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on the paradox of knowledge
I vaguely recall being told when I was in my late teens that the more we know the less we know and thought then that this was ridiculous. Clearly I did not then know enough.
Over my professional career there have been many occasions when my team and I have been engaged in planning something and have gone through that stage where our researches have led us to a point where we have more questions than answers; every answer that we seek leads to more questions and it is an iterative process that all project teams go through.
At some point in one of these project team meetings someone gave that long forgotten answer again; the more we know the less we know and it struck me that, far from being nonsense, it was actually true. It is aligned to another old adage about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing and I have had moments where I have made a fool of myself trying to use a new piece of knowledge only to find that what I knew barely scratched the surface.
Everything that you learn opens the door to more learning. I know now that this is what fuels my own passion for learning and it is so easy now. As a boy I had an old atlas of the world and a dictionary of similar vintage and these were my main sources of reference. No I have a tablet beside me for much of the time and, if not that, then a mobile (cell) ‘phone. With a few clicks I can check all sorts of facts and have been known to spend an entire evening digging through having started on one topic and been led to various threads from that.
The opportunity to learn is all around us these days and there is no excuse for not using it. Ignorance may be bliss, but I am a lot happier knowing things and seeking to know more. Hopefully I will never lose that urge to learn something new every day.
on the joys of shopping
I’m going to look at this from the customer perspective. All management should do this anyway, but many seem to ignore it beyond what they see from market research and I will come on to that too in a moment.
Why do we shop? To buy stuff is the obvious, and correct answer, but how many of us go shopping and come back with more than we went for? The Berkshire Belle and I once worked with a chap who was, fortunately, married to a like minded lady. They went shopping with a list and bough only what was win the list. Things around the house had to fail completely before they were replaced; we remember that their cooker was down to one working ring on the hob before they bought a new one.
Our friends were not common though and most folks are like the double B and I in that shopping is about browsing, about buying things on impulse regardless of whether you need them or have an immediate use for them. You see, you like, you buy is how it works and that process involves not just the eyes, but touch. I will walk along a rack of golf shirts, for example, running my fingers across the fabric. I buy more by what feels nice than the colour or brand. Cutlery, glassware and crockery have all been bought by how they feel in the hand rather than anything else (except maybe how they look).
These pleasures are, if sort of allowed, not practical or desirable at the moment so, like many, we are not doing it. There is no fun anyway in visiting a shopping centre or high street and having to queue at almost every shop that you want to visit. Touching products, other than to put them into your basket or cart, is not something that is a good idea and just wandering around looking at things is not encouraged, or acceptable, when others are queuing to get in. Shopping is becoming more about necessity than a source of pleasure.
This is the dilemma for those in the retail trade and many are fighting for survival. The writing has perhaps been on the wall for a while with the impact of internet shopping and the evolving habits of each new generation, but this current plague has brought matters to a head. How they will get through it I don’t know. It seems unlikely that we will return to a world where we can shop without masks, social distancing or fear any time soon so which businesses will survive that long?
Whilst this is a problem for government in that it impacts on the economy in so many ways it is not a problem that is in their gift to solve. Market research is too often flawed and there is a lot of nonsense out there in terms of customers surveys; just sigh up to do a few of these on-line and you will see what I mean. The questions are often nonsensical and there is no way that meaningful answers can be gleaned from it, certainly not in terms of allowing management to make realistic decisions.
What we get over the next twelve months or so is going to come from innovative thinking, from people who have a vision that they can translate into actions that work and that will generate income for their businesses. As always the ones that can take advantage of the changing environment will be the survivors.
I don’t think that we will see the world that we had sic months ago again. What we emerge into will look and feel different. I don’t know that I will like it, but I will have to lump it if that is all I have.
on crisis management
I have, over the years, had to manage a few some lasting a matter of hours, many for a couple of days and one or two that went into a second week. They come along with reasonable regularity and most you have planned for, for example there is a good chance that you will get a power failure at some point and you should have plans in place that you test. Occasionally you get some warning; floods for example, but most of the time a crisis will come out of the blue and you need to react.
