuring both are respected) is a key part of my role.
Essentially I'm minding the boundaries of the conversation and getting out of the way so that my clients can have the conversations they want to. It's amazing what happens when you simply get lost!
Pilobolus began as an experiment among three guys and one puzzled professor in a Dartmouth dance class back in 1970. It was survival of the giddiest, as the three non-dancers goofed around with the material they'd been given -- themselves -- and got entangled in science-inspired poses (think: "soft-belly protoplasmic thing") and movements. From these humble, biological beginnings has emerged an innovative, unlikely and almost-uncategorizable dance company that combines athleticism, grace and humor with a profound sense of unity.
Have a look at this 14 minute performance from Pilobolus (where else but at TED 2005). The piece is called Symbiosis and like so many of the arts and cultural events at this conference it blends extraordinary technical skill with a deep emotional impact. I'm going to choose a number of my favourite arts/cultural events from TED to publish here over the next few weeks but for now, enjoy.
Mmm I think there may be a problem with that embedded video - here's a link to the TED site where you can see the video.
I've been enjoying Creativity at Work and found this story there about the authors of The Art of Possibility. It's a nice variation on Appreciative Inquiry. I've just bought the book and am looking forward to settling down with it one of these days.
Ben Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, was faced with the same problem every year for 25 years: Teaching students who were in such a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance, they were reluctant to take creative risks. One night, he sat down with his partner Roz Stone Zander, a therapist, to try to find a solution. They decided the best approach would be to give everyone an A, at the beginning of the course. The A was not intended as a way to measure someone's performance against standards, but as an instrument to open them up to new possibilities.
This didn’t mean students could slack off for the rest of the semester. Students were required to write a letter that began with “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because…” and they had to describe in as much detail as possible, how they came to achieve this “extraordinary grade.”
In writing their letters, Zander said students must “place themselves in the future, looking back, and report on all the insights they acquired and the milestones they attained during the year, as if those accomplishments were already in the past. Everything must be written in the past tense. Phrases such as ‘I hope,’ ‘I intend,’ or ‘I will’ must not appear.”
Zander asserts “the A is an invention that creates possibilities for both mentor and student, manager and employee, or for any human interaction.” The A allows teams to accomplish what is possible, and reduces “the disparity in power between them can become a distraction and an inhibitor, drawing energy away from productivity and development.”
Zander doesn’t say what happens to the A when his students don’t pull their weight. His point here is to help people we work with to remove the barriers that block achievement--and to embrace the mindset of giving an A, by letting go of rigid mindsets that keep people pegged.
Zander applied this kind of thinking to his conducting and it transformed him from being a dictator, to an orchestrator of collaboration. This approach opened the door for musicians to speak more freely with him about their concerns -- about the way a piece of music ought to be played, for example, and he discovered that "the player who looks the least engaged may be the most committed member of the group." This new openness in communication had a huge effect on the morale of the orchestra, improving the performance of both conductor and players.
I don’t believe you can do any kind of authentic work with people unless you name (and tame) the elephant in the room. On several occasions over the past week I’ve worked with groups where someone has been brave enough to name what’s not being said and the depth of the discussion has substantially changed for the good. I think it takes a huge amount of courage to name the unnameable and I think it’s part of my role as a facilitator to make it safe enough for the naming to take place. It’s also part of my job to make sure that the naming is done in a respectful way and is owned by all of those present. I see the courageous one as doing a service on behalf of all. When someone is brave enough to name the shadow and is supported by a group who are brave enough to see their part in it - that’s where real change and transformation takes place. You simply can’t not know what you know. You can make a choice to ignore it or act upon it, but “reality” is forever changed and hiding can’t ever be an option. “I didn’t know” or “nothing to do with me” won’t work in a system where the elephant has been named and ultimately tamed.
In recent years, a handful of chefs and restaurateurs have invoked intellectual property concepts, including trademarks, patents and trade dress — the distinctive look and feel of a business — to defend their restaurants, their techniques and even their recipes, but most have stopped short of a courtroom. The Pearl Oyster Bar suit may be the most aggressive use of those concepts by the owner of a small restaurant. Some legal experts believe the number of cases will grow as chefs begin to think more like chief executives.
Fascinating article in today's New York Times (Free registration required) from Pete Wells about an impending law suit amongst the culinary classes in the big apple. Chef Rebecca Charles is suing Ed McFarland, chef and co-owner of Ed’s Lobster Bar in SoHo and her sous-chef at Pearl for six years for breech of intellectual copyright. She claims that McFarland's new restaurant copies "each and every element” of her eatery and it's going to court.
What makes this case so interesting is that it appears there's nowhere safe from litigation these days. The piece claims that chef's are taking this very seriously and one ..
has applied for patents on a number of his culinary inventions, like a method for printing pictures of food on flavored, edible paper. Mr. Cantu also makes his cooks sign a nondisclosure agreement before they so much as boil water at Moto, his restaurant in Chicago.
If lawyers are now in the kitchen can it be long before they're in the rehearsal room, the gallery or the theatre as well?
So, what do you do? If creativity plays a big role in your life, it’s probably not an easy question to answer. If you work in the creative industries, it’s probably even harder. Reworking concepts,
information, ideas and knowledge for a living often doesn’t lend itself to a job title that adequately explains what you do. If you work in the creative industries, the chances are you work for yourself, for a small organisation or for a small team in a big organisation. You’re probably working in a close network of collaborators and associates. You probably find yourself working on several different things at the same time, and many of those activities are often one-offs not to be repeated. Your job makes sense to people you work with but explaining it to people at parties becomes almost like relaying a joke that you ‘really had to be there’ to get.
or how about this?
Over the last ten years public policy has paid considerable attention to supporting creativity through the provision of education and skills, a copyright framework, business and innovation support,public agencies and the funding of work. But among employers, entrants and people working in the creative industries many of these interventions are resulting in confusion, indifference and, in some cases, irritation. Why? The aggregate result of jobs that are hard to
understand is a sector that is hard to understand, and therefore hard to support.
These are quotes from the new Demos publication So What Do You Do? available for download at their site. I've only just skimmed the document and am looking forward to a more thorough read over the next week or so but so far I'm impressed with their thinking on how creativity can be resourced through increased access to resources, spaces and meeting places and most interestingly stories of how this community actually works in practice, not in theory.
I'm hoping it may also help me answer that age old chestnut "what do you do" - I really need an elevator pitch!
I've just returned from Stockholm where I attended the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations annual symposium. The symposium is an opportunity for those of us working in a psychoanalytic way with organisations to meet and share knowledge about this area of practice.
There were numerous interesting papers and one in particular on a group relations conference conducted via the internet caught my attention. I have to admit to being mystified by how a group relations conference that didn't deal with the territory (i.e. cyberspace) would work. The consultant presenting the case paper bravely stepped into the project and fed back his experiences of how it was managed and conducted. The detail of that isn't of particular interest here. But what did interest me is how systems-psychodynamics needs to be applied to working on the web. There is a whole body of literature at this stage (particularly from psychology and systems thinking) about operating and working on line which I think systems-psychodynamics needs to attend to and build on, not merely replicate. Working on the web seemed to be a very new idea to many people who were at the conference and to some extent mirrors my experience of therapists and consultants who work psychoanalytically, many of whom have a sometimes neurotic attachment to being "in the room" and privilege this as the primary way of generating the transference. (As an interesting aside, of the 14 people who attended this workshop only 2 of us were women...I'm not sure what that means but the gender imbalance was more pronounced here than at any other event I attended).
Some of the thoughts that occurred to me about this..
1. The web doesn't exist - it is a wonderful manifestation of the collective unconscious - everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
2. The web is a boundary less space and many of the conversations (particularly in the wake of the Kathy Sierra incident) about placing boundaries on it have resulted in strong reaction and an acknowledgement that formal rules simply won’t work in this space which means it’s ripe for persescutory experiences and a regression to primitive drives.
3. The only thing that stops any of us committing an “offence” online is our own conscience or sense of what is right and wrong. So our internalised boundaries and how those boundaries are negotiated and made meaning of, are of primary importance in this space.
4. The absence of the social clues that assist us make meaning of, and interpret, relationships offline are absent online so this heightens the transference and counter-transference in a way that can be persecutory. This is why I’m mystified as to how a group relations conference that doesn’t address the territory can operate with integrity in this space.
5. When a conference finishes we have our experiences of the people who attended and how we entered into relationship. When contact online ends we have that, minus the physical presence of people but we also have the written correspondence. What happens to the text afterwards? And how are boundaries around text negotiated? We all know that once something is out there in cyberspace it is never coming back so the archiving function of the web is something that has to be looked at?
I'd love to hear from any psychodynamically informed practitioners working online about their own experiences of this area..
Synchronicity is at work once again - Finola Howard is doing something I've been thinking about for a while - Paying it Forward. It's a simple idea - you do three good deeds for people unknown to you in return for each good deed done for you. Lots of people (many of them complete strangers) have gone out of their way to help me over the years whether it’s been in business, personal or blogging life and this is a nice way of saying thanks to them and offering something back to others who might benefit from some of my accumulated wisdom.
I’m offering free executive coaching sessions or consultation time on one day a month (starting on Friday 3 August) to anyone who wants a space to reflect on their role or on relationship management issues at work. The three hour-long sessions will be free of charge and your only commitment is to pay it forward to three people you don’t know after we've finished. We can work in person (in Dublin), via Skype or phone.
Finola is a marketing consultant based in Carlow and she is offering a free clinic on the third Friday of each month. If you have a marketing question, dilemma or issue, phone her on +353 59 9183206 and book in for one of the three hour-long slots. IT consultant Colm Whelan of Rockfield IT has also joined the movement and he can be reached at colm.whelan@rockfieldit.com (he’s based in Carlow also) and if anyone else is taken by the idea to sign up then let me know and we can start building a community of practitioners interested in paying it forward.
should, for the most part, forget about issues, policies, even facts, and instead focus on feelings.
In an article in yesterday's New York Times (free subscription required) Westen is described as wanting more passion in politics - Bill Clinton thinks it's great so it won't be long before the rest of the Democrats row in behind establishing their USP as the party that's emotionally intelligent. The New York Times piece goes on to outline the rational and scientific justification for attending to emotion in political life which is awfully familiar if you're aware of the EI industry. For the record I'm not a fan of EI - while it may be a useful tool to begin a conversation about emotion in organisations it's still a rational instrument for the control of feelings and largely designed to manage and hide "negative" emotion. Cognitising emotion is reason not feeling and if we don't pay attention to how feelings (and their public performance as emotion) are generated in systems then we get more "irrational" behaviour and less intelligence about what's really going on. Organisations are emotional and emotion generating environments so feelings are valid intelligence in their own right and not experiences that should be considered toxic, dangerous or 'out of control'.
We also need to be aware that reason and feeling are inter-related and not separate domains that exist in parallel universes...but maybe I'm getting too emotional about this stuff?
What happens when you combine Mindmapping with Wikipedia? You get WikiMindMap a tool that presents the information you are looking for in Mindmap form. I searched for information on "psychoanalysis" and got this series of branches.
Clicking on any of the branches then brings up more detail which means you can keep all of the information in one place. I love this "whole system in the room" approach to managing information and this is one gadget I'll be coming back to again and again.
I frequently work with boards of directors and management committees wanting to take time out to review where they are and where they are going. Sometimes this involves organising and facilitating "retreats" or "away days". A recurring theme is often that of board composition - Who do we need? What skill base are we looking for? Do we need to think of retiring and asking others to step in etc? When it gets down to thinking about real people groups can often get stuck. Loyalties, allegiances, politics and favouritism sometimes get in the way of the task at hand.
Increasingly I'm using other methodologies for getting at what's needed and a favourite technique of mine is the fantasy board game. In this, each person picks a person - real or imagined, alive or dead to place on the board. It's a fun brainstorming session and the more it is played the wilder the suggestions get (and you can tell a lot about the group by whom they suggest). It's easier to pick a fantasy person than name someone you might know in a personal capacity because it removes the emotional awkwardness and allegiance difficulties. I then do an exercise with people about why they picked the person they did - and the list of attributes and qualities simply flows! We then have a list of all of the skills and qualities needed to populate the board that will look to the future and it's not a difficult task at this point to compare that list with the skill base of people currently sitting on the board. Augmenting, changing or moving around tends to be a much more l"ogical" task once the "illogical" one of picking fantasy people has been completed.
There's a lot to be said for playfullness in consulting - I really enjoy these sessions, and for what it's worth Katharine Hepburn is always on my list. Why? She's independent, sassy, not afraid to call it as she sees it and can stand up to Humphrey Bogart in a boat while at the time being a four time Academy Award winner and remaining fabulously feminine. Now I wonder what that says about me eh?
Arguing for the value of the arts is a full time, headache inducing activity that most arts organisations and policy makers know only too well. Unfortunately, many of the indicators reached for are quantitative and economic, making the intrinsic value of the arts for their own sake more difficult to articulate. Liverpool is hosting the European City of Culture title in 2006 and there's an interesting project under way there to broaden out the indicators for precisely this measurement exercise.
Impacts 08 – The Liverpool Model, is a joint research initiative of the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University, which will evaluate the social, cultural, economic and environmental effects of Liverpool’s hosting the European Capital of Culture title in 2008. The research programme, commissioned by Liverpool City Council, will examine the progress and impact of this experience on the city and its people.
This is a five year study organised around "indicator clusters" which include:
* Economic Impacts and Processes
* The City's Cultural System
* Cultural Access and Participation
* Identity, Image and Place
* Physical Infrastructure and Sustainability of the City
* The Philosophy and Management of the Process
More details about the research framework are available here. This is going to be a very interesting project to watch and I hope that it will go some way to offering a more creative framework in which to have conversations about why the arts matter and how we demonstrate more effectively (in a qualitative way) that they do.
The Irish Film Institute in Temple Bar is hosting a weekend of workshops, discussions and screenings on 28 and 29 July entitled Toys on Film. I'll be chairing a panel discussion on Sunday 29th July between 1 and 2pm at the IFI exploring 21st Century Toys – play or dismay?
How does your child play today? As Internet, mobile phone, computer games replace more conventional toys, what might be the long-term effects of such technology-driven play?
Leading representatives from Internet safety, film distribution, classification and parents’ organisations will be present to discuss this question and issues relating to contemporary toys and film.
What an impressive line up of panellists don't you think? Tickets are free (but do book in advance) and if you need further information call the education office at the IFI on 01 679 3477 or contact the booking office. You can always stay around to see Toy Story 2 which will screen after our discussion!
The slam poet/tech artist/paper sculptorRives does eight minutes of lyrical origami, folding history into a series of coincidences surrounding that most surreal of hours: 4 o'clock in the morning. This elusive hour, both very late and very early, appears often in art and literature as a way to describe the most extreme states of affairs. Rives -- aided by a nimble mind and extensive online research -- reveals 4 a.m. as an iconic moment, drawing hilarious historical connections. (From TED).
Questions are a key part of my consulting toolkit. In particular there are 6 questions I think every consultant should ask of themselves and the clients with whom they are working because I believe that asking questions of ourselves is a key way to process and analyse information we receive.
1 Who is the Client?
Sometimes the client isn’t the client and it’s important that you are working with or reporting to someone who has authority in the system. If you are not, then you are compromised from the start.
