The Business Sensei

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 The Momentum of Time?

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

As we discussed when we looked at the High Performance Cycle and goal setting, goals have momentum. In a more precise sense, success has momentum. When we are succeeding, we feel better about ourselves, our work, and the organization we are a part of. How we manage time plays a major role in our perceptions of success.

As we saw earlier in this chapter, when we feel rushed, our perceptions narrow. We don’t see things that are right in front of us. We will even miss things that matter deeply to us: when they felt rushed, our divinity students speaking on the Good Samaritan completely missed their opportunities to live up to the content of their talks. In business settings, people in a hurry will spend days, weeks, or sometimes months not noticing the solution that is staring them in the face.

Whenever we are running behind our schedules, we end up feeling rushed. Being behind schedule might trigger people to work hard, but they do so at the expense of working smart. When we are behind schedule, every minor problem becomes a major disaster. It’s just one more thing that is preventing us from hitting our deadlines and getting the job done! As a result, we tend to respond with quick fixes and overly simple solutions just to get the problem to go away. At one software company, when the product team was clearly not going to make the deadline, the director of engineering grudgingly allowed them another two weeks. They still weren’t ready, so he did it again. This proceeded for about three months! Half of each two week chunk was spent undoing the quick fixes they’d implemented in their frantic race to finish during the prior two weeks, and the other half was spent instituting a new set of quick fixes! The constant feeling of pressure meant that no one had time to think or consider any solution that took more than a few days to implement. In three months of being behind schedule, they probably made about one month worth of actual progress! Had they just extended the schedule by six weeks or two months right from the start, they would have finished a lot sooner.

Conversely, when a team is running ahead of schedule, people are much more energized and creative. The feeling that there is time available means that people feel they have more space to consider alternatives and look for lasting solutions to problems. Unexpected problems become challenges rather than disasters. When a team is ahead of schedule and team members work long hours because they are excited, they are choosing to put in that extra time. When the team is behind schedule, team members are often pushed to work long hours to try to catch up. The choice is no longer really theirs.

Fundamentally, being behind schedule means feeling that we don’t have control of the situation and our time. Being ahead of schedule means feeling that we do have control of the situation and our time. The more control we think we have, the more motivated and focused we are. Individuals and teams that feel in control work harder and produce higher quality results than those that feel that they don’t have control. Thus, a team that is ahead tends to pull further ahead and teams that are behind will often tend to fall further behind until the inevitable triaging of incomplete work allows them to declare themselves done.

Going back to the High Performance Cycle, when we complete goals with a burst of effort and blast across the finish line after being triumphantly ahead of the game, we feel a much greater sense of satisfaction and internal reward. The external rewards also tend to be greater in that situation. When we stagger across the finish line after completing the equivalent of the Bataan Death March, we just feel exhausted and relieved. Internal rewards are lower and satisfaction is lower. It’s the first case that really builds high performance.

Build schedules that you can beat with hard work. If you consistently finish with lots of time left, then your goals are not aggressive enough. If you are always falling behind, then you are too aggressive. Pay attention to the feedback that you are getting as you set deadlines and see if you are making them. It takes a certain amount of effort and practice to make your schedules appropriately challenging but not impossible, particularly because we tend to routinely underestimate the difficulty and time requirements of most tasks: just think about Boston’s Big Dig or that latest home remodeling task you still haven’t finished. Remember that you want to start with easy goals so you can experience early successes and quickly move out ahead of the schedule: that will set the tone for the entire project. Starting with success gets momentum on your side.

Do your best…

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

I often hear the argument made that the effort involved in effective goal setting is really unnecessary so long as people just “do their best.”

The problem with “do your best” is that “your best” is an arbitrary term. There is no real way to measure it or even know when you’ve arrived. Each person has their own view of what “best” means. Thus, I’ve often heard managers telling employees, “You call this your best work? This is terrible!” Of course, this “feedback” is of absolutely no value as it fails to provide the person with any information that she can use to change or improve her work. Conversely, I’ve also seen many an engineer respond to a deadline by saying to their increasingly frustrated managers, “But it’s not done yet. It could be better!”

For an organization, “do your best” lacks any coherent focus or vision. It produces muddied priorities instead of a common objective. Common goals help bring teams together and provide a means to adjust course when something doesn’t work as expected; “do your best” is more likely to produce argument and blame when the team runs into an unexpected problem. In a “do your best” environment, clearly failure is the result of someone not “doing their best!” Everyone should just “try harder!” This is a sure recipe for overwork, exhaustion, burnout, and low productivity. Of course, since everyone is busy running around in circles frantically trying to “try harder” and “do their best,” it looks like a lot is getting done: remember that motion does not equal progress. Accomplishing goals equals progress.

