Lessons about leadership from the boy scouts.
The scoutmaster entered the chapel with his family and filed into one of the middle pews. I got a knot in the pit of my stomach as I saw him. He was newly clean shaven.
I’m screwed.
To understand my dread you need to understand a little bit about Boy Scouts and a little bit about the LDS Church, which sponsors our troop. The adult leadership within a boy scout troop is:
- Scoutmaster – Guy who does all the hard stuff like planning the yearly calendar, filling out trip permits, getting parent volunteers, owning a truck
- Assistant Scoutmasters – Guys who show up on campouts and get to relive being 12 and not 50 (Doesn’t have to have a truck)
Okay, the truck requirement is a “nice to have” for the scoutmaster, but the rest is true. I love being an Assistant Scoutmaster. I’ve been involved with boy scouts nearly continuously since I was 11 years old. I hate the paperwork, I love the scout craft. The Scoutmaster came recently to scouting. He did the paper work, I showed up and helped the kids tie knots.
Now, let me explain a little about the LDS Church and why I was pretty sure I was screwed last Sunday. The LDS Church local congregation is called a ward. It’s defined by a geographic boundaries. In Utah that means that the people you go to church with are your immediate neighbors. All local leadership at the ward level is volunteers. The ward is led by a bishop and he has two counslors. Typically a bishop would serve for five years and then he and his counslors were released and someone new was called as bishop with new counslors. Again, the new bishop and his counslors (collectively called the bishipric) were guys from the neighborhood.
Today the bishopic was being released and a new one would be called.
Members of the bishopric are not allowed to have beards.
Why do you do what you do? Maybe you are a youth soccer coach for your kid’s team. Maybe you volunteer at the food kitchen. Maybe you go in and read to patients at the nursing home.
I have a friend who is a local comedian in Salt Lake City. He looks like a hard core biker with tattoos down one entire arm. And yet, he’s one of the nicest guys I know. Every Christmas he collects donations and puts on two charity comedy shows. The proceeds go to local charities. It pretty much takes up his entire November and December.
Why do you do what you do?
I’ve thought about that as I’ve watched my boys progress through scouting. Being the assistant scoutmaster is a volunteer position, but the invitation to serve has to come from the ward leadership. I spent a few years in our ward as the dad would attend the campouts with my boys. My youngest boys turn 13 this month. They have another year in this scout troop and then they go with the older boys who still do activities, but not necessarily scouting ones.
Will I still be interested in scouting when I no longer have sons involved? I think so, but it does make me think about why I do what I do. I like the outdoors aspect of boy scouts, but I think mostly I enjoy the teaching aspect.
Last Saturday I was with 5 boys exploring Goblin Valley. The sun was bright but, not too hot.
Who can tell me how to tell direction without a compass?
You can look at the sun.
Good, but if it’s the middle of the day how do you know direction?
I don’t know.
Well, if you have a watch with an hour hand, you point the hour hand at the sun and halfway between the hour hand and 12 o’clock is South. What else?
Shadows?
Good. You can put a stick in the sand so that it has no shadow. Then, wait wait for an hour. The shadow will move point east. What about in the winter? Suppose it’s cloudy. What could you do?
Something with snow?
Yes. There are two ways. You look for a snowbank that has started to melt away. The melted side will have sharp points on the South side. Or, if you can see a mountain with snow, one side of the ridge is going to be snow covered, the other will be free of snow. The snow covered side points North.
What if the mountains are running East and West instead of North and South?
All mountains in North America run North and South.
The hike wasn’t supposed to be about direction finding specifically, but the opportunity presented itself. And that’s the part of scouting I enjoy – the chance to teach something new. And many of the skills are useful later in life. We teach the boys cooking, personal management, pioneering, orienteering, swimming, mountain biking and a whole host of other skills.
And we get to see boys who are sometimes spending a night away from home for the first time. Or, we get to watch them attempt hard things. We’ve been on hikes where we are miles from the cars and home. The boys in that situation don’t have the option of giving up. They got themselves up the mountain, they need to get themselves down.
So, there I sat in church last Sunday waiting to hear if our Scoutmaster was going to be part of the new bishopric. Finally, they announced the new bishop and sure enough his second counsler was the Scoutmaster. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The 2nd counslor was responsible for overseeing the scouting program. He would still be in my meetings, but would not be in charge of planning.
They would be looking for a new scoutmaster. As the meeting let out, I approached the scoutmaster,
You know I don’t have a truck, right?
