Chapter One

Being On A Roll

This book is about being on a roll. Notice I did not say learning to be on a roll. This is because I believe our natural state is to be on a roll, and getting back to that state involves a lot more unlearning than learning. Being on a roll is the product of a state of mind that leads to WHOLEHEARTED commitment, and this state of mind is only reached when we follow the guidance of our hearts, rather than allow ourselves to be ruled by our heads. To be on a roll, we must break free of rules that keep us out of touch with our hearts—so we can get back to the effortless ease of WHOLEHEARTED commitment.

In this book you will discover why our conscious, rational minds are attempting to play an unintended role of master over our intuitive minds, and why they are failing so miserably at it. You will learn how our rational minds are perfectly designed instead to be servants to our inner, intuitive minds. You will also learn the steps taken by effortless high performers to develop this more productive relationship. Hence, this book invites us to unlearn many intellectually based rules about how things should work and replace them with a practical, proven, intuition-based system of self-management. This system is based on asking RIGHT QUESTIONS. As we learn to practice it together, we will each move back toward a state of WHOLEHEARTED commitment and effortless high performance. When applied at an organizational level, mastery of this self-management system as a leadership style can lead to effortless high performance there as well.

I invite you to join me now as we explore a fundamental question which has led to all of the insights presented in this book: "What are you and I like at our very best?" Over the past 27 years, my relentless pursuit of answers to this question has transformed my life. It is now my intent to make the life-transforming benefits of this question available to everyone who chooses to read this book.

What Are We Like At Our Best?

So, what are you like at your best? When does it happen? What is your level of awareness about this for yourself as we begin this journey? For example, when things are going especially well for you—i.e., when you are truly on a roll—have you taken time to really explore how and why you got there? Or, are you like most people who wait until they fall off their roll and then wonder what's wrong? Could it be possible we have been asking the wrong questions . . . and at the wrong time? If we wait until we're down and then try to figure out what's wrong, we are failing to learn the key steps required to get ourselves back to our natural state of being on a roll. This is why it is so important for us to discover how and why people get on a roll. We have much to gain by recalling and exploring our own experiences of being in this wonderful state, whether we are someone who enjoys being on a roll much of the time, or if we just aspire to get there in the future.

This book explains why we must make a fundamental shift in our approach to asking questions—from one of inquiring about what is not working, to one of learning to identify and build upon what is working. But it doesn't stop there. It shows exactly how to bring this shift about, and how this will allow us to reach higher levels of personal achievement—and do so with less effort than we may have ever thought possible. In other words, we are about to explore a set of insights that can bring us back to a natural style of inquiry found to be always at work in people who are WHOLEHEARTEDLY committed and on a roll. By adopting this style of inquiry, each of us can return to and remember how to sustain ourselves in the euphoric state of effortless high performance—which I again propose is our naturally intended state.

A quick example will show what kind of results can be achieved by making this simple shift. The president of a printing company in California once asked if my approach could help him solve a costly problem of rework. As he went on to describe his concern, I learned that in a typical month seven percent of his printing orders had to be redone because of errors. I also learned this had been going on for years, in spite of many different attempts to solve the problem, and that it was eating up much of the company's profits. During dialogue with the company's management team, I encouraged them to shift their focus of inquiry onto what produced perfect orders rather than why others contained errors. Their agreement to make a shift didn't come instantly, but soon included most team members. After several years of failed attempts to "solve" their seven-percent rework problem, it took that team only 30 days to move the plant's output from 93% to 97% perfect. Output went on to exceed 98% perfect during four of the following 12 months.

The ideas being set forth here actually grew out of a life-changing experience which occurred for me in October of 1970. By way of background, I can tell you I grew up with a failure pattern. I grew up with a wonderful father who just happened to judge it "not okay" for me to need attention. As a result, he made it a point to withhold any attention from me for doing things well. In response, I learned to fail in order to get his attention. It worked every time. Among other things, this is a personal story of how I came to recognize my failure pattern, and how I managed to remove it as an obstacle in my life. It is also about how, in the process, I was able to develop a model to help me and others achieve our goals in life with effortless ease.

Psychological Theory?

