Category: Learning

Watch out for the Choke Levers | Working Principles

I’m showing my age in this post. If you are younger than 30 you probably have no idea what I am talking about.

Do you remember having a choke lever in your car? Do you still look for it in your current car? When was the last time you gave a thought to the fuel mix going to your engine? If it was recently, I suspect it was because you were driving a vintage vehicle, or more likely a petrol lawnmower, or generator. If you don’t know what a chuck lever is/was then here’s a quick overview: What is a choke and what does it do?

My last car had an automatic handbrake, it took me a while before I trusted it. When I got a new car without it, I had to relearn the process.

There’s a quote that is regularly attributed to Henry Ford:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Many of the projects that I work on are changing things for people and often those project starts with a phase called “requirements gathering”, or sometimes refered to as “user needs.”

I find this phase fascinating for many reasons, one of the main ones being the process of looking for the “choke levers.” People tend to state their requirement in the terms of what they currently do and the tools that they use. This isn’t surprising it’s what they spend much of their day doing and most of them aren’t being paid to think outside of the framework into which they have been fixed.

We aren’t so good at abstracting our requirements into actual needs.

Let me explain using the Choke Lever as my example.

Take this as a pProblem statement: “The Choke Lever is difficult to pull out.” This may well result in a requirement of “A Choke Lever that is easy to pull out.”

With the privilege hindsight you look on these and smile. You know that the answer to the problem isn’t an “Easy Pull Choke Lever.”

What went wrong here? Was the problem statement wrong, or the requirement? Neither is particularly wrong, it’s just that they both failed to go far enough, they both focussed on the Choke Lever. The problem and the need were constrained by the current framework, neither saw beyond the Choke Lever, neither saw beyond the need for faster horses.

Knowing what we now know we can draw out a far more sophisticated set of needs for the Choke Lever problem. We can see that the higher level need is to “start the engine”, and that in order to start the engine we need to “change the mix of fuel and air into the engine” and all of the associated needs like “adjust the mix back once the engine is warm.” A whole set of needs that gave us automatic chokes and computerised engine management systems.

But wait even these more sophisticated definitions of need are subject to the framing of “the engine.” Why do you need an engine? What about electric vehicles. I don’t need to start the engine in my electric lawnmower.

When we ask people about their requirements we need to recognise that they will communicate the problem they see before them and there are times that we need to help them to see beyond the frame and reach for a better outcome.

Header Image: This is the view from Edinburgh Castle on a late summer, early Autumnal day.

Deployment is just the first step – Adoption takes longer | Working Principles

A little personal story on the difference between deployment (getting something out there) and adoption (getting people to use and value it).

Last Friday morning I awoke feeling a bit strange, and aware of a raised heart rate. I’d only just woken up and being British decided that the best response was to wait a while. We don’t like to make a fuss about nothing, and this was bound to be nothing.

A short while into my wait I remembered that my new Apple Watch had an ECG App on it and wondered whether now was the time to give it a go. I clicked on the App and watched as it showed a trace of peeks and troughs which I assumed corresponded to what my heart was doing. Some 30 seconds later the App popped up to tell me that my heart wasn’t behaving quite as you might expect. Still being British I decided to sit a while longer because this still wasn’t worth making a fuss.

Having waited a little longer (well, an hour) everything settled down and it was time to get on with the rest of my day.

A couple of days later I decided that perhaps I should put my Britishness to one side and do as the ECG App had instructed me, which was to contact a doctor, or, more specifically I decided to contact the reception at my General Practitioner. I wasn’t sure quite how I was going to describe the events from the previous Friday, I still didn’t want a fuss, and I certainly didn’t want an ambulance needlessly turning up at my door. In the end I decided to start with what my Apple Watch had told me. I then described it again in a slightly different way because this was clearly something a bit unusual. The lovely, now confused, receptionist put me on hold while she went to speak to someone. A few minutes later she came back with a plan, she would send me a link where I could describe (again) what had happened and post some pictures from the App, they would then assess the information and get back to me.

I dutifully did as requested and awaited a phone call, which came a couple of hours later. The next phase of the plan was for me to go in to see a Nurse Practitioner, which I dutifully did.

The Nurse Practitioner was lovely, she asked me to describe the situation, again, which I did by showing here the ECG traces on my phone. She never really engaged with Apple Watch App data preferring instead, as I was expecting, to listen to my chest, take my pulse and check my blood oxygen. These were all normal, as I had expected they would be. The data on my phone was irrelevant to the conversation because, as the Nurse Practitioner said, she had no knowledge of whether the App was accurate or not. The deployment of the ECG App may have given me some value, but it wasn’t going to be able to give any value from this point on.