2 What’s really going on here?
The presenting problem is rarely the problem. It may be that the problem is a solution to a particular set of circumstances in the organisation. Treating the presenting issue as a symptom will generally yield more information and possibilities that moving in with a solution
3 What am I listening to? What am I hearing?
There is a difference between listening and hearing (and I’ve written about this topic before). A consultant’s job is to respond to what they are hearing, not what they are listening to.
4 How am I being used?
Consultants are engaged for many reasons and it’s important to work out what task you have been given on behalf of the entire system. It may be that you have been selected because you can offer insight. It may be your task to say the unmentionables out loud. It may also be that you have been selected because you can’t do the job. In the latter instance it may be important for the organisation not to resolve this particular issue and selecting the “wrong” consultant ensures that the status quo is, in fact, the status quo and a scapegoat is being required.
5 Is my experience the client’s experience?
Pay attention to how an assignment makes you feel because your experience may mirror your client’s experience in this organisation. Your experience therefore is a critical piece of systemic information about how this organisation works.
6 What is useful about the client’s experience and problem?
Persistent behaviour (constructive and destructive) has a pay off and a value in organisations and dealing with the pay off is essential if the issue is to be resolved so asking what’s useful as distinct from what’s “wrong” can be a helpful place to start.
There are many more questions to be asked when consulting but I have found these to be a central part of my toolkit. What’s in your consulting toolkit?
Doing a PhD is the equivalent of someone giving you carte blanche to convene your perfect dinner party. There's nothing like picking up the phone to complete strangers whose work you've admired; telling them you are doing a PhD and inviting them into a conversation for them to say "yes". In fact, nobody I have called has said "no" - people have given very generously of their time and expertise and I'm hoping our discussions have been as interesting to them as they have been to me. So the question then arises as to why it's taken me this long to find an "excuse" to have extraordinary conversations around a topic of interest to me. Do I really need an "excuse" or would an invitation to explore something in common have been enough?
Of course this is about authority - and the way in which we authorise and de-authorise ourselves when it comes to taking a step into the unknown. If we hang around waiting for someone else to make the suggestion then chances are it's not going to happen. So now I'm in the process of having the ideal dinner party conversation for real in my head. Who are the next 6 people I would love to be in a room with to talk about my topic of research? What kinds of conversations would keep me awake at night; head processing the discussion and generating all kinds of fascinating connections?
If you were to authorise yourself to make those calls - who would you want to talk with?
I spent a couple of days last week with a group of highly creative and artistic people assisting them think at a strategic level about their sector. Like many people in the arts they are passionate, committed, enthusiastic and are not afraid of moving between their personal and professional selves in the service of the task. One of the things I noticed from the outset was how long it took some people to “arrive” both physically and psychologically. Some were late for our sessions and others were on time but not on message. I guessed that many mobile phones were on vibrate or silent and not many had been switched off entirely. (As it turned out, I was right).
This was a really experienced group of practitioners who were interested in the dilemma I reflected back to them about being in the room. I wondered what was going on that made it challenging for people to be really connected in the task. We worked through those challenges and emerged at the end of our work with a manifesto of responsibilities each was willing to sign up to in order to work productively in the future. They recognised that there was important information in not turning the phones off and being psychologically “outside the room”.
Physically “showing up” isn’t enough. The key question is – are you present? Being present requires a psychological and spiritual connection to the work that is happening in the moment and to the people with whom you are working. It requires intimacy and connection and it also means dealing with the fear of being connected. Being connected brings responsibilities and commitments and if we’ve left the phone on or are making ourselves available somewhere else it means our sense of commitment is also somewhere else. Agreements about tasks and decisions will then fail to deliver because that bullet pointed list may be a way of avoiding something deeper.
There was a time at the early stages in my consulting career when this kind of dilemma would have bothered me and I would have tried to “fix it”. These days I see it as a rich opportunity to introduce more of the shadow into the room – if people are willing to have their “resistance” seen then it’s a clue that the time may be right to have a look at what’s important about that resistance.. So it’s not only the participants who need to show up, it’s also the consultant or facilitator who needs to pay attention to what’s actually going on in front of them rather than what they think should be going on. In my own case, the less attention I pay to the detail of the discussion and the more I pay to the context and tone of the discussion the better I am able to work between the levels to create a space where everyone can be present. I can’t make them show up but I can wonder out loud about the quality of presence.
I wonder about the state of Irish arts criticism. More often than not the critics begin by telling us how disappointed they are that the show they are about to review isn't the show they want to review so they'll settle for what's in front of them (the sigh is almost audible) and off they go. It's still difficult to find an online listings portal for cultural events in Dublin that includes all art form areas and up until now online reviews were fairly jaded - that is until Dermod Moore decided to put pen to paper and start reviewing theatre in Dublin. Dermod is a journalist with Hot Press and a blogger and he's been attending Dublin theatre events (and a notable gig starring Barbra Streisand), paying for his own tickets and writing some of the most intelligent and informed reviews I've read in quite some time. (His reviews of the shows at the Abbey are top of the Google rankings).I hope the publicity people in Irish cultural venues start paying more attention to Dermod and his ilk, recognising that the power of the blog can be a great marketing and information tool for their events - if word of mouth is what sells a show then shouldn't all arts organisations be courting bloggers?
Every problem is a solution to a set of circumstances – so you could say that the problem is both the problem and the solution.
One of the things I try to do with clients is help them “appreciate” the problem they are having. No, that’s not some new age methodology that doesn’t deal with the issues. It’s more a case of asking them – is there any way in which this problem has truth to it? Most particularly if it’s a problem person we’re talking about. I try to encourage my clients to look at the “job” this person is doing for the organisation first before we talk about what to do about it.
Here are some examples of the work problem people have done in organisations I have been invited to consult to.
A technical director in an engineering company made the working life of the sales department “hell” (their words) by refusing to co-operate with them. He withheld his staff, demanded more appropriate briefing, took the sales requests back to his department and sat on them for days holding up the closing of business. When we actually looked at what was going on here, this technical director was seen to be protecting his division and team from an increasing set of demands by all departments that were impossible for his technical team to meet. The technical director was, in fact, offering leadership to his team by protecting them from being overwhelmed by demand. By helping the sales team appreciate the problem they were able to articulate the real problem which was an unrealistic set of sales targets that had been imposed by senior management on both the sales and technical teams and not negotiated with them.
The manager of a cultural organisation was increasingly vilified by her board of directors as being “useless” and having “terrible” communication skills. The board never knew what was going on and more to the point this manager wouldn’t take their calls when they phoned. On closer examination it emerged that the way of communicating in this company was informal. The 10 directors on the board would frequently phone the manager at all hours of the day and night sometimes requesting the same information. The manager was in 10 different relationships and each director was comparing notes with the other. It was a fact that she was “useless” and had “terrible” communication skills when you looked at it from this perspective – who wouldn’t be? The organisation had transitioned being a voluntary organisation to a company limited by guarantee with a board of directors. While they had hired a professional manager, the board themselves were still operating like a voluntary group – which meant that the company business was done informally and out of traditional business hours. The director was trying to run the business during the business day and the directors hadn’t settled in to their new roles. By helping them look at the “problem” as the “solution” they were able to openly negotiate a way of working that resolved the tension and achieve what they really wanted.
More often than not, problem people are articulating something in organisational life that others refuse to do. When you’re on your own you sometimes have to shout louder to make yourself heard – the louder you shout, the more problematic you are and the more isolated you become. “Problem” people can emerge for lots of reasons and the person who carries this role may have a personal back story that makes them the perfect candidate for the job. A person’s back story may also be where the intervention is required so knowing when to refer someone on for more personal work is a key part of any consulting in this area. The working environment and context for the issue is of course an essential part of the story as well.
Building a good working alliance with a client is essential if we are going to have that kind of conversation. Organisations have an unconscious life. Because it’s unconscious it’s unseen and difficult and very often threatening to look at and my clients have to trust in my skill that I have some idea of what I’m talking about. But if you can have an appreciative relationship with the problem, then that’s a really great place to start the conversation.
Sutton is writing about the difference between quantitative and qualitative data generation and the assumption in business that the former is always better than the latter. I come across this assumption regularly and it’s particularly prevalent when you work in an area that’s about emotion and unconscious processes in the workplace
Sutton gives three examples of when qualitative is better than quantitative:
1. When you don’t know what to count. Unstructured observation of people at work, open-ended conversation, and other so-called ethnographic methods are especially useful when you don’t know, for example, what matters most to customers, employees, or a company. Just hanging around and watching can have a huge effect.
2. When you can count it, but it doesn’t stick. ..people are swayed by stories , not statistics.
3. When What You Can Count Doesn’t Count. Researchers are always looking for things that are easy to count, so they can get numbers that are amenable to statistical analysis. There are times when these numbers do matter. Sales, numbers of defects, and so on can be valuable. But in the hunt for and obsession with what can be counted, the most important evidence is sometimes overlooked. As Einstein said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Quantitative data collection will give you the “what”– what has worked, what needs to work and what actions should be taken next. What it won’t give you is the “why” and very often the “how”. Why it happened, why it hasn’t and how action is sometimes stifled by other processes. Knowing what needs to happen and making the leap to making it happen requires a different kind of data generation and management which is why so many change processes aren’t as successful as they might be. How many organisations do you know that spend a fortune making sure the IT system communicates properly but leaves the human communication to the bottom of the “to do” list?
Tammy Lenski has a great article about the Gotcha trap - you know that moment in a consultation process where someone moves in with a snappy statement and shouts "checkmate"...Tammy describes a zoning meeting about a cell tower to be located in her neighbourhood.
The attorney for the cell tower company, standing at the front of the room, interrupted one speaker. Do you have a cell phone? he asked the speaker, in a pretty unpleasant tone. Then he turned to the room of us, “Ok, show of hands,” he demanded. “How many of you own a cell phone?”
Gotcha, I thought, he’s pulling a Gotcha.
Oh this feels so familiar - short term triumph which results in long term resistance. I've seen this approach fail miserably on so many occasions, particularly in stakeholder consultation processes which are very often dissemination processes masquerading as consultation. When I am working with organisations about to embark on a consultation I ask them a very simple question at the outset - how willing are you to change your mind/hypothesis/position on the basis of what you hear throughout this process? It sounds simple but it isn't...and if the organisation isn't open to being surprised then the consultation won't work and they are better off engaging a marketing expert to sell what they've already agreed on. The other side of the process is the willingness of the stakeholders to "reality check" their list of requirements of the consulting organisation. An open ended "what do you think we need to do?" consultation will result in a shopping list, raised expectation and yields disappointment. Reality testing that shopping list means asking the hard questions in the room - "if we need to do A with X amount of resources then help us think through how to prioritise what's important?" That generally means a more mature discussion, less disappointment and a move out of the either/or position that generates those "gotcha" moments that Tammy describes.
If someone is pulling a Gotcha moment then the triumph will result in polarisation, monologue and resistance. If someone is willing to suspend their need for triumph, open themselves up to the possibility that they may be dealing with experts in their stakeholder group - that will yield a dialogue and reduce the possibility of entrenched resistance.
Another fine TED talk - this time from Charles Ledbetter. I heard Ledbetter speak at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier in the year about creative collaboration. There are so many interesting ideas in here for any organisation with consumers, customers or audiences...like - how do you organise without organisations? What do you do when your consumers, customers or audiences know more about what you do than you do? And of course...the advent of the pro-am. Interesting stuff
One incident that’s stuck in my mind was an interview I had 24 years ago for a financial consultancy. The interviewer talked about money, about wealth, about owning yachts.
Then he began to talk about the losers, the [sorry, but I’m quoting] c**** who didn’t recognise money and its importance, that in five years you could walk away, that you could have other people doing the work for you. That the world had two kind of people - people like him and the “stupid c****” who didn’t understand. He went on and on. It was like talking to low-end devil.
Finally, he let me get a word in. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m one of the c****.” And I walked out. One of the more terrifying experiences of my life.
At an individual level, each of us needs to do the same. I have something of an email habit, clicking "refresh" on my inbox like a rat in a Skinner Box - but I don't have a PDA/Blackberry (which is a bit like a meth addict proudly claiming not to touch heroin). I have decided I need to have one email-free day a week. The computer will stay off*.
We also need to examine the relationships that are mediated through these technologies. Are we driving people crazy with our behaviour? How do we manage ourselves to get the best out of our interactions with others? For some of us, this might be too painful. Best get back to hitting them with emails/txts/IMs I guess - that'll learn 'em.
Then there's Flickr which I use from time to time and do newspapers count if you don't pick them up via RSS?
I still haven't taken the leap to Facebook or MySpace and I don't have a Twitter account - I'm ambivalent about them and maybe I'll write a longer, more considered post some time about my ambivalence.
And I'm also sure that as soon as I post this I'll think of a bunch of other applications I use that I take for granted...
The Dublin Fringe Festival began on Saturday night and I and my blogger friend Dermod had great seats for La Clique at the Spiegeltent. Dermod has written a lovely review of the evening here but I wanted to throw in my tuppenceworth as well. For a couple of hours on Saturday evening I was enchanted and entertained by a series of fabulous performers (who were joined on the evening by the wonderful Camille O'Sullivan). And as I was sitting there at the front of the tent watching a double jointed man squeeze through a stringless tennis racquet and two "strong men" with unmatchable finesse and showmanship do unspeakably amazing feats I realised I was impressed. I was so very impressed. And I took great comfort in the fact that there wasn't a single person in that audience who could emulate what these performers were doing. There wasn't a moment of envy - just sheer admiration. And it got me thinking about how important it is to be impressed by other people in a way that's healthy and nurturing.
At one point the above mentioned double jointed man balanced precariously on a series of tin cans (4 to be precise) on top of a piano, the top one was the size of a bean tin...he then wrapped his legs around his head and wondered out loud with us that if he could follow his dream and spend his life doing this...what might we aspire to?
Well, tin cans and stringless tennis racquets aside for a moment, he had a point...and it was eloquently made and even more eloquently received by many of the people I knew there that evening. What if following our dream meant being the best we could be? What if waiting for the "right" thing to come along meant we were missing opportunities to be impressive in other areas of our lives? What if we had to learn to be impressive first and the dream might follow...and what if we allowed ourselves to be impressed once in a while without feeling threatened?
All that and more at the circus..and if you plan on going to the circus, using the piano as 12 o'clock, get a seat at 3pm...I can't tell you why but I do promise you'll be impressed.
Do you have an elevator pitch about your business? I have tried and failed (repeatedly) to invent one.
I’ve written here previously about Dynamic Participation – the principles that inform how I facilitate and consult and I’ve refined those 10 points into a 3 point plan for working with groups
1 Keep the process in the room
2 Consult with curiosity
3 Respect the resistance
I spent a most enjoyable 90 minutes or so on a Skype call yesterday with more Moores than you can shake a stick at (Johnnie from the UK and Matt who is in Australia to be exact.. who depending on whom you speak with are either evil twin brothers or utterly unrelated...). At Johnnie's invitation we were discussing the Shadow side of organisations. Jung is credited with the term but it was interesting that the day we choose (unbeknownst to ourselves) was the 68th anniversary of the death of Sigmund Freud who had a thing or two to say about the hidden, unconscious and repressed side of ourselves. Johnnie is busy editing the conversation into a bite sized podcast and I'll post a link as soon as he's finished.
