Innovation – Page 19 – Graham Chastney

Technology is making us rude

Another day, another conference call, another set of instant messages, some SMS messages and lots of rudeness.

I would like to confess that today I have:

Joined a conference call without introducing myself.
Had an Instant Message conversation with someone I have never met and not even said “hello”.
Looked at my BlackBerry while talking to someone, to check an email.
Left a conference call to speak to someone else, while the call was still running, and not said anything. I just walked away.
Created a slide deck while on the same call – for a completely different project. I nearly had to confess to this rudeness and say “I’m sorry, can you say that again”.
Sent an SMS text message to someone without any pleasantries at all.
Ignored a phone call – because I knew who was phoning.
Stopped listening to someone sat next too me, because I was giving more attention to the PC screen in front of me.
Turned up late to a conference call and didn’t apologised for my lateness. These calls never start on time, do they?
Ignored a whole set of Instant Message conversations that people are wanting to have with me.

In short – very rude, but very normal.

You might argue that some of this is not really rudeness at all, but that would be putting a gloss onto something that is becoming an endemic issue.

Anyone else like to confess?

Procrastination

Some days, there are more important things to be done:

I could spend hours doing this…

Random Thoughts for the Bank Holiday Weekend

I try to put together a well constructed post with something meaty to it at least once a week, but this week hasn’t been one of those weeks, so here are some random thoughts and stories:

After spending most of a day in a room with no light and very poor air-conditioning I again realised how destructive the working environment can be to productivity.
Team dynamics are constantly in play. Just because you’re “performing” in one place doesn’t mean you aren’t “storming” in another.
After sitting in a freezing cold office with the desk that backs onto a window I again realised how destructive the working environment can be to productivity.
Power and heating are still huge issues for IT. Many a fancy gadget is ruined by the need to carry around a power supply.
There are still far too many places without good mobile network coverage. It cannot be assumed that everyone, everywhere has, or can have network access. And in some of them you can’t even make a phone call.
The topics I think are going to be contentious – often aren’t. It’s the things I think are simple and straight forward that always catch me out.
Some things have annoyed me for more than 20 years.
After starting a group on Facebook for a reunion I realised the power of visual memories once I posted some old, old pictures.
I still hit ; when I mean ‘ far too many times.
Twitter is good for simple responses, but terrible for a conversation. This was made evident when two conversations overlapped with hilarious consequences – were we talking about underpants or Chrome?
It’s very difficult to type on a BlackBerry when your thumb is bandaged.
After reading a set of documents that didn’t answer a single one of the questions that we being asked I realised that people will spend days and weeks doing anything, rather than go through the agony of asking for help.
Having been misquoted by a number of people I was reminded, again, that people don’t always hear what is being said.
When being asked for my advice I know that on many occasions people are really asking me to take a decision for them, even when it’s their responsibility to answer the question.
One of my many faults is that I always expect people to know what I know. It’s irrational, I know, but it’s something that I do.
And finally for today, here’s a little experiment for you. If you draw the capital letter Q on your forehead leaving you finger where you finished. The side of your forehead where your finger ended up tells you something about how you see the world – I’ll let other explain.

Statistically Predicting the World Cup

Apparently you can predict the outcome of the world cup on the basis of GDP:

I really like infographs, even if I think this one owes a little too much to statistical analysis of random situations.

There’s always a chance that they are right, especially as it came out with one of the safe answers for overall winner – Brazil 🙂

Story, Biography and Metaphor

I’m looking through a document today that is 744 pages long and i know one thing for sure, I’m never going to read this document.

At home I have another book that I am reading, it’s quite a long document. I am definitely going to read this document.

What’s the difference between the two: story.

One is a business document talking about repositories, artefacts, entities, capability and continuum.

The other is a biography of Guinness, that’s right a biography of the Dublin based brew. It’s a story of the founder Arthur Guinness, about his children and their impact on an organisation and the broader Irish society.

I’ll wrestle with one of these documents to get to the valuable lessons that it needs to teach me; the other book will teach me things without me even knowing it.

