The power of the human imagination is still relatively little researched. Productivity literature, parents and teachers ask us to focus on the task in hand and our project plans. Yet we know through our human history that it has been the big thinkers that have enabled our faster progress as a human race: not those who just focus on the here & now and accept the norm.

As animals, we are goal oriented (food, sex….) and from what we know about our evolution, we can speculate that a sophistication in our goal setting was introduced as we developed consciousness. We could defer satisfaction. Invest time and energy, working together for a longer-term and ultimately more rewarding goal. I suspect this skill is also subject to further evolution. We can be bound by what we know, as framed by our human history and what we tell each other. Limited by the current ‘realities’ of our knowledge. Or we can recognise this will just bring us a tomorrow that looked like yesterday.

Instead, we need to recognise our own power of imagination. We use the same parts of our brain in imagining as we do in remembering. Your ‘brain’ doesn’t really know that your big vision hasn’t already happened; therefore you are the only blocker to your dreams. Your limiting self-beliefs, your why-nots. So let’s take advantage of our sophistication. Let’s blow the doors off everything that limits us. Let’s all start to have visions that we’re proud of: our reality is what we make it.

Fortunately a giant robot dinosaur called FAKEGRIMLOCK comes to the rescue of our human limitations on a post on Eric Ries’ Lean Startup blog. My favourite part:

EVERYONE GOOD AT SEE CAN’T. EVERYONE LIVE IN WORLD FULL OF IMPOSSIBLE.

EVERYTHING THAT MATTER IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL SOMEONE DO IT ANYWAY.

STOP BEING EVERYONE. STARE AT WHY NOT UNTIL IT GIVE UP AND BECOME HOW TO.

1. Look for disruptive change. As you are about to start a new venture, ask yourself these questions: What is becoming possible or necessary that wasn’t possible before?  Is a new product or service able to take over an existing market or create a new market? When I co-founded LinkedIn in 2003, the tech industry was in a deep depression. I looked at all the opportunities created by the Internet and had the idea that eventually everyone would need a professional profile online. This profile would enable them to connect with similar professionals and share news, tips and other information. The development of online professional profiles that people could create and control themselves led to an enormous, disruptive change in the recruiting industry. It provided a way for people to directly reach the best candidates rather than hoping for responses from a listing in the paper.

2. Aim big. Regardless of whether a start-up is targeting a big idea or small one, it will still require the same amount of blood, sweat and tears — so aim big! What is big? It is a new product or service that creates or dominates a significant market. If the market is small or your product is only a marginal improvement over what is already available, you will be taking the same risks but for a much smaller potential gain. I am on the board of a company called Shopkick, which aims to revolutionize retail shopping through a mobile application and incentive program that will enable retailers to attract new and more frequent shoppers. Shopkick founder Cyriac Roeding didn’t think small. He is targeting ALL retail shopping.

3. Build a network to magnify your company. A lot of people seem to think that behind every great start-up is a single entrepreneur with an idea. The reality is, great companies are built by a number of people with talent who are surrounded by supportive networks. Going beyond recruiting exceptional talent, the most successful entrepreneurs bring in advisers, investors and even early customer relationships. Building out this network of alliances massively increases the size and probability of a positive result. Zynga, a global social-gaming company based in San Francisco and founded four years ago, has raised a great deal of capital yet the company’s founder and CEO, Mark Pincus, has yet to use most of it. He raised that money in order to bring in strong board members who could help him build his gaming empire. The capital those investors bring to the table is just insurance.

4. Plan for good and bad luck. Whenever you are about to embark on building a new company you should assume two things: You will have good luck and you will have bad luck. Good luck is not as simple as “it works out.” Rather, good luck is when you suddenly discover a great opportunity and can quickly shift to go after it. Bad luck is what happens when your idea doesn’t work out. It doesn’t mean instant failure, but means you need to go to plan B. PayPal was founded at the turn of this past decade. When we launched the first product, the company still thought of itself as a mobile payments company. We came upon some good luck when we noticed the massive traction and growth from just one week of providing payments for eBay’s marketplace. The company quickly pivoted so that its main focus was powering eBay’s marketplace.

