Competitive collaboration

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility, opportunity, paradox

Michel Roux' service 'apprentices'

One of the things that really struck me about the recent Michel Roux series was how different it was from other ‘reality TV’ shows. Unlike Ramsay’s offerings, there was no shouting, bullying or swearing; unlike Sugar’s Apprentice there were no over-confident 20-odd year old ****s biting at each other and unlike the jungle there was no Gillian Keith! More a case of a group of individuals working to become a team in the hope that some of them could win a life-changing prize.
Never once did I see or hear any evidence of an individual trying to get one up on their colleagues or to position themselves as a ‘winner’. No, it was so evident throughout that this was a team game, even though there would ultimately be winners. What a wonderful demonstration of the power of teamwork to allow individuals to show themselves at their best.

5 ways to help you achieve the impossible

Geoff Roberts change

Mission Impossible
Watching the final episode of Michel Roux’ Service last night, I was struck by what the participants had achieved over just 8 weeks. They had come from ‘less than happy’ life situations and blossomed as they were given tougher and tougher challenges. Some of these kids had never been in a restaurant other than McDonald’s and here they were serving in Michelin starred establishments.
It was slightly sad to hear, early on in the series, a couple of the participants saying “I can’t do this” and that led me to reflect a little on how we can achive the impossible. I have 5 suggestions…

1) Change your mindset about what is possible. Specifically, start to believe that it is possible and that you can do it. If you don’t believe then you will never deliver. Michel Roux was unremitting in his praise and reinforcement for the capability of his proteges – how often did we hear him saying “You can do this”.

2) What happens, happens – work with it. You cannot control very much, if anything, about what is going on around you so embrace the opportunity whether it comes your way through sheer coincidence or planning. Embrace the opportunity and use it to further your aims. You may not get the perfect opportunity at the perfect time so do the best with what you have now. The servers quickly learned that even though customers do some odd things and make some strange requests they could meet thier needs with a smile.

3) Get out of your comfort zone (yes, again). Tell other people-friends, partners, bosses etc – what you are going to do. That public commitment can make so much difference. Michel Roux certainly took these guys out of their comfort zones!

4) Take action. Thinking never changed the world, it was only when the thinker decided to take action that something in the real world changed. The sooner you start to take action, the soon you get feedback and the possibility of learning whether you need to pursue the current course or make a course correction.

5) Seek help. No matter how much you practice, there is likely to be someone or something out there who can help. Someone who shares part or all of your aim, someone who has been there before and can help you or maybe just someone to prop you up when the going gets tough. Do what is necessary. If you do not have all the answers, and you almost certainly don’t, then seek them from someone who might have. Keep going and strive for improvement. Michel constantly introduced his trainees to different mentors, each of whom brought a different set of skills to learn from.

Anthony Robbins is quoted as saying:

what we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.

No risk, no reward

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, opportunity, Risk

risk is realityHow often have you heard the phrase no risk, no reward?

When I was at school I was quite good at chemistry, well ahead of the class. I vividly remember one practical lesson when the chemistry teacher, a wonderful man called Dave Hudson, took me aside and explained that he was going to give me a different practical to complete compared to everyone else in the class. He said that it was extremely difficult but that he believed I could do it. It turned out to be a fairly complex procedure, using some dangerous chemicals. However, I pulled it off much to my own surprise and quite possibly to the chemistry teacher’s. That practical lesson could well have been the moment that catalysed my future career. A brilliant teacher took a risk and allowed me to learn that I was capable of much more than I had so far showed. I blogged earlier about fear and anxiety in learning and this is clearly linked to the concept of taking risks. Risk creates anxiety, anxiety opens the possibility of learning.

So my challenge, whether you are thinking of personal development or the development of those with whom you work, is to think about the amount of risk you take in your daily life and to push the boundaries a little. How often have you not asked (the boss, your colleague, your partner…) because you fear the wrong response? Will surely the worst that can happen is that they say no and if you don’t even ask then there is no possibility of them saying yes.

So next time you really want to try something new, go ahead and do it – I might even suggest that you don’t even ask, just go ahead and do it because it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission and, moreover, you are much more likely to get it.

