Back in the Box Thinking

Look to the right and you’ll find two new category headings that weren’t there yesterday. I’ll confess now: there’s no illuminated insights – or writing of any kind – in there. They are empty boxes.

One of the challenges of mass-coordination industry, of Gantt-driven workflows and come-in-at-or-under-budget objectives is that the project goal is to complete the project. It’s a finite game.

Once the train leaves the station, the good news is that the rails of benchmarking do a remarkable job of keeping the train on the tracks. The bad news is that the rails do a remarkable job of keeping the train on the tracks. The space for innovation evaporates unless a) you are between projects when new best-practices can be integrated or b) the project exists to innovate and create new best-practices. Otherwise, the name of the game is to end the game.

Once we leave the station success is judged by a project-complete percentage and a %-of-budget metrics. So what’s the antidote?

Ask unanswerable questions, and demand answers; any answers.The only way to do that in an Excel-driven work-flow is to create a cell that requires input, lest it respond with #DIV/?!

The questions we ask set the horizon for our imaginings. So ensure your pushing it far enough to allow exploration, and the revelations that can lead to paradigm shifts. Otherwise we risk inadvertently hitting our heads on a glass ceiling of expectations, when we could shatter it and reestablish what’s possible.

That Our Flag Was Still There

I spent last evening at a round-table discussion at NYU’s Gallatin School, my alma mater, listening to a former classmate discuss his work as a First Amendment lawyer. My friend, a liberally minded fellow, spends most of his time defending people he happens to disagree with. The U.S. is unique in it’s blindness to what type of speech the law applies to, unlike France and Germany with their “no hate-mongering” clauses.

I asked him how he developed the skill of holding two opposing ideas simultaneously, and as a lawyer must, inspiring action despite those contradictions. “Appeal to underlying principle,” he replied.

The organizational implications are obvious. Within a quickly diversifying marketplace (employees included), the clarity and resiliency of a organization’s values guides the stakeholder above personal, positional or even national identity.

The First Amendment is part of the United States’ mission statement; its social contract with we, its stakeholders. My friend defends those dissenters not because he agrees with them, but because he understands that the act of validating their – and their expression’s – existence has greater implications, and its for that idea he seeks judgment in support of.

Organizations must be willing to uphold their values unwaveringly, lest the stakeholder, staff or client, lose trust in the integrity of those ideas. “Making money” is not a mission statement. It’s the how and the why that define who an organization is. It’s our willingness to lose an apathetic stakeholder in exchange for a committed citizen that illuminates the fortitude of our mission.

Man Lifts Car in Display of Super-Human Strength

Variations of this headline have crossed our vision enough times that it’s become cliché. Similarly, the creative output you accomplish in one “it’s due at 8am?!” all-nighter in college dwarfs what we accomplish in our regular 9-5.  What a person becomes when transformed by adrenaline is regarded as something beyond what we are normally capable of.

Except… It’s not.

Adrenaline, and the associated chemical releases, simply optimize the performance of various bodily systems, from oxygen & glycogen delivery to tendon activation. It doesn’t do anything TO our body except grant the sympathetic nervous system permission to have access to our full range of capabilities. The actual tensile strength of our muscles, the neural firepower to tear down a challenging creative problem is already there. All the adrenaline does is take our abilities off the leash.

While medical science reminds us that the heightened state adrenaline brings is by no means sustainable, there are numerous Work Better/Smarter texts out there (my current favorite is Tony Schwartz’s The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working) teaching us how to access higher performance levels for longer periods of time. But while you’re waiting for whisper-synch to deliver the latest curriculum, ponder me this:

That adrenaline, norepinephrine and even old-fashioned caffeine doesn’t grant super-human abilities; its just grants access to capabilities that have been there all along.

How much higher can we perform without a crisis state (or a venti-mocha-hoo-ha-with-an-extra-shot) simply by recognizing that those abilities are already there, waiting to be turned on?