A Second Guitar Lesson: The Six Month Rule

What happens if there’s not enough time to do this?

This post is about the neuroscience of learning. And I will get to that. But first, a brief interlude about delays, stops, and starts. Jinxed by my last blog entry about learning the guitar, I just went through a month when I really didn’t practice. Three weeks of being super-busy, then Thanksgiving holiday week travel when I couldn’t bring the instrument.

Delays can be fatal when you’re trying to make a change or when—like me—you’re trying to learn a new skill. It’s pretty easy to find examples of projects and change efforts that were delayed in an attempt to kill them off, as far back as ancient Rome and as recently as the Wall Street reforms under Dodd-Frank.

So what does a delay mean for learning a new skill? Maybe something like my slowly developing musical dexterity? Studies in neuroscience, and specifically neuroplasticity, suggest that it all depends on how long you’ve been at it. There’s pretty good evidence that once you’ve been working on a new skill for more than six months, your brain is much more tolerant of delays.

Guitar Lesson: No Such Thing as a One-Way Door

I’m learning to play guitar. Definitely a humbling experience. While I’ve gotten to the point of plucking a few melodies that I actually recognize (who knew Beethoven’s Ode To Joy would be fun played on a cheap folk guitar?), about half the few chords I play sound like dying cats.

As a child, my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to do something musical. So, I chose the trumpet. (I think I saw the instrument on TV somewhere.) I spent about five years going to trumpet lessons and at times pretending to practice so my mother wouldn’t nag me. Despite all my puckering in the mouthpiece, it just never sounded that good.

For many years, I’ve wished I’d learned to play the guitar as a kid instead. But there was an essential trap in my thinking. In my mind, deciding on something besides the guitar all those years ago was like a one-way door. Once I had gone through, I could never go back. The fact that I hadn’t learned guitar back then meant it would never happen. I could even think of all the reasons why: Kids learn to play instruments so much easier than adults, I could never hope to reach a high level of proficiency, I didn’t feel like I had time for lessons and practicing, and on and on from there.

Capsized: Learning From a Crisis

Something to hold onto

If you had asked me a month ago what I would do during a potentially disastrous boating accident, I would have probably said: “Panic. Definitely panic.” Well, it turns out I’m wrong.

During a weekend with friends on the Connecticut coast, I made a series of mistakes that left me in a small, tipsy kayak, separated from my kayaking partners, trying to paddle home while fighting rising winds and waves with whitecaps. That’s when I sagged sideways into a wave and capsized. Out of the boat, I began bobbing up and down 100 or 200 yards out from an inlet. My life jacket – an old model powered by compressed air – failed to inflate. So I grabbed onto the kayak with one hand, casting about for what to do with the other. My flip flops floated away as I grabbed my orange baseball cap out of the water (easier to spot me from a distance). I also took hold of the paddle, which was just beginning to drift away.

That’s when things could have gotten really bad.

Dropping the Fiction of Multitasking

While I like variety in my work, I’m a lousy multitasker. I’m at my best doing one thing at a time. Plus I need to build in a quick pause when I shift my brain from one kind of task to another.

Those characteristics should make me precisely the wrong kind of person to thrive in the modern working world. We’re told in a variety of ways that being able to multitask is the norm. You should be able to write memos while perusing a research report and checking email. It’s hard to have a meeting and not hear the click, click of people texting while they’re listening. And it’s hard to find a job posting that doesn’t ask for someone who is a multitasker (in addition to being a self-starter and entrepreneurial)

Well, multitasking is a crock.

Financial Crimes: One Reason There's No Justice at Justice

Three years after the financial crisis, not one of the big financial sleezemeisters that created the subprime mortgage machine has gone to jail. Plenty of people have lamented this basic fact. Sure, complicated financial crimes can be hard to prove, and weasel’s like this guy have money, but it’s hard to see that as much of an excuse. One major factor – one that doesn’t really get a lot of attention – is that the way prosecutors organized themselves to investigate the crimes set them up to fail.

