Maurice A. Ramirez, DO, CNS, CMRO

Expand Your Business Horizons with Pattern Recognition

I regularly tell audiences that the practice of medicine is the practice of Pattern Recognition. The old adage, "The Eye Sees What the Mind Conceives" is all to true inthe ER and in the Disaster Arena. If you want to see new opportunities for your business and increase your decision-making speed and accuracy, begin by looking outside your own business—even outside your industry—at trends and patterns that you can apply to your own organization. Ask yourself, “How do others do what they do?” The fact is that you can learn from observing others companies’ patterns of how to change, and in turn solve problems, make decisions, and grow your business faster than ever before.

A failure to recognize an impending problematic pattern can be just as devastating to a Mom & Pop business as it is to a hospital or NASA or to a CEO’s career. Enron had a pattern of corporate corruption and failure of personal responsibility. MCI had a pattern of bad investment and then later fraud to cover those bad investments. All of these things were patterns which we can look back on in retrospect, as the books are open for everybody, and from outside industries we can say, “It was obvious this was happening.” And yet the people inside the industry, the “experts,” were looking at the same patterns and could not see them. They lacked perspective from the outside, just as we, in our own industries, can fail to have the perspective on ourselves that others may have of us. So how can you improve your pattern recognition skills to enhance your business? Consider the following:

Look beyond your own niche. You must be able to pull back your blinders to recognize those patterns that tell you something has changed or is about to change. Within your own company, you may have great pattern recognition and the ability to anticipate what’s going to come next, but if you can’t see outside your company’s bubble, you may be left in the same situation that IBM was in 1978. They only looked at their own company’s patterns and did not see the coming of the personal computer. Over at Apple, though, Steve Jobs identified patterns beyond the horizon, hired Bill Gates, and started a new company…and a revolution.

If other industries ultimately serve a similar purpose to yours, then even if they seem radically different than yours, their operating patterns may still be applicable. For example, health care has in recent years begun adopting the safety models used in the airline industry. Like doctors and nurses, pilots and air traffic controllers are among the few in their industry who have ultimate responsibility for a large number of lives. Many more support people are responsible for making certain that the pilots are able to do their jobs safely and effectively: the mechanics, the flight attendants, and the gate agents.

When the medical industry identified that it had a problem with safety (too many unfortunate situations were overlapping and people were dying as a result), they looked outside their own industry, to those where the stakes are very high and where a single error, if not caught, could result in not one death but 500. They learned that in the airline industry, everyone—from the lowliest mechanic or carpet sweeper, all the way up to the captain—has the authority to say, “Stop that plane!” if they have reason to believe a safety issue has arisen. Importing this and other patterns gleaned from the airline industry will be a long process for the medical industry but one that will ultimately lead to greater safety and efficiency.

Trust patterns, not data. If you’ve been wearing blinders for awhile, you may find it difficult to trust your instincts, even when you have identified patterns within your own business and beyond. Your natural tendency will be to look for data that will back up the pattern you’re seeing. If you do this, though, and the data doesn’t support the trend, that doesn’t mean you were wrong in your initial identification of the pattern. Data simply can’t predict the future; it can’t tell you where your business is headed, only reinforce what you already know about your business’ past. Data can tell you that profits are down or have leveled off, but only pattern recognition can give you a new perspective on your business and help you decide what to do to reverse trends and solve problems.

Use your eyes, then analyze. Albert Einstein said that the ultimate insanity is to continue to do what you’re doing and expect a different result. Perhaps you’ve identified a pattern that you want to adopt, but you don’t want to make significant changes just to make changes, nor do you want to take action with only guesswork to back you up.

First, you must have the ability to recognize what’s wrong. When you look at your business’ financial picture, for example, what do you see? If it’s not what you expect, what do you do? Supplement this analysis with the extra patterns you’ve added to your repertoire in your exploration of other businesses and industries. The perspective you gain from having these extra patterns to reference will give you a twofold gain:
1) With enough patterns, you’ll be able to see that the financial picture isn’t right, and
2) you’ll have a sense of what changes you can implement to make the situation better by borrowing patterns from other industries and adapting them to your situation.

Mimic, then make them your own. When NASA experienced the space shuttle accidents, the first thing executives did was to look back at where patterns failed. They discovered that a culture of silence had evolved at NASA. So they went outside of their industry and got experts in communications and team-building to teach them new patterns that enabled them not just to team-build, but also to teach them new patterns they could mimic. The experts enabled NASA to learn what the pattern looks like when a team is beginning to fail and to emulate new, more effective problem-solving patterns. Now they can recognize when the teams begin to fail and communication lines are crossed so the opportunity for absolute disaster is less likely to occur.

When you’re making an adopted pattern your own, don’t make a deliberate effort to change it around or adapt it to your business. You’ll find that if you fully internalize a pattern, as it becomes a part of your behavior and thought process, then your brain will automatically take any aspects of the pattern that are not particularly useful to you and set them aside, so that the pattern, though adopted from elsewhere, works for you. At that point, the pattern truly becomes yours; you have broadened your perspective and added additional facets or directions from which you can see still new vantage points.

Passing the patterns down. While your company’s culture will determine whether one leader learns this process or a group does, a group is ideal. You want any shift in paradigm for the organization to be a unified shift. Therefore, all of your core decision makers should learn new patterns simultaneously so as not to create the appearance to those below them that the senior executives are all headed off willy-nilly in some new, weird direction. So, as you develop a culture of mimicry in your organization, the rank and file will learn new patterns by simply mimicking the behaviors of those who lead.

Pattern Recognition + Positive Actions = Excellent Results
When you’ve built up your storehouse of borrowed patterns and perfected the processes of mimicry and internalization, you’ll see a myriad positive results occur. Among other things, you’ll learn that you are able to discern when something is not only different, but good-different—a positive shift that benefits your business. When that happens, resist any temptation to mess with it and instead ride it out. Likewise, should you identify a negative pattern approaching, you can take proactive steps to head it off at the pass. Either way, your business will benefit from your new pattern recognition skill, and your company’s bottom line will soar.

(Excerpted from my lecture series and book, Avoiding Business Disasters: Lessons from the Disaster Field Office)

Business Triage

What do Tylenol, New Coke, Jack-in-the-Box, Bag Leaf Spinach, Katrina and the World Trade Center have in common?  They were all disasters.  More specifically, they were all business disasters, and the outcomes of each of these disasters was completely dependent on managing needs and resources.

But what does triage have to do with business?
If a business is doing well, absolutely nothing. 
However, in a global economy where labor is cheaper for “the big boys” overseas and markets are flooded with less expensive goods, where disgruntled employees or other malcontents take out their frustration on a business directly or its customers there are few businesses that do not regularly suffer a disaster.  The problem is, they don’t know how to recognize one when it comes.

The first lesson from the disaster field office are the definitions: a disaster is when your needs exceed your resources.  It’s a simple mathematic equation:
Disaster = Needs > Resources

A catastrophe is when your needs exceed all ability to respond.  Again, it’s a simple mathematical equation:
Catastrophe = Needs > Ability to Respond.

Resiliency is defined in many ways. One definition is even of a book on the subject, Mastery Against Adversity (Disaster Life Support Publishing, 2007).  But the simplest definition is that resiliency is the opposite of disaster.  It is when your resources exceed your needs, or mathematically:
Resilience = Resources > Needs.

The second lesson from the disaster field office is every business must have resilience to survive its disaster.

The third lesson from the disaster field office is that there are acceptable losses.  Several years ago when New York City suffered its most recent blackout Arnie, who owned a small convenience store and ice creamery faced a business triage decision.  With the power out he had ten flavors of ice cream in the cabinet that would soon melt.  At 5 gallons per flavor there was slightly less than 50 gallons of ice cream up front.  This was a small loss, but it would be compounded by the fact that he had over 100 gallons of ice cream in the back. 

Arnie knew that he had a disaster on his hands.  His needs (refrigerator) exceeded his resources (electricity).  Arnie needed to make a simple triage decision.  He had to decide where he could focus his efforts and his remaining resources so that his business would in fact reopen when the power came back on.  He also needed to plan for as short a recover as possible.  It takes a lot of effort to get rid of over 100 gallons of ice cream and a lot of dumpster space.  The clean-up would be horrendous and if the disaster lingered too long his store would be filled with stench of sour milk and rotting ice cream.

Arnie ran a neighborhood store and his customers had already been in to purchase what he had on hand.  With an old cigar box he had given up his computerized register and was going business “the old fashioned way”.  But what to do with the ice cream?

Arnie doesn’t know if he was the first store owner to think of it, but in the sweltering heat Arnie struck upon an idea, give it away.  After all, what would he be losing?  The product would be ruined before refrigeration could be returned. So he simply gave away the ice cream.  A small handmade sign in the window soon drew people in off the street.  “Free Ice Cream. 

In no time he had a line.  He was giving away the ice cream, but what to hold it in?  Ice cream cones!  The cones were actually cheaper than Styrofoam cups, and Styrofoam have an unlimited shelf life.  Would the ice cream cones go bad during the blackout?  No, but you can’t give people ice cream in their hand, and the small loss in the cost of ice cream cones was less than the larger loss than the cost of Styrofoam cups. 

To Arnie’s amazement, many people tried to pay him for the ice cream.  Wanting to get rid of it as quickly as possible, before it all went bad and he had to carry it out back where it would create a horrendous stench, he simply refused.  To his greater amazement people began to buy other items in the store, items that in all likelihood he would not have been able to sell at that moment in time simply because before the free ice cream sign he didn’t have many customers.  Before he had given away all the ice cream, Arnie found that his store shelves were bare and his cigar box overflowing.  His acceptable loss, the ice cream, had gained him an unexpected profit.

But that’s not the end of Arnie’s story.  The power came back on and Arnie was re-supplied with both ice cream and merchandise.  He also saw a tremendous increase in business.  People didn’t just come because he had given away ice cream.  They came because they felt that Arnie cared about them.  He had taken a tough decision and turned it into a benefit for those around him.

Triage has come to to be sorely misunderstood.  Triage is not simply sorting the most important project or business goal, or even critically ill patient to the front of the line.  Triage is determining what resources are available and how those resources can serve the largest number of goals or the largest number of people at any given moment in time.Triage is a continuous process, and it is a repeating process.  In business that means constantly reassessing the resources available at hand both as they are expended and as they are re-supplied.  Business triage involves reassessing the needs and goals of the company on a minute by minute, hour by hour basis.

Arnie is just one example of businesses surviving and flourishing because of efficient business triage.  Johnson & Johnson (cyanide in Tylenol) and Pepsi-Cola (needles in bottles) are two “big business” examples of the same principle. 

In the business world triage missteps, failure to define an acceptable loss has resulted in product failures and brand damage (Coca-Cola with New Coke and Jack-in-the-Box with tainted hamburgers).  The news examples disaster was taken to catastrophe because needs were not prioritized and goals not adjusted to the realities of available resources.

The lesson of business triage is that when a business faces a disaster it must accept that not all of its goals can be met until more resources are brought to bear.  If those resources are not available then acceptable losses must be identified and sustained.  This must be done dispassionately and with the same logical approach as business uses when choosing a vendor or a new project in which to invest.

(Excerpted from my lecture series and book, Avoiding Business Disasters: Lessons from the Disaster Field Office)

Profiting from Disaster: How to Ethically Make Money During Times of Crisis

When a disaster strikes—whether it be a hurricane, earthquake, flood, terrorist attack, or some other devastating event—many businesses are eager to volunteer and assist those in need. They want to help rebuild the damaged homes and businesses, and they often donate the necessary materials and manpower to do so. Unfortunately, the resources that are brought in on a volunteer and donation basis typically run out much sooner than expected. And very often, those businesses who gladly gave their time and resources to those in need feel guilty charging for additional services, so they pack up and leave the area, proud of their good deed, yet leaving those in the disaster area with few recovery options.

A great example of this is what happened in Port Charlotte, Florida after hurricane Charley. Initially after the hurricane, a large number of contractors went to the area, donating services, supplies, and other things needed to rebuild the community. The federal government also came in and paid many of the rebuild bills, even things not normally covered by FEMA. But then the money started to run out, and the majority of the volunteers went home. The funny thing is that the residents of Port Charlotte didn’t want the contractors to leave and would have paid the contractors their normal rate to stay and finish the disaster recovery efforts. But the contractors—those who were there on a volunteer basis—felt guilty taking money from disaster victims. Now, two years later, many Port Charlotte residents are still seeking reputable contractors to help them. It’s an unfortunate situation that doesn’t have to happen.

Perhaps even more concerning is that we’re starting to see a similar trend in the people and companies that help with disaster preparedness. Recently the Annals of Emergency Medicine, one of the largest emergency medicine journals, published an editorial aimed specifically at universities that were profiting from selling courses developed under grant dollars. That is, they created disaster preparedness materials using federal grant money, and then they made hospitals and communities pay to receive the course materials. While such a practice is clearly unethical, many people thought the journal was implying that it’s unethical to make a business of disaster preparedness—to go into communities and hospitals and charge a consulting fee or teach for profit how to be ready in the event of a disaster. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

So does that mean it’s possible to profit from a disaster situation and not feel guilty?
Yes! And those businesses that are able to come into a community after a disaster strikes and offer a needed product or service can profit handsomely…and ethically.

