The Darwinian approach to creative thinking

It was in the middle of a particularly boring conversation that I recently had my eureka moment. It’s not that the vision I gained is going to challenge my understanding of the laws of evolution or anything as grand as that but it has, however, assisted me in understanding a little more the dynamics of creative thinking.
When a group of people get to know each other extremely well by spending a great deal of time together, the group tends move into what I now refer to as a 'dormant state'. It is not as if they are asleep as such, but they begin to interact in ‘Safe Mode’. The group tends to become very apathetic towards creativity and decision taking. It often becomes a completely dysfunctional group and splits into smaller sub groups or it becomes an operational team devoid of the desire for change. In either mode the group tends to become overtly resistant to any kind of change and is too often closed for genuine creativity. Only the daily news or office gossip can temporarily divert its attention this way or that.
I have observed this phenomenon on several occasions but only recently recognized it for what it is. When I first step into a company, it is a usual process for me to quickly identify areas for concern, I do this by asking questions, by challenging the ‘norm’ that I see, and in doing so, I sometimes inadvertently awaken new thought processes.
I try to encourage the consideration of a different reality. For example I often hear statements like: “The trouble with our company is that there is no real communication between departments”. I like to challenge these kind of statements with “how should it be? What is your vision of interdepartmental utopia”? I then try to set about taking the first step to empowering people to tackle their own complaints. In the case of non inter departmental communication, I would encourage the first steps to building it – sometimes it can be as mundane as identifying a simple topic of mutual interest or benefit and then setting up a small meeting between a few people from the two departments in question. Results can be surprisingly quick and very encouraging, especially if progress is encouraged with a mixture of self discipline and benefit focus.
If mankind is to continue to move forward and solve the desperate problems it is currently facing, then influence makers need to be constantly ‘awakened’; to be challenged by new ideas. Often this can only occur by the simple addition of a stranger into a settled group, a change in the team's dynamics. In this way our reality is are challenged and we are forced to decide on new paths to follow; this way or that, to resist or adapt, to accept the stranger into the group (enriching its dna) or to rejecting him or her completely? Either way, decison processes are awakened and with them oportunities for change, no matter how small, are born.

Putting you customer somewhere down the food chain

If you think that Proximus, now Belgacom mobile (the Belgian nationalized mobile phone company) is bad try this for size! The following story is a good example of designing a credit procedure that touches the customer and alientates them right from the start.

Recently I started a new assignment in Germany and so needed to buy a German SIM card for my mobile Phone. I chose T-Mobile (the biggest supplier in Germany). The following describes their approach to customer awareness and demonstrates the internal workings of their business processes:

1 Visit T-Mobile Shop in Leverkusen
a. Wait 30 minutes to be served
b. Friendly assistant (speaks only a very little English)- OK
c. Explain my needs – business use, lots of international calls etc., give permission for them to take as much from my account or from my Master card they need to cover my bills.
d. Walk out with Sim card
e. 2 hours later active.
2. All contracts, letters and bills in German
3. Cannot set up my answer phone - do not understand German (I speak Dutch and English but these are not options)
4. Visit website – no website in any other language than German
5. Get help - someone calls and I am given a special number, obtain the option for my outgoing answer phone message in English!
6. (Two weeks later) phone service stops working – German message, don’t understand it – get help. Message says “Use another phone to call this number.”
a. My German friend calls the number : they refuse to speak to her because she is not me!
b. We ask for English customer support – not an option!
c. A colleague then calls telling that I do not speak German so please speak to talk to them instead, eventually they agree.
d. Phone is cut off because I have spent 260EUR on international calls, Remedy:
i. I must go to a post office and pay in 260EUR in cash
ii. Obtain a receipt
iii. Fax the receipt to a special number
iv. Phone will be re-connected
e. Go to bank - obtain cash
f. Go to T-Mobile shop to pay in cash and to tell them to increase my credit.
i. No one speaks English
ii. Cannot pay my bill in the shop – must go to Post Office
g. Find Post office – pay in cash – must pay 8EURs extra for paying in cash
h. Send Fax and letter
i. Phone re-connected quickly – but for how long?
It seems incredible to me that such a high technology company cannot contact the customer prior to their credit limit being reached, that they cannot inform the customer in advance what their credit limit is! That customer’s cannot pay in money in their own shops!
Proximus (covering a client base of a fraction of the size of T-Mobile) has customer service and a website in four languages, it has shops in every town that are open right through the day, they will take your money and they treat you with respect. + their technological options seem way ahead of T-Mobile re their answerpohne (T-Mobile have no delete message, save message or auto dial caller options.
I am NOT a typical Brit that expects everyone to speak English, but I have just arrived in Germany and have not yet had time to learn the language and I cannot believe that there are no other people living Germany that do not speak German either?

I think we should invent an award for the worst business process ever - any contenders?

