Welcome Professionals…
…I was at the dentist today. One of my inlays was broken and I decided to have it replaced as protection from potential further tooth decay. This preventive maintenance is costly, time consuming, and not really pleasant. As I was laying on the dentist chair, I thought about the analogies to our consulting profession.
What we would all agree to as a wise decision in dental care also applies to business. Accepting the smaller pain today in order to avoid the bigger pain in the future. Thinking through the various decisions within my 15+ years as a top management consultant, I can come up with many examples for the smaller pain:
- admitting a mistake
- asking an embarrassing question
- changing staffing after a few days on the project
- giving pushback on targets set by client/superior
- scheduling a weekend shift before an important presentation
All these highly unpopular and sometimes painful actions have the potential to avoid a bigger and even more painful failure in the future. However, I sometimes had the idea that I might get away without any pain. I might get lucky, I thought. Well, very unlikely to get lucky on caries for the next 50 years with a broken inlay. Why not apply this wisdom to everyday business?
Welcome small pain!
Malte
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As we climb the ladder of success in whatever profession we find ourselves we will find out that there are pains which we have to experience to avoid future greater pains. The smaller pains are like stepping stones to avoid pains that can ground us. Your analogy is a very good one, there are degree of pains in the dental clinic. I have had a few extractions, two caps and a few fillings, the degree of pains are quite different. I realised much later that if I had looked after my dentition properly, all of these visitations to the dentist would have been avoided except the pains of scalling and polishing. The same goes in business, smaller pain in dealing with troublesome team members, gaining the confidence of our clients will avoid grounding the business.
Very interesting topic! Unfortunately, we all agree rationally, this is the way to go (smaller pains, etc). So why is it so hard to put it into practice? For me and apparently for a lot of people around me as well? The shown behaviour has a psychological component(well described in Daniel Kahneman’s Fast Thinking, Slow Thinking – the slow thinking process understands rationally that it is better to take the small pain now, act immediately, etc, the fast thinking process is guided by all kinds of past and inwired experiences and goes into avoidance model.
My advice: every time you notice it happening (the first step towards improvement), step back and think hard what makes you avoid the pain. Do this a few times and you’ll see a pattern emerging. Then deliberately break the pattern once, twice and there is a good chance you have established an new improved habit. Good luck!