3 Ways to Profits
When it comes to profiting from disaster, most people think of price gouging or profiteering. Price gouging is not only immoral and unethical, but in every state and every territory, it’s also illegal. It’s a criminal act in which you’re taking advantage of people who have no choice but to pay. When hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, we heard examples of unscrupulous store owners selling generators (that normally retailed for a few hundred dollars) for two and three thousand dollars. All those people received jail time or fines, and their business license was revoked. Such people are not seeking to profit from disaster; they’re seeking to profit from misery. There are essentially three ethical ways to make money after a disaster.

1. Volunteer and Donation.
In this scenario you volunteer your time and donate your products or services. You cover all your own costs and accept nothing in return, other than perhaps food and lodging. In return for your time and materials, you get the warm fuzzy feeling of doing something good for the community. You become an everyday hero. If you’re visible during this time, you also get great publicity, which could lead to business down the road from those who remember your good deed.

2. Discounted Services.
This is the most common scenario, and just as the name implies, it means that you offer your products and/or services to the community at a discounted rate. Those who opt to go this route figure out how low they can price something without the decision being a burden on the business. Realize, though, that no one in the community asked for the discount (although none will turn the discount down either). Often, the business owner gives the discount because he or she has some level of altruism.

3. Full Price.
In this scenario, you come into the community and bid a fair market price for a product or service, roughly equivalent to what other companies would charge during non-disaster times. And because it’s fair market price, people are more than happy to pay it. This is completely moral and ethical. Unfortunately, few businesses make the transition to full fare after starting out as a volunteer. But if you really want to grow your business and profit from disaster, this is the way to go.

From Free to Fee
So how does a business make the transition from a volunteer to a paid consultant or contractor? Here are some suggestions:

1) Be upfront.
State how long you can offer your products or services for free. For example, tell people, “I can afford to volunteer for two weeks. I can afford to bring X amount of materials. If we run out of materials before two weeks, you supply the material and I’ll stay the remainder of the time I stated.” After the two weeks are up, before you pull out and leave, talk with the people you’ve been helping. Explain again that you can only afford to volunteer for two weeks. Very often, at that point, they’ll ask you to bid the remainder of the work. Then you can offer a fair market bid. If you get a “yes,” then why would you not stay? You’re already there, and now you’re making money. If they say “no,” then they’re taking responsibility for their own recovery. At that point, you can go home and tend to your business, knowing that you’ve done a good deed. 

2) Be Proactive
When your community does its disaster relief plans (before a disaster hits), put your company on the list of businesses available to aid in the recovery efforts. Businesses can work with their local communities to be “first-called” in the event that a disaster strikes. What does that mean? Assuming that the business is capable of responding, that business will put the community recovery (or specific targeted recovery within the community) at the front of the line. But that’s just the beginning. In some cases, a business (let’s say a hospital, for example) may contract with a service provider (such as a roofing contractor) and pay a retainer fee so that in the event of a disaster, that contractor will put the hospital at the front of the list. In return, that contractor gets the bid for the other work the hospital needs done. The contractor is happy to give that deal because it guarantees them business. This is completely ethical. In fact, it’s a win-win solution. The business gets the repairs they need done and contractor has guaranteed work. What could be better?

The bottom line is that businesses need to understand the different ways they can help, and they need to get over the stigma of profiting from disaster. Realize that the people receiving your products or services don’t mind paying for them. In fact, nobody on the receiving end of the products or services expects to get everything for free, and most of them will gladly pay a fair market price for anything you offer. So take full advantage of this profitable market segment. By doing so, you’ll be helping people in need while helping your own business grow.

Get Out of Crisis Mode and Stay Out: Utilizing Resource-Based Decision-Making in Your Organization

Two economic sectors dominate the field when it comes to decision-making: one operates on a resource-based model and the other runs on a continuous crisis model. Many organizations choose the latter model because they place tremendous emphasis on saving money minute to minute, not on investing in future need. But resource-based decision-making offers a process that helps you make instant decisions, and more important, introduces small changes that, over time, prevent your organization from getting into future bad situations.

Once you have assessed a situation, you need to determine the best course of action. But before you can make a decision about what to do, you must have the resources to put that action into place. Giant retailers operate on the principle of building “surge capacity,” and your organization can, too. Basically, surge capacity involves investing in plenty of extra resources and having people trained and at the ready to use those resources when necessary.

Here’s how it works: a super-store like Wal-Mart may have thirty cash registers, and while they may have fifty employees trained to work in check-out, at most times only five to ten clerks staff the registers. However, the store prepares based on its assessment of when business is likely to be slow and when it will suddenly mushroom to a point that necessitates bringing on additional staff to utilize those empty registers. On the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, for example, the retailer will need to add temporary workers and all available permanent staff to get customers’ money and then get them out the door with a minimal wait.

With Resources, Timing is Everything
The idea of surge capacity originated in hospitals that brought in additional help when necessary to utilize their reserve resources in the case of pandemic outbreaks or massive accidents. Ironically, most hospital administrators have now given up using the idea of surge capacity in their emergency rooms, which is why patients must sometimes wait as long as twenty-four hours to see a doctor. Business models in every industry provide similar examples when they function without back-up resources or surge capacities. In manufacturing, does it cost more to store parts (resources) than it does to shut down the line and pay everybody if a strike means you’re unable to obtain just one necessary part? In your business, how often is a similar situation likely to happen? Knowing this will determine your risk model. What is your tolerance for risk? And what are your customers willing to accept as a failure?

In your own organization, you must look at what resources you have and make decisions about those resources on an ongoing basis. When you have resources in reserve and aren’t doing a lot of business, financial prudence may be wise, but as you approach the end of your available resources, you must reorganize priorities. When that happens, you get out of your comfort zone and front-load the system with more resources. Otherwise, you will provide worse customer service when your resources are only sufficient to meet immediate needs and face disaster when your resources exceed your needs. In extreme cases, you could end up with a full-blown catastrophe on your hands, where your needs exceed all ability to respond or recover. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s usually in the form of a total business failure. To keep your organization from holding too many resources—whatever you consider your equivalent of too many empty registers—you need to start as soon as possible to notice patterns. When you begin to experience back-up, should you restrict product outflow or availability? Increase business through incentives at off-peak times so you need to concern yourself less with the peak times? These are all early resource-based decisions that keep you from getting into or exceeding your surge capacity.

Resource Availability and Adaptability are Key
You have to know your resource availability. This may seem like common sense, but cost arguments will arise, so prepare for opposition to this model in the majority of corporate value systems. While super-centers operating on the surge capacity system accept the necessity of only using fifty percent of their registers the vast proportion of the year, the airlines’ practice of overselling flights is far more common. For many such industries, angry customers seem like a small price to pay until the system is maximally stressed. As you move further into your surge capacity, you need to bring in additional resources so you can utilize those physical resources you’re holding in reserve. In the retail model, this means spreading work throughout the store by pulling people off their positions and on to the registers.

With resource-based decision-making, you’ll learn that you need to adapt; sometimes it’s easier to get employees, and sometimes it’s easier to get equipment. If you’re an auto detailer, all you need to do routine business is your car and cleaning supplies until a surge period like Valentine’s Day, when you may need to hire additional office help to handle calls for service while you go out and detail cars, or you may need to hire other detailers while you stay in the office booking clients. Many of us learned to make resource-based decisions but rarely as an ongoing practice. You’re taught to plan, but as situations develop, you’re likely to go off the plan, making up new plans as you go, thinking outside the box. But you need to think outside box before the box careens off the cliff. If you’re trying to make resource-based decisions in the middle of the crisis, you’re behind, and if yours is a resource-limited situation, you’ll stay behind.

Make Your Case for Resource-Based Decision-Making
No one’s likely to listen to a lone wolf advocating a resource-based decision model, especially in the midst of a crisis. To achieve buy-in, work patiently to change the corporate culture, introducing the ideas before the organization hits crisis mode. If you’re already at the disaster point, prepare to wait until the organization moves through the emergency, and then seek out key decision makers and suggest half-day conferences to familiarize them with the system’s principles. Post-crisis, many leaders are open to new thought processes that will provide a way to avoid future calamities. In the end, resource-based decision making beats the crisis model 100 percent of the time. The key is to keep at it consistently and to always be evaluating your resources and making adjustments as necessary. By adopting this practice in your company, you’ll have an edge over the competition, happier customers, and less stress in times of challenge or change. And those are the true keys for a business that thrives.

How to Instill the MFA Mentality in Your Company

The most interesting thing I have learned in my years both as an Emergency Room Physician and as a Disaster Medicine Expert is that the lessons learned in the Emergency Room and the Disaster Arena are not only applicable tot he Board Room and the Corporate Arena. To truly reach your customers, you need to understand where they’re coming from—what they want and need in your product or service. But you don’t need to shell out a bunch of money on focus groups and marketing research. You can do the research yourself for much less. How? By learning to think like your customer and teaching your employees to do the same. Once you master this, customers will flock to you.

