Why consultants exist

Anosognosia (n) a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of that disability

Best manifested as...

Dunning-Kruger Effect —the phenomenon whereupon one's incompetence masks the ability to recognise that incompetence

Strong ties

Last October Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece in the New Yorker about the strengths and limitations of Twitter and other forms social media. He compares the (successful) American civil rights movement of the 1960's with the (generally unsuccessful) colour revolutions of the last few years.

Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist

Gladwell's argument is that Facebook and Twitter are all very well for establishing the 'weak ties' that are great for disseminating information but no replacement for the 'strong tie' relationships needed to ferment political change. Tweeting your dislike of the government is not the same as occupying Tahrir Square. Friends are only of use to you if they're by your side. You need to bear witness to each others' commitment.

High-risk activism... is a “strong-tie” phenomenon. This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

So what we know can be expanded by 'weak ties' whereas what we do is rarely influenced in that way.

Last week I was in Birmingham helping a client refine their strategy for a new breast cancer treatment. The sales team has successfully established almost universal awareness of the product but the number of actual sales (prescriptions) has been disappointing. Cancer is a grim business and oncologists are thus quite conservative. Whilst no one wants to be the last person to start using a new therapy neither does anyone want to be first. This leads to chicken-and-egg scenarios, which is where my client finds itself.

The sales team is frustrated by doctors' reticence to make what they see is a very low-risk change to prescribing. Every rep I spoke to believes passionately in the product but that's just what they're paid for. They don't have any 'skin in the game'; no pharma rep will ever get the 3am call saying that a terminally ill woman has been admitted to hospital with an unexpected side effect that no one on staff has any experience of handling yet.

So what can my client do to get this group to act differently (ie start prescribing the drug)? By discovering and cultivating any 'strong tie' relationships that exist between the less conservative members of the population. The sales team has to act on the answers to two questions...

1. Which doctors out there believe in our product?
2. How do we connect them; first to each other and then to everyone else?

This is a well-established path in pharma marketing. The client will stage a series of educational meetings where less believing customers are given the chance to bear witness to the testimony of their peers. As non-peers, the sales team's role in all of this is peripheral; they have no real role in these 'strong tie' relationships. Frequently they get in the way at the worst possible time.

On the flipside of my life Andrew Watts is starting up a comedy club in the wilds of Wiltshire. He's been musing over best way of promoting what will undoubtedly be a consistently high quality night. Hopefully he'll dodge the all-too-common reliance on facilities like Facebook and Twitter to drag in the punters.

It's no Tahrir Square but many people find the idea of a night of going to live comedy stressful. The most cited reason for this is a terror of being singled out / picked on. I suspect that this is a polite misplacement; the larger, usually unspoken fear is that the acts will just suck. A night spent in deep sympathy for an audibly sweating twentysomething comic dying in an otherwise silent room is a highly unpalatable prospect.

One of the hallmarks of a (newly) successful comedy night in a rural or even provincial setting is a large number of group bookings. In Gladwell's parlance this is a 'strong tie' phenomenon in action; punters are less likely to view the night as stressful and so more likely to attend if encouraged to go as a group.

My advice to Watts is to offer a heavy discount for larger group bookings, at least in the early days. Once punters have come to the opinion that it's a quality night their stress level will dissipate and they're much more likely to return in twos and threes.

Of course it'll also help if he doesn't book comics whose acts rely on picking on the more unfortunate looking individuals in the crowd. That sort of behaviour's the height of rudeness down Devizes way.

The adjacent possible

Steven Johnson is one of my favourite authors.  He thinks deeply over a gamut of topics ranging from the impact of new technologies to urban planning and collaborates with the likes of Brian Eno, which is just a little bit sexy.  His latest book is Where Good Ideas Come From, (cool YouTube summary here.)

The idea that intrigued me the most was the 'adjacent possible'.  The term was coined by an evolutionary biologist named Stuart Kauffman to describe how the building blocks of life can only have emerged in a certain sequence: -

In the case of the prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup.  Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside of that circle of possibility.  The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

p. 31

The idea speaks directly to many aspects of life but especially to the human impulse for storytelling.  In a good story events unfold in a sequence.  The building blocks of character and incident get combined and recombined in an order that the listener finds inherently pleasing.  The same goes for a great symphony or pop song or play or joke.  It's the logic that underpins the mildly addictive iPhone game Doodle God.  It's presumably why a rule of thumb states that no new characters can appear in a film script after page 50.

