Vision of the Regulatory Project Manager of the Future?

Now before anyone riles at this I am not suggesting that project managers of the future will be flys, but rather that they will need the optical capabilities of a fly, taking multiple perspectives of a problem This was the most striking picture I could find.

Recent regulatory changes have been increasingly complex, drafted by a number of regulators and impacting businesses with operational and commercial footprints spread across the world. As a result it has become apparent that one has to look at any change from a number of perspectives, some of which are not immediately obvious. Additionally one has to be cognisant of the limited perspective of any advisor as it will limit the advice they can give and the confidence one can take from them.

Imagine a Gibraltan fund that markets into the EU and has appointed fund managers in the US and Japan with a global UK-based custodian. For almost any change now one really has to look at impact and validity of solutions from four or five different perspctives. What is acceptable in Gibraltar and the US may create another problem in the UK or EU. If you just ask the funds Gibraltan lawyers they are likely to look at some aspects, but it is unlikely they could or would want to be held responsible for every relevant domain.

It is unlikely that this can all be codified in simple checklists. Instead the regulatory project manager of tomorrow will have to be perpetually looking at their project(s) from many perspectives hence the multi-faceted eyes.

I wonder what other evolutuionary traits a project manager will need?

Ninja Cyclists - For goodness sake, take some personal responsibility!

In my standup set earlier this year I had a piece about ninja cyclists. At the time I thought it was an original idea, but I now find the term coined in the urbandictionary. Fortunately I had the same definition ie someone who spends all day stripping any reflective surface off their bike then dressing in dark clothes goes out after dark. They then career down the road expecting everyone else to get out of their way in the belief that our bat-senses will detect their approach without any aid from lights or warning sounds.

The relevance today is the convergence of two things. The first was the continuing debate triggered by a number of recent deaths of cyclists - 6 in London alone I think. The second was the fact that yesterday evening (after dark) I drove through London from Elephant & Castle and out through Tottenham and Enfield via the City. I was listening to LBC and, yes, the debate was about who was to blame for the carnage on the roads. Drivers blamed cyclists and cyclists blamed drivers.

When I am in London I am usually walking or using public transport so the road debate washes over me. It is extremely rare these days that I drive in London, let alone after dark, but last night I experienced first hand the "Ninja Cyclist". I will admit that what I say next is mostly irrelevant to daytime road use, but I will let the reader decide what parallels they can draw.

My point is that it is clear that most evening cyclists seem to have no awareness or no care of how difficult they are to see at night. I found myself looking out for cyclists' lights and really struggling to spot them. Many had no front light just a tiny blinking red dot the size of a dog's eye that was often attached to a backpack or a jacket and so was not always clearly visible even if you stood directly behind them. Some just a had a front light that was about as effective as a miners' lamp powered by a candle and NO back light and a number had not light at all that I could locate.

Few had light coloured clothing let alone anything reflective or hi-visibility. This meant that often the best way to spot them was by the absence of other light as they physically blocked the head lamps of oncoming cars. A bit like spotting a black hole in space - ie by what is not there, rather than what is.

I also suspect that the shift to orange streelights has not helped as it seems to lower the clarity of images at night.

On top of this I encountered cyclists riding three(!) abreast, presenting me with three shadows to track. I don't recall any of them attempting to signal their intended manouvres, leaving me to guess their likely movements and then I found them squeezing between gaps that I would struggle to walk through.

My conclusion was that the vast majority of cyclists out last night were not helping themselve at all. While sitting in my car I did not feel physically threatened, I did feel pyschologically threatened fearing that should there be a clash with a cyclist, they would certainly come off worse, yet I would probably still be blamed.

I wonder of those cyclists have any idea how difficult they make life. I am pretty sure that if I drove in London more I would invest in one of those video cameras to try keep a record of the world that I see as a driver.

At the end of the day London's roads were not designed for the weight or mix of traffic it carries, but for goodness sake these Ninja cyclists really must take some personal responsibility, else the mortalities will continue to mount.

NLP Day 2 & Overall Assessment

Well, Day 2 started with sexual innuendo - "Did you think of me in the shower this morning?" was the trainers openning gambit! Sorry you had to be there to understand, but it had clearly been a post-hypnotic suggestion planted by James (Hutchinson) the previous day - I did say in the previous post that he also trains hyponotherapists!

