How do we change the world?

We are talking about what to do when you care about a political issue and see things happening that you think are wrong.

Felipe’s example is the tragic death of Natalie Morton. He is enraged by some of the reporting, by right-wing newspapers who continue to claim that her death was linked to her cervical cancer vaccination, in order to further a political agenda. (Disclaimer: I love, trust and respect Felipe but I have not seen this coverage first-hand. I am taking his word for it.) He makes the point that this is deeply irresponsible and also socially damaging; that people will die because of it. And it is not okay for us, knowing that this is happening, to sit and watch it and to do nothing. There is an obligation on us to take action, and we are currently not living up to this obligation. The party political infrastructure does not help him; he does not trust it (somewhat understandably) and there’s not sufficient of a march with his beliefs.

He is also, I think, making a deeper point – that we are not well organised to take action. I might write to the Press Complaints Commission on this one (if it is not too late for me to establish what happened), because it pushes a lot of my buttons. I really do believe that reporters have an obligation to tell the truth, and in particular to report scientific research accurately, and that this obligation is often ignored, and that this is wrong and causes damage. I think it’s wrong to use a personal tragedy to make a political point.

But, in general, I’m not doing a lot, and a big part of that is because of Felipe’s point – that it’s not clear how to go about it. I sign petitions, but I don’t go out looking for them – I sign the ones that are tweeted or posted on my friends’ lists. I write Amnesty letters, because Amnesty makes it very easy for me to do it, but nowhere near as many as I ought to. And I also have work and family and friends and I never have a clue when to stop with anything, so quite often I don’t start.

Dr Bear argues a different case – that we don’t need to be organised, that we should start not from the top down but from the bottom up. For example, she puts the question: are we constraining ourselves by thinking that we have to be organised along party lines, or can we just we coalesce around different interests? She uses the example of the people who march in favour of abortion rights; they are ’strange bedfellows’, but this peculiar coalition has engendered social change.

She makes a powerful case for writing letters: “You have to say that you haven’t forgotten; you have to say that ‘we still notice, we still care’.” Not only is this a moral obligation for its own sake, but it is politically valuable because it is additive. Each letter is another voice, and when we get enough voices then something will happen.

So how do we engage with the current political process? Do we need to wait for an infrastructure, or to create one, or join a party and change it from the inside, or should we just go ahead and do what we care about most, regardless of what others are doing?

I don’t know the answer. I know the questions I want to ask next. They are as follows:

(1) What do we see working? What is changing the political landscape right now, and how? Who are the people that are changing the world in a good way, and how are they doing it?

(sub-question 1a: where do we have to filter for ethics? Changing the political landscape sometimes comes with too high a price.)

I don’t know the answer to this. I’m writing this post at least in part to hear from others. Both Felipe and Dr Bear are very clever and politically aware; they will have thoughts. I’d like to see that conversation move forward, on that level: system rather than individual, pattern rather than generalisation, and descriptive rather than normative at this point. I’d like to try looking at our political system from various different angles and see what we observe, before we start to figure out how to change it. And I’d like us to do it from a positive viewpoint, asking questions that will energise us rather than becoming so absorbed in what’s not working that it’s hard to find the will to do anything at all.

(2) What are our individual strengths? What do we have to bring to the party? What kind of activity makes us come alive?

Felipe is powerful when he’s driven by his anger; mine eats me up and leaves me a husk.

I am not a fighter. This is not the wiring I have. Most of the time (although not always) I think that the world needs fighters, that they are the people who drive a lot of this change. But this is not who I am. Putting me on the front line will not get a blind bit of value out of me, and it will distract the heck out of the people who are meant to be there.

I can be useful in other ways, though. I can help people to think through problems, or to connect to the best in themselves and find the willingness to act differently. I can help disparate, conflict-ridden groups of people to work together to figure out a way forward and get there. I can ask questions that open up new lines of enquiry and get people to see things differently. I can support people in pain and help them carry on.

I’m a lot more valuable if you use me like this than if you chain me to the railings. And I can do it for a lot longer before I fall over, because this is playing to my strengths, because it is working with the grain rather than against it. Ditto with everyone else, and their unique strengths. But for this to work, someone has to be asking the question.

Does that someone need to be an external leadership presence, organising Felipe and me and others to work in our different ways, pointing us at the problems that need us most? Or can we do it for ourselves, without thinking about what is happening around us, and trust that this is sufficient to do useful work? I don’t know the answer. I think it’s a good question.

