When embarking on a new improvement measure, whether in your personal life or at your job, REALITY must be the starting point. Right? Because if you aren’t dealing with reality, you won’t truly understand the problem. You have to know where you are before you can figure out how to get where you’re going. Simple. Post over.
Just kidding! The hard question: are you actually seeing reality? When we first think ask ourselves this question, it’s easy to say, “Of course I am! I wouldn’t be doing X if I wasn’t!” This is where we often get derailed into addressing a symptom of our problem rather than the problem itself. Reality is often hard to look at, so we avoid looking at it directly. Maybe we give it the side-eye, maybe we just give it a quick glance, maybe we look just to the right of it and call that reality.
Here’s an example: I recently took up gardening. I don’t like to call it gardening because I don’t really see myself as a gardener. To me, it’s just working in the yard. Fine. But I had to come to terms with the fact that I am cultivating plants and I care about their well-being when my roses and my phlox came down with a substance that I discovered was powdery mildew. Not fun. I ignored it for awhile – I made some observations and noted that the leaves were still green and everyone seemed to be doing fine. Well, it only got worse. Meanwhile, on my fuchsia plant, there were these little furry white bugs that I eventually discovered were mealybugs. I decided that maybe they were little friends and were eating some other bad bugs. Nope. They were eating holes through the leaves and destroying the flowers.
I tell you this story because it’s a great example of where I would rather sidestep the messy reality that my plants had issues than deal with the actual problem. In both of these cases, I didn’t really want to see reality because I knew that once I did, I couldn’t in good conscience just let it go. I wasn’t going to let my fuchsia get devoured by predatory insects any more than I was going to leave my little phlox defenseless against a mildew spore.
So, am I just lazy? Do I need to give up on my desire to have healthy plants? No. Neither of those are true. The truth is that I’m a human, and sometimes when we are presented with an inconvenient or even completely insurmountable problem, the easier approach seems to be to ignore it altogether or to explain it away using some convenient “data” – that would be my observations about the plants.
It’s impossible to actually change anything if you are unwilling to first see it for what it actually is. Take Kintsugi – if you refuse to acknowledge the plate as broken, you will never be able to fix it with that neat gold glue. We often stymie a change or improvement effort in our simple failure to acknowledge reality.
Reality is not always a fun thing to look at. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say it is rarely a fun thing to look at. This action requires humility to admit that we don’t know everything. It’s also much more fun to make up a story and tell ourselves everything will be better if we look the other way or keep our heads in the sand. And that’s fine to do if you don’t mind leaving your plants to fend for themselves and live mediocre, struggling plant lives.
The other piece of this is that if you see reality you can then explore the best solution for the problem rather than settling. For example, the best solution for my problem with the powdery mildew was neem oil. It was not watering the plants down (that would have made the situation worse) or cutting off the affected foliage (this doesn’t actually kill the spores).
And thus we come to our activity: How do you train yourself to see reality when it may not be what you want to see?
- Put away your critic. This is often one of the hardest things for us as humans to do. We love judging – ourselves, others, bad things, good things. We just love it, and we’re so good at it! Right? There’s a time and a place for your critic; here and now is not it.
- Set down your fear. We’ll talk more about fear later, but this is a critical part of seeing reality. If you don’t know what you might be afraid of, consider what seems to be at risk. For example, if you aren’t hitting revenue, your job might be at risk. My question to you: is it better to be at risk and ignore it or to be at risk and try to do something about it? When you have assessed these things, take the time to put the fear down.
- Ask WHY. People often tell me I ask great questions. This always makes me laugh because when I was in second grade and they were trying to teach me basic computation, I wanted to know why – why the rules were what they were, why the numbers did what they did, etc. My mother told me I needed to just stop asking that question. But the basis for all good questions is this word: WHY. Ask it. Dig. Get to the root of the issue.
- Make a plan. We often skip this step. We see reality and then we move right into action before we have truly assessed the problem and made a plan to address the root cause. A bad plan is better than no plan. Even bad plans can be flexible. No plan means no metric, which means it’s impossible to measure progress.
- Execute. Keep looking at reality throughout this step. Is your plan working? Why? Do you have to make changes? Why? What are you learning?
- Repeat. Check in. How does reality look now? What has changed? Celebrate the progress. Keep going.
You’ll notice that in this activity I didn’t have you stop at just seeing reality – I have you moving into changing what you can. This is because seeing reality often requires change, as I described earlier with my phlox situation. You’re not going to leave a problem that can be solved. You’re going to solve it, and seeing reality is just the first step in that process.
*You can learn even more about the power of seeing reality by reading the Shingo Model!