Author: The Information Badger

Think differently about your performance appraisal with your boss…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Business, Delivery, Education, Human Resources, Information Technology, Leadership & Management, Learning

The reactions of people who’ve just had a performance appraisal with their boss varies enormously and also highlights how different we are as individuals. Personal reactions, of course, cover a wide spectrum. The Badger’s experience, however, is that while a person’s demeanour and body language says a lot about their reaction, most people share little more than the odd comment about their appraisal with others. There are always, of course, people who think they’ve been treated poorly and say so to anyone who will listen. In the Badger’s experience, such individuals tend to be self-centred, averagely talented, poor listeners, and they normally have egotistic or narcistic personalities.  These individuals, and those at the other end of the spectrum who are just downright lazy, unproductive, and permanently negative,  tend to share their displeasure widely and keep HR functions busy with claims of unfair treatment.

A youngster in their first job since leaving University 15 months ago whined to the Badger this week that their appraisal had been a shock and unfair. The youngster, hungry for rapid career and salary progression, unfortunately failed to recognise that they haven’t adjusted to working life as well as their peers. The Badger explained this, and in the course of doing so remembered some wisdom from a training course he attended many years ago. On that course, a behaviour expert, building on the sport coaching work of Tim Gallway, emphasised that we should think about individual performance using the simple equation ‘Performance = Talent – Interferences’. If someone has 100% Talent, then their Performance is never 100% because there are always Interferences from personal and/or organisational factors. Personal interferences come, for example, from lifestyle, health, family and/or caring responsibilities. Organisational interferences come, for example, from skill set mismatches with work role, adequacy of role definition, relationships with leaders and work colleagues, organisational bureaucracy, and factors like organisational dynamism and workforce stagnation if business growth is poor.

The behaviour expert’s key message was that everyone has Interferences, so no one can ever perform at 100%! Interestingly, they used the same equation to describe the performance of a company. In this case, Talent represents a company’s portfolio of  products and services, and Interferences are largely the policies, processes, and  controls that influence the delivery of the portfolio to clients. Bigger companies tend to have more Interferences than smaller ones, and no company ever performs at 100%, although clever accounting and expectation management often masks this!

So, think about your performance appraisal in the terms above. Your Talent is constant, so your Performance dips when Interferences rise. Eventually Interferences will reach a level that makes you feel like doing something different with your life. It’s very empowering when this happens, because it definitively changes the way you approach your appraisal with your boss.  

Redundancy in Meta-land…

Posted on by The Information Badger in social media

The recent Meta announcement about staff redundancies came as no surprise to the Badger. Why? Because with Meta’s share price down by more than 60% over the last year and its metaverse ambitions a potential money pit, the Badger’s felt for a long time that the rubber would hit the road and some corrective action would be necessary. No business is immune to market, consumer, business performance, and investor realities. When a corporation takes corrective action there’s normally some downsizing of the workforce involved, and many loyal, long-serving, hardworking employees suddenly find themselves exited as quickly as the law in a particular country allows. Meta’s redundancies are a reminder that job security in any commercial organisation is wafer thin.

Social media is barely two-decades old. Its rise, as you can see here, has been phenomenal, as has its impact, both positive and negative, on the conduct of our lives. Social media companies aren’t social, not-for-profit enterprises, nor are they charities or bastions of accurate information or free speech. They are, when you cut to the chase, commercial organisations seeking to make money any way they can from information collected from their users. These points came up unexpectedly in a completely unrelated podcast the Badger was listening to this week.  They triggered the Badger to muse on how his usage of social media has changed since first establishing a presence on Facebook in 2010.  

In the first few years, the Badger and his Facebook friends followed a few organisations and regularly shared material relating to their family, local community, interests, and travel. By 2015, however, personal postings had reduced significantly as privacy awareness increased and more unwanted ‘suggested for you’ and similar clutter appeared from the ether. Personal activity on Facebook became intermittent, and then the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. Since then, the Badger and his friends’ usage of Facebook has amounted to occasional monitoring and a rare post. In our different ways we have all concluded that caution is a good policy because nothing is free in life, and that there’s more to life than being glued to social media feeds. As one friend put it, avid users are those with FOMO (fear of missing out), image conscious wannabes, and those with an ego to massage. That’s a bit strong perhaps, but it’s easy to understand the sentiment.

