382: The Immense Power of Clarity with Karen Martin

Pete Mockaitis
Karen, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome at your Job podcast.

Karen Martin
Hi Pete, great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes, well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. To start, I understand you have an aspiration to write not just business-y type books, but also thrillers. What’s the story here?

Karen Martin
Oh, I don’t even know where it came from. I always liked to write and I always liked to read. I tended as I became an adult to read mysteries and thrillers with the early John Grisham books and everything and just always loved it. Then I moved to Los Angeles and I was surrounded by screenwriters and film people, so I was just always thinking about plots and subplots and characters.

I started writing back I think it was in ’93 and wrote one completely, got an agent. But he – it was pretty funny. He wanted me to raise the body count, meaning kill more people. Seriously, I’m not kidding about this, you have to actually think about how to kill people.

Pete Mockaitis
And you do.

Karen Martin
You really do. I just got to where I didn’t like having to think – I had a whole shelf of books about how to kill people, poisons and gas and guns and-

Pete Mockaitis
And the FBI knocks on your door, “Hey Karen, checking in.”

Karen Martin
Yeah, yeah. I just decided I didn’t really have it in me, even though I wanted to do it. I don’t really think I have it in every cell of my body to kill people, so I’m not writing thrillers anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well, so I’m intrigued, what was your favorite way to kill people? I don’t know how I want to define the word ‘favorite’ but I’ll leave it to you.

Karen Martin
Well, so I always liked the non-gun way because I just can’t stand guns. I did come up with a couple clever ways. I can’t remember the name of the drug, but there’s a drug – it’s kind of like the modern day version of what’s that tree – oh, I’m blanking. What’s that tree – serum that comes from trees and it kills people pretty quickly. It’s like the modern day version of that. I can’t think of it.

But I just heard of something. I heard that someone killed someone just recently using Visine and putting Visine in a drink.

Pete Mockaitis
How much Visine do you need to-?

Karen Martin
Apparently not much because this – I think it was a spouse thing. I don’t remember if it was the wife killed the husband or vice-versa, but Visine, really? But these are the kind of things I would think about on a regular basis. I now think about how to help leaders and businesses perform at higher levels, so much ….

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes, I’m more into that as well. Boy, I’ve used Visine many times. Now I’m wondering.

Karen Martin
I have too. It does kind of sting when it goes in. I didn’t look up the ingredients yet. I should do that when we’re done.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. Now can you tell us – what’s your company and the Karen Martin Group all about?

Karen Martin
I actually started out in health care a long time ago and was building operations. It could be hospital operations, clinical laboratories, physician practices. I did a lot of building networks of hospitals and physicians and things like that.

Then I just had this weird coincidence in my life where I needed to go to San Diego and there was a position at San Diego State University in their extension program overseeing their whole quality and improvement operations excellence programs. I had been consulting for seven years, but I had reason to want to get off the road because I had children suddenly. I decided to take that.

I got introduced to this whole new way of thinking about operational design and business performance known as, back then, lean manufacturing. I had zero manufacturing experience, but as I started learning about it, it was just so intuitive and sensible and practical. I started kind of knocking on doors in health care to get them to listen to this Japanese model of business management that was so powerful.

Then many years later now, it’s in every industry is trying it at some level. Most are being successful in pockets. Yeah, so it just was a weird transition that I couldn’t have predicted.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. We actually had Mr. Taguchi come and speak to our class when I was in college. It was so funny because none of us recognized the significance of this man. But our professor says, “He is in our country. He is in our city. We must go see him,” so we all took off class and went to the auditorium. Yeah, so powerful stuff.

Karen Martin
It is powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
You share some of the tidbits in your book, Clarity First, sort of what would you say is the main point here?

Karen Martin
Well, Clarity First was a follow-on book to The Outstanding Organization and kind of what’s behind The Outstanding Organization is my studying organizations for decades and learning that most of the problems with performance came down to four missing attributes or conditions in organizations. Those are clarity, focus, discipline and engagement. It’s not rocket science and yet it’s woefully lacking in most organizations.

Clarity, that chapter got so much attention and a lot of emotion came to me through the people saying, “Wow, I had no idea that we were operating in this sea of ambiguity and what it was doing to me and my team and our performance and everything.” I just knew I had to write a book.

