Blueprint – Page 2 – Lorne Mitchell's Thursday Thoughts

01/08/201203/08/2012

The Lords’ Verdict

For those who have followed this blog for a while, you will know I presented evidence at the House of Lords’ inquiry on the present UK’s government’s policy on Next Generation Broadband. So it was at midnight on Tuesday, the Lords published their report which can be found <HERE> entitled “Broadband for all – an alternative vision”.

Lord Inglewood was interviewed in a video:

“Our communications network must be regarded as a strategic, national asset. The Government’s strategy lacks just that – strategy.

The complex issues involved were not thought through from first principle and it is far from clear that the Government’s policy will deliver the broadband infrastructure that we need – for profound social and economic reasons – for the decades to come.”

The report has had a mixed response. Supporters of a truly open-access fit-for-purpose National internet Infrastructure applauded.

Other analysts were eless complimentary:

Matthew Howett, lead analyst of Ovum’s regulatory practice, said many aspects of the inquiry’s report are “simply odd”.

“With nearly 50 recommendations and no indication of costs or how they should be met, it’s likely to be dismissed as nothing more than a pipe dream,” he said.

Odd it was for me that so many Peers took the time out to learn about the industry and the pros and cons of various options for technology and business models. It was a piece of work that involved many hours of their time to see the problem from different perspectives. It challenged the status-quo and came up with an alternative vision for what the UK’s national internet access infrastructure might look like. It was bound to be unpopular in certain quarters as it threatened the status-quo.

Sure, the government and BT’s in-house analysts might dismiss the ideas as pipe-dreams, but one wonders where the whole BDUK process is heading. It might be the Games in London – but this particular game will go one well into the Autumn after all the athletes have left London.

It is definitely time for the status-quo to be challenged. BDUK is at best a strange construction and at worst a totally bonkers policy for a government set on Localism and Community Engagement. The Lords’ report went to the heart of this matter and has suggested a framework for a truly revolutionary approach to fixing the monopoly of BT’s infrastructure – particularly in the middle-mile.

At times, I think of giving up banging this drum and doing something more conventional and toe-the-line. Yet at one minute past midnight on Tuesday, I had a new surge of enthusiasm that the ideas that we have been working on for several years now are getting some traction and that a body of revered and highly intelligent Peers actually understood what many on the fringes of the industry have been saying for a while.

If only the Government could stand back and listen to some of the concerns about the current vision and understand that they have alternatives that are better, faster and cheaper that will help the UK’s international competitiveness, we might actually come up with something that really does get the economy back on its feet in a fairer way, based on an infrastructure that no single part is too big to fail. Surely there is a lesson here from the banking system that is staring us in the face?

Come on, Jeremy. Put the bell head back on the stick, put the bell down and start listening again. Unless, of course, you get reshuffled – in which case it is round-and-round we go!

Source of quote and more on this story at:

http://www.cbronline.com/news/lords-uk-broadband-strategy-heading-in-the-wrong-direction-010812

http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=475352&G=1&C=4&page=3

13/10/201114/10/2011

What Makes a Good Story?

I have always been fascinated by what makes up a good story and the effect that is has on the way we think about the world and our place within it. I have only recently came across the work of Joseph Campbell and his seminal work “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. In the book he explores the underlying pattern of the heroic struggle from each of the great myths from around the world. He then goes on to uncover an underlying sequence of typical “hero-actions” which are embedded in each of these stories.

George Lucas (the creator of StarWars) was so impressed by Cambpell’s work that he wrote the StarWars epic using his ideas. We are very fortunate that a series of six programmes summarising Campbell’s work and his ideas were recorded just before he died. You can see the first (and subsequent) videos on the (rather whacky) internet site below – though it is obviously much better to buy “The Power of Myth” DVD on Amazon or elsewhere and watch it legally:

Campbell neatly summarises one of the heoric struggles with phrase early-on in the six-part documentary:

“where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world”

The orphan archetype is possibly the most common storyline that Campbell uncovered. Moses, Romulus and Remus, Cinderella, Oliver Twist, Mowgli, Tarzan, Superman, Annie, King Arthur, Frodo Baggins, and yes, Harry Potter – as well as Luke Skywalker.

