But let’s say you do everything right and manage the resistance and you even get some initial results. Are you destined for success? Rarely. If you come back to that same organization weeks or months later you may see some of the trappings of the change – but it’s real effect will more often than not be undetectable.

But it’s better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all, right?

Actually, not really. Organizations are a lot more like people than we think. Organizations can learn. And when they learn to fail, it’s a hard lesson to overcome. We’ve all heard that change killing phrase — “we tried that before and it didn’t work.”

Also, all change comes at a cost. The obvious costs are the money spent on extra resources, expertise and all of that. There are people who do change without bringing in some real expertise. There are also people who cut their own hair. But most organizations, if they are serious, do invest in outside resources.

But that’s only a fraction of the cost. All change drains resources from the day to day operations. All change makes the organization less productive before it becomes more productive. If you tabulate the sum of internal and external spend for change, you know that it’s not something that you do on a whim. You don’t want to pay that price if you don’t get a payback.

So when you do change in an organization, you want ensure that if you really are going to make lasting change and hold onto those hard earned results.

How do you do that? You do it like you learn to ride a bicycle.

Remember I said that organizations are a lot more like people than we think. Organizations can learn — just like people. They can learn something using something that very much resembles our short term memory. Short term memory is what allows us to remember something for a brief period of time – a phone number, a grocery list, maybe even the words to a song. A few hours later, when the knowledge is no longer relevant or useful, it’s discarded. A lot of what we encounter or experience falls into that category.

We don’t retain every piece of information that we take in. That’s probably a good thing. There are lots of things that I really don’t want to remember. But even if you did, that’s not the way the mind works. And the more we get bombarded with information, the harder it is for it to stick.

Ever got partway through a movie or TV show and realize that you’d seen it before? A lot of what we experience is simply flushed away.

Yet some things are retained in exquisite detail. It gets transferred from short term to long term memory with incredible clarity. We’ve all had the experience of hearing the first few notes to a favourite song and not only knowing the song, but experiencing a flood of memories — where we were when we first heard it, what the weather was like, who we were with, what we were feeling — the sights, the sounds even the smells.

Even if we think they are long forgotten, to our surprise, a simple stimulus can bring them rushing back. Artists know this and use it frequently to inspire us and help us reconnect to things that we have forgotten. The connection is more simply memory, it’s often very powerful. But even these memories get chipped away and fade. Or they get rewritten. If you have spent any amount of time with an old friend or significant other, you know what I mean. Speaking of old movies that we’ve all seen, my wife seems to have lived a major part of her life in a parallel universe. We have been to the same places at roughly the same time, but she remembers a totally different set of facts and experiences. Go figure.

So even our long term memory gets compromised.

But there is a form of memory that never seems to fade and comes back with unerring accuracy. If you’ve ever learned to ride a bicycle and haven’t done it in a while, try it. You’ll wobble at first, but the whole thing will come back to you. An incredibly complex set of activities requiring coordination, balance and skill. Never forgotten.

It’s called “muscle memory”. It’s learned through repetition. It’s also learned at a level below our consciousness. We don’t actively recall it. It’s just there when we need it. It’s the way things are. Yes, we are a little rusty, but fundamentally it’s accurate. You don’t stop to question it, you just do it. Moreover, you can adapt these skills quite easily to a new reality. The type of bike I learned to ride ages ago is significantly different than today’s technical marvels, but I managed to generalize what I knew quite easily.

That ability to generalize these skills can give us the confidence to do new things. I think its why some people (my kids) are “good” at using computers. When you watch my son operate a new device, he’s not even really thinking about it. He just dives in and explores using what he’s learned before from countless hours of playing with all kinds of devices. Few new devices can stump him. Moreover, if the usage requires some form of skill, he masters it quickly.

What has this got to do with organizational change? Just this.

Most of what you see as organizational change uses a form of “short term” memory. For those who are students of theory, check out the Hawthorne Effect. This famous experiment showed that if you just pay attention to people, you can get temporary boosts in their performance. It’s the model that a lot of change is based on. Managers pay attention to a problem and they see a result. Job done. We start a program and there’s a flurry of activity. Job done.

But it doesn’t last. Shortly after you stop paying attention, things go back to the way they were.

In response, some practitioners and organizations attempt a transfer to long term organizational memory. This can be a little more successful. We persist. We put out more communications. We publish documents and processes. We put out manuals. We expect people to read them and learn them. Some even do. Managers are trained to reinforce them message over a longer period of time until they hear it coming back to them. Job done.

But an interesting phenomenon happens when we intellectualize change. Try this if you don’t believe me. If you ask someone what the procedure is for doing a task in a department, if they have had good training, significant repetition or been diligent in reading the material, they will describe a process to you in a way that is eerily close to what manual says. But then take it a step further. Watch them perform the task and you will find some real surprises. What they say they do and what they actually do are often as different as what my wife remembers versus what I remember. BTW – unless you draw this to their attention, most of the time they will be blissfully unaware of this difference.

When skills are learned at this level they can be fairly rigid. As every system analyst worth their salt will tell you, even a process which is not really followed can be vigorously defended as the way that it’s “supposed to be done.” You can point out the fact that things don’t really happen that way all you want. People have learned that they might be able to make some compromises in reality, but you can’t change the process. And if you pay attention to it, it will snap back like magic. The old process will be back temporarily in its full glory and often in its full inefficiency.

