@mhsutton

heart.head.work.life

Author: Mike

  • Aerlingus Rocks or Linchpins are like Unicorns or 'How Mike Almost Missed His Flight'

    Ok, so I know I’ve bitched about the quality of Aer Lingus food in the past and maybe also about their tardiness.

    But, you know, when it really counts, Aer Lingus absolutely deliver. Above and way beyond expectation.

    Let me share my story with you.

    Today I was due to catch a flight from Shannon in sunny Ireland (yes, that’s right, I said ‘sunny’ and ‘Ireland’ in the same sentence) to London Heathrow. And I was running late. Very late.

    Driving faster than is permitted on any grade of road in Ireland (often times, twice as fast – FYI, this is not a confession that is admissible in any court), my mind begins to identify my options. I call my wife Katharine (aka – the Eye in the Sky) to do some searching for later flights, alternates plans.

    19 minutes to departure.

    Arriving at the airport, I’m convinced there is no hope and the next conversation was going to be what the next flight out was tonight. All hope was surely lost. To make matters worse, although I had checked in, I hadn’t printed my boarding pass – so the only ID I had was my passport and a smile.

    Running to the check in desk, I approached the lovely Roisin, announcing ‘Please be my angel, I need a miracle!’. I handed her my passport and she bounded off her desk and said ‘I need a radio!’.
    (This in hindsight seems like a TV commercial moment, but I assure you it happened just like this)

    15 minutes to departure.

    Roisin disappears behind some doors (a little bit like the Wizard of Oz, but with doors), emerges and dashes across to another desk (clearly radios are in short supply). She then calls out to me from a short distance (at which point, I’m practicing my ‘downtrodden’ face).
    Instead of announcing what I knew to be true but didn’t want to believe – that I had indeed missed my flight, the lovely Roisin said to follow her – she was taking me through to the gate!!!! Wooo-fucking-hoooo!

    13 minutes to departure.

    We pass through security, Roisin vouching for me at the boarding card check desk. I don’t think I have stripped off everything quite so quickly. We are met at the gate by another totally awesome Aer Lingus ground crew ( we were bolting for the flight at this point and I missed her name – I think it was ‘Sarah’).

    11 minutes to departure.

    Sarah asked for my boarding pass and I announce, rash faced that I hadn’t printed one. Without batting an eye ( or in any way visibly recognising that I was, without a doubt, the dumbest passenger she had ever encountered), Sarah led me to another desk and quickly hand-wrote a boarding card , tore it and handed me a stub.

    9 minutes to departure.

    I run out to the aircraft, sprint up the steps and make my way shamefaced along the aisle to 14D, at this point I’m sweating like a pig at a sausage factory.

    6 minutes to departure and I’m in my seat, buckled and totally not quite sure what just happened but absolutely thankful to whatever gods may be for this tremendous bit of good fortune.

    We depart on time and I’m writing this somewhere over the Irish sea in total gratitude to the absolutely graceful ground crew and staff of Aer Lingus at Shannon and the flight crew of flight EI386 to London Heathrow.

    Linchpins are like Unicorns.

    I’m intrigued by linchpins – people who go the extra mile to delight others (amongst other things). To meet one is luck, to meet two in the same day is a freak of nature. To have both working on my case and delivering a miracle is institutional.

    My takeaways

    • Always , always check-in online.
    • Try as best you can to travel with no check-in luggage.
    • Smile (it’s often the difference between a miracle and nothing).
    • Don’t be a douchebag, be respectful.
    • Trust that people will help, be humble.
    • Do the best you can to be in a position to be helped (run , drive fast to be in the night place) – luck and opportunity will meet you half way, so must you.
    • Oh, and try to have your boarding card printed beforehand, although Sarah didn’t show it, I’m sure she must have thought ‘Oh boy, what a hopeless case, how does he manage to dress himself in the morning!’

    Thank you for reading, I hope you fly Aer Lingus (yes, I am endorsing them AND no, they are not paying me to), at least I hope you are flying Aer Lingus when you are in a jam.

    Finally, I’d love your thoughts on this, has an airline gone way beyond the expected to delight you? What experiences of delightful service have you experienced?