Some readers may be tempted to view the insights offered here as psychological theory. That would be puzzling, however, since the field of psychology is so focused on the study of sick people to find out what's wrong. My approach has been exactly the opposite: it has been to study the super-well to find out WHAT'S RIGHT. Besides the many fresh insights produced by this approach, it also exposes the painfully high cost we incur as a society for our all-pervasive "find-what's-wrong-and-fix-it" mind-set. It also reveals why efforts to manage change that rely on "yet another theory" to fix WHAT'S WRONG are destined to fail. Thus, it is surely not my intent to continue this practice here. I seriously question the need for yet another theory when, deep inside us at an intuitive level, each of us already knows all we need to know to be at our best. Yes, that is a core finding from my study. Here is another.

No Advice, Please

Those who operate most of the time in the state of effortless high performance didn't get that way by following advice given by others. This is why I've delayed writing this book for several years. I simply do not wish to reward anyone for looking to me for answers. In this book I have no intention of giving advice. Instead, I shall raise wonderful questions which are used to find your own answers deep within. Thus, if you are accustomed to looking outside yourself for answers, and hope to find those in this book, you may encounter some initial discomfort with the approach used here. My findings convince me that being at our best is a natural state which cannot be accessed via the overlay of "yet another theory." Asking ourselves and being asked RIGHT QUESTIONS (in order to regain conscious access to what we already know intuitively) is a path far more certain to put our lives on a permanent roll.

The key to getting on a roll and staying there is learning to frame questions in such a way that they cannot be processed analytically. When we do this correctly, our questions are automatically processed by our intuition. When applied personally, the intuition-based system of inquiry being introduced here has proven far more productive, and at the same time less stressful and more fulfilling, than any other I have ever seen. This intuition-based approach to inquiry can also be applied directly to organizations—and to teams of people who work together. Using this approach, team members have often enjoyed far higher levels of cooperation, commitment and motivation than they had ever seen before, or perhaps had even thought possible. Visionary leaders give us a wonderful glimpse of this system of inquiry in practice.

Visionary Leaders

My experiences from studying visionary leaders for many years have made a significant contribution to my understanding in the area of effortless high performance. One experience in particular will be instructive. Business Week ran a cover story in its 1/25/85 issue entitled, "The New Corporate Elite." This story featured 50 visionary leaders from American businesses, and was the first time I can recall visionary leadership being given such high visibility. For me, the article's high profile was a welcome validation of my commitment, since by that time I had already dedicated nearly 15 years of my life to the study of visionary leaders.

After reading the article, I was prompted to write a letter to several of the leaders identified. I wished to extend my congratulations for the example they were setting, and to include a complimentary copy of an article I had written about how visionaries think. Eventually I sent letters to 43 of the 50 leaders. This correspondence created an opportunity for me to personally interview five featured leaders, only four of whom turned out to be true visionaries. My experience with the fifth leader, the non-visionary, was a watershed. It gave me a first glimpse into the vast difference between those who are vision-driven and those who are theory-driven.

A Surplus and Abundance World View

The first four leaders I interviewed—those I later came to realize were true visionaries—demonstrated a consistent and remarkable openness to new ideas. It was as if they simply couldn't wait to get another idea to help lift their vision to another level. In contrast, it was as if the leader who was theory-driven had to hold every new idea at arm's length until he could confirm it would not risk upsetting his theories of how things should work. It felt energizing to be in dialogue with the four who were vision-driven. After leaving my meeting with the leader who was theory-driven, I felt emotionally drained. It felt like we were adversaries, and for no apparent reason. This felt very different from all of my dialogues with true visionaries, where an awesome sense of partnership always seems to occur. By seeking to understand these differences, I learned how the thought process practiced by visionaries works to generate a surplus of creative energy. This excess energy allows them to sustain a "surplus and abundance world view," which leaves them completely open to new ideas. This is a very different picture than the illusory world view of depletion and shortage, which is initially created by and then reinforced by the theory-driven thought process.

You may as well know right now that it will be impossible for any of us to experience WHOLEHEARTED commitment and become effortless high performers as long as we remain theory-driven. No amount of good advice will get us there either. The natural and self-sustaining source of creative energy needed to enjoy this level of commitment is simply not available to us as long as we continue to look outside ourselves for answers. Hopefully this book will not reward anyone for looking to me for answers. Instead, it will equip us all to look more skillfully inside ourselves—not to our egos or intellects, but to our hearts and our intuition—where the only true answers for guiding our lives await our discovery.

