Dinner was going well. The sourdough bread hadn't prompted anyone to complain of the smell of catsick; the focaccia had absorbed all the olive oil I couldn't fit in the cupboard; the salad and the mussels were accepted as 'delicious'; and the wine bottles were mostly empty. Time for the flourish: the richness of a Christmas syllabub with walnut shortbreads.

I had taken a few liberties with the recipe: the walnut shortbread called for two packs of butter and so I halved the quantity - and still ended up with a tray full of thick biscuits. And then, when I was adding the cream to the fruit and spices infused with alcohol, I realised that my huge carton of double cream was half the size required by the recipe. So I was only making half the quantity ... still, a little, light burst of sugary sweetness to end the meal - yes, that would be acceptable. If people were still hungry, I could get out the cheese and biscuits.

Maybe I shouldn't have had so much wine before I started to serve the syllabub. Maybe then I would have noticed.

I started spooning the meagre quantity of syllabub into individual bowls and I didn't seem to be making much impression in the amount I made. The I dunked two shortbread biscuits into each bowl and the tray still seemed full.

People could always come back for more, I thought.

After a few minutes at the table, I got the distinct impression that people were struggling. Conversation had died. There was an embarrassed silence around the room. Nobody had eaten more than a quarter of their syllabub; and everyone had eaten enough.

'Ha!' I improvised. 'I wondered when you would all have had enough!' Slight attempts at laughter around the table. I finished it off: 'Do, please, stop when you want. This is far too much. Far, far, too much.'

The next day I checked the recipe. If I'd made double the quantity, it was supposed to feed 4-6 people. Maybe that was 46 people.

The recipe came from the Hairy Bikers.

I won't use another recipe from fat people.

David Hare's Page Eight

They showed David Hare's 'Page Eight' on television. I was mesmerised. You would expect the acting to be superb and the story to be clever, but this was exceptional. So much of the story was understated that my head was buzzing with the effort of keeping up. At the end, I felt privileged to have seen it.

Reading the reviews and the comments was a depressing experience.

'Page Eight' is about trust and the difficulty of having trust between people and in systems. The actual events are incidental to that theme - it was a play, not a documentary. How do we trust? How do we trust the information that we receive that informs us who we should trust? Every scene had that edge: do you believe what that character says?

I feared the ending was going to be a cliche: the main male character leaves a painting with the female character and disappears. Would we have that shot of the painting dissolving into the real location and the two characters appearing in each other's arms? No. Instead, the female character looks at the painting and suddenly gasps at its significance. Hare assumes that the audience is already there - sadly, the reviews I read missed this completely.

There is so little intelligent drama on television, it seems a shame that Page Eight has not yet had the acclaim it deserves.

Art accrues

Some people write to express themselves. Some people write to communicate with specific audiences. The hardest writing is the stuff that appeals to a lot of different, unknown people. I find notes to myself that I can no longer understand; there are letters and emails that are full of code and shared ambiguities that would be confusing in the wrong hands - or even dangerous; but fiction ...

There are already more novels in print than a person could read in a lifetime. Does the world need any more? Does a new novel have to be better than what has gone before? Is topicality something people want from their fiction?

The question is important now because the traditional methods of distribution for all the creative arts is changing. And the creators are the ones who are suffering most. Bookshops are now big and muscular, or online and dictatorial, and are squeezing the publishing companies; photographers contribute to massive online libraries where the revenue gets lower and lower as more and more pictures are available; music is sold by the track or listened to for next to nothing on streaming audio. People can access everything, from any time, so new work is in obvious and direct competition with classical and proven material from all over the world. Who wants to pay a premium to listen to stuff, just because it's new or local?

I don't know what happens next. I can see less and less originality making it into the public arena and I know more and more creative people who are struggling to earn money from their imagination. Meanwhile, publishing companies are refusing to read manuscripts and even agents are preferring work by celebrities.

This is one story that does not appear to have a happy ending.

