Author: grahamchastney

The Return of the Artisans

When we have a Saturday with nothing in the diary (which doesn’t happen very often) there are a few things we like to do as a treat. One of them is to travel to nearby Lancaster; once there we will stroll through the market and visit a favourite Indian food stall where they make the most fabulous Samosa. The lady behind the stall, Sanah, is a character and greets everyone with a smile and a vigorous welcome. Having collected our Samosa we walk a little further to the nearby bread stall with wonderful smells wafting up from the selection of home-made speciality breads. We’ll wander a little further and look in other places, but these two stalls are a must. Having completed our shopping we’ll head back towards the car, stopping at a local speciality coffee shop along the way.  There we’ll choose a particular coffee from a particular country, we’ll watch the Barista weigh out just the right quantity of beans, see them ground to the correct coarseness for the particular method of coffee brewing that we’ve chosen. The coffee will be expertly made and presented with a smile.

Each of these traders are artisans – they are skilled in their craft, they produce high quality outcomes and use high quality ingredient. They’re not part of huge corporate machines, they are small businesses selling to other small businesses and individuals. They aren’t constantly driving to produce the cheapest goods they can, there is a standard to what they produce that comes at a price and in its time. Each of these artisans has a passion for what they do. These businesses are anchored in a historic way of trading – these businesses are the future.

You might think that the future is going to be dominated by large corporations turning us into ever more homogeneous versions of each other, but there’s another trend building and it’s a much more human one.

It’s worth taking a detour into a quick history lesson for a short while. Back in the 18th Century we Brits birthed an industrial revolution named after the transition to mechanized manufacturing and the rise of the factory system that was taking place. Prior to this time production had mostly been done in small workshops environments but now people had to attend to the machines in large factories. This industrialization of production completely revolutionized the way we live and resulted in a mass migration from a rural society to a primarily urban one. There are towns in the UK that only exist because someone decided to build a factory or a mill there.

The initial phases of the information age also relied upon the centralization of people to enable access to expensive machinery. Over the last five to ten years the need for people to attend to gain access to information systems has all but vanished in many industries. Large scale production environments have become largely automated. Another way of working is emerging – the artisans are being reborn. The artisans aren’t just baking bread or creating crafts they are also doing data science, designing, developing application, producing films and many other roles.

These people no longer need to go to a centralized facility to do their work, they can work wherever they are and sell their good to the whole world. That doesn’t mean that they won’t travel, just that they don’t need to travel.

In 2013 I highlighted the move to sole-traders and small businesses that was occurring in the UK at that time, since then the transformation has accelerated.

“Overall the number of SMEs has increased by 1.8 million (up 51%) since 2000.”

bpe_2014_statistics_growth

We are in the midst of another significant change in working habits, I struggle with the word revolution because it’s so often over-used, but perhaps it’s applicable to this change. The impact of automation and robotics on this world is still being worked out, but that’s another subject for another day.

Office Speak: Greenfielding

“We need to do some greenfielding of this process”

This one is relatively easy to take apart, but you do need some prior knowledge of the green-field metaphor.

In the UK a greenfield is a fresh, new, undeveloped field; we even go as far to describe areas of greenfield land as green-belt and have specially designated areas for such. Green-belt development is normally regarded as a bad thing.

The opposite of greenfield is brownfield. This is land which has previously been developed and carries some legacy from that development. In the physical world a brownfield development might be an extension to an existing facility or the addition of a new facility within an existing development.

This concept has been taken on in a number of contexts giving us, for instance, greenfield software development projects. A greenfield project is fresh, new and undeveloped; starting without any consideration to what has gone before it and ignoring any of the constraints. Likewise software development projects that add to an existing capability are known as brownfield projects.

Greenfielding is, therefore, the process of starting afresh. I’m not sure why starting afresh isn’t used but that’s the mystery of most Office Speak. I think previously we would have used the phrase “we need to start from a blank piece of paper here.”

“We start each day with a blank sheet of paper in front of us, and what we write on it is up to us.”

John Larkin

On the train in 2015

I’m on the train travelling home from London after a two day workshop. It’s time to read fiction and to let the mind wander. Normally I would have my headphones in but today I think I’ll listen to the world around me.

The suited man across the aisle from me is snoring. His white shirt is still adorned by a tie, but it’s warm in here and the collar is unbuttoned and the tie is loose. He’s the only person I can see who’s wearing a tie on this business dominated train as we hurtle through the countryside. He’s clinging on to his beaten-up blackberry and I wonder whether he’s set himself an alarm so that he wakes before his station. He looks strangely out of place in 2015.

