After the Storm

Tim Johns | 15th April 2020

I’ve never experienced a hurricane.  A real hurricane.  But I know people who have, including people who live on a main hurricane route.  For them, every year there is a hurricane season. And there’s the “once in ten years” hurricane. And then there’s the “once in 50 years” hurricane.  Forecasting nowadays is pretty accurate so they know that the storms are on their way.  They lock down the house, battening down the hatches, putting up storm shutters, and retreat to safety in a secure basement where there are ample supplies and stand-alone generators.  And there they stay until the storm has passed.  When it finally moves on they emerge from their bunker to survey the scene.  The damage will often be extensive.  Chainsaws will deal with fallen trees but there will be much that has been broken beyond repair.  But things will be replaced and things will return to normal.

So, what about our Covid-19 storm?  What will it look like après le déluge?  Some may feel that it is too early to start thinking about the future when we’re still in the midst of the crisis.  Others will say that without a clear sense of direction it is impossible to know whether we are heading on the right path.  I have always maintained that it would be great to be able to press pause: to put life on hold for a moment whilst we take a look at where we’ve ended up; to get our bearings and reflect on whether we are happy with where we are and where we’re going.  Are we going to reappraise, reinvent, or remake? 

There are, I think, four main ways to think about what happens next. There are the Iconoclasts, who see this as an opportunity to move fast and break things. These people want to seize the opportunity to start afresh. 

Then there are the planners, who with calm and considered system’s thinking, want to co-create a more inclusive future. They want the chance to create a sustainable Utopia, probably centred around Davos.

Then there are the followers of Belloc’s poem Jim with its famous line: “Always keep a hold of nurse / for fear of finding something worse”.   They’re the incrementalists, who want as few changes as possible.

And finally, there are the followers of Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, owner of the Frog & Peach – the catastrophic failure of a restaurant with a limited menu (frog and peach) situated in a bog in the middle of Dartmoor.  Poised to open a new restaurant, he was asked whether he felt he’d learnt from his mistakes. “I think I have, yes” he replied “and I think that I can probably repeat them almost perfectly”.

The world of work was already cracking at the seams.  The contract between wealth creation and society is under strain. Add in healthy doses of AI, automation, demographics, disruptive technology, political volatility, and climate change and the picture looks decidedly uncertain. And then Covid-19 came along, bringing recessions, bankruptcies and economic turmoil. Surely too much has changed for things to go back to exactly as they were? Businesses will have changed, people will have changed, governments will have changed.

Churchill won the war. He thought that all he had to do was turn up for the 1945 General Election.  He had the respect, gratitude and admiration of a grateful Nation.  He lost.  He didn’t realise that the War had changed people.  It was time for a new normal.

I do think that so much will have happened that many people want to return to a new version of normal.  And so here are some thoughts for society, government and business of areas that might be ripe for a rethink. It’s far from comprehensive, and not everything is either true or realistic but perhaps many do reflect the sorts of things that will be up in the air.

Governments may have different priorities

• More directive
• More interventionist
• Less trusting of big business and special interest groups
• More big projects – Les Grands Projet. Marshall Plans. Bretton Woods
• May effectively nationalise key businesses – infrastructure, travel, utilities, media
• Rebalance the economy away from services and more support for manufacturing
• More devolution
• More nationalistic
• More protectionist – Britain/America/France First
• Further fragmentation of political parties

Governments may intervene more in the capital markets

• Limit foreign investment/takeovers
• Stricter control of hedge funds (short sellers)
• Rules on dividend cover and share buybacks
• Rules on supply chains
• Tax may need to be reformed – NI (like pensions, are a Ponzi scheme)
• If jobs are scarce, why have income tax that mainly taxes jobs
• Tax land/ capital rather than income
• Change business tax regime

Financial Markets may have to find other ways to measure value

• EBITDA not EPS
• Govt strategic investments in certain industries/sectors may see reductions in liquidity
• More realistic valuations – Ocado is home food delivery middleman not a tech company; Uber is ride hailing app; WeWork is a glorified letting agent
• Users are not the same as underlying profitable users/customers
• Clicks are not eyeballs are not readers are not interactors

Society may want different things

• Rebalance reward/tax in favour of key workers
• Less tolerance of executive pay
• Society is only as strong as its weakest members
• The economy serves society not the other way around

Businesses will have to change

• Greater role for worker representation
• Even good profitable, well-managed, innovative businesses will go under.  Fundamental difference between turnover, profit, and cash
• Questions over “efficient” business models
• Share buy backs will either be outlawed or become socially unacceptable; ditto sale and leaseback
• Specialisation less fashionable; maybe a move towards conglomerates who can spread risk
• Less outsourcing
• Pressure to shorten supply chains (see: Macron)
• Less Just in Time, more Just in Case
• Reduction in global travel, conferences
• Rethink on role of offices
• Rethink on effectiveness of open plan
• Work smarter – fewer hours, less travel, more technology
• Rethink role of, and primacy of, shareholders
• Greater role for unions/worker representation
• End of low cost procurement to best value

It’s a long list and it’s far from comprehensive.  I certainly don’t know the answers let alone the real questions.  But what businesses and society need now are people who can take the long view and the short view; who can learn from the past as well as look to the future; and who can bring the outside in as well as the inside out.

Rebuilding, reappraising, reinventing…

It’s all up to us.

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”  – Giuseppe di Lampedusa The Leopard

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Sustainability Stories as a Three Act Play

Simon Cooper | 5th June 2018

A beginning, a middle and an end
Communicating sustainability issues is something every sustainability initiative cares about, but how often do our messages fall on deaf ears? Every so often something really cuts through into the public consciousness, most recently the problem of plastic waste in our oceans and the deadly effects of this on marine life. For many, their first contact with this issue was through David Attenborough’s BBC TV programme Blue Planet II, where images such as a young albatross killed by swallowing a single plastic toothpick moved people in the programme’s worldwide audience to ask what could be done to clean up our oceans.

