r u l y

Frozen Spring Blossoms. Photo by lowjumpingfrog. From the Flickr Creative Commons.

All this month, we have been discussing change, particularly looking at how adapting to change is a big part of staying organized.

We learned that change = learning and discussed the most stressful life changes

Chip and Dan Heath taught us from their book Switch that implementing successful change requires some consideration of analytical/logical factors and lots of consideration of emotional/motivation/external factors. The easier we can make the change appear to our overtaxed brains, the more likely we will expend the extra energy to make that change. My favorite tip from this post was looking for bright spots, i.e. find someone who is in a similar life situation to you, who faces the same challenges you do in terms of time and resources, who has achieved your goal, and find out what that person did to achieve the goal. Chances are that a life-specific tip is going to work much better for you than generalized advice from someone who does not face your same challenges.

John C. Maxwell’s Thinking for a Change reminded us that we need to make time for self-reflection whenever we are attempting to make change or achieve a difficult goal. Writing up a brief diary/status report on your weekly progress and personal reflections can really help focus your attention. I have been trying it out for the past few weeks and while it takes some time to do it is very helpful.

M.J. Ryan’s book AdaptAbility helped us process the emotions of change. She reminded us that we live in a constantly changing environment and that while we can’t control the external changes happening around us, we can take some comfort in knowing that we do control our response to these situations and that with the right mindset we can use difficult experiences to become better versions of who we really are.

Amanda Ripley’s book, The Unthinkable, walked us through the process of change under extreme duress, in emergency/survival situations. Her book reminded us that when faced with an immense, stressful change, the best thing we can do is be prepared in advance and follow our training because our thinking under these conditions is poor and often wrong. We also need to have the confidence to be our own leaders rather than waiting for insight from others. While her advice was specific to disaster/emergency situations, and we applied it to the case of airplane evacuation, Ripley’s advice could be translated to a variety of situations.

Ruly Ruth gave practical and emotional adjustment tips on moving—one of life’s most difficult changes.

We also looked at the new culture of change in business, where the pace of change is accelerating rapidly. Robert H. Schaffer and Ronald N. Ashkenas’s Rapid Results! made their case for constant 100-day mini-change projects, rather than limiting change to massive once-in-a-while projects. The authors reminded us that mobilizing an organization for change is the most important quality in a business leader today.

Finally, we got a wonderful sneak peak at producer Helen Whitney’s book and upcoming documentary film, Forgiveness. Forgiveness is one of the most powerful life changes. Whitney’s work shows the resiliency of the human spirit when faced with overwhelming hurts and inspires us to examine our own lives and see whether we can work to free ourselves from thoughts and experiences that limit our potential.

To end the month with a lighter twist on change, I wanted to relate what we have learned in theory about change to the change process I have been watching on The Biggest Loser. Weight loss has to be one of the most difficult changes to process. We know the simple formula, eat less and exercise more, but we all know that in practice, weight loss is anything but simple.

First, when we meet The Biggest Loser contestants, they are whisked away to a special camp where they are required to eat healthy food and exercise strenuously with some of the best physical trainers in the country. They are taken away from all the stresses of everyday life and they don’t seem to need to work to earn money. Their full-time focus is weight loss. While some of the contestants are there with a paired family member or friend, most are separated from their families and not allowed to contact them during the show. This appears to be both stressful due to the lack of support but also beneficial in terms of the lack of peer pressure with regard to bad habits.

• Change strategies involved: make the path easier

Each week the contestants weigh in (shirtless for the males and in sports bras for the females) and vote to eliminate one of the contestants who lost the lowest percentage of body weight. Contestants who remain are competing for a grand prize of $250,000.

• Change strategies involved: motivation (through earning money, team pride, fear of failure/loss of privileges by going home, seeing the physical transformation)

Contestants meet with a doctor who counsels them on the dangers of obesity and even provides some contestants with an estimated death date if they don’t lose weight. Contestants occasionally meet with a professional chef who advises them on cooking low calorie, healthy meals.

• Change strategies involved: analytical/logical knowledge of the problem

Contestants have psychological coaching sessions with the physical trainers to discuss the emotional barriers they face when confronting their weight loss.

• Change strategies involved: reflection, emotional processing

Contestants express remorse for becoming overweight and the impact being overweight has had on their own lives and those of others around them.

• Change strategies involved: forgiveness

As the weight loss program proceeds, the contestants go from losing lots of pounds each week to fewer and fewer pounds. Losses are sometimes not correlated with the amount of effort a participant puts in. Sometimes contestants cheat on their diets or don’t put in maximum effort on their exercise.

• Change strategies involved: expecting failure, dividends of learning, willingness to experiment

You can see that aside from being entertaining television, there is a lot of thought that went into helping these contestants transform their lives. It has been very inspiring for me to watch these contestants confront their weight issues so publicly and to see the results of their honesty and hard work.

The only disappointing aspect has been that the “make the path easier” attributes of the training camp is such a big part of their success. It would be very hard to duplicate their results for average people. We see on the show that weight loss slows down dramatically when contestants go home even for short periods and this Anchorage Daily News article shows the harsh reality contestants face after the show ends and the weight they often regain.

Change is not easy but it is possible. We have to learn to accept change as a continuing process rather than a quick fix and know that difficult changes will require ongoing effort, setbacks and a continued investment of time and resources to achieve our desired result. I hope that this month’s discussion has given you some insight into your own change process.

Next week, we start a new month and another Ruly theme. Please check back then.

"Children display banners at the Redfern Community Centre after watching the live telecast of the formal Apology to the Stolen Generations," (February 13, 2008). Photo by Borofkin from the Wikimedia Commons.

I was honored to be contacted recently by a publicist for producer Helen Whitney asking if I would be willing to review her latest book,  Forgiveness: A Time to Love & A Time to Hate, and get the word out about her PBS documentary of the same name airing in April. The subject was a perfect fit for this month’s Ruly theme of change. Forgiveness is one of the most powerful and the most difficult changes. Forgiveness, or its counterpart, the unwillingness to forgive, can dramatically alter the course of our lives. 

I am an enormous fan of PBS as well as Helen Whitney’s prior work—most recently her highly acclaimed documentary “The Mormons.” Whitney has spent much of her filmmaking career producing documentaries on various religious subjects, including “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero,” Pope John Paul II, and life in a Trappist monastery. Despite her enthusiasm for the subject of the “spiritual landscape,” she approached her latest project with some reluctance. 

“Given my intense engagement with spiritual themes, the subject was a perfect fit but it was also perfectly wrong. It was everything I had vowed not to do at this point in my life. . . . Forgiveness was vast, shapeless, emotionally and psychologically scarier than any of my earlier films. The intellectual and geographical boundaries seemed infinite.” 

–Helen Whitney, Forgiveness 

After two years of research and over eight hundred interviews around the world, Whitney created the film and book that ask us to begin a complex conversation on a subject that has no defined answers. While your initial expectation may be that this is going to be a sugary sweet film about how we should all forgive each other, you are in for a surprise. Whitney takes the conversation in several directions. There are, of course, incredible stories of forgiveness by grievously wronged victims. But there are also challenges to the whole notion of forgiveness. Are there some things that are unforgivable? Are there times that it is more appropriate to hold on to anger than to forgive? 

As I thought through these questions myself in the context of the many personal stories in Whitney’s book, one of the most piercing insights I received was that until a person has gone through an event so traumatic that it requires an incredible, nearly impossible, act of forgiveness to overcome, one doesn’t really know one’s capacity for forgiveness (or one’s limitations). It is one thing to solve some minor grievance with a glib “forgive and forget” but entirely different to go about the process of recovery from adultery, crime, death or torture. It was also insightful for me to learn that although forgiveness is a central tenet of every major religion, there are significant differences among religions about how forgiveness is granted and who grants it. 

The book is divided into two parts: the private realm and the public realm. The private realm section addresses personal stories of forgiveness, covering varied topics including infidelity, termination of employment, and criminal acts. In the public realm section, the focus shifts to public apologies and the healing process required to rebuild nations, using examples such as South Africa’s healing from apartheid and Rwanda’s healing from genocide. Given the transformations occurring in many countries, particularly in the Middle East, the topic could not be more timely. 

