Sometimes Business Changes Need A Lot Of Patience To Mature

Patience Works Quicker

I was not a great college student.  My senior year was the year I decided it was important to study hard.  That was the year I almost produced straight A's.  However, prior to that year I was more interested in playing baseball and going to parties.  I was one of those kids who could be a serious irritation to the education system.   I linked up with the wrong set of friends and lost the right reasons why I was attending college in the first place. I did not leave a path of wonderful exhibits along my college trail.

There are a couple of educational highlights that stand out, which is amazing.  One of those highlights was some experiential lessons I received in a psych laboratory class.  The class was actually a cool class.  I took this class when I was junior and my academic efforts were beginning to turn around for the good.  I was actually enjoying the path of learning some new things.  I quit worrying about how much others knew about information and lessons that were brand new discoveries to me.  I became more excited about finding new patterns of thinking that were new and interesting.

The lab work we did in that psychology class was an experiment to teach a rat how to press some buttons and receive some pellets of food and a drink of water.  I had a partner in that lab class as we shared a rat in our experiment.  I do not remember my partners name.  I can barely picture this partner in my mind, vaguely.  I do remember how impatient my partner was.  I remember how we used to go to class and work for two hours each day during class to get our rat to do what we wanted it to do.  I remember how stupid our rat was.  Our rat did not seem to have a lot of intelligence.  Our rat could not figure out where the water cup was located.  Our rat did not seem to have a very good nose for finding the food pellets either.  It was a tough lab test.  I actually liked the instructor, the learning material and the lab project.  I made my mind up that our rat was going to beat all of the other rats and learn how to get his own pellet and water feedings by learning how to push the buttons all by himself.  I decided to study how to make that happen.

I would go to the lab after a day of school and work on teaching our rat how to find the levers and make his food and water come into their feeding trays.  My instructor taught me how to use the method called, "successive approximation," to get this training done.  I caught on to the process.  It truly is a patience game.  The trainer with the most patience will be the one who completes the project first.  I learned how quickness comes from slowness.  My lab partner was not very patient.  He would foul up the good work we were doing on the patience game.  We would need to start over with each return back to the lab from day to day.  Our training was moving in an endless circle.  Therefore, I recognized that in order to get this training done right, I would need to do it at night when my impatient partner was not around to screw it up.

The idea behind the experiment was to teach the rats how to feed and water themselves.  There was a lever in the large cage for the rats to push on that would drop a pellet into a small dish for them to eat.  There was another button for the rats to push to release a few drops of water into a little tray.  Our lab job experiment was to try and teach our rats how to feed and water themselves.  The only tools we had to train this rat was a series of cords and buttons to operate the water release and pellet release mechanisms.  We had another cord that managed the buzzer in the cage and one to manage the little light in the cage.  The idea was to use the buzzer and the light to help teach the rat when it made the right moves to approach the food and water trays.  It sounds easy.  It was not.

Successive approximation was the technique we were instructed to use.  The idea behind this technique was to reward the rat for making the right moves.  When the rat was moving about inside the cage it would have its back to the light and levers on the other end.  When the rat turned around to face the direction of the light and levers, we were instructed to press the buzzer and turn on the light.  Each time the rat made a move towards the light and lever area, we were instructed to press the buzzer and light button again to reward the rat movement.  If the rat made good moves that were significant enough, we would press the food and water buttons to release a little reward for the rat to receive.  It was truly a serious patience game.  My partner did not get it.  He was a 'bad' human rat in this experiment.  He was very impatient.  He believed that by giving out a ton of food and water into the trays the rat would catch on and go to them all of the time.  He was correct.  The rat would stare at those trays for hours upon end, waiting for the food and water to come out.  Not once did the rat ever make a move to the side of the cage to push on the levers that would release the drops of water and the pellet of food.  Not once.  We were losing the lab experiment game.  Other students were making better progress.

You Might Be The Only One Who Is Patient

I decided to work on my partner.  My partner was not getting it.  His destructive methods were killing the lessons our rat would learn.  My partner could not see his destructive leadership methods.  His patience to perform this task correctly was on the low side.  It was obvious he was not going to modify his destructive working ways.  Our rat lab project was not very high on his personal list.  He reminded me of my careless behavior during the first three years of my college efforts.  Oh my, how the tables turn.

Our lab work was only a small part of the class that we attended.  The time we spent in the lab was given a lot of leeway by our instructor.  We could go to the lab anytime we wanted to go.  We were only required to attend the classroom lessons when they were scheduled.  All the lab work was permitted to be done when we wanted to do that work, at our leisure.  The instructor was rarely present in the lab.  This arrangement gave me the opportunity to tell my partner that I would cover for him if he wanted to 'skip' lab and do something else.  He jumped at the chance.  I covered his and my own lab schedules.  I essentially fired my assistant.  I did the lab work by myself.  My partner was not patient enough to do the right work.

This gave me the opportunity to work slower and more effectively.  I began unwinding the bad habits the rat had learned.  It took a lot of time with the buttons, buzzer and light.  However, I noticed that the rat learned how to recognize the buzzer and light.  The rat was no longer looking for food and water.  The rat was learning how to recognize the buzzer and light, then it knew it got food and water for the recognition of the buzzer and the light.  Now all I needed to do was to get the rat to learn how to make the right moves towards the levers.  I took a lot of hours and a lot of patience to get that rat to do the right moves.  Sometimes I would spend three to four hours each night in the lab working with him to get him to recognize which movements created the best rewards.

I worked such long hours on the project that I met the college building maintenance crew.  They were the ones who cleaned and fed the rats at night, when the lab was closed.  I asked them to do me a favor.  Skip feeding my rat tonight.  I want him more hungry tomorrow.  They knew I was paying very close attention to my rat so they saw no potential for any mistreatment of my rat.  They agreed.  The next day, my rat was a lot more responsive to comply with my lessons for finding the food and water.  At the end of that term, the psych instructor used my rat as the example to the class of how you teach a rat how to feed and water itself.  He had me describe the successive approximation techniques I used.  By now the whole class knew my partner had skipped out of the lab work.  Everyone knew how I used the maintenance crew to get done what I got done.  The instructor was able to teach the class a whole bunch of lessons that evolved from this one term.  He used our team as the example of how humans work with each other to accomplish the same steps the rats were learning.  It was a classic college experience.  The best lesson of that experience came from the patience needed to perform the change.  None of the other students had the 'right' patience to perform the 'right' steps to make the 'right' results.  None of them.

Patience is the key.  Patience was the difference.  Humans are not very patient.  Neither are rats.  If you want to beat your competition, learn how to become more patient.  Your competition does not know how to do that step.  Learn how to perform it well.

Sometimes business changes need a lot of patience.  Be more than willing to offer more patience.  It may be the difference between quicker success and slower developments.  I found the more slower I went, the faster the rat learned.  When the term ended, none of the other rats had progressed as much as mine had learned.  We will talk about this same subject on the next post.  I will use a real business example to help make this point.  It is a vital lesson to get under your business belt.  Become more patient.

Until next time...