Until one sunny May afternoon I am in my car sitting at traffic lights when the driver behind me has a ‘momentary lapse of concentration’, and runs into me at 35 mph. My car looks as if Superman has punched it

At first I am fine, I drive the car home, and two hours later I’m sitting at my desk making notes for my insurance company. Suddenly I can only move my eyes. This passes, fortunately! – But over the next two weeks I find can move less and less.

The next few years were interesting and I learned a lot. Not least of which I was learnt how to walk again. Or more accurately I was taught how to walk again by a physiotherapist. Since although I could walk, I walked badly, in a weird crablike motion. I couldn’t walk in a straight line, or for any length of time.

I remember at one point my physio said to me,

People are never taught how to walk. They learn by themselves, and as a result many of them walk poorly. I make a lot of money repairing the damage that this causes when they get into their 40s and 50s.

Many years later it occurred to me that walking isn’t the only thing we teach ourselves to do poorly with the resulting damage only becoming apparent decades later. As a child, I was never taught how to think. I was taught what to think, but never really how to think.
Do you know how you think. Do know there are various different ways to think. Logically, creatively, systemically, the list goes on with each form of thinking having its own strengths and weaknesses.

For me, ways of thinking are like tools in a toolbox, with different tools for different purposes. Different ways of thinking can help you identify and then deal with different situations. Otherwise if you only have a hammer in your toolbox then everything will look like a nail.

I received it from EDF, my new energy supplier, saying they had a message for me. They didn’t tell me what the message was, they simply asked me to visit their website, where I would be able find out what their message was. This was oddly exciting, perhaps I had won a year’s free electricity in competition I hadn’t noticed. So I went to their website. However, when I tried to login, I found that I had forgotten my password. To reset it I needed to remember my memorable date, and I couldn’t!  I tried all the memorable dates I could think of without success.

Now virtually every other site for which I have a password has a facility to reset the password by e-mail. Sadly, not this one and I have to phone them. This did not sound good, call centres of national companies are rarely fun to reach. I was not to be disappointed. When I phoned them, I got a message that said EDF are improving their call centre and that they are experiencing excessive delays. The recorded voice suggested I use their website… which of course I can’t log in to, which is why I am phoning them. And so, I send an e-mail, and receive a promise that they will reply to me within 10 days.

Meanwhile of course I have no idea what their original message was. I then find out – I receive a letter telling me that my first direct debit had not gone through on time and I owed them some money. In order to pay this I need to use my account number, which they state I can find from my last statement or bill. But I’ve not had one, since I just joined them. Oddly they didn’t include the account number on the letter they have just sent me. This reluctance to supply me with information I need is beginning to look like  pattern.

I try phoning again, and again, and again, and again. I email them again. I owe them some money, and I don’t want my power to be cut off . Though still I get no reply to either my phone calls or my emails.

Coincidentally, I am then at a seminar at the Royal Society of Arts. John Seddon, the noted systems thinker, is there and is talking about what he calls ‘Failure Demand’. I know something of this. In the case of EDF my electricity supplier, the demand is the number of calls and e-mails I have made to their call centre, which was increased by the failure of their processes to allow me to reset my password.

I can imagine the conversation in EDF’s head office:

“Let’s reduce the demand on our servers by getting our customers to reset their own passwords without bothering us. We’ll make them remember a memorable date as well as their password.”
“And then let’s make it really difficult for them to reset their password if they forget their memorable date. We’ll make sure they remember their password the next time!”

I’m prepared to bet that the department that made the decision regarding the passwords has nothing to do with the call centre, and cares nothing about the call centre’s excessive workload, or the way they have just increased it still further.

Little wonder EDF feels the need to improve their call centre. Perhaps it would have been cheaper to improve their processes. Which of course is what systems thinking and Seddon’s concept of failure demand is all about.

Post script: The EDF call centre recorded message and I are now on first name terms, and I still haven’t been able to pay my outstanding bill.

TweetDeck on a desktop - also on iPhone and Android

I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. I started to use it some time ago and rapidly got fed up with the simple Twitter.com interface.