The book has a very interesting writing style that I have never encountered before. It reads like a documentary film. Most of the text is comprised of long quotations from her worldly and eloquent interview subjects with just a few bits of narration and commentary in between. The quotes are all seamlessly woven together so that you have to stop and check every once in a while to confirm who is speaking. The effect is a highly personal conversational flow. 

To whet your appetite for reading the book and watching the series, I wanted to highlight some of the most thought provoking quotes from the book: 

“[F]orgiveness is the memory of lost possibilities, the enormous presence of absence, an ache for what could have been but is no more.”

–Helen Whitney, Forgiveness 

“In my years working as a psychotherapist and a psychoanalyst, I’ve learned that you can’t simply say, ‘I forgive you’ and the heavens open up. It’s a slow and often painful process. To get to forgiveness, you have to first go through unforgiveness. It involves understanding the unconscious roots of a problem and that reasons you hold on to a grievance or to resentments, bitterness and hatred.”

–Dr. Glen Gabbard, quoted in Helen Whitney’s Forgiveness 

“There’s juice in not forgiving. I wanted to be angry. I needed to be angry and unforgiving and I held on to it. “

–Deb Lyman, quoted in Helen Whitney’s Forgiveness 

“[T]here is never complete forgiveness, there is always an awareness of what happened.”

–Dr. Janet Reibstein, quoted in Helen Whitney’s Forgiveness. 

“[W]e had to discover that it wasn’t about fixing what was broken [about going back to how things were before], rather it was about changing it into something else, something new, and then finding new ways of relating.”

–David Long, quoted in Helen Whitney’s Forgiveness 

“[F]orgiveness is not always possible or appropriate and . . . the anger used to energize and seek justice can be as transformative and liberating to the human spirit as forgiveness.”

–Helen Whitney, Forgiveness

“Forgiveness had rendered me inactive for many years, because this tremendously detrimental cheap grace I had granted . . . left me powerless, with an inability to acknowledge my anger and allowing injustice to continue. . . . If I’d remained that place of easy forgiveness the truth would never have emerged.”

–Terri Jentz, quoted in Helen Whitney’s Forgiveness

“For someone who feels dogged by emotional pain or humiliation, anger makes them feel alive . . . If they feel unable to influence the course of their own destiny, anger can often create the illusion of control.”

–Lesley Karsten DiNicola, quoted in Helen Whitney’s Forgiveness

“Unless we can find something else the affirms the value of our life, the past events will always haunt us. . . . [T]he loss of a sense of value is like death.”

–Helen Whitney, Forgiveness

“Pain doesn’t just go away, anger doesn’t just disappear. It comes up in different ways, at different times. Maybe there’s a temporary forgiveness or temporary understanding that we come to, and then it flitters away and we have to chase after it again. But it’s a pretty good place to get to when you can say, ‘I do understand. I have compassion for what you did . . .’ “

–Dan Glick, quoted in Helen Whitney’s Forgiveness

“[T]he past did happen. . . . I am aware of that. It’s just that I was no longer defined by it. I think this what we mean when we say that someone has paid their debt. It means that we are no longer defining them by one moment in their life and its consequences.”

–Kathy Power, quoted in Helen Whitney’s Forgiveness

“Forgiveness is an awkward term for me. It gives too much power to the forgiver, and it requires too much humility on the part of the person being forgiven. I like to think of humanizing a relationship, of discovering humanity in another on the basis of a shared sense of what’s right and wrong, a sense of connection that enables us both to move forward in a liberated way.”

–Albie Sachs, quoted in Helen Whitney’s Forgiveness

“Sometimes we can genuinely forgive. Certainly, as time passes, most of us have less need to think about the harm, to obsess about it, or to feel the hurt; we can move on, time does do that. But it doesn’t necessarily take it all away. One of the hopes is that forgiveness will short-circuit the process and make it possible to do it in less time. Maybe sometimes it does. But maybe we’re only fooling ourselves.”

–Walter Reich, quoted in Helen Whitney’s Forgiveness

“Getting rid of your anger is like giving away a part of yourself. When your anger lives in you, slowly it melts into your blood and your emotions, it shapes how you think about people, about life, and so relinquishing it is like losing a part of your body, your character, a part of who you are. You have come to feel that it’s your right to hate. Giving it up means you lose your cutting edge, you become vulnerable, and feel like a victim again.”

–Antoine Rutayisire, quoted in Helen Whitney’s Forgiveness 

Helen Whitney’s work is fascinating on many levels. Clearly, if you need to forgive or are seeking forgiveness, its insight will embolden you. It will challenge your own views on the subject and require you to examine your fundamental concept of human nature. The work is a wonderful starting point for a book club discussion or religious class. Even if you aren’t looking at the grand spiritual plain and you just enjoy a compelling story and the human response to extreme situations, Forgiveness will not disappoint.
Below is the trailer for the film airing in two parts on PBS Sunday, April 17 and Sunday April 24 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Likely, it will also be available for viewing online at pbs.org for a limited time as well. 

As I was preparing for this post, coincidentally, I glanced at the wall calendar we use for scheduling family appointments and found that the featured quotation this month was from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the subject of forgiveness.

“We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”

–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

While Martin Luther King Jr. was not mentioned in Helen Whitney’s book, clearly forgiveness has played a crucial role in all of our lives and its themes are woven in our histories and our future.

How has forgiveness impacted your life? Will you be tuning in to watch Forgiveness? Please share in the comments.

"Rapid fire questions cause Federal Reserve Chairman to have headache. Washington, D.C., March 23. Marriner Eccles, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board undertook to answer the Questions fired at him by Walter Trent, Director of the Rocky Mountain Metal Foundation. Trent's questions came so fast that Accles was hard put to answer them. Here he paused to rub his head during the questioning he was put through at the meeting of the Special Silver Committee." (1939) Photo by Harris & Ewing. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Perhaps you read the title of this post and thought it was a good soundbite but totally unrealistic. Change your business in 100 days? Major change in business organizations takes time. There are lots of people and processes involved. You have to plan thoroughly to make sure changes don’t cause more problems than they solve. Yes, that is what I thought too but after reading Robert H. Schaeffer and Ronald N. Ashkenas’ Rapid Results! How 100-Day Projects Build the Capacity for Large-Scale Change, I too had to learn that this type of thinking is not necessarily accurate or helpful for the long-term growth of a business.

Shaeffer and Ashkenas’ book flies in the face of management strategies taught in most MBA programs and practiced in most businesses. When a business is facing a major change, such as massive restructuring, radical strategic shifts, large-scale mergers and acquisitions and major technology upgrades, there is almost a common recipe for addressing the issues. First, research and write a detailed analysis of the situation and recommended solution, often employing outside consultants. Second, begin implementing the solution, again with outside help. Third, train the employees and fourth, turn the solution over to the business for day-to-day management. The process often takes years from start to finish, is extraordinarily expensive and the results are often disappointing. Mergers and acquisitions, for example, decrease shareholder value in 60-80 percent of cases. The biggest problem is not that the solution is intellectually incorrect but that it is a poor fit for the particular organization in question, primarily because the organization does not have the ability to implement the changes.

Shaeffer and Ashkenas don’t disagree that sometimes large-scale planning of this nature is sometimes needed but they argue that the most effective research and planning an organization can do is experimentation with small-scale projects. Get started right away. Less research more action.

“A surprisingly large number of people reach senior management positions without extensive experience in getting their troops to tackle very difficult challenges successfully. When those managers face a tough goal, many fail to stand up in plain sight and say to their people, ‘This is what we have to do; now let’s decide how we’re going to do it–and by when.’ Instead, they slip into a variety of alternative routines and processes that are part of their organization’s traditional modes of attack on goals. They focus on doing the preparations and studies that simply must be done before they can decide how to move . . . Most organizations have an endless supply of such delaying tactics to postpone action in favor of preparations.”

–Robert H. Schaffer and Ronald N. Ashkenas, Rapid Results!

