I spent yesterday afternoon clearing out an old man's garden shed. It was the normal treasure trove of heritage tools and artifacts, well worn and much loved. Sturdy wooden handled spades, forks, axes and rakes - built to last, blurred with time. Old jam jars and biscuit tins full of 'round-to-its' and 'may-come-in-handys'. Everything covered in a gentle patina of dust and soil, rust and toil.
Amongst the time coddled treasures was a muddled, muddied bundle garden twine. Slowly I began to untangle it. It reminded me of one of my grandmother's exercises designed to calm me down and teach me the virtues of purposeful patience. 'Here, help me untie this,' she would say and hand me a huge knotted ball of string.
An hour or so later I would hand her a neatly wound ball. 'There we are,' she'd say, 'that wasn't so bad was it?'
A couple of years ago I used a version of this exercise with a management team I was meant to be coaching. I spent part of an evening tangling mountain climbing rope into the most almighty Gordian Knot I could fit into my corporate workshop. We kicked off the next morning's session with the simple instruction, 'Sort it out as a team.'
The predictable scrum followed. Seven voices; six different process suggestions; five diagrams; four bystanders; three working groups; two minutes to go; one guy left holding the last knots - result!
Some problems are best tackled by one person at a time in a quiet old shed. Alternatively give them to my grandmother to sort out.
Tuesday, 30 January 2018
Monday, 1 December 2014
Answering Ireland's call
I flew into Dublin last week. The Ryanair flight was a few minutes early for its landing slot and chose to circle in a leisurely fashion over the gentle, mottled countryside below. It gave me a moment to pause and reflect on a country to which I feel inextricably linked.
My grandfather left Galway City in the 1890's as a nine year old boy who had just lost his father and eldest brother. His mother, a brave and enterprising soul, had gathered together her remaining brood and embarked on a journey of renewal to Cape Town - inevitably via Dublin itself and Liverpool. On the strength of that ancestral connection, I carry an Irish passport - proudly and conveniently.
The very first time I was able to use this invaluable travel document, I was nineteen and determined to visit the land of my forefather. On a bitterly cold, foggy morning disembarking from the ferry at Dun Laoghaire, I was part of a crowd of some two hundred day trippers who were confronted by a lone Irish immigration official sheltered alongside a brazier in a wooden quayside hut warming his hands on a mug. He poked a scarf-embalmed head out of his nest and peered at the advancing horde. It was definitely not a day for stepping outside and checking travel documents one by one. He waved one mittened hand.
'All you's with an Irish passport can carry on straight.'
The surge of freezing bodies hesitated but momentarily and then swept past him towards the promise of on-shore warmth. I was left holding my brand new, green, harp-adorned passport, uninspected and with a sense of betrayal - my moment of triumphal homecoming snatched from me by one man's pragmatic defiance of the elements.
I trod on Irish soil for the first time, unchallenged but also somehow unbaptised.
As I gazed down from my bargain seat on the ordered fields and hedgerows of the Pale, I remembered that first visit some forty years previously and my youthful awe at the power of lore and legend in Ireland. Apart from conferring on me the infinite gift of travel, my Irish passport had, over the years, given me a sense of identity, of connection with a tradition of literary giants - a largely unexplored causeway to world of Celtic faith and fealty.
The airline announcements crackled across my romantic, fanciful reflections. Within moments I was being processed through a modern airport portal, subject to a perfunctory passport check and bundled out into the milky light of a mild Dublin morning. Welcome home.
My grandfather left Galway City in the 1890's as a nine year old boy who had just lost his father and eldest brother. His mother, a brave and enterprising soul, had gathered together her remaining brood and embarked on a journey of renewal to Cape Town - inevitably via Dublin itself and Liverpool. On the strength of that ancestral connection, I carry an Irish passport - proudly and conveniently.
