A penny for your thoughts

Your blogger was in Nigeria a week ago, trying to think above the incessant wheeze-choke-rattle of the neighbours’ generators, which kick into life every evening to compensate for the appalling absence of state-generated power. Perhaps ‘think’ is too rich a word for what was going through my mind as I daydreamed about a Call of Duty style raid that would leave said generators scattered over a ten mile radius. My dear Mama must have sensed that I was troubled because she innocently offered me a penny or my thoughts.

Well, that got me thinking. A penny ? Is that all my thoughts were worth. I live in a world where people are paid vast sums of money for their thoughts but what if all along they should just have been given pennies for them? Eager to seize on any distraction from the wretched generators I grabbed a piece of paper and started doing some calculations. Here they are, poor fare though they may represent:
First we must assume that some bloke is trying to sell you a thought for a pound (we are talking pennies so let’s stick to British currency). He is in fact going to exchange some carefully formulated words and nothing else for some hard-earned cash. Now, let’s try to put a value on these words.

If Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey both independently came up with devices to transmit speech electronically, it follows that our man’s thought is highly unlikely to be unique. He may be the smart kid in the dumb class but that doesn’t mean that there are not a lot of other smart kids around, some of whom may be smarter than him. To me that fact alone loses the thought 90% of its value. That anyone could have had the same thought is not the great devaluer, it is that many other people have had exactly the same thought and our man is trying therefore to sell something he does not really own.

In today’s money the thought is now worth 10 pence, which is still ten times more than my mother would pay for it. To understand the loss of the rest of its value we should go back to the preceding paragraph and the words “smarter than him”. Yes, while a thought remains unproven as fact, the possibility exists that it is not very good and that better thoughts can be freely had. One can picture Mrs Bell looking at her husband’s device and thinking “all very well but who can I call?” It took a long while for the telephone to reach the level of utility that it has today and I’m not sure that many people would pay premium price for an acorn in the hope that one day it will become a mighty oak. Nope, for me the thought has now lost half its value.

Five pence for a thought missus? My mother shakes her head and holds out her shiny penny. It is all she will give because she knows there is more. In a world full of thoughts many of those thoughts cannot be achieved. Let us be generous and assume that just over half of thoughts have practical merit; and because my maths is very poor let’s round that up to 60%. This means that our man’s though is now down to 3 pence.

If I were him I’d sell now if there were any buyers because the real kicker is beginning to occur to me. If we take some studies seriously, 80% of new businesses fail in the first 3 years. Now nobody starts a business thinking that’s a really bad idea, I’ll do it anyway. This means that 80% of thoughts are positively bad for you. Our man’s thought could be seriously detrimental to your wealth! So now we should only give him 20% of the 3 pence for his thought. Luckily for him there is nothing in British currency as low as 0.6 of a penny, so we generously round it up and hey presto, 1p.

It turns out my mother was not being harsh, she was being gloriously generous. Well that’s what I think anyway and now you know what my thoughts are worth…

While doing some research on usability as part of a review of 4Romz’s User Interface we happened upon thousands of pages of what seemed to us to be complete gibberish. Then we noticed a pattern; the gibberish repeated itself! What did this mean? Was this the verbal equivalent of the mystery of Pi?

It didn’t take long to realise that we were seeing no more than what we advocate in our consulting on innovation; the evolution of a common jargon that is a shorthand way of expressing complex ideas. When an accountant talks about Balance Sheets and P&L accounts, he or she is saying an awful lot more than that there are two types of accounts. My builder can mutter something about an RSJ and splints to his mate Jack and for all I know they are talking Martian. Half a dozen words thus exchanged and bish-bash-bosh the wall comes down, but the roof stays in place – marvelous! I wish I knew what they had said.

Jargon is an absolute necessity in life. If you don’t speak the jargon for a process then you probably do not understand enough of how it works to be able to have any impact upon it. Understanding this is fundamental to introducing a culture of innovation into our workplaces. If you are trying to introduce innovation into your organization you should ask yourself if you speak Innovationspeak and if not, in our words, you suffer from the Man Friday Syndrome – you’re doing something you are not skilled at simply because you are the resource to hand.