Schaffer and Ashkenas’ prescription for organizational change is a tough one. The basic idea is that you set aggressive 100-day target goals (i.e. “gasp goals” where the goal is beyond what is considered possible), you demand that people achieve them and….the big catch…you don’t take them off their regular assigned duties in order to accomplish the new goal. The idea is that when people are stretched in this way, pressured by both time and resource constraints, they will come up with new and creative ways to address a problem. In the best case scenario, companies achieve significant revenue-producing or cost-cutting projects in unbelievably short timeframes. Even if the project ultimately fails, Shaffer and Askenas argue that the experiment generally costs the company little or nothing and that knowledge gained through the experiment will help the organization identify unproductive areas of inquiry, and provide managers with valuable training on how to implement change initiatives.

“Each project yields a dividend of learning . . . .”

–Robert H. Schaffer and Ronald N. Ashkenas, Rapid Results!

Shaffer and Ashkenas believe that these 100-day type of projects should be a constant feature in every organization. Change is not a once-in-a-while event but a constant. For most organizations, the big hurdle is lack of management ability.

“If there is any one capacity that all leaders need to develop, it is how to mobilize the organization for change. . . Quite frankly, when most companies fail it is not because these leaders lack the knowledge of what needs doing, it is because they lack the ability to make it happen.”

–Robert H. Schaffer and Ronald N. Ashkenas, Rapid Results!

Shaffer and Ashkenas argue that organizations that are continually implementing 100-day small projects are going to develop the leadership and organizational capacity to handle change of any size. When a big change, like a merger or strategic shift is necessary, it won’t be intimidating but just a more involved version of what is already happening every day.

So far, it all makes sense, doesn’t it? Why don’t we see more companies implementing constant change strategies?

“It is not uncommon to hear business leaders make statements like, ‘We have too much going to to undertake any more projects for a while.’ If you were to probe what is actually happening you would find that ‘too much going on’ often means that the usual suspects–a small number of able senior people–are drowning in special assignments and one-time projects while the rest of the organization goes about its routine work. Naturally, if the same fifteen or twenty people are exclusively the keys to change, they will also function as the limits to change. To develop truly superior implementation capability, it is necessary that large numbers of people at all levels share responsibility for making change occur.”

–Robert H. Schaffer and Ronald N. Ashkenas, Rapid Results!

Share responsiblity? That would require delegating authority, letting people take risks and make changes, acknowledging that someone else might come up with a brilliant idea and accepting that failure will inevitably occur some of the time. Many senior managers find this extremely threatening.

“Many . . . leaders say they’d like everyone in the organization to participate in the changes, but they seem trapped in the conviction that they need to be out leading the change. This drives them to become embroiled in specific, detailed operational changes that are often outside their area of expertise.”

–Robert H. Schaffer and Ronald N. Ashkenas, Rapid Results!

Employees too can be resistant to change. Who wants to volunteer to take on more work? Aren’t we stressed enough as it is doing our regular jobs combined with the demands of our private lives? Some people may crave the predictability of routines or standardized procedures and will be reluctant to give those up. Schaffer and Ashkenas acknowledge that rapid results projects are a lot of work but they also argue that this type of work is more energizing than draining.

“[R]apid results projects increase the energy, creativity and motivation that people bring to the effort and reduce the toll on employees’ productivity, health and personal lives.”

–Robert H. Schaffer and Ronald N. Ashkenas, Rapid Results!

People like being part of something that matters. They like seeing big results quickly. They like getting credit for their work. Schaffer and Ashkenas call these the “zest” factors. If you infuse an ambitious project with enough zest, the high people get from achieving the results more than compensates for the effort required. This energy then radiates throughout the organization inspiring others. As one manager of a rapid results project at a Georgia-Pacific plant remarked, “It was just wonderful to see what people could do when we gave them the chance. It gave you goose bumps to walk through the mill and see them at it.”

If you are a manager reading this and think, “This sounds interesting. I would like some training to know how to do these rapid results projects.” Interestingly, this is not what Schaffer and Ashkenas want to hear. While a small amount of formal training or learning might be helpful, Schaffer and Ashkenas really just want you to get started now. Take action. Learn by doing. They argue that most management training is worthless because it is all done in off-site corporate classrooms with little hands-on experience.  Having a real short-term project with real accountability and real results is what helps people learn and benefits the company at the same time.

“All it requires is the will to get started, to experiment and to learn along the way. . . .”

–Robert H. Schaffer and Ronald N. Ashkenas, Rapid Results!

If there is any formal training needed, it is likely in how managers should communicate demands for performance. It takes a strong manager to pull off these aggressive organizational changes.

“One of the keys to learning how to be a better demand maker is to accept the notion that most people actually benefit from being pushed, challenged and stretched–even if they don’t realize it at the time. . . . The underlying beauty of tough demand making is that the more your people protest, the more they will actually appreciate your leadership.”

–Robert H. Schaffer and Ronald N. Ashkenas, Rapid Results!

The authors provide an interesting “7 Deadly Sins of Demand Making,” illustrating the mistakes many managers make when communicating performance demands to their subordinates.  While the book is not really a how-to, it does provide several tips on goal-setting and management strategies as well as case study examples.

I was not expecting to be so inspired by this book. It provides a glimpse into the future of business and management. With the constant changes facing business today, everyone, from CEOs to line employees must embrace the need to share the responsibility for change and constantly reinvent work. I would not be surprised if we start to see this type of management structure everywhere in the near future, from the corporate world to government and non-profit organizations. It’s a radical shift from the way we operate now and we are all going to be learning in the process.

Does your organization use rapid results projects? How would you rate your company’s ability to implement change? Are you intimidated by Schaffer and Ashkenas’ reccomendations? Please share in the comments.

"The Howard family moving into their new home at Gardendale, Alabama" (1937). Photo by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

As we learned at the beginning of the month, moving is one of the top 10 most stressful life changes. Ruly Ruth weighs in today on lessons learned during her numerous moves. Her family may be drawing on this advice themselves when they add move number 6 at the end of the year.

Moving is an art form.

My husband is in the military, and we’ve moved in 16 years a total of five times. It can be overwhelming.

Each time you move, you need to get “plugged in” so to speak–find new doctors, dentists, friends, schools, colleagues.  The military helps simplify the moving process by generating lists of services in each town that are military-related, providing easy access to school ratings (through greatschools.org), and developing relationships with services sites like sittercity.com offering free membership to the military (we are SO GRATEFUL!).

After so many moves, I have developed the following moving strategy tips:

1) Purge as much as you can before you move. Take a brief inventory and anything that you haven’t used in 1-2 years, GONE!! Don’t save it for your dream house–from experience, if you’re not using it now, I guarantee you won’t use then!

2) Get organized. Look at very special, delicate, precious items. Large paintings should have their own box built–or one time moving ours we sandwiched it between mattresses in the truck. Worked beautifully! Figure out the best way to move/pack special items.

3) Anything you would absolutely die if it were lost/destroyed that’s on a small scale (photo albums, baby books, important papers)–should be immediately stashed in a car trunk or a friend’s house so it doesn’t get packed, and gets hand-carried to the new location. JEWELRY AND EXPENSIVE ITEMS—make sure that’s in your car or personal vehicle or backpack that stays with/near you. NO TEMPTATIONS FOR THE MOVERS! (A friend had to buy her wedding ring out of a pawn shop because movers stole it and pawned it–she’s just lucky she thought to call the local pawn shops to see if they had it.)

4) Create an area of a house–we usually use a bathroom–where you tape it off, close the door, and mark DO NOT MOVE on it–anything to be moved by you and not general movers (even if it’s your friends) goes in that room. Musical instruments–or the items from #3—this room should already be packed up so ONLY these items are in there. During moving, no one should have any reason to use that room—so make sure of that as well.

5) If moving yourself, make sure the truck is big enough. You may laugh at this, but a friend packed themselves recently from CA to FL, and didn’t realize how much stuff they had and ended up at the last minute tossing furniture on top of furniture without properly wrapping it–needless to say they have extra scratches, scuffs and breaks that were never intended in the first place.

6) If using a moving company, you have to supervise them!! Overall, we’ve had excellent luck–but you have to watch them pack. This makes the movers feel supervised, and I guarantee that they’ll take a bit of extra care to pack your stuff. Always a good thing!

