IKEA - My fallen Icon

This week I visited an IKEA store in the USA. Well, I visited a blue and yellow warehouse type place with the name IKEA on the front and furniture with odd Scandinavian names inside, but there the resemblance to the IKEA I love ended.




The visit was to a store in New Jersey, right by Newark Airport, at a place called Elizabeth. This area constituted a new benchmark for me for the term industrial wasteland. It seems the whole of this part of the state consists only of motorways, railroads, swamps and factories.



I was already a bit stressed, the visit coming half way through a day of picking up bits of furniture in a van from most of the New York City boroughs as well as New Jersey. But I wasn’t ready for what happened inside my blessed IKEA.



The physical layout was familiar, though the car park was vast, uncovered and bleak, and the inside seemed tired, even the restaurant. But the real problem was the service.



First, the store did not have a single catalogue inside. That is a bit like a pub with no beer, as the catalogue is at the heart of the business model. The staff were blasé about it. Seemingly, a new one was just coming out next week. But really, how can it be acceptable ever to run out of catalogues?



Then, the place seemed understaffed, and the staff that were there just didn’t have motivation or knowledge. Only three checkout lines were open, with long queues, though the people manning them seemed happy talking among themselves some of the time. After establishing upstairs that the storage units I wanted did not get supported upstairs (why?), I found the warehouse, and some computer screens which got me tantalisingly close to the information I needed to go and fetch my components. But only close. Some pictures didn’t come up well on screen, and the menus were not good enough. I just needed a catalogue! Or even the IKEA website would have sufficed. But neither were available.



Instead I asked for help. The first guy was offhand and pointed me to another guy behind a desk. Who was rude, ignorant and useless. In the end I had to guess what I needed I still don’t know if I guessed well or not.



The other thing that struck me was the absence of joy in the whole place. The staff were just going through the motions, and no managers were in sight. The customers were grim faced. Many were confused and unhappy, and more than one was handing out abuse to anyone who would listen, shouting “this place stinks” or things like that.



All in all, after a long hour and a half, I was very happy to get back to the van and drive off into the industrial wasteland, fortified only by the good meat balls, but otherwise in a foul mood. And I suspect many other customers left the same way, and some of those would not return.



When I got home, I tried to work out what had happened and why. Many European retailers struggle in the USA, and IKEA has had a mixed experience here. Does my experience this week offer any clues as to why?



When I thought about it, many of the direct aspects of the experience were similar to Europe. IKEA is nearly always in something close to an industrial wasteland, and parking is never fun there. Choosing items from the warehouse is always a fraught experience, and often leads to mistakes and follow up visits. There are frequent queues at check outs. Staff often seem to be absent from where you need them and not to quite the knowledge needed.



So the European experience is not a bundle of laughs either. Yet somehow there is something about it which makes me feel good. Something plainly missing from the experience in the USA.



I thought back to my first visits to IKEA in Europe. These had been tough too. It took time to build belief in the business model and faith in myself to make it work for me. I remember long queues in Croydon as well, and the misery of having to take loads of stuff back due to my errors. Yet I came back, and became a fan.



I think there were two reasons. One is the end product. I managed to persevere long enough with IKEA to get benefits, and to believe that I would continue to get benefits. The products are great, and wonderful value, and brilliantly designed, and even I can put them up. If I keep my head down through the difficult parts of the experience, I would emerge at the far end with a good outcome. I came to believe it was worth it.



The second reason is that IKEA did everything they could to make the experience bearable, with positive aspects mitigating the inherent bad bits. The catalogue is clear. If my mood is light enough, I can marvel at all the great products. The restaurant is a miracle. I can take myself out of the experience itself and intellectualise how superb the business model is. The staff do their very best to help. And somehow a combination of all this means that lots of other people, with their kids, are in a light, positive mood around me in the store, which keeps my own mood lifted.



So in Europe the two factors build a strong brand. The positive parts of the experience are just enough to get you through the inevitable negatives, until the great outcome kicks in, from when your mood on visiting is so good you stop noticing the negatives.



Obviously what was missing in Elizabeth was the positive aspect of the experience. Far from happy kids and great staff, this place was just miserable, and we were all dragged into the void, even long-time fans like me. And this came down to basic operations. Not enough staff. Management not caring enough (or bothering to find out) about a lack of catalogues. Undertrained, under-motivated staff.



