On Becoming Dean of Innovation and Learning

Last week I had the pleasure of accepting an invitation to become Dean of Innovation and Learning for the Purposeful Planning Institute. The PPI consists of legal, financial, wealth and lifestyle advisors to high net worth individuals and ultra-high net worth family offices. They are a great bunch of people who, as their Institute’s name suggests, seek to go beyond simple financial planning and look deeper into the purpose it is meant to serve for both this generation and those yet to come. To do this they need to find out what really matters to their clients so that financial and legal decisions are driven by and serve the client’s fundamental beliefs and values. Being able to do this is a real skill and that’s where I come in.

I have been working with them over a number of years and indeed I will be speaking at their conference as I do each year in Denver in August.

They did a very striking thing recently. They surveyed members about the most pressing kind of innovation needed in the field. What came back was that approximately 60% of respondents said that the greatest need for innovation was in the area of client conversations.

So, not fancy new products, just how to engage in good conversations that ensure people are clear about how to create a future for themselves and others that is in keeping with their goals, values, beliefs and aspirations. To achieve this you need to be able to shift from presentation to elicitation.

That’s why this year my session is entitled “How powerful are your questions?” While some questions are more useful than others in drawing people out there is no magic set of all-purpose ‘powerful questions’ which you can just fire off in any situation.

In addition to having the right question there’s the small matter of rapport and timing. Ever noticed how someone can be technically very competent but not good at putting others at ease? Well it’s the same with elicitation: if you don’t have the rapport it doesn’t matter how good your questions are. Similarly timing really can be everything. It may be the right question but is it the right time to ask it? Instead of defaulting to a few favourite questions which just become a habit, it’s better to have an understanding of what’s going on when you ask a question. Then you can engage appropriately.

So in a nutshell, whenever we ask a question we send the brain on an internal search. The question is how useful was that search? One thing we can do to improve our questioning skills is ask ourselves, what are we’re really going for?

Advisors then would do well to ask themselves a question before they ask their clients anything, namely, ‘What is the quest in my question?’ Or to put it another way, what kind of search am I seeking to trigger?

Although this is a perfectly learnable skill, very few people exercise such intellectual discipline. It’s incredibly helpful because if you know what you’re going for, you’re far more likely to notice if you don’t get it and you’re much less likely to be distracted by an out of left field answer. Outstanding communicators invariably know what they’re going for and don’t get distracted.

As ever innovation begins with how we think. Just how rare this is as a mindset was brought home to me by a student in an Innovative Skills program I was running recently who exclaimed: “You want me to think before opening my mouth? Wow! That’s pretty innovative!”

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Low cost Innovation

In the era of Apple it is very easy for people to get hooked on the artefact and fail to appreciate the kind of thinking that gave rise to it.

To achieve effective innovation what is frequently needed is the ability to ask some basic questions and think afresh about what we are doing. (Which of course is exactly what Jobs and co. did consistently).

What does this really mean in practice?  Here are two case histories I often use when considering what would innovative thinking look like if there’s no extra budget but things need to change?

In the first few years of the Second World War Hitler’s U-boats were taking a terrible toll sinking a huge tonnage of Atlantic shipping. Ensuring Atlantic convoys would continue to get supplies through to the UK was the single most important determinant of ensuring continued resistance to Hitler. If the Atlantic convoys were all sunk then so was the possibility of resistance to Hitler. However the British kill rate for destroying U boats was abysmal – about 1% of those sighted were sunk.

Enter Patrick Blackett, physicist and Nobel Prize winner. Blackett developed what we now call organisational research. With a very small team he started to ask some questions. The Navy knew that the U-boats could only move at a certain rate. Something like 45 seconds elapsed between sighting and dropping depth charges. They knew that the U-boat would probably dive to about 150ft so you set the charge to go off at 150ft. Well that’s fine, the depth charge explodes but it’s is in the wrong place because what they hadn’t taken into account was that the U-boat might change in direction not just depth.

So what did Blackett suggest? That the parameters be changed. You would only go for attacking U-boats if they had been out of sight for no more than 25 seconds and that you would set the depth charge to 25ft because they could not have gone any deeper than that in 25 seconds.

The net result of this was that it improved the kill rate from 1% to 10%. That is the equivalent of having a new secret weapon which is ten times more powerful than its predecessor. But actually there was no new secret weapon - just a different way of thinking.

Much of the time U-boats travelled on the surface so they should’ve been pretty visible. Given an estimated number and the distances they travelled it was possible to calculate how often they should have been sighted,

In fact only thirty percent of the sightings that should have been achieved were being achieved. Why was this? All sorts of fancy ideas were suggested. Again some basic questioning yielded vital information. The planes used were converted night bombers. Because they were used at night they had been painted black. However they were now being used as spotter planes in broad daylight and black is the most visible colour against a daytime sky! Repainting the underside of the wings white led to a doubling in the number of sightings. That is like suddenly doubling the number of planes you have available.

