Category: Change

How All Great New Truths Will Be Resisted Emotionally

“All great truths begin as blasphemies” — is a widely quoted sentence written by George Bernard Shaw. The meaning of blasphemy here is of course, insult towards something considered sacred and inviolable – another truth.

all-great-truths-begin-as-blasphemiesThis quote is interesting because it creates a few problems by itself. It implies that a truth can only be relative or timely, because a new truth will necessarily replace an old truth (hence the blasphemy).

It also implies that the arising of a new truth will be resisted by society, which is certainly reasonable – and we observe every day when well established institutions defend themselves from changes occurring around them. The word ‘blasphemy’ however is very strong and implies an emotional reaction that is deep rooted in present beliefs. It is true that legal and public challenges by existing institutions sometimes border on modern blasphemy indictments.

In any case it serves to highlight that if you come up with a new truth you can expect to be strongly rejected by society, in an emotional manner, because you put in question the prevailing belief. You’ve been warned!

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Why Avoid the Organizational Comfort Zone Retreat Reaction

In the past months I have observed astonishing reactions from various leaders and organizations to an unexpected economical situation. When faced with a scary and stressful situation, it is amazing how thoroughly people tend to revert to their comfort zone – where they had been successful in the first place. The problem is that this comfort zone might be obsolete! This has dramatic impact on the organizations and individuals.

running back to the comfort zone
Running back into the comfort zone!

I am quite active in the Oil & Gas industry which has suffered a shock since a bit more than 6 months with the sudden drop of the oil price. Some organizations’ leadership have literally freaked out, with the result that they have undone what they had been building for the last few years in just one movement, fleeing back to their traditional business model – the one that made them successful in the first place. Of course, some organizations had taken some measured risk to expand and grow in the last years, but it is really astonishing how people revert to their basic nature when they freak out!

Going back to their comfort zone means often, reverting to business models and operating modes that are thought to be safe while they are in fact obsolete. Where a crisis should rather force to ask tough questions about significant changes in the business model, possible new industry structure and new alliances, those organizations that freak out retreat into their comfort zone and close the door, waiting for the storm to pass.

This creates a most depressing effect on the morale of the top people in the organization, who were at the forefront of building a sustainable new model. When they are not sacked they generally leave quickly.

It is in tough times that the quality of the skipper shows. Retreating into one’s former comfort zone is certainly not the best reaction. Yet it is amazing how leaders sometimes react, with dire consequences on their organizations on the long run.

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Why You Should Always Keep an Eye on the Context

As I was watching lately the film American Sniper I was struck by a quote. During training as a sniper the hero (Chris Kyle) is asked to close one eye to aim. He answers that he prefers to watch what’s happening around him instead of just focusing narrowly on a possible target.

Keep an eye on the target, but keep the other open on your surroundings!
Even if you are a sniper, keep an eye on the target, but keep the other open on your surroundings!

I think it is a great metaphor of the fact that we both need to focus our attention to be effective, and we still need to monitor continuously our surroundings to check what is happening. Because the most disruptive changes to our situation might come from places that we can’t even anticipate, and be very indirect consequences of far-away events.

This represents an important balance that we need in life, and it is not contradictory – although it requires some discipline. We can do both sequentially, not necessarily at the same time: maintain concentrated focus on what you want to achieve, which might be far away and tough to reach, and don’t forget to monitor sufficiently what is happening in the world around you.

Remember that the worst disasters were always the result of unexpected chains of events that started from places we thought were safe and stable. Don’t forget to monitor what happens around you!

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Why It Always Seems Impossible Until It’s Done

“It always seems impossible until it is done” is a famous quote by Nelson Mandela. To all of us who try to do things outside our comfort zone, or try to change the world (or, in a more limited manner, some organizational entity), it sounds very true. And always related to the tough ancillary question: if it does not happen yet, should be persevere?

impossibleThe fact is that in complex systems (our world), change will be sudden and what looked like an abysmal failure or a mediocre endeavor one day might become a sudden success overnight. At the same time it is difficult when we are in the midst of action to realize what is the amount of progress we might be making.

A significant level of perseverance is always needed to cross the stage where it seems that progress is very little until we reach effective change. And we are always surprised as how change can be sudden and widespread when it occurs. It takes a lot of background work in a lot of areas to effectively create change.

What is important is to have and to kindle the vision of what we want to achieve. If it’s ambitious it will look impossible. Just go and do it! It will be long, and it will eventually happen.