You can borrow mine whenever you want.
As the congregation made its way into the foyer, I saw the second assistant scoutmaster.
Did you notice the scoutmaster when he came in?
Yeah, was your first thought the same as mine?
We’re screwed?
Yeah.
Neither one of us wantes to be scoutmaster, but both of us love working with the boys. The change in leadership helped us think about why we do what we do.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It was beautiful.
I was standing with a group of six other men in a location in Southern Utah called Goblin Valley. It was Halloween eve, Friday night before Saturday’s Halloween. The sun had set hours earlier. The boys were here playing capture the flag. Us old guys were swapping stories of raising teenagers, kids’ weddings, becoming grandparents, and other conversations that men who share a faith and a appreciation for the outdoors hold when they are in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night.
And then we saw it. To the east, a soft glow signalled the impending arrival of the full moon. But, it wasn’t just that the full moon was rising. It was the location. It was going to rise like a second sun behind a huge rock outcropping that jutted like a withered hand up from the darkened horizon. The moon was going to rise behind it, giving it a halo effect before the moon itself was visible.
Like I said, it was beautiful. I wish I had a picture to share with you. I don’t, not because I didn’t have a camera, but because I had a camera that wasn’t good, it was just good enough.
My daughter got married last month. Last Sunday she and my new son-in-law came over to share with us the wedding pictures. They plugged their thumbdrive into the USB port on our TV. (I didn’t even know our TV had a USB port.) As we scanned through them, we came to the one of the bride’s family; me, my lovely wife, my daughter and her husband, my other kids that attended the wedding and my oldest daughter, her husband and baby.
My oldest daughter spoke up.
Dad, you should put this one in from their wedding in your frame as the official family picture. All my wedding pictures from two years ago are in black and white since the photographer didn’t consider the snowy background.
Yeah, it’s too bad there wasn’t another photographer there to suggest she pick a different backdrop.
Dad! That’s like saying you own a cell phone so you’re a photographer.
Actually, I was my official class photographer in high school. I took thousands of pictures with a good 35mm camera. I developed my own film and printed hundreds of pictures. I got pretty good.
Oh. . .I had no idea.
It was true. At her wedding I had suggested to the photographer that there was no way I would have been able to color and light balance a picture that was taken inside a pavilian but with a backdrop of new snow. The photographer thought that she could adjust the f-stop enough to make it work. She couldn’t and the pictures had to be done in black and white.
I used to be a photographer. I guess I still am. I still have an eye for a pretty shot..
But I used to have a good camera. I owned a Pentax K1000. It was a workhorse. Zero automation. Everything had to be set by hand, the focus, the shutter speed, the f-stop. Manual film advance. But, it took fantastic pictures and after several years of working with it, I could adjust it to get just the effect I wanted. It was a good camera.
I don’t have it anymore. Ironically, I sent it to the woman who photographed my daughter’s wedding. She wanted to do more print film.
Instead of one camera, I now have three; my iPad, my cell phone and a GoPro Hero3. None of them are good cameras. They are simply good enough.
I take most of my pictures with the GoPro. Recently a friend asked me about it.
It’s pretty limited from a camera standpoint: no preview or viewfinder (I call it point-and-pray), no zoom, no focusing, no shutter control.
Wow. why do you use it then?
It’s good enough for most of what I need to do. I mount it on my walking stick and take it on all our campouts and hikes.
It’s super convenient. It’s always with me, and with two button pushes I’m taking pictures. No fumbling with a lense cap, or digging a camera out of my bag. But, what it has in convenience it loses in the “corner cases.” The cases that are the exceptional shots, not the standard shots.
Sometimes I get lucky. Sometimes my point-and-pray method produces a shot I never expected. But, I used to be good and used to have a good camera. I notice the difference.
My cell phone and iPad have slightly more features than the GoPro, but not much. They have a standard lens and the phone decides on focus, light meter, shutter speed and resolution. Most of the time it’s good enough. But, that doesn’t mean it’s a good camera.
And that takes us back to the moonrise in Goblin Valley. I didn’t even bother to take a picture with the GoPro. The moon would be a white speck in a sea of blackness. Several of the guys got out their cell phones and attempted to capture the interplay of moonlight on the ghostly hoodoos. What they got was a white splotch on a sea of blackness. Their cell phone cameras were good enough. . .good enough for most pictures. It didn’t mean they were good cameras. Taking pictures of the moon is one of the things they are not good at.
Last month I posted this picture with the caption:
Picture of the Blood Moon or a picture with the cover closed on my iPad.
Many people weren’t sure.
Never mistake “good enough” for “good.” The difference is the difference between a bowl of wax apples and oranges and a bowl of real fruit.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Did we get lost?
No. In order to “get” lost, you have to have known where you were going at some point. We started off lost.
Last weekend I was down in Goblin Valley for a campout with the young men from our church. Friday night was a massive game of capture the flag and Saturday was a hike up “Ding” and “Dang” canyons. We do this campout and hike every year. Last year was my first year to attend, but I chose to not go on the hike. This year I didn’t go on the hike either, but not by choice.
I hate getting lost. As a lifelong boy scout and a long time scout leader, I take great pride in knowing where I am and where I’m going. I own an extensive collection of US Geological Survey maps for areas I’ve lived and camped. I own five compasses. I’ve been known to take a compass on a hike up a canyon that has one entrance and one exit.
I like maps.
When I plan a campout I do a lot of research on the location. I buy maps and check maps.
I didn’t plan last weekend’s campout. Before we left for the 3 hour trip south, I made sure I had directions for how to get to the park. I didn’t have a map, but I was with a group of people who knew where they were going. If I’m going to lunch with someone at a new restaurant, and they are riding with me, I don’t check a map, if they already know how to get there.
Five of my sons were on this campout with me. My boys know my rule for Saturday morning: you pack your gear before breakfast. So, by the time the food was done, I was loaded up, packed up and ready to follow the caravan of trucks, SUVs and the occasional car from the campground to the trailhead.
…and then…
One of the leaders gave some anti-chafing powder to one of the boys riding in my vehicle. Last summer, this boy had to drop out of a hike because his chafing was so bad. The powder was a good idea. The timing was not. The boy headed into the restroom to use the powder and all the other cars headed out of the campground to get to the trailhead.
What would you do? I couldn’t leave the boy. I couldn’t follow the cars. Oh, and cell phones were out of the question. We were miles from the nearest cell phone bar.
I did the only thing I could do. I waited. Finally, the boy was back and my 15 passenger van, loaded with me and five boys went roaring out of the campground to catch up. Visibility was a couple of miles. I couldn’t see any cars on teh road ahead. I pushed the van as fast as I dared over the curving road. I slowed down as I went past the ranger station, and then sped back up.
I finally arrived at the edge of the park. I didn’t know where Ding and Dang were, but I knew they were outside of the park boundaries. The road came to a T. I could go left or right. Do I take a chance and go left toward the mountains? Or Right toward the highway?
There was a map posted at the intersection. I scoured it for any trace of Ding and Dang canyons with no luck. So again, I did the only thing I could. I waited. The boys piled out of the van and occupied themselves best they could in a desert.
They would eventually come back to check on us, right?
The didn’t come back.
After about 45 minutes I found my brain. The ranger station I flew past. They would know the local canyons.
Come on, boys. Everyone back in the van.
The ranger knew the directions to Ding and Dang. And it wasn’t the direction I’d taken. There was an earlier turn off for Wild Horse canyon. About a mile past Wild Horse is Ding. I hadn’t considered this turn since it was still inside the boundary of the park. It was a long lonely unmarked road that eventually made its way out of the park by another way.
The paved road eventually gave way to a dirt road. And then it gave way to a small river. At least that’s what it looked like.
And it was here that I found our camp trailer and the non 4×4 vehicles from our group. And I found a note:
ROAD WASHED OUT
DO NOT ATTEMPT
MEET HERE AT NOON
And there it was. I’d found my way to the right path, but in my Chevy Express van, I was literally at the end of the road. Again, I was stuck with a decision.
Well boys, we have a choice. We are not going to climb Ding and Dang today. We can go try to find another canyon to hike, or we can go back to Goblin Valley.
Goblin Valley!
I was pretty steamed. I had mentioned to multiple peole that I didn’t know where the trailhead was. I was ready to leave on time, and another leader made a decision that delayed me. Then, they didn’t wait at the campground. Then, when they did figure out I was lost, they didn’t leave a driver and a truck at the trailhead.
I had a couple dozen reasons why this was not my fault, and how other people had screwed up. I took a good long walk through Goblin Valley cussing out the Hoodoos and the sagebrush. And somewhere on my walk, I realized that there was one person more than all the rest that really screwed up, that deserved my scorn. That person was me. This was the second time I’d been on a scout outing that others had planned and I had gotten lost because I got separated from the group.
This is the second time that man has done that to me. There will not be a third.
