Accepting the unspoken word

There have been two separate thoughts, one long held and one more recent, that have been floating around in the back of my mind. It was however an event last week that led me to connect them. 

When I used to play a lot of football I remember being struck by something my old coach and friend “Sir” Dave Stapylton said to me. He said that you can tell a lot about who a man is, and how he lives life, by watching the way he plays football. The more I watched people I knew play, the more this seemed to ring true. I’ve never forgotten that. In fact at work I still sometimes use this as one of two “mental levelers” to help me better understand situations I am not comfortable with – I often try and imagine how a game of football would pan out if I could get all of my work colleagues out onto a 5-a-side pitch for 90 minutes, (the other is to try and imagine what a particular person was like when they were at high school – the age at which we start to become adults with all our foibles and insecurities).

The more recent thought that struck me was another passage from Po Bronson’s book that I mentioned in an earlier posting. He said that, “When I was in New Orleans, one young man who was not yet a parent, but considering it, said “I’ve noticed that people who don’t have kids never quite see themselves as a success, and people who do have kids never see themselves as failures.” It seemed dead true to me, but why? Are kids an “achievement” that makes you feel like a success? Not quite. I stared at his quote for six months before I could see the cause and effect: having kids will teach you to be accepting. Not to be submissive, but to be patient. Tolerant of minor delays. You don’t measure yourself on the conventional success/failure spectrum. Many parents talk about how it’s made them better people, and this is one of those ways – it forces the mind to be a little more flexible.”

The event that brought these two ideas together for me was last week when I gave a present to a friend. This friend is someone who I really like a lot, and the present was not for any special occasion other than the fact that an opportunity presented itself and I thought he might like the gift. He is a rather brusque individual who has a tendency to be somewhat irascible especially when tired. He leaves no-one indifferent; indeed his own daughter said to me that people either love him or they hate him. I obviously fall into the former category. When you give a gift you naturally assume the person will say thank you, even if it is a pair of unwanted socks at Christmas. My friend doesn't tend to and obviously didn't say thank you on this occasion. However I am increasingly able to beat back the natural instinct to expect a verbal thanks and I can now focus more on my friend’s behavior immediately after the giving of any gift… On this occasion I gave him the gift around the middle of the day, he then basically changed his plans for the rest of the afternoon to help me out with my horse. We spent a good few hours together and on reflection it was clearly infinitely more meaningful and enjoyable than a speedily spluttered two word “thank you” (indeed in French it would have even only been a single word – a solitary “merci”!).

So as much as life’s “conventional spectrum” would dictate that I should get my “thank you” and that this would confirm that I had been successful in opting to give him a present, this individual has reminded me of the power and the importance of the unspoken word and my need to be more accepting of different ways of doing things. What he did and his behavior immediately after I gave him the gift, rather than anything he said, reconfirmed for me what he’s all about and why I like him as a person. Whilst I’m not going to stop teaching the kids to say please and thank you, this particular incident served to remind me of the power of what’s not said but done in a world where there are many erudite air bags in all walks of life. I must remember to teach that lesson to the kids although maybe I’ll wait until they are out of nappies.

Mirror mirror on the wall

Sandie is doing really well at work in the civil service. Actually living onsite where she works also means that I get to meet her team albeit in an informal capacity. It’s interesting to share ideas and hear about her experiences. I was always surprised when I compared my “Accenture education” in terms of how to lead teams, with the way the civil service have pushed her from individual contributor to manager of a team of 20 people with no formal or extended preparation. Thankfully she’s really enjoying it and they enjoy her natural management style. One of the other things that strikes me about work in the public sector (and in companies in the private sector that don’t place as much as an emphasis on people development as Accenture do (or did at the time)), and which is a painful lesson I had to go through personally, is that people rarely make a distinction between the person and the work that person produces. For me it was tremendously powerful to make this distinction. It actually changed the whole way in which I was able to measure and discuss peoples’ performance on an ongoing basis without every six monthly evaluation meeting becoming like a pitch battle and personal attack. Accenture measured people based on three key criteria – value creator, business operator and people developer. I have to say that I do miss that simplicity and the rigorous management of people’s development.

Hello Brooke!

