One of my co-workers just swung by my desk the other day.  He was always on the heavy side and has obviously lost a whole lot of weight.  I said to him, "You’ve caught my disease."  To which he laughed and said, "Actually I’ve been meaning to tell you that you were my inspiration to make a change in my life and get things back in order."  You can’t imagine how it feels to be an inspiration to someone.  It’s really amazing.  It was one thing to have succeeded in my weight loss goal but a whole other thing to be pulling others along with me!  Anyway….it just felt so good I wanted to share!  I’m sure we have all inspired people in our life times.  I hope whoever you have inspired has shared it with you too!

There are two important message in this story;

    – Those watching may be pulled along

    – If watching offer encouragement

Change is often difficult to detect if we don’t know how to look for the early shaping steps that would indicate things are being done differently.  Our impatience causes us to give up too early.  It also causes us to miss the other things that are going on around us.  Things like other people watching us to see what we are going to do and how we are reacting to others.  They may even be helping us out or modeling our behaviours in other areas.

You never know who may be watching you and deciding to make a change based on what they see you doing.  So don’t give up.

If you are watching don’t forget to offer up a word of encouragement.

Gandhi said "You should be the change that you want to see in the world."

Ok the background on the episode;

Gordon is going to help Nick who runs Nick’s Bistro @ Rococo Restaurant in King’s Lynn.  Nick is a former Michelin Star Chef with £100k of debt.  Things aren’t looking good.

Gordon’s goal is to help Nick turn the place around.  He shows up and makes an assessment of the current environment.  He finds the following;

• Prices are high for what the local area will support (sales)
• Supplies are expensive and doesn’t take advantage of the local produce (expenses)
• Restaurant isn’t attracting customers (revenue)
• The food is pretentious and fussy (product)
• Nick doesn’t have a plan to change (leadership)

Gordon asks Nick about using local produce.  Nick says "blah blah blah" and rationalises away his actions.  Gordon goes out and does his own reconnaissance and finds out that Nick’s perception just isn’t reality.  He then takes Nick out to show him the reality of the local suppliers. (management information)

Next he gives the team a little test so he can see check their thinking and skill level. (performance data)  He does a ‘Ready, Steady, Cook’ and gives them 20 minutes to prepare a dish.  They make one dish.  Gordon says "look you could have made a starter and a main with the same ingredients and made a good profit."  He now has a read on how in tune they are with making money.

Gordon has used all this to create what John Kotter calls a sense of urgency.  The stage is now set for a change to occur.  Start the transformation.  Gordon helps the team create a new environment.  He does this by;

• Changing the menu
• Renaming the restaurant to Maggie’s
• Redecorating
• Gets Nick to throw away the ego items (ie guide books that say how great Nick’s old restaurant was in years gone by).^[2]
• Goes out into the town to announce the new restaurant. (marketing on a shoe string)

To try and ensure that the changes stick, Gordon seeks out the allies around Nick who will provide reinforcement to help him keep these new behaviours and changes on track.

The process Gordon has taken Nick through is modelled after the Kübler-Ross curve.^[3]  First Nick denies there is a problem.  Then he increases the resistance as demonstrated by him locking Gordon out of the restaurant.  He then lets Gordon back in and says, ‘last night I had a good cry…I have hit the bottom and the penny has finally dropped.’

Gordon says good, now lets move forward.  Fair play to Nick, he does move forward and two months later, on a return visit, Gordon finds things turned around.  Nick says all the suppliers are paid up to date and things are in order.  The restaurant is again profitable.

I was struck by this show because Gordon demonstrates so many of the elements that we are trying to get across to people in business;

• Pinpoint the result you want to achieve
• Analyse the current situation
• Change the environment
• Evaluate the change
• Sustain the change

All of this activity is underpinned by data.

The bit I find interesting is that Gordon uses Negative Reinforcement to create the sense of urgency and change.  (I think this is absolutely the right approach.)  He then attempts to provide a little bit of Positive Reinforcement to sustain the change.

The set of behaviours he uses to create results are tipped more toward the negative.  The language laced with ‘F’ this and that is insulting.  His dose of punishment often leads to the other party shutting down in his presence or a delayed outburst once the bully has left.   (The scrappier ones come back swinging.) 

