What I thought about as I ran was when I learnt to drive in a fully manual car, one of the really tricky bits was the clutch control. The whole balancing/ tipping point bit around not over-revving and potentially stalling when taking the clutch off too quickly and not under-revving and avoiding going anywhere (apologies to any pure- automatic drivers who think I’m now talking in Swahili…….) In the worst case scenario you end up flooding the engine.

So my question was whether taking action on tasks/ projects/ challenges and goals is like learning to drive and are we all still stuck in learner mode? I know I sometimes over-rev and stall in advance of taking action. Over-thinking and over-anticipating the small amount of effort actually required to be successful. There are still skeletons littering my project and task list (and in some furthest corners my goals and vision statements) which are like flooded engines. Too much anticipation has built up in the cylinders of my mind and I just can’t start on them.

I need some advanced driver lessons.

The power of the human imagination is still relatively little researched. Productivity literature, parents and teachers ask us to focus on the task in hand and our project plans. Yet we know through our human history that it has been the big thinkers that have enabled our faster progress as a human race: not those who just focus on the here & now and accept the norm.

As animals, we are goal oriented (food, sex….) and from what we know about our evolution, we can speculate that a sophistication in our goal setting was introduced as we developed consciousness. We could defer satisfaction. Invest time and energy, working together for a longer-term and ultimately more rewarding goal. I suspect this skill is also subject to further evolution. We can be bound by what we know, as framed by our human history and what we tell each other. Limited by the current ‘realities’ of our knowledge. Or we can recognise this will just bring us a tomorrow that looked like yesterday.

Instead, we need to recognise our own power of imagination. We use the same parts of our brain in imagining as we do in remembering. Your ‘brain’ doesn’t really know that your big vision hasn’t already happened; therefore you are the only blocker to your dreams. Your limiting self-beliefs, your why-nots. So let’s take advantage of our sophistication. Let’s blow the doors off everything that limits us. Let’s all start to have visions that we’re proud of: our reality is what we make it.

Fortunately a giant robot dinosaur called FAKEGRIMLOCK comes to the rescue of our human limitations on a post on Eric Ries’ Lean Startup blog. My favourite part:

EVERYONE GOOD AT SEE CAN’T. EVERYONE LIVE IN WORLD FULL OF IMPOSSIBLE.

EVERYTHING THAT MATTER IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL SOMEONE DO IT ANYWAY.

STOP BEING EVERYONE. STARE AT WHY NOT UNTIL IT GIVE UP AND BECOME HOW TO.

1. The cost of understanding your product/service has to be less than the immediately obvious benefit that comes from using your product/ service. People will stay with you (pitch/ marketing message/ website) for as long as their needs being solved are made immediately apparent, are sufficiently significant, and the ways in which your product/ service solves that need are clearly understandable (and the cost of understanding is less than the benefit) [adapted and evolved from SuperConnect]
2. A CEO should be aiming to only focus on strategy and people development: your head should be 12-18mths hence at first (longer over time), and your heart should be in developing the person better than you. You are the only person in the business whose job it really is to ‘develop the insights/ perceptions/ abilities to detect patterns of change and relate them to your landscape, industries, competition and business’ [adapted from Execution]. You should always be looking to develop the person better than you to be able to take your job. If they don’t yet exist in your company, make sure you hire them. ‘Yes’ or ‘passive no’ people will kill your business.
3. If the core transactions of your business don’t exist without funding (including your time/cost funding), then your sole focus should be on adjusting your business model to be profitable in its core operation without investment. However well-funded or visionary your plans are, the cash flow monster eats the investment and then chases and kills 99% of its prey.
4. If you can’t translate what you do into an emotional need solved, your business idea will struggle. I always get my businesses and clients to then translate this further into the company’s mission: its reason for existing. This aligns the owners, team, stakeholders and clients behind a common mission.Compelling needs are fine. Emotional needs take your business to another level. Just make sure you go back to the ‘patterns of change’ point in 2. above, because as soon as a need is solved another tends to appear.
5. The primary reason for failure (after cash) is a lack of self-awareness. A lack of honesty where the founder/ owner/ MD is doing things which they shouldn’t and others should. An inability to analyse their own blockers and get out-of-the-way of their own business’ success. Only focus on what you and only you can do. Delegate or outsource all else.This is the reason all my current businesses exist to enable entrepreneurs, CEOs and MDs to fulfil their ambitions for their business by removing their own blockers to success.

From Execution

1. Look for disruptive change. As you are about to start a new venture, ask yourself these questions: What is becoming possible or necessary that wasn’t possible before?  Is a new product or service able to take over an existing market or create a new market? When I co-founded LinkedIn in 2003, the tech industry was in a deep depression. I looked at all the opportunities created by the Internet and had the idea that eventually everyone would need a professional profile online. This profile would enable them to connect with similar professionals and share news, tips and other information. The development of online professional profiles that people could create and control themselves led to an enormous, disruptive change in the recruiting industry. It provided a way for people to directly reach the best candidates rather than hoping for responses from a listing in the paper.

