Dear Rwanda

This visit has been along time coming. In some ways it’s been 30 years in the making, but even once the decision was made it took another four years for us to feel your orange soil beneath our feet.

We have loved the warm, warm hospitality of your people and give thanks for so many hand shakes.

We have glimpsed your pain and heard a little of its impact upon you.

We have breathed in your verdant green hills and thousands of small farms.

We have loved exchanging a wave and a fist-bump with your beautiful children.

We have watched as you crisscross lake Kivu in your small boats.

We have watched the hippo and interacted with the elephant, puzzled at the height of the giraffe and the speed of the impala.

We have glimpsed the rhino, the leopard and the Nile crocodile.

We have been in awe of the power of the lion and chuckled at the mountain monkey.

We have savoured the taste of a truly fresh banana and ripe pineapple.

We have been surprised by the new taste of the tree tomato.

We have enjoyed cassava and Irish potato in the simplest of households with the warmest of people.

We have wondered at what can be carried up, and down, your hills on a bicycle pushed by one, two and sometimes three people.

We have marvelled at the ladies carrying a hoe on their head as if it’s the most natural place for it to be.

We have tasted your fine coffee and smelled the fragrance of the tea plantations.

We have enjoyed your vibrant fabrics and fine Sunday dress.

We have become used to sleeping with the gecko, almost.

We have been astonished by your ability to talk, actually talk, on a mobile phone in any and every situation.

We have loved listening to your intricate language and stumbled our way through the simplest of greetings. We are so grateful for your ability to speak our language.

We have experienced your fine new roads and the Rwandan massage on the dirt track.

We have watched, wide eyed, as your vast workforce of motorbike taxis going about their daily work on their red TVS Victor GLX 125s.

We have become used to explaining that we live near Manchester. We have come to expect “Manchester United” as a reply and been surprised by those who say “Manchester City.”

We have been surprised by our lack of breath before realising that we were at 2,500m, way higher above sea level than our lungs are used to.

We have spoken with some left paralysed by backbreaking work and heard a little of the impact that this has on their family. We have been thankful for those seeking to make a difference.

We have worshiped with a people of joy in the church and the workplace.

We have swayed and clapped with many choirs.

We have witnessed just how much can be done in bright yellow sliders.

We have given thanks for the work of a hospital and a polytechnic having lasting impact in the midst of a mostly rural community.

We are so very thankful for those who spent hours driving us and serving us in so many ways.

It will soon be time for home and I can’t say whether we visit you again.

Some have asked if we would be your ambassador as we talk with others, that I will gladly do.

Thank you for the adventure

Header Image: sunset over Lake Kivu, if you look closely you might spot a small boat.

Working Principles – Top 10

I’ve been writing the Working Principles posts for a little while now and really enjoyed the process.

Different ones have received different levels of engagement, with most of them provoking a response from someone. Thank you for the time you spend reading and responding.

If you’ve not seen all of them here’s a little bit of a Top Ten on the basis of the number of views for each post:

Repeat after me: “Meetings are work” | Working Principles

In which I wrestle a bit with an inner tension to regard work as the things that happen outside of meetings and a tendency to regard meetings as somehow not work.

We are wired for story | Working principles

We live in a world of data, but it’s not data that moves us it’s story that does that.

Optimise the System | Working Principles

There are many point-solutions to make individual parts of our working life more productive that result in little or no impact overall. We only get true change when we look at the whole system.

Complain to the Empowered, Complain with your Power | Working Principles

Few people complain effectively because people tend to complain to the wrong person. We should spend more time working out who has the power to change a situation.

“Expensive” is a definition of value not cost | Working Principles

When someone says something is expensive our tendency is to try to work out how to make it cheaper when we should really be trying to communicate the value.

Watch out for the autonomy thieves | Working Principles

People who take the initiative are highly valuable and yet much of what we do strips away peoples ability to take the next step.

Resist the urge for action | Working Principles

The need for action is a strong force and often takes us nowhere. By taking some time to consider we can often get to a better conclusion in less time.

We need to feel the urgency | Working Principles

Without a stimulus things don’t get done. In a busy world we need to feel an urgency.

You can hear a smile (and a frown) | Working Principles

Even if people can’t see you, they can hear your demeanour. People who smile project that smile in their voice, people who frown likewise.

“Just” can be an extremely expensive word | Working Principles

“Just” is a bit of a trigger word for me. Rarely is something “just” anything, behind the four letters lurk all sorts of trapdoors.

Notable Favourites

This list is missing some posts that I expected to be in the Top 10 viewed and as this is my blog I’m going to add them in here as my recommendation of ones you should look at:

I’ve still got plenty of Working Principles idea, some of which will be coming soon.

