OneSmartWorld

Lynda Gratton and Tamara Erickson have written a compelling article for those of us who believe that 'we are smarter than me' and that collaboration on a large scale is critical to enterprise success. Gratton's work is first rate. I really enjoy her thinking and her understanding of the real roots of enterprise success. Her book on the Democratic Imperative, a little formal in tone, introduced the idea of the knowledge worker as investor, someone who goes to work everyday and makes the implicit decision on whether or not to 'invest' themselves fully in the work they have to do. Her new book on Hot Spots examines the roots of innovation and how high creative collaboration separates the high performing enterprise from all the rest. Read her work if you are serious about building innovative, adaptable teams and organizations. What follows are my summary notes on her recent article in the November, 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE: How do executives strengthen an organization's capability to collaborate effectively to solve complex organizational challenges - faster, better and smarter. The business environment frequently has inherently complex issues that require quick, urgent responses, under conditions of high pressure with large teams of 100 or more. These teams have to work together - often virtually or online, from 3 or more different locations to think through complex tasks that require depth and breadth of experience.

Strengthening an organization's capability for collaboration requires a combination of long term investments - in building trust and relationships, in developing a culture where leaders are role models of cooperation - and smart, near term decisions about the way teams are formed, roles defined and challenges and tasks are articulated.

Gratton and Erickson's research on 15 multi-nationals and 55 large teams showed surprising results. Using statistical analysis, considering more than 100 factors, they isolated 8 factors that consistently contributed to success, where teams worked more productively and innovatively. The 8 factors are grouped into four categories:

Factor #1: Executive Support
Top executive philosophy is a crucial success factor to collaboration, where these executives collaborate among themselves, invest in building social relationships and create what the authors call a 'gift culture' in high quality relationships.

1. Investing in signature relationship practices
2. Modeling collaborative behaviour
3. Creating a gift culture (helping people create vital information networks)

Factor #2: Focused HR Practices
The type of reward system used for team or individual achievement had little or no discernible effect on complex teams productivity and innovation. Two key practices did make a difference - training in skills of collaborative behaviour and support for informal community building.

1. Ensuring the Requisite Skills
2. Supporting a Strong Sense of Community

Factor #3: The Right Team Leaders

1. Assigning Leaders both Task and Relationship-oriented

Factor #4: Team Formation and Structure

1. Building on Heritage Relationships
2. Understanding Role Clarity and Task Ambiguity

Helping Leaders Succeed in the Intelligence Economy using OneSmartWorld

Leaders who can't think well, will not lead well. 80% of business failure is the result of mental mistakes from poor quality thinking senior managers. Leaders who can harness the total intelligence of their people, will succeed. Like RIM's BlackBerry, OneSmartWorld is a world class multi-purpose business solution, made in Canada for the demands of the intelligence economy.

The 4D-i is the new industry standard for the intelligence economy. We work with leaders to achieve their business objectives, increase productivity and accelerate team results, all off one convergent operating system for the mind.

Our all-in-one solution is based on:

• a common language for collaboration across departments and levels
• core competencies for high performance thinking
• simple, repeatable problem solving processes for better meetings and relationship management
• practical tools - on line, print and program resource materials

The 10 ways leaders can use OneSmartWorld to get the ROI/return on intelligence that is essential in the intelligence economy are:

1. Inventory Brain Power: you can't manage what you can't measure. Know your human capital assets. Develop a portfolio of the minds in your organization - using our 4D-i - the premier thinking development system in the marketplace. Know the spread of thinking styles across your human capital. Spot the gaps. Get an in-depth data-based inventory of how your people like to think and solve problems.
2. Develop Core Competencies in Thinking and Problem Solving: improve results at every level of your organization. Develop your people's thinking skills in the 4D's/4 Dimensions of High Performance Thinking - creativity, understanding, decision-making and personal spirit - and install the common language for improving relationships at work. Use in your leadership, management and employee development programs.
3. Improve Coaching Results: use the 4D-i and the smart track processes to improve the consistency, quality and impact of coaching across the organization.
4. Build Better Teams: Use the human capital inventory to assemble more diverse and task matched teams with the right diversity of skills.
5. Increase Team Performance: equip all teams with the 'smart tracks' problem solving processes to accelerate team productivity.
6. Save Time in Meetings: roll out the 'smart meetings' system to reduce time wasted in meetings by 20% or more
7. Accelerate Project Team Results: ensure that all project teams understand each other's strengths and preferences and use the common language and smart track processes to come up with better solutions, faster and with less unnecessary conflict.
8. Accelerate Innovation and Business Solutions: use our RIP IT/Rapid Innovation Program to bring a lot of your great minds together quickly to develop better, smarter solutions to the toughest business challenges and best opportunities your managers face.
9. Build Capacity in House: build skills inside your organization through certification.
10. Reap the Rewards of a Smarter Workforce: increase employee engagement and get more done, faster than your competition. Improve your management's abilities to optimize the investment in people.

Organizations have systems in place to inventory and manage every dollar. They know how to get the most out of every piece of equipment, to optimize every square foot of space and to eliminate waste in every business process. But innovative leaders and managers know that the elephant in the productivity room is the daily waste of human capital - the most expensive and under-utilized organizational asset.

Human intelligence - properly mapped, deliberately developed and skillfully leveraged - will be the most significant key enabling success factor for leaders, organizations and nations seeking to achieve higher productivity and accelerate innovation in the new intelligence economy.

Get Smarter Fast: Welcome to the Intelligence Economy

The intelligence economy is rapidly replacing the knowledge economy. What you know is still important. But the pace and complexity of change makes how well you can think and solve problems more important than ever. Globally, almost everyone has access to the same pools of knowledge. Success comes more from how well you can think and how well you use your intelligence to figure things out, especially in situations when you don't know what to do.

According to the Conference Board, 85% of all new jobs require mental skills, not physical skills. The #1 skill set employers are looking for is critical thinking/problem solving. Employers want people who can think smart, work smart and solve problems.

Employee brain power is the most expensive asset and most under-utilized resource in the economy today. Organizations spend from 65% to 85% of their budget on their people. More than 80% of people working today report that the knowledge they have is untapped by their organization. Over 50% report that their brainpower is significantly under-utilized at work. This is a management problem, not an employee problem.

If you can't think well, you will not do well in the intelligence economy.

5 Propositions for the Intelligence Economy

The human mind - working alone or engaged in teams and organizations - is now the most renewable and sustainable source of competitive advantage. The faster knowledge changes, the more important the ability to think smarter becomes.

Here are 5 propositions for success in the intelligence economy:

1. In the 21st century, harnessing the human mind is the most critical asset to achieve high performance, productivity and innovation. Smart people innovate, not technology. In the intelligence economy, smart wins.
2. Thinking skills, not knowledge, is the new core competency for success in the intelligence economy. If you do not learn to think well, you will not do well. Thinking skills can be developed with deliberate practice, just like any other skill.
3. Quality thinking processes are the best way to improve business productivity and accelerate innovation. Processes exist for every aspect of business. Teams that can use systematic thinking processes to problem solve together will get better results, faster.
4. Thinking skills and quality thinking processes are skill sets that can be developed, like other skills, through deliberate practice. Personality tests like MBTI and Insights were useful in the knowledge economy. In the intelligence economy, learnable thinking skills, not personality traits, are the keys to success.
5. Leaders, managers and teams that can mobilize their total intelligence will achieve consistently superior results. Leaders and organizations that can develop, manage and optimize the total intelligence of their human capital, with the same degree of discipline they manage