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I am on vacation between August 5 and 15 2010. During this period I'll be running a marathon, celebrating a family birthday, and hosting the party to launch my new book Organisation Culture: getting it right that is now available. I'll be back blog writing on August 16.

Examining orgnisation culture is fascinating because despite theories, perspectives, definitions, labels, and inventories that claim to measure it culture is largely an unknown quantity. Donald Rumsfeld could have been talking about organisational culture, instead of Iraq, when he commented:

"As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know".
-Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Grappling with the issues put down to the culture of his organisation one executive commented: "There's the question of what it (culture) is. I suppose every company has a corporate culture of a sort, and certainly every executive I've met claims to be promoting one ("we have a culture of accountability" etc). But such widespread usage makes the word culture feel flabby to me. It would be wonderful if it could be described more crisply or provocatively so I could know what it is and then do something about it."

That manager's frustration in trying to understand organisation culture is not helped by the fact that there is little agreement at a practical level of what culture 'is': in the same way that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', so it could be said that 'culture is in the mind of the experiencer'. (Additionally there is a philosophical difference between academic researchers who take the view that organisations 'have' a culture and researchers who take the view that culture is what the organisation 'is').

Where there is agreement about the constituents of culture they are stated as 'patterns' of values, norms, beliefs, attitudes, behaviours and suchlike that can be shared. This may be useful as a generalization but is less useful when it comes to taking actions at a local or individual level. Take an analogy, if the various ingredients of an apple pie (which stands for the culture) are a proxy for value, norms, beliefs, etc, when the pie is assembled, cooked, cut and shared out each person will experience it differently and have their own response to it. Similarly with culture – the 'ingredients' of culture are meaningless before combination, and when combined are experienced differently by each individual.

Beyond this there is confusion as to whether culture is static – and therefore easily teachable, say to newcomers to the organisation, – or dynamic and inherently less predictable and teachable.

And then, it is not clear whether culture is influenced by people or whether culture influences people. Is it 'done to' people or 'done by' people? Or, more likely, is it a continuous interplay of people and circumstance?

Finally when people talk about their organization culture they are, for the most part, inwardly focused. They do not allow for the external framework in which the organization is situated which, simply put, is evident at three levels:

• The organizational regulatory and tax compliance requirements
• External relationships with governments and communities
• The legal frameworks and mutual expectations surrounding the rights and responsibilities of workers and employers e.g. whether employees are barred from joining a union

Thinking about culture it is evident that it is 'about' patterns of the organisation – things like what type of person gets promoted, how offices are allocated, what gets noticed, who talks to whom, and so on. Where these patterns can be discerned across the whole organisation they are usually reinforced in policies, performance management systems, common visual symbols or décor and so on. But at the local department or team level the patterns can be very different depending on the nature of the work, the personalities of the managers, even though they are within the parameters of the organisation.

When you think about your own organization's culture see if you can work out what is evident across the whole (e.g. same value set) and what is local but still within the overall parameters (e.g. managerial style). Does anything fall so far outside the parameters that you would consider it 'counter-cultural'?

The problem with labels of culture is first that they are shallow – working only in terms of stereotypes on the lines of 'all Frenchmen eat frogs' – and confusing: the painting of a pipe by Magritte labelled "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (this is not a pipe) is an example of this. The confusion lies in labelling something that looks like a pipe as 'not a pipe' because, in fact, it is not a pipe but a two dimensional representation of a pipe. Similarly a label of culture is not the culture but a severely abbreviated verbal description. Labels do not represent the pervasive, implicit, nuanced, subtle, complex, and dynamic ways of community being that might be generalisable across an organisation but experienced individually and subjectively.

Second labels imply something fixed in the same way that a flag is fixed. The flag of a country does not change beyond recognition – the Union Jack or the Star Spangled Banner have been the way they have for decades. An organization's culture, however is always moving and fluid, as Gareth Morgan's definition states "(Culture is) an active living phenomenon through which people jointly create and recreate the worlds in which they live."

