Connect with Purpose, and Connect with Results

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Here is a brief excerpt from OutThink on the power of integrating the human factor in our work. Enjoy!

TurnerThe profession of radiology has been progressing over the past fifty years in terms of how people are trained, the 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. Remember the end result – the purpose – and your impact will soar.

Endings are just new beginnings

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BRASIL X HOLANDA - COPA DO MUNDO 2010 ÁFRICA DO SUL - ESPORTES - 02/07/2010

“The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That’s real glory. Thats the essence of it.”
― Vince Lombardi Jr.

“You guys were just great! Well done. You all played really well.”

No one said anything. Our ten-year old soccer team had just lost. We got crushed. Badly. I was the coach and trying to cheer up the boys.

Later while walking to car, my son Will said, “Dad, why did you say all that stuff about us after the game? We sucked!”

Praise and recognition is a tricky motivator. And when we have setbacks, praise rings hollow. It doesn’t sound believable and we often don’t feel like we deserve it. Specific feedback is better. Praising specific plays, moves, passes, shots, and attitudes is both more believable and memorable. And it’s even better when the praise is specific to the individual.

There are varieties of incentives we can use to motivate and encourage others, but as we know from research, it’s a sense of progress in meaningful work that is the strongest motivating factor around. And when things go well, things tend to go well. That is, wins beget wins. Naturally, when the team has a winning game in which they play well together against a fairly matched opponent, the team feels positive, acts more cooperatively, enjoys the game more, and plays with more assertive confidence and control.

But something interesting happens during setback events. Not only does the team act less supportive with one another, but they respond less to praise and recognition. They will also feel more restricted in their actions. Team members begin to develop a perception that they can’t (or aren’t permitted) to take risks, be assertive. Sure, sometimes we throw a hail mary pass or take desperate chances, but they aren’t often elegant and inspired chances. More often we retreat.

You’ve seen this before in sports. When one team starts losing, they play more defensively, more conservatively, and take fewer chances. And because of it, often start losing even more. The same is true in our work. In fact, we’ve learned that negative events and setbacks have a far bigger impact on our emotions, our perceptions, and then our actions in our work. As researcher Teresa Amabile found:

The effect of a setback event on happiness was over three times as strong as the effect of a progress event on happiness, and the effect of a setback event on frustration was almost twice as strong as that of a progress event on frustration.

Understand a setback for what it is. It’s just an event, a moment, an opportunity to learn. It doesn’t define you. What defines you is what you do next. Remember to celebrate endings, because they represent new beginnings.

When we leap

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leaping

Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.
– William Arthur Ward

It’s an astonishing thing to observe people who encounter obstacle after hurtle after challenge, and yet seem to only gain strength and confidence and power after each, seemingly insurmountable, roadblock is set before them. There’s a great scene in the animated movie KungFu Panda II in which the bad guy – an evil peacock – laments, “How many times do I have to kill the same panda?!” because the Panda, of course keeps getting stronger throughout the movie, until the end in which he’s catching blazing cannonballs and throwing them back. All because he’s found inner peace.

Terry Fox was like that. He developed cancer in 1980, and while still in the hospital, decided to run across Canada to raise money and awareness for cancer research. We lost Terry to cancer but only after he had run a couple thousand miles across Canada…on a prosthetic leg. His mother Betty Fox kept Terry’s legacy and spirit alive for the last thirty years.

In the book Born to Run, we learn Scott Jurek had such an alchemy moment at the 2005 Badwater Ultramarathon. It’s a 135 mile ultramarathon. Run in Death Valley at temperatures typically approaching the mid-120s. After Scott collapsed after (only!) 55 miles in a ditch in 125 degree heat in a catatonic stupor, he laid in a bucket of ice and searched his mind for ten minutes. Then stood to run the next 80 miles in record time to win the race.

