The wheels are now in motion

You can learn from my mistakes! Mistakes are wonderful things. Can you think of a faster way of learning something? And, the bigger the mistake, the more effectively we will learn. We really cannot miss something that hits us straight between the eyes. Problems will arise. And the question we need to ask ourselves is: what constitutes a problem? Quite simply, a problem arises when our present state does not equal our desired state. For example: Present State = over budget Desired State = within budget Who is to blame for this situation is irrelevant, the problem simply needs sorting. If you've done your sums right, then this will simply be a temporary cash flow problem; and, if you have kept the controller of the purse strings informed, all the way along the line, this will come as no surprise to him or her. The best businesses in the world can have cash flow problems to begin with. What further problems can this problem create? If you can't pay Fred for a week or so, tell him, and tell him why. This means that he knows exactly what's happening, and can budget accordingly. People just like to know what's happening - it makes their lives so much simpler. (And this includes the Inland Revenue and the VAT people! They are only too happy to help, if you tell precisely what's going on.) Supposing you're behind schedule. What other problems is this going to cause? As Peter says, publication date is just the date you have given to Whitaker's - way out in the future: your books will be ready months before that (so that you can send out review copies, and the reps can show it off to the bookshops). You, or your designer, will have booked your space with the printers, and they (if they are as efficient as Redwood) will have checked well in advance that you are still on schedule. You will also have allowed yourself a week or so's leeway to cover hiccups - so what other problems could lateness cause? If a reviewer is desperate to have the book because of a deadline, he or she can always have it on disk. The postcards aren't ready. Okay, so what? They will just have to wait. It's no big deal. The question with problems is how we think about them. If we think it is the end of the world, then it's going to mess us around. If, however, it simply requires a solution, then we can find a solution. The trick is to ask yourself what you would say to a friend who came to you with the same problem - because, if the problem is not ours, we are detached from it and therefore much more rational and sensible than we would be if we thought it was going to overwhelm us. If the problem is between you and a member of your team, then it is your joint problem - you will need to solve it together. The trick here is to do it side by side, with the problem out in front of you, say on a piece of paper, or laid out on a table. This separates the person from the problem: the other person does not need to feel defensive, because you are not eyeball to eyeball: the problem is out there, and you are working on it together. (We do not say that somebody is 'on our side' for nothing.) Gregory Bateson, one of the great thinkers of our time, has a meta-conversation with his daughter in STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND, called 'Daddy, why do things get in a muddle?'. He goes round her bedroom discussing where she likes things to be, and how much he can move them, before she objects. They discover that her tolerance for moved things is very low, and that - for the one 'right' place for each object, there are a million and one 'wrong' places. In other words, as Peter Finch puts it: 'if it can go wrong, it will'. All we need is the flexibility to accept this, and the flexibility to do something different if we need to. What are our Options? The printers announce that our book will be ready on Friday week, and it was supposed to be ready last Friday. :: We can accept this :: We can throw a complete wobbler :: We can think how much difference this is going to make to our overall plan and negotiate if necessary :: We can do something completely different The question is, what would be the most useful way to react, in order to achieve our overall goal, which is to get the book out in time for all the promotional stuff to happen before publication date? How much difference is this fortnight really going to make? Can we afford it? Or is it time for negotiation? If we have chosen something from the 'completely different' category, what will it give us, and what will we lose? What opportunities does this problem give us? Like the million and one things that can be 'wrong', there are a million and one opportunities open to us, when problems arise. And the first question we can ask ourselves is: what have we learned from this problem? The answer may be something that we missed in our planning process, and will be a valuable learning for our next project - like my realisation that I could have saved myself a lot of money by cutting EASY BEING down to 192 pages, instead of having whole extra section, with lots of empty pages called 'Notes'. There are always things to learn - that is the fun of it. And NLP-ers have the presupposition that there is no failure - only feedback. Thus all our mistakes become learnings. Back to opportunities: what could we have done and/or what could we now do differently? Because, if we always do what we've always done, we'll always get what we've always got. We could go back into dreamer mode, and dream up all sorts of opportunities resulting from this change in circumstances; then we could consult our instinct, or our feelings, and pay attention to the answers they come up with. My husband has an irritating habit of knowing long before I do when things are not going to work; for example, when the copy editor for LAZY LEARNING started to be a pain, he said: 'get rid of her!'. 'She isn't mine to get rid of', I said, (she was employed by the publishers), and went on, sanctimoniously 'she's just a test of my flexibility'. So on I went, being flexible, getting up at 4.00 in the morning to wade through her pages of complaints until, as you know, the end result was produced - which I could not allow to go to press because it was so awful. Whereas, if I'd listened to Philip in the first place, instead of being so virtuously pigheaded ................... Pay attention to instinct - it is there to forewarn you of trouble. And, when you hit a problem, think back to all the little warnings you were given - either unconsciously by the other person, or by your instinct - in an effort to stop you before it was too late! Then you can learn to pay attention to your own highly efficient warning system.