In a recent post, we quoted Joe Phelan, evolutionary biologist and University of California at Los Angeles lecturer, who was concerned about what ‘gets lost’ when you use PowerPoint.” The quote came from a longer article, “Is PowerPoint the Devil?” written by Julia Keller and first published in the Chicago Tribune. She initially frames her concern from the viewpoint of a football team coach, in the dressing room at half-time in a match where the team are already a long way behind.

At this point, the coach can:

• Deliver a rousing, emotion-laced speech exhorting the players to press on in the face of tremendous adversity and daunting odds, or
• Cue up a PowerPoint presentation on the six keys to victory, including bulleted items such as “Proper blocking and tackling,” “Exhibiting a winning attitude,” “Turning weaknesses into strengths” and “Don’t focus on the scoreboard,” along with a multimedia photo montage of memorable game-winning plays set to the soundtrack of “Rudy.”

Which approach is more likely to send the team back onto the field poised for a comeback? Your answer instantly drop-kicks you into one of two camps:

• Those who believe in the power of a freewheeling address, full of digressions and personal chemistry, to change hearts and minds most effectively.
• Those who believe in PowerPoint.

And while the cultural scoreboard may be invisible, this much is indisputable: The PowerPoint people are winning.”

Replete with photo montage and stirring music, it seems wrong to see the PowerPoint option as the reductive one, but – having spent more than I would have preferred of my formative years boiling down an argument to fit on one slide at 24pt – there is something more than a little ‘complete the following presentation in 12 words or less’ about the PowerPoint approach.

And whenever I get that feeling, I also feel like I’m entering one of those now old-fashioned competitions to win a lifetime’s supply of a new flavour of cat food or the chance to have lunch with Bobby Moore. At which point, the text is the only thing that’s starting to get a little snappier.

Joe Phelan is not the only educationalist to have voiced concerns about the approach to topics that PowerPoint tends to encourage. Sherry Turkle is professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self. Although she uses PowerPoint herself (and it’s not a habit I’ve kicked either), she has serious worries about its use as a teaching method:

… what’s fine for a business professional might not be so fine for a child just learning how to think, how to connect ideas. These technologies are changing the way we think. […]

We have a technology that is encouraging us to see things in black and white – but is this a time when we need to see things in black and white? Good and bad? This kind of `three bullets up and down’ isn’t helping us come up with the right kinds of arguments.”

As she went on to say, this can easily lead to a situation in which “A strong presentation is designed to close down debate, rather than open it up.” ‘Death by PowerPoint’ is such a cliché that it now has its own entry at Wikipedia – surely a unique accolade for a software package? – but its entry is about the death of interest or attention of the audience, not of the content.

Most of us – or perhaps that should be ‘most of us who have taken on board audience feedback’ – know the do’s and don’ts of using PowerPoint. Unless the entire audience are visually-impaired, don’t just stand there and read the slides (and if they are all visually impaired, don’t bother with the slides anyway); use graphics; don’t clutter the screen and use legibly large fonts. More importantly, rehearse. But even picking one of a million web resources on using PowerPoint at random – Phonewire’s The New 10 Commandments of Powerpoint (which, remarkably, includes the commandment “Thou shall not bullet”) – I still found myself reading this:

[…] think of it like Twitter: If you can’t get your point across briefly, you need to further narrow your point. “

I gulped a little at that one. I’d only minutes earlier been reading Edward Tufte, an international authority on the visual presentation of information, who has also attacked what he called (in a brief pamphlet devoted to the topic) The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, arguing that it constrains the presenter and reduces complex ideas to bullet points, limiting the opportunities for creative interplay that typify the best learning environments. They may be ideal as note taking guides, but they offer little that benefits comprehension or retention.

If you read the pamphlet, you will learn how Tufte links the Columbia space shuttle disaster to the ubiquity of PowerPoint through the use of over-simplification of instructions to (literally) mission-critical maintenance tasks – a point taken seriously by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, whose report acknowledged his specific research:

The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

(If time is short and a 23-page pamphlet is too long, you can read a version of his essay reduced to a (you guessed it) Powerpoint-style version. Let us know how much you learn).

Tufte is as concerned as Phelan and Turkle about the use of slides to convey learning, as he made clear in an article for Wired magazine, PowerPoint is Evil. (If nothing else, read the online version for the annotated photograph. And then delete your browser history and rework your next ‘presentation’.) Although Microsoft’s targeting of the education market is no different to most IT companies, even the Catholic Church might blanch at the kind of criticism Tufte offers in response to the side-effects of their “get ‘em while they’re young” policy. Arguing that we are being taught from very early ages to compile ‘client pitches and infomercials’ rather than construct a rational argument, he comments that:

Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.”

If we want to get an important warning through to both the next generation and the more unthinking of the current one, maybe we should borrow a phrase from a different medium: rap music. I can get it down to five words, which would fit on a slide at 48pt, and provides the opportunity to diversify into t-shirts, mouse-mats, ringtones, lunchboxes and many other lifestyle products with high consumer utility.

• Guns don’t kill ideas.
• Bullet-lists do.

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There are lots of objections to this human tendency, mostly to do with lack of nuance. Those of us that work in English work with one of the most sophisticated and subtle tools humanity has devised, yet business communication usually urges us to strip back as far as possible. (If employers did that with our desktop software – greying out 75% of the options – we’d be upset, no?) Soundbites have their place and purpose, but they do encourage us to give into the temptation to be facile. (Oddly, we’re also implicitly rewarded for something that’s actually easy to do: most of us can quip. Just because the world’s our oyster, there’s no need to overcook it.) But there’s a more subtle argument about the ‘bullet list’ approach, for which we need to turn to a Canadian father and son.

