Sunday, January 20, 2008

The Most Important Learning

There is a study indicating that people in French bistros touch each other 110 times per hour. In English pubs they touch one another an average of three times an hour. Finnish pubs have not been studied.

If you asked me, what I have done lately, I would answer ´Nothing special.´ With no further questions we would pass over to other, probably more interesting topics - the lack of snow and plans for the summer. Sometimes what we name ´Nothing special´ hides something that would be worth paying attention to. Words are used as camouflage. The most important messages are the hidden messages.

´Nothing special´indicates mental laziness. It is an effort to shift the communicative responsibility onto the other person´s shoulders: "You talk. Me listen."

Many of us feel comfortable only when there is somebody else to tell us what to decide, what to do, what to pay attention to. In other words we would prefer having a mother or a wife to organize and control our life. There are men who have a wife whose main function is to control their drinking.

I´m not that much different. I would like to have a wife as well. However, I do not have any, and my mother has always been very reluctant to lead my life. This means that I am compelled to personally activate myself and shift gears to become socially active.

In Finland we are not supposed to talk too much. Nor are we supposed to emphasize our personal comings and goings. That makes it easy to evade building really meaningful social contacts. We appreciate quiet and withdrawing people. We automatically connect those characteristics with intelligence and trustworthiness. You never know what talkative people might end up to. If you are really enthusiastic about something, you had better pretend that you aren´t - that much.

Human beings and dogs are alike. Both are snifflers. No matter who we meet and in what kind of circumstances, we sniffle each other to be able to decide what to do next. Every group of people sends particular messages that you need to recognise if you want to become an accepted member. All cultures have their physical signs to show expertise, professionalism, friendship etc. These rules can be broken, of course, but breaking them makes it more difficult to find shared goals and objectives. A couple of Italians in a Finnish supermarket are easy to detect. Normally behaving Finns in a French bistro must look either stupid or hostile.

Anyway, being a talented sniffler, you never take ´Nothing special´ as a definite answer. Mine wasn´t that either. Really - it wasn´t any nothing-special-week.

On Saturday I went to Helsinki to a business seminar to learn how to build a learning organization "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole (reality) together." (Senge, The Fifth Discipline)

My long-term dream is to build a truly learning organization and I highly appreciate my team memebers who I share this goal with. It is exciting and intriguing to follow this process, to experience what empowerment means in practice.

Straightaway on Sunday we decided to have a nice and quiet strategy meeting with some people at Pajutila. Having arrived there, it was easy to see that the meeting would be nice, but not quiet. The place was absolutely crowded with people because of the 50 per cent sale that had just started. Two enjoyable events for the same day! We just postponed the meeting for later in the evening.

However, those events did not make the past week memorable. There will be other seminars and other opportunities to go to sales. Things and events that can be repeated do not necessarily require any special attention. That is why they tend to just flow away and be replaced by other things and events. Best we remember events that will never occur again and people we won´t be able to meet some other time as well.

My aunt was at the terminal care centre Pirkanmaan hoitokoti close to my house. I went to see her several times a day, which proved that we do not have time, we make it.

As time producing beings we constantly choose what we have time for and what we do with it - as long as there is still some time left in our personal allottment. Hers was getting scanty. Last night there was no more left.

What did I learn during that week?

In our life there are two kinds of people - those we can meet again and those we can´t.

If you have friends whom you meet once every five or ten years, you had better count how many times there are still left - and behave accordingly.

When sniffling around you meet people that might be interesting to learn to know better, do not hesitate to tell them that. Invite them to a French bistro or to an English pub. We have learned all our behaviour patterns in various cultural contexts. If your own culture does not teach you the value of touching, you need to learn from other cultures.

My most important learning during the past week was that when somebody´s allotted time is running out, being present, holding the hand, caressing the cheeks, rubbing the back is the only thing that you can do. And it is the only thing that has any real importance.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Northern Activities

My father had excavators and bulldozers. Their engines were so big that they had to be started by means of a special inbuilt starting engine.

The engine proper may be big and efficient, but without a well-functioning starting engine it is worthless.

Christmastime made me remember my father´s excavators and bulldozers for several reasons. In the beginning of the holiday season I thought that my own engines have just run out of fuel. Having no energy for anything you just want to sleep and sleep and sleep. They say that the special charm of sleeping lies in the fact that in sleep we need not use any energy for controlling our thoughts. Sleeping means saving fuel.