7) If using a moving company, set aside any items that arrive damaged at your new destination. Each damaged item needs to be photographed showing the damage, and then a claim sheet should be attached to each photograph that lists the detailed description of the item and the damage, the estimated age of the item, the amount paid for the item and the amount to replace that item. We also attach copies of internet items of similar value to document replacement values as well. Keep copies of all of this paperwork which you submit to the moving company for reimbursement. The company will ONLY be responsible for items THEY pack–and large furniture pieces they move. If you packed your own box and the items broke during the move, that’s on you!

8 ) In transit, if you are moving to a destination that may require 2+ days of travel, pre-map out a route and stopover point. This helps you budget for hotels and meals as well, to help you prepare.

9) Keep all receipts for tax purposes also–if you move for a job and it’s over 35 miles away, all moving expenses are tax deductible. Meals are not included in this, fyi.

"Family moving into trailer at the FSA (Farm Security Administration) camp for defense workers. This family is from Minnesota. The man came to San Diego ten months ago and enrolled in a vocational school. He started to work at Consolidated Aircrafts as a riveter and is now a clerk in the machine shop. Before his family came out three weeks ago he lived in a cabin for which he paid twelve dollars per month. He said it was alright for a man but that he wouldn't take his wife and children into such a place. He got a furnished apartment for his family--it was two rooms, rental eleven dollars per week. His wife soon discovered that there was inadequate hot water and was overrun with roaches and rats. San Diego, California." (1941) Photo by Lee Russell for the Farm Security Administration. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Aside from the basic logistics of moving, I’ve found that to make each duty station truly a fulfilling place, I have to get to know the town, and the locals, so to speak. They are a wealth of information!!  But how do you get to know these locals, particularly when you might only be there for just a few years?

Volunteering is, to me, the number one way to get quickly “plugged in.”  My passion is my children’s education, and I’ve always volunteered at my son’s school/sports organizations. Meeting people through both of these realms introduces me to locals–other parents and coaches who are either born/bred in those locales, or else moved years ago and made their lives there with their kids. Other friends love animal shelters, or working with the elderly, or art-related projects, etc. My biggest piece of advice is to volunteer in what you love to do–not necessarily what everyone else loves. Because it’s YOUR time, after all.

Finding work in your new community is excellent as well. I know it’s tough everywhere, in this economy, but definitely put out those feelers! Telling as many people as you meet that you are looking for a job helps too.

Getting the whole family on board with the move is huge. Often, one or more family members don’t want to move. We’ve had friends allow their kids to stay with other friends while the rest of the family move in order for that child to finish high school, for example. (I could never do this!) But get the kids involved early. Tell them your plans, where you’re going. Help show them pictures on the internet. Our son loves to go house hunting with us as well, so he can give his input. It really helps him in the transition process. And show them their schools beforehand. Visiting while it’s in session is a huge advantage if it’s possible time wise. And get them involved in their sports, activities ASAP! Kids need to get plugged in as much as adults do–and this often is another way for adults to network as well.

Good luck, have fun, and safe moving!

Have a moving tip or story?  Please share in the comments.  Also, for a professional organizer’s perspective on moving, see this article from Erin Doland of unclutterer.com.

"Mrs. Jennings, tired out after a day of moving into her new prefabricated house in Pacolet, South Carolina." (1941) Photo by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Flight attendant. Photo by Tom Purves. From the Flickr Creative Commons.

In the last post, we reviewed Amanda Ripley’s book The Unthinkable, which urges all of us to become more aware of emergency situations and be psychologically and physically prepared to handle them. In the book are several suggestions with regard to escaping from airplanes that I found very helpful and wanted to pass along. We are going a little off topic from our change theme but bear with me, we’ll get back on track next week.

As we know from Ripley’s work, one of the biggest problems the average person faces in an emergency situation is paralysis, i.e. being so overwhelmed by a situation that the person does nothing rather than using the precious time available to do something that might save one’s life. This is especially true in the case of airplane evacuations. Ripley indicates in her book that many times an airplane crash or fire is survivable but you have to move quickly and get off the plane as quickly as possible. The brief training you get in the airline safety presentation at the beginning of a flight does not do much to tell you some of the most important and very simple things you need to know.

While I have never been involved (and never hope to be involved) in an airplane crash, the first airplane business trip I took required an emergency landing and the lessons Ms. Ripley teaches would have helped me tremendously in that situation.  So below are 6 tips on airline emergency preparedness garnered from Ms. Ripley’s research and my own experience.

1. During an airplane emergency, it is likely that the captain will not be communicating with passengers at all and you need to sit calmly and quietly and be ready to help yourself rather than waiting for instructions.

In my situation, we were about an hour into a commuter jet flight, when suddenly the oxygen masks deployed. Since this had never happened to me before, my blood pressure immediately increased and I looked around the plane anxiously. My fellow travelers, all middle-aged men who appeared to be veteran business travelers, noticed the masks but didn’t seem to be doing anything about them. I looked across the aisle and asked a man, “Should we put these on?” He shrugged indicating he had no idea.

There was no communication from anyone for a very long time. The flight attendant looked as perplexed as the rest of us. I naively assumed that they all must have been through this type of experience before and since this was my first business flight I should follow their example. Now that I know about the normalcy bias and the natural unwillingness to be the first to make an action that could be perceived as panicking, I would trust my own instincts before I would look to anyone else for guidance.

2. If the oxygen masks ever deploy in flight, put one on immediately. Don’t wait for someone to tell you to do so or for other passengers to do the same.

Ms. Ripley informs us that in the event of rapid cabin decompression, you have only 10-15 seconds to get that oxygen mask on before you are at risk of passing out. This is why they tell you in the safety briefing that if you are traveling with children you should put your own mask on first before you help your children. So if the mask comes down, put it on right away.

During my fateful flight, there wasn’t a rapid decompression but rather a gradual failure of the ventilation system. When we took off, we all noticed that the plane was a bit hot. The pilot told us that things would cool off once we were in flight. Little did we know that this was the first sign that the ventilation system in the plane was not working correctly. I later learned that the heating and cooling of the plane is directly tied to the pressurization of the cabin so if you don’t have air conditioning you are at risk of losing pressurization and oxygen.

About 5 minutes after the oxygen masks deployed, the pilot came on the intercom telling us that the ventilation system was malfunctioning and that we should put the masks on as a precaution. This was my first experience with these oxygen masks. I was not prepared for what I experienced. First, the flow of oxygen is very weak. You don’t feel a rush of air or really have much sense of whether the mask is working at all. For some reason, I assumed that the emergency oxygen supply in a plane was in some sort of large air tank in the ceiling. It turns out the supply is a small canister about the size of a mailing tube in the ceiling above each seat. The oxygen is generated by a chemical reaction in the tube rather than a tank of air.

Also, since these oxygen masks are rarely used, they were not in the best condition. Many of the masks did not seem to be working. Fortunately, this was not a full flight so many passengers could simply change seats until they found a mask that worked. The flight attendant advised us that we might need to tug on the plastic cord a little to get the oxygen flowing. Many people pulled the cord so hard it came out of the canister and due to the heat of the canister could not put it back in without burning fingers.

3. If there is a problem during your flight, chances are the first thing that the pilot will be doing is trying to land the plane as soon as possible. Don’t be immediately alarmed if the plane is rapidly descending.

Nobody likes the sensation of rapid descent in an airplane. In my situation, with no information coming from the captain, it took all of my concentration to breathe slowly and focus on whether oxygen was flowing into my mask. When the plane started suddenly descending, my heart was beating so quickly and all I could do was pray, “Please God, don’t let this be my time to go.”

Fortunately, there was no panicking on the plane. All of the men around me seemed almost numb to the situation. It was very quiet and I watched in horror as the plane was edging lower and lower to a completely unfamiliar rural landscape below.

It would have been tremendously reassuring if the captain or flight attendant had been able to communicate with us that the the reason we were descending so quickly was that we needed to get to an altitude where oxygen can flow in the plane without pressurization. The oxygen supply lasts only a short while, maybe 30 minutes. This information came much later after we had already descended to the “safe” altitude.

