I recently had the opportunity to take a paddle boarding lesson in Kaua’I with an experienced surfer. There are a series of blog posts coming up regarding this instance, as I found it pretty fascinating. If you are ever on Kaua’I, take a lesson from Bear Bubnis; http://www.kauaiadventurefitness.com The first thing we learned was to respect the ocean. A few visitors a year lose their lives to the waves by not paying attention, and by not respecting the ocean for the awesome power it has. We started the lesson with some simple water safety. Bear told us to spend 5-15 minutes looking at the water:
These simple safety lessons made sense to me, and make me question how often we all look at the warning signs in our everyday work.
And we can learn to respect the power of these forces, and be prepared for them. Ask Bear. He’ll tell you all about it.
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From Wikipedia: Design thinking refers to creative strategies designers utilize during the process of designing. Design Thinking seems to be on everyone's minds these days. A simple search will reveal multiple online sources for college classes, documents and white papers all discussing the ideas and methods of Design Thinking. What is it really? It is a group of people all building on ideas. "Unlike analytical thinking, design thinking includes "building up" ideas, with few, or no, limits on breadth during a "brainstorming" phase. This helps reduce fear of failure in the participant(s) and encourages input and participation from a wide variety of sources in the ideation phases." It is a practice of 'yes, and'. Improv provides the structure to allow Design Thinking to work. It is the basis of Design Thinking in the ideation phase; How do we continue to move the conversation forward and upward, without having a 'no' or a 'yes, but' blocking the progress? It is the base toolset. And as this article in Fast Company magazine says, Improv Comedians make the best Design thinkers. So give your organization a good dose of Design Thinking in a fun and engaging way that they will remember and utilize. Give your company an ImprovMindset. Public speaking is an art. As someone who provides multiple speeches every year, I have a chance to see many of other speakers. Inevitably, I see the same thing. Like this article in Forbes, the same mistakes are made over and over. You can see the coaching that someone has been told, and the little things that a speech coach did to quell the speaker's normal responses: they walk in a straight line from one side of the stage to another, they try to have flashy graphics, and they start with a joke of some sort (which often does not work as well as planned.) From my work as a professional Actor - we train to engage an audience. We practice bringing a personal connection, carrying the rhythm and tone, changing the speed to make emphasis.These are all part of the tools of our trade. And it takes years to master - one ToastMaster class is not going to make you a dynamic speaker overnight. As with all practices, it takes perseverance, training and practice. And it shows when someone has spent the time, and invested in their presentation. It makes us, as listeners, feel respected. So next time you have a big speech coming up - consider it this way: You are a world famous actor, and these are your lines. You might win an Oscar/ Tony for this role, so you want to prepare for every possible scenario, and stay on message. And most important, you want to be willing to improvise based on unforeseen changes in the situation and make it all seem like it was planned. So be prepared for your next presentation. Take an acting class. An article in Forbes magazine asked 'What is the #1 problem every leader has and isn't aware of?' Author Mike Myatt poses that it is problem solving - plain and simple. When most leaders are asked to self evaluate their problem solving skills, they judge themselves as great fixers. The question is, what do they measure themselves against? In Kraig Kramers CEO Toolkit, he lays out simple tools to help leaders measure their organization. 12 over 12 moving monthly averages and other tools help to measure progress, so that you spend more time looking for why something happened rather than what to do to fix the issue. As everyone says, you can't fix what you don't measure. Ask yourself: What skills do you employ? They can be simple tools like Kramers, or they can be more esoteric tools. I have even taught recent workshops using Benjamin Franklin's Moral and Prudential Algebra. Anything that helps you to look at both sides, start to consider options and weigh potential actions against each other is all you need. And there are a wealth of resources for leaders if they choose to employ them. It really comes down to what works for the individual. So begin to identify your toolkit for problem solving.