Positivity is infectious

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus

I met a colleague of mine, Chris Edwards, in Leeds yesterday. Chris has overseen a fundamental transformation and improvement of education throughout Leeds over the last 10 years and is now out on his own looking for opportunities to help the world. I always find my time with Chris inspirational – he is irrepressibly positive and upbeat, his favourite word is “brilliant” and his belief in people, especially children, is awesome. We talked a lot about beliefs and how the beliefs that parents embed in their children can either help or hinder them.

I would never dream of telling my four-year-old granddaughter that the picture of a tree that she has just presented me with looks nothing like a tree and that she cannot draw. It seems almost intuitive to me that constant negative messages are likely to leave her believing that she is no good and lo and behold she will be no good. Chris tells me that there is some research that shows that the lowest performing children have parents who give them eight times as many negative messages as positive and the highest performers have parents who give them eight times as many positive messages as negative.

If this makes so much difference the children, then why not adults as well? If you work with anyone, and you don’t have to manage them you simply have to work with them, then perhaps you might like to check how often you praise them versus how often you give negative feedback. Yoou DO give feedback don’t you?

And what about yourself? What about that self talk that constantly goes on inside our heads? Is yourself talk supportive or destructive? Do you believe in yourself? Do you believe that you can take things on and do a good job or is everything too difficult? Self belief is all-important. As Henry Ford once said

whether you believe you can
or you believe you cannot
you are probably right

Believe in others, believe in yourself and be sure to give yourself and others great feedback.

Learning to Learn

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility

When I was at school, and it is not all that long ago, the careers advisers could look at our academic and other strengths as well as our preferences and make a pretty good stab at the sort of careers for which I would be most suited – chemist, bank manager, bus driver, dustbin men etc. And indeed for most of my generation that is what happened. I was a keen little amateur chemist, with a chemistry set that would probably get me into trouble with the anti-terrorist squad these days, and I went on to be an analytical chemist before extending my scientific education into sewage science and other aspects of environmental science and regulation. It was only towards the latter part of my career that I started to take a serious interest in organisational change and personal development, the fields in which I operate nowadays.

It would not have crossed my careers adviser’s mind that I might want to be a online games designer or a developer of operating systems for mobile telephones (which did not exist when I was at school) or even an engineer fitting satellite receiving dishes to individual domestic properties to allow them to receive the several hundred television channels available these days. None of these jobs even existed when I was at school. This is the dilemma that so many of today’s schoolchildren face.
It has been suggested that the pace of change in technology and society if such that most of the children starting school today need to be prepared to do jobs that do not even exist and cannot currently be envisaged. So with what skills do we equip those schoolchildren? Yes, they will need to be literate and numerate and the ability to speak Chinese or Spanish or one of the Indian dialects is likely to prove more helpful than speaking French or German. However all of this is just the fundamental basis upon which more specialist knowledge is likely to need to rest. So what specialist knowledge? How can we know if the jobs, and even industries, which will employ today’s schoolchildren have yet to be invented?

Well it seems to me that there are two core skills that will be needed. Firstly the ability to work constructively with others – fields of knowledge are getting ever smaller, we know more and more about less and less, and effective work in the future will require comprehensive collaboration amongst different people with different knowledge bases. Secondly, and arguably the most important attribute of all, if the ability to learn. The HR pundits have been talking for some years now about lifelong learning and the more forward of my colleagues have recognised that they need to keep their skill base topped up. In my lifetime, I have had three fundamentally different careers each of which necessitated learning substantial new knowledge and skills; in the lifetimes of children at school today they might expect a fundamental career change every 10 years or so. I vividly remember introducing a computer-based customer complaints and operations management system which required many of our frontline staff to operate keyboards for the first time in their lives. Today’s generation grow up with keyboards and Xbox controllers almost as appendages to their hands. But what will they need to learn to use so that they can do the job they will be fulfilling in 20 years time?

It has become increasingly clear that the one sustainable Advantage that education can give our children, and we can give ourselves as adults, is the ability to learn quickly and effectively. This does not just happen. We can no longer ‘finish our education’ after university and today’s kids can no longer simply fill their head with facts. I was never explicitly taught how to acquire knowledge or a skill, let’s make sure that today’s pupils are being equipped for the unknown world into which they will be ejected all too soon.

A quick thought on the importance of language

Geoff Roberts change, language

Question mark - WHY?
When someone else does something that puzzles me, I am often tempted to ask ‘Why?’ – and I always get an answer that justifies the original act.

