At loggerheads in Manila

I was lead facilitator of a big Unilever workshop in Manila - and the going got tough.

Participating were 50 managers from all over South East Asia, the fastest growing region in the company at the time, and so filled with self-confidence.

The problem was that the Thais and the Indonesians were totally at loggerheads with each other about the way forward. I did what I could to bring about some kind of consensus. No joy.

Eventually my very experienced American colleague, Ned Preble, stepped forward. "Shall I see what I can do?" he asked me. "Be my guest, Ned!" I responded gratefully.

"OK, would everyone who intends to find a solution to this problem step up please," he announced. "You should know, however, that if you choose not to participate, you're agreeing to the solution. Agreed?"

So over the next 30 minutes or so, Ned facilitated a heated, chaotic-seeming scrum of competing voices around a flip-chart. Eventually, the hubbub subsided.

They had the answer.

The Power of Silence

I was facilitating a creative workshop in Manila for a multinational group of senior managers. One of the head honchos came from New York to observe.

Mid-way through the second day, I asked him what he particularly noticed.

“What strikes me most is that you’re so unafraid of silence,” he said. “Sometimes you are prepared to just wait and wait till something emerges.”

That certainly was not the case when I started out as a facilitator. Nature abhors a vacuum. And, when there was silence, I would panic, worrying that the wheels were falling off, and I would fill the void with words.

But silence can be valuable in so many ways.

UnConferencing: Un for All and All for Un

While I’ve spoken at dozens of conventional conferences, I’ve always felt that the format – rows of chairs in old-fashioned classroom-style, with “teacher” or a panel of “experts” up front – is quite inadequate, rarely releasing the potential in the room.

So much more can be achieved by radical transformation. I first started experimenting with all this some twenty years ago. Since that time I’ve tried all sorts of different processes and formats, and have evolved a flexible approach that deals with many of the main issues involved in the trad format. Most recently I ran two UnConferences in Manila.

The first was a meeting of the top 350 managers at Nestlé Philippines (one of the largest and most successful companies in the country) and the second at a Brand Renovation masterclass for some 60 senior managers from diverse backgrounds (blogpost 14 November 2011).

A while ago, I wrote another post (31 August 2011) about the first Big City Brainstorm we ran at City University London to launch the Centre for Creativity.

And in January I’ll be running an UnConferencing session within the Association of British Orchestra’s annual conference.

There are a number of important principles involved:

• Communication ceases to be top-down and token Q and A.

• There’s a minimum of presentation and a maximum of dialogue.

• The dialogue (whether brainstorming, problem-solving, debating issues, visioning, planning or whatever) moves from the podium to the body of the room.

• The whole thing needs continuous and skilful facilitation.

• The room can be set up in various ways. I have come to prefer either small circles of chairs or round tables.

• Each circle needs a flip chart, so that ideas/thoughts can be captured immediately.

• It’s important to set up some groundrules for working together. These include the usual stuff – no judgements, anything goes, headline first, speak for yourself and so on.

• I like to work with the maximum of human contact and the minimum of technology, but with groups of 50 or more, the facilitator will need a throat-mike.

• Often, when getting reports back from the floor, I like to have the headlines come up on a big screen at the front – so a skilled “technographer” is needed for this.

Is your organisation still stuck with the teacher/class model? What’s your experience of UnConferencing?

Can Manila do a Barcelona?

Last week I gave a masterclass on Brand Renovation for a group of senior managers from diverse backgrounds in Manila. And at the heart of it was a case study on the transformation of Barcelona in the years running up to the 1992 Olympic Games.

I was lucky enough to be consulting for the International Olympic Committee through several Games and later I was able to research the impact and heritage of Olympic cities for this masterclass. I interviewed a range of personalities who had been involved in various capacities, with Barcelona emerging clearly with the “Gold Medal”.

Historically, in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, that city had been substantially passed by – a sleepy, scruffy, post-industrial conurbation, full of traffic jams.

Under the leadership of its mayor, Pasqual Maragall, a comprehensive new strategy was developed which involved:

the cleaning up of the historic parts of the city, including the wonderful and unique boulevard, Las Ramblas;
the redevelopment of the port area;
the upgrading of the airport and the transformation of the city's main road system;
the building of new sports stadia of various sizes, with the main one earmarked as a major venue for gigs, and home for the city’s second football team, Deportiva Español;
the positioning of Barcelona as a centre for creativity and the arts, with the great architect, Gaudi as the figurehead, plus the artists Picasso and Miró;
a hub for design, fashion and the advertising industry.

At the heart of the strategy, the city competed for and won a whole series of major international events – sporting, entertainment, business, expo and so on. The cherry on the top of the cake was winning the Olympics and the city used that as the lever to get all the urban renewal done.

The consequence of this exciting project has been that Barcelona is no longer a place to be avoided. In fact, for many years now it has become the number one city in Europe for “quality of life”, in the Top 5 for “doing business”, and a Mecca for tourists and (especially) honeymooners.

In post-Olympics research, visitors have described the city as “enchanting”, “exciting”, “cosmopolitan”, “my favourite”, “vibrant” and “oozing style and culture”.

At the masterclass in Manila, we used the Barcelona story as stimulus for thinking creatively together about how their own capital might be similarly transformed – in its own particular way.

