Restoring Spirits

Last week was one of the most enjoyable I can recall. In the elegant surroundings of Princeton, I was part of a wonderful choir of sixty-five, rehearsing and performing the six major Bach motets under the direction of Dr. Joe Miller and his colleagues. We sang most of the day, and we all loved every minute. I have a blessed life, and my mood was good even before the week, but had I needed a tonic this would have been the perfect way to restore my spirits.

Much of the joy arose from the singing itself, and particularly from singing Bach. His music is so well-written and the Baroque style so healthy that most of us could have sung ten hours per day instead of just five, and repeated the program after each performance. I have found on a wonderful major hobby, hopefully one that I can still develop and enjoy for many more years. I owe a big debt of thanks to Charlie back in The Hague for setting me on a more determined path of voice development, to Mikae and subsequent teachers, and to directors like Joe Miller who have helped me discover new joy.

Bach was an intensely religious man, and much of his music invoked the Christian Trinity. The Holy Spirit he generally portrays with fast, running passages of notes. Sometimes these passages are mysterious, but more often wild and joyful, showing how the Spirit spreads its benefits through humanity. Most of the motets are full of such passages, usually in triple meter, many lasting over several minutes and developing to joyful climaxes as the many voice parts weave complex patterns. The image of classical music can be staid and dry, but these Bach motets are quite the opposite. As Dr. Miller said in one of his introductions, they might comprise the most joyful music ever composed, in any genre.

The audiences were certainly entranced and caught up in the joy and the spirit. The predominantly young choir were especially demonstrative, with faces full of life and bodies swaying with the dance rhythms, and the audience often found themselves swaying in response. One of the motets starts with the text “Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf”, or “The Spirit helps us in our weakness”. Bach brings that spirit alive, and shows how it can help us. The Spirit is the horizontal element of the Trinity – whereas Father and Son are about our individual connection to the Almighty, the Spirit is how we connect together as humans, pulling each other to greater heights and small miracles, just like last week.

And indeed, much though Bach and Joe Miller contributed to my restored spirits, the greater part was played by the rest of the group. Of the sixty five of us, I would guess that over fifty were in their twenties, and there is something about that generation that always impresses me so much and gives me such optimism for humanity.

I first noticed about ten years ago, in Shell, that somehow a number of kids were coming out of college with a greater maturity than before. They were comfortable in their own skin, respectful of everyone around them, grounded and balanced, and a pleasure to be with. Since then, every occasion I’ve been exposed to that generation I have been more and more impressed.

The same happened this week. Those fifty kids were a sheer pleasure to be around. Each of them seemed at ease with their own body and mind and with each other. I witnessed nothing that could be seen as bullying or arrogant. Everyone respected each other, respected the group discipline and even respected Bach. It was a week full of smiles and laughter as well as curiosity and learning and support. While I kept myself at some distance outside the organised sessions, preferring to rest and sensing that many of the group wanted to spend their free times in reunions with friends rather than meeting strangers, simply observing was enough to be uplifting to the spirit.

Whenever I eulogise today’s youth, cynics point out that I am not seeing a balanced sample, but only witnessing the elite. I accept this. I can’t really say what a group of fifty kids from Mali would be like, or even a group from Baltimore. But that doesn’t stop me celebrating what I see. And the group this week are not exceptionally privileged – they have chosen a career where most will struggle to earn enough to buy houses and where they’ll face classrooms of unruly middle school kids for many years. True, the group was suspiciously white, and might include a number who enjoy parental support.

But my comparator groups are elite too. I look back on my time at college and just after, and the people in my peer groups then. Many of us had no idea how to be relaxed with the opposite gender, leave alone more complex sexualities. We had narrow minds and limited world-views. We often treated each other thoughtlessly, especially anyone different.

I am convinced that this generation will achieve great things. Just like the passages of Bach’s sixteenth notes, there will be downs as well as ups, missteps as well as triumphs, but overall humanity can only move forwards with this group at the helm. My belief is that succeeding generations in Baltimore and Mali are stronger too, despite what we may see in headlines. Humanity is moving forward, generation by generation, at an accelerating rate.

This conjures up another emotion in me – one of pride for my own generation. True, when I tuned in to the hate and ignorance of the Republican convention at one point during the serene week, the contrast was jarring, and my lot are certainly making a mess of many macro things in politics and economics.

