The Open Channel - October Newsletter

 

The Open Channel

We are delighted to welcome you to the October 2012 edition of The Open Channel Newsletter.

 

The Open Channel is a venture borne out of a passion for supporting change and our belief in the strength of people and organisations. Janet Dean and Steve Loraine are senior practitioners in public sector service delivery and work collaboratively with private sector, voluntary and community organisations.  Do contact us to find out how we can assist you to manage your change challenges.

 

FindOut More

 

Led by Janet Dean and Steve Loraine, two highly respected and experienced independent public service advisers, The Open Channel has a fresh and highly cost-effective approach to helping you lead and manage change. We understand the challenges you face and appreciate the financial constraints you cope with.

Our approach is based on the view that people and organisations are inherently strong and capable and that supporting your strengths in times of change is a particularly positive and a more sustainable way to lead and manage.

If you are a public body, private service provider, voluntary and community organisation or social enterprise, you will find the services we offer just right for your needs.

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

We report on our Leadership Development Programme for a County Fire and Rescue Service, where we are using a mixture of executive coaching, action learning and strengths models to develop the leadership capacity of the Service.

Find out how we use the SOAR strategic planning model to assist clients to create appreciative strategies and how this powerful approach to planning can benefit your organisation.

Following publication of the Joseph Rowntree Report on Creating a Dementia Friendly York, The Open Channel is partnering with AESOP Consortium to offer Accelerated Learning Programmes on this topic.

And we offer some reflections on recent experience in helping a local authority review its approach to performance management

Contact Us to Find Out More

 

The Open Channel Case Study

 FIRE & RESCUE SERVICE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

We have been working with a County Fire & Rescue Service for a number of months, supporting a team of senior managers in their leadership development as the Service navigates the inevitable and challenging consequences of public services reform and resource cuts.

Our work has involved a series of individual executive coaching sessions and strengths profiling feedback; personal development action planning; action learning group sessions and senior leadership event.

The executive coaching sessions have been set in the context of the demands senior managers face in leading complex change and how a team of managers can work collaboratively, supporting each other to achieve individual and mutual goals.

In addition, the learning set sessions have provided a group setting where the collective talents and strengths of the team are brought to bear on shaping and leading organisational change.

As the individual and group sessions took place, another element was added - the Strengthscope profiling tool. This is a powerful model that provides individuals with a high quality report accurately identifying their top seven strengths in a work setting. With this knowledge, the leaders optimise their strengths through the activities they carry out in their own functions and in combination across corporate, strategic projects.

The feedback from the managers about the value of the coaching has been highly positive and their managers, i.e. the Service’s Principal Officers, have commented on the productive change that both the coaching and action learning have made to the strategic outcomes the team is achieving.

Tellingly, the Service also used the Strengthscope profiles to assist it in making decisions about the reallocation of functions and strategic roles to each manager during a recent service re-alignment. This is the first time we’ve seen the model used in this way to help guide a leadership team in the alignment of its members’ strengths and the Service’s activities. We will encourage the service to share their learning from this innovation when they are ready.  

 

 The Open Channel Approach

 

SOARING TO STRATEGIC SUCCESS

For many years now SWOT has been a popular strategic planning tool for teams and organisations. This model has provided structure and focus to future planning conversations in organisations across all sectors. What’s noticeable though about the model and how it’s used is that, whilst at first sight it’s a 50/50 split between negative/positive elements, in practice we find that the conversations tend to focus overly on the negative elements, i.e. weaknesses and threats and less on the positive elements, i.e. strengths and opportunities. So much so that the proportion of the conversations was towards 75/25% negative/positive, concentrating on problems and deficits, tending to drain energy and lacking a compelling preferred future. 

Now there is an alternative; SOAR (Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations and Results). SOAR is a strategic planning framework with an approach that focuses on strengths and seeks to understand the whole system by including the voices of all the relevant stakeholders.

Focusing on strengths means that SOAR conversations centre on what an organisation is doing right, what skills could be enhanced and what is compelling to all of those who have a stake in the organisation’s success (and not just its leaders). Also, when you use SOAR, you needn’t abandon SWOT, because SOAR and SWOT have a ‘both/and’ relationship, i.e. SOAR leverages the strengths and opportunities from SWOT as a foundation and then adds Aspirations and Results – the critical connection between our imagination and the innovation of implementation.

We have used SOAR with Boards of Trustees, leadership teams, divisional teams and strategic partnerships. When people use SOAR they see the ‘whole’ and their part in delivering the vision. This is how SOAR creates greater alignment and energy to move quickly to implement strategies.

For more stories about SOAR and how to use it to create and deliver your strategies, then contact Steve Loraine

 

 

 

The Open Channel Newsfeed

 

Dementia Without Walls Project Report Published

Following a year- long action research project, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published its report ‘Creating a Dementia Friendly York’ this month. Led by Janet Crampton of AESOP Consortium and Janet Dean of The Open Channel, the report was co-authored by AESOP Director Ruth Eley.