The pilot then made an emergency landing at a small, rural airport–again with no communication to the passengers. We had no idea where we were until we pulled up to the gate to unload.

4. If it becomes necessary to have a crash landing, after the plane comes to a stop, you need to focus on getting out as soon as possible.

Based on Ms. Ripley’s research and interviews with survivors, you learn that those who survived plane crashes are the ones who immediately unbuckled their seat belts and headed for the exits as soon as the plane crashed without waiting for any formal instruction. Many times people are so stunned by what happened they just sit there in their seats waiting for instructions or paralyzed by shock. Again, yelling at people to get out, is often enough to shock people back to their senses. Calm evacuation goes much faster than when people scramble to climb over seats and rush the exits.

5. Never stop to grab a carry-on bag or any other items when it is necessary to evacuate an airplane quickly.

When it is time to get out quickly, too many people stop to grab their carry-on bag and take it with them off the plane. Ms. Ripley indicates the carry-on bags are tremendously dangerous in this situation. If the cabin is full of smoke, people end up tripping over the bags and the bags become weapons when they are flung down emergency slides toward other passengers waiting below. Let that bag go and just focus on getting the people out. If you ignore this rule, you could end up causing your own death or someone else’s.

6. If it is necessary to use the emergency slide at the exit, mentally prepare yourself to fling yourself down that slide as quickly as possible without pausing at the exit to contemplate the view.

Women, apparently we are the worst offenders of this rule. Delaying at the exit means less time for everyone else to get out. We need to risk minor injury getting out of the plane to avoid harm to ourselves or others by being too slow.

For an inspiring example of all these tips in action, check out the recently released video from the National Geographic channel on the famous landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1919 in the Hudson by Captain Chesley Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles.

Have an airplane survival story or tip? Please share in the comments.

OFUNATO, Japan (March 15, 2011) Members of Virginia Task Force 1 from the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department search for survivors in Ofunato, Japan, following a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Teams from the United States, United Kingdom and China are assisting in the search for missing residents. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Matthew M. Bradley/Released). From the Fox News Insider's Photostream, Flickr Creative Commons.

Change is hard. Change under stress is harder. Change under disaster conditions is devastating. The horrible confluence of events in Japan–earthquake, tsunami, radiation leaks—are on everyone’s minds lately. For Americans, the empathy for the Japanese people as well as the horrifying realization that even a developed nation can be fully consumed by disaster in an instant is almost too much to contemplate.

I had already planned to review a book discussing change in disaster circumstances, never expecting to have a real-time disaster to analyze it against. If you find yourself feeling a little detached from the horror of the disaster’s impact and the recovery efforts, Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why helps to explain how most people process disaster situations and why change, or thinking of any kind, in these situations, is incredibly difficult.

In The Unthinkable, Amanda Ripley, a former senior writer for Time magazine, takes the reader through a series of chapters where firsthand accounts of disaster situations are interwoven with a discussion of emergency preparedness theory and practice. The reader walks down the emergency staircase of the North Tower with a 9/11 survivor, experiences the conflicting feelings victims of Hurricane Katrina, goes into the classroom with a survivor of the Virginia Tech shootings, and dives into the icy Potomac with a heroic rescuer bent on helping survivors from an airline crash into the Potomac River in 1982. Her storytelling is superb and her ability to extract fine details from the survivors paints a vivid picture of exactly what they thought was happening at the time.

From her research of both eyewitness accounts and emergency preparedness theory, we learn that most human beings are generally not all that good at disaster situations. We fall back on a lot of very primitive behaviors that may have been appropriate at some point in human history but are ill-suited for modern times.

First, it is hard for us to take any warnings or alarms seriously. Working against us is the “normalcy bias,” the tendency to think that everything is still OK because it always has been OK. This bias tells people, “It is OK to ignore that fire alarm or take my time getting out of the building because it has always been just a drill in the past.” “I don’t need to evacuate. I have survived a hurricane before.” Also working against us is peer pressure. We don’t want to look paranoid, alarmist or appear to be overreacting to our friends. Finally, working against us is that the alarms themselves often provide little valuable information.

“[T]he people in charge of warning us should treat us with respect. It’s surprising how rarely warnings explain why you should do something not just what you should do.”

–Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable

Next, if we do heed the warning, we often do so in a lethargic way—stopping to gather supplies, turn off computers, and call friends or family. As I read this, I recalled the news story about a Japanese mother who stopped to get milk for her child instead of immediately evacuating and ended up tragically perishing in the tsunami.

We also are not so good at assessing threats, giving far more weight to threats created by humans than “old-fashioned risks like weather.” Notice how much the U.S. is worried about nuclear meltdowns and how little we are worrying about earthquake and tsunami preparedness for example.

Of course, sometimes we would be lucky to respond even in a lethargic way to a disaster. Our bodies can start to shut down under extreme stress, affecting our ability to reason or solve problems, causing temporary blindness or hearing “loss” or resulting in the loss of control of bodily functions. In especially dire situations where danger is clear and present, people often completely freeze up and do nothing or literally lay down and die waiting for the worst to happen. Movie stereotypes about people panicking, moving about and doing anything to cling to life it turns out are inaccurate. Many times, people just give up. They typically only snap out of this state when they remember their children or loved ones and they feel the need to survive.

“Paralysis seems to happen on the steepest slope of the survival arc—where almost all hope is lost, when escape seems impossible, and when the situation is unfamiliar to the extreme.”

–Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable

When dealing with people who have either frozen or are prone to panicking in an emergency, often the most effective way to get people to snap out of this mindset and get them to do an effective and appropriate action is to yell, scream and be otherwise rude and insensitive to them! This is obviously counterintuitive to most of us. Ripley provides us with this vivid example:

“[M]embers of the Kansas City Fire Department rescue squad yell profanity-laced threats at [drowning] victims before they get to them. If they don’t, the victim will grab onto them and push them under the water in a mad scramble to stay afloat . . . [As one fire chief explains], ‘[I]f I approach Mrs. Suburban Housewife and say, ‘When I get to you, do not f***in touch me! I will leave you if you touch me! She tends to listen.”

–Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable

Many airline flight attendants, for example, are trained to yell at you to jump down the inflatable slide quickly during a plane evacuation. Otherwise, too many people pause at the top of the slide for far too long, hindering the rescue effort of those behind them.

Our disaster response can also strongly be influenced by the crowds around us. Interestingly, we tend to behave ourselves in disaster crowds, helping others where we can. When I first read a story in The Washington Post (which strangely seems to have been removed from their website) about how kind the Japanese were to each other at disaster recovery camps, including remembering to recycle their garbage, I thought to myself, “That would never happen in D.C.” But it turns out that it probably would, here or anywhere! Ripley wrote about this in a recent blog post.

Is anyone naturally good in a disaster situation? It turns out yes. Ripley reports that one researcher, Paul Slovic, discovered that approximately 30% of men and, for unknown reasons, predominantly white men, “see very little risk in most threats.” Who are these men?

“They had a few subtle things in common. ‘They liked the world of status, hierarchy and power,’ says Slovic. They believed in technology.”

–Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable

Additional studies on Special Forces soldiers showed that these men are chemically different as well. They produce high quantities of “’neuropeptide Y,’ a compound that helps you stay focused on a task under stress, among other things.” Psychiatrist Charles Morgan III found that he could identify which of a group of soldiers were members of Special Forces units just by looking at their blood. Further, Special Forces soldiers almost never “dissociated” from an emergency or stressful situation, such as reporting that things seemed to move in slow motion or seemed like a dream. Morgan developed a simple test that predicted with 95% accuracy whether someone would make it through the U.S. Army Survival School based just on their answers to his dissociation quiz.

If you found yourself watching the footage of the Japanese tsunami on television thinking it seemed unreal, like the waves were washing over some sort of dollhouse landscape and not the homes of real people, welcome to the dissociation crowd. Survivors reported dissociation as well:

“Akiko Sato, 50, fought to persuade her aged parents to evacuate, but they would not. As she packed a bag in her own Nobiru home, just steps away, she looked out the window. “I couldn’t believe what I saw,” she said. “It looked like almost hundreds of thousands of horses running towards me, like a computer simulation game.”

