bitesize shot or weekend away...

Been racing around the world with the team recently hence lack of updates but here’s something to keep you going for now.

 

The health spa vs. massage debate.

Is it better to put your learners away for a week or expose them to a series of small bitesize chunks over a number of weeks or months...  mmmm.

Opening the batting in a consistently brilliant fashion is the guru of learning Dr Seb Bailey from the Mind Gym. Here’s a starter for 10:

http://clomedia.com/articles/view/is-the-future-of-learning-bite-sized#comment-883319633

 

my thoughts are. You learn not what the lecture told you but what it caused you to do.

If it’s content (regardless being 90mins or 9 days) failed to engage you (for whatever reason) then you’ll learn that you can attend workshops and check your email without being spotted, think negatively and daydream about running up to the MTV beach house...

Nail the causing piece and you’ve got it cracked.

In a shameless piece of trumpet blowing, we worked with the CEO and team of JWT MENA last week on unlocking business issues that had rattled around for a while. It took 3 days. These guys worked day and night. They rocked. Like Aerosmith BUT they also realised very strongly it is their immediate action after the workshop that seals the learning.

For me nothing happens during a learning intervention when the learner is conscious of his/her experience in the classroom. It’s when you pass it on AFTER the event you realise what has been acquired.

At the point of transfer you aint you; it’s like suspended animation. And like a CD on pause, 90mins or 3 days can pass instantly when you’re in that status.

Now,

Go think.

CUSTOMERS AT THE HEART OF EVERYTH...zzzzzzzz

Put 'customers at the heart of everything we do' in a search engine and see what you get.  The highest number of related comments I got when search was 99 million.

What made me smile more wasn't the quantity of material, but the range. On one page I saw that both Thompson Reuters and William Hill the book keepers put customers at the heart of what they do.  Along with tanning salons, cake makers and of course, your business.

I believe that 'putting customers first' etc. has become another platitude.

three reasons I think it's a 'fail'.

1.  If you are putting customers first, you don't need to tell them.
2.  Customers is a generic term. No two are the same and although a few may be groups because they all want the same loan (or car, or t.v, or fake tan) they did so for different reasons, their friends will give them different comments and 5 minutes later, you can bet (on William Hill) they'll want something else that differs to each other.
3.  If every business achieved this customer utopia, then there would be no effort in the world needed at the customer end to discriminate and discern one quality of service from the other; think about it. It's because some offerings are poor that the customer chooses you over another - but then if such were the case we could do nothing and wait for everyone to make mistakes right? if only life were THAT easy.

But putting customers etc. almost creates a platform that no-one can own and thus you're setting the conditions around yourself that you can't satisfy.

odd one this.

I've been asked to think about a 'customer centric brief' and as such feel it's worth a longer explore to get to know the brief.

if only we did the same with all our customer requests...



 

note bag does not inflate.

Thomas Homer Dixon speaks of the ingenuity gap. That growing distance between the complex world in which we live and our natural ability to deal with it.  It’s a compelling argument.

Here’s some evidence to make you smile as it did me; evidence of genius at work.

See attached  shot from my local off licence.

 

I guess the owner got so tired of repeating herself time and again the request for customers to hang on until the machine WAS ready that she stuck the sticker on instead.  It took less than a minute of her time and has made her life at the till easier.

 

The designers of the chip and pin machine spent £millions in its development yet over look the insight that people do follow machines in a certain way despite being asked to do other actions...

 

I’ve spent several of the last few weeks on planes. Can’t help wonder when someone will come up with a cellotape solution to the international expectation setting clause of ‘bag will not inflate’...  perhaps design another bag or hope someone bridges the gap with some ingenuity.

Conference Cliches - 6 gems of advice so you rock rather than roll...

We’ve been about on lots of plane trips recently and spoken at a few events and got the year off to a strong start.  The tongue in check nature of what I write here is meant to provoke my dear readers into think long and hard about any content and delivery you have planned for your own conference appearances.

1. It’s massively important to make a link as explicit and as a strong as you can to the headline of the conference and the presentation you give. You audience are being boomed at all day by dozens of PowerPoints and stimulated by nothing but free mints an luke warm coffee. They don’t want to be given an intellectual resume of your business performance, your cleverness (that’s just isolating) and you shouldn’t ask them to work hard to understand your speech.  If the conference is about HR ENERGY, then your speech should be about HR ENERGY!!!

2. Write your content so a BABOON can understand it. If it contains material that hurts a scrabble player, take it out.  The best guide is FEWER. BETTER. WORDS.

3. Have pictures – they paint a thousand words, but don’t get them off ‘getty’ etc. anyone can do that.  Impress me with your own photography of a moment in life that you captured and made you think. If you don’t do that, I’ll just ignore you and play with my mobile along with the guy next to me.

4. you don’t need to out the ENTIRE CHART OF 1000 figures to show me result went up 65%.  Just tell me. I’ll believe you.

5. If you find yourself saying “the point i’m trying to make...” in your speech. It fills the room with doubt.

6. The reaction you get is the communication you give. (yeah, thought i’d leave you with a philosophical one)

 

And now some fun...

 

Here’s a chart of stand cliches.

In at number 5 is “man suit  holding world in his hands” . Not seen this one since “shrub in soil held delicately in palm of child’s hand” became out of fashion. What I enjoyed about this photo was the poor resolution of the printing.  Close up he looked like he was made of Lego.

