Thinking outside the box September 10, 2009
Many people talk about doing it, but few can tell you _how_ to think outside the box.
One of the easiest methods is to ask questions. But not just any set of questions. Questions that are designed to force your thinking outside the box.
We, as humans, have been well trained that a question, any question, has an answer. We find it difficult to not answer a question. If we don’t know the answer we are often forced to say “I don’t know” as the actual answer. Use this to your advantage.
Below is a list of my favourite ‘out of the box’ questions. As you read them, think of a problem or issue you currently have. Also, as you ask them assume there is at least three different answers to each question.
“If I were to do X, how would I?”
“In what situations or context is this problem a benefit?” or “In what situation or context is this problem a solution to another problem?”
“How have I caused this?”
“If someone came to me with this problem, what advice would I give?”
As you read some of the questions, you may think they do not apply to you. These are the ones most likely to present you with ‘out of the box thinking’ – so make sure these are the ones you actually answer!
When stressed, your brain stops. August 20, 2009
For many years I’ve been using this idea. And not just that the brain stops, but under ongoing stress, we become less likely to be able to make good decisions and de-stress ourselves. Another way to describe this is: The path to burnout. We become so stressed over time that we can’t think of any solutions. This is the exact situation I found myself in years ago.
Now there is some research that shows that when we are stressed, the brain changes in ways that keep us stressed! In short the researched shows that under chronic stress, the rats stopped making their usual decisions. Instead relying on their last choice – even when it didn’t serve.
I’ve seen this behaviour many times in the people I work with. They are so stressed, they miss vital information. This vital information is often in the form of feedback from the world in relation to their decisions. This feedback is not taken as information for a new decision but instead feeds straight into the stress. Increasing our stress and thus making our decisions even less useful. A vicious cycle. And the people I work with keep doing the same things that cause their stress at the same time they are unable to think of a way out.
As I’ve said many times before, if you’re trying to change your stress while under stress you’re fighting an uphill battle. First you need to catch a breath, make some space, or just take a break. Then you can learn and train the skills needed to keep that stress managed.
So here is the test: If you think you can’t make the decision to take a break or you don’t know how to take a break, you’re too stressed to make that choice! Your biology is working against you. If that’s the case, take a break RIGHT NOW. Stop what you’re doing and go for a 5 minute walk outside. It doesn’t matter if you’re in your pyjamas, or that it’s raining or snowing outside. Go for the walk, you need it more than another 5 minutes surfing the web.
Link to the research.
Link to the NY Times write up.
Four tips on how to motivate a new team. June 3, 2009
Getting everyone in a new team, group, company or organization to work together is a challenge but not impossible. To give you some of the ideas I use, let me start with a metaphor to get a point across.
As a teacher, I teach to specific individuals. Even in a full class, I teach to the individuals. If the individuals get my point, I move on. If half of them do, I restate the case till they all do. Sometimes I even intentionally confuse the ones that get it, to help them learn a different thing.
In short, I have my learning outcome. I know what responses I want from the students. The students also have their out outcomes for learning. As the instructor, I have to match those two up.
Now, just for a moment, consider a team or company a class. How do I navigate through each individual’s needs, wants and desires to reach my corporate outcome? It takes time and attention (your and theirs!). If they don’t want to belong, then you’re kind of stuck. You can’t make anyone learn something they don’t want to learn. In either case you either have to make them want it, ignore them, or expel them from the team. Having a disruption in a new team can be unrecoverable. In an established team, the team itself usually deals with it naturally.
So some specifics as I appreciate them.
1. Ask the team. You might not use everything they tell you, but you have to take the team ‘pulse’.
Ask the individuals within the team a few specific questions.
“Is the team helping you do what you want?”
“What are you trying to do?”
“What do you most value about the team?”
“Other than yourself who do you think the team finds is the most beneficial member?”
“Who do you think the team finds the least beneficial member?”
2. Give the team clear instructions. So many times I’ve watched highly effective teams self destruct because they were given a wishy-washy goal.
These instructions can also be about how to act as a team. Instructions on WIIFT (What’s In It For Them), what they have to do (both individually and as a team), how they contribute, what ‘contribute’ actually means and more.
