Lidenskap.blog

You have been there. You are introduced to someone. You shake hands, your eyes meet, and then ...

What do I say after I say Hello?

Are you good at asking the right questions in the right context?

Here are some questions I will ask more of.

When you hear things are impossible, problematic or difficult, try to lift the cognitive load of reality and let the person play with the imagination, and solutions may become more accessible.

• What would it look like if it were possible? What would it look like if it were easy?
• Imagine a miracle happened and your problem was solved. How would you know?

Instead of examining something problematic, difficult or bad in isolation, try to get clarity from contrast.

• "This is so hard / bad / problematic ...", ... compared to what?

Have you met people who are very confident and firmly believe they are right and that they know the answer or solution? Be curious, and ask some questions.

• How do you know that? How do you know that this is the right thing to do?
• What leads you to that conclusion or to that assumption?
• What might happen if it's wrong?
• What are the uncertainties in your reasoning?

When you are presented with new strategies, directions or processes, don't you sometimes wonder ...

• Do we have to change in an obvious way in order to execute this strategy?
• What do we need to do in order to deliver on this? What do we need to stop?
• How do we know if this new strategy, process or whatever is successful? How do we recognize a successful execution?

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed and stressed over all the problems and opportunities that should be addressed and solved.

• But what happens if we do nothing? Maybe that's a question we should ask more often.

Have you ended up in a deep rabbit hole where the discussion leads nowhere?

• What are we trying to accomplish here?
• What are we up against here?
• How would you like me to proceed? How can we solve this problem?

Learning is important for me. These fun questions are difficult to answer, but they at least trigger some reflections.

• What have surprised you the most?
• What's the most difficult thing you did the last X weeks/months, and what did you learn from it?

I am not good at small talk with new people, so here's at least one opening I use.

• What are you currently working on that you are most excited about?

What questions do you tend to ask and why?

I'm a Yes-person! Yes to everything and everybody.

I don't think I am alone. We say yes too often.

Saying 'No' to people when they ask you? Hell no. I don't want to disappoint people or hurt any feelings. I want to be polite. And what if I miss out on something if I turn it down?

But I also know that my reluctance to say "no" leaves me overcommitted and overwhelmed.

Zoe Chance decided to let 'no' be her default response for an entire month, which she dubbed 'NOvember'. As the month progressed, she started to feel less stressed and more in control of her own decisions, her time, and her life.

She started giving her MBA students a 24-Hour 'No' Challenge. To practice saying no! 

It's about being kind to yourself. People won't hate you. You may find it empowering.

Sometimes you must respond with more than a "No" or "No, thank you".
Your boss assigns you yet another task when you are already swamped?

• Why are you asking me?
• Whom else have you asked?
• When you say this is urgent, what do you mean?
• According to what standard does this need to be completed? By when?
• If I couldn't do all of this, but could do just a part, what part would you have me to do?
• What do you want me to take off my plate so I can do this?

I read somewhere that the best and most polite excuse is just to say you have a rule, like “I have a rule that I am home for bath time with the kids every night" or "I have a rule that I don’t decide on the phone".

People respect rules and they accept that the rule allows you no choice.

Or simply use Derek Sivers "Hell yeah or no" rule?

We all have our practical skills which can be acquired through education, training programs, learning by doing. Skills we are not born knowing. Something we must teach. "Hard skills" as we often say.

In the book 'The Song of Significance', Seth Godin says we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to skills like 

• Decision-making, 
• Eager participation, 
• Dancing with fear, 
• Speaking with authority, 
• Working in teams, 
• Seeing the truth, 
• Speaking the truth, 
• Inspiring others, 
• Doing more than we are asked, 
• Caring, and 
• Being willing to change things.

He says that we tend to underinvest in training on these skills, fearful that these things are innate and can't be taught. 

We downplay them, calling them "soft skills", making it easy for us to move on to something seemingly more urgent.

These are interpersonal skills. Leadership skills. Human skills. Skills that amplify your hard vocational skills.

Adam Grant refers to "character skills" in his hook 'Hidden Potential', which are never too late to build.

• Take initiative to ask questions, 
• Seek information, 
• Get along and collaborate with peers, 
• Pay attention, 
• Take on challenging problems, 
• Do more than the assigned work, and 
• Persist in face of obstacles.

These skills can actually all be learned. Even though they are more difficult to measure, that doesn't mean we can't improve them, can't practice them, or can't change the way we do our work.

Seth Godin asks us to imagine a team member with all the traditional hard skills: productive, skilled, experienced. That's a fine baseline.

Now add to it. Perceptive, charismatic, driven, focused, goal-setting, inspiring, and motivated. 

It is in our nature, and we love it.

What images are evoked when you hear the word "learning"? Sitting passively in classrooms or meetings and listening? 

Taking in information is not the same as learning.

When we have learned we are able to do something we never were able to do. Learning is about expanding our ability to produce the results we truly want. We never "arrive". It's a process.

The best learners get comfortable being uncomfortable. The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but isn't necessarily how you learn best. Practicing something before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it. Accelerating learning requires you to use your knowledge as you acquire it.

The most powerful learning comes from direct experiences. As babies we learn eating and walking by trial and error. We didn't learn to speak our mother tongue in a textbook, starting with grammar and, checked by bi-quarterly exams, systematically fitting words to the acquired rules.

There is a dilemma here. Yes, we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important business decisions. How do you and your organization learn then?

Teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. When teams are learning, the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise.

Is it crazy to say that the primary objective of a team is to learn? Isn't the primary goal to deliver value? But how do you know you deliver optimal value without learning? The faster you learn, and the quicker you can integrate those insights into your delivery, the more value is created.

One of the best measures of any group's culture is its learning velocity - how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.

You probably have performance goals. What about learning goals? Getting A in French vs. Learn to speak French. Which one leads to mastery?

But hey, we don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience someone said. But we are busy, so we don't have time to just sit around and talk, right? We barely have time to think. 

Reflection that isn't connected to action is what makes people think they don't have time for this. We need a culture and the discipline to integrate reflection and action.

Teaching others is a surprisingly powerful method of learning. My favorite. The protégé effect. 

If we know that others are going to learn from us, we feel a sense of responsibility to provide the right information, and fill our own gaps. It is simple. Next time you have learned something, explain it to someone else.

Learning starts with me. I can never expect the people around me to be more open and willing to learn and improve than I am. 

To learn I must be humble enough to realize I have something to learn.