I’ll finish with a quote from Rabbi Tarfon that I’ve used here before, because Dr Bear likes it and I think it’s apposite: It is not your responsibility to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it. Maybe the first responsibility is to get clear about how best to approach the task. Maybe it’s just to do what feels like the next right thing. I really don’t know.

Oh dear, I am bad at this. My last post here was on 24th August.

The thing is, I really don’t want to write about anything that might identify or embarrass my major client, and that’s where I do all my thinking about organisational systems.

Which is a bit of a shame, really, because I’m doing a lot of really great work on organisational systems and I’d love to find a way to capture it and share it. I just can’t quite work out how to go about it. I know that people on my client site read this, which is fine, but it leaves me feeling that I have to be very careful what I write.

What do other people do about this?

Anyway, I did want to write about learning styles, which is only peripherally relevant to system design but is nonetheless interesting. It’s a train of thought that was kicked off by watching Patrick and Chris posting links to articles on Twitter.

I’ve worked with Patrick on and off since 2005 (full disclosure: I’ve also been going out with him for about half that time) and I’ve always been impressed with his research skills, his ability to track down the latest research and knowledge on a given topic. It’s the Gallup strength of Input; collecting and synthesising external content. * Chris does the same. She’s always sending me articles that should interest me – about positive psychology, strengths, organisational systems, ways of learning and growing – and I’m always failing to read them. And, most influentially, my brilliant father does it – he’s always been the ur-repository of data in our family, and what he doesn’t know ain’t worth knowing.

I don’t work that way. The articles bore me, and I don’t retain the data. I can do it if I want to – the bibliography in my M.Sc. dissertation ran to sixteen densely-written pages – but it’s not my favourite way of working and it’s not how I do my best work.

I’m plagued with a perpetual sense of inadequacy about this. I’m often convinced that I would be infinitely more productive if I read all these articles, if I spent time trawling the Internet for them myself, if I used Twitter to further my professional interests rather than tweeting about my wardrobe and my cats.

Actually that’s really not true.

I’m not practising what I preach here. If I coached someone who said to me ‘I ought to learn through reading and I don’t', I would not say ‘let’s explore ways in which you could get better at this’. Instead, I would say ‘maybe that’s not where your strength lies. Let’s talk about how you learn most effectively, how you have most fun learning, and let’s explore ways in which you can do more of that.’ I’m a great believer in working with the grain rather than against it.

Of course, we always treat ourselves differently from the way we treat others – both favourably and unkindly – and that’s a whole ‘nother post. But it’s good for me to remember that actually there are a lot of ways to learn.

I learn through practice. It’s odd, because I’ve got an incredibly academic background and CV, so it looks like I learn theoretically. But actually I only learn by doing. I’m highly kinaesthetic (that’s a whole ‘nother post as well, one I’ve been promising for about two and a half years) and chucking visual or auditory data at me is a bit of a waste of time. In college, I was very distressed by my inability to understand any of the lectures, because I didn’t know anything about any of this stuff. I just thought I was stupid. But in my final year, when I’d run out of time and had to study, I discovered that I could cover a lot of ground in a short space of time just by doing problems.

I learn through talking to clients and colleagues, through designing solutions and project plans, through writing papers and running workshops and reviewing others’ work. I learn experientially. I learn practically. I don’t learn through reading. I don’t learn from research. I don’t learn through theory – although I know a lot about what I do, I find it hard to describe what I know. I just know how to do my job, and, somehow, I learn how to get better and better at it.

I believe that there are many different ways of learning. I think the work that’s been done on learning styles is not great, but it’s a useful place to start. I don’t buy their model but I like that it allows different ways to learn. And just asking some basic questions about learning is valuable. When have I learned best in the past? What was I doing? What were other people doing? When have I been excited about learning?

And it’s valuable to be positive about difference. No, I can’t do what Patrick and Chris can do, but I can do other stuff that they can’t. It’s up to me whether I pay attention to what I’m good at or where I’m lacking. And it’s up to me whether I pay attention to trying to be like someone else, or to being myself.

* Incidentally, the reason that I am extremely sceptical about the Gallup StrengthsFinder is that they claim that Input is one of my strengths. This is because their questionnaire asks lots of questions about how much people read, and I tell them that I read constantly. Which is true. But I read detective novels.

The Twitter experiment: phase two

I think I’ve worked out what’s going on for me with Twitter. It’s nothing to do with the platform at all. It’s me.

Here’s the bottom line: I don’t like having surface conversations with people that I don’t know.