I have no idea what it takes for a diagnostic device to become adopted by the professionals of the NHS, but it was clear that this hadn’t happened for the Apple Watch ECG App, even though from what I can tell the data it produces is highly accurate – over 98%. I may have deployed a highly accurate piece of technology, but it hadn’t been adopted by the broader system. The broader system needed to carry on doing what it had always done. I’m sure this will change but it’s going to take time, it wasn’t that long ago that medical professionals didn’t trust the widely available electronic blood pressure machines, now they use them as their default tool.

The conclusion of the visit to the Nurse Practitioner was – more tests.

I little while ago I wrote about how long it was taking us to adopt our newly deployed kitchen – a similar challenge of deployment v adoption.

There are hundreds and thousands of technical solutions that have been deployed in businesses across the world with little or no adoption. There are plenty of piece of technology in our homes that sit dormant in cupboards awaiting their transition to the local recycling facility, eBay, Facebook Marketplace or equivalent. How many Apps sit unused on our smartphones? Most of these had a plan for deployment, but only a limited plan for adoption. One of the problems is that deployment is easy to measure, adoption is subtler less tangible, and often takes far longer than you think.

Businesses use a famous misquote from the 1989 film “Field of Dreams” – “If you build it, they will come.” You do need to build something for people to come, but even if they do come it doesn’t mean that they will hang around and enjoy the stay. Adoption isn’t the natural outcome of deployment.

As a maker of things, the objective isn’t to have the things deployed it’s to see them provide value, to see them used. We need to look beyond the first step of deployment and accept that the long journey of adoption is where the value is.

Header Image: This is York Minster on a lovely day of wandering around ancient streets filled with American tourists marvelling at a pub that was nearly 400 years old and spending vast amounts of money on Harry Potter merchandise.

Be a Good Customer | Working Principles

At the weekend I was walking into a small shop where I have been several times, it’s a bit of a favourite of mine, a place I’ve recommended to many people.

As we arrived something was clearly going on between the proprietors of the shop and a male customer who was being asked to leave. Eventually one of the owners stood up and pointed out to him that as the shop was Private Property and he had been asked to leave, that he was now trespassing.

Yet the man stood there, all the time complaining about something. In time the man was ushered out of the shop onto the pavement from where he continued his complaining from, telling the owners that they were rude and needed to go on customer care courses.

With a flourish one of the owners of the shop closed the door on the man, turned to us, sighed heavily, and put on a smile.

We looked at the proprietors and asked them if they were OK, they said they were, but you could tell that it hadn’t been an easy encounter.

We chatted a bit longer, they gave us some great advice on my purchase, helped me to find exactly what I was looking for, and we left happy. They were genuine, pleasant, helpful, amiable, expert, and professional.

What was the difference in these two encounters?

“The Customer is always right” or “The customer is king” are two phrases that are familiar to anyone who has done any form of customer care training. They represent ideas popularized by department store owners Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker and Marshall Field. While the original intention behind these phrases may have been a good one, in recent years I’ve seen much more of their ugly side with people demanding their right to be “king” and using the phrases as an excuse for some awful behaviour.

Personally, experience tells me that I get better outcomes from people when I’m a good customer.

These are my working principles for being a good customer:

  • Be polite and respectful – There’s no need to be rude, the person serving you is a person.
  • Listen – When your supplier is talking it’s best to listen, it’s the only way you are going to learn something. What you learn may save you from a whole heap of trouble.
  • Takes advice – The person serving you has probably seen your need before. Your desire may feel unique to you, but it’s likely to be something already known for which there is already a great answer.
  • Be clear about what you want – There’s a skill in asking for things. Too precise and you miss the advice. Too vague and asking clarification questions can become embarrassing for the supplier.
  • Make decisions – Your job as a customer is to decide, it’s not the supplier’s job. Sometimes the right decision is to not decide, but don’t waste people’s time doing it.
  • State your time expectations – So many people expect immediate service, but some things take time. If you need something by tomorrow, you need to state it, you can’t expect your supplier to discern it.
  • It’s not all about business – The person supplying you has a life outside work. A chat can be so valuable.
  • Time is valuable to you and them – In your interactions be mindful of the time that you are taking. There’s a need to be balanced here – don’t outstay your welcome, but good service can take time.
  • Ask good questions – I think we’ve been there before.
  • You don’t need to be rude to be firm – When things aren’t going to plan you may need to be firm but that’s no excuse for being disrespectful.
  • Gratitude is free – When you receive what you need saying “thank you” doesn’t cost anything.
  • A smile is free – In most situations a smile will make a huge difference to the conversation. This is also true for voice only interactions, people can sense a smile in your voice.

