K.E.E.N. skills | The Fourth Revolution Blog

How You Can’t Be Creative Without Taking Some Risk

Being creative entails some kind of risk. But further than that, it is not possible to be creative if you don’t take risks.

Creativity requires by definition being unconventional, exploring new spaces and ways of doing stuff. It entails risks. It means frequent failure, and pivots and new tries. It is necessarily messy.

Is it possible to “manage” risks while being creative? Yes, and that is the job of e.g. car designers, who develop concepts and test them with members of the public. There is a fine line between managing creativity and killing it, and many organizations play with that line.

Being creative is a risky business and you must be ready for what it entails – rejection, failure, agony over concepts and ideas. Yet it is worth it. Are you ready?

Why I am Really Blogging

Dear reader, you might be surprised that although I value you very much, I do blog in great part for myself.

I find that writing blogs, with the self-imposed discipline of a publication 3 times a week, forces me to sit down, slow down and think about important stuff. It forces me to focus my attention on what is really important and think about the condition of the world around me.

For me it is about writing, but I guess everybody should have a practice that responds to the same criteria, i.e. impose some sort of a discipline slowing down and thinking about what happens around us.

The plus of writing is that writing is a way to concentrate and reformulate ideas until they take a shape that makes sense. In addition, writing to publish adds some quality requirement that does not leave us put our guard down.

I hope you still get a lot of value from reading my blog and the ideas and thoughts I capture to share with you! And maybe you should blog too?

Why We Should Avoid Moralistic Judgments

As a personal discipline, we should refrain from moralistic judgments. This creates new perspectives. I love this quote: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” – Rumi.

One other reason is that we are often wrong on our moralistic judgments, because we don’t know the circumstances that led to what we observe. It is so easy to be imprisoned in one’s frame of mind and not see that the situation is perfectly explainable in a moral way.

“One kind of life-alienating communication is the use of moralistic judgments that imply wrongness or badness on the part of people who don’t act in harmony with our values.” writes Marshall B. Rosenberg in ‘Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life‘. Indeed jumping immediately to moralistic judgments can be deeply life alienating. Just avoid it.

Why We Should Focus on Our Energy Level

More and more I find that focusing on my personal energy level is the right way to go. “The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.” writes Scott Adams in his book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘.

My energy level is directly correlated with whether I am keen to perform certain tasks or engage in certain work. Also, it is clearly relevant to stop working on something when energy is low: production will anyway be poor too!… Better do something to regenerate at that time!

Managing one’s energy level through the day is also important, and it is where what we eat and drink (like coffee) comes in to make sure we keep the relevant level.

I also struggle with a particular energy-killer: jet lag. That does not help because it is difficult to remain adjusted to the local natural rhythm, creating unexpected energy troughs and highs.

At the end, managing our energy and responding to its variations are probably an essential skill in the modern world. And you, how do you manage your energy?

Why it is Important to Better Control Our Attention

“People who have better control of their attention, emotions, and actions are better off almost any way you look at it. They are happier and healthier. Their relationships are more satisfying and last longer. They make more money and go further in their careers. They are better able to manage stress, deal with conflict, and overcome adversity. They even live longer.” [Kelly McGonigal]

Having better control and awareness of one’s emotions requires practice and continuous attention, because it is not straightforward. Practices such as meditation or just paying attention to what happens right now are not promoted by our modern way of life.

Still personally I find great benefits in managing to extract myself from the stress of the daily grind and take some distance. This requires often focusing attention on myself (like my breath), and allows to consider the situation at hand in a much wider and comprehensive manner. It is not always easy but always worthwhile. And you?

Quote from an excellent post by Valeria Maltoni Using Curiosity to Break Bad Habits

Why You Should Have a Success System Rather Than Success Goals

Scott Adams in the excellent book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘ is strongly against setting goals. He advocates rather develop a system for success and stick to it – and be ready to capture opportunities when they pop up at the right time.

The main reason according to him is the conservation of personal energy: “Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction”

I find this viewpoint very interesting and challenging. Establishing a system that works consistently and reliably allows to avoid focusing on challenging goals that might never be reached, and allows to focus on a daily routine that will bear fruit. Hence for 2016 I have decided to focus my effort more on setting up a system than setting goals. And you?

Is ‘Following your Passion’ a Bullshit Advice?

“Passion Is Bullshit” writes Scott Adams in the excellent book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘. This is quite a contrarian statement, as many today advise to follow one’s passion to truly live a fulfilled life.