  • Planning is good, Execution is better.

    A Little Secret

    I have to admit something, please keep it quiet. Come closer, I’ll whisper…

    “LATELY, I HAVE BEEN ALL PLAN AND NO EXECUTION!!”

    Its a damn nuisance, every time I am about to get going on something, life conspires to really slow me down, in the form of pesky childhood illnesses messing with my children, moving countries or more work (at work) than I know what to do with.

    So, on Sunday night (yeah, March 25th) I gave myself an ultimatum –
    “Execute or revoke your planning rights”.

    The deal was to start burning down on some of all this work that was queued up or just admit defeat and never add anymore.

    What kind of work am I talking about anyway – well here is the broad list:

    • Work on startup idea #1/17: Something called ‘StoryTeller’. Its stealth right now, so ssssh!
    • Do more yoga, specifically Bikram ‘hot’ yoga. You can share that experience in “Getting Sweaty – My First Bikram Yoga Experience.”
    • Read more (more variety, more often)
    • Knit more
    • Blog more at wizewerx.com, blogs.chittych.at and mhsutton.me (here)

     

    Paralysed By Planning

    Like I said, I spent a couple of months in planning paralysis, pinned by fear (of failing, learning curve sickness), plagued by self doubt (“Am I good enough, am I still hungry enough to code till 3am every night and still hold down a highly responsible job?”) and prone to sudden bouts of laziness (“Screw work, I’m watching the Mentalist!”).

    So rather than start anything, I simply added more stuff and planned, planned and planned so more!
    To make things worse, as an agile coach and advisor to startups, I know that execution is where the goodness is.  Winners plan and ship and losers just plan.

    This knowledge is like a Jiminy Cricket on ecstasy – reminding me at every turn to do what I ask others to do when faced with a slump – take some time out, collect thoughts, mobilise energy and just do something (anything!) on the list. Most times this will lead from one thing to another and the execution engine just kicks in.

    Faced with doing something or giving up,  I chose to do something.

     

    Plan as though you mean to Execute

    To get out of my quicksand, I had to act.  What worked for me was to plan my next week like I really meant to go through with it.  I went into my calendar and added the time for Yoga, reading, writing and working on the startup.

    So on Monday – I called and booked a Yoga class and actually went to the Monday evening session. I paid €50 for 30 consecutive day trial. I already know how many days I will be going for. Its not 30 though.  This Yoga is different – its Bikram ‘hot’ yoga and I endured the most exhausting 90 minutes I have done since I stopped chasing chickens for sport. Then I started to write about it.

    On Tuesday, I did more yoga at home. Not the hot kind, but really enjoyable Vinyasa ‘Flow’ yoga.

    Did I read?  You bet.  Its too early to call it a routine, but I start with 30 minutes of my book (its on iBooks and its called ‘Calculating God’ by Robert J Sawyer)

    Tonight I also started work on Storyteller.  Nothing fancy, just some basic javascript to test some ideas.

    Oh. And I wrote this blog.

    Pearls of Wisdom       

    Here are 7 of the main learnings I could distil from my experience.

    1. If you can help it, don’t beat yourself up too much for not executing. Recognise that you aren’t and move on.  I didn’t do this soon enough, I hope you will.
    2. Act like you are going to do what you plan to do. Book a place on a class, pay the money, commit to someone – whatever.
    3. Be specific about what you want to do (I already had the specifics in my plan!)
    4. Give yourself a shorter timeframe than ‘forever’. Pick a week and see if you can sustain it for a week.
    5. Don’t give up. Email me and I’ll help you keep going, have a beer or two. Maybe take a break, just don’t quit.
    6. Get some early success, it helps.
    7. Have something to show for the work you do. Visible results of execution are fantastic motivators (I have the sore legs to show for the yoga and this blog to show for the writing).

    Thanks for reading, I would love to know what you thought of this post.

  • Managing Mirrors

    It was a great pleasure to facilitate the recent Agile Coach Camp USA (twitter hashtag #accus) open space. During my regular walkabout to ensure all the sessions were happily bubbling along, I happened on an intriguingly titled session called ‘Steal My Frustration’ convened by @azagile (Michael Kutch). My observations on that session are contained in another post called ‘Pausing for Thought’.

