If Visualisation Guaranteed Success, There Would be Six Billion of Us on This Planet©

If success was all about setting positive and precise goals developed through visualisation, developing appropriate strategies and taking actions, couldn’t we all attain what we want? I could teach these principles and practical steps to thousands of people, but not everyone will act on these, and act consistently. You can wish for a thing, but you are only ready for it when you believe that you can achieve this. The state of mind must be belief, not simply hope or wish.

I have used the visualisation technique for several years now with hundreds of people in training and consulting work with clients, and have come across scores of sincere hard working people who would say that they find it hard to visualise, or the picture they see in their mind is not that bright and clear and inspiring. When we unearth the reasons, these generally boil down to some of the values or limiting beliefs they have. Some months ago I was coaching a consultant friend of mine who had set clear goals for his business, but it simply wasn’t moving fast enough. The consulting work he does involves quite a lot of travel away from home. Although he enjoys travelling and the kind of work he undertakes, we discovered as we dug deeper that his strong family values had actually made him sometimes unhappy with his work, although consciously he (in agreement with his wife) has always tried to ignore this conflict between his family values and work demands as unimportant. But somewhere in the back of his mind this did persist, and whenever his creative mind tried to visualise the future, his mind’s eye just refused to engage.

Values are like emotional hot buttons that drive our behaviour. They are what we value as important in our lives. All of us regard values like ‘success’, ‘freedom’, ‘security’, ‘love’ and ‘happiness’ very differently. And it is the way we internally rank these values that determine the kinds of choices we make, and the actions we take. Some might value material success over spiritual, while others might simply concentrate on their spiritual well-being. Once we identify the specific value(s) that drive us and acknowledge them, we can craft strategies that support these values, rather than strategies and values working in opposition to each other.

Beliefs fall into a different category, especially when these become self-limiting. When people don't believe a goal is possible (like passing the driving test, for example), they feel hopeless. And when people feel hopeless, they don't take the appropriate action. A person may also believe that a goal is possible for others to achieve, i.e., people can pass driving tests, but not possible for herself. When the person believes she doesn't have what it takes to succeed, you'll typically find a sense of helplessness. Contrarily, if one has empowering beliefs about what one can achieve, well.....anything is possible – remember, Mohammed Ali’s “I’m the Greatest” proclamation came years before he won the world title!

Self-limiting beliefs, sometimes based on a single experience or a casual remark, can hold one back for years. Almost everyone has had the experience of mastering a skill in an area where they thought they had no ability, and being quite surprised at themselves when they overcame the limiting belief.

Your Beliefs Are Acquired, Not Inborn:

The good news about beliefs is that all beliefs are learned. They can therefore be unlearned, especially if they are not helpful. When you came into the world, you had no beliefs at all - about yourself, your religion, your political party, other people, or the world in general. Just as you once shed your belief that Santa Claus or tooth fairy was real, you can shed any belief, or acquire new beliefs if you want to.

In my coaching work, I have been working with a gentleman (we will call him Jim) who has been, what I would call, a successful businessman. At sixty-six, he runs a family business, with a turnover of a slightly over a million pounds. On the surface, he is happy – he makes a decent living from his business which is managed by a Chief Executive and his team. But somewhere in his mind is a long unhappiness that his business wasn’t growing over the years. He has had his close circle of friends desert him as they grew their businesses and some of them became multi-millionaires. They grew up together, spent their youths together, set up business together, and went to the same golf clubs. Suddenly in the last ten years, Jim noticed he was getting cold shouldered by some of them as they had moved on to being friends with more successful, richer people.

Losing his friends and self-esteem, Jim invested all the time and finance he could master in his business in the past three years, wanting to expand his business. He has worked closely with his Chief Executive and management team to push for business growth and expansion. But nothing has really made much of a difference in their business – Jim’s company manufactures DIY tools for well known international brands. Competition has been stiff as manufacturing moved to Asia and Eastern Europe. Jim’s company has had to work harder and harder to stay where they were. He had no doubt that his management team had done all they could.

It turned out some of his friends have ridden on this wave of global change and moved their production to China, and that’s how they grew their business several-fold, while Jim saw that same change a block to his business. Jim did not want to take risks. He likes his management team because they run the business in the way he ran it for two decades, and they don’t take risks. Although Jim pushes them to expand, he subconsciously likes it when they come back with the explanation that times are difficult with competition from the emerging countries.

All his life Jim has valued safety and security, and avoided risks. Back in his teen years, he joined horse-riding and football. A couple of times he came home slightly injured. His loving mother who had his best in her heart always advised him not to do those risky sports. He will be no good in those.

