A Vision For Analysts

We've been having meetings about "what sort of MI team we want to be". I try to miss these as all anyone does is serve up apple pie. After the Leading A Team course I went on, I wrote this in an hour on Friday afternoon...

"Our first job is to help the business. We do that by responding to their requests and by spending time talking with them about what they are doing so that we can suggest MI and analyses they may not have thought of.

Our second job is to produce an overview of the business. Most of our colleagues are focussed on details and don’t have the time or resources to do this.

We take time to discuss with the customer what they want and need, why, when, for what audience and for what purpose. And we keep the customer informed on progress and discuss any issues arising during the project.

We keep up with what other MI groups are doing so we can benefit from their work and not duplicate it.

When we have ideas for improving reports or find things that strike us as interesting during the course work, we will not be disappointed if does not fit the current business agenda.

We are in MI because we like to understand what a business and market looks like and we like solving intellectual problems. We should be looking at things we think might be interesting even if no-one suggested it and we should be extending our knowledge of the tools we use even if we don’t have an immediate use for it.

We are surrounded by people whose job it is to influence, persuade and manipulate other people into working on their projects. We need to develop the skills and temperament to handle those people in a polite and mutually beneficial manner.

High-grade MI is produced by smart analysts using the right tools and adequate data. The team will hire people with potential and train them so that in two-three years they will leave for salaries way above what they could earn here. In the meantime The Bank will have had one or two years of a quality of work way above what it is paying for."

... and sent it to the boss. You may safely assume that if I'm saying we should do something, we're not doing it and indeed some people think we shouldn't be. This might look obvious, but none of it is showing in what we do. And I'm going to bet it isn't in your team either.

The Parental Cocoon

I've muttered before about parents schlepping their crying kids around public transport, restaurants and shops where the adults don't want them yowling. There's places kids should not be. But there's also places that adults shouldn't expect to go because that's where children and parents belong. Call it the parental cocoon, the simplified, safer world which makes raising children easier, protected from the ambiguities, emotions, physicality, sexuality, uncertainties and threats of the adult world. The cars drive slower, the surfaces are softer, the toilets larger so nappies can be changed, the spaces between tables large enough to accommodate prams, there are no rowdy teenagers pushing and shoving, nor mysterious hoodie-wearing strangers carrying sports bags going in and out of flats during the day... whatever it is that makes parents' lives easier. If we could remove the boogie-men created by the Social Services' PR machine expressly for the purpose of putting fear into parents, well, I'd do that as well. Children need open spaces to play in, open roads to cycle along, responsible local shopkeepers who don't sell them things they shouldn't have... I don't know how you do that now, but some politician should think about it. What does a child-friendly space look like? What are the child-friendly hours? When does the world belong to parents and children, and when does it belong to adults with jobs and social lives? And no, everywhere cannot be part of the cocoon, nor should it.

Because the lives of adults and parents do not mix. The spaces adults like are not suitable for children.  Adult spaces are crowded, fast-moving, ambiguous, sexual, physical and assume that everyone is aware of where they are, where they are going and what is happening around them. Tourists are like children in this respect - they don't know where they are or what they are doing. If you do, you're a local even if you don't live there.

Adult spaces are subject to discipline, manners, courtesies and sacrifices. Children can't do these things and parents are too tired and made too clumsy by prams and tired ten year-olds to do them as well. That's the real reason why children and parents aren't welcome in adult spaces - they don't have the manners, they can't behave properly. One of the largest adjustments people have to make when they have children is to stop living like adults and start living like parents. It's a larger sacrifice than they realise - if they knew how much it was, many wouldn't do it. That's the decision the Spanish make.

Only the movie industry has had the insight to define its own parental cocoon: movie and TV ratings define the extent to which the space of the show is part of the cocoon in which parents need to raise their children. It's time other industries did. Children are not exempt from the manners of adults, and their inability to behave as adults is why they should not be in adult spaces. However, parents need their cocoon as well. And when they want to take part in the adult world, they can hire a baby-sitter.

To "Lead" Or Not To "Lead"?