 

Whilst using York as a Case Study, the report draws examples from across the UK and the world to make the case for a dementia friendly approach. Janet Dean’s contribution in developing the Four Cornerstones Model which uses Place, People, Resources and Networks as a way of understanding what communities need to do, can be applied everywhere.

 

To help local authorities and their community partners across the public sector and in business, culture and the voluntary and community sectors to make fast progress in making dementia friendly communities a reality, AESOP and The Open Channel has developed an Accelerated Learning Programme for senior decision makers. Over the course of six months, participants can combine their own experience with practice from outside and use the Four Cornerstones to develop their local action plans.

 

At the moment, the Accelerated Learning Programme is being offered to interested pilot authorities who need only fund part of the cost. Please contact Janet Dean if you would like to be considered for the Programme.

 

PERFORMANCE REVIEW – PROCESS OR PEOPLE?

Janet has been working on a project for a London Borough advising on Performance Management in Housing and Social Care. Here she reflects on the conversations she has had with staff at all levels in the organisation.

‘When you ask people what Performance Management means to them, there are as many answers as there are people – no wonder it’s hard to find a way of making it meaningful.  Some people think immediately of systems – data in, information out at best. But there is seldom one system; if there are many, they often don’t speak to one another, and if you put in bad data, bad information will come out.

Some people talk about process – who collects what, where it goes, how it is communicated and understood. It is not uncommon to find that processes don’t wire round the whole system, they may go so far and fizzle out. People at the sharp end who are inputting data, sometimes don’t recognise it when it is presented at the top. It’s hard in this case to get everybody to buy into the process.

Others emphasise the culture – are people interested in performance, do they want to improve, and are they genuinely trying to work across the organisation to make it happen. How are service users and the public involved, can they influence performance directly? Are elected members interested in the same issues as people delivering services, and do they all want what customers want?

My feeling is that data and even information (i.e. analysed data) are not going to help without knowledge – this comes when we communicate what is happening, and understand it in the same way. But even then we can find ourselves in the same loop. Improved performance comes from wisdom, learning from our practice, doing more of what is good, what is going well, so that we do less of what is going wrong.

In our experience people often start with what’s going wrong – at The Open Channel, our emphasis on strengths means that we will ask you what is good and help you to understand how to make it even better.’

 

KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH THE OPEN CHANNEL

You can keep up to the minute with The Open Channel through our blogs and Twitter feeds. We engage with our clients and stakeholders at @janetdean and @steveloraine and via Linked-in. Check out the links in this newsletter, visit our blogs or add us to your favourites’ lists via www.theopenchannel.co.uk

Leading Change and the Metaphor of the Rings

As we navigate complex change, as a result of the government's public services transformation programme, i.e. cuts, or other models or imperatives to change, we can often benefit from stories and metaphors to help us understand change in different ways. One such metaphor is the Metaphor of the Rings, which we found in David Noer's excellent book, Breaking Free. Here it is... 

 

The Metaphor of the Rings

It begins with the vision of a series of gymnastic rings, hanging by ropes. A person jumps from a platform and grabs a ring with the right hand and then – while maintaining momentum – reaches out and grabs the next ring with the left hand; then, again, grasps the next ring with the right, keeping the rhythm and moving through the line of rings.

 The Perilous Journey of the Entrenched

This is the story of one person’s travels through the rings. It can be applied to many others. This person has spent many years perfecting travelling down a seemingly endless and very predictable row of rings. The rings were of equal spacing and size and stretched over the horizon. He was very good at swinging through the rings and was quite happy. He was able to move swiftly, efficiently, and predictably along his narrow corridor of interchangeable rings. His plans were to keep swinging through the rings until retirement.

One morning he jumped from the platform, beginning another day’s journey. From the time he hit the first ring it was apparent that things had changed! The first ring was a bit off to the side. The next ring was slightly closer than he was used to. As he continued to move he discovered that the new ring-world was, indeed, very different – the rings were spaced at unpredictable distances, some closer together, others further apart. To make matters worse, the height began to vary. He had to struggle to reach some that were high and drop down to catch some below him. Then they grew very slippery, as though someone had put oil on them. As if that were not enough, they began to vary in size, and then he discovered a few that were not rings at all but trapeze bars – some of them broken and hanging only by a single chain on one side. Then there was the light – it would suddenly grow very dark or the lights would become glaringly bright. There was no pattern and it was disorienting.