I’ve watched my mom, Bev Hunter, conjure resilience and calm in the storm of cancer. Harnessing the cumulative strengths of her community, her faith, her research-driven analytical mind, family, and joie de vivre, she has transmuted obstacle into power, challenge into growth, fatigue into enlightenment. Erik Weihenmayer uses that term Alchemist to describe just such people who turn adversity into strength, a challenge into innovation, a smack-down into power.

I certainly agree we have the ability to surprise ourselves. If you watch kids, they do it all the time while testing the boundaries of their own possibilities. And then they move on to the next challenge. We often reflect that what seemed daunting and impossible at the time, seems small, easy and controllable in retrospect.

But the key is to take the leap, sign up for that daunting project, or impossible race, or mythic challenge you might think is beyond you. Build those capacities, strengths and creative resources now, because you never know when the world is going to sign you up for something beyond your control.

Open the window shades. Look under more rocks.

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Ice from airplane3It was odd. Unnerving. And a little disorienting too. After we took off from Hong Kong to the States, the mapping tool in the airplane that shows where we are in the world wasn’t tracking. The little airplane icon kept showing we were still on the runway in Hong Kong. Which was impossible since we had been in the air for some time.

Hours went by after the meal service. The cabin was darkened and the shades were pulled down, and still the map showed our airplane icon on the runway in Hong Kong. Most people on board were asleep or had their faces lit up by electronics. At some point about six hours after we took off, I stopped a cabin steward and asked where on earth we were. She asked me to wait while she went to ask the captain.

She came back a minute later and said, “The captain said in just a couple minutes we will be passing over the north pole.” Wow. I got up and went to the back of the airplane to the rear bulkhead and there I eased open the window shade. Blindingly brilliant sun light reflected off of the fractured polar ice below. Although we must have been nearly six miles in the air, the clarity and ice detail was astonishing. It seemed high noon on the polar ice cap and the ice detail was crisp and wrapped for miles to the horizon.

I closed the shade and turned back to look down the darkened fuselage of the airplane. Almost everyone was asleep, while we were passing over the north pole. I cracked the window shade again and gazed down at the glittering ice.

The experience led me to learn more about new flight paths over the polar ice cap from Asia and it reminded me of the wondrous moments we can experience when we get curious and seek new experiences.

When we keep our kids up late to lie in the yard and look up at a meteor shower. When we wake early to swim across the lake at dawn just as the birds are waking. Take off the headphones and listen to the conversations in the market. Look under more rocks. Sometimes it’s unforgettable.

There it is again. Weird works.

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fosburyIn 1968 Dick Fosbury astonished the world at the Mexico City Olympic Games by clearing 7′ 4″ 1/4 inches in the high jump. His efforts before 80,000 people were an aberration – an anomaly in track and field events. Dick was a gangly 6’3″ athlete who hadn’t excelled at any event in track and field at his Medford, OR high school and he unveiled a maneuver to set a world record. More remarkably, his competitors failed to recognize and adopt his innovative style and lost – not only on that occasion, but for years to come because they couldn’t acknowledge the power of his innovation.

Fosbury’s own coach, who didn’t care for the move at all, called it “a shortcut to mediocrity.”

But it wasn’t, in fact, “unseen before.” Fosbury had been working on perfecting the technique for a couple years. Not only that, another athlete, the Canadian Debbie Brill, had developed an identical style she called the “Brill Bend.”

So how in the world did the lesser athlete Dick Fosbury not only develop a technique to best his rivals, but do so quite publicly while his competitors failed to recognize and adopt the innovation to excel?

The day Fosbury actually unveiled this new technique was five years earlier at a track meet in which he beat his own personal best by a foot and a half. Eighteen inches. High jump improvements are typically measured in inches – or fractions of inches. People should have been paying closer attention instead of ridiculing him. But why? Because it was new, because it was different, because it looked weird, and because no one else had the discipline to bother.

There it is again…curiosity, experimentation and persistence as keys to excellence.

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.

