With literally thousands upon thousands of books, articles, website and programs on how to achieve success (whatever success means for you), I continually wonder why there is not more success? Several years ago at a national conference, I learned from the speaker, David Herdlinger, part of the answer to this question. For years performance experts, education specialists and organizational consultants recognized that knowledge, skills and attitudes affected performance and hence the success of the individual or business. David had taken this challenge and reconfigured it into a way that would make more sense for people. He placed the letters KSA into a quadrant. The upper boxes contained the letters K for knowledge and A for attitudes. In the lower left hand box was the letter S for Skills. To complete the quadrant, he added the letter H for Habits in the lower right hand corner. Now the letters K.A.S.H. fitted neatly into a box and a new tool the K.A.S.H. Box was developed. The purpose of this K.A.S.H. Box was to show that more often than not poor performance is not just an issue of knowledge and skills, but also includes poor attitudes and habits. Yet, individuals spend most of their resources developing knowledge and skills as demonstrated by the purchases of thousands of self-help books and fail to develop the necessary attitudes and habits for performance success. After listening to Davids dynamic presentation, I expanded his concept to help even reach more individuals by constructing the K.A.S.H. Box for Sustainable Change. Since the purpose of cash boxes is to hold the daily productivity as measured by change, I placed a large rectangular box under the quadrant. When cash is spent on the left side of the K.A.S.H. Box without investing cash on the right side, the money is not reinvested into the individual, but is drained away. Hence, a negative return on investment happens. When focusing on both sides of the K.A.S.H. Box, the efforts are reinvested into the change drawer and sustainable change happens. Furthermore within this box, I identified that the left side(Knowledge and Skills) is all about learning the acquisition of knowledge. While the right side (Attitudes and Habits) is all about performing the application of knowledge. The K.A.S.H. Box also identifies the Knowing-Doing Gap the Gap. This is the gap between the actual results and the desired results. So, the next time you wish sustainable success for yourself, ask yourself this simple question: Will my success be dependent upon the acquisition of new knowledge and skills or will my success be because of my consistently applied positive attitudes and habits?Another way to ask this question is: Have my past failures been a result of a lack of knowledge and skills or due to poor attitudes and habits? If you answered attitudes and habits, then what you are doing to build those attitudes and habits on a daily basis? Anyone can go buy a book or take a class to gain knowledge, but very few people take the time to develop and redevelop the true obstacles to their success! |
