On Dewy Grass

After returning from the morning walk with my dog Bobby I felt inspired to write this poem. It's been a long time since I wrote any poetry, I normally have to feel in a certain place to find inspiration. Being out with nature this morning provided that muse. Please let me know what you think! x

On dewy grass this morning passed

Two friends without a care.

Together moored by silver cord

Happy union betwixt this pair.

Under foot they crush the meadow lush

As nightly beasts did so afore

Nature’s hues – greens, browns and blues –

In light invites mortals’ awe.

The poppy heads so proud and red

Stand like giants ten feet tall

Passed between the trees upon the breeze

They hark at blackbirds’ morning call.

Down by the river the bushes a-quiver

Out shot a tawny hare –

The river flushed in mimicked rush

And washed the moss rocks bare.

O’ Sweet Gaia earth, this early mirth

Shows although man tries in vain

To steal her wealth with open stealth

Her beauty shines through the pain

(c) Caroline E. Ruiz 2012

Leading from behind

*It's my first post in a little while (sorry!) so I thought I would treat you to a little picture today :o)*

Today I attended my first Great Insiders event. I'd been very much looking forward to it for some considerable time - even more so because of recent events! I met some fantastic people, swapped ideas for how to avoid the common mistakes internal consultants make, and acquired fodder for further thought! (Phew!)

One thing that stuck with me was an expression that Jill and Liz from Suffolk came up with:-

"leading from behind"

Immediately I found a mental picture of something else that is lead from behind, which as a metaphor I felt summed it up perfectly:

The horse represents the company: the head where the vision and thinking goes on (!) could be senior managers or the board, the legs the "powerhouse" aka operational staff who carry the weight of the labour. The head is blinkered, only seeing straight ahead, oblivious to everything around, below and behind it. The legs are tired, possibly overburdened, but follow the head regardless.

The yoke represents the constraints that everybody in the system feels - "that'll never work here because of x, y, z". Regulation, legislation, lack of creativity. Too much conformity, control. (See how the horse frolicks playfully in the field when he has been un-tacked!)

So that leaves the farmer, walking along behind the horse, detached and guiding *ever so gently* via the reins. He is aligned to and can see clearly the direction where the horse is heading. He can also see the bigger picture and steer the horse away from the puddles and divots. The horse trusts the farmer to guide him through the field as they work together to sow the seeds of change (ok, that was probably taking the metaphor slightly too far - I'll leave it to your imagination to take this further......)

So, in case you haven't guessed it by now, Great Insiders are the farmer in this scenario. Here are some of the problems we share with the farmer (amongst countless others):

• The farmer doesn't hold the reins steady enough - dropping them, not applying enough pressure. This confuses the horse, potentially everything comes to a grinding halt.
• The horse becomes upset and kicks or bites the farmer in self-defence, hurting the poor farmer.
• The horse doesn't trust the farmer, and with a mind of its own wanders off, either stumbling on the rough ground and hurting himself, or tempted by juicy grass grazes to excess, which then leaves the horse bloated and regretful.

And my favourite one of all - The horse becomes frightened by loud bangs and runs off, pulling the farmer off balance and sending him flying face-down in the mud (thanks to Paul for this one!) 


Have you ever had projects that have gone wrong and left you feeling, well, shit? 


If you want to be a great farmer, sorry - insider - then download yourself a copy of the report - "7 mistakes... and how to avoid them" and come join us on LinkedIn. See you there! :o)

Strengths and Weaknesses

I've taken a test to look at my strengths and weaknesses, to identify where my natural talents lie! - you can too by following either of these two links:


http://strengths.gallup.com/110440/About-StrengthsFinder-2.aspx


http://richardstep.com/richardstep-strengths-finder-rssf/


The first one is a book that you have to purchase, then enter a code to do the test. The second one is a free test, and is the one that generated the results below:

Your Top Strengths Are:

1. Inclusiveness (100%):
   People strong in the Inclusiveness theme are accepting of others. They show awareness of those who feel left out, and make an effort to include them.
   
2. Individualization (100%):
   People strong in the Individualization theme are intrigued with the unique qualities of each person. They have a gift for figuring out how people who are different can work together productively.
   
3. Ideation (100%):
   People strong in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
   
4. Achiever (100%):
   People strong in the Achiever theme have a great deal of stamina and work hard. They take great satisfaction from being busy and productive.
   
