The Power
of Three
I recently wrote an article in Cumbria Business on The
Power of Three. In today’s volatile,
crazy, Trumpian world, all businesses are facing pressure – pressure coming at
them from all angles, all directions – all the time.
Employees at
every level of the Company are facing this pressure 24/7 at work, at home.
Pressure is expectation, scrutiny and consequence.
It is the curtain coming down, the shutters closing,
the red mist rising. It leads to tightening,
anger, panic, choking and poor decision-making.
(Watch the US President for all five symptoms – sometimes all in one
Tweet.)
Inspirational leaders realise that pressure is a
privilege – it shows we are standing up and trying to accomplish and
achieve. They relish it because they
know themselves and their instinctive reactions to pressure and have
identified, practiced and ritualised simple techniques to absorb the pressure,
and to use it – jiu-jitsu-like – to feed calmness, clarity and capability. They keep a ‘Blue Head’, not a ‘Red
Head’. This is practiced throughout the
All Blacks rugby organisation – players and coaches are taught to focus on
Clear Thought. Clear Talk. Clear Action.
I’ve been a Manchester City supporter since my favourite
player Colin Bell moved from Bury to the Cityzens in 1966. And today the world’s best football coach,
Pep Guardiola, has got the entire squad focused on relishing pressure, and
thinking and acting clearly and cohesively as one.
Bad decisions at the highest levels of sport and
business are not usually made through lack of knowledge or lack of skill. They are made because of an inability to
handle pressure at the pivotal moment.
In 2003, Clive Woodward and Brian Ashton called this TCUP – Thinking
Correctly Under Pressure – and England’s 2003/2007 Rugby World Cup squads
demonstrated their mastery of these principles time after time.
In Peak Performing teams and companies, people share
the same Purpose, same Dream, same Focus and same Language. In Pressure situations there is nothing as
successful as The Power of Three. A
common language shared by all that delivers clarity in pressure
situations. If you have a direction you
want to go in, if you can describe it succinctly and clearly, that’s the starting
point.
In football, the pressure is at its highest when the
opposition are in possession of the ball.
At Manchester City, Pep has coached the 5” rule. When a City player loses the ball and the
team is under pressure, everyone follows the same Power of Three mantra:
React
Recover
Regain.
Succinct.
Clear. In 5” – get that ball
back.
In business, I used to measure all my leaders on their
Business IQ – which I summarised using the Power of Three:
Fail
Fast
Learn
Fast
Fix
Fast.
Pilots when faced with a crisis in flight are all
trained in the same disciplines:
Aviate
Navigate
Communicate.
First focus on keeping the plane airborne; second fly
the plane in the right direction, third tell people where you’re flying the
plane.
It’s a simple, practical process that has saved
lives. Its simplicity enables pilots to
orient themselves and take the right steps in the right order.
Paramedics have their own Power of Three for first
aid:
Assess
Adjust
Act.
Assess the situation; adjust your approach to suit the
situation, act accordingly. The process
creates clarity and certainty without losing urgency.
The Power of Three gives us a structure we can absorb,
remember and follow in a stepwise process to handle the pressure
situation. By harnessing this three
point structure, mantras create a strong linguistic chain of events; they take
you from chaos, through clarity and into action, automatically.
As the Maori tell us:
Titiro
Whakarongo
Kōrero.
Look.
Listen. Speak.
