There is no failure, only feedback

Head in hands with failure

 

My friend Andy Green has decided to label this week “Failure Week” and it set me thinking. Those of you who read this blog will recognise that it has become rather occasional – one might say that I have failed to write something every day, which was my original intent.

However in my world failure is only really failure if I fail to learn from it. So what have I learned?

  1. I am most successful blogging daily when I have a plan – usually to write a series of articles on a particular topic (see Twixtmas or Metaprograms earlier).
  2. I need to sort out the ‘Schedule’ function in my WordPress – it doesn’t work and it bugs me that I have to go in every day to workaround the fact that my scheduled post didn’t make it to your wonderful eyes.

What I have learned from earlier experience is that a list of more than 2 or 3 items is less likely to get completed than a very short list – eat the elephant one bite at a time. So that’s it. I suggested elsewhere that I might write an A-Z of personal development, so I am off to compose the first few, any suggestions for topics (especially for Q, X, Z) will be very welcome.

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.

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 🙂

I don’t understand…

George Osborne behind a pile of pound coinsYesterday morning I was reading an article by George Monbiot about possible changes to the Corporation Tax regime in the UK. The deeper I got into the article, the more I realised how complex issue was and how little I knew about the topic. Now, I run my own company so I probably know more about Corporation Tax than the average citizen and yet here I was completely baffled by changes that the government are apparently considering.

How often do you find yourself on the edge of the subject that is getting so complex that you really do not understand the implications? What do you do in these circumstances? I was left wondering whether I should

    a) simply accept that I would never understand it and move on
    b) continue to surf superficially over the topic
    c) Rams in an uninformed way or
    d) seek an expert who might be able to explain it to me.

In the end this took me back to an earlier piece about whether I could Control, choose to Influence or simply Accept what was going on. I can certainly not control government legislation, I could choose to accept whatever happens or I could choose to influence in whatever way I could. Each of these options would be likely to lead to a different selection from the four above. In the end, I decided that others are more likely to be able to influence significantly than I was and so decided that I would simply accept whatever was going on and move my attention elsewhere.

So, how often are you faced with a situation that you do not completely understand? And how do you respond? What response or action most suits your long-term goals or vision? Think about it. Take you mind off autopilot and make a conscious decision about how to deal with your ignorance.

Context and immediacy in learning

tree of lifeThese days I tend not to lose much sleep over some of the wackier government edicts that come our way. However, a recent one suggesting that reading tests for six-year-olds should include “non-words” set me thinking. Apparently the rationale is that including non-words allows testing of whether or not pupils can decode using the phonics system that is prevalent in our primary schools these days. The counter argument, to which I admit I subscribe, is that reading is about obtaining meaning not simply translating symbols on a page into vocal utterances.

So, why am I writing about this in a personal effectiveness blog? Well, it seems to me that the debate centres on the whole issue of the relevance of context in learning. It is widely accepted that if a learner understands how to apply a new piece of learning and, better still, has an opportunity to practice that learning within a very short timescale then the learning will be much more effective. How, I wonder, does your average six-year-old understand the concept of or use a non-word?

I think this question of context poses interesting challenges for us trainers and our trainees. As a facilitator of learning (I am really not very keen on the word’ trainer’) my challenge is to be constantly anchoring new material in the current reality of my learners. It is no good just talking about the concept of personal responsibility or networking, I must help my learner identify a specific situation in which they can try out/practice the ideas to which I am introducing them.

So what happens when we turn the tables and I think about this topic of context and immediacy as a learner? I remember, many many years ago, being sent on a short course to learn how to use spreadsheets. My boss at the time thought this was a good idea and in the long term it probably was, however what he had missed was that neither he nor I had any immediate application for this new knowledge that I was acquiring. I came back with all this wonderful stuff in my head and got on with my day job while what I had learned slowly decayed to the point at which when I finally did need to use a spreadsheet I had to start almost from scratch in my learning. From that point onwards, I only ever went on training courses when I either had or could create an immediate application for the new knowledge.

When I apply this thinking to my current field of helping others in their personal development, the challenge is all too apparent. I can sit down and draw pretty diagrams of elephants in circles of Completions Gestalts and lots of other theoretical models, but it is only when my client goes out and actually does something different every day or rewards themself for completing a task that they really understand the power of the ideas I would like to get across. To my coaching clients – please remember that your home play is extremely important! To anyone else reading this blog, just takes 30 seconds to think about the implications of what you have read for your own situation and how you are going to put into practice this context of context and immediacy in learning.

It is not the sound of words that is important, it is their meaning.

Challenge yourself

man standing out from the packI was watching the new series of Masterchef last night and was seriously impressed by the enthusiasm and commitment of the participants. Some of them very clearly knew how to shake a pan, others perhaps needed a bit more practice. I was left wondering how many of them had decided to cook something safe, well within their capabilities, and how many had decided to take risks with new and challenging recipes in the hope of winning this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Sometimes we do only get one opportunity and you might find it instructive to have a think about how you react in those situations. Do you take the safe but sure approach – which unless you are world class probably puts you in a pack with many others – or do you give it your all in the hope of creating something new and unexpected?

Heston Blumenthal did not become one of the best chefs in the world by cooking conventional French cuisine better than anyone else, he needed to find his own style and even his own techniques.

People who are different, or do things differently, are the ones that get noticed, so what do you do or are you going to do to make yourself noticeable and push the boat out?

Attitude is all

attitude changes everythingI make no apology for using someone else’s words today – Charles Swindoll seems to say it all…

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude to me is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than success, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, gift, or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it. And so it is with you… we are in charge of our attitudes.”
Charles Swindoll