it’s not human to engage in an activity without a goal, so maybe i could safely assume that though we run not to a destination, we perhaps run in competition, with ourselves, our peers, or with someone we know absolutely nothing about but interpret as being just in a better place than us or a place we ought to be in… we run because we have come to believe that if we walk, we’ll not survive… we’ll die.

It appears a lot of the world is living in this pseudo-dimension or conceptual world which we now spend all our time and energy trying to protect from the invasion of concrete realities. we fight this invasion by increasing complexity…we run. Maybe we run because we are scared, because if we ever stop we’ll have to confront that ever present nagging in the back of our minds that in reality, there’s nothing there but emptiness, words whose meaning are merely in other words…

So i guess we just keep on running… or do we?

(First Adobe Ideas Ipad App drawing by my 5yr old daughter)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Harbour Front Walk,,Singapore

Common sense is the ability all human beings possess to be able to make sense and meaning of the world around them.

School sense is a pseudo-sense based on rules- formal learning rules. These rules are governed by academia. The accepted application of current rules rather than common sense determine what sense is made and often results in sense with no personal meaning. The more removed from personal meaning the school sense being made is, the more separated from common sense the developing sense becomes. Acceptance not meaning is the objective.

Work sense is the same. It’s a way of making sense of the world using work rules. These rules are governed by big corporations to which employees aspire to belong. Once again acceptance not meaning is the objective.

This slow death of common sense results in the birth of a mindless, soulless being never satisfied and never fulfilled. Always searching but never finding. For that which he seeks is right there in his hands but he can’t see it as he searches with false senses…

Unless all these become integrated into common sense we will never be able to leverage our natural ability to be excellent and to excel

But rather than integrate with common sense, more and more these pseudo-senses appear like clouds hovering above common sense creating a whole new type of person, a whole new type of consciousness… Interaction is quite an interesting feat as often the superficiality of it disturbs and confounds all but no one can do anything about it as no one understand the root of the discomfort and lack of engagement… It’s no wonder no one can find the reason when all search with false senses!

So to survive, we learn the rules, play the game and keep our feet as far off the ground as possible so we never have to confront our greatest fear – emptiness.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

“@dehumob: Initiative is what service staff need to show for customer experience to be above average. Enable & encourage it!”

Read the 2 stories in the article and you’ll probably agree.

From iTODAY:Great customer service starts at the top

© 2010 Richard Branson. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate Richard Branson | 16 Jul 2010 00:00

I have always liked Sam Cooke’s old hit song, Chain Gang. It really comes in handy when I’m talking about customer service.

That’s because delivering good customer service requires that a frontline worker receives supportive assistance from an entire network of co-workers – in effect, a chain reaction of teamwork, one that is consistent from beginning to end. And when it comes to helping a customer, the chain of assistance is only as strong as its weakest link.

I love hearing reports of good care, especially when they’re shared by a Virgin customer. But no matter what the source, there’s usually a lesson to be learned.

Just to prove that I’m not always bashing our competitor, British Airways, I’ll tell a consummate customer story that involves that other British airline:

An Executive Club passenger sitting aboard a jumbo jet about to leave London for New York suddenly realised he’d left his beloved leather coat in the airport lounge. He rushed to the front of the plane and asked if he had time to get it. “Sorry, sir, too late,” replied a member of the cabin crew. “But don’t worry. I’ll tell the ground crew and they’ll have it sent to you.”

He returned to his seat, convinced he’d never see his favourite coat again.

Seven-and-a-half hours later, when the flight arrived at JFK International Airport, the passenger was amazed when an agent met him at the door of the aircraft and handed him his coat. They’d put it on a Concorde flight that had beaten his slower 747 across the Atlantic!

(Of course, I am obliged to point out that British Airways can no longer pull off that particular trick, since the speedy Concorde is no longer in service.)

It’s true that the airline could have put the coat on a later flight and the customer would have been just as grateful when it arrived. But going the extra mile builds massive customer loyalty and brand-enhancing benefits.