Header Image: The bracken is brown and the wind is chill. This is the view from above Watendlath looking down onto the hamlet and tarn from the Dock Tarn path on an early autumnal day. To the right is High Seat, in the distance is Skiddaw.

Concept of the Day: Continuous Partial Attention

I am sat at home and the TV is showing a programme that I like, but I’ve seen it before. I’m also engaged in general chit-chat with my wife. I occasionally look down at my phone as various notifications pop-up. Then my watch vibrates and tells me that it’s time to stand up. I am suddenly conscious that my wife is looking at me expecting a response. I know where the conversation was going, but somewhere in my automated switching between stimuli I’ve lost the thread and it’s floating away. This is where I have a choice, I can try to style my way out of the situation and hope that a chuckle and a smile is enough to get things going forward in the hope that the thread will return, or I can own up to being distracted again, take the consequences of this revelation, and continue watching the TV, engaging in the chit-chat and flicking through my phone. Another possibility is that I apologise for being a poor husband turn the TV off and put the phone out in the foyer and seek to engage fully in a conversation with my wife.

This is the world that we live in. This is the world of continuous partial attention.

Something interesting pops up on my watch, it’s too long to read on the phone so I pick up my phone to investigate a little further. I see that it’s another report on the latest celebrity news so move on quickly. While I have my phone in my hand, without thinking, I open a social media app, death scroll my way through it. Then switch on to another social media app and do the same. Everyone is a member of at least four social media apps right? I scroll through each one absent-mindedly. Almost automatically I move on to a couple of news apps and get depressed by the world. Finally I take a quit look at the stock market and check who’s up and who’s down, unfortunately for me today is a red day.

This is the world that we live in. This is the world of continuous partial attention.

I am sat on a train trying to write a blog post, this one, I’m making good progress when a chat from a colleague pops onto my screen. While I’m responding to the message I notice the person on the other side of aisle from me. They are a tall athletic looking individual cuddling a tiny white fluff of a dog while, at the same time, running WhatsApp across three different phones. He’s jumping from one to another as we travel, switch-scroll-type-switch. My watch vibrates and it’s a friend asking if I’m available for the usual Wednesday breakfast catch-up. I look back at the blog post and wonder I was up to.

This is the world that we live in. This is the world of continuous partial attention.

You might be reading this and thinking that I’m describing multi-tasking and perhaps you are right, but I like the differentiation of Continuous Partial Attention as something diffeent.

Linda Stone, who first publicized the term, puts it like this:

Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. Each activity has the same priority – we eat lunch AND file papers… At the core of multi-tasking is a desire to be more productive. We multi-task to create more opportunity for ourselves – more time to do more and time to relax more.

In the case of continuous partial attention, we’re motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There’s a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With CPA, we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly scan for opportunities – activities or people – in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, “What can I gain here?”

Time Management Continuous Partial Attention — Not the Same as Multi-Tasking – BusinessWeek (archive.org)

I spend far more time in Continuous Partial Attention than I do multi-tasking. I’m much more likely to be switching to fulfil my desire to be in the know, on the pulse, all caught up, connected. When I sit on my sofa in an evening with multiple screens, usually at least three, I’m not seeking to achieve something on each one, I’m quietly urging each one to be bring me something interesting.

This isn’t good for us. We aren’t built to process all of the inputs that are being fired at us every day. We are meant for a simpler life.

The Wikipedia article on Continuous Partial Attention highlights some of the areas where this behaviour is probably not good for us. I don’t have the attention cycles available to go and check, so I’ll let you link over there and see whether it makes sense. If nly half of what is written there is true we have a lot to be worried about.

Header Image: This is the view along the length of Thirlmere whilst descending Steel Fell after a day of two halves weather wise.

Reliving the Corporate IT experience on the train?

It’s been a strange morning.

It started with an early alarm call so that I could get to the railway station in time for a meeting down in London. I used to do this trip regularly but it’s been a while, so long that I felt like a novice. The timing from bed to being seated on a travelling train used to be highly tuned with very little hanging around. Today I was stood on the platform 25 minutes early wondering what I was doing there.

The journey to London is only just over 2 hour according to the timetable. This makes for a long day but not a ridiculously long one. I’d rather do a long day than spend multiple nights in a hotel. I like my home comforts and never sleep that well in a hotel bed, besides, I needed to be back to go to the theatre on the following evening.

Sat on the cold platform with my coffee and pains-au-raisin all seemed good (why are station platforms always a few degrees colder than anywhere else, and why are platform benches made of metal?) I met someone I knew and we chatted for a while before the train arrived. It was 11 mins late, but we’ve learnt to regard that kind of delay as normal for this trainline.

Resting comfortably in my seat we travelled through the Lancashire countryside and into Cheshire and on to Staffordshire. Warwickshire beckoned on what was a misty autumnal morning. The green of summer was starting to give way to the golden colours of the new season.

