Protecting the Good Stuff from the Stupid Ideas

Over the past couple of years I’ve been following the antics of Charlie and Brigid and the utterly beautiful movement entitled: Spaces for Listening. Once upon a time they let me join in: I interfered and felt like I spoiled it. However, the experience was inspiring, the feedback uplifting – and contrary to the typical arseholes banging on about active/passive/flavoured listening – Charlie and Brigid advocate little more than giving our fabulous humanity some space!

What’s more they do it all without the need for any overwrought SMART arse goals. It’s definitely a worthwhile wander and I’m sure they’d invite you along, if you asked nicely. Ask really nicely and they may even run one for you, your friends and some random strangers who will quickly become more interesting, than your friends. They just will be more interesting if you’re a normal human and believe me, within their wonderful Spaces, we all are!

Anyway, while banging on about some other interesting thing, Charlie posted my warning about the dangers of The Rise of the SHINY. In short, how the most important things we do, the essential work, is so easily overwhelmed by the perpetual arrival of a Shiny, albeit stupid idea. It lit a fuse and caused some tweets that led to a challenge: in exchange for a Charlie style critique smacking the arse of a bloggy buttock, I offered an appropriately pert, fresh one along the lines of:

Oh really… say more please (or expand on it in your next blog😃)

— Charlie Jones (@charlie_psych) October 28, 2023

Right Space Right Time…

Lately I’ve been writing for other people, so getting a welcome nudge, made me reflect on the fact that my own ramblings have been left destitute and neglected. On reflection, writing for other people is easy. Well, at least it is for me, because I’ve an effective system for setting the parameters with the commissioner.

Those parameters act as the constraint. The boundaries within which to write creatively about the same thing that everyone else does – an obscure corner of the world that I’ve come to know intimately. The intimacy slips, slides, soups, saunters and sashays indiscriminately into the faces that happen to be nearby who, soaked in the waves of my memory, rise with the emotions of a held hand, a taught knife and a voice lost in the night. Oh that suddenly went a bit Dylan Thomas. And so it is, in a dark corner of an half tidy shit pub, where it’ll cost you a beer or two, to work out what that metaphor means!

The constraint provides the necessary pen and paper, but to feed the creativity the best commissions also trigger a little insufficiency. That which pokes the perspective, lights the spark of starvation and pumps some pressure into the mist of meaningful metaphor. And believe me, every writer needs both.

For myself, the necessary is a lifelong love affair with procrastination and wine and that’s really what the commissioner pays for.

But for the insufficiency, I need angst! Something frustrating to bang on about, something shit to rage at, something that draws forth my favourite warm feeling of an appreciative audience, filled with laughter and awkward silences. It’s a very personal thing and my usual targets, albeit anticipatorily joyful, don’t seem to be tickling my fancy anymore.

Queue Charlie, who gave me a nudge while I was sat in one of my essential spaces for listening and reflecting and watching a Labrador chase fish.

Offence…

The Leaderists remain lost in the same old medieval pseudo-religious social control fantasy that they always have.

Like all the ONE BOOK ideologies based on ‘our people are better than yours’, they inevitably circle around the same old shite, having rotated most recently to spouting about heroism, again! I think it’s probably the natural reaction to the pending self-realisation that 30 years of promoting Leaderism has brought society the worst trough of butknuckles in positions of power, EVER!

That’s a BIG call but thank God that a belief in Leaderism comes fully fledged, with a predisposed disregard for competence. They may well have become Sisyphus, Caligula, Khan, Napoleon, Hitler or even Trump! But despite having the same underlying psychotic delusion, compelled Leaderists are incompetent and rarely rise beyond the rank of an employee. Power mad despots craving a boardroom table to bend over and the cold lick of a glass walled executive office, but nonetheless mostly hopeless, salaried and in the workplace, alongside the rest of us.

I’ve even started feeling sorry for them. Not the Leaderists themselves, but the ideologues like Humphry and Daphne HappyClappy.com who actually go around selling the psychotic delusion: that all you need to do, is be a better version of you. Suggest that you might actually try and do something useful with proven tools, techniques and an entire Project Management Office full of organisational knowhow and Humphry and Daphne fall to their knees, clutching candles and chanting.

