still surfing D Day beaches

Oamaha was the best so far= so must have been pretty rough back in 1944; tomorrow juno; stand up paddle boarding aint easy though; I have spent a fair amount of time falling off; back next week to a once or twice a week post

surfing D Day beaches

Much has been written about the recent revival of interest in the old Hawaian art of stand up paddle boarding- briefly surfing bifurcated at its origin into boards you jump up onto and boards you stand up from the word go and paddle with a nice long paddle. The latter allows full body exercise, the ability to get fun out of riding tiny waves as well as monsters and a piece of kit you can paddle up a canal if you really want to.

I’m off for a week or so to paddle board the Normandy beaches, surfing in on Omaha and Gold, on the latest brilliant piece of kit, yep, the INFLATABLE stand up paddle board- weighs a mere 10kg and fits in the space behind the car front seats. Inflatables are so brilliantly made these days they seem rock hard when fully pumped…hmm odd sentence that…anyway here goes- my next post will, I hope, be next week sometime.

young and old

Each day we are sometimes young and sometimes old for varying amounts of time. Chronologically young people may actually spend more time being ‘old’ than their chronological elders.

For the purposes of this observation ‘being young’ means being into things.

‘Being old’ means either a)wanting to be into things that chronologically young people are into, or,

b)not being into things.

you want to be an entrepreneur?

Every successful entrepreneur I have met (and I admit I've only met a few, but still) acts like a human being, a normal person not some kind of mechanical business freak genius. They rely on friends and use ordinary relationships to pursue business ends. The only difference is they are willing to use money to sharpen the bait so to speak. They also talk refreshingly about how the money will be made. There is no hocus pocus- it is usually a simple case of selling something for more than you paid for it. Being entrepreneurial is seen as some kind of magic skill but actually most kids have it when they make some sweets or thumb wrestling puppets to sell at school. They do it partly also for the fun and they derive fun from being with the people they are doing business with. There is none of that ‘professional’ detachment you see in middle managers sneaking away to make endless emails. Almost every entrepreneur I have met has been a party animal or at least sociable and all have time for people.

dodge city

Until we understand the nexus of crime-dodginess-creativity-success we will never solve the problem of burgeoning prison populations in the ‘developed’ world. Balzac said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. I’d say that behind every business lies some kind of dodginess. By necessity: there are simply too many rules out there that if one focuses on obeying them one loses the focus of getting something done. A businessman starts something and hopes to wing it through legal wrangling and having a fall back position of thinking – well- I’ll just write off the investment if it fails. A criminal thinks: it’s worth a five year stretch to do this robbery. Now there is a difference, but it isn’t a difference of quality, it is one of degree. That doesn’t mean one has to condone either or both, but it does mean that we should recognize the human need and tendency to be dodgy.

teaching flexibility to egyptian teams

Egyptians can be legendarily flexible: who hasn’t experienced such brilliant ad hoc problem solving as a coat hanger serving as a satellite antennae, a screw and pliars used as a corkscrew, thread to seal a leaky water joint or even a car steering wheel in place of handlebars on a bicycle? To name but a few.

But we’ve also experienced the incredible dogmatic inflexibility of someone who just won’t budge an inch and shift THEIR way of doing something to one that is obviously better, quicker and more appropriate. Or the type who having been shown a method and having appropriated it as THEIRS spend a lot of time manoevring and trimming reality to suit their method. There’s even an Egyptian story to cover it- a man finds a falcon and trims its beak and claws and finally pronounces- “At last you really do look like a pigeon”. Of course these characteristics occur in the West too, but there the culture of innovation is more entrenched and can be easily referenced and used to coerce intransigent team members. For a while I thought this 'situational inflexibility' of some Egyptians was unavoidable, just part of the cultural scene.

But the more I worked with Egyptians the more I saw that there was a way around this chronic inflexibility and it’s ally, lack of sensible initiative taking. One actually leads to the other: once you put TOTAL value on your way of doing things then taking the initiative- which by definition means doing something new- will involve a deviation from your methods and hence must be avoided at all costs.

The way out of the problem is to see it from the Egyptian perspective. To the chronically inflexible team member changing your method is seen as SELLING OUT.

That’s right- think of a writer in Britain penning poetry for a tiny magazine and someone suggests- “hey you’re a good writer why not try and do an episode of Eastenders?” Answer- total outrage, inconceivable, an attack on my integrity etc. or the avant guard composer who you suggest might pen a eurovision song contest number or even a film score. Or the conceptual artist you ask to do a mural on your kid’s wall of Disney characters…

Selling out.

To the 'situationally inflexible' Egyptian his integrity lies in having a ritualized pattern of work. A set of things he does at certain times and in a certain way. And he or she may well have been very creative in arriving at this pattern or not. But once it is in place the object is to stick to it. The more he can stick to this the better he has done, the less he has sold out. If he deviates, even if it results in a win for those employing him, he won’t be happy as his system has been breached, he has compromised his integrity. Now this may not be an exact explanation of what is happening but it works as a form of cultural comparison. We are all familiar with the concept of 'selling out' and have a grudging respect for those who don't. That respect, if transferred to inflexible Egyptian workers could be the injection of goodwill always required if you want to help someone change.

A ‘good day’ for a typical European team player is when hard work or a good idea results in a win either for them as an individual or for the team. A ‘good day’ for an Egyptian team player with an over developed sense of integrity is one where his integrity (his own way of doing things, his routine) has not been breached and neither has his team’s.The task, then, is to take these potentially very flexible team members who are mired in a false conception about what constitutes GOOD WORK which has made them inflexible in certain respects, and get them to view flexibility, initiative taking and bending to suit a new situation, in a different light. As not selling out but as being on the crest of a new and exciting wave of behaviour, linked perhaps with new and exciting forms of technology which are always eagerly embraced. ipod creating behaviour so to speak.

Part one is to explain all this.

Part two is to instill it through exercises, games and discussion.

are you stuck for ideas?

Building a lego model I was busting a gut to find one particular wheel. Instead of cursing with frustration, a fairly usual response, I decided to experiment and started a procedure for finding hard-to-find bits in the lego box. I scooped all the vaguely wheel shaped bits up into one corner. This freed me up, since I didn’t have to BE CONCIOUS as I searched, I didn’t have to kind of talk to myself saying ‘nope, that’s wrong, that’s wrong’- in other words I reset my mind to an abundance setting, the same setting you have when facing a blackberry bush groaning with berries- you just pick on automatic setting. Hoovering up all the wheel shapes I naturally unearthed the right one along the way, effortlessly it seemed. The lego experience set me thinking about creativity. One of the best tricks for helping you write scenes in a novel is not to try and think up a scene- instead make a list of ten possible scenes that will serve the purpose needed. Then pick one. It may well be suggestion three or four, too, not the first idea you had. But that’s a side bonus. The real benefit is it flips you from static mind to dynamic mind, where choices are made super fast, almost automaticly- rather than dithering over the blank page.

The world’s most prolific author, Dr Jose Ryoki Inoue of Brazil- 1075 books to his name (some as short as 10,000 words- but still!) once gave an utterly illuminating comment on his methods, “Momentum is everything- always keep going even if you have to move sideways like a crab.” In other words when he hits a wall he moves sideways like a crab until he finds a break in the wall and then he moves on. And there are always breaks, sooner or later.

Creativity is a dynamic process. Actually everything, when we do it well, is experienced as something on-moving and dynamic rather than static, or a series of succeeding static positions- everything from fighting a battle to cooking. But creativity suddenly leaps into overdrive when you honour its dynamic nature and align yourself with it rather than fight against it. We fight our best abilities usually by allowing the self-talking conscious mind to interfere and turn creation into a static event. There’s a great moment in the Simpsons when Bart tries to imagine the new Itchy and Scratchy movie because he can’t get to see it at the theatre- a bubble appears above his head and the characters appear but they just stand there mute, doing nothing. This is static creativity, staring at the blank page waiting for inspiration- enough to give anyone the heebie jeebies.

Instead, like scooping up all the vaguely wheel shaped lego bits you need to widen your arms and scoop up from the mega-abundance out there, stuff that will roughly suit your purpose. From being in critical mode- which usually slows things down to stasis- you are suddenly spoilt for choice, and you make the choice quickly because you have an abundance of material.

As with the Steve Jobs quote I posted earlier (‘creativity is just having enough dots to join up’) you always need to have an abundance of material. And that doesn’t mean you have to spend three years doing research- it may mean just changing your perspective on what you already have. What EM Forster called ‘table topping’- if you change the scale you suddenly have access to a whole lot more material. You can get the same effect by ‘dropping down a gear’ or one of my favourites which is ‘what would I do if I had only one day to deliver this’- using a time limit to force me to look wider and stop being a perfectionist.

When you have your abundance you can get into automatic sort-mode- that is- making decisions instantly rather than pondering- which just gets you back in the static zone. One reason why the one-big-idea book, story, article, talk, art work is so fruitful is that it aids the automatic sort procedure frame of mind- you just keep relating stuff to the one main idea rather than having to relate to several ideas- it doesn’t flip you into self-talking, the very death of the dynamic approach.

When walking a canoe down a shallow stream filled with rocks you can go really slowly – and still hit the odd rock- or you can go fast, making instant decisions- and you may well find you hit fewer rocks and bottom-out less often. Trust that dynamic mind, of which the static mind is but a pale shadow.