5. Maintain flexible persistence. Very often entrepreneurs are given conflicting advice. They are told, “Be persistent! Stick to your vision! Drive through adversity!” At the same time they are told, “Listen to customer feedback! Pivot on key data! Know when to change!” The challenge for entrepreneurs is to be able to follow both pieces of advice at the same time. In other words, you must know when to maintain flexible persistence. Over the years PayPal has made multiple significant pivots. The company started as a mobile encryption platform. Then it was a mobile payments company. Next PayPal was a combination mobile and Web site payments company. Finally PayPal became an email payments company. Each pivot over the life of the company was the result of rethinking the business but maintaining the vision. The focus was always to become a payments operating system; but the nature of the operating system changed multiple times.

Reid Hoffman is co-founder and chairman at LinkedIn and a Pprtner at Greylock Partners. He is a member of the founding team at PayPal and has been an angel investor and adviser to dozens of organizations including Facebook, Zynga, Flickr and Last.FM.  He currently serves on the boards of LinkedIn, Zynga, Shopkick, Kiva.org and Mozilla. His complete profile can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman.

via LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman: Five Lessons for Entrepreneurs – Tech Europe – WSJ.

Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health to sports, business and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence—believing you are better than you are in reality—is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success. However, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Here we present an evolutionary model showing that, counterintuitively, overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition. In contrast, unbiased strategies are only stable under limited conditions. The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars.

via Deric Bownds’ MindBlog: Evolutionary rationale for positive illusions..

Handoff Checklist

1. What do you understand the priorities to be?
2. What concerns or ideas do you have that have not already been mentioned?
3. What are your key next steps, and by when do you plan to accomplish them?
4. What do you need from me in order to be successful?
5. Are there any key contingencies we should plan for now?
6. When will we next check-in on progress/issues?
7. Who else needs to know our plans, and how will we communicate them?

via The Secret to Ensuring Follow-Through – Peter Bregman – Harvard Business Review.

Search for ‘vision and goal-setting’ on this blog. Look at my ‘About’ page and you will see, ‘my long-term passion is to investigate the relationship between the conscious mind and other-than-consciousness in relation to vision and goal-setting.’ I was driven to start blogging through a belief that there was something very powerful in strong self-affirmations. Create the vision of success, get your other-than-conscious aligned and off you go. Job done. So what is making me question this?

Jonah Lehrer in the Frontal Cortex describes an anagram-solving experiment by Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracin which compares “interrogative self-talk” with “declarative self-talk”: so the apparently weaker ‘will I solve these anagrams?’ compared to the stronger ‘I will solve these anagrams’. I’ve always thought of myself as an ‘I will’ kind of man. I’m clear on what I’d like from my future without being blind to the randomness of fate. I’ve always thought this to be the best way of operating.

In the experiment however, results confound this expectation as Lehrer explains, ‘At first glance, we might assume that the “I Will” group would solve more anagrams. After all, they are committing themselves to the task, silently asserting that they will solve the puzzles. The interrogative group, on the other hand, was just asking themselves a question; there was no commitment, just some inner uncertainty.But that’s not what happened. It turned out that the “Will I?” group solved nearly 25 percent more anagrams. When people asked themselves a question – Can I do this? – they became more motivated to actually do it, which allowed them to solve more puzzles.’

From pulling together the results of a number of different experiments, the explanation appears to lie in intrinsic motivation vs. extrinsic motivation: ‘the power of the “Will I?” condition resides in its ability to elicit intrinsic motivation. (We are intrinsically motivated when we are doing an activity for ourselves, because we enjoy it. In contrast, extrinsic motivation occurs when we’re doing something for a paycheck or any “extrinsic” reward.) By interrogating ourselves, we set up a well-defined challenge that we can master. And it is this desire for personal fulfillment – being able to tell ourselves that we solved the anagrams – that actually motivates us to keep on trying.’

