RULE: Act Different
(Based on NLP)
Gita works in a garment industry.
She had to place an order for 100 meters of Blue cloth and 1000 meters of white. Instead she placed an order for 1000 meters of Blue and 100 meters of White.
Using this combination, she would not be able to execute her production work. The material will be unusable, resulting in loss of money for her company. May be she will lose her job too.
She realized her mistake when she reached her home only. By then it was late night and the supplier would not take any change in order over the phone. She had to do it over the internet.
She called Naran S. Balakumar next day at 7 in the morning. He told her to do the following:
- Count the no of flowers – white and red flowers, on her way to office. She had to stop at every office building where there are flowers, count them – White and Red, and put the counts in a piece of paper.
- Call Balakumar as soon as she reaches her office, but before entering the office and give him the counts. (This step was to stop her accessing her computer as soon as she enters her office and thus change her expected behaviour pattern.) The reason being: when you Change your Routine Habitual Actions, you will get Different Results and not the expected ones.
She did so. After she gave him the counts, she checked up her mail box.
Surprisingly she had received a mail from the supplier. He had mentioned in the mail that it looks like that the order is not as per standing instructions given to them. Therefore he wanted to confirm whether he can execute the order or not.
By changing her action pattern (called as Breaking the Pattern in NLP), Gita could save her job as well as stopping her company from incurring loss and get a bad reputation with their client.