The very first time I was able to use this invaluable travel document, I was nineteen and determined to visit the land of my forefather. On a bitterly cold, foggy morning disembarking from the ferry at Dun Laoghaire, I was part of a crowd of some two hundred day trippers who were confronted by a lone Irish immigration official sheltered alongside a brazier in a wooden quayside hut warming his hands on a mug. He poked a scarf-embalmed head out of his nest and peered at the advancing horde. It was definitely not a day for stepping outside and checking travel documents one by one. He waved one mittened hand.
'All you's with an Irish passport can carry on straight.'
The surge of freezing bodies hesitated but momentarily and then swept past him towards the promise of on-shore warmth. I was left holding my brand new, green, harp-adorned passport, uninspected and with a sense of betrayal - my moment of triumphal homecoming snatched from me by one man's pragmatic defiance of the elements.
I trod on Irish soil for the first time, unchallenged but also somehow unbaptised.
As I gazed down from my bargain seat on the ordered fields and hedgerows of the Pale, I remembered that first visit some forty years previously and my youthful awe at the power of lore and legend in Ireland. Apart from conferring on me the infinite gift of travel, my Irish passport had, over the years, given me a sense of identity, of connection with a tradition of literary giants - a largely unexplored causeway to world of Celtic faith and fealty.
The airline announcements crackled across my romantic, fanciful reflections. Within moments I was being processed through a modern airport portal, subject to a perfunctory passport check and bundled out into the milky light of a mild Dublin morning. Welcome home.
Friday, 11 July 2014
The world is round
I was on a flight from Manchester, UK to Atlanta on the day
that the USA were playing Portugal in the 2014 FIFA World Cup. On the tiny
screen jiggling around irritatingly on the seatback in front of me, I was
following the game. USA scored and went ahead and all around me the whole plane
erupted with cheers. Suddenly I realised that I was surrounded by American
‘soccer’ fans following the game as passionately as any in Manchester itself.
I began to compare notes with my neighbour who turned out to
be an ex-US Army colonel who had then embarked on second career with a major
oil and gas company. He was clearly a sports nut – it hardly takes one to
recognise another.
‘C’mon,’ the colonel muttered to his players from 30 000
feet, ‘stay on offense.’
‘Attack,’ I correctly him mildly, ‘in football we say
‘attack’.’
‘Same difference, buddy, our wide receiver is playing for
too deep.’ I peered at my bouncing screen. He had a point. Maybe he didn’t need
my help understanding the beautiful game.
By the time Portugal had levelled the game 2-2 and we had
both ripped off our headsets in disappointment, we could agree that the game provided
us, if not with an exactly common language, then certainly a very useful set of
shared metaphors. We quickly got into how the role of a sports coach differs
subtly from code to code around the world and yet how fluidly the lessons of
any successful coaching seem to apply in running a business.
I told him of a colleague of mine who had once opened a corporate
training workshop in Saudi Arabia by asking who supported Manchester United.
Half the room cheered wildly and the other half booed equally spontaneously.
From there on a potentially tricky workshop simply hummed along. Football had
provided us with a sure kick-off in the unlikeliest of arenas.
He told me all about his final football game for the Army
and a never to be forgotten touchdown. I got it in a heartbeat. Sport can so easily
be the container for our most precious memories.
Throughout the current World Cup I have heard American
sports fans using the rich and expressive language of their own embedded sports
vocabulary to help analyse their ‘roundball’ team’s strengths and weaknesses.
They should be playing ‘man-to-man defense’ not ‘zone’. Their ‘playmaker’ is
killing us ‘box-to-box’. Look at that great ‘pick-and-roll’ get right round the
‘perimeter D’. And so on right down to the agonising wire of those last minutes
against Belgium – a state about the size of Maryland for crying in a bucket. In
all sports there is the exquisite agony of heroic failure.
In the next two weeks this visceral pain will be felt in
seven different countries from all around the globe. One winning population
will bask gloriously in the fleeting euphoria of victory and then wake to a
world that has rapidly moved on. However, what every sports glued to the World
Cup will share is a renewed sense that great emotional well spring of
globalisation, ‘we are all connected, we are all in this together.’
