Resolve

I was going to begin a three part rant about training myths this week - just to kick the new year off in style - but a trip to the gym on Monday sidetracked me, so you’ll have to wait until next week for that. I normally go to the gym (assuming I’m not working) three or four times a week and - as always happens in these circumstances - I’ve become quite comfortable with my routine and with seeing the same old faces. So, after a couple of weeks off for the festive season, I returned to the gym on Monday at the usual time with a spring in my step and was confronted with a surprisingly full car-park. Inside, the gym was full, and it was full of people whose faces I didn’t recognise. For a moment, I wondered what was going on and then it struck me. These new people, wandering in a slightly lost fashion around the gym, clutching their brand new workout cards, looking for the next piece of equipment on their list, were busily executing on their New Year’s Resolutions.

Now, I’m not trying to be cynical about people who decide to make changes in their lives. I’m not one of those people who thinks that it’s impossible for people to change or that changes are always destined to fail. But it is the case that the odds are most of these new gym-bunnies will fall by the wayside and stop going to the gym in fairly short order. Market research indicates that only just over 25% of gym members actually go to the gym and some statistics I’ve seen show that 90% of new members will stop going in the first 90 days. Change4Life UK assert that most New Year’s Resolutions last for barely longer than a week.

It’s all very sad and you have to wonder why this happens. The answer that’s often given is a lack of motivation and there are plenty of resources out there to help keep motivation up. There are lots of little techniques, from visualisation to positive reinforcement that can help with motivation. However, while motivation is a part of achieving any goal, I’m afraid that it’s not the most important part.

When someone says that they’re not motivated to do something, what they’re really saying that that they don’t feel like doing it. Well, that may be the case, but the fact is that the only way to achieve a goal is to work at it - constantly, not just at the times when we feel like doing it. Life sometimes - often - expects us to do things that we don’t feel like doing: the difference between people who succeed and those who don’t is often that those who succeed didn’t use “not feeling like it” as an excuse not to do what need to be done.

So, if you’re working on a New Year’s Resolution, may I make a suggestion? Motivation is important and I’m very happy to do what you can to maintain it; but focus more on your discipline. It’s not a fashionable word and maybe for some it has some negative connotations but I promise you that cultivating discipline will have a far greater impact on your ability to execute on your goals than motivation. Make the commitment and stick to it. Good luck.

The view from here

I’ve been running some time management workshops recently and one of the things that we’ve been looking at is the direction in which people are heading, their longer-term goals. Having a direction is an excellent way (and possibly the only real way) of establishing your priorities, without which it’s impossible to organise yourself in any meaningful way. The thinking behind this is that it’s important to know where you want to get to otherwise, as Lewis Carroll pointed out, it doesn’t really matter which way you go.

I left school with weak A-levels and didn’t go to university. A few years ago, I decided that I was going to return to studying and get the degree I didn’t get a quarter of a century ago. As I was thinking about this, it struck me that it would take about six years to do this and that I would be 45 years old by the time I got my degree. That length of time felt daunting until I realised that, unless something dreadful happened, in six years I was going to be 45 anyway – I might as well be 45 with a degree.

My destination was the degree and I had a vague idea of what I was going to do with it when I began studying. An analogy that I often use is that of a pilot filing a flight plan: when the plane takes off, the pilot knows where he’s going to land – unless, of course, something unexpected happens. It’s a helpful analogy but, like any analogy, if you push it too hard it will break down. Since I made my choice, my outlook has changed and evolved. In the words of every contestant on the X-Factor, I’ve been on a journey and the view from where I am now is different to the view I had when I started studying.

Someone once told me that “to decide is to divide” – a yes to one option is automatically a no to another option. But that yes also opens up the possibility of a whole lot of other options. Because of the choice I made five years ago, I was alert to several opportunities that have come my way in the last few weeks, opportunities that have helped to clarify that vision I mentioned above. For us, the destination doesn’t have to be fixed in stone – we’re not locked into a flight plan and it’s possible for us to change our destination at any point. It’s what makes the journey exciting.

The normalisation of deviance

Every now and then, in my travels across the internet, I come across a quotation so perfect that I’ll start using it on every workshop I run. I found one of those quotes the other day and I’ve been using it everywhere I can ever since:

Each uneventful day that passes reinforces a steadily growing false sense of confidence that everything is all right – that I, we, my group must be OK because the way we did things today resulted in no adverse consequences.