– Captain Jack Aubrey “Master and Commander, The Far Side of The World”
I could have solved every problem that happened that day if I’d chosen to bring my own map. I was lost. I didn’t “get lost” since I’d never known where I was going in the first place, but I was definitely lost and I only had myself to blame.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I strained to catch the sound of the returning trucks. Turning my head to the side, I took a step toward the West, where the vehicles would be returning from.
There! The faintest hint of an engine. And yet, it wasn’t quite right. Carefully, I rotated trying to locate the sound. It wasn’t exactly coming from the West, and yet, it was just as loud when I turned toward the north. Finally, the sound became loud enough that I figured out it was coming from above me. . .32,000 feet above me. Looking up I noticed the faint contrail of a passing plane; a mere speck in the sky. The sounds of its engines barely audible above the gentle wind through the desert flora.
I shook my head in amazement, and turned my attention back to what else I might have missed hearing in the Southern Utah desert.
Last weekend I ended up in Goblin Valley. It’s about 230 miles south of Salt Lake City. The nearest city is Hanksville (pop. 210), 20 miles away as the crow flies, but over 32 by car. It’s remote. Don’t bother to try to getting a cell phone signal.
We bring the boys down here every year. This year there were about 40 boys and a dozen leaders. It was noisy. . .for awhile. The boys play capture the flag among the hoodoos. The “goblin” shaped rock formations. A couple of the leaders played, but most of us hung out at the “base” and talked. And some of us looked up.
We forget what the night sky looks like. I’ve been campping a lot and I live in a rural city at the base of a mountain. But, rarely do I see the sky without any other light source. It’s magnificant. Our galaxy is called the Milky Way. On a cloudless, moonless night in the middle of nowhere you realize why. The sky has a white band across it. You don’t see stars, you see the remains of God wiping up spilled milk.
Even the familiar constellation, the big dipper, Orion, etc., are backlit with thousands of dimmer stars that we don’t normally see except in photographs.
It was a rare treat and one I look forward to. Is it important to be able to see the Milky Way for myself? It’s easy to wax philosophical and talk about viewing the skies as our ancestors did, of looking up at the stars and imagining a time 100 years, 1,000 years or a million years ago. Utah’s landscape hasn’t changed much in that amount of time. Goblin Valley looks the same as it did thousands of years ago. It’s easy standing in the middle of that valley to imagine that the rocks around us could be from any era since the birth fo the world.
But, do I have an advantage over someone who lived their entire life in the city with its light pollution?
Probably not. The desert is beautiful, but so is the Eiffel Tower. So, is the Roman Coliseum. So is the Louvre. It’s not about one being better. It is about enjoying what you hve and where you are.
I didn’t go on the Saturday hike. I ended up getting to the trailhead late and the road was washed out. My 15 passenger van was not going to make it. So, I found myself on a ridge waiting for the rest of the group to return, and listening.
What do you hear? Maybe a coworker on the phone. The ding of the elevator. The distant highway. The hum of electronic equipment running. Try to seperate out all of those noises and what do you hear?
At some point you end up with an absence of sound. Nature abhors a vaccume. As I realized I didn’t hear anything familier, I started to hear the unfamilier. The wind through the sagebrush. A distant cricket singing for a mate. But, like the landscape of sand dotted with occasional cactus and sagebrush, the desert air was filled with lots of nothing filled with occasional spots of sound.
Another airplane flew over. It’s distant engines loud in the stillness. I was surprised to hear breathing and realize it was my own. From a quarter mile away I heard my sons playing tag. Their words clear in the still air.
The trucks would be back in a few minutes. I was sure I would hear them well in advance. In the mean time, I enjoyed listening to the vast nothingness that was the Utah desert.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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All I wanted to do was enjoy a couple days with my boys. We go camping a lot, but typically the campouts are arranged by age. My five boys, aged 12-16 span three age groups.
But, the Goblin Valley trip was different. It was a combined trip. All the boys and leaders went. We loaded the van, met the other boys and leaders at the church at 4:00pm and set out, my big van one of a caravan of 6 cars and trucks headed for Southern Utah.
And then my phone rang.
PRIVATE NUMBER flashed on my caller ID. I took a deep breath and swiped to the right.
Hey Rodney, this is Antonio in Salt Lake. Sorry to bother you. We have an issue on the call floor.
How many agents are impacted?
All of them.
Have you talked to Louisville?
Yeah, all there agents are impacted too.
