PERSONAL SPECIAL.... Want to Know What Drives You? These 4 Personality Types Are the Key

Want to Know What Drives You? These 4 Personality Types Are the Key

    

Has a sudden jolt of personal insight ever blown your mind?

When I recently took Gretchen Rubin’s quiz at a friend’s suggestion, complete aha-ness dawned on me when I was deemed a “Rebel.” As a frequent taker of quizzes and tests, that rarely happens. It felt so on point. I also had an emotional connection to the word because my late father’s nickname for me was “little rebel.”

And when I read her book, The Four Tendencies, more and more became clear to me. My thought processes—and those of the people around me—began to make more sense. I could learn how to properly motivate myself, based on how I respond to expectations.

As a Rebel, I resist outer expectations and inner expectations too (yep, I struggle with commitment even to myself). I forge my own path and don’t necessarily go with the flow. When I was fortunate enough to enjoy tea with Rubin recently, she said something that made me feel understood: “Rebels understand how free we all are.”

I secretly always think to myself,Why does everyone seem to be doing what they’re expected to do in this world? You can live where you want! You can get start your own business! You don’t need permission to be whatever you want to be! Our life is up to us.

But what does your Tendency say about you? Here’s a wrap of Rubin’s Four Tendencies and their accompanying mantras. Read up and then take the quiz to find out your personality type.

Upholders: Adhere to outer and inner expectations

Mantra: “Discipline is my freedom.”

Put simply, Upholders stick to commitments to themselves and to others. They’re reliable, probably stick to a schedule and… well… get it done. People trust their follow-through. It’s the opposite of me, a Rebel. I wonder if life is easiest for Upholders because they probably abide by the 100-Percent Rule in making their decisions. There’s no overthinking or “but do I feel like doing it?”

According to Rubin, you might wish to improve on being rigid (and at times, defensive). Because it’s OK to make a mistake! And to delegate too. As a Rebel, I wonder if Upholders could benefit from evaluating how much satisfaction their actions bring them and checking in with their innermost desires once in a while. Because Upholders can seem (to me) a little on auto-pilot as they breeze through their days.

Questioners: Question all expectations; they'll meet an expectation if they think it makes sense.

Mantra: “I’ll comply, if you convince me why.”

My sister is a questioner, and her questions exhaust her (and all of us sometimes). “Is getting a dog a good idea? If so, why? If not, why not?” Put simply, Questioners like data. Because of this, they are fair-minded. They’re not people-pleasers because they are self-directed.

I think Questioners are the most interesting of the Tendencies, as they are always curious. And hey, it’s wise to seek information before making a decision. I also like the headstrong nature of Questioners (because of this quality, Rubin says it’s easy to get Rebels and Questioners confused). Historically speaking, they may also be our key change-makers, as they frequently question the status quo.

Rebels: Resist all expectations

Mantra: “You can’t make me, and neither can I.”

Rebels don’t live by conventional wisdom. They’re spontaneous and independent. If you’re a Rebel, you might struggle with self-discipline (another rosé, please! Who cares if it’s Monday at 9 p.m.?).

I’ve learned that we might want to consider allowing more structure into our days, because some rules and systems can be helpful and allow us to be more successful. For me, this is automation in my business and hiring people who are detail focused. Because passion needs structure, and feeling restless and defiant can be unproductive (don’t I know it).

Rebels might make life a little easier by being more agreeable at times—saying yes to family holidays, letting Jane plan your baby shower (even though you cringe at anything baby-themed), and just attending those mandatory internal meetings.

Obligers: Meet outer expectations, but struggle to meet expectations they impose on themselves

Mantra: “I’ll do anything you ask. Until I won’t.”

Obligers, being focused on delivering for and helping others, make great bosses and responsive leaders. They’re responsible. They care deeply about people. But they're most susceptible to burnout because saying no is hard for them.

