The Business Sensei

In the Zone

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

There are a number of advantages to operating in the zone of optimal arousal. The major advantage is that our focus feels almost effortless. We automatically pay attention to relevant information and ignore things that are not relevant to the task at hand. This is assuming, of course, that we know what is relevant and important to the task at hand! How do we know what is relevant and what is not? That’s where goal setting comes into play. One of the advantages of structured goals is that they tell us what is relevant and what is not. Thus, well designed goals combined with implementation intentions and the proper level of arousal generates that optimal level of focus shown in Figure 2. Productivity in this state is at its peak; it won’t get any better. In sports, this is known as performing in the Zone; an athlete in the Zone will perform many times better than a similarly skilled athlete who is not in the Zone: it’s the difference between winning and not even making it to the podium. The results in a business environment are similar.

One life or two?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

Another area of destructive stress is everyone’s favorite problem: conflict between work life and family life. The problem here lies in the basic premise that we have two lives: a work life and a family life and that these are somehow two separate existences. Perhaps if you are James Bond you get to live twice; the rest of us don’t have that luxury.

One of the biggest sources of frustration for employees is this illusion that these lives are separate. When we ask people to sacrifice family for the sake of the organization, we are putting them into a very stressful situation. In part, we are forcing them into a form of role ambiguity: they are being forced to play two roles at once or choose between two very important roles. We are also forcing them into a mental state where they are doing one thing but thinking about the other: a form of multi-tasking. This is a very bad place to be. Not only does it reduce performance, it also interferes with job satisfaction. As you’ll recall from our discussion of the High Performance Cycle, reducing job satisfaction reduces commitment to the organization, which interferes with goal accomplishment, better known as productivity.

Taking the time to respect people’s lives outside the organization is a powerful tool for building loyalty and commitment. Indeed, as we’ve discussed, time is a powerful gift. Sending people home a little early if you’re running ahead of schedule or accepting that quarterly report a little late so that Fred can attend his kid’s soccer game are extremely effective methods of reducing that work/family conflict. Flexible work from home policies are another good approach. When you make it easy for people to manage the demands of work and family, you build loyalty and increase satisfaction with the organization. That, in turn, feeds the High Performance Cycle.

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal.  Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers.  In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources.  Steve Balzac is the 21^st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

What does lack of control do?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

As we discussed earlier in this chapter, our own stress response is one of the signals that tells us that we are in danger. When we feel threatened, we look for the threat. If our attempts to identify the threat and make it go away fail, we first start to see the people in other departments as the source of the threat, and eventually our own colleagues as well. Fear is not that precise an instrument! In a very real sense, it doesn’t matter if we are physically afraid or afraid of being embarrassed or losing status, the reactions are the same. If anything, our fear of embarrassment or loss of face is often greater than our fear of physical harm!

Thus, when fear takes over, cooperation and teamwork suffer. People start to fight over little things, as they attempt to exert control over something. When we feel out of control, we seek to take control of what we can in whatever ways we can. When we don’t know what to do, we do whatever we can, whether effective or not, whether appropriate or not.

The stress of 20-20 hindsight

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

The hindsight trap can be best described by Dr. Watson saying to Sherlock Holmes at the end of the mystery, “It’s so obvious once you explain it!” Holmes famously does not reply by saying, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” though one might imagine that he is at least thinking it. The fact is, though, that what Holmes is doing is not elementary or obvious, as evidenced by how few readers can actually figure it out. In fact, being able to look at an apparently random collection of clues and figure out how they fit together is incredibly difficult. However, because after the fact it seems so clear, we are vulnerable to the hindsight trap: we assume that because hindsight is 20-20, foresight must have been 20-20 as well.

In rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories recently, I realized that Arthur Conan Doyle does play fair most of the time: he reveals the clues to the reader, or at least he reveals the fact that there was a clue in such a fashion as to provide the reader the information he needs to figure out what is going on. For example, there are times when Holmes is taking advantage of knowledge not readily accessible to the reader, such as Holmes’ enyclopedic knowledge of mud or cigar ash, but that’s not the point: it is a sufficient clue that Holmes is interested in the mud or the cigar ash. Despite this, it’s extremely hard to figure out the solution to the mystery before Holmes reveals it. Once revealed, though, it’s equally difficult to imagine the pieces fitting together any other way.

