DaChispa

NLPers do it to themselves!  I thought this might make a good bumper sticker, and even has an element of truth in it.  The course I have just completed did teach all participants a lot about themselves and it was interesting to see who changed and how.  The trainer finished by saying that the best NLPers were often those who did it to themselves, so encouraged us to do this (hence the bumper sticker moment).  I think at the beginning of the week, I might have thought this was a bit self indulgent – but actually it was easy to see how the changes in course attendees would carry back into their workplace and their lives.  There was at least one occasion when an exercise was demonstrated and I sat back and thought ‘how on earth will this be relevant to me or my work?’.  This is fact turned out to be one of the most powerful experiences of the week, so sometimes you just have to trust that it will work and go with it.  The emphasis on well rounded outcomes, grounding things in the senses and taking an overall view of a situation/person – as well as challenging givens – adds up to a comprehensive tool kit to help bring about change.  It can be at any level – personal, team or organisational – but I think it could be very effective.  Can’t wait to see whether it withstands my Monday reality!

The motto of the day from Charles Faulkner ‘If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly – at first’.  I am so glad he said that, as it was a struggle to put theory into practice this morning and coming up against one’s own limitations is no fun at all.  However, doing something badly taught me an awful lot about doing it at all and after a very grumpy lunch break, the afternoon went much better.  What I learnt (apart from useful techniques) is that simple, clean questions work much better for me as otherwise I allow myself to be drawn into solution mode.   I think the concept of challenging ‘rules’ (must do, need to do etc) and ‘universals’ (everyone says this, it has always been done this way) was also easier for me as, to a certain extent, I do this already to get things moving.  It did give me some useful questions to direct the challenge (Everyone? What would happen if you didn’t do this?  Never? etc).  Simple, but effective because they actually make you think about your taken for granteds.  So much to take in.  We might be able to use it to help clarify KM objectives in several areas.  Maybe we should ask ourselves some hard questions too like ‘where are we now’ and ‘where do we want to be’ and then really test ourselves on how we will bridge the gap. 

..or at least it makes you think.  A very practical day on the course today, looking at patterns and how you can interpret the way people speak, glance and move.  We also started looking at ‘stepping up’ and ‘stepping down’ which essentially look at clarifying goals and problems with reaching those goals.  It was a deceptively simple process – which our small group of 3 managed to complicate before realising that you just asked the basic questions and didn’t need to embellish them.  The key to the process was that it wasn’t about you, it was about the person you were ‘guiding’ so you didn’t really need to understand their goals, just help them.   I never really thought it would be possible to not help people, but it actually makes perfect sense because it is much more powerful when they arrive there themselves.  All 3 of us in our group literally felt it in our guts (I felt quite sick) when we reached the point where we began to see things differently.  It’s not a path I intended to take, but I can see an application to groups or projects who have got stuck or lost focus.  I think it might need a bit more practice first.

Sometimes you have to do something to really understand it.   We have had posters up all over the office which encourage us to walk in our customers’ shoes – which is a worthwhile exhortation.  However, today we did an exercise where we sort of did it for real (no, we didn’t exchange shoes..that would have been too weird).  In pairs, one went for a 20 minute walk and the other copied their walk and noticed what they noticed, then you swapped.  What it made you do, is (if you got someone different from yourself, and I was lucky in that I did), change the way you looked at things.   The main thing people noticed is that their partner was purposeful/fast where they were slower and more relaxed (or vice versa).  For me it brought about a physical change in that I was forced to relax down to a slower pace.  I found this difficult at first, but eventually the body learns and adapts and it was actually quite restful.  Just describing it doesn’t do justice to the perceptual change it brought about in a lot of people and if you can relate it to your life/job – it could really make a difference.  I can already see implications for my relationship with customers.  I made an assumption that because my partner was taller than me, he would walk faster.  This was not the case.  How often have I assumed something about someone I am dealing with but, unfortunately, not checked it and therefore continued down the wrong track?  The answer is that I don’t know, so maybe this is something that needs to be monitored more closely. 

 Storytelling also came into things today – we had to tell a couple of stories and repeat them back to the storyteller while trying to get the emotion behind it.  We also had to tell a story using different language (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, gustatory).  This was really interesting because it showed up the language (perceptual) preferences that you might not have realised that you had.  This has implications for storytelling as a KM technique as it could be made even more effective if you could mobilise the different perceptions of your audience.

I had an idea about stories as well – maybe we should start gathering these good practice stories into some form of resource (NOT a database).  If we think along NLP lines (novice as I am) – perhaps you would have video/audio (with the appropriate use of language) and maybe pictures.  Maybe a business Eisteddford .. or some form of cultural festival around a theme.  Perhaps a bit off the wall, but there’s a germ of an idea there.