The first hour was sailing along and it felt like my plans for the day were going to work out just fine.

I was admiring the light shining through the mist when we started to slow down. “Not good” I thought. Eventually we came to a complete stop somewhere in the middle of the country. I couldn’t tell you exactly where because this also happened to be somewhere with little phone signal and the wifi was being hammered.

Eventually the Train Manager came on the intercom with an ominous “ping-pong”.

“There is a technical fault with the train and the driver is currently talking to signaling for advice. I’ll keep you informed when we know more. Hopefully we will be on our way soon.”

“Ah well,” I thought, “I’ve got plenty of time before my meeting.”

This is where it all got very Corporate IT.

The next update from the Train Manager was that the driver was going to “turn the train off and back on again” this would apparently take 10 minutes and the lights would go off for that time.

“You need to turn it off and back on again?” 🤦‍♂️

How many times has a Corporate IT Service Desk given someone that advice? It happens so often that it’s become a running joke. If you are really smart you don’t even bother calling the Service Desk until you have turned everything off and restarted it all.

(There’s a reason that you are told to do this and it’s probably not what you think it is.)

The impact of restarting an application or even a PC is minimal, it’s annoying for the individual concerned, but a train? I couldn’t decide whether this was their way of explaining the process in a simplified way so that everyone kind of understood, or whether that was really what was going to happen.

True to their word and after a period where the lights went out, the Train Manager was back on the intercom. Unfortunately a reboot of the train hadn’t fixed the fault and we were going to run in “safe mode” to the next station. The image in my mind was of the Windows xp safe mode screen, which was etched on my memory from many a long evening trying to fix an issue.

The next station was only a few minutes away and we’d then have to get off the train and wait for the next one. I’m assuming “safe mode” meant that we were traveling more slowly than normal but it was hard to tell.

As you would expect the next train was itself already late. It had been waiting for us to get going and it was rammed full. I could have chosen to wait for the next one a few minutes later still, but I decided that standing for an hour was a safer option.

I made it to my meeting an hour later than planned having stood by the carriage doors with several other bored screen obsessed, non-communicative, passengers all of us in the same predicament.

When I got to my my meeting I told the others about my experience. One of the other attendees told us how his car did the same thing and required the same treatment from time to time. “They tell you to reboot your car?” 😲

Some people are very worried about the robots taking over and subjugating their human masters. I don’t think we have too much to worry about just yet. If they do become too dominant we’ll just turn them off and back on again, that should sort it 😉

Header Image: Not today, but a recent morning view on my regular morning walk near my home.

We need to feel the urgency | Working Principles

Are you a planner?

Do you prefer the last minute?

What makes you respond with urgency?

I was recently out on my morning walk when I stopped for a chat with one of the locals who likes to sit on a bench near my house. He’s an interesting character so when he started to tell me about some people “sleeping rough” in the fields nearby I didn’t think too much of it. Sitting there on the bench he theatrically described where they were and how he’d gone over to them earlier that morning, woken them and told them to “Get off my #*&%ing land!” He looks quite scary but they’d simply rolled over and ignored him.

I was planning on going that way so would take a look as I passed; out of curiosity.

Sure enough, as I crossed one field into another, there on the top of a small hill were a set of sleeping bags and other detritus. “That’s interesting” I thought and left them to it, it was early and they were asleep. Also, there were more of them and I’m not as scary as my friend from the bench.

They didn’t look like people who were homeless or in distress. Where they were camping was out in the open on an exposed hillock, not where you’d sleep if you were sleeping rough. They didn’t have tents or bags of belongings. It looked more like local kids making the most of the last few days of the summer holidays.

A few days later I was back out doing my walk and wondered to myself whether they were still “sleeping rough.” I was also hoping that they had left the field in good order. Sadly, there was rubbish spread across the area where they had been. Annoyed and saddened I looked around pondering what to do when I noticed a plastic carrier bag with the branding of the nearby convenience store.

That simple plastic carrier bag sparked an urgency in me. It was time to get this mess tidied up, an urgency that eventually resulted in me filling the carrier bag and creating another bag out of a fleece blanket that had been left behind. The spoils in hand I headed back home depositing the rubbish in a public dustbin on the way.

Why did I act? What was it that made this situation urgent? Why couldn’t I leave this mess for someone else to tidy up? Why did I feel an urgency to sorting it out?

All of the definitions that I could find for urgency include words like: swift, immediate, pressing, important, speedy, action.

Plenty of emotion in those words.

The litter made me feel an urgency.

And yet, in business we have a habit of forgetting the emotional aspects of urgency.

We create statistics that tell people that we are 5% behind the progress that we should be making.

We send people emails from senior people imploring them to fill in the latest survey with logical reasons why they should.

We use cascade techniques expecting each individual further along the line to care about the message that they are delivering.

