“So they finished their supper in great joy and contentment, and presently retired to rest between clean sheets, safe in Toad’s ancestral home, won back by matchless valour, consummate strategy, and a proper handling of sticks.” Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 1908.

Christmas is always my time for catching up on wider reading. This year I chanced upon a copy of The Wind in the Willows when I was clearing out an old bookcase, and re-read this beautiful children’s story. Those of you who know this story will remember that Toad’s grand home is invaded by the stoats and weasels while he is in prison for stealing a motor car. (A very rare commodity of course in 1908!) However, with the help of his good friends the rat, the mole, and the badger they recapture Toad’s ancestral home during a daring raid using underground tunnels to take the stoats and weasels by surprise while they are partying!

What struck me in this story was the animals’ reflection on why they considered themselves successful. In my blog of 30 January last year I talked about the ingredients of success in All Blacks rugby and Lakeland hill farming, in particular how to get the very best of results in whatever endeavor we undertake. Kenneth Grahame’s pithy summary is much more urbane and simple than many business texts on this topic: in one phrase he sums up the three elements you need to achieve success. These are character, strategy and tools.

Kenneth Grahame’s phrase needs a little translation to bring it into the 21^st century. Valour is not a word we hear used often. It means great courage in the face of danger, especially in battle. If we are faced with ‘risk’, ‘challenge’, and ‘goals’, then success in business – whether commercial, social or ethical – could be seen as a battle which requires a leader to show courage through the choices they may need to exercise facing the unknown.

The second corner of this triangle – in which all three elements form a necessary whole – is strategy: but consummate strategy at that. ‘Consummate’ as an adjective means showing great skill and flair; as a verb it means to complete a transaction. So in the sense meant by Grahame strategy indicates not simply a plan or policy, but its successful execution and implementation. So often we can be weighed down by the words, spending too much time on arguments about what we should do, leaving too little time to put our words into action.

But consummate is not just about completion for completions sake: it is the innovation and novelty that emerges as a result of the initial and ongoing thinking and conversations. This should focus around the following question: ‘What are the actions that will take us to a new place that makes us more effective than we have been in the past, or more aligned with the vision and goals we are seeking to achieve?’ As always, flair will rarely come through the genius of one person working alone; it is much more likely to come from the ‘receptive context’: that is, the genius that arises from the myriad of conversations when the right people get together in the right space at the right time, often across organisations.

And finally we come to that lovely phrase ‘a proper handling of sticks’. In other words, we win the ‘battle’ not just because we have bigger or better sticks, but because we know at any one moment how best to use them. Thus training is the key to productivity, something we are lamentably poor in this Country – on all the available data – at offering to our staff. Training is often the first budget to be cut in an era of austerity, yet opportunities to learn, test and share are key to a consummate strategy.

We all need a little more Wind in the Willows.

Nick Day, Exeter, 10 January 2018

I have always been an admirer of John Berger, the art critic and social commentator most noted for his seminal book Ways of Seeing published in 1972, who has died earlier this Year aged 90. I loved his pictorial collaboration with the photographer John Mohr on the life of European migrant workers in the Seventh Man (1975); and his evocative account of living and farming in the disappearing world of rural France captured in Pig Earth (1979). His work always invites us to see the world differently, and thus encourage us to move in new directions. He says in Ways of Seeing: “What we see and what we know is never settled” [1].

His final book of reflections published just before he died he entitled ‘Confabulations’. The OED translates this as ‘private and friendly conversations’, while the LOD suggests it means ‘talking together’. This clearly suggests intimacy and warmth, gossip and chatter, something collaborative, conversations about what is personally significant to us, dialogue perhaps of agreement or disagreement: out of which we make sense of our world. Here Berger returns to one of his key themes, that of language and its use.

As a consultant often working to mediate between agencies in complex settings and dealing with people who can feel at great distance from the professionals seeking to support them language and its use has always been the critical tool for me. Tools and techniques maybe useful: but it is the conversations that help us to decide when and how to use these tools, and pull out the messages that arise, that is the meat-and-drink of any good consultant. As consultants we spend a good deal of our time as translators between different worlds.

“True translation”, Berger says in Confabulations, “is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair: the third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal” [2]. Getting behind what a speaker is trying to say, understanding the context and desire, trying to learn their starting points and assumptions is more than words: it is also critical to see gesture and hear voice inflection, to see smile or a shed tear, to ‘feel’ the mood and ambience.

Here I used to think that technology had its limitations, particularly as a ‘return to the pre-verbal’ and therefore the intuitive can often involve group collaboration and discourse in the same physical setting. Yet I see that recent advances in machine learning are starting to help us build on the intuitive. For example a US healthcare organisation called Triggr that supports people in recovery from addictions have devised a new app for mobile phones that uses algorithms [3] to map deviation from safe behaviours and so trigger a human intervention before someone stops engaging in positive recovery behaviour. As the machine learns it builds up a greater degree of predictability, and now boasts over 92% accuracy.

I am fascinated by this new machine world, with its ability to manage complex data and pull out messages for us to use in making sense of ‘the pre-verbal’. I can see enormous benefits to improving public service. These developments represent the ongoing, natural tension in the partnership between the human and the technical with which we constantly grapple: but a partnership that must always remain at the service of humans. At Triggr medical experts and ex-addicts define and review what constitutes safe behaviours and risk moments, against individual starting profiles: the machine then ‘manages’ data that contributes to the case management and well-being of an individual by triggering the most appropriate human intervention based on reproducing what the CEO calls ‘motherly intuition’.

Researching the term ‘confabulations’ further I was amazed to learn that it is central to the theory of cognition and consciousness advanced by S.L. Thaler, an American scientist, in the 1990s in which he shows that new thoughts and ideas can originate in artificial neural networks (ANNs) in the same manner as biological (animal/human) networks i.e. there are emergent ideas in machines as well as in humans that can arise from learning.

In psychiatry ‘confabulation’ is defined as a disturbance of memory, in which the ‘speaker’ produces fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, but importantly without the conscious intention to deceive. These distortions can vary on a continuum between subtle alterations or bizarre fabrications, and in which the individual is generally very confident about their recollections, despite contradictory evidence. Although individuals can present blatantly false information, confabulation can seem to the speaker to be coherent, internally consistent, and relatively normal. (Is this a definition of Trump-ism?)

If I follow the thread correctly, although confess to not fully understanding the science, while confabulation in psychiatry equates to a false, degraded, or corrupted memory, in an ANN confabulation exploits these ‘false memories’ along with other data inputs through neural feedback loops to form the basis of inventive sensemaking systems (such as Triggr). The idea of such opportunistic confabulation seems to have grown out of two sources. Firstly, experiments with ANNs that simulated brain cell apoptosis i.e. the natural and highly regulated process of cell death in humans [4] that confers life-cycle advantage, where it was discovered that novel perceptions and the creation of new ideas can arise from either reversible or irreversible neurobiological damage. Secondly it grew out of vector analysis of data retrieval, aided by the growing power of computers, and is currently used to do such things as detect credit card fraud.

So we are standing at a new crossroads in which the machine can either be our servant or master. I now hear some people speculating as to whether these new developments are the basis for a second industrial revolution. They certainly have the potential to be disruptive, to change patterns of work, service and play. The ultimate test is whether machine learning, like all technology, is used wisely, and to the overall benefit of humans. This is where we must heed the Royal Society’s counsel: “Careful stewardship will be needed to ensure that the productivity dividend from machine learning benefits all in society.” [5]

In terms of the public sector world I recall a late GP friend cautioning me on the limitations of generic strategies based solely on numbers (using a very apposite phrase in a machine learning age) where: “the algorithmic bastions remain unbreached” [6]: by which he meant in the health care context that there is a hegemony of evidence-based clinical trails across broad populations to determine clinical practice and commissioning behaviour that take no account of what he calls the “personal significance” to a patient of their presenting health circumstances which the doctor helps to interpret. In other words the numbers, the stories and the relationships become disconnected. I am therefore heartened by a machine tool such as Triggr that promotes personal significance, in which the individual interprets data with a recovery expert that, at the same time, builds up a body of general research.

For Berger confabulations enabled him to make sense of his world, to translate between different peoples and contexts, to access the pre-verbal. Machine learning it seems can also use the process of confabulation in the service of humans to access the pre-verbal. We are only at the beginning of this understanding. It seems we all need to confabulate a bit more!

Nick Day, Exeter, 28 July 2017

[1]  – John Berger (1972), “Ways of Seeing”
[2]  – John Berger (2016), “Confabulations”. Penguin
[3]  – For the uninitiated, algorithms are defined as a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer. The word has its roots in an interesting mix of Latin (algorismus), Greek (arithmos), Medieval English (algorism) noting the decimal notation of numbers, and Arabic (from al-Ḵwārizmī, ‘the man of Ḵwārizm’ (now Khiva), a name given to the 9th-century mathematician Abū Ja‘far Muhammad ibn Mūsa, author of widely translated works on algebra and arithmetic.
[4]  – Between 50 and 70 billion cells die each day due to apoptosis in the average human adult
[5]  – Royal Society (2017). “Machine learning: the power and promise of computers that learn by example”
[6] – Kieran Sweeney (2006). “Complexity in Primary Care: Understanding its Value”. Radcliffe Press