So what else is happening? A reader, Cappy Anderson – who mailed in following an earlier post – made the philosophical comment that ‘somewhere in that three years [at law school] I came upon the notion that the answer to any question is contained in the question itself’. The application of this notion probably provides for sufficient pause in a normally conscious stream of thinking and problem solving to apply some right brain introspection. In a link from the Lehrer post, Daniel Pink quotes an entrepreneur Lisa Gansky warning against the leadership and entrepreneurial hazard of ‘breathing your own exhaust’,

‘”I’m a self-talker for sure,… and when I’m working on an idea, it starts out as a declarative.” But as she progresses, she moves toward the interrogative: ”When you create something, you can fall in love with it and aren’t able to see or hear anything contrary. Whatever comes out of your mouth is all you’re inhaling,” she says. “But when you ask a question – Will I? – you’re creating an opening. You’re inviting a conversation – whether it’s self-conversation or a conversation with others”‘

So what now for my mission and long-term passion, my belief in ‘create the vision of success and off you go’? I think this very act of interrogative self-talk has made me even more motivated to examine our relationship with ourselves. But in a more questioning way. Maybe then I’ll solve more of life’s little anagrams?

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Initial planning questions:
1. What are you trying to change?

2. Who is involved in the change?
2.1. Do they want to change?
2.2. What do they need to change?

3. What does the changed future look like?

4. What are the top 3 blockers to change that require specific strategies to overcome them?

Detailed Planning Steps:
5. Clearly articulate objective: what does the changed vision/ goal/ future look like?:
5.1. Write down in technicolour detail.
5.2. Use this as an initial engagement step with those involved in the change (i.e. facilitated brainstorm/ meeting away day)
5.3. Create a clear list of benefits that will be enjoyed when change is achieved

6. Go public with the change vision: be clear on how those affected by the change will be kept engaged and informed

7. Create a clear and detailed timebound plan with detailed sub-projects, tasks and next actions needed to achieve the vision in 5. above, whilst ensuring the blockers in 4. above are addressed:
7.1. The actions all need to be concrete and measurable.
7.2. They must include clear accountabilities and ‘sprint’ milestones that effectively breakdown the overall change project into manageable chunks capable of completion and celebration (see 8.)
7.3. You must also create specific sub-projects for overcoming blockers and resistance to change as well as communication and engagement steps included in this list

8. Communicate and celebrate successful achievement of change chunks.
8.1. Ensure these are timed to maximise the positive internal (and any relevant external) PR impact: you’re aiming to create change momentum here.
8.2. Ensure that real small rewards are earned/ enjoyed – even if it’s just a round of drinks with the people involved in achieving the sub-goal or giving yourself a small treat

9. Keep on reminding all involved (those identified in 2, 5.2 and 7.2 above) about the clear list of benefits that will be enjoyed when change is achieved (you created this list in 5.3. above). You need to treat this step as a communication sub-project in its own right

Starting:
10. Take a planned action
10.1. Repeat 10.

The FT’s article (30/12/09, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson) exploring family businesses and long-term strategic decision-making also highlights the importance of paranoia and values in business leadership.

Without long-term planning and the projection of risk exposures, a company cannot look to add value over time. Past this management speak though, a healthy self-awareness and translation of leadership team stress, paranoia and questioning into strategy evaluation and revision/ actions is fundamental.

Allan Leighton (sits on several boards, inc. Selfridges and BSkyB) is quoted in another FT article (6/1/10, Judgment Call – What is the right attitude for leaders to take this year?):

‘Stay close to the detail of your business, worry frequently, don’t be complacent, and look after your people. Survive and thrive.’

