Joining the dots

Trying to remember the Chinese word for something
or other. But where will it lead?

Today I had lunch with my counterpart in the Hong Kong learning and development team of another international law firm.  Simon is unassuming: quiet, thoughtful and understated.  You'd never guess that this year he swam from Hong Kong to Macau, 35km across one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, setting a new world record in the process. Simon has just extended his stay in Hong Kong by another year and now works a four day week. He spends his non-work day studying for a Master's degree in psychology and is starting a not-for-profit initiative to teach domestic helpers how to swim. Our conversation meandered, as it tends to when you're talking to someone interesting. Towards the end he asked me where I go from here. What's next? Where do I want all this lead me? 

An interesting question.  The short answer is I don't know. At the moment I'm having too much fun to think seriously about what the future holds - at least in career terms.  Without much thought I could give several possibilities - a more senior role with HSF, a 'head of' role somewhere, my boss's job one day, freelance consultancy.  Or perhaps a year or two off work - house husbandry, full time father, renovate a house or two.  As I was offering up these disparate possibilities I was reminded of the story Steve Jobs told students during his Stanford University commencement address some years ago about joining the dots. 

Jobs tells about the time he dropped out of college, uncomfortable with wasting his adoptive parents' hard earned cash on an expensive education that wasn't teaching him anything.  As Jobs tells it, he 'dropped in' - liberating himself from a fixed curriculum, he would sleep on friends' floors and attend whichever classes looked interesting. His days were spent sitting at the back of lecture theatres listening, absorbing, thinking about whatever captured his imagination on any given day.  During this time he became obsessed with a series of handwritten posters appearing around campus - each itself a beautiful calligraphic work of art.  The posters led him to join a calligraphy class, through no desire greater than curiosity and the fact that it seemed - in that moment - something worth doing for its own sake. Years later when Apple were producing the first Macintosh operating system - the daddy of all 'windows' type graphical user interface systems - he insisted that users should be able to choose from a wide variety of fonts.  "But why?" his bemused software engineers would ask him, "its just a computer. You're just typing." Steve Jobs knew differently. In his view you were no more "just typing" when you sat down to write at a Mac keyboard than you would be "just writing" when you sit down  to craft a handwritten letter, a poem, or a beautiful piece of calligraphy. Writers were free to choose their own handwriting and in his view it should be no different just because the medium is keyboard and screen rather than pen and paper.  But this story wasn't about fonts or handwriting, it was about joining the dots.  His point was that when he took that calligraphy class he had no idea that many years into the future he would use the knowledge, appreciation and artistic sensibility of his calligraphy class to redefine personal computing. It was only afterwards that he could join the dots. 

Earlier this year Anita and I debated the merits or otherwise of enrolling Lara in a pre-school nursery programme that would be conducted 60% of the time entirely in Mandarin Chinese.  Its a notoriously difficult language to learn as an adult, yet as a three year old Lara seemingly picks it up with ease, happily singing to herself, counting to ten, and pointing out to us the Mandarin words for household objects.  But will she learn enough for it to be of use in her future? Will she study at SOAS, or grow up bi-lingual? Will it lead to a career in international law? Or as a translator at the UN? Or even an MI6 spy? Will she return to the UK in a few years and forget everything she's learned? 

Who knows. And frankly, who cares.  Only when Lara looks backwards fro her future will she know whether she can join these and myriad other dots.  For now, they're random, and I'm convinced that's the way it should be.  The future is unknowable, and it's pointless trying to predict it.  Let's stick to whatever feels like it's worth doing in the moment, for its own sake. Or for no other reason than curiosity and adventure. 

Slow Down!

Lara and Iliya take it slow, Chiang Mai, October 2014.

In July I turned 37. Anita asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday and on a whim I said yoga.  I'm not sure why, it just appealed. Perhaps I'm becoming more aware of my stiff and creaky body when I ease myself out of bed the morning after a big day of exercise. Perhaps its something I read about Ryan Giggs attributing his longevity as a footballer to Yoga (and look what he achieved - ON the field at least). Whatever it was, Anita booked us in for a free taster session and we dutifully trooped down to Pure Yoga in Causeway Bay for Dana's Hatha class.  In a nutshell: the class was great; Dana was very forgiving; we're both hooked; we signed up to a year's membership.  But the thing that blew me away more than anything was how it forced us to slow down. 

I have said it before in this blog: life is fast. Hong Kong life is particularly fast. With so much to see, do and experience, I worry that I won't fit it all in. We fill our mornings and our evenings, our weekends and our calendars.  Yet inside the yoga studio - no sound, no talking, no phones - life slows down. Breathing slows. Movement slows. It feels almost guiltily indulgent. 

Don't misunderstand me: yoga is hard.  I sweat profusely. My body protests at the contorted positions I ask it to adopt. My legs scream in lactic-acid-induced pain after a couple of minutes of Warrior II. There can be no mistaking that it is a thorough workout.  Yet at the same time it is undeniably slow - in stark contrast to so much of life. And perhaps therein lies the appeal. 