Marshall McLuhan may be a familiar name to some: he popularised the concept of ‘the global village’ and the often misunderstood cliché that proclaims that ‘the medium is the message’.  His son, Eric, has continued his legacy, publishing a book called Electric Language: Understanding the Message that, 12 years on, reminds an intelligent and instructive read for anyone truly interested in communication and presentation. Now that we mostly have email, we write far more than we used to. But, if our novels are anything to go by, our sentences are getting shorter and shorter. The McLuhan’s have noticed something else too.

One-sentence paragraphs are all the rage.

As a consequence, they argue, the traditional one-sentence paragraph has lost its role of transition or dramatic impact. Ideas are no longer developed in paragraphs. And this has impact in more ways that one. In the words of Joe Phelan, an evolutionary biologist who teaches at the University of California at Los Angeles:

 I spend a lot of time identifying what works in lectures. It’s not about a content transfer from the teacher to the other person. The students have the information. It’s something else that gets conveyed in a good lecture. That gets lost when you use PowerPoint.”

Most organisations would, of course, protest strongly that the trend towards simplified lists of options – be they bulleted, numbered, lettered or laid out in matrices – is not intended to be lethal, even in the most metaphorical manner. And no doubt they have a point. But I’m thinking of two apparently irrelevant things. The first is the Wall Street Journal’s review of Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right”, and specifically a section about the astonishing safe-landing of a commercial airliner on the Hudson River:

Dr. Gawande closes “The Checklist Manifesto” with the story of the crash landing on the Hudson River, in January 2009, of a US Airways plane that had lost its power in both engines. It was undoubtedly a good thing that every member of the crew had been drilled in various procedures. But the “miracle on the Hudson” happened because Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger focused on flying the plane, not a checklist on how to fly the plane. As William Langewiesche put it in his account of the incident, “Fly by Wire”: “There was no time for the ditching checklist. . . . Across a lifetime of flying, Sullenberger had developed an intimacy with these machines that is difficult to convey. He did not sit in airplanes so much as put them on. He flew them in a profoundly integrated way, as an expression of himself.”

The second is the drinks machine in Douglas Adam’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Engineered to within an inch of its metaphorical life (and not much further away when it came to the tastebuds of its user), no matter how carefully the user prescribed what they wanted it remorselessly served up something not just unsatisfactory, but vile. But we still have a faith in picking a winner from a list of options that has more place in the betting shop than the office.

A colleague recently commented that most organisations approaches to succession planning and talent management boil down (pun intended this time) to three options:

• Nurture anyone worth retaining
• Define and ring fence a talent pool
• Identify a few ‘stars’ and nurture/develop/pamper them.

Obviously, developing staff is a cost. (But then, according to most organisations, so are staff anyway.) But each of these approaches has drawbacks as well as strengths. The first option is expensive and may dilute effort too widely to have an impact if costs are to be contained. The second implicitly assumes that previous performance determines future potential, and that by point ‘x’, anyone with potential has shown in; late developers or those whose talents have had no chance to surface are left a view of the exit door. And the third assumes even greater foresight in the ability to identify future winners, and offers no greater assurance that the stars won’t find a better heaven to shine in.

Like Adam’s Arthur Dent stood in front of the Sirius Cybernetics Nutrimat, the organisation more or less knows what it wants – to develop the next generation of leaders and managers who will ensure at least its survival, and hopefully ever-greater success. And like Arthur Dent, what winds up in the cup when it presses Button A, B or C could well be almost but not quite entirely unlike that. And they will, no doubt, blame – or even kick – the machine.

But for a fuller flavour, they might contemplate a blend of these options rather than a single brew. Talent is a not free-standing: it happens – and is demonstrated and developed – in context. High performers translated in the context of a new employer may deliver all it was assumed that might promise, but they might not: where they don’t, their new employer is unlikely, sadly, to consider the impact of the new environment on that ‘failure’.

Talent is rather a process: we develop through practice, through exposure to new ideas, to rises to challenges – especially so where we are supported by others while we do so. It’s not the learning in itself that delivers the difference, it’s the transfer and application. The rewards and recognition belong to those that deliver, not to those that are undeniably ‘talented’ but achieving little with it. But the responsibility doesn’t just rest with them: as the key factor in delivering performance, the line manager’s role is critical. Without both support and opportunities, talent cannot develop or be fully implemented. This requires the pressing of more than one button: if we are to have a real and meaningful ‘culture of talent’, it requires a real and meaningful talent for culture – and rather more besides.

And that’s a more complex, subtle – and satisfying – brew.

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I’d be fascinated to see more recent results, but the last major survey on how we feel about job titles – conducted by Office Angels in 2000 – revealed that 70% of us might forego a slightly large pay cheque if we could have a more impressive job title to promote ourselves with. And, as The Guardian reported at the time, promoting ourselves was very much what was on our minds:

The spur is that 70% of employees believe people they meet after work judge them instantly by their titles. The consultants said this had been accelerated by a spread of self-important US-style job titles and by wordier job descriptions in e-commerce posts.

Around 70% of those questioned said that they might give up a bigger pay cheque for a more “motivational or professional” job title to make their role seem more dynamic and inspirational. “

In current times, this might be very interesting reading for an HR Department facing the probability of low level pay rises for the foreseeable future – or facing the prospect of pay freezes in the case of the public sector. (We await the detailed survey comparing the cost of updating the intranet and reprinting the business cards with the cost of a pay increase.) It certainly holds out the possibility that there may be a low-cost reward and recognition strategy out there, just waiting for someone to spend a few hours on an online Job Title Generator and make us all happy again.