2. Aim big. Regardless of whether a start-up is targeting a big idea or small one, it will still require the same amount of blood, sweat and tears — so aim big! What is big? It is a new product or service that creates or dominates a significant market. If the market is small or your product is only a marginal improvement over what is already available, you will be taking the same risks but for a much smaller potential gain. I am on the board of a company called Shopkick, which aims to revolutionize retail shopping through a mobile application and incentive program that will enable retailers to attract new and more frequent shoppers. Shopkick founder Cyriac Roeding didn’t think small. He is targeting ALL retail shopping.

3. Build a network to magnify your company. A lot of people seem to think that behind every great start-up is a single entrepreneur with an idea. The reality is, great companies are built by a number of people with talent who are surrounded by supportive networks. Going beyond recruiting exceptional talent, the most successful entrepreneurs bring in advisers, investors and even early customer relationships. Building out this network of alliances massively increases the size and probability of a positive result. Zynga, a global social-gaming company based in San Francisco and founded four years ago, has raised a great deal of capital yet the company’s founder and CEO, Mark Pincus, has yet to use most of it. He raised that money in order to bring in strong board members who could help him build his gaming empire. The capital those investors bring to the table is just insurance.

4. Plan for good and bad luck. Whenever you are about to embark on building a new company you should assume two things: You will have good luck and you will have bad luck. Good luck is not as simple as “it works out.” Rather, good luck is when you suddenly discover a great opportunity and can quickly shift to go after it. Bad luck is what happens when your idea doesn’t work out. It doesn’t mean instant failure, but means you need to go to plan B. PayPal was founded at the turn of this past decade. When we launched the first product, the company still thought of itself as a mobile payments company. We came upon some good luck when we noticed the massive traction and growth from just one week of providing payments for eBay’s marketplace. The company quickly pivoted so that its main focus was powering eBay’s marketplace.

5. Maintain flexible persistence. Very often entrepreneurs are given conflicting advice. They are told, “Be persistent! Stick to your vision! Drive through adversity!” At the same time they are told, “Listen to customer feedback! Pivot on key data! Know when to change!” The challenge for entrepreneurs is to be able to follow both pieces of advice at the same time. In other words, you must know when to maintain flexible persistence. Over the years PayPal has made multiple significant pivots. The company started as a mobile encryption platform. Then it was a mobile payments company. Next PayPal was a combination mobile and Web site payments company. Finally PayPal became an email payments company. Each pivot over the life of the company was the result of rethinking the business but maintaining the vision. The focus was always to become a payments operating system; but the nature of the operating system changed multiple times.

Reid Hoffman is co-founder and chairman at LinkedIn and a Pprtner at Greylock Partners. He is a member of the founding team at PayPal and has been an angel investor and adviser to dozens of organizations including Facebook, Zynga, Flickr and Last.FM.  He currently serves on the boards of LinkedIn, Zynga, Shopkick, Kiva.org and Mozilla. His complete profile can be found at http://www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman.

via LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman: Five Lessons for Entrepreneurs – Tech Europe – WSJ.

They’re coping with a lot of the things that leaders have to. I started to explain things in terms of suspending a balance between the following areas of accountability as a leader and manager:

1. Being involved in the detail (normally on an urgent/ important basis) sufficient to be able to make an informed decision when called on to do so

2. Maintaining progress on the list of important value-add or change areas that will step change the company’s performance and future success (inc. strategy)

3. Monitoring and maintaining the systems of control over process as well as managing, mentoring and coaching people to be able to run the company tactically and operationally

I realised that the big challenge in this is that you can mentally allocate the focus to areas two and three; area one normally drags you in without your planning. Arguably, area three. is easier to plan for in terms of operational review meetings, 121s, performance reviews and coaching sessions.

But that’s all about the conscious intent as opposed to the reality.

The urgency and all-consuming nature of some of the detailed decisions in area one. The personal commitment (and sometimes soul-searching/ pain) involved in managing people issues in area three. These are all things that can emotionally throw you so far from your ability to manage you conscious intent/ mental plans for maintaining the balance between your areas of accountability.

This is where the ‘x’ factor comes in. In previous posts I would have called it something like ‘personal strength’ or ‘resolve’. Since the start of my exploration of a more ‘organic?’ approach (see Influenced by Randomness) it is best to call it the ‘x’ factor.

This is the ability to manage multiple challenges to your time and ‘head space’ in a relaxed and efficient way. The perfect balance of multiple accountabilities of different types and with different positions on the urgent/ important scale.

A worthy goal.

In a line from Daniel Nettle’s great book ‘Happiness, The Science behind your Smile’   he states ‘…happiness, though, is not calculated by a simple summing up of all the positive moments and a subtraction of the negative ones. It also involves more complex cognitive processes, such as comparison with alternative possible outcomes (note: this quote refers to something he calls ‘level two happiness’ which is all about ‘judgements about the balance of feelings’. A hybrid of emotion and judgement about emotion.

Now it’s a very pop. psychology way of thinking about it, but could this element of our happiness ‘assessment’ also operate as a pre-assessment in advance of activities?

Mark Forster’s view in Do It Tomorrow: of the ‘Reactive Brain as a lizard sitting on a rock in the sun. If it sees a threat, such as a predator, it scuttles under the rock and freezes’ analogises what came to mind.

We assess happiness post-event against a comparison with alternative possible outcomes. ‘What we are programmed for by evolution is not happiness itself, but a set of beliefs about the kind of things that bring happiness, and a disposition to pursue them’ (Nettle p14). If you put these two things together, could you not argue that we have an inbuilt procrastination tool as the downside of our pursuit of happiness?

If we are disposed to pursue the things that bring us happiness then there is the obvious answer that work will be hard to motivate to do. But is the problem mainly that without specific pre-work activity we can’t model the alternative possible outcomes to judge our happiness against? Do we have to plan for the successful outcome? Does procrastination arise mainly where we cannot directly deliver to our disposition to pursue those activities that bring us happiness.

IkesWorld post and quote from British prime minister and author Benjamin Disraeli, “Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.” nails it for me.

Thaler and Sunstein ‘demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice’. They suggest how accepting our ‘peopleness’ and suggesting rather than telling will lead to greater success in change.

They show that by knowing how people think, ‘we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society’

With my focus on the self, I was struck by how similar this was to observations about how game playing offered a simple route for the brain to accept change, or enter into a routine without an adverse reaction. The game or scorecard. The simple tallying and framing of it as a competition rather than a ‘must-do’. These are just simple nudges into a new habit or routine.

What fascinates me though is the why? Do we have an over-inflated sense of the complexity of our own consciousnesses? Simple methods are the easiest.

Or do we have an in-built independence and reaction to being told what we should do? Whether by a third party, or by our conscious telling our other-than-conscious.

]]> https://justseventhings.com/2012/12/24/nudge-yourself-to-change/feed/ 1 77 siconroy https://justseventhings.com/2012/11/16/time-management-and-satisficing/ https://justseventhings.com/2012/11/16/time-management-and-satisficing/#respond Fri, 16 Nov 2012 20:49:07 +0000 http://justseventhings.wordpress.com/?p=206

Massage by Steve Woods

Satisficing is defined as ‘a decision-making strategy which attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution’ – Wikipedia. It is a blend of words: satisfy and suffice.

Most tasks tend to expand to fill the time that we give to do them.

I started thinking about whether satisficing could help explain why it is sometimes possible to create some great work in the 30 minutes before a deadline and yet produce a similar quality (if more long-winded) product if you’ve given yourself a day to do it.

I wrote about whether I create these time bound situations myself to thrive better under stress. Now I wonder whether satisficing is the flip side of this. That of producing something that satisfies and is sufficient for the time given.

So when you are disorganised you satisfice for the time you ‘bounce’ into. Whatever time you have left to fulfill the boss’s request, complete the form or get the paper in. Give too little time, you get something that is sufficient for that time. Give too much time, and you still only apply the time sufficient to satisfy the requirements for the task. The extra time is squandered in procrastination or distraction.

All completely speculative and I’m sure I’d be shot-down with a psychological/ academic analysis… but it feels like there is something in it.

]]> https://justseventhings.com/2012/11/16/time-management-and-satisficing/feed/ 0 206 siconroy Massage by Steve Woods https://justseventhings.com/2012/10/28/leaders-learning-skills-from-their-teams/ https://justseventhings.com/2012/10/28/leaders-learning-skills-from-their-teams/#comments Sun, 28 Oct 2012 19:15:35 +0000 http://justseventhings.wordpress.com/?p=185

The Open Book by Dan Christian Lavric

Just something that occurred to me today as I was taking a note of what one of me client senior managers had said to me that I wanted to learn from.

How many leaders and managers consciously look to learn from their teams? How many are both open to the fact that they could learn from the people that they’ve hired and that work for them, as well consciously seeking out opportunities.

NLP frequently indicates the information to be gleaned from modelling other people. It is interesting that a fair few of the ideas I have read about suggest the identification of influential leaders or peers. People within your communities to network to and ask all of those ‘how do you know?’ questions. It’s probably through a remission in my reading, but using people who work with you and for you in aggregate to create a composite ‘model’ is not something I’ve read.

Now, reading this back, I’m probably going off on one. The compartmentalised skills, attitudes or behaviours are well and good when exhibited separately and modelled from. Often though the benefits to be be sought lie in how those individuals marry together elements in their overall life. How do they handle the opposing thoughts or the conflicts that arise?

However, for me I noticed that there is a lot of validity in using your colleagues or team members. Advantages include the close proximity on an ongoing basis: the ability to validate through experience what they’ve said when you’ve elicited responses. The ability to see the impacts that their behaviours have on others: your ability to be able to take this and through trial and error model your ‘way’ of doing whatever it is you’re looking to do.

Finally, I think that one of the big things for a leader is that by modelling and therefore also learning better how to mirror behaviours, the level of engagement that you can develop with your team becomes far superior. You can talk their language and act in the way that elicits the best response from them. When you need to. Another tool in your kit…..

]]> https://justseventhings.com/2012/10/28/leaders-learning-skills-from-their-teams/feed/ 2 185 siconroy The Open Book by Dan Christian Lavric