In his seminal book "In Praise of Slow", Carl Honore uses Yoga of an example of the counter-intuitive benefits of taking things, well, slowly.  Western exercise philosophy tells us that fast is right, fast is best.  Yet much eastern philosophy says the opposite. Yoga, Tai Chi, and even 'fast' martial arts like Aikido and Karate are based on an underlying philosophy of slowing things down and being aware in the moment - what would currently be labelled with the buzzword 'mindfulness'. 

I can't rate Honore's book highly enough and I'd urge anyone who feels their life is speeding out of control to buy a copy and enjoy a leisurely few hours indulging yourself in his wisdom.  The idea behind going slow isn't to become a slacker, or a layabout, or to be lazy for laziness's sake. Sometimes one needs to go fast, sometimes slow. But Honore urges us to get away from the idea that fast is always best. Its about balance, about finding the right speed for our lives in each moment - what musicians would call the tempo giusto.

Honore's central point is this: we have been conditioned to equate speed with productivity. In our drive to be productive, efficient and competitive we strive constantly to achieve more in less time - none more so that in the workplace, but increasingly at home and in our leisure time.  Yet as Honore points out, this equation is fundamentally flawed: "when everyone takes the fast option, the advantage of going fast vanishes, forcing us to go faster still. Eventually we are left with an arms race based on speed. And we all know where arms races end up: in the grim stalemate of Mutually Assured Destruction."

Nothing, and no-one, is immune form the 'fast is best' mentality - not even children: in the East, and increasingly in the West education starts ever earlier and involves cramming more and more into early years. Children are in a race - often driven by their parents - to hit milestones earlier: talking, walking, reading, writing, swimming, riding a bike, or learning their times tables. Earlier this year Anita and I found ourselves comparing pre-schools for Lara (who had just turned three) based in part on their academic curricula - what would she be learning? And by when? Yet perhaps we should take a leaf out of Plato's book, who several hundred years before the birth of Christ recognised that "the most effective form of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things."

Whether its eating, exercising, reading, working, raising children or having sex, Honore argues there is always a benefit in going slow. Do less; give yourself more time. Focus on quality over quantity.  Its a mantra echoed by all sorts of people, including the dean of Harvard University's undergraduate school - hardly a bastion of laziness or under-achievement. 

Its only when we slow down parts of our life that we make time for the other parts that matter - taking the kids to school, reading them a story, enjoying a slow meal or a good novel, reading, thinking, or simply daydreaming. As Einstein always maintained, we're at our creative best when we give ourselves time to do nothing at all. But perhaps the last word should go to Ghandi:

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."

You've got to make a change...

My job has a strong organisational change dimension to it. This makes my job paradoxically both interesting and challenging for one reason: organisational change is hard won. Whilst organisations consist to some degree of processes, systems and rules, they largely consist of people and behaviours.  And behavioural change is particularly hard won because given enough time behaviours become habits. We all know that old habits die hard: a cliché, but also a truism.  Depending on which dictionary you prefer, a habit can be defined as "a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up", "an established disposition of character" or "an acquired behaviour pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary".  

In fact, behaviours become so engrained over time that we start to confuse behavior with personality –  we persuade ourselves that it is not just what we do, it's who we are.  "I can't change who I am" is a familiar refrain to anyone concerned with behavioural change.  To which the response is: true – but you can change what you do. 

A fundamental issue that needs to be understood by anyone wishing to change behavior is that "making a change" implies it is a one-off event. That in itself is misleading.  Change is a process, something that has to happen continuously, over time, with a degree of consistency and discipline until the new behavioural state is attained.  Some studies have suggested that 30 continual days' worth of the desired behaviour is the minimum required to engrain it as a new habit.

A recent article in Harvard Business Review suggested we could do worse than look to the painter Pablo Picasso for inspiration. Picasso famously said his approach to becoming great at his art was to ensure that he practiced continuously.  For him this meant committing to painting every day. Crucially though Picasso said that rather than have to decide, every day, that he would paint, he decided just once that he would paint every day, and then consciously and deliberately structured his daily routine in such a way that he could easily do so.

This logic can be applied to anything: whether its committing to exercising more, keeping in better touch with friends and family, interacting more with colleagues or giving regular feedback at work.  Constructing a routine, putting in place rituals and setting up your working day so that these things happen as part of your routine as a matter of course mean that behavioural change needn't become a battle of willpower or a matter of self-discipline.  Some of the most famous "change" programmes in the world involve twelve steps, but maybe three steps are all that's required: first, decide what you want to do more of, less of or differently; second, construct a routine and introduce rituals so that it becomes easy for you to do that. Third: enjoy the feeling of change.

Willpower and discipline or routine and ritual? I'd say less willpower is required than we might think, but perhaps a wee bit more creative thinking.   

So the question is, what will you change?