3. Be an example for the team. They will follow your lead, not knowing anything else to do. If you stifle creativity, you’ll get less of it and the team will begin to stifle it itself. If you foster creativity, it will grow and be nurtured by the team.
4. Following on from point #3, if you notice the team moving in a direction you don’t want, be the example that moves them in the other way. This can be the toughest of all because most of the time we don’t notice the direction the team is heading until it’s already halfway there.
What other tips to motivate a new team can you think of? Comment below!
Simple non-verbal communication changes get massive response January 29, 2009
Late last year I spent the week training in
But this post is not about how good
Let me give you an example. The class contained only Koreans. Their primary language is Korean. English is a distant second (or third or fourth!) So on the first day when I asked a question, I would get no response. The first question I asked? “Can everyone speak English?” The response; silence.
Two days later, we are having an interaction, a conversation. Their English is ok. Not perfect but perfectly understandable. They are (and were able to) on the first day understand me. What changed them from silent attention to asking questions?
One specific non-verbal behavioural change on my part.
I play with things – all the time. If I’m not, then I’m thinking about how to. I also test, constantly. I try things in new ways, use tools where they are not meant to be used, push boundaries and edges. Doing so keeps me interested and learning. This is play.
So after lunch on day two, I started playing with facial expressions. Normally, I smile a lot – but I decided to stop and freeze my facial expression. Suddenly the students started asking questions. Confused, I slipped back into my regular smiling and they lost interest with my answers and didn’t ask more. It was like turning on a switch. Freezing my face induced more questions. Back and forth it went.
One ’simple’ change and my results change. What simple thing can you change in yourself to get different results?
Coaching the Uncoachable June 9, 2007
As someone who regularly coaches professionally I read with interest Seth Godin’s discussion on coaching the uncoachable. While I agree with his point, one of the main presuppositions in the post is just plain wrong.
He describes some of the symptoms of uncoachability and almost all of them imply that coaching is about the coach, when in facts it’s really about the person being coached. These symptoms also point to failures within the relationship between the coach and coachee.
* Challenging the credentials of the coach
This is a requirement. Of course, the challenge should be in regards to understanding how the coach can help your performance, not as a methods of discrediting their suggestions.
* Announcing that you’re being unfairly singled out
If a coach offers you a suggestion, you are being singled out. The coach (we hope) is professional enough to see in your behaviour things that can be improved or modified. It makes very little sense for the coach to single someone else out for your mistake.
* Pointing out, angrily, that the last few times, the coach was wrong
Yep, the coach may have been wrong in the past, and may be wrong now. It’s not about the coach, it’s about you.
* Identifying others who have succeeded without ever being coached
Yep. Those other people are not you. If your results are as good, or better than the person you identify, then we can discuss this further.
* Resisting a path merely because it was one identified by a coach
This is just ridiculous behaviour. The coach is there for your benefit, your improvement or the benefit of your team. If you want to act like a two year old child, is it any wonder that the coach begins to treat you like one. This, of course, just increases the difficulty and tension felt by both parties. Luckily, this behaviour is very easy to deal with by a competent coach.
Does this mean you roll over and do whatever the coach says? Of course not. It does mean you have to stop treating the coach like a parent and more like a peer. While this might cause different conflicts with your coach for a time, a professional coach will (should!) be able to modify their own behaviour to match.
What most people don’t know about Powerpoint presentations August 1, 2006
Microsoft’s Powerpoint is a very simple product. It does the job for what it is designed quite well. Unfortunately most people don’t know how to use it.
And the failure is not because people don’t read the Powerpoint manual. The issue is not about Powerpoint at all, but about the presenter. As part of the work I do in training presenters I have noticed a relationship between the comfort a speaker has on stage and the quality of the Powerpoint presentation.
You’ll notice the best presenters only sometimes use powerpoint, and when they do it is a single line of text, or a picture. They use it very specifically and very simply. The worst presenters have their entire speech in 8 point so everyone ‘can’ read it. The best presenters know Powerpoint is there to assist the presentation and audience’s understanding, the worst presenters sometimes think that a flashy powerpoint will distract the audience’s attention from their quivering voice.
