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The Effectiveness of Your System is Inversely Proportional to Your Awareness of It

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From David Allen’s Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life (p. 96):

When you have to focus on your system, you are detouring energy that could be used to create and produce with your system.

The objective of system installation, change, or enhancement is to get “system” off your mind again as soon as possible.

The better your systems, the more you don’t know you have them. The less attention you pay to them, the more functional they probably are. The only time you will notice them is when they don’t work or when you have to be too conscious about your use of them. You want to be working, doing, thinking, creating, and dealing with things — not focused on how you’re doing them.

You want to enjoy driving your car in the countryside without thinking about how to shift gears or work the climate control.

Creating smoothly running silent systems is often the greatest improvement opportunity for enhanced productivity.

Nine out of ten times, people have workflow systems that don’t work, because they are too much work.

Most of the organizing gear and software sold in the last twenty-five years makes sense conceptually but doesn’t function as fast as what people are trying to coordinate. When the amount of what has to be managed increases in speed and volume, a system will start to fall apart if its design is flawed or the habits of the operator are not grooved on “automatic.”

The Mental Price of Multitasking

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Stanford University News summarizes the findings from a recent study on multitasking. Here are some key excerpts:

People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.

High-tech jugglers are everywhere – keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments.

But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.

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“We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it,” said Ophir, the study’s lead author.

….

“When they’re in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they’re not able to filter out what’s not relevant to their current goal,” said Wagner, an associate professor of psychology. “That failure to filter means they’re slowed down by that irrelevant information.”

My Interview with Tim Challies

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I recently did an interview for Tim Challies’ blog on Desiring God, where my role is senior director of strategy.

I talk about how DG began, our core purpose, our philosophy of being here to serve rather than for how we can benefit, why we post everything online for free, and some thoughts on organizational effectiveness.

In regards to the latter, one of the things I talk about is how an organization should navigate the future in light of the fact that it cannot be known with clarity — and therefore detailed strategic blueprints become outdated almost right away. I discuss three ways that we do this:

  • Evolutionary progress, which happens incrementally and organically (rather than according to a predetermined plan) through the principle of “try a lot of stuff and keep what works.”
  • Building on the strengths of the staff.
  • Intentional and planned progress, through the concept of BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals) that paint in broad strokes the envisioned future.

The core idea here is to combine incremental progress, which progresses organically in response to the environment and needs as you experience them, with intentional and bold goals (BHAGs) that paint in broad strokes but do not blueprint things out in detail. This provides intentionality about the future without attempting to script everything out, so that the organization can remain flexible according to reality as it actually is while still progressing toward a bold envisioned future.

There is a great quote in Built to Last on how Jack Welch utilized both of these concepts effectively at GE, which I think explains the concept very well:

Instead of directing a business according to a detailed … strategic plan, Welch believed in setting only a few clear, overarching goals. Then, on an ad hoc basis, his people were free to seize any opportunities they saw to further those goals. This crystallized in his mind after reading Johannes von Moltke, a nineteenth century Prussian general influenced by the renowned military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, who argued that detailed plans usually fail, because circumstances inevitably change.

Why Being Organized Matters

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Being organized matters because it reduces the friction in getting things done.

In other words:

Most people act when it’s easy to do so. The better organized you are, the easier it is to act and the greater the tendency for you to do those things that should be done when they should be done, whether you like to or not. (The Personal Efficiency Program: How to Stop Feeling Overwhelmed and Win Back Control of Your Work, p 4.)

On Grasshoppers and Email

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When I go running, there is a field on my route that is filled with grasshoppers. The field looks ordinary from a distance. But once I get to it, grasshoppers start jumping out everywhere.

The first few times that I went through it I would speed up to try and get away from them. But I could never outrun the grasshoppers. They would just jump out as I went along, regardless of how fast or slow I was going. They jumped out where I was precisely because I was there. Going faster didn’t get me past the grasshoppers; it just made them jump out sooner.

So this immediately made me think of email. Email contains a paradox, like these grasshoppers: Going faster doesn’t mean you’ll get less. In fact, it might mean that you’ll get even more, because email responds to your presence, just like the grasshoppers.