“Please oh great guru, allow our latest prefix-leaderism wheeze, to once again, suckle at the budget of yet another HR department that has absolutely no idea, what else to do.”

Picking on their thoughts and prayers doesn’t feel fair anymore. For some reason it’s all gone a bit sad and the few old hacks still hanging around the edges of Leaderism, appear increasingly more like that creepy-looking relative, who turns up at a funeral…. and nobody talks to.

Then there’s the all new Improvementalists who are usually up for a laugh – at, not with!

Whisper at any Quality Improvement Proselyte, with the mere scent of a full fat brew of basic 1992 Project Management on your lips, and they roll over like a dying Walrus, making all kinds of noises. Desperately vomiting all the blubber they’ve consumed from 400 slides that say the same thing as all the other Walrus collections of infantilised cartoons and car factory fantasies.

The fantasy is that the vast majority of them have anything at all to sell beyond a little bit of project management. They colour it in, change the words and type them into boxes, arranged in shapes that they market shamelessly, but nonetheless it’s just a bit of project management. And even then, not the real meat and potatoes, just some of the amuse bouche that your typical PMO does, to sort the shit from the custard.

“Look at my amazing enormous shiny teeth” belches out the dying Walrus, attracting all the attention and not an inconsiderable amount of money, “all you need is two amazing enormous shiny teeth just like me, you do, you do… there is no other waaaaay!”

Two teeth, five teeth, seven teeth, nine teeth, fourteen teeth carved into a row of little statues of Deming, it’s all the same highly cleansed, lack of grit sack of shit!

Typically when the latest shiny toothed initiative ends and the awards have been handed out (by a fellow Walrus) the blubber is rolled back into the sea. Everyone congratulates each other on their new set of amazing enormous shiny teeth, as they watch the award bobbing away desperately looking for the next place to beach up. Unfortunately, no matter how shiny, there aren’t many uses for enormous teeth unless you too are a Walrus. Meanwhile, they point blankly refuse to accept that in the real world, the big teeth are called tusks, and pretty useless ones at that.

So, as a professional Killer Whale, swimming past – with an actual degree in an actual science and decades of experience and having had e-bloody-nough of all the shiny teeth – similar to most senior clinicians, I can make a black-belted Walrus whimper uncontrollably, as I explain how their ideas are completely toothless!

Again, it seems unfair to pick on these poor buggers anymore, as yet another wave of novice, one trick Walruses roll out, onto a beach, near you.

Defence…

I warned you that I like a metaphor and the Shiny blog is all about the increasing plethora of bewildered lightweights within our institutions who are attracted to simple but wrong ideas. They typically appear in one of two forms, but whether a Leaderist or an Improvementalist, a bloody good Project Management Office, is the best defence:

