Category — psychology

Last night I had my first ever dream featuring a celebrity. The only other time I’ve dreamt of anything celebrity-related was the time I woke Joe up because I was shrieking in my sleep (I was riding around on Angelina Jolie’s speedboat in the dream – I never actually saw her, but I knew it was her boat and I was having the time of my life.)

Anyway, here is the dream:

I am on a small passenger plane headed for Vancouver. There are about 25 passengers and all of the female passengers are clustered around a seat at the back of the plane. When the crowd of giggling and preening women part, I see a supremely annoyed looking Robert Pattinson sitting in the seat. It’s clear to me he’s trying not to lose his temper, or give into to the temptation of tossing the lot of them out the door at 25,000 feet. The girls are all making a huge fuss of him, trying to get his attention, trying to find some excuse, any excuse, to touch him.

He sees me looking at him, his mouth is set in a grim line, his teeth clenched. I give him a little half-wave and turn away.

We begin our descent into Vancouver and the girls all reluctantly return to their seats. I stare out the window as we fly lower and notice that a large tank is rumbling it’s way down a set of unused train tracks as we fly over Kerrisdale. The pilot begins to speak over the PA system as I lose sight of the tank:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid we must divert our Vancouver flight to another nearby facility. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened and your seat backs and tray tables in the upright and locked position.”

I’m feeling a little anxious and more than a little annoyed. All I want is to get home and get off this stupidly tiny plane with it’s cramped seating and silly women behind me. Some of the ladies have chosen to become hysterical at the pilot’s announcement and have launched themselves in a flurry of fake tears into Robert Pattinson’s lap. I don’t need to look this time to know that he is not impressed. I can hear him and the flight attendant urging these idiots back to their seats.

The plane finally lands and we are shown into a small, cramped air hangar and told to wait for the arrival of our luggage.

While most of the passengers cluster around Rob, I head over to a counter and ask why the flight’s been diverted. One of the employees, her attention largely focused on the large group around Rob, tells me that the pilot saw a tank in Kerrisdale and was unsure it was safe to land. Cars were being brought in to pick us all up and get us either home or to a hotel.

I walk towards the group which has dispersed somewhat and get Rob’s attention.

“What?” he’s practically snarling with frustration.

“The pilot diverted the flight because he thought there was a threat to our safety. Cars are being sent to pick us all up and take us where we need to go. I thought you might like to know.”

Rob looks surprised, then colours a little for biting my head off. “Thanks.”

I nod at him and walk over to where our luggage is being unloaded. I take my bags down a small hallway near a door over-looking the tarmac. A few moments later I hear footsteps behind me. I turn and it’s Rob.

“Hey,” he says. “Want to grab a cigarette with me?”

I don’t smoke, but what the hell, I agree and we walk out. Rob lights up and we start walking across the tarmac. Suddenly, from behind, there is a cacophony of voices. “Rob! Rob, is this your new girlfriend?”, “How does Kristen feel about this?”, “How did you two meet?” and other questions lost in the babble of voices and sound of camera flashes and hurried footsteps.

Rob grabs my hand and looks at me quickly and then down again. The message is clear: “Don’t look. Say nothing. Keep moving.” We hurry further on and I feel grateful that he didn’t simply bolt and leave me to fend for myself. There is a large white car across the way and we move towards it. As I am looking down and hurrying, I see a small pixie dressed in a deep pink dress at my feet. I bend and scoop her up in my hand as we rush forwards.

The pixie is completely unimpressed with this and bites me.

I frown at her. “I thought maybe you’d prefer to not be trampled by those idiots.”

“Oh.” she says in a tiny bell-like voice. “Then I apologize for biting you.”

The reporters and photographers are now gone and we reach the car. The pixie leaps from my hand into the open driver-side window. The dome light goes on illuminating the amber tinted windows and the driver-side door opens. Inside, the car is upholstered all in white leather. As my eyes adjust to the slightly darker interior, I see that the seats are covered in strings of raw meat, watery blood and the small holder between the two front seats is full of what looks like a blood and milk mixture.

I look back at Rob and he grins, “Well, we have to have somewhere to eat, drink and whore.”

At this point I got woken up by a garbage truck in the alley behind the house – and maybe that’s for the best.

Yesterday, I bought Daniel H. Pink’s book Drive. I was inspired to read his work after watching the following video about why money is a poor motivator in the work place.

The whole book was an excellent read, but what really grabbed my attention is the concept of the Results-only Work Environment (ROWE).

Let’s compare and contrast:

Typical office workplace:

• Must be present during “core business hours”.
• Must fill in time sheets to record all work activities – sometimes in excruciating detail.
• Must attend all meetings – even if they will not be useful to your work in anyway.
• Socializing with other employees is not encouraged except for company sponsored “team building” exercises.
• Managerial “babysitters” whose purpose seems to be ensuring you’re there and working.
• Personal or professional development is encouraged so long as you do it outside of work hours.
• Flex-time is available, but it’s not really that flexible. You must still work a 40 hour week and account for all your time.
• Yearly evaluations from people you don’t work with on a daily basis to set meaningless, buzzword filled goals.

ROWE workplace:

• Must get the work done and it must be good quality – when and where you do it doesn’t matter.
• Meetings are for collaborating on or discussing something – no meetings just for the sake of having one.
• Employees can do great work on their own terms.
• Pays employees fairly so they can a) take care of themselves and their families properly without a lot of stress and b) stop worrying about who’s making what and get on with creating something great.

I know which model I prefer.

Does it work for all businesses – yes. Say you have a retail store, it will be open during what is considered “core business hours” generally speaking. It will also likely provide a service or product – and you can still let your employees direct themselves. People who aren’t comfortable on the cash register can work the floor and help people. Employees with a creative eye can set up enticing displays, the diplomats among them can deal with unhappy or difficult customers. And of course, money won’t be an issue with them at work, because you pay them fairly.

I wonder though if the old and stale model is still around because we keep dressing it up with fancy concepts. For instance, let’s look at software companies that use an Agile development process. Agile is meant to stop treating software development like a car-factory (the waterfall method) and let self-directed, cross-functional teams build software in short cycles. This allows for better collaboration and visibility and when done correctly, you have a small piece of working software that could potentially be released to a customer for immediate feedback.

Agile is a fantastic concept and a great environment to work in when done right; otherwise, it’s simply another buzzword used to make the company sound innovative and interesting to people who don’t work there. I have worked at such places – and after the initial excitement of forward momentum, there comes a screeching halt and a feeling of confused betrayal. It seemed like we were moving forward, things were changing, the old ways were being dismantled so new growth and ideas could flourish. But really, it was just a new coat of paint on the same old tired structure. Like lipstick on a pig is the phrase that comes to mind.

When something that should have been great turns out to be riddled with problems and mediocre at best  – people lose heart, become unhappy, demotivated and even angry. This is when people spend their lunch hours surfing Workopolis and cleaning up their resume. This is where employee turnover happens.

Daniel Pink points out that as children we are self-directed, curious and will work at something just for pleasure – but we lose this once we start school or working and we start doing things only because we have to and for the dubious reward of a gold star or a cash bonus at work. We become uninspired people merely collecting  rewards we won’t enjoy.

My goal is to get back to that curious and motivated state. I know I can’t be five again, but I wonder what things I might think up if I just explored what was around me, read more, wrote more and rather than feeling humiliated by my failures, used them as new opportunities.

We need to free ourselves from these schedules and time-sheets and silly carrot-and-stick systems and just engage with the work we’re doing – no matter what that work is. We need time and space to create new ideas and try new things – and this time and freedom could lead to truly innovative ideas that advance our thinking, our way of working and the work itself.

I’ve read all these concepts before and thought “What cheesy, new-agey sounding crap this all is.” But I was wrong to think that – not wrong because I know for a fact this approach won’t work for me, but wrong because I’ve never bothered to try it before.