–”For survivors of Japan’s quake, tsunami, it’s almost too much to comprehend,” Times Wires, March 15, 2011.

The heroes of many disaster situations–those who put their own lives in danger in order to help others–also end up being predominantly male or as one researcher described them, “male, single, childless and young.” Ripley does a wonderful account of the psychology of the hero, concluding:

“[H]eroes feel a nonnegotiable duty to help others when they can . . . For certain people, caught in rare circumstances, heroism may be just as much a survival strategy as freezing; it’s a survival strategy not for the body but for the mind.”

–Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable

For those of us who are not naturally good at disaster situations, it does not mean all hope is lost. Ripley argues passionately that all of us can become better at disaster preparedness through training and makes a fervent call to all of us to rethink our role in a disaster. Often the only advice we are given about emergencies is to sit and wait for help yet often this advice is unhelpful for survival. Educating ourselves about disaster situations and developing the preparedness tools mentally and physically to deal with these situations is the best option.

“These days we tend to think of disasters as acts of God and government. Regular people only feature into the equation as victims, which is a shame. Because regular people are the most important people at a disaster scene, every time.”

–Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable

“All across the nation, we have snapped plates of armor onto our professional lifesavers . . . only after everything goes wrong do we realize we’re on our own.”

–Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable

In a positive example of the power of training, Ripley reports that 100% of the residents of the city of Langi on the island of Simaeulue survived the Asian tsunami of 2004, despite having only 8 minutes from earthquake to tsunami. How? In 1907, a tsunami killed approximately 70% of the population of the island. Cultural memory never forgot this tragedy and generations of people were trained that as soon as the ground starts shaking you run to higher ground. Amazingly, almost 100 years later, the lesson stuck.

“Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a believe that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences.”

–Amanda Ripley, The Unthinkable

I hope that Ripley’s words have given you a new framework to evaluate the information you see about Japan’s disaster recovery, to find hope in the despair and to further your own disaster preparedness. As we hope and pray for Japan’s recovery and future, I find comfort in one of the first quotes Ripley cites in the book from St. Augustine:

“This awful catastrophe is not the end but the beginning. History does not end so. It is the way its chapters open.”

–St. Augustine

Please share in the comments your reflections on Ripley’s ideas or your thoughts on the situation in Japan.

"Colorado River - Shoshone Rapids." Photo by Jason Wehmhoener. From the Flickr Creative Commons.

Change can be unwanted and upsetting. Life gets hard when too many things change at one time or when something we love exactly the way it is, something we have depended on forever, is yanked out from underneath us. Author M.J. Ryan in her book AdaptAbility argues that current events have put us in a state of “permanent whitewater.”

“The only thing any of us can know for certain is that life will continue to change at a rapid pace because the world has gotten more complex and interdependent. Organizational consultant Peter Vail calls this “permanent whitewater,” referring to a time of ongoing uncertainty and turbulence. We can’t see exactly where these changes are headed or where the submerged rocks are, yet when we’re tossed out of the boat, we want to make sure to swim not sink. . . . [Experienced rafters] expect the whitewater. And so should we.

–M.J. Ryan, AdaptAbility

M.J. Ryan knows whitewater conditions. When she turned 40, her husband of 14 years and business partner decided to end their marriage. The publishing company she founded experienced a significant downturn in revenues and the entire publishing industry changed. Her 30 years of experience in publishing could not save the company and she had to sell it. She could no longer afford her home and had to sell and move. She lost one-third of her savings in the 2003 stock market downfall. Times were bleak. Fortunately, she went on to create a new career for herself as an author and consultant, married again and adopted a child from China. But none of us can escape the whitewater conditions, and to this day she admits suffering anxiety over any downturn in her business, worrying about what the future will bring.

Ryan’s perspective is radically different from Chip and Dan Heath and John C. Maxwell. For example, the subtitle of her book is: “How to Survive Change You Didn’t Ask For.” Remember John C. Maxwell indicates that a “survival” mentality is the sign of an unsuccessful person, whereas a successful person focuses on “progress.” Chip and Dan Heath have us riding elephants of change, implying we have at least some control over our situation, even if our beast of burden can be unwieldy. Ryan’s primary metaphor has us victims dumped overboard, swirling in the whitewater, inviting anxiety, fear and a sense of inevitability. The first two thirds of her book are primarily about seeking inner peace and acceptance of the situation using techniques like meditation. I wasn’t sure if this was a message I was going to relate to.

Yet, after reading her book, I have a great respect for her perspective. Ryan has a lot more life experience than I do and her book speaks especially to women and to older people. Despite advances in equality, it is undeniable that women, and particularly mothers, face very different life circumstances than most working men, even those that are fathers. Decisions that may be easy for Chip and Dan Heath or John C. Maxwell to implement have a different emotional calculus for many women. Her book also speaks to those who have a hard time with change in general, whether due to limited financial resources or psychological makeup, and who can be easily overwhelmed when their world is turned upside down. We know from news reports on the recession that there are many people who see the world more like M.J. Ryan.

Now, for those readers, who prefer a more rational approach and are ready to turn off completely to Ryan, you must know that she does redeem herself as a hard-headed businessperson primarily in pages 153 to 195. For example:

“The name of the game is staying relevant, and the life cycle of relevancy is getting shorter and shorter. It used to be that you got an education then once you started working . . . the basics of your education held you in good stead for decades. Now the world is so connected and the speed of change is so accelerated that we need to be constantly learning new skills and tools.”

–M.J. Ryan, AdaptAbility

She also makes a convincing case that the 5-year business plan is become obsolete and we spend time more effectively focusing on immediate term goals. While I could go on about her more analytical and strategic suggestions for change, what makes Ryan different is her willingness to address the emotional side of change and she has plenty to say on that topic that we can all learn from.

“You are not just at the mercy of outside forces! Change always creates a death and the possibility of rebirth. Your life has a trajectory that is created from some mysterious combination of outside pressures and internal longings. It’s part of our job as Change Masters to not just rotely bend ourselves into whatever shape seems to be called for but to use the pressure to become more of who we are and to offer more of what we have to give.”

–M.J. Ryan, AdaptAbility

This section did not appear until page 146 of the book but once I read it the rest of the book made a lot more sense. Ryan’s strategy for those facing unwanted change is to use the experience to discover more about yourself and find a better place for your talents. Her strategy really is a lot more about “progress” than “survival.”Below are some of my favorite quotes from the book.

“When I was an editor, I always loved the quote attributed to William Faulkner that writers needed to ‘kill their little darlings.’ It’s a message about how, in order for inspiration to enter, we need to let go of the ideas we’re so in love with in order to make room for something better. It’s a willingness that everyone needs to succeed these days.”

–M.J. Ryan, AdaptAbility

“What’s happening right now to most of us is not because we’re bad or wrong or incompetent. It’s because the world is transforming at breakneck speed and each and every one of us must adapt to those changes as quickly and efficiently as possible. No one’s exempt. Age doesn’t get you off the hook . . . Nor does how hard you’ve worked until now or what your expectations of life have been. Or what you’ve sacrificed for or invested in. That’s because what’s going on has nothing to do with you personally!

–M.J. Ryan, AdaptAbility

“The best first thing we can do [when facing unwanted change] . . . is get clear on what is actually happening so we can get down to the business of dealing with it.”

–M.J. Ryan, AdaptAbility

“When a wave of change hits, run as fast as you can to get help. Phone a friend, a colleage, a mentor. . . . Women more naturally seek out others when times are tough. Men are another story. They tend to try to tough it out alone. . . . The worst thing you can do right now is isolate, despite the urge to hunker down and try even harder to do what you’re doing.”

–M.J. Ryan, AdaptAbility

“Forget blame, accept what is, and seek the best solution.”

–M.J. Ryan, AdaptAbility

“Self-care isn’t optional when we’re riding the whitewaters of change . . . To have maximum energy, we need extension and recovery exercises in all the domains of our existence: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.”