It’s important to create boundaries to avoid resentment and even what Rubin calls “Obliger rebellion” (when you’ve had enough—oh my). Ever seen that? When someone gives, gives, gives… then blows up? I had an Obliger colleague who did everything for everyone (“Yes, I’ll run that errand. Of course I will go to San Francisco if you can’t make it. I’ll totally help you with your expense report!”), and one day he flipped out in a taxi when one demand too many came through via email request. Even though it seemed unfair, his Obliger rebellion did hurt his reputation over time. Boundaries matter!

So What Does It All Mean?

Socrates said, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” Knowing your Tendency can be tremendously helpful. For example, as a Rebel, working out is painful for me because conventional wisdom (a.k.a. my fit friends and scientific literature) tells me to. I hate it. So I have to position it another way. To convince myself to get to a barre class, I say, “For an hour, I’ll be free from my phone! No one can reach me, no matter what! Ha.”

That’s good motivation in my mind. A Questioner might want to assess the real value of their workout and dive in if it they’re convinced it’s worthwhile. An Obliger would do best with a workout buddy who holds them accountable to a Sunday run in the park. An Upholder wouldn’t have to convince themselves; they’d stick to their schedule.

Understanding yourself and other people means not only do we get the most out of our personality, but the motivations and actions of others make sense too. Because life is just easier—and better—when we all understand one another a little more.

BY SUSIE MOORE

https://greatist.com/live/the-four-tendencies-personality-types

MANAGEMENT SPECIAL ....The case for behavioral strategy PART I

The case for behavioral strategy PART I

Left unchecked, subconscious biases will undermine strategic decision making. Here’s how to counter them and improve corporate performance.

Once heretical, behavioral economics is now mainstream. Money managers employ its insights about the limits of rationality in understanding investor behavior and exploiting stock-pricing anomalies. Policy makers use behavioral principles to boost participation in retirement-savings plans. Marketers now understand why some promotions entice consumers and others don’t.

Yet very few corporate strategists making important decisions consciously take into account the cognitive biases—systematic tendencies to deviate from rational calculations—revealed by behavioral economics. It’s easy to see why: unlike in fields such as finance and marketing, where executives can use psychology to make the most of the biases residing in others, in strategic decision making leaders need to recognize their own biases. So despite growing awareness of behavioral economics and numerous efforts by management writers, including ourselves, to make the case for its application, most executives have a justifiably difficult time knowing how to harness its power.

This is not to say that executives think their strategic decisions are perfect. In a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey of 2,207 executives, only 28 percent said that the quality of strategic decisions in their companies was generally good, 60 percent thought that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones, and the remaining 12 percent thought good decisions were altogether infrequent. Our candid conversations with senior executives behind closed doors reveal a similar unease with the quality of decision making and confirm the significant body of research indicating that cognitive biases affect the most important strategic decisions made by the smartest managers in the best companies. Mergers routinely fail to deliver the expected synergies.³Strategic plans often ignore competitive responses. And large investment projects are over budget and over time—over and over again.⁵

In this article, we share the results of new research quantifying the financial benefits of processes that “debias” strategic decisions. The size of this prize makes a strong case for practicing behavioral strategy—a style of strategic decision making that incorporates the lessons of psychology. It starts with the recognition that even if we try, like Baron Münchhausen, to escape the swamp of biases by pulling ourselves up by our own hair, we are unlikely to succeed. Instead, we need new norms for activities such as managing meetings (for more on running unbiased meetings, see “Taking the bias out of meetings”), gathering data, discussing analogies, and stimulating debate that together can diminish the impact of cognitive biases on critical decisions. To support those new norms, we also need a simple language for recognizing and discussing biases, one that is grounded in the reality of corporate life, as opposed to the sometimes-arcane language of academia. All this represents a significant commitment and, in some organizations, a profound cultural change.

