Listening is fast becoming a lost art.  Conversations, whether during business meetings or dinner parties, are too often one-way exchanges of information.  People rarely talk with each other; rather, they talk at each other when it’s their turn.  Other people are so pleased with the sound of their own voice that they rarely, if ever, let the other person get a word in.  When they do pause it is simply to reload. Being on transmit-only is endemic in the business world, with so-called leaders spending their time telling people what to do and what to think.  The clichés of communication being a two-way activity and of using our one mouth and two ears in proportion tends to fall on, well, deaf ears.  There are a number of reasons for this.

The first reason, it seems to me, is the sheer volume of noise in our everyday life. Rather than respond to this constant cacophony by being quiet, we seem, instead, to simply talk louder.  Noise generates more noise.  Look at the number of people on public transport and walking in the street who are on headphones. Their response to the general hullabaloo of the modern city is to replace it with other sounds.  It’s a veritable arms race of discord.

The second reason is the speed at which we live our lives.  Everything happens at such a breakneck pace that it affords little time to invest in listening. Slow listening is much more difficult than fast talking.  Listening is hard work.  It requires taking the trouble to want to be part of the narrative that is being shared.  Real listening involves using not just one’s ears but one’s eyes and whole body.  It is more than being merely interested.  And real listening is more than hearing.  Hearing is being aware of groups of words and sentences. Listening is an altogether deeper experience where sometimes the true meaning comes in the silence of words that remain unspoken.

The third reason that I think we’ve all become such poor listeners is due to a collective sense that we have to have a point of view.  Our egos seem to need to constantly demonstrate their importance by having things to say.  One organisation I know says that they don’t mind what you think, only that you have a view point.  To be fair, they take that position as a way of encouraging dialogue. However, the collective egos of modern society demand that we all have views on the causes and the solution of everything from the Greek debt crisis, Ukraine, European migration, and every other micro and macro issue around.  The result is that our egos encourage us to talk and talk rather than stop and listen.  When I catch myself pontificating on subjects beyond my ken I get a little tap on the shoulder from Wittgenstein reminding me that whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent.  And my new muse is Montaigne, who said – and I think we could all benefit from having this as our motto – “Que sais-je?”

Stopping to listen brings enormous rewards.  It also is an act of generosity, allowing people to tell their story.  And it is always good to give the ego a dose of humility by reminding it that there is much to learn from other people.  However, like all things that are worth doing, listening is a skill that requires practice. As the great Raquel Welch once said: “You can’t fake listening. It shows.”

2,500 years ago the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said “There is nothing permanent except change.” In doing so he rather unintentionally launched the School of business-speak clichés. Also permanently with us, it seems, is the change management industry.  Businesses need help, apparently, in finding ways to monetise content in an age of free, or bricks and mortar in an online world.  Everyone needs help in rightsizing or in creating new business models that take account of globalisation, sustainability, and increased competition.  The solution, it appears, is to call in the change consultants.

Scratch the surface of change management and you’ll find a whole eco-system buzzing with buzz words, and a methodology for every madness. Everywhere you look there are solutions looking for problems. There are the big consultancy firms who arrive with pantechnicons piled high with partners and associates, ready to fill you with awe at their intelligence and to make you dependent on their systems.  There are the experiential experts who want to help you bring your brand and values to life by co-imagining a future state.  Then there are the organisational designers, with their reporting lines, the programme managers with their Gantt charts and Excell sheets, the HR experts with new processes and procedures to replace the old processes and procedures, the communication experts with their engagement and leadership visibility programmes, and the behavioural psychologists…and on it goes providing Dante with enough new material for another circle of hell.

