Recently, a friend of mine called me asking for advice. I’ll shorten it here, roughly he said:
“Marian, I’m a team leader and I’ve got a problem with my CEO.
She won’t approve the work the way I do it, she keeps changing it and spoiling it.
I’ve tried talking to her but all in vain.
She can’t see it and she disagrees, believing she is improving it.
Tell me, what can I do to make her stop doing this?”
My reply went something like this.
"There are three ways to solve any problem:
1. Change the source of your problem. 2. Change your experience of the problem. 3. Remove yourself from the problem.
You’ve tried option 1 and it hasn’t worked – the CEO won’t change what she is doing - messing up with your work.
So move on to option 2 - change your experience. Can you work under these circumstances and be mentally OK? Can you enjoy your job INCLUDING the CEO?
If not, your only option in number 3. If you can’t change the source of the problem and you can’t change your experience, then remove yourself from the problem. Get a new job.”
I knew that wasn’t what my friend wanted to hear.
Anyway.
Reality vs perception of reality
Rory Sutherland was right to point out that many problems in life can be solved actually by tinkering with experience & perception rather than 'that tedious, hard-working and messy business of actually trying to change reality.' We all know that changing reality rarely works and it costs a lot of time, money and effort. Changing the perception of reality, however, is almost always a better way to move foreward.
Al Ries & Jack Trout wrote in their book,
“ Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products”
and here are three stories for you to prove it.
1. Banned potatoes
In 1774, King Frederick II of Prussia was very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it because he realized that if you had two sources of carbohydrates - wheat and potatoes - you get less price volatility in bread, and you get a far lower risk of famine 'cause you actually had two crops to fall back on, not one. The only problem is, potatoes, if you think about it, look pretty disgusting. And also, 18th-century Prussians ate very few vegetables. He tried making it compulsory. The Prussian peasants hadn’t seen the potatoe before and they didn’t want them. They said, we can't even get the dogs to eat these damn things. They're absolutely disgusting, and they're good for nothing.
So he tried plan B. He tried the marketing solution, a more delicate & subtle approach. He declared the potato as a royal vegetable and none but the royal family could consume it. He banned peasants from eating potatoes - that made them scarce and special. He planted them in a royal garden with guards who had instruction to guard over it night and day, but with secret instructions not to guard it very well. Now, 18th-century peasants were intrigued, they knew if something was worth guarding, it was definitely worth stealing. Voila. They began stealing them, cooking them and eating them.
That is how potatoes became accepted. What Frederick the Great had effectively done is he'd rebranded the potato. It was an absolute masterpiece. 'It isn’t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image’, said David Ogilvy. Remember, people don’t want something until they can’t have it.
2. Time flies (when you are having fun)
Here's the second example. This is a train, which goes from London to Paris. The question was given to a bunch of engineers about 15 years ago. How do we make the journey to Paris better? And they came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend 6 billion pounds building completely new tracks from London to the coast and knocking about 40 minutes off a three and a half hour journey time.
Now, call me Mr. Picky. I'm just a simple guy. But it strikes me as an unimaginative way of improving a train journey only to make it shorter. Here's my naive alternative suggestion. What you should in fact do is employ all the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free drinks for the entire duration of the journey. You'll still have about 3 billion pounds left and people will actually ask for the trains to be slowed down.
Ok, I know I am going too far. To be more serious, spending 1 percent of that money on faster Wi-Fi on the train would definitely do the trick. You could improve the sitting comfort, or install better AC to improve overal travelling experience.
You see, if you’ve got a problem you can’t solve, change it into a problem you can solve. That’s creative thinking.
3. You are great at solving wrong problems
How you frame things really matters, imagine this: You are the owner of an office building, and your tenants are complaining about the elevator. It’s old and slow, and they have to wait a lot. Several tenants are threatening to break their leases if you don’t fix the problem.
When asked, most people quickly come up with some solutions: replace the lift, install a stronger motor, or perhaps upgrade the algorithm that runs the lift. These suggestions fall into what I call a solution space: a cluster of solutions that share assumptions about what the problem is - in this case, that the elevator is slow.
However, when the problem is presented to building managers, they suggest a much more elegant solution: Put up mirrors next to the elevator. This simple measure has proved wonderfully effective in reducing complaints, because people tend to lose track of time when given something utterly fascinating to look at -namely, themselves. The mirror solution is particularly interesting because in fact it is not a solution to the stated problem: It doesn’t make the elevator faster. The point of reframing is not to find the “real” problem but, rather, to see if there is a better one to solve.
P.S.
I love how all the ‘experts' give us tips on how to work from home. OMG, it’s not some new language or exotic hobby that has to be practiced day in day out for 10 000 hours to be good at it. You get up and then don’t go to the office. Just get on with work. There you go - you’ve just mastered it.
Working in an office is a strange way to do things. We got used to our offices but that does not make them any more justified. Leaving your home at 7am, get stuck in a heavy traffic and travel to where everyone else is, then sitting in an open space or, more often than not in a meeting room, looking at the screen of a device you brought with you from home, and then packing it up and taking it back home with you at 6pm - that is a very strange way to get anything done.
Waking up and saving two hours of travel, a shitty lunch and distractions from colleagues each day and just getting on with your work is by far the optimum mode of action for most of us. And maybe many more of us are about to realise that the big question during the next few weeks won’t be - how do I work from home? It will be why did I ever do it any other way?
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Thanks Rory Rutherland for inspiration
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