Earth Hour - intelligence for the planet

I attended a Microsoft seminar last week and the subject of what’s in a name was discussed. Business intelligence is so much more than just business, isn’t it? It’s as relevant to business as it is to the public sector as to voluntary or charitable organisations. Business intelligence is for everyone – including, I believe, the planet.

You might have noticed that 28th March 2009 saw Earth Hour.

WWF asked 1bn citizens of the world to switch off their lights for one hour to show their concern. The campaign has generated a great deal of interest and support amongst those that care about the earth and the way we are treating it.

Yet I have to admit I was far from convinced. Yes, turning off the lights for an hour is fun and different. Yes, turning off the lights is a reminder of the enormous benefits we all take for granted with on-demand electricity. And yes, it was great to see so many people showing that they believe this issue is important.

But no, we are not debating the energy issue in a grown up way. No, people are not well informed enough about the alternatives. And no, I cannot understand why the most likely source of clean and efficient power is not higher on people's and politician’s agendas.

I guess I think the energy debate is a complicated one that affects all of us. But not all of us are being involved. At the same time as the government approves a new coal-fired power station, they also under-fund the best chance we have for clean and efficient fusion power that could be commercially viable as soon as 20 years from now – providing the right actions are taken. Yet very few people know about either decision.

As Earth Hours shows, however, they do care. They care passionately and WWF have done a wonderful job in highlighting the issue in such a fun way.

Business intelligence is about having enough data to make good decisions. Research has shown that business people make better decisions when they act on data, and not just intuition. So why are we driving the energy issue without the data? Just sitting in the dark for an hour isn’t going to help – we need better education and better information. We need intelligent data. Then maybe we will collectively make better decisions about how our children will keep their lights on.

Improving performance isn't always easy

There are things we take for granted that might never have happened without a champion: someone who cared enough to make something change. All of us know in our day to day work change is far from easy – particularly when there are vested interests to be considered.

One champion for change was the 19th Century politician Samuel Plimsoll. His interest was in shipping, and in particular safety. He researched, wrote and campaigned to make marine safety a priority. He even got himself elected to the House of Commons in order to become more effective in his campaign.

His most lasting legacy is something called the Plimsoll line – a line painted on the side of a ship to show the point to which it can be safely loaded. It graphically shows the maximum weight a ship can carry. If the ship is overloaded, the line disappears below the water line and the ship owners were clearly seen to be compromising safety. Simple, effective, graphical – and thanks to Samuel Plimsoll from 1877 onwards it was also the law.

It is difficult to estimate how many people’s lives have been saved as a result of Mr Plimsoll’s belief in his work. Despite opposition from greedy ship owners who cared more for profit than they did for lives, Plimsoll succeeded in passing a law that improved safety and the reputation of the shipping trade. An elegant and effective example of data-visualization.

Stay focused

Our online, connected and socially-networked world has reduced our ability to stay focused. That was the results of Microsoft’s research to find out how long it takes us to return to a task once we have been interrupted.

And don’t we find such rich and varied ways of getting interrupted? Email popping into our inbox which has to be checked straight away. Or checking our inbox even though nothing has popped in, just in case? A colleague (or friend) popping up on instant messaging just to catch up? What should be two minutes turns into half an hour because (a) IM is so slow as a way to communicate and (b) such a funny thing happened to them on the way in to work.

Then there is checking someone’s updated profile on LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook and the rest. And of course we have to make sure our own profiles are up to date. Thanks for our friends at Twitter we now have the mother of all distractions – a whole room full of people Tweeting about what’s caught their attention. Fascinating, but so distracting – links to follow, people to follow, time to twitter away.

Each time we get interrupted from our original work task it takes anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours to get back to what we were doing. 2 hours!!!

Now once in a while it’s not going to harm, but the problem with these distractions is that they are not occasional, they are daily, hourly, minute by minute. They are a constant pull away from what we should be focusing on.

The solutions are not rocket science:

1. Turn email off and only check it periodically. I try this from time to time but find I need information that is stored in my email, so it can get turned on again quite soon. For the short periods I manage to keep it turned off, though, it does help.

2. Turn off instant messaging while working on a task. Or only turn it on in the afternoon. This one has no downsides and lots of productivity upsides.

3. Note down start and stop times when working on a task. I use this a lot and find it effective and wrote about it in Boosting Personal Productivity. This makes me super-aware of the time I spend on a work task or the time I take out to check a favourite blog. I use my trusty stopwatch but know its a little eccentric.

4. Work on a clear desk. My sister once bought me some post-it notes that said “My desk may be cluttered, but my mind is empty”. Enough said.

The wonderful, wonderful book Life’s a Pitch by Stephen Bayley & Roger Mavity tells the story of pitching for the Volvo account. They had 8 weeks to put together a winning presentation and after 6 weeks had got nowhere. Rather than redouble efforts for the last 2 weeks, they took the first week to make everyone clear their desks of anything other than Volvo work. For the second week they went to a hotel and did nothing but Volvo work. Of course – because it’s in the book, they won the account. But what a clever and brave strategy.

What's your favourite tip for staying focused and improving performance - either personally or as a team?

How to work better

Peter Fischli and David Weiss are two talented Swiss artists. A couple of year’s ago I was lucky enough to see their retrospective at the Tate Modern gallery in London. Not only was the exhibition just wonderful, but just as I was about to leave I noticed a stencilled list.

You might know the piece I’m talking about – it’s called “

How to Work Better”. It’s a 10 point list with wise and wonderful points about, errr, how to work better. And they bring me back to centre every time. I have it framed on my office wall and love it to bits.

It’s supposed to be ironic, but that’s missed on me. I just think it’s a great list. So if you don’t already know it – here are their 10 points:

How to work better

1. Do one thing at a time


2. Know the problem


3. Learn to listen


4. Learn to ask questions


5. Distinguish sense from nonsense


6. Accept change as inevitable


7. Admit mistakes


8. Say it simple


9. Be calm


10. Smile

4 ways to make better decisions

I read an article recently about how groups make decisions. It struck me that whilst not being able to make a decision is harmful to performance, making bad decisions is even worse.

History throws up some monumentally bad decisions that serve as a reminder to us all that smart people sometimes get things spectacularly wrong.

Deciding to launch the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986 even though a good number of people knew there were problems was not one of NASA’s finest hours. Televised live to a huge audience it was a massive set back to their work, and a tragic loss to the families of all those on board.

Yet what impresses me about NASA is its openness. It has an online database of lessons learnt which is there for anyone to inspect. It has very detailed findings by engineers as well as some of the larger and more significant lessons. I have no doubt that as public-facing data it is less frank and less complete than their internal version, but nonetheless it’s an extremely useful reminder to everyone that lessons need to be, and indeed can be, learnt.

It also gives some confidence that things will actually change and people will learn from such a horrendous accident.

A great deal of research has been done on decision making and how to improve it.

Researchers have identified 4 danger signs:

• Emotion


• Attachment


• Using intuition


• Decisions based on self-interest rather than the greater good.

All make us a little uncomfortable because they are certainly not confined to the historically dreadful decisions, but also crop up in our day to day work. And just knowing that list isn’t necessarily going to save us from a mother-of-all-foul-ups.

So, how to avoid bad decisions? Well, that makes interesting reading, too. You might be surprised to hear that all four recommendations involve other people. Far from “committees” producing camels, they actually produce better decisions. Recommendations include:

• Finding safeguards for risky decisions


• Get someone to challenge your views


• Not having all the power vested in one person


• Monitoring what happens afterwards.

Four simple and effective ways to make better decisions.

Targets and scorecards have been shown over and over again to be harmful if they are measuring the wrong things. Deciding what are the right things is easier to say than it is to do, but that little list above might just be some help.

Lent, alcohol, and an update

I met a friend for lunch the other day – I was about to say an old friend, but he is about the same age as me, so I’ll give that one a miss. It was a radiantly sunny day and we found a pretty pub that was new to both of us.