Then there are cyclists…

Some organizations don’t write their processes into manuals. Some write them into their culture. This came home to me when I heard Isadore “Issy” Sharp, founder of the Four Seasons Hotel speak at a dinner recently. When asked about his secret, Issy gave some principles. One of his principles – “the golden rule.” Treat customers like you’d want to be treated. Another — “every employee has their own ‘credit balance’ that they can and should use to do the right thing when a guest is unhappy.”

Note the distinct lack of specific details. He’s not telling people how they should do it. He’s also not allowing anyone to fall back on a procedure as an excuse for not making a guest happy.

How do people learn these precepts? They learn them from seeing them in action. T They learn them because their management treat them with that same respect.

Issy doesn’t teach his people to read a manual. He teaches them to ride a bicycle.

Sounds so simple. Why don’t more organizations do this? Two reasons. One — it takes time. hey learn them from the care that people take in hiring — Issy’s people spend way more time hiring for even what some hotels would class as menial jobs. If you want to work at this level, to quote the legendary Larry Bossidy from his book “Execution”. “You have to sweat the small stuff.”

The task of living the principles never stops. And it takes an enormous amount of effort and time.
When I work with organizations to do change, I’ve taken the model of the bicycle. Using techniques from Lean and other disciplines, we get people to make things visible. We challenge them to go out and look at how it is really done. And as consultants, we let them do the work. Because it is work.

It’s scary for some folks. They come prepared to sit at tables and talk. Or they bring in binders that show us that they have these things documented. Then we insist that they get up, they move around. We construct their processes on walls with post it notes and show them how easily something can be moved, changed or even taken out entirely.

We focus on outcomes and not on change for change’s sake

David Maister, the guru of Management Consulting said in his book “True Professionalism” that the old testament prophets didn’t go to pray for more commandments. They prayed for the strength to do the ones that they already had. The organizational equivalent of that is a focus on outcomes.

Amazingly, once you focus on these realistically, a lot comes into clear focus. Issy Sharp asks – “is the customer happy?” Not – “did you follow procedure?” Results are what count.

The customer is the focus, but the discipline extends to every aspect of the business. Issy tells a story of a group of employees who were setting up a room for an event and had one of the team who was doing the bare minimum. The team sent him packing saying that “if he didn’t want to work, he should get lost.”

Organizations that ride bicycles are incredibly disciplined at all levels. I wouldn’t want to face Issy if customers were unhappy. But I also wouldn’t want to bring him excuses if a hotel was not profitable. Yet I would expect him to give me time to execute a reasonable plan.

Which I fully expect he does. You need a level of patience and dedication that goes far beyond what most management teams are prepared to defend. So many opt for short term memory. Some try the process route.

A few ride bicycles.

I remember when we first started on the internet back in the last century.  I’d already been living with corporate email for almost a decade before the internet hit full steam.  So I laughed a little at the analogy that the internet of the early 90′s was like “drinking through a fire hose”.   Anyone else remember that line?

I was a voracious reader.  I was a quick study.  I could stay up later than anyone.  I could keep up.

No more.

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to yell “give!”

For the first time in my life, this last year has overwhelmed me.  Yes, I take on too much.  Yes, my fascination with many things keeps me over-committed.  But for the first time, no amount of working harder will get me out of it.  It’s been a brutal year in that regard.

So I have to get smarter and better.  That’s not a New Year’s resolution.  It’s a necessity.

But it’s not all hopeless.  I’ve started to develop some strategies for dealing with all of this.  I’ll be glad to share them with readers of this blog.   But in the coming year, I’m going to be looking at ways of — changing the game on this issue of too much information.

I’d appreciate your help and input.

What game changing strategies have you adopted to help you cope?  How have they worked?  What obstacles have you found?  What are the real issues you are confronting.

C’mon.  Share.  Leave a comment on the blog.  It only takes a few minutes.  Spelling doesn’t count.
Let’s work this out together.

And have a great Christmas — and a wonderful, stress free New Year.

Wait a minute, my email is coming in, let me just check to see….

Damn, that uh… sigh. How am I going to respond to this one. Hmm. Let me think for a second.

What? Cool. A new video about where Google is going. Let me load it up.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. This fantastic observation.

Oh, that’s the phone. Quick screen share …

I”m back. Where was I? Oh yeah.. This great idea.

What was it? Do you remember? Give me a second to get refocused.

Waitaminute…let me get that. It’s Phill.

Sorry, I’m back… just got interrupted by a phone call. But there you go…the whole morning and I still haven’t finished this damn blog posting.

Frustrated? You should be.  Think this is painful to read?  It’s painful  to write.

This is your brain. This is your brain on multitasking.

This was, I hope, a little humourous. It’s based in part on my actual morning. I left a lot of stuff out, because if I didn’t you wouldn’t have stayed this long (if you are still here) and heard the really important thing that I noticed yesterday.

I came across an article from another game changer, and I followed up on a tweet (twitter message).  The gentleman’s name was  Jeffrey Tang.  He has  blog called Beyond Freelancing (www.beyondfreelancing.com) — but don’t go there yet.  As the Buddhists say, stay in the moment.

The title of the blog (really, don’t go there yet) is “Why I’m cutting back on multi-tasking and why you should too!”. In the blog, Jeffrey discusses why he’s going to give on on multi-tasking. He claims (quite rightly) that there are three problems with multi-tasking.

1. It kills quality
2. It leads to burnout
2. It destroys productivity

He’s right. And it’s not just his opinion.

There’s a lot of proof.  In fact, I know better. I’m a practitioner of a process transformation method called  “Lean”. I’ve used it to help organizations make incredible gains in productivity, quality and reducing lead times.

