To maintain our standards (and the standards of professional bodes to which we belong, as we are proud to support organisations that work to define, maintain and drive up standards), we are committed to regular and ongoing professional development.  A further ethical concern is to recognise the boundaries within which consultancy is provided and presented: the opportunity to present ideas does not translate into a right to see them implemented. (Indeed, insisting too adamantly ultimately undermines the recipient client: effective consultancy should be based on mutual professional respect.)

As world leaders in promoting the criticality of ensuring the successful transfer and application of learning, coaching and OD interventions, we are seeking here to identify and encourage the achievement of best practice in this business critical area.

Ensuring the Effectiveness of OD Consulting
As with any development activity or intervention, whether organisational or personal, establishing excellence of theory and concept is not the aim: the ultimate objective of OD should be sustained – and sustainable – improvement in performance. Any consultancy provided with the aim of improving performance must, for the sake of its credibility, accept that it is provided in an arena where its effectiveness will, and indeed must, be tested.

Organisation Design (OD) consultancies should have a clear commitment to evaluate – and be evaluated – across all OD projects: just like any other service, OD consultants shouldn’t expect invoices to be honoured where a service is promised but under-delivered. But perspectives on what constitutes effective consulting – and, more crucially, on how (and on what criteria) OD Consulting projects are evaluated – are varied and continue to evolve.

For many years, it has been commonly understood – if that is the right verb – that there is a gap between ‘theories in books’ – the ideas, tools, processes and techniques are introduced during a consultancy intervention and ‘theories in action’ – the application of that learning that leads to improved performance. (A gap that can be less elegantly expressed as the difference between understanding what could be done and actually doing it.).

In that time, our understanding of the wide range of factors that cause this ‘transfer gap’ has been enhanced by a growing body of academic research, which has also identified the ways and means by which the gap might be bridged. What is less evident is the extent to which organisations have embraced the challenge of the transfer from theory to action, and adopted new techniques that could, if the researchers are correct, improve the effectiveness of the OD intervention.

Your OD consultancy projects will, of course, be underpinned by contractual agreements, defining the services to be provided and the way in which the project is to be managed. As well as the (vital) on-going contact at both strategic and operational level between consultants and clients, there should regular review meetings to monitor progress, review strategy, identify and address issues as they arise, and make modifications that address changing circumstances. There may be formal evaluation processes and criteria built into the project scope – indeed, we would argue that these are essential, and should be as rigorous as possible.

What follows is the work we have completed on one vital piece of the jigsaw- namely, how best to evaluate the effectiveness of OD consultancy interventions, where effectiveness is defined as what we can show to our clients that makes a compelling case for the proof positive of the bottom-line improvements to be gained from highly effective partnering work with them.

A Self-Evaluation Questionnaire For Consultants
Regardless of the formal evaluation processes to be followed, OD consultants should always be prepared to ask themselves the following questions – and be prepared to respond to these questions when they are raised by their clients.

1. Has the project enabled complex problems to be appraised and dealt with?
Answers to complex problems should emerge during the project, as consultant and client work collaboratively to identify and clarify current and emerging issues (and the factors driving them), and then continue their collaboration to address them. This process should also be a learning opportunity for both parties.

2. Has the OD intervention encouraged and recognised diverse perspectives and values?
Experienced OD consultants should always remember that any issue within the client organisation can – and will – be seen from many perspectives, not just through individual differences but through the filters of a variety of operational and strategic agendas and priorities. The ‘helicopter’ and ‘ground level’ views will naturally be different: both see elements that will be invisible to the other. By encouraging and exploring these differing perspectives, opportunities are generated for more successful problem solving – and for greater mutual understanding.

3. Regardless of the destination, where did you start from?
Consultancy means working with your partner: the need to work hand in hand with them throughout the process means that there may be a need to accept their pace rather than to impose your own – and thereby risk travelling ahead of them, which in turn risks communication and understanding. Likewise, consultancy can start only from your client’s starting point: to work with their starting perspective, you must first take time to understand it – explore the initiatives that they have previously tried, what has worked – and not worked, and their own view of what needs to be done. While you may (feel a) need to modify their perspectives, you can only – in the words of the cliché – start from where you are, no matter how far that is from anywhere you might consider ideal.

4. Were you able to demonstrate that the real value of their input lies not in the details of the project but in their management of the flow of the project process?
Project details will be subject to change throughout the project lifespan: it would be remarkable – and possibly even cause for concern – if they did not. Your greatest value lies in managing these changes of detail while maintaining the overall direction, focus and effectiveness of the project.

5. Have you been able to articulate how the OD project has provided a framework for change?The framework’s role – like the consultants’ – will evolve during the project. In the initial stages, its purpose is to provide a shared frame of reference within which consultant and client can discuss project goals, methods, evaluation and learning. To do this, it must be articulated and understood clearly by the client – it should quickly become apparent if this is not the case. But the framework will also evolve in parallel with the project:: communicating these on-going modifications as you work with your client and ensuring that these changes are understood are vitally important.. If there were evident problems of understanding and mutual comprehension, review communication processes.

6. In delivering the agreed objectives for the OD project were you able to build trust and rapport?
OD interventions are, by definition, highly dynamic: rarely cleanly linear, they will often take many twists and turns, and there is considerable potential for the client to feel either bewildered or confused. In ensuring delivery on agreed objectives – and ensuring your client’s perception that this remains the case throughout – consultants must make every effort to remain grounded, clear and consistent to build trust and commitment and achieve the clarity required to resolve problems and overcome obstacles.

7. Were you able to demonstrate effective partnership working?
OD interventions do not work if they are seen as consultant-led; the best advocates of change and re-construction are internal. Likewise, consultants do not simply advise. They should always explain the reasons for their advice and the benefits their client that accrue as a result, and allow their client time to respond.

8. Did your relationship with client mean that they felt free to take – or not take – your advice?
There are two issues here. External consultants must be mindful that they are providing a service to enhance and improve their client’s business, but they are not actually taking it over. It is easier to be mindful of this by reflecting on the second issue, which is one of the most challenging for consultants (in any field or context) to accept: people learn only what they are ready to learn. Your client has a right to reject your advice, even if it would bring real advantage; they are, however, more likely to accept the advice if your consultancy has prepared them to do so. Just as clients must take ownership of new learning and new behaviours, similarly they must retain ownership of the project and the organisation – which includes the right to say ‘no’.

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Of course, Never Never Land is also a real place – the remote, largely uninhabited outback Australian regions in the Northern Territory and Queensland. Interestingly, European emigrants had a different interpretation of the name to the Aboriginals.  To the Europeans, it was a place you would “never, never” go; the locals, by contrast, saw it as more like a “state of mind and a folk-memory that recalls the pre-settlement outback life with fondness”.

My childish view was that Never Never Land encapsulated a place of dreams, where reality could be challenged and the constraints of logic and seriousness could be suspended.  Of course, with that comes the persistent challenge of constraint, tugging at the hem to eventually unravel and reveal what can truly be achieved when adversity is overcome – good versus evil, Pan versus Hook, etc. 

So I’d like to allow myself to go to Never Never Land for a moment, and I hope you’ll follow.  Think of it as the chance to explore the continuum that moves from self-awareness at one end to a utopian dreamlike state at the other, and let’s explore the risks associated with being totally open to ideas – and the risk of potential self-delusion. 