I exaggerate, of course, to make a point.  But here are some serious tips.  Firstly, whatever you do, approach change as a natural, evolutionary process and not as a programme. And never give it a name as to do so will only serve to remind people that there were programmes before and, more likely than not, there will be programmes afterwards.  Secondly, you can’t create change (although you can create disruption) but you can create the climate in which change happens.  And this leads to the most important point: change comes from within.  Given the right circumstances changes can occur spontaneously and straightforwardly.  In order for this to happen a new approach to leadership is required, one that sees its role not as that of making decisions but one of creating the environment in which decisions can be taken.  It also requires a style of leadership that recognises that words are a poor proxy for behaviour.  Rather than telling people what the new behaviours are, success comes from living them.  Change starts and finishes with the self.  Get that bit right and you sow the seeds for sustainable change. As Tolstoy put it: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

Convention is a funny thing.  Much as we may rail against the conformity of traditional social norms, few of us really want to change things.  We say we will and we accuse others of being less open to new thinking and behaviours, but actually we conform more often than we challenge.  As JK Galbraith said: “The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”  Two small but interesting examples come to mind.  The first is the wearing of hats.  Hats are sensible things to wear.  They keep one’s head warm and dry in winter and, in summer, protect us from the strong rays of the sun.  Recently I have been in two cities during very hot weather.  The vast majority of people were hatless.  There were some caps and there were some ladies using umbrellas as parasols.  Hats were rarely seen.  Why is that?  We all know it is a good idea.  It was once the norm to wear hats, so why has it dropped out of fashion?  So if we all know that wearing hats is a sensible idea, what has to happen before we all start sporting them again?

The other example is the recent campaign on social media by the famous athlete @SallyGunnellHL.  She is passionate about the benefits of good posture and, in particular, of standing up.  Again, we all know that sitting, badly or not, for long periods is not good for us.  Instinctively we feel better when we’re upright.  We know that the human skeleton was designed for walking and standing rather than sitting and slouching (we’re actually designed to crouch rather than sit), and yet how many of us spend significant periods of our waking lives sitting hunched over our desks.  It’s not good for us and we know it.  We know that we should work standing up, so why don’t we make the first move?  Some of it is because we don’t like to step outside societal norms and some of it is the illusion that we’d like to but that we’re concerned that others wouldn’t.  Either way, it seems, a bad back is preferable to looking silly.

One recent approach to creating positive change is the Nudge theory.  The government now employs a team of behavioural scientists who aim to find ways of getting us to do the right thing without being either told or mandated to do it.  Healthy living – smoking and drinking less, exercising more, and eating more fruit – are all areas where the team are trying to find ways for us to change our lifestyles. The insight is, of course, that change comes from within.  If we’re told to do something we’re unlikely to see it through simply because it is not our decision.  If we think that it’s our idea then any behavioural change is likely to be more sustainable.

One aspect of the nudge approach is availability.  Seeing new things and having access to them forms images in our minds.  This, in turn, makes them seem normal or, indeed, fashionable.  And, because we do often behave like sheep, when everyone else starts to do something then we do as well.  What was once beyond the social pale becomes the norm.

So here are two predictions for you. The first is that standing desks will soon become an accustomed sight in offices around the country.  As a result, meetings will be shorter and more productive and fewer cases of back pain will be recorded.  The second prediction is based on a real observation.  Two new hat shops have opened in Jermyn Street. Just as the beard made an unexpected comeback recently, so too has the time arrived when hats once more become socially acceptable.  So hat’s off to that.

Dear reader

Recently I took some guests to a dinner. Unsurprisingly, given what marvellous people they are, both sent me hand-written thank-you letters.  Similarly, my daughter, who is currently volunteering in Sri Lanka, loves to receive letters in the post from her grandparents.  They’re good reminders that there’s nothing quite like receiving a proper letter in the post.  Every stroke of the pen leaves an imprint of the writer’s personality in a way that no electronic communication can.  As A S Byatt said in Possession: “Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.”

On the other hand, I’ve never been much of a fan of emails.  They arrive at all times of the day and night and seemingly demand one’s instant attention.  They are often written in haste which, in turn, encourages both bad grammar and idiomatic abbreviations. (eg ‘please let me know if you can make the F2F by COP tomorrow. BW. Sam’).  They are not good at conveying irony. They’re either too long or too short.  And they often come with attachments.  Email even kills conversation.  We’ve all seen examples of people in the same room emailing each other.  Email, far from liberating us from the drudgery of work, has made our lives considerably more stressful.  Man is born free but everywhere he is on email.

Emails tend to be both transitory and transactional.  They require of their recipient action rather than thought.  Likewise, the author perhaps rarely takes the time to consider the context of the overall communication message into which their email falls.  Too little reflection goes into how the messages will be received. Communication is two-way and that includes writing. 

