We've had a facelift

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we were in the process of overhauling the inspired Consulting website. Well, the good news is that the work is done and the new website is up and running. You can take a look by clicking on the inspired logo and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the new look.

Business Maths

I was never particularly good at maths when I was at school and that inadequacy with figures has, I’m afraid, carried over into my adult life. The chances are, many of you could or would say the same. It’s socially easy to admit to difficulties with maths whereas it’s very difficult to admit to difficulties with reading. Perhaps that’s what explains some of the very questionable business maths that I heard from a group the other day.

Let’s begin by setting you a simple problem. You have a team of eight people, all of whom produce one widget per day. If you take away four people, how many widgets per day will the remaining four have to produce in order to maintain your total output of eight? The answer is, of course, two per day: even I could work that out.

However, there’s a problem. The current eight people don’t appear to be slacking. They all appear to be busy each day; they’re not sitting around drinking coffee and gossiping. One widget per day appears to be about right; in fact given that you used to have a team of 16 people producing eight widgets per day, the current productivity seems very good. So what do you do?

The answer to that, of course, is equally simple: you make the cuts anyway and drive the remaining four to work even harder, until they burn out or leave. It seems crazy – no, wait; it is crazy – but that’s exactly what the company was proposing to do. The group I was working with were resigned to taking on a whole lot of extra work on top of their existing responsibilities. When I asked them how they proposed to do that, someone muttered something about “discretionary time” but, in order to be discretionary, you have to have some choice in whether you give that time. They felt they didn’t; they had to work the extra hours, just to keep up with the job.

Oh, I understand that there are efficiency savings to be made. I understand that there might be synergies (and, unlike a lot of people who bandy that word about, I know what it means) but there is a bottom line. This bottom line isn’t on the accounts: it’s the baseline below which no-one can go. Everything you do takes time; there is nothing you do that you can do in an instant. You can be more efficient and look for ways of, perhaps, doing two things at once to speed things up, but there is a bottom line below which we cannot go. There is a point at which there are no more efficiencies; there are no more synergies. What then? Work harder is no longer the right answer...

Pig whistling

I’ve been working with some groups recently on a personal impact workshop. It’s been a fun experience and they’ve been good groups, open and ready to take on all the stuff we threw at them. On one of the workshops I encountered a delegate who was newly promoted into quite a senior role. As a facilitator, you begin to get a bit of a sixth sense about delegates; the quality of some just strikes you and this was one of those cases. She was bright, articulate and smart – the fact that she’d just been promoted into a big role clearly spoke volumes about her abilities and her organisation clearly had confidence in her. The one thing she lacked was confidence in herself.

She was role-playing, with an actor, a scenario involving her manager: she wanted his support (by which she meant his reassurance that she was doing a good job) but he wasn’t giving it. It wasn’t that he was a bad person or unsupportive – he’d recommended her for the promotion, after all – but he was totally unable to understand or deal with the emotional needs she was describing. The other people in the group, watching her role-play, suggested that she shock her manager in some way, to force him to change his approach and give her the support she needed – the most common suggestion was for her to burst into tears. I know they were motivated by good intentions but I couldn’t help saying I thought that was a bad idea.

I was reminded of an old saying: never try to teach a pig to whistle – it never works and it annoys the pig. The fact is there was nothing particularly wrong with the manager. Of course, perhaps she – and I – might prefer it if he was a little more in tune with the emotional needs of his staff but as he was in his mid-fifties, that was unlikely to change and wasn’t the problem, anyway. The problem was that she had perfectly reasonable needs which she insisted that he meet, despite his obvious inability to do so.

My advice to her was to use her manager for the things he was good at – his technical expertise and his practical guidance on the job she was being expected to do – and to stop banging her head against a wall, expecting him to do something he was clearly incapable of doing. Better, instead, for her to focus on getting those emotional needs met elsewhere – perhaps through a coach or a mentor.

It sounds like I’m blaming her and letting her manager “off the hook” in some way but I’m not. We deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be; sometimes people don’t do what we want or don’t give us what we want. No one can change another person any more than someone else can change us – they have to want to change and sometimes they don’t want to or feel they can’t. In that case, as Victor Frankl wrote, when we cannot change our circumstances, we are forced to change ourselves.

