I talked earlier about a number of categories of ‘rules’ that evolve to govern the self-organising systems that constitute families. Let’s look further at those categories.
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Whilst I hope you personally have a very merry Christmas, it is axiomatic that, for many, Christmas is the exact opposite, with family gatherings creating anger, distress, conflict and upset. Indeed, many telephone counselling services report that for this very reason Christmas is consistently one of their busiest times of the year. Can we understand this a little bit better from a Systems Thinking perspective? Read on and see.
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In the Austin Powers movie, The Spy who Shagged Me, there is an amusing scene in which one of Dr Evil’s henchmen, Mustafa, is questioned by Powers and his CIA assistant Felicity Shagwell. Mustafa initially contemptuously refuses to answer the questions, but when asked the same question a third time, his resistance immediately crumbles. To the surprise of Powers and Agent Shagwell he discloses the information they want and confesses that he simply cannot stand being asked the same question three times. What does this teach us about the sales process?
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A quick blog this, following on from others I recently wrote on the subject of sleep and its effect on performance at work. A few days ago the CIPD, in association with the mental health charity MIND, published a report and a guide to managing mental health issues in the workplace. Read on to find out what this has to do with sleep.
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Today has been a bit of a frustrating day so I intend to reframe it as an interesting inspiration for a blog. If you want to find out how a visit to the GP and a frustrating traipse around multiple pharmacies led to creative inspiration, read on.
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The great inventor, Thomas Edison, said:
“The person who sleeps eight or ten hours a night is never fully asleep and never fully awake – they have only different degrees of doze through the twenty-four hours.”
But let’s face it, Edison, inventor of the electric light-bulb, was in the daylight business. The experience of high-profile business people such as Lloyds CEO, Antonio Horta-Osorio, through his struggle with insomnia (which I discussed in a previous blog) puts matters into a more realistic context.
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“There were lots of invitations; I know you sent me some.
But I’ve been waiting for the miracle, for the miracle to come.”
These words from Leonard Cohen’s magnificent song, The Miracle, sum up for me one of the most alarming aspects of the personal development movement of the last decade or so.
Various books and philosophies have come out during this time, promoting concepts such as ‘manifesting’, ‘The Secret’ etc, that overtly or implicitly have delivered a simple message – “Whatever you want the most in life, wish for it badly enough and it will come to you.” This notion is, in my opinion, the source of a great deal of human suffering and disappointment – not only through the failure to obtain one’s heart’s desire, but the added disillusionment of realising that the metaphysical system in which one had placed great faith has crumbled to naught.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no objection to spiritual beliefs and systems that serve and empower an individual. Furthermore I believe that creating and focusing on compelling goals and targets is an essential part of personal achievement. Any approach, however, that encourages the omission of taking definitive and consistent action is doomed. Those who have found manifesting or The Secret useful and obtained results from it are those who have experienced a random act of fortune and concluded that they manifested it; have started to notice stuff that was there all along; or have quite naturally combined their wishing and meditation etc with empowered action consistent with their desires.
Unfortunately, I believe that many of those who place their greatest hopes on these approaches are those who feel powerless to act in the world and turn instead to theories of a Universe that will fulfil strongly held wishes, in a desperate hope to exert influence they wrongly perceive they cannot exert otherwise. It is these people who are the most vulnerable and suffer the most from their disappointment. They are like the singer in Cohen’s song – blithely ignoring authentic opportunities (“invitations”) to act and create happiness, whilst waiting in vain for the delivery of a life-changing miracle.
I am reminded of the nurse in Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who prays every night for God to remove the birthmark from her face, rather than exploring alternative ways to address it or simply accept and live a rich life with it. Needless to say, every morning when she awakens the birthmark is still there.
In a number of blogs taking us over Christmas and up to the New Year I will be looking at various ways to act in pursuit of your goals and to actually feel motivated to act.
This morning’s Independent newspaper reports the return to work of Lloyd’s Chief Executive, Antonio Horta-Osorio, after a period of sick leave caused by insomnia. In this blog I would like to bang on again about the foolishness, nay the absolute insanity, of believing that we can compromise on sleep without suffering serious consequences and the short-sightedness of a corporate culture that demands staff prove their worth by working unsustainable hours.
Horta-Osorio was signed off work and entered rehab about six weeks ago to recover. He talks of how, although he attempted to sleep, he struggled to do so and often managed to grab only two or three hours a night. In Horta-Osorio’s case it does not sound as if he was unable to set aside time to sleep – rather that sleep simply would not come to him during those hours. This is slightly different from those workers (often in highly paid City jobs) who simply cannot set aside the time for sleep if they want to be seen as having career potential.
I mentioned in a blog some time ago a client of mine in a City institution who for days on end would leave home for work in a taxi at 8:30am (let’s assume he got up at 7:30am to shower, shave, dress and grab a bite to eat) and would leave the office the following morning at about 3am (perhaps getting to bed at 4am if he was lucky!) This schedule, even if he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, would permit him a maximum of three and a half hours sleep per night. And this was ongoing! And he was working on critically important business paperwork! And this was considered normal!
This type of schedule, which is seen as a badge of honour and viewed with macho pride, is in actuality the institutionalisation of lunacy.
The effects on physical health, mental health and performance of sleep deprivation are well know and alarming. Horta-Osorio echoed a point I made in my previous blog when he commented:
“I know now why they use sleep deprivation to torture prisoners.”
Not only is it extremely distressing, sleep deprivation also scrambles an individual’s ability to make balanced and reasoned decisions, such as – in an interrogation situation – whether to disclose information and how to assess the tactics and manipulation being used by the well-rested interrogators. In short, decisions made by sleep deprived people are lousy, short-sighted decisions. Yet, we ask people to make crucial business decisions and perform detailed tasks in circumstances where they will almost inevitably be rendered sleep-deprived. Make sense? No, of course it doesn’t, but we do it nonetheless.
In a blog to come, I will look a little more at this subject which is addressed, along with a number of other useful perspectives on our Working Patterns for Maximum Efficiency course, offered in London, Cheshire and Belfast.
It must be nearly Christmas because I watched The Great Escape at the weekend. The Great Escape is one of my all time favourite films and I enjoy it now as much as when I first watched Steve McQueen on his motor bike trying to jump the barbed wire fence into Switzerland. But surely, you may be thinking, The Great Escape doesn’t have anything to do with sport psychology?
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Over the last couple of blogs I have been looking at the notion of Second Order Change – the transformation that can occur when people revise the boundaries and assumptions of a problem at a fundamental level, rather than allowing their thinking to be constrained by such factors. I looked at a few examples of such change from science fiction and also military history. I also mentioned the concept of sponsorship. What do I mean by that?
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Follow Watt WorksHello and welcome to “The Lightbulb”.
The Lightbulb is a blog that brings you the best in systems thinking, neuro linguistic programming and sports psychology and how the ideas and concepts from these areas can enhance performance for both individuals and organisations.
I’ll be bringing you ideas and concepts from a variety of disciplines … and including ideas from people such as Stafford Beer, Peter Senge, Humberto Maturana, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener, Gordon Pask, Warren McCulloch, Buckminster Fuller, Heinz von Foerster, Milton Erickson, Alfred Korzybski, Virginia Satir, Peter Drucker, Russell Ackoff, W. Edwards Deming and many, many more.
If you have an interest in individual or organisational change, transformation or coaching there should be something of interest here for you. I’ll be exploring the application of ideas from the greatest thinkers of our time to a wide variety of issues in order to improve such things as personal and organisational communication, strategy creation, creativity and innovation, policy formation, performance management, governance, marketing, sales, facilitation and problem solving.
