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The Change Challenge NOW.

Indeed.

Another of my favorite thinkers, Rick Maurer, recently posted on this same topic after reading an article in the Washington Post about “Fat School”. Rick is another national consultant with some outstanding ideas. He’s also, like me, influenced strongly by Gestalt principle of change. If you haven’t checked out Rick’s blog Change Management News: Change Without Migraines ™ you should. Here’s Rick’s post:

The article in The Washington Post (5/20/08) titled Fat School got me thinking. The story profiles a residential program for overweight children. The cost: $6250 a month with a four-month minimum stay.

Although the school presents high short-term success rates, and a few anecdotal reports of kids who kept the weight off for longer periods, there is no research to indicate that this approach does a better job than anything else in helping young people keep weight off. And at $6250 a month, it seems like that might be a good thing to do.

That got me thinking about change in organizations. It does strike me how easy it is to invest in something without any real indication that it works simply because the need is so great. Are parents willingness to invest so much in the lives and health of their children any different from leaders who spend millions on Business Process Reengineering when the success rate of such projects is so low? But, I’ll save that rant for another day.

I am most interested in the lack of support for these kids after the program ends. As Anjali Jain, a pediatrician at Children’s National Medical Center said in the article, “If their families don’t change, [students] are going to be back to their old ways of doing things” once they return home.

What many changes fail to take into account is what it will take to support these changes once the program goes live. Here are a few questions that I think are worth considering. What current programs and practices will vie for attention and resources of this new initiative? And what are we going to do about that? How will we support people as they take on the new tasks? (e.g. rewards, clear directions, training). And speaking of people, change brings shifts in power. How are we going to deal with potential turf wars? How will our customers and suppliers react to these changes? How will we make the transition easier for them? And the list goes on.

While organizations are willing to invest a lot in the front end of a change, they often don’t put money and time in supporting the roll-out. They’re willing to pay $6250 a month for tuition, but don’t want to actually change their own habits once the kids return to the land of Ho Hos.

It seems 2000 years after Artistole, we’re still in the habit of making the same mistakes — ignoring habit. Thanks to Rick for continuing to be a voice of real change. If only there were a system designed to help support the habits of success, day-in and day-out, so we get the most out of these investments in training (after great consultants like Rick help us make change, something that will help us keep it)…. ohh wait, there is one… and it costs a lot less than $6k a month.

Do you own a swiss army knife or know someone who does?  They’re a great tool, because they can do lots and lots of things.  Check out this swiss army kife. How neat is this?!#@  It’s fun just thinking about all the things this can do.  I love the newest electronic inventions and cool contraptions.   My wife would tell you the name Brian Mistler may actually be Latin “lover-of-gadgets”.  Maybe you share my affection for new toys and power tools.   And maybe, if you had a chance to pick up one of these, you would jump at it, and throw your little 9 feature knife away in a heartbeat…?  But, that could be a big a mistake.

Imagine having the “perfect tool” for any problem that could possible arrive.  You’d be the hero in the office, and the savior around home…. whatever comes up, you’re prepared.NOW…. imagine what that tool would look like, and imagine carrying this thing around in your pocket all day.  There’s no way, right? I mean… I suppose there IS  a way.  All those success seminars taught me to respond to “that’s impossible” with “anything is possible”.  In fact, sometimes I see really well trained success-seminar graduates respond “anything is possible” without thinking.  But, it’s not a question of possibility… it’s a question of desirability.  Sure I can, but do I want to?

Purposeful Doing requires Purposeful Choosing

I was about to write pages about all the implications of and kinds of “purposeful choosing” there is — about all the decisions in life where it’s important to make a purposeful decision. But, I decided against it for a reason — I purposefully chose not to. My reason is that if I had listed 100 examples you probably wouldn’t read them all… and you might even get overwhelmed and not read any (if I’m wrong, e-mail me and I’ll send you a few more examples!). Or, going for a 100, I may never have finished it. An article in the hand is worth 10 great half-finished ones on my hard-drive. Here’s another cliché I love, “killing two Birds with one stone.” It’s a great idea. Killing 100 Birds with one stone isn’t a cliché for good reason — because the stone would have to be SO huge, it becomes impractical. Or, the moment so perfect, you and I will never see it.

