{"id":376,"date":"2020-10-30T18:01:35","date_gmt":"2020-10-30T18:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/?p=376"},"modified":"2024-09-08T17:50:16","modified_gmt":"2024-09-08T17:50:16","slug":"how-would-it-make-you-feel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/how-would-it-make-you-feel\/","title":{"rendered":"How Would It Make You Feel?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\u201cWhat is the problem you are trying to solve?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

*Thunderbolt* *Dramatic Music* *Spine Tingles*<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\u00a0\u201cThe best thing to do when things are complicated and you\u2019re not sure which way to turn, is to ask the question\u2026 what is the problem you are trying to solve?\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I\u2019m not sure if that follow up qualification sentence was precisely what was said but what I do remember word for word is\u2026<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\u201cWhat is the problem that you are trying to solve?\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It burned into my brain as a genius way to help teams get to the root of the issue and to cut through the noise of broken systems and processes.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Mark Berdusco, an Australian Lean Lead first said this magic sentence to me in 2012 when I was in the middle of delivering a Lean Fundamentals course (developed in partnership with a number of Nestl\u00e9 experts based at their HQ in Vevey, Switzerland) to their Asia Pacific team in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It made me do a little shiver, the way that fundamentally important lean revelations tend to (tragically).<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Practically every time I teach, a student will say something important that makes me think.\u00a0 I\u2019ll share my ideas and someone might then say \u2018but what about?\u2019 … I\u2019ll pause for a moment \u2026.\u00a0 think .. and then in my mind mutter to myself\u2026 \u201cyeah what about <\/em><\/strong>that?!\u201d \u2026\u2026 \u00a0cut to quizzical face, cut to me teaching and searching for a pen, cut to me scribbling down the idea illegibly on my lecture notes whilst not losing eye contact with the class.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I fundamentally believe in the power of teaching as a mechanism to teach the teacher things<\/em><\/strong>. I\u2019ve had so many good ideas whilst in the process of trying to explain something to others, and I\u2019ve learned so much from my students too.\u00a0 Not enough emphasis is placed on the power of teaching as a knowledge creation device imho. \u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Anyway, I can\u2019t attend many meetings now where I don\u2019t hear the \u2018what is the problem we\u2019re trying to solve\u2019 phrase in some kind of form. \u00a0I know that I\u2019ve repeated the phrase often<\/strong> in my teaching, so maybe I\u2019m part of the reason for its proliferation, but now its everywhere and as genius as it is, it no longer makes me shiver, it makes me do a little sigh<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

How fickle you are Sarah Lethbridge, t\u2019was a magic sentence when you said it and no one else had clicked with it, even though you yourself had stolen it from someone else. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Oh to create my own phrase. I\u2019ve tried to make my \u2018elegant simplicity\u2019 TM take off \u2013 success rate so far \u2013 one person has quoted the term back to me (whilst intelligently knowing that I really wanted them to say it, so I\u2019m not sure that that really counts).<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I feel like this next one might have business parlance legs – let\u2019s see if it has the same kind of impact as the Berdusco revelation.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I believe that if enough people in power had have said this phrase when discussing the dilemma of issuing exam results with no exams and the welsh ban of unnecessary item shopping in supermarkets in the firebreak, the resultant public outcries could have been averted.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

How would it make you feel? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In the exam result example, how would it make you feel if you didn\u2019t have the opportunity to sit your exams because of the pandemic, that the only means of achieving a grade was to ask those who knew you best what grade they thought you\u2019d get and then a nameless, distant authority applied a formula to change that grade and issued you a different grade instead? Even though you hadn’t sat anything? Even though mathematic moderation usually happens every year, this year, this unusual year, how would it make you feel if you knew that the best guess A was changed to a more mathematically correct C? Would you be ok with it?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

You\u2019re in lockdown, again, you can\u2019t see your friends, wider family, you can\u2019t go out and do things, so you go to the local supermarket to at least buy loads of chocolate and wine, how would it make you feel when you arrived and large parts of the store were cordoned off to you when you were just expecting to go to the supermarket as normal and suddenly even that experience was destroyed?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In both examples the authorities had absolutely the right intention behind their actions.\u00a0 Moderation is an essential part of assuring a qualification standard and the Covid rates are rising so rapidly, the firebreak an opportunity to make a dent in its advance, so person to person contact needs to be eradicated, temptation removed.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Yet I believe that asking the question \u2018how would it make you feel?\u2019 as a guiding force, as a leveller, as a means of connecting the work to the individuals that your decisions affect, is an exceptionally powerful device.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

How would it make you feel? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Perhaps it\u2019s even more powerful when prefixed with the \u2018what is the problem you are trying to solve\u2019 question… ?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In these desperate times, where decision makers are naturally, and rightly, driven primarily by the need to protect the public, to cope with the weight of what is in front of them, it would help to make sure that consideration of emotions and feelings are put up front and centre, to guide the public to accept the truth and to do the right thing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Feelings can be so more powerful than sense.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWhat is the problem you are trying to solve?\u201d *Thunderbolt* *Dramatic Music* *Spine Tingles* \u00a0\u201cThe best thing to do when things are complicated and you\u2019re not sure which way to […]","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":1023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"custom_author":[44],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-strategy","custom_author-sarah-lethbridge"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/554\/2020\/10\/Zebras.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1024,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions\/1024"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}