He then discovered two distinct varieties of fellow travellers. For the first time in his career, people began to pass him, travelling with an ease and grace that seemed impossible on that confusing and unpredictable array of gymnastic apparatus and rapidly changing visibility. They were moving much faster than he was willing to risk, although, after watching them, he thought he could learn how to do it. He next found a second type of fellow traveller. Only, the people in this group were not moving – they were stationary - hanging from individual rings or trapezes with both hands. They got in his way and he really needed to be agile to duck around them.

There was no relief. Things kept getting more difficult and he grew very tired, angry and frustrated. Why couldn’t things be what they were? He had really excelled at swinging through predictable, evenly spaced rings. Maybe he should just try and stop and take a break. He was so tired and it was so difficult trying to move through the next rings using his old skills. Perhaps he could take a quick rest on the next one, just hold on with both hands for a while…

What do we learn from this story? One insight might be that you have to let go of one ring before you can grab hold of another and there comes a moment of truth when, if you want to continue to move, you have neither hand on a ring, but must have faith that you will have the ability to grasp the ring in front of you. Another view might be that we have become used to the spacing, however uneven and yet more changes lead us to become exhausted and frustrated to a degree that makes us question our competency to continue. Another interpretation and a variation is that in moments of severe change and flux you are moving through the rings blindfolded and need to have faith that there will be a ring in front of you when you let go of the old one. And so on.

 

What do you take from this story? How many of your colleagues are finding the 'rings' further apart, at different heights and not even rings at all? How do you help your colleagues navigate their set of rings, or perhaps you are one of those who finds the rings becoming ever more difficult to cope with.

Quoting from 'Breaking Free', David Noer.

 

The Open Channel Newsletter September 2012

THE OPEN CHANNEL NEWSLETTER SEPTEMBER 2012

We are delighted to welcome you to the latest edition of The Open Channel Newsletter. 

The Open Channel was created from the germ of an idea in February 2011. Since then we have launched our website, set up our regular blogs and social media links and delivered services to clients. 

This newsletter brings you quality content on a regular basis. Do contact us to find out how we can assist you to manage your change challenges. 

Find Out More http://www.theopenchannel.co.uk/


If you are a public body, private service provider, voluntary and community delivery organisation or social enterprise, you will find the services we offer just right for your needs. 

Led by Janet Dean and Steve Loraine, two highly respected and experienced independent public service advisers, The Open Channel has a fresh and highly cost-effective approach to helping you lead and manage change. 
Our approach is based on the view that people and organisations are inherently strong and capable and that supporting strengths in times of change is a positive and more sustainable way to lead and manage.


INSIDE THIS ISSUE
We report on our Leadership Development Programme for Harborough District Council, where we used a mixture of coaching and facilitation techniques to develop the leadership capacity of the Council. 
Find out how we use Action Learning and Appreciative Inquiry with great success and how these approaches can benefit your organisation.
We also update you on our involvement in various new projects. 

Contact Us to Find Out More http://www.theopenchannel.co.uk/


THE OPEN CHANNEL CASE STUDY 

HARBOROUGH DISTRICT COUNCIL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT 
Initially invited to bid for a short intensive programme of support for the Senior Management Team, Janet Dean introduced The Open Channel to Harborough District Council in July 2011. Our involvement has lasted for a year during which the organisation has faced one of the most transformational periods in its history.

Our work has fallen into three phases:
An initial programme of support for a Senior Management Team facing change; we provided three themed workshops, three Action Learning Sets and telephone and Skype coaching for the Chief Executive and six senior colleagues.

In phase two we were commissioned to provide a programme for 30 senior employees including the Senior Management Team. 
Based on Harborough’s Leadership Competencies we delivered four one-day interactive workshops on Managing Change, Leadership, Working with Others and Communication and Strategic Focus.
Between the workshops we facilitated four Action Learning Sets linked to each of the themes, enabling participants to bring practical issues from the workshop to a shared problem solving arena.

Phase three, which uses Appreciative Inquiry to explore leadership themes is focused on the Council’s new Leadership team, which includes senior leadership posts shared with neighbouring local authorities.

This is what participants told us:

‘I felt it gave a common language and a platform from which to challenge (appropriately) others when behaviours could have been better’
‘The Action Learning Sets were the most positive outcome for me and I intend to continue to commit to them.’
‘It introduced me to new concepts with regards to leadership – and I found the appreciative inquiry element particularly interesting.’
‘I feel more confident in my leadership style and the impact I have on those around me.’
‘I found working with others especially useful and I feel now that I have a much better working relationship with colleagues and will be in better position to share issues and problems.’  


THE OPEN CHANNEL APPROACH

ACTION LEARNING

Training your people to support one another through Action Learning
Action Learning is a method for developing real-world solutions and the reflective practice skills of employees at all levels through the shared exploration of workplace challenges. It is particularly suitable for people who need support for the difficult leadership and managerial challenges they experience.

At a time when public services are changing rapidly and resources becoming ever scarcer, Action Learning is a cost-effective method for building the capacity and confidence of your key people.

