New year’s resolution: make time for doing… nothing much

Humansinwork

Busyness is so yesterday….

Action for Happiness uploaded a great poster just before new year’s day, ‘Stop the Glorification of Busy’. What a great idea! It’s gone right to the top of my new year’s resolutions… but I know I’ll find it hard to keep.

I just did a quick google search for ‘busyness is over-rated and lots of entries come up. One of them points out that appearing to be busy all the time is a real status symbol. We must be really important if we are always busy. And we must be really committed and working very hard. We certainly don’t want to be perceived as lazy, and, of course, if we look very, very busy then hopefully we can divert extra work from coming our way.

Busy people have a kind of aura around them that stops us bothering them with unimportant queries or conversation. It works…

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Dan Price gets my award for best CEO!

Humansinwork

This picture is of Robin Hood (well, it is of a scarecrow inspired by Robin Hood that was made by a schools project in Cornwall and exhibited in Tregwainton Gardens). Last week Dan Price, CEO of an American company, announced that he was cutting his own pay by 90% in order to fund a pay rise for his staff, and he hopes to raise every worker’s pay to £47.000 within two years. He’s a bit unusual – recent studies of western economies all say that the gap between the richest and poorest was at its lowest point in the late 60s and 70s and then began to rise until it is now it is at the highest point since we started to keep records.

Of course the analogy with Robin Hood isn’t fair because Dan Price is not stealing from anyone but himself – although his senior managers have not…

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Taking Stock

The Small Places

I’ve just received the poster for this year’s Taking Stock conference in October.  It looks set to be really interesting; book your places now!

You can download the poster from here.

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News on the #LBBill second draft

LB Bill

It is now four long months since the 12 Days of the #LBBill Christmas; we know we’ve been silent in that time here (there has been some discussion on twitter and facebook), but we thought blog readers were long overdue an update. Perhaps the most significant development has been the publication of the government consultation Green Paper: No voice unheard, no right ignored. Norman Lamb paid tribute to the #JusticeforLB team when he launched it (that includes you if you’re reading this and supporting the LBBill) and you can see our response here. So, what has happened for the LBBill in 2015 so far?

1) Feedback

We have spent time pouring over the feedback that you’ve all provided so far. You can see most of the feedback here, and there has been some sent by email. This has been absolutely critical to the process, we are…

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Farcical inaccuracies

mydaftlife

It turns out that now OCC have published this report without our knowledge, and shared it with at least one external organisation, I’m expected to go through all 21 pages and highlight the factual inaccuracies contained within it. [Warning: the report apparently took 8 months to publish because the new Deputy Director of Social Care wanted it to be as “robust as possible” and “added quality assurance”. Hard hat time for those who need services in Oxon.]

Can you imagine wading through old emails from a time when your son was still alive [he died?] to correct a report you didn’t know was being written? In your own time? Serious brain melt. How much was matey boy paid to write this rubbish I wonder.

Deep breath.

(I don’t think OCC can seriously expect me to keep this confidential in the circumstances). The report is so biased it’s almost…

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Five headline changes in the Care Act 2014

rightsinreality

It’s Care Act Eve (The Night Before Care Act?) and time to focus on the good the new legislation may bring.

Yes, there’s not enough new money, with some councils issuing judicial review proceedings against the Secretary of State as a result. Yes, there hasn’t been enough time to prepare; Luke Clements has highlighted that there was a three year implementation period for the NHS and Community Care Act 1990, whereas the Care Act comes into force less than six months since the final guidance was published. So the world will not magically become a better place for people with needs for care and support overnight. However there are undoubtedly aspects of the new law which everyone interested in the rights of disabled people and carers must surely welcome. In the spirit of an earlier post on the Children and Families Act 2014, here are my top five changes:

1. The…

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That Risky Ol’ LBBill

Love it….as Mark says…’ The LBBill is going to be so bloody annoying because it has a polar position to the current thinking. Bloody hell – its saying that a learning disabled person has a right to live a risky, messy life. The bounders.!!’

Love, Belief and Balls

Yesterday, I was remembering on Twitter the boxloads of risk assessments Steven had drawn up during his time in the Unit. Every activity, inside and outside the house was risk assessed. Every human contact he had was risk assessed. Every place he visited was risk assessed. And the upshot of 1000s of risk assessments was that he was permitted to do very little. Look hard enough and you can find a risk in everything.

The risks were assessed using a phenomenal system. One part of the assessment looked at “possibility” and was rated from “highly likely” to “unlikely” (Note there was no room for “not at all”). The second part looked at ” outcome” and was rated from “intolerable” to “mild”. The real outcome for Steven was that he was prevented from doing mostly everything even when the score was ” unlikely” and “mild”. I guess if you’re that terrified…

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What can managers learn from poets?

Humansinwork

Kathleen Jamie, one of my favourite poets, was recently asked about her approach to writing. I really liked what she said, and much of it resonates with my experiences of management. You can read the write-up of the interview here:

http://qz.com/346452/seven-lessons-for-writers-from-scottish-poet-kathleen-jamie/

This is why I think her ‘lessons’ are equally relevant to managers – what do you think?

Allow connections to occur: A lot of management theory and practice stresses breaking things down into component parts. Sometimes that can be helpful, but it can often be even more helpful to see how things connect, how activities taken in one part of the organisation create effects that ripple outwards, or that weave around and reconfigure themselves in surprising way. Management writers call this ‘systemic’ thinking (because you are trying to see the whole ‘system’ as inter-linked, or ‘relational’ thinking (how things are related to each other).

Be exposed: Yes, I know…

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