Deliver More Than Expected

Deliver More Than Expected

Do you complete your tasks on time ?  I think so.  Do you deliver things as expected.  I believe so.  Do you deliver or complete things more than expected or required ?  Honestly, I doubt it if the majority of us would admit having such a mindset.  WHY ?  For multifarious reasons, obviously.   Firstly, we tend to be so caught up with that OBLIGATORY mindset such that all mattered was delivering things as expected.  Secondly, we tend to have developed that COMPLIANCE mindset wherein if I needed to deliver from A to C, all that mattered was A to C and not either D, E, F or G.  So, what seems to be prevailing is something not premeditated at all.

Yes. fingers will be logically pointed to the habits we formed.  As the 3 R's of habit formation, REMINDERS, ROUTINE and REWARDS are the very factors that influence our DELIVERY MINDSET.  Getting so caught up with the triggers and cues that form as the REMINDERS, it leads us to what are ROUTINES which are defined alongside REWARDS.  At work, that means working eight hours because we're paid for those eight hours.  In online classes now brought about by this pandemic, it's literally following the instructions to fulfill and comply in projects after projects, all with deadlines.

How could we override this mindset then ?  Simple.  Let's agree with this poster: "WHEN YOU DO MORE THAN YOU'RE PAID FOR, EVENTUALLY YOU'LL BE PAID FOR MORE THAN YOU DO." Same goes for the school's online class-based projects.  If the teacher states that to get a perfect 100, you need to submit more than what is all listed in the project instructions, that human factor kicks in.  We will end up doing more than what we're paid for at work.  We'll submitting school projects beyond specifications.  That new mindset shapes up then till it becomes our new norm, our new habit.

That goes true too with giving and receiving.  By nature, we're so caught up with what we need such that if we receive ten items we do need, we're willing to part off with one or two items, keeping the rest for us.  And this is when our SURVIVAL mindset kicks in.  We [wrongly] think that we received are part of our basic survival needs such that, parting off with nine of the ten items we received is just a NO-NO.  Unfortunately, that is a NO-NO mindset.

At work, another culprit is our 'TIME-TRACKING' mindset.  Simply because the operations manual documented the end-to-end process to take sixty minutes, what matters most to us is that misguided mindset that executing that end-to-end process in sixty minutes makes us the TOP PERFORMER at work. REALLY ?  Can't we take that Xtra effort to execute that process in fifty minutes or less yet delivering it within specifications ?  That Xtra effort has always been key in our company's continuous service improvement initiatives.  If only more can adopt it.

If we take that paradigm shift, our output a.k.a. throughput will likely shoot up.  Our submissions as part of our online classes' projects may even look like 'earth shaking'. And as this pandemic still locks-in all of us, partaking more by giving out more than just that 'drop in the bucket' would create that positive ripple effect to the needy, to the underprivileged.  Let's think about it❗