Leaving aside the details of how you manage a crisis there is a common thread and that is that you need information in order to make decisions about what to do. The problem that always occurs is that the information you are getting is not static. Let’s take an equipment failure as a starting point. Something stops working so you do the obvious checks and then call for an engineer. They will be with you in two hours you are told and so you work on the basis that it will probably be three hours before they get to you (experience) and then at least another hour before they have diagnosed the fault.
So you are planning on at least four hours before you know what is wrong and then you should have some idea of how long it will take to fix. You make some decisions about what you can do to continue business and communicate an action plan. Half a day is potentially down the toilet and you will be trying to work out the implications of that. You should have some plans in place for this sort of problem and you will have kicked those off, but, as the military will tell you, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. In this case the enemy is life and it will conspire to screw you in all probability.
The fitter arrives five hours after the call and starts work. There is no point in asking how long at this point because they cannot tell you any more than that they need a certain amount of time to run their tests. Leave them to get on with the job and concentrate on the things that you can do something about, but, by now, you have lost today.
As you try to reschedule again and plan communicating the changes news reaches you that one group of people have, instead of doing something that you asked, decided that they had a better idea and have implemented it. It might actually be a better idea, but doing it in isolation has screwed up the overall plan (by now you are probably on Plan C).
Trying not to panic you accept that today is really now finished and look to work out what you will do tomorrow. There are still variables though and the engineer tells you that the part that has failed has been identified, has been ordered and is en-route by courier from Germany and that he will be back in the morning to accept it on delivery and fit it. You know not to ask when things will be running again, but you ask anyway. The response is a shrug. Plan D is worked out that evening along with plans E and F as contingency and you have all the communication ready to roll come the morning.
I won’t go through the story* any further because the moral has been set out: Things change all of the time around you and trying to juggle them all whilst new things keep getting thrown in as ones in the pattern are snatched away is all part of managing. Rarely does anyone tell you that you are doing well and, whilst you always have crisis plans, all they do is give you a rough framework and a few tools. Most of what happens you will be making ups as you go along based on information, predictions and experience of which the first two will be changing, often to the extent of complete U-turns.
All you can do is to keep your head and plough on. You know that you will, at times, look stupid or incompetent, but don’t let it phase you. The Monday Morning Quarterbacks will have a field day with the benefit of knowing the results and will glory in the bits that you didn’t do so well, but they were not there in the hot seat.
One of the problems is that there will always be some damage and anyone who try’s to say that there should n to have been is wrong (I have a lot of other descriptions for them, but I’ll keep this clean). What you want to do is to minimise that damage and as long as you do that you have succeeded.
Yes there needs to be a drains up review afterwards, but that has to be solely about learning; apportionment of blame can play no part because you want the truth not the smokescreen of a fighting defence.
- The story is a real one. The new part arrived and failed that day. It took four more days to find the root of the problem and another two to implement an effective cure. It cost us dearly in terms both financial and to our reputation and all because a new piece of kit being operated by the company next door was causing spikes in the electricity supply. We did survive though and over the next twelve months we recovered, but one customer had left all of our daily briefings and delighted in trotting them out every time we got around to negotiating another contract with them. That’s life; suck it up and keep smiling.
on the fail fast principle
For most of us we have become used to the fail safe way of working. I am old enough to remember a time when air brakes failed off leaving you with the best way of stopping being to find something soft to drive into. We don’t allow that these days.
Failures are things to be avoided and we work hard on our processes to find ways of doing it right first time, every time. If you are failing your KPIs it is career threatening, a thing of shame. No wonder that so many people are afraid of failure.
Yet we all know that we learn more from our failures and something that I adopt is based on a way of thinking that is called fail fast. The principle is to have something monitoring the system that warns of potential failure somewhere and puts things into a safe mode. It is similar to the Limp Mode that you may have found on your car. Some engineers are using it to push for failures, to encourage them to enable their eradication and this type of thinking is used in high pressure areas like Grand Prix motor sport to find and eliminate potential weak spots in any system or component.
Forty years or so ago we were doing something like this with software testing. The classic test was to take historic data and run that through the program to check that it was doing its sums correctly, but we mixed in erroneous inputs to see what happened. We would also overload the software beyond its specified capacities again to see what it would take, or otherwise.