But don’t take my word for it. There are a number of companies who have made Lean part of their culture. The current “poster child” for Lean is Toyota.  They’ve made Lean part of their culture.  It’s the major reason why Toyota made the leap from nowhere to leader in the auto industry. The power of Lean is that devastating.

Yes, you can whine about how cheap imports are and the whole China thing — but go to Japan.  It’s incredible expensive to live there.  Yet Toyota makes well priced, high quality cars.   How?  Lean.

Like many great ideas, Lean is very simple at it’s core. Deceptively so.  It changes the way we see our processes. In fact, the term Lean itself means “learn to see”. What do we see?

Waste.

By cutting the waste we supercharge our processes. That one little principle revolutionized the whole area of process improvement.

Don’t confuse this with the old idea of “cutting the fat” from a process. That’s usually a mistaken idea that we can take out the “frills and nice to have things” like quality and attention to customers. Lean processes have exceptional quality and focus on customer needs. In fact, what Lean terms as waste is anything that does not serve a customer need.

What is this waste?  It’s everything that you doesn’t serve the end value created for the customer.

And our processes are full of waste.  So much that we don’t see it anymore.  I use one statistic from a Lean study that showed that the average amount of time spent creating value in a creative or administrative process was close to 5%.

The rest of the time was waste.

How can there be that much waste?  We simply don’t see it anymore.  How does Lean help us see it?  It labels it.

There are a number of types of waste that Lean identifies, but one in particular is the cost of interrupting  a process.  Every time a process is interrupted, you pay a penalty which Lean calls “setup time”.

If you think about it, you know what it is.  It’s that time that you spend switching gears, getting back up to speed, getting into the zone again.

What causes that waste?  Sometimes it’s interruptions that we can’t change.  Emergencies happen. Even though Lean says, don’t interrupt a process, it’s not always possible to screen out every interuption.  But we don’t have to do it voluntarily.  And we sure don’t have to brag about it.

It affects quality as well as time.  When we multitask things take longer, we get lost, we get bored, we do the same thing over and over, we make mistakes.

So why hide it? Why this big lie about multi-tasking being more efficient? I don’t know. Why does your mind love to wander? Why do we love to procrastinate? (Why did I just check my email instead of staying with this flow?)

One reason. We don’t spot the waste. But its there. In fact, we actually feel like we are busier when we pop from item to item. But it’s a lie. You can prove it.  Remember that 95% waste in many creative processes.  I didn’t make it up.  Lean analysis confirms it.   But, c’mon — you know it.

When push comes to shove and you have a big deadline, what do you do?  Multi-task? Not a chance.

You hunker down, get focused and plow through it. Who among us hasn’t experienced that. Have you ever gone to the office on a Saturday morning when no-one else is around and blasted through a dozen items that you couldn’t get done in the regular week? Weren’t you amazed at the productivity?

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried meditation. If you have, you know that the idea is to let your mind empty out and focus on nothing.  You know what happens when you try that.  Your mind immediately fills up with all kinds of thoughts. The mind loves to wander.

Our minds are undisciplined.

When I say undisciplined, I don’t mean lazy. Far from it. In fact, we are often trying to do too much. That’s why we fall into the trap of needing to feel busy all the time. We have become so action focused that we feel guilty if we take a moment to think.

Don’t believe me? Try this test. If you walk by and someone is on the phone, would you interrupt them? Nope. What if they were sitting there quietly, thinking? Nine times out of ten, you would interrupt. Oh, you might apologize, but you’d interrupt them.

Oh but you will say, I can’t tell what the person is thinking. She might be daydreaming. Oh yeah? You often can’t tell who someone is talking to on the phone. Nope. The real answer is we don’t value thought and reflection. We value activity.

In our current age where we are inundated with email, hyperlinks offer an unending stream of trails to follow, where the leisure society went the way of the flying car — we’ve adopted a form of cultural Attention Deficit Disorder — and we’ve made a virtue of it.

Whom the gods would make unproductive, they would first make unfocused.

In fact, one reason we let ourselves fall victim to the multi-task trap is that it actually feels good (at first).  When we get under pressure, we need to feel active.  Since we don’t value planning, we do that thing we value.  Activity.  Any activity.  Even if that activity is a waste.  As long as we look busy.  As long as we are working hard.

That’s the amazing thing.  We will sacrifice real productivity in favour of activity.

Over time, our brains have become wired to insist on constant action.   But like the meditator, who finds that the minute they sit down the random thoughts happen, you can train yourself to focus on one activity at a time.

It takes time, but after a while you get more and more times of focus. If you haven’t tried this, you should.

Why? It’s fabulous to experience that feeling of refreshment when you have a few minutes when your mind is not racing around from thought to thought. When you do come back to work, you are, at least for a while – tremendously focused and productive.

Even if you don’t meditate, you know the feeling that I’m talking about.  Ever been to the office when nobody is there, no interruptions?   If you have, you’ve probably experience  that “Saturday morning feeling”.  of blasting through things.  You come in rested, you want to get out and enjoy the day, so you focus and bang, bang, bang — you are productive.

You can believe me or not. I know it works. That’s why I do my blog on Saturday mornings when I’m not interrupted every 5 minutes.

Still don’t believe me?  Try both. If you can.  You might just find that when you try to focus, you can’t do it easily.  The  habit of multi-tasking is an addiction. It’s hard to break. Like the little voice in our head when we meditate, our shorter attention span makes it more and more difficult to stay focused.

