Well done you!

Now you just have to muster the will to engineer the reverse exercise. This is when you find out whether you are, what some people refer to as, a ’self-starter’. The magic property which enables you to get on with it all by yourself.

Me? I completely failed to start learning to touch type and I am now having to resort to the loser’s tool of choice: the New Year’s Resolution. My current excuse for five-finger-typing-whilst-watching-the-keyboard-and-still-misspelling-every-third-word is that my friend Tom who promised me a superb, ‘best in class’ book on the topic has not delivered, and frankly, until he can, I’m stuck. Job done. No need to continue with that one.

Part of the problem for me of course is that there’s no one giving me stress about my productivity; I just type, work and play at my own pace. I turn up to work when I feel like it and stop when I like. But, alas, like any company owner/diligent employee, I do far too little skiving/goofing off/resting. I don’t take breaks much, I often forget to have lunch, consider train journeys to be golden times to work on things and have to make conscious and specific efforts to stop having ‘brilliant ideas’ at weekends. But then, I’m lucky. Very, very lucky. I really like my job. So the most damaging aspect of not having a constant boss (I have as many transient ones as I have clients) is that when it comes to something that isn’t important to me, or at least important/urgent enough, I delay or just drop it from the list. So, I seem to have it taped. Lucky me. Well not quite actually. My self-starter approach has come with a high price: there are many things that I just haven’t stretched myself to do. I could say that I haven’t, until now, been very brave and so have played things rather safely. Here is where mentors come along.

I, like everyone else, need someone sometimes to chivvy me along; to help me to get into a difficult, higher gear. Some people depend on their manager to help more than others in this respect either because of the way they are or because of the circumstances in which they live and work. Many of us would show up to work only reluctantly if things were going wrong at home or if work was getting on top of us; repetitious or stressful jobs exact a personal toll which I can only guess at. In these circumstances we positively need leadership. And people who want to be stars at anything (think: athlete, ace pilot, politician, top academic etc.) also need some sort of leadership or at least people around them who perform elements of leadership on them – even when not requested.

We need to know there is someone there looking out for us, giving us an outlet for discussing work-based problems and the occasional home-side catastrophe. We also need someone to give us feedback (a nudge, or stronger) when we are about to take a backward step. So some of us need a leader to get us out of bed, others need one so that they can excel and still others need a leader for self-preservation: because of what the job takes out of them.

So what do we need this precious leader to provide us with under any of these circumstances?

Many things, but a few critical ones are:

1. Set the vision and communicate it to us
2. Determine direction and strategy and pass it on
3. Facilitate progress – make it as easy as possible
4. Provide consequences

Were you expecting number 4?

If you stumble across a poor performing team or a place where morale really stinks it will almost certainly be because there are few consequences to either good performance or poor.

Just reflect upon how you feel when you’ve done something really difficult and no one says anything.

How does it feel, when a little while later, someone fails to do something or gets it wrong (the notion of ‘fault’ is not relevant here) and there is no response, no consequence?

Even those of us who profess to be utterly self-sufficient and to not require formal leadership need consequences to our own actions if we want to get anywhere special. And we want to see consequences for those around us whose actions affect us.

Without consequences events and outcomes just don’t make sense. Fulfilment is never achieved, the will to improve or alter something doesn’t materialise within us. The worst consequence of the lack of consequences is that we give up trying because, when things are really difficult, anything bearable will do. The consequences provide the point. No consequences; no point.

So, I still can’t type and it’s a big waste of time and energy; I get tired and frustrated. I get documents done but without the satisfaction of doing it quickly. I waste brain power on doing corrections instead of using it to be creative, to write better. So the lack of external consequence for me not learning to type, far from freeing me up to remain a free agent, binds me to a situation I don’t like. It’s not big, but then again, it is a bloody pain. My only hope is that Dr Bill Baker will call me to embarrass me about his virtuoso Ukulele playing. At lunch, a few weeks ago, the deal struck between us was: “you learn to play and I learn to type”.

So what does all this mean to you and your team?

You might give them 1-3 as above and much besides. But if you don’t provide consequences for good and poor performance they will never, ever perform anywhere near their best, if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, they may give a lot less than that because they will assume that it really doesn’t matter to you. And if it doesn’t matter to you, they will find a way to cope: making it not matter to themselves (cognitive dissonance).

So what are you going to do about it? That is up to you.

