Momentum is hard to resist. Someone makes a harsh statement, and I find myself taking the opposite side, even supporting ideas I might not know enough about. Or a colleague makes an investment or business decision… when they’ve spent time, energy, emotion and money on something, it’s hard to back out when things go south.

When things aren’t working, and there’s so much invested, it’s hard to face the mistake. We start to see things as we had expected or wanted, rather than how things really are. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias.

I’ve been reading Peter Bregman’s book 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. It’s full of good tips. I particularly appreciate his suggestions for slowing down in a heated discussion. You can buy some time by saying things like:

• “That’s an interesting point, I need to think about it some more.”
• “Tell me more about what you mean.”
• “I hadn’t read that article (or report); can you send me the link?”

Listening more to your “opponent” buys time to think things through and to find a way to successfully exit the discussion without committing you to any point of view. Give yourself time to back away from being so invested in being right.

I’ve seen colleagues and friends destroy relationships because they didn’t want to appear weak. It takes great strength of character and confidence to admit you might not have the answers and sometimes might even be wrong. And I believe that most others perceive this as a strength as well.

Good leaders are able to slow down, look critically at their own perspectives and stay open to other people’s view points. They are able to listen, reflect, and be generous in their comments. Do you agree?

Here’s an exercise to try to find out how well you listen… Go have a conversation with someone for a few minutes. You can use the phone. While you are listening to them, notice what else you are attending to while they speak. What other thoughts do you notice running around inside your head?

This is a good exercise to try, but it’s really hard since you have to pay attention to what the other person is saying and still take note of your own thoughts at the same time. So maybe it’s easier when you try it out with someone who’s a good talker and who goes on a bit.

Thanks to David Rock in his book Quiet Leadership, here’s a suggested list of what you might notice going on in your head while you’re listening. You may be listening for:

• Opportunities to sound intelligent
• A chance to seem funny
• How you can sound important
• Information you want
• External distractions such as other noises, music, etc.
• What’s going on with the other person
• Your own thoughts, and not listening at all
• How you can help
• How to understand the problem
• How you can benefit

I’ll add a few more of my favorites:

• How I can give advice
• How I can solve their problem
• How I can turn the conversation around to me and what’s going on with me
• How I can control the length of the conversation

And to be a little positive as well:

• An opportunity to reinforce the person
• Provide positive feedback
• How people feel
• Point out a bright side they may not be seeing
• A chance to encourage and support the person

When Marshall Goldsmith wrote his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, he made a list of 20 faulty habits that leaders engage in. About three-quarters of them contribute to or directly cause bad listening. Think about this: the best bosses are really good listeners. They “hear” what you have to say.

Go ahead and try this exercise. You may be surprised at what you find out about yourself!

It’s one of the reasons managers avoid difficult performance reviews and feedback — their language and conversations skills are lacking. When trying to have any kind of meaningful discussion that involves human performance, we’re afraid of the strong emotions that lie beneath. We’re not sure we’ll know what to say.

In the work I do with leaders in organizations, I find people are rarely succinct or precise with their language. People take much longer than necessary to express their ideas. Consequently, listeners tend to let their minds wander, often formulating their own stories in their heads. The “conversation” then becomes a series of monologues rather than any meaningful flow and exchange between people.

We speak on average at 100 words per minute, but we think faster, about 600 words per minute. This is why leaders must first capture and then keep people’s attention. And do so in a focused way, getting to the point directly so the other person’s mind doesn’t wander off.

Being succinct provides the listener bite-sized pieces of information to process. If your sentences are embellished, with complex side-comments, you are providing rabbit holes and distractions to your main point.

Our working memories can only hold seven things at a time. When people listen to you, they are mentally finding connections in their own minds to what you are saying. Given how complex our brains are, the more succinctly we can describe our thoughts to others, the more chance these connections can occur.

Adult learning occurs when we create new connections to what we already know. So if you’re trying to have a coaching conversation with a valued staff person, you want the person to be able to generate maps in their own mind about what you are saying and give them time to compare these to their existing maps, so that they might make connections between the two.

