I read an article in The Times the other day that struck a nerve. It was Justice Malala’s last column of 2016, and carried a picture of a dog lying flat-out on a wooden deck, looking exhausted. The theme of the column was that 2016 had been a tough year, and that he (and we) were all tired of it and all it had brought us. He went on to outline in some detail the things, people, and events that had made him really, really tired.

I empathised, because I’m tired too. And the people I work with, our service providers, and our clients, are all tired and looking forward to a break, and to a fresh beginning. And that’s the critical part of it all: a fresh beginning.

What is it about the New Year that awakens hope; that allows us to believe we can wipe out all the disappointments of the previous year, and begin again? After all, it’s just tomorrow, one tick of the clock from yesterday and the year before.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth, caught in the tension of a moment in time, despairs at a life where yesterday and its decisions condemn him, and tomorrow offers no hope.

For most of us, though, tomorrow and its promises can’t come quickly enough. We want it all to be better in the morning. We end days of chasing our dreams, tired, and we head for bed, leaving our troubles to the new day and the next deposit of 86 400 seconds that comes with every new dawn. We battle through workweeks that stretch us, and subscribe to TGIF and the relief that the weekend brings. We are conditioned to see month-ends as staging posts in our mad dash – our pony-express-like journey – towards whatever we are chasing. We pause for a moment, take on board provisions, and then it all starts again.

And so to the lure of the New Year… We write 2017 instead of 2016, and it makes all the difference. We wind forward the calendar to January, and a new, unmarked year stretches ahead. We lose the continuity of our time in the belief that this transition offers us redemption and a new beginning.

I once asked a group of delegates on a leadership programme the difference between a Goal and a New Year’s resolution. “You’re drunk when you make the resolution”, came a lightning fast response. That may or may not be true, but of course I was hoping for more; perhaps some commitment to action…

Perhaps unsurprisingly, by far the two most common New Year’s resolutions every year are: ‘to lose weight’, and ‘to stop smoking’. The fact that they remain the most common suggests that they are more often well-intentioned wishes than serious goals.

May I encourage us, as the light of 2016 flickers its last, to look purposefully towards the bright dawn that we will call 2017. I have been as guilty as most – in my tiredness – of vaguely wishing the New Year to be different. But without tough decisions, committed resources, and criteria to measure progress, there is little chance of making it so. In this New Year, then, let us:

I wish you peace, and joy, and love as we brace ourselves to jump the great divide between what has been and what will come. I wish you a 2017 that will be everything you dare to dream about. And I hope that you play a conscious and significant role in making it so.

As all “Trekkers” will know, James T. Kirk is the captain of the starship USS Enterprise leading his crew as they explore "where no man has gone before". In a statement full of wisdom appropriate to his Star Trek character, Chris Pine said: “The only thing you sometimes have control over is perspective. You don’t have control over your situation. But you have a choice about how you view it”.

That seemed particularly appropriate to me on a recent journey I was making. It wasn’t a journey ‘where no man has gone before’. In fact it was an all too familiar one: a routine morning flight to a business appointment in another city. In every respect a journey like thousands of others I have made as a frequent flyer over many years.

Except for one thing. On this trip, someone died. Someone left home that morning on a routine commute and didn’t make it. A family somewhere was left devastated and without an opportunity to say a final goodbye.

And because it all happened at 37 000 feet, it affected some 180 people in different ways. The captain made the decision to return to the city of departure while a nurse, her husband, two passengers and one of the cabin crew tirelessly administered CPR for over an hour in an attempt to revive or maintain the possibility of life.

We landed, waited while paramedics tried everything they knew without success, and were eventually disembarked and returned to the terminal building. And it was once there that perspective was gained and lost. I had watched the whole on-board drama unfold at close range, with growing sadness. I was standing in the terminal now with fellow passengers who had all lived through the same experience. I knew how I was feeling, and I wondered how this had touched their lives.

I saw again those who had tried to film the whole thing on their cell phones, and wondered at their view of things. I spoke at length to the young nurse, the only person on board with medical training. She and her husband were foreigners on honeymoon, and were likely to miss their connecting flight to an idyllic island to continue their special time together. No complaints. They had toiled to save a life, and failed, and knew that their inconvenience was minor when set against death, and loss. Perspective.

