A man attempted to set ablaze if not blow up a flight headed from Amsterdam to Detroit. The flight originated in Nigeria, and the alleged perpetrator (not so “alleged” as he put himself on fire!) was on a terrorist watch list.

Why was he allowed to get on a plane, particularly one headed to the US? The inanity is mind-boggling. We’re told he was on a “watch list” but the concerns weren’t “aviation related” and so he wasn’t on a No Fly list! Spend a bit of time on that one and see if you can extract any sense from that. A terrorist may surely switch their focus without broadcasting it to intelligence officials. Surely a simple rule that we don’t want people on a terrorist watch list on airplanes wouldn’t be too controversial?

Moreover, if a potential terrorist presents themselves at an airport, pays all cash for his ticket (as he did), has no checked luggage and the smallest possibly carry-on, don’t we want to flag this somehow in a common database so he can be detained, searched and questioned? Why do we think there is union discipline among terrorists whereby say railway bombers don’t step on the turf of airline arsonists and vice-versa?

This gets even more bizarre. The Nigerian terror suspect was refused a re-entry visa into the UK 7 years ago for various reasons — one, he was known to have some ties with radical Islamic extremists, but also because he claimed he was returning to carry out studies at a University that doesn’t exist! Surely, that was a modest red flag. Less than a month ago, his own father reported to the US Embassy his concerns about his son’s ties to extremists! When your Dad turns you in (an affluent and respected individual), you’d think (and here the consultant in me comes forth), you’d get that information disseminated to border patrol, airlines and more. Shockingly, the re-entry visa to the US of this individual was kept valid despite what had happened in the UK and this information from his father. My own uncle (I’m an American, but originally was from Pakistan), who has a son who is a US citizen, was himself former Pakistan Finance Secretary, and is over 80, needed over 4 months to get his own multiple entry visa re-issued! Surely we’re missing the point in how we focus our energies?

There are now largely irrelevant panic-stricken knee-jerk responses. So now coming into the US, we are told no one can get up in the last hour before landing (that’s when the incident occurred). What if the next person does something in the first hour? So then we can’t get up in the first hour either? What is the relevance of the “last hour” necessarily to this incident? We had blown our obligation for due diligence well before we got to that point. No blankets on our laps in the last hour either we are told. How ridiculous! Talk about locking the gate after the horse has bolted!

If this happened from someone we had no reason to be concerned over — not a one way ticket buyer denied a visa in the UK and on a terrorist watch list — maybe we would say we’re down to that and have no choice. But why is the response to inconvenience as many law-abiding citizens, further decimating the airline industry as people further try to avoid air travel,  for what are utter lapses in inter-agency communication and scrutiny? Why this rush to more indiscriminate symptom management? So we’re all to interfere with countless businesses and lives to compensate for lack of integration and competence? This needs surgery, not Pavlovian mania.

Rushing to “ban” peripheral activities that are often quality of life issues (say for a shivering passenger wanting a blanket, or a pregnant woman needing the bathroom) is an almost insulting response to such a core breakdown.

Congratulations to the passengers and crew. We’ve at least as a public started to re-empower ourselves. It’s high time that same accountability filters through to the inane if not insane ways our intelligence lists are managed, shared…and acted upon.

Business Traveller Magazine announced that a famed hotel in Hong Kong was hosting a spectacular event. A group called “Premium Families of Wine” was doing a set of dinners, pairing top Estate wines from some of the world’s top wine families, with the cuisine of a Michelin-starred Chef.

I had our hotel call for details. After 48 hours of being assured details were “forthcoming”, they sent over a Credit Card authorization form and a price — but no specific event details!

I told them they were hanging on to sanity by a thread to have gone so far as to establish a price, and then having the gall to ask for a non-refundable payment, while providing no details of the menu, the wines, or their vintages. I have therefore no basis to assess the value being offered!

They responded with more rhetoric about a “superb chef” and “top vintages”.  I’m sure that’s the intent, but I’d like to see what’s actually on offer.

This led me to consider how often we make it difficult for clients to know what we’re offering. Agreements are imprecise, metrics fuzzy, and we attempt to overload people with verbal excess rather than clarity and simplicity. Why?

Might it not be an idea to be as transparent as possible? If not, why not?

It’s true that some requests are inappropriate. For example, asking a surgeon for a blow-by-blow game-plan of an upcoming surgery is beyond obtuse. We are counting on their skill and ability to adapt procedures to what they find as they proceed. Similarly as consultants, we rightfully chafe when people ask us for a blow-by-blow of a key engagement. We can and should agree and share outcomes and be answerable for them. But a pre-fabricated game-plan suggests that we are applying stodgy templates from the past, not current imagination.