Here’s how it worked: Despite the fact that the Southern District of New York (think Wall Street) had the most experience ferreting out accounting fraud, the Department of Justice basically handed out big cases as plums to different U.S. attorneys offices. Countrywide (the shady mortgage company now owned by Bank of America) went to Los Angeles; Washington Mutual went to Seattle, A.I.G. went mainly to Washington. Even Lehman Brothers was split like a pie with the Southern District getting just one slice. According to George Packer of the New Yorker:

Given the targets in question – huge banks, well-insulated executives, intricately structured financial products, tens of millions of knotty documents – it’s unlikely that a federal prosecutor’s office, staffed by generalists and operating under standard procedure, which is to wait for cases to come in, could have made serious headway.

What the Department of Justice needed to do was organize itself as a knowledge-based organization rather than merely an investigating organization. Knowledge-based organizations put a premium on building up knowledge in core areas that they know will be critical to their success, and then develop systems to share that knowledge. (This field is sometimes called knowledge management.)

Measurement Has Its Limits: The Cookie-Radish Effect

 No willpower needed

I recently wrote about how measuring your own activity, using something as simple as a stopwatch in the shower, can pay off big time in behavioral change. (It can speed you up on tasks you tend to do slowly.) That said, I’ve recently run into a few people who take that concept much further. They schedule tasks for themselves in 10-minute intervals and constantly check to see whether they’re on time and on task. I’ve even talked to one colleague who suggested I do something similar.

Yikes! I can’t imagine being a slave to the stopwatch in that way. But I want to have a clearer reason why such a thing makes no sense for me. Something more than it just doesn’t feel right. So here it is:

When you force yourself to do something that takes a lot of effort or willpower, what you are actually doing is using the rational part of your brain (the part that handles executive functioning) to take over from the more emotional and instinctive part of your brain (the part that wants to do what feels right). Well, there’s a lot of research that suggests that most people have rational effort/willpower in limited quantities. Use too much of it and you’ll begin to run out.

Measurement Drives Behavior, Even in the Shower

A tool for behavioral change?

Sometimes lasting change comes from very small adjustments… and a little understanding of how our brains are wired.

My natural pace in the morning is slow. I’m one of those people who always seems to take a good long time picking out clothes, showering, getting dressed, etc. And this used to make me late a lot. But in the past year, I’ve turned the situation around. The new element: wearing a waterproof watch with a stopwatch function.

By starting the timer when I step into the shower, I’ve completely changed my dynamic. I haven’t made any conscious effort to speed up (seriously, none), but that’s what has happened anyway. The only effort has been to look at my watch from time to time. That’s where my brain’s wiring takes over. It can’t see a sequence of times, day in and day out, without looking for patterns. I developed a pretty good idea for how long I should take at the various tasks: showering, toweling off, getting dressed, coming down to breakfast, etc. (A five-minute shower is about average, and eight minutes is slow.) Now I can’t help noticing when I take longer than usual; I find myself taking corrective action without much thought. Slow at one step, and suddenly I speed up at my other tasks. Now, when I have everything laid out the night before, the whole sequence of getting out of bed and out the door is less than 25 minutes.

There’s a basic idea that underlies this change: Measurement drives behavior. Just by the act of measuring something and paying attention to the results, people begin to change what they do. This idea is critical in the business and management world. But there’s no reason it can’t work at the level of personal change, too. The hard part is picking the right things to measure and getting the whole process started. That seems to be what’s going on with my morning stopwatch. Looking at a timepiece was not hard to turn into a habit. 

Bin Laden: Leaders Get One Transformation

He couldn't transform
Al Qaeda twice

There is an old adage that a visionary leader of an organization typically has one major transformation in him, but it’s unlikely that the leader will be able to transform the organization a second time. (It’s an adage that’s particularly common in nonprofit circles.)

Osama bin Laden helped Al Qaeda transform from an organization that essentially carried out its own terrorist acts (9/11, Kenya bombing, etc.) to an organization that acted largely through a group of affiliates (Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Jemaah Islamiyah, etc.) This change was a necessary one, given how much pressure the terror group’s central leadership was under after 9/11 from the continued hunt, drone strikes and the like from the United States and its allies. But it was also a smart transformational move by Bin Laden. To an extent, this shift allowed Bin Laden’s central Al Qaeda leadership to continue to push for attacks against the U.S. and its allies, and get credit for attacks that the central Al Qaeda leadership didn’t actually coordinate.

But Bin Laden didn’t have a second transformation in him.

