Sunday, April 22, 2012
Changing the Game
Ben Dirs is one of my favourite writers on the BBC website sports pages, always witty and usually distinctive. This week he wrote a blog about people or moments which changed a sport forever.
I’m not sure about his list. Ronnie O’Sullivan in snooker is a choice I don’t agree with (Alex Higgins or Steve Davis, surely?). His other choices are Usain Bolt, Adam Gilchrist, Tiger Woods, Jonah Lomu and Muhammed Ali. I recall his chosen moments for all these except the Ali one (1964 is a bit before my time). As usual, my main take-away is how personal memories are. We all see different significance in events unfolding around us, which is one reason why the world is so complex, and interesting.
Anyway, the article was enough to make me think about the same question for myself. All my events occurred since 1970, as it is my list built around my memories.
I have to agree with Woods, and I also agree with Ben’s chosen event and its significance. Due to Woods, millions play and watch golf. Due to Woods, nearly all professional golfers behave like sportsmen, with fitness and mental coaching, rather than the amateurs of yore (though we still love throwbacks like Bubba Watson). Due to Woods, the bar of what is possible at golf has risen several notches. And he is of mixed race, which has changed conservative attitudes in golf around the world, including the all-white Augusta club. Once he retires, I hope we remember all this more than we remember his downfall.
For Rugby Union, I also like the choice of Lomu, from a world cup match when he steamrollered England scoring four tries. The English must have prepared for the match, but they just had no answer at all. If it is the same match as the one I recall, the first try cam virtually from the kick-off. New Zealand simply passed the ball to Lomu and no one could stop him. Dirs is right that this was the catalyst for Rugby players nowadays more often resembling Lomu for size and strength.
A second game changing moment for me in Rugby came in commentary, with Bill Beaumont describing a typically dull 5-nations game in the 1980’s. Someone kicked for touch as usual, and Bill said something like “well played, that is the art in international rugby, get the ball off the pitch whenever possible”. I like to think I wasn’t the only one who heard that remark and wondered why we bothered to watch. Since then, regulators have changed the rules many times, most often for the better. Thanks Bill.
It is interesting that soccer does not feature on Dirs’ list. I could go for Cruyff and total football, or Beckenbauer and the invention of the sweeper (since morphed into the holding midfielder). I could go for Wenger: much as Woods has changed the work ethic of golf, Wenger has done the same for premier league football. Do you remember Superstars back in the 1970’s? Sportsmen from all sports competed in various fitness and skill challenges. The footballers always lost. ‘Nuff said.
But my football choice in the end goes to Bruce Grobbelaar. Look at old footage of goalkeepers. They leave their line a few yards to meet a cross, or to face a striker one-on-one, but that is all. Grobbelaar was the one who changed that, turning the number one into a true eleventh player. They all do it now, thanks to Bruce. His decision making and shot-stopping was not the best, but he changed his art forever.
Gilchrist is a reasonable cricket choice, and I like the example of an innings that won a test match in fourth innings. It surprises me that this is still not commonplace. Teams still hate to chase batting fourth (ironically, Australia more than most). I predict that this will change in the next ten years. For me, the lasting change in cricket started with Kerry Packer. Before him, cricket was like the county championship still is, an elite pastime with little interest for a spectator who wasn’t an insider. Packer blew this apart, and if he were alive, he would be smiling at twenty-20 and the IPL, as well as the fact that test cricket has improved too.
In athletics, for negative reasons, I go for the Ben Johnson 100m Olympic win then disqualification. For me, I still cannot watch any athletics without wondering who is cheating. So I never watch athletics. Hansie Cronje gets a passing mention in cricket for the same reason, but the game just about holds on to its credibility for me. Athletics (and cycling road races) sadly do not. Boxing never had it for me. Formula One may not be tainted by cheating, but I still don’t see the point.
In tennis, my choices are Billie Jean King as a precursor to Martina Navratilova. They were great players. They changed their sport in their emphasis on work and fitness – and that matters more than elegant skirts, surely, if we want only beauty we should follow fashion not sport? But I also love that they were lesbians and did not hide that fact. As a sheltered teenager, this was a revelation to me, and it really helped to understand that difference exists and is OK. We forget how prejudiced and fearful we all were then. Those two made a contribution beyond their sport to removing one of humanities great injustices.
While I adore US football, I can’t think of a stand-out game-changer there. Other Us sports I don’t know well enough.
That was a nice exercise, and I recommend it as good thought-provoking fun. I reminds me how much sport has developed in the last forty years, from the days of Eddie Waring and Kent Walton (was he the wrestling guy on ITV?). It also reminds me that some sportspeople have changed not just their sport, but their society as well.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Days that shape Lives
I’m half way through “One Day” by David Nicholls, and enjoying it very much. I loved “University Challenge” too. The author appeals to me because he writes of exactly my generation, he captures the embarrassing and pathetic truth in all our lives, and because I love his jokes.
The book is set on the same day across many years, but the title is also making the point that individual days, even moments, have a profound effect on all our lives. We rarely see them at the time, but there are forks in all of our roads, where we veer left or right. Which way we turn shapes the rest of our life.
This is certainly true of my own life, and probably of everyone’s. Last week I was sitting with an old friend in a bar. This friend is old as in I have known him a long time, but he is also not young. We talked about the day of his medical for Dutch national service. He had a minor heart defect, and at the end of his examination, the army doctor offered him a choice – he could complete the form in a way to excuse my friend his service, or he could allow him to join up with everyone else. My friend chose to by-pass the national service, and that choice, made in an instant, had a huge impact on the rest of his life. If he had known that at the time, he might have been paralysed by indecision.
Today, as an exercise, I tried to write down ten or twenty such shaping moments. I tried to be selective, choosing not momentous occasions, but rather decision points or points that had a lasting effect on me. The momentous occasions are often the outcomes of such points rather than the points themselves.
The exercise was poignant for me. Unsurprisingly, many of the moments I chose were very personal and at times quite intimate, so I won’t share them here. Nonetheless, I recommend the exercise. What I will share some general discoveries.
One weird discovery is about association. For many of the events, I can recall vividly something else going on at the time. I recall one decision I made in 1978, and just at the time the news came on TV that a pope had died (two died in that year, so I can’t quite place the moment). Another moment in 1985 I associate with listening to a particular piece of Rachmaninov on my first Walkman. A more recent decision was made listening to Byrd. A fourth association is of a weekend exactly thirty years ago, a shaping weekend in my life played out to the backdrop of war being declared on Argentina.
Now, what is going on here? True, many pieces of music or world events do have some association in my mind. But it seems extraordinary that so many life-changing times have such clear linkages. It is not as if I knew the long-lasting effect of these moments at the time, at least not consciously. Perhaps something was happening in my subconscious. I cannot explain it, but I find it noteworthy.
A second discovery is the role of other actors. We like to think we have a modicum of control over our lives. We make plans, lists, choices. Yet in many of the items on my list, a critical role was played by someone else. And usually the someone else is, in Hollywood parlance, not a co-star in my movie, but merely a supporting actor or actress, someone who has otherwise played a bit part in my life. A chance remark or a reaction to something I said or did was often what shaped the lasting effect.
This discovery also came as a surprise. Far from striding manfully through my own life, I am blown around by the whims of others. Not just blown a little bit either, blown into a different ocean. True, I am in charge of my own reaction, but I cannot escape the conclusion that at key moments I have placed my destiny squarely in the hands of a dice roll of someone else. This made me wonder who else I have been the one rolling the die for? Whose life have I shaped without realising it? How small we all are!
A final discovery is how little I have considered key decisions. True, it would have been impossible to anticipate that many of the moments on my list would have had such a lasting impact. But for others it was all too obvious. Here was a huge road sign in the middle of the road, offering clear choices with major repercussions. Yet when I think back to those choices, I was very careless in how I made them. Did I write down pros and cons? Did I consult others? Did I take my time? Did I heck! In most cases I shot straight from the hip. I won’t say the choices were wrong, actually in many cases they seemed to turn out fine, but I certainly can’t claim I was using all the tools available to me at the time.
A bit like the associations, perhaps the subconscious has played a role here. Knowing the weight of a decision can be a massive burden, it can make a decision making process very painful and inhibit a decision at all. Perhaps my subconscious knew that, and deliberately set me into spontaneous mode. I wonder. What is also true is that maturity has lent more consideration to my key decisions, that I am not as impulsive as I used to be.
