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Mind Like a Steel Trap

by Ron Potter

Steel

I visited my chiropractor the other day and he had a new young assistant who checked me in. As this young man was checking me in on the computer, I patted him on the shoulder as I passed him on my way to a chair. Wow! This kid’s shoulders felt like steel to me. I asked him if he was still in college and if he participated in sports. He was indeed enrolled in a nearby college and he said he was on the track team. I said, “Wow, you’re a runner?” He said no he didn’t run but he threw things: the shot and the hammer. It came clear. Those shoulders that felt like steel came from the fact that he threw very heavy things. In this case, feeling like steel was a good thing.

I’m not very attracted by the images, but when you see bodybuilders, they often look like they’re cut from a block of steel or granite. The image of Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was in his body-building days comes to mind. However, I’ve heard Arnold and other bodybuilders say that even though they work hard at building their bodies, they lose a lot of flexibility in the process. I think steel can be good, but the loss of flexibility is not.

You may have heard the old statement having a mind like a steel trap—or maybe it’s just a saying that us old engineers are familiar with. The idea is self-explanatory of course. You grasp an idea and your mind closes on it like a steel trap and won’t let go.

That’s a good thing if you’re setting up a trap to catch wild animals. It may not be the best approach when it comes to ideas.

Flexible Thinking

An article that Shane Parish wrote in his Farnam Steet blog caught my eye. His opening statement is “The less rigid we are in our thinking, the more open minded, creative and innovative we become.”

Shane has several quotes from a book written by Leonard Mlodinow. Shane’s opening paragraph says this about Mlodinow’s book: “Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World confirms that the speed of technological and cultural development is requiring us to embrace types of thinking besides the rational, logical style of analysis that tends to be emphasized on our society.”

I received a wonderful email from my grandson who is currently living halfway around the world with his parents. He said, “I look up to your logical thinking.” I certainly took that as a compliment from him but wasn’t sure it was the best thing to be known for in an ever-changing world. Shane, in his comments, says, “We need to accept that analytic thinking—generally described as the application of systematic, logical analysis—has limitations.” He goes on to say, “Although incredibly useful in a variety of daily situations, analytical thinking may not be best for solving problems whose answers require new ways of doing things.”

Experts Sometimes Know Too Much

In my years as a consultant to CEOs and their teams around the world, I would often observe a dynamic that fascinated me. Many people on the leadership team were outstanding on a particular topic. On that particular topic, they had a mind like a steel trap. However, there were many times when the team was stuck on a particular issue and couldn’t seem to come up with an answer outside of their expertise. But, on those occasions when there was a young (less expert) member of the team, they seemed to ask a question about their current dilemma that the “experts” had not thought of. In fact, they might often start their question with some qualifier like, “I don’t really know what I’m talking about here but I’ve just been thinking that it might be a good idea to explore ‘such and such.'”

I would often watch the team of “experts” go completely silent until one of them would acknowledge that they hadn’t really thought about it that way before. They were soon talking non-stop about how that opened them to a whole new way to think about their dilemma. Flexibility, not rigid “steel” thinking, had them coming up with new approaches.

“Flexible thinking” is required to work our way through our ever-changing world. Without it, we are just stuck and will quickly be left behind.

For next week’s blog I’m writing on a topic that really scares me. It scares me for personal reasons. It scares me to think about what my grandchildren will be facing in the world as they mature. It scares me for the human race in general. I’ve not yet figured out how to deal with the topic and not be afraid, but I and others must do it.

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BlogLeadership

Leading Change

by Ron Potter

The basis for this blog is a Harvard Business Review article by Patti Sanchez titled “The Secret to Leading Organizational Change is Empathy.”

I’ve had several experiences in my consulting career and personal life that emphasize the importance of empathy. One of them was a personal experience.

The Association

We moved into a new city several years ago to be closer to one daughter and her family. This particular family lived in the Middle East for at least ten years and we wanted to spend more time getting to know our grandkids before they went off to college. After looking at several possible locations we settled on a small community of condos within a couple of miles of our daughter’s house.

