mental and behavioral codes. When you walk, talk, drive, read,
or laugh, it is unlikely that you think consciously about how you
do these things. The programs that make them happen are
managed on your behalf by your unconscious mind. These
programs are known as strategies.
Nevertheless, if you want to model excellence either in
yourself or in other people, your aim is to elicit both these
unconscious strategies as well as the conscious ones that
enable you to do what you do. When you have the strategy for
how someone manages their experience, you have the key to
reproducing that experience for yourself.
When a chef produces a gourmet dinner, not only is he
following a recipe for the ingredients, he is also following a
recipe for thinking and behavior. He may, for example, have an
image of what he wants the dish to look like accompanied by
the aroma of the final meal. He may also be concerned with
timing and the look and feel of the ingredients. He has a
unique way of achieving the result.
I watched a program on BBC television in which companies were
invited to put their business up for overhaul. One of these
programs featured Mo’s corner shop. This was a typical corner
shop, packed full of thousands of different product lines, many
of them beyond their shelf life and many almost impossible to
find easily on the cramped shelves. So Mo applied to the BBC
team of experts to have them redesign his business. He was
under threat from the big supermarkets nearby, so not only did
the BBC team want to increase the efficiency of the shop but they
also wanted to find ways to differentiate Mo’s shop from these
bigger competitors.
The expert team set about reorganizing and relabeling the
products on the shelves. They installed self-clean, maintenance-
free bread ovens to supply daily fresh bread. They introduced a
new stock control system and eliminated the 80 percent of
products that had not sold for years. And they went into Mo’s
office, where they found that his method of personal
organization was to use three-year-old diaries (or older), cross
out the days, and overwrite them with the current year’s days
and dates. So the office came under the experts’ scrutiny and
revision as well.
Unconscious strategiesMODELING 159