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.

Just one thing

Over the last couple of months, we’ve looked at daily and weekly planning, the key steps towards achieving increased productivity and balance. This week, we’ll finish the series by outlining the process of weekly planning.

The key benefit of weekly planning is that it gives you the chance to stop and think – to step back from the day-to-day and take a broader view. This can feel difficult when all of those urgent issues and tasks are pressing in on you but the busier you are, the more important weekly planning is. It only takes fifteen minutes or so and you can make it a regular part of your routine – essentially, a habit – by scheduling it into your diary as a weekly meeting with yourself.

The first step is to review your roles. Some of your roles will change as you go through life while other roles will stay with you for longer periods or even last a lifetime. Take a moment to reconnect with those roles, ensure they’re still relevant, and remind yourself of what you’re trying to achieve in these roles.

Secondly, ask yourself, what is the most important thing I could do in this role this week? Not everything you could do; not everything you have to do; not everything you hope to do. Just the most important thing – the one thing that would make all the difference. Of course, you'll do other things in those roles but what you’re looking for at this point is simply the most important thing.

The third step is then to schedule it into your week: if it’s an appointment, put it into your calendar, if it’s a task, put it onto your daily task list for the relevant day. When that day comes, that task is the most important thing you have to do that day – it’s your top priority. This is so important: it means that, whatever else happens that week, no matter what other urgent or unexpected activities come crashing into your schedule, you’ll have done some significant, longer-term, activity – something that takes you one step closer to achieving your goals.

You will have noticed that none of the steps to weekly or daily planning are what you might call rocket science and that’s a good thing. Complexity, in this case, is unnecessary – simple things, done well and repeatedly, will produce much more significant results in the longer term. But don’t take my word for it – try it for yourself and prove it.

What would you do with a 25th hour?

Last week we looked at the first part of weekly planning – establishing your roles in life. This week, I want to think a little more about why that’s important and what weekly planning will give you that you don’t have now.

In his bestselling book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey talks about the Time Matrix – a four-box model allowing tasks to be categorised based on whether they are important and/or urgent. It’s not a new model – the first reference I’ve found to it is as the Eisenhower method, as it was said to be used by the US President, although it’s not clear whether that’s apocryphal or not.

© FranklinCovey

When I run Time Management workshops, I’ll very often ask people what they would do if they had a 25th hour – you can think about this question, too. As I’m psychic, I know you’re thinking that you would spend that hour sleeping so I’ll let you do that for a couple of weeks and then you have to do something else: you can do anything you want. Inevitably, the things people come up with are Quadrant II activities; they say they would spend time with their loved ones, play with their kids, learn a language or a musical instrument, travel, paint or simply sit and read a book. You probably came up with something similar.

Why do they never get round to doing these things; why do they need a 25th hour? Because most people spend most of their time in Quadrants I and III. By definition, Quadrant II activities aren’t urgent and there are always other, urgent things to do which take priority – even when those urgent things aren’t important. The Quadrant II activities are left for those times when you have less to do; when things aren’t so crazy around here; when things calm down a bit.

It doesn’t have to be that way. What weekly planning gives you is the opportunity to schedule in some of those Quadrant II activities. And because the most important things in our lives tend to revolve around relationships – with ourselves and with others - establishing your roles in life is more than just categorising what you do. It also means thinking about how you do it. Decide what kind of bricklayer or musician you want to be and then schedule activities to help you achieve that.

The great benefit of weekly planning is that it changes your focus, lifting you out of the day-to-day grind of the urgent and into the future. We all have dreams, hopes or aspirations – they may be big or small but they are all important and should never be put off while we deal with things that are, fundamentally, unimportant. As Goethe said, “things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”