Tuesday 28 October 2014

The confusion of NOT Belonging: "No, we're not them, they're different and we're separate"


I was at a North London hospital yesterday accompanying a friend. We signed in at reception, she was called in to her appointment, I could see some patients returned back to the waiting area for a while after a prep session.

So I asked at reception whether I should stay-put to give smiling support to my friend, or go down to the café.

The receptionist answered:

"Oh, I couldn't tell you about that. We're not them."

Confusing.

"Well, how long might she be?"

"No, we're not them, they're different and we're separate."

It was a Lewis Carroll conversation: the person you are looking to for help is explaining not only that they can't help you but that they shouldn't, because they are not part of the group that would be able to help you.

She defined her lack of help through NOT belonging to the department my friend was seeing. She reinforced the internal structures:

"They just lease the space from us."

Uh? It's all one NHS hospital, we weren’t in a private wing or external company.

Then, Status:

"We're Surgical. We do day surgery. A whole lot of top specialists doing lots of different things. ‘They’ just do one thing."

And finally, NON accountability.

She was not accountable for looking after the patients of ‘Them’ beyond signing-in. So, you see, she couldn't possibly help me.

The problem for this member of staff was sharing a reception service with another department which used to be separate. Though her job is to serve Reception for both units, she feels she 'belongs' to the surgical, not the investigative, team. So she refused to do anything beyond the basics.

She was dressed in claret-coloured kit, 'raspberry scrubs'. (A staff sign said this was required dress code for surgical teams: you get the importance of this now.)

"You need to ask someone in blue" she said grabbing a lady in blue.

"Hello" said the lady in blue
"I'm Esther. How can I help you?"

Esther was straightforward. She told me how long it might take, where to wait (the next room, not hard to point to), to get tea for me but nothing for my friend because Esther was in charge of that.

That's because Esther is a recovery nurse. She is not a receptionist. It is not her job to look after patients' anxious friends and families. She is not accountable for this. But she does it anyway, because it makes a difference to her that people feel comfortable about the procedure they are coming in for and the support around them.

The raspberry-scrubs receptionist could have told me all that, in less sentences than the confusing stuff about her Not Belonging to the other team.

OK, it’s not a big deal. Organising people in reception has low level risk. 
But it’s a neon-highlighter for how a sense of 'Not Belonging' can trounce personal accountability.

In another context, what if Not Belonging, and Not Being Accountable, spreads to an ethical judgement or a safety risk? We’ve seen catastrophic risks in many sectors. 


Belonging leads to commitment; commitment means accountability.

Commitment means doing more than basic tasks. 
Commitment means relationship more than transactions. 
Commitment means looking at consequences of actions. 
Commitment means connecting up with other teams.
Commitment means being willing to go further, accepting accountability for follow-through.


But it all begins with Belonging.

"We're not them, they're different, we're separate" sums up why organisations need a clear sense of belonging.

Most organisations are complex, many-layered, a mix of mergers, acquisitions and sub-contracting, old and new departments, specialist teams.

In the minefield of belonging to different territory, the lines of accountability can get mangled.

Each break in belonging is a potential breakdown of accountability, or failure-point for ethics, safety and strategy.

Wherever you fit in, you're still part of the same goals. Your team, and its particular specialism, interconnects with others. ‘We're’ all 'Us'.


And that means having a sense of belonging, a shared ethos on which to base commitment, and clear accountability to uphold it.


Show everybody in the organisation how it all connects, the principles that bind all its communities into one, as well as the particular focus of each team.

In a complex organisation like a hospital, it is interdependence not independence that makes it all work.

In this way, belonging brings the cohesion to achieve effectiveness as well as efficiency.

I asked Esther if it was a good hospital to work in. She gave answered firmly:

"It is. But do not look at these new buildings and say it is a good hospital.
Look at the work, look at the people doing the work. Look at how they work with each other.
Then you’ll see: is it a good hospital?

It is a good hospital. But that doesn't mean that everybody in it is good."

She’s right, and about a lot more than hospitals.


Do your teams feel they belong to the same organisation?
Do your people share accountability?


Talk to us about how to create a sense of Belonging.

isabel@belongingspace.com

www.belongingspace.com
Twitter @IsabelBelonging
Twitter @BelongingSpace

Sunday 19 October 2014

Can Credit Unions* restore faith in the ethical standards of financial institutions? (*Now with Royal approval)


The Duchess of Cornwall gave her enthusiastic support this week to the work of Credit Unions and their role in providing financial services for the most vulnerable.

