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June 2007
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NOT ALL DIPS ARE CREATED EQUAL
Seth Godin has recently produced an engaging book called 'The Dip'. In short, the dip is a 'failure zone' or a 'slower results than anticipated' zone. And the suggestion of the book is that such a slump, such a period of frustration is almost inevitable in any undertaking worthy of its salt. Rather than being flummoxed by it...rather than retreating from it...we need to endure it, make our way through and to the other side. Too many people fail, because they fail to navigate 'the dip' in whatever they are undertaking or seeking to achieve.
Wunderbar! However, as with virtually every concept, no matter how nifty and enticing, there are numerous nuances we have to attend to in order to get the most value. Otherwise we will end acting like dips...NOT what the author intended!
First, there are varieties of dips. Most generically, it is just a period that we must necessarily endure and progress though until results eventually stockpile, and where our own learnings accumulate and reach a decisive 'tipping point', and perhaps where we gain the relationships and credibility to be finally successful at what we're attempting.
So Starbucks initially appealed to cafe enthusiasts...and then as those people became raving fans, it learned how to produce a replicable enterprise and target key neighborhoods. Starbucks does very little 'official' PR...but neighborhood buzz does the job for it. However, they had to hang in there, until the first few neighborhoods were saturated. They had to learn how to deal with overwhelming turnover in staff for such industries by giving employees profit benefits and industry-specific training of a far higher order than conceived of in prior coffee house incarnations.
That 'learning curve' and 'establishing curve' usually happens as we 'dip'...and it is the learning and the will to recalibrate as we establish our brand, our identity, our positioning and our value, that then lifts us out of the dip and allow us to find the crest of our wave.
Fine, and fair enough. But some dips aren't just a 'proving time'. There is more complexity here. Consider for example the situational leadership 'dip'. In Situational Leadership there are numerous development levels. One is called 'D2'. This is where someone has low motivation and low competence. Its predecessor, D1, the prior development stage is when someone is new -- has motivation but scant competence. In D2, the motivation also slumps, as the person finds that 'doing something new' is hard. As we try to gain a new skill or competence, we usually get worse before we get better. This is as true when we learn to ski, or tackle a new language, or even seek to improve our IT skills.
When the glamour and sizzle of starting something new wanes, and the hard reality of a tough slog ahead is made painfully evident, and there isn't much initial encouragement by way of results...that's when our motivation goes down, and here is where most change efforts fail.
D2 can also be called a Dip...just not a generic one. It is a competency dip, not a results dip. It can be caused by the difficulty of hanging in there for sure...but not because of time only...because of the inertia of the known and our fear of looking maladroit.
If you can imagine that to make it through a Dip you need endurance, competence, energy, grit, courage, follow-through and more...D2 is the competence/energy axis. And it can be helped by having a mentor and/or a coach...someone who has seen others do it, and can be a guide and a galvinizer.
If the Dip is in areas where others have passed through a similar development curve, the experience and tutelage of someone like this can be indispensable. And their assurance and expertise, provide us the external kindling to light our inner fire long enough to experiment, to fail, to fail forward, and thereby begin to build the rudimentary competence needed to oxygenate our belief that we can get some results and the inner drive to make it so.
However, there is not a one-time passage out of D2. Try to gain excellence in anything, and we will return, achievement plateau after achievement plateau, to a period where our competence is inadequate for the next level and where the recurring frustration of not being able to ski that next hill, or sing that particular octave, or make it past the contentious acrimony when issues are actually surfaced, begins to decimate our motivation.
That is when the desire has to be large enough, and the coaching and support from able allies abundant enough, to take us out of the valley and onto the next peak of achievement and possibility. All change involves being ready for multiple D2's and embracing rather than ducking their challenges.
TOO BIG A DIP
When we try and tackle something too big too fast we may encounter a Dip that is so large that it may engulf us, perhaps even overwhelm us. For example, to sign up to run a marathon in two months when we currently can't walk a mile at a fast clip, may produce an unhealthily extreme Dip...and we may not have the time to get into it properly, much less get out of it.
Microsoft flourishes in part because with its resources and its lock on the most ubiquitous operating system in the world, Bill Gates has created an inherent Dip so extreme that it is excessively daunting to virtually any new competitor.
If you do select a currently 'impossible dream' and find the Dip to be beyond your faculties, or ken, or resources, don't despair. The trick is to start with a smaller chunk of that aspiration, and therefore a smaller Dip, and then ratchet up.
A start-up entrepreneur wanting to build a $10 million dollar per annum business within a year may create excessive stresses and extreme challenges and unsupportable risks. However, take an aim at $1 million first from a start-up and the nature of challenges, risks and learnings become those that you may well be able to 'stretch' to embrace.
Pick an aspect, pick a niche, pick a slice of the goal, and Dips can be temporarily downsized enough to become the learning curves they should be.
