Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do?

Posted on December 12, 2012 by David Tebbutt

Last December we embarked on this blog with little idea where the journey would take us. We just felt that a lot of people of good will were out there with good ideas about how to make our world better. All we had to do was find them. Or, better yet, for them to find us.

And, through a mix of word of mouth and downright cajoling, they delivered their thoughts, based on their life experiences, for us to share with a wider audience. And, for that, we are truly grateful to every one of them. Here they are:

As you probably know, this site is non-commercial. Everything is voluntary and the most anyone gets is the opportunity to see their words published and to give themselves a slight exposure to a wider audience. Some benefit from this more than others. No names, no pack drill.

I’d just like to say “Thank you” to every contributor and reader and wish you all seasonal greetings and a happy new year. We’re going to take a bit of a break now. I’ll leave you with a list of the contributions and perhaps you’ll enjoy reading some of those you missed.

Why things will get better - from a Matt Ridley TED talk
Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, Felix Dennis, on Good Fortune
Never mind GDP, what about Gross National Happiness? - from a Chip Conley TED talk
Reconnecting kids with the school curriculum - Ray Maguire
Has the Khan Academy found the right way to educate? - from a Salman Khan TED talk
Why green makes business sense - Ben Goldsmith
Is sustainable growth a myth? - Clive Longbottom
Rag and bone men of the information world - Euan Semple
The power of community Mark Chillingworth
Where’s the ‘social’ in ‘accountancy’? - Martin Banks
Mind the gap - Hussein Dickie
Inhumane HR behaviour - Tracey Poulton
Listen! (To the right people) - David Tebbutt on Cognitive Edge work
Get on the trust trajectory - Rob Wirszycz
Baby, bathwater, beware … - Anne Marie McEwan
Is green the new gold? - Tarquin Henderson
Hunters got us into this mess – will farmers get us out? - Dr. Bill Nichols
Fairtrade, Organic or Me-Me? - Andy Redfern
How sticky are your labels? - David Tebbutt
Reputation is deeds, not words - Tari Lang
Passion + talent = magic - From Sir Ken Robinson’s work
Authenticity vs perception - Dr. Bill Nichols
Could the fly save humanity? - Jason J. Drew
Ignorance and prejudice - Ibukun Adebayo
Superstorm Sandy: what would you have done? - David Tebbutt
Doing the right thing – even when no one is watching - Neil Crofts
Stubbornness – The Nailhouse Principle - Drew Buddie

So, what do you reckon? Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do? Do you know anyone who would like to share their learnings from real life for the greater good?

Please point them at me trttd@tebbo.com. Thank you. (PS It could be you too!)

Doing the right thing – even when no one is watching

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Neil Crofts

One of our contributors – Andy Redfern – linked us to this excellent blog post by Neil Crofts. Our thanks to Neil who has kindly given us permission to republish it.

Doing the right thing even when no one is watching, can, perhaps be taken as a definition of ethics. It is also the basis for sustainable success and happiness.

We arrived at a point of inflection in the 90′s where the invention of the internet (and therefore the inevitability that someone was watching) coincided with a moment where venal, ego driven, greed is good, success at any price appeared to go mainstream. Corruption, which had generally been the preserve of an elite, was “democratised” to a far wider population of politicians, business people, journalists, celebrities, bankers, sports stars and anyone else who had the opportunity than ever before.

Today we are living with the hangover from a get rich quick decade where thousands prospered at the expense of billions – the naughties indeed!

Although there are those who will continue to pretend it is not, the game is most definitely up. Even despots tend to be more inclusive than they used to be (there are exceptions of course).

Just as philanthropy is the new super yacht, ethics are the new CSR. There is a new moral puritanism sweeping the corporate, sporting and (hopefully) political worlds that says that “success at any price – actually is not success”.

There was a generation of athletes, business people and politicos who genuinely believed that if you did not get caught, you did nothing wrong. Cyclists who believed that if you didn’t fail a dope test, you were clean. Bankers who believed that if you got paid the bonus the loan or bet must have been OK and politicians who believed that if you made it to the end of your term, you were home free.

Q: If you die before your transgressions come out – did you get away with it?

In today’s twitterverse comeuppance is swift and inevitable. Skeletons barely make it to the cupboard, carpets have been replaced with polished floors with nothing to sweep things under and elephants tend to already have been posted on YouTube, making them hard to ignore, no matter what size the room is.