The USA is strange when it comes to staff. I receive some wonderful service every day, from people who lift my mood. I used to think the famous “Have a nice day” cliché was a false thing forced on people by training and coercive management, but I learn that usually it isn’t. When this wow factor exists it is powerful. But I also frequently experience the opposite. Just now, having arrived, I meet a lot of government departments, and they are notorious, not just in the USA. The Department of Motor Vehicles has scarred me already, and just from one visit.



I suspect the main problem European retailers have is in creating this wow factor among the local managers and staff. This certainly seems to be the case with IKEA. Which suggests that US staff respond to a different combination of stimuli. The package of pay, teamwork, training, job security, incentive and other things needs to be different here.



I’ll observe more and develop some theories. One possibility here is that the freshness fades more quickly, so managers have to find new ways to keep people motivated more often. That would correlate with the focus on marketing and continuous renewal here.



Whatever the secret, IKEA in Elizabeth do not have it, or if they once had it, they lost it. IKEA global managers should be ashamed of that store, at least based on that one visit. I will be going to the one in Brooklyn this week, with some trepidation. Can my icon recover?

An aural Assault

Life in New York City is certainly fast-paced. It is no wonder that I frequently look into eyes that seem very, very tired, and also into eyes that appear utterly defeated. This is no place for anyone lacking spirit.




I have come to realise that one symptom of the intensity of life here is that all my senses seem to under fire all of the time. It is nice in a way, life is spicy that way.



Touch is more frequent than elsewhere. Despite the frequent warnings in the subway about sexual assault, it is impossible to live here without touching more human beings than in other places. The subway is just crowded. So are the buses, and so are the pavements (should I say sidewalks?). Anyone over sensitive to being touched will have a miserable time here.



Taste is assaulted mainly in a good way. Food and drink are a big part of life, with little and often being the metier. I have never seen so many cafes and restaurants and street stalls, and the variety of their wares is stunning. Whereas we have been rather shocked by the cost of many things here, casual eating and drinking is quite cheap. And the variety is wonderful, so the taste buds get used to many flavours. You have to be careful to avoid things with added sugar, as much of the diet seems unhealthy. It is no wonder so many Americans have become obese, even here with its built in exercise regime.



This is a city of many smells. Human flesh is a large part of it. In the heat and the crowds, it would be good to be able to shower many times a day, but of course that is not what people can do. So odour is a part of the human diversity here. Add in smells of food, and of various forms of pollution, and there is plenty to smell.



There is always something to see, anywhere in the world that is not dark or confined. But what sights there are in New York! Nothing is petite. I was looking at some building today, very majestic architecture, somewhere in Gramercy. I have no idea what is was, but it struck me that the building would have been the centrepiece of almost any town, but here it was almost mundane. We can be snobbish about our history in Europe, but there is majesty a plenty here. Add in the human diversity, which surprises me every single day in some way, and even our eyes get life full on.



All the senses get battered, but it is the ears which bear the brunt. I remember an Indian once telling me that it was the silence in Europe that he never got used to, since there was no such thing as silence in an Indian city. It is the same here. So far, the only thing I miss of Europe is the absence of noise. I expect that would be common, it is the absence of something that we don’t appreciate so long as we have it, but miss when we lose it.



Noise here is everywhere. Start with the background noises. Air conditioning machines or power generators are never far away, with their tell-tale hum. To sleep at night in summer either requires great tolerance for heat or tolerance for noise. Open windows let in the world. Air conditioners are just noisy. When we watch television with the aircon off, we set the volume to about 16. When the machine is on, we need to set it at 40 to hear properly. Imagine what that is doing to our ears.



At home we can keep the windows closed, but what about when we are outside? There is always a steady hum of traffic, often punctuated by loud heavy motors and sirens. The subway trains are brilliant, but wow do they make a racket.



New Yorkers almost all respond to this by employing ipods, and I have come to do the same. But I wonder if that is so smart. Firstly, I cannot listen to anything with loud and soft bits, as either I am deafened in the forte or the piano is absent. Hooray for Bach and renaissance music! But even when listening to something of a steady volume, I find I need the volume set very high. These ears seem destined to be assaulted one way or another.



We luckily found a haven of peace last Sunday at the episcopal cathedral, with a lovely recital by a Cambridge college choir of all things. But even then the silence was less than I was used to. Once the conductor had to give a tone in competition with a mysterious noise emanating from somewhere. And there was also the audience. To be fair, people were quiet during the singing, but not immediately before. Two New York ladies behind us had plenty to discuss, and did not seem to mind who heard it.



Which brings me to the last source of noise, the people. Wow, are they loud, and in your face. Actually, I rather like it. A bus journey is never dull, there is always someone telling their life story or moaning about a New York sports team. In restaurants, everyone talks all the time. In Europe, I had already got used to choosing places which muffled sound better, and sitting with my good ear facing my companions. Here, even those precautions will often not be enough.