Friday, 4 July 2014
The Prince
I met a prince yesterday. Not a royal one as it happens - more self-made. Geoff Prince is his name although it is his will to work rather than his surname that marks him out. 'Will to Work' is the charitable trust that Geoff has built which offers anybody in his town the opportunity to do an afternoon of carpentry, painting, sewing, fiddling with electrics or even just pottering about making tea in his community workshop - on one condition - you need to be 'feeling a bit poorly' as Geoff puts it.
His business model (not a term that Geoff bothers with much) is based on the fact that every day somebody clears out an old draw, cupboard or garage full of useful tools and materials that somebody else no longer needs. Will to Work accepts these items as donations and puts them back to work in Geoff's workshop housed in an old school building right alongside the town's health centre - with its handy rows of disabled parking spaces. Sensible doctors have begun to prescribe an afternoon's occupational therapy for many of their patients with a range of conditions which might be making them 'feel a bit poorly'. And from there good-hearted volunteers, donations, referrals, grants, goodwill and word of mouth does the rest. Oh, and endless shifts of time and love and tea put in by Geoff, his wife and their small core team.
Now I have designed and led and run hundreds of workshops myself. Most of them end up looking like an explosion in a Post-It factory with scribbled flip charts scattered everywhere and a tired facilitator gathering up evaluation forms - or 'happy sheets' as they are known in my trade. The Will to Work workshop doesn't do happy sheets - it just does happiness instead. And proves that every man can be a prince.
His business model (not a term that Geoff bothers with much) is based on the fact that every day somebody clears out an old draw, cupboard or garage full of useful tools and materials that somebody else no longer needs. Will to Work accepts these items as donations and puts them back to work in Geoff's workshop housed in an old school building right alongside the town's health centre - with its handy rows of disabled parking spaces. Sensible doctors have begun to prescribe an afternoon's occupational therapy for many of their patients with a range of conditions which might be making them 'feel a bit poorly'. And from there good-hearted volunteers, donations, referrals, grants, goodwill and word of mouth does the rest. Oh, and endless shifts of time and love and tea put in by Geoff, his wife and their small core team.
Now I have designed and led and run hundreds of workshops myself. Most of them end up looking like an explosion in a Post-It factory with scribbled flip charts scattered everywhere and a tired facilitator gathering up evaluation forms - or 'happy sheets' as they are known in my trade. The Will to Work workshop doesn't do happy sheets - it just does happiness instead. And proves that every man can be a prince.
Tuesday, 14 May 2013
Dilbert
Dilbert announces to his boss that he has looked at every available book on leadership.
'What´s the secret?`
`Apparently leadership is the product of extreme sociopathy plus luck - all the other personality traits are inactive ingredients.` His boss looks both thoughtful and wary.
`Did you actually read all those books?` asks a colleague later.
`No,`says Dilbert, `I just needed to check that they were all different...`
Something in this exchange resonates. Have a good day.
'What´s the secret?`
`Apparently leadership is the product of extreme sociopathy plus luck - all the other personality traits are inactive ingredients.` His boss looks both thoughtful and wary.
`Did you actually read all those books?` asks a colleague later.
`No,`says Dilbert, `I just needed to check that they were all different...`
Something in this exchange resonates. Have a good day.
Wednesday, 26 December 2012
The tough questions...?
I had a call from a client the other day - a senior executive in a global business. She wanted help in preparing a series of year end feedback interviews that she had scheduled with the team of six people reporting in to her. After some discussion about the purpose of the team and its work, we came up with this list:
- What's the one thing I do that adds real value for you?
- What's the one thing I do that really annoys you?
- Does anything I do waste your time?
- What else could I do differently to help you become more effective?
- What's the toughest question I could ask you?
Saturday, 1 December 2012
Taking a bath
If there was one thing I had to do while in Turkey, it was to take a bath. I was raised under a 'cleanliness is next to godliness' regime and in the ablutionary world there is no higher state of absolution than the full Turkish experience.