The upshot of all of this is that we have to get used to doing what we are proud of – only and avoiding anything that might compromise us in the future.

Of course redesigning a culture to take account of these new realities is a stupendous challenge and yet that is the process we are in. I feel personally privileged to be part of this process. I am awed by the changes wrought in the last ten years. When I started this journey, a little over ten years ago, authentic business and leadership were a pipe dream, a fantasy and yet today they are an emerging new reality.

I have been accused of living, too much, in the future and this may be so, but I firmly see the evidence of this shift and am inspired and reassured by it.

Ignorance and prejudice

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Ibukun Adebayo

I’ve never been one to cry foul when someone calls me a “‘black’ whatever”; I’m usually more concerned about the ‘whatever’ bit than the fact they’ve confirmed what I’ve known since birth, i.e. that I’m ‘black’.

I once started a job in IT whereby I met with so much resistance in my early days there that I felt like taking up kick-boxing to relieve the stress. I was turned down for kick-boxing lessons because, apparently, my massive feet could have knocked an opponent into a coma.

Eventually, the manager who had led the unwelcoming pack told me one day, “You know you’re the best leader I’ve ever worked with and the only problem I had with you at the beginning is you’re black and you’re a woman, and I’ve never worked for either before”.

Okay, so how did this two-pronged ‘revelation’ affect me, and did it influence my views on the IT industry? It didn’t really. Many people have prejudices and biases, yet very few are as honest as this manager was with his straightforward admission that he was prejudiced against women in IT and that his ignorance about reporting to a black woman was affecting his professional relationship with me.

Things got better after this; and after he’d realised my massive ideas matched my foot size (ten, if you’re interested). While on the subject of my feet, I also take strides of purpose while carrying my team members along with me. Moving to the other end of my body, my unusually large nose means I sniff about and probe and ask my managers the right questions, expecting them to provide answers as I steer my department towards our agreed vision.

In the CIO (Chief Information Officer) community, things do need to be spiced up a bit. Attending CIO conferences (we met at one – ed.) is still a pretty testing experience for me as, despite being born in Balham, I’ve always enjoyed rice – preferably extra-large plates with curry, beef and goat meat – with some nice chilli hot pepper, whereas conference delegates tend to be presented with bland tasting rice, sometimes err… dripping with water, and a few tiny bits of lamb, while, of course the ‘polite’ thing to do is to take about two tablespoons of rice and move on to an equally bland tasting sauce. But, more importantly, you don’t see many female CIOs at these events because there are so few women in ‘C’ positions in IT in the UK. And you see even fewer women there from ethnic minorities.

I don’t believe in quotas, rather in appointing the right person to each role whatever their colour, gender or religious orientation. Sexual orientation shouldn’t even come into the recruitment equation, after-all nobody should care who you get into bed with, as long as you’re personally not being asked to get into bed with anyone other than the love of your personal life.

Managerial life really isn’t that stressful and, because of my baptism of fire into a role where I received affirmation of my race and gender plus of my credentials as a good leader, I’ve learned that leadership means being able to differentiate between prejudice and ignorance. It means being able to deal with any conflict that arises from prejudicial behaviour, and being able to identify development needs where ignorance is the issue. It means ensuring that the ignorant are developed until their ignorance turns into awareness, and always remembering that not all ignorant people are prejudiced, yet all prejudiced people are ignorant.

Passion + talent = magic

Posted on September 6, 2012 by David Tebbutt

If you are already familiar with Sir Ken Robinson‘s work, stop reading now. You will already know how much sense he speaks, interspersed with jokes and asides. You’d never know from listening to him that he was born in Liverpool, to a large working-class family. He speaks beautifully and intelligently about the human condition and what we can do to make our lives better.

He rails at how so many of us fail to achieve our potential, largely because of the way we are taught and conditioned. His 2006 TED video on children and creativity is a classic (it has been viewed almost twelve million times). Here’s a quote, “My contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.”

He views traditional education as an industrial-style narrowing exercise which squeezes out creativity (my paraphrase, not his, by the way). He says, “Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.”

The RSA was inspired to get his talk Changing Education Paradigms animated by Andrew Park’s Cognitive Media. That’s been viewed over eight and a half million times. Talk about viral …

And there’s more, much more, on Sir Ken’s website. His most recent work has been around the subject of aligning your passions and your abilities. He contrasts the lives of many who eke out their working lives in anticipation of the weekends and those who are fulfilled in everything they do. Opposite ends of a spectrum of experience, but it’s easy enough to plot where anyone sits on this continuum. His assertion is that we can move. And, indeed, we should move.