I thought that a single subject book would be really easy to write—hah! Not so much. Clarity is tough. Clarity is very interesting and it was tough to write about to be honest.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And it’s tough to get a lot of times. Maybe before we hit the how, I’d like to hear a little bit of the why. Now, I know from my experience in working in organizations that when things are unclear a lot of my time gets sort of sucked in terms of speculation. Do they want this or do they want that? I don’t quite know.

But can you share how you quantified the impact of unclarity in work places nationwide or any other sort of stunning statistics that point to whoa, this is a big deal?

Karen Martin
Yeah, so there’s a metric that we use called percent complete and accurate. We use it to measure the quality of information always. It can be verbal, written, any way that information is being passed from one person to the next or one team to the next.

When you map out a process using that metric – we also use time also to look at processes – when you map out the percent complete and accurate, it’s not unusual at all to have at some point in a process a team or person say “None of the time do I get work that’s clear that I can just do what I need to do without having to go back and ask follow-up questions and clarify and get through this ambiguity.” Customer requirements are often very unclear. What leaders want people to do with the project is often very unclear.

In our view, it’s a fundamental act of disrespect to pass information on to someone and expect them to do something with it, when in fact it’s unclear. It’s about raising our own bar in how we communicate with others and business processes are one of the areas we receive the biggest problem related to too much ambiguity.

Pete Mockaitis
This is funny. This reminds me back to my Bain Consulting days. It was kind of a joke, but kind of not a joke that rather than saying, “I don’t know,” we would say, “It’s unclear.” They really are pretty synonymous except ‘it’s unclear,’ makes you seem like you’re smarter because it’s not me that’s ignorant. It’s unclear, fundamentally, intrinsically.

Karen Martin
That’s interesting. That’s a funny little play on words.

Pete Mockaitis
I dug that. Then, you also measure time. How does that work?

Karen Martin
Well, there’s two different times we measure. One is the time it takes to actually do the work if you could do it uninterrupted, but yet most people have interruptions and other things that get in the way of being able to do work uninterrupted. That one – the process time is the time it takes to do work.

Then lead time is the time from beginning – or the work being available to be worked on till that piece of the work is done and passed on to the next person or team in a chain. That’s often a much, much larger number than the time it takes to actually do the work.

Then when you start looking at it is well, why is that? If it only takes five minutes to do something, why is it taking three days to get it done? That opens up lots and lots of doors to discovering the different barriers that are in the way of getting work to actually flow, which is something that makes leaders happy, makes people doing the work feel good. Flow is a good thing. Lack of flow is very frustrating.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. This percent complete and percent accurate, what’s the distinction there again? Like, I have all the stuff versus I know what you’re saying is it kind of?

Karen Martin
Yeah, so it’s I have everything I need and it’s as clear as it needs to be for me to move forward and do my work, whatever that task or that person’s task is. It means am I having to do any form of rework or am I not.

Rework is both just correcting wrong information, it’s also adding information that’s missing that should have or could have been supplied. But the big one is clarifying information that isn’t clear to begin with. That’s a much higher percentage of the reasons for rework than what people think when they are not sensitized to it. Once they’re sensitized to it, they’re like, “Oh my God.”

We’re not suggesting you don’t clarify when you need to. We’re suggesting you get rid of the need for clarification by giving better information upfront.

Pete Mockaitis
This is intriguing because I think that – well, I’ll just play devil’s advocate a little bit. If someone says, “Karen, the work we’re doing is complex and not everything is known and spelled out and I, as a highly paid executive, passing it on to a slightly lesser paid manager am counting on that person proactively using their initiative and gumption and judgment and problem solving to advance clarity and get it done. Should it really be my job to lay that out for them as a high-level professional?”

Karen Martin
Yeah, that’s a really good distinction. It’s really – in that case it’s about having enough clarity when the work is assigned that the person knows what they need to do to get going on seeking that clarity that’s part of the project.

Often times when the assignment is given, the goal or the mission or the outcome that you’re looking for, the result, that’s unclear. Then the person starts going down a path that may not be the path that the leader intended in the first place.

And people are afraid. I talk to people all the time, they are afraid to go back and clarify when the big boss has given them something to do. It’s very risky to not clarify, very risky.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s risky to not clarify, but the fear is associated with doing the clarifying and can you speak to what – how’s that fear? What’s it look, sound, feel like and to what extent is it warranted and justified versus a phantom?

Karen Martin
It’s almost always warranted and justified if you get even one case of proof, where you ask for clarification, you get smacked down.

Pete Mockaitis
“Karen, figure it out.”