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Why You Need to Give Yourself Permission for New Ideas

“New ideas won’t appear if you don’t have permission within yourself” – Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, quoted in the book Focus by Daniel Goleman. He continues “When I was a VP at Oracle, I took off to Hawaii for a month just to relax, and when I did that it opened up my career to new ideas, perspectives, and directions.”

walkingYou need to give yourself permission and time to release your creativity. This is often related to giving yourself permission to disconnect and be creative. This might then take the shape of a walk, or of a couple of days off, undisturbed by the concerns of your usual occupation.

I can testify that my most creative moments have been related to a change of scenery and some time to think and develop new ideas.

So, if you want to be creative, create the space for it. You can’t find and explore new ideas if you stay in your daily grind and don’t spare time and space for this essential activity. It is not easy to give ourselves permission to do that because we all run very busy lives. But essential for change and your personal growth as well.

When will you give yourself permission for some time and space off?

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How Your Attention Determines Your Reality

“How we deploy our attention determines what we see” – quoted from Anne Treisman in the book Focus by Daniel Goleman. A more poplar quote is attributed to Star Wars Jedi masters: “Your focus is your reality“.

focus-jediControlling our own attention is an extremely important skill, in particular today as multiple technologies increasingly compete to grab our attention almost every minute of our waked life.

As our perception is filtered more or less automatically by our learned categorization. Focusing our attention is the only way that allows us to see beyond our learned filters to discover new things. Thus, attention is the only for us to grow and develop intellectually and spiritually.

Your reality is determined by where you focus your attention. Develop your attention skill. It needs to be trained like a muscle. A simple exercise is how long you can concentrate on a task or a book without looking at your messages or your emails. Remove unwanted notifications from your life, and grow your reality!

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Why Bureaucratic Processes for Risk and Business Planning Are Suspect

“Bureaucracy was born out of the human desire for complete assurance before taking action” – Scott Belsky in Making Ideas Happen. And this assurance is a very natural desire in humans. As a result, bureaucracy creeps up everywhere and fast and finally prevents us to take action.

risk management process
A risk management process that has great chances to become a large bureaucratic exercise

This effect is very interesting to observe in particular in the field of Risk Management. It’s all about risk and uncertainty, reactivity and agility to unexpected events… and most risk management processes implemented in organizations are awfully slow and bureaucratic – at a point where the operative executive does not really use them beyond maybe some thoughts once a year when he must or at the start of a Project.

There are quite a few areas where we will never have a complete assurance whatever the effort we will spend, such as predicting the future, including future risks. Bureaucracy is the wrong answer to risk management and future prediction so that any method that implies some of it should be automatically suspiciously classified as an attempt to seek reassurance for ourselves.

Is your risk management process or your future business planning process excessively bureaucratic? You’d better review it immediately because it is most probably not fit for purpose!

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Why the Law of Financial Viability is Important

When starting a new pursuit or a new venture, it is important to remember ‘The Law of Financial Viability’: “When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on” – writes Cal Newport in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

cash-paymentHence it is essential to determine as quickly as possible (based on a demonstrator or Minimum Viable Product as they say in the Lean Startup movement) whether people are really ready to pay for what you want to offer. That is also applicable to a career change – are people willing to hire you?

And there is a significant distance between people saying that that they’s be interested and they would be happy to pay – and people really, actually paying.

One of the interesting consequences of this observation is that it is far better to have the first customers pay a little something rather than giving for free: it will prove that people are happy to reach their wallet, which is a significant psychological hurdle; and as an associated benefit it will force you to get your payment and invoicing processes up and running.

To summarize, Cal quotes Derek Sivers as saying: “When it comes to decisions affecting your core career, money remains an effective judge of value. If you’re struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea”

Demonstrate the value of your idea by effectively getting money for it.

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How Age Changes our Outlook on What We Can Achieve

I’d like to thank Mary Cravets for an insightful comment on my post ‘How We Underestimate What We Can Do in Ten Years‘. In this post we comment the statement that ‘People always underestimate what they can do in ten years and overestimate what they can do in a week’. Mary commented that our perspective on this timeline will probably change considerably between our 20’s and our 40’s.

too-late-to-start?
It is never too late to start something awesome and different! Here in the case of entrepreneurs

For sure when we reach 40 or 50 we will have grown consciously through a few decades, and in hindsight most of us can measure how much change we have introduced in our lives in the space of a typical decade. When we are 20, our experience in the matter is more limited. Hence we might believe more in the statement with maturity.

