I loved using Ishikawa or “Fishbone” diagrams (named after Kaoru Ishikawa who became one of the guru’s of modern management in the 1960s after he pioneered the use of them in quality management processes in the Kawasaki shipyards). It was like peeling an onion, carefully taking each layer of a problem and figuring out what had caused the problems we were seeing at the time so that we understood the cause. Once we understood the cause we could decide what our next course of action was; was it something we could fix and move on, or had something changed meaning that our landscape had altered and our course of action needed to change?

Beautifully simple.

Has this thinking gone out of fashion?

Take Eastman Kodak, so sad to see a company with such heritage file for bankruptcy. A company with the innovative intelligence to invent the first digital camera but lacking the business intelligence to understand the effect of that innovation in the market and how to use it to change its own destiny. Too scared to embrace the fact that this new technology would cannibalise its already successful business, it went for the alternative… made ill thought through decisions, didn’t look at the ongoing effect in the market, didn’t change, just died.

Do we like to react and respond more than we like to understand the real problems and what we can do to solve them?

IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS!

So, draw one cartoon like fishbone with a big head (see picture at the end of the post).

Take one problem and put the word WHY in front of it e.g. Why are sales of film declining?

Make this question the head of the fish. This is the effect or the consequence of an action.

Brainstorm all the reasons why that problem is happening e.g. all the reasons why the sales of film could be declining and attach them to the bones (branches) coming off the head of the fish. You can group reasons together if you have lots are that relating to the same thing e.g. new technology…

For each branch of the fishbone, dig deeper into what is happening and ask WHY again, creating spurs off each branch until you feel you understand what is happening.

Take time to take this in and decide on your course of action.

Let me know how it goes.

It’s like a computer game. First, you have to get through the amount of people who say that you’re not in ‘their area’ when they’re 3 miles down the road, before battling with the ‘I can come to you today, I’ll call you’ people who when you ask ‘but will you come today?’ they put the phone down, to the people who want your card details before they’ve even seen the problem- it has been a maze of hassle from start to finish.

Along with the very public news of Fred Goodwin (who didn’t really win good) being stripped of his honour, the week has told a tale of trust, what that means to people, and how the break-down of it can be severely detrimental to more than just one party. When one person (who had said they were going to fix my dishwasher in that day and then called back three hours later to try and get out of it) was surprised I cancelled, they had ignored the fundamental lesson that comes with trust- it has to be earned!

Trust is at the core of every relationship, and has to be protected in order for the relationship to thrive. The biggest damage that has been done to major brands and corporations has been down to a breach of trust, or a lack of consideration when making big promises as to whether they can actually deliver those to their consumers. People actually make a good living repairing a breach of trust in corporate governance. So whether it’s a white good repair, a friendship, or a hostile takeover, sticking to the fundamental rule of mutual trust will keep it from going down the drain (no pun intended).

This is what the politicians wanted us to do isn’t it, be brave, be ballsy, put the country back on its feet.

This is of course a lesson in do what I say not what I do.

Take the debate over the benefits cap, a proposal that affects a reported 67,000 people out of the 60′ish million that live in the UK and would save £290m out of a £192b work and pensions budget (figures reported in BBC News). The debate itself has rattled on for days (that on its own costing a fair bit) and now the prospect that it might go regional, the cost of administration to support that will erode even more of that saving.

This wouldn’t get past the Project Board in big business today, it would get sent back with a REJECTED, reason? No game changing ambition and poor ROI. The debate on the matter would either end or the team proposing would work on it to show that a real difference could be made…

They might take the total £192b work and pensions budget and say “there will be no benefits system going forward”. The concept behind this would be that all people on benefits today become employees of the Company for Work and Pensions tomorrow. Suddenly everyone has a job. The admin that today is put behind assessing, giving and taking away benefits would be moved to assessing and giving people work. There would be no sick pay but a bonus for those who turn into work everyday. If you don’t show, or don’t work, there is no money. These jobs would not be classed as public sector jobs, they will be part of a growing number of entrepreneurial companies funded by us the taxpayer. The opportunities would be as diverse as the community of employees within it.

