Ofman’s model looks like this:

It’s a nice and simple model (I think a cyclical design is always intuitive), but let’s run through it step by step before we start applying Lumina terminology.

The first bubble here is Core Quality. Ofman’s understanding of ‘quality’ is basically the same as ours: it’s a key character trait or tendency. Let’s leave the Spark qualities aside for a moment and use something more general. A good example – and one that’s often used to demonstrate how the circle works – is ‘drive‘. I have ‘drive’ if I have get-up-and-go, if I’m purposeful and have lots of energy and focus.

Drive is useful, but too much of it can be inappropriate. Too much of a quality in Ofman’s model leads to what he calls the Pitfall, where we overuse a quality. The pitfall in this model is similar to our over-extended persona as displayed by Lumina Spark. Too much drive could be an inability to switch off, a failure to be objective, or even a lack of tact or rudeness.

But if you find the inverse of too much drive, what Ofman calls the Positive Opposite, you get calmness, peace, self-control. This is definitely useful, and exactly what you want to balance out your drive. The Core Quality and what Ofman calls the Challenge are the perfect balance for your personality.

Over-extend the challenge and you again find trouble. Too much calmness or peace could result in inactivity, even laziness. Laziness is the antithesis of drive, and so it’s likely to be very irritating for someone who’s driven. Hence Ofman’s decision to label this bubble the Allergy.

The positive opposite of laziness? Drive. So the whole model is a neat circle.

Let’s go through it again from a Lumina Spark perspective. I’m going to re-label the concepts just for now, to better fit with the Lumina terminology. We’ll start with the core quality, which we’ll label for now as a Trait (since Lumina Spark is often described as being ‘trait, not type’).

I’ll use one of my key traits, which is in the green/yellow area of the mandala. Being FLEXIBLE is really useful for me. It lets me bring in new ideas from lots of different sources, lets me react to events as they happen, and lets me always keep an open mind to new opportunities and new ways of thinking.

 So here’s the first part of the model, and my trait is FLEXIBLE.

What happens when you have too much of a trait? You may find that quality can betray you, let you down when you need it, or not be appropriate for the situation you’re in. For the sake of neatness, let’s say it can become a Traitor.

If I exercise too much flexibility, and don’t ever try and tie myself down, I find my working life becoming CHAOTIC, which is the Lumina Spark over-extended version of flexible.

So my trait become a traitor, and my life gets CHAOTIC.

So I need something to get me out of this chaotic mood. I need a Challenger to my current way of thinking. What’s the opposite of chaotic? It’s definitely STRUCTURED, which, surprise surprise, is on the opposite side of the Lumina Mandala, and is a red/blue quality. 

The challenge to chaos is STRUCTURE.

But I don’t want too much structure. Too much structure makes me rigid, makes me PLANNING OBSESSED. I lose the best of my work style, I lose all the new ideas, the adaptability and flow. I also find people who are planning obsessed really, really irritating. I can’t stand it when people are get bogged down in the minutia and never just get started, cease the day and see what happens. They get right up my nose, so I think I’ll just stick with calling it an Allergy.

I’m allergic to people who are PLANNING OBSESSED.

The opposite of PLANNING OBSESSED? FLEXIBLE, and we’re back to my side of the mandala again. But I should remember that too much flexibility can actually handicap me, and that sometimes I need a little structure. I just need to make sure not to overcompensate.

Ofman’s model is useful because it can be applied to teams as well as individuals. The person that really irritates you on a team may be over-extending the quality that’s opposite to yours. At the same time, the person that really challenges you on a team might be exactly the person you need to balance out your personal strengths.

In other news, we’ve published a free booklet on psychometrics, and so far it’s been really well received. You can go here to download a free copy, or order a free copy in the post.

Lots of other people don’t have it so lucky. A recent survey has shown that one in four staff complain of “chronic boredom.” I had always assumed that being bored at work was easier than being overworked and stressed. If all you do is sit around on BBC Sport and drink coffee… well, it can’t be that bad, can it?

So I was interested to discover that being bored at work is actually just as bad for you as being constantly under pressure. In fact, it can even be worse for your health! Researchers from the University of Central Lancashire found that people who are consistently bored are more likely to resort to chocolate and coffee pick-me-ups to get them through the day. Not a massive surprise, but bored staff are also more likely to have an alcoholic drink at the end of the day, which I found interesting (especially as all I ever seem to hear in the pub is how hard people work).

