I love this… Click on the article to view the video…

I have been a fan of Prêt-A-Manger for some time; their sandwiches and stuff are delicious, they have a genuine social conscience, their responsible attitude towards ingredients fills me with hope the way their team members behave is an inspiration.

I have always wondered how they engender such fantastic customer service behaviour. I have recently been lucky enough to spend some time with the Prêt Academy finding out how they do it and I think that we can all learn something from the positive consequences of their approach.

I have had conversations about maybe working as a consultant to the team at the Academy, and learnt that consultants, as well as senior managers in the organisation, go out to a retail branch and do a ‘buddy day’.

What a fantastic, creative approach; get right to the ‘coal-face’ and connect with what the business really does. I can almost hear the ivory towers crumbling.

I spent my ‘Buddy Day’ with a fantastic team of people in Guildford on the 11^th October.

The morning involved learning what was important about preparing the food whilst making sandwiches and rolling wraps the Prêt way. After lunch I learnt what was important about the retail space whilst clearing and cleaning tables, sweeping the floor and talking to customers about their food.

I loved it!

There are a handful of simple principles in each environment, described in an easy to remember way and conveyed through examples. It provides enough detail for the team member to know if something is good enough or not, but at the same conveys the spirit of it; the intention of what they are doing, and requires the team member to constantly use their judgement; their initiative.

If I’m lucky enough to do some interesting work with Prêt, I’m no longer a detached consultant.  I was already a frequent customer, and I now have a tacit feeling of what it’s like to work for prêt. They are an inspiration!

If you were to observe a proficient footballer doing ‘keep ups’ (juggling the ball with his/her feet and keeping it from making contact with the ground) you may suggest that they have good ‘ball control’ or that they are ‘controlling the ball’ well.

Obviously they are not ‘controlling the ball’. They can’t make it stop in mid-air. They have no control over the ball whatsoever. They have the skill and experience to constantly react to the ball (whatever it does) so precisely that it creates the illusion of control.

So often when we work with an organic system (like a person or a group of people) we attempt to manage or control – but they are far more wildly unpredictable than a ball!

If you want to be influential I would recommend that you let go of ‘control’. It’s not possible anyway.

You can influence, provoke or seduce – but you cannot control.

Would you rather be ready for everything or ready for anything?

Ready for everything suggests a great deal of preparation – imagining every possible scenario and preparing for it. Of course you would also need to plan for the unexpected: The tangents, the distractions, the objections, the heckles and the miss-matched expectations.

Ready for anything suggests having the ability and flexibility to go with whatever happens and make it work.

It’s great to have a plan – it gives us something to deviate from.

Have you ever noticed that whenever you think about about ‘managing relationships’ you never really have them? Maybe you do on a surface level, but not many on a deep, open, effortless level. Your really great relationships probably don’t need any managing.

Relationships are not things, they are a collection of experiences, and if you think of them as things to be managed you are dissociating from the experience; like hosting a party and not being at the party.

Similarly, ‘Managing change’ is surely a constant necessity – how exhausting! How about creating the conditions so that you don’t need to manage change because it’s just what happens around here and it’s embraced?

‘Managing stress’ seems like a crazy idea. Stress is not a thing it’s a bio-chemical process. Don’t learn to manage it – learn do something else instead! (I know that sounds silly and flippant, but really, it is possible to condition yourself to have more unconscious choice of responses – different bio-chemical reactions).

To be creative: Be in the moment, having the relationship and fully engaged in the experience with a choice of responses – rather than being stuck with only one response and ‘managing’.

I love this question.

I asked it a couple of times last week and enjoyed watching the typical confusion followed by revelation. It’s a fast and elegant way to become aware of counter-examples and open your mind.

I’m running a self-application experiment this week and I urge you to join me: Every time I catch myself being narrow-minded and over-simplifying things (indicated by my being very ‘certain’) I’m going to ask:

What do I have be ignoring to think that?

If you join me in this game, I would love to know what happens…

Oh dear; I’m sorry to point this out, but If you are not okay now, you are not okay.

Get creative and deal with it now! Mix it up! Change stuff!  Why postpone dealing with it until some future date when things may or may not be different? (Most likely they will not).

I’ll be all set when I get that qualification, then becomes I’ll be okay when I get that job/promotion, then I’ll be okay when I get the relationship I want, I’ll be okay when we move house, I’ll be okay when we have kids, I’ll be okay when the kids are at school, I’ll be okay when we have a bit more in the bank, I’ll be okay when we have a decent pension, I’ll be ok when I retire…… oh shit, game over.