We offer Action Learning on site or through webinar-style meetings. Sets work best with between four and eight people in the group. We not only facilitate the Action Learning; we also transfer skills to the participants enabling them to self-facilitate their sets in the future. In Harborough DC for example, we provided over 20 Action Learning sets through the year. 

Finding your Strength through Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a view of the world which enables organisations and communities to cooperatively explore what is working well, understand their strengths and address challenges based on the best of what is. It provides a balanced approach to change that does not over-concentrate on weakness or failure, as so many other frameworks and models can. 

Our clients tell us this approach really releases energy and enthusiasm through the appreciative conversations stakeholders have, capturing what works well, imagining their future, followed by creating shared goals. The actions focus on harnessing a community or organisation’s productive energy and aiming it at measureable and positive outcomes. Concrete actions, real results and sustainable change are several of the benefits of this approach.
We provided an introduction to AI for Harborough and then used it as an approach in the Workshops, Action Learning Sets and Executive Coaching. 

Elsewhere, Steve has introduced AI to and worked with clients to realise the benefits of AI in Fire and Rescue Services, city Councils, strategic partnerships, voluntary and community bodies and individuals. We will share the stories from these in future issues. 
 

THE OPEN CHANNEL NEWSFEED

JANET DEAN TO CHAIR COMPASS UK

The Open Channel co-founder Janet Dean has been appointed Chair of Compass UK with effect from the 1st September 2012. Compass UK is a charitable social enterprise which delivers almost £10m of services to families, young people and adults who want to become free of drug and alcohol dependency. Janet’s experience as a commissioner of health and social care, her wide public sector knowledge and extensive networks and her commitment to supporting people to live fulfilling lives will all help Janet in her new role.


KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH THE OPEN CHANNEL
You can keep up to the minute with The Open Channel through our blogs and Twitter feeds. We engage with our clients and stakeholders at @janetdean and @steveloraine and via Linked-in.

Check out the links in this newsletter, visit our blogs or add us to your favourites lists via www.theopenchannel.co.uk

Great Links for strengths and talents

Here are some great links that you might have missed:

 http://www.strengthscope.com/

Strengthscope have a great profile tool for individuals and teams.We use it extensively with our executive coaching and leadership team clients. It is a highly effective and accurate profiler that provides a high quality report and promotes a new dialogue with our clients around their strengths in a work-setting. 

The language of strengths is new to some, e.g. in one recent piece of coaching with senior managers in a large back-office services company, we noticed it's promotion of and reliance on lean and sigma-based tools with its own clients was so strong that its own managers had little or no vocabulary to describe their strengths and talents. They were eloquent on their weaknesses and almost silent on their strengths!

Adjusting the balance of conversations towards strengths and talents with leaders can radically alter their view of themselves and, critically, their colleagues; leading to fresh insights, improved relationships and enhanced leadership team outputs and outcomes. 

The strengths profile and a personalised feedback sessions are highly cost and time-efficient. We can provide both as a package, over the 'phone and email at a time to suit you.


Miles Downey has a new blog-post with a simple yet highly persuasive idea to get us moving, becoming 'unstuck', through creating multiple views of ourselves rather than having single views that can lead us into becoming stuck in our ways, i.e. I am the way I am.

http://mylesdowney.com/2012/06/12/i-am-the-way-i-am/

At Optimum Interventions and The Open Channel, coaching with clients to help them become 'unstuck' is a key feature of our work. We really do appreciate that leaders can and do reach points in their careers where they are both successful yet at the same time in a dangerous position. They are at risk of becoming one-paced in terms of their style, impact and in the perception of others. They risk being outmanoeuvred by fleet-of-foot competitors and rivals who are actively developing their approaches; risking 'failure' to become more adept and agile in their responses to rapidly changing contexts. Coaching can help to unearth new insights and shape fresh directions or responses at just the right time, in an atmosphere of supporting challenge. 

Check out what we can offer in executive coaching at both of our sites:

http://www.theopenchannel.co.uk

http://www.optimuminterventions.co.uk

Thanks for reading this blog. Why not comment or click on the Follow button before you leave.

