To Reflect is to Transform

One of the greatest powers humans have and other living creatures don't, is the power of reflection. It is reflection on the meaning of things,  seeking patterns and design in situations that has made the human race great.

Reflection centred on sorrow transformed a prince into the founder of Buddhism.

Reflection centred on the futility of war transformed a mighty, ruthless king to embrace Buddhism and spread the message of peace.

Reflection centred on life during a health breakdown, made the hard working editor and publisher of a popular magazine to realise that success has a third metric - and it is not money and power.

Reflection centred on the evils of colonialism on being evicted from a first class coach by an  Englishman, prompted Gandhiji to come up with the idea of Ahimsa or nonviolence to fight racism and colonialism. And to set him apart from human beings and become a Mahatma.

Reflection centred on the priorities of the human hierarchy of needs triggered by coming face-to face-to with poverty, made Bill Gates realise treating malaria was more important than connectivity. And the world's richest man turned philanthropist.

Reflection centred on  innovation has made people like Elon Musk and companies like Google and 3M come with ground-breaking products.

Yes, it makes sense to harness the power of reflection!

Right Metrics Key to Organization Success

“I don't know how keen we are to have problem solvers in government. The assessment is on who has spent maximum funds rather than who has solved a problem or achieved something. How can a bureaucrat innovate or disrupt amidst such a straight-jacketed approach to them?” Comment made by Aruna Sundarajan, secretary in the electronics and IT ministry at candid talks on performance and functioning, top bureaucrats had with the Government.

Leadership learning: Choosing right measures and assessing wisely is key to the success of a performance-driven company.

Encouraging Innovation

For the 2014 April Fool prank, Google and the Pokémon Go teamed up for the Google Maps Pokémon Challenge, in which players had to comb the globe virtually to catch 'em all. Could the virtual game be set in real life, thought John Hanke, the inventor of the game. He took the idea forward, resulting in the worldwide runaway success.

#Businesspoint
Innovation is one part serendipity and three parts possibility mindset, persistence and creativity. Leaders needs to nurture and encourage all parts.

Fostering Innovation

Leaders can foster creativity by setting goals with clear boundaries but at the same time breaking all the rules, often unspoken. Our creativity and innovation is often capped by these unspoken rules, which condition our thinking process. - Franklin Tang, CEO Philip Tang and Sons

INSIGHT
An organization's spoken rules define the ’musts’, while the unspoken ones define the ’shoulds’. Articulating the unspoken, transforms them into ’coulds’.

Innovation Has Many Faces

Do we have original innovation in India? Snapdeal’s Kunal Behl, when asked this question, says innovations in India are unique to the country's challenges. To prove his point, he cites the instance of innovations made around digital payments, supply chain and platforms to cater to the multilingual nature of our country.

Insight
Innovation has many dimensions. An innovative product or service does not necessarily have to be globally unique or globally applicable. More important, focus on innovation should be around making social and environmental context specific systems and processes more efficient.

Nursing Innovation

#LivingStories
“If you inject a live virus into a healthy body, the body will react to it. And it's the same thing with organizations. They say they are promoting innovation but they are not, really. And if you happen to be in the innovation/disruption team, then the organization will attack you. So you need to find a way around it“. - Tobias Digswell,  Nobel Museum curator

#MyLearning
Do not stop at just innovating a product or a process, think through the strategy of how to inject and nurse the innovation through the whole system.

Coaching Using Principles of Behavioral Economics

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, Thaler and Sunstein, authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, explain, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself. Decision makers do not make choices in a vacuum. They make them in an environment where many features, noticed and unnoticed, can influence their decisions. The goal of Nudge is to demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice. The person who creates that environment is, in the authors terminology, a choice architect. 

Reading more on Nudge in the various web references gave me more and more the feeling of just how remarkably similar the role of a choice architect is to that of a coach. Here's why: 

• Anyone  who indirectly influences the choices people make, the authors say, can be called "choice architect". A coach does exactly that, hence he is a  "choice architect" too.
• Choice architecture, can be used to help nudge people to make better choices (as judged by themselves) without forcing certain outcomes upon anyone. This is one of the basic tenets of coaching. 
• The tools described by the authors (though differing in nature and application) sound very similar to the ones a coach would use. For instance, the tools highlighted are: 
• Expecting error (the coach tool: empathy) 
• Understanding mappings (the coach uses assessments to map client needs) 
• Giving feedback (a primary coaching tool)
• Structuring complex choices (the coach is a clarifier)
• Creating incentives. (the coach uses small wins as incentives so client is motivated for the big wins)

The remarkable similarities set me thinking. How could one incorporate the discipline of behavioral economics on which the book is based, with the practice, and business, of coaching?