The whole point of goals is that they give us a way to decompose a task into logical pieces, organize those pieces, and attack them in a systematic fashion. Goals provide us feedback so that we know how far we’ve come, how much is left to do, and when we’ve arrived at our destination. “Do your best” does none of these things. Overall, people, and businesses, with clear goals out-perform those who are simply attempting to do their best roughly 99.9% of the time. But, since autonomy is an important motivating factor, you should feel free to bet against those odds if you really want to.

Plan to fail

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

I have to confess to being very tired of the old aphorism, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Planning to fail is actually a worthwhile exercise, while failing to plan is simply a good way to waste time and energy without any benefit at the end. Failure is a surprisingly useful tool, at least for those who are not afraid to use it.

Seeing how your plan is failing can give you vital information on how to shift focus, allocate resources, and generally adjust your strategy. On a more subtle level, we won’t fully trust a plan that fails to consider failure: we need to have confidence that our plans or our feedback systems will alert us to something going wrong in order for us to believe it when things are going right. I’ve frequently seen companies abandon working plans simply because they had never determined how they’d know if something was going wrong and therefore concluded that something must be going wrong no matter how much evidence they had that their plans were working!

More broadly, though, the difficulty is often a misunderstanding of what it means to plan. I’ve worked for companies that tried to plan projects out 2-3 or more years. While this is possible in a very broad sense, details matter, and you can’t plan details that far in advance. Instead, you have to plan the steps in front of you. Part of the plan is to pause periodically and review the plan. What worked? What didn’t work? What are the next steps? Developing an effective strategy is not something you do once and then execute blindly; you have to constantly adjust as circumstances change. The beginning chess player tries to play out a sequence of moves and is paralyzed when the opponent doesn’t respond as expected; the chess master has a plan and constantly adjusts his strategy in response to his opponent.  You need to plan far enough, but not too far: This may sound like it contradicts the concept of reverse goal chaining; not at all. It is simply the case that the more distal steps are going to be vague until you get close enough to see the details. Good strategy requires a certain comfort with ambiguity and the ability to periodically evaluate, adjust, and adapt any plan.

Interestingly enough, the beginning chess player usually can’t explain his plan, while the master can. The beginner’s plan sounds like, “I have a plan: I’ll do this, and this, and this, and that’s how I’ll win.” The chess master, on the other hand, is likely to treat you to a detailed discussion of his thinking processes and chess strategy. The first is easy to say and easy to listen to, but is fundamentally useless. The second is hard to articulate and takes a lot of effort to follow, but actually does have a chance of working. Part of the reason it works is that the chess master has contingencies built into his strategy: he’s already considering that his opponent might do something unexpected and is mentally prepared to handle that. The beginner, by assuming that each step simply needs to be executed in the proper sequence, is locking himself into a rigid mindset. Chess strategy or business strategy, the results are same.

Fundamentally, failure is a form of feedback. In fact, this is exactly what you want failure to be: a means of testing out different strategies and figuring out which ones work best. Used this way, failure can be very helpful. Indeed, without such productive failures learning and strategy development is impossible.

However, sometimes the cost of failure can be somewhat higher. If Billy’s goal is to cross the street safely 75% of the time, what about the other 25%? Even if we raise the expectation to 99%, that one failure can negate all the successes: getting hit by a car can ruin your whole day.

It’s all too easy to confuse the two types of failures and businesses do it all the time. They are afraid to fail when that failure would give them valuable information and they take risks that sound good but where one slip causes you to lose everything.

How do we tell the two types of failure apart?

“Author Stephen Balzac has written a terrific book that gets into the realpolitik of organizational psychology – the underlying patterns of behavior that create the all important company culture. He doesn’t stop at the surface level, explaining things we already know like ‘culture beats strategy’ – he gets into the deeper drivers and ties everything back to specific, actionable stories. 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

Goal decomposition

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

I’ve mentioned several times the concept of creating subgoals and how large goals generate a great many smaller goals. This process is known as goal decomposition. Goal decomposition is critical if we’re going to accomplish anything large or significant: a black belt in a martial art, a college degree, shipping a product, building an innovative organization, or implementing successful organizational change, are all large goals that must be broken down into pieces in order to have any reasonable chances of success.