Okay. I need both of you to open tickets and escalate to Incident Management. I also need you to open a ticket with the client. I’ll call them and get a status. Have the incident manager call my cell phone and add me to the conference bridge.
Okay. See you on the bridge.
Oh, and tell them that I’m headed into some canyons and I might lose you.
Will do.
The younger boys in the car stared at me with a “Can we talk now?” look. My 16 year old son just looked at them, “You need to be quiet until he’s done.” The car fell silent except for my multiple phone calls. As the miles passed, I switched back and forth between talking on the bridge with my team and making calls to the client.
My phone lets me make two calls at the same time. I use that feature a lot, especially when I’m on vacation and work interferes. In between calls I turned to my son,
I have a weird job. I don’t know of anyone else who has to take multiple phone calls while on a camping trip.
It’s okay.
Is it? I don’t know. Mabye it is. Maybe my boys will remember me being on the campout with them. Maybe they will instead only remember that “Dad was always on the phone.”
Goblin Valley
Gobline Valley is located in southern Utah. It’s a fun state park. The Goblins are unique rock formations called Hutus. They are anywhere from a few feet to over 2o feet tall rock formations. They look like Goblins. . .sort of. There are hundreds in the park. We won’t really get to see them. See, we get here in the dark and then we play capture the flag under the midnight moon. In the morning, we make an 8 mile hike up Ding and down Dang. There isn’t really time to go tour the Hoodoos.
This week I’ll be writing about my visit to the Valley of the Goblins. Everytime I go on one of these trips, I learn a lot. This one especially.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It happens like magic. Look at it, candy stays. Look away and it disappears.
Tomorrow is Halloween. Millions of little goblins and Harry Potter’s and super heroes will be wandering the neighborhoods in search of that houw that gives out the full sized Snickers bars. Pity the unprepared who leave their porch light on and forget to stock up on candy.
My kids are finally too old for trick-or-treating. My youngest will be 13 next month. They have moved on to parties and movies. Apparently, many of our neighborhood kids have never seen “Haunted Mansion.” So, we’ll have a house full of teenagers.
We’ll still have the candy bowl, of course. And chances are that we’ll end up with extra. Better that than running out, right? Some of that candy will make it work with me to appear in my work candy bowl. And a funny thing will happen there.
I work in a cubicle which is part of a cube-farm. I used to sit right in the middle of the farm. I was directly under a TV and right in a main traffic flow area. It killed my productivity. My ADD is pretty bad. Too many distractions.
A couple of months ago I moved to a corner. A nice quite corner where I have a single cube mate next to me. It’s been great. However, it does mean that my candy bowl stays mostly full. No one “wanders past” my desk. And the guy in the seat next to me doesn’t eat candy. So, my bowl sits there day after day in all its candy goodness. No, I’m not tempted. I pretty much gave up sugar a little over a year ago. (How I Lost 40 lbs And Why You Can’t.)
But, the candy doesn’t disappear very quickly. . . unless. . .
A couple of weeks ago I forgot and left the candy bowl on the desk overnight. Then I was gone for a couple days. When I came back, it was half empty.
What happened? Did my coworkers stop by my desk to see if I was back and help themselves to some M&Ms? Did my seat mate suddenly develop a sweet tooth?
Maybe. (People who work in an office know exactly what happened to it.)
Most likely, it disappeared the same time my garbage can got emptied. Leave a bowl out overnight and I can nearly guarantee that it will decrease. Our office once had a candy bowl that sat on the receptionists desk. It was dropping precipitously every night. We are technology guys. We came up with a technology solution. A web cam was installed and clearly showed the janitor taking a double handful each night.
There are some ethicial questions about putting out candy for anyone to take and then having a problem when someone takes some. I still haven’t decided how I feel about it. However, I put out the candy so that coworkers or visitors who have come to talk to me can enjoy it. It’s like a reward for those willing to come find me hiding in my corner.
I put my candy bowl in my desk each night. It’s doesn’t disappear that way. Of course, it means I still have candy from two months ago.
Maybe I should just bring it home and hand it out tomorrow night.
Happy Halloween.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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I have a friend who who lives in Washington state and is financially comfortable and single. He spends his money on concerts. . .lots of them. In fact, at the beginning of the year, he fills his schedule with concert dates for the year. Being single, he even buys multiple tickets and invites his friends.
I live in Utah, so I don’t go to concerts with my friend. But, that doesn’t mean I don’t go to concerts. I go to a lot of concerts. And while I pay a lot less for my concert tickets, I think I probably enjoy them a lot more. And it has to do with personalization, or how they relate to us.
