Category: K.E.E.N. skills

How It is Necessary to Take Complex Problems One Chunk At a Time

I realize a lot of my value is sometimes to help clients faced with complex problems create smaller, more digestible chunks. To narrow down the scope to something manageable that can be readily be a scope for action.

Of course this process is at the same time frustrating (all issues don’t get addressed, only the priority ones) and there is a definite risk of creating a local optimized solution that is not optimal at all for the entire system. However it is often the only way to progress into action.

I realize that this act often requires leadership and the ability to take a risk, and is not natural to everyone. It is important to take the time address the major risk of creating a local solution incompatible with later developments by first going through an elucidation phase that is sufficient to clarify the system and avoid as much as possible this situation. And at the same time it is essential to progress and to resolve the priority issue that is under consideration.

Split the elephant into small chunks to eat it. Otherwise often we would not get anywhere. Take care about doing it right.

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How Telling People What To Do is Easy, but Building Real Change and Agreement is Hard

Today I am in for a rant: I am amazed at how people still believe that change is so easy it is enough to tell people what to do. To force them doing something different. In reality, deep and sustainable change has to be built over time over a wide agreement of the participating group.

Not quite the right manner to implement change management

I am still called up to effectuate deep changes in organizations under the belief that the orders from the top combined with the industry best practice experience from a consultant will create a sustainable change of habits and ways of working. Worst is that many consulting firms do nothing to dissipate this illusion; they are too happy to work undisturbed to develop tools and processes that at the end will never get deployed for lack of knowledge and understanding.

This is too naive to be true, but believe me it still happens! (although not always exposed as directly). And we have some great examples at the moment in the world that this approach does no work: an American President that tells people what to do, and noting gets ever really done after the announcement.

Creating sustainable change requires a more subtle, engaging and inclusive approach that involves the people that will later implement those changes in their daily activities. This is why successful transformation programs are often longer and more resource-intensive at the start, because they need to involve more people. This investment redeems itself many times after during actual implementation.

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How to Deal with Mood Issues When Facing Disruption during Change Efforts

To complement our post on ‘How to Deal with Inevitable Disruption in a Transformation Process‘, let’s talk a bit further about our mood. In another post ‘How to Get Back on Track with Motivation & Habits‘ Leo Babauta extends his reflections on the issue of one’s mood when facing an unexpected disruption in the midst of a change effort.

In addition to the derailment of our current efforts we are too often impacted in terms of mood and that is very often a killer for the change effort.

His main point is thus that “getting off track and getting back on track is all about mood.” He further proposes the following steps to regain confidence:

  • Admit there’s a problem, and ask a key question to remind us about the objective of the chain.
  • Take one small, easy step. Don’t think about the entire project of getting back on track. That’s too much, and can be overwhelming, which means we’ll never start. 
  • Focus on getting any kind of victories.
  • Build long-term strength with small steps. If you build little victories, take small steps, and nurture your mood as in the previous steps … you’ll start to have a more solid habit or motivation for your project. 

When faced with disruption in a change project, take care of your mood. Go exercise, change your mind. Look at the big picture, and take it a small chunk at a time. Go slow, and go steady.

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How Not to Forget to Turn Knowledge Into Habit

In this excellent post ‘Don’t forget the second step‘ Seth Godin makes the point that it is essential not to forget the second step after having performed the first step, which is learning how to do something new.

“Step two is turning it into a habit. Committing to the practice. Showing up and doing it again and again until you’re good at it, and until it’s part of who you are and what you do.Most education, most hardware stores, most technology purchases, most doctor visits, most textbooks are about the first step. What a shame that we don’t invest just a little more to turn the work into a habit.”

I am also guilty from time to time to limit myself to the theoretical knowledge of a concept and not following up to put it in practice. It takes effort to put in practice, and practice until it becomes a habit. It is so much more worthwhile. The point is to remember why we wanted to learn in the first place. it was to resolve some problem we might have, and we need to face it after.

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How Waiting for Permission is the Worst Form of Procrastination

We all suffer from procrastination, some more than others. But a really pernicious form of procrastination is to be waiting for someone else’s permission.

Procrastination, of course, is a huge problem. A lot more on it in the excellent New Yorker’s article ‘Getting Over Procrastination‘.

But waiting for permission is even worse. It is a great excuse for doing nothing. And it kills every ounce of initiative we might have had. It is pushing the deadline supposedly waiting for an external input.

I guess that procrastinating a little bit, from time to time, is part and parcel of human nature (some would argue that it is actually a necessary space to reflect). But waiting for external permission is absolutely not required for most of what we want to do in life.

Never take waiting for permission as an excuse for doing nothing! As the quote says “Those who wait for permission never get it. Those who don’t wait for permission become the leaders other turn to for permission”. Be a leader, not a following procrastinator!

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How To Face Our Fears: Run Towards Them!

In this excellent post ‘the source of fear’, Om Swami quotes several experiences by Pema Chödrön regarding fear. In particular, Pema’s teacher Trungpa Rinpoche when faced with a nasty, ferocious and barking dog “turned and ran as fast as he could—straight at the dog. The dog was so surprised that he put his tail between his legs and ran away.”