The value of good decision processes

Think of a large business decision your company made recently: a major acquisition, a large capital expenditure, a key technological choice, or a new-product launch. Three things went into it. The decision almost certainly involved some fact gathering and analysis. It relied on the insights and judgment of a number of executives (a number sometimes as small as one). And it was reached after a process—sometimes very formal, sometimes completely informal—turned the data and judgment into a decision.

Our research indicates that, contrary to what one might assume, good analysis in the hands of managers who have good judgment won’t naturally yield good decisions. The third ingredient—the process—is also crucial. We discovered this by asking managers to report on both the nature of an important decision and the process through which it was reached. In all, we studied 1,048 major decisions made over the past five years, including investments in new products, M&A decisions, and large capital expenditures.

The research analyzed a variety of decisions.

We asked managers to report on the extent to which they had applied 17 practices in making that decision. Eight of these practices had to do with the quantity and detail of the analysis: did you, for example, build a detailed financial model or run sensitivity analyses? The others described the decision-making process: for instance, did you explicitly explore and discuss major uncertainties or discuss viewpoints that contradicted the senior leader’s? We chose these process characteristics because in academic research and in our experience, they have proved effective at overcoming biases.

After controlling for factors like industry, geography, and company size, we used regression analysis to calculate how much of the variance in decision outcomes⁷ was explained by the quality of the process and how much by the quantity and detail of the analysis. The answer: process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six. This finding does not mean that analysis is unimportant, as a closer look at the data reveals: almost no decisions in our sample made through a very strong process were backed by very poor analysis. Why? Because one of the things an unbiased decision-making process will do is ferret out poor analysis. The reverse is not true; superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.

To get a sense of the value at stake, we also assessed the return on investment (ROI) of decisions characterized by a superior process. The analysis revealed that raising a company’s game from the bottom to the top quartile on the decision-making process improved its ROI by 6.9 percentage points. The ROI advantage for top-quartile versus bottom-quartile analytics was 5.3 percentage points, further underscoring the tight relationship between process and analysis. Good process, in short, isn’t just good hygiene; it’s good business.

The building blocks of behavioral strategy

Any seasoned executive will of course recognize some biases and take them into account. That is what we do when we apply a discount factor to a plan from a direct report (correcting for that person’s overoptimism). That is also what we do when we fear that one person’s recommendation may be colored by self-interest and ask a neutral third party for an independent opinion.

However, academic research and empirical observation suggest that these corrections are too inexact and limited to be helpful. The prevalence of biases in corporate decisions is partly a function of habit, training, executive selection, and corporate culture. But most fundamentally, biases are pervasive because they are a product of human nature—hardwired and highly resistant to feedback, however brutal. For example, drivers laid up in hospitals for traffic accidents they themselves caused overestimate their driving abilities just as much as the rest of us do.⁹

Improving strategic decision making therefore requires not only trying to limit our own (and others’) biases but also orchestrating a decision-making process that will confront different biases and limit their impact. To use a judicial analogy, we cannot trust the judges or the jurors to be infallible; they are, after all, human. But as citizens, we can expect verdicts to be rendered by juries and trials to follow the rules of due process. It is through teamwork, and the process that organizes it, that we seek a high-quality outcome.

Building such a process for strategic decision making requires an understanding of the biases the process needs to address. In the discussion that follows, we focus on the subset of biases we have found to be most relevant for executives and classify those biases into five simple, business-oriented groupings. (You can download a PDF of the groupings of biases that occur most frequently in business.) A familiarity with this classification is useful in itself because, as the psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, the odds of defeating biases in a group setting rise when discussion of them is widespread. But familiarity alone isn’t enough to ensure unbiased decision making, so as we discuss each family of bias, we also provide some general principles and specific examples of practices that can help counteract it.

Counter pattern-recognition biases by changing the angle of vision

The ability to identify patterns helps set humans apart but also carries with it a risk of misinterpreting conceptual relationships. Common pattern-recognition biases include saliency biases (which lead us to overweight recent or highly memorable events) and the confirmation bias (the tendency, once a hypothesis has been formed, to ignore evidence that would disprove it). Particularly imperiled are senior executives, whose deep experience boosts the odds that they will rely on analogies, from their own experience, that may turn out to be misleading.Whenever analogies, comparisons, or salient examples are used to justify a decision, and whenever convincing champions use their powers of persuasion to tell a compelling story, pattern-recognition biases may be at work.