What I found fascinating about the conversation was that we're all coming from very different perspectives, working with different kinds of organisations and industries and had myriad examples of how the shadow manifests in organisations. Johnnie's shadow Mr Rant even had an outing, prompted by the term "Knowledge Manager" (which Matt is) after I shared my fantasy of what they do (putting manners on wayward and out of control files). Yes, it got silly at times but it was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a Monday morning and we uncovered lots of topics we'll return to in future conversations.
It has been a long while since I've been so WOW'd by a business model as I've been this morning. Simply put, this is the BEST template I've seen for building a home-based practice from, of all people, a physician
So says Matt Homann about Dr Jay Parkinson a Brooklyn based physician who's breaking all of the rules. He has a web based practice where you can sign up for appointments (click here for his schedule) .. not only that but you can reach him via text, chat, email or phone. From his website:
• I AM A NEW KIND OF PHYSICIAN.
• I strictly make house calls either at your home or work.
• Once you become my patient and I've personally met you, we can also e-visit by video chat, IM and email for certain problems and follow-ups.
• I'm based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My fees are very reasonable.
• I'm extremely accessible. Contact me by phone, email, IM, text, or video chat. Mon-Fri 8AM-5PM. 24/7 for emergencies.
• I specialize in young adults age 18 to 40 without traditional health insurance.
• When you need more than I provide, I make sure you wisely spend your money and pay the lowest price for the highest quality.
• I've gathered costs for NYC specialists, medications, x-rays, MRIs, ER visits, blood tests, etc...just like a Google price search.
• I mix the service of an old-time, small town doctor with the latest technology to keep you and your bank account healthyl
Matt is recommending this model for lawyers, I can see myriad applications for a model like this and I wonder how it might work for the medical community on this side of the pond if they were brave enough to take the leap? I wonder does Dr Jay do cyber based consultations with people outside of the United States...lots to think about here particularly for the 'helping professions.'
Last weekJohnnie Moore, Matt Moore and I had a conversation about the shadow side of organisations. Part one of this is available as a podcast (click here) - show notes will follow and thanks to Johnnie for all the technical work. I hope you find the discussion interesting and do leave comments and feedback.
Here are the show notes. Warning: These are unreliable. The timings are approximate and this is my paraphrasing of what was said. Don't take them it too literally. This was a conversation and not as linear as even these rough notes might suggest.
The elephant in the corner
0.00 Introductions and what this is about: the Elephant in the Corner and things that don’t get talked about
0.50 Annette asks Johnnie what prompted his focus on this? Why now? Johnnie describes a client conversation that may have pointed to his own shadow side… the “deep sense of ranklement” that suggests that there’s something for him to work on…
3.25 …and prompts Annette to look at how this might also be seen as a shadow on the client side “what job was your sense of shame doing for the organisation for which you worked?” Why does the shadow need to be hidden? Do we collude in scapegoating people inside organisations, or consultants that advise them?
If too much choice leads to unhappiness then does scarcity lead to something more productive? I'm inclined to think it might after the past week or so. Mayo County Enterprise Board asked me to design and deliver a series of day long workshops for 16/17 year old students to encourage them to think of entrepreneurship as a career option after school. 50 students attended each of the four workshops we ran over the past 2 weeks and at the end of each day we had 8 new businesses complete with elevator pitches; unique selling positions and costings.
I designed the sessions to give the students resources including the services of consultants; some brainstorming exercises to get their creative juices flowing; space; time; there was an award for the members of the winning team and a clear task. Then I added some constraints. Consultants could be booked for a limited number of timed sessions. A lovely lunch was provided but we didn't have an official lunch break. A deadline was imposed for each of the 8 groups to present their pitch to their classmates. The students had to self manage time, resources and constraints.
The workshops were variations on similar bootcamp events I've run for business clients and I also structured the days around a set of principles I believe to be true in organisational systems.
• People (particularly teenagers) know much more than we give them credit for
• Real creativity happens when you connect people with their own unique truth and experience
• People are experts about their own experience
• When creativity dries up in the system start looking at who’s managing the process – blocked creativity is rarely located in an individual’s experience it’s always about the message individuals are getting about what constitutes the ‘right’ way of being creative
• Most of what constitutes consulting and facilitating is getting out of the way
• The other bit is learning to listen – which means not thinking about your response to what the person in front of you is saying
• Creativity can only thrive with constraints. Too much of anything is not liberating it's oppressive
• You can only manage at the boundaries - anything else is police work
The students came up with fantastic ideas, on time, on task and made creative use of all of the resources we put at their disposal. Claire Wilson documented the days and we were joined by a team of five consultants who worked closely with each of the groups.
If I've learned anything in the past week it's that teenagers know more about strategy than any MBA graduate I've ever met and trusting them to get on with the task is half of the work involved - let's not assume that because someone is 'younger' (in any sense of the word) that there's anything they need to learn from us oldies. These young people blew me away with their ingenuity, positiveness and ability to work with what was in front of them. I'm indebted to a wonderful 17 year old young woman (my niece) who has taught me a lot about respecting the wisdom of younger people - she deserves half the credit for the design of the day and I'm proud and honoured to have a wonderful consultant of this calibre. She has two younger sisters and I'm on standby for the life lessons they'll pass on when the time is right.
Following the blogging and podcasting workshop I ran with Conn earlier this year and some of our conversations about extending the reach of publicly funded services Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council Library Service (a client of mine) decided to commission a series of 2 podcasts of one of their cultural events Books in the Park. The podcasts were created by Conn at Edgecast Media and part one The Children's Corner is now available for download from the DLRCC Library website. Part 2 is now also available by clicking here and features the adult authors who read in Cabinteely Park on June 23rd. They are Paul Carson, Sarah Webb, Robert Dunbar, Marisa Mackle and Jacinta McDevitt.
The event itself was held in Cabinteely Park on 23rd of June, organised by the Library and Parks Service and 5 Childrens' authors read their work to a rapt audience. Conn and Brian Greene recorded the events and interviewed a selection of people on the day and this episode includes authors Don Conroy, Oisin McGann, Aisling O Loughlin, Joe O Brien, Derek Landy. Mairéad Owens and Conor Peoples from the Library Service and some of the attendees are also included.
I'm hoping this is going to be the start of many more podcasts from Dun Laoghaire Rathdown who are trailblazing in this regard - and I'm hoping that other local authorities will follow. This is such a brilliant example of how to extend the reach of publicly funded services - it's about connecting with people where they are when they want rather than the other way around. The trick now is going to be to find ways of evaluating the impact of initiatives like this when they don't tick the traditional number-crunching formats. For now, I'm thrilled to have been part of the conversations that led to this development. The DLRCC Library site doesn't have a comment facility on the post (not yet anyway!) so please leave a comment here or at Conn's site, or alternatively drop the Library Service an email at libraries@dlrcoco.ie I know they would appreciate your feedback.
Reflecting on the enterprise bootcamp reminded me of Hugh McLeod's wonderful treatise on how to be creative. You can read the full document here. My favourite chapter from it is I'd like my crayons back please.
Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, "I�d like my crayons back, please."
So you've got the itch to do something. Write a screenplay, start a painting, write a book, turn your recipe for fudge brownies into a proper business, whatever. You don't know where the itch came from, it's almost like it just arrived on your doorstep, uninvited. Until now you were quite happy holding down a real job, being a regular person...
Until now.
You don't know if you're any good or not, but you'd think you could be. And the idea terrifies you. The problem is, even if you are good, you know nothing about this kind of business. You don't know any publishers or agents or all these fancy-shmancy kind of folk. You have a friend who's got a cousin in California who's into this kind of stuff, but you haven't talked to your friend for over two years...
Besides, if you write a book, what if you can't find a publisher? If you write a screenplay, what if you can't find a producer? And what if the producer turns out to be a crook? You've always worked hard your whole life, you'll be damned if you'll put all that effort into something if there ain't no pot of gold at the end of this dumb-ass rainbow...
Heh. That's not your wee voice asking for the crayons back. That's your outer voice, your adult voice, your boring & tedious voice trying to find a way to get the wee crayon voice to shut the hell up.
Your wee voice doesn't want you to sell something. Your wee voice wants you to make something. There's a big difference. Your wee voice doesn't give a damn about publishers or Hollywood producers.
Go ahead and make something. Make something really special. Make something amazing that will really blow the mind of anybody who sees it.
If you try to make something just to fit your uninformed view of some hypothetical market, you will fail. If you make something special and powerful and honest and true, you will succeed.
The wee voice didn't show up because it decided you need more money or you need to hang out with movie stars. Your wee voice came back because your soul somehow depends on it. There's something you haven't said, something you haven't done, some light that needs to be switched on, and it needs to be taken care of. Now.
So you have to listen to the wee voice or it will die... taking a big chunk of you along with it.
They're only crayons. You didn't fear them in kindergarten, why fear them now?
First the interview and now this wonderful video which explains the web in all its complexity in just over 5 minutes. It's from Michael Wesch a professor at Kansas State University (check out the blog Digital Ethnography).
The second piece - a vision of students today is a really thoughtful piece on teaching - I was interested in the questions it asks about what learning is and where it happens. I thought the piece was a call to reach people where they are and not where we would like them to be.. see what you think.
This video was created by myself and the 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007. It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in. We created a Google Document to facilitate the brainstorming exercise, which began with the following instructions:
“… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.”
Over the course of the next week, 367 edits were made to the document. Students wrote the script, and made suggestions for survey questions to ask the entire class. The survey was administered the following week.
I then took all of the information from the survey and the Google Document and organized it into the final script portrayed in the video which was all filmed in one 75 minute class period.
I visited the doctor today in New York – Brooklyn to be exact and I can safely say I felt really good afterwards. The doctor in question was Jay Parkinson and we met at his office – a corner coffee shop in Williamsburg. I’ve been tracking the extraordinaryresponse to his practice and as I’d referred to it in my presentation on Saturday I thought I’d email Jay to see if he was free for a face to face chat He quickly said yes and I had a really interesting hour or so with him and his four footed friend buddy. We talked about health care on both sides of the pond; how having a dog impacts on your social life in New York; the way in which social media is changing the professions; the emotional splitting that can happen online (why disagree face-to-face when you can keep that aspect of relating to instant chat?) and the huge interest he’s receiving from the main stream media (see here). Just to prove the point a reporter from the Times of London called in the middle of our chat to arrange an interview for later in the week. I really appreciated Jay’s generosity and the speed with which he agreed to meet a visiting blogger – but that’s been my experience of the blogging fraternity on all my travels to date. I’m not qualified to comment on the model of healthcare he’s offering – or the costs associated with it but the business model he’s using really inspired me – I can see applications for all kinds of professionals. It’s also fair to say that he’s been the subject of some criticism – and I admire the fact that he’s decided to take on the critics in public and allow them to have their say on his blog. He’s also invited his patients to publicly review him and his practice.
Sitting in another coffee shop later in the day - listening to the strains of where the streets have no name (Bedford Avenue actually) - I wondered what it was about meeting Jay that stayed and refused to leave me alone. Another coffee and three U2 tracks later it occurred to me that perhaps the doctor I imagined meeting wasn’t the one that showed up. The doctor in my mind was a crusader – someone ‘taking on the system’; perhaps angry or at least with some scores to settle. But nothing could have been further from the truth. The doctor I met struck me as someone who couldn’t possibly be doing what he loves to do in any other way. I didn’t sense any agenda – no crusades – simply a doctor, passionate about his work and doing it in the most efficient and contemporary way possible. I was really impressed by the ease with which he’s found a niche – so obvious and yet so newsworthy. If Jay Parkinson is medicine 2.0 I wonder what that means for the way the rest of us are doing business?
Thanks for your time Jay!
Jay is also a very talented photographer and you can see his work here.
Photo credit:Noah Kalina
Bloggers "know" a lot of other bloggers, but seldom get to actually meet them.
This quote from Terry Seamon is so true. I skim read nearly 150 blog postings a day - many from bloggers I feel I 'know' very well from their writing. but most of the bloggers on my blogroll remain virtual friends - particularly those outside Ireland. On this trip to the US I decided to meet some of those bloggers in real life. First up was Dr Jay Parkinson and following that I met Terry at his office The American Management Association in the middle of Times Square and the theatre district. Terry describes himself as a
Learning & OD Guy, interested in management, change, organization effectiveness, communication, work, creativity, media, movies, travel, spiritual growth, stewardship, and making the world a better place.
and I was intrigued by the mix of interests, curiosities and expertise he fuses together on his blog Here We Are, Now What? We had a really interesting conversation about all of the above and much more and yet again I was so impressed by the generosity of bloggers and Terry's interest in meeting a complete stranger. While blogging is often (rightly) described as a narcissistic activity it's also a great way of building bridges and starting conversations - many of those are online, many others extend to offline meetings. I intend to continue cold calling bloggers when I'm on my travels and I would like to extend an invitation to any travelling bloggers to do likewise and make contact with me if you are planning to be in Ireland.
(part of) what value a not-for-profit (corporation or foundation) that supports a community of practice can derive from more traffic on their site. It also shows (part of) what is involved in attracting more traffic... More traffic, especially more traffic that is appropriate for your site does not happen automatically ;)
I think this is a very helpful way of exploring the relationship between organisations, their online presence, customers/clients, content and the feedback mechanisms that operate between each. I'll be using this map with not for profit clients in the future.
Why are we so attached to the official story of events? I’ve spent a large part of the last week engaged in wonderful conversations with peers and friends..a lot of those conversations were ‘unofficial’ stories of shared experiences. 100% of those stories will never make it into the official discourse of ‘what happened’. This seems to mirror so much of my experience in organisations where an attachment to the idealised image of ‘who we are’ and ‘why we are’ is deemed to be more important than the lived experience of ‘how we are’. In my mind’s eye I have an image of being together where the official discourse is listening to the unofficial stories..but maybe that’s another fantasy that may need to remain imaginary?
In this TED talk Stanford Professor and chair of Creative Commons, Larry Lessig presents his argument that the law is strangling creativity. In particular he argues that amateur culture (those who produce for the love not the money) is not the same as amateurish culture and the internet is moving us back to a read-write culture as distinct from read only one. He makes the compelling distinction between piracy/plagarism and using the tools of creativity for literacy in this new generation of digital technology.
Why is it that you need permission to copy? and if you want to create something 'new' you are defacto a trespasser because you have to copy? And why does copy equal plagarism in the eyes of the law - and indeed those who are resistant to new technologies? He advocates that artists/creative types make their work freely available through Creative Commons licences and finishes by suggesting that we can't make our kids passive - we can only make them pirates. It's a fascinating 18 minutes - do yourself a favour and tune in.
Ben Cameron's keynote address to the Southern Arts Federation contains some of the most compelling insights into the state of contemporary culture and how co-creation is an invitation rather than a threat. Read the complete presentation here.
But just when we think we are beginning to catch up, the economy has shifted again. Those who wish to survive must think, not merely of experience, but of participation—an economy where value will no longer be consumed but where value will be co-created. Let me say that again: in the future, value will no longer be consumed. Value will be co-created.
We already see the power of consumer participation in other industries. The monolithic power of the restaurant critic has been shattered by Zagat where the collective consumer passes judgment and defines a restaurant value. “Dancing with the Start,” “So You Think You Can Dance,” “American Idol”—all are predicated on the active involvement of the consumer.