We don’t really have a word ‘innovationspeak’, that was just to illustrate a point, but we do advocate that the organization learns to speak the Language of Value. Value is a simple concept to get across and it goes something like this:

To be valuable something has to be:

a) Rare
b) Hard to obtain
Or
c) A competitive advantage with a barrier to duplication (time to copy is a good barrier)

Once we establish that we want to talk about value, we then have to agree how to talk about it. The only way to talk about things that are valuable is to talk in value terms. So, everyone must learn about investments and returns on investments, business cases and monetization of measure of progress.

The mistake that exists in a lot of organizations is to assume that jargon is hard to learn or hard to teach; both are false assumptions. If you cannot teach the language of valuation of initiatives to anyone of moderate intelligence in fifteen minutes then you are a ‘Man Friday’, trying to do something at which you have no skill. If you want an example of what you are aiming for then this is the type of desired outcome:

Have your employees recommend a retention programme with significant financial benefits (as per the numbers) that might include such incentives as nursery vouchers (costed).

This is the type of thing you definitely do not want:

Let’s build a crèche.

There are enough studies out there to prove that innovation is extremely valuable and it is not hard to create a culture of innovation. If you don’t see straight away how you would do it in your organization then it’s probably because you don’t yet speak the jargon.

November’s blog comes from seat 13A on the early morning flight to Manchester. It is a typical November day; cold, grey, wet and miserable. The pilot has announced that we should expect a slight delay today because of the weather but one look at the twitching faeries on the ground, their life blood ebbing away tells me he is either lying or a hopeless optimist. And it is lying and hopeless optimism that are therefore the subject of this blog. And why not, we work in a world where lying and hopeless optimism abound.

I had cause to smile recently at the way in which organizations force the individual to lie. You might argue that only a human being or group of humans can force another human to lie, that an organization is not a living thing and can exert no moral pressure on a person, but you would be wrong. The extraction of the lie is not done tacitly; it is done in sullen but silent collusion. You can picture the scene yourself: you are part of a team that has developed a new process supported by a new computer system. Much hope and hype has been attached to your work. Big time Charlie Potatoes have stacked eggs ten feet high in your project’s basket. Like Mama Isoro’s all-in-one magical herbal powder that cures warts, hair loss, indigestion, fever, aches and pains and bad skin, yours is a veritable cure for every ailment known to the business. Shortly before you are due to launch however, in a big, public presentation to colleagues and clients, you discover that it is not going to work.

Question:
a) Do you stand up at the big presentation and tell everyone present of your horrendous discovery?

Or…

b) Do you launch the project anyway, hoping that somehow you are wrong and it will be successful but knowing in your heart of hearts that it will not succeed?

If you answered a, that you would announce to a room full of expectant faces that you do not believe in the thing that the organization has put its time and money into, then you should apply immediately for a course as an airline pilot because your powers of hopeless optimism are wasted in your current job. 99.9% of us would surely launch the project, accept the rapturous applause, slink quietly from the room and let the project die its now anticipated death.

To understand why we would do this you should not try to understand the individual, you have to understand Organizational Behaviour because you can replace the individual with any other and the outcome will be the same. Organizations exert a tremendous pressure towards optimism, which far outweighs the tendency of any individual or small group of individuals towards realism. This is why it is so very important not to attempt to implement good ideas but rather to understand and define the supporting data and processes that turn ideas into initiatives. Once an organization has embarked upon its good ‘idea’ and has invested time, money and political capital in it, then this pressure towards optimism overwhelms anyone who tries to reign it back when they realise it will not deliver the expected results.
What will happen to the project now? People will start to distance themselves from it. We have an unerring instinct for spotting nervousness and uncertainty in others. Like deer, we are easily spooked by the person who raises their head above the cubicle and glances around, desperately looking for a new project to be attached to.