The ROI here is uncapped and the future proofing benefits that support ongoing positive outcomes of a country with zero unemployment…priceless.

OK, I might be dreaming now but I wish I wasn’t.

]]>

Weirdly, this reminded me of an article I read in The Guardian over the weekend about the singer Lana Del Rey. She is currently being lauded as a ‘one to watch’ for the next year after some internet hype around her first two singles last year.

Things have not always been this way for Lizzy Grant (LDR’s real name). Her first career as a ‘run of the mill’ singer-songwriter in her own name resulted in an album that did not perform well. Some rebranding with her new pseudonym and a makeover as a “gangster Nancy Sinatra” and her ‘debut’ album is now being waited for with baited breath.

Unfortunately for her, the indie blogosphere that hailed her initial releases are already starting a backlash that her look is contrived and too marketing focussed. Personally, I don’t see the harm in creating an image that will get you attention.

Why are they so surprised? After all, it worked for Madonna and Bowie … even The Beatles had their ‘mop-top’ image to help them get ahead.

Packaging is important. It’s the immediate shelf impact that makes your product stand out above the competition and helps to encourage your customers to keep it on their shelves. So how do you ensure that this vital part of your product is properly developed and managed to protect your brand?

What does 2012 hold for The Monkey?

Innovative in spirit, Monkeys get a helping hand in 2012 from the Year of the Dragon. Opportunities for growth are many and doing things for the general good of those around is recommended. Research/study and taking on activities to push their own personal growth will be on the anvil and prove exciting. With a taste for adventure and their love of partying, Monkeys will be wearing their social hats, throwing many a swanky do or taking trips around the world.

That is so accurate there might be something in this after all…

My view, believing in the good stuff only makes life better, gives you something to smile about, even have a daydream about what could be. The year of The Dragon is a very auspicious one, symbolises power, strength and good luck – we all need to believe that right now, wouldn’t it be amazing if we all did?

I’m not suggesting that thinking about it alone will make the difference as the Psychologists would say this is “external locus of control.” A kind of fatalism, where people believe that they can do little or nothing personally to change their lives. Because of this, they either merely hope for the best, focus on trying to change their luck by various kinds of superstition, or submit passively to whatever comes—while complaining that it doesn’t match their hopes.

To improve your fortune, first decide that what happens is nearly always down to you; then try focusing on what works and what turns out well, not the bad stuff. Your “fate” really does depend on the choices that you make. When random events happen, as they always will, do you choose to try to turn them to your advantage . . . or just complain about them? Thomas Jefferson is said to have used these words: “I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” Your luck, in the end, is pretty much what you choose it to be.

I’m thinking the opposite “internal locus of control.” People that believe that what happens in their life is nearly all down to them; and that even when chance events occur, what is important is not the event itself, but how you respond to it. This makes them pro-active, engaged, ready to try new things, and keen to find the means to change whatever in their lives they don’t like. They aren’t fatalistic and they don’t blame bad luck for what isn’t right in their world. They look for a way to make things better.

I’m born in the year of The Rooster 2012 brings new adventure, the Year of the Dragon will support every encounter and provide new avenues of change. On the professional front, starting up businesses or finding their expertise in demand will be some of the highlights for Roosters as they march to the beat of their own drum. It’s all about colour, variety and personal freedom. For all of you that know me, you know that’s pretty spot on too, not because I read it but it’s because I will make that happen.

What about you?

“It’s not just the Conservatives. I use a very old-fashioned term – it’s the ruling class … Politics has become hollow and bland. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Labour or Conservative, Lib Dem, whatever.” - Rod Dixon, Artistic Director of ‘Big Society!’

No matter how much I try to engage with it, I find it difficult to be enthusiastic about modern politics. Just reading political headlines or watching Question Time irritates me as I am faced with ‘career politicians’ who seem more interested in sniping at their opponents than anything else.

Worse than that is the ‘smoke and mirror’ tactics that they employ; as if any definitive answer that they give is instantly held up as policy.

