I was driving through Delamere Forest this morning listening to one of Kenneth Clarke's profiles of great jazz musicians on BBC Radio 4. He was reviewing the career of Milt "Bags" Jackson, peerless exponent of the vibraphone. Clarke's own tones are well suited to radio and his choice of easy, fluid tracks made for a sublime moment bowling along the ancient hunting tracks of the forest. For a politician presumably busy grappling with the most intractable economic conundrums of our times, our radio DJ seemed supremely relaxed and completely immersed in a medium he so obviously adores. It was strangely reassuring to hear an ex-Chancellor thus.
There is something to be had in metaphorical comparisons between the global economic crash of 2008/9/10 and the world of the jazz musician. Nobody has the faintest idea what the score is and where the next big gig will be; payment is arbitrary and never guaranteed; all we can do is keep playing a few familiar, jaunty riffs and hope that somebody somewhere picks them up. And yet maybe, just maybe there are a few underlying certainties and reassuring patterns beneath the surface cachophony. As Ken's studio guest said, 'you just have to keep your ears wide open'.
Keep whistling. Somebody may hear you.
Tuesday 31 March 2009
Saturday 28 March 2009
The healing power of nails
This afternoon a small volunteer working party tackled the task of carrying out essential maintenance work on our village cricket pavilion. It's a long, low wooden slatted structure that once saw service as barracks on a World War Two military base in Shropshire. Forty years after the war had ended, and the base was finally being dismantled, a previous cricket club working party rescued the old hut, transported it to our village ground and re-erected it on the spot where it has stood as changing rooms, scorebox, pub, community dance hall and winter cricket kit storeroom for twenty-five seasons. It is a building of little architectural note yet boundless symbolism and timeless charm.
Today's issue was the rotting timber joists where rain had got in through cracks in the creosoted slats. As we began to tear open the work of our predecessors of twenty-five years ago, it became apparent that the whole structure was held together through the liberal and imaginative use of every type of nail imaginable. I counted fifteen in one three foot piece of 2x4.
Nails. Twisted and rusted, bent and arthritic, straight as a sweet cover drive, crooked as a dropped catch. Tiny rows of thumb tacks and great, stonking pile drivers; headless slim ones fissured into a beam or fat flat headers ribbed and rasping against the grain. Between them they formed and held the very fabric of the building. You could hear the thumb bashing curses of cricketers past echoing off the rafters. I imagined the sigh of intense satisfaction as a final, clean hammer blow drove home that last match-winning shot.
Painfully we clawed at each metal splinter and eased them out one by one, tossed them aside in a tinkling heap and swept them up in a pile of pre-season debris. Except for one - which I have kept on my desk with my odd collection of rescued detritus. Six inches of smooth, cool, gently browned nail, perfectly balanced in my palm and secure in its twenty-five years of impeccable service upholding a village treasure.
A sacred relic; a carpenter's tool; a reminder of the healing power of nails.
Today's issue was the rotting timber joists where rain had got in through cracks in the creosoted slats. As we began to tear open the work of our predecessors of twenty-five years ago, it became apparent that the whole structure was held together through the liberal and imaginative use of every type of nail imaginable. I counted fifteen in one three foot piece of 2x4.
Nails. Twisted and rusted, bent and arthritic, straight as a sweet cover drive, crooked as a dropped catch. Tiny rows of thumb tacks and great, stonking pile drivers; headless slim ones fissured into a beam or fat flat headers ribbed and rasping against the grain. Between them they formed and held the very fabric of the building. You could hear the thumb bashing curses of cricketers past echoing off the rafters. I imagined the sigh of intense satisfaction as a final, clean hammer blow drove home that last match-winning shot.
Painfully we clawed at each metal splinter and eased them out one by one, tossed them aside in a tinkling heap and swept them up in a pile of pre-season debris. Except for one - which I have kept on my desk with my odd collection of rescued detritus. Six inches of smooth, cool, gently browned nail, perfectly balanced in my palm and secure in its twenty-five years of impeccable service upholding a village treasure.
A sacred relic; a carpenter's tool; a reminder of the healing power of nails.
Thursday 26 March 2009
Ships? What do you mean, ships?
The story is told of Captain Cook's seventeenth century voyages of exploration to the South Pacific islands. On some he was greeted with spontaneous hospitality, on others with quite natural hostility and on a few with completely blank incredulity. It's easy enough to understand and explain the extremes of human warmth and warrior aggression that his arrival in tall ships, with funny hats and firesticks provoked but it's perhaps more instructive to think for a moment about the blank stares of total incomprehension.
Those Polynesian eyes were not seeing anything at all because there was no response from the brain when it was required to provide a stored reference point. We can't see things at first that are outside our experience. We do however manage to see things that aren't there because want them to be there or because they were there last time we looked. We look with our imagination and in our past.
Derivatives? What do you mean derivatives?