Speed

Like many people, I’ve been keeping an eye on the television over the past few days, keeping up with the ongoing political situation here in the UK. The thing that’s struck me most is the number of presenters who have been camped out in all weathers, reporting from outside various locations, waiting for something to happen. Exactly why it was necessary to drag these presenters blinking into the sunlight from their warm and cosy studios, I’m not entirely sure but I suspect it has a lot to do with our culture’s current obsession with speed.

Aside from giving the spurious impression that the news they are conveying is somehow more accurate because they are “on the scene”, the main reason for having presenters in Downing Street or outside the cabinet offices is so that they can capture events, as they happen. Sky, for one, makes great play of being the first to bring what is now referred to as “breaking” news as does BBC Radio 5 Live.

But what does speed give us? In all but a very few instances, speed or immediacy adds little: it tells us what has happened but the focus on immediacy means we don’t understand why it happened, or the consequences of what has happened. It’s symptomatic of our broader desire now to get things done quickly. Mobile phones are with us all the time and we’re expected to be available almost 24 hours a day. Email is all but instantaneous so some people assume that the reply should be, too, and I’ve written before about the pressure for ever increasing efficiency – for which, again, read speed.

Where in all of this instant reaction is the opportunity to stop and think? Where is the opportunity to consider, to reflect, to weigh up alternatives? How many mistakes might be avoided, how many ideas might be improved, how many decisions might be better, simply by avoiding this pressure and slowing down? I’ve spent this week with a great bunch of people, all of whom report being under so much pressure that they are at near breaking point. It’s not that they’re inefficient, or poor at their jobs, or unintelligent – they’re just struggling to keep up with the relentless pace of the jobs they do. The only way they stand any chance of keeping up is to react instantly, constantly spending time in Quadrant One, slowly but surely burning out.

It takes courage to take a stand against this tide and I hope, during the course of this week, I was able to give them something that might help. It’s a situation that I’m facing with delegates more and more often, though, and seems to be a trend which is only going one way. It’s like we’re all speeding along a motorway: we’re unsure of where we are or where we’re going, certain only that we’re making such good progress we don’t have time to check the map.

A guide on the side? (Part Two)

Last week, I was talking about the degree to which groups can – or can’t – trust their trainer. In the past, I’ve always joked with groups that you can’t trust a trainer; what I’ve meant by that is that no one in a training session should just take everything I say for granted – they have to think about it, test it against what they already know to be true about the world. One of the best things a group can have is healthy scepticism, by which I mean an openness to learn but the attitude of mind that they question what they learn in order to understand it. My intention, in the training room, is to develop a form of Socratic debate and get the group involved in a two-way discussion about the material, rather than being in a passive, more didactic style session where the trainer teaches the material and the group “learns” it.

In order to create that type of debate, two things must happen and the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether they are – to an extent, at least – mutually exclusive. The first is that the group has to trust that it’s okay or “safe” for them to disagree with the material or, at the very least, to question it. Secondly, for the sake of the argument and in order to stimulate or move the debate forward, I might have to take on positions with which I don’t necessarily agree. So, on the one hand the group has to trust me whilst on the other I might occasionally need to mislead the group.

That tension must, on some level at least, be confusing for groups and could get in the way of the workshop material. I can imagine that, as a delegate, it would be very easy to be suspicious of any question that I ask because, at the back of your mind, there’s always the suspicion of my motives in asking it – am I trying to catch you out? Am I, in other words, not to be trusted?

I don’t have any pat answers to these questions – just a much longer series of questions that they raise in my mind. But I’d love to know what you think about it – what’s your view on what happens in the training room? Do you trust trainers?

Change is in the air

Something is coming – and it’s something about which we’re quite excited here at inspired. Over the last few weeks, with the aid of an excellent designer, we’ve been overhauling the inspired Consulting website. The original site was only ever intended to be a temporary thing but, as with so many things in life, temporary turned out to be a little longer than we had originally anticipated.

As a part of the overhaul, we’ll be moving the blog and incorporating it into the new website. What this means for you is that the inspiredblog will move and I hope you’ll move with it. To ease the transition I will update both this blog and the new one for a period, so there’s no chance of you missing out.

It won’t happen immediately and we’ll give you plenty of notice when it does. In the meantime, keep reading and thanks very much for all your support.