When, not so long ago, I moved jobs I went through all my emails to see what was of value.  The answer was that the vast majority were merely run-of the-mill work-related stuff; some were of vague importance; but only a few were of any real value.  That was, of course, partly the nature of the work but it was also indicative of how we communicate with each other.  I don’t suppose that many publishers would be in the market for “The collected emails of …” Contrast that with some of the great collections of letters.  Recent good examples include Lady Diana Cooper’s letters to her son, Dear Monster, and the laugh out loud letters of Roger Mortimer, Dear Lupin.  Recently I’ve discovered Rilke’s extraordinary Letters to a Young Poet. 

On the other hand, I am quite a fan of Twitter, Whatsapp, and the like.   Used well, both can convey messages and thoughts succinctly and efficiently.  For those of us who have a tendency, as Disraeli said of Gladstone, to occasionally be “…inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity”, the discipline of forcing ourselves to convey our thoughts in under 140 characters can be quite good.  I once sat next to a well-known journalist who was tweeting from the event we were both attending.  She first wrote out her thoughts by hand on a note book.  She then crossed out certain words and reformed the sentences.  Then she wrote out her final version.  Finally, and only then, did she type it into Twitter and press send.  Writer, sub-editor, editor, and compositor all in one.  The result was a carefully considered and well-written observation. 

I don’t believe that electronic communications per se are the problem.  It’s just that email is a blunt instrument.  Communication is too important to be fired off without taking the time to think through the real nature of the words.  Brevity forces contemplation.  As Pascal said: “I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short”.  Likewise, the very act of holding a (fountain) pen requires us to slow down, hear our own voice, and watch it emerge through our hands and onto the paper. 

Perhaps letter writing will follow vinyl records and real books into the great digital dustbin in the sky. Certainly, sad though it is, I doubt whether we’ll see Facebook spending $19bn buying Basildon Bond and Parker pens. Nevertheless, I hope that as our obsession with email reaches its nadir, whatever comes next will prove to be a far more effective communications channel.

Yours faithfully,

Tim

A number of things struck me about this encounter. The first is how many people, both at work and at leisure, prefer the comfort and safety of their own zone.  These days travellers tend to do everything they can to blot out the reality of other people invading their personal space, often by withdrawing into their headphones (although many, unhelpfully, share their “music” by playing it too loud. More on that later).  One of the most significant problems in large organisations is that of the silo mentality: people think, work and are managed in vertical hierarchies and rarely share or collaborate horizontally.  The best organisations foster curiosity (both idle and otherwise) and encourage their people to engage with what interests them.  Cultivating knowledge requires us to look beyond both the immediate and the obvious.  It necessitates observing, noticing and making connections.  However, many of us are simply too busy doing things to step back and observe and to use our observations to inform our thinking and feeling.

The second thing that came to me was how many of the conversations that we have tend to be merely the exchange of information.  The lady who asked the question of me did so not because she wanted to tell me what she thought of the book, but because she wanted to hear my view.  Too many so-called conversations simply consist of two people taking it in turns to talk.  But a real conversation is so much more.  As Mark Twain said: “Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other so that we can have some conversation.”  Business leaders, especially, express the desire to communicate and have a dialogue with their employees.  However, most want the conversation to be on their topics, on their timescale, on their channels, and using their language. Many work on the assumption that other people find them endlessly fascinating and that they hang on their every word.  True leadership is less about directing and is more about empowering; and the route to empowerment is through listening to people and allowing them the space to be their own leaders.

Sometimes even asking questions can be the wrong approach as it has the potential to dictate the exchange and to close off the development of the other person’s thinking.  As an inveterate talker who is only too happy to share my pearls of wisdom, I am now learning the skill of judicious questioning and active listening.  As Proust said: “The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing.”  As I’ve said before, listening is much harder than it seems and is certainly a lot harder than talking.

The idea of encouraging conversation yet minimising talking may seem oxymoronic.  However, I believe that we should all embolden ourselves and seek opportunities to engage our curiosity in conversations outside our comfort zones.  And rather than merely exchanging pleasantries with strangers it should be about those things that we know are important.