This article is my attempt to do just that.

Applying Principles of Behavioral Economics to Coaching

The use of behavioral principles is fundamental to any coaching practice. Behavioral economics can help coaches understand better what every coach always understood, albeit unwittingly: That people are not rational.  Any new understanding of people's behaviour can only give coaches a better understanding of how exactly coaching works. Or how they can make it work better. 

Stephen Covey the personal development guru applied his mind to why humans behave the way they do and what they could do to avoid human susceptibilities that lead to wrong decisions. The result was his book The 7 Habits of Effective People, and the first of the seven habits is Be Proactive. Proactive people, says Covey, are those who are in control of themselves and do not surrender to a stimulus in the external environment but use their personal power to deal with the stimulus, whether people or situation. How are they able to do this?

Stephen Covey's Proactive Model

Proactive people know that there is a gap between a Stimuli and Response and within that gap is their freedom to choose the right response to maintain control over their self and be above circumstances.

What about people who are not proactive? Often, resistance to change is the result of lack of clarity because of a conflict between the rational and the emotional mind which comes in the way of allowing any change to stick. Ideas, and in turn change, is effective when it stays with you over time and changes the way you think.

Weaving the two models together- Thaler and Sunstein's derived from behavioral economics and Covey's based on new age theories of personal development, could, I realized, help create a useful model for coaching: Nudge Coaching

In his Proactive model, Covey talks of the four tools humans have at their command to effectively exercise their freedom to choose. The four 'hot buttons of pro-activity' being:

1. Self-awareness
2. Imagination
3. Conscience
4. Independent Will

Through the process of Nudge Coaching applied to each of the four 'hot buttons of proactivity', the coach would be able to resolve the conflict between the rational and emotional mind, and makes change happen.

The Nudge Process of Coaching 

Choice architects, according to Thaler and Sunstein, can have considerable power to influence choices. Or to use our the authors preferred language, they can nudge. The authors explain this term as "...any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives." Most important from a coaching point of view - nudges are not mandates.  

Coaching clients are busy people who are trying to cope in a complex world and cannot think deeply about every choice they make. They adopt rules of thumb that sometimes leads them astray. The Nudge Coach brings organization and structure to the contexts in which people take decisions. Choice architecture does not seek to reduce choices - just influence them in order to improve the client's lives, as judged by themselves. Humans are susceptibile to various biases and hence the way an issue is framed makes a huge difference to the success of a coaching engagement. In other words, people are nudgable. In the Nudge coaching process, a coach helps clients to structure their choices and create strategies that makes it easier for them to do things that improve their lives. He uses four types of nudges to achieve these coaching goals:

1. Nudging Client Self-awareness: Faced with important decisions about their lives, people often make pretty bad choices—choices they would not have made if they paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities and complete self-control. They adopt rules of thumb that sometimes lead them astray. The explanation, according to Thaler and Sunstein, is rooted in some well-documented human behavioral quirks that are amplified by information overload and trying to cope in a complex world. All this leaves people with little time to think deeply about every choice they have to make. The Nudge Coach helps create awareness of their cognitive abilities and the resources available to them for better self-control.
2. Nudging Client Imagination: Sunstein and Thaler have spent a lot of time thinking about how people can be encouraged to make better decisions, and they offer some intriguing ideas. Their central thesis: People will make better choices if they are given a clear and well-designed set of options that acknowledge and offset human idiosyncrasies. For helping client's design and structure the options available to them,  the coach has to take into account his knowledge of behavioral science. By helping to rightly structure the choices available to the client, a coach helps to nudge clients to do the 'right' thing.
3. Nudging Client Conscience: Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik explains that the ideas of right or wrong, good or bad exist only among humans. No animal is good or bad - only humans would pity the antelope being being made meal of by a predator such as a a cheetah in a National Geographic documentary. Humans are greedy, unlike animals, who stop eating once their stomachs are full. Thus says Pattanaik, humans have the capacity to be worse than animals (greedy) and better than animals (generous). And it is in these subjective choices - greed vs generosity, right vs wrong and good vs bad that the coach, by structuring choices available to the clients, helps them to to improve decisions about their health, wealth and happiness.
4. Nudging Client Will: One of the basic tenets of behavioural economics is that people do not always take rational decisions. They have  status quo bias and change doesn't come easily. For reasons of laziness, fear, and distraction, many people will take whatever option requires the least effort, or the path of least resistance. All these forces imply that if, for a given choice, there is a default option—an option that will obtain if the chooser does nothing. The solution - helping coaching clients first make their choices, and then hold them accountable to their choice. Holding them accountable can at times  make the client feel challenged. A useful approach to overcome this is the one akin to the program in gmail. Every time a user mentions the word attachment but does not include one, prompts a pop-up, “Did you forget your attachment?” Similarly, by reminding the client of his commitment to the choice he has made, the coach can nudge the client will in non-threatening manner.

