What’s become redundant?

How do you take photos these days?

Spring has finally showed up in Toronto. The last patch of snow got washed away by rain just the other week, I’ve been able to go for a bike ride without the risk of losing a limb through frostbite, and I’ve even worn shorts a couple of times.

With that, I’ve been doing a little tidying up - you could call it Spring Cleaning I guess - and going through some of the various boxes I have stored my bits and pieces.

In one box I found my SLR camera. This was one of the very first “grown-up” purchases.  I had just turned 20, and was traveling to Nepal and India for six weeks and wanted a proper camera. I spent months on the research, trying to figure out how to get the best for the money I had, saved from long nights washing up dishes at The Pizza Hut. In the end I selected a Canon 3600 EOS with a 30-90mm zoom, fairly lightweight, flexible with all the mod-cons.

And I loved and used that camera for years, capturing my life at home and the adventures I had overseas.

But finding it again in this box, I realized that I hadn’t used it for at least five years.  And I couldn’t believe how big and heavy and … clunky it was.

Because now I have a tiny little Canon digital camera. As you well know, suddenly you can carry a camera smaller than a deck of cards (if indeed you have a camera at all, and it’s not built into your phone).

Stuff… And actions… And thoughts.

Things move on.  Things get better.  (Not always, of course.  And not for everything.)

But most of us have the equivalent of my old SLR camera stored away somewhere.  And not just stuff, literal stuff.  We’ve got actions, commitments and thoughts that are taking up space, taking up time and energy.

(Do you remember the 6th principle from The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun? - click on number 6 after the music begins)

But the problem most of us face is that we just don’t ever stop and think and ask ourselves these fundamental questions:

Is this still useful?

Is this what I still want to be doing?

Is this what I still want to be holding on to?

Or even more bluntly, it comes down to that perennial question I keep asking you (and me):

What am I saying Yes to?  And If I’m saying Yes to this, what am I saying No to?

Want more?

Check out Leo Babauta’s terrific blog, ZenHabits, devoted to celebrating the Power of Less (which also happens to be the title of his excellent new book.)

Don’t take my word for it

Smart people thinking out loud about falling into habits.

“Habit is a great deadener.”
-Samuel Beckett, Irish writer

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
-Annie Dillard, American writer

“If you have always done it that way, it’s probably wrong.”
-Charles Kettering, American inventor

“Habits are first cobwebs, then cables.”
-Spanish proverb

“Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.”
-Agatha Christie, British writer

My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.
-Errol Flynn, Aussie actor

From our newsletter Outside the Lines - The Business Edition

Great Work Truth #5 - Great Work is not a solo act

Here’s the bottom line question:  You can’t do Great Work alone.  So who are you inviting in to share the adventure?

Saying hello

I probably go on about this in this newsletter more than than any other of the Great Work truths, because it’s what I’m most trying to learn myself.

It’s both an inviting in.

And an inviting out.

Start with inviting some new folks in. It’s never been so easy or so difficult with the explosion of the social networking phenomenon.

There’s no excuse not to be finding and collaborating with the best in the world.  Not just your office, or company, or country.  The best in the world.

And the best are easier than ever to find.  Google, LInkedIn, Twitter - all roads to finding out who’s extraordinary.  Email and phone:  a simple way to make an invitation.

Seth Godin champions this with his new book Tribes.

My tribes

Last week I was in London, and I had the pleasure of spending time with two groups of people I’ve invited in.

The first was lunch with five of the Coaching for Great work faculty:  Steve Pauley, Jonathan Hill, Judith Underhill, Pennie Evans and Daniel Stane.

The second was the world’s first Find Your Great Work workshop.

Spending time in partnership with these two groups was fantastic.

Saying good-bye

But it’s not enough to just invite people in.  You also need to look at which relationships are costing you time, money, energy and effort.

And the challenge is:  How will you reduce contact with them, say goodbye, cut them free?

Time is short, time to do your Great Work is short, and finding the right people to be with and then creating the time to do just that … that’s what’s important right now.

From our newsletter Outside the Lines - The Business Edition

Blackout

The power went out last night at 10pm, and 24 hours later it’s yet to go back on.

That wouldn’t be so bad if I was still in Australia and frolicking in an Antipodean summer.