This level of innuendo continued for the rest of the day having the majority of the audience laughing frequently, with a group interacting at a similar level and almost certainly most going home feeling that they had had a good time.

Let me deal with the question of the humour first before I tackle NLP.

Looking around the room the male:female ratio was something like 30:70 with a strong HR/social work/counselling feel to at least the female contingent. Judging by the copious note-taking and an eagerness (verging on obsession in places) to understand and comply with instructions, many wanted to "believe". James played up to this, something that is not surprising when one one remembers that his primary interest is to sell more courses! At the end of course wrap up he did, in all fairness, acknowledge that his level of humour was something that had been commented on, but stated that he chose to use it as in his experience it helped. Fair play, he had an audience and he made the most of it - I am just not part of that demographic.

On Day 1 James had said that in building one's own business, 90% was about developing the business and 90% of that 90% was selling and he is definitely an entrepreneur and a salesman. I was certainly left with the feeling that he could sell snakeoil if he set his mind to it.

James also acknowledged that in coaching an therapy much of the work was done by having a personal brand that people recognised and wanted. Also if they had to wait to gain access and pay a significant amount the client was well on course to ensuring that they extracted value from the interaction. This was certainly true of the therapists whose work is modelled by NLP and can readily be seen as true today on coaching/counselling/therapy scenarios. James was certainly building that with members of this weeks audience with a string emphasis that if they signed up for the NLP practitioner course he dleivers it himself an they would have another ten days of his company and attention.

So back to the NLP. The first session spent a while (probably too long in my view) having people affirm what they had taken from Day 1. To be fair most people did return for Day 2 with only three people reported abesnt from around 90-100.

James then covered quite a lot of ground, threw out a lot more nuggets and did some practical exercises. The key pieces being positive language, hypnotic language, rapport, association and disassociation, submodalities, system checks and filters. This may have been new to some/many, but I have seen much of it in other courses. That does not mean that it was not good stuff, but delivered no "wow" factor for me.

The interesting piece was the dissociation element where we did an exercise to explore how to adjust a persons feelings about a situation. This, I guess, is what the NLP coach I experienced 10 years ago was trying to do. Once again though, and I was being honest about it all, it did little or nothing for me. It rather reminded me of a golf coach who would say "feel the club head open at the height of the backswing!" Unfortuantely I had no feel for the club head that was out of sight and behind me - all I could relate to was the positioning of my hands, that were physically attached to my sensory system.

I did feel sorry for my partner in this exercise, who was earnestly trying to experiment with the technique, but with the client from hell ie me.

I won't go on, but want to acknowledge a couple of things.

James admitted that one should not be too fixed on the pure NLP notation and elements. Indeed he changed some things himself and encouraged others not to use things if they felt wrong. I think this is most pertinent when trying to use NLP outside the counselling/coaching/therapy world. Not everyone wants to be coached and if they do they may not want to be coached by you.

James did touch on the question of is NLP manipulating or influencing, something that causes me discomfort. His argument was that the determining factor is your motivation ie if you are doing it soley for your own benefit then it is manipulation while if you believe you are doing it for their good it is not. I thought this rather convenient and could have taken up debate, which I didn't. His distinction presumes that you do know what is best for the other person and it felt as if he had applied his own filter to the question coming up with an answer that suited him - one my say hoisted on his own petard!

For me the distinction is the freedom of the other person to decide. No matter what you think your motivation is, if you are doing things to bring about an outcome of your choosing then it is manipulation.

James was also pretty honest in my eyes in telling people that if they bought his courses then they bought him! If that is what one wants then good, for me I doubt I could take ten days of that style of delivery - it would get in the way of and undermine the content.

So in summary what do I think? Well there is some useful stuff in NLP and it was worth reminding myself of parts of it. That said it should not be used blindly or uncritically. It probably works best in the coaching/counselling/therapy arenas and I am not about to label myself as an NLP change agent - what I use I will use silently.

I don't seem to be the ideal NLP client. This may be because I have done a lot of things before including a consiserable amount of self-hypnosis in my younger days. I understand and can relate at an intellectual level, but do not connect at the personal level. Whatever the cause if I need help I would not look to NLP first.