Don’t Diworsify

I believe it was mutual fund manager Peter Lynch who used to talk about portfolio “Diworsification”. People get so excited by so many different things — or so afraid of risk — that they add more and more things to their portfolio until all of their knowledge and insight has been diluted. Mathematically this is almost certain to end in regression to the mean — that is, in mediocrity in the middle. By all means, try them out, and make sure you know what you’re getting! This is purposeful choosing. And, when you’re ready, buy one. When I buy a 7 feature pocket knife, I’m saying, “THESE are the 7 features that are important to me,” and at the same time “all these others are less important”. This is purposeful choosing — both deciding AND BUYING AND PUTTING IN MY POCKET (or your purse if you prefer). You see, if had said, “these 7 are important… but, so are those 10… and that other knife that does a different 7 things”…. I would either have ended up leaving them all in the store because I couldn’t pick one “the paralysis of analysis” Dr. King used to call it, OR, I would have bought them all… if I buy them all, I can’t carry them all everyday unless I want to be EXHAUSTED (and I know many leaders who are exhausted for this reason). So, I pick one one day and one another. When I problem comes up, I hope I have the right one in my pocket… but, I have to remember which one I have and probably remember how to use it, and chances are I’ll have the wrong one the wrong day, etc. etc. You get my point? You’ve got to pick a knife, buy it, and put it in your pocket. This is commitment.

Commitment: Rethinking Won’t and Can’t

Once it’s in your pocket, amazing things start to happen. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “at the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you.” And, this is not too hard to understand. You’ve got one knife that you’ve chosen well. It can’t do everything, but what it does do it does well. And, you’ve made friends with it — you’ve committed to carrying it each day, and so when it’s needed you’re ready. You’re an expert at its use, and you’re full of energy because you don’t have a pocket full of metal.

When someone asks for a flip out size 3 light bulb remover, or a Russian to Pilipino currency converter, you say “I don’t have that — I can’t”. And, you go back to the business of doing what you do have — what you love, what you’re good at, and what you have energy for. Not being able to do certain things is the flip side of commitment (just as, in marriage, restrictions on outside dating come with the vows). If you’re married, and someone asks you on a date, you say, “I can’t”. I can’t is “I won’t” taken to the level of commitment.

For people who are stuck, mindlessly caught in a commitment they need to get out of, helping them to go from “I can’t” to “I won’t” (realizing it’s a choice) frees them up. For people caught in diworsification — in under commitment and frenzied doing, “I can’t” can offer the same freedom. I can’t can be a sign of purposeful choice.

Commitment, Creativity, and Flexibility

I’ve seen mission statements that have way too many implicit objectives. When an employees asks, which do I work on?”, the leader says, “do it all”. That’s unreasonable, I think, and I’ve never seen it work. I can’t give you a magic number (here my commitment to accuracy prevents me from saying X # of core objectives is IDEAL). You see, that number varies for people, and depending on how much the objectives overlap. A knife that has a beer bottle opener and a soda bottle opener is easier to manage than one that has a wine opener and a shovel. Dr.

Brian Higley and often suggest leaders start with 1-5 objectives, then move on to 1-5 more when the first 1-5 are going well. This seems like a reasonable number to start with to me. The bottom-line secret is to choose — set a clear mission statement and objectives (so you’re not playing whack-a-mole the whole time — see this article), commit to it, and then develop goals aligned with those objectives (see this article) your team can agree on, and then execute goals according to your priorities. Sure you can be ready for change. But, change is half of it. The key to preparedness for change is stability. In order to be ready for change, you have to have clear priorities about what you want to keep the same. Be creative in implementation, but don’t sacrifice commitment.