When breaking goals down, it helps considerably to start at the end and work backward to the starting point, rather than work forward from the starting point to where you want to go. Working backward, a technique known as reverse goal chaining, does two things:

First, working backward creates implicit agreement for each step. As you define a step, it’s clear how that step moves you forward; after all, you just stepped backward to define the step! If you can’t see how to move forward from a given step, that alerts you that you’re taking too big a step. You can address that issue immediately, or at least put in a goal that when you get to point X you need to evaluate how to move to point Y. Because you are working backward, the logical progression is easier to see and there is less debate about whether that step will get you where you want to go. Instead, the implicit agreement that you’re building makes it easier to generate overall agreement to the entire goal chain; this is extremely valuable when you need to convince your team to buy in to the goals! People are more likely to listen with an open mind instead of arguing the validity of each step in the process.

Second, reverse goal chaining is a very elegant way to transform your goals into a well thought-out strategy for accomplishing those goals. Strategy is, in a very real sense, the art of looking to your end point and then reasoning backward. As you work your way backward, insetad of fighting over the validity of the step, you can instead consider how each step influences or changes the world around you and how those affected by your actions might respond. In what way might a competitor react to your actions? How can you anticipate and prevent that? A chess master builds his strategy often at an almost unconscious level, but they do work backward. They are then playing toward various board positions that they know will move them to victory. Intervening board positions are the subgoals along the way to the final board position. At the same time, the other player is seeing and responding to each move, potentially forcing the strategy to evolve and adjust. Fencers do the same thing, leading their opponents into patterns of moves so that the opponent becomes predictable. Smart businesses try to force their competitors into untenable positions as well.

As you work your goals backward, you also need to address the question of close and distant deadlines. Technically speaking, we are looking at Proximal Goals and Distal Goals.

Proximal goals are the goals that are right in front of us. Those are the goals we are doing today.

Distal goals are further off in time. Those are the goals we are working toward tomorrow.

Proximal goals build upon one another to bring us to our more distal goals. At any given moment, our proximal goals tend to be the most relevant since, after all, they have the most immediate deadlines. Sometimes, though, a proximal goal is just not that interesting or personally relevant by itself. In that case, our distal goals help remind us of the importance of those proximal goals: the proximal goal of practicing falling feeds the more distal goal of learning to throw, which feeds the goal of passing a belt test, which feeds the goal of learning the next set of techniques toward the ultimate goal of a black belt. Even a student who doesn’t much care to practice falls will still do so if they value that end point sufficiently. Because the path to the end point is broken down and visible, it’s easier to imagine achieving it.

When a business tells me that their employees have no sense of urgency, one of the first things I look at is how they’ve broken down their goals: are milestones all big and distant? Quite frequently, the problem is that the goals, and rewards, are all distal and there are no proximal goals to get people started.

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

What are process goals?

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

If outcome goals are what we want to accomplish, then process goals are how we are going to do it. Process goals reflect those elements of the goal equation that are under our control: for example, the judo player might rehearse different throwing combinations, the fencer different combinations of blade work. A business might explore different methods for improving the quality and speed of software development: for example, they might try Extreme Programming before discovering that it really doesn’t work all that well. A writer might arrange her day to have uninterrupted chunks of time in order to be able to concentrate most effectively.

Process goals are the beginnings of strategy: while outcome goals only give us feedback at the end of an activity, process goals give us feedback during the activity. Real time feedback is what permits real time course correction. Real time course correction is what enables us to discover that we should have made a left at Albuquerque before we end up in the middle of the Sahara desert.

The intent of process goals is to focus our behaviors into directions which will give us control over those aspects of our outcome goals that we can control and improve our odds in those areas that we can’t control. For example, Jesse Livermore, the legendary stock market wizard, recognized that he could not control the direction the market was going. However, he could control whether or not he was in the market, and developed rules, or process goals, which told him when to buy or sell. Executed properly, these process goals maximized his odds of turning a profit: indeed, Livermore’s profits when he covered his short positions into the Crash on Oct 29, 1929 were reputed to be on the order of $100,000,000.

In sports, when an athlete attempts a move and it doesn’t work, the athlete can switch to a different move. A business that conducts market research is doing the moral equivalent: they are testing different approaches or different product formulations and using that feedback to guide their goal-directed behavior.

Process goals are your battle plan. While it may be true that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, having a battle plan lets you know when you’ve made contact.

Process goals can be decomposed into outcome, process, and learning goals.