Travel broadens the mind, maybe

"In future times, even these things shall seem pleasant." I forget the source of that quotation. A Greek, I think. I carry the phrase around like a warn coin that has worn off the milled edges and the raised type of details, spending it regularly on journeys where I am tired through lack of sleep and excess of motion, thin from rucksacks and missed meals or thick from the extravagence of lunchtime menus and credit card dinners - as time goes by, what I recall are the occasions where my jaw dropped at the wonder of the world, created by nature or man. I forget the bites and the wet clothes and remember the unique and unusual, things stared at intently to fix and cement into memory.

And then I return, usually to nothing special, but more aware of the world.

Except the world I return to does not care for wonder elsewhere, does not value experience beyond its own horizon, so my home world seems even more tawdry and childish, more limited and plain than when I left.

So then I find myself stretched, with my feet on familiar roads, entering familiar shops to buy the routine and the essential; but my head still sees the snow on the mountains and the golden temples, still smells the fragrance of the forest and the salt of the sea, still hears the bird calls and the choir to which I now belong, singing in the wilderness.

The twin myths of consistency and justice

There are two things in which we all believe, although we may not realise that we do: that things happen for a reason; and that there is a power of justice at work that rewards the good and punishes the bad ... in the long run.

The first belief is important for our sense of consistency, which ties together our fragmentary worlds and our delicate sense of self; this consistency edits our own histories to ensure that we have always believed what we currently believe, have always, deep down, been supposed to be doing what we are doing now; this consistency says we make our own luck and "unlucky" people are simply failing to see the opportunities around them, while good fortune is a natural end product of endeavour; and that the world is not random and, deep down, there is some force that keeps us safe ...

The second belief, in justice, is important so that we do not scream in blind, impotent rage when we see people do bad things and misfortune strike people who are doing good. These are temporary diversions and, in the long run, people get the right punishment and reward. Just you wait. Any minute now. Soon. Well, maybe in the next life, then.

There are various ways of dealing with these myths. They can be accommodated in some religious systems; they can simply be accepted as something that affects Other People But Not Me; or they can be a prompt for a more considerate approach to people doing well and others doing badly. There, but for the grace of God ... and, if you do not believe in God, and even if you do, there is a need to accept that someone down on their luck may not deserve their misfortune, that successful people may be bad and greedy, that the team that wins the match did not 'deserve their victory' simply because they scored more goals, that Little Dorrits do not escape every time. Consistency and judgment are desirable myths, reassuring and universal constructions, without which most people have difficulty in being optimistic.

We do our best not to think for ourselves, but, instead, to follow those heuristic rules of thumb that save us effort; to use processes when we should be exercising judgment. Recognising that consistency and justice are desirable is good, but we need to recognise that they are not hidden hands watching over us. We do not make our own luck, but we do identify our own opportunities, using our own judgment (and sometimes there are no opportunities, so we sit and wait). Our successes are not simply due to effort, or desire; and our failures are sometimes beyond the vision of a seer. Our own misfortunes are usually seen as temporary setbacks, even as tests of our fortitude, and we all hope that people will evaluate us for our potential rather than our success when we feel unfulfilled; contrarily, people will ask to be evaluated on their trappings of success when they have simply stumbled upon good fortune.

Let us be stoical and recognise our own selves are not simply a reflection of the randomness of the world around us. A person's character is independent of their fortune. Let us judge ourselves accurately and then be prepared to value others in the same way.

Tummy ache

I met someone recently who was working too hard and no longer trusted their own judgment. In particular, the stresses of the job, the range of responsibilities, were making everything a source of tension: so much so that they were getting a tummy ache simply thinking about the tasks in hand.

Tummy aches are a wonderful indicator of what we should be doing. Our intellects can find the value in a number of tasks; but our bodies can tell us quite clearly that this is not something we should be doing, either because it is not in keeping with our real interests or because it is morally wrong. We want to expand our horizons, take on new tasks, grow into new roles and responsibilities, and it is right that we should be nervous about such unknowns. But there is a difference between apprehension and dismay, between wondering whether we are up to a new task, whether we can learn enough and fast enough, and that Kafka-esque state where we can rationalise the most uncomfortable situation which is not in our best interests.