I called my client to explain. No problem, he said. Call me when you land and we’ll make a plan. Perspective. And then I became aware of a drama being played out at the terminal counter that was in every way like a scene from a low budget movie, badly acted, and completely over the top. Three excitable Europeans were marching around, flinging their hands in the air, shouting at officials, and complaining loudly and repeatedly that they were going to Europe, and they might miss their connecting flight. Did the airline not understand? And why was nobody doing anything? They wanted to speak to the manager. This was all so unprofessional. And that stupid little airhostess bursting into tears: so unprofessional! She should have been setting the example. On, and on, and on…

A smartly dressed woman sidled up to me and said with a resigned voice: ‘What a waste of a day. I was supposed to be in the City for a meeting, and that’s not going to happen’. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘to put things in perspective, someone started out today for the City and isn’t going anywhere again, ever’. ‘Yes’, she said quickly, ‘but not everyone is as understanding as we are. Some people are so selfish’. And then she moved on: perhaps she had seen someone else she had to speak to.

I became aware of someone standing quietly next to me. ‘Phew. Some people are upset,’ he said glancing towards to the B-movie drama a few yards away. ‘You were one of the guys helping with CPR weren’t you?’ I said, recognising him. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘poor guy’. Perspective. I noticed the honeymoon couple, quietly and politely trying to rearrange their flights, when they could get a word in over the tragi-comic drama. Perspective.

Later that week, (it was one of those weeks), I sat in traffic for three hours making a routine twenty-minute journey as we all coped with the deluge that saw hundreds of cars stranded, whole suburbs devastated, cars bobbing like corks in rivers where none had been before, and six people lose their lives. Fascinating to hear the outrage on the radio the following morning. The weather service should be sued, some said, for not warning us of this disaster.

And Benjamin Zander’s Rule #6 came to mind. Zander tells the story of a Prime Minister entertaining a Prime Minister from another country. While they are sitting in discussion, someone bursts in in a state of uncontrolled anguish, flinging their arms about, and shouting. The resident Prime Minister says, ‘Please, please. Remember Rule #6’. The person instantly apologises, calms down, and leaves the room. This happens three times (as it always does in stories, says Zander), and finally the visiting Prime Minister can no longer contain his curiosity.


So I thought of flights and floods, of damage and devastation, of apoplexies and apologies, of life and death, and times when I have had a serious sense of humour failure, or been tempted to rail against the wind or whatever. And I remember Rule #6 – don’t take yourself so d@#&! seriously. It’s a marvellous way to regain perspective.

The morning traffic is a great place to reflect on the ‘ripple effects’ of our choices.

I was driving to the airport one morning this past week on a busy motorway, when the lines of a Billy Joel song popped into my head. : “…I know it’s gonna get me somewhere along the line”.

I was becoming increasingly anxious at miles and minutes of first-gear, stop-start ‘motion’, wondering if there was yet another accident ahead: or another rush-hour roadblock: or protest action of some kind…

And I wasn’t the only anxious person with somewhere to be that morning. As I sat in my 5kph queue, a line of fifteen mini bus taxis (I counted them) rumbled along on my outside with one wheel in the yellow line section and the other on the grass verge. As I looked more closely, I saw that they were following a well-worn pathway… this unofficial ‘third lane’ long established.

When we finally started moving again I saw that there had been no accident. No incident. The whole frustrating crawl the consequence of people bypassing the queue and feeding in at the front.

And so the reflection on consequences and the ‘ripple effect’…

This isn’t a rant against taxis. Rather, it’s a bit of introspection on short cuts and consequences. It happens that queue jumpers are one of my pet ‘hates’, whether in traffic or airports or supermarkets. And that’s because whatever the reason, there are always consequences: “…you know it’s gonna get you (or me), somewhere along the line”.

Which deepened the introspection. Am I ever responsible, I wondered, for short cuts that impact others negatively? And if I am, do I have the right to complain? Surely I am either compliant, or I am complicit.

• As a businessperson, do I deliver and charge for work that is below the standard I implicitly or explicitly promise?

