A stumbling block to collaborative learning (and working)

A recent post from Doug Belshaw, in which he quotes extensively from Steve Shapiro got me thinking about a conversation my husband and I often have, out of sheer frustration.

One of the things South Africans in the UK are often accused of is being gung ho. This is because of a different formative workplace experience. I don't know what it's like now, but during the years that we lived and worked there, actions would be allocated during meetings, and the owners of those actions would be expected to go away, do the job and come back with the completed chart, project, design, whatever. If you needed help doing X-thing, you spoke to the person with the skills or the access or the authority and you got it done. If you had a meeting with your line manager or your team before the task was complete, you would report on your progress and then get back to it afterwards. If you needed to escalate the matter to your line manager because you weren't getting the results you wanted, you did. But you owned the task.

So when we moved to the UK, we adopted the same approach... and it didn't go down at all well!

As an example:

I once worked at a company as the in-house IT trainer. I should point out at this stage that it was explicitly stated that they wanted me to be able to hit the ground running, because my line manager (the IT director) had a big project looming, and wouldn't be able to allocate much time to training. At a meeting with the stakeholders, it was decided that everyone in the company needed to have (among other things) certain Excel skills. Now of course, the skills that were needed day to day by the people in that company weren't the same as the skills needed by people in another company. So we identified the core actions that were likely to form part of pretty much everyone's day job within the organisation. We also identified a set of additional Excel skills that a subset of employees would need. These we would address separately. It was decided that everyone should be invited to attend a core skills workshop, but that, initially, at any rate, only those who used the additional skills would be asked to attend that workshop.

It seemed pretty clearcut to me, so I did what I thought I had been asked to do. I hit the ground running. I designed a core skills workshop. I set up exercises using familiar spreadsheets that users were likely to encounter on a day to day basis, in order to provide context for the features being covered. I created a manual, using screen grabs as signposts. I created an index, so that attendees could refer back to the manual after the workshop. I spoke to the in-house print team, and got them to do a nice layout for me.

We had already drawn up a very nice questionnaire which served as a base level TNA, and we had a clear idea where the greatest need was.

We had also kitted out the training room with the equipment needed.

So, we were all systems go. I invited my first batch for the pilot session of the workshop... and all hell broke loose.

Apparently, I was supposed to check back with my line manager at every step of the way. Each step needed to be approved before I could move on to the next step. Since no-one above me on the food chain had the remotest idea about learning or training... and were singularly lacking in people skills, I was completely non-plussed. We had already decided everything that needed to be decided, surely? I had been given my actions, and I was, well, actioning them.

My husband's experience is similar. He will be asked to write a report on X thing, but the report is sent back umpteen times, with minor changes and edits, sometimes to changes and edits made earlier.

And it is this ethos that I think stands in the way of the successful implementation of social business, collaborative working and collaborative learning. I have been in situations where it has fallen to me to create a shared space for a certain project (for example, a wiki). Immediately I have done so, the rest of the team has then deferred to me as the owner of such space. Instead of editing material entered, they would send me an email, identifying suggested changes. I have also worked with organisations that have introduced systems such as Sharepoint in order to encourage collaborative working, but then immediately locked down all the permissions and so on, so that only management approved materials can be published in shared space.

So, I would suggest that, if social business is to become de rigeur, then the offline attitudes and culture need to be addressed, too.

When you give someone a task to do, you need to trust them to do the task, and empower them to call on such resources within the business as are needed in order to do so. You need to trust them to manage their time, to assist others with other projects as and when it is appropriate. You need to allow them to have an exchange of emails without CC-ing you in all the time. You need to be available to them, if they need your help, but not hanging over their shoulders to make sure they do the job as you would do it (if you don't have anything else to do, maybe you should have done the task yourself, huh?). You need to let them make mistakes and ask them what they learned and what they would do differently... then let them try again. You need to let them take credit for what works and own up to what fails without feeling that they are failures.

In other words, you need to trust yourself, too. If you hired them, because you believed that they could do the job, then let them do the job and appreciate the time it frees up to let you do yours!

In most of the organisations I have worked with, the nature of online relationships replicates the organisational culture offline.

Until we start to give people a bit of room to breathe, I think we're not going to be able to properly harness the power of social business.

...or that's what I think, anyway.

Crossing the language divide using online tools

I'd like to tell you a true story about something that happened to me quite recently.

We keep getting mail for the previous owners of our house. We have lived in this house for more than two and a half years, so mostly, it's just junk mail. But there's one rather serious-looking envelope that keeps arriving from Paris. It's addressed in French and indicates it contains official documents which require a signature. I think it has something to do with tax, but I'm not quite sure what gave me that impression.