With more manual processes this approach can also be tried and it will tend to show where the flow starts to fail. Critical Path Analysis is a good companion tool here and using the two can show how the CP can change user different circumstances.
These things can start as desktop exercises, but there is no substitute for doing them in real time because the the working environment will often through up things that would otherwise be missed; the story of my old boss and his M1 traffic jam has been told here before, but it was a classic case of the real world making a bugger’s muddle of what looked like a great plan.
The key message here is to always look at what other people in unrelated industries are doing. It is time rarely wasted because everyone has a need to make things happen as efficiently as possible. How they do it and the way that they think about their problems can often through up an idea that you can adopt or adapt. Take time to look around; you never know what you might find.
on attitudes
People are strange. We all are to some degree or other, but there are times when one or more will just be contrary; they will not accept the common belief in something. How you overcome that as a leader is something that you will have to come to terms with.
Take the current position on wearing masks whilst shopping. It was plain from the start that it was a good idea in general. Yes there are some problems, but if you wore a mask correctly and observed the readily available advice on wearing and disposing of same then you were going to be at less risk than without and were less likely to spread the plague if you didn’t know you had it.
Now it is compulsory unless you have genuine reasons for not wearing one, but there are plenty of people taking the “I’m not wearing one” stance. They all have their own reasons, but why defy a requirement, especially one that makes sense?
The internet, social media in particular, does not help for it is hardly the place for sensible debate let alone good advice. But if someone wants to believe something they will do so and will not be easily persuaded otherwise. I recall a case where we had found funds to refurbish the restaurant at a building that served around 1300 people daily. The original layout and furnishings were around 25 years old and very much on the lines of a 1950s works canteen, so a refresh was long overdue.
We did some consultation with the users and from that the architects came up with a new style. A display of the proposals was put up in the restaurant for people to see and comment on and I went along that day to get some direct feedback. “Where are we going to eat when all this happens?” was the first comment, so I asked what they meant. Surely it was obvious that everyone would continue to eat in the refurbished restaurant, but no, there was a strong feeling that the new layout was “too posh” and only designed for the select few; the “ordinary workers” would have to eat at their desks or find somewhere else to have their lunch. There was also a firm belief that prices would go up to levels that they could not afford despite a clear assurance that they would not.
Around 200, of the 1300, were convinced that they would not be allowed to come into the new restaurant and, once it opened, about 50 declined to use it in case they were refused service. They would not believe the evidence before their very eyes and you can do nothing about that sort of bigotry.
As a leader you try to take people with you, but you cannot allow yourself to be distracted by minorities. Spend time on them by all means, but don’t forget the majority who are with you all the way. If they think that you have lost interest in them you will loose them too. Attitudes can be changed and good leaders can do it with ease, but never forget the law of diminishing returns; spend your time one the people that are worth the investment and don’t waste too mucho in those that are not.
on the SISI principle
In good teams there is a focus on individual goals; if everyone delivers their part to the best of their abilities then the team will succeed. There is nothing wrong with that. It is a very good basis for success, but in executing such a way of working it can go wrong.
Where it goes wrong is that you have a group of individuals and not a team and there will be none of the synergy that real teams enjoy. The foundation for good, and possibly great, teams is to ensure than everyone understands what the organisations goal is and focuses their attention on their part of that, but also working for each other as the day goes by.
You want people who have each other’s backs, who will think of the common good and not just of their own targets. It is about helping the team succeed and not individual glory. It isn’t about baling out lame ducks; that is your job as the leader, but it does include putting things right when there is a problem.
The SISI principle is built around the old adage; Everybody was sure that somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but although it was everybody’s job everybody thought that somebody else would do it. In the end nobody did what anybody could have and somebody should have done.
SISI stands for See It Sort It. If it needs doing then do it. If you can’t do it find someone who can, but get it sorted now, don’t leave it for someone else. If a colleague is in trouble help them. If you are struggling seek help. If you see a problem then sort it. It can be the most trivial of things; leaving the photocopier without paper, not putting a new toilet roll onto the holder or not tidying up. All of these things are the grit in the gearbox that wears people down, but if you can get them to just fix these things as they go you get that synergy.