What am I going to do? Well, since my boss refuses to administer any consequences of note, I’m going to call Bill and get myself a consequence that I care about: his good opinion. That should nail it.

Let’s be honest now. You and I have struggled to keep going the last couple of weeks; a mixture of fatigue (why now?? see last post), social and environmental hypnotic suggestion (twinkly Christmas effect – technical term) and a raft of business reasons have made it very tricky to keep the productivity machine from stalling altogether. But the day is approaching when we are actually going to have to stop ourselves checking our various electronic devices for updates, actions and trouble; we are going to need to divert our attentions to our own, personal lives. But like a sick dog who isn’t permitted to eat but habitually sniffs it’s bowl anyway, we will both, you and I, have to find ways stop sniffing the empty work bowl for 10 days.

Habit is one thing and wish is quite another. A habit can dry up quite quickly, in the space of 40-50 experiences, even quite close together. So if you do glance at your Blackberry or iPhone and then realise that there is no real need, you may not have to go through this ritual many times before you notice that you are doing it less and less within a day or two. The point here is not so much can I stop the habit but do I have something better (more engaging) to do? Something that brings me a stronger (nicer) feeling than the little kick that I get from checking my mail/voicemail to see if I have received good news or a lack of bad. That part is of course a matter of personal choice. We can each choose to fill our heads with what is happening right now or to worry about what we left behind (unfinished tasks and troubles) and what is coming up next on the 3rd of January (more tasks and trouble).

The challenge for busy people is to exist in the present whilst creating outcomes for the future; to do what we are supposed to be doing now and not what we were supposed to be doing yesterday or what we should be doing tomorrow. Whenever you have decided to stop work, your new ‘To-do’ is to work at doing the present well – keeping your head in the now as the saying goes.

This thing about concentrating on living the day, the experience, the moment is the most obvious recipe for returning to work as happy and rested as possible. Not to mention the most obvious way to ensure that you have something to give, beyond your physical presence to the people around you during the few days that you have at your disposal.

Bottom line: just as you and I can choose how, when and how well to work, we can choose to make a really fine job of switching off and having a great holiday season – even if we must at first work at it.

My best wishes.

It’s just a short break.

The Christmas phenomenon is theoretically simply a 10-day hiatus when everyone takes holiday at the same time. It is a brief period in the calendar when it is difficult to get any sort of financial transaction done here in the UK beyond paying the bin man his Boxing Day bonus. Actually, now that I think of it, even that is difficult since our corruption-paranoid council is in the habit of rotating the collection teams. It must have solved a problem, I wonder which one?

Waste collection aside, the period in question is actually really rather small – much shorter than the summer shut down with its huge penumbra that seems to extend for months. But Christmas day, small and neat as it is, reduces our keenness for action like a black hole swallowing up everything in the 4-week vicinity of its dark centre. The festive phenomenon is an indiscriminate magnet for everything to do with making progress in business: focus, energy, plans, determination, money, attention span, resources and even good health. All seem to vanish into the void of Christmas without trace or explanation. What is going on, year after year? Should we not be told?

Back to childhood?

Could it simply be that our collective wish to forget all our problems and have fun is to blame? Maybe the twinkling lights and toy advertisements on TV rake up past demons who must be appeased with childish attention. Could it be that the twinkliness of Christmas, like the tortured call of the ice cream van’s crazy music, still has the power to make our collective pulses race? To hypnotise us? To make us forget what we are supposed to be doing as rational adults? Might it be that the daily reminders of the approach of the festive season unrelentingly chip away at our will to execute on business strategy, to be active in sales and marketing, to maintain business rigour and all the other things that we must do to keep our organisations up there, out there and growing.

Christmas seems to act upon our common sense to the degree that ‘sense’ becomes as uncommon as a perfectly roasted turkey. And yet I think the dimension of the festive season that really sends us beyond the fringes of reason is the notion of ‘The New Year’.

A new and better place? I think not.

We are annually taken over by the belief, at a profound, pre-conscious level that everything on the other side will be different and, more catastrophically, is a long, long way off. We start to foster irrational thoughts of new beginnings, fresh starts and clean slates. A new bright world where we can stride out and achieve the unachievable. Conversely, people with targets, having had their counters reset to zero and their quotas increased must face the nail-biting prospect of starting from scratch. But is there really any relationship between either of these two positions and reality? Don’t be daft.