I have repeatedly done a return to sender, but the documents keeps returning, each time with a more urgent looking message on the envelope. Last time, I wrote on the envelope in large letters: Mr Bloggs has not lived at this address for well over two years, please update your records.

The documents came back last week.

I was tempted to open them to find some contact details, when I noticed what appeared to be a phone number on the front of the envelope. Nothing ventured...

I used Google translate to find out how to say, "Is there anyone there who can speak English, please?" and practised it a few times.

When the phone was answered, I stumbled through "Est-ce qu'il ya quelqu'un qui parle anglais, s'il vous plaît?"

The lady told me that there was not.

Hmm. How was I going to explain my situation to her? I know enough French to say "Je ne parle pas francais, mais une moment, s'il vous plait..."

I typed into the translate box, "You keep sending me letters for Mr Bloggs." followed by "But he hasn't lived in this house for more than two years." I then used the 'listen' button to play this to her through my phone.


She figured out (more or less) what I was doing and spoke very slowly back to me in a combination of French and English. Eventually, we managed to establish that I no longer wanted Mr Bloggs's tax demands (or whatever they were), that I didn't have a forwarding address for him, and that she should stop sending his mail here.

It was clunky, but you know what? It worked. Now where's my flipping babelfish?

Pretty

I came across this slam poetry video via the Facebook page of Ruth Demitroff. My sap rises every time I watch it... and I have watched it many times.

Be aware that it contains a single profanity, entirely warranted in my view.

Every little girl (and big girl, for that matter) should hear something along these lines.

The blame game is counter-cultural to learning

Beth Kanter wrote a post that set me thinking about blame culture and the making of mistakes. One thing we loudmouths learn early on is that the blame culture is alive and well...and the loudest mouth makes for the easiest scapegoat.

At school I was (as the expression seems to have become) all mouth and no trousers. I talked a good line in rebellion, but I obeyed the rules as if I were on rails. It made no difference. I got into as much trouble as if I were a complete hellcat. Teachers approaching our classroom from down the corridor would hear some kind of kerfuffle and enter the room declaring what my punishment was to be. The fact that I was more often that not frantically trying to finish the homework that had been sidelined by my innumerable co-curricular and extra-curricular activities made not the slightest bit of difference.

This followed me to college, where the matron once grounded me for three weeks for breaking curfew, when I had been stuck in a lift all night at a friend's hostel. No amount of offers of evidence of my innocence would suffice. On another occasion, I was awoken late at night and ordered to her office to be told, "I can hear you from here! I can't get a wink of sleep with all the noise you're making!" I didn't endear myself to her by apologising for snoring and blaming it on catarrh. As I said: all mouth.

My first 'proper' job was a very junior role in the customer service department of a blanket factory, run by a petty tyrant who screamed (no other word will suffice) at people on a daily basis. He was a real piece of work and no-one wanted to be on the humiliating receiving end of one of his tirades. As a consequence, finger-pointing (and outright lying) was a regular feature of the business culture. On one occasion, there was a huge to do, because the distribution list from one of our biggest customers detailed despatch to their various stores in multiples of 14, but the goods - thousands upon thousands of blankets - had been packed in multiples of 12. Mr Tyrant went ballistic and starting tearing strips off people left and right. And of course, the finger-pointing began. The dervish entered my office, already well on his way to bursting a blood vessel and yelling at full volume before he even crossed the threshold.

I wigged out.

I was already known as 'Bof' (bundle of fire) because I had stood up to him (and other members of the senior staff) in the past, so it was not entirely without precedent that I yelled, "That. Is. Enough! Shut up and let me talk!"

I asked him what kind of operation he ran that would put a 21 year old office junior in charge of making senior management decisions about logistics. I pointed out (loudly - and probably colourfully), that there were people a lot higher than me on the food chain, earning more in a week than I did in a month, whose job it was to make these decisions. But because he was such a bully and a tyrant, none of them was prepared to acknowledge having made this mistake, so they just kept pointing fingers until it came to the bottom of the pile and I had no-one to point at. I told him that, if he had spent half the energy on finding a solution as he had on trying to find someone to blame, the blankets could by now have been repackaged and on their way to the client. By this time, there was dead silence in all the neighbouring offices.

To give him his due, he burst out laughing and told me that I had more chutzpah than a shiksa had any right to.

