Deeper Appreciation

Day 51 (Wednesday 20th January 2016)

51 percent of live TV is watched live. Betraying my age, when I grew up we all watched the
same programmes at the same time (or missed seeing them). Live television viewing was at 81%
in 2008, according to research by NBC Universal, but increasingly people now view TV via
streaming on demand at a time when it suits them - digital broadband is rapidly changing our lives.

Today, the Advent Blogs and Post Advent Blogs series come to an end, and what better way to end than with a post based on appreciation? I am so grateful to all of the wonderful writers who submitted pieces for this year's series. What a breadth of topics have been covered under a theme that many found difficult to tackle. The pondering and effort has paid off - I think that this year has been the best yet. Thank You! I will provide a more detailed breakdown of themes and views later this month.

David Goddin is the author of today's excellent piece. Having initially met David via social media (his Twitter handle is @ChangeContinuum), I have worked with him on a number of occasions and it comes as no surprise to me that he has written an encouraging, celebratory piece about what makes people great. David has a talent for making people see things in a constructive light and for enabling people to achieve more than they believe they are capable of. David is the founder and Managing Director a Change Continuum, a specialist consultancy that focuses on business performance and enabling positive change for both individuals and the organisations in which they work. He is a wonderful husband and father and lives with his wife and two sons in Norfolk.

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In thinking of both “Comet Tails and Coal Dust”, I’ve been struck by how culturally each seems often to be seen in a singular view. There are deeper meanings beyond that are perhaps commonly missed... appreciation that is the understanding of the worth, quality or importance... appreciation of that full awareness or understanding.

“Comet Tails”. Our immediate appreciation is perhaps for the existence of a comet, its apparent beauty and perhaps connections and time beyond our own mortal reach. I wonder if we appreciate that the decay of the comet is what creates its tail? I wonder if we appreciate that it is only through the comet's long slow, and perhaps lonely death that we may see a comet's tail pass us by for a time?

Comet Lulin

“Coal Dust”. Dirty, useless remnants to be discarded perhaps. I wonder if we appreciate the 300 million year journey that brought coal dust to us here today? I wonder if we appreciate that its existence at all is a sign of the value we’ve obtained?

Appreciation is something we see written about quite frequently and it’s often beautifully given in the sense of gratitude. Appreciating what is good. Appreciating the help & support of others. Appreciation.

Yet, in the “Coal Dust” sense there is often little or no appreciation given to that which we perceive to be useless or troublesome. In the “Comet Tail” sense there can be appreciation but perhaps with some superficiality.

It’s naturally human behaviour. We can choose to take what value and appreciation that we find immediately useful to us. And I wonder if that’s enough?

We love the new, the shiny, the sexy, the appealing... often without an understanding of what sacrifice, trouble or consequence may lie behind.

1996 making of balls for Nike in Pakistan

We dismiss what we immediately see as useless and troublesome... often without understanding that it is a very limited and limiting lens that we look through.

Yet we can forgive the failings and failures of those nearest and dearest to us... We can catch those who need our help when they fall, without question... We can find abundance of friendship, love and support without asking. That appreciation is the deepest in every sense and we can all show it.

I think that capacity is where we are brilliant as humans. I think it also demands us to seek a deeper appreciation more often than we may be inclined to.

"What a Wonderful World" sung by Louis Armstrong

Coal Dust and Women’s Work

Day 39 (Friday 8th January 2016)

39 percent of UK transport users would consider using a driverless car,
this number rose to 62% amongst young urban professionals, according to research conducted by
Transport Systems Catapult on behalf of the Department for Transport, the Department for Business
Innovation and Skills and Innovate UK.
Photo of Toyota Prius self-driving car Photo: EPA/GOOGLE

Today's blog is by Rachael Burnham, an excellent Learning and Development expert based in Manchester, with a particular interest in informal and blended learning. She has worked as a specialist consultant for over 14 years and is highly rated by her clients. She started her career working for a voluntary organisation preparing young people for leaving home and this gave her the opportunity to deliver training for the first time. She was good at it and enjoyed helping people grow, hence she started working in a more conventional staff development and training capacity. Rachael is active on social media, her Twitter handle is @BurnhamLandD and she writes a great blog: L&D Matters. Outside work she values spending time with her family and is a keen jazz fan, as well as having a passion for gardening.

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When the theme for this year’s Advent Blog was announced of ‘Comets and Coal Dust’, I was immediately drawn to that second part – Coal Dust – and transported back to my earliest childhood memories.

We lived in a terraced house in that part of Blackburn known as Wilpshire.  Our house was part of a little row along an un-made up road, which you went down to under a bridge.  Our house was somewhere in the middle of the row and behind the houses, at the end of the small gardens, was a path that ran along the back of the houses.   And the other side of that path was a stream, which I loved.  