As someone whose hearing is already a little impaired, I worry what effect New York will have. I would like to see some studies on the subject. I have blogged about hearing before, and I feel this is still an under-researched area, compered for example with the science of vision. There are occasionally (rather contradictory) studies about what electronic mobile phones might be doing to our brains, but I also wonder if we are destined to be a generation of half-deaf people, especially those of us living in the biggest cities. I only hope the science of hearing aids develops quickly, for I am sure to need them before too long.



Is any relief at hand for our suffering ears? Well, I hope so. First, it will not stay mid-summer for ever, and the air-conditioning can be turned off for much of the year (though I am told that the steam heating common here makes a racket too). And we have rented a house with central air conditioning and heating, so hopefully that impediment to sleep can be removed.



Secondly, we will be living in Forest Hills, which is not anything like Manhattan, or Roosevelt Island where we are temporarily. The background noise will be less there, especially since we seem to be a good distance from railways and motorways. I am already wondering if people will speak more softly as a result.



Finally, I think we have to look to ourselves. All lives need balance. I have written about simplicity, and here we will need to seek simplicity of sound. We can seek out places of silence, and reflect more on silence when we find it. We can coach each other to speak more softly and to listen more carefully. Meditation may play a role. I wonder if the Church here might turn out to have subtly different benefits here compared with in Europe.



New York has many wonderful things to offer, and most of the surprises so far have been positive ones. But I sense that we will need to utilise our ingenuity to negate the assault on our ears that New York might be.

First Bites of the Big Apple

Today seems the first time in a month that I have been able to draw breath. Some periods of our lives go at turbo speed, with decisions and actions far faster than normal. We get by somehow on adrenaline, supported if possible by good friends and some project management skills. This has been such a period for me, combining my wedding last month with a relocation to New York City on 1st July.




When I look back at what we have managed to achieve this month I am rather proud. Somehow we have enjoyed a milestone celebration in a great way, while emptying a flat, finding new places, and all the million and one other things required to relocate. So far nothing serious has gone wrong, at least nothing with any longer-term consequence. We hope to sign a lease for a permanent apartment here this evening, not bad for nine days after flying in. There is still much to do, but hopefully from now on we can gradually revert to our normal pace of life.



So what of New York? Two clues are in the paragraph above.



First, somehow the place works. I managed to get a working mobile phone on the first day, and a bank account on the second day, with funds transferred into it by day four. I know from bitter experience that would have been much harder in the UK, and in other European countries as well. For all that we Europeans tend to look with scorn at the market-created chaos in the USA, my experience so far is that things work. You can find what you need, unnecessary obstacles are removed, and people are anxious to help. That is a pleasant surprise. At least I expected some problems because of our international backgrounds – after all the UK seems incapable of understanding that some people come from other countries, so I would have expected the same in an even more insular land with even more power and arrogance. But not so – well done USA.



Heck, even the public transport works. Transport is one of my favourite topics to extol central planning and its benefits. The Dutch are brilliant, the British rubbish, and it really shows. Until now, my assumption had been that only governmental oversight (national or local) could deliver this well. New York proves me wrong. Think of one place in the world where you would expect gridlock, and you might choose Manhattan. It is an island, reliant on bridges, in a land worshipping the car. Now, admittedly it is a holiday season, but somehow the various forces at work seem to have happily conspired to prevent this.



The subway may not be beautiful, but it is mighty extensive and effective. I did not expect to see so many buses, or even local trains. People even walk. And Manhattan has smartly used its reliance on bridges and tunnels as an effective defence mechanism by imposing large tolls. On Saturday, we went to New Jersey. On the way, we used public transport, and paid a flat fare $2,25 for a subway ticket and $4,50 for a bus, altogether travelling quite a distance. London, are you watching? On the way home, we took a lift in a car. The journey took longer, and was punctuated by $20 in tolls, not counting fuel or other costs. To my mind, that is how it should be – and not how I expected it to be in the land of the free and the powerful.



The system is also helped by a plethora of helpful announcements and signs. Some of this might emanate from the litigious nature of US society (“please tread carefully onto escalators”), but much of it simply helps. Each subway train and station has great maps and signs, and they announce things clearly. It also helps a mathematician like me that they use smart systems. The numbered avenue and street grid in Manhattan is well-known, and wow does it help navigation. They have the same in other boroughs, and signs use compass directions very usefully too. House numbers follow the pattern so you can find an address approximately quickly. In Forest Hills, some of the streets have real names, but consecutive streets start with A, B, C and so on. Smart. This is a mathematical navigator’s paradise!