THE EXACERBATED DIP
Dips can also be exacerbated due to our own culpability. The first way to extend a Dip is to prolong it unhelpfully. The key way we do this is to postpone key decisions that need to be taken. If a key person has to be confronted, or a product or service discontinued, or a supply chain deadlock unraveled, and we keep postponing it, due to the potential aggravation and challenge involved, we allow the problem to mushroom and the symptoms to stockpile, until eventually all the impacts become so far-reaching that there are Dips everywhere...life becomes a minefield of them. Don't have a crucial conversation that a marriage needs say about togetherness and separateness, and the number of necessary conversations may proliferate, as a that key one spawns myriad problems, misunderstandings and complications.
Another way to exacerbate a Dip is to simply make it worse by trying to do too much at once. This is the opposite extreme of postponing key decisions. A client of ours made a major move to acquire a large competitor at the same time that they decided to change all the key structures, systems and processes in the company. With so much going on, too much in fact, their market performance plummeted precipitously. The Dip they should have been facing with fewer and more focused initiatives was the fact that their historic edge as a company had been eroded, and that their unwillingness to face their need to improve their customer engagement and internal leadership development was compromising their market leadership. By then firing in all directions all at once, they ended up shooting themselves in the foot. We need to find the few critical ways of moving on...not just spin our wheels in all directions.
KNOWING WHEN A DIP IS A DEAD-END
Some Dips are dead-ends, they are permanent plateaus because our strategies are outmoded. This tends to happen when you've already been successful and now have hit a plateau as the world, or technology, or customer tastes, or a combination of all of them, have changed.
IBM when Lou Gerstner took over was guilty of facing their painful Dip by trying to do what wasn't working...harder. Their Dip was being exacerbated because people didn't want to face the necessary medicine. Hung up still on mainframes and thinking of themselves as a computer company, it took Gerstner (an outsider to the industry) to help IBM reconceive of itself as a customer-obsessed enterprise solutions company, that today doesn't make computers anymore. However he had to literally help jolt the company awake and shake up the foundations of entrenched complacency.
When unwillingness to endure pain isn't your symptom, when you've slogged long and hard, then beware of just perpetuating what is failing in the name of perseverance. Tactically, the NLP maxim works. 'When what you are doing isn't working, do almost anything else.' Meaning that by interrupting the pattern of current attempts, you'll learn something. You'll liberate new options and ignite new insights. You'll carve out new possible paths.
The first step when stuck in this way is to ask, assuming that what I'm doing is wrong, what mental model do I/we need to change? What model, given our resources and strengths, have we seen out in the world that would give us the greatest chance of success? And how could I take a first step into that paradigm? Who else can I engage and enroll that is already in that world, or who can help take us there? And so even the venerable GE shifts from a 20 year dedication to operating excellence back to its Edisonian innovation roots and a newfound customer partnering methodology and evangel (At the Customer For the Customer).
SEPARATING DIPS FROM DEAD-ENDS
If you're in a dead-end, here are some indicators. The vision is blurred. You find increasingly that your facts and assumptions are wrong. The situation has changed from what you originally perceived. Continuing on violates rather than serves your true values and priorities. It is clear that more of the same is producing less of the aim. And others are successful and profitable in the same market doing different things. This then requires a true re-engineering of attitudes, strategies, perhaps relationships, tactics and certainly focus.
If it's a Dip, something to work through and learn from, the indicators will be different. You are 'on dream'. While results may be far from ideal, they are coming in, slowly but surely. Progress is visible. Some variation of your strategy seems to have worked for others (for example getting fit may be a series of dispiriting plateaus, but we can take inspiration from others who have walked or jogged this path before us). Talent and ability are there in terms of what is most needed for success. This is a core commitment and furthering it is more important than whether you succeed or fail in the short term.
Finally though, a Dip is a personal evolutionary process. As long as you keep recalibrating and look for signs of progress and are dedicated to the peak you are climbing towards, not maintaining a paradigmatic status quo, dead-ends can be converted. Their walls can be removed and become bridges instead.
The trick is to enjoy the process, be open to changing everything but the vision and values, be courageous enough to act boldly when merited, and to stay the course when needed, and be utterly welcoming of input from life and others. When that is the case, our Dips can become our deliverance.
MOVING FORWARD
Pick any real aspiration and it will come with one or more Dips en route to fulfillment. By not being stressed by them, or fighting their inevitability, we move faster through them. By keeping our antennae up, we can keep from exacerbating them, and we can build our own competence by leveraging mentors and necessary emotional support so we don't ourselves become a personal barrier to achievement.
Living and thriving through Dips is a hallmark of personal leadership -- it is a prerequisite to converting aspirations into effective action long enough for us to prosper and to WIN!
Omar Khan,
Senior Partner, Sensei International
Phone: 1 (212) 295 2191, Fax: 1 (212) 295 2121
e-mail: omar@sensei-international.com
Omar Khan is a globally acknowledged leadership development innovator and success coach. He is a sought after change catalyst and a pioneer in transformational learning. He is the author of the acclaimed book SYNERGY as well as the newly released and much awaited, TIMELESS LEADERSHIP.
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