Where business and the arts meet, making work better together.
How does past change affect future change? That’s the nuts and bolts of a question posed on LinkedIn by Garrett Gitchell. Good question Garrett. Here’s my attempt at answering it using a diagram. Why a diagram? Well a picture paints a thousand words so they say – and hey, it’s just a little different eh?
Every year I’m fortunate to experience lots of change. I enjoy it. The mix of excitement, uncertainty, and the helpfulness of so many people I’m fortunate to know make for a thrilling journey.
2009 has been exceptional. My forays into the world of social media exploded as the Stop Doing Dumb Things to Customers blogging experiment went from strength to strength. Thousands of people tuned in and many have contributed and co-created too. This inspired me to try and improve the mix of employee, customer and social engagement offered through the blog, and through LinkedIn and through facebook, and beyond. I found real enjoyment in writing and it helped make some fantastic new connections, of which more in a minute.
In the summer of this year, I resigned from a successful and enjoyable 12.5 year career working for BT which encompassed sales, sustainability, change management and employee engagement. I’ve started a new business (well someone had to). It’s called What Goes Around Limited. I hope it will bring the very best of what I’ve learned and am learning about engagement, sustainability, leadership, trust and autonomy in pursuit of great service to an even wider audience. In the few short months that What Goes Around has been in existence, we’ve enjoyed some success, uncovered lots of opportunities and made plenty of mistakes. Sorry, I mean learned lots of valuable lessons.
Something I learned a few years ago (I think it happened when I became a father) which I want to amplify today is the power of sharing. My experience of large organisations has taught me that sharing is often spoken about, and rarely practiced. The old maxim knowledge is power only feels right to me when the knowledge is shared to create power with others. Yet too often knowledge is selfishly held close in the belief that it can create power over others, where its value is truly limited, and sometimes even dangerous. In the belief that we can co-create more real power and movement in 2010, I want to share just a few of the many people and things which have inspired me in this exceptional year of change.
Have a great Christmas, and an exciting New Year.
Doug Shaw
07736 518066
What Goes Around Limited
Registered in England. Company number 06997727
Inspiring people, places and things
Jonathan Wilson. Jonathan is one of the most fascinating people I know. Though I’ve known him for some years, I include him on this list because the new ideas and opportunities he introduces me to make it feel like I’m often meeting him for the first time. This year he showed me a great way to measure communication and performance within a team, and improve it.
Is Bad Behaviour Killing Big Business. My friend Katherine Wiid encouraged me to start what is now a growing network on LinkedIn full of interesting people sharing, learning and having some fun discussing stuff about behaviour. Click here and if you like what you see, please feel free to join in.
David Zinger. Katherine then introduced me to David Zinger’s employee engagement network. A growing, thriving network of people with a sincere interest in this exciting subject. David also runs davidzinger.com an interesting and useful site full of insight, cartoons, poetry, plans and the Zinger employee engagement model.
Life Without Pants. Through David Zinger’s network I met Shereen Qutob-Cabral. Shereen is an enthusiast and a motivator. She showed me the way to Life Without Pants and its owner Matt Cheuvront. Matt writes and collaborates wonderfully. Amongst the wonderful things you can find at Life Without Pants is a great read called the Inconvenience of Change. 38 bloggers coming together each with their own story and perspective on how to inspire change.
What Matters Now. After enjoying the great work on Life Without Pants, I went seeking more. I found What Matters Now, which is the work of more than 60 people with big ideas and something to say. It will inspire you to make some changes in 2010, and to keep doing work that matters. Please download it and share it with your colleagues.
Other folk who’ve given me a hand in 2009 include Chris Plush, Tony Mason, Walter Hicks, Gary Smailes, Pete Massey, Dan Pink, Kate Davies, Ross Clephane, Lyndon Wright, David MacLeod, David Shanks (who gave me the name What Goes Around Limited), Dave and Maggie Wheeler, Huw Williams, Joseph Bridgstock, Tamar Collis, Charlie Duff, my dad Paul and my darling wife Carole and lovely daughter Keira Joe. For every experience I recall there are more I can’t right now so my apologies if I’ve forgotten to acknowledge your help and co-creation this time, I hope to do better in the future.
Job candidates may be hired depending on the order in which they are interviewed, in the same way X Factor contestants who sing later in the show are less likely to be voted off, research indicates. In an article published by Personnel Today, we see that researchers at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School have been investigating what gives winning game-show contestants the edge. They found that the order in which contestants perform plays an important role in their success.
Wyn Llewellyn, Director at ValueFlows Ltd, observed, “An interesting piece of research and a creative and invalid extrapolation – from X factor to recruitment process. A conflicting hypothesis might be – the later you are in the process, the more tired and jaded the selection panel will be, they may have seen a ‘star’ earlier and become biased towards them, etc.
Also consider the following; professional recruiters are working to clear selection criteria and are professionally trained to do so – the public who vote in X factor have neither of these characteristics – they just vote for who they like! Wait a minute – maybe a proportion of recruiters do that too!”
This got me thinking…
So hang on a minute. How many initial applicants for a role would you expect to be able to fulfil the requirements? 1 in 10 maybe? And how often would you expect the interview process to deliver the right results? Most experts would say that a 7 out of 10 success rate of interview process delivering right result is high. Hey, it’s nearly Christmas so let’s be generous and say 8 times out of 10.
Using these assumptions the chances of selecting the right candidate are about 2 to 1 against (and if you do turn the dial to a 7 out of 10 hit rate on interview process the odds against correct selection increase to nearly 4 to 1 against).
Let’s do the maths:
1000 applicants, 900 can not do the job, 100 can.
Of the 900 who cannot do the job, an 80% correct interview process will deliver:
720 of the 900 correctly identified as not able
180 of the 900 as able, even though they are not
Of the 100 who can do the job, an 80% correct interview process will deliver:
80 identified as able
20 identified as not able, even though they are
So if we divide the 180 incorrect able candidates by the 80 able candidates, 180/80 gives us 2.25 to 1 against.
So if the formal interview seems to correlate so poorly (if at all) with future effectiveness, well maybe we’d be better off taking our chances with Simon Cowell et al after all? At the very least this leaves me wondering if we should be considering alternative ways of connecting the right people with the right job role…what do you think?