Karen Martin
Yeah. If that happens, that’s proof. You know it is. However, what often happens is we’re shaped, we behave, and we think based on all of our experiences in life.

What happens very often is we either have parents or early teachers or early bosses who have a whole different set of reasons why they don’t want you to seek clarity. They don’t want you to be curious. They don’t want you to be humble and approach things in the really positive way. You get tamped down. Little by little that fear starts rising because you get in trouble for asking questions.

What has to happen as adults we have to be able to differentiate between that situation and this situation and be more intentional about is it safe to ask or is it not safe to ask. I would pause, if it’s not safe to ask for clarification, got to really start thinking about getting in a different environment where that clarification is honored.

Pete Mockaitis
What would the punishment or the reprisal or the feared for response kind of sound like in practice? It’s like I ask you for clarification and you give me the response I fear. What’s that kind of response sound like?

Karen Martin
Well, it can be everything from, “Stop asking so many questions. You don’t need to know all this.” Those kinds of things to people not knowing the answer and not being able to say, “I don’t know,” or “That’s unclear.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so they just lie or make something up or-?

Karen Martin
Oh yeah, people lie all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Karen Martin
Because they’re insecure about saying ‘I don’t know.’

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Karen Martin
Yeah, it’s a weird – it’s a really weird – it’s a slippery slope and it’s a weird dynamic between people and teams. This isn’t just individuals. This is between entire work teams within an organization where you see this “Well, da, da, da,” because they don’t want to appear that they don’t know and don’t feel comfortable saying, “I don’t know,” which is the three most powerful words besides ‘I love you’ that there is. ‘I don’t know.’

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell me, why is it so powerful?

Karen Martin
Because it’s honest. It’s authentic. We don’t know. If we know everything, then we are operating from a place of arrogance. We don’t know. It’s being very humble and it’s not being not powerful. Actually, the more powerful people that really have power, you’ll hear them say ‘I don’t know’ a lot because they really don’t know.

No leader especially can know a lot of the kinds of questions that people at middle levels or even lower levels in the organization ask. They don’t know. They’re not the experts in that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so intriguing when you talk about the lying then. I guess that puts you in trouble if you listened – you asked for clarification, you get a lie back, and then you kind of make good on doing just what you thought you’re supposed to do based on the lie and then they probably could sort of retract that lie, like “Well, you asked for this.” “I asked for no such thing, Karen.” What a mess.

Karen Martin
Yeah, what a mess. Exactly. Hopefully you don’t have to resort to the CYA thing where you document everything.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, “Please confirm. Please confirm.”

Karen Martin
There’s plenty of cultures where that becomes the norm.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Then, boy, I want to get your take then – well, first just I think we locked in the complete and accurate situation.

We may have a wildly undefined piece of work, but so long as you’ve got enough to begin charging down on it, then that counts as 100% complete, 100% accurate from your assessment such that if I said, “Hey, figure out a marketing strategy. We know very little, but we do know that we’ve got $20,000 to spend and that we want it to be very trackable and that it should have strong reason to suspect a tremendous ROI. Go,” so that would be kind of enough to count as accurate and complete?

Karen Martin
Yeah, those are clear requirements, so the person can do what they need to do. A lot of times we get clarity and certainty confused. They’re related.

Pete Mockaitis
Nice, that’s good to distinguish.

Karen Martin
Yeah, and transparency also is a bit of a cousin there, but they’re not the same. You can be very certain that you’re unclear and that’s good. You can be very clear that you’re uncertain. Did I say that-?

Pete Mockaitis
I think you got it both ways, yeah.

Karen Martin
Yeah, yeah. Certainty is very normal and there’s a lot in life, especially with new product development or market types of decisions. There’s a lot you’re not certain about. But you can be clear about what your goals are, you can be clear about any kind of constraints that are in the way. You can be clear about a whole lot that makes getting work done a whole lot more effective, higher quality and faster, a lot faster.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very good. You mentioned, we were talking about getting the data on how big a problem is you said sometimes you’ll see straight zeroes, like it’s totally unclear or incomplete or inaccurate. Do you have a benchmark average or median where it’s like generally we see roughly between X and Y percent of completeness and accuracy?

Karen Martin
Well, when we map either a process, which is very technical level process or value streams, which are a series of processes that deliver value to a customer, the percent complete inaccurate in businesses processes, so I’m not going to talk about patient care and health care or manufacturing yet, but in businesses processes, it’s not at all unusual to see the cumulation of all the individual percent CNAs be around 15%, meaning 85% of the time, the work is not being passed forward as clear as it can and should be or as complete.

