“I don’t know” – good!

I-Don't-KnowI recently came across this challenging little sentence in an article by Luc Gallopin:

“As far as mastering today’s world is concerned I think we would be better off with the skill of ‘not knowing’ or ‘ignorance’.”

Well, that got the grey cells active! In this age when we are exhorted to set goals for everything from when we will reach millionaire status to what time we will spend with the kids each day, surely ‘not knowing’ has no place? Perhaps this idea of knowing what we want to happen is especially prevalent at this time of year when those New Year’s Resolutions come out again – goals for the next year.

You might, by now, expect me to have a slightly different take on goals! Oh, I do not deny that they have their place – how else would we know what to buy at the supermarket if we did not set out to get butter, milk, bread etc? (actually I very rarely take a list as I like to be guided by what takes my fancy as I wander around), how could we be certain of submitting that report on time if we did not know ‘when’ the right time was, etc.

I want to put a case for not knowing, for leaving things to just happen; and I want to preface it by asking you to think about those great things that might have happened to you when you did not have a SMART goal – falling in love, watching that spectacular sunset, learning to walk or talk (interesting how much children manage to learn/do without even a mental concept of ‘goal’). Just imagine setting the goal “By 23rd February 2013 I will have fallen in love with a 5’10” blonde Australian woman”, how ridiculous (even though it might be aspirational!).

But ‘not knowing’ is subtly different to not having goals, after all Columbus set off to discover the East Indies (his goal) without having much idea of where or how he could find them perhaps that’s what enabled him to find the Americas instead. He clearly subscribed to the apocryphal quotation:

You cannot discover new oceans unless you are willing to lose sight of the shore.

Losing sight of the shore involves being prepared to give up foreknowledge. Yes, you might have some idea of what you want to achieve, but be prepared for stuff to just happen and take advantage of happenings. We cannot know the future, so all we can really do is set off into the void with some generalised desired outcomes and be prepared for whatever happens.

In my book THAT is the essence of great leadership; having the humility to acknowledge that you do not know, the passion to achieve something and the wisdom to recognise and use whatever opportunities come your way. Good leaders are comfortable being uncomfortable.

One day at a time

One day at a timeDo some of your goals sometimes seem a bit too challenging, a bit  too long-term or a bit too much to take on? Do you find it hard to make and maintain the committment necessary?

Well, I came a cross a suggestion that I found helpful – take it one day at a time. Now just a minute, isn’t that what is always advised? well, what I heard was a slightly different take.

The suggestion was to commit to your goal, or more accurately the action needed to achieve it, one day at a time. When you wake up, promise to yourself that you will eat only healthy food, run for 30 minutes, contact one new potential customer, whatever…today. If you miss it, you miss it, get on with life and re-make that commitment again tomorrow when maybe you will be more successful.Yoou will probably hit your action more often than not, each step still moving you forward, but without the weight of months or years of effort in your head weighing you down.

I find it easier to do something one day at a time than ‘for ever’. Maybe you will too.

Consolidate your gains – complete the jigsaw

Consolidate changes - complete the jigsawYou’re on your way, the benefits of the change are becoming visible, so now is the time to planning yet more change!

Remember that earlier when I said “Do what you can, where you can, when you can”? Now is the time to look for what else you can change, where else you can change and when else you can change it.

The increased credibility of the change program allows you to look at systems, structures and policies that don’t fit the vision; to hire, promote and develop employees who can implement the vision and to reinvigorate the process with new projects, new areas for improvements and new change agents. You are building the momentum and extending your influence to different areas of the organisation.

My only word of caution is to be avoid trying to do too much too soon. Now, there is no known algorithm for establishing how much you can do and so you need to be listening to the rumblings at ground level-are they welcoming these new initiatives as complementary to what is already happening or is resistance building rather than reducing? Always remember that you need to be able to explain how your latest initiative is just another part of the big jigsaw represented by the vision. You started with the pieces that were easy to connect together, you are now starting to fill in the gaps and make sure that the parts of the jigsaw being worked on by different people connect together efficiently.