I work every day with leaders of very large organisations. Many of them associate creativity, risk taking, thinking on your feet and self-transcendence as aspects of that utopian destination – a place they may journey to, but mostly in their dreams because the reality of corporate life doesn’t allow them to go there. 

Self-awareness vs fixed mind
Am I alone in finding it fascinating that the language that organisations (and I use the term ‘organisations’ in terms of a collective consciousness) use  suggests the opposite state of affairs, often promoting creativity and risk-taking and open thinking in their top talent, yet not actually role-modelling it.  What is the risk? What’s holding us back? Is taking that step into the unknown, that jump into the unexpected, really that frightening?  Organisations often talk about creating environments within their cultures that will move them from compliance to creativity, Are they holding back from doing so more publicly because the destination is (vocally or tacitly) seen as farcical and childish?

Ponder the opposite state of affairs for a moment (if blogs had stage instructions, there would be one here saying “Enter Hook, cackling”): being fixed minded and closed to the possibilities inherent in ideas and – in the broadest sense of the word – dreams.  Of course, there’s a benefit: drawing up the shutters to daydreaming and wondering ‘what if I …?’ it protects us from self-delusion.  Spend too much time with your head in the clouds and you’ll always be the second star to the right, not the one seen as dependable or realistic.  And you can argue that not opening yourself to the risks associated with creative ideas is a way to become more resilient to the ‘real world’, and to remain grown-up and logical in our thinking.  However, please consider a quote from Matthew Syed in his book Bounce:

Even if the sparks that ignite us are sometimes enigmatic, lost in the deep and unfathomable mysteries of the mind, one thing is certain: if your chosen destination is within the domain of excellence, you’d better have a growth mindset. Why? Because a spark ignited in a fixed mind is likely to be extinguished at the first sign of failure?”

Those of you who are old enough can whistle a few bars of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” at this point”. The others among us can perhaps reflect that, while there can be merits to being intractable and maintaining a set position in relation to the world, these merits are also attributes of bollards – not usually considered a role model. 

Living whose dream?
Musing aloud, I wondered about other parallels. Self-awareness is a value starting point in both personal and leadership development, but projecting a certain persona or creating a framework within which you present yourself or your ideas or your plan are also part of the development and implementation jigsaw. The balance between reality and projection here can have some significant consequences.

All politicians will have tropes: Tony Blair was ever anxious to promote the ‘new’-ness of everything, while David Cameron rarely completes a sentence without ‘fairness’. But part of self-awareness is recognising that the image you are striving to project – to encourage perception of newness or fairness (or Tinker Bell and a marauding pirate, or …) – has a perception from its audience too. Think of George Orwell’s 1984 and Newspeak: Big Brother (no, not that one) may have hoped – or even believed – that the people collectively agreed with the world as Newspeak framed it, but (as Orwell suggests) that’s not necessarily the case. A ‘collective consciousness’ – whether it’s the ‘proles’ belief in Big Brother, or committed employee engagement in an organisation to a new vision or mission – happens when the audience aren’t thinking ‘fantasist’. Barrie gets excused as he’s writing a kid’s book, not a mission statement – and because we allow our children to dream more wildly than we do ourselves.

The art – for those us of in the working world rather than the children’s library or on the sofa with a DVD and our offspring around us – is in recognising the balance. Too much literalism, and every spark will be still born. Fill your corporate mine shaft with the mental equivalent of carbon monoxide, and presto! Dead canaries, every time. (Remember Matthew Syed?)

Too much daydreaming and the focus on outcomes can be lost, but other things can be more subtly lost too. Projecting a mission or a vision or a framework too far along that realism-fantasy continuom for too long and short-term dividends (such as controlling the scope of the debate) can be lost. And so can the faith and respect of those around you: we may quite like a daydreamer if they have other qualities, but a pathological Walter Mitty isn’t anyone’s idea of the ideal colleague.

And these unrealistic daydreams can become prisons for their creators too: Big Brother had no other way to think beyond Newspeak – there was no flexibility to respond to changes in the world around it, or changes in the reaction of the fictional public. In real life, fantasies tend to fail, get enforced through rigid control and terror (as they are essentially implausible), or restricted to strictly prescribed circumstances (the most printable example off the top of my head is games of Dungeons and Dragons).

What If?
I later came across the music of the band U.N.K.L.E .and their album Never, Never, Land (partly inspired by Barrie): those commas in the title changed the meaning of the words completely for me, representing very accurately the fact that nothing is constant: we truly never, never, land.

The challenge, perhaps, is to strike the happy medium while we struggle to remain airborne. Facing a challenging world, we need to be realistic enough to accept the lie of the land for what it is (even if we’re going to Never Never Land, we have to get there from where we are), but not to rigidly anchor ourselves to too many aspects of it. Our world is one of constant flux: unless you know exactly how the tides are going to change, chaining yourself to a rock can be as good a way of drowning as of surviving.

Casting off completely, however, can leave you simply adrift. And blue-sky thinking has a time and a place but try to remember that some visions need medication, not implementation. Nonetheless, encouraging a culture – or space for discussions – that allow ‘what if?’ to be not just asked but answered, and where ideas can circulate and percolate does mean that we don’t necessarily need to trap ourselves in our individual, hyper-realistic personal cages.

Sharing and exploring with others might be more than just a way of bouncing around the ideas till they take shape (and getting feedback and fresh input from others, quietly unlocking themselves from their own little cages): it might be a way of encouraging them to share a more plausible dream – and helping each other to build it.

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We were recently asked by a professional journal to proffer our thoughts on assessment techniques that might help graduates and employers in “one of the toughest job markets for decades”. It was one of those moments when you couldn’t help but wonder if the question did the situation justice. It felt like Douglas Adam’s crashed space ship of telephone sanitisers and PR advisers inventing the wheel but not putting it into use because they couldn’t decide which colour was best. In a year when employers – or at least those that are recruiting – may be trying to redefine selection processes for their graduate intake because the traditional methods don’t cope with the volume. Yet a CIPD press release issued this morning seems to fly in the face of what you would assume:

The latest focus study on skills, migration and off shoring in the CIPD/KPMG Labour Market Outlook report shows that demand for migrant workers has increased in line with improvements in the UK labour market during the past year.

Almost half (45%) of the 600 employers surveyed report vacancies that are hard to fill, with 21% saying they are recruiting migrant workers for engineering vacancies, and 18% for both IT and accountancy/finance positions.”

The same issue of the Independent on Sunday ran an article, “University? Is it still worth the trouble?”, and the question – if CIPD/KPMG are right – should be one that not just potential and current students should be asking themselves. As the question begins to circulate more widely, statistics fly in all directions, as commentators search – understandably – for those that back their argument. So while The IoS reports graduate salaries are currently on average 38% higher than those of non-graduates after 10 years, Aditya Chakrabortty writing in today’s Guardian draws a different conclusion:

What about the extra money that degree-holders are meant to earn over their careers – the so-called graduate premium? Even by Whitehall calculations, that has dropped from £400,000, to £100,000 now – which works out to an annual £2,500 over a 40-year career. But even that more modest average is swollen by the number of Oxbridge students who end up at Goldman Sachs.”

With an average graduating student debt of c.£25,000, it’s even less rosy: even without interest payments, ten of those forty career year financial advantages will be spent repaying the loan for the education that delivered them. “What are you reading for?” is, in that light, a question that has teeth every bit as sharp as many a Bill Hicks routine.