Third labels do not invite creating a shared meaning. When he took over as chief executive of Lehmann Brothers in 1994, Richard Fuld determined to establish "a culture built on teamwork" as in his view "(this) leads to the best business decisions for the firm as a whole, and paying employees in stock helped reinforce that culture. I wanted them all to think and act and behave like owners." If, as in this case, there is no concerted effort to create a shared understanding then simply making the statement is a recipe for disaster. Again taking the example it:

• Assumes that Fuld's notion of 'teamwork' is the same as each employee's
• Presumes employees have a common view of what thinking, acting and behaving as an owner is (and want to be an owner)
• Acts as if people are motivated by the same rewards – in this case stock
• Believes that 'teamwork' leads to best business decisions

Fuld's main action to develop a "culture of teamwork" was to link compensation to the overall performance of the firm through equity awards (Fuld being awarded colossal sums – somewhere between $350 million and $484.8 million between 2000 and 2008). when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy during the financial sector collapse of 2008 it became clear that the 'culture of teamwork' was one based on greed, lack of oversight and accountability, and blame – not the characteristics commonly associated either teamwork, or with well run owner-managed businesses.

Edgar Schein's definition of culture reinforces the notion that creation of shared meaning is core. He defines culture as "A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems."

Given that labels of culture are a fact of organisational life, and also that they have severe limitations what approaches can you take to see beyond the label and into the richness of what it stands for? Tomorrow's blog presents some thought on this.

Geert Hofstede, who has written several books on organisation culture, following his seminal research on national cultures in IBM between 1967 and 1973 was asked the question:

"Between the time that you were first analyzing this data and now, has your definition of culture changed at all?"

His answer was: 'No, not really. Of course, you have to realize that culture is a construct. When I have intelligent students in my class, I tell them, "One thing we have to agree on: culture does not exist." Culture is a concept that we made up which helps us understand a complex world, but it is not something tangible like a table or a human being. What it is depends on the way in which we define it. So let's not squabble with each other because we define culture slightly differently; that's fine.'

But far too often people describe the culture of an organization terms of a label, as if it were a tangible as in Apple being described as having "created a culture of secrecy", and Walmart "an austere culture built by old man Walton" or Unilever's CEO, Paul Polman who wants to develop 'a culture of accountability'.

These labels are a fact of organisational life – and very difficult to get away from as you'll see if you pay attention for one week to the number of companies you read about or come across whose culture is labelled in a single phrase or word. Think of your own organisation – what label do people attach to its culture? Common ones are: a culture of innovation, a culture of collaboration, and a culture of teamwork. A rather more vivid label is one I found in the Economist of July 31 2010 (the week I was writing this article) that talks of PIMCO, one of the world's largest bond-fund managers, having "a culture of constructive paranoia."

They are a fact of life because they serve several useful purposes:

1. They are identifiers – much as a luggage label on a suitcase.
2. They act as flags for waving and mustering behind (or tearing down and attacking)
3. They are a quick and easy to use form of shorthand or sketch which people can recognise or picture
4. They are yardsticks for measurement or comparison
5. They can act as defenses

On this last a good example is the comment made by one of the staff on hearing of the appointment of Markus Dohle as chief executive of Random House (a division of Bertelsmann, a global media company). He wondered whether Dohle, "known for his entrepreneurial zeal" would be able to lead Random House "without harming its creative culture. On the face of it, it looks like the guy is a complete production bean counter. It doesn't look hopeful that he'll share the romantic idea of literature and publishing."

Given their usefulness and their ubiquity why is it that they should be treated with caution? Think about this as you think about the cultural label of your own organisation and read tomorrow's blog where I'll make some suggestions as to why.

Thanks to my brother, I've just come across a wonderful series of 255 shorts on You Tube. The one I watched first was Daniel Pink talking about on performance and rewards in the RSAnimate series.

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
Adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, it illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.

You can skim through the whole list of 255 vidoes to find the 'RSAnimates' and find several that are directly relevant to organization design and development, and many non-animates that are also worth watching.

What's wonderful about those is the RSAnimate series is that as the person is speaking you are watching a cartoonist/graphic artist illustrating the talk in real time. He/she is drawing at the same speed the speaking is speaking. It's rather like graphic sign language.

Last week I was at a strategic planning session with NO PowerPoints. Instead there was a graphic artist recording the discussion on huge sheets of paper. The whole notion of graphic facilitation is fun – each artist (facilitator) has a different style and the Center for Graphic Facilitation has a website awash with comments, examples, and points about this mode of communication.