So I emerge from the exercise rather humbled. My key decisions have often been made using a flimsy process or delegated to random other people. My subconscious can spot a key moment of truth a mile off, so much so that it provides an association to mark the spot, but my conscious self cannot reward this. I have been blown around through my life like a feather in the wind.
As well as humbling, I find this discovery valuable. I already knew that as a parent I could claim little credit (or blame) for how my children blossomed, understanding the far more important roles taken by the children themselves and by fate. If I thought about it, I also knew my life outcomes were driven far less by my own choices but by accidents of birth (a white male child born in a middle class home at a time of unparalleled peace and prosperity, blessed with a high IQ – wow, what could be a luckier draw than that?). Now I come to realise that, even when given a limited opportunity to shape my own fate, my hand on the wheel is far from steady.
The book is set on the same day across many years, but the title is also making the point that individual days, even moments, have a profound effect on all our lives. We rarely see them at the time, but there are forks in all of our roads, where we veer left or right. Which way we turn shapes the rest of our life.
This is certainly true of my own life, and probably of everyone’s. Last week I was sitting with an old friend in a bar. This friend is old as in I have known him a long time, but he is also not young. We talked about the day of his medical for Dutch national service. He had a minor heart defect, and at the end of his examination, the army doctor offered him a choice – he could complete the form in a way to excuse my friend his service, or he could allow him to join up with everyone else. My friend chose to by-pass the national service, and that choice, made in an instant, had a huge impact on the rest of his life. If he had known that at the time, he might have been paralysed by indecision.
Today, as an exercise, I tried to write down ten or twenty such shaping moments. I tried to be selective, choosing not momentous occasions, but rather decision points or points that had a lasting effect on me. The momentous occasions are often the outcomes of such points rather than the points themselves.
The exercise was poignant for me. Unsurprisingly, many of the moments I chose were very personal and at times quite intimate, so I won’t share them here. Nonetheless, I recommend the exercise. What I will share some general discoveries.
One weird discovery is about association. For many of the events, I can recall vividly something else going on at the time. I recall one decision I made in 1978, and just at the time the news came on TV that a pope had died (two died in that year, so I can’t quite place the moment). Another moment in 1985 I associate with listening to a particular piece of Rachmaninov on my first Walkman. A more recent decision was made listening to Byrd. A fourth association is of a weekend exactly thirty years ago, a shaping weekend in my life played out to the backdrop of war being declared on Argentina.
Now, what is going on here? True, many pieces of music or world events do have some association in my mind. But it seems extraordinary that so many life-changing times have such clear linkages. It is not as if I knew the long-lasting effect of these moments at the time, at least not consciously. Perhaps something was happening in my subconscious. I cannot explain it, but I find it noteworthy.
A second discovery is the role of other actors. We like to think we have a modicum of control over our lives. We make plans, lists, choices. Yet in many of the items on my list, a critical role was played by someone else. And usually the someone else is, in Hollywood parlance, not a co-star in my movie, but merely a supporting actor or actress, someone who has otherwise played a bit part in my life. A chance remark or a reaction to something I said or did was often what shaped the lasting effect.
This discovery also came as a surprise. Far from striding manfully through my own life, I am blown around by the whims of others. Not just blown a little bit either, blown into a different ocean. True, I am in charge of my own reaction, but I cannot escape the conclusion that at key moments I have placed my destiny squarely in the hands of a dice roll of someone else. This made me wonder who else I have been the one rolling the die for? Whose life have I shaped without realising it? How small we all are!
A final discovery is how little I have considered key decisions. True, it would have been impossible to anticipate that many of the moments on my list would have had such a lasting impact. But for others it was all too obvious. Here was a huge road sign in the middle of the road, offering clear choices with major repercussions. Yet when I think back to those choices, I was very careless in how I made them. Did I write down pros and cons? Did I consult others? Did I take my time? Did I heck! In most cases I shot straight from the hip. I won’t say the choices were wrong, actually in many cases they seemed to turn out fine, but I certainly can’t claim I was using all the tools available to me at the time.
A bit like the associations, perhaps the subconscious has played a role here. Knowing the weight of a decision can be a massive burden, it can make a decision making process very painful and inhibit a decision at all. Perhaps my subconscious knew that, and deliberately set me into spontaneous mode. I wonder. What is also true is that maturity has lent more consideration to my key decisions, that I am not as impulsive as I used to be.
So I emerge from the exercise rather humbled. My key decisions have often been made using a flimsy process or delegated to random other people. My subconscious can spot a key moment of truth a mile off, so much so that it provides an association to mark the spot, but my conscious self cannot reward this. I have been blown around through my life like a feather in the wind.
As well as humbling, I find this discovery valuable. I already knew that as a parent I could claim little credit (or blame) for how my children blossomed, understanding the far more important roles taken by the children themselves and by fate. If I thought about it, I also knew my life outcomes were driven far less by my own choices but by accidents of birth (a white male child born in a middle class home at a time of unparalleled peace and prosperity, blessed with a high IQ – wow, what could be a luckier draw than that?). Now I come to realise that, even when given a limited opportunity to shape my own fate, my hand on the wheel is far from steady.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Peer Pleasure
Last week I read an article in the Guardian weekly about a successful experiment at a home for people with mental problems. They had brought in other people with mental problems, those at different recovery stages, to help with caring. I couldn’t help but laugh. After all these years, the lunatics really had taken over the asylum.
Then I read more and thought more deeply. Of course, I concluded, this made so much sense. The root causes of people with disturbed minds are often psychological, things starting out with lack of self-esteem or other requirements for empathy. Despite all their training, it is very hard for care professionals to fully relate to such patients and to get through to them. Other people emerging from similar issues might have more ability to see into the heads of the sick, and explain coping strategies that might help, things that may have worked for them, things that could give hope. Hope may be all that is missing, hope given by someone credible yet not superior, someone who cannot be a threat or any sort of humiliation.
Isn’t that lovely? I wish them every success with the experiment, and hope that more spring from it. Of course care professionals do not lose their role, but it modifies. They have to work in the background, finding the right peer partners, gently suggesting approaches to those partners, being ready with follow up treatment such as a change in medication, and overseeing to ensure no harm comes from the process.
But the care professionals may not be comfortable with this. These different skills may not come easily to them. They may even feel a bit threatened by their subtle change in power and role.
I believe this is a microcosm of a very common opportunity. Sorry to keep bleating on about it, but in my part of Shell we tried something similar (though I’m not sure Shell leaders would be all that pleased about being compared with mental patients). In the Applied Leadership programme, we replaced training courses about leadership with discussion groups of leaders. Under the eye of a moderator, participants shared their issues and their solutions, building confidence and a menu of tried and trusted strategies. For many it worked well. For some it opened their brains for the first time to improving their leadership, something ego and fear and prevented before. Hearing that peers had similar problems was the catalyst to being able to share their own problems. Barriers were broken down, not for everyone, but for a larger group than would have secured value from classical training.
In essence, I believe this to be identical to the mental patient story. And it started me wondering what other examples might be out there, and what other fields might be improved with this approach.
Training teachers has changed a lot in the last fifty years. Classroom type sessions have been partly replaced by experienced based training, spending time in front of real live kids and finding ways to cope then to connect then to thrive. I remember when I was at school, there were some teachers who were no doubt very clever and technically well-trained, but who had no ability whatsoever to connect with their pupils. Some did not master control, others couldn’t find the right atmosphere or language, others simply could not see the problems from the point of view of the kids. I know this has improved, but I suspect that it go further. I am gratified to see that teachers are offered two or three days per term for training, but I wonder how much of that time is spent receiving technical training. My guess is that more often a dimple discussion with other teachers at the school would yield more dividends, if properly moderated. And the simplest and most cost effective way for any teacher to improve might be to invite a peer into his or her classroom a few times to observe, and to give the same favour back later. Does this happen? I have my doubts. What stops it? Well, ego and fear are two things – who would not initially be a little bit frightened letting a colleague into their empire? And I also suspect professional trainers by block this, subconsciously or not. The trade unions might not help much either.
Generally, any field where human communication is an important part of the skillset could benefit from a peer-based approach. One good bi-product of the much-maligned health service reforms might be the increased possibility for GP’s to give peer coaching to each other, though the same blockers are likely to persist as in teaching.
