Month: July 2021

Monday, 9.48pm

Sheffield, U.K.

You just keep moving forward and doing what you do and hope that it resonates with people. And if it doesn’t, you just keep moving on until you find a project that does. – Octavia Spencer

Last year I had a go at working on book-length projects. The plan was to write a first draft in blog posts and then stitch the lot together, going through as many edits as needed. I created enough material for four books and learned a few things along the way. Here are some of them.

Wednesday, 9.14pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It is a process; it’s not random. – Ken Robinson

It’s always a challenge to figure out how you should spend your time – where you’re going to add the most value. And while you’re doing that you need to remember that value is of greatest importance to the person who gets it from you, not to you yourself.

Imagine you have a business. Should you be laser focused on the things that make you money today? Or should you be patient, building and investing for the long term? Short-term rewards can seem the most attractive because they bring in resources now. But how do you know you aren’t throwing away something that could be much more valuable, if only you gave it some time?

I was talking to a friend today about this and how hard it is to decide whether to do a little or a lot. We’re advised to focus, to make it really clear exactly what we do and how we help. But we also try and serve everyone, try and do more than we can. And if you speak with people who know what they’re talking about they’ll be blunt about it. “Figure out where you add value,” they’ll probably say, “And do only that.”

But a focus on just one thing is not good either. I often read about entrepreneurs who have a good idea, raise money to plough ahead with that and then wind up a few years later, finding that there is no market for that thing they’re creating. But you don’t know whether they’ve given up too quickly.

The unhelpful answer, I suspect, is that you have to do both. You have to have a portfolio of investments, some that are mature and produce now and others that are nascent and that need to be tended until it’s clearer whether they have value or not. It’s like being a gardener, and making sure all the plants that you want to keep are fed and watered and the weeds are pulled out.

I think what’s important, however, is making it very clear what you do in each element of your portfolio. You may have a technology portfolio and carry out work in certain areas. Each of those packages of work needs to be clear – a minimum viable package in itself – that does not overlap with other elements but is able to communicate and cooperate with them.

This is not easy to do and there is a question of “how” that should be done. There are answers, of course, but this is not the place to talk about them. The point is that there are many ways to make things worse, but only a few that make things better.

And one very big idea is that the less you do the less you can do wrong.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 9.47pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If there aren’t roles you want to play, then you’ve kind of got to create them. – Margot Robbie

I’ve had a few days of listening to academic presentations at a conference and am reflecting on how easy it is to fool ourselves and how much effort it takes to avoid doing that.

Take work, for instance. We like to think that things are clear cut, that what you need is a mission and vision and goals and the right person in charge and everything will be well. We like to think of stars and individual performance as things that make a difference. But how do we know that these things work? How can we be sure that success came from doing certain things unless we’re sure that there aren’t organisations and people that have done exactly the same things and failed?

You can get away with such assertions if you’re a salesperson or motivational speaker but if you’re going to be peer-reviewed then you need to put some more effort into being honest. And once you start to penetrate the jargon that suffuses a typical paper you start to see that there is some useful stuff there, even though you have to dig for it.

Take, for example, this paper on facilitators by Lessard et al (2016). I’m interested in this because we’re often in situations where things aren’t working out ok and we want to change things. That means working with others and that’s a challenge. Good change often doesn’t happen by itself, it needs to be facilitated.

So what does facilitation look like and who does it? Facilitation can be a role a person takes on, it can be a process or it can be about helping a group work through something.

The paper argues that if we look at facilitation as a role you end up doing two types of activities: you change how things are done or you help people to work better together. In the first case you’re involved in processes for change or for project management. In the second you’re looking at faciliting meetings between people and supporting them as they do the work of making change happen.

But that’s not really enough to tell you what’s done and that’s where you come across lists in papers. For example, what do external facilitators do in their day to day work. Here’s a list from this one.

• Train you in skills
• Help you think critically and ask better questions
• Know what needs to be done next
• Evaluating meetings
• Tailor sessions to meet local needs
• Plan and generally sort things out
• Listen, clarify and summarise material
• Watch how people act
• Share what others are doing

Internal facilitators, on the other hand:

• Use stories to make their point
• Talk about examples and cases
• Link actions with outcomes

If you’re trying to change things around wherever you are, then these papers give you useful checklists. Do you do some of these things, all of these things? Are there things you should do more of?

I spend a lot of time being unsure about things. That’s probably a good thing because it means you’ll check things out before you decide to believe in them. But when you’re sure you need to make that clear – and that’s a skill I need to develop for myself.

And it’s worth doing because there is no shortage of situations that could do with someone who knows how to change them for the better.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Lessard, S., Bareil, C., Lalonde, L. et al. External facilitators and interprofessional facilitation teams: a qualitative study of their roles in supporting practice change. Implementation Sci 11, 97 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-016-0458-7

Monday, 6.39pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Fairness is not an attitude. It’s a professional skill that must be developed and exercised. – Brit Hume

My first real understanding of the differences in opportunity people across the world face only came when we were expecting children. We took classes, a free one and one we paid for. And I realized, looking around me, that all the children who were going to be born to parents that had the relatively small amount of money needed to pay for their class would have books and attention and resources. The free session had a different set of parents, ones with more challenges and the children born to them would have less – and that difference, cemented at birth – would only increase until they went to school and then the gap would get increasingly harder to close all their lives, not considering other factors like gender and race.