 

"If the economy was a sick patient, George Osborne would be struck off"

Larry Elliott writes on today's Guardian website:

"Weaker growth has meant the government's deficit reduction plan is well off track, with David Cameron admitting that austerity will now continue for a decade, double the five-year period of pain promised when the coalition came to power. The Treasury has borrowed well over £500bn since the recession began and the figures are worse this year than they were in 2011."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/25/economy-george-osborne-growth-figures?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

John Cridland, DG of the CBI and general all-around supporter for the Chancellor says:

“These are very disappointing figures. They show there has been a lack of growth in the first half of 2012. “When I talk to businesses on the ground, however, the overwhelming view is that right now the economy is flat rather than negative, and there is potential for Britain to get back into growth later in the year.”

http://www.cbi.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2012/07/cbi-comments-on-latest-gdp-data/

Yep, that's it - after 5 of 7 quarters of negative growth, an economy smaller than it was in 2008 and government borrowing way beyond target, added to which another decade of austerity is forecast with, a 2014 Comprehensive Spending Review which has to decimate the public sector further because there is nowhere else to go if your economy is contracting - the CBI appears to be the only major representative body not to be calling on the Chancellor to 'do something different!' Shameful. Even the British Chambers of Commerce, hardly a left-wing organisation, is calling for public investment in infra-structure and the IoD, definitely a right-leaned organisation, says improved leadership is needed from the Chancellor.

Even the 'red-braces' are panicking, given that the ratings agencies, those small, shadowy completely unaccountable companies who can wreck a nations creditworthiness, are circling the UK's AAA rating. Just watch the fall-out when that happens - and there's no pleasure in that, particularly when we all suffer and our pensions are put at risk (both private and public sector - yes, we are all together in that mess!).

Meanwhile, Osborne is the Government's chief political strategist as well as the Chancellor - glad to see he fills his spare time gainfully.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jul/25/george-osborne-under-pressure-economy?intcmp=239

Bitter? You bet I am. This is a disaster and the Government can no longer go on repeating, ad-nausea, that it's clearing up the previous Government's mess. It just doesn't wash.

Painting the 'big picture' - leadership & intentional communication

Effective communication by leaders with their organisation's employees helps to create engagement, motivation and a shared direction. What can sometimes happen though is that corporate communications fail to create a clear picture of the organisation's strategic direction, tending to focus more on day-to-day operational matters, exhortations to better performance and trying to beat the rumour-mill to the punch. 

In 2007 HBR research found that a clear minority of employees reported that their managers communicated a clear strategic direction to them. Interestingly, in connected research this year, senior managers when asked believed a minority of their employees had a good grasp of big-picture strategy. So, if managers believe employees don't have the strategic picture and employees believe their managers don't inform and engage them, just what is going on and who is responsible for communicating or connecting with the big -picture? 

In our experience, the most effective leaders tend to paint the 'big picture' readily and ably in their communications. Similarly, we've found that engaged employees connect themselves to the big picture messages and make connections between their roles and the strategic direction. 

HBR went on to suggest that to raise the level of strategic understanding "leaders must learn to be intentional about the way that they communicate with employees. In other words, they must work to align what they say — and how they talk — with a clear pattern of strategic intent." HBR called this "organisational conversation." 

In traditional leadership models the leaders treat employee communication as a distinct entity from the organisation's strategy. HBR suggested that leaders who engage intentionally place a premium on integrating the strategic direction into their regular messaging.

They go on to offer four ideas to help us become more intentional leaders:

"1. Think ahead. Before they can cultivate a strategic conversation within their company, leaders need to develop a conversational strategy. 

2. Paint a picture.  Smart leaders get creative about how they communicate this kind of information. They tell a story.

3. Ask for help. One way to ensure that people have a clear view of their company's strategic priorities is to give them a role in setting those priorities. 

4. Watch what you say. In talking with employees, effective leaders use consistent, well-thought-out language — language that aims to keep everyone's "eyes on the prize" 

The full article with more about the 4 ideas can be found here:

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/to_resolve_the_uncertainty_in.html

Barclays, banking and failure - how to generate new directions through AI.

The Guardian web has just published an article that shows perfectly where several of the key players stand on the 'Barclays Affair' and other recent misdeads of the 'masters of universe.' 

"The government is to order a review of the operation of the inter-bank lending rate, or Libor, following revelations of its frequent abuse by Barclays and other banks. The move follows Ed Miliband's call for a public inquiry into the "institutional corruption" of the banking industry after a series of banking scandals.

A spokeswoman for Downing Street said the review would be independent but that details of who would lead it have yet to be worked out.

Barclays were fined £290m for manipulating the inter-bank lending rate, and several other international banks are also under investigation.

The review falls short of the public inquiry demanded by the Labour leader, who said tougher rules and jail terms were needed to tackle the immoral culture and practices committed by a "corrupt elite" in Britain's banks.

On Friday the Bank of England governor, Sir Mervyn King, demanded a "real change in culture" as Britain's lenders were left reeling by the controversy."

King's intervention seems characteristically weak. The BoE it was of course that was so surprised by so much of the 2007-09 disaster (did it really not understood how Northern Rock had a such a flawed business model - many others did in real-time, not after the fact), having singularly failed to properly lead the thinking about ethics and practice in it's sector. This meak calling for a change of culture (to what precisely?) just reeks of capitulation, i.e. is the banking and insurance sector now so ethically and morally corrupt that there really is little option but to make vacuous calls for them to change their ways? Fat chance of that happening anyway without some decent-length prison sentences to act as electric cattle-prods. 


I like little about the USA, but the alacrity with which they imprison their financial miscreants is always worth a closer look. They even bring them out of their offices in hand-cuffs and with TV cameras nicely positioned to capture it all. Priceless moments of base satisfaction for the many who have had their financial futures so damaged - and this particularly includes small businesses, public services and millions of individuals. 


As Ed Miliband says, these are and were not victimless crimes; the consequences of casino-banking and all of its derivatives (excuse the pun) are now legion. They have caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in all sectors, damaged pensions in all sectors, left a generation of young people unlikely to find fulfilling employment, reduced numbers of university places, increased student debt massively, created gross mistrust and friction between people in all sectors who actually have a lot more in common than they might at first think, and so on.

The Guardian goes on to say: 

"The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, said bankers who had committed crimes must be brought to trial.

Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays, and Marcus Agius, the chairman, have been summoned to appear before the Commons Treasury select committee on Wednesday.

Miliband pushed for a 12-month investigation to "find out what is going on in the dark corners of the banks" after the Financial Services Authority (FSA) uncovered "serious failings" in the sale of complex financial products to small businesses, just days after interest rate-rigging at Barclays was revealed.

The taxpayer-backed Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), HSBC and several other lenders are also being investigated for manipulating the rates at which banks lend to each other, known as Libor and Euribor, to boost their profits.

Miliband said the inquiry, set up with cross-party support, would be asked to draw up a bankers' code of conduct going beyond the "narrow" professional standards enforced by the FSA.

Calling for the worst offenders to receive prison sentences, he said: "It should be about probity, honesty, integrity. Bankers should be struck off if they do the wrong thing … this is not a victimless crime."

Clarke said there should be criminal investigations and prosecutions where financial crimes had been committed.

"This is still being investigated, no doubt, but once these investigations are complete, if they have committed criminal offences, they should be brought to trial," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

The former chancellor said some of the banks' actions that came to light this week were shocking.

"Some of it is distorting vital interest rates, some of it is knowingly selling products they know are worthless to the less sophisticated people you are selling it to – which I regard as obtaining money by deception," he said. "Then there is the total moral bankruptcy of the comments being made by the people who are doing it."

King said he did not believe a Leveson-style inquiry was needed, but condemned the conduct in the industry.

"From excessive levels of compensation, to shoddy treatment of customers, to a deceitful manipulation of one of the most important interest rates and now news of yet another mis-selling scandal, we can see we need a real change in the culture of the industry," he said.

The FSA revealed earlier that Barclays, HSBC, RBS and Lloyds Banking Group had agreed to pay compensation to customers who were mis-sold interest-rate hedging products. Around 28,000 of the products have been sold since 2001 and may have been offered as protection, or to act as a hedge, against a rise in interest rates, without the customer fully grasping the risks.

Serious Fraud Office investigators are in talks with the FSA over the Libor scandal, while the Treasury has started to look at strengthening criminal sanctions for those responsible for market abuse.

Miliband described the Barclays fiasco as "the unacceptable face of capitalism", and called on Diamond to step down.

But Diamond, who was head of the bank's investment arm at the time of the allegations, reportedly told a meeting of analysts at US bank Morgan Stanley that he would not resign." So ends the article.

And you know, these latest high profile, national and international stories not only have a strategic impact, but for some, and I include myself in this, our personal experience over several years have told us at our individual levels what we are now learning in very specific and large-scale terms: that the banking and insurance industry has gone from hallowed, trusted institutions to largely being a necessary evil, to simply being an evil. 


Unfettered 'markets,' the specious claims of new "redefined standards" of "customer service" and the mythical allure of "shareholder value"; the off-shoring of services; the lack of a moral compass being consistently provided by Government and the Bank of England; the ethics of the mafia and many more contributing factors, have all mixed to create this farago. It only takes good people to do nothing that allows evil to flourish. Has the time come to show these institutions and their leaders especially, that this is where the line is being drawn? Yes and the pleasure of revenge aside, how best to do this? 


Well, apart from trial and prosecution, as Clarke calls for, a very different way to begin a moral and ethical recovery is through appreciative and generative ways; from within the very real and negative experiences and the wreckage of once sound institutions, searching for those remaining elements and practices that are positive, ethical, that stand against the predominant orthodoxy of 'money and massive profit above all else'; great and consistent customer services for its own intrinsic value and so on. These might offer a new route to redemption. 


Creating new visions that encompass the ethical, life-affirming and redemptive practices that many other organisations continue to achieve despite all of their current challenges and with none of the massive freedoms and continuing governmental financial backing that the banks and insurers enjoy. Seeing the 'whole system', not just their piece of the system, will encourage and prompt new thinking, fresh insights and may lead to the Design of new, honest and sustainable practices, involving stakeholders in their design, e.g. customers and clients, properly and for the long term, not just via flawed customer-feedback schemes. And so on. 