I like having surface conversations with people I know. My best Twitter moments are all about swapping bad puns or poking fun at my housemates. (So, interestingly, going through this process has made me value Facebook more and more, because it enables me to have surface conversations with lots of people I know, and I think the conversations are good for the relationships even though they are surface.)

I like having real conversations with pretty much anyone. But I don’t yet see how a real conversation can take place in units of 140 characters or fewer.

I see lots of surface conversations going on in Twitter, and lots of people find this useful. People form connections. They share opinions and find others with like minds. They look for information on their chosen specialised subjects and Twitter makes it easy to figure out where to go. Patrick is a master at this, and I admire him for it. But Patrick likes talking to people he doesn’t know, and he is good at it – he can talk about more or less anything. He is made for Tuttle, whereas I always have to gird my loins a bit.

I don’t really want to be in these conversations. My best ever Tuttle conversation was when someone sat me down and lectured me on my approach to romantic relationships. When I do go (which is sadly rare these days), I always gravitate to people that I’ve met before, in the hope that we can move into the real conversation space. It’s not really what Tuttle is for.

I’m not really what Twitter is for. It’s a magnificently creative space, just as Tuttle is. I’m not sure that it is the solution to all the world’s ills, but I do think it will thrive and that microblogging will be more and more central to the way we live. But I don’t want to use it to have surface conversations with people I don’t know, and that cuts out about 90% of what goes on there.

I messed this up right from the start, because I didn’t get clear about what was personal and what was professional. I only had one account, and I posted both. So I feel constrained professionally, because I don’t want to spam my friends with ads for my blog posts, and I feel constrained personally, because I don’t want potential colleagues to google me and find me whingeing about the cricket. My best friend got this right – she has a personal and a work Twitter account, and she uses them for different purposes. I think that’s a great model.

So here’s what I’m going to do.

I’m taking the current account personal, which means that I have taken my real name and bio off it.

I am going to unfollow everyone unless (a) I know them, or (b) I really enjoy reading their tweets. That includes pretty much everyone who tweets ‘professionally’, even if I really like them.. That will take the list of people I follow from about 400 to less than 100 and quite possibly less than 50, and I expect that most of the people who currently follow me will unfollow me pretty quickly.

I’ve bookmarked my name, so that I can have it as a professional account if and when I’m ready. But I’m not ready right now, because I still cannot figure out what I have to offer that is valuable and comes in units of 140 characters or fewer. (I’m extremely interested in others’ views on this.) Right now, I just do not get Twitter as a medium for professional interaction, and I’m giving up trying, for now. The only professional tweets that I find profoundly interesting and valuable are the religious and spiritual ones, and I’m not quite ready to nail my colours to the mast on that. (I also think this is probably influenced by the fact that I do almost all my Twitter reading on my phone, so I’m only going to click on links to articles if they are really, really fascinating.)

I will probably still tweet links to blog posts, because, hey, why not. But I will not be tweeting anything else work-related at this point.

This unhooks me from the professional constraint.

It will be interesting to see what happens as a result of this. At the other end of the spectrum, the other person I admire a lot on Twitter is Kiz, because she is incredibly authentic. Her tweetstream is a stream of consciousness, and I find it utterly compelling, because she herself is very compelling. I’m not sure I’ll ever have the guts or the honesty to do that. But maybe, as with other things, the more I stop trying to be Patrick (or whoever), the better I’ll get at being me.

It’s who you node

Procrastinating cat is procrastinating, so I have been playing around on Facebook to try and track down a cousin, and got caught up in the friends-list of someone I know very slightly, who seems to know an incredible number of minor celebrities.

It started me thinking about degrees of separation. My understanding of the model is that it’s a vertical one – I am connected to someone who knows the prime minister – my MP, say, or the head of the organisation I work for – and they are connected to all the world leaders and the world leader in Outer Mongolia, without loss of generality, is connected to someone who’s connected to someone who’s connected to person n, so I can be joined up to person n in a few steps regardless of n’s location or occupation.

Facebook seems to operate on a different model. It’s more of a network in its real, mathematical sense – there are a few nodes who have lots and lots of friends and they make it possible to get to pretty much anyone quickly. I am one degree of separation on Facebook from a surprising number of famous people, because of where I went to university. This is different from the real life model, of course, because if it weren’t for Facebook then I wouldn’t be in touch with most of the people that I knew at university. So it isn’t a real connection. It’s a strange virtual connection. If I met these famous people at a party, I couldn’t even tell them why I am one degree from them on Facebook because I really can’t claim the connection as a real friend.