Empower your people

Empower your peopleI once had a client complain to me that “I have told my people they are empowered, yet they still don’t get on and do things.” Of course the heart of the problem lay in the very way he expressed himself – “I told…” with its implicit hierarchical power.

I cannot empower anyone, all I can do is create an environment in which people will feel able to make their own decisions and to coach and support my people in ways that encourage them to take hold of the reins themselves rather than be constantly looking upwards for direction.

Many organisations, no, let me correct that – many bosses – see Kotter’s fifth step “Empower others to act on the vision” as the most challenging. This is the step which requires them to hand over their carefully crafted vision to the workforce who can take action to deliver it. Change it. Leadership is no field for control freaks.

A significant part of the work in this step is to remove the controls that kept the organisation in its prior status quo because these will get in the way of change and progress. Just think of a lorry facing downhill with a couple of wooden chocks under its wheels to stop it actually rolling. What is the easier way to get it rolling downhill, get lots of people at the back and push it over the chocks or get one person to quickly kick the chocks out of the way?

This is a time to encourage risk-taking, to promote experiments and non-traditional ideas and activities. It is a time for truly open dialogue about the vision and how it might be achieved-remember that the key skill in dialogue is listening, not speaking. It is a time to lead, not manage, a time to encourage your people by praising them for trying and failing (there is no failure, only feedback) as well as for their successes.

Essentially, you need to set the direction get out of people’s way.

Managing change according to Kotter (or Geoff!)

Kotter's 8 Steps according to GeoffLast week we explored the first four of Kotter’s eight steps for managing change effectively:

  1. Establish a sense of urgency.
  2. Former powerful guiding coalition.
  3. Create a vision
  4. Communicate a vision

For the rest of this week if I want to explore the remaining four steps:

5. Empower others to act on the vision
6. Plan and create short-term wins.
7. Consolidate improvements.
8. Institutionalise new approaches.

However, before I do that I want to go back to a comment I made in the opening blog of this series relating to the non-linear reality of change in leadership. I stated, and I stand by that statement, that most change models are false in that they imply that you started a point A, go to point B, then point C etc before eventually arriving at your destination. Anyone who has experienced change in the real world, as compared to the world of academics and theoreticians, recognises that the situation is somewhat different.

Just look at last week’s four steps-might it just me that someone has a vision for change before getting together their guiding coalition? Or perhaps an initial guiding coalition (often one or two directors or maybe even the whole board) just senses a need for change and set out to create the sense of urgency and burning platform upon which subsequent action will be based? So when you look at change in your organisation, always remember my guiding principles

  • “Do what you can, where you can, when you can”
  • “Light fires in the business and tend or douse them, as appropriate”
  • “Be prepared for changes of course-the planning is more important than the plan.”

So tomorrow we will explore the oft misunderstood field of empowerment and what we have to do to get people on board and working towards the new vision.

Planning change

Kotter's 8 StepsYou have probably figured out by now that one of my areas of interest, indeed professional expertise, is change leadership. Perhaps it’s about time I wrote something on that topic. For the next couple of weeks I will be sharing my experiences with leading and facilitating change, using John Kotter’s 8-step model as a vehicle.

This change leadership business is not new. The following quotation from Charles Darwin sticks in my mind

it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

However, being adaptable or even willing or better still desirous is not usually sufficient. In order to effect a significant change in an organisation a process and a plan isnecessary. This is where the various change models offered by an ever increasing range of gurus comes in. You can take your pick, and most of them have something to offer. However my real life, rather than academic, experience suggests that is the eight steps offered by John Kotter are a very good place to start and to come back to to make sure that you are covering all bases. I will write about one of the steps of each of the next eight days but in the meantime, here they are listed out:

  1. Establish a sense of urgency.
  2. Form a powerful guiding coalition.
  3. Create a compelling vision
  4. Communicate to the vision
  5. Empower others to act on the vision
  6. Plan and create short-term wins.
  7. Consolidate and integrate improvements.
  8. Institutionalised new approaches.