At the bar we ordered – wait for it - a diet coke and an orange juice. Admittedly it was lunchtime, but in days gone by there might have been a glass of beer on the table. For a variety of reasons, lent included, alcohol was off the menu.

I don’t need to say that it didn’t in any way spoil what was a great catch up. Of course it didn’t - it had been a while and there was loads of news. It’s amazing how people don’t change – and despite quite a few years’ gap it was we were back putting IT systems to rights in no time.

I have to admit I have hardly missed the wine at all. I say hardly at all because there have been occasions when a glass (or two) would have been nice. But it’s honestly been no big deal.

So from the perspective of doing what I said I was going to do – it has been a success.

From a performance point of view, however, it hasn’t been quite the silver bullet I had hoped for. I still have days when I am totally turbo-charged, but also days when it’s a bit of a struggle to get out of bed (much less frequent, but they do happen).

So, what can I conclude? I certainly think it helps. But then a glass or so occasionally helps too. After the fabulous bottle of red Burgundy I am planning with some Roquefort over Easter, I will be sticking to weekends only for the vino.

Somehow, though, I think that might be more difficult than abstaining completely. I’ve never exactly been the moderate type. As the wonderful

Gretchen Rubin pointed out recently:

“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.”

Leonardo da Vinci himself said that – it’s an odd thought that he might also have struggled with such banal matters.

The future's bright - but largely ignored

Britain is to have a new power station. It is claimed to be cleaner, more efficient, and, wait for it, will be coal fired. Yes, you heard – coal fired.

Like me, did you just check your calendar to see whether it really is 2009? That would be 2009 in the 21st century when we are all well aware of the

adverse effects of burning coal (greenhouse, gases, acid rain, the impact on the land, and much more besides). Plus we are doing all this in the full knowledge that coal is not a renewable energy source. It is the sort of decision that might have been excusable in the 60’s or 70’s, but surely not today.

So what’s the alternative?

There are

renewable energy sources - wind, solar, tidal and water. These are clean, with relatively little impact on the environment, but will never produce the majority of our power.

Then there are nuclear energy sources – nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Fission is in use today, with the main disadvantage of the extraordinary long time that the waste remains radioactive.

Nuclear fusion is not yet in production, but it has so many advantages you wonder why. It is clean, produces no greenhouse gases, with either no or little radioactive waste, and is safe. And it can produce electricity in the amounts we need to support an increasingly power-hungry world.

Generating power using fusion would answer most of the problems we currently have with energy production. That’s a pretty big thing for future generations, but it is largely not debated and not sufficiently funded. The reason? We are still some years away from a working fusion power plant and it doesn’t have the easy-sell that renewables have.

More research is needed to harness the power that we know can be created through fusing atoms together. We have some of the best scientific brains in Europe working on it, but they are hampered by lack of political will and lack of funding. More money is spent on ringtones in the UK than is spent on developing fusion. That says something about our priorities.

So what’s the link to metrics, and performance management? You guessed it – targets: government and EU targets. We have an EU mandated target to achieve 15% of our energy from marine renawables by 2020. Laudable in itself, but it means that the long term and the very significant benefits of

fusion are left off the agenda. That can’t be right.

Is it another case of measuring what’s easy, and palatable, whilst omitting the more challenging measures? In this world of 30-second sound bites and our obsession with celebrities, we risk neglecting what’s really important. Are we avoiding the decisions, and targets, that will make this planet a habitable place for our children’s children?

Benjamin Franklin’s balanced scorecard

Benjamin Franklin is known as a great American leader and diplomat. He was a signatory to the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

He is less well known for the little scorecard he devised, which is a shame because it is quite something: balanced and still instructive.

Benjamin Franklin developed a plan with 13 virtues he wanted to live his life by. He monitored his plan using a small grid containing the days of the week and initials for the 13 virtues.

He gave each virtue one week’s focus so that after 13 weeks he had worked on all 13. After 13 weeks he would start the process over again.

He kept a little book and every evening he would review the day and put a dot next to a virtue when he considered he had failed to live up to its qualities.

His goal was to live without having to put any marks on his chart. To start with his charts had lots of dots, but in time they grew clearer. Eventually he reduced his dependence on the charts, but he always carried the little book with him as a reminder.

He followed the plan to the age of 79 when he wrote about it. He said that he was even more determined to stick with it for his remaining days because of the happiness he had enjoyed by following it.

Benjamin Franklin's 13 virtues are quite unique and unfortunately rather out of fashion. Yet they obviously served him well since he is one of the most respected and most accomplished men in the history of the United States.

His determination to live a good life, and his methods of achieving his goals, are instructive to anyone interested in Performance Management.

His 13 virtues, each with short descriptions, are given below:

1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation.


2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.


3. Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.


4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.


5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.


6. Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.


7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.


8. Justice: Wrong none, by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.


9. Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forebear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.


10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.


11. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; Never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.


12. Tranquillity: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.


13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Who's that girl?

How long does it take to become successful at something?

There is a temptation to think that Performance Management is a silver bullet. Nothing could be further from the truth. Performance management is a tool – a very useful tool, but it’s not a substitute for persistence and determination.

I’m reminded of Picasso who apparently was once asked by a fan to draw something on a napkin. The story goes that Picasso agreed but requested a sizeable sum before parting with the sketch. The admirer was shocked and asked Picasso how he could ask so much for something that took so little time to create. Picasso replied that it had taken him over 40 years.

A genius like Picasso was no overnight success – so what hope for you and me?

You might have noticed that the blog is looking a little happier today. That’s thanks to my very own Picasso – John Cassidy; photographer to the stars and talented business people. I spent some time with John last week, and learnt a few things I didn’t know about how to take fabulous shots of David Beckham, Sean Connery and Caroline Eveleigh (spot the celebrity in that list!).

John has been taking professional photographs for over 20 years focusing on the military, sports personalities and business people. He has worked in over 100 different locations - from the Falkland Islands, to Norway; Malaysia to Kuwait and back again. When not taking photographs of people he has photographed some seriously impressive jets: Jaguars, Tornados, Hawks and Harriers. And oddly enough you have to keep up with a jet to photograph it, which means travelling faster than the speed of sound in another seriously impressive jet. Some people have great jobs, don’t they?

John has taken over 100,000 images of celebrities, and over 500,000 images of business people. That’s significantly more than half a million images to get maybe 10,000 photographs that have been published in national newspapers, magazines, and journals. That’s a lot of photographs, a lot of smiles, and a lot of awards for his work.

This is performance management in action, driven by passion not scorecards.

John is good fun to work with and has an impressive portfolio of work. When he isn’t shooting people or jets, he also blogs about the life of a photographer.

My only complaint is that he didn’t introduce me to Thierry Henry. Maybe next time?

Fit for purpose

Performance management and business intelligence somehow imply providing something more than the basic product or service that your customer might expect. But this is not so. Performance management is mostly about providing the right environment for an organisation to consistently and efficiently meet the standards expected by its customers.

Performance management initiatives are put in pace so that the organisation can perform its necessary functions to a good standard. In other words, ensuring its product or service is fit for purpose. Not just occasionally, but consistently.

This occurred to me yesterday as I walked through my local train station. And no, my train wasn’t late. I was struck by something much more important than that: safety.

Like many major towns and cities, Reading attracts its share of anti-social behaviour. But there has been a change in recent years – and a welcome one in my view. The local police are a great deal more visible. The presence of the Transport Police, and their uniformed cousins the Policy Community Support Officers, has made Reading Station a calmer and safer place to be. In addition to the coffee shops and boutiques, it has actually made it a rather pleasant place to be.

The crew on duty yesterday as I walked through the station were approachable and friendly. I stopped and chatted to them, and their Sergeant, about their thoughts on keeping the peace. Despite their youthful appearance, they also remembered a time when the station was a tenser and less safe place to be: a few drinks, and a few mates, easily spills over into disruptions that ruin lives both for the perpetrator and the victim. How much better to fund more police officers to calmly restore order and ensure and good night out stays that way?