The Profits of doom are staring at their dashboards

Over the past few weeks we have been confronted with so many negative images and stories about the financial crisis that it is making me wonder if some of us are spending too much time staring at our dashboard indicators, rather than at the horizon ahead of us?

The secret of successful entrepreneurship is anticipation and adaptability. Anticipation involves keeping your chin up and keeping your eyes wide open, scanning for the best way forward, seizing (if not inventing) opportunities as you see them. Staring at your feet, to where you are right now, will not help you.

We have spent so long looking at our reliable indicators that I think we all have a pretty good indication as to exactly how deep and wide the crisis is and how much bigger it is likely to become? Now is the time to build bridges, to find new ways of avoiding further disaster by looking for creative strategies to forge a new way ahead.

The tools we used to create this crisis are not the same ones that we will need to circumnavigate it or even to kick start the flow of cash again. I can understand that politicians and business leaders do not want to create false hope or be disrespectful for those hardest hit by the current crisis. But we simply must remember that financial crises have come before. Perhaps not as bad, but we know that the first communities to recover are those that accept their reality and adapt to it the soonest. Now is the time to sit with younger minds and to take on board the fact that not only is the world economy fundamentally changing, but so are our business processes.

We are living in a world where many of the most successful and cash rich companies are giving their products away for free! The old rules do not necessarily apply anymore. Sure we have ‘traditional’ businesses that produce essential products for the world to consume, but the leaders of these industries must also look for creative ways to act more locally by using the power of their global information communication systems and trading methods to discover new efficiencies and opportunities. Cost saving on current overheads alone will not inspire the creation of a new frontier.

On Thursday I looked at my Huygens barometer only to notice that the alcohol was reading off the scale (see the image above). Being my normal arrogant self I assumed that this was down to some kind of fault in the apparatus. But then logic kicked in: Huygens barometers can not ‘go wrong’, they have been working accurately for the last two hundred years or more – so what do I conclude? That I am witnessing an extraordinary event, the likes of which almost never happen, I conclude that I am still alive, my house is still standing and my cat is still asleep on the radiator, oblivious to the panic in my head. The reason I do not feel the storm is because I am in the very heart of it, in the centre of the low depression, where the wind is still. On the edge everything is in chaos – the devastation is merciless. Where I am the sun is still shining and everything is calm – now is a good time to think and make plans, knowing that things will change and that I will need to change with them.

The ethics of loyalty

Being loyal to those who pay your fees is not always ethical and for project managers there are times when conflict of interest situations can become quite tricky.
I was talking with two of my MBA students last night and one of them posed me a question about an ethical dilemma he was facing. He asked a simple question:
‘When there are conflicts on a project where should your loyalty lie?’
‘That’s simple’, I replied, ‘your ultimate loyalty is to your customer's shareholders. As a professional you should be looking to supply the best possible solution for your customer, your decisions and influence should be directed accordingly. ’ But then came his second question:
‘But who is my customer? I work for a consulting company that supplies services to the end customer, for whom I am managing the project. Should I be loyal to the shareholders of my employer (the subcontractor) or to the shareholders of their customer?’
The situation (simplified) was that the sub-contractor (his employer) was asking him to play a more active role in ‘bigging up’ the client’s problem; increasing the risk evaluations to create a sense of criticality and to supply a technical solution that would require more services and hardware than might otherwise be needed.
For me, it is still a simple issue: As PM for the end customer, his professional code of ethics should motivate him to advise the end customer as he sees fit and he should not be influenced by the bias of his ‘immediate’ bosses. But I know that this is easier said than done, especially for employees of subcontractors.
I am curious to hear other people’s opinions and stories.
At The Bayard Partnership, we like to pride ourselves on the fact that aim solely to deliver the solution our client's actually need. The solution that ultimately delivers the best share value. Partly because of this, we prefer to supply our services directly whenever we can, or at least via other suppliers that share our fundamental philosophy and principles.
In times of recession the temptation to motivate consultants and PM’s to extract as many man-hours from the customer as possible, may become too big to ignore for some contracting companies, especially those solely focused on short-term profitability. I like to think this is not the case but experience tells me otherwise. Many are afraid of losing revenue and falsely feel that by dragging events out, somehow they will get through. nothing can be further from the truth. In times of recession we need to deliver value for money. Neat solutions to complex issues. Quality, honesty and succinctness will seperate the the long term players from the charlatans.

Torturous Meetings

I am lead to believe that a group of musicians have started an action group to try to prevent the use of their music for torture purposes. When I first heard this I thought that it was a joke, but now I have heard about it from several sources. I tried to imagine it, being tied to chair, forced to listen to Barry Manilow’s Copacabana a thousand times over. So I tried it at home and collapsed half way through the second playing!

The experts claim that being forced to listen to even your favorite music can produced a similar effect. Apparently torturers the world over are, at this very minute, experimenting to find the ultimate musical torture tools. Apparently Witney Houston’s “I will always love you” is high on the list – but I think I can suggest some better ones (should I want to contribute to the perfection of torture).