Researchers from University College London followed more than 7,000 civil servants for more than 25 years and found that those who complained of chronic boredom were 2.5 times more likely to die before their time of heart attack or stroke. Possibly because they eat all that chocolate and drink all that coffee and booze, but the result is still an eye-opener.

I’m going to quote directly from the article I found on this:

“There is an opposite state to the widely known ‘burn-out’, and that’s ‘rust-out’ – where people are in un-stimulating and undemanding jobs and they get bored,” says corporate psychologist Ben Williams. “Ironically this has very similar effects on their health than if they were over-worked and highly stressed. Their health suffers and from a corporate point of view they ultimately become less productive.”

I suppose people don’t complain about being bored as much as being overworked because they don’t want to be mocked or looked down on. But it turns out that being overworked is actually a preferable state. According to this article from Psychology Today, a survey by Sirota Consulting LLC of more than 800,000 employees at 61 organizations worldwide found those with “too little work” gave an overall job satisfaction rating of 49 out of 100, while those with “too much work” had a rating of 57.

Jeffrey M. Saltzman, chief executive of Sirota, said “When you say you have too much work to do, other things are happening in your head: ‘I’m valued by the organization. They’re giving me responsibility.’ That’s better than being in the other place where you say I’m not of value in this place.”

So boredom stresses you out, and makes you less productive. I think that a lot of what we do at Inspire is simply combating boredom: we demonstrate better, quicker ways to do things that are more stimulating. The less time you have to devote to monotony the more creative and empowered you are in the rest of your work. It’s not just a matter of available time: being bored had a negative impact on your creativity all day!
The article I reference above suggests three reasons why you might be bored at work. They’re pretty comprehensive, but I think I can suggest simpler, more inclusive ones. The good news is that all three can be addressed.

1. You’re underworked. You literally don’t have enough to do in the day. You might have to stretch out the tasks you’re given to fill up time. You might have given up on asking your supervisor for more tasks, or you might spend most of your time waiting for other people to give you the go ahead/return their feedback so you can move on. This also counts if you feel your work isn’t important or noticed. You might spend all day slogging away, but if your work has no effect or impact… well, you might as well not be bothering.

Solution: there’s always more work to be done if you can find it. The first step is to talk to people: inform your colleagues and employer. Not in a bragging way (“This is too easy! Bring me a greater challenge!”), but in a manner that demonstrates that you’re being underutilised. Finally, discuss taking on jobs outside of your orbit. Just because a company doesn’t have a person doing a specific task, doesn’t mean that task doesn’t exist. There might be new things to do that are well out of your current jurisdiction that might benefit the company. You’ll appear enthusiastic, and have an opportunity to broaden your skillset and experience. Just don’t bite off more than you can chew!

2. You’re uninterested in what you do. There might be a disconnect between what you do and how you feel about it. Your job might be busy, challenging, even stressful, but if you don’t feel involved or enthusiastic about what you do then you can still feel bored. These feelings of antipathy can develop even if you once felt involved. You might feel constrained by processes beyond your control.

Solution: again, talk to people. Firstly, just to get a sense of why your job is necessary: who it affects, and what else they might need from you. Secondly, it’ll give you a sense of what you might prefer to do. If there’s really nothing within your current environment that you might find satisfying, you could consider looking elsewhere, but you’d be surprised how often a change is good enough. If you’re bored in a job that once enthused you, it may be that you’re stuck in your comfort zone, or that you feel constrained by rules that you no longer need to follow. This Guardian article points out that many jobs contain prescriptive guidelines: people assume that there’s only one way of doing things. But you may have more autonomy than you think. If you were presented with a specific way of doing things on day 1, and it’s now day 1000, think about whether those rules still apply to you. Ask your colleagues and employer if it might be appropriate for you to shake things up a bit. Bosses might be surprised to find that you aren’t being stretched, and if you can suggest work methods that are generally more productive or useful, they aren’t likely to mind you going off piste!

3. Your work simply isn’t challenging. You have stuff to do all day, but you find it easy, or dull. You rarely feel stretched.

Solution: it might be time to look elsewhere. This doesn’t necessarily mean quitting or anything so dramatic, but you may have to look outside your work environment. The first option is to begin learning something else, either through work or in your personal life. If your job isn’t challenging, find something that is. If you can up-skill then fantastic, but you’ll find that doing something diverting outside your job will have a positive impact inside. And in the end… well, perhaps you’ll have to find something else. People do outgrow their jobs.