The rapid expansion of higher education participation – now suddenly performing a handbrake turn – has had many consequences, but they may not have been the ones that were intended. Chakrabortty cites a research study:

A couple of years ago, two economists at the University of Kent crunched through data from 1992 up to 2006 on how graduates fared in the jobs market. It was a big exercise, going through thousands of career paths, and it was carefully done. Francis Green and Yu Zhu took into account that it can take a while for graduates to find the right job […] Yet they still found a third of graduates were “overqualified” for their jobs. Many were “formally overqualified”, in positions that wouldn’t usually require a university degree; but one in 10 were what Green and Zhu called “really overqualified” – their jobs barely utilised their expensively acquired skills.”

Part of the ‘problem’ is not just the increase in graduate numbers; many jobs – perhaps in their anxiety to achieve or inforce their status as ‘professions’ – now demand degrees that have not previously done so. There is a definite hint here of ‘professions’ (you might want to read our previous post about the MBA oath and the double-edged sword of ‘professional status’) pulling up the ladder behind them as fast as Higher Education has tried to extend the ladder from below to reach them. But even jokes that were once fresh (Q: What’s the most common question a media studies graduate asks at work? A: Do you want fries with that?) can lose their flavour.

There is another undercurrent too – one that concerns what we see the role of education as being. Michael Hoffman, a translator, poet and critic, wrote a Guardian column shortly before A-level results were released that deplored our approach to foreign language teaching in the UK (as do employers who want employees with languages skills, although as Hoffman comments: “Employers are becoming unhappy; their science and business and IT agenda has been overplayed.”). Although his article focuses on language teaching, the larger context – ie what is the point? – includes sentences that are telling in the wider debate:

It looks like an education problem, but it’s not an education problem. Education is just where things get shunted that society doesn’t want to deal with or can’t deal with. [ …]

Education is a field hospital, where the little troops are patched up and turned round and sent back to fight in the great economic war that seems to be all that’s left of life.”

When a traditional model (school -> university -> graduate -> graduate entry scheme) becomes largely inoperable, it may be the model that needs to be adjusted rather than the processes that operate within its framework. So what can companies do to change this glum and rather bitter picture? Standing back a little to review the broader perspective might be one start. Graduates are, by definition, largely untested in real working experience: one conundrum of talent is that it can take time – and investment – to emerge. (Malcolm Gladwell’s cited figure of 10,000 hours may seem daunting to a recruitment specialist, but we hope that they’d agree that their own performance has improved since they started their role?) Even then, knowledge and skill don’t necessarily translate into subsequent performance – In the medium-term labour market, other approaches – internships, part-time working, working with community volunteering schemes, apprenticeships – may provide meaningful development opportunities, and organisations with alternative approaches to monitoring and assessing their potential.

Pondering whether job requirements have become over-inflated (an accusation levelled at educational qualifications in both the UK and Ireland) may pay dividends. As unemployed and would-be graduates scrabble for work, the ‘lower level’ routes into work intended for those with lower level qualification become their target. Yet, despite the coalition government’s aim to increase by 50% apprenticeships to 150,000 (itself a huge increase on the 34,500 available in 1990), this would still leave us 71% below the number available in 1968.

Are organisations demanding that young entrants gain unnecessary skills so that they find themselves using entry routes to work designed for ‘lesser achievers’, so that they can then learn the skills that were really wanted in the first place? A system that far off the rails surely couldn’t ever reach its destination. As Anastasia de Waal of the Civitas think-tank was quoted as saying in the IoS article in commenting on the over-emphasis on university education:

As a result, the alternative routes are suffering and we are not getting the best people into non-graduate jobs.”

CIPD/KMPG’s research would imply that, despite decades of rhetoric around aligning education with vocational needs, teaching skills for life, and increasing business input into shaping educational curricula, the students we are awarding qualifications to are not just as unfitted to what our businesses need as ever, but increasing in number too. Even the politest commentator could, I would say, be forgiven for asking ‘So what has business been doing about explaining the skills it really needs for the last 15 years?’

In difficult economic times – where the CIPD itself expresses concern about the ability of the private sector to provide sufficient new jobs to accommodate those expected to be lost in the public sector – it would be churlish and simplistic to chastise organisations for unemployment levels, even those of the young.

But whether or not we are all part of a ‘big society’, I think it can be argued that corporate social responsibility extends as far as contributing intelligently to rethinking the students that our education system (secondary, tertiary and higher) produces where the mismatch will threaten not just the economic and employment chances of the next generation (and who knows what talent lies untapped within it?) but also, by extension, the talent management and succession planning prospects of the organisations that constitute our economy.

Oh, and that Bill Hicks joke … (We’ve removed the bad language, although the underlying anger seems more appropriate now, 17 years after it appeared in a filmed stand-up routine).

I was in Nashville, Tennesee last year, after the show I went to a Waffle House, I’m not proud of it, I was hungry. And I’m alone, I’m eating and I’m reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me, “Tch tch tch tch. Hey, what you readin’ for?” Is that like the weirdest ******* question you’ve ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading for. Well, godammit, you stumped me. Why do I read? Well… hmmm… I guess I read for a lot of reasons, and the main one is so I don’t end up being a ******* waffle waitress.”

There’s every chance you’d want Bill Hicks in your workspace as little as he would have wanted to be there, but a large number of literal people deserve better than the 2010 UK equivalent of waffle waitressing, and have the talent to back up their aspirations. Have we continued fighting the Talent War without noticing that it’s the ‘talent’ itself that we are in danger of defeating?

So how are we going to rethink talent recruitment to address our current situation? And do you want fries with that while you’re thinking about it?

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• The Second Biggest Lie in HR: All “A” Players is Possible Outcome… – The HR Capitalist looks at the prisons that HR practitioners can create for themselves, including waiting for the ‘perfect’ ‘A Player’ candidate when the job requires someone more … er, prosaic. As one commenting visitor pointed out, “Personally for my company I think I want the ditch diggers – coders, hackers, outre graphic designers, deep level video player designers. Not glamorous roles but core to my success.” So do divas belong on the payroll or the CD player?
• Business Culture: Denmark vs USA vs Guatemala: The Chief Happiness Officer (we’re guessing self-proclaimed, although we’re admiring the job title) looks at differences in four aspects of working cultures and attitudes around the world (Power Distance Index, Individualism, Masculinity, and Uncertainty Avoidance Index, as evolved and refined by Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede) before drawing a few conclusion on the ideal balance. The CHO wonders how far Hofstede’s work illuminates the prominent positions Scandinavian countries traditionally enjoy in international surveys of job satisfaction, while his readers wonder how far these stereotypes hold up in the light of experience (perhaps slightly missing the CHO’s point?). In the meantime, I’m wondering how many jobs in Copenhagen don’t demand a working knowledge of Danish … 

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The bigger picture with the private sector is, of course, tackling the deficit. If you were listening to The Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning, you may have caught an item about the government’s Spending Challenge website, which has been inviting suggestions from the public on ways of reducing public spending. There has fairly widespread comment about this initiative as an example of – or as an attempt to apply to the public sector the principles of – crowdsourcing.