The Nudge Coach

By keeping an eye on the four nudges, a coach aka a choice architect can improve the outcomes for clients on their journey of the head and heart to fulfill their potential.

Journey to a Coaching Insight

Innovation was a term which had aroused my curiosity, and also bothered me  for a long time. The word was commonly understood as standing for something new or something novel - an understanding that did not satisfy my curiosity and therefore added to my bother.. For instance, I have always believed that my approach to any work I do, whether it is fixing things around the house, creating  new marketing strategies in my corporate career, or the tools and methods I use in my coaching have been uh, creative. I dreaded to use the word 'innovative' as a description of my methods, even to myself! This was because, in my mind the word stood for something radically different, and at the same time it also meant something incremental, creative or better. As you can see, the two were poles apart and just not reconcilable! Peter Drucker's definition of innovation as "Change that creates a new dimension of performance" was no help either.

Enlightenment Happens

Then, I happened to read an interesting article by Brianna Sylver in Businessweek, What does "Innovation" really mean. And enlightenment dawned! I understood just WHY the word innovation had bugged me so much. The word, Sylvers pointed out, had been used to describe everything from the Apple iPhone a new template in Microsoft word (or our very own jugaad)! How could one term be used to describe such vastly different things? The problem, Sylvers explained, lay in the lack of qualifiers. The term was used to mean 'ground-breaking  or world shattering' (iPhone) as well as a situation where the object of change became 'better than what it was before' (MS Word). Ah, so there it was, the cause of my discomfort and lingering dissatisfaction was  all because of the lack of qualifiers! This was Step1 in my journey of understanding of innovation. 

At about the same time, I came upon two definitions of innovation that helped me take a few more steps forward in my understanding.

The first was its description by Dr R.A. Mashelkar, Chairman  of the Innovations Foundation of India as "moving from best practices to next practices." The other was it's description as a "solution designed to address a particular pain point." by Navi Adjou of the University of Cambridge. While Adjou described 'pain points'  as the improvements made in technology, poor skills or processes, I was not quite sure what Next practices meant. On doing some research, I found Best practices were those that only allow you to do what you are currently doing a little better. On the other hand, Next Practices called for imagining what the future would look like; identify the big opportunities; and build capabilities to capitalize on them. In other words, Next practices were about creating your own future rather than relying on the innovation of others.

After churning this understanding of innovation in my mind's blender, I came with the following two definitions (in my coaching context):
Best Practices: Means solutions to the client's pain points uncovered through discussions with clients or assessments. These practices for improving skills and processess may (but not necessarily) be picked up from what competitors or industry leaders have employed successfully. 


Next practices: Means looking beyond typical sorces of information like successful past strategies or even strategies that industry leaders are currently using. It means looking at future challenges and developing a strategy with new solutions and services. Requires coach in helping client imagine the future and look at ways to capitalize on the opportunities. Next practices are innovations meant to address such opportunities that create new dimensions of performance.


To Journey's End
But my understanding was not yet complete. I still had to figure out how exactly all this played out in my coaching practice, which the image below did. 


My coaching practice, I noted,  was directed at 3 levels

1. Individual (Owner/Business head), 
2. Work group (Key Decision-makers and/or executives)
3. Business (Working at both the above levels to impact whole business)

The process innovations co-created by the coach and the client and/or his team were across a continuum from Best practices to Next practices. We traveled the continuum in three ways:  

                             Best Practices....................Next Practices

                                       

1. Streamlining: Understand client's pain points. Look at, and adapt best practices of competition to address the pain points. 
2. Surfacing: Tap into client's vision for his business, or if one does not exist, help to develop one. Visualize opportunities in the context of the vision and co-create ways of capitalizing on them. Give concrete shape to the aspired future through an Action or Project plan..
3. Inventing: Help 'invent' the future. Co-create the next practices to ensure successful outcomes. 

