February 2024

MonthNotes

Hi, welcome to my MonthNotes — reflective notes looking back over the past month, loosely based on a set of questions which help me reflect.

1. What went well?

• The first meeting this year of our business unit’s senior leadership team, which a colleague and I planned and ran together (we got an NPS result of +92 in the post-meeting survey — the highest score I’ve seen for any such thing)
• An all-day face-to-face meeting with my team, which I ran (it was our first in-person meeting since last March):

Our themes for the day were:

- Team connections
- Team effectiveness
- Team wellness
- Making 2024 a success

Our guiderails for the day were:

1. Be present (eg no phones/devices during the meeting)
2. Assume best intent [we watched this video in advance on ‘the fundamental attribution error’]
3. Courageous conversations, framed respectfully
4. Wear your ‘Board of Directors hat’ [we watched this video in advance, and read this article ]
5. Disagree & Commit

2. What did you fail with?

• I failed to get clarity on actions/ownership for a piece of work, which led to me failing to pick up a ball which a colleague thought they had given to me and which I believed another colleague was leading on. I felt dreadful when I learnt about my part in our mis-alignment.
• In a converation with a colleague, I failed to acknowledge in words the emotions they were having. I would like to have shared in the conversation what I was noticing about their emotion — lightly and without judgement.

3. What was difficult?

• Realising that I create some (many?) of my own difficulties:

After finishing something outside work that I’d been putting off, I felt a massive relief. And then I realised that by procrastinating I’d been causing myself anxiety over a couple of weeks. Moreover, that feeling was completely disproprotionate to the time and effort involved in doing the thing.

There were also a couple of times when I was disappointed in how something outside work had been done, as each time it turned out differently from what I had imagined. It was only afterwards that I realised I’d had a fixed image in my head about the outcome (which I had taken for granted and never explained). Once I let go of that image, I realised I was totally fine with the result. It was different to what I had imagined but nothing more than that. [Memo to self: people cannot read my mind. If I attach importance to it, I need to articulate it.]

• Imposter syndrome:

“Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts.”
David Whyte

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” Montaigne

4. What did you experiment with?

• Conversation cards (from Steven Bartlett/The Diary Of A CEO)
• LeaderFactor’s EQindex™ emotional intelligence self-assessment

5. Who inspired you?

• My colleagues at our world sales conference
• Debra Searle
• Fullscope & Cambridge Curiosity & Imagination helping people with their health and wellbeing through creative practices

6. What made you proud?

• My colleague Michiel talking about embedding support for the LGBTQ+ community within Elsevier
• Our end of year results:

In 2023, we launched Scopus AI alpha, a generative AI-enhanced tool that helps early career researchers and interdisciplinary research. (And researchers are telling us how the tool helps them get the info they need quicker than ever.) We received almost 3.2m article submissions and published over 630,000 new research articles following peer review. Our journal articles accounted for over 17% of global research output and 28% of citations, demonstrating our commitment to quality. The global scientific community accessed our articles over 2bn times across our journal platforms. Our world-leading journal platform ScienceDirect was recognised as the most accessible homepage by WebAIM among 1m websites. Elsevier won 16 awards recognising our workplace culture and was rated the number one company globally for diversity by Comparably.

7. What did you learn?

• In Spanish there is a saying ‘consult with the pillow’. It means rest and in the rest, clarity will emerge.* In English we say ‘sleep on it’.
• ‘WAI WHAT?’ (HT Ross):

This acronym, which when you say it sounds like ‘why what,’ stands for:
‘Where am I? and Where are they?’

It is a quick and simple framework that you can use as a reminder to both check in with yourself and to think about the other person/people before a conversation or interaction (eg when you’re about to answer an email, at the start of a meeting, or when you’re about give a presentation). It comes from hockey coach Danny Kerry, who coached GB women to Olympic Gold in Rio, and who stressed the importance of EQ (emotional intelligence) — understanding what you’re feeling and being able to manage yourself, as well as being able to read and empathise with others, and then influence them for the better.* You can use acronym as a prompt to create a mutually beneficial communication in each and every interaction. The full version is: “Where am I? Where do I need to be? Where are they? Where do they need to be?”*

• The Expanded TSA Rule (which is essentially ‘if you see it in a meeting, say it, and sort it in the meeting’):

[Note: The acronym TSA stands for Transportation Security Administration — the US government agency that has authority over security within US transport systems. The equivalent in the UK is the British Transport Police, who have a long-running campaign: ‘See it, say it, sorted.’]

• FOMU, which stands for the Fear Of Messing Up.* (Not to be confused with FOMO: Fear of missing out…) As a leader, you want to focus on achieving excellence rather than just avoiding errors (HT David Marquet — see chapter 7 of his classic book, Turn the Ship Around!)

8. What did you get reminded of?

• Status quo bias:

A colleague recently highlighted this bias — defined as “a non-rational or biased preference for the current way of doing things”[*] — which I first came across through reading Daniel Kahneman.

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/status-quo-bias

• The value of celebrating small wins (HT Debra Searle)
• The power of music to lift me up (HT Debra Searle)
• The SCARF model (HT Ross), which is a way of describing and understanding social threats and rewards and how our brains respond to other people’s actions (I wrote about the model 3 years ago):

• The division bell ringing in pubs around Westminster
• The basics of non-violent communication (NVC) (HT randy silver):

If you want to learn about NVC, an obvious starting point is Marshal B. Rosenberg’s brilliant book Nonviolent Communication — A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides). It isn’t complex or dense and lays out the framework for NVC very early on. Alternatively, he explains the basics of NVC in this (3-hour) video of an introductory workshop he ran. The Center for NVC also has lots of resources.

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean.
Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

9. What poems touched you?

• ‘I will stand at these gates for eternity’, by AMN
• Leisure, by W.H. Davies:

https://shorturl.at/hkxPY

“if you read a poem with your whole being and your whole attention, which is the only way to read poems, you will hear all the unsaid in the white space. It’s one reason why poems on the page look strange, why they don’t fill the page. They don’t fill the page because in that silence around the words, in the white space around the words, is the wisdom. And the completion of the poem is in the person reading it.” Jane Hirshfield [*]

10. What was fun?

• Seeing friends and laughing lots
• Seeing teammates and laughing lots
• Dancing on a Monday morning with Jason and on a Friday night with Ajay — the perfect way to book end my working week
• Watching karaoke

11. What did you enjoy?

• Being visited by a blue tit, sitting on the window ledge 4 feet away from the desk where I normally work
• The taste of water
• Going to Dubai (I’d never been before)
• Meeting new colleagues

12. What are you looking forward to in March?

• Seeing friends
• Meeting some of our customers
• A trip to Hebdon Bridge
• Exploring the question “What Would Nature Do?” with Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination and partners at King’s College, as part of this year’s Cambridge Festival.