Author: Nailia Tasseel

A letter to my younger self

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

Imagine you could go back in time, to a point in your life at which you faced a decision. Using the benefit of your wisdom and experience, you could advise your younger self as to their future – not to change history, or to alter the course of events – but to reassure them that the journey they are undertaking will come good in the end, or that their efforts will one day all be worth it.

It has become quite a popular exercise – Google ‘Letter to your younger self’ and up will come scores of blogs and articles written by people who have obviously been on such a journey, and have found it cathartic to imagine a world in which such a letter might be possible.

A world in which an angst-ridden spotty 16-year-old could read a letter from his 30-year-old future self (perhaps with an accompanying photo depicting him with stylish facial hair and a clear complexion), and be reassured that Sharon Granger from Number 17 isn’t destined to be his one true love, his broken heart will mend in uncanny correlation with the start of the new football season, and advising him to spend less time on the Xbox and more on his homework if he wants a fruitful career in Graphic Design.

A world in which a lonely pensioner could advise his younger, busier, self that he should spend more time playing with his children and telling his wife he loves her, because one day he will have all the time in the world but that world will have moved on.

Or a world in which a stockbroker who has lost everything could go back to her ambitious, hungry graduate self, and teach the lesson of caution.

What a great opportunity – sadly impossible. However, it’s a great exercise – looking back at the issues that worried, confused and saddened you in your past, and reflecting on how those issues resolved themselves, for better or worse. You should try it.

It got me thinking about what we do as a business. Generally, our clients are on a journey – they have a destination in mind, and a way in which they are going to get there. Imagine if, at the end of their journey, they could go back to the start and reassure themselves that their destination was indeed reachable, attainable, and everything they imagined it might be. They might be able to warn of a few hurdles, dead ends or errors, and outline some of the lessons they’ve learnt along the way. Or they might leave their younger selves to make those errors anyway, knowing that it’s only experience that allows both people, and organisations, to grow. But how inspiring for that CEO, or any employee, regardless of their position in the company, to know that their future self does embark on that journey, and come to the end, however that destination ends up looking. Motivational or what?

Whilst none of us can predict the future, we’re all able to tell the stories of our past. And we can probably learn more about ourselves, our ambitions and goals, from looking back into our past and seeing how we dealt with the struggles we’ve faced in our journey to date. So perhaps it’s a good exercise for us all to carry out, on a personal or professional level. And if in the future some brainiac does discover how to send items, or people, back in time or space, our letters will be ready for the first post.

A fracas in a teacup

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

 

So we’ve gone from a ‘punch up’ to a ‘fracas’, to ‘handbags and pushing’, in the space of just a couple of days. No doubt by Monday the dispute between BBC presenter Jeremy Clarkson and his producer will be labelled a ‘minor tiff’ and all will be well again.

We place a lot of emphasis on words. There was fevered speculation, before the details emerged, as to what a ‘fracas’ could have involved. Its dictionary definition is a ‘noisy, disorderly disturbance or fight; riotous brawl; uproar’ – not the same as ‘pushing’, or indeed punching – and its use has probably been regretted by the BBC since its hastily-issued press release earlier in the week.

Being in the business of storytelling, we place a great emphasis on the importance of words, and choose them carefully. What means one thing to one person might have a completely different meaning to another. I was reminded of this earlier in the week when discussing the term ‘red tape’, as this was a phrase I was not allowed to use for years in a previous job as it had such clichéd connotations, especially when used in conjunction with the equally maligned ‘health and safety’. Yet it has deep resonance for some, who see it embodying all the barriers they experience in their work.

The meaning of words is so impactful that the Huffington Post has curated a list of nine (why nine?) of the literally most hated words of all time. And I’ve just used three in that last sentence. Whilst I don’t mind a lot of them, I can see why they could grate, especially when used together. Management speak in particular has become deeply ingrained into our corporate culture, and now veers between being meaningless or ironic, neither of which is helpful.