Before anyone does, we’d suggest they read the CIPD’s online resource on job evaluation, which counsels that:

Job evaluation can be defined as ‘a method of determining on a systematic basis the relative importance of a number of different jobs’.

It’s a useful process because job titles can often be misleading – either unclear or unspecific – and in large organisations it’s impossible for those in HR to know each job in detail.”

There are certainly plenty of wonderfully daft job titles out there. Here are a few of my favourites from articles on the subject at the Daily Mail, the Plain English Campaign, and the Daily Telegraph:

These are job titles that cry out for outbursts of righteous disrepect for the poor souls attached to them – even if they may not have been the ones to choose them. Maybe it’s an English trait, but we do as a nation appear have a healthy scepticism for pretention: when I worked as a Project Control Assistant for a major University, one academic took great care always to refer to me as an Assistant Control Projectionist (thus illustrating an ability to quickly discern my true role on the organisation’s behalf).

There are good reasons for changing job titles, not least clarity to those outside an organisation. Take the example of Sandra, a Senior Administration Assistant for a large local authority, who was mentioned in the ivillage.co.uk coverage of the Office Angels survey and feels her job title is a handicap:

It doesn’t reflect the level of responsibility I have or the variety of work I do. I manage six clerical staff, deal with enquiries from the public and am responsible for a sizeable budget. I particularly hate the word senior, it makes me sound old rather than able!’ She always describes herself as the office manager when telling people what she does, ‘It’s a more accurate reflection of the responsibilities I have.” 

But there’s a more serious point beyond tittering at other people’s self-importance. While transparency of description is a laudable aim, a pompous job title might reveal more than it intends. Proudly being an Executive Operations Controller might look good on your LinkedIn profile, but if your interactions with others – or your performance at a job interview or assessment centre that your self-promotion has secured – reveal that there’s a more mundane reality underneath … that gap between rhetoric and reality, and between claimed skills and demonstrated ability, might become more of an asset than a liability. Awkward, especially when you see the sentence that concluded the quote from Sandra:

I think having the word manager in my job title would give an application for a higher level post more credibility.”

It’s certainly set to remain a thorny subject. In the most recent article on the topic at the BBC website, Steven Overell, associate director of the Work Foundation, was happy to point a finger at his prime offender:

Human resources are the worst miscreants. They’re often responsible for escalating the jargon on their own jobs. I remember one HR manager whose title was ‘talent and transformation country manager’ and another ‘vice president HR (employment relations, outsourcing and change)’.”

Despite the CIPD’s remarks on the problems posed for job evaluation earlier in this post, their Angela Baron commented differently:

People can get very emotional about their job titles if it doesn’t reflect their level of seniority or responsibility. All sorts of menial jobs have quite sophisticated titles to make them feel their jobs are important. So on the Newcastle Metro, ticket inspectors are now called revenue protection officers. It has made their jobs sound more important – and why not?”

We understand the motivation point, and – within reason – the psychological reasoning. But, with our downbeaten commuters’ head on, we might point out that calling them ‘revenue protection officers’ also communicates to us that our money matters more than we do. But I’m sure that wasn’t the intention …

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Thinking about the generations to come, rather than the future per se (an altogether more nebulous concept), is not something I’m the only one contemplating, of course. David Willetts, Conservative MP and Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills has recently published a book called The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give it Back – with the implication that it may pay those who will follow us to be a little less meek, as they’re going to inherit the Earth anyway.

Apply this approach to the world of work, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the strongest legacy is the largest possible organisation with the healthiest possible bank balance. Which is, of course, to base your expectations of the future on the circumstances of the past. If your thinking would benefit from a jolt here, here’s a recent quote from Brian Eno on what has happened to the record industry:

I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Record music equals whale blubber. Eventually something else will replace it.”

There’s a missing point here, however. The recorded music industry has changed beyond recognition in a very short space of time. Record shops are closing even faster than manufactured pop groups rise and fall. Musicians, whose ‘product’ (ie recordings) has been driven down in price by e-commerce and high street competition, are returning to live performance and associated merchandising to make their living. (Madonna, who’s arguably always made better business decisions than records, is ‘signed’ to a concert promotion agency rather than a record label.) Small niche record labels survive, but by playing to small niche markets. The big winners have been supermarkets, Amazon and – perhaps the most unexpected – Apple, an IT company.

But … music itself endures. (As Philip Ball explores in another recent book, The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do without it, we have yet to determine quite why we respond to it as universally as we do, or what evolutionary purpose it serves, but all societies have it as an important cultural entity.) Those who work in music and its related industries, however, have had to be exceptionally Darwinian in recent years. The most abundant legacy catalogue may not ensure the survival of a company wedded to pressing and distributing little silver discs if that stops being how we purchase it (unless they secure a deal with a digital retailer who makes it all available for download.)

There was another, almost delightfully ironic example of the need to adapt on the Today programme this morning, and picked up by the BBC News website. Rory Cellan-Jones BBC News blog carries an item – A digital time capsule at the library – that looks at the British Library’s fears that some websites may be lost forever. Many decades ago, I worked in its R&D Division, monitoring research into digital retrieval systems, electronic Chinese typewriters and many more examples of the ways in which we store, archive, disseminate and record human knowledge in its broadest sense. As an organisation that funds research across such a wide range of disciplines, the BL is far-sighted enough to recognise that books aren’t the end of a Library’s remit. Given that book publishing may yet undergo upheavals that go far beyond those of the record industry, this is an important recognition.) It is therefore fighting for a ‘right to archive’ (as the BBC reports in a separate news item).