I was watching Griff Rhys Jones in Hong Kong on ITV’s “Griff’s Greatest Cities” last night (before turning over for “Outnumbered”). He was sitting in a class doing complicated mental maths in the blink of an eye. He was staggered by the speed that these kids could add and subtract complex number strings. What was the secret of their success, it was the teaching method. Their teacher had brought them up to use a special kind of abacus. Over time the teacher had removed the abacus and told the kids to imagine it. When doing their maths the kinds just pictured the abacus and read out the answer that it gave them. He had found a very powerful metaphor and the kids were exploiting it to great effect.

The other night I noticed a book on the bookshelf that I hadn’t read in a long time. It was a set of stories about a bear. This bear has taught me a number of lessons about life. This is a bear who says that he has very little brain, but there is wisdom to be found in his dealings with the other characters.

I spend most of my life simplifying things so that people can comprehend the essence of them and sometimes it’s to help them to subscribe to the vision that is being painted. I try my hardest to find a a story, a biography or a metaphor to communicate. These analogies have two very powerful results, they allow people to comprehend, but they also live on in peoples thoughts, they allow people to explore beyond the simple into the more complex. They can venture to the end of the metaphor, even if it breaks at that point, they’ve learnt something, if it doesn’t they can venture further. It’s a bit like a seed starting to germinate, as the leaves grow skyward, so the roots grow down into the ground.

I have one simple request, lets stop writing 744 page documents of business speak, let’s tell more stories.

Adding more people won’t fix the problem!!!

Dilbert picks up on what is still a surprisingly common issue:

We’ve known this for generations, quite often, if your project is in trouble, the last thing you need is some help. The promised help rarely turns into help, it nearly always turns into more problems.

The issue here is simple, people aren’t like RAM, they can’t just be plugged in and put to work instantaneously. People need to be brought up to speed, they need to be managed, they need somewhere to sit, they need access to things. They come with an overhead that is higher than their value at the beginning.

There are things that you can do to make each of these things easier, but they need building in from the start.

If you add a number of people then you are likely to have to go through the whole forming, storming, norming, performing team development cycle all over again.

Even if people were like RAM, you still don’t come for free, adding one person to a team doesn’t add one person’s worth of value, it adds more overhead to the management processes taking away value elsewhere.

Then there is the final, and probably the most significant issue, people are all different – different skills, different capabilities, different relationships. Adding the right person can make things better, but it’s unlikely that you have access to this person, if you did they would already be working on it. More often than not, the people you are talking about adding are the spare people. The spare people are definitely not the ones you want, they are likely to be spare for a reason.

If you still don’t believe me read The Mythical Man Month it was first published in 1975, but the wisdom contained within it still applies today.

(For those of you know me, yes this book is why I keep going on and on about Conceptual Integrity)

Let’s hear it for the New Dorks

If you understand half of this – worry:

“The geek is now damn cool”

[Hat Tip to Church of the Customer]

Caffe Business Observations

I’ve spent this afternoon working in a Caffe and it’s been an incredibly interesting experiment in people observations.

My seat is in the corner of the room so I can see most of what is going on and I’ve been here for a couple of hours so far.

It’s a weekday in one of the UK’s larger cities and it has been busy in here all afternoon. There was a slight lull about 14:00 but other than that every table has had someone sitting at it.

Of the 13 tables I can currently see, four of them are occupied by single people (mine included). Only one of these people is doing anything “social”, everyone else is typing on a keyboard or writing in a report, or something similar. At least four other tables are occupied by groups of people having business meetings; some of them more overt than others.

The first thing I notice about this working environment is how insecure it is.

I know something about this city and something that is going to happen here that is all “hush hush” as the advertising executive said to the sales person he was dealing with. I also know how much it costs to advertise in the sales person’s magazine.

I know when the two people in the table opposite are next going to meet and where.

I haven’t had to do anything special to gain this information, I’ve just sat here and overheard.

The other thing I’ve noticed is how essential the mobile business device has become.

I’m the only person using a fully fledged laptop, everyone else is making arrangements and taking notes on either an iPhone or a BlackBerry. Contacts are being exchange, meeting arranged, even sales figures discussed, all on the small screen.

Another observation is how attentive people are.

I attend lots of business meetings where people look as if they would rather be sat on the toilet. That’s not the case for most of these meetings, people are talking, interacting, negotiating, illustrating, gesticulating even. They are engaged in their business. It could be that the type of people who come to such a place are the type of people who are naturally engaged, but I suspect it’s more likely that the atmosphere in here is more conducive to debate and discussion.