As Terry Windling so succinctly puts it:

“The orphaned hero is not, however, a mere fantasy cliché; it’s a mythic archetype, springing from some of the oldest stories of the world. This archetype includes not only those characters who are literally orphaned by the death of their parents, but also children who are lost, abandoned, cast out, disinherited by evil step–parents, raised in supernatural captivity, or reared by wild animals.”

Christopher Volger (in his book The Writer’s Journey) created twelve distinct stages to a good story:

1. Ordinary World

2. Call to Adventure

3. Refusal of the Call

4. Meeting the Mentor

5. Crossing the Frist Threshold

6. Tests, Allies and Enemies

7. Approach

8. Ordeal

9. Reward

10. The Road Back

11. Resurrection of the Hero

12. Return with the Elixir

So there you have it. The twelve stages to telling a good story based on Campbell’s “Monomyth” – or common pattern for all good stories. Try it. It really works. Whether you are narrating an important case study that is being used as an example to help you sell a product or service at work, or giving a bed-time story to children, the underlying drama always touches a chord. And it is fun to hold the attention when only you know where you are going to end up! Ah, yes. That is the other trick. It is important to know where you are going to end up (roughly) – though I find some of the fun of story-telling is that the story itself can unfold in unexpected ways. The Hero always finds his or her way through, though!

Oh, and by the way. Steve Jobs was an orphan. Which is probably why his real-life story has touched us in so many ways in the past week.

Makes you think, anyway!

Other References:

Joseph Campbell Foundation – for a lot more resources

Joseph Campbell Foundation on YouTube – for some other great videos from Campbell

Windling, Terry.

22/09/201125/09/2011

Presence over Process

This week, the bees went to bed for the winter. Fed down with verroa treatment in the hope that most colonies will survive the winter.

I have also had three very different conversations this week about the importance of Business Processes. In each conversation, I came to a different set of conclusions. However, there was one over-riding idea that shone through from each conversation. The obsession with the current process-centric religion in management thinking has actually made many of our service-based organisations less, not more effective and less, not more efficient.

The first conversation came from an experience I had with a US-based hosting company I have used for about ten years. Last year they put SAP into the company. Two months ago the company was sold. The service has been declining for about a year. Coincidence? I don’t think so. The new process involves forcing you to ring a US telephone number which is actually answered by someone in the Phillipines who filters you so they can direct you to the right department. The problem I had involved both Domain Names and Hosting – so I ended up being put through to two departments. In the end I was double-billed and had to ring back a week later to complain – when I went through the same rigmarole – and was sent an email to say I couldn’t reclaim the money because it was against company policy. I rang a third time and finally got through to someone who sorted me there-and-then. Sounds familiar? More like a telephone company? Yes, indeed. I then got hold of the Director for Customer Experience and Process Design on LinkedIn to share my story. He was a Harvard MBA. He saw my profile but ignored me. The company is called Network Solutions.

The second case was with a former colleague whom I had lunch with. He is an aspiring partner at one of the big five consulting practices. He told me he was writing a paper about the importance of process design in telecoms companies. I cited the above story and said that Presence was more important than Process. He looked quizzical. He could not compute. He was not sure how he could implement Presence and make money out of the idea from a consulting assignment.

The final conversation was with an enlightened ex COO of a Telecoms company with whom I had lunch with on Tuesday. He said he was process mad – yet when you listened to his stories of how he managed processes, there was a great deal of practicality and experience blended in with the importance of providing the right information to the right person at the right time to turn customer issues and questions around on the first call.

In the crusade to banish the obsession with Process centricity, I continue to marvel at the bees that I keep. They don’t have crazy processes to waste time. They have developed an approach that balances Process AND Content (or pollen/nectar collection) IN THE MOMENT so that they can respond with far more intelligence than just following a book of rules. Interestingly, the model they use shows that outsourcing is extremely wasteful and makes no sense at all. If you have to hand off, do it only once (not three times like ITIL). The models from the bees also demonstrates the sense of investing in small, agile “cells” of capacity and capability tuned to specific types of demand.

To summarise, I believe it is time to create a new management paradigm based on Presence (modelled much more on the natural world that the bees have developed over 50 million years). It creates a paradigm shift that takes us away from the insanity (or caetextic thinking) of process-obsession and into a new much more organic model based on cells or colonies that can respond to demand of various types a seasonal basis.