You can be sure that passenger talked up the airline for years, and now even the chairman of a rival company is telling the tale. How great is that?

Let’s look at another story that clearly demonstrates the importance of every link in the service chain – this time involving Virgin Atlantic.

An Upper Class customer’s free limo failed to connect with him at his New York City hotel. (It turned out the customer had been waiting at the wrong door.) He jumped into a cab to Newark Liberty International Airport, a fair distance from the city. Rush-hour traffic was bad; by the time he got to the airport he was very angry, running late and panicking that he’d miss his flight.

The first Virgin agent he located immediately seized control of the situation. She calmed the fuming customer, apologising profusely and assuring him that he would not miss his flight. From her own pocket, she refunded the taxi fare he had paid, then she rushed the passenger through a staff lane and got him to the gate with 10 minutes to spare.

Truly a job well done. Like the leather jacket incident, it demonstrates how great customer service can convert a negative into a positive.

WHEN THE CHAIN BREAKS

Now we come to the part of the story where the chain breaks. During the post-flight debriefing, the agent told her supervisor what had happened and asked to be repaid for the US$70 ($96) cab fare. Rather than congratulating the agent on saving the day, the supervisor asked whether she’d gotten a receipt for the fare.

When her answer was, “There was no time for that,” he actually chastised her. He said, “No receipt, no reimbursement. You’d better take more care next time.”

Clearly, the supervisor was more concerned about rigid adherence to accounting practices than about employee initiative. While fiscal accountability is important, especially when an outlay of cash is involved, there will always be occasions when an asterisk needs to be marked on the balance sheet.

One thing was certain: Any Virgin employees witnessing their supervisor’s scornful reaction to their colleague’s exemplary deed would be unlikely to display the same resourcefulness. Which means that the customer loses – and so does the entire company.

Happily, the story came to the airport manager’s attention and he quickly took steps to redress the imbalance between company procedures and customer service. He advised the finance team that he’d approved the cash shortfall, while the supervisor got a quick refresher on how important we at Virgin think it is to “catch people doing something right”.

Eventually I heard this story, and it truly impressed me. The next time I flew through Newark, I made a point of seeking out the agent who had made us proud. I remarked: “I don’t have a taxi receipt, so you probably can’t help me.”

Her astonished smile said it all.

No company can train its front-end people to handle every situation, but you can strive to create an environment in which they feel at ease “doing as they would be done by”.

Good customer service on the shop floor begins at the very top. If your senior people don’t get it, even the strongest links further down the line can become compromised, as the story shows.

Finally, poor customer service can also be relished … if you experience it at the hands of a competitor! At such moments you might catch me humming another old favourite, Aretha Franklin’s Chain of Fools.

The writer is the founder of the Virgin Group and companies such as Virgin Atlantic, Virgin America, Virgin Mobile and Virgin Active.

Get iTODAY on your iPhone for free by visiting http://www.todayonline.com/iTODAY/iphone

Sent while mobile…

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

However, I resist the urge to talk of hope or a better future… It’s easy to offer hope as a distant dream, a story, an inspiration, a supposedly attainable desired future state… it is not always clear whose dream is being hoped for or worse still, whose desire the supposed end state really is. But more importantly, the hope and motivation offered is like air and smoke, often, it merely ends up inspiring an endless expectation of miraculous interventions which then results in a life of waiting, of  inconsistencies, of frustration and disappointment.

What’s missing? Well, as offers of hope encourage us to look up into the sky, somehow we begin to believe we can fly, we slowly forget or avoid confronting the reality that we actually don’t know how to fly and thus never commit to developing the skills. We just want to fly because we believe we can…

Three things missing…

1. The reality of where you are relative to where you want to be
2. The self belief not only that you can get there but that you have the capacity for anything it’ll take to get you there
3. The courage and confidence (wherever you get this from) to go the distance.