After a few years, I was asked to be the association president. The president before me had been in that position for several years and it seemed to him he was constantly dealing with conflict. When I agreed to run and won the presidential position, his words to me were something like, “Good Luck. This is a rough crowd.” He felt like there were competing desires within the homeowners and there was no way to reconcile them.

There were only sixteen homeowners in the association, so the first thing I decided to do was get to meet and listen to the needs of each of them. I had no agenda and no particular goal. I just wanted to listen and show empathy.

I visited each of the sixteen families and just listened. No goal. No timeframe. No rush. Each family invited me in and talked with me about their situation and desires. I made no attempt to correct or guide them, I just wanted to hear them. I left each visit with no promises made. I had just listened.

There were a couple of difficult issues that the association faced. After those visits, I formulated my plans (with the executive team) and let the residents know what I was going to recommend for a vote at our annual meeting a few weeks later. They had been controversial issues for a few years and I wondered how the discussion and vote would go. There wasn’t much discussion, so we put the issues to vote. All the issues were passed by unanimous votes. People felt they had been listened to. In fact even now, several years later, one of the residents who had been the most controversial and vocal calls me “the best president they ever had.” Why? Because I listened to her with empathy.

Who’s the Boss?

Another issue I remember is related to my consulting career. The CEO resided in the US but they had major operations in Europe and SE Asia. The European leader for the company was Irish and resided in Ireland. He was an authoritarian leader. People did what he told them to do or else. After our team meeting about leading with empathy, I was hoping he would change. Unfortunately, not.

When I began to talk with him about being a leader, I asked him to describe what a leader was like. He proceeded to tell me about the British ruling Ireland. The Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland by English kings happened in the last 1100s. His view of being a strong leader went back nearly a thousand years. But to him, a great, strong leader was based on England ruling Ireland. He wasn’t about to shake that image that a ruler was someone who came in and subjugated people to do what they were told when they were told.

Experience

Question your own thoughts and motives. What has your experience taught you? Who empowers you as an employee, that controlling boss who keeps you under his thumb or the empathetic boss who makes you feel like you’re a part of what’s going on?

Most often people think of an empathic leader as weak and a controlling leader as strong. That’s not true. A great empathic leader is one who helps you grow, develop, listen, and help your team make decisions. A controlling leader is one who makes all the decisions and expects you to respond. My observation over the years is that good people will leave a boss like that as quickly as possible. The people who stay under those conditions are sometimes referred to as “yes men” and all the creativity leaves the organization. Believe me, now and in the coming years creativity will become more and more required. Without it, companies will die quickly.

Fortune 500

Only sixty companies remain that were in the Fortune 500 after WWII. Why is that? One of my beliefs is that after WWII, most of the companies on the list were being run by officers from the war. They knew how to “command.” They expected their commands to be carried out without question. Companies were generally not creative. In order to survive the coming years, companies (leaders) will be required to be creative.

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BlogCulture

My Elastic Mind is Getting Stiffer

by Ron Potter

I’ve mentioned many times that Shane Parrish of Farnam Street is the blogger I read most consistently.  He was very instrumental in getting me started with blogging.

One recent article he wrote was titled, Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World.

His opening paragraph says,

The less rigid we are in our thinking, the more open-minded, creative, and innovative we become.

As we’ve been focused on our rapidly changing world in our last few blogs, things are changing fast as we look for and understand the new normal.

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin‘

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song.

Elastic Thinking

Share refers to a book by Leonard Mlodinow, Elastic,  in which Mlodinow explains elastic thinking as:

  • the capacity to let go of comfortable ideas and become accustomed to ambiguity and contradiction
  • the capability to rise above conventional mind-sets and to reframe the questions we ask
  • the ability to abandon our ingrained assumptions and open ourselves to new paradigms
  • the propensity to rely on imagination as much as on logic and to generate and integrate a wide variety of ideas
  • and the willingness to experiment and be tolerant of failure

Let Go of Comfortable Ideas

Like our bodies, our brains are lazy.  It’s much easier and less taxing if we just stick with comfortable ideas rather than contemplate new ideas or new approaches.  I think this is one reason that this new virtual world we find ourselves facing is so taxing.  We’re getting warn down just because of meeting virtually rather than in person.  See my post on Zoom Fatigue from May 13, 2021.