The 1000 feature knife represents a classic dream for many people — in many ways it’s part of The American Dream — having it all! I want a boat in the Virgin Islands, and an apartment in New York… I’d also like a house in Maine, and maybe a cottage in Northern Itlay…  who doesn’t, right? But, once I’ve got all these things, where will I spend my holiday? I might be able to have it all, but I can’t have it all right now. I’ve got to prioritize.   And, when values are at odds, I’ve got to get the priorities right.   Of course, I can’t tell you what your priorities should be… I don’t always know what mine are.  But, when I take the time to get clear about by priorities, and make sure my goals and actions are in alignment with my priorities, things work best.   You can have almost ANYTHING you want. You just can’t have EVERYTHING you want. Prioritize.   Be purposeful. Pick the tool (and the career, and the life) you love, execute with excellence, and get BAD at all the other stuff.   You can pick more than one thing for sure, but you can’t pick TOO many things. Multi-function tools are great because they offer flexibility and creativity.  And, they’re an even BETTER tool because they CAN’T do everything. That’s right, CAN’T is more than a 4 letter word… developing priorities, and committing to them is the secret of filling your pockets with money and success instead of oversized multi-function tools.

I think if I could get this across to people I work with, more than any other idea, they might be successful. Fewer than 50% of the people I talk to really identify good, meaningful goals. Maybe 10% of them are working on activities that are really aligned with their core goals and organizational mission. But, this last part, almost no one is doing. Why is it so tough? I’d love your comments about this!

What I do know, is what the consequences are if you don’t do it. People who don’t prioritize their goals are constantly responding to the most urgent — or seemingly urgent — problems, and rarely find time to make progress on their important goals. Dr. Brian Higley calls this Frenzied Doing. I compare this in my discussion with the various business and government leaders I talk to, to playing a game of whack-a-mole. Remember that children’s game where you put in a nickel (a quarter or fifty cents these days), the moles pop up, and you take a big rubber headed mallet an bop them on the head. Lots of fun, quite engaging and entertaining, but you’re not getting anywhere are you?

The same is true of so much of what we spend our time on. Someone comes to us with the newest idea or newest problem, and it grabs our attention. We set aside for one more day our big idea, and focus on today’s small fire. we put out the fire, but we’re still sitting there, in the same place, when the next fire comes. And, instead of paying 50 cents to play this game, you’re probably paying a lot — ALOT — more. Often, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in lost productivity. But, there’s a way out.
The secret, I believe is two-fold.

1) Develop a system that includes importance ratings (like the Execution Boost Support System — or EBSS — does) and use it to track ALL of your goals. Including your ‘fires’. This will help you get a clear picture of where your time, and the resources of your employees are going.

2) Devote at least 30% of your time to what Steven Covey calls “the important” — not just the “urgent”. This isn’t by itself a secret — but, so many people fail to do it because they’re missing step 1. Without a solid way to systematically prioritize goals even the most sophisticated tracking systems are useless.

For more on this subscribe to the RSS feed, check back for comments, and read some of the other articles on this site. You should also feel free to contact me at BrianM at TBB2excellence.com or by using the contact button above.

You might also be interested in this free 5 minute execution assessment from The Building Blocks to get a quick sense of how much time and money you could easily save if you got your employees systematically on track.

Organizational excellence is often correlated with the health (both physical and psychological) of the individuals that make up the organization. According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Bol. 295, N0. 17, pages 2037-2045), organizational cultural factors may be as important as drinking, smoking, and other of these common known dangers in determining individual health risks.

Indeed, an article in the April issue of the Monitor, a publication of the American Psychological Association suggests that though Americans spend 2.5 more times on health care, we’re still sicker than the British when it comes to diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, heart attack, stroke, lung disease and cancer.  These individual health issues certainly effect long-term organizational effectiveness in a variety of ways.

Moreover, it also seems according to Dir Michael Marmot, PhD, of the University College London that being rich doesn’t really protect anyone from the health risks discussed above. So, if the normal ways of explaining why we are putting our health at risk (”to make more money”) don’t stand up, what’s the answer here?

A solution to this dilemma often evades us. The American Psychological Association article discussed above, and countless others in the research literature on this topic, point to an important core cause for poor individual (and, thus, organizational) health – too much unnecessary stress. It’s no secret Americans work harder – often more than 50 or even 60 hours a week – than, for example, Europeans do.  In fact, we spend so much of our time working that we don’t often have time for satisfying leisure, family responsibilities, or enjoyment of life in general.