But that spectre follows me even to this day. A couple of years ago, I made a decision that put me in the firing line and, instead of coming to my defence, my manager served my head up on a platter to soothe ruffled feathers higher up the food chain. The mouth is silenced when the head is plattered.

But this is something I have known since before I had wrinkles and greys. It doesn't take wisdom, just common sense:

A blame culture saps energy. It distracts from solution finding. While everyone runs around trying to find out who was to blame, in order to mete out punishment, things cannot move forward.

If, instead, energy is spent on finding a solution, lessons can be learnt, deliveries made, damage controlled, etc. etc. And, in such a culture, it is far more likely that people will acknowledge having screwed up, thus uncovering mistakes before the knock-on effect gets out of hand.

Can we instead work towards a culture of "Oh hell. I screwed up. Can we fix it?"

Please?

Multilinguistic monolingualism

I've been thinking about the different forms there are of a single language, and how we need to master so many of them during a lifetime.

For example, the language I use at home with my family isn't the same as the language I would use in an academic paper (not that I ever mastered that particular form of English, it has to be said!).

My kids happily use 1337 (leet) speak online with their friends and even in their text messages to one another. Occasionally, they will use elements of 1337 when texting me. Elements of 1337 have informed lolcat (follow the link and have a bit of fun, I dare you!). Even my pedantic septuagenarian mother has adopted some of the shortcut spellings when sending text messages (her most recent message to me included the word 'fite', for example... I never thought I'd see the day!).

My last employer owned the rights to a few courses in business English in a range of delivery media.

Here are some anecdotes that illustrate misapplication of contextual terminology:
A neurosurgery theatre nurse recently told me about a wonderfully talented Vietnamese neurosurgeon who had very little English when he joined the team at the hospital where she works. Being an intelligent and determined man, he learned quickly by listening to and imitating his colleagues. But he learned the hard way that it is inappropriate to tell a patient's family, "Oh, he's toast."

When my husband arrived in South Africa as a child, at the prompting of his classmates, he went and told his teacher to "Go jump in the lake" (although you can be pretty sure what he actually said was "gaw yump in de lake"). She remembered that with fondness when he phoned her some 25 years later to wish her well on her retirement.

A pastor friend of mine went to preach at a church in Mexico, where one or two teenagers, passionately devout about their Christian faith, sported T-shirts with the most profane of slogans, utterly oblivious to the meaning of the words writ large across their chests.

If there are this many forms of the language of which I am a native speaker, goodness knows how many forms there are of the languages of which I am not a native speaker. I wonder how many times I have put my foot in it. I know of one occasion when I politely advised a Swede that my Swedish was poor, but that I could follow if only they would speak 'more badly'. I'm sure there have been countless other occasions.

As national and cultural boundaries are breached by social media, we find ourselves in daily contact with non-native speakers of our language. We might need to remember to cut them a little slack... there may be times when they say something grossly offensive without meaning to do so!

Learning from the British

There is much that is amiss with British culture, but there are times when things happen to make me deeply appreciate the things that are so very right with it.

I would like to relate a true incident to highlight this.

At a recent conference, a prominent American speaker had cause to summon a delegate onto the platform. In a largely white audience, this delegate was one of the few black people in attendance. The speaker explained that, in America, he would call this man African-American, but he didn't know what term to use in the UK. "What do I call you?" he asked the man. To resounding cheers from the by now very uncomfortable audience, the man answered, "I'm British."

I have always wondered how 'African American' is a less offensive term than 'black' because it amounts to pretty much the same thing. It is a term which serves to divide a society on the basis of skin colour. What's wrong with 'American'? Why does there have to be differentiation at all?

Oddly enough, the one person I can think of to whom the term can accurately be applied is President Obama, since he has one African parent, and one American parent.

But the 'African' bit is somewhat misleading, anyway. I play squash once a week with a friend. Let's say two people were watching us play and person A asked, "Who's winning?" If person B answered, "The African woman is behind by 6 points," person A would probably think I had opened a can of whup-ass on my friend. But under those circumstances, they would be dead wrong. You see, she's black-and-British, while I am white-and-African.

Some time back, I related how I had been hounded out of an online group for Africans on the basis of my skin colour. To add insult to injury, the ringleader of my virtual lynch party was an American woman who had never set foot on African soil.

It doesn't work.

In recent years, I have noticed increasingly racist tendencies on the part of friends and family back in South Africa, as the problems in the country fuel the racial tensions and give rise to all manner of blame-game tactics. I have heard the most pejorative terms coming from the mouths of people I love, people from whom I never expected to hear such talk.

And I want no part of it.

