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