Fake It Until You Become It

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Success_is

“The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.”
– Jim Collins

Earlier this week I met Amy Cuddy. If you’re not familiar, she has a signature expression in her talk: “fake it until you become it.” Moving the discussion beyond “fake it ’til you make it”, she means to convey that whenever we try something new, attempt a new skill, or otherwise leap into the unknown in an act of bravery, there is always a part of us that feels like an impostor. Because it’s not about just “making it”, it’s about showing up, consistently, until we fully inhabit – fully become – the new persona we envision ourselves to be.

When we join a new sport, begin playing a musical instrument, pick up yoga, or take on a new job, there is always that little voice of doubt in our mind that says, “You don’t belong here. You don’t know what you’re doing. They’re going to find out you’re a charlatan.” Amy says she spent years of her life feeling like this as she constantly took on new challenges and slowly recovered from a debilitating injury.

I once had a conversation with Vince Poscente, who at age 26 decided he wanted to be an Olympic skier. Just like that. While at the time a fairly middling recreational skier, Vince dedicated four years of constant training, crashes and injuries, to make the Olympic team and compete in the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France. He didn’t win, but he showed up, every day and locked into his skis to train.

It’s marvelous to watch kids attempt new things naturally, unselfconsciously. Kids will regularly cast themselves into the unknown of new sports, or art, or other acts of joyous bravery. If we bring forth what is within us, with consistency, and sometimes a touch of bravery, we can slowly and surely develop new skills. And over time, hone those skills into real expertise.

Go. Conceive and Deliver Art

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Beautiful non-commissioned work at http://www.heatherperryphoto.com/

More beautiful art conceived and delivered at http://www.heatherperryphoto.com/

In 1943, Richard James was a naval engineer trying to develop a meter designed to monitor horsepower on naval battleships. Richard was working with different types of tension springs when one of the springs fell to the ground. And after it fell to the ground, it kept moving as if stepping away. Astonished and delighted by the odd movement, he immediately thought this would make a fun toy for a child. He had just discovered the slinky.

Swiss chemist Jacques E. Brandenberger was sitting at a restaurant one day in 1900 when he watched a glass of wine spill and seep slowly into the tablecloth. His thought in the moment was: wouldn’t it be better to have a kind of coating to the cloth that would prevent absorption, so it would be easy to clean up. He spent the next ten years of his life working on this side project to invent what is now called cellophane.

Some cool innovations are recognized immediately, while others are conceptualized and take years of persistence of realize. Yet there are two primary ingredients that pervade accidental innovation: Curiosity and Play.

Or to put it another way, these were non-commissioned works by an artist.

Almost twenty years ago, Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and her colleagues conducted an interesting study. They asked 23 artists to randomly select 10 of their commissioned works and 10 of their non-commissioned works. They then took the 460 works of art to a space where they could be evaluated by a team of art curators, historians, and experts – all of whom had not been told which was commissioned (paid) art, and which art was created at the self-direction and initiation of the artist

Amabile and her colleagues reported:

“Our results were quite startling…the commissioned works were rated as significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works, yet they were not rated as different in technical quality.”

In other words, it was the non-commissioned, self-directed art that was found to be more creative, interesting, and valuable. Go, conceive and create, undirected, non-commissioned work.

Where’s Your Woodshed?

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CharlieParkerWoodshedding is an old jazz expression – it means to go deep in isolation to build your chops, get your groove on, master your instrument. As the legend goes, in 1937, when he was only 17 years old, young Charlie Parker – before he became the great “Bird” Parker – would go down to the High Hat Club, also known as “the cutting room” to play with the great session musicians of the day.

One night, after young Parker ran out of breath and ran dry of new ideas in the middle of his solo, the great session drummer Jo Jones unscrewed his cymbal and threw it with a crash at Charlie Parker’s feet. The gesture was clear. Take a hike kid. You’re cut.