Coming back to the Jeremy Clarkson incident – consider this from the producer’s perspective. His employer has described an incident in which he was variously bullied/attacked/teased/threatened (depending on your perspective) by his colleague as a ‘fracas’. This has led to an ‘inquiry’. If nothing comes of it – and after a ‘hearty man to man chat’ as one newspaper has described it, Clarkson is given just another caution – then what message does that send to the producer? That a ‘fracas’ is a perfectly acceptable method of communication between colleagues? And that we can all get away with a fracas at work if we put down our ‘handbags’ afterwards and say sorry?

Words are important. Words have meaning. As the press department at the BBC may or may not learn, they can come back to haunt you, as indeed Clarkson found to his cost just a few months ago. When telling a story, your choice of words can really affect the listener, or reader, who will draw their own conclusions from the words you use. That’s why stories have so much power.

The dress is in the eye of the beholder

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

Team Blue and Black, or White and Gold? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you clearly haven’t been exposed to much social, or indeed any, media this past week, in what has become one of the most talked about internet sensations in recent years. ‘TheDress’, as it became known, split the world (at least those on Twitter anyway), dividing workplaces, celebrity couples, and earning the manufacturer, Roman Originals, more free publicity than they could ever have dreamt of.

The science – briefly, because it’s not that interesting, and because I still don’t understand it – is to do with how the brain perceives colour, and chromatic adaptation, and means some people will see the dress in its actual colours – blue and black, whilst others will perceive it as being white and gold.

What I found interesting about the debate was how vehement people were in their assertions that they were seeing the ‘correct’ colours. Until the original dress was revealed (and Team Blue and Black came out in triumphant applause), everyone seemed to be vehement that the colours they were seeing were right. Some celebrity tweeters argued with their other halves about the dispute, others declared themselves scared and confused. It was as if one dress had the power to make some doubt their very existence.

It’s fine for opinions to be divided – we read about this every day in the papers, ranging from trivialities to worldwide disputes – but when such basics as what we see with our very eyes are challenged, we can’t accept the fact we might be wrong. We’ve all seen optical illusions, gone cross-eyed in concentration at magic eye posters, and even the concept of colour blindness doesn’t faze us anymore. So why all the fuss?

A couple of weeks ago, a fellow blogger, Tabrez, wrote of his surprise and delight in discovering that one of our colleagues has synesthesia. Whilst she regaled us all with tales of how she ‘sees’ words, names and events in colours, smells, even tastes, we were interested and intrigued – but never at any point did we feel she was wrong, or strange – merely she had a different way of experiencing things to us. The same with the dress. I saw it white and gold, but considered myself neither right nor wrong for doing so. It was just my perception. It strikes me that perception can be dangerous if it undermines what we consider to be a shared experience. How many other things do we see differently?

At the end of the day, it’s just a dress – and will be quickly forgotten. But it would be nice to live in a world in which a difference in perception merely sparks a lively conversation, not international outcry! I maintain that the dress is prettier in white and gold than blue and black. But that’s just my opinion.

Same, same but different

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

I recently returned from a trip to Vietnam and a comment by a guide to me at the beginning of my trip still resonates with me today.

Vu, my guide, was native Vietnamese, born and raised in Ho Chi Minh city. The difference between him and many of his fellow countrymen was that he was married to an Australian and spent many years of his life living and working overseas. He had experienced a more liberal and autonomist culture. What he said was, “Many people in Vietnam don’t think independently. Generally people follow the lead of others, rarely breaking the mould.” Although this was a very sweeping comment and by no means envelopes everybody in Vietnam, over and over again I saw it in practice throughout my travels. There were streets of shops all selling the same things … entire districts devoted to one product. Case after case where one person would find a successful line of business and others followed suit.  None of these shopkeepers were making their fortunes: there was too much competition in their line of business. They were surviving but not thriving.