The profound irony of this continues to strike me, as we often defend the importance of all our work in helping us get enough money to provide for our families, to secure health care, and in general increase our quality of life. What if all this work isn’t doing that however? What if it’s actually HARMING our families, our health AND our quality of life?

A recent study conducted by our firm with several of America’s top leaders found that while leaders scored predictably high in a number of areas, they often scored significantly lower in identification and pursuit of their most meaningful goals, and in the ability to find quality leisure time. To read more about this study, click here.

What can we do about this?  The answer may surprise you! All of this seem to confirm what I’ve been telling friends and clients for years – don’t give (or expect others to give you) “100%”, it will kill you (technically, the act of TRULY giving all that you have does, in fact, kill you – if you have nothing left to give you will die).  Instead, I recommend you give (and ask for) 50% – and give it in relation to only the most important things in you organization.  Before you click away from this article in disgust, read on to find out how this approach can actually help you and your team to double effectiveness and efficiency levels.

If you are successful in “getting 50%” from your team, you will, in reality, get about double of what most people normally give (remember, the average person seems to give about 20-30% of their potential; even in the face of – and in some cases because of – being asked to give the impossible: 100-110%).  In addition to doubling effectiveness, you’ll also be more satisfied with your life and live longer.

I can say this with confidence for a number of reasons. It should be clear to you from the research I’ve discussed above how dangerous over-working can be to your psychological and physical health (please feel free to post comments below this article for our readers if you’ve got other direct links related to this research) . Indeed, if you’re reading this, and you’re one of the millions out there who are successful, but struggling with diabetes, heart attacks, meaningful connections with loved ones, etc. (or have family and friends who are), this fact is probably already quite clear to you.

What may not be clear, (judging from the comments I get most often from ambitious business leaders when I talk about ”giving 50%” initially), is how giving 50% can actually help increase productivity. The case is overwhelming, and our interventions constantly confirm it. In short, the reason I want your employees to give 50% is because so many of them are giving 20% right now… and, spending 80% of their time figuring out how not to give more.

Or, worse, or at least equally as bad, they’re spending their time dealing with frantic problems, that always appear urgent, and almost never devoting time to their most important, meaningful goals. These meaningful goals may be time spent helping the business grow, pursuing personal/professional growth, or exploring the next billion dollar idea. It may be that you don’t have time to focus on your company’s mission – that critical vision that will make you money and help the world – because you’re so busy with day-to-day stress related to not developing and executing the goals that will help you fulfill your mission in the most effective and efficient ways.

What can we do about all of this?

1. Finding a systematic way to track goals that includes IMPORTANCE ratings is one of the first keys.
2. The next is including all of your important goals in that system. All of them — including ones related to balance. Creativity happens in the moments of rest very often — and these moments are underrated.
3. Spend less time worrying and more time boosting health.  We often spend a lot of energy without accomplish anything.  Helping yourself and your employees with exercise programs, therapeutic and coaching programs, and short breaks can actually improve productivity by reducing stress. The body under stress undergoes a number of profound physiological changes, including increasing the tunnel vision that leads to frantic behavior and lack of vision.

Imagine being able to do more, live longer, be more relaxed, make more money. All while spending less time fighting with people to do their job and more time leading your organization in the areas you’re passionate about.  If you have a mechanism for doing so, we say use it – and start now!  If you’d like to know more about our system for helping organizations become more excellent, check out the EBSS links and other articles on this site, subscribe to the RSS feed, or take a look at this article on overcoming barriers to quality execution.

This article was written with Brian Higley

Eilliott Jacuqes popularized the idea of “requisite organization”. It’s not a new concept — but, it’s a critical one. The idea is this — almost every problem of organizational dysfunction isn’t the result of deficient employees, but instead can be traced to some systemic problem(s).

What’s a Systemic Problem?

It’s becoming, I think, more and more understood that we, as human beings, create the environment we live in. Indeed, the best and brightest among us seem to do this the most powerfully. These above-average people see the world with a vision, and they use their personal power to bring this vision into the world. This is as true of great political and religious leaders like Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as it is of the most exceptional business CEOs like Steve Jobs or Jack Welch, changing the social reality in which they live.