In a recent presentation on Passion for the School of Life, he told the story of a book editor who absolutely loved her work yet prior to this she’d been a concert pianist. Her whole life, her education – right up to her PhD – had been centred around music. Yet, she was far more passionate about books than piano recitals. One day, after another successful concert, the conductor suggested that she hadn’t enjoyed it. It was a pivotal moment. She admitted he was right. Soon after, she became a book editor and closed her piano lid for good.

He suggests that if you are doing something you’re good at and that you love, an hour seems like five minutes. To pinch the title of his recent book, written with Lou Aronica, people like this are in their Element.

If you or your colleagues are finding that time drags, then surely that’s a clear signal that you should plan for change. And, if you need inspiration, Sir Ken Robinson can provide it in spades. Providing you’re partial to his jokes.

Reputation is deeds, not words

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Tari Lang

It’s now 15 years that I’ve been pushing the mantra that “reputation has a financial value”, in my campaign to get reputation on the agenda of the CEO. Back then, reputation was viewed not as a business asset but as a marketing tool to be addressed through PR campaigns. These campaigns tended not to be bound by considerations such as facts, truth or intelligent insight. Siobhan Sharpe, the vacuous proprietor of Perfect Curve in the BBC’s cutting satire Twenty Twelve, embodies just that old style way of dealing with reputation. I cringe watching that programme for the memories of just that type of communicator – just as I cringed all those years ago.

Thankfully we’re all much smarter now. And yet, the banking sector has had to learn the hard way that behaving irresponsibly has destroyed its collective reputation, leading directly to censure, legal recourse and restraint in business practices. Bankers’ remuneration is widely regarded as undeserved and disproportionate.

So I continue to urge my clients to be vigilant about their institutional, corporate and personal behaviour. I try to focus on how leadership teams think and act, not just how they communicate. I examine claims of excellence and talk with clients’ stakeholders to ensure the claims they make can be substantiated. Conversations with clients’ marketing and communications agencies test how responsibly corporate messages are being narrated.

This does make life more complex. But the stakes are higher than ever before. Corporations spend millions on legal defence and counter attack. They spend huge sums on management consulting firms who produce fancy charts to create an organisational structure to replace the last one they created and to demonstrate, of course, that their expensive services continue to be required. Yes, you guessed right, my opinion of big management consultancies is very low. Yet organisations spend only, even now, a relatively small proportion on reputation management and reputation risk assessments.

This piece is not a bid for more work or more money – I’m busy enough, thank you. But there’s a lot of rescuing to be done out there. This needs strategists to raise their game and everything sits on that powerful word: reputation.

Hunters got us into this mess – will farmers get us out?

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Dr. Bill Nichols

It used to be boring. But five recessionary years have confirmed ‘retention’ as marketing fashion’s ‘new black’. It’s all that stuff everybody vaguely knew but most didn’t practice: loyalty, lifetime value, relationships. And, take note, it’s no fad. Just long overdue.

In traditional marketing, acquisition – making the next sale – is king. Understandably. It emphasises the next win, the thrill of the chase. It adopts the language of the ‘hunter’ (as top business developers are called in consultancy): you target the punter and you ‘knock him over’. It offers glamour and rich reward. And, in a final and most egregious flourish, it is the essence of the disaster that has engulfed banking. If you combine PhD-complex products, human ‘hunter’ instinct and cultures incentivised only to hit the next sale or deal, then why is anyone surprised by Barclays et al?

Poor old retention, meanwhile, is hard, continuous work. Long-term and longer yawn. Such ‘farming’ simply doesn’t have the same sex appeal as hunting. It won’t justify a bottle of Bolly! As an early boss summarised: “so long as we win more than we’re losing, who cares?”

Answer: well almost every business. For example, stemming a typical annual 25-33% churn means survival in tough times and will pump the bottom line in good. Leveraging the recommendation value of loyal client-advocates often underpins 50% of new business in a professional services or considered purchase environment. Focusing on your ‘share of wallet’ (say of a customer’s eating out preferences) may not only yield growth but also innovation for the long-term.

How does it work? Well don’t panic. This isn’t an ad for an expensive CRM software implementation. True, that might help when it comes to downstream execution. But first focus on how you create the retention asset: customer goodwill.
Think of customers’ ‘goodwill’ as a series of bank accounts. Keep them nicely in the black and you can ride out problems and build opportunities. Run them on ‘empty’, or into the red, and the smallest incident may mean you lose the customer.