Reframe the Question

One of the greatest assets I’ve observed in business is the ability to reframe questions.  One of the best books on this topic is A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger.  This has always been a great asset and I have found it at the root of the more innovative companies.  But in this rapidly changing environment, we find ourselves in today, I believe it is essential.  If you’re still framing questions based on the old “normal” you will find yourself quickly losing ground and even your footing.

Abandon Ingrained Assumptions

I think of this one as being slightly different than the reframing questions above.  Assumptions get us in trouble.  One of my early mentors used to say: Assume makes an ass of u and me.  Don’t assume.  I believe that avoiding assuming requires listening to understand.  If we’re really trying to understand another person, we must listen with the intent to understand.  If we’re not doing that, we’re assuming we know the answer or we know what is right.  Assume and make an ass of u and me!

Balance Imagination and Logic

I find very few leadership teams that are good at this.  Although the word imagination is used, I’m going to change it slightly to emotion.  I believe it is essential to balance emotion and logic to make the best decisions.  Many leaders and leadership teams believe that all decisions should be logical.  “Fifth Avenue” figured out long ago that we make decisions based on emotion and then justify those decisions with logic.  I’ve told this story before but I believe it’s worth repeating here.  Years ago while my wife and I were in a Chevrolet dealership waiting for a very practical and inexpensive sedan to be brought upfront for a test drive, the salesperson and I were drooling over a Corvette convertible.  Pretty soon my wife said, “I see no logical reason to buy a Corvette”.  Both the salesperson and I looked at her in complete disbelief.  Finally, I said, “No Corvette was ever sold based on logic.”  All decisions are made based on emotion and then justified based on logic.

Tolerate Failure

It’s not easy to tolerate failure.  Especially when it’s your own.  We are often afraid to admit failure because we believe that people will think less of us or we’ll lose the power to lead.  But I have found it to be quite the opposite.  As long as we’re honest and straightforward with admitting our failures, we actually become better leaders.  People like following people who are human.

Frozen Thoughts

Mlodinow talks about “frozen thoughts” as being the opposite of having an elastic mind.  Don’t let your thoughts become frozen.  As Dylan says, “For the times they are a-changin”.  I believe we’re in one of those mega shifts where things are moving and changing so fast we can’t even figure out the new normal yet.  You’ll never make it with frozen thoughts.

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BlogCulture

The Power of Positive Feedback

by Ron Potter

I received a note a couple of days ago telling me how one of my posts had positively affected a person’s life.  They mentioned a post I had written nine years ago.  Was I really writing blog posts nine years ago?  That surprised me.  My second response was that I didn’t remember that blog.  I had to go back and read it.

We were never allowed to be Victims.

That blog ends with a quote from Condoleezza Rice explaining how she made it from being a young girl of color in the South to being Secretary of State of the United States.  The headline above is her quote.  She was calm, confident and yet very humble.  She was an amazing person.

Easy to become Victims

In this pandemic that we’re all experiencing, it’s easy to feel like the victim.  It’s interesting to note that we’re already seeing the results of feeling like victims.  Our obesity levels and alcohol rates are already climbing.  We’re looking for an escape from feeling like victims.

As that blog noted from nearly ten years ago, the opposite of the victim is creativity.

Be Creative

Almost everyone I’ve talked with recently speaks to how lethargic they’re feeling.  They just can’t seem to get motivated.  I’ve experienced the same issues.  But as I mentioned in my last post, deep thought and creativity are the paths to feeling better under trying circumstances.  Just like exercise, which has tremendous benefits if you’ll just spend about 30-60 minutes at least three times per week, spending at least an hour in deep thought and reflection three times per week will increase your creativity.  You’ll feel so much better and think about your circumstances so differently, you’ll come out the other end being a much better and maybe totally different person.

This pandemic is very victimizing.  Don’t let it get you down.  Be creative.  Spend some time in deep thought and self-reflection every week.  View this as an opportunity that seldom happens more than once in anyone’s lifetime.

Positive Feedback

So what does this have to do with positive feedback?  Reading that comment about how my blog made a positive difference in one person’s life motivates me!  I was having difficulty keeping up with my blog.  I just couldn’t find the motivation.  And then that comment arrived.  I’ve been writing blogs almost every day since that feedback.