Remember, if you’re bored, and you’re actually working hard, then you’re being underutilised. It’s not in anyone’s interests to get less out of you than you can give. I think in a lot of cases people don’t consider seeking extra activities: your job is your job and you don’t often look outside of it. Being bored can sap your energy, even the energy you need to look for something more interesting! The first step is to admit to yourself that you’re bored, and then decide to do something about it. Don’t be ashamed to say so. Being ashamed is boring.

Elements is, as the name suggests, a style guide. It’s probably the most famous style guide for writing there is, and as such is much quoted and debated by copywriters. It’s more than 50 years old now and is on at least its fourth edition.

Joshua was complaining (he does that a lot) about people’s rigid adherence to the advice of Elements. With most copywriting words are at a premium, and so it makes sense to have some guidelines. Copywriting is – to a certain extent – measurable in a way that other writing isn’t. You can judge if something is good copy by how successful it is at achieving its aims. It could be increased clickthrough or sales, or how many people sign up to content, but most copy is written with an expressed purpose: we want more of this, or we want less of that.

Creative writing is less rigid, and this was where Joshua’s complaints lay. Sometimes rules can be constricting, and simply mentioning them in every situation does not provide good criticism.

One of Strunk and White’s gems of wisdom is to use adverbs sparingly, and this was what had got Joshua’s goat. He does have a tendency to be wordy and I think he was just sick of hearing the same piece of advice over and over. “I want to know,” he said, “whether the adverbs are correct and useful or not. Why should I have to take them all out just to satisfy some old advice? What’s the point in having these words if we aren’t allowed to use them?”

I think some of his complaints were tongue in cheek: Joshua knows how important it is to be clear and quick in your writing. I’ve also seen him with his nose stuck in Elements, so I know he doesn’t dismiss it entirely. It was people’s unthinking attachment to the rules that had annoyed him, and their tendency to use it to show they were correct without really thinking about it. He sent me this article a little later:

http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497

The author seems even more irritated than Joshua! He makes some good points (I’ll admit to being terrible with grammar so there were lots of things I’d never noticed or didn’t even understand), but I think in some cases he missed the point.

Firstly, Elements is a style guide, and although Strunk and White speak with authority they can hardly be blamed if people slavishly follow their every word. Secondly they were advising beginners, not people with a sublime grasp of grammar and language. If, like the writer of the article above, you were a master of the English language in all its mystery, why would you need a style guide in the first place?

This follow up article says it all very well:

http://blog.thisyoungeconomist.com/2009/06/elements-of-style-50-years-of-bad.html

I think the point – from both articles, as it turns out – is to think carefully about following ‘the rules.’ Why are they in place, when were they designed, and by whom? The latter article points out that knowing the rules well is essential if you want to bend them effectively. But knowing the rules – or at least researching them well – is also essential if you want to change them.

It’s easy to let things get entrenched in business culture. It’s all very well to read about innovation or being direct or constant evaluation but to actually do it is another thing. For the most part, people are just too busy. There’s work to be done, and no time to constantly question the method. Rules are often an attempt to streamline things. A ‘style guide’ is really a time-saving tool. You want to write well, but you don’t want to agonise over every choice. If you follow the examples of Elements you don’t have to (for better or worse – but at least it’s quicker). And once you’ve laid down some ground rules that make sense you can become a bit more sophisticated.

That’s really what Inspire – and by extension, all business training – is for. We have an opportunity to look objectively at the rules and conventions of a business and say: do these work? If not, why not, and can they be improved? Are there better ones we could suggest?

Because that’s our only objective, we can devote all our energy to it. That’s one of the main reasons why trainers are necessary and effective – we can do things that businesses simply don’t have the time and resources to do.

I quite like thinking of Inspire as a ‘style guide’ for other companies. Maybe that’s a bit immodest, and I’m certainly not saying that people ought to follow out suggestions to the letter! But something like the Effortless Inbox sessions that we ran recently could be compared to Elements – we thought about some major problems that needed addressing and came up with a style that we thought could be applied in most cases. Obviously it won’t be an exact fit for everybody and those who have their own sophisticated methods will be less likely to need it, but that’s a lot like a real-life style guide.

I think Strunk and White must have made some good points to have their book last so long, and be read and used by so many. Perhaps in time attitudes will change and their way of writing will be seen as outdated, but for now I think it still deserves most of its acclaim. Hopefully our training sessions have a similar effect!

I just love that. I love how English it is, in every aspect. We wanted a dry spell, and now we’re being doubly punished for it!

The idea of ‘the wrong sort of rain’ might sound ridiculous, but solutions to problems are rarely 1 to 1 simple. In fact, I’d posit that if you have a 1 to 1 problem, you don’t really have a problem at all, you just have a chain of cause and effect. If all you need to address an issue is to acquire something, it’s simply a matter of doing just that.

