Choosing art

I had the interesting experience of selecting paintings for an exhibition the other day.  I work for a Great Big Company and the local council contacted various Groups in the Community to ask for volunteers to pick paintings for a Peoples’ Choice exhibition.  (It’s Blairite, but is it Art?)  So I said “that’ll be me then” and volunteered.

There were seven or so of us, and we were given an enormous catalogue of the paintings in public ownership in the county, and told to pick three each and state our reasons.  (The catalogue turned out to be fascinating and desirable in its own right and, since it’s available from Amazon, I’ve just bought myself a copy.  Damn.) The chap was a curator at one of the local museums or art galleries and he encouraged us to be simple and direct in our reasons, giving examples of things that other groups such as school children had said.

Three?

Bugger.

It would have been easy to consult with others and pick a whole exhibition of social history, or local faces, or even specifically non-local work, but it was much, much harder to pick just three.

I resisted choosing damaged pictures just because they were damaged which gives them an added layer of meaning in my pretentious world.  I resisted picking the local views because that was all a bit too obvious.  I resisted two enormous and gloomy portraits of a grimly smug victorian couple which I wanted to pick on the ground that - hey look, these people are so freaking different from people today.

I discovered that when push came to shove I preferred portraits, which was rather depressing.  My brow is higher than that, surely?   I did steer myself away from just picking portraits and resisted the option to show off by going entirely for abstracts.

It was an interesting insight into the world of the curator and the choices involved in putting together an exhibition.  I’ve bought myself a copy of the catalogue of the county’s art collection, and I’m looking forward to the exhibition.  I should love it.  What better way could there be to arrive at an eclectic mix?

Just going outside

In what world does someone who dies of illness or in an accident leave their job “voluntarily”?  Suicides yes, if you push the logic that far.  But if I choke on a carrot in the canteen I haven’t left this vale of tears of my own free will, now have I?

However, I’d be classed as a “voluntary leaver” by most HR statisticians.

Phffah!

Large employers like to keep track of all sorts of things including the number of people they hire, the number of people who “don’t work out” in the first year, and the number of people who leave even though the company would prefer to keep them.  The “involuntary leavers” represent errors of judgement on the part of the people hiring them, and you can see the sense of tracking those numbers.  “Voluntary leavers” on the other hand are the people the employer will be put to the inconvenience of replacing because they have been offered a better job elsewhere, decided to return to full-time education, or left to set up in business for themselves.  Or selfishly gone and died.  Without giving notice.  Where’s their team spirit? (I exaggerate for cheap effect).

What the employer is tracking with these figures is the employer’s wish or intention (volition) not that of the employee.  But HR being the sweet and fluffy discipline it is, it doesn’t spell it out as crudely as that.  Ho no. How much nicer to pretend that what you are measuring is what your employees want.  The caring face of statistics.

War is peace.  Love is hate.  People are our greatest asset. The dead are voluntary leavers.

Who needs thought when you’ve got jargon

A friend of mine who knows my weakness for jargon and my aspirations to critical thinking sent me a couple of texts the other day which he’d garnered from his work.

Purpose
The WhizzyDooDad is designed to provide customers with a variety of resources that, when used as part of a learning program that incorporates learning courses, will effectively apply professional competencies and reinforce learning content from those courses.

Desired Outcomes

• Application of e-learning to real business situations and needs
• Increased competency and productivity through the application of new skills and knowledge
• Leveraged investment made in learning and classroom training
• Increased use of learning/training programs
• Projects or initiatives can be related to and/or integrated with a blended solution.
• Learners have increased potential for actualizing new skills and behaviours “on the job”.
• Learners take on new roles as facilitators and/or observers of skill transfer
• Promotion of a learning environment/culture.

I’ll spare you the rest; I’ll even spare you my sarcastic analysis.  You’re intelligent.  You can supply your own.

My friend rewrote the thing entirely, without any reference to the original. Here’s an excerpt from the new version:

The introduction of WhizyyDooDad means that those of us who work in the department can easily find someone to give practical advice on whether or not an app [ie a software application - AB] is the best choice for a particular task. It also makes it  easy to find out what apps we already use and save money by choosing the ones we already have licenses for, instead of going out and buying something entirely new which does the same thing. We are no longer limited by what we know as individuals and in our local teams - we all share our knowledge.

The second paragraph isn’t particularly elegant, it still includes jargon and the last sentence is fluff, but it is at least clear fluff.

When I pointed out that the two texts say completely different things - the first talks about customers and training courses and the second talks about finding experts and reducing license costs - he shrugged, so far as you can shrug on Instant Messenger. “That’s what happens when you substitute jargon for thought”, he said. Which is a fair point well made. It is still one hell of a leap from Text A to Text B.

