A 30 Foot Vision

A 30 Foot Vision

As I stood among the crowds in the middle of Oakfield Road, I was aware of a sudden rush of excitement.  She was walking down the far end of the road, I could just about see her.

I’d waited a long time to see her; ever since I first saw her images a long time ago on YouTube.  She was fascinating and I’d walked a long way that day to see her.

As she drew nearer, cameras were pulled out of bags and hundreds of mobile phones were trust into the air; she was here; she was about to walk past us.

There was a lot for our eyes to drink in.  Her green dress, her long dark hair; braided in plaits at the sides, her buttoned up shoes and impossibly long eyelashes.  She was 30 foot tall, a beautiful young girl in the shape of a giant.

She walked past majestically – considering her height she was elegant and absolutely captivating.  As she looked from right to left and back again she seemed real, with a level of calmness about her as though she realised that we were all here to see her and as though she accepted our fascination.

As she walked past, we couldn’t just leave her; so we walked as best we could along-side her as far as the park where she sat down, yawned and went to sleep.

There was then a mad sprint down to Albert Dock where her uncle, a 90 foot giant was emerging out of the dock and walking along the Strand and then into Liverpool ‘s commercial district.  Another amazing sight when he walked past us towards a huge Royal Mail container...

Liverpool’s Titanic Girl and her Uncle captivated the City for a weekend.  The headline in the Liverpool Echo was “Goodbye, we won’t forget you”.  How true.  I never will.

Feedback from the Farmyard

Feedback from the Farmyard  

The current Dowager Duchess of Devonshire has always kept chickens.  If you have ever been to Chatsworth, they are roaming freely in the grounds in a very ‘free range’ kind of way.

Deborah Devonshire (the last of the Mitford’s), along with her husband the then Duke of Devonshire, transformed Chatsworth into the magnificent place it is today.

One of her many aspiring qualities is the wonderful way in which she is able to engage people.  One of the working farms on the Chatsworth estate opened to the public and school trips were encouraged.  The Duchess wanted children to be able to see farm animals face to face, so to speak, and to be able to understand the working of a farm and where products came from.

In order for her to gain feedback from the children and teachers without them actually realising it was her – she donned simple clothes and a headscarf and pretended to be a farm worker.  On one of the cow milking sessions, a young school boy from Birmingham pointed at the cow and was reported to have said something along the lines of “Is that where milk comes from?  That’s absolutely disgusting”.  The Duchess merely smiled.  She had achieved the feedback she was looking for.  The child was enlightened and educated in a process that previously he knew nothing about.

Sounding like an old duffer

“Please can I have a mobile phone Mum”? I looked in astonishment at my five year old son.  “Don’t you think you are a bit young to have a mobile mate” was my reply.  How can a five year old want a mobile and anyway, who would he call?  None of his mates have a mobile yet – a concept that seems to have not occurred to him.

I must admit I nearly passed out when six months ago he asked me for hair gel.  At the risk of sounding like an old duffer (at 42); are the kids growing up a bit too quick?

When he’s a bit older, I will of course get him a mobile; but five is far too young in my opinion.  Also I have a feeling that he won’t want a basic standard mobile; he’ll want an iphone – just like mine.  As he already navigates his way around my iphone and knows how to do things on it that I didn’t know existed, it’s hardly surprising.  Perhaps he just likes playing Temple Run and see’s mobiles as being games devices rather than the function they were originally designed for.

I knew that this would happen one day,  perhaps it happens when you pass the big four zero.  At parents evening last night; the other teachers in my son’s primary school looked about 15.  That’s roughly when the penny started to drop; in few years I’ll have turned into my mother and will be a real curtain twitcher. 

I suppose it all boils down to feedback  and change.  When toys etc break, my children automatically bring them to me to be fixed as I am apparently in charge of quality assurance as well.  Sometimes the feedback from them isn’t quite what I was expecting if my DIY fixing skills aren’t up to scratch.  Feedback is such an important part of our lives.  How else do we know whether or not we are doing a good job? My feedback recently has been to step up the quality assurance on fixing Buzz Lightyear.  Take this into the workplace and suddenly your cheese has been moved....