The same concept can be applied to project meetings, or team meetings, or even company meetings. Like anyone who’s held a job for at least a month, I’ve been to meetings. Lots of meetings. No business is immune. From IT to fast food, everyone has sat through a meeting where the person in charge drones on and on about a topic that while important, is just not that interesting.
Want to make your meetings more interesting? Follow my concert plan. Personalize them. I regularly sit through meetings where we discuss numbers and statistics. I love statistics, but they are boring. No one ever got excited by seeing an 2% increase productivity on an Excel spreadsheet. At our call centers we talk to tens of thousand of people every day. Two percent of ten thousand is 200.
I can talk about the value of increasing our efficiency by two percent, or I can talk about helping an additional two hundred people. We provide services. Helping two hundred more families today than yesterday is kind of a big deal. Imagine if you were providing life saving services. Helping two hundred additional people get clean water, or good housing or a warm meal is kind of a big deal.
But, maybe you don’t work with 10,000 people a day. So, your two percent isn’t a couple hundred people. Does this example work if you interact with only 1,000 people? Or 100? Or 50? It’s not the same. It’s better.
Two percent of 50 is one. Your company cares very much about its products, or services, or processes. If your improvement is a single individual, that becomes your story. Make it personal and you will make it memorable.
The population of Utah recently reached 3,000,000. Yes, I know that my entire state has fewer people than soem of our large cities. I didn’t learn that we have 3,000,000 Utahns because I saw a table of Utah population growth. I saw a newstory. But, the story wasn’t about the demographics. It was about the governor visting a local hospital to welcome the 3,000,000th resident of the state.
If you want them to remember it, make it personal. Tell stories. Use personal examples. Give your numbers faces and names and backgrounds.
Ten thousand men dying in battle is a statistic. One man being run over by an ox cart is a tragedy.
My friend in Washington goes to see the cool bands. The new groups that are touring now, and the bands from our youth that we never could afford in high school. I don’t go to those concerts. But, I go to a lot of concerts. In fact, I went to one yesterday and I’m going to another tonight. Tonight I’m looking forward to hearing one of the violinists. Last night it was a half full concert hall to listen to a wonderful young clarinetist.
If you want them to remember it, personalize it. You can’t get much more personal than this.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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They won’t tell you that. They’ll tell you that they want the truth. They want transparancy. They want to be kept “in the loop.”
They are wrong.
There are at least three areas where your team absolutely wants you to lie. In fact, if you don’t lie, it might just destroy your team.
Lies Of Omission
These are the easiest to justify and the easiest to tell. Just shut up and don’t say anything. Are layoffs a looming possibility? Tell your team and you can kiss their productivity (along with your top performers) goodbye. Is your biggest competitor hinting at making a hostile take over? Spill the beans and you’ll gut your team’s effectiveness but you’ll inspire 1,001 stories of what the (not yet confirmed) changes will bring. Personnel issues, of course should be kept to yourself.
But, these aren’t real lies. These are just avoiding oversharing. Does your team want you to tell them actual lies?
Hard Stuff
I once ran a small software company. We were making a single product, a reservation system for professional rafting companies. Our shipping window was incredibly tight. We HAD to release at the beginning of September. That’s the slow season for rafters, and it’s when they are flush with cash from the recently completed summer. And if they are going to switch their reservation system, it has to happen before December. They lock things down after the start of the year to prepare for the start of the season.
We weren’t going to make it. I’d worked in software a long time. We had too many features, too few weeks left in the calendar and we were not going to be done on time. So, what did I do? I lied to the team.
You guys are AWESOME. We are so going to knock this out of the park. I work with the greatest programmers in the industry!
They didn’t want to hear the truth. They didn’t want to hear that I really thought we were goign to be late. They wanted me to lie to them. And a funny thing happened. They did deliver on time. There were a lot of compromises and I didn’t get everything I wanted, but we shipped a product we could all be proud of on September 1st.
If I had shared my worries and fears with them, do you think they would have risen to the occasion? And that leads to the third lie.
I’ve Got This All Figured Out
I once heard a story about a young second lieutenant who was deployed to Vietnam. His first night out on patrol he got lost.
Sergeant, I don’t know where we are. Do you?
Can I speak with your privately, sir?
Sure.
If you ever again admit that you don’t know what you are doing in front of the men, I will frag you myself. . .sir.
