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Look, Listen, and Unlearn

It is essential that we keep our eyes and is open. The reason people and the businesses they run fall behind is that we as individuals are not paying attention to the changes taking place.

Some dramatic and well known examples of disruptive change are:

• Who ever uses a cassette tape or a vinyl record today?
• Where are the typewriters of yesterday?
• Toyota and the Hybrid car
• the electric light displaced the gas or oil lamp

With regard  to the changes around us – are we looking for them but not seeing them, are we reading about them but not understanding them, are we noticing them but refusing to listen to the lessons they give? Sure, you can trundle out hundreds of excuses about being too busy, under resourced or restricted by the management but in reality these all just excuses.

If you take repeated action that is not pushing you in the right direction and you are not using this feedback to infer how you may need to change, then this is not intelligent behavior.  It has been referred to colloquially as the definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Not all feedback is good in the first instance. The faster you move through denial, to believing that all is rosy when it is actually not, and making some changes for the better. First you have to notice that all was not rosy.

The beauty of being a flip star is that you can always do the opposite of the what the world suggests – Google’s founders did this beautifully well – in truth they created an environment where change was seen as good. People say knowledge is power. Perhaps knowledge is not power. Maybe ignorance is David Grable, an author, speaks of the loss of ignorance with sadness:

“Unlike knowledge, which is infinitely reusable, ignorance is a one-shot deal; once it has been displaced by knowledge,
it can be hard to get back. After it’s gone, we are more apt to follow a well-worn path to find answers
than to exert our sense of what we didn’t know in order to present new options.
Knowledge can stand in the way of innovation. Solved problems tend to stay solved sometimes disastrously so.”

2000 years ago people “knew” the universe was created in the week. 1000 years ago humans “knew” the sun moved around earth. 500 years ago people “knew” the earth was flat. Imagine what you will know tomorrow? What knowledge or practices do you hold on to that are no longer empowering? What behavior that once drove your success do you and your team now need to unlearn?

Great leaders and managers must be prepared to make decisions about their business, and for that matter their lives. Often these decisions will be based as much on intuition and educated guesswork as on predictable data and knowledge. The flipstar makes the decision anyway. Why:

1. decisions lead to actions. When you finally make up your mind about something, it usually leads to action. There is no need at this point to say why this is a good thing.
2. Decisions creates momentum. The action that follows your decisions will give you the clarity that was preventing you from making a decision in the first place, and now you’re off on a positive upward spiral. Action leads to clarity, clarity leads to confidence, confidence leads to another decision and now the decision warrants action and so on.
3. Decisions create confidence. The decision gives you not just a sense of confidence but also those around you. If you get your team or, if you’re a CEO your whole company moving in the right direction of your stated trajectory, you had better instil some confidence.

Decisions create that confidence.

Let me give you a simple but profound question. When will Apple cease to be a computer company that has an interest in music downloads to being exclusively a music and media company?

Tags: Cassette Tape, David Grable, Definition Of Insanity, Denial, First Instance, Flip Style, Founders, Google, Hybrid Car, Innovation, Intelligent Behavior, Knowledge Is Power, Oil Lamp, Paying Attention, People, Reason, Regard, Right Direction, Sadness, Sun, Toyota Car, Trundle, Typewriters, Universe, Vinyl Record, Worn Path