It’s a quote from Scott Snook, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, and is used in the context of the “normalisation of deviance” which is not as much fun as it sounds.

It describes a situation whereby a group or an organisation, usually under duress, takes a risk or a short-cut that it wouldn’t normally take. Perhaps it eases its safety procedures or lowers its quality control standards. Whatever it is, the decision is made in good faith that the measure is only temporary and that normal service or standards will be resumed when the crisis or unusual circumstances have passed.

However the group realises, consciously or unconsciously, that having taken a risk they have, effectively, gotten away with it – nothing bad has happened. And so, instead of returning to the stricter procedures, the laxer regime is allowed to continue. The longer this goes on without any adverse consequences, the more used to it the group or organisation becomes – essentially forgetting that there is any risk involved in what they’re doing as the deviant procedure or process becomes part of the normal, everyday run of things.

This applies to serious and tragic events such as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and to trivial events, like me being pulled over by the police because one of my headlights wasn’t working. It hadn’t been working for a while; I knew I had to fix it but the longer I left it the more normal it became until I had forgotten that I was taking a risk

And this is the key thing, I think. At the start, we know we’re running a risk but when disaster doesn’t strike we forget that risk doesn’t mean that an event will happen – merely that it is possible. The longer we continue without the risked event occurring, the more we forget that the risk is still there – it just hasn’t happened yet. As the deviance is normalised we forget the risk that’s being taken and then suddenly disaster arrives out of, apparently, nowhere.

Are you successful? Are you, your team, your organisation doing well? Are you doing well because of the actions you’re taking or despite them? What risks have you normalised? What disaster, even now, as you read this, could be building because of a deviant procedure that you might even have forgotten about? Sleep well – and don’t have nightmares.

Telling your story

Before I get to the subject of this week’s blog, I’d like to ask you to do me a favour. To do this, you’ll need a piece of paper and a pen and you’ll also need to pay very close attention to your mind. I’m going to give you a word and I’d like you to write down the first word you think of when you see the word I’m going to give you. It can be any word you like, whatever pops into your head but, as I said, you’ll need to pay very close attention to your mind.

Are you ready? The word is: choice. Write down the word you associate with choice and we’ll come back to it in a while.

I was working with a group this week, helping them work out what they wanted to do with their lives and careers. This obviously involves some goal setting and that goal can be very general or it can be very specific. To use a journey as an analogy, your destination could be as general as London or as specific as a particular address. Neither is better than the other but, in order to set off in any meaningful way, you’ll probably need at least a general idea of where you’re going.

One of the delegates was completely unable to do this. She had, she claimed, absolutely no idea of where she was going. Not only that, she was sceptical about the whole process. There were too many other things that could happen in the future – including the old cliché of falling under a bus tomorrow (I checked: she didn’t) – and for her that made planning or goal setting pointless and impossible.

We spent some time thinking about the journey she had already made in her life and it occurred to me that we can tell our life stories in one of three ways. It can be a story of chance – luck, coincidences and random happenings. It can be a story of destiny – you were fated to marry that person, born to do that job. Or it can be a story of choice – where you are today is a result of the choices you made yesterday and the day before and the day before that. All of those three options, it seems to me, are equally valid; it’s your autobiography and you can tell it any way you choose. However, only one of those options allows you to have any part in building your future, and that’s choice.

Go back to the word you wrote. Some people write negative words – burden, difficulty, overwhelming; some write positive words – freedom, autonomy, excitement. I wonder what you wrote. And I wonder how much the word you associate with choice will determine the way you tell your autobiography – and the extent to which you write your own future.

Training isn't working - post script

As regular readers will know, over the last few weeks the blog has been looking at why it seems that training doesn’t work and what you can do, as managers and the people commissioning training, to change that. This week, I’d like to return to the topic for last look and to share with you something that I found whilst researching the topic.

Let me being by asking you a question. If you were diagnosed with a life-threatening illness but could avoid it by changing your behaviour, would you change your behaviour? If you said something like “yes, of course” you’re like most other people that I’ve asked that question. And, like most other people, you’re probably wrong: the sad fact is, statistically, you’re highly unlikely to change your behaviour.