One of the best things about long haul flights – I can finally discover some of the random music that has made its way onto my iPod over the course of the last few years. This week’s trip to Boston allowed me to (re)-discover Brooke Fraser and her album Flags. Brilliant. It’s amazing the things that happen when you take a bit of time to live life…

Georges Seurat in Cauterets

Rather than being at La Grande Jatte on a Sunday afternoon, I’ve actually been in Cauterets all week for the annual ski trip with the in-laws. Overall it’s been a good week and they’ve all been pleased with the copious amount of snow that has fallen. I’ve managed to get out for a few runs, I’ll head off to ride my horse tomorrow, I’ve managed to have a few pints of Guinness, learn some Spanish, get up to date with all my emails before work starts in earnest next week, and to do some reading. One of the other things I’ve done quite a bit of is, rather unsurprisingly, looking after the three kids (even if the presence of their three slighter older cousins has made this task a bit easier than it might otherwise have been). You’ll never hear me say that being a full time mother is easy, although I do have to say that I have found that so long as I address each child related task as an isolated activity, rather than seeing them as a never ending sequence of tasks, then I have found it relatively manageable and many of these interactions are actually good fun when the kids do what I say (does that make me sound like a control freak?). Basically I see the waking up of the kids as different from getting their breakfast ready, which is again different from getting them dressed for the ski slopes, which is then different to getting them shipped up into the ski-lift etc. As I was breaking down my day into this series of regular activities, I then stumbled across the following passage in the book that I am currently reading by Po Bronson. The passage talks about why motherhood and the stories of mothers are difficult to tell… I found it very interesting and thought provoking.

 “Why is it so hard to tell a mother’s story? I put this question out to many mothers, and a few answers came back again and again: 1) a culture that celebrates careers more than parenting doesn’t pick up on the subtlety inherent to a mother’s story. The subtle triumphs of a baby finally going to sleep, or a child learning a new letter, get drowned out by the noise of a big career advancement. 2). Mothers’ lives are very fractured. They don’t have one single project that makes for a simple strong storyline. They’re involved in their children’s lives, in their community, in their schools, in their extended families. Mary Ann compared it to the painter Georges Seurat’s famous pointillist work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. “It’s laid down one dot at a time. Rarely does anyone else recognize the meaning of that one dot.” In other words, a mother’s life makes a great painting, but not a very linear story. 3). Parenting is so personal; there’s a religious righteousness when parents talk about their philosophies. Talking about it out loud usually offends someone. 4). A good mother doesn’t own her accomplishments. Her children do. And since children can thrive and fail independent of good parenting, it’s hard to tease out what a mother’s contribution really is. You can’t give all the credit to the mom."

I’m not sure if all of this makes the act of parenting easier or harder. Maybe easier for me because I’m someone who likes to see the big picture, and the idea of each dirty nappy changed being one more (brown) dot on the canvas feels like although each activity is isolated, they will all add up to an overall result which is hopefully three happy, respectable and sensible young kids…

Feeling success

The process of learning how to ride horses has been, and continues to be, a very interesting process. Compared to when I did my A Levels at the age of 18 (Oxford was a different kettle of fish), learning by rote or by memorizing facts was actually relatively easy given that I was a fairly dedicated student who had a short term memory of acceptable ability. Without wishing to generalize centuries of equestrianism, I would contend that learning to ride horses is more complex and operates on multiple layers. The first levels of education are all about learning (and then understanding) some guiding principles of riding. The second phase is about understanding both the morphology and the mentality of the horse – just like all humans don’t walk or think in the same way, all horses don’t walk, trot, canter or react to the same stimulus in the same way. Once you’ve got the basics down, then it is all about feeling your way around a horse to understand how you need to readjust the application of the handful of principles to a given animal depending on its own unique way of thinking and moving. After having ridden for a few years now, I can confirm that the part that is the most delicate is the feeling bit. What can make this part of the apprenticeship longer is that at times you don’t initially always know what the right feeling feels like. However once you’ve experienced and recognized the right feeling, then everything after that becomes a search to try and recreate that feeling on the same and different horses. I was reminded of this process of trying to understand what the end game feels like when I read the following article about how to try and psychologically vaccinate soldiers against the trauma of war http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21566612-it-may-be-possible-vaccinate-soldiers-against-trauma-war-battle-ready. I also started to think about what this meant in the context of business. For me it is fairly obvious – it’s all about being able to tell people and teams what eventual success looks and feels like. Whereas the current obsession is always about what are the financial metrics we need to fulfill in the current quarter, I wonder if we wouldn’t be more successful if we could explain to our teams what the office and client sites would look and feel like if we achieved the financial targets we set ourselves – what type of behavior would our eventual success engender in our managing executives, how many new faces would we have in the team, what is the way that we’d expect the team to interact with each other to get to the desired result, what type of client feedback could we imagine receiving… I believe that the knowledge of what success looks and feels like is massively important – maybe that’s the reason why companies pay a premium for people who have come from successful companies. It’s just a shame that so few of our left brain fact memorizing leaders in positions of authority can actually articulate what success feels like rather than just what it looks like in an Excel file. 

Limbic Leaders

At times I am concerned that the only publications I read on any sort of regular basis are Triathlon 220 and the Economist. (Let’s not even talk about reading novels). However work has been quiet since the start of the year. This has actually allowed me to get up to date with all my back editions of the Economist, and take the time to discover some other sources of information including the FT plus various podcasts (of varying quality) including Freakonomics, Tim Harford’s Pop Up Economics, Pop Tech Audio and the Guardian’s Business Podcast amongst others. I’ve also downloaded a number of new apps for my iPhone including both the TED and Facebook ones. As much as I try and steer clear of the “self-help” category, and genuinely wish I could follow more of my Dad’s advice of “fewer business books and more of the literary classics”, I couldn’t help but be drawn into Simon Sinek’s “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” TEDcast on my iPhone this morning despite trying to do something else at the same time http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html?utm_expid=166907-15&utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ted.com%2Fsearch%3Fcat%3Dss_all%26q%3Dsimon%2Bsinek. The talk started off in a fairly predictable “let’s think outside the box” type of way, but it got increasingly interesting as the 18 minutes progressed, and it even prompted me to do some more reading about the limbic brain which controls emotion, behaviour and  memory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbic_system) and the diffusion of innovation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations). By the end of it I was thoroughly delighted to have listened to someone who could articulate two things that I know are right, but could never explain as eruditely as Simon does here; namely that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it; and the fact that there is a clear difference between leaders i.e. people who hold positions of authority, versus people who lead who understand that people follow leaders for themselves, not for the leaders per se. All interesting stuff…now back to the day’s onslaught of emails (surely it shouldn’t have to be this way, or, shouldn’t I be thinking about how I can avoid this being the inevitable outcome that it is… although that, at a minimum, sounds like a different blog post).

My own social mess explained

Despite some of my oldest friends winding me up about the fact that I flick through back editions of the Economist to wind down, I continue. I found a couple of interesting articles about the new internet super firms of today – Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. The initial article (http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21567355-concern-about-clout-internet-giants-growing-antitrust-watchdogs-should-tread) talked about the key challenges they are facing, but it was the second more recent piece that I found more thought provoking (http://www.economist.com/news/business/21569766-social-networks-shares-recover-it-fixes-its-search-problem-search-me)… Until reading the article I hadn’t appreciated that “Social Search” was the third pillar of Facebook’s strategy after its Timeline and News Feed functionality. Although I personally don’t think social search has lots of legs, at least not in the same way as Google’s search has even become a verb in the English language, clearly this social thing isn’t going away (something which I think is a good thing). Effectively this article inspired me to sort out my own social mess... In addition to my recent (non-ethnic) cleansing on Facebook (username Aidan O’Brien), I have also started to have a clearer view on when I use this blog, Garmin Connect (username ajdobrien), and when I use my Twitter account (username @ajdobrien).  Facebook will be for glib, flippant or what I consider to be mildly amusing remarks, Twitter will be for geographically or place related musings – often for when I am travelling, Garmin Connect will be for those people who want to keep up with how many calories I've burned and kilometers I've covered during my various runs and bike and horse rides around the world, and this blog will be to keep family and friends updated on how the family is getting on, and some of my more half-baked two bit ideas. So, with my metal free arms and 20:20 eyesight I’m not just ready for 2013, I’m now all social and ready for the 21st century; although I am pretty sure that my young cousins and ex-au pairs are already lamenting the fact that Facebook is just so passé and that I should already be looking at the likes of Four Square, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+…I suppose I should really just be thankful that my children are too young to be embarrassed by me yet.