‘Business needs to adapt to the new realities and get on with driving momentum, being proactive and looking for ways to keep edging forward, remembering that flat is often the new up’

Strong leadership is not a one person game. The leader – in position because of knowing what those who would be led need to be led – drives both the momentum and the action, but should also drive the questioning. Historic decisions of even the last month should be re-challenged in light of all current data and experience.

The fulfilment of the mission and big hairy audacious goals should provide the direction and framework; this should equate with the company’s best ability to deliver total stakeholder return over time (defined in both monetary and non-monetary terms).

What happens day to day, week to week and month to month should be guided by a clear bridling of your stress and paranoia as a leadership team in pursuit of the right strategic decision-making/ revision-making.

Continually switching strategies or strategic procastination/ incontinence are both unacceptable. Continually questioning yourself and whether you are doing the right things now – based on your business values – to achieve your long-term mission, is a necessity.

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‘Whenever our brains successfully pursue the ingenious strategy of creating a unified and dynamic inner portrait of reality, we become conscious’

‘First, our brains generate a world-simulation, so perfect that we do not recognise it as an image in our minds. Then, they generate an inner image of ourselves as a whole. This image includes not only our body and our psychological states but also our relationship to the past and the future, as well as to other conscious beings’

My marginalia at this point in my first reading of the book explodes. One of my long-term passions (and the core objective of this blog) is to investigate the relationship between the conscious mind and other-than-consciousness in relation to vision and goal-setting. I was immediately struck by Metzinger’s words above because of the sophistication that it infers the brain must have in the areas of image creation, belief and subsequent thoughts and actions reliant on the images and vision created. Some inter-linked areas I’ve explored:

What Could You Do in the Future With Your Imagination Now? illustrates the MRI scans from a brain remembering and imagining: the same areas are used.

How The Different Parts of The Brain Help Vision and Goal-Setting is my earlier, formative attempt to start to pull the findings of neuroscience into the vision area.

NLP, Modelling and Scenario Planning looked at the area from a business planning perspective following a great article by Ram Charan.

In Seth Godin’s compilation ebook, What Matters Now, Michael Hyatt writes about vision: ‘Leadership is more than influence. It is about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build—and why it matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future.‘

So, one conclusion to draw is that one of our core competences as Homo sapiens is the ability to imagine – to become conscious by creating a ‘inner portrait of reality’ – and then to project forward future realities.

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Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell in Human Givens argue that the giving and receiving of ’attention’ is a basic human need. They refer to Idries Shah and his studies when they note that ‘many social and commercial transactions are in fact disguised attention situations’. Shah suggested that humanity could benefit enormously by ‘studying the attracting, extending and reception, as well as the interchange, of attention’:

‘If individuals are unaware that what is driving them in certain circumstances is the demanding, extending or exchange of attention, believing they are engaged in something else – such as learning, informing, helping, buying or selling – they are likely to be less efficient in achieving their ends’

So by remaining mindful of the currency of attention in your interactions with others, you can achieve your goals more effectively. Since I read this, it’s had a big impact. Rather than necessarily re-interpreting all situations – I think we are well developed in understanding clear attention needs and giving – it has made me more aware of how to respond better to the clear ‘needy’ situations (mine and others). I have tried not to interpret the interaction as being anything other than need driven. I have found that subtlety unlocks  a much better response in me to both my own needs and others. The act of focusing on the ‘attention transaction’ has also has enabled me to better understand what’s really driving my needs. And then do something about them.

Where the whole area gets really exciting is when you consider it within this context of learning. Griffin & Tyrrell argue that it is clear in the attention exchange that we suspend our critical faculty. It is something we have to do if we are consider and absorb new patterns of information:

‘When attention is focused and we grasp what someone is telling us in an uncritical way, we have absorbed a pattern at an unconscious level. Its full meaning and ramifications may not become apparent at once but, once the pattern is in the brain, it will affect future actions and add to the sum total of our knowledge. Knowledge only becomes real in action, when it is experienced. This is how we learn’

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