Lastly I suspect James is wasted. I think he would happily be a Tony Robbins, but something seems lacking. As I write this the word "authenticity" comes to mind ie it was laregly absent this weekend. This may not be the right word, but it is the one that appeared to me.

He certainly could be a successful stand-up comedian if he set his mind to it. Somehow no matter what he does he has to find his leverage and reach a wider audience.

So as weekends go, it was different to my usual weekends. It was entertaining and good to be reminded of some things. I recalibrated my thinking on NLP. It is now slightly more positive, but still not something I want to devote much more time to.

For me it is job done! One of the NLP foundations are that there is no such thing as failure and that each outcome is the perfect response to the strategy (sorry lots of NLP speak) so I certainly do not see this weekend as a waste or a failure and the outcome (of which this blog is part) the perfect outcome of the strategies James and I brought to the days.

NLP (Re-)Assessment?

Yesterday was Day 1 of a two day NLP Foundation Course. I invested my time as while I have not been a fan of NLP I was concerned I had not given it a fair go and may just have had a bad experience.

In summary, at the half way mark, I remain unconvinced.....though the course leader will of course blame that on me, saying that that outcome is the result of the personal "frame" I brought with me to the course.

One problem may be that I have been to a run too many courses of all sorts so I am picking up lots of things around the course as well as the pure content.

The first is that I find that my stand up comedy experience has a lot of relevance. James Hutchinson, effectively presented all day. His persona reminded me of a mix of Jim Carey and Michael MacIntyre, both of whom I can admire, but who can also become annoying. The day was riddled with jokes (setups, reveals, callbacks, etc), an increasingly annoying false smile and head/hair flick and playing to a number of middle aged ladies (social worker  comes to mind) who desperately want to believe and lap up the attention and innuendo.

There was a large pile of Christmas cracker-like nuggets (James' term) of wisdom. For example "every life coach should get a life first" and "all theories are lies". He is also very disparaging of visual learning - maybe that is why I am having a problem in that he does not acknowledge or cater to m pictures and patterns style of learning.

It certainly was a consumate performance, but that is what 90% of this felt like and James loves the attention. While I believe he has a passion for NLP his reveal that he is a trained hypnotherapist and in the last seven years he has set up slimming seminars and had a tooth whitening business that died, places him into the serial entrepreneur category in my mind, with all that brings!

That said there were some useful takeaways and reminders.

• The first is the importance of the frame or context in which something is said or done and that different people will have different contexts.
• Presumptions (or presuppositions) can create issues that did not exist and limit/divert outcomes.
• NLP is based on the work of therapists and effective therapy. In that situation the recipient is there voluntarily and seeking help. This is not the case in most work and everyday situations, where the prescribed structures and formats will more like come across as patronising, verbose and unhelpful.

This last point may be why my experience with an NLP coach was so unsatisfactory. The company set it up, I was not seeking the help, and the coach's use of full NLP techniques was so dissonant that it failed to provide any value. I think I just put that down to a bad experience and as a reminder that even the best tool can be used badly.

 

James did go off piste quite a bit and acknowledged it, providing more general management / life skills advice, but did not clearly identify the boundaries.

 

I will also take away his definition of NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming as being a methodology that looks to observe and model excellence and find the fewest (programming) steps to change another person's behaviour and that in doing so NLP leaves behind a set of tools and practices. Cynically this suggests you can include what you want and discard what you don't when it comes to NLP, something that may be behind the rifts in NLP world.

 

Oh yes, James also reminded me how annoying it is to spend time within someone who never answers a question with anything but another question or a flippant laugh and comment.

An NLP Epiphany or Comfirmation of my Scepticism?

This weekend I will be spending two days on a NeuroLinguistic Programming course. My wife is not best pleased with the pressure of Christmas preparations growing, but it was an offer on a discount site that I decided to take advantage of.

I confess to going into the two days with mixed feelings. My exposure to NLP has been limited to

• A general osmotic awareness of NLP.
• Having been subject of a coaching session with an NLP practioner.
• Reading the book "NLP for Dummies" on holiday a couple of year ago.

My general awareness gives me considerable misgivings that NLP is a manipulative technique to be used on other people. Now I realise the inconsistency in my fear given that I have attended and taken away ideas for influencing other people from many management and negotiation courses. The line between what I see as acceptable influencing and unacceptable manipulation is not entirely clear - I just believe there is one. It may just be the word programming which implies that once set in motion the outcome is predetermined.