I think it's especially good way to distinguish between good improvisers and average ones.  Once you master the basics improv is a great platform for wacky ideas.  For a while every improviser goes through a the-wackier-the-idea-the-better phase but at its heart improv is a storytelling discipline, which is where the idea of the adjacent possible hits home: -

The weaker, wackier improviser will jump from establishing premise to zany-crazy outcome in a heartbeat then wonder why his (admittedly very funny) ideas leave the audience cold.  The stronger improviser will take us to exactly the same place but slowly.  She'll combine and recombine ideas and so usher us into that wonderful shadow future

This is why weaker improvisers prefer 'time warp' formats that rely on the viewer mentally joining up the deliberate gaps left in the narrative.  Audiences will happily participate in this game (and they are genuinely participating) but this is very different from the satisfaction of watching events unfold in the manner of 'proper' storytelling.

Stand-up comics must have an innate understanding of the adjacent possible; if you don't take the audience with you then you're on your own, which is an extremely lonely place to be with a mic in your hand.  A great routine will make leaps in logic that are precisely calibrated to reward the audience for keeping up.  The rest of us do well to remember the great Logan Murray's definition of a good joke: -

All information necessary for the punchline is present in the set-up

It took me ages to see just how wonderful this definition is.  And a perfect example of the adjacent possible.

Betriebsrat

Another interesting aspect of last week's pilot programme in Munich was the intervention of the company's Betriebsrat (Works Council).  Here is the strange contradiction at the heart of the modern German economy; dynamic and innovative yet also so very protective.  In Mitteleuropa not everything is sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.

I am a farmer's son who has been self-employed for most of his life with no more than a passing acquaintance with organised labour so this was all a new experience for me.

As the session was officially designated as 'training', severe and immutable restrictions were imposed on which observers were allowed in the room.  These were announced late on Monday morning ahead of a Tuesday start.   As a designated 'co-facilitator' I was okay but strictly on a 'named basis'.  Not all of the Head Office attendees were so lucky.

Everything I read indicates that the German economic model is functioning better than any of its competitors so who am I to question their methods?

But what I did learn was that you'd better check with the Works Council before you schedule an observable pilot programme in Germany.  Given that no trainee likes being under the microscope as they learn the Betriebsrat knew exactly what it was doing in warding off the Head Office observers.

Subcontractors II

More pan-European training projects = more non-English delivery = more hassles with bilingual subcontractors.  Good problems to have but problems nonetheless.

Last week it was a 'pilot' with a German team in Munich.  The rub was that this time the client sourced their own external trainer to deliver my programme.  Nice guy, 20+ years in sales training and pharma industry experience before that.  Was it ever going to be a decent fit?  Not even close.

Why is it that no 3rd-party trainer can stick to the script?  Every one of them is somehow compelled to 'add additional value' with some banal personal touch right at the beginning of my programme.  There appears to be two main reasons for this: -

1. The trainer needs to start with some element of content that he knows and trusts before diving into all this new stuff belonging to the pushy Australian taking notes at the back of the room
2. Putting his own spin on things is the best way for the trainer to make himself irreplaceable

As the guy who has to deliver a product that's replicable in any European context your motivation for dicking around with my stuff is pretty much irrelevant to me but even so reason 1. is more excusable than 2.  There's a case to be made for you getting comfortable in your own skin as you start, whereas trying to make yourself irreplaceable is always going to piss me off.  And I'm always going to have enough influence over the roll-out for you to want to keep me onside.

What really confounds me is the hackneyed nature of the stuff they crowbar into the precious first minutes of my carefully crafted programme.  Lately it's been decades-old vision intended to soften up the participants with some message about how nobody-knows-everything-so-everybody-can-learn-something-from-today or all-the-best-sportspeople-still-practice-the-basics or whatever.  It's a video for Christ's sake; the sort of one-way stimulus that hasn't worked in a high school or university in years.

By introducing himself in this way the trainer is making a performance error so basic that no stand-up comic makes it after even a few months: you're apologising for being there.  Worse, not only are you starting on the defensive by pleading a case for being listened to, you're outsourcing that rationalisation to a fucking video.

At the heart of this rant is a recognition that few trainers see the world as I do.  I doubt that my oh-so-experienced German colleague considers himself a performer.  Which might be why he made so many annoying technical errors such as sitting down whilst speaking and allowing the focus in the room to splinter during group discussions.  To be fair he only lost me completely when he introduced his collection of novelty sound effects (motorbike starting, jet taking off, air raid siren).

I'm guessing that even in German there's a difference between amusing and bemusing your audience.