Meeting Notes - A culture of wellness

Hi,

I hope you are well. It's been a mad week here at Lambert HQ. My eldest is learning to drive, we've had two birthdays and frankly, I've been working too much too. But alas - most of that work has been enjoyable.

I mentioned briefly in previous newsletters that I was pulling together a Releasing Business Agility scrapbook. Well, it's live now - and I'm adding to it over time.

Last week I wrote a post on Leadership behaviours to improve every day, and also gave away a "conference talk idea generation" slide deck.

I've also made the book Take A Day Off available for digital download too!

And yes, I'm still trying to finish my tutorial manual also.

I've got some excellent snippets of goodness for you below.

For those new to the Meeting Notes newsletter, welcome, I’m Rob, Chief Wellness Officer at Cultivated Management. This newsletter is about mastering the art of communication and creativity - and creating a bright future of work. 

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A sub-culture of wellness

Digging through my notes and archives is a nurturing activity. I stumble across ideas, notes, insights and bad diagrams.

One such find was this sub-culture of wellness mind-map.

I'm not sure whether this is a copy of someone else's work (if you know drop me a message), or whether this is a learning note cobbled together from my own insights and various reading. I suspect the latter. It's a very old note.

What is clear though is that wellness and wellbeing are hot topics, and this mind map covers some intriguing ideas about the culture of wellness. I've done a video and post of Wellbeing (and how it's not your fault) here.

A lot of the thinking in this mind map has influenced my own work a lot.

Job fulfilment, meaningful goals, building flow and slack into delivery, increasing people's power to solve problems, finding ways to increase decision making near the work itself....all things I aim to do, not only for excellent delivery but to cultivate a workplace that enriches the lives of all who work in it.

You'll see the note is from the Xmind tool. I had ALL of my learning notes in Xmind at one point - all connected and interweaved. It was a thing of beauty and extremely powerful.

Then it stopped working and I lost it all - this was an export I made before that point....wish I'd done it for all of my notes.

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Strategy should be informed by data, but people don't need to see the data

Consider this idea when you're doing any strategy creation or activation.

A good strategy has a clear painted picture of the future, with some goals and a plan to overcome the obstacles you know about. These insights and decisions will be guided by data points. Data on markets, on finances, on opportunity, on delivery, on people, on projections.

But, when you come to communicate the strategy, and importantly, activate it, the data should fade.

The data disappears when you tell the strategic story. Stories go where facts cannot.

A common mistake many leaders and managers make is leading with the data and facts. But a good strategy interconnects this data, then a rich, human, emotional story emerges.

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Time passes and flowers fade

I read this somewhere on the web, captured it and left it sitting in my notes. Someone the other day asked me what I thought the "purpose of work" was for.

It's a hard question to answer but I thought of this quote. Time passes and companies fade. Time passes and the work itself fades. The market changes, the jobs come and go, the companies fly high - and then fall. Time is passing and things fade.

But what maybe doesn't fade so quickly are the skills we develop along the way, the memory of the fun and challenging times we had with other people, the satisfaction of doing good work, the knowledge we gain and the friendships and relationship we build (and nurture) along the way.

Maybe that's what work is for. To give to society through the value derived from the company - and the personal growth, learning and relationships that we build along the way?

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What is reflection?

Our world is full of retrospectives, reflective sessions, reviews and of course, the trend of reflecting on our own lives (yes, I am an avid journal taker).

But what, below a popular word and series of "agile" meetings, is reflection?

How can we learn to "reflect" more effectively? And why is the "retrospective" meeting at work so important?

Here's my short thoughts:

• Reflection is an opportunity (and space) to think with a clear purpose (to understand how to get better).
• Reflection is an opportunity to analyse how we perform (or learn, or speak, or move, or whatever).
• Reflection is an opportunity to think critically about our reality, and then ask hard questions about it.

Any "reflective" meeting or activity, that doesn't have these three thing, may be missing the power of reflection.

"He had a talent for appearing when he was not wanted and a talent for disappearing when he was wanted"

Sounds like this should be on a list of dysfunctional traits of leaders and managers.

Source : The Man Who Knew Too Much - Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority - G. K. Chesterton

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We make everything too complex

It's not uncommon, when engaged in problem solving, for a simple answer, potential solution or idea to emerge.

The simplicity foxes people though.

A simple answer must surely not be right.

Layers are then added on to what was a good solution in the first place.

At some point though, someone will call out the complexity of the solution.

"It will be hard to do. I no longer understand it. How will we communicate this? Why do we need to include the entire organisation in solving this?"

You get the idea.

At which point, people will start to unpick the complex answer and work back to the most obvious, or simple, answer. Typically close to the one they started out with.

If you can - try to avoid people making something simple more complex.

Sure, ask good questions about the answer or solution, test it, give it some critical analysis. But try to not to inflate it, bloat it, widen its scope, make it bigger and add complexity through this process.

The simple answer or solution is typically the best. Try not to sabotage your own work.

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Potential Future(s)

I was doing some thinking about the future the other day, for some work I'm currently doing. Thought I'd share with you a simple concentric circle diagram I often call on when doing future(s) work.

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Codifying Abilities

There's only so much we can write down as an individual to share what we know. At work, it's not uncommon for leaders to assume we can codify someone's skills in a wiki, email, handover guide, job description or some other format. But that's not really possible. I've written about this before - nothing worth knowing can be taught.

I dug this out of my notes:

"I’ve been polishing this craft for decades / it’s not something to include in an email, it’s not quantifiable- it needs transmitting person to person"

A case for on-the-job training.

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Support Cultivated Management

This newsletter is a labour of love - if you’d like to support my work please consider:

1. Sharing this content with others you feel would get value from it.
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5. Upgrading to paid.

It means a lot. Thank you.

Until next time. Have a great week.

Rob..