A week of conversation and still going strong

Over the years I've been on a few extended busienss trips abroad with colleagues and clients, and always enjoyed them.  Always.  Last week I was off to Sicily with a BIG Dutch client, Pim Berkhout, founder and main owner of de Arbodienst..

I say BIG advisedly because Pim is tall and hefty - heftier than he would like to be.  He also has a big voice and a very big personality.  He can be daunting and domineering. 

He likes to do his brainstorming and business in interesting places.  So we met up in Rome airport on Saturday 3rd April, flew on to Catania and spent much of the next eight days in conversation over breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as between meals.  Mostly the conversations were in English, occasionally in Dutch and sometimes in Italian.  And amazingly, by the end of the week we were still going strong, conversationally.

Our agendas were very open - we were both looking for ideas and inspiration to move our respective businesses and possibly to seek some opportunities for collaboration.  Pim is highly entrepreneurial and I have other skills and interests, so we learned a lot from each other.

At the beginning of the week I wondered how we would fare spending so much time with each other.  Would we run out of things to say?  Would be get bored with each other.  Once again, I learned that it's possible, with the right intent and skills, to spend many hours and many days with someone and still have fresh, rich conversations. 

Men and conversations - is it true?

Conventional thinking says that women are much better at general, open-ended conversation than men are. I can certainly think of a number of men - often the male half of a couple - who are really hard work in conversation. However, I can also think of quite a few men who are a pleasure to talk with, and quite a few women who are hard work.

Conventional thinking says that women try harder in conversation because - either by nature or by conditioning - they are more focused on smoothing things along, on making sure other people are looked after and feel good. It says that men tend to be more "instrumental" in their conversation, talking for a purpose and not talking just for the sake of it; they tend to compete with jokes, quips, digs and facts.

As in so many areas of life, conventional wisdom grossly oversimplifies the situation, but it does contain more than a grain of truth.

Purposeful Conversations vs. Random Conversations

I wrote "vs." in the title but there doesn't need to be a contradiction.

A conversation may start off with a specific purpose such as deciding on an itinerary, but if the parties involved are open to it the conversation can become random and lead to who knows where. I booked a hotel in Taormina at the weekend and having cleared the details, ventured a few random comments and observations which opened the whole thing up. All sorts of information comes up, some of it "contentual" (the director is a former tennis champion) and some of it contextual (Antonella enjoys chatting and has a sense of humour).

Conversely, a conversation may start off random and increasingly focus on a purpose. For example this morning I called Mike for a chat and we ended up talking about how and where I would ideally provide the new service I'm thinking through.

Jumping to conclusions in conversation

In conversation with my friend Philippe, he spoke about a rigorous interviewing process that he uses and trains others to use. The trouble is, he explained, that people supposedly using the process have already made up their mind within a minute of the starting the process and they waste an hour going through the motions, just to arrive at the conclusion they had already reached an hour earlier.

There are times when coming ot a conclusion quickly is vital - for example in A&E admissions in a hospital.

However, there are many occasions and circumstanstances where jumping to conclusions - or paying too much heed to the impulse to jump to conclusions - is counterproductive. Sometimes it's important to open oneself to more information, more deeply, for longer and allow the brain/mind to work on it.

One area where people often try to force things is language learning. From my early years teaching English to foreign students (through the 1970s, on and off) it was so clear to see when students were stopping incoming words in their ears and - metaphorically speaking - trying to force a direct translation out of them, or worse, refusing to believe that the word could exist. What works with foreign languages, and many other things, is to allow information in and to trust the mind/brain to do its work.

All too often we apply "technische afhandeling" (technical processing) as a lazy, self-confirming shortcut.

How long before I succumb to e-books?

Too many CDs and too much convenience from iTunes / iPod have virtually halted my purchasing of physical CDs.  I now buy at least as much music in purely digital form as I do on CD - probably more.

I stopped buying printed newspapers in about 1994, when we moved to Holland.  These days I read a selection online, including on my iPhone - it's perfectly possible to read a long piece that way.  However, I do still get printed copies of the Economist, Wired magazine (US and UK) and Prospect magazine.  I've always taken weeklies and monthlies since I was a kid, and I like having the physical paper handy.

I take a load of photos but most of them exist only in digital form.  A couple of years ago I did take the plunge and have 500 or so printed up, but we look at them less often than the digital versions.  In the next week or so I'll be selecting, processing and sending off a dozen or so photos to make big prints for an exhibition - but they're the exception.

I work entirely paperless.  The only things I ever print out are for the accountants.  For the rest, it's all digital. 

I have bookshelves full of books, many of which I'll probably never get round to reading.  Yet I still can't resist buying titles that catch my eye, even though many will only ever gather dust.  In some respects it would make more sense to get them on an e-reader,  Yet at the moment, that feels like one screen too far.