Being succinct and specific gives both the speaker and the listener time and energy to go deeper into topics, or to move to a new issue. It requires the speaker to be really clear about what they want to say. It requires asking many questions. When I’m coaching executives, they often know what they want to say, but lack succinct language to say it. It’s a big reason to work with a coach.

Chinese proverb:  “Ideas are like children.  We love our own the best.”

Why is this true? Our brains are not wired to learn something second hand. We rarely learn from instructions from outside sources. Rather, we learn from making connections in our brains that lead to deep understanding and insights.

While we say we want advice, what we really want is to air our thoughts with a trusted person, then come up with our own solutions.

In David Rock’s book, Quiet Leadership, the author lays out six steps to transforming performance at work. His observation is that managers need to help people to think better in order to create insights and solutions. But our conversations aren’t geared towards helping people think; managers are prone to giving advice and solving things according to their own experiences.

Since no two brains are alike, if you want to truly help people perform better, you need to encourage people to find their own ideas. Given the education and independence of today’s workforce, it’s not a bad idea to manage with coaching questions like Rock proposes.

There are a lot of suggestions in the book for enabling coaching conversations, but I’ll try to summarize some important points here:

1. Permission: Ask if it’s okay to have a coaching conversation and ask questions.
2. Set the stage (what the author calls Placement): Give a brief outline of what your conversation goals are.
3. Ask 6-10 questions about the person’s thinking (not details about the issue). How long have you been thinking about this? How important is this on a scale of 1 to 10?
4. Listen and clarify, allow the person to process their thoughts.

Instead of going into “why” or “how” the problem or issue happened, the focus is more on the thought process of the person with the goal of getting them to make connections and come up with insights. As the person is processing their thoughts you see facial expressions that illustrate their thinking:

• Awareness of the dilemma (frustration)
• Reflection, introspection (thoughtful)
• Illumination (often an “aha” expression)
• Motivation to get into action

Next time someone walks into your office and asks for some advice, offer to help them think through their thought processes and see what happens. They might come up with a great insight on their own, and thank you for the good advice!

A habit never goes away. However, we can leave one habit alone and create a new one, based on new connections and new insights. Creating a new habit is much more achievable. But in order to inspire people in companies to create new ideas and routines, we require a new kind of management.

One hundred years ago, most people were paid for physical labor, and we continue to rely on the same management principles to encourage peak performance. But now days, as a result of computers, technologies, outsourcing and process improvements, at least 40 percent of employees are considered to be knowledge workers.

For mid-level managers and above, the number is closer to 100 percent. People in organizations are being paid to think. Unfortunately, management models that most companies use are still those of the manufacturing or process eras.

David Rock, in his excellent book, Quiet Leadership, writes: “We have not yet taught our leaders and managers how to improve thinking. Imagine a factory where artists painted pictures, and the people managing them had not studied how to improve the quality of painting itself, only how to build better canvases and frames.”

He makes a good point, don’t you agree? Think about the way you go about managing people in your company.

• Yes, there are routines – there have to be.
• And as well, everybody agrees we need more creative input and innovative thinking.

But if your management and leadership style focuses on improving processes and productivity … you’ll get the same old results. You’ll be increasing the use of old habits and engrained routines, that by their very nature, shut down creative thinking.

Incremental improvements are great but they don’t lead to breakthroughs. You probably have some bright people working for you. The increasing education and independence of employees is a valuable asset in any organization, but are we really creating a culture where people can flourish?

I love this statement from author Rock: “…we have not significantly reinvented our management models since the times Henry Ford hired a pair of hands and wished they’d left their brains behind.”

Leaders can learn to change people’s thinking through coaching conversations. Coaching conversations are those that ask questions to stimulate thinking about possibilities. Peak performance today requires a shift in thinking before behaviors can manifest and turn into business results.