These are not 'soft' suggestions. They would involve the deepest of self-reflection, sharing and honesty - a thorough process of discovery, involving contact with many of those affected by the failures, yet with the appreciative purpose of seeking to unearth the best of what is and best of what yet may be. It is through these methods that a new culture might be born, not through vacuous calls to people to behave - that train has long since left. The old paradigm of problem identification and solutions, yet more law-making and punishment simply speaks to old thinking. Whilst I might get perverse personal pleasure in seeing the 'red braces' doing 'time,' I would derive much more pleasure from seeing really new and generative processes introduced at this point of maximum crisis.


Just a thought - what do you think?

Game Theory and its application in our organisations

At The Open Channel we are open to new technologies and ways of communicating and learning. The Gametrainers web site is a good practical resource for trainers and facilitators and also a catalyst for creative thinking for all learning and development practitioners. 


Most people are more creative when they are having fun, and all organisations need creative thinking to support positive change. Team meetings for example can be (but aren't always) boring, repetitive and stifling. There are though some practical and productive ways to generate deeper engagement and new ideas. How about:

• Hold the front page
• Ideas tennis
• Resource Auction
• Information mining
• Plane Speaking
• Homepage Hotspots
• Balloon Debate
• Solutions Cycle

Can you afford NOT to try these innovative and playful methods to generate insights, ideas and progress?

http://www.thegametrainers.com/apps/blog

A call for more sustainable growth and fairer distribution

The 2020 Public Services Trust, a part of the RSA, has launched a report called Business, Society and Public Services which calls for a more sustainable approach to economic growth and a fairer process for distributing wealth so that we can invest in public services over the longer term. The widening gap between rich and poor is a cost on our collective responsibilities and we need a different way and a new commitment to investing in our social and public institutions


http://2020psh.org/?p=1023


At the same time, Common Dreams highlights one of the cases where sustainability and fair distribution are an anathema!


The Common Dreams website is certainly one that people with a particular world view might choose not pay much attention to all that often. Once again though it has highlighted the dreadful risks that large ‘casino’ banks take – and in the end their (failed) risks hit every single person, e.g. the £60b the UK government used to bail-out just two banks in 2008-09 and the cuts in public services we are now seeing as a result of that economy-saving move (lest we forget. 


Common Dreams tells us “Doing God’s work” as JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon calls it - that is, betting huge sums of money with depositor funds knowing that you are too big to fail and can count on taxpayers riding to your rescue if your avarice threatens to take the country down — has lost some of its luster. The jewels in Dimon’s crown sparkle with a little less grandiosity than a few days ago, when he ridiculed Paul Volcker’s ideas for keeping Wall Street honest as “infantile.”” His London traders’ £2b losses have cost JPM big money and one of his senior players’ careers. 


Read more about what these ‘masters of the universe’, as Tom Woolf called them in ‘Bonfire of the Vanities,’ are up to. Remember, what they do on Wall Street, eventually impacts on us.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/17

   

World Appreciative Inquiry Conference 2012

World Appreciative Inquiry Conference 2012, Ghent.


I attended the Conference and a pre-conference AI/Strengths Master Class with David Cooperrider in the two days preceding the conference. There are several webcasts from the Conference really worth viewing.



The first is the Conference Opening Keynote speech from Prof. Cooperrider which sets the scene for the three days that followed and also picks up a number of themes from his earlier masterclass, with almost 200 participants. In particular the need to find ways of 'scaling' strengths-based approaches to transformation in our cities, organisations and communities and the development of the appreciative models to be ever more generative in nature, i.e. far more than mere positive thinking and talking.


http://www.2012waic.com/webcast-opening-keynote/


The second webcast involves two fascinating examples of how 'business can be an agent of world benefit', another theme from within the Conference. One example involves an entrepreneur using digital design manufacture to reduce waste, speed production and scale the knowledge of the processes across the globe. The second example involves a more 'straightforward', if that's the right word, use of Appreciative Inquiry in an already highly successful service company in Belgium. The AI intervention was facilitated by David Cooperrider and the presentation demonstrates the power of using AI in organisations that seemingly had little need of improvement. The lesson was, transformation can take place when we are most capable, as well as when we are least able or poor in our performance.


http://www.2012waic.com/plenary-session-1/


The final webcast, by Dr. Diana Whitney takes us on a global journey of Appreciative Leadership at the Nexus of Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Psychology and the Strengths Movement. Dr Whitney is one of the thought-leaders in the AI world and again draws on the latest research and case studies to demonstrate how leadership has been influenced and shaped through the three pillars of this world-view, i.e. positive psychology, AI and strengths.

http://www.2012waic.com/webcast-plenary-session-3-dr-diana-whitney/


Taken together these webcasts offer some of the most uptodate thinking and practise in a field that is continuing to challenge the deficit, problem-centred 'improvement' paradigms in our organisations, services and cities. All of this offers ways for our hard-pressed organisations, particularly in the public sector, but not only those, to address the need for transformation from their generative and positive cores.    

