Author: debby.hallett@gmail.com

10 Tiny Changes

If you take a look around your life, you can probably see a lot of things you’d like to change. If you make a list of all those things, letting the ideas spill out of your over-crowded mind and onto a blank sheet of paper, it can be daunting. There can be literally hundreds of things, and every one of them looks huge. You could throw up your hands and never even begin.  But I’ve found a better way to get started.

Julia Cameron wrote The Artist’s Way to guide people on a 12-week path of personal change. One of her exercises is Ten Tiny Changes.

Make a list of ten tiny changes you could make in your life, that would bring you joy, or contentment, or a sigh of relief. These changes are really supposed to be tiny, more like ‘wash the window that catches the morning sun’ than ‘travel to the Maldives’. Choose things that would take only a few minutes.  Don’t be hard on yourself, but find some simple-to-do, high value things. For example, if you’re like me, there’s bound to be something that you notice repeatedly. How about the shrub that drips cold water on you every time you pass it? (Snip off that branch.) Or those cobwebs up above the door? (Brush them all away.)

From your list of ten tiny changes, pick one and make it your goal for this week. Do it! You’ll add something nice to your life.

Today, I filled a shopping bag full of novels to take to my local Oxfam. It’s cleared a nice space on my bookshelf, where I’ve put a small picture of my granddaughter. It’s made me smile.

Low Hanging Fruit – the downsides

When you hear the phrase ‘low hanging fruit’ in regard to a problem, it  generally means that the focus is on easy fixes that can be applied quickly for some gain. It’s a very popular approach to problem solving in business, where managers want to be seen to be actively solving workplace problems.

Although you are bound to get some quick wins (as well as some outright misses), there are unintended consequences of looking for the low hanging fruit.

  1. Very soon all the easy solutions will have been applied; all that remains are complex or difficult solutions.
  2. Often the first solution that comes to mind doesn’t fix the problem. If you are willing to stay in that uncomfortable groan zone for awhile longer, you’ll come up with a better solution. (By better, I mean less costly or more effective, or both.)
  3. Harvesting the low hanging fruit costs your organization more in the long run. If your easy and quick solutions don’t fix the problem, time and money have been spent and you still have to seriously and sytematically address the problem to find solutions.

Instead of grabbing for the low hanging fruit, try this:

  1. Use a formal root cause analysis (RCA) methodology. I’ve used Apollo Root Cause analysis very successfully. http://www.apollorca.com
  2. When the first potential solution is put forward, ask the group to think about how this might go wrong, what part of the problem it leaves unaddressed, or any other question that causes everyone to think further rather than grab the first low hanging fruit they find. The idea is to slow down and consider a bit more carefully.
  3. Brainstorm many possible solutions, then review each suggestion to see how well it addresses the problem, without introducing any other problems. These other problems are sometimes called ‘unintended consequences’. While unintended consequences might be good ones (it’s what we call serendipity — when you find something wonderful while looking for something else), most often the unintended consequences are problems that your ‘solution’ has created elsewhere in the system.

It’s not always a good service to the organization to harvest the low hanging fruit. The temptation to settle for ‘quick wins’ and easy solutions is not always (or even usually) the best thing in the long term.

Here’s what I think

I have a million things to say, on a thousand different topics, and a dozen points of view to offer on just about anything.

So I set up this new blog (after speaking to my friend Alex, who’s an internet marketing guru) and here I sit to do the first post, and I can’t think of anything to say.

Isn’t that just predictable? I also don’t perform too well when someone is looking over my shoulder, so maybe this feels like the world is looking over my shoulder. Hah!

Well, there’s always the delete button, isn’t there?

Things I’ll talk about (because I know something about them and have something to offer:

  • personal development
  • leadership development
  • measuring things in a business environment
  • Action Inquiry
  • Myers Briggs Personality typing
  • business process improvement
  • software engineering process improvement
  • KPIs, especially for IT organizations
  • coaching for business results
  • integral anything (ala Ken Wilber)
  • Leadership Development Framework (ala Harthill consulting)
  • increasing your self confidence
  • Increasing your promotability at work
  • Getting things done – planning and organizing
  • de-cluttering
  • mind-mapping
  • emotional intelligence
  • building a healthy relationship
  • how to learn from your experience (more efficiently and effectively)

There’s more, but once I press ‘publish’ then I’m on my way.

May something I say here be of some use to you in your life.