Positive feedback made a difference.  It only takes one.  In the nine years since I wrote that blog, I’ve written somewhere between 400 and 500 blog posts.  Did they all make a difference?  Probably not.  Did I hear some positive feedback on many of them?  No.  Did positive feedback on less than one percent of the bogs I’ve written make a difference?  Absolutely!

Pass on some positive feedback today.  It may be to that neighbor who just happened to wave “hi”.  It may be to someone at work where you’re trying to conduct virtual business.

Just give some positive feedback.  It makes a difference.

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BlogCultureCulture Series

Culture – Adaptability: Organizational Learning

by Ron Potter

Organizational learning requires much more than a procedure, a checklist, or even a department.  Organizational learning needs to be deeply embedded in the organization.  It must be a deeply held belief, part of everyday processes, and highly rewarded.

Reward Failure

Does your boss (or you as a boss) look for and reward those moments when learning takes place?  People learn more from failures then they do from success.  Let those two concepts sink in for a minute.  We reward learning.  Learning is the greatest from failure.  Therefore (if I still remember my algebra) we reward failure!

How many organizations will survive is they reward failure?  Not many, you might say.  But if you remember our last blog, if we don’t change we die.  You must figure out how to fail successfully to change and grow.

I remember one CEO in particular that seemed to have a good knack for successful failure.  At his leadership meetings, his direct reports began to understand that if they brought an idea forward on how to do something differently, he would “reward” them with great attention and questions.  For a moment they would get the center ring.  When someone proposed a new idea, he would ask all of the “mission” questions from the first quadrant of the Culture Survey to make sure they were headed in the right direction.  If so, he would grant permission to go ahead but with frequent updates, progress reports, and budget projections.

Noticed that he didn’t just turn them loose with no guide rails.  The idea needed to further the mission, and he also set parameters in place that would assure quick small failures before things got too out of hand if the idea didn’t work.

But the ideas were rewarded, and the person who brought the idea forward was rewarded with a “job well done” and went on to the next topic with a nice grin on their face.

Innovation and Creativity are not the same

I hear many top executives proclaim that they want more creativity from their people.  However, when people propose true, pie-in-the-sky, out-of-the-blue creative ideas are brought forward, they are often shot down for all the standard reasons.

Innovations are usually small, easily executable, quick ideas that help the organization change and adapt rapidly to a changing marketplace.  Innovation often falls in the category of rewarding failure.  Top executives love innovation (or at least they should).  It doesn’t have the risk of creativity, and it’s easier to make sure it fits with the guard rails described above.  Even if they call for creativity, corporate leaders are asking for innovation.  Respond accordingly.

Generational Differences

One final note is probably worth mentioning.  I grew up in the older generation.  Our generation that would ask “Why am I taking calculus?  Will I ever need it?”  The only answer I ever received was “You’ll better understand how things work.”

The younger generation grew up with electronics and access to more information than we’ll ever use or need.  They don’t need calculus; they Google it.  (Interesting how Google has now become a verb.)  Learning to them is very different from the learning process we went through.

How do we develop a culture of organizational learning in today’s environment?  My answer to that question is to ask.

  • Ask your employees about what they need to learn.
  • Ask them what they want to learn.
  • Ask them how they learn.
  • Ask what you can do to help them learn.

How do we learn?  Ask, don’t tell!

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BlogTrust Me

Quality Chaos: Creativity

by Ron Potter

The irony is that a certain amount of chaos is necessary because “quality” chaos stimulates creativity. Organizations that do not create some space for creative chaos run the risk of experiencing staleness, loss, and even death.

“Life exists at the edge of chaos,” writes Stuart Kauffman, author of At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. “I suspect that the fate of all complex adapting systems in the biosphere—from single cells to economies—is to evolve to a natural state between order and chaos, a grand compromise between structure and surprise.”

If a leader fears the creative tension caused by chaos, trouble is often not far away. Leaders need to understand that creativity comes out of chaos, and even what has been created needs to be exposed to chaos just to make sure it is still viable and working. Even the new creation may need the chaos of re-creation to survive in a highly competitive world.