–M.J. Ryan, AdaptAbility

“[E]xperiences . . . teach us there’s no such thing as ‘deserve.’”

–M.J. Ryan, AdaptAbility

“One of the advantages of what’s happening right now is that it’s happening to everyone . . . What will the neighbors think? They’re too busy thinking about their own need to scale back to give [your scaling back] much attention, unless it’s to wish they had your worries.”

–M.J. Ryan, AdaptAbility

For more on Ryan’s speaking and coaching style, see the video below.

Do you identify with M.J. Ryan’s focus on emotional recovery in the change process? Please share in the comments.

"The Thinker - At the Rodin sculpture garden in Paris." Photo by Dan McKay. From the Flickr Creative Commons.

“Have the right attitude” is a common admonishment to anyone making a difficult change. The mind is a powerful ally or foe in the change process. We can convince ourselves of success or failure and often this core belief influences a future course of events.

Now, there are those who take this theory a bit too far and insist that if we want to change all we have to do is think our way to success. We know from Chip and Dan Heath’s Switch that this is not true as willpower is weak and easily exhaustible. You have to back up that willpower with constant motivation and practical tweaks to your environment to make your change process easier.

But thinking is undeniably a very important part of the change process and perhaps the most important part. After all, if we weren’t thinking, we probably would never decide to make any changes at all!

John C. Maxwell’s Thinking for a Change is an interesting read on the thinking process. He has clearly done a lot of thinking about thinking. He organizes thinking into 11 different types–each type having a role to play in leading a fulfilled life personally and professionally.

1. Big Picture Thinking (thinking beyond your immediate needs to the greater goals of your organization)
2. Focused Thinking (restricting your interests and contacts to those that are most valuable to you)
3. Creative Thinking (invention, innovation, being unafraid of failure)
4. Realistic Thinking (i.e. negative thinking, preparing a backup plan for when things don’t go according to plan)
5. Strategic Thinking (planning and organizing, asking why and how)
6. Possibility Thinking (believing you can succeed when the odds are against you)
7. Reflective Thinking (reviewing the past, turning “experience into insight”)
8. Questioning Popular Thinking
9. Shared Thinking (seeking input from others)
10. Unselfish Thinking (putting the needs of others ahead of your own)
11. Bottom-Line Thinking (remembering the desired result or end goal)

Dr. Maxwell approaches thinking from an interesting perspective. He is a trained evangelical Christian preacher and now operates several businesses that help congregations raise money and train church leaders as well as provide general leadership training for the business world. He has written numerous best-selling books on leadership, communication and other topics. Because he has both the reflective and unselfish practice of a preacher and the realistic, strategic practice of a businessman, he ends up having quite a lot to say.

I went into this book not quite sure what I was going to get out of it. I was a bit skeptical that there would be some real insight to cling to but I am pleased to report that there was plenty.

While the main focus of the book is on the 11 different types of thinking, including questions to ask yourself and examples of the different types of thinking, some of the real gems in this book are the quotes about how thinking relates to the change process. Since an enormous part of Dr. Maxwell’s consulting involves changing churches steeped in tradition and resistant to change, it is clear that he has had to become an expert on change. Each of the quotes below made me stop to think further.

• “Unsuccessful people focus their thinking on survival.
• Average people focus their thinking on maintenance.
• Successful people focus their thinking on progress.”

–John C. Maxwell, Thinking for a Change

When I read this quote I immediately thought about my own organization challenges. I don’t find it motivating to embrace a “maintenance” mentality when it comes to organization. “A place for everything and everything in its place,” while certainly true and helpful, is not intellectually stimulating. I find it far more inspiring to have a higher and broader goal of improving and changing my environment that just returning it to the same state time after time.

“People are willing to embrace change when they:

• Hurt enough that they are willing to change.
• Learn enough that they want to change.
• Receive enough that they are able to change.”

–John C. Maxwell, Thinking for a Change

This one hit home as well. Think of the last time you made a change and identify how these three aspects made your change possible or how lack of one of these elements thwarted your change.

“If a change doesn’t feel uncomfortable, then it’s probably not really a change. . . People often forget that you can’t improve and still stay the same.”

–John C. Maxwell, Thinking for a Change

I realized that I often do think that I can get better in one area without making any changes to other aspects of my life that are already working well. Embracing change means being willing not only to fix something that doesn’t work well but also to revisit something that already works well to do it differently or perhaps even better.

“[T]he purpose of goals is to focus your attention and give you direction, not to identify a final destination.”

“Goals may give focus but dreams give power. Dreams expand the world.”

–John C. Maxwell, Thinking for a Change

These quotes made me tighten up my goal-setting language. Dream the destination, goal the direction.

“[E]xperience alone does not add value to a life . . . it’s the insight people gain because of their experience. . . . An experience becomes valuable when it informs or equips us to meet new experiences.”

“Some of the most valuable thoughts you’ve ever had may have been lost because you didn’t give yourself the reflection time you needed.”

–John C. Maxwell, Thinking for a Change

If you are in the business world in particular, the above quotes should give you pause. How many times do you find yourself rushing about from appointment to appointment on your calendar, fielding hundreds of emails and calls and never having a moment to stop to think about what you are learning from all this “experience.” Dr. Maxwell’s quote reminds us that just putting in the time is not enough if you aren’t truly learning from your experiences. Making time each week (on the weekend if necessary) to review your week and reflect on how it went is very important. A brief diary of accomplishments, lessons learned and key decisions and their impacts could make the difference between a future leader and the eternal employee.

For a taste of Dr. Maxwell’s speaking and teaching style, watch the short clip below from a presentation to businesspeople in Taiwan. It is interesting to see how he combines his religious background with his business presentation style. The result is an instant credibility because he is unafraid to hide what may be considered controversial or unpopular, presents his authentic self, and highlights the advantages of his engaging and emotional style.

Do you set aside time regularly for thinking? How do you characterize your primary thinking style? Has the right attitude made a difference in your change process? Please share in the comments.

"Herd of Tourists." Photo by AnnieGreenSprings (R.M. Calamar). From the Flickr Creative Commons.

Imagine you are trying to get to a destination and the only way to get there is by elephant!  There you are, sitting atop the elephant, headed down a path.  What will influence your progress?  According to Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, there are three main variables:

1)   The Rider: i.e. your logical/analytical brain.  Do you know where you want to go and how to get there?

2)   The Elephant: i.e. your emotional brain.  Are you excited about going there? Can you summon up the stamina to make it to the end of the journey?

3)   The Path: i.e. the external situation factors.  Is the path steep, flat or downhill?  Will you be deterred by weather or other hazards en route? Can you take a different route that makes the journey easier or the wrong path harder to pursue?

Switch is kind of a treatise on the current status of psychological research with regard to change and motivation.  The authors have cleverly organized an enormous amount of information around the elephant metaphor above and added in numerous real-world examples of change at work in personal lives, in business and in the non-profit world.

Similar to the Ruly philosophy, the Heath brothers believe that there is one process for successful change and that mastering that process will lead to success in any context, whether personal, business or philanthropic.

Some of the great psychological theories discussed include:

1)   solutions-focused therapy – This is a technique developed by the husband-wife therapist team Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg in their marital counseling practice who asked couples to imagine that overnight all of their marital problems were solved.  She then asks them to identify what visible signs would be evident the next morning to indicate the change had occurred.  Identifying and recognizing these signs is critical to identifying the progressive changes that need to occur.  This type of therapy essentially disregards the reasons why someone got to their current state of problems and makes the person focus on the way forward.

2)   identity theory – This theory, developed by psychologists Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser, shows that shifts in your identity result in behavioral changes. (Example: If you identify as an environmentalist, you might be inspired to recycle.)  Experiments also show that people can be receptive to adopting new identities.

3)   fixed mindset versus growth mindset theory – Carol Dweck  developed this theory and determined that you need a growth mindset to implement change.  The growth mindset believes the brain is like a muscle and you can change your situation at any time with enough effort.  The growth mindset accepts big challenges despite the risk of failure.  (Example: Schoolchildren who received training that they can be good at anything, including math, if they just work hard enough achieved far more than children who did not receive this training.)

