Overcoming Inertia

Welcome to the Change Science Academy channel, where we explore and discover alternative ways of thinking to drive measurable value in executing our personal and organization strategies. In this channel, we look at getting from point A to point B in as straight a line as possible, but we always know it takes twists and turns along the way. But we're really looking at how to iron that out to make it as straight as possible with as little risk as possible. We want to make that easy. We want to have our teams be energized And we want to get that payoff of our strategies, our aspirations, to get to those as fast as possible. So, have you ever had a project, either for yourself or with your team, where you just couldn't get it going? It just wouldn't start. And you tried, you injected a little energy here and there, and it just wouldn't go. So today, we're going to talk about inertia. Now inertia actually is a scientific term, but we use it sometimes in the organizational behavior field. But inertia is the resistance of any physical object to any change in motion. Kind of makes sense, right? Newton's first law of motion is a body at rest will want to stay at rest. A body in motion will stay in motion, which is kind of confusing, right? We'll get to that in a second because unless there's some other force acting on that body to either move it, to get it moving, or as it's moving, to slow it down. Today, what we're going to look at is that body that just wants to stay, you know, stay put. And that force that we talk about is gravity. Gravity is a force that actually keeps us wanting to stay put. But in the Change Science Academy channel, we're going to start looking at gravity as what is the gravity for your team? So the first thing we're going to look at here is what is gravity? Gravity in terms of you or your team. So the first thing we're going to look at, sometimes gravity, you know, in our projects is created when the destination isn't really clear. So if we don't know where B is, we don't want to go. We want to stay where we are. Status quo feels really safe and sound, so we don't want to go and do— go someplace to an ambiguous destination. The second one that creates gravity for our team is when it really looks like like the journey is going to be really hard. And when the journey is hard, you know, you go like, wow, I get where we're going, but man, this looks like it's going to be really, really hard, an arduous journey. So sometimes people go, you know what, let me just stay put where I am. The third one, if there's really an unclear benefit to getting to point B. And when we talk about that benefit, that benefit could be dollars, but it also could be some sort of intrinsic reward or extrinsic reward, but I don't see the benefit of getting to B. So if the value to B is small, I'm not going to take the journey, the hard journey to get there. And finally, the other thing that creates gravity for our teams is if the thing that we want them to do is of low priority for them. Yeah, I'm doing 22 things, Patrick, and you just asked me to do your 24th thing? I'll put that in priority number 24 slot. Well, then you wonder why it's not moving. Well, that's gravity. Other priorities creates that gravity for your particular initiative. So I want you to think about a project that you can't get moving and think about what's the gravity to it. Why does the status quo look so comfortable and easy and secure versus the destination, the journey to get there? Is there a benefit to it? What's preventing you? So that might be a good way to analyze the gravity of a current situation, why it's not moving. So now that we've talked a little bit about what is gravity, well, you know, the most important thing on this channel is to talk about strategies for overcoming that inertia. And we've got 6 strategies here to look at overcoming that inertia. And the first one that I want to talk about is probably the most important, is engage your team. Authentically. Ask them, "What are your worries? What are your concerns? What are your thoughts about this? Is the journey hard? Is the destination tough?" Ask and engage them and really understand where they're at with this journey. The second way to overcome that inertia is to ask the 5 whys. Now, you ask, "Why, why, why, why, why, why?" That sounds horrible, but let me give you an example of that. When I was, actually last year, when I was teaching a class on strategic solution selling, this client of mine, they sold pipe. And it was really high-end pipe, really good high-end pipe, quality pipe. And so the sellers in the solution selling class were asking questions like, well, you know, we always lose on price because our competitors have lower quality pipe, but our clients always want that, you know, the low price. And so they were really bound up into saying, well, we can't get from there to from here to there. And so I asked them 5 whys. I said, "So, you know, let me play the dumb card here, guys. So why is it important to have high-quality pipe?" Well, high-quality— and these were a bunch of engineers, and they were like saying, "Well, you know, a high-quality pipe is non-corrosive." I said, "Okay, great. Why does a customer care about non-corrosive pipe?" Now, they thought I was stupid. They said, "Well, they want non-porous pipe because it doesn't rust." I was like, "Okay, got it. Why do customers care about rusty pipes?" They rolled their eyes. 25 guys in the room and they were like, "Well, we care about rusty pipes because if they rust, then they fail." I said, "Well, why do customers care about failed pipes?" Now they thought I was really dumb. They said, "Okay, well, they care about failed pipes because They leak money. And you can almost see everybody in the room going