Your Personal Productivity Platform – 7. Progress
This is the seventh post in the series on your personal productivity platform.
How do we keep score, whatever the game we are playing? Is it simply about the final score or is there more to attend to?
I am a firm believer that we get value when we track, assess and adjust as warranted according to interim measures (scores) and metrics (scores compared with a standard). True in sports. True in business. True in relationships. True in life in general. Those measures tell us where we are, relative to our intended path, direction or destination. Our choice of measures and metrics defines what is worth paying attention to and managing, influences our sense making, and informs our formative choices of new navigational actions to take.
There are three relevant aspects that can help us use this perspective to advantage. The first is to recognize that humans live in language and that language is not only descriptive but generative. It creates our world through our listening and speaking[1]. In fact, we seldom distinguish what we are adding to the description of our world and where we fit in it (and then forget that we even authored the story).
The second is to distinguish between facts and opinions/interpretations/stories. Facts are what a community agrees to be true, expressed as an assertion. For example, “I assert/claim that the capital of Illinois is Springfield,” or “I claim that the temperature in my bedroom right now is 68 degrees Fahrenheit, according to this thermometer.” If asked about it, I offer to provide proof to verify the claim that is acceptable to that community. On the other hand, the statements “Springfield is prettier than Chicago,” or “My bedroom is cold right now” are my interpretation. Each of us as an observer of ourselves, others and the world can make such assessments. Our assessments reveal how our world occurs to us and affects our motivation, choice of actions, and felt satisfaction. We often confuse assertions from assessments, to the detriment of all.
The third aspect is the power of context. Context is the background from which we observe, make sense of, and experience our world. It is a function of many factors, including our biology, practices, history of experiences, and interpretations of those experiences. Everyone operates from a context – their context – and it influences what we notice, what’s important, what’s possible, and even the mood in which we find ourselves. Because we are each a unique observer, with our own unique context, it is likely that we experience the world differently from others and use that to feel separate. On the other hand, we all have common experiences that can be a bridge for connection and empathy, shared care and the choice to align and co-create a shared future. Common experiences include maternal bonding, managing our bodily functions and emotions, familial experiences, individual and group learning experiences, etc.
Back to keeping score in a game we are playing. We use the interim results as multiple snapshots of how we are performing. Each score in time is a fact. Taken over time, the scores may reveal a pattern. Depending on the pattern, we may characterize that pattern as ‘progress’. That’s our assessment and story. Someone else might have a different story about the same pattern.
What does it matter what our assessment is? It affects our perspective about how life is going, whether our horizon of possibilities is expanding or contracting. It can affect our mood of optimism or pessimism, our felt sense of efficacy or impotence. It can influence our resilience and persistence. In a change process, will we stop or continue past the “valley of despair” to the upturn in affect and performance? On our learning curve, will we continue to accelerate up the curve as we learn, practice and embody?
Here’s an example. Barbara, a coaching client of mine, was working on a set of leadership and business issues for her organization. At the same time, she wanted to take a fuller look across the important domains of her life (known as a ‘wheel of life’ exercise[2]). She identified seven of them (including ones for work, finances and lifelong learning). She then assessed her current level of satisfaction in each domain and where she wanted to be in a year. Finally, for each domain, she created at least one game to play that, if played fully and well, was anticipated to close the satisfaction gap.
Periodically (every 6-8 weeks), we would review her exercise, her games, what challenges she was confronting, what she was noticing and learning, and how she was viewing her experiences over time. She rated her satisfaction. Over time, her satisfaction scores increased. In her mind, she was making progress. She felt motivated to continue playing, excited by how the trending quality of her life experiences was being enhanced through her efforts. Though wobbly (some lower as well as higher scores), the trend was upwards! After a year, she had made improvements in her level of satisfaction in five of seven domains, held the same level in the other two. For her, she had amply demonstrated her capacity to juggle and manage multiple commitments[3] without a loss of focus or power.
‘Making progress’ is an important assessment we can make when we are taking goal-oriented action and producing results in our desired direction. We affirm our intention and our effect on producing the kind of better future we want. Where do you make assessments of progress? What impacts does that have on you? On your team? How do your assessments of progress (or lack of progress) affect your mood? Your resilience? Your persistence? I’d love to dialog about this contributing factor to our productivity. Please share your thoughts.
[1] Martin Heidegger observed that “Language is the house of being.” Speech act theory, as discussed in works by Join Searle (Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language) and John Ausin (How to Do Things with Words), provided a fuller articulation of this perspective. More recently, the 1986 book by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition, and Alan Sieler’s 2003 book, Coaching to the Human Soul. Volume I. The Linguistic Basis of Ontological Coaching, take the implications of this perspective further.
[2] I first found this in the Laura Whitworth, Henry Kimsey-House and Phil Sandahl 1998 book, Co-active Coaching.
[3] The kaleidoscope process and “just enough” standard described in this 2007 HBR article, “Success that Lasts” by Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson is what Barbara was able to leverage.
#self-leadership #designyourlife #progress