I have never been a big fan of targets. Maybe it’s a cultural thing – I was brought up to think that the work was what mattered, not the results. If you do what you need to do every day the long-term will look after itself. And if it doesn’t it won’t matter anyway.

But even that ability to “get on with the work” is a privilege. It presupposes that you have the time, knowledge and money to do work. And not everyone has that.

I’m learning, quite late really, about the power of targets to change behaviour. But there’s something else about what’s going on that seems to suggest that targets are a good thing. And it’s the availability of information.

Take investing, for example. Once upon a time you could have an information advantage. If you read the papers and looked for opportunities you might find a bargain. Those days are gone because information is widely available and the ability to profit from an information advantage no longer exist. Now, you’re best off buying the market or buying a great company at a fair price – not looking for an edge.

This “transparency” is what’s making the difference in sector after sector, workplace after workplace. Your reputation is on the Internet, with metric after metric telling the world how you’re doing on financial and non-financial metrics – how you treat your people, what you’re doing to the environment, who you’re paying.

Setting a target does two things: it sets up an evaluation framework and creates an incentive mechanism. For example, if you run a conference these days you’ll be evaluated on how diverse your panels are. If you have a male only panel – a “manel” – people will ask questions that you will find hard to answer. You have an incentive to create a diverse panel if only to avoid the embarrassment of being seen as a unrepresentative and behind the times.

The incentive mechanism spurs you to take action and you can do one of two things. You can create real change and start to transform your operations so that you develop a diverse workforce or you can game the system and make sure that you meet the numbers. But it’s going to be hard to do that over the long term because of the availability of information – it’s certainly harder to do this than it was in the past. Some people perhaps look longingly over at the more authoritarian regimes in the world remembering when they could do the same thing but still claim to be democratic.

Diversity and representation is one very important space where targets seem to be making a difference. Another area where you can see action is when it comes to climate change. Clear targets like the UK’s Net Zero target and the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees science based one are causing companies to make public statements about their commitments – ones that they increasingly feel compelled to do to protect their position in the economy. And that’s a good thing.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of this approach is that it’s a fundamentally fair way of looking at what the economy is meant to do. If the economy is made up of many people but the benefits of their work goes to a few it used to be ok to argue that those few were entitled to more because they worked harder, because they were “better”. And that’s not a bad argument really because you do want people to be the best they can be. But what you also want to do is dismantle the barriers that are in the way of people being the “best” they can be.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 7.47pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing. – Warren Buffett

I sometimes wonder what the value is in what I do in this blog – how reading and writing and thinking help in any way with the practical issues we face day to day. As Robert Kiyosaki trenchantly pointed out, “A students work for C students, and B students work for the government.” It’s easy to wonder whether getting an education is worth it or whether you’d have been better off setting up in business a long time ago.

And then I learned how much of a privilege it is to have the choice to have an education. I was editing my grandfather’s memoirs and reading about his struggles to get an education in the harshest of circumstances. If he hadn’t pushed himself to study, kept trying to better himself, things might have been very different for those of us that came later.

The thing with knowledge is that it’s a weird sort of thing. When you give it away you still have it. If I tell you something I know I don’t lose anything, I still know it too. But whether or not you know it depends on the way in which you get it.

Most education is about information transfer. In an engineering class, for example, you might learn about relays. You’ll learn about different types of relays and the way in which they’re operated and how they can break circuits when overloaded. But it will mean very little to you if you’ve never seen a relay before or a substation or any of the infrastructure that powers everything around us. I nearly failed electrical engineering because I really didn’t know anything about electrical systems.

Later, when I knew what a generator was and how it was connected a network I understood why such knowledge might be useful. I had a real-world example of a situation that I didn’t understand and the knowledge needed to fill that hole in my understanding had value all of a sudden.

Or in a more general example you only know the value of learning to swim when you find yourself unexpectedly in the deep end.

There are some things you can learn “just in time” and there are other things you should learn “just in case” but the biggest thing about learning is that when you know what you’re doing the risks of doing it wrong go down dramatically. As Santayana said, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s best to learn from other people’s mistakes.

But we don’t always value knowledge, not unless we understand that we really need it. No one wants unsolicited advice. But when they’re in trouble they’re desperate for anything that can help.

And I’ve found that the exercise of writing has helped in unexpected ways. I’ve written about models and approaches that seemed interesting and, all too often, the next day someone will mention a problem where one of these ideas happens to help. In the writing phase it can sometimes seem a waste of time. But then it’s unexpectedly valuable when a problematic situation comes along.

Perhaps the best way to end is with another quote by Warren Buffett.

“If you are investing in your education and you are learning, you should do that as early as you possibly can, because then it will have time to compound over the longest period.

And that the things you do learn and invest in should be knowledge that is cumulative, so that the knowledge builds on itself.

So instead of learning something that might become obsolete tomorrow, like some particular type of software [that no one even uses two years later], choose things that will make you smarter in 10 or 20 years.”

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh