Pheasant

This shop in York really didn’t sell my kind of clothes, but I did like some of the random stuff hanging from the shelves.

Incompetence as a sign of personal progress

At the beginning of our first lesson, our climbing instructor told us that there were four stages to learning a new skill.  These were unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence.  I think it is the second stage that causes most problems, often leading to someone refusing even to try learning a new skill.  When you are looking at problems like adult illiteracy, this gets serious.

This is my understanding of the four stages:

• UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE.  This is where you are before you even start to learn to drive, climb or whatever.  You can’t do it and you don’t even know how to go about it.  This is a comfortable place to be.
• CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE.  This is the painful bit.  You know what you are supposed to be doing, but you are not skilled enough to do so.  You try, you fail. you try again, and fail again.  The car keeps stalling; you can’t reach that hand-hold that the climbing instructor assures you is within reach if you just straightened your leg and shifted your balance a bit.
• CONSCIOUS COMPETENCE.  Progress.  You can now do it, but you have to concentrate fiercely on not stalling.  That hand-hold, you can now reach it but you have to psyche yourself up to it and that one move is an achievement in itself.
• UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCE.  Success!  The driving is becoming effortless, and you don’t even think about reaching those hand-holds any more, you just go for it and move on up.

The trouble with learning a new skill is that moving from stage 1 to stage 2 is entirely about becoming acutely aware of what you cannot do. This can make you feel awful about yourself.

Although I don’t go as often as I would like to, I still evangelise about climbing and am always keen to introduce people to it.  Unfortunately this can mean that you are introducing people to the dip of conscious incompetence.  I always try and describe how great the feeling of finally reaching those hand-holds is – of getting to the competence stages and seeing how far you have come.  I guess that good instructors make a point of focussing on your future successes rather than your current failures, which after all are just a means to an awesome end.

Matt Ridley – When Ideas Have Sex

Matt Ridley is one of the people who had a great influence on my thinking.  In the mid nineties, when I was in my early-mid teens, he wrote a weekly column in The Daily Telegraph (the paper my parents got) called Acid Test.  The weekly topics varied widely, but included economics, science, human behaviour and the like.  Each column would follow a similar pattern:

• He would introduce an often topical piece of conventional wisdom
• He would tell you that it was wrong
• He would tell you why it was wrong in theory
• Then he would give several examples showing it to be wrong in practice

Later I would come to read several of his books, including The Red Queen and The Origins of Virtue.

Here he is speaking at TEDGlobal 2010.

Backing Young Britain Mentoring Programme to close

I have been mentoring with Backing Young Britain Mentoring, which matches up mentors with young (18-24) job seekers.  Today I received an email stating:

I regret to inform you that on 16 July 2010 Nord Anglia Education Partnerships Ltd received notification from the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions that the Backing Young Britain Mentoring programme will close. Nord Anglia Education will continue to provide a reduced service up to 17 September 2010. This service will focus on matching mentees to mentors and ensuring young people begin their mentoring.

In principle, how little could a mentor-mentee matching service be run on?  Would a website, where people registered as potential mentors or mentees, that allowed people to make their own matches be viable?  How much mediation is required?

The BYB Programme had a high profile advertising campaign, so it is likely that many people who signed up as mentors were new to this volunteering malarkey (like me), and wouldn’t necessarily move on to other schemes, especially if they don’t know much about them.  Is there an opportunity in a slimmed-down successsor to BYBM, taking advantage of the fact that lots of people did sign up and might be keen to continue?  I certainly felt slightly bereft when I received the letter.  Not surprised, but a bit sad.  What’s important though is the effort to make a difference, not the administrative incarnation it currently exists in.

Get in touch if you are interested or have any ideas/leads – pete dot james dot collins at googlemail dot com.

Creating a Social Enterprise

On Wednesday I went to a seminar run by i-Social Entrepreneurs in Birmingham, on setting up a social enterprise.  I’m still toying with the idea I described here although my conception of it keeps shifting.  At the seminar I coined the term “volunteer virtual assistants” which seemed to fit nicely with my current take on it.  Basically, if you are a tiny, struggling social enterprise there may be a role that “volunteer virtual assistants” can play for you.  Perhaps you don’t have the time or the skills to sort out that cashflow spreadsheet, do that research, or proof read that proposal.  You might not need a permanent volunteer, just a couple of hours of someone’s time to enable you to get on with pushing the organisation forward, not getting bogged down.  Well connected groups, e.g. those affiliated to churches, wouldn’t need the service because they are already connected to a large community, but many struggling one-man-bands might.

But I digress.  The seminar was fascinating, particularly the preponderance of people who already work in caring professions (social care etc) but can see the writing on the wall vis a vis how public services will be funded and commissioned in the future.  It appears that David Cameron’s “Big Society”, an inspiring but frustratingly vague concept, is already being planned for by those that we will need to take the lead in providing services.

Other observations include: three-quarters of the attendees were women; that Loaf chap (the excellently named Tom Baker) got a mention – he seems to be a bit of a Birmingham celebrity; social enterprise is a very quickly growing sector, and this will almost certainly increase.

All in all, an interesting and inspiring session, albeit one not really aimed at me as it turned out.

UPDATE – see here for a one-page overview of the virtual volunteering thing – others seem to be pursuing similar things according to i-volunteer

How do large companies think?

Dutifully, I filled in the Survey Monkey survey that I received at work.  My department was canvassing our opinions on how they communicate with us.  As is so often the case, I felt I had something to say on the matter but the questions didn’t allow me to do so.  This is (paraphrased) what I wrote in the “any other comments” bit:

Generally I think that the quality of the communications we get is quite good, although there seems to be an excess of titles – perhaps they could get rationalised a bit?

More importantly though, the problem is not communication from “on high” (I don’t say that as a dismissive comment, merely as a description), but communication “on the ground”.  It is SO difficult to find information on the intranet, either via browsing or searching, and so difficult to make connections with other people – this is the problem.  How can we cross-sell when it is so hard to find out what is going on and make connections?

I would characterise the communication as being analogous to good quality magazines and newspapers – good material, but conceptually stuck in the last century.  Communication now is about wikis, blogs and blog comments, and social networks – i.e. connections between end-users, not mediated by a central authority.  I’m not saying we should all start blogs on the intranet, but we need to rethink how we communicate as a company.

Globally, we employ about 15-20,000 people, with a large concentration of people in the UK.  I would think that this should be sufficient to create a “critical mass” of people who could post and edit material on the intranet.  I’ve heard the term “corporate wiki” before and I guess this is what I am envisaging.  If it could work for anyone it could certainly work for a very large interdisciplinary consultancy, although I have no idea how well they work in practice.

Getting rid of Stuff

I and ‘Er Indoors are making an inventory of All Our Stuff.  Everything.  We rent a furnished flat but even so you can still accumulate a lot of detritus that you really don’t need and frankly don’t even want.

When you look at your possessions in isolation it can be easy to justify owning each one, so we are making a list so that we can see the extent of the accumulation.  We are also ranking how much we want to keep each item on a 1-5 scale.  I still haven’t quite got the hang of this because so far I have been ranking my CDs by how much I like them, which is different to whether or not I should keep them.  An album of a band I loved 15 years ago may get a high “liking” score compared to a recent purchase that I am only just getting in to, but it is the latter I should be keeping.  I think I will be pretty ruthless with the CDs when the time comes, as you don’t NEED them, and most stuff you can get on Spotify.

For clothes, apart from boring stuff like socks (of which you only need so many) everything has to pass one of two criteria: either it makes you feel shit-hot, or it is enabling.  My suits stay because they make me feel shit-hot, my climbing shoes stay because they enable me to pursue a really fun activity (climbing, obviously).  As much of everything else as possible gets ditched.

A brother of a friend of my partner spends most of his time house-sitting, so avoids paying rent but has to move around fairly often.  I think that would be a bit of a leap for me, but a nice situation to be in vis a vis Stuff would be for all our possessions to fit comfortably in a car, just in case we want to become professional house-sitters.

One-stop-shop for risk screening values

I’ve just had ANOTHER brilliant thought (quote at 5 mins)!  Well, my colleague did, but she said I was welcome to it, and if I made any money out of it I said I would buy her a drink.  Seems like a good deal to me.

For those of you who are not involved in environmental consultancy and risk assessment, you might assume that by now it would be a simple thing to determine if the level of a contaminant in something (soil, water, food etc) is dangerous or not.  It isn’t.  The problem is that the available screening values (which can be enshrined in legislation, or simply the firm opinion of the relevant agency, which almost amounts to the same thing) are smeared thinly and irregularly across the internet.  If you come across a non-standard contaminant in a non-standard situation, it can be a nightmare even to find out whether there ARE any statutory limits, let alone what they are or if they apply to your particular situation.

There could well be an opportunity for the brave soul(s) who decides to collate ALL of this information into one easily searchable database.  You could charge quite handsomely for access to this, so long as you could guarantee the currency of the information, because for the consultants who need to deal with the figures time is money.  One graduate could spend one day searching for information for one project they are working on, and still not necessarily get the correct information.  That’s £250 right there, gone.  Multiply that by a lot of projects and it could save consultancies serious money, as well as making their services more saleable because they could guarantee they would be using the most up-to-date and relevant information (this is a problem more often than you would think).

Seth Godin and I are obviously thinking along the same lines.

Crowd-sourced Consulting for Charities

A few weeks ago I discussed how you should capture those ideas you get that might just turn out to be good ones.  Needless to say this was prompted by one of those ideas. which I have now written down.

You can find it here.  Let me know what you think.

Requiring the services of consultants can be an expensive barrier for small charities and similar organisations to achieving their goals.

The cost of consulting is largely a factor of the man-hours required to complete a project. Often the bulk of the man-hours are assigned to a graduate or another grade of staff that does not necessarily have a significant level of experience. The “authority” that a consultant report has is often given by the very time-limited input of a senior member of staff. The author’s experience of costing consultancy reports suggests that often less than 20% of the cost of a report is related to this authority.

The remaining work load could be packaged up into a series of discrete chunks with simple instructions that a motivated volunteer with an appropriate skill-level could easily achieve. This would mean that the bulk of the work could be done by volunteers whilst still achieving an outcome of sufficient quality.

It’s interesting how writing things down affects how you look at ideas and concepts.  When an idea first comes to mind you hold it only in your head and it all seems to click, but having to write it down demands that you establish a logical flow of how it all fits together.  Having done this I’m not as convinced as I originally was about it, but there still might be something there.

Inspiration eludes me

A few weeks ago I was always 2 or 3 blog posts ahead so that come Mon/Wed/Fri I always had something to post, even if my mind was blank at that particular time.  I then had one really busy week when I used up all my spares so I am now blogging hand to mouth.

As with blogging, so with life.  You always need some ideas in the pipeline so you have something to work on if you hit a wall with your current project.