Working with a client in Mumbai, I kept hearing the refrain, “We’re in a crisis, and we fear there’s too much random and scattered activity.” Smart people! Again, vague, ill-defined strategies and actions, absent any prioritization, can give the illusion of purposeful action. But a surfeit of this actually saps energy from strategically differentiated actions. And the largest lament from the team there was: tell us the larger vision, when we shift from established plans, tell us not only what we have to change but why, validated against the larger vision — the aligned upon “end in mind”.

Absence of clarity reveals an absence of the following: strategy, planning, prioritization or decisive action. Sometimes it reveals a deficit of all of these.

One of my Credit Cards was re-issued. I called to ask how many reward points I had. They said “zero”. I told them my last redemption was two years ago, and I had demonstrably spent a significant amount on this Card.  Hence logically, there cannot be zero points — unless some expired. They said there had been no expiry, but wondered if there was some technical error. I said, “Nothing to wonder about. Look at the expenditure. And as these points are generated by expenditure, tell me where they are. So there is definitely a technical error.” Dead silence, a complaint reference number, and a request to call back in 72 hours. Yet it took three repetitions to drive home the point, that on the face of it, there was clearly an issue. This customer service agent hadn’t bothered to consider with any clarity how these points were issued, and therefore the evident fact that there was a systems error.  So he aroused irritation, suspicion and distrust as to his organization’s collective competence. Hardly an impact to be desired.

So, in dealing with clients, customers, friends and colleagues, when enrolling them for something, make sure they know in terms of key parameters and anticipated value, what they’re signing up for. Try to be clear as to what counts, what matters, and how it will be evaluated. And then align those intuitions and judgments, so you’re not debating the basics over and over.

I continue to hope for the listing of wines and the menu from this venue in Hong Kong. As they sell this in tables of eight, there is a major sale waiting to happen. However, each day that passes, my interest wanes somewhat, the likelihood of my making alternative plans goes up. It’s an interesting insight that when we confuse our clients, leave them uncertain, or unclear, they too, despite evident interest, may take their intentions and interests elsewhere.

Reach out today and check understanding of salient outcomes and expectations with key stakeholders and partners. Insist on being impeccably clear in your dealings, agreements and transactions, as well as in your offerings and proposals. The act of arriving at that clarity is part of the very breakthrough that makes you valuable. So make that effort and ensure you come through here. You’ll find very little competition if you do. Even more importantly, you’ll find scores of grateful and avid clients and fans in your portfolio. You’ll find them, and you’ll be far more likely to keep them.

Dee Hock, founder of the “charodic” (the fusion of chaos and order as Mr. Hock so insightfully observed) Visa corporation, observed that the trick is not how to get new ideas in but rather how to get the old ideas out.

We’ll find this predominates everywhere. Look at Iran and the new ideas are bursting to express themselves, but the old ideas tenaciously cling on. Look at the problems between Israel and the Palestinians and you’ll see again the challenge is not a paucity of new ideas, it’s the dogmatic fixation on old definitions, paradigms, boundaries and conceptions that have to be tackled.

Carl Jung once pointed out that any real problem can’t be solved, it can only be outgrown. Then you don’t consider it a sacrifice, you just draw new rules of engagement. Then President de Klerk of South Africa said when apartheid was effectively defeated at the polls, “Today the South African people transcended themselves.”

A recent book, IN PURSUIT OF ELEGANCE, argues that what we leave out is as important, if not more so, than what we leave in. The author refers to the darkening of the screen in the pivotal last few minutes of the SOPRANO’s final episode: vexing, infuriating, titillating and irresistible. Toyota has long been studied for its principles of lean production and team and individual empowerment on the line — but it is as instructive to study all the things Toyota doesn’t do, that more ponderous and less effective competitors are addicted to.

Consultants beware! How many consulting firms tout endless product offerings: strategy, change management, organizational redesign, leadership development, employee relations, world peace and the kitchen sink. If the Elegance book is right, then we need instead a different sweet spot: simplicity — albeit concepts that are both simple and powerful. We should look for and infuse what we do with that power, not substitute for it by proliferating seemingly encyclopedic offerings.

Lao Tzu is evoked (he often is, being so inscrutable, his highly elegant, simple and compelling elegy to the Tao is timeless and adaptable to numerous interpretations) in pointing out that the hole at the center of the wheel matters more than any individual spoke. The space between the walls makes the home, the gaps between the notes make the music. It’s not just what is present, it’s what is absent. It’s the breathing room we have to create for ourselves, our services and our offerings that so often matters most. And if we can shed the peripherals (careful: one person’s peripherals are another person’s poetry), we can spotlight what’s essential. We can find and offer our passion and our genius, not an attic laden with ubiquitous  jargon and piles of second-hand consulting gewgaws.