The other clue about first impressions is about the pace of life here in New York City. It is not slow. People walk more quickly and converse more purposefully. Of course I have been ringing and visiting many estate agents this week. I would characterise these encounters by the expression “cut the crap”. No small talk, just down to business. If they haven’t got what I want, they work it out quickly, tell me, and kick me out the door, with a friendly “have a nice day” delivered to my back.



I have to say I like it. No one is unfriendly, but they don’t waste each other’s time either. It is not all about money, but money plays its part. Time is money. Space is money too. I just love the way they use the vertical axis of space here. Car parks use every square inch, and then do more by using cubic inches too, stacking the cars on winches high into the sky. Brilliant. But will life at this speed become tiring? I’ll let you know in the months ahead.



One bonus I have now is that for the first time in sixteen years I’m living in a country where I speak the native language. I’ve got by before, somehow understanding the gist of what is coming on around me, using all my senses and asking for help. But here they speak English! What heaven! I only realise what a handicap it has been for all these years now the handicap has finally been removed. Lucky me.



Mind you, you do hear some strange versions of English. I thought I was living in a diverse society in The Hague, but I was kidding myself, compared with here. True, we had many nationalities in The Hague, and Dutch society is tolerant of lifestyle choices. But here I have had to add extra dimensions. Take affluence. In The Hague we had poorer and richer people living together, but somehow within limits and with some borders. Here the range is wider and the borders less clear. Poor and desperate people, some missing limbs, are living side by side to the most affluent. I have seen some of the shortest and some of the tallest people I’ve ever come across in the last week. Colours blend, and you sense that within a generation or two they will have blended even more. I am amazed at how many Asians are here, and from so many countries. This is all great, in my opinion.



You also see some very tired people, with “lived in” faces. Living at this pace for so long and with some of life’s disadvantages must be tough here, yet many do it, year after year. You see some desperate life stories in the faces on the subway, every day. Many faces betray some cynicism and suspicion as well. This is a tough place to live, if you are not affluent, young or loved. I don’t think this is somewhere we would consider growing old.



I am looking forward to experiencing what New York City has to offer. I feel truly blessed. Each morning I open the blinds to see the might of Manhattan stretching before me across the East river. What a testament to humanity this place is.

I’m told that the boiling frog syndrome is a myth. The popular belief is that if you suddenly immerse a frog in boiling water it will jump for its life, but if you put the same frog in cold water and then gradually heating the water to boiling point, it will not react and perish.




True or not, the syndrome describes something we all recognise. If you see your grandkids every day, you hardly notice them growing. But if there is a gap of three years between sightings, you will notice a massive change. If you want to be depressed, try looking at a photo of yourself from ten years ago and then looking in the mirror.



Most examples are negative ones. If something bad creeps up on you slowly, you will not see it. But the same is true with good things. I’ve used the example before about learning to sing, that I like to try out a piece from a couple of years ago every so often. It is only then I notice that the piece that used to be tough is now easy, and I can be sure I have progressed.



I was struck by a different example last week, when I had a particularly trouble-free travel experience, including a wonderful time interval of less than fifteen minutes between my plane touching down and my emergence from the terminal. In travel and suchlike, we only tend to register when things go wrong. Hence we complain, and we tend to conclude that progress has been in a negative direction.



But my happy experience of last week led me to reflect on the typical journey I would have made twenty years ago, and how it has changed for the better.



First of all, my choice of destinations twenty years ago would have been more limited. For those places I could travel, there was probably only one airline flying, and that only once per day. The price was higher, even without allowing for inflation. To book, I would have had to use a travel agent, where I sat for ages in a queue, before dealing with someone who alternated between bad computer screens and endless phone calls to confirm my booking. Remember?



Next, the journey to the airport. It says on the ticket to allow two hours before travel, and in those days it really meant it. What is more, that meant allowing three hours in practice, because of the frequent traffic jams approaching the airport, the huge distance to the car park and the infrequency of busses to the terminal.



Once inside the airport, I would queue in a long line of people at check in, holding a ticket so large that it would not comfortably fit in my pocket (why did we need those?). I never understood why it seemed to take each party in front of me in the queue three or four minutes to complete the simplest procedure. Nowadays we have e-tickets, internet check in, and baggage drop (though I still don’t understand why that bit takes as long as it does).