like, oh, we're not selling high-quality pipe, we're selling the client not leaking money. Now one of the things that they had a really hard time selling at this client was pipeline services. Because, oh, now if they're not buying high-quality pipe because it's too expensive, pipeline services is just an add-on. We're trying to add more on. But now, what they started seeing is they weren't selling pipe. What they were selling was peace of mind. Peace of mind that they wouldn't, that the pipes wouldn't fail and that they wouldn't leak their product all over the place. And so that's a huge peace of mind. So now they had a better way of looking at how to sell their pipe. This is getting to why. Why gets you to the real understanding of what B looks like. It gets people energized and excited about selling that, the getting to B, to your audience. So that's the second big strategy for overcoming inertia. Now the next two are beliefs. These are beliefs that you want to sell and influence and persuade your team around. First one is not A. What you have to really convince your team is, if you stay in A, we'll never get to B. Now that sounds kind of stupid, but in some ways it's like, you got to make A look like what we're doing today won't get us to to where we want to be. We can't live our dreams, we can't live our aspirations if we stay in A. If you keep doing things the way you do today, you're going to end up with the results you have today. So something you have to do is move people to say A doesn't work for you, which leads to the second belief here, which says you have to really convince people that B is a great place to be. And so that's a high-value place to be. Either that could be a benefit to the customer, it could be a benefit to you, it could be a benefit to them, intrinsic, extrinsic reward, whatever it is. But you gotta say, A won't get us there, B is where we want to be. And so that's sometimes, you have to paint that picture. I want to tell a story here about 30 years ago when I was a chemical engineer. I worked with this statistician, his name was Neil. And Neil would always tee up, you know, in these meetings, a graph. And everybody would look at the graph and go, yep, we need to do option X versus Y or Z or something else. And this was just consistent. Neil did this over and over again. And I was like— so I pulled Neil aside, and he's a PhD statistician, you know, big head guy, could do all sorts of amazing stuff. And I said, Neil, how do you build these great slides that just everybody gets it right away, and then they make the decision right away? And he goes, you know, Patrick, what I do is I create 120 slides for the single slide you see. I map temperature versus pressure, log-log, and all sorts of stuff. I look at the data. And what the data tells me, I really want to emphasize exactly what that data says so people clearly understand it. So you need to know his audience. And then also what the decision he wanted people to make that the data was indicating. And he would do 120 slides for every slide that he showed to everybody. That's amazing to me. And so I took that into my career, you know, 30-year career as a consultant and saying, boy, really creating that money slide that says, "This is what it is and this is what you need to do." And when you can come up with those kind of slides, you know, you come up and people can see, "Oh yeah, A is not where we want to be, B is a much better place to be." So that's my Neil story. The fifth strategy for overcoming inertia is right here, where I look at 5 boxes. Now, it could be 5 to 9 boxes, but a lot of time when people look at this really tough journey in front of them, they're thinking of 125 things that they need to do, all of them really tough. But if you can break it down into like 5 boxes, put all those activities in chewable chunks into 5 boxes and say, here's the 5 steps, the 5 moves we need to make to get from point A to point B. And I think of it as 5 to 9 because If you have more than 9, if you have double-digit number of boxes, it gets too complex. What you want to do is be able to, I think about it, is put it on a slide or a picture or a framework of some sort and say, here's the 5 things we need to do to get from here to there. It could be a project over 2 weeks or it could be a project over 2 years, but put it into these 5 different phases of a project. Then to wrap all of this together, the final strategy that I want to put out there is is have an awesome, awesome energetic kickoff meeting. Meaning you bring everybody together to start an initiative, you energize them, you figure out what you put in front of them, the why, why, why, you engage them, why A doesn't work, why B is a great place to be, you give them the framework of what the journey looks like, and maybe have the sponsor come in and talk to the team about how important this is to the company and the priority this is and how important all of you are. And that you're special as a team to come together and make this strategy happen. All of that should go into an amazing, amazing kickoff meeting. So those are 6 strategies for overcoming inertia. I'm sure there's an infinite number of more, and please put those in the comments down below. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts about that. Hopefully you came up with something today that helps you get over, overcome that inertia with your project or with your team's project. If you like this channel, this episode, please like this episode and subscribe to this channel. Find 4 or 5 other friends to invite over to look at this and get value for their projects on this. Love to hear from you down below in the comments section. With that, I'll leave you with this: to learn continuously and live your life 100% empowered. Until next time.