So what does this mean? Possibly nothing at all. But it is interesting. People seem more accessible through this medium than they do in real life. They put photos on their Facebook pages. I look at them and some of me thinks, hey, I’m part of their social circle.

Of course, I’m not.

Patrick wrote a post about this, in response to this one by the Gingerbread Girl. I’m still working on my response to that one. (Essentially I think she’s talking rubbish but I really like her, so I’m going to try and make my argument a bit more sophisticated than that.) But I think Patrick’s post is linked to this. We think we know people better than we actually do.

But, also, the route to getting to know people is different. If I wanted to meet celebrities, in the past the trick would have been to go to places where they go. Now it’s getting to know people who have lots of friends on Facebook. (I really don’t want to do this, with one exception, whom I schemed and schemed to meet and then hid under the table from shyness when I actually managed to be at a party with her).

But if I were looking for lots of new work at the moment, my networking strategy might be different. Rather than cold-calling or working diligently through my list, I might start thinking in terms of nodes. Rather than asking ‘who are the people in my address book who are close to the type of work I want to be doing?’, I might start asking ‘who are the people in my network who are the nodes? who sits at the centre of their own network?’ I’m not looking right now, but when I next do, I think I’ll try this approach and see what happens.It’s an interesting way of looking at things that hadn’t occurred to me. Yet another reason to be grateful to social networking. It expands my mind.

In real life, I am one degree of separation from the late great Alan Turing in two different ways. How cool is that?

MBTI: my (somewhat random) thoughts

Inspired by a post from Ros and comments from several people, including Ankaret. I won’t link because I don’t have her permission, but I hope she’ll do so in comments.

I first discovered the MBTI when I was twenty-three, in the summer of 1995. It was a bit of a revelation to me.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time designing and running management development workshops, and one of my theories of management developments is the law of diminishing returns: participants are blown away by their first experience and become progressively harder to reach, the more they do. And this was the first management development intervention I’d ever seen. So I’m sure that was part of it. But it also spoke to something very deep in me: the desire to understand myself in relation to other people. I’m a non-standard type in consulting: ENFJ. My interests, needs and motivations were different from those of many of my colleagues, and this gave me a non-prejudicial language for my differences. It enabled me to understand myself without judgment, and it enabled me to understand colleagues without judgment as well.

I remember having a very entertaining conversation with C, a colleague, about MBTI. “It’s okay to be different!”, we chorused in excitement. After about fifteen minutes of unpacking, though, we discovered that actually our statements were total opposites of one another. She meant that it’s okay for other people to be different from her – MBTI gave her a framework for making sense of those differences. I meant that MBTI gave me permission to be different.

I did MBTI training in October 2002, nearly seven years ago, and I’ve used it regularly since. I do not think of myself as an expert but I am very thoroughly familiar with both the theory and the practice. I still think it’s a tool of great value, but I also put caveats on it, and I would never consider it as being the answer to all ills.

Here’s why I like it: the same reason I liked it fifteen years ago. It enables us to understand difference without judgment and to talk about it. I do not quite understand how it is that we are able to reach the adult world without getting that people are different from one another, but there it is. MBTI talks about preferences. It does not talk about skills. It does not attach a moral value to those preferences. Some are more statistically common, and some are more socially privileged. (For example, many workplaces conduct decision-making through meetings, which is disadvantageous for introverts.)

In my experience it is helpful to understand one’s own preference, because one can then make decisions about how to work with the grain rather than against it. Introverted and forced to attend meetings? Demand the agenda and supporting papers first, programme diary time to review them. Extraverted and forced to write a report? Set interim deadlines to gain others’ involvement and set up workshops to plan the contents with other people. Et cetera.

It is also useful to understand others’ preferences. I once ran MBTI-based team development for a team of Intuitives led by a Sensor. Decision-making had stalled, because the team leader could not go forward without data and his team could not understand that this was what he needed. Understanding each other’s preferences resolved the situation very quickly.

MBTI is also a good tool for handling team diversity. Everyone wants to work with people like them, but building a team with uniform preferences can lead to groupthink, arrogance and narrow decision-making. Understanding Myers-Briggs types shifts the question from ‘why can’t he / she be more like us?’ to ‘how can we use his / her difference productively’? I’ve often seen an increase in diversity among teams as they start to get MBTI. They start being willing to choose team members who are different from them and see this as a strength, rather than a problem.

