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We’re Going Back to Being Human

My good friend and associate Gareth wrote a piece this week called ‘Conversation is the New Currency’. I think the post is interesting and I disagree with his assertion about newness. Long before social media ever existed and (insert religious being of choice here) willing, long after too – conversation will be vital. It is indeed a currency older than the Roman Sestersius. The fag break, the lunch break, the hello on the way into work, the goodbye on the way out – all these and more existed long afore ye twitter and ye olde Facebookke.

Rob Jones has written a piece called ‘The One With the Wrong Era’, in which Rob challenges Gareth’s assertion through the lens of his father. Both these posts are well worth a read, and if you’re not already following Gareth and Rob on Twitter, I think you’ll get a lot of value from doing so.

I’m sitting in the sun, reading and absorbing all this stuff when I spot Matt Alder (yeah follow him too) tweet about Rob’s post. Matt said, ‘Agreed, we’re just going back to being human.’ I love it, we’re just going back to being human. If I was some kinda inspirational tweet guru I’d stick that top of my list, or at least on a t-shirt.

Before Frederick W Taylor came along and fucked everything with his well meaning and bonkers ideas around command and control, we used to get stuff done at least partly through talking with each other. Talking, learning, sharing; skills, ideas and methods. And as Rob’s post shows us, we still managed even though FWT’s ideas became widely adopted. Some of the best examples of engagement in the broadest sense and between the broadest range of stakeholders, occurs through the art of conversation. Yes we need to listen, do, feedback, improve, loop the loop and all that. But we’ve all been there. The best places we work are the ones where useful conversation helps to make work better, where the art of conversation is seen as inspiring, not inconvenient, winning not wasteful.

We’ll be talking more about this stuff at the upcoming Stop Doing Dumb Things event on June 27th if you’d like to join us (I couldn’t resist!), and it’s the subject of my talk at the Ohio SHRM in September, although Matt’s title is waaay better than the one I’m currently using (note to self – change it!).

We’re Going Back to Being Human. Thanks Matt.

photo credit

 

From Start to Finnish

Back in March of this year I went to TEDxGranta and had a fab day, partly because I met Ross Sargent, co founder of Cambridge Kung Fu. Since that day I’ve kept in touch with Ross on Facebook where he shares some interesting and useful stuff. Recently he shared a video talk by Pasi Sahlberg called ‘Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland’. Here’s a link to the video (it’s a whopper – clocking in at 1 hour 20 minutes, Ross suggests you can wind through the first ten mins):

Now being a kind soul, Ross watched the talk then summarised his observations. He’s kindly allowed me to repost these as a guest post, thanks Ross. I’m inspired by what the Finnish people have achieved and as Ross says – we could do this! Here’s his summary of the talk and why the Finnish education system works, hope you like it.

1. Trust people to do their best.
2. Teach people to be responsible don’t make them accountable.
3. Value teachers especially primary school teachers above pretty much all other professions! Pay them a good salary and give them plenty of time for teaching and planning within their work hours.
4. No testing under the age of 16.
5. No external checking.
6. Start half day school at 6 (combined with half a half day of play) and full time school at 7.
7. Multiple avenues for success that are equally valued in society – both academic and practical.
8. No private education – the aim is for absolutely everyone to be given the exact same opportunities to succeed.
9. Teachers get to design their own syllabus for their school – and studies have shown that this has led to by far the least variation in academic standards across all schools of all measured countries!

Along with Singapore and South Korea, Finland is consistently in the top 3 performing schools in all known measures and has been for the last decade or so.

We live in a different country with different issues but 30 years ago Finland did not have a good education system and now they have the best, so change is possible. They were not ‘born’ with a good education system, they thought about what needed to change and made the changes they felt were needed and have continued to refine the system and will continue to do so. We could do this!

Coulda Woulda Shoulda

I was talking with the wonderful Ed Percival last week and he observed something interesting. In conversation I kept saying ‘I should do this’, ‘I should do that’. And I spoke about adding these ‘should dos’ to a list. ‘And maybe I should schedule time to do these things into the diary? 09.30, write blog post. 10.30, write proposal, 1.30 phone calls, 2.30 go for a walk, etc etc.’

Ed suggested that this to do list (or should do list!) is not very helpful. As it grows it becomes more off-putting, more likely to remain uncompleted, and more likely to create a sense of failure. I think he’s right, and this may be partly why I don’t currently keep many lists. He also wondered how I might approach these scheduled tasks if I schedule them as completed.

I’m dropping should from my ‘making stuff happen’ vocabulary, and yesterday I got a bunch of stuff done, some of it had been hanging around longer than I’d originally intended. And later this week I’m going to schedule completed tasks in the diary and see how that works. 09.30 blog post written, 10.30, proposal written, 1.30 pm phone calls made, 2.30, just returned from 2 mile walk.

I’ll let you know how I get on. Meantime, what ideas do you have for getting stuff done?