Another example is conducting and choir directing. True, technical skills are important, but, once again, my guess is that the best way to develop above a certain level is to observe and be observed by peers and to start an improvement dialogue as a result. Ego is especially big in this field, so don’t be surprised that in my experience few actually do this.
Gaining the benefits of peer coaching is one of the things enabled by the internet. Blogs and open query sites are perfect for peer coaching. People can share what works for them, or post issues holding them back, without much stigma. Virtual connections are fast, plentiful and relatively unchallenging. Many of us have got into the habit of surfing the web when we have a new problem to solve. We could probably do it more than we could, and apply the approach to things we think we have already mastered as well.
Two more example areas might be parenting or caring for the elderly. In both these cases, these are less often professions than skills people need to acquire as they go without training. A bit like line management really. I love to observe other parents and try to be open to their criticism of my own approach – within a couple is the easiest place to start of course. And I would love more clues for how to care for my ailing mother. So, I should start with the internet on that one.
I notice my daughter is a lot better and many of these life skills than I am. Building relationships is another one, my generation had no clue how to do that at all yet many kids these days avoid the pitfalls with grace. I expect peer coaching has a lot to do with it. Facebook and MSN may be derided by some of my generation, but my belief is that they are enabling a positive revolution in many empathy-based skills. Which only bodes well for a bright future. Perhaps in the future there will be many fewer people needing help mentally – and the treatment for those that still do will be more effective do to peer coaching.
Then I read more and thought more deeply. Of course, I concluded, this made so much sense. The root causes of people with disturbed minds are often psychological, things starting out with lack of self-esteem or other requirements for empathy. Despite all their training, it is very hard for care professionals to fully relate to such patients and to get through to them. Other people emerging from similar issues might have more ability to see into the heads of the sick, and explain coping strategies that might help, things that may have worked for them, things that could give hope. Hope may be all that is missing, hope given by someone credible yet not superior, someone who cannot be a threat or any sort of humiliation.
Isn’t that lovely? I wish them every success with the experiment, and hope that more spring from it. Of course care professionals do not lose their role, but it modifies. They have to work in the background, finding the right peer partners, gently suggesting approaches to those partners, being ready with follow up treatment such as a change in medication, and overseeing to ensure no harm comes from the process.
But the care professionals may not be comfortable with this. These different skills may not come easily to them. They may even feel a bit threatened by their subtle change in power and role.
I believe this is a microcosm of a very common opportunity. Sorry to keep bleating on about it, but in my part of Shell we tried something similar (though I’m not sure Shell leaders would be all that pleased about being compared with mental patients). In the Applied Leadership programme, we replaced training courses about leadership with discussion groups of leaders. Under the eye of a moderator, participants shared their issues and their solutions, building confidence and a menu of tried and trusted strategies. For many it worked well. For some it opened their brains for the first time to improving their leadership, something ego and fear and prevented before. Hearing that peers had similar problems was the catalyst to being able to share their own problems. Barriers were broken down, not for everyone, but for a larger group than would have secured value from classical training.
In essence, I believe this to be identical to the mental patient story. And it started me wondering what other examples might be out there, and what other fields might be improved with this approach.
Training teachers has changed a lot in the last fifty years. Classroom type sessions have been partly replaced by experienced based training, spending time in front of real live kids and finding ways to cope then to connect then to thrive. I remember when I was at school, there were some teachers who were no doubt very clever and technically well-trained, but who had no ability whatsoever to connect with their pupils. Some did not master control, others couldn’t find the right atmosphere or language, others simply could not see the problems from the point of view of the kids. I know this has improved, but I suspect that it go further. I am gratified to see that teachers are offered two or three days per term for training, but I wonder how much of that time is spent receiving technical training. My guess is that more often a dimple discussion with other teachers at the school would yield more dividends, if properly moderated. And the simplest and most cost effective way for any teacher to improve might be to invite a peer into his or her classroom a few times to observe, and to give the same favour back later. Does this happen? I have my doubts. What stops it? Well, ego and fear are two things – who would not initially be a little bit frightened letting a colleague into their empire? And I also suspect professional trainers by block this, subconsciously or not. The trade unions might not help much either.
Generally, any field where human communication is an important part of the skillset could benefit from a peer-based approach. One good bi-product of the much-maligned health service reforms might be the increased possibility for GP’s to give peer coaching to each other, though the same blockers are likely to persist as in teaching.
Another example is conducting and choir directing. True, technical skills are important, but, once again, my guess is that the best way to develop above a certain level is to observe and be observed by peers and to start an improvement dialogue as a result. Ego is especially big in this field, so don’t be surprised that in my experience few actually do this.
Gaining the benefits of peer coaching is one of the things enabled by the internet. Blogs and open query sites are perfect for peer coaching. People can share what works for them, or post issues holding them back, without much stigma. Virtual connections are fast, plentiful and relatively unchallenging. Many of us have got into the habit of surfing the web when we have a new problem to solve. We could probably do it more than we could, and apply the approach to things we think we have already mastered as well.
Two more example areas might be parenting or caring for the elderly. In both these cases, these are less often professions than skills people need to acquire as they go without training. A bit like line management really. I love to observe other parents and try to be open to their criticism of my own approach – within a couple is the easiest place to start of course. And I would love more clues for how to care for my ailing mother. So, I should start with the internet on that one.
I notice my daughter is a lot better and many of these life skills than I am. Building relationships is another one, my generation had no clue how to do that at all yet many kids these days avoid the pitfalls with grace. I expect peer coaching has a lot to do with it. Facebook and MSN may be derided by some of my generation, but my belief is that they are enabling a positive revolution in many empathy-based skills. Which only bodes well for a bright future. Perhaps in the future there will be many fewer people needing help mentally – and the treatment for those that still do will be more effective do to peer coaching.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
My Seven Wonders
I grow to love Intelligent Life, the Economist magazine published every two months. It is rather like the review section of a Sunday newspaper, but with the sharp attitude and writing style from the parent publication. Some features, like the wine review, just leave me cold, since they describe a world outside of my comprehension (how can a wine bottle of 400 dollars be good value?). It is also hard to make credible listing which are global and relevant: if six exhibitions are listed, then the chance that I might happen be in one of the cities might be 10%.
One regular feature is called Seven Wonders, in which some polyglot is asked to describe a special view, city, hotel, building, beach, journey and work of art. Often, I have not even heard of most of the nominations, and that can grate, inspiring not awe but a sort of jealousy. But each time I have read the feature I have been tempted to try it for my myself. So, this week I did. I have no expectation that it will inspire awe, and hope it will not inspire jealousy either. My hope is to inspire you to try the exercise for yourself, as I found it fun and pleasantly nostalgic.
For a view, there are many candidates in Scandinavia, and some cityscape views as well, for example the Staten Island ferry view in New York, but my choice is the Swiss alps from a plane. Business travel has many negatives, and frequent flying is certainly one of them, but I still love looking out of the window on a clear day, reflecting on the miracle of flight. I also love maps and fancy myself as a good navigator, so the puzzle of identifying locations beneath me is endlessly fascinating. Flying over any city I know is thus a joy, but, for its sheer splendour, mountain ranges are special. It is almost worth the cost and hassle of a day trip from Amsterdam to Milan and back for the beauty that are the alpine views from the window. One of the blessings of our generations.
I love cities, and love being what I now learn is called a flaneur, a sort of random wanderer in a city. Walking and public transport are my favourite ways to be a flaneur. Choosing any city over any other is difficult. London, Paris, New York, Barcelona, Lisboa, where to start? I suppose somewhere compact, where it is easy to walk, somewhere with a distinctive history and present, and where buildings and especially people have stylish diversity. So I go for Sevilla. It is stiflingly hot in summer, but otherwise the city is a jewel, its people proud, demonstrative, stylish and often out of doors. Boston or Cambridge might qualify as well.
I found hotel the hardest category, I think mainly because hotels for me mainly evoke the most sterile part of sterile business trips, judged only by the absence of the negative. As long as the room temperature is OK, the bed soft and without bugs, the hot water hot, the breakfast edible and the check-out efficient, I’m happy to move on. True, I’ve been to some beautiful locations (Holmenkollen in Oslo and the Danube front hotels of Budapest), historical places (the castle hotels near Stockholm or the Hunting Tower near Perth in Scotland), and quaint establishments, and I’ve had wonderful experiences in hotels as well, but something about the category does not work for me. So my choice is a sort of anti-choice. Formule One is a great business model, and revolutionised its category, so my choice is any Formule One. You can plan your journey, you know exactly what you will get, and your wallet will hardly be troubled. I’m old enough now to value a private toilet, but if Formule One hadn’t started the trend, imitators with private toilets would not have arrived.