Think about it this way. Healthcare in the US costs around $1.8trillion a year – the overwhelming majority of that is spent on illnesses caused by five behavioural issues: too much smoking, too much drinking, too much eating, stress, and not enough exercise. All of those things can be prevented or avoided by behavioural changes – but aren’t.

The most shocking example of this that I found was a quote from Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University, one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the world. He was talking about patients with heart disease so severe that they have to undergo surgery, a traumatic and very expensive operation that can cost more than $100,000. About 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties -- all at a total cost of around $30 billion. These operations temporarily relieve chest pains but rarely prevent heart attacks or prolong lives - about half the time, the bypass grafts clog up in a few years; the angioplasties, in a few months. The causes of this are complex. Sometimes it’s a reaction to the trauma of the surgery itself but most patients could avoid the return of pain and the need to repeat the surgery – not to mention stop a disease that could kill them – by adopting healthier lifestyles. But very few actually do.

Says Dr Miller, "If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle. And that's been studied over and over and over again. And so we're missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can't."

Change is not hard to do – change can happen in an instant. We can all change things – and things can change for us – in a heartbeat. But, in the words of the Japanese proverb with which I started this blog, nearly a year ago, beginning is easy, continuing is hard. Studies in the US find that what doctors often do is try to motivate people to change with fear – they confront their patients with the ultimatum, change or die. The surprising thing is that people get used to anything: even the fear of death as a motivator stops working as we get used to the idea that we’re going to die. Now, doctors are changing to a more positive message: change and live consistently proves to be more motivating. People can change – we just need a positive reason.

Training isn't working - part three

Having spent the last couple of weeks trying to convince you that training doesn’t work, this week it’s time to turn our attention to the things you can do to make sure that it does. The good news, with which I teased you last week, is that there are some relatively simple things you can do to greatly improve the chances of seeing real, on-the-job application of the things delegates learn on workshops.

This diagram shows how training and development should work, at an organisational level. It starts on the left, with the identification of a business need. What is it that the company or team needs to achieve? What is the goal the individual is working towards? What, in other words, is the purpose of the training – what is it designed to achieve and how does this help the individual, the team or the company?

Moving into the middle box, in order to achieve this goal, the company, team or individual needs to start doing something – it’s only natural to assume that, in order to achieve goals you’ve never achieved before, someone somewhere needs to start doing something they’ve never done before. What is that “something”?

This then drives the right-hand box; to do this “something”, what kind of training do people need. This is when the training intervention can be put together – safe in the knowledge that the workshop (or whatever it is) is designed specifically to achieve business-relevant results.

The picture shows a shaded area around the behaviour box – this is the environment within which the delegates will be trying to apply what they’ve learned. That environment can be destructive and unhelpful, as we’ve covered previously, or it can be supportive and helpful. If you’re a manager, you can make all the difference.

Talk to your people before they go on the workshop. Ask them questions like:

• As a result of this training, what will you do differently?
• When will I see you doing it?
• What help do you need to put what you’ve learned into practice?

Keep in touch with them and use the trainer that you hire – any good trainer worth his or her salt with provide after-workshop support of some kind, so make sure you or the delegates make the most of it. What goes on at work, the messages you give to the people who’ve been on training, the support you offer, the encouragement you give, will make all the difference. And, of course, I’m honour bound to point out that if you want to make big changes – get inspired!

Training isn't working - part two

Last week, I think we covered enough statistics to convince even the hardiest sceptic that training isn’t working. The question this week, is why does this happen and the answer lies, in research by Geary Rummler and Alan Brache (1995), who found that 80% of performance problems relate to factors within the work environment. In other words, what happens outside of the training room gets in the way of application.

In my experience, three scenarios occur repeatedly, and make application difficult, if not impossible:

Training for no reason

I’m working with a multinational company training sixty of their managers, at great cost, simply because they haven’t had any training for a couple of years and the company thought some training might be a nice idea. Training is supposed to be performance enhancing: it's the bridge that takes you from point A to point B. If there isn’t a point B, why do it?

There is a reason – the delegates just don't know what it is

There is an idea that training can “fix” people. A manager has a member of staff with performance or behavioural issues; they don’t want to confront the issue directly, so they send the member of staff on a training course, in the hope that they’ll learn something and change. It’s not always that extreme, though: so many times, I see delegates who’ve had no conversation with their managers in advance of the workshop – they’ve just been sent there. What does that do to their willingness to learn?