Now the ocean plastic issue is a global concern, with many organisations moving to ban single-use plastics from their shelves. Generation X author Douglas Coupland has filled Vancouver Aquarium with plastics recovered from the Canadian shore in a shocking exhibition, Vortex. Viewing it on its opening weekend, I saw visitors moved by the sheer quantity of waste and its mundane nature – who knew that so many toothbrushes and marker pens are thrown away, to float in the Pacific sun until they bleach white?

The question that ran through my mind as I took in the exhibition (and its visitors) was – why has this issue gained so much traction now? Campaigning groups have been trying to raise awareness of the issue for years. Why did most people not notice until Blue Planet II aired?

I think the problem may be not our attempts to raise awareness of these problems – it’s what comes before and goes after that activity. We need a Three Act Play approach.

Think back to when you’ve seen a film or play that seemed unsatisfying. When I revisit such experiences in my mind I usually find that they were missing a vital component of the narrative structure – the beginning, the middle (rarely), or the end. The earliest storytellers knew that they had to have those three elements if their fellow cave-dwellers weren’t to lose interest, and over the centuries the form has evolved into what we now understand as the Three Act Play. Looking at those sustainability campaigns that lacked impact, how many of them are guilty of being a story badly told? However bright the idea, if colleagues and external audiences aren’t engaged by it, they won’t believe in it and it will go nowhere. Innovation has been defined as a good idea multiplied by the number of friends it has, and sustainability communication is just the same.

The beginning
The beginning – or Act One – is where we get to know the characters in a movie or play. It’s the same with a sustainability issue – at the beginning, you get to know who’s who and what’s what, the history and the backstory of the problem you’re grappling with. But in the annals of unsatisfying movies, there are many which had an Act One but still failed – because they failed to build your compassion for the characters. It’s the same in communicating sustainability, we need to know what people care about, what motivates them, as well as the bare facts, statistics and trends.

Some organisations try to work this out by asking people – through surveys, interviews and other methods. They sometimes don’t succeed because people won’t tell them the truth – they give a skewed version of the truth. If they like the organisation, their comments will be through rose-tinted spectacles, if they’ve had a bad experience – or if the organisation wants them to give up something they love, such as driving their car – the account will be scathing. You might think that each would cancel the other out, but of course we never know how many there are of each. The great thing about communicating in the world of social media is that you can get constant feedback on how your Act One is being received. Being sensitive to what is being said about you and your storytelling is a vital skill nowadays.

The middle
Act Two of the story is where most sustainability campaigns concentrate their firepower – the threat to our planet and our way of life, the call to action to solve the problem. I don’t disagree that Act Two is important – it’s just that we should place equal emphasis on what goes before and what comes after.
In plays and films, Act Two is where the drama or crisis happens, leading to resolution in Act Three.

This is where we should bring our characters together to deal with what we and they have learned through Act One. If the prince is a ditherer and his girlfriend in urgent need of psychiatric help, it’s good for everyone to know that before making any irrevocable decisions on the government of the kingdom over the next decade.

Good, purpose-driven storytelling is based on good information and a sound understanding of the behaviours and motivations of the characters who are going to be responsible not only for moving though Act Two but carrying the action forward into Act Three. It worked for Shakespeare but most sustainability initiatives want to avoid a dénouement that results in all the leading personalities coming to a messy and untimely end.
The essential is to be crystal clear about what you are trying to implant in the audience’s mind. Is it a lifetime of happiness for the prince, revenge to right past wrongs or imperial ambition to acquire neighbouring territory?

Make sure you know in Act Two what you want the audience to feel, think and do at the end of the story. No matter what the time pressure, no matter how restless the audience is becoming, there has to be firm understanding of the end point you’re trying to get to.
Great theatre depends not only on the author, director and star performers but on bringing out the best in the set designer, the technicians, the stage crew, the choreographer, the make-up artist and the rest of the cast. You wouldn’t launch a West End show or a blockbuster movie without ensuring everyone was confident and comfortable in their role and had a clear impression of the big picture. It’s the same in sustainability stories – the entire organisation must move in step with the storyline.

Act 2 has to have a neat conclusion to make Act 3 start well. I see it as a precise, concise and specific central proposition around which the rest of the detail can be played out.

The ending
Act Three is where everything gets resolved in the dramatic plot – the baddie gets slammed into jail, the couple in the will-they-or-won’t-they storyline walk hand in hand into the sunset, and so on. The typical film language is to have a long, slow zoom out to a very wide (often overhead) shot while the orchestra wells up into a rousing finale. All very satisfying for the human need to see everything concluded nice and tidily.

How often have you experienced that satisfaction in a sustainability story? I’m willing to bet the answer is seldom, or even never. Act Three in sustainability stories is, in my experience, the most difficult part to get right because we can’t achieve the happy, tidy ending that the human mind yearns for. Almost always, there’s unfinished business – we need to change our lifestyles to reduce harm to the planet, businesses need to rethink their processes, governments need to act differently, a whole variety of story threads must be left hanging in mid air. Not the ideal Hollywood ending.

So, in Act Three, plan to listen carefully and sense the reaction of the audience to the point the story has reached. Moviemakers commonly stage test screenings and will change or even reshoot scenes based on the audience reaction. In the world of unfinished sustainability business described above, does the audience feel unsettled? That may be a good thing, as they will be moved to action. Do they feel something worse, despair perhaps? That is a bad thing, because if things look too serious to resolve, people may give up and simply wait for the worst to happen. The most effective feeling we can leave our audience with is one of hope linked to action – that the issue can be resolved if enough people do the right thing. Gauging audience reaction and finessing the end of your story can lead to much more impact than your first attempt at a conclusion.

The credits roll…
In his Artist’s Statement at the Vancouver Aquarium Vortex exhibition, Douglas Coupland says:

“Everyone talks about oceanic trash gyres, but there are few actual images… In a way, this project has been about putting a face on something faceless and to crystallise emotion into a solid form”

The reactions I saw in visitors’ faces on the opening weekend showed that Coupland had succeeded in his storytelling objective, making something unseen so tangible that it felt like being punched in the chest.

And Blue Planet II? Surely the reason it had such impact is the quality of the storytelling. We know and trust David Attenborough – his Three Act Play spans 64 years since his first TV programmes, so he is someone we have built our compassion for. Within the Blue Planet II series itself, the story arc offers all the elements of the Three Act Play as I have described them, so we finish watching with hope and a clear agenda for action.