In reality the inner strength and purity that allows one to see the slightest flickering flame in the distance and have the courage and confidence to go beyond the obstacles and trudge confidently and determinedly towards the light, comes not from believing but from knowing, not from hoping but from doing, not from waiting for the right time but from knowing what time it is now. The belief that you can fly should come from the belief that you have the capacity to develop the ability to fly…

Until you come to terms with and accept who you are, you can not truly change. Sadly, until you are willing to look yourself in the mirror and see yourself for who you are, your ability to be the person you desire will always be a distant dream. For whatever life you create will never satisfy the pseudo-person who created it… You have to be yourself so when you change (if you so choose) it will still be you.

Sometimes the fear that comes with acknowledging self comes from the desire to live up to the perceived expectation of the assumed audience in what I can only refer to as  ’A play called life’ with you as the lead character. But then even with this, if one can look out into the audience and realize that one is not alone, that what one feels is felt by others, what one wants is wanted by others, what you’re thinking others think also and what you want is desired by many… that should ease the fear for in itself it is liberating… if only one could truly see, if only one could know..

You can be anyone you want to be if you believe you can… this not a self-contradiction… you can only truly ‘believe you can’ if you know and acknowledge (not necessarily accept) who you currently are. The greatest threat to your confidence and capacity to be who you want is the extent to which you deny who you currently are… the longer one lives in this state of denial, the harder it becomes to acknowledge reality and eventually loss of hold on reality and loss of  control self results.

As you become more willing and able to see and acknowledge who you are, you allow yourself to tap into a phenomenal internal store of confidence and capacity to become who you desire.

One of the worst things that could happen is to disregard the current self and instead just keep hoping that the desired-self will miraculously emerge… how is this even possible?

This hope that somehow results will cease to matter in the volume of tasks completed is sadly not true.

Activity exists and is defined by the result it aims to achieve. This result is not and can not be the completion of actions or the completion of the activity for the activity is only complete when the results are achieved or a decision is made to abandon the results and thus the activity.

One must ask then what results task completion meets? That question can only be answered by answering others…how was task completion defined? How was the task completed? What activity is the individual executing the task participating in?

Often the activity from the individual’s perspective has an objective that the supposedly task completion actions fulfil. This activity need not be the same for another individual performing same actions or involved in the activity in a different capacity e.g. A manager or supervisor.

For example the individual’s goal may be to complete the task and completing the task means getting a supervisor to sign it off as complete. If the individual and the supervisor do not share the same objective then they are are not truly involved in the same activity. This a dangerous situation because there is a high chance the activity will never achieve it’s results. A person can only supervise so much short of personally doing the task, it is impossible to drive achievement of task objectives and thus activity objectives through supervision alone.

Thus it’s the activity that matters and since the activity is defined by results, it’s the committed results that each individual is aiming for that determines what the actions mean…

Ensuring objectives are shared with a level of personal commitment (motivated to achieve) is the only way to ensure actions will achieve desired results. Especially if the person who desires the results is not the only one who needs to act to achieve it.

I find myself making a case for a seemingly obvious principle of managing performance by focusing on development rather than performance… sounds simple enough but then as with most simple things, the simplicity can be confounding at the point of putting a theory into practice.

This article describes this meta-learning effect in school aged children but I am convinced the principles and behaviors apply to working adults as well…especially given that most adults probably experienced education that emphasised performance (exam results) over learning.

Sustainable performance obviously indicates the awareness of an underlying approach and strategy an individual adopts to achieving results under varying circumstances (i.e. a development-focused, reflective approach raising a meta-level awareness of personal processes driving an adaptive self), rather than merely knowing if one achieved or not (i.e. with a binary, performance-focused, non-reflective approach driving an inconsistent self). Exceptions exist for individuals who already have well-developed strategies.