I see in my roam around that they are also called Visual Practitioners who state:

We are a powerful community of creative leaders from around the world, who share a common passion for bringing information and ideas to life visually. For over a quarter of a century, business people, artists, communities, governments, educators, and individuals have been leveraging the power of our Visual Practitioner community of graphic recorders and graphic facilitators.

And they are also called visual recorders. A kind of 101 article on the topic explains:

Graphic facilitation is a type of "explicit group memory" — a way of capturing the thoughts of group members in real time and making those thoughts available to the whole group. Practitioners of graphic facilitation (called "graphic recorders" or "graphic facilitators") use felt marking pens and large (4-feet-high and 10-to-15-feet-long) sheets of butcher paper, sometimes in combination with pre-made templates, for organizing group members' thoughts. The templates can be either loose and free flowing or relatively tightly structured.

So is there any difference between graphic recorders, facilitators, and visual practitioners? I don't know the answer to that. But I do know that watching the artist at work as a group is speaking is a great experience. What you're seeing is the artist interpreting the discussion which acts to give a different perspective on what is going on and the connections that can be made between topics. Obviously the artist doesn't get it in one go and I was interested to read in the Seven Tips for Graphic Facilitators that it's a good idea to bring stick labels to cover spelling mistakes and then correct them.

Turning to Amazon I looked at Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes and Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity which is just about to come out, and added it to my wish list.

If you're designing a group meeting and you've never tried out graphic facilitation or taken the risk of no Power Points it's well worth the experience. Look at one of the RSAnimates and you'll get a feeling of why this is.

Culture

Cryptic culture,
Cultic culture,
Consumer culture,
Fake culture,
Pretentious culture,
Freedom robbing culture,
World destroying culture,
Live your culture.
Find yourself.
Have your veracity.
The state of which
Is just another culture.

Randy Briggs
http://www.poemhunter.com/

I was going to use this poem in the introduction to my new book on organization culture. In the end I did not include it so here it is instead.

Yesterday I was talking with someone who was under a lot of emotional stress at work. She was having difficulties communicating with her boss, who she felt was attacking her, she was upset by the way she felt so down about her inability to handle it, she wondered where her normal resilience had vanished to, and overall was down in the dumps, feeling physically and mentally drained.

Later in the day I was talking with someone who was on her way to Singapore to take a workshop in psychic self defense, something I had never heard of. She sent me the link where I read that:

This workshop is primarily focused on Psychic Self Defense. .. Do you know that you are being attacked on the psychic level on a daily basis and you do not even know it? … Join us in this informative workshop to learn:

– how to identify a psychic attack
– how to protect yourself spiritually, psychically, energetically, mentally and emotionally
– have a better understanding of why they happen
– how to prevent other people's negative energies from affecting us
– And practical tools on psychic attack prevention and protection

This sounded exactly the type of workshop to benefit the emotionally stressed person I'd been talking to earlier, but ever skeptical of anything that sounds fringe, or a panacea I did a little more investigation. It turns out that 'pyschic self defense' is a whole field of endeavor (not that this makes it valid, reliable, or legitimate or vice versa) that has writings about it, enthusiasts supporting it, and marketing selling it.

Following the tack of psychic self defense a bit further I remembered two books roughly on topic. One is Nasty People by Jay Carter. This is about invalidating behavior – how to recognize when someone is invalidating you, and how to stop being an invalidator yourself. It's got a nice line in the introduction "what you are paying for in this book is perspective". So I've taken it off my bookshelf and will take into the person today.

The second is Gareth Morgan's book Images of Organization in which he presents one image of organizations as psychic prisons. In the chapter Morgan explores 'some of the ways in which organizations and their members become trapped by constructions of reality that, at best, give an imperfect grasp on the world.' He suggests that one of the strengths of using the psychic prison metaphor in relation to an organization is that it shows that 'change initiatives often attack unconscious psychological defenses'.