Not quite this week’s big thing – the recent splurge of books on the topic seems to be waning – crowdsourcing is nonetheless fashionable. One well-known example of it – Wikipedia – helpfully provides two slightly definitions: the main ‘encyclopedia’ offers:

the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an “open call” to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions”

while Wiktionary (Wikipedia’s crowdsourced dictionary) gives us a slightly blunter view:

delegating a task to a large diffuse group, usually without substantial monetary compensation”

The latter positions the idea – almost as a Spending Challenge contribution might – as something that could be more prosaically described as ‘focus groups without the cup of tea and the biscuit’. As with any government initiative, regardless of political stripe, it has come in for a degree of flack on several fronts – three examples that caught my eye were by Laurie Penny, Zoe Williams and Chris Dillow, all writing (separately) for The Guardian.

Whether we applaud the initiative or not – and I’m minded to argue that a relatively low-cost application of technology that enables the public to at least exercise their opinions is a good idea (some people’s ideas could lose a few pounds, to be candid) – it strikes me that there is an opportunity for those running the site to provide a powerful example in the art of leading, and to test a few preliminary ground rules in using online media to promote engagement.

Drawing a direct analogy would be a little daft – not only is government an enormous, multi-headed apparatus, but it is running a country, its economy, key aspects of the future of its social culture, and its international relations – but this is still an exercise in providing those being led with an opportunity to speak out, and those doing the leading to listen in. I’m not going to attempt a strained metaphor about push and pull factors and talent retention no matter what scope recent debate about immigration caps might provide, but any government – especially one calling for greater ‘civilian participation’ – will benefit from an engaged public. And, of course, any political party in office needs to be re-elected.

Listening matters. The CIPD Report seems to bear this out very strongly: regardless of sector, when it comes to perceptions of directors/senior managers, the item with by far the most positive score is “They have a clear vision of where the organisation is going” (averaging +15). Comparing this with “I trust them” (-5), “I have confidence in them” (+1) and “They consult employees about important decisions” (a shocking -27), and one lesson is hard to avoid. ‘Strong’ leadership alone is not the answer: even if we do tend to think of strong leadership positively – and that’s not actually the question CIPD was asking – we certainly don’t like leadership that appears to be deaf.

(A side question. What’s worse? Leadership that doesn’t bother asking, or leadership that asks, makes a big fuss about asking, and then ignores what it hears. I’d hazard a guess the latter is rather more annoying …) 

The exercise is, of course, about the public sector – where the Government is (directly or otherwise) effectively the employer, while the public are (indirectly) providing the payroll. A fair percentage of them are also the employees: as stake-holding goes, this is potentially powerful stuff. We recently wrote about ambient awareness – a rather different aspect of social media, but one we hope the Treasury is alert to. The following snippets from that CIPD report provide important background evidential data, and any effective survey of ‘the lie of the land’ should bear them in mind:

Job Satisfaction: “Private sector employees (+36) are for the first time more satisfied than employees in the public sector (+34)”

Employee perceptions of senior managers: “perceptions of leadership are much worse in the public sector – in fact every item has a negative net satisfaction score and these scores have worsened since last quarter”

Job-seeking: “While public sector employees are least likely to be looking for a new job currently, they are the group that would ideally most like to change jobs within the next year (46%)” (the Report separately notes that “39% of public sector employees report their organisation is planning to make redundancies, compared with just 9% of those working in the private sector.”

What will be interesting to see in the long-run is how the exercise is used and how its impact is both perceived (‘did all of us typing in our entries do any good’) and received (‘oh, so that was the sum of our opinion’). Listening isn’t always the comfortable option – it depends very much on what you hear – and even democratic outcomes will be unpopular with the minority. (I remember a joke that went around the morning after the election: “I bet the Queen wishes she’d asked for 50/50 or phoned a friend, because asking the audience has been a bloody disaster”.)

Demonstrating an open ear as well as an open door matters: CIPD found that public sector employees are far less satisfied (27%) with “opportunities within their organisation to feed their views upwards” compared to the private sector (38%) and voluntary/charity sectors(41%). Although the Spending Challenge exercise has not been primarily about engagement, it is an exercise in it – and one that uses the language of engagement to encourage participation. (It also uses rather emotive language too. I’m not sure what a professional engagement surveying practitioner would make of a prominent pull quote that starts with ‘The Chancellor says; “Tell us – where’s the waste …’)

The coming years will be ones in which public sector organisations will need to work hard to identify ways to maintain front-line services with substantially reduced budgets. These will be years when ‘doing more with less’ will be a stark reality, not a rhetorical flourish. They will also be years in which maintaining the satisfaction of their client base and the morale of their staff will be of paramount importance. A bin man is a bin man, but a proud, satisfied one who feels valued (by managers as well as householders) is a big improvement on a disaffected one.

Despite CIPD’s findings, which may be causes for gloom, the Spending Challenge has already delivered one positive message. Public sector workers appear to relish opportunities to make constructive suggestions: apparently, two-thirds of suggestions made to date have come from them. They are, as CIPD’s figures suggest, ready and willing to speak out – but they do need to be given opportunities to be heard. I couldn’t help but think of two publications we’ve received in recent months. The first was Dave and Wendy Ulrich’s “The Why of Work”, where the first question on their agenda for leaders was:

What are the insights we need to succeed as an organisation? Who spends time thinking and reflecting on these insights? Who has responsibility for new ideas, learning from the past, and reflecting on our current situation? How do we make room for pondering, reflection, learning and creativity?”

The second was the Work Foundation’s Exceeding Expectations report, about which we noted:

The report also shows engagement in a new light: although the report uses the phrase ‘Putting “we” before “me”‘, this could be rephrased as showing that engagement happens with people, not at them. The best leadership is about “us”, not about “here’s my way of doing things and my vision; you engage with it”.

I have no way – beyond reading 10,000 suggestions – of knowing if these points (and those made by many others, such as the McLeod report on employee engagement) are among those that we have collectively made (although I might, as good citizen, offer them myself). But I can confidently assume that the website – and the time of those not just moderating but reviewing our input – has come at a cost. Whatever our individual political persuasions, the initiative does provide a great opportunity to provide a model – however flawed a first attempt may provide – to stimulate real engagement and involvement. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, is source of an interesting quote that we need to hope the Spending Challenge website’s managers will bear in mind:

“I find the term ‘crowdsourcing’ incredibly irritating. Any company that thinks it’s going to build a site by outsourcing all the work to its users not only disrespects the users but completely misunderstands what it should be doing. Your job is to provide a structure for your users to collaborate, and that takes a lot of work.”

As an individual and a citizen, I have many hopes for the outcome. But not least among them is that the government maximises the value of that spending to demonstrate how engagement can be stimulated, how leaders can listen and how listening pays dividends not just in understanding but in end results. That really would be ‘doing more for less’.

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Having recently finished its 263 pages, I had one other reservation: the writers are wise and experienced enough to know that their essential message – providing and encouraging the unearthing of meaning, a sense of purpose, connectedness, value and hope in people’s working lives not only enriches the working experience but boosts both organisational performance and profitability – is simple in neither reality nor in implementation. Although the conventions of the business blockbuster are respected – breaking down their quest (and that intended for their readers) into ‘the seven questions that drive abundance’ – the book, quite rightly, covers a very wide area of ground. Although they are clear that implementing their tools, models and practices requires time and effort, this is not a book whose content – or conversational style – offers a ‘quick fix’, as illustrated in one extract:

Dave realized that sustained change did not come through emotive weekends but through institutionalized HR practices around recruitment, promotion, development, compensation, communication, and organization design. When these systems are changed, organization capabilities emerged that outlasted any single event or leader.”

