As children, we figured out, very early on, how to get attention. Crying incessantly and screetching worked great – for a bit. Most of us moved on to annoying repetition, as soon as we were able to speak. The weapon of choice for some being “Oh please! Oh please! Oh please!”. For others throwing oneself on the floor in the middle of the crowded supermarket achieved the desired outcome quicker than your mother could shout “Security!”

As the years whisked by in a plague of spots, exams and failed relationships each of us found our own particular style of influencing. I seem to remember alcohol, loud music and silly clothes playing quite a large part in my early experiments at influencing. Then by adulthood, many of us had graduated to yet more sophisticated methods for gaining attention and commitment. Well that was the hope.

So, what’s happened to your communication skills? Have you hung onto the best that your childhood self was capable of or did you start again when you began working, trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t, by trial and error? Perhaps you discovered a gift for rhetoric in the university debating society (uurgh!) or your first boss sent you on a course and you came away with some tips and tricks that have carried you through.

But what should we have kept from childhood and what do we need to regain from our original interpersonal skills if we want both allies and sceptics to sit up and listen to what we have to say?

The reality is that most of us do many of the behaviours that we did as children but not quite as well. We have simply varnished our early behavioural repertoire with what adults call ‘professionalism’, ‘self-control’ or worse ‘maturity’. Ironically, the one thing that we should import wholesale into adulthood from our days as children is the almost universal childhood capacity to be able to tap into our own feelings about the moment.

Unfortunately most of that apparently time-consuming emotional nonsense (for that is how many parents see their children’s early attempts at assertiveness) is ‘educated’ out of us so that by the time we emerge bright eyed and bushy tailed into the business world we have learned to disguise how we are really feeling in the belief that it makes us appear stronger, more professional, more trustworthy.

My experience with clients suggests otherwise. Whilst most of us become rather sophisticated at covering the tracks of our real selves in the belief that we are thus better protected, what we unwittingly do at the same time, is to become much harder to understand. By using longer words, fewer expressions of emotion and more euphemisms, figures of speech, hinting talk and ‘fibs’ (“big fat lies” to you and me as children) we actually confuse, turn off, bore and block the people around us.

Some people, frustrated by this state of affairs, sometimes consciously (but usually not) decide that they will be blunt and then go about their lives depicting themselves as such. The truth is, they want to say it the way it is but don’t know how to without offending. So they develop a story, a persona that gives them the excuse to be direct and of course usually  – rude. They think that by giving out a warning like a film rating system, (“I am going to have to be blunt – I’ll just get to the point…”) what they say will be noticed, appreciated and respected.

Others go the placid, nothing-bothers-me route and emulate the path of a Zen master, reacting outwardly to very little. The majority unfortunately only manage half of the spiritual trick and secretly seethe inside until they either get ulcers or promotion. Of course one or two really do the Zen master thing properly and… become Buddhist monks which fortunately for the rest of us does at least get them out of the promotion pool.

So what is left for the rest of us? We who want to be able to get our meaning across without reproducing the worst social mistakes of the developing child. We who would like to be able to somehow retain some vestiges of truth, authenticity and spontaneity without wearing our hearts on our sleeves?

The quick answer?… (like most it won’t work on its own but may at least point you in a useful direction):

1. Learn about your feelings and be prepared to mention them from time to time (more than annually, less than every sentence).
2. Put other people’s feelings and not their intellects at the top of your list when you are trying to influence them to do something that they will find hard. People behave with conviction because they feel like it not because they think like it.
3. Tell the raw, unvarnished truth once a day – it’s so easy, even a child can do it.

http://youtu.be/OTrIwzRYRB0

1. When the process is going wrong, e.g. someone is talking too much, not enough or is using jargon or long words not understood by the other person.
2. Action – When someone has done something that is difficult to live with, e.g. has been dishonest or is coming across as aggressive).
3. Mis-communication (genuine and un-premeditated) e.g. talking at cross-purposes (thinking we are talking about the same thing, in the same way but it turns out we’re not).
4. Disagreement on content but the other person isn’t listening. This can play out in 2 ways:
   1. Passive – I don’t tell you overtly that I disagree but hint at you instead
   2. Overt – I tell you that I disagree
   3. Resistance – for any reason…to you, your idea, or both.

Firstly I want to explain one piece of forward planning – one proactive troubleshooting piece that you can do – preventative stuff…

Set expectations correctly.

This can boost the chances that everyone knows where they stand. There is a piece of psychobabble for this – ‘contract setting’.