The same thing happened to Parker just a couple years earlier, when he was only 14 years old. And when he was that young, he didn’t know what he didn’t know. He was so humiliated then that he quit the instrument for three months and refused to play. But this time he had a different reaction. He was indeed humiliated being cut from the stage, but this time around Parker worked even harder at the instrument. That summer he secluded himself at a resort in the Ozark Mountains to work on his playing. He joined a house band to pay for his roof and bread. But what he was really doing was wood-shedding and playing alone hour after hour each day to develop his virtuosity.

He emerged from that self-imposed seclusion and presented the world with an astonishing contribution to a new developing form of jazz known as bebop.

Here’s what I believe: The key to developing innovation and excellence starts by having the courage to develop our own niche mastery, and to understand and know that our actions make a difference.

First Reach In: Find your most compelling signal in the noise that surrounds us. Find the intersection of your passion and talent, and with perseverance, tenacity, grit, hard work and pluck, take it to the woodshed. In the constant din of noise that surrounds us, we need to understand the power of a mute button to silence the static while we focus.

Next Reach out: to a teammate, friend, colleague, or loved one, with encouragement and accountability enrich them to do the same. Multiply that excellence in others. For remember, a rising tide lifts all boats

Day-glo 80’s ski tricks, Border Smashers, and Dinner Rolls

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Before Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile, a group of runners had been working on it for a decade and many, including scientists, considered the four minute barrier physically impossible. But once the world saw Roger do it in May of 1954, within weeks his record 3:59 was beaten by John Landy of Australia. And then the floodgates opened and a quick string of runners beat the four-minute barrier after that. Today a talented collegiate runner can break a 4-minute mile. When we see the possible, it can become inevitable

My son’s ski coach is a former U.S. Ski Team moguls champ. When I mention his name to people on the mountain, they say to me incredulously, “Have you seen him ski!!?” Yes, he rocks. And few sports have had the amazing amount of fast ingenuity and innovation that moguls and freestyle skiing has.

Here’s that I mean. Jonny Moseley won Olympic Gold in 1998 in Nagano Japan in moguls skiing. Fast and fluid and best in the world, but basically incrementally improving on what everyone already knew. He didn’t do anything remarkably different. He just executed the best on known skills and tricks – what my son calls “day-glo 80’s tricks”. For example, here is Travis Cabral a year afterward, winning a U.S. Championship in 1999 doing much the same tricks that had been repeated over the past few decades.

 

Then Jonny Moseley invents the “Dinner Roll” – an off-axis double rotation trick, the likes the world had never seen. He created the trick for the 1999 X-Games, perfected it, and then performed it in Olympic competition in 2002 in Salt Lake City. The judges didn’t like it, and scored it the same as more simple tricks, because they didn’t know what else to do with it. And because he spent more time in the air executing this trick, he was slower on the course. He got fourth in the 2002 Olympics, but the crowd went completely nuts. In the eyes of the world, he crushed. Here it is in slow motion (with a hilarious commentator):

 

 

Jonny Moseley’s “Dinner Roll” is now known, among those who speak the language, as a “Cork 7” – short for “corkscrew 720” and it’s a fairly basic trick these days for anyone in competition. Here’s a 12 year old doing one (fast-forward to 1:35).

Over the past ten years since Moseley smashed that border, there has been a whole new dimension of tricks and an explosion of ingenuity. Here’s Mikael Kingsbury winning the World Championship last month, March 2013.

 

Here’s the thing about Moseley’s irreverent ingenuity. He knew, going into the 2002 Olympics, that he wasn’t going to win with the Dinner Roll. The judges, his coaches, his teammates all reminded him he would gain nothing in points for his somewhat smart-ass trick. And he did it anyway. And because he did it anyway, he cleared the way for invention in the sport. Within six months of presenting the Dinner Roll in 2002 Olympic competition, the rules were changed to allow, and reward, inverted and off-axis rotation in the air.

Sure he would have liked to win. But pushing the boundaries of the sport was more important. Jonny Moseley said of the 2002 Olympics:

“There’s no question I was making a point; I was making a statement. I had hoped to be able to both make a statement and win, but in the end I probably sacrificed a gold for a statement. I hate to sound like I did everything for the good of the sport. I just personally couldn’t swallow the idea of going up there and doing what every single other person was doing. It wasn’t worth abandoning innovation and abandoning what is possible.”