I do have caveats, though. Firstly – and this is the strongest – in my experience this tool works a lot better for some people than others. Some people have clear preferences and others find it much harder to discern. Some people connect emotionally to the tool and others can see themselves in all the type profiles, or in none. Carol Craig, whom I admire and who does not support the strength-based approach that I advocate, asked me ‘what does working with strengths do for me that MBTI does not?’ I didn’t give a coherent answer at the time, but, with thought, this is my response. Strengths work for everyone. We all have unique strengths and virtues. I don’t think everyone fits as neatly into an MBTI framework as its most passionate advocates would have us believe. The theory says that it works for everyone, but in my experience this is just not true.

Secondly, it only goes so far and no further. Okay, so I am an ENFJ and my partner is an INTJ. This helps us understand our differing approaches to social events and decision-making. But that’s a small part of our relationship. Even though we’re both Js, we’re at very different places on the scale – I’d plan every detail of my life if I could. Spontaneity is a dirty word in my vocabulary, and for him it has meaning. Most of our differences require a much more sophisticated language to discuss.

I think there are other problems, too. The terminology, for example. In MBTI terms I’m an extravert – I’m energised by being around people and drained of energy by being alone. But in natural language I’m often closer to an introvert – reserved and much happier in 1-1 or small conversations than at parties. It’s difficult and emotive to divide people into ‘thinkers’ (who are not cold-hearted) and ‘feelers’ (who are not stupid). Et cetera.

In summary? A valuable tool, a valuable way of thinking and a valuable language. But imperfect and limited, like all tools, ways of thinking and languages. And, as with all of these, the greatest value is in how the user holds it and works with it.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone

This is an edited (for length and focus, not meaning) conversation that M and I had on his blog. I liked it a lot, so I thought I’d tidy it up and post it.

Disclaimer 1: this post is not about Christianity. It’s about how to interpret the experience of being in a large-scale system. I’m not in the business of telling people what to believe unless they ask me directly for help.

Disclaimer 2: I’m conscious that this post effectively gives me the last word. Two reasons: (i) I had to stop somewhere, and (ii) I’m pleased with my last comment, which sums up something important I want to say about systems. I trust M to respond wholeheartedly in comments, but if he wants me to post a ‘guest post’ response from him then I’ll happily do so. Also, the conversation is still going on, so there might be subsequent posts.

F: …if you’re going to be thinking about ethics in society, you could do a lot worse than The Sermon on the Mount…. it’s also a fascinating exercise in system dynamics. How did the man whose credo is ‘turn the other cheek’ become the figurehead for [atrocities]?

M: …as a guide to individual spiritual practice, the Sermon has few matches…

As a tool of religion, it amounts to little more than a divine injunction to sit the hell down and shut the hell up, or you won’t get any dinner.

Maybe that needs a little explanation… religion I can take or leave alone, in that I can see them as producing good or evil. In the western world (the only one I have meaningful experience of), religions tend to accumulate capital, become institutionalised, and identify and act as conservative forces. I don’t condemn religion unreservedly, even in the narrow sense that I’ve experienced it. I can see social benefits from religion in terms of mutual support for believers. I can even see that where they operate in alignment with their spiritual origin they are capable of bringing benefits to those outside their congregation (although this is obviously fraught with dangers – the role of British chaplains in the Indian Mutiny/Uprising, the support offered to Franco by the Catholic church, collective blindness to the plight of Jewish refugees – the set of evils perpetuated by organised religions is not infinite, but it is large).

To return to The Sermon, where we started, I’ve heard the argument that you will be rewarded for poverty and powerlessness in this world with everlasting life in the next repeatedly, and, strangely, it’s rarely an argument deployed by the poor and the powerless.

… [redacted for length, including a whole entry from me]

…it is very interesting that I see religion as an instrument of control, and you see it as a path to happiness..

F: … I don’t think I see religion all that differently from you … I see it in exactly the same way as I see sex or the Internet – something that is in the hands of man, rather than God, and therefore has as many instantiations as there are people. To say ‘religion is good’ or ‘religion is bad’ is a nonsense statement to me. It can lead to transcendent miracles of grace and also appalling tragedy and abuse of power, and these things can both happen very effectively in the absence of religion as well. It is a man-made construct.

M: …I wish I could agree completely with you here. Unfortunately, context is all. I’m not talking about a one person – one religion mapping here. I’m not even talking about the hundreds of organised religions that are beyond my direct experience. I’m talking about direct experience of the religions of the book, and in particular of Christianity, since we started from SoTM and its appropriation by the church. I’d never say that religion is bad, I think there is a case to be made that a church is bad, in the way it uses a particular religion.

F: …I do think it’s more complicated than you say.

