We coach leaders to the Pinnacle of performance
Using an Improvement Roadmap: Indentifying the Most Cost-Effective Processes
Topic Highlights: ▪ What Are You Trying to Improve? ▪ Make Sure the Intervention Works ○ Doing Consistently and Behaving Non-Disruptively ○ Framing Realities Realistically ○ Handling Complexity Intuitively ▪ Finding Your Way through the Improvement Maze
New insights into the automatic side of human
performance
What Are You Trying to Improve?
If you don’t know where you are going, any path will get you there.
Alice : "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" Cheshire Cat: "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to." Alice: "I don't much care where." Cheshire Cat: "Then it doesn't matter which way you go." - Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The first crucial distinction to make when attempting to improve performance: What are you trying to improve? The biggest mistake people make when trying to improve their own performance or trying to help others improve is failing to make the crucial distinction regarding the source of the deficiency. Since most people do not realize that we operate in two distinct modes because we have a bipartite mind, they commonly try to use techniques designed to improve the familiar thinking-self and apply them to issues that reside in the previously elusive auto-self. If the deficiency emanates from the thinking-self, then acquiring new knowledge provides the solution. If the auto-self causes the deficiency, then facts, requests, or demands normally will not get the job done. Do you need more knowledge, or do you need to transform an auto-self activity?
How can you tell if your thinking-self or your auto-self controls an activity? If your issue is one of the five business-success factors identified below, the auto-self probably controls it.
Many people believe that automatic behaviors cannot change because they come from immutable personality traits. Others believe that everyone should be able to change a dysfunctional personality trait or a bad habit if they just had a strong enough desire, a clear enough intention, or where sternly directed to change. This is what we call the "Bobby Knight Syndrome." In the summer of 2000, Indiana University President Myles Brand gave celebrated basketball coach Bobby Knight an ultimatum. He told Coach Knight that if he had one more temper flare-up and abused another student, he would fire him. On September 11, 2000, President Brand fired Bobby Knight after an inevitable blowup occurred. Here is an example of an organizational leader, the president of the major university, who did not understand how automatic human activities work and how you go about changing the one that plagued the coach and the school. As with most people faced with auto-behavior challenges, Bobby Knight really had no hope of changing his deep-seated behavior on his own. This misperception is all too common among otherwise savvy business leaders and even many HR professionals who must recognize this distinction. In fact, auto-behaviors are neither immutable nor easily changed. We can transform auto-behaviors, but the change requires persistent application of techniques designed to erase and replace stubborn habits.
Make Sure the Intervention Works
Techniques for improving the thinking-self have existed for a long time, so most people don't have trouble locating effective means to increase knowledge when inadequate information causes a deficiency. The challenge comes when trying to make changes to our automatic activities.
We previously identified five ways the auto-self affects business success:
Doing Consistently and Behaving Non-Disruptively:
Auto-behaviors drive both of these auto-self success factors. Therefore, improvements for either require the same types of techniques. It helps to view these opposite impacts of auto-behaviors from different perspectives.
When Auto-Behaviors Need Improvement
As discussed previously, guiding people to recognize, accept, and commit to change a dysfunctional auto-behavior often creates a difficult challenge. Because auto-behaviors are ingrained in the automatic part of our mind, changing them creates discomfort. The Comfort Imperative dictates we must mount a concerted effort to counteract the discomfort to avoid abandoning the transformation process.