Now this reads and feels as if change leadership is a linear process where step six follows step five. I have to say, that is not my experience. Whilst such an apparent linear model helps to understand what needs to be done and the preferred order of doing things the reality is somewhat more pragmatic. Shortly after I finished my Masters in organisational change, in parallel with which I was leading a major organisational change for my then employer, I was asked what was the most important thing I learned on the programme. My response was that effective change leaders do what they can where they can when they can. Sometimes this means joining the dots up later, indeed I have blogged earlier about how easy it is to join the dots up in retrospect, even though there was not an initial plan. Well, by all means start with a plan but do not expect reality to our line with what you have written on your paper, or even put into MS Project!

Always remember that you are much better off working with one advocate then against 10 resistors. Seek out your advocates and help them light fires at various places around the business. Some of those fires will die out, let them. Some of them will flareup, you will make much more progress than you thought possible. Some of them will just glow away slowly waiting for a puff of wind to spark an interaction-make sure you keep your eyes on these and are ready to provide the puff of wind whenever it is necessary.

Tomorrow, I will write about the importance of creating a sense of urgency.

Rattlesnakes can cause stress

Richard Bach has been at it again, this time he has stimulated my thoughts around change. Ask anybody who deals with change on a professional basis and they will typically tell you that either it takes a very long time or it can happen instantly, the latter usually when there is some sort of crisis to be dealt with. This requires a response outside our normal repertoire.

Richard Bach, brilliant writer that he is, put it this way:

It doesn’t take time to change once you understand the problem” he said, his face lit with excitement.” Somebody hands you a rattlesnake, it doesn’t take long to drop it does it?

Sometimes I was unaware that rattlesnakes were even around, sometimes I knew about the rattlesnakes but ignored them, sometimes the rattlesnakes transformed into a poisonous spider, but every now and again one of those rattlesnakes ends up in my hand. This is a bit like how some people deal with stress.

We wake up in the morning and someone has left the bathroom lights on all night (it’s not worth the hassle of finding out who and reminding them to turn it off in future), we go downstairs and the first thing we notice is the waste bin overflowing (who is it that is so lazy that they cannot be bothered to empty it and so just it just piles up. It falls on the floor), only try to fill the kettle up but we can’t because the sink is full of dirty dishes, then we find our favourite cereal has been used up, then there’s no milk, and the kids are late which risks me being late for the appointment that I have to meet after I’d taken them to school, then there’s an accident on the way there and I am delayed yet again, then the client I’ve been speaking to 4 weeks decides he wants a fundamental change in the proposal we have been working on, then I get home and my printer has run out of ink again, then the telephone rings and rings and rings but I am trying to concentrate on something else, then… (add in your own stressors will).

Then my wife comes in and asks what’s the dinner tonight?-And she gets it all dumped on her. I’LL TELL YOU WHAT’S FOR DINNER TONIGHT. WHAT’S FOR DINNER TONIGHT IS WHAT YOU COOK WHEN YOU WANT TO COOK IT….

Poor woman, a simple enquiry yet the stacked up stresses of the day just collapsed on her very ordinary question. And I spend the next week apologising and making it up – somehow.

If only I had dealt with those little things as they were happening…

If only I had dealt with the rattlesnake before it ended up in my hand…

Life is for living

Richard Bach - OneI have just been reading another wonderful little book by Richard Bach called “One”. I first came across Richard’s books when I was introduced to Jonathan Livingston Seagull over 30 years ago. JLS can take you half an hour to read or a lifetime; it can be a simple story about a Seagull are a complex parable about learning. For many years I never left the house without a seagull on a chain around my neck, until the day that I realised the seagull had flown away when the chain broke,  never to be seen by me again.