There’s also that complete. We’re not talking so much about that today, but there’s that complete and clear part of that metric.

In manufacturing it can get up more the 50%, 60, 70, 80. Health care also can get up into those. But when you have business processes, most organizations haven’t spent any time really working on their business processes. It’s the area that is the predecessor to the actual delivery of value to a customer. It’s really important to get high levels of clarity in those processes. They’re often ignored.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example of a business process and where some things might fall short along the chain?

Karen Martin
Sure, so business process could be in the HR area, IT, finance, or in the case of insurance, it could be their whole product line is a business process, so processing a claim, processing an application. What happens is as people are learning how to do the job, they’re taking in information, making assumptions – that’s the other thing is we operate with assumptions and biases and history that may not be relevant or valid for that situation.

Then they pass it on and sometimes the people that they get the work from, don’t know that it’s wrong because they’re not the ones thinking in the way that the predecessor was thinking. It just is a bit of a snowball when this keeps getting passed down the chain and everybody – no one’s really sure that the information is unclear. I’m sorry, they’re not sure it’s wrong at the point that it gets passed down.

When you’re working with a computer, you’re pretty much doing a business process. When you’re data heavy, transactional, all those kinds of processes that are not making a widget, for example, or treating a patient, those are business processes or administrative processes you can also call them.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s interesting, so in the realm of say filing or processing an insurance claim, as an insurance company, they do this many, many times per day/month. Where might there be some key breakdowns that we shouldn’t stand for and tolerate? We should say, “What’s up with this? Let’s fix it.”

Karen Martin
Well, it’s everything from having clarity around what the requirements for the work to be accepted versus not accepted to be in the first place. Now a lot of organizations, you’re not allowed to reject work that you got from an upstream internal supplier. In other words, the department that passes work to you, a lot of times it’s not acceptable culturally to say, “Hey, this isn’t right. Fix this and then give me the work.”

What happens is people take the work and they think they’re doing the right thing by just trying to fix it themselves, but then the people that are passing that work on never learn that the work wasn’t okay to begin with. This happens all the time.

We get cross-functional teams together in a room and someone who supplies work to someone else will be at the table and the person who receives it will say, “Well, I’d say 30% of the time it’s either unclear or there are errors.” The people delivering the work will go, “What? What is it? What do you need that you’re not getting? What’s unclear?” Then the person will say, “Well, this and that and the other thing,” and they just never had the conversation.

What usually happens is there’s been tension between these people and these departments, but once they understand each other – it’s all about understanding each other – it melts away. Then you have a brilliantly designed process that performs as it should because these people had a conversation that they should have had ten years ago, but we force it in these kind of tiger team-like activities to get clarity around the work and what should be done.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s interesting. I guess sometimes when it comes to fixing it, I guess at times it might be good to just make it clear that yes, that is part of your job is to fix it based upon the leveraging or application of resources as opposed to other times, you’d be like, “No, no, no, it needs to come in pristine consistently.” I guess I’m thinking based upon sort of where your bottlenecks are and the relative expensiveness of each employee’s hour to the organization.

Karen Martin
Yeah, well, I’m not a big fan of a department that didn’t generate the work fixing the work. I’m a big fan of putting the problem where it belongs. It belongs back at the people generating the work. It’s not about the people. It’s almost always about the process or the work systems.

The people are doing what they think’s the right thing and it could be any number of reasons why they’re not able to do the right thing and they’re passing that work downstream. But I don’t think the downstream people should be the ones fixing upstream work that doesn’t come in clean.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I’m thinking, let’s imagine – I’m imagining a world in which I sort of upload some files. We’re just getting real tactical and specific. I upload some files and they’re recordings of a Skype conversation. Maybe your Skype name is something KMartin43. Then I just sort of put it up there.

Now it would be good and proper of me to rename that file to having your full name to make it clearer for my collaborators to unmistakably note, “Okay, yeah, this is where it lines up on the media schedule and so forth.” But I sure love saving the 20 seconds of not renaming it and having other people that do it for me.

I guess maybe the way to have my cake and eat it too here is to just make it sort of make it like a standard understood operating procedure. It’s like, “Oh, you might notice at times that the file names come in this way. Please take a look at the media schedule sheet and adjust it accordingly.” I guess that’s how I’m thinking about it is sometimes I’m the beneficiary of my unclear practices.