• As a manager, do I fail staff members by setting ‘stretch targets’ without designing work so that it is possible for staff members to excel; or fail to remove barriers to excellence, or share my knowledge and expertise in focused coaching sessions that might make all the difference; or create inefficient systems? Peter Senge suggests that organisations fail individuals more often than not; that individual failure can be traced in 85% of cases to a failure of the “system” to make excellence possible.

• As a parent, do I ever allocate time at crucial stages of my child’s development to selfish pursuits: golf, my career, TV, whatever may at that moment seem a better use of my time.

In none of these cases am I deliberately setting out to harm another: my client; or a team member; or – least of all – my child. But in each case there is a resistance to “sitting in the traffic”. I choose the short cut that bypasses the hard – or just less ‘fun’ – work involved in producing good products, creating high-performing teams, or raising secure and contented children.


The challenge in every choice of this nature is that there is seldom an immediate downside. It takes time for the short cut to take effect; for the consequence to become apparent.

Think about it: Like me, you might be observing national and international events with concern. Before pointing fingers at symptomatic behaviour, though, we might examine the causes more deeply. In how many cases is what we are seeing simply “the rent (becoming) due”, to paraphrase Billy Joel?

What to do?

We have a choice of thinking about whether (and how) to ‘pay the rent’, or to explore possibilities. We can get into what Ben Zander calls “downward-spiral thinking”; conversations that see only negative consequences. In a world of relentless measurement and comparison, the only outcome of downward-spiral thinking is anxiety. Or we might embrace Zander’s challenge to ‘radiate possibility’. Possibility, in Zander’s words, is a world of shared commitments, shared involvements, open-heartedness, contribution, love, and health – both personal and organisational.

We get to choose, every day, which world we will live in. And before you think it, this is not about “positive thinking”. Positive thinking is convincing yourself that something is good when it isn’t. Radiating possibility is something quite different. Zander says that his father – who lost everything as a holocaust survivor – had an amazing ability to ‘radiate possibility’. He had a saying: there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.

Radiating possibility is a decision to create something out of circumstances that seem to have no hope and no possibility in them. It’s a new lens through which to view the world.

So, how do I radiate possibility?

I am faced with a choice to accept the situation as impossible: the child is badly behaved; the team is dysfunctional; the country is on the road to ruin. Or – to take but one of these – I might decide to embrace the diversity of my team; to choose to see people as more than replaceable parts; to ‘sit in the traffic’ of coaching and supporting, and redesigning jobs and systems to make the achievement of excellence possible for ordinary people.

In your country, in your workplace, in your family, what decisions do you need to make that will create something where there seems to be no hope or no possibility? And what might the consequences, the ripple effect, of those decisions be?

Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, records a conversation between Alice and the Cheshire Cat.



For all our advancement in many areas and directions, it is worth asking – as so many do today – where are we going? What’s it all about?

Albert Einstein might have been writing for our times when he said: “The perfection of means and the confusion of ends seems to be our problem”. It seems that we may have become very, very good at doing things without a clear idea as to WHY we are doing them.

Perhaps that sounds ridiculous?

To paraphrase the Cheshire Cat, we will get somewhere if we keep doing what we are doing long enough… The question is: will we like where we get to when we get there? And can we afford to leave that destination – the ‘end’ – to be the chance outcome of our ‘perfected means’.

Jennifer Aaker (Stanford School of Business) presents compelling research in the Power of Purpose to suggest that having purpose in life leads to more meaning in life, improved health, and more satisfaction from work. She defines “purpose” as intention: having a stable far-reaching goal. When we are pursuing that, she says, we feel our lives are more meaningful. Also, the people who count their lives most meaningful are those who give the most to others. They have a strong sense of where they come from and where they are going: a purpose. The feeling of meaning increases when we feel connected to others and to something bigger than ourselves.

How are we doing on that score? As history unfolds, are we increasingly purposeful people who live lives of deep meaning?

