Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.
The first thing you notice about a Japanese-style rock garden is that little if anything actually grows in it. The second thing you notice is the nothingness of it all: a great expanse of seemingly empty space adorned with nothing more than some rather mesmerizing patterns of lines and waves in the sea gravel surrounding what appears to be randomly placed rocks. The garden is stark and simple yet elegant and beautiful.
As you gaze upon the garden, a feeling of tranquillity and serenity sweeps over you. You realize that you know that feeling; it’s the one you get when you stand on the seashore at sunset, staring out at the ocean, listening to the waves crash on the shore with a natural rhythm that calms your soul. Sand, waves, water. It’s a peaceful, easy feeling.
It is also the intended effect of a well-designed rock garden, and I can assure you that it is anything but easy to achieve. A number of Zen design principles work together to create that effect. For most people, though, it is the lines in the gravel that can be the most puzzling. How did they get there, who created them, and how in the world did they do that without leaving a footprint?
The Zen aesthetic ideal at play is that of datsuzoku (dot-soo-ZOH-koo). Datsuzoku is meant to denote a break—from routine, habit, or normality—to evoke the feeling of freedom from the commonplace, of transcending the ordinary and conventional, often resulting in pleasant surprise and sudden amazement. The patterned lines and grooves in the sea gravel appear to be interrupted by the rocks, but the effect is reminiscent of islands in a stream or sea and ripples in the water when a pebble is dropped. The lines may be taken to represent convention, and the rock is meant to be a surprise. Datsuzoku may be thought of as freedom from restriction and regulation. To a Zen practitioner, it is in the break that the seed of ultimate creativity is to be found.
When a well-worn pattern is broken, creativity emerges. It is the broken pattern that makes us sit up, take notice, and pay attention. We think differently, more resourcefully, when a break occurs.
Let’s say you get a flat tire while driving. If you’re normal, you curse out loud. That curse signals a break from the ordinary, which, being creatures of habit, we don’t much care for. But now suddenly you’re wide awake, with senses on high alert, and you’re aware of a problem that requires your full attention to solve it. Suddenly everything you normally take for granted becomes vitally important: how the car handles, the shoulder of the road, safe spots to pull over, traffic around you, tire-changing tools in the trunk, immediate avenues for help. These are the resources you need for a creative solution.
They were there all along, but it was the break that brought them to your attention. Thus the fifth law of subtraction: Break is the important part of breakthrough.
There are two kinds of breaks: those you make and those you take. Subtle differences to be sure, yet important enough to devote separate space to each. This chapter will look at the breaks you make, and Chapter 6 will look at those you take.
When it comes to healthcare, one word comes to mind: crisis. It’s a wicked problem facing all of planet Earth. In the United States, nearly 20 percent of the gross domestic product is tied up in healthcare, nearly 50 million residents are uninsured, and those who have insurance face an average of almost $14,000 annually to cover their families as more and more employers pass greater portions of premium costs on employees or stop offering coverage entirely. Not only is it more expensive and difficult to get healthcare, the care that is delivered is far too often plagued with quality issues: there are at least 10 times more deaths caused by preventable medical errors in the United States than deaths resulting from drunk driving.* No one is happy with the system. Truly patient-centered care is a distant dream.
Or is it? Sometimes all it takes is someone willing to make a break with convention and look at the problem from a different angle.
I hadn’t heard of WellnessMart, MD, until a friend told me I could get a body composition test for $10 there instead of paying $75 at my doctor’s office, in addition to the fee for an office visit. I could get a full lipid profile showing my cholesterol and triglyceride levels for $45 instead of the $175 my doctor wanted to charge. I could walk in without an appointment rather than waiting three weeks to see a doctor, and I’d be done in less than five minutes.
WellnessMart is a refreshing concept: It’s a cash-based retail doctor’s office.
My friend did not exaggerate. Although I did spend well over an hour there, it was entirely by choice: I was talking to the founder, Dr. Richard McCauley, and chatting with him was fascinating. A graduate of the medical school at the University of Southern California, Richard had been an emergency room physician for several years before developing a new idea for healthcare.
WellnessMart looks nothing like a typical medical office. It has an attractive retail storefront, ample parking, and no waiting room. That’s because there’s no waiting. In fact, walking into the store feels like entering something that Apple and FedEx Office—aka Kinko’s—conjured up on the back of a napkin. It’s a nice mix of Apple clean and Kinko’s convenience. Picture white and lime-green walls, modern furnishings, an open floor plan, glossy floors, big-screen televisions, and walls covered with prominent menu boards listing services and cash pricing.
“I totally copied the Apple store concept,” Richard confesses. And it turns out that he’s related to Kinko’s founder, the business visionary Paul Orfalea—they’re cousins. But what I found really intriguing was his business strategy: where in the enormous healthcare market he had chosen to play and how he planned to win.
“There are two kinds of people,” states Richard. “Healthy and sick. Why do sick people and healthy people go to the same place? Every other medical site in the world treats both. We don’t. We only serve healthy people. It’s called ‘healthcare,’ not ‘sick care.’ Healthcare isn’t just for unhealthy times. There are so many routine maintenance kinds of things you need from time to time. My sole goal in life is to make that quick, easy, and cheap.”
Richard would get along just fine with the “faster, better, cheaper” crowd at NASA.
WellnessMart is a different and smarter way of doing many health-related things. You can get everything from travel shots, to tuberculosis testing, to your kids’ sports-team physical. Richard can administer a multitude of medical tests, including cancer screens. You can buy physician-approved vitamins and take cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) classes. It’s a study in what isn’t there, and the entire approach is one of subtraction: no waiting, no appointments, no old magazines, no coughs and sniffles. “If you’re wheezing, sneezing, and coughing, you came to the wrong place,” says Richard.
But WellnessMart can help you if you’re sick. Richard and his partner, Chris Spieth, have compiled a directory showing where to get the best price on healthcare services that WellnessMart doesn’t provide. You can look up where to go for doctor visits, x-rays, lab tests, dental work, and prescription drugs. They have binders containing all the information spread out on a designated table, accessible to everyone. Richard said he got the idea while working as an emergency room doctor.
“I got really frustrated working on the front lines,” he tells me. “I was beginning to feel like I could never fix anything. As a physician, part of my job is to be a patient advocate within a very complex system that frustrates everybody involved. I wanted to go directly to the public—with a retail store. The idea was to create a medical marketplace with a certain level of transparency so people can see what things cost. I thought, Wouldn’t it be great if healthcare was more like car care at your favorite local mechanic?”
So Richard made the break. He started small, in the hallway of a large health club, testing his concept with his potential consumer base. “Where do you find a well-contained concentration of healthy people? In a gym, working out,” he says. His concept proved popular. In 2008, he launched WellnessMart in a small strip mall in Thousand Oaks, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. His break is now officially consolidated: he has two stores in northern California’s Sacramento area and another in West Los Angeles, for a total of four.
But Richard’s solution doesn’t stop at health maintenance. He’s tackling the toughest and most opaque part of healthcare: insurance. Well-nessMart is a cash business and doesn’t take insurance, but it sells policies and educates people on insurance. “Health insurance should really be more like car insurance,” he says. “You buy car insurance for accidents, not for oil changes, tune-ups, and tires. You don’t go to Jiffy Lube and hand them your insurance card, right? But that’s how health insurance operates. It’s ludicrous. If car insurance companies tried to sell policies the way health insurance companies do—five times more expensive than they should be and partially paying for routine maintenance—nobody would buy them.”
Richard wants people to look at health insurance the way they look at auto and home insurance: as something to purchase for the big disasters. “People should be buying health insurance strictly for the unexpected crisis,” he says. “There is so much savings there. A deductible in your car insurance is straightforward—if something happens, you pay the deductible and the insurance company handles the rest. Not so in health insurance. In all but a few cases, you keep paying. It’s a different concept but the same word. And it’s not right.”
He educated me about my own health insurance and on the value of a healthcare savings account. He showed me how to save thousands of dollars by simply shifting my understanding of what insurance is and what it isn’t. With this philosophy, the money I can save in premiums pays for the services I actually use, tax-free through a health savings account.
Richard is a licensed insurance broker, but he recommends and sells only a few catastrophic policies. He showed me a number of different plans, ran different scenarios on them, and easily illustrated how just a few were worthwhile because they operated more like auto insurance.
WellnessMart represents a profound improvement for consumers: a place they can walk into and get honest answers. “Let’s live in the real world where people have limited resources. Not everybody can afford everything,” Richard tells me. “If people can get the same quality of care for less money, let’s start there and give people the opportunity to experience healthcare in a positive way. Let’s allow them to ask questions and learn. Traditional medical offices are not set up to teach. They’re set up to diagnose and treat.”
That’s another cue Richard took from an Apple store: the notion of a “genius bar.” Each WellnessMart store has an educational area equipped with large screens and ample seating. Training classes regularly teach CPR, first aid, and child safety. I found the entire concept and the experience to be one of the most effective I’d ever encountered. I asked Richard if he plans to expand nationally or perhaps franchise. “We are staying small and lean right now,” he says. But he’s well positioned to take advantage of what appears to be a growing opportunity: the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas expects the number of walk-in clinics to almost triple in the next four years in response to patient demand.
“You know that 2,500-page healthcare reform act working its way through Congress?” Richard asks. “All you need is one sentence: ‘Healthcare service providers must openly post the price of every service on a menu.’ Problem solved, game over. We have to break with convention, and that’s how to do it. That’s how we did it.”
As I walked away, I couldn’t help thinking that I had just realized my first victory over healthcare issues. For $10, I got a body composition profile, an education in how to simplify the most complex situations, and advice on how to save tens of thousands of dollars. I knew I’d be back. Again and again.
If you head north from Los Angeles on Interstate 5, hang a right on the Antelope Valley Freeway toward Palmdale and the Mojave Desert, and cut east past the Antelope Valley Country Club, you’ll run into the Sierra Highway, off which you can see Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works building, not far from Air Force Plant 42 and Edwards Air Force Base. You’ll know you’re in the right place because you’ll see a white building with a cartoon skunk on it: the Skunk Works logo. As you drive around, you’ll see a good bit of barbed wire, a high concrete wall, and plenty of “No Access” signs. You’ll see an F-104 Starfighter on display near the main entrance off Lockheed Way and pass Kelly’s Way, named for Lockheed’s legendary chief engineer, Clarence “Kelly” Johnson.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons.
No matter how hard you try or how many times you call the Lockheed Martin public relations office, you will not get inside; that is, unless you ask about a fairly obscure program such as the Advanced Composite Cargo Aircraft. You’ll then be invited to take a tour of the project hangar.* Skunk Works is, and has been since its inception under Kelly during World War II, Lockheed’s top-secret Advanced Development Program.
Kelly Johnson ran Lockheed’s innovative Skunk Works for nearly 45 years, from its inception in 1943 to 1975, when he turned the reins over to his longtime right-hand man, friend, and protégé, Ben “Stealth” Rich, who ran it until 1991, when he retired from Lockheed after over 40 years of service.*
Skunk Works was not always situated out in the middle of the desert, and it did not always have its own building. In fact, when it began, it had no building at all. The Skunk Works story begins in World War II and is a tale of one world-changing aviation breakthrough after another at the hands of departure from convention. As in the stories of Pathfinder and Lexus, it is the enormous complexity of the work, the superb design quality, the limited resources, and the radical thinking with which those breakthroughs were achieved that make the Skunk Works story worth retelling.
It was the appearance of Germany’s first jet fighter planes in the skies over Europe that prompted the U.S. War Department in 1943 to knock on the door of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, headquartered in Burbank, California, next to the Burbank airport. Lockheed actually owned the airport and had gone to great lengths to conceal the entire area from Japanese air reconnaissance. An enormous burlap tarp painted to depict a suburban neighborhood camouflaged the factory, adorned with artificial trees, buildings, and cars (made of rubber) to give it a three-dimensional effect.
For the War Department, there was just one man for the job: 33-year-old Kelly Johnson, Lockheed’s talented but eccentric chief engineer.
In his memoir Skunk Works, Ben Rich described Kelly as always “rushing around in his untucked shirt” with “a comical duck’s waddle, slicked-down white hair, and a belligerent jaw.” According to Ben, Kelly looked like W. C. Fields, complete with a thick, round nose but without the humor.