Nothing happens afterwards

What happens after the workshop is crucial – if on-the-job reinforcement is missing, there's no reason or incentive to do anything. It’s difficult to sustain changes in behaviour and often we need help and support; if that’s not forthcoming, most of what we learn is gradually forgotten.

Of course, a fourth reason is that sometimes the training's just bad. A poor workshop or a poor trainer (and, lets face it, some are terrible) won’t generate any kind of change or application at all – but that’s a topic for another day!

So what’s the solution? There’s a great quote, attributed to both Einstein and Woody Guthrie (it’s easy to get them confused): “Any fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.” The inspired philosophy is simple things, done well, repeatedly: the good news is, for all of these problems there some very simple solutions and we’ll look at them next week.

Training isn't working

Have you ever engaged a training company? What differences did you see as a result of the training? If the answer to that is “very little” then I’m not surprised because training, it seems, just isn’t working.

Plato said the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. When I say working, I mean there is a noticeable transfer of learning to the business: what happens in the training room doesn't stay in the training room but it leaks out into the business. That's important because it's one of Donald Kirkpatrick’s four key measures for training:

• Level one – Evaluation (did they like it?)
• Level two – Recollection (did they remember it?)
• Level three – Application (did they do anything with it?)
• Level four – Impact (did it make a difference?)

Level one (evaluation) tends to be done most but produces data of the least value. Data at Application and Impact levels is harder to come by but what information is about paints a depressing picture.

In 1985, John Newstrom studied the perceptions held by members of the ASTD and there was a commonly held belief amongst them that training was not effectively transferred to the workplace. They believed that:

• Only 40% of the training content was applied to the job by the learner immediately following training.
• Only 25% of the training content was still applied to the job by the learner after six months.
• Only 15% of the training content was still applied to the job by the learner after one year.

Remember, this is perception and not necessarily reality but it is supported by other figures. Baldwin and Ford (1988) conducted a survey of the academic literature of the time on training effectiveness, and concluded, “Not more than 10% of the estimated $100 billion spent each year on training by the American industries actually resulted in transfer to the job”. Although doubt has been cast on the validity of this statement, in terms of the exact percentage and the estimated spend, it’s very similar to studies carried out by USA Today and by Ford and Weissbein (1997).

In 1992, Tannenbaum and Yukl conducted a review of the available literature, and concluded that the transfer of learning to job performance was generally low. They reported that relatively few learners, as low as 5%, actually applied in the workplace what they had learned in the training room, figures similar to those found subsequently by Stolovich (2000).

Have I convinced you – or merely bored you with a whole bunch of figures? The fact is, as Stolovich concluded, “Training alone is not effective in achieving on-job application of knowledge”. Next week we’ll look at why that is and, more importantly, what you can do about it.

What do you think you're doing?

When I was a child, one of the phrases I heard most often from my parents – usually in response to some sickening crash or disaster that I’d caused – was “what do you think you’re doing?” All these years later and that phrase still has a great deal of resonance for me and I like to ask it regularly, of others and myself. I’m often surprised to find that they – and sometimes I – don’t actually know. Sometimes there’s a difference between what I think I’m doing and what I’m actually doing but that’s a discussion for another week.

As I sat down to write this week’s blog entry, that phrase came back to me. Back in August last year, when I started this blog, I wrote that beginning something was easy but continuing was difficult. Since then, I think I’ve done pretty well – there’s been an average of a blog post a week, I have a handful of (intelligent, sophisticated, attractive) followers and sometimes people write to let me know that they’ve agreed with what I’ve written. But still that question keeps echoing in my mind: when it comes to this blog, what do I think I’m doing? It’s become even louder since I started a marketing campaign for inspired, trying to find new clients and new work: what do I think I’m doing?

Once I’d started asking the question I found that I didn’t have a convincing answer – not consciously, at least. Re-reading the blog, however, a pattern began to emerge and a realisation dawned on me. What do I think I’m doing? I’m simply trying to change the way we all – each one of us – think about work.

I’ve written before that I’ve seen too many people who’ve mistaken their job for a hostage situation. People for whom Monday morning – and sometimes even Sunday evening – is the low point of their week. People who can’t wait for the weekend – or even retirement – so they can do what they really want. People who are being ground down and used up by their employers and employers who know this is what they’re doing but can’t think of any other way to be.

