I am 99% persuaded by positive psychology, largely because I thought like a positive psychologist long before it was invented.  I never took to clinical psychology so I had nothing to discard, so to speak.

But it is the darker side of life where I think positive psychology has its limits.  Maybe the typical positive psychologist does not feel that because they have the skills to deal with people who are deeply unhappy.

My reservations come at many levels.   As a practitioner, though, I want to know what to do when we are in a dark place.

What does it mean to be resilient when times are terrible?  What are the critical processes that we are trying to leverage?

If I succeed at exercising leadership when times are miserable, if I show resilience and help others to be resilient, what might these processes be?

Here are 5 processes underlying resilience

I would be interested in your thoughts.

Active listening

The key to listening to angry people, among which I include people who are deeply insulted, humiliated, frightened, defeated and generally gibbering wrecks, is to acknowledge their emotion.  We don’t have to agree with their emotion.  We don’t have to copy their emotion.  We don’t have to make any comment about the circumstances.

We simply have to acknowledge the emotion, and show, through our acknowledgement, that we still respect the person, in spite their emotional display, and in spite the circumstances that led to these humiliating circumstances.

Generally, that leads to slight embarrassment on their part but that is a much more comfortable emotion than the anger and hurt.

Developing a group

We are often angry and humiliated when we have lost status and losing status usually means losing status in a group or being ejected from a group. Referring to a group to which we are both a part helps restore status.

Additionally, when people have been humiliated in front of their nearest and dearest, particularly the partners, children and parents, we should restore their status in their eyes too.

Identify small actions

Anger comes from loss of status and be implication, loss of control. When we look for small things we can do now, and we do them, we feel better.

Be grateful ourselves for having the opportunity to help

While we are doing all three above, we are active. We take the initiative. We are in control. We belong.

Be grateful, and allow our gratitude to show to the other person.  They will be grateful in turn.

Gratitude is a great mood-lifter.

Enjoy the results

As the other person lifts from utter dejection to a willingness to try, enjoy.  And be grateful again.  That way we share the ‘positive feedback’ with the other.   Let them share the way our mood has improved.

And watch the entire group become more bouyant

If we have done our job well, collective efficacy and trust should have risen.  And we all know that collective efficacy – our belief that our colleagues are competent – is the most powerful factor in raising school quality.  It is bound to have the same impact in other circumstances.

Trust also creates upward positive feedback spirals.  Though, we may need a lot when we start from a dark place.

What do you think?

Are these the effective mechanisms for regaining resilience in desperate places?

Are these effective mechanisms for encouraging people who really have few ways forward and little to push off from?

Would these questions even help you in the day-to-day dispiriting trials of the western world – like getting stranded in an overcrowded airport?

Are you able to try them out in the less-than-terrible conditions so that one day you can use them when life is truly terrible?

To recap:

L – Listen

G – Group

A – Act

G – Gratitude

E – Enjoy

Today I had glass of warm water and a few drops of lemon juice for breakfast to allow the medics to do a fasting blood test.  A fasting blood test helps them get ‘reliable’ readings for something for other.  Happy in my ignorance.

We spend most of our waking hours in ignorance of what we are doing or why – happy to let someone else decide.

So, for those of us who have taken it upon ourselves to teach, we find ourselves in a daft situation.  We can be annoyed when the knowledge of our profession is not taken seriously.  We are seriously annoyed when the professionals in our field don’t know the basics.

To talk glibly of “evidence-based practice” is really rather irritating.  We boil water for our glass of warm water, in many countries in the world to kill bugs.  But let’s face it.  Many bugs survive boiling water.  Some thrive in concentrated sulphuric acid.  What we mean is that of the things we know how to do and can do in our kitchen, boiling water is prettry useful at killing some bugs that kill us.  A very northern hemisphere idea, btw.  It’s just as good to put your water in a clear bottle and leave it in the sun.  But of course, there is not to much sun in the UK.  It works fine in hotter climes.  Do you get my drift?

All our knowledge is based on custom and folk-lore and we are not exempt.   To pass on knowledge to people who are not experts in our field in language and practice they can relate to is not a disgrace.  It is a professional necessity.  They don’t want to know the ins and the outs.  They want to know what to do.  They are leaving uswith the responsibility for the result.

But what a disgrace it is to not know the basics.  When we start to believe that boiling water kills bugs rather than some bugs do not survive boiling water, then we perhaps should have our license take away.

It is knowing the basics that helps us think of new solutions.

