Challenging the status quo

One of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits (Habit 7, fact fans) is “Sharpen the Saw.” It’s based on the idea of continuous improvement, on the idea that we have to continually learn, continually grow, continually expose ourselves to new interests and influences. Ghandi once said "we open the doors and the windows and allow all the currents to come in” and I think that’s a good philosophy: it’s important to let the tides come in occasionally, to mix things up. It’s not easy to set aside time to do these things – I’ve talked before about the tyranny of the urgent – but if we don’t continually improve ourselves, we’ll get left behind.

So here on the inspired blog, in addition to our regular weekly posts, we’ll occasionally be posting a series of interesting articles and videos for you to take a look at. Hopefully, they will spark thoughts in your mind or provoke a debate. I’d love to know what you think of them, so please do take a moment to leave comments or tick the little box below; the more I know what you like, the more I can deliver it!

This week, we bring you a video by Seth Godin from the ever-reliable TED website; if you’re not paying attention to what both Godin and TED are doing, you really need to give yourself a good talking to. As you watch this video, ask yourself what story you’re telling and how you’re challenging the status quo...

Confidence tricks

I’ve talked in the past about the importance of asking yourself those simple – but crucial – questions and when it come to workshops, one of the questions I like to encourage delegates to ask themselves is “what do I want?” I’m not surprised that the most common answer is that, almost regardless of the topic of the workshop, delegates want more confidence. It seems like a reasonable request: who couldn’t use a little more confidence? Who wouldn’t find their life enhanced if they had more confidence? Who wouldn’t live the life they wanted if they had more confidence? But what is confidence and where does it come from?

The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms, so let’s look at how confidence is defined in the dictionary: “belief in own abilities; self assurance or a belief in your ability to succeed”. The thing that strikes me about that definition is that it contains the word “belief” twice, so we can be relatively confident that confidence is a belief although we usually take it to be a feeling. This is important; we can create our own beliefs and change them when we need to.

The second thing to bear in mind about confidence is that we often get it the wrong way round. How many times have you said to yourself; if I had more confidence, I would… (insert dream/task/objective here)? But where does a belief in our own abilities come from? Is it going to arise, magically, before we attempt the things we want to do or does it arise afterwards, from reflection and hindsight, from learning from experience?

I knew someone once who was adamant that people don’t change but she’s wrong because it’s a fundamental part of being human – the ability to take action, experience the consequences, learn from them and behave differently in future. That’s where confidence comes from – reflecting back on our experiences and learning from them that we are able to succeed; because either we did succeed or because, having failed in the past, we have learned what it takes to succeed.

It’s also important to remember that having confidence doesn’t mean not feeling scared or apprehensive or worried: I’m not pretending that confidence is easy. I would love to have some magical injection or form of words that would give anyone more confidence but the truth is that confidence arises from inside, from our experiences. From grasping the nettle and taking chances; from risking failure and achieving success; from daring and reflecting. Confidence is a result, an outcome of a task or an experience, not a tool to tackle the task in the first place.

A change is as good as a rest...

If you had been born in a different country, would you have been a different person? It’s a deceptively simple question and one that has been nagging at me over the last few weeks, as I’ve been pondering the subject of change. I’m in the change business, to a degree; I ask people, encourage people and help people to make changes to their behaviour. Recently I’ve started to wonder whether changes to behaviour actually lead us to become different people.

A river flows the way it does because of certain fixed points – the depth of the riverbed, the rainfall, the angle of the ground, the rocks and other obstructions around which it must flow. Change any of those fixed points and the river will flow differently. So it is with the flow of our lives. If you had been born in a different country, you would still be you – but a different you: the influences to which you were exposed, the culture in which you developed would all have been different. Even using a different language can change the way we think. Perhaps some fundamentals would remain, something genetically programmed into you or something inherently “you” but otherwise, you would be a different person.

Most of the time, for most people, change brings with it feelings of discomfort; often our efforts are directed towards keeping things fundamentally the same as they are now. But we all come to points in our lives when we look around ourselves and actively desire change – we reach a point when we realise that things cannot go on as they were. At this point, many people will turn inwards – to self-help books or to counselling or therapy of some kind – to make the changes they feel necessary.