Then there were several more lines before getting onto the plane, all asking overlapping information that an integrated service would remove the need for. This part hasn’t improved in twenty years, indeed it may have got worse, because of the added security checks these days.



Perhaps the biggest improvement is once we are actually in the plane. Can you remember how frequent it was that the incoming plane was late, and then seemed to take forever to turnaround? Easyjet have mastered the 30 minute turnaround, and other carriers have slowly copied that. Then we could often sit in the plane for an hour waiting for a take-off slot. Despite that, once we had taken off and flown to the destination, it seemed de rigeur to circle the airport a couple of times before coming in to land. Nowadays, air traffic control seems to work almost flawlessly. Apparently, we are less likely to bump into another plane than in those days as well.



Finally, on arrival, it was more common to have to wait for a vacant gate, the passport queues were longer (now, praise be, we even have Schengen), and the luggage comes more quickly as well. I even think incidents of luggage not arriving are less frequent too.



Of course when it goes wrong it still goes wrong, and delays can be hours, whether due to weather or mechanical failure. Even there, at least nowadays most airports have humane spaces to wait in with at least a modicum of facilities.



The improvements continue once we have started our business in the foreign country. Twenty years ago, money was always a problem, with lots of cash (where legal), bought at the airport for exorbitant rates, those quaint things called travellers cheques, and long queues at banks. Now ATM’s usually process foreign debit cards, and credit cards work nearly everywhere, and both of these services rip us off a lot less.



Then there are communications. Remember queuing at a foreign post office to make a phone call home? Or, in the early days of computers, the utter impossibility of connecting to any useful service? Mobile phones and the internet have changed all that.



So, next time you are delayed or stuck in a queue, remember what travel used to be like, and celebrate the progress we have made. You might at the same time celebrate progress in other areas. Infant mortality for example. Or the defeat of smog, at least in most countries. We are somewhat attuned to moan, and it is good for us to put our moans in perspective every so often.



On this happy note, this blog might go into hibernation for a month or two now, due to some momentous events coming up in my life. This weekend I’m getting married again, and a week later the family are moving to New York City. Even those this should be more trouble-free than it would have been twenty years ago, I somehow don’t think finding a connection and sitting down to blabber to a keyboard for an hour will loom large in the priorities in the coming weeks. I’ll be back though, hopefully and God willing in July, and can start to reflect on new beginnings in some letters from America.