I'm not really trying to make any connection between psychic self-defense, invalidation, and organizations as psychic prisons, but it does strike me that all three conjure up concepts of attack that need to be consciously recognized and then worked with in a way that promotes individual or organizational health rather than a down-ward spiral into defensiveness or resistance. That same day someone mentioned the quote "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer", attributed to Sun-Tzu.

Maybe learning techniques to work with your perceived enemies (invalidators, psychic attackers) in a way that thwarts their attacks without demeaning them, would be helpful all round. (I was in a union meeting the other day and some better ways of dealing with psychic attacks, and invalidations, and just plain hurling of insults might have been a lot more productive).

As a side note: An additional recommended, by a friend of mine, method to ward off negativity, invalidation and psychic attack is by wearing black onyx. "Onyx jewelry is worn to defend against negativity that is directed at you. Black stones have protective energies in the sense that black is the absence of light, and therefore, can be used to create invisibility. "

The Economist had an article on Pixar on June 17 "Planning for the sequel". It made the point that Pixar also obliges its teams to conduct formal post mortems once their films are complete.

In lesser hands this might degenerate into a predictable Hollywood frenzy of backslapping and air-kissing. But Pixar demands that each review identify at least five things that did not go well in the film, as well as five that did.

One organization I worked in had what was called the meeting 'hotwash'. After every meeting there was a brief review spanning:

a) what went well about the meeting: things like agenda, content, participation, actions recorded
b) what went less well: things like not listening, talking over each other, paying more attention to BlackBerries than the meeting
c) what to do differently next time: things like shorten the meeting, have a timekeeper, 'have the meeting in the meeting' (that is don't leave the meeting and say something different outside it than you said inside it)

Last year the HBR Classic How to Run A Meeting, by Anthony Jay, that was first published in 1976 was reprinted. It still reads very well: the six points on why having a meeting are sound.

1. A meeting defines the team, the group, or the unit
2. A meeting is the place where the group revises, updates, or adds to what it knows as a group
3. A meeting help every individual understand both the collective aim of the group and the way in which his own and everyone else's work can contribute to the group's success.
4. A meeting creates in all present a commitment to the decisions it makes and the objectives it pursues
5. In the world of management, a meeting is very often the only occasion where the team or group actually exists and works as a group
6. A meeting is a status arena. It is no good to pretend that people are not or should not be concerned with their status relative to the other members in a group.

And I am inclined to agree with the point that
"a meeting still performs functions that will never be taken over by telephones, teleprinters, Xerox copies, tape recorders, television monitors, or any other technological instruments of the information revolution."

Perhaps that puts me firmly in the same generation as Anthony Jay, but even though the orgaisation I am currently working with has access to all the technology possible for meetings there are still many, many, face to face meetings.

Jay goes on to describe types of meetings in terms of: size, frequency, composition, motivation, and decision making processes before tackling how to conduct the meeting. What it doesn't cover, however, is how to review the meeting i.e. doing the hotwash that I mentioned at the start.

In fact, googling the phrase 'How to run a good meeting' yielded, of course, a bunch of possibilities but taking a random look only one out of about 15 mentioned 'review the meeting' (in terms of the process and content, in order to improve it the next time round).

Out of curiosity I googled 'Hotwash' and discovered – which I didn't know, that:

All military members are familiar with using exercises as a training tool. It's a tool the military utilizes on a frequent basis to ensure we are prepared to defend, rescue, react and survive in a variety of scenarios.

After the exercise an evaluation is made to determine how well the exercise went. At Dobbins this evaluation is commonly referred to as the hot wash.

"The hot wash gives units a means to get feedback on how they performed in an exercise or event," said Ms. Josephine Atkins-Scafe, Emergency Management acting chief. It provides the participants with "something tangible to take back to their units to correct any developing adverse trends that may impact resources and operations."

"The goal with any of our exercises is to train the way we fight and to assess our ability to respond to various emergency situations," said Lt. Col. John M. Vallrugo, 94th Airlift Wing performance planner and exercise evaluator team chief.

The hot wash usually occurs at the end of an exercise or operation. It can also occur at the end of each phase of an exercise or operation or at the end of each day or work shift.

"The main purpose of a hot wash is to identify strengths and weaknesses of the response to a given event," said Colonel Vallrugo. "This leads to another governmental phase known as lessons learned. This is intended to guide future responses in a direction to avoid repeating errors that were made in previous exercises."