What do you think about these ideas? True? Sometimes true? Only a little bit in your organization’s management teams? I’d love to hear from you.

Jonathan Schooler, a UC Santa Barbara psychologist who studies insight, has been able to demonstrate that people who consistently engage in more daydreaming score significantly higher on measures of creativity. According to Schooler:

“…It’s not enough to just daydream. Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative thought.”

In other words, we need to let our minds wander, yet pay attention to those moments when our daydreams generate creative insights. To encourage this creative process, Dr. Schooler says, it may help if you go jogging, take a walk, do some knitting or just sit around doodling.

Relatively undemanding tasks seem to free your mind to wander productively. But you also want to be able to catch yourself at the Eureka moment.

Take the example of Post-It Notes.  Arthur Fry, the engineer at 3M who invented Post-It notes, was bored at church one Sunday. He let his mind wander back to a meeting at 3M where a colleague, Spencer Silver, presented an adhesive that was extremely weak. At the same time, Fry was looking for a way to bookmark his hymnal so that his little scraps of paper wouldn’t fall out. Because of his relaxed mind-wandering, he was able to connect the two ideas together.

Productive daydreaming requires a mental balancing act. Boredom can actually be harnessed into a relaxed form of thinking that leads to unexpected connections. But if you let your mind wander too far afield, it can easily get lost. While it’s easy to entertain oneself with random thoughts, you need an anchor to real world problems in order to have creative insights.

What do you think about this? Do you allow yourself enough mental space for creative insights to happen? Do you provide opportunities for your employees to “just think?” Or does this sound too much of a time-waster?

Here’s a couple of brain teasers:

• What’s the link between bicycles and airplanes?
• The link between winepresses and books?
• Mountain burrs and Velcro?

According to Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, the act of invention is really an act of recombination.

The 18th century philosopher David Hume wrote about this 250 years ago:

“All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.”

So how to some teams and companies excel at innovation? The most successful creative minds are those that master this part of the creative process: tying together ideas from other fields into new products and services.

Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of winepresses into an idea for a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. The Wright brothers used their knowledge of bicycle manufacturing to invent the airplane. George de Mestral came up with Velcro after a hunting trip in the Alps when noticing burrs clinging to the fur of his dog.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the search algorithm behind Google by applying the ranking method used for academic articles to the sprawl of the World Wide Web: a hyperlink was like a citation.

These radical concepts all started with old ideas mixed into a new field. But here’s the tricky part of coming up with radical new solutions and products: You can’t get there with relentless focus. While intense focus and attention is necessary when solving analytical problems, it prevents us from detecting the connections from diverse fields that lead to insights.

A relaxed state of mind is crucial for creative insights. That’s why so many new ideas come to us away from the office, doing activities such as daydreaming, exercising, or in the shower.

Yet we don’t remember to take time away from a problem when it’s most needed. We hunker down, stay at the office late, and ruminate when what we really need to do is take a break. We need to un-focus, change our environment, do something entirely unrelated and relaxing.

In the work I do with some pretty smart executives, I learn that many of them skip vacations. But here’s what the inventor of Velcro advised:

“If any of your employees ask for a two-week holiday to go hunting, say yes.”

Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find an answer. But when we tell one another stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase of the process.

So begins Jonah Lehrer’s book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. He’s right, of course. Think about your best ideas: they came about because you wanted to fix something too painful to continue to live with. But as soon as we find a breakthrough solution, we forget about the struggles. Which is too bad, because the next time we need to solve a problem, we need to be reminded that feeling frustrated is part of the creative process.

Lehrer points out that often, after we’ve struggled and given up as truly stumped, we have a flash of insight. The answer arrives after we’ve stopped searching for it. It will come in the shower, or during a long commute, sometimes even in a dream.

The question is how do these insights happen? What allows us to have a mental block and then, suddenly have a breakthrough? And why do answers appear when least expected? More importantly, are there things we can do to facilitate creative thinking, so that we can find better solutions in shorter times?