Imagine if I were on the proverbial desert island, wouldn’t it be better to have the idea in my head that I must get rid of bugs in the water that might kill me.  I am abundant in my ignorance.  There are so many bugs that can kill me and fair handful that scientistis don’teven know about yet.   Therefore, the question is not what is the solution but what are the many ways I can ‘purify’ [another misleading idea] the water.  And the right action is to do what I can and begin as General Colin Powell says, when I have a 40-60% chance of being right.

So don’t talk glibly of research-based practice.   You are trying to wave a spell in the air.  Actually, you are trying to get me to pay you more money.

Show me your protocols.  And make sure

a. they are intelligible to me

b. I don’t know more than you

Otherwise, we might just chase you out of town.  We won’t call you a witch, because that is still illegal in UK, but we won’t allow you near our food.  Get your own.

Show me your protocols – in language and experiences I can understand and where I can see the goal and the basic idea.

I’m a member of LinkedIn, the professional networking site. You probably are too. If you live in the UK, you are one of 1.8m members. Around 30m people in the UK are of working age. So about 6% of us are LinkedIn members.

So, is it worth belonging to LinkedIn? And if you are, who are you likely to meet there?

I painstakingly took some numbers off Google Adplanner and I have three surprises that will make you rethink Linkedin membership.

When you’ve whizzed through the headlines, narrative and graphs, tell me what you make of this picture.

#1 College graduates in UK do not dominate Linkedin

That’s a surprise isn’t it?

Check the graph. Linkedin in the UK is dominated by people in the range of “some post-school education but less than a degree”.

Education & Gender on Linkedin from UK (drawn in Chartle)

Should we be surprised?

About 25% of people in UK have a degree. 33% of male Linkedin members in the UK finished University. Slightly fewer than 30% of female members of Linkedin in UK have degrees or graduate degrees.

So the facts go in the right direction.  Graduates are more likely to join Linkedin than people with other levels of education, but, because three-quarters of the population have not been to university, even members who have no further education at all outnumber those with a first degree.

This is a salutary lesson for us all. Even on Linkedin, the real world dominates. And in the real world, most people do not go to University.

#2 People who earn 50K pounds a year (or more) dominate Linkedin

I will surprise you again.

In the next two graphs, we see that people whose household income exceeds 50K a year dominate LinkedIn.

Salaries of Men on Linkedin UK (drawn in Chartle)

OK, this is not so surprising in itself. After all, Linkedin is a high-end service. Google also reports household income. Average income in the UK is about 20K per person and if two people work, 50K is an average amount. So we shouldn’t be surprised to have Linkedin users from households who earn 50K a year.

(BTW, a 50K salary puts a person in the top 10% of the UK.)

But given that Linkedin is dominated by ordinary people – may be this figure is surprising?

When we look more closely at the graphs, we see that education makes it easier to earn household incomes of 50K+, but there are lots of people out there with ordinary education levels who also have household incomes of 50K+.

To spell this out:

• If you are a male Linkedin member, with a graduate degree, you probably earn 50K+.

• This is also true if you have a Bachelor’s degree – but about a third of ordinary degree-holders on Linkedin earn in the 30K to 50K range.

• If you are in the dominant group, “the post-school but no degree” crowd, you are more likely to be in the 30K-50K range but, there are as many people in this group earning 50K+ as there are degree holders earning 50K+ ! There are also more of this group earning 50K than graduates earning 50K+ – largely, I suppose, because there are fewer people with graduate degrees in the market.  “The post-school but no degree” crowd rule, OK?  Fonzi, still rules!

Burn this on to your brain.  If you find someone with high household income on Linkedin, they could come from almost any education level.

We have two apparently conflicting facts.

• Education helps us earn money!

• But earning money telling us little about a person’s education!  There are just as many high earners from lesser education levels (at least on Linkedin).

The pattern for women on LinkedIn is similar. But, it is confused by the over-powering dominance of women in the “more than high school but no degree group”.  They rule even more than they do among men.

Salaries of Women on Linkedin UK (drawn in Chartle)

#3 The high earners in Linkedin are young and the younger members of Linkedin are high earners!

This is the really stunning surprise!

See at the next graph.

The 25-34 year old group have high incomes AND they outnumber older people with high household incomes!

Have a good look at that graph and burn it onto your memory -

Who are the big earners on Linkedin UK? (drawn with Chartle)

Now to the interpretation.

It is not a surprise – though nor is it acceptable – that women earn less than men. We should also disentangle the more complicated picture at the the mid-age levels. But we all knew this already.