It comes from team spirit, but it also builds team spirit. Once you get a group working as a team you will find that they can absorb pressure like a sponge. They are all confident that someone has their back and develop a belief in themselves as a team that can do anything.
SISI, it easy. It cost nothing and pays back in volumes. Why not try it?
on “I told you so”
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, there will always be someone who thinks that they know better and you can always rely on them to say so. Said to your face is one thing, but if you are in any position of responsibility the likelihood is that they will tell everyone that they can just how badly you got it wrong.
For anyone who is leading making decisions is a problem. Whatever you decide impacts on others and their families; your own people, suppliers and customers can all suffer if you screw up and bring the business down. If you are the one in the hot seat then you try to make sure that all of your decisions are made based on the best information that you have at the time and the consequences of your decision are well thought through.
Over the years I have made hundreds of big decisions for the businesses that I have worked for or owned. The beast majority of them didn’t turn out too badly, there were a few spectacular failures and about the same number of decisions went so well that they kept me employed and well paid. I would love to claim credit, but the reality is that luck played a part part in almost all of the outcomes, good, bad and middling.
It would be easy to control the outcomes if you could control the environment that you are working in, but you can’t. The world is a dynamic place and things around you are changing all of the time. Any advice that you can get on the future is based on the past and it is not uncommon for results to work out to be the opposite of what was confidently predicted. Research is constant and can also show results that swing like a pendulum so if you catch the swing going the right way you are fine, but if you catch it at the end off a swing you look a chump. And you can safely bet there will be those who delight in pointing that out.
You learn from mistakes, but a decision that doesn’t work out as well as it ought is not a mistake and I would always accept constructive criticism from people who has also been in the hot seat. How you react to failure is important and adds to your experience as you face the next big decision and the one after that. The armchair critic and the Monday morning quarterback can, and will, have their say, but you can largely ignore them, simply because they did not have the decision to make. In any case they are working with hindsight and any fool can say a decision was wrong then.
The other thing about the “I told you so” mob is that they rarely can explain what they would have done or why that would have worked. Look at politics; the opposition will always criticise the lot who are in power, but they rarely come up with any credible solution and, should they gain power, are rarely any better with their own decision making.
As a leader you will find the world a lonely place, but that is how it should be. You take on the responsibility and you do your best. If you are good enough you will make decisions that work out well most of the time. Let your team take the credit for delivering those because it is them who will be doing the work. Take the failures on the chin yourself regardless of why the idea failed, and let you critics take a running jump.
on back to normal
We are living in strange times, certainly here in the UK, but also in many other countries and we are all looking forward to an end to the restrictions that have become our current norm. But will we go back to what we had before?
Certainly there seems to be a political desire for us to get “back to normal”, and I can understand a desire at that level to try to be reassuring, but I am not sure that we will ever get back to where we were in, say, February 2020.
Change is inevitable and you can never really go back. I can remember my parents and others of their generation talking about how different things were before and after WW2 although I could not image it myself. Now as I approach my eighth decade I can look back and see change fairly clearly; it is not that long ago, for me, that as a salesman out on the road I carried a bag off coins so that I could call the office from a telephone box. I can also remember programming mini computers to run programmes through 1k of memory. The last sentence would probably take up 1k in a word processing programme of today and my mobile ‘phone has more processing power than we could have dreamt of back then.
But even the more dramatic changes that I have lived through pale in terms of what we have seen in the last three months and I cannot believe that whatever we get next will be less than a quantum change. Businesses are going to fail, especially in retail and hospitality, and the knock on effect through distribution to production will ripple across. All of this will affect the way that money flows through the economy and whilst we have been through recession a few times in my life I feel that this is going to be different.
Shopping patterns have changed, attitudes have changed and all of what the last few months have brought is going to make it a different world. I have no doubt that the economists are doing their best to predict the future, but I have. no idea what awaits us once Covid-19 fades from our priorities (assuming that it does).