When creating a Powerpoint presentation there are several things to keep in mind:
- The slides go with your words. Produce your slides when you know what you are going to say.
- A picture is worth a thousand words.
- The slides are not there to be understandable without your speech but there to represent the idea you’re talking about.
- You are the reason the audience is listening.
- Use huge fonts. Readable from the moon. At least 30 point.
- The slides are there for your audience, not for you.
- Keep it simple – each slide should be understandable within 5 seconds.
For some more information, Guy Kawasaki talks about this specifically and has some examples. There is the always very useful www.presentationzen.com. And you can download some other examples from Tom Peters.
Technorati Tags: Business, Communication, Presenting, Powerpoint, Storytelling, Training
To Er in speech June 21, 2006
There is unfortunately a common occurrence that to me is like nails being dragged down a blackboard.
It’s the ‘um’ and ‘er’ that some people put into gaps in their speech.
These are sounds added in between words and sentences to fill the silence and tell listeners that the speaker is still speaking. In a normal two way conversation, the people having the conversation take turns to speak. Like a tennis match these turns go back and forth. The listener knows when to speak next, when the ‘ball is in their court’, by waiting for the speaker to be silent. So if the speaker does not want to give up their turn, they add in some form of filler noise. An ‘um’ or ‘err’.
Of course, when someone is presenting there is no need for the filler noises as there is an expectation from everyone that the speaker is not having a back and forth conversation. Yet I’ve seen CEO’s of multi-national companies presenting to a camera and have two or three of these noises in every sentence. It was excruciating for me to watch.
The interesting thing about these filler noises is that they are not needed. Not only not needed when speaking to an audience, but not even needed when speaking one on one. You can keep silent within a conversation, and still hold the speaker position. The most obvious, overt example of this is when the speaker holds up their hand like a stop sign.
You can hold the attention of all listeners with entirely non-verbal methods. Take a look a Tony Blair and Bill Clinton during interviews for examples of this. Watch their behaviour, not what they are saying. Listen to the timing and rhythm and become aware of the silence that they deliberately allow into the speeches.
There are many things that you can do to first stop the habit of ‘um’ and second learning how to keep attention. To start, consciously slow down your rate of speech a little allowing you to listen to your own words and enable you to self edit what you say. And secondly, play with how much you can slow down your speaking and extend the silence without others commenting…
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Persuasion, Presenting
Begin at the end May 25, 2006
So there I was, watching someone be taught a new Aikido movement. I have learnt it myself, about 15 times now, so I forget what I learnt before and took careful notice to learn even more. My attention was drawn, not to the movement, but to how the person I was watching learnt it.
All movements can be broken down into component parts. Step 1, step 2, step 3 etc. Depending on how new you are to the skill, the smaller the steps are. The more skill you have, the larger the steps become. So what used to be bending your arm at the elbow, opening hand, pushing hand forward, adjusting distance, closing fingers, opening fingers, dropping hand is now one automatic movement of shaking someone’s hand.
So this fellow was having particular difficulty with the movement. He would perform steps 1 through 5, but get step 2 wrong. He would not notice his mistake until step 5. Repeating the movement, he would then still error on step two, but make changes to step 4 only to be more confused at step 5.
When you want to change the course of a river, you don’t start at the top, you start where it meets the ocean, dig the channel you want, then at the last moment break the old banks and redirect the river. You offer the river an easier path, rather than fighting it as you dig franticly in front of the oncoming wave.
I’ve experienced this many many times; Being confounded by a problem that I myself created by screwing up a step long before. This is one of the reasons I like to learn and teach things backwards. Starting with the end, and working back. So if I am teaching you to count to 10, I teach you 10. Then 9, 10. Then 8, 9, 10. Then 7, 8, 9, 10. Etc. Each time I teach a new topic (number), it flows into what you already know. So the more we learn, the better you get at everything you’ve learned before.
Yeah, it’s a little different than most of us would have been taught. It takes a little more planning and thought. And a fair amount of trust as you know where the end is, but no where to ‘hang’ that knowledge (which is another direct benefit). So if you teach others, offer advice, or just talk about a subject, how would you restructure your behaviour to teach it backwards?
Technorati Tags: Change, Learning, Psychology, Training