Whenever you ask someone ‘why’ they did something, you are inviting them to justify their actions and, in their mind, this actually reinforces the behaviour. The question somehow invokes defensive routines in the respondent’s mind.

Rather than ask why someone did something there are more helpful questions you can pose. Ask them what they were trying to achieve, or how what they did helped them. These are quite different questions and far more useful because they activate a different part of the brain to ‘Why?’. You might get an answer that helps you understand how the original action was a good idea, or you might get a better understanding of the rationale for the action and so be able to formulate a different action that would get the result you both want.

On the other hand, it is good to ask why someone did something that turned out well, as this will reinforce the desired behaviour.

“Why do you read these blog articles?” 🙂

Risk and fear in learning

Geoff Roberts change, Risk

Comfort zoneI have just come back from three wonderful days in Peterborough helping train a small group facilitators. Now facilitation is a many headed beast with lots of different definitions and expectations. In this case we were helping the participants to learn firstly about a 10 step process and secondly about the art and science of helping groups to make decisions within that process. The first part, as I have commented previously, is relatively straightforward whereas the second is, to me, the interesting arena.

There is a whole bunch of theory about facilitation, with John Heron being the most well-known guru, but the theory is no use unless you can put it into practice and it is only in practice that one really learns at an affective level about the realities of group dynamics. Moreover, that learning is partly about group dynamics and partly about oneself – it is the self learning that I want to comment on here.

One of the exercises we gave this group was to tell them that a small number of very senior and very experienced people would be coming along on the second evening and that our trainees were expected to host them. That’s all we told them, no times, no expectations etc. It was, and always is, interesting to observe the group struggle with this seriously ill defined task (especially if, as in this case, the group is primarily comprised of left brain engineers). On review, all of the participants reported feeling fearful around this task, outside their comfort zone and worried about whether or not they could pull it off. Of course, they did pull it off and they always do and the review explored whether or not the success was despite of or because of their fear.

Perhaps it is both, because the fear and discomfort requires them to go into a creative zone and to overcome the fear. The clever ones amongst our clients realise that the task we give them is both a learning exercise and the real task and the very clever ones acknowledge that learning only occurs when we are to some extent uncomfortable. Indeed being comfortable means, by definition, that we know what is going on around us and if we know that then we cannot be learning.

So one of our challenges in helping people learn, and one of your challenges in learning, is to become comfortable being uncomfortable. I’ll say that again, we need to get comfortable being uncomfortable, because the only place where learning occurs in the uncomfortable zone. Not so far that panic sets in, but so far that our brains have to go somewhere new to invent ways of handling the situation. Now we could run away from the situation, but that would neither get the task delivered nor create learning. Or we could resist, and that might create a different sort of learning with good facilitation but it would simply get in the way of getting the task done. So effective learners accept the situation as it is, recognise the value of their own discomfort and working on themselves with others to create effective solutions. It is in this uncomfortable zone that creativity can really happen, and after all what is learning if not creating new neural pathways?

So, if you want to be a lifelong learner then maybe you should be on the lookout for opportunities to make yourself uncomfortable – do new things, go to new places, read new books, talk to new people… Face your fears, whatever you choose to do just push yourself every now and again into that zone of discomfort knowing that when you look back you will be able to discover some learning. No risk, no reward.

PS I have just come across a short interview with Ed Schein on this topic – thanks to my mate Wynn Rees for alerting me to his work on this subject.

Metaprograms – Towards or Away From

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility

Donkey with stick and carrotIn yesterday’s post I thought about whether or not we see the world as full of problems to avoid or opportunities to take. I also mentioned that there was a link to metaprograms dealing with Towards or Away From motivation.

I have spent a lot of my career dealing with change at both corporate and personal levels and can now easily recognise two different types of thinking when faced with change. There are those who look at situations and can readily list all the problems that we currently have and perhaps how the change might be able to help solve them – their motivation is to move away from problems. On the other hand there are those who will look at the situation and will be primarily motivated by the wonderful bright new world into which we are sailing – their motivation is primarily towards the future.