First day of the NLP practitioner course today and, although it is mostly stuff I have covered before, it is from a different perspective and has helped consolidate and clarify a few areas.  One of the things that they are doing, which I think is really useful, is to have assistants who are there not only to help, but also to observe and give feedback to individuals.  This is really effective because it reassures you as to your progress.  The importance of a feedback mechanism was pointed out to me recently by a colleague - if you don’t let people know that they are doing something right (or wrong), they won’t know that it is important, or indeed, do it at all.  I sort of got this mentally, but it is only through experiencing it that I understand how powerful it is for your actions to be noticed. 

I’ve had a bit of a ‘money where your mouth is’ moment.  It’s one thing writing something like this blog, which is a personal record of what interests me with a bit of commentary thrown in, its totally something else to think about writing something more professionally.   I’m keen to take that next step as there are some initiatives that I know about that would be of interest to a wider audience and help get KM more solidly on the police map (maybe…), but it is a bit daunting.  I remember having similar problems when I had to write academic essays.  It always seemed to me that to do well with those, you had to follow a certain formula and that writing something interesting came a poor second.  When I do research, if I don’t understand the first paragraph of a paper (or it is just plain boring) I don’t go any further – no matter how highly it comes recommended.  Maybe that’s why I like writing and reading blogs – they are largely in paragraph size bytes, so no time to turn people off. 

Well I think I’ve just decided how to start – a series of interesting paragraphs!  Fit them together later.  Not the normal structure approach, but maybe it will get a better result than my usual structured planning…..

One of my colleagues just told me that, because half his team had given up smoking, he now misses out on the really useful conversations they used to have while waiting for the shift to start.  Now people just get straight down to work.  From a management point of view, you may be thinking ‘Great, less time wasted, more work done’, but actually he feels he benefited from the really useful information that he used to pick up during these few minutes while that last fag was finished.

 Of course I wouldn’t advocate encouraging people to start smoking again, but it does pose the question of how you get people to congregate informally but usefully to engender this sort of knowledge sharing.  There are various places in the department here where sweets and biscuits are occasionally put out for consumption, and you get smaller conversations happening with unexpected people, but it is difficult to engineer informality.  Perhaps we should instigate fake smoking breaks or occasional tea parties to get people talking.   The after hours drinks and the Friday lunchtime get together is one option but this is still ’organised’ and not the same as the unofficial clustering of smokers…..

So far, it feels like I have achieved more in the last week than in the preceding 3 months, but I’m beginning to think that KM is a bit like decorating.   You have to do an awful lot of preparation at the beginning but, if you are patient, the end results are much better – and come relatively quickly.  The difference is that when you paint a room, you can see the result immediately, KM is sometimes a bit less obvious.  Maybe the answer is to add that lick of paint – i.e. package the result more slickly so that it is obvious. 

We have been having discussions about the difficulty of getting KM initiatives off the ground when you are trying to convince people who don’t ‘get it’.  One possible response is to give them an outcome that recognise (i.e. a meeting or a report) which incorporates the KM product.  My preference is to work on helping them understand what you are trying to achieve, otherwise you will run into the same problem with your next KM project.  I think they are both valid approaches, but my compromise is to find a project whose outcome the potential sponsors do value, and use a KM approach to improve that outcome.  The main problem here, of course, is proving that the KM intervention is responsible for any change…… 

I’ve done a bit of a rush job on a piece of work this week because I couldn’t really see the reason for it.  I figured if I produced something quickly and it wasn’t what was required, less time would be wasted than if I spent a lot of time on it and it wasn’t what was required.  Turned out that there was a back story to the request which made it much more sensible and meant that what was provided wasn’t exactly what was needed - so I was right to build a Mini and not a Rolls Royce.  Prototyping doesn’t only apply to software or designs – it can be used for any deliverable.  Sometimes you need to give someone something so that they know what they don’t want!

I take the title of this blog from an article of the same name in December’s copy of the Harvard Business Review.  It talks about context, but in a way that people can demonstrate for themselves by tapping their fingers on a desk.  CEO’s make sweeping ‘vision’ statements that are usually the result of a lot of work/thinking.  Unfortunately the employees don’t have an insight into the thinking behind them so the meaning is often lost.   The article illustrated how this might happen by describing some research involving tapping out tunes with your fingers.  Tappers were asked to tap out tunes (such as ‘Happy Birthday’ to a listener and to estimate how often a listener would guess what it was.  They guessed 50%, but actually the result was nearer 2%.  The tapper could hear the song in his/her head, but the listener didn’t have this starting point so found it very difficult.  I tried this yesterday with a slightly bemused colleague – who couldn’t guess the tune.  It seems like a really quick way to pass on the concept of the importance of both context and the use of language that makes it real for the listener.  If you relate the figures back to corporate messages – if potentially only 2% of your staff understand what you ‘REALLY’ mean – the room for transformation into incorrect action is massive.