Research finds six major ways to credit your customers’ goodwill accounts. As you might anticipate, people expect to be satisfied with service and utility. And many are committed to brands and relationships.

But evidence suggests that the most valuable is satisfaction based on pleasure. Your product ticks all boxes (utilitarian satisfaction) but do customers enjoy their experiences? Your waiter’s timing is impeccable but does he ever make customers smile? Your project reviews are perfectly organised and beautifully presented but does anyone have fun? And, note, this pleasure (or hedonic) satisfaction unerpins a very potent customer behaviour i.e. public advocacy or willingness to endorse your product in an article or on stage.

Next comes fairness (much loved of course by Brits). Please note this isn’t about some philosophical absolute. It is, rather, about perceptions. If a customer believes that you deal fairly in all aspects from pricing to after-sales service, it creates an unstated ‘my word is my bond’ relationship. Fairness is especially a strong defensive currency. It creates resistance to switching (‘yes, ABC is cheaper but I trust XYZ’) and it supports exclusive preference (‘I know we could easily walk to Beta or Gamma Restaurant but I’m at home at Alphas’). Note to any new potential entrants to UK banking: build even the most basic reputation for fairness and just watch the customers pour out of the old discredited high street players…

And finally: well it may be the ‘new black’ but your opportunity is that most people really don’t know how to wear it well. Retention isn’t about ‘targetting’ with a loyalty card or knocking them over with a special loyal-customer bonus. That’s hunter language…. Effective retention is about engaging, working together, creating mutual opportunities… It’s simply the right thing to do. Isn’t it?

Is green the new gold?

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Tarquin Henderson

Sadly the Environment seems to be increasingly one of Westminster’s favoured battlegrounds. A place where the Treasury can show who really is boss while the Department for Energy and Climate Change (led by a Lib-Dem) attempts to grapple with some of the most challenging issues facing our country today.

I say grapple but I could also (again sadly) say fumble or stumble as there has been an alarming amount of dilly dallying at times on the timing and structure of key environmental policies – but that’s the theme for another post. The key point here is that despite all of this political posturing, the green agenda is not going away and nor can it.

We’ve all heard the view that now we are going through the economic wringer, any thoughts of doing something good for the planet have to take a back seat. That is a view fostered in the main by never-knowingly-under-lunched City types who much prefer to assess business on the levers they best understand and to avoid harder to assess, in number terms, contributory factors like social and environmental responsibility. I think they are missing the point and not just because we all need to ‘save the planet’. (A euphemism for ‘save ourselves’, by the way.)

Environmental issues need to be put into a stronger business context because they are just as relevant to many businesses’ balance sheets as the cost of raw materials, payroll or competitive pricing. That might seem a bit of a stretch but this is really not the warped view of the strident environmentalist lobby. Managing energy use in business today is about making your business more competitive.

A number of factors are at work. Here are three of them:

Firstly, the simple cost of energy. Despite some recent decreases, the general trend is for a steady and inextricable increase in energy costs – to heat the factory, power the machine tools, light the call centre, turn the turbine.
Then there is an increasing trend towards supply-chain compliance. If you make sandwiches (or trucks for that matter) for a supermarket, the chances are that they will be placing increasingly punitive penalties in place if you don’t cut their environmental mustard. Or they may just choose to work with someone else. While that is a factor already with some clear precedents in the Food & Drink sector, we are seeing signs of other markets adopting this strategy – manufacturing, aviation, entertainment and leisure.
Also, while there is a lot of carrot in the Government’s approach to encouraging consumers to be more efficient in their energy use, it’s the big stick that is being used increasingly with businesses. The Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) is already causing disquiet among the UK’s largest businesses – it’s effectively designed to place an energy tax on the country’s biggest energy users. My colleagues and I believe that this approach will begin to filter down towards SMEs before too long. The basic message being, “if you haven’t got your energy act together then the Government are going to strongly ‘encourage’ you to do so …”

What many businesses are missing is the will to do something about all this. To date, unless you are a power user of energy there has been little compulsion to do anything. It’s simply not been that important. My view is that those businesses, no matter how small, who grasp the concept that good energy management can be good for business, will improve their competiveness and their bottom lines. So green can be made into gold.