Thursday was International Day of Credit Unions, with activities across many countries, to recognise the achievements of this distinct kind of institution.

Belonging is at the heart of Credit Unions: customers belong as members and investors, they share ownership and benefits of the fund, as well as a voice in the decisions around it. They are mutually-owned, ethically-run, and locally-based.

In contrast with the recent scandals around PayDay loans used by the most financially and socially vulnerable to tide them over week-on-week. With compound interest of up to 4,000% this left people with impossible debts.

Ethics - and commercial sustainability - have no place in this practice. Under pressure from public and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Wonga recently wrote off £220m of debts for 330,000 customers. 

The Credit Unions show us a different model: one in which ethics, commerce and financial services are easy partners.


Shared ownership means shared accountability, creating a powerful sense of belonging. 

Purpose is twinned with ethos, giving people principles to believe in and a reason to commit.
Belonging is not just about what you are doing, or how much money you are making: but who you are serving, and why.

Mutual support, strong principles, sharing, exchange and interdependence are all features of this kind of belonging.

Ethics benefits too. When people feel they belong to something they commit more firmly to its principles.

When people belong they do the right thing because they want to, not just because it says so in the rules.

The theme of this year's ICU Day is "Local Service. Global Good". The World Council of Credit Unions says this emphasizes credit unions' positive impact in their communities and around the world 

In the UK there are 524 Credit Unions with £1.1bn worth of assets and almost 1.5 million members, of which the Duchess of Cornwall herself is one.  

The Duchess said: “Credit Unions serve people, not profit” and could be “a real force for change in the financial landscape”.

They are growing in popularity in the UK, though just 2% of population are members. Although returns on savings are low, the appeal is in mutual support, with members borrowing and lending through the fund. Gateway Credit Union in South Wales reports significant growth.

In the US, Credit Unions are used by 46% of adult population with strong regional brands.

Mazuma Credit Union, based in Kansas City, exudes the power of belonging. Respected for its great work with the communities it serves as well as a great culture for the people who work within it, it has achieved consistent growth and stability through the recession.

Public faith in financial institutions crashed after a host of ethical disasters. Even the Co-op, the paragon of ‘good business’, is sullied by the scandals around the previous CEO and revelations about failings in Governance.

Are the major financial institutions are too big to be held accountable?
Can Credit Unions set high standards of ethics, and help restore confidence in finance houses?

Mark Lyonette, chief executive of the Association of British Credit Unions Limited says Credit unions are a very good way of keeping banking in check.”

The unique ethos and structure of credit Unions must be welcome to the FCA. In its earnest efforts to improve standards of ethical conduct in financial sectors it stresses
“Treating customers fairly remains central to our expectations of firms’ conduct, that firms put the well-being of customers at the heart of how they run their businesses.”

Let's hope that the ethics of Credit Unions, and the spirit of belonging, can imbue shared accountability across the financial sector.

We surely need it.


Do your customers, employees and investors all feel they belong to your organisation?
Does everyone in your business uphold its ethics?

Talk to us about how to create a sense of Belonging.
isabel@belongingspace.com

www.belongingspace.com
twitter@IsabelBelonging

Thursday 2 October 2014

Belonging is the sum of the parts: Lessons on maths and collaboration from the writers of The Simpsons



It's one of the most common challenges in corporate culture: cross-discipline collaboration.


It's depressingly common for experts to Belong exclusively to their specialist team, blocking any integration with the wider business.

How do you get them to work together so the sum of the parts really is greater?



Commitment to separateness?

This week I have been running a series of workshops in Germany with a company of mostly scientists, all dedicated and well-meaning, but experts in particular areas. 



Sure enough, the challenge of getting specialists to work together came up loud and clear, with two recurring themes:  
"Ko-operation" and "Kommunication" 
(luckily the translation to English is straightforward).

Though the teams have achieved great innovations, how much more potential is restrained?



With another client, two small teams - both in digital development - were intent on defining their separateness: 

"No, we're COMPLETELY different! They're FRONT end development and we're BACK end!"


Thereby reducing their specialist expertise to two ends of a pantomime horse.



It is this ring-fencing that is the problem: Belonging is reduced to such a small level that collaboration is almost impossible.


"Ah, but we're SPECIALISTS - the others just don't understand what we do."