More importantly, where are the older high earners? Why don’t they join Linkedin? Are they that complacent, or are they outnumbered by young people in real world too?

I did check with the UK Government Statistics Office. And I spoke to a professional statistician. They don’t have numbers going from high salaries to age. They have a 1% sample of taxpayers and they present data from age to salaries in percentiles. Their reports suggest – as common sense suggests – that the workforce is dominated by people in the 40-49 range who also have higher salaries.

So what is happening here?

Because we haven’t any baseline data for the UK working population, we have to work with some sweeping generalizations – never a good idea.

It looks as if Linkedin is attracting younger people who are high earners.

Remember these things.

• 29% of men on Linkedin in UK who have household salaries of 50K+ are aged 25-34

• 35% of women on Linkedin in UK who have household salaries of 50K+ are aged 25-34

• 57% of men on Linkedin in UK who have household salaries of 50K+ are aged 25-44

• 68% of women on Linkedin in UK have household salaries of 50K+ are aged 25-44

Interpretations?

Possibly, because women tend to partner men who earn more than them? Worth exploring, I think.

So what eureka moments did I have in this time-consuming micro-analysis of Google AdPlanner?

• The typical member of Linkedin in UK does not have a degree (700K out of 1,8M)

• The typical household income bracket of UK Linkedin members is 50K+ pounds.  University education makes it more likely you will be in the high earning group but people who finished university are outnumbered by people who didn’t or didn’t go at all.

• The high earning bracket is dominated by 25-35 year olds!

How will I use this in practice?

• I am going to find out who are the young (25-34 and 35-44) women on LinkedIn with household incomes of 50k+.

• I know that less than half will have a degree but I can fine-tune this information AND find out what they do.

What will you do with it?

Almost everyone who uses Twitter is on Facebook.  Its easier to say that 1 out of 7 Twitter users do not use Facebook.

But as 6 out of 7 of their Twitter friends will be on Facebook, they are well connected!

The question is whether you can find the other 2/3 of UK residents through your Facebook network.  It would be work a try, wouldn’t it?  Can you find and meet anyone of the 61 million people beginning with your Facebook network?

The picture

Twitter & Facebook Users in Users

The numbers

I made the diagram using the online chart maker, Chartle, using the numbers below, some of which I got from Google Adplanner on 2 August 2009 and some of which I got from Wolfram Alpha.

Weekend special.  Leadership from the top or from the bottom?

Good pic for a lecture on leadership and organizational design.

Customized shoes by Van.

For those mulling over HR and the recession

Have we organized the work in the organization so every person on the edge can use their skills, and the situations that arise in their patch, to advance our cause?

The genius of the Obama campaign machinery is that they provided the resources to do a good job (communication channels, how-to-do manuals, moment-to-moment goals e.g. make 100 000 calls) and let people get on with it!

Let’s tell the stories of what works well and do more of it?

What are the great HR stories where we have help managers focus the management system to (a) reduce management cost and (b) increase initiative and productivity?

And did we manage to pass on the gains to the workforce?

Mmmm, lets publish the success stories of  HR and the recession.  The press will do a fine job for the downside.

See you on the brightside?

Yesterday, I posted on my difficulty explaining the simultaneity principle in positive organizational scholarship and extrapolating the implications for organizational design.  If you can help me, please do!

Today, I followed up a review about a book on New Zealand history in The Economist.  I’ve extracted this quote wholesale:

“Christina Thompson is a New Englander from a trim town outside Boston with a white church and a green. Seven belongs to the Ngapuhi tribe and his family lives in a ramshackle settlement at the end of a dirt road. Ms Thompson is an intellectual in the tradition of the Enlightenment, an editor of the academic Harvard Review. Seven, with his belief in ghosts and aliens, is the very man that tradition hopes to enlighten. She weighs options and makes plans. He sees the future not as an arrow he shoots ahead of him, but as an arrow that arrives at his feet.”

The future is an arrow that arrives at our feet.

I intuit it.  Who can explain it further?

Positive psychology x new media x work

It is quite arbitrary, of course, to sum up a blog at the end of each month, but it is also quite useful and I am astounded again by the ground I have covered and the people I have met.

The high point for me has been finding Jane McGonigal’s description of “engines of happiness”. That came via attending the NLabNetworks meeting in Leicester which I attended primarily to meet Ken Thompson of Swarm Teams. What would Jane call this? Ping quotient I believe.

Though I am more than chagrined to take a year to discover this work, Jane McGonigal’s analysis of game design in terms of positive psychology brings me exactly where I want to be. She looks at the intersections of positive psychology and alternate reality games and points out that game designers make better use of psychology than designers in other spheres, such as work.