We expend huge amounts of effort communicating facts that leave us cold and unmoved.

Is there any wonder that they don’t move us let alone move us with urgency?

I didn’t reason myself to urgency on that hillock, I felt annoyed, and the annoyance gave me an urgency. No statistical analysis changed my attitude.

If we want people to change, to act, we need to work out how me make them feel the urgency.

Some of the biggest challenges of our day, climate, war, are urgent. It’s time for us to work out how we feel that urgency.

People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.

Malcolm Gladwell

Cover Image: From a morning walk a few months ago. This is the field where the “rough sleepers” were.

“Expensive” is a definition of value not cost | Working Principles

A few years ago, I was in a cafe where they roast their own coffee. This place is a special place for us.

While we were sat in the garden with our freshly brewed coffee the owner of the cafe came over for a chat. We talked about the great service they’d given us during the COVID lockdowns delivering wonderfully tasting coffee to our house. This led to a conversation about other places where we’d ordered coffee. He asked about a roaster that he knew which was nearer to our house and whether we’d ordered from them. I told him that I’d looked at their coffee, but that “it was expensive.” His reply to me was something along the lines of “so they didn’t manage to sell you their story.” It took me a few seconds to respond to him then what followed was a master class in the difference between cost and value.

When people say to me “that’s expensive” I return to that conversation and remind myself that what people are stating isn’t that something costs too much, what they are communicating is that they don’t see the value.

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

Warren Buffett

Value comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes but is always defined by the buyer. There are lots of different aspects to the definition of value and it’s rarely about one single thing.

Sometimes the value is seemingly straightforward and without differentiation – a litre of E10 petrol from the local supermarket will get me just as far as the litre from the motorway service station but one will cost me significantly more than the other. There’s a cost difference but the functional difference is negligible. Easy?

Sometimes the value is situational – the value of the expensive service station petrol changes if I’ve been stuck in traffic and don’t have enough fuel to get home. It’s then that I’m willing to pay whatever it takes to get me to where I need to be.

Sometimes the value is non-functional – in a world where there is little functional differentiation suppliers love to build non-functional elements like point-schemes and loyalty rewards. It’s amazing what people will do for points. I wonder how many people drive past one refuelling station to get too another “for the points”. There are many non-functional elements, perhaps it’s the ethics of an organisation, or the way that their app works, perhaps the people serving you are nicer, or the shop is cleaner.

At times you get what you pay for – there’s a proverb that says “buy cheap, buy twice” which I’ve certainly experienced. I do a lot of walking, and I’ve learnt over the years that the cheap boots aren’t up to the job. You won’t see a professional workman with cheap tools, they aren’t worth the effort.

Sometimes the value is mostly emotional – I don’t buy coffee beans from a small independent roaster hundreds of miles from my house because they make more litres of coffee than cheaper brands. I buy it because I like the taste and the reason I like the taste has a lot to do with the feelings surrounding the associated memories. It’s an emotional buy, there is a limit to how far I’m willing to go for an emotion, but I will go quite a long way for a taste.

As times the value is historic – there’s an electronics shop not far from my house where the service has been so poor, in the past, that I’m not going back again. It’s probably 10 years since I’ve been in and everything could have changed, but my history is preventing me from reliving past experiences. There are other places where I’ll return because the value is always good.

“A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.”

Peter Drucker

There are all sorts of values that we can associate to something. Sometimes the values add up to a story that feels expensive, at other times we are willing to pay more to get the value.

Next time someone tells you that you are too expensive, you could cut the cost, but the outcome for both of you will be so much better if you trying to work out how to increase the value.

“The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about.”

Seth Godin

Header Image: This is the nearby Cockerham Sands on a glorious evening with birds flying everywhere.

Resist the urge for action | Working Principles

I recently entered a long thin room at a conference where a few chairs were set out in rows across the narrow part of the room. There were 30 or 40 chairs, and they were already spreading down the room.

Several people were already in the room when the organiser arrived. He looked at the room and said something like “We are expecting more than this, it’s going to work much better if we set the room up the other way around. If you are able, could you help, please.”

With those words everyone already in the room and those arriving sprung into action moving chairs. I happily joined in by taking some chairs to the far end of the room to start some new rows, other people stood up and made other new row where they were, some did little more than turn their chair, and one or two around them through, 90 degrees so they were facing a different wall.

All this time the organiser of the meeting was trying to get people to work together to build longer rows across the full length of the room, with little effect.

Some stewards were bringing in extra chairs which was taking a while because they needed to navigate through from one end of the room, which was now full of randomly placed chairs, to the other, where there were far fewer chairs. It didn’t help that some of the chairs they brought in were broken and needed to be taken out through the same maze of randomly placed seats.

