Sherpa Alliance

Achieving breakthroughs is hard work - by definition we are trying to create systemic solutions to systemic problems which don’t happen by accident.  We are typically gridlocked with insufficient time, money and resources.  To unlock the gridlock, we need to employ the principle of compound interest and the 1% solution.

• The 1% Solution:  Looking for a small change you can make (stopping something, starting something or continuing something in a modified way) which will create just 1% wiggle room, of time, money and resources - you aren’t looking for 20%, or 10%, or 5%, just 1% - that’s all!  No matter what the issue is around which we are gridlocked, we can always find a 1% solution of some sort.
• Compound Interest:  As Einstein said, "The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest".  Take the action to liberate the 1%.  Now take that 1% of wiggle room you have created in time, money and resources and reinvest it in figuring out how to unlock the next 1% of wiggle room, so that 1% becomes 2%.  Just another 1%, that’s all!  Now reinvest that 2% in figuring out how to get to 5%,  and so on - 5% to get to 10% and 10% to get to 20%.  Compound interest at work!

That get’s you to the start of the 80/20 Rule/Pareto Principle of cause and effect - that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.  You have compounded your way from 1% to 20% to 80% - now a breakthrough is with your grasp and reach.

Suppose the gridlock issue is your Personal Productivity, for instance, feeling maxed out every week with no time to be more strategic.  20% would be one day a week!  Imagine how that would change your life if you could give yourself back 1 day a week! The problem is that many executives go looking for the 20% straight away, looking for a big fix solution which will create an instantaneous breakthrough - maybe using a new time/productivity management tool (some new software or a new day planner) or purging their office/setting up a new filing system or some thing else of that nature.  Typically, those attempts don’t work well, because we haven’t progressivley liberated the time and space (energy and attention) to implement them well, fully utlize the functionality/benefits and adopt the new disciplines/habits required.  If we aren’t careful, at best we end up with another initiative gathering dust and, at worst, we end up with another problem (rather then a solution) on our list.

Go looking for 1% solutions instead - what can we do today, which will make tomorrow just a little bit better than today?  Staying with the Personal Productivity example, 1% solutions might include:

• Delegating a piece of your responsibility to someone else.
• Evolving a meeting or combination of meetings to be more time effective/efficient (which might include having a new meeting to batch-up some of the interactions which otherwise occur throughout the day, in a disruptive way - Week 12 Tip:  Holding a morning Meeting - just do it!).
• Stopping doing something - such as attending a particular meeting you don’t need to be at, or getting off a non-profit or professional-association board you are on which isn’t panning out, or stopping fielding problems/disputes/technical issues the way you do (taking the monkey off someone else’s back, as the saying goes).
• Getting you admin assistant (if you have one) to take some time-consuming things off your plate (fielding your voice-mails for instance and/or certain categories of e-mails) and/or to agree and adopt a new pattern in your daily/weekly/monthly calendar as to when you will take meetings and when you won’t.
• Or something else along those lines which can be a 1% solution.  Just 1% is all you are looking for - that’s all!

 You can apply the same 1% solution approach to any kind of gridlock issue:

• A software system which is becoming a legacy problem or the lack of a software system to handle a complex process.
• A cross-functional process which isn’t working or is non-existent.
• A facilities constraint where we are running out of room and/or things are becoming untidy, disorganized and ineffiicent.
• A product line and/or market segment which is losing sales momentum and/or profitability.
• A relationship with a strategic client/account which is strained and at risk.

You will be under constant assault from dabblers, obsessives and hackers (Dabbler, Obsessive, Hacker or Master?), including the dabbler in you too, who will want to go straight for the 20% solution rather than plodding along towards it in a more compounding way, loving the plateau and waging war against the quick-fix, fast-temporary-relief, anti-mastery mentality.  Resist the temptation to look for a seemingly easy, fast-track, route as they often turn out to be snake-oil.  If there really was an easy, fast-track route, you would have found it and done it a long time ago.  There is a reason why you are gridlocked (on whatever issue it is you are working) because you have a systemic problem requiring a systemic solution, which is not going to be solved easily and quickly.  Unlocking the gridlock and compouding to a 20% breakthrough will be hard, progressive work, finishing big, but starting small.

Another example, in addition to the Personal Productivity one we have discussed, which most of us have personal experience with is the first bullet above:  a software system which is becoming a legacy problem or the lack of a software system to handle a complex process.  This is a classic case where we can rush head first into a big-fix solution, only for it to become a problem rather than a solution (software deployments are notorious for this, with a commonly held statistic that 80% of them fail to go as planned, typically to a very substantial and painful degree).  Why?  Becuase we didn’t start small, compounding 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%, 20% to make sufficient time and space (energy and attention) , not to mention money and resources, to tackle a major software deployment properly, devoting adequate planning, training and executive focus and leadership to it.  Typically, these projects get short-changed and end up being another problem (if not train-wreck) on our list, at least for a considerable period of time, rather than a solution.

This principle of compound interest and the 1% solution is something you can get started with right away.  Choose a gridlock issue to start working on this week and go looking for the 1% to be implemented by the end of the week, so that you can be reinvesting it next week in getting to 2%.  Maybe the following week you can be reinvesting the 2% to get to 5% and next month, 5% to 10% and the month after, 10% to 20%.  Three months from now you could have changed you life and it all started with looking for 1%, which we can all find - I challenge you that it is always there to be found.  Often times, a good issue to start with is your Personal Productivity, as that is the root-cause gridlock of other gridlock in your business, becuase you just don’t have the time, energy and attention to devote to them.  Once you start compounding interest from your 1% solution on that as a core issue, you can start looking for 1% solutions on a range of other issues.  That’s how breakthroughs happen - start small and finish big!  As Einstein also said, "Its not that I’m so smart, its just that I stay with problems longer".