Lessons

Lesson Info

Building a Reef

So what have we got in terms of reef building? Anybody got some ideas for stuff you could do to get people talking so I don't work for organization but I can kind of his fire this exercise to think about my work so for example, if I have for the shit I come out with concept and I'm starting working on production ah usually sent all information to make up artist ascend the same information so stylist so assistance to more those agencies and I noticed right that it's always like separately we never get together because sometimes you worked with different people. So now I got this idea why not create like, online meeting that maybe somebody can bring and give advices incorporate together that make up artists have changed talk to stylist not just towards me as ah right, right. So what? Why should everything have to go through you? Yes. When yes, maybe that will even write create project in better way yeah. Oh, cool. I like that any but any other. Any other reef building ideas. So I was thi...

nking like in like in a restaurant to kind of create that team instead of two silos you could have you could have the cook who actually made the dish as opposed to just the head chef explain it themselves to the server so there's the interaction you could have a pre shift kind of discussion yeah, because normally at once the night you give a description so yeah, excellent. Uh, what else I thought would be really fun is like an iron chef style competition where you have ah, servers team to with cooks and the cook makes the dish and the server has to pair it with the beverage and then serve it now has the kind of work together, right? Yeah, no, I like that. I mean, I think these kinds of interactions you know, when you find that information isn't flowing effectively finding ways to engage people and get that that discussion going, you know, because a lot of times people you know, sometimes there are situations where I have opportunities to do things for five different ways, and I've chosen a particular way to do it, because as far as I'm concerned, that's the best way to do it, given just the environment I'm in, when in fact, if I did it a slightly different way, it might actually be optimal both for me and for you elsewhere in the organization. I'm just unaware that that that the choice that I made was having this impact on the way that you're doing your job and the more communication you get them or the maur, the opportunities there are to create this more global kind of optimization of how things were functioning ready steady it started with the study started dodgeball team which I found in shit and I think that's what I got right and read it but they had each of the members of the dodgeball team by gift for another member of the dodgeball team and that effort of like going out finding something that this person might enjoy buying it for them like brought their team together and their team performed exponentially better than the other teams and then they did the same thing with sales teams and it worked perfectly too, so this is like bonds of buying something for somebody else and thinking about them and what does this person about what they like and the gift giving process was really effective? Yeah, yeah, I like that, you know, because one of the nice things about both gift giving and also actually having conversation, you know, the fascinating thing about having a just having a conversation with somebody else's in order for us to effectively communicate in that moment you and I have to actually think similarly because if we don't think similarly we don't actually communicate I don't transmit the message that I wanted to give to you you don't transmit anything back to me unless the two of us r r really thinking in the same way and that requires me to take your perspective to some degree and for you to take my perspective whenever you begin to do that, you begin to realize the ways that that your perspective actually differs from mine, which helps to give me more insight into into more globally. How it is, is that that that that an organization is is functioning and that's particularly good, because, you know, human beings are, as we are social species, but we're awfully good at dividing the world up in tow us is and thems right? And, uh, you know, it's, not so good organizations can fall apart when there are buses and them's inside the organization, and you do see this, you see these competitions, and there could be healthy competition within organizations. It's always nice to see different groups, you know, striving to, you know, to raise more money than somebody else for something or, you know, to have a little bit of pride within the group, but but there are times where you actually stay, you know, across the line from having some friendly competition toe actually tow active disdain for other people within your organization. Oh, it's, you know, it's, the suits or whatever it is, you know, that that sort of thing is really dangerous, right? Because now you don't have a shared mission, and so one of the the nice things about having that that kind of conversation going on is that I'm now forced to think about things from your perspective in order to have that conversation. It makes us it, it makes us in us, uh, even even if there had been a tendency for us to think of ourselves as being in separate groups within the organization. So that's, I think one of the really another one of the really nice things that can happen so conversation could do that, but but exercises like, you know, just having to think about, well, what sort of gift would you like, you know, forces me to think a little bit, not about what would I want it? So we're giving me again, uh, but what would you want? Yeah, yeah, I like that that's. Cool. All right, so to reiterate something I was saying earlier, right way really need to be willing to engage with people around us. Um, we need to be willing to spend some time, um, with other people who do what we do because, um, there's, just so much to learn out there. And in fact, you know, I would say seminars like this, they're sort of like that it's