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According to leadership coach, speaker and author, Oscar Trimboli, we spend half of our days listening, yet most of us aren’t equipped with the skills for deep listening:Multiple academic studies have shown that between 50% and 55% of your working day is spent listening, yet only 2% of people have been trained in how to listen.
Trimboli states that for the most part, the average person listens to reply and not to understand. Of course, that is far from the truth for a graphic recorder or scribe. At Innovation Arts, we spend most of our time working hard to listen deeply – engaging with content in it’s spoken form so that we can properly translate into into visual metaphors. This requires a lot of training and practice on the part of our graphic recorders.
When Trimboli contacted us to find out more about how graphic recorders hone and utilise their deep listening skills, we were happy to share as much as we could. Sarah Manley and David Christie sat down with him to talk “listening to content” through the lens of scribing. Good listening, for a graphic recorder, filters content into the essential – bringing the meaning of a conversation to the service and preserving it in visual form.
We really enjoyed being part of the recording of this podcast, and reflecting on our own methods and process with Trimboli. If you are interested in the podcast and learning more about graphic recording please have a listen!
You can download the podcast for free on iTunes or listen below:
Porter created the idea of businesses having a value chain – ideally designed so as to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes as understood by the customer.
When we talk about processes we mean the specific ordering of work activities across time and place, with a beginning, an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs. They are the structure by which a business physically does what is necessary to produce value for its customers.
By mapping out and improving individual processes, and how they worked together as a system, planning and organisation could be facilitated throughout a business. By focusing on common process goals – and the collaboration required where processes span two or more functional lines, the value chain could deliver more value for fewer resources.
Re-engineering was the most comprehensive, far-reaching, enterprise-wide option for process improvement. It was also the most radical. The most prominent proponents of this approach were Hammer and Champy who, in their book ‘Reengineering the Corporation’ stated that managers “must abandon the organizational and operational principles and procedures they are now using and create entirely new ones”.
Their view was that business reengineering meant starting again from scratch, forgetting how work was done as well as understanding that old job titles and old organisational arrangements would cease to matter: How people and companies did things yesterday wouldn’t matter to the business reengineer. They tackled the organisation’s core processes instigating “radical change to achieve quantum process improvement”.
During this time I was a young process consultant, analysing clients’ business processes and assessing the degree to which they satisfied the organisations’ customers. A process focus meant I was less concerned with things like people and technology and although there were associated ‘Hard’ issues (including the tools, techniques and Information Technology available to support the re-engineering effort) and ‘soft’ issues (individual and team behavioural reactions to the instigation of change within the organisation, the management of which spawned further growth within the consultancy industry as ‘Change Management’ shot to the top of every CEO’s agenda) the ethos was that all would flow from the customer and be process-driven as that was the pathway to value creation. Specifications for skills, jobs and even the technology to enable each process would be created and fulfilled as a consequence of the process.
All in all, this process-centric model was a beautifully scientific theory, rational, bursting with logic, and it certainly delivered improvements, but even then I sensed it was missing something fundamental, something intuitive. Maybe the fact that we humans are complex and irrational. Or maybe that in a dynamic context we were moving from one static ‘wrong’ solution to another, static, ‘right’ solution.
The world and the way we look at businesses have since moved on, but I took away a very valuable lesson from this era: All models are wrong, but some are useful.