Get your copy of Organizational Psychology for Managers before it sells out again.

What are goals?

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

We talk about goals a great deal. Every January I receive numerous articles touting the benefits of setting goals, and assuring me that if I just set goals then everything will magically work out Just Fine ™. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve walked into a company and asked people, “What are your goals?” only to receive blank looks in return. Occasionally, I’m told that the goal is to make money. At least they have an answer; it’s not a very good answer, but it’s a starting point for discussion.

Let’s start by recognizing that making money is not a goal. It’s not even an outcome. Making money is a form of feedback: it’s one of several measures that can tell you if your strategies are working and your company is producing valuable goods or services. Focusing on the measurement instead of on the goals and approaches that enable you to make money leads to poor strategy and short-term optimization at the expense of long-term growth. That’s not to say that making money isn’t important: for many organizations and individuals it is a vital component of continuing to do what you want to be doing. It’s merely not the overall goal and, as we’ve already discussed, it’s also a terrible way to produce long-term motivation.

What about those New Year’s resolutions that everyone talks about at the beginning of the year? Sadly, those are not goals either. They are, at best, good intentions. The problem is, an intention is not a goal; an intention is a statement of desire or a wish or a dream, but it is not a goal. As we will discuss later in this chapter, intentions can be used to help execute goals, but they are not goals. Intentions are too vague, too hard to measure, and too lacking in structure to be effective goals.

Rather, we need to think about goals as a combination of desired outcomes, processes or strategies to achieve those outcomes, and learning and discovery. Indeed, like Gaul, goals can be divided into three types:

• Outcome goals – these are our desired results.
• Process goals – goals set to produce behaviors that will lead us to our desired outcomes.
• Learning goals – developing new skills and obtaining new information to help us with our process, outcome, and learning goals.

Let’s look at each of these goals in more depth.

The Efficient Light Bulb: A Productivity Fable

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

Once upon a time, there was a light bulb. This light bulb was quite a remarkable light bulb: it was praised far and wide for its incredible efficiency. This light bulb gave off no waste heat. This light bulb did not contribute to global warming. It had no carbon footprint.  It did not rely on fossil fuels. Truly, it was an amazing light bulb and visitors came every day to see this remarkable light bulb.

One day, though, a traveler coming to see the light bulb in action was delayed by an unfortunate flood that closed several roads. He did not arrive until well after night had fallen. Much to his surprise, he found the light bulb sitting in a pitch dark room.

“Why aren’t you giving light?” asked the traveler.

“Give light!” replied the light bulb in shocked tones. “You must be joking. If I did that, I would use fossil fuels. I would have a carbon footprint. I would give off waste heat. I would no longer be efficient.”

“But isn’t the purpose of a light bulb to give light?” asked the traveler.

“I’ve always been told to be efficient,” replied the light bulb with a shrug. If you have never seen a light bulb shrug, it is truly a wonder to behold. The traveler would have been amazed, except, of course, that the room was too dark for him to see the miraculous event.

Once upon a time, there was a software company named “Soak, Inc.” Soak’s product relied upon a very complex database server. One day, the VP of Engineering stormed into the office and declared, “The server is too slow. We need to speed it up.”

From that day forth, every effort was focused on improving the speed of the server. Other issues were deemed insignificant beside the one, critical, goal of performance. Engineers who dared to raise other issues were publically humiliated for wasting the company’s time. Bugs that did not relate to performance issues were deemed “optional.” People who spent time reviewing the optional bugs and trying to fix them were warned that their insubordination would cost them their jobs if it did not cease immediately.

Eventually, Soak developed an amazingly efficient server. It was fast. It was robust. It was ready to demonstrate to potential clients.

The demo started out remarkably well. The server did not crash, causing some to believe that this couldn’t actually be a demonstration of a software product. Indeed, the server performed flawlessly. All would have gone well indeed for Soak had not someone noticed that the data being delivered by the server didn’t make sense. Yes, what the server had gained in performance it had lost in accuracy. In other words, it was incredibly good at very rapidly delivering useless or incorrect information.

When the engineers were questioned about this unfortunate oversight, they shrugged and replied, “We were told to be efficient.”

While it is not nearly as amazing to see an engineer shrug as it is to see a light bulb shrug, the effects are much the same.

At Soak, a goal was set, a metric for success was defined, and that metric became the sole determinant of progress. Goals are extremely powerful tools: the best thing about them is that you accomplish them. Unfortunately, sometimes the worst thing about goals is that you accomplish them. At Soak, they accomplished their goals. A dead light bulb is extremely efficient, but not useful. Similar observations can be made about the server.