But if your problem requires an integrated solution, then acquisition alone isn’t going to cut it. In fact, these are the sort of situations where you can get too much of a good thing, or resources going to waste. You say you need more traffic on your website. But what is that traffic for, and what is it going to do? You need to start at the bottom, creating a system that can effectively handle and utilise that traffic, before you go out hounding for more. Otherwise it’s just a waste of energy. You get what you wanted, but it doesn’t do you any good – the wrong sort of rain!

This reminds me of a situation we used Lumina Spark to address. A fairly major client was having integration problems after a merger. They absolutely had all the resources they needed: the talent and tools available to them were immense. They had excellent people, but they were still struggling to maximise results.

What was required – and what Lumina Spark provided – was a ground floor approach. The resources were already there, they just needed a better atmosphere and process to make use of them.

The Met Office are being a bit glib when they say it’s the wrong sort of rain. What they mean is that it’s the wrong sort of ground, and the wrong season. Two years of drought have left the soil rock solid, so the rain tends to run off. Because it’s spring – and because of the burst of really good weather we had about a month ago – there are also lots of leafing plants about, and these tend to drink up a lot of the moisture.

We can’t do much about the ground (although come to think about it, we can’t do much about the rain either). But that’s Mother Nature, not human nature. There is rarely a workplace system so entrenched or stagnant that it can’t be improved or removed.

Rather than looking for new resources – rather than looking to acquire – to solve a problem, ask yourself whether the failure is not with acquisition but with integration. The better your integration strategy, the more you can extract from resources, even if they’re scarce. You might also find that it’s easier to adapt to different avenues of supply, even completely novel ones, so that you never have ‘the wrong sort of rain.’

We generate a lot of high-quality printed materials at the office. Handouts for seminars and workshops, workbooks and guides for various training programmes, Lumina Spark portraits by the truckload. We have some top end printers and it’s quite nice to produce all your materials in-house. It means you can tweak things or correct mistakes without wasting too much time, and there’s something very satisfying about generating quality materials yourself.

Except when we have printer trouble, of course. Then it doesn’t go so smoothly. Poor Stevie has been all around town trying to sort things out. Luckily there are always other options, and everything is going to get done. But it can be frustrating when a system that was working well – and that you’ve therefore come to rely on – breaks down entirely.
I said in jest earlier on that I had failed to negotiate with the printer. I would have liked to give it a try, though. One of the most annoying aspects of technology is the impersonal nature of dealing with problems. If something breaks down you can’t reason with it or negotiate. It’s even more frustrating when it involves a software problem or something similar. Lots of non-techie people are almost reduced to tears by programmes / websites / design packages refusing to work how you want, with seemingly no indication as to why.

A constant example is the Microsoft Office package, because Microsoft feel compelled to change things with every release. They do this to make it easier and more streamlined to use – of this I have no doubt – but because it takes a few years for each new version to be released most people have learned and ingrained the method of using the previous version. You upgrade Microsoft Word from 2007 to 2010 and suddenly all the buttons have migrated and none of the menus make sense any more. You can’t politely ask Word to go back to the old version – which worked perfectly well for you – so you have to start learning again.

Our printer probably has a mechanical problem, but I have no idea what it might be. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could talk to electronics in the same way you can talk to people? If your computer starts doing something bizarre, you could just ask it nicely to… stop. If there’s a problem you don’t understand you could just ask. As search and help functions get better we come a little closer to this… but just a little.

What’s interesting to me is how infrequently people use the opportunity to talk to people in real life, despite how frustrating they find technology. Often people – especially when they are at work – will allow a situation to develop into a problem before they talk to someone about changing things. We’ve been discussing email a lot recently and one of the things I’ve noticed when we’ve been training in-house is that lots of people use email as their primary mode of communication with people they work with in the same office. They send short, informal but professional messages all day long, rather than getting up and talking to someone they sit less than 30ft away from.

Email is limited as a communication form simply because we aren’t evolved to use it. Everything about our brains is developed to deal with face-to-face talking. Pitch, tone, body-language, expression; human communication is feast of audio-visual data. Stripping it down to the bare bones can be confusing and frustrating – a little like talking to a computer. It’s almost always more practical to talk to a person rather than send them an email.

It’s puzzling that –even though we have various examples of how frustrating it can be to be blocked by something that won’t talk back – we still persist in limiting our communication options. I think improving communication skills is important. I think what’s as important is reminding people that they can communicate in the first place.