Meg Wheatley writes in her book Leadership and the New Science, “The things we fear most in organizations—fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances—are also the primary sources of creativity.” The question is, how do leaders get people from the scary, agonizing, and anxiety-filled feelings of chaos to the liberating place of creativity, change, and steadiness?

Before we answer that question, we do need to look at creativity and chaos. The reality of today’s world is that millions of ideas for innovation, change, and improvement lie within any factory, distribution center, high-tech office, retail storefront, or operations center. You can also multiply that number by millions (or so it seems) when you bring people together in a team setting and allow them the freedom to create, innovate, and change. In many organizations this causes chaos and uncertainty.

Leaders, then, who understand the positive side of chaos can begin leading people through the confusing maze that creativity causes. They can help people understand that disruptions are opportunities. They can focus their attention on a building a culture that understands change and brings teams together, creating synergy among the members. These leaders explain how necessary it is for a company to respond to change in order to remain competitive.

Leaders help their employees understand the chaos going on around them by making meaning out of it. It is not easy, but it is so very necessary. “Leaders must have the ability to make something happen under circumstances of extreme uncertainty and urgency. In fact leadership is needed more during times of uncertainty than in times of stability: when confusion over ends and means abounds, leadership is essential.”

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BlogTrust Me

Chaotic Order

by Ron Potter

The world we live in is chaotic. A great leader learns how to leverage chaos into creativity, to bring a sense of tranquillity to a crazy world.

Dealing with new technology, profit expectations, continual new-product development, the fickle shopper, and global competitors requires perpetual change and lightning-fast reactions. Markets change, old competitors consolidate, new competitors emerge, and attempts at re-engineering threaten our daily bread. Both leaders and employees can soon feel under siege and at the mercy of chaos.

A creative, energy-filled calm is what we need. A word picture may aid our understanding of this. Imagine you are a surfer. There you are with your board, waiting for the “big one.” If you are in Hawaii, the waves you are playing in might rise to twenty feet. All around you is surging, frothy chaos. Currents, tides, and the weather have combined to create a uniquely unstable environment. Conditions are always changing; every moment the ocean is different. If you try to catch a wave exactly the way you did yesterday, you will take a hard fall. You must stay alert and react quickly to every nuance of water, tide, and wind.

Gutsy leaders confront chaos. No one who is content to just paddle a surfboard beyond where the waves break has ever caught a “big one.” Neither has such a person ever wiped out. If you want to ride a wave, you have to enter into the chaos. If you panic while riding a big wave, you are sure to wipe out. If you stay calm, you can have a wonderful ride while tons of water crash down around you.

Creating calm in the office requires a similar ability to assess the environment, to act quickly, and to stay calm. The economy, products, competitors, consumers, and employees all constantly change. Someone has to have answers; someone must be an independent thinker, able to calmly think things through.

I am familiar with a banker who had a client ready to sell a branch location of his business. The main location seemed to be prospering, but this particular branch appeared to be a drain on energy, time, and resources. The business owner was upset, but the banker remained calm. He took the time to analyze the underlying causes of the owner’s problems. He visited the location, recast the numbers, and advised the owner not to sell the branch but to move and resurrect it. In reality, the branch location was producing extra cash, and the owner, following the banker’s advice, turned his entire business around.

People will follow leaders who stay steady in the chaotic times and work with them to create new answers, new plans, and a new future.

Whatever you do, don’t slip into what I call the “arsonist’s response to chaos.”

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that firefighters in Genoa, Texas, were accused of deliberately setting more than forty destructive fires. When caught, they stated, “We had nothing to do. We just wanted to get the red lights flashing and the bells clanging.”

Do you know any leaders who intentionally start “fires” so they can get the “red lights flashing and hear the sirens”?

Leaders in one of my client organizations proudly described themselves as “firefighters.” They were proud of the fact that they were good at hosing down crises. But when they were asked, “Is it possible you might also be arsonists?” it caused a great deal of reflection within the company.

The goal is a creative, steady productivity—not a chaotic environment that squanders energy and resources on crisis management.