Pattern recognition is second nature to all of us—and often quite valuable—so fighting biases associated with it is challenging. The best we can do is to change the angle of vision by encouraging participants to see facts in a different light and to test alternative hypotheses to explain those facts. This practice starts with things as simple as field and customer visits. It continues with meeting-management techniques such as reframing or role reversal, which encourage participants to formulate alternative explanations for the evidence with which they are presented. It can also leverage tools, such as competitive war games, that promote out-of-the-box thinking.

Sometimes, simply coaxing managers to articulate the experiences influencing them is valuable. According to Kleiner Perkins partner Randy Komisar, for example, a contentious discussion over manufacturing strategy at the start-up WebTV suddenly became much more manageable once it was clear that the preferences of executives about which strategy to pursue stemmed from their previous career experience. When that realization came, he told us, there was immediately a “sense of exhaling in the room.” Managers with software experience were frightened about building hardware; managers with hardware experience were afraid of ceding control to contract manufacturers.

Getting these experiences into the open helped WebTV’s management team become aware of the pattern recognition they triggered and see more clearly the pros and cons of both options. Ultimately, WebTV’s executives decided both to outsource hardware production to large electronics makers and, heeding the worries of executives with hardware experience, to establish a manufacturing line in Mexico as a backup, in case the contractors did not deliver in time for the Christmas season. That in fact happened, and the backup plan, which would not have existed without a decision process that changed the angle of vision, “saved the company.”

Another useful means of changing the angle of vision is to make it wider by creating a reasonably large—in our experience at least six—set of similar endeavors for comparative analysis. For example, in an effort to improve US military effectiveness in Iraq in 2004, Colonel Kalev Sepp—by himself, in 36 hours—developed a reference class of 53 similar counterinsurgency conflicts, complete with strategies and outcomes. This effort informed subsequent policy changes.

CONTINUES IN PART II

BOOK SPECIAL..... Learning from Netflix: How to Build a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility PART II

Learning from Netflix: How to Build a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility PART II

Knowledge@Wharton: Is the kind of culture that you’ve written about easier to implement in a startup environment — and as a company grows in scale and complexity and size, would that be hard to preserve? At what point do you need rules, regulations and policies to manage that process – instead of just dispensing with them as you advocate in the book?

McCord: If you’re in a regulated environment like banking or loans or medical or safety, then there are rules and regulations that are really critical.

The reason it’s easier in startups is because you feel more open to experimentation, and you don’t have the rules yet. You [also] don’t have the institutionalized behaviors that are associated with the rules. [Somebody might say], “I know that’s a good idea, but you can’t do that, because you have to ask for permission first.”

The problem for large institutions is that it’s not just that the rules are there. It’s the institutional behavior attached to it.

I was consulting with a company the other day, and we were talking about its complex bonus structure. Each person had their own goals. Their goals were rolled out to team goals. Team goals were rolled out to department goals, into division goals, and into corporate goals. Then there was a quarterly review of whether or not the individuals, the teams, met their goals – blah, blah, blah. Then we had to figure out the payout. They always paid 100% of their bonus – every year to every employee that was still employed – and had for years. It was called a “performance bonus.” When all was said and done, what you got the bonus for was showing up to work.

I had them delve in and calculate the cost of administering this process, in management time, in executive time, in administrative time, and in software time. [I said to them], “All of that time – it’s not just money – is time people aren’t working for your customer.” There is a real lack of ROI, or whatever is not ROI – like non-return on investment – of this kind of activity.

Knowledge@Wharton: If you had a magic wand that you could wave in dealing with this situation, what would you advocate they do?

McCord: I’d advocate they throw it away and see if there’s any difference. Put [the bonus] in pay. Stop [awarding bonuses] for a year. And see if the world as you know it doesn’t come to an end. I bet you it won’t. You’re going to … pay attention to the things that [you] were going to pay attention to, to pay the bonus. “What’s our return on investment? How’s our growth going?” You can still pay attention to those things without making it a process. In large corporations, it’s the undoing that’s hard.

Knowledge@Wharton: To do what you are saying would require what you call the practice of “radical honesty.” I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what that means and how it worked at Netflix.

McCord: I learned it from the engineers I work with. It’s a learned behavior. Here’s how engineers are wired: Their world is good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, zero or one. And anything in between is suspect. I learned through trial and error, when I started speaking HR-speak to them, [such as]: “Well, the system is enabled to provide you the empowerment so that you’re engaged in deliverables that will create an environment of happiness and well-being.” And they’d just roll their eyes back in their head. If I deconstruct that and write down that sentence and look at it again, I didn’t actually say anything. I learned to speak their speak. I learned to apply fact-based, data-driven behaviors.

Knowledge@Wharton: Can focusing on the future help to build a culture of freedom and responsibility?

McCord: Absolutely. I told a group of startup CEOs that the biggest smoke to notice in your company, or the biggest potential for fire, is nostalgia – wanting it to be the way it used to be, wanting the culture to stay the same, wanting to keep it the way it was. You have to assume there’s going to be growth and change.

[You have to be] constantly thinking about where you’re going to be, who your customer’s going to be, what you need to do differently, how you’re going to scale, and how the world’s going to look. Even if we wanted our companies to stay the same, our customers won’t. The world’s going to go on without us, whether we like it or not.

Knowledge@Wharton: Looking at the way in which HR departments are structured, which elements can you identify as being outdated and things that you should get rid of, and what is worth keeping?

McCord: One of my favorites is the annual performance review. I don’t think it’s very effective anymore. That one just needs a big rethink. The other one is bonus programs. There’s an assumption that people work for money, and many studies say that’s intrinsically not how people get satisfaction at work. In fact, it’s just delayed gratification that usually makes people unhappy.

Some of [what] we do simply doesn’t work. [For example], the way we recruit is pretty archaic. The idea of filling out a form with a list of skills and experience, and checking all the boxes in the form, and hiring somebody who checks all the boxes but doesn’t want to do it, is really broken, right?

I advocate figuring out the problems you need to solve, then hiring people who want to solve those problems and are capable of doing it. That’s a different kind of matchmaking, rather than recruiting for skilled and experienced people.

Almost everything that we do can use a refresh. I see the gamut of [HR executives] saying, “It’s our job to make the rules and force people to enforce them, because if not, they’ll sue us and misbehave and cheat and steal and lie.” With those types of HR departments, I lead them out into the parking lot or to the bus station or to the subway, and I say, “Really? All these people who have cars in this parking lot came to cheat and lie and steal? Wow – you didn’t do a very good job recruiting all these evil people.”

We’ve [also] got to dispel the myths about working that we keep saying and we know aren’t true. Companies aren’t going to keep you for the rest of your life and provide you with endless career progression.

Knowledge@Wharton: It seems to me that loyalty isn’t much in evidence in the business world. And it seems to me that there is some value to loyalty to one’s team and to people whom you have tried hard to recruit. How do you decide it’s the right time to let someone go? They may thrive somewhere else more than in the environment that you’ve brought them into.

McCord: There are a couple of logical ways to think about that. One of them is looking forward and knowing the team that you need to build in the future, and having clarity about that and what that team looks like, what they’re going to accomplish, what it’s going to take to be able to do it, and what’s the timeframe?

Say you’re a public company, and you need a CFO. You’ve got somebody in Accounting who wants to be a CFO someday, and they’re really smart and really capable. It doesn’t mean that they won’t be a CFO someday, but probably not next year. That’s a radically honest conversation you can have.

The second case is when the person is driven by an opportunity or something that they desperately want to do, and they want to have that opportunity in your company, and you just don’t have it. Keeping that person is the wrong thing to do, even if they’re amazing. You don’t want an amazing person who’s unhappy, because misery loves company.

When you have a team that’s clicking and the right people are on it … you don’t need to talk about loyalty. You don’t even need to talk about engagement. It’s called wanting to wake up and come to work and solve these problems with these people.

That’s where the word “loyalty” starts taking on connotations of family. Confusing those things has hurt us as employers and employees. Employees expect too much from their employers to “take care of them,” and we spend way too much time keeping people that we should just set free.

Knowledge@Wharton: You referred some time ago to some stumbles at Netflix. What are some downsides to the culture at Netflix? How did you manage those?

McCord: Oh, there are lots of them. The freedom and responsibility culture isn’t for everybody. A lot of people function much better with guardrails. Some people like a lot of structure, and they like working within the structure – particularly early in your career. So when you don’t know what the consequences are, and you don’t know where the walls are, you jump off cliffs a lot, unintentionally. So that was hard. Having very senior people come from other rigid companies into the culture and deprogramming them was [also] hard.

One important thing about the Netflix culture deck is we wrote it as an internal on-boarding document. We didn’t write a manifesto. We tried some stuff. Some of it worked really well, and some of it didn’t work very well. Some of it scaled, and some of it didn’t scale. But you won’t know if you don’t try.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-netflix-built-its-company-culture/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2018-05-29

AGILE SPECIAL..... Accidentally agile: An interview with the Rijksmuseum’s Taco Dibbits PART I

Accidentally agile: An interview with the Rijksmuseum’s Taco Dibbits PART I

The director of the national museum of Dutch art and history describes the central role of agility in the museum’s massive renovation project—and in its drive for perpetual renewal.

When its current building was completed in 1885, the Rijksmuseum, the national art museum of the Netherlands, was intended to serve as a cathedral to house the greatest treasures of Dutch art and history. Throughout the 20th century, it was increasingly deprived of its glory: its decorations were painted white, and it slowly became cluttered with modern offices and archives. To some, it had become a dusty labyrinth where people struggled to find their way.

At the turn of the millennium, the Dutch government, along with a group of corporate sponsors, offered a singular opportunity in the form of a major monetary gift: the chance to transform the entire museum all at once. Despite bumps along the way, including a surprise discovery of asbestos in the building that stretched the museum’s closure to ten years, the museum’s physical transformation ultimately spurred an organizational one as well. As museum director Taco Dibbits describes in this interview with McKinsey’s Wouter Aghina and Allen Webb, the museum’s staff inadvertently embraced agile organizational principles—forming, dissolving, and reforming teams that were more interdisciplinary than those it had employed in the past—as it worked to redesign its galleries.

After a successful reopening in 2013, Dibbits, as director of collections at the time, first stepped back with his team from an agile process, then reintroduced it when he and the team embarked on a 21st-century vision for the museum. Along the way, Dibbits says, he learned a great deal about the characteristics of great teams, the power of constraints to inspire creative solutions, and the role of the leader to get people out of their comfort zones. Although the Rijksmuseum differs in many respects from the typical company experimenting with agile approaches, Dibbits’s experiences as an accidental agile leader should be thought-provoking for a wide cross section of organization leaders.

The Quarterly: How were things organized at the museum before the renovation?

Taco Dibbits: In the old museum, the art was arranged by specialization and was, in a sense, a reflection of the organizational diagram of the museum staff. The curator of ceramics had her gallery of vases and bowls, the curator of glass had his gallery of champagne flutes and pitchers, and so on. Within these galleries, separated by medium, the materials were then organized chronologically. So, for instance, in the paintings galleries you would start with the Middle Ages and walk up to the 20th century. With each new category, the public would have to start all over again.

The Quarterly: What was the motivating idea for a new approach? How did it change the way things worked?

Taco Dibbits: What we sometimes forget is that when visitors come to a museum, they don’t generally know what they’re supposed to get out of it. We sought to change that by creating an experience that would give the public a sense of time and a sense of beauty. We thought the best way to do this was to create a more sweeping chronological arrangement, because a national museum like ours also serves as the physical memory of the nation. Therefore, if you want to create a historical narrative for the public, you have to start mixing all the collections that traditionally had been arranged by material.

We decided that we would divide the gallery installations century by century, starting in the Middle Ages and working all the way up to the 20th century. The question we wanted to answer was not how to assign objects to spaces but how to place objects in groups that are linked aesthetically and historically in some significant way.

This would mean a change for our curators, who had previously worked quite autonomously. Now, everyone would have to start working together. We did this by establishing a working group for each century made up of different curators, as well as a person from the education department who would think about the right interpretation approach for the public.

The Quarterly: Were these groups completely self-directed or was there some leadership role involved?

Taco Dibbits: Each working group was chaired by the person whose expertise was right for that century; for example, in the Netherlands, the 17th century was the Golden Age—with paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others—so the curator of paintings would chair that working group.

We encouraged the chairs to behave, to some degree, like enlightened despots, because we knew that otherwise, the groups would have tended not to make rigorous choices. We Dutch are all about consensus. But that kind of approach would have created a result that was too homogenous. We needed people in each group who could make their mark and say, “Well, the 18th century is the century of decorative arts. So that’s how we’re going to organize it.” You need a few people who push toward the highest-quality result, and those who are inspired by them to do the work and follow their lead.

The Quarterly: How did the proposal and selection process play out?

Taco Dibbits: It took about a year and a half for the groups to craft their proposals. There was very thorough research involved, and after that, each group presented its proposal to what we called the steering group.

Then the question for the management team became, “How are we going to slash the number of objects?” The 17th-century group, for example, presented far too many objects, around 3,000, which would never fit in the galleries. Any decision to cut down objects would naturally be frustrating for the working groups. It’s very difficult to “kill your darlings.” Our solution was to basically dissolve the task forces and assemble new ones. Their new mission was to create a selection one-third the size of what the first groups had proposed. They also had to write an argument for why they wanted to keep particular objects in, why they would be interesting to the public, and how these objects related to the others in the proposal. In this way, it gave all the specialists a feeling of ownership in the creation of the museum’s offerings, even beyond their own area of expertise.

The Quarterly: Did the reopening go as well as you had expected?

Taco Dibbits: We could not have imagined the scale of the success. The year of the reopening, in 2013, we had 2.25 million visitors, and the following year, the number of visitors increased by 250,000. At the time, we were so happy with how well things had gone—and so exhausted as a museum—that we didn’t immediately shift to new priorities. After two years, the previous director left, and I started in this role. Because I had been on the board in my previous role and I was an internal hire from within the museum, we could move quickly to draft a new vision and strategy. We didn’t include anybody else in that process, but once we had it on paper we opened it up for criticism. And we came away with a stronger vision, I think, because of those discussions with our supervisory board and works council.

CONTINUES IN PART II

LIFE SPECIAL ....3 Doable Ways to Make Real, Positive Change in Your Life

3 Doable Ways to Make Real, Positive Change in Your Life

"He screwed me over again!" my friend Sam said when her boyfriend broke up with her a second time—and left owing her $1,000.

Not only did he take her money, but he would also often disappear for days at a time and had even damaged her car ("I'll take it to the mechanic tomorrow," he said, though he never did). While of course, I had sympathy for her, in the end, she was giving him power—allowing herself to be stuck in a repeating cycle of being wounded and ripped off.

Sam knew this guy's player reputation and dated him anyway. She decided to lend him money. She made the decision to take him back after he already let her down more than once. In the end, what she needed more than anything was to take accountability for her role in this relationship.