“Definitely without that,” Ben wrote. “Johnson was all business and had the reputation of an ogre who ate young, tender engineers for between-meal snacks. We peons viewed him with the knee-knocking dread and awe of the Almighty best described in the Old Testament. The guy would just as soon fire you as have to chew on you for some goof-up. Right or not, that was the lowdown on Kelly Johnson. But the open secret in our company was that the chief engineer walked on water in the adoring eyes of CEO Robert Gross.”
It was Robert Gross who saved Lockheed from extinction by buying it out of bankruptcy in 1932 for the tidy sum of $40,000. Gross risked everything by placing his money on the development of a twin-engine commercial airplane. During wind tunnel tests at the University of Michigan, a 23-year-old engineering student of Swedish descent by the name of Clarence Johnson contradicted his professors and told Lockheed engineers that their design was seriously flawed: if one engine went out, the plane would go down.
Lockheed hired Johnson for his audacity, and before long he was nicknamed “Kelly” for his “fighting Irish” temper. Not only did Kelly correct the design flaw, he did so with an unconventional twin-tail design that would become the Lockheed signature. The plane, the Electra, saved Lockheed and revolutionized aviation in the 1930s. Kelly’s star rose, and he became the go-to guy on everything from aerodynamics to flight testing, including flying the planes he built; he declared that unless he scared himself nearly to death once a year in a cockpit, he wouldn’t have the proper perspective to design good planes. That’s genchi genbutsu at its finest.
Kelly was a maverick and often left people in his wake. “Once that guy made up his mind to do something,” Ben Rich writes, “he was as relentless as a bowling ball heading toward a ten-pin strike. With his chili-pepper temperament, he was poison to any bureaucrat, a disaster to ass-coverers, excuse-makers, or fault-finders.”
Kelly took all of three days in the late 1930s to transform the Electra into a bomber for the British Royal Air Force. Called the Hudson, it was so successful that England ordered 3,000. Kelly’s colleagues were so awestruck by his design skills that they swore he could actually see air.
In 1939 Kelly designed and built the only American fighter plane in production throughout U.S. involvement in World War II: the P-38 Lightning Interceptor. If you’ve seen World War II footage, you’ve seen the P-38. It’s the twin-propeller plane with the funny-looking twin-boom tail design. It was the most maneuverable propeller plane of the war and played several roles: ground attack, air-to-air combat, and strategic bombing. It was the P-38 that not only shot down Japanese Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto’s airplane but also was responsible for shooting down more Japanese aircraft than any other fighter plane during the war.
As with the Mars Pathfinder and the Lexus LS400, challenging constraints shaped the project: build a jet fighter prototype that would fly at 600 miles per hour—the edge of the speed of sound and 200 miles per hour faster than the P-38—in 180 days. The only problem was that Lockheed was out of floor space, as the entire complex was devoted to 24/7 production of the current planes.
The jet fighter project was to be conducted with top secrecy, and so the space constraint was something Kelly decided to leverage. He rented a large circus tent, borrowed 23 of the best design engineers and 30 shop mechanics from Lockheed’s main operation, and set up camp next to a foulsmelling plastics factory, figuring that the overwhelming odor would help keep “nosy barkers” away.
The whole setup reminded people of Al Capp’s L’il Abner comic strip and the “Skonk Works,” a dilapidated factory on the remote outskirts of Capp’s fictional backwoods town, Dogpatch, run by one Big Barnsmell, the lonely “inside man.” In Capp’s comics, scores of Dogpatch locals are done in every year by the toxic fumes of concentrated “skonk oil,” which Big and his cousin Barney brewed and barreled daily by grinding dead skunks and worn shoes into a constantly smoldering still for a purpose that Capp never disclosed.
“The connection was apparent to those inside Kelly’s circus tent forced to suffer the plastic factory’s stink,” writes Ben. “One day one of the engineers showed up for work wearing a civil defense gas mask as a gag, and a designer named Irv Culver picked up a ringing phone and announced, ‘Skonk Works.’”
The name stuck, and behind Kelly’s back his team began referring to the operation as “the Skonk Works.” It wasn’t long before even those working at the main Lockheed plant were calling it that too. Over the next 15 years, Skonk Works became part of the Lockheed lexicon. In 1960, when Al Capp’s publisher objected to Lockheed’s use of the name, rather than abandon it, Lockheed changed it to Skunk Works and registered both the name and the cartoon skunk logo as trademarks, thus becoming the official alias of the Lockheed Advanced Development Program.
Over the years, the term skunk works has come to refer to any effort involving an elite special team that breaks away from the larger organization to work autonomously on an advanced or secret project, usually tasked with breakthrough innovation on limited budgets and under aggressive timelines. The term has become official and is defined in the fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as “an often secret experimental laboratory or facility for producing innovative products, as in the computer or aerospace field.”
Perhaps it was the stink that drove Kelly’s secret team to design and build the prototype for the P-80 Shooting Star—nicknamed Lulu Belle—in a mere 143 days, 37 days ahead of schedule. Although World War II ended before the jet fighter could prove itself, Lockheed produced nearly 9,000 during the lead-up to the Korean War. The P-80, later called the F-80, won the first all-jet dogfight over the skies above North Korea, shooting down a Soviet MiG-15 and becoming the first American jet fighter to score a kill.
Given the success of the P-80 project, Lockheed management agreed to let Kelly keep his elite design and development team running as long as it did not interfere in any way with Kelly’s primary duties as Lockheed’s chief engineer and was kept on a shoestring budget. Kelly hand-selected a few of the brightest designers and moved into a building known only as Building 82. Skunk Works would remain there until it moved operations out to the desert in Palmdale in 1994. Kelly split his time between the main Lockheed plant and Building 82, usually turning his attention to Skunk Works in the later part of the day.
“Those guys brainstormed what-if questions about the future needs of commercial and military aircraft,” Ben writes, “and if one of their ideas resulted in a contract to build an experimental prototype, Kelly would borrow the best people he could find in the main plant to get the job done. That way the overhead was kept low and the financial risks to the company stayed small.”