The good, the bad and the ugly - part 3

Having been off work for a week, I’ve forgotten what it was like.  Here are a few of the folks I’m going back to.  But I’m not of course.  These are figments of my imagination, and all similarities to individuals living or deadly are entirely coincidental.

The graduate

One word. Plastics. The Graduate gets it. Instantly. He’s used to being the brightest person in the room, and is frustrated by what he sees as stupidity, arrogance and bullshit all around him. Everywhere. All the time. The fascinating thing about working with the Graduate is how someone so bright can be so stupid. The Graduate fails to contextualise his knowledge and he cannot read between lines or see shades of grey. He has no concept of experience, and dismisses other peoples’ caution as stupidity. He’s vastly impressed by himself, and is in denial about the fact that no-one else is. Female Graduates tend to be very pretty, and the brighter ones end up either as super-bitches or netball players.

The super-bitch

This woman has balls of steel. She delivers the goods and does not care who or what gets in the way. She’s Ms Perfection, so she’s physically attractive in photographs. In person, the combination of perfection and focus can be  off-putting. You’d rather not imagine her having sex: the thought is frankly frightening. On the other hand, if you do hear her talking to her beloved on the phone she often sounds like a completely different human being. Make that “like a human being”. She’s nowhere near as resentful of men as the Netball Player. Why bother? She’s overtaking them effortlessly anyway.

The dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. He’s probably a really nice bloke, and if he’s senior enough to send out updates to entire mailing lists then he’ll be all laddish and matey and finish up with a comment on the football. The thing is, he’s not a lad and you’re certainly not his mate. In his world, work’s for work, home’s for home, friends and colleagues never mix.  This ability to compartmentalise means that he’s may well run a discreet mistress for years, though whether he bores the pants off her or charms them off varies from dull boy to dull boy. At work, though, he shows no sense of humour. He doesn’t see why thanking people or upbraiding them in public is any different from doing so in private. He’s effective at what he does, but comes across as a teutonic version of Mr Spock.

The good, the bad and the ugly - part 2

Here are a few more corporate and business characters:

The Underminer

The Underminer seems to be the most helpful person in the room: they understand things quickly, they ask pertinent and clever questions, they contribute, smile and make the odd joke. However if you need them to do anything for you, at best they will do nothing and at worst they will sabotage you. To add insult to injury they won’t even bother to hide what they’re doing. They’ll criticise you for incorrect spelling but blithely fail to hand in their own homework, ever. Watch this failure to deliver: the underminer gets their greatest kick from humiliating you in public by letting you assume that the promises they made in private were true.

The proto-tycoons

Still at the stage of two porsches and a secretary, these young men live fast, drive fast, talk fast and pay slow. Your importance to them can be measured by the amount of attention they pay to you. If you are a minion in their world you won’t merit eye contact, if you can withhold something they need then you get their undivided attention. They are bright enough to stay within the law most of the time, but this is because they believe that only fools get caught, actually they think speeding fines, taxes and 30 day credit terms are for other people. Satisfyingly, a sub-set of them will spend their 60th birthday, and a dozen or so others, behind bars.

The working-class hero

It’s not a chip on his shoulder, it’s an entire timber-yard. In many ways he’s like the Netball Player, but he’s fighting the class war rather than the battle of the sexes. If you are more southern, more northern, older, younger or in any other way different, then you are - obviously - out to get him. He’s determined and will thirstily soak up new information and you will get loyalty for so long as you can teach him things. The moment he thinks he knows as much as you do, you’ll become “moody, unpredictable and impossible to work with”. Of course you will. On the other hand, if he sets himself a task, he’ll do it, no matter who or what lines up to prevent him. He’s a difficult but oddly likeable chap, life actually has dealt him some bum hands and he can be surprisingly supportive when women show vulnerability.

As before, these are of course entirely fictional.  I have a very active imagination.

The good, the bad and the ugly - part 1

I’ve been thinking about some of the people I’ve come across at work in the last couple of decades or so.  Here’s a wee taster:

The Explainer

Ask an Explainer the time and he’ll tell you. He’ll also explain the origins of Greenwich Mean Time, the legislative history of British Summer Time, the pros and cons of harmonising our time with Central European time and the origins and use of the 24 hour clock. Some Explainers will finally deliver a nugget of pure gold you’d never have found in any other way, others just talk till your eyes glaze over.  Explainers are kind-hearted souls and volunteer for tasks like being a first-aider.  Unfortunately they have kind-hearted larynxes too.