The leader always has a plan. Sometimes, that plan is “under development,” or “not yet ready to be shared publically.” But, as the leader you need to know what you are doing, or you need to convince people that you do.
Most team members don’t want to know the details of the plan. The programmers do not really care about the marketing plan. The Product Managers don’t care what language the code is being written in. The team members just want to know that someone knows what is going on.
Because, here’s the problem; nature abhores a vaccuum, and so does business. If your team doesn’t think you have a plan, they will start to make up their own. They will second guess your decisions. They will worry for their jobs.
But, what if you don’t have a plan? You fake it until you can make it. You lie. Your team will thank you for it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
The audience sat in rapt attention, as the little boy nervously made his way through the dark and cramped tunnel. They listened to the plop, plop, plop of his feet through the water as his flashlight winked out, only the moonlight streaming through the overhead sewer grate up ahead. The shivered in delicious fear as the voice from the dark whispered
You’re not supposed to be here.
Yesterday I got to participate in one of my favorite annual events. I joined an audience of of about 150 people gathered in the Orem Public Library, of all places. Six storytellers took turns trying to scare the audience and us the judges with their tales of suspense and fright. I was a judge for the Timpanogos Storytelling Hauntings contest.
I wasn’t even supposed to be there. Well, I was, but just as a participant. But, a last minute cancellation meant I found myself at the judges table with the nearly impossible task of deciding who’s story was the best told.
Storytelling, like any art has a particular form to it. There are some people who are natural storytellers; who seem to innately know how to tell a good story. But, for most of us, it’s a process. And fortunately, it’s a process that can be learned. And the benefits of it are not just to entertain groups of people around a campfire, although that has it’s place as well.
The tradition of the modern storyteller can be, in many ways, traced back to Mark Twain. Before he became a renowned author, he was a storyteller. As a young man seeking his fortune, he left his home on the Mississippi and traveled west. He travelled to my state of Utah and met with Brigham Young, one of the early leaders of the Mormon church. He travelled to Virginia City, NV and was a silver miner for a while. Eventually, he made his way back home and considered how he might make a living based on his travels. He rented a hall and put up posters announcing that he would be holding lectures describing his adventures in the West.
Twain admits he had no idea if people would come or not. They came. They came and packed the theater where he was speaking. And they continued to come. And his course was set. He eventually wrote the stories down and published them in a book called Roughing It.
But, what makes a good story? Let me answer that by talking about the judging criteria for our contest.
Originality
Stories can be about anything, really. Last night be heard about a couple on their honeymoon to Iceland, young lovers exchanging a ring and a mirror, a walk through the cemetery, Little Orphan Annie, fishing and of course, the boy in the sewer. The trick is to find the uniqueness, and since these were scary stories, to find the chill factor. Some where tales that had been told before. Some were original works. But, the story needs to have a reason for people to listen.
Presentation
Theere is a diffence between writing a story and telling a story. And there’s even a difference with writing a story designed to be told. the art of storytelling is not just the elements of the story itself, but the telling of it. The most effective storytellers use their voice like a musical instrument. They can draw the crowd in with a whisper and set them back in their chairs gasping with a well timed exclamation. Using no props, no movement, just a teller at the microphone, they can take you on a journey of your imagination. The story is important, the telling of it is critical.
Effectiveness
What seperates storytelling from some other performance art forms is that you are right there with your audeince. As judges we had to gauge the effectiveness of the story. Storytellers make themselves a part of the audience and by extension make the audience a part of the story. It’s less a speech and more a conversation. It’s just a conversation where one side is actively talking and the other side is actively listening. And the tellers who did the best connected with teh audience in the telling.
Chill Factor
You might think that a scary storytelling competition would feature lots of blood and gore and disembowled ghouls. This wasn’t that type of competition. Scary stories should be scary, of course. But, there’s a difference between scary and gory. When Steven Spielberg went to make the movie Jaws, he had a problem. The shark looked fake. So, he had to shoot most scenes with just a hint of the shark in them. He actively worked at hiding his fake looking shark, and in the process he scared us all out of the water. It’s our imaginations that provide the move fertile ground for terror. We can scare ourselves much better, with just a hint, than a bloddy gore-fest.
It would be easy to describe storytelling as a lost or a dying art. After all, we don’t really listen to professional storytellers much anymore. Well, not outside of election season. But, it’s there if you want to find it. Utah is blessed with a rich and story storytelling tradition. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with both the Hauntings contest and the Utah’s Biggest Liar competition that happens in the spring.
