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.