The net result of coaching efforts directed at meeting current needs and/or aspired future are felt at 3 levels of the client's business:  

1. Structure and/or Culture: A Structures and/or Culture in sync with the desired goals.
2. Roles: Better understanding of  Leadership  and Employee roles  in sync with desired goals.
3. Procedures: Tools and techniques for Strategy development, Customer relationship management,  Communication, Collaboration and other critical areas of business success.

End of Journey. Beginning of Another

This leg of my journey - figuring out the what and how of innovation in my coaching practice, was now complete. I had started out by trying to address the discomfort I had felt with the use of the word innovation, and ended up, not only a wonderful understanding of it, but much more! I now had, not only a proper definition of innovation in my mind, but had understood the difference between Best practices and Next practices. Most important of all, I had understood exactly how all this played out in my coaching practice! 

Further Reading: Seeking Out “Next Practices,” the Next Generation of Best Practices

How to Attain Mastery in Coaching

I have often reflected on this - is there one, and only one true model of coaching that really, really works? Especially so because, in nearly all my client interventions over my last eight years as a coach, I have believed in experimenting with a wide variety of tools and approaches to enable client's to successfully achieve their goals. I have debated on the merits of this approach with other coaches in several coaching forums and I have realized that opinions seems fairly divided between two schools - the Fundamentalists and the Evolutionists. The Fundamentalists are usually graduates of coaching schools who believe that only the model or the approach they have been trained in, is the best. In the case of Business coaches, Fundamentalist come from particular specialization who believe that only their expertise area is the one that will work for a business client. For instance, somebody coming from a finance background would tend to believe that a business coach’s job is to increase the cash flow of the business from operations and nothing more. While profits are the lifeblood of every successful business, the success of strategic planning systems such as the Balanced Scorecard suggests that financial goals are achieved from a seamless integration of several other perspectives as well. On the other hand, there are the Evolutionists - liberals and experienced (self-taught) coaches who believe that one's coaching model needs to evolve and develop with the individual coach's experience. Diane Lennard, author of Coaching Models: A Cultural Perspective supports this Evolutionist school of thought. She believes that in coaching, just as no two clients are the same, no two coaches or coaching approaches can be exactly the same. She is a proponent of the belief  that coaches apply their cultural backgrounds, interests, and experiences to their coaching and factor in their own insights, experiences, successes and learning to support the client. This, says Lennard, can result in stronger and more authentic coaching interventions.

As an Evolutionist, I have always believed that a coach needs to continuously improve on his coaching approaches by experimenting with different models. I have personally constructed several models based on various behavioural, cognitive and management (both business and self) theories and incorporated them into my coaching in the light of my personal experiences. In addition, I have a whole bunch of assessments and graphic aids, all designed to help clients achieve their goals in a manner suited their needs, expectations and capabilities. I am therefore of the view that coaching is a craft, which requires to be worked on constantly to attain mastery.

So, how can we raise what we do as coaches from a mere mechanical process, to the level of a craft? To do this, we must first understand what exactly constitutes craftwork.

 What defines Craftwork?

Howard Becker , an American sociologist known for his studies on occupations, identified three criteria for an occupation to be termed as craftwork:

1. Craftwork should produce a useful product or service.
2. Craftwork should be done for, or on behalf of someone else to fulfil that person's need for a useful product or service
3. Craftwork in addition to function and focus on the end user, should involve innovation 

Let us explore each of these criteria individually;

1. Craftwork should produce a useful product or service: Becker defines this dimension as a "body of knowledge and skill that can be used to produce useful objects." For practitioners, examples of craftwork could be of park construction to provide aesthetic experiences and opportunities for physical activity and supplying clean drinking water efficiently.

For coaches to elevate their coaching to a craft would require acquiring and perfecting a body of knowledge and skill which can be used to produce successful client interventions.

         

2. Craftwork is done for, or on behalf of someone else to fulfil that person's need for a useful   product or service: Becker describes this as consisting of the ability to perform in a useful way to suit individual needs..

In coaching, the clients are diverse and the perception of usefulness of the coaching intervention depends on the coachees'  goals and different notions of how to achieve their goals. A coach is required to make a diverse set of  people and groups identify a not the, strategic goal and move them toward, and implement it successfully.
Secondly, according to Becker, for an activity to be called craftwork, requires it's usefulness to  be          evaluated externally - by     individuals and groups of people.