Richard Holway from TechMarketView  called ‘peak Facebook’ way back in 2018, and the Badger’s changed use of the platform is evidence of his wisdom. This is, of course, no comfort for the 13% of Meta’s workforce who are being made redundant. The Badger feels for them, but hopefully their skill sets will open up new opportunities with other employers and their pain will be short-lived. As for Meta overall, well the Badger senses there’s more pain ahead unless Mr Zuckerberg recognises that he might be part of the problem.

There’s more to getting a smart education than ever-smarter technology…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Education, Learning, Life, Smart & New Technology, Uncategorized

With a bleak Winter on the horizon, Pink Floyd’s ‘We don’t need no education…’ grumbling from the radio, and Remembrance Day a few days away, thoughts about the grip that tech has on our lives have been a trifle melancholic. Remembrance Day is always poignant for the Badger. His grandfathers, who he never knew, served in the Army during WW1, and his father rarely spoke of his childhood, his life during WW2, or his post-war Army service. The poignancy is heightened this year because the horrors and hardships they endured are evident today in a Ukrainian family currently being hosted by a family member. Sadly, the tech-dominated ‘progress’ of the 21st century has done little to change the propensity for humans to inflict harm on other humans.  

Research has expanded the Badger’s knowledge of his forefathers’ lives, producing enormous pride, and admiration for their resilience in the face of adversity. One grandfather won two Military Medals for bravery in WW1. The other was invalided out of the Army after being gassed in the trenches, a primary factor in his death in early middle-age. The Badger’s father was a child evacuee from London when WW2 started in 1939. He was orphaned in 1942 and joined the Army in 1946 serving in a decimated post-war Germany, and then in Egypt. When pressed, he would only say that these experiences were ‘character-building’ and had influenced his three favourite sayings, namely ‘There’s no such thing as can’t, try’, ‘If you’ve got a problem, don’t bleat about it, deal with it’, and ‘Every day is a day for learning’. When the Badger was growing up, these were part of the parental soundtrack of life and became embedded attitudes. It was his father’s way of passing on lessons learned from difficult life experiences. 1

The Pink Floyd rendition here reminds the Badger that education has not only changed dramatically over the decades, but also that today’s Tech makes it easier, in some respects, to adopt an ‘Every day is a day for learning’ attitude. The days of blackboard and chalk, and throwing chalk at a pupil not paying attention, are gone! The smartest of educations, however, comes from complementing learning delivered by ever-smarter technology with face to face, non-virtual, cross-generational discussions with people sharing their experiences and life lessons. Part of the Badger’s melancholic tinge is due to a feeling that ever-smarter technology is progressively diluting this kind of learning. Another part is a feeling that whilst today’s world is different to that of his forefathers, it isn’t really any better. The melancholic tinge will no doubt fade in a few days. On Remembrance Day, the Badger will be paying tribute to his forefathers, and their values, with great pride. ‘Every day is a day for learning’ is very much part of their legacy. Make it part of yours too.

Showbusiness for ugly people, Mr Blobby, and the credibility of elderly people with power…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Change, Leadership & Management, Psychology, Technology

Someone said recently that politics is ‘showbusiness for ugly people.’  It made the Badger laugh because the phrase resonates with recent news items like those, for example, covering China’s 20th Communist Party Congress, Putin declaring martial law, and turmoil in the UK government.  The latter, in particular, has provided comedic value on a par with old television programmes like Fawlty Towers and Yes, Prime Minister. Unlike the first broadcast of these programmes, however, the internet, social media, and 24-hour news mean we don’t have to wait for the next episode because the comedy unfolds continuously in real-time.