In business many interplays don’t involve a retail transaction, but they are still customer-supplier interactions. When you need to ask someone for advice you are the customer, they are your supplier. When you need your boss to approve something you are, again, the customer. When you send a message to someone asking a question you are a customer.

Every time you are a supplier, you are also a customer. When someone needs you to answer a question or is looking for your advice, they are telling you something. Even if all they are telling you is that there is a question that needs answering you are a customer of their feedback.

How much healthier would our workplaces be if we were all better customers?

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

Peter Drucker

Header Image: This is Ullswater as the rain leaves over Kirkstone Pass, having overstayed its welcome on a summer’s day.

‘The book might have given you an idea, but it didn’t change your lives.’ – Raynor Winn

A short extract from Landlines by Raynor Winn:

From nowhere a couple flop down in the heather next to us.

‘Well, hello there. We’re walking the Pennine Way, going north just a few days at a time. But you, I know you’ve walked a long way.’

I look down at my clothes, muddy, ripped, smelling of dried bog-water. ‘I know, we do look a bit of a mess.’

‘No, you can’t get away with it like that. I know who you are. Your book changed our lives – it changed the way we live our lives. We would never have given ourselves the time to just walk, not before we read your book.’

I look at the couple, heading towards middle age, but glowing from the wind, sun and enthusiasm. ‘The book might have given you an idea, but it didn’t change your lives.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because books don’t change lives. They can change how you think, but it’s you that changed your life. You allowed the book to influence you, then you chose to change how you live. The power was always in you, the book just opened the door.’

‘Ooh, you make me feel quite powerful, quite in control.’

‘I think we all are, if we allow ourselves to be. Do you want a jelly baby?’

Raynor Winn, Landlines

Header Image: This is Castlerigg Stone circle looking out over St. Johns in the Vale and towards Helvellyn on a strange August day of showers and a little sun. These stones have stood here for several thousand years, and a bit of precipitation isn’t going to make much difference to that. Why did someone put them here, there are lots of theories, but no one really knows.

Questions are Powerful | Working Principles

There’s a line in a U2 song:

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

U2

Most of business seems to be focused on answers, fast answers, definitive answers, simple answers, answers that lead to action.

Not much of business is focused on asking the right question.

Without the right question, we can’t get the best answer.

A big part of my current role is to be the person that people come to for answers. Quite often the questions I am asked are defined in simple terms with people looking for a specific answer. I’m grateful for this, people know I’m busy and don’t want to have a debate about something that is likely already covered in a document, or I can answer in a couple of sentences.

Although the answers are often straightforward sometimes experience tells me that there is something behind the question. When I get that feel my response to the question is often another question. Most of the time all it takes is a simple “tell me more?” from which the conversation hopefully opens into something more valuable.

I say hopefully because asking questions is tricky, particularly in written form.

In his book Nonviolent Communication, Marshall Rosenberg dedicates a whole chapter to the skill of “Observing without Evaluating” in which he summarizes:

“The first principle of NVC entails the separation of observation and evaluation. When we combine observation with evaluation others are apt to hear criticism and resist what we are saying”

The challenge with so many questions is that they come with hidden evaluation. I try to avoid the simplest question “why?” for that reason. While I may be genuinely asking “why?” what I risk people subconsciously hearing is “why are you asking that, that sounds like a daft idea, don’t you know better?” the result being that an open question instantly becomes a closed one.

Despite the risk of questions becoming loaded with evaluation I still think that they are the best way of broadening a conversation. Stepping back and ask the question is a powerful thing.

Another area where questions are powerful is in documentation. Returning to my previous post on writing for the reader, I’ve found that many people think in questions. I now spend as much time writing FAQ as I do on the formal documentation. We are no longer in a time when people read documents end-to-end and I’m not sure that we ever were.

What people need is to get an understanding. Knowing that the answer they seek is somewhere in the middle of fifty pages isn’t immensely helpful. Having the answer to a question that points you somewhere else can be more useful.

There is a challenge here, people who live by questions only know the answers to those questions. Their knowledge is limited to their ability to ask good questions. If you don’t know something exists, how are you going to know to ask about it. If you ask people at the beginning of a project what questions they think should be in an FAQ you’ll find that they are extremely limited.