Coaching or mentoring within any context or domain should fundamentally focus on raising meta-cognitive and meta-learning awareness in order to drive sustainable performance. Performance should not be confused with learning. Effective Learners will give you sustainable performance especially in what is becoming a fast changing world with ever-increasing levels of ambiguity. Performance Coaching conversations or conversations with mentors shift from how to improve to performance to how to improve learning, how to improve agility.

Coming out of this, I revisit my ideas about agility, I see learning agility as the ability to learn quickly and effectively under varying circumstances and in different contexts, I see performance agility as the ability to sustain high levels of performance under varying circumstances and in varying contexts. Performance Agility is learning agility demonstrated in a specific domain of ‘activity’ e.g. school – able to consistently pass exams, work – able to achieve performance objectives.

One behavior I am convinced effective learners display is ‘pulling’ on available resources to drive their learning. The resources pulled upon vary and are definitely not limited to packaged ‘training’ which often has to be pushed to learners.

I was pondering some things and decided to blog my thoughts… Here goes.

Instructional designers and learning professionals tend to view performance gaps as training or non-training related. This simply translates into articulating whether a person can do something or not. If s/he can do it, then the problem is not training.

The problem I currently have with this view is the whole definition of being able to do. If we view ‘doing’ as an act within generalised contexts or conditions like driving a car on a straight smooth empty road, then I see a problem which presents itself in what kirkpatrick identified as L3 – would the person ‘be able’ to apply this ability ‘to do’ back in the workplace? However if we decide to view ‘doing’ as holistically and realistically as possie, then it will include the context or conditions of doing which means we then address a much larger learning objective, a capability you might say… now the doing is not just about a specific ‘to do’ but something of a ‘meta-do’ i.e. Being able (do) to do. The ‘being able’ refers to the context and conditions and the ‘to do’ refers to the act. The ‘being able’ I can maybe call coping-ability and the ‘to do’ I can call task-ability. The two together I consider as ‘capability’.

We now have a choice on how to define the context or conditions. With this view, the supposedly non-training solutions are actually those things that will alter the conditions or context to make them more easier for the ‘to-do’ and reduce the ‘coping’ in order to achieve the expected performance…

My point is if we already considered the all the tangible and possible aspects of the real and actual current context and conditions of action as part of the capability (being able to do) requirements, then is the question whether the performance gap is training or non-training even relevant at all?

The organisation

For the organisation, the context of conditions can never be perfect. There will always be people who can cope with it and perform and those who can’t and they don’t perform or they leave.

The questions I think we need to ask are:

1. Is the organisation aware of these conditons or context of work and what it means?
2. Are the development interventions addressing this context or ignoring them?
3. Do we know the type of talent that will thrive under the context and conditions we have and are we attracting them?
4. Do we know know the type of capabilities (coping and task abilities) required to perform under the work context and conditons and do our development program address these?

Engagement and Motivation

Human beings adapt, we have the natural ability to adapt to any situation within reason. The only two requirements are that

1. We want to (engagement and motivation)
2. We can (capability)

There are many reasons why a person might not want to adapt, but two addressed by a capability development program are:

1. Had the wrong idea of what was required ‘to do’
2. Don’t know how to do (capability- context/conditions and task)

The risk with having very challenging context or conditons of work that emphasize coping-ability over ‘to do’ ability is that you will have to pay a high price (not necessarily financial) to retain talent who are able to perform under those conditons and even then it will only delay the inevitable

If we so decide that we want to attract a different type of talent or If you want to get same or higher performance without paying a premium then a revision of conditions and context are important considerations. However from a capability development perspective, this just means that the development interventions after this would need to now address a different context or conditions or work…

One last point, a holistic addressing of conditions and context would inevitably deal with the people related aspects of those conditions e.g. The manager capability development will address the manager’s part of defining the context and conditions of work for their team… Etc

Fundamentally the view here is that learning professionals should no longer look at learning as a medication to treat a symptom but as holistic treatment to enable and support the cultivation of a healthy lifestyle…

Some of ideas might be taking some complicated issues and over simplifying them, this was done intentionally.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Decho,Suriya Wong,Thailand

After spending the better part of the past 10 years working with professionals and experts in various fields from media to finance, medical sciences to arts, I find one question remains common to all- who is the expert?

