What Happened one Sunday Morning

It's a Sunday. Early. I get a text from Allie.

Are you there? Can we talk?

I call her straight back. She's in a taxi on the way to the office.

Allie is 37, MBA from a top ten US school, sharp in the way that makes rooms run better when she's in them.

She's responsible for a project with a major review on Thursday. One of the top people is flying in from New York. The project is a spreadsheet model almost two years in the building — pulling data from 36 countries, supposed to produce useful intelligence for the business.

It's a mess. She inherited it from the previous manager, who bungled it and used his connections to leave before it collapsed on him.

Allie has inherited the broken model, a demoralised infighting team, and against her instincts, she’s hired an expensive outside consultant who is a petulant prima donna.

Her words on the phone: I'm at the end of my rope and running out of room.

We don’t look at the spreadsheet. That's not my skillset, and more importantly, it's not where the answer is.

Instead, I take her into the inner tools we've worked with for a few months. She finds a conference room, closes the door, and we go in.

What comes to her is a vision of a burnt-out rainforest landscape. Moving through it, she finds a patch of trees — and she knows immediately that these trees are the spreadsheet model.

She floats above them and begins to see a pattern. The arrangement of the trees shows her exactly where the linkages in the model are broken.

At the same time, a figure is moving through the undergrowth. A medicine man, clearing away choking vines.

Twelve minutes. Then she comes back.

We hang up.

She calls again around three in the afternoon.

They've fixed the linkages. The model is working.

And — what I couldn't have predicted — the outside consultant has done a complete reversal. The passive aggression is gone. He's engaged, constructive, actually helping.

Thursday's review goes well.

Allie went on to use these tools on one dead-in-the-water project after another.

The senior person who'd flown in from New York eventually headhunted her internally — moved her from London to New York at roughly triple her UK salary.

I tell this story oftens because it shows something I want to be precise about.

In twelve minutes, on a Sunday morning, in a borrowed conference room with her eyes closed, Ali accessed a level of understanding that two years of conventional analysis hadn't reached.

Not because she's unusual. Because she used a different door.

That door is available to anyone willing to learn how to open it. It doesn't require belief in anything. It doesn't require a particular kind of mind or a particular kind of problem.

It requires learning to access a level of intelligence that's already there — one that most of us were never shown how to use.

That's what I teach.