Between Not Doing and Doing is an act of bravery

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superhero“Annie, Fynn sees through your eyes.”

“What?” says my seven year old daughter Annie.

“When you are leading a horse, you need to actually lead. Fynn sees through your eyes. So, when you call him to follow, you need to look where you’re going and lead him down the path, at your speed, not his. When you turn and look at Fynn, all Fynn sees is himself. He needs to see where you want to go.”

Little Annie learned to lead a horse by confidently looking forward where she wanted to go and asking Fynn to follow. And so a thousand pound horse named Fynn followed my daughter down a path through the woods.

At the intersection of what you have never done, and what comes naturally, is an act of bravery. This is the cusp, the edge, the apex of valor and daring. To cross the divide from Not Doing to Doing, takes courage. This is the essence of bravery. Here it is in action:

Lead with Your Footprints

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footprints-in-the-sand

The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.
– Warren Buffett

Jim Collins has popularized the notion of the “stop-doing list.” Equally as important as your do-list, he argues we need to make room for innovation and growth by ceasing some of the repetitive, mindless, or ineffective activities that can become habitual, but might not be leading us in constructive directions. In a recent presentation, I suggested the “stop-doing” mantra. Afterward someone approached me and said, “OK, stop doing…like, what?”

Fair enough. Here are ten mindless-doing traps we can often engage in, that you might try stopping. For more great ideas to add to your stop-doing list, Joe Calloway has some good advice.

  1. Stop replying to all, and pick up the phone
  2. Stop waiting for someone else to decide, and gather those who are willing to help decide
  3. Stop trying to do everything yourself, others can and want to help
  4. Stop focusing on what you can’t control (see #2)
  5. Stop needing to be right
  6. Stop waiting to talk, and start listening
  7. Stop wishing someone else will change, and accept them
  8. Stop trying to make it perfect. The world needs to see it.
  9. Stop muting conference calls while you do other things (like throw emails around)
  10. Stop having the same conversations with the same people. Comfort conversations are good but try reaching out to a dormant contact and ping someone you haven’t interacted with in a while. When you do, start by giving without expectation.

You might read these and think, “Right! [insert name] constantly does these things.” But here is the killer application of these ideas. The only reliable way to ripple effect these behaviors is to model them. People around you are far more likely to follow your footprints than to follow your advice. I too, am trying to let go of what I can’t control. That, and stop drinking coffee after noon.

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

The New Reciprocity: Give and Forget

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GivingI was listening to a podcast yesterday of Adam Grant talking about his new book Give and Take. If you’re familiar with the book, in it he writes about “Dormant Ties.” Dormant ties are those people whom you have known in your life – professionally or personally – but have fallen off your radar and disappeared into your past. These are also people with whom you can easily kick-start the relationship because you have a long history and can skip the getting-acquainted part of relationship building. They will have an emotional memory of you already.

As Grant writes in his book, researchers working with executives asked them to solicit business advice not only from those close and respected colleagues, but also from former colleagues with whom they had no contact with for at least three years. Once the executives begrudgingly agreed to contact two former colleagues (their dormant ties) and ask a few questions of advice, they discovered it was the dormant ties who offered the most valuable and insightful bits of advice and information, not those closest to them.

This morning I was listening to Ken Coleman‘s podcast in which Tim Sanders was describing his “morning devotional.”  Each morning, before checking email – the electronic debt machine – he pauses to reflect and give thanks to people who have been greatly helpful to him recently. Then he reaches out to two people in his life to help. Maybe it’s an introduction, or a recommendation, or an insight he can offer in their work. Whatever it is, Tim tries to make it relevant and valuable, and never with any expectation of return. He calls this exercise Give and Forget.

Here’s the mash-up idea. Resusitate a dormant tie from your past and instead of asking for a favor, give something: an idea, a recommendation, an introduction, a compliment…and then let go. The point of this exercise is not to trade value with someone from your past, or mine your network. The point is to add value to the community. I’m making a habit of it.