In his later years, Jim would go to the skiing slopes of Swiss Alps and would spend his days there sipping wine, while his wife would be go skiing with their children.

Jim had managed his entire business with this single motto: don’t get hurt; don’t take risks so that you do not fail. Be safe!

Once he realised how a few childhood incidents had such a grip over him throughout his life, it was easy to make a change – the safety advice he got in childhood was no longer relevant to run his business. And one of the first things he has done in the past few months is to hire a dynamic CEO who is a risk-taker and has a proven track record of growing businesses he managed.

Changing Beliefs:

Negative beliefs can be changed easily through changing the internal dialogue that goes on in our mind constantly. There are seven easy steps in the process:

1.     State the belief (‘I am hopeless in remembering names’).

2.     Gather evidence: allow your ‘other self’ (our internal dialogue always has two personalities involved – usually ‘self’ and ‘the other voice’) to gather as much evidence based on experience and reality to counter the belief statement. ‘Don’t you remember any names?’ ‘Don’t you remember names of twenty of your friends’?

3.     Seek Alternative Explanation: if the evidence in the second step wasn’t strong enough to disprove all the arguments (which confirm the belief that ‘I am hopeless’), are there alternative explanations – ‘I usually can’t remember the names when I meet people for a short time’.

4.     What are the consequences (of having the belief)? Is that serious?

5.     If the belief is still strong, ask the question: what is the use in holding this belief? Is there any positive value from holding this belief? If not, it’s better to change it.

6.     What action can you take to improve the situation? Write them all down.

7.     Make an action plan

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©Abhijit Bhattacharjee, Results Matter Consulting

When Change Fails, Change again. And again!

All of us are familiar with this phenomenon of never-ending changes in organisations. As a concept, change is fine, and shows signs of an organisation adapting to its changing environment. Except that, the type of changes I am referring to are primarily about changes in structures, or more appropriately, organogram. Some organisations have this unbounded faith in the powers of structural change to bring about magical changes in the organisation that before the dust has settled on the last round of musical chairs, another round of changes to the organogram has already begun.

In my consulting career, I have seen organisations who play around with their structures so much and so frequently that it is not unusual to see them come back to what they had moved away from five years ago. Every ‘big idea’ of change usually comes with a proclamation from leaders about how wonderful the future will look like, and yet they end up looking pretty much the same! The staff have by now seen this ritual year after year, and the ‘survivors’ among them have learned to live with these, and the rest live from one day of uncertainty to another.

There is another type of organisation where structures are not the focus, but they systems and procedures keep changing continuously, at a pace where no one is quite sure what the current regime is. Manuals and procedures are churned out at such regularity that managers who have the responsibility to operationalise these spend most of their working lives trying to figure out what the latest commandments are. Everybody in the organisation complains about the heavy bureaucracy and ‘red tape’ that results from heaps of manuals and procedures laid on top of each other. Yet with every new situation or challenge the organisation confronts, the default is to go into the print room and bring out another set of guidelines and procedures, hoping against hope that from some of those pages will emerge a solution. And everybody will live happily ever after.

Unfortunately, the ‘ever after’ moment never arrives, and the leaders complain of staff’s inability to adapt, and the staff walk around like zombies lost in the labyrinths of the organisation.

A fundamental element missing in most change processes is a lack of focus on the culture and style – i.e., corporate culture, shared values, work ethic and leadership styles.

Let me share with you an example, which is not uncommon in many organisations:

Some years ago, I was involved in helping a large international humanitarian organisation to put in place a systematic performance management system. We undertook extensive consultation at all levels of the organisation and introduced something which was developed through months of iterative exercises. This had buy-in from all managers and senior leaders of the organisation. A detailed roll-out strategy involving briefings and training for all managers and staff was implemented over a six-month period. The system was as good as one could get, and the commitment, so we thought, of the organisation was clearly there to use it to bring about fundamental changes in the ways of staff development and performance management.

Some months ago, I was back again in this organisation to assist with a review of their humanitarian work. This gave me an opportunity to see for myself how the staff appraisal system actually worked in practice after three years it was introduced.

The system on paper, the forms, the guidelines and the instructions are all up-to-date, and couldn’t be better. However, in its actual use, things were different: although managers were trained, it is not integrated into the development of managers, and many managers do not believe that it (staff appraisal) is actually important to do and may be actively discouraged by more senior managers from using it as this was not valued by the management.

