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Start with why

As a kid I had many passions. In the fall it was football. In winter, basketball. In spring track, then, tennis, then baseball. 

As I neared adulthood I thought about how to turn my passions into a vocation. Becoming a professional athlete wasn't in the cards, but I considered pursuing sports journalism like my Dad. Or becoming a teacher and coach. But those options didn't light a fire in me. Something didn't feel right. To be honest, I worried that my passion for sports wasn't serious enough to make it the centerpiece of my career. 

So I muddled through college and beyond without a North Star. Clarity arrived as a graduate student in my early 30's. It wasn't a matter of connecting passion and work. What emerged in those years was a purpose that would inspire and sustain me.

It was the mid 1990's. The World Wide Web was gaining momentum. I could see the myriad ways this new technology was going to challenge the status quo. My organization--a mid-sized university--was in for a rude awakening. It would need leaders who could navigate the rough waters ahead. I would prepare myself to meet that challenge.

Three decades later I still work for the same university. It has not been easy. Collectively and individually we have been beaten down. I persisted because I was on a mission. The purpose I formed in my 30's sustained me though many trials.

Now I work with other leaders to change my university in ways it has resisted for decades. We're making progress, I think, because we are starting to believe in the same purpose--helping everyone who comes to us reach their full potential regardless of their background.

 I believe in that mission as a first-generation college graduate whose life was transformed by the experience. Now I have two worthy purposes that complement one another.

Author Simon Sinek tells us to “start with why.” I see and feel and benefit from the magic of that approach.

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"All great leaders have charisma because all great leaders have clarity of WHY; an undying belief in a purpose or cause bigger than themselves."

--Simon Sinek

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"Science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose."

--Dan Pink

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"The fact is, motivation and cooperation deteriorate when there is a lack of purpose. You can train leaders on communication and teamwork and conduct 360 feedback reports until you are blue in the face, but if a team does not have clarity of goals and roles, problems will fester and multiply."

--Greg McKeown

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Always be cobbling

A former colleague started nearly every conversation with me the same way. "Hey, I have an idea," he would tell me. It was usually the same idea he'd shared before. He hoped that I could take his idea and move it up the chain of command.

My colleague's desire to contribute an idea isn't uncommon. People at all levels of an organization have unique perspectives on problems and how they might be fixed. They want their ideas to be heard, and leaders should listen.

But more than listen, leaders should connect. My colleague's one big idea wasn't novel, but he didn't know that because he lacked access to others in the organization who were thinking about the same problem. His idea never bumped up against a brain that thought differently.

In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson describes a good idea as a network.

"A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness," Johnson says.  "A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind."

He urges us to let go of the notion of an idea as a single thing. It's more like a swarm.

Most leaders I've know fear swarms.

It's not just empowering employees to generate ideas. It's about creating an environment for those ideas to mix and morph, to be challenged, altered, strengthened, and tested in action.

"This is not the wisdom of the crowd," Johnson says, "but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network."

One last thought from Where Good Ideas Come From:

"We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of that detritus. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. We like to think of our ideas as $40,000 incubators, shipped direct from the factory, but in reality they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage."

The lesson here? Remember your ABCs: Always. Be. Cobbling.

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"You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged."

--Ed Catmull

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"Ideas rise in crowds . . .They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection."

--Steven Johnson

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"To have an idea is a brave thing. To have an idea means you are given both an opportunity and a responsibility."

--Todd Henry

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Secret sauce

My team is preparing for our most important day of the year. One day each June we bring our organization's executives, directors, and project leaders together to reflect on the past year, commit to a path forward, and talk about alignment. 

My job is to design ways to tie us together. To weave together our values, aspirations, goals, and actions. To help us move forward together. Simply sharing information about our recent successes and our future strategies won't cut it. We need to build a culture that embraces intentional and creative thinking, relationships, and collective confidence in our ability to persist and adapt.  

"What's the secret sauce of culture?," a colleague asked in a recent meeting. Without hesitation I said 'stories.'  