Now, if this phenomenon was limited to Sherlock Holmes mysteries, it would be rather thoroughly insignificant. Unfortunately, it happens all the time:

“I can’t believe she didn’t see that coming!”

“How could he have not noticed the problem ahead of time?”

“Were they even paying attention?!”

When something goes wrong, be that in a marketing campaign, a client engagement, developing an app, or launching a new online service, the reasons are almost always obvious… in hindsight. Like a Sherlock Holmes story, once the ending is clear, we can’t imagine any other arrangement of the pieces. Thus, we assume that not only is someone responsible, that person or that team must have been incompetent, indifferent, or careless, because they didn’t recognize what we now know to be completely obvious. Ironically, what I’ve observed over and over is that when someone does point out the potential problem, they are first laughed at for being too nervous and then when the problem is clear to everyone, castigated for not pushing their point more aggressively!

On the flip side, when someone does successfully anticipate and forestall a problem, their efforts are not taken seriously. After all, the problem was obvious, so why did it take them so long to figure it out and prevent it? Clearly, they weren’t working all that hard!

The net result of both of these manifestations of the hindsight trap is that self-confidence and the feeling of being in control are both eroded. This is a very bad combination, because eroding self-confidence makes us less likely to take actions that might demonstrate control, and reducing control also reduces our self-confidence. As we can see, getting caught in the hindsight trap is a very destructive form of stress.  In particularly severe situations, the hindsight trap can produce such a strong focus on the past that it leads to organizational stasis or passivity. No one is willing to make a decision because they are too afraid of being second-guessed for it later. The decision to do nothing is viewed as the safest course.

Taking this a little further, we can now understand why fear based motivation sooner or later causes trouble. Fear activates our fight/flight response: just ask Thag! Fear focuses our attention on the source of the fear; if we can’t easily find the source, then our attention is very likely going to be grabbed by anything which we think might be the cause. In the first case, when people are afraid of the boss, they are not focusing on the goals of the organization. Rather, they are focusing on pleasing the boss, or at least avoiding his wrath. While this can be a tremendous boost to the boss’s ego and self-esteem, it doesn’t do much for the employees. Their sense of control is now based not on their actual ability to address problems and accomplish goals, but on the far more nebulous ability to manipulate the boss. Cooperation, creativity, problem-solving, and the high-performance cycle all suffer in this scenario. In the second case, where attention is grabbed by whatever seems to be causing the fear, we again see a loss of control. In this case, the organization or the team spends its time and energy focused on the wrong things, and hence fails to adequately address the actual challenges in front of them. Constantly seeking to change something that doesn’t matter will sometimes briefly create an illusion of control, similar to constantly pressing a “Walk” signal that doesn’t actually work. More likely, though, is that the wrong focus leads to repeated failures to change the situation, and a steady erosion of both individual and team confidence.

Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”

 

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence

When is stress destructive?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

Stress is very much one of those things about which we can truthfully say, “Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.” While we are capable of handling very large amounts of stress and responding quite effectively to the demands upon us, too much for too long is a sure recipe for unbaking your team and burning out the members of your group or organization. It’s also the case that whether or not the stress is good or bad depends on context: being around other people revs us up. When it comes to brainstorming and bouncing ideas off others, this can be a very good thing. However, when it comes to complex problem solving and tasks requiring deep concentration, the presence of others can turn from energizing us to distracting us. In addition, there are certain types of stress that are more destructive than others: it’s not just the raw amount of stress that matters, but the nature of the stressful event.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael

Editor-in-Chief

ERE Media

Ongoing stress

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

Unlike in Thag’s day, however, most of our modern stressors cannot be solved in the simple, direct fashion that worked so well for Thag. Faced with a tiger, Thag stabs it with a spear or he runs away. In either case, Thag gets to use all that energy his body is providing. Today, though, that approach is rarely quite so effective. While drop kicking our laptop across the room might feel satisfying at the moment, in the long run it’s likely to only increase our stress levels. And, no matter how much we might dream, bringing a spear to work is going to attract some very strange looks, many of them from men in blue uniforms or white coats. Nor do we get to run screaming from the office. The net result is that we’re all revved up with nowhere to go. Instead of helping us focus, we end up physically and mentally tense, unable to concentrate because we are “looking” for danger.