I find that people who live by questions tend to miss the big picture and that robs them of the ability to rationalise other answers. As a way of breaking that down my FAQ answers sometime expect people to work for the answer, and in so doing they hopefully get the broader view.

Questions are everywhere, sometimes the answers are easy, sometimes they are more difficult, or even unknown, but questions are always powerful. I believe that the wise people of the future will be the ones who know how to ask good questions.

To question a wise man is the beginning of wisdom.

German Proverb

One who is afraid of asking questions is ashamed of learning.

Danish Proverb

To a quick question give a slow answer.

Italian Proverb

Header Image: Time for a swim in a somewhat chilly Devoke Water.

Writing for the reader | Working Principles

It’s time to start a new series, called Working Principles – a few ways of doing things that I find make life more successful when I follow them. I’m not sure how many of these there will be, I’ve never written them out before, but having started I already have several titles listed out.

In our education system we are taught to write essays. The purpose of authoring an essay is to demonstrate what we know about something. In education we write for our purposes – to pass an assessment.

When I started work, I would write in the same way, documents full of information that I knew, but I never stopped to consider the purpose of writing and who I was writing for. I was several years into my career before someone pointed out that I should flip my perspective around and ask a couple of questions when I write:

  • Who am I writing this for?
  • What do they need to know?

Simple questions, but it’s clear from the many communications that I read that they aren’t common questions. In my mind I have a phrase which applies to a lot of business writing “never mind the quality feel the width.”

There are so many documents, emails, presentations which completely miss the needs of the person they are trying to communicate with. A plethora of words missing their purpose. A mountain of lexicon going to waste.

These are questions I’ve tried to stick to over the years of my career and they’ve helped me and hopefully helped the people I’ve been writing for.

When the reader is in focus, I use fewer and simpler words.

When the reader is front-of-mind I write things in a different order. Putting the need first.

When I focus on what the reader needs, I can leave lots of unnecessary information out.

(When I write a blog post the person that I am writing for is mostly myself 😊)

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Header Image: This is the view from the local hills, just a few minutes drive from my house.

Graham’s WFH Tip #12 – Keep an Eye on Incremental Change – Marginal Gains and Losses

Things change, all the time, some changes are for the better, some for the worse, but how many of them go unnoticed?

I recently got a new laptop having become aware that my previous laptop was becoming annoyingly slow. It was annoying, but not so bad that it was top of my priority list to sort. Even having received approval for a replacement it still took me weeks to go through the process of getting it ordered.

(Part of the delay was my own expectation of how draining the ordering process would be – I have to say that it was straightforward and only took a couple of days.)

I knew my old laptop was a problem but when it arrived, I was shocked by the difference a new device made to the way I work.

The previous device was memory constrained and would take several seconds to open an application, being memory constrained I couldn’t leave many apps open, hence my day was filled with hundreds of delays. The impact of these delays wasn’t limited to the time it took to load an app though, those few seconds would regularly interrupt my flow of thought, I’d get distracted by another task and never get back to the previous one. At the end of the working day, I would regularly find half written communications that were waiting for some additional information that I’d gone off to retrieve only to be distracted along the way.

This degradation in my working didn’t happen all at once, it built up over weeks and months. I would handle each slice of performance degradation with a minor change to my working process. Each slice being layered onto the previous ones and before I knew it, I was walking through treacle puzzled by how long things were taking.

If anyone is thinking about the analogy of the frog in boiling water here – please don’t, it’s not true. Marginal Gains is a better analogy, but even this doesn’t quite work because of its focus on optimization in a particular area. There aren’t many of us who’s working role requires us to become optimised in a specialty, most of us are generalists and it’s in that broad spectrum of activities where we need to be effective. Take communication as a broad example – I need to be productive at communicating. Reducing the time it takes for me to write an email isn’t going to have much impact on my overall productivity. There is a point at which authoring an email can be so slow that it detracts from my communication productivity, but spending time drafting emails is only a proportion of what I do. I also write documents, create diagrams, attend meetings, create videos, respond to chat all with the intention of communicating. And communicating is only one of the areas where I need to be productive.

I’ve spent enough time with the methods that promise to revolutionise my productivity to know that a revolution isn’t what’s going to happen, I need to incrementally make changes for the better.

There are fewer external reference points in our working-from-home-working-from-anywhere worlds, that’s one of the challenges we must be on guard against. This means that there are fewer places where we can notice that someone is working better than we are. There aren’t those times when you sit next to someone and notice that their device is way better, or worse than yours. There aren’t those times when someone shows you a new way of doing something that gives you an incremental advantage to your working day. Now let’s be honest here, there weren’t really that many opportunities for those interactions in an office, but there were some.

