lidenskap.blog

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.

They planet ...

We fear uncertainty

We fear uncertainty. We don't start walking until we find an approach that's guaranteed to work. How can you know what you are doing when no one has done it before? 

The secret is to start walking before you see a clear path. If you stick to the familiar, you won't find the unexpected.

First-principles

Reason from first-principles. Doubt everything you can possibly doubt until you are left with unquestionable truths. That's where you start. With each commitment, each presumption, each budget item, ask yourself, what if this were not true? Why am I doing it this way? Can I get rid of this this or replace it with something better?

Compare oranges and apples

Approach life not with the assumption that we know (or should know) the answers, but with the desire to learn, experiment and absorb. Compare oranges and apples, look for connections between seemingly unrelated things.

Tackle the hardest part first

If your goal is one percent improvement, you can work within the status quo. But if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go. You must then start with a blank slate and question all assumptions. Picture the perfect and ask what it takes to build it. Move backwards. Tackle the hardest part first.

Problem reframing

In schools we are taught to answer problems, not to reframe them. Problems may have multiple causes, don't stick with the first that pops to mind. Don't fell in love with your favorite solution and define the problem as the absence of it.

Opinions are sticky, hypotheses not

We undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them. Opinions are sticky. Instead, generate several working hypotheses. Opinions are defended, but working hypotheses are tested. Your goal should be to find what's right, not to be right.

Failure is success if we learn from it

Celebrate lessons from failure, not failure itself. Good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. In uncertainty, outcomes are not completely within your control. Focus on the variables you can control – the inputs – instead of the outputs. Even if the project fails, you can take the input that worked and use them elsewhere.

Surviving your own success

When we succeed, we believe everything went according to the plan. When we succeed we stop pushing boundaries. Surviving your own success can be more difficult than surviving your own failure. Instead of risking something new, we maintain the same "proven" formula that led to our success.

Remain in Day 1

The rocket-science mindset requires remaining in Day 1. We must keep devising thought experiments, taking moonshots, proving ourselves wrong, dancing with uncertainty, reframing problems, testing as we fly, and return to first principles.

That's the mindset of a rocket scientist!

"Think Like a Rocket Scientst" by Ozan Varol

When we are going to do something we have done before, we know what we don't know. 

We know where and why delays are likely to occur and we usually know what to do if something goes wrong. We can plan the steps ahead. In this world, clarity and process optimization is good.

Wicked or complex problems on the other hand are different. There is no one right answer. There are no agreement on what the problem really is. 

You face many stakeholders with conflicting objectives. No solutions are right or wrong. You can make the outcome better or worse, but you are never done. Forcing clarity in this world will inevitably hinder innovation.

Getting married is not complex, but having a happy marriage is. There is a manual for getting married. But there is no "best practice" for a happy marriage. It's the sum of many small parts which makes it difficult to make a detailed plan. You cannot copy someone else's work and expect the same results because no two complex problems are alike.

All the analysis, plans and methodologies used to build a car are useless if your problem is car traffic. A car slowing down will cause ripple effects in the traffic difficult to predict. The issue with traffic is not the cars, the buses, the bicycles, or the pedestrians. It is in the relationship between them.

Building the Titanic out of LEGO bricks is not complex. You can simply follow the instructions. The whole equals the sum of the parts.

What about development of digital products that you haven't built before, either at all or in your context?

Market conditions change. Technology is changing. People's behavior change. We don't quite know how we are going to do it. We don't know what people want. You don't know what you don't know until you do something and get feedback. That's when the actual development starts.

Leading in complexity calls for something other than plans and best practices. Sense what's happening. Get some data. Take small actions based on the data and see what happens. Learn from it. Do more of what works, and less of what don't. Find the small changes that have a large positive effect.

Easier said then done. We are humans and we fear uncertainty. When we face uncertainty, we often manufacture excuses for not getting started. We don't start walking until we find an approach that's guaranteed to work.

It's hard to say to your stakeholders that you don't know exactly if it will be a success, when it will be finished and what it will cost.

What we can do is to deliver something early and often and let people try it and give feedback. 

We can also share what we believe (our hypothesis), what we will do to verify it, how we will measure it, what we observed, what we learned from it and what we will do next based on that.

In complexity, how do you measure success? You get what you measure you know ...