Yes, I agree that there is a system effect. It’s not sufficient to say ’some Christians enact doctrine in a way that’s valuable and some in a way that’s harmful’. Some of this is a numbers game – if 90% of priests, say, do the latter then you probably have a system that’s primarily causing harm, and vice versa. (I don’t think we can gauge that.) Some of it is an open systems thing – in a culture that is grasping for certainties, for example, or starving, Christianity (or any other religion) will land differently from a prosperous first-world country that’s experienced the Enlightenment.

But some of it is beyond additive synthesis. Justin tweeted from Synod that ‘80% of primary healthcare in developing countries provided by Christian organisations’. Assuming that it’s true – which I don’t know – this statement is subject to more than one interpretation. For me to use it in an argument that ‘Christianity is a force for good in the world’ would be insufficient. We don’t know the conditions under which this takes place and we can’t therefore deconstruct it. We just don’t know.

I don’t think your argument is sufficient to generalise either. Some instances of the Christian church use religion as a tool of social or political oppression. Others use it to help people lead very rich spiritual lives and be of social service. Even if you could calculate the numbers – and we can’t – we can’t gauge the effect.

If we look back at Christianity and the world, in a hundred years, we might find ourselves saying that the conservative social policies of the RC church led to massive overpopulation, spread of AIDS, retardation of emancipation and high social cost. Or we might say that the Church’s leadership on environmental issues in the US … made a qualitative difference to our approach to climate change.

I just don’t think we can judge a whole system from our experience of it, ever.

People are not rational

Disclaimer: this is not aimed at anyone in particular. I’ve been doing this work for nearly fifteen years, and there are many, many people who do this, ranging from senior executive to administrator and all points in between. You know who you are. You are legion. Quite often you are me.

People are not rational.

People mostly do not hear what you say. They hear what they want to hear, or what they most fear hearing, or what they are emotionally capable of hearing at this particular point in time. Do not assume that someone has heard and understood what you have said, no matter how clearly you think you said it. This may well be true even if you have said it several times. Goes double or triple or quadruple if your method of communication is electronic.

Do not assume that because something is clear to you, it will automatically be clear to others. They do not know what you know.

Just because you have explained how to do something, do not assume that your audience understands it. Above all, do not say ‘well, they should understand it, because it is their job to understand it’. This will not work. It does not matter whether or not it ought to be true, it is vanishingly unlikely to be the case. If they need help, they need help, and arguing with this will not change it. We need to learn to operate from what is true about people, not what we think should be true.

Do not send out forms and expect your audience to fill them in correctly the first time. You need to take an active interest in the process. This is true no matter how simple you think the templates are. Lots of people will get them wrong. Take the time to explain what you are doing and why. It does not matter whether or not it is their job to know the answer or they should have done it before. If the timescale matters, or you care about the outcome, you need to put in the work to make it happen and that means spending time with your stakeholders talking them through the process and why it looks like that. Quite possibly it means doing this several times. Get over it.

People are not consistent. They – we – do not react in the same way every time. They rarely react logically. They have big responses to small triggers and small responses to big triggers. They accept organisational oppression for months and years and then walk out over desk positioning or coffee machines or the wording in an email. Do not assume that you know how people will react to any communication. Give them space to respond, listen, take them seriously, change their approach. Do not assume that what is important to you will also be important to others, or that your priorities are intrinsically more valuable than theirs.

People are wrong a lot. That includes me. That also includes you.

People do not react logically. They react emotionally. This is almost invariably true no matter how clever they are, no matter whether or not their job asks them to act rationally, no matter how high up they sit in the organisation. If you think that you are reacting logically, you are likely to be wrong. I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

There is no one way of looking at any organisational problem. This is because no problem is entirely about systems or data or anything mathematical that can be interpreted within this model. All organisational problems involve people, and people are not rational or consistent or logical so mathematical reasoning breaks down. Let go of the mentality that says ‘one of us must be right and the other must be wrong’. Assume that you are both right, then ask ‘how can it be true that we are both right?’. Much more profitable line of questioning.

Do not assume that if people appear not to understand or are not co-operating, that they are consciously resisting you. It’s not impossible but it’s far from the most likely and it’s not a helpful assumption either way. Instead, assume that the communication that needs to happen hasn’t yet happened. Seek feedback. Be open-minded.

Do not assume that people are stupid. Enquire into why they are doing what they are doing. Believe the answer.

But do not assume that people are rational. Because we aren’t.

Strength as authenticity or strength as virtue?