Having no allegiance to any political ideology is probably why ‘showbusiness for ugly people’ seemed to resonate so strongly with these news items. Being playful for a moment, the Badger thinks the phrase supports the thesis that in today’s world dominated by attention-grabbing content, Mr Blobby, Paddington Bear, and Winnie the Pooh would do a better job delivering what matters than anyone groomed by the machinery of political parties.

A television news bulletin showing Mr Putin in the Kremlin prompted a visiting relative to ask a great question, namely, ‘Mr Putin is 70 years old, Xi Jinping is almost 70, Joe Biden is almost 80 (and Nancy Pelosi is 82!), so why haven’t they retired?’. They added that they weren’t ageist but merely pointing out that, in their experience, the leaders of large public sector and commercial organisations never appoint anyone of this age to run major projects, programmes, and business units. Why, therefore, are these elderly individuals credible as superpower leaders when they are in the twilight years of mental and physical prowess?

Initially flummoxed, the Badger paused to think for a moment, and then simply said that while many believe the world is a rational place, the reality is that humans are inherently both rational and irrational, as internet and social media content frequently illustrates. The propensity for irrationality can be seen in all walks of life, and especially in those who are trying to hold onto power regardless of whether it’s good for themselves and those around them. Whether elderly superpower leaders are credible is thus questionable.

The visitor expected more, so the Badger pointed out that Biden, Xi Jinping, and Putin are not from a digital-native generation and that they are all past their country’s standard pension age.  Younger, impatient individuals from digital-native generations will be biting at their heels hungry for power and change. In this decade we might thus see events that trigger the replacement of old men as superpower leaders by dynamic individuals from the digital-native generation. Eventually, of course, leaders from the digital-native generation will be corrupted by power too, and the cycle will repeat itself. The visitor looked perplexed and suggested that the Badger needed mind-altering medication…

To recycle an old radio-cassette player…or not

Posted on by The Information Badger in Digital devices and the environment

Forthcoming building work means the Badger’s garage has to be cleared of everything that’s accumulated there over the years. It hasn’t housed a motor vehicle for a long time and, as is the case for many families, it has become a storage area of equipment and old household items that are no longer used but are perceived to be too good to throw away. Last weekend the Badger started the clearance, an activity which proved satisfying and thought provoking in equal measure.

Clearing a garage always leads to unexpected surprises! One for the Badger was finding an early-1990s portable radio-cassette player, complete with its power cable and a couple of tapes. It was hidden, caked in dust, on a shelf where it had lain forgotten for many years. Finding it triggered a surge of memories and an instant urge to see if it still worked. Ignoring pleas to be careful, the Badger wiped the dust off, plugged it in, and turned on the FM radio. It burst into life producing surprisingly good quality sound. The cassette player, which functioned as if it was last used the previous day, played the music tapes without destroying them! This might be ‘old’ technology but fiddling with real knobs, switches, and knowing that it didn’t need the internet or software updates to function, was strangely satisfying.

Starting to clear the garage and finding the radio-cassette player proved to be a refreshing distraction from the woes of our current world and a reminder of three things. Firstly, that we all have unused electrical and electronic items squirrelled away in our homes. Secondly, that entertainment capabilities that predate the internet, social media, smartphones, tablets, and laptops, can still entertain and don’t require you to surrender your personal information. And thirdly, rather than hoard them, our electronics-dependent world needs us to promptly recycle unused, obsolete, gadgets, computers and phones if the technological, environment friendly future that is envisaged is to materialise.  

So far, political, social, environmental, and economic turbulence, and geopolitical belligerence, are the hallmarks of this decade. As the Head of the UK’s GCHQ, recently said in an objective and informative speech about the evolving technological environment in the context of national security and geopolitics, statecraft, technology, security, and economics are ‘entangled and mutually dependent’. It thus seems quite reasonable to think that the specialist metals and minerals recycled from our electrical and electronic equipment are essential to feed military and cyber capabilities like those in use in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. That is, perhaps, a rather obtuse thought, but it might explain why, much to his wife’s annoyance, the Badger has moved the radio-cassette player from the garage to a shelf in his home office and next to a box of old mobile phones. Will these items be ultimately recycled? Hmm, time will tell…