There was nothing fancy about the Skunk Works space. In fact, Kelly preferred to keep things as spare as possible. When Ben Rich was lent out temporarily to Kelly in 1954, little did he know that he’d never leave. He describes his first impression of the space as being nearly as eccentric as Kelly himself:
The office space allocated to Kelly’s Skunk Works operation was a narrow hallway off the main production floor crowded with drilling machines and presses, small parts assemblies, and the large assembly area which served as the production line. There were two floors of surprisingly primitive and overcrowded offices where about fifty designers and engineers were jammed together behind as many desks as a moderate-size room could unreasonably hold. Space was at a premium, so much so that Kelly’s ten-person procurement department operated from a small balcony looking down on the production floor. The place was airless and gloomy and had the look of a temporary campaign headquarters where all the chairs and desks were rented and disappeared the day after the vote.
But there was no sense of imminent eviction apparent inside Kelly’s Skunk Works. His small group was all young and high-spirited, who thought nothing of working out of a phone booth, if necessary, as long as they were designing and building airplanes. Added to the eccentric flavor of the place was the fact that when the hangar doors were opened, birds would fly up the stairwell and swoop around drawing boards and dive-bomb our heads, after knocking themselves silly against the permanently sealed and blacked-out windows, which Kelly insisted upon for security. Our little feathered friends were a real nuisance, but Kelly couldn’t care less. All that mattered to him was our proximity to the production floor. A stone’s throw was too far away; he wanted us only steps away from the shop workers, to make quick structural or parts changes or answer any of their questions.
That first secret project set the standard for every Skunk Works project to follow, including the U-2 bomber, the SR-71 Blackbird, and the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter. High-quality designs in a short time with limited resources became the hallmark of a Skunk Works project.
Kelly had three simple management principles supporting a single fundamental belief: don’t build an airplane you don’t believe in. His three principles: First, it’s more important to listen than to talk; second, even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision; and third, don’t halfheartedly wound problems—kill them dead.
Over time, Kelly developed 14 rules for all Skunk Works projects as a way to put his core belief and basic principles into practice. Half of the rules (with a few word changes) can be applied to any skunk works project, and they prescribe a robust framework within which to operate:
• The Skunk Works manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He should report to a division president or higher.
• Strong but small project offices must be provided.*
• The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people (10% to 25% compared to the so-called normal systems).
• A very simple drawing and drawing release system with great flexibility for making changes must be provided.
• There must be a minimum number of reports required, but important work must be recorded thoroughly.
• The contractor must be delegated the authority to test his final product in flight. He can and must test it in the initial stages. If he doesn’t, he rapidly loses his competence to design other vehicles.
• Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled by appropriate security measures.
Ben Rich neatly tied together the elements that have allowed the Skunk Works program to enjoy an ongoing record of breakthrough innovation for nearly 70 years:
We created a practical and open work environment for engineers and shop workers, forcing the guys behind the drawing boards onto the shop floor to see how their ideas were being translated into actual parts and to make any necessary changes on the spot. We made every shop worker who designed or handled a part responsible for quality control. Any worker—not just a supervisor or a manager—could send back a part that didn’t meet his or her standards. That way we reduced rework and scrap waste.
We encouraged our people to work imaginatively, to improvise and try unconventional approaches to problem solving, and then got out of their way. By applying the most common-sense methods to develop new technologies, we saved tremendous amounts of time and money while operating in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation both with our government customers and between our white-collar and blue-collar employees.
In the end, Lockheed’s Skunk Works demonstrated the awesome capabilities of American inventiveness when free to operate under near ideal working conditions. That may be our most enduring legacy as well as our source of lasting pride. A successful Skunk Works will always demand a strong leader and a work environment dominated by highly motivated employees. The Skunk Works’ strength is the autonomy they have enjoyed from management and their close teamwork and partnership with their customers….
If you’re contemplating your own skunk works project, take a page from Kelly Johnson and Lockheed’s Skunk Works.
The mysteries of the mind and brain are many and complex. Neuroscience, through the magic of technology, is just beginning to unravel some of them. In light of the fact that my livelihood revolves around creativity and change—in fact, creating change—I am a voracious consumer of all things neuro. I’m especially fascinated by neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the mind to change the brain. Yes, you read that right. Neuroplasticity radically reverses ages of scientific dogma holding that mental experiences result only from physical goings-on in the brain and that we can’t do much about that. The brain is the brain, or so the thinking went, and it doesn’t change once it’s hardwired, and even if it did, it couldn’t possibly be a person’s thoughts that were responsible. But neuroscience can now confirm that our mental machinations do alter the physical structure of our brain matter. Thus, when you change your mind, you change your brain.
This is great news for most of us, because the universal issue facing everyone in this age of excessive complexity is change, whether it’s breaking a habit, adopting a new one, coming up with new and original ideas, shifting a business focus, changing behaviors, changing company culture, or changing the world. At the heart of the matter is the issue of breaking out of well-grooved patterns—minds and mindsets—and creating new ones; in other words, unlocking the brain.
I first met Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, a practicing neuropsychiatrist affiliated with UCLA, in 2008. Jeff is the author of several books, including You Are Not Your Brain, The Mind and the Brain, and Brain Lock. What’s interesting about Jeff is that he deals with one of the most prevalent, challenging, and debilitating patterns in the brain: obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). He’s an internationally recognized authority who developed a successful behavioral therapy at UCLA’s medical school for patients with OCD, called the “UCLA Four Steps.”
And here’s the thing: he doesn’t use drugs to treat patients. He teaches them to reset and rewire their brains by changing the way they think.
If anyone knows about the pattern-making, pattern-recognizing, pattern-locking machine that is the human brain, it’s Jeff Schwartz. “Your brain is like a DVR,” says Jeff. “It records every sensory experience you have and sends that information to your frontal cortex, which houses your brain’s higher functions, and stores it as data. The process is ongoing, and there is no real editing that goes on. An automatic grouping mechanism gets triggered when new information comes in, so the new information gets filed with other like data. That’s how your brain creates specific and unique patterns. Different patterns combine to make memories and perceptions. Those connections are reinforced over time and quickly become mental models—mindsets, if you will.”