I've just finished a course about How To Lead A Team. It was run by the same guy who ran the Resilience  course in Bristol - The Bank clearly has a small number of trainers on tap - and I found it thought-provoking. I went there to get my thoughts provoked. The last time I had a team working for me, at AT&T, I don't think I made a very good job of it - though I'm not sure I made any worse a job than anyone else who ran one either. The Bank is a bureaucratic swamp and its official literature is full of abstract language signifying so little that in practice managers just do what they want. Line managers are appointed without being put through training, which tells you that the organisation doesn't think all its processes and procedures matter (if it did, you'd be trained in them before you had to use them, which is kinda what professional armies do).

So after two days I'm pretty sure I can do the thing intellectually. Of course I can. It was only towards the afternoon of the second day I realised that the real question is: can I do it emotionally? When it really matters, am I going to tell someone that they need to straighten out their act thisly, or start behaving thusly, or read the damn manuals because that's what separates the men from the boys. Am I prepared to deliver, not the bad news (I've told people they have to go or are being made redundant, and I think I do it with tact and consideration) but the here's-what-you-have-to-change-about-yourself news?

Or to put it another way: is it safe for an ACoA with co-dependent and addictive streaks to be "leading" people? Setting examples and standards and generally behaving as if I have some wisdom to impart? Because that's the kind of "leader" I would need to be. I would need to figure out how I did that without feeling involved or responsible for my people, so that my codependency didn't kick in. My first thought is that I can't do it, but even just naming the problem makes it less scary.

And then there's the question of the marginal increase in bureaucracy. Could I really handle that? And could I handle not doing the technical work? Which, let's fact it, I'm doing because that's the niche I found for myself there? In other words, I wound up thinking about a lot more than just "oh god, I'd have to do 1-2-1's".

But that's the real value of these in-house courses. I don't really expect to learn any specific tricks, techniques or procedures, because they gave up treating those years ago. Far too prescriptive. The value is the time it gives you to think about what you want from work and need to change about your act.

And finding someone else thinks that The Bank has no internal corporate culture. I've been there over three years and if I still don't get the place, it means there's nothing to get. It ain't even there.

Singles for a Very Hot Summer

There's a theory that all human life originated on Richard Leaky's tea plantation in Kenya. Our evolutionary unconscious (or whatever) expects the weather to be hot during the day and cold at night if we're at any altitude. Cold weather is not what we're programmed for. This year I felt that somewhere in my torso, that we are supposed to be hot, not cold, and that northern European weather is not where we feel comfortable. It's another humid, hot London summer and I would not change it, especially after a winter that lasted until about mid-April.

Which brings us to Singles for a Very Hot Summer. This one for some reason I have a deep an automatic association with Trafalgar Square and the National Portrait Gallery. Get over the awful 60's hairstyles and listen to the lyrics. And for that matter, the piano chords.



The Lovin' Spoonful, 1966. Then there's Marshall Hain from 1978. They were basically a one-hit act, but we all loved this song.



I thought she was really hot - don't snigger, girls in the 70's looked different from the way they do now. They didn't all have long legs and come from a gym in Essex. In a different decade I suspect Kit Hain would have turned into Imogen Heap.

On A Course In Leeds

I was born in Sheffield and I have been to Leeds once before, sometime in the early 80's. I have a vague memory that the place was pretty industrially run down. Not so now. It looks like someone re-built it on the same month in about 2002. They call this building "The Dalek"

I was staying in the City Inn Hotel, which had a fine view over Leeds Station - in fact le Tout Leeds d'affairs seems to want to be within a short distance of the station. These are two views from the thirteenth floor (yes, I know, who has a thirteenth floor?) of the hotel, the Skyline Lounge...

You see what I mean about the buildings. It must be the only town with the main hospital - the famous Leeds General Infirmary - on one edge of the entertainment district. The centre is packed with places to eat and drink, from rather tatty at the bottom of the hill, getting slightly swisher as you go up towards Millennium Square. They are all chains and theme restaurants - nothing that feels local except Kendalls Bistro, a French restaurant by the theatre which was holding a private party Tuesday night. There went the wild boar. So I went to the newly-opened Jamie's Italian for supper. It was rammed with a half-hour wait for a table. At seven o'clock. Every other restaurant was empty. But then it serves stuff like this...

A terrific antipasti mix of cheese, salami, the best mozzarella I've tasted and olives. Notice the cute way the wooden platter is standing on two tins of chopped tomatoes. The place was full of hen parties - my waitress said it was not a Tuesday Night Leeds thing. I had the lamb chops and ice creams. The espresso was good.  On the way back to the hotel, I walked through this tunnel under the station...