The evidence is not good. It’s a sad fact that the most economically prosperous nations in the world also have the highest rates of depression, suicide, and substance abuse. It may well be that, in our enthusiastic pursuit of the possible, we have lost sight of the purpose. In that pursuit, we may have dismantled many of the principles, beliefs and values that served as a ‘true north’ for us in the past. They were our compass, and now, while there is always movement, direction seems less obvious. Unless we live with purpose – live with the ‘end’ in mind – the ‘means’ we perfect will determine the ‘ends’ for us. Our systems will ‘run’ us.

We are more ‘able’ than at any time in our human development. It seems there is little we cannot do if we set our minds to it. Except, apparently, live in peace with others and ourselves. “The world is too much with us;” said William Wordsworth; “late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”. In our driven state, we may well have lost the power to be fully human.

“The perfection of means and the confusion of ends…”  So much of what we do, the means we perfect and execute, is amoral. We do what we do because we can without proper thought about ends.

In what way is this relevant to the world of work, and those who manage it?

We can continue to perfect means – to become increasingly efficient – but at what cost to the human spirit? Perhaps William Blake was prophetic in his words “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.

Isn’t it time to think about ends, to ask where we (each of us) are going? To clarify for ourselves what is truly important to us; what we value when we are the best versions of ourselves? Isn’t it perhaps time to live courageously, so that we create better alignment between personal values and organisational values? That we stop pretending that the world is divided into silos with no effect, one on the other? After all, the logical conclusion to doing more and more with fewer and fewer is that I will be without work, and the meaning it attaches to my life; the dignity it affords me as a human being.

A few thoughts:

• We must remind ourselves that organisations are communities rather than machines. That we lead people and manage systems, and that systems are intended to serve us and not the other way around. When we have forgotten these things, the results have always been catastrophic.
• We must remember, too, that the way we lead people determines the way the systems and structures turn out (and how they affect our lives and wellbeing).
• We must challenge ourselves continually by asking what our end point will be if we continue, unchecked, on our current path of perfected means…

The best version of yourself has something unique to offer your team, your organisation, your country… even humanity itself. Have the courage to be that person…

The fact that you’re reading this right now means that you have made a decision about how you will spend the next ten or so minutes of your life. It would be interesting to know how you came to that decision. Not to read this article at all, I mean, but to read it at this moment and not at some other time.

Perhaps this is time you have scheduled for personal thinking and reflection as part of a purposeful growth strategy. If that’s the case, then what you are doing is aligned to your personal values and growth goals. You might, on the other hand, have been bored or frustrated by what you were doing, and you’re using this as a distraction or even work avoidance behaviour.

The point is, you either are, or are not, prioritising successfully.

Greg McKeown has written a book (worth reading) on the subject of choosing the ‘important’ called Essentialism - The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. In the preface he says: “The Way of the Essentialist involves doing less, but better, so you can make the highest possible contribution”. He draws a little diagram that illustrates this idea simply but profoundly:



We can, he suggests, either expend energy in multiple directions and accomplish relatively little; or we can focus significant effort in fewer directions and accomplish much, in that direction. All we must do is decide what is essential, do that one thing, and leave all the rest behind.

As an ‘Essentialist’ struggling to emerge from his ‘non-essentialism’ – as someone struggling with the many good things clamouring for attention in my life – I find myself asking: How on earth do I decide on that ONE thing to do at THIS time?

I have found this insight from Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, to be helpful: “Prioritization sounds like such a simple thing,” he says, “but true prioritization starts with a very difficult question to answer… If you could only do one thing, what would it be? And you can’t rationalize the answer, and you can’t attach the one thing to some other things. It’s just the one thing.”

So how do we choose one thing, and how do we avoid rationalising as we select that one thing? Because as Robert Heinlein suggests, “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal”.

You see, when we’re struggling to make choices about how to spend our time, we are seldom struggling with choices about right and wrong… it’s more about good, better and best.

Does that sound at all familiar? If it does, you will see the truth of Vincent Ruggerio observation: “Rationalizing is the very opposite of reasoning; whereas reasoning works from evidence to conclusion, rationalizing works from conclusion to evidence. That is, rationalizing starts with what we want to be so and then selectively compiles "evidence" to prove that it is so”.