Karen Martin
Yeah, so I think what you’re defining there is a situation where you just have to be clear which person needs to do which task. You can have a high, high, high paid person doing work and choose not to have them do some aspect of the work, but rather have a lower priced person doing that kind of work so that the higher priced person can keep producing higher quality – or higher priced output. That’s one choice. It’s sometimes very, very much the way you should go.

There are other times when it’s the opposite. It’s very situational. It depends on who has the knowledge and what the additional time it takes to do the work is because sometimes the higher paid person, it’s only seconds do to that one last thing that if you hand it over, might take minutes for someone else. Even if they’re lower paid, it can cause delays in the work moving. It’s very situational. You have to look at the whole picture.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. That’s well-said because it could be many times that because someone’s like, “KMartin47, what the heck is this? I don’t know. I’m going to have to download it. I’m going to have to listen to it. I’m going to have to hear some key words. I’m going to have to do a search of the file system and realize oh, that was a podcast interview Pete did with someone named Karen Martin on this date. Okay.” Maybe that took ten minutes, whereas I could have just clicked Rename, Karen Martin, and had that handled.

Karen Martin
Well, yeah. The other thing is, we want people to feel good about their work. This is not – we aren’t putting rats in a mill to do work the way rats in a mill do.  I don’t know what I even ….

Pete Mockaitis
Hard working rats.

Karen Martin
I don’t know where that came from. But rats in a mill, that’s my new thing. But we want people to feel good about the work and be able to put a high-quality work. What needs to happen is – let’s just say that you decide that the process design that works the best is to have this downstream person do – correct your file names. If that downstream person doesn’t recognize that as part of his or her job, then he’s going to be pissed off at you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah. “This sloppy jerk.”

Karen Martin
Yeah, arrogant, whatever. It needs to be explicitly designed as part of the process and good reasons given why that person should do this work and they need to be also very involved in designing the work at that level, at a tactical level. They’re often not. As long as people understand why, that’s very liberating. A lot of people will take a lot of stuff if they understand why.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And maybe even take pride in it, like, “Hey, you know what? Things move real fast around here and there’s going to be a little bit of mess and boy, when you bring order and organization into that mess, it just makes everything hum along so much better, so thank you. You’ll be tackling the renaming of files as well as the organizing of them in these ways and it’s really helpful.”

Karen Martin
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s talk about how we get to the clarity. You mentioned one thing is simply having that conversation associated with sitting down and here’s what’s incomplete or difficult or inaccurate. What are some of your other best practices for getting there?

Karen Martin
Well, mindfulness is key in all of this. Working mindfully means a lot of different things. It means that we are aware of – very, very acutely aware of what’s going on and we’re making strategic decisions based on that deeper awareness of what to say and what to do.

When you – awareness takes practice to get  – mindfulness takes practice to become really good at it. There are lots of different practices that help you get there like meditation and clearing the mind in all kinds of different ways that are out there.

Just being not methodical meaning you get really slow, but being methodical about considering the information you received and what are you really supposed to do with that information and just taking a breath and slowing down  for a moment helps bring clarity. Clarity is a gift. It helps both deliver with greater clarity and it also helps you see whether what you’re receiving is clear enough to take action on it or not.

It’s just slowing down, thinking, clearing the mind, breathing, and you actually – I always say go slow to go fast, you actually work faster when you’re more methodical.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So the mindfulness helps because you are getting a clearer sense of what is actually taking place as well as maybe more compassion for imagining the next person who’s tacking it. It’s interesting that that makes such a difference.

Karen Martin
Yeah, it does. We get into this kind of rat on a treadmill thing. We’re not mice in factories anymore. Now we’re rats on treadmills. We just go, go, go, go, go, go and we don’t stop to think enough. If you just take a moment to think about what’s really happening and being very present and not being judgmental, frankly.

It’s being able to take what’s happening kind of nonjudgmentally, without emotion, and then taking better actions as a result of that level of awareness, it just, it helps monumentally.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fascinating. We’ve talked a lot about how mindfulness makes a real impact for you, the individual worker not succumbing to distractions and being able to have more creative ideas and focus in on the right things. Now you’re highlighting that there are some powerful interpersonal effects of it as well.

