Others were running guns. I was running the finest Lebanese hashish, in exchange for condoms

Then we found out my girlfriend was pregnant. I knew I’d never live in Ireland again

THE IRISH TIMES ABROAD

Mon Jul 18 2022 - 02:00

Earlier this year my wife, who is Canadian, and I watched Canada play Ireland in rugby sevens at a tournament in Vancouver. Ireland won 17-7.

In 2016 we had travelled 3,500km, to Chicago, to watch Ireland triumph over the All Blacks. So, naturally, we celebrated with the Irish everywhere last weekend, when Ireland beat New Zealand on their home turf in Dunedin, in the second match of their international triptych.

But at that sevens match in Vancouver in April I had a dilemma: which team should I support?

My mother fretted, while my father’s explosive outburst — You’ve ruined your life! — stung. We married two weeks later, a faster timetable than we had planned, but ours was a loving relationship, and we were happy with the outcome

In the 1960s, Blackrock in Co Louth, where I grew up, was a drab seaside village of about 1,000 souls. But, as a Border town, it had its own unique flavour. For a few weeks in the chilly summer it would come alive with northern tourists, their skinny white bodies chasing multicoloured beach balls along the rippled strand. The Border loomed large in my life, and I was an amateur smuggler — though while others were running guns I was running the finest Lebanese hashish, in exchange for condoms, which were illegal at the time. The fun lasted until my mother, ever the sleuth, found out.

In January 1973 my girlfriend and I sat on a hard bench in the arts-and-commerce building on the Belfield campus of University College Dublin. We were in shock. I was 19, she was 20 and she had just received the results of a pregnancy test. We were terrified. We had committed the ultimate sin in Catholic Ireland, the sin of love.

Predictably, consternation followed. My mother fretted, while my father’s explosive outburst — You’ve ruined your life! — stung. We married two weeks later, a faster timetable than we had planned, but ours was a loving relationship, and we were happy with the outcome.

I found a job with Unilever in London, and we left the following year with our son Davy. Regardless of the shaming we experienced at home, I saw no reason to be embarrassed about our beautiful boy. Yet I knew I would never live in Ireland again. Bitter memories of Catholic puritanism, bigotry and intolerance were enough to alienate me from the land of my birth.

A few years later we moved to Canada. My wife, son and I settled happily in Toronto, and in the ensuing years we had two more sons.

It was on a summer evening, not long after our arrival, that I fell in love with this spectacular country. Drifting in a canoe with Davy, on a mirror-calm lake in Algonquin Provincial Park, north of Toronto, a magical silence settled over us. It felt unlimited, borderless. It was a vast, open land of lakes and forests; of bears, moose, eagles, wolves; of Northern Lights illuminating an enormous sky.

Canada was full of opportunity. I hated my corporate job, and in the 1980s I ditched the business world to study for a PhD. But in Ireland things were still tough. When I told an old friend in Blackrock about my decision he was flummoxed. Why would you give up a safe, secure job to go back to school? In the Ireland I grew up in, security was everything, career change a luxury and second chances rare.

I wholeheartedly embraced the Canadian experience. I took up skiing and skating, loved the fresh, frigid air, the sparkle and crunch of snow crystals at minus 20. Ireland became a distant, bitter memory.

Some years after my marriage ended I met Carol Ann, my present wife, and moved to Vancouver. Sharing an interest in the outdoors, we hiked in ancient forests, inhaling their intoxicating scent of pine and spruce. We kayaked, canoed and swam in the waters of the Pacific. We skied and snowshoed through mountain and valley. We celebrated rain, snow and sun with equal delight.

Yet I never felt truly Canadian. Welcoming as Canadians were, their shared cultural memories of wartime heroism, 1950s TV shows and glorious ice-hockey triumphs were lost on me. (I tried to play ice hockey, but my skating skills would have embarrassed a five-year old Canadian.) Canada was a great country, but it was not my country.