If you want some ideas of what might be a good read on the topic of ‘change’ in 2017, I have 3 recommendations from my last year’s bookshelf. They are:

• James Kerr, ‘Legacy: 15 Lessons in Leadership’, the story of why the All Blacks are considered by some the most successful sporting team in history;
• Carlo Rovelli, ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’, a brilliant and simple layperson’s account in 79 pages from a theoretical physicist of the most important scientific theories in recent history that have helped us better understand the world;
• James Rebanks, ‘The Shepard’s Life’, reflections of a contemporary Lake District Farmer on the changing nature of one of our most iconic environments in Britain;

One of the skills in navigating organisational change is to decide not just what has to go, but more importantly what needs to stay: something I call identifying and isolating the ‘threads of continuity’. This is a tricky exercise because this does not mean holding on to what is clearly passé or what is a reflection of personal preference or entrenched interest. It is about recognising and holding onto what is of community or corporate value. But how do we distinguish between these two ‘territories’: what must change, but what should stay and be cherished? Each of the above books has something to say on managing this tension.

The Thread of Continuity: ‘No Dickheads, Follow the Spearhead’

Where does the trigger for real, sustained change in our businesses and organisations come from? When does it occur? How is the starting gun fired? Basically, there is ‘disturbance’ or ‘dysfunction’ somewhere (to use scientific terms) that can no longer be ignored. As James Kerr shows the All Black rugby team radically changed their approach in 2004 after a disastrous tri-nations tournament in South Africa when team members threatened to quit. (The net result of making some fundamental changes has subsequently been to win two world cups!) What did they change and what did they hold onto?

Of the 15 leadership lessons from Kerr’s book (one chapter on each lesson) it is difficult to divide them directly into lessons that indicate change and those that suggest continuity. The book argues the team’s success comes from taking something they have always done, but now doing it differently. Talent, a desire to win, teamwork and training are obviously critical: but to the All Blacks this was no longer enough. For Graham Henry and his leadership team the starting point for change was a mantra ‘Better People Make Better All Blacks’.

The book is rich in lessons for leaders seeking to manage change. An overall message, to quote Kerr, is that “character triumphs over talent”. The All Blacks followed a philosophy that had been central to the success of the American Football Team, the San Francisco 49ers. Their Head Coach, Bill Walsh, had declared: “Create the highest possible operating standards, develop the character of your players, develop the culture of your team, and the score takes care of itself”. People strategies are therefore central to success.

So while some of the delivery techniques changed – for example Henry re-designed the structure of the working week so each individual player had a worksheet/daily map to focus on self-improvement, and leadership and responsibility was transferred from coaches to players – what didn’t get ‘spat out’ (to use Gilbert Enoka’s phrase, the team’s mental skills coach) was the focus to continually re-connect their players to their Mãori story, what the Mãori call their whãnau. This is symbolized by a spearhead, an image derived from the flight formation of the kawau bird. For whãnau to function everyone must move to the same point in an endless synchronized support system. There was no room for selfish, disaffected mindsets. He quotes Kipling ‘The strength of the wolf is in the pack’. Thus the All Blacks reaffirmed their blunt mantra: ‘No Dickheads, Follow the Spearhead’.

The Thread of Continuity: Managing Probability Not Certainty

One of the lessons of quantum theory, as Rovelli demonstrates, is that relationships are the key determiner of everything in a world of probability rather than certainty. He takes the reader on an intriguing journey that starts with Einstein and relativity, and goes on to cover the discovery of quanta, the architecture of the cosmos, the structure of particles, the discovery that space is ‘real stuff’ and that time does not flow…and how we ourselves fit in this ‘boundless world’! “The equations of quantum mechanics and their consequences are used daily in widely varying fields…yet they remain mysterious. For they do not describe what happens to a physical system, but only how a physical system affects another physical system.” A quantum world is unpredictable, replacing a Newtonian world in which everything seemed regulated by firm laws that were universal and irrevocable.

For Rovelli the implications of his analysis are: “that we must accept the idea that reality is only interaction”. So if ‘reality is only interaction’ the threads of continuity are spun out of the relationships we make and cherish, create and end. They arise out of our history, culture and traditions: and our plans, ambitions and aspirations for the future. Rovelli shows how at every turn: “Science begins with a vision (and that) scientific thought is fed by the capacity to ‘see’ things differently than they have previously been seen”. For him science helps us define our future path, but only if we plan from probability rather than certainty. The crucial irony, of course, is that you can predict the probability of something happening to a lesser or greater degree, you just can’t be certain it will happen.