Behind the calm and confident exterior of those police officers lies an array of performance management building blocks. There is the programme to get more police and PCSOs on our streets, the selection process, training, promotion boards, and on the job mentoring. All monitored and rolled up into government statistics.

This type of policing might be seen as the tip of the iceberg in work that encompasses so much more. Inevitably there is much valuable police work that that is unseen, unreported, and unappreciated. I have no desire to detract from that. I do, however, think that visible policing is a welcome and necessary initiative.

From a performance management viewpoint, it also a lesson that sometimes we need to take an all-round view of a product or service. In this case it isn’t good enough that trains run on time, although that’s always helpful, I also want to travel in a safe and calm environment.

Thank you Transport Police and PCSOs. And what a nice lot you are too!

6 things that seem to be true

1. Measurement improves understanding: in business, and in life.



2. Working with smart people is a joy, which is why I’m such a happy person.
   
   
3. Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people. I wish I had written that, but I didn’t: Frederick Lewis Allen did. I think he has a point.
   
   
4. Measure what matters, measure what you can manage; otherwise don’t measure it. More complicated than it looks - see (1), (2) and (3) above.



5. Effective data visualisation is worth a thousand pie charts.
   


6. I have not seen any problem, however, complicated, which, when looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated. Apparently Paul Anderson said that in the New Scientist in 1967. He must have been a systems analyst too.

How do you measure innovation?

A frequent criticism of performance management and measurement is that it stifles creativity. Intuitively we believe this to be true – innovative endeavours cannot be time-boxed or benchmarked. That, we argue, is the nature of innovation.

On Saturday evening, however, I had the pleasure of witnessing a ballet performance that was both innovative and measurably excellent.

Northern Ballet Theatre’s production of Swan Lake was horrifyingly original and spectacularly successful. I say horrifyingly because this was Swan Lake – the perennial favourite of ballet lovers everywhere. The one classical ballet that pretty much guarantees the crowds. So it is a brave choreographer who messes with Swan Lake.

Northern Ballet, however, are unafraid of tackling large and contemporary topics with their dance.

They are gritty, humorous, and the very best of what you might expect from the North.

Their Swan Lake managed to pull off the seemingly impossible. They found heartbreak and depths of emotion in Tchaikovsky’s music through the storyline rather than pirouettes. Their athletic male dancers replaced the prettiness of the swans’ tutus but left no-one short changed. The final scene had us transported to a world only rarely glimpsed. And when the final curtain fell the audience was so caught up in the sheer drama of what they had just seen that no one could remember what the original Swan Lake was all about.

But how do you measure something as emotional and innovative as this? By the number of seats sold for the performance? By the rapturous applause? By the loud and unmistakably male northern voice behind me that pronounced “that were brilliant!” as the curtain fell. I guess all of this, and more.

Northern Ballet Theatre like any other business is accountable both commercially and artistically. In their 40th Anniversary year they are going from strength with glowing critical acclaim and performances in more theatres throughout the UK. But in this business, as in any other, the numbers matter. Whilst the numbers can only mirror the brilliance of their current artistic director, David Nixon, and not replace it, they are nonetheless important in securing funding and ensuring more people get to appreciate the power of dance.

The numbers also speak volumes about the standards that the artistic team set for their dancers and their company. Alongside Opera North this is another northern gem that is hitting well above its weight.

I’d wager seats in the stalls that both companies keep more than half an eye on their performance management statistics, silencing any critics who say that measurement stifles creativity.

Wriggling around targets

Interesting things can happen when targets are set.

The intentions behind the target seem clear, but once the target is out there things can sometimes not turn out the way you expect. Whether you call it wriggling, or plain cheating, I guess depends both on the target and the degree to which the intentions behind the target are being stretched.

Whilst we are still in Lent, I’ll use my own example of giving up alcohol as an example.

Although I was brought up a Catholic, religion does not play a big part in my life today. It was a meeting of Toastmasters that raised the idea, and so I set myself a goal of not drinking alcohol during Lent. My schooldays was the last time I had done anything remotely similar (although then it was more likely to have been chocolate!)