Everyone was expending effort, actively participating in the mele, contributing towards the goal. I’m sure everyone felt great about their involvement in the experience, there’s something very uplifting about being helpful.

The result was a hodgepodge of rows with significantly more seats on the side of the room where they had been initially and only a few around where the speakers where in the middle of the length of the room.

I suspect that two or three people who knew what they were doing could have sorted the whole thing in about half the time and with a significantly more elegant outcome.

This need for action is seen in businesses across the globe every day. Enacting something is better than doing nothing, isn’t it? In my experience quite often, the answer is “no.” I regularly find myself in situations where a bit of thought, a moment of planning, a conversation or two would have significantly reduced the time to complete and improved the outcome.

Yet, the need for action is a strong one and I’ve learnt to accept that sometimes you just need to let people do something, anything. I’m sure that there are times when people schedule a meeting just to be able to log some action. Another method I’ve used has been to create a harmless task for the masses to do just to keep them busy while reviewing a situation for the best approach. Asking people to fill in a tracking spreadshet is perfect for this. This is, of course, wasted effort. It would be much better to resist the urge to action, take a breath, think, and then act.

There’s a quote that is often ascribed to Victor Frankl, almost certainly inaccurately as it can’t be found in his writings, but I like it all he same:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

We need to learn to resist the urge to fill the gap with action and instead take the power and use the space to think through the next steps. Utilising the gap might feel uncomfortable, but it will lead to a better, speedier, answer.

Header Image: This is the view from the top of High Cup Nick having walked up the middle of High Cup Gill to get here. This walk has been on my list for a long time, and it didn’t disappoint.

Our expectations shift with each new wonder that we see

I was recently in a cafe doing some work when a couple in their twenties came and sat at the table next to me.

They both retrieved a laptop from funky bags and open them onto the table.

A conversation about the voluminous size of the portions in the branded refreshment establishment followed.

I was trying to get some work done and not listen, but it was difficult.

One sentence caught my attention though – “I can’t work on 4G, but I get 5G so rarely.”

My immediate reaction was “What? You can’t work on 4G? What work are you doing?” followed by a feeling of “I’m old.”

I remember the day when a bump in speed from 14.4Kbits to 28.8Kbits or even the dizzying heights of 56Kbits required a new modem and a way to justify the significant expenditure. Each one of those jumps was a wonder to behold, enabling us to download 1024×768 pictures so much quicker. Universal high speed mobile communications were reserved for the characters in sci-fi films.

Now, here I was sitting in a cafe, surrounded by mobile communications devices and the 30Mbits that we typically get from 4G in the UK isn’t good enough?

We’ve moved to a position where bits fly through the air at a rate 535 times higher than the highest speeds I could get down my phone line at home are no longer good enough for some people’s work needs? The marvel from 2014 that is 4G is on the road to redundancy.

How our expectations shift from wonder to expectation, from expectation to obsolescence.

This isn’t one of those “they’ve never had it so good” posts.

This is me marvelling at our ability to adopt and adapt, to see something new and to build employment and commerce around it.

This is me looking at the huge changes that are coming our way and cheering on the future shapers and modelers.

This is me choosing to look away from the gloomy side and towards a hopeful view of the future.

This is me wondering at the work that could require more than 4G and what that could be.

It won’t be a future that looks anything like the ones people are currently envisioning, that’s almost certain, but I do hope that it’s a good one.

I’ll finish with another story of wonder.

We were recently on holiday in another country and were making use of a hire car. We weren’t planning on doing many miles and had chosen the most basic car that we could, which turned out to be a Dacia Sandero with a few years on the clock.

As I got into the driver’s seat, I noticed a USB socket. “Great” I thought “I wonder if I can plug my iPhone in.” Which, of course, I did having reached into the small bag of cables that I carry with me on holiday and retrieved the appropriate combination of ends.

Instantaneously my iPhone asked me if I wanted to allow the device to be connected, I clicked “yes” and there on the car screen popped AirPlay from my iPhone. Another 10 seconds later and I’ve searched for a nearby cafe on a beach using Google maps and we are on our way with satellite imagery directing us to a joyous table of tapas in the sun.

So many wonders to list if you look. The marvel that is USB becoming truly universal for so many different connectivity requirements. The phenomenon that is free global satellite navigation which knows about the tiniest of roads on a small island. The sensation that is a mobile network that allows me to connect instantaneously and at local speeds (for a small roaming fee, but we can overlook that, it was less than the cost of one of the tapas plates.) The geneous that is a touch screen. The wonder that is the GPS network which always knew where I was. I could go on, but I won’t, hopefully you get the point.

I posted about the cafe conversation at the star this post on Threads and it got a few comments. If you would like to reminisce the days of the 14.4Kbits modem, or the negotiation required to use the phone line, that’s the place for you.