The coaching session with an NLP practioner was at a time of considerable professional stress and the company brought the coach in to help provide support and advice. It may be being a (literal?) scientist, but I found it weird and unhelpful to be asked to imagine a small man standing on my upturned hand and to tell him how I felt about what was happening at work. It is seemed silly, disrespectful and unhelpful. It certainly did not leave a positive impression.

While being starnge holiday reading I decided that I would have a look at NLP presented in a simple way. My lasting impression from the book was a degree of confusion of what came first. By this mean that as I read about different aspects it felt as if it was a collection of ideas and approaches that I have come across in other tools and techniques - ones which seemed to have made their cases better, at least in my eyes. There was also a touch of "The Secret" - another book I found unconvincing - seemingly written for those desperate to believe.

So, I enter into two days of professional training and I have no idea if I will have an epiphany and become a convert of whether this experience will confirm my scepticism. Either way I should better understand NLP and be able to better rationalise my feelings.

Stay tuned and next week I will report on my experience.

Evolution on Steriods?

- Frankly we should aspire to do better!

A friend was telling me the other day that he is giving a keynote speech on "change" soon and will focus on evolutionary change. When he said this, the hairs on my neck went up, even though this is not a new term and I was not sure why.

Then a few days later another contact told me that his message to managers is "enhancement & evolution".

At this point the light went on and I realised what was unsettling me and it was the word evolution and the suggestion that this is where managers should aspire in a world of growing pace and complexity.

As a scientist by training I can sometimes be too literal, but there is huge power in the words we choose to use and the messages they give to others, often subliminally and unintended. So what is my problem with "evolution"?

Well, I have three big reasons:-

• Evolution is the result of CHANCE! In simple terms the theory of evolution is that a population of similar creatures will be subject to a set of chance mutations (triggered by cosmic rays impacting on genes?) and that a mutation that makes the single creature slightly better suited to its environment, will have a (slight?) advantage for survival and/or reproduction and thus is more likely to be perpetuated. Unless we resort to theological discussion (and I don't intend to here) there is no purpose or conscious decision making in these changes, it is just chance and the changes that a single steps brings are all but indiscernible.
• Real significant change is usually the result of thousands of mutations/iterations over many generations and is accompanied by as many extinctions. This luxury of time is not open to modern management.
• Successful evolution is selected by the enhanced survival of the changed creature. Irrevocably linked to this is the extinction other creatures whose changes were less successful. The supposition of "chance" in the earlier point means that the creature has no determination in the likely success of its future, they don't choose to be faster of stronger! Few businesses really set out just to survive, they wish to thrive. Survival is based very much in the "now" while to thrive requires a forward view and all the uncertainty and risks that brings.

So the term evolutionary change lacks purpose, ambition and pace. That is my problem!

I understand the psychology of making a change seem simple and easy to accept - the term "evolutionary" plays to this - but can we live with that any longer? Business cycles are shorter and shorter, management tenure is dropping and the level and nature of competition seems to grow and change at a frightening pace. Survival is really not good enough and aspiring to evolution would seem to set a business up to fail.

The alternate to evolutionary change is usually cited as revolutionary or transformational change. For many this is neither easy to conceive and accept, nor to execute. My thinking is something in between, something that injects the sense of purpose, something like "directed evolution".

(NB I quite like "evolution on steroids", but I guess that sends as many wrong messages as right ones.)

Of relevance here are some other quotes that I have seen from leading entrepreneurs. I will paraphrase them as stating that the modern successful entrepreneur is someone who travels from failure to failure without losing heart until he or she finds success. While there are some true overnight successes there are many more who have taken a long while and carry many scars before they succeeded. They have purpose!

To be clear I am not suggesting that every manager and company should bet his/her/its existence on every change, or even on any change unless the situation is truly dire, but that progressive change should not be left to chance, and it needs to be bold enough that it will not be 100% safe.

Maybe the challenge should be, "What do we think we we need to be and how much can we afford to fail?" Of course the debate is more complicated than this, being more like, "How much of the business can we risk, for the benefit we believe we can generate?"

This will be more uncomfortable for many managers, but few business can afford to stand still and just keeping up with others is not good enough.

I hope you get the idea and please do let me know what you think?