For coaches to raise their work to a craft would require them to explore different ways and means to successfully guide their clients toward achievement of their goals. Positive client feedback should be the only measure of the coach's success.

3. In addition to function and focus on the end user the work should involve innovation: Many years are required to master the physical skills and mental discipline of a first-class practitioner. An expert, or one who has mastered the skills is one who:

• has great control over the crafts material, can do anything with them,
• can work with speed and agility,
• can do with ease the things that ordinary, less expert craftsmen find difficult or impossible.

To elevate their coaching to a craft, coaches have to acquire an extraordinary control of material and techniques and be able not only to do things better than most others, but also to do more things.

Now that we have understood what a coach requires to do to raise the level of his coaching to a craft, let us see how he can go about doing it.

The Road to Coaching Mastery 
The following is a suggested 3 step process to transform your coaching approach from a mechanical process into a craft, and attain mastery of it.

Three Steps to Coaching Mastery 

Step 1

Follow the Rules:  Begin by choosing a coaching model - either the one you have been trained in by your coaching school, or one of your choice. Follow and practice this model thoughtfully and rigorously. After each coaching intervention, check with clients on the benefits they have derived from the session and reflect on the  clients' as well as your own experience. Study the method in the light of this new found understanding and factor the knowledge into your subsequent coaching interventions.

Step 2
Break the Rules: Over a period of time with rigorous use and observation of the results of the practice of the chosen coaching model, you will begin to build up a body of understanding of what works and what needs to be improved further. Factor the insights and experiences into your subsequent coaching interventions and carefully monitor the success of your improved model of coaching. Keep a close watch on the impact made on clients by constantly taking their feedback.

Step 3
Ignore the Rules: To recap, you began with your chosen coaching model, progressed to factoring your insights and experiences into your modified version of the coaching model, and continulusly validated its impact. You have have now arrived at a point where you can start ignoring the rules. So rather than relying on someone else's method, you can now confidently begin to incorporate your individual perspectives, skills, knowledge, experiences into devloping your own coaching model/s. You could also start to explore ways of incorporating the knowledge and understanding of your culture to influence your coaching orientation.

For instance, the Indian cultural dynamics are quite different from that of the the West (see my blogpiece Decoding the Desi Dynamics). You can begin to examine how you can factor these into your own coaching model. As an Indian, it would be also be useful to look at using Krishna as a useful model of a coach, mentor and facilitator.

Apart from using your model with your client, you could also use it as a personalized tool for reflecting on your coaching process and practice. This should facilitate continuous learning and improvement of your coaching effectiveness.

Hi-5s to Your Business Improvement

Every day, newspapers and TV news channels in India keep telling us of the dark clouds of political uncertainty in West Asia and North Africa, unemployment in the US and the Greek debt. And then there are the ominous whispers that more news – bad of course – on the debt front from Italy and Spain. Are things really that bad? Is it all gloom and doom?

The Economic Times recently surveyed 22 CEOs of large businesses to rank 10 issues on a ‘headache scale’ of 1 to 10, where 1 stood for the ‘least headache’ and 10 for the ‘worst headache’. The most important conclusion of the study was that in India, consumer demand would continue, that top line growth would remain intact and that we can weather a global crisis. This will come as good news to all those business leaders who may have started to grow jittery, hearing all the global bad news. So then, what does Indian business need to worry about - if at all? It is the high input costs which could end up hurting their profits. And it is this situation of shrinking margins that is likely to give business heads, especially from the SME sectors, sleepless nights. And sleepless nights, as we all know, can lead to rash decisions. So what should they do to deal sensibly with the current situation?

In my experience of working with owner-managed businesses I have noticed that most, if not all of them, are so deeply operationally involved in the day-to-day managing of their businesses that they rarely give time and thought to put in place a long-term directional view of their businesses. Renny Thomas, of McKinsey & Co attributes this neglect to the fact that up until recently, India was in a period where lack of a meticulously planned strategy did not matter as much since the growth areas were obvious. But with increasing competition from Chinese and other foreign competitors, coupled with shrinking margins, business heads have realized that it is no longer enough to go with the flow. It’s time to move beyond the present and start planning the future with purpose and intent and desired results in mind.   