The Ducker and Diver

The Arthur Daley of the corporate world, the ducker and diver has an actual cupboard full off odd bits of hardware and software, bottles of wine, books and other bits and pieces. He also has a metaphorical cupboard full of favours owed. He’s great at fighting fires: if you have something that needs sorting out quickly, he’ll know who to ask, who to blackmail, who to bribe. Everything’s always changing in his world so planning’s pointless, but he’s the one destabilising it all. He’ll delegate activity but not control, which makes him hard to work for. However, he’s a useful employee because he’s good at getting things done even if “quick” and “dirty” are his middle names. Chances are you won’t even need to worry about internal audit coming along afterwards, he’ll know where they’ve buried their own bodies. He probably lent them the spade.

The Adrenaline Junkie

His mottoes are “JFDI” (just effing do it) and “don’t sweat the small stuff”. In his world, details cause delay. Work is an extreme sport, and he gets his kicks surfing the edge of chaos. He likes headlines and bullet points. He gets bored quickly and delegates as much as he can, though once he’s delegated something it stays delegated: he’d find picking it back up again - or even just checking on progress - to be frustratingly dull. More honest than the ducker and diver, he has the same restless energy, but for him work is a sport rather than a game.

The Netball Player

If you’ve got a problem she’ll be very supportive, but she can be critical and extremely bitchy when she chooses. She has a clique of female colleagues who form a mutual admiration society, and everyone else is on the outside. She appears very professional and very on top of her game, but her underlying brittleness makes working with her an interesting spectator sport. She’s very certain about everything and can be astonishingly judgemental, which seems at odds with her sense of sisterhood until you remember that in her world all men are bastards. She may be lesbian, she may be straight, but she’s far too fond of certainty to be bisexual.

I do wonder how I’d summarise myself, if I worked with me. All resemblance to persons living or undead is of course coincidental. Allegedly.

Failing to plan is much easier in the short term

Longer ago than it’s polite to admit, Bloglily tagged me with the meme to ask how I plan things. I didn’t do it, because I don’t really organise myself, so it never got on a to do list, so I never did it, so it’s all rather embarrassing. However, today I found a sheet of paper I wrote up a year ago when I was working out things that need doing to the house, and it clicked itself in beside the “must do Bloglily’s meme” entry in my brain, and so I offer it here. Pretty, isn’t it?

And confusing. And impractical.

The long and the short is that I don’t have a consistent system. As I’ve said, I tend to carry my to do list around in my head which is a Bad Thing. The diagram above shows an attempt to get the list out of my head and prioritised in some way.

At work where these things matter, I either plonk my way through my email inbox, red flagging things that need dealing with and confirming them as complete when I’ve done them, or else I make a list in my notebook and tick them off when I’ve done them. I’ve taken recently to doing beautiful diagrams in Visio of things that need doing and the order they need doing in, and they look rather like demented seaweed. Oddly, I have a reputation at work for planning and preparation, but that is because I can be heard snarling things like “failing to plan is planning to fail” and “being without a list makes you listless” and “poor preparation makes for p***-poor performance” at myself, and occasionally at others.

Every five years or so I make a Life Plan. I write the things I want to have or do more of in coloured pen on a sheet of flip-chart paper. They tend to be fairly generic things like “laugh” and “do gardening”. I also work through the exercises in “What Color is Your Parachute” which help me think about what I want in my life and what I want out of it. It can take me years to gather my thoughts for the really big changes like buying a house or making a career change or choosing a degree course, but once I’ve gathered them I end up putting my criteria into a checklist of 4 - 8 things. I am then ruthlessly uncompromising about the criteria on the list, but very patient.

Ultimately though, I find that lists of things to do are usually so oppressive and depressing, and full of so much obligation and so little that’s actually worth doing for its own sake, that I tend not to bother. Which is why only half of the things on the picture above have actually been dealt with a year later.

Soft is hard

One of the things that annoys me about the industry I work in is how much it undervalues what it persists in calling “soft” skills. Tech skills are the hard skills which command respect. Don’t get me wrong. I love geeks, in fact I find geekiness really sexy. I like it when a guy’s skillset is really hard. But before we tumble too far down the road of pornuendo, I want to wave a flag for soft skills.

(Incidentally, it’s not just my industry: surgeons are godlike if they do good scalpel but their bedside manner is considered irrelevant because you can’t quantify it, despite the rather obvious thought that the placebo effect is a neat way to improve a post-op complication rate and that there is a direct relationship between faith in the practitioner and the power of the placebo).

Now I have pretty good soft skills. Give me a bunch of folks and half a day and I can get just about any form of coherent analysis out of them you’d care to mention - be that a plan, a process, a set of requirements, a list of deliverables, a taxonomy. You name it, all we need are post-it notes, marker pens and caffeine and carbs, and we’ll end the day tired, happy and in agreement. I’m not bad at training sessions, though it’s not really my thang. I can plan a series of activities to take a group of people through the acceptance cycle when we are imposing change on them. I know a reasonable amount about NLP and how to use it appropriately in business situations. I spent more of my life than I care to remember selling, which is the ultimate test of soft-skills in action.

