Dolphin Trainer?

In my twenties, as a trainee Chartered Accountant, I was surfing the waves of an energetic social life in and around London — chasing amusing opportunities, making new friends, all while trying to delay exposure of a significant flaw in my social persona.

Internet-based fact checking didn’t exist in the early 1990s, so I had a cunning plan for the inevitable question: “What do you do?”

This was London, not New York. British Q&A gave more leeway for banter than the formal social contracting scene of the 1990s Big Apple.

The prettier the subject, the crazier the answers became.

The one that sticks in my memory was:

“Dolphin Trainer.”

Exotic. Foolish. Cute. 

A laughable contrast to the truth but what I didn’t realise at the time was that this silly answer would end up being oddly close to what I do today.

Someone asked me the same question at lunch this weekend. I’m pleased to say they were as charming as those occasions of yesteryear — but my finance-focussed answer achieved only: Nod → “How interesting” → Pause → Move on.

I woke up on Monday morning wondering whether I could have said “Dolphin Trainer” without just being a fraud-for-a-laugh. And then it occurred to me: perhaps we need to be careful what we dream for.

I now live in East Africa and love to take visitors out into the bush. 

Most people want to see the killers and giants that inhabit their dreams of Africa. But I want them to stop — and see behind the picture of the "boring" things.

Like a grazing herd of female impala, and its single male companion who eats nothing, because he is on a singular mission: procreate and fight, for as long as he possibly can. We all see the same movement. But I see the underlying patterns, having watched the same behaviours for decades.

I didn’t become a safari guide. The less poetic truth is that I watch behaviours and explore the plumbing of business organisations. I look at the same thing as everyone else — and often I see something different.

The patterns are remarkably consistent across industries, time periods and stages of organisations.

They share the same problems:

- cashflow crises

- inefficient operating methods

- gaps in controls

- information that arrives too late to matter

The solutions are context-specific. But the route to them is also consistent.

Understand and adjust the operating method. Then consider the tools. 

In that order.

Being a Chartered Accountant still needs a little lightening at the social table.

Introducing myself as a wildlife watcher will perhaps no longer be such a fabrication after all. With a little poetic licence, I can go on to explain that I am really about seeing the patterns beneath movement, realities behind actions, and working out quietly how to influence what’s likely to happen next.

If you meet a Dolphin Trainer unexpectedly in the days ahead, it might just be me — watching the movement and wondering what’s really driving it.