Header Image: This is St Ouen’s Bay, Jersey where you’ll find a very nice cafe serving wonderful tapas right next to the beach.

Repeat after me: “Meetings are work” | Working Principles

It’s a work morning and I open my calendar to see what the day has in store for me. It’s heavily littered with meetings, and I wonder to myself “when am I supposed to get some work done?”

Later on that day a meeting, amazingly, finishes early and I quietly vocalize to myself “Great, now I can get some work done.” I look down at my list of tasks and realise that my brain is too addled to be able to get anything constructive done in the fifteen minutes that I have.

I’m not a fan of meetings, perhaps you already guessed, I’m in good company:

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works.

Peter Drucker

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

John le Carre

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’

Dave Barry

I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities – and found no statues of Committees.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

What is it about meetings that make us feel this way? Why doesn’t a gathering of people around a subject make us feel fulfilled, energised? Why would I rather be writing a document?

What is it that is so broken here?

Is it the way that meetings are run that is broken? Or perhaps it’s my attitude, others appear to have an enthusiasm for gatherings that I can’t muster? Or maybe it’s a collective problem that we all need to own our part of?

Let’s take a look at a few more quotes:

“The magic to a great meeting is all of the work that’s done beforehand.”

Bill Russell

Let’s start by thinking about the work that happens before a meeting.

Most of us can tell when someone is winging it and most of us are rightly frustrated by those meetings where a lack of preparation wastes everyone’s time.

So many good meetings are created in the hours before the session.

I’m currently doing a series of meetings which are really training sessions. These meetings are being recorded because we expect people to go back over the content which is motivating us to be prepared.

Those meetings feel so rich.

“If we have a clear agenda in advance, and we are fully present and fully contributing, the meetings do go much faster.”

Unknown

We live in a very distracted world and no more so than at work. We apply half our attntion to many virtual meetings and the result is that things that could happen in ten minutes take twenty, thirty, forty minutes.

Despite what you think, you are not enabled for multi-tasking.

I hope that’s we’ve all attended meetings where we’ve been in the zone, fully present, and felt the exhilaration of getting something done that perhaps you didn’t think could be done, or would take a long time to get done.

“The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.”

Tim Cook

In our virtual working world it’s so easy for people to call a meeting and pick the length. It’s a truism to say that the time taken for a meeting grows to meet the time available. How many 1 hour meetings should have been 30 minutes? How many 30 minute meeting should have been an email? Meetings rarely finish early while I’m sure much of that is to do with people’s attention to the meeting sometimes it was just poor meeting management.

I’ve worked internationally for over 30 years and have learnt to recognise that timekeeping differs around the world. There are some cultures where time appears to be more liquid than we expect in the UK.

In every organisation there are individuals that have their own view on the meaning of an hour and a minute. I make no apology for my reputation as a fierce timekeeper. Far too many meetings have all of the energy sucked out of them by the weight of time.

The thing that is regularly going through my head in these situations is the cost-benefit analysis of the meeting. Yet, there are times when I come out of a meeting and know that the value of the gathering was way higher than the hours spent, that things were achieved that would have taken days to get done in any other way.

“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”

Steve Jobs

This is the reality of business, it’s about the team and teams need to communicate. We have many different ways of communicating but nothing comes close to the meeting. While so many meetings are frustrating, time-wasting, energy sapping, distracted, sinkholes for precious, never to be recovered, minutes there really is no replacement for them. When they are well-prepared, engaging, focussed, enlightening gatherings they can be magical places where real work gets done.

I am trying to change my attitude and to remind myself that meetings are work – but I have a long way to go.

Header Image: This is a sculpture called the The Praying Shell which overlooks Morecambe Bay near to where 23 Chinese cockle pickers tragicly died in 2004. The sculpture was envisioned before the tragedy it’s become something of a symbol for it.

Complain to the Empowered, Complain with your Power | Working Principles

“Why are you telling me? What do you think I’m going to do about it?” These were the thoughts going through my head as I sat in another late-night meeting listening to a team struggling with a problem.

Here in the UK, we have a reputation for being a bit whingy, particularly with our friends in the southern hemisphere. As with many reputations it’s not wholly true, but there is an inner truth to it. There have been many times when interactions with my countryfolk have been heavily moan laden.

From this evidence some might conclude that we are good at moaning, but the reality is, our inbuilt timidity makes us awful complainers.

I was at the gym the other week, and this was the conversation in the sauna:

  • Me: “I see that the showers are out of action again.”
  • Other Gym Member: “Yes, they’ve been out for a couple of days this time.”
  • Me: “I wonder how long they are going to be out.”
  • Other Gym Member: “No idea. Have you complained to anyone?”
  • Me: “No.”
  • Other Gym Member: (Looks back at me and shrugs)

We both know that neither of us are going to do anything about the situation, that’s the end of that conversation.