Puerto Rico Part II: The Engineer Turned Forest Ranger

In my previous post I introduced Frank, who was our guide in the El Yunque rain forest in Puerto Rico. As Lani and I walked along a rain forest path, Frank talked plants and wildlife and then about bits and pieces of his background. Here’s what we learned:

Frank was born in Puerto Rico, but moved to the continent (that’s how many Puerto Ricans refer to the mainland United States) when he was young. You can still hear the remnants of a New York accent in his throaty voice. After high school, he joined the Air Force and was posted with NATO in Europe. He married his high school sweetheart and things went along smoothly. He studied electrical engineering, something that served him well when he left the service. He moved to Puerto Rico where he began working for a large computer manufacturer. He eventually helped the company develop factories that built things like main frame computers – you know, those large, clunky pieces of electronics that existed in the Stone Age, i.e., before advent of the PC. (At one time, tax incentives led a large number of electronics companies to run factories on the island.)

In a matter-of-fact way, Frank told us that his wife died of cancer in the early 1990s. Although he didn’t say the words, I suspect Frank had a nervous breakdown. Frank couldn’t work. He just shut himself off.

“I was depressed, I thought it was all over. I just didn’t want to go on,” Frank explained to us.

Puerto Rico Part I: Rare Finds in a Rain Forest

Lani and I were recently visiting some of her family in Puerto Rico and managed to spend a few days in a mountainous tropical rain forest called El Yunque. (It’s a national forest.) We hiked around verdant landscapes populated with giant ferns, tree frogs, and climbing vines and scrambled our way across mountain streams feeding into waterfalls.

El Yunque is also where we met Frank, shown at right (last name omitted to protect his privacy). A longtime electrical engineer, Frank had a personal crisis that initially dragged him down but ultimately led him to a life as a park ranger, something he’s done now for 15 years. “I work as close to heaven as you can get,” he says.

Frank will be 72 this year, though in person he looks a decade or two younger. (The light breezes of the mountains and Frank’s obvious gusto for his constant level of physical activity probably has something to with it.) He does a whole set of ranger-y tasks: trail maintenance, guiding visitors, search and rescue, etc. He roams around with a wide-brimmed hat, a hand-carved walking stick he made himself, and a necklace with a large ivory-looking tooth on it. A few times a day, he leads short hikes for visitors starting about two thirds of the way up the main mountain. Lani and I were lucky enough to get him all to ourselves on a slow afternoon. We wandered with him under the variegated canopy.

Less Taxing To Do Lists: A Self-Justification

I have a quirky way of making to do lists. As you’d expect, I include all the complicated things I need to get done by breaking them down into simpler steps. But I also make sure to include super-basic items that take almost no effort, as well as a few that I’ve already completed and can check off without actually doing anything. For some reason, the list looks less daunting this way.

Here’s an example. I’ve been slogging through my taxes over the past couple of weeks, and I made a point of writing in really easy items along with all the important complicated stuff. Things like gathering up the W-2 forms that came in the mail from our employers and creating the pile of tax-related receipts I will eventually need to deal with. I even gave myself kudos for filling out the cover page of a tax organizer from the accountant we work with. Of course there are other to do items that make my brain sputter and fizzle. (Itemizing? Ack!)

Lani finds the odd mélange in my to do lists amusing, but now I’ve found some scientific backup. It even has a fancy, scientific-sounding name. It’s called the endowed progress effect.

Update From the Office Disaster Zone

There’s an old adage in the consulting world that execution is more important than planning. The world is full of fantastic plans that just sit on a shelf covered with dust. But even an uninspired plan, if well-executed, can amount to progress.

Looking around my office at the moment, there’s an element of that consulting lesson to be seen. When I first started this blog, one of my goals was simply to clean up my space. I wanted to remove the towering piles of paper, magazines, envelopes, file folders and other sedimentary layers that have built up on the floor, my desk, my side table, the filing boxes, and just about everywhere else. My plan was to focus at a manageable level: sorting the mess in a quick and dirty way without getting to caught up in any individual item. A couple of months later, there has been some progress, but I’ve lost a lot my original momentum. But rather than harp on what’s gone wrong, here's a quick inventory of what has gone right:

• I can see some of my rug (seriously, that’s a major improvement)
• I have a big box of stuff to file, and I’ve gotten rid of three bags of trash/recycling
• I’ve hunted down some unexpectedly large dust bunnies that had been hiding out
• I found lots of stuff: From the useless (five-year-old bank statements), to the useful (a binder from a seminar I once took on grant writing), to the exciting (a list of the salsa dance moves I learned for my wedding)

The piles are smaller, but plenty is still there. So, I think I’ll call this a partial success. (OK, maybe a very partial success.) Time to build on what’s worked so far.