Later I was a bit afraid thinking that maybe it is not just a starting engine problem. The main engine might be kaput. Need more fuel to be able to check the situation.

When are we free? I heard a programme on the radio about free time and free time activities. The general complaint was that free time has become something we feel obliged to fill in with activities in the same way the working time is filled with various tasks and duties. The difference between free time and working time is that the working life activities are more or less given to us. We know what we are supposed to do, but free time is something you need to organize yourself. You make the choices. In other words, you are free, but you need to use your energy to control your thoughts and activities. Instead of generating energy, our programmable free time consumes it. In these circumstances the only possibility to be really free is to sleep.

We had a serious conversation with my daughter. The basic idea she wanted to express was that she never learned to "be by herself". She never saw me just "being by myself". All the time there´s some kind of goal oriented activity going on, probably something worth being included into the cv.

My daughter was right. For generations my family has been known as diligent hardworking people. My father´s family lived on a big lake. There was no road to their tiny farm. On the other side of the lake lived another big family. Their farm was equally small and had no road either.

The difference between the social status of those two families was, however, clear. In my father´s family all of the eight children had their own pair of shoes. On the other side of the lake the children had to share only one pair of shoes. They had less freedom than my father´s family, especially in winter. For instance they had to go out to the toilet taking turns, because walking bare foot on the snow is out of question - unless you are returning from the sauna bath. Additionally that was the time before climatic disturbances.

My mother´s family was no better. My grandfather owned barges and transported wood to St Petersburgh. It was still sailing time when the October revolution in 1917 started. My grandmother told us that someone had come to tell them that shooting was starting and they had better sail back to Finland.

Alongside wood my grandfather traded luxury goods from St Petersburgh. When you have a scalable profession, you need to pay attention to anything around you. You never know where and when business opportunities knock. You learn to be active at all times and in all relations - and that attitude is not only contagious but also hereditary.

Maybe you live in Finland and want to build a house or renovate it. You hire men to do that. It might be useful to know a couple of things first. One of them is that the men come in and they start planning the project with you. Instead of encouraging and complimenting you for all the decisions you have made so far, they will tell you why the project is extremely difficult, expensive and, in fact, absolutely impossible. Listening to them you feel how your own enthusiasm starts fading out. You feel desperate and ashamed and you want to apologise for ever having dreamt of any new or renovated house.

Just when your self-esteem has sunk to the bottom of the ocean, one of the workmen finds a possible solution for one of the problems, then there is another solution for another problem, then one more, until all of the terrible problems have been solved. Still feeling weak you return back to the surface understanding that it is exactly this particular group of heroes you need to hire if you ever want to live in your beautiful dream house - and you feel a special pride for having this opportunity to hire them.

Why am I telling this? The reason is simple and connected with the idea of life-long learning. No matter what you want to achieve in your life, you need the skill of making yourself a hero. If you do not know how to become and be a hero, just start registering how other people do it - and then copy what they do.

Another thing you need to know about hiring men for your building project in Finland is that one day nothing happens on the site. They do not come. Neither do they answer the phone. Then all of a sudden the work starts again without any explanations. You smell the old alcohol and feel relieved, because you hired heroes and you want to keep them. What you need to know is that heroes never get tired. They cannot take a normal holiday because of tiredness, but they can go for a drunken spree for a couple of weeks. Heroes have their faults, but they have no signs of weakness.

In the old days, long before the climatic changes, Finnish people more or less slept through the winter. The pace of life slowed down. Because of all online global contacts we cannot afford that any more. We just go on. This reminds me of our traditional all-the-year-round activities and of a true story that took place in Lapland.

Somebody coming from the south of Finland asked a Saame man in Lapland what activities these poor people have there, so isolated and so far up north. The man answered: "In summer we fish and make love. In winter we do not fish."

That is the normal life we would be leading here, if there were no railway and airplane timetables. In summer 1959 my father built the road to Utsjoki, the northernmost commune of Finland. The name of his bulldozer traxvator was Caterpillar 955. That is how and when the postal bus with its regular time table arrived in Utsjoki making use of diligent, hardworking people. Maybe it would, in the long run, be more valuable to turn back to the basics and not fish that much.

You might like to see what Utsjoki looks like - without any time tables.