On taking advice from friends and frames of reference

A few posts back I wrote about a friend of mine who gives me a good reality check when I need it. It also got me thinking about the kind of advice that we take from friends and what it is based on.

Everyone sees through their own frame of reference. If you want good advice, it's really important to understand just what frame of reference your adviser is speaking through.

At any executive level advisors are deep experts in their field, when companies hire consultants, they also hire deep experts in the area they seek to improve - even when it seems like it's a general area like "competitive advantage" or "process consultant". In general you won't find a CEO going to a risk consultant for the next audacious business idea and you wont go to the guy responsible for your last crazy business venture (successful or otherwise) for a detailed risk assessment, because their frames of reference are just way off for the particular areas where help is needed.

When I spoke to my friend about a few changes happening at work, i was a little stunned at just exactly what I got back - I got every reason that I shouldn't do it, everything that could go wrong and every reason I should stay where I was. I was stunned at first - but eventually had a good laugh at myself when I realized that I'd just asked my friend the senior risk consultant from a major financial firm about a new job - of course she was going to give me the risks, her entire frame of reference is risks. Later on when I spoke to another friend of mine - a senior sales consultant with a major IT company, I got entirely the opposite - what a great opportunity I had to do something great, she wasn't better or worse, her frame of reference was entirely different - and based on the views of two experts, I came out somewhere in the middle - leaning to the optimistic side because I'm a terminal optimist.

Too infrequently we do not consider the frame of reference of the person from whom we are seeking advice or discussing a problem.

We also don't understand our own frame of reference.

A frame of reference is something that developed over years, it isn't really controllable on a day by day basis, the best you can really do is steer it in a particular direction and be aware of the gaps that you have - it's the gaps that are really important because they represent your blind side,

Filling gaps is where advisors become really valuable - and there are many ways to identify your gaps. The best place to start is probably personality tests - myers briggs or disc or any one of a hundred others. Look for the areas in which you score badly so you can find people who are strong in the areas you aren't.

A second place to try is your own job function. In almost any organization of a reasonable size you'll be able to find the jobs that are naturally at odds with yours - marketing and finance, sales and operations, find someone who represents the opposite philosophy to yours and ask them lots of questions - seek advice on particular situations, ask them what they'd do, you might be surprised at the insight they have based on a different frame of reference.

Understanding your own frame of reference isnt an easy task - and it's actually harder in areas that you know something about. We have a the tendency to automatically underestimate the size of the things that we don't know we don't know. Developing an understanding of your blind spots really starts with deciding that there are people who know more about all kinds of things than you do - not always an easy task.

A couple of key things to remember every time you seek advice:

• Consider your sample size - one person doesn't generally make a total picture unless it's the Dalail Lama or they're a deep expert in exactly what you're talking about.
• Consider the sample size of the person you're talking to - if they've experienced something related to what you're talking about once they're better than nothing, but maybe not much.
• It's the unknown unknown that will get you most times - in these cases ego will get you every time and a mentor or a deep expert will save you most times.

Lifelong learning, the law of averages and when always doing what you've always done gets less

The saying goes "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got".

It's not really true though.

What the saying forgets is that while you're out there doing what you've always done, other people are doing things just a little differently - which advances the status-quo, ups the average.

What the saying should be is "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get slightly less than you've always got".

In reality, you need to do just a little more every day if you even want to keep up with the world around you.

Large companies in general do this pretty well, the ones that have managed to stay around and stay profitable for any length of time all have programs in place to make sure that they're just a little bit better every day. They call it continuous improvement, TQM, Six Sigma, Lean...whatever, it's the same thing - being better every day.

It's a pretty simple concept, do something better each day - you can do this in a thousand ways that aren't difficult, they just have to be thought about in a systematic way and turned into repeatable habits and processes that you can live by. Where it gets tricky is when you're trying to get ahead - then you have to be a lot better every day, you cant just increment, you have to innovate.

Innovation is something that you have to be open to and motivated for, it requires that you lose the ego that says “the way I’m doing this now is the best way it can be done” - there is ALWAYS a better way, in some cases it’s just not worth the cost, but it’s still there and one day, it will probably be worth the extra cost.

Really good innovation generally requires deep, specific knowledge or insight brought from another place where you have deep knowledge. The deep knowledge for a lot of people it comes from university or some form of tertiary study, but if you didn't do those things, that’s OK - the law of averages and compound interest seems to apply just as well to study and knowledge acquisition as it does to everything else.

The application of the law of averages here is simple - if you learn a little every day, but you do it EVERY day, and you stack it up, consistently over time, you’ll develop some seriously deep knowledge - or a lot of simple knowledge about a lot of different things - and depending who you believe, that’s just as good for solving complex problems.

The important thing is that you’re thinking and learning, not only does the mental exercise do you good, after a while you begin to see problems in terms of other problems you’ve seen - and that’s when your average really starts to compound - and it’s the compounding that makes the difference, if you read one page more per day than someone else, that’s about 2 books per year and over your lifetime, it’s 140 books - and that’s just a page, imagine how far you can go if you read 10 more pages per day than someone else.

If you’re looking to get ahead of the people around you, you don’t necessarily have to have a better degree or higher level qualification - you just have to out average them (and then work hard applying what you’ve learned).

Key takeaways:

1. Getting what you’ve always got is fine - but in reality, you’re going to get less if you do the same things to get it and if you only do a little bit more, you’re probably only going to break even.
2. Getting more comes from being better every day - working at it, systematically, out averaging the competition in the learning stakes.
3. Knowledge has a time value - keep your average up and keep what you’ve learned compounding for the best results.

Try it out - chances are that if you’re still reading at this point you feel like you’re getting something and you’re already on your way. Take some of the thinking from this post and use it, find a book, join a discussion group, read a magazine related to your job or something you want to be good at - whatever, just put the time in every day as part of the routine and see where it gets you - it might not go where you think it’s going to, but at least you wont always be where you’ve always been getting what you’ve always got.

The positive power of feeling inadequate.

I have a great friend.

She's a chronic over achiever - the kind of person who hasn't really ever failed anything - and this isn't an accident, she's smart, well educated and is quite capable of working anyone else I know into the ground. Most of my life I've been measuring myself against her. It's not flattering.

I've got a bit of an ego, I get excited by new ideas, I leap without looking. She keeps me grounded.

Every time we talk about a new thing I'm doing she gives me her take, generally I feel like a bit of an idiot, get a little depressed and then.... and this is the crucial part....

I make a better decision.

Who in your life makes you feel inadequate?

Have you thanked them lately?