Anticipating Success by Planning for Problems
| An Interview with Mike Dunbar, Founder of The Windsor Institute By Joe Jordan, Director of Business Development, Action Management Associates 
If your travels ever take you to the quiet seaside town of Hampton, New
Hampshire, about a mile and a half out of town you'll find a 25 year-old,
one-of-a-kind school nestled amoung 58 wooded acres. This isn't your typical
corporate training center, yet scores of executives and managers have invested
a week or more learning the techniques taught by these experienced and
highly-skilled instructors. There is a clearly defined curriculum but
instructors don't use Power Point or PCs to teach their students coming from
six continents.The classroom isn’t full of comfy swivel chairs—it contains large, wooden benches and students stand during most of their training. The focus of each week of instruction isn’t on balanced scorecards, ROI, or shareholder value. Each class in this unique learning center focuses on the historic art of hand-crafting wooden chairs. But the lessons students carry back to their corporate and professional worlds have application and value far beyond a carefully crafted chair or the mound of wooden shavings around a work bench at the end of a day. An article titled Avoiding Mistakes in Popular Woodworking magazine caught my attention and prompted me to call Mike Dunbar, the man who single-handedly started what is known today as the Windsor Revival. The interview that followed was an intriguing look into the world of crafting Windsor chairs—and an insightful journey into the dynamics of critical thinking, problem solving, and avoiding problems. If you’ve participated in an Action Management workshop, you’ll notice how closely Mike Dunbar’s approach to chair-making parallels Action Management’s processes for problem solving, decision making, and preventing problems. It seems a bit odd that a young man in his twenties would become passionate about reviving the nearly extinct art of hand-crafting chairs. Mike makes it clear that this unique career path wasn’t intentional. He says it all started with a little black chair he spotted at a garage sale. “I was finishing my bachelor’s degree, planning on teaching at the university level,” says Dunbar. “I loved furniture so I bought the chair for fifteen dollars. I took it home, looked at under different lighting and realized it was hand-made, with a unique quality. After a bit of research at the library, I discovered I had purchased an antique Windsor chair, most of which were valued between $200 and $1,000 dollars each.” Dunbar began seeing other chairs like the one he bought in the back rooms of antique shops and found he was able to get them rather cheaply. He began repairing them, looking for old tools that he thought were what he needed to repair these unique pieces of furniture. As he learned how to fix a chair, Mike began thinking he could make one of his own. Books like Good to Great and Built to Last underscore the shared goal of many organizations to find a formula that will create a company that can succeed beyond quarterly earning statements. In a culture where 60 days is considered long-range planning, the Windsor chair is a tangible reminder that something built for longevity isn’t built overnight. Dunbar notes that Windsor chairs are well-engineered and valued for their comfort. Originally designed by educated 18th century artisans that expressed themselves through their chairs, a 250 year old Windsor chair can be as tight today as the day it was made. Many of the situations Mike encounters while teaching people to make chairs parallel the dynamics prevalent in corporations. Whether you’re pursuing a new market, developing a new IT system—or making a hand-crafted chair, a lack of knowledge can lead to some unfortunate mistakes. But more serious and unnecessary mistakes are often the result of not anticipating and planning during the construction process. Dunbar told me that the people he meets often make mistakes because they can’t anticipate what is next—they have never been there before (welcome to a flat, global, marketplace). As experienced chair-makers, Mike’s instructors know where students are going to go, so they can prepare them. Business leaders need to remember that the most effective leaders aren’t managing performance and productivity from a P&L statement that reflects information that is 30-60 days old. Proactive managers use their business acumen and experience to help them and the organizations they serve look forward, make timely decisions, and anticipate the problems that can derail success. On the first day of class Dunbar gives students a packet with procedures, photos, and a tip sheet of things the instructors know from experience that students need to be aware of in order to be successful. While every student is different and there is always room for the unexpected—accumulated knowledge gives Mike and his colleagues a distinct advantage. Mike tells students, “You’re going to come to us with mistakes and a look of shock and horror. You’ll think we don’t care. We do—we’ve just seen your mistake before.” Dunbar notes that most mistakes reoccur so his team anticipates them and provides guidance to help students avoid repeated problems. As in business, this is accomplished by first knowing what causes the problem. Unfortunately, people don’t take time to read the packet of information they receive at the start of class and they run into problems. “We give them a checklist of procedures to reinforce what they’re learning,” says Dunbar, “We try to prepare them to avoid mistakes. Dunbar and his team have developed a list of over 40 principles that when followed during chair-making will help people avoid many common mistakes. Many of his principles offer valuable guidance to corporate builders as well.