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Short Book Reviews

The Book of Why

by Ron Potter

Ron’s Short Review: I found this a little difficult to read but the key point for me is that we put way too much emphasis on cause and effect when in fact they are random events that happen in the same time frame. Our human mind looks for shortcuts to understand the world around us and if it can attach a cause and effect to an event, it will do so in order to explain it quickly and easily. Take caution. We have to question more to better understand the world around us.

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BlogTrust Me

Passionately-Focused Leaders

by Ron Potter

Staying focused is virtually impossible without passion. Passion is a craving deep within us, that yearning for something we feel we just must have. It surfaces in a multitude of ways. For example, consider the story of Patrick (Pádraic) Henry Pearse.

Headmaster at St. Edna’s, a small private college south of Dublin, Pearse’s passion was Ireland’s heritage, something he feared was being destroyed by the domination of the English.

Pearse was by nature a gentle man who could never harm even the smallest creature. He had spent his life helping his students understand and pursue their own big dreams. Pearse certainly was not considered a militant or a revolutionary. Yet he was driven by his passion for Ireland.

No longer able to watch the nation’s language, culture, and history eroding, he felt it was time “to pursue his own great goals that, in his words, ‘were dreamed in the heart and that only the heart could hold.’ ”4

He embraced the cause to reclaim Ireland and within a year was a leader of the Easter Rising, the Irish rebellion of 1916. After days of intense fighting, the British army defeated the revolutionaries, and on May 3, 1916, Pearse and others were executed in a jail in Dublin. The British leaders mistakenly thought this would put an end to the rebellion. But they did not understand the power of a person’s passion, as people across Ireland embraced Pearse’s ideas for saving Ireland and dreaming big dreams.

In 1921, Ireland declared freedom from England, and Pearse’s passion and dreams for the Irish culture came to fruition. Pádraic Henry Pearse’s passion ultimately forced a nation to find itself.

Finding our passion includes dreaming big. Ask yourself some questions:

Answers to questions like these will point you to your passion.

A friend of mine, the late Leonard Shatzkin, had a passion for mathematics that helped him become a pioneer in understanding the technicalities of inventory management. He developed a model of inventory control using linear regression that proved to be revolutionary for two companies he headed. But his passion didn’t just stop with benefits for his own organizations. Leonard then devoted the rest of his professional career to telling anyone who would listen about maximizing return on investment and minimizing overstocks.

That’s what passion is like; one way or another it demands expression. Even after his death, the effects of Leonard’s passion live on. His ideas and systems serve many individuals and organizations well.

Too often we allow old habits, the rigors of everyday life, and our ongoing fears or frustrations to impede our passion. We are cautioned by friends: “Don’t be so idealistic.” “Don’t be so daring.” “What if you fail?” These kinds of comments can shrink our passion so that we settle for working in fields away from our passion. We abandon it, we make do, and we play it safe.

Just as a mighty river needs a channel, passion needs a channel and a goal. Without such restraint, the result is a flood, a natural disaster. You need to make certain that you control your passion, not the other way around.

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BlogLeadership

Innovation: hovering for takeoff or collapsed?

by Ron Potter

Current Excitement

Three months ago, she had been excited. This was the opportunity she had been working toward since she joined the company three years ago. Meaningful work is one of the more joyous things you can experience. She didn’t want this job because of its prestige or high pay. She wanted this job because it was meaningful to her, her colleagues and clients.

How it Started

When I talked with her three months ago she was riding high. She explained that when she joined the company she had been hired for her skill set and outstanding success in her last assignment. But before she even joined the company she explained to the CEO that this was not her dream job. She would certainly do the job and do it well but in the end, she wanted a different assignment that was more meaningful to her.

Over the three years, she did indeed do the job well. She built a great team and was recognized beyond her company as an outstanding contributor to the industry. And while she enjoyed the work and found great satisfaction in building and growing a great team, she continued to remind the CEO on an annual basis that she was still interested in the job that was more meaningful to her. And now she had it.

Takeoff

She was filled with new energy and new excitement and explained all the things she wanted to accomplish in the new role. Many of them had never even been tried by the company. The breadth and depth of her vision were overwhelming when she explained all the things she wanted to build. I was wondering how any superhuman could possibly accomplish that much.

