Creating a New Strategy

I started a new book a few days ago. I’m not that far into the book yet, but a few things have really stood out to me. As I was reading them, I wondered if any of it could translate into the workplace. The author looked at every single war over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. The larger country won 71.5 percent of the time. In my mind, that’s a C- on the grading scale and not very good. Here is where the numbers get even crazier. What happens when the smaller country decides to not fight the way the way the larger country had planned on fighting.  The smaller country’s winning percentage goes from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent. The example the author gives is, what if The United States went to war against Canada. The United States has a population ten times greater than Canada. If Canada chose to fight unconventionally, the numbers show that Canada would be likelier to win the war. As I read that, it just doesn’t make any sense. How can someone with all the numbers and all the resources lose?  As I was thinking about all of it, I thought about work. How many times do we do everything the way that we are expected to do it. Then we find ourselves losing because we don’t have the manpower or the resources. I believe that if we look at the example from above, it will actually show that if we choose to change the way we do things, we actually have a better chance of winning.  That means that we must figure out what everyone is expecting and then change the game. The thought of actually taking the rules and throwing them out and creating our own rules sounds amazing. We know what we want to accomplish, but how we get there is always up to us. How we talk to people, how we train people. We can make the rules. All of this leads me to the next thing that I read. The author was talking about the size of classrooms. He had tons of examples from schools and teachers on what the perfect size of a classroom is and why. If the class is too big, too much is going on. If the class is too small, you don’t have enough going on. It all made sense, but not the interesting part to me. The interesting part was when he talked about an economist who looked at some Dutch school children. He concluded that the number of peers you have had a surprising correlation with academic performance. If you were a poor student but had other poor students around you asking the same questions you had and were going through the same struggles you were, everyone improved. Most of us don’t have a perfect situation. We go to work, and we have people that are struggling. We see some potential, but we can’t figure out how to bring it out. We spend most of our time hoping that we can find it before we must get rid of them. So, what would happen if we grouped everyone together by their current talent level? All your elite performers would be in the same area, you could show numbers so that they could push each other. All those people who have potential, we could put all of them together and then have someone available to answer questions and help. If people had similar questions, you could bring them together to show them what to do or you could answer questions together, so you don’t have to keep repeating yourself. Can you use what you learned about putting people with their peers and combine that with what we learned about doing things unconventionally and a find a way to win even when the odds are stacked against you? The hardest part seems to be willing to do it. I need to find out what my opponents are doing, and what they are expecting. Then I need to do something else. I need to be willing to be uncomfortable and move things around so that people are around their peers. I also need to be willing to make an honest assessment of where people are at. Just because someone is a nice person doesn’t mean that they are good at their job. Just because they said they would be more comfortable somewhere else, doesn’t mean it’s the right place to be. I guess I need to go figure out a new strategy!