We tend not to do it because:

1. We forget that we start conversations from different points (mood, opinion, perspective etc.)
2. Stability not dynamism – we assume that things, people, feelings and opinions stand still and that the other person will be in the same place they were when we last spoke or saw them.
3. We are worried about patronising the other person/people involved so we just get on with it.

If you want to try to set the contract the next time you are starting a conversation that is important to you, here’s how. You’ll be surprised at how much clearer and crisper your interaction will be.

Ask for or announce what you want under the following 3 headings:

1. What
2. How
3. Them (yes, them, not when)

1. What you want to talk about – the topic title and why
2. How you want to do it (start point, depth, duration)
3. What you want from them – how you want them to behave (listen, save comments, cut in, advise, not advise)

Simple! It should take no more that 60 seconds – often less – for each person involved.

Now for the remedial piece. What do you do and say when something has gone wrong, more particularly when the conversation you are having is no longer ‘real’. In short, when your conversation is missing one or more of these:

1. Inner talk (the stuff in your head) becomes outer talk (comes out of your mouth!)
2. Giving and receiving of real material (you say it the way it is)
3. Minimum of ritual – talking about the weather and generalities
4. In the moment – not tactical – another way to put it… authentic

I could give you a whole book on this but I will just tell you one piece then ask you to listen to the recording of the last 2 seminars.

THE QUICKEST 2 ways to repair a conversation that has gone wrong are:

1. To find out what is happening to the other person (option A)
2. To tell them what is happening to you (option B)

How do you decide which to do?

Goood question. Here’s the rule of thumb:

If I think I am in a worse position than you, I make a statement about what is happening to me. If, however, you seem to be doing worse than me, I make a point of finding out what is happening inside your head.

So far so good?

But how?

Option A – don’t ask, instead guess and suggest

e.g. “You sound/look/seem…” followed by the word that describes how they seem to be feeling. Then have a guess on what that might be about.

The whole thing strung together might sound like this:

“You don’t sound very keen to go into detail…”

“You seem unhappy about the way this conversation is going…”

“You’re obviously annoyed about me raising this now…”

PAUSE as soon as you can – let them talk some more. They will tell you if your guess is right as well as what they want next. It may take a few attempts but stay with it – and them.

Option B

Tell them how you are feeling and what about.

e.g.

“I’m worried that we’re going around in circles…”

“I am puzzled about what you just explained…”

“I am keen to move on to the main topic…”

And again, PAUSE as soon as you can – let them respond. It may take a few attempts to get through. Don’t play the parrot though, respond to the last thing that happened and how it made you feel.

In the recordings at the end of this post, listen out for these two things in play.

I have just crunched 20 hours of material into a 5 minute read – I hope you at least have a taste for what I am trying to convey. Watch this space for our forthcoming public programme Not Just Talk – first places available in July – download the PDF fact sheet.

Listen to Part 2 of the series: The Mechanics of the Real Conversation. Here it is:

And Part 3  - Troubleshooting – mending the broken conversation:  

Here’s the condensed version of what was discussed.

What is a real conversation – how do I define it and what does it look like?

1. Inner talk becomes outer talk
2. It’s about the giving and receiving of real material
3. Minimum of ritual – little talk about the weather and even less figures of speech such as “to be honest”
4. It is ‘in the moment’ – not prepared and not tactical – usually lots of thinking and pauses to take things in. To watch – a bit scruffy

Does the whole thing have to be like this? – no we can work towards the ideal – being real (authentic) for even bits of a conversation can really drive the result a lot quicker

But why have a real conversation?:

1. To be believed
2. To have an effect – to change something or to keep something going

When for example?

When a relationship needs repair work, when a process has stalled, when performance is not good, when there is stuff going wrong, when there is stuff going right, when wrongs need righting. When there is something that we would rather went away by itself but we know won’t.

Risks – real and perceived

1. Real feelings being exposed – need to be dealt with – will I get them back in the box – will they?
2. Commercial advantage – I’m I saying things that wil make my brand look bad or will prejudice me getting the right deal?
3. Image – is that at stake here?

What actually has to happen for it to occur?

• 2 tangible things – behaviours
• and two intangible things – notions or drivers

Intangible first…

The wish:

• A realisation that the situation has to change – usually because of pressure or a block or hitting rock bottom
• Seeing that I have something to gain
• Knowing that I have something to give

The courage:

May come from…

• Realising that the potential gain outweighs cost
• Being very unhappy/annoyed
• Getting excited about a good outcome

Now the tangible… the behaviours

Empathy and assertiveness

A very brief glance right now at both and a bit more on the assertiveness right away.