To think like a customer you need a heuristic thought process, that is you must “be your customer”. Much like how a fine artist “knows” if a painting or musical composition “works” by going with their “gut,” your employees should “know” what a customer wants. Artists develop this ability through an MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) program. Through traditional business education (MBA), however, most employees have refined their linear thought process—point A leads to point B leads to point C. But customers don’t analyze each part of your product or service; they just know if what you offer works well and if they like it. Employees who can think creatively, as if they had an MFA, can assume the mindset of your customers and market to your customers more effectively.

Such employees go with their instinct. They truly understand the customers’ wants and needs. The next time you want to know how your customers would feel about a particular product or service, adapt a non-linear (heuristic) research approach and become a part of your study base. Your focus group of one (you) will guide your initial thought process toward reaching your customers. As you instill this new MFA mindset, consider the following:

* Beware of Your Framing Bias
Think about what happens before a manager goes into a meeting. Rarely will people walk into the situation “cold.” They are briefed on who they’re going to meet and what they’re supposed to accomplish. They draw certain preconceptions, which is called a framing bias. Framing bias is the ability to walk into a situation with a plan—a plan to make a sale, a plan to establish a relationship, etc. As long as you know what your framing bias is upfront, then you can allow the situation to develop organically. You can then take away your feelings and your impressions and use them as an analytical tool. That’s the essence of heuristics—taking your feelings and impressions and using them analytically. Before you can fully immerse yourself in your customer’s viewpoint, you need to shed your framing bias. First, identify what your preconceptions are about your product, service, or situation. Second, once you’ve identified them, clear your mind and explore the experience for the first time. What’s your first impression? Are you reacting the way you are because of your preconceived ideas or because you are looking at the situation through fresh eyes?

* Become One With Your Customers
Become part of the story, even if you aren’t part of the product story. Generally, people like and dislike the same things. If not, you’d never have to wait in line for your favorite roller coaster at an amusement park. What do you feel? Listen to your gut—chances are your customers’ gut would tell them the same thing. You may not identify with the problem, but you’ll know what you need to do to make it feel “right.”  How can you now translate what you’ve discovered into a story for your customer? If you’re developing an ad for jogging shoes, you need to think like a runner—even if you’re not one. Why do people run? What is important to runners? How does running make people feel? After you’ve collected your personal research, you’ll be able to speak in the first person as a runner. Pretend you’re one of those successful fiction authors writing under a pseudonym. Tell your story like you live it. Now your customers will be able to personally connect with you because you’ve become one of them. 

* Passing the Torch
Not only do you, as a business leader, need to know how to think non-linearly, but you also have to encourage it in your employees for your company to truly succeed. Here are some ideas for encouraging creative, non-linear, MFA-style thinking in the workplace:

* Adopt an “Open Thought” Policy 
The old concept of the “open door policy” needs to be revamped into an “open thought policy.” Creative thinking should be encouraged at every opportunity. Let your employees freely express their “good” ideas. Sure, you’ll need to wade through the terrible ones to get to the good ones, but it’s worth it. Your employees will feel valued and be encouraged to find new, creative ways of solving problems. Over time, employees will learn to evaluate ideas on their own. At first, you will hear tons of ideas, only some which are worth exploring, but hang in there. It will take some time for an employee with limited knowledge of all the factors involved in running the business to be able to fully evaluate an idea of their own. As you take the role of mentor, rather than monitor, employees will become more creative and more skilled at self-editing. They’ll be able to take their ideas to the next logical conclusion and say, “You know, that idea is not going to work.” But they’ll also feel comfortable suggesting a well thought out “wild” idea to their supervisor that may turn out to be a great one. Over time, the manager and the employee will learn how to mentor and listen more effectively, and the company may benefit from some great new ideas. An employer can’t conceive all possibilities for his or her product or services. For progress to happen, you’ll need new ideas, so encourage your employees to speak up. If one comes up with a good hook but never has the opportunity to present it, think of how many sales you could be losing.

* Bring in a Teacher
Bring in an educator for your organization that teaches and coaches creative thinking and alternate thought processes. Rather than hiring a speaker this year who gives the same old talk about ramping up sales, consider bringing in someone who teaches employees how to think creatively. See what kind of difference it makes in your sales numbers for the following year.