Just like the bees do.

I am writing a book on the idea – so expect more like this in future postings.

I have also posted Presence over Process on MIX – The Management Information Exchange – please add comments and vote for the idea there or add your comments here as you wish. Always valuable!

27/07/2011

Reasons for Encouragement: Keeping the World View

In the week that the US space shuttle programme came to an end, the BBC put a cut-down and edited version of the film “Round the world in 90 minutes.

You can watch the older version on YouTube in five fifteen minute cuts:

Let’s hope that the planetary consciousness that the outstanding programme has delivered will continue to see the world as a fragile ecosystem and not as a toxic dumping ground for consumer madness (per the previous post).

30/05/201101/06/2011

Innovation at the Edge of Elecricity

Although this is almost exactly a year old and quite US-centric, the video below “Innovation at the Edge of Electricity” was made. It has some great stories that may well make the minds of anyone living in the US or Europe boggle at how true innovation is happening in the developing world without any “help” from regulators or lawmakers.

As technology is forcing industry convergence, it is not just the Western-style Telecoms regulation that is getting in the way, but the rules and regulations from the Electricity and Banking Industries too. For instance, look to Africa, not Europe or the US if you want to see what true innovation is on mobile payments.

Many of the stories are particularly helpful when we think at how we should rollout faster broadband to the so-called “Final Third”. Innovation has always happened on the edge of the network. Surely it is time for us to include some of these new ideas from the “edge of electricity” and adapt them to our own requirements. Or will we let the regulators carry on regulating our service industries to die a slow, painful death?

Well worth watching to the end.

05/11/201005/11/2010

Home Ownership in the Connected Kingdom

I got up yesterday morning questioning why it was that BT will take at least another five and possibly ten years to upgrade my broadband from 2MB to 10 or perhaps even 40 (on their current unpublished, un-thought-about plans). I run an information intensive business from home and I need faster broadband – now. And I am not alone! Why should I wait? And I thought who owns this problem anyway?

It triggered a thought. A Thursday Thought!

In the early days of Telecoms deregulation, BT was forced to move the ownership of the (plain-old-bog-standard-you-can-have-it-in-any-colour-so-long-as-it-is-black) Telephone to the person owning the number. Standards were created and innovation thrived with new types of telephone being connected to the network – so long as they conformed to standards.

When Openreach was created, management of the equipment on the end of the line was handed over to other so-called “Service Providers” and (a little known fact), BT was forced to auction-off the actually ownership of about 60% of their lines – which were predominantly won by the French company, Orange. However, for those in the Final Third, this line ownership trick is irrelevant. We are still at the beck-and-call of BT Openreach’s exchange upgrade programme.

A few weeks ago I had lunch with the Chief Engineer at BT Openreach (George Williamson). I asked him how it was possible to unlock BT’s investment bottleneck and accelerate the rollout of broadband to the final third. But he simply said the current plans for upgrading would take all of BT’s resources in the next three years and that the programme put BT’s implementation teams at maximum stretch. So there is an implementation capacity problem here too. Which is why more local infrastructure building (with or without BT) looks interesting. There is a market for it, if only BT Openreach were prepared to publish their plans of where (and where not) they intend to go.

So I thought, what about me owning my own line – like in the days when I ownership of the telephone passed from BT to the private sector? What if I could then do a deal with BT (or another service provider) to pay them double to upgrade the line (rather than pay Sky to watch football). What if I paid them treble (and not buy a new car)? What if I bought new shares in a community bond scheme which would partner with BT (or another builder) to accelerate the rollout? What if (like in some parts of Europe) a mortgage company will extend a mortgage to include the cost of a Next Generation connection? What if there were people in my community who would underwrite the scheme? What if….

So I leave the question hanging – why shouldn’t I be able to by and own my own line? I don’t want it owned by some service provider or some company that themselves are totally dependent on a part of BT Group that is not the slightest bit interested in my line – until about 2108 if I am lucky!

Time to re-think “home ownership” and what a connected home really means in the connected kingdom!

21/10/201004/01/2020

Great Inventor Dies

There are very, very few people who invent truly new shapes and ideas that come mainstream and change the way people think within their own lifetime. However, Benoit Mandelbrot (who died last Thursday) can be said to be one of these very, very few. He both named and created the field of fractal mathematics.

