When doing something is hard, STOP working harder.

I was recently presented with a client situation that we all face professionally: we need to make a change, a transformation, but its hard to make that change.

The change involves people who don't report to us... the change involves doing things differently... the change involves a wholesale revamp of what we do and how we do it.

And with all of those factors, and more, we realize that change is hard. We work late nights, we setup systems, we ideate, we seek input, we revise over and over again, and yet we don't make the progress we want to.

This is when its time to STOP. Just stop. Step away from the problem. Step away from the solution. Step away.

Refusing to step away from the problem is like handcuffing our minds, forcing us to run into a brick wall time after time, seeking to find a solution. And by the time you find a crack in the wall, you're probably not even solving the same problem you started with.

So how do we give ourselves, and our brains, the best chance at solving problems, making decisions, and setting up our teams for success?

First we need to acknowledge the need for a pause and this is what the science shows us...

1. You're burnt out and not being productive right now. "Burnout has been associated with various forms of job withdrawal—absenteeism, intention to leave the job, and actual turnover. However, for people who stay on the job, burnout leads to lower productivity and effectiveness at work." [1]
2. You're biased, and the halo error has you over estimating the advice of both your boss and your peers. "...the extent to which halo error inflates true score correlations between job performance ... for supervisory ratings this is a 33% inflation ... for peer ratings, the inflationary factor is even larger: ... a 63% inflation" [2]
3. You're dealing with limited information and accepting the first proposed idea. "...people typically consider only one hypothesis at a time and often make the assumption at the outset that that hypothesis is true leads to the conjecture that reasoning might be improved by training people to think of alternative hypotheses early in the hypothesis evaluation process" [3]

Heed those three considerations to stop repeating the same old way, stop expecting different outcomes with similar tactics, and stop handcuffing our minds.

Step away ... and restart in a new way. In our next discussion, we'll dive into the restart with problem solving and decision-making frameworks and how to know what a good one looks like. I appreciate any comments you have then and now.

[1] Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job burnout. Annual Review of Psychology.

[2] Viswesvaran, C., Schmidt, F. L., & Ones, D. S. (2005). Is there a general factor in ratings of job performance? A meta-analytic framework for disentangling substantive and error influences. Journal of Applied Psychology.

[3] Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of general psychology.