Too much work and responsibility overwhelms the indicator, makes everything too much, so that a tummy ache ceases to point to any direction and, instead, suggests we should lie down for a while and relax.

Gatekeeping should never be a process

I keep finding situations where creative solutions are denied because the gatekeepers are managing a process and not evaluating the situation as unique. From publishing to management to job recruitment, it seems the process constantly gets in the way, ensuring that the solution boils down to more of the same, more of what we already know and what we already have. That is what process delivers. Is that what is required?

Harry Potter was rejected by many publishers because it was about boy wizards and there was no market for books about boy wizards because the publishers didn't publish any. I saw an Internal Communications Management job advertised by a Recruitment Agency where their best fit would be someone with the same understanding of internal communications as them - limited, restricted and ineffectual. I see organisational innovation programmes that are so process driven that they run counter to their objective. And I see customer service where the individual nature of the customer is denied by the proscribed process.

Organisations do not trust their staff to make judgements. So they should train their staff and take risks. Processes are never going to provide the best answer.

Intelligence and communications

There can be no intelligence operation without communication and I am frequently frustrated at the restrictions that organisations place on their internal communications, narrowing the range of subjects in focus and reducing information on those subjects to a trickle - and then negating the whole operation by disseminating what is known to the wrong people.

However, the hardest question in establishing an intelligence operation, it seems to me, is the first question: what do you want to know? For that question assumes pre-knowledge of the subject and the issues, the threats and the plots, the ripples that will become waves and the waves that are ebbing away ...

Anyone starting a successful business does so because, in part, their business emerges, fully fledged, with the requisite intelligence for its initial operation, usually derived from the experience, vision, insight and contacts of the founder. But that founder's knowledge cannot extend to the developments and changes in the environment and frequently the business flounders because the big picture is always the same picture, touched up and re-framed occasionally.

The more I think about advising organisations on their intelligence, the harder it is to find a process that will enable the people at the top to understand and address that question. How do you know what you need to ask?

The gang of four

A recent news item covers the ability of fish to count to four. Which got me thinking.

I've always been fascinated about the preference to group things in four, whether psychological profiles, dream characters or business models. I am put in mind of research into the infant brain, which demonstrates the in-born ability to see circles, triangles and squares.

If we have the natural propensity to recognise squares and triangles, it seems to me, then we do not need to count until after four. One to four is something we can handle without numbers. We have in-built mechanisms that can group and identify two, three and four and differentiate between them without recourse to numeracy.

Maybe fish are the same. It would be interesting to see what shapes and notions come hard-wired into the piscine brain!

Creative futures, again

I perceive a dark future for people earning a living through creativity, but others do not agree. The two extreme views I have met can be summarised as: just try harder; and so what?

Just try harder suggests that changes in distribution patterns present new opportunities for creative selling, whereas I argue that the changes shift the balance of income disproportionately to the distributors, especially in an age when anyone can produce a photograph or a piece of music or an article - small payments that are now made for most creative output now encourages people to give their work away for free or nearly-free in the hope of Getting Noticed, after which, it is hoped, other people will do their marketing in the expectation of large sales.

The so what? argument is a different kind of threat. Great creative output available in the market for next to nothing - that's great for consumers! I do not think it is sustainable. For sure, there will no longer be any premium paid for the ordinary - the competition in photo libraries ensures that anyone searching for a picture of a dripping tap is not going to have to pay very much - but people learning and perfecting their arts need that income to sustain themselves.

Maybe this is it, then. We are reverting to the mean for the arts: they are a luxury, to be funded on the whims of Kings and Corporations.

And behind it all is the real fear: that this is a sign that the Systems Thinkers are really taking over everywhere and the future for the individual is bleak.

Funny thing, truth

So how did the Universe begin?, I am rarely asked. What is the truth of the matter?
And I would reply that matter is the simple aggregation of composite energy in three dimensions of space and one of time; that everything began with energy in a pure, undifferentiated form that was so pure that it needed neither dimensions of time nor space; that such purity could not exist so that it cooled and slowed and created dimensions; and, in that diminution, the energy became stretched and split over different dimensions of space and time; and that the cooling soup of energy in our bubble of dimensions collided and collated to form basic proto-leptons and quasi-quarks that recombined and were charged and so on and so on; and that our dimensions intercept the planes of other energy from the creation but that this energy is on only two dimensions of space and two of time; and that there are other interactions; and that quarks formed in different parts of the universe at different times will be different; and that most of the energy from the creation is in the other dimensions; and that there is a lot more but I lost your attention long ago.

And the point is? For us to regard something as true, we must regard that truth as having some utility. So it will be years before anyone realises that this definition of physics is useful. And, in the field of corporate communications, the necessity of effective communications is often regarded with the same raised eyebrow as someone explaining their theory on the origin of the Universe.

Communication at a distance

How do you trust communication at a distance? How do you ensure co-operation when the other party can cancel all future interaction? It has never been easier to walk away from obligations, to fail to return phone calls, to communicate only through anonymous email addresses and then not communicate at all. So what do you do when the other party does not fulfill their part of the agreement? Perhaps the blog becomes the social conscience of us all, with search engines noting the names of miscreants and liars ... except that this, too, becomes open to abuse, with individual reputations easily targeted by people eager to cause mischief for financial gain or childish expressions of ego.

The new model of social interaction is opening up new opportunities for bad behaviours.

Other people's point of view

Everyone claims that they can see things from other people's point of view - and then become frustrated that other people do not believe the same things as them. Recent sociological changes are increasing the rate of fluidity in society: the traditional conformity ensured by location, family, class and profession is undermined by moving people around geographically, increasing the number of jobs that people have and the kind of work they do, increasing the range of people that everyone meets.

This acceleration could lead, on the one hand, to a greater appreciation of diversity. However, what seems to be happening is that this diversity means that everyone can find someone who supports their point of view, no matter how shallow or local. The traditional interactions that are forced on society by family ties, by church, by community and so on are gone so that there is greater freedom to create a personal identity and less pressure to ensure that this identity has merit. One result of this is that other people's point of view becomes more threatening, as if there is a small voice inside that wonders on the validity of how we see ourselves, how we have created our own point of view.

Why is bad service so easy to find?

When I am working with a company on service issues, I am often asked to provide examples of organisations that are doing it well. This shouldn't be so difficult! Yet it always seems easier to recount disappointments and outrages than the really surprising successes.

On one level, good service is like a friendly, wise Uncle, knowing better than you what you want and providing it with an amiable flourish, expecting no thanks, simply happy to make you happy. And most of us have that family experience, of parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and so on - people who can look after us and surprise us with their care and attention. That is the environment that is at the heart of the human condition: we are, after all, family creatures, and modern economic necessity has severely disrupted people's experience of being surrounded by a caring clan. But I digress.

Modern business talks of care, but caring for people demands an individual response, not a process. Processes are pigeon-holes and the process-driven people are focused on finding a box to put the customer in, not what the customer wants. Any customer service environment that is driven by process must limit the chances of providing good service - there will always be people who do not fit the boxes.

Not to mention the limitations of the process, created by a business model and the drive for financial success. I was reminded of this recently when I placed an order for some photographic equipment with Jacobs Digital Photo, an online retailer. One of the items I ordered was displayed as not in stock, but would be available in ten days. I placed my order and waited.

And forgot, until I noticed the full amount on my credit card statement, some forty days later. So what, according to an un-named customer service person at Jacobs, was my problem? They said it wasn't in stock. It was their practice to take payment on order. I would get my stuff. Whenever.

My observations that their site was misleading (it still says available in ten days) and that they should not take payment for goods they could not supply were ignored. The process rules.

The devil is in the implementation

Strategy. Without strategy, there is individual reaction and ambiguity; with strategy, there are clearer definitions of what the business is achieving and all tactics flow from it.