For buildings, I am no expert in architecture, but I do love wandering into Churches. For me the delight of Rome is just to randomly walk, stopping at every Church I pass. But how to choose between them all, single one out? Then I also love many modern buildings, those that combine functionalism and simplicity with grace and uniqueness. I am not one to denigrate the town hall in The Hague. My choice is a museum, the Vasa in Stockholm. The building is the boat, reconstructed from a salvage operation fifty years ago, the same boat the sank half an hour into its maiden voyage four hundred years earlier. The boat itself is magnificent, and its museum combines that splendour with history, science and intrigue.
A beach for me is for walking. So it needs solitude, dramatic colours and dramatic sea, the chance to paddle and sand that is flat and hard enough to walk on, an alternative cliff top route for the return journey, and a vista facing either way. It also helps if the climate is seasonal but mainly sunny. So I choose Falesia beach in the Algarve, between val de Lobo and Albufeira. Just like Sevilla, avoid July and August, this time because of people as well as temperature. Otherwise the orange cliffs and exciting sea offer all the aids to reflection that one could ever want. Portstewart in Northern Ireland has all the same positive characteristics – but unfortunately it is usually raining.
Journey is a lovely category. One day I would love to walk to Santiago de Compostelo, but I haven’t had that pleasure yet. The South Downs way from Eastbourne is a wonderful journey and surprisingly accessible, dotted with good pubs. I could also choose something abstract like Holy Week. But I choose a rail journey, as I love travelling by rail almost as much as walking. The route from Oslo to Bergen is stately. At the top of the mountains it is possible to detour onto a funicular and boat trip on a peaceful fjord. But the best feature of the journey is its ability to offer three seasons in a single day, for example in September. Near Oslo you find Autumn colours and flavours, but it the mountains it is already bleak winter. Then in the maritime air towards Bergen you can capture the last of summer. Spring is a bit harder generally in Scandinavia, as it is always late and fleeting. Bergen is a wonderful destination if you are lucky enough to choose one of the sixty or so days in the year when it does not rain. A tourist tip for Norway is to go inland. The Hurtigruten up the coast is famous and has its charms, but the views cannot compare.
Last comes a work of art, and my appreciation is greatest for music. I could go for a Victoria or Monteverdi anthem, last year I sang a piece from the same era by Vivanco which was unforgettable in its drama, but in the end I choose Bach. This prolific composer could not write bad music, nor could he write music that stands still. Some Bach can be so somnolent as to be monotonous, but not the Magnificat. Twelve short movements, each with its own distinctive character, perfectly formed. Amazingly, Bach wrote much of his music for his local Church choir, and was constantly harangued to keep his music short. His remit for the Magnificat was not to go over thirty minutes, and this may explain why the very last movement rather runs out of steam. But in show business the maxim is always to leave the audience wanting more, and that certainly applies here.
So, that was fun, and I commend the exercise. One overall reflection is that most of my memory concerns less the object and more the human experience I associate with it. Don’t you find that when you look at your old photos the only ones you linger over are the ones of people? Well, I found the same with this. I suppose that is good, or we might all choose the same places.
The other reflection is how blessed I am compared with my parents, to live in an age where the world has become so much smaller and more accessible. Yet still almost all my choices are from the developed world and even from Europe. I guess my 22-year-old daughter would already be able to offer a more eclectic selection, and just think of the range of experience she might have when she reaches fifty one, or when her own kids reach fifty one.
One regular feature is called Seven Wonders, in which some polyglot is asked to describe a special view, city, hotel, building, beach, journey and work of art. Often, I have not even heard of most of the nominations, and that can grate, inspiring not awe but a sort of jealousy. But each time I have read the feature I have been tempted to try it for my myself. So, this week I did. I have no expectation that it will inspire awe, and hope it will not inspire jealousy either. My hope is to inspire you to try the exercise for yourself, as I found it fun and pleasantly nostalgic.
For a view, there are many candidates in Scandinavia, and some cityscape views as well, for example the Staten Island ferry view in New York, but my choice is the Swiss alps from a plane. Business travel has many negatives, and frequent flying is certainly one of them, but I still love looking out of the window on a clear day, reflecting on the miracle of flight. I also love maps and fancy myself as a good navigator, so the puzzle of identifying locations beneath me is endlessly fascinating. Flying over any city I know is thus a joy, but, for its sheer splendour, mountain ranges are special. It is almost worth the cost and hassle of a day trip from Amsterdam to Milan and back for the beauty that are the alpine views from the window. One of the blessings of our generations.
I love cities, and love being what I now learn is called a flaneur, a sort of random wanderer in a city. Walking and public transport are my favourite ways to be a flaneur. Choosing any city over any other is difficult. London, Paris, New York, Barcelona, Lisboa, where to start? I suppose somewhere compact, where it is easy to walk, somewhere with a distinctive history and present, and where buildings and especially people have stylish diversity. So I go for Sevilla. It is stiflingly hot in summer, but otherwise the city is a jewel, its people proud, demonstrative, stylish and often out of doors. Boston or Cambridge might qualify as well.
I found hotel the hardest category, I think mainly because hotels for me mainly evoke the most sterile part of sterile business trips, judged only by the absence of the negative. As long as the room temperature is OK, the bed soft and without bugs, the hot water hot, the breakfast edible and the check-out efficient, I’m happy to move on. True, I’ve been to some beautiful locations (Holmenkollen in Oslo and the Danube front hotels of Budapest), historical places (the castle hotels near Stockholm or the Hunting Tower near Perth in Scotland), and quaint establishments, and I’ve had wonderful experiences in hotels as well, but something about the category does not work for me. So my choice is a sort of anti-choice. Formule One is a great business model, and revolutionised its category, so my choice is any Formule One. You can plan your journey, you know exactly what you will get, and your wallet will hardly be troubled. I’m old enough now to value a private toilet, but if Formule One hadn’t started the trend, imitators with private toilets would not have arrived.
For buildings, I am no expert in architecture, but I do love wandering into Churches. For me the delight of Rome is just to randomly walk, stopping at every Church I pass. But how to choose between them all, single one out? Then I also love many modern buildings, those that combine functionalism and simplicity with grace and uniqueness. I am not one to denigrate the town hall in The Hague. My choice is a museum, the Vasa in Stockholm. The building is the boat, reconstructed from a salvage operation fifty years ago, the same boat the sank half an hour into its maiden voyage four hundred years earlier. The boat itself is magnificent, and its museum combines that splendour with history, science and intrigue.
A beach for me is for walking. So it needs solitude, dramatic colours and dramatic sea, the chance to paddle and sand that is flat and hard enough to walk on, an alternative cliff top route for the return journey, and a vista facing either way. It also helps if the climate is seasonal but mainly sunny. So I choose Falesia beach in the Algarve, between val de Lobo and Albufeira. Just like Sevilla, avoid July and August, this time because of people as well as temperature. Otherwise the orange cliffs and exciting sea offer all the aids to reflection that one could ever want. Portstewart in Northern Ireland has all the same positive characteristics – but unfortunately it is usually raining.
Journey is a lovely category. One day I would love to walk to Santiago de Compostelo, but I haven’t had that pleasure yet. The South Downs way from Eastbourne is a wonderful journey and surprisingly accessible, dotted with good pubs. I could also choose something abstract like Holy Week. But I choose a rail journey, as I love travelling by rail almost as much as walking. The route from Oslo to Bergen is stately. At the top of the mountains it is possible to detour onto a funicular and boat trip on a peaceful fjord. But the best feature of the journey is its ability to offer three seasons in a single day, for example in September. Near Oslo you find Autumn colours and flavours, but it the mountains it is already bleak winter. Then in the maritime air towards Bergen you can capture the last of summer. Spring is a bit harder generally in Scandinavia, as it is always late and fleeting. Bergen is a wonderful destination if you are lucky enough to choose one of the sixty or so days in the year when it does not rain. A tourist tip for Norway is to go inland. The Hurtigruten up the coast is famous and has its charms, but the views cannot compare.