I quickly came to a realization that this is not an easy question to answer. For example you can be speaking with, the academic or a text book, a practitioner with articulated experience…or you can be speaking with years of subconscious insight and experience that will only emerge with the right engagement.

Though these possibilities provide specific input into the development of a suitable intervention, it is important to quickly identify who one is speaking with especially when content is not the primary focus of the design.

The extent to which an organisation is able to harness the experience of it’s most effective workforce in the support of it’s new (induction/onboarding) and developing (capability enhancement), the more effective such support will be in driving the people dimension of it’s strategy towards success.

So often the design adopted leverages on the voice of the available not the voice of the effective (expert). More importantly, understanding what makes for an expert practitioner is central to the situational intelligence available to the designer to deliver relevant supporting te design within a specific developmental experience.

In short, the way an organisation defines, identifies and grows true experts within it’s workforce is critical to it’s ability to sustain competitive organisational capabilities.

Though performance is often the default indicator used, performance is often by the doer, in some cases the ideas or thought driving the performance come from a less obvious source…

– Posted from my iPhone

In the midst of a dream reality comes knocking
Persistently knocking, a grudging acceptance of defeat in a war that cannot be won

A stroll past what will soon be past, a history, memories being created
The one and only way to retain the essence is to hold on to the significance of the moment

And lucky you’ll be if you find one, for in the highlands, high points beg discovery or maybe it’s definition..? I forget

Now passes so the new can emerge, only it’s not the new but the old in new time
It’s not often that the new emerges from the unseen future, so when it does celebrations are in order

Like now. The new.

And now, the heights are redefined once again and the new becomes even less likely…. We’ll jut call the recurring old the familiar.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone on the way back from Scotland

Location:South Lanarkshire,United Kingdom

What bugs me I guess is what we do while we are supposedly waiting for the right time? How will we know when the time is right? …ah and here is where my thoughts led me:

It’s not really about timing but about experience. Using a journey as an analogy, there is a distance to be travelled in order to complete that journey. If we take the destination as the outcome one desires and the act of making the journey as the action that needs to be done at the ‘right time’, then it sugggests that you’ll only get to your destination if you take the actions at the right time… But analogically this is not true,it might take you forever but as long as you travel, you’ll get there. What this analogy suggests is that as long as you experience the appropriate distance between where you are and where you want to be, you’ll end up there eventually. Timing merely determines when you get there depending on the route you take which inturn determines the experience you’ll have on the way.

If at any time you stop acting (moving) you’ll never get there. If you keep going round and round in circles with no consistent direction of motion, you’ll never get there. If you keep looking backwards you’ll slow yourself down.

Bottom line, it’s not about the right time, but the right experience. When the experience is complete you’ll have your desired outcome; you’ll be at your desired location.

If you want to get there faster then research well before you start the journey. Shortest route, traffic conditions, mode of travel, etc. This way you’ll not get lost, go round in circles or start looking back. You’ll also be better able to orientate yourself every step of the way.

There is a time for everything is not about waiting for the right time but about knowing where you are, where you want to go and what you need to do at ANY point in the journey, including this moment, to get there

Maybe we should ease up on the focus on ‘right time’ and focus on how the experience we are currently having will get us to where we want to go and what we need to do right now.

Rather than wait for the right time, we could find out what time it is now. It’s worth noting that it’s not one action that will get you there but a lot of actions… it’s not about when to take a left turn but what turn to take now.. waiting at the junction will not change a right turn to a left turn no matter what time it is. But if you keep moving there will come a time when turning left is required.

It’s probably impossible to know the right time for a specific action unless one can see the future, but it’s possible to know what the time is right for now, and that comes from experience.