According to Scott Adams, this advice would be an illusion, fostered by the fact that successful people assign their success to passion but it is not proven that it was the origin of their success: “It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion”

Moreover, he believes that passionate people are less susceptible to be successful, because “passionate people are more likely to take big risks in the pursuit of unlikely goals, and so you would expect to see more failures and more huge successes among the passionate“.

Finally, he remarks that “If you ask a billionaire the secret of his success, he might say it is passion, because that sounds like a sexy answer that is suitably humble. But after a few drinks I think he’d say his success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains, and appetite for risk“.

This point of view is definitely contrarian in a world where ‘follow your passion’ is a basic advice (in particular since Steve Jobs “follow your heart” famous speech in 2005), and I think it should make us think a bit about this element of popular culture.

It is true that passion only can’t be the single recipe for success. It is also important to have skills that can be sold, and sometimes people are very happy having their passion develop outside a more common salaried job.

The next time you see ‘follow you passion’ advice, stop a few minutes to think if that is reasonable when it comes to what you are really passionate about!

Why the quality of our attention matters above all

“It’s not what you do that counts, it’s the quality of your attention.” (quoted from Marshall B. Rosenberg – ‘Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life‘).

Attention we give to people is what counts in the end. It requires practice and focus to avoid distractions and be able to give the attention people need. But in the end it is what counts.

This becomes increasingly difficult in today’s world with all its interruptions, buzzes and rings. It is why is becomes ever more rare and valuable, and people notice. It is sometimes enough to give full attention for a few minutes to create a relationship that will last years.

Work to create those spans of attention and nurture real relationships with people that matter to you.

How Leadership is a Relationship

In an interesting TEDx talk, Barry Posner explains very well how leadership involves nurturing a relationship to be effective. Even with the best vision and assurance the leader can’t do anything without a good relationship with others.

“The first person that has to follow you is you“, but leadership is a relationship.

The nature of this relationship is particular. As Barry Posner says, the most effective “leaders turn their followers into leaders“.

“Leadership is not a solo act, it is not a monolog, it is a dialog, it is a conversation“.

As Barry Posners sums it up, “you can make a difference – and you can’t make it alone“. Nurture the relationships.

Why We Should Practice Nemawashi in Change Management

Nemawashi is an interesting lean management practice (part of the Toyota way), which means going around the decision-makers before a decision meeting to explain to them the foreseen change and prepare them for the decision.

Basically it means convince the participants one by one, or at least expose them to the decision they have to make. At the extreme, the decision meeting itself becomes just stating an evident decision.

I very much like the image – wikipedia states: “Nemawashi literally translates as “going around the roots”, from ne (root) and mawasu (to go around [something]). Its original meaning was literal: digging around the roots of a tree, to prepare it for a transplant. This process involves bringing the dirt from the new location, and introducing it to the tree, before the transplant, so the tree can grow accustomed to the new environment before it gets there.”

So let’s us have a process before transplanting new idea. Nemawashi!

How to Make Hard Choices: Rely on What You Want to Be

Philosopher Ruth Chang’s TED talk on ‘How to Make Hard Choices‘ is quite an interesting insight into how we take tough decisions. According to Ruth Chang, we generally think we take the option that looks like the safest: “It’s a mistake to think that in hard choices, one alternative really is better than the other, but we’re too stupid to know which, and since we don’t know which, we might as well take the least risky option.”

There’s another way – I actually do have in my bag a dice to help me take tough decisions when I can’t decide.

But in reality, Ruth shows that what we choose is actually what we want to be – and then after we rationalize to promote the option we prefer. “Instead of looking for reasons out there, we should be looking for reasons in here: Who am I to be?“. This is related to out unique capability to put our own selves into our decision, by projection of what we want to be.

As Ruth concludes: “we become the authors of our own lives“. Not everyone does it, but that is a unique capability that allows us to tackle tough decisions in our lives.

Take 15 mins to listen to this interesting talk:

Why You Should Constantly Develop the Leadership Capacity of Others

I stumbled on this excellent quote by Pamela Slim: “Your job is to build the leadership capacity of the community you serve.”

Pamela Slim continues: “What does this mean? Your success as a leader, whether as an independent professional, a manager in an organization, a coach or a parent, depends on your ability to provide challenging learning experiences that make the people around you stronger, more capable and more prepared to solve the problems that you all care about. In short, stop doing things for them and start supporting them to do things for themselves.”

Let’s pause for a moment here. I find this extremely insightful. Instead of teaching skills the conventional way, she states that we should mainly focused on developing other’ leadership capabilities. Quite a challenge, and this certainly challenges the conventional views. On the other hand it is quite right.

She concludes: “This is easier in theory than it is in practice.” Sure. When do we start?

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