The double-edged sword of ensuring legacies is illuminated precisely by their spokesperson’s comment:

We can’t make a judgement about what people in the future will find useful”

What music, the British Library and other examples of enduring aspects of our lives share is an important kind of tradition – a tradition of change. They have the ability to adapt to circumstance and to changes in their environment that enable them to stay relevant to the current and future generations. (And we could say similar things about Apple, which still makes computers but actually makes far more of its income – and its impact as a brand – by selling music and phones.)

If we think back to the start of this piece, the majority of our consultants chose to talk about their children when asked about their hoped-for legacy. Society has moved on from the days when we bore and raised children so that someone would be strong enough to hunt mammoths and gather berries for us in our dotage (although demographic trends and the state of the pensions industry may yet provoke a return to old behaviours), but a relationship between raising the next generation and succession planning remains.

We may not be consciously aware of it, but Darwin and the dinosaurs have – at some level – taught us that adaptability and responsiveness to external change are key factors in sustainability and survival. While we hope to instil values and morals in our offspring (and by that we usually mean our morals), good parenting involves an acceptance that our children may not turn out to be carbon copies of ourselves.

Indeed, the ‘rebellion’ of adolescence is a process by which we learn how to arrive at independent thinking, evolve opinions and shape and choose our own values. Overly strict parenting and micro-managing have similar outcomes, at least in as much as they ill prepare us to develop and to manage our own affairs. As Stephen Covey once said:

There are only two lasting bequests we can give our children… one is roots, the other wings.” 

Succession planning is not so different: while they may not be kith and kin, those who follow you in the workplace will inherit whatever you leave behind – including the lessons you pass on to them. If your legacy is to be more than short-lived, the skills and values you pass on must include the ability and awareness of the need to adapt – and the ability to help and inspire others to do so. And succession planning should not attract the emotional attachment of family respect: the future may be yours to influence, but it will not be yours to either live or deliver.

Yesterday’s death of Michael Foot is perhaps instructive. He may have lead a major political party to a historic defeat, but tributes paid to him paid recognition for ensuring that – despite this – the party would continue. In the words of Lord Kinnock:

The fact that the party survived as a recognisable political entity at all is attributable to the commitment, conviction, sheer guts and self-sacrifice of Michael Foot.”  

Your legacy is fundamentally about those you leave it to, rather than about you (which is why the media were less than supportive of Tony Blair’s pubic concern about his): focus not on being a giant, but on having shoulders that will bear the weight of those that follow. (As David Berlinski, American mathematician – and, in the context of this piece, ironically a leading critic of both evolution and Darwin – has commented, “every monument accumulates graffiti”.) As the oldest author I could find of a relevant quotation (and quotations are a legacy in themselves), I’ll leave the last words to Pericles:

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”

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Creativity is a competitive advantage:  Janet Clary asks the simple question “Are innovation and creativity taking a back seat to survival in this fragile economy?” and, by implication, if we are acting in our longer-term best interests. So, are winning the battle but losing the war?

The evolution of training: Verity Gough explores the development of training in response to social and organisational change, and provides rich food for thought. How evolved is your organisation and its relationship to learning?

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The crux of the matter was summed up in an editorial in the Irish Independent on 2 March 2010:

Education, more than any other sphere of activity, has long been a focus of Irish self-congratulation. In the 1960s, admirers of politicians (some existed then) spoke of free secondary schooling as if we had invented it. A generation on, and we boasted of the high proportion of our young people who attended third-level institutions. In reality, by international standards we are only average at maths and a little above average at science.

It has taken straight-talking by some of the very people who work by international standards to prick the myth.”

Even in a pre-globalised world, education is vital to national competitiveness. The talent pool of tomorrow – and the leaders and innovators of a couple of decades further on – can come from only one place: the classrooms of today. As human capital has become both more valuable to most organisations and more recognised for its value, it’s importance as being as much a vital raw material of ‘production’ as physical materials has grown.

In a world where global and multi-national companies carefully evaluate different territories as potential operational bases, its value is also judged on more than just price. While cost of labour is a critical equation at many levels of the workforce, quality – the abilities of the workforce, on induction and through subsequent development – is also a critical success factor. And at the higher organisational levels, quality (ie ability) almost certainly trumps price as a deciding factor: it was, after all, called ‘The War On Talent’. (Perhaps ‘The War On Labour Costs’ was just something we all took for granted …)

Concern – and dissenting voices – about exam grad inflation has been rising in Ireland for several years. There is, for example, a Stop Grade Inflation website, containing a wealth of links and research. Given that previous studies show the percentage of first class honours degrees awarded in universities has trebled since the mid-1990s, while the number of students securing the perfect Leaving Certificate results has increased five-fold, this is hardly surprising.

But the latest round of press coverage and public debate has been triggered not by concerned academics, but by the ‘end consumers’ of Ireland’s education system: employers – many of them from major global companies.

Concern has already reached the point that the Minister for Education, Batt O’Keeffe, has launched two parallel reviews. The significance of retaining faith in the education system – in an eerie parallel of the more recent desperation to retain faith in the international banking system – has drawn comment from industry. A number of voices have been heard, including John Herlihy, Google Ireland general manager and vice president, global ad operations:

Ireland’s education system has been a critical attraction for US investment in Ireland and the key to delivering the smart economy. We found the Minister very open to hearing the comments of industry. We want people who can understand their core subjects and solve problems. The key thing is that it will confirm the integrity of the underlying system. Google and all the other multinationals are here for the calibre of the education system and it is essential that there be total integrity in relation to that.”

