The Business Sensei

Speaking of panic…

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

I have three cats. Cats being the creatures that they are, I have only to sit down to read a book and instantly there is a cat on my lap. Regardless of which cat it is, a familiar pattern ensues: first, the cat carefully positions itself in front of my book. Once I adjust to move the book, the cat then carefully positions itself on one of my hands. This continues until I give the cat the attention it’s seeking. At that point, it first butts its head against me and then, purring loudly, turns and sticks its behind in my face.

I am sure that there are people who find this end of a cat absolutely fascinating. I’m even quite sure that there are contests in which cats win awards for having the most beautiful behind. For cat breeders and cat fanciers, it can be a big deal to win one of these cat trophies. It is a cause for great celebration. 

It is not a cause for celebration when our arousal spikes up so fast, or is kept high for so long, that we hurtling down the right side of the performance curve. Instead of a more or less gradual decline in performance, we instead experience a very different form of catastrophe.

As we can see, instead of sliding smoothly down the curve, performance can collapse suddenly. Whether this collapse occurs depends on a number of factors, including the overall level of stress, a person’s overall level of fitness, whether or not you’ve had enough sleep, how recently you remembered to eat, and so forth. People who are in good physical condition, are getting enough sleep, and who are remembering to eat despite the stress are less likely to experience catastrophe. They aren’t immune, but at least their odds are better.

When we are sliding down the performance curve, various centering and focus techniques can be used to stop our descent and move us back up toward the peak; we will look at those techniques shortly. Once we fall off the cliff, however, we have to start all the back at the left end of the curve. In other words, we need to rest and recuperate, at least overnight, possibly for a few days, before our performance will return to its precatastrophe peak. Quite simply, when we are sliding down the right side of the curve, we are drawing on our energy reserves more and more rapidly. When we hit catastrophe, we’ve exhausted our reserves and we need to recharge.

If we try to continue performance once we’ve hit catastrophe, we just make things worse. Now we’re into error catastrophe, where mistakes compound upon mistakes, and our efforts to fix them only causes yet more errors. Athletes who hit catastrophe generally don’t have a choice about continuing: they are often physically unable to do so. If you’ve ever seen an uninjured runner or cyclist abandon an endurance race, that’s often what’s going on. In the office, however, we are more likely to get into competitive frog boiling. No one wants to be the first to admit defeat and go home, so everyone keeps pushing on even though productivity is plummeting and we’re actually making the situation worse. When we are feeling stressed, our instincts are to make the stressor go away; taking a break and sleeping seems counter-intuitive, even though it’s exactly what we need. Remember, cognitive short-cuts most often kick in when we’re tired or distracted, and lead us into errors. It is also possible to reach a point of such mental fatigue that it almost becomes too difficult to stop and take that necessary break. This is where it’s particularly important that the team leader has the judgment and presence of mind to chase everyone out of the office.

A final thought here: I’ve seen many companies where the idea of going home and getting a good night’s sleep was viewed as a sign of weakness. Instead, the teams would push on until they dropped from exhaustion, and then force themselves to continue the next day. The results were never worth it. In the infamous Apollo 13 disaster, with oxygen running out for the stranded astronauts in the damaged space capsule, mission controller Eugene Krantz still ordered the crew to get a few hours sleep before attempting the difficult maneuvers necessary to bring the space capsule back to Earth. Running out of air was less risky than the consequences of attempting a difficult operation on no sleep.

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

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.