by Charles Plant | Aug 21, 2014 | Leadership Development
Daniel Levitin has written an interesting book called the Organized Mind. I saw him speak the other day about the book and was fascinated by the stories he told about highly accomplished people.
Not being one of those people, I listened closely to figure out what I could learn. What struck me most was the way he differentiated between creative thinking and rational decision making.
To Levitin, “Creative thinking means allowing the nonlinear to intrude on the linear and to exercise some control over the output.” It is a mystery though, how linkages are made between the linear and non-linear in order to make creative leaps.
“In contrast to creative thinking is rational decision making.” According to Levitin, “Human brains didn’t evolve to be very good at this…because we have a limited attentional capacity to deal with large amounts of information.”
So if a human brain has two critical functions: creativity and decision making, it turns out that we’re not much good at either of them. And if we don’t have the ability to to pay attention to detail, we’ll never get any better at the latter.
This leaves the human brain to excel at one thing, which is day dreaming, and that I suspect we are all very good at this.
by Charles Plant | Jul 29, 2014 | Leadership Development
If you did a survey of drivers I think that you would find that 80% of them consider themselves to be of above average capability. I know I fall into that category yet I am guilty of speeding (most of the time), rolling stops (often) and running yellow lights (sometimes.)
In reality, I am probably a below average driver and yet because I don’t get caught, I figure I’m above average. After all I have a friend (Tom are you there?) who gets caught speeding half a dozen times a year. He is definately below average.
But what about execution?
I figure its the same thing with execution. Most managers out there probably think they are above average at execution. Well if this is true (statistically impossible) why does HBR think that execution is the biggest problem in business today?
I finally figured it out and of course it has to do with the way people are managed. If a company has a results-based management focus and good metrics then people can know with precision whether or not they are executing well.
However this isn’t the case with most companies. Most of them are activity-focussed, manage activities and use metics that track activities. If they don’t have a measured, causal relationship between activities and results then they’ll never know whether they are any good at execution.
And because there is no one explicitly in charge of execution (we all are) and thus no one measuring it, no one really ever has a way of finding out whether or not they are any good at executing.
Which brings up the dreaded annual appraisal. Is there anyone out there whose appraisal is any good at dealing in an objective manner with execution?
So there we have it: No one in charge, poor metrics, activity orientation instead of results, poor appraisals means no one really knows if they are any good at execution. (But I’m sure you’re all great drivers – except Tom of course.)
by Charles Plant | Jul 23, 2014 | Leadership Development
I’ve worked over the years in a variety of environments that were totally chaotic and always wondered why employees didn’t do something about it. Why do people put up with chaos when they could be fixing systems to make them more orderly?
Well thanks to a comment from Oksana Fedan I finally understand what causes the acceptance of chaos and it is Business Entropy. Now I am not much of a physicist and I’ll have to resort to physics to explain this so hold on.
Entropy is a “measure of disorder or randomness in a closed system.” The concept originated in thermodynamics but has been applied to all sorts of fields. In physical terms, energy flows from a hotter region to a colder one until they all become equally distributed and less able to utilize that heat.
Business Entropy
Business entropy occurs in bureaucratic organizations when people begin only to see their own jobs and not interactions with others. Employees do only what is expected of them and cease trying to organize the work in a manner that best suits the entire organization.
It takes extra effort to bring order out of chaos and when things get chaotic, organizations just find it easier to adjust to the chaos than to fix it. It takes less energy to do this (and less cost).
Unfortunately, Business Entropy is almost inevitable as an organization grows, becomes more process oriented, jobs become more specialized and bureaucracy emerges.
Bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy and as employees become more process oriented they tend to defend their processes against intrusion from outsiders and change that would benefit the organization as a whole.
It takes a shift in business thinking from a process orientation to an orientation around results to counter Business Entropy and for most companies, that’s just too much of a switch.
by Charles Plant | Jun 25, 2014 | Leadership Development
I was working away on a new business plan with Paul Engels of Veloxsites fame when out of the blue he said something like: “Stop the presses, we have to do this differently.” Being an inquisitive type and not understanding what on earth he was talking about, I asked him what’s up.
Well Paul had gotten fed up (and rightly so) with the quantity of words in the document. Being someone who as you might imagine, has a love affair with words, I was very disappointed as I actually wanted to add more words.
The way I figure it, no one reads business plans anyway so adding more words just makes the plan seem all the more righteous. But no, this wasn’t what Paul was talking about.
What he wanted was to add more pictures. Yes, replace words with cute little pictures and diagrams that make it so that people who don’t like to read things can get some value out of a document.
That’s when he said something that rocked my world. He gave me a new way to think about communication. What he said was:
Having a picture gives the reader permission to skip reading in detail.
And this is true. When there are pictures in a document, most readers gravitate directly to the pictures and skip the rest. Genius. What it means for you, is that if you want to communicate better, draw some pictures.
by Charles Plant | Jun 13, 2014 | Leadership Development
So if procrastination isn’t a bad thing and instead is just a value judgement made by anally-retentive over-achievers (see yesterday’s blog) then it is something to be celebrated.
Before we actually get around to creating National Procrastinator’s Day, maybe we should focus on how to become better procrastinators. Here then are five easy steps to save time and effort by becoming a better procrastinator:
- When someone else gives you a task to do along with a deadline, ask them if they really really need it by the deadline date or whether it is an artificial date. Try to get that deadline extended.
- After a few days have gone by, ask a bunch of really tough questions that will make the other person think hard and take a while to answer. This makes the other person think that you’re really getting at it and at the same time it can cut down what you need to do or potentially delay completion even more.
- Let the task roll around in your head for a while, all the time thinking about what is the least amount of work you can do to get the task done. Ask more questions to seem busy and try to reduce the task or eliminate it.
- Once you have figured out the absolute minimum amount of work needed (see blog on Perfectionism) then figure out the absolutely latest time possible that you can start the task.
- Once that time has past, get down to and rescue victory from the jaws of defeat by doing even less work than you thought you needed to do and pulling off a miracle to complete the task on time.
Now you may think I’m joking about this but I’m being perfectly serious. A lot of us spend too much time doing things that don’t need to be done or spending too much time on things of little value.
The great thing about procrastination is that it can be used as a tool to avoid doing the unnecessary and reducing time on the unimportant.
by Charles Plant | Jun 12, 2014 | Leadership Development
You would think from the comments to my last blog that people feel very guilty when they procrastinate. I find that really funny as I never feel guilty when I procrastinate.
Apparently, there are three types of procrastinators, Delayers put things off for all sorts of reasons, Perfectionists don’t let go of something until it is perfect and Distractibles are people who are easily distracted by bright shiny objects.
No matter what type of procrastinator you happen to be, most people seem to feel some form of guilt, anxiety, dissatisfaction, depression or self-loathing when they procrastinate.
Silly, silly, silly. This must be something like left-over guilt from toilet training when one is young. After all, if you aren’t late at delivering something you promised,who cares if you did it at the last minute or weeks ago? Why do we think it is better to do things early that to do it late. After all, what does it really matter when you do it, as long as it is of acceptable quality and on time?
In fact the way I think about it, there are a bunch of benefits to procrastinating when trying to do something:
- Whatever you have to do might get cancelled before you get to it.
- You get to do things you like more first.
- You get more time to figure out what to do. (If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.)
- You can get it all done at once.
So it’s time to take off the shackles of unwarranted value judgements designed in the Victorian age to benefit the early bird who gets lots of worms. Stop feeling guilty about doing things at the last minute. Who really cares when you do something?
Procrastination is much better that not getting stuff done. These are the people who really should feel guilty, the ones who don’t produce. And the funny thing is that the non-producers don’t feel guilty about their lack of production. So why should you feel guilty about procrastinating?