So where do you begin? Here are five ways to kick-off your change process:


1. Assess Your Company’s Current Status: Put everything on the table, both the good and the bad. Include areas of the business you are proud of and problems you wish would just go away. Address issues relating to staff, products and services, location, profitability, and new business development.

Hi-Fives to Your Business Success



2. Review The Past: Look carefully at your past marketing efforts, successes, and failures. If you are running a marketing program but cannot justify its expense with increased sales, consider cancelling it or placing it on hold. Successful marketing turnarounds stop the bleeding quickly.



3.  Analyze Competitive Activity: Often, a new entry in a market will use new marketing techniques and follow new thinking to achieve sales that you didn’t know were possible. Evaluate objectively, to achieve a successful marketing turnaround, you must do what is best for your company.

3. Rethink Your Business: Keeping your learning from the earlier three steps in mind, think again, about current customers, competition, industry changes, and technology. Rethink your business model. Many successful businesses have managed to stay successful by moving with the times. They saw that the needs of their customers were changing and acted accordingly. Be flexible to adjust to new opportunities and challenges.

5. Be Quick. Act quickly on your plans to marry the short-term to the long-term. Speed and flexibility are essential in turning a company around.

And don’t give up - giving up too early may result in your falling short of the great success your business was destined for.Act consistently and diligently on the five ways and you could have success dancing on the palm of your hand!

And in case you need help; I have more than10,000 hours of Buisness coaching experience of supporting business-owners such as you. I can help you reach your business goals faster, achieve higher and become stronger! For contact details click on Contact tab above.

Over the Moon With Your I I

"When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened."

                                                                    --John M. Richardson, Jr 

The problem of getting started with any change, whether personal or organizational, is our initial reluctance to it. The tendency is to procrastinate, even though we know the circumstances require we do something about it. We let "things happen" and when the inevitable happens, "we wonder what happened!". In my previous blog post (On Why CEO's Procrastinate. And What They Could Do About It), I had suggested an approach to overcome this reluctance to act  which was more in a business context. Thomas Pytchyl, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University  who specializes in the study of procrastination, suggests a way all of us could employ. When Pytchyl is asked what someone should do to reduce procrastination, his most common answer is, "It's not enough to have a goal intention, you need to have an Implementation Intention too." Implementation intention, a term coined by Peter Gollwitzer, is a specific type of intentional statement that defines when and where a specific behavior will be performed. and is an easily applicable planning strategy that can help overcome procrastination by automating action control. An implementation intention supports goal intention by setting out in advance when/where and how one will achieve this goal. So instead of making yourself a "to do" list of goal intentions it is more effective to decide how, when and where you are going to accomplish each of the tasks you need to get done. 

In my opinion, the best example of this format  is John F. Kennedy made to the American congress on May 25th 1961. That's when he announced a plan to put a man on the Moon before the decade was over. Now, even though there wasn't even a plan in hand nor the technology to do so, it had to be done. The reason?  The feeling worldwide that the Soviets were way ahead in the space race. Only twenty days before Kennedy's speech, NASA had launched Alan Shepard into space, the first US man to reach space. And, unlike Yuri Gagarin more than a month earlier, Shepard didn't even orbit Earth. He was just launched like a cannonball. 

Kennedy clearly knew that getting NASA started on a project as crazy as this was to put a stimulus for action into the environment. And the stimulus? The fear of the Soviets beating them to the moon and making it a Red Moon. Remember, this was in the days of the cold war when the US-Soviet competition to beat each other in every way was at its height. So here is how Kennedy in his speech, used the "If....then, when/where and how" format to galvanize his countrymen into action:

If... (we do not) "land a man..."
Where "on the moon..." 
When "by the end of the decade..."  
Then (left unsaid) the Soviets will beat us to it and rub our collective noses into the moon dust!

The result was that on July 20th 1969, an American became the first man on the moon.

The result of Kennedy's "If...then" stimulus

 The spectacular results of Kennedy's 'moon speech' has now made it a classic example of the perfect  mission statement. His accomplishment was to set his scientists a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) with a "then" stimulus (even if not explicitly articulated) impossible to ignore.

And for You and Me...