Now, I’m not passing judgement on the scenario above; after all, they are all ‘good’ things. What I am suggesting is that the choosing starts with a desired conclusion in mind. It’s a little like my youngest son’s ‘fail safe’ decision making coin. It has “yes” on one side and “no” on the other. Faced with a decision, you flip the coin and it gives you the answer. And if you find you don’t like the answer it gives you, then you know it was the other option anyway…

When you are faced with decisions about how to use your time, perhaps run this little checklist through in your mind:

1. Does this align with my personal values, and vision for my life?
2. Of the competing calls on my time right now, is any of the other calls both important and urgent? Do they demand my immediate response in terms of my values, vision and current employment?

Graphically:

The focus you gain by knowing who you are, what you believe, and where you are going, will help in finding that ‘one thing’. Choosing on those terms will both energise you and free you from the anxiety caused by the frantic pursuit of everything.

Yes but, you say, how do I make it happen? Bill Hybels suggests that a runaway calendar will keep you from the focus we all seek because “it holds you hostage to tangible things” – meetings, appointments and projects – without giving proper priority to the intangibles: who you are becoming” and the key relationships in your life. If you don’t consciously intervene – start using your diary differently – this pattern will ensure that the things that are most important to you in terms of your personal values and vision for your life will always come second to the urgent priorities of others.

What are those things that will determine who you want to become? What do you need to enter into your calendar first? If they are in first, and everything else is slotted in around those things, then you have taken the first steps to becoming the kind of person you want to be.

Last weekend I was privileged to participate in a “great race” – the Washie 100 miler. And before you ask, no, I wasn’t running. I was driving a support vehicle with a small team seconding an athlete running the race. 

The race began on Friday evening at 17h00 and for our athlete – who came 16th out of 100 participants – it finished just after 13h00 on Saturday. Read that sentence again, slowly… yes, 20 hours and a few minutes to be awake, and running on a pretty brutal course (see the profile below):



I spent a lot of time that weekend thinking (when you drive 160km at an average speed of 7 - 10kph, you have a lot of time to think). My thoughts – the printable ones at least – included:

• Why would people do this to themselves?
• How much further?
• Why am I doing this?
• How much further?
• How are we going to get through this?
• How much further?
• Are we going to get through this?
• How much further?

It’s wonderful how simple things – like a hot shower, a decent meal, and bit of shut-eye – restore sanity and perspective. Which gave me a chance to reflect on the achievement and the experience as a whole. And I thought about things like motivation and passion; about strength – both physical and mental; and about action learning.

The first thought is that the motivation and the passion come from within. In races like the Washie 100 miler, there are no prizes – just a small wooden trophy that every finisher receives. There is no external incentive, no fame or glory, very little publicity or even recognition. The true prize is completing the race and achieving the targets you have set for yourself.

Learning is no different. As teachers, facilitators or managers, we may push, cajole and even threaten learners of all ages to learn. But unless the motivation is from within, we are all – teacher, facilitator, manager and learner – going through the motions and the outcome is not transformative.

Thomas Jefferson said once: “Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.” I know the young athlete well enough to understand something of his motivation: that it is about stretching himself; finding out what he is made of; pushing to the limit; achieving his full potential; living the adventure of life; squeezing every drop of significance out of it. It is a learning journey into the unknown. The journey transforms him, and that is learning.

The second thought is that the race isn’t just about being physically fit enough to run 160km. It’s also about being mentally strong enough to have completed a full marathon and know that there are another three of those to go. Or to reach the last checkpoint – after 120km of mind-numbing and muscle-sapping work – and know that you have another 5 hours of running left to do. I was exhausted just sitting in the support vehicle and watching; I was blown away by the sheer grit and determination as he came to terms with “another 40km”. Sometimes it came to breaking the race down into counting forty steps; or reaching that tree…

Do we settle too easily into comfort zones and never extend ourselves, or take risks…? It’s too difficult, we may say, or time-consuming, or a waste of time, or too daunting to try this or go for that: we might fail… Les Brown, motivational speaker, author, radio DJ, former television host, and former politician, says: “The only limits to the possibilities in your life tomorrow are the ‘buts’ you use today.” Learning is not only about ability; it is also about durability.

