After a very busy year workwise with breaks to Sardinia, Croatia and France thrown in culminating in a number of business trips in November and December, followed by an enjoyable series of Christmas celebrations with family and friends, (during which I pulled a muscle in my back and twisted my knee again!) what of all the possible activities did I choose to do to relax over the holidays? 
 
I built or rather extended a rockery in our garden. Not you would have thought very relaxing. It involved Googling how to design a rock garden then digging, moving topsoil, laying some small stones for drainage, building a path, rolling heavy rocks from across the garden (where they had got hidden in undergrowth) and then some planting. The finishing touch was a small antique white stone hippo brought for a very good price at the local garden centre.
 
A crazy way to wind down at first sight, but then I realised as I thought more about it that actually the activity and the result is both rewarding and therapeutic - a complete antidote to overworking and then over indulging in food and wine. Even my back and knee seem fine.
 
Rock gardens or alpine gardens date back to early Chinese and Japanese culture becoming very popular in Victorian times. See this Brief History which comments that The Chinese, especially,  have a tradition of mountain worship and rockery in gardens to recreate mountain scenes and these can be seen as early as the late Yin and early Zhou dynasties (1600 BC- 771 BC). They create a space in a garden which can be both relaxing and calming - somewhere you can contemplate.
 
As I thought back over the year of 2018 and how to approach the new year which is just around the corner I realised that I had, perhaps accidentally, hit upon one of the things which is so important in our busy professional working lives – the ability to find ways to get away from everything for a time and put things into their proper perspective – even if it involves hard physical labour!
 
It seems gardening can reduce stress more than relaxing with a good book – see this article which says  in an experiment subjects were asked to perform a stressful task and then asked to either perform 30 minutes of gardening in their allotment gardens or 30 minutes of reading. While both groups experienced a decrease in stress, the gardeners experienced a significantly greater decline in stress (as measured by salivary cortisol, a stress hormone), as well as a full restoration of positive mood; the readers actually experienced a further decline in mood.
 
I am not advocating gardening per se but just finding a way of doing something completely different as a means of winding down – and maybe cementing the lessons of the last year and looking forward to the next one.
 
May you all find ways to relax and sum up the lessons of the past year and take them forward into the New Year.
 
As Lyndon B. Johnson said Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

As we approach the festive season, which is so much about socialising, and as I struggled back from a business trip to Gatwick airport after the drone strikes, I was thinking about the effectiveness of communication in business negotiations.
 
A “negotiation” is a discussion aimed at reaching an agreement. A presentation is a formal talk, often in order to sell something or get support for a proposal. These two concepts can get mixed up and too much “presentation” can defeat the purpose of a dialogue between two parties.
 
I have been involved in different outsourcing contract negotiations over 2018, all with their unique dynamics and challenges. One of the things I have recognised more and more over the year is the importance of preparing before going into dialogue sessions. It is critical to have worked out what you want to say on any issue and to secure buy in from your team, especially those who will be present in the room. It helps to articulate this negotiating position succinctly, for example, in PowerPoint slides.
 
However, I have also learnt that it can be a mistake to assume that your side can then simply turn up and make the PowerPoint presentation and hey presto the issues will all be agreed. The reality is that the other team across the table will have a point of view they will also want to put forward – especially if they are the customer. They will not be happy if they are being “told” what the position will be.
 
And the thing is the better you are at your job, the more you know it the more you want to speak or present and not listen. As a recent Harvard Law School blog commented the temptation to talk instead of listening increases the more educated a negotiator is and the more she knows about the topic at hand. Ironically, smart people are most prone to making the mistake of not listening.
 
As somebody once sagely told me if you are a one-eyed man in the land of the blind nobody likes you because you keep telling them what they cannot perhaps yet know. Or to put another way as Harri Holkeri the Finnish statesman and prime minister said “If you come to a negotiation table saying you have the final truth, that you know nothing but the truth and that is final, you will get nothing.”
 
Therefore, a far better approach is to work up your negotiating position in a way that could be presented if required, creating slides and whatever other support documentation may be useful. However, you then go in and listen first and bring in your points at the appropriate stage in the discussion. This is then a proper dialogue and often you learn things of advantage to your side that you never would have done if you simply “present” your position. You may still be able at the right time to use one or more of your pre-prepared slides to illustrate a point.
 