 

 

 

In at 4 is “conference bag made from environmentally friendly fabric”.  This allows users to gather up as many pens, leaflets and free mousmats as possible before throwing them away in the trash to become more landfill; genius.

 

 

 

 

 

At 3 is conference muffins and sweets.  Nothing sells contract mobile packages, or fleet hire cars more than sponge and sugar and an empty glass bowl where all the sweets used to be

 

 

 

 

 

At 2 is a BIG EMPTY WHITE BOX. So ... your brand is about what exactly?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And my favourite from this year is an insight stand where the monitor is ... off all bloody day!!

 Not a single insight to be found despite three juniors searching their facebook page for the answer below.

 

 

 

 

See you next conference.

Sigh.

 

 

DONT TAKE YOUR LAPTOP WITH YOU!

 

I’ve sat in front of this machine all day and only now feel I’ve got some of the stuff I wanted to do, done.

 

Things are made worse when laptops are taken away on business trips too.  It’s all to easy to get them out at the airport and in-flight to ‘work’ . But I pack mine in the hold as I know NOTHING gets done.

Watching some folk in the airport and on flights this week, here’s three conversations I think should have happened.

 

“Ashok, how are things?”

“Not so good boss. I got out the laptop in the lounge and brought up the PowerPoint.  I fiddled around with a few fonts, changed the background colours a few times, watched a YouTube video of a horse in Tescos and then moved slide 4 to slide position 18 and then back again. I moved that vertical bar on the left of the screen from left to right which made the appearance of all the slides go larger and then smaller and settled on how it was in the default setting. The new animation package on Win 8 is great so I made the first set of bullet points slide in like a skidding car and made all the strategy slides transition like breaking glass. I watched another YouTube video of a monkey riding a pig and then took out all the animations, shut down and boarded the plane”

“no different content then?”

“no”

--

“Simon, good to see you – how are the figures after the weekend”

“same as last time boss. All I really did on the business flight was change fonts in each column for 10mins until my meal came and then had the laptop sit on my drinks tray until the battery ran out. I was watching Batman for most of the flight. I paused it a couple of times and added a few formulas.  Most of the time #REF kept popping up in the menu bar so I gave up. With over 450 rows of numbers I figured I could write the words BATMAN LOVES ROBIN in the cells and no-one would notice. In the end I saved it under another name figures_edit_Sun_flight_01_Jan but nothing really has changed”

--

“Tracey! What news on the comms project?”

“As yes, I got all emails from head office that I had been cc’d on and spent the flight replying to all with either ‘yes’ or ‘fine’ to everything and replying all back. I thought that was a useful and totally productive way of using our IT resources!”

Stop taking your laptops away with you.

It’s wasting your time.

It’s wasting the earth’s energy resources.

And like this blog, only a few people appreciate the effort you made.

 

snow makes decision making simple

 

Another few cms of frosted water lands across the UK and Britain stops. We love a good snow drama and no doubt the papers will produce similar headlines to what they did last year.

No it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone in the UK that the snow has fallen/is falling. We obsess about the weather here on a daily instance. All conversations start with it and should you want to be a spy for a foreign country, please just strike up a conversation with us about the climate and we’ll suspect nothing.

That all said, the drop in temperature seems to do something to our powers of thinking, analysis, perspective and problem solving. Look no further than the data to draw your own interpretations.

The number of people whose car won’t start and/or get into trouble requiring rescue call out will be in its THOUSANDS.

The number of people who cancel meetings or work from home will be in its THOUSANDS.

Schools will close, shops will shut yet we’ll all have a valid (but irrational reason really) for doing so.

I have a theory that our brains ability to think about the future is high jacked at the mention of snow.  We take the path of least resistance.

We could check the car battery and pull it out of the car and into the house to keep warm and put die-icer in the doors locks to stop them freezing and a blanket on the windscreen to stop the frost. We could email and text everyone at the meeting tomorrow in advance to make sure that we’re all making special effort to get in and manage our travel and physicality so that we arrive on time, in a good mental state, prepared and ready to go; like any other given day. We can also ensure our children have adequate plans to get home without us.

This requires effort, energy and forethought.

Instead we cancel the day and play snowballs.

 

I think there is a great deal of learning in our snow approach if we lifted the DNA of ‘least resistance’ to other aspects of our lives when it comes to solving problems. Does the ppt. need ANOTHER page, do we need to involve yet ANOTHER stakeholder, do we need to ask yet ANOTHER boss and ‘just run things by him just in case’. The answer is no.

It’ll always be no.

And those who disagree are the ones who aren’t having fun right now in the soft blanket of happiness that’s just landed outside....

 

 

There’s an often misquoted saying from Alice in Wonderland that goes “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”.

The actual passage for the literature nerds is:

 Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.

"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough.”

 

Neat.

We like this.

 

We’re spending a good part of the year with our clients aligning and exciting them around their visions for the future. It’s often the case we spend a great deal of time explaining that the vision is made up of many parts.  The mission of the business, the meaning the business has in the world, the reason for its existence, the process on how it’ll achieve its strategy and guidance on people behaviour – all this we think make part of the business vision.

How easy to get lost our clients can become.

So I stick to the simple questions that are often the most profound.

What do you want?

How will you get it?

How will you behave during that process?

 

Have these answers as your north star and you’ll always know where you’re going.  Good advice I say for the start of the new year...