 Considering that you and I do not have such bruising(?) imperatives as did Kennedy, let us consider an everyday example Pytchyl cites. I might have, say,  a goal intention of "flossing my teeth regularly" An implementation intention can support this goal intention by setting out in advance when/where and how we will achieve this goal. In this case, it might be "When I put the toothpaste on my toothbrush in the evening (something which is a habit for me), I will then stop and get out the floss first." Essentially what I've done in making this implementation intention is to put the cue for behavior (putting the paste on my toothbrush) into the environment, so it serves as a stimulus for my behavior. I don't have to think about or remind myself about my goal. The moment I put the paste on my brush, my behavior is cued. In time, this should become as automatic as my teeth brushing is already. My 'then' stimulus could also be, "or end up with decayed teeth or a root canal treatment." This of course would make my stimulus an imperative in the same league, or close to that of  Kennedy's in his moon speech!

Call to Action

Studies indicate that implementation intentions on getting started can help when we have an initial reluctance to get started on an aversive task.What the above examples clearly prove is you're more likely to get started when you put the stimulus for action into the environment.

So when do you intend to get started on your "moon mission"?

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SPEAKING OF GOALS >

A study by the American Society of Training and Development showed that:

• People who merely hear a goal, have a 10 percent chance of achieving it
• People who create a plan for a specific goal have a 50 percent chance of achieving it
• People who have a coach holding them accountable to their goal have a 95 percent chance of reaching their goal 

In other words, you can double your chances of success by being held accountable through a coaching program versus merely having a plan. A good coach can leave a positive impact on your life (and business) and help you achieve things you may not have been able to attain on your own.

Get yourself a coach. Contact uday.arur@gmail.com

 

Move Over Visioning. Enter the Future Story

Jeremy King is an English restaurateur whose interview with Vir Sanghvi appeared in a recent issue of Brunch. Asked what his principles for starting a new hotel were, Jeremy made a point which appeared to be of particular interest to me for my Visioning workshops which I conduct as a strategic coach. This was about how every hotel must have a back story. 

A back story is an essentially cinematic concept. What it means is that the events you see on screen have a background, a story that explains their provenance, even if we don't have to confront that back story in the actual plot. An example is the story actor Michael Caine created around his role as the butler in the Batman series. He fleshed out a story about how Alfred the butler was a former British commando who took up to cooking on difficult postings and who went to work for Thomas Wayne (Batman's civilian avatar) when he retired. This story helped Caine to not only understand Bruce Wayne's motivations, but also to understand Batman's world of violence. Moreover with his commando background, the butler could actually help Batman in his fight against crime. All this Caine made up because he reckoned nothing made sense with out a back story. 

Jeremy applied the same principle to the new hotel he is opening in London's Oxford Street. According to the story,  the hotel was built in the 1920s by a rich American who loved London. It was the toast of the town, Then as the American owner went back to the States and the hotel fell on bad times and was sold to a modern chain which destroyed its character and now King and his partner are renovating it to recover its lost lustre. None of this of course is true, so why bother? Because, says King, it gives the new owners, the architect, the designer, the management and the staff an idea of what the hotel should be. They don't just say, "Let's convert this office block into a hotel." They say, "What would the hotel have looked like at its peak in the 1920's?"And while designing the rooms, they ask themselves, "What would a luxury hotel built in the Jazz Age have offered to its guests?" The back story serves as reference point for everybody in the same way that Alfred's back story told Michael Caine how Alfred would react to any situation. According to King unless a hotel had a convincing back story, it failed in the long run.

Source: Philantopic

Source: Vision Ohio

 And this brings me to the connection between the back story and the 'future story' people can create for their companies. Just like a well-thought-out and crafted back story serves as a reference point for everyone involved with the project of building or renovating a hotel, a carefully crafted future story can serve as a fleshed out story of future success in companies. The individual stories help people to understand the dreams and concerns of their colleagues, and the stories lead to significant themes around which an energizing  and motivating picture of the future can be painted. The resulting one story, embodying critical themes from all the stories, helps to create an irresistible pull which acts like a compass, a battery pack, and a talking map all in one.

So instead of making people rack their brains and go thorough an exhausting day(s?) of a  Visioning exercise, move to the Future Story, it will enable your people to:

• make up stories, plausible or fantastic, to paint the future
• understand organizational issues better because they are presented in the form of a story
• sort out and describe what has happened to oneself or others, often with a richness of context and detail, and often with great relish
• envision chains and webs of causation
• build scenarios and to plan and think strategically
• resonate with the stories of others; to see another's viewpoint when presented with the stories which underlie or embody that viewpoint
• to discover themes in the events of the story
• to recognize (or select) certain elements as significant, as embodying certain meanings and to draft a road map of the future

And finally, don't forget to tell your people to give their stories a touch of the cinematic. The  gloss, and shine will illuminate the future everyone can look forward to.