What the book does offer – at least to the leader who wants to embed sustained change rather then depending on a ‘hit and run’ approach that may ultimately deliver little, and is more interested in leaving a legacy to others than a monument to themselves – is much of eminently practical help. The range of change assessment and diagnostic tools included in the book are a valuable ‘add on’ to what is currently out there in the leading and implementing change arena.

We can contend that much of the basic idea is not new: the importance of a sense of purpose beyond sheer profitability is territory that Charles Handy, for example, covered in the 1990s. It can be traced back at least as far as William Morris, who wrote the undeniably Utopian News from Nowhere as long as 1890, proposing a society in which work should be a source of pleasure or personal value.) In far less erudite circles, a Canadian band (Max Webster) sang in 1976 that “’ Cause you can only drive down Main street so many times/And a million vacations is what you’ve got in mind”: pause to consider how many people’s working days that still sums up and the song’s wit loses a little of its charm.

But the Ulrichs’ position this message firmly in the here and now, in an era of a growing acceptance and understanding of the critical importance of the employee value proposition, the personal factors that influence or motivate individual workers (and the recognition that money may not be the chief amongst them). It’s also a book rich in optimism, not least in the choice of the word ‘abundance’ to typify the kind of organisation and working environment and atmosphere that they seek to encourage.

In an era where ‘cuts’ and ‘austerity’ are very much words of the moment to the UK reader, I’m not sure how much this choice of language will help the book to reach those they are most seeking to address. (The book also reads to the UK reader as being rooted in American social culture, where local church group and voluntary activity possibly plays a larger part in more people’s lives and value systems).

To use a parallel I didn’t spot in the book, work is one of those (excluding currently those who find themselves without it) unavoidable elements of life like eating. We have to do, but our lives are richer when it’s a pleasure – when the ingredients are chosen with care, treated well and the company in which we share the experience is enjoyable. In parallel with The Why of Work, I was reading a novel (Muriel Barbery’s “The Gourmet”) about a dying food critic remembering the great meals of his life. For a grounded example of the kind of meaning the Ulrichs apply to ‘abundance’, the following seemed to sum it up for me:

I was Ali Baba. The cave of treasures: this was it, the perfect rhythm, the shimmering harmony between portions, each one exquisite unto itself, but verging on the sublime by virtue of the strict, ritual procession. […] The sweet bell peppers, unctuous and fresh, softened my taste buds already subjugated by the virile rigour of the meat, and prepared them for the next powerful assault. Everything was there in abundance.”

Not just dinner, but food in which both cook and diner found real pleasure. For the reader – and leader – who engages with the Ulrichs’ message and imperatives, there is much here to chew on. Understanding the signature strengths and motivating categories of purpose for individual employees and acting to match them to best opportunities and positions within the organisation where they drive not just personal performance, but customer satisfaction (and thereby retention and thereby profitability) is a rich meal in itself, but – for a leader committed to acting on it – opens implications for the organisation’s employee value proposition, its approach to line management and more over to recruitment. Recruitment that focuses on skills and past achievements overlooks personal motivations, passions and what gives a sense of purpose to the potential recruit – all of which may indicate not just the potential contribution that could be made -in an organisation open to the concept of creative contributions, of course.  

Here, however, is another potential barrier to the reader: just as the book would benefit from an opening section that clearly addresses those who ‘don’t get it’, it would in places benefit from taking its own advice on the value of being open to possible objections. Recruitment that factors in personal passions is a laudable aim, but in the current job market with too may chasing too few opportunities, it’s an approach that may encourage insincerity in applicants already finding it hard enough to find work at all, let alone meaningful work. In another section that cites the Harvard MBA Oath as evidence of the changes in motivational factors in today’s business graduates (a topic we’ve previously covered), the criticisms levelled at the MBA Oath are not mentioned let alone countered or developed.

Although the depth of content here is both new and laudable, the long history of respected writers lamenting the lack of value, meaning and purpose that too many of us find in our work suggests that their words have yet to influence a significant percentage of us, which would suggest that a more vigorous approach to those amongst us who are more a part of the problem than of the solution might deliver dividends. (I was reminded at several points of Michael Foley’s The Age of Absurdity – reviewed recently – which made argument that modern practices are increasingly counter-productive to satisfaction, pleasure and meaning. Perhaps the case for meaning needs to be made not just in more depth – see also our review of Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman – but with more force.)

In researching this review, it became evident that even those that might find much that they agree with in much of the book – one example is the Work Foundation – can have qualms about ‘Ulrich as guru’. In a book that offers much of real value (although it would benefit from shortening and better organisation of its content), the pessimist in me wondered how effective it will prove in changing the working environment for those who need that change most. The biggest obstacles to that change are the types of leader and manager that were best summed up by Margaret Thatcher’s quote:

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

I also found it hard to escape the real significance of those whose response to the book and its imperatives will be the four highlighted in the book itself: ‘criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling’. HR Managers who ‘get it’ and who have not just their Boards’ ear, but their support (along with time and budgets) will find enormous inspiration here: many HR Departments may find something closer to frustration in recognising what might – and should – be achieved. To cite one brief quote from the book will always take words out of context (a more powerful sense would be conveyed by inserting several more adjectives into the first half of this sentence), but those with the most to learn from this are probably a close fit to the following grouping:

Leaders who are shaming, critical or grumpy may evoke a lot of action, but not necessarily a lot of learning or real productivity.”

While the occasional glibness of some of the book has surfaced in accompanying interviews – my immediate personal reaction to the closing answer in one at Bnet was that it would take more than cookies to turn around a dismal working experience – there was, however, one quote that I thought illuminated the failings of the types of practice that the Ulrichs hope to help banish. The interview was with Management Consulting News, where one question and answer ran as follows:

McLaughlin: On the flip side, if an employee wants more meaningful work but has skeptical or resistant leaders, what can that person do?

Ulrich: An employee has three choices: Exit, loyalty, and voice. You could leave. But many people don’t have the option of quitting.

Another choice is loyalty. You just shut off your brain and put in your time. The danger is that, over time, shutting off your brain kills creativity and you end up going through the motions — kind of retired on the job.

The third way is to voice your opinion and find a way to make leaders see that a different management style will help them get what they want. Whether the goal is financial profits or increased productivity, passionate employees can help them get there. That’s not an easy sell, but when leaders get it, they will be able to attract and retain the best employees.

The ability to see work through your employee’s eyes is not small part of this book’s mission and lesson. Overcoming my own pessimism, I’d hope any employer reading that quote above would recognise that at least two of those options are as dismal and bleak for them as for the employee. The choice presented is, in fact, no choice at all.

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From the outset when we started in 1980 we really wanted to include kids, so part of the aim for WOMAD was to introduce a lot of music. If we can teach them about some of the joys of the world then it’s a wonderful thing. It’s like with food, if you don’t let them eat different things, they won’t like things that are strange and foreign!”