* Offer Tuition Reimbursement
For very large companies, consider offering tuition-reimbursement for employees to get their MFA. The object is not to get them to master painting or an instrument; it’s to teach them a non-linear thought process—a very valuable skill in today’s business world. With funding this advanced education, you will reap the rewards of your employees’ new skills, and the expense may not be as high as you’d think—you may be eligible for tuition tax credits. If you pursue this option, be sure to set some boundaries. Require employees to maintain a certain GPA and stay with your company for a set period of time after earning their degree. You don’t want to have people earn their MFA and then get lured away by your competition!

Begin to Change Today
Creating a workplace that encourages non-linear thinking won’t happen overnight. Begin with you. Come up with a non-traditional, non-linear idea and share it with your employees, then encourage them to do the same. Encourage your employees to be aware of their framing bias and step into your clients’ shoes. Have them “become” your clients and watch how much your business grows. 

Fiddling as America Burns

Irwin Redlener in his recent book American at Risk sings the common refrain of all Emergency Managers, Contingency Planners and Disaster Preparedness Educators nation wide. The need for a coordinated disaster preparedness effort is not news. The need for meaningful and effective disaster preparedness funding is not a recent revelation. The Institute of Medicine and later the National Academies of Science have published a total of 3 reports calling for increased funding, more coordinated planning, effective and meaningful drills and the widespread adoption of High Fidelity Immersion Simulation by the medical community and the rest of the disaster response community. Together Redlener and other outspoken advocates for the American people form a cacophonous symphony of concern. But is anyone listening as this band plays on?!

In the past it has been painfully obvious that those in the private sector in charge of spending on preparedness have been unwilling or unable to invest in this most critical of priorities. Some hospitals have begun to invest in the education and the equipment, but most have not. Even fewer major American corporations have “seen the light.”

There have been some shining stars:
* The National Disaster Life Support Foundation has created a series of courses often characterized as “The CPR of the 21st Century.”
* The American Board of Disaster Medicine has begun a process of Board Certification for Physicians in Disaster Medicine
* Training for disaster preparedness has moved from the university environment to become a growth industry in the private sector
* The National Center for Biodefense Solutions, Inc.
* Disaster Life Support of North America, Inc.
* Burgess and Associates, Inc.
* Disaster Management, Inc.
* The State of Texas has created the Texas Medical Rangers as a disaster medical reserve corps.

But more is needed:
* A commitment by corporate healthcare to Disaster Preparedness and Community Emergency Response Integration regardless of whether grant funding is available.
* An understanding that Disaster Preparedness is a personal, family, community, business and healthcare responsibility, independent and separate from the Federal responsibility.
* An acceptance of the financial responsibility for personal, family, community, business and healthcare preparedness.

Irwin Redlener is singing the right song, but is finally America ready to sing along?

Want Business Success? Think a Little Differently

The key to making Disaster Preparedness Education a reality is to make it applicale to everyday business life. For this reason, the "From Preparedness to Profitability" category was created. The goal is to generate dialogue on the application of Disaster Preparedness principles and techiques to the everyday operation of businesses with an eye towards a better bottom line.

While many jobs for American MBA graduates are going overseas, those who have MFA’s will be in great demand. According to Gartner Inc, by 2008, 40 percent of IT jobs for MBA’s will be outsourced to workers overseas. The reason? A person can fill in a spreadsheet from India as easily as from Silicone Valley for one-tenth the cost. However, corporations cannot outsource creative jobs as easily. The ability to go quickly from problem to problem, problem to solution, or from initial idea to unique product does not cross cultures well. The employee needs to be a part of the culture he or she is marketing to. As a result, American employees with Masters of Fine Arts degrees (MFA’s) are more in demand and earning more than those with MBA’s. Why does someone who is trained in artistic abilities do well in business? It’s not the particular artistic talent, but the thought process that creates it. Fine artists have the ability to apply non-linear thought to problems, which is a valuable business skill. Companies are looking for those employees who can apply a non-linear thought process to business problems.

What’s the Difference?
Here is a simple exercise that will demonstrate the difference between a linear and non-linear thought process. Take out a sheet of paper. In the top left corner, write a letter “A.” In the center of the page, write a “B.” Halfway down the page on the right hand side, parallel to the “B,” write a “C.” In the bottom right corner, write a “D,” and in the bottom left corner write an “E.” Now draw a line from A to B to C to D to E. That is linear thought—arriving at the final answer by following a step-by-step process. Now take your right thumb and forefinger and grab the left top corner of the page next to the A. With your other thumb and forefinger, grasp the lower left corner next to the “E.” Touch the A to the E. That’s non-linear thought—finding the solution without having to go from point to point to point.