“How’s project X going” asks the big boss (who is always the last to see the light because everyone works so hard to keep him in the dark). “Fine, fine, it’s early days though,” is the response, accompanied by a wan smile; and somewhere out on a cold, wet, grey November morning another faerie bites the dust.

Her jaw worked with mechanical efficiency on the wad of gum in her cheek. Every now and again she would pause in her chewing and push it out between her teeth to show the world the extent to which she had battered all colour, shape and taste from it; a latter-day Neanderthal hunting out the last whiff of marrow in a dry, old bone. I held my cowardly tongue. She was the wrong person to ask whether they had size 10 Predator football boots in stock. Instead, I set about seeing if I could find a size 10 of any boot on display, which I could try on without disturbing this mean spirit. If I found one that fit then I could just ask to buy it and its pair and perhaps she wouldn’t bite my head off and start chewing that.

Clearly I am more pessimistic about the human spirit than my fellow man, because even as I was concluding that Gum-chewer was minded to be about as useful as a chocolate fireguard, some cheery chap, dressed in an outfit so garish and ill-fitting it had to be the store uniform, came bounding up to her, all smiles and good humour.

“Hi Sugarlitefairyplum,” he said - no that’s not her name but this is a blog so we can’t use real names - “Can you take over from Grumbleweed (fake names but accurate sentiment) on the till?”

Gum-chewer made it plain from the look on her face that she thought Cheery was something she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe. She did her party trick of showing him her masticated-to-death gum in a defiant gesture, as if to say, yeh mista, but you can’t stop me chewing, and walked off in the direction of the till without uttering a word.

Wow, she’s cross about something I thought. Still, what did I care why she was cross, I had just found someone who looked like he would willingly go and get me the boots I wanted.

Cheery searched in vain. It wasn’t just the size 10 Predators he couldn’t find, it was the Mercurial Vapors, the Puma Kings the… well, let’s not get into football boot anorak territory here. Suffice to say there were lots of boots that he couldn’t find in my size. I looked around me at the piles of boxes and stray boots scattered everywhere; this was a mess. Cheery was an island, slowly sinking in a sea of chaos! It put me in mind of the Monty Python cheese shop sketch, but a version entirely bereft of humour. In the end I felt so sorry for him that I agreed to buy some frumpy looking things from the last century that I knew I would always hate but at least were comfy.

I made my way to the till, boots in hand, to find Gum-chewer engaged in animated conversation with Grumbleweed, who though relieved of his duty had nowhere better to be. Somehow she managed to serve me without ever making eye contact, breaking off her conversation, or pausing in her mastication. I listened to their inane chatter; she made the free time for me to engage in this fruitless pastime by being in no hurry to do anything, and so absent-minded that everything she did do was wrong so it had to be done twice. They spoke in txt, a modern language I only vaguely understand, but I gleaned from the words I caught, their body language, and the spite in their eyes, that they were furious with Cheery. He, it appeared, was some Johnny-come-lately who represented a new inventory management system and of course, as I could testify, it was not working very well (my description not theirs, which had a few added expletives).

New System, as we shall call it, knew nothing about local delivery schedules or the vagaries of the Warehouse Management system, people’s capacity to lie about whether they had actually counted what was in store, and much more, all of which meant that none of the stock levels in the shops were accurate anyway and the computer’s account of where everything is was a pack of lies – Duh, everybody knows that!
Cheery, struggling with the next hapless customer, called out a query to Gum-Chewer and Grumbleweed in plaintive tones, to which they shrugged and volunteered no reply or assistance. Gum-chewer leaned closer to Grumbleweed and in a conspiratorial tone that I had to strain to hear, said the words that this blog is all about, “Don’t ask me, I just work here.”

So that was it! These two miserable misanthropes were angry because someone had done something that had ignored their knowledge. Nobody had allowed them to participate in the genesis of New System so nothing about it, and certainly not its problems, were their concern. They were not going to voice their objections or make any statement whatsoever that might be construed as either negative or positive regarding the system; they chose instead to engage in Passive Blocking.