When I share these cases with business leaders they immediately grasp that the innovation lies in rethinking the challenge and asking new questions. 

So  you might want to consider what is the equivalent for you in what you are trying to do? How might you do more effectively what you already do now?

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What Work Would You Like to be Doing if Money Didn’t Matter?

I think one of the most rewarding things I probably do is working with people to clarify just what it is they want to be doing in life and in which direction to be going in in order that they have a sense of engaging in purposeful activity and indeed meaningful work. I think this is particularly on my mind at the moment because in the last two weeks I have been focusing on this area with different people of wildly different ages and yet the same kind of questions arise. So, talking with a number of people who are in their very early twenties who really have been grappling with ‘what is my career path?’, ‘where am I heading’ and ‘what should I be doing?’. The kind of schools career approach didn’t seem to be really very helpful for them apparently and so I tend to go a different route which is to actually fall back on a number of ways of asking questions that take us to the heart of the matter.

To give you an example, many many moons ago, Alan Watts had an interesting question that he would ask in a variety of different ways but essentially it would all boil down to saying that if money was no object what would you like to be doing? However you choose to come at that you’re really of course saying let’s separate money and remuneration from the activity and let’s be clear about what would be the optimal activities as far as you’re concerned and what would you want to be doing?

This immediately takes us into questions about what is satisfying to you, what is meaningful to you, what is energising for you and what allows you to feel that what you’re doing is worth continuing to do and could be the basis of a fulfilling life. Now obviously there are very good reasons for wanting to get clear about this, not least if you spend about a third of your life working it might be a smart idea to be doing something that is rewarding. But of course people often think that rewarding must mean financially and yes, you need to be able to eat, you need to be able to pay the mortgage or whatever it may be but I think very often people jump straight to economic necessities they perceive rather than getting clear about what I would really get turned on by doing is this. Now, how could I do this and derive some kind of worthwhile income from doing it. At the start of a professional life it is an important question but you know it is just as important down the road, thirties, forties and fifties.

 I have worked with people who have been in the bizarre position of spending years doing something they really did not enjoy because they felt that they were restrained and they had to because it was the only way they knew how to bring home the bacon. That doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me just because you end up then living your life doing something you don’t like in order that you can do more of it tomorrow again. What? So really whatever one’s age these I think these questions get to be really important.

And myself I know that, many moons ago, I became very clear that the most rewarding things for me were being able to engage with people so that they could create the kind of life that was meaningful to them. I just found it incredibly rewarding, basically to be assisting people to become really more of who they could be. I also found it very motivating , it got me up in the morning and made me create a variety of businesses that are based on that fundamental premise that it is possible to find what is meaningful to you, it’s possible to move in that direction and you don’t have to give up the day job necessarily but you gradually edge in the direction that makes sense to you. For me that has been unbelievable satisfying, fulfilling, and frankly, intensely moving so that I end up having people coming back. A couple of weeks ago I had someone who said they would like to give me their book, and that without me it would not have been written. There was also a little dedication inside which was lovely.

So, I guess it doesn’t matter what age we are, the question is if you separate the money from what you love to do, what would you love to be doing and how might you begin to move in the direction of doing more of that?

Creating your own legacy happens on a daily basis by having the intention to move in the direction that is right for you. 

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The Colour of Birds

Well I tend to be an early riser, up about you know, six usually, and this time of year, summer time, in Connecticut especially very good reason for being up early.  Because I remember when looking for a home here coming across the description in the realtors catalogue of this property that we finally bought, it said two thousand three hundred feet of waterfront property.  And by golly it is amazing!  Because although most of it is absolutely unusable, in that you know, it’s steep wooded forest going down to the lake, it nevertheless provides a fabulous habitat for all sorts of animals.  And when you’re out early in the morning, we can go down to the lake, down to the dock, sit on the dock and actually if we’re very quiet and stay there for a while, sometimes you’ll see deer come down to drink form the lake, and it’s really quite magical.  And sometimes the ducks come by as well and I actually came across a book recently on bird watching.  Now I’ve never really had much interest in bird watching, I’m happy birds exist, I like to see them around, but that’s about it.  But I happened to open this and I was flicking through it and there was something that was really striking to me, it started to tell me about why birds are different colours, in terms of how colouration is so important for their protection.  Well obviously you know, you figure that birds have to use camouflage as most animals do and indeed a bird’s survival often depends on its ability to conceal itself, and especially of course females sitting on their nests.  So there’s this thing called cryptic colouration or protective colouring, which means the birds, if still, virtually disappear.  So here’s something that I think is kind of fascinating, when you see birds with streaked or striped feathers, you can be pretty sure that they live in grassy areas and that’s because the appearance is concealed, because the field grasses blend in with the colouration.  On the other hand, birds that have green feathers are likely to be up there in the tree tops and if they didn’t move around so much, you’d never see them- the green matches the leaves.  And then there are the birds with dark backs and light bellies, like sparrows for instance.  And you can be pretty sure any birds like that spend a lot of time on the ground, because the light underside breaks up the overall shape of the bird, so it’s less noticeable, whereas an all dark bird would be far more easily visible.  And of course you know the mottled grey or brown feathers of say an owl that mean that birds just blend into the bark as long as they don’t move.