If the end of the last sentence has left you wondering if I’ve lost the plot then it’s time to order your copy of  Who Moved my Cheese? By Dr Spencer Johnson.

The ‘cheese’ is a metaphor for what you want to have in life – whether it is a good job, a relationship, money, possessions, health or spiritual peace of mind.

It’s a profound story about four characters searching for cheese in a maze.  The maze (again is a metaphor, this time for ‘life’) is basically where you look for what you want. 

I was told to read this book once when I’d asked for feedback.  It basically taught me to adapt to change quickly and to embrace it.  After all, change will happen whether we like it or not.  Since reading this short story; I’ve become a bit of a change junkie.

We all need feedback in our lives.  If used constructively it can strengthen skills and although we maybe don’t like to admit our weaknesses, we all have them and  feedback can help to recognise  them.   I recognise that feedback and change walk hand in hand, sometimes we don’t want it, but ultimately without, it can be difficult to see what we need to do to make it easier to get the things we want.

So, back to my small but growing up too quickly son; should I ask him for feedback on whether or not I’m turning into his Nana..... not sure if I want to hear the answer, but I’ll get back to you on that one.

Buzzword Bingo....

Buzzword Bingo – Still Going Strong? 

Have you ever sat in a business meeting and wondered what everyone is talking about?  I don’t just mean the fact that you’ve switched off for five minutes to stare out of the window and wonder if you’ve got enough sun dried tomatoes for tonight’s pasta dish.  I mean wondering to yourself if the people around you are talking a different language.  Although let’s face it, some meetings are more interesting than others.

I’m talking about when people start talking with Buzzword Bingo.  Some of you may have been exposed to it already, the ‘Corporate Bingo’ speak.  Most of it has now become very common speak in the workplace and has slipped quietly into our vocabulary without any of us realising it. 

I was in a meeting once and my colleague was talking about a particular project that wasn’t going too well.  She said “I think this project could turn into a sausage factory”.  Pardon?  Another colleague at another meeting mentioned that we could get a “Quick and dirty result from producing the report”.  Quick and dirty? !  Isn’t that a term used by the SAS?

Perhaps someone sat down a few years ago behind a very big desk and decided to make up a load of terms that at first no-one would understand but would integrate subliminally into our day-to-day speech. 

For one day only it would be an interesting project to ask everyone to stop the bingo terms and speak properly, with proper words and proper sentences and to say exactly what they mean without using a corny phrase.  In the current corporate world, do you think that this is achievable? I’m not altogether  sure.   Maybe we are so used to this type of terminology that most of us speak it without actually thinking about it.

Here at Insightful Edge, we are a bunch of like minded people.  But it has to be said that on occasion we are prone to the odd ‘Bushism’.   Apart from that, there isn’t a sausage factory in sight.

For those of you not familiar with Buzzword Bingo aka ‘b*llsh*t bingo’, it’s a bingo style game where participants prepare bingo cards with the buzzwords and tick them off when they are spoken during a meeting or speech.  The game is played as a standard bingo game with the winner crossing off the words and then shouting the obligatory “Bingo” when complete.

The game is played where participants feel that the speaker, in an attempt to mask a lack of actual knowledge is speaking in Buzzword Bingo terms rather than providing actual information. 

Clearly a crucial part of the game is having the guts to actually shout ‘Bingo’ at the appropriate moment.  An alternative could be to actually silently mouth the word and hope that no-one guesses what you are doing.

Buzzword Bingo was invented in 1993 by by Silicon Graphics Principal Scientist Tom Davis, in collaboration with Seth Katz. The concept was popularized by a Dilbert comic strip in 1994, in which the characters play during an office meeting.

