Rule of Five

Right: enough of the whippersnapper Kipling. I think you’re ready for some ancient wisdom: how to understand the essence.
The alchemists had a number of techniques. Perhaps the simplest was to boil off the spirit and distil it. Then take the distillate, boil off the spirit and distil it. Then repeat. And repeat. And repeat. By which time you should have got to something pretty pure. the five times distilled “quintessence”. 
Swooping back to the present, Nicholas Bate's series on "Simplicity, the far side of complexity" rolls on. Episode four is "Dig Deep: Find The Real Issue". But how deep? Bate offers "Deeper", with the implication that you'll know when you've gone far enough.
Slithering back a couple of decades, let me offer a tip I got from Shoji Shiba, the TQM guru, in the early 90s. He recommends that, however well you think you understand a question, you will always understand it better if you go down five levels.

1. Why didn't I get the management team to sponsor my project?
    A. Because the presentation was poorly prepared
2. Why was the presentation poorly prepared?
    A. Because I did it in a rush the day before
3. Why did I do it in a rush the day before?
    A. Because I was too tired to make time amongst all my other priorities until I had no option
4. Why was I so tired?
    A. Because I stay up late browsing social media late into the night
5. Why do I stay up late browsing social media?
    A. Because I don't feel I've achieved anything worthwhile during the day

This is a trivial example. As often as not, round about the fourth question, you break through a bland, conventional explanation to get down into the root of a problem, or make a lateral link that gives a new and useful insight.
This is very much Mother Nature's learning strategy, as any parent of a small child will recognise. Can a million years of evolution be wrong?
Perhaps it should be "The Rule of Five Year Olds"?
Try it: it costs nothing to release your inner toddler!

5 More 5s

1. Pentagrams: getting ready to celebrate the feast of All Souls?
2. The Five Marks of Mission: the CofE has always been corporate. Whilst I wouldn’t normally recommend a five part mission statement, theirs is worth five minutes’ contemplation. Would Jesus have allowed weasel words like “seek to” and “strive to”? Still, a good effort, I think. Having read it, how does yours stack up?
3. Five honest serving men: Any of the five Ws from Kipling’s six will each guide you faithfully down to the next level of insight. I had forgotten that he rested them during working hours. Times have changed.
4. Five steps to a project: David Allen’s Natural Planning Model will bring focus and purpose to any task. Requires: the back of an envelope, a pencil and five minutes.
5. Quintessence

Challenge Accepted

You can find the sordid result here. (I don’t seem to be able to either embed or convert a .wav file.)

News from the cradle of democracy…

 

“I say, I say, I say, what’s that you have there?”

“A Greek urn”

“What’s a Greek urn?”

“Oh, about a hundred quid a day”

If only.

A nice economist came to talk to us the other day about the Euro crisis. Her thesis was that,in essence, the Greek economy produces almost nothing and imports almost everything. Furthermore, there is a conflict between the rich who tend not to pay taxes and the poor who therefore bear the brunt of any fiscal measures required. And the Germans have been bankrolling the whole system for reasons which make good profits for the bankers but little sense to the voters. She was very witty.

Not sure how well this went down in our Athens offices.

She made the point that most people know what needs to be done, but any government that tries to do it is likely to find itself out of office in short order. The technocrats who have been parachuted in to some countries have been doing a pretty good job, but will be turfed out before the job can be completed.

The real problem, in short, is democracy.

I’m not sure I can go along with this. Last time the world economy melted down, the nations of the developed world tended to turn away from democracy. That did not turn out well. And that is why the institutions of Europe are being set up. The challenge is to preserve democracy through the crisis. Even if it means that things need to get much worse before the people can accept what needs to be done.

The Storm Cone
1932

---

THIS is the midnight—let no star
Delude us—dawn is very far.
This is the tempest long foretold—
Slow to make head but sure to hold.

Stand by! The lull ’twixt blast and blast
Signals the storm is near, not past;
And worse than present jeopardy
May our forlorn to-morrow be.

If we have cleared the expectant reef,
Let no man look for his relief.
Only the darkness hides the shape
Of further peril to escape.

It is decreed that we abide
The weight of gale against the tide
And those huge waves the outer main
Sends in to set us back again.