To have a sustainable model, the use of negative reinforcement to create a sense of urgency must be done inside the context of a positive environment.  The leader has to have spent time building trust with the performers before they have the credibility to deliver the negative reinforcement.  If this process is rushed the performers often feel like they are just being punished and will seek revenge on the organisation.

Most leaders I know don’t even do a good line in creating a negative environment like Gordon.  They simply issue empty threats to their staff and then spend time alone or with their mates.  They create a work environment of extinction. 

When we start to talk to these leaders about performance they take the same stance that Nick took; look I am a professional, I know what I am doing, there isn’t anything wrong here, anyway what do you know.  What they need is a sense of urgency, they need some data, they need a good dose of negative reinforcement to get them to wake up and smell the coffee.

Now to find a leader inside the organisation who is interested in performance.  Once you find that creating a sense of urgency becomes a whole lot easier.

Besides talent, one thing Gordon has over most leaders is a focus on performance.  He knows his target and stays over it the whole time.  He has some amazing instincts,^[4] that serve him well.  There is no doubt that he is very successful. 

Do I want him to change? No. 

Why?  It just wouldn’t be good television if he did.

1. ↑1 Although I am not sure my wife enjoyed the running commentary.  Since we have Sky+ she could always rewind to catch what she missed during my excited outbursts
2. ↑2 This is an interesting point.  Daniel Goldman of Emotional Intelligence fame suggests that IQ + EQ > EGO if you are going to be successful.  Nick has got this equation out of balance and it has prevented him from seeing reality.  He is cooking for his EGO not for his customers.
3. ↑3 See my earlier post about A Serious Dose of Negative Reinforcement.
4. ↑4 In another episode Gordon got a pub turned around by creating the campaign for real gravy.  Simple, elegant and easy for all the pub’s staff to understand and execute.

I pushed them very hard using a technique called Socratic questioning.  I thought they might just tune me out at one point but they hung in there.  Looking back they said it helped them expand and strengthen their thinking.  They felt like they had advanced their idea.

I have seen many good ideas or plans that have not been passed through a lens of critical thinking.  In the process of getting the original idea down on paper and making a set of slides people fall in love with their work and feel like the job is done.  If you ask them critical questions they become defensive and this serves to protect the first pass of the idea.  They miss the opportunity to strengthen their thinking by engaging in some rigorous debate.

This is a sculpture by Rachel Whiteread that depicts the space the object does not inhabit, sometimes called the negative space.  What I was trying to help these entrepreneurs discover was their space beneath the stairs.   I believe they have a very interesting idea but the real discovery is still hidden.  They haven’t completed the critical thinking that will help them build something truly unique.

I first heard of the idea of the space beneath the stairs while listening to a recording of Charles Handy’s speech from it@cork.  In this talk Charles describes how entrepreneurs see the space beneath the stairs and that is what makes their ideas truly different.

I am a firm believer that without rigorous debate you won’t be able to create an environment that will support high performance.   The person doing the Socratic questioning can often be seen to be very threatening, aggressive or just plain negative.  To be able to engage in rigorous debate you have to have a trusting relationship with the other parties. 

My friend Howard and I often engage in these discussions.   During our most creative moments we use this technique to explore all kinds of ideas and improve the quality of our thinking.  Most of these discussions are held in the privacy of our offices.  On occasion we have invited other people to join in on one of these sessions.  As the questioning unfolds you can see a look of concern on their faces.  They are very worried that there is something wrong between Howard and I.  We have to explain to them that everything is ok.  Often we point to the finished product and say look, these are two fantastic ideas that we got out of the session.

I want to be clear that we aren’t yelling at each other.  The approach is more sophisticated than that; what we are doing is asking very intense, focused questions that are designed to probe and uncover our underlying assumptions and mental models.  We feel that to be at our best for our clients our practice sessions must be rigorous. 

The value we bring is helping others to see the space beneath the stairs.  They don’t see these spaces because they are too busy running up and down the stairs.

The purpose of the strong dose of negative reinforcement is to take the person beyond the "Resistance" point and push them all the way down to "Acceptance & Regret". At this point they are now ready to begin to form new neural pathways that will allow them to change their behaviour patterns, or go sulk.