To be done with your weeks work in 2 hours, youll need to become 20 times more effective, a 2,000 percent solution. The steps for creating a 2,000 percent solution (accomplishing 20 times more with the same time, effort, and resources) are outlined here:

1. Understand the importance of measuring performance.

2. Decide what to measure.

3. Identify the future best practice and measure it.

4. Exceed the future best practice.

5. Identify the ideal best practice.

6. Pursue the ideal best practice.

7. Select people with the optimal talents and encourage them to succeed.

8. Repeat the first seven steps.

This essay looks at eliminating mental barriers that make it difficult to accomplish step five.

Remove Blinders to Envision Perfection

The ideal best practice is simply the most effective process that can possibly be accomplished by anyone over the next five years. It will usually exceed the future best practice by a wide margin, and the ideal best practice reflects a performance level that might not normally be reached for decades. Heres an example: In corporate communications, an ideal best practice would mean having all employees receive, understand, and act on a message in appropriate ways within a few seconds. We know thats possible because people after seeing a large fire, smelling smoke, and hearing a fire alarm will begin evacuating a building in that amount of time. By comparison, your organizations performance today represents a tiny fraction of what is possible. People perform nearly perfectly all the time in many different ways. Put those perfectly performing people into an organization, and its often the same as removing 99 percent of their intelligence. Thats the negative consequence that follows from employing poorly designed processes.

Before searching out the ideal best practice for your process, let us observe that you are seeing the ideal best practices of near perfection all around you on a daily basis. But chances are that you dont notice the near perfection at all. Instead, your focus is probably on what isnt working well


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