9.12. Exercises
Exercise 9.1
You will need two 15-minute segments of time to complete this exercise in "reading between the lines."
First Set:
Select a historical or fictional book that you might consider to be rather dry reading material. Depending upon your tastes it could be the Holy Bible or Catcher in the Rye. Find a story about people, and read a paragraph or two carefully. Think about what was it like to be those people. What motivations could they have? What pressures were they under? What do they want and why are they doing what they're doing? Use your imagination to fill in the details of their lives that further explain and enlighten the story. Have someone ask you these questions about the story and hear what you come up with.
Second Set:
Now select some technical reading material, perhaps a recent magazine. Pick articles written by vendors or consultants, individuals who are likely to have an agenda (selling something) for writing the story. Read a few paragraphs and think about them. Why are they telling you this? What is their agenda? How does their message compare with what you already know about the topic? Did they neglect to mention something germaine to the topic? Do they claim something which you suspect is misleading or blatantly false? Did they include proper citations for verifying their claims, or are they vague about their sources? What is their surface motivation, e.g., telling you about the Java language? And what is their true motivation, e.g., selling you their Java tool by telling you how hard your work will be without some great tool?
Background for Solution:
This is an exercise in subtlety. You are learning to perceive beyond the surface content and get into the author's head. What you know from your perspective is equally as important as the content that you are reading. Most messages that we encounter every day come from biased sources and there is a hidden agenda for sharing this information—for example, advertising and commercials. But more important, much of what you assume is unbiased editorial content (e.g., newspaper stories) is actually based upon press releases from highly biased sources. In fact, some large software companies have hundreds of public relations agents feeding information to the media as quickly as they can assimilate and print it. This is the world of managed perceptions that we live in. Either learn to see through it, or be misled by most of what you read.
Exercise 9.2
To learn the concept of internal psychological control, there are a few things that you can practice all the time to consciously modify your natural reactions.
First Set:
When someone comes to you with a technical idea, it is natural to try to talk him out of it. We naturally want to discourage people from attempting things that lead to disappointment. In this exercise, try to spend a whole day encouraging people, instead of discouraging them. Before you reflexively blurt out your discouraging message, STOP! Take a breath. Think of a positive message, one that will give them ownership and permission to try it on their own recognizance. This exercise is about changing your own behavior. This discouragement behavior is one of the most obvious natural reactions, so we use it as a classic example which you can work on.
Second Set:
Unless you are in a high light environment, like San Diego beach, most people don't smile as a regular habit. In this exercise, try smiling when you encounter people—friends, acquaintances, and nonthreatening strangers. Inside your head, the message you want to convey with your smile is, "I want you to know that you matter and I care." This conscious modification of behavior will have a positive impact upon the people around you. You'll be having a good day, and you won't know why.
Background for Solution:
There is a distinct difference between what we would do naturally and emotionally, and what we should do for ourselves, our friends, and our businesses. Psychologically, we may be stressed out, we may be frustrated, we may want to lash out at people emotionally, sometimes for the slightest implied insult. In psychological warfare, we know that it is "always a mistake to take things personally." Before we react emotionally, internal control should kick in, directing us to respond, not react. By responding with internal control, we can maintain important relationships in our lives and our businesses, which might otherwise be destroyed in a few heedless moments.
Exercise 9.3
Try the following. Soon. Suppose that you know that you are about to be asked to deliver something, and you are on your way to management to discuss the details. In this exercise, we apply expectation management to our commitment for delivery.
Let's say that you think it's about one day's work, but you're likely to get interrupted and miss a one-day deadline. You believe that if you had two days, you could easily complete the task and deliver. And in three days you could deliver a gold-plated high-quality version.
When you talk to management, I would propose three days, initially, and claim that, "I'll be able to deliver what we basically need by that time." If management balks, and claims they need it in one day, I would tell them the truth, with a bit of underselling. "I really need two days to do an adequate job. I'm very likely to get pulled off into other tasks during those two days, so it will be a struggle." If they absolutely insist on one day, tell them the truth again. State your conditions. "The only way I can deliver is if I get absolutely no interruptions. The only way I can ensure that is if I work at home and unplug the phones."
They should buy on this basis, or find someone else to do the task. So, worst case, you get to spend a luxurious day at home. Take a long hot bath. Do a few hours of uninterrupted work. And take the rest of the day off. Worst case. More likely is that you'll get your two days, they'll expect a minimal job, and you'll deliver a more-than-minimal product, exceeding expectations. You'll be a hero. You kept your word. You delivered on time. And your quality exceeded expectations. Well done! You should give yourself a day off for working so hard!
Background for Solution:
It is quite natural to want to oversell something that you can do in order to quickly generate consensus. However, if you oversell, you have set yourself up for underdelivery. And that's the opposite of expectation management.
Exercise 9.4
Applying the principles of Psychological Akido, let's turn around your next negative situation and find the positive lessons learned. Suppose your boss (or customer) is in the habit of getting quite angry because the software is late and buggy, or some other equally normal occurrence. How should you react? Most people would have a reflexive emotional response (without thinking) which varies widely based upon early childhood experience (or so the psychologists claim). Some people might get angry, right along with the boss: "Those darn programmers, they're always late, and their code stinks, damn them to hell!" Other people can't tolerate anger, and they close down. They become very passive, afraid, and quiet. Or they find a reason not to be there and leave.
As an expert martial artist in Psychological Akido, our response is to stay balanced. This is the boss's emotional trauma, not ours. We don't have to be afraid or angry. That's the boss's process erupting, not ours. We want to be there for the boss, and help him work through his feelings. Sensitively. I might say something like, "I'm sorry you feel that way about this situation, how can I help?" Neither angry, nor afraid, but compassionate. Ideally, let the boss sort his own problem. You might ask some leading questions to get him started on identifying alternatives. Perhaps, "What do you think is causing this problem?" and "If you had a magic wand, what would we do to fix this?" Help the boss channel his/her energy into constructive brainstorming of alternatives, and then to selection of positive actions.
Background for Solution:
There are always alternatives. Using this martial art, we channel negative energy into constructive planning and action, because fundamentally we believe that positives and negatives are the same. Both express energy that leads to equally constructive possibilities. From the experience, we learn "how things happen," and a new way forward for dealing with negative situations.
Exercise 9.5
Suppose our job was to redirect 100 software projects to use a common process or standard, such as CORBA, within one year. If we were brilliant enough to redirect one project every week, through face-to-face mentoring, it would take two years to complete the task. Nobody is that brilliant or consistently productive. We can't succeed working one-on-one. That's working hard, not smart.
The techniques of Intellectual Akido show a way forward. The core of the strategy is to prepare and present tutorials on CORBA that will evangelize and train the developers to use the technology effectively. In addition, various process and guidelines documents can make it easy to transfer lessons learned to projects, so that they can adopt the desired technology readily. In addition we would add a few other elements, such as an executive policy letter directing all projects to make the transition. We would also add CORBA to the enterprise operational environment (i.e., site licensing and easy acquisition and installation by any project) [Brown 98].
When given an intractable task such as the one described in this exercise is to approach it confidently with a firm grounding in the psychological warfare techniques that will make you ultimately successful.