Dyslexic distinction

Over the last week, I’ve been watching some Monty Python compilations. As an adolescent, I remember the watching parts of each show creased up in laughter, and failing to see anything funny at all in other parts. That hasn’t changed. Some of the hilarious passages have not withered at all with age, still seeming edgy and original. Wow, how far ahead of its time this material was. But many of the animations and a few of the sketches still leave me as cold as they did forty years ago. Python set many trends. One was pacey progression within a sketch. Before Python all sketches had a theme, a beginning, a middle and an end. Python often started with one theme but then deviated, as the saying goes, into something completely different. This must have frustrated ordered minds, but, watching it again now, I love it, as it maintains momentum and enables the team to get full value from their time. Nowadays, the Python way has become standard, though I would say few do as well as the Python team even now. A stranger thought from watching the sketches was that Python may somehow have been the forerunner of reality TV, or at least celebrity TV. Many times the sketches revolve around the ridiculousness of people with one strength doing something else. Remember the philosophers playing football? Or, in a similar way, Marx and Mao being asked when Coventry last won the FA Cup? Brilliant. And not so different from celebrity Mastermind, or Strictly Come Dancing, or many other popular shows of today. Should we thank Python for this or curse them? Make up your own mind on that, but at least remember the laughs they gave us. One thing that was never pleasant about Python but which sticks out like a sore thumb now is their attitude to stereotypes and to women. Poor old Connie Booth is never anything but a dumb sex object, and the boys seem strangely attracted to women’s clothing and hag characters that might just be their own mothers in psychological disguise. Gillam’s animated women seem to lose their clothes all the time. This sort of stuff has been relegated from the mainstream by now, and a good thing too. Well done, Pamela Stevenson and Tracey Ullman, I think you were the first two women to break into sketches and sketch-writing as equal partners. There is a lot of cruelty and disrespect in Python for other groups, including homosexuals, which seems strange since Graham Chapman was gay himself. Perhaps we have become over-sensitive now. In any case, I don’t think Python helped tolerance. We have moved forward in these areas despite them rather than because of them. And then there is disability. The 1500m for the deaf, where no-one hears the starting gun. The 100m for people with no sense of direction, where they all go off in random ways. Various other examples. Brilliant, and hard not to laugh. But over some line of acceptability? How far is this from the paralympics? With physical disability, we have made a lot of progress in Western society, even if I am still always knackered after pushing Mum’s wheelchair along the uneven streets and unfriendly curbs of Eastbourne (of all places). Sometimes, it does seem almost Pythonesque in its tokenism. On Sunday, I saw a news piece about a warship fitted out for a disabled crew. OK, the armed forces should indeed make space for disabled people (after all, they create a lot of them), but on a warship? I couldn’t but think of what Cleese and Chapman would have made of that, with the Chinese or Al Qaida attacking with mortars or bombs while the crew were patiently queuing up to use the lift. Still, there are now many relevant and brilliant applications of the special skills of the physically disabled in our lives, which we can celebrate. But then I read Schumpeter in this week’s Economist and was completely taken aback. The article focused not on physical disability but on people whose minds worked differently, like dyslexics and autistic people. It included stunning statistics from a recent survey. Dyslexics make up 10% of the population, yet only 1% of professional managers. Wow. Then, dyslexics make up as many as 35% of successful entrepreneurs. Wow again. Many of the entrepreneurs that we admire the most are dyslexic. There is a parallel story with Asperger’s syndrome, ADD and autism. Here, the link is to IT, software and so on, as well as to entrepreneurism. Apparently, Zuckerberg and many in silicon valley show some of the associated symptoms. The IT link is maybe understandable. Great memories, focuses on numbers and facts not nuances. Not easily distracted. This makes some sense. All the positive of features of geeks combined with natural talent will lead to a great software professional. But dyslexia? That is more complex. One possibility is that those dyslexics who happen to be smart and commercial and ambitious are excluded from many fields, so gravitate to entrepreneurship. That makes sense, based on the statistic about professional managers. Most smart non-dyslexics end up as lawyers or bureaucrats or whatever else. Dyslexics are disadvantaged there, so start their own companies. Even if this is the only factor at work, that says a lot about most companies. Dyslexics seem to prove that companies can succeed without the skills which companies demand of their professional managers. So some of those skills most be over-valued, or indeed counter-productive. If we couldn’t write reports, we wouldn’t. Perhaps the reports are useless, or at least less useful than the other things we could do with our time. But perhaps there are other factors at work too. I have seen this myself, since I work closely now with a dyslexic. I can see ways he has used it to help him. He hates reports, so makes fast and simple decisions, asks good questions and uses great examples. But he is also unusually commercial. My own arithmetic is very strong, but compared with this guy I am slow, especially when money is involved. A company may have 40,000 customers per day who could be persuaded to spend 30 Romanian lei more; what is that worth in US dollars per year after tax? It is useful to be able to rapidly compute things like this to a rough order of magnitude, and I find I make mistakes, but my friend does not, almost seems to know the answer intuitively. Is that just him, or does dyslexia help him somehow? He also has a great feel for what customers might want. Might it be that while the rest of us are poring over useless market research or analysis, he is just observing? Just like a blind person hears well, does a dyslexic observe well? This whole area must have massive potential for business. We have worked out how many different types of diversity benefits businesses, even if we don’t yet always embrace it willingly. But we are still quite narrow in how we typically view categories of diversity. These examples show clues to a multitude of new categories based on our mental indicators. The potential in this field seems almost unlimited, and the advantages for those ahead of the game huge. Now I’ll go and enjoy some more Python.

