Hi,
One of the benefits of not traveling is that I get to sit down and finally email you. My goal for this email is to stay connected to you and to share some random and useful ideas that I have discovered in the world of organizational and personal change.
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WHAT HAVE I BEEN UP TO?
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Spending a lot of time at home and trying to spend less time in my own head. Turkey was on complete lock-down from March through the start of June - during which, we were only allowed to leave the house at specific times to get groceries. As someone who travels quite a lot and is constantly out swimming, biking, and running, being under house arrest with a wife and four children did not just require us to adjust but to rethink home life altogether.
In fact, these three months at home and the three months that followed, caused me to reconsider several things from first principles: coaching, training, parenting, health, and fitness. For this, I am grateful for 2020. This year has been a test of all of our personal agility and openness to change. If the key point of agility is the ability to adapt to uncertainty and the unknown, these past couple of months have been a stress test on our personal and professional agility.
Needless to say, I have a lot of work to do!
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RANDOM AND INTERESTING IDEAS
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0 SPECIALISTS VS GENERALISTS?
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One of the fundamental debates in product development is generalists vs specialists. Tiger Woods became the world’s greatest golfer through focused, delivered practice, while Roger Federer played multiple sports before choosing tennis. Author, David Epstein argues that Woods is the exception. The debate should not be specialists vs generalists, but rather, what the superior path to finding your greatness is.
What the debate between Gladwell and Epstein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXBhINPoKEk
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1 MENTAL MODEL WORTH ADOPTING
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Hanlon’s Razor states “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect or incompetence.” This heuristic can be found in the Jargon file (aka the Hackers dictionary), a lexicon of slang terms used by programmers. I find this maxim useful - not just for programmers trying to understand other programmer's intent, but even more so to understand managerial intent. It has helped me to be less judgmental of others as well as expend less energy trying to understand the intent of others. This has been very useful during these days when true face-to-face communication is rare.
Link to the Jargon File: http://www.jargon.net
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1 MY FAVORITE F-LAWS
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During many of my classes, I have you watch a video of Russ Ackoff explaining systems thinking. Before his death, Dr. Ackoff published 80 management laws that he observed over his career. He named them f-Laws. Of my favorite:
-It is very difficult for those inside a box to think outside of it.
-An organization's planning horizon is the same as its CEO's retirement horizon.
-Overheads, slides, and PowerPoint projections are NOT visual aids to managers. They transform managers into auditory aids to the visuals.
Link to the book: https://www.triarchypress.net/management-f-laws.html
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2 FOUR REASONS PEOPLE RESIST CHANGE
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In 1978, Harvard professors Dr. Kotter and Dr. Schlesenger published the four main reasons people resist change:
1. Self-interest
2. Different assessment of the situation
3. Low tolerance for change and inertia
4. Misinformation and misunderstanding
Luckily, they also published the 6 approaches to overcome resistance to change:
Link: https://hbr.org/2008/07/choosing-strategies-for-change
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3 CREATE A RESUME OF FAILURES
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Keeping a failure resume CV of Failures is simple and useful: When you fail, write it down. But instead of focusing on how that failure makes you feel, take the time to step back and analyze the practical, operational reasons that cause you to fail. I personally do this and a resume of successes.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/smarter-living/failure-resume.html
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5 DO YOU COME WITH A USER MANUAL?
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I heard about the idea of a user manual and decided to create one. The basic idea is that we are complex, non-deterministic creatures. Yet we don't come with a basic user manual. My son spent the summer working with me and I asked him to write a user manual for me. I asked him to answer the questions.
-What is my style?
-What annoys me?
-What do I value?
-How do I work?
-How do I manage?
If you are interested in what he wrote, ping me :)
Link: https://qz.com/1046131/writing-a-user-manual-at-work-makes-teams-less-anxious-and-more-productive/
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8 MY CURRENT FAVORITE HACK
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One of the key areas I have been exploring during this pandemic is breathing. What got me hooked was the Wim Hoff’s 10-minute breathing exercise. After 10 minutes I felt great. This sent me down a rabbit hole of breathing work.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybOi4hjZFQ
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13 THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
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What if the pandemic and pandemic restrictions continue for the next 10 years. What would you do doing differently?
I would love to hear from you. How are you doing? How are you coping with your new reality and the result of the thought experiment.
Warm Regards,
Ahmad
www.ahmadfahmy.com