You’re a driven man. Focused on production and the entire mechanics of the sustained, rational pursuit of a target. You’re a smart man. Well-read, well-trained, well-respected and yet you’re here because something is off. And worse, you don’t even know what it is. You - that seemingly capable man. Grinding, isn’t it.
What’s festering beneath is very real and very visceral. Quite frankly, it feels lousy. The echoes filter into your home life, into your relationships and your time. It’ll have you question your entire identity, your personality and your capability. But, here’s the good news - it’s none of those things.
I’ve seen it plenty of times. First from the inside and then from the outside.
The normal recourse is to double down. Think harder, dedicate more time, analyse the market, research the wave and the players more deeply, rise to the crest and broadcast the new target with gusto, focus and determination.
And the target mostly arrives. Good job, right!?
That simple iteration is the recipe for the inevitable ‘burnout’ trail. Collateral damage on that journey could be relationships, friendships, divorce, alcoholism, a broken body and maybe a vastly depleted mind. And, isolation - which can be devastating.
The ancillary support for all this comes in the form of books, training courses, HR (god forbid), self-help nonsense, all manner of retreats, counselling, coaches and all of their new acronyms and methods. The familiar message is “I know your problem and I can fix it with my method”.
And you did some of that, perhaps all of that, and perhaps some of you did all of that several times over. And yet, the same destabilising feeling returned.
Why? And then the iteration continues.
I was very fortunate to have been blessed with a collection of inherent deficiencies. Strange to say, right. But, being a bloody minded sod, I didn’t accept any of it. I’ll prove you wrong, I’ll outsmart you, or my body will be the fittest or I’ll develop other sensory acuities to get around my severe myopia. I’ll accomplish more, I’ll see around corners, I’ll do what nobody else can do.
I wanted recognition for intelligence and novelty so that people around me would go ‘wow’ - there’s that smart guy.
It’s important to be honest about why we do the things we do. That’s all part of it.
I developed a natural curiosity about systems, thinking, frameworks and behaviour. Soon I was in a career groove and trained in Edward de Bono techniques, design thinking, strategic planning and behavioural engineering.
HCI was particularly useful and fascinating. The study of people systems, computer/technology systems and the marriage between the two.
It was amazing to me that individually, people would report their place, condition and purpose solely within the confines of the containing function that they operated within (probably their department and field) and its place within an organisation. Rarely did anyone stop to think about the wider availability.
Chief execs of course thought about the market, competition, shareholders, PR and their own function within that frame. The two were essentially the same thinking frameworks albeit one was more developed and sophisticated.
I spent those formative years in finance and banking, and so HCI was driven by efficiency and capitalisation.
Because I was good, my work made people redundant. Truthfully, I felt a pang each time, but I didn’t know why and buried it. I was of course somewhat naive. I excused myself that it was all part of the game. It was only later, looking back from somewhere outside, that I saw what I'd been unable to see at that time: I was just as contained as anyone. That was my blind spot. And, I’d been living inside it.
Sometimes an engineer would be faced with something like an end-of-day transaction reconciliation problem. Make sure our rounding algo is working correctly and we’re not losing out at the tenth decimal place. Then he would get right to it, thinking about the how.
The same was also observed higher up the chain. TSR results pressing on the CEO distills into the how. (of course there’s far more than the how but my point is that there is a consistent framework and process).
Fascinating right?
The work of de Bono taught me, amongst other things, to change the frame and lateral movement. Which helped me to investigate availability and gain perspective.
And then came David Kelley and Bernard Roth. These guys brought another dimension to my work. Design thinking was not just ‘Begin with the person, not the technology.’ but something far more visceral could be revealed by laddering down and then the one great insight that the solution is implied in the framing of the question. Ergo the boundaries of any solution may be contained by both the question and the framework from which it exists.
In layman's terms, you get what you ask for. The question you ask acts like a pair of blinkers and it can completely dictate where you're allowed to look for an answer.
That opened the door to a new wave of thinking. And then I had de Bono, HCI and design thinking skills which became my new foundations. The rest - Strat planning and behavioural engineering were fantastic skills and disciplines and they too gave me different ways of moving outside any given frame.
So, you smart and capable man, by now you have probably realised that the thing you are experiencing may not have anything to do with your personality or capability. It may be a blind spot. And a blind spot is positional, not deficient thinking.
Perhaps until now you have simply not witnessed it. An eye cannot see itself by looking through it. But allow yourself to move, shift positions physically, emotionally and mentally, and suddenly you can see what was always there, and what you couldn't see becomes something you can finally use.
So, if the problem is positional, thinking harder from the same position is unlikely to be enough. Or, you may simply become more sophisticated at thinking inside the same frame.
You need to alter the conditions from which you are looking. Change the question. Change the environment. Talk to someone who is not inside the same system and do something that lets reality give you better feedback.
That might mean stepping away from the target long enough to ask what it is actually for. It might mean testing an option you would normally dismiss before analysing it to death, and it might actually mean putting yourself somewhere completely different and noticing what becomes available from there.
The point is not novelty, it is about movement because a different position gives you different information.
And then you have a much greater context to look at your opportunities. Which you then test, observe and let reality reveal the things that thoughts and frameworks alone cannot.
But changing position can sometimes be difficult precisely because you are still inside the system doing the looking. That’s where an independent outside mind becomes useful.
This is where Private Direction comes in. I help improve the picture, see what may be difficult to see from your current position, widen what is available and test what matters in the real world. Then we can make a better next move.