Your Buzzword Bingo game card to play at your next meeting is below....  Enjoy.

globalization compete scalable up sell bottom line synergy consensus outside the box bandwidth spam transition cohesive BINGO telecommute outsource soft copy multi-tasking deliverable fast track repurpose offline critical path leverage action item seamless

drill down mission-critical efficiency scope localise b2b mitigate cycles target best practice strategic ping BINGO realign ROI FAQ game plan world-class 24/7 collaborate value-added procedural beta virtual proactive

Art for Culture Vultures

How fab of Google to create a website yesterday dedicated to art.  Googleartproject.com was launched yesterday morning and I must admit, it’s really good.

Step 1 - Pick an art gallery or collection from anywhere in the world.  Step 2 – view some of the art work/paintings/masterpieces from the gallery or take a virtual tour.  What a great concept.  If you love art (like me) and appreciate fine art (like me), you’ll love this.  Lets face it – the chances of me travelling the world to experience all the art work that I would like to see is highly unlikely.  This is due not just to the cost implications but also having two small children who would rather go and see Mr Tumbles  than Picasso.

 Got to admire concepts like this.  Highly innovative and letting us all have a taste for culture and inspiration – free of charge.

Clearly this will never replace seeing the artworks live; in front of your eyes, but the chances of travelling the world and seeing them all live is not exactly realistic for me.  Thank you Google.

Welcome to our world!

Welcome to our first blog!  We are relatively new to the world of blogging, so finding our way around the blogging terminology is proving to be both amusing and interesting.  I particularly like the fact that we are now part of a blogosphere...

We’ll be featuring regular blogs and now that we’ve started, they’ll be no stopping us.   We haven’t been much of a chatty bunch in the past, so now that we’ve finally started, it’s time to make up for it. We’ll be discussing relevant topics, particularly feedback and performance enhancing tools....

As feedback is such a huge and relevant part of our professional lives, it’s not surprising that we are quite passionate about it.  We are hoping that as our blogs become more interactive, that people will also want to discuss feedback and its positive sides. 

So where shall we start with feedback?  One of the most obvious places to start would be with one of our favourite quotes, Ken Blanchard, his quote “Feedback – the Breakfast of Champions” is a good starting point for anybody’s journey into the feedback world. 

Although Ken Blanchard’s bibliography is vast, let’s take The One Minute Manager,(co-authored with Spencer Johnson) a really simple, short and effective book which has sold over 13 million copies and translated into 37 languages, clearly he must be doing something right.   Spencer Johnson then went on to write Who Moved my Cheese, but that’s another story.
The brief volume of The One Minute Manager, gives us three different techniques of an effective manager, one-minute goals, one-minute praisings and one- minute reprimands.  Each of these three techniques takes only a minute, but is potentially of a lasting benefit to all managers.

A friend of mine, a secondary school teacher, read this book and decided to try and use this with her pupils in the education environment.  After all, in the Introduction of the book, there is a quote by Confucius which advises us ‘The essence of knowledge is, having it, to use it’.  My friend, the innovative teacher, thought this would be a good tool to achieve results from her pupils in a small time frame.  In taking on the ethos of the book, she initially introduced goal setting with them in the framework of achieving their homework targets etc.  Moving on to the one minute praisings and the one minute reprimand (although this was implemented on a softer scale), she found that her pupils were engaged more and therefore more productive.  In particular, the goal setting part of the experiment was the most successful and therefore worth investing time in.

Staying on the theme of knowledge sharing and the educational environment; here at Insightful Edge, we have spent 2 years developing a range of feedback tools for schools which are achieving successful results from the tracking studies we have carried out. 

The tools measure the school climate by collating the opinions of all involved (pupil, staff, parents and governors). All our tools have been developed in line with the Ofsted framework and the DfE guidelines.

It would be interesting to find out what Ken Blanchard thinks about our Insight 4 Schools project and whether he would deem this among the breakfast of champions.  Perhaps we’ll ask him.