And isn’t that what all sustainability stories should try to achieve? As Douglas Coupland put it in Vancouver, “Crystallise emotion into solid form”.

Use-by date

Tim Johns | 8th January 2018

Use-by dates creep up on you. It comes to everyone, of course. The old year passes and the new one reminds you that time and tide aren’t waiting. Over the decades one has been through the cupboards of one’s parents, surreptitiously discarding all those items clearly past their use-by dates. And then it happens to you. Nothing prepares you for the toe-curling embarrassment as a daughter, back home for Christmas, takes huge amusement from clearing out jars, packets, and tins. To be fair, most had use by dates between 2014 and 2017, but there were enough that were more than a decade past their peak to make the exercise an uncomfortable one. Oh, how the tables were turned. We were the future once – Et in Arcadia ego, as they say – and now it was our turn to make excuses about how spices never really go off.

The arrival of a new year often separates the half-fullers from the half-emptiers. Introspection can lead some to think that their best days are behind them. At work, all the talk is of AI, Robots and those pesky millennials coming along and taking our jobs. Cabinet reshuffles aim to bring in new blood. Age, once seen as synonymous with experience and wisdom, is now often bracketed with black & white tv, and tradition has become a dirty word. Perhaps there is time to hang up one’s boots. (As a case in point, the combined age of the three front-row forwards of the rugby team I support, Cardiff Blues, is 120. And they’re called the Blues as that’s what you get from watching them.)

But the truth is that many of our skills and cognitive approaches do have a use-by date. Often what got us to where we are might not be what we need to get us to where we want to go. The old paradigm of learn-work-retire is no longer fit for purpose. As people live longer (and as health costs outweigh increasingly pitiful pensions) a thirty-year retirement doesn’t make sense, and nor does the idea that once you pass twenty all learning stops. Whether it’s the impetus provided by a new year or not, we all need to pause and rethink what we need for the next stage of our lives. And, yes, that may even mean ditching some of our legacy thinking and attitudes. Reappraising allows us to refresh, and then to reskill, retrain, rewire our thinking and then reboot our lives.

Much is made of how few people stick to their new year’s resolutions. Some blame their lack of willpower. I’m more like P G Wodehouse who said: “It is true that I have a will of iron, but it can be switched off if the circumstances seem to demand it.” The reality is that rather than seeing personal change as a one-off, the mindset needs to be one of continuous improvement. None of us need to reach our use by date if we make sure that we always refresh and retrain and commit ourselves to lifelong learning.
………………….
And for your bonus track, here’s the peerless Michael McIntyre’s Spice Rack gag.

http://bit.ly/1vGOPtC

M&A – lessons from failure

Tim Johns | 24th October 2017

The majority of M&A, it seems, end in failure. They simply don’t produce the expected results, destroying rather than creating value. And yet every year companies continue down the path with their eyes wide shut. Books have been written and lectures given but still lessons are seemingly ignored. Sometimes it is because M&A was simply the wrong strategic option, or perhaps because the task was greater than the resources available. But many of the failures are the result of a specific issue: not enough attention had been given to people and culture.

Even allowing for the growth of robots and AI, the fact is that a business is its people. And yet when preparing for a potential, M&A few organisations will look at the cultural fit. Due diligence tends to cover physical assets, intellectual property, processes, systems, and financial assets and liabilities, and rarely, if ever, cover people issues. And this is where the problem starts. M&A starts with the logic of the market analysis, and integration planning is about preparing to take control. Cultural issues start on the backfoot and often aren’t considered until way down the line, by which time the planning has taken on a life of its own. So here are a few lessons from observing failure.

Putting employees last

M&A is usually led by finance and strategic marketeers. Their spreadsheets are made up of numbers which illustrate competitive advantages, synergies, benchmark data, and financial analysis. Their numbers always seem to lead to a situation of overwhelming logic for a deal. All that has to happen is to integrate the two organisations and realise the synergies. Their focus is on rightsizing to benchmarks. It is integrating by numbers for numbers. This phase is what’s called the heavy lifting. The number-focused M&A specialists see this as the key part of the role (and they are, of course, highly incentivised to hit the numbers). They cut, impose, integrate, close, right-size, and take control of operations and process. I’ve even heard people say that they’ll do the heavy lifting first and then do the softer culture second. And they then want to know why that didn’t work.

Communicating through numbers

Many people have written about the need for communicating through stories and numbers. Data and numbers are not motivating. Vision and stories are. And yet too many M&A corporate narratives are still dominated by numbers: market share, growth opportunities, EBITDA. Apart from the highly incentivised executives, no-one gets out of bed wanting to increase shareholder value. And yet the M&A people still can’t use normal images and words to communicate. M&A is really about transformation not imposition. And transformation requires visible leadership, engagement, listening and telling the vision on a daily basis.

Our values are your values

Despite the fact that M&A is about two organisations coming together, many still think that 1+1=1. In other words, the bigger of the two thinks that as they already have a vision, purpose, values, and a set of behaviours, then these are the ones that are going to work in the new, bigger, entity. This is a huge mistake. When two become one, each brings a unique set of cultural and behavioural norms. They each have a heritage and a back story that has made them who they are. Imposing a new cultural outlook never works. The new employees become the objects of change and have attitudes imposed upon them. The best takeovers are those where there is significant investment in understanding the two cultures and creating opportunities for employee on both sides to work towards building a culture based on the best of both.

Not invented here syndrome

Whenever two people get together a hierarchy is established and the fact is that in most M&A there is always a dominant partner. Mistakes happen when the ascendant company assumes that because they are taking over someone else then they must be the better organisation: better at planning, marketing, operations, financial accounting, etc, and have the better systems and processes. This blinkered attitude often leads to huge errors as they impose their less effective systems rather than recognise how much they can learn. A bit more humility rather than arrogance can go a long way.