In Mike Dunbar’s world, anticipating problems is accomplished by marking up a piece of wood before it is crafted into something of use and beauty. But Dunbar notes that many people are reluctant to mark up what they hope will be a work of art. “It’s psychological,” says Dunbar, “To mark up the wood is contrary to their end goal of making something that looks nice. Woodworkers see the goal of making something that looks good so they have a natural resistance to marking it up; they want it to look perfect along the way.” When trying to determine the root cause of a problem it is critical to determine what the problem is—and what it is not. Mike teaches his students that “knowing where you don’t want to cut is as important as knowing where you do.” He uses great fanfare and drama to help students define where they will focus their creative energies—and where they won’t. During 27 years of teaching individuals and teams the critical thinking skills needed for effective problem solving and decision making, Action Management has observed that people using defined processes for determining the cause of a problem, developing solutions, making quantified decisions, and anticipating future problems achieve greater and more consistent results. Dunbar draws a clear distinction between the time to be free-wheeling and creative and the time to stick to a process in chair making. “You can’t use forms and patterns and be too creative. The creativity is in the process,” says Mike. “If you want to be creative you do it by creating a new set of patterns and a design of your own. Our goal is to take a graduation photo at the end of a class with 18 identical chairs in the picture. We tell students to trust the process. We took care of the creativity before class began. If they want to introduce a new chair, that’s where their creativity comes in.” Knowing which critical thinking tool to use when is essential in order to become an effective problem-solver. Mike concurs, “We teach how to use the right tool at the right time. We teach people how to know which tool to use at a specific time in the process.—to develop habits in the way they use their tools. People make mistakes and run into problems when they don’t take advantage of habit.” The pressure for immediate results, a demand for more with less, and short-term focused reward systems often encourage people to fix a symptom of a problem, rather than taking additional time to determine the real cause of a challenge and resolving the core issue. In Mike’s classes many students are amateur woodworkers, some are professional furniture makers, and for many, this is their first woodworking experience. Mike has noticed that the professionals know to call for help when they get stuck. The less experienced think, “I’ll take care of this. I’ll fix it myself.” Mike tells his classes, “You can’t get out of a hole by digging.” Dunbar has noticed that when someone’s ego gets involved, they create a bigger problem for the teacher to fix. The instructors at The Windsor Institute scan the room all the time trying to help people avoid problems by following the tip sheet—using the processes they received at the start of class. Mike has observed that most mistakes are the result of someone becoming
Mike had what he calls a “eureka moment” about the importance of preventing problems by planning for them when an instructor at the Harvard Business School sent Mike a poem about the ambulance in the valley—the story of a village that has a sharp cliff along a road. Rather than building a fence to prevent people from driving over the cliff, the villagers put an ambulance in the valley. “Our goal is to build a fence and help people avoid mistakes by following a process that anticipates and plans for problems and shows students how to prevent mistakes from occurring,” says Dunbar. “Mistakes can be avoided when you follow a plan that has already identified when mistakes occur and gives you a process for preventing them.” All problems are the result of change—but all change does not have to create problems. Whether in a board room or a workshop, avoiding mistakes has everything to do with planning your work and anticipating what might go wrong so you can prevent it from happening. As Mike Dunbar defines it, “You avoid a lot of problems by thinking about what problems might happen. We provide the written procedures to help people avoid the same problems when building their chairs that we’ve seen before. There are things you can anticipate and prevent if you take notes and plan ahead—anticipating the problems you’ll run into. When we encounter a problem we take a break. If we don’t take a break an accident can occur—creating a bigger problem.” The quiet forest around Mike Dunbar’s world may create a scene that sharply contrasts your corporate landscape. The processes he uses to anticipate and plan for problems and avoid mistakes are valuable in any context. One stanza from the poem Mike cited paints a memorable picture of what happens when we focus our energies on repairing mistakes rather than preventing problems and provides an appropriate conclusion to our conversation with this creative and insightful teacher. Said one, to his pleas, ‘It’s marvel to me that you’d give so much greater attention to repairing results than to curing the cause; You had much better aim at prevention. For the mischief, of course, should be stopped at its source; Come, neighbors and friends, let us rally. It is far better sense to rely on a fence than an ambulance down in the valley.’ The Ambulance in the Valley A version of
this poem was reportedly first published in 1913 in the bulletin of the North
Carolina State Board of Health, Volume 27, Number 10. That version of the poem
reflects several text differences from what is cited here. For more information about Mike Dunbar and The Windsor Institute,
visit www.thewindsorinstitute.com
or check out Mike’s blog at www.thewindsorinstitute.com/blog.
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