Cutting bureaucracy at the BBC

I notice that BBC director general Tony Hall has committed to cutting bureaucracy.

Top of the agenda, apparently, is to tackle the BBC’s meeting culture – halving the number of boards and steering groups. “We spend far too long agonising over decisions that other organisations have learned to make much more efficiently,” says Hall.

Sounds like a good start.

A useful follow-up would be to light a bushfire under the forest of processes and procedures, rules and regulations, that were set up, one by one, on the basis that they would increase control, reduce risk and facilitate progress, but actually just get in the way.

The relativity of time

 

I don’t know that Einstein was aware that time is also relative to culture.

In Germany, a 9:00am meeting will start at 8:55. In England at 9:10. In France at 9:15 and in Italy at 9:20. In Brazil it will be 9:45 or 9:50. Uniquely, in my experience, the meeting starts at 9 o’clock sharp in the Netherlands.

All of these are in reality on-time meetings. So getting upset when “my time” isn’t happening often means that you’re working with foreigners.

Running a workshop in Sao Paolo, the German client came to me on day two to apologise for the tardiness of her Brazilian colleagues. “I’m sure they will be here on time,” I responded. And they were.

Which language is most useful in multinational meetings?

A bright young Frenchman, Dominique de Jarnac, came to work with me in London. Things went well, then one day he told me that he was disappointed.

“You never correct my English,” he told me. “How will I ever improve?”

“But your English is good,” I replied. “It’s very charming when you make ‘mistakes’ – and we understand you perfectly.”

“If we were in Paris, we would correct your French constantly,” he told me.

It’s clear that the French hold tightly to the idea that there is one ‘correct’ French and that everything else is ‘incorrect’. Whereas in England we seem to know intuitively that there are dozens of versions of English, each with their own validity – Southern English English, Northern, Scots, Irish, Welsh, American, Australasian, Indian, West Indian.

All these, of course. But also Singaporean and Malaysian, Philippine, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese… and French English.

So if one is facilitating or chairing a multicultural meeting, the most useful common language is… second-language English. Worth learning to speak it fluently if English is your first language. It’s different.

Meetings, bloody meetings

Research we did at Synectics before the social media revolution showed that managers in America spent some three quarters of their time in meetings of one sort or another. It does not seem to have been a happy experience for them.

Among managers in “star” innovation companies, only 25% thought that they regularly had productive or creative outcomes, whereas for those in “spectator” innovation companies, the figure dropped to a pitiful 2%.

But here is an interesting sub-finding: my meetings are more productive and creative in outcome than yours. The research showed that, irrespective of who I am, or in which function, I think that my meetings are pretty good – but yours are not!

I wonder whether things are improving? Or are meetings just as dire as they have ever been (as in those John Cleese videos)?

One problem that persists, it seems to me, is that the ability to chair a meeting productively is not a skill widely embraced (or well taught). The co-founder of Synectics, George Prince, concluded that it was better to split the role of the chair into two – a “problem owner” (who would lead content), and a “facilitator” (who would lead process). Both would need to model and promote positive climate in the meeting.

Is this happening much? I rather doubt it.