Please find ways to be okay now.

I often wonder if our identity, our sense of ‘I’ is the biggest barrier to creativity.

I wonder if we need it. I’m not sure I have an identity because there is not any judgement that I make about myself that I consider to be universally true. Allow me to demonstrate…

Think of an opinion or self-evaluation about yourself:

I am…… / I am not……

Now go looking for the counter example; the thing that you need to ignore in order to believe the judgemental statement.

Most sentences that start with I am or I am not are untrue. We are far too complex to be distilled into one judgemental sentence – there is far more to us than that.

For example:

I can think ‘I am clever’ because I have plenty of experience of being articulate. I tend to grasp complex ideas quickly and thoroughly so that I can re-explain them in a hundred different ways. I’m very imaginative, I can tell colourful stories and change people’s minds. I can reason any argument from multiple perspectives, can simultaneously evaluate at least three differing variable factors and have a very high IQ score.

BUT… At the same time, I can be extremely stupid. I’m hideously forgetful, I am ignorant of current affairs, I can only name about four members of the current UK Government, I have very little knowledge of sport, I do not speak a second language fluently, I cannot play a musical instrument well, I’m clueless about history and have great difficulty remembering people’s names if I don’t know them well.

For me – the statement ‘I am clever’ is neither true nor untrue, it just seems like a silly thing to say. Just as ‘I am stupid’ seem an equally crazy and simplistic evaluation – neither can be universally true.

If you play this game enough you can escape the need for a ‘self-concept’ and stop judging yourself in such hideous, simplistic, polarised, limiting ways.

The same is true of beliefs – you really don’t need them.

Sure I accept there is a need to be operating from an assumption that is likely to be confirmed by experience – but to believe it, to your core, as an irrefutable fact – surely that’s not necessary.

A belief is a powerful schema that organises how you experience the world; whatever you believe, you will make it so (In some cases you may even make things invisible in order to protect your belief), and you will be oblivious of the counter-evidence.

I don’t think I have any beliefs… but is that a belief? I don’t think so because I’m looking for counter evidence – I haven’t found any yet I really don’t know.

Identity (or self-concept) and belief are types of self-limiting prison, and you really don’t need them… Discuss…

I heard it again recently, those ludicrous words; “Is this all there is?”

As usual I resisted the temptation to say, “Yes, and here’s how you have created that world…”

The only way to get to “Is this all there is?” is to have created a life that is way too easy. In society’s eyes you have probably got it absolutely sorted, but it’s not fulfilling.

You have turned off your creative processes of questioning and looking with curiosity. You no longer need to be alert or on your toes.  You have created a comfortable world that is so horrifically predictable that you can just go to sleep. You have labelled your world with simplistic judgmental descriptions that all make perfect sense to you, so you need look no further.

You have been driven away from discomfort and therefore set about eliminating the negatives (risk or inconvenience), leaving yourself with a comfort prison where you can stagnate – no alarms and no surprises please.

If you imagine the following continuum:

On one side is:  Sorted, life is easy, well within my comfort zone, predictable, no mystery

In the middle is:  I’m challenged, stretched, alert, curious, confused, awake

On the other side is:  Blind panic, extreme stress, no perspective.

Where would you put yourself for most of the contexts you find yourself in?

Aim for the middle ground – push yourself – risk possible discomfort and feel the fulfilment of achieving something difficult. Thrive!

I never really understood the idea of managing change.

To me, it’s a bit like having a process to make sure the stable door is shut properly long after the horse has bolted.

The fundamental reason for the range of emotions labeled on ‘the change curve’ (that people may or may not experience) is that the audience is confronted with a change they are not involved in – they have previously been in the dark, they have no control and they cannot contribute. Their fundamental needs have been violated. They are having it done unto them. It is therefore no surprise that under these conditions change is typically resisted with people wishing to cling to a previous status quo that they are comfortable with.

I wonder what would happen if the entire budget dedicated to ‘change management’ after the event was put into ‘creative collaboration’ prior to the event?

What if you stimulated creative thinking, problem solving and collaboration so that people embraced change and included themselves rather than resisting it?

If you treat people like robots they will behave like robots – grumpy robots.

Don’t ‘manage’ the problem – fix it!