I don’t think that I am alone in my disillusionment.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if somebody gave a direct response that addressed the question? Or, even better, wouldn’t it be nice to get some evidence that backed it up? Surely, it’s not beyond the realms of imagination to whip out a laptop and say, “Well, I’d love to employ more nurses but this is how much that would cost, and this is how much we actually have coming in and we still have to pay for education and policing and the rest.”

Isn’t it time for a change?

We work with businesses on projects that centralise information to help people make better decisions about their products and services based on facts, rather than on headlines and assumptions. One of the key outcomes of this process is that everybody can be engaged and passionate about the final outcomes.

What if the politicians did the same thing and gave us the facts rather than the headlines so that we could make informed decisions. Doesn’t that sound like a ‘Big Society’ that we could believe in?

I am drawn to how she became the most powerful female leader since the age of Queen Elizabeth, a person who tore apart the rule book with regards to gender and class and why that didn’t open the floodgates of women who believed they could do the same…what happened why don’t we have at least a handful of women who followed the trailblazing path she made and are rule making now?

So I thought about my own position…did MT make me think about going into politics…yes, in fact tried it at a local level and I hated everything about it. Did she inspire me to do anything else…yes, I always saw her smashing that glass ceiling as a moment that signified women could do anything, between her and the Queen, women were holding the most powerful positions in our country, the world was mine for the taking. So I looked to see if these role models have contributed to the shrinking of the entrepreneurship gender gap, what I found sent me into a depressive state.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2010 Womens Report makes miserable reading for an optimist like me. Although these are global statistics the UK is not a beacon of hope and the bit that made my heart sink the most was “compared to men, women are equally likely to see entrepreneurship as attractive, yet they lack positive attitudes about their own personal capacities or inclinations for starting businesses, and they have less personal contact with entrepreneurs.” WHY?

“in only one of these 59 economies (Ghana) did more women participate in entrepreneurship than men. While most policymakers and academics agree that entrepreneurship is a catalyst for economic growth and national competitiveness, they must also acknowledge that not all groups in their societies have equal access to this endeavor. When a major part of a population does not engage in entrepreneurship,these economies lose the benefits that would otherwise be provided by new products and services, additional revenues, and new jobs. More specifically, when women do not participate equally in entrepreneurship, society loses out on the value that can be created by half its populace.”(Gem Consortium)

At the same time I came across some female statistics that are on the increase. 1 in 4 assaults now committed is by a women under the age of 25, horrifying tales about the rise of Girl Gangs. So on one hand, women are still insecure about their own capacity to be an entrepreneur on the other hand they are fighting back on the streets. I don’t want to generalise or trivialise very complex issues but its hard not to join some dots and look at cause and effect…

MT did ignite our capitalist culture, she followed her fathers view that not everyone was equal and never would be, but it didn’t mean we couldn’t aspire to and have the same things. Her policies made that possible and did start the “what’s in it for me” boom that so many benefited from (privatisation, home ownership, etc.). Past her reign because the going was good those policies spanned political parties and we have seen a deterioration of the social structure that had been in place, families have become broken, estranged and extended, respect for others has become tribal and some people don’t feel guilty about robbing – they just see it as getting something they want.

Is this the legacy of the first and only female PM? No, it’s the legacy of many decisions made by many people but we can only ever look back and learn and I for one think that that’s something worth doing as we find ourselves at another turning point for our country. MT was elected at a point in time where strong leadership was critical and she provided that, I’m not so confident our current coalition are doing the same. So do we wait or do we do something?

I don’t believe in positive discrimination and I’m not a member of any women’s groups but I don’t like what I’m hearing and I am more about the do something than waiting for something to happen. So anyone women reading this who wants some help setting up their business or wanting to know where to start, call me 07837 536979 or email ninadar@cheeky-monkey.co and I will give my help for free. For me MT’s legacy was “do something rather than try and be somebody” our culture could definitely benefit from that right now.

I didn’t want to write something negative about a cause I believe in and think that others should too. This led to a wider conversation with the lovely Katy Cory who agreed and added “this is the problem with movements that we want and need to believe because the headlines of what they are they for and what they do are so important but generally they don’t deliver, for example the United Nations (UN)”. We wouldn’t want to ‘out’ the UN as not having the muscle to deliver what it needs to because we know the world is better because of the concept of the UN but is this right? Do we expect less or are our expectations too high, after all it was Mandela who said “After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb”.