Before leaping into setting a goal, especially a goal to solve a problem, it helps to understand the actual problem and to understand what the actual symptoms are. Rather than create useful goals, they fixated on a symptom. That did not, however, actually change anything.

At Soak , the VP stated that they were trying to solve the problems his company was facing as rapidly and effectively as possible. They were setting goals. They were Taking Action! Taking action is certainly helpful, but it is even more helpful to be taking the correct action. Since it’s not always possible to determine just what the correct action is, it becomes even more critical to listen to the feedback and questions from the people who are charged with actually executing the action. The engineers knew that something was wrong, but no one was willing to listen to them. As we will discuss shortly, a key aspect of successful goal setting is understanding the feedback you’re getting.

I realize that many of you reading this are probably chuckling to yourselves and thinking that this scenario could never happen at your companies. The folks at Soak said the same before, during, and even after it happened to them. The light bulb had no comment.

Productivity seems like such a simple thing. Somehow, though, it never is. As we have already discussed, cognitive shortcuts such as the Halo Effect can influence how productive we perceive someone to be. Ultimately, the only real way to measure productivity is through understanding goals and knowing how to construct goals so that they will actually get you what you want. Otherwise, you may just end up with a dead light bulb.

After it was released, Organizational Psychology for Managers sold out in two days at Amazon.com. Order your copy now.

What is learning?

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

It is very easy to find long and detailed discussions of what learning is and what it means to learn. Most of these definitions, while interesting, are of little practical use. Of considerably more practical use, however, is this:

Learning is the (hopefully!) permanent change in behavior resulting from practice and experience.

Sounds simple. Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easy. We have only to look at the number of failed learning initiatives and the frustration so many people feel around learning to see just how often learning is not handled well. Part of the problem is that learning is treated too often as an event, not as a process: a single class rather than an ongoing practice of skill development. To understand how this works, consider the process of learning a skill.

As I often tell students in my jujitsu class, learning a move is easy. Performing the move when you want to is what’s difficult. For example, it takes only a few seconds to demonstrate how to block a punch. Most people, upon seeing that demonstration, are then capable of moving their hand in the correct manner. They are not, however, blocking the punch yet; they are only moving their hand. In other words, they are repeating an action but they have not yet internalized the action. Under carefully controlled conditions, they can block the punch: it’s slow, it’s clearly telegraphed, their partner doesn’t really want to hit them. If their partner does something unexpected, the student freezes, panics, gets hit, or all of the above. Similarly, a sales trainee might learn a script to use or a set of phrases and actions designed to make the prospect sign on the dotted line. So long as the prospect behaves exactly according to the script, the trainee is fine. Should that prospect deviate in any way, the trainee is lost: their brain is full of the script and there is no room for anything else, such as improvisation.

Eventually, after enough practice, the block improves, right up until there is some pressure: a belt test, a more aggressive partner, or anything else which suddenly raises the stakes of getting it right. At that point, many students instead of blocking with their hands, block with their nose. It takes a great deal more practice before the skill works reliably under pressure. Similarly, a trainee might do well on practice exercises, but fold when tested or put in front of a real client.

This process of continual practice is known as automatizing the skill. Because we are not actually that good at thinking about multiple things at once, if we have to think about how to use the skill, we can’t pay attention to what’s actually going on. We have to learn something so well that we no longer need to think about it. At that point, the skill is becoming reflexive and we only need to recognize the need to use it for it to happen. This frees a tremendous amount of brain power, enabling us to take in more information and respond more effectively to our environment: the beginning basketball player is so busy concentrating on dribbling the ball that an experienced player can walk right up and take the ball away. The beginner will often report that, “I didn’t even see him coming!” As dribbling becomes automatic, the basketball player becomes more able to pay attention to the other players and evade the person trying to steal the ball. The beginning salesman is so focused on her script that she misses the warning signs that the sales call is about to go off the rails. The experienced salesman notices the subtle shifts in the prospect’s behavior, and is able to adjust his strategy accordingly. The rote action is transformed into a framework for activity.