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Leaderist Wheeze	Improvementalist Blubber	PMO Defence
I met someone on a Development Spa Day, who invited me to talk about our potential collaboration at a Spa Day in Naples, in the Spring.	I matched spirit animals in a WooWooCircle® at IHI and now I want to pay my fellow Walrus to run our first local WooWooCircle®.	Invite the Lightweight to send an advocate to the Innovation Appraisal Committee (that lists all the stupid ideas like this) and meets once every six to eighteen months.
I got sent something by someone important promoting one of the above.	I wrote a letter to a NED saying what a fabulous time I had at one of the above, having been sponsored by Aunty Betty NED.	Add it to our nicely curated list of ideas from Lightweights designed solely to be occasionally presented to the collective Lightweights in important committees so that they start competing with each other again.
A serious strategic investment is required to create a programme about this thing with my name on.	Something horrible has happened somewhere else and the only possible solution to avoid the horror, is to build my great army of the Walrus.	Schedule 12 months of Outline Business Case Support Team meetings, to argue mostly trivial points about stuff that nobody could possibly know, until the Lightweight forgets or leaves the business.
I saw an infographic showing how much of a coloured Walrus would be effected with a link to a webshite where I can drag and drop things into the Walrus.	I got a load of spin-filled charts published on an obscure webshite and now everything I ask for, is fully evidence based.	Every PMO should have a Ginger Gareth who can de-squirrel data out of all sorts of basements into a Benefits Realisation Analysis to 9 decimal places, capable of countering any claims from half-soaked data penguins, dancing and honking.
The CEO has forwarded a letter to me about a new ministerial priority with a time limited budget.	As Chief Walrus, I should take full control of said budget.	A member of our PMO should be sleeping with the ACFO in charge of CIP, who can establish a scrutiny process that allocates almost all of the money to stuff that we already do for that priority.
In the clubhouse on Sunday, I read a very scary news article, about a Leaderist like me, who got arrested for negligence. Quick, cover my arse!	I put the launch of the ‘Teaching Everyone Enormous Shiny Teeth Saves Lives Academy” in my new Strategic Plan.	Head of PMO temporarily takes chair of Corporate Governance, Risk Management and Improvement Project Planning Framework Approval Committee: accessible via a 250 page Self-Assessment.
The Chair was in a private meeting with the Minister and got bollocked for us not playing nicely under his new regional togetherness board policy and now I have to do something.	I know where to buy a WooWooCircle® (new subtitle) Partnership Working Walrus Fast Track Development Programme.	PMO applaud Walrus Programme. Events and colourful Reports full of togetherness, will be squirted over what we already do like some kind of Policy Initiative Deodorant. It’ll keep the Lightweights busy for ages pretending something is happening, while the rest of us carry on regardless.
I got a copy of a briefing explaining how ‘HappyClappy’ is perfectly aligned to a strategic goal within my portfolio.	I must insist on presenting to the Board, this beautiful publication and quirky animation explaining how I, Chief Walrus, am the most important strategy in (replaces name of last organisation who fell for it, with my own).	PMO opens, exquisitely collated compendium of all current policies and strategies explaining how what we already do, is way more well aligned than the stupid idea.
At a splendid dinner up in London, I was handed a very impressive OBC by Novak & Good Plc, containing a massive implementation contract.	The International Walrus Institute has offered me a fellowship, if I buy in fellow fellows to run a readymade Scale and Spread version of our Enormous Shiny Teeth Collaborative.	Official permission for PMO to go Super Saiyan and organise an Option Appraisal Strategic Engagement Singularity: a large scale email bombing campaign to annoy the arse out of as many people as possible, for as long as possible, all in the name of the Lightweight.
Hi, I have just joined the organisation as the new Chief Director of (something or other) and Transformation and I have baggage and a burning platform.	I’m now an associate at ThinkWank.com and I want to invite them and their million dollar marketing budget, to come and sell us a six figure corporate subscription.	Project Manager takes out of the filing cabinet: Reconfiguration of Secretarial Services Programme. With the full secret support of the secretaries they’ll line up the senior managers and clinicians to question absolutely everything. Nothing will go anywhere for months.
I saw a wonderful thingumajig on some slides that whizzed around to dramatic music.	I am committed to implementing the All New – list of fashionable words, in coloured boxes, with random arrows – Walrus Model?	Nuclear option: Get your most annoying clinicians from above, to talk about the only change model that counts and has any evidence of actually doing anything useful: History Assessment Prognosis Treatment Continuity Medical Model c.12000 BC

I know what you’re thinking: “that’s mostly about causing unnecessary delays and inventing bureaucracy to prevent change”. Well yes, after all this is defence, but a very simple and incredibly powerful tactic that’ll beat any Lightweight with an idea. If you don’t believe me, go get a coffee and take another 10 minutes to learn about the OGZ.

Top Tip…

Occasionally you may be confronted with the ungodly offspring of a Leaderist and an Improvementalist in a single half-crazed, tusk-wielding attention seeker, atop their personal iceberg of delusion. In this case, it’s best to keep your prized PMO well back and seek some specialist help from a suitably satiated Killer Whale.

Satiated because like the tactics, you got to be able to take your time and have already learned how to be the opposite of a lightweight. Having swum through some deep, rich, insight and experience and knowledge and skill, the best Ocra will achieve what you need, quietly. So quietly in fact, as to effortlessly navigate around all the bureaucratic icebergs, with barely a ripple. That, is the offensive capability of a bloody good PMO!

So I’ll amend the title of this blog, slightly. Without doubt, over my 30 years, the greatest work I have ever done is: quietly protecting the good stuff from the stupid ideas.

Now there’s a space worth listening out for 😘