The secret is to get a genuine exchange of views as part of a “discourse” in the sense of written or spoken communication or debate. Apart from clarifying everybody’s understanding this sort of iterative discussion starts to create the building blocks of the good working relationship that will be essential once the contract is signed and service delivery commences.
 
There is intriguingly it seems some academic recognition of the contribution that discourse make to negotiations – see for example this book “The Discourse of Negotiation” which takes the position that negotiation implies collective decision making, and in this sense, almost anything is potentially "negotiable", including obligations, information, decisions, services, status, territory and public image. Negotiation requires complex interaction with one's fellow actors, and the pursuance of potentially conflicting goals.
 
The Oxford scholar Theodore Zeldin says Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards. 
 
The same is true in negotiation. Have a great Christmas break hopefully communicating mainly with your friends and family and not business colleagues!

When I was younger I thought feedback was something rock musicians experienced when they were playing an electric guitar and got too close to an amplifier - An uncontrollable, high-pitched, squealing feedback that hurts the ears of everyone. More enterprising musicians like David Bowie, Lou Reed and Frank Zappa tamed and utilised this phenomenon to enhance their music.
 
Nowadays “feedback” is more often than not associated with formal or informal comments about how you do your job. The Oxford Living Dictionary defines this sort of feedback as Information about reactions to a product, a person's performance of a task, etc. which is used as a basis for improvement. It used to be more one way – a boss telling you how to do the job better. Nowadays it can be given by anyone – colleagues, managers, subordinates. It can be 180 degree feedback where your raters are at the same level as you (peers or colleagues), and a person you report to. Or you can have 360 degree feedback defined by Wikipedia as a process through which feedback from an employee's subordinates, colleagues, and supervisor, as well as a self-evaluation by the employee themselves is gathered.
 
In fact, it seems there can be any manner of degree of performance appraisal from 90 degrees to 720 degrees – see this academic article which describes each of these. A 720 degree appraisal is basically a 360 degree appraisal performed twice and performance is appraised from 5 dimensions and feedback.
 
Have we all gone mad - 720 degree feedback! But the real issue is whether feedback is constructive or destructive. As I look back over the last 12 months I or the teams I have been in have definitely received both. As this short guide suggests bad feedback Demotivates, focuses on blame; creates defensiveness and confrontationwhereas good feedback Encourages, focuses on improvements – achieved or possible; creates trust and cooperation.
 
I like this article Learning to Deliver Feedback Effectively: Good and Bad Examples which starts with a quote from Ken Blanchard, an author and management expert,  “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” and goes on to cite some good examples of positive and negative feedback.
 
This article cites a Harvard study which indicates that giving or receiving peer-to-peer negative feedback rarely leads to improvement.It suggests that:
 
"There's an assumption that what motivates people to improve is the realization that they're not as good as they think they are. But in fact, it just makes them go find people who will not shine that light on them. It may not be having the intended effect at all."
 
I think this is the challenge. We may well not be able to improve if we are never given negative feedback, but given feedback the wrong way we may become defensive. It also depends on our basic makeup and how we receive any kind of criticism or indeed praise – do we have a fixed mindset which tend to make us over sensitive to negative feedback of a growth mindset which embraces an opportunity to learn -  see the Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck’s excellent book mindset.
 
Delivered or received the wrong way feedback may at best be ignored or at worst act as a real disincentive to improve. As George Bernard Shaw commented truthfully if a little enigmatically “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
 
Ultimately feedback should be at the very least sensitive as to its likely impact and as sympathetic and understanding as is possible in the circumstances. It should as with electric guitar feedback be used constructively, in the way Jimi Hendrix, one of the innovators in this musical form, did - and not just be a high-pitched whining noise. The American writer and cartoonist Frank A. Clark said “Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man’s growth without destroying his roots.”

This weekend I am on a once every six months “retreat” to a health spa in a country setting in Sussex where the buildings are developed around an old manor house overlooking a lake. I find this a great way to relax and recharge my batteries especially prior to the busy but enjoyable Christmas festive season where work is inevitably pressurised as the year end approaches and social life moves up several gears.
 
I went to a Kundalini yoga class this morning, not something I regularly do, but it is very relaxing and helps put things in proportion. In this context the yoga teacher suggested something that rang a broader bell for me. A couple of times as we relaxed after some yoga posture she said “scan your bodies” looking for any tension or tightness.
 
It struck me how little we actually do this. We wait for something to “break” and then try and fix it. The same is I suggest true in working life in that it is really hard to find and take the time to sit back after say a particularly complex negotiation or other intense and challenging professional activity and to review how things have gone and to reflect, perhaps a bit self critically, on your performance – what went well, what didn’t, what could be done differently next time. 
 