Framing Realities Realistically:
As with auto-behaviors, reconstructing an auto-context normally creates a traumatic experience. Our auto-contexts center us. They provide common, stable assumptions so we can communicate with each other and so we can make sense of our chaotic environment. This stability serves us well in consistent environments, but it serves us poorly when changes in the business environment dictate the need to reconstruct the "rules of the game." Because auto-contexts appear to us as the way things "really are," we automatically resist challenges to them, so obsolete or ineffective auto-contexts persist. This image illustrates the point of how we continue to view order through an idealized perceptual lens even while chaos emerges in our environment. We uncontrollably cling to obsolete realities (auto-contexts) for critical business areas, which often creates failures. Antiquated or unrealistic auto-contexts create problems in the business model (company culture), our self-image, our attitudes towards others, and the way we approach performance improvement. Because challenges to auto-contexts immediately create internal reality wars, the Comfort Imperative drives most people to reject the information creating the challenge. That is why people normally need external help to reconstruct auto-contexts. Unfortunately, the Comfort Imperative creates such a relentless force that, even with competent external help, many people steadfastly resist facing the need to reconstruct an auto-context – to their grave peril. After people overcome their reality vertigo and realize they need to change an auto-context, the reconstruction process itself creates discomfort. The most straightforward way to reconstruct a hidden auto-context is to probe until it becomes explicit and repeatedly practice using the explicit context until it eventually migrates to a new auto-context (due to auto-self Property #7 – Brain processes emerge to execute repeated activities automatically). When one of our auto-context lenses through which we interpret our realities becomes out of focus, we need to grind a new lens.
Confusion still exists about the nature of leadership and the effectiveness of attempts to construct leadership abilities. Much of the confusion arises because our auto-self controls most of our leadership abilities. As such, no matter how well written, leadership books can never create leadership abilities. A big part of improving leadership abilities entails creating new auto-skills rather than erasing and replacing existing behaviors. Creating new leadership skills does not normally produce great discomfort. However, it does require practice with feedback, and as anyone who has tried to excel at sports or a musical instrument knows, creating a new skill is tedious and can take a long time. Most people attempt to improve their leadership abilities by attending leadership programs at universities, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit companies. Effective leadership development organizations build their programs around experiential workshops because we need "experiences," not just understanding, to construct new leadership abilities. If you want to create leadership abilities for the future, search for a program that constructs the ability to recontextualize, which entails understanding when auto-contexts become misaligned with the business environment and reconstructing cultures, attitudes, shared behaviors, and self-images when needed.
Handling Complexity Intuitively:
Because the business community has so poorly understood auto-expertise, we lack techniques for creating it. Pattern recognition, which underlies auto-expertise, emerges through extensive, successful experience. Because of the way expertise emerges, most experts cannot articulate details of their own auto-expertise. They just see things differently than other people. The challenges are to recognize and leverage when people do have auto-expertise and for experts to learn greater patience and tolerance when other people can't comprehend at all what they see so clearly. As reported earlier, Terri benefited from this insight that enabled her to create a new explicit context, which eventually migrated to an auto-context, that people who didn't see "the obvious" were not obstinate or stupid – they just lacked her expertise.
Finding Your Way through the Improvement Maze
The diagram below identifies the major types of performance improvement as viewed from the bipartite model of the mind. The top part represents the familiar knowledge improving processes. The bottom section identifies the less familiar processes for transforming our automatic activities. Please note that "coaching" shows up in two places on the diagram. Because coaching has become a buzzword lately, some people who advise or consult now call themselves "coaches." If you need specialized knowledge, then look to a consultant or advisory coach. However, if you need to change somebody's counterproductive habit, be sure you select a coach who understands the automatic side of human nature and knows how to employ transformation techniques to improve it.
Besides assuring an effective performance-improvement process, you should select the one that requires the smallest investment that still provides reliable results. The following tables identify the relative costs of different processes and identify which processes match which needs most cost-effectively.
Since self-help requires the smallest investment, there is no harm in trying it first. Verify your results. If you improved the way you wanted, congratulations; you're among the relatively few who have successfully transformed themselves. If your desired results did not materialize, consider engaging a transformational coach.
We have focused on correcting bad habits and on discovering characteristics of one's auto-behaviors to open up the opportunity to correct counterproductive behaviors. Another decisive way that our auto-self affects success is the array of hidden contexts that frame how we understanding and interpret our business realities. Ignorance of this auto-self mechanism leads to many business failures. These auto-contexts not only control the business-model culture but they also enable and constrain how we understand peak performance and performance improvement, which is the main topic of this website. The next web page identifies how to manage auto-contexts to reach the Pinnacle of success.
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