Then Ireland changed, in ways I could never have predicted. Within a few years peace broke out in the North, the country went from rags to riches and then back to rags, and it still ended up the second-richest country in Europe. The iron grip of the Catholic Church was forced open, and Ireland, once the most conservative country in Europe, became one of its most liberal.

I find myself proud to be linked to this strange new Ireland. But I haven’t rejected Canada. I still delight in Canada’s openness and wildness, yet I follow Irish newscasts closely, and support Ireland’s rugby and soccer teams. Brought up near Ireland’s Border, I am still in liminal space, a kind of borderer between Canada and Ireland.

As it happens, I supported Canada — as the underdog — in the sevens rugby match in Vancouver this year. (Had it been ice hockey I would have supported Ireland.) I wasn’t at all sorry when Ireland won handily. And last weekend, against the All Blacks, I supported Ireland.

Shut Your Eyes and See

A nation’s mythologies

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

Fintan O’Toole

Liveright

624 pages, hardcover and ebook

April 2022

In 2017, in the west of Ireland, the remains of almost 800 children were found in a mass grave. Shocking as the discovery was, few were surprised. The bones of several children had, in fact, been uncovered in 1975 by two boys playing in an orchard where the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home — a Catholic institution for “fallen” women and their infants — had once stood. In what now seems a cruel metaphor for a culture of devout denial, the site had been blessed by a priest and covered up again.

In countless ways, the story of modern Ireland is the story of covering things up that don’t fit the national myth — with devastating consequences for many. In We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, the Irish Times critic Fintan O’Toole unpacks this truth with passion and smouldering rage. Although set an ocean away, the book holds lessons, about national self-delusion and its repercussions, that are relevant here.

Ireland in the 1950s, the decade of O’Toole’s birth, considered itself Ireland the Holy, a bulwark against the sinful world. It was also Ireland the Poor, with few job opportunities; and Ireland the Troubled, where the violence of the Irish Republican Army was tacitly supported by church and state.

Like so many of my compatriots, I dealt with all this by leaving. Those who stayed behind experienced changes far beyond anything I could have imagined when, in my twenties, I set out for Canada, hoping to distance myself from my island’s hypocrisy, poverty, and bigotry.

The once inconceivable changes arrived slowly, then all at once. O’Toole describes how the natural governing party, Fianna Fáil, became sclerotic and corrupt; the Catholic Church became enmeshed in scandals; the IRA’s tactics became increasingly pointless. At first, the rot was below the surface; few foresaw how the edifice of power would implode. “The aura of authority, maintained now by personal charisma and defiant insouciance, could always prevent things from becoming overt,” O’Toole writes. “It did not seem conceivable that this authority could unravel so suddenly.” There were even more dramatic shifts to come: the Celtic Tiger economic boom, the Belfast Agreement in 1998, and the financial crisis of 2008.

O’Toole traces some of the “unknown knowns” that helped keep the illusion alive for a time. In his own Dublin neighbourhood, for example, Father James McNamee, a recognized sexual predator, was promoted to parish priest. De facto slavery at industrial schools — ­institutions for neglected, orphaned, and abandoned children — was known to exist and was ignored. By turning a blind eye, Ireland could remain holy.

The twist was that this ability to know and not know turned out to be useful. By not knowing Gerry Adams’s terrorizing past, the architects of the Belfast Agreement could include the IRA in the peace process. By not knowing that a foreign tech giant was hiding profits from tax authorities, the government could keep the economic miracle afloat. “The Irish state knew very well what Apple was doing,” O’Toole explains, “but it decided not to absorb that awareness into its active consciousness.”

But the country could not look the other way forever. In 2008, the unknown finally collided with the known, with the sovereign debt crisis and Ireland’s near bankruptcy. The continued fallout of Brexit now poses a renewed threat of violence along a border that itself is both known and unknown: no longer a barrier in any practical way, it remains very real in hearts and minds.