Of course, there is a catch. As I alluded to a moment ago, we have to recognize the need to use a skill in order to use it. It doesn’t matter how much we’ve automatized the skill if we don’t realize that we need it. Thus, part of skill learning is situational: like an actor, we need to know our cues. The more time spent looking for our cues, the slower our response will be. Just like a scene in a movie seems artificial and unbelievable when actors don’t realize it’s time for their lines, so too do behaviors ranging from leadership to engineering to sales seem artificial, and hence unbelievable or not trustable, when we don’t recognize our cues in those settings. The leader who is not aware of the signs, or cues, that indicate a group is entering Storming is thus more likely to respond inappropriately or too slowly to the changing team dynamic. In the worst case, like the jujitsu student who misses the warning signs that it’s time to block, he may be gob smacked.

As a result, proper training includes coupling the behavior and the appropriate cues for the behavior. This pairing must also be automatized, although not necessarily at the same level of reflexivity as the base behavior. Sometimes we want to be able to choose between several trained choices. The important thing is that the appropriate cues bring the appropriate options to mind, and that we have the cognitive resources available to evaluate the situation and choose. Training conducted in an artificial environment which divorces situation from action reduces the value of the training; similarly, management training that does not include the rest of the team lacks appropriate cues from the team, and often teaches the manager behaviors that the team doesn’t know how to respond to. As we discussed in earlier chapters, training the leader and the team separately is not all that effective: this is one of the big reasons why.

Another important point of how learning works is that people have to be able to get it wrong. Learning is not just absorbing, memorizing, and rehearsing behaviors. It is also experimentation and exploration. Making mistakes is a critical part of skill mastery: being able to execute a skill reflexively is great, but you still need to be able to adjust when something unexpected happens. When people learn without the opportunity to make mistakes, the skill is brittle. Failure becomes a catastrophe, and fear of making a mistake can paralyze performance under pressure. That jujitsu student learning to block will get hit many times along the road to mastery: under training conditions, the student might end up with a bloody nose or black eye, but otherwise will be unharmed. Along the way, they learn how to make their own movements more effective. More to the point, they learn that getting hit isn’t the end of the world: it isn’t fun, but you can keep going. This enables them to relax under pressure. Paradoxically, the less afraid you are of getting hit, the less likely you will get hit. The less afraid the salesman is of screwing up, the less likely she is to screw up. The leader who is confident that he and his team can recover from mistakes is more open to trying new and innovative ideas. That confidence and that lack of fear come from making mistakes. Note that there are limits to this: I have been told that the best way to avoid being stung by a bee is to be unafraid of the bee. I can state from personal experience that the bee does not know this.

Unfortunately, too many learning situations are focused around fear of failure, a lesson we all learned in school, when failure meant bad grades and quite possibly Not Getting Into The College of Your Choice. These learned habits often interfere with ongoing learning in organizational settings. Typically, when we learn something new in a class or training exercise, we will only have time to get down the rote memorization piece of it: the process of then mastering the skill, that exploration and experimentation piece, needs to happen on the job. If you can’t handle making mistakes, you just wasted roughly 90% of the training.

Is this all there is to learning? Of course not! If it were, we’d have a lot more experts out there! A key part of making learning successful is understanding what your goals really mean and understanding the context in which learning is occurring.

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 21st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

Avoid the Remediation Trap: Focus on Strengths

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

Our strengths are the things that we enjoy doing. The reason our strengths are strong is because we feel good when we succeed and so we do more. Weaknesses, on the other hand, are often things that do not provide any internal reward no matter how well we do them.

It is very easy to focus people on remediating weaknesses. Unfortunately, this produces neither effective growth nor motivation. There is nothing particularly satisfying about doing something that you never enjoy no matter how hard you work at it or how proficient you might become.

It makes much more sense to focus people on building their strengths. Legendary martial artist Bruce Lee used to say that if you built your strengths they would overcome your weaknesses. Bruce was quite correct: he became a formidable martial artist despite being nearly blind without thick glasses and having one leg so much shorter than the other that he needed special shoes to stand normally. Instead of bogging down in weaknesses, he focused on his strengths.

Focusing on strengths increases motivation and enjoyment. As people become better and better at what they do, you and they will find ways to negate or work around their weaknesses. Along the way, you are increasing their sense of competence, enabling them to take more autonomy, and building the relationship by showing that you care about their growth and development.

It’s worth noting that the Harvard Medical School special health report, “Positive Psychology: Harnessing the power of happiness, mindfulness, and inner strength,” found that focusing on strengths and what people are doing right increased performance by 36% on average. Conversely, focusing on weaknesses decreased performance by 27%. That’s what is known as a Dramatic Difference.

Finally, don’t worry that everyone isn’t good at everything. This is normal. We are not clones.

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

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.