This isn’t necessarily the wrong thing to do – much sustainable change begins from the inside out and I’m a great advocate for it. It strikes me, however, that a quicker way to change is to change the fixed points in our lives. If you lived in a different town, if you had different friends, if you took up different hobbies, watched different films, read different books, the flow of your life would be different. All of these things are in our control – after all, we decide where we live, the job we do, the hobbies in which we partake and we can change these things, if we so choose. Making that choice would mean that to an extent, over time, you would come to be a different person.

A game of inches

There’s great excitement at the inspired offices because this weekend marks the start of the new season for both Formula 1 and the IRL (F1’s American equivalent). Before you switch off, thinking that this entry is going to be petrol-head heaven, it struck me as I watched the F1 practice session this morning that there are a lot of good business lessons to learn from the physics of motor racing.

It takes about five months to design and build a Formula 1 car and the costs run into the millions, per car – even the wheel nuts have to be specially designed and built and cost in the range of £300 each! Many clever people work long and hard on the aerodynamics of the car, finding the most efficient shape that allows the car to move cleanly through the air; they work on the engine, finding ways of squeezing the maximum speed from it; they work on the tyres, finding exactly the right formula for the rubber. The driver himself (or herself, in the case of IRL) trains hard in order to improve his/her reaction times and ability to cope with the huge g-forces they experience.

All of that time, effort and money relies just one thing; that tiny area of the tyres which is touching the track at any given moment. Called the contact patch, all of those untold millions of pounds, dollars and hours rest on an area roughly equivalent to an A5 sized piece of paper. Introduce anything into that contact patch between the tyre and the track – water, gravel, bits of worn rubber – and all that time, effort and money will count for nothing. The most powerful engine in the world won’t be able to move the car if the tyres can’t convert that energy to forward motion.

So what’s the relevance to business, you ask? How many times have you been on a workshop and had time at the end to do some action planning? So often, I’ve seen delegates just take it as an opportunity to call a taxi, arrange their bags, pack up their stuff, have a cup of coffee or an extra break – anything, in fact, except what they’ve been asked to do: their action planning. And yet that little action planning session is the most important part of the day, the equivalent of the contact patch – the whole value of the workshop rests on that session, where you work out how best you can convert what you’ve learned into new behaviour at work. And that’s really the point, isn’t it? The purpose of learning is not knowledge – it’s action.

I once heard someone describe yacht racing as a game of inches. I suspect that’s the same for all sports and for business, too – the tiniest of things can make the biggest difference. Most people don’t recognise the importance of those tiny things but the best sportsmen/women and businessmen/women do. That tiny session, that brief period of time when the trainer asks you to do some action planning, is one of those moments – use it wisely.

Consequences

There are times when you want to do what my American chums call “the headslap” and I recently encountered one of those times. I was working with a manager who was having problems with a contractor who was producing poor work, missing deadlines and so on. She told me that, despite talking to the contractor about it, the problems continued and it was causing her a lot of extra work, irritation and inconvenience.

We talked for a while and she told me the only sanction she had was to withhold the contractor’s payment but she didn’t want to do that because (a) she thought it wasn’t very nice and (b) it was a hassle for her to fill in the paperwork. In other words, the situation was causing her some inconvenience but she didn’t want to do anything to correct it because it would cause her some inconvenience. Hence the headslap.

It started me wondering, though: how often do we complain about situations that are, fundamentally, of our own making? I wrote previously about Irene – that situation was as much a creation of the managers who didn’t want to grasp the situation as it was of Irene’s making. I’m not saying that any manager should like or enjoy confrontation but it is a fact that sometimes we have to confront issues that aren’t going well or situations that aren’t working. What I tried to explain to this manager was that confronting the issue wasn’t being “nasty” but was the only way the situation was going to change.

We make decisions in the light of the consequences of those decisions. In this case, for the contractor, until this point there had been no consequences: he could continue to hand shoddy work in late and she would fix it for him. The only price he might have to pay was the occasional meeting where she complained a bit but even that was mild. There was just no incentive for him to change. For Irene, there was no real consequence to taking all that time off – she just got passed on to another manager.

I suspect that, for this manager, it was easier to complain than it was to fix – for her, the consequences of inaction weren’t sufficient motivation to do anything about it. Although I would choose differently, I respect her decision. I’m not advocating the old-fashioned “carrot and stick” approach to motivation or suggesting that the way to get people to do something is to threaten them, but it is vital that people understand the consequences of their current behaviour in order to make a decision to change. That’s not being nasty – it’s just common sense.