In the last video, I talked about leverage and how to persuade people that change is inevitable. It's imminent, and it's personal. But you know what? There are still some people who will respond to all of that and say, Yeah, I get it, he's gonna happen, it's gonna happen soon. It's gonna happen to me, but I don't need to engage. What can you do then?
Well, the technique I'm going to show you comes from a therapeutic background. It's called a pattern interrupt, they got themselves into a pattern of thinking, I'm in a safe place. I understand my organization. I understand my role in the organization. I like the way things work. Now, I don't want to engage with any changing area in that pattern, that kind of circular loop of thinking and you need to interrupt that Now in therapy, this is an important way of interrupting people's patterns of unresolvable thinking that gets them into bad emotional states.
A therapist friend of mine, uses a cup of water, a plastic cup of water on a small table place between him and his client. If they get into a hysterical state or a repetitive tearful state, which is unhelpful and repeated, he needs to interrupt the pattern so he will cross his legs. And he's very artful in the way he does this. He crosses his legs, he accidentally kicks the table, the water flows up spills all over the person who is tearful or angry or upset. And I'm all wet, and that breaks the pattern. When that happens a couple of times, their brain gets the message that this needs to change.
And that's what we need to do is change leaders. Except of course, we can't spill water over them. By the way, the classic The classic pattern interrupt is illegal in most countries, which is to slap someone. You remember the old movies, someone gets hysterical and someone else slaps them. That's a pattern interrupt, do not slap people in the workplace or anywhere. So how can we create a pattern interrupt?
What we need to do is confront someone, suddenly, with an experience that they cannot deny. that demonstrates the absolute need for change. Let me give you an example. I worked for an organization where we were asked to find efficiency savings across the organization, big numbers at one of those efficiency savings that struck us very early on, particularly as I come from a project management background was the vast number of projects they had running. And many of these projects were going in opposite directions or perhaps two projects were doing the same thing. There was duplication, there was overlap, there was conflict there were projects that hadn't been properly signed off.
There were projects that were going badly wrong. And there were projects that they should never have been doing in the first place. And we told the finance director this, we said, you need to cancel lots and lots of projects. He said, Don't worry, every project we're doing vital. We said no. And he said, Yes.
And we couldn't get him to recognize the need to start examining projects and canceling them. So one day, we decided we needed to interrupt his pattern. So what did I do? I got little index cards. And on each index card, I wrote the name of the project as some key statistics about it. And there were hundreds of them.
And quietly, one morning, we plastered all of these over the walls of the boardroom. And then invited the finance director and some of his key personnel and one or two other senior executive Seems to a meeting. And this they came in, they said, what's this all over the wall? And we said, that's your project. And they said that can't be we have got that many projects and we're so nice. You just made those up.
No. Find us a project that we can't prove exists. And we'll accept it. But they couldn't and they suddenly realize confronted with this vast mass of cards, that they had to do something that was a pattern interrupt. The strongest way to demonstrate to anybody they leave brace