I found TweetDeck and loved it. It organised my inbox, my direct messages, and mentions in to separate columns. It had a nice clear, friendly interface. Yet, everyday I’d try and read the increasing number of tweets, and I’d get lost, and frustrated. Someone said Twitter was like shouting in a darkened room  full of other people also shouting. I began to see what they meant. And I gave up on it.

Twit List Manager - small, simple and brilliant

The one day, a client asked if I was on Twitter, I explained and they said use lists. OK so I tried again. I wasn’t sure what list were; I found I could group the people I followed into a professional list, a social list, a list of friends. I could now separate the people I follow and want to read everyday from say suppliers I follow, where if I miss some of their tweets, I am less concerned. A cool idea, until I realised I had to do each person one at a time! Even with around 100 followers this was going to take me ages.

Cue Twit List Manager – It looks a bit like the form on an on-line survey. It lists all your followers and you click to select the groups you want them to belong to. It can sort and filter and will even show you which followers don’t belong to any lists.

TweetDeck has been bought by Twitter and re-vamped – badly

The latest version of TweetDeck is now very different from that described above.

A lot of the functionality has gone, the look is to my mind depressing – imagine a grey overcast winter’s day and you’ll get the idea. Sad. I am looking for a new Twitter app. I’ll update this post when I find one

And so recently nine of us (plus one lovely dog) turned up at the Green Man in Grantchester. We quickly agreed that there were some lessons to be learnt already – hat, gloves and a torch were likely to be useful! It was a lovely sunny evening, though already it was beginning to get colder.

Vandy then arrived wearing a rucksack and after a short briefing we were off. Vandy had prepared a set of three questions that we could discuss in small groups, though I think we all found that we had plenty to discuss anyway. We walked at a good pace behind the houses in what seems to a be a pretty little village. We were walking and talking in twos or threes, with people occasionally leaving one group to join another.

Walking back up to the Green Man (Photo by Vandy)

There was a moment of confusion when we unexpectedly arrived at a private swimming pool. Once we had retraced our steps we found our route again and walked back alongside the river to the pub. By now there was a great sunset and Vandy took a photo as the last glimmers of light kissed the treetops and we arrived back at the Green Man.

The walk had taken about an hour. With the light now faded completely the pub was too inviting. We settled down around a large table and continued to network.

All agreed it had been a good evening, and that we should repeat it – in the spring!

Recently, though I have noticed I wanted to write some stuff that perhaps fitted better elsewhere. I have now moved a couple of posts from the coaching blog and posted them here along with a new post.

A friend was recently telling me about a blogging challenge where she posts everyday! I admire her determination, I am going for one a week!

I am just back from a near-perfect conference.

I go to conferences because I am attracted by the sound of the headline speakers. There is the potential for interesting conversations, and hopefully there is a nice venue. And so often I have come back the speakers were OK – they had obviously done their thing too many times, and had lost interest. The conversations were inhibited by the venue, which had the atmosphere of a warehouse.

TEDx Granta – the TED event in Cambridge was different. The speakers were dynamic and thought-provoking. I was inspired by anocean-rower. Moved by a story of street-kids playing world cup football. And utterly amazed by a recycled house. There were many more, some streamed on video from the recent TED event, and many live. A few initial technical issues were soon fixed and the mix worked really well.

TED is a not-for-profit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It holds an annual event in California. TEDx are the independently organised local events based on the original TED. This event was brilliantly organised. The venue chosen was fantastic. The Møller Centre, in Churchill College Cambridge  has a splendid purpose built auditorium, no warehouse acoustics here. There was a wide range of fascinating people there, and plenty of time and crucially space to meet and eat and talk. For me the speakers and the networking are equally important and I felt that  both were given equal attention by the organisers. We had a dedicated and rather attractive area to withdraw to during the ample breaks.

My sincere hope is that the team will be repeating this and similar events in Cambridge. Watch out for them TED has ideas worth spreading and TEDx Granta has just held a conference worth attending.