“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” -  Edmund Hillary

In the 1944 unfinished novel Mount Analogue, René Daumal describes the travel of a company of eight, who set sail in the yacht Impossible to search for Mount Analogue, a solid, a geographical place that “cannot not exist.”

The protagonist of the book is convinced by a certain Father Sogol to undertake this “crazy” expedition. Father Sogol is a figure who likes to invert cause and effect (and is therefore called the inverse of the Greek “Logos” – representing ‘rationality’ and logical thinking).

“A crazy expedition”

The story of Mount Analogue is about making something happen that all people around you say is impossible and ridiculous.  In this novel about the expedition to a mythical mountain that reaches from earth to heaven, Daumal mentions the chameleon law, which he describes as the inner resonance to influences nearest at hand (“la résonance aux plus proches affimations” if you happen to speak French). As the protagonist of this tale is in the vulnerable starting phase of this expedition, he discovers how he is prone to peer pressure and how difficult it is to commit to something before knowing how.

Father Sogol had really convinced me, and while he was talking to me, I was prepared to follow him in his crazy expedition. But as I neared home, where I would again find all my old habits, I imagined my colleagues at the office, the writers I knew, and my best friends listening to an account of the conversation I had just had. I could imagine their sarcasm, their skepticism, and their pity.

I began to suspect myself of naiveté and credulity, so much so that when I tried to tell my wife about meeting Father Sogol, I caught myself using expressions like “a funny old fellow,” “an unfrocked monk,” “a slightly daffy inventor,” “a crazy idea.” After all that I was stupefied to hear her say at the end of my story: “Well, he’s right. I’m going to start packing my truck tonight. For there are not must two of you. There are already three of us!”
“So you take this all seriously?”
“This is the first serious idea I’ve come across in my life.”

And the force of the chameleon law is so great that I came back to the thought that Father Sogol’s enterprise was, after all, entirely reasonable.

The Tipping Point

Now what could possibly be the relevance of this chameleon law for us as organizational change managers? Mount Analogue is about inner doubts and how this chameleon law rocks us asleep and prevents us from seeing the other 99% of the possibilities that are at hand in each situation. With rational thinking and conventional ‘common sense’ we easily fall prey to the chameleon law.

However, organizational change projects are mostly about creating a situation that does not yet exist. A situation, a project or any other expedition is “talked into existence”. With every word you speak about it, a seed is planted that can give birth to a new reality. Karl Weick refers to this as the process of Enactment to denote that certain phenomena (such as this crazy expedition, or your own ambitious project for that matter!) are created by being talked about. Slowly but surely – if we are persistent enough – our ideas translate to words, our words translate to actions and our actions result into tangible outcomes.

The chameleon law is the biggest enemy during organizational change efforts, because you are shaping the path for a future that has no gravity in the present. As Arthur Schopenhauer is often quoted: ‘Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized.
In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident.’

Broken Windows

This is exemplified by the broken windows theory. Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Scientists in the field of criminology found that disorder invites even more disorder and that a small deviation from the norm can set into motion a cascade of vandalism and criminality. Litter encourages more litter – another way of saying: resonance to the influences nearest at hand.

Malcolm Gladwell was the first to bring the broken window theory to our attention when he described it as paramount in reaching a Tipping Point (an idea which he first published in 1996 as an article in The New Yorker and which he later published in a book with the same title).  As Gladwell notes: “Why was the Transit Authority so intent on removing graffiti from every car and cracking down on the people who leaped over turnstiles without paying? Because those two trivial problems were thought to be tipping points-broken windows-that invited far more serious crimes“.

So we need to beware of all the broken windows symptoms of cynism and indifference and instantly fix every broken window. This is the intense and step-by-step work of creating a new culture.

Committing without knowing how

However, preventing the chameleon law from taking over goes a little deeper than paying attention to practical details. One has to be crazy enough and stubborn enough to endeavor your objectives against all odds. The Mount Analogue expedition reveals the insight that any expedition or organizational change project is a mountaineering expedition of the inner mind and intrinsic motivation, as much as it is about delivering a project according to a certain methodology. The tipping point is as much an external and societal process as it is an inner struggle for fueling our own commitment to an expedition with an un-rational (i.e. rationally ‘unreachable’) objective. It’s the ability to pursue a dream.

Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action.

You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again… So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully. There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know. . .

Daumal, who was apparently one of the most gifted literary figures in twentieth-century France, died before the novel was completed, providing an extra symbolic meaning to the journey. Beware of the chameleon law as you endeavor to live your dream, instead of dreaming your life!

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Related post: Better a wrong decision than no decision (February 14th, 2007)

Every once in a while I meet bosses and project managers who are very tired and extremely grumpy. You probably have met these kinds of managers too or maybe you are one of them. They seem to be carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. They are literally looking after everything and are trying to manage everything into the last detail. They have everything under control and they work very hard to keep it that way.

However, when I look at the results of these managers and compare it to the results of other – less grumpy and less tired – bosses and project managers I see no major differences. So there must be a way to achieve the same level of excellence with less suffering. In my humble opinion the answer is ‘yes’ and it is all tied to the manager’s maturity level: being able to let go of the control and to empower his people. Let me explain with the simple comparison of the project team and the engine of a car (*).

Grumpy Car Drivers

The grumpy managers I have met so far are action oriented, results driven and demanding so they hire the best people, which gives their project engine a lot of horsepower. Quite soon they kick off the project – the initial combustion to get the engine running. But then – since they want to control everything – they shift the gears into Neutral and they start pushing the car themselves. Every initiative of a project member to bring the project forward is scrutinized, reworked and criticized until it is completely according to the flavor of the boss. People stop using their brains as pro-active initiatives are discouraged by micromanagement. The engine is not ‘empowered’ because of fear of it getting out of control.

The boss complains that he always has to take care of everything – and he does. He also complains that nobody ever takes any initiative – and indeed they don’t; people are discouraged to do so. The project does not advance as it should, the boss is very tired, the skilled people are also tired of being told what to do in the last detail and all the fuel (i.e. resources: time, money, manpower and attention) are wasted. These managers would be better off with a project bicycle than a project car with a powerful engine.

Turbo Managers

We all know that these bosses should just be shifting that gear into Drive and empower their team of skilled people, consciously making use of time, money, manpower and attention. However, in their minds they are already doing that and they may even be pushing the pedal to the metal – but with the gear shifted in Neutral it only makes a lot of noise. People only do what they are being told because the more our grumpy man uses his reins the less they will use their brains.

Changing the gears of this project car from Neutral to Drive will not require the boss to “do” certain things differently or to “do” more things. Instead it will require the boss to “be” a different driver. The basic question here is: “Who am I being that I always have to take care of everything and that nobody ever takes any initiative?” This type of question refers to Ben Zander’s The Art of Possibility and here is my personal answer to that question…

An empowering manager is not the driver of the project car but the turbo of the engine. Instead of controlling the engine in all its details a turbo is committed to the performance of the engine. The function of a turbo is to aerate the engine when the engine needs extra performance. Turbo managers are committing rather than controlling; they hold themselves responsible for creating the circumstances for better engine performance. So the solution is not a quick fix like changing the oil or the tires, but a transformation from a driver into an engine part.

The Real Driver

You may wonder: “when the project manager is the turbo of the engine – who is at the steering wheel and controlling the pedals?” The customer is. And the manager no longer ‘assumes’ what the customer needs. Again this requires the manager to give away another part of his control: reporting about the delivery part of the project (when the customer does not follow the project car from close by the project manager can report any status he wants).

As you can guess Turbo Management (wow, a new buzzword is born!) requires two fundamental changes:
1. The boss is no longer controlling the project like a grumpy maniac but declares himself as an empowering part of the engine;
2. The customer needs to be in the driver’s seat – which makes more sense since the customer knows the road and the destination better than the boss or the project manager.

It’s just a thought that came to my mind…

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(*) Regular readers of my articles will note that this article builds further on the 2003 article “Communications Antislip Training for Project Managers“.

In his 2007 book Mindless Eating, Cornell Professor Brian Wansink reports that changing the label on a wine changes diners’ opinions of their wine, opinions of their meal, and their complete dining experience that night.