So we claim we are really more productive when multi-tasking.  “Denial,” as my friend John Thorp points out, “is not a river in Egypt.” Nope.

When confronted with changing our habitual behaviour, we rationalize or go into denial. I’ll quit after this pack kept me smoking for 20 years. It’s only when I quit before the one I was about to smoke that I actually stopped.

Same thing with multi-tasking. I drank that Kool-Aid at one time. Then I discovered, by doing some experiments, that I was kidding myself.

P.S. The first part of this blog, where I let myself get interrupted took 3 hours. The second half took about 60 minutes including the edit.  This is my brain. This is my brain when it isn’t multi-tasking.

Thanks Jeffrey.

But sometimes our experiences play tricks on us. We don’t see the real problems and the real solutions. We’ve been conditioned not to see that solutions do exist. We’ve been trained to play the game a certain way. We can only see the solutions that are “acceptable” or fit the “accepted wisdom”.

Someone once said that “for every difficult question there is a simple, direct answer. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.”

I’ve found that to be so very true. As I work with process transformation using LEAN techniques, I’ve been struck by how many times the real, lasting solutions to tough problems are counter intuitive. They go against traditional wisdom.

I’ve learned that you have to balance these contradictions. I’ve learned to do things that seemed outrageous at first but really work. You have to slow down to speed up. I’ve learned that bigger isn’t better – that you can produce more efficiently in smaller units which are produced at the rate they are consumed. I’ve learned that you have to give up control to get a disciplined regulation of an organization. Sound like nonsense to you? That’s okay. I didn’t accept half of this stuff at first.

It took me a long time to realize that biggest impediment to problem solving is the way we stick to the things we “know” and rule out new and novel solutions. We do this even when our existing solutions are what is causing the problems.

What makes it more more insidious is that we don’t even realize what we are doing this until, for the lucky few, someone comes along and shows us that the emperor has no clothes.

The problems we face are large and important. If we merely show that our current wisdom is leading us off an abyss, we have not solved the problem. We’ve created another — hopelessness. When people fell hopeless and helpless, they simply go into denial. What we need is the faith and belief that there is a solution, if only we can see it.

How do you get people to try new solutions which their whole education and all general wisdom tell them are “pie in the sky” or “dreams” or will just plain never work? I said earlier that I’ve seen the results and now I have faith. But in our scientific and logical world, faith and belief is not enough. It’s rare that any of us have the position to bring a group or an organization along solely on the basis of faith. Real leaders can sometimes do this. It takes tremendous courage.

For the rest, we need to have some proof that if we let go of our current blinders, we can find solutions to even apparently insoluble problems. Only then do we stand a chance of helping others to rid themselves of the the baggage that is obscuring the solution from their view.

The proof is out there if you want to see it. I encountered that today. I’d like to share it with you.

I saw Bill Clinton speak today. If you ever want a perspective from someone who has seen and continues to see difficult, global problems — an ex president is the place to go.

I was so amazed as he spoke so frankly of the enormity of the problems that a president sees. Clinton was amazingly candid about his perception of the world’s problems and how all of it hit his desk in his years as president. It would be – it is – easy to be crushed by the sheer weight of it all. Global warming. Genocide. Poverty. Disease. Nuclear threats. And more.

I was a little bit crushed just hearing about it all. Especially since he spoke with such candor and with such knowledge about the details and the true complexity. Some politicians make it seem that all we have to do is follow their ideology and difficult problems will go away. I remember the Nancy Reagan line for solutions to the problems with drugs and addiction — “just say no”. Someone quipped to me that her solution for the problem of homelessness would be “just get a home”.

But it sounds like such “common sense”. Remember what I said? Every complex problem has a simple solution – unfortunately, it’s wrong.

So if you want a simple, ideological solution, Clinton isn’t the speaker for you. Folksy at times, yes. But he gives us more of what I’d refer to as “complex sense”. He respects the audience enough to give them a bigger picture. No easy solutions.

No surprisingly, he talked about global warming. He pointed out that although its received very little attention, scientists are increasingly pessimistic about global warming. Where the general wisdom was that we were facing a 4 degree increase in average temperature by the end of the century, many scientists believe that we may face more than twice that – a 9 degree increase. (Farenheit) That would result in global catastrophe and a reshaping of our societies and human habitation patterns. At a minimum, our coastlines will no longer exist the way they do today. We’re not talking only about threats to low lying cities like New Orleans, or some of the islands in the world that will simply disappear. We are talking about coast lines that will be moved back, eliminating huge areas of land that will be under water. A global catastrophe equal to anything you’ve seen in one of these blockbuster disaster epics.

From there Clinton went on to talk about international conflicts. He spoke with knowledge and absolute authenticity. At one point he shared a poignant, moving confession. He felt that he could have saved hundreds of thousands of Rwandans in the genocide that went on when he was president. He pointed out as a fact, not as an excuse, that his people were blind to the problem. How does the world’s greatest intelligence gather system miss the genocide that affected close to a million people? It didn’t fit their way of seeing problems. It fell into their blinders.

All of that data, all of that information coming in. Everyone so into “group think” that they couldn’t see the problem emerging? No. I don’t believe it. I believe that the information came forward and that someone in the chain of command decided it wasn’t important. And when that happened, there wasn’t enough openness, enough leadership or enough organizational courage to challenge that sort of thinking. Hundreds of thousands of people died.

Clinton practically had me in tears. He refused to push the blame to someone else. He simply said that he’d have to live with that mistake for the rest of his life. Wow.