What each of us needs to do is to take ownership of the responsibility for our own productivity within the scope of our control, however large or small it is. We need to notice the productivity detractors and work to remove them, we need to find ways of improving our productivity step-by-step. That’s the tip for today – own what you can of your personal productivity.

Header Image: This is the view from the top of a hill called Shipman Knots looking back towards Kentmere.

Automation Makes You Rigid and Brittle (and Speeds You Up)

Automation is everywhere, without it we would struggle to do all sorts of things that we regard as part of our normal day-to-day lives.

The letters that we receive through our door are automatically sorted.

The containers in our fridges have been automatically filled.

The item I’ve just ordered online will be automatically picked and loaded into a logistics system (with some help from humans)

I’ve just received an automated notification on my phone asking for feedback about a recent interaction with someone from an insurance company.

As you can see I’m using quite a broad definition of automation here, but much of what I am about to say is particularly applicable to IT automation, an area that I work with every day.

Each of these automations is dependent upon a set of criteria to work. They have prerequisites. They need to have a steady “if this” before they can “then that.”

For automation to operate stably the “if this” needs to be known, predictable and repeatable. The “if this” can be complicated but the complexity needs to be constrained. For automatic letter sorting to work there needs to be an address that a machine can process. In the UK we use postcodes for the heavy lifting on that process, automation struggles with “Aunty Mable, Birmingham”. Automated container filling requires containers that fit a dimension profile.

The known, repeatable and predictable constraints that automation requires introduce rigidity into the end-to-end process. Ask a human to fill a completely random set of containers and they will use their flexible ingenuity to get the containers filled. You can’t ask the same of an automated system.

For automation to pay back the “if this” needs to stay the same for an extended period, automation needs volume. A container filling plant will run batches of work because switching between configurations takes time. You can’t do a one-off with a different size in the middle of the current batch.

Every good automation system has an exception process to deal with things that fall outside the parameters of the “if this”, but exception processing is the last thing you want to be doing. Exceptions are very expensive indeed. Imagine the parcel logistics situation where nearly all of the items are automatically handled, but a small number of them isn’t. What is going to handle those exceptions? A human, the pinnacle in flexibility. Not only is the human more expensive than the automation, but this human is also likely to be under-utilized driving in even more cost. Hopefully, the volume of exceptions is low, but if the “if this” is too brittle it’s easy for the exceptions process to become overrun and overwhelmed.

Flexibility comes with an inflated cost of production; automation comes with the cost of rigidity. We need to pick which is most important for the phase that we are in.

I see many projects where people are leaping to automation early in the activity without understanding that this drives a rigidity that isn’t helpful this early in the activity. I’ve worked on several projects where we’ve had to redevelop the automation to align to needs that have only become evident part way through the development cycle. Minor changes driving bigger changes. Development effort wasted on automation that hasn’t had the opportunity to get anywhere close to its required batch size. There’s also a risk that constantly changing automation carries unnecessary brittleness.

Some years ago, I adopted a three-phase thinking:

  • Define the process
  • Optimise the process
  • Automate the process

I think this idea came from Lean but I struggled to find any reference to it in that documentation. It might even have been a Six Sigma thing. It doesn’t really matter where it came from, it makes sense to me.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not suggesting a massive waterfall activity where a whole project is defined, then optimised, and only then automated. Automation is best delivered throughout the lifecycle of development, but we should try to avoid taking on the rigidity too early in the cycle. We should automate what is known and predictable, avoiding automation of the unknown until we need to. We should also strive to make the cost of change in automation as low as possible so that the required batch size can stay low.

Automation is good, so long as you know exactly where to put the machine.

Eliyahu Goldratt

Header Image: We’ve seen a lot of this blue-sky stuff recently, and we aren’t really sure what to do with it. Taken in the Lake District from the shores of Derwentwater.

Idea of the Day: Jevons Paradox – why isn’t it getting cheaper?

Graham’s summary: As things get cheaper, we increase our use such that we end up paying more than we did before.

Jevons Paradox is named after William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) who was an English economist and logician.

The life of ideas is something that fascinates me. How long does it take an idea to become mainstream? Why do some ideas live and others don’t? That kind of a thing. This particular idea is over 150 years old and is still being hotly debated.

It’s also worth observing that Jevons wrote about the paradox at the age of 30; he was dead by 46.

The paradox is summarised by William Stanley Jevons as follows:

“It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”

Several real-world examples of this:

As our vehicles get more efficient, we travel more, and the level of oil consumption continues to rise.