One of the interesting, and in this case irritating, factors in how we deal with stressful situations is that we use our own stress response to help us recognize when we should be having a stress response! In other words, it’s not just that our fight/flight response activates when the tiger appears; it’s that if our fight/flight response is activated, we assume there must be a tiger around somewhere. If we can’t find the tiger, we rev up even more. As you might imagine, having our fight/flight response activate even before we are consciously aware of the danger can buy us those critical fractions of a second that can make the difference between life and death. The price for that capability, however, is that our modern stressors can trap us in a vicious cycle of increasing stress responses. This is not good; once we rev up past a certain point, performance collapses. Even without that, we are not built to have our fight/flight response active for long periods of time. Remember that when we’re directing all our power to the weapons and shields, there’s not much left for life support. When fight/flight is active for long periods, it interferes with healing, digestion, blood pressure, and sleep. Long-term, we become more vulnerable to sickness and injury: anything from indigestion and distractibility to more serious problems such as reduced attentional capacity, high blood-pressure, and heart disease. On a very short-term, practical, level, stress has the potential to short-circuit everything we’ve discussed in earlier chapters about team development, motivation, goal setting, and the organizational narrative. Highly stressed people will often be compliant, but they are not actively committed to the organization’s goals, thus killing the High Performance Cycle. When the water is boiling, creativity, cooperation, and effective problem-solving are amongst the first things to go: stressed out people are more critical, more impulsive, more easily irritated by trivial incidents. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of too much stress is when trivial issues quickly escalate into intense, pointless conflict.

The other sneaky problem with stress is that stressors are not independent of one another. Stress is cumulative: it doesn’t take a major traumatic event to push our fight/flight response into overdrive. A great many small stressors add up to a large stress response. The daily hassles of life, frustration at work, a distressing political or economic climate, can all help trigger our stress response and keep it active even when there is no immediate physical danger. Thus, that one additional request you are making of your employees might not seem like much by itself, but can trigger a major outbreak of bad temper or collapse performance if it comes after a series of major changes or reorganizations or during a period when everyone is frantically working to hit a deadline. I’m still amazed when a company ramps up the stress level right around Christmas: so many people are already stressed out around the holidays that adding to it does not help.

The trick to dealing effectively with stress is in understanding how to maintain the right level of stress: we want people to feel excited and engaged. When the levels of stress are appropriate, that’s exactly what happens. When they get out of hand, though, is when individual and organizational performance breaks down. We also need to understand how to manage stress: Olympic athletes, after all, thrive under conditions of extreme stress. They have learned the trick of being physically revved up and mentally relaxed, giving them the best of both worlds and enabling them to perform at an incredible level.

Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.

 

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence

George Washington Bridge Leadership

This article was originally published on the Human Talent Network

I very much enjoyed the Hunger Games, both the books and the movies. The story is a gripping one, of a dystopian future and the corrupt government that holds power through brutality and, of course, the Games. The portrayal of the political environment and machinations are particularly well done, with one notable exception: a certain major figure makes use of poison to further his aims. As a powerful government official, there is no reason for him to do that: he had the full apparatus of the state at his disposal and a team of loyal flunkies ready to act on his behalf. There was no reason for him to use as crude a tool as poison.

The power of the state, along with some loyal flunkies, was on full display in the news lately. The news this past week with was filled with stories of New Jersey governor Chris Christie and a scandal with the unfortunate, but inevitable, name of “Bridgegate.” According to the New York Times, Bridgegate involves having all but one lane of the George Washington Bridge closed down for four straight days last September, causing complete traffic gridlock in Fort Lee, NJ. Although Christie laughed it off at first, subsequent revelations are showing that people in his office were responsible. Indeed, he just fired his deputy chief of staff when it turned out she was involved.