But if that had been all he did, I would have walked out of that room depressed. Instead, I left feeling elated. He didn’t simply rub our face in the hopelessness of global problems. He gave us some practical advice with the same power and authenticity that he conveyed in defining the problems.

He urged us not to get caught up in what defeats politicians. He said that the problem with politics is the way that they posed the questions. Politicians, he said, focus on asking “what?” and “by when?” They should be asking “how?”.

I think what he was trying to say is that when we ask the wrong questions, we can easily blind ourselves to real and creative solutions. When you are tackling a difficult problem, you have to be very careful in how you phrase the question. Each question, to some degree or other, restricts its own answer.

Then without really realizing it we are not in search of a solution, we are playing the game of admiring the problem. A game with a predictable ending. We start with optimism and end at the insurmountable problem that has defeated those before us and will now defeat us as well.

Given this repeated pattern, we can all be forgiven sometimes if we despair. How can one little person can make any real difference in this world? When someone who has been the most powerful person on the planet confesses that they have felt frustrated and powerless, it makes it even more believable.

It would be easy to throw up your hands in defeat. You could believe that the individual is dwarfed by global politics, international business, global geopolitical realities — and in the face of that, we are truly powerless.

Bill Clinton doesn’t accept that.

And bless him, he gave us some answers which proved that individuals can make a real difference – if they choose to change the game.

He gave a number of examples, but here’s one that spoke to me in particular.

We could easily say that poverty is impossible to address. We already give enormous amounts but its never enough. Is there any way to truly help people? In the midst of this never ending demand, can we really make any difference at all?

It turns out that we can – and many do. Clinton talked about a modern miracle called micro-lending. For those who don’t know about it, micro-lending focuses on loans to those who banks would never loan money to – individuals in poor regions, those in poverty, those with no assets to secure the loans.

Instead of lending massive amounts of money or aid, micro-lending lends what for us might be small or trivial amounts. But for those who receive the loan, that money is far from trivial. For them, it is the way of fulfilling a dream. lifting themselves out of poverty or changing the face of an entire community.

The classic wisdom that you need huge programs, massive amounts of money, that we need to send large contingents, that it takes organizations like the world bank to go in and tell these people how to run their economy — it turns out that this is nonsense. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a lot of cases where these macro solutions actually worked their way down to the average person on the street in terms of benefits.

Micro-lending, on the other hand has incredible and measurable results. It delivers effective solutions directly to those affected. It’s not us swooping in to help some poor unfortunate. It’s about enabling them to find their own solution.

According to Wikipedia, it’s not a new idea. It’s been around since the 18th century when Jonathan Swift inspired the Irish Load Funds. It gained world attention since the 1970′s when it was tried by organizations in Bangladesh. For those who don’t go that far back, Bangladesh was the “poster child” for poverty, with starving people, distended bellies and pencil thin limbs. The “mega solutions” were tried. Rock concerts were held. Charities showed awful pictures of starving children and brought in millions.

I don’t know how much of that (if anything) really worked. I know that people give millions and millions. How much really reaches those in need? I don’t know.

I do know that micro-lending gets right to the people in need. Why? Because you can see it directly. The money that you donate turns up in terms of loans to real people. You can see it.

I also know that in 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameem Bank for their work in developing micro-lending and in particular, focusing that on the development of Low Cost Housing.

Micro-lending works. You can prove it with hard, unbeatable facts. For one thing, the default rate is close to 0. Yes. Zero. Nada. Nothing. It’s incredible. These loans to the poorest and most disadvantaged are far, far more secure than say a load to individuals or even large companies. I’ll bet GMs bondholders would like to have place their money where it had a zero default. It’s not just a tribute to the their honest. The money truly has a return in terms of their standard of living. They can afford to pay it back.

This is not charity. These people and the small businesses that are recipients of loans pay back the principle, often with a fair although not crippling, interest rate.

A marvelous thing happens when you empower people to succeed and have high expectations of them. I saw the power of local business first hand when I worked for a wonderful guy named Jim Gowans in what was then Inco’s Indonesian mining operation. I’m not an apologist for big business. I’m talking about this leader and his team. I remember Jim Gowans focusing on local business. He pushed his staff to learn the local language. He expect the company to provide support for local businesses with its purchasing power. But he did it as a business person. If there were local businesses that could do things profitably and sustainably, he wanted to see us move heaven and earth to support them.

It wasn’t charity. It was responsible business.

Micro-lending is the same.

I’ve long been fascinated by micro-lending. To be able to do it is one of my dreams. I’ve often thought that if our business ever really took off, or if we won the lottery, that’s how I’d use that money. I dreamed of being able to one day be able to make a difference.

But I’m not the president of a huge business with millions of dollars of budget to allocate. We do well but we don’t have hundred of thousands or millions. And I haven’t won the lottery yet.

I was thinking about “what” and “by when”.

Clinton shook that apart. “Did you know,” he said, in that folksy Arkansas manner, “of a group called Kiva.org? You can be a micro-lender with as little as $25.00.”

He spelled it out clearly for us and challenged us all. You don’t have to be a millionaire or a former president. None of us can solve the entire problem. No solution is perfect. But if we all do something, the power is enormous. He pointed out that Obama’s average donor gave approximately 50 dollars. Many were poor. In the end, the Obama campaign was a juggernaut, with more than enough money to finance a great campaign.

What if we could harness that force to fund micro-lending? It turns out that we can.

I got home and checked and he was right. Kiva is a micro lender that allows an individual with as little as $25.00 to be a micro lender. You put the money in, you select the project, you get to monitor it. You pool with other individuals to create larger loans, just like banks syndicate to fund loans of a large size for them. It’s not a charity. It gets paid back and you can put it back to use again and again and again.

