Tag: choices

Bases of consent

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We know of a few people who have had laser eye surgery where what they could expect during and after the treatment wasn’t made clear.  It made us think about what it takes to give informed consent – especially where a cash payment is involved.

We think this 5-level model applies to buying services like higher education and consultancy as well as any form of health care.

Are you given:

1) sufficient technical details to understand what the service involves

2) an accurate impression of what the experience will be like

3) a clear statement of the possible side-effects of the intervention

4) information on whether key practitioners delivering the service actually recommend it to others and use it for themselves

5) help to weigh the cost/benefit for yourself and what it means for you individually?

And as always, caveat emptor.

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Quick, make your mind up

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Waitrose charitiesWaitrose offers tokens which you can allocate to a charity or local organisation as you leave the store. They share £1000 according to the proportion of total tokens each organisation receives.

Which of these three would you allocate your token to?

For what reasons?

– I might need them or know someone who does
– they look popular already and I should support the one that most people think is important
– they seem under-supported and I want to help the underdog
– they already have enough support and mine won’t make much difference
– I won’t allocate at all as I can’t choose between them (or I’m late and need to rush!).

When people make quick decisions, it can be worth exploring the underlying reasoning.

PS – this accumulative and transparent way of expressing a preference (where you can see the relative support so far) is quite an efficient and possibly fairer way of allocating resources. It ensures that lower profile needs or those with weaker ‘brands’ or ‘voices’ don’t miss out completely. If you did this blind (ie the boxes were opaque), the most popular one could well get a much higher proportion of the votes as people are less informed and hence less inclined to make some of the alternative choices listed above.

PPS – the Hampsire search and rescue has consistently had the most support.

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The time to act

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In 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote his best-known work, Il Principe (The Prince), as advice to any in the ruling classes who wanted to gain or maintain power and also attain glory.

He describes what he has seen in his political life as the necessary things a prince must do – in essence combining the guile of the fox with the force of the lion.

Subsequently, the use of his name has had very negative connotations. Most people would not relish being called “Machiavellian”. But his thinking has been very influential in shaping our history – and in many good ways. It helped stimulate liberal political philosophy to advocate positive change for the citizen, promoted the supremacy of civil rather than religious or monarchical power and stressed the ideals of honesty, hard work and people’s responsibility to their communities. Like Kafka and Freud, the adjective derived from his name paints just a narrow idea of what he had to say. So his reputation is rather ill-deserved.

While The Prince is not meant to be a moral guide for the day-to-day living of the average Joe Bloggs, it nonetheless has ideas in it which we can all learn from. So, for example, he tells us that Fortune is the force that can always crush you. “Extremima malignita” or pure misfortune can be just around the corner. The results of the current economic conditions might feel like that to some. What seemed certain is no longer so.

How can you defend yourself against what might happen? Machiavelli says that you should try to “master Fortune”. To paraphrase, as they might say in the US, you should try to “get lucky”. How do you do that? You have to take action: “It is better to have acted and regretted than not to have acted and regretted”. In doing so, “Fortes fortuna adiuvat” – fortune favours the brave (here he borrows from Levy the Roman historian).

Maybe now is the time to act. What steps can you take?

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A local point of view

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Having just come back from working in Borneo, I now see another side to the easy-to-knock palm oil industry.  There, people are concerned about development.  A palm oil plantation is regarded much like a cultivated valley in the west.  The impact on the orangutans is regretted and in some ways ameliorated with local support for sanctuaries. But it is not the primary concern when human material issues are at stake.

EU policies on bio-fuel from palm oil and for the oils used in cooking impact not just on the profits of trans-national corporations but also the livelihoods of peasant farmers (see article). 

 Palm oil

Complex stuff.  Not just about Nestle and Kit Kats.

In Kenya a couple of years ago, the local press also helped me see there are other points of view on:

1) using corn in the US for bio-fuel. Surely a good thing – but less grain available as food aid in areas where people are starving as a result of drought.

2) the pros as well as the cons of poor farmers flying green beans and flowers to Europe, including the low energy and pesticides required in their forms of agriculture.

All our points of view are local – so it’s worth travelling to find a different way of looking at things.

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Be careful who you lend your brand to

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BP

First, the Texas oil refinery disaster.  Now the Gulf of Mexico.  BP’s brand risks freefall. 

Before the merger with Amoco, BP was renowned for its progress with safety and ethics.  Its late ’90s approach to managing corporate memory and knowledge was world-leading.

Now, we see how easily culture can move (for worse, as well as better).  And the risk that takeovers have for the parent company. 

The wider lesson?  Who do you give your personal brand to?  What might a poorly managed alliance do to you, your team or your organisation?

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Obscuring changes the picture

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Kings Cross 4/3/10

The work on Kings Cross station carries on apace.

A bit of covering and suddenly a different view – radically so in certain lights!

What we obscure matters.

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Changing polarities

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Management not Administration.

Leadership not Management.

Transformative not Transactional Leadership.

All are familiar polarities.

Replace the “not” with “and” – and we are starting to get there.

And what is leadership?  Our definition: “Leadership comes from anyone who wants to make a difference to the thinking and actions of others.”

Influence more than instruct.  Encourage rather than demand.

This is relevant for executive and line managers.  For workers ‘at the bottom’.  As customers.  As consultants.

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Deliberation or democracy?

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It seems so sensible.  A band needs to agree 4 songs for a demo.  “Let’s set up a Google vote – that will be fair”.  A dissenting voice: “I prefer deliberation to democracy – your views change mine, your vote doesn’t.”  The result?  10 minute later a reaffirming of the likely preferences of pub and party sponsors – with a restatement of what The Band wants to offer.  The vote will now be chosen from a short list of 9, not 30.  The options are narrowed but not eliminated through dialogue.  There is more energy and commonality. The Lowest Common Denominator receeds…for the time being.

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