In the political arena, the questions are, “What did Governor Christie know? When did he know it?” He claims that his staff kept the information from him. I am not particularly interested in those questions; this isn’t a political article. Rather, I am much more interested in what the behavior of Chris Christie’s immediate staff and appointees says about him as a leader and what lessons business leaders can learn from these events.

Leadership is a funny thing, and can take many forms. Some leaders and quiet and self-effacing; others are loud and brash. No matter the overt style adopted by a leader, the actions of the leader set the tone for the group. The leader who is organized and focused on building a good process eventually gets a staff who also value process. The leader who values results at all costs eventually gets a staff that values results at all costs. This is the nature of leadership: the leader is the person out in front, setting the example. The team follows the leader and the team imitates the leader. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and most people like to flatter the boss. People who imitate, that is, flatter the boss, are those whom the boss is most likely to reward.

Thus, how a team behaves when the leader isn’t looking tells us a great deal about the leader. If the team behaves ethically when no one is watching, then odds are pretty darn good that the leader holds to high ethical standards. On the other hand, if a team behaves unethically, that also says something about the example being set from the top.

Most leaders will also at least go through a period when their staff worships them. Good leaders recognize this can happen and work hard to get past it. Weaker leaders are quite happy to be worshipped and are content to foster and maintain that sort of atmosphere. The best leaders build up their followers and transform them into highly effective, ethical leaders as well.

In Governor Christie’s case, it appears that his direct reports deliberately withheld information from him and lied to him when he asked them about it. They also seem quite willing to take the fall for him, at least if the news reports are correct. Assuming this is all true, it tells us a great deal about his leadership and the state of his team.

What sort of example was Christie setting that led his people to believe that their behavior was acceptable? Had it been one person involved, well, occasionally bad apples do get in. The correct behavior is to fire them as soon as you find them.  Had the actions in question been taken by people far down the organizational hierarchy, that too would be less meaningful: The influence of the leader is always strongest at the top, and does weaken as we move further and further away from the centers of power. But the people involved in Fort Lee’s Traffigeddon were members of Christie’s inner circle. They apparently thought that using state power to pursue a private agenda was acceptable and that their boss would want them to do it. They also apparently thought that it was okay to lie to their boss about it. What sort of leader conveys those messages to his subordinates?

So how does this apply to business? Ultimately, the attitude the CEO exhibits is the attitude that the staff will imitate. At one maker of scientific software, the CEO viewed the customers as a bunch of incompetent idiots. Why did he take that view? Well, apparently they had the temerity to criticize aspects of his software. Of course, he never expressed his views to his customers, but he was quite open about them in private with his subordinates. This led to a general atmosphere of amusement and condescension when a customer called in for help. The customers, highly educated professionals, were not idiots; at least, they were sufficiently not idiotic to know when they were being laughed at and condescended to. Moreover, because customers were viewed as idiots, their feedback was routinely ignored. Eventually, as competing products entered the market, customers deserted the company in droves. In the end, the company went out of business.

If team members view the leader and the team as indistinguishable, the problem can get even worse. When the leader is too much the center of mass of the team, team members won’t wait for instructions. Instead, they will attempt to do what they think the boss wants, often without really considering whether those actions are necessarily the best actions to take. When you add to that mix a sufficiently inappropriate role model, you have a serious problem brewing. Of course, in Chris Christie’s case, it didn’t just brew; it boiled over, and he will have to clean up the mess. High performance teams, on the other hand, understand their goals, think through the process of accomplishing those goals, and consider the ramifications of their actions.

Ultimately, the more your team likes you, the more they want to impress you. Assuming they are sufficiently skilled to take action without your specific instructions, the actions they do take will be governed by how they feel about you and by the example you set. The initiative they take will be the initiative you’ve taught them is good. In other words, if you’re wondering how your team could have done something amazingly brilliant, or utterly stupid, all you really need to do is look in the mirror. If you want to change what your team is doing, that’s the place to start.