To make it a shining beacon to the future.

References:

1.  http://www.co-intelligence.org/I-powerofstory.html

The Emotional Investment Finder

You are what your 

deep driving desire is,

As your desire is

so us your will,

As your will is

so is your deed,

As your deed is

so is your destiny

                  - Upanishads

Will stemming from desire, aka commitment, says Michael Neill, is that place inside ourselves, that recognizes the inevitability of creating any result we are willing to put 100% of our mental and physical energy into achieving. Will also calls for a deep driving desire - an emotional investment in the lengths one wishes to go in achieving the goals. A commitment born out of an emotional investment says, "I will get there or I will die trying" - and as much as it is one of the most powerful forces in the universe and one in which any one can tap into at any moment, simply by making the decision to do so.

But for J my client, this decision wasn't simple. Long on planning and short on commitment, at every one of our coaching sessions, he made enthusiastic plans and actions to achieve his goals - even making a careful note of them in his diary. However at the subsequent session, when I asked him about the action taken on his earlier commitments, he would have acted on none. On probing further, I discovered that he never referred to his diary to check on his commitments.

The challenge for me was to make J act on his commitment, but how? Just then I happened to came across a Michael Neill tip, which I thought with a little bit of tweaking, could help me push J across the chasm from interest to commitment. Based on the tip, I designed an exercise to help me evaluate his degree of commitment to achieving his goals, and called it The Emotional Investment Finder Scale  Here's a quick look at it from the bottom up:

Exercise

The Emotional Investment Finder

To achieve my goals, I commit to...

Want them

Choose them

Strive for them

Act on them

Give them priority

Honor them consistently

Find them satisfying/affirming/pleasing

Miss them when they are gone

Adhere to them under pressure

Uphold them when facing resistance or opposition

Sacrifice for them

Fight for them

Suffer for them

Working through the exercise helped J evaluate just how much his goals meant to him and the degree of  commitment he was willing to invest in achieving them. The exercise brought about a significant improvement  in his "actions done" rate.

Are you encouraging innovation in your company?

Yesterday my friend Shiva texted me the following joke:

Teacher: What is half of 8?

Student: Depends sir, if  cut horizontally into half, then its '0' and if vertically it is '8'!

The teacher fainted.

Researchers at the Wolverhampton University looking for the world's oldest jokes have found that jokes ancient and modern shared “a willingness to deal with taboos and a degree of rebellion.” Much the way the student did - no wonder the teacher fainted! 

Innovation like jokes, also requires a willingness to deal with taboos (out-of-the-box thinking) and a streak of rebellion (an ability to take risk). However, no innovation can be called an innovation unless its implemented because, as the graphic below shows, Implementation = Profits and Profits fuel Innovation. An unimplemented innovation remains a mere idea generating zero profit, instead it reduces the time spent on generating and vetting it as cost to the company.

Source: http://www.jpb.com/innovation/index.php

Recently, I happened to facilitate a team of key managers from an engineering company which was one of the oldest in its line of business, but getting battered by the competition. The MD wanted me to help them change their way of doing things. At one of the sessions the MD observed that one of the reasons the company was lagging behind was that few, if any, innovations were happening in the company. Based on this observation, we decided to form a cross-functional team that would work exclusively on innovation projects. However, a few months into the project, the MD suddenly decided that  as it was nearing the end of the sales year, all innovation projects were to be shelved and everyone was to focus only on completing the target. The Innovation projects went out of the window, and the last I knew, they have not been revived either.

The MD may have had his reasons for doing what he did, but imagine the consequences of his decision on his team. If  innovation was be a priority for the company, then the leader should have been communicating this message to his team in all possible ways. In this case, by taking a so called break on the innovation projects, he had sent a message to his team that the projects weren't important enough, generating sales was.

Change management requires several tasks to be done simultaneously. It is therefore very important that leaders drill into their managers that all change management tasks need to be done in addition to their day-to-day tasks. Not in exclusion, or one instead of another.

As the graphic above shows, successful implementation of innovation projects need to be powered by management. By taking his eyes off the "innovation ball", the MD had sent a silent message to his team about where his priorities lay.

PS If you are interested in creativity and innovation, you will find Jeffrey Baumgartner's website http://www.jpb.com//index.php very useful: