Tag:

Process

BlogCulture

Flow

by Ron Potter

Daniel Pink spoke often of getting into the flow in his book Drive. You know you’ve been in flow when you look up and you’ve completely lost track of time. You’re so engaged in your work that time is not a consideration. You’re in the flow.

Even though I experience it on a regular basis I hadn’t heard the word recently until an article by Srinivas Rao titled “What it takes to lead an extremely high flow life” caught my eye. The hints that it took to get into high flow included:

  • Avoid Interruptions
  • Work for long enough to get into flow
  • Do deep work

Sounds simple enough. Every team I work with lately is telling me how wonderful it is to avoid the interruptions of their daily routines. Avoiding the interruptions rewards them with the time they need to really get into some deep work. NOT!

Every team I’m engaged with is asking me to help them with the stress and pressure of their business lives. I’m observing mental stress, emotional stress, and physical stress. People are getting sick, losing touch with their family and friends and feeling that they never have enough time to get into the work that they’re good at, enjoy and have been hired to accomplish.

Why have we allowed these things to happen to us? Everybody seems to understand that it’s happening and it’s destructive but there seems to be a sense of helplessness to get out of the tornado, plant your feet on the ground and get some work done. Why?

I believe one of the reasons (maybe the main one) is that we’ve lost our ability to say No! I just finished reading “The Power of a Positive No”. It’s good to understand why we’re hesitant to say No. The book offers what it calls the Three-A Trap:

  • Accommodate: We say yes when we want to say no.
  • Attack: We say no poorly
  • Avoid: We say nothing at all

And The Combination is the deadly mix of all three. Our reasons for not saying No are powerful; I don’t want to lose my job, I don’t want to damage our relationship, I don’t want to look ignorant, and the list goes on. But what are we doing by not saying No? Destruction and falling short of our goals. Not good things.

The simple word decide can be an answer. Think of all the words you know that end in “cide”. Cide in Latin means “put to death”. When we decide, we’re not supposed to keep saying yes to everything. We’re supposed to declare what we’re not going to do so that we can accomplish the important things.

Have you decided what you’re not going to do today? It’s the only way to get into deep work and flow. Enjoy the journey.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterEmail
Become a Better Learner: Review
BlogCultureThree Steps to Become the Best Learner

Three Steps to Become the Best Learner – Part II

by Ron Potter

Become a Better Learner: ReviewKnowing something is different than knowing the name of something.

Shane Parrish of Farnam Street Blog spoke of this concept from Richard Feynman, the Nobel winning Physicist.

Feynman said that his technique would ensure that he understood something better than everyone else. It helped him learn everything deeper and faster.

In a previous post we talked about Step 1: Teach it to a child. Feynman’s second step is Review

Step 2: Review

In step one, you will inevitably encounter gaps in your knowledge where you’re forgetting something important, are not able to explain it, or simply have trouble connecting an important concept.

This is invaluable feedback because you’ve discovered the edge of your knowledge. Competence is knowing the limit of your abilities, and you’ve just identified one!

I want to key in on one word that Feynman uses here, feedback. This word has its beginnings in the early days of rocketry. When the scientist were developing the first rockets near the end of World War II, they discovered early they could develop a rocket with enough thrust to reach a target. Thrust was not the problem.

The problem was they couldn’t actually hit a target even tough they had enough thrust to reach the target. They then had to spend more brain power, money and time to develop a process they described by coining the word, feedback.

Thrust is not the issue in learning. What you need is feedback from other minds. It works best when you inquire expert minds and more importantly when you inquire novice minds. Experts will ask great questions but experts also make too many assumptions. Novice minds have no such assumptions and will often ask more intriguing and difficult questions.

Review in your own mind. Review with experts. Review with novice minds. The important part is to make no assumptions. I’m reminded of a saying that my high school physics teacher was fond of using, “Assume makes and ‘a**’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’.”

Reviewing means questioning all of your assumptions.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterEmail
Short Book Reviews

The World is Flat

by Ron Potter

The World is Flat1Ron’s Short Review: This was a re-read for me.  First published around 2007.  Like many of these “observation of change” books, the author seemed to see it coming but the points of the book are really hitting us now, a few years after the original publication.  Worth rethinking as the future unfolds.

Amazon-Buy-Buttonkindle-buy button

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterEmail
BlogTeam

Hard Choices

by Ron Potter

I read Jeffrey Katsenberg’s book, “Hard Things About Hard Things.”

I just listened to Ruth Chan’s TED talk, “Hard Choices.”

So here’s the Hard Thing about Hard Choices:

Ruth explains that any choice that can be quantified is an easy choice because all numeric values can be related to each other based on their comparative amounts but hard choices are based on values.
Values can’t be quantified and compared to each other. Values are based on who we are and who we want to be. Ruth goes on to look at the dilemma from a person’s point of view and concludes that taking the quantitative approach is the safest way out. Making a value based decision forces us to choose who we want to be. I agree. This is a great personal growth philosophy.

But here’s the hard part: I work with corporate leadership teams where I help individuals make their own personal value and growth decisions through my personal coaching. The problem is we also have to make hard team decisions.
I believe most corporate teams fool themselves into believing they only make logical, fact based decisions or believe all decisions can be reduced to a number exercise so that the >=< analysis can be made. But as Ruth explains, hard choices are not quantitative in nature; they’re value based.