Turn the small screws

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think-small-imageThink big! Blue sky! Anything is possible! Let’s build the next iPhone. Or better, let’s disrupt our own business model with a seismic market change, like iTunes. No…wait, like Spotify!

This kind of collaborative bluster is akin to throwing a Hail Mary in the waning seconds. Possible, yes. Probable, no.

I was reminded of a valuable trick from Seth Kahan the other day on how to build predictable innovation. More often, it’s in the small tweaks of what you already know, not the big grandiose changes – that generates consistent wins by building incremental value.

Indeed, Seth does have lessons on how to identify big-picture shifting market inflection points and how to capitalize on them. But the kind of value building that leads to reliable market leadership is about parsing out the pieces of our value chain, examining each, and tweaking steadily toward constant excellence.

I once had a conversation with Patagonia founder and CEO Yvon Chouinard who told me he has yet to find a business or product problem that cannot be solved by increasing quality. Patagonia is a company that has built a legacy of consistent product integrity and innovation. From rock climbing pitons to the source of their cotton to the dying processes they use, Patagonia has been chasing excellence and success for over forty years.

“We have 1,500 styles of clothing and shoes, and we follow every one of those products all the way from the farmer to the very end to make sure there’s no unintended consequences of our actions and it’s as clean as we can possibly make it.”
– Yvon Chouinard

In that same spirit, Kahan’s advice is to look at all the parts that contribute to the whole – the supplier, the transport, the assembly, the quality assurance, the delivery, point of sale, customer service, etc… and peel away the layers of each part of the process. In doing so, you’ll find something to improve. Always. Don’t think big. Think small. Innovation will follow.

Have a Memory of the Game Before it Even Starts

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Wayne_RooneyWayne Rooney is widely regarded as an astonishing soccer player – one of the greatest playing the game today. Also mercurial, brooding, even thuggish at times. He was recently banned for a game for intentionally kicking Montenegro’s Miodrag Dzudovic. As a kid he played non-stop – in the streets, in the house, in the backyard. And when he couldn’t play, he dreamed of playing soccer.

Rooney does this today before every match:

“Part of my preparation is I go and ask the kit man what color we’re wearing — if it’s red top, white shorts, white socks or black socks. Then I lie in bed the night before the game and visualize myself scoring goals or doing well. You’re trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a ‘memory’ before the game. I don’t know if you’d call it visualizing or dreaming, but I’ve always done it, my whole life… you need to visualize realistic things that are going to happen in a game.” (David Winner interview)

If you can actually practice, great. But imagining practicing is just about as good. In a well-known experiment Australian researcher Alan Richardson divided about 90 students into three groups. With the first group he asked them to ignore basketball and come back at the end of the month. He asked the second group to come into the gym 5 days a week and practice their free throws for twenty minutes, trying to get better at their shots as best as they could. The third group he asked to come into the gym 5 days a week and for twenty minutes imagine shooting free throws – to sit in the gym and visualize each attempt, to develop a pre-shot routine, “see” and “feel” the ball bouncing and then leaving their hand arcing to the basket. If they missed, they had to visualize an adjustment. They were also asked to be constantly striving to improve.

At the end of the month all three groups had to come into the gym and shoot 100 free throws.

  • Group 1 didn’t improve
  • Group 2 got 24% better
  • Group 3 got 23% better

I had an interveiw with Rich Herbst, VP for Learning and Leadership Development at Teletech, who emphasized the use of simulations to help develop call center operators to perform better on the job. A former F-14 pilot, Herbst described how he had thousands of hours practicing in simulators and on airfields before he actually landed an F-14 on an aircraft carrier. In our interview he described the experience of landing on a carrier:

“I had done it so much that it was like it was kind of like muscle memory. And so you stop thinking about the stress of what you’re doing, and training takes over. And so I think in the best types of training that you have, regardless of what it is that you’re doing in life, if you can get yourself to a place where you’ve learned it so well that when you experience it in real time.”

Think about what you’re trying to accomplish, or get better at. Are you wishing it, or rehearsing it in your mind, and then actively doing it – prepared to fail or succeed but always learn.