The third thought is that the young athlete’s running ‘career’ has been and is an on-going learning experience. Running was the weakest discipline of his triathlon (swim, bike, run) and has become a focus area of continuous improvement. It has been a process of learning about optimal training programmes; rest and sleeping patterns; general diet and in-race nutrition; and race management – setting and sticking to plans, anticipating and dealing with physical, mental and emotional ‘flat-spots’, and adapting to the unexpected in race conditions. It is literally about finding what works and what doesn’t. In that sense he is an on-going action-learning project. He is always on the journey to being a better version of himself; always striving for goals he has set for himself rather than those set by others.

What keeps him going? Perhaps there’s a clue in the words of poet E.E. Cummings: “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” In every sense that involves real, transformative learning. I wish for you the courage, the internal motivation, the mental strength, and the passion to become all that you can be.

My mother told me once that, when I was a little boy, she instructed me not to touch the wood-burning stove because it was hot and would burn me. It seems, though, that the concepts of “don’t touch”, and “hot”, and “burn” remained abstract and disconnected until I brought them together in a searing moment of learning and truth – I touched the red-hot stove.

That was my first conscious encounter with a principle Einstein expressed as: “The only source of knowledge is experience.”

It seems that I learned all the required lessons that day: I gained first-hand experience of “burn”. I never did repeat the experiment with the hot stove. And I was able to generalise this particular experience: I didn’t have to touch other hot things to know what the result would be.

More importantly perhaps, I learned to trust a source of information and direction that had my best interests at heart. I can’t remember the actual words, but I would be unsurprised to find that “don’t you remember I told you the stove was hot and would burn you” was mixed in with the salve and comfort. And I had a lot of time to reflect on those words, reinforced by frequent sharp reminders from outraged nerves (isn’t it astonishing how often we unthinkingly strike our fingers against things in the course of everyday activity).

The trusted source became part of my experience too, and this saved me from other potentially dangerous lessons. I didn’t have to learn about the shocking impact of electricity by putting my fingers into plug sockets; or cross roads without looking to know that cars might knock me down. You get the idea.

It seems that, unwittingly, I validated David Kolb’s model of experiential learning.

• I did something (touched the stove – concrete experimentation).
• I thought about what I had done (reflection – assisted by Mom’s “I told you so”).
• Kolb’s third stage – abstract conceptualisation – describes well the talking, thinking about, and applying lessons learned in one situation to others. I didn’t touch other hot things. I obeyed reasonable instructions directed at my safety.
• I did things differently: I used oven gloves when approaching the stove, and this fits with Kolb’s final stage of active experimentation.

So is that what Einstein means? And if it is, why do we so often fail to learn from our experiences?

After all, life presents us with a host of potential learning situations every day. We are late for appointments; we get stuck in traffic; we miss deadlines; we communicate poorly with colleagues; we arrive home late for dinner; we miss soccer matches or ballet performances; we write clumsy reports; we deliver dull presentations; we have moments of misunderstanding with important people in our lives… and many of us do it over and over again.

Typically we brush these off as aberrations, but in each there is a ‘learning moment’, an opportunity to reflect, to decide, to change. It is what makes progress possible. It is the way that we avoid repeating our failures, and instead give ourselves the chance to move forward, to make new mistakes, to learn and change and grow again.

The key word, I think, is ‘reflect’. Put simply, we don’t; or not very often anyway.

Two CEOs of an organisation in the USA (true story) were discussing a rather expensive mistake by a junior executive, which had caused a $1,5 million loss. “I guess you fired him on the spot,” said the one. “Why would I do that?” asked the other, “I’ve just spent $1,5 million training him.

I want to suggest, though, that unless there was serious reflection, the ‘training money’ is a permanent loss rather than an investment.

Perhaps it has to do with our general busyness. There is no space, no time, no quiet for the work of reflection. And work it is. We are connected relentlessly to others by multiple devices and social media. Even our watches – thanks to Apple and Fitbit – are no longer just for telling the time. If a recent Bloomberg report is to be believed, we routinely work more than 40 hours per week; our responsibilities both at home and work are increasing; and flexitime often means being permanently ‘on call’. In a world of instant gratification and demand-driven responses, where and how do we find time to reflect?