Of course, when it comes to ending bad relationships, I'm talking exclusively about the garden-variety, that-person-is-such-a-jerk type—not instances of emotional or physical abuse. That's a whole other kettle of fish and usually involves making a plan to get out. You can learn more about it here.

But if you're stuck in a run-of-the-mill cycle of complaining and not making changes—with your friends, your work, or yes, even a relationship that's simply not fulfilling your needs—you may be in what's called a "victim loop," and the only way is to transform it into an "accountability loop."

Here's how:

1. Notice the signs.

What are you currently complaining about: Not having enough money? Being unfit? Having flaky friends?

In many cases, you can harness your earning power—for example, by learning fresh skills, asking for a raise, or starting a side hustle.

And if you're not as fit as you'd like to be, the truth is that no one controls how often you slip on those sneakers but you.

If you're sick of flaky friends, who exactly is responsible for you taking initiative with new (non-flaky) friendships? Or having a grown-up conversation with current friends about your needs being met as a reliable pal? Yep—that's you and you.

As an extremely punctual person, I told a chronically late friend how unfun it was to always be sitting at a bar or cafe for 20-25 minutes waiting for her while she did I-don't-know-what. I mean, once in a while is unavoidable, but not every time. Because my time matters too. She's rarely been late since—and said it's been a source of pride for her (even other people have been pleasantly surprised by her newfound punctuality).

Signs of dissatisfaction add up over time—rarely is something going wrong a total shock. What signs are you ignoring? A dwindling bank account, tighter jeans, annoyance over yet another cancellation text? Pay attention. The earlier you notice the signs, the sooner you can take decisive action to correct them.

2. Be flexible in shifting your focus to you.

A great way to begin is to start all sentences with the word "I."

Think about how much more power you have when you say, "I'd like to learn how to be a better conversationalist" instead of "People judge me for interrupting them, but that's just who I am!"

Where can you start using "I?" "I can," "I have," or "I will" is even better!

Let's say you can't cook (... I'm with you on that one). I constantly say things like, "Cooking is hard!" "Ingredients are expensive, and they always get thrown out!" and "Ugh, it's so annoying that at the end of an exhausting day we have to figure out what to eat!"

Instead, I could say:

"I can learn a couple cooking hacks—hey, these don't look too tricky" (and Nos. 6 and 20 look extra delish).

"I have a Trader Joe's four blocks away—I can make this happen."

"I'll benefit from less-salty Seamless orders, that's for sure!"

When we start a sentence with "I," it's empowering. It feels different. Because you are playing the active role! And that means you have the powaahhh! Try it even for a day and notice what it does for you.

3. Decide to accept full accountability for your life.

When something bad happens, thinking it's anyone's fault but yours is not going to help you—ever. When you declare your own accountability, not only are you acting as your highest, most mature self, but something remarkable happens. The change-making magic of control is put squarely in your hands, and it starts to feel pretty damn powerful.

Here are couple of ways to activate your accountability:

Be honest with yourself.

When something upsetting happens, be quiet with yourself for a minute. Put both hands on your heart and ask yourself, "What do I know to be true?" Your inner guide will give you new direction. And it will only be based on what you are to do—not fixing anyone or proving anything to any other human. All of the answers are within you when you decide to take your power back. And exquisite honesty yields exquisite capability.

Be willing to shed something.

When we are willing to let go of something—a person, a physical object, a belief… after the initial scariness and sadness, there is space. That space allows fresh thinking and new opportunities to flow to you. Think about it—nature does this all time. Shedding is natural and healthy. We don't freak out when dead leaves fall off the tree, right? The tree ain't dead! It's in the cycle of renewal. Our bodies need to shed old cells and create new ones, and so do we.

Do you need to shed something in your life sooner rather than later? You know the truth.

Sam never got her money back, but her heart healed, and she learned a lesson worth way more than $1,000:

The biggest mistake we make when we give away our power is thinking we don't have any.

BY SUSIE MOORE

https://greatist.com/live/stop-the-blame-game