Take the opportunity to tell stories when you can. They can even make you a better employee, salesman or business owner.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
They were big, and black and directly blocking our path. And there were a lot more of them than there were of us.
I spent much of Saturday straddling a torture device known as a mountain bike. Oh, at the beginning I didn’t consider it a torture device. The scoutmaster and I took 7 boys out to an old railway line that had been converted into a biking trail. One brave dad accompanied us. We were there to make a 22 mile mountain bike trip. It was the final requirement for the Mountain Bike merit badge.
The day dawned cold but clear. It’s late October here in Utah (and everywhere else, of course) and while winter is still a few weeks off, the thin high desert air doesn’t hold the heat and especially in the mountains it’s chilly. It was about 32 degrees at the start.
As we pulled off the highway outside Park City, UT, we started unloading the bikes when one of the boys shouted,
Oh gross! Look at that.
That deer obviously didn’t make it across the highway. The same one we had to shepard 7 boys across.
Don’t touch it. Just ignore it.
It wasn’t the last dead deer we’d see that day.
But, first the cows. As we made it on the trail it looked like the trail went right through a bunch of cows. But, this was an old railway. Did the train have to dodge cows? As I got closer, I noticed the gate. Yep, the trail went right through the cow pasture. Most of the cows wanted nothing to do with us. At least one started acting like a dog that wants to catch your spinning bike tires.
A little faster boys.
It really was a beautiful ride. We were going out 11 miles and then coming back over the same trail.
As mountain bike trails go, it’s a pretty easy trail. The trail map we checked online it said the elevation change was 300 feet over the 11 miles. A walk in the park really. Well, except we were riding. And we were out in the Utah mountains instead of a park. Compared to the challenging rides we did in preparation, this was not a great challenge. Just long.
Like most people, I learned to ride a bike as a kid. But, I don’t ride often. In fact, we have three leaders over the scouts; the scoutmaster, me and another assitant scoutmaster. The other assistant really should have been on the ride. He actually does mountain biking in his spare time. He has a beautiful bike. It has features I’ve never understood.
My bike?
It’s pretty simple compared to many. We had the boys bring their bikes to our Wednesday night meeting last week to prepare for the Saturday ride. I ddn’t bring my bike on Wednesday. I didn’t need to. I was one of the people checking out the kids’ bikes. I could check mine whenever I wanted. Except that I didn’t.
Anyway, the other assistant’s niece was getting married on Saturday. She wasn’t interested in changing the date to not conflict with our ride. I don’t know, maybe he didn’t even bother to ask her.
As we started across the cow pasture and the Utah landscape started slipping past, I noticed an issue with my bike. The front derailer was frozen. It meant I was limited to six gears instead of 18. Except that the back derailer only went up to the five gears.
So, why didn’t I check my bike? Because I stink at time management and my son had some work needed done on his bike and someone at work pushed a computer change through that broke a bunch of stuff. On Wednesday my son’s bike needed a new tube, the rear wheel switched out and new brake pads on the back. I decided I’d do the repairs Friday after work. Unfortunately, work had other ideas. Our system issues started at 5:00pm and continued until about 10:30 pm when we finally resolved everything. Too late to start on a bike repair.
Saturday started at 5:00AM for me. I wanted to give myself plenty of time to make sure his bike was working. During the time I was fixing his bike I got three more calls from work about the previous night’s outage. We needed to be loading up the bikes at 8:00am at the scoutmaster’s house. My bike check? It’s probably fine without a check.
So, the cobbler’s child had shoes, but the cobbler was going barefoot.
The ride was nearly perfect. . .except for one thing. The internet said the starting point and the midway point were 300 feet different in elevation. That was true. It’s also true that you can drown in a lake with an average depth of 3 feet. The trail, even though it was graded for a train, had some pretty severe ups and downs. Someone’s fitbit, or droid, or something electronic told us that the maximum vertical change was about 1100 feet: lots of up and down.
Unfortunately we started at the “uphill” point. So, 11 miles downhill. Then, uphill for the return trip. At about the 15 mile marker we finally decided to split up.
The scoutmaster took half the boys and continued on to the vehicles. I took four boys with me back down the hill back to the halfway point which had now become the finish line.
The goal was to do 22 miles. The requirements didn’t say you couldn’t retrace your route. . .twice. It was also silent on riding with the cows.
But, that was yesterday. The ride was fun. Tiring, but fun. Today? I’m having a little trouble finding a comfortable position to sit. Like I said, it’s a torture device.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