How Do You Make Sure You’re in the Right Place at the Right Time?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“Slow down.”

I can’t count the number of times that my original sensei would say that to me when I started practicing jujitsu. It drove me nuts. I never felt like I was moving fast. Besides, what was wrong with going fast? Now, after twenty years of jujitsu practice, I’m constantly telling my students to “slow down.”

Speed is a funny thing. It appears to be the most important thing in martial arts: being able to block quickly, hit quickly, throw quickly. However, when you move fast, there’s a tendency to overshoot the target, to over-commit. The block is too wide or the punch is over-extended, leaving you vulnerable. It’s easy to miss obvious feints by an opponent, and walk into a fist. Speed also leaves you physically and emotionally exhausted, unable to actually complete a workout. Indeed, the most skilled practitioners never seem to move all that fast. Rather, they become extremely good at always being in the right place at the right time. Speed comes from precision, but precision does not come from speed.

I’m frequently reminded of this phenomenon when I work with my clients. There is a tendency at many companies to try to do more and more in less and less time. The logic seems to be that if people just worked quickly enough, they would be able to get the job done. Instead, though, the error count is increasing even faster than the productivity. The time spent going back and correcting problems and fixing bugs more than makes up for the time saved by moving faster.

In jujitsu, moving fast can appear to work for a while. Eventually, though, you run into someone who knows what they are doing and you get punched in the nose. In a business, moving fast can also appear to work for a while. The major difference is that when you get punched in the nose, it’s not quite as obvious. It still happens though, and usually when you least expect it.

The problem once again is that moving rapidly does not equate to moving precisely. In a corporate setting, that lack of precision translates to instructions not being read closely, exceptions not being recognized, assumptions not being tested, or flat out inaccurate information not being corrected. It can also mean overreacting to a competitor’s product release or to a news story. In jujitsu, you may not have time to stop and think: if you haven’t prepared and trained, then you may just be out of luck. In a business environment, you may feel that you can’t stop and think, but the reality is far different. Unlike jujitsu, decisions don’t need to be made in fractions of a second. There is time to pause and consider the situation: even in the Apollo 13 disaster, NASA’s Eugene Krantz slowed everyone down and collected information before deciding what to do. Knowing when to slow down is what saved the astronauts; moving too quickly would have only compounded the problems beyond recovery.

Fortunately, most of us will never face the kind of life-or-death scenario that Eugene Krantz had to face. That, in turn, only makes the tendency to move too fast even more inexcusable.

The first problem, of course, is recognizing that you are moving too fast. Just as in jujitsu, it is surprisingly not obvious to the person, or team, that they need to slow down. It helps, therefore, to learn to recognize the symptoms of speed.

One of the easiest ones to spot is when the same types of errors just keep cropping up no matter what you do. You fix them in one place, they appear somewhere else. You come up with procedures for reducing the errors and for each mistake that you remove, a new one takes its place. One health related company demanded such a high throughput of patient claims that they were constantly dealing with forms being rejected because of mistakes. So they put in a layer of checklists to make sure the forms were done correctly. Then a layer of paperwork to make sure the checklists were correct. The errors simply kept shifting and the responses only created a slower and steadily more unwieldy system in which the ability to generate billable hours is limited by the need to do paperwork. The company is now one of the leading exporters of red tape. If they had but slowed down a little, they would have finished considerably more quickly.

Another common symptom of moving too fast is feeling like you’ve spent the day on a treadmill: you’re exhausted but it feels like nothing really got accomplished. Items on the to-do list never seem to go away or items that are crossed off keep coming back a few days or weeks later. When problems that were thought solved keep reappearing, that tells you that you need to slow down and put more time into understanding what’s going and devising more robust solutions. Unfortunately, when you’re feeling rushed, a quick solution feels good and creates a temporary oasis of calm. That feeling can be addicting: at one software company, one department developed the habit of simply marking any bugs that had been around for a while as fixed. They knew that it would sometimes take at least two or three weeks before the bugs could be verified. Maybe they’d go away. Maybe they would no longer be relevant. Maybe there’d be more time later to actually look at them. Sure, they almost always came back, but so what? They bought themselves time to relax, and managed to make themselves look good because their bug count was always low. The actual problems with the product, on the other hand, were never addressed.

