The Power of a SImple Process

Again yet with today's resignation at the BBC - the cry goes up of "we need a reorganisation" or " we need new processes". It seems like corporation's cannot conceive of dealing with an issue without the cry for "Process, Process Process".... as though this the answer to all our problems.

Like methadone for the Heroin addict, plastic cigarettes for the smoker who struggles to give up or the false body parts as an antidote to personal insecurity. It seems that organisations use the process word as both a means to avoid responsibility and push the problem to tomorrow.

As a rapidly ageing coach and consultant I would offer the view that in most cases processes don't fail - people do. And until we really have the courage to stop playing the corporate mañana game then we will like that wonderful film Ground Hog Day - be doomed to repeat the mistakes of yesterday forever and forever.

I am not anti-process - just anti the adoption of pointless processes.

A case that I often use and love to explore is the one of queuing. Queuing is a wonderful topic in England. We love to form queues; we argue about queue jumping and we even employ specialist to help manage them in post officies, cinemas and doctors surgeries. In fact the one of the greatest stress points we can suffer from in entering a new situation is to understand what queuing system is being used. Is it separate lines per till; the winding snake model; the take a ticket model or the free for all.

Flying out of Southend airport yesterday one passenger was clearly too embarrassed to start the the boarding queue 90 minutes before boarding time - but he was also in a state of anxiety about losing the precious first place. So he nonchalantly stood at the sectioned entrance of the EasyJet check in - strategically blocking the space with his case. Thus sending a signal that I 'own' this space without actually triggering the queue rush that starts once the first person stands in line.

My point with all this is that it really doesn't have to be complicated.  Occams Razor agues that ""when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better." In the same way when you have two competing process solutions then I would argue go for the simplest one over that which is more complicated (and probably begin sold by the consultant!)

A case in mind is the one of queueing in spain. When we first moved here I walked tentatively into the bank wondering how it all worked. Everyone was standing around chatting and chilling and there seemed to be little control in place. In fact it looked chaotic. But then listening to what was being said as each new person walked into the room they asked the question "Que Ultimo". Which translates roughly to "who is the last person". Once they know who the person preceding them is they don't have to worry about anything else. The more vocal spaniards will cruise the room chatting and hugging friends, some will sit and play with their iPad and the older people will find a chair and rest their legs.

The key thing is that they just followed one principle - focusing on who precedes me. And that is it. The processes works for banks, butchers and brothels (!!). But buried within the simple process is also a deep cultural model of trust and respect. Simple systems will often be founded on a solid human base of trust. Whereas in my experience complicated processes are often needed because of an absence of trust in the organisation.

So, before arguing for yet another bright new shinny process maybe asked questions about why the currents one failed - and what human factors were present (or absent) that caused things to go wrong.

Mick Cope
 

The Morality of Looting and Leadership

In a recent book I explored how leadership can be viewed using three very simple layers;

·      Level 1 is Lead Yourself

·      Level 2 is Lead Others

·      Level 3 is Lead Leaders

My idea is simple – that it can be difficult and possibly damaging to seek to lead others when we have not first learnt to lead ourselves. Seeking to lead from a level 2 or 3 layer when level 1 has not been resolved is quite simply a bad choice  and one that generally creates more problems than it resolves.

My argument has been that over the past 20 years – organisations have tended to take the easy option of rolling out plastic leadership programmes. Managers are repeatedly sent on high profile development programmes that offer the plastic tools of leadership but don’t address the deep ethical and moral aspects of the art and practice of leading others. The net result has been a class of manager and leader that might be deemed as plastic. Very pretty and well presented on the outside but lacking substance within. They often know the company values, the corporate speak and the ideal PowerPoint font to use. Deep down the people they lead are following them because of their job title and not their core personal leadership capability.

This concept came to mind vividly last night when watching the unfolding riots sweeping across the UK. I sat with friends collectively going through the whole mix of anger, fear and frustration as we watched a society we loved being torn apart. I too joined in the rapid cry of ‘lets prosecute, watergun, shoot and then finally castrate them’ as I struggled to understand how we could solve such a terrible problem.

But in the cold light of day I started to reflect on the deeper issue that we all face. I wondered just what could drive a teenager to be so callous and destructive to their neighbor. Although we heard many people talk about the need for more ‘robust policing’. I wonder if we need to call for more ‘robust leadership’.