In a recent report from USC, researchers discovered how being funny changes your brain. They showed a cartoon from the New Yorker, and asked participants to create one funny caption, and one un-funny caption. Meanwhile, they performed MRI scans on them to record their brain activity. “What we found is that the more experienced someone is at doing comedy, the more activation we saw in the temporal lobe,” said USC doctoral student Ori Amir, who led the study with Irving Biederman, professor of psychology and computer science. The temporal lobe receives sensory information and is the region of the brain key to comprehending speech and visual cognition. It’s also where abstract information, semantic information and remote associations meaningfully converge. In contrast, the amateur comedians and non-comedians relied on their prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive functions like planning complex cognitive behavior and decision-making. “The professional improv comedians let their free associations give them solutions,” Biederman said. Many business leaders ask me what they can do to create more independent thinkers and problem solvers in their organizations. Now the answer is clear: Send them to an Improv Class! The more experience they get, the more they will rely on making new connections between items and creating innovative solutions. For information about having an improv class for your organization, contact Andrew for details. What do you like doing? What are you great at? What does the world need? What are you paid to do? And where do those things coincide? For me, it's teaching. Teaching a subject that I am passionate about. Watching the small transformations on people's faces when they suddenly realize a truth about how they work. These things get me out of bed in the morning. Teaching is also a vocation I fought against for years. Both of my parents were teachers. So I went to school for acting. I got a masters degree. I run a company. And, I teach. When I sit down and think about all the things I do, the one that brings me the most joy is teaching. So ask yourself - where do those questions coincide for you? And how does that answer change your views on what you do? According to a recent article in Psychological Science, most people consider themselves great drivers; "... across all experiments participants believed that they were exceptional drivers—but only according to their own definitions of good driving. Even when participants were provided with clear definitions for good driving behavior from the National Safety Council, they rated their own individualized definitions as better. The discrepancy between self-ratings and the ratings of others only disappeared when participants were explicitly told to use the expert guidelines as the basis for rating driving behavior." Since there is no 'standard' for what could be considered being a good driver, most individuals have created their own measurement tool. They decided that the way they drive (fast and texting, or slow and cautious) are the correct ways to drive. The same can be said of leadership. Since there is no single definition of being a 'good leader', individuals have created their own measurement. For many years, Microsoft believed that the 'stack ranking' was the best way to manage people, even though it caused people to work against each other rather than collaborate. Which leader decided that idea was the best? We all suffer from a form of confirmation bias, and being aware of our biases can help to bring an objective view to our work. One of the things we discuss in my workshops is focusing on what is different, rather than what is the same. By focusing at the anomalies, we can start to see what is happening in that moment, rather than what we have assumed. Those assumptions can lead us down the wrong path into believing what we are doing is the right action for our team. So ask yourself: What kind of leader are you? Can you objectively look at what you are doing and re-evaluate your actions? Do you routinely self-examine your practices to stay up to date and current with your ever-changing team? By beginning to bring awareness to your own assumptions about your abilities, you can then start to make an active change to continually improve on what you are capable of. Don’t just assume you are a good leader. Be one. Many years ago I had the honor of working with the head of the Lithuanian National Theater , Jonas Jurasas. I was in graduate school, and he was a guest director of great renown that the school hired to direct a play. The show was a messy circus themed play that was a huge stretch for many of us, and a great challenge for us as actors and artists. At one section, I had to descend down a ramp overhearing the onstage conversation. I would start walking and Jonas would say "faster!" so I would speed up. Then he would say "slower!" and I would slow down. Then he would say "No! Faster!" and I would speed up. Only to have him say "No! Slower!" I finally took the moment at a great to ask him, “When I make that entrance, do you want me to move fast, or slow?" His answer was emphatically “Yes!” At first I thought it was a translation barrier. Did he understand what I was asking him? His english was quite good, but there had been a few translation errors in the process. So I asked him again, "What I am wondering is, should I move fast, or should I move slow?" His answer again - "YES!" After a few other questions, he finally clarified what he wanted. He said "you are walking slowly, but you are moving so