Away From or Troubleshooting thinking is great at identifying what is currently wrong, what might go wrong in the future and how we might prevent previous problems recurring. Those who process in this way tend to be risk averse, to excel in a crisis situation and to be good at making contingency plans. Because they are so good at this, there is a risk that sometimes they identify problems that aren’t actually there and fight fires that don’t exist or don’t need putting out. They can slow down change and sometimes this is helpful because the towards thinker can become a bit gung ho.

Towards thinking is typified by the person who still smiles even when they are up to their neck in the crocodile filled swamp. This type of thinking is extremely future focused, concentrating on achieving goals and positive thinking. However these thinkers can be so enthusiastic that they overlook actual or potential problems and pitfalls and need an away thinking colleague to complement their approach.

Perhaps you will do both of these, although experience indicates that it is rare for someone to excel at both types of thinking, or perhaps you sit closer to one end of the scale than the other. Remember that both types of thinking are helpful, the towards thinking provides the enthusiasm and drive to move forward and the away from thinking provides the caution necessary to avoid the towards thinker falling down a dirty great hole that they just didn’t see because they were focusing on their goals.

So here’s the exercise – think of a change that you would like to make. Now list two or three current problems that the change will solve and one or two potential pitfalls that you will need to be aware of. Next list three or four compelling reasons for making the change, three or four improvements that will be recognisable once the change has been made. Using both types of thinking gives you a more comprehensive view of the situation.

Leadership in the middle

Geoff Roberts change

LeadershipI posted a week or so ago about that challenge of becoming a leader, commenting how effective leaders become more of themselves rather than copying someone else. The rest of the programme caused me to wonder yet further.

The whole programme concentrated on iconic leaders in industry and politics. This is fair enough and I do not want to deny the role of such leaders. However, the majority of leadership roles sit much ‘lower down’ in organisations and I would love more attention to be paid to leading in/from the middle of an organisation.

Every team and department has its leader, every social club, every boozing party, every sports team… – and that leader faces many challenges familiar to the iconic heads of the organisation. Indeed, one might argue that, because they have to deal with their own bosses as well as team members, they have bigger leadership challenges.

Very few of us will ever reach the dizzy heights of Prime Minister or Chair of Marks & Spencer, yet many of us will face leadership challenges as we try to take others with us on our journey. Many of the attributes and capabilities are likely to be the same, but how does leadership from the middle differ? I will be looking out on this topic over future months, expect to hear more…

Skiing and a lesson in excellence

Geoff Roberts change

Downhill skierI have spent the last half-hour watching the men’s downhill skiing from Kitzbuhel. Now I used to be a passable skier before I got fat and unfit and have skied several of the mens’ downhill courses around Europe; so I have some idea of how difficult it is and remain awestruck that these guys approach 80 mph, skiing in 2 min something that used to take me 10. The whole experience set me thinking about what it is that makes us experts at something.

Other writers have suggested that in order to become world-class at something we must practice for at least 10,000 hours, what I know is that practice gets me closer to perfection. I also know, as do even world-class skiers, that every now and again I will fall off, make a mistake that might even prove catastrophic for the particular performance in which I am engaged. What I also know from my own experience is that if I am not falling off occasionally then I am not at the edge of my ability and am therefore unlikely to be learning anything. I am reminded of one of the key beliefs of any effective learner “no failure only feedback”.

The effective learner reframes failure as an opportunity to learn something. They look on failure positively, as a demonstration that they still have more to learn. The ineffective learner says to themselves “Well that shows that I cannot do that, I don’t think I’ll try again”.

I guess one of the highlights of my skiing career was one day when I tagged along behind a group of instructors who appeared to be going home. About half a dozen of them were skiing in line down the shortest route home, which was of course one of the most difficult. I can still bring to mind the memory and feelings of almost suddenly being at the bottom of one of the most difficult slopes I have ever been on and wondering how on earth that happened. Well I think it happened because I had belief that the instructors in front of me knew what they were doing, belief in my own ability and commitment to the task in hand (rather than being diverted by “might be”s such as “I might not be able to make this turn”). I recall just skiing. Some would call this being in the zone. However you label it I do know that I simply trusted my body to do what I knew it could do and somehow or other got my brain out of the way. Timothy Gallwey would talk about conquering the Inner Game.

So, here is a challenge for you – next time you face one of those really difficult tasks, one of those that you are not sure whether you can really do it, just throw yourself into it with the belief that you have all the resources you need in order to complete the task superbly. Just let it flow.