Non-Linear Thinking is an Inherent Skill
From the moment you are born, you are an input device constantly making connections. In the first five years of life, your brain grows very rapidly and sets down patterns of recognition. For example, as a survival skill, infants smile at everyone. Next they learn to recognize mommy and daddy, then they develop a fear of strangers, and then they learn to reserve affinity for family and other trusted people. Finally, they choose their own friends. Over time, people begin to lay down patterns of normal and non-normal. That’s why you can look at a situation and know something isn’t right. If you see someone in an airport who has recently had a stroke, you may not realize the individual had one, but you do know that something isn’t right. That is called non-linear thinking—moving quickly from an observation to an end-point. Depending on your experience, that endpoint might have an accuracy as low as 50-50. However, for people trained in creativity, the accuracy is about 99.7 percent. These quick, non-linear solutions, called snap judgments or instinct, are valuable in life and in business. Too often, though, these instincts are not used in the business world, but that’s about to change. 

Creative, Non-Linear People Benefit Business
Creative people get in touch with the emotion of what they’re creating in themselves and use that as a guide to produce the same emotion in another person from the same society. Businesses see the value of that skill—an employee making decisions based on the mindset of a person of the general society, not as an employee tied to a business. Your non-linear, or heuristic, thought processes are when you observe from the inside out, seeing how your own emotions mirror the ones you observe in others. Can people only achieve this non-linear thinking ability by earning an MFA? Of course not. Not everyone is willing to go back to school for another two to three years to get their MFA. Fortunately, you can encourage the same type of non-linear thinking in yourself and your employees. Here are two of the steps to an MFA mindset:

* Eliminate your framing bias.
How you ask questions determines the answers you get. For example, if you manufacture candy bars and you’re ranked second in sales behind brand A, you may ask yourself, “How can we take market share away from brand A?” The obvious linear answer: make your product taste like Brand A. You have labs, testers, and linear thought people who can make Brand B taste like Brand A, or even better. Due to framing bias, they ask the focus group, “Which one tastes like Brand A? Which one do you like better?” Brand B wins, because now it tastes just a little better than Brand A. But the problem with this scenario is that nobody ever went back and asked the basic question: Will our existing customers accept this change? The executives assume brand loyalty will drag customers along. But if they have a core group of fans who love the original taste of the product, in changing the flavor, they alienate them.

* Quantitate non-linear thought.
Learn to apply non-linear or heuristic research methods by taking a written inventory of your own feelings, prejudices, and thoughts on the subject at hand. Now you have the ability to walk into a situation and start observing how the situation itself affects you. That’s called “going with your gut.” If you are a representative of your culture, your environment, and your area of expertise, as well as in touch with your customers and what you experience and feel, then you have unframed your bias. If you are honest, you will be feeling the same reaction as your customers, and you have just gone from point A to point E without all the letters in between. A business person needs to walk through the mental door to unframe his or her biases. For example, with the chocolate bar example, a good businessperson would go to the store, or go to the factory, or call his or her best distributors. The businessperson would evaluate whether the new product was flying off the shelf. If so, that’s good. But he or she would not let that framing bias affect the next time he or she goes through the door, as the opposite may be true then. Such an instantaneous response leads you to continue doing what you’re doing or more of it, depending on how well it’s going.

Learning Non-Linear Thinking and Dual Processing
A new intern fresh out of medical school is the ultimate linear thought machine. In medical school, students are taught that symptom equals possible disease. A equals B. They then run a test to confirm if B equals C. This process, however, is not conducive to all types of medicine. As soon as these new interns walk into an emergency room, they quickly learn non-linear thinking. After a few days of training, experience, and drilling, they become parallel processing machines. They still do their linear thought processes but they also tap back into the non-linear thinking they had before they got their higher education.

Most people who are now are drifting to an MFA degree already have their MBA. They’ve learned and honed their linear thought processes into a sharp edge; now they get their MFA to hone and reactivate their non-linear thought processes. At the end of all that education, they must learn to parallel process on their own, much like the emergency room interns. In the future, people will pursue their MFA after getting their Bachelor’s in business. This way they will achieve both linear and non-linear thought processes and they’ll learn to parallel process. Five to seven years from now, we will see people start earning dual degrees, or universities may start offering a new degree that incorporates both. In the meantime, businesses will need to find ways to encourage parallel processing in their employees. They can do this in a few days of intense training in a corporate retreat setting, or spread over several weeks in a coaching environment. Getting back in touch with non-linear thinking is not hard. Being able to parallel process takes some practice, but the payoff will be more success for businesses, a steady job outlook, and higher earnings for those who master this skill.