Finally, here’s a story about loud music on the train.  A man was reading his book when a young woman sat opposite him.  Loud music was coming out of her earphones.  He politely asked her to turn them down.  She ignored him.  He then started to read his book out loud.  She sheepishly moved away. Marvellous.

The issue with “they” is two-sided and reflects to some extent the “us and them” attitudes that have characterised many workplace relationships over past decades.  I’ve seen this problem manifest itself at a number of levels, especially during change programmes.  Senior leaders often impose change top down. They see their role as making others change and thereby widen the gap between themselves, as the drivers of change, and the rest of the workforce who become the objects of change. This sort of approach helps to perpetuate a degree of learned helplessness and a dependency culture.

Traditional management approaches also tend to make it more difficult for people to see themselves as individuals.  Organisational silos and hierarchical structures combine with old-fashioned attitudes to keep people in boxes and inhibit any sense of collaboration or individual creativity.  Yet to blame the system for many of the supine attitudes held by people in many organisations is to miss the point. Many people are, to far too great a degree, ready and willing to delegate much of their lives to anonymous others.  And when they don’t like how things have turned out, rather than take responsibility they’re happy to blame others.  Sometimes it’s due to the dependency culture, including the lure of stability that comes from the security of a regular income with bonuses and a pension. At other times it’s due to personal inertia and a reluctance to shoulder responsibility for oneself. In between the two are those who have postponed their real life until after they have retired, making a quasi-Faustian pact with their employer for deferred gratification.

Those who do take control of their lives tend to find it the most liberating thing that they’ve ever done.  As George Bernard Shaw put it: “To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.” Wresting influence from others and seizing back authority over one’s actions can give an extraordinary sense of purpose and direction to individuals.  Rather than blaming bosses, politicians, or even society at large, the only person left to blame is the one looking from the mirror. This sense of personal ownership isn’t all about doing one’s own thing. It’s an attitude of mind.  Even within large organisations there are those who are able to see beyond what needs to be done towards what ought to be done.  Taking control back of one’s attitudes and directions and not blaming others is the route to personal leadership.

For some, of course, there will always be security in the crowd.  It’s not just the tribal instinct at play but the feeling that it’s far less tiring having someone else do all the heavy thinking for you.  Remember that great scene in The Life of Brian when, in a case of mistaken identity, Brian finds a multitude outside his bedroom window. “You’ve got to think for yourselves.” he says “You’re all individuals” “Yes” the crowd reply “We’re all individuals.”

Another problem with the wrong sort of leadership is that it can lead to learned helplessness. Employees become so used to being told what to do that they start to lose the ability to think for themselves, either through fear of getting things wrong or out of lack of practice.  In many organisations, the strength of the top-down, command and control structure is such that decisions are constantly being upwardly delegated.  I know of one organisation where the power of the senior leaders was so strong that middle managers acted on the assumption of how their bosses would react and they’d simply not propose any option that they thought would get a frosty response.

The new leaders are those who see their role not merely as making decisions and being in charge. Rather, they recognise that leadership is about empowering people and creating the environment where decisions can be taken.  Yet in many instances, organisations are still only scratching the surface of the creativity of their people.  Most workforces today are full of technologically-savvy people who are keen to share and collaborate.  Businesses, however, are dominated by silo mentalities and a culture of management by results that inhibits rather than encourages cross-functional working.

One organisation, however, has taken leader-proofing to the extreme.  Video games developer, Valve, has no leaders.  Individuals themselves decide what to work on, where to sit, even how much each other gets paid.  Teams coalesce naturally around the best ideas.  Dialogue and creative thinking is at a premium, uninhibited by hierarchy or traditional structures. Obviously such a structure may not work everywhere, but it is interesting how there are those who see that there is another way to operate away from the normal pyramid-shaped, leader-led organisation.

In the meantime, leaders of traditionally-run organisations need to start to consider their own role in unleashing the power of thought latent in their organisation and held back by its structure.  They need to realise that the more that they give away the stronger their organisation becomes.  Businesses need leaders who embrace the opportunities that new ways of working offer and who can leave behind the old style of management.  Leader-proofing means not only liberating the creativity of the whole workforce but also of moving on from the old approach to leadership.  The traditional caricature needs to be put to rest.  As, for instance, John Cleese once said:  “I find it easy to portray businessmen.  Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.”

There are a number of reasons for this personal inertia.  One of them is the very modern problem of the tyranny of choice. The overwhelming number of options that we have for how we spend our lives and our spare time creates anxiety.  With too much choice we end up sticking with what we know.  We become more and more reluctant to try new things or to broaden our horizons.  We know we should try new things, fulfil our ambitions, or do what’s in our best interests, but we invariably stick to our old ways of behaving.  The great Flanders and Swann song, The Sloth, sums up this self-inflicted ennui rather well. (Don’t put it off, listen to it now! http://bit.ly/1diasIV ).

Linked to this is “busy doing nothing” syndrome.  We all know people who are so busy working that they have no time to stop and think.  For them working is a form of procrastination, postponing the real conversation that they ought to have with themselves about what they really ought to be doing.  These people are too busy to allow themselves the opportunity to discover their true needs and to follow their authentic self.  In a way, this endless cycle of  activity is, in effect, inactivity.  As Jerome K Jerome said in his essay “On being idle”, one can only really be thoroughly idle if one has lots to do.  Being busy is often little more than a method of displacement from the real issue.

The pace of today’s modern life comes littered with opportunities for distraction.  The 24hr, invasive nature of the media means that few people ever delight in switching off. Many people are driven half mad by the demands placed on them by being constantly switched on and the expectations of an instant (and considered) reply.  Again, this creates a superficial world and with it a sense that if you’re not tweeting with the in crowd then you’re not actually part of society.  And if you don’t answer your emails on holiday or at one o’clock in the morning then you’re not totally committed to your company.

Once all distractions have been put aside one’s left with oneself.  Although this can be a lonely and disconcerting place to be, it is also the start of the journey to one’s authentic self.  Eventually, with focus, it is possible to learn to listen and hear what one’s true needs and ambitions are. Having established them one needs willpower to bring them to life. Willpower is a mixture of focus and discipline.  Rather than self-esteem, which is an outcome, the key to happiness and fulfilment is self-control.  The people who succeed are those who first find their true self and then set out to achieve their goals with purpose, determination and willpower.  Goals plus willpower leads to success. No goals plus no willpower leads to the same old same old.

And as George Bernard Shaw said:  “Imagination is the beginning of creation.  You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and, at last, you create what you will.”

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the station the other day.  I was walking quite briskly, a briefcase in one hand, a phone in the other (I’m always expecting a call), and in my mind I was rehearsing a conversation that I would be having at a meeting later that day.  I was, in fact, completely in the zone. So much so, however, that as I stepped on to the kerb I lost my footing and fell over. I got up, dusted myself down and gave the kerb a long, hard accusative stare. But once I was sure that nobody had seen me I settled down to think about what had occurred.  The fact was that I had been so distracted by walking to somewhere else whilst thinking deeply about the future that I had lost any connection with the present.  Rather than practising mindfulness, I’d been doing mindlessness.

 It is extraordinary how easy it is to miss the present moment and to be too busy to just be.  As TS Eliot put it in The Rock: “where is the life we have lost in living?” Many of us simply miss the moment and those that are “present” are often only present in the artificial superficiality of the hustle and bustle of the so-called real world.  Modern communications technology has both empowered us and made us more connected whilst at the same time it often makes us feel curiously disconnected us from ourselves. Twitter, for instance, can make us feel both part of the happening world and yet strangely insignificant compared with those seemingly more influential.

 The recent Ofcom survey on the media consumption habits of the British throws up some interesting insights.  The good news is that for the first time for a while there is an increase in families coming together to watch TV.  Regardless of the content of the programmes it is important that families take time to be with each other.  However, the bad news is that it seems that many people “distract” themselves from the TV by phoning, texting, or interacting with others on social media. So even when we are together we’re not actually together. Doh.  As Alain de Botton put it: “It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much.”