In the work I do in organizations, sometimes I work with teams, other times with individuals as an executive coach. Everyone wants to be more creative, and to find a brilliant idea that will change the way they work, bringing success to both their organizations and themselves. Yet few people look at the creative process as something that can be improved. They assume breakthroughs just happen.

It is in fact the struggle that forces us to try something new. Until we feel frustrated enough, we won’t begin to look at problems from a new perspective. But most of us avoid frustration and go out of our way to minimize it, ignore it, and just plain deny it.

Maybe we spend too much energy figuring out how to tolerate things instead of trying to find solutions? Just a thought.  What do you think?

It’s identifying which habits to change that’s tricky. What will bring about the most significant results? According to Duhigg, detecting keystone habits means you search for certain characteristics, by looking for behaviors that will cause a culture where change is contagious.

You need to look for “small wins.” Small wins have enormous power because they influence others to change. They fuel change like a snowball effect. They convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.

An example would be the research conducted on people wanting to lose weight. When they asked one group to use a food journal, recording everything they ate, they lost twice as much weight as those who didn’t track their food.

When Paul O’Neill wanted to improve safety at Alcoa, he demanded safety reports be submitted on a regular basis. This meant the creation of an internal email system with easy access for all employees. Such a system had unintended consequences: it improved communications throughout the organization, as well as facilitating the submission of innovative ideas by employees.

I’m wondering which small habit change I could make that would make everything else more efficient. In fact, I was noodling a few ideas and here’s a list of possibilities:

1. Make two to three phone calls a day to ask people a thoughtful question.
2. Make a point of telling two or three people how much they’re appreciated.
3. Start (or end) my day with five minutes of deep breathing and meditation.
4. Get up five minutes earlier each day and alternate exercise or stretching.
5. Answer emails 4-5 times a day at set times so that I’m not constantly interrupted.
6. Read from a business book 20 minutes each day.
7. Write out some thoughts in a journal once a day.

What about you, what would be on your personal list? Your leadership list?

In 1987, Alcoa faced challenges. One of the largest companies on earth and a pioneer in aluminum smelting, management unwisely tried to expand into new products lines. Competitors were stealing customers and profits away. So most investors were relieved when new leadership was announced.

But they were skeptical when Paul H. O’Neill, former Secretary of Treasury, took the helm. Besides being a government bureaucrat, Wall Street was taken aback when he announced his first strategic plan: worker safety.

“I want to talk to you about worker safety,” he said. “Every year, numerous Alcoa workers are injured so badly they miss a day of work. Our safety record is better than the general American workforce, especially considering that our employees work with metals at 1500 degrees and machines that can rip a man’s arm off. But it’s not good enough. I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for zero injuries.”

O’Neill hadn’t said anything about profits or taxes or government regulations. “If you want to understand how Alcoa is doing, you need to look at our workplace safety figures. If we bring our injury rates down… it will be because the individuals at this company have agreed to become part of something important: They’ve devoted themselves to creating a habit of excellence. Safety will be an indicator that we’re making progress in changing our habits across the entire institution. That’s how we should be judged.”

Within a year of O’Neill’s speech, Alcoa’s profits hit a record high. By the time O’Neill retired in 2000, the company’s annual net income was five times larger than before he arrived and its market capitalization had risen by $27 billion.

That growth occurred while Alcoa became one of the safest companies in the world. O’Neill made one of the largest stodgiest and most potentially dangerous companies into a profit machine by attacking one habit that was key. Other changes followed in a trickle down fashion.

In an interview, O’Neill reported, “I knew I had to transform Alcoa. But you can’t order people to change. That’s not how the brain works. So I decided I was going to start by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company.”

Some habits have the power to start a chain reaction as they move through an organization. Keystone habits are those that identify key priorities that can be leveraged throughout all areas of work.

You don’t have to get every single thing right, just a few significant ones. When you get people to change the key habits that matter the most, they start to shift and dislodge other patterns.

What do you think about this? What one thing could you point out as a keystone habit in your organization?