The final observations is that I haven’t seen a single tie all afternoon.

All of the business is taking place in casual dress, some smarter than others.

Meeting Efficiency: Oh how true

I hate to think how many meetings I have sat in that have basically been people catching up on email with the odd nod to the presenter.

We have a presentations style at work just for this occurrence – it’s the non-stop meeting style. We present at breakneck speed without any stops and without any time for questions. At the end we say “so is that agreed then?” and in many instances the answer from the non-listening participants is “yes”.

Found In Translation: The Case for Pictures in Business

One of the most popular blogs on this site is the one on Rich Pictures. I think that pictures are fabulous, so I really liked Dan Roam’s article on ChangeThis called Found In Translation: The Case for Pictures in Business.

In this article Dan tells a simple story about getting directions in Moscow and the four different ways in which he could have been given the directions.

The Narrative
The Checklist
The Map
The Landmark Sketch

and Dan describes each one of them:

All four of these sets of directions are correct. Following any one of them should in theory get us to the Gagarin Museum in the same amount of time. But here’s my question: I’d like you to look over the four options again, really think about it for a moment, and then ask yourself this: if we actually were in Moscow, which option would you prefer?

The powerful communication methods are the map and the landmark sketch – without a doubt. We all know it’s true, so why do we use so many words in business?

I believe that for practical, business-oriented problem solving—when you and your team need to address something right in front of you right now, the visual options—the map and the landmark sketch are without question the way to go. The fact that we so rarely see these kinds of pictures used in business is why I write my books.

Over the last two days I’ve filled sheet after sheet of flipchart paper with diagrams. We’ve been talking through a solution with a customer, a solution that takes thousands of words to document. The documents don’t communicate, they just document. I had presentation slides and charts, but I knew that they wouldn’t communicate either. Simple blocks and lines on a chart with a commentary – that’s what communicated.

There’s something very powerful about a conversation held over a piece of paper, and I think it’s something intrinsic in who we are, but something that we suppress as adults. My reason for saying this is the difference that I see in the way that children react to paper table-cloths and the reaction of adults. What do children do with paper table-cloths? They write and draw on them, they get creative. What do adults do? They protect them, even though we know that paper table-cloth is going straight in the bin as soon as we have left. Why is that? One of the reasons, I think, is that the children’s need to be creative is fresh and unimpaired, as adults we’ve come to suppress it so much that we don’t even think about it.

If you haven’t come across ChangeThis before then you really are missing out on a treat. I really like their manifesto.

Social Networks – Unexpected Results in the Snow

I continue to be surprised by how deeply engrained in our day to day life social networking has become. I had another example of this last week.

We’ve been having some extreme weather in the UK over the last few weeks (just to be clear, this is extreme for the UK, it’s normal for other places in the world).

We had for the third time this year a lot of snow starting last Monday, travelling from Scotland and working its way to the South – or so I thought.

We’d already had our snow on Monday evening and Tuesday morning so continued with my plan to travel north to Edinburgh on Wednesday. Having check the weather forecast and road information I concluded that I’d be fine to travel. No more snow was expected and the roads were clear.

This is where social networking kicked in – on Tuesday I had twittered:

Tomorrow I am supposed to be in Edinburgh – what do you think the chances are?

As it happened I had a lovely drive up the M6 as far as Carlisle, enjoying the view of the snow over the Lake District. Passing Carlisle, it started to snow and by the time I’d got to Lockerbie we were down to a single lane and managing to do little more than 20mph. At that point I again twittered:

Did I get to Edinburgh ? No. I got to Lockerbie before turning back.

That evening I received a phone call from my Mum – who isn’t on any social network. She was wanting to make sure that I was OK and that I was home.

I had deliberately not twittered that I was setting off because I didn’t want some people to worry, but still my Mum had found out even though she has no simple way of seeing my updates.

How did she know? She’d been speaking to my sister, who’d seen my original update in Facebook. That wasn’t something I was expecting.

I’m going to have to be even more careful in the future.

http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?set_id=72157623171858968&text=Winter%202009/2010
Created with flickr slideshow.

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