    During Michael’s session, we got into an interesting discussion about conflict management situations and what options existed for coaches or team servant leaders when trying to minimize harm and help contain the situation.

    Sometimes a person can get so angry about something that the only option in the moment is to let them vent it to a point at which you can safely and reasonably engage with them. When this person is in a team and their actions can be destructive/disruptive to either themselves or to others, the teams servant leadership (coach or scrum master) has a duty to protect the person, themselves and the team from as much of the energy as they possibly can.

    I coined the term ‘Managing Mirrors’ to describe the visual that came into my head as the discussion progressed.

    I imagined the angry person in their period of anger, as running amok with a laser beam indiscriminately cutting down anyone around them. At a time like this, the most anyone could do might be to run around with mirrors, deflecting the beams away from not only the bystanders, but also away from angry person and ,of course, the coach.

    Whilst it is tempting to assume it is only one person’s responsibility to ‘manage mirrors’ in a scenario like this, I feel that it falls on other members of the team (even if purely for self preservation) to, perhaps, manage their own mirrors. To ensure they are not cut down, whilst also ensuring they are not deflecting anger at others as they try and protect themselves.

    As I described this visual to someone else, their view on the title created a different possibility, one that I feel could yield a powerful coaching metaphor as a a way to help people effect the change they would like to see in their world.

    Our behaviours often reflect what happens around us. For example, if an organisation does not demonstrate it respects its employees, it can be difficult for employees to demonstrate respect for each other – particularly if they have no other social bonds beyond working together.

    At a personal level during interactions with others, being able to ‘reflect’ the other person’s behavior in a non-violent way, might lead to opportunities to improve. Or being able to project the positive attitudes in a way that is then reflected back to you (almost as a measure of improvement) is very influential technique.

    From a servant leadership position, sensing what a person might need in terms of what is reflected to them at any one time, is an interesting way to think about ‘managing mirrors’, because it might help to guide our decisions on how to offer connections (I know, some example would really work here!).

  • Whose stepping stone are you?

    ‘If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants’ – Sir Issac Newton

    I have been thinking about this for a few weeks and it has been truly humbling.

    No one ever got anywhere without help. Every step of our journey through this world has been aided and abetted by other people. I believe it is the nature of our interconnectedness.

    If you’re lucky you know who offered help or witheld obstruction to enable you to be exactly where you are today, then celebrate it.
    If where you are now is good – great, if not, don’t fret. Life is funny that way.

    As you stride through life, through your career or relationships – pause for a moment and reflect two very important things…
    Who has supported and help to shape you to make you the awesome bundle of possibilities you are today?
    How are you helping others to cross the river of Life’s challenges?

    Thank you for reading this. Now, smile and go be great.

  • BBC and its biased reporting

    I have been following the BBC reporting of the Israeli killing of 9 activists on board the Gaza blockade busting flotilla.

    9 people were shot and killed by Israeli forces. The Israelis claim there were guns on the ship – none have been found. Now they seem to be saying they had ‘reports’ there were weapons on board the ship and ‘ the use of force was the only way to stop the flotilla’.
    Meanwhile – the BBC – in true ‘plant seeds of doubt and dehumanisation’ fashion report that…
    ‘Eight Turks and 1 Turkish-American were killed’.
    Turkish-American??? Is that a nationality or are we now counting the dead by ethno-nationality. What is the relevance that this individual was an American of Turkish descent?
    Is it so inconceivable that any other American citizen could act on their conscience and be on that flotilla protesting the imprisonment of an entire people?
    It is my belief that the media and most commonly the BBC , use this technique to undermine the legitimacy of the individual by correlating their action to their ethnicity – when there is no obvious connection. It serves to reduce the significance of the protest or the power of the act. Somehow they deserved to be shot and killed because they were Turkish and Turkish-American. Somehow their lives are less valuable , somehow they are more expendible.
    Do the BBC do this intentionally – I don’t actually think so. I think the instituationalisation of bias is so ingrained that they simply do it and no one checks, no one picks its up. To the reporter, their editors – it is quality reporting. All paid for by the UK tax payer.
    I hardly read the news anymore from the mainstream – what passes for news these days has been put through so many filters of political correctness, national security, popularity etc that what comes out is dross. I have never believed in the BBC and its so called impartiality and it must surely be time for a new organisation – especially one funded by the tax payer – to be overhauled and manned by the likes of Robert Fisk, John Pilger and Mark Curtis – individuals who report what they find with equanimity and honesty.