Collapsed

But now! Have you ever seen a large hot air balloon being deflated? The beautiful, magnificent structure stories high into the sky with a buoyancy that leaves it hovering just above the earth defying gravity. But an instant later the entire structure has gone cold, collapsed to the ground with a heavy thud and lies there motionless and useless on the ground. That was what today’s phone call felt like.

She had just come out of a budget meeting where it was clear the company was not going to meet next year’s goals and drastic cuts needed to be made. In an instant, her carefully crafted team and the multiple goals that had been hovering above the ground, ready for takeoff were now lying on the ground with no visible means of support. Deflated!

Lean Times Require Focus and Innovation

Times of plenty can destroy one of the greatest assets of leadership teams: good decision making. We’ve discussed this in other blog posts, but the concept is always worth reinforcing. The word decide (de-cide) means figure out what to kill or stop doing. In times of plenty, leaders seldom have the spirit or inclination to say “no”. Good deciding means to be clear about what you’re saying “no” to.

The other concept we began to talk about in her time of deflation was innovation and creativity. It has been well documented that the best innovation takes place when the boundaries are the tightest. Again, in times of plenty, it’s much easier to throw some ideas up on the board, try them all and see if any of them produce fruit. Not innovative! Innovation is about simplicity. Doing the most with the least. It’s those times when budget, time or resources are in extremely short supply when the best innovation happens. This was her time of opportunity. The budget was not just going to be tight, it was going to be slashed. She was going to be forced to say no to save that part that absolutely required a yes. And even the items that received the yes would need to be accomplished in the highest quality and the most elegantly simple way possible. Now was the time for true innovation.

Have you figured out how to say no? Have you absolutely insisted that things get accomplish in the most elegant, simple form possible? At some point, you will likely be forced to accomplish those tasks. You might as well get started now. Learn to say no. Do everything as elegantly as possible.

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BlogCulture

Walk away from Productivity Blocks

by Ron Potter

I was at my computer at 6:00 am this morning. Three and one-half hours later I was stuck! I was facing a difficult client meeting and it was requiring extreme concentration and creativity to deal with the issue in a constructive way. But, I just got stuck. So, I got up and took a long walk.

Fortunately, I was in a location where I could walk in solitude on a very quiet path through the woods. I took a 45-minute walk. Let me break that walk into thirds for you.

Conscious of my surroundings.

The first third of the walk I was totally conscious of the sounds of my steps, the slight breeze rustling through the trees and the few jays that loudly proclaimed my presence. Nothing else. All my work thoughts were subconscious.

Deep Understanding

Over the next 15 minutes, the concentrated work I had done that morning began to blend with the solitude of my walk. I can’t fully explain it other than my mind began to produce some very high-level understandings. In that 15 minutes, it became clear how I should organize, structure and present the materials.

Blended Experience – Organized Plan

The last 15 minutes of the walk was spent enjoying a little bit of both. I once again became conscious of the sound of my footsteps and jays, but at the same time, I began to see the structure for the meeting, the key points to be emphasized and the steps to success.

High Productivity

Upon returning to my computer the next half hour of work was just incredibly productive. I took all of that thought process from that deep 15 minutes of understanding, put the structure together and began filling in all the pieces. Moving from being stuck to a very satisfying completion with some deep work in between.

Getting past Stuck

When we find ourselves stuck after 3-1/2 hours of concentrated work, most of us will stick with it, stay at the computer, keep hacking away, work until we get at least what feels like a conclusion. And yet, walking away is likely to be the most productive approach. Not to our email. Not to the break room. Not to our news feeds. Just getting up and walking out. Walking through nature in complete silence for 30-45 minutes. That’s when the deep work happens.

Word of Caution

Please understand. I did not decide to spend 15 minutes on each phase of that walk. What I’m sharing with you is my reflection on how I moved from being stuck to some very satisfying work. I didn’t plan to take a walk to solve my problems. I planned to take a walk. Taking a walk lead to some very satisfying productivity.

Deep Work

Deep work! That’s the key. A good walk in the woods. (Note: the book Deep Work by Cal Newport is a great resource.)

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