I was working with a restaurant, that sold pizza and homemade root beer. In a management meeting the subject of increasing root beer sales came up. First, we identified the natural subgroups that exist in the business. Each night there was a different crew, so we created a contest. Before the shifts for a week, the servers would get together and develop a "system" for selling root beer. The night that won the contest with the highest percentage of root beer sales would win a prize. Then, we had generated "group information" by scoring the results. When we went back to the entire group with the winning night's system, they were willing to put that system into place and enthusiastically change their selling behavior. The new system had a balanced support behind it. Subjective opinion (management liked it) and objective data (it won).
Management succeeded in balancing the group discussion by generating objective information with their experiment, finding balance is one of the simple keys to creating a healthy group dynamic.
Let’s make a distinction between cheap motivation and expensive motivation.
Cheap motivation is self-motivation. Everything else is expensive.
Self-motivation occurs when the person gets inspired, AND that inspiration finds a vehicle for its fulfillment. Having a good idea on how to improve the business, raises the person's energy level. They write it up, turn it in, and then what?
Lost in the shuffle (I've got too many ideas already) = demotivation.
Used in the system (discussed, tried, proven, used) = motivation.
The people in your group will only be committed to the goals of the group if they can see themselves in the group's design. People are naturally inspired to belong to the group and will offer the fruits of that inspiration. The key to building up the group dynamic is to take these "Lifelines" of inspiration and tie them to the group's operational systems.
Most businesses are run by people providing information to other people. What people don't realize is that up to 80 percent or more of the information is subjective. Subjective information is largely made up of opinions. Relying on people for information to run a business can be very political. Systems designed to control and produce a particular result, however, report a very different kind of information. Objective and void of opinion, this information is critically important to bringing a balanced perspective. Most people view their accounting systems as objective systems. However, due to choices in how to account for transactions, even this system contains a lot of subjective information. The more concrete a result we want is, the better it lends itself to a system design.
The more systems we design to run our business, the more objective information we can gather to help us in discussions and decision making.
Ideas are thoughts about what we'd like to learn from our future experience.
They are as numerous as the stars and the purest form of human energy. The trick is to be able to identify which ideas have significance. I call these ideas "CLUES", because they lead me down a trail of future experience.
Learn two skills when working with ideas. The first skill is to capture as many falling stars as you can. Like lightning bugs in a jar, poke a few holes in the jar and try to save them. The second skill is humility, talk about the idea and create agreement with others. Surrender to the idea and the direction that it might take you and your group.
A group that practices these two skills can gain a measure of judgment for good ideas and will learn to better identify which ones have significance. Individuals within the group can learn to get in touch with their creativity and unconscious power as a human being. There are so many possibilities for our future, individually and collectively, if we use these skills we can truly escape the inertia of habit and become a healing force on this planet.