That changes now.

I always hate having to start the first post in months with an apology, so I won’t.

I finished a long contract about two months ago and have written nothing since. I wrote almost nothing while I was contracting too.

Here’s the issue: I have a tendency to be consumed by my work. I go to work, I give pretty much all I’ve got and then I go home and I continue to think about work. I fret over everything – even (and maybe especially) the things I have absolutely no control over. I talk about the project and its issues ad nauseam, I spend time puzzling over possible solutions,  I often sleep poorly because I keep waking myself either thinking of work or dreaming about it.

In short, over the course of my last contract, I became my job and drove my husband up the wall.

Enter the multi-talented Nicole Sheldrake and the Vancouver Innovation Camp.

Innovation Camp, to quote the website, is the place where you will learn to “challenge assumptions, connect ideas, embrace failure and see problems as opportunities for creative solutions in order to take your entrepreneurial venture to the next step. Our workshops are hands-on learning opportunities which engage learners through real life situations and challenges – no lectures.”

No lectures? Doing something creative instead of just talking about doing something creative? Count me in.

I needed a creative kick in the pants anyway.

Innovation Camp delivers exactly what it promises; I learned some really valuable lessons:

1. I am an anal retentive planner who is not always very comfortable with half-baked, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants plans. Yesterday, for the final activity, I had no choice but to go along with this approach (and I had great teammates who basically said “You go freak out over there and we’ll come get you when we’re off and flying. Everything will be fine.”) And you know, it was fine. I joined in, still feeling a little iffy about half-formed plans and then just improvised on the fly with everyone else. Everything worked out great and it was a lot more fun than following a pre-made plan to the letter.
2. Promoting ideas and building on them – especially the ideas that aren’t yours – is a great way to generate even better ideas with a team. Being told “No.” or being the one to say it to every idea ever stifles future ideas, makes people angry and unmotivated and will completely kill a project. Worse, the project won’t die, but it will be weak and boring.
3. Allowing team members to use their strengths and strengthen their weak points is the best way to build a great team. I’m a lousy negotiator – I’m too abrupt, and I have no qualms about walking away from what I feel is a poor deal and that burns bridges. After watching some of my teammates negotiate successfully, I learned a few things and tried again. I was only negotiating a trade of peanut M&Ms for some cheddar Sunchips, but you have to start somewhere right? Besides, those Sunchips were delicious.
4. Gut instincts count for a lot. If you are really certain that the final product will be unclear to the intended audience, say so before it’s presented. Presenting something confusing to people and knowing they have no idea what you’re on about is not a good feeling.
5. A ball of wool has A LOT of potential (trust me on this, it just does) and if a ball of wool can generate discussion, make people happy, add value to someones life (even if only for a few minutes) and be the catalyst for awesome ideas – imagine what you can do!
6. We need more freedom – we are not our job titles or our paycheques. So I don’t make $80,000 a year or own a car or my very own tiny condo…who cares? As one of my teammates said “You can cry in a BMW, or smile on a bike.” (I know, I know, the choices are not quite that black and white, but to have those things – I’d have to make myself unhappy. I don’t want any of that stuff that badly).

In addition to learning useful things, I met some great people that I will definitely have future contact with. Will we band together and start our own business? Maybe. Will we stay in touch and support each others endeavors?  We will if I have anything to say about it.

Innovation Camp was exactly what I needed – without it, this post would not exist. I would still be sitting in front of the blank screen thinking “I have to look for proper work. I must bring home a big, fat paycheque from somewhere. I must swallow my hatred of the 9-5 world and be an adult.”

I would still be paralyzed by a sense of duty to something I really don’t like – and what use is that really? My workaholic tendencies add no value to my life or the lives of the people I care about.

So thank you Nicole, and fellow teammates – you’ve made a big difference and given me the courage I needed to start moving forward instead of just talking about it.