But I’m back in Toronto and going through a deep freeze.  It’s -25 degrees Celsius outside (that’s about -15F) and it’s not getting any warmer any time soon.
I’ve escaped to the other side of town and found one of my favourite coffee shops up and running and warm. So I’m sipping espresso and warming my toes and musing about power.

Discussing power

In organizations, flowing along beneath most conversations are questions about power, responsibility and accountability.

Peter Block’s work first opened my eyes to this, and since then I’ve been encouraging people to surface the issues of power, bring them into the light and discuss the implications.

Imagine this conversation with your team, with your boss, with your customer, with your CEO, with your kids, with your colleagues…

• How do you feel about the amount of power you have in this situation?

• Here’s how I feel about the amount of power I have.

• What shall we do about that?

A powerful and difficult conversation.  (And one that gets easier the more you do it.)

While you work your way up to framing those conversations (start with the person with whom it will be most easy,) here are some additional ways to think about your power.

Four tips to keep your power

1. Get clear about your Great Work.

Unless you know what work really matters to you, what impact you want to have in this world, it’s hard to decide what to say Yes to and what to say No to - ultimate expressions of your power.

Know what you want.  Ask for what you want.  (Knowing the answer may be “no”.)

Resource: Find Your Great Work

2. Remember that feedback is not the truth.

Mostly, it’s just someone else’s opinion of you, and more often than not, that’s a mix of judgment, projection and hypothesis.

When someone gives you feedback, take what’s useful and ignore the rest.

Resource: Non Violent Communication

3. Go easy on yourself.

One of the places our power leaks out most conspicuously is through our own self-judgment.  Our capacity to beat ourselves up - the notorious “inner critic” - constantly diminishes who we are.

Resource: Taming Your Gremlin

4. Stop taking it all so damned seriously.

Hands up if what you’re doing is life and death.  I thought so.  OK, hands up if what you’re doing will really matter in 100 years time?  Yep, the same.

It’s one of the paradoxes of Great Work - it’s both important and in the big scheme of things, not that important.  Remembering that can free things up nicely.

Resource: The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun

Don’t take my word for it

Smart folks thinking out loud about power.

“Man is made or unmade by himself. By the right choice he ascends. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of his own thoughts, he holds the key to every situation.”
James Allen, American writer

“Dear, never forget one little point. It’s my business. You just work here.”
Elizabeth Arden (to her husband), Canadian businesswoman

Read more quotations about power here.

From our newsletter Outside the Lines - The Business Edition

2008 has left the building

OK, not quite.  But it’s getting there.

In the US, today’s Thanksgiving which means:

1. Massive amounts of turkey

2. The end of the year is nigh.

And what does that mean?  For many of us in organizations, there’s a charge on for the finish line:

Hit the numbers.

Sort things out.

Wrap things up.

So with just 35 days left to 2009 (and less than half of those working days), here are five things to focus on wrapping up.

1. The unspoken acknowledgement

It’s a drum I’ve beaten before:  Great Work is not possible on your own.  You need the help of those around you.

Who has helped you get this far?  Who has played a role in your success?  (Think of the obvious.  Then think of the less obvious.)

Try out this formula - it’s good for the first draft:

“[name], when you/because you [insert action they did], I was able to [insert impact it had on you].  And I just wanted to say thank you.”

Then find your own words to acknowledge those to whom you’d like to say thanks.

2. The excess flowing into your InBox

Hands up all those people in the world that have too little email.

Exactly.

Barack Obama might be on the only one

Rather than just figuring out how best to process the flow, think about what you can shut down at the source.

What mailing lists are you on that you never read, just delete?  (Hopefully not this one).

Whose emails do you get CC’d or BCC’d  because that’s just the way things are done.  Tell them “don’t copy me on your emails.”

What other emails show up that you’d rather not see?  How can you go beyond “delete” and shut them up for good?

3. The chipped relationship

Somewhere along the line, some of your relationships got a little tarnished this year.

A misunderstanding.  Accidental neglect.  Two sides of an argument.

It doesn’t really matter how they got deflated.   Rather, the question is this:

Do you want to reverse the trend?

Who are one or two people that you’d like to rebuild with?

4. The project that matters

I know you’ve got a lot of STUFF that needs to be done between here and the holiday break.

And you’re busy as a … well, insert your cliché of choice.

But what if you stopped trying to get everything done and just got the project that really mattered done really well?

Change the definition of success from “everything done OK” to “most things done adequately enough … and the thing that matters most done extraordinarily.”

What is that project?

What would “extraordinary” look like?

5. Clarity on what 2009’s Great Work might be

Lift your head from the hurly-burly of 2008 … and ask yourself:  if 2009 is a year where I do Great Work, do more Great Work, do the work that matters…

What will I be doing?

What’s the project you want to say Yes to?

What are the distractions you need to say No to?

It’s not too soon to start dreaming of 2009’s Great Work.  If you don’t, we just might be having this same conversation in 12 months time….

And if you’re still looking for something to wrap up

Then this video might give you some ideas

while this one is just sweet

Let me know what you’re planning on wrapping up in the Comments section

From our newsletter Outside the Lines - The Business Edition

A Choice

Wisdom often lies in having to make a commitment, a bold judgment on the state of things.

It’s a way of cutting through the messy complexities of everyday life; complexities that keep us busy and doing - and not thinking too hard about the situation at hand.

It turns gray into black and white.  It’s not that this means it’s necessarily the truth - but it does create an interesting moment of pause before you take the next step.

You’ve already heard a few of my favourite questions to ask in that pause.

• Is this Good Work?  Or is it Great Work?

• Does this move you closer or further away?

• Is it a Yes or is it a No?

Here’s another one I’ve been chewing over recently.

• Are you doing this “to” or “with”?

The difference

This distinction gets to the heart of the way you work with people and the nature of the relationship you create with them.

You’ll get the difference straight away.

“With” takes you to an “adult to adult” relationship, where you and they both ask for what you want and both feel free to say Yes or No.

It’s not necessarily a touchy-feely or even a deep relationship.  You can have transactional relationships that are “with”, just as you can have more intimate relationships that stay stuck in “to”.

In short, it’s a place where you’re reminded of their humanness, what Martin Buber would call an I/Thou relationship. (see I And Thou)

“To” on the other hand is when the dynamic shifts.  It’s no longer “adult-to-adult” and something has happened to corrupt the way the power and responsibility is shared.

Buber would call this an I/It relationship, one where the other person’s essential humanity has been forgotten and you no longer respect and hold their freedom to make their own choices.

You’ll remember the times you’ve had things done “to” you - and just how that can subtly or otherwise diminish you.

And you’ll remember those people with whom you’ve worked “with” - and remembered the sense of trust and growth that engendered.

Drama Triangle

One of the models that helps explain this to me is the Drama Triangle, a model that has its roots in Transactional Analysis.

The Drama Triangle suggests that when a relationship is dysfunctional - when it’s in a “to” phase - three roles get played out.

> Persecutor
> Victim
> Rescuer

The Persecutor is the bully (or more subtly, the micro-manager), the person who doesn’t trust anyone and who feels surrounded by people not as good as themselves.  The “to” side of this is pretty obvious - when you’re working with fools, you can’t trust them to work “with”, you have do this “to”.

The Victim is the whiner, the “it’s all so hard, and they’ve let me down, and I can’t do anything.”  The Victim is a genius at attracting people who do things to them - either the Persecutor or the Rescuer.

The Rescuer is a role as dysfunctional as the others, although it can somehow feel a little better as you’re just “helping out.” Rescuers love Victims and are forever jumping in to save them.  That’s not “with”, that’s “to”.  It’s a role that gets played out in organizations all the time.

If you find yourself dancing around the Drama Triangle - and we all do at some stage or another - then there’s been a shift from “with” to “to”.

Something to ponder

Scan the list of people with whom you work.

• With whom are you “with”?  With whom are you “to”?

And perhaps more interestingly…

• What is it that flips you from one to the other?

• What helps you get to “with”?

• What pulls you back to “to”?

Don’t take my word for it

Smart people thinking out loud about recognizing others’ humanity.

“Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.”
-Thomas Carlyle, Scottish philosopher

“The more I see of man, the more I like dogs.”
-Marguerite De Launay, Baronne De Staal, French writer

See more quotes and add your own here.

From our newsletter Outside the Lines - The Business Edition

The Great Work Blog

Last month I launched The Great Work Blog, and I’ve been writing short pieces on Great Work five days a week.

Think of this as a form of regular “drip irrigation” to help grow your own Great Work garden, rather than just an occasional newsletter deluge.

In this newsletter I’m featuring five of my favourite pieces so far:

- Five Things to say No to
- You can’t figure it out by figuring it out
- Underwork it for the breakthrough
- The feeling of Great Work
- D’uh!  (this one will make you laugh)

And even better you can subscribe so each post pops into your Inbox. You don’t have to remember to check for updates.

=> Subscribe by email here
=> Subscribe by RSS here

== Five Things to say No to ==

You can’t do Great Work without saying No to a few things.

Here are five places to start.

1. People who drain rather than nourish.
(There’s no room for those that drain your energy.)

2. The belief that everything has to be done excellently.
(”Adequate” is normally just fine.   Needing to do everything excellently is not only impossible but overwhelming.)

3. The idea that doing email is doing work.
(It’s a means to an end, not an end in itself.  Learn to tame the beast.)

4. The feeling that being busy …

=> Read the rest here

== You can’t figure it out by figuring it out ==

The other day I was speaking with my friend, Jen Louden.

Jen’s been a big success is the world of self help, in particular for her work as The Comfort Queen and providing insight for women to build greater comfort into their lives.

For the last little while, she’s been looking at evolving, asking “what’s next?”

And she’s been stuck in every increasing, then decreasing, then increasing, then decreasing, circles in her head.

The problem  is trying to figure out the future is nearly impossible.  We try and extrapolate from the past and that leads either to improbable fantasy or reality +/- 5% which isn’t that exciting.

Jen’s solution?

=> Read the rest here

== Underwork it for the breakthrough ==

Browsing in a magazine store the other day, I picked up one of those generic men’s magazines.  You know the type:  a guy with unnaturally white teeth and a six pack on the cover — together with promises of gadgets, sex tips, and a six-pack of your own — to lure you in.

I picked it up - hey, I have the occasional moments of weakness and wanting to be pumped and ripped and shredded - and flicking through it actually found an insight of some use.

An athletic trainer was talking about how to get unstuck, how to breakthrough when you’ve hit a certain point and can’t go beyond.

His insight was this…

==> Read the rest here

== The feeling of Great Work ==

Just about 24 hours ago, I invited pretty much everyone I know to consider applying to be trainers of the Coaching for Great Work training program.

The truth is, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect.  I was hoping to find 10 great people.  And to date I’ve had 60 or people from around the world - Canada, the United States, Australia, Costa Rica, Poland, Argentina, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, the UK - apply to be part of it, often sending me wonderful notes of enthusiasm and support.

I’ve spent much of the day dealing with the influx, answering emails, monitoring comments on the blogs, acknowledging the honour people do me in applying.

And, lying in bed tonight, I’ve finally caught up with how this feels.  How this Great Work for me feels.

I can’t sleep.

I’m filled with doubts - did I launch this too early, can I really deliver this, what was I thinking?

I’m looking for other distractions.  (No kidding, I’ve had this great idea for another cool website).

I’m feeling anxious.

=> You can read the rest here

== D’uh! ==

This one’s a picture and worth a thousand words.

You can see it here

Outside the Lines - The Business Edition

I’m striving for an effortless August. It’s summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, and that deserves things being slower, easier and more fun.

And heck, things should be slower, easier and more fun all the time.

Here are five ways that might help you get closer to that.

Five Ways work can be easier

==> 1. Get a grip on your email

You know the old story of “starting in the mail room and working your way up”? These days we’re all back in the mail room but we’re just working.

I’m a great fan of David Allen’s, Getting Things Done approach to productivity in general and that’s helped me with the email monkey. (That and not having a Blackberry.)

Here are some great tips from 43 Folders on how to get your email Inbox down to zero.

(By the way, I’ll be speaking at David Allen’s Global GTD Conference in March next year. You can find more information about it here.)

==> 2. Purge

This is closely related to #1.

You know all that paper you’ve got piled up and filed away and generally filling up space?

How much of it do you think you’ll ever look at again?

Maybe 10%?

Block out three hours and see how much crap you can get rid off.

If you need a boost, you can always check out the 6th Principle of the Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun here.

==> 3. Figure out what really matters

It seems that most of us are so busy doing stuff, we (occasionally) lose sight of what really matters.

Here’s the easiest way I know how to do this.

Go to your boss’s boss. And ask them what are there three most important priorities for the next 90 days.

I know, I know - there’s all sorts of reasons why you can’t do it. But find a way to do it anyway.

Use phrases like “I know you’ve explained this already, but I just wanted to hear it from you again …”

or

“Just to make sure I haven’t lost sight of the forest for the trees, can you tell me again …?”

By the way, I love Bill Jensen’s, The Simplicity Survival Handbook for tips similar to this. And I’m interviewing Bill as part of the Find Your Great Work interview series.

==> 4. Book in your vacations for the next 12 months now.

Time off is a rare and precious thing.

And (and I can hardly believe this) many of us don’t use our full vacation time.

Block it out and defend it fiercely.

Make it something sweet and juicy and full of anticipation.

If you’re up for adventure, here’s the National Geographic’s top 25 adventures for 2008 .

If you’re more into relaxation, Conde Nast Traveller is full of opinions.

And don’t forget the joy of just hanging out in your own neighbourhood.

==> 5. Remember to breathe

I’m convinced that we spend most of our lives at work holding our breath.

Tension, stress, the busy-ness of it all.

We hold our breath when we arrive and (maybe) exhale on the drive home.

Not only is that difficult to do, it stops oxygen getting to the brain. So we don’t think as well and we’re more easily knocked “off centre.”

Go on, take a full breath now: In. And Out. And tell me that you didn’t feel your shoulders sink down a little.

You might enjoy watching this lecture from Jon Zabat-Zinn on Mindfulness. This is a lecture he gave to the folks at Google. I’m also a big fan of his book, Full Catastrophe Living.

============================

Don’t take my word for it

Smart folks thinking out loud about taking it easy.

“Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much more restful.”
-Mark Twain, American writer

“Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time.”
-T.S. Elliot, British writer

“If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it.”
-Herodotus, Greek historian

You can read more quotes and add your favourites here.

Outside the Lines -The Business Edition

Ever think you’re working too hard?

In my Coaching for Great Work courses, I spend a fair amount of time talking about the value of being “a lazy coach.”

I’m not talking about being slack. I’m talking about not overworking the work you’re doing.

Part of the challenge of doing more Great Work is that you have an ENORMOUS amount of Good Work, in fact an endless amount. What complicates this is that most of us come to all we do with a determination to do an excellent job. (Personally I blame the need to get “A”s at school.)

And “excellence” is more often a curse than something useful.

Abandon “excellence”

Most of the work we do doesn’t need to be excellent. It needs to be adequate.

And by over delivering on what needs to be just OK, you pay a price. You spend too much time, energy, focus and effort on work that doesn’t matter. And in doing so you lose the time to invest in work that does matter, your own Great Work.

Brad Bird, the genius mind behind Pixar’s The Incredibles (pretty much one of my favourite movies ever and Ratatouille addresses this when he talks about his ability to create movies that are not just complex and brilliant but also on budget and on time.

“Not all shots are created equal. Certain shots need to be perfect, others need to be very good, and there are some that only need to be good enough to not break the spell.”

(You can buy a copy of this article here or find a free summary of the interview here.)

What’s the easiest thing to do?

So what “shots” are you taking? And, thinking about which of these shots need to be perfect, which need to be very good and which need to be adequate?

==> Where are you over delivering?

==> Where are you under delivering?

I’m a fan of these two questions:

==> What’s the easiest thing to do?

==> What’s the fastest thing to do?

And to give you a little inspiration, here’s a brilliant role model

If I had to recommend just one resource

Bill Jensen’s, The Simplicity Survival Handbook is a practical guide to focusing on the work that matters. Worth getting just for its tips on managing your email.

Don’t take my word for it

Smart folks thinking out loud about doing just enough to get the job done.

“It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?”
-Ronald Reagan, American President

“A man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied; he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be equally considered; in a word, he must be able to simplify his duties, his business and his life.”
-Henri Frederic Amiel, Swiss writer

“Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify, simplify!”
-Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher

“Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.”
-Floyd Dell, American writer

“Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.”
Walter P. Chrysler, American automaker

“Efficiency is intelligent laziness.”
David Dunham, American actor

“Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.”
-Andy Rooney, American writer

Outside the Lines - The Business Edition

Hear This!

For my birthday I got an indulgent and very cool present from my parents - a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones. They have a built-in microphone that listens to the ambient noise around the wearer and then creates the opposite sound wave that cancels out that excess noise. They’re particularly good on airplanes, as they cut down that persistent whine of the engines - which means you don’t have to watch the substandard movie at a volume louder than your average rock concert. They also work really well, by the by, when vacuuming the house…

Would it not be brilliant if Bose would design a similar set of headphones for work? Not for cutting out the ambient noise, but for reducing the excess of information that gets thrown your way. The headphones would cut out all that white noise that fills up the atmosphere, causing an unpleasant buzzing, knocking you off balance and distracting you from your Great Work.

In lieu of a pair of magic headphones, here are three suggestions on how to improve reception at work.

Listen to what’s good

I recently finished a series of the Coaching for Great Work training programs in Amsterdam. The feedback was very positive indeed, with one exception. And that wasn’t even a big exception, merely a suggestion of a different approach I could take to one part of the course.

Did I pay attention to all the positive feedback? Of course. A bit.

But did I gnaw and worry and fret over and generally harass the piece of not so good feedback? Absolutely. I stomped around Amsterdam ignoring the great sites of the city, being nearly mown down by the cyclists and generally stuck in my own head.

What got me out of my funk was this: remember to listen to what’s good. My bias is to give undue weight to any negative or neutral comments and to dismiss what’s good as not that relevant or somehow less important.

It’s summed up nicely in the movie Apollo 13 when Ed Harris, playing mission control director Gene Kranz says, “Thank you. I hear what’s wrong. Now tell me what’s good.”

The devil’s advocate

And having said that, let me contradict myself by saying this: be wary of all feedback, both the good and the bad.

In particular, be wary of feedback that projects a judgement towards you (”you’re terrific!” “you’re rubbish”). That can be difficult when the feedback sounds positive, but remember that such feedback is not the truth, it’s someone’s opinion, someone’s judgement. As tempting as it is to buy into the positive feedback, it’s no more grounded and useful than the negative feedback.

Feedback becomes valuable when the person giving it is specific about what you did, and then specific about the impact on them. That then lets you know the impact of your behaviour - and gives you the choice as to whether you’d like to shift it or not.

Want more?

Peter Block’s new book Community is a (typically) wonderful piece of work. He speaks very powerfully of the need to move away from focusing on the problem and the powerful impact that can have. The best business book I’ve read all year.

Another powerful resource on this is Marshall Rosenberg’s core work Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Rosenberg’s insight into how confused our typical communication is - and how you can restructure it differently - will change the way you relate to people at work and beyond work.

Listen to your intuition

With the busy-ness of business only picking up pace, we’re often in a place where we stop over-thinking things and just get on with doing them. Work becomes all about processing, churning through the work that needs to get done, punching out replies to the emails that clog the Inbox.

I’ve started thinking that one definition of coaching is as a pause button from this hectic pace, a way of stopping for a moment to get a new perspective on what’s really happening. One thing this “pause button” helps to do is to reconnect with your intuition, helps you realise the power of your subconscious to understand and decide about a situation before you’ve really thought about it.

To bring that to the surface so you are more consciously using your subconscious (if that doesn’t sound too confusing), the best question I know:

“Is this a yes or is it a no?”

Putting things in such blunt terms makes the choice clear and it somehow can override our big brains that often over complicate the situation.

Want more?

Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink looks at the power of intuition and the subconscious in his usual elegant and entertaining style.

There’s a bunch of other great books on the marketplace about the power of the brain. I also really enjoyed Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor of psychology.

Don’t take my word for it

Smart folks thinking out loud about what to listen to.

“People say I don’t take criticism well, but I say ‘What the hell do they know?’”
-Groucho Marx

“Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience.”
-Rita Mae Brown

“You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.”
-Ray Bradbury’s advice to writers

You can read more quotes and add your own favourites here.

Outside the Lines - The Business Edition

Strategy versus Tactical

A 2002 Harvard Business Review article, “Beware the Busy Manager” suggests that only 10% of us have the right combination of focus and energy that stops us wasting our time with “busy work” and keeps us in the sweet spot of the work that matters.

It’s a challenge that’s getting harder rather than easier, as our work life speeds up, we assume greater responsibility and things get more complex.

So how do you deal with this?

Get strategic. And then stay strategic.

Definitions

But what does “strategy” actually mean? I suspect it’s one of those words that gets bandied about without meaning very much, another corporate “weasel word“ that contributes to long meetings, vague documents and people working very hard on the wrong things.

So here are three definitions I like and occasionally use. I’d consider them to be both true and not the whole truth:

==> Our best guess at the future

==> What matters

==> What we say No to

(I’m sure there are alternative definitions - share yours on the blog in the Comments below.)

Easy to write. Easy to say.

And hard to start, yet alone maintain.

(My own coach, Ernest Oriente, sent me this cartoon which sums up the challenge nicely).

So here are three ways of approaching strategy that reflect the three definitions above - and may open up some new opportunities for you:

1. Create a picture.

I’ve found attempts to “get strategic” get lost down two different pathways.

The first is the way of the abstract pontification, high level ‘blah blah blah’ that everyone can nod their head to but few people are willing to pin down to meaning anything.

Or alternatively, there’s the pathway of minutiae, when an attempt to imagine the future gets confused with actually predicting the future and needs 100 or so slides to cover all the (largely erroneous and irrelevant) detail.

To keep from straying, it helps to realise that strategic thinking is a different type of thinking, a visual form of thinking. (That’s one of the reasons why people who are dyslexic are over-represented in the realm of successful entrepreneurs and leaders. Their need to understand information in a different way helps them, to literally see a different picture and forces them to be strategic).

Action step

Create a vision of what you (and your team) are trying to achieve. Not a bunch of words labelled vision. But an actual vision. Find 10 pictures that sum up where you’re heading and what success looks like (draw your own; rip them out of magazines; find them on a picture library like iStockPhoto.com). Then reduce them down to the five that are the most powerful.

Then think (and talk and draw and…): What are the three most important things we can be doing to help get us to this vision?

A useful resource:

Find Your Great Work: Napkin-size solutions to stop the busywork and start the work that matters.

Coming in September, this book is all about creating pictures to help you get a new perspective on what matters.

You can register for some cool pre-publication specials here.

An alternative resource:

If you’re looking for inspiration to get visual, then Presentation Zen is full of brilliant tips, tricks and role models for more powerful presenting skills.

2. Work out who matters.

In most strategic conversations, the focus is on collating and shaping the tasks - adding a little here, pruning a little there.

Which makes many of these conversations less about strategy and more about task-shuffling.

Start with a different conversation. Start with: Who matters?

In fact, as you become more senior in an organization, you start to realise that this is one of the critical conversations. It comes about because seniority means gaining influence … but also, as you’re no longer doing it all, losing control. And your influence lies in the invisible web of relationships you have. Your ability to be strategic is entangled with people and only then played out by completing tasks.

You can’t be everything to everyone. In fact, to be effective you’ve got to start making some choices about what you’ll be to whom.

So stop the doing for a moment. And turn your attention to the interacting.

Action step:

Who are the three internal people who matter most?
What do they want? What does that tell you?
Who are the three external people (or groups of people) who matter most? What do they want? What does that tell you?

A useful resource:

Get Them On Your Side by Samuel Bacharach is a great little book one of my readers recommended to me. As the title suggests, it helps you get a little smarter about who you need to build relationships with - and how to go about it. It presents a number of core strategies that will work with a range of different people.

An alternative resource:

Find the person in your organization who you think is the savviest, who has the best people relationships. Look broadly: it may well be the guy on the front desk or it might be the VP of Sales - or anyone in between. They know who matters and why. Take them out for a coffee, tell them what you’re trying to achieve and ask them: who do you think I should get to know?

3. Start saying no.

Quite possible my favourite coaching question is this one:

If you say Yes to this, what are you saying No to?

Its power lies in the fact that it makes explicit the choices that are being made. And stops people just saying Yes, one of the curses of modern business.

Don’t take my word for it

Read what smart people thinking out loud have to say about strategy here.