Coincidence? – Four very similar views from four very different people of what it takes to get into a zone and create work of lasting value.
Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Category: Professional Development (Page 2 of 2)
Deep Work and Meetings
Here is a good article from Help Scout on How to Sabotage Any Meeting. In reference to my previous post on Deep Work, the work that gets done at meetings is normally bad too, because everyone is flitting about on the surface with too many distractions. Number three on How to Sabotage Any Meeting,
Do synthesis work at the meeting
…. I’ve learned the hard way that while meetings are useful for outlining what can be done, they’re god-awful for putting paint on the canvas. Feedback becomes relevant when The Thing has taken shape—even if it’s just a fragment of the final result.
Collaboration has its limits. Use meetings to chart the course, to get visceral reactions along the way, and to push past the finish line. Don’t use them to synthesize on the spot. Create alone, decide together.
I couldn’t agree more. Rather than spending the time to do the Deep Work and bring a thoughtful proposal to the table, most people are either too lazy, distracted, or scared. Lazy, because they are trying to get others to do their work or don’t want to do more than one iteration. Distracted, because they have lost the discipline to do Deep Work. Scared that their Deep Work would look amateurish. My advice on this last one is to not worry. If you really do think about the issue deeply and consider the situation, you will almost always out-think the distracted rest-of-us at the meeting.
That article about The Collaboration Curse from The Economist is a good one too. Good fodder for another post.
Photo Credit:
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. “Harlem branch, Boys club meeting” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-8207-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.” ― ee cummings
In A More Beautiful Question, Warren Berger makes the case that in a world full of easily accessed knowledge, the real skill is to pose better questions. I like the title wording of Warren Berger via ee cummings. Our new world is not bereft of questions. I get tons of them. Most of them could be solved by the person asking them with a DuckDuckGo search.
In fact, our new world is full of answers and full of questions. However, the answers often have no context and people don’t often frame the questions well. Part of this ties in with what I wrote last week in Deep Work and Self Education. The ability to think of a really good question is often what separates true understanding from mere collections of fact. What keeps us from formulating a good question is often not thinking about it deeply, because we are busy and awash in information. Its a vicious circle, but one we must break.
Elegant questions are what make our work meaningful and give us real priorities, rather than artificial deadlines to do something. Taking the time to answer the basics, understand them, help others understand them, and put them in context before posing an intelligent question is what separates the professional from the amateur. Insightful questions are also what gets the attention of the experts you may be seeking to involve in your project or cause. The best way to be ignored in professional circles, and social circles too, is to ask simple questions that show no understanding or empathy for others’ time or concerns. What intrigues people is when you ask something that shows you spent some time trying to understand the subject and you are looking to them for a deeper understanding.
Berger’s theme is that more beautiful questions are what is needed to increase innovation. To tie in Steven Johnson’s assertion that good ideas are derived from the chaos at the edge of current knowledge, the glut of information and lack of good questions present a target rich environment. For those who can grasp the context and continue to push out the knowledge with perceptive questions, the adjacent possible comes into view.
I also think that stimulating questions make for better plans. What I really like about the Minto method and the Army Operations Order is that you start with a fully acknowledged Situation and Complication before you decide what you should do and how you should do it. Using modern Army parlance, “The enemy gets a vote.” By making this understanding explicit, one gains the confidence of the people one will eventually ask to do something. With that confidence and an expectation that those involved will also be expected to ask compelling questions, the network mind is activated.
If you are looking for your next professional read, I highly recommend Berger’s A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.
In his new book, Deep Work, author Cal Newport goes in to detail about why the ability to focus on work that requires deep thought and multiple levels of inquiry has become a competitive edge. No doubt, this type of work has always been relatively rare. However, it is more so these days due to the much discussed proliferation of technologies that nip at your attention like a pack of hyenas trying to pick off the weak in the wildebeest herd. Sadly, in our world, the attention-hyenas have grown fat and don’t even have to give chase. We sit in our chairs and wait for them every morning.
I think Newport’s thesis is correct. The ability, not the time, is actually what is missing. Lots of people say that they just don’t have the time to set aside and think deeply on things that are important to them. However, I don’t need to quote specifics –about the billions who use social media all day long or the people who respond to emails in seconds like it is some lab experiment to grab pellets when the bell rings– to make the point that we are not using the time wisely. (yes, I see the irony in this article… get back to work 😉
Because we have been doing this now for one or two decades, many of us have lost our ability to do the deep work even when we have the time. Stare at a blank document or project plan for twenty minutes, meet the first obstacle, and freeze. Send an email to Fred to see if he got that new data. Text Mary for an update on how the meeting went. Read our “professional” newsfeed for the fourth time this morning, etc. We are all talking about talking about talking. We’re just doing it on new and different platforms.
The ability to think deeply and present new ideas on how to tackle problems is now the rarest of things. I often see this in the board room. The conversation flies around, but nothing is tackled in depth. No one brings deep critical thinking to the table. Every one just brings the latest data, report or presentation. None of it sticks to the walls and becomes deep conversation.
I agree with Newport on career development too. If a person wants to make themselves valuable to themselves or to an organization, they need to develop the ability to go into a quiet room, think deeply on an issue, and come out with either a new option on the issue or deep analysis of which known options are better and actionable. Either output is far more valuable than anyone else is likely to bring to the table.
When one ties this ability with the other rarity of the modern world which is the ability to self-educate, a person will have a formidable set of skills. In fact, I’ll go further. Teaching yourself to A) work deeply and B) self educate is the whole education that most should be seeking. If one develops the discipline and skill to work deeply on any topic and develops the skills to educate themselves with the near-universal amount of knowledge available today, there is no need to predict what comes next. One with these two capabilities doesn’t care. They can analyze any market, make deeply considered choices, and educate themselves to tackle what they choose. If they are wrong, they can start again. They are not one-trick ponies. In other words, strive to be adaptable, not prescient.
Finally, I think this is New Yeoman territory too. Any trade is susceptable to improvement in these skills. Don’t waste time in the truck on Facebook before the next customer call. Read the trade journal and come up with new ideas for your customer. Consider how your invoices and receipts may help you convert more sales. Develop that nagging idea you’ve had for a new specialized tool. Think deeply, turn it into digestable chunks of work and take action.
Charles Bukowski via Brain Pickings,
In a letter to a friend that encouraged him to pursue his art, “You know my old saying,”
“Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”
IMHO, it is not just artists that this applies to. It applies to everyone who would rather work for themselves rather than toil for someone else for a wage that erodes in one form or another over time. It is certainly right for many, but I truly believe that a lot more people are employed than should be. A size-able chunk of the employed workforce owe it to themselves to become self-employed and do greater (or just happier) things to put food on the table.
In another letter via Jay Dougherty, Bukowski writes,
“I have one of two choices–stay in the postoffice and go crazy…or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.”
That was Bukowski at age 49. It took him a long time to stop working for someone else and start doing what he was meant to do. It is never too late.
Clear and spectacular answers to questions about which university to attend are hard to find. However, a recent study published in Contemporary Economic Policy by academics Eric R. Eide, Michael J. Hilmer, and Mark H. Showalter has done just that when speaking about financial returns on STEM degrees. In an article in The Wall Street Journal they state,
What we found startled us. For STEM-related majors, average earnings don’t vary much among the college categories. For example, we find no statistically significant differences in average earnings for science majors between selective schools and either midtier or less-selective schools. Likewise, there’s no significant earnings difference between engineering graduates from selective and less-selective colleges, and only a marginally significant difference between selective and midtier colleges.
This is huge for two reasons:
- If a person is going to major in a STEM discipline, his local state school may be just as good as Stanford or Harvard, if financial return is the most important issue to them. So, unless the person is killing it in school, has a perfect SAT, and/or is a recognized genius (and in that case, they are probably going heavily subsidized anyway), why should they spend the price differential between Vanderbilt and the University of Tennessee?
- It is a great way to get a kid to wake up if they are looking to do a humanities or business degree at a less than stellar institution. If they are not doing very well in those disciplines and cannot get into and elite school, then the financial math is hard to justify.
This is really good information for those about to spend or borrow an enormous amount of money to go to an elite school to study a STEM discipline. Expect the push-back from the elite universities to be fierce and quick.
I’m not sure how I missed this conversation about an email sent by General James Mattis, Retired, USMC in 2003 to his subordinates, but I did. The money paragraph:
Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for
how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give
me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.
I think this is very important and it applies to other professions as well. The military professional obviously has more to lose from an ignorant (in the “not knowing” sense) leader. However, an artisan, electrician, or designer or any other New Yeoman has much to lose as well by not keeping up to date with their profession. Just as importantly, knowing the history of the trade or profession shows professional competence, both inside the trade and to one’s customers.
The emergence of this email apparently created a stir amongst the academics who study war (full disclosure; I am an academic historian as well as a business owner), but they tend to ignore the fact that Mattis was writing to another practitioner about other practitioners. [Ahem. Pardon me while I shoot this guy whilst you get your dataset and independent variable situated.] I think independent business owners are much the same, they are running businesses and know how to filter on the run. The fact that one read and / or recommended something does not mean that all of its ideas and premises were accepted without reservation.
As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Any New Yeoman that wants to succeed on his own must develop a sense of their industry’s past and have a view on its future. Not only does it make the New Yeoman more confident and resilient, but it is a more satisfying life that helps one feel that they are not just being tossed about on the ocean. With professional reading, you give yourself a compass, a rudder, oars, and the knowledge of how to make a mast and a sail.
Let’s face it. No one in this rat race has time to read, but the best of their respective trades or professions make time to read.