Game Changing

It's no easy thing to radically alter how people perceive the tasks that they do. But I recently came across a very basic, powerful example: a former colleague of mine, techie columnist Chris O’Brien, signed his kids up for an online game, Chore Wars, that turns their chores into a warriors-and-monsters role play. Chores are labeled as adventures that enable the kids to gather gold pieces and fight all sorts of nasties. Chris’ eight-year-old son Liam took on the persona of a bearded hunter named ElZorro Bernardo, who carries a sword and fights basilisks.

These days, when my son wakes up, he says, "Dad, I've got to do my "Chore Wars." He often wanders into the living room to fetch the laundry I folded the night before and then heads to the dishwasher to empty it. All without a nudge from me... When I notice [my kids] haven't done a chore, I'll open the full dishwasher, for example, and tell them, "Cool, looks like I get to claim 'Chore Wars' points for the dishwasher." They'll come running over and intercept me before I can start unloading.

In one sense, this isn’t surprising at all. Kids love games, so why shouldn’t a game get them motivated to do chores? In another sense, it’s amazing. (Seriously, it's amazing!) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen my five-year-old nephew have a tantrum when he’s asked to clean up his toys. And any amount of threats or rewards (“you can’t have dessert until you clean up”) don’t seem to make a difference.

Making Haste Slowly—An Organizational Lesson from Plants

John Trexler takes the long, long-term view

Normally I wouldn’t expect an obscure botanical garden 40 miles outside of Boston to yield up some perspective shifting wisdom, but maybe I just don’t hang with trees often enough. An ever-so-brief break in the nasty winter weather recently led Lani and I to join some friends at a place called Tower Hill that sits on a hillside overlooking forests and a lake. It's a place that thinks about things in half-century increments.

Tower Hill has a bunch of botanical buildings with peaked roof that house orange trees, tropical plants and other inviting stuff. There’s a 200-year old farm house, and formal gardens with spouting fountains, that extend along the spine of a hill. The place’s motto is “make haste slowly” (or festina lente for Latin hounds). And taking a tour led by the head honcho of the place, a prickly 59-year-old named John Trexler, I began get an idea why. Instead of just pointing out what was there, he constantly talked about how the place would look 15 years down the road. That building would be replaced, over here a quadrangle would be complete, saplings would become full trees, and a row of small shrubs would become a thick wall of green.

The King’s Speech: Perspective Shifting

People of all sorts have a tendency to take one aspect of themselves and treat it like it’s their whole self. It’s a kind of psychological shorthand. Someone says “I’m an engineer” rather than “I work in engineering,” or “I’m a soldier” rather than “I’m in the military.” But this thinking is a tremendous millstone for people who have to confront serious challenges in their lives. Example numero uno is Bertie (Colin Firth in the recent film The King’s Speech), a.k.a. Albert Frederick Arthur George, the Duke of York, and much later, King George VI.

As portrayed in the movie, Bertie’s label for himself is ineffectual stutterer. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t splutter and stammer in almost any social situation or when he wasn’t utterly terrified of his father and of not living up to his royal responsibilities. He has tried various treatments, all of which failed. And he has become convinced that a stutterer is just what he is and what he always will be.

The perspective shift comes after a trick demonstrated by Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) that allows Bertie to hear a recording of himself reading a passage from Shakespeare with no stuttering at all. That’s when Bertie’s self-label begins to get fuzzy. He can see Bertie the man and the stammering he suffers from as two distinct things.

Reframing, Part III: Practicing the Reframing Process

I've been writing about the process of reframing: redirecting your attention to the motivational and enlivening aspects of what you’re planning on doing, and defining problems you encounter as incidental challenges rather than barriers.

So how do I put this reframing idea to work? I’m going to use the process of writing blog posts to practice it.