That conversation has haunted me all afternoon. My disappointment with the ANC is firmly with its political transition where its leaders are failing the people who really need them while they indulge in the power struggles and greed that plights politics all over the world. The movement that that freed people from the Apartheid regime was amazing and resulted in a change that should always be believed in, they seem to have lost their way and I hope this anniversary puts a spotlight on that.

We were so quick to judge an organisation like the UN for its lack of tangible delivery but the truth is some things need to happen and they don’t always have a hard output that can be measured, does that mean they have failed, disappointed us or worse don’t give us a reason to believe?

When I though about this in the workplace I realised it had been 3 years since we had worked on an enabling project, a project that will help get a tangible result, but not directly, it provides the infrastructure or the glue that brings a number of people, concepts and processes together to get the result. Enabling Projects need a reason to believe that goes beyond a hard deliverable, something that you know should happen because so many things will be better because of it, the greater good…sadly this kind of thinking doesn’t resonate in these economic times but it should.

So, when you are reviewing what projects you are supporting in 2012, think about what you need to deliver in terms of output and how many of these deliverables could be brought home if you linked them together through an enabling project – the glue, infrastructure, sanctions that could provide the greater good that makes it all happen. Spare a thought for those organisations like the UN without which the world would be a worse place (Major Achievements of the UN).

The question of how successfully we are communicating is an important one. If you stop to consider how dramatically the way you communicate has changed in the past 10 or 15 years it might even be funny. But are you now guilty of poor-quality communication overload? There is a trap with all the aids we have like Twitter, Facebook, emails, BBM, WhatsApp etc. that quantity is taking precedence over quality, with cycles of boomeranging information taking much longer to reach an action point. Anyone who has been the victim of dozens of internal emails which bear little personal relevance understands this.

There is also a danger that relying on electronic communication is making us lazier- or less likely to confront people or problems face on. Much like dodging a phone call you know might be unpleasant, the distance created by the internet also creates two time zones- one for each correspondent- which can make room for misunderstandings. These separate worlds we all live in now make us have to work much harder at staying ‘on the same page’.

Whether you feel liberated or oppressed by it, communicating electronically is here to stay. So, my new year resolution will be to commit myself to becoming better at it. This doesn’t mean plunge myself in to a tweet frenzy, or sending millions of collective emails, but asking myself how I become smarter at it. The advantages of electronic communication are to me threefold: 1. Access to millions of interesting, useful people at my fingertips. 2. Emails give me time to think and consider better solutions, rather than give instantaneous reactions. 3. ‘New’ communication technologies provide an additional means of building relationships, not a replacement.

Heading into 2012, where there will almost certainly be a new shift in the way we talk to each other, we can all ask ourselves if we are communicating smarter than 10 years ago. You might surprise yourself.

Homelessness is more than just a housing issue; family problems , mental health issues, losing your job and so confidence, not feeling like you can be part of society for a variety of reasons – every person has their own story, you need to get beyond the drink and drugs issues, of course sometimes that is why they are there but it’s also a way of surviving where they are.

When I lived in Bristol I could walk to work everyday (the only time I have been able to do that), when you walk through a city early in the morning and late at night you can’t ignore how many people are living in subways, under bridges, doorways and park benches – I just couldn’t walk past them day in day out as if they weren’t part of my life, I saw some of them more than my family at that time! So I didn’t, I made them part of my life and it was an experience so rewarding I remember them dearly…BUT generally people thought I had finally lost it and I found the preconceived ideas of why people are homeless and the way they were judged very sad.

So this year we have donated the money we would have spent on Christmas cards to The Wellspring in Stockport, they have done a fantastic job for years and this year you will add to their Christmas cheer.

From everyone here at Cheeky Monkey we would like to thanks you for your support this year and hope you have a brilliant Christmas and New Year. Spare a thought for those not as lucky as we are and as you walk past the homeless as you rush getting your last minute bits, stop for a chat make them feel part of your life – it’s the warmest feeling you’ll get all season.