I love the part about nonjudgmental because I imagine if your brain is consumed by fuming over how some idiot always gives you the stuff wrong, then you are in less of a mental position to have some helpful, proactive, creative strategic ideas as to fixing the root of the problem.

Karen Martin
Yeah. We blame people all the time for work-related problems. It’s almost never a human desire to screw things up. “I’m going to go to work today and I’m going to just mess up everything as much as I can.” No one says that, maybe the rare sociopath that gets hired somehow, but that’s rare. Most people want to do well. They want to perform at high levels. They want to serve.

In organizations we kind of create these situations where we do everything but allow them to be able to do that. Then we blame them. That’s like, no, no. That’s not right.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then I’d love to get your take, so that’s one thing is you have the conversation. You work mindfully. What else?

Karen Martin
To get clear?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Karen Martin
I think asking a lot of questions about questions is an underutilized skill. When someone asks you a question, very often that question is masking what they’re really asking. Let me think of an example. Okay, let’s just say you give me a report and I say to you, “Oh, are you done already with this report?” What am I really asking? I’m not asking – you can say, “Yes, I am really done,” but there’s something behind my question.

Asking questions about questions and very often I’ll just say something simple like, “Huh, that’s an interesting question. I’m curious, why are you asking that?” If you do it with the right tone and in the right way, people will often answer it. You’ll get amazing insights into what they’re actually after and what they’re thinking. Then you can respond in a more relevant way because you’re actually – you’re answering the question they didn’t ask.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. They could mean any number of things from “I’m accustomed to this taking four times as long,” or “I had imagined there to be a very detailed research piece necessary. How could you possibly have already completed that?”

Karen Martin
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Or something totally different.

Karen Martin
Like “I don’t trust this because it’s too fast.” Yeah, whatever it might be. By the way, this stuff all works so well at home. This is great tips for relationships, parent/child situations. It’s so interesting how we choose to communicate and how often it is very unclear.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d also like to get your sense for that’s a great question is, “Oh, I’m curious, why are you asking that?” What are some of your other sort of top favorite power questions that tend to just yield clarity phenomenally?

Karen Martin
Yeah, in our world there’s a couple of really key ones. ‘Why,’ of course is a really big one. ‘Why’ is another one that people get pounded out of them sometimes by otherwise well-meaning parents/teachers and bosses. We have to allow people in the organization to be able to ask that why because why is – the mind of a scientist asks why. Curiosity is what’s going to lead to greater innovation and higher quality and all those good things that we want, but yet sometimes people don’t feel safe asking why.

‘What if,’ is another one and ‘why not’ is another one. Another one is how – ‘what would have to be true if.’ Another one is ‘how could we.’ All of those questions stimulate positive thinking and the glass becomes half full and not half empty.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us a few completions of the ‘why’ stem there? The first thing that came to mind for me is ‘Why am I doing this?’ but how about you say it.

Karen Martin
One quick thing about ‘why.’ ‘Why’ is one that’s very tricky tonally. You have to be very careful that the why isn’t laced with any kind of blame. It’s both body language and the way the question why is asked. You have to ask it from a very heartfelt place if you want to get a good answer.

‘Why’ could be everything from why a situation exists to why a person’s taking this specific action they’re taking to why something – well, I guess it’s those two things. It’s either an action or a thought pattern that you’re exploring and trying to figure out what’s behind that. ‘Why’ is big in problem solving, very big in problem solving.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that point you made about the defensiveness. I remember from my coaching training, they’d suggest you could substitute why with ‘what led you to’ or something like that, which still gets you there. It’s like, “Why are we doing this piece of work?” It’s like, “Oh, what are we hoping to achieve with this piece of work?” You’re getting after what you’re still getting after. That’s good.

Any other pro tips on how we arrive at clarity before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Karen Martin
I think being kind of relentless in seeking clarity helps. In other words developing – I see job descriptions a lot that say, “Must have a tolerance for ambiguity.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Karen Martin
I say no. You don’t want to hire someone that has a high tolerance for ambiguity. You want just the opposite. You want someone who has zero tolerance for ambiguity. Just becoming aware of it, then just deciding you’re going to be brave and courageous and ask for clarification and then identify why you’re having to ask it and then find a way so that you don’t have to keep asking it. That solves the problem more deeply.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m glad you went there. That’s intriguing to hear. I also think about sometimes the business language and jargon people use, at times I think that’s because they haven’t actually done the hard thinking or the hard questioning necessary to know what they’re really, really after, so they use some corporate-y jargon-y buzz words, which have multiple interpretations and that way what they’re saying is not inaccurate; it’s just not saying much.

Karen Martin
Right, yeah. It’s again being responsible on both the provision of information and also the receiving of information. Being responsible on the provision of information is doing your best to be clear about what it is you want to ask or say before you ask or say it. Then when you receive information then that person may or may not be aware and may or may not be thinking about clarity. Then if you’re getting unclear information, that’s asking for clarification so that you understand.

It’s very powerful to have clear information. It’s scary at times because sometimes the truth isn’t so lovely, but it’s definitely more powerful and liberating than not knowing or trying to operate in muck or fog, which is what happens if you don’t ask for clarification.

Pete Mockaitis
A lot of times – speaking about the muck or fog when – what do you do when just the powers that be don’t really seem to have their own act together with regard to what’s the true priority, what really matters more than then the other thing?

Karen Martin
Oh yeah. If I could answer that one definitively, I’d be a rich woman. It’s a really good question. It’s very difficult when you have people above you in the company that are not operating from a place of clarity.

There’s everything from the small little things where you do ask for clarification and explain why you’re asking for clarification, so the person doesn’t feel threatened. You really have a need to know because of this that or the other thing. You can help sensitize them to the fact that they are operating communication-wise from a place of not a lot of clarity.

Sometimes you can get away with a candid conversation with someone, even someone who’s above you in the organization hierarchically. You can sometimes sit down and go, “I just feel like we can be so much – we can get so much more done and be more effective and have higher quality if I’m a little more clear to begin with on what the needs really are or what you need from me,” or whatever it might be. Sometimes if you frame it in the right way, a person will be very responsive to that and hear it.

Then there’s the occasional leader that is never going to hear it. They’re never going to be anything but defensive. That’s when you have to make a tough decision, whether you try to find a place that is a little more inviting for you to be able to thrive as a person.

Pete Mockaitis
Well now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Karen Martin
Well, the one I mentioned earlier is one of the ones I say the most often, which is “Go slow to go fast.” It’s counterintuitive, but it is very, very powerful that people often think that they’re going to get analysis paralysis if they just slow down a little bit, but in problem solving, for example, if people rush to a conclusion, they’re often operating from fear because of time constraints or from a place of assumptions or biases or from a place of arrogance because they don’t know.

If you don’t learn why the problem exists and do the deep dive and have a scientist’s mind for that, you’re very likely going to put either a superficial and short-lived countermeasure in place or it’s going to be the wrong thing altogether. The overall problem-solving cycle gets much, much faster if you take the time to understand why the problem exists and do a deep dive into that before you figure out what you’re going to do about it.

Most people do the opposite. “Here’s the problem. Here’s what we’re going to do about it. Bam.” That’s not good thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Do you have a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Karen Martin
Actually it’s related to clarity but it’s also not entirely related to clarity. There was a study I learned about when I was writing The Outstanding Organization about task switching. It was this professor out of University of Michigan. Meyer is his last name, David Meyer.

He studied engineers and showed that they switched tasks every – like five to eight times a day on average and that every time they did it, they were losing 20 minutes of productivity because they had this mental ramp up time to get back to the thing that they were working on before they got interrupted or went to a different project.

The more we work with organizations, the more we see that that is a huge organizational burden that is a bit of a drag on the organization at an individual level and also project teams.

This research was pretty darn compelling. Then others replicated it and then they also started adding in different kinds of tasks and things like that to see that this whole notion of multitasking is a misnomer. You can’t multitask to cognitive tasks. You’re actually switching back and forth. Becoming clear that you’re doing that and becoming sensitized to how that erodes productivity is a very helpful exercise for individuals, leaders, anybody.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite book?

Karen Martin
Oh my, I have so many favorite books. I’m going to say a fiction book first since we started out talking about thrillers. It’s not a thriller at all. My favorite book is Hemingway’s, The Sun Also Rises. It’s been a book I’ve read over and over and over. I just love that book.

From a business perspective – oh, this is tough. There’s so many I love. I actually like the work of W. Edwards Deming a lot and all of his books are – they’re really good. He was wise well beyond his years. Now a lot of his wisdom is coming back to roost and people are starting to finally see, “Oh, this guy was right after all.” It’s nice to Deming’s work come back.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite tool?

Karen Martin
By tool do you mean – what do you mean?

Pete Mockaitis
Something you use to be awesome at your job.

