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17 January 2012

All work and no play: how to strangle innovation

Posted by Ed under behavioural change, communication, HR, leading performance, learning theory, learning transfer, line managers, management, motivation, relationships, reward and recognition, talent management | Tags: innovation, learning transfer 2010, mckinsey, steven johnson |
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HRZone recently published an interesting article by Emma Littmoden, partner at The Living Leader, called Can HR devise rules that stimulate not stifle innovation? A question that begged for a response – possibly a fairly abrupt one – from the organisational equivalent of ‘the cheap seats’, I thought, so it’s lack of comments so far comes as a surprise. Perhaps everyone else’s HR departments have issued memos banning employees from posting comments at HRZone?

There were quite a few points I wanted to pick Emma up on, in the nicest possible way. First of these was her surprise at Apple’s apparent introduction of stern social media protocols, given the money it makes from handheld devices that encourage ‘the free-flowing ideas of the individuals on the payroll’. Once some of the world had stopped loading candle apps on their iPads and leaving £400’s worth of hi-tech equipment outside shops to mourn Steve Jobs (I’m no accountant, but a tea-light would have said the same, and been far cheaper and less of a personal data security risk), I got the impression that the control-freak tendencies of the recently deceased were aired more freely than previously. And Apple, for all the design savvy of its products (for which thanks should strictly speaking go to Johnny Ive), is a company that makes it very hard to dig beneath the OS, install open source software, and is very keen that we load our (very profitable) new toys with apps, tunes, books, movies and so on bought from an online store that very much runs by their rules. Apple’s version of the world is impeccably stylish, but pretty tightly closed. I’m not sure everyone wants to rule the world, but Apple is keener than most: their internal application of the tendency didn’t surprise me in the least.

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5 January 2012

Think of hope as a doorstep

Posted by Ed under behavioural change, coaching, HR, learning theory, learning transfer, life, motivation, recruitment, relationships | Tags: change management, new year, resolutions, vaclav havel |
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Ah yes, January. Bit of an opinion divider as months go. Some of us are raring to go, all ‘out with the old and in with the new’ – purging ourselves of brandy butter and port, and filling the void with earnest resolutions. Some of us are closer in sentiment to an old Flanders and Swann song:

Dark November brings the fog/Should not do it to a dog.
Freezing wet December, then/Bloody January again!

My own take on resolutions is probably closer in spirit to an Oscar Wilde quote – “The basis of optimism is sheer terror”. The spur to think about changing things springs predominantly from the horror of the idea of more of the same old same old. Which in turn requires a modicum of awareness that things could at the very least be different, and possibly better. Faced with thinking or feeling “Uh oh, here we go again”, one answer is to go somewhere different.

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15 December 2011

Fools’ Gold and Human Materials Science

Posted by Ed under HR, leading performance, motivation, talent management, teamwork | Tags: alchemy, fools gold |
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They might have been being facetious, but I recently absent-mindedly eaves-dropped a conversation comparing HR with alchemy. The snatches of the conversation that I overheard were along the lines of turning base metal into gold, rather than exploring some of the other goals of a now archaic discipline – formulating the elixir of life (an aim now pursued more by cosmetics companies and surgeons and by life coaches) or creating the ultimate panacea. As a metaphor for talent management, I guess ‘turning lead into gold’ works rather better than elixirs, and panaceas can stand in for engagement strategies and BUPA membership. But it was an interesting reminder that the urge to discover the legendary magic formula that makes everything all right lives on, regardless of the fate of the disciplines that spawned the different approaches we’ve abandoned over the centuries.

I also couldn’t help but think – possibly as a measure of the prevailing lack of other stimulation at the time – that it was interesting that the other strand of alchemy had somehow dropped out of the equation. To quote everyone’s favourite wise friend (Wikipedia): “In general alchemists believe in a natural and symbolic unity of humanity with the cosmos.” This spiritual and philosophical strand was an integral element of alchemy, but one that fell by the wayside as the scientific discipline of chemistry evolved and displaced its metaphorical parent.

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8 November 2011

“What are they afraid of?” or “If Kirkpatrick must go, let’s at least give him a good send off!”: Guest post from Tony Martin

Posted by Ed under behavioural change, communication, evaluation, HR, leading performance, learning transfer, management, reward and recognition, talent management | Tags: accountability, business models, kirkpatrick, learning and development, organisational performance, working relationships |
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The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Franklin D Roosevelt

There you go. Nothing like a well-worn cliché to kick off, and with the apparently imminent (again) collapse of the global financial market and the consequent disintegration of democracies around the world, that is probably as relevant and true today as it was 80 years ago. Except of course, the Armageddon scenario won’t happen because throughout time the brave have overcome the one thing that would precipitate such meltdown; the paralysis of fear and the temptation to sit on the touchline and watch the whole sorry saga dissolve before their frozen, staring eyes. (Caveat: if it does happen, by then you’ll have hopefully forgotten that you read it here first and have more important things to worry about.)

Robert Terry’s recent blog “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”, or “Kirkpatrick must go!” put forward an interesting ‘conspiracy theory’ slant to the whole training evaluation debate, and it got me thinking that the root cause of the lethargy that contributes to the huge sums that are wasted on training events might just be because it’s all a bit scary. Even in such austere market conditions, why are so many of our corporate leaders apparently content to sit back and watch the money flow out through their Learning & Development budgets? Why do they seem satisfied when they have a team who return from their development experience having made some new friends, are a bit more motivated and, at best, have transcended as individuals into better human beings, albeit not actually able to contribute anything of demonstrable additional value to the business?

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3 November 2011

A little learning is a dangerous thing? The role of universities

Posted by Ed under communication, HR, leadership development, learning transfer, life, recruitment, talent management | Tags: business schools, higher education, student loans, universities |
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I’m normally more an Independent man (all puns intended), but – as professors reminded me during my own days in academia – reading around the list rather than down it can sometimes pay dividends. And if you’re going to be informed, why not be informed about more than the one thing? Glancing unaccustomedly through the pages of The Pink ‘Un, I was refreshed to find an article – Question of relevance must be addressed – in their Soapbox column that posed a long overdue question or three:

What are business schools for? What do they do? How can they best serve the needs of business and society?”

All good questions, I thought, although it seemed perhaps a little unfair to single out business schools. (We can’t all be managers, and it wouldn’t help if we could.) When it comes to purpose, relationship to both society and the economy, and to upholding their end of some very nebulous psychological contracts, most of higher education could do with clearing its throat and piping up in words of one syllable. The Guardian’s Q&A best bits: Marketing higher education during times of change (first published this April) was an interesting Googlefind, but not an inspiring one in this context.

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1 November 2011

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”, or “Kirkpatrick must go!”

Posted by robert terry under behavioural change, coaching, evaluation, HR, learning transfer, line managers, motivation, organisational development, relationships, talent management | Tags: kirkpatrick, learning and development |
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Every now and then, a foolish notion takes such a firm grip on the public consciousness that no amount of hard evidence to the contrary can persuade its believers to put aside their convictions and embrace what is frequently an unpalatable or less interesting truth. Some such notions emanate from the ‘supernatural’ school and demand high levels of blind faith from their adherents. The absence of anything remotely evidential in the stories that surround faith-based urban myths presents no problem to their originators who, through their powers of persuasion and the vulnerabilities of their audience, succeed in recruiting armies of supporters to their cause. The uneventful passing once more of Harold Camping’s revised deadline for the end of the world on 21^st October is unlikely to persuade his followers that The End Times is a put-up job any more than readers of horoscopes will cancel their subscriptions just because none of the foretold events actually happen. Faith like bindweed once established, is tough to kill.

Some urban myths are lightweight confections whipped up by pranksters seeking nothing more than the inner satisfaction of knowing that they have duped the gullible. The recent Kidney Heist Hoax is a masterpiece of the genre. In its frequent beery re-telling the narrative gathers both mass and momentum like a snowball rolling down a ski slope. Each storyteller attaches his or her own embellishments and invigorates the story by making it their own; or at least “a friend of friend’s”. These myths derive their currency from the frequency with which they are told and the conviction of the teller, no matter how implausible the story itself may be. It would seem that for many, a myth repeated often enough will assume the authority of truth.

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27 October 2011

Teamwork – more bees, more buzz. But do hive minds make honey?

Posted by Ed under communication, life, motivation, relationships, reward and recognition, talent management, teamwork | Tags: co-opetition, crowdsourcing, groupwork |
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One of my colleagues here at ASK recently handed me a Times article that she thought might inspire thoughts (or better yet, words – but let’s not rush to judgement): Driven by team power – which you’ll need a Times subscription to read – looked at the emphasis on teams and team working in several MBA courses. It’s inevitably one of those articles that start with the words “The world of work is an increasingly …”, which must surely now rank as a cliché of business writing, although framing truisms in 500 words or less is the kind of challenge that mainstream journalism tends to set. (One possible explanation for the rise of blogging: the writer can use the number of words that are needed, rather than the number that fit the pre-defined space?)

It’s also one of those truisms that are, to be frank, eternal. Teamwork isn’t some new fangled blinding flash, and I’m sure we could unearth (no pun intended) a few archaeologists and anthropologists to back up that assertion. Somehow, I don’t think Avebury rose from the Wiltshire plains because a tribal leader fancied a monument and sent smoke signals out to a preferred supplier list of stone-working consultants. Teamwork was certainly around 300 years ago when Isaac Newton admitted its importance:

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

And there’s always that timeless electricians’ mantra: “many hands make light work”.

Teamwork is timeless because no man or woman is an island. Even the most anti-social, introverted or malodorous of us depend on others to some extent: unless you are entirely self-sufficient in food, heat, light, shelter, sanitation and so on, others are involved. I will always fondly recall one colleague inadvertently thinking out loud in response to the eternally irritating “There is no “I” in “teamwork” and saying “Yes, but there’s no “f” in “Co-operation” either, is there?”. She wasn’t thanked for her contribution.

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18 October 2011

The path more trodden – the application of desire lines

Posted by Ed under behavioural change, communication, HR, life, motivation, relationships, talent management | Tags: bill bryson, carl myhill, desire lines, desire paths, edgelands, nudge, owen hatherley |
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Living near a planned city – in this case, Milton Keynes – I’m used to an urban environment that’s rich in greenery (welcome) but equally rich in meandering, winding footpaths. After living here for the last 17 years (during which time I have only occasionally caught myself whistling “Hotel California”), I’ve still to become totally immune to the annoyance of following an agreeably landscaped but snaking route that may or may not get me where I’m trying to go – even when I can see my destination on the horizon. Perhaps it takes an outsider’s eyes to see things afresh, but Bill Bryson’s description of his first encounter with my adopted home in his Notes from a Small Island is one I’ve treasured since I first read it (you can read a longer version of this extract online):

From a hilltop I spied a sprawl of blue roofs about three-quarters of a mile off and thought that might be the shopping mall and headed off for it. The pedestrian walkways, which had seemed rather agreeable to me at first, began to become irritating. They wandered lazily through submerged cuttings, nicely landscaped but with a feeling of being in no hurry to get you anywhere. Clearly they had been laid out by people who had thought of it as a two-dimensional exercise. They followed circuitous, seemingly purposeless routes that must have looked pleasing on paper, but gave no consideration to the idea that people, faced with a long walk between houses and shops, would mostly like to get there in a reasonably direct way. Worse still was the sense of being lost in a semi-subterranean world cut off from visible landmarks. I found myself frequently scrambling up banks just to see where I was, only to discover that it was nowhere near where I wanted to be.”

For an updated opinion on Milton Keynes, you can try Owen Hatherley’s recent A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain – an unexpectedly absorbing (and entertaining) read, but not the book that recently got me thinking about paths again. The trigger was Edgelands, written by two poets (Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts) to hymn those ambiguous places where towns frey into countryside: here you find both new business parks and abandoned industry as time and economics gerrymander boundaries between town and beyond. I’m confident it’s a niche read, despite picking up the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award for non-fiction, but to shrug at the subject in focus would be to miss some beautiful and thoughtful writing.

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Don't Compromise!