There are various definitions of strengths. I was going to copy the paragraphs from my dissertation, but it’s very dull indeed and far too long. So I will just pick out a couple: The canonical classification of strengths is the VIA-IS (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), where virtues are defined as ‘the core characteristics valued by moral philosophers and religious thinkers’, and strengths as ‘the psychological ingredients … that define the virtues’ (Peterson & Seligman, 2004, p.13) … Linley (2008) defines a strength as “a pre-existing capacity for a particular way of behaving, thinking, or feeling that is authentic and energising to the user, and enables optimal functioning, development and performance”

There are lots of different ways of asking questions about strengths, too, but I’ve chosen these definitions because they highlight one of my current frames: the difference between strengths as authenticity and strengths as virtue. Linley is talking about the unique strengths that we all have – he uses the phrase ‘working with the grain’, which is a way in which I love thinking about strengths. How can we do things ‘our way’, finding ways to build on what we are best and and what comes most naturally, rather than trying to standardise? Peterson & Seligman, by contrast, hold a definition of strengths that is morally charged. Their strength classification is based on virtues that transcend cultures and societies. Although they argue that everyone has signature strengths, the ethos is different.

At the conference, there were a lot of conversations about how to use strengths in life, or in the workplace – are they associated with happiness and success and, if so, how? This is one of my specialist subjects. I wrote my dissertation on what happens when women start using their signature strengths in male-dominated workplaces, and I remain very interested in it.

I’m particularly interested in how to use strengths with my current major client, with whom I’m working in the organisation design space. It’s a good project for an organisation that I’m proud to be associated with, but I think I could bring more of my specific experience to it – in positive psychology, Appreciative Inquiry as well as my own research. When I’ve thought about this, it’s been more in the space of Linley/ How can I help my client connect to the unique strengths of the function I’m working in, and its key players, to build energy and engagement and deepen the quality of the work they’re doing?

But then my mind turned to a different place. I’m going through a considerable personal journey of my own right now, which I’m not going to write about here, but I found myself asking the question: how could the concept of strengths be of value to me here?

My VIA signature strengths (roughly in order) are creativity, wisdom, spirituality, kindness and leadership. So I asked myself the question ‘how can I use these to support me in navigating this personal crisis and hasten my growth in this space?’ I thought it would be a productive question – it yielded really great results for my research participants in my dissertation – but so far it has led to a dead end. (I’m still sitting with the question, though, so this might change.)

However, asking the more generic question ‘how might character strengths be of value in this journey?’ has been a much more fruitful line of enquiry. Very quickly I come up with a long list of VIA strengths that are directly relevant: gratitude, kindness, self-regulation, humility, forgiveness, humour, integrity and others. This has nothing to do with my particular character: it’s the strengths themselves. And it’s not just an intellectual exercise; asking the question ‘how can I use forgiveness right now to help me’, or similar, is a practical coaching intervention that has led to useful insight and changes of state.

On Sunday morning, though, I heard David Cooperrider talk about how he’s using Appreciative Inquiry with world leaders to build new ways of driving large-scale social transformation. He talks about ‘the energy that comes from connecting strength to strength and hope to hope’. In this, I see echoes of both approaches to strength, yoked together.

Cooperrider’s talk was very, very impressive and I’m probably going to write more about it later. But I just want to pick up one of his main themes now: the idea of integrating concepts that previously seemed to be inimical to one another. He cited the powerful example of business and peace.

So maybe my question should not be ‘which approach to strengths do I want to take?’ but instead ‘what language and framework can I use to bring the two together into a richer whole?’

Thoughts, as always, are welcomed.

Linley, A. (2008). Average to A+ Realising Strengths in Yourself and Others. CAPP Press. ISBN 978-1-906366-03-2.

Peterson, C. & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. Washington, D.C: APA Press.

How many is the right number?

This is a bit of a departure from my usual agenda because I am only posing questions. I think they are good questions. But I don’t know what the answers are.

I often think about sizes of system. I know that it’s an important thing to take into account in thinking about how to help a system to work well. A team of 30 people all know each other, whereas a team of 200 don’t. So you need different mechanisms for information flow and collaboration and decision-making.

Similarly, one of the things that I notice the government do is continue to centralise decision making and it is going less and less well for them. I think that a major reason for this is that the size of system is too big. You can’t make good decisions about everything for sixty million people. You need to devolve some of your decision-making. The Liberal Democrats used to be good at that, in theory anyway – they used to think hard about what sort of decisions to make centrally and where to give more power to local government. I haven’t read a recent manifesto so I don’t know whether they are still.

