Tag Archives: jo swinson

Results take time to measure.

13 Friday Dec 2019

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Okay. Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way.

Not that long ago, I published a blog on The Circle of Influence. The message was that effective people spend their time focused on doing the things that they can do something about.

Yesterday, there was a General Election. This morning my brothers (love ‘em to bits), all being left like m’Dad (who wasn’t all that left but read the Daily Mirror) have started discussing their disappointment that they didn’t win.

Well, technically. I say technically because one of them did. He lives in a ‘safe’ Labour seat, presumably voted Labour and Labour stayed in. Nevertheless, they’re all ‘scared’ (FFS) about the future.

Here’s the thing. We do not elect the Prime Minister. We only elect a local representative. Therefore we have little to no influence over who governs the country because we do NOT have a vote in the other 600+ seats, and it’s that number which decides a government. Which means that the winner of a GE lies solely in our Circle of Concern.

Get out of there!

Next, they’ve also discussed the right-wing, pro-Brexit bias of the media.

Talk about ideological myopia!

The media has been fairly consistent in its desire for Brexit to stop, and Channel 4 has admitted as much. The political interviewers have bashed everybody of all persuasions over what they said when they said it years ago. (In fact, as a criminal interviewer I would say that the manner of their interviews would be described as unprofessional at best, and illegal and oppressive at worst, in all cases.)

The media particularly lied when they showed the evidence of people doing what they denied they’d done, the bar stewards! How very dare they.

Anyway, I’ve left the brothers’ Messenger group for a week while they get it out of their system.

Doris Day said it best when she sang, “Que Sera, Sera.” Whatever will be, will be. Over time, the electorate will see what happens, and then they will either be proved right, or be proved wrong. Hyrum W. Smith expressed it in a similar fashion when he suggested that we only know whether something serves us if we measure the results over time. I’ll go with that.

But I must admit I want to say something political. I respect the general membership of the Labour Party, brothers. They mean well, even if (like all sides) they’ve adopted the aggressive rhetoric of the US.

But think about this. Jeremy Corbyn has supported the IRA, Palestinian terrorists, and Russia (in terms of the Novichok incident).

Brothers – between 1980 and even up to now, to a degree, the people he defends would happily have killed me, as a serviceman and policeman. Not in a war, mind – most likely by planting an IED that would also have indiscriminately killed anyone near me regardless of their status. Or shooting me as I, unarmed, got into my car.

He supports the people whose actions could have resulted in you quietly escorting a plastic bag in a sealed coffin to a local graveyard.

Quite how you could support a man who’d welcome my violent death disgusts me. But I still love you all.

“Conduct a Conversation” isn’t a literal instruction.

12 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by in Character and Competence, Time Management, Uncategorized

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Communication.

Habit 5 of The Seven Habits® is specifically directed towards that major part of human existence. If you were to read ‘The Book’ you would receive a comprehensive explanation of how successful communication works.

On a course I used to run (as a licensee of The Springboard Consultancy) called Navigator®, one of the modules was about communication and, more relevantly here, about barriers to communication. Obvious examples included language, culture and context, but I have discovered a new one, one which also goes some way towards confirming how we humans have a tendency to become conditioned to mannerisms like modes of speech and language and adopt them unthinkingly.

Remember Covey’s first Habit, Be Proactive? Its main thesis is that there is a space between stimulus and response, and our failure to utilise that space results in blind compliance with whatever becomes the norm in our environment. This blind compliance results in everyone acting ‘the same’ having given no thought whatsoever to the consequence of that new behaviour.

At the moment, combining the two lessons of reactive response and barriers to communication, I have an observation which I hope readers will share. Primarily with the BBC Politics Live to start with, then everywhere else.

It is this.

For some reason, and it is more noticeable with young ‘speakers’, people on the television have developed a habit of waving their hands about when talking. It was one or two, now they’re all at it.

In itself, a controlled gesture that is designed to emphasise a specific point in a sentence is fine, even welcome and natural. But emphasising every single word with a pointy/downward-claw/pleading gesture made with both hands (yes, Miss Swinson, YOU) means you have emphasised NOTHING.