Harder hitting was Craig Barrett, the former CEO of Intel speaking in the Round Room of the Mansion House in Dublin:

On the vital subject of education, Barrett warned that Ireland needs to be more than just average in terms of STEM subjects like maths and science.

He said that while two of Ireland’s universities are among the Top 100 in the world, neither are functioning as wealth creators in the same tradition as Stanford or Berkley in California or indeed universities in Israel. “The economics of Stanford, Berkley, MIT and Israel, this is what your future has to entail.”

This need to – as Mr Bennett put it – ‘redraw the Irish blueprint’ was echoed by Dr John Robinson, Chief Executive of the Kepler Institute, who recently spoke out in favour of raising the standard required for entry to third-level engineering degrees:

Writing in the ‘Engineers Journal’, he warns the implication is that our best and brightest students do not have courses to pursue that will take them to the limit of their ability.

“This is not only an injustice to them, but is a loss to the country. That untapped potential, a key resource of Ireland, the very resource required to create an environment for innovation, is lost to us”.

Concern about Ireland’s competitiveness and ability to attract inward investment is borne out by international indices: the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index for 2009-2010 shows that the country has dropped from 22nd to 25th place, having been overtaken by New Zealand, Luxembourg, Qatar, United Arab Emirates (Iceland, unsurprisingly, fell further than Ireland, but this may not be much of a comfort.)

If the importance of credible, high-performing education needed underlining, Batt O’Keefe himself commented to today’s Irish Times that:

 “There are allegations that the system has been dumbed down and we need clarification on this because our future is heavily dependent on the level of attainment in our schools and colleges. If we are an export-led country we have to be informed by industry as well as to their experience of graduates and the quality they are finding. It is important to listen to what industry is saying.”

Lessons, it seems, don’t end when the bell rings at the end of class (although that is something that some of the L&D industry could perhaps have ‘taught’ the education system). And neither does evaluation end with self-assessment. It’s not just ‘what’ you’re fit for that matters: in today’s world, it’s also a matter of ‘who’.

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Picking up on the changing immigration patterns of the last couple of years (as our recent in-flux of plumbers, painters and heating engineers fled in search of the comparatively god-paved streets of Gdansk and Vilnius), the company gave some of the unemployed of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, an opportunity to compare their performance with those of the immigrant workers who they have been ready to label as ‘stealing their jobs’. We’re not about to get into the tangled murk that is the issue of immigration (we suggest you watch the programme, which – as might be expected from Davis – was well crafted and intelligent, and mostly chose appropriate tools with which to crack any nuts it identified): even our comparatively lengthy blog posts simply don’t allow the space. What the programme did provide was a fascinating example of the problems of workplace feedback.

Given the opportunity to demonstrate the prowess of the Great British Chippy (as opposed to the Great British Chippie), we were introduced to Dean. Pausing to gloss over his assumption that Lithuania – his supervisor’s home country – was in the third world rather than the EU, Dean seemed to have a few problems with receiving constructive guidance. The comment that he should use screws rather than a nail gun to improve the durability of his plasterboard work was timely (tick), constructively (tick) and delivered unthreateningly (tick). Dean’s “interaction with his feedback provider” was certainly instantaneous (half a tick) …

The eye-opener was his opinion that feedback was a process that should consist of talking about him behind his back when he’d left, and that giving comments face-to-face was in some way rude. Programme editing, especially an hour-long single programme covering several people and a viper’s nest of topics, can simplify or omit with even the best of intentions, of course: by the end of the experiment, Dean had generated sufficient regard for his work that he was kept on for two week’s additional work to complete the job in hand. (And the BBC Website has a very favourable comment on his handiwork in response to one of the articles about the programme: we should be clear that we are not in any way intended to single him out: even if we were, feedback should, of course, rise above the purely personal and should always strive to avoid being hurtful.)

Dean’s not the only ‘service provider’ most of us – and I’m no exception – will have come across who took umbrage at having his performance questioned or his approach brought under scrutiny. (I’ve recently experienced the joys of a taxi driver who had a better idea of where I lived than I did, a window cleaner who seemed to think leaving the corners dirty was ‘a la mode’ this season, and a delivery company I’ve already ranted about, to list – if not actually ‘name and shame’ – but three.)

What I struggled with was how a valuable lesson – ie if you tried this approach and took these comments on board, we’d give you more work and you’d better off and helping your self-esteem – was interpreted as somehow offensive. I appreciate that unemployment does precious little for anyone’s self-regard, and those whose pride has taken a hammering (no pun intended) might feel defensive in the face of comment, but an approach to constructive feedback that seemed to suggest that the ‘stick my fingers in my ears and sing loudly’ approach was the best way was beyond me. Even if you’re half a mile away, engaged in something constructive (brushing up on European geography, perhaps), you can’t learn from a conversation that you’re not taking part in.

For any of us, no matter how elevated or humble, feedback is a chance to learn and to discover – to engage in dialogue that helps us find a better way forward for ourselves, to make sure we understand a situation that we may have wrongly or incompletely grasped, and to improve a working relationship (both with our supervisors and with the tools of our chosen trade). While ‘screw this’ was simultaneously the right and the wrong answer in this particular instance, the lesson for those of us on the receiving end in the feedback process is to maximise the potential opportunities of the situation. As Oscar Wilde once quipped, there is only one thing worse than being talked about …

For those on the giving end, there is perhaps a slightly different lesson. Some people will take feedback badly (an issue we touched on in a previous article, discussing the characteristics of the highly creative), and – as our earlier post pointed out – feedback is a loop process. Adjust the tone and message to the situation and it has a better chance of getting through: feedback is about listening as well as talking.