Karen Martin
Oh, to be awesome. I think a favorite tool is listening.

Pete Mockaitis
And any favorite ways you like to listen?

Karen Martin
I like to ask clarifying questions. If someone is asking me, like when you said, “What’s your favorite tool?” I didn’t know exactly what you meant, so I said to some effect, like, “What do you mean by tool?” That way you deliver more accurately what the person is looking for.

I think deep listening is a – I don’t know if you call that a tool or not, but it’s a skill and it’s something you use to generate higher performance. I think listening is an art in and of itself and something that we can all get better and better at.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. How about a favorite habit?

Karen Martin
My favorite habit is zero inbox.

Pete Mockaitis
Every day or how often?

Karen Martin
Every day.

Pete Mockaitis
How long does that take you?

Karen Martin
All day. Not all day, not all day to clear it out, but it’s you’re doing it all day long to make sure that at the end of the day you don’t have anything in your inbox. It’s a challenge to keep up with it, but it is so liberating when you get it down. Yeah, zero inbox is David Allen that started that whole movement. It’s one of the most liberating things. Also, turn off email notifications.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh right. Yes.

Karen Martin
Turn them off. Turn them off everyone. Both of those habits help me be much more productive. I think the proof is in the pudding. People should try them and see what happens.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Now, I’m so intrigued by this because I find it so difficult. I even am part of a private beta for some software called Superhuman that runs faster than Gmail. It’s actually pretty awesome. I love it. You might ask them. They’ll probably let you in. It’s a free ad. Hey, Superhuman, enjoy.

But yeah, so just – so you say that’s part of just your working day is that you multiple times a day fire up Gmail or the email program and go to town.

Karen Martin
Yeah, well my email is always open, but I minimize it when I’m working on other things. There’s no sound. There’s no visual. There’s nothing to distract because that contributes to task switching and that is a productivity drain beyond—beyond. You can get four times as much done during the day if you just focus on one thing at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. If you bring it to zero every day, then does that mean you have a smaller limit to the number of hours you’ll commit of yourself a day to not email?

Karen Martin
No. I don’t think so. It’s situational. When I have a book come out, of course my email volume goes way up. When it’s been six months, seven months into it, then it starts dying down a little bit again. It’s situational, but no.

I don’t think that I lose any time by getting to zero inbox. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m gaining a ton of time because you look at things once, you disposition it and then usually you’re done. It’s just a matter of not letting things linger and get to it and get it done and move on.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a sense for how much time you spend on email each day?

Karen Martin
That’s a great question. I’ve never timed it. I work long hours, so first of all, let’s get this into proportion. I’m often working 12- and 14-hour days. I would say 2 hours.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. All right. Thank you.

Karen Martin
Of that day, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that’s the price of excellence. Thank you for sharing. How about is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with people and they quote it back to you?

Karen Martin
I can’t think of anything they actually quote back, but this is the one fascinating thing that happens with clarity is every time I either give a talk or I give a workshop or something, people kind of stalk me and they go, “Oh my God, Karen Martin, you’ve ruined me.” I’m like, “Well, how have I ruined you?” “I can’t stop thinking about clarity. Now in the presence of ambiguity, I can’t tolerate it.” I’m like, good, my mission is accomplished.

I hear it a lot that people just are feeling so liberated by starting to live with clarity. They feel so much worse when they’re not in the presence of clarity because they now see the power of clarity. You know what to do, now you can do it. You don’t have to guess. It’s pretty liberating.

Pete Mockaitis
If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them to?

Karen Martin
There’s a couple different URLs I’ll say. TKMG, is the company name, .com. That’s the main website. Already ClarityFirstQuiz.com is a free assessment you can take to learn how you’re currently dealing with clarity or not and your organization as well. Then ClarityFirstBook.com is the book page. I have all kinds of free webinars also and podcasts on the website as well. TKMG.com is kind of the brains and you can go from there.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Karen Martin
Being awesome requires that you embrace the need for clarity, you believe that it can be helpful and you start practicing it every day. I would just encourage everyone to make the decision that it’s better to have clarity than not and start delivering with greater clarity and start demanding clarity in return. Just see how high you can soar. It’s pretty powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Karen, this has been a whole lot of fun. I wish you all the best of luck with the book, Clarity First, and all the things you’re making clear.

Karen Martin
Thank you so much. I wish you a very nice holiday season and spread the word of clarity more and more to everybody. It’s a gift.