We are clearly witnessing a veritable tsunami of creative energy unleashed through technology. We are seeing the emergence of a class of amateurs doing work at a professional level—a group dubbed elsewhere as Pro Ams—a group whose work populated You Tube, independent film festivals, dance competitions and more. And knowing that we graduate 400,000 MFA’s in this country every year, this highly skilled, professionally capably yet a vocationally artistic pool is destined to increase—a time predicted perhaps by our Secretary of State, a trained concert pianist who continues to play chamber music with professional musicians, even as her career has called her elsewhere.
This sense of co-creation is an invitation—an invitation to dismantle irrelevant distinctions between professional and amateur, a status once exalted as more precious than professionalism, capturing as it does in its etymological roots the love of practice. This is an invitation to dismantle arts education programs and replace them with community engagement programs. This is an invitation to seeing our mission, not in creating products to be consumed, but in offering experiences that will serve as springboards to our audience’s own creativity—to nurture what Henry Jenkins calls a Convergence Culture, utilizing multi-platform narrative and marketing, inviting everyday people to reassert their right to actively contribute to their culture, channeling creative energies to come together. This is a call to a field to see ourselves, not as presenters, perhaps, but as activators, engagers, animators of creative energy.
I eventually got around to reading the Art of Possibility on my recent trip to the US. Here's an extract from the Amazon blurb.
Ben Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, was faced with the same problem every year for 25 years: Teaching students who were in such a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance, they were reluctant to take creative risks. One night, he sat down with his partner Roz Stone Zander, a therapist, to try to find a solution. They decided the best approach would be to give everyone an A, at the beginning of the course. The A was not intended as a way to measure someone's performance against standards, but as an instrument to open them up to new possibilities.
This didn’t mean students could slack off for the rest of the semester. Students were required to write a letter that began with “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because…” and they had to describe in as much detail as possible, how they came to achieve this “extraordinary grade.”
In writing their letters, Zander said students must “place themselves in the future, looking back, and report on all the insights they acquired and the milestones they attained during the year, as if those accomplishments were already in the past. Everything must be written in the past tense. Phrases such as ‘I hope,’ ‘I intend,’ or ‘I will’ must not appear.”
Zander asserts “the A is an invention that creates possibilities for both mentor and student, manager and employee, or for any human interaction.” The A allows teams to accomplish what is possible, and reduces “the disparity in power between them can become a distraction and an inhibitor, drawing energy away from productivity and development.”
Zander doesn’t say what happens to the A when his students don’t pull their weight. His point here is to help people we work with to remove the barriers that block achievement--and to embrace the mindset of giving an A, by letting go of rigid mindsets that keep people pegged.
Zander applied this kind of thinking to his conducting and it transformed him from being a dictator, to an orchestrator of collaboration. This approach opened the door for musicians to speak more freely with him about their concerns -- about the way a piece of music ought to be played, for example, and he discovered that "the player who looks the least engaged may be the most committed member of the group." This new openness in communication had a huge effect on the morale of the orchestra, improving the performance of both conductor and players.
It's a nice variation on Appreciative Inquiry and one of the most useful things I took away from the book is Zander's invitation to stop thinking in good/bad splits and ask the question 'Did I make a contribution?' I've asked myself that question on numerous occasions over the past month or so - it's such a forgiving position to take - the answer is invariably 'yes'. It's also useful to ask if I experience others as making a contribution and the answer to that question is generally 'yes' also. The invitation is really about focussing on 'good enough' rather than on 'the best' - a little bit of the reality principle mixed with a soupçon of humility - I like it.
There are plenty of us eager to give ourselves to the arts.....But unless we are given the same authority to reinvent and reshape organizations as you yourselves were given, we are not interested. -- a point of view that raises far more questions about an organization's capacity for change than about the identity of an heir apparent.
How interesting is that in the context of new generations? and how relevant for all kinds of organisations?
A story is told of Alfred Adler, one of Freud's early followers, who once interviewed a prospective patient at great length, taking a detailed family history, and getting as elaborate an account as possible of what the man was suffering from. At the end of the consultation, Adler asked the man, "What would you do if you were cured?" The man answered. Adler replied, "Well, go and do it then." That was the treatment. As in Jack and the Beanstalk, and in many fairy stories, there is a serious problem and a piece of magic; this magic makes strange things possible. The magic is there to show how poor our sense of possibility always is. Jack's beans make him full of beans; they make his world huge. And they show him, as a taste of things to come - living happily ever after with a beautiful princess - that very small things can get bigger and lead you into unexpected and unusually satisfying places. Small boys are not Freudians, but they know that they have their own beanstalk, and that it takes them away from life at home.
The story says that being sensible only gets you sensible things. And whatever else growing up is, it is an initiation into the sensible.
And the Freudian reading of the fairy tale evolves into a fascinating essay on how our desires and our sense of possibility (known to us as wishes when we are children) are turned into sensible options as adults and invariably wished away rather than acted upon.
Most of my work in the past year or so has been designing and managing stakeholder consultation processes. In my experience, there are three types of consultation methods
The first is what I call the Defensive Model where the organisation consults with stakeholders out of a requirement to do so. The process is designed to 'tick boxes' and it is invariably created for the purpose of optics.
The second is the Persuasive Model where the organisation has made its mind up about what it wishes to do and the consultation process is a sophisticated publicity and marketing exercise designed to get 'buy in' for an already established idea.
And the third is the Discursive Model where the organisation is seeking the stakeholders' help to 'think out loud' about changes or a new direction and the process is created as an inquiry.
I favour model number three because numbers one and two are effectively monologues not dialogues. Number three creates the possibility that the organisation can answer 'yes' to the only question that really matters:
Are you willing to change your mind on the basis of what you hear?
I've been fortunate to work with clients in 2007 who have jumped at the challenge presented by consultation with stakeholders, designed in a spirit of inquiry and conducted as conversations. What kinds of consultation processes have you been part of in 2007? Monologue? or Dialogue?
Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize speech is a wonderful and impassioned plea for the importance of education and telling our stories. In her speech she talks about illiteracy and the lack of books in Africa and compares the passion for learning with our comfortable complacency here – which is particularly apt at this time of the year.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.
That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is – we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?
She’s not a fan of the time spent surfing and wonders
How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?
But of course the irony is, that blogging and social media have become important ways of telling stories – and Lessing’s words will permeate many imaginations by virtue of bloggers picking up and sharing what she has to say. But I take her point – I love books - I love the kinaesthetic experience of holding a document in my hands – and while others herald paperless books – they miss the point. Reading is not a delivery mechanism, it’s an emotional and spiritual experience and that can certainly be enhanced by the digital revolution but not supplanted by it. Unlike Lessing I'm hopeful about the future of literature, and the book, and can only hope that digital and traditional ways of telling stories can continue to co-exist.
And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. "Have you still got your space? Your sole, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don't let it go." There must be some kind of education.
More than ever, bands must be able to manage themselves. The age of lavish label advances and indulgent A&R handholding is over. Upheaval and stress in the industry means diminished tolerance for chaotic behaviour among band members. There is less money available to clean up the messes created by out-of-control artists.
So says my colleague Mike Jolkovski. in a fascinating article he's written for Music Connection Magazine. Mike is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, musician and organisational consultant working with music groups (of all genres). In this article he's taking on the heady issues of artistic license and what it allows and doesn't; the music group as an organisational unit; working with feelings and psychology as well as technique and politics; dealing with problems as soon as they arise (instead of trashing the hotel room as a minor diversion) and the tricky issue of dividing the spoils. It's a great piece and his blog is full of more fascinating insights into how psychoanalysis can be applied in a practical way to the world of work in the music field.
Happy New Year. Broken any new year resolutions yet? Or maybe you’re the kind that refuses to make them – that way ensuring a 100% satisfaction guaranteed rating at the year’s end. Like so may people I think about resolutions at this time of the year – I sometimes act upon them, but often than not by the end of January I’ve quietly put them away for another 11 months. This year I’ve decided to take a different approach. For the past 6 months I’ve been thinking about change – personal and professional – and spending a lot of that time asking myself what’s useful and productive about not making the changes I say I want to make. What kind of satisfaction (or secondary gain) am I getting out of my stuckness that’s more useful than the imagined newer version? I invariably come up against comfort (with the status quo) and fear (of the unknown) not highly original but pretty real in my case.
I have a couple of major personal change projects for 2008 and instead of writing a ‘to do’ list and an action plan I’ve made a mental list of how I am feeling now and how I want to feel when I’ve achieved those changes. I’ve decided to make the emotional engagement with these resolutions the focus of my attention while also embarking on some practical actions. So often it’s the emotional stuff that derails our best laid plans and in my case I can revert to a comfortable and controlled emotional relationship which inhibits my progress with outward action. So far it’s working –I’m delving into the value of my fear and comfort and discovering all kinds of interesting insights. I’m taking on my inner saboteur and am going to make ‘her’ my closest friend for the next year and I know that by the end of January I won’t be consigning any ‘to do’ list to the back of the drawer for another 11 months.
How are you getting along with your resolutions? And what’s your plan to befriend your inner saboteur?
For a great article on New Year Resolutions head over to Escape from Cubicle Nation where Pam asks ‘what’s perfect about your problem?’
When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?"
165 contributors; 112,600 words
Some fascinating answers to the Edge world question - here are some of my favourites:
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London
The Question of Objects
The 20th century has been obsessed with this idea of the objects and hopes of architectural and artistic permanence which nobody questioned more thoroughly than the late Cedric Price. The 21st century will increasingly question this fetishization of the object.
What are the architectural and artistic contributions which are going to endure they are not only the ones which have a built physical form. Its not only a question of objects but a questions of ideas and scores.
JORDAN POLLACK
Computer Scientist, Brandeis University
Electronic Mail
I've changed my mind about electronic mail. When I first used email in graduate school in 1980, it was a dream. It was the most marvelous and practical invention of computer science. A text message quickly typed and reliably delivered (or be told of an error) allowed a new kind of asynchronous communication. It was cheaper (free), faster, and much more efficient than mail, phone, or fax, with a roundtrip in minutes. Only your colleagues had your address, but you could find people at other places using "finger". Colleagues started sharing text-formatted data tables, where 50K bytes was a big email message!
The worst part is the legal precedent that your employer "owns" the mail sent out over the network provided. It is as if they own the soundwaves which emit from your throat over the phone. An idiot judgment leads to two Kafkaesque absurdities:
First, if you send email with an ethnic slur, receive email with a picture of a naked child or a copyrghted MP3, you can be fired. Use email to organize a Union? Fugget about it! Second, all email sent and received must now be archived as critical business documents to comply with Sarbanes Oxley. And Homeland Security wants rights to monitor ISP data streams and stores, and hope no warrants are needed for data older than 90 days.
Free Speech in the Information Age isn't your right to post anonymously on a soapbox blog or newspaper story. It means that, if we agree, I should be able to send any data in any file format, with any encryption, from a computer I am using to one your are on, provided we pay for the broadband freight. There is no reason that any government, carrier, or corporation should have any right to store, read, or interpret our digital communications. Show just cause and get a warrant, even if you think an employee is spying or a student is pirating music.
Email is now a nightmare that we have to wake up from. I don't have a solution yet, but I believe the key to re-imagine email is to realize that our computers and phones are "always on" the net. So we can begin with synchronous messaging (both sender and receiver are online) — a cross between file sharing, SMS texting, and instant messaging — and then add grid storage mechanisms for asynchronous delivery, multiple recipients, and reliability.
Until then, call me.
It seems to me that both of these respondents are struggling with what objects look and feel like in the 21st century, not to mention what they mean, how they are created and who has ownership over all of the above. Fascinating stuff!
A Harvard Business School study looked at job satisfaction. Orchestra players came just below prison guards. Chamber musicians came in at number 1. What’s the difference? The presence of a conductor.
Boston Philharmonic Conductor Ben Zander, speaking at Leaders in London 2007
The leader, according to Zander, is the one who is masterful at creating and holding distinctions. Learning and leading is not about the transference of information, from conductor to orchestra or leader to employee. It is about the opening up of new categories to help people make sense of and thrive in a fast-changing world in which existing categories are not creative enough. "Framemakers create new frames. There is no problem that can’t be solved if you are willing to make a new frame, a new category."
A few times a month, I stand up and do performance poetry in various pubs & cafes around Sydney. Sometimes the punters love it. Sometimes you could hear a pin drop in the pained silence. Thems the breaks. I've been doing this for a year and I'd like to broaden my horizons.
and he is making a generous offer to his readers
Would you like a poem written for you?
Yes. You.
Matt is offering to write an original poem for anyone who reads his blog...he has a some suggestions for getting you thinking about topics and contents and then comes the catch.
Well, here's where it gets interesting. I had thought of charging for this service but I'm not skint at the moment and I'm more interested in fostering creativity in others than tangling with the taxman. So you have to think of something to give me that you perceive as being of equal value to the poem. But what that is exactly is up to you. This is an exchange of gifts. A potlatch
So I think that's a wonderful idea and I'm signing up ... and now I'm wondering about how to brief an artist who has never met me to write an original work of art about a topic I can pluck from nowhere...not to mention what I might offer in return. How exciting!
This lovely Ted Talk from Lakshmi Pratury is a love letter to the lost art of letter writing. She invites us to think about both/and - email and text messages as well as hand written personal notes both of which should be able to sit side by side. It's a timely thought for me. I've noticed that my handwriting is declining in clarity the older I get - while I can rectify my blurry vision with stronger lenses, the only way I can reclaim my penmanship is to take a pen in hand and practice more often. I tend to hand write envelopes even if the contents are business related and the only real notes I've written in the last year are either Birthday/Christmas cards or summaries of meetings I'm involved in that need to be decoded afterwards.. so a thought for the new year will be to create more opportunities for that personal touch. When so much of what I read is about creating better and more personal relationships it seems to me that a handwritten note might just be the most creative technology we have at our fingertips to make that happen.
I like questions. I like them more than answers. Very often when I’m pitching for a piece of work I’ll ask questions as well as offering solutions. Sometimes, the questions we ask say more about us than the answers we provide. Here are 10 questions I’ve used in organisational contexts. I’d love to hear some of yours. Or, I’d love to hear questions you wish you’d been asked.
If you could appoint anyone – alive or dead, fictional or real to the board of directors who would it be? And why?
If this organisation was a religious group – what would constitute a cardinal sin?
What’s the most exciting experience you have had in this company? What were the characteristics of it? How can we create more experiences like that?
What are we not allowed to talk about around here?
How would your favourite TV personality describe this organisation?
If you could pick one person to give you feedback on how you manage in this company – who would it be and why?
If this organisation were a film what would it be called? Which actor would play you?
What would it be like to work for a company that’s the exact opposite of the one you work in now?
Where do the real decisions get made around here?
If you could give yourself a new job title that reflects the actual job you do, what would it be?
I've mentioned this video before - A Vision of Students Today - from a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty and now Professor Michael Wesch has outlined in detail the process that went into creating the piece and it's a fascinating example of reflection, reflexivity and participant observation in action. He outlines a five step process which includes inquiry, formal research, and my favourite aspect of it all is the open ended questions he used to start the process such as:
What is it like being a student today?
So the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.
We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.
The data were captured in a Google document which he has made available here and of course the final video is a masterful piece of work.