Last comes a work of art, and my appreciation is greatest for music. I could go for a Victoria or Monteverdi anthem, last year I sang a piece from the same era by Vivanco which was unforgettable in its drama, but in the end I choose Bach. This prolific composer could not write bad music, nor could he write music that stands still. Some Bach can be so somnolent as to be monotonous, but not the Magnificat. Twelve short movements, each with its own distinctive character, perfectly formed. Amazingly, Bach wrote much of his music for his local Church choir, and was constantly harangued to keep his music short. His remit for the Magnificat was not to go over thirty minutes, and this may explain why the very last movement rather runs out of steam. But in show business the maxim is always to leave the audience wanting more, and that certainly applies here.
So, that was fun, and I commend the exercise. One overall reflection is that most of my memory concerns less the object and more the human experience I associate with it. Don’t you find that when you look at your old photos the only ones you linger over are the ones of people? Well, I found the same with this. I suppose that is good, or we might all choose the same places.
The other reflection is how blessed I am compared with my parents, to live in an age where the world has become so much smaller and more accessible. Yet still almost all my choices are from the developed world and even from Europe. I guess my 22-year-old daughter would already be able to offer a more eclectic selection, and just think of the range of experience she might have when she reaches fifty one, or when her own kids reach fifty one.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Take me to Jakarta?
A couple of weeks ago Ipsos published a happiness survey of 28 countries. Indonesia were run-away winners with 51% saying they were very happy, more than double the score for any European nation.
I love these surveys. I was encouraged when David Cameron started a campaign to understand and drive policy towards “gross national happiness” a couple of years ago and am disappointed that it seems to have led nowhere. Probably it has run into the problems of defining and measuring happiness, and also political blocks: who really wants to stake their re-election prospects on something so fickle as a poll?
The Ipsos survey interviewed people from the same 28 countries in 2007, so it is also possible to see trends. There are splits not just by nation, but also by age, gender, marital and work status. I looked at the raw data on the website, but haven’t yet found great surprises or insights from these other categories.
As the surveyors point out, a healthy dose of salt is necessary in drawing too many conclusions, even if we assume that the interviewers managed to find a large enough representative sample from each country. First, there is the language and culture dimension. The basic question can be translated into different languages, but the exact nuance is bound to differ. Anyone with one native language living in a second country knows that subtle changes in text radically change interpretation. Even if the intent of the question is more or less the same, the responses will still reflect culture. Perhaps in Indonesia, if a stranger comes up to you in the street and asking you how happy you are, it would be a monumental insult to them, to your family or to your God to respond anything but positively. For this reason, perhaps the trends over time give better indications than the national scores.
But this leads to another problem. I’m pretty sure that my response to the question would vary day by day, even hour by hour. True, we have an inner sense of contentment or otherwise that remains pretty solid for months or years. But my mood today is buffeted by so many ethereal factors as well. If the sun is shining, I always feel better. If I have slept well. If my football team has won its most recent match. If a friend paid me a compliment, or if I managed to make a friend happier myself. If I am free from a slight headache or backache or whatever ache. If the morning news or something I just read uplifted rather than depressed me. If my most recent family interactions have been happy ones.
Especially since I may respond quickly and without much thought to a random pollster catching me off guard, I have a feeling that my answer s might swing rather more wildly than they should. And while some of these effects are personal and might be expected to balance out in a large enough poll, others might effect a lot of people in the same direction, the weather, news and sport as examples.
Can a poll really mean anything in the midst of all that noise? My suggested answer would be: only if conducted quite frequently. One measurement in 2007 and another in 2011/12 seems to me to be rather like dismissing climate change because it was cool last week.
Still, let us for a minute cast all these quibbles aside and look at the poll results. Most countries at the top of the league in 2007 stayed there in 2012. Behind Indonesia were India, and then Mexico and Brazil, though Brazil dropped back in 2012. Turkey jumped from the bottom half of the table to fifth place. Then all the developed non-Europeans/non-Asians are in a cluster – US, Canada, Australia. South Africa, Argentina and Saudi Arabia are in the top half too. Then we have all the miserable Europeans. The Brits and Swedish are a bit ahead of most continentals, Italy and Spain (especially in 2012) a bit behind, and Hungary and Russia right at the bottom. China does no better than average, and Japan and South Korea do worse. For a table, look (among other places) at the February 25th Economist.
So, what does this all tell us, caveats notwithstanding? Money plainly doesn’t buy you happiness, at least as a nation. The best performers perhaps have simpler lifestyles, and a strong faith-based spirituality. I am sure that Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the excellent “Eat, Pray, Love” would not be surprised to find Indonesia and India at the top, and might attribute it in part to simplicity and spirituality.
While absolute economic development is not an indicator, some sense of progress perhaps is. Life for the leaders probably feels more blessed than a generation before. Turkey is plainly going forwards, and its results improved more than any other nation. Even Australia and the US might benefit from a sense of national youth. In Europe, by contrast, we are often led to believe that our best days are behind us. Perhaps distant former glories afflict the Chinese and Japanese as well?
What about dignity and justice? I argued before that these were stronger drivers of wellbeing than freedom or wealth. This theory is supported by Russia’s lowly position. In the case of Saudi Arabia, there may be multiple forces at work. There is also a case to say that material goodies only start to make us unhappy when we lack them but our neighbours don’t. That is one reason that, unless we are as enlightened as Liz Gilbert, we probably wouldn’t all make ourselves happier by moving to Indonesia.
All in all, the survey is fascinating and makes me beg for more. Surveys are so cheap to administer nowadays – why can’t this one cover 100 countries, with ten times as many people asked ten times as often? We might start to learn more about what truly makes people happy, and be able to do something about it, individually and collectively.
I think it would work. In the part of Shell I worked in, we started a regular staff survey, and used it to track things which were otherwise hard to measure. Questions like: “Does your division value for money for clients?”, or “Is X an innovative company?” are excellent for surveys, since trends in employee perceptions are probably the most reliable (and earliest) indicators of important business drivers. I was always fascinated by the results, and astonished at how consistently they anticipated real change. The work of Reichheld and Bain using customer and employee surveys to measure net promoter score uses a similar method, and I find it one of the most powerful tools available to companies.
Looking at why companies don’t do these things more often offers a clue why governments don’t either. At the time we used these internal surveys, my division was blessed with an enlightened leader. Even so, he was quite sensitive about the questions used, and not always objective in applying the results. His management team hated the surveys, seeing them as a threat. His bosses listened politely and allowed us to use survey scores to influence our self- assessment, but showed no appetite to copy us.
This was all about politics. How many leaders really want to display the truth? How many want to put their bonus in the hands of something so fickle as a survey?
It is the same with politicians, which is why I am cynical whether anything good will come from Cameron in the end. But, in the end, technology will defeat them. Online surveys already proliferate, and will become more pervasive, just like social media. It is not just Putin and Assad who in the long term will truly have to look their people in their eye.
I hope by that stage the Indonesians will still be as happy. But that is the great paradox of development. They probably won’t be, because that same technology might have taught them to value what they lack as well as what they have.
I love these surveys. I was encouraged when David Cameron started a campaign to understand and drive policy towards “gross national happiness” a couple of years ago and am disappointed that it seems to have led nowhere. Probably it has run into the problems of defining and measuring happiness, and also political blocks: who really wants to stake their re-election prospects on something so fickle as a poll?
The Ipsos survey interviewed people from the same 28 countries in 2007, so it is also possible to see trends. There are splits not just by nation, but also by age, gender, marital and work status. I looked at the raw data on the website, but haven’t yet found great surprises or insights from these other categories.
As the surveyors point out, a healthy dose of salt is necessary in drawing too many conclusions, even if we assume that the interviewers managed to find a large enough representative sample from each country. First, there is the language and culture dimension. The basic question can be translated into different languages, but the exact nuance is bound to differ. Anyone with one native language living in a second country knows that subtle changes in text radically change interpretation. Even if the intent of the question is more or less the same, the responses will still reflect culture. Perhaps in Indonesia, if a stranger comes up to you in the street and asking you how happy you are, it would be a monumental insult to them, to your family or to your God to respond anything but positively. For this reason, perhaps the trends over time give better indications than the national scores.
But this leads to another problem. I’m pretty sure that my response to the question would vary day by day, even hour by hour. True, we have an inner sense of contentment or otherwise that remains pretty solid for months or years. But my mood today is buffeted by so many ethereal factors as well. If the sun is shining, I always feel better. If I have slept well. If my football team has won its most recent match. If a friend paid me a compliment, or if I managed to make a friend happier myself. If I am free from a slight headache or backache or whatever ache. If the morning news or something I just read uplifted rather than depressed me. If my most recent family interactions have been happy ones.