The man behind him is tapping away on his iPhone and has been since we left Euston. What can be doing that’s taking so long to type, or perhaps he’s playing a game? I can’t see from here. His attire is more current with his casual shirt carrying its corporate logo.

I’m sat at a table with a much needed power supply that’s reinvigorating the various, barely adequate, batteries that my mobile technology utilizes. I’m wearing a shirt today, but haven’t worn a tie for business meetings for a long time.

Opposite me another businessman works his way through an over generous food bag as he watches rugby on his oversized bright blue laptop with his headphones in. I thought he was going to be a problem when I arrived; his bag, laptop, Kindle and Samsung Galaxy covered the whole table. Thankfully he soon constrained himself to his side of the table.

Behind me there’s a discussion between three businessmen and one businesswoman around another table. They’re in various logoed polo shirts and are trying to work out whether it would be possible to disappear in a modern world where the network knows your every move:

“You just can’t do anything without leaving a footprint somewhere.”

“Just imagine what Facebook already knows about you”

“How many different cameras have captured images of us today?”

The businesswoman isn’t too bothered about the thought of disappearing as she taps away on her pink-clad smartphone completely ignoring the men, who she clearly knows but has probably heard enough from already.

We are accompanied on our journey by a young Asian couple who are swapping stories and laughing as they pass each other their iPhones. They’re also plugged in trying to water the lithium. It’s hard to tell whether they are business people or on a tourist journey. Where would we be without flex?

There’s a cloud free sky outside and bails have been randomly scattered across the golden-brown fields. The sun is setting and the colours are a beautiful spectrum of oranges, yellows and blues. The sun will soon be set and I will soon be home.

I'm being a bit less social

I suspect that I’m like most people when I say that my on-line social activity has gone through a number of phases of evolution.

If you were to look through my Twitter feed or Facebook newsfeed from a few years ago you will see that they are much more active than today. One measure of this activity would be frequency of posts, which has dropped significantly. Another measure would be the number of direct posts where I write something directly in Twitter or Facebook, which has all but stopped. If you could measure openness you’d also notice that I’m less revealing about my emotions, my location, my family, my faith even. I’ve made a conscious choice to be less publicly social.

There are a number of reasons for this, some of them are about simplicity and basic privacy. One of the major reasons, though, has been the realisation that we are all public figures now and I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

At first I thought that being publicly social would in turn give the opportunity to be famous, I’m not talking about global fame just recognisable-in-my-own-little-world famous.

Then I started to see some people become social-media famous and it wasn’t a good thing to witness.

At one end I saw situations where people were trying to make a serious point only to be misunderstood and ridiculed. This isn’t a new phenomena, fame has always been like that, Francis Bacon put it like this:

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

At the other end of the spectrum I saw people’s lives torn apart by being exposed to the shouting-mob. Jon Ronson researched the experience of many people including  Justine Sacco who he highlighted in this TED talk (below). The research resulted in him writing a book with the title: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

There are many cases of ‘ordinary’ people being thrust into the public glare and shamed:

I’m not condoning any of these actions, personally I wouldn’t do any of them. What is scary is to see that these are ‘ordinary’ people thrust into the public glare with a few clicks on a screen and the amplification of the social platforms.

I’ve never liked mobs and I certainly don’t want to be part of one, or even associated with one. So, for now, I’ve decided to be a bit less public.

I did wonder about going far more private on my settings, but I’ve decided against that for now.

"DON'T WASTE WORDS…"

DON’T WASTE WORDS
Jump to conclusions

Millican Dalton

Inscription from the entrance to The Cave Hotel which Millican occupied in Borrowdale. The camping holidays that he offered to people were described like this:

“The Programme will be seasoned to taste with further real adventures and experiences such as the following:

A Dinner of the Savage Club on a Desert Island.
Exploration of a Cave.
Lost in the Mountain Midst.
A Thunderstorm in the Mountains (weather permitting).
Dangling over the Precipice.
Astride the Razor Ridge.
Ascent of the Needle.
Varied Hairbreadth Escapes”.

Because it's Friday: Match Head Bomb at 2500fps – The Slow Mo Guys

In the long list of things not to try at home, the Slow Mo Guys create and film and Match Head Bomb.

It’s a smaller version of the one produced by the Mythbuster team who used 1,000,000 match heads.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing…"

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing:  the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl was a world famous neurologist and psychiatrist – and also a survivor of Auschwitz.