Anyway, back to this latest book “One”. He posits a situation and an exercise that I challenge you to take on yourself. Somehow or other  he meets himself in the future and that future self  knows, for certain, that he only has six months to live. Let me give you the exercise by quoting from the book:

“I think we ought to take this napkin here”, she reached into her purse, “and this pencil, and we ought to list what we want to do most and make this the best six months, the best time in our lives. What would we do if there were no doctors with their dos and don’ts? They can’t cure you, so who are they to tell others what to do with whatever time we have left? I think we ought to make this list and then go ahead and do what we want.”

I don’t know whether the subject of this piece was lucky or not that he knew for sure that he had another six months to live. I don’t know whether or not I will be alive when you read this entry-there is no reason why I shouldn’t be but who knows what happens on the roads or in that complex biochemistry that keeps is running every day?

So my challenge to you is to do the exercise, to figure out what it is that you want to do (not need to do – that’s usually someone else’s agenda), to make a list and to get out there and do it. Oh, there will be challenges, but isn’t a life full of those anyway? Yes, you might upset a few people but you are living your life and you probably only have one of them so you might as well get the most out of it.

And some people will tell you that it’s impossible, selfish, not affordable, etc  – those are their hangups. So let them deal with them rather than dump them on you. I urge you do this exercise , after all you might only have six months to live.

Life is (not always) good

Life is good
I have just read a comment on Facebook “X wishes that people would not use Facebook to moan about stuff”.

Do you know people who seem to spend more time complaining than celebrating? More time moaning about how grim the world is than doing something, anything, about it? So did I until…

He had been a friend for many years, generally hard work but occasionally real fun to be with. We had gone out for a Chinese meal one night and for some reason he took umbrage at my leaving a tip for the staff – something, I forget what, had not pleased him abut the service but I had been very happy and I was paying and so left the usual tip. He went on, and on, and on, and on, and on… about how ‘wrong’ it was for me to leave a tip when he had been dissatisfied. Something must have flipped, because I told him there and then that as I was paying I felt it was for me to decide on a tip and anyway I did not appreciate him making a major visible and verbal fuss in a restaurant that I had used for years and hoped to use again. I then chose not to see him again – I deleted his presence from my life. And how things changed; that one action of saying ‘I have had enough of this. I am an adult and I choose with whom I spend my time’ released all sorts of space in my brain. This person had been an energy parasite for years and suddenly I had freed myself.

I guess that my reflection on all this is that we can look at life in two ways (to be a bit simplistic about it!). We can notice and comment on all the bad things – and they do exist – around us, or we can notice and recognise the good that happens.
What mindset do you think develops when we notice and talk about the crap that happens (and it does happen)? How much more positive are we likely to be about the world if we develop a mindset based on noticing the great stuff around us?

Now I am not saying to ignore the crap – it happens and needs dealing with. What I am saying is twofold, firstly deal with the duff stuff and move on, secondly notice and celebrate the good around you.

Today’s challenge – spend 15 minutes during which you actively notice and say out loud something positive every minute.
Tomorrow’s challenge (and every day thereafter) is to notice at least one high point of every day and to record it somewhere.

Isn’t life great 🙂

Closing the Loop

Thank You on typewriterHow often have you wondered what happened later?

Perhaps you passed on a contact to a third party, or gave a reference for someone applying for a new job, or sent someone an article that you thought might interest them…
…and then heard no more.

When this happens to me I am left wondering whether or not my input was valued or just wasting their time. Conversely, even a brief acknowledgement reinforces the link that I feel to that person.

Don’t leave someone hanging after they reach out to you, wondering about the outcome. It’s rude, it looks bad, and it actually has the potential to create negative consequences.

The way to close the loop is simple: no matter the outcome, no matter if the news is good or bad, be sure to follow up and share what happened.

At the end of the day, people appreciate recognition and follow-through. While you certainly don’t have to go overboard and send a bunch of roses, a simple note to close the loop can mean the difference between maintaining a two-way relationship and tainting a once-good bond.

Go on, have a quick think about who you want to say “Thank You” to today…