Two Years On

Does anyone know how to create line spaces and paragraphs with this new version of blogspot? Sorry I haven’t worked that out yet. It is a month short of two years since I chose retirement, just before my fiftieth birthday. In case anyone else out there is pondering such a move, here is how it has worked for me so far. It is hard to separate out retirement from the other big changes in my life that happened more or less at the same time. My daughter left home, I separated, I lived alone for a time, and now I have a new family. These events changed me a lot. But so did retiring, and I think I can at least try to separate out the different factors. First, I can dispel the lingering fears I had before taking the decision. I have never been bored. I still have as many unfulfilled dreams as ever. And I do not miss the routine of work, or the intelligent company of work colleagues. When people left Shell, this was always their most common gripe, that they miss the intelligence of daily discussion. Well, not me. Why have I not suffered these things? I can only guess that I get enjoyment from my own company, and can take pleasure from some simple things that take time, like walking, reading, even sleeping. I have also had no trouble finding a variety of things to fill my day, many involving good company. I have actually worked, for money. When I tell people this, their most common reaction is that it is good for me. I don’t know about that. So far, I have really enjoyed my work, especially as it has only been for a few days per month. I don’t think I need it as much as people seem to think I do. Somehow there would be other activities to replace it. Perhaps what people are saying when they say it is good for me is that if they were in the same situation they think they would need some work for some reason. I did not really have a plan for retirement. I wrote down a few goals, and actually I have gone some way to achieving many of them. Of course I had hobbies, some ideas, and some dreams. But I think one of the keys to making this work has been to be ready to embrace what life brings along. I have ended up doing some things I never would have guessed, perhaps because my attitudes and preferences have evolved, and perhaps because such things would have never crossed my radar before. I fully expect these pleasant surprises to keep on coming. One nice side effect of these diversions is that I see no risk of completing my dream list anytime soon. There are still as many vague ideas out there as there were two years ago. That leaves a nice sense of being able to look forward to the future. I don’t know if I do things slower than before. My sense is that I am about as efficient as I ever was. True, I can spin out a task, make something last a couple of days when it could be done in one, but that was always the case – work tasks were the same, expanding to fill all the time available to complete them. What is certainly true is that I am usually less tired. I looked around me at choir practice the other night and looked at faces. Almost all looked tired, some very tired indeed. I think that used to be me as well. Now, we all want to make the most of our fleeting existence on the planet, but I am not sure if being really tired is a good goal. Surely, it is harder to appreciate experiences when we are tired? People still think I look older than my years, but I sense not as much as before, and the pitied look offered to a tired soul is something I rarely experience nowadays. Actually, I can hardly imagine how I coped before. I did most of the things I do now, plus many additional hours every week of this other thing called work. It is no wonder I was often tired, and didn’t do things as well or gain as much from experiences. Perhaps the biggest change has been in my mood and my behaviour to others. I can still be brusque, aggressive and thoughtless. But I sense that it happens less often now. Maybe my other transitions in life have contributed, but I think retirement has too. My brain is no longer running at hundred miles per hour and on its unpleasant autopilot. I can listen, reflect, and react better than before, see things from the perspective of another. I have a key piece of evidence, which is that relapses in behaviour tend to happen while I am in Romania working or soon after I get home. I think many factors are at work here. Partly it is the high speed multi-tasking that leads to hasty interactions. Partly it is the office culture of competition and selfishness invading my private space. Whatever it is, I don’t like it. And perhaps what I now observe occasionally is how I used to be most of the time? Might that be you too? It is no wonder so many of us use devices to keep us in balance. Meditation, physical things like massage, breathing exercises can all help. So can religion – I am convinced that while I was working the one hour per week sitting in Church reflecting was an important way to dampen aggression. I still use these devices, even though I suppose I need them less now. But whereas before they maybe took my personality from dangerous to somehow controlled, now I can often find deeper levels of serenity. Essentially, retirement has created more space for close relationships. With everyone, I can now take more time, including reflection time. With my family, this is even more true. But most of all the space created gives time for my relationship with myself (and with God, if you like). This time and space is a true gift. Yet looking at it this way may give a clue as to why retirement does not work for everybody, indeed why we tend to clutter our lives so much. This extra time is only a gift if we are comfortable in those relationships. If we are not comfortable, if there is lack of reconciliation or unresolved tension, the extra time will only shine a harsh light on the problem. True, the time gives opportunity to seek and find reconciliation, but this can be a painful process, especially if we are in denial and not ready to face it. So this may be the best advice I can give, if you are contemplating retirement or some other simplification of your life. Do it, time and space is a gift. But be ready for what that time and space will reveal. If possible, find true reconciliation in your closest relationships before making the change, or at least be ready for some pain. The closest relationship is with yourself. In your cluttered life, you may not even notice the tensions inside yourself and with others – that is even why the clutter is there. It is a shame that such a cathartic process is not something we tend to prepare for. It is only now, two years on, that I start to see how necessary it was for me, and I got through it more by accident than anything else. And who am I to say that I am through it now? So, dare to tidy away the clutter and let in the sunshine. If you wait until you are forced to, that will only get in the way of allowing the sunshine to help you. Just like this last weekend in Northern Europe, the first effect of a dose of sunshine after a long winter might be some painful burning. But, once that is out of the way, sunshine on the skin and the soul has a great and lasting healing effect.