As clothes cleaning technologies have taken the labour out of cleaning, we clean far more than we used to, the result being that we now spend more time cleaning clothes than we used to. Interestingly, there’s a secondary effect here, cleaning clothes more regularly has required us to have more clothes, but that’s a whole other conversation.

In the world of IT the cost of storage continues to go down, per gigabyte, but the rate at which we are storing things is accelerating even faster. Storage is just one technology commodity, the same is true for compute and networking capacity.

I’ve been involved with several conversations with customers where they expected the deployment of a new system to reduce their costs, only for the new system to increase use and drive higher costs overall.

Jevons paradox is hotly debated in energy circles where the concern is that as renewable energy becomes more efficient the result is an overall increase in our use of energy rather than a displacement of the non-renewable alternatives.

Over recent weeks there has been a vogue for organisations to announce huge reductions in their workforce resulting from the expected use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here’s one example: BT to axe up to 55,000 jobs by 2030 as it pushes into AI | BT | The Guardian. Apart from the observation that 2030 is a lifetime away in AI terms, does it also overlook Jevons and his paradox? Yes, lots of jobs will be directly impacted by AI, but how many of those will just morph into different jobs?

What if, having made a unit of work cheaper – which is what AI is doing – we use more of it and the result is that we need more people than we used to? That’s the challenge of Jevons Paradox.

Are the organisations declaring staff reductions just short-sighted?

Header Image: This is the river Dart in Devon. The Dart is famous amongst wild swimmers, and this is one of the most popular places to swim. We weren’t swimming, but only because we’d just been for a swim in the sea, and we were doing a bit of exploring during a short trip to the south of England.

“The White Noise of Modern Life” – can you hear it?

I’m currently loving reading a book about a man, Chris, who is walking the coastline of the UK. This isn’t as easy as you might suppose if, as the author is doing, you are determined to stick to the actual coastline of a small nation with a very jagged perimeter and lots of islands.

What makes this a compelling story is that Chris’ walk is as much about mental attitude as it is about the physical challenge.

As you can imagine, part of the time is spent in cities and coastal towns, but there are huge sections where the walk is through sparsely populated areas.

Upon leaving one of our country’s busier cities the author used this phrase – [it was great to be away from] “the white noise of modern life.”

Something about this phrase reverberated around my mind, and I’ve pondered it several times since.

In recent years, the term white noise has taken on a broader meaning, breaking out of its signal processing origins. In this quote I think Chris is referring to all those things that we are so used to being there that we no longer notice them. They are there, all the time, in the background, vibrating the air.

As I pondered, I started trying to listen to the white noise and to hear those things that many of us allow into our modern existence to fulfil a purpose, bringing with them noise.

I sought out times when I could turn other noises down to see what was underneath, it would take me a few minutes each time, but this is what I found in my surroundings.

On my morning walk, a time when I deliberately try to have a time of quiet, I have been aware of a significant white noise for some time. I regularly post videos of my walk on Instagram, but rarely with the original audio, and that’s because my walk is always accompanied by road noise. There is an eight-lane motorway near to my house and I never walk far enough away from it for there not to be a level of tyre hum. When I made the effort to listen there were other noises that I wasn’t aware of, over in the near distance there’s a warehouse which was being accompanied by the serenade of vehicles maneuvers, there was also the hum of machinery at a nearby building site. All white noise that my brain was filtering out until I paid attention to it.

Returning home, I sat in my office and listened. The clock had stopped, I’ve written about that before. Outside a workman was using an impact driver to erect some woodwork in my garden. There is the low hum of the powered air-filter underneath my desk and another buzz which I eventually discovered to be one of the LED lights, my main monitor also has a slight buzz. My desk is positioned in front of a window that looks out into our garden. I love to have the window open for the fresh air and the sound of the birds, but the window also opens to the sound of the motorway. My laptop is quite quiet, but it isn’t silent. All imperceptible most of the time but lurking in the air.

Sitting in my lounge there’s some more white noise that I can hear. It’s coming from near the TV, but the TV isn’t the cause, one of the boxes has a hard drive in it, which must be spinning iron as it’s causing a vibration that is slightly rattling the glass shelf on which it stands. It’s not much, but more white noise. As I sit in silence for a little longer, I can also hear that the uplighter in the corner has an electrical hum. More air vibration.

We are privileged to have a small room where there is a chair and not a lot else, deliberately. I sit in there and I am struck by how quiet it feels, I can’t put my finger on what has changed, but it’s notably more peaceful in this place away from other noise generators.