Especially since I may respond quickly and without much thought to a random pollster catching me off guard, I have a feeling that my answer s might swing rather more wildly than they should. And while some of these effects are personal and might be expected to balance out in a large enough poll, others might effect a lot of people in the same direction, the weather, news and sport as examples.
Can a poll really mean anything in the midst of all that noise? My suggested answer would be: only if conducted quite frequently. One measurement in 2007 and another in 2011/12 seems to me to be rather like dismissing climate change because it was cool last week.
Still, let us for a minute cast all these quibbles aside and look at the poll results. Most countries at the top of the league in 2007 stayed there in 2012. Behind Indonesia were India, and then Mexico and Brazil, though Brazil dropped back in 2012. Turkey jumped from the bottom half of the table to fifth place. Then all the developed non-Europeans/non-Asians are in a cluster – US, Canada, Australia. South Africa, Argentina and Saudi Arabia are in the top half too. Then we have all the miserable Europeans. The Brits and Swedish are a bit ahead of most continentals, Italy and Spain (especially in 2012) a bit behind, and Hungary and Russia right at the bottom. China does no better than average, and Japan and South Korea do worse. For a table, look (among other places) at the February 25th Economist.
So, what does this all tell us, caveats notwithstanding? Money plainly doesn’t buy you happiness, at least as a nation. The best performers perhaps have simpler lifestyles, and a strong faith-based spirituality. I am sure that Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the excellent “Eat, Pray, Love” would not be surprised to find Indonesia and India at the top, and might attribute it in part to simplicity and spirituality.
While absolute economic development is not an indicator, some sense of progress perhaps is. Life for the leaders probably feels more blessed than a generation before. Turkey is plainly going forwards, and its results improved more than any other nation. Even Australia and the US might benefit from a sense of national youth. In Europe, by contrast, we are often led to believe that our best days are behind us. Perhaps distant former glories afflict the Chinese and Japanese as well?
What about dignity and justice? I argued before that these were stronger drivers of wellbeing than freedom or wealth. This theory is supported by Russia’s lowly position. In the case of Saudi Arabia, there may be multiple forces at work. There is also a case to say that material goodies only start to make us unhappy when we lack them but our neighbours don’t. That is one reason that, unless we are as enlightened as Liz Gilbert, we probably wouldn’t all make ourselves happier by moving to Indonesia.
All in all, the survey is fascinating and makes me beg for more. Surveys are so cheap to administer nowadays – why can’t this one cover 100 countries, with ten times as many people asked ten times as often? We might start to learn more about what truly makes people happy, and be able to do something about it, individually and collectively.
I think it would work. In the part of Shell I worked in, we started a regular staff survey, and used it to track things which were otherwise hard to measure. Questions like: “Does your division value for money for clients?”, or “Is X an innovative company?” are excellent for surveys, since trends in employee perceptions are probably the most reliable (and earliest) indicators of important business drivers. I was always fascinated by the results, and astonished at how consistently they anticipated real change. The work of Reichheld and Bain using customer and employee surveys to measure net promoter score uses a similar method, and I find it one of the most powerful tools available to companies.
Looking at why companies don’t do these things more often offers a clue why governments don’t either. At the time we used these internal surveys, my division was blessed with an enlightened leader. Even so, he was quite sensitive about the questions used, and not always objective in applying the results. His management team hated the surveys, seeing them as a threat. His bosses listened politely and allowed us to use survey scores to influence our self- assessment, but showed no appetite to copy us.
This was all about politics. How many leaders really want to display the truth? How many want to put their bonus in the hands of something so fickle as a survey?
It is the same with politicians, which is why I am cynical whether anything good will come from Cameron in the end. But, in the end, technology will defeat them. Online surveys already proliferate, and will become more pervasive, just like social media. It is not just Putin and Assad who in the long term will truly have to look their people in their eye.
I hope by that stage the Indonesians will still be as happy. But that is the great paradox of development. They probably won’t be, because that same technology might have taught them to value what they lack as well as what they have.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Look back and Learn
It is a good practice to live our lives as much as possible in the present. Idle dreaming of the future or bitter regretting of the past take us nowhere, it is the present we have the power to influence.
While living in the present is a good general rule, there are useful things that the future and the past can do for us. The future offers us hopes that can become plans or intentions. And the past offers us the chance to learn, and sometimes to celebrate.
Learning from the past is a laudable objective of many companies, yet it does seem hard to achieve. In Shell we had an enormous computer repository of all sorts of data, called Livelink, where people dutifully recorded their activities. The problem was that, in general, no-one ever accessed this data ever again. No wonder smart cynics used to call it Deadlink.
I often wondered why this was. My main conclusion was that we humans are often too arrogant or too stressed to take the trouble to ask questions of the past. Somehow, it seems like cheating, or it takes away the fun of problem solving. True, but there had to be more to it than that.
I was handed a fortuitous clue this month when a friend sent me a link to an old promotional clip for Shell Centre, made soon after the building opened in the 1960’s. Thanks George, it gave me a laugh as well as setting me thinking. You can watch it for yourself on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zUQD1p9bXY&feature=related&&
There are some predictable take-aways from the film. Anyone in the 1960’s showing off about the state of technology then, be it telephones, switchboards, typing pools or mail rooms would not be too surprised to learn that things have moved on apace since.
There were some physical areas where it struck me how little progress there had been since the 1960’s. All the public areas of the building, the lifts, the canteen and the offices all looked much the same forty years after the film was made. True, nowadays no one would bother to show off about the speed of a lift. But it seems we have made little progress in how buildings work for us.
And in some areas we have got worse. Security has become more pervasive and intrusive than ever. Sometimes in recent years it took me 15 minutes to gain access to Shell Centre, unthinkable in the 1960’s. Yes, there are new threats. But I fear that security is just slapped on without much thought for the typical person. Just look at the journey from the front door of an airport onto a plane – it is not designed with us in mind.
However, in the video the most telling things were social ones. We learn most about the things that were never highlighted in the commentary. Someone had taken the trouble to include a token black man in the post room, which just looked anomalous now, showing by accident how much progress has been made in race relations. Wow, even the football pitch is joining the twentieth century nowadays, if not quite yet the twenty first.
But that was not the most obvious apartheid. Class reared its head all through the video. Shell did well not to include shots of the executive dining room, but it was still in existence, for forty years after the film was made. Progress there has come at last, but it took a long time.
And then there is gratuitous sexism, the most noticeable aspect of the video. Wendy is in a typing pool of girls. Her concerns are portrayed as how she can change for an evening out or secure some recreation rather than anything to do with her work. Admin staff are all “girls”, physical blue collar work is done by rough looking guys, and managers are invariably men, looking serious. That was the reality then. And you can see how the portrayal in films like this would have prolonged that reality. Feminism needed to be aggressive to shake things up enough to drive change.
In many countries we have since made great strides in tackling feminism, homophobia, racism and class stereotypes. Nonetheless we can be sure that it is not just John Terry (allegedly) and Luis Suarez who are lazily prolonging unacceptable current realities today. If a video were made of our daily lives now, and shown forty years from now, our behaviour would be exposed just like those from the 1960’s was, in ways we don’t even notice today.
Which brings me to my main point. The past has many lessons. But most of those lessons are not obvious from the vantage point of the past. The makers of the video were setting down something they thought would be interesting in the future, but the things that are interesting are not the things they envisaged.
That may be part of the reason why Deadlink fails. We record what we think people can learn. But by the time anyone is ready to learn, the context has changed and the relevant lessons are not those we envisaged.
This argues for a more random way of recording and accessing the past. Rather than just storing documents, we should somehow try to store experiences, without trying to judge the lessons.
Even five years ago, this was an impossible technical challenge. But with youtube and google, now we have the power to store so much more, and also access archives based on keywords. My guess is that this will revolutionise our ability to learn in a very short time, and competitive advantage will be available to those who can jump the queue.
Specific, targeted learning from looking back is much simpler. I don’t understand why companies do not insist more on post investment reviews. It also makes sense after any project to pull the team together to see what there is to learn. Few do it, and those that do always benefit. Perhaps it is not done because people let the emotional side take over. Someone trying to get a bonus or credit or shift blame can get these reviews a bad name very easily.