Whilst he didn’t discover the basic maths of fractals, he found an obscure, almost unknown concept of exploring the world between two dimensions and three dimensions and showed its fundamental role in the fabric of the universe.

Wikipedia has a great entry on what both fractals and Mandelbrot’s other work have done for mathematics.

Benoit Mandlebrot RIP

23/09/201023/09/2010

The Power of Envisioning Your Ideal Outcome

I was reminded this week of a very useful technique that a friend taught me about five years ago. She called it the “blueprint method”. She used it with her partner many times – and it was extraordinarily successful for her.

At the time she taught us the method, my wife and I were looking to move house. We knew roughly what we wanted. My friend suggested that we both find a quiet moment and WRITE DOWN on a piece of paper our ideal home – giving it as much description as possible and describing it AS IF WE ALREADY LIVED IN IT AND OWNED IT.

We went home and did just that – and envisioned owning a cottage in the country in the price-range that we could afford (which was considerably less than the going market rate for a three bedroom cottage in our area). We pictured a garden front and back with a garage and beautiful views with a forest we could walk into. At the time, we were living in a tiny rented cottage in the middle of a village with none of the above features.

Having written down our vision, I filed the paper away and we went on holiday. During the holiday we discussed the cottage and tried to convince ourselves that our wish-list was possible. Somehow the price we wanted to pay was far too little against market rates at the time.

Within a week from returning from holiday, the estate agent rang and showed us a cottage that FITTED OUR BLUEPRINT EXACTLY. My wife and I walked through the door and knew it was where we wanted to live for the next few years. And it was in our price-range. We still live in that cottage now!

So this week, I tried the same exercise on a business problem I had. I conducted the exercise on an IDEAL CLIENT and sure enough, someone fitting the description of my ideal client came right through the door the next day!

So, in summary, here is the MAGIC BLUEPRINT METHOD:

1) Sit down with a piece of paper (ideally with anyone else who will benefit from the exercise) and WRITE DOWN exactly what you want. Use pictures, photographs or drawings to bring the wish to life. It is important to believe that you already OWN OR ARE LIVING YOUR DREAM. (The dream must be for the greater good of those involved, otherwise it is in the realm of black magic and I do not endorse any outcomes).

2) File the piece of paper away, and each time the idea comes into your mind, simply BELIEVE YOUR WISH HAS ALREADY COME INTO YOUR LIFE

3) When the time comes for “that for which you have wished for” to come into your life, SIMPLY RECEIVE IT WITH GRATIFICATION!

It might sound whacky and I am sure there are many internet sites making exaggerated claims about similar ideas. However, many books have been written about this technique for many centuries – including “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill and more recently “The Secret”. If you envision something for a higher purpose, write it down and allow it to come into your life, then it works every time. You just have to believe it for it to come true! It is the stuff fairy stories are made of.

Interested in any folk who have similar stories or have tried it already. Also to those of you who give it a go and get results. Try it: it works. But you have to believe in it!

02/07/201001/10/2019

Why do some organisations drive us totally bonkers?

Most of us can relate to examples of when customer service organisations have driven us completely bonkers: being passed off to another department that does not answer your call and drops you into a black hole; getting through to an Indian call centre that has not a clue how to address your problem; orders placed and fulfilled incorrectly……the list is endless.

With the so-called customer relationship being such a fundamental component to the success of any business, why do companies behave in such a maddening way? The answer may well lie in some interesting new research from psychology. It describes a model that helps to diagnose the roots of certain common mental health problems but can also be extended to help us understand some of the more general dysfunctions that we see within organisations.

The New Psychology of Caetextia (or Context Blindness)

Recent psychological research in the UK has come up with a new model for us to understand better what is going on with people suffering from a range of mental health conditions such as Asbergers’ syndrome, Autism and schizophrenia. In summary, these symptoms are best expressed by the inability of people to switch easily between several foci of attention – and to track them against the history and context that relates to them. This new line of research has been called ‘caetextia’ by the researchers: coming from the two Latin words caecus, (meaning ‘blind’) and contextus, (meaning ‘context’). Further details can be found at www.caetextia.com.