Keys to effective swift-starting teams

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pilotsNext time you’re standing at the gate waiting to get on a flight and the crew shows up, watch how they interact with each other. It will tell you a lot about how effective as a team they are going to be up in the sky shortly.

Mary Waller, a researcher at York University in Toronto, has been studying swift-starting teams – and flight crews in particular. Swift-starting teams of experts are everywhere – TV news crews comprised of journalists, camera, lighting, audio, and transmission engineers who come together to cover a media event. The doctors, nurses, technicians in hospitals who assemble for a ER shift to work together. Or the engineers that may run a nuclear power plant. In many cases these teams are comprised of highly-specialized professionals who assemble as a team for a specific job or task, and sometimes have little or no prior interaction with each other.

Specifically members of swift-forming experts teams are:

  • competent and familiar with their complex work environments
  • working quickly under situations of very evident time pressure
  • have a stable role on the team but ad hoc team membership
  • have complex, interdependent tasks that rely on interactions with team mates during the performance to yield coordinated execution of well-trained skills.

It turns out that how they interact with one another during just the first 15-20 minutes is highly predictive of how they will perform as a team for the duration of the job. The reason is that interaction patterns are established early in these relationships, and those patterns usually persist throughout the job.

Key #1: simple and consistent communication

Waller and her colleagues tracked each piece of dialogue uttered and identified the patterns in which they develop. For example, “Input the coordinates” is a command. “We have good weather today” is an observation. “Maybe we should ask tower control” is a suggestion and “What should our heading be?” is an inquiry…and so on to include disagreement, humor, anger or small-talk, etc. What they discovered is that patterns of interaction often emerge quickly and persist throughout the relationship. And the highest-performing teams established those patterns early, keep them simple, consistent, and reciprocal and balanced with one another. The lowest-performing teams had greater variety of conversational patterns, more unique communication patterns, and members who showed lack of reliance on other team members.

Key #2: short and targeted communication

While big locker room pep-talks or command-center speeches look good on television (think Ed Harris playing flight director Gene Kranz in Apollo 13), they aren’t terribly effective in driving team excellence. The most effective teams kept their communication short, precise and targeted to a specific task or job sequence.

Key #3: balanced communication

In the study, the researchers measured what they called “reciprocity.” That is, to what extent the team members relied on each other and balanced the participation of communication, as well as the reliance on one another for information and expertise. For example, if a team member showed “mono-actor” behavior of asking and answering their own questions, they showed less reliance, and less reciprocity on other team members. As a result, their study showed an overall decreased team performance when team members showed a lack of reliance on others and lack of reciprocity of expertise.

Here’s an interesting twist in the study. The researchers hypothesized that any “mono-acting” behavior (when someone asks and answers their own questions) would be on that part of the pilot currently in control. They thought that the person with command of the airplane would be the one offering the least reciprocity. Nope, it was the PNF (pilot not flying), who lacked control of the plane who exhibited the greatest amount of mono-acting behavior – in other words, was the least team player.

The best swift-forming teams of experts keep their communication simple, targeted and balanced.

Integrate the Human Factor in Your Work

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The profession of radiology has been progressing over the past fifty years in terms of how people are trained, equipment and technology used, and immediacy of feedback. Yet despite these advances, error rates often remain statistically significant and frustratingly high depending on the type of reading performed – bone density, chest radiographs, mammograms, gastrointestinal, and beyond. According to Imaging Economics, the reading error rate can vary from 2% to as high as 20%, depending on the scan, the clinician, the environment, and even the time of day. And up to eighty percent of the errors are perceptual errors. That is, the information was present and shown on the film or scan, but not identified and seen by the radiologist.

Yehonatan Turner, M.D., was a radiology resident at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem in 2008 when he decided to experiment with humanizing the process of reading radiology scans, to learn what affect it might have on the quality of the reading and the error rate of the clinicians. He and his colleagues performed an experiment in which they asked 267 patients for their permission to be photographed before their CT scans. A Computed Tomography scan is a more detailed X-Ray exam that focuses on a specific part of the body and yields a more detailed image of what’s inside the body.

