Manchester plays in Manchester, bugger

A few new phrases have popped up a lot lately. "Bugger" which seems to politely mean "damn", or maybe "that's annoying". I'm trying to think how it's used in a sentence, I think it's like a one word comment that people say to each other, for example, "I just dropped my phone" "bugger".

"Full stop", that's another one that's popped up a lot lately. I think it means "end of story", or maybe "nothing else to debate". You'd hear "and that's how I define systems engineering, full stop". 

Here's a fun one "Bobs your uncle". It literally means nothing, it's just filler. The context I first heard it in was a conversation between a realtor and a buyer. "You could sign now, be done with it, bobs your uncle". I dunno, good luck understanding that one :)

Here's a link my friends at work shared with me to explain some common British phrases-

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/16/british-phrases-that-confuse-americans_n_5591520.html

Oh, I said one of the dumbest things I've ever said last week. We were chatting about football (soccer), making small talk. I was saying I'd let to get to a match (game). Someone said to go watch Manchester United and for some unknown reason I said "where do they play". Oh man, they are not letting me live that one down. Yes, Manchester United play in Manchester. It's a city. In the UK. 

Moshi Monsters in Birmingham

My oldest daughter is a big fan of a toy series called Moshi Monsters. We drove a couple hours to a town called Birmingham because the Moshi's were there. See, the company behind Moshi is brilliant because they partner with places like Sea Life (what we'd call Sea World in America). In their partnerships, Moshi brings toys for kids to play with, and trade. They also bring mascots and games. The kids not only love Moshi, they get to enjoy and learn about the real sea creatures too. 

There's also a Cadbury (chocolate) museum in Burmingham. It's also a popular place that you have to book in advance. We were hoping to get lucky and just walk in, but nope, you really have to book in advance. I still found a way to buy a huge box of chocolates from their discount area though :)

We thought about driving by the science museum, but we decided it was time to head home. The day had been a success thanks to Moshi Monsters.

AIR un del, can't miss castle

On Sunday we took the short drive down to a town called Arundel (pronounced AIR un del). The plan was to visit the castle, the cathedral and maybe a few shops. 

Like any well laid plan, we had to adapt as soon as we arrived. The main street was shut down and traffic was diverted. We couldn't quite see why, although it appeared to be for a party or good news, as opposed to any kind of bad news. 

We followed traffic and parked in a field just at the edge of town. We walked into town and quickly found it to be a nice little gathering of live bands, outdoor shops and lots of people enjoying themselves.

We walked a few blocks over to the castle, already excited to come back to town for the party. The party continued at the castle though, they had live birds of prey, plus lots of tents and actors. The actors were displaying military gear from the 10th century on. Each person wore gear from a different century so that you could see how it changed over time. We watched a short battle between several centuries of gear, and one poor guy actually got hurt and needed a real medic. 

Then we walked through the castle and had a great time. It's one of the most "impending" castles you'll ever see. It sits atop a hill and you have to crane your neck to see up to the castle. Quite intimidating, and very very well kept, it seems to be in perfect shape. We walked through the castle keep, and the rooms, it's a great place. The gardens are great too.

We walked back through town and enjoyed the party. Lots of people standing around to listen to live music or eat in the streets. So many different kinds of music were being played, from bluegrass to folk to pop to classical. I thought the classical guitar duet was the best. 

We grabbed a quick meal in a very traditional pub, then we walked up an enormous hill to the cathedral. The cathedral is stunning from the outside and it's nice on the inside.

We drove back home very satisfied with a great trip, and even had more great conversation on the drive home.

Consider Open Feedback vs Closed Feedback

As I've gotten older, I've noticed more and more ways to give feedback to people. It's taken me awhile to put my finger on what makes them different. I still don't have the best words to describe it, but let's call one way "open feedback vs closed feedback". The more I think about it, it might be better to call it holistic feedback vs situational feedback.