As the first weekend arrived the idea of a pint was proposed. “I can’t” I said “I’ve given it up for Lent.” Then I thought – did I just promise to give up wine or the whole alcohol thing? Maybe I’m allowed a beer? I had to go back to my posting to check. You can bet your gin and tonic that if I had written wine in my posting I would have been enjoying a half with a pub meal.

I will admit to being slightly surprised at myself. I knew what my intention was, but I was prepared to look at the wording to see how much leeway I would allow myself. Crumbs! And it seemed so simple.

Then came the 40 days and 40 nights PLUS Sundays. Does that mean I can enjoy a glass on Sundays then? Again, I was looking for some sort of needle for my camels.

The target was so simple, the intention so clear. Yet once the realities of making an effort set in, I looked for various ways out.

I’m pleased to say that I am still on course and not missing the booze at all. But it does raise some interesting ideas about how easily goals can be distorted once they see the light of day.

Needless to say I have been noticing other people’s efforts a little more than I would ordinarily do.

The Church of England has suggested doing good over Lent, rather than giving something up. This interesting, and must be applauded. Yet it strays somewhat from the original intention of remembering Jesus’ fast in the desert.

Targets must be thoughtful, appropriate and possible to achieve. But even when all those are in place, I am still slightly taken aback at my own readiness to look for loopholes.

Beware what you wish for

It is systemically damaging with predictable and harmful side effects. It degrades employee performance and motivates unethical behaviours. It harms interpersonal relationships and corrodes organizational culture.

Are we talking about too much exposure to the Internet? Allowing employees to listen to their iPods all day long? Letting people take too many days sick? Nope, none of those.

We are talking about goals in organisations. The ubiquitous and seemingly benign Key Performance Indicator. Objectives, targets, goals – whatever you call them, we all have them – just some are better managed than others.

Goal setting
Two fascinating papers hit my desk yesterday on the subject of goal setting. Both, in different ways, were saying “beware organisational goals”.

The first by Bazerman et al did not mince its words: “systematically damaging”, “harmful”, “motivates unethical behaviours”. Strong, attention-grabbing stuff.

The second from Bourne and Franco-Santos at Cranfield School of Management was less controversial and more practical. They also looked at HOW to achieve goals and make the point that quality practitioners look at improving processes in order to achieve the required performance improvements.

Both said what we have known for a long time – that goals are often set with too little thought, and without thinking through the possible consequences. Bazerman’s article gives lots of grisly examples of how, under the right management pressure, people will cheat in various ways that would be comical if they weren’t so serious.

Goals are good
In between the doom and gloom of targets, both papers acknowledge the positive side of goal setting. Much research has been done in this area and neither could say that goal setting is a bad thing. It isn’t. It seems to be pretty well universally acknowledged that people like to have something to aim for, and do better when want to be seen to achieve what they set out to do.

The danger comes where goals compete with one another, are ill thought through, and where goals become too narrow, thereby shifting attention away from wider, but still important, issues.

A potential solution
Bourne and Franco-Santos suggest a 10-point checklist for goal setting. Notice how far down the list the task of setting targets is!

1. Review stakeholder expectations
2. Clarify and select strategic objectives
3. Define a success map
4. Prioritise objectives
5. Operational-ise strategic objectives
6. Collect data
7. Analyse data
8. Set targets
9. Design an action plan
10. Discuss and agree an action plan

Creating goals, and managing progress towards them, goes to the very core of business and organisational life. In my experience it normally takes a group of people to “buy into” dubious behaviours that sabotage the good intentions of targets to the degree where organisations can be damaged. In other words, a lot of people need to turn a “blind eye” to let some of the more remarkable stories come to fruition.

Goals that have been properly thought through, and do not set up dilemmas in people’s minds, must be more effective. And this 10-point checklist is both comprehensive and manageable.

References
Ordonez, L.D. , Schweitzer, M.E., Galinsky, A.D., and Bazerman, M.H (2009) – Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting , Harvard Business School

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6114.html

Franco-Santos, M. and Bourne, M. (2008) –The Impact of Performance Targets on Behaviour: A close look at sales force contexts, Cranfield University School of Management