Another reason to look back occasionally is to celebrate progress. In my singing lessons, every so often I try to re-learn a song I studied some years before. This is always so good for morale, as the high notes and passages that used to cost me sleep invariably seem so much easier now. I have got better, and it is only this sort of thing that offers proof. Similarly, when we go to dancing class, I love to observe the end of the previous class. Often it is a group of a standard that we were a year ago, and don’t they seem slow! At the time, those steps were hard for us to, and it is good to see that and celebrate the progress we have made.
In singing and dancing these simple benchmarks are available, but in most aspects of our lives it is harder. Am I a better parent nowadays? I have no idea, and it would be hard to conceive of evidence to prove it one way or the other. Unless I had lots and lots of video clips, I suppose. Clips which the facebook generation may well have when it is their turn.
Living in the present is a good idea, but the past has its uses. The same technology that could revolutionise corporate learning is available to us as individuals. We should all take lots of photos and make lots of videos, and not just of things we think are interesting now. We can look at them later, and learn things, things we could not even contemplate now. Learning and celebrating are both good ideas.
While living in the present is a good general rule, there are useful things that the future and the past can do for us. The future offers us hopes that can become plans or intentions. And the past offers us the chance to learn, and sometimes to celebrate.
Learning from the past is a laudable objective of many companies, yet it does seem hard to achieve. In Shell we had an enormous computer repository of all sorts of data, called Livelink, where people dutifully recorded their activities. The problem was that, in general, no-one ever accessed this data ever again. No wonder smart cynics used to call it Deadlink.
I often wondered why this was. My main conclusion was that we humans are often too arrogant or too stressed to take the trouble to ask questions of the past. Somehow, it seems like cheating, or it takes away the fun of problem solving. True, but there had to be more to it than that.
I was handed a fortuitous clue this month when a friend sent me a link to an old promotional clip for Shell Centre, made soon after the building opened in the 1960’s. Thanks George, it gave me a laugh as well as setting me thinking. You can watch it for yourself on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zUQD1p9bXY&feature=related&&
There are some predictable take-aways from the film. Anyone in the 1960’s showing off about the state of technology then, be it telephones, switchboards, typing pools or mail rooms would not be too surprised to learn that things have moved on apace since.
There were some physical areas where it struck me how little progress there had been since the 1960’s. All the public areas of the building, the lifts, the canteen and the offices all looked much the same forty years after the film was made. True, nowadays no one would bother to show off about the speed of a lift. But it seems we have made little progress in how buildings work for us.
And in some areas we have got worse. Security has become more pervasive and intrusive than ever. Sometimes in recent years it took me 15 minutes to gain access to Shell Centre, unthinkable in the 1960’s. Yes, there are new threats. But I fear that security is just slapped on without much thought for the typical person. Just look at the journey from the front door of an airport onto a plane – it is not designed with us in mind.
However, in the video the most telling things were social ones. We learn most about the things that were never highlighted in the commentary. Someone had taken the trouble to include a token black man in the post room, which just looked anomalous now, showing by accident how much progress has been made in race relations. Wow, even the football pitch is joining the twentieth century nowadays, if not quite yet the twenty first.
But that was not the most obvious apartheid. Class reared its head all through the video. Shell did well not to include shots of the executive dining room, but it was still in existence, for forty years after the film was made. Progress there has come at last, but it took a long time.
And then there is gratuitous sexism, the most noticeable aspect of the video. Wendy is in a typing pool of girls. Her concerns are portrayed as how she can change for an evening out or secure some recreation rather than anything to do with her work. Admin staff are all “girls”, physical blue collar work is done by rough looking guys, and managers are invariably men, looking serious. That was the reality then. And you can see how the portrayal in films like this would have prolonged that reality. Feminism needed to be aggressive to shake things up enough to drive change.
In many countries we have since made great strides in tackling feminism, homophobia, racism and class stereotypes. Nonetheless we can be sure that it is not just John Terry (allegedly) and Luis Suarez who are lazily prolonging unacceptable current realities today. If a video were made of our daily lives now, and shown forty years from now, our behaviour would be exposed just like those from the 1960’s was, in ways we don’t even notice today.
Which brings me to my main point. The past has many lessons. But most of those lessons are not obvious from the vantage point of the past. The makers of the video were setting down something they thought would be interesting in the future, but the things that are interesting are not the things they envisaged.
That may be part of the reason why Deadlink fails. We record what we think people can learn. But by the time anyone is ready to learn, the context has changed and the relevant lessons are not those we envisaged.
This argues for a more random way of recording and accessing the past. Rather than just storing documents, we should somehow try to store experiences, without trying to judge the lessons.
Even five years ago, this was an impossible technical challenge. But with youtube and google, now we have the power to store so much more, and also access archives based on keywords. My guess is that this will revolutionise our ability to learn in a very short time, and competitive advantage will be available to those who can jump the queue.
Specific, targeted learning from looking back is much simpler. I don’t understand why companies do not insist more on post investment reviews. It also makes sense after any project to pull the team together to see what there is to learn. Few do it, and those that do always benefit. Perhaps it is not done because people let the emotional side take over. Someone trying to get a bonus or credit or shift blame can get these reviews a bad name very easily.
Another reason to look back occasionally is to celebrate progress. In my singing lessons, every so often I try to re-learn a song I studied some years before. This is always so good for morale, as the high notes and passages that used to cost me sleep invariably seem so much easier now. I have got better, and it is only this sort of thing that offers proof. Similarly, when we go to dancing class, I love to observe the end of the previous class. Often it is a group of a standard that we were a year ago, and don’t they seem slow! At the time, those steps were hard for us to, and it is good to see that and celebrate the progress we have made.
In singing and dancing these simple benchmarks are available, but in most aspects of our lives it is harder. Am I a better parent nowadays? I have no idea, and it would be hard to conceive of evidence to prove it one way or the other. Unless I had lots and lots of video clips, I suppose. Clips which the facebook generation may well have when it is their turn.
Living in the present is a good idea, but the past has its uses. The same technology that could revolutionise corporate learning is available to us as individuals. We should all take lots of photos and make lots of videos, and not just of things we think are interesting now. We can look at them later, and learn things, things we could not even contemplate now. Learning and celebrating are both good ideas.
Friday, February 3, 2012
The Optimism Bias
Are you a glass half full or glass half empty person?
I read a couple of articles this week which both suggested that human beings have a bias towards optimism. Supposedly it is something that distinguishes us from other animals. Furthermore, capitalists claim it is a positive factor in business, since it makes us good at the creative destruction required for progress.
This got me thinking. Are we really optimistic? More than other animals? Our cat is certainly optimistic, always exploring, curious, living in hope. I don’t think I’m more optimistic than the cat. Still, that is what the research has discovered, and I’ve certainly evolved to be brainier than the cat, for better or worse, and perhaps my optimism is one reason why.
I certainly accept that a degree of optimism is healthy for us. The same research claimed that without our bias to optimism, we would all be depressed most of the time. I have certainly seen the converse of that. One of the things depressed people lose is their optimism. There is a certain inevitability of failure when failure is expected, and that is how depressed people tend to think.
Yet optimism plainly has its downside as well. If we all threw ourselves off tall buildings, in hoping that we would be OK, our life expectancy would suffer. Yet in many things we are a bit reckless. We go skiing, despite evidence from statistics and from our own eyes – how often do you see people carted off in ambulances, and what makes you think that will not be you next time? We place massive trust in fellow human beings every time we get into a car, yet it doesn’t stop us speeding.
Gambling is also pretty reckless, yet it seems to be a human urge that is hard to control. And I’m not even sure about the claim of the capitalists. I have seen crazy, reckless behaviour again and again in business. Almost every acquisition I have been involved in has become a sort of animal hunt that eventually tosses reason out of the window. And what about all those dot com business models that started with the wonderful naïve assumption, that if just one per cent of possible users became users, we would all be rich?
What about with relationships? Almost one in two marriages in Western societies now ends in divorce. Globally, a far large share than 50% ends in misery for one or both parties. Yet somehow we all think our own marriages are different, that those statistics don’t apply to us.
Then there is health. Much though the tabloids love to play on our fears by reporting daily about the dangers of some foodstuff or other, our behaviour usually suggests we believe we are invincible. How many people die each die without making a will? How many people (especially us men, myself included) don’t bother with health checks and would rather ignore symptoms than face up to them?
And our last great optimism is our faith. Even people with no religious belief like to think there might be something waiting for us after our death. Looking at the evidence, that seems heroically optimistic really. There seems to be even less evidence for another common belief, that somehow some God has chosen us individually from the crowd to look after.