Those mental models allow us to function, for the most part, much more efficiently and effectively by helping us rapidly sift data and sort information into useful knowledge according to whether it confirms or contradicts the strong patterns already embedded in the brain.
OCD occurs when a good brain pattern—such as washing one’s hands—goes bad: it gets chained, locked, and encrypted by the brain like a steel vault. The pattern is amazingly robust and resistant to change. “OCD is an insatiable monster,” Jeff says. “The more you give it, the hungrier it gets. Even Howard Hughes, with all his wealth, with a retinue of servants to perform the bizarre rituals his OCD told him to perform, couldn’t buy his way out. Eventually, the false messages coming from his brain overwhelmed him.”
OCD is related to chemical imbalances in the brain and is a lifelong disease identified by two groups of symptoms: obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are intrusive, unwelcome, distressing thoughts and mental images. They don’t go away by themselves. Jeff refers to this as “brain lock” because connections between parts of the brain get locked together, leaving a person unable to shift from one thought to the next. Compulsions are the behaviors OCD sufferers perform in a vain attempt to exorcise the fears and anxieties caused by their obsessions. What Jeff has proved is that his OCD patients can change how they respond to their obsessions by using their thoughts to physically change the way their brains work; in other words, by exploiting the brain’s neuroplasticity.
When you look at a brain scan of someone with OCD and compare it with a scan of a normal brain, you notice that the OCD brain is all lit up—highly and abnormally overactive in places where the normal brain isn’t. The cortex of the OCD brain, which is where the messages from other areas are connected and become thought, is where all the action is. Specifically, it’s in what is called the orbital cortex, which is like an error-detection unit, a sort of “check engine” light. After a successful treatment using the four-step cognitive behavior therapy, that area of an OCD patient’s brain shows a nearly miraculous decrease in activity, leaving it closer to normal. Showing this type of imagery to OCD patients is a critical step, because they understand from the start that it’s not them, it’s their brains that have a few glitches and that they can change their brains to manage those glitches.
This separation enables the therapy to begin working by invoking the belief system. It’s when we believe we can make a break that we break through whatever barriers are holding us in place. This is the reason I am drawn to Jeff’s work in the first place. It’s not because I’m curious about OCD per se but because of what he knows about breaking free of those kinds of fiercely strong patterns. If his method helps people with OCD, doesn’t it make sense that we should be able to use it in making any kind of change?
As he described the four steps to me, the answer became obvious: Yes.
“The first step is to relabel a given thought, feeling, or behavior as something else,” Jeff says. “An unwanted thought could be relabeled ‘false message’ or ‘brain glitch.’ This amounts to training yourself to clearly recognize and identify what is real and what isn’t, refusing to be tricked by your own intrusive thoughts and urges. Essentially you call the thought or urge exactly what it is: an obsessive thought or a compulsive urge. For someone with OCD, instead of saying, ‘I have to check the stove,’ they would start saying, ‘I’m having a compulsive urge to check the stove.’”
Now, in order to do this, notice that you are really engaging in a bit of personal subtraction and genchi genbutsu: you are removing yourself from the equation and observing yourself objectively. “I bring out the impartial spectator,” Jeff explains.
Adam Smith in his 1759 treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments defined “the impartial and well-informed spectator” as the ability to stand outside of oneself and watch “the person within” in action. “We each have access to this person, and that’s what you learn to do in the relabel step,” says Jeff. “You step back and say, ‘This is just my brain sending me a false message; if I change my behavior, my brain will change.’”
This sounds easy, almost a trite affirmation, like what they give you at one of those weekend-long shut-in sessions where you transform yourself into the person you always thought you could be. It isn’t. It’s hard. Adam Smith knew how hard it could be to do this, writing that it requires the “utmost and most fatiguing exertion.” The reason isn’t hard to figure out: when your brain is sending rapid-fire, long-embedded directions at you with overwhelming force, focusing on something completely different is incredibly difficult.
The second step is to reattribute, which answers a key question that Jeff poses: “Why do these thoughts come back? The answer is that the brain is misfiring, stuck in gear, creating mental noise, and sending false messages. In other words, if you understand why you’re getting those old thoughts, eventually you’ll be able to say, ‘Oh, that’s just my OCD, or that’s just a brain glitch.’” That raises the next question: What can you do about it?
The third step is to refocus, and this is where the toughest work is, because it entails the actual changing of behavior. You have to do another behavior instead of the old one. Having recognized the problem for what it is and understood why it’s occurring, you now have to replace the old behavior with new, more constructive things to do. This is where the change in brain chemistry occurs, because you are cutting new grooves, new patterns, new mindsets.
By refusing to be misled by the old messages, by understanding they aren’t what they tell you they are, you find that your mind is now in charge of your brain. This is basically like shifting the gears of a car manually. “The automatic transmission isn’t working, so you manually override it,” says Jeff. “With positive, desirable alternatives—gardening, riding a bike, anything you enjoy and can do consistently each and every time—you are actually repairing the gearbox. The more you do it, the smoother the shifting becomes. Like most other things, the more you practice, the more easy and natural it becomes, because your brain is beginning to function more efficiently, calling up the new pattern without thinking about it.”
It all comes together in the fourth step, which is the natural outcome of the first three. With a consistent way to replace the old behavior with the new, you begin to see old patterns as simple distractions. You devalue them as being completely worthless. Eventually the thoughts and urges begin to fade in intensity, the brain works better and better, and the automatic transmission in the brain starts working properly.
“Two very positive things happen,” Jeff says. “The first is that you’re happier, because you have control over your behavioral response to your thoughts and feelings. The second thing is that by doing that, you change the faulty brain chemistry.”
Jeff confirms that his methods can be used to create change in any area of business, work, or life. “Since it has been scientifically demonstrated that the brain has been altered through the behavior change,” he says, “it’s safe to say that you could do the same thing by altering responses to any number of other behaviors.”
What all of this meant to me was that we can learn to improve our ability to defeat the traditional thinking traps we fall into when we try to change our view of whatever challenge we’re facing. We can override our default. We can retrain our brains by exercising the Apple tagline: Think different.
The UCLA Four Steps group gained world acclaim, and the success raised deeper questions for Jeff: What happens at the instant a person decides not to check the stove after decades of doing it in response to her brain’s false signals and in spite of her racing heart and churning gut? What is responsible for her ability to suddenly switch gears, activating other circuitry?