Baby, bathwater, beware …

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Anne Marie McEwan

William Hague said recently, “There’s only one growth strategy: work hard.” Without daring to go near the politics of that statement, I have to say that it would have made more sense to say “work smart.” You can flog your guts out working hard the same old way but if you don’t take into account the changing world and intelligently figure out how to work with it, then you’re likely to exhaust yourself and fail into the bargain. Sorry William.

At the moment, you hear a lot of buzz around ‘social business’ or, before that, ‘Business 2.0′ and similar sounding slogans. The trouble with such ‘paradigm shifts’ is that they all imply a jettisoning of past experience. How stupid is that? And, no, I’m not taking a pop at anyone or any organisation in particular, just making the point that ‘new’ is often complementary to some of the ‘old’.

Some of the ‘old’ is with us, rallying under a new banner. “Organisations are networks of formal and informal relationships.” Geddaway. Of course they are; they always have been. The difference now is that we have software and communication tools to massively improve their effectiveness.

We have the legacy of the first wave of smart working, in particular, “the need to make innovation everyone’s business and to empower workforces to ‘take action that will benefit the customer without layers of bureaucratic approval’.” Lessons learned from the successful pioneers of these working methods are invaluable input to what’s needed now, in this even more uncertain and chaotic world.

We need to build flexible systems with adaptability, integration, disciplined collaboration, innovation and knowledge sharing in mind. This isn’t a lazy set of buzzwords, each is a vital consideration as we invent our way to a better future. I could have added more – discovery, sharing and co-creation, for example. The point is that the networked world really is a network of brains, knowledge and information sources all orchestrated for the collective good. ‘Collective’ in this case has to include customers which, by extension, means suppliers. Otherwise you won’t have any customers when the current turmoil ends.

Turmoil? No, I’ve not made a big deal of the ways in which the world is changing and the challenges we face because I assume you know. But, just in case, try these for size: ageing populations; shifts in global economic power and declining industries. The latter being replaced by new high-value industries such as: bio-tech; electronic gaming; renewable energies; and so on. Adapting to change is not easy but the status quo is no longer a place of refuge.

The future of work is visible. Most of the ingredients exist, even though we’re bound to see more come along. It doesn’t matter; we have enough to act. We can blend the old with the new and connect up to internal and external knowledge flows.

Here’s an example taken from a presentation by Alistair Moffat: NSN, a 60,000 person organisation formed from parts of Nokia Networks and Siemens Communications, faced the challenge of accelerating the emergence of a common culture. It chose to use discussion forums to create The Culture Square, a forum where company‐wide conversations could take place.

People were encouraged to talk freely and anonymously without risking dismissal for saying what they believed.The values and attitudes of the Chief Executive and his desire to nurture an organisational culture consistent with adult-to-adult relationships, where people could disagree without being disagreeable, were core to how the conversations unfolded and, indeed, succeeded. The Culture Square came to represent trust and inclusion., revealing the important issues that people were most concerned about.

Each person involved in innovation and problem-solving can be augmented by the knowledge and capabilities in their network. This is massive. And it’s at our fingertips. Yet what are many businesses doing with social technologies, the potential turbochargers of change? Imposing a blanket ban.

How blinkered is that?

Anne Marie wants you to know that she was aided and abetted by David Tebbutt in the creation of this post.

Get on the trust trajectory

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Rob Wirszycz

Who do you trust these days? Your holiday company or TripAdvisor? Your PC provider or a user forum? Your mates for an introduction to a new partner or an online dating service? I could go on, but you’ve probably caught my drift. The world has changed. Whether it’s automation or crowdsourcing, there are now better ways to achieve the results you want.

What does this mean for suppliers of goods and services? Once upon a time, they were the source of information and knowledge about their products. And, yes, they were trusted. Many of them did apparently sensible things like outsourcing crucial elements of their operation to low-paid people in far-flung lands who did the minimum they could get away with. This worked for the accountants but not for the customer. Producer-efficient but not customer-effective. No wonder trust and respect evaporated.

We’re waking up. We inhabit a world where we expect the right answers, where we demand high levels of service, where we switch on and get everything we need and, crucially, where we’re used to transferring our business to somewhere more amenable if we feel let down by a supplier.

We don’t actually care much whether we get our answers from an automaton or from a human as long as they’re the right answers. My car tells me when it thinks I’m tired. I don’t mind. It’s usually right. It knows because it looks at time behind the wheel and my driving pattern. I love it (the car that is) so much that I’ve not so much bought a car as bought a driving experience. My every need – service, insurance, monitoring for advance warning of problems en route – is taken care of by the manufacturer’s IT service network, in which the car is a wifi node.