I’m at a conference for about 1,500 to 2,000 people and the networking is not happening, because it is too big. In general I am a believer in self-organising but this needs more signposting. People need more space. They need more help to figure out how to find people with shared interests and engage in conversation with them. I went to a similar conference last summer with about 400 – 500 delegates and that was a right size for self-organising networks.

I am currently thinking a lot about organisation design principles for large systems, and one of my questions is, how big do you want your decision-making units to be? Obviously you want them to be as big as they can be, because you want (a) simplicity where possible, and (b) lack of duplication, and (c) minimal bureaucracy. But centralising everything doesn’t work, pace government in para above.

My question is this: how do you know what size is going to work? I don’t think this can be done in theory, although I would love love love to be wrong. But where is the information situated about what decisions can be made at what size of system? In particular, what is really working right now?

I would be very, very grateful for any thoughts, links, information, insight, challenge about this. I know it is a non-standard question and I have written this post in a hurry and in the UK it is Friday night, which is a bonkers time to be asking difficult questions about systems. (I do this a lot. Be very, very glad you don’t date me. I made Patrick talk about evolutionary and taxonomic metaphors at 7am on the Saturday morning after we’d flown to Washington on the Friday night.) But if you could see fit to share any thoughts, no matter how ill-formed, and / or to pass this on to someone who might have any ideas then I would be very grateful. Please do also ask for clarification if I haven’t been clear.

Right. Pizza now. Many thanks in advance.

The Lucifer Effect

At the first World Congress on Positive Psychology in Philadelphia, I heard Philip Zimbardo talk last night about his work on the Lucifer Effect, the combination of factors that can cause ‘good people to engage in evil actions’. I thought it was fascinating, and very relevant for my ongoing thought process about ways to engage with systems of people.

Professor Zimbardo talks about the psychology of evil (and, later, its counterpart the psychology of heroism), but his greater frame is the ‘psychology of liberation’ – how much freedom do we really have, and why do we make the choices that we do? He has a system mindset, which I obviously like a lot. Rather than locating evil primarily within the individual, as we have mostly been trained to do, he talks about the complex interplay between dispositional psychology (‘bad apples’), the situation (‘bad barrels’) and the wider system (‘bad barrel-makers’). (Because of his previous work in this space, Zimbardo was asked to serve as an expert witness in defence of Chip Frederick, which has been the catalyst for much of his new work.)

Zimbardo identifies circumstances that lead to ‘the Lucifer effect’. Some of the key factors are:

Lack of oversight – photos from Abu Ghraib demonstrate how the night shift guards were left to themselves, knowing that there was no possibility of discovery by superior officers.

De-individualisation – soldiers lose sense of themselves through the assumption of uniform. They start to see themselves as part of a mass, rather than as individuals who are responsible for their own actions and can hold personal definitions of right and wrong.

Dehumanisation – this one is well known, I think. Soldiers (and others) start to see the enemy (or minority groups, or students playing prisoners) as less than human and therefore it becomes okay to treat them abusively.

Blind obedience to authority – Zimbardo was very interesting on the subject of the Milgram experiments. He talks about how the Milgram experiments carefully found ways for the authority figure to cut off any of the participants’ exit routes by counter-arguments to all their protests. He also shared some interesting results from some of the variants on the Milgram experiments, which again locate the discourse in the situation rather than the individual. In particular, 91% of participants administered shocks if they had previously seen a peer do so – the highest total figure – but only 12% did so if they had seen a peer rebel.

Mindlessly taking the first step – once the border between good and evil becomes permeated, the rest is a slippery slope. Zimbardo points out that the first shock in the Milgram experiments is a mere 15 volts and the first steps at both Abu Ghraib and Stanford involved getting prisoners to do push-ups.

Boredom – Chip Frederick worked twelve-hour night shifts seven days a week.

There are other factors, but these are the main ones that he discussed, I think.

I’m really happy that he talks about systems rather than individuals. It always seems clear to me that people behave differently in different contexts – there are situations that evoke heroism and situations that evoke the opposite. We’re not very good at studying systems, because it’s so hard to measure the answers. But we have to ask the questions anyway, because at least people are then talking about the right things at the right level.

Professor Zimbardo’s interventions are at the individual level – how can I become one of the 9% who doesn’t push the button, rather than one of the 91% who does? It’s a great question. But I am interested in a parallel question – what can we do to create a system in which that 9% number gets bigger and 91% shrinks? What types of intervention should one consider, and how might they be set up?

It is a difficult space because all my answers are speculative – I can’t prove any of them. But I found Zimbardo’s talk inspiring and thought-provoking, and I have a lot of notes for possible future posts in this space.