Are we, like the hamster, doomed to run until we drop or the wheel breaks?

The good news is that even the hamster gets off the wheel every now and again. We simply must create time to reflect.

How?

Recognising the importance – believing in the absolute necessity of reflection – is a starting point. Because it remains true that what we regard as of primary importance, we find time to do. Without reflection, we are doomed to repeat the first stage of the learning cycle: we will ‘do’ something again, and again, and again.

That way madness lies...

What’s in a name?

I like to think of myself as a Facilitator.

When I introduce myself in this way, people will often say: “Oh, you mean like a Teacher, or a Trainer?” No, I am tempted to answer; like a Facilitator.

Am I being precious? Wouldn’t Shakespeare insist that, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”? I am reminded, though, that words don’t have intrinsic definitions. Definitions are simply descriptions of the way people use words.

I am a Facilitator, because I like the way it describes me more than I like what Teacher or Trainer says about me right now.

Why?

When people talk about a Teacher, they frequently mean a school teacher, a person who provides education for students in preschool, primary school, secondary school, and so on. And while I might be interested in helping people acquire appropriate knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits, I have very little to do with formal education structures.

Trainer, as it is frequently used, seems even less appropriate. A Trainer is defined variously as: a person or thing that trains, especially one who coaches athletes, racehorses, or show animals; or a member of a naval gun crew who trains cannons horizontally. None of those describes particularly well what I do on a day-to-day basis.

In what way is Facilitator any different or better?

Well, to facilitate literally means to “make easy or easier”. One who facilitates – a Facilitator – is someone who makes progress easier. And they do this by leading a discussion, asking questions, mediating between opposing viewpoints, or by ensuring that all participants’ views are heard. I am happy to own all of that.

But while I am happy to facilitate, I recognise that not everyone is happy to go through the process. I remember ‘Jan’ well. I was working with a group of young managers, grappling with a relatively complex idea. I was operating, as I do, on the assumption that they were not “little vessels… ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim” (Dickens, Hard Times). We had been throwing ideas around – some of us more willingly than others – when one of those ‘moments’ happened which make the whole thing so worthwhile for all involved. Someone said, “Oh, so that’s why…” And the lights came on in a series of “Aha!” flashes. But Jan sat with his arms folded, a disgruntled expression on his face. “If that’s what you wanted us to know,” he said, “then why didn’t you just tell us?”

I could have said: because real learning only takes place when you battle your way to understanding. I could have said that if he battled for the answer he would remember the outcome because it would be his. Instead, I had my own “Aha!” moment, and it was this: Not everyone enjoys the hard work that real learning almost always involves. I love what Peter Senge has to say about this: “Taking in information is only distantly related to real learning. It would be nonsensical to say, “I just read a great book about bicycle riding—I’ve now learned that.”

Oddly, as in Jan’s case, some learners are more than happy to ‘outsource’ this function, to have an expert ‘tell’ them what they need to know without question or process. That is both disappointing and frightening, and goes some way towards explaining some of the challenges we encounter as countries, businesses, and communities, and in our homes.

How does it happen that the joy of learning hardens in some to indifference and even to arrogant resistance? I am old enough to have watched with sadness how the creative spark that is within every child is so often snuffed out in formal learning processes.

In his book “Aha!”, Jordan Ayan writes: “My wife and I went to a pre-school parent-teacher conference and were informed that our budding refrigerator artist, Christopher, would be receiving a grade of ‘Unsatisfactory’ in art. We were shocked. How could any child— let alone our child—receive a poor grade in art at such a young age? His teacher informed us that he had refused to ‘colour within the lines which is a state requirement for demonstrating grade-level motor skills’”.

If we ‘learn within the lines’, it is possible to reach a limit. We come to understand that this is “the way things are done around here”. At some point, for some people, necessary learning is deemed to have happened. They know what they need to know.

So I facilitate. I do it because facilitation, as I understand it, builds learning skills that deliver independent learners; learners capable of lifelong learning. And learning how to learn is more important than any number of ‘gallons of facts’ you may learn.

Take responsibility for your own learning; don’t outsource it to someone else. The person you are becoming is too wonderful to leave in someone else’s hands.