The more I consult and the more I'm embedded in my own research the more I know that finding the right question to kick start a process is where the energy needs to go. Finding a creative way of engaging a client unlocks so much energy and very often that means flinging our own hypotheses about what's going on out the window.
Matt's secret life as a poet is well out of the bag at this stage. I told him I was thinking a lot about disappointment right now and he invited me to search Flickr and send him ten images with my comments - but not the search terms I used (you can see the images and the comments here) - I also sent him some of my writing and he has written the following which I love! I particularly like the expression 'imagination mansion'. Now the difficult bit is reciprocating with something interesting for Matt...if anyone has any suggestions..
7H
I draw the plans in hope and 7H pencil
on the back of a flattened cigarette packet (smoking may harm your unborn baby).
They are sumptuous,
stunning,
mine.
They are, however, but a pale shadow
of my house of dreams.
My imagination mansion.
Diamonds and mahogany,
marble in majesty,
but still tastefully done.
I have the plans transferred
onto vellum with gold leaf letters
from the finest oriental calligrapher
stolen money can buy.
The authorities approve my wishes
with only minimal bribing required.
The builders are engaged at
sufficiently exorbitant rates
to appease my ego,
and I plant the opal foundation stone
on the first day of work
to rapturous applause from hired lackeys.
Slowly the house of my dreams
rises from the ground
like the geological event it is;
then burrows under the earth,
a regal mole blind
to its own beauty.
Three months in, there is a stock market correction.
I stand, corrected, humiliated, broke.
The house is half-done and alone.
A perfect ruin already.
I burn the plans
and float away on the smoke.
Good to see the Sunday Times Culture section taking an interest in the wider cultural implications of social media. Kathy Foley’s piece in today’s paper Clique Here (for which I was interviewed) touched on the usual stories (Facebook is costing businesses a fortune in wasted time etc) as well as raising some (of what I consider to be really interesting) questions about the implications for arts and cultural organisations about the way in which people are organising their social lives online. If we’re now living in a ‘drag and drop’ culture what does this mean for the quaintly old fashioned notion of gathering people at 8pm in one venue for the shared experience of theatre performance? Why (still…) are so few Irish arts organisations using social media and web 2.0 technologies to produce and present work not alone using those spaces to publicise that work? What are the implications for the funding of artists who may wish to work in virtual spaces? What may be the implications for physical spaces if so much social and cultural activity is taking place online? What about those clearly defined lines between the ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ artist when it comes to funding and credibility? Oh I could go on and on and on about this and there’s a real need in my opinion for intense debate about these (and other issues). I sometimes feel like I'm talking to myself about this one..I’m hoping Kathy and other (note Irish Times) will write more on this subject over the coming months..
Blogging has been lite the past few months. Due in some part to other commitments and due in no small part to a degree of disillusion on my part as to what I have to offer in this medium. If I pay attention to how it 'should' be done I would regularly offer 10 Tips to Success/remedy/sorting your work and life out and continue in the vein of so many established bloggers by generating a problem/syndrome and offering a remedy.
My disillusion and my increasing optimism comes from knowing that life isn't that simple - if only it was. If only I could diagnose in 5 minutes flat and quickly write a prescription that would make it all better. I see so many consultants falling into this trap in the work world and then watch them wonder why there is so much cynicism about the profession. Over promising and under delivering is the consultant's syndrome. I see so much of it in the blogging world as well - bullet points, simple solutions, increasing helplessness on the part of those of us who simply 'don't get it' and the roundabout goes on.
I've fallen into this trap myself - I do have 'rules' of a kind but I tend to play fast and loose with them - perhaps I've adopted the lingo of the blog world in an attempt to slot in? But increasingly I'm uncomfortable with it and as a result my blogroll will undergo a massive spring clean in the next week or so. My increasing optimism comes from wanting to put down the burden of writing a 'useful blog' and giving myself the freedom to think about abandoning this space altogether - I've no plans to quit just yet - but thinking about it has certainly fired the creative juices again. Perhaps I've ignored my meta rule which is - work with what's staring you in the face instead of trying to ignore it'. So no quick diagnoses or solutions to be found here ... I eschew the bullet points ..and I invite you to slap me on the wrist if I fall into complacency mode in 2008.
Further Edit (thinking out loud) of course this really is a cry for help on my part - I want a simple 3 step plan to solving this dilemma I find myself in - all answers on a bullet pointed post card please.
What a great idea for working with groups? I occasionally use Haiku as a way of focussing on what people really want to talk about - or, as a way of evaluating or summarising a wide ranging process.
So - what would your six word or less statement be? Here are a couple I composed earlier:
I had a conversation with a poet this week about how the value of something like poetry (which, in comparison to many other art forms is a relatively niche area) is captured. Our discussion centred on the ways in which we value experience and how increasingly, that is through quantitative measures. A poetry festival can never compete in terms of numbers with a music festival and a music festival can never compete with a soccer match. So if the numbers are the only way in which we can attach value then we’re losing before we start.
Our discussion evolved into one of how to capture the quality and value of experience. In our social and personal lives we can speak to this with ease and comfort but we find it difficult to attach a value to it when we get “organised”. Of course, this is relevant in the world of consulting and business as well. How can I add value to what it is I do in a way that is meaningful to me, to my client and to what happens as a result of our time together? My poet colleague remarked on the feedback he hears each year which is about the intimacy of the surroundings, the quality of the engagement between readers and audiences and the informal way in which conversations evolve out of the formal task of the enterprise.
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not always possible to know what you know. That space in between is where the real added value happens. That real added value isn’t something that can be sold or promised. It’s something that’s created when the quality of the experience is significant. So the relationship is the thing – and tending to that means
Listening as well as hearing
Knowing when not to talk
Taking time to reflect on what each brings to the relationship as well as what each takes away
Knowing what baggage as well as luggage is carried
Knowing that it isn’t the client’s responsibility to make up for previous bad experiences I have had with others
Knowing that it isn’t my responsibility to prove to the client that I won’t repeat the same damage as a previous consulting experience has
And ultimately
Knowing who I am and what I want out of this relationship
And that’s as well as doing the job I’ve been hired to do.
I often wonder if we were to put as much effort into our personal relationships, in terms of courses, methodologies, evaluations etc as we do into the science of managing relationships with clients, what the world would look like. Is it that we can see the prize in business but can't in our personal lives? I guess I think of myself as being in the business of joining up the dots between both which is why the balance between one-on-one consulting and larger consulting engagements suits my skill base, personality and passion. It also seems to attract clients who are interested in resolving problems while learning the lessons they contain.
Sitting amongst 1000 other people listening to Joe Jackson on Friday evening I was struck by the importance of remembering. I, like many of those present, remembered the first time we heard Is She Really Going Out With Him? Most people knew the lyrics and sang along to the set list..we were transported back to 1979 and the overwhelming feeling was one of nostalgia, belonging and the collective sense of remembering.
Why do we spend so much time in organisations dreaming about the future? Strategising? planning? hoping? moulding ourselves into a fantasy of what the future will bring? Why don't we spend more time remembering? Remembering what brought us together in the first place? the ideas, values and dreams that were supposed to be worked out in this gathering of people.
If more planning processes attended to the reasons why we started this rather than rationalising why we should stay together then like most relationships (personal and professional) we could start from a place of shared commitment..maybe I'm wrong about this .. but sitting in that theatre on Friday night I know that we could have moved mountains out of our shared emotional connection. Remembering is a present tense activity .. maybe we need a bit more of it, more of the emotional connection.. In the meantime...
I’m increasingly beginning to believe that successful consultation processes create, at their core, the possibility for all participants to say “I don’t understand that” or “I don’t know”. And I also believe that the approach I take as a consultant to meeting with consultees sets the tone for how the conversation around knowledge and not knowing is generated. “Not knowing” is one of those hackneyed phrases that lives in the same box as “excellence” (I’m sure you can add to the list)…essentially they are meaningless and meaningful in equal measure.
I’ve had several great conversations this week with people who profess to “not knowing” anything about the arts. Some have even gone so far as to label themselves “philistines”. Never one to accept something at face value, I inquired further and of course all of these people knew much more than they thought they did about the arts….some haven’t had the official “jargon” with which to talk about the topic - others didn’t know that what they knew counted for expertise about the subject.
I’ve deliberately held “meetings” in informal places. I’ve resisted wearing a suit and the informality of the setting has gone some way to an increasing comfort level and much creativity in the conversation. I guess in each of these cases I have started from the perspective that we all know more than we do and the conversation must be structured around the meaning of “not knowing”. In the past few weeks I’ve learned the following from people who have claimed not to know what they were talking about.
We all know much more than we think we do
When someone tells me they “don’t know” I hear “I don’t know how”
All we need is an invitation to reflect on what it is we think we don’t know anything about
Informal conversations are as important as formal ones – in a jargon defended arena informality can create a safe place in which to be creative
If someone tells me “I don’t know” I inquire into what it is they do know
I meant to pick up on this great post from Johnnie some time ago but I've been too busy working on strategies with clients! Seriously though, of course he's right. There's a lot of idealisation around strategies - as though a strategy is a fixed object of wisdom (preferably published in a book) that when published will reveal the way ahead. Strategies are about now, and how we see the future from this vantage point - so I am more interested in cultures of strategising than I am in trying to control the future. Having said that, I've experienced a lot of fear amongst some clients of wanting something different in the future - as though admitting their desire will in some way ensure it can't be realised. Strategising means a degree of making the fantasy real to some extent and consultants can be pressurised into containing that fear by providing the framework (or offering their own wishes and interpretations of what's possible). So I agree with Johnnie and at the same time ask my usual question which is - how are consultants and facilitators used in that process to do a job on behalf of the client system?
Robbins' photographs grace an article in the March 6 edition of the New York Times in which Penelope Green asks What's in a chair? The article is an exploration of the physical spaces in which therapists work and she asks a number of interesting questions - what is the impact on a patient's therapeutic process when the sessions take place in a therapist's house? or when the decor or arrangement of the room gives something away about who the therapist 'really is'?
Few therapists today would contend that it’s possible or even desirable to present oneself as a true blank slate, with an office and treatment style utterly free from personal influence. And so the conversation now centers on degrees of influence and revelation: is a family photograph too much? What about the family dog?
The real question that's not addressed in the article is - why are some therapists (and for this read consultants, coaches etc) so grandiose that they think they can control the patient/client's transference? There's a difference between flaunting one's personal life in the face of clients and bringing oneself fully into the room/relationship. The physical presence we create says as much about us as practitioners as the psychological and emotional one. What's absent from a room says as much about someone as what's present. I don't have a lot of time for practitioners who angst about controlling clients' emotional and unconscious lives with the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) inference that the therapist or consultant's 'real life' is somehow split off and unimportant in building a working alliance. A therapist's life is not a contaminating quality. As a therapist and consultant I work with who is in the room and with what is presented in the room - consciously and unconsciously. I am not and neither do I believe I have the right to attempt to be in control of the client's experience of me. I wonder how many therapists and consultants are really comfortable in a space where the free reign of a client's unconscious is unleashed in the room?
Co-incidentally? Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips is the subject of the Guardian's Writers' Rooms series in which he talks about the physical space he has created in which to write (his consulting room has been photographed many times for various interviews).
One of the unchallenged tenets of consultancy is the concept of confidentiality. In the course of assignments I am often assumed to hold a confidential space and for many years I accepted this principle as a central hypothesis in my work. While the concept of confidentiality is always discussed in therapeutic relationships, I am finding myself more and more curious about why consulting clients are not as ready to have conversations about this concept in the same way. In more recent times I have also become more interested in the concept of confidentiality and how it is constructed as a mechanism for the distribution of power within organisations.
As a society I see an ongoing struggle between what is useful in terms of confidentiality and what is sacrificed as a result of it. The discourse here in Ireland surrounding the Catholic Church and the various tribunals etc – have all contributed to new interpretations of what confidentiality means and constructs. In each of these situations, power and confidentiality appear to sit side by side.
So I’ve been developing a series of hypotheses about confidentiality and consulting
1. The first is that my role as consultant is often defined by the confidentiality I offer – as though I “own” the concept and bring it “to” my clients. My credibility in the organisation can be defined by the way in which I manage and navigate the concept i.e. I retain sole responsibility for it.
2. The second is that the stories that are revealed “in confidence” are perceived to contain the “truth” of the organisation – those stories revealed openly as part of the lived experience of clients are merely one level of engagement.
3. The third is that those who reveal the most “dramatic” stories in a confidential setting can be perceived to be the most “honest” members of an organisation and maintain a powerful position as a result of their ability to “say it as it is”.
As a consultant I am often invited to hear the stories, be influenced by them and synthesise the meaning into something more objective and less personal. In many cases this may result in little sense of ownership and participation on the part of those interviewed in conversations concerning the co-constructed nature of challenges and more importantly the co-constructed nature of moving forward. This places the consultant in a powerful position within organisations, particularly as we continue to live in a culture that values information as currency.
So in recent times I have opened up this whole issue of confidentiality as part of the contracting phase with clients and begun to question what confidentiality means and how I am being used as a container for the client’s secrets. I have also begun to reframe the conversation about confidentiality by asking these kinds of questions:
• What are the limits of confidentiality?
• What would a ‘safe enough’ environment look like?
• How can we jointly create a safe enough space in which we can tell the stories that need to be told and heard in order to move forward?
• How is power distributed in this organisation and how does confidentiality contribute to that?
• How can we begin to distribute empowerment in this organisation?
Tracking and discussing the shifts in the power relationships with clients is a way of holding power ‘for them’ as distinct from ‘instead of them’. It may be necessary for me to hear and hold confidential content while at the same time exploring what confidentiality means for this client and how each of us are being made and re-made in each others’ presence. I now welcome a richer conversation about confidentiality – one that addresses content and context and hopefully one that challenges a few ‘taken for granted’ stories about the power of secret keeping.
The annual meeting of ISPSO takes place in Philadelphia between 20 and 22 June this year. The title of this conference is Meaning and Motivation at work. If you are interested in how organisations 'really work'; and are curious about how emotion and unconscious processes influence how and what gets done then this gathering of consultants, managers and academics is the place to be. Before the main part of the proceedings there are four days of professional development workshops (16 - 19 June) open to anyone to attend. The questions being covered this year include:
How does one effectively market psychoanalytic work?
How does photography introduce new power into understanding organizations?
When consulting or coaching assignments involve working through impasse, what methods can encourage transformation?
What can organizations do to build resistance to corruption in their work?
There are any more fascinating topics - so if you are in the Philadelphia area and are curious about a psychoanalytic approach to working and organising check out the full schedule here.
There's more information about ISPSO here and the full conference schedule is available here.
Sometimes being in a familiar place can be an unfamiliar experience. I’ve been in New York for the past ten days and the place should technically look and feel the same as it always does. But it doesn’t. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m a regular visitor to the city now (at least twice a year) or maybe it’s that I’m taking it for granted – but I think it’s probably the people and relationships I am building here that makes the difference. I’ve always felt that I make more sense to myself in this city. The grass is always greener I know, but there’s a constellation of people, places and feelings that are evoked in me when I’m here that’s unlike anywhere else I’ve travelled. New York is the city that never disappoints – and technically it should. I know the city very well, the ride from the airport should be passé – but the Manhattan skyline takes my breath away every time, each time anew, each time a renewed beginning.