I'm reframing my writing process to make it less stressful

Reframing, Part II: Reframing and the Barrier Reflex

I recently wrote about Paul Miller—the self described one-armed dwarf who was one of the most resilient and upbeat people I’ve ever met. Now, a few months after his death, I’ve had a chance to think about some personal change lessons to take from him.

I’m something of a worrier by nature, a glass-half-empty type. When I think about trying something new, my initial reaction is to focus on the barriers that stand in my way. I call this the barrier reflex. The barrier reflex is a knee-jerk, unconscious response that can make it hard to get motivated, hard to get moving, and hard to get out of first gear.

One way past the barrier reflex is through reframing. This is a way of changing the meaning you make of the situation by redirecting where and how you focus your attention.

Reframing, Part I: Eulogy for a "One-Armed Dwarf"

Looking at a situation from a wholly new angle is a powerful technique for change—something psychologists call cognitive reframing. I’ve seen many examples. One that sticks with me came from Paul Miller. In this post, I’ll give one piece of his story, the part that I witnessed. In the next post, I’ll explore some reframing Paul seemed to do so effortlessly that I didn’t really understand it was happening until much later.

Paul Miller

The first time I met Paul was at the dinner table at my cousin’s house in Washington, DC. Paul, who was a little over 4 feet tall, was wearing khakis and a maroon knit shirt with one empty sleeve. He seemed like an inquisitive, upbeat guy who happened to be working crazy hours at the White House while staying in my cousin’s guest room. (Paul’s wife and kids were in Seattle, where had been working as a law professor.) He also fumbled with his food, just a bit. He talked about the foibles of working in the White House office that deals with job vacancies and political appointees—a dicey and complicated business. One day was the day to look for possible Hispanic appointees, another day was African Americans. But he didn’t seem too impressed with himself. Neither his dwarfism nor his missing limb came up at all. (He did talk about the convoluted process he needed to go through to give his daughters, when they came to visit from Seattle, access to the White House playground built for the Obama girls.)

What I didn’t learn until later was that Paul’s arm had been amputated only two weeks before.

Paul was learning to redo everything in his life one-handed without betraying any frustration or changing hi demeanor. He didn’t miss work. He’d been flying home to Seattle every few weeks to get chemotherapy to treat the tumor in his arm. And until the amputation, most colleagues had no idea what was going on.

Alex the Chocolate Alchemist

Alex and an old chocolate roaster

Taza Chocolate is to regular chocolate what a nutty seven-grain bread is to white bread. It has a slightly grainy texture, depth, and a certain hint of fruitiness.

I think of Alex Whitmore, the driving force behind Taza, as a chocolate alchemist. He never set out to be a chocolatemaker, though. Alex got his degree in anthropology in 1999. Rather than work for a dot-com like many classmates, he worked as a yacht captain, sailing Walter Cronkite's 60-foot sailboat up and down the East Coast. Later, he moved to Portland, Oregon, where he waited on tables. That’s where he hit rock bottom – not knowing what to do with himself

I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was living with college buddies. I was totally depressed. The gray and rain of the winters destroyed me.

Alex became a licensed sky diver, earning money stuffing parachutes into packs. Then it was back to Boston, where he managed a fleet of cars for ZipCar. Then he briefly lived in Chile, where he taught English and rode for a semi-professional bike racing team.

Building a WikiLeaks That Would Last

I recently argued that while WikiLeaks' activities may be decentralized, it appears that its leadership under Julian Assange is not, and that makes the organization vulnerable. So, how might you build a better WikiLeaks?

Make it look more like Al Qaeda.

Given the controversial nature of its activities and the tendency to make powerful enemies, you’d need a WikiLeaks that could function well even when one or more pieces or people were out of commission. WikiLeaks would be better off if there were actually multiple WikiLeaks organizations. For example, WikiLeaks could be a network of regional groups unified by common goals, principles, and shared methods for doing the work, but functionally independent. In organizational parlance, this is what’s called an affiliate network, and it’s common in the nonprofit world and among social movements. Contrast an affiliate network with a branch structure where there are multiple locations that are wholly controlled by a central entity, kind of like McDonalds or Starbucks. (There's plenty of research about how affiliate models can best be used.)

