The Productive Pessimist

  It's happened again.  Your cookies have tracked what seemed to be an engaged, potentially high-spending customer across your website. They lingered the appropriate amount, clicked suitably quickly, examined the full, carefully-crafted description your copywriter had two fits of screaming profanity, three breaks to cry in the loo, and one episode of throwing a hardbacked version of the Oxford English Dictionary  at a colleague's head before their words were finally approved. The customer's virtual basket shows enough variety to suggest new marketing angles, but not so much that your software can't categorise them effectively. It will be possible for the software to prompt the tried-and-tested selection of marketing approaches that (mostly) work with their demographic. To appeal to their ambitions, their glittering image of themselves, their fears, their hopes, their prejudices, and, in doing so, get more money from them. Then - disaster! They've left your website!

(*names and features have been changed for privacy) GullRun Health Services are an independent healthcare provider, established as a Community Interest Company (CIC) who are looking to move away from their current business model, which is heavily dependent on NHS (National Health Service) commissioning.  GullRun want to move away from this model in order to establish a more visible presence in their local area, and also to avoid the significant payment lags that they are experiencing on many of their contracts - in some cases, it has been over a year since the service they were commissioned to provide started seeing patients, and they still haven’t received a single payment from the NHS. This is obviously having an impact on their ability to maintain a prudent level of reserve funding, and preventing them from addressing pressing healthcare needs within their communities. GullRun Health Services approached The Productive Pessimist Ltd, and requested a supported session working through

  Today is International Day of Happiness. We're The Productive Pessimist; those two things may seem to be completely at odds.   Can pessimists be happy?  Isn't pessimism essentially a guarantee of lifelong discontent? Pessimism is actually more likely to create a state of calm, enduring happiness, because pessimism prevents unrealistic expectations from being built into believable ambitions. Pessimists have dreams, like everyone else, but they are grounded in a realism that has been subjected to often quite extreme analysis. Just because a dream doesn't make it through this analysis, it doesn't mean a pessimist can't or won't indulge it; sometimes, it can be pleasant to play with a dream which we know won't go anywhere - after all, if the dream is acknowledged as impossible, we can enjoy our ideal of it, without any risk of having to encounter the downsides which come with any dream. Dreams which make it through a pessimist's analysis much more readily

This week (March 18th-24th 2024) is Neurodiversity Celebration Week. As a neurodiverse-led organisation (our Director, co-founder, and lead Trainer, Morgana, has ADHD and autism, both of which were diagnosed in adulthood, but which influenced her experience of childhood and adolescence), The Productive Pessimist are aware that 'celebration' can feel like a very loaded word, both to people who live with a particular condition or experience, and to those who work with them, educate them, and parent them. Social media, in particular, has often centred white-passing female/femme individuals, who are highly verbal, skilled at art, and with strong social skills as "neurodiversity rep", a backlash to society's frequent presentation of socially-inept, emotionally unavailable men, or hyperactive boys, often as the "accepted medical presentation" of neurodiversity. Many people would ask how someone who is non-verbal, someone who lacks awareness of their basic bodi

  Have you been watching BBC One's The Apprentice over the past few weeks? (or years, for many of us?!) Here at The Productive Pessimist , our Director, Ash, has been a fan of the show from the beginning - he even got an audition for the 2011 series! (Unfortunately, he was out of work at the time, and ended up having to go to a less illustrious job interview on the same day... he didn't even get the job... the paths we didn't take, eh?) We all sort of know, the way we do with all 'reality' shows, that it's probably not as disastrous as it seems. Editing can tell a completely different story to what actually went on, and how many of us would actually tune in every week to see people being competent, capable professionals? (Our bosses tell us that's what we go to work for!) However true or constructed it may be, all we have to go on as far as the capabilities of the wannabes are concerned is what we see when we switch on. Which...isn't always that inspiri

  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