The solemn reality that we must face is that Tuesday 3^rd of January, will be like any other day. The third of January does not know that it is the first day of our business year, 2012. The universe, in keeping the world spinning and the stars evenly spaced around us does not take into account our puny notions of time and relativity. It will, in the starkest reality, be a day like any other except for in one, essential way: how we feel about it.

Our feelings about the day, the preceding weeks, and about the weeks that follow will dictate how we fare: whether we overcome obstacles, if we meet our targets, the degree to which we feel fine, stressed or ill. The degree to which we are taken in by the idea that Christmas and New Year are a genuinely significant existential watershed will determine what we do now and in turn affect what happens around us in 6½ weeks’ time, and far beyond. At the risk of sounding like a Harry Potter film character, you and I shape events in the future by how we act now. You and I can actually change our destinies. How? Mainly, by not allowing our good sense and adult judgment to be sucked into the nonsensical black hole of the approaching holiday season.

Easily said, but how? By asking ourselves 1 simple question every time, in the next few weeks, that we are about to make, or postpone, a notable decision:

If it was 1^st September today,

what would I decide to do?

If your answer is substantially different to what you had decided to do when you factored in that you only had 28 working days left until Christmas, go and splash cold water on your face and think again.

The markers that we use to shape time, events like New Year’s Eve, a flotation date or the financial year end do indeed help us to make sense of what we have achieved and what’s coming next. And yet these same markers can also make us suckers for acting with only the instant result in mind.

Reckoning our objectives and achievements against days, weeks, months and quarters encourages us to go for only the most obvious goals, to shoot for the nearest horizons. Of course, chopping up our years into seasons and holidays does provide us with rest time and relief from our problems and fatiguing work but it also prevents us from having a really good go at things, from taking the long view, from tackling big problems with cooler, calmer minds.

Surrender but not yet.

And if there is one thing that we need as we hurtle towards the coming festive black hole it’s a cool, calm mind that will prompt appropriate action and not wait for the perfect day that will never come.

And yet, as the magic days draw close, their attraction will be too strong for you and I to resist. And then, for a few days, it will be time to surrender ourselves.  Because the part of you and me that will enjoy Christmas and New Year the most will not be the sensible adult who runs a business, but the child inside who chases ice cream vans and still believes that anything is possible.

Meaning: looking at the tiny little behaviours that seem to amount to nothing at all but can make the difference between a decision that everybody goes for and therefore executes their piece of and one that is pushed forward by the ‘big voice’ and never gets full compliance and therefore execution. The exciting thing is that we are getting back lots of nods and examples.

Repairs them? But no one repairs things any more, surely. And a television? Actually, Mr Teague has also overhauled for me a favourite 25-year old Kenwood mixer and a Raclette machine that used to make all the lights go out when you switched it on. Teague’s Televisions is a small shop, full of used and occasionally decrepit electrical goods waiting for careful repair or collection by a grateful owner. The smell of dust and solder flux hangs in the air – it’s the smell of effort and of careful repairs.

All this in stark contrast to the constant upgrades and improvements, the throw-away-and-replace mentality which we practise, and are exposed to, in every sphere of our lives. Every time I buy a toothbrush it has more bristles, of more colours and of more textures than the one I was able to buy 2 months before (I have a soft spot for new toothbrushes). And try buying a bar of normal, uncomplicated chocolate, in a hurry. You’ll be faced with myriad bars of all shapes that involve chocolate mixed with 20 other ingredients. Somewhere in there you may see a bar that has only been mixed with chocolate – if you’re lucky.

Children at school now have something called Forest School. About 3 years ago someone in Westminster decided that school subjects were just too boring to be taught as they were or that our children were just too lacking in attention spans to be able to cope with didactic teaching methods that had worked well for 250 years. So now our children are taught in a draughty canvas shelter in a field, 100 metres from the school building. Something about team work has been mentioned… Neither of my children, or any of the teachers, has ever been able to explain how teaching maths and English in the middle of a field works better that teaching it in the classroom.

It seems that we just can’t leave things alone or at least that we are allergic to the thought of keeping it simple and applying a little more effort. If you believe in the ideas around Maslow’s hierarchy of needs you could be forgiven for thinking that we have recently shot out of the top of the pyramid, zooming past the self-actualisation zone without a pause, onwards and higher, to the hitherto unknown: fiddle-about-and-make-things-complicated-so-that-we-don’t-have-to-deal-with-what-we-don’t-like zone.

