Communication – Page 28 – The Consulting Artist

Drawn to the Moment

Here’s an enjoyable and useful way to spend a few minutes. Grab a sketch pad and a nice soft pencil and spend just a very few minutes drawing someone. In the examples you can see here folks in a workshop last week spent exactly ten minutes drawing me. Before sitting down to draw we had spent a few minutes in a gallery looking at the way artists use different materials to capture their subjects.

There was reasoning behind this drawing exercise. Most importantly it is fun. It is also for most people a chance to experience something a little different and it is another way of helping folks to focus on a particular task. Sometimes you don’t have very long to do the task – can you capture the essence of what you need in a brief period of time? I think these results show you that the answer is yes.

We developed the idea a little further and had another play with the sketching pencils. This time we only had two minutes to complete the task. It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind and your pencil to it. What do you do when you need to focus, when you don’t have long to complete a task?

Best Practice

The word arrogance means to turn away from questioning. I understand it has its roots in the Latin words ab, meaning away, and rogare, meaning to question.

Best practice is arrogance in motion. The minute you believe you have achieved best practice, you stop asking questions. Well of course you do, what you have is the best. Best practice see, it says so.

Good practice and better practice are both useful places on an improvement or development journey. But best practice?

Best practice is game over. You lose, they win.

Stand Up!

A lot of folk I speak with seem mighty pissed off these days. What about? The humble meeting, that’s what. I was running a workshop recently and the group got really animated about meetings. How poorly prepared, badly run, and terribly followed up they are. And don’t get us started on late arrivals.

One of the group suggested having meetings standing up. Keeps people on their toes (har har). These stand up meetings are usually short, and to the point. And there’s nothing wrong with that. So this morning I hopped onto Twitter and posed the question:

“Someone suggested running meetings with no chairs in the room as a way of getting stuff done quickly. What do you think?”

Good old Twitter – you’ll never let me down…

Callum Saunders loved the idea

Rob Jones suggested “sit down and focus”

Lara Newman told us that where she works they call the idea “The bird table”. I love that

Gary Smailes got in touch to say Tesco run meetings on their feet

Lord Manley suggested email as an alternative, is this a choice of two nightmares I wonder?

Jo McMahon likes stand up agile meetings – keep it brief and focussed

Green Contact likes 15 minute flash meetings – keep it sharp

Mr Airmiles has experience of stand up meetings – and he thinks they are great! He and I have previously spoken about desks that you can wind up and down to stand and sit at too.

Flora Marriott did the maths for us. stand up = definitely. Toyota might claim to have invented it, she adds.

And Greg Savage (yeah him again) popped by to share some great thinking around whether or not meetings should even take place.

I’ll be covering other aspects of the dreaded meeting soon. Meantime I love these suggestions – and I’d be keen to hear if other people have more to add.

Update: here is an interesting addition to the debate courtesy of Tobias Mayer over at Agile Anarchy. Don’t have meetings is his suggestion.