This, coupled with the fact that the performance appraisal was not linked to any management decision-making processes (training, promotion, sanction), influences the collective belief about its (ir)relevance. Staff and managers now engage in a game of going through the motions of conducting the appraisals which are now reduced to the task of filling in forms once a year.

Work ethic, collective beliefs and values demonstrated by the management didn’t quite nurture the appraisal system in the organisation.

Three important things to remember in any organisational change process:

1.     Most often leadership is preoccupied with changing structures or systems (procedures, policies, etc), and ignore a key element in organisational systems – the culture which embody and reflect the values, beliefs and work ethic within the organisation.

2.     Leaders need to live the organisational values by bringing to life and demonstrating what it values most in its day-to-day work.

3.     Good leaders know that structures and systems can take you only this far, but if issues of culture are not addressed, business practices don’t change.

Game Theory, Somali warlords, Change Management, and all that ..........

Last month, I have had a chance to revisit Somalia, a country which has been at war with itself for nearly two decades now. I first visited this country about six years ago, just when for the first time in nearly fifteen years, a federal government was formed. For those of you who have forgotten the recent history of Somalia, here is a brief recap: a Federal government which existed collapsed in 1991, and since then the country has been ruled by warring groups (called warlords) lording over different territories of the country, all trying to wrest control of the rest of the territory from the other groups; everyone printing their own currency, and issuing even passports to the ‘people’ under their control, and claiming to be the ‘legitimate’ authority in control!

To the outsiders like me, it has always been a puzzling scenario as to why all initiatives to bring the warring factions together for greater good of everyone have failed time and again, when the ongoing impasse is actually harming the mutual interests of all warlords and the people they rule.

During this visit, I travelled to a few remote areas accompanied by two local youths who run a social organisation which supports some of the communities in resolving local conflicts. The discussions I have had with them gave me an entirely different insight into the situation in the country. Over the years, I have read a lot and spoken to scores of researchers and so-called Somali-watchers who have given their own interpretation of what has been happening in the country. I don’t think I had ever understood any rationale behind the crisis that has protracted this long.

How can you call it a perfectly rational behaviour when the warring groups have brought such wanton destruction of life and property in the country for nearly twenty years? Yet there is a rationale behind what’s happening out there.

Put yourself in the shoes of a Somali, and consider the dilemma here:

Let’ say there are only two warlords. If one warlord (A) lays down arms and B doesn’t, then the latter will overrun the entire territory of A and grab all the arms A has, and A (and his group) will end up with nothing. If warlord A keeps his arms and B surrenders, the reverse will be true. If however, both A and B keep their arms and troops, each one can protect himself and his army. It is another matter that both would be better off by laying down their arms and getting into nation-building activities. But that does not happen, and each one tries to expand its territory or arms, regardless of what the other does.

Sounds familiar?

Well, not so long ago, for nearly five decades the civilised world witnessed exactly this prisoners’ dilemma in the form of the cold war and nuclear stockpiling.

A non-violent version of this dilemma often can be seen in organisations too. Some years ago, I was involved in helping a large international humanitarian organisation to put in place a systematic performance management system. We undertook extensive consultation at all levels of the organisation and introduced something which was developed through months of iterative exercises. This had buy-in from all managers and senior leaders of the organisation. A detailed roll-out strategy involving briefings and training for all managers and staff was implemented over a six-month period.

The system was as good as one could get, and the commitment, so we thought, of the organisation was clearly there to use it to bring about fundamental changes in the ways of staff development and performance management.

Earlier this year, I was back again in this organisation to assist with a review of their humanitarian work. This gave me an opportunity to see for myself how the staff appraisal system was actually working in practice after three years it was introduced.

The system on paper, the forms, the guidelines and the instructions are all up-to-date, and couldn’t be better. However, in its actual use, things were different: although managers were trained, it is not integrated into the development of managers, and many managers do not believe that it (staff appraisal) is actually important to do and may be actively discouraged by more senior managers from using it as this was not valued by the management.

This, coupled with the fact that the performance appraisal was not linked to any management decision-making processes (training, promotion, sanction), influences the collective belief about its (ir)relevance. Staff and managers now engage in a game of going through the motions of conducting the appraisals which are now reduced to the task of filling in forms once a year.

This is again a classic case of the prisoners’ dilemma where although collective interests would be served by an effective appraisal system, individuals work against their own interests, and against the effective implementation of this system.

Collective beliefs and values demonstrated by the management didn’t quite nurture the appraisal system in the organisation.

But this is a topic that has to wait for the next story.