I suppose the real question here is – so what? Does the noise we surround ourselves with have any impact upon us? I’ve done a bit of reading around, and the answer is inconclusive. There’s a link between noise and stress, which is clearly negative, but white noise is also linked with stress reduction. There are studies that show that white noise can have a positive, and negative, impact on both performance and stress depending on the volume. The impact of white noise is also dependent upon the type of activity being undertaken.

As the noise I’m talking about here isn’t true white noise, I’m not sure that we can claim the benefits, but do we need to do something about the negatives?

If we look at the primary source of white noise in my life, the road noise, there is research but it’s not really talking about my situation:

Despite my inconclusive research findings, I have a feeling that the noise around me is generating a level of stress, nothing major, but enough to be noticeable. We can give up our quiet spaces too easily and I’m determined to do a bit more to protect my own. I’m also looking to reduce the white noise in my workplace, although most of that is irrelevant at present as the workman is still building in my garden.

For those of you wondering here are the book details:

  • Title: Finding Hildasay: How One Man Walked the UK’s Coastline and Found Hope and Happiness
  • Author: Christian Lewis
  • ISBN-10‏: ‎ 1035006790
  • ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1035006793

Header Image: The local tree canopy is looking radiant in its green out on my morning walk.

Office Speak: T-Shaped People – I’m not sure I’m any shape?

The idea behind T-shaped people goes like this: The vertical axis is supposed to symbolize someone’s depth of skills in one particular area, whereas the horizontal demonstrates the breadth of their skills across different areas. Think about it like this, if you invest all your energy in training people on how to do their job you end up with I-shaped people who only have the skills to do one job. That might be fine in a world where people just do one job, but in the creative economy you need people to work across different disciplines, people who can work interdisciplinary. They don’t need to know every discipline in detail, they need a basic understanding. These people with a wide, shallow knowledge in many disciplines and a deep knowledge in their own disciple can be envisioned as a letter T, rather than an I.

Lay a set of T shaped people together and you get lots of areas of overlapping skills which make for great interdisciplinary teamwork.

While I understand the metaphor, it’s not very good, is it? I don’t use the term myself, it’s the kind of Office Speak that I dislike, let me explain why.

Let’s start with the beginning of the metaphor – the I-shaped person. Do you know anyone whose skills are truly I-shaped, absolutely linier? The only thing that this person brings to the business is their ability to do one role. Let’s pick an example, in my business that could be a coder who can only code – they can’t do even the smallest amount of design, product management, test, deployment, analytics or even user documentation. I’m sure there are people who are like that, but they are very few and you may want to employ them because they probably bring something special to the role that they do.

If most people aren’t I-shaped, what are they? Honestly, I don’t think that they are any shape. I’m not even sure that you can describe most skills in a way that would allow you to put them into a box and classify someone proficient. Even in the skills where you can clearly define proficiency there’s a huge variance. Take driving as an example, there’s a defined proficiency for it in most countries – the driving test resulting in the driving license. Yet, how many of us know someone who has a driving license, yet wont drive on the motorway, or in the dark, or into a city. Are these people proficient, or not?

Think about other skills, ones for which there isn’t a defined level of proficiency. How do you measure someone’s amiability, or their honesty, how about clarity of thinking, or adaptability, and a huge one for our current age their ability to learn? Where do these fit into the I or the T? How do you even measure these in such a way that would allow you to put them on any chart?

Most of us don’t just have our employment skills though, we have all sorts of other skills. These skills aren’t in a separate bucket that we leave outside our office when we start work each day, they are our skills. A few personal examples: I learnt map reading as a boy scout, I’m convinced that the way I understand technical diagrams is heavily influenced by that skill. I used to do youth work at the local church and that’s strengthened my listening abilities and my ability to command a room. Working with people in volunteer roles has taught me about motivation. I’ve read several books about neuroscience, a fascinating subject. Where do these skills fit in the T?

The final reason I don’t think that the metaphor is very good is that it’s been endlessly corrupted. Let me give you some examples.

There are the people who want to define the thickness of the T – “that’s a fat-T role” or “that’s a thin-T role”. I don’t think that this is a comment on someone’s stature, I think what they are trying to say, in the case of “fat-T” is that the role needs someone to be very general with only a small amount of specialty, whereas a “thin-T” person needs to be very highly specialized in one area, but not so much in the breadth areas.

Then there are the people who start applying other letters to different situations.

There’s the X-shaped Executive, which just confuses me, I can’t see how this fits with the metaphor at all. The best that I can understand is that the X is there to symbolize that someone has intersecting skills as a leader and as a subject-matter expert. In other words, Executives have more than one I and they overlap?