All the evidence is that locking these people up will not fix the problem. We may deprive them of their liberty – but that does not mean they will change their underlying belief that it was OK for them to steal. That is their belief and they will choose to maintain that morality for as long as they choose. Their moral map operates on the assumption that it is ok to take a few bags of crisps as they only costs pennies, to steal large amounts of money as it will be someone else’s problem and that it is ok to threaten someone who is weaker than yourself.

My argument is that we can only change how people behave by changing how they think and feel. So after we have rightly punished the guilty in the short term we then need to ask the deeper and more difficult question of how do we change the long term moral maps being used by the youth of today?

But before we look at changing them – lets think about where they got the maps from in the first place.  Clearly we must look in the first instance at the parental role. But in this note I want to step round that and instead consider the role of the social leader as often these people impact greatly on the values of the citizens in society. We look to our parents for home based moral maps – but the social leader will often set the tone of how we should behave as a collective. In the same way that violence on the football pitch will trigger violence on way home in the streets – what role do society’s leaders have on the moral maps of the youth?

Lets consider just who are the social leaders who planted the moral maps in their heads. Just who are the leaders who nudged the appropriate behaviors to the teenagers who were running wild last night?

Four groups that come to mind are the politicians, police, press and the priests (church). These are the groups who offered a solution to our problems last night on TV. And they are the legal guardians whose maps have been given as correct to our youth. These are the people whose moral maps have been used to steer, guide and nudge the youth over the past twenty years and help them make the key choices in their life. A nice example of this is that David Cameron said just now on the TV that we need a “clearer code of values and standards that people have to live by.”

But lets explore this. What actual moral maps have these supposedly ethical guardians offered our young over the past few years?

·      What moral map do politicians offer when they believe it is acceptable to steal from the public by the use of fraudulent expense claims?

·      What moral map is offered by a press who believe it is acceptable to hack into people’s personal phone calls?

·      What moral map is offered by a police force who feel it is acceptable to take ‘gifts’ from powerful figures in exchange for favors?

·      What moral map is offered by a church that believes it is acceptable to hide the abuse of children in its care?

Maybe the question is what moral right do these plastic leaders have to “Lead Others” when they have not demonstrated the deep capacity to ‘Lead Themselves’. Maybe we need to ask what damage leaders do who set themselves up to guide the maps of others when they have not developed robust and ethical maps of their own. Just maybe we need to have an open debate about the long-term damage being done by short-term leaders!

I look forward to the day when society’s leaders are able and willing to lead others from a platform of personal rather than plastic leadership. I hope to see a day when a politician, policeman, priest or press officer says – “yes I screwed up”. I hope to be alive in a time when making a leadership mistake can be deemed to be a point to learn from and not hide or run from. Until we truly can operate from a personal rather than plastic perspective our leaders will command little real respect from those people who we need to work with before our society becomes really broken.  If all we do as a result of the recent riots is punish the guilty few with some show trials – then the immoral many will continue to maintain their corrupt mental maps. They will behave according to these and what is worse pass these maps onto their children. And so the battered society continues to be broken.

But it gets worse! At the end of the day – what right do I have to rant and curse at the rioters on TV unless I am prepared to “fess up” my sins. Maybe when I can be sure that how I lead others comes from a personal rather than plastic leadership perspective then I have the right to judge others. Until then maybe I need to sit back and reflect on the moral maps that drive my life.

Without this reflection how can I be sure that I am not just another plastic leader?  

Mick Cope

Lead Yourself - Before Leading Others

Chubby Cat rasied an interesting point in a previous blog regarding the role and value of the "Back Office".I think you have touched on a significant and topical point with this. 

"I was talking to an organisation the other day that had split their internal finance team between front-facing 'business partners' and a back-office shared service centre. Result? The back office folk are all demotivated because the business partners are getting all the glory. Perhaps showing the back-office people their true role as the 'Hidden Persuaders' would help them come to terms with their new (and vital) role?

Alan F  "

At the moment the standard government response to a fiscal crisis to “lets slash and burn the back office”. After spending many years working with and for large organizations I can see how waste can grow like Japanese Knotweed as an invasive force that sweeps across the corporate hierarchy.

But in the same way that the knotweed will no be fussy where it invades – corporate waste isn’t just confined to the ‘back office’. Low value people, processes and systems can permeate front, back and middle office functions. I have consulted with may back office functions that are a hotbed of low value operations. But I have also worked with many front line operations that are full of people and processes that should have been confined the waste bin many years ago.  

The standard response to ‘cut the back office’ really cuts no ice if we are serious about improving the operating value of the organization. It is like deciding to improve a football team by halving the number of defenders, by saving the cost of running the Rolling Stones with sacking Charlie Watts, or an F1 team cutting the race costs by only having one engineers in the pit stop to change the wheels. I would go so far as to argue that is often a lazy response motivated by political expediency and has little to do with making a real commercial or operational difference.

If a senior team is serious about improving efficiency within an organization – then it should seek to address the process with professional rigor. To this end a number of pertinent questions need to be answered:

1.     Before looking at the levels of waste within the system – what caused the waste to develop in the first place. What people, processes and policies existed to allow the problem to develop – because if not resolved the old problems will reappear.

2.     Can the team be sure that the process will be driven by an ethical and robust review process and not just turn into a witch-hunt. I have seen too many change programmes where the regular downsizing process is seen as pay-back time.. A chance to get rid of the people who have crossed the path of members in the senior team. In the short term it may clear out the dead wood – but in doing this no matter how the change is sold to the people – they will see it for what it really is and will fight back in subtle and covert ways.

3.     In too many optimization programmes I have seen local downsizing choices made that ignore the consequential impact on the overall systemic model in the organization. One manager may view the paper pushing exercises undertaken by the lifer in the team as a redundant activity that is no longer needed. But it may well be that the apparent low value of the effort is needed on rare occasions when client groups need to quality assure the internal systems before awarding large contracts. Activity costing must be undertaken against end value and not just team or unit value.

4.     Maybe get rid of the phrase ‘Back Office’. It sucks. Everyone should have clear line of sight to how their daily activities contribute towards customer satisfaction and the profitability of the business. The Front and Back office title create an arbitrary, false and tribal based split within a group of people who must be dedicated on delivering customer service. Otherwise we could have upstairs and downsides people, brown eyed and blue eyed people. What’s the point? If anyone cannot explain with clarify and focus how they add directly towards customer satisfaction and group profitability – then maybe that is the place to start asking questions about the value of the work they are performing.

The problem is that the simple act of naming something sets it apart from the context in which it sits. A bowl of apples is a bowl of apples. The moment I highlight that there are five Coxes and one Granny Smiths then I have created an arbitrary form of separation. Note it is my separation not the apples! Applied in am organizational setting the simple act of making one group the front off and the other the back office has immediately set a wall of separation in place that can be hard to overcome?

As an indication of how the tribal separation can lead to tension consider how rock bands manage their income. Royalties from a hit song can feed the writer for the rest of their life. But if the songs are written in the rehearsal studio, over late nights and drinks - how do you decide who has written what? In the early days of Take That there was one songwriter - that's Gary Barlow - who took sole credit. In the newly reformed Take That they decided to operate a collective system where the writing credits will be shared four ways. With Coldplay royalties are evenly split among the members of Coldplay. Chris Martin writes the songs and shoulders the fame, but shares all royalties with his three mates from university.

The next time you hear some grand pronouncement from a big knob official saying they will cut the “Back Office”. Try to look beyond the bland statement and inquire just how the critical choices will be made and determine if they are really trying to create a more efficient operation or is it yet another political game.

True business efficiently gains are achieved by separating the people and process that add value from those that don’t. Arbitrary naming conventions serve little real purpose in this exercise.   

When the models met Mater - Airbrushing your dents and dings away

Two thoughts grabbed my attention yesterday. First watching the news there is a lot of press about the use of airbrushing in photography and the impact on young children. Second, I went with my son to see Cars 2 (I didn’t See Cars) and was struck by some comments made by a key character in the film.

First a cosmetics giant has been forced to act after a watchdog found that consumers had been misled by digitally manipulated images of the stars. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld a complaint by Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat MP, who claimed the retouched images misled consumers by exaggerating the results the products could achieve. Essentially airbrushing means that women and young girls are being bombarded with images of people with perfect skin, perfect hair and perfect figures that are impossible to live up to. So this false presentation of false body images to young people will cause them to turn to short term enhancing measures as opposed to accepting and embracing the aging process.