But look more deeply and you can see that the spirit usually works positively. Consider the advances in medicine, psychology, science or technology, and how they have contributed to the next generation’s development, especially in how they have impacted the social climate. Above all, my generation can take pride on having been better parents than our own parents were to us. And I can only wonder at what fantastic parents my Princeton choir will become, and the potential results for their own kids.

So I can offer you three ways to restore your own spirits. One is hard, one in the middle and one as easy as breathing.

The hard one is to find God or some other spiritual grounding. That certainly takes a leap of faith. But you don’t have to believe every word of a creed or to support much of what comes out of the Vatican to be able to take succour from a vertical dimension as well as the horizontal one.

The middle one is about finding spirit from a passion. Bach is as good as any, but many others are out there – just make sure it has enough depth that you can keep wondering anew. If you choose Bach, go to some live concerts, don’t just rely on recordings. And choose a group that is good, but not necessarily professional – most of all you want their energy to shine through, and that is hard to sustain if their main motivation is financial. Choose a choir like ours.

The easy one is to take time to observe the amazing examples of humanity around us, and reflect on progress, generation to generation, and how wonderful that means the world can become for our own kids and grandkids. Holy or not, that is what spirit means and achieves.

We can draw spirit in this way every single day, but sometimes we are blessed with an experience to shine a sharper light. Last week at Princeton was one such experience for me. My heartfelt thanks to everyone involved.  

Applied everything

School teaching is a pet subject of the Economist, and for good reason. Education is the best route to global prosperity and to widening opportunity, and improving the quality of teaching may be the best route to improving education. Further, nowadays there are a lot of data and experience to draw upon, but still wide variations in approach and results. The field offers vast attainable global potential for improvement.

Sadly, until very recently this has been a rather sterile and ideological debate, and the Economist has let itself down by becoming sucked into one side. In many countries, teaching is one of the last bastions of the era of powerful trade unions. Teachers have historically had low oversight combined with strong tenure. The focus of would-be reformers like the Economist has been to lobby to break down this power base, making it easier to fire teachers and promoting assessment, often via testing of school kids.

This narrow focus has been intensely political for a generation, generally to the detriment of the kids and to progress. Teachers unions sense threat and respond by blocking reform, via becoming paymasters of major political parties. So-called reformers target teachers and their unions as a sole goal. One result is movements like charter schools, which are sold as child-centric beacons of progress, but in reality are usually little more than devices to weaken the contracts of teachers.

This obsession with contracts and power infects many in business, including myself. In Shell retail, there was always debate about the nature of the contract with operators of filling stations, and we changed for too often, at great cost, misleading ourselves that if only we could fix the governance and control, other good things would follow. While these contracts are important, the risk is that the reality is that the other good things are sometimes attainable without such wrenching change, and prove just as elusive afterwards.

More widely in business, look out for leaders who put too much faith in reorganisations, for that is the same disease. It is good practice to reorganise every few years and to prune a business at the same time, but in many cases endless reorganisations serve little purpose beyond obscuring a lack of real strategy.

Going back to teachers, it is true that in many countries the union has misused its legacy power. Current strikes in Mexico show just how broken patronage type systems can become, how jealously the beneficiaries defend them, and how detrimental such battles are to kids.

But at last the Economist has managed to broaden its lens in an extended essay published last month. The article reviewed what worked around the world rather than focusing on ideology, and was all the better for it.

And it does not surprise me that what works around the world is often about helping teachers become better teachers through applied training and coaching. The best place to learn these coachable skills is in the classroom.

The starting point for the analysis is not the lazy segmentation of bad or lazy teachers and good teachers, but the huge potential every teacher has to increase their effectiveness in front of kids. The way to unlock that potential is usually to understand and apply certain techniques, which differ for each teacher based on their strengths and situation. An expert observing a regular lesson can offer the teacher insight into what works and what could create better outcomes, and work with the teacher as they become comfortable with minor changes and start to implement them. The essay including many fascinating examples of the sorts of techniques and models that work, and they appeared very credible to me.

