Category: Blog

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.

The businessman and the fisherman

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

One day a fisherman was lying on a beautiful beach, with his fishing pole propped up in the sand and his solitary line cast out into the sparkling blue surf. He was enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun and the prospect of catching a fish.

About that time, a businessman came walking down the beach, trying to relieve some of the stress of his workday. He noticed the fisherman sitting on the beach and decided to find out why this fisherman was fishing instead of working harder to make a living for himself and his family. “You aren’t going to catch many fish that way,” said the businessman to the fisherman.

“You should be working rather than lying on the beach!”

The fisherman looked up at the businessman, smiled and replied, “And what will my reward be?”

“Well, you can get bigger nets and catch more fish!” was the businessman’s answer. “And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman, still smiling. The businessman replied, “You will make money and you’ll be able to buy a boat, which will then result in larger catches of fish!”

“And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman again.

The businessman was beginning to get a little irritated with the fisherman’s questions. “You can buy a bigger boat, and hire some people to work for you!” he said.

“And then what will my reward be?” repeated the fisherman.

The businessman was getting angry. “Don’t you understand? You can build up a fleet of fishing boats, sail all over the world, and let all your employees catch fish for you!”

Once again the fisherman asked, “And then what will my reward be?”

The businessman was red with rage and shouted at the fisherman, “Don’t you understand that you can become so rich that you will never have to work for your living again! You can spend all the rest of your days sitting on this beach, looking at the sunset. You won’t have a care in the world!”

The fisherman, still smiling, looked up and said, “And what do you think I’m doing right now?”

Visualising success

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

Major James Nesmeth had a dream of improving his golf game—and he developed a unique method of achieving his goal.

Until he devised this method, he was just your average weekend golfer, shooting in mid to low nineties. Then, for seven years, he completely quit the game. Never touched a club or set foot on a fairway.

But it was during this seven-year break from the game that Major Nesmeth came up with his amazingly effective technique for improving his game.

The first time he set foot on a golf course after his hiatus, he shot an astonishing 74. He had cut 20 strokes off his average without having swung a golf club in ten years! Not only that, his physical condition had actually deteriorated during those seven years.

What was Major Nesmeth’s secret? Visualisation.

Major Nesmeth had spent those seven years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. During those seven years, he was imprisoned in a cage that was approximately four and one-half feet high and five feet long. During almost the entire time he was imprisoned, he saw no one, talked to no one and had no physical activity. During the first few months he did virtually nothing but hope and pray for his release. Then he realised he had to find some way to occupy his mind or he would lose his sanity and probably his life. That’s when he learned to visualise.

In his mind, he selected his favorite golf course and started playing golf. Every day, he played a full 18 holes at the imaginary country club. He experienced everything to the last detail. He saw himself dressed in his golfing clothes. He smelled the fragrance of the trees and the freshly trimmed grass. He experienced different weather conditions—windy spring days, overcast winter days, and sunny summer mornings.

In his imagination, every detail of the tee, the individual blades of grass, the trees, the singing birds, the scampering squirrels and the lay of the course became totally real. He felt the grip of the club in his hands. He instructed himself as he practiced smoothing out his downswing and the followthrough on his shot. Then he watched the ball arc down the exact center of the fairway, bounce a couple of times and
roll to the exact spot he had selected, all in his mind.

He was in no hurry. He had no place to go. So in his mind he took every step on his way to the ball, just as if he were physically on the course. It took him just as long in imaginary time to play 18 holes as it would have taken in reality. Not a detail was omitted. Not once did he ever miss a shot, never a hook or a slice, never a missed putt.

Seven days a week. Four hours a day. Eighteen holes. Seven years. Twenty strokes off. Shot a 74.

The boiler and the dog

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

An energy company we were working with a couple of years ago told us this story.

It was in the wintry depths of February, and an elderly woman who lived alone had her boiler break down. So she called the gas company, and they sent a repairman.

When he arrived, he became more than a bit apprehensive when he saw a little dog that was running around his legs in a kind of frenzy. This dog was clearly harmless, but he’d always been terrified of them. Still, wanting to be polite, he didn’t say anything, and just went about his business hoping the dog would go away.

The boiler was old and fiddly, and the repairman had to go back to the depot to get parts. When he got back, the parts weren’t quite right, and he had to go back again. Every time he returned, there was the dog. As the flat was getting colder and colder, he pressed on with his work, despite this dog that made him tremble with fear.

After several hours, the job was finally done, and the radiators clanked back to life. When he went to say goodbye to the woman, she told him his service had been excellent, and she was very pleased. But she did offer one bit of constructive criticism.

“You really shouldn’t bring your dog with you to repair jobs”, she said.

Making a Difference

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

A young boy was walking a beach after a tropical storm. Driftwood and rubbish were everywhere, but also hundreds of starfish that had been washed up on the sand. The sun was starting to come up over the horizon, and as the boy skipped along, he bent down occasionally to toss a starfish back into the sea.

Another and yet another starfish was returned to its watery world, and as the boy continued his journey along the beach, a tourist walking from the opposite direction stopped to watch him with curiosity. He shrugged, continued walking, and then stopped again. He turned back towards the boy.

“Why are you throwing those starfish back into the sea?” he asked. The boy looked at him, somewhat surprised.

“The sun’s coming up. If these starfish don’t go back into the sea, they’ll shrivel up and die in the heat.”

“But there are hundreds of starfish on this beach,” said the tourist. “And thousands of starfish all over the world being washed up on beaches like this. You are wasting your time – you can’t possibly make a difference!”

The boy looked at him, unfazed. He bent down, picked up another starfish and threw it back into the waves.

“I made a difference to that one,” he said.