In terms of providing the potential to learn, WOMAD delivers. As well as performers from every continent, this year’s festival providing workshops, films, cookery demonstrations by the performers (sometimes singing and playing as they fed their audience), a participatory roots architecture exhibition and much more – including a large dedicated children’s area – besides. But one person’s diversity is another’s pick’n’mix – which is where the Australian slang came in. The phrase “pelican’s breakfast” was a new one on me: the metaphor is the hasty summary preen of the salient areas rather than a full-on shower (and nutritional input) variety. A tour of the Internet’s slang thesauri threw up a range of similar expressions – although it’s a little on the Anglo-Saxon side, I did like the dingo’s breakfast – but the running themes are constant: something cursory with an undertone of impoverishment.

It’s stuck in my memory as it chimed with another abiding conversational memory from the weekend. My partner – about who Leonard Cohen might have coined the lyric “But you don’t really care for music, do you?” – was perfectly happy to be led from stage to stage and to sample music from Finland, Gambia, Ireland, Senegal, Hungary, Spain, Jamaica, Cuba, Cote D’Ivoire, Congo, Algeria and Leeds. We admitted our own musical ‘prejudices’ – mostly about the difference between micro-tonal musical scales and being out of tune as it relates to sub-Saharan guitar playing – but learnt a little about daily and cultural life in different countries from the performers and opened our ears to aspects of the world that the Today programme doesn’t offer.

But what struck us strongly was the surprising percentage of the audience who plainly just weren’t very interested in the potential feast being laid before them. Some just talked their way – loudly – through sensitive and subtle performance from people who’d flown across continents to offer them. Some seemed to spend the entire weekend continually traipsing – mobile in one hand and can in the other – from one stage to another, trampling on those sitting to listen and more interested in chatting to those they’d come with (presumably traipsing elsewhere on site) than in the experience they’d paid – quite handsomely – to receive.

This was a phenomenon commented about afterwards at WOMAD’s online forums: a festival founded on inclusion, diversity, education and respect had started to attract at least a partial audience who saw it as just another field to get drunk in and send texts from. Culturally, they could have dined on experiences from endless facets of human life. But they chose the dingo’s breakfast – many of them literally. The water was abundant, and the paths to it were informatively signposted, but some of the horses wanted no more than a cursory lap.

A couple of days before I left for the festival, I’d read an article at TrainingZone – Organisational development: Vive la difference? – about the work of Professor Daan van Knippenberg on diversity management: after the festival it chimed with a louder chord. For van Knippenberg diversity is, perhaps appropriately, multi-faceted rather than linear in delivering benefits. To quote the article’s author, Mike Levy:

If the desired outcome is one of measurable benefit to the organisation, then respecting difference and promoting toleration of others is, he says, necessary but not sufficient in achieving that objective. In other words, his research points to a rather weak effect of managing diversity simply by encouraging understanding, tolerance and inclusion.

Those attributes are highly desirable and, indeed, necessary in promoting a cohesive team. But they are not sufficient in producing high quality outputs.

Nor, he believes, should it be the goal of diversity leadership to convince team members that in fact, they have lots in common and should work as an homogeneous group. In other words you can’t be sure that traditional diversity training is associated with positive effects.”

Looking at WOMAD as an on-going event (it holds festival around the world, but has been an annual spectacle in the UK since 1982), it is under-going something of a paradox of diversity itself. Originally held at a small site in Reading, it initially attracted a small(-ish) but knowledgeable audience: it’s marketplace area typically included a high level of one-off,. High quality craftwork. Wind forward 28 years, and it’s moved to a larger site in Wiltshire and accommodates many thousands more, with bigger ‘name’ acts to attract them: its market stalls (essential as an income stream) still have much of real quality and originality, but they also have a much more noticeable level of what my partner called ‘generic hippy tat’. No matter how you might hyphenate that phrase, he has a point. To compete in the now crowded festival marketplace, WOMAD has to accommodate an audience that is more diverse – but not necessarily more attuned to or interested in diversity.

To play music critic for a paragraph, there’s an interesting parallel in the festival content. Many performers bring us imported cultural purity – a group of Emirate oud players or a Cuban band playing traditional 40s son – while others incorporate diversity as much as contributing to it. It’s one of the conundrums of ‘world music’ that it has such a dire label: all human music is from the same world, after all. But while some is from single locations, others represent that dubious word ‘fusion’. Something of a red flag word, this can vary in practice from pioneering combinations (I’m thinking of Australia’s Yothu Yindi, who combine Aboriginal instrumentation and language with modern rock music) to the musical equivalent of chicken tikka pizza.

Apart from being inauthentic, chicken tikka pizza is notably something else: shallow. I suspect its appeal is not to those with sophisticated palettes who ponder the gastronomic potential of cross-fertilising elements of Italian and Indian cuisine, but rather to those who aren’t too fussed about food and just want something they can get delivered and then eat without cutlery. Last weekend I witnessed a number of its musical equivalents: this typically took the form of a pounding western rhythm (usually louder than the other elements) garnished – I chose the word deliberately – with ‘exotica’ such as koras, sarods or Asian variants on the violin. It seemed to appeal to a different sub-section of the audience too – but I suspect one that wanted a beer and a bop and was happy to pass on the cultural enrichment.

(The most notable proponents were also, I noted, one of the biggest crowd draws, and one of the artists with the highest CD sales. Balancing diversity, education and commercial appeal is a plate-spinner’s challenge. Offer some people a rainbow and they’ll ask you if you do it in beige.)

To bring diversity to a wider audience, WOMAD is having to be more inclusive of homogeneity. That’s quite a conundrum: effectively, diversity is being diluted to reach more people – and has to sacrifice some of the flavour that was the original point to do so. It’s a conundrum van Knippenberg’s work and research recognises:

If you wish to promote synergy within the team, you don’t do this by emphasising similarities but differences. It is the different perspectives, diverse takes on things that lead to more creative outcomes or bring about a higher quality of decisions. Leadership should not just point to differences then sit back and relax. Effective leaders should emphasise and encourage toleration of difference and then go on to capitalise on the richer wealth of experience, viewpoint and knowledge that arise from diversity.”

For more detailed discussion of van Knippenberg’s work in application, there is an article from the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation that explains how the relationship between diversity, performance and decision-making is not linear, but curvilinear – too much diversity leads to a lack of cohesion, while too little gives a scarcity of available inputs. While it might be the result we expect, the ‘feast’ is actually on the spectrum between the dog’s dinner and the pelican’s breakfast, not at one end of the scale.

Although it wasn’t written as a parable about diversity, another post at a very different blog – Enlightened Tradition – uses the metaphor of photography to discuss the concept of “Choosing focus”:

I have an interest in photography, where focus is clearly a part of taking good pictures. However, there is more to it than that. Cameras come with a number of settings that affect the image — what is actually in focus. All of these settings require the photographer to make choices, which are similar to the choices we make when we talk about focus in a more general sense.”

It’s a useful metaphor here: a photographer’s choices encompass both breadth of inclusion (from a narrow focus to a wide angle view) and ‘depth of field’ (whether one element is sharply focused while others are hazily blurred) as well as the aperture and shutter speed that determine the amount of light that is accommodated. In terms of organisational development in response to diversity – which encompasses race, gender, age, culture, class, attitudes, experience, culture and background, language and more – the members of the organisation are effectively both the camera and its subject: their perception of each other determines the interplay between diversity and performance. (To give you a real world parallel, theatre director and film-maker Topher Campbell has written in Attitude magazine about the invisibility of his sexuality to the gay community – who initially see a black man – and in The Guardian about the invisibility of his sexuality in the black community: although both groups probably see diversity as important, both see it primarily through their own preferred focus – to the exclusion of other perspectives.)