This Lesson on Nonprofit Leadership Brought to You By MLK

How can you fix a rudderless organization without bringing in a real leader? In the nonprofit world, you can't.

It hasn’t gotten much front page treatment, but the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—Martin Luther King’s civil rights group—appears to be close to the end. There have been years of mismanagement, a lack of direction, some hanky-panky with funds, and a board rift that sent two board factions to court trying to decide which was the real one. After a judge ruled last year who was in charge, the plan was for Bernice King, MLK’s daughter, to become president. Well, now there’s a rift between the newly empowered board and King. Apparently she doesn’t want to be a figurehead, and the board wants to be in charge. I don’t necessarily think King was the SCLC’s savior. (MLK’s children have a pretty sketchy leadership history.) But I do know that in the nonprofit world, you never see a turnaround without a strong leader at the center. And interference from meddlesome boards is one of the main ways leadership is thwarted.

Why does leadership matter so much in the nonprofit world? In the for-profit world, making money is all that matters. There are many cases of mediocre business leaders turning around a company and managing to make money. (The history of U.S. car companies is full of these kinds of CEOs.) The typical nonprofit exists to address a social problem or serve a population (one place it can fail); it has to engage allies in addressing its core issues (a second place it can fail); it also has to please funders and monetary supporters (another place it can fail); and it has to keep mission-oriented employees engaged (yet one more place it can fail). That's a lot of things for a good leader to address, and virtually impossible to do successfully with weakness at the
center. 

Why WikiLeaks Won’t Make It From Here to There

Whether you agree or disagree with what WikiLeaks is up to these days, from an organizational perspective the group has a whiff of failure about it. Strangely enough, the champion of decentralized leaks to expose the world’s secrets seems too centralized around one person—Julian Assange—to be a lasting player once Assange is out of the picture.

WikiLeaks has explained where it’s trying to go:

Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth.

So how is Assange undermining this purpose? For an organization as controversial and dangerous as WikiLeaks to really last, its long-term aspirations can’t be dependent on a single person. Yet if you believe the New York Times (de facto WikiLeaks ally), Assange’s behavior makes it all about him. He’s the face of the organization, the guy who says he likes crushing the bastards, who lives undercover and constantly under threat of arrest or worse. And a thorough look at Assange's essays makes it pretty clear that the WikiLeaks founder has his own agenda, one that extends much farther than just exposing important secrets. He wants to make it impossible for governments or pieces of governments (Assange calls these conspiracies) to function by providing a constant torrent of leaks that prevent them from doing anything in secrecy.

Pretending To Be Adventure Boy: A Trip in a Blizzard (Part II)

Stopping in the ghostly arch

Day two of our trip to the Berkshires began with the blizzard still howling and virtually no visibility. We trudged our way over to the Mass MoCa complex, occasionally stumbling into snow drifts. (Luckily the museum did not close for the day, merely opened late.)

Mass MoCa is housed in a 19th century brick mill complex along a river. It has space for some of the largest museum art installations I’ve ever seen. They’re so big that the museum doesn’t keep most of them permanently. It rotates each art exhibition space around once a year. We first passed through a gallery of some vaguely creepy pieces covered with silk roses in dark wax and preserved peacocks hanging on a dead tree. Then up the stairs to something utterly surprising: a 150-foot-long gallery crossed by dozens of fishing filaments lit to create an arc of light points above a phantom tunnel. Wow. (The piece, Re-projection: Hoosac, by Tobias Putrih, echoes a local train tunnel known for its ghosts.)

Pretending To Be Adventure Boy: A Trip in a Blizzard (Part I)

Getting going to beat the snow

When it comes to braving extreme weather, I start thinking in a voice not so different from my grandmother: “There’s a storm coming? Snow? Wind? A blizzard? Why would you leave the house, Bubelah?”

So, should Lani and I drive across the state to the Berkshires on a day when there was a big ol’ blizzard warning? At least two different times—night before and morning of—we nearly said no. But it was 9 a.m. and the snow was just falling lightly. The main event wasn’t due until midday. We decided to act like hardy New Englanders (even though we’re really wimpy New Englanders) and get on the road. The grandmother part of me insisted that we pack plenty of food and add a snow shovel to our luggage, just in case.

The result: We zipped out of Boston and outran the storm for a good part of the day.