Carrying on the way we are simply isn’t an option anymore: if the last couple of years have taught us anything – and that’s an open question – it’s that our current approach to work is unsustainable. We have to find a new and better way. I believe work – whatever that work is – can be inspiring. I believe work can provide dignity and fulfilment, can provide opportunities for creativity and service and links to a higher, more engaging purpose. I believe work should enhance life, not make it miserable. I believe all of this is possible and achievable, for everyone, and that’s what I’m trying to achieve – that’s what I think I’m doing.

It’ll take effort but the reward will be worth it. Who’s with me?

The dignity of labour

Are you busy? Feel like you’ve got too much to do? If you do, it would seem that you’re not alone: I was struck by some recent statistics from the Corporate Leadership Council showing that the average job “footprint” (i.e., what someone is expected to do as part of their job) has increased by a third since the beginning of the recession. The Hay Group has found that two-thirds of workers say they are regularly putting in unpaid overtime, in order to cope with this increased footprint.

But, you might argue, these are hard times and we must all pull together and do our best; it’s all hands to the pumps. Companies and workers understand that and the extra effort people put in now in order to help keep their employers afloat is appreciated. Except it isn’t: in the same Hay survey, 63% of workers say their employers do not appreciate their extra effort and 57% feel they are treated like “disposable commodities”. Around fifty per cent say that their current level of work is unsustainable. What are the consequences of those statistics?

This is a familiar theme on the inspiredblog – it’s one that we’ve returned to a number of times over the months. Booker T Washington said “no race can prosper until it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem” and it’s true. At inspired, we strongly believe that all jobs contain and provide dignity. Work defines us and having spent some time in the past without a job, we know how corrosive it can be, how meaningless and empty the days can become, and the crippling effect it can have on self esteem. But, to quote Camus, “there is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted” and what we’re seeing increasingly is that work is not freely accepted; it’s forced on us. It doesn’t provide dignity, it provides anxiety and illness. Is it any wonder that absenteeism, disengagement and low level corporate crime are all increasing, at precisely the time we need people to stay and engage the most?

Have you ever heard anyone say that their employees are their company’s greatest asset? Next time you hear it, remind them that employees are people, not assets. We’re human beings, not “Human Resources.” Unless employers ensure their employees are treated like people – with care, with consideration, with respect – statistics like the ones quoted above will increase and I fear that this recession will get an awful lot worse before it gets better.

We've had a facelift

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we were in the process of overhauling the inspired Consulting website. Well, the good news is that the work is done and the new website is up and running. You can take a look by clicking on the inspired logo and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the new look.

If things don't change...

Many years ago, I came across a Tibetan saying: “if you want to know your future, look at what you are doing in this moment.” At the time, I didn’t fully understand what it meant but over the years it’s come to be an important saying to me because it has two meanings.

Firstly, it reminds me of that other old saw – if things don’t change, they’ll stay the same. Whatever we’re doing now, we’ll still be doing it in ten years unless something intervenes to change it. Often, we rely on circumstances or external factors to change what we’re doing – we complain about a job that makes us unhappy but don’t take the steps to improve it or leave, preferring instead to hope that something – redundancy, retirement, a lottery win – will intervene to change things.

Of course, more often than not, those things don’t happen and so time drifts by and we find our selves fundamentally living the same life we lived ten years previously. It’s only then we realise that “if things don’t change, they’ll stay the same” isn’t the entire truth: that only holds true if the rest of the world is static, too. It’s more accurate to say that if things don’t change they’ll steadily decline – but that’s quite depressing and doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

The second meaning for my Tibetan phrase is the one that really resonates with me. Whatever your life is like in this moment, the chances are that the shape of your life has its roots in your past – often quite some way in your past. We plant seeds every day and they grow slowly – sometimes we do not even know that we are planting them but they bear fruit in our lives nonetheless. We are often too casual about this – not paying attention to the seeds we’re planting, only to have them blossom into a harvest that we really don’t want.

It’s truly the case that we reap what we sow in life. Each day, consciously or unconsciously, we are shaping our future and we must pay attention to the seeds we’re planting. This week, as you go about your life, focus on what you are doing in each moment; for every activity, think carefully about how it will shape your future – because it surely will.

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...

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.