The Productive Pessimist

  The Productive Pessimist ' s  working practice is to ask 5 questions of clients whom we're helping to address strategic, systemic, and crisis challenges in their focus remits. 5 questions. No more, no less. Asking so few questions compels everyone in the room to focus on the "real problems", and set aside their personality clashes, their fixations, their personal perceptions of "the problem", and come together to bring through meaningful responses. The business community, once they finally accept they do have  problems, engage quite well with the challenge. The charitable sector, however... I'd like  to say the non-profit sector doesn't even accept they have any problems, because that would at least be reasonable, and make a lot more sense than the real situation, which is that the voluntary sector does nothing other than  complain about all  the "problems" it has.  And yes, many of those problems are genuine, and valid.  But, despite all...

As soon as air travel began to become more affordable, Britain's small museums, and other smaller tourism attractions were in trouble. The problem was that, being British, those organisations didn't consider that they were  in trouble. Their entry fees were still a lot  cheaper than a plane ticket, and flying abroad was so much hassle , wasn't it? And besides, they were British.  You could have a conversation  with the lovely, British volunteers working in lovely, cosy, local British museums, you could enjoy the bracing British seaside, or the beautiful British countryside, whilst exploring quaint, quirky tourist businesses, and - the really cool  payoff - keeping your money in the local economy! And, for a while, the British public agreed with all of this. They pottered, they provided endless 2ps, 1ps, and 5ps, they brought quirky knick-knacks that would sit on a windowsill for a few weeks, then be moved to the mantlepiece, before finally being scuttled off to ...