I am reading an excellent book currently, ‘The Secrets of Sand Hill Road’ which was given to me by one of my clients and offers an excellent insight into the workings of venture capital. In one of the chapters there is a quote from Max Planck, the German scientist credited with the invention of quantum physics that captured my attention; “Science advances one funeral at a time”.
This is written in the context how venture capitalists make investment decisions; a product won’t succeed if it only offers a marginal improvement on current technology. One of the primary reasons for this is because people are resistant to change, so adopting new technologies for marginal benefit isn’t worth the effort or risk. It is this resistance to change embedded within our human psychology, and how it impacts our progress at a personal level, that I would like to discuss in this week’s blog.
I often wonder how many of my students are actually using any of what I teach a year after the training, and for those that are what percentage of what I taught they are using. For the first question I am reasonably confident (based on post-training anecdotal discussion) that the percentage is quite high however, for the second it is definitely lower; people pick and choose what they are willing to adopt. They manage the level of change.
Returning to the Max Planck quote with which we started, our natural pace of change is slow – one funeral at a time. We only justify change when the consequences of not changing are painful enough to convince us that the effort (and uncertainty) of change is worthwhile. You have heard the saying the “we are creatures of habit” and yes, habits are known and comfortable. To change is against our natural human bias.
However, we all have habits that do not serve us well. The only limit to converting a bad habit to a good habit is our self-belief and the limitations we place on ourselves. While there is clearly a personal empowerment application in this approach, I will close with a focus on how this methodology impacts our ability to communicate effectively and enjoy improved responses from our counterparts.
Every one of us has ways in which we can improve our communication. The time and effort required to make a change that may seem small, a ‘marginal improvement’, can appear disproportionate to the benefits. However, rather than considering the improvement itself, consider the compound effect, time after time, year after year of each application of the new behaviour. Suddenly, a small change can have a huge impact.
This is my 20th blog and already we have discussed how to leverage the emotions, present in public, use the smile, use softening frames and many other communication hacks. Don’t let your communication strategy develop one funeral at a time. The tools you need to start making a lasting and effective impact are already at your fingertips..
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