Yes, exactly. The intersection between positive psychology, new media and work is where I want to be. And if work becomes more engaging, more compelling, more involving and more meaningful, you want more psychologists there too!

We are ready to roll

I could spend the rest of July summing up June! We seem to have 4 key points to consider at this intersection.

1 What is our role?

How do we relate to other people? How much does it matter to understand what our clients want? How much does it matter to feel and be part of the drumbeat of a wider community?

I expect a consultant to understand why I ask the questions I ask by understanding my business and then to add value by bringing to bear expert information in their field.

The British have an expression “fit for purpose”: to be fit for purpose we must understand purpose and to understand how we augment that purpose.

In social settings, purpose is contested. The way we act reinforces or changes hierarchies, rights and privileges. I am always wearied by professionals who believe they are not part of this process. We are making the future as we take part, as we are made in the way we take part.

The starting point of a vibrant practice is enjoying the complexity and fullness of life in the age in which we live! Our practice should be a celebration of times in which we live! I particularly loved the way Paul Imre highlights his clients’ businesses in his own blog. I think we could all do more of that.

2 What do we understand as the essence of life and therefore how do we try to manage life?

JK Rowling gave the commencement address at Harvard this year. She talked of the importance of imagination which leads us to both innovation, and empathy, and then to collective action.

Eric Schmidt talked of his role as CEO at Google and what it means to a manager of a company which values imagination.

If there you have any doubt about the zeitgeist of our age, listen to those two videos and let me know what you think. JK Rowling talks of people who live in narrow spaces being frightened. Today, the idea that we can live imaginatively and playfully is fresh and exciting. I’ll give it a year before it is almost old hat. Within ten years, we will be in another phase of life, whatever that will be!

Studying an imaginative approach to life is new for many psychologists and I am learning from poets, philosophers and social media.

3 How can communicate what we offer to other people so they can make informed choices?

Switching registers from talking with each other to talking with our clients is difficult, but we do need to switch back-and-forwards. Someone who just “sells” loses touch with the fundamentals of the field and someone just in technology is incomprehensible to our clients so cannot add value.

I found a good articles explaining in lay terms what coaches do . I’ll add it to my three posts on what we do as my growing set of templates (consulting to businesses, social media, general outline of psychological practice, essential ideas about happiness).

4 Skills

And our basic skill base: I’ve put together a 5 point comparison of 3 dominant approaches in positive psychology (Hero’s journey, Appreciative Inquiry, David Whyte’s poetry), I’ve started a wiki for positive vocabulary, and I laid out a wiki of positive psychology courses which colleagues on LinkedIn kindly reviewed for me.  I also summarized well know work on job design and contrasted it with the attributes of computer games.

What’s on for July?

Saturday 4: MediaCampLondon. Registration is free. Head to the site. Come along. This is a good opportunity to experience an unconference.

Monday 28 July: Personal leadership presentation at University of Buckingham.

Technology: Get the google appengine going. Why? Websites should take us hours to get going, not months.

Social Technology: Dry run of Swarm Teams, Ken Thompson’s SMS system for teams.  I am particularly keen to demonstrate how new social media allows us to capture the energy that builds up at conference that we have previously allowed to “run down the drain” at the end of the meeting.

Aspirational Goal: Gather together people who see the same potential in the intersection of positive psychology, new media and work!

Image via Wikipedia

What would you do if you were not a social media guru and “got social media” for the first time?

When I was growing up, we didn’t have electricity. We cooked on a “wood stove” (a Dover for connoisseurs). Our water was heated in wood-fired boiler. Our lights were gas. Our fridge used paraffin. The generator at the office used diesel. In winter, we had a wood fire. Our irons for pressing our clothes were heated with coals.

Our house was built for electricity though. The plugs, switches and wiring were all in place. It was a pretty low key affair the day we were connected to the national grid. My mother received a telephone call (remember the mechanical models weren’t powered with electricity) and we calmly switched on the lights. I must have been about 10 and for some reason I got up that night. I wandered through to the living room and mother was ironing clothes with the electric iron. I might add that we employed someone to do the ironing (with the heavy wrought iron “irons” and their coals). So this was a thrill – using an electric iron was a thrill!

The number of appliances that work so much more conveniently with electricity are numerous – lights, irons, stoves, fridge, the kettle, the toaster, the radio. And we have added more – the TV, the blender, the shower. What else?

What do we already take for granted about social media?