I’m thinking about this in terms of organisations and what would make going to work a renewing experience every day. With so much energy going into staff retention; work/life balance and work related satisfaction I wonder is it as simple as the relationships we build while we’re there? Work is a social place and organisations are networks of human systems. If, like me, you’re driven by curiosity and a need for conversation then the quality of those relationships make or break an environment. I can’t imagine not having my imagination fed through my work. I can’t imagine not having my heart stimulated by relationships.
I know I’ll look back on this trip and see it as pivotal in the relationship I’m having with myself – I look in the mirror each morning and see a difference - the difference is down to the people I know here. If the old cliché that home is where the heart is, is true then the fact that I’m feeling at home here and within myself has to do with that heart connection. I wonder how many of us can say the same of our work lives?
I spent a great evening at the White Institute last night where I shared some of my research on disappointment with a fantastic group of people who in turn, shared their experiences of disappointment in organisational settings. This was the first time I’d spoken about my work and I was very nervous and also very excited to see how my thinking would be received. As ever with psychodynamically informed practitioners, the conversations were rich, pregnant and enormously satisfying – I took away more than I contributed and I’m grateful to everyone who participated in the conversation for their generosity and indeed for the welcome I received.
Apart from the rich learning around my research topic I learned (again) that I speak too quickly when I am nervous and I really need to address this for future presentations. I get in my own way sometimes in my rush to get out of my own way (if that makes sense) and I’m much more comfortable in conversational spaces than I am in formal presentation ones – but perhaps that’s just another thing to think about and add to the mix. So thanks to everyone who contributed to my thinking and thanks to the White organisation programme for the invitation to share some of that thinking in such welcoming surroundings.
Very thoughtful post from Andrew Taylor on the way in which our taken for granted stance in relation to professional arts organisations is changing. He says
Consider, for example, the three-word phrase that often crops up at such conferences: ''professional arts organization.'' This phrase captures, in shorthand, the specific category of cultural endeavor we tend to be discussing. Professional arts organizations require professional management, aesthetic integrity, curatorial control, and stable but responsive structures to hold them together while moving their mission forward. These are the standards that drive our teaching and learning about the field.
But each of those three words -- ''professional,'' ''arts,'' and ''organization'' -- is in radical flux at the moment. That suggests that a phrase (and an assumption) combining all three could mean less and less in shorthand form.
He goes on to deconstruct each of the three words and also says
what happens to the word ''professional'' when works of comparable quality and skill can be conceived, produced, and distributed without expensive or centralized means of production? Flickr has millions of exceptional images, many shot by individuals with no formal training, expecting no pay, and unfiltered by a traditional gatekeeper (curator, publisher, agent)
This is a critically important dialogue that is going to blur the edges of practice. It's going to have profound implications for stated funded organisations (particularly in countries like Ireland where the aspiration to secure Arts Council funding is both fiscal and a mark of integrity. If anybody can make great work then how do we decide who to distribute the funds to?
When is enough enough? San Francisco based Psychoanalyst Dr Owen Renik says
The profession is in a great decline, and I predict the decline will continue. The reason for it, and the reason a corrective is needed now, is that although psychoanalysis began in a spirit of open-ended inquiry, with an orientation above all to be helpful to the patient, it took on a self-perpetuating guild mentality that was its ruin. The possibility is still open to reverse the decline, but it will be necessary to escape the clutches of an establishment that, unhappily, has increasingly gotten away from the original scientific enterprise.
He goes on to say
There is a tendency among psychoanalysts to pursue self-awareness as a goal in itself, rather than a means to an end. Originally, the idea was that the self-understanding that arose as a result of psychoanalysis was unique and impressive and valid because it afforded relief from symptoms that were otherwise impossible to treat.
If you don’t require that self-awareness be validated by symptom relief, there are two destructive consequences. The first is scientific. You have no independent variable to track; you set up a circular situation in which it’s the analyst’s theory that determines what is found in analysis. Many critics of psychoanalysis have recognized this.
The points he raises are interesting in themselves, but they also relate to any kind of inter-personal and professional relationship – when is enough enough? And what kind of methodologies do you use to determine if you your intervention is (a) appropriate? (b) working? or (c) past its sell by date? There is always the temptation to keep clients wanting more. I don’t see coaching in particular as an endless process. There comes a time when you have to say goodbye – often times it’s the coach who has to determine that if a client appears to be too reliant on their coaching process and reluctant to move on and it's sometimes the case that a client is ready to move on long before a coach or consultant is willing to let go.
Renik goes on to say
You should have a criterion for judging whether the outcome is satisfactory, which leaves you free to judge by trial and error. If the treatment seems sufficient, you stop. You can always resume the therapy when and if there’s a need. What might also happen along the way, you might become aware of other things that then you define as symptoms, and you want to address those. Let’s say you have trouble dating, for example. We discover when we look into it that you have trouble asserting yourself, and that applies in a number of areas, including your work life. So we go on, until you are able to make progress there. If you’re not having symptom trouble after that, there’s no reason to keep analyzing stuff. That’s it. You’re done.
I think the same is true of any kind of coaching or consulting, particularly if it’s a one to one relationship and where the identity of the consultant gets tied up with the assignment. If the job is done, it’s done and it’s time to move on – dealing with the personal nature of ending and rejection is something that consultants need to integrate into their practice. I know when I was working as a therapist I had regular supervision where I addressed endings and beginnings on a regular basis. Now that I’m consulting I try to build in some kind of formal ending process with clients – be that a review or other – to mark the transition.
But as Renik says –
there’s no reason to keep analyzing stuff. That’s it. You’re done.
Each time I come to NYC I'm taken aback by the generosity of complete strangers. New York is a city that's dedicated to capitalism and the contemporary but it's also a city with a huge heart that remembers its friends. This time out I met up with some familiar faces - like Terry Semon at the American Management Association whose blog Here we are now what? I've been reading for some time. He, in turn introduced me to his colleague Bettina Neidhardt who has started a blog called Fearless Leadership. Both of these practitioners are at the coal face of integrating theory and practice and making it work outside the theoretical confines of academia. And then I caught up with Dr Jay Parkinson and his colleague Sean Khozin both of whom are going to turn the way health care is delivered in this country on its head by simply challenging the taken for granted 'rules' about the way things should be done. Then there's Mark Hollander, whom I met a few years ago through blogging, who coaches creative thinkers, accommodates complete strangers, and is the best lunch partner a traveller could ask for in this town. These and many others (most of whom should be blogging because of the wonderful insights and stories they carry around about the work) gave very generously of their time and expertise to me on this trip. I'm grateful to them all (you know who you are :).
The final day of any trip is always a transitional one for me - reflecting, remembering and re-entering. Right now I'm reflecting on the depth of emotion I have felt on this trip. I'm familiar with this city, I know it well. I have developed relationships here - but this time out I have felt those relationships growing deeper - I can say with hand on heart that I have very good friends here, some old and some very new - I have found like minded colleagues here and the New York in my mind is both a construct and a reality at the same time. My parting thoughts are about the sense of privilege I feel to have found a place and people with whom I feel so at home, which makes going home a bitter sweet experience.
University College Dublin's School of Art History and Cultural Policy is holding a conference on Ireland’s arts and cultural management sector which will take place on UCD’s campus on 11-12 July 2008 (Friday & Saturday). The conference is entitled 'How are we doing? Managing culture and the arts in Ireland'.
How Are We Doing? Managing Culture and the Arts in Ireland, 2008 is a practitioner-focused forum aimed at giving cultural sector managers, collectively and personally, an opportunity to take stock of their work in the wider context of policy and practice. The conference will enable practitioners to reflect on their management environment, as well as the skills, training and lifestyle issues that affect arts and cultural managers in contemporary Ireland. Sessions include presentations and keynote addresses by internationally renowned scholars and arts managers, and opportunities to meet and network with colleagues in the field.
There is a conference blog here in which you can have your say about the current issues affecting the arts in Ireland and the organisers plan to disseminate the content an follow up via the blog after the proceedings.
I'm pleased to see that my colleague Mike Jolkovski is back blogging again (about time Mike - where have you been?). Mike is a psychoanalyst who specialises in working with musicians and music groups. He has a great post here about How to work with a Prima Donna in which he describes said creature as
A classic Prima Donna is arrogant, vain, high-maintenance, demanding, petulant, and entitled. The entitlement can help them rationalize exploiting and manipulating others. This is especially destructive in bands. A prima donna is by definition not a team player, and will often unrealistically expect to live a lifestyle that hasn’t yet been earned. Alcohol and drugs tend to make all of this this much worse.
He then goes on to outline some strategies for working with Prima Donnas and on the off chance that any are actually reading his post he says
It’s a fantastic relief to be able to let go of that superior business — the world is a lot less lonely that way. Some perspective can help, as can a sense of humor about yourself. Maturity is not a bad thing. A competent psychoanalyst can help. I’m just saying.
Mike has another post called Who owns the band - all useful information for those of us who work with artists. Mike is currently doing research on conflict, power & ego in bands for an upcoming book and is interested in hearing your stories - you can email him yours at this address mj [at] workingthroughmusic [dot] com.
Elsewhere a new friend Bettina is writing about the relationship between religion, spirituality and work. She's even coined a new phrase and goes on to apply it to fearless leadership
My current winning combination seems to be Quantum/Tolle/Chopra/Secret (which really is all one thing, isn't it?! Let me call it Quan-To-Cho-Se for now and tell you about how some of the concepts and techniques really seem to work in challenging management and leadership situation
It's great to see Omani back in the blogging saddle as well and I'm sad to see that Shane Hegarty at the Irish Times is hanging up his blogging boots for a while. Shane's blog was consistently great reading and I'm sorry to see him go. But if there's a day job and a book in the offing I guess something has to give?
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..
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.
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
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
I love this piece by David Armano including his great 'I'm the centre of my universe' graphic
Top 10 Signs You Might Be A "Weblebrity"
Andy Warhol's prophecy was fulfilled with the advent of MTV's programming and widespread reality television. We're now seeing a new kind of micro-fame which lasts well beyond 15 minutes. You don't have to have thousands of friends on My Space, Facebook or Twitter to feel like a "Weblebrity"—you can be the celebrity of your own social system regardless of size. Here are the top 10 signs you just might be a Weblebrity. :-)
1. You have signature clothing such as a certain T-shirt, hat, tie, sunglasses, boas, and occasionally ascots.
2. At internet parties people follow a "drink for link" policy—they buy the drinks, you provide the links.
3. Your internet friends treat you like a star while your real friends tell you to go F@*k yourself.
4. You stopped thinking about yourself as a person years ago. Now you're a "brand".
5. At family gatherings you receive regular taunts like "can the internet superstar please pass the casserole??".
6. You've considered getting your Facebook photo shot professionally.
7. Total strangers you meet at conferences know more about you than your significant other.
8. You fight back the urge to say "do you know who I am?" almost daily.
9. People actually think you're friends with Scoble.
10. No-one in the real world has ever heard of you.
Why does the word ‘evaluation’ strike fear in the heart of many people I work with? As part of a training day with artists and community organisations last week I explored some of the myths about this seemingly powerful concept.
It’s done to us, not with us
It’s about and for funders
It’s a waste of time
It takes us away from the ‘real’ work
It’s negative
It’s retrospective
It’s costly
And on and on the list went – relentlessly negative and profoundly depressing. That’s of course if you are to take those statements at face value. The myths are all about disempowerment – as though evaluation were a bean counting exercise in justification imposed from outside. As Adam Phillips says
So it’s as though if we count, or measure, or notice or quantify we erase the power of the arts to impact on some deep level. And it’s as though there’s one version of events (and indeed one ‘report’) that must be agreed upon. But that’s not really the case. Many of those who attended the training day equated evaluation with description skipping the two important steps in between. Evaluation contains the word ‘value’ and in order to embark on an evaluation we have to connect with our own values – what’s important? Why are we doing this? What are we hoping to achieve? Then we have to take the values, take the descriptions and make some judgements about what happened and why, what didn’t and why and that leads us in the direction of evaluation. Ultimately evaluation is research in the service of learning – from disempowerment (a fear of erasing the power of the work) to reimpowerment (reframing evaluation as a creative learning experience for ‘us’ as well as ‘them’) in the knowledge that what works for one stakeholder may be very different from what works for another.
I had two pleasant meetings in London this week – one took place at the RSA near Charing Cross on Thursday, the other at 1 Alfred Place off Tottenham Court Road yesterday. The RSA is a meeting of minds kind of place – library, lecture room, brainstorming places and lists of awfully famous and distinguished members on the walls in the public spaces. Alfred Place is more business meeting orientated with plenty of lounge space, free wifi, coffee and working space. But what both have in common is that they are private spaces where people of like minds or similar interests can come together to talk. RSA fellows also invite complete strangers into their homes to carry on the conversations in a project called Open Dinner.
The idea is simple. Fellows organise dinner parties, so called OpenDinners, in their own homes around topics close to their heart; and issue open invitations through RSA networks, voluntarily abiding by an agreed set of rules.
The simple rules include
• Dinners need to have a clear theme or purpose.
• All dinners need to be openly advertised in advance.
• There can be as many guests as the host can seat.
• No dinner must cost more than £3 in total per guest – excl. drinks.
• All dinners (guest list, recipes, photos etc) need to be documented.
• Reviews/reflections by guests are strongly encouraged.
Diners post their reviews, comments etc on the site afterwards and so the conversations continue.
a new cultural enterprise based in central London offering intelligent instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life.
You can sign up for courses about love, politics, family or have somebody do a makeover on your reading habits or, take a weekend trip to Heathrow Airport in the company of philosopher Alain de Botton.
The School of Life is
based in a small but spectacular shop on Marchmont Street, a thriving and bohemian part of central London. We've organised the shop as a chemist for the mind, a place where you can try out a variety of cultural solutions to everyday ailments. We sell books, artworks, courses, holidays and therapeutic services.
And it seems to me that there’s an interesting shift happening in the ‘real’ as distinct from virtual world these days – as though these types of spaces are a physical manifestation of the communities of interest/practice that are so common on social networking sites and now they’re working offline as well. I like this idea and I really like the Open Dinners idea – so much so that I’m tempted to launch into a version of it in Dublin. But, bearing in mind that most of the readership of this blog comes from outside of Ireland I’m wondering how I might successfully go about inviting a group of strangers to my home to talk about an interesting array of topics. I suppose half the fear is announcing a list of topics that I find interesting to discover I'm a lone ranger - what do you think?
This opinion piece in the New York Times - Two Silences - (for the full piece click here) has a lot of wisdom about listening - how we do it (or don't) and what we listen for and where. Worth thinking about for any of us in the 'listening professions'.
For the past week, I’ve been staying in northern Finland, just south of the Arctic Circle and a few kilometers shy of the restricted zone that marks the Russian border. This is the boreal forest, a place of almost surreal silence this time of year, when most of the birds have already migrated.
I found myself checking, again and again, to see whether I had gone deaf. I popped my ears. I scuffed a shoe. I tossed a rock into an eddy along the river’s edge. I tapped the guard-rail with a knuckle. There was nothing wrong with my hearing. The human ear is not really meant for straining, and yet I was straining to hear. The silence felt more like an unnatural muffling of my sense
As I stood there, I heard the faint, but quite audible roar of the rapids a half-mile downstream and around a great bend. Why had I not heard it that first night? The answer, I suppose, is that I was too busy not hearing the things I’m used to hearing, including the great roar that underlies the city’s quietest moments. It had taken a week to empty my ears, to expect to hear nothing and to find in that nothing something to hear after all.