You can see the pictures of the people who you help. You can hear their stories. You can have a direct impact on their life.

It struck me how imaginative this business model is. It is truly a creation of the web. It adopts the networking capability, the peer to peer approach, viral marketing disciplines and leverages a web site to manage it all.

Yet there is nothing extraordinary about the technology. Nothing I could see in terms of function that couldn’t be built for next to nothing. You might even find open source programs to do most of it.

The technology is not astounding. The creativity is. A global problem. But one person can make a difference. They changed the game.

I’m sold. I’m in. I’m going to become a micro-lender. I urge you all to do it. Let me know if you do. Tell me how it works out.

So my thanks to Bill Clinton. He gave me an amazing example of technology and of social networking using a new business model. He shattered the common wisdom that one person can’t really make a difference. He showed me someone who had really changed the game.

Score one for the good guys. That was a gift for my soul.

He also left me with a business lesson These people have tackled a intractable world problem that has defeated huge governments, large organizations and others with way more resources than any of us will ever have. They did it with the same tools that are available to all of us. Our company could have built their solution on a shoe string.

But by simply changing the business model to leverage the power of technology, people and process in new ways — they issued a challenge to us all. The next time you want to complain about the recession, or your lack of resources or of how the problems you have are insoluble, it may be time to step back. Stop asking “what” and “by when” and start thinking of “how” — how you can change the game.

You can. And if you do, let me know what you did. Please. I am really interested.

So I got real value from my ticket. I learned how I could fulfil a dream and do some real good in the world. I also took away a lesson about how you can beat the world if you are willing to step away from the same old, same old and really take a creative look at solving your problems.

I got million dollar consulting advice. I’ve passed it on to you for free. Don’t thank me or pay me yet. Go and become a micro-lender for $25.00 Help some other entrepreneur. Because no matter how tight your business is, you can find that amount. It’s worth it to get the answer to so many big problems…

If you want to solve a big problem, think small. Change the game.

Thanks, Bill.

As always, I’m interested in your comments and issues.

When I first read this quote it stuck with me instantly. I remembered it days later. I had this visual image of Einstein with the funny hair and a blackboard behind him with E=MC2 written on it in chalk. The visual image made the quote even more memorable.

Isn’t it funny how a simple message can have such an impact? What would you give to be able to be that memorable to potential customers?

Why is that important? Because in this environment, can you really afford to lose even one single deal that you could have or should have gotten? Are you struggling to find those new customers in these tough times?

I’d like to suggest something that I’ve found has really worked for me. It might work for you as well. Only you can find that out for yourself. Your experience could be different. But take a second and think about this.

Two nights ago I went to see Shelle Rose Charvet speak at a meeting of the our Strategy special interest group of the Toronto CMC Chapter. Shelle said a number of amazing things, but she left me with an image that I can’t get out of my head. Actually, it was two images — but if you want the second one, you have to hear her speak. She knows what it is. I think of her talk at least once a day. It turns out that’s healthy. But even if I tried to forget it, I couldn’t. And I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday. So making me remember two things is quite an achievement!

Let’s return to that first image. Here’s what she said — I wrote it down so I’d get it exactly. It might not be perfect, I wrote it quickly, but I’m sure she will correct me if it’s not right.

Here’s what I heard.

“In order to get someone to go somewhere with you, you need to meet them where they are…”

Shelle went on to make another point. She feels that many times our real competition might not be competitors. The real thing that’s preventing us from winning the sale may be that the client has other alternatives. One of those alternatives is to do nothing. The other is to study the issue – put it off.

She suggested that we need is to find a way to convince our clients that they need us more than ever. Shelle also went on to explain why we can have the best product or service and still lose the deal. Or why sometimes our own honest enthusiasm might be working against our message! I appreciate that all of this might sound a little over the top so let me share something from my own experience.

I’ve been following Shelle’s work for a few years now. Recently I had a client who had a problem. They had a product which would legitimately save their customers money. It had added benefits as well. It offered them ways to access new services. Interestingly enough, this other product was not only good for my client’s customers, it was much more profitable for my client. So imagine how frustrating it must have been to find out that they could not convince customers to switch.

They told me that their customers preferred the first (less profitable) product. They could not be convinced to switch.

As someone who cannot resist a good problem, I wanted to see if I could help them (as Shelle would say) re-frame the issue. Or as I might call it — to change the game. I had some ideas I thought might work, and I asked them if we could do a pilot to test them out.

So here’s what we did. We stopped selling. We asked customers if we could help them. We created a script which asked customers what their needs were and we asked permission to explain the differences between the two options. We explained these options clearly and objectively (we’d prepared this well). What happened? In our tests, we converted 60 percent of the people to the cheaper, but more profitable option.

Remember that my client was convinced this wouldn’t work? the results immediately raised some skepticism. So they should. They have every right to be skeptical about results like these. It’s a good thing. And I wanted to be careful not to “oversell” this. I was clear that their results could be different in other stores, other circumstances. But I got the chance to ask a question. I got the chance to ask what benefit they would get if the results were 1/10th of what we got in the pilot?

When even the skeptics went to work on this, they had to admit to themselves that this was worth a try.

Why did this work? The underlying principles came from reading one of Shelle’s books “Words That Change Minds”. I tell people that the reason my consulting gets results is not that I have to be smarter than everyone else. I just have to be smart enough to recognize great ideas an adapt them to what I do. Shelle has given me a number of those ideas over the years in her book. So it was very rewarding for me after all these years to be able to sit in the audience and hear her talking about things that I had thought about over the years since I first discovered her book in our company library.