4)   fundamental attribution error – This theory, developed by Lee Ross, is similar to the fixed mindset theory and explains that sometimes we don’t believe we (or others) can change because of innate, unchangeable personality characteristics.   “The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in. “ (Example: The speeding driver who just cut you off is not necessarily a thoroughbred jerk but someone running late for an appointment.)

Some of the unique insight about successful change offered by the Heath brothers includes:

1)   look for bright spots – If you are trying to implement a very difficult change, look first for examples of people who live in nearly identical circumstances to you who have achieved the goal.  What did they do that you could replicate? (Example: When working to combat poverty in a poor community, philanthropists first looked to the poor mothers in that community with relatively healthy children and taught those healthy mothers’ dietary techniques to the mothers with more sickly children.)

2)   seek small solutions – “Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions.  Instead they are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions.. . . If you seek out a solution that is as complex as the problem . . . nothing will change.”  As former UCLA coach John Wooden put it: “When you improve a little each day eventually big things occur . . . Don’t look for the quick big improvement.  Seek the small improvement one day at a time.  That’s the only way it happens – and when it happens it lasts.” (Example: The U.S. government’s food pyramid is cited as an incomprehensible guide for healthy eating that does almost nothing to solve obesity and other problems.  More effective have been specific directives such as asking people to switch from whole milk to 1% milk.)

3)   make change seem easy – “A  business cliché commands us to ‘raise the bar.’  But that’s exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant.  You need to lower the bar . . . ‘shrink the change.’”  (Examples: A car wash offering a free wash after 8 washes on a punch card had better success when giving customers a 10-wash punch card pre-punched with 2 washes than an 8 wash card starting from zero.)

4)   focus on changing feelings – “The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people, and behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people’s feelings.”  (Examples: Trying to inspire your employees by focusing on cost reduction or financial goals is much less effective than inspiring them to provide incredible service to their customers or other emotionally connected goals.  Trying to sell to your customer by giving them a PowerPoint presentation with the logical reasons why they should use your product or service is much less effective than walking in with a hands-on tactile display showing you understand their problem and showing them the way to a solution.)

5)   expect failure - “Any new quest, even one that is ultimately successful, is going to involve failure.”  . . . You need to enable the expectation of failure. . . . Even in failure there is success.”  (Example: A famous design firm tells its designers to expect that during the design process there will be ups and downs and that the down periods are not signs of failure but periods the designer must persevere through to generate an excellent design.)

I generally enjoyed reading this book.  It started off very strong and engaging but toward the end in the discussion of making the path easier it started to lose a little steam.  Some of the last suggestions are about making checklists and scheduling tasks—basic time management stuff.  The only other criticism I have of the book is that when you finish it, you feel inspired with all kinds of thoughts but do not have a lot of clarity about exactly what to do next when facing a specific problem. However, if you are willing to sit down and spend some time doing your own thinking, this book is an excellent starting point and a goldmine of ideas about solving truly difficult problems.

Believe it or not, organization is mentioned in the book as a complex problem in need of a solution.  And the FlyLady, a.k.a. Marla Cilley, is cited as an example of effectively using various psychological techniques for optimum motivation in the field of personal organizing.    She is cited as a “shrink the change” follower by advising people to set a timer for 5 minutes to begin to clean up one room the best they can rather than committing to clean the entire thing (which can be daunting).  I also think she is a “quick, small solutions” practitioner as her first commandment is the simple, “shine your sink.”  She then progressively adds tasks like “get dressed to your shoes.”  You could also argue she is an “identity” practitioner as she has her own alter ego and calls her followers “FlyBabies.”

If you want to start applying the Switch philosophy to your own problems, you could start by separating your problem into the three change areas:

1)   Analytical/logical – What do I need to accomplish?  What is wrong with the way I am doing things now?  What do I need to learn more about?  What steps are involved?

2)   Motivation – What would make me excited about making this change?  What thoughts/feelings are derailing my success?  How can I structure the steps toward my goal so that the change seems easier to me?

3)   External – How can I change my environment to make change easier and reversion to my old ways harder?

Can you relate to the Switch elephant/rider approach?  Which techniques/theories appeal to you the most?  Please share in the comments.

"Developing primary hippocampal neurons." Photo by Asha Bhakar, MIT in collaboration with the Harvard LDDN, USA using GE Healthcare technologies. From the Flickr Creative Commons.

It’s the beginning of a new month at Ruly and time for the introduction of this month’s organizing theme topic.

Recently, I was watching some online episodes of the weight-loss reality show The Biggest Loser.  While weight is fortunately not one of the struggles I have, I found the show fascinating because of the emotional as well as physical transformation the contestants required to implement healthy lifestyle changes.  As I watched, I wondered how it was that these people got to be hundreds upon hundreds of pounds and why it was that they had trouble making the changes necessary to lose weight on their own.  I realized that their struggles in the weight arena were probably no different than what most of us face when we are trying to change a hard-wired habit in any area.

Our lives are constantly changing.  Change can be something that we desire to do or something we have to do, like it or not, because of our life circumstances.  Many of us naturally resist change.  Change often requires a lot of hard work to form new habits and eliminate our prior unproductive habits.  We may have invested a lot of time and effort creating the original habits and are hesitant to let them go.  We may be afraid of the uncertainty and the possibility of failure involved with change.

How does all of this relate to organizing?  Often, when a person feels “disorganized,” it means that a change has occurred and the person has not fully accepted or adjusted to that change.  The same organizing strategies that worked before the change may not be appropriate or effective in the new circumstances.  Being willing to change is a big part of staying organized.

So, this month at Ruly is all about change: the dynamics of change, how to implement change and  adjusting to change.

To kick off the month, I wanted to share a few facts on change.

What are the most stressful life changes?

Psychologists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe compiled a Stress Scale, assigning point values to the most stressful life events.  You can see the entire list here.

Simplifying the list to include broad categories of the more commonly experienced conditions, I have compiled the following Top 10 most stressful life changes.

10. Leisure: vacation, Christmas, family reunions
9. Moving: changing residence, schools, churches, social groups
8.  Major Transitions: starting or ending a new job or school program, child leaving home
7. Conflict: disagreements with in-laws, boss or social group
6. Personal Changes: eating habits, sleeping habits, exercise regimens, organizing routines etc.
5. Money: changes in financial condition or business status, foreclosure, bankruptcy
4.  Work: dismissal from work, retirement, changing jobs or changing job responsibilities
3.  Health: personal injury or illness of self or a family member
2.  Love: divorce/marital separation, marriage or marital reconciliation
1.  Death: loss of a spouse, child, close family member or friend

It was interesting to see from the Holmes-Rahe list that both positive and negative life events involve change and stress.  For example, marriage is not that much less stressful than marital separation!

Is it true that you can be “too old to change”?

Sadly, a 2009 study suggests that peak brain function occurs around age 22.  Decreases in brain speed, abstract reasoning and puzzle-solving abilities begin to occur around the young age of 27.  By age 37, memory decline can be detected.  However, our general knowledge increases until age 60.  Another 2009 study suggests that if you have at least a high school education and take good care of your health, including exercising regularly and not smoking, you have a good chance of maintaining your cognitive abilities into your 70s and 80s.

So, while you can implement change at any age, there is some truth to the fact that it is harder to change as we get older.

How does the brain process change?

A 2011 study on the impact of emotional stress on brain function explains the internal brain mechanics involved in change:

“Our ability to learn from experience and to adapt to our environment depends upon synaptic plasticity — the ability of a neuron or synapse to change its internal parameters in response to its history.”

–Science Daily quoting a study by Iaroslav Savtchouk in The Journal of Neuroscience

Brain plasticity is impaired by events such as injury or drug addiction and can be improved with pending therapies like embryonic cell transplants as well as taking good care of your health and keeping your brain active through physical exercise, social interaction and other intellectual stimulation.

Coming this month…

This month we will look at various strategies to implement change from a diverse panel of experts.  The discussion will include both practical tips as well as theoretical concepts.  We will also examine a variety of different types of changes and our rational and emotional response to these changes.

Please exercise your synaptic plasticity and join me on this month’s exploration of change!