Part of our reticence is that our expectation of resolution is low, an expectation that has been set by previous experiences trying to find people who can influence an outcome. We know that the kindly young man, in ridiculously tight gym-wear, on the front desk isn’t empowered to resolve the issue. We suspect that even the manager of the gym, who we rarely see, has limited influence. The manager is normally quite good at sorting things. There’s a feeling that this is outside local control and that no one locally is empowered to get the problem resolved. A shared shrug is the best we can do.

It’s worth acknowledging here that everything above is speculation, and the gym manager may have a plan that they are already enacting. We aren’t going to do the work to find out because we’ve taken on a form of learned helplessness. Our desire for change hasn’t overtaken our reticence and so we sit dormant.

The reality is many people live much of their working life in similar situations. They want to get something done, but they don’t see a way to get it done. They look at the people around them and don’t see anyone who can resolve the issues that they face. Eventually they turn to moaning and complaining to anyone who is listening. I’ve done it, I suspect we’ve all done it, but it isn’t going to get any of us anywhere. This type of complaining does little more than reduce us to hot air rattling the wind.

What should we do?

One of the challenges I see is that people haven’t learnt to complain effectively, there is an art to effective complaining.

People often complain to people who can’t do anything about the situation that they are complaining about. We need to find the people who are empowered and seek to get them to make a change. That isn’t always as easy as it sounds.

I think that one of the reasons that we dislike call centre interactions so much is that we suspect that the person on the other end of the call, on the other side of the planet, has little empowerment to resolve our issue. We answer the questions that “George” in Hyderabad or Krishna in “Newcastle” has on their list to ask us knowing that the result of this box-ticking-exercise is going to be a second conversation with a “specialist” who is going to ask the same questions. I recently had a situation where I answered the same set of questions for five different specialists who each asked me to try the same things each of which took several minutes. When I asked the third person why we were needing to redo the same tests they told me that they needed to show on the call handling system that they had been done. Eventually the fifth person agreed to send me some new equipment. The only empowerment that “George” had was to get me to the next person, the person with real power was shielded from me.

There are other situations, though, were we need to step outside of our timidity and engage the person who is empowered.

We need to acknowledge our power in these situations. While we can often feel powerless, we often have more power than we think we do. In the gym situation I am a customer, I am paying money, which gives me a voice. I need to be careful how I use it, but it has some weight. In the callcentre situation I knew that my power was in my perseverance and that eventually we would get to the end of the questions. There wasn’t any point in me using my voice to get aggressive I would have been complaining to people who couldn’t change the situation that we both found ourselves in.

We need to change our attitude from one of complaining to one of changing.

“What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.”

Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

We need to learn to be better complainers. Complaining to the unempowered isn’t changing anything. Complaining to others might make us feel a bit better, but it’s not changing anything either.

Header Image: These are the grounds at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire on a glorious spring day with friends.

Optimise the System | Working Principles

I work in technology that means that I spend a lot of my time working with technologists.

There’s a saying:

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”

Unknown

This pithy proverb is a central feature of The Law of Instrument of which Abraham Maslow and Abraham Kaplan were both contributors.

The concept is that we all carry around a bias to overuse familiar tools.

Within my world the technologists tend to solve problems by using technology, this our bias. Being a bias, it constrains our thinking to the parts of a problem that can be fixed by technology, but it goes further than that. We tend to solve problems with the latest, new-and-shiny, technology. If we are honest; quite often we find some new-and-shiny technology, then look around for problems to fix with it. That’s the way that our minds work.

What this approach gives us is a Heath Robinson (Rude Goldberg if you are American) set of solutions where we have bolted different bits of technology together to produce an outcome of a fashion. Things work together, but not in the best way, and certainly not in an optimal way. Part of the system are over-engineered while other parts haven’t received any engineering at all. Multi-million-pound systems are linked together by spreadsheets or someone manually typing something.

Technology is what I know, but it’s not the only place where I see this problem. I like to watch how the system is working in restaurants, so many of them are poster children for this. In its simplest form you see bottlenecks in the flow from table to kitchen, everything is good at the table, everything appears to good in the kitchen, but the linkage between the two is a disaster. There’s one café I go to where the kitchen always looks like it’s working seamlessly, but you only have to sit and watch for a short while to realise that the food storage is at the other end of the facility with staff running through the tables to grab boxes of ingredients. I was sat in another cafe a few months back and noticed that the clean cutlery was stored in a low drawer below the point-of-sale equipment. You could either reset a table, or do all of the meriad of things that you do on a point-of-sale device, but not both. This was a popular cafe and people were constantly phoning to book tables meaning and the person on the phone was regularly apologising to customers that they couldn’t answer their query because they couldn’t get to the point-of-sale equipment. Added together there was a lot of staff time spent waiting for this little corner.