Not many of us are volunteering to going back to houses fueled and heated with wood, coal, bottled gas, candles and paraffin and those that are, probably never lived without the national grid. Social media and its immediate antecedents are now so much part of our life, we aren’t going to volunteer to live without them.

Email is not really social media – but lets start there. If you live apart from your family, email is a boon allowing daily messages in almost real time. My supermarket who sends we illegible emails somehow misses the entire point.

Txting is not just a youth thing. How on earth did we find each other in the shopping mall or the railway station without our mobile phones? What a boon it is to arrive on a long distance flight and to txt “we are down” to someone who is coming to pick you up.

Skype has been described as a “life saver”. Imagine being apart from your loved ones. Then think of speaking to them daily over Skype with a cam.

Google search is now so common, we forget it is less than 10 years old.

Internet banking is also a given, I couldn’t that my British bank issued a cheque book when I arrived here. I had to be reminded how to use one. (And I only use it to transfer money from one part of the bank to another – but we are in UK now – when in Rome and all that.)

Wikipedia and online dictionaries clear the desk next to us as do online yellow and white pages. I use wikis unconventionally. I just like them for organizing long documents and I become quite irritated by long word documents. Nothing over one page on Word, please!

Blogs are not just convenient soapboxes. The conversational format also encourage people to write. No one mentions the increase in literacy and fluency likely to develop from the ease of content generation.

RSS feeds and aggregators are marvellous. I follow a story like the Obama campaign by setting up an alert and feeding it into a folder. Then once I day I can scan 50 or so stories and get the formal news and the citizen commentary. I do the same for new professional areas where I am still getting oriented.

StumbleUpon is the opposite of Google. It finds new sites for me on the basis of their similarity to sites I found interesting previously.

Yahoo Upcoming! is one of my favorite sites. In a place as large as the UK, it is so useful for finding the niche events that interest you.

Twitter is as much fun as passing through the neighborhood cafe or pub.

What are the obvious uses of social media in small business?

The challenge that was thrown out by small business owners at the NLabNetworks conference was to spell out the benefits.

Somehow it is easy to think about moving from gas light to electric light; or coal-fired iron to electric irons. But only because we have already made the transition.

What we need to do is to list the infrastructural benefits of social media so our clients can see quickly and easily what it offers them.

Maybe a session at Media Camp London on July 5 2008?

When we first got electricity, we had to invest a little in the change. What should we get first? A kettle? A new stove? A new boiler? For the record, my mother was quite keen to get a cake mixer (we ate a lot of cake) but we continued to heat the water with a wood burner and had log fires in winter for another 10 years. If we are introducing social media, what should we do first, second, third?

A heuristic for advising clients curious about social media

The speakers at NLabNetworks suggested a concept that we can use to think about the social media that would be most useful for our clients. Think constraints. What constraints can we release with social media?

I suggest these simple questions for understanding a business.

1. What does the business sell?

2. Who does it sell to? Who are its customers?

3. What would the business like to do if it could do anything it wanted? What does it want to be? Bigger, busier, more influential?

4. What is stopping it? This is the constraint. Go gently here. Your client is likely to display a lot of frustration – this is often gets deep, down and personal.

5. What types of social media would release that constraint? That is the value you deliver – your imagination. And then a little know-how as icing on the cake. Can you show your client how to use that media and if not, which of your social media colleagues could you co-opt quickly to the cause?

Looking forward to working with you on this. Being able to work quickly and easily with each other illustrates the benefits of social media for small businesses. See you at Media Camp London on July 5, I hope.

PS Paul Imre has posted today linking to his clients who have running blogs. I think this is a good step that we could all take.

Image by foghornleg90 via Flickr

A good article here on savoring and a list of actions and the corresponding emotion we feel.

1. What did we take the time to marvel at today and did we feel awe?
2. What did we stop to give thanks for and did we feel gratitude?
3. Did we have five minutes to bask in a task well done, or a compliment, and feel pride?
4. Did we luxuriate in the bath, or the park, or some where else and feel pleasure?

It would be good to extend the list. I’ve just started a little public wiki for anyone who wants to join in.

I was following up the new field of “performance studies“.   I have lost the link unfortunately.   Here are five statements and questions I re-phrased in “plain-language”.

1.  We make the company every day by what we do.

2.  Together we act out a story.

3.  Remember there is more that one story we could tell.

4.  Why do I have to speak for you?  What can’t people speak for themselves?

5.  What does the story we are acting out say about our relationships with each other and are we willing to talk about this question?