We’ve all heard Gum-chewer’s view expressed in the workplace. Some of us (at ALL levels) have even voiced the same words ourselves. It happens when people above us in the hierarchy assume that we do not know when we are inhabiting a sub-optimal world. When we see a process and think ‘that’s rubbish’ our most common mistake is to believe that the people working within that process don’t think it is rubbish too. Our mistake is to not understand the concept of Workplace Evolution, a Gogojajaism that states that everything is as it is for a reason, so understand the reason before you act.
If you fail to take into account the knowledge of the workers in the process, that there are flaws you cannot see which they are working their way around, then when you hit those flaws yourself (as you surely will) they will not help you! This is Passive Blocking, the destruction of an initiative by a person or persons whose knowledge has been ignored.

We know that Passive Blocking exists because we are all capable of engaging in it. Translated into idiom it is the capacity to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It is a uniquely human quality that if our knowledge is ignored we are so insulted that we are prepared to allow any venture to fail, no matter whether we stand to gain from it or not. Yet despite the fact that we know this, great men and women choose to ignore it. The boss will launch the vision statement, empower the hell out of his lieutenants and give lung-bursting, morale-boosting speeches to the troops. The new initiatives are launched with much fanfare and all is well with the world. Yet one year down the line these same initiatives lie buried under so many weeds of inactivity they shall never be seen again. They have been blocked! Easily! Simple non-participation can kill any initiative. A Passive block is the spanner in the works of the mightiest machine and it can bring the whole thing to a juddering halt.

How then do you get rid of Passive Blocking? Why, you institutionalize peer representation in decision-making. Gum-chewer and Grumbleweed might not be minded to volunteer any information whatsoever on anything, but if they thought that they could, if they were so minded, and someone would have to listen to their opinion if it were ventured, then they wouldn’t have blocked anything and I might not now have these hideous boots from that stupid shop that I shall never go back to again.

I recalled while lecturing the other day, a wonderful moment in that fabulous old sitcom, Till Death Do Us Part, that really had to be seen to be appreciated for its wit and perfect timing. Warren Mitchell played the bigoted, working class Alf Garnett and Dandy Nichols his long-suffering wife, Else. In the scene, Else asks Alf when he will do something for her. He replies tetchily “in a minute, in a minute” to which she says “in a minute, in a minute, you’re always going to do it in a minute”, or words to that effect. Alf, defending himself from the accusation, declares “All right, I’ll do it.” There follows a brief pause and then, with perfect comic timing, Else asks innocently “so when are you going to do it then?” Alf starts to reply “in a…” and his voice tails off as he realises he has been caught; he has to do it now.

Now Alf Garnett does not normally tie into my presentations on The Workforce Optimized Enterprise but this sprung to mind as a perfect example of how to illustrate what I call the Number One Non-option. When we train people to understand organizational behaviour so that they will know how to create the right conditions for initiatives to succeed, we stress that for every case for action that is presented they should also present the case for inaction. More than that, the case for inaction should be the number one choice and only when it is absolutely rejected should anybody embark on a project of any significant scale.

Ignoring the Number One Non-option does not make it go away. It lurks at the back of a project like a bad smell seeping out from some unknown source. If inaction is NOT explicitly ruled out as an option then it remains a possibility and given normal human behaviour it is inevitably the option that some will choose. After all, there is a certain security and comfort that is offered by the status quo and to ignore this as a real threat to progress only results in procrastination and delay.

Else defeated Alf’s option to procrastinate by simply revealing it for what it was. The principle that emerges is: What we don’t discount remains an option. By revealing the option to do nothing - even if that is only writing the words “DO NOTHING” next to #1 on a whiteboard – defeats that option, unless of course it is a credible alternative (and why not?). The real beauty of this ‘technique’ is that if you force the issue and end up agreeing that doing nothing is not an option, the next question that naturally arises is: so when do we have to do it? If you get to that point then try to keep the smug smile off your face so nobody knows that the timeline was what you were angling for all the time. Don’t start where Else did at the procrastination stage, she was a genius who knew Alf like the back of her hand. Start one step back at the never do it stage and you’ll probably end up with exactly the same result – no inaminits.