Not Getting There—Spammer Style

For a con artist, the old-fashioned pursuit of lucre could be a life-changing event...especially if it involves messages from an old flame and a sprinkling of Tuscany-inspired love poems.

If you’re someplace where you can let out a guffaw or two, check out this email interchange between a would-be conner and UK-based theater writer/director James Veitch. This con artist missed a few of the key rules of the trade (yes, there are rules of the trade), including the concept of a quick exit. I can’t remember the last time I got three full-throated cackles out of a New York Times piece.

[Photo courtesy of DitB]

"Just Show Up": The Uncle Paul Principle

Paul's focus shifted from the law to music composition

My Uncle Paul has a music studio set up in his house. The room is populated with drums – djembes, congas, snares, bass drums, and high hats. It’s also full of recording equipment he uses to compose his own music, meticulously assembled from samples and remixed with a computer and soundboard. Right now he has multiple albums – based on world beat, jazz, latin fusion, and whatever else suits his fancy – for sale through iTunes and other online services. What fascinates me is not where he is now but how he got there. Once he was a lawyer in Pittsburgh who dabbled in music; now he’s a musician who dabbles in law. That transition took more than 30 years. But it started with something pretty simple – just showing up.

A Crack in the Door in Congress? Looking for a Evidence of a Shift

I was once hired to help a group of organizations work together after years of squabbling and rivalry. The goal was to convince the organizations, which focused on similar mental health issues, to communicate smoothly, stop competing for money, and spend less time stepping on each other’s toes. Oh, and this had to be done through a two-day workshop. Yup, totally impossible.

All I could do was open the door a crack for the executives involved to change the way they related to one another. I helped them identify some shared motivations for the work they do. Then we used those motivations to generate just a few modest projects they agreed to pursue together—projects that allowed them to model behavior they might hope to repeat in the future.

So, can such a change happen with the partisan rancor Washington?

Uh, I have no idea. But I know what kind of evidence to look for. Does the door open a crack? Does something happen that causes rival sides to talk in terms of shared emotions and motivations? Much as some may wish it, I doubt the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is such an event. But it has some of those elements. (Members of Congress rallying around a colleague, hoping to turn down the rhetoric level that leads nut cases to think violence is OK.) Do influential politicians on both sides of the aisle start to focus on a few shared goals – no matter how modest? We’ll see.

Resolutions To Change: Small Movement vs. Willpower

The Wall Street Journal regularly does stories about New Year’s resolutions, including this one. (Here’s the same reporter at it a year ago.) My problem is that these stories make it seem like the New Year is the one time to change. Not true, of course. But Sue Shellenbarger does put her finger one key fallacy—thinking that force of will is what will make change stick:

Most people get stuck thinking willpower is the answer. In a survey of 1,134 adults released last month by the American Psychological Association, willpower was the top reason people cited for failing to make positive changes.

But in fact, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that helps you impose your will, especially when choosing among multiple options, can easily get tired out. Relying on continuous brute psychological force doesn’t make a good foundation for change.

Ira Glass — On Being Wrong

The fear of being wrong leads people to resist change. Then again, the state of actually being wrong is a big reason why people (and organizations) change. I’m fascinated by people who are willing to talk about their own wrongness and how they got past it.

Through an interview on Slate.com, you can see that the career of NPR’s Ira Glass was initially a tale of his dogged persistence in the face of his own incompetence. Glass used an extreme version of the Uncle Paul Principle ("Just Show Up"); he spent a decade showing up in radioland despite a total lack of outside encouragement. He burrowed his way step-by-step into skills needed for audio storytelling.

Everybody has a drama, a struggle that they went through, and for me it was turning myself from somebody who wasn't any good at this thing into somebody who's really, really good at it. I was a great intuitive story editor from the start, but writing, interviewing, performing on the radio—I was just terrible at all of that. All through my 20s, my parents were like, "Why are you doing this?" I wasn't making any money, and I was so bad at it. I was 19 when I started at NPR and I was 27 or 28 before I could competently put together a story that I had written. All that time, I just stubbornly pushed toward this thing because I thought it would work out in some form. I was right about that, but I was wrong about pretty much everything along the way.