There are many more examples of failure and much that we can learn. And so it is important that planning for success starts early and focuses on intangibles like culture and sees people as physical assets. Good practice includes stakeholder mapping, engagement surveys and Pulse checks, and having open two-way communication channels. After all, employees today are part of the most sophisticated users of technology the world has ever known. They don’t leave these skills at home when they go to work. They are creating and sharing content with people they trust in their private lives and that is how they expect to be treated at work. Success comes from including all employees, building new purpose and visions together, and co-creating a distinct culture that expresses the new entity.

When we create partnerships in our private lives we don’t start with practical issues like assets, houses, money and domestic arrangements. We get together and coalesce around shared values and interests, and it is emotions that bring and keep us together. And so if more people approached M&A integration as if it were a marriage perhaps the success rate might be higher. As Charles Dickens put it in David Copperfield: “There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.”

Events, dear boy, events

Tim Johns | 29th August 2017

When the then UK Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, was asked what could blow his government off its course he famously replied: “Events, my dear boy, events.” Things rarely go in a straight line, shit happens (as the phrase goes), and few strategies stand the test of time. This conflict of strategy meeting reality was probably most eloquently summed up by Mike Tyson who said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Our collective addiction to news gives us a constant stream of events, large and small, human and natural. Making sense of them and learning to live with ambiguity is something that many people struggle with. This is because events represent a change from what came before and we all find change unsettling.

Organisations are highly complex and interwoven and they operate in highly complex interwoven, environments. Events, large and small, happen all the time. But it may be that the traditional approach to leadership is negatively impacting the corporate ability to evolve and react to change and opportunities. Many leaders still picture themselves as being in charge; standing at the helm and steering their ship towards its ultimate destination. Their corporate narrative describes a journey, a transformation to a glorious future of prosperity and success. There is a marvellous naivety in the idea that one person has the ability to influence and others merely follow. Such is the need for decision-making and productive activity that top-down, hierarchical structures are no longer appropriate.

Leadership, in all its various definitions, needs to be a core competency of every individual. Yet the reality is that too many have delegated and outsourced their personal responsibility to people “above” them. Many organisations have fostered a dependency model. However, to survive and thrive organisations need a cultural revolution where everyone sees themselves as a leader, and where the power of the swarm can self-organise to create solutions. This means that any culture change programme needs to start with the idea of encouraging individuals to take responsibility. In other words, to become leaders. And that also means that those who currently see themselves as leaders need to let go. The more they let go of control, the more they allow others to succeed.

And on the macro scale, of course, some events are demonstrably beyond control. Once in 500-year storms over flood plains that have been covered in concrete will test any water management systems. Communities can only survive such cataclysmic events through individual instances of leadership. One person, be it a Mayor or President, can’t solve such problems. Leadership can’t prevent natural events, as King Canute will attest, but it can try to limit and mitigate by empowering others to make decisions and act. True leadership is about creating the environment in which decisions can be taken.

And then there are events such as solar eclipses which are so beyond human intervention that one can only stand back and remember just how insignificant humanity is. This impotence is best summed up by one of my favourite quotes, first read over 35 years ago: Bertrand Russell demolishing Karl Marx: “He is too practical, too much wrapped up in the problems of his time. His purview is confined to this planet, and, within this planet, to Man. Since Copernicus, it has been evident that Man has not cosmic importance which he formerly arrogated to himself. No man who has failed to assimilate this fact has a right to call his philosophy scientific.”

You’ve got no mail

Tim Johns | 3rd July 2017

As cheesy romcoms go, You’ve got mail is on most lists. We all remember the visceral excitement of getting our first emails: the sense of communion, and of being part of a brave new digital world. 20 years later and perhaps we have hit peak email. Few work-related issues seem to stress people out more than the size of their inbox. For many, work has been reduced to sending and responding to emails. Input is receiving emails and output is replying, whereas outcome is measured solely by the number of unread emails left at the end of the day. This, perhaps, is why the UK has amongst the lowest productivity of any Nation in Europe. Technology that was meant to liberate has done the opposite. As Nicholas Taleb put it: “The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.”

Last week I heard of an accidental anthropological study. The experiment took place in an office and it was an accident because the company concerned was the victim of a ransomware attack aimed at their global parent. The longshot was that for three days they couldn’t use their systems. No email, no normal. All routine and all schedules disappeared, and with no typewriters to fall back on (incidentally, if you ever fancy a laugh, try explaining “cc” carbon copies to a Millennial.) The shutdown, however, led to some interesting outcomes.

Firstly, people started to talk to each other. Despite being full of people, many offices can be impersonal places. Teams sit together, workers have their heads down, and functions rarely break out of their self-imposed silos. People don’t talk because to talk is to interrupt screen-based work. Take away the screens and the people in this office started to communicate more openly than they could remember. People offered to help; people made creative suggestions; leaders emerged from unexpected places. Business as unusual created different behaviours.

Secondly, work became more effective. Without the constant waterfall of new emails, people were able to work without interruption. They triaged and prioritised work. They were better at making the distinction between urgent and important. Clients and customers were the focus rather than satisfying internal processes or managers.

Thirdly, there seemed to be fewer meetings. Perhaps it was because the routine had been broken, but it may also have been a subconscious realisation that not only were emails unproductive but also that so were meetings. And if they could do without the one then perhaps they also didn’t need the other.
Fourthly, people proved to be far more creative than their normal work suggested. As if no longer shackled to their desk, people broke free and came up with other ways to solve problems. They shared ideas beyond their usual groups and worked with others on issues outside their normal role. It demonstrated how often people are forced into work-related straight-jackets, unable to use their wider skills because they’re not part of their usual business objectives.

Finally, it was observed that there were far fewer free riders than would have been expected. Yes, there were some who made excuses, saw an opportunity to go home early, or to work from Starbucks. But the majority enjoyed the challenge that came with the unexpected crisis and rose to it.

And so, the questions are what were the lessons learnt and has any change been sustained? The answer to the first question is that many people for a long time have realised that email is a blunt instrument. It is good for sending messages or for posting documents to clients, but it is a bad way to run business, work collaboratively or make ironic jokes. Email is effective as a postbox but not much else. Many companies have for a while been working with digital communication solutions that are designed specifically for team tasks and co-working that encourage and enable creative collaboration (for instance, Yammer, Slack @Workplace by Facebook. Check out experts such as @simply-communicate for advice). In fact, internal communications as a discipline is fast changing from a top-down channel for senior management messages to one that gives people the tools they need to do their job properly. Technology, properly used, can liberate rather than enslave.