The problem is that soft skills are hard. They are hard for a lot of reasons. They are hard partly because soft processes are only logical in hindsight. You can look back at a soft process - the process used to manage a series of changes to the way that people work, for example - and think it was all pretty obvious. But try to design it… ah that’s another thing.

There are very few “how-to” guides to soft skills. I think I’ve found two on requirements analysis in all of the IT bookshops I have ever been to. There’s a lot of literature about training skills and some about introducing change to people, but a lot of it is either off-puttingly pretentious (”Soft Systems Methodology” - I mean, wtf?) nauseatingly cute (”The one-minute cheese-monger”) or theoretical but not practical (”The Tipping Point”).

The other challenge is that soft skills are implicit skills; they are hidden, obscure, almost invisible. This doesn’t make them easy but it does mean they are undervalued. The people with the best soft skills don’t make it look easy. Oh no. When you are with people with really good soft skills, you don’t notice that anything is happening at all. On the other hand when change is introduced badly, it is obvious for all to see. The best and most recent example I can think of from this blog is the MTAS debacle where change was imposed on the victims with no attempt to get them to actually want the change. MTAS could have been a success; the system it replaced was broke enough to be worth fixing. MTAS needed better technical implementation for sure, but those affected could have been brought at least to a state of neutral acceptance of the concepts behind it, and maybe even trust and support, if had been handled right.

Soft skills are subjective skills, when using soft skills you need be aware of context and to exercise judgement. You need imagination. You have to be willing to walk in someone else’s shoes. They involve taking risks and making yourself vulnerable. When you are exercising soft skills, you have to be willing not to know. This subjectivity makes them difficult to turn into a system or a methodology.

With soft skills there’s no right or wrong answer, there is better and worse, more useful and less useful, but no right and wrong.

That’s not easy.

In fact, it’s hard.

Christmas Pud

One of the things I like about this time of year is Christmas Pudding.  A good Christmas Pud is far too good to eat once a year on a full stomach.  I’ve always liked it cold for breakfast or fried in butter, if you want slices of it hot.

A couple of weeks ago I bought my first one of this winter.  It was a Tesco’s Finest and wasn’t bad at all: moist, tasty, good texture, recognisable bits of fruit and large chunks of expensive nuts.

And rather a strong smell of brandy.

Which I hadn’t taken into account when I decided to have some for breakfast at work the other day.

Suffering fools

As I get older and crankier, I am less patient of people who refuse to trust my professional judgement. It would be nice if I was growing more tolerant of human insecurity, but I’m not.

My former team’s new boss put a meeting in my diary so that I could explain one part of my previous job, planting sunflowers, which apparently I had failed to include in my handover.

Now there is nothing to planting sunflowers - you bung the seeds in the ground, water them, and a few months later you’ve got twelve foot tall bright yellow daisy-things tapping on your bedroom windows. My former team member knows this well enough. On top of which, there was nothing to hand over. I’d picked up an action from a previous meeting (buy the sunflower seeds and put them in the kitchen drawer until the spring) and done it: the packets of seeds were safely in the kitchen drawer. The only thing I missed was telling anyone I’d done it, and I only missed that because I’d done it and crossed it off my “to do” list a month or so before the handover. I forgot to tell my team I’d wiped my nose on the third Thursday in August too.

Instead of ringing me up and saying “Aphra, I went to a meeting the other day and they asked if you’d bought any sunflower seeds, but I didn’t know whether or not you had” we had a meeting request followed up with emails using words like “very embarrassing” with stuff underlined in red, and using phrases like “all aspects of the sunflower project”. Eventually we got to “even so” and “at any time that’s convenient to you”.

You know things are tense when you get to “even so”. “Any time that’s convenient to you” is Defcon 3, really, isn’t it?

I refuse to spend an hour of my one and only precious life-time in a meeting explaining that the packet of sunflower seeds is in the kitchen drawer, topping and tailing it with a 15 minute walk to their site and a 15 minute walk back. Instead I’ve taken them at their word and booked a meeting which makes them do the walking. And I am going to get my former team member to explain to his boss that the way you grow sunflowers is to put the seeds in the ground and water them. You see, this is the thing that annoys me: he already knows how to do it because I taught him how, and the whole thing is a bloody great drama over nothing - so much so that one, single, ten minute phone call sorted it out with my former team member, but his boss “had a meeting to go to” both times I phoned him. Which is how we arrived at “even so”and “any time that’s convenient to you” and the 15 minute walks.

I don’t mind being asked to explain things. But I really dislike being asked to explain myself.

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The image is by a photographer called Leisa Hennessy. I am so glad I chose sunflowers as my metaphor.