The Productive Pessimist

There's a lot of talk these days about "boundaries".  Every other social media post tells you that "boundaries are important."  Half of the rest of the social media posts mock the entire idea of boundaries, and insist it's all part of the "woke agenda". But what are  boundaries, and how do you hold them whilst still enabling people, including the strangers who may become your collaborators, your team members, or your customers/clients, to approach you freely? What are boundaries? A boundary, in human psycho-social terms, is a requirement you have around the way people behave and interact with you.  It needs  to be expressed, because expected people to "just know" what your boundaries are is unreasonable; people aren't psychic. Many open-access spaces include signage about zero tolerance of verbally or physically abusive behaviour towards their staff - that's a poorly stated  boundary, because everyone's idea, particularly of v...

  "Mental health at work" has become something of a buzz phrase in recent years, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. "Mental health" is the reason people "need to get back to the office" - because the extroverts are suffering, since they're no longer able to dominate meetings, talk people into agreeing to take on more work than they're actually comfortable with, or enthusiastically create a situation where, if getting drunk with people you already spend too much time with, or leaping on a zip wire, aren't really your thing, you're "unadventurous", "anti-social", and "not really a team player." The UK government insist work is good  for our "mental health", even as successful GPs decide they literally can't carry on anymore, and choose a permanent solution to the problem of burnout.  While the low wages, in comparison to the cost of living, and long hours of many jobs are actually c...

This piece was written by Morgana Ford-McAllister, our Neurodiversity and Gender Inclusion Lead, in response to the Cass Review , in particular the suggestion that children and young people expressing a gender identity distinct from that to be expected from their sex as assigned at birth are actually neurodivergent, most likely on the autism spectrum, and experiencing a neurodivergent 'lack of awareness of self/inability to understand gender.' Morgana is an autistic trans woman. Autistic Lack of Self vs. Gender Identity TW for childhood trauma, denial of agency, discussions of transphobia and so on. As a lived experience trainer with The Productive Pessimist, I read 35 pages of The Cass Review to get an actual feeling for what was being said and the tone being taken. From that point onwards the report seemed to move more into the models it would recommend NHS England initiate for clinic sites and a discussion of statistics, neither of which were particularly relevant to my role...

  TW: Discussion of systemic transphobia, Discussion of racism "How can a trans woman be CEO of an endometriosis charity?!"  Well, the head coach of the England Women's Rugby team is a male-identified, cisgender (assigned male at birth) man. The CEO of the RNIB isn't blind. CEOs of anti-poverty charities are certainly well-remunerated enough to not actually be in poverty. Most have never  experienced hardship, having danced from Executive post to Executive post, before eventually landing as a CEO. The upside of being a pessimist is you spend so long looking at problems that you gain an intuitive awareness that, very often, the thing being presented as "the problem" isn't, in fact, the real  issue that needs a solution. In endometriosis , the (very real, for those who suffer from the condition) issues of medical fact would be fairly straightforward to address. The problem  is medical disinterest, and, very particularly, the attitude of the medical profess...

If you have any experience of teenagers, you'll be very familiar with the response of "nothing" when you ask them "What did you do at school today?" They're not being sullen, uncommunicative, or rude. They're not 'so addicted to their screens they've forgotten how to have a conversation with real people!'   They're not keeping secrets. What did you  do at work today? What did you do when you went out earlier? What did you do at the weekend? I suspect a significant number of you, at least initially, thought "nothing" or "nothing much". Clearly, 'nothing' doesn't actually mean nothing , either when we say it as adults, or when children say it. A proof of this: Ask a five year old what they  did at school - but make sure you have at least an hour to listen to the answer! Ask a teenager, without judgement, what happens in a gaming stream, or what's going on in the book they're reading, or how their late...

  "I think you'd benefit from some personal development." "We need to develop ourselves as an organisation." You've probably all heard at least one of these, or, if you haven't, you're likely to have had occasional thoughts - probably around the 1st of January! - about 'self-improvement' or 'personal development'. But how do you know what you need to develop or improve about yourself, your team, or your organisation? Well, what is guaranteed to make you absolutely furious? What is the recurring focus of your bad dreams and Monday-morning blues? That's your brain telling you, in its unique, sideways way, what you need to work on. If you get furious about the fact that your team never seem to do anything they're asked, and, to all appearances, just sit there in between project check-ins twiddling their thumbs - your development needs are motivational communication, resilience, and adaptability. (Yes, your team likely have develo...

  One of my personal frustrations is when people or companies say they want a slice of an absolutely huge pie, that's showing itself very well in just about every class - eg, a business sector that's romping all over the board, and bringing in profits with barely any effort - but then seem to find any and every reason to take as long as possible actually getting round to even picking up a plate! I go bodyboarding when I get the time. One of the key facts in that world is that, by the time EVERYONE is able to see a wave breaking, if you're not already riding it, it's too late. The same is true in business. Whether it's an individual or a company being a hesitant wallflower in the face of the ride of a lifetime, the motivation seems to be the same: they'll waste time on business cases, business plans, and, if they're an organisation, corporate governance. The prevailing attitude, certainly in the UK, often seems to be that business cases and business plans hav...