My dad has recently spent time in hospital, another exemplar of the craft. Each role appears to have created its own way of doing things which I’m assuming worked for them, but from the patient’s perspective it was utterly chaotic with overlapping and competing priorities.

Imagine a car, and I’ve seen this done, where someone decides that they are going for sporty. They replace various parts of the engine with high-end equivalents. They even get the car firmware updated to improve the available horsepower. Having spent a small fortune on innovative technology they get into the car and the engine sounds sweet. Pressing on the accelerator releases a beautiful low growl. Shifting into gear they press down on the accelerator again and go nowhere. There’s a squealing noise and smoke billowing from the tyres then a lurch forward. While it is possible to get this car moving without spinning the wheels it’s very difficult and within a couple of weeks the tyres need replacing. What’s more the local council has decided that it’s time to resurface the main road near to their house and the delays are awful. What’s more they receive an update from their insurance provider who has decided that the modifications to the car will more than double the premiums. Is this really better performance?

It often helps to take a few paces back, look at the bigger picture and fix the biggest thing that you see. Let’s be conscious of our biases and, for me, realise that technology can only take us so far, and sometimes it will take us backwards. We need to think about the system and not just the parts.

Header Image: This is Derwentwater on a wintery day. It looks cold, it was cold, but it was also beautiful.

More? The Artisan Bakery, Staveley | Graham’s Guides

Graham’s Guidelines* Rating (1 to 5)
Coffee5*
Food5*
Conversation5*
People Watching3*
Graham’s Guidelines for More?

Well, here we are with my very first Graham’s Guides.

If you are expecting pictures of food, sorry, I don’t do pictures of food. Go to the web site you’ll see plenty.

If you are expecting technical details about the food, again, sorry, these posts are really about my feelings about a place. You’ll have your own feelings.

Also, I don’t do comments about “value for money”, it’s such a subjective notion. What I’m willing to pay for a really good coffee may not align with your idea of value.

This morning Sue and I awoke with a clear diary and fine weather, something that hasn’t happened at the same time for a little while. We knew the weather was going to turn later, so headed out first thing.

As there was just the two of us, we thought we’d grab a bit of something on the way at one of our favourite places. There are several favourite places that we could have chosen, but recently we’ve loved dropping into the Mill Yard in Staveley where More? The Artisan Bakery has become a repeat visit.

Today was about simple, yet wonderful, delights – a good coffee and an excellent pastry. For me an almond croissant, for Sue a plain croissant. I didn’t ty the plain croissant, so can’t comment, but this is the second time I’ve had the Almond Croissant and both times they were a delight. This isn’t a small delicate pastry, it’s more like a second breakfast. Crisp almonds on the outside, a creamy almost paste on the inside and delightful flaky pastry that is flaky but doesn’t feel the need to explode the moment it encounters a mouth.

The coffee is from True North Coffee which is a sister business to More? I meant to look up what the blend was but forgot so can’t give details. I’m not sure I like it when coffee is described, like wine, by relating it to various other flavours, but I get why people do it. I know what I like in a coffee, I’m not sure I could describe it other than to say that this was a very enjoyable brew. I’m a plain coffee drinker, I take it black and can’t understand why anyone would want to mess with the flavour by adding various syrups and milk concoctions. A good black coffee should have a full flavour that isn’t too bitter, or too smooth. It should be strong, but not too strong. It should linger on the pallet in a good way. I think as I write these posts that I might need to develop my explanation of good coffee, but that’s all you are getting for now.

Although it’s almost in the Lake District, More? isn’t situated in a quaint little slate cottage, it’s in a former Bobbin Mill so is more Industrial Chic, set amongst a set of other businesses. A good café should have an atmosphere, there needs to be people, good service, and something that makes you want to come back. Despite the industrial chic More? always has a good group of people and the service has been excellent every time we’ve visited which has been a few. I like it when a cafe has a mixed group of people, it says something about its appeal. I like to guess what people have been up to and what their plan is for the day. I guess that today was a combination of people who had already been for a run, people planning a walk with the dog, family people with a baby taking a break from doing the Saturday jobs and people, like us, on their way into the Lake District for various adventures.

There’s ample free parking, and you can normally park quite close, which fitted in perfectly with our plan to drop in and go elsewhere. As you enter the Mill Yard More? is at the back.

Sometimes when I go walking, I like to go a bit upmarket with my lunch and More? has provided some of the best packed food I have ever tasted. The Katsu Chicken sandwich I picked up last time was wonderful.

It’s a favourite and we will be back.

More? The Artisan Bakery
Middle of the Mill,
Staveley Mill Yard,
Staveley Cumbria
LA8 9LR.

Header Image: This is Tarn Howes where we started our walk today. A topic for another guide? Perhaps.