Every now and then there was someone that stood out, finding a niche that was different to everyone else. These people were small jewels. They were one step ahead of everyone else and they had dared to be different – running a business that was selling products nobody else was selling. Their success was evident. They ran bustling independent stores, to which tourists flocked. They had risen in the ranks of review sites and were the first green shoots of change in a growing economy. In Vietnam and Asia business is booming.

Vietnam is the world’s biggest coffee producer but they are held back by producing poor quality Robustas Coffee for the freeze dried coffee market rather than the more lucrative Arabica Espresso trade. Mia, a small-scale coffee roaster, is bucking the trend, roasting high quality Vietnamese beans for espresso. It’s a business that’s doing something different, and thriving. Surprised?

That guy sounds like a beige bun

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

The other day, we had a lunch gathering amongst The Storytellers, and as usual I love talking about food — the myriad varieties of flavours and the wonderful tastes out there, not to forget presentation of food in which some eateries in our area excel.

Seeing sounds, and tasting words however, came up in conversation with Alison, one of our MDs. In between courses Alison mentioned that she sees the year ahead like an arc in her mind’s eye, and that every month has its own colour and taste. With a few blank faces in response, she pressed on, saying that every word in her vocabulary carries with it a colour, texture or taste. Personally, I was completely fascinated, as this was the first occasion I had met someone with synesthesia — a sensory experience whereby one experiences one sensation from the stimulation of another — for example, if I say 23, you taste honey. Surprisingly, no one at the table, including Alison, had heard of this beautifully strange natural phenomena. She had always assumed that everyone thought this way. So we kept feeding Alison – not food to taste, but words to hear her interpretations of taste, colour and texture. These were some of our favourites:

Tabrez: Brown, and crispy
Robert: Beige colour, and has a bread or bun-like texture
Amy: Pale yellow, smells like freshly ironed clothes
Marcus: Blue and is an egg (with toast soldiers)
Martin: Blue, and tastes like juicy plum tomatoes (the name, not the person!)
Roger: Absolutely a Cadbury Flake, possibly with toffee, and tastes delicious

There have been a number of attempts to bring the synesthesia sensation to life, and in the last year, there two great executions stand out for me. The first is a video by Grey London, commissioned by Schwartz Flavour Shots, and the attempted visualisations of their flavours.

The next one I unashamedly love, and have been playing with regularly over the last year. Before you visit Patatap, make sure your speakers are on high (or you have headphones), and that you have a spare ten minutes as it’s more addictive than your Facebook feed on New Year’s Day (if you’re into that kind of thing)! This project by Jono Brandel was partly inspired by synesthesia and I think it’s a great insight into how other people experience sounds.

Enjoy.

Time well spent

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

A couple years ago, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion that you can learn to do anything expertly – all it takes is 10,000 hours of practice.

This 10,000 hour rule is widely known as the amount of time you need to spend practicing something in order to be considered ‘truly skilled’ in that particular field. Ten thousand hours. That’s over 400 days. 14 months – without sleeping. I doubt you’d be skilled at much at all if you didn’t sleep for over a year.

So let’s break it down a bit. Let’s consider 10,000 hours in terms of a 40-hour working week. That works out at four-and-a-half years, or five if you were to take a holiday or two. Five years is a long time – a big investment for an employer, if you were to take the line that your new member of staff, fresh out of university or school, and about to embark on their chosen career, wouldn’t be ‘truly skilled’ at their job until they’d used up five years’ (increasing) salary.

So what about hobbies? I enjoy writing, and spend as much of my spare time as possible practicing the craft. My current commute to work takes 20 hours a week. If I spent all that time writing, it would take me nine-and-a-half years to reach 10,000 hours, and I’d probably have a serious case of repetitive strain injury. (I will also have travelled 350,000 miles in that time.)