5. Fairness (100%):
   People strong in the Consistency theme (also called Fairness in the first StrengthsFinder assessment) are keenly aware of the need to treat people the same. They try to treat everyone in the world fairly by setting up clear rules and adhering to them.

Of course, we must remember that these are *models*, and that there are many facets to our personalities, which present themselves in different situations. How we are at work may be different to how we are at home.

But it is, nonetheless, a useful insight into our inner workings..... Have fun finding out what yours is!

Reflections on a very busy week!

Wow, what a busy week! It may only have been four days long but it felt like the longest one ever! I learnt so much this week as well – and I don’t just mean about the processes I was mapping – but rather reading between the lines and gaining some deeper understanding.

Wednesday marked the beginning of two days of process mapping communal repairs. We had a mixture of people in the group from different departments as well as a resident, who provided the necessary challenge to our broad generalisations. “Residents always want this….” was met with “Er, no they don’t, some want this….” (or words to that effect).  He provided the necessary checks and balance to “group think”. A good mix of opinions, although it is fair to say a few times the debate got a little over-heated!

On Thursday I made my way to Leytonstone to the offices of a partnering contractor – a bit of a mission via the train with the large *CSI black bag* (now infamous), then in the rain avoiding the enormous puddles. This time the group comprised some of my maintenance colleagues and people in varying roles from the contractor’s end. The discussions in this group generated a “creative tension” as people saw the problems in the system from different perspectives – like two sides of the same coin, perhaps? (my favourite metaphor). It was a productive team and a productive day – I got what I needed from the group and I feel like the day wasn’t just about identifying issues in a process: perhaps more importantly it was about building on and strengthening the relationship between us and them. For instance, I overheard one conversation where two people who had spoken many times on the phone and via email but never met in person realised who each other was – that “a-ha” moment. From personal experience I know that once you know what someone looks like, it makes it a little bit harder to blame them for a problem as they’re no longer a faceless entity.

So, the thing that I’m keen to explore further here is about breaking down preconceptions and doing away with blame to create harmonious relationships with a shared common goal: Blame occurs whenever we work in silos and lack understanding of what each other does.

I’m also going through a phase of reading self-help books. Some people scoff and turn away when they hear that phrase “self-help”, but they’re the ones that are too proud or scared to learn something more about themselves. A good friend of mine says that “inner space is the new outer space” – we’ve learnt far more about our external environment than we know what goes on inside our own heads! Self-help books are a way of exploring the inner psyche to understand more about how and why we think like we do. I think there are obvious ways to relate those teachings to how we interact at work – we are all people, we all have different psychologies, so of course there is some learning to be had here!

My favourite one at the moment is Susan Jeffers Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. In case you haven’t read the book a quick synopsis is how all fears can be broken down to just one fundamental – that you cannot handle whatever it is you’re afraid of. Jeffers states this is pure nonsense. You can, of course, handle whatever happens. But the chatterbox inside our head will feed our subconscious a torrent of negative statements, trying to drive us crazy. And the sad part is, our subconscious listens to this endless attack and inevitably ends up believing it. So we talk ourselves into feeling low and bad about ourselves, that we’re not good enough to do x so we will keep on doing y, and believe that we are never going to achieve great things or indeed happiness. The chatterbox erodes our self-esteem worse than anybody else you will meet in person.

This low self-esteem creates a situation where we end up playing the victim, blaming others for the cause of our problems. When we blame others we are giving away responsibility for our happiness to someone else – we are giving away control! We are told as we grow up to “take responsibility” for what happens, good and bad, and we think in our adult lives that with buying a house, starting a family and working in our chosen professions that we are “taking responsibility”. But that’s not what it’s about, because actually we can all be guilty of not taking responsibility. Here are some statements that Jeffers asks us to consider to see if we are really taking responsibility for our lives:

“Taking responsibility means never blaming anyone else for anything you are being, having or feeling”.

“Taking responsibility means not blaming yourself”.

“Taking responsibility means being aware of where and when you are NOT taking responsibility so that you can eventually change”.

 “Taking responsibility means being aware of the multitude of choices you have in any given situation”.

So, to relate this back to work, a common problem I hear from people is that “nobody takes ownership in this process”. Everybody seems to be handing off ownership to somebody else, who in turn hands off ownership to another. So this is a situation, to put it simply, where NOBODY IS TAKING RESPONSIBILITY.

With nobody taking responsibility, we are not in control of what’s happening; we are blaming each other for when things go wrong without realising that we were in control of the events leading up to the problem arising and we should have been aware of the choices we could make at that time. Our organisations are suffering from low self-esteem! Somewhere, in the neurochemistry of our companies there exists a chatterbox, which is feeding the organisational subconscious damaging negative messages.

Which leads me to ask this question:

What is it that the organisation is so afraid of that it doesn’t believe it will handle it, if and when it comes along?

What customers really want....? #2

So at the end of What customers really want....? #1 I was questioning whether there was a flaw in lean and systems thinking, from the point of defining value as relating to customers - because it assumes they know what they want. 


Exactly.

What if they don’t know precisely what it is they want?

You could also define value as what the customer is prepared to pay for. Again, that raises a conundrum: what the customer may (be prepared to) pay for may not be ultimately what they want – even from a value sense!

Take the example of when you go to a restaurant. You have chosen that particular restaurant because you like the food, the waiting staff are friendly, the atmosphere is pleasant. But when you are presented with the menu you are torn between ordering the steak or a curry. The decision very much comes down to how you are feeling on that particular day as much as dietary and taste preferences. You think you fancy something spicy because all you have eaten the past couple of days is something bland. So you order curry. It comes, it’s very nice but it leaves you with heartburn afterwards.

You have finished your main meal. You regret choosing the curry and wish you’d had the steak instead, if only to avoid the heartburn. By then it’s too late, and really, you made that decision so you have to live with it. Perhaps if you had your choice again then you would have chosen differently. Who knows? But you’re left not entirely satisfied with your experience of the evening. It kind of matched expectations, but at the same time fell short. You still pay the bill at the end – you cannot argue with the restaurant that they didn’t deliver what you wanted because you chose that item from the menu – nobody held a gun to your head and made you choose curry over steak!


In a world away from restaurants and back in construction - where decisions can be made many years in advance of knowing who the end-user/customer really is, it can fall to the client and their team to make those decisions on behalf of their customer. From this all else in lean/systems thinking flows (purpose - to meet customer demand, SIPOC, and so on).....


So my questions are this (and I don't have the answers yet - so happily welcome your thoughts):


- Do we make too many assumptions about what the customer wants because 1) we may not know who the end-user/customer is, and 2) even if we do, they don't really know their own minds (indecisive - "product out" v "customer in" thinking)?
- How can you prevent customers from having regrets after you've delivered to them what they (you) thought they wanted?
- Do we pressurise customers into choosing things because there isn't enough time to fully explore all the options? If so, how can we make time?

It is too easy to identify who the customer is, make assumptions about what they really want (taking it for granted that when asked they really know their own minds - how many of us can say that truthfully & with total commitment to follow through without disappointment at the end?) and from that build a whole product that purports to meet that exact demand. 


And that's assuming we know our end user!

What customers really want......? #1

On Tuesday I went to the Grand Opening of a rural exception scheme I had been working on for the past five years. I handed over my “baby” to a Development colleague in August last year when I changed jobs internally, safe with the knowledge that the hard work was over with. (The scheme was not on paper “controversial”, but had met with a minority of local opposition who had instigated legal challenges in a desperate attempt to thwart development proceeding. All actions failed. Cost reimbursement was sought from the defending council. The moral is it doesn’t pay to be a trouble maker purely for the sake of it).

At that point it was up to timber frame roof level, so to see it blossom from an unruly, obstinate child into a beautifully mature and welcome addition to the village was tear-inducing. All I could say when my construction-colleagues asked me what I thought was that it was “brilliant”, “wonderful”: I was a little lost for words (highly unusual!)

I was privileged enough to have a look inside one of the properties, which had by now become the home of a young family. The lead tenant had grown up in the village, and whilst he had lived with his parents in the village his whole life his girlfriend had lived with her parents - with their baby - in the city as there was nowhere suitable (affordable) for them to be living all together. Their story was the very reason why we stuck with the scheme, despite all the challenges, pursuing it to the very end. Because it may only have been eight units, but those houses became homes for people desperately in need of affordable accommodation in a community that sees middle-aged city workers moving into their area for a “better quality of life”, without appreciating their migration pushes up the prices for those born and raised there, beyond hope of reach.

But I haven’t written this blog to whinge and moan about the lack of affordable housing in rural areas. That's another story. Instead, what struck me when walking around her home was how design decisions I had made early on had contributed to the delight she now experienced living there. I want to explore this further.

I always drew on my own personal experience from how I live in my home, the design changes I would make to make my life easier, and brought that to the table with this scheme. For instance, I decided not to box in the under-stairs cupboard (as had been done in my home - before I ripped it out) because it limited valuable storage space with a stupid piddly little door for access. I could see that this family used it to store their daughter’s pram – something that would not have been possible if it had been enclosed. In one of the flats (which I unfortunately was not able to gain access to) I had installed a sun-pipe into the upstairs landing, because as there were no windows there would not have been any natural lighting – something I detest in my mid-terrace house. The Quality Assurance Manager informed me that they really chucked out a lot of light into that area - which is exactly what I had intended.

However, those design decisions were made before I embarked on my systems thinking learning journey. I made “educated guesses” at what it was our future residents would want to see in their homes, drawing on personal and professional experience. I had no way of asking them specifically what they wanted. It was perhaps by luck, perhaps by intuition that I happened to get those decisions right, and ended up with a finished product that met (you might say exceeded) their expectations.

This made me consider what I now think may be the fundamental flaw in lean or systems thinking: we start with defining the customer and then what value means to them – as in, what we need to do to meet their expectations. But what if we - and more to the point, they - don't know what those expectations are at the crucial time?

To be continued in #2

A waste of a day....

Aaaarrrrrggggghhhhh! 
I've had an absolute pig of a day trying to get through to various companies via their call centres without any success - all of which are based here in the UK, before you go waggling the finger at oversees outsourcing as being the root of all evil in customer service. One in particular I feel especially aggrieved at, so much so that I've started drafting an Official Complaint. I thought I would share the main points from it, along with my attempts at constructively suggesting possible improvements, for you all to snigger at or sympathise with. I haven't sent it yet. I may have a different (more toned down!) view in the morning. But this is what I really mean...

1. An automated telephone routing service with far too many options: I fell asleep half way through its announcements! It also seems to route you through in loops – particularly if you end up somewhere where you thought you needed to go given the options, then spoke to someone who said you needed to be somewhere else, so back through the system you go again – why can't you just put your customer straight through to the person who can resolve their query!

2. Keeping your customers on hold for fifteen minutes is unacceptable. Have a call back service to leave a message – and use it! And don’t keep repeating that we can contact you via email because after the first eight times of hearing it I’ve got the address, I’ve emailed whilst I’ve been waiting on the phone and that hasn’t got me a reply any quicker. I need an answer NOW! (That's why I've called, rather than written....)

3. Answering a customer’s stroppy email insisting upon a call-back that very same day with one phone call, followed up by an email does not correspond to dealing with a customer query. Sure, it’s “answering” it, and that’s great if all the customer wants is to know that somebody does actually work at "Company X". But if you need to garner more information before you can help the customer (which you did because I deliberately did not give too many details away because I wanted to speak to a real person) then you need to actually have that two way real-time dialogue with them. Not leaving your number for them to call back doesn’t exactly help if they're then expected to call you back. Even worse when they call the number back you dialled from, it’s not a direct line and it goes back around the houses of the automatic routing system (see point 1). So I emailed back, got no response, gave up, fumed for a bit, then decided to write this letter (well, blog for now) when I’d calmed down to see if this would spark some constructive communication?

4. What is it with the nationwide - perhaps global - culture of covering your back to avoid blame? (I'll just cc him/her in just in case) Does your manager really need to be cc’ed in to an email so they know that you have simply called someone – even if you’ve not actually dealt with their query properly? Is that a good thing to show your manager….. really? Or would they prefer to learn that you’ve done your job by resolving the issue before it became a complaint and everybody is happy? Today all I wanted was to speak to someone to get to the bottom of my query – I didn’t care if it was phone, email or even pigeon that got me the response, I just wanted information. Instead, I got nothing. Except you probably met your targets for response, and alerted every man and his dog to an impending complaint. Great. But that wouldn’t give me job satisfaction.

I could go on - but I'm wasting my evening now thinking about it. I think it's best to leave the letter for now, have another beer and resume complaint in the morning. I might have my less sarcastic head on tomorrow..... (will they take me less/more seriously then?)