So, suddenly I had this set of distinctions about ahh we can really understand different kinds of bird colouration here and what kind of habitat they probably inhabit.  And for me anyway, this was like making sense of something which previously had been you know, pretty random.  And I often think that when we can do that, when we can understand some working principles, things become both easier to understand, but I think often more fascinating as well, because it’s not just I don’t know, there you go, it just happens to be pure chance- nothing very chancy about evolution in one sense, because it really is about how you ensure your survival.

So I don’t know whether I’ll be going in for any cryptic colouration myself, I don’t think that’s necessary.  But just looking around the world and understanding it differently, has enriched my morning experience as I sit  on the dock and enjoy a cup of tea and look up in the trees and see the birds. 

So ‘til the next time.

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Wired and Tired

So the other day I’m standing in the supermarket line waiting to get some stuff with Paulette at the checkout. And there’s this guy in front of us loading on case after case of high energy drinks, and it struck me that there’s a lot of caffeine in there and of course these are whatever, however it’s tarted up basically high energy drinks are about getting a buzz, getting yourself on a dream surge, and all of that usually done through some form or another of caffeine, whatever the flavour may be. Anyway, we finish there, we go to the pharmacy, and there I see this person who’s getting their prescription filled for their sleeping tablets. And it just struck me, both of these products are in ever growing demand, certainly in the US. And so you’ve got these two kind of extremes, where people are getting ever more wired and on the other hand you’ve got people who can’t sleep and needing sleeping tablets. And I wonder if they’re all being consumed by the same people. We don’t know. Not necessarily.
 
Either way, it just set me off on a train of thought about sleep generally, and how it’s changed so dramatically since the invention of the electric light bulb. So much so that most people have no conception of how the human race has, for most of their existence, had a completely different sleep pattern to what we now take as normal. And you don’t have to go that far back to find out, to see examples of it. In fact, if you go back pre Industrial Revolution, it’s a very different world, specifically about how people would sleep. And the way it would work, there are lots of examples of this that make it very clear, how the pattern was once upon a time. And then, actually there’s one really good example of this, in the Canterbury Tales, in the Squire’s Tale, if I remember correctly, where there’s a reference to the woman having her first sleep. And then, what is her first sleep? Well that’s what used to be the norm, that the sun would go down and then a little while after the sun went down, you’d go to sleep. But you didn’t go to sleep and stay asleep right the way through the night, no that was your first sleep. You’d wake up quite naturally, spontaneously, somewhere about midnight or a little thereafter, then very common to get up do something for an hour or so, and then you’d go back to bed and have what was called your second sleep.

And that was the way it was, every day of your life. Your first sleep and your second sleep. And there are, there’s oh gosh, all sorts of interesting examples of what was associated with the space in between the first sleep and the second sleep. There’s there’s a medical book that was written about how it was a very good thing that you should sleep on one side for the first sleep and on the other side for the second sleep, and that the space in between the two sleeps were supposed to be particularly beneficial and indeed lots of people of course, would wake up, have sex, go back to sleep. And you’d be more refreshed after you’d had that first sleep.

Well that’s not the way it is any longer of course. But the interesting thing is, if you put people in environments where there’s no electric light, this is the pattern that will gradually appear again. And it’s also often found in tribal cultures that haven’t been influenced much by the West. So you get this completely different way of thinking about sleep, and quite, where does the siesta fit into all that? Well I don’t know, but again what’s the rhythm that would make it even easier for anybody to feel more relaxed, more energised, not just wired and tired?

And I think it may be useful for people to know that it’s absolutely okay to go to bed early, wake up, potter about, go back to bed, go back to sleep. If that suits you, feel free, go ahead. And the electric light bulb is what changed it all of course, because we just kept going until we passed out basically. But how odd it is as a way of functioning, for me was brought home when there was a power cut in LA, in I think it was 1994, and all the lights went out and people suddenly had a new experience of their world. And there were lots of reports to the police to report a giant silver cloud that appeared in the sky. And people were very concerned about what it was . And guess what it was. It was the Milky Way. No one had seen it before, because all the lights and suddenly the world opened up in a new way. Welcome to the Cosmos. Food for thought.

‘Till the next time.

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