I've been taught a feedback model called Situation Behaviour Impact. It's called the SBI model. The idea is that you should succinctly tell someone about the situation, what they did, and the impact it had on you. It's quick, easy, factual and can often start a nice conversation.

Some people do it differently. Some people take quite an effort to put themselves in your shoes. It's common to hear questions about "how did you feel about that" or "what other options did you consider". It's almost like coaching as opposed to mentoring. 

Using that approach, the feedback tends to be more about multiple situations coming together, as opposed to a single situation. I think it's fascinating that there's a bit of a subtle, yet quite profound, difference when you think about it. 

Either way, feedback and conversation is critical. I suppose you can't really go wrong with any approach, as long as you keep adapting and improving. I'll be watching the results of different ways to give feedback. Let's see if one tends to be more effective. Let's see which people/situations lend themselves to certain kinds of feedback.

Brighton Beach and a town called Worthing

Every once in awhile, we pick a family member and say "today is your day". It's like a birthday, but it's almost more of a day to practice leadership. The family member gets to choose all the activities, food and plans for the day. The rest of the family comes along and enjoys it. 

Today was my wife's day. She chose Brighton beach. It takes about an hour to drive there, so enjoyed a nice chat on the way. We hit a little traffic, and parking was sold out, but we eventually made it. 

Brighton is a great little town. Lots of shopping, and it's very kid and pet friendly. Close to the beach, the streets are windy and narrow, almost like Venice. Slightly north of the beach, the streets straighten out and open up a bit, still lined with great shops.

We also wandered to the beach, it was actually pretty cold, especially for late August. It's a pebble beach, which our youngest daughter loves. 

We tried to get into a few places for dinner, but they all been booked way in advance. So we drove 30 minutes west to a neat little sea town called Worthing. We found a great spot and my wife enjoyed the scallops she was looking for.

Work hard, play hard, sick hard. No Paris for me

Today was scheduled to be our third day in Paris. My family left a day before I could, so they arrived without a hitch. On the other hand, I'm still closer to London, on my third day just trying to get out of bed. 

To spare all the nasty details, we'll just say I've either been in the bathroom or in bed since Thursday night. I feel much better this morning, I might even take a walk around town if I can muster the strength.

My wife and daughters are having a great time in Paris, so that's good to hear. I know they enjoyed the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, I think they've been to several other places as well. 

Late last night I watched some tv, which was something of a first for me here. There seem to be channels dedicated to old shows like Smokey and the Bandit, Friends, King of Queens, CSI, NCIS, Everybody Loves Raymond, etc. I watched "Got to Dance", which is very similar to So You Think You Can Dance, then I watched Shawshank Redemption. I saw commercials for X Factor and Downton Abbey, so I might try to record those. Oh, I watched some cricket too because I am starting to find it pretty interesting. 

Hope you're feeling well and out enjoying family, friends and fun!

Meeting with Clive Woodward

I had a one on one meeting with a British national hero today. I spent just over an hour talking about knowledge management with Clive Woodward. It felt as lucky as if I were to meet with Tony Dungy or Phil Jackson. 

He's such a good guy. He started with a bit of chit chat, then he asked how I'd like to run the meeting. I stated one simple objective - to discuss our thoughts on knowledge management. Then I asked if he was interested in that or how he'd like to proceed. It turned out he was very interested in the topic and even knew a bit about it. 

I shared our knowledge sharing process. He not only listened intently, he asked great questions and he even took notes. He didn't leave the room, or take a phone call, or rush the conversation in any way. Two other people from his team came in to the conversation as well.

He demoed his knowledge sharing software package with me. He did it himself, not someone from his team, I thought that was so cool.

We talked about the similarities between his tool and our process. He especially appreciated when I shared concrete examples of how the process plays out in reality. He loved the differentiation I made between knowledge mgmt and information mgmt. He pointed out the similarities as he saw them, and he shared several examples of professional athletes and how they learn (and how he coaches). Just awesome.