What is less discussed is the way in which the social reality we live in, changes us. The most common way in which this gets discussed these days in organizational leadership and management training seems to be in the concept of ‘culture’. However, too often, culture is talked about vaguely, as something that has to do with casual Fridays and pictures of the founder in the lobby. While these things are important, and may sometimes work, culture is a much too important thing to leave to chance.

Intentional Cultures — How to Create Systemic Solutions

The key is making culture concrete. Eilliot Jacques talked extensively about how we can do this — things like making sure there’s a match between employee ability and job, management structure, and most imporantly defining the managerial leaderhip process clearly. The point is that culture is simple — culture is, I believe, what you choose to reward.

Organizations could save lots of money on wasted employee time, training and re-training, leadership speakers, and management workshops that don’t have a lasting impact if they would do one thing. That thing — develop a clear system. Until now, no one has made the process of developing a clear system strait forward and systematic.

If you want to learn more about a systematic approach to organizational development that’s saving organizations lots of money, and actually working systematically check out the Execution Boost Support System

As business consultants, we’re a bit like doctors – someone comes in, and says ‘my chest hurts’. And we say, let’s test your blood. My clients are sometimes aghast, since, they’re coughing and wheezing, not feeling any pain in their blood at all. Turns out there isn’t an elevated white cell count or such, so we ask about the foods they eat. This seems even more remote – the pain is in my chest, the patient says, and it doesn’t seem to matter what I eat. We, however, having worked with many people who have chest pain, have discovered that consuming too much dairy seems to be strongly correlated in a large number of cases.

This has let me to believe that there are three kinds of patients (and three corresponding doctor roles consultants can play), let’s say.

1. We can try to explain to the person why we think this is so… and, patients of type 1, the understander, who wants a co-investigator, this is very important.
2. But, for many of them they stop eating dairy, their chest feels better, and they don’t have to know why – patient #2 the pragmatist, who usually wants the consultant to play delegatee or, what I sometimes call plumber. That’s why they pay us. They’ve given us responsibility for their health, and we fix it. These clients are usually easier to work with because they stay out of our way, but a little less successful long-term, I imagine. It’s important, in any case, to know which patient you’re working with, but also to ask for enough of a scientific outlook that they give a few different things a shot.
3. If the person is convinced what the problem is, they don’t need us except to legitimize their solution with a prescription. This is type 3, the pre-decided, who hires a consultant to be the legitimizer. "Doc, I won’t take too much of your time, can you give me another penicillin script since the pharmacy won’t give it to me otherwise, and I’ll be on my way."

Unfortunately, my sense is that business consultants often have the reputation of being type 3 – boss hires us to get his people to finally listen to what he’s been saying, by hiring someone ‘objective’ to say it – or, to create cover for a pre-planned hire/fire/re-structure. I don’t judge this decision either, and, if people want to pay us to play this role, it may be fine, but, I think it’s important to understand what way the client/patient/user wants to go clearly.

I often think of business consulting as therapy for a whole organization. People often come to see an individual therapist as a type 3, and we slowly work them towards type 2, and eventually release them when they’re type 1 (the good therapists do at least, in my opinion) – and, we often help people make this transition by demonstrating our utility in the short term as we’re allied with their type 3 ambitions, and slowly help them re-frame the problem. The client usually comes in saying, “I’m a perfectionist and unhappy – help me be more happy and more perfect.” And, we spend a lot of energy trying to get them to view the problem differently. Sometimes explaining this very process to a client is helpful – at least, maybe it’s helpful if the client is an understander. Sometimes, all you can do is go along with their type 3 goals to some degree, sign on to the ones you can (like increased purposeful execution or life satisfaction), and try to avoid the others without destroying rapport, long enough for the client to see ‘past’ them on his/her own.

If the above paragraph isn’t helpful to you (especially for the pre-decided and pragmatists who have bothered to keep reading), then I would say, at least, consulting works best when both parties agree on things that are the important to do first/best (if I understand correctly, even sprinting requires putting one foot in front of the other), and for even the pre-decided, processes of clarity, alignment, and consensus help find out where other people are getting stuck executing the brilliant solutions that management has already picked out and announced.

