Avoiding tasks

As usual I was putting off something I didn’t want to do – and in order to do so I did a  search on avoidance, and procrastination.  Despite the irony of this, it did motivate me to go and do the task.

The job was fixing a screw in a shower.  It turned out to be a 5 minute job, as it had simply come loose.  However, I had cluttered my mind wondering if I’d need to re-drill the hole, use some putty or glue, and wondering if I would be adequate to the task.

Fear of failure certainly played a big role in procrastination in this case, and I think in many other cases as well.  Yet, failure is so important to learning, in business or elsewhere, that avoiding that is likely to kill a business or your own personal development.

 

The habit of “just do it” is part of good time management.  However, that also leads to fragmented work, addictive email checking (I can’t remember the reference, but somewhere I saw time lost by stopping work to check or answer emails frequently amounted to up to 8 hours per week in some cases) and otherwise putting off bigger or more difficult tasks by apparently practising time management.

So the motto might be “eat a frog before breakfast” – do the things you fear most first, to begin to release the mental clutter.

Conflicting roles in managing risk with service users in supported housing

Last week, while delivering training, the model below occurred to me.  It represents the two roles that a Supported Housing Worker or similar professional has in relation to managing risk with service users.

Most of the time an empowering approach works best to reduce risk. Often risk taking is an attempt by the service user to assert independence and take control, so supporting and empowering a service user may work to reduce their need to take risks. Being positive about them and their lives, allowing learning from risk taking through adult dialogue, and building a non controlling and trusting relationship will also work to reduce the service user’s desire to take risks.

However, some risks are so significant (such as an immediate risk of suicide or abuse), that the service user or other people must be protected. Failure to do so may lead to charges of negligence or worse against the worker. At this point a protection agenda kicks in, which is almost the opposite of the enabling one.

The judgement of the professional involved is required to decide which approach to take in which situation, and the border between the two is unclear. In most cases protection wins when there is doubt, as people naturally act to assert control when they fear a risk.

How we learn

This is my view of learning. It is a sense making model, with the implication that planned learning that ignores any of the elements shown is unlikely to be effective as applied learning. I’d love some comments on this.

Many models of adult learning (Kolb, Jarvis, etc.) use a staged process that fails to take account of the doubtful authenticity of experience caused by social and cognitive bias.

An individual’s reflective learning takes place in the space inside social context, reflection, experience and their own emotional and cognitive bias.  For the learning to be effective, both reflection and experience need to be present.  Experience without reflection is a series of actions from which nothing is learned.  Reflection without experience is untried theory.

Put more simply, you can memorise knowledge, but is only “learning” when it is of use in a social context.  Likewise you can reflect on experience, but unless you recognise your unique social and thinking biases, you are trapped by them.  The social context also represents the “situated” nature of learning.

How plans fail to fear and loathing

Talking with my friend Alice, I started considering the frustrations that delays in plans cause me.  While I and others would easily acknowledge the concept of emergence within strategy and operational management, its much harder to accept day to day.  Really knowing this viscerally is a challenge.

One aspect of this is our unwillingness to confront the unpleasant or emotionally messy, and the frustration felt when others (or we ourselves!) put things off , delaying everything.

An article I read recently on social groups within on-line games discussed how cross functional teams form and quickly dump “free riders”, in exactly the way the not for profit sector does not. The unwillingness of charitable management to deal with poor performance (characterised as the “nice nice nice BANG!” style of management to me once) leads to 4 times the number of ITs as in the private sector (sorry, don’t have a source for this statistic, so may be here-say). Wow!

Emotion and fear manipulates those supposedly leading – not just when putting off hard decisions and dealing with messy situations, but when anxiety and stress inform their need to keep control and maintain power, and to be unpleasant to others to assert status. I know this is counter productive more often than not, but I still catch myself falling into those same traps.

Perhaps what we all need is a critical friend, like Alice, to hold us to account!

Tendering, TUPE and staff motivation

For not for profit organisations the commitment of their staff to the cause has always been important.  In the best cases this commitment results in powerful added value from staff going the extra mile, and this can show especially in the way they work with service users.  The downside of this is when that commitment causes mutual dependency with the service user.

Well motivated staff is something that every organisation searches for.  In the Supporting People world services and staff now regularly change organisations as slices of business are lost or won, or organisations merge and consolidate to cope with the competitive landscape.

This makes managing the distress caused by change important – organisations can expend enormous effort on TUPE or mergers.  The distress that any change causes is part of that, but I think it is made considerably worse for not for profit organisations as staff are there to make a difference to a cause, not just to earn a wage.  The psychological contract includes some measure of security and commitment to them and the service users from the organisation, which is harder to demonstrate when the organisation keeps changing.

In addition, the staff TUPE transfers result in everyone having to learn a new set of relationships and behaviours, which is both positive and negative.  Positive because it prevents the “rust out” frequently found in the sector, but negative because of the cost in time, training, relationship building and period of sub-optimal performance as staff and organisation learn about each other.

And while I’m on the subject of cognitive bias

Here’s a link to a slide show about cognitive bias in social design, and how that can be used.

Being positive

Happy new year!

The standard new year’s resolutions can be quite negative – lose weight, stop smoking, drink less – and lead to negative self image.  So choose something positive.  Mine is “go dancing once a week”.

And just for a moment, apply this to leadership, or Supporting People services.  Start from need and deficiency (supporting people) or competency based assessments at the end of the year (“here’s where your weaknesses are, lets try and do better, eh”)?  Reinforce poor self image?  Lead on to feelings of hopelessness and perhaps mild depression?  Create dependency?  Create confirmation bias?

So happy new year, be all you can, and let those you lead or support dream, and tell them, “yes you can!”