So fifty fine minds brainstormed a wide range of possibilities, from which they selected eight ideas as being of particular promise, developing each of them into draft parts of a new strategy for the city.

Hopefully, these will be presented some time soon to the newly-appointed Secretary for Tourism in the Philippines, Ramon Jimenez Jr. There are high hopes for this visionary appointment – unusually Mr Jimenez is regarded as something of a guru in creativity and marketing communications. He was with Saatchi and Saatchi before founding his own creative businesses.

Manila has such enormous potential – if it can be tapped!

José Rizal: pioneer of non-violent revolution

Although I’ve gone to work in Manila on several occasions, it’s really only because I have connected on this current trip with some very interesting Filipinos that I’ve finally come to grips with José Rizal.

Rizal was a very early proponent of non-violent revolution. Born in 1861, he wrote and published two novels – Noli Me Tángere and its sequel El Filibusterismo – which attacked both the Spanish colonists and the grip over the people of the Catholic Church in the Philippines.

While his aim was freedom from oppression, he was clear that there could be bear-traps in the path once that had been achieved. "Why independence,” he asked, “if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?" And, of course, this pit was indeed fallen into by a later generation. His life and work were influential for both Gandhi and Nehru.

He was an extraordinary man – a polymath beyond the boundaries of possibility, it might seem, having expertise in anthropology, architecture, botany, business, cartography, drama, economics, education, engineering, essay-writing, entomology, ethnology, farming, folklore, geography, grammar, history, horticulture, journalism, lexicography, medicine, music, novel-writing, ophthalmology, painting, philosophy, poetry, political theory, psychology, publishing, satire, sculpture, sports, sociology and zoology. Having traveled the world, he amassed twenty-two languages.

Yesterday, amongst much else, I saw some of his sculpture. Very accomplished.

His final poem, written in Spanish shortly before his death, starts

Farewell, my adored Land, region of the sun caressed,
Pearl of the Orient Sea, our Eden lost…

And, celebrating his unwed Irish wife, Josephine Bracken, it ends

Farewell, sweet stranger, my friend, my joy;
Farewell, to all I love. To die is to rest.

Rizal was executed by firing squad in 1896, aged just thirty-five.

Steve Jobs. Saint?

Working this week in Manila with a wonderful group of young Filipino leader/managers, I’ve been asked several times why I have not written about Steve Jobs since his death one month ago.

I think the truth is that I have been wrestling internally with a couple of issues.

On the one hand, there’s no doubt that, particularly since his return second time around to the company he founded, Apple’s story has been one of continuous and spectacular success. And he has written and spoken inspiringly.

So what’s the problem?

Well, for one thing it’s clear that the great successes of the company were all built on the innovations of others – from the laptop to the iPad. And all the other blockbusters in between. Picking up other people’s inventions and improving them for the customer is good, but really doesn’t make Jobs comparable with, say, Thomas Edison, who was the founding father of so many of the world-changing innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

And then there’s the man who has been described as “Jobs the Tyrant”. Years ago I was told that it was not a good idea for an Apple staffer to get into an elevator with Steve. Apparently there was a good chance that you might emerge unemployed. I guess that story is more emblematic than literally true.

And yet, since then I have continuously heard and read about the tantrums and tirades, the disrespectful ways that colleagues could be treated.

No doubt the upside to all this was a sense within the organisation of what people call “creative tension” - tension which can drive performance. At least in the short run.

Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, said recently: “In the end, you have to judge him on the outcome.” Right now, the Apple juggernaut rolls on, apparently unstoppable.

Only time will tell what the outcome will be now that he is gone. Will enhancing the innovations of others be sufficient? And how will the climate change in Apple now that he no longer visits the building?

Maybe in future I should include Apple in Brand Renovation masterclasses that I give. For, in my mind, the company is a superb “renovator”, rather than being a real innovator.

By the way, are you coming along on Tuesday in Manila?

Manila Masterclass with Roger Neill, 8 November 2011

Best language for brainstorming?

I have found over the years that brainstorming is best done in local language.

Quite simply, the freshest ideas seem to come into our heads most readily in whatever vernacular we learn in childhood. And they are most easily expressed verbally in that language too.

This is not so easy when, as is usually the case in workshops with multinational companies, the common tongue is second-language English.

My Lintas colleague, Eleanor Modesto, discovered this vividly when she went from Manila to be managing director of the agency in Indonesia. She quickly discovered that the language of business in Jakarta is Bahasa Indonesia, so she got down to learning it, becoming expert enough in the language to pass as a local.

Yet it remained clear to her that being able to speak a language is one thing, whereas thinking in it, having ideas in it, is another thing altogether.

“Sometimes, it’s better to think conceptually in Tagalog [the major Filipino language],” Eleanor has said. “I would ask them ‘Do you have an idiom like this?’” And instead of generating ideas from “Man of Steel,” she would throw Filipino idioms like “tibay ng loob” [loosely translated as strength of character] into the mix, enriching the whole process.

Of course, I’ve discovered over the years that the facilitation of workshops in local language(s) brings greater complexity and requires special skills…

To explore this and much more, come to my Brand Renovation Masterclass in Manila, 8 November:

http://www.yeheydigitalgroup.com/repo/adobomasterclass/masterclass_edm.html