Right. That happens. Must do. Somewhere.

Strategy is difficult enough to create because of two key problems. First, people are not exactly sure what a strategy looks like, how much details it includes and how it relates to other management statements of vision, mission, corporate responsibility, job appraisals, disciplinary procedures, health and safety statements ...

Second, management responsible for creating strategy want to get on, so settle for ambiguity in language. This is not an intention and is seldom recognised: it is simply that words are used that everyone can agree constitute a strategy, without exposing the differences as to what those words mean in practice.

Now, if that's difficult, the implementation of strategy often proves to be impossible. Any attempt at implementation immediately hits a number of barriers, the most obvious of which is that the ambiguities of language are exposed. Often, different parts of the business, charged with implementing the strategy, interpret the new direction as either being consistent with the old one, so that nothing is changed in practice at all, or as addressing a long-held want or enmity that changes the relationship with the rest of the business - but was not intended by central management.

Without communications understanding, the unrolling of strategy is frequently followed by an unravelling of the business, which is never blamed on the originators of the strategy!

Nietzsche wrote his unique style, it seems to me, because he wanted to convey his message without ambiguity, so writing in theoretical and aphoristic/illustrative modes, covering different angles to light his subject as fully as possible. And then you get people like Gilles Deleuze who find ambiguity in Nietzsche and manage to destroy all the original messages.

You can never avoid ambiguity. So the problem for strategy is not simply to state it; it is to reiterate, rephrase and reinforce its essence as language changes its meaning in the face of circumstances and resistence.

Communicating with customers

Modern customer service needs to balance remoteness with empathy. Wouldn't it be easier, organisations thought, if we simply recruited people who were good at relationships and systems, so they could form a bond with the customer while ticking off the boxes that we use to measure them? So much easier than trying to train and manage the diverse range of people we employ currently!

Ah, but then the ugly head of profiling reveals its second face. Profiling works if you know exactly what you are looking for and can frame questions that discover those qualities. Sadly, profiling is never done with complete knowledge of future needs, nor is it proof against people projecting a version of themselves that they are unable to deliver in the workplace.

So now there are organisations with perfectly defined procedures and a staff totally aligned behind the key behaviours ... and then there comes the realisation that the procedures do not anticipate all eventualities, nor are the staff able to deal with the diversity of customers that they come across. What is more dangerous is that any office community that is formed around common behavioural traits is less likely to notice or appreciate different traits in customers: the common and championed values are constantly reinforced and customer behaviour is translated into those values, so any failure to provide a service is seen as a shortfall, not a wrong direction. Do all customers want a friendly and flexible service? Or do some want to exercise a measure of control; do some want to see timetables and nothing else; do some not really care as long as its done? It all needs more flexibility in the system and more individual accountability from the service providers.

The process of individualisation is a cultural thing. As Gellner wrote, it is not a birthright, but a cultural construct needing constant reinvestment. Perhaps the education of youth is not providing all that is necessary, in which case the human resources departments of organisations become an essential part of life-long learning - not in the search for accreditation or the acquisition of new skills, but in the gradual exposure to dealing with diversity that explores the potential in all of us to be more human.

A sense of scale

Most managers lose sight of the problems of corporate internal communications because they are not aware of the limitations of scale. We naturally converse in groups of two or three; we have teams of between eight and 15; we can handle group interaction of up to 200; and we can recognise 2,000 faces.

But what happens when the organisation puts us in situations where the numbers are bigger? We need presentation skills training to talk to big groups; teams become squads with very different internal communication needs; informal large-scale communications for 200 people break down when the numbers grow too large, requiring structure and flexibility; and how do you communicate corporate culture when you cannot tell whether the person you are looking at is a colleague, a visitor or someone who has wandered in to find a toilet?

Communication is such a natural function that people resent the implication that they need help. Any organisation that intends to grow needs to plan its communications early.

You don't have to be brainwashed to work here ...