They fall and whelm. We strain to hear
The pulses of her labouring gear,
Till the deep throb beneath us proves,
After each shudder and check, she moves!

She moves, with all save purpose lost,
To make her offing from the coast;
But, till she fetches open sea.
Let no man deem that he is free!

If you can keep your head

when all about you

are losing theirs and blaming it on you ...

In a desperate attempt to get Sprog4 into the habit of writing, I am nagging him mercilessly to post a blog entry, however small, each day. So it's only fair that I should do the same. Sadly, I have got out of the habit of collecting nuggets through the day to tease out into some words of wisdom later in the week. And I never got into the habit of dashing off a Deep Insight in five minutes. So I find myself casting around for inspiration. It occurs to me that "If" covers just about everything a human being can aspire to: I should be able to hang a cogent observation or two off each couplet.

We begin with the memorable lines on grace under pressure. A mother needs to get the children to school on time: one has lost a shoe; one is wearing odd socks and the dog has diarrhea. A middle manager is struggling to pull together a dysfunctional process while his burnt out staff abandon him faster than he can replace them. An accounting manager is looking at implausible results on the last day of the monthly accounting close while the systems are crashing around him and the Board are questioning what is going on.

Of course good planning might have avoided the crisis. Which is one of the reasons why you can legitimately be blamed. But that is not the point. The point is, can you handle it when you have to?

What does it take to keep your head?

In the first place, you have to have a clear head to keep. That is, you need to know what you are trying to achieve and how you are trying to do that even before things go wrong. Like a sailing ship, you can only manoeuvre if you are moving forward. If you are simply reacting to whatever comes along, you will lose control when the pressure mounts.

Linked to this, you need to take responsibility rather than joining the chorus of people simply seeking to avoid the blame. This gives you a mandate and inspires the troops. Though of course, it also opens up the possibility of highly visible failure. Nevertheless, the failure is rarely as visible or as catastrophic as it seems at the time.

Finally, you have to make a decision and follow it through. Making the wrong decision is forgivable (if you don't make a habit of it). Making no decision is not.

So you grab a handful of bananas, dig out the lost shoe from behind the umbrella stand, accept the odd socks and bundle the children into the car while calling the cleaner to tell her to stay out of the kitchen today. And on the way to school, you make it very clear that everyone will be hounded mercilessly out of bed at 6:30 tomorrow.

You explain to your internal customers that the process is broken and they won't be able to get any more fixed assets until it is fixed.

You make your best assessment of the potential errors in the results and that this is acceptable for now. You tell the Board the position and commit to a full analysis in the next two weeks.

And your children weep bitterly, but they know that they are in safe hands.

And your internal customers bitch and moan, but they know they are in safe hands

And the Board is officially unimpressed, though they know unofficially that they are in safe hands.

A friendly introduction

Like many Britons (and all right thinking, properly educated, English speaking people), I am inordinately fond of the works of Rudyard Kipling. Especially "If", his inspirational exhortation to his doomed son.

This is something of a guilty pleasure for my generation. We were required to see him as an apologist for a frankly racialist mindset which underpinned the British Empire. He was the quintessential type of the hidebound establishment that we were supposed to be rebelling against. Here is a nice picture of Malcolm McDowell and friend picking off leaders of that establishment in the closing moments of the 1968 film of the same name.

Yet the poem holds up today. Written in a clean, natural rhythm, it simply lists the defining virtues for us all to aspire to. And they could have come straight off the blog of a life coach last night: grace under pressure; confidence; empathy; modesty; risk taking; accountability; persistence...

So all this sage advice was available a hundred years ago. (Each generation has to find out for itself, of course. Especially now, when the nuclear family restricts access to wise old uncles and aunts.) The message for today is clear: the Edwardians strove to meet the same ideals that we do. They may have fallen short in different ways, but the foundations for success have not moved an inch. Don't bother with blogs until you have digested the books.

So you chunter comfortably through the poem, checking off the virtues as so many slices of motherhood and apple pie. Then you double take as you realise what you've just read. Could he really have meant that?

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you

If all men count with you, but none too much

There's food for thought.

Nowadays we are to believe that, as far as relationships go, the deeper the better. We are to let down our defences, so our friends can hurt us. We are to welcome the inevitable pain as part of Life's Rich Tapestry.

I wonder.

Now, as then, one size does not fit all.