Just alongside an entrance to the Grand Bazaar on my way towards the Blue Mosque, I spied a sign engraved in marble, 'Enter Istanbul's Oldest Hamam, 1584'. It sounded like an imperial proclamation that was impossible to ignore, let alone refuse.
The receptionist was dressed in a tightly fitting, shiny olive coloured suit complete with waistcoat and fob chain. His front of house manner was such that he could just as easily have been running a pre-war provincial cinema or a betting shop close to a major racecourse. He explained the tariff structure to me in careful, practised English. I opted for the DIY wash out of a slight cautiousness. With a snap of his fingers he summoned one of his underlings to escort me to a first floor locker room up a twisted flight of wooden steps. 'Undress,' was the curt, unambiguous command from the disappearing minion.
I looked around guardedly. On the bench in my private, caged locker room was small gingham tea towel presumably designed to afford me some modesty in my journey towards the steam, heat and thudding sounds that emanated from the floor above me. I stripped off, slipped on a pair of blue plastic bath thongs and tried with limited success to use the tea towel for its fit and proper purpose.
I stepped out of my locker cage and turned to head upstairs. A large hand clamped itself on my shoulder and propelled me slightly faster in the direction I was already going. My borrowed thongs slid unsteadily across the uneven dark grey marble slabs underfoot. I was ushered into the magnificent central arched vault of the hamam still driven firmly from behind by my attendant. 'DIY,' he spat out the term like a curse. Then all of a sudden I was alone in an echoing chamber of smoke.
Looking up I could see the sunlight streaming in through half the tiny windows circling the inner rim of the dome. The central section of the dome itself had been punctured like a pepper pot with more vents creating brilliant shafts angling through the steam. Rising a foot above the floor of the bath vault was the huge circular 'belly stone' platform in a lighter shade of grey marble. I went to sit on its nearest edge and immediately leapt up scalded. From one of the private alcove wash stations set around the outer circumference of the room, I heard a throaty chuckle. As I became accustomed to the steamy haze, I realised that I was in fact not alone at all and that several fellow bathers were attending to their rituals sluicing themselves down using the fawcets set above marble basins in each of the surrounding alcoves.
One of these fellows emerged carrying a shallow metal tin plate full of water and splashed it hissing over the belly stone before flipping his tin over and settling it as a pillow under his head as he stretched out on the gleaming slab like a cat rolling on its back in the sun. I made my way to an alcove to begin some private and tentative ablutionary experiments of my own. My small roughly chopped cake of soap smelt of freshly cut lemons.
Step by step I began to get the hang of the DIY version of the splash, soap, lather and scrub routine that I saw being carried out by attendants on the more adventurous or accustomed bathers. My tea towel soon became a sodden scrap but still useful for insulating my buttocks from the sharp marble sting of the furniture. Slowly everything softened, relaxed, sweated and plumped up like a prune in hot water. It was easy to imagine the grittiness and stress of days of travelling washing away down the elaborate system of drains and gunnels criss-crossing the floor.
Super-saturated I dragged myself away from the quiet hiss and splash of the bath house and back in the direction from which I remembered entering. Not so fast. I was immediately apprehended by an attendant who looked as if he might well have done much of his earliest and best work in a high security penal establishment. Certainly his service philosophy seemed more shaped by Midnight Express than the Orient Express. This heavily moustachioed officer unceremoniously re-directed me towards the shower area, slapped open a tap and shoved me under the cold jet that emerged directly from a gouge in the tiles at head height. Gasping and clutching for my towel, I spluttered my thanks and stumbled towards the stair well.
As I approached the sanctuary of my locker, an unseen hand thrust a fresh white towel in front of me. It was soft, sweetly scented with lavender and with a deep, thickly luxurious pile that scoured my back and shoulders with the gentlest of rough caresses. I got dressed in a dream and headed out, cleansed, to face the purity of the Blue Mosque.