Take the smartphone challenge…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Online Services, Psychology, Smart & New Technology

The Badger’s concentration often lapsed during dry presentations at corporate conferences. He was not alone judging by the extent to which those in audiences were always furtively using their smartphones rather than concentrating on the speakers. It’s still the same today. Indeed, our smartphone makes it difficult to maintain an optimal state of concentration on anything for a prolonged period. When it comes to concentration, the smartphone is not your friend. It’s a source of distraction that not only affects your mental productivity, but also encourages brain habits that are not in your overall interest.

This point arose in a conversation with an old friend who is a psychologist. Over a beer reminiscing about our careers, the Badger’s friend asked him to distil a frequent frustration during his career into just one word. The Badger scratched his head and eventually answered ‘procrastination’ because it always frustrated initiative, creativity, and productive progress. His friend grinned, said procrastination was a natural human reaction to things that seem difficult or challenging, and emphasised that it’s as common in general life as it is in business. Apparently, it happens when our inner energy to prepare, decide, and act, simply fails to overcome our inner resistance. The resulting inaction can frustrate and cause conflict with others.

Pointing to their smartphone, the psychologist said the device neither helped in reducing procrastination, nor helped to promote good life habits or personal productivity, because it disrupts our ability to concentrate. Frequent checking for emails, text messages, news items, and social media posts, during a task apparently disrupts our brain’s focus and hence our productivity. The Badger was sceptical, so his friend challenged him to ‘take the smartphone challenge’ . It would show that his brain could not only be retrained to be less dependent on the device, but also that his concentration and productivity would improve. The challenge was simple. Just turn your smartphone off for one hour, once or twice a week, and use that hour to do a specific task or a hobby. Continue for some weeks and you will notice that your concentration improves, your productivity in each timeslot improves, and that this regime becomes a new habit. It becomes embedded behaviour, and your brain benefits in doing tasks without the distraction of the virtual world. The Badger procrastinated in accepting the challenge, until his friend simply raised their eyebrows!

Now, some months after turning off his devices for an hour twice a week to write creatively using pen and paper, the initially sceptical Badger can report that the challenge works! It’s now embedded behaviour, and the concentration, productivity, and quality of output improvements have been obvious. So, don’t procrastinate, take the smartphone challenge yourself. If you give up or it doesn’t work for you, then this in itself tells you something about your willpower and the extent to which your brain has been affected by your own fear of missing out (FOMO) if disconnected from the virtual world.

Smart Motorways: an incident cements an opinion

Posted on by The Information Badger in Smart Motorways, Transport

Regular travellers between Junctions 10 and 16 on the M25, London’s orbital motorway, know that this road section is always horrendously busy. This stretch is the ‘controlled’ kind of ‘Smart’ motorway with a permanent hard shoulder and variable speed limits on gantries across the lanes. The speed limits are often irrelevant because this stretch of road commonly resembles a four-lane car park. It was while stationary in the second lane of this section recently that the Badger’s opinion about other types of Smart motorway became unshakeable. These other types are ‘dynamic’, where the hard shoulder is opened for vehicles at peak times, and ‘all-lane running’ where there is no hard shoulder. What caused this firming of opinion? Simply being involved in a minor collision which, as this crash map shows, is a frequent occurrence on this stretch of motorway.

As four lanes of traffic crept forward after being stationary for a few minutes, the Badger moved forward a short distance in the second lane coming to a halt when the traffic stopped again. There was a loud bang, the vehicle shuddered and lurched forward, and the Badger’s passenger uttered some choice words. The 1 series BMW behind had driven into the back of the car. The Badger indicated to pull over onto the hard shoulder and the BMW followed, a daunting manoevure given that a 40-tonne lorry behind the BMW obscured the moving traffic in the first lane.

