HEY, WHAT WENT RIGHT HERE?
I’m always amazed at how much time is spent in business pointing fingers, looking for blame, finding fault and holding endless meetings on what went wrong and who screwed up and why! Countless upon countless hours, weeks and months are wasted and lost dealing with the negative intentions of what went wrong.
Kathryn Shulz is known as the World’s Leading Wrongologist! She studies just how faulty the standard business practice of “looking for wrong” is. She says, “We have the power to understand what we did right and what we did wrong and make change. We can say that we made a mistake and change and learn from it!” The key word here is LEARN. However, most of the time LEARN is not the focus and BLAME is.
In my business coaching practice, I really demand my clients to get out of the negative habits of wasting time thus wasting money, by going on regular witch hunts when something goes wrong. Here are my four essential rules. This is our new mantra and standard for dealing with all issues:
- Clearly what do we know about what happened?
- Clearly, what did we learn?
- Clearly, what are we going to change so this won’t happen again?
- Clearly….that’s all the time we’re going to spend on it…rear view mirror, DONE, we move forward!
So here’s a very powerful and cool alternative to the “What went wrong” session. From this point forward you will create a “RIGHT WAY” note book. Instead of focusing on the negative use the same time that in the past you’ve allocated to finding blame, to analyzing what you, your staff and your company is doing RIGHT!
Many times we find that companies are spending so much time protecting themselves from what could go wrong that they neglect what is going right. Today we can reverse that trend. I urge business owners to spend focused time on all systems and processes and become acutely aware of what IS WORKING. Then understand why, precisely, why the approach or strategy IS working; document it completely and then figure out a way to insure continuous improvement.
A major shift from negative to positive takes place in your business and you begin to build more and more successful processes and strategies that tend to build on each other. This inevitably begins to drive future success and higher profits, and that my dear friend is always good!