If you want to move fast, you first have to learn to move with precision. That means starting slowly and learning how to be in the right place at the right time. Otherwise, you spend all your time and energy rushing about overshooting your target and fixing your mistakes.

What is stress?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

I hear all the time about stress reduction and the importance of eliminating stress from your life. The problem is, if we eliminated all the stress, we would also eliminate all progress and success. Stress is healthy, in the same way that food is healthy: we need it pretty much every day, but too much can give you a belly ache or cause other health problems. It’s not necessarily the food per se, it’s the quantity or quality that kills you.

Stress, at root, is anything that gets us moving, be that thinking, feeling, or acting. When a stressful event occurs, we experience physical and psychological reactions. It is the combination of the stressful event along with our reactions to it that we need to know how to use to our best advantage. It’s when we don’t use stress to our advantage, or when it gets out of control, that we start experiencing the negative effects of stress: illness, distractibility, reduced team performance and organizational commitment, loss of creativity, and so on. In order to really understand how stress works, though, it will be helpful to look at cavemen and the starship Enterprise.

Let us turn the clock back twenty thousand years or so and consider Thag. Thag is a hunter, a member of a nomadic band of hunter-gatherers. In Thag’s line of work, the biggest risk is being eaten by something that disagrees with you. On a typical day, Thag wakes up in the morning, grabs his trusty spear, and heads into the primeval forest to hunt. He probably does not have a cup of coffee, there being a notable lack of Starbucks in the forest primeval and besides, Thag hasn’t yet invented money.

So far, this has been a fairly low stress day for Thag. There is enough stress, specifically hunger or the needs of his family, to get him up and out hunting, but nothing too extreme. This is about to change. As Thag makes his way through the forest, birds chirping ominously in the background, a tiger suddenly springs out. Now the stress level skyrockets. Thag’s heart starts beating faster, his breathing comes more quickly, and the blood is really flowing in his veins, which, in point of fact, is where he’d like to keep it. Under the surface, as it were, epinephrine and norepinephrine (the chemicals formerly known as adrenaline and noradrenaline) are released into Thag’s blood. Energy is routed from non-essential functions, such as digestion, healing, and the immune system, to Thag’s muscles. In little more than a heartbeat, Thag is ready to fight or run.

But wait! Since when are digestion, healing, and the immune system non-essential? Without them, we’re not going to be particularly happy or healthy. Fundamentally, if you’re looking at a hungry tiger, or, more to the point, if that hungry tiger is looking at you, neither fighting off the flu nor digesting your last meal are particularly high on the priority list. Your goal is to live long enough to worry about the flu otherwise that last meal really will be your last meal.

Why not run or fight and also maintain digestion, healing, and the immune system? Well, to answer that let’s jump from the distant past to a not quite so distant future. Whenever the starship Enterprise is attacked by Romulans, Captain Kirk orders full power to weapons and shields. That makes a certain amount of sense: when someone is trying to blow you out of space, you don’t want to put half power to the shields. Sometimes, though, full power is just not quite enough. When that happens, as it so often does, Kirk orders emergency power to the shields as well. At that point, Mr. Spock usually observes that such an action will mean taking power from life support, which never stops Kirk but does serve to make the scene more exciting (which is also a form of stress, albeit a pleasant one at least when it’s happening to someone else). Basically, the Enterprise may be big, but it’s not infinitely large. It has only so much power. That power can be put in different places, shifted around as necessary, but there’s still a finite limit to how much there is. Most of the time life support, or long-term survival, is a pretty high priority. However, when confronted with hostile Romulans, the short-term need to not be vaporized takes priority.

On Star Trek, this is known as a Dramatic Moment. For Thag, however, it’s more commonly known as the Fight or Flight response. Confronted with danger, the stress triggers Thag’s body to fight or run. Like the Enterprise, Thag’s body is finite. He has only so much energy to go around.