It seems like a good practice to adopt for any meetings given the standard Dilbert view of meetings in which several people sit around a table while the meeting organizer says things like, "There is no specific agenda for this meeting. As usual, we'll just make unrelated emotional statements about things which bother us…" And which are not followed up by any process aimed at improving things.

At a meeting this week one of the topics that popped up was culture change. The meeting divided into two camps: one saying culture change was easy, the other saying it was difficult. A brief and good-humored debate happened.

The culture change is 'easy' group had the following argument:

If you change the leadership, and the leadership role models the behaviors it wants to see in the organisation, and you do something disruptive, like move the corporate headquarters. Then the culture will change. This group implied that culture change can happen quickly and fairly painlessly without loss of productivity and business continuity.

The culture change is 'hard' group argued that: Even if the leaders are willing, able and committed to change, (and agreed on what it would look like), then the middle managers will act as an impermeable barrier – stopping both the top down change, and any bottom up change which this group felt would occur as, in the organization in question, young people joined who expected a quite different psychological employment contract and career path from the longer serving (and older) members of the workforce. They suggested that it's a very slow and painful process to change the culture.

There are a number of difficulties with both arguments. The difficulties they share include:

1. Arguing from over simplified ideas of what culture is
2. Believing that there are specific levers to manipulate it e.g. leadership style
3. Implying that an organization has a monolithic culture so that what works to change it in one part of the organization will work in another
4. Ignoring elements of the infrastructure that bake culture in e.g. performance management systems, outdated policies, unexamined standard operating procedures, and compliance requirements

One organisation that seems to have good experience in changing the culture is Cisco. Take a look at John Chambers talking on teamwork and collaboration and you'll see that he talks about a process that had already been going on for six years (to the time he did the video in 2009), and involves multiple changes to systems, processes, structures, and behaviors. Chambers is frank in stating that he had to change a lot about his own modus operandi. He had to learn to let go and let other people get on with it.

Alan Mulally of Ford is another CEO changing the culture. But again it is not a totally easy or fast fix – Mulally has been in post nearly four years. A Wall Street Journal article in February this year points to some of the issues including labor concerns. And although he turns 65 in August this year "the typical retirement age for executives in Detroit. Ford has no formal retirement policy for its top people, but Chairman Bill Ford Jr., a scion of the founding family, has said in jest that he hopes Mr. Mulally will remain CEO for a couple more decades." presumably to carry on his culture change work.

What is relatively easy to do for the executive team is to make clear, explicit statements about what the cultural attributes should be and why they should be different from what they currently are. The 'why' they should be different must be rooted in a real (and communicable) shortfall in business performance or change in business strategy. Sony, an electronics manufacturer, losing competitiveness, decided to invest more in specific global brands (one of which was Playstation) than in less well known brands. This brand focus "forced the company to engage in culture change efforts that have had repercussions on the rest of the corporate strategy. As Sony CEO, Nobuyuki Idei, stated "We have to change from a manufacturing industry culture to a knowledge-based global culture. . . . a reinvention of the business model itself. (See: Schulz, M. and Hatch, M-J. (2003). The Cycles of Corporate Branding: the case of the Lego Company. California Management Review. Vol 46. No. 1. Fall)

Chapter 7 of my book Organisation Culture: Getting it Right presents and explains six conditions for culture change: To change a culture you need

1. Clear and well articulated reasons for changing the culture that are inextricably linked to the business strategy
2. Clear and well articulated principles for delivering the business strategy which are supported by values that are shared, and acted on by those working for the organisation – albeit in different ways in its different parts.
3. Alignment of such matters as language, policies, practices, processes and the physical environment with the principles for delivering the business strategy.
4. Overt leadership commitment through deeds as well as words to the desired/required 'way we do things here'.
5. A recognition of what degree of change is possible given the constraints of history, legacy, the business model, resources and so on.
6. Acceptance that planned culture change takes years rather than months, and that culture is in any case changing all the time irrespective of any plans to change it.

Neither quick nor easy but doable in the right conditions.