But perhaps there’s a higher level of message here, and one that most companies should make sure they hear: employees should know that feedback is a continuous, on-going element of performance management and improvement. Its purpose is not to demonstrate the status of the line manager, their superior ‘power’ or knowledge: even when dealing with carpenters, a hammer isn’t the only tool. (Any line manager with this approach to feedback frankly deserves to receive some of their own.) Feedback that is not constructive and sensitive isn’t doing its job – which is to lead to a better situation and a better performance. The better an organisation can communicate the intentions of its feedback process and its place in its performance management culture, the better the chance that the process will deliver its intended result. Handled poorly, feedback can put up firmer, more durable walls that even the world’s finest carpenter …

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• Fond of asking dumb questions, despite their intelligence
• Arrogant when they know they know something, humble when they know they don’t
• Highly self-critical
• Often markedly introverted, but sometimes quite the opposite
• Very honest about their own shortcomings or knowledge/skills gaps
• Tend to see situations and issues in more complex terms than their colleagues.

You might be blunter, and throw in some other phrases: “hard work”, “difficult to handle”, “no business sense”. Or just plain “trouble”. Yet these traits are some of the characteristics of the highly creative, as identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Davidson Professor of Management at the Claremont Graduate University, California.

Mr. Csikszentmihalyi is probably best known for the concept of ‘flow’ as a description of human creativity, which he has described as:

… being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

This is territory that we’ve touched on before at Don’t Compromise, of course (as a jazz musician, it was probably unavoidable!). Peter Cook’s book ‘Sex, Leadership and Rock’n’Roll’ (see our Q&A session with Peter) uses an analogy with different forms of music to look at innovation in a business context, using the following correspondences:

As Peter goes on to write:

Too much creativity without structure and nothing ever gets finished!

Here we have the basic reasons for so many first-wave dotcom failures, i.e. a business full of creatives but no structured people able to channel that creativity towards a market need. {…} Unfettered creativity accounts for a lot of product failures in this era.”

Which is true up to a point, but if we want to seriously address the role of creativity (and therefore how to mange creative talent), a couple of further points need to be considered. Having worked in internet development consultancies at the time of the first dot.com ‘wave’, it’s fair to say that creativity wasn’t the only reason for the high attrition rate. Indeed, I doubt it was the most significant factor. Looking around me at the time, I saw a number of over-ambitious business managers blinded by the promise of a large pot of gold at the end of a very short rainbow, and an investment market that was acting to encourage their myopia. Most of the actual web design wasn’t that bad, but the business planning and market research was woeful.

The second point is that ‘creativity’ is an essential component of success: structure alone just leads to rigidity. No matter how successful an organisation, the world isn’t (touching wood) about to stop turning, and your products, services, branding, market, competitive environment and more will change over time. To sustain your position – or improve it – you must change into something new and … be a little creative. Even to stand still, you must be on the move, no matter how counter-intuitive that seems.

This isn’t necessarily a matter of perpetually bringing into being something startling different and new. Twitter has carried a lot of tweet over the last few days about ‘innovation’ vs ‘quality’, many probably triggered by a Scott Berkun article at Businessweek, ‘Good’ Beats ‘Innovative’ Nearly Every Time. It’s a thought-provoking read, although it was what it made me think that I want to focus on:

• ‘innovative’ is just a label, and a word that is hugely abused by businesses (in the same way as ‘dynamic’, ‘pioneering’, ‘unique’)
• A ‘good’ innovation is an innovation, but a bad one is a ‘gimmick’
• Everyone has an angle to sell, including public speakers and authors of books on innovation and creativity (like, with all due respect, Scott Berkun).

Here’s an extract from his article that particularly left me wanting to be the troublesome boy at the back of the class wanting to ask a ‘dumb question’:

Innovation, in the simplest definition, means new or novel, to take an approach others have not seen before. But by this definition, the iPod and Firefox barely qualify. Even the iPad is late in the game of tablet computers, as Microsoft’s Tablet PC and Amazon’s Kindle have been aiming at this market for years. In all cases, these are entrants into fields of established players. Their creators borrowed parts and ideas from other products and even from other companies. Their success or failure is driven less by revolutionary ideas or radical disruptive breakthrough thinking and more by a focus on making solid, reliable, simple, good products that solve real needs people have.”

While all these examples are ‘tech products’, I don’t have a problem with that per se – technology roughly equates with innovation for a lot of people nowadays. (Although you might want to see our review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget if you have any misgivings about that state of affairs.) The point I think Scott Berkun is in danger of losing – albeit that he is encouraging business managers to focus on quality (of service as well as product) – is that designing and developing a good product requires as much, if nor more, creativity than a mediocre one. Jonathan Ive, designer of the iPod, is no less a creative genius than the designers of previous MP3 players (indeed, back in 1994, the BBC reported him being named as “the most influential person on British culture”).

The trick, I suspect, lies in how well companies manage and deploy the creative talents of their staff, and how much ‘creativity’ – which can but does not have to mean ‘problem solving’ – is valued in a company’s culture. Jean V. Dickson’s article, Creativity and the HR Department, highlights just some of the negative attitudes that abound in some organisation’s approach to the apparent eccentricities that Csikszentmihalyi has identified as powerful indicators of exceptional creativity. Depressingly, these seem to boil down to either not hiring them in the first place, or in trying suppress creative instincts in those creatives that do manage to ‘sneak under the radar’.