It made me think of all the things I’ve spent over 10,000 hours doing accidentally  – and whether that’s made me skilled at them. Breathing? I re-master that skill every 14 months. Sleeping? Three-and-a-half years to perfect a good night’s sleep. How about eating? Those with a normal metabolism will take 27 years to be considered truly skilled at scoffing.

Of course, it’s not just about putting the hours in, clock-watching until the magic number is achieved. Generations of people have gone to work, day in, day out, for the necessary five years and wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves skilled in their profession.  (Nor would their bosses.)

Surely, in order to commit 10,000 hours of your life to something, it should be something you’re passionate about. Something that drives you. It took Michelangelo four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And if you go back in history and look at the amazing architecture in the world – cathedrals, the Great Wall, the Pyramids – all of which have had millions of man hours devoted to them – you’ll see that these are feats of both time and imagination, each in astounding quantities.

Spending 10,000 hours on something you love shouldn’t seem like such a feat. Maintaining a friendship, building a home, bringing up a child, grooming the dog. Ten thousand hours – that time will pass anyway. If you remember the birth of Tracy Barlow in Coronation Street, consider yourself ‘truly skilled’ in the art of watching the nation’s favourite soap.

So what will you spend 10,000 hours doing? And how will you ensure they are well spent?

Don’t tell me a story. Show me a story

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

How do you engage your audience when you explain the physics of entropy, the strange world of quantum mechanics, or what happens to the mass of an object in the vacuum of space? The only way to explain it is to employ the wit and charm of Professor Brian Cox, master of analogy!

If you’ve had the pleasure of watching any of his incredible recent Human Universe documentaries, you’ll certainly be familiar with his enthusiastic prose, and his skill at taking the most complex theory and breaking it down into the most digestible of words. He’s up there with other great television scientific alumni such as Michio Kaku, Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan, to name but a few.

Using the physical world around us, he explains the basic principle of black holes. The idea of space “travelling faster and faster towards a black hole” can be likened to a calm river. At certain points you can easily swim against the current, as the flow isn’t very strong. Yet in his example, it is revealed that this isn’t just any river, it’s the Zambezi River, which leads to the epic Victoria Falls. This marvel of nature was cast in this analogy as the black hole. There will come a point in your leisurely swim where you can no longer overcome the strength of the current which is gravitating towards the precipice of the fall – the event horizon upon which your body will be completely sucked in.

Just as anything in the water near the falls cannot successfully swim against the ever-increasing pace of river, even light cannot travel fast enough to overcome the speed at which everything barrels towards a black hole as, faster and faster, it draws nearer and nearer.

The point is, you can use as much body language as you want to explain something simple, but this has its limits. When you start using waterfalls to explain black holes, and Patagonian glaciers to explain the arrow of time, you can rest assured this is one of the best ways to get your message across – visualising your message, and using concepts people already understand to make the leap towards understanding concepts that are much more foreign to all of us.

No wonder this wonderer of the world has been awarded all sorts of prizes for helping the likes of me begin to understand something like the physics of entropy.

Now, I’ll travel to the future to see how well this article was received before posting it!

Is employee engagement a fad? Maybe. But does it matter?

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

I went to a stimulating discussion event earlier this week at the Groucho Club in London, hosted by Engage for Change. The event took the format of a debate. The resolution? ‘Employee engagement is just another management fad’.

An audience poll at the beginning revealed around one third to be in agreement that employee engagement is nothing more than a fad. And in the end, the speakers in the ‘yes’ camp apparently won some converts. About two thirds of the raised arms were in support of the resolution.

The sad thing is, even if employee engagement is a fad, it’s not much of one. The ’employee engagement crowd’ can at times be quite far from C-suite execs. The concepts of employee engagement and its relevance to business performance can seem self-evident to its advocates in HR and organisational development circles, but they often struggle to gain an audience with those at the top of organisational hierarchies. A fad implies that everyone’s trying to get a piece of it, and that’s just not happening right now.