Forty-one diners at the Spice Box restaurant in Urbana, Illinois were given a free glass of Cabernet Sauvignon to accompany a $24 prix-fix French meal. Half the bottles claimed to be from Noah’s Winery in California. The labels on the other half claimed to be from Noah’s Winery in North Dakota. In both cases, the wine was an inexpensive Charles Shaw wine.

Those drinking what they thought was California wine, rated the wine and food as tasting better, and ate 11% more of their food. They were also more likely to make return reservations.

Accoring to Wansink it comes down to expectations and his findings are aligned with another set of studies that were conducted about 36 years ago. These studies have consistently shown that people’s impressions are based far more upon how information is conveyed rather than the content itself. For instance, the study by Mehrabian in 1972 shows that the impact of a communication is only for 7% purely the content, for 55% body language, colors, layout, smiles and visual stuff, and for 38% how we speak, language, vocabulary, tone of voice etc.

This means that our perception accounts for 93% of the impact (provided that the 7% content is to the point and correct). In terms of Wansink’s dining experiment: the content of his bottles impacted only 7 % of the perception. In the drawing below I have blended both insights to depict the impact of the wine label on the dining experience.

As Wansink asserts: Once they were given a free glass of "California" wine, they said to themselves: “This is going to be good." Once they concluded it was going to be good, their experience lined up to confirm their expectations. They no longer had to stop and think about whether the food and wine were really as good as they thought. They had already decided. This mechanism is also known as ‘cognitive dissonance’ or ‘overjustification’ and it is hard-coded into the human mind.

Of course I would not be writing about these findings if I wouldn’t attach my own ‘far fetched’ analysis on organizational change management. Well, here it is and it comes with a big disclaimer: In the same way as the label of a wine bottle can impact the dining experience, to the same extent – that is approximately 93% – your change management efforts can influence the experience of your systems implementation (be it SAP or any other ERP platform) or reengineering effort. This is depicted in the drawing below: the impact of change management on the experience of your target audience.

The disclaimer – of course – resides in the fact that good change management does not compensate a bad implementation or bugged ERP software. The content has got to be right, although it will only positively impact the user experience for 7%.

Conversely, if the content is not good (corked wine or a bugged ERP software for that matter) there is no way a nice label or good change management practices can make up for it. In this respect, good ERP software is a hygiene factor and change management is a motivation factor.

As I stated in an earlier article, it’s all a matter of managing the attention we give to the one and (not: "or") the other.

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Sources:
– Albert Mehrabian “Nonverbal Communication” Walter De Gruyter;  1972
– Brian Wansink "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think", Bantam, 2007

People often ask me why I always refer to ‘Learning’ instead of ‘Training’ when we discuss the Organizational Change Management portfolio. That is because 99% of what ‘Learning’ really is occurs outside of the classroom. In a previous article on Miffy I have argued that training alone is not enough in order to make an organizational change happen. At the very best it is a starting point. From there on you will need to coach your way to the future state.

Teaching is Placebo

Any healthy person holding an MBA degree will wonder: ‘If 99% of the learning return occurs outside of the classroom, then why are we investing such a large amount of time, money and manpower into classroom training?‘ That is because classroom training is mainly an investment in attention and the effect on learning is accidental rather than linear, just like the Hawthorne effect.

I am convinced that in large scale organizational change programs the strategy and advertising around and about the classroom trainings is at least as important as the content taught. Most of the times a classroom training is the first tangible contact with the future state for the target audience. Anthropologically speaking, the classroom training serves as a ritual in which participants allow learning to start (and implicitly ‘not to learn’ before that event takes place). Mentally speaking, the participants flip their learning switch ’on’. In medical terms we would rather call this a placebo effect: a treatment with (almost) no therapeutic activity for the condition but which has a healing effect nevertheless.

We could have endless discussions on the cause-and-effect of classroom training on learning but the evidence is clear: classroom training is necessary to get people started but it is far from sufficient in order for people to be ‘ready’ because the major part of ‘knowing’ resides outside of the classroom. The drawing above depicts the view on ‘organizational knowing’ from John Seely Brown. You can easily see that classroom training at best accounts for the top left-hand corner.