Organizations Can Be Put On A Roll, Too

Since the very beginning of my study I have noticed striking similarities in the way organizations and individuals function. It soon became apparent to me that any insights I might gain into what each of us is like at our best as an individual must be equally valid when applied to an organizational entity as a whole. In this context, perhaps it would be helpful to present a case study. The following experience provided many insights into how my findings could be applied to the task of putting an entire organization on a roll.

The situation presented itself as follows. I received a call from a client who for the preceding year had been doing an excellent job of implementing our intuition-based system of management within his area of responsibility. This client found himself suddenly placed in charge of a huge software development project which was deeply in trouble. The project consisted of a $100 million effort involving some 400 software engineers who were 38 months into a 60-month government contract requiring them to deliver a distributed bus system for running a piece of military equipment. The technical requirements of the contract were so complex that the team slipped its schedule in each of the first 38 months of work on the contract. By the time my client asked me to look at the situation and make recommendations, work had fallen an estimated 18 months behind schedule. Everyone was particularly concerned about a contract stipulation of $30 million in penalties if the team remained 18 months behind schedule at the 48-month milestone—a mere 10 months away.

Fortunately, my client was a true visionary. He had also experienced the power of our intuition-based system of management during the previous year. As a result, he looked upon his new situation as a perfect opportunity to demonstrate to the entire company the power of asking RIGHT QUESTIONS. We both knew if we could simply change the question the team was running on from "What's going wrong?" to "What's going right?" we'd have the problem licked. My client also knew that the crisis would allow him to justify a budget large enough to assure full implementation of our system within the troubled project. Once he secured a budget commitment for $150,000, he issued me an employee badge and put me to work. He added, "There's more money where that came from if you need it, so don't come out of there until you've got it right." (Talk about a consultant's dream!)

My vision for how to turn this situation around was to get everyone on the team running on the same question—in precisely the same manner as visionary leaders run on a single galvanizing question. I knew my success depended on choosing a question powerful enough to capture everyone's imagination and lead to WHOLEHEARTED commitment. I also knew the only way I could ever hope to identify the perfect question would be to fully immerse myself in the energy of the project for a few days.

I began by taking teams of 18 to 20 engineers off-site for a two-day team dialogue designed to bring about a fundamental shift in thinking from WHAT'S WRONG to WHAT'S RIGHT. (This book is intended to produce a similar outcome.) I also found the intense interactions which always took place in the team dialogues to be a perfect place for me to get fully engaged in my search for the perfect question. From the work I had done with visionaries, I knew what kind of a question it would take to truly capture their attention. The moment of insight occurred in the second week, when it dawned on me that our question had to be: "What will it take to finish this project a week early?" This question met every one of the criteria I had identified.

It was fascinating to watch people's initial reactions. On the surface, of course, the question was preposterous. It was considered by most to be totally impossible, but this was one of the criteria it had to meet in order to work. It was so preposterous, in fact, that on more than one occasion I found myself being summoned into a supervisor's office and sternly advised to stop asking this question. First one, and then another, would say to me with great conviction, "These people are engineers, Kurt. They know this can't be done. You'll just destroy your credibility if you keep asking this question." In response, of course, I had to thank them profusely for saving my skin. I then went right back out into the hallways and continued asking my preposterous question.

Later in the book, after we have developed a better framework within which to understand their implications, we will explore several aspects of this case in much more detail. For now I will just let you know I completed my commitment to the project in six weeks. I used only $90,000 of the $150,000 budget, and left after describing to my client all of the reasons I now felt the project would succeed. Some eight months later, this critical phase of the project was completed right on schedule—exactly on the 48 month milestone date, and $15 million under budget. Add the $15 million savings to the vanished $30 million penalty risk, and we have a $45 million payoff. All of this from a mere six-week effort to shift the mode of thinking from WHAT'S GOING WRONG to WHAT'S GOING RIGHT among 400 software engineers. Some folks would say that's a pretty good return on investment for breaking a few rules. From my perspective, it's not an uncommon experience at all when WHOLEHEARTED commitment is engaged.

Order your own copy of “Breaking the Rules” directly from Clear Purpose now

Return to top