How do you get better at what you do?
Gary Klein has a great model in his book, Seeing What Others Don’t:
Performance Improvement = Reduce errors + Improve insight
He gives great examples of different types of insight that can transform your perspective on problem solving & innovation. The problem is that work isn’t designed around insight. Work is designed around efficiency.
Error reduction leads to efficiency. So that’s perfect. Except when you consider that insight would be a prerequisite to error reduction.
Damn, another paradox? They’re everywhere at work. You want increase efficiency. To achieve that you have to disrupt what you do. I wanted to think out loud and explore this a bit more…
The problem with increasing insight
“Those in middle management… found innovation disruptive to their day-to-day activities and felt it got in the way of running and efficient organisation- which is what they were paid to do.”
2011 PwC Report
Insight, like innovation, is inherently disruptive. So it’s going to slow you down before you can see the benefits. It’s counterintuitive.
The issue lies in the fact that insight & error reduction are interdependent. They both need each other, like bees and flowers. Bees feed off the nectar & pollen from flowers, and as they travel some of the pollen falls off and pollenates new flowers. Each depends on the other for sustaining their species’.
The same is true for insight & error reduction. Error reduction functions through insight, and insight requires the need for error reduction.
It’s a developmental cycle that requires care and balance to function correctly.
Finding The balance
Balance is the key to optimising performance. Not maximised, optimised. Creating a balance between efficiency and disruption to achieve optimal performance.
I really like this quote from Jeff Bezos about deliberate disruption…
"Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering."
Jeff Bezos on balancing efficiency vs insight.
Open-ended growth
The reason balance & optimisation are important is that the future is open-ended.
People who talk about compounding when it comes to growth are a little Utopian for me. Growth and learning is not an ever-increasing, additive cycle. It grows & shrinks, to learn new things you need to unlearn others. It’s not a straight line.
I don’t mean to sound negative. There are endless possibilities for growth. It’s just that we need to be aware the future is unknown. Unknown, but open-ended. You cannot plan for the unknown. You can work to create a balanced system, working with the interdependent parts, to support positive growth in an open-ended future.
“Start by doing what's necessary, then what's possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible."
Francis of Assisi
Supporting change at work
The trick to supporting performance at work? Clear goals, supportive managers, and a process that challenges decision making at key points. After that, get out of the way to reduce friction.
Except when driving insight. Insight needs friction. Learning new things needs to be a sticky process. So know the difference. When you want to run for efficiencies, give teams room to operate. When you want to drive insight, find ways to make them reflect & slow down the day-to-day cycles.
Performance vs new skills = quick wins vs desirable difficulty. Yes, this is just Courses vs Resources in all but name.
Practice is key to everything. You need to practice to understand where the errors are, in order to design for insight.
competence>implementation>performance (where do errors occur)
Paradox solved…?