Consequences for Organizational Change Management Practitioners

No matter how obvious this insight may seem there are serious consequences for the way you set up your activities as a change manager. Here are 5 TIB’s (*) in this regard:

1. Hire teachers with EQ, maturity and hands-on experience rather than IQ, technical seniority and expertise. Most of what the teachers will be confronted with is anxiety, anger, and cynism (i.e. hidden sadness). Technical expertise won’t get you very far in those circumstances. Listening skills, simplicity and a disciplined follow-up on the other hand will prove to be success factors. The primary job of a teacher is to make learning possible as soon as the participants leave the classroom.

2. Recruit teachers from your target audience, in other words: practice involvement. Both participants and teachers should be able to surf, link, lurk, watch and try to do some things of your organizational change program themselves. Previously I have argued that the deliverables of your project should be planned in such a way that people can participate and accelerate your project. Classroom training is a big deliverable on your path, so from this perspective home-grown teachers are always a bigger hit than smart consultants.  

3. Build communities of knowledge and facilitate knowledge sharing. Knowing that 99% of the learning occurs outside of the classroom, it is worth investing in those 99%. This comes down to increasing your investment in local transition teams and a user friendly website of your project. You should also pay attention to events and workshops that allow change agents and key users of your project to share their learning so far.

4. Evaluate learning on all possible levels. Now that you know that learning occurs largely outside of the classroom you should not restrict the measurement of our return on investment to that very space and time. Basically this comes down to measuring Kirkpatrick’s four levels as far as you possibly can.

5. Allow people to localize your materials. Although I am a big fan of maintaining rigid guidelines and standards for the creation of materials, learning objects and templates, there is one thing I believe most: the execution of your change travels at the speed of making sense. That is: the more people are able to make sense of your materials by adding information and adapting your stuff, cutting and pasting, etc; the faster they will absorb the content.

So don’t get me wrong when I say that teaching is a placebo or a ritual; because as much as it fakes knowledge transfer, to the same extent it makes learning possible.

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(*) TIB = Things I Believe.

One of the biggest names in the history of management is not the name of a guru but the name of a factory: Hawthorne Works. This is the factory where a series of experiments on factory workers were carried out between 1924 and 1932.

There were many types of experiments conducted on the employees, but the purpose of the original ones was to study the effect of lighting on workers’ productivity. When researchers found that productivity almost always increased after a change in illumination, no matter what the level of illumination was, a second set of experiments began, supervised by Harvard University professors Elton Mayo, Fritz Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson.

They experimented on other types of changes in the working environment, using a study group of five young women. Again, no matter the change in conditions, the women nearly always produced more. The researchers reported that they had accidentally found a way to increase productivity. Hence the term ‘Hawthorne Effect’.

In other words: the Hawthone studies gave scientific evidence of the fact that attention is a resource worth managing. In an earlier post I have argued that Time, Money and Manpower are not the only resources you should be managing. Management is the art of working with people, so it is pretty useful to know what drives people. The answer to this question is attention and feedback on results. That is because every human being has a fundamental need to be proud of what he or she is doing. Spening attention means granting them that opportunity.

The one thing you need to know about the Hawthorne effect is that it is by far the most mentioned management term used by academics. However, to the same extent that this term is abundant in management books, the concept of attention management is underdeveloped. Attention Management is at ground zero as you are reading this, although the scientific evidence is gathering dust for almost 80 years now. There is still some work at hand if we want to make it to the league of Money, Time and Manpower.

Sometimes people look at me strange when I mention the importance of psychological safety during organizational change projects. It is a term that I borrowed from the writings of Edgar Schein. Until now I didn’t find a way to explain in plain English what exactly I understand under that term. Strange and expensive words come out of my mouth every time I try to explain and after the upteenth buzzword like "paradigm", "frame of reference" or "change readiness", you can see the blood run from people’s faces. I suck at explaining ‘Psychological Safety’.

So here is another attempt. Consider going to the dentist with children. There are parents who dramatize the event as it approaches and who ‘package’ the situation as dramatic. Most of the times their behavior is driven by their own discomfort with the situation. This tension sucks up all their attention and they transmit this to their kids. Most of the times the result is pretty devastating on the level of fear and tears.

Other parents pay attention to their attention as they know that their own behavior, words AND mindset influences that of their youngsters. I would suggest that their success rate on the level of fear and tears is higher.