That would be important for anyone who is at least somewhat mentally paralyzed to understand. “At the instant of activation,” Jeff says, “both circuits are ready to go—one encoding your walk out the door for a jog, the other a rush back to the stove. Yet something in the mind is choosing one brain circuit over the other. Something is causing one to activate, the other to stay quiet. What is that something?”
The renowned psychology pioneer William James was seeking an answer to that question over a hundred years ago when he asked “by what process is it that the thought of any given action comes to prevail stably in the mind?”
For Jeff, these questions launched a new immersion in the study of how the mind can change the brain. What was accounting for the observed changes in the physical brain? Good old-fashioned willpower was the most reasonable explanation. But this went against the theory many scientists still labored under, a purely reductionist view that the mind is simply a result of brain stuff—implying that conscious thought couldn’t possibly change actual brain hardware. For the first time, “mind over matter” had hard science behind it. Jeff had the solid evidence from brain imaging that a change had taken place, and he believed that a directed mental force accounted for it. You can imagine the old-schoolers saying, “It’s all just one part of the brain changing another, it’s still the brain doing it all on its own, don’t bring the conscious mind into it.” But the successful treatment of OCD patients required tapping into the belief that they had power over their actions. That’s how behavioral therapy works.
What Jeff was able to show was that the mind, through a directed mental force, can activate one brain circuit over another, and once the new circuit begins to fire on a regular basis, you need less force to activate it. In other words, the relabeling and refocusing of attention start becoming automatic. As the brain takes over the heavy lifting, the mind resets.
The neuroscience of change reveals the power behind the fifth law of subtraction: Breakthrough often demands that one simply make a conscious break from existing routines and patterns and then stick with it.
It’s the sticking with it part, though, that has yet another dimension and quite possibly is the key to tapping one’s most creative self.
JONATHAN FIELDS
MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER
TANNER CHRISTENSEN
KAREN MARTIN
ROBERT MORRIS
BRUCE ROSENSTEIN
DAN KELDSEN
JAMIE FLINCHBAUGH
BRIAN BUCK
I gave up a seven-figure income as a lawyer to make $12 an hour as a personal trainer. Crazy, right? Then, married and with a three-month-old baby, I signed a lease to launch a yoga center in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen in New York City the day before 9/11. Forget crazy; it was utter insanity.
Not only did I survive, I flourished and prospered. Along the way, I learned some real-life lessons that enabled me to develop a fresh approach to transforming uncertainty, risk of loss, and exposure to judgment into catalysts for innovation, creation, and achievement.
I’m learning to become a fear alchemist. Fear alchemists are people who have spent some time understanding the process and experience of fear, what it is and what it isn’t, and then equipped themselves with the strategies, skills, and tools to take that experience and instead of having it paralyze them, turn it into something that mobilizes them. I’m an aspiring one, still exploring, but I’ve learned a thing or two.
First, it helps to have some “certainty anchors”: things that you can count on, that you know recur regularly, every day, in your life in a fairly automated way. You can look forward to them always being the same, always being there. The power of a certainty anchor is that it gives you a sort of baseline calm—ropes to the ground, if you will—so that you feel more comfortable going to that untethered creative place where you really just let go. Certainty anchors assure you that you’ll still be able to touch back down after blasting off.
The question for many people is, How do you minimize or avoid the collateral damage—to other parts of your life and others in your life—in chasing your creative passion if it’s something dramatically different from your current path?
Easy: build something on the side. Do it as a skunk works. Do it in your spare time. Take the four-plus hours the average Joe spends watching mindless TV and do something with it. People say, “I need that time to wind down.” Baloney. When you’re doing something you’re passionate about, it energizes you. At some point, if you keep at it, you can make the break to the new path when the new idea is viable. Meantime, you keep your responsibilities and provide the security and stability those in your life rely on.
There is something you never, ever want to remove: butterflies. If you kill the butterflies in your stomach, you’ll kill the dream. Most people back away when they get that nervous, uncomfortable feeling. But that feeling signals that you’re doing something that matters to you. Embrace the feeling. Try to understand what the feeling is telling you. Train yourself in the alchemy of fear. Save the butterflies.
Jonathan Fields (jonathanfields.com) is the author most recently of Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance.
You’re on the quest for elegance, for focus, for impact. And yet overwhelm is forever tapping on your shoulder. More meetings to attend, more e-mails to process, more projects to manage, more dotted lines to and from, more plates to spin, more people with whom to connect. And that’s just at work.
Our natural reaction is to speed things up: refine our processes and get more and more efficient, rush to get things done, find the answer, and create an action plan that gets things moving.
But an elegant solution to the wrong problem is not an elegant solution.
It’s a simple, powerful, and rare discipline to take just a little more time at the front end to figure out what the real challenge might be. There are a few things that help me do more of what matters and less of the rest.
First, I slow down. It’s my impatience as much as anyone else’s that’s got me rushing to the solution. I take a breath and decide I’m going to give myself time just to be curious about what’s really going on.
I refuse to be seduced by the presenting challenge. I have a working hypothesis that the first thing that comes up is most likely not the real thing, just an interesting starting point. The first thing that comes out of someone’s mouth is rarely the real thing. It’s often a best guess, or a smoke screen, or even a solution to the unarticulated challenge. And by “someone” I’m talking as much about me as I am about a person I might be talking to.
I turn off my advice-giving machine. I just love to help. I want to add value. I want them to help me help them, like Jerry Maguire. But if I’m giving advice, I’m already down the path of action and complexity. It’s hard to be curious when you’re telling someone what to do.
More questions. Less advice. That’s my mantra. But what questions? Here’s the one that makes the difference: What’s the real challenge here?
That question alone will add focus to everything and for everyone. If I really want to amp up my curiosity muscle, I’ll add this question to the mix: And what else? Asking that acknowledges that the first thing someone says is not the only thing that person has in mind and probably not even the best or most important thing. It’s a self-management tool to stop me from jumping into action. It keeps me in curiosity mode.
From curiosity comes insight, from insight comes clarity, and from clarity comes elegant and focused action.