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal.  Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers.  In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources.  Steve Balzac is the 21^st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

Sometimes a Little Inefficiency Can Go a Long Way

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

An efficient system is frequently described as one in which there are no mistakes.

People, however, only learn by making mistakes.

This creates a bit of a problem. In a truly efficient system, there would be no opportunity for people to learn. When there is no learning, the system will eventually fail: either it becomes rigid or it stagnates, but in either case it fails to adapt to changing conditions in the environment.

Shoto Funakoshi, the founder of Shotokan Katate, used to say that in the practice of Shotokan there was no room for error. American students never had the patience for the level of perfection demanded in more traditional Japanese dojos; instead, they made a great many mistakes. Today, Americans win most of the competitions.

Fencing is a very precise sport: a master swordsman can hit a moving quarter with the point of an epee. Yet, the winner of the competition is frequently not the person with the most perfect moves. Instead, the winner is often the person who appears to be making mistakes.

Now, there are certainly situations in which there is no room for mistakes: surgery and landing an airplane are two that come to mind. However, for someone to become a master surgeon or a successful pilot they had to make a lot of mistakes along the way. The goal, of course, is make sure those mistakes occur in settings that do not involve people getting killed. And, although both of them are required to perform potentially difficult operations without error, they are also expected to rapidly recognize and adjust to changing circumstances, for example having both engines of your airplane taken out of action by birds. That ability to adjust can only come from experience in dealing with unexpected or unusual situations: in other words, coping with mistakes without losing your mental balance.

I’ve worked with jujitsu students who completely crumbled when they made a mistake. Their concentration and confidence were shattered and their performance along with them. One minute they’re comfortably demonstrating techniques; the next, they’re frozen or in a panic because something didn’t go as expected. In the business world, I’ve seen CEOs comfortably running their companies, apparently supremely confident, right up until something unexpected happens: revenue misses expectations, there’s an unforeseen problem with the product, a deadline has to be extended, etc. The response is pure panic: in one case, the CEO refused to acknowledge the unexpected problem and insisted on shipping it on schedule anyway… and then couldn’t understand why the customers were so irate. In another situation, the first time revenue came in light, the CEO immediately laid off 20 percent of the company. This was not a particularly well-considered response to the situation. In both of these scenarios, the CEO didn’t stop to think; instead, he took the fact that Something Was Wrong, imagined the most dire of consequences, and took the first action that came to mind.

The problem is that mistakes are not something to fear. They are events that can provide valuable feedback. When something doesn’t work the way you expect, that is often a sign that conditions are not what you expect either. Something has changed or is not what you imagined it was, and it’s critical to understand what that means. Only when you understand exactly what is causing the “mistake” to occur can you design an appropriate solution.

In one company, a researcher was fired because he was clearly making too many mistakes and not committed to his job. How did they know? His experiment wasn’t working. It didn’t work for the next three people either, all of whom quit or were asked to leave. Eventually, it turned out that the experiment couldn’t be performed as designed. The first mistake was made by the person who designed the experiment; the second by management who refused to consider alternative explanations. As a result, they repeatedly executed an inappropriate solution.

When too much focus is placed on being efficient, more and more energy is spent on avoiding mistakes. Eventually, more energy may be spent on avoiding the mistake than on the mistake itself as the company works to solve the wrong problem.

It helps, therefore, to have plan for making use of mistakes and not being frozen by them.

• Start by doing nothing. Take a moment to consider the situation. Look at your own reactions: are you imagining disaster down the road? If you are, try “seeing” that image as a photograph and then imagine crumpling it up and throwing it away. Free yourself to consider alternatives.

• Ask what the mistake is telling you. Consider different ideas. Brainstorm a list of possibilities.

• Look for an opportunity to innovate. Don’t settle for the status quo. Instead of just eliminating the mistake, can you turn it to your advantage? How can you make the system a little, or a lot, better than it was before?

Sometimes, a little inefficiency can go a long way.