A consultant without that essential simplicity can hardly be a credible advisor or coach in helping a business leader seeking something like that for themselves. It took us a long time at Sensei to realize that we excelled at locating the link between strategic business results and human performance — that engaging leaders and teams to deliver such results in global contexts was our particular strength. All the other things could be jettisoned.

So review your business, your marketing, your life. Absolutely make sure they express what matters most to you. But also make sure enough is missing. Make sure you de-clutter your business, your marketing and your life. Decide what you will not do and redirect that energy into creating the future.

And if certain old ideas continue to battle for dominance, stop fighting. Work on growing up  instead, and therefore “out”.

How? Ah, therein lies the the rub. But a great way to begin is to start living the new ideas (even if the old ones are still clinging on), live with the contradiction for awhile if you must, and then let the superior, the saner value win. It’ll be that much easier if there’s more space…in your day, priorities and life. When too much is afoot we hit our default switch. When we have some breathing room, we more readily set off in fresh directions — those more likely to get us where we wish to go.

The word “hallucination” doesn’t usually conjure up positive associations. But when I first started out in the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), I learned that most of what we call “reality” is our hallucination…i.e. our projection, or interpretation imposed on what we experience. In other words we perceive “x”, and then we add our subjective take on it to transform it into “my x“. We therefore customize what we experience to our chosen perceptions. And by choosing how we package our perceptions, we also to a large extent, select our responses and responsiveness.

Some research indicates that if you do a predictive competition between optimists and pessimists, you find an interesting anomaly. Pessimists are right more often than optimists — Murphy assures that things go wrong more reliably than they go right. Entropy, natural decay is built into the fabric of life, evolution requires energy. But fascinatingly, despite that, optimists tend to be more successful.

Why? They hallucinate better! In other words, even setbacks become “milestones” or “learnings”. There is the famous anecdote about the almost one thousand “failures” by Thomas Edison en route to inventing the incandescent light bulb. He is reported to have replied when asked if he was discouraged, “What failure? I discovered one more way not to invent the light bulb! That’s progress!” Well, it’s certainly a far more effective hallucination or “frame” to adopt given the iterative and uncertain reality of so much progress and innovation.

George Bernard Shaw, the great playwright, pointed out that reasonable people adapt their dreams to reality, whereas unreasonable people seek to get reality to adapt to their dreams. All progress he therefore concluded, depends on unreasonable people. In other words, those who hallucinate more audaciously and then are willing to act as audaciously to manifest what they imagine.

Companies no less than individuals have to decide what frames to use. You can look at the debris of destroyed companies during this extended financial suicide we’ve experienced in global financial markets and decide to retreat behind corporate bunkers, slashing all discretionary expenses, freezing all benefits, and going to the corporate equivalent of war footing. Or we can decide to clean up our act in wasteful areas yes, but also to prioritize key innovations, to deepen customer insight and loyalty, to improve our talent bench strength, to amplify engagement to get our teams to fight for productive gains, to reward more judiciously but to do so meaningfully where merited, and to see how we can emerge more competitive rather than bereft of vision or capability or future-creating potential. This isn’t a matter of “truth”, but of the frame we place on crisis, the hallucination we opt for.

Unreasonable people tell their countrymen in the midst of an historic economic meltdown, all we have to fear is fear itself. Unreasonable people look at the tide of Nazi victories and tell their embattled island, “we shall never surrender”. Unreasonable people looking at Russian space technology superiority throw a gauntlet down to put a man on the moon safely in a decade. Unreasonable people stand up at a time one hundred years after a Civil War failed to effectively remove segregation and unforgettably emote, “I have a dream!” Unreasonable people take their learnings in a calligraphy class and create wide-scale innovations in computer fonts (as Steve Jobs did). Unreasonable people believe micro-enterprise is a viable option for the once destitute as a mode of both dignity and pragmatic empowerment (as Nobel-prize winner Muhammed Yunus did through his Grameen Bank in Bangladesh).

So let’s choose profitable hallucinations for our clients, for our companies, for our lives. No matter what we face, we need to face the obstacles with the eyes of possibility. Why? Why not? Possibility is the fossil fuel for entrepreneurship, imagination, drive, creativity.

Chris Gardner, whose story we became familiar with through his best-selling book and Will Smith’s portrayal of him in a laudable movie, was homeless for a time while being a single dad, before transforming his circumstances, building a company, significant personal wealth, and a rich life. His new book sums up the best possible hallucination, start from where you are. But start as you mean to go on…committed to finding your next step towards reasonable or even unreasonable progress. And treat everything as “feedback” and “learning” along the way. You may not be right (whatever that means), but you will certainly succeed far more often.

At every juncture, ask,  “What is the most profitable, productive hallucination I can choose?”

And then lead, live, collaborate and innovate to make that hallucination REAL!