Leadership
Random and Ridiculous Rules in the Workplace
As an aspiring gymnast, my 10-year-old granddaughter spends three nights a week at the gym for two-hour practices. Being 10
As an aspiring gymnast, my 10-year-old granddaughter spends three nights a week at the gym for two-hour practices. Being 10
I’m up to my eyeballs in complexity. Yes, we all are. Our “modern” world is a fast-paced, interconnected, technologically driven
We all fall prey to the path of least resistance – doing what is easy and expedient over what is in our long term best interest. We are hungry and pop into a convenience store, where we are overwhelmed by poor choices. Do we seek out the isolated piece of fruit hidden among the chips, candy and donuts? I don’t know about you, but peanut M&M’s win out every time for me.
Understanding the human proclivity to take the path of least resistance can help us design ways that “pull” people into the desired behaviors more easily. That’s why this simple mantra can make a big difference in any change initiative…
The idea of pivoting comes from lean startup – starting with a business idea and testing it in the real world with real customers (potential customers at this point) very early and very often. You test and explore and learn as an early step with a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) or just enough to get started. The hard reality is that more ideas fail due to not finding a market than due to poor execution. Build it too fully without testing it with the market and you are likely to miss the mark. You tend to overbuild. You might miss some brilliant insight from a customer that makes a real difference in your product or service; one that you would have never stumbled upon in the inner sanctums of your garage or home office. In lean lingo – one learns quickly, fails fast and avoids the tendency to over-engineer or perfect things before the customer (and their wallet) has their say.
As you test and learn and fail, you “pivot” or make changes and tweaks that make your product or service or business model better. You don’t lose sight of your goal; you just recognize that the path to get there might look like this:
So today I share with you a real life story of pivots and of persistence. And it is my story.
I’ll admit it – I am an expert at knowing all the ways one can AVOID conflict. I grew up in a house where Mom and Dad never disagreed publicly, where parents spoke and children listened, where adults were always respected and one never talked back. That translated into discomfort around disagreement; space I inhabited for many years.
I have a very different view now…
There are times when I’m facing a tough situation – and a coach is not available. When that happens, I’ve honed a process to “coach myself” through the situation. I’ll share the process and the questions I ask myself in those specific situations.
Problem solving is looking in the rear view mirror. It’s fixing something that was not right in the first place. Today things move so quickly, that you may be fixing something that is no longer needed.
The ratio of time spent creating vs. problem solving is 1 to 50. I’ve been to problem solving training, learned
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