At the end he said, that was great, let's do this again. I thought he was just being polite, but then we pulled out diaries and started talking about dates. We're going to meet again in just a few weeks! Wow.

The Beauty of Northern Ireland

It's a 50 min flight from Bristol to Belfast. We paid a bit extra to sit in the front row with additional leg room. That extra space helped keep the toddler comfortable I think. I'm not sure it was worth the extra money though.

Northern Ireland is part of the UK, so they drive on the left side and use Sterling Pounds as currency. Good ol google maps took us to the castle next door to our hotel as opposed to the hotel itself. Someday I'll learn how to use google maps perfectly :) This made for a fun experience though, the castle was a personal residence, covered in ivy, with large barking dogs behind the front door. I learned about the dogs because I walked all the way up to the front door in my stubborn hope that it really was the hotel. The nice residents were kind enough to point us next door and I'm sure we weren't the first or the last people to make that mistake.

The hotel concierge told us to "park under the yellow rugby posts", which made me smile because I barely knew what they were. We'd call them field goal posts.

It seems as though everywhere you look in Ireland is beautiful. Even my first parking spot was a beautiful spot.

My wife commented that "you see the beautiful greenery and flowers everywhere, and you can't really see the houses". It's true. The shades of green hilly patches are lined by pristine trees and bushes. The trees and bushes stand in perfect lines. The shine of the leaves from the shine produces flavours of green that just cause you to smile.

Our first activity was the Carrick a Rede rope bridge. Its basically a hand made bridge that spans between two mountains over their crevice. It's probably over a hundred feet in the air. Feels thrilling to walk across whilst the wind blows and the bridge shakes and the beautiful water teases you below.

It poured rain on our walk back to the car, but that didn't matter. In fact it created some good laughter as getting soaked often does. It also created a mini moment for my youngest daughter and I as I carried her above my head for the last kilometer. When we finally arrived at the car, I placed her in her car seat and looked straight into her drenched eyes to apologise without saying any words. She understood. 

We forgot the car charger for the phone, so we had to use our extra battery packs and rely on road signs. Always makes for a fun journey. 

We stopped at a place called the Giants Causeway, which is basically an extremely unique rock formation. The joke is that giants threw rocks to build a road from Ireland to Scotland. We enjoyed the kids audio guide and the hike. We ran into friends from the states at the rope bridge, we found them again at the causeway! We joked that we'd see them again soon at Dunluce castle, which is the most common next tourist spot in the Northern Ireland trifecta.

We went to Dunluce Castle, which is old ruins. The view of the ocean is fantastic and we watched a few wedding photos be taken there.

We jumped back on the road, still fairly early in the day, and "done" with our planned activities. So we randomly stopped at beautiful spots along the road. The first stop was white rocks beach, which I loved. There was a piece of burning wood in the sand, I think it was burning from natural heat and the aroma was phenomenal, it smelled like the perfect bbq smoker. 

We had met just enough locals to already learn that "wee" and "aye" are very common words. Wee means small, aye means yes.

It was interesting that my rental car only displayed kilometers per hour, but road signs were in miles per hour. For a few minutes I tried to do quick math, but then I just embraced the difference and tried to follow the flow of traffic. Here's to hoping I didn't get any speeding tickets, because I sure enjoyed the freedom of barely having any idea if I was speeding or not :)

Luck of Northern Ireland

I had my first European shower that had a shower head above my head, at an angle (not pouring straight down), and not on a flexible pipe. That's rare in Europe from my experience. 

We spent the day right on the edge of a hurricane or tropical storm. It wasn't too windy or dangerous, it was just very wet. We drove around a town called Londonderry or Derry. We learned the name itself is somewhat controversial. There's a lot of history there about Protestants and Catholics. If I'm not mistaken, each party has a different name for the town. There's a peace bridge there and CS Lewis was born there (or lived there, not sure without looking it up).

We wanted to go to the Ring of Guillion or the Mourne Mountains, but we decided to head into Belfast and enjoy the city. The Irish accent is fantastic, they're quite a jubilant group like the Italians. We sat next to a group drinking beer at 9am and sharing some great loud laughs, it felt quite comfortable actually, it was an inclusive laughter and conversation.

The breakfast food reminded me more of the states than it reminded me of Europe, there were sausages, toast, orange juice, bagels, etc. I did see baked beans and grilled tomatoes though, that's more European. 

We drove by the main cathedral and wow you should have seen the police presence! No exaggeration there had to be at least two dozen fully armed cars, each with multiple officers. You would have thought there was a riot. Maybe we're ignorant and it wasn't safe, but the police were mostly smiling and I'm guessing that just might be their standard Sunday morning mass? 

We went up to the Belfast castle, which sadly isn't much. Nice place for a wedding though. We drove past the opera house and the central market. We stumbled right upon the "titanic quarter" which is where the Titanic was built. There's a great museum, but it had a two hour wait, and our flight was about 4 hours away.  

We drove to airport, had a great flight back on Easyjet and there was a full rainbow in Bristol. Perfect ending to a perfect weekend in Ireland!!

Is anything truly "sustainable"?

The Head of Nursing at the Atlanta-based hospital recently spoke out. She's one of the hospital leaders taking in the controversial Ebola patients. I thought her perspective was fascinating, and a common one that we hear it business. She said something to effect of "we're the best place to handle this difficult challenge and it's the reason we exist". It was fascinating that she was willing to speak out, document her thoughts, and share them. I'll be watching to see how it plays out because I consider her move to be one of fundamental KM - ie "work out loud" and be transparent about decisions (and the progress along the way).

I'm having more and more collaboration meetings inside and outside of work. The UK seems very interested in "how" to do KM. The interest seems to stem from a very nice assumption "of course it's valuable".

One of my uncles was passing through London on a trip around the world. We met up at a pub and had a great conversation. One of the topics was "how to negotiate in different cultures". We basically boiled it down to "aggressive negotiations" vs "considerate negotiations". Aggressive negotiations probably require a short temper, loud voice and succinct rationale. Considerate negotions take much more time and finesse.

All of this leads me to a question I've been pondering lately, is anything really sustainable? I've often referenced the Peter Senge quote of "the only sustainable competitive advantage is an organizations ability to learn faster than it's competition". But then there's been a lot of talk that competitive advantage is shifting away from "taking market share" and moving toward "creating and delighting customers". That's a very different way of thinking, and it implies a very different way of operating as a business. 

The balance between long term and short term appears to be unobtainable. I often hear that we're taking on projects because "they're good for the long term" or "will build a foundation for us to build upon". For a moment I'd like to challenge the assumption of "sustainable is possible, and good". 

Let's say we're re-building a nation. Sustainable infrastructure would be a great thing. We'd like to have roads, schools, communications, etc. But even if we invest in all of that, how do we know if it will last? How do we know if people will use it? Will people like the results (for example, choosing to setup mobile infrastructure vs land line infrastructure)?

I certainly see the value of things that stand the test of time. And I certainly do not want to aim for only quick fixes. And I don't think all effort and progress is futile. I think I'm trying to say that sustainable is a word, or a goal, that needs to be clearly defined in context. The team should understand if it means sustainable for one year, or 5 years or a lifetime or many generations. "How long should it be a sustainable base, and what would be the consequences of innovative disruptions over that time period" might be quite a key question to discuss up front. We might be surprised by the varying answers of each person.

Telly

I actually sat down and watched some tv tonight, which they call telly. There's a show called "Got to Dance", which is just like So You Think You Can Dance, so I'm excited about that. I'm also watching Hell's Kitchen with Gordon Ramsey. They don't beep out any cuss words, which takes a minute to get used to.

Battle Proms are Amazing!

We got a bit of a late start on Saturday, mostly because we had several ideas and didn't finalize a plan until the morning. It was somewhat purposeful because we wanted to look at the traffic on google maps in real time. We wanted to drive by Stonehenge and then spend time in Bath. The traffic near Stonehenge was awful according to google maps, so we went straight to Bath. Unfortunately we ran into some heavy rain and some accidents, so it took awhile to get to Bath too. 

We arrived in Bath, I dropped off my family, they ran to the Roman Baths. I parked and walked around with my youngest daughter. I do love the town of Bath, fun spot. My family enjoyed it and then we went to a really special event called "Battle Proms". I meant to follow google maps path to drive right past Stonehenge, but I was so rushed to get there, that I forgot to go that route. Instead, we took the fastest route to Highclere Castle, also known as Downton Abbey. So I feel bad that my parents never did see Stonehenge.

We made it to Highclere and parked way in the back. The gates had opened at 4:30, we arrived at 6pm. We just barely missed a cavalry demonstration at 5:50. We could hear the music from our car, I had seen the brochure, so I knew it was a British pride band known as the Rockabellas. They're 3 females who sing popular songs and get audiences excited about Britain. 

After their performance an emcee announced the upcoming events and a bagpipe player starting playing. The next event was a flyover of an original spitfire plane. We bought 3 British flags and waived them with the other 10,000 people or so. We ate dinner there and I grabbed some chocolate covered strawberries too, delicious!

The big finale started about 9pm and we walked up to the castle to stand there, much closer to the stage. They had hundreds of cannons, fireworks, and soldiers firing blanks all in alignment with the music, it was spectacular. A huge thanks to my work colleague who recommended this awesome event, a very special British pride moment. 

Family and Friends

I booked a Wimbledon tour for my parents because they've watched for a long time. We walked the museum first. It's still great to see the history of the game, and how quickly it's changed over the years. We went outside for the tour, which started closer to court 1 than centre court this time. The tour guide had more info this time, but she didn't leave much time for pictures or questions, which was a bit unfortunate. We still had a great time.

We were able to catch a friend visiting from America for lunch. It was cool because we had to do some fancy planning to line up timing and location, worked out perfectly. Great feeling to catch up with family and good friends in this great area.

Then we jumped over to Abbey Rd since my parents are fans of the Beatles. My phone didn't have a connection, so I felt like quite a local since I have the way memorised already :) My dad was laughing on the way, so excited to see it, I think. They really enjoyed seeing the sign, the cross walk and the studio, they laughed and smiled the whole time.

My mom wanted to pick up trinkets, so we stopped in Westminster on the way back. They apparently had not stood right there at Big Ben and Westminster Abbey before, so that was fun to watch. They took lots of photos and picked up some London trinkets from the many shops right there. 

We went home via train, and ate dinner at their 3rd or 4th British pub experience. They spent their next and final travel day with my wife and daughters walking around Guildford. The castle recently came out from under scaffolding, but I don't think they made it over there. Great to see them and hopefully they had a great trip, they had many nice compliments for us on their way out.

Enjoying Family

My parents visited for several days, we had a great time together. They did the whirlwind tour of London on their first day. I went to work, so my wife and daughters took them around. I think they hit all the major sites such as Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, London Eye, etc. 

The next day I drove them to Leeds Castle, which they seemed to really enjoy. I've come to learn that Leeds is unique in that it's one of the few castles that's not located in a small town, and it's one of the few with a moat, and the grounds are huge and amazing. 

That night my daughter acted in her first play. She had gone to a special acting school for 5 days (8 hours a day). We all enjoyed the play and the best part was how excited she was on the walk home. 

As a family, we stopped for dinner on the way home. We had a package from Amazon that we thought was a magazine gift for her. She opened the package at dinner and it turns out it's a book that she's published in! Lots to celebrate