an opportunity for someone who knows something's to spread some of that information and and you know hopefully we know we've engaged in a little bit of conversation here both with the folks in the room and with some of the people online but one of the beauties of really of really finding ah mentor that you can work with mohr than that is the opportunity to engage in a lot more conversation and to really put yourself in a situation in which you can get more individualized attention about the things that are that are really affecting you in your ability to to to change your behavior to work more effectively and and even to progress within an organization that you're working for you know, mentors air just members of such a wonderful thing and they're really an underutilized facility in most organizations you know it's funny I mean you know university of texas we hire all these wonderful faculty and it's a very strange thing I mean about universities that we hire people because they're really great researchers and then at some point we say oh and by the way we need you to teach all these classes and everybody wants to teach you we want to do a good job but it's very hard to learn to do it and we've begun to do as a university I mean and his universities in general begun to do a lot more mentorship of people as they've started their academic careers you know, teaching universities, because we've realized that we have this whole untapped resource of people with a tremendous amount of experience, you haven't been sharing that experience, um, and I and I and I feel like if universities have blown it that way in the past, that lots of organizations are just failing to give the kind of mentorship that they need to give to other people, and so I'm really, you know, I've really been promoting that, and I think that that creating mentorship programs within companies is actually another great way that companies can demonstrate their commitment to the people who are working for them, you know, it's a it's, a great way, both for newer people to begin to feel like they're career path is being valued it's also a great way for for people who are later in their careers, you know, mid to late in their careers, to really demonstrate what you know, what, what it is that they've learned over the years from working, and I think that can also be really re energizing for people to really feel like they are part of the future of the organization, and not just a some kind of relic who's still hanging around, you know, at some kind of organization, and as I said earlier, you know, we want to do we want to use, you know, take this ability to be calm, a mentor in that situation in which our motivation flags in the middle and I want to just pick up on on to other things that that can happen when our motivations sags in the middle one is to pick up on a suggestion, and I made yesterday just to make sure that we put that into its proper context, which is there? Is this this concept of the commitment contract? This idea that we talked about yesterday, about about when my motivation sags? Maybe I know I I form a contract with you and I say I'm going, I'm going to commit to doing, you know, I mean exercise monday, wednesday, friday or at least three times a week on dh if I don't I'm gonna pay you money, you're going to give that money to a charity that I hate right? It's not a great way of changing your behavior in the long term. It works for a very short period of time after what you begin to feel like our the heck with that idea, I don't need this money, but for a short period of time it's great it's a great way of getting yourself over the hump when when your motivation is sagging and a lot of times once you kind of re energize yourself after that motivation sags a little bit. You get yourself back into the routine and you're good for a while and maybe every year or so you need to use that commitment contract for a week or two just to kind of keep yourself engaged in the routine, you know? Or maybe you create that commitment contract says you're going on vacation, you know? And you want to make sure that you you can continue your routine. Um and so, generally speaking, you want to engage with people right to help your motivation, you know, phone a friend too, right? It doesn't just have to be a mentor. I believe that you should give people in your life the thie ability to nag you and the permission to nag you when you're trying to change your behavior, make use. You know, we hate nagging, we hated because we know they're right that's that's why we hate it, right? But that doesn't mean that it's bad, you know, just because you hate something doesn't always mean it's bad. Um, I think we want to give people that chance to help us, to change our behaviour, to really put people in a situation in which they can help us by, um, by engaging a little bit of strong social pressure. Right? And then the very last thing to remember is one other thing that we talked about yesterday, which is this idea of gold contagion, and ijust again want to bring this up in the context of using people now where I want to talk about this both in terms of changing our own behaviour but also influencing others. So this idea of gold contagion again is this idea that we are prone to take on the goals of the people around us. So if you see somebody doing something, it makes you more likely to want to do the same thing. You know, austin, texas has this beautiful river right downtown, and there are paths on both sides of the river, and there are always people jogging on that, and if you go hang out by the river, you can't help but move around because there's just too much movement happening, right that's a great way of changing your individual behaviour, but if you want to influence other people, right, you know the great gandhi quote, be the change that you want in the world? Why does that work? Right? It's it's not just because every individual has to take some responsibility t try to make changes it's also because each of us, whether we intended or not, serves as an example for the people around us about how to behave we do a tremendous amount of what's called