The Productive Pessimist

  Do you love your job?  Do you love your life? What would you most love to do? What's your heart's desire for your business, yourself, your family? Other coaches talk a lot about 'love'.  Every other piece of professional advice tells you to 'find a job you love.' What do they actually mean when they use 'love' like this? Clearly, no one's suggesting you get into the same mindset around going to work Monday morning, sitting through yet another PowerPoint presentation, or organising the kids and arranging the online grocery deliveries as the thought of a hot date with someone who hits all your buttons, or a weekend spent in the company of your best mate puts you in.  And we're definitely not advocating that 'married to the job' should be a literal matter of legally-validated fact. You're not going to be serenading your office block, or sending a dozen roses to your project teams.  You're not going to be inviting your new hire out

1. Know what you don't know Barney down the pub, Jan at slimming group, and Kayleigh, your 13yr old, may think it's "obvious" how to resolve a particular crisis, but the age and treachery which will overcome youth and inexperience knows that, the more 'obvious' the problem seems, the more aspects of it you have underestimated, ignored, or simply never been aware of. 2. Accept your limitations You cannot solve the crisis. YOU. CANNOT. SOLVE. THE. CRISIS. Loud enough for you?  You can't solve the crisis. Your team can't solve the crisis. Your organisation can't solve the crisis. What you can do - what you have  to do - is to realise that every 'crisis' is simply a series of smaller problems. You can solve problems. Your team can solve problems. Your business can solve problems. You can't solve the crisis.  You can  solve the problems that comprise it. 3. Don't micromanage crisis Crises are frightening. They upset people. People get tr

2024. A new year, a new five year plan - and one that brings us to the eve of not just a new year, but a new decade!  This  five-year plan is going to really count!  No Brexit, no Covid, no new wars... nothing to derail your ambitions from being achieved, and your company, specifically, dragging the entire British economy back to its feet. Nothing stopping you achieving your personal goals. You absolutely would  have been a better person by now, except so much has happened in the past few years... honestly, no one could really  expect you to achieve anything when things in the wider world just kept happening. Pro tip: 2029 won't be any different for you, for your company, for the country, than 2024.  Five-year plans don't work; over 300 years of government by carefully pre-selected elected representatives who have always best represented their own interests should have taught us that particular lesson by now. Wherever you are in 2029, it's mostly going to be by accident, ra

  We're roughly a week away from "full-on" festive season for many people.  For my household (Pagan - eclectic in general, with Norse leanings on my side, and Celtic on my wife's) we're just five days from Solstice, our winter celebration. For those who are mystically inclined, five is a dynamic number, promising positive change through effective communication - so, five days before one of my major points of celebration seems a good time to talk about the power of Productive Pessimism, and encourage you to consider making a booking for 2024 - or sooner, if you're ready for change right now! How Can Pessimism Be Productive?! I know what you're thinking - "Pessimism isn't productive! I don't want a bunch of Negative Neils whinging on around my ideas and projects!" Absolutely - nobody wants a Neg coming in and being a killjoy. That's not what Productive Pessimism is about - pessimism is "the expectation that bad things will happen&q

  "I'm having endless  conversations with the school about my son, because of his behaviour in lessons - he's lovely  at home..." What jumps out to me from this statement - which is one heard ad nauseum, seen all over social media, in every agony aunt (and uncle!) column, just with the gender of the child changed - and which is reflected in the adult world as "HR conversations about this completely unmanageable employee, who won't follow processes or take direction!" is that the wrong people  are being engaged in conversation. If your child's school are reporting discipline issues - talk to your child. Not by yelling at them, or telling them what the school told you, but in terms of: . "Do you know what your teacher wants you to do when you're in a lesson?" . "Do you understand why it's important that your friends feel you're being kind to them?" The answer to these questions may be "No" - which begins a conv

  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

  Today is World Kindness Day. One of those days that has me rolling me eyes so hard, I risk having to explain to my ophthalmology consultant exactly how I lost the remaining 45% of my sight in under an hour. Of course you shouldn't just go around being an arsehole to people for the sake of it, of course a bit of small talk can oil a lot of wheels, and everyone's over edge lords and their "I don't care about your feelings!" shtick, but... Kindness doesn't help anyone. Kindness is telling someone, for 16+ years, that their drawings and paintings are amazing, and then leaving them to deal with the fall out of discovering they can't turn their passion for art into a career on their own when the market goes "That's sh*t - I wouldn't give you a spare fart for it, mate." Kindness is telling someone that they "just need to find their tribe", when what they actually  need to do is learn to communicate in styles that aren't their per

  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

  Negative is also a charge - and it may just be the power your business needs to get future-ready, and move forward at pace. Negativity can destroy a project - but, if it's applied before the project starts , pessimism can create  a project with so much momentum and collective will behind it, it genuinely is unstoppable. How many of your projects have been brought to a crashing halt by governance challenges? And hasn't that, if you're honest, made you hate governance, and seek to avoid it?  What if you could get the insight of a productive pessimist during scoping - someone who would help you 'fail fast', and work with you to destruction-test project plans in rapid succession, so that what you eventually submitted to governance was so spot-on, so aligned with your organisation's values, that it couldn't   fail? The Productive Pessimist   offers a three-day 'rapid response' consultancy for project teams, by the end of which you're guaranteed to h