Empathy – the capacity to sense a little bit of what the other person is going through

Communicated empathy – the act of reflecting back for checking.

i.e. How they feel, what about and why.

4 outputs:

1. I am forced to pay attention
2. I get trust and respect from the other
3. I remain open-minded – an intellectual challenge in itself
4. I give an invitation to talk without having to say it

Assertiveness

What we normally don’t say – how we feel.

I can mentioned 3 things about myself:

1. How I feel
2. What about
3. Why

But why would I bother? How does it help make a conversation ‘real’ and what does that sound like in a more naturalistic situation?

1. It makes me more compelling to listen to – because I am telling the truth
2. It makes me easier to read – I win trust
3. I am easier to understand

4 examples of how this moves into language…

Jane, thanks for doing that. I was getting worried – I know I needn’t have. I like the fact that you just get on with doing things when I ask you to – it couldn’t be easier for me. And yet I do worry about whether something has been done or not because you tend not to tell me and I tend to fear the worst.

I’m worried that we are falling behind with our digital strategy planning – it’s Feb already and we want to launch in June – it doesn’t leave much time.

I was really pleased to get your mail – it explained the background to some of the things that had really puzzled me in the presentation.

I’m nervous about presenting these figures to you because at this stage they are tentative and yet you may be inclined to take them ask gospel.

Recap:

1. Real conversations involve real news about things like emotions as well as opinions
2. They involve inner talk – the stuff we don’t always say – the stuff in brackets.
3. They are not rehearsed and non tactical
4. We can strive to make conversations real when we need to be believed
5. They always involve some form of assertiveness and empathy

Here’s sound file from the last teleseminar.

The dog has learned to climb the stairs – all three steep flights of them. Getting down is tricky, though, given that Deerhounds have long, gangly legs and as any climber will tell you, the last thing you need when beating a hasty retreat is four long legs to arrange in sequence.

The thing with dogs, or at least your Scottish Deerhound, is that they are persistent, especially when hungry. And they are persistent with a very narrow range of tactics for success. When Fizz (sic) is hungry she works in strict sequence of opportunity according to which resources are accessible to her. It goes something like this:

1. Food bowl
2. Kitchen work surfaces
3. Waste paper baskets (apple cores, sweet wrappers, used tissues, anything else worth shredding/eating)
4. Ask to go out and patrol garden for duck eggs – especially straw bedding in duck houses
5. Final resort – eat anything spongy and filling (car washing sponges and pot scourers are more filling than they look)
6. Rest in front of the fire
7. Go to step 1

“Ha-ha, look at the silly doggy” we laugh.

“Cute but dumb” we think.

Really? Is that really a dumb routine?

Repetitious it certainly is, but dumb it is not. The fact is, it always produces a result that gets something into her stomach which is more than you can say for some companies who have perished in the last few years. So whilst the actions in themselves might be ill-advised, the continuity and persistence requires a closer look.

Innovation, we are always being told, is the stuff of survival. I agree – to a point. New ideas that solve problems or create some life improvement are indeed a fabulous feature of our evolution as humans and of our evolution as humans in commerce. However, one shortcoming of our appetite for innovation is that it leads us to keep switching approaches – sometimes with catastrophic consequences. We rarely, it seems, test anything new for long enough to discover the upsides that follow the opportunity costs.

Consequently, many strategic directions set by company boards and governments are ever worked through properly, often because the initiative is either not an instant crowd pleaser or because it simply entails steady, consistent, tedious-yet-skilful repetition. The consequence is almost permanent upheaval as change is introduced and then dropped and replaced by another strategy. So every time a change is about to bed in and perhaps yield some progress, someone comes along with another ‘good idea’. The result is no progress but tiring upheaval, unsettled teams and individuals who cease to apply themselves to anything because they can be pretty confident that their efforts will be redirected before they have had time to become fruitful.

“We’ve tried everything” the leaders utter. “Yes!” comes the reply – “everything except sticking to the plan!”

But how long should one stick to the plan that is costing time and money and yielding nothing? Is it not true that some strategies really should be abandoned as quickly as possible because they were bad from the outset?

“Yes!” comes the reply, now at a shout, “so stop coming up with the stupid stuff!”

So what does the dumb doggy say? She says: “keep it simple and keep it up”. And then she goes to bed.

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.