“The mind once expanded to dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Nick has been on a ‘mission’ this week, while staying on the aptly named Mission Bay in San Diego. He’s helping two of our best strategic coaching clients, San Diego Hospice and Solutions for Change, take a literal QUANTUM LEAP.
He spent time with the CEO’s and the entire teams at both organizations learning how they are, literally, changing the model of hospice care and homelessness, respectively.
This kind of ‘change the world‘ attitude can be captured pretty effectively by comparing it to thinking from the world of QUANTUM PHYSICS… which is often described as the most powerful science ever conceived by human beings!
A QUANTUM LEAP is the explosive jump that a particle of matter undergoes in moving from one place to another!
Here are some notes and thoughts to help you build your own QUANTUM LEAP CULTURE.
- QUANTUM LEAPS are about exponential jumps in your Impact and your Income… not about kaizen, tweaking, or 3% to 5% growth tied to the adjusted cost of living, tuition increases or annual fund goals.
- QUANTUM LEAPS are like taking any BIG JUMP… You don’t focus on the ‘middle’ of the hump… but where you want to land!!!
- QUANTUM LEAPS are NOT about ‘trying harder‘! Trying harder produces only incremental gains not QUANTUM LEAPS. Physicists studying Quantum Mechanics note that particles make these ‘jumps’ with no apparent effort… and without covering all the bases between the starting and ending point!
- QUANTUM LEAPS never happen by doing the same thing you’re doing now. Price Pritchett says, “Be ruthless about trying something different. Conventional growth comes because we think along conventional lines.”
- QUANTUM LEAP means violating the boundary of the problem. Give yourself permission to dream, to risk, to try stuff.
- QUANTUM LEAPS come when you seek simple, elegant solutions. Look for an approach characterized by SIMPLICITY, PRECISION and NEATNESS.
- QUANTUM LEAPS allow you to do MORE with LESS! Less resources. Less people. Less money. The paradox: This creates MORE resources. MORE people. MORE money.
- QUANTUM LEAPS are NOT about the ‘how to’. Skip the detail. Stay at 30,000′. The answers will come to you. When they do, you’ll probably find them to be simple, streamlined solutions, rather than complex, complicated confusion.
- QUANTUM LEAPS are tied to Jim Collins’ BHAGs. They are not Big Hairy Audacious Goals if you’re GUARANTEED that you can reach them. Collins and Pritchett say if you have the ANSWERS and STRUCTURES and CERTAINTY UP FRONT… it’s NOT a BHAG/QUANTUM LEAP!
- A QUANTUM LEAP, by definition, means moving into unchartered territory with NO GUIDE to follow. You personally draw the map as you go.
- Note: However, we offer a lot of ‘Guides‘ to help you on the journey. You still get to draw.
- QUANTUM LEAPS require you to take the OFFENSIVE. You can’t achieve exponential gains from a defensive posture, a passive stance.
- QUANTUM LEAPS require FAILURE.
- It means you’ve left the safety of the status quo. Failure is a resource. It helps you find the edge of your capacities. (If you send a rocket toward the moon, 90% of the time it’s OFF COURSE; it ‘fails’ its way to the moon by continually making mistakes and correcting them.)
“FAIL. FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER.” (Samuel Beckett)
‘FAIL. FAIL FAST. FAIL FASTER.” (Suddes)
“Success is going from FAILURE TO FAILURE with no loss of ENTHUSIASM.” (Winston Churchill)
“We need to FAIL in order to SUCCEED. Our only decision is HOW TO FAIL. By not going far enough… or going too far. I prefer the latter.” (Harriet Rubin)
- QUANTUM LEAPS regard ‘ZERO DEFETCS‘ and ‘PERFECTION‘ as HOSTILE CONCEPTS. ‘GETTING READY‘ (research, fancy brochures, perfect design, etc.) is a stalling tactic, an act of anxiety.
Finally, you don’t ‘prepare’ for a QUANTUM LEAP. You MAKE IT, and then you frame out the DETAILS and STRATEGY on the way!