So if you try to overcome email overload by doing email faster and more often, you won’t end up getting ahead. You’ll just end up with a lot more email to keep up with.

If you want more email, that’s fine. I’m not against email, and a lot of important work gets done through it. (And I probably don’t say that enough.) But if you want to preserve a good chunk of time for other responsibilities that you (hopefully) have, then the solution is to reduce your number of email cycles.

In other words, if you want to decrease the amount of email that you have to attend to, the main solution is not to go faster.

Yes, you should go faster and be more efficient at processing your email. But if that’s all you do, you’ll just see more email coming your way than you would have before. What you need to do is both become more efficient at processing email and at the same time decrease the number of times that you check email each day.

In other words, the way to create more time for other things is to decrease the number of email cycles in your routine.

Last of all, an objection. Someone will say “but if I check email less, then I’ll be less responsive.” Well, that’s probably true. I’m not saying that you have to do this. But realize that this trade-off exists on both sides of the equation. For if you choose to be almost immediately responsive with email, then you will get less long-term and important non-email stuff done. And that’s a problem, too.

It’s really up to you. There’s not necessarily a right or wrong here. It depends upon the nature of your responsibilities, your strengths, and what your organization needs you to be focusing on. Things may also fluctuate for the same person from season to season. (And, it’s worth pointing out that you can probably find a balance that preserves a good level of responsiveness even if it is less than you might initially default to.)

You make the call. Just be aware of the likely trade-off. If you end up doing less non-email work in order to give more time and attention to email, just make sure that you are doing that on purpose rather than automatically assuming that that is the way it has to be.

The Universal Requirements for a Visionary Company

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From Jim Collins’ Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies:

A company must have a core ideology [core purpose plus core values] to become a visionary company. It must also have an unrelenting drive for progress. And finally, it must be well designed as an organization to preserve the core and stimulate progress, with all the key pieces working in alignment.

These are universal requirements for visionary companies. They distinguished visionary companies a hundred years ago. They distinguish visionary companies today. And they will distinguish visionary companies int he twenty-first century.

However, the specific methods visionary companies use to preserve the core and stimulate progress will undoubtedly change and improve. BHAGs [huge, audacious goals], cult-like cultures, evolution through experimentation, home-grown management, and continuous self-improvement — these are all proven methods of preserving the core and stimulating progress. But they are not the only effective methods that can be invented.

Companies will invent new methods to complement these time-tested ones. The visionary companies of tomorrow are already out there today experimenting with new and better methods. They’re undoubtedly already doing things that their competitors might find odd or unusual, but that will someday become common practice.

And that’s exactly what you should be doing in the corporations [and organizations] you work with — that is, if you want them to enter the elite league of visionary companies. It doesn’t matter whether you are an entrepreneur, manager, CEO, board member, or consultant. You should be working to implement as many methods as you can think of to preserve a cherished core ideology that guides and inspires people at all levels. And you should be working to create mechanisms that create dissatisfaction with the status quo and stimulate change, improvement, innovation, and renewal — mechanisms, in short, that infect people with the spirit of progress…. Use the proven methods and create new methods. Do both.

Don't Win the Fight but Lose the Customer

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A good post from Seth Godin on the true meaning of “the customer is always right” and how not to fire your customers:

Does it really matter if you’re right?

Given the choice between acknowledging that your customer is upset or proving to her that she is wrong, which will you choose?

You can be right or you can have empathy.

You can’t do both.

It’s not the nature of capitalism to need to teach people a lesson, it’s the nature of being a human, we just blame it on capitalism. In fact, smart marketers understand that the word ‘right’ in “The customer is always right” doesn’t mean that they’d win in court or a debate. It means, “If you want the customer to remain a customer, you need to permit him to believe he’s right.”

If someone thinks they’re unhappy, then you know what? They are.

Trying say this to yourself: I have no problem acknowledging that you’re unhappy, upset or even angry. Next time, I’d prefer to organize our interaction so you don’t end up feeling that way, and I probably could have done it this time, too. You have my attention and my empathy and I value you. Thanks for being here.

If you can’t be happy with that, then sure, go ahead and fire the customer, cause they’re going to leave anyway.

What Needs to Be Done?

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From Drucker’s The Effective Executive:

The first practice [of an effective executive] is to ask what needs to be done. Note that the question is not “What do I want to do?” Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success. Failure to ask this question will render even the ablest executive ineffectual.

Why Talking About the Weather is Smart

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While we’re on the subject of small talk, it’s worthwhile to say a few words about the biggest small talk cliche around — talking about the weather.

Oscar Wilde said that “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

It turns out that Oscare Wilde was wrong. Talking about the weather is not lame. It’s actually a really good idea.

Here’s why:

  1. The weather affects everybody.
  2. Talking about the weather leads into a whole lot of other subjects. But if you never get started with a “basic” topic like the weather, you might not get a conversation going at all — and thus you’ll never get to other more substantial topics at all.

I first came across this realization in a chapter from The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable, edited by Seth Godin. The book is a collection of insights from 33 different minds. I’m not sure who wrote the chapter “Talking About the Weather,” but they said it well:

Until I was thirty-five years old I thought talking about the weather was for losers. A waste of time, insulting even. No one can do anything about the weather anyway. I believed that any comment that doesn’t offer new insight or otherwise advance the cause of humanity is just so much hot air….

Then something happened. Alone for the first time in a long time, living in challenging circumstances, experiencing a cold winter in New England, I noticed the weather. It affected me deeply and directly, every single day. Slowly it dawned on me that the weather affected everyone else, too. Maybe talking about it wasn’t totally vacuous after all.

I started with the cashier at a gas station….Years of cynicism made me almost laugh as I said, “Sure got a lot of snow this year so far.” “Yep,” was her reply. Then she said, “I could barely get my car out of the lot, be careful driving!”

Talking about the weather was easy, even effortless. An entree to at least one person on the planet who apparently cared about me, at least enough to share her small challenge and want me safe on the road. Wow.

Next I tried it at work. It turned out to be even more effective with people I already knew. Talking about the weather acted as a little bridge, sometimes to further conversation and sometimes just to the mutual acknowledgment of shared experience.

Whether it was rainy or snowy or sunny or damp for everyone, each had their own relationship with the weather. They might be achy, delighted, burdened, grumpy, relieved, or simply cold or hot. Like anything of personal importance, most were grateful for the opportunity to talk about it.

Then something else happened. As talking about the weather became more natural, I found myself talking about a whole lot more. Cashiers and clients and suppliers and colleagues all over opened up about all kinds of things. I found out about people’s families, their frustrations at work, their plans and aspirations.

Plus, I found out that the weather is not the same for everyone! And it’s only one of many factors dependent on location that you’ll never know about without engaging in casual conversations.

For a businessperson, there may be no better way to make a connection, continue a thread, or open a deeper dialogue. Honoring the simply reality of another person’s experience is an instant link to the bigger world outside one’s self. It’s the seed of empathy, and it’s free…. Talking about the weather is a baby step on your way to making change.

Breaking the First Rule of Small Talk

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Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, has a good post on making small talk more effective (and authentic) that makes the simple point: be yourself. But to do this, you have to ignore conventional wisdom’s first rule of small talk:

Small talk experts claim that when you first meet a person, you should avoid unpleasant, overly personal, and highly controversial issues.

Wrong! Don’t listen to these people! Nothing has contributed more to the development of boring chitchatters everywhere. The notion that everyone can be everything to everybody at all times is completely off the mark. Personally, I’d rather be interested in what someone was saying, even if I disagreed, than be catatonic any day.

There’s one guaranteed way to stand out in the professional world: Be yourself. I believe that vulnerability—yes, vulnerability—is one of the most underappreciated assets in business today. Too many people confuse secrecy with importance. Business schools teach us to keep everything close to our vest. But the world has changed. Power, today, comes from sharing information, not withholding it. More than ever, the lines demarcating the personal and the professional have blurred. We’re an open-source society, and that calls for open-source behavior. And as a rule, not many secrets are worth the energy required to keep them secret.