As a Quaker, I find all kinds of torture absolutely repugnant and I do not want to belittle the problem because apparently this is not a joke and it appears to be very effective. However, sometimes I find attending meetings as a kind of torture. The kind of meetings that have no agenda and apparently no purpose. The kind of meetings where you are invited to attend for your expertise but where you quickly realize that your expertise is the one thing that is not going to help.

I know of a company where people are free to attend meetings as they wish, so if they have nothing to do they can look at the list of meetings for that day and simply ‘drop in’.

Meetings are important and sometimes a very light structure (or apparently no structure at all) can be beneficial – but the important point is: are they effective? Did the brainstorming session produce valuable gems or tedious trivia?

I looked up the definition of the word torture: (apart from the definition to inflict pain to extract information) I discovered: (Collins) 2. ‘To cause mental anguish. Noun.

So there we have it – meetings can be a form of torture!

Just say ‘yes’

The end of the year is the time that many of us are thinking about how we can improve ourselves in the future, how we can have more fun or be more effective. The space between the two years, that seems to come from nowhere, gives us ample time to consider ourselves both in the present and in the future. And so it was on Christmas eve, while driving to the butcher to collect a six kilo Turkey, I heard an interview on the radio with a very natural and enthusiastic sounding person – the interviewee was telling how a simple piece of advice had changed his life.

His girlfriend had left him a while ago and his life had changed in a way that he hadn’t expected. He became insular, staying at home, turning down invitations and avoiding unnecessary social contact. Until one day a friend told him that he should ‘say yes more’. He said “it’s not good for you to stay in so much”. The interviewee thought about it for a while and decided to take his friends advice literally. He also considered that ‘just say yes’ would make a good title for a self help book, and so it was that he decided to give the advice a try.

He started to say ‘yes’ to literally everything; Yes to buying a secondhand car he didn’t need, yes to learning Flemish, yes to invitations to parties and yes to offers of daring and adventure and even yes to mundane activities. And all the while he documented his experiences and set about writing his book.
Several months later the phone rang, on the other end of the line was a film producer (apparently the maker of the Harry Potter movies) – “I have read your book” he said, “very interesting – I think a broader public would be interested in it, may I make a movie of it?” Of course the answer was ‘yes’. I don’t know the name of the interviewee or the exact title of his book but I do know that Jim Carey is playing in the movie and his ex girl friend in real life is being played by a famous actress.

The moral of the story is pretty obvious I guess but I thought it worth pondering for a while. Especially while considering ones New Year resolutions and how to stick to them. However, in my case, I am going to do the opposite. In 2007 and 2008 I said ‘yes’ to too many people with the result that I overstretched myself. In 2009, I am going to concentrate on what I know and do best, in environments where I have influence, in situations where I can be most effective. And, if I can have some fun at the same time, then so be it. My five year strategy plan is going well and all I want to do in the difficult months ahead is to try and keep it all on course.

So here’s wishing all my readers a very happy new year and a successful 2009!

Best wishes,
Harley

2009

In London and New York the taxi drivers have a reputation for offering advice, even when it is uncalled for. Ask them anything you like; politics, a topical moral issue, business, football or even show business and they’ll give you their opinion. What’s more they’ll often back it up with “I had that Gordon Brown (or any other name that fits) in the back of my cab the other day and you know what he told me?......”

So let me introduce you to Sonia. Sonia is my pedicurist. (I have a toe that regularly causes me aggravation and once every few months needs her attention). I went to her this week, I hadn’t seen her since the funeral of her husband back in the Summer. Sonia is a positive soul and just like taxi drivers, she always has something to say. And so it was of no surprise that during my treatment Sonia took it upon her self to give me some advice for 2009. She told me that the number nine is a very solitary number and that because in 2009 it is accompanied by two zeros only enhances that fact. According to Sonia 2009 is going to be a very difficult year. “It will be a time to look forward” she said. “It will be an individual journey for everyone. Don’t look back, the past is the past and is not the same as now, what applied yesterday does not apply any more. When people look backwards, they tend to fall over. Don’t be afraid, find your own path, your journey will be enriching and from it you will enrich the lives of others.”

When Sonia says something, it’s a bit like listening to the advice of a wise aunt. You know you have to stay polite and to listen and yet, almost annoyingly, there is something to be taken from what she says. I know better now than to question – my cynical brain goes into standby mode and I accept what I hear as an uncompromised view on things – a message driven from spirituality, rather than logic. After all what do we business leaders, politicians, lawyers, and teachers know any more than Sonia about the future? If we are all as clever as we like to think we are, how come we are where we are and not in some other place or situation?

In less than half an hour, I had received treatment for my toe, nutrition for my head and a hot cup of coffee, and all for less than twenty Euros! Despite the icy steps that lead down from her door, I left with a new spring in my step, feeling confident and ready to face anything that comes my way.


Harley