The Business Sensei

Balanced For Success

The story is told of a young student watching Aikido founder, O’Sensei Morehei Ueshiba, sparring with a much younger, stronger opponent. No matter what the opponent did, he could never strike Ueshiba or throw him to the ground. Afterward, the youngster said to Ueshiba, “Master, you never lose your balance. What is your secret?”

The master replied, “You are wrong. I am constantly losing my balance. My skill lies in my ability to regain it.”

Ueshiba could not be thrown because he knew the instant he was off balance by even the slightest degree, and he would shift to regain his balance before his opponent could take advantage of the opening. From the outside, though, this constant adjustment was invisible. It appeared to observers and to those he fought that he never lost his balance.

Ueshiba recognized that training with the idea that he would never be off balance was an impossibility: either through the skill of an opponent or through mischance, sooner or later he would be drawn off balance. If he always planned to be on balance, then that moment of off-balancing would prove to be his undoing. Thus, he trained not to be perfectly on balance, but to rapidly and smoothly recognize being off balance and correct it before it could be used against him.

In the business world, being physically off balance may not happen all that often, at least not the way that Ueshiba Sensei might experience it. However, being mentally off balance can happen quite easily, with potentially devastating results. Consider Darren, the CEO of a mid-sized, publically traded company. One quarter, his company missed its numbers. This had never happened to him before, and he was stunned. Rather than stopping to regain his mental equilibrium, he panicked. Within two weeks, he’d sold the company for a song to his largest competitor. Darren did learn from the experience, though, as his performance in his most recent, highly successful, venture demonstrates: he’s managed to regain his balance despite several significant setbacks, and come back stronger each time.

Fortunately, learning to regain your balance isn’t that difficult: the hardest part is remembering to do it! Unlike Ueshiba Sensei, if it takes you a few minutes, or even a day, to collect yourself, odds are no one will be throwing you to the ground in that time. There are a number of techniques that are used by martial artists and Olympic athletes when they need to rapidly recover their mental or physical balance in competition.

The first is a technique used by martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Whenever he felt disoriented or overwhelmed, he would ask himself what he had just thought or imagined to make himself feel that way. He would then imagine writing that thought down on a piece of paper, crumpling it up, and throwing it away. That let him focus on what could go right instead of what might go wrong.

Another technique is to simply pay attention to your breathing: a few deep breaths can work wonders. When we’re feeling off balance, though, the tendency is to take short, rapid breaths. Deep breathing breaks the cycle and convinces our bodies that the danger is past, allowing us to think clearly and act calmly.

Ueshiba achieved his amazing ability to regain his balance by paying attention to his balance all the time. Any time he noticed he was standing off balance or in poor posture, he would adjust his position. He would also stand when riding the subway and not hold on to anything: the fine art of subway surfing. Paying attention to balance all the time seems like a lot of effort, but the exercise becomes second nature very quickly. Oddly enough, when someone is physically on balance, it is very difficult to take them mentally off balance.

One mistake many managers and even CEOs make is to talk to someone close to them in the company. Unfortunately, when the problem is at the company, the other person is also off balance. Two people who have both lost their balance are going to be figuratively hanging onto one another to avoid falling over: very amusing when done in a slapstick comedy, but not so funny at the office. This is what happened to Darren: by talking to the people around him, he only magnified his sense of being off balance. Instead, find someone unconnected to the company with whom you can talk. This can be a close friend, coach, or trusted advisor. Their lack of deep emotional involvement means that they are not going to be knocked off balance and hence will be able to act as a stable anchor.

In the end, Murphy’s Law is inevitable. It’s not a question of whether it will knock you off balance, but how rapidly you’ll recover when it does.

To Succeed, Plan to Fail

I’m getting tired of hearing people say, “Oh I get it. We didn’t plan to fail, we failed to plan.”

When I’m working with a business to help them understand why their process is failing or their projects are off course, sooner or later someone comes out with this little gem. At that point, everyone nods sagely as though they’ve actually solved something. They are missing the point. If that was all that was wrong, they wouldn’t need help.

Sure, it’s certainly true that if you fail to plan, you’re far more likely to fail, but knowing that doesn’t actually address the real problem: they are taking the “failure is not an option” mindset. This is a fantastic line in a movie, but has some problems in reality.

When we take the mindset that failure is something that cannot be accepted, we are implicitly stating that failure is a terrible thing, something so terrible that we cannot even consider it. It’s an attitude similar to that taken by many martial artists, who teach their students that they must never allow themselves to be taken off balance. All their training is then based on the idea of never being off balance. As a result, when they are off balance, they freeze.

A youthful student once watched Morehei Uyeshiba, the founder of Aikido, sparring with a much younger, stronger opponent. After Uyeshiba defeated the guy, the young student said to him, “Master, that was amazing. You never lose your balance!”

Uyeshiba’s reply: “You are mistaken. I frequently lose my balance. My secret is that I know how to regain it quickly.”

Uyeshiba recognized that loss of balance is a normal part of any fight. By training to rapidly regain his balance, he stripped the experience of its emotional content. It was merely something that happened, and something which he well knew how to recover from. As a result, not only were his opponents unable to capitalize on taking him off balance, when he took their balance, they didn’t know what to do.

Failure is the same. When failure becomes something we fear, it can cause us to freeze. At one company, the first hiccup in a string of successes led to panic by the CEO. He wasn’t used to failing, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

The problem is that fear of failure causes us to avoid risk and not experiment with new ideas. When something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, we figuratively lose our balance and become momentarily stuck. If we think that failure means something terrible will happen, we opt for the safe course. Unfortunately, the safe course is often not the best course or the wisest course. It’s merely the one that minimizes the short-term risk to us, potentially at the cost of long-term risk to the team. That, of course, is just fine: if the entire team fails, no one is to blame.

Conversely, when we accept that along the route to success there will be many failures along the way, and when we practice viewing failures as a form of feedback, the negative emotional component of failure is eliminated. Instead, we simply have information: something we attempted did not work the way we expected. What does that mean? What is that telling us about our plan? About our process? About the competitive landscape?

Failure is a way of calibrating our efforts and focusing our energy. Particularly early in a project, small failures are, or should be, common. The less defined the project, the more exploration needs to occur in order to adequately and accurately define the milestones. Indeed, early milestones are best thought of as little more than wishful thinking: opportunities to put stakes in the ground and see what happens when we get there. It’s the chance to see how well the team members are working together, how effective the leader is being, how effectively the team can make decisions and implement a course of action.

When we fear failure, the fear itself is often more damaging than the failure! The key to succeeding at large, important projects is to recognize that failures will happen along the way. By accepting the information that failure gives us and cultivating the mindset that failures are recoverable and useful, failure truly does make us more, not less, likely to succeed.