Integrate!

I met with two business people this week. Both were the kind of people you would want working on your team: professional, committed, interesting. And both of them were engaged in work that had only the fuzziest of purposes. It makes you wonder how much our economic reality would change if we gave everyone the benefit of a clear, compelling purpose for their work. It's hard to be productive when there is no clear criteria for knowing you have done a good job and no real (I mean something you can see!) result for doing the work. No matter how much you want to work, a 'why' makes a big difference. It's my pet peeve with people seeking training. "We are interested in some training in NLP," the voice on the phone says. And my instincts say "run!" Because people who won't commit to a purpose are unlikely to achieve a purpose and 'some training' is not a purpose. I ask them "what will change if this training goes as well as it can possi...

The best collaboration gets almost magical results.  Working together, people produce ideas that no one would have generated working alone and everyone discovers that their skills are a fit for one another and for the task. Yet we all have experiences of collaboration that are much less than the sum of the parts, times when we have worked with others and been less inspired and less effective than we would have been on our own.  An NLP approach to the problem is to ask: what's the difference? What makes collaboration work? It may be that focus is the difference that makes the difference. Groups that focus on developing a shared outcome and a shared state might be more effective than groups that focus on the problem they are solving or the task they want to complete. One of the things we know for sure is that states are easily transferred from one group member to another and that the strongest state in the group is the one that is likely to dominate. Groups that focus on w...

Who has time for complicated theories? Even those of us who love rich complex thought, especially combined with clever wordplay, have only a little time for it. It's the square of exquisite dark chocolate in our diets, not the leafy greens that keep us healthy and moving. This morning, I'm going to offer you a simple way to think about how you are getting the results you are getting. Most of us don't think about performance (except in phrases like performance review). We think about getting things done and satisfaction and relationships. But. . . . whatever you do in a day is a performance and you can decide where you would like to perform better (which is a more direct way to think about where you would like to get better results). The four Ps of performance: Pain:  I know. It's a terrible place to start. But pain is an indication that there's something that needs to change. And working through pain extends your endurance and ability. Problem: All pain is a...