What is more, while you are waving your hands around, the camera or eye that is focused on your top half can only see your hands waving around and it can’t see what expressions your face is making. People who are hard of hearing (or who are in a room full of screaming kids) and trying to lip-read just can’t.

In other words, what you are trying to say – and it may be important – is lost in a whirr of randomly-wriggling digits and limbs.

I recall the old days when news presenters just spoke with a mic in their hands and I’d agree that was visually dull. But now they’ve been trained to ‘be more expressive’ they’ve gone banzai-nuts and can’t stop moving about. It’s like watching Sir Simon Rattle conduct Thunderstruck by AC/DC.

There is a happy medium.

Might I make a suggestion?

It’s still considered a bit contentious, because some professional speaking clubs don’t like it, but if you put one hand in your pocket, you reduce the sillier gestures by more than half, and the other hand finds a natural rhythm in terms of gesturing that enhances, not obstructs your presentation. (But keep the pocketed hand still…… that’s a whole different distraction.)

This doesn’t just apply to political panels. It applies to any presentation that you have to make, and ‘Hobbs’ Law’ makes the speaker “100% responsible for communication”.

If the audience can’t hear you because all they can do is see your agitated hands, then it’s your fault if they don’t get the message. And a missed message wastes time. Lots of it. Time that has to be spent repeating the message properly.

If Jo Swinson hadn’t been waving her arms about, perhaps she could have been PM tomorrow.

(Sorry, I just spat my own coffee…………….)

Does it REALLY matter? If so – how much?

05 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by in Time Management, Uncategorized

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Do you know what ‘priorities’ are?

In most organisations, ‘priorities’ consists of a long list of important ‘stuff’. The bigger the organisation, the longer the list. What’s more, the higher the number of individual departments in the aforementioned corporate monolith, the more varied and even greater the priority number.

Each department, if it is like the public sector, will have its priorities met by the activities of other departments and, more often than not, front-line staff.

Think about that.

Department A will set priorities, as will departments B and C. All three departments’ activities will be conducted by their staff. Department A’s priorities may not be B’s (etc), but without a doubt Dept A will state that ‘X must be done by the end of the day and returns submitted by 5pm by staff in Departments B and C.’  Meanwhile, Department B expects the same of staff in Departments A and C, which means all three departments will be working hard at complying with three sets of priorities, and I’ll bet a week’s wages that they all have to be complied with ‘by 5pm’ so even though NOTHING WILL BE DONE WITH THEM until the end of the next week.

But by setting that 5pm today deadline, they expect that any late returns won’t be too late. In other words, an artificial deadline is set so they save time – at the expense of the other people running around after them.

Ring a bell?

Did you know that ‘priority’ means:

“the fact or condition of being regarded or treated as more important.”

Synonyms include: “prime concern, first concern, most important consideration, most pressing matter, (etc).”

Notice that each of those terms implies that NOTHING is more important than the ‘priority’.

Make a note, staple it to your forehead and wear it as you walk into to the C-Suite.

If you have too many priorities, you have NO priorities.

I suggest that, in acknowledgement that some organisations do have more than one ‘service responsibility’, the number of priorities should at least be reduced to a couple, instead of hundreds; that the departments in the entity be told when ‘their’ priority is not a priority at all; and that staff be so briefed so that they can act on THE priorities that remain.

This is not to suggest that all work is not important. But there are degrees to which (for example) the assembly of statistics (and their circulation to the disinterested) by an administration department is far less important than the activity of the front-line employee actually delivering the service that your organisation was created to deliver.

And, might I say, constantly berating said employee for not blindly prioritising the said admin department’s number crunching really has to stop.

I say this because, from a time management perspective, creating false priorities warps the decision-making of the employee to the degree that mistakes are made in failed efforts to comply with too many masters.

You make better decisions when you have to make fewer decisions.

And having to many priorities undermines quality decision-making.