A lesson from a cake container

I watched someone lift a cake out of a plastic container and they were able to do it easily using little tabs attached to a false bottom. Obvious when you think about it, but I had never seen this before. A small improvement, but a big difference!

It got me thinking about other things that I took for granted.

What do you use or what do you do regularly that has become habit and normal, and you no longer think about it?

Think of a small tweak to the design or process that would make a difference, even just a small difference.

Assume that everything could be improved and it’s just a matter of figuring out what that tweak could be.

Apply the tweak, and think of another one.

You are now following the philosophy of Kaizen which seeks to achieve small, incremental changes for improvement. Here is a list of many other tools and techniques for quality improvement.

I’m riding in an orange taxi

There’s a new local taxi company in town and I only noticed them because they painted their cars orange. So I tried them out, and now I am riding in an orange taxi on my way to the airport.

They did something different and got noticed.

Just stop for a moment and think about what you want to be noticed for.

What can you do to improve the odds of being noticed for what you want to be known for?

And what else?

Think about the ‘touch points’ where you interact with others, and that’s not just face to face.

Here are some other tips on getting noticed for the right things.

They should know what to do – it’s obvious!

Someone said to me “People aren’t doing what I want!”

I asked him if those people knew what he wanted, and he said: “Of course, it’s obvious!”

As you have probably guessed, the problem was that they didn’t know what he wanted. Just because it seemed obvious to him, doesn’t mean it was obvious to anybody else.

What have you got going on where you are trying to influence others to do something?

Here is a checklist of things to think about to improve your influencing success rate.

Truly dangerous, or just scary?

We use fear as a signal to move away from things that are dangerous and scary.

But we can get confused. Some things can be scary but not dangerous. When we avoid change, it is often because it is scary, even if it is not dangerous.

What is a change you are thinking about doing that feels scary, but when you think about the worst that could happen, it really is not that dangerous?

> Learn to spot the scary stuff that’s not dangerous.

By the way, this also works the other way around. We can be doing dangerous stuff with significant and bad consequences, and yet, because it doesn’t feel scary at the time, we keep doing it. Think about diet and lifestyle; think about following the crowd, even if you know it’s wrong and that one day what you have done will come back to haunt you; think about doing the same old thing because it’s so easy, and later it becomes the greatest regret of your life that you didn’t reach for something more.

> Learn to spot the dangerous stuff that’s not scary.

Attribution: I got this idea of scary vs dangerous from this blog