We Don’t Know Ourselves is a masterpiece of perceptive analysis, made accessible by personal anecdotes and clear, passionate prose. After dismantling Ireland’s hypocrisy, O’Toole takes a positive turn. In two referendums, on same‑sex marriage in 2015 and on abortion in 2018, the Irish shook off their image of intolerance and showed “intimate grace”: their acceptance of those whose lives differ from their own. The ability to live with unknown knowns matured into a skill in navigating ambiguity; a national myth was discarded in favour of an acceptance that the country’s story is still being written.

Although the Irish may have turned it into an art form, their ability to fudge things is not unique. Canadians too have their mythologies, their false certainties, supported by hypocrisy and unknown knowns. Like Ireland the Holy, we are Canada the Good: multicultural, tolerant, clean, responsible. Except when we’re not.

As the voices of victims of oppression grow ever louder, as Alberta’s oil sands sully the ­pristine image many Canadians still have of their country, as the death toll from opioid addiction mounts — are we really that good? Ignorance, complacency, and misplaced trust can blind us to the dark realities on our streets and under our soil. But this timely book reminds us how unknown knowns have a way of eventually becoming known knowns, how buried children often find a way to speak from the grave.

Opinion: As McDonald’s retreat from Russia shows, branding goes well beyond the burger

To build trust in today’s world, brands must align with customers’ values and demonstrate that they help to address social problems

April 29, 2022

As Moscow awoke to a grey morning on January 31, 1990, a new era was dawning. By the time the USSR’s first McDonald’s restaurant opened, hundreds of hungry Russians, clad in fur hats and blowing into their hands, were waiting in line. After McDonald’s CEO George Cohon’s 14 years of intense negotiations with the Soviet government, Muscovites would get to taste capitalism in a bun.

“If you can’t go to America, come to McDonald’s in Moscow,” urged the burger chain. The Berlin Wall had been torn down a few months earlier; by the end of 1991, the Soviet empire would collapse entirely.

One of a handful of brands that encapsulated Western values, McDonald’s was more than a burger joint. In March 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, McDonald’s closed its 850 restaurants across Russia, in protest against “unspeakable suffering to innocent people.”

Brands have always been about values, but never more than today. Companies like McDonald’s have become acutely aware of the need to go much further than providing good, reliable products and service with a smile. They need to align with their customers’ beliefs, to think beyond the bun.

Authenticity rules

Canadian consumers are becoming increasingly conscious of the values that brands represent—and they trust brands whose values align with their own. This impacts the bottom line: if consumers trust you, not only do they stay loyal to your product but they recommend it to others. Companies are awakening to this reality and actively managing brand trust.

Since 2015, we at the Gustavson School of Business have conducted an annual survey of brand trust, the Gustavson Brand Trust Index. Each year, we analyze brand ability (how a brand performs its function), brand affinity (how it treats customers) and brand authenticity (the values it represents), for over 400 brands among a sample of over 9,000 consumers.

We find that authenticity is an important factor in consumers’ overall trust of a brand. A consumer today doesn’t just consider the product, service or value for money. They take into account whether they trust the brand to help address problems in society—be it by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, treating employees well or being a good corporate citizen.

This is especially true of millennials and younger consumers. For example, in 2021, we saw that those aged 19 to 35 recognized Patagonia as their most trusted brand, which we may attribute to its support of climate activism. The previous year, this younger group ranked Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics—with a history of supporting grassroots campaigns—most trustworthy.

Companies are acutely aware of this increasing scrutiny: in 2018, the Business Roundtable, an elite group of CEOs of America’s leading companies, issued a statement that committed their organizations to delivering sustainable value to all stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers—a far cry from the old model of exclusively delivering shareholder value.

A hasty exit

Perhaps the most astonishing part, however, of brands’ reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the speed with which it happened. Oil and tech companies led the rush to the exits. Following the invasion, BP, ExxonMobil Corp. and Shell all announced closure of their Russian operations. Tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft Corp. and Samsung Group followed rapidly by suspending or shuttering their business in the country. Retail brands like McDonald’s and Starbucks were slower to respond. But in the face of widespread criticism, they quickly closed down, too.

Our research shows that trust, once lost, can be slow and difficult to recover. It’s clear that companies are not just aware of the impact of values on consumer trust: they’re now proactively getting ahead of a trust crisis by taking rapid action.

Gone are the days when businesses avoided taking a position on global issues like sustainability, justice and security. Consumers now want to know that their purchasing decisions help build a better world, and they expect brands to behave accordingly.

For now, McDonald’s restaurants in Russia are “temporarily closed.” What is permanent is the fact that it’s no longer just about the burger: we invest brands with our hopes, fears and beliefs about how the world ought to be. Would you like trust with that?

Think twice about ‘design thinking’

DAVID DUNNE SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL PUBLISHED JANUARY 11, 2019

Design thinking has both fans and detractors. In the past two years, no fewer than 89 pieces on the subject – articles, blogs and case studies – have been published by Harvard Business Review. Most authors are overwhelmingly positive about design thinking’s value for business; others are less impressed and write it off as a business fad. Does the design thinking emperor have any clothes?

My research shows a nuanced picture. Design thinking – an approach to innovation that uses empathy, logic and imagination to understand users’ problems and develop solutions – can have great benefits. But there are many different ways to implement it: To take full advantage of design thinking, organizations need to be very clear about what they want to accomplish and to adopt a model that fits within their own environment.

I interviewed design leaders within organizations to understand the experience of those who had adopted design thinking. The organizations operated in the private, public and non-profit sectors in the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia. They included global multinationals in categories such as pharmaceuticals, packaged goods and retail; large non-profit hospitals; and government departments. Understandably, most wanted to show their efforts in a positive light; but from our in-depth conversations, it was clear that it had not all been clear sailing.

In all the organizations I spoke with, design thinking had strong support from the top – if not from the chief executive, then from a supportive member of the senior management team. However, this support was not always grounded in an understanding of design thinking. One frustrated designer at a health-care provider complained that “[Senior management is] really quickly jump to ‘We want this finished, we want to move on,’ as opposed to actually taking the time to prototype, reframe, go through the iterations.”

Perhaps because of this lack of understanding, design thinking was often adopted with many goals in mind. Some programs grew out of previous initiatives that had failed; others were introduced out of senior management’s frustration that the organization was slow and bureaucratic; others from a sense that the organization had lost contact with its customers.

And that was the rub. Design thinking is not a silver bullet. While it can have powerful benefits, it’s a mistake to try to do too much with it.

Design initiatives come in many different forms: a central lab devoted to out-of-the-box thinking; a distributed program across different departments; a collaborative model in partnership with other organizations. Each one of these arrangements is better for some things than others. Many of the organizations I interviewed had hybrid models that tried to straddle different goals; yet such diverse goals are hard to accommodate in one program.

If you want truly disruptive innovation, take your lab offsite and give it the resources to think not just out of the box, but as if there is no box. Or collaborate with organizations that can bring a dramatically new perspective. But don’t expect to change corporate culture this way. For this, you should have a distributed program that places designers into teams throughout the organization.

There’s nothing wrong with incremental innovation, of course: Products and services need constant tweaking to remain up to date and to match competitive changes. On the other hand, many organizations are desperate to stay ahead of disruption by designing their own disruptive innovations. Design thinking can accomplish each of these goals and more.

But you do have to make a choice. If you try to stretch design thinking too far, you are likely to be disappointed. Disruptive innovators can become isolated from their organization – “crazy cowboys” who are not taken seriously – or, in an attempt to gain legitimacy, can take on incremental projects and become overwhelmed.

If you’re thinking about trying design thinking, think twice: first about your goals, then about the right model for your organization. The design thinking emperor does have clothes. But they need to be tailored to fit.

Abstract

Design thinking has been adopted by organizations in all sectors of the economy. In this qualitative study, I explore organizations’ goals in adopting design thinking, the challenges such programs encounter, and the approaches they have taken to deal with these challenges. I find that unclear goals, the need to build legitimacy, cultural resistance, and leadership turnover can compromise the work of design programs. Possible antidotes include technological and collaborative platforms, and extending design thinking into the implementation process.

Read the full article here.

Design thinking has become the recipe du jour for innovation.

For some, it is the route to transformative thinking and revolutionary change.

For others, it looks like chaos, where millennials plaster the walls with sticky notes and play with Nerf toys and Lego. Others see it as a fad that has failed.

Fad or not, design thinking (creative problem-solving) has been adopted by governments, tech companies, consumer goods manufacturers, health-care organizations and many others. For my book, Design Thinking at Work: How Innovative Organizations Are Embracing Design, I interviewed large organizations that have adopted design thinking.

I wanted to understand why they embarked on a design thinking program and what their experience was.

I heard the usual stories about its benefits — how its fluid, iterative approach could bring great insights and find hidden opportunities. But I also heard about real obstacles to making it work.

Organizations adopted design thinking for many reasons, not just innovation. Some programs grew out of previous initiatives that had failed; others came about as a result of senior management’s frustration that the organization was slow and bureaucratic; others to improve contact with customers, to encourage collaboration or to attract and retain talent. Some had all of these goals, and more.

Bridging the cultural gap

At one large hospital, the design team stood out starkly from the rest of the organization.

Within a culture of scientific professionalism, their casual dress contrasted with the formality of medical staff. Even their use of language was different — for the designers, the word “experiment” meant just giving something a try; for doctors, an experiment was a formal undertaking with placebo controls and fixed protocols.

These differences illustrated a cultural gap, one that could block design teams’ ability to innovate. As the lead designer told me:

“When you turn up at a clinic on a Monday morning to do an experiment, the desk staff … they’re just not going to want you near them, they don’t know why you’re there, they’re not going to really trust you.”

Pressed to show what they could do, design teams went out of their way to reach out to the rest of the organization and build legitimacy.

In many cases, this meant taking on small projects to show what they could do. However, these incremental projects could quickly become overwhelming. Said a design leader in a multinational drug company:

“The innovation team was spending a lot of time herding cats across the organization. Most of the effort was around [organizational] structure and scope of responsibility, and less about demonstrating what [design thinking] could potentially offer.”

Some organizations dealt with this by setting up independent labs, located some distance from head office. Yet there was a risk here too — such labs could become isolated from the organization, seen in one large retailer as “crazy cowboys,” rather than transformative innovators.

Some projects could never get started

Many potentially significant innovations had trouble getting off the ground because other parts of the organization were unable or unwilling to implement them.

In some ways, these findings are not surprising. Organizations are not typically set up to tolerate the fundamental questions design thinkers ask. For one Danish government lab, challenging organizational thinking was critical:

“What is the framing? What is the understanding of the problem? From where do we know this? Why do we assume that this apparently simple solution or approach will actually work for someone?”

In a culture where employees are under constant pressure to solve problems and move on, such questions can be seen as distracting or even threatening.

How to make design thinking work

It’s still possible for companies to have a successful design thinking program. They can use design thinking as a vehicle for cultural change and for creative collaboration; for either incremental or disruptive innovation.

But businesses are unlikely to accomplish all of these at once. There are several different ways of implementing design thinking –centralized or distributed, for example – and which direction companies choose depends on their goals.

Is design thinking right for every organization?

If a company’s culture is all about efficiency, it may be a difficult fit. The iterative, messy nature of design thinking can be disruptive to an organization that relies on repeating the same process, time after time.

There are good alternatives, however, to adopting it internally — many consultancies now use design thinking for problem-solving, and many design firms offer excellent innovation services.

Incidentally, the Danish government lab shut down in May 2018. Its founders aspired to disrupt the bureaucracy, but its true impact was hard to measure.

In the end, it was replaced by an initiative focused on digital technology. Its demise was a blow to many, myself included, who believe in design thinking.

It’s not a cure-all for every organization, nor is it a dying fad; in the right conditions, it can bring great value.

But for businesses to make a success of it, they must exercise common sense by being clear about their goals and making realistic choices. This is neither a transformative nor a revolutionary concept. Sadly, such common sense in the business world is not always so common.