Just alongside an entrance to the Grand Bazaar on my way towards the Blue Mosque, I spied a sign engraved in marble, 'Enter Istanbul's Oldest Hamam, 1584'. It sounded like an imperial proclamation that was impossible to ignore, let alone refuse.
The receptionist was dressed in a tightly fitting, shiny olive coloured suit complete with waistcoat and fob chain. His front of house manner was such that he could just as easily have been running a pre-war provincial cinema or a betting shop close to a major racecourse. He explained the tariff structure to me in careful, practised English. I opted for the DIY wash out of a slight cautiousness. With a snap of his fingers he summoned one of his underlings to escort me to a first floor locker room up a twisted flight of wooden steps. 'Undress,' was the curt, unambiguous command from the disappearing minion.
I looked around guardedly. On the bench in my private, caged locker room was small gingham tea towel presumably designed to afford me some modesty in my journey towards the steam, heat and thudding sounds that emanated from the floor above me. I stripped off, slipped on a pair of blue plastic bath thongs and tried with limited success to use the tea towel for its fit and proper purpose.
I stepped out of my locker cage and turned to head upstairs. A large hand clamped itself on my shoulder and propelled me slightly faster in the direction I was already going. My borrowed thongs slid unsteadily across the uneven dark grey marble slabs underfoot. I was ushered into the magnificent central arched vault of the hamam still driven firmly from behind by my attendant. 'DIY,' he spat out the term like a curse. Then all of a sudden I was alone in an echoing chamber of smoke.
Looking up I could see the sunlight streaming in through half the tiny windows circling the inner rim of the dome. The central section of the dome itself had been punctured like a pepper pot with more vents creating brilliant shafts angling through the steam. Rising a foot above the floor of the bath vault was the huge circular 'belly stone' platform in a lighter shade of grey marble. I went to sit on its nearest edge and immediately leapt up scalded. From one of the private alcove wash stations set around the outer circumference of the room, I heard a throaty chuckle. As I became accustomed to the steamy haze, I realised that I was in fact not alone at all and that several fellow bathers were attending to their rituals sluicing themselves down using the fawcets set above marble basins in each of the surrounding alcoves.
One of these fellows emerged carrying a shallow metal tin plate full of water and splashed it hissing over the belly stone before flipping his tin over and settling it as a pillow under his head as he stretched out on the gleaming slab like a cat rolling on its back in the sun. I made my way to an alcove to begin some private and tentative ablutionary experiments of my own. My small roughly chopped cake of soap smelt of freshly cut lemons.
Step by step I began to get the hang of the DIY version of the splash, soap, lather and scrub routine that I saw being carried out by attendants on the more adventurous or accustomed bathers. My tea towel soon became a sodden scrap but still useful for insulating my buttocks from the sharp marble sting of the furniture. Slowly everything softened, relaxed, sweated and plumped up like a prune in hot water. It was easy to imagine the grittiness and stress of days of travelling washing away down the elaborate system of drains and gunnels criss-crossing the floor.
Super-saturated I dragged myself away from the quiet hiss and splash of the bath house and back in the direction from which I remembered entering. Not so fast. I was immediately apprehended by an attendant who looked as if he might well have done much of his earliest and best work in a high security penal establishment. Certainly his service philosophy seemed more shaped by Midnight Express than the Orient Express. This heavily moustachioed officer unceremoniously re-directed me towards the shower area, slapped open a tap and shoved me under the cold jet that emerged directly from a gouge in the tiles at head height. Gasping and clutching for my towel, I spluttered my thanks and stumbled towards the stair well.
As I approached the sanctuary of my locker, an unseen hand thrust a fresh white towel in front of me. It was soft, sweetly scented with lavender and with a deep, thickly luxurious pile that scoured my back and shoulders with the gentlest of rough caresses. I got dressed in a dream and headed out, cleansed, to face the purity of the Blue Mosque.
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