There's interesting discussion going on here and here and here about the Open Space model of facilitation. I'm not going to attempt to do justice to the various writers but Johnnie said something on this post about the role of facilitator that really caught my eye
What's more interesting - and harder to express - is a more fundamental question: do we really believe in the idea of one person leading a group of mere mortals through the wilderness? Or is it more realistic to expect confusion, frustration and mess as well as epiphanies and breakthroughs? And sometimes much more of the former than the latter?
There's so much richness in this comment but what struck me is that I don't believe one person leads and many others follow - the act of leadership is a complex one - leaders need followers so to follow is as complex a decision as to lead - sometimes the leader is the one who didn't declare their followership early enough and got the top job by default. So the breakthroughs, epiphanies and frustrations that Johnnie refers to belong to followers as much as leaders i.e. there is group ownership. All of this begs the question as to why bother hiring a facilitator in the first place? What's their (or my expertise?)...in my case my expertise is about process and the most I can bring to the table is my awareness of what's happening in the room (which may be very different from the group's interpretation of what's happening) and in sharing what I see and feel I'm hoping to facilitate the group's awareness of how they are doing business, thinking, creating or stagnating. Most of the time that's about identifying, naming and trying to process all of the confusing stuff that Johnnie refers to above that in being ignored gets in the way of moving forward...
So I agree with Chris that there's really no such thing as objectivity and all I can do is be aware of my subjective self and wonder what tuning into that tells me about fantasy and projection. I guess that's where a psychodynamic understanding of groups is incredibly helpful - allowing the unconscious and emotional processes some air time as useful intelligence about what's working and not. You can't tap into that material if (a) you're being 'objective' and (b) see leading or facilitating as a process that's separate from following and participating. Such rich material in these posts....Now I'm wondering what objectivity might actually look like ... anyone any ideas?
This TED talk from Technorati'sPeter Hirshberg on how the relationship between TV and the Web has evolved is fascinating. There's a lovely piece at the beginning where he interviews a group of 'tweenies' about which is more important TV or the web...you can probably guess the answer...There's also interesting archive footage of Marshall McLuhan talking about the 'global village' which, as Hirshberg suggests is eerily contemporary if you substitute blogosphere...
the global village is as big as a planet and as small as a village post office
and
Every time new media arrives the old media is the content
I would want to promote the idea that it’s impossible to be misunderstood. That when one feels misunderstood, what you’ve stumbled upon is the fact that there are other people in the world. In a way that is the most interesting thing. The better world would be one in which I wouldn’t be sitting there feeling outraged and scandalised at being misunderstood; I would be thinking, ‘That’s really interesting’. I would be interested, in that moment, in seeing what’s coming through, rather than wanting to blow the system apart by my rage. There are affinities in this acknowledgement of difference that I think are better than the outrage if people don’t understand me. I think that rage is adolescent. We shouldn’t want to be understood, we should want to be redescribed.
..the thing we are likely to be affronted by is the thing with which we have some affinity. And there’s a loss of energy in the repudiation of the opposing view. Because your enemy, so to speak, has something profoundly in common with you.
The Arts Council of Ireland is hosting a one day working seminar on the arts, new media and broadcasting on 25 November 2008 in Dublin Castle entitled New Media New Audience? (A disclaimer here - I have consulted to the Arts Council on the organisation of this event). The purpose of the day is to explore the ways in which artists and the public are adapting and adopting new ways of producing, presenting and promoting the arts. The keynote speakers are Charles Leadbeater and Andrew Keen and there will be a workshop presentation from international arts blogger Andrew Taylor as well as a series of panel conversations, some hands on workshops on social media and podcasting and there's also space in the middle of the day for attendees to organise their own discussions on matters of interest. As someone who has wonderedout loud for some time about why so few Irish arts organisations are using social media, I'm particularly pleased that the Arts Council is leading out on this discussion. I hope there will be a diverse group of people there on the day (and there's free wireless internet access so I'm looking forward to participation on as well as offline) taking up the opportunity to explore the challenges as well as the opportunities presented by all kinds of new media.
Registration for the event is free - the conference website is here and you can download a pdf version of the conference agenda here.
John Kelly (RTE's The View and RTE Lyric FM's JK Ensemble) has been confirmed as the chair of the upcoming Arts Council New Media, New Audience? conference at Dublin Castle on 25 November. Registration is free for the conference and it's rapidly filling up so I'd encourage arts organisations and artists to get over and sign up. To whet your appetite a little here are some video clips of the keynote speakers.
Charles Leadbeater at TED talking about creativity and innovation:
and Andrew Keen debating web 2.0 with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
Ever wondered why hiring the wrong consultant is very often the right decision for organisations? There may come a point when you know that the task you’ve been hired to do or facilitate simply isn’t the task that needs to be done – what on earth are you going to do? How are you going to manage the mounting pressure to deliver when all around you the signs are telling you that failure is on the horizon?
Change processes evoke anxiety – whether it’s at a personal or professional level – that’s one reason why the change industry is outsourced to consultants. Anxiety is difficult to talk about or deal with at a conscious level but its presence is felt everywhere in what may look like irrational behaviour and illogical decision making.
You’d imagine that choosing a consultant to manage the change process and deliver on the strategic goals would be important? After all, this is an important stage in the organisation’s development isn’t it? All well and good with our rational hats on. Unconsciously it may be more important to choose a consultant who can’t deliver, thereby protecting ourselves from the anxiety of change by blaming the consultant for not being good enough.
Consultants can be “not good enough” in various ways. They may not have the right people skills to work with the emotional issues that change presents. The IT system will be up and running in no time but people won’t have a clue what’s happening and where they may end up next week. A consultant may simply not have the professional experience to engage with the task at a strategic enough level. The project will be micro managed, take enormous amounts of time and may be discontinued due to excessive costs. The consultant may not have the authority in the system to roll out the changes that have been agreed – s/he may be de-authorised by the board from actually delivering on the task.
In all of these scenarios the consultant will absorb the organisation’s anxiety by feeling unwelcome, not good enough, set up to fail, disappointed, confused and angry etc. Very often, the consultant will be scapegoated for failing to deliver while not knowing that they were hand picked to fail.
When the wrong consultant is picked it may be the right decision for an organisation not ready to deal with change. A ritual sacrifice is often required and on many occasions the consultant is that offering. In this instance failure isn’t failure it’s a strong signal that there is other work to be accomplished before change is actioned. Very often that other work is finding a safe way to address the underlying anxiety that all change evokes. If a company is brave enough it may look to its “failures” as rich learning about the need to connect with the very real and very human fear of change.
This is a 20 minute interview (in two parts) with Ken Robinson put together by British Reporter Riz Kahn in which Robinson outlines his criticism of our western education models - created he argues for the industrial age and predicated on an outdated idea of talent. In part one of the interview Robinson argues for parity of esteem for the arts alongside traditional subjects such as maths and science. When the rhetoric in organisational life is one of innovation the attention paid to creativity in the education system is fairly minimal - certainly here in Ireland the arts play a poor second, third and fourth to more 'valuable' subjects that are quantifiable in examination results.
In part two Robinson goes on to talk about creating the conditions in which creativity can flourish and he also rather poignantly talks about how many people go through their formative education experiences never finding out what they are really good at.
'Can't we have a stationary table?' thunders Katharine Hepburn, 66, to one of the producers on The Dick Cavett Show. Hepburn rarely did interviews. When she did, she wanted it just so. In this case, in prep for the actual recording, Hepburn went on set to veto a wobbly table ('nail it down!') and joke about the garishly russet-coloured carpet: 'Gee whiz. Put a rug over it. Who's idea was that?'
American video-artist Viola has carved out a very definite niche: ultra slow-motion films, imbued with an almost painterly quality, and often tackling twin issues of mortality and spirituality. This early film fixes on a woodland pool and a man frozen mid-air over it. With intimations of birth and death, it's ultimately both creepy and moving.
Though German-born photographer Hans Namuth didn't much rate Pollock's work, he was fascinated by the man. Having taken over 500 photographs of him already, he turned to film. His resulting documentary captures the artist dressed head to toe in black, a cigarette hanging from his lip, drip painting on to glass. Best of all is Pollock's curiously droning narration: 'The method of painting is a natural growth out of a need.'
213 people attended the Arts Council’s New Media, New Audience? conference at Dublin Castle yesterday – we hoped for 150 but quickly surpassed that. I’m biased but I think it was a useful and successful event – certainly ‘good enough’. Damien thinks so and then there are views from Emily, Fearghus, Eoin, Conor, Dermot, Dermod, Electric Mill and the Model and Niland too – I’m sure there will be others as the next few days unfold. Andrew Keen and Charles Leadbeater kicked us off with a robust interrogation of the merits and demerits of web 2.0 and certainly set the context for much of the discussion that took place throughout the rest of the day. John Kelly was in suitably wry form and kept manners on the proceedings throughout. In chatting with Keen after his presentation he was surprised (and not too disappointed I imagine) that he had such a sympathetic hearing – he’s used to being the devil incarnate at these events. But like him or love him he’s talking about things that matter to artists – like making a living, keeping some kind of control over your work, and asking questions about the value of the curated space and the value of artistic integrity. Charles Leadbeater showed a small clip of this video and then walked us through how this young man might have been met by the BBC if he’d had this idea and wanted to get it produced through traditional channels. Much hilarity ensued and the point was well made – traditional institutions have to change how they commission and produce and with whom and I think this is going to be a massive challenge for Irish arts and cultural organisations over the next few years. I don’t think Keen and Leadbeater are too far apart from each other and while the presentations were polarised both are passionate about creativity and equally passionate about increasing access to more of it. It does amuse me sometimes how resistant people can be to opposing or different views as though there must be a consensus for us all to live happily together.
It was a particular pleasure for me to spend time over the past few days with Andrew Taylor whose blog I have been following for many years. He gave a wonderful presentation on the Metaphors We Manage By and as a fellow systems thinker, invited us to dispense with boxes, circles and other containers to concentrate on the making of the art and the most helpful and useful ways of doing that. He talked us through the ecosystem as he sees it and there were references to mushrooms also – (I can’t do justice to it but Andrew has promised to let me have his slides in due course) his, and other presentations and the various panel discussions are audio streamed on the conference website here (some of the audio quality is poor because the radio mics weren't used as widely as we would have liked). Over the next week or so we’ll up date the site with slides and feedback from the Your Space sessions.
So what surprised me? Firstly the speed with which the conference sold out. I have had more approaches from people in the last week wanting to get their friends/colleagues into the room and I believe that to be a first – I’m generally not that popular! Secondly the really strong engagement, interest and enthusiasm of delegates who attended. Sure there were moments of boredom, tiredness and crankiness – but overall the conversations I overheard were excited ones. Thirdly the make up of the delegate list – we had the traditional attendees at an Arts Council event but the presence of bloggers, social media specialists, pr, technology, marketing firms and generally interested people made for a very different kind of conversation and engagement. It simply isn't cool to talk to ourselves any longer.
A couple of meta issues stood out for me also – the first is the predictable challenge that happens at every event of this kind that I have ever attended to the ‘organiser’ or those in charge to ‘do’ something about next steps. It’s as though convening a space for a conversation is a disruption of some kind and can’t be valid unless there’s a strategic plan in place. Invariably the responsibility for that plan is with the Arts Council or some other agency ‘in charge’. This challenge came predictably in the final plenary from a delegate. Was the Arts Council going to set up a forum or make some other intervention etc? Andrew Taylor suggested that the something next was already happening in the room and perhaps the delegates might like to think of how they could continue the conversation by taking charge of it themselves (a man after my own heart in that regard). Damien Mulley got into an interaction (just one Damien:) with someone about wanting access to publicly funded broadcast content to distribute, curate and play with. When one delegate asked him ‘why?’ there was an audible sigh in the room. And during the keynotes earlier in the day a delegate challenged Keen to stop being a critic and propose a way forward’ – Keen replied he would when he had one.
These types of comments really depress me – it feeds into this profoundly anti intellectual space we’re very fond of occupying in Ireland. It’s as though ideas for their own sake are useless unless they have some utilitarian function. Beauty, intellect, creativity, emotion – can’t be good unless we have a plan for how to use them. What’s profoundly depressing to me is that these comments should arise at a conference stuffed to the gills with artists and creatives – if the rule is that creativity, ideas, beauty and the intellect have to be useful before being conceptualised then I think we’re in bigger trouble than we imagine.
But, as they say in business, that may be a high level problem – those comments were certainly in the minority yesterday and the difference is always part of the richness. It was a pleasure to meet so many old and new faces and I’m looking forward to following and contributing to the conversations on an off line as they unfold. My thanks go to my colleagues, the panellists, moderators and keynotes all of whom were such a pleasure to work with. Now to important matters - how can we get John Kelly to start blogging? ideas?
I always look forward to Adam Phillips' interpretation of fairy stories at this time of the year. So, from Saturday's Guardian, here's (part of) his take on Cinderella
Freud's infamous question "What does a woman want?" is both silly and mildly insulting, implying as it does that women in general are incapable of knowing what their wants are and making them known, aside from the obvious fact that all women are different and want different things at different times. What Freud really wanted to know is: what do mothers want from their children?
If Cinderella was a story about what women want, the answer would be: women want a mother who does everything she can to facilitate their pleasure; a mother who relishes her daughter's pleasure rather than envies it, or competes with it, or trivialises it.
To pursue her pleasure, a woman has to imagine that there is another woman who enjoys and sponsors this pleasure. In this sense, her fairy godmother, in her unlikeness to her wicked stepmother, is the most important person in a girl's life. Without her, at least in the terms of the fairy tale, she can never leave home and become a woman; without this fairy godmother - the part of herself that will do whatever is necessary for her heart's desire - she will go on believing that her pleasure always harms another woman. Indeed, she could even believe that her pleasure is in harming another woman, whereas this is just sometimes the consequences of following her heart's desire. So guilty is Cinderella about her own pleasure that when she does finally marry her prince, she finds two "noblemen" for her ugly stepsisters.
The moral of the story is: girls must learn not to be intimidated by envy, not to make themselves unenviable by diminishing themselves, and that this requires a certain magic, a ruthless unwillingness to accept things as they are. Rebels, Sartre wrote, are people who keep the world the same so they can go on rebelling against it; revolutionaries change the world.
For the author, and possibly the reader, of Cinderella, the question is not "what does a (the) woman want?" but "how does she want?" How does she go about disregarding her own wishes? What is her wanting like if she can live two such disparate lives, as drudge and princess? Drudgery, the story persuades us, is a bad solution to the problem of wanting. It is not satisfaction the woman fears, but the envy of her satisfaction. Men are the least of a girl's problems, at least from Cinderella's point of view.
there's a grown up conversation happening about the arts the Sunday Tribune publishes this pointless article. Fearghus's very gracious response is on his own blog here.
This is my contribution (or should I say Adam Phillips' contribution) to the current end-of-the-world scenario we appear to be in the midst of right now.
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.