So how do you get a bunch of MBA trained financial experts, engineers, marketers, and scientists to make the hard choices based on value?

You need to build team.
Not just a team with defined roles and responsibilities, not just a team with clearly defined interfaces and decision gates. Not just a team of various functions that get together to discuss and coordinate the business. Not a team, but TEAM!
Teams are built on respect and trust. Teams honor and appreciate the diversity of thinking, attitudes, and beliefs that we bring to the table. Teams know who we are and what shapes us and what values we hold dear and what values we won’t violate.

These teams are fully capable of making the hard decisions and are fully capable of making them work.
If you want to build a great company, build a great TEAM.

Have you been fortunate enough to be part of a great team? Share with us how that happened. What made it work? What’s keeping your current team from being a great team?

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterEmail
BlogMyers-BriggsUsing MBTI to Great Advantage

Using MBTI to Great Advantage – Work Life

by Ron Potter

Using MBTI to Great Advantage is a blog series in which I’ll do an overview of each of the four Myers-Briggs (MBTI) functions and then in subsequent blogs will dig into each one in more depth with some practical applications for creating better dynamics and better decisions making. Click here to read the Series Introduction.

 

Work Life Overview: Judging vs PerceivingMBTI series header

Myers-Briggs (MBTI) calls this your “living” function but I never quite knew how to relate to that word so I’ve modified this slightly to “Work Life”. How do you like your work life structured around you? Our Judging types like their life organized and structured. Plan their work and work their plan. Our Perceiving types like things a little more open ended. Be ready for changes and surprises. React to the moment. Figure it out as you go.

Our business schools and businesses have taught us the need for organization and structure so I tend to see an overabundance of Judging types in the business world, until I ask people how they like their vacations structured. The most organized business person in the world might say to me “Totally unstructured! All I want to do is get away from the rat race for a while and be completely in the moment and do whatever I decide to do at the time. Or maybe simply decide to do nothing!” I find that many people are well trained and disciplined at work but as soon as they can get away from it will revert to their more natural Perceiving type on their own time. We’ll talk about the need for Balance, Balance, Balance in future blogs as well as some deeper and often hidden implications of this function playing out in the work place.

Four Functions and Three Rules. So there you have a quick overview of the four functions of Energizing, Perceiving, Deciding and Work Life and I hope you’ve already gotten the message that the best way to manage these functions is through Balance, Balance, Balance. Teams that accomplish this balance in a trusting, respectful manner are always the best teams. They make better decisions more quickly that are more universally accepted than teams that never figure out how to use their diversity. This is one of the best technique and mental model that you can ever implement for overall better teamwork!

Sixteen Types. It’s also important to understand that it’s not just the individual function dichotomies that make a difference, it’s the combination as well. An Introverted preference may function very differently when it’s part of an ISTJ preference set than when it’s part of an INFP preference set. All of this to say, don’t become the arm chair psychologists and assume you can figure out someone’s type and therefor figure them out. You can’t. Your best bet at success is to master the process that brings out the best of all of the fourteen type preferences.

The Four Functions:
1. Energizing
2. Perceiving
3. Deciding
4. Work Life

The Three Rules:
1. Balance
2. Balance
3. Balance

Over the next several blogs we’ll take a more in-depth look at each of the functions and learn some great techniques to create balance, balance, balance.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterEmail
BlogTeam

Decide: We’ve Got it All Backwards

by Ron Potter

I’ve learned this concept from Chris McGoff. In his book, The Primes: How Any Group Can Solve Any Problem, Chris lays out numerous frameworks on how teams work. One of the most powerful for me and many of my teams is understanding the meaning of the word “Decide.”

I’m not trying to be morbid here, but what do the following words have in common?: pesticide, homicide, suicide, genocide? They all end in “cide.” In Latin, the word means kill, killer, murderer, to cause death. One of my clients who was a Latin student said there was even an indication of public execution—to put to death publicly.

So, if we go back to our word decide, it doesn’t mean to figure out what to do, it means to figure out what to kill.

If leaders and teams would actually start killing off the options or directions they’ve decided not to pursue, a great amount of resources could be saved and redirected toward the chosen path.

When you must decide, figure out what you’re going to kill and publicly execute it.

Image Source: Brandon Doran

Image Source: Brandon Doran

All too often, we decide what we’re going to do and we muster the resources to pursue that option. But no one tells the many people down through the organization what to stop doing. And in fact, there’s lots of momentum in the life of the organization for people to continue doing what they’ve been doing over the last several months or years. If you don’t publicly execute that work, they’ll naturally continue to do it.

As I was working through this concept with one of my clients, one team member said, “But we’re really good at prioritizing our work.” And she was right. The organization was really good at knowing which issues should receive top priority and the most resources. But as we continued to pursue the concept, it became painfully obvious how many resources were being applied to extremely low priority items. In fact, by deciding to kill off those low priority items it was astounding how many resources would be freed up to concentrate on the things that really need to be accomplished.

When faced with a team or leadership decision, decide what to kill and then publicly execute it and you’ll be amazed at how many more resources you have available to pursue the path of success.

Why do we have such a hard time killing off projects, initiative, lines of work or almost anything that people have been dedicating their time to? I can think of several reasons but what’s your experience? Share with us.

1 comment
0 FacebookTwitterEmail
Newer Posts
Older Posts