What comes first - seeing or believing?

Words: 349 Reading Time: 1 minutes 10 seconds

Relatively few businesses seek any form of outside consultancy or coaching.

In 2009, according to the Office for National Statistics, the UK economy was made up of 525,000 sole proprietors, with another 1,382,000 enterprises employing between 2 and 10 people and another 20,000 enterprises with between 11 and 49 employees.

Of all businesses (2.15 million) 348,000 were under two years old and a further 316,000 were between two and four years old.

Clearly, with so many small businesses and so many new businesses there is benefit to be had from seeking professional help, especially as approximately one in fifty six businesses will have failed in the same year. So why is this assistance ignored?

Aside from issues of ignorance and concerns about cost I believe the main reason is belief.

For any personal or corporate change to take place, first there must be a change in belief. If any part of the old Henry Ford adage is true, it’s the second part, “you can’t if you think you can’t”, because if companies are convinced of their own inadequacy they are unlikely to attempt any change.

In the unlikely event that they do make an attempt, they are unlikely to persist, taking any early lack of success as proof positive of their initial doubts rather than recognizing this as almost inevitable during the first stumbling steps on the road.

Shifting belief takes work, which probably acts to deter most people. When our beliefs change, so will some of our values. And that tends to scare people. What they more easily embrace is surface pattern change rather than deeper belief work. It has the attraction of seeming to yield early results.

But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the pattern change rarely sticks. Why would it when it is unsupported by underpinning beliefs? Unfortunately this probably leaves the enterprise worse off than before.

To break through this debilitating condition what people and businesses require is a meta-shift – a shift in their belief about belief and the role it plays in their success or failure.

However, I am sure none of that applies to my readers.

Learning from our mistakes

Words: 78 Reading time: 16 seconds

We spend needless time worrying about mistakes, mainly because we have been programmed during our formative years to concentrate on correcting our errors, rather than maximising our successes. What we have rarely been taught – but what we must quickly learn for ourselves in business – is that mistakes are the inevitable corollary of success. Unless we are making mistakes we are missing opportunities; we are not trying hard enough and we are forgoing huge, valuable and irreplaceable learning.

Knowing Is Not Enough

Words: 561 Reading time: 1 minute 52 seconds

It isn’t what we know that determines the outcome; it’s what we do with what we know.

Example 1
Prior to “Operation Market Garden” in September 1944 the senior Allied commanders knew that the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions were located on the corridor that the Allies planned to use for their narrow-front thrust. This made achieving the objective highly unlikely.

More than 16,800 Allied troops were killed, wounded or captured in a fruitless effort that was essentially targeted at assuaging a bruised ego.

Example 2
In December of the same year the Germans launched a tactically brilliant offensive through the Ardennes, inflicting heavy losses on inexperienced Allied troops.

Just like Market Garden 'It was not intelligence (evaluated information of the enemy) that failed. The failure was the commanders and certain G-2's, who did not act on the intelligence they had,' according to one of Patton's subordinates.

Although both of these failures to listen came close together, they are by no means unique. Similar failures had preceded them in earlier times and others have followed in later times.

Example 3
The North Vietnamese Easter Offensive of 1972 was similar and as one author has pointed out "Though the location, numbers and types of forces were not the same, the command assumptions, the weather and the use and misuse of intelligence had almost the same catastrophic effects in both clashes.... "

Example 4
Ten years later, in the South Atlantic, the Falklands war may have been avoidable. In any event it was undoubtedly made more costly and riskier by the intelligence failure that preceded it. British officials were unresponsive to warnings that diplomacy had failed and invasion was imminent.

Example 5
In 2003 it was Iraq. As the White House has acknowledged, intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs did not drive its decision to go to war.

The intelligence on Iraq was there. It did not get things wrong and thereby mislead policymakers. Once again the leaders were insensitive to information that suggested that the course of action on which they were embarked was likely to lead to disaster.

These examples are drawn from the military sphere simply because mistakes there tend to more visible and better documented than failures in business. But similar failures in business abound. Failures where the enterprise does not give sufficient weight either to facts within its purview, or relevant facts easily revealed.

Many people, let alone businesses, are uneasy acknowledging that many of the conventions and principles they operate on are unwritten, unspoken and unconscious. Psychologists estimate that 95% of the things we say and do each day are done on “autopilot”, that is automatically, unthinkingly and routinely.

And the very familiarity of such actions mean they go unrecognised and unquestioned long after they cease to be either safe or appropriate. Thus it is that we wake up one day to find ourselves in an awful mess without realising quite how we got there.

The tragedy is that working with either a business coach, or an NLP Practitioner for even a short period of time will begin to raise awareness of the subconscious paradigms we are running and what the implications might be.

Make just one New Year’s Resolution – start working on raising your awareness of yourself and your business so that you can improve your chances of recognising the warning signs before it is too late.

The wisdom of making mistakes

We all make mistakes. And fear of making mistakes too often keeps us frozen in indecision and inaction. However, it is rarely the mistake itself that is the real problem. More often it is the consequence we expect, the outcome from the mistake that blocks our moving forward.

That fear is misplaced for four main reasons:

Our fears may be groundless or, at least, exaggerated. Fear is only felt in relation to potential future events. Nobody fears the past since it is already known and experienced. However, potential events are not real events. They may never happen as we anticipate and we cannot know how they will happen until we take action. How often has some dreaded eventuality turned out to be not so bad after all?

Mistakes may be more apparent than real. What we judge to be a mistake in the short term can eventually emerge as a breakthrough. History is replete with such events. Artificial sweeteners, X-rays, microwave ovens and vulcanized rubber are just a few of the inventions that owe their existence to chance.

We learn from our mistakes. It has been said that success teaches us very little, whereas failure carries valuable lessons. Our failures cause us to pause, take stock, work out what went awry and then modify our approach. Success is often taken for granted. We pat ourselves on the back, congratulate ourselves for being so smart and move on. We rarely stop to work out what elements came together to deliver such a great result.

Indecision and inaction is itself a decision – hence the expression ‘damned if you do, and damned if you don’t’. With a decision made and action take you have intention and a degree of control. With indecision and inaction one is subject to the variable winds of fate and fortune, and the decisions and actions of others, never know where one is likely to end up.

Then there are those mistakes that only appear to be foolish, but conceal a deeper wisdom:

One day a beggar appeared in the marketplace. Whenever people showed him both a large note and a smaller note he always chose the small one.

Eventually, a generous man who was tired of seeing everyone laugh at the beggar quietly went over to him and explained that when people offered him two notes, he should choose the larger one. Then he would have more money, and people would not think him a fool.

"You are surely right", replied the beggar. "But if I always choose the larger note, people would stop offering me money, in order to prove that I am a greater fool than they are. And then I would no longer receive enough for my food. There is nothing wrong with appearing to be a fool, if what you are doing is in fact intelligent."