Far from the whole being greater, too often the parts are fighting so hard in factions that they can't even see the sum.



Insights from the Simpsons writers

What a joy then, last Friday evening, to join a special event at The Science Museum  on The Mathematical Secrets of The Simpsons.



It revealed secrets not only of mindblowing maths and humour - but also of easy collaboration.



Our host, Simon Singh, recently published a book (The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets) full of the hidden-maths written into episodes of The Simpsons



He held a genial conversation with two of the writers who provide covert nerdiness: Al Jean and David X Cohen. Both are brilliant mathematicians (Harvard and Berkeley, PhDs in maths so complex that it would befuddle even Lisa Simpson) who are also funny, wrote for The Harvard Lampoon, then graduated to writing comedy-show scripts.



The audience was entranced, right from Simon Singh checking our capacity for both maths and humour with his Mathematickle Test. We passed, so he was happy to share. To uncover the maths secrets he has found in The Simpsons and Futurama you must read Mr Singh's excellent book, and article in The Guardian. (Valuable pre-lecture cramming for a non-mathematician:  perfect numbers, narcissistic numbers, Mersenne prime numbers...)



Cross-discipline exchange was a fascinating theme. The writing team includes several gifted mathematicians (David X Cohen found he was not the first Simpsons writer to have a paper on post-PhD maths research published in 'Discrete Applied Mathematics') as well as non-nerds
Yet clearly there's no 'us and them' split in the writing team, or with the other creative disciplines.



The secret maths gags are very funny, the tributes to mathematicians and physicists are irreverent hero-worship. Turns out the maths-comedy subculture runs deep: in the audience a chap outed himself as a "Chartered Accountant and Stand-up Comedian" (perhaps not a boast he makes to clients?).



All of us were bowled over by Al Jean and David X Cohen's disarming mix of super-cleverness and feet-on-the-ground humility. 
No arrogant smartypants, no superior comedy-elite, no BigShot PrimeTimeWriter Divas. 



On the contrary: there was understatement, informality, and sheer pleasure that people got the jokes that they had hidden in there.



All great ingredients for good collaboration. 



And the most critical one: egos are subordinate to content.



How do you manage collaboration between such refined specialisms?


Cross-discipline collaboration remains a holy-grail for many companies. 
As with our German client, and the digital Front-and-Back-Enders, business success and individual motivation hang on integration. 


Yet it's harder to fathom even than the taxicab number that recurs in both Futurama and the Simpsons 



How has The Simpsons team mixed its cocktail of disciplines and heritage - writers, mathematicians, physicists, comedians, animators, producers - into such potent force, with apparently fluidity?



They've avoided the silos (even barbed-wire) between departments, open derision between experts, abject refusal to exchange ideas...

All those problems that - in so many companies - get in way of Belonging, causing mass frustration and wasting months and years of business time; leaving motivation, innovation and profit (both fiscal and cultural) running down the drain.



But pay attention to Al Jean, David x Cohen and The Simpsons and Futurama teams, and the answers are in plain sight:


Secret formula for collaboration

  • Respect throughout, regardless of status or giftedness
  • Mutual support between teams
  • Easy exchange between experts
  • Don't take yourself too seriously, however brilliant you are
  • Do take your colleagues seriously, recognise how brilliant they are
  • Appreciation and reward are based on your contribution to the whole not on isolated expertise
  • No-one's more special on their own than the collective brainpower


And above all, the generosity of spirit that says:
"This knowledge (or this gag) is much more useful if it's shared".



(Thank you to Simon, Al and David for, in the same spirit, signing the book for 9-year old Arthur: he's chuffed to bits to be called a 'fellow nerd' and to be encouraged with pride in maths-geekiness.)



And the winning bit of evidence behind this formula is the duration of the collaboration of Al Jean, David X Cohen and The Simpsons team: 25 years, and still writing and laughing together.



So take note, all those businesses of experts who can't work together properly. 


Listen up, all you micro-teams with your closed-minded separatism.



And pay attention to the detail: 

There is clever maths and cross-discipline collaboration - all hidden in Bart's shorts.





Would you like to get your specialists collaborating easily?
Do you have a whole lot of experts working in isolation?

Talk to us about how to create a sense of Belonging.
isabel@belongingspace.com

www.belongingspace.com
twitter@IsabelBelonging 

Catch Simon Singh's book tour 
“The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets”
Next date Archway 17 October