New Year Brings Change to Government's Day-to-Day Managers, Not Just Top Dogs

We are asking for a lot from our government leaders right now: Help us out of this economic mess. Cut budgets. Create jobs. Keep essential services.

Governors and mayors act as communicators and direction-setters, creating a vision for where they are trying to lead both the people they govern and the government bureaucracy. They also act as managers, with responsibility for overseeing day-to-day activities by a range of people and departments. It’s rare that you find someone at the top who is able—or has the time—to do both roles. Businesses often have the same problem, which is why companies frequently have one person who is the president or CEO, and someone else who handles the day-to-day, usually with a title like chief operating officer (COO).

In companies, when things go off the rails, it can be as much a problem with execution as with vision. For example, Lehman Brothers was sunk by all the crazy maneuverings and risk that it took on to carry out what originally seemed like a basic vision—to be a leading Wall Street investment bank.

So shouldn’t there be a lot more scrutiny of the COO-types in the public sector? These are people with titles like chief of staff, deputy director, deputy secretary, deputy mayor, etc. The new year is bringing more than 20 new state governors, hundreds of mayors, and multiple changes at key federal departments and the White House. That means just as many new COO-types managing day-to-day execution at a time when the consequences of missteps are magnified.

Personal Change: The Role Dark Chocolate

I’m a dark chocolate guy. I like its depth, its round feel in the mouth. The sweet and slightly bitter combined. I didn’t set out to write a blog about shifts in perspective; I set out to write about chocolate. Over the past decade, there’s been an explosion of high-end artisanal chocolate-makers: people who are meticulous about getting involved in every piece of the chocolate production process – starting with close contacts with cocoa growers to machinery that lets you make chocolate in small, minutely adjusted batches. (They remind me of craft-brewed beer, only earlier in the cycle.)

My brainstorm was to explore the personalities in the world of artisanal chocolate through a sort of travel narrative. So, I talked to a lot of people and tried a lot of chocolate. What I found in almost every case was that the people who came to the world of artisanal chocolate started out doing something completely different. They were yacht captains, musicians, golf course managers, and engineers. Something just happened to each one of them on the way to wherever they were going that shifted their perspective. In future posts, I’ll tell some stories about individuals behind companies such as Taza Chocolate, Black Mountain Chocolate, and Bittersweet Café.

New Year's Resolutions: White House Edition

President Obama and some key staffers are planning out a White House reorganization. It’s partly in response to the Republicans holding more power in Congress and the impending re-election campaign. That said, the reorganization plan appears to have an awful lot of goals, some of which are, well, insanely broad. Parsing the New York Times, here are just a few:

• Get fresh perspectives from outside the White House echo chamber
• Streamline operations and reduce bureaucracy
• Improve internal communication
• Maximize the power of the executive branch
• Modernize the White House (whatever that means)
• Better seize opportunities available in divided government
• More effectively use the White House bully pulpit

Hmm.. it seems like you'd need the MVP of reorganization plans to do all that in one fell swoop.

[Photo courtesy of Elen Uska at http://www.flickr.com/photos/9590458@N03/3669948882/]

Learning to Change While Cleaning a Disaster Zone (aka my office)

Clear guidance for sorting crap

I am a horizontal filer. The desk in my office mainly exists as a repository for papers. So does my side table. So does the floor, for that matter. Pretty much every surface, in fact. (There’s enough stuff buried there to take core samples.) It’s not that I like it that way. It’s that I always seem to be busy, and the idea of cleaning up that whole place has been far too daunting to get started.

I know the big goal here. The question is, can I come up with a simple structure that lets me feel like I’m making progress from the very beginning, even if that progress will be slow? So here comes my first change principle: Keep it simple.

The most likely way for me to get bogged down is to try to file each thing in its proper place as I get to it. (This is a trap I’ve fallen into during several previous – and short-lived – attempts to clean the disaster zone.) My wife has a piece of advice to keep me focused at the right level: “Don’t try to find a cure for cancer buried in there somewhere; you just want to see the rug again.” The best way to keep it simple is to choose a few categories and just sort it at the top level. Get rid of the obvious junk, pile up the stuff for immediate action, and another pile for things that can wait. It amazed me how quickly I got rid of a huge volume of stuff. Not that I’m done yet, but the movement is palpable. I’ll check in on this project down the line and see if I can keep up the momentum.