In sum, whether you’re an understander, looking for a consultant co-investigator to help you figure out what’s going on and how to fix it long-term, a pragmatist, who just wants the consultant plumber to improve the bottom line without an interest in how the drain gets fixed, or a pre-decided, who hires a consultant to be the legitimizer of decisions already made, or some mix, like many of my clients, of all three, understanding theses relationships with your consultant usually proves helpful. And, investing even a little time in clarifying the problem further, besides understanding, can only lead to more legitimate, workable solutions.

For more on the importance of clarity, I encourage you to read, "Organizational Execution Crisis: The most important issue facing business today. . . and how to address it." Brian Mistler (co-investigator, plumber, and legitimizer).

I’m a strong believer, like Aristotle, William James and some others before me, that there are at least three kinds of knowledge a teacher passes on to his/her student; training in facts (declarative), training in skills (procedural) which includes reasoning, and training in being. My personal experience has been a focus through most of my education on declarative, starting shortly after I learned to tie my shoes and write the letter Z, and continuing disappointingly even into most of my Graduate experiences.

Fortunately, our educational system today includes some small component of focus on procedural knowledge, but much of this seems to be ‘accidental’. The processes for the critical skills needed to succeed in most of today’s growing fields seem to be developed by people as a necessity at the point of the task, but never addressed meaningfully in the curriculum. In many business and liberal arts schools alike they are offered the basic materials (declarative) of success, and plenty of wonderful examples of the successful outcomes in the form of faculty and CEO success stories, but the process of getting there is too often in shadows (forgive me, as a consultant, I’m often a process guy).

The human species has recognized for generations, hasn’t it, the difficulty of making such procedural skills explicit, especially when the varying circumstances of implementation in the real world are at odds with the kind of universal abstraction we might try to teach in our universities. At some point the wisest among us instituted formal apprenticeships and mentoring as a blessing on everyone’s house.

However, as instantiated through most of my education and professional life, I’ve struggled with craving one component of apprenticeship most — wishing the opportunity to observe my mentors performing their vocation. To see experts I admire doing things — talking with a customer, sharing ideas in a marketing meeting, hiring, firing, and all the grit of leadership and management that comes in-between. This is absolutely critical for me, and the system I have experienced in most of my training (after we get past educator as power-point developer) is mentor as ’supervisor’ — assigning tasks (input this data, read these articles, get this done by Tuesday), or as an expert mirror providing feedback (this gets an A, do this differently, good work today), or perhaps soliciting self-reflection (what were you thinking?). These are all valuable, but I hope you’ll consider, lack the pre-requisite modeling step.

If you were trying to explain this to an audience, I might say imagine the ideal process as riding with your mentor to their house, and then switching seats, having them assist from the passenger seat, and finally, when you’re ready, being available by phone (or e-mail) when you get lost. To so many of my great teachers’ credit I’ve felt wonderfully supported in these last two steps. Yet, imagine the difficulties incurred by skipping the first step of modeling — your mentor is still there to say “you’re hot, you’re cold”, “turn here”, and even when they’re not in the car to get across the mentor as OnStar message, “I’m here to support you, you’ve got a net” — yet, while all this is important to the development of an independent driver, it’s so much less efficient without the first step of modeling to seed the process.

For this reason, the opportunity to observe my mentors modeling the various components of whatever vocation they’re experienced in, and which I aspire to, is for me (and psychologists who’ve studied it for 30 years like Albert Bandura) an indispensable component of passing on knowledge.

In short, if you want to train people to do anything really well, at some point, it helps a lot to put them with someone already doing that thing with excellence, and let them watch. Too often we show our trainees people who have DONE it, and try to tell them why we think it worked. And, if you find someone with internship experience — with practice doing the job you want them to do — grab them!

“Mentoring means modeling,” might well be the sine qua non mantra of excellence in higher education and successful business training. John Spence has written another excellent article on the topic of mentoring, which may certainly be worth your time to read. I also encourage your comments below.