To lead better in diverse organisations, it seems to me that leaders must think more like photographers, encouraging their organisations to adjust the width of focus and depth of field to see the bigger picture rather than cropping each snapshot to co-exist smoothly with a pre-existing mental template. As van Knippenberg has said:

The problems arise when a leader does not like difference and where he or she wishes to build common ground so that everyone is moulded in their image.”

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A recent survey, Learning to Change, of decision makers at 100 of the UK’s top 500 companies (by turnover) about the state of dedicated L&D functions, professionally undertaken by Coleman Parkes on behalf of Capita has produced results that have certainly given the profession and its practitioner-commentators plenty to commentate about. And a fair bit to put into practice too.

Here are the salient figures:

• 70% see inadequate staff skills as barrier to growth
• 40% see employee skills risk being obsolete
• 55% claim L&D failing to deliver necessary training
• 46% doubt L&D can deliver
• Less than 18% agree that L&D aligned with business.

(You can download the summary report from the Capita website in PDF format.)

One commentator – Andrew Jacobs at Trainingzone.co.uk – drew a line between two of the figures that seemed salient (“If “70% see inadequate staff skills as barrier to growth” yet “46% doubt L&D can deliver” how will the skills be developed?”), although the most obvious comment to my mind seems so far to escaped almost everyone, unless they’re all being too polite. But surely if this is the real state of L&D in so many of our top companies, those decision makers have been making some seriously dreadful decisions – in recruitment, strategy, management and business oversight processes – and letting the effects drag on for too long?

One of the few exceptions I’ve found on the blogosphere is Clive Shepherd. As he points out – actually quite politely –

I’d be inclined to point the finger of blame (not a nice thing to do but hey) at the key decision-makers themselves:

• What on earth are you doing tolerating such poor performance (at least as you perceive it)?
• Would you sit back and do nothing if other departments performed so poorly?
• What direction have you been giving to your l&d team?
• On what basis did you appoint your l&d manager?”

Elsewhere, a less gallant version of the blame game seems to be in play. The only comment his posting has received is from Donald Clark, another blogger to have covered the original survey. A well-known speaker on e-Learning, Donald’s online profiles suggest a penchant for delivering colour and controversy as well as learning. (A penchant for CIPD-bashing also seems to be rather evident, when it’s degree of impact on learners – after all, an important part of the equation – as opposed to L&D functions, trainers and executives must be debatable.)

There seem to be a number of tendencies at play in the online debate. Firstly, to blame L&D for its perceived failings (which does leave Clive Shepherd’s questions begging for a response). If L&D has become so detached from corporate strategy, it’s probably not done so deliberately and it will also be a situation that others have allowed – consciously or otherwise – to take place: at this juncture, someone should ask if accountability shouldn’t cut more than one way?

A second tendency is to promote technology as a vehicle for delivery. It should, in the interests of fairness, be pointed out that many of these making this argument have vested (often vested business) interests in promoting e-learning – although there should be no surprise that the blogosphere, as an uncensored medium, should be used as a PR vehicle. Nick Shackleton-Jones, commenting at Clark’s blog, does however make a valid point here:

My point is this: unless we make real progress in our understanding of learning, then online will fare no better (and often worse) than traditional methods.”

It’s a point that bears repeating: none of the failings that the Coleman Parkes survey suggest are actually directly to do with delivery methods, and – their merit of newness aside – new techniques don’t come with any in-built guarantee of addressing these issues.

A third tendency debates evaluation and measurement, some wanting to do away with Kirkpatrick’s model, sometimes on grounds of irrelevance to decision makers. I started to wonder here quite what Levels 3 and 4 were if not relevant in this context, although the argument that evaluating irrelevant learning outcomes doesn’t teach you anything is valid. But many surveys suggest most companies fail to evaluate at these levels anyway, even though that’s the evaluation they feel is most valuable. Evaluating beyond the ‘happy sheet’ level is difficult, and often time-consuming and expensive – and meaningless if done too soon after an intervention – but I can’t quite see how ‘scrapping Kirkpatrick’ actually solves that conundrum, beyond giving the factions a new topic to argue about.

This is ground that we’ve visited before (by which I’m referring to ASK and Robert Terry’s The Great Leadership & Management Development Conspiracy article, rather than the profession – which seems to revisit it on a daily basis), so it was refreshing to see some commentators making suggestions to build bridges across some of the divides that debate around the topic sometimes seems more interested in widening than closing.

Blaming L&D functions for executive’s perception of their failure does not, in itself, solve anything, but neither does absolving executives from responsibility for the situation. These parties need to work together and to increase their understanding of each other’s outlooks. Executives keen to emphasise effective learning need to be guided as to how adult learning occurs, how it works best, how organisations can support, encourage and enhance it. (As Clive Shepherd also puts it, L&D “needs to start by educating those above to understand the realities of adult learning in the workplace, not the business of processing employees through courses.”)

And L&D practitioners need to understand the types of learning and development that the business really requires so that it can make strides to reshape its activities, processes, methods and curricula to better deliver it. Both sides will also need to learn each other’s language – and also that they are not the only people that need to take action. None of the blog posts – or the comments on them – made a single mention of line managers, possibly the biggest single influence of the outcomes of learning and development and a critical factor in transfer and application, which was also striking by its absence from the debate.

Well-structured, carefully designed learning that aligns clearly with business requirements and objectives and still doesn’t stick isn’t going to be that much of an improvement, is it? There are many voices calling for their preferred solution, which is only to be expected. While some of these solutions would offer some real benefit, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a post at The Technium, which explored what it called “The Shirky Principle”, named after Clay Shirky’s observation that:

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”.

There is a touch of the ‘If all you have is a hammer …’ scenario in some people’s willingness to spot protruding nails. Where freelance carpentry isn’t the main solution offered, other voices typically call for L&D to reinvent itself, grasp nettles, revolutionise – although the calls for change tend to be somewhat light on the direction the revolution should then head off in. One commentator who did get my attention offered a different proposition: rather than restyling itself, L&D should … well, ‘get out more’. For Peter Casebow, writing on his blog, the answer lies not so much in localised transformation as in organizational-wide rethinking and cooperative collaboration. As he puts it:

As ‘Learning to change‘ says ‘a downturn brings change and transformation and to be successful requires people with the requisite skills, abilities and attitudes’. This can only be achieved with the strong input from learning, but the actual outcomes and accountability lie across the organisation.

We need to stop evaluating learning as a stand alone activity and see it as part of a more sophisticated solution. As such we should measure how well the organisation uses learning to get results. The responsibility for this belongs to the whole organisation. It cannot be delegated to the learning department.”

(He has also written interestingly on the working relationship between L&D and HR – in this context, an important and related point.)

But perhaps the most damning statistic in the report is one that has been little mentioning in the blogosphere, although it is picked up by Mark Berthelemy:

• Half (50%) believe that their L&D function is stuck in a ‘business as usual’ mindset.

He’s aware of the Shirky Principle too, to judge by his concluding comment:

You could argue that this data is simply designed to point people towards Capita Learning and Development. That might be partially true. Even so, it’s quite clear that L&D in general really isn’t hitting the spot where businesses are concerned. Perhaps that might be because we still have the mind-set that “learning” is a commodity that we deliver. We provide training to meet perceived training needs. Every performance problem is seen as solved by a training intervention.