Some of these examples of optimism are healthy, some less so. It is not so clear cut whether the net effect of all of them is good or bad, both for us as individuals or for our species overall.
There are other factors in play as well as optimism. Curiosity is generally good, if it doesn’t become envy or obsession with others. A sense of adventure, with limits around high buildings and the like, must be good too. Even faith has its advantages. Whether there is an afterlife or not, a belief system helps us to stay humble and recognise and accept our ignorance and relative powerlessness. It is also good to try to keep a balanced view of the bigger picture – there are cycles in life, and things will sometimes get better, sometimes worse.
On the reverse side, superstition or irrational exuberance probably have more downsides than up. You don’t meet too many well-balanced gamblers, and the partners of gamblers suffer even more.
What is clearly true is that a sunny nature is a blessing. Whether my own glass is half full or half empty, it is always more fun to be with people from the half full persuasion.
In business, I am not so sure. Optimism is all very well in the marketing department, but cold, hard numbers have their place too.
Are there difference between nations and cultures? Scandinavians are known to have a prevalence for depression and suicide. It seems to be accepted that this is related to light deprivation in the winters. Portuguese are also said to be a bit sombre, while some Latin nations are sunnier, and Americans are also known for their optimism.
One of my favourite bits of market research is about American optimism, and it goes a long way to explain US politics. When Europeans and Americans are asked what class or income bracket they belong to today, both groups answer quite realistically in accordance with the facts. But asked what class or income bracket they will belong to ten years into the future, Europeans tend to assume little change, while most Americans see themselves moving up a rung or two.
Now that is optimism. It explains why taxation of the wealthy wins fewer votes stateside. Does it explain US economic success? I’m not so sure.
Another group of relentlessly optimistic people are those who succeed in sales jobs. I read that the human characteristic most correlated with success in sales is the ability to be rejected on Monday yet still turn up smiling on Tuesday. If you are thinking of career in sales, or looking to recruit sales people, bear this fact in mind.
Again, there might be more than optimism in play. Fear of rejection may be lower in sales people. They may have the same degree of optimism about whether a sale will come off, but may have a different response to failure or anticipated failure, being ready to brush it off and move on.
I’m always careful about gender generalisation, but this last quality may be a male one. If so, it is a good thing, as us guys seem to have more things going against us than for us (listening, empathy, persistence, etc.), so we need some advantages. It might start with the dating game. Even nowadays, it is usually the job of the male to initiate the various phases of the relationship. That places us right in line for rejection. Yet we bounce back again the next day.
What is that? Optimism? Arrogance? Hardness? Whatever it is, the species needs it to prolong itself. And in the end, any optimism bias probably comes down to simple Darwinism. Which is one reason why I’m a bit sceptical about the claim that we have more optimism than other animals, cats or otherwise. They have to evolve too.
So perhaps we ought to wish for a cocktail of attributes. A sunny nature, and the luck to find others with a sunny nature. Some curiosity, sense of adventure, humility, recognition of ignorance. A dose of bounce-back-ability. But not too much recklessness or superstition.
I read a couple of articles this week which both suggested that human beings have a bias towards optimism. Supposedly it is something that distinguishes us from other animals. Furthermore, capitalists claim it is a positive factor in business, since it makes us good at the creative destruction required for progress.
This got me thinking. Are we really optimistic? More than other animals? Our cat is certainly optimistic, always exploring, curious, living in hope. I don’t think I’m more optimistic than the cat. Still, that is what the research has discovered, and I’ve certainly evolved to be brainier than the cat, for better or worse, and perhaps my optimism is one reason why.
I certainly accept that a degree of optimism is healthy for us. The same research claimed that without our bias to optimism, we would all be depressed most of the time. I have certainly seen the converse of that. One of the things depressed people lose is their optimism. There is a certain inevitability of failure when failure is expected, and that is how depressed people tend to think.
Yet optimism plainly has its downside as well. If we all threw ourselves off tall buildings, in hoping that we would be OK, our life expectancy would suffer. Yet in many things we are a bit reckless. We go skiing, despite evidence from statistics and from our own eyes – how often do you see people carted off in ambulances, and what makes you think that will not be you next time? We place massive trust in fellow human beings every time we get into a car, yet it doesn’t stop us speeding.
Gambling is also pretty reckless, yet it seems to be a human urge that is hard to control. And I’m not even sure about the claim of the capitalists. I have seen crazy, reckless behaviour again and again in business. Almost every acquisition I have been involved in has become a sort of animal hunt that eventually tosses reason out of the window. And what about all those dot com business models that started with the wonderful naïve assumption, that if just one per cent of possible users became users, we would all be rich?
What about with relationships? Almost one in two marriages in Western societies now ends in divorce. Globally, a far large share than 50% ends in misery for one or both parties. Yet somehow we all think our own marriages are different, that those statistics don’t apply to us.
Then there is health. Much though the tabloids love to play on our fears by reporting daily about the dangers of some foodstuff or other, our behaviour usually suggests we believe we are invincible. How many people die each die without making a will? How many people (especially us men, myself included) don’t bother with health checks and would rather ignore symptoms than face up to them?
And our last great optimism is our faith. Even people with no religious belief like to think there might be something waiting for us after our death. Looking at the evidence, that seems heroically optimistic really. There seems to be even less evidence for another common belief, that somehow some God has chosen us individually from the crowd to look after.
Some of these examples of optimism are healthy, some less so. It is not so clear cut whether the net effect of all of them is good or bad, both for us as individuals or for our species overall.
There are other factors in play as well as optimism. Curiosity is generally good, if it doesn’t become envy or obsession with others. A sense of adventure, with limits around high buildings and the like, must be good too. Even faith has its advantages. Whether there is an afterlife or not, a belief system helps us to stay humble and recognise and accept our ignorance and relative powerlessness. It is also good to try to keep a balanced view of the bigger picture – there are cycles in life, and things will sometimes get better, sometimes worse.
On the reverse side, superstition or irrational exuberance probably have more downsides than up. You don’t meet too many well-balanced gamblers, and the partners of gamblers suffer even more.
What is clearly true is that a sunny nature is a blessing. Whether my own glass is half full or half empty, it is always more fun to be with people from the half full persuasion.
In business, I am not so sure. Optimism is all very well in the marketing department, but cold, hard numbers have their place too.
Are there difference between nations and cultures? Scandinavians are known to have a prevalence for depression and suicide. It seems to be accepted that this is related to light deprivation in the winters. Portuguese are also said to be a bit sombre, while some Latin nations are sunnier, and Americans are also known for their optimism.
One of my favourite bits of market research is about American optimism, and it goes a long way to explain US politics. When Europeans and Americans are asked what class or income bracket they belong to today, both groups answer quite realistically in accordance with the facts. But asked what class or income bracket they will belong to ten years into the future, Europeans tend to assume little change, while most Americans see themselves moving up a rung or two.
Now that is optimism. It explains why taxation of the wealthy wins fewer votes stateside. Does it explain US economic success? I’m not so sure.
Another group of relentlessly optimistic people are those who succeed in sales jobs. I read that the human characteristic most correlated with success in sales is the ability to be rejected on Monday yet still turn up smiling on Tuesday. If you are thinking of career in sales, or looking to recruit sales people, bear this fact in mind.
Again, there might be more than optimism in play. Fear of rejection may be lower in sales people. They may have the same degree of optimism about whether a sale will come off, but may have a different response to failure or anticipated failure, being ready to brush it off and move on.
I’m always careful about gender generalisation, but this last quality may be a male one. If so, it is a good thing, as us guys seem to have more things going against us than for us (listening, empathy, persistence, etc.), so we need some advantages. It might start with the dating game. Even nowadays, it is usually the job of the male to initiate the various phases of the relationship. That places us right in line for rejection. Yet we bounce back again the next day.
What is that? Optimism? Arrogance? Hardness? Whatever it is, the species needs it to prolong itself. And in the end, any optimism bias probably comes down to simple Darwinism. Which is one reason why I’m a bit sceptical about the claim that we have more optimism than other animals, cats or otherwise. They have to evolve too.
So perhaps we ought to wish for a cocktail of attributes. A sunny nature, and the luck to find others with a sunny nature. Some curiosity, sense of adventure, humility, recognition of ignorance. A dose of bounce-back-ability. But not too much recklessness or superstition.
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