The same goes for managers whose organizations are going through organizational changes. They too have a choice between paying attention or not. As their peers and team members are reporting panic, anger or disappointment they can either focus their attention on actions and solutions or focus their attention on persecuting, rescuing or victimizing (aka: dramatizing).

As a manager you need to pay attention to your attention as you are going through an organizational change. If your panic, your people will panic. Why? Because your people look at you in times of uncertainty and they read your behavior all the time. If you’re not paying attention to your words, gestures and mindset, then why should they get a grip on themselves? In times of resistance there is a golden rule: suspect yourself first!

Research suggests that the level of autonomy or job-control determines the level of stress and burnout to a larger extent than job-demand or complexity. For managers there is a lesson in there: Respect.

I was on the 5:50 pm train with Nancy. She works for the social security administration on a department I would simplify as ‘accounts receivable’. She talked to me about how puzzled she was by the high turnover in the team of datamanagers – a team that is fundamental in managing the accounts of about 6 million inhabitants (as you can guess: Flanders).

On the other had she was very surprised by the stabilty of the claims department. Not only do they have the straining job of hunting citizens to pay social security, they also need to take care of the complaints, excuses, arguments and plain threats. Because of that stress, she would have expected to witness a high turnover the latter team instead of the former.

The Insights

As an outsider who is keen on organizational behavior I immediately thought of the reseach on burnout. Two specific researches came to my mind:

1. The 1979 Karasek model (*) which is also known as the ‘job-demand-control model’. It illustrates that high job demands do not necessarily lead to burnout. The point here is not job demand but the ability to control the job at hand! In other words: are people supported by the right level of autonomy, context, framework, tools etc. in order to cope with the job demands? If yes: then the job is stimulating rather than exhausting. If no:… well … quite the opposite.

2. The 2006 research on Employee Burnout by by Lakshmi Ramarajan and Professor Sigal Barsade from Wharton suggests the same as Karasek: job control is the bottom line. In their research, Ramajaran and Barsade have elaborated this dimension a bit further. First, they found that respect (indeed: R-E-S-P-E-C-T) influences burnout above and beyond the effects of job demands. In their own words: “The impact of organizational respect on burnout is felt most strongly when job autonomy is low.” Autonomy (i.e. ‘Job Control’), the researchers note, can act as a buffer on stress - and actually decrease job burnout.

The Real Bottomline: Respect

And there is more. According to Ramajaran and Barsade, the extent to which others are treated can influence an individual’s own perceptions of respect. For example, when team members see someone else on the team being treated unfairly, they alter their own perceptions of the fairness of the team. In case you would not have a clue what Ramajaran and Barsade are referring to, have a look at this video of Tom Peters explaining the correlation between R-E-S-P-E-C-T and excellence in leadership: my gut feeling says it must be around 99,9%.

Of course, as an outsider I could be terribly wrong in my analysis but blogging about this topic was a good reminder of what really matters in the workplace. Thanks Nancy, for sparking these ideas!
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(*) Source: Karasek, R. (1979). Job demands, job decision latitude and mental strain: Implications for job redesign. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24, pp. 285-306.

Management is not a science like mathematics or quantum physics, but nevertheless some truths come to the forefront like laws of nature. One of those is the basic need for attention. Translated into workplace mumbo-jumbo this means that people (starting with you and me) have a basic need to be proud of what they are being and doing.

Too bad we are clueless when it comes to ‘managing’ attention … because there’s quite some evidence that this would be a wise thing to do. 

Attention is the Common Denominator

In the domain of motivation theory some gurus have summarized and visualized the motivation laws of gravity and other major truths even before I was born. When we have a closer look, there is one thing that all of them have in common: attention as the driving force. Let’s have a look at my three favorites:

1. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943)

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels. Like in a computer game we only worry about the needs of certain level if the needs of all the lower levels are met.
 

Fulfilling the needs of a certain level is nothing more than managing the attention on that level. 

2. William Reilly’s Balance of ‘Wants’ (1957)

Quite an old book in which he describes the 4 basic ‘wants’. Way less popular than Maslow, not the most requested article from the Harvard Business Review like Herzberg – but to the same extent pretty much to the point when it comes to describing what we really want.
 

