Friday 22 February 2019

There’s nothing like a fully alive human being

Listen directly to the podcast version of this post here.

Today’s podcast is from the cognition sparkenation of my Remarkable Workplaces book. Sparkenation: a spark that ignites passion that leads to action that changes what’s normal.

We learn, grow and understand primarily through experience, what happens to our senses as a consequence, and what we intend, feel, think about, our behaviour and the actions we take. As a process this is called cognition.

Like most things a key to cognition is context.

Through working with more than 1000 leaders, women and men, in over 40 countries since 1991 I’ve learned that there are intentional/spiritual (the fertile ground), emotional (ploughing), mental (seeding), physical (nurturing) and universal (harvest) components to every solution to your challenges.

Let’s look at these components as five faces of a fully alive human being which I first explored in my 2011 published Changing What’s Normal book, the first book in the trilogy. Download this book and all my resources for humans co-creating/sustaining remarkable workplaces.

The five faces of a fully alive human being are excellent context to explore cognition.


3 recommended actions

1) Complete the pulse check inside the download above yourself and with your team.

2) Create a performance improvement plan for yourself for the next 90 days. Then repeat this process or move to one of the other solutions in the Remarkable Workplaces book and integrate into your plan. There’s a performance improvement plan template at the companion resources web page under Sparkenation 13 Co-promises.

3) Create a performance improvement plan for your team for the next 90 days. Then repeat this process or move as recommended in 2) above.

Three recommended deep work actions:

If you’re not yet familiar with the concept of Deep Work I highly recommend Cal Newport’s book of that name

"Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate."

"Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world, and are easy to replicate."

1) Make deep work as a personal practice at least a once a week ritual.

2) Over the next 3 months eliminate shallow work. Keep a log of your time, energy and money savings. (You’ll be surprised!)

3) Set up a value-delivery deep dive conversation which each person your role has a relationship with. Ask them to tell you what they must have from you and their delivery preferences. Update your Role Clarity Statement (in the old out of date 20th century language that’s your ‘Position Description’). Ask people to describe how they feel about their relationship with you and for feedforward on how you could be and do better. Commit to a series of quantum leaps to improve your value delivery and check-in regularly with those your delivering to.

The Aggregation of Marginal Gains

I love this insight.

It’s a perfect fit with taking quantum leaps.

I first learned about the aggregation of marginal gains via the writings of James Clear which he has now included in his great October 2018 published book ‘Atomic Habits’


Do Your Work.

Be remarkable.
Ian

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