Come and co-create the European Appreciative and Strengths-focused Network

Just a week before the World Appreciative Inquiry Conference in Ghent, a group of fellow AI practitioners is publishing this open letter to all appreciative and strengths-focused practitioners and our clients, inviting you to invest in the next stage of the development of the European network and its web home. 


A small group of us has been working for months since the Manchester Network meeting in November 2011 to develop ideas and proposals to create a stronger resource-base for the www.networkplace.eu home of AI in Europe and to deepen the influence of the stakeholders in what's known as the Begeistring Community. Now we feel is the right moment to seek this wider co-creation for our community, to improve its resilience, widen its membership and provide sustainable resources for a fully inter-active learning platform.    


Below you will find that invitation and I really commend you to take a moment to read it and visit the networkplace.eu website. Do also visit www.optimuminterventions.co.uk for more on AI and strengths-focused approaches to change and development. 

Invitation to be a Stakeholder in the European Begeistring Community

How about being a Stakeholder in the European Begeistring Community?

A European Network of Practitioners like you, working with Appreciative Inquiry and Other Strengths-Based Change Approaches.

A Network deeply committed to the relational way of working, high quality connections and learning opportunities.

Practitioners seeking to connect their best practices, combine diversity and co-create a vibrant landscape of events and resources within the European Spirit.

The European Begeistring Community offers co-operation and support through access to a vivid and active Network of Professionals and to an increasingly important reference point for Appreciative Inquiry.

*****

How about becoming a Co-creator of the Begeistring Network with its vision to make a huge difference in the world through actions and through sharing the curiosity to see what more there will be and can be?

Develop connections with other professionals across Europe to better serve your European clients.

Exchange and share best practices by working together.

Make connections with people in your own field of work.

Enrich your practice by taking part in Pan-European research or learning opportunities.

Build your strengths and resilience in your own life, work and career, family and friends or future situations.

Have your company visible and searchable by potential clients and academic bodies interested in speaking with AI practitioners.

Enjoy an active and growing web based learning platform offering accessibility, kinship, recognition, support, intelligence, materials, connections, opportunities.

Bring your passion and expertise as a Begeistring Network Stakeholder

To co-construct the Network …

Bring your passion for co-creating futures to translate the ideals of the Network into building an interactive learning community.

Bring your expertise on posting, editing and updating a web-based learning platform to keep vital information flowing to Network members.

Become part of this remarkable Network and enjoy its services and visibility with your sponsorship. Choose your sponsorship level at www.networkplace.eu.

Enjoy and co-create an active and growing web based learning platform offering accessibility, kinship, recognition, support, intelligence, materials, connections, and opportunities.

Your contribution through sponsorship and/or active participation in working with the web-based environment will help the community to move forward in collaboration and broadening the Begeistring landscape.

On a very practical matter there is a need to move www.networkplace.eu to a more collaborative and inclusive platform and to integrate the work we have started with the Grundtvig project on www.learningeurope.eu

If you are excited by the idea of co-constructing the future of the European Begeistring Community, do reply and say how you want to be involved.

We look forward to hearing from you

Best wishes,
On behalf of Network Advisory Group
Kees Ahaus, TNO Management Consultants, Netherlands
Anthoula Athanassiadou, Greece
Griet Bouwen, vzw Stebo, Belgium
Joep de Jong, Van Harte & Lingsma, Netherlands
Mille Duvander, Intersmil, Denmark
Mario Gastaldi, Brain Team Consulting, Italy
Klara Hejdukova, Systemic Institute, Czech Republic
Yianna Klissari, Greece
Leif Josefsson, Metaspace, Sweden
Helena Kettleborough, England
Peter Bach Lauritzen, Denmark
John Lodder, Balance Consultancy, Croatia
Steve Loraine, Optimum Interventions, England
Claire Lustig-Rochet, CLR Conseils, France
Johanna Nordström, MacMannBerg, Sweden
Anne Radford, AI Practitioner, England
Daniel Richardsson, Sweden
Ann Shacklady-Smith, England
David Shaked, Almond Insight, England
Harris Valassoglou, Serendity ltd, Greece
Karin van Kesteren, Netherland
Bert Verleysen, vzw Stebo, Belgium
Sven Sandström & Lisen Kebbe, Sweden
Bernard Tollec, Involve Consulting, France
Annet van de Wetering, TNO Consultants, Netherlands
Kaj Voetmann, Denmark