Michael Bungay Stanier (boxofcrayons.biz) is the senior partner of Box of Crayons and the author of Do More Great Work and the philanthropic End Malaria.
An apartment that was empty except for a plain camping mat was my life when I first moved to Salt Lake City some years ago.
Whenever friends came over to visit, they were astonished at the void that was my living space. Whereas the typical living arrangement for anyone in his or her early twenties consisted of a large TV, posters on the walls, video game consoles, and a messy bed or at the very least an unkempt mattress, my apartment was completely empty.
Can you imagine living without the comfort of a coffee machine, a TV, a bookshelf, even a dresser drawer for clothes?
For more than a year I got by exceptionally well without any major belongings, and I did it for a good reason.
At the time my life was dedicated to my work, to writing and creating a remarkable—albeit small—e-book publishing house. The way I saw it, a television or a couch or an excessive collection of books could inspire me but, more important, could work as a distraction as well.
So I went without.
And for the first time in my life I found myself immensely inspired by my own means. Day and night I would focus my energies on creating my own inspiration and pushing my business ideas forward. When friends came over to visit, we would either sip wine and talk about how we were going to change the world—which worked marvelously as a motivational tool—or gather scraps of paper and canvas and paint or draw to our hearts’ content.
I was essentially living without anything that didn’t push me to pursue my dreams and goals. If you have never seen the photo of Steve Jobs in his home in California at the age of 23, only a lamp and a rug filling the large space around him, it’s worth finding and looking at.
Steve Jobs knew, as I knew when I moved to the city, that removing elements from your life that don’t directly relate to your goals or essential survival can be remarkably inspirational and motivating.
If you’re looking for a good boost in productivity and want to change your life, start by removing what you don’t really need. It’s certainly not easy to do, but it can work remarkably well as a way to start doing the things you need to and engaging your imagination.
Tanner Christensen (tannerchristensen.com) is the founder of the e-book publisher Aspindle.com.
For me, subtraction is about uncluttering, removing the obstacles, and letting go of burdens that stand between the way things are and the way you want them to be in the future. I’ve come to realize that before you can remove any burden you carry, you need to let go of why you’re carrying it in the first place: fear.
Rational fear is a good thing, as it alerts us to potential danger. But irrational fear is a different beast. It’s what causes us to hold on to burdens we should really remove. When I reflect on the accomplishments that I’m most proud of, removing fear was always step one. The best example I have is when I decided to leave my job and launch my own business in the middle of a promotion to vice president.
I had always dreamed of running my own business. But each time I got close to making the leap, the fear of jumping into deep water kept me on the ship. Could I make it financially? Why leave the great compensation and big title behind? On the surface, all my questions revolved around money and prestige. Or did they?
On the Friday afternoon before the Monday I was to start, I met with my boss, the COO, to finalize everything. I left the meeting feeling empty instead of elated, which puzzled me. I liked my job, team, and leadership. But something wasn’t right. I knew what I had to do to sort out my conflicted feelings: deep reflection.
That weekend was the most difficult and most profound I’ve ever had. I closed my blinds and turned off the phone. I thought and thought and then thought some more. And I felt. The more I imagined life as a solo consultant, the more excited I got. And then at noon on Sunday, it finally hit me. My fear wasn’t about money and title per se; it was how I had come to view money and title as the very definition of success. This aha moment was the most liberating experience I’ve ever had. The moment I gained clarity about my fear, it lost all its power.
On Monday morning, I resigned. Saying good-bye wasn’t easy. I had been the first employee hired, and I had put my heart and soul into that company. And now I was taking them back.
Nineteen years later, the warning our COO gave me—”you’ll hate consulting”—hasn’t panned out. Quite the opposite. Subtracting fear from the equation opened up a wonderful world of possibilities that keeps getting better.
I can now smell fear. And I can help others let go of the clutter that holds them back.
Karen Martin (ksmartin.com) is the founder of Karen Martin & Associates and the author of The Outstanding Organization.
Many years ago during an interview, Katherine Hepburn was asked the secret to the success of her career. “Elimination! I have eliminated everyone and everything from my life that interferes with what I want to do and how I want to do it. Even Luddie, my former husband and dearest friend still. He simply had to go!”
Years later, I came upon Albert Einstein’s observation: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Then there was an observation by Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” Still another by Michael Porter: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
These and other insights help explain why elimination can have great power if—huge “if”—it is combined with sound judgment and sufficient information.
One of my favorite anecdotes from the art world involves a French Romantic poet—I think it was Baudelaire, but I’m not certain—who was asked, “How to write a poem?” After a lengthy pause for reflection, he replied, “First draw a birdcage and leave the door open. Then wait and wait and wait. Eventually, maybe, a bird will fly in. Then erase the cage.”
About 20 years ago, a severe frost was predicted here in Dallas. My wife said we had to trim back all the crepe myrtles or they would die. We cut them back almost to ground level. I feared that we had decapitated them. On the contrary, they were among the few smaller trees and bushes in our neighborhood that survived several days of sub-freezing temperatures.
Years ago before my family and I moved from Connecticut to Rhode Island, a grizzled New Englander from United Van Lines came by the house to estimate the costs of packing and shipping our belongings. Then he met with us to discuss the situation. “With all due respect, ma’am, please remember that crap here will be crap there.”
I think it’s important to keep in mind that the power of elimination can have both positive and negative impact. Again, I stress the importance of sound judgment in combination with sufficient information.
As Jason Jennings suggests, “If it’s DOA, bury it.” Fair enough. But to invoke a gardening metaphor, I suggest that we also be careful not to rip out seedlings just to see how well they are growing.
Robert Morris (http://bobmorris.biz) specializes in accelerated executive development and high-impact organization change and is also an Amazon top 50 reviewer.
The late Peter Drucker taught me something so valuable that I adapted it to help me organize my life. Drucker called it abandonment. It was a way to eliminate anything that was no longer at peak productivity. The idea is to regularly and ruthlessly put every activity and process on trial for its life to identify which ones still make sense and which should be dropped or scaled back.
I call it the total life list. Drucker led a busy life as a writer, consultant, and professor. I was lucky enough to spend time with him before his passing in 2005 while I was working for USA Today and later when writing a book. There were two striking instances when he stopped doing things he enjoyed because they either weren’t working well (writing two novels) or were taking time away from more pressing work. One was writing novels, the other teaching Japanese art at Pomona College in southern California.