Perhaps L&D needs to rebrand – towards performance consulting… Often performance problems are more around culture, systems, processes and communication. Solve those, and you won’t need to provide training in a lot of cases.”

The last sentence is provocative – perhaps deliberately so? – but the preceding one seems closer to the heart of the issue: L&D alone can’t address culture, systems, processes and communication. If learning isn’t driving the improvements in performance that your organisation needs, it may not just be the learning department that needs to make amends: a more holistic approach may provide greater dividends. After all, even if your toe nails are too long, trimming them won’t cure a headache.

Just as learners are dependant on their environment if they are to successfully embed their new skills and behaviours, L&D functions are dependent on their environment if they are to provide the ‘performance consulting’ that is really needed.

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• The Social Media Cigarette Break – Clark Quinn must be telepathic, given our own comments, but his point about social media networking and trust is a strong one. If social media tools are to achieve their potential for collaboration, sharing and informing, attitudes towards access – essentially issues of trust – need to be addressed too. There’s little point moving to flatter organisations and open plan offices if we just rebuild the barriers with firewalls.
• A hashtag for the head: v-c tweets to keep in touch – The Times Higher Education Supplement reports that the new Vice Chancellor of my old alma mater, De Montfort University, is embracing Twitter, commenting “As a new vice-chancellor, it’s a way of quickly giving colleagues a sense of who you are. I recognise that there’s a lot of curiosity about what I’m like, about my ideas on a new vision, how many arms I’ve got – that kind of stuff.” We look forward to a University sharing what it has learnt, as well as taught, in due course.

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We’ve previously published an article here about phatic communication – the small talk that oils the wheels of communication, opens channels and provides low-level social glue – and its relationship to recent developments in social networking. But my impression is that its biggest impact has not been at work – where team working matters more than ever, where there seems to be an increasing importance to ‘need to know’ in order to understand what’s going on around you, and where understanding the current context enables you to make the most effective contribution – but in our personal lives. It’s very possible that you have a better idea about how life is going for your old acquaintance in Los Angeles than about key events and changes in the organisation – probably no less scattered, but with rather more pressing reason to be connected – whose monitor and keyboard you’re sat in front of.

In some organisations, or parts of them – hopefully a declining number, but the determining factor is often the style or preferences of individual line managers – knowledge or information is still thought of in terms of ‘a need to know basis’. In other words, the default is not to tell people anything. In terms of information sharing and knowledge management, this is a ‘command control’ model – what can be isolated can be managed, as if information is some kind of virus that may have terrible consequences if it is not dragooned with military accuracy. Counter-intuitively, it seems the military aren’t part of that declining number, and are drawing on the social networking skills of a younger generation to assist not just with military efforts but with building bonds in the field. Consider the following extract from a recent New York Times article:

As a teenager, Jamie Christopher would tap instant messages to make plans with friends, and later she became a Facebook regular. Now a freckle-faced 25, a first lieutenant and an intelligence officer here, she is using her social networking skills to hunt insurgents and save American lives in Afghanistan.

Hunched over monitors streaming live video from a drone, Lieutenant Christopher and a team of analysts recently popped in and out of several military chatrooms, reaching out more than 7,000 miles to warn Marines about roadside bombs and to track Taliban gunfire.”

For all the modern proselytising about its health-giving benefits, the water cooler isn’t a physical point where we gather at work anymore (in Britain, it was probably always the kettle anyway). But beyond literal hydration, it’s benefits– people keeping each other up to date and up to speed – are no less important than they used to be. (It continues to surprise me, and not in a good way, that smokers are often among the better informed, as they occasionally spend three or four minutes having the opportunity to update each other. So why does the concept of encouraging all the non-smokers to spend a few minutes together in the car park four or five times a day seem so bizarre? There’s a lesson there somewhere for organisational health policy makers.)

The phrases that get used in Knowledge Management circles for this low level on-going mutual updating are ambient awareness (picking up on what’s going on without having to make an extraordinary effort to do so, or without having to make a case for needing to know) and status sharing (letting other people know what you’re up to). Back in 2008, Clive Thompson wrote an article for the New York Times called The Brave New World of Digital Intimacy (you can still read it online), but some of the responses to the piece were – in a work context – more telling than the original article. Fittingly, given the theme of sharing and networking, the waters that flowed told us more than the opening of the floodgate, so to speak.

Consider the responses of Alex Bowyer writing at human2.0:

First let’s remind ourselves why status sharing is useful. The idea has been heavily criticized in the media of late – especially Twitter, which many have dismissed as pointless babble. It’s important to realise that social software is actually a lot more useful for work than it is in our personal lives. I may not care that a schoolfriend has “had a cracking night out”, but it’s very useful at work to know Fred has “just put together presentation for XYZCo”, especially if I know XYZCo will love the new feature I’m working on and Fred hasn’t seen it yet. It’s even more useful to find out that someone is working on something that directly benefits my own work.”

Or of Laura Fitton:

We know it’s important [to] share ideas and to surround yourself with successful, inspiring people. We know that substantial business goes on at receptions, dinners and the golf course. We know that harnessing the power of loose ties leads to better opportunities and problem-solving.

Ironically, the contrived nature of this “ambient intimacy” powerfully mimics the natural human process of acquaintance. Dan Bricklin pointed out close parallels to The Little Prince chapter where the Fox asks to be tamed via non-confrontational, non-transactional presence. Proximity, time and repetition of this presence are what leads to connection, aka taming, aka… love.”

As ever, the human relationship with technology is a subtle and complex thing. In terms of its ability to provide that valuable ambient awareness (a less alarming phrase to some managers than ‘digital intimacy, I suspect: you can almost imagine the panicky phonecall to IT …), it also becomes embroiled in the thing it also has the potential to benefit – the human interface with work.

Like many organisation’s human assets, IT also frequently falls under the arena of ‘a need to know basis’ as the tendency to control, shepherd and restrain kicks in. (It strikes me that these verbs are all, in different ways, synonyms of ‘manage’, which only serves to remind me that managing and leading really aren’t the same thing.) Viewed from this angle, information and knowledge become things to be indexed, catalogued, collected and stored – and to which access must be regimented, sliced to a granular level and tightly controlled.

This is a point that’s been picked up on by JohnTropea writing in the context of the advent of social media but casting a backward glance at our earlier approaches to harnessing technology to the task of keeping everyone better informed:

Whether it’s real-time or not; connection, context and ambient awareness is what the concept of KM was about (or should have been about), but it failed as it took a library science approach; it lacked behavioural characteristics that encourage engagement; it lacked these new social tools back in the day; and it was all managed by a centralised, incentivised and predictable “plan and outcome” management approach…more connection and less collection.”

But we now live in an era of a conscious effort to increase engagement, where the best leadership is recognised as being that which encompasses dialogue with teams to build rapport, identify individual motivations and personal strengths so that we can create opportunities to not just build these strengths but find constructive outlets for them by aligning them with the bigger business picture.

Does your team – and other colleagues – know how best to play their part if you keep your own counsel, or if you engage with them? Silence might or might not be golden, but that’s not the pressing point about it: does it speak volumes, or does it merely spread ignorance and a lack of awareness. And if the elephant in the room isn’t on your radar, how are you planning on avoiding flying into it?

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