 The idea that we can do two things at once is a myth and yet people seem to do it all the time.  Business meetings are often taken up with people sitting in front of their laptop or emailing on their phone with only one ear on the conversation.  Rather than listening to understand they listen to respond. And then there’s the business presenters who put detailed powerpoint slides on a screen and then talk to (or over?) them not understanding that we can either read the slides or listen to the points but we can’t do both. And if anyone says that they are the exception that proves the rule, tell them that the research shows that the people who are worst at multi-tasking are the multi-taskers.  As Confucius said, a man who chases two rabbits loses one and misses the other.

 The good news is that there is a growth in the number of people practising mindfulness.  Indeed, there are now many businesses which are encouraging their employees to get involved in the discipline.  They recognise that mistakes are happening because people are too busy and under so much pressure that they’re missing the present (perhaps this will even lead to a decline in noisy, distracting open-plan offices in favour of a return to quiet areas of concentration). Society needs to be less frenetic and more grounded.  We all need to be more aware of the present and live for the moment and stop running on autopilot mode where we look without seeing and hear without listening. Only then will we be able to concentrate on the moment.  As Brian Tracy put it: “Throughout my career, I have discovered and rediscovered a simple truth. It is this: the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status and happiness in life.”

 And if you still think multi-tasking is a good idea, next time you’re in your car remember the scary thought that half the people around you are trying to drive and follow their SatNav.

It can be quite depressing sometimes, looking at the world and thinking how much needs to change. All those wrong turns we’ve taken as a society valuing the wrong things for the wrong reasons (we’re pretty much the first generation, for instance, who don’t see our principal role as that of passing on the lessons of the past; but we are the first to see elderly parents as an encumbrance best out-sourced to “care” homes). Such societal wrongs seem to provoke three reactions: the ostrich-like ignoring of the reality; the shrug of the shoulder, what-can-one-do acceptance of the status quo; and the radical, up-with-this-I-will-not-put of the change agent.  It was, of course, Marx who said that: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world…the point is to change it“. However, despite my rather iconoclastic thinking, I’ve never been much of a sans culottes revolutionary. In fact, I’ve always been rather suspicious of the action-orientated eager beavers rushing overhead frantically making things happen. 

 For me, change is always more effective when it comes from within; and, to that end, I prefer to influence it and let it happen in its own good time. Change rarely works when it’s forced on either an individual or an organisation.  Real change occurs when the person is themselves the agent rather than the object.  And the gestation period for that moment of self-realisation differs by person, organisation and issue.  The natural process of change can be helped by thinkers, and coaches. By providing a questioning environment they in effect give permission for people to think and feel differently and to realise that there is no rule book which states that life had to turn out this way.

 Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m beginning to sense that more and more people are beginning to question why things are the way they are and how, perhaps, they can start to change.  Two things recently helped to reinforce my view.  The first was a marvellous personal event, that of my daughter’s graduation.  She was one of nearly 200 young people receiving her BSc in psychology (at the same ceremony there were also around 25 MSc graduates and half a dozen PhDs.).  It occurred to me that the huge explosion in the popularity of this subject can only be a good thing for society.  Equipping a whole generation of future leaders with the knowledge, interest and scientific understanding of how people think and behave the way they do must be a positive development.  Using evidence-based research to consider the effect of both nature and nurture on human behaviour will help us better understand how we can positively impact the society we live in.

 The second event was reading a blog. http://blog.wcgworld.com The author (a communications thought leader and himself a PhD Experimental Psychologist) wrote about an MBA class lecture he gave on reputation.  What was interesting was less the content of the lecture and more the way he described how these future business leaders addressed their group exercise.  Faced with three major corporate issues, the class responded by seeing the solution as being proactive transparency and stakeholder engagement.

 Bit by bit we are seeing people question action-orientated leadership, management by results, and a sole focus on shareholder value.  Slowly but surely, we are seeing a more mindful approach creep into business, including a growing move towards long-term thinking and environmental sustainability.  We need to nurture these thoughts and allow people to feel comfortable challenging current social norms. For instance, rather than accepting that the political debate must be dominated by the demand for growth we should recognise that true happiness is rarely found in mindless acquisition. 

 I believe that the current zeitgeist has entered the first stage of change, that of questioning.  Let’s pause and celebrate, but recognise the inevitability of gradualism.