It would appear that organisations can also demonstrate the symptoms of caetextia (or context-blindness). Organisational Caetextia (or OC as we will call it from now on) can help us understand why some organisations exhibit a sort of madness when dealing with their customers and employees – yet give us a clue as to why they remain blind to the significant consequences of acting in such a crazy way.

In cases of caetextia in individuals, the new research has uncovered two types of context blindness – and OC can also be observed in two distinct types of dysfunctional behaviour. Before we look at these two types, though, it is worth looking in more detail at the part of the brain that allows us to process context.

Parallel Processing in the Human Brain

In order for us to have context, we need to be able to see events from different points of view. Recent research into how the brain works has revealed that all mammals have a part of the brain that can process masses of information at the same time – similar to the new ways that we configure parallel processing in computers. This part of the brain developed millions of years ago to guage the risks associated by processing multiple streams of information and unconsciously comparing them to previous experiences. This is something we take for granted today, but millons of years ago it was the key to any mammal’s survival and conserve energy by not reacting to every stimulus that came along.

The research has concluded that this parallel processing part of the brain can become impaired – and this is particularly prevalent in people who demonstrate symptoms on the autistic spectrum. In such cases the brain cannot do the parallel processing necessary to keep separate streams of attention, switching effortlessly between each of them to assess their relevance to what is actually happening in the here-and-now. This form of parallel processing requires the brain to dissociate: in other words to be able to to review what it knows about something that it has come across before, whilst also paying attention to that something in the present. It is no wonder that such people often suffer from learning difficulties!

Two types of Organisational Caetextia (OC)

The research has also uncovered two types of Caetextia: front-of-brain or straight-line thinking blindness and back-of-brain random association blindness. What is interesting is that these types of caetextia can also be applied to organisations and can help us understand why some organisations are so disconnected.

The first type can be called “Process OC”. This is where an organisation processes work in logical straight lines without taking into account the wider organisational implications of doing so. This type of OC is fixated in the front of the brain. Examples might be a call centre agent who does not know which person or department to hand-off someone to and simply puts them into a telephone black hole. Another example might be an agent who says “I am really sorry that this has happened to you, I will get someone to ring you back” – and they never do.

Organisational Caetextia of the process type tends to happen lower-down organisatons (for instance someone in the back-office saying: “that’s not my job, I only process this type of transaction”. Front line workers will often be encouraged to adopt to this type of thinking with phrases such as “You are not paid to think. Just do what I say”. This dysfunctionality is exacerbated by outsourcing arrangements where the supplier organisation fulfills its minimum service level obligations and is very much driven by the mantra “if it is not in the contract, then I can do it, but it will cost you more”.

The second type “Informational OC” tends to be found higher-up in organisations. This type of OC is based in the back of the brain. The symptoms of this type of organisational madness is driven by managers and “leaders” defining a whole world of information they need to run the business that is of very litle value other than to those managers holding their jobs down or playing the politics of the given day. Often the amount of information needed expands without any understanding on the cost associated with gathering it. The information is then dressed up as targets to “motivate” those lower down the organisation to stretch themselves to meet those targets and get a bonus. Vast parts of the organisation chase numbers that have no bearing on the reality of what is actually happening to customers on a day-to-day basis.

In times of stress, the information will often be used to create random associations between the data sets, coming to rapid conclusions to reinforce otherwise illogical assumptions and then finding it rather difficult to justify their decisions after the event. The whole saga of justifying Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq is a good example of this. Organisations also use such pools of information to get rid of people lower down in the organisation who are not “conforming”… even if the data bears no resemblence to reality and the people are doing valuable work with customers.

Conclusion

Successful organisations use back-brain (information = innovation) with front-brain (process = delivery) in a combination that drives continuous improvement. A well-known example of this is Google who allow each employee to spend 20% of their time on their own projects.

In less successful organisations, these two frameworks of OC might be useful in alerting organisations, managers and employees or service workers to the madness that is around them – and perhaps give them a perspective to stop some of the maddening things they are doing to their customers and suppliers at the moment!

References

More on the basic and ongoing research at Mindfields College (now Human Givens College) at: http://www.caetextia.com

The main ideas in this article were first published with Mark Richards (ex:pw consulting) in an article for the CRM evaluation centre.