And as always, she was reframing the issue so I could see it in a new way. If you want to get someone to go somewhere with you, you have to meet them where they are. We did that. We got to them in the store as they were in the process of making their decision. But we knew from surveys that customers wanted to be helped, not sold. We devised this so that it was clear and helpful — no sales, we simply gave them the facts they needed to make an informed decision and invited them to make up their own minds.

If we’d started where we were, we would have been trying to convince them. Even if we were right, even if we were enthusiastic, we would have been making them even more skeptical and less likely to hear our message.

So I’ve been asking myself a question. How many times am I missing opportunities because I am not going to where my clients are? As a consultant, I fall into the trap myself. I might be good at spotting issues with clients, but missing them in my own work. My own filters might keep me from seeing myself clearly. Sometimes even the best of us need a good mirror. That’s what Shelle’s presentation was for me. And what her work has been for me over the years. It’s a chance to hold up a mirror and take a clear look at how my message is being (or not being) received. By seeing it clearly, I can remove the obstacles to my own success — in the same way that I remove them for others.

So to my friend Bob who started this out with his question this morning. If you are reading this, that’s the answer to the question you asked (half in jest) this morning. Your question was right on the money. I hope I got it right You asked, if I’d read Shelle’s book so many times, why didn’t I spot these issues earlier? Correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll fix it. (The wonderful thing about a blog!)

I might suggest suggest that I’ve done some very good work for my customers. Do you remember that famous quote from Archimedes? I think we all learned it in school. “Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

I’d like my clients to think of my services in that way. I can help them leverage what they do now and transform their efforts so they can do things they never thought possible. I can help them solve tough problems. The solutions are what they need them to be. For some, its that extra customer, for others, it’s reducing costs, for others its getting their teams to work together effectively. Some just want to hold the customers they have by building loyalty. They believe that loyal customers stick with you in tough times.

Even my business has challenges. We are a growing business and need to find new customers. Or better still, we need to convince old customers that doing nothing is not an option. I have to help them see why they need my services more than ever. This recession (or whatever it is) is changing customer behaviour. To use Shelle’s visual metaphor, it’s like clients have moved off to a different bus stop. And I can only convince them to get on the bus with me if I go to the bus stop where they are. It’s a timely message that we might all consider.

Everyone — including good consultants — need a look in the mirror from time to time. Because the world changes and our filters — the very things that help us cope with all the information out there, the things that make us successful, can actually prevent us from seeing problems clearly. Even if you are great at seeing what others need, you can still miss it for yourself. Shelle helped me once again, to reframe and see a challenge that I have.

so I came out of Shelle’s workshop with a list of notes. I’ve learned that if I want to get a lot out of an event, I have to listen carefully. Some speakers make that hard. Some make it easy to listen.

Shelle not only makes it easy, she explains how you can do that as well.

I hope I will never stop improving. So I set some goals. I will try to meet my clients where they are. I will expect them to be skeptical if I talk about all the great results that they will get. I will ask even more about their problems. I’ll remember to ask them what matters to them and why. I’ll continue a habit that Shelle taught me long ago – I’ll capture the answer in their words and not mine. I want to meet them where they are and not where I think they should be. If I can do that, I can invite them on the bus with me and we can take a journey together. That’s the type of work I think I’m good at. It’s also the type of work I love.

Thanks, Bob for raising that question. Thanks to Shelle for helping me see an issue that I can share with my friends, colleagues and readers.

Note for anyone who missed this workshop. Shelle is having two more workshops which are sponsored by CMC Canada in Toronto. Contact CMC Canada if you want more information about these workshops. Check out Shelle’s web-site if you want to find out more about her. You have to make up your own mind. All I can tell you is that her advice has helped me a lot

I wish I’d said that. I forget who did. But it knocked me for a loop. Because it is so true.

The speaker at the time was making a point about how we take one concept and use it as a metaphor to explore another new concept. We do this all the time. Because it works. Especially when we are talking about things that are unfamiliar to us. Or if we want to see something we already know in a new way.

We are working on new deal that merges several companies. We use the “marriage” metaphor a lot. It helps us a lot. Or you’ll hear the line “fences make good neighbours” — you get my drift. We’d be lost without metaphors.

Where metaphors become dangerous is where we start to think of them beyond their ability to illustrate. We confuse the two. A business partnership is LIKE a marriage in many ways. It is NOT a marriage. I have had many successful and long term business partnerships with people I didn’t even like. I can’t imagine I would have been married for 27 years in similar circumstances. It would have been laughable if our marriage prep would have talked about the rules under which we could invest in other companies. In the metaphor that is relationships, my wife didn’t want me buying shares in any other company — if you get my drift.

Sometime ago, everyone got on the genetics bandwagon. We talked about DNA of everything. We had “organizational DNA” as a metaphor for corporate culture. It works to illustrate, but it can easily lead you to some bad decisions.

Wisely used, metaphors are valuable to explain or illustrate. Badly used, they promote logical fallacies and lead to some very, very bad conclusions. This is so frequent that logicians even have a term for it. It’s called “faulty analogy.”

A case in point — multi-tasking.

Somebody the other day brought out that old chestnut — I’m more efficient when I’m multi-tasking. The truth is, no, you are not. Full stop.