Across the stream was a field in which cows were kept.  In those days, it was quite typical to leave a baby or small child out in a pram in the garden unattended and I remember looking at those cows with deep fascination and that they seemed to look right back at me!

Our house had coal fires. Just the phrase ‘coal dust’ brought to mind the sights, sounds and smells of those fires.  

My mother on her hands and knees bent down sweeping out the hearth, 

the grey, pinkish ash, 

the distinctive sounds of the coal tongs and poker knocking against the grate and slightly acrid smell of the coal.
  

To be honest I don’t really remember the sight of the fire lit with the flames – what I remember is the big brass fire guard which dominated the fire place – a sort of metallic cage 

and in front of this on the mat, in the warmth, I remember building wooden brick towers 

and playing with a pull-along elephant.  

I still have the elephant – he is made of chestnut coloured wood and is the most delicious rounded shape, with a very cheerful face – having survived two generations of Burnham’s play!

As a teenager, I remarked one time to my mother about how nice it would be to have a real fire again and was firmly brought back to reality by being reminded of how much work they involve.  Filling the coal bucket, sweeping out the hearth each morning, laying the fire, getting it to light and all that bending and being on your knees, 

in addition to having three children under four (by the time we moved to Blackpool) and all the other work that that involved.  ‘That’s why there is that phrase ‘A woman’s work is never done!’ ‘my mother would say.

When I became a parent myself and sometimes struggled with the care of my one child, I would think about how much easier I had things compared to my mother.  If I had been doing #3goodthings in those early years I would have frequently  tweeted 1) central heating 2) automatic washing machine 3) disposable nappies   ( ‘warm baby to snuggle, baby giggles and at sleep at last!’ would also have been popular choices).

About the time that this Advent Blog series was launched, we reached that point in the calender, 9 November, at which in Britain women are effectively working for free compared to men due to the gender pay gap.  This currently stands at a difference of 14.2%.  At the current rate of change it is estimated that it will take another 54 years for us to reach parity of pay – even over 40 years after the Equal Pay Act was introduced!

At the same time, Maternity Action were running a campaign drawing attention to the astounding fact that the number of women in the UK losing their job as a result of pregnancy discrimination had risen in the past decade from 30,000 in 2005 to a deeply shocking 54,000 in 2015.

Much of the workplace is still effectively sex segregated, with so many jobs primarily done by women or by men. Women are desperately under-represented in science, engineering and maths- related roles and over-dominate in education, health care and social care.  We miss out on women in science and in men in education and caring roles.  And there is the vertical sex segregation too – too few women in senior decision-making roles in organisations and in politics.

Then there is the continuing taboo around the menopause and work – it would be good to start talking about this.  And whilst access to work across the board for over 5Os is hard, there also seems to be an element of extra discrimination at play for women over 50.

I know that there is lots to tackle on other fronts too – disability discrimination, greater acknowledgement and acceptance of mental health issues in the workplace, a disturbing trend of increased race discrimination in the workplace and more.  But it does particularly feel like a ‘feminist’s work is never done’ at the moment.

The need for change doesn’t go away – it may seem to disappear from public view – but like a comet returns and galvanises us to action afresh.

Green

Day 29 (Tuesday 29th December 2015)

29 - the number of letters in the Turkish alphabet

I love the calm days between Christmas Day and the start of the New Year. They are always a good time to contemplate the world and this post by Anthony Allinson should make you do just that. Given the awful flooding over Christmas in the North of England, Scotland and Wales (with more storms on the way) combined with other meteorological problems elsewhere in the globe, Anthony's post is highly topical.

To use Anthony's own words when describing himself, he is "not a HR wonk". He is an Operations Manager with a great track record of establishing PMOs, global services and support organisations. He is currently leading the Managed Services function at Mosaic Island, a digital transformation company based in Bristol and London. I met Anthony via Twitter (his handle is @allinsona). Despite his desire to distance himself from HR (!) Anthony is passionate about the working environment and ensuring that he knows what matters and motivates people (so that he can ensure that one fuels the other, thereby ensuring that customers and colleagues have a great experience). Antony writes a well-followed blog, Joining the Dots  he also has a passion for the people of India and the issues that they face, having become involved with the Sylvia Wright Trust that looks after the sick and disabled in Tamil Nadu - the state hit with severe flooding over the past month.

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Like most people who read this blog I suspect, I voted in the May 2015 election. I value my vote, even though I know it often counts for little on its own.  They add up. That’s the point. I am a little swayed by the argument that people died so we could have the vote I suppose, but note a lot more pragmatically that suffrage came to most men only a little before it more famously came to women. In 1800 around 3% of the adult population had the vote.  It is all quite recent really, a norm, a right we’ve had universally for quite a short time.  I value it as a hard won right, gained over many centuries.

