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.