On the hard shoulder, the damage was inspected, details were exchanged, and both drivers expressed some relief at being off the main carriageway. Damage was restricted to paint scuffs to the Badger’s rear bumper, and the radiator grill and a headlight glass on the BMW. The BMW driver said that as the traffic moved off, they had been momentarily distracted by a flash in their rear-view mirror and had not seen the Badger’s vehicle stop until it was too late. As we chatted, traffic on the carriageways picked up speed  and we both felt vulnerable as large lorries thundered by.

Afterwards, the Badger was thankful that this wasn’t a ‘dynamic’ or ‘all-lane running’ motorway because the experience would have been much worse. This M25 stretch was to be upgraded to ‘all lane running’ but the upgrade has been paused, at least for the short term.  The Badger’s minor incident cemented a feeling that UK motorways without hard shoulders do nothing to minimise the anxiety or enhance the safety of those involved in traffic incidents. Ever more ‘Smart’ traffic systems to feed the altar of efficient vehicle flow at the expense of personal safety does not feel right. Indeed, if the pause to upgrading this section of the M25 to ‘all lane running’ is ultimately lifted then it will be a travesty for common sense and ultimately an expensive mistake.

Social media: Molly Russell deserved better…

Posted on by The Information Badger in social media

Executives, leaders, and managers make decisions all the time, normally based on facts, rational analysis of trends and risks, input from trusted advisers, and, of course, the specific objectives and incentives they have been given by their organisation. In rational people these factors dominate the decision-making process, and so any niggling contrarian gut instinct is easily smothered. It’s therefore not very common for decisions to be taken on gut instinct alone. However, the Badger learned from dealing with troublesome situations over the years that gut instinct, or any feeling of unease, should never be suppressed. Why? Because it was common for those in trouble to admit privately that they should have listened to their instincts more before taking a decision that ultimately proved flawed and the root cause of their problems.

There are many times in life when gut instinct tells us that something isn’t right, is too good to be true, or that some attractive short-term path forward has longer term, unpredictable, downsides that are difficult to pin down. It’s this instinct that something isn’t right with social media platforms that has made the Badger limit his use of them in recent years. The testimony of Meta whistle-blower Frances Haugen in October 2021, news that TikTok might face fines for failing to protect children’s privacy, and the testimonies of Pinterest and Meta executives at the inquest into the tragic death of Molly Russell (see here, for example), imply that the Badger’s instincts are sound.       

Social media is a key component of the modern digital world, especially for younger generations who have never experienced life without it. It isn’t going away. However, Frances Haugen’s testimony and advocation for transparency and social media accountability, and what’s emerging during the inquest into Molly Russell’s death, seem to highlight two things. Firstly, that unelected executives at the top of social media companies have become the people who determine what is right or wrong for people to see. Gut instinct says that isn’t right! Secondly, these companies are businesses that put profit before anything else. Whereas good businesses do what’s good for the company and their users, social media companies concentrate on the former and are disdainful of anything that attempts to redress the balance. Gut instinct again suggests that isn’t right!

Tougher regulation must change this situation. Arguments against this on the grounds that it would limit our free speech are spurious and must be resisted because free speech has existed in democracies for way longer than social media has existed. Finally, here’s a shout-out for Ian Russell, Molly’s father. He has become a prominent internet safety campaigner since his daughter’s death, and he has determinedly asked questions about social media platform’s accountability regarding toxic, harmful content. The Badger’s gut instinct is that it would be fitting and right if the outcome of Molly’s inquest creates another headache for Mr Zuckerberg and other information overlords.   

There’s no such thing as a grouchy old person…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Business, Change, Diversity, Information Technology, Life

The Badger has noted a rise recently in the ‘suggested for you’ items pushed to him on Facebook. Normally these items are simply ignored, but the other day when ‘Dumfries and Galloway! What’s going on?’ appeared as ‘suggested for you’ the Badger was intrigued. What had he been doing online recently that could make the algorithms behind the scenes conclude this might be of interest? After wracking his brain for a minute, the answer didn’t materialise. May be Facebook is desperately pushing anything to increase the time users stay on the platform? Perhaps, because user stickiness is, after all, core to social media business models, and Facebook will, no doubt, use whatever techniques it can to make money and counter waning user popularity.

