Posts from — May 2008

The very lovely people of The Eastlake Group invited me to speak at an event for their customers and prospects. Given that they specialise in creating effective working spaces for their clients, they’d had the great idea to hold the event not in a conference centre or hotel meeting room, but in the shell of a just completed new-build office block.

My talk: Working Towards a Brilliant Life.

Photos to come, and, in the meantime, here’s the flyer - eastlake-brilliant-life-invitation - with what my bio looks like in Welsh…

I’ve been in Shanghai, working in a hotel which was, apparently, the home of Shanghai’s Gangster No 2 early last century. Given the photos of him around the walls, holding court with the statesmen, politicians, actors and business people of his day, he was clearly a very popular guy. Or maybe he was very persuasive.

Monday morning: a workshop that starts by asking this marketing leadership team: what’s the thing you most need to develop that will create a step-change in the work of this team? Their answer: influencing. Creating more effective relationships with their internal and external business partners so that they get the buy-in, engagement, permission, resources - and all those other variants of Yes - which allow their ideas to come into reality.

I’m taken aback by how strongly the team feels about those it has to influence, and mostly those feelings are not positive ones. The default stance seems to be that others are wrong or bad to behave as they do, and that is what makes them difficult to influence. Which sort of explains, I guess, why people think they are going to have to have difficult, fierce and risky conversations to move things forward…

So the first intervention is to change how they look at these ‘problem people’ (Wayne Dyer: change how you look at something, and what you look at changes). To stop making them wrong, to stop making them intractable. To see that the behaviour of these people is perfectly right, natural and justified - from their perspective.

I’ll add a third reason to CW’s list of reasons all business people should have a substantial theatre experience as part of their development. It’s about the customer. That the customer pays our salaries is the truism that many businesses use to sell the idea that serving the customer well is a good idea. So there is an economic transaction: we treat you nicely and we get something we want in return.

In the theatre, this transaction is taken down a few levels, to a place where the money becomes the merest of details. Of course, we can’t pay the actors and the stage crew if we don’t get a paying audience. But there’s something more substantial at risk. Without an audience to witness us, there is no performance. Without the observer, the character does not come into being.

Our customers do not just pay for us, they validate our existence.

In the rehearsal room.

You should see what happens when grown adults learn to play again. When judgement is let go of, and is replaced by ‘what about?’ and ‘what if?’ and ‘let’s try it, see what happens’.

I’ve been given the great opportunity to work in a theatre again, eighteen years after I last stepped foot in one as a creative participant rather than an audience member. It has been wonderful.

On one level, the project was a teambuilding one. Richard Jacobs of Yes asked me to help him out with a client who wanted to explore their corporate values, and in so doing, develop the work-related skills of collaboration and innovation. No big news there. Companies come together on off-sites every week of the year with such intentions. They could have abseiled down a cliff together, or built a raft out of twigs and lemon peel and sailed across a river. But Richard persuaded them that they could just as well generate some healthy anxiety by coming together on Day 1, knowing that 28 hours later, by the end of Day 2, they would be performing - having devised it, written it and (for those who did not want to ‘act’) learnt the complementary skills of stage management, lighting design and so on - a complete one hour play for a specially invited audience of friends and family. And all this in a real theatre, the Unicorn.

On another, personal, level, this has been a journey for me. I came into the business world from theatre, and, here I am, about to take a sabbatical from business, apparently coming full circle. Back to the stage. Back to the magical place.

When I was writing How to Make Work Fun! I went to the States to talk with a man who had written a similar book over there. It transpired that as well as being a ‘fun consultant’ CW Metcalf also had begun in the theatre (and along the way played Bozo the clown in Happy Days - a character I cannot recall but who almost certainly was the spitting image of Crusty the Clown from The Simpsons). Anyhow, CW told me that he thought all business people should have some experience working in the theatre, for two reasons:

(i) that, without any exhortation or theory or coaching to be that way, theatre is inherently a team activity. The guy on stage doing a soliloquy from Hamlet knows that he is no more important or necessary than the guy hidden away in the darkness at the back of the theatre with his hand on the lighting controls.

(ii) that there is nothing in business that - despite its bluster and macho will-power and long-hours-work-hard-get-the-job-done effort - is akin to the extraordinary energy or spirit that kicks in in the final days before curtain up, and transforms a rag bag of doubting actors and suddenly new props and gaffer-taped scenery into The Performance.

This energy is known and has passed into the collective consciousness as the cliché It Will Be All Right On The Night, but I assure you, the phrase doesn’t do the experience justice. And as I stand here in the darkness of the wings at the Unicorn Theatre, I am remembering its power. It is like being held, and lifted…

My belief is that the great untapped potential of Organisational Development is how people talk to each other: what they say, what they don’t say, and how the nature and quality of their conversations creates the ‘field’ which they then say they ‘experience’. The challenge is that this field is a result of the talking, rather than the instinctive understanding we tend to hold that our talking simply describes the field and the experiences therein. The clearest demonstration of this is when I ask you to tell me about your company, or its culture, or the problems it is facing: you can’t do that without including some stuff, and leaving other stuff out. And in this natural, often unconscious, editing of ‘reality’, you have your company be as you want it to be, for whatever reason you have for doing that. So you tell me about the problems, and you describe and justify those problems with data - and of course I do that too when I want you to know how unique and special my own personal problems are -  and what we all end up with is the story of a problem-saturated company.

It may even be ‘true’ that your company faces these problems, but even if it’s true, it’s not especially helpful or empowering to talk about them in this way. On the contrary, it probably results in us both being agreed that there’s an awful lot of intractable problems in your company, and dismayed that we’ll ever be able to do anything about them.

The work therefore becomes exploring what is left unsaid, what is being edited out. And that’s where the potential comes alive again.

So a good question to ask is: “Tell me - what’s working around here?”

On the verge of our move, and in the midst of what might be seen as my second mid-life crisis, I am in the wondrous, glorious, precious position of being able to stand where I am and look back at my life to date as an OD consultant and reflect on what, above all else, has made any difference at all. From those reflections, I have compiled this one page.

I heartily recommend anyone reading this to carry out the same process, whatever your field of practice: what really worked for you, and what, in the end, turned out to be so much puffery?

A necessary side effect of such an exercise, perhaps, is the realisation that so much sound and fury has apparently been wasted on stuff that didn’t actually work at all. Ah well…I wish I’d have had access to this single page of text when I started…

what-works

…all sorts of stuff, really