This makes planning for randomness in our organisations critical, and – surprise, surprise – is one of the hallmarks of All Blacks training. This aspect of their strategy is characterized by throwing all sorts of problem solving situations at the team and then randomizing scenarios, combining this with pace and physicality, to stress the brain and test decision-making capacity. The aim is to remain on the task during a game and not get diverted, allowing you to win by following the process and not getting caught up in outcomes.

Reading this made me conscious of the current public sector mantra to focus on outcome as opposed to outputs: a natural reaction to the now discredited ‘management-by-target’ approach that can drive the wrong sort of management behaviours. Kerr reminds us of the requirement not to confuse outcome with the constant need for a better understanding of the necessary processes and structures that relate to principles and end state goals.

What the All Blacks have discovered is that a programme for mental toughness gets better long-term learning: intense mental preparation for randomized situations conditions the brain and body to perform under pressure so that peak performance becomes automatic. Note that the Greek word for automatic means ‘self-thinking’, in which thought and emotion become combined. Research and experience shows that, under pressure, thinking can shut down: that if you rely solely on emotion and instinct you no longer pick up the cues and information to make good decisions. The All Blacks discovered you have a much greater probability of winning if you follow the pre-agreed strategy and game structure at crucial moments in a match rather than get caught up in the outcomes.

The Thread of Continuity: Tuning to the Right Channel

So what does James Rebanks have to say about understanding the threads of continuity: about what to change but also what to leave alone? To some his book will be seen as a defense to a particular way of rural life that might be called anachronistic. Yet in his Lake District, economics and tradition go hand-in-hand to create a form of natural governance. “The numbers were fixed by custom and communal management to reflect the grazing capacity of the fell and the winter grazing capacity of the farms below. This was, and is, a system that requires rules and customs to prevent, abuse, cheating or mismanagement.”

There are echoes here of the Mãori sense of whãnau: that you move forward in formation in search of a future embedded in a strong and unapologetic sense of culture and tradition. Rebanks talks about how lambs are ‘hefted’: “taught their sense of belonging by their mothers – an unbroken chain of learning that goes back thousands of years”. One of the problems I often encounter in change work is that those affected get little explicit time to assimilate what is being asked of them, to make sense of the request from their personal anchor point of identity and history. This often gets confused with defensiveness.

Rebanks’ book is similar to Kerr’s in that it talks about the problems and possibilities that come from integrating different cultures. Rebanks was brought up in a Lake District farming family, but eventually went to University to study history, before returning to what he most loved. There is a truly memorable phrase in his book that illustrates the importance of respect: “Shepherds are not thick. We are just tuned to a different channel”.

For Rebanks change is about respecting different ways of thinking that sometimes defies rational economics. It is about that ‘mental toughness’ the All Blacks engender that enables them to cope with random but potentially predictable situations by picking the right cues. “The egg-timers in my head are always trickling away, reminding me of things I need to return to. Knowing when it is best to interfere and when it is not takes years of experience. My grandfather and father taught me that we have a range of options and the trick is knowing which one to resort to, depending on the situation.”

The Thread of Continuity: The Basis of Managing Change

While the executive decision to change in an organisation will come from the senior leader, once started it can be no respecter of persons, even though it will catch many people in the web of change. And every one will have the same question on their lips: ‘will I fit into this new organisation? Or will I be surplus to requirements?’

The trick to building the threads of continuity that enables each participant caught in the web to cope is to create a powerful change story. This is of benefit to both the individual and the corporate entity. As Kerr demonstrates in his book: “Based in strong, resonant values, using a common language that employs mantras, mottos and metaphors, storytelling helps leaders connect their people’s personal meaning to their vision for the future”.

Kerr argues that there are 4 criteria for creating a compelling change story, for building the necessary threads of continuity. The story must be:

• Credible and relevant: it must have ethos (an authority and understanding of the subject) and logos (it must make rational sense);
• Visual and visceral: it must have pathos (it must be felt), seizing our hearts as well as impressing our minds;
• Flexible and scaleable: it must be a easily told in the pub or café as across the boardroom table, implying the use of simple, everyday language and ideas;
• Useful: able to turn vision into action, purpose into practice, translating meaning from ‘leader’ to ‘led’.

All 3 books I recommend start from the premise that we best manage change when there is a strong reference back to tradition and custom. All 3 books suggest that our future is best safeguarded if we see ourselves as custodians of this future, “tuning to the right channel”, where, like the All Blacks, any change seeks is driven by their mantra of ‘Leaving the Jersey in a Better Place’. All 3 books highlight the relational nature of this past and future, based on a probabilistic rather than a certain world, where there are “no dickheads, we follow the spearhead”. It is my belief that we cannot manage change, but only the threads of change.

Nick Day, Exeter, 31 January 2017