fast inside!” At first, I took this as an example of how a crazy Lithuanian Director tells you to do something. I mean, how was this possible? I can move one way, or the other, not both! After a little more conversation with him, I realized what he wanted. He wanted the movement to be physically slow, and the thought process to be very fast, like holding a team of horses back from running. When I started trying that, he would yell out "YES! THAT IS WHAT I AM LOOKING FOR!" Very often I find myself telling this story as a great example to being able to do two things that I thought were incongruent. In my mind, I couldn't do both - it was impossible. I was limiting what I thought I could do, and what I was needing to do to make the play work. I had been stuck in an 'either / or' style of linear thinking, and was unable to find a win-win solution. The possibility of doing both things simultaneously was alien to me, and so it could never be a solution. So when you find yourself in an 'either / or' decision process, ask yourself the question: "Can I do both?" Maybe unlocking the linear thinking can be a key to a new innovative solution. In my work running a company, I love looking at financial documents and balance sheets to discover the ratios between assets and liabilities and figure out an organizations solvency. If you have never seen a balance sheet before - take a look at this tutorial I filmed for the Washington Non-Profits association. The key take-away is that a balance sheet is a snapshot in time, it is a report of the financial status of the organization at that specific moment. The same is true with teaching case studies - they are snapshots of what was true at that moment in time. They represent the moment when that event happened, and it may never happen that way again. Many people use case studies as a tool to say 'what would YOU have done?' There is merit in that line of reasoning, however impossible it may be. Since you were not there, and you don't have the same attachment, emotional investment and engagement with the process, it is hard to say what you really would have done. When I teach workshops I stress the importance of focussing on the differences in a situation, rather than what is similar. Focussing on what is similar can lead me to say 'this is the same as last week...' and place a solution in play that may or may not have relevance. Our brains are wired to search for patterns, so the default for our brains is to say the situations are the same, when in fact they are probably very different. By focussing on what is different, you can make sure you are staying in this moment, and not reacting to the past. You can stay active to the people, processes and engagement at hand, rather than dismissing new information that can be the key to innovation. So remember - when you see a situation that seems the same - ask yourself if this resembles a snapshot in time you had previously, and focus on what is different to stay active in the moment. Solutions you used yesterday are often not the correct solutions for today. About five weeks ago my wife and I rescued an eight-year old dog named Brodie. He was transported up to Seattle from a high kill shelter in California, and had been in and out of shelters, foster care and trial stays with families for the last six months. When we met him, we knew we were in love. He has one crinkled ear, some extensive scarring on his head and other ear, is fairly deaf and as lovable as possible. Clearly he has had a tough life (or at least we imagine he has) and we are happy to provide him a forever home. Since our other dog passed away over four years ago, we have been adjusting to having a dog again. Early morning wake up's for walks (6am?!?! Really?!?!?!) and changing schedules for feeding times have all been a welcome addition to our world. I am reminded again of the lessons of leadership and shared responsibility from having a pet. When we walk in the morning (yes, at 6am, like clockwork) we practice walking next to each other, heeling when we need to, and not pulling my arm out of it's socket when a squirrel runs by. Sometimes he gets to choose the neighborhood route, which tends to put a little more pep in his step as he makes the decisions and I follow him. We travel the journey together, each day practicing the shared responsibility of the task at hand, even though we are both aware that I hold the end of the leash and am responsible for his care and well being. It is a give and take - and he provides for us the comfort and love that helps us to grow and be productive in our world, and we provide a home and care. At work I have noticed more of my inclination to share the responsibility of the walk, rather than set out the route and demand we stay on it. As we feel which way will work for all of us, we then chart a direction knowing the goal and that we each can control and give input on how we get there. Even in those moments where we are having trouble lsitening (or deaf - like Brodie) we can still feel how the direction needs to change. So be aware for yourself; What are the aspects of your journey where you can share the responsibility? How can you let others lead, so that they can have more pep in their step? What can you do to foster someone who needs fostering, and help them to share the responsibility of leadership? And see how that changes your work for the better. Just ask Brodie. Click here to contact Andrew for more information on workshops and classes for Leadership Development, |
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