Where I live in rural Hampshire they don’t so much weigh the vote as look at from a distance.  The pile of blue Conservative votes dwarfs the other piles. It is no contest. 

Ballot papers being counted in Hampshire UK

I am a natural Conservative voter, perhaps that makes me less like the majority of people who read and contribute to this blog, I don’t know. I don’t like much of what they do, what they stand for, where they come from and how they behave, but still, I tend to vote for them.

In 2015 I voted for the Greens.  Why?

Out of all the issues that did the rounds this year, the environment matters most of all when set in the context of what differentiates the parties and the need to do something quite radical about it, and to do it now and to keep doing it for a very very long time.

Many other issues do matter and must be dealt with too, it is not “all about” the environment, but it might get to the point where it is.   

I care about our health service and that tricky balance between social safety net and our each being responsible.  If there is a kitchen table debate that happens most often in our house it is around what constitutes an effective education system and what “they” should do to fix it, interspersed with hypocritical rants about why “they” keep meddling with it. I think that having everything on a sound financial footing is necessary for sustained control and stability.  I am less convinced that GDP growth is as all important as we often unthinkingly seem to assume it is.  I do not have a clear view as to what to do about the chaos (I first wrote, “unrest”, and felt that an insulting understatement) in North Africa and the Middle East and the impact it is having on the people there and increasingly on us.  

You can read into all that what you like.  It probably adds up to reluctant Tory. I generally don’t like being pigeon holed but I think I fit the bill.  

I listened to the election debate, joined in a little and concluded that what each party would actually do varies by relatively little, diluting the power of all our votes, further reducing their effect.  People will take issue with that.  I accept they are not all the same.  That would be a jaded view, a counsel of despair which is something I generally rebel against.   I also accept that the current debate about what to do about the chaos I referred to above is massively important, very much a now issue and another that will require effective policy over decades and perhaps even centuries.  

It was when I looked at considerations about the environment that those differences on most other matters suddenly looked small, cyclical and a little irrelevant in a long term and truly global context.  All a bit troublesome in the now, but frankly neither here nor there when set is alongside what we are doing to the world and the need to act promptly, practically and in a highly co ordinated way, making some very tough decisions. Those decisions will test democracy.  I worry that the period of democracy we are enjoying and value so much might turn out to be a bit transient too. 

If any of you read one of my other blogs in recent weeks you’d know I have been to India.  

Chennai, India - photo by Anthony taken on 16th November 2015

I have been there 30-40 times before, but always cocooned by business class cabins, air conditioned cars and swish hotels, so I can then work in palaces glass and steel.  This time I was in a small city, and met real people who live in one and two roomed huts on a few dollars per day. It was not an emotional or moving experience.  It was thought provoking though.  We were there, not to make them richer, or more like us, but to fill gaps where that poverty becomes a real problem.  In this case for the deaf and disabled.  See tswtblog.wordpress.com/normality for that story.

The energy consumption per head is a fraction of ours in the West.  It is rising and broadly we can’t and shouldn’t stop that.  I saw a lot of cars, tuk-tuks, lorries, buses and motorbikes, but relative to the population, still not many at all.  The houses I went into typically had one light bulb, perhaps a fan, in one case a fridge albeit one shared by several families, a village fridge, a bit like a village pump.  I also came across the village mobile phone. 

Typical village scene in Tamil Nadu

There is a whole piece in those observations and what we think of as needs. The consumption gap is wide and will close. I expect Africa to make the same progress while the population there grows too.  Growth in China has slowed but actually still continues, “slow" being a relative term.

I wrote this just as the Paris climate change conference opened a few weeks ago. The agreement seems, by general consensus with a few dissenters, to be a good foundation which needs more work and continued intent.  It was a tough agreement to reach, the product of failure in Copenhagen and long negotiation before Paris.  Following through will be a lot tougher still and take a long time.

Many reading this will know about change and how it is much better when one does it to one's self rather than having it done to you, being in control to the extent that one can be.  The current normal, one that assumes the world can contain 10 billion people who can consume energy in a way that will tend towards the way we do in the West now is not credible. 

Photograph taken on 16 November 2015 in Otley, Yorkshire, UK

There will be change.

The new normal will be very different to the current normal. We can do it deliberately, under some level of control, or not.  There is scope for disorder and chaos if we allow it to just happen. 

That is not something I will explore here,  it will take too long, but it is something we should ideally avoid and at least contain.  I suggest we start now.   

We could always have a cull I suppose.  That’s the other way.  Humans tend to do that every so often.  Especially when resources become scarce. We call it war.  I am not a fan of that.  A little coal dust will be the least of our problems.