In one of my interviews with Drucker, he told me that in his experience, the people who were most satisfied and content with life “lived in more than one world,” which ultimately gave me the title for the book. It also caused me to respond to him that what really matters is one’s total life, the sum of all our activities inside and outside the workplace, as well as our interactions with the people in those various dimensions.
Afterward, I concluded that the only way to really know where one stood within these dimensions was to create a list that included just about everyone one knew and the activities in which one was involved. I came up with about a dozen different categories. It allowed me to see which activities in my life had outlived their usefulness or that I had outgrown and no longer enjoyed.
This list has had a profound effect on me. I can’t think of anyone who couldn’t profit from an honest, thorough listing of what he or she does in life and whom he or she does it with. If you’re unsure of what you should stop doing, it helps to make sure that you know in detail exactly what you are doing now.
Bruce Rosenstein (brucerosenstein.com) is the managing editor of Leader to Leader, a former business journalist for USA Today, and the author of Living in More Than One World.
The year 2011 saw the single biggest change for me. It was a year of subtracting fear and routines that I hadn’t fully realized I’d allowed to creep in and rule the way I was thinking, working, and living.
I had become an accidental solopreneur in late 2010 when my business partner of three years left to take a dream job. Suddenly I was forced to radically rethink what I was doing with myself. I walked into the office and thought, “Okay, so what does this business mean to me now that I’m literally the business now?”
As immediately paralyzing and confusing as it felt in the moment, suddenly being the last man standing was probably the best thing to ever happen to me. The “breaking” of the business as it went from two guys to one was most definitely the breakthrough I’d needed to take myself to the next level professionally and personally.
I’ve become far more focused on being myself than on being what I’ve allowed myself to become. I’ve eliminated nonproductive habits and instead operate in ways I’ve always believed to be more authentic. I’ve been rehumanizing myself into the strengths I can now look back and see were evident even in grade school (and which many teachers attempted to teach out of me), subtracting away the “corporate wisdom” that most of us have had the misfortune to be steeped in.
I wouldn’t have ever thought to shrink the business by half. That decision wasn’t mine to make, and I wouldn’t have had the guts to leave to strike out on my own. But that breakthrough and shock really was a reset for me. I’m now seeing opportunities that I previously would have closed off as being distracting, inappropriate, or not interesting to my business partner.
It’s not a huge surprise, then, that I’ve turned my rehumanizing insight into my single biggest focus moving forward, which is in understanding and applying insights into individual and group behavior. If nothing else, we’re all human, and until we have a solid foundation for understanding and dealing with our fellow humans, everything else we do is likely to fail sooner or later. Think Humanity 2.0 before thinking Web or Enterprise 2.0, and the outcomes are dramatically different.
There’s such a massive disconnect between what corporations believe will motivate people and how we actually think and act. I firmly believe we’re just now seeing a massive subtraction of a whole world of assumptions about how companies should be owned and operated, and I’m excited to be in the middle of it, working as a change agent to help others get back to being human.
Dan Keldsen is the president of Information Architected (informationarchitected.com) and co-founder of Level 50 Software.
I spend much of my professional life helping people think in simpler terms, getting to the core of a problem or an idea to fit it on one page, to make the point in one story. However, it doesn’t come naturally for me; it’s a skill I’ve learned over time.
Part of my childhood was spent literally on the factory floor at Weldon Machine Tool, where we made cylindrical grinders. I’ve done my time doing tasks such as shoveling metal chips from the lathes to the scrap bin. But I also had the chance to do some more value-adding work as well. An early opportunity helped shape some of my thinking regarding simplicity in developing solutions.
We were building a grinder for a client. It was to include some software, which I would write, that would help generate the machine code. I was a college freshman, not an experienced programmer. And I was programming on a computer with low processing power: my first runs of the program took well over 12 hours.
After my first trials with a working program, we sent the code back to the client, only to hear that it was wrong. I was not in a position to disagree, because my engineering experience was limited and, of course, they were the client. I kept digging and digging and couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong.
A week or so later the client called back and said, “Sorry, but your code is right. We thought it was wrong because it doesn’t match ours, but your approach is actually more accurate than ours.”
Here’s what happened. The old process involved someone sending the part drawings to an engineer. Those drawings would sit on the engineer’s desk, waiting, usually for something like six weeks. The engineer would then develop the machine code after doing some calculations based on the drawing.
I went a simpler way. I bypassed engineering and took numbers straight from the drawing and used them to generate the part profile and code. The end result was that instead of sitting on an engineer’s desk for six weeks, a machine operator could enter some numbers directly from the drawing and generate the code in six minutes. That turned out to be pretty useful.
Just because something was always done that way, that doesn’t mean that it is right or best. Sometimes a fresh and direct look at how to do something will yield the simplest and best path forward.
Jamie Flinchbaugh (leanlearningcenter.com) is a cofounder of the Lean Learning Center and the coauthor of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean: Lessons from the Road.
Early in my career I learned a powerful lesson: showing others how to do what I do best frees me to grow and learn something else while benefiting the other person at the same time.
The power of this was driven home to me years ago. I had created an Excel macro that helped reduce tedious steps for processing claims. I became so married to that macro that my professional growth slowed down, because all my time was spent preserving it.
But I missed the creativity of doing something new.
I showed my coworkers how to make changes to the program when they wanted to update it. A few of them really loved learning a new skill. In the end, what made it work was that I was able to transfer ownership to them. I was free to be assigned to a new project and begin growing again.
I repeated this pattern throughout my career: learn something new, become proficient at it, pass the knowledge and responsibility to someone else, and then use the freed time to gain new or deeper knowledge about a topic.
Breaking free from having to be the sole source of knowledge or skill by sharing it with others has given me the opportunity for many professional breakthroughs. More important, I have been able to help others learn things that make their jobs easier.
Knowledge is not power. Shared knowledge is power. If you create new knowledge, don’t hoard it; set it—and yourself—free.
Pass it on.
Brian Buck coaches organizational teams to remove waste through kaizen and blogs at improve withme.com.