I met someone yesterday who was deeply sceptical about the Thatcham Vision. That’s fine, of course: people should be sceptical about everything. Being sceptical means not accepting things at face value, digging beneath the surface, asking questions, thinking hard, testing ideas and so on. Sceptical is good.
But this person was also deeply negative about the Vision. In my view negative is bad. Very bad. Being negative certainly isn’t the same thing as being sceptical, although they often get confused. Negative is when your first response to an idea is to find everything that’s wrong with it. I can understand why people are negative – we live in trying and stressful times: I’d be concerned if I met someone who wasn’t a bit negative from time to time.
But to be honest, negativity – particularly as the very first reaction to a new idea – really winds me up. If you want to kill an idea the best way to do so is to be negative. Trot out the usual excuses: ‘we tried that before and it didn’t work’, ‘it might work there, but it won’t here’, ‘we’ve never been any good at doing that sort of thing’ and so on. There are dozens of variations on that theme. (The ‘we tried that before’ line is particularly weak I’m afraid: won’t bore you with the details here – drop me an email by clicking here and’ll tell you what I think is wrong with it.)
In a nutshell, I hate negativity because it stops useful things from being done. This is a subject on which I could bore for England: it’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Some years ago I came up with a name for the condition suffered by people who exhibit a severe negative response to everything: I call this Premature Evaluation. Premature Evaluation can be very unpleasant, but luckily there are cures available these days. Of which more in later posts.
And I shouldn't leave you with the impression that everyone is negative about the project. That, I'm pleased to say, is very far from the case.