  • Some nerve.

    Peter Mandelson, more recently Lord Mandelson , an unelected cabinet minister in Gordon Brown’s waste of space Labour government today announced the row over the sell off of the UK Royal Mail business was making the task of finding a buyer much harder.

    It would appear that Mandelson would not only want us to accept that there is no alternative to the sell off, we are now also expected not to question it and challenge the government’s wisdom that the sell off is necessary.

    Whether the Royal Mail actually needs to be sold is not the point – I don’t know enough either way, but the disdain that this government has for the citizenry is frightening. Let them carry on – they are in the throes of a dying government, one that will not be back for a while.

    I for one will be voting Liberal Democrats.

  • Is Obama the new Jesus?

    Barack Obama made history. That is undisputed and worthy of celebration.

    But what is this fiasco about the order in which world leaders get to visit him?

    On 5th Feb, the BBC reports that Tony Blair met President Obama. Other media mongers extended this as a oneupmanship against Gordon Brown.

    Today , the Japanese prime minister has been reported as the first world leader to visit President Obama.

    Did the newspapers read the same when the three kings made it to the manger to see baby Jesus – don’t be silly, there weren’t any newspapers back then!

    But seriously is Obama the new Jesus with world leaders paying homage to the saviour , or is it more mafia like – with capos from the various smaller families coming in to show respect to the capo di capo tutti! The beers can’t really be that much colder in the White House.

  • Mama was right

    When my mum called Tony Blair an ‘out and out’ liar and his administration ‘morally bankrupt’ , I was a little reticent to join in and thought for a second that she might be wrong.

    Blair and his Labour government are indeed liars in their role in the Weapons of Mass Deception fiasco which provided a very poor excuse for invading Iraq and unleashing the devastation that followed.

    Today, Jack Straw – the UK Minister for Justice (heeheehee – ironic isn’t it!) announced that he was vetoing the releasing of the minutes of the Cabinet meetings in the run-up to the Iraq war (see Straw Vetoes Iraq Minutes Release). Jack Straw was in the Cabinet and involved in those meetings and now it seems, is part of the longer term cover up.

    His cover for the cover-up? Releasing the minutes would do ‘serious damage’ to the system of Cabinet government and collective responsiblity. His view is that this is of greater importance than openness and public accountability.

    Such is the total disregard that these political shysters have for us – the citizens of the United Kingdom by whose mandate they govern.

    I have to live with the shame that the first time I exercised my democratic (and hard fought) right to vote in this country, I voted in liars and war criminals.

    They have lied and stumbled their way through events that have monumental repercussions for the very foundations of this country and indeed the world. We can excuse them screwing up the little things (like education and healthcare!), but when they screw up on the big things – like committing hundreds of billions of pounds we actually don’t have to inherently broken institutions with little regard for the suffering it causes , it is inexcusable and at the very least they need to be sacked. The entire government needs to go! If they’re lucky they won’t do jail time for incompetence.

    Not only are they liars and lack moral aptitude, the rot continues and is amplified by the new government of Gordon the unelected/unelectable. Their lack of vision and creative thinking in this financial crisis is astounding. If ever there was a time to spend taxpayer money wisely – this would be it. Instead they hurl cheques that might as well be blank at greedmongers and those that have ruined entire economies.

    Britain was great once – on the backs of the oppressed and the blood , sweat and tears of the colonies. This labour government has a chance to make it great again – by rebalancing our society and creating a fairer and rejuventated community, revolutionising public services and creating a knowledge economy that would sustain generations of growth, for halting the pace of environmental decline and perhaps turning it back. But they lack the vision and political will to do it.