social referencing we're we're always trying to figure out what is the appropriate thing to do in the world, particularly if there's any ambiguity it also tell one little lie one story about this, um, experiment with little babies so joe campus used to do this stuff there's all this work on the visual cliff because when kids reach a certain age, they've just begun to crawl and they start getting depth perception. So so how do you know if a kid has depth perception writes an interesting question? How do you know if kids depth, perception's, here's what you do? You have a kid who can crawl and they crawl out over so let's imagine this this right here that's that's ah, that looks like a ledge and so what they do is they have a ledge that a kid could crawl out over, but of course you don't really want a kid crawling out over alleged so what they do is they put some glass over it's um really clear glass so that so that if the kid actually does crawl out on over, they don't, you know, plop over and so basically right there's a sledge if I crawl out over the ledge and looked down and I see it in depth then I'm not going to crawl out over it because I know I'm going to fall, but if I can't see it, then I might just continue going. Now, at a certain age at a young age, infants will just crawl right out onto it because they don't see it right um, and at a much older age, they do see it, and I'll get to the edge and look over, but they won't crawl, but there's this intermediate phase where they're not quite sure they're getting some visual information that's a little confusing, they're not sure what to do in that phase. They do this very clever experiment at that age, they have the mom, the kid's mom just on the other side and the kids. Mom, what happens is the kid gets the edge because the mom is there, the kid looks up at the mom, and in that moment the mom either goes right, which is the universal signal for don't do that or the mom goes, come on, come on and the kid basically follows whatever it is that the mom says to do so if the mom is saying if the mom is showing the sign of fear than the kids stops, but if the mom encourages the kid to come out, the kid comes out to the kid is just is just using information from other people to figure out what to do in these circumstances now that one's pretty overt but we do the same thing all the time just by watching people's behave you know you look around is it ok to sit in this place where I don't know is anybody else sitting I guess they are I guess I can sit right um you know, should I should I uh you know don't have to be all buttoned up or you know, can I can I take my tie off? I mean, we do these sorts of things all the time we we just we just look at what people are doing around us so when we try to be the change in the world, well what what part of what we're doing is demonstrating to other people what behavior is acceptable behavior we are transmitting what kinds of goals we believe other people should adopt just by the way that we act and it's an incredibly powerful influence on behavior. So if you want to see a change in the world act in a way that you'd like other people to act and it's amazing how much influence that will have on other people whether you know it or not so I'm gonna be summarizing in a second what we talked about with people but before we do that I wanted to see if we had any any questions yeah, we had a few come in here now this one comes from rambo and I know that we have a lot of people out there watching who are solar solo entrepreneurs they started their own businesses and he wants to know he says I mostly work alone and there isn't always a lot of back and forth between the client and myself. So does that make me a silo? How do you do these things still apply to people who do work closely on their own yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting, right? You know, social interaction is really important and so finding communities that you can work with, I think it is important. So and so it's it's a silo in a somewhat different way that it zo euron isolated nodes and, uh and I think that that one of the things that's important to do when you're a solo entrepreneur is to find the community that you can engage with to get great feedback on the work that you're doing to help you tow home the work that you're doing. And and I think in some ways also to to invigorate the work that you're doing right, I think, you know, it's very, very hard to work alone um, you know, particularly if you're not getting a tremendous amount of feedback from the people that you're working with and so engaging with a community which could be a local community, like I say, if there are these coworking spaces or networking meetings or or other kinds of, you know, if there are boots drive communities and, you know, other kinds of communities that can that can really, that you could be a part of that's great, if not if you can find online communities where you can at least be into contact with people or having similar kinds of issues who can make recommendations? You know, one of the things that's really fascinating is this is this hole, this whole notion of cooperative shin, right, which I'm a big fan of, which is this idea that, you know, business is also not a zero sum game, you know, it turns out that that it's really possible to help other people, even ones that you think you're in competition with and that khun still often make the pie bigger, right? Um, that we're not necessarily all competing for the same small pool of customers. There are times where, when we joined forces share experience, we can actually do things that grow the number of people who are interested in what we do all together and, uh and and that, actually, you know, makes the entire industry were involved with a better place to be so so I think, you know, just because just because we own a company by ourselves, and maybe a business of one, doesn't mean that we have to be isolated, even from other people in our same industry. Ian and I think that that's a, you know, another important way to to create those same kinds of connections. That can be really valuable.