If trust is at the heart of business these days (as it always should have been) then it’s clear that many companies have taken their eye off the trust trajectory. They simply don’t ‘get it’ and continue with their traditional behaviours. They worked in the past, why shouldn’t they continue? Because their customers are different, their expectations have changed and this can only accelerate as the good companies show up the bad. Switching, in most cases, is a button press away. And that button press might dissuade many other people not to use your services too. That press, and all the others, could add up to a massive thumbs down for you.

The good companies, the ones that do ‘get it’, use smart humans and automation driven by data patterns to achieve a positive effect, with the traditional middle bits – outsourcing and out-tasking – being disintermediated. Companies are taking back control and protecting their reputations. At one extreme is the expert interpretation of context, and at the other lies self–service, augmented by knowledge and data. Each aims to completely satisfy the needs and desires of the customer. The boot is now well and truly on the other foot. The customer’s, that is. And we like it. We use this approach to learn where to go on holiday, where to eat, what to watch, who to date, what jobs exist, how to travel to work, how to lose weight, how much my house is worth, and so on.

If your business is unaware of this polarity, then I have bad news for you. You won’t last. If you’re a personal services company – hairdresser, window cleaner, housekeeper – you’ll probably last longer than most. But even your lives will change as people increasingly find you, and drop you, by what they read online.

You are increasingly, not who you think you are, but what others think of you. Collectively. Get it or die.

Listen! (To the right people)

Posted on May 16, 2012 by David Tebbutt

Social media has amplified the power of (Bernard Levin’s) single issue fanatics. They are able to quickly galvanise an army to lobby on any topic. Some are entirely worthy but many are questionable. These forces are then directed at governments, bankers, business leaders – whoever they choose to get in their sights.

The sheer volume of signatories or, in extremis, activists suggests that they are representative of ‘the public’ at large. They aim to sway the press, the public as well as their primary targets. The truth is that the quieter voices in social media, as in society as a whole, quite often have the most meaningful things to say.

Other sources of ‘grass roots’ input are statistics and surveys. The first has shortcomings – lead time and interpretation skill being two. The second requires an intelligent set of questions and response options. The way these are phrased almost inevitably funnels the respondents’ answers.

Decision makers have to choose what to do at any time based on their best understanding of the information (or misinformation) available to that point. Whichever way they jump, they’re going to upset someone. But their job is to arrive at some sort of conviction then act on it in time for their actions to have a meaningful effect.

Ideally, their actions should address the real needs of those affected by them. But how often do you see decisions made which are total nonsense because they’re based on abstract principles rather than local context?

At a very mundane level, our local council decided to create a Jubilee Garden – benches, paths, an obelisk, trees and bushes. Had they asked the local park users – dog walkers and the like – they’d have learnt that the garden would end up as a magnet for graffiti, vandalism and litter. The thing’s not even finished yet and the local hooligans have already bent the steel security fences out of shape and scored the new benches.

Of course, this is trivial by comparison with tackling violence in an unstable country or providing the right support to the right people in an area hit by disease or social disorder. Decisions made at the centre may make sense to aid organisations or governments but, to the people on the ground, they may just miss the mark completely. Wasted money, wasted effort and increased disaffection. Not quite the desired result.

This blog is not in the business of promoting products or services but one in particular does point to a possible way forward. SenseMaker is a suite of software tools that helps extract meaning from large collections of personal experiences contributed by members of a community. These stories are triggered by a simple but carefully phrased open question. The teller of the story is then asked to add meaning, or metadata, in various simple ways – plotting their perspective between three variables, using sliders or clicking check boxes in a questionnaire. Without plunging into too much detail, a collection of this metadata is used to generates plots where the clusters reveal widely held feelings about particular issues.

A triad plot showing response clusters. Each individual dot leads to a story, enabling the researcher to drill deeper.

The process is reasonably speedy and the results are not only statistically valid, they are rich in context too. Rather than so-called experts analysing the stories and determining their significance, the respondents themselves do it. This is a profound change from traditional methods. And nothing is lost; the decision makers can drill down to the original stories and really gain an insight to how these previously powerless people experience the world.

Such insights, in the right hands, can lead to the right actions.

My thanks to Irene Guijt, Tony Quinlan and Dave Snowden for much of the intelligent content of this post.

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