Heartaches, hopes and high fives - Day 18

Tuesday 18th December 2018

18 - the number of chapters into which James Joyce's modernist novel, Ulysses,
is divided. It was initially published in installments in an American journal, but was then
released as a complete work on the author's 40th birthday. The novel's stream-of-consciousness
technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose—replete with puns, parodies, and
allusions—as well as its rich characterisation and broad humour, have led it to be regarded
as one of the greatest literary works in history

The Christmas silly season has arrived - lunch in Cambridge yesterday followed by supper at the RAC. I will need to pace myself. (I say that to myself every year and I seldom manage, but I am exhausted - this year has been more demanding than any I can remember). But enough about me, onto the blog...

In many ways, today's post is a perfect follow-on from Niall's of yesterday and Nick's from the day before - it considers our world, how small we are within it and has hope for our future. It has been written by David Head. David is a highly respected executive coach and mentor; he specialises in supporting people through periods of change and career transition. Just over five years ago David decided to move down a slightly different branch in his own career, away from senior search within the IT sector and qualified as a coach. Since 2013 he has worked for the award winning, London-based business performance and leadership consultancy, Accelerating Experience, as an executive coach and mentor. David for many years has been a keen sportsman (tennis and golf) and is also well read and an erudite writer - you would probably enjoy his articles posted on LinkedIn. You can follow him on Twitter - his handle is @DavidAHead2. It is a pleasure to have him back in the series this year. 

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This image of the Northumberland coast (you can just see Bamburgh Castle in the background), recently won an amateur photography award and was taken by a friend, John Chappell.  I chose this image because the sea is significant to most of us on these small damp islands. It is somewhere we go to have fun, reflect and take stock. Significantly, it ‘delivers something the soul loves too’.

I love gazing out to sea, particularly at this most moody, evocative time of year. 

Looking at this image you can sense the eddies, currents and flows going on under the surface, rather like our own thoughts, feelings and emotions. The sunset in the background represents a sense of hope to me, or is it the fading of the light?

It is this sense of ambiguity which draws our wandering minds and souls in, like mariners navigating the unseen flow of our unconscious.

‘We are tied to the ocean..and when we go back to the sea, we are going back to whence we came’John F Kennedy

From dry land the sea becomes restorative and nurturing, soothing our deepest heartaches and fears. Stand silent, gaze out and sense the darker and unknowable, yet instinctively known forces of life, and death.

The sea is the most primal force of nature, unpredictable, wild, ragged and untamed. It reminds us that whilst we can damage nature, we can neither tame it or destroy it. We are insignificant, small, vulnerable and therefore ‘at sea’. Shakespeare reminds us of that;

‘We to the gods are as flies to wanton gods, they kill us for their sport’

To look at this seascape reminds me of the turmoil of our times and of the sea’s transcendence. It also reminds me of our own relative insignificance, for better and worse.

Like a goldfish bowl our own world is often too small for us, and we are drawn to the sea.

‘The world is too much with us late and soon…Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’

From the same poem Wordsworth reflects;

 ‘ ..I’d rather be a peasant suckled in a creed outworn; so that might I standing on this pleasant lea. Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; or hear old triton blow his wreathed horn.’

The sea, through Wordsworth, or Wordsworth through the sea reminds us of deeper wisdom...

This is a time of year for reflection and If gazing out to sea is a reflective exercise, then ‘taking it on’ and entering the waters’ domain requires great courage and resilience. It may also be equally cathartic. I am reminded of the Yachtswoman Susie Goodall who was recently rescued from sea after capsizing. I don’t doubt that she will go to sea again. Not just for the high fives but like the mountain, because it is there.

I am struck by how many leaders and adventurers are passionate about sailing, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. When I asked a friend why, she replied that it was ‘the spirit of adventure..not knowing what the next day would bring’ that draws her in. Compare this to Susie Goodall’s text when her 12 meter boat was taking a pounding in the middle of the Southern Ocean;

‘Wondering what on earth I’m doing out here’

And yet still we come, and still she goes...

If we can overcome our fears and risk all at sea, what more might we achieve? What would we do or take on if we knew that we could not fail? In this sense the sea challenges us, drawing out our deepest hopes and fears, whispering its siren call to set sail..

‘Time in the sea eats its tail’Ted Hughes

Walking in our Parents' Shadow

I am writing this on Father’s Day. I confess that I have been thinking a lot about parental impact and the outcomes of childhood events over the past few weeks – mainly due to some excellent plays and live performances that I have seen over the last month. I’m off to see Alice’s Adventures Underground this afternoon – the story of a little girl on an adventure without parental supervision (a bit like adulthood for me – my world is full of wonder and unexpected encounters). 