Which you can bet was not that clean and shiny in 2000. This lead me to my hotel room...

Yep, that's an iMac serving as a TV and available as a computer, something I've always said I'd do if I was living in a flat. Peer round the curtain to the left and you have a fine view of the platforms of Leeds Station. The course? Advanced Influencing. I will discuss that later.

Sometimes Being Tired Just Means You Should Go To Bed Earlier

I spent a Saturday walking around Amsterdam recently with an old university friend. We're within months of the same age and from very similar backgrounds. We tend to experience the similar things at similar times. Right now, we're experiencing one of the many things they don't tell you about Being A Man: staring at the last ten years of your working life and wondering what the heck you want to do with it, now it's clear you don't have a career left. I have a job, a paid-off mortgage, am terminally single and my pension is worth a damn. He's been a freelance technical writer and translator for a long while, has a mortgage and a wonderful partner and his pension is probably better than mine, but not so he can travel round the world on it. He's thinking in terms of living maybe twenty years after retirement, I'm thinking of checking out pretty much when I can't earn any more. Which looks like a lot of differences, but it's just economics.

People only ask themselves what they want to do when they don't know. But you can't answer that question by making lists of alternatives and evaluating them – if one of them was what you wanted to do, you wouldn't bother evaluating the others – so whatever you choose from that list is emotionally random even if it has good numbers. Knowing what you want to do is like being in love: if you have to ask, you don't and you aren't. When all those life- and career-planning books tell you to work out what you want, you're doing all the heavy lifting for them. What we really want to know is how to live when we don't have any clear signals.

And yet, this feels different from all those other moments when I asked myself what I wanted out of life. For one thing, I'm not asking that question. I'm asking why I'm not upset by the fact that there's no-one in my bed. I'm asking why I'm not going to see movies that a few months ago I would have gone to see, or why I'm just taking sandwiches back to the office instead of going out into Soho. I'm asking why I'm tired and waking up early. I'm assuming that I must be in some sort of state of shut-down to be not feeling those things. But what if this is what it feels like to be absorbed or at least occupied by your work? Not something I would know.

There is one more clue in my case. Remember the bit where I'm an ACoA with co-dependency and drink and addiction issues? We tend to sabotage ourselves. Just when we get near to doing something we want to do, that might be beneficial or move us along in the world, we distract ourselves with something else, mess up, or in some other way lose the chance. I maybe doing that. If I knew which of my projects I'm actually succeeding with. The day job? I'm not so sure there. My work? I think my latest story has potential. I'm still in the West End. I could try again to do what I abandoned last time because the budget threatened to run out of control. I should suspect self-sabotage rather than anything profound and just let whatever it is play itself out.

Signs of Distraction

I'm writing this on a train to Leeds. Not the one I booked on The Bank's travel system and for which I had a seat reservation. No. That train left at 17:33 from Kings Cross. That's what the ticket said. I thought I was getting a train at 18:00. There is one. I must have chosen the 17:33 instead. So I missed it.

On Friday I lost my toiletry bag somewhere in Heathrow Airport. I had built its contents up over the years: a small badger shaving brush, a tube of almond shaving cream from Taylors of Old Bond Street, various pills, plasters and potions to cope with minor eventualities and stomach acid, toothbrush and toothpaste. I had it in an external pocket where the security people could look at it, and when I left the Cafe Nero to go to the boarding gate, there it was gone.

When I arrived in the Netherlands, my phone decided to go wandering. It wouldn't find a signal, lost my friend's details and re-booted itself when I tried to look at his records. It cured itself after being off for a while. This morning it lost my sister's details.

When I tried to leave the Netherlands on Sunday evening, KLM decided to change the plane, os instead of leaving at 20:30, we left at 21:40. When we arrived at Heathrow, they parked us at a gate somewhere near Reading. I think we may have been the last plane into T4 than evening.

I bought another train ticket and the chances are good I can expense it. I replaced the essential parts of my toiletries bag. I can re-load the contacts in my phone. I can't get the bad night's sleep back.

But it's not about losing and replacing things. It's about the state of mind I'm in but don't seem to be aware of. I'm distracted. I'm thinking about anything but where I am. It's not just what usually happens over summer, there's a little more to it than that. And when I find out, I'll tell you.