What a better image of how to deal with fear? If we run away from the dog, fear will increase and we will get attacked. If we run towards our fear it will evaporate.

Of course it takes a considerable amount of self-control and courage to run towards a frightening thing, but that’s what we need to learnt to master.

“A degree of courage, certain resolve, a sort of commitment is needed to face our fears. Until we face them, we won’t understand them. And unless we understand our fears, how can we possibly ever rise above them? At any rate, developing an attitude of loving-kindness, abiding in mindfulness are absolutely critical to dissipate our ignorance and eliminate our fears. This prepares us in facing our weaknesses.“. How beautiful!

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How People Have an Irrational Need to Complete Sets of Things

This excellent Quartz post ‘People have an irrational need to complete “sets” of things‘ quotes a Harvard University study showing that as a species we have some strong bias towards completing incomplete sets.

This can be used as a marketing trick of course, and is a reason why some people become obsessed with collecting stuff (to complete some series in particular). “New research reveals that people are irrationally but effectively motivated by the idea of completing a set, even if it means working harder or spending more money—with no additional reward other than the satisfaction of completion and the relief of avoiding an incomplete set. ”

At the same time, research warns that the set should not be overly complicated and comprise only a limited number of items.

Be careful about this bias next time!

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Why Our Mind Should be Flexible – Up to Liquid Like Water

A famous quote by Bruce Lee goes “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be like water”

It is the property of liquid to take the shape of whatever container it is in. This mind flexibility is essential to adapt to the situations we are facing. This exercise is difficult because we naturally develop thinking patterns that rigidify our brains and the way we process information.

It is a good exercise to try to develop flexibility in investing in new habits and approaches to problems. To detach ourselves from certain experiences we might have that have created particularly strong patterns. It is worthwhile reminding us that we need to strive to exercise our flexibility in that way in a continuous manner.

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How Taking Vacations Is a Requirement for Transparency

The Forbes paper ‘5 Reasons Why You Need to Make Key Employees Take Their Two-Week Vacations‘ (by the way a very US problem description) makes an interesting point in that it is essential to have employees take vacation for transparency sake – and be replaced in the their position by other people doing the interim.

Examples of large recent frauds in organizations involve people who don’t take vacations, or who don’t make what they are working on accessible to others even if they are taking time off.

It is therefore essential in high risk or stakes environments to have people being replaced at least temporarily by others that would have access to their files. This is an essential fraud prevention lever which I believe is often underestimated by fraud prevention frameworks. And vacations is the right opportunity (in addition to more frequent job rotation, which is another technique used historically by many organizations and governments).

Another reason why taking vacations is mandatory!

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How to Overcome the Curse of Self-Interruption

We have increasingly a hard time to focus on something even when it is important. That point is very well developed in the Nautilus paper ‘Are You a Self-Interrupter?‘.

Studies show that we are today constantly multi-tasking, interrupted and quite never alone with our thoughts (are there is always the temptation of checking out our devices). For example, a study has shown that “Shockingly, students could not focus for more than three to five minutes even when they were told to study something very important“!

And more generally, “One interesting aspect of this penchant for combining tasks is that we seem to have lost the ability to single task. Glance around a restaurant, look at people walking on a city street, pay attention to people waiting in line for a movie or the theater, and you will see busily tapping fingers. We act as though we are no longer interested in or able to stay idle and simply do nothing.”

We need to consider this issue – close to a mental health issue – and develop disciplines to take the benefit of connectivity while making sure we still spend enough time with ourselves. It will take time for this to become standard, but we can already recognize at the individual level the need for some effort.

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How To Decide on the True Importance of a Decision

We take multiple decisions daily. Some small, some really important. How can we discriminate? It is quite simple actually – those that are important are those that have significant consequences. And often, long term consequences.

Reviewing the potential consequences of a decision is a good way to weight their importance and the amount of time and effort that needs to be spent taking the decision. It is an excellent way to discriminate where to put the emphasis.

Unfortunately we all encounter in our lives people that get that priority in reverse. They spend huge amount of time and effort agonizing over decisions that have very little consequences. And then, maybe out of exhaustion, they don’t consider properly those really important decisions.

Think first about the consequences of the decision you are about to make. Depending on those consequences, allocate the right effort to the decision.

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How People That Move Beyond Conformism Are Hated by Others

Those that remain conformists and stayed at their place have a tendency to hate those that have moved on to new things. It is a constant law.

Samuel Maverick
Samuel Maverick

My guess is that this happens in great part because of jealousy, added to the fact that a group of people always tends to reject weirdos that do not follow the conformist behavior.

Of course there are many examples of mavericks being finally hailed at heroes but that always comes after many years of rejection and hatred. And that concerns only a minor fringe of renegades.

Interestingly, ‘maverick’ as a term comes from Samuel Maverick who refused to brand his cattle in 19th century Texas and was thus considered badly by his neighbours.

So if you feel strong rejection from the social body surrounding you, it may be because you are a maverick. Don’t let yourself be impressed. That’s part of the game. And move on!…

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