Secondly the star of Cars 2 is a rusty old tow truck called Tow Mater. Mater is out of sync with those around him because he doesn’t fit in with the jet set crowd. In the second movie his best friend Lightning rejects him for not fitting in with the crowd because he doesn’t look the part. As the plot unfolds he is given the opportunity to have his dents removed. But surprisingly he retorts, “You can’t touch my dents,” says Mater. “I got every one of them dents with my best buddy Lightning McQueen.” Critically Mater recognised that his dents did not detract from who he was – in fact the dents were a record of his past achievements as he towed cars to safety.

These two made me think that although the world of Airbrushing tends to drive a society that places a perfect body on a pedestal – there is also a temptation to place a perfect ‘inner self’ on a pedestal as well. In the Lead Yourself book – I argue that before we have the moral right to lead someone else that we need to look inside and learn to lead ourselves first. Essentially what moral right do we have to airbrush out someone else’s ‘Dents” if we haven’t had the courage to understand and manage our own.

Inner personal leadership means that we must be prepared to look into our secret shadows and shine a light on the thoughts, feelings and behaviours we have tried to supress or airbrush away. For example, with me it was a long journey to accept my alcoholism. I tried to airbrush my addiction away by cavalier statement of ‘I am just a social drinker’, ‘the government says that one glass of wine a day is good for you – so a bottle can’t hurt’. Or the classic ‘I will stop tomorrow’. My drive to airbrush away the problems is in many ways like the regular use of Botox or some other age defying tool. One day the past catches up you cant airbrush any more without looking slightly. At this point the truth will out. And boy does it out with a bang.

The other thing about airbrushing is that we all know that these actresses and actors are not perfect. In fact the tabloids cash in on this in showing us the star opening the door in the morning to get their milk and splashing how they really look across the front page. In the same way that we all know what the star will look like first thing in the morning – we are generally able to sense someone’s inner dents. We meet people who are full of bravado, who always supposedly have perfect lives and who never admit to having any personal fears. But as Malcolm Gladwell explores in his book Blink, we all have the gift of rapid cognition. This is the perception of others that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. In those two seconds, conclusions we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good. Although we think we might be able to airbrush away our inner scars and dents – in most cases they show in one-way or another. Like ‘Tells” in a poker game – we leak our inner thoughts and feelings like a sieve. But in most cases the other person is too polite to mention them.

In the film Mater argues that dents are not something to hide with embarrassment – rather they are something to take pride in as they represent where he has come from, who he is now and the person he plans to be in the future. His goal is not to be the plastic person as demanded by society, rather to be a person of principles who is prepared to present who he really is to the world and not offer a false façade to satisfy the hungry masses.

In the Lead Yourself book I argue that the development of plastic leadership programmes that supposedly offer short term fixes to long standing problems fail because the recipients of the change (the staff members) can still see the real inner person. The New Model Leaders exit the leadership course with a sense of miraculous self worth with all their faults airbrushed way. They have been convinced by the trainer that they are now wearing the new cloak of leadership (like the cloak of invisibly in Harry Potter). But unlike Harry’s cloak on their return to work the team members can see right through this façade and recognise all to well that the same airbrushed person is sitting in front of them.

A wonderful example of a leader who doesn’t seek airbrush out his dents is Richard Branson. He often explains how at school most academic things at school passed him by. One implication was that, right up until the age of 50 whilst running the largest private company in Europe, he still couldn’t grasp the difference between gross and net profit. It made board meetings quite bizarre. Eventually one of his directors drew him a picture – he drew an ocean showing a net with fish in it which we could take home, explaining that everything else, all the rest of the turnover, goes elsewhere.
For me the subtle message from Mater in Cars 2 is that before we can stop airbrushing our inner dents away we need to know what they are. In the film as well as knowing that the dents were there - Mater could describe just where each one came from.

Personal leadership is about having the courage to look inside and be honest about who we are as human beings and to accept the various dents and dings that we have picked up along the way. By recognising these supposed ‘failings’ – we can choose to embrace them and turn them into brand assets. Unique characteristics that enhance who we are and actually help make us distinct in a crowded market place.

Back to the Bone - Stripping your brand to its simple state

Brand confusion

Over the past few days three separate things happened that seem to have an interesting connection:

1.     Out walking with the wife and we wondered why a local cafe/ restaurant that was so successful at its out of town unit had failed to replicate that apparent success when it opened a place in the centre of town.

2.     With the impending arrival of our new puppy I was looking for some reading material about training dogs. Our local puppy centre highly recommended a book by a well published and famous dog trainer. I found his web site and was keen to find out more about his ideas – but then one of the pages on his site promoted another part of his business where he made and sold guitars. I came away slightly confused and didn’t really follow up on his material.

3.     In looking for someone to come and do some repair work on our house – (some minor jobs) I ended up getting so frustrated trying to find a professional that in the end I asked a neighbors daughter if she wanted to do the work as I knew that she did this type of thing in her spare time.

Although these are seemingly different stories – the one common thing that binds them is the problem of customer confusion and how this can degrade and in some cases block the sales process.

• For the 1^st one – we think the problem stems from the fact that the original place was a café on a local industrial estate. So there was a perfect mix between the customer need and the service provided. It was a café offering what we believed was the best value food in the area. For their new venture they were trying to mix the café and restaurant experience and for us it was hard to get our heads around. The result was that if we wanted ham and chips we went to a café in the high street and if we wanted smoked ham with French Fries we went to the restaurant. That fitted our mental model of the food we wanted and the surroundings we would eat in.
• For the 2^nd point my confusion is that I wanted to get advice from the best dog trainer in the world. The moment I see he is also selling guitars then in some way (and I know this isn’t logical) I was less interested because I didn’t really understand where his priorities lay.
• For the 3^rd one almost every builder or decorator I spoke to wanted to convince me that no matter what job I wanted resolved they were the person to fix it. Painful experience has taught me (leaky roofs, falling down ceilings and dodgy guttering!!) that if I want a wall plastered then I will use a plasterer – not a plumber who has a bag of left over plaster in their boot.

The common problem here is one of brand confusion. And in times when the market is poor, with many alternative service providers and cash is tight maybe we all need to think very carefully about how best to present our brand to the market. If our brand pitch presentation does not have the necessary clarity and focus then the risk is the customer will look elsewhere.

In a world where the “job” is dead and we are all on a six-month contract then you need to manage and protect your brand like you would a newborn baby. If your brand is not pitched to the market in the optimum way then the chances are you will struggle to compete and survive.

BRAND THEORY

This idea of brand management is explored in my Personal Networking book. In this I explore the idea that personal brand needs to be considered using four primary dimensions.

• Simple - Simplicity exposes the quality of an idea. Its helps others to remember you and your brand. Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple is quite difficult
• Singular - Dare to be different - seek to be unique within your chosen market - ‘Be distinct or be extinct’. Your personal brand recognition needs to be instantaneous and sticky. If you are not sure what makes you different - then ask e others what they believe makes you stand out
• Symbolic - Make it easy for people to recall you and your personal brand – ensure you don’t inadvertently alienate people. This can be a logo, story, artifact, drawing or catch phrase – something that represents who you are and what you do. It must be easy to read/understand/recall, eye catching, recognisable, timeless and memorable.
• Sincere - Design your brand around you – not you around your brand. People know when someone is faking it, so always ensure your brand is authentic and true to your beliefs and values. Work inside out – discover your beliefs – don't import someone else’s because they are convenient.

For me all three stories suggest that the "Simple" test had been compromised. That cafe trying to be a restaurant, the dog trainer selling guitars and the builders trying to cover all jobs. For me contact with each one left me slightly confused as to what they were offering and more importantly where their core expertise

Link - "The global brand simplicity index is a report published by Siegel+Gale, a global branding and communications company that highlights the simple fact that customers pay more for brands that provide simpler services.
The global study asked 6,000 consumers across seven countries questions relating to their experience of using services and buying products. The data showed that between 5 and 15 percent of UK consumers are willing to pay more for brands they believe offer the greatest value of simplicity.

“The Global Brand Simplicity Index™ then generates a Simplicity Score™ which is a rating of each brand and its category on the elements used within the simplicity methodology”. Basically this means that Siegel+Gale can rank brands based on how simple they are to interact with."

Testing your brand simplicity

If you want to be sure that your personal brand be not being presented in a confused to your market then maybe take a few minutes to talk with clients and ask the following:

• Can they describe your brand to otherwise in a few words or does it need to be explained?
• If your brand were on the bag of a playing card would people get it?
• Can people get an emotional as well as a logical connection with what you do?
• Can you sum up what you do in ten, then five then one word?

The key to brand simplicity is the need to be merciless. Strip away that which does communicate value immediately, strip out fluff and if you cant do it then get someone else to tear your brand pitch to pieces.

Finally – I do believe that the secret to developing brand simplicity is about detachment. I once heard Elton John say that he left the selection of a single to others because he was too close to the creative process. In the same way often we can be too close to what we do and love to be able to be ruthless and cut away the crap. This is where it is key to use other people. Find people you trust and then trust the feedback they offer on ensuring that your brand pitch is simple.

Google+ and ‘The +1 problem’

Some years ago I managed to go from a relatively healthy 14 stone up to a less than comfortable 21 stone. The strangest thing is that I didn’t realise it at the time. The reason this happened is because of the +1 syndrome. Typically it would be one more wine gum won’t hurt me, one more can of beer isn’t a problem, one more rib and so on. The invisible hand of the ‘+1’ problem meant that I crept up to a dangerous weight and essentially became fat and bloated. Because of this my life slowed to a crawl as I was just unfit and fat.

The strange thing is that I see this same effect in the way that people manage their professional networks. There is a seemingly huge race to acquire as many contacts as possible on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+. In the same way that just one more wine gum gave me a quick hit of sugar – the just one more network contact can give us a give ego boost and a sense that we are loved by the world. But the end result is often a fat and bloated professional network. It may be large in size but will be limited in usefulness.

I tried to address this issue in my book on personal networking. This pulls together a number of theoretical ideas about the development of social networks and how they might be used to map a your personal or professional network. In this article

I want to move from mapping what our networks look like to understand how we make choices, who to include in the network and how to avoid the +1 problem of network density.

My argument is that a lot of the networking choices are intrinsic and innate.  We find it easy to say yea to a new networking request without really thinking about the value it will add and the extent to which it will bloat our social capital. The risk is we run the risk of creating a professional networking system that rapidly becomes unmanageable and of little personal value. The +1 effect tends to occur where we add just one more name to our network without really thinking through why we have pushed the accept button and what the consequence will be. Just think – when you get that friend request – what criteria do you use to either accept of reject the enquiry.

So how do we naturally and instinctively form social networks? There are many reasons we form tribal groupings – but in simple terms people often make a choice to include someone in their group according to their fit with the following criteria:

·       Profession: It is very easy and comforting to be with people that we know and trust. Because we spend so long with work colleagues it can be very easy to slip from a work based relationship to a network relationship. But from a networking perspective – your work colleagues are about the past and present – networking is about the projected and where you are going. If your network system is clogged with today’s people how will you find time to manage the tomorrow people?

·       Personality: Sometimes we want to spend time with people because we like them. We might not share the same hobbies, skills or goals –we might just enjoy their company. The trouble is that professional networking is about shared success and ensuring that both parties gain from the relationship. It is not about finding drinking buddies or people to have fun with. That is better allocated to the “friends circle” and kept away from the professional circle.

·       Proximity – if I were walking through the outback of Australia and suddenly came across someone from my hometown – the chances are that I would get a rush of comfort. That sense of shared connection, place and experiences can form an important driver that stimulates the creation of network nodes. Because someone is near they must be important and so can be included on my network. If the goal of your professional network is to get to know your local town better – then it may be a laudable criterion. But if your goal is to build a professional network that will help with your career – then maybe having two thirds of your network group who all live within a mile might be someone self defeating.

·       Purpose: Think about that thing which is important to you. It might be spending time on a charitable cause, working on a local campaign or simply being member of a sports team. The binding force between these people will be their purpose or that thing that find important and are working towards achieving. Building a network structure around purpose is important. But if your network only consists of these people then it will lack diversity and richness. What happens when your goals change and you want to take like in a new direction? Having to create a whole new group of network contacts is massively time consuming and may prevent you from being successful. Also keep a few obscure contacts in your network that have little or nothing to do with your purpose in life – it keeps it fresh and open to new opportunities.

·       Passion: This might be a member of a rock group, people who love to play golf or maybe a desire to play chess in a local club. The binding force within the network is driven by passion and a heart felt desire to spend time on something they love. The one risk of being surrounded by passionate people is that love blinds people and can prevent them from making sensible decisions. It is this very problem that can be seen in politics where leaders surround themselves with people who share a similar passion for a new project, war or campaign. They often end up making silly decisions because they believe their own hype. By all means draw people with passion into your network – but ensure that you keep a level of sensibility in the network structure to avoid making a bad professional choice.

Why do we need to understand the subtle choice criteria that impact how we form social networks? One of the hard facts about the development of a robust and valuable network structure is that the law of diminishing returns will kick in. The greater the number of people in your network the less time and energy you will be able to offer each person. Although technology is often offered as a solution to this – in my experience it makes it worse because we simply end up with a greater number of people in our network – namely because we don’t like to say no to a network request.

This is so clearly evidenced in the current climate. As people worry about their jobs and careers so the number of invites I receive to the online networking groups is increasing each week. But as these people augment their groups then need to consider whom have they invited and what will they do with the connections once in place.

Before sending out yet another online invitation to join Google+ then just think about why you are including them in your circle of contacts. If you are simply building a network of friends and effectively using Google+ or Facebook as an inline contact book - then fire away celebrate when you hit the magical 1000 friends. But if you are seeking to grow your professional network and pt. it to good use then think carefully about who is in your network and how you plan to use the connection.

With each network connection ask:

·       Why have you sent/received the invite?

·       What value exists for you in the connection?

·       What value exists for them?

·       What shared and compound value can be created?

·       Make sure that you are not just connecting because of the Personality, Profession, Proximity, Passion and Purpose preferences?

The demise of the job for life, final salary pension plan and the emergence of global markets means that all jobs (even those with a guaranteed contract) are effectively 6-month contracts. No job can offer anything more concrete than that. You personal security and capacity to feed your family or buy the latest Porsche rest on a combination of what you know and whom you know. The ‘Job’ died many years ago. We are all contractors now.

If your professional network is fat and bloated and full of irrelevance then it will hinder rather than help with any career development you plan to undertake. Treat your network with the same love, care and attention that you would your new Porsche. Check it every week, clean it regularly (weed out the dead contacts) and make sure you keep it topped up with lubricant (new network contacts).

Don’t forget – what you know (your talent) and whom you know (your network) are under your control and no one else’s. You own these so make sure you use them wisely.

 Mick Cope

One swallow does not make a summer

In other words one good or positive event does not mean that everything is all right. We can develop this further to suggest that one instance or action does not mean that a broad generalizable truth can be inferred.

A fight kicking off in my local pub doesn't mean it is a trouble spot - maybe if it happens a second or third time then I might begin to worry that it has gone downhill. A puncture on my car doesn’t mean that my local roads are full of nails and a lucky £10 win on the lottery doesn’t mean that I will win lots of lotteries from now on.

If we accept this premise then why because of one stupid persons action in parliament is there a risk that a rich aspect of our democracy may be withdrawn. Yesterday's pie throwing incident at Mr Murdoch may well result in some major changes to the way that inquiries are handled. As David Allen Green wrote in the New Statesman, this will result in ever tighter security around Parliament, further widening the gulf between rulers and ruled, making life just a bit more unpleasant for those who like living in a liberal democracy. This was also seen in parliament when the purple powder thrown at the Prime Minister a few years ago resulted in a glass screen across the visitors section, Thus creating a barrier between the MPs and their constituents.

I highlight this point because it can be very easy as a coach, consultant or trainer to be given a client contract that is actually a bad choice on their part. The client may well have observed one minor problem in the office and inferred that there is a major issue without ever getting beneath the surface to clarify what the shadow issues might. 

So often I will meet a client for the first time and they give me the solution of ‘I need you to run a training course on xxx’. If I push back and ask why then the response may be ' because yyy happened last week'. But only after pushing further and deeper does it turn out that this action only happened once in the past five years and even then it was driven by some other random and rare activity that is unlikely to ever happen again. 

This idea of systemic challenging is introduced in the 7Cs model using the Client and Clarify stages of the framework. These argue that we must ascertain if there is a real problem and if the problem is a simple fixable issue or if it is a deep and systemic problem to be resolved.

One man throwing a pie at Mr Murdoch does not mean that all committee meetings will have similar problems. The supposed urgent and important issue that your client is pushing you to resolve yesterday may not need such drastic action. 

As a coach, consultant ad trainer I always need to be aware of the ‘Law of unintended consequences’. Any solutions I help deliver will have consequential outcomes for years to come. And most of which I will never be aware of. Hence I need to think carefully before agreeing to deploy any changes at the client’s request.

For more information see 7Cs of Consulting and 7Cs of Coaching