Everyone I know is scared. Workers’ fear has generalized to their workplace and everything associated with work and money. We are caught in a spiral in which we are so scared of losing our jobs, or our savings, that fear overtakes our brains. And while fear is a deep-seated and adaptive evolutionary drive for self-preservation, it makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but saving our skin by getting out of the box intact.
Ultimately, no good can come from this type of decision-making. Fear prompts retreat. It is the antipode to progress. Just when we need new ideas most, everyone is seized up in fear, trying to prevent losing what we have left.
I am a neuroeconomist, which means that I use brain-scanning technologies like magnetic resonance imaging to decode the decision-making systems of the human mind. It is a messy business, but a few pearls of wisdom have emerged about the fear system of the human brain and how to keep it from short-circuiting sound decision-making.
The most concrete thing that neuroscience tells us is that when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off. The first order of business, then, is to neutralize that system.
This means not being a fearmonger. It means avoiding people who are overly pessimistic about the economy. It means tuning out media that fan emotional flames. Unless you are a day-trader, it means closing the Web page with the market ticker. It does mean being prepared, but not being a hypervigilant, everyone-in-the-bunker type.
I DON’T care what your business is, but if you think it will eventually come back to what it was — your brain is in the grips of the fear-based endowment effect. What I am doing is looking for new opportunities. This means applying neuroscience discovery to realms where it hasn’t been used before.
So much of the art of facilitation is simply getting out of the way. The more I get out of my client's way, the more they generate the content they really want heard. I'm sure there's a mathematical formula or a two by two of some kind to quantify the relationship between the facilitator's activity and the creativity of the group. I'm learning this more and more every time I work with a client group. I'm also realising that the real role of the facilitator is about minding three things
Task
The big picture and the overall reason for the gathering. I have this in my mind as the day goes on. My role is to make sure we achieve the task we have set ourselves.
Time
There's a finite amount of time available to us and within that there are choices about how that time is managed and used. My role is make sure the time boundaries are adhered to and the use of the time is consciously acknowledged. If a group decides to use the time in a different way then they need to take responsibility for that in the moment.
Territory
Making sure we have a safe conceptual space and a good enough physical space in which to work (and ensuring both are respected) is a key part of my role.
Essentially I'm minding the boundaries of the conversation and getting out of the way so that my clients can have the conversations they want to. It's amazing what happens when you simply get lost!
This is an interesting way for a national cultural institution to channel their resources into the artistic community when swinging cuts are making it difficult for arts organisations to think clearly about what the next year will bring. (There's more on the Kennedy Center initiative in this Washington Post article).
Andrew Taylor writes eloquently about the systemic conditions around the Kennedy initiative and suggests that
The crisis in the arts, or any other industry, is an ecological one. Any crisis can certainly benefit from unilateral and independent action. But a more resilient and encompassing response would also include recognition and interconnection of the entire ecosystem that provides coaching, counseling, mentorship, and responsive strategy support to organizations and leaders at the edge of collapse.
Thinking outside the (black) box may be mainstreamed as a result of this recession - again and again I'm finding myself in conversations with practitioners who are struggling to reframe this downturn as an opportunity for self reflection and creative ways of sharing the resources do exist - bartering, mentoring, a spirit of generosity and myriad other non cash alternatives are coming back into fashion and I believe it's only a matter of time before we see some genuinely innovative ideas emerging about organisational design and structure. It occurred to me while reading the Kennedy Center website that an international initiative might be worth exploring - currently you can sign up to be a mentor but only if you're based in North America - wouldn't it be interesting to widen out the boundary and collaborate across geographical boundaries? Watch this space..
TED 2009 is just about drawing to a conclusion and in this talk from author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love) she muses on the unrealistic expectations we heap on artists and geniuses....She asks (wryly) 'what is it about creative ventures that seem to make us afraid of each others' mental health?'. Are creativity and suffering inextricably linked? She
shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.
Kindness is in danger of disappearing - it has become our "forbidden pleasure" and something "we feel consistently deprived of" - so say Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor in their new book On Kindness. The book is an impassioned plea for the return of kindness in a selfish age...and was probably conceived and written before the world as we know it began to unravel. The book outlines the history of kindness from Roman philosophers through to contemporary psychodynamic interpretations of the concept (in particular those of Freud and Winnicott). At its heart is an invitation to rethink compassion, generosity and kindness as essential to our well being and it's such a timely intervention as we see the financial markets and the 'greed is good' philosophy implode.
So what would our work environments look like were we to take up Phillips and Taylor's invitation? Might forgiveness and empathy; sympathy and patience sit alongside kindness? Might our rush to 'rules and regulations' abate for a while in an attempt to resolve difficulties through discussion? I don't have any ready answers but I do know that an invitation to place kindness more central to our engagement with co-workers can't be a bad thing and might reap different kinds of profits in the longer term.
Theatre Forum has launched the programme for their annual conference The Way Through and yours truly is sitting on a panel discussion entitled The Uses of Crisis.
Are we tired of talking about the recession yet, about the economic crisis in which the arts is mired? We may well be, but tough realities remain, and what's needed most of all is the kind of conversation in which each speaker in this session specialises: frank, forward-looking conversation, an interrogation of those realities, a staking out of priorities and of strategies by means of which to find the way through.
I'm looking forward to the opportunity to think creatively with creative people about the opportunities presented by the current economic climate (or the Crisitunity as Homer Simpson might say). I'm also really interested in gathering the views and opinions of readers as to what this economic downturn might have to offer to artists and creative organisations. If you have any thoughts or impressions, feel free to mail or leave a comment. Theatre Forum's conference is on 10 and 11 June at the Wexford Opera House.
In the midst of all the doom and gloom appears this story in today's Irish Times.
SOME PEOPLE go to extreme lengths to pursue a dream, but Taka Hayashi went further than most. Nearly a decade ago, Taka came out of a Riverdance concert in Tokyo convinced he could tap the boards too.
He was a 28-year-old IT consultant who had never danced. But the concert had changed his life and nobody could convince him otherwise, not even his taxi driver dad who called him “mad”.
“I realised at that moment what I wanted from my life – to be a Riverdancer,” he says.
Matthew Stewart's essay on the value and worth (or not) of management education in The Atlantic is worth reading. It's a bit of a rant about management theory and education but he does ask som provocative questions which should be relevant to anyone thinking of embarking on a management training course - particularly in the current climate where the old models don't appear to be working very well right now.
After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?
He then goes on to say
Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling, you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey, these are people we’re talking about! And the debate goes on. Ultimately, it’s just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group.
The tragedy, for those who value their reading time, is that Rousseau and Shakespeare said it all much, much better. In the 5,200 years since the Sumerians first etched their pictograms on clay tablets, come to think of it, human beings have produced an astonishing wealth of creative expression on the topics of reason, passion, and living with other people. In books, poems, plays, music, works of art, and plain old graffiti, they have explored what it means to struggle against adversity, to apply their extraordinary faculty of reason to the world, and to confront the naked truth about what motivates their fellow human animals. These works are every bit as relevant to the dilemmas faced by managers in their quest to make the world a more productive place as any of the management literature.
Couldn't agree more!
But I particularly liked one of his closing paragraphs in which he says
There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.
Knowing what we don't know is an undervalued skill - one that I believe will become more valued as this current recession/depression/repression unfolds...
I met up with a consultant colleague of mine last week for lunch. We were discussing the dilemmas presented by the initial client encounter and the (sometimes) "impossible" tasks we are asked to perform. In his case he'd been asked to solve a dilemma he knew, and they knew, couldn't be solved. He seemed a bit stressed out by the impossible task and wasn't sure how he was going to proceed.
We kicked around the dilemma for a while until I asked him - what's your dilemma telling you about the client, the client's system and their dilemma? That seemed to be a lightbulb moment for him becuse his experience of dealing with them, was in fact, their own experience transferred on to him. While I'm glad the conversation was useful for my colleage it did get me thinking (apropos a previous post on whether coaches are coachable) as to whether consultants are consultable to. I would love to run some workshops for Consultants - particularly those working on their own, where we could explore our innate intelligence and how working with our emotional reactions to clients tells us more than we imagine. I'm not sure of the format right now - online? offline? Or whether consultants would be interested in this kind of intervention. I would love some feedback from those of you who work on your own as to how you reflect on your practice? and whether you would be interested in a workshop designed to help you capitalise on your emotional intelligence about clients?
Andrew Taylor asks a deceptively simple question over at The Artful Manager - what's your business model? It's a question I imagine a lot of the attendees at Theatre Forum's annual conference might usefully attempt to answer. Andrew quotes from Seth Godin's blog in which the elements of a business model are distilled into four questions.
2. We don't and we can't (nonprofits are designed, after all, to deliver goods and services at below their total cost). So we access revenue beyond the traditional market in the form of gifts, grants, and subsidies (while we also reduce our costs through volunteers, low wages, deferred maintenance, and number shuffling).
Questions 3 and 4 are a wee bit more problematic. Question 3 in particular is a complex one because as well as commoditisation and a price wars (although we don't see too many of the latter) there's also the competition between all other cultural activity (and none!) and the perceived value of the arts in relation to health, jobs etc. I haven't seen much evidence of theatre practitioners really re-evaluating the marketing model - as Andrew suggests - it tends to be retrospective and generally speaking we ask people to take enormous risks in parting with their cash in return for the promise of quality and satisfaction. On top of this traditional marketing strategies continue to be used and social networking, new media are eschewed in favour of more tried and tested methodologies.
I hope as part of the Theatre Forum Conference this week we get an opportunity to delve into some of these issues in more detail.
Fascinating presentation from Dan Gilbert author of Stumbling on Happiness at TED. There's a great Q and A at the end of the talk that's worth watching also. Gilbert makes a number of points that are relevant to the global economy right now (and particularly relevant for cultural organisations). He says that satisfaction or goodness is directly related to our capacity to estimate the odds of getting what we want and the value we attribute to the getting of what we want. Research suggests that we're not great at either set of estimates. But the point that stayed with me was about our tendency to compare what we have/want to the past as distinct to the possibility in the future. What's familiar will always be what we reach for...many, many questions here about how we re-imagine ways of working if our tendency is to compare to the past as distinct from looking to newer ways that have yet to be imagined.
Foresighted are most resilient
Focus and nimbleness are more important than size or discipline
Missions remain fixed
Significant financial losses
Endowments have dropped 20-35%
Corporate contributions down 20-50%
Foundations and individual giving down 10-25%
Programs are being curtailed and/or adjusted for more popular appeal
What I found most interesting though was that their research found that organisations fell into the following categories:
Proactive (about 25% of interview sample): These organizations are aggressive in dealing
with the recession, both short and long term. They have projected budget and program
scenarios across multiple years; they have examined every budget line item and made
surgical and strategic cuts; they are keeping their boards, staff and key stakeholders well
informed about the challenges and the choices they are making. The leaders of these
groups are creative, energetic, and nimble. Some report actually being energized by the
current situation, stimulated by the pressure to think in new ways.
Informed (roughly 60% of interview sample): These organizations are actively
addressing near-term challenges. They have reviewed and adjusted current year
budgets. They are tracking expenses and income more closely than in previous years.
They are not yet thinking about long-term impacts, waiting until Spring to see what
happens to ticket sales, contributions, touring engagements, and other revenue. These
groups appear to have less experience with scenario planning than the first group, and
less data on which to build those scenarios.
In denial (roughly 15% of interview sample): These organizations are living in the present
and operating “business as usual.” Some reported that they have not felt the economic
downturn yet and expect this year’s budget to resemble last year’s. Some appear so
distracted by day-to-day pressures that they have not considered the larger
environment and longer-term view.
I wonder how those response would compare to the Irish situation? Only 25% of organisations consulted are looking beyond the short and near term....More interesting information to consider at the Theatre Forum Annual Conference today and tomorrow.
There's a summary of the research here (in pdf and powerpoint formats).
Q. Being a cynic, as so many of us are these days, I imagine that everything that can go wrong in a situation will. What does your book have to say about the low-level anxiety most of us experience?
A. You probably think it would be good if you could feel perfectly happy at every moment of your life. But we have a word for animals that cannot feel distress, anxiety, fear, and pain: The word is extinct. Negative thoughts and emotions have important roles to play in our lives because when people think about how terribly wrong things might go, they often take actions to make sure those things go terribly right. Just as we manipulate our children and our employees by threatening them with dire consequences, so too do we manipulate ourselves by imagining dire consequences. Sure, people can be so anxious that their anxiety is debilitating, but that's the extreme case. For most of us, anxiety serves a purpose. It is what keeps you from sending your nine-year old to the rough part of town one night for a loaf of bread. If someone could offer you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that is perpetually stuck on NORTH is worthless.
The Irish Times picks up on Theatre Forum's Annual Conference in Wexford 10 days ago. I'm quoted liberally as inviting the Irish theatre community to reflect on the 'good times'. The points I tried to make on the panel discussion were:
When I think of crisis I think of world poverty, famine, terrorism etc - I think applying the word crisis to the economic downturn (particularly as it relates to the arts community) may be a bit of an exaggeration. If a reduction in state funding is a crisis then the sector is operating under the assumption that there's a form of stability at work which only gets 'more stable' rather than less. That's an illusion - change is the default, not stability - so what's going on that we're surprised?
Complacency and satisfaction are not good bedfellows for the creative impulse. All creativity needs a boundary or limitations - how else can difference and newness be created? I asked the Irish theatre community to reflect on what the great artistic projects of the past 15 years have been and in several follow up conversations with colleagues later in the day we were hard pressed to think of examples. I excluded buildings from the mix.
And speaking of buildings - property developers have been widely criticised for our economic gloom - yet the Irish arts community has willingly embraced its own inner property developer - the proliferation of capital development throughout Ireland in the past 15 years was unrivalled with little attention paid in a lot of cases to ongoing running costs, audiences or the availability of work for presentation - what then of our own contribution to the current crisis?
So rather than crisis I think in terms of disruption or disturbance - and the opportunity contained therein for reflection and redirection.
I'm currently facilitating a series of conversations with Ireland's theatre makers on ideas about a new policy for theatre funding. My client is the Arts Council of Ireland and I've been privileged to have been involved in many of these types of consultations in the past. The current financial climate is weighing heavily on everybody's minds here right now and it's fair to say that there isn't enough existing state funding to resource the current state of the arts so how do we even think about succession and new generations?
The conversations are wide ranging - moving between the very real cuts in budgets that have been visited on organisations and artists and the opportunity that this climate presents for re-imagining how theatre could be resourced into the future. There are lots of good ideas, no consensus, much disagreement, a good dollop of disappointment but also an emerging sense of collaboration. There has always been collaboration in this community but some of the ideas emerging now are an extension of the informal arrangements we've seen in the past.
As ever, it's balancing the tensions and looking after the boundaries that is the most interesting area for me as facilitator. Holding on to what works while also creating a flexible structure that can respond to the 'wild card' as one contributor remarked. Not only viewing 'emergence' as a young or new artist phenomenon; creating environments where mid career is something that occurs at any point in an artist's creative life; investing in what works really well while also recognising that some structures may be temporal.
The conversations haven't come up with firm answers but there's certainly a richness of conversation that extends beyond the immediate needs of this generation happening. The question I have in my mind as I facilitate these discussions is - what kind of theatre (or arts) infrastructure are we envisaging in 20 - 30 years time? and what do we need to do now to ensure we get there?