And here’s another problem: what’s the opposite of a fad? Surely something that’s not a fad would be concrete and obviously meaningful. Employee engagement, on the other hand, lacks anything resembling an agreed definition. David MacLeod’s report identified 50+ going definitions. Perhaps executives’ reluctance to engage with employee engagement stems in part from the fact that no one really knows exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about employee engagement.

But, at the risk of sounding a bit mystical, just because we can’t define something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You can argue over whether increasing employee engagement is worthwhile, or even possible. You can debate whether engagement is a means to an end (i.e. business performance) or an end in itself (i.e. the normative argument that employees should have positive feelings towards their work). But you can’t really argue that it isn’t a good thing (whatever ‘it’ is, exactly).

At its worst, employee engagement is nothing more than a manufactured “dark art that gives HR people something to do”, as one speaker put it. But that of course is a very limited vision of what engagement is all about. As we continue to discover in our work, there are so many things that affect how an employee feels about his or her working life, and it’s not something any single department can take on on its own. It’s not the narrowness of employee engagement as ‘just’ an HR function that keeps employee engagement from flourishing, but rather the breadth of the challenges is presents.

In our work, we’ve seen over and over again the transformative power of getting an organisation’s people genuinely behind a new initiative, new behaviours or new ways of working. Our goals aren’t simply to increase engagement—that’s a by-product—but rather to make the organisation seem more human, leaders to become more authentic, goals to become more realistic, to allow people to collaborate and discover better ways of working. These are just some of the aspects that inform whether employees are engaged, and it varies immensely from company to company. So I’d in fact agree, at least in part, with the resolution. Employee engagement is faddish in its vagueness. It’s not nearly enough to just say ‘we need to increase our employee engagement’. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of things companies can and should do that will end up doing just that.

For a more thorough breakdown of the arguments presented at the event, check out Gloria Lombardi’s excellent write-up. And for a rousing employee engagement call to arms, check out the RSA’s Matthew Taylor in his 2013 lecture (researched by yours truly).

People may soon be leaving their jobs in droves. What can be done?

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

The accreditation body Investors in People recently released their annual employee sentiment poll, and the results should be at least a little alarming for all UK employers. The number of workers who are actively seeking a new job at the moment has risen by 10 percent over last year.

You’d be right to attribute some of this increase to a greater sense of confidence in the labour market. People who were unhappily stuck in their jobs because they felt they couldn’t find a new one are now feeling increasingly able to move on. And this is good for employers and employees alike, since neither side benefits when employees’ hearts and minds aren’t in it.

But that only partly explains it. While 10 percent more—now almost a quarter of all employees—actively seeking a new job, and 34 percent (up 5 percent from last year) “considering” a new job, the proportion of employees who feel the job market has improved from 2014 has risen only by 6 percent. In other words, the number of people looking for a new job has risen faster than the number of people who feel confident in their ability to find one.

This is most true in professional services and telecoms, and particularly true of workers in London.

Why is this happening?

Not surprisingly, one of the major drivers of dissatisfaction in work is pay. But there’s one even greater reason employees are looking for new gigs: the quality of management. Almost half, 46 percent, of those unhappy in their job cite poor management as a key reason, while only 44 percent cite low pay. And a similarly large number of people, 38 percent, complain they don’t feel valued as a member of staff.

 

Investors in People are calling this a “job exodus time bomb”, and they’re right.

Clearly, companies can do better. And unless they want to suffer the cost and turmoil of massive staff turnover, they will need to. And there’s an strong connection between feeling valued as a member of staff and feeling positive about the quality of management. As psychologist Dan Pink has argued, and as these statistics confirm, three key drivers of satisfaction of work are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Good-quality leadership will allow all these to flourish within the organisation.

Leaders must give their people a sense of where the organisation is going, what it’s accomplishing, and how individuals play a crucial role. That way they will come to feel they are heroes of the journey, rather than passive victims of it.