The current reality is that most teachers are trained in multi-year programmes in establishments where practice is hard to offer, spending most of their time with textbooks and lectures. Having qualified, they are put in front of real kids and many will never again be observed or even have a chance to observe colleagues. Instead they must summon their own motivation to improve and experiment, resources which are limited and tend to decline over years of habit-forming.

Doesn’t this make sense? With almost anything involving human interaction, the way to get better is to practice, coached by someone who can observe and give tips. In the essay, the results and payback for this approach were excellent, far stronger than ideological shibboleths such as smaller class sizes, higher budgets, pupil streaming, more assessments or flexible contracts, many of which seemed to offer no benefits at all.

This research offers great hope to societies. Predictably, unions will carp, seeing it as a Trojan horse for assessment, and market zealots will give them good cause. Beyond that, the main challenge will be resources, since it is not logistically simple or cheap to offer the in situ coaching required.

Applied learning is a fantastic concept that applies equally well to almost any skill requiring complex human interaction. Line management is a topic I have passion for, something, just like teaching, that makes a huge difference to outcomes and to wellbeing, yet typically carries little training, specialisation or facilitated improvement opportunities. In Shell, Greg Lewin and I designed Applied Leadership to address exactly this opportunity, with good results. Our idea was to create peer groups of line managers who would meet periodically with a facilitator to talk through what works and what could work better in specific situations. I am convinced that most corporations could benefit from such a programme.

Another favourite of mine for this sort of treatment is choir conducting. Just like in teaching, students tend to be offered a lot of theory and lectures and then left to improve by themselves. In this instance there is the added problem of ego, which means many are reluctant to invite coaching, especially not from fellow practitioners. My favourite question when hiring a choir conductor is “how do you make sure you keep learning and improving?” Most have never even considered the topic.

Medicine is another obvious candidate for the applied treatment. Medical school is also lots of theory and lectures and not enough practice. To be fair, there is then a long probationary period with plenty of applied learning and feedback. But once that is over, coaching stops and habits solidify. Many GP’s can’t even initiate an open conversation – TV’s Doc Martin is not as untypical as you might expect.

This whole area becomes a wonderful challenge for new technology. IT also has the potential to transform learning, yet it is not obvious how to combine that with the applied teaching methods that seem to work best. The two opportunities do not work against each other, but finding the best combination will take more experience and more studies. This double opportunity carries potential in medicine as well.

I have come to believe that applied learning is powerful in many, many fields, and is used to its full potential in few, for all sorts of reasons. I hope this can change in the coming years, to the benefit of all of us. Meanwhile, what complex human interaction do you employ regularly that could benefit from some applied learning, and how might you go about utilising it? Help is usually available if you are just open and ask.           

Respect the 52%

The recent UK referendum on Brexit was a momentous event. I feel lucky that I wasn’t living in my national homeland during the campaign, since I understand it was unseemly at both macro and micro levels. The country and its leaders did not perform with class or grace, with truth or logic playing very minor roles on both sides. But the most difficult aspect would probably have been the strain on personal relationships. Many of my friends there have talked about how they have become estranged from long-term friends, and I expect that would have happened with me as well. Being in the US helped me to keep my mouth shut and my judgments private.

I predict a similar challenge within the US over the coming few months with the Trump/Clinton presidential campaign. Rather like Brexit, it is rather tempting to characterize one side as racist, closed and intolerant. Sitting on our well-educated comfortable, informed high horses, we struggle to respect anyone who admits to a temptation to vote for Brexit or for Trump. Listening to those campaigning for Brexit or Trump only reinforces this, since both campaigns go out of their way to use the dog whistle and promote hate.

My weekly periodicals, The Economist and the Guardian Weekly, have, no surprise, been unusually united in their support for staying in the EU. Nearly all their arguments resonate with me. Economically, it must make sense to punch with the weight of a powerful trade and standards bloc, though I suspect the outcome won’t be quite as bad as the doom-mongers are now predicting, since many of the economics effects will be pretty marginal. Personally, I am more concerned with the politics. I have read books describing the build up to both world wars, and a common feature is a set of events which by themselves seem inconsequential but together lead to tragedy. There must be a chance that June 23 2016 is later seen as one such event, and for that reason alone I could not see myself contemplating support for Brexit.