Stories—well-crafted stories—can shift and strengthen our culture. Change management expert Donna Brighton calls stories the programming language of culture. "The stories people share in an organization reinforce the underlying beliefs and assumptions that shape the culture," she says. "To shift culture, reprogram it with new stories." 

Stories perform magic.  

They make apathy disappear by grabbing and holding our attention. The next time you're in a meeting, notice how people react when the speaker begins to tell a story. You'll likely see people look up from their devices. Lean forward. Listen. 

Once you have attention, the next challenge is to help people understand and care. Well-crafted stories do that. As Chip and Dan Heath say in Made to Stick, stories provide simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). 

 Inspiration. The power to move others. 

Well-crafted stories provide that power. Well-crafted stories touch our emotions. They engage our whole brain. I'm interested in telling stories that involve struggle and resiliency. Stories that illustrate how connection and cooperation break down barriers and spark creativity. Stories about how people learned and got smarter and stronger because they made mistakes and bounced back.  

I'm intent on finding the recipe for that secret sauce that makes magic happen.

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"Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution—more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to. Story is what enabled us to imagine what might happen in the future, and so prepare for it—a feat no other species can lay claim to, opposable thumbs or not."

— Lisa Cron

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All good stories have one thing in common . . . they have an ending that transports you somewhere. You have to have been challenged or transported somewhere for the story to be a great story.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.

Danial Coyle

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B-E-A-UTIFUL

I'm reading end-of-year project reports. Across the board, project teams came up short of their ambitions. There were just too many barriers.

Too few employees. . . not enough time . . . too many priorities . . . not enough funding . . . too little cooperation . . . not enough leadership.

The people we serve have no sympathy for our problems. They want a great product. They seek transformative experiences. If we can't deliver, they'll go elsewhere. They hold us to a high standard because they encounter the extraordinary every day. And take it for granted.

We have no choice but to figure this out. Instead of letting barriers block us and deflate us, what if we shifted our thinking from victim to transformer? What if we used constraints to fuel creativity?

Mark Barden and Adam Morgan, authors of A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business, say that "a key difference between being victim to a constraint and transforming it is the relationship between the constraint and the ambition attached to it—they are intrinsically linked."

It's all about how we frame the question.

Ask propelling questions

Barden and Morgan encourage us to ask propelling questions that force us to think and behave differently.

"A propelling question is one that has both a bold ambition and a significant constraint linked together," the authors say. "It is called a propelling question because the presence of those two different elements together in the same question does not allow it to be answered in the way we have answered previous questions; it propels us off the path on which we have become dependent."

They share an example of Audi's project to develop a car to compete in the 24-hour Le Mans race. Instead of framing the challenge as "how can we build a faster car?," they asked a propelling question: "How could we win Le Mans [ambition] if our car could go no faster than anyone else's?" [constraint]

The discomfort of propelling questions makes us think differently Barden and Morgan say. Instead of thinking about how to make their car faster, Audi's propelling question helped engineers recognize that fuel efficiency was key. Their car wasn't faster than the others. It just spent less time on pit stops.

Propelling questions help us shift from victim (we can't because) to transformer (we can if). Barden and Morgan studied real-world examples and identified nine common can-if statements that produced constraint-driven breakthroughs:

We can if we think of it as . . .

We can if we use other people to . . .

We can if we remove x to allow us to y . . .

We can if we access the knowledge of . . .

We can if we introduce a . . .

We can if we substitute x for y . . .

We can if we fund it by . . .

We can if we mix together . . .

We can if we resource it by . . .

One last piece of wisdom from Barden and Morgan: transformers are made, not born. We're all capable of solving vexing challenges with the right mindset, strategies, and habits of thinking, acting, and persisting.

Bring on the barriers.

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We are living in an era of extraordinary people rewriting our sense of what is possible. They make an unarguable case that a constraint should be regarded as a stimulus for positive change—we can choose to use it as an impetus to explore something new and arrive at a breakthrough. Not in spite of the constraint, but because of it.

Mark Barden and Adam Morgan in A Beautiful Constraint

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How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

Niels Bohr

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Our actions may be impeded . . . but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Marcus Aurelius

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The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

Warren G. Bennis