The faulty analogy in this case? Everyone likes to think that multi-tasking is like parallel processing. We can somehow split our attention between many different things and do a number of things simultaneously, paying enough attention to each and thus getting many things done at the same time.

When this helps someone juggle several quick task like doing work while riding on the subway it’s useful. When you think that you can translate that into doing your email while “listening” at a meeting – no. The human brain can do several things at once, but only when operating on a subconscious level. You are enough like a computer that you can do batch and online at the same time. But two online processes — doesn’t really work well.

The fact that it feels good only reinforces the fallacy. I won’t debate the causes (others have done it) but I don’t think anyone has seriously argued that attention spans are getting longer. So staying on one thought or task from beginning to end is hard. It takes a lot of discipline for some people. In those cases, we have a perfect storm – faulty analogy meets the shortened attention span.

How do I know this? I’ve spent a lot of time adapting LEAN principles to white collar environments. For anyone who doesn’t know LEAN it’s the gold standard in process transformation. It’s the reason why Toyota overtook General Motors well before the auto meltdown.

LEAN has a concept of uninterrupted flow. A task that moves from beginning to end without interruption is more efficient. It uses less resources and time for the amount of end benefit it generates. Someone out there is madly saying — no, batch processing is faster, better, cheaper. Great. Only the true facts get in the way. Even in this down economy, who’s shares would you rather have bought 6 months ago – Toyota or GM?

If you are still resistant, don’t worry. It took me a long time to figure it out. I try to find exercises to illustrate what is a simple point:

Whenever you interupt a process you pay a penalty for setup. Setup means that
you have to stop what you are doing, put it away somewhere and then when you come back to it, you have to reorient yourself, get back up to speed and then — and only then — do you get back to performance.

How much setup time depends on the person, the task and a lot of factors. The reason why I write my blog at 3 in the morning? There are no interruptions. I can go from start to finish.

But we still claim that multi-tasking works. My son tells me he can watch TV and do homework and be on Facebook. So why did his grades improve so radically when he fell behind and we cut off his computer and TV privileges until he caught up? Coincidence?

I thought about this last night when we were in a meeting and I watched someone “listening” while they did their email. If I’d have called them on it, they would have said they were multi-tasking.

That’s the problem with the faulty analogy. You see, a computer can have several threaded processes running at once — though even on a computer there is a bottleneck where the tasks are sequentially organized in stops and starts. The big difference with a computer? The setup costs can be minimized because it can recreate the exact state that it was in before an interruption and get back up to speed in milliseconds. Even then, run enough of these interruptions and you will swamp even a big processor as we all have experienced from time to time. That “not enough system resources” message is the setup charge catching up with you.

When analogies become mythologized, they are even harder to deal with. We all think – Henry Ford, mass production, batch process … good. Even though it’s not true. So I look for examples like Toyota. I’ve found others and I keep searching for them. Why? Because most people don’t let the facts get in the way of a strongly held belief.

I find most of them by luck. For example I was trying to explain LEAN to the head of a refinery in Acton, near London U.K. I was worried because a lot of refining is batch by design. I explained the batch “myth” and waited for the usual counter argument. He didn’t make one. Instead, he took me to another area of the plant and showed me his pet project – a continuous flow refining process – one that that was many times more efficient than the old batch process. I thanked him profusely. I wanted to see a mechanical process prove that uninterrupted flow was superior — if only so I could use it to dispel the myths and faulty analogy.

But people are not machines or mechanical creations. Our setup costs are much larger. When interupted, we need time to be reoriented. The amount depends on the person and the complexity of the task. How many times have you been at a meeting and paid the “setup cost” for someone else whose attention was distracted? Or how many times have you come back to a task and had to get back “up to speed”?

We’ve cut days, literally days out of business processes by moving to an uninterrupted flow. Even IT has caught up. No one seriously does batch processes for systems anymore unless you have a legacy or you absolutely have to. And my son’s marks improved. How much more proof do you need?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not out to tell everyone what they have to do. I do resist when I or my team have to pay the setup cost for someone else.

It’s a modern world. The shortened attention span is real. The addiction to busy work versus thought and planning is real. Proof in point? I ask people this all the time. If you saw someone on the phone talking would you interrupt them? Hardly. But if you saw them sitting quietly at their desk, staring into space, would you interrupt them? For most people it’s a no-brainer. And yet, why would we assume that the phone was work and thinking wasn’t? It says something profound about our culture.

People will wax profoundly about how they are more effective when multi-tasking. So would you like it if the pilot of your plane was doing his taxes? Or if your surgeon was doing a crossword during the operation? I don’t even even like it when other people are talking on their cell phone while driving. It’s okay for me, however — I can multi-task.

Or can I? So why is that when I get to the end of a day and I felt like I hadn’t gotten anything done I would explain it as having fallen victim to the dreaded “got a minute?”

We aren’t going to stop the interrupt driven nature of our lives because I write a blog about it or even if I’ve held a workshop. But I can help reduce it, even a little, it’s worth it. if we could improve by 10 percent – what would that do? The results would be significant. LEAN thinking puts cycle efficiency (the amount of real value in a process) at between 5 and 25 percent. Increase it by a small factor and you get amazing results.

But the first step is admitting there is a problem. I have my own private 12 step program for low attention spans. Because I suffer from it too. That might be the REAL reason I write this at 3 in the morning. Maybe I paid so much setup cost this week that I have to work harder than I want to.

But if I can break this faulty analogy and make more of my tasks into uninterrupted flows, I could gain back some of that efficiency. If I did it enough times it might become a habit. Heck, it could even become part of our organizational DNA.