And has the change been sustained? What do you think? It’s probably too early to say. But as Sir Arthur Strieb-Griebling (aka Peter Cook) said: “Certainly, I have learned from my mistakes. If I had to start all over again, I’m sure I could repeat them exactly.”

Things have changed

Tim Johns | 29th March 2017

I used to think that I was good at change; after all, I coach people and organisations on embracing change and even call myself a change agent. But, as Bob Dylan said, things have changed. And I don’t think I’m alone in finding it all rather wearisome. I sense that one of the chief outcomes of the political, social, environmental and technological turbulence that we’re all experiencing is a rise in discombobulation. Even high energy, go-getting enthusiasts for change seem to be running out of breath. In organisations, long-term employees would often roll their eyes when (yet) another change programme with a fancy project name was announced. Clichés such as the only constant is change only adds to the sense of change fatigue. But one is now observing a sense in society generally that not only is the pace and frequency of change exhausting but also that the promised outcomes either never materialise or leave us worse off. So why bother. The general feeling seems to be to question whether all this change is actually necessary, whether that be macro political upheaval or the latest corporate restructure.

There are some who maintain that the lessons of history point to change occurring in cycles. There’s social cycle theory, generational theory and Schlesinger’s cyclical theory which states that in the US the hegemony shifts between public purpose and private interest. Others see our current situation, especially with the exponential growth in technology, as unprecedented. Some call it liquid modernity, others talk of flexible capitalism, or of an accelerating culture. Whatever it is, the search for peace of mind is more difficult.

Four seemingly interrelated concepts are at play in the never-ending cycle of change. The first is the pervasive idea that everything, and everybody, has to constantly improve. Nothing and no-one can stand still. Each of us has to be the best we can be at everything, all the time. The world of work is one long clarion call of self-advancement. We’re told of stretching ourselves and marginal gains. To be average or settled is a sign of failure. Only ceaseless betterment will be allowed. (Incidentally, is it only me who thinks that “constant change” is an oxymoron?).

The second is the demand for certainty. Ambiguity will not be tolerated. Good is good and bad is evil. Nuance is a French word and we don’t like French words. This thinking has influenced our political discourse where there can only be one truth. Listening and engaging with those with opposing views is for a small minority.

The third issue is that of the tyranny of the positive. Everything, it seems, is about being happy. Negative language and ideas are for losers. Businesses only want people who see opportunities and not problems.

Finally, there is FOMO – the fear of missing out. In our fractured state we want to belong. Standing out from the crowd and being on the edge of thoughts and movements relegates us to the margin. We need to be with the in-crowd, never more so than in times of great uncertainty. Social media, of course, exacerbates this feeling.

And so, we’re told to change and improve, to always want to be right, to be positive and to be on the winning side. No wonder that, given the circumstances, discombobulation is on the rise. What is the answer? One has been given by the Danish psychologist, Svend Brinkman. His new book, Stand Firm: resisting the self-improvement craze, is a cracking read that puts Stoic philosophy centre stage. It’s not meant to be taken too literally, but it is a marvellous antidote to the 100mph, positive psychology movement. It reminds us that things aren’t meant to be happy all the time, and that negativity is a human condition which, if we lose it, means that we lose much of what makes us who we are. He reminds us that we only know for certain what we know and, therefore, rather than moving forward in doubt it is often best to say no and stay where you are. It is a rewarding and reflective read.

But if we don’t want to be as accepting as the Stoics, how else can we respond to our troubled times? Some people I know are becoming politically engaged for the first time; others are getting involved in social projects to do their small bit to heal a broken society. And, of course, there are those who are checking out. Me? Well, I’m too old to become a fully paid-up optimist and so the best I can do is to try and become a positively-minded pessimist. Things have changed, but I still care.

People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight and out of range
I used to care but things have changed
Bob Dylan, Modern Times

Interesting times, and how to respond.

Tim Johns | 3rd February 2017

May you live in interesting times, says the famous Chinese curse. Well, it certainly feels as if we’re all cursed at the moment. Social, political, and economic turmoil, coupled with growing environmental issues, are all combining to such an extent that we’re seemingly suffering from corporate discombobulation. Every day there’s yet more bad news, raising the already raised blood pressure of the Nation. And so, given the extraordinary events that we wake up to every morning, what should be the rational response to our raised emotions? There are, I think, four potential responses, each rational in their own way. The question is which is the best in the long term.

The first response is to ignore all that is happening and try and remain in a state of blissful ignorance. There is a lot to be said for this Peekaboo(*) approach. We know that constantly worrying about things, and talking with others, can create a negative spiral into an even greater slough of despond. For me, this can be summed up with the morning dilemma of either choosing to switch on Radio 3 (calming classical music) or Radio 4 (more news about Truxit or Brexump). The first choice will set me up for the day in a good mood, whilst the other makes me angry and depressed. But is it right in the long-term to deny the reality of the situation in which we find ourselves? Which leads us to the second response.

Eternal optimism, or glass half full syndrome, to give it its proper name, can be a sensible alternative to ignorance. Mr Micawber, Dickens’ famous positive thinker, as his guiding principal said that something will turn up. Business is full of people who say that there’s no such thing as a problem, only an opportunity. More recently, a whole industry has developed around the idea of positive thinking and self-help. The shelves of airport bookshops groan with tomes devoted to the idea that we can take control of our destiny and, through the power of positive affirmation, guide ourselves to the life we want to lead. Recently, however, the Pollyanna brigade have taken a bit of a knock with academics attacking the idea that we can think our way to success and, instead, that achievement comes from practice, focus, and perseverance (see: Angels Duckworth, Grit; Roy Baumeister, Willpower ; Dan Pink, Focus). And see also the work of the Danish academic, Svend Brinkmann, who is so anti self-help that he thinks we should focus on negative aspects and repress our emotions. So, if optimism isn’t the right response, what else is there?

This week I found myself in a choir singing a chorus from Les Misérables (please don’t ask the details although, in my defence, it was for the Lord Mayor). It was the famous call to arms, the song of the angry men. (**) As I was singing lustily and heartedly (it’s impossible not to with these words) it struck me how perfect a sentiment it represented for our times. The rational response is to fight fire with fire. A new foe demands a new movement, a movement of right-thinking people. Citizens needs to organise and take the battle of societal engagement to those who try to impose their world order on others. And this, of course, is the right thing to do in the right circumstances. There comes a point when we say to ourselves, as Churchill did, that this is something up with which I will not put. But it seems to me that combating anger and hatred with anger and hatred, banning people from visiting us because they ban people from visiting them, has the effect of raising the nastiness and outrage to irrational levels of nastiness and outrage. And that can only end in tears.
And so to the fourth response. Call me naïve and foolish but surely a better long term approach is to be the change that you want to see. If you want to live in an open, tolerant, liberal, law-abiding environment, then act as a role model. The age of anger needs to be countered, but countering it with anger merely replaces one bad thing with another. Take road rage. US figures show that 66% of traffic fatalities were caused by aggressive driving. Responding to road rage with road rage makes a bad situation worse. And before you dismiss my hopelessly credulous thinking, I heard a story recently of a US professor who had been taking the same journey to work for 30 years. During that time he had experienced so many examples of bad traffic that he had been able to conduct his own experiment. He found that when he drove aggressively (constantly changing lane, driving too close to the car in front, not letting others cut in, accelerating quickly at the lights) it actually took him longer to get to work. When he drove well it was always quicker. He found that his bad, aggressive driving seemed to encourage others to act in the same way. When he was calm and polite, others were as well. Surely this is a metaphor for our times. And then there was the story from Texas of after a recent arson attack on a mosque, the local Jewish community handed the Muslims the keys to their synagogue so that the Muslims had somewhere to worship. Tolerance and decency seem far stronger long-terms weapons than hatred and reprisals.

I accept all accusations of foolishness, and I know that although Pastor Niemöller, in his famous poem (***), didn’t explicitly mention sherry-drinking, Renaissance music-loving, bibliophiles, but that I’m included by default. Nevertheless, I will leave anger for later. For the moment, I will stick to trying to be a role model.
…//…
(*)
Peek-a-Boo, I can’t see you,
Everything must be grand.
Boo-ka-Pee, they can’t see me,
As long as I’ve got me head in the sand.
Peek-a-Boo, it may be true,
There’s something in what you’ve said,
But we’ve got enough troubles in everyday life,
I just bury me head.
The Ostrich Song
Flanders & Swann

(**)
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the songs of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
That will give you the right to be free!
Herbert Kretzmeur – Les Misérables

(***)
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

[This blog also appeared on www.oratoconsulting.co.uk]

The truth about post-truth

Tim Johns | 21st November 2016

We are now living in a post-truth world, apparently. Recent political events have led some to conjecture that truth is passé, that facts are debatable, and that fake news is to blame. Some of this analysis comes from people genuinely concerned by how public discourse has become fact-lite, but the rest seemingly comes from those struggling to make sense of how their side lost. They perhaps feel cheated of their birth-right as a result of the other side not playing fair. But the “truth” is surely that this has always been the case: in a battle between facts and perception, facts will always be on the losing side. Social media, as ever, may have exacerbated the situation but the elements that make up a post-truth society have always been with us.

The history of humankind is based on myth. In fact, one of the main distinguishers between our species and others is our ability to make sense of our existence by telling each other stories, as Yuval Noah Harari reminded us in Sapiens. Money doesn’t exist: we invented it in order to create trade; nation states don’t exist, but we use them for our identity. Myths and the telling of stories is part of our humanity. For thousands of years people have lived in societies where actual truth is only a bit-part player. Religious doctrines, which in nearly all instances began mostly as myth, tend to be full of literal, historical and, of course, scientific contradictions and inaccuracies. Yet for vast swathes of the world the facts of these religions are the basis of how people live their lives. Repressive political regimes have, again throughout history, used a wide interpretation of the word truth to keep their people in check. What constitutes propaganda often depends on which side of the curtain you’re sitting. And, of course, it was Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) who was so impressed by the propaganda techniques that he’d seen during the war that he wanted to deploy them in peacetime. He thought, however, that propaganda sounded a rather dirty word; instead, he chose the phrase Public Relations.

The post-truth brigade also miss the lessons of behavioural science. All our decision-making is post-rationalised. We choose based on assumptions and emotions and then retrofit a rational explanation. Our free will is constrained by our neuro-chemistry and our social conditioning. Facts, such as they are, rarely come into it. Group think, for instance, can place unbearable demands on our understanding of what is true. There have been numerable psychological experiments where a group of “experts” get together to argue for something they know to be false leaving another in the dark arguing for what (they all know) is right. In all cases this experiment ends with the lone voice so doubting themselves in the face of such peer pressure that they “change their mind.” Scarily this experiment has been tested with groups such as lawyers, doctors, and airline pilots, each time with the same effect. It can also be the sheer volume of facts that can be the problem. Such are the many permutations of options that there can never, for instance, be a factually correct data/phone tariff choice. Therefore, we either best guess, or use other surrogate decision-making substitutes. And, of course, there’s our old friend confirmation bias, where we seek out information to support our pre-existing views. As Orwell said, the best books are those that tell you what you already know. Quid est veritas, you might say.

Brexit and Trump both provide other good lessons. There are those who may like to think that facts played a part, especially those incorrect facts deliberately deployed to scare. There are no facts, only interpretations, as Nietzsche reminded us. But really both these political events probably demonstrate two inter-related points. Firstly, the power of myth, or story-telling to give it it’s nom du jour. In both cases, one side deployed stories and the other deployed logical facts. Soft (tall) stories beat hard facts. Secondly, communication will always be a poor proxy for behaviour. People listened less to the words and more to the body language. In times of difficulty we seek out people like us. We are, after all, a highly tribal species. People looked for those that they thought were on their side. They listened to them and they believed their myths. They ignored the others not because of what they said but because how they behaved demonstrated whether they were on their side, sharing values and aspirations. Fake news, lies, conspiracy theories…all these things were in the margin. People picked personalities that were part of their tribe, and in both cases it was the left behind attacking the elite.
So where does this leave us? Firstly, it does make us question the role of communication to influence. Perhaps we need to focus more on behaviour and attitude and less on words. Secondly, when we do focus on words we must tell stories rather than try and bludgeon people with facts. And thirdly, despite society’s seemingly endless need for certainty perhaps we should occasionally admit that sometimes we really don’t know the answer. There often is no black and white. The truth, as Oscar Wilde put it, is rarely pure and never simple. Seeing things from the other persons point of view and building for consensus rather than difference may be the only way forward, but blaming them for not understanding facts is unlikely to help.

Autumn Leaves

Tim Johns | 8th September 2016

Summer is over, annual leave has ended, Autumn is upon us, and it’s back to work. Despite the summer break it is all too easy to settle back into the same old routine and roll downhill to Christmas. All those dreams and ambitions of the summer, the wistful feelings of another way of living, all land with a bump when real life comes back with a vengeance. It is surprising how many people jump back onto the treadmill and carry on as if nothing has happened. They shake the sand off their flip-flops and they’re back at their desk as if they’ve never been away. Some people see the new year as heralding a new start but for me it’s always been the beginning of the Michaelmas term and the rugby season that gets me thinking. Every time the leaves start to turn I see it as an opportunity to pause, reflect and, in modern parlance, reboot.

The environment in which we all operate is more complex, volatile and uncertain than ever before. And yet many seem programmed to carry on working and living as if it is business as usual. This silo mentality is instilled in us from an early age. We are put into compartments by, on the whole, well-meaning parents and teachers; we are either good or bad (delete where applicable) at games, music, maths, science, languages, art; we are either academic or good with our hands; we are shy or gregarious, and so on… But this language is important because it goes a long way to shaping how with think of ourselves and, especially, our attitude to our work lives. It dominates our life choices and shapes our destiny.

Coaches frequently come across people who are stuck. They’re people who are very good at what they do but they feel stranded, trapped by their own success and with a feeling that they’re pointing in the wrong direction. It is extraordinary how many brilliant people can suffer from poverty of ambition. They can see clearly from their current vantage point but struggle with being able to imagine other scenarios. Sometimes it is because their view is coloured by extrinsic issues: for instance, their perception of their own status or their financial needs. But other times it is due to their intrinsic sense of what they’re good at and their sense of purpose. One technique that coaches use to unblock some of these issues is visualisation: getting people to imagine multiple possible alternatives. Reimaging oneself can be a useful tool in helping unblock the sort of rigid thinking that keeps people, and their talents, in a box. For instance, just because you were good at maths and became an accountant doesn’t mean that’s what you have to do for the whole of your life (although as Monty Python showed us, if you are an accountant and want to be a lion tamer it is probably best to make the transition via banking). Similarly, pausing to reflect can also be helpful in reaffirming commitment to one’s current path.

The world may be uncertain and volatile but is also exciting. To prosper people are going to have to be more flexible and fluid in their approach to work than ever before. The nature of work is being disrupted (by, inter alia, big data and AI), and the gig economy and freelancing are both growing rapidly. Rigid thinking towards careers and work are being challenged. More people are seeking to seize control of their destiny and make their own luck. After all, it is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves, as Shakespeare put it.

With or without a coach, Autumn is a good time to challenge oneself instead of jumping straight back into the old routine. Rather than seeing it as a time of twilight, try and kindle the memories of the summer when you managed to not think about work. If you’re content with the status quo, fine, carry on. But if there’s a nagging doubt, then pause and try and let the voice make itself heard. Either way, rather than allow yourself to be stuck in your self-imposed silo, aim to do remarkable things. After all, we only get one chance.

And, by way of a bonus track, here is the English Chamber Choir singing Autumn Leaves, by Joseph Kosma arranged by Andrew Carter http://bit.ly/2c09et3

Brexit lessons in change management

Barry Clarke | 30th June 2016

Irrespective of which side we took in the referendum, it has provided valuable lessons in anticipating, planning and managing change which, after all, is our business at Change Agency.

Remarkably, the political and economic lessons from this exercise in democracy resonate with the evidence we have gathered in helping companies and non-profit organisations to manage change effectively. In particular:

• Address clearly the issue of ‘what’s in it for me’
• Don’t take your stakeholders for granted
• Set clear and measurable goals so that you know what success will look like
• Be clear about the costs
• Consistent and frequent messaging is effective
• Tell the truth

The Remain side failed to make a clear value proposition to a significant part of the electorate. In focusing on the likely negative consequences of leaving the EU, it failed to explain to millions of disaffected citizens how the EU benefited them.

Every successful change management project requires the investment of time and empathy to understand the hopes and concerns of those who will be most affected. Remain clearly failed to do this – particularly the Labour Remainers who had not heard or acted upon the anger and frustration of their members. The election of Jeremy Corbyn ought to have been a clue about the disaffection with politics as usual among those who have experienced nothing of the economic recovery since 2008.

There wasn’t any suggestion of a strategic plan on either side. Remain had no Plan B and Leave didn’t even have a Plan A. The absence of any sort of plan was evident in the subdued winner’s speech in which Boris seemed surprised to have won and uncertain about what to do next. We suspect that he was even more disconcerted when stabbed in the back by his very own Brutus. Change needs more than a negative purpose but neither side was able to articulate what success looks like.

All change comes with cost implications. It would have been helpful for the voters to have had some idea of the impact of leaving on the cost of imports, the value of sterling and the billions needed to shore up our currency.

There’s also an important lesson in the messaging. Our experience as communicators compels us to admire the Leave campaign’s ability to communicate a simple idea and do so with frenetic frequency without fear of excessive repetition. In the last of the Dimbleby Debates, the Leavers adeptly repeated their slogan ‘Take back control’ at least once every three minutes to ensure that their message reached viewers with a limited attention span.

Truth was, as always, an early victim of this war yet all successful change depends on it. We urge clients to give clear and reasoned expectations of what change will achieve. We would have liked both sides to be more honest with the data and to clearly differentiate evidence from speculation. Change management fails when expectations are not met.

The referendum majority expects massive investment in the NHS, a continuation of all regional development funds, higher earnings and selective immigration. We suggest the early and comprehensive design of Plan A with extensive mitigation provisions in the event that taking back control requires more than just a slogan.

Compromising at Work

Tim Johns | 8th March 2016

There are few aspects of life that don’t involve making compromises. Every part of our existence involves curtailing individual freedom or postponing desires in order to co-exist with others. We happily obey rules that limit our personal liberty, such as driving on the left or paying taxes, in order to benefit from the security that a civilised society offers. Even those people who opt out make a compromise, trading their freedom against the ability to avail themselves of the many upsides of a consumer society. At a more basic level, successful relationships are based entirely on two people deciding on issues together, something that inevitably involves the art of making sacrifices.

The world of work is no different. But, in this instance, I often get a sense from talking to people just how many have made their compromises unconsciously. They started out perfectly sanguine about what was required from them and what unwritten contract they made with themselves. Before they know it, they have fallen into a routine of long hours, commuting, endless unproductive meetings, bureaucracy, and hierarchies. Work has, for many, become a straight-jacket from which it is difficult to escape until, that is, a way has been found to exist without money. Until then, the need to pay mortgages, school fees and holidays provides a constant reminder to keep working. It is a necessary evil although, as C S Lewis reminded us, we should never mistake necessary evils for good.

Businesses also incentivise people to stay. That can only be a good thing, right? Well, I see so many people who continue to postpone what they really want to do until their long term incentives pay out. These LTIPs or CNCL (crap now, cash later) as I call them, have the effect of rewarding the wrong behaviour. The famous Marshmallow Test experiment of Walter Mischel tried to test whether a child’s ability to defer gratification (one marshmallow now versus three later) could predict the strength of their willpower. These long term incentives, rather than spawning improved performance, have a habit of encouraging people to keep their heads down and stay past their sell-by date. I also see people who have stayed so long that they’ve forgotten what it is that they made those compromises for in the first place. It’s a bit like the reverse of Wilde’s Dorian Grey. In this instance, they’ve grown grey and gaunt after a lifetime of work and now barely recognise the portrait in their loft of them as a young, thrusting person with an ambition for life.

All this occurred to me as I recently read the latest Julian Barnes’ novel, The Noise of Time. It’s a quasi-biographical novel about the life of the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich. It is fascinating and can be read on many levels. But it is essentially about the compromises that Shostakovich makes, both personally and artistically, in order to survive in Stalin’s Russia. As Barnes said: “If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself.” Of course, I am not in any way trying to compare corporate life with the heinous Stalinist regime, but this is, I feel, as good an insight as any into the nature of compromise. People at work do, consciously and unconsciously, make sacrifices that eat into their very nature. And so much so that they move inexorably away from being the person that they used to be. Again, as Barnes says in the novel: “…one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.”

Staying true to our dreams and ambitions is tough, because life does require us to make compromises. Life can never be a straight line. But having a sense of one’s non-negotiables – those values and needs that we will not forgo – can help us enormously to navigate our way through life. It is important for us to be conscious of those decisions rather than let them sink below the surface only to re-emerge when it’s possibly too late. And that requires a high degree of bravery. As e e cummings said; “it takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”

Loneliness of MSI leadership

Barry Clarke | 8th February 2016

The executive leadership of even the most successful multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) is often a lonely and unrewarding task.

Over the past two decades, we have seen impressive growth in the number and reach of MSIs which formalise and encourage the design, development and implementation of systems to transform production methods and supply chains for the benefit of people and the environment. These voluntary standard systems have become models of effective pre-competitive collaboration between multi-national companies, their suppliers, commodity producers and civil society organisations.

The largest and longest established of these standards systems, have achieved global impact in sectors ranging from forestry and fishing to cocoa and coffee. Some, such as the Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade, have succeeded in raising levels of awareness among consumers as well as influencing the policies and practices of governments and behaviour throughout supply chains.

Many of these systems share knowledge and experience through membership of the ISEAL Alliance which currently has 23 full and associate member organisations which can demonstrate how they are contributing to economic, environmental and social sustainability. Beyond the current membership, there are dozens of other sustainability standards at various stages of evolution.

While each organisation has a different mission, our work has enabled us to see evidence of the effectiveness of the cross-sector collaboration while appreciating the challenging and often dispiriting nature of executive leadership in MSIs. These organisations are extremely tough to manage.

As we see it, there are four key factors which contribute to the loneliness and frustration of MSI chief executives: reconciling stakeholder priorities, serving a multi-stakeholder board, securing income and attracting key staff.

It can be difficult to manage the expectations and interests of all the stakeholders. While the participants share a common vision, their culture, resources and priorities are quite different.  Agreement on long-term goals does not equate to a consensus view of short-term action. The initiative’s supporters have differing reporting obligations to their own stakeholders, different concepts of how governance relates to management and different notions of return on investment.

MSI Boards tend to be made up of experienced and authoritative individuals who are highly skilled but time poor. For the chief executive, the MSI is an overriding concern while for her or his board members it is just one of a wide range of interests and concerns and may be something to think about just before or during occasional board meetings.

Funding is a major issue for newer MSIs while they are testing and developing a viable business model. Not surprisingly, there can be significant differences around the board about who should contribute how much and the extent to which the organisation’s work should be funded through earned income as opposed to donor philanthropy. It is invariably the chief executive who is held responsible for securing income and meeting the diverse and possibly conflicting expectations of those provide it.

Arguably, the greatest challenge of all is attracting and retaining the high quality talent which is essential to the success of the initiative and to the performance of the chief executive. Senior roles in these organisations require exceptional specialist expertise yet the compensation on offer compares unfavourably with that on offer in the public and private sectors.

Our conclusion is that MSI leaders have a great deal to gain by sharing experiences with each other. The World Bank sponsored conference at Wilton Park in 2014 was a welcome effort to bring together MSI leaders to address issues of mutual interest but there’s much more that could be done by promoting and enabling collaboration among the collaborators.

The ISEAL Alliance Global Sustainability Standards Conference in Washington DC in May could prove to be an opportunity to share learning and build a mutual support network for this small but essential group of leaders who deserve more reliable backing than they currently receive.