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This is another in our series of previews of the material inside our knowledge base. We have mindset material to help owners, managers and mentors understand key concepts and communicate them effectively to their Teams; Team-facing training material that directly shares important knowledge and expectations; and hands-on tools like conversation scripts, meeting agendas, decision trees, worksheets, and other methods to help you organize information and triage your ongoing process toward change and growth.

“The person who says they know what they think but cannot express it usually does not know what they think.”  —Mortimer J. Adler, “How to Read a Book”

The Conflict Buster helps you process a situation into an outline for a conversation and a group of lists to help you execute that conversation as effectively as possible. 

I'll say before you read this that often just beginning this exercise is enough to get you to pick up the...

This is another in our series of previews of the material inside our knowledge base. We have mindset material to help owners, managers and mentors understand key concepts and communicate them effectively to their Teams; Team-facing training material that directly shares important knowledge and expectations; and hands-on tools like conversation scripts, meeting agendas, decision trees, worksheets, and other methods to help you organize information and triage your ongoing process toward change and growth. 

Dr. MacInnis always practiced under the assumption that if you weren’t getting unsolicited compliments on your needle technique, you weren’t doing it right. The cheek-shaking technique was how he earned those unsolicited compliments. He counted it among the items the success of his practice was built on. In the Growth Platform, we’ve enshrined it as an Effective Action in Dentist’s 4Blocks. We include a video to show not only the technique with the...

This post is to give you a peek inside our e-learning suite. We want to give you a sense of our style, our values, and the kinds of information we share. Enjoy as some shop-talk reading, and share with a colleague or your Team members. We'd love to hear how any of this conforms to your experiences, sums them up nicely, fulfills a need for training--or seems to come from somewhere totally unexpected. Let us know in the comments or by dropping us a line at [email protected] --Cheers! RK

Background Note: If you're not providing thoughtfully complete standards and expectations material with the team, you're not supporting them. Studies and successful practice show that sharing clear rationale behind Team expectations, or "The Why" is the most important thing you can give a competent team. Training is not about doing the learning for your Team, and it's not about assigning "The How" and letting them bump into walls as they try to understand how to adapt...

Why does anyone try to do things differently than the way it first occurs to them? To get different results, usually. 

But what about when you want to do things the same way, over and over again reliably? That's what an intentional approach to running a business is all about, and it's the goal of all business systems.

Let's explore this difference by talking about decision trees and desire paths.

Desire Paths

A desire path is something we've all seen. If there is no paved path to a drinking fountain at a park, the shortest or easiest path will be visibly worn in by foot traffic. Paths to water are a great subset of examples and a good way to think about desire paths.

There is a certain kind of truth in evidence in desire paths, along the lines of "Form is the diagram of forces," and so systems designers in specialties from civil engineering to software engineering observe the emergence of desire paths and incorporate them, sometimes with...

Soon we'll be blogging regularly about management, decision making, organization and anything else we think will entertain, inspire and motivate. Watch this space!

In the meantime, here's a representation of the engineer's creed as a decision tree. 

-RK