Mixed in with some mourning and some moaning and some reasonable diagnosis and predictions, the periodicals both suggest a new division of the electorate. The descriptions differ but similar adjectives appear. Open against closed is the most common pairing. Then you get descriptions such as educated, tolerant, self-reliant, modern, forward-looking or optimistic on the open side, and anti-immigrant (or worse) on the closed side. Demographic distinctions come second – the open group is more predominantly urban and generally younger.

As someone who likes to see himself as all of the open adjectives (well, maybe not so young anymore), I lap all this up, just as I lap up the mainstream disdain for Trump in the US. But then I thought a little bit harder, and decided that it was not terribly tolerant to judge more than half of my compatriots so damningly. It might also be described as elitist or patronising.

So I decided to try a bit harder to get into the shoes of the 52%. Might they actually be right? Or might they be at least partly right, or right from their own interests?

The immigration aspect is hard to condone but not so hard to understand. I have had the benefit of a life in many diverse neighbourhoods, but in my early years I was pretty racist, just like nearly everyone around me. I feared difference, and tried to be in the dominant clan. I was brought up to think that all Russians were somehow evil and bent on destroying our society, but not to dwell on judging white South Africans, so it is not so surprising that I was also suspicious of people of colour.

In most places, racism is strongest where diversity is lowest, where people have not had experiences to counter-balance their fears. But we should also not discount the real burdens of immigration on some, and it is interesting that in the referendum the highest “leave” share was in districts with the highest east-European immigration, the agricultural heartlands of the fens. Here it is quite possible that immigration has diminished job prospects, with wages having plummeted while hours have increased and conditions worsened. Is it closed or racist or backward-looking to resent that if I come from there? It is not so easy to up sticks and head for London if my roots and experience are agricultural.

Then there is the whole question of globalisation, the dominant trend of the period that the UK has been in the EU. True, the EU has not been the cause of globalisation, indeed in some ways has tried to soften its impact, but the EU is globalising in the fact that it breaks down national sovereignty, and if I’m a loser I’m not going to dwell too long on analysing causes.

And losers there are many. Remain proponents banged on about GDP, but that means little if median wages are stagnating and inequality raging. A generation ago, a family often had a local job to see them through to a decent retirement. Such certainties are long gone, and families are dispersed and stressed as a result.

Consider also finance. A family will have had a mortgage before, arranged from a standard suite from a local building society. Since 1980 they will have very likely been mis-sold an endowment mortgage, been persuaded to take a couple of credit cards, been forced to learn the hard way about pension plans and student loans and been led down the garden path with a few privatisation shares. Spare cash often evaporates into black holes of the national lottery and ubiquitous sports betting. All of this – except the retirement maze – has been discretionary, but should we really judge families who have become entrapped this way?

Meanwhile, the elites have hardly put on a stellar performance in other areas. That same family may have lost a son in Iraq or Afghanistan and still wonder why. Housing policy has served only the wealthy. And over the last ten years public services and investment have been repeatedly slashed in the name of austerity, to seemingly little purpose beyond bailing out bankers.

These families don’t really want to hear any more from experts, as Michael Gove pointed out during the campaign. And who can blame them for blaming the EU, at least in part, since Dacre and Murdoch and politicians of all stripes have never lost an opportunity to do so?

So before we condemn 52% of our population as closed or worse, let us step into their shoes for a short while. We should certainly cast harsh judgement on our so-called leaders. Cameron was reckless with his nation’s future and could never be credible during the campaign since anyone making his arguments should never have called a referendum in the first place. Johnson was criminally opportunistic, Corbyn woefully ineffectual, Farage disgracefully bigoted. There is some schadenfreude in seeing all of these villains receive some comeuppance, but at what cost to us all? None, by the way, to the City slickers, who will now make a killing as parasites of global finance, the UK as one giant offshore haven.

Americans would do well to observe and learn. By all means disparage Trump the bully and Christie the opportunist, but think twice before extending condemnation to everyone who might consider voting for them. Instead, think hard about how to deal with the causes of their disquiet, and create a positive storyline that can be applicable beyond the lucky few, with emphasis on social and economic mobility to extend opportunity more widely.

That indeed might indicate a better segmentation than open versus closed. How about lucky versus unlucky? Us lucky 48% may have run out of luck this time. But didn’t we deserve that? And who are likely to be the real losers in the longer run, the lucky 48% or the unlucky 52%?