I'm sure that if I actualy took the plunge and got an e-reader, I would be hooked.  However, looking at the move from this side of the decision I feel sad about it. Books are the last hold-out of analog content in my life.

How do you know?

How do you know something's funny? A good sign is when it makes you laugh. However, I remember watching the Fast Show when it was first on and finding it very funny but not laughing - at least not until later. And funny is probably the easiest to know.

How do you know that you like a food? Obviously, if you enjoy eating it is a pretty good sign. But then why bother acquiring a taste if you don't immediately like it? How do you know it's a taste worth acquiring?

Reflecting on most things we think we know, it seems to me that paradoxically it all comes down not to the rational "knowing", but to the feeling of "knowing".

So how do you kinow whether somebody is good to do business with? How do you know whether you've spent your working day well or badly? How do you know whether your plans are giood or not?

Sooner or later, what we call "knowing" comes down to a feeling. Our evaluation of knowing and in fact of everything else ultimately comes down to how we feel about it.

My favourite model

Yesterday evening I had a long rich conversation with my friend Jeremy, covering (among many other things) models of interaction. In plain language, I mean the roles that are implicit or explicit in interactions between people

We were struggling to find a description of the model that I naturally use. The key elements are:
- Equal partners: no single party owns the high ground or runs the agenda
- Open agenda: exploratory, not instrumental towards achieving a specific improvement or outcome
- Creative: building on each others' inputs
- Unselfish: feeding the conversation, not the ego - no point-scoring
- Authentic: speaking from the heart, honestly

It's not small talk but it's not heavy talk either. It's definitely not coaching or therapy or motivational, although the effect can be any/all of those.

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Gun worship, the global religion of our time

When I was a kid it was all cowboys and Indians, and I fashioned Colt 45s out of bits of wood and Lego.  Then it was the Man from Uncle, James Bond, Dirty Harry, then later the ironic gun play in Tarantino films.  Then of course there's "24" and numberless gun-toting films and series on TV.

I can't imagine how many people I've seen get shot in the name of entertainment.  It's normal, par for the course, all in a day's viewing.  From a certain perspective it's not so different from the bread and circuses of Ancient Rome, where the plebs went along to watch gladiators fight and die for their pleasure.  The difference now is that we don't smell the fear and the blood, plus we get close-ups and slow-mo shots of bullets meeting flesh and exiting amid a spray of blood.

My youngest came back from an overnight today, having played an 18-plus rated video game.  "I killed eight in my go, but Joe's record is 27 - that's amazing".  Part of me felt disgusted and part of me thought, don't be stupid, boys will be boys.

It's bad enough living in a global popular culture where gun worship is widespread, casual death by shooting is normal.  I'm just glad I live in a country and a continent where most people don't carry guns and confine their gun worship to screens. 

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Professional Thinking and Writing

Thinking about the brain

Have you been listening to A History of the World in 100 Objects? It's compelling listening for anyone interested in our species and our world.

It's also so refreshing to have it in purely audio form rather than on TV. As soon as video cameras get involved, they hijack the whole thing and all too often we end up with video cliches. When it's purely audio, it relies on the descriptive powers of the speakers.

Anyway, one fascinating insight is that although human beings have so much DNA in common with primates such as chimps, our brains are asymmetrical whereas other primate brains are symmetrical.

Another is that, according to the programme, fMRI shows the brain areas involved with speech overlap with the areas activated for knapping stones (chipping stones to make tools). The hypothesis from this is that stone knapping and speech co-evolved.

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Professional Thinking and Writing

Mixing fun and serious in business

A couple of weeks ago I had a message from somebody (not a business contact) commenting on the style of threads on Ecademy, the social business networking site. As you will see, the person doesn't regard Ecademy as a place where serious business is done or discussed, nor indeed where serious business people hang out.

"Now the threads at Ecademy have so many batty cartoons and loud-font signatures (and let's add the Skype icons along with the Twitter icons which trail the colored membership stars, etc.) and the average Ecademy thread looks like a MySpace page where twelve-year-old are attaching cool avatars or catchy quotes by Cicero or by Robbie Williams as they complain, using frowny faced icons, that their parents don't understand them."

I can see the point that this person is making, but on the other hand a lot of serious new businesses (e.g. Google) use whacky graphics and fun stuff. I know that that Smugmug, a 10-year-old photo sharing site that's been self-funded and profitable all along, does some pretty whacky stuff back at base.

I've no doubt that there are plenty of buttoned-down businesses people who would fire everybody on Ecademy in a heart-beat for not being serious. There are some very hard-nosed, glum people around. A very senior contact of mine recently told me about attending a board meeting of his company in the USA where the CEO was ranting about health care and commies.

However, I think that there are plenty of successful young companies proving that it's perfectly possible and even desirable to be effective in business while keeping a light touch and a sense of play.