Is Disobedience a Core Competency?

I’ve always been interested in what makes some people able to take the decision to “walk on water” and just get on with trying to make something happen while most are looking for a set of rules to follow. I set up the Free Spirits Club in Ecademy to discuss these issues.

Some people believe that we are hardwired to seek conformity and rules – the simpler the set the better. It’s true that if you study the way the brain works you tend to come to the conclusion that it’s a machine to take 2 and 2 and produce 5. It’s driven to produce patterns from insufficient data and these become persistent, rigid and infective. Much religious dogma seems to fall into this category.

However there does seem to be a countervailing tendency for individuals to recognise that they are trapped and to strike out on their own. Sometimes blindly, sometimes calculatedly, sometimes in a conscious attempt to achieve a balance of self expression but not at the expense of the group.  Level 7 – the yellow zone in spiral dynamics. Dudley Lynch’s book Mother of all minds is an account of his own journey.

What interests me is what can be done to facilitate and sustain the independence from group-think that’s needed to make real progress. Or is this just a meta set of rules because the only truly independent thinkers get sectioned?

This seems like a discussion worth having as it touches on many of the recurring themes of small business.  How do we build a sustainable business (which usually doesn’t involve following someone else’s simple formula), How do we stay true to ourselves, How do we steer our course between gross materialism on the one hand and utter wishful thinking on the other.

My own view is that we need to learn how to be disobedient for the common good.

I realised when I was 10 that if you played the game according to the rules you were going to lose. It’s a casino, the deck is stacked against you. Big industry and government regulation are always making life harder for the independent. But somehow we all survive in growing numbers. It’s a key competency to understand which things you can ignore and which things you can’t.

A successful operation needs just enough structure .  What we’re told to do is generally over-engineered and will result in slow death – euro-necrosis

So – how do we keep the vital spark alive?

Over to you guys.

Alan

Why do small companies resist training?

Here are some reasons why SMEs resist training

1) Most available training is aimed at large organisations. It’s over engineered and takes too long for the value that’s imparted. It’s also priced inappropriately. £500 for a 1 day Chartered Institute of Marketing course is just too much.

1) Too much of it is aimed at compliance. Corporate vendors are as bad as the government in making their distributors take over engineered one size fits all product training courses that are irrelevant. A decent sales refresher would be a better bet.

1) Most training providers have no clue about the balance of activities in a small business. In a large organisation strategy and tactics belong in different provinces in a small business they’re totally integrated. In IT, the official view is that there are users on the one hand and professionals on the other. WITH NOTHING IN BETWEEN. This is of course nonsense. There are tens of thousands of companies out there who have what can best be described as “IT paramedics” keeping the systems up. There is no training for them. e-skills continue to duck the issue. I once developed a suitable course which the punters liked but the ministry for the prevention of learning ( the LSC to you) withdrew the funding.

1) There is no funding. All of the adult education budget has been channelled to remedial reading and writing courses because the education system is broken. The recent Leitch report’s fundamental recommendation is that we should focus on this to pretty much the exclusion of everything else if we expect the UK to be competitive in 2020. You would have thought something about using technology effectively would be part of the mix but apparently not. And Leitch is the Chair of Zurich and should be expected to know better. This is certainly impacting student numbers for Chartered institute of marketing.

In summary most training available from the training industry is overpriced, irrelevant and over engineered.

The reality in a 10 man company is that you will do what you need to do to stay compliant and that’s as much an overhead as you can stand.

What will happen otherwise is that someone senior might go on a course and then train the others. In bite size chunks. Mixed in with the work. Digested and relevant. Backed up by the most powerful motivational tool known to man – the bacon sandwich.

Yes training motivates and retains staff – but you generally have to do it yourself as much of the available courses are neither use nor ornament.

You might gather from this that I have a dual perspective – as an owner manager of small businesses since 1981 which as part of their offerings have required me to develop and deliver training programmes usually in IT and marketing and usually for small businesses but sometimes for corporates who want to reach SMEs.

I think most trainers would benefit from understanding small business better and coming up with more appropriate material

but hey what do I know

Alan

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!