All of the things we want so much are actually a form of expressing attention, the currency of attention so to speak. (thanks to Michael Neill for pointing me to this reference). 

3. Frederick Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory (1959)

According to his theory, people are influenced by two factors. First, motivation factors, which help increase satisfaction but have little effect on dissatisfaction. Second, hygiene factors which, if absent or inadequate, cause dissatisfaction, but their presence has little effect on long-term satisfaction.

In other words: motivators are the factors that add value if you pay attention to them (note the management term: ‘paying’ attention, as if it were a resource like money, time and manpower). Hygiene factors on the other hand are those things that are damaging if we don’t pay attention to them. 

Attention Management

Those of you who regularly scan through the ‘question & answer’ section of LinkedIn may have noted that there is one question that keeps coming back: ‘what is the difference between managing and leading?’. A lot of interesting responses pop up, some more practical than others. In the light of this post, I could offer an additional answer to that question:
Managing = taking care of the resources Time, Money and Manpower. Leading = adding the resource ‘Attention’ to that list.

If there is one thing that I want to continue blogging about in 2008, it is attention management. Take my word for it: it’s my new year’s resolution.

Nowadays it’s hard to look past the “buzzy” people who are eagerly typing with both thumbs on their Blackberry device. In a restaurant, at the airport, in the car, at the dinner table or even on a day out with their family. These people are at work: controlling their workload, arranging their schedules and meeting their deadlines. Life is hard, isn’t it?

(Note to the readers: in this article I do not claim to have a balanced life myself. This rant is partially – if not completely – devoted to my own disturbing behaviors.)

Painful Observations

‘So what’s new?’, you may think, ‘ever since the existence of cell phones, people have gotten used to being reachable any time and anywhere’; and ever since that moment it is common to have any conversation interrupted by saying “Sorry, I need to take that call”. Do you feel listened to when the person you are talking to is taking that phone call, playing on a gameboy or sending an sms?

The blunt reality is that when you let a conversation being interrupted by a call or buzz of your Blackberry, you are actually communicating that it is more important than the person you are talking to. The same goes for: “hang on, I have a second line”. Have you ever experienced any appreciation while listening to the music of the second line?  

We’re Addicted!

Even when you decide not to take that call or grab that Blackberry, you’ve lost a part of your attention (clearly noticeable through your eye movements, and thus impossible to hide from your counterpart in the conversation you’re having). For example: you are in a meeting or a restaurant and any mobile phone or Blackberry beeps a call, an sms, a mail or just a low battery alert, observe how many people are interrupted and grab their own device. It’s worse than the disturbance of smokers in a restaurant!

We seem to have forgotten that these things can be switched off. We seem to have forgotten that we choose our responses to the world. know at least a dozen of people who claim to be swamped in emails every day (“it never stops!”). Unfortunately, when I check and sort my own mailbox they seem to be the ones listed in higher ranks of received mails.

Let’s just admit that we are addicted and that we need help. The first step in the healing of any addiction is admitting that you are powerless over it and that your life is becoming unmanageable because of it (see step 1 of the Twelve-step Program)

Claiming Your Attention Back

Let’s have a look at what’s really going on here. Of all the resources that are available to us (i.e. time, money and attention), there is one that can not be compensated by the two others: Attention. Yet it is the sole resource that we almost never treat as a scarce and valuable one. So declaring your attention as a valuable resource may be a first step in finding the off-button of your mobile device.

This post is not about discipline or good manners. It’s about claiming back what really matters in our relationship to other people: our own attention. In short, some final advice:
1. Respect the ones you are with in the moment. Switch off that device more often and you will be more present in the moment.
2. Respect the ones that call or mail you by reserving a moment during the day to call or mail back.
3. Resist the temptation to dash an answer mindlessly, for it may be more non-communication than you have intended

So no need for a 12-step plan (yet) because the 3 steps above may get you halfway.

Like me, you may be one of those persons that is gifted with quite a dose of prejudice. If this applies to you as well, then have a look at this prejudice-correcting movie.

I was moved when I saw this and I intend to keep it as a reminder for the next time I bump into a new environment and quick-scan, quick-categorize and quick-prejudice the people around me. Self confidence does not equal talent and vice versa.

Pay attention to your attention…