Where do the E-shaped people fit in? Well, it turns out that this is a different metaphor all together with E symbolizing the four attributes that happen, conveniently, to begin with an E – expertise, experience, execution and exploration. These are often depicted as the different strokes that make up the letter E.

We haven’t finished though, where do you think an M-shaped person fits in? Here we are back to the metaphor with the two vertical bars of the M representing people who have deep skills in multiple areas.

Then there’s Pi shaped people? From what I can understand they are just M shaped people with an attitude.

People without a specialty can be described as a dash or hyphen. I hope no-one ever uses this definition in real life to describe an actual person.

Then there’s the ultimate description, the one that blows the metaphor completely apart – the comb-shaped person. They have deep skills in many different areas spread across a breadth of knowledge. This, for me, would represent most people except I don’t believe that you can put people’s skills on two dimensions. None of us fit neatly into two dimensions in any way that is meaningful.

Things have various qualities and the soul various tendencies, for nothing presented to the soul is simple, and the soul never applies itself simply to any subject. That is why the same thing makes us laugh and cry.

Blaise Pascal

Header Image: This is the view from the White Beach on Iona looking north towards Staffa and Mull.

Office Speak: “on a Page”

Something like this has happened to me hundreds of times in my career.

I am working on a solution to a problem, and I have a set of diagrams that describe how we can get things fixed. I’ve even created a commentary for the diagrams to explain the contents of the diagrams.

The answer to the issue is complex and is going to require multiple steps. Each step will need to be completed before the next one starts making it a sequence involving several teams.

The need for different teams means that I need to set up meetings to talk through the resolution. I’d quite like to put together a short document that talks people through it, but this is an organization driven by email, reaction, and most of all distraction. I know that getting people to read and interact with a document is not going to give me the results that I need. There’s a chance that a meeting will help me make progress.

It’s then that someone points out that there’s already a meeting where this kind of thing can be discussed. I ask what it is I need to do to get on the agenda. I’m directed to the person who organizes the meeting schedule, they book me a slot on the meeting and send me the standard slide deck that I need to fill in.

I open the standard slide deck and my heart sinks as I read the title of each page:

  • Problem Definition on a Page
  • Solution on a Page
  • Plan on a Page
  • Costs on a Page
  • Sales on a Page
  • Risks and Issues on a Page
  • Actions on a Page
  • Stakeholders on a Page
  • Current State Analysis on a Page
  • Mode of Operations on a Page
  • Customers on a Page
  • Team on a Page
  • SWOT on a Page
  • Integrations on a Page
  • Coffee Order on a Page

What is meant here is that I have one page to say all that needs to be said on this topic, the use of animation is cheating. It’s really shorthand for: “keep it simple enough for us to understand, don’t embarrass us by making it overly complicated.”

Each of the standard slides looks fine, but when I come to edit them it it’s clear that this template has been put together by someone who really doesn’t know how to make something that someone else can use. I am conflicted by the desire to stick with the standard verses doing my own thing in half the time.

This is a complicated set of activities; how can I be expected to get your solution on a page? How do I do that? I could make the diagrams smaller so that the details fit on, I could also simplify the diagrams. The problem with both options is that neither is very helpful. The small diagrams, I know, will just make people’s eyes bleed, the simplified diagrams will give people a simplistic view of the situation. Unfortunately, the rules are the rules, and the solution has got to fit on a page. I ask how firm the rule about a single page is, the reply is “No you can’t have more pages, we struggle to get people to focus for one.”

There is, of course, a third option, and that’s to get a bigger page. Unfortunately, most people are reading the material on a screen so it’s a bit of an academic argument. The point isn’t really about fitting material to a page, the true message is about simplifying the story.

I have some sympathy for the on a page approach. I’ve been in so many situations where someone thinks that you care enough to go through their entire documentation to get an understanding of what it is they are doing. I’ve also sat in meetings where someone describes everything in intricate detail despite being told that all you want is the overview that will help you to formulate the questions. Conversely, I’ve also been in an on a page meeting where it’s clear that someone is trying to hide something in the simplification. Mandating a single page feels like a blunt instrument to use when really what is required is someone to set the scene correctly.

I attend the scheduled meeting. Everyone looks at my on a page deck, which has taken hours to create; the attendees of the meeting conclude that I need to have another meeting to talk through the details with their teams. In this meeting we talk through all the diagrams and agree it’s the correct answer.

Header Image: This is the Lismore Lighthouse, taken from the ferry from Oban to Mull.