Those Polynesian eyes were not seeing anything at all because there was no response from the brain when it was required to provide a stored reference point. We can't see things at first that are outside our experience. We do however manage to see things that aren't there because want them to be there or because they were there last time we looked. We look with our imagination and in our past.
Derivatives? What do you mean derivatives?
Unlearning
I heard about an interesting experiment the other day.
Two groups of subjects in a memory trial were gathered together and set the same task. One group were all chess grandmasters; competitive, rational, highly disciplined thinkers, specially enrolled for an important experiment. The other group were a random selection of teenage students rounded up from a local school, earning a bit of pocket money as lab. monkeys.
Both groups were briefed together and set an identical set of tasks. They were shown flash images of chess boards with the pieces arranged in classic game formation, as if an actual game had been interrupted mid-match, and asked to memorise the placings. On average it took the grandmasters 2-3 rapid 10 second flashes in order for them all to reproduce the exact game placings on their individual blank grids. The teenage students struggled for much longer and it took anything up to 20 flashed repetitions before some of them produced a perfect replica pattern.
Then the rules of the game changed. The chess pieces were replaced by an unfamiliar collection of shapes and the placing of these new look 'chess' pieces became random rather than classically patterned. The grandmasters continued to work individually on trying to remember which piece was placed where on their grids. The students were told they could work together.
The results in Round Two of this experiment? Almost an exact reversal of Round One with the grandmasters floundering to fit unfamiliar shapes into uncomfortable, meaningless patterns on a grid they thought they knew so well. Meanwhile the students quickly devised a rough and ready system of watching out for different areas of the grid and shouting out pieces and positions to one harried recorder who was then able to present her accurate answers within 2-3 flashes.
I thought there was a lot in this story that speaks to the need for rapid and fluid 'unlearning' in a context of constantly shifting certainties and the rapid melting of traditional boundaries to knowledge boxes and collaboration fields.
I wish I knew who had carried out this little experiment...?
Two groups of subjects in a memory trial were gathered together and set the same task. One group were all chess grandmasters; competitive, rational, highly disciplined thinkers, specially enrolled for an important experiment. The other group were a random selection of teenage students rounded up from a local school, earning a bit of pocket money as lab. monkeys.
Both groups were briefed together and set an identical set of tasks. They were shown flash images of chess boards with the pieces arranged in classic game formation, as if an actual game had been interrupted mid-match, and asked to memorise the placings. On average it took the grandmasters 2-3 rapid 10 second flashes in order for them all to reproduce the exact game placings on their individual blank grids. The teenage students struggled for much longer and it took anything up to 20 flashed repetitions before some of them produced a perfect replica pattern.
Then the rules of the game changed. The chess pieces were replaced by an unfamiliar collection of shapes and the placing of these new look 'chess' pieces became random rather than classically patterned. The grandmasters continued to work individually on trying to remember which piece was placed where on their grids. The students were told they could work together.
The results in Round Two of this experiment? Almost an exact reversal of Round One with the grandmasters floundering to fit unfamiliar shapes into uncomfortable, meaningless patterns on a grid they thought they knew so well. Meanwhile the students quickly devised a rough and ready system of watching out for different areas of the grid and shouting out pieces and positions to one harried recorder who was then able to present her accurate answers within 2-3 flashes.
I thought there was a lot in this story that speaks to the need for rapid and fluid 'unlearning' in a context of constantly shifting certainties and the rapid melting of traditional boundaries to knowledge boxes and collaboration fields.
I wish I knew who had carried out this little experiment...?
Wednesday 25 March 2009
Dealing with interruptions
A participant in a recent workshop interrupted me while I was in full flow on the subject of 'challenging conversations' to ask me for any tips I had on dealing with interruptions. As a piece of faintly surreal improvisation by both parties, it appealed to my sense of the absurd. I think I responded something along these lines:
On the whole I find that interruptions when I'm speaking can be characterised as either helpful or unhelpful. There's the short, helpful variety that buys you time to think, allows you to re-focus, gives you confirmation that you are getting your point across or a vital clue that you are not. Then there's the longer, rather less helpful kind that demonstrates that your conversation is a long way from closure, there are whole mounds of unshared assumptions between you and that there's still much hard work to be done in building any form of consensus. And of course we have all experienced and launched the frankly subversive interruption which is an ill-disguised takeover bid - a not so subtle conversational coup d'etat.
Interruptions are frequently culturally conditioned and significant. In many situations youth will not interrupt age; subordinates will not challenge power by speaking up before they are invited to do so and women will defer to men in sustained, pained silence. To interrupt is to disrupt the social order and disturb much more than a train of thought.