Trying too hard

A nice piece in Intelligent Life (May-June) concludes that sometimes thinking is a bad idea. Ian Leslie suggests that our tendency to choke, or fail at critical times, is because we are trying too hard and lose our spontaneous performance as a result. I agree. The examples quoted are mainly sporting ones. Novak Djokovic in 2011 went through a period when he could not stop winning. And what was noticeable was that he seemed to play his best points under the highest pressure. Under severe pressure, most of us become stiff, cautious, and underperform. Look at almost any golf tournament. Birdies fly in for the first 63 holes, but the winner is the one who makes fewest errors over the last nine. I am no sportsman, but I suffer from this myself. In singing, it is weird that I sing the highest note of any piece consistently badly. I am not alone in this. It hardly matters if the note is really high or not. An F is no problem if the piece has G's and A's, but if the F is the summit, it starts to cause problems. The best way to avoid this is to somehow confuse my brain. Techniques for this include focusing on something other than singing, like walking around. If the top note passes without me actually registering it, I sing it OK. When I used to play bridge, I remember sometimes having the thought that I might win a particular tournament, usually about 80% of the way through if things were going well. This thought was always somehow almost fatal, and my performance declined instantly. The only way to win was never to let winning enter my head. Sports people recognise this phenomenon. One consequence is the rise of psychology in top sports. Professionals have their technical coaches, but if anything nowadays they value their psychological coaches more. These miracle workers are the ones that help their clients fail to notice that they are about to tackle their top F, so the moment passes just like all the other moments in the event with a regular, good, performance. One way to try to understand why this choking happens might come from a model I learned at work. The model is the origin of the famous rumsfeld speech about known unknowns, so ridiculed at the time. I learned it first in a sales context (trying to win clients) but its applications are wide. The model is a classic 4-box, with competence on one axis, and consciousness on the other. In any skill or challenge, we start in the unconsciously incompetent box. We are useless, but we don't really know it. Many of us think we can sing well, but it is not necessarily true. It is state of blissful ignorance, unless you have an exhibitionist streak or a poker habit. The theory goes that to develop, you have to first move into the consciously incompetent box. Only when you know you are flawed in something can you motivate yourself to change things. In sales, you have to make your client feel uncomfortable with their present supplier before you have a chance to convert them. Makes sense. From consciously incompetent, you are ready to learn. You get training, listen to others, work hard, practice. If you have talent and application, you slowly become consciously competent. You know that if you open your mouth wide (and many other things)on high notes, they will sound less forced. Slowly, you train yourself to do it. But this is not the end of the journey. Most skills are multi-dimensional, and the human mind can only focus on two or three of these dimensions at once. In a skill with say twenty facets, we have to master at least nineteen to the extent that usually they are performed without active thinking about it. This is unconscious competence. Nineteen factors are safe, you focus on the twentieth, and the result is good. Even better if twenty are safe. That way the result is so natural that performance can transcend regular boundaries, you can almost take yourself out of yourself and discover hidden facets 21, 22, and 23. Somehow, you can move from the technical to the inspired. Thinking about the choking experience and this model together leads me to my theory about why choking happens. As we approach the finish line, we want to make sure we get there. Somehow, we remember the factors from our training, and focus on some of them to make sure we don't go wrong. As soon as we do this, we move BACK to the conscious competence box, and become mere journeymen again. And we choke. I do it every time I sing a song. Even the very best sportsmen do it to a small extent every time they stand over a match point, a penalty kick or a winning putt. The winners are those who do it less. And Djokovic in 2011 seemed to be an example of defying human nature, and not doing it at all. Now let us extend the logic beyond technical skills like sports or arts. I think it might apply to almost everything that we do. How does a baby learn to walk? The same model applies. How do we prepare for exams? How do we drive cars? Handle a negotiation? The same model applies. Then there are human relationships. How do we become better bosses? Parents and children? Life partners? Lovers? Flirters? And what about our own psyche? How do we understand who we are, our wellness and feeling good inside ourselves? Ourselves and our Gods? Life and death? I had not previously given a lot of thought to the latter categories. But I suspect the model applies even more strongly simply because the necessary skills are so ill-defined. In each case, many (most?) of us blunder through life unconsciously incompetent. We might make it to consciously incompetent, and make some effort to become consciously competent. Even then, uncounscious competence is rare, and vanishes as soon as there is any pressure, when the skill really matters. So the lessons to us as individuals are clear. First, we should look about for the vast areas of our lives where we are unconsciously incompetent, and start on the road around the four boxes. This is all about humility. Then, once we have done our training - hard work, but mentally the easy bit - we must try to avoid choking. This is all about not thinking too hard. How many first dates have we ruined by trying too hard? How many family rows have only festered when we tried too hard to solve them? How many depressions are made worse by thinking too hard about them? Todays prayer. Oh God help us to be humble enough to see our many failings, diligent enough to address them, and serene enough to be at our best under pressure. Amen.