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“Some years ago I spent a week giving an in-house program design course at a manufacturing company in the mid-west of the United States. On the Friday afternoon it was all over. The DP Manager, who had arranged the course and was paying for it out of his budget, asked me into his office.

“`What do you think?’ he asked. He was asking me to tell him my impressions of his operation and his staff. `Pretty good,’ I said. `You’ve got some good people there.’ Program design courses are hard work; I was very tired; and staff evaluation consultancy is charged extra. Anyway, I knew he really wanted to tell me his own thoughts.

“`What did you think of Fred?’ he asked. `We all think Fred is brilliant.’ `He’s very clever,’ I said. `He’s not very enthusiastic about methods, but he knows a lot about programming.’ `Yes,’ said the DP Manager. He swivelled round in his chair to face a huge flowchart stuck to the wall: about five large sheets of line printer paper, maybe two hundred symbols, hundreds of connecting lines. `Fred did that. It’s the build-up of gross pay for our weekly payroll. No one else except Fred understands it.’ His voice dropped to a reverent hush. `Fred tells me that he’s not sure he understands it himself.’

“`Terrific,’ I mumbled respectfully. I got the picture clearly. Fred as Frankenstein, Fred the brilliant creator of the uncontrollable monster flowchart. `But what about Jane?’ I said. `I thought Jane was very good. She picked up the program design ideas very fast.’

“`Yes,’ said the DP Manager. `Jane came to us with a great reputation. We thought she was going to be as brilliant as Fred. But she hasn’t really proved herself yet. We’ve given her a few problems that we thought were going to be really tough, but when she finished it turned out they weren’t really difficult at all. Most of them turned out pretty simple. She hasn’t really proved herself yet — if you see what I mean?’

“I saw what he meant.”
~ Software Requirements & Specifications by Michael Jackson

A client sent me this just the other day and it made me laugh out loud. What a wonderful story. It speaks to our capacity to make things complicated – and how that generates the Bad Work that consumes way too much of our time and our life.

A model I like – and which I’ve seen both here and here – says that processes can be put into one of three camps…

1. Simple

Like baking a cake.  Follow a few steps, and you’ll pretty much get to where you want to go.

2. Complicated

Like launching a space shuttle.  Or baking a really complicated cake.  Lots of step by steps, project management, flow charts … but get it all done and in the right order, and you’re likely to get that rocket into space.

3. Complex

Like a flock of birds.  Birds don’t have a long list of to-do’s or rules and procedures on how to fly.  They follow two or three key principles, and that allows them to decide the best behaviour.  If you imagine one of those big swirling flocks of starlings, they 1. stay as close to the other birds as possible 2. fly towards to center of the flock, and 3. don’t run into any other bird.

These simple rules allow them to become a self-guided, self-governing group.  (You can learn more about boids, the computer program that first helped describe this, here)

The problem is…

We default to complicated – over-management, excess rules, prescriptions on this that and the other – when we as humans are actually complex, and respond best to clear principles on how to act.

Of course, there are times when detailed and specific rules on how to act are appropriate.  But, as Dan Pink and others have described, this is the work that is typically outsourced and off-shored.  For those of us working in organizations today, over-prescription tends to do nothing but create bureaucracy – and Bad Work.

Great Work requires you to be like a bird, not a piece of machinery.

You’ll know Dan Pink through his cool books Free Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind.

Here he is giving a commencement speech (and drawing on his most recent book, the manga style The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need).  It’s advice to new graduates – and rings equally true for anyone at any level in any organization.

Out of many, my favourite quote is:

“There are massive returns to doggedness”.

It’s so true.  Hard work trumps time and time again persistence.  My friend Andrea Lee asked me a similar question the other day as to why I’d succeeded to the extent I had.  And I said:  Mainly, persistence.

Here are the two parts of Dan’s speech:

When I interviewed Guy Kawasaki about Great Work, I asked him what the secret was to his success. (Because of COURSE all gurus like Guy have a secret).

And of course, there is no secret. “My secret,” Guy told me, “is that I’m a grinder. I can grind.”

That comment has stuck with me, and I was reminded about it again when Dan Pink twittered about the latest Malcome Gladwell New Yorker article.

It’s about innovation, sort of. But it’s really about how a David can beat Goliath.

And the insight at the heart of the article?

Focus on what matters.

And grind.

(Gladwell’s article is really worth a read – it covers Under 12 girl’s basketball in Silicon Valley, Lawrence of Arabia and a trick to win war games).

Darwin turns 200 today

This is truly a birthday worth celebrating.

It’s hard to underestimate the brilliance of this man who articulated such a robust and powerful theory, the father of biology in the same way Einstein is the father of modern physics.

Knowing that, it was a pretty easy choice to bring some of his insights to bear on what it takes to create a life of fun, inspiration and action.

All quotes from Charles Robert Darwin.

1. What matters to you?

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”

While the whole “dares to waste an hour of time” has a bit of a puritanical beat-me-up-with-a-stick feel to it, I’m very struck by the phrase “the value of life.”

One of the things I got from reading Bill Bryson’s fantastic book A Short History of Nearly Everything is just how extraordinary it is to be who we are, now, alive, conscious, on this planet.

Any one of a billion things could have gone wrong to have made it not so.  And an equally high number of things had to go right.

(For instance – our moon is much larger than most moons in the solar system.  The result?  The Earth stays on a steady axis, which means consistent seasons, which means we can grow food reliably, which means we can have civilization….)

This then is not a call to be busy all the time.  (You see in Find Your Great Work that I’m all about stopping the busywork).

It’s about taking the time to focus on what matters to you.

Questions to spark action

• If I was to examine your calendar, or to track how you spent your time … what conclusion would I draw about what matters to you?
• What’s the gap between your proclaimed priorities and reality?
• What’s the Big Thing you’re up to?  (Seriously.  How are you making this world a better place?)
• What will do differently?

2. How are you adapting?

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

This is no doubt a time of anxiety and lack of confidence, certainly for any of us with jobs or savings, and I certainly don’t mean to make light of that.

I can also feel myself getting swept along on hypothesis, hysteria and doubt – without really knowing what truly is going on.

Grounding myself in the reality of the situation sets me up to be able to adapt to it.  Holding onto old stories, denying things are shifting, believing everything I’m told – that just keeps me frozen.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

And with a sense of “what’s true?”, turn your thoughts to what’s negotiable … and what isn’t.

Your ability to adapt is driven by clarity about what you need to hold onto and what you can let go off.

“Hold on to” is perhaps the wrong phrase.  It seems to be that a better metaphor is that of a magnet.  As we wander through life, stuff just starts sticking to us.  Things.  Expectations.

Obligations.  People.  Habits.

Before you know it, we’re trailing behind us this pile of stuff – physical and metaphysical – which slows us down and impedes our ability to change.

Now, I’m not saying cut and run.  I am suggesting that you’re carrying too much, and that it most likely won’t go away of its own accord.  You need to shake off what you don’t want and keep (and keep more securely) what you do want.

Questions to spark action

• What’s true right now?  Rather than hypothesis, media reports and loose intuition … figure out what’s actually true about you and your situation right now, things you know to be facts, data, objective truth.
• And what have you been making up?
• What will you let go off?
• What must you keep?
• What will you do differently?

3. Where are you headed?

“As for future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”

It’s what’s so invigorating and unnerving about the future.

We’ve really got no idea how it’s going to turn out.

The good news about this is that if it was up to just our imagination, it would actually be somewhat boring and predictable.   (Let’s face it, 10 years ago could you have imagined what the world is now?)

Dan Pink said it perfectly well in his excellent how-to-have-a-meaningful-life-at-work book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko : “There is no plan.”

The other good news.  There may not be a plan, and you may not know exactly where you’re heading, but you can certainly set the general direction.

I actually interviewed Dan couple of weeks ago as part of the Great Work Interview series and we both agreed we have no idea what we’d be doing in five years time.  But that it would be something we’d have come to by moving toward what matters to us.

So, without kidding yourself you know how it’s going to turn out, take a deep breath, turn to the sun, and start striding out to the future you’d like to imagine for yourself.

(And all that said, I’ve always loved this quote from Kehlog Albran: “I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer.”)

Questions to spark action

• Are you still ‘driving the car’?  Or was the GPS autopilot set some time ago, and now you’re just following directions?
• What’s the bold destination?  For your life?  For your work?
• If you were to pick one path to stride forward upon, which path would it be?
• What will you do differently?