Project J

Like some of my best ideas this one came to me one morning while in the shower. Not sure what it is about ideas and the shower, maybe the white noise and warmth of the water provides a calming effect...anyway before this gets too deep and analytical I want to write about my idea which I'm calling (for the lack of any better description) Project J.

Karen

Karen & Diesel January 2017

The seeds of the idea were laid in March 17. I was planning the funeral of my wife Karen. We had been married 26 years and have two wonderful grown up kids, she was a lovely person and people took advantage of that to the extent that over the last few years of her life she felt like she was being bullied/victimized and just generally treated unfairly in her working environment. I'm no mental health expert but believe the constant drip..drip..drip of negative experiences led her in a very short space of time ( a week or two) to become desperately paranoid. Of course I didn't know it was paranoia at the time, it came on so fast that I barely had time to think but I did know she was becoming "mental" to the point that I suggested we go see someone in the Mental Health and Welfare department. Of course that was a non-starter for her due to the stigma attached to having mental health issues but perhaps it could have saved her. I later visted the MIND website and worked out that Karen was hitting most of the indicators associated with Paranoia 

Valentines Day 2016

Valentines Day came and went, it was a sorry affair, I was focused on trying to get a new job and planning for an interview on the 17th which required travel back to the UK on the 16th, Karen was off sick with stress from work, and both of us were stressed from different angles about Karen's mental health and I was stressed about a situation at work that affected one of Karens friends so we were just going through the motions, completely different from the previous year which was full of love, laughs and silliness.

I failed to get the job at my interview on 17th Feb, Karen had seen that as a ticket out of her current situation job wise as we would move back to the UK to start a new life. She was very subdued when I returned home on the 17th but we tried to look beyond this setback and had already decided that she should give up work. The next day we decided to go to Dusseldorf on a day trip, she felt ill and we decided not to go in the end. With the day now free I needed to fix the garage door (which I had managed to crash her car into a couple of weeks earlier - don't ask!) I went to the hardware store, brought some parts, fixed the garage door and came back to find that my wife had hung herself from the banister of the upstairs landing/hallway.

Flowers at the Funeral

It took a month for autopsy and final repatriation of Karen back to the west coast of Scotland where we used to live and where she grew up. In trying to come to terms with this and the speed with which it had overwhelmed Karen, the funeral director gave me a leaflet which suggested that mental health was like the game Jenga, everything seems stable and good but sometimes life events can cause a brick to be removed that causes everything to crash down. That helped me ... I'm an simple engineer you see, I know how to fix things (most things in fact) but when it comes to people I am a little lost. The basic engineering rules of logic and repeat-ability don't seem apply with people,  they are illogical and apparently random, press button A on one day and you get response B, press the same button A on a different day you get response X. The notion of the Jenga model therefore brought the logic, clarity and repeat-ability that I just hadn't been able to grasp in the situation I had found myself in.

Diversity Day

Back at work some months later, the department had decided to hold an Inclusion day, my team and I were also struggling to deal with the feedback from the previous years People survey which suggested that high levels of bullying and harassment were being experienced despite having a zero tolerance policy. Inclusion (or the lack of it) is often associated with bullying so there was a link that needed to be exploited. We arranged a coffee and cake session to bring the team together in an inclusive way to talk about Inclusion, Bullying and Harassment. As department head I was expected to lead the discussion but to be honest I was struggling with finding words so turned to the poster which the department had produced to advertise the event which had a few key positive words written on it as a means of defining what the day was supposed to be about. As I have said before, I'm an engineer and find some of this people stuff difficult so need all the help I can get.  So it was while thinking about those words in the shower one morning in September that I stumbled on the idea of combining Jenga with the positive words on the poster to produce a model/visual aid which I could use to talk about the underlying concepts but basically to show that the lack of something positive doesn't always mean the end of the world (the collapse of the Jenga tower) but eventually if you keep denying, preventing and taking away the positives, collapse is inevitable in (for an engineer) a satisfyingly predictable way.

The Prototype

The Prototype

As is usual for me I had left everything to the last minute, the night before the Coffee and Cake morning, I had to make a cake (A Rhum Baba which I had first encountered on a visit to Naples and wanted to share with the team) and a model. While the Rhum Baba was proving I found some old strips of wood that I had left over from a previous project and set about chopping them up to create a rough Jenga style stack. I didn't have nearly enough wood so I only managed to create about 33 blocks. I sat down with a pen and paper and scribbled a few key positive words that I associated with the themes of Inclusion, Bullying and Harassment, then I got hold of a black Sharpie and wrote one of the positive words on each of the blocks and that was it - done. It was a bit scrappy and messy and I still hadn't thought about what I was going say or how I was going to say it but a least I now had a prop to work with, and the more I thought about it the more it seemed to work.

More Shower Time

Next morning another shower and more time to reflect and I started to realise how everything seemed to line up. When you start out in life as a child, you start with a few basic bricks (a bit like the lower levels of Maslows heirarchy of needs) as you develop you and your parents start to build your personal stack of bricks filled with lots of positives, beliefs and assumptions - perhaps these are the basic building blocks of mental health in the same way that a good diet and exercise are the building blocks of good physical health. At some point, life starts to play with your personal stack. Your positives, beliefs and assumptions are challenged by life events, some of them are removed but not just removed and left to one side, the loss of a positive becomes a negative and a burden because you are aware that the positive has been removed and (in a Herzberg Hygiene Factors style effect) slowly starts to challenge or de-stabilise the other blocks in your stack. One or two missing bricks isn't really a problem but by the time you get to 10 or 15 missing bricks the analogy indicates that your mental health is starting to become really unstable.  Bullying and Harassment and lack of Inclusion act as significant forces to remove blocks and once something is removed from your stack it becomes very hard to put it back in place just like the real game of Jenga.

A positive reception

Inclusion day was upon us, the team were gathered and tucking into coffee and cake and it was my time to launch the model. I introduced it as an experiment because although I could see how everything worked I wasn't sure that anyone else would be able to grasp it, so I pretty much told the same story that I have written in the previous paragraphs. Demonstrating how removed bricks stacked up to act as de-stabilising influences,and how it was difficult to restore stability by trying to replace a brick that had been removed. I had intended for volunteers to come forward to pull a block at random but I ended up doing myself. Each time I talked a bit about how it would be so easy to either deliberately (as a bully might do) or inadvertedly (as a manager who is under pressure to deliver might do) remove a building block. It was a bit emotional for me because I talked about Karen in an open forum for the first time and also, I was surprised to learn, for some of the team who had clearly grasped what the model was all about. After the gathering several people came to speak to me about how good the model was to the extent that I was encouraged to run another session at another gathering in a few weeks time. Two people in particular felt that the model could be expanded such that with a few slightly different words the model would work not only for people, but for teams and for organisations.

More feedback

The Chief Exec was going to be at the next gathering so I felt I couldn't just turn up with just my limited stack of roughly sawn blocks so set about making it look a bit more professional. Coupled with the idea of trialing a set based on teams, I set out to make 2 new sets each with about 48 bricks per stack. I needed more words so asked the two that has suggested expanding the model to provide some.

The shroud

The second session was better, I ran through the story of how it had come about but this time with less tears from me. I also tested a new idea that had floated into my mind in that when we meet people for the first time, their "stack" may already have holes in it from their personal life experiences but its shrouded, its not until we get under the skin a little that we start to understand or feel what might be missing. Its probably something thats linked with emotional intelligence, the ability to detect those missing blocks. I came to realise over the 28 years that Karen and I spent together that she had a few missing blocks too; a childhood dominated by parents that had to get married, were too young, got divorced in her early life and then married other partners who at best didn't like and at worst abused her..she was shuttled between two families in two locations none of which she felt part of. The only stability she had came from her grandparents, who tried to compensate in whatever way they could until the day they died. Its sad to reflect on this but I'm sure the story is far from unusual across the country. 

A bit more professional looking

At the start of the second session, I divided the audience into 2 groups each with about 10 people and gave them one of my Jenga sets to play with. I floated between the 2 groups to listen in on the conversations as was surprised to see that despite the many different nationalities they all seemed to engage. They expressed what the words meant to them as individuals (everybody has a slightly different perspective based on their own experiences in life) and discussed in a surprisingly open way how they would feel if they were denied the thoughts and feelings that sprang to mind when considering the word on the block. As the game progressed it got to the point of collapse and at that point we discussed the word on that final block that represented the final straw. Maybe it was just blind luck but the final straw was always meaningful to those present.

December '17

In December I ran a final session with a bigger audience using 3 sets. This one was not as successful from my perspective, maybe becasue it was slotted in prior to the Teams Christmas party, maybe people were getting tired of seeing it or maybe because I had tried to minimise the story of the design and development so there was less emotional engagement from me. I'm not sure but recall feeling a little disappointed...don't get me wrong it wasn't a disaster ..there were some good conversations going on but the focus seemed to be more on building the highest tower....(maybe there were just too many engineers present!)

A higher tower

Present Day.

The current "standard" word set.

After a period of being lost with what to do with the idea, convinced it was useful and ultimately wanting something positive come from Karen's passing if at all possible I had a couple of introductions via friends.

The first was with a psychologist who was running a Mindfulness course at work. She specialises in personal constructs and explained that the Jenga tower is a transitional device that allows people to have conversations about difficult stuff without having to make eye contact. She suggested that in terms of personal constructs that the individuals could write their understanding of the opposite of the word on the reverse side of the blocks (if they were covered by a whiteboard type material) as often the negatives can be more revealing when trying to work with personal constructs.

A few weeks later in a most unlikely setting on a bench outside a pub near Basingstoke and dressed in the garb of a typical 17th Century Musketeer I was introduced to a couple of councillors and rather nervously ran through my idea. To my surprise they are both interested in getting a set to work with their clients. One of them wanted to tweak some the words to make it more appropriate for her particular client group so I'm about to produce a custom set. I've also tweaked the standard word set recently in response to learning a bit more about myself, people and relationships. There is also an additional possibility of getting some further interest from the charity MIND. The MIND website was were I turned to in trying to diagnose Karen's behavior so it seem entirely appropriate that I complete the circle.

Interested?

If you want to know more or have ideas for further development or a requirement for a custom set please get in contact