It’s to some extent about being “self-aware” – see this article which sums this personal skill as being about knowing your emotions, your personal strengths and weaknesses, and having a strong sense of your own worthand this Guide to Cultivating Self-Awareness: A Foundational Skill for Emotional Intelligence which defines self-awareness as  Self-awareness is the ability to know what we are doing as we do it and understand why we are doing itand commences with:
 
In Ancient Greece, at the front courtyard at Delphi, the former shrine to the oracle Pythia, there was an inscription:
 
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
 
It translates to “know thyself,” a famous aphorism often attributed to Socrates or Plato. 
 
However, whilst I acknowledge that understanding yourself is a part of critical “self-scanning”, perhaps the greatest challenge in our busy lives these days is actually finding the time and indeed the motivation to do this in the first place. It’s all too easy to move on regardless to the next IM, email or Skype meeting or whatever is in your Google or Outlook calendar.
 
In this context I like this Harvard Business School article Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure which suggests We often take a militaristic, “tough” approach to resilience and grit. We imagine a Marine slogging through the mud, a boxer going one more round, or a football player picking himself up off the turf for one more play. We believe that the longer we tough it out, the tougher we are, and therefore the more successful we will be. However, this entire conception is scientifically inaccurate.
 
It concludes: You can use apps like Offtime or Unplugged to create tech free zones by strategically scheduling automatic airplane modes. In addition, you can take a cognitive break every 90 minutes to recharge your batteries. Try to not have lunch at your desk, but instead spend time outside or with your friends — not talking about work.
 
I suggest that we are better off taking the time to unplug from our myriad of electronic devices and to reflect and learn from our daily working experiences. Victor Hugo said in a different time and age well before technology changed our lives “He who every morning plans the transactions of that day and follows that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.”
 
As Confucius said “Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated” !

 An amanuensis was originally a literary or artistic assistant, in particular one who takes dictation or copies manuscripts. All professional people used to have some sort of support from a secretary or at least a word processing pool. Now we all hot desk and work from home using admittedly vastly improved technology, but without this support, often to the detriment of our work because we have to focus on mundane tasks in order to do our real job.
 
By way of example we recently had somebody professionally clean our oven to fit in with the new kitchen we have sort of built around it. The man was very thorough, but he also had to run his appointment system, and deal with all manner of questions from other customers, at the same time. As a result, he was forever taking phone calls whilst trying to do the cleaning with one hand. He eventually did a good job, but I can’t believe he truly did justice to the different tasks he was trying to do at the same time - and at the very least each visit took him longer adding to his already busy agenda.
 
Maybe help is at hand though. We can use personal assistants on our phones like Siri which is Apple's voice-controlled personal assistant - see this article. Siri competes  with Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. 
 
Siri and the other personal assistants can actually do quite a lot - read your last email, send a text, let you know what films are playing today, find a table for three in London, call your friend at work, set an alarm – or as with me yesterday give me the weather forecast when I was out working the dog.
 
However, when you ask people what they use this current range of digital helpers for more often than not it is just to set alarms to remind them when for example dinner will be cooked. I think we are just scratching the surface of the use to which we can put voice enabled assistants.
 
This article 7 Key Predictions For The Future Of Voice Assistants And AI captures where we may be going to with conversational user interfaces commenting that contextual understanding is important - the Google Assistant has already charged ahead of the game as the technology has understood the context of follow-up questions since early last year.
 
This articlefrom Business Insider refers to interviews with Harry Shum, EVP of AI and Microsoft president Brad Smith about their new book "The Future Computed" 
and suggests Twenty years from now, Microsoft and its competitors will be offering personal digital assistants that will offer the services of a full-time employee usually reserved for the rich and famous.
 
There is also an amusing side to digital assistants – see this site for Siri sayings including “What is the meaning of life – all evidence to date suggests it is chocolate”. To be fair Siri seems to be learning – I asked the same question today and received the answer “I Kant answer that. Ha ha” and then a few minutes later “I find it odd that you would ask this of an inanimate object”!
 
The American writer Anthony J. D'Angelo once said Always be nice to secretaries. They are the real gatekeepers in the world. Maybe voice guided AI helpers will be our future as professionals and we had better get used to working with them.
 
For as the Twentieth Century economist Leo Cherne said The Computer is incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.
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