So when it comes to 'dealing with interruptions' as a team leader, technical expert, subject presenter or workshop facilitator, it's useful to have a small tool-kit to hand which can mean that a far greater percentage of the inevitable quota of interruptions that you will experience can become useful ones and not roadblocks, threats or mere irritants. Here are a couple of the tools I use:
When the interruption comes, resist the urge to fight it by simply raising your voice, your speed, your tone and probably your blood pressure. Roll with the interruption early, like a martial artist embracing its momentum. Use the pause in your own broadcast to ask yourself the question, "what's the purpose of my presentation or conversation - what does a successful conclusion really look like, sound like, feel like?" This of course works best with the short, helpful, clarifying or generally supportive interruption.
If the interruption persists or sounds as if it is never going to stop, you may have to get back into the conversation using the "blinking word" technique. This is a simple process of waiting long enough to hear a particular word on which the speaker is laying great emphasis by repeating it or using it in a exaggerated manner, at which point you are at liberty to counter-interrupt with "what exactly do you mean by...(and quote the "blinker")?" This helps to re-balance the conversation and may even take it down a surprisingly useful path.
If neither of these tools is sharp enough to do the job, you may have to use a more emotionally charged and thus dangerous tool. First ask yourself, 'what am I feeling about this interruption right now and why?" If the answer is one of the negative, destructive emotions, you need to move rapidly to the moral high ground of tolerance, good humour, genuine curiousity or gracious humility. After this brief internal examination, you should be ready to deploy one of the big guns in dealing with interruptions. "wait a minute, this isn't working" or "ok, we'll have to agree to disagree here' or something similarly hard-edged and definite.
Ands then of course you're right in the middle of yet another 'challenging conversation'... and so, back to my subject. Thank you.
On the whole I find that interruptions when I'm speaking can be characterised as either helpful or unhelpful. There's the short, helpful variety that buys you time to think, allows you to re-focus, gives you confirmation that you are getting your point across or a vital clue that you are not. Then there's the longer, rather less helpful kind that demonstrates that your conversation is a long way from closure, there are whole mounds of unshared assumptions between you and that there's still much hard work to be done in building any form of consensus. And of course we have all experienced and launched the frankly subversive interruption which is an ill-disguised takeover bid - a not so subtle conversational coup d'etat.
Interruptions are frequently culturally conditioned and significant. In many situations youth will not interrupt age; subordinates will not challenge power by speaking up before they are invited to do so and women will defer to men in sustained, pained silence. To interrupt is to disrupt the social order and disturb much more than a train of thought.
So when it comes to 'dealing with interruptions' as a team leader, technical expert, subject presenter or workshop facilitator, it's useful to have a small tool-kit to hand which can mean that a far greater percentage of the inevitable quota of interruptions that you will experience can become useful ones and not roadblocks, threats or mere irritants. Here are a couple of the tools I use:
When the interruption comes, resist the urge to fight it by simply raising your voice, your speed, your tone and probably your blood pressure. Roll with the interruption early, like a martial artist embracing its momentum. Use the pause in your own broadcast to ask yourself the question, "what's the purpose of my presentation or conversation - what does a successful conclusion really look like, sound like, feel like?" This of course works best with the short, helpful, clarifying or generally supportive interruption.
If the interruption persists or sounds as if it is never going to stop, you may have to get back into the conversation using the "blinking word" technique. This is a simple process of waiting long enough to hear a particular word on which the speaker is laying great emphasis by repeating it or using it in a exaggerated manner, at which point you are at liberty to counter-interrupt with "what exactly do you mean by...(and quote the "blinker")?" This helps to re-balance the conversation and may even take it down a surprisingly useful path.
If neither of these tools is sharp enough to do the job, you may have to use a more emotionally charged and thus dangerous tool. First ask yourself, 'what am I feeling about this interruption right now and why?" If the answer is one of the negative, destructive emotions, you need to move rapidly to the moral high ground of tolerance, good humour, genuine curiousity or gracious humility. After this brief internal examination, you should be ready to deploy one of the big guns in dealing with interruptions. "wait a minute, this isn't working" or "ok, we'll have to agree to disagree here' or something similarly hard-edged and definite.
Ands then of course you're right in the middle of yet another 'challenging conversation'... and so, back to my subject. Thank you.
Tuesday 3 March 2009
Everything's an Offer
This little review appeared on Amazon recently after I'd bought a book written by a friend and colleague, Robert Poynton.
Poynton reveals himself as a master of fresh air and fun - however he is never lightweight nor frivolous and displays real humilty in the face of the systems complexity and organisational noise he uncovers. As he determinedly follows his educated nose in search of the fine truffles of improvised learning, the overall aroma of his writing is warm, earthy and pungent. Highly recommended.
Poynton reveals himself as a master of fresh air and fun - however he is never lightweight nor frivolous and displays real humilty in the face of the systems complexity and organisational noise he uncovers. As he determinedly follows his educated nose in search of the fine truffles of improvised learning, the overall aroma of his writing is warm, earthy and pungent. Highly recommended.
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