Chris Milk: How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine

One of the methods that I use to keep up-to-date with technology is to listen to all sorts of podcasts and then to look into some of the people that they highlight.

Today I was listening to a TED Radio Hour episode where they highlighted the work of Chris Milk and his use of Virtual Reality as a way of deepening the connections between people.

The films are beautiful and moving, even without a VR headset:

Quote: “Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination…”

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been ploughed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. Environmentalists are always arguing that those butterflies, those grasslands, those watershed woodlands, have an utterly necessary function in the grand scheme of things, even if they don’t produce a crop. The same is true of the meadowlands of imagination, time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space – for wilderness and for public space – must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.

Rebecca Solnit
Wanderlust

Office Speak: Cadence

Why do words and phrases seep into the psyche of an organisation? It’s a question that has puzzled me for some time.

One word that has recently become the ‘in word’ is: Cadence.

I have no idea where it came from and I had assumed it was one of our internal words. Recently I’ve heard it used by other people in other organisations so decided that it’s use must have become more widespread, though not commonplace. One of my tests of whether something is office-speak or normal-speak is to ask Sue (my wife) if she knows what it means. When she looks blank I know that I’ve spent too long on conference calls.

Cadence has a several meanings, all of them point towards rhythm or repetition:

  1. Rhythmic flow of a sequence of sounds or words:the cadence of language.

  2. (in free verse) A rhythmic pattern that is nonmetrically structured.

  3. The beat, rate, or measure of any rhythmic movement: The chorus line danced in rapid cadence.

  4. The flow or rhythm of events, especially the pattern in which something is experienced:the frenetic cadence of modern life.

  5. A slight falling in pitch of the voice in speaking or reading, as at the end of a declarative sentence.

  6. The general modulation of the voice.

  7. Music. a sequence of notes or chords that indicates the momentary or complete end of a composition, section, phrase, etc.

None of these meanings relate directly to the way it’s used in my world. It’s normally used in a phrase similar to this:

We need a regular cadence for these meetings

Previously we would have used the word schedule, but over the last 12 to 18 months this appears to have been superseded by cadence. I have no idea why we decided to change, but change we have. Perhaps there’s an interesting social experiment that could be created to understand why groups of people change the words that they use.

There’s a couple of terms I’m still struggling with:

  • Cost wire-brushing
  • Bamboo connection point

Any ideas?

Because it's Friday: "Magical Porta Potty" by Improv Everywhere

It’s festival season in the UK and I would love to see someone pull this stunt:

"Performance ratings data within companies is all bogus"

Most of my exercise is accompanied by podcasts. Whether I’m out for a walk or in the gym I’m likely to have someone speaking in my ears.

This morning something went “YES!!!” in my head when I heard these words:

“Performance ratings data inside companies is all bogus. It doesn’t actually measure what it says it’s measuring. Which, of course, is hugely problematic because we end up promoting people, and paying people, and training people, and deploying people based on those rating data and they’re invalid.  “

These are the words of Marcus Buckingham speaking on The Future of Work Podcast in which Jacob Morgan.

Sometimes you hear something and you know intuitively that there’s something significant about it, and that’s what happened to me this morning.

I’ve been subject to a number of rating systems in my time, some of them with forced bell curves others not; some of them have had a few points of assessment others with many areas of assessment. These assessments have always been done on an annual basis with the occasional mid-term review. None of them have made a significant difference to what I’ve done day-to-day and they’ve all felt like they were being done to tick-a-box for the corporation. I’ve always been diligent in ticking that box because the numbers in the assessment have made a difference to the money in my pocket but little else.

There have been a number of high profile organisations switching away from these systems:

Marcus’ own article also cited Deloitte – Reinventing Performance Management.

The Performance Review systems that I’ve experienced tend to link together development and reward. Often they are the only conversation about development and reward that an employee has with their manager. Everyone knows that this shouldn’t be the case, but it’s what happens.  I can’t remember a time when a Performance Review has resulted in a change of my Development Priorities. The times that I’ve developed the most have always been whilst working for an effective team leader, hence some other words from the podcast resonated:

“I strongly suggest the future of work should be built around the practices of what the best team leaders do anyway, and they do not do a one every six-week conversation…what they do do is check in with each person each week about the work, it starts with the work.” Marcus Buckingham

We may not be in a position to change the performance rating system, but we can all make a different to people’s development in the places where we lead.

I like Marcus’ principle of 5 minutes to tell me about 5 things for the next 5 days.