Well, I suppose we solution-providers have played our part in feeding this hunger for the effortless solution. We have been furnishing a seemingly endless stream of ever more intriguing and comprehensive ideas, models, theories and solutions to whoever shouted for help. Solutions to things that may not have needed a new solution at all but just the original one re-applied, more consistently, more carefully, for longer. I suspect that sayings such as ’persistence pays off’ and ’if it sounds too good to be true, it is’ have a greater potential to nudge us in a constructive direction than have many serious books by clever business authors and assorted gurus.

But whilst tiny gems of wisdom such as these are quick to bring to mind, they are even easier to dismiss. And although simple they require an amount of personal investment to make them real. And it can be at this stage of personal investment that we fall. We are frail creatures, we want things to be fixed so that we can get on – with as little effort as possible. We like our solutions on a plate, not in a recipe book.

Going for the big, complicated, branded solution is the ideal meal on a plate. It looks fresh, it looks substantial and it costs enough to be good. There is little room in this thinking for the simple solution. The fact is, the simple solution is a bit embarrassing, at least in part, because it negates all that time and money that we wasted on the complicated stuff that we’ve just tried. But worse, it takes away the hiding places; no complexity and learning curve to shelter behind. Simple solutions are a tough sell not only because they lack the ‘wow’ factor but because they require immediate action which entails personal effort and even individual discomfort. And yet, self-generated improvements are like toys that don’t need batteries. There’s nothing to run out and there’s nothing to say that you can’t fix them when one of the little wheels falls off. It’s the solution you’ve always wanted and it was in your pocket all along. You know what you need to do: think ‘simple’.

What are you waiting for? Close your laptop and fix something.

Question: Did the boss of Kweku Adoboli, the 31-year-old UBS trader who has admitted to wiping out $2.3bn of UBS funds, ever have a real heart to heart with this trader? Did he even have a meaningful annual conversation with him concerning anything aside from the nuts and bolts of the job? I just can’t imagine it. You would notice something. Surely you would notice his behaviour changing over the months? Because we’re not even talking about noticing subtle change over years. We’re talking about picking up signals from someone who has got themselves into a major jam in the period of a few days – and only then over months and years.

The first day.

And there was a first day. There was a day back in 2008 where Kweku turned up to work happy, or at least feeling OK, and left in pieces when he realised that he should have closed a position at a loss and taken the rap on the knuckles. Why didn’t his boss or colleagues notice, and if they did, why was there not a next step? Something in the interpersonal DNA of that trading desk meant that it was a conversation that nobody could have. But there is worse – at least for his leaders. As if they don’t look incompetent enough, have a little think about this… What dynamic existed between him and his boss that meant that Kweku couldn’t countenance turning around to his boss at any time in the first few weeks to say: “I’ve messed up big time”. Reports suggest that had the trader reported the problem at any point in the first few months (even in the first year, some say) then he would have had to endure little more than the proverbial smack on the wrist. So why didn’t he take advantage of this amnesty period and be done with it?

Behind the scenes.

Things are of course never as they appear. If you or I worked at UBS we would know the answers to all of these questions. We would know what the culture of the place is and recognise the strict yet invisible differences between the acceptable and the unacceptable. We would both know the taboo subjects and the corporate attitude to mistakes. We would both know who to look out for and who could be trusted to admit something to – who we could ask for advice without fear of being exposed as being weak, dumb or incompetent. It will be interesting to see how the management of UBS react to this appalling fault in leadership in the coming months. Will they bulk up on rules and regulations or will they put all their management on intensive doses of emotional skills training? Neither I hope. A little and often. A slow in-depth change of culture is what is needed. But above all, positive, intelligent  help, not snap, remedial training. An even more interesting question is: will you do anything differently on Monday morning in the way that you treat your reports or colleagues? Are you confident that you know your people as well as you need to? Are you sure that they can come to you with a mistake and meet with an intelligent response or even support? Is the culture in your area of the office or organisation such that people help each other, share ideas and confidences or is it highly competitive to the degree that the members of your team aren’t much bothered who falls by the wayside as long as it’s not them? The chances are that you recognise elements of all of these cultural conditions.

No man is an island – wanna bet?

No office or organisation has got team cooperation and intelligent, compassionate leadership completely taped 24/7. Why not? Well, because even if you are a great leader and your team really do pull together, most of the time, you can never account for the one or two people who join the organisation and then never quite fit; never completely drop their guards and connect with the social system. These people cannot be helped easily because they have not retained the ability to show vulnerability alongside technical authority and knowledge. They have, in fact, developed a persona which makes them much less vulnerable to life’s knocks and yet equally renders them beyond the reach of help. We all know that when we pull up the drawbridge we shut out the cavalry as well as the enemy; and for some of us the drawbridge will always be up more often than it is down. So, for the sake of both happiness and organisational fitness-for-purpose, we should invest energy in learning to recognise these well-defended people and also in fostering a social environment that makes ‘real’ conversations possible. Because as Leeson, Kerviel and now Adobole have shown us: if I have a problem, you have a problem.

This need to learn to ‘have the tough conversation’ comes up again and again for us on projects and amongst ourselves as consultants. How is it possible to tackle a difficult issue with a colleague not only without souring the relationship, but actually, with the possibility of improving it? And is it possible to make a positive outcome less hit-and-miss?

An incentive.

It goes almost without saying that the people involved have to have some incentive to get their heads together – they have to all/both have or perceive a payoff from doing something that they may find very uncomfortable. These payoffs may take many forms but will all have something to do with feeling better, more relaxed, relieved, better motivated, more cheerful. The effort to improve communication in a relationship that is based on a predominantly business goal, be it financial or organisational, will probably not be strong enough to motivate the people involved to take difficult action. We rarely feel strongly enough about improving business to risk our own feelings in that sort of effort (unless of course it’s our money and then that goes back to feelings anyway).

Ingredients.

So, what are the ingredients of a ‘let’s get real’ conversation? I think they are:

1. A shared keenness to take the relationship somewhere new: less laboured, more trusting, less tactical, more open.
2. A shared keenness to listen to difficult material about ourselves without interrupting or judging.
3. Some degrees of capability and willingness to talk truthfully about our own feelings and to hear about the other person’s, too.
4. A very specific topic or incident to discuss or repair – this could for example be entitled simply: ‘how we get on’ or ‘merging our departments humanely’.

But the overarching need is for the people involved to create the environment between themselves that makes them feel reasonably confident that what is exchanged will stay within the relationships in the room. How do we do this?

Perhaps the simplest way is for the people involved to look each other in the eyes and profess their wishes: “For me to be able to be open with you I need to know from you that what we talk about will go no further than you without my agreement –  I will of course promise the same in return.” The point here is that there doesn’t have to be a big, fancy preamble. Having said that, if the individuals or group involved have had difficult times in the past then it can be helpful to give people the chance to discuss their fears surrounding disclosure before they are actually asked to do it – a ritual that serves as a warm up period – a chance to ’size up’ the other people in the room – to build a little rudimentary trust. To give people the chance to communicate thoughts such as: “I’m taking a risk here – are you going to treat me properly?”

A focus.

Finally, as a note to No. 4. above: The conversation may be tiring as well as progressive so to save people getting tired and then reverting to old, non-functioning habits or getting ground down by the volume of negative material about themselves, I suggest that the topic be carefully limited to something SPECIFIC and SMALL. It is by doing this that big things happen. Why? Because the small but essential invisibles get discussed properly e.g. how I feel about you and how you feel about me…

But let’s be honest, this short piece (and the many others like it on the web at this very moment), is worthless without there being a willingness, in some form, for the people involved to have a real, less tactical conversation. It doesn’t matter why they want to be more open, it’s just important that they should want it at all.

Also, following guidelines like these is OK but the No.1 priority is to just GET TALKING and DON’T STOP – however scruffy, embarrassing or aversive it might be at the beginning.

As children growing up in a complex world we labour constantly, often without knowing it, to work out what is going on around us. What does that frown mean? What do I say when someone says that? How do I stop the shouting? Why am I getting peas again?

So we guess. We develop ‘rules of thumb’ so that we don’t have to work things out from scratch every time. Much of this rule-making is done by the time we reach pre-school age or soon after, although our accumulated expertise might not always be evident because, at that stage, we often lack the words to describe our insights to our carers. But let us be clear, this expertise is just based on really good guesses and personal interpretation. Fact-checking features very little at this stage.