A joy of living in London is the easy access to the Arts. Last Saturday I saw one of the world’s best troupes of Tango dancers – offering slick flicking, sensuous holds and slides that seduced the audience into roaring and stamping their approval. The Belgian choreographer, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, had managed to instil different forms of human relationships into the dance, ranging from mourners offering condolence at a funeral to the joys and intimacy of first love. There was one disturbing sequence that clearly demonstrated emotional and physical abuse – the impact of one person on another was obvious and thought provoking. 

In addition to the tango, I have enjoyed two excellent plays (more about them below); the farewell performance of one of the world’s prima ballerinas, Sylvie Guillem; and a live concert by a man commonly hailed as the world’s best guitar player. The latter was Eric Clapton playing at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate his 70th birthday (it was 50 years since his first performance at the iconic London venue) – he is a brilliant guitarist – he clearly loves what he does and does it often; despite the size of the venue, it felt like sitting with friends jamming in their front room (perhaps that was enhanced for my eldest son and me as we were actually sitting on the stage and were able to exchange grins with Nathan East) – the home-like impact was reinforced by the fact that Clapton had his own small carpet, brought onto the stage before the start, and he sat on it, on a stool, while he strummed. 

Clapton's carpet:

His voice is still strong and compelling. It was a brilliant and memorable evening.

The following Saturday I saw the RSC’s production of Oppenheimerstarring John Heffernan in the title role (I am also enjoying watching him as Lascelles in the BBC’s stunning serialisation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norris, which is screening on Sunday evenings and is worth catching on iPlayer, even if only for the impressive CGI. Three of us went to see Oppenheimer – my youngest son, and also my friend Michael and me. Michael’s being with us was a real treat and a privilege as, despite being in his early 40’s, it was the first time he had been to the theatre. Theatre has been part of my life since childhood – family trips to the pantomime, acting in local dramatic productions, flipping a coin between a career on the stage or studying Law. The impact of seeing a play for the very first time when you already have a wealth of knowledge, an adult perspective and other events against which to gauge the occurrence, must be extraordinary. Michael is very well read and a film and music aficionado. I was actually quite jealous of his ability to have the experience, as well as nervous at the responsibility of being his introducer.

Thank goodness the play was good – superbly acted and full of depth. I hope that one day he will blog about his impressions, as he had an artistic encounter that most of us reading this will never be able to undergo. 

A connecting thread for all the productions I have seen was the impact of childhood incidents on the future lives of individuals. The RSC  production of Death of a Salesman was stunning and a core theme is the impact of parents on their children. However I will cover it in my next post. Eric Clapton was born to a single mother – his father was a soldier stationed in England during World War II, who returned to his wife in Canada, leaving a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl to cope alone. Her parents stepped in as surrogate parents to the infant Eric and raised him – indeed he believed for many years that his mother was his sister. The discovery of the truth, when he was aged nine, had a profound impact on Eric, plunging him into a period of self-distancing and rebellion, this resulted in his failing at school. He fell in love with the guitar, spending all his time listening to the blues in his early teenage years, this lead to his being expelled from Kingston College of Art, as he had done no work. He had always felt “different” from others and dropped out to become a musician, commencing as a busker in Richmond and Kingston (to the west of London,) whilst supporting himself by working as a labourer on building sites alongside his grandfather. He played pubs in the evenings and soon became the most talked about R&B player on the circuit. His local notoriety lead to him being offered a place with a band, the Yardbirds – where he gained his nickname, “Slowhand”, and this saw the start of his musical fame. 

Guillem and Nureyev - Giselle, 1988

Sylvie Guillem is another artist who has always felt herself to be different and, despite her talent and immense global success, she has remained removed from mainstream classical ballet. She was Rudolf Nureyev’s protégé at the Paris Opéra Ballet, which she joined aged 16, becoming the youngest person to become an “etoile” at the age of 19. Like Nureyev, she was happy to stand apart from the crowd, gaining the nickname “Mademoiselle Non” and she left the Royal Ballet in London when she feared that a change of management would compromise its approach towards productions. Guillem, like Clapton, was impacted by her childhood and to this day remains shy, rebellious and socially awkward, until the moment she steps on the stage. She has humble roots - she grew up in the suburbs of Paris, her father a car mechanic and her mother a gym teacher. There was no music in her home and she was devoted to her family. Her aspirations as a child were to become an Olympic gymnast. She loved the free-expression available to her in gymnastics and found the authoritarian approach and discipline of ballet training tortuous – mainly due to the teachers’ lack of open-mindedness and vision.

She trained with ballerinas because her gymnastic coach felt it might enhance her performance, but it soon became clear that she possessed exceptional talent as a dancer. She hated having to board a ballet school and, deeply homesick, nearly threw her future away, until her mother challenged her to stop crying and apply herself or leave. With steely determination, for which she is famed, Guillem made a conscious decision to change and progress – from then onwards she started drifting away from her roots, but became a star. 