This is not meant to be a doom and gloom post, far from it. We will come out on the other side and make the best of what we have; we always do. Change brings a level of excitement, it brings out the competitive urge and opens doors for those brave enough to walk through them. There is much that I do not like about 2020 so far, but it is what it is and I can’t change it. I can just look forward to doing my best with whatever hand I get dealt. If we all do the same we will be fine.
on good and bad
I am an avid reader. I have been since I learned to read and have always got a book on the go. At the moment I have three; one a technical tome that I read on the dining table, and e-book biography that I read on my ‘phone over breakfast and breaks at work and a paperback biography for bedtime reading. From two of this trio comes some thought on good and bad in people.
There was a man who was prominent in a field that I know a lot about. He was, in many ways, a pompous ass and was not quite as good at what he did as he thought he was. I would have loathed having to work with him in that respect, but on the other hand he did a lot of good things. Overall I have always though of him as a decent enough bloke, but one of the books that I am currently reading alleges that he was far from good.
It is a common enough theme; Rolf Harris gave a lot of pleasure as an entertainer before certain facts became known and he went to prison for his actions. Jimmy Savile did a lot of good for various charities, but was also found to be a bad lot after he had died and no doubt you can think of your own examples.
Over the years I have worked with people who have been lovely as individuals, but a nightmare to work alongside. There have been others who have been a delight to work with yet were not people that I would have wanted to know outside of the office. My view is that I have a job to do and it will get done regardless of how I feel about the people around me and I am sure that there are people who have known me who did not like me at work or would not have wanted to socialise with me. It matters not to me.
There seems to be a view these days that people should be perfect, but we aren’t. There is always the possibility that there will be something about us that would offend others. For most of my life that didn’t matter; I have always had friends who had different political views to me, supported sports stars or teams that I can’t abide, were deeply religious (I am an atheist) or whatever. Our differences often cemented the friendship as we argued our respective points of view.
My friendships have also survived where the other party has done something that they should not have done. I am not going to abandon a pal lightly; if you are my friend and you are in trouble you know that I will be there for you. This is not something that I was directly brought up to, more that it is how my attitudes have evolved.
I do not expect perfection from anyone, let alone politicians and business leaders. Yes I would like them to behave to a standard that I would find acceptable, but why should my standards prevail? There is good and bad in us all and I can live with that.
on decisions
A perennial topic this one, but the current criticism of the government here in the UK prompted my thoughts because one of the most usual causes of decision paralysis is getting it wrong; if you don’t make a decision you can’t make the wrong one.
I am talking here about critical decisions because there are unimportant things where doing nothing is often the best corse of action, but when there is something important to be done you should do something so not doing it is most certainly wrong.
A favourite quote of mine is from Yogi Berra the American baseball star; “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”. Decision making in business or government is more complex than the 50:50 chance of getting it right or wrong, but you are working with three parameters; time, knowledge and resource. Of those you cannot control time and you may not be able to control resource or knowledge before time runs out.
You have to go with the best that you have and accept that you might not get it right. Be decisive and, once it is over and you can see what happened, look at whether or not you could do it better next time. An investigation is essential, but it should never be about blame, always about learning and improving.
Every decision you make will have consequences, but doing something is both an opportunity to learn and it puts experience into the pot for when you have to make the next decision. Fear of failure is an instinctive response, but one that you need to push past if you are to grow. The more you do the more experience you have and experience helps you respond to the consequences of your actions.
Another sporting hero provides an appropriate response here. Eric Carlson was one one the finest rally drivers of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time when rally cars were simply tuned up versions of road cars and safety equipment minimal. He was asked what went through his mind when he approached a blind brow in the forest at night whilst driving at over 100mph. He thought for a moment and said; “Well, the road must go somewhere”. That is experience talking. It gives the confidence to be able to deal with whatever comes. Like Yogi’s advice to take the fork, whatever choice you make your experience will help you deal with whatever comes your way.
There will always be someone who will tell you that you have got it wrong and these people will almost always be those who did not have to make the decision. Pay them little heed for these are the Monday morning quarterbacks who have the benefit of hindsight and had no skin in the game. They might be right, they might be wrong, but as long as you made the call as best as you could with the time, knowledge and resource that you had then at least you did something. Learn and move on.
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