The attention-grabber with the ‘Dumfries & Galloway’ item was simply the following headline text:   

‘There’s no such thing as a grouchy old person. The truth is, once you get old you stop being polite and start being honest.’

It made the Badger – who strives to be polite, honest, and never grouchy (although some may disagree) – chuckle, reflect, and realise that the sentiment conveyed by this text applies throughout our working lives and not just in our dotage.

Think back to when you left school, college, or university and entered the workforce. No matter how full of enthusiasm you were, you probably deferred to the views and decisions of colleagues ten or more years older than yourself because they were ‘old’ and more experienced. Now roll forward ten years to when you had married, acquired a large house mortgage, and perhaps a couple of young children. You were now part of the ranks at work that you once considered ‘old’, but you were still probably careful of openly disagreeing with ten-year older colleagues in senior positions to avoid putting your employment and salary income at risk.

Roll forward yet another ten years to when your mortgage is no longer a millstone, you have some financial security, and the children are finding their own way in life. You realise your career has plateaued, those ten-years older are retiring, that leaving the workforce is the next big personal milestone, and that you have nothing to fear from saying what you really think. Directness, impatience, and frustration come to the surface, and younger colleagues think you are just a grouchy ‘old’ person, which isn’t the case. You’ve just reached the part of the lifecycle where you realise that you can be completely true to yourself, and that politeness and saluting the corporate mast have their limits.

Always remember that throughout your career and whatever the role you have in your organisation, you are always ‘old’ to some. The ‘Dumfries and Galloway; What’s going?’ attention-grabber is a progressive truth, because there is no predefined age when you become ‘old’. It’s worth remembering that.

Nothing is forever…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Change, Technology

The Badger’s first boss in the IT industry had their employment terminated  after the financial performance of their business unit disappointed for the third quarter in a row. They shrugged their shoulders sanguinely and told the Badger  ‘Nothing is forever. That applies to technology, organisations, and people. Always scan the horizon and prepare for possible changes as best you can’. These words came flooding back with the announcement that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s reign had come to an end. The Badger has found himself reflecting on these words given the huge technological changes that happened in the Queen’s 70-year reign.

At the time of her Coronation in 1952, television was black and white, in less than 20% of UK homes, and there was only one channel. Radio and paper newspapers dominated the flow of news to the general public, coal and wood were the primary fuels for heating homes, only 1 in 20 people had access to a motor car and the UK motorway network didn’t exist. The world’s first commercial airline service using jets had just started, steam engines pulled carriages on the railway network, and a landline telephone in the home was a luxury. Life was spartan, food was still rationed, satellites didn’t exist, microchips had not started to revolutionise the field of electronics, and the Information Technology sector had yet to be born.

Things are very, very different today. The technological change during the Queen’s reign has been phenomenal. It has been diverse, fascinating, and awe-inspiring, and it has evidenced the truth of the ‘nothing is forever’ words of the Badger’s boss. The Queen’s reign saw both the emergence of multiple new technologies that changed our lives, and their subsequent obsolescence. The emergence and then decline of video tapes, CDs, and DVDs with the advent of streaming illustrates the point neatly, as does the journey from bulky black and white and then colour TVs with Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) screens to today’s ‘Smart’ flatscreen, wall-mounted, multi-functional, entertainment devices. The journey from early mainframe computers for business, to personal computing, the internet, and the powerful tablets and smartphones in our hands also potently illustrates the numerous cycles of innovation and obsolescence that have occurred during the Queen’s reign. It’s a sobering reminder that the technology we embrace today is inevitably tomorrow’s obsolescence.

‘Nothing lasts forever’ is an undeniable truth, a truth that the end of the Queen’s reign brings into stark perspective. It’s a truth that applies to everyone, everything, and in every facet of life, and one that our new monarch, King Charles III, is now steadfastly embracing. These three words remind us that we should actively and positively deal with the cards that are dealt to us in life, and that there are no better role models for doing this than the Queen we mourn and our new King.