I remember having a discussion with a Training Manager on the corporate responsibility to educate young staff to think. We agreed on the country in question's failure to encourage individualism through its education practices as was evident in the profiles of the latest graduate recruits. Should the organisation take on the task of turning these new recruits into, well, people? For the mutual benefit of them and the business?

That discussion echoes still. In many Western countries there is an assumption of individualism that is not born out by behaviour. The current fashion for measurable personality tests in recruitment, job-specific qualifications and constant financial targets demonstrate little understanding of psychology or the history of corporate success. Organisations always rely on individuality seeping through the system to provide innovation and challenge. Organisations always are at risk from the Systems Thinkers who regard everything as definable and measurable - and who seem to believe that other people will behave just like them in all known situations ...

Sigh. The Systems Thinkers are taking over. And the radical thinkers, like the falcon in that poem by Yeats, are turning and turning in the widening gyre. I don't see enough innovation and I don't see enough interest in innovation.

If I had to draw a composite for the devil, it would be an economist who believed in post-war French philosophy and behaviouralism.

Corporate cogwebs

There's some interesting stuff in neuroscience about the cognitive networks that form in our heads that save us from thinking! These cogwebs are created by canalised patterns within the brain, where ideas proven by experience provide an easy heuristic for dealing with most of the world around us - we recognise part of the pattern, and the cogweb fills in the rest. This saves us time and effort. (For more details, I recommend Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by Kathleen Taylor.)

But if the event does not fit the pattern, the cogweb can be a problem. A weak and uncertain network is relatively easy to amend; a fixed and proven cogweb can be so much a part of the way we think that we will change our experience of reality to maintain it. (Heidegger had an interesting essay on What Calls For Thinking?, where he postulated that most thought is routine identification of routines and we rarely choose or are compelled to look directly at the world and think things through for ourselves.)

As with individuals, so with organisations. Many corporate cultures have cogwebs that describe how things work. Even when evidence mounts up that these patterns are not accurate or complete, people will sift the evidence to maintain consistency with the corporate cogweb.

It seems to me that the corporate environment is an ideal breeding ground for such concrete cogwebs: every organisation requires good practices to ensure consistency and new arrivals learn their jobs by learning the rituals of perception and response ... but when that perception is no longer appropriate, are there the mechanisms and motivations to correct it? There are many people within organisations whose identity is wrapped up in the practices and perceptions of their job and who enjoy obeying orders as it takes away their need to evaluate the world, with all the effort and doubt involved.

There has to be effective feedback mechanisms within an organisation in order to create effective cogwebs and then test their veracity. An organisation needs to manage its patterns of thought and be prepared to change. In fact, changing thoughts should be a constant agenda item and managers should be charged with identifying shortfalls in current thinking.

The control of environment

I've been wondering how an organisation controls its communications environment to the maximum efficiency and I'm beginning to think that the key is in the amount of leakage from the external environment that is encouraged. There are various stories about businesses that sell their culture so completely that everything from socks to vocabulary is standardised, ensuring complete compliance with corporate goals - however, those corporate goals are likely to become the wrong targets and increasingly inappropriate in a changing environment.

So the need to get the message across is countered by the need to ensure that it is the right message. That second point is a cauldron of trouble - does it suggest that the direction is the wrong one? Does it threaten the ego of the senior directors? Does it give too much encouragement to the Change Freaks who believe, like Shiva, in development through destruction, without appreciating that systems work and that there are people whose identity is bound up in those systems?

I've seen organisations with no real message to communicate; and organisations where their message fails to appreciate the local culture, so that it is filtered and flattened to comply with local beliefs and objectives; and organisations where the message is so heavy-handed that criticism is traitorous and feedback is carefully controlled ... and ignored.

The consistent observation is that organisations do not understand the factors involved, I suppose, and are ill-equipped to deal with them on a personal and systematic level. The key gaps are usually in organisational intelligence functions and the related field of internal communications.

The worst thing is, from my point of view as a communications consultant, is that so few organisations seem to care!