Sylvie Guillem by Erick Labbé, 2011

Sometimes a hard start in life makes you more determined and resilient.Oppenheimer, (the central character of the play that Michael came to see with my son and me), also made a conscious decision to change and become removed and resilient, following a disturbing incident when he was 14. Robert Oppenheimer was the American theoretical physicist selected to head the US’s Army’s secret weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, during World War II, which developed the atomic bomb. He is claimed to have quoted from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita (XI, 32): 

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

when he watched the first nuclear explosion test in the US dessert, although his brother Frank (also a physicist) claims that what he actually said at the time was “it worked”. Oppenheimer was apparently deeply disturbed by an event that occurred in his early teens that, like Guillem, encouraged him to become detached and personally driven.  

He was an academic child, encouraged to be so by his father and grandfather. Being a bit of a know-all, he was not a popular child at school. One summer, during his early adolescence, his parents sent him away to summer camp – to boat, do sport and play in the countryside with other boys. It appears that Oppenheimer commenced making friends and enjoyed the camaraderie and smutty discussions in the dorm at night. However, he wrote and told his father, who was shocked, drove to the camp and demanded that such behaviour had to stop. The boys were summoned, publicly dressed-down and ordered to desist. It comes as no surprise that this made Oppenheimer very unpopular. Shortly after the boys turned on him, stripped him naked, trussed him up, painted his genitals and buttocks green and left him locked overnight in an icehouse until found by an attendant. Instead of demanding to be allowed to go him, Oppenheimer stuck it out until the end of the camp, enduring daily taunts. This experience had a profound impact and from then onwards Oppenheimer deliberately detached himself from those around him, at times being deliberately obnoxious and at times offensive in his intellectually arrogant (such as the time when a university student that he finished reading a paper by his professor and handed it back to him saying “I couldn’t find any mistake – did you really do this all alone?”). We are moulded by the way our parents impact our lives.  

On Wednesday it was announced that Philip Larkin, who died in 1985, is to be commemorated with a memorial stone set in the floor at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. To my mind there is no doubt that he is one of the exceptional English language poets of the 20th Century, although I suspect many only know one of his poems (or can at least quote its first line). I wonder if Larkin was aware of the influence his own mum and dad had had on him when he wrote this: 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

  This Be The Verse, by Philip Larkin, 1971

The first four lines were recited by a British Court of Appeal judge as part of his judgement of a particularly acrimonious divorce case involving the future custody arrangements of a nine-year-old child. Lord Justice Wall referred to the emotional damage caused to the child, saying: "These four lines seem to me to give a clear warning to parents who, post-separation, continue to fight the battles of the past, and show each other no respect.”

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged pieces beyond repair.” - Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven.

I do fret about how I have impacted and continue to influence my sons – I can see and feel the marks and smudges of my parents’ impact on myself and my siblings. So many of my friends have suffered as a result of their parents: interpersonally crippled by unduly authoritarian and aggressive fathers; emotionally damaged by hypercritical, obsessive and destructive mothers; beaten and assaulted by adults to the extent that they had to run away or take legal action to rescue younger siblings. What is interesting is that many of those who had the toughest times are now the ones that stand out as successful, but they are frequently also the ones most aloof from the crowd. More of that to follow…

(This is the first of two posts that look at the influence parents have on their offspring. I trust you enjoyed it.)

Space Matters - Part 2

As yesterday’s post illustrates, there are times when planning for the future makes best sense when placed on the foundations of the past. Florence Nightingale knew that fresh air and sunlight help heal bodies, without being aware of the scientific evidence that supports her ideas, as provided by the men from Porton-Down. My grandfather’s research was forgotten, only to be replicated by strangers nearly a century later, they emphasised the same findings – that intelligent planning and efficient design can enhance a workplace and the experiences of those within it.

Google's Office in Zurich

Last week’s CIPD hosted event was a powerful illustration of the fact that all of us in work can learn much from others. Leading experts from HR, Facilities Management, L&D and Workplace Strategy came together to debate what the world should look like in the future and hence how the workplace needs to adapt to become fit for purpose. With Neil Usher’s encouragement, supported by able facilitation from David D’Souza (the newly appointed Head of London for the CIPD), Jonny Gifford a respected CIPD research analyst with an interest in work and the work place and Simon Heath, one time COO and Head of Facilities, who is now a talented artistic facilitator and corporate illustrator, the attendees at the event were challenged to list the top ten aspects of a workplace that we felt were required for a “Living Wage Workplace” – i.e. one that provides more than just the basic requirements but is not overly ostentatious or expensive.

Meeting room wallpaper

The group I was with used the room we were in for inspiration. The event was held in the basement function area of a trendy London Hotel, with no windows and shocking pink, in-your-face, highly decorated walls.  It is interesting how much colour can impact how people feel. We were lively. Last weekend I went to visit my family in Somerset. On the Saturday afternoon I agreed to act as chauffeur for my mother and aunt, as they wanted to go on a church crawl. We saw some wonderful buildings, but I was particularly stuck by the vibrant interior of Holy Trinity Church at Long Sutton – a striking contrast to its quite austere exterior. Much of its fifteenth century screen, pulpit and intricate decorations remain intact – they have been painted as they would have been when first constructed.

I can only image the awe inspired by the flamboyant colours, soaring pillars and roof held up by beautifully angels. The ceiling, as you near the altar, is covered in golden stars on a sky-blue background, to indicate the proximity to heaven. The carvings and colours used as a means to make a point and to influence the thinking of the congregation.

The impact of colour and décor should not be underestimated. I hang pictures in my workplace and as a business we share some of the wonderful illustrations made by Simon Heath at various corporate events he has illustrated, as well as artwork belonging to our business that depicts our history and interests. By doing so we make the space our own. People perform better if they feel a personal connection to their work and workplace. Yet, how many employees are trapped in soul-less white or magnolia tinted offices, devoid of fresh air or an identity and sense of belonging?

Belonging and control were the next aspects of modern work that my group at the CIPD event explored. All of us agreed that, increasingly, people expect to have some say in and influence over their environment – be that being able to work with different teams on specific projects (and hence move or rearrange the layout within a physical location as required) or even just being able to change the temperature without it having to be the same for all. We are used to autonomy and personal customisation outside work and so now we expect the same wherever we are. Research is showing that employees perform better when they have choice and control over their space.

 

Skype's HQ in California with moveable furniture

We are living in a time of rapid innovation, with enhanced access to data and hence in theory knowledge. People are able to find answers to questions that previously have been the domain of an educated elite – for example online medical self-diagnosis or the ability to acquire a new skill via self-selected online learning (such as through videos on YouTube or MOOCs). It is this free access to information that will, in my opinion, have a profound impact on the workplace.  As people educate themselves they are likely to become more demanding. As Bacon said in 1597, “with knowledge comes power” and employers should be aware of this. People will expect to have a work environment that fosters employee health and wellbeing. Obesity and exercise are a point in case. As individuals become increasingly aware of the impact of sedentary lives and inappropriate diets they are likely to demand change. I suspect that a growing number of people will see it as an employer’s responsibility to be aware of and protect the health of their workforce. If an employer forces workers to perform in an environment that could be considered unsafe or likely to encourage known medical issues in the future, that employer could become liable, by being deemed irresponsible and having breached the duty of care that is owed to employees.

We discussed the need for exercise and activity whilst at work – to boost thinking and help combat many of the detrimental effects of being inactive for hours in a chair in front of a screen. I quite like the idea of a treadmill desk, although I prefer the option of getting out into the sunshine. The choice will probably up to the employee as to what action they take, but we all agreed that an employer that refuses to provide support in a health and wellbeing related matter would, at the least, be less likely to attract and retain the best of the workforce and at worst could find itself in costly and damaging litigation for negligence. It has happened before...

At the end of the CIPD event, it was gratifying to discover that we touched on most of the aspects of the list that Neil shared with us (although perhaps not with the specific examples I have provided above). Neil’s Top Ten (not in any particular order) are as follows: 

1. Daylight
2. Colour
3. Choice
4. Influence
5. Space
6. Storage
7. Control
8. Connectivity
9. Refresh
10. Wash

I believe that there is one more… As our world continues to change we need be open to amending or adding to the above. One of the banks in The City of London is relocating to a building that is described as the “greenest” building in the Square Mile. It has the largest number of solar panels on a commercial building, a green roof, rainwater harvesting and heat reclaim driven under-floor heating, as well as significant storm drains. Clearly this type of building is not cheap, but it may indicate a prudent approach towards the future or perhaps a return to the past’s attitude of having a greater awareness of our place within our environment. The last of the churches that I visited last Saturday, with my mother and aunt, was the Church of St Peter and St Paul at Muchelney. It became famous during the Somerset floods, when the village of Muchelney was cut off for nearly a fortnight and could only be accessed by boat. The village children had created a summary of “Island Life” that was displayed on the church wall.

The church itself and the older houses stood proud of the water – the architects having taken advantage of a slight rise in ground.

I think Muchelney’s church is an example to us all – its designers and builders were attuned to their environment and hence built their church on higher land to avoid the problems of flooding. We need to be equally aware of what could happen in our futures and design our workspaces accordingly.

Muchelney Church's Barrel Vault ceiling