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In late 2005 I joined a new unit of BBC News called Mediaport.  This was the BBC’s central recording team responsible for maintaining the organisation’s new digital recording system, called Jupiter, and recording incoming video.  It was one of the most challenging assignments I had at the BBC, and the one that taught me most about leadership and staff engagement, thanks to the amazing, largely unsung heroes who worked there.

The core function of Mediaport was a thankless task.  When we did our job perfectly, no one noticed.  They rightly assumed that recordings of news footage would be made day in, day out without error.  But, like a goalkeeper whose every mistake, however small, is likely to lead to a goal, whenever we made the slightest error, it was immediately a big deal because we could have failed to record a video required for the news. Busy news producers are not blessed with the time to be patient or forgiving of such errors.

Add in the fact that the Jupiter system was in mid rollout in 2005/2006.  Like many IT systems, particularly those designed to do complicated tasks for thousands of users, the rollout was not always smooth.  There were times when recordings failed through no fault of ours.  Yet human nature is such that it’s often the innocent messenger that gets the blame for bad news. And so it was for Mediaport staff who were often the bearers of the bad news that “your recording failed” and were often the recipients of unjustified criticism as a result, as if we were personally responsible for the functioning of the technology we operated.

Continue reading “The incomparable advantage of a positive attitude: in tribute to Jo Gage”

I’ve just come across the most wonderful story in the book On Form, by Mike Brearley.  Brearley, the former England cricket captain, now a psychoanalyst and lecturer on leadership and motivation, explores what it means to be “in form”, the wonderful state of being where you are at seemingly effortless peak performance. As you would expect, it includes a lot of cricketing examples.  One of them reminded me of this post I published in 2016.

Mike Brearley writes about Mike Atherton’s great innings in 1995 where he batted for almost 11 hours against ferocious bowling from Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock to score 185 not out to save a test match against South Africa. He quotes the journalist Scyld Berry, who covered the match, saying Atherton was “serenely calm” and in a “trance-like state”. He had no fear of failure, according to Berry: because he was

.. too far above the battle to notice, too inwardly certain of success to think for one moment of failure.

Mike Brearley says it’s the same quality that children have when they are absorbed in play. And he tells this lovely anecdote.

I like the story told by the educationalist Kenneth Robinson of a six-year-old who was asked by her teacher what she was doing. “I’m drawing a picture of God,” she said.

“But,” said the teacher, “no one knows what God looks like.”

Quick as a flash the girl replied: “They will in a minute.”

So there’s an inspiration as you try to find form yourself.  Try to regain the seriousness and sense of infallible purpose you had as a child at play. Continue reading “UPDATE: Childish ways to maximise happiness AND PERFORMANCE”