A couple of weeks ago I read a piece in the New York Times on the benefits of blowing your top. The writer talks about

"Millions of people live or work with exasperatingly cool customers, who seem to be missing an emotional battery, or perhaps saving their feelings for a special occasion. People who – unlike the mining operators in the gulf – have a blowout preventer that works all too well."

I thought this was a good and different take on the perceived wisdom that blowing your top – at least in the office is not the right thing to do. It's seen a emotionally unintelligent and a 'derailer'

DDI has a published a list of what it calls 'Executive Derailers' characteristics that are likely to upend an executive on his/her path to fame and glory. DDI identifies 11 derailer behaviors. Described as "fatal personality flaws, which…may knock [leaders] off the track to success," these behaviors include being: impulsive, risk adverse, imperceptive, arrogant, approval dependent, self-promoting, eccentric, defensive, and volatile. Low tolerance for ambiguity and micromanaging complete their list.

Volatility is the one that equates to 'blowing your top' it:

Describes individuals who have difficulty controlling their emotions and are perhaps moody and quick to anger. Others might describe them as possessing short attention spans, frequently changing interests and enthusiasms, and "taking a roller coaster ride through life." These people tend to lack tactfulness. Individuals might derail because they are seen as too moody, have unstable relationships and job histories, and fail to express emotions appropriately.

The Hogan Development Survey assesses eleven personality-based performance risks that impede work relationships, hinder productivity, or limit overall career potential. These career derailers – deeply ingrained in personality traits – affect an individual's leadership style and actions. Hogan's eleven derailers are different from DDI's eleven derailers. Their's are

• Excitable: moody, easily annoyed, hard to please, and emotionally volatile
• Skeptical: distrustful, cynical, sensitive to criticism, and focused on the negative
• Cautious: unassertive, resistant to change, risk-averse, and slow to make decisions
• Reserved: aloof, indifferent to the feelings of others, and uncommunicative
• Leisurely: overtly cooperative, but privately irritable, stubborn, and uncooperative
• Bold: overly self-confident, arrogant, and inflated feelings of self-worth
• Mischievous: charming, risk-taking, limit-testing and excitement-seeking
• Colourful: dramatic, attention-seeking, interruptive, and poor listening skills
• Imaginative: creative, but thinking and acting in unusual or eccentric ways
• Diligent: perfectionistic, hard to please, and micromanaging
• Dutiful: eager to please and reluctant to act independently or against popular opinion

I haven't checked whether other writers, researchers, and survey designers also think that eleven is the magic number of derailers. And I'm not sure if there's a sort of proportion that's in order for predictable leadership success – if you show signs of 5/11 derailers but 12/24 leadership strengths is that ok? But I guess that's not worth speculating on. It's all contingent on circumstance.

The reason I was looked at the topic in the first place was because one of the leaders in my acquaintance suddenly blew his top about meetings: having them, the protocols (not), of them; the time wasting of them; the lack of results from them; the list went on for nine – not eleven – points and we were all invited to add to the diatribe against meetings in order to get a comprehensive list of things to eradicate for ever from our meetings.

The interesting thing was that the 'blowing of top' was entirely calm, cool and collected. It was a deliberate kick at unproductive organizational behaviour, and a well-aimed kick too.

So, blowing one's top can be a controlled blast, much as a building is consciously detonated, or it can be uncontrolled, with disastrous and uncontrollable consequences. It is useful or not depending on the circumstances and the way in which it is done. And this is what the New York TImes article suggests:

Research in the past few years has found that people develop a variety of psychological tools to manage what they express in social situations, and those techniques often become subconscious, affecting interactions in unintended ways. The better that people understand their own patterns, the more likely they are to see why some emotionally charged interactions go awry – whether from too little control or … perhaps too much..

The key to whether a behavior is a derailer or not then is partly to do with the situation and partly to do with how the behavior is expressed and regulated

In a paper discussing emotional regulation the researchers proposed measuring three components of regulation: concealing (i.e., suppression), adjusting (quickly calming anger, for instance) and tolerating (openly expressing emotion). The research subjects were all students in their twenties so the researchers pointed out that generalizations to other age groups would be a mistake. Nevertheless the idea of choosing how to effectively (i.e. not damaging oneself or others) blow one's top and get good results from doing so is worth exploring.