    My mother was right, beyond what she could even comprehend or perhaps she just has the vision that this government sorely lacks.

  • Broke in a broken system

    With spectacular size comes spectacular impact. The collapse of the global financial system is just that – spectacular.

    I searched for exactly what the ‘Global Financial System’ and was (un?)reliably informed (by Wikipedia) that is a system, operating across borders and nations, for the movement of money and other financial instruments.

    So, simply put, it is the basis for international trade and mutual economic dependence.

    Trade has always existed between nations and the GFS is only the most recent attempt at trying to regulate it. As crooked as it now appears – riddled with greed and devoid of social conscience, it may have started with some semblence of honourable intent.

    It is perhaps laudable that by engineering a state of fundamental interdependence, the creators of the GFS were , perhaps in part, aiming to replace military conflict between States with a more overwhelming concern – security and health of connected economies.

    The only trouble is , when a system is so interdependent, crucial points of failure start to emerge. Pinch one of these points and the system fails. As we now see happening.

    Yet this system was founded on the interests of the rich and powerful, they gang together – deciding who sells what and for how much. Wait a second, I hear you chime – the markets decide. Of course they do. But barkets are about demand and supply… and cash and control. The global rich and powerful (corporations and governments – who can tell the difference) control so much raw cash that they use their financial might and the power they weild through thier political arms, to bully and buy control of the markets.

    Yet, it is the only system we seem to have, so whether we realise the markets are fiddled, what choice do the rest of us have. Especially when there is little steadfast unity amongst those who are overwhelmingly disadvantaged by the GFS.

    Any system (financial or otherwise) that begins with a uneven playing field can never be fair. I hate to play the colonial card , but if you look closely enough, the economies of former colonies are

    So, something as simple as banks (the arteries in this system) not lending to each other has crippled all the other functions of the system.

    The lending issue is only a symptom – the underlying disease being unregulated sharks, fueled by greed, destroying what little trust was in the system.

    We, the poor and middle-classes – the beasts upon whose labour the entire system is funded, are left broke and starving from a bankrupt and broken system.

  • Who Pays?

    Israel launched hostilities against Hezbollah in Lebanon, destroyed homes, infrastructure and brought human devastation.

    Who paid to rebuild shattered buildings?
    Who paid to rebuild shattered lives?

    Then Israel had a lock-in in Gaza. It cordoned it off from the outside world (mostly, though al-jazeera still got real reports from their on the ground teams). Then they went to work, in the name of stopping Hamas missiles from being launched against civilian targets within Israel.

    Neither of these are wars. They are brutal acts of aggression by a recognised State against non-state actors. Nevertheless, Israel is accountable to international humanitariand and human rights law to behave properly. This means they must avoid harming civilans and they must ultimately pay for the damage.

    War or not , Israel must be held accountable for the scale of destruction of life and property in these attacks.

    I’m not naive enough to think that Hamas is saintly or bears no responsibility for at least part of this mess – any group that launches missiles from within civilian populations, effectively using innocents as human shields are immoral and criminal. Their actions make them complicit in the ensuing crimes against humanity that occur. Both sides are to blame in this tragedy. That is not the same as condemning them as out and out terrorists without a cause. Which is a topic for another piece.

    For either side to then claim any kind of victory against the background of babies and infants on fire and children trapped under collapsed building, is both obscene and chilling.

    My primary concern in this piece is who bears the costs of rebuilding broken buildings and infrastructure, of compensating fathers for the murder of their children, of mothers for the death of their breadwinners (though with 80% unemployment in Gaza, not much bread is being won!).

    The EU emissary to Gaza said European taxpayers are tired of paying for buildings to be rebuilt only for Israel to blow them up again. Why must the rebuilding costs be borne by anyone else but those who knocked it down?

    Why isn’t the United Nations drawing up resolutions forcing Israel to pay for the devastation is has wracked – perhaps knowing that they will have to pay the rebuilding costs and compensate for the human carnage will encourage them to negotiate a peace?

    My questions resound within the emptiness of the international community’s resolve to hold Israel to account. It is the State entity here after all and must be made to play by the rules of Statehood, which must include bearing the financial consequences of the military policy.