I far prefer a society in which a person of any skin colour whatsoever can say unequivocally, "I am British."

Reward

The whole theme of reward or cause-and-effect is exercising my mind lately. Mostly it just goes in circles.

I'm not about to disinter Pavlov, but I can't help feeling that we should be looking to reward desired behaviours in education, in the workplace and even in society in general.

Obviously, the nature of the reward would have to be made appropriate to the context. I can't see us giving a newly appointed manager a star for sharing his crayons with the person at the next desk.

Recently, my elder son asked me to intervene in a situation for him. He had lent a sum of money to his younger brother. It seems my younger son was going to repay this debt at £5/month, interest free. But that would take several months, by which time my elder son will have finished school and started his gap year in Australia. So he asked if I would give him the money, and let my younger son repay me at this rate.

I agreed, but I shouldn't have. The thing is, my elder son lent the money to his brother without establishing the terms of repayment first. This is not a very wise thing to do, and in taking over the debt, I have rewarded his poor choice. It isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, so this would have been an ideal opportunity for a bit of tough love. A lesson to be learnt at no great cost.

I'm too much of a softie!

As I see it, the exam system also rewards the wrong behaviours. I know some kids who seem pretty dense, to be honest. They seem to know nothing about anything, and are utterly unable to hold a meaningful conversation about anything of substance. And yet they are in the top set for all their subjects at school, raking in the A grades. If education is preparation for life, the behaviours that should be rewarded are surely things like the ability to find information on a given subject, establish whether information is valid/reliable, apply information to a situation that does not exactly mirror a case study, work as a team, delegate responsibility, meet a deadline, be innovative with limited resources, overcome obstacles. You know... real life stuff.

We're a long way from that, I reckon. Probably mainly because we're a long way from knowing how to assess those skills!

I used to share a house with a few long distance truck drivers when I was a student. These guys were paid a certain fee to haul a load from point A to point B. They would get a bonus for doing it extra quickly. Not only that, but if they managed to shave a day off the delivery time, that gave them an extra day to start earning on the next project. So any time saved gained double rewards, financially speaking. So these guys would drive for 24 hours at a stretch, overdosing on caffeine in attempt to stay awake. There is no doubt that they constituted a hazard to other road users and themselves. In fact, I heard a couple of years back that one of them had been killed in an accident.

But the system was such that they were rewarded for this behaviour.

I have heard many tales of teenage girls in the UK, fed up with their parents restrictive rules, deliberately becoming pregnant in order to qualify for additional benefit payments and perhaps get a council flat. I'm not pretending to know a better way to respond in this situation, but it strikes me that this is another example of rewarding the wrong behaviour.

Like I said, my mind has been going in circles on this subject. I'm not sure I have any constructive answers, but I guess a change to the education system wouldn't hurt!

When cultures collide

Every now and again, something happens that reminds me that we can't take for granted that the learning experiences (or anything else for that matter) we provide will make sense to everyone. We sometimes under-estimate the role that culture can play.

Even though I live as something of a cultural misfit in a country not my own, I guess I have grown accustomed to enough little quirks of the British psyche not to notice them. But today, I witnessed an incident that brought home with a thump how different cultures react in situations. Of course, I am generalising enormously - we are all individuals, but there remain certain cultural tendencies.

This afternoon, I boarded a rather full train in Birmingham, bound for home. Almost all the seats on the train were reserved. However, some people had taken a chance that the person might have sat somewhere else or might not show. Right next to where I was standing, a man and a woman were sitting in two seats within a cluster of four. An elegantly dressed woman trailing two offspring in their early 20s strode up and declared loudly in an American accent, "Right, someone doesn't belong here, because we have three seats booked and there are only two open." The man assured her that he had booked his seat. The woman, seated next to the man, and against the wall, said meekly in a local accent "Would you like me to move?" To which the owner of the seat replied, "No. I want you to get out. Those are our seats."

Still quietly, but dripping with the sort of sweetly understated irony that appears to be the exclusive province of a certain sector of English society, the woman said, as she collected her things, "Thank you for asking so nicely."

Realising that her barb had gone unnoticed by the American woman, she then said with just the merest hint of assertiveness, "You might have been more polite."

As the American woman, her son and daughter took their seats, and the English woman walked away they both said (one sotto voce and the other more volubly) "So rude!" The American woman added "What's the point of reserving seats if people are just going to help themselves to them?"

Of course, no-one else said a thing, but a few other passengers found a way to make it abundantly clear to the English woman that they were on her side.

I wondered which way the general support would have gone if the same incident had played out in the US.