From my own experience as a creative (having worked as a writer, musician and visual artist), there is also another important element here, and those managers who perform least well at managing the processes (and personalities) of creative staff might benefit from reflecting on it. Csikszentmihalyi has shown us that ‘creatives’ tend to view ‘problems’ in a more complex way, exploring their subtleties and nuances. But if, in serving the success and sustainability of their organisations, creatives are to evolve not just ‘innovative’ but high quality solutions, the managers charged with their supervision should perhaps ponder an old truism – the time-cost-quality triangle. I’ve looked at it from several angles, but I can’t unearth further layers of complexity: the equation is really fairly straightforward – give the creatives less time to reduce the ‘cost’, and what falls? Answer: the quality. (And if we’re wanting not just new ideas, but high quality ones, then – like anyone in any area of a business – the creative team need time to evaluate the quality and appropriateness of ideas.)

There’s an irony here, of course. The commercial urge for speed contrasts with the creative need for analysis, thought, review and contemplation in the same way as the tortoise and the hare. But despite the common myths of the creative genius, they are not necessarily the ones being ‘hare-brained’.

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To access a complete list of all our download articles in PDF format, simply go to our Elsewhere  page on our blog: articles are also available to download from the Press section of our website.

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The first difficulty the programme identified – and seemed to wish not to unearth again too often – was how to define ‘genius’. At different times in reviewing our quest to identify how it arises and if we can ‘manufacture’ it (in what must be a knowing Spinal Tap reference, he frequently used the phrase ‘turning my brain up to 11’), alternative phrases were used: ‘supernormals’ (which hinted at a different film – The Incredibles), or ‘extreme talent’. There have been many attempts throughout recent centuries to identify what ‘creates’ heightened intelligence, although from an economist’s viewpoint this could be seen as a demand-led activity: the ability to create ‘super people’ would be a very valuable patent to hold, after all. But there was more than a hint of the story of alchemy about the programme: science seems to contain a long list of people and theories that have failed valiantly in the attempt to either sift for or turn ‘base metals’ into gold.

Brain power, for example, isn’t purely physical: size – or rather weight – isn’t everything: Charles Babbage, computing and mathematical pioneering, was lighter between the ears than Napoleon. One physical difference does seem to make a difference: the number, size and length of connections in the brain. By dissecting the brains of ‘supernormals’, we’ve discovered that they have more, smaller ‘mini-columns’ in the cortex area, but more noticeably an overabundance of short local connections. The implication in terms of functioning is an ability to focus very intensely on single tasks – which fits quite well with our stereotype of absent-minded professors who can find new planets or paradigms, but not their car keys. Unfortunately, it strikes me this doesn’t help those looking to identify capacity of immense talent in terms of workplace application outside rarefied fields – there can’t be many industries where a management team entirely composed of people with these kinds of ‘extreme talent’ would be an asset.

IQ appears to have a similarly chequered end-of-term report: in an on-going trial that followed the life paths of those identified young as having high IQs, one of those rejected from the ‘followed’ cohort was later awarded a Nobel Prize for inventing the resistor. (Without which I wouldn’t be word-processing this, and you wouldn’t be reading it – hopefully, we both consider this a loss at some very small level.)

Our genes possibly hold more promise: we share with mice a gene that scientists have been able to ‘turn off’ with the effect that ‘learning’ – at least in the Pavlovian sense of conditioned response – ceases. Having identified the seemingly responsible gene, there’s possible scope here for ‘turning our brains up to 11’ – although how we might feel about genetically modifying ourselves in this way wasn’t a question the programme chose to explore.

I was left with a similar worry by experiments that showed that injecting a weak saline solution into the brains of volunteers and then running mild electric currents through their heads not only increases short-term learning performance but – if applied for 24 hours or more – has permanent effects. As these permanent effects include brain structure, this left me with similar concerns about consent, ethics, and unforeseen side-effects – again, topics that were left unexplored. The implicit advice that those who find their ability to learn isn’t what it might be (and who determines acceptable progress towards genius is another interesting question left hanging in the ether) should electrocute themselves – albeit in the nicest possible way – felt rather uncomfortable.

When the role of ‘nurture-side’ influences was considered, we seemed at times to be on familiar ground from other disciplines or areas of research. As babies, our brains are very flexible. We saw that a six-month old girl exposed to large numbers of monkeys’ faces learns to distinguish each individual face as clearly as we do our fellow human beings – the monkeys no longer ‘all look the same’.  The connections in the brain that support this ability develop in response to her environment, much as a blind and autistic man was shown to have developed an extraordinary ability as a pianist: in both cases, the message seemed to be that extreme talent has arisen from an extreme environment.

The balance between scope and focus also re-emerges here: the pianist’s musical ability was vast, but his autism posed him other challenges that his musical ‘genius’ neither cured nor compensated for. While the image of the ‘savant’ has a certain cache, we should be careful not to equate autism with genius. (As an aside, Daniel Tammet  - diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (you can read an overview on Wikipedia or read his blog) gives a truly compelling account of growing up and living as a ‘savant’ in his autobiographical Born on Blue Day, which is utterly fascinating but clear that the condition should not be considered as a ‘blessing’.) There was an unspoken implication that we have an overall finite capacity and that extreme talent in one area uses capacity from other areas – an implication that wasn’t pursued or explained, but seemed to me to be an important question. If we could create genius, but it would come ‘at a price’, would we still pursue it so eagerly and what would be the wider social implications?)