Those 267 patient photos were submitted within a total of 1,137 CT examinations and would automatically be presented to the radiologist when evaluating the scan. Seventeen radiologists performed the readings and the results were quite surprising:
   • 80% of incidental findings were not reported when the photo was omitted with the scan
   • Radiologists reported a greater sense of empathy and care when evaluating the scan
   • Duration of scan evaluation did not increase

Anecdotal comments included, “The patient photograph prompted me to relate in more detail to the CT” and “It enabled me to feel more of a physician.”

In other words, accuracy went up, empathy went up, sense of connection with the patient went up, and there was no additional time required. This is an example of innovation by connecting with the end result – with the purpose of the work.

Would your product really be missed?

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“In category after category, companies have gotten so locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate – which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become…Products are no longer competing against each other; they are collapsing into each other in the minds of anyone who consumes them.”
– Youngme Moon, author of Different

Several times in my life I have been a part of creating and launching successful and original products. And each time we’ve never paid much attention to what anyone else was doing.

The first successful launch was in 1993, when my father Hal had a crazy notion to take content experts into television studios and broadcast live their classroom presentations, and use phone and fax machines for interactivity. Insane. Who would do such a thing? Who would buy it? He very nearly conjured the idea out of thin air. He reasoned that instructors could reach more audiences using television technology, and people with satellite dishes would pay for learning at a distance. Reasonable extrapolation, but it wasn’t modeled against an existing business he knew of.

After over a year into the effort we were contacted by companies and groups who were creating (or had created) just such a learning service. As you might imagine, since we never “benchmarked” ourselves against what anyone else had done, we were busy making our own mistakes. With persistence, and many mistakes, it worked. We still create live, satellite-delivered (well, mostly webcast-delivered) presentations today.

The first colossal failure came when we did try to copy what another company was doing. We discovered after a few years that there were entire digital satellite networks dedicated to delivering learning content. National Technological University (still exists but the network folded), PBS, The Business Channel (ran out of funding), RTN Group (folded, and yes, that domain is for sale…), had all ventured into the business of building real-time digital satellite networks and failed. We figured we would win because we were smaller, faster, more nimble, could operate more cheaply. All of these things were true. The problem was that no matter how cheaply we could deliver the service, it didn’t matter because no one was buying.

The problem with head-to-head competition now is that since the technical ability to emulate and copy someone else is so easy, it’s hard to differentiate. In an earlier time, companies could develop a proprietary platform, technology, or capability, and lead with that advantage for some time, possibly years, before anyone could catch up. Now, technology is the great equalizer. Whatever you can dream up, someone else can copy. And if you follow this treadmill, it leads inevitably to feature explosion and product augmentation. The trick is to do something your competition isn’t willing to do. The trick is to take that chance that no one else is willing to take, precisely because it hasn’t been tried. Only if you are willing to wildly fail, can you wildly succeed.

Harvard professor Youngme Moon, in her book Different, describes those products and companies that learn to thrive in this world of easy equivalence, as those companies who are willing to swim against the tide of incremental improvement and feature addition. She describes these successful products as “lopsided.” That is, they accentuate what the rest of the pack is unwilling to emphasize due to perceived risk. The result of the copy-cat economy is that while product developers may be able to tell you the nuances that distinguish their products from everyone else’s, the truth is no one cares.

In the words of Jim Collins, the real question you want to answer is: If your company went out of business tomorrow, would anybody really miss it?

The Speed from Obscurity to Visibility

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“Time is the most important thing that you take from a person and I have to deserve it, give something, and spark some feelings in the viewer.” – Onur Senturk

I’ve been collecting stories about how fast cool, new ideas, innovations, and talents can move from obscurity to world stage. Just a couple years ago Onur Senturk was a fairly anonymous computer graphics “motionographer” posting his own imaginative renderings on public platforms like Vimeo. Well, Vimeo certainly surprised him by naming him winner of their Motion Graphics Vimeo Award. Here is his winning video.

Now he’s been picked up by major studios and has rendered the opening graphics animation for Transformers, John Carter, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, among others. Check it out: