For a simple decision like whether I should meet my wife for lunch, the calculus is easy: In one potential future, I take an hour for lunch and come back happy and relaxed. In another, lunch goes long and we spend most of it discussing family logistics and babysitter problems, and when I get back to my desk I’m fried—and behind schedule.
By thinking through potential futures, I was better prepared to influence which of those futures would actually occur. When choosing a restaurant to meet my wife, for instance, I suggested one close to my office so I could make it back to my desk quickly. When family logistics came up during lunch, I asked my wife to wait until that evening to talk calendars. By anticipating the future, I was better prepared to make wiser decisions.
But bigger decisions—such as whether to take on an exciting new writing assignment—require a bit more analysis. Midway through writing this book, for instance, a production company asked if I was interested in developing a TV show. To decide if I should pursue that opportunity—which would delay my reporting, but might pay off in the long run—I wrote out a few potential futures of what might happen if I worked on writing a show:
I had no idea how to evaluate these potential futures. I knew there were dozens of other possibilities I should be considering but couldn’t anticipate. And so I called some friends in television. Based on those conversations, I assigned each scenario a rough probability:
Based on the estimations of professionals, it seemed most possible that if I invested a lot of time, it wasn’t likely to pay off. But if I invested a modest amount of time, there was a likelihood I would learn something, if nothing else.
At that point, I wanted to let my Bayesian instincts guide me, and so I spent a few days letting my imagination play with various outcomes. In the end, I decided that there was another potential future I was ignoring: That even if this show never materialized, I might have a lot of fun. So I decided to commit—but I specified, up front, that I wanted my participation to be modest.
It was a great decision. All told, my involvement in the project was small—probably the equivalent of two weeks. But the payoffs have exceeded my expectations. The show will premiere this fall and I’ve learned a lot working on it.
What’s most important, however, is that I made this decision in a deliberate way. Because I had anticipated various possibilities about what might occur—and, in fact, had drawn up some stretch and SMART goals before joining the project—I was able to manage my involvement.
TO MAKE BETTER DECISIONS:
? Envision multiple futures. By pushing yourself to imagine various possibilities—some of which might be contradictory—you’re better equipped to make wise choices.
? We can hone our Bayesian instincts by seeking out different experiences, perspectives, and other people’s ideas. By finding information and then letting ourselves sit with it, options become clearer.
THE BIG IDEA
This appendix offers a quick overview of a few key concepts that have been meaningful in my own day-to-day life. If you can become more motivated, more focused, better at setting goals and making good decisions, then you’re a long way down the path to becoming more productive. There are, of course, other ideas in this book that also help when we are managing other people, when we are trying to learn faster, when we need to innovate faster. Each of those areas of productivity have their own insights, as well:
TO MAKE TEAMS MORE EFFECTIVE:
? Manage the how, not the who of teams. Psychological safety emerges when everyone feels like they can speak in roughly equal measure and when teammates show they are sensitive to how each other feel.
? If you are leading a team, think about the message your choices reveal. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you showing you are listening by repeating what people say and replying to questions and thoughts? Are you demonstrating sensitivity by reacting when someone seems upset or flustered? Are you showcasing that sensitivity, so other people will follow your lead?
TO MANAGE OTHERS PRODUCTIVELY:
? Lean and agile management techniques tell us employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decisionmaking authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success.
? By pushing decision making to whoever is closest to a problem, managers take advantage of everyone’s expertise and unlock innovation.
? A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and solutions, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored and that their mistakes won’t be held against them.
TO ENCOURAGE INNOVATION:
? Creativity often emerges by combining old ideas in new ways—and “innovation brokers” are key. To become a broker yourself and encourage brokerage within your organization:
? Be sensitive to your own experiences. Paying attention to how things make you think and feel is how we distinguish clichés from real insights. Study your own emotional reactions.
? Recognize that the stress that emerges amid the creative process isn’t a sign everything is falling apart. Rather, creative desperation is often critical: Anxiety can be what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways.
? Finally, remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to alternatives. By forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from different perspectives, by giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before, we retain clear eyes.
TO ABSORB DATA BETTER:
? When we encounter new information, we should force ourselves to do something with it. Write yourself a note explaining what you just learned, or figure out a small way to test an idea, or graph a series of data points onto a piece of paper, or force yourself to explain an idea to a friend. Every choice we make in life is an experiment—the trick is getting ourselves to see the data embedded in those decisions, and then to use it somehow so we learn from it.
What’s most important, throughout all these concepts, is the foundational idea undergirding these lessons, the tissue that connects the eight insights at the heart of this book: Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook. It’s about making certain decisions in certain ways. The way we choose to see our own lives; the stories we tell ourselves, and the goals we push ourselves to spell out in detail; the culture we establish among teammates; the ways we frame our choices and manage the information in our lives. Productive people and companies force themselves to make choices most other people are content to ignore. Productivity emerges when people push themselves to think differently.
When I was working on this book, I came upon a story that I loved, one of my favorite bits of reporting. The tale involved Malcom McLean, the man who essentially created the modern shipping container. McLean died in 2001, but he left behind videotapes and numerous records, and I spent months reading about him, as well as interviewing members of his family and dozens of his former colleagues. They described a man who had relentlessly chased an idea—that shipping goods inside of big metal boxes would make docks more productive—and how that insight eventually transformed manufacturing, the transportation industry, and the economies of whole continents. They explained that McLean was so productive because he was fanatically obsessed with a single idea.