PARADIGMS-GHOSTS OF THE PAST
There is a story about a Russian bear named Bongo. Bongo lived in a ten foot by ten foot cage, on display in a small village somewhere in the south of Russia, where his owner made his living charging admission to see the bear.
Bongo spent his days walking from one side of his cage to the other and then back again; day after day, week after week, month after month for many, many years. Finally at the urging of the town’s people his owner agreed to return him to the wild where he could live out the final years of his life in freedom.
Bongo was taken to a remote part of the forest and there, he was set free. Years later his owner returned to the place where he had set Bongo free only to find the skeleton of a dead bear, with a ten foot path worn in front of it. The cage that Bongo lived in for years was gone, but the cage that was still in his head was stronger then ever. Sometimes we as human beings are unaware of the cages that we create for ourselves and then live with.
The one constant of the world is that nothing is constant. The base of our knowledge is never static, nor should it be. What is true today may not be true tomorrow. By not allowing yourself the ability to see those changes and the new possibilities they represent, you are doomed to only what you once knew. The reality of this is even more true for business, and sales in particular.
I believe one of the single greatest sources of lost opportunity is what I refer to as “causalities of doomed history”. They are people who live in the past of their own failures; they failed and the memory of that failure continues to haunt them. As is often the case, “bad” experiences are often “emotional” experiences, which means they can be anchored heavily in how we think and react moving forward.
Even years later, despite the likelihood that the same people are no longer there, the weight of that bad experience continues to blind to the present because they can only see the past.
Over the years I have encountered a curious phenomenon that I have literally seen happen over and over again. Let me set the stage for you. We begin with a company that has been in business for a number of years, maybe not an old company necessarily, but a one that has an established sales force. Then one day a new, inexperienced salesperson is hired and in a matter of a few months, sometimes even weeks, the new person is selling more than people that have been there for years.
The question is why? It would be easy to attribute it to youth, or maybe because new people tend to be more aggressive, more energized, or maybe even smarter; but interestingly none of these reasons are the real reason.
I believe the real reason is ignorance…yes ignorance. Ignorance, despite popular opinion, does not mean stupidity, nor does it have the negative connotation that many ascribe to it. Ignorance is merely the lack of knowledge in a specific area. The kind of ignorance that I am referring to here is the same ignorance that affected Einstein, or Edison, or Currie; and it is the same kind of ignorance that I suspect lies at the heart of almost every great human achievement, the fact that it was conceived and created by an individual who did not know they couldn’t do what they did.
New salespeople often come to a new job without the baggage of knowing what they can and can’t do, and yes they make mistakes, sometimes very painful ones, but they are also often successful in finding opportunities that were in front of the rest of us the entire time, the only difference is we are blinded by the artificial boundaries that we have created for ourselves. Unfortunately they become the ones that others who follow in our footsteps will unconsciously take.
Paradigms are the pathways we create, models of not only how we act, but how we think, and they are not necessarily bad. The actual definition for paradigm is, “a model or example”. In this case the paradigm is an evolved methodology of thinking. We learn that a stovetop can be hot, but that knowledge is not limited to just one stovetop. The knowledge is generalized and we concurrently know that all stovetops “can” be hot. The danger in paradigms is when the only thing we consider about stoves is whether they are hot or not. All the other perspectives of what a stove could be are no longer seen and we develop what is called paradigm blindness.
What is sad and all too often the case; not only do we condemn ourselves to the failures of the past, we can pass on those paradigms to others without even knowing it.
PASS DOWN BEHAVIOR
If being a causality of our own doomed history was not destructive enough, we can, and often do, pass on our attitudes to others. Whether it be a note in a database from years before, or just an attitude, like ripples on the water that eventually wash up on some distant shore with no recollection of the pebble that caused them, we become epicenter of events that may occur far beyond our station and far into the future
Robert Coeffman, a Harvard PHD specializing in emotional response behavior, tells a story about a test involving monkeys. It began with several monkeys in a cage. At one end stood a tree with a piece of fruit at the top. Eventually when one of the monkeys discovered it and climbed the tree to get it, as soon as he touched it the entire group was sprayed with water, apparently something that monkeys don’t particularly like.
Eventually another monkey would try it and then another with the same result, all of the monkeys were sprayed. In time the monkeys stopped trying, in fact they would not even go near the tree.
Then one of the monkeys was removed and a new monkey put in his place, but when he tried to get the fruit the other monkeys would beat him up. This continued on and one by one the original monkeys were replaced until all of the original monkeys were gone, and though none of the new monkeys had any memory of being sprayed, none would try for the fruit, or even get near the tree.
Now humans, you would think, would be different because of their intellect and their ability to reason, but history has not proven it to be so.
A good friend of mine who is African American told me of an even more provocative and startling example. He was in the process of writing a book on his family’s history and in the context of that research became interested in what he called “slave” behavior. For anyone who is not familiar with the term “slave” behavior, it is a mindset passed from one African American generation to the next, over hundreds of years. He was amazed how much certain attitudes of slavery continued to have an affect on people a hundred years later, despite the generations that have come and gone and were not actually the generation where the paradigm began. In the broader sense, we are all products of our past whether its origin is ours, or someone else’s.
In business the life cycles are much shorter, and as a result the strength of the past is much more visible. The battle to overcome our past regardless of race or circumstance is a constant battle, and new attitudes can only come about when we learn from the past, but not embrace it so vehemently that it becomes our future.
I try to impress on the people that I teach, regardless of their age or their personal circumstance that what they absorb from those around them, must be taken with a grain of salt. Learn to see past the artificial boundaries and discover for themselves what is real, what is possible, and then act with abandon on what you know to be true.
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