The strongest evidence on the development of greater ability in adult life to date, it seems, is actually the rate of development. Our cortex thickens during childhood before thinning in adolescence. But it seems that those with thinner initial cortices where thickening happens more rapidly and at a later age (although later here means 11-12) will evolve into those with the highest IQ. (I’m quoting from du Sautoy’s Times article supporting the programme here, and wondering how the use of IQ as the yardstick supports or undermines the ‘evidence’ here.) This may retrospectively support arguments for streaming education (the timing of the 11 plus seems fortuitous with hindsight), although it equally undermine arguments for the ‘streaming’ that is applied in selecting ‘top talent’ in organisations: our future intelligence would seem to be substantially pre-determined by the time we reach the workplace is this evidence is to carry weight.)

The programme ended with two trains of thought – no pun intended – that seemed more promising in terms of both implication and application. The first highlighted the ability of the brain to ‘re-wire’ itself, re-activating dormant connections. I was already familiar from work in this area with stroke patients: abilities lost in the aftermath of a stroke can be regained with practice, even though the brain has suffered physical damage. (Any jazz fans among readers might be familiar with US guitarist Pat Martino, who regained his extraordinary technical grasp of the instrument after a brain aneurysm meant learning the play the instrument again from scratch – as he recalls in his online biography and in a fascinating interview about the recover process and his ‘re-learning’) The programme highlighted the example of a woman who had overcome blindness by learning to ‘see’ again using software that converts pictures – including live video feed – into sound. While she has had to ‘re-think’ concepts such as perspective, her learning has taken place at a faster pace than can be accounted for by the development of new connections in her (non-infant) brain. I was left wanting to know more about how we can tap this latent human potential – and how those of us not threatened by what we might call ‘the onset of mental disability’ might locate or harness the motivation to tap it.

A final sequence looked at another ‘patient’, a man whose brain haemorrhage had left him with an overwhelming urge to paint. This returned us to the problem of defining ‘genius’ – or whichever other word or phrase we wish to use – and its composition. Implicit reference was made to a quote from Einstein (who also once said ‘my mind is my laboratory’), which I looked up this morning:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Here we returned to the opening sequence of the programme, which wondered aloud if genius is a mere ‘skill’ or something that can be defined mechanistically, or if genius must include creativity – the ability to make imaginative mental leaps. As the neuroscientist working with the man explained, we all have varying degrees of ‘latent inhibition’ – the ability to filter out our surroundings and ignore what is currently or temporarily irrelevant. The weaker our ability to do this is, the more creative we tend to be – explained in terms of ‘bringing down the walls’. And here we arrive at a paradox: the creative genius must balance and juggle a minimising of latent inhibition with a maximising of focus. (Again, implications spun of this for me – not least that the inspiration for imagination, and therefore creativity and ‘genius’, must be partly external. To see the world in new ways, we must see the world per se.)

The problem with conclusions in a debate this abstract is that they are impossible to draw, but the ‘nature vs nurture’ debate was far from concluded – both clearly have roles to play. (We should also acknowledge that those arguing either case also either occupy entrenched positions or have vested interests. The nature vs. nurture debate has been with us a long time, and is not likely to depart in a hurry.) Some of us may have a head start (in an almost literal sense) in some fields – certainly, it seems, some of us really don’t’ ‘get maths’ – but imagination, creativity, adaptability and practice all have vital roles to play in developing our talents.

For example, the autistic pianist’s thousands of hours of musical practice took us right back to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers – the opportunities we receive, both in terms of exposure to sources of inspiration and opportunities to practice, are clearly an important factor: this should already be clearly known to those working in learning and development or in HR capacities.

But I was also left thinking about a comment made by Jonathan Wilson in response to an earlier post here – talent isn’t just a ‘gift’ that we have or don’t have. To quote one section of his comment:

Not everyone can be the world champion, because all world class performers do practice constantly, but nearly everyone can improve their performance many times over through learning and assiduous practice, but that takes time and hard work. It is easier and less demanding to wish you possessed the “gift” and thus exonerate yourself from the effort of developing real talent.”

Moreover, in considering ‘exceptional ability’ (or any other neo-synonym for genius) in an organisational context, there are many other factors to consider – attitudes and behaviours, sociability, interpersonal skills, organisational context. Simply identifying the ‘best contenders’ is not the end of the story, if it is even the beginning: even if nature can supply half the answer, we must work to enhance the nurture and support the adaptability and application that completes the equation.

We also need to recognise the roles of others in our own development and in achieving our potential. The total sum of human knowledge long since passed our individual ability to embrace it all: as a former colleague in the British Library’s R&D Division pointed out at a conference in the early 1980s, we had passed the point where the required skill was to know as much as possible. The new skill was the ability to know where to find the answer (although it should be pointed out that ‘librarian’ is increasing a profession that looks like we have scheduled it for archiving: foresight is no guarantee of shelf-life.)

Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) – the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help – is also highly relevant. Whether we call them parents, teachers, coaches, trainers or mentors, they have a role to play, as Vygotsky’s definition of ZPD explains:

the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers^“

To conclude, three more quotes from Einstein. The only creativity I can claim in citing him is to arrange the quotes in a sequence that provides a positive note – but it’s a start …

If God has created the world, his primary worry was certainly not to make its understanding easy for us”

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.”

There’s a Genius in all of us.”

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