And then the tricky stuff really begins. From the first days in contact with other children it begins to dawn upon us that we don’t all think alike, or to be more precise, we don’t all believe alike. Each of us has by now developed a subtly different set of rules from everyone else in the group and here we face an even tougher challenge than before – deciding which of the competing rules is ‘right’.

Much of the time our need for an instant decision in tandem with a need for comfort leads us to one of the binary conclusions: either you’re wrong and I am right or you are right and it’s me who is wrong. It is this decisional dead-end that opens the opportunity for ‘mistakes’. Of course, mostly, there is no mistake, there’s a mismatch.

If there is a mistake it is one that we seem to often miss the lesson on – even as we grow into adults. The mistake in a given situation is not made when I fail to match your rule or you fail to match mine but when we both fail to notice that there is a rule. Or to be more precise, two. The follow-on error is to for each person to promptly decide that the other person is wrong/bad/thoughtless/horrible (add your own judgements here).

So, is the remedy simply rule recognition – noticing that we are just believing something different rather than being different, right or wrong? Partly. But first an example:

I am writing this sitting on the train to London. 10 minutes ago, as the train filled up with passengers a man drew level with the seat across the table from me and slammed his orange drink down as if to say “Mine! This is my seat – anyone got a problem with that?!” Now his version… “Oh no, I don’t think I’m going to be popular, three people at the table already and it’s very quiet. I hate asking ‘is this anyone’s seat? Instead, I’ll just put my drink down here and they will hopefully get the message that I’d like to sit down and if there’s a problem it won’t be so embarrassing as actually sitting down or asking the stupid question which often gets a negative reply…”

Of course I don’t know what he was thinking, I’m making it all up, his version and mine. The point is, which version of events do I need to believe to bring about the better outcome? Do I make the juice man nicer by treating him badly? Of course not. Do I make myself nicer by treating him badly after guessing nasty things about him? Definitely not.

Which brings me to the second part of the remedy:

Stop guessing like a child or guess something nice.

Actually there is another problem – Milo and fizz hate being brushed. In fact all deerhounds hate it (it’s an insult to their dignity) unless you give them cheese to eat at the same time and that can become expensive given how much brushing is involved. The fact is that most owners simply don’t bother unless they plan to show. And since showing involves giving up your life and that of your family, liquidating your assets, giving up work and buying a gypsy caravan to take you round the country for 6 months of every year, most deerhound owners don’t show – well not us sane ones anyway.

Back to the coat.

It takes about an hour and a half to groom a Deerhound that has been left a little too long. It takes about an hour to groom a deerhound once a month. It takes about a minute to groom a Deerhound once a day. In that light I could say that Fizz and Milo embody the dos and don’ts of maintaining relationships and intimate communication. By intimate I not only mean the conversations that we have within our most personal relationships but to those that we can have with colleagues with whom we have developed what we might call a special relationship. A situation which enables either person to raise even awkward topics so openly and honestly that there is very little risk of the input being met with anything more obstructive than moderate awkwardness (a red face or a bit of fidgeting!).

The ritual of brushing the dogs daily (I actually stroke them at the same time to take their minds off the wiry brush), whether I perceive that I have the time or not, works on many levels. (Incidentally, this morning I swore that I did not have time and yet still brushed for two minutes. Was I late for my first appointment? No, of course I wasn’t – it was only two minutes).

After two weeks of the daily campaign:

1. The hounds look great.
2. Milo and Fizz are staring to like being brushed – or at least to dislike it less.
3. I don’t berate myself multiple times a day for not brushing the dogs.
4. I feel proud every time I see them because I am caring for them properly.
5. I appreciate them and their presence more; they now receive more attention, through the day, than ever before.
6. They seem to respond to a call to heal even more quickly than before.
7. I have stopped making promises that I know I will not/cannot back-up – “I really will brush you properly this weekend…”
8. Lots of minute and apparently insignificant efforts (positive and negative) stack up remarkably quickly.
9. I have realised that there are a great many tiny things that I can do to make life go better for me and for others.

Most of us, by the time we attain a certain age, will claim to be competent at conducting positive, deep, relationships and performing all of the skills that are required to stay ‘in relationship’ with the people around us more widely. But the point is not whether we know what it takes, it is whether we do what it takes. Do we really behave as if we mean to make progress with the people we spend time with, professionally and personally? Or do we tend to operate on the literal, factual level with them, trusting against all logic and experience, that the relationship will simply look after itself, and even improve over time – just like the coat on a large, shaggy dog?