On the other hand, when we are 20 we think we can take the world by storm; at 40 or 50 most people are a bit more prudent. If they have met significant hardship or disappointment on the way they might even be pessimistic about how much they can change the world around them and this might prevent them to take initiative. Our level of energy and endurance might also have sagged on average (it is not true for everyone!).

Age and experience does change our outlook on what we can achieve. There will be, depending on the person, positive and negative tensions that will or not lead to take initiative.

Personally, I try to reinvent myself about every 7-8 years, professionally at least. That is what I have done in the past. Those changes are a bit tough sometimes, but they can be managed. And it is fun! The more I age, the more I want to continue to do that, because it is fun and I like to discover new things. And right now I am quite sure that what I will be doing in a decade will be quite different from what I think today. What about you?

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Why is Deliberate Practice so Powerful?

“This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle— [deliberate practice] – one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field” writes Cal Newport’s in his book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’.

deliberate-practiceWe have already mentioned this concept of deliberate practice in the post where we reviewed the book ‘Talent is overrated’. Practice is not sufficient. It needs to be accompanied by pertinent and frequent feedback and challenge.

The psychologist who came with the concept, Ericsson, is quoted as writing “Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance“.

Practice that is not deliberate will soon lead to a performance plateau. Get frequent feedback and stretch yourself constantly to reach mastery instead.

Now… how can you develop more deliberate practice in the activities you’d like to become great at?

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Why ‘Embedded Consulting’ Delivers Better Results for Enterprise Transformation

As consultant I have seen two extremes when it comes to consulting interventions regarding enterprise transformation:

  1. The ’embedded consulting’ with one or two ‘trusted advisors’ to Senior Management, most of the work done by employees temporarily assigned to the project and a very limited number of specialized consultants focused on specific capabilities that are lacking in the organization,
  2. A large team of consultants coming in and doing most of the work , delivering finished products (typically the business model of large consulting firms).
rugby support
Should the consultant be the player or the person supporting the player?

There are a few intermediate options still in general it is possible to recognize the pattern of one or the other extreme.

I have observed that the first approach was by far superior when it comes to sustainable results in the organization.

The reasons for this are actually quite straightforward:

  • In option 1, the organization shows actual commitment by assigning resources to the transformation project. It shows commitment of the top of the organization, that management walks the talk and this can only be favorable to actual implementation,
  • The employees directly involved in devising the transformation are the best spokespersons for what they have setup. As they are demobilized from the transformation project and come back to their usual position they instantly become a strong network of proponents of change embedded in the organization,
  • As changes are devised by employees for the benefit of the organization, they are in general more pragmatic and closer to the needs of the organization.

Option 2 remains valid in cases in other projects where the organization’s DNA and culture is not directly touched. For enterprise transformation projects it does not seem to be the best solution, although it might appeal to the senior executives through the power of the brand of some large consulting companies.

A common argument is that only option 2 can deliver disruptive transformation. I do not agree, because employees are often open, much more creative and knowledgeable on what could be done, and their talent can be released by a specific, punctual intervention opening new possibilities.

If you have a project to transform or upgrade your organization, prefer to involve your employees supported by a limited number of senior and specialized consultants. With ’embedded consulting’ the transformation will be sustainable, much better accepted and overall much more successful.

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Why Finding Meaning in our Life Becomes Harder

As the complexity and unpredictability of our world increases significantly, and has even been accelerating in the past few years, it becomes more difficult to find our life’s meaning and purpose.

labyrinth
How can we find our way in an ever larger labyrinth?

One of the reasons is the multiplication of choices that are offered to us – like excessively lengthy restaurant menus, choice kills the choice. As our freedom increases, it is naturally more difficult to fix ourselves on a single purpose.

One other reason is the unpredictability and the occurrence of freak events that change significantly the world around us: how can we steer a straight course over years and decades in this context?

This all happens at the same time where personal development has never been so popular, requiring everyone to find passion and purpose in life and follow those. As a result, our general level of stress increases dramatically, leading inevitably to serious societal problems.

The solution might be not to find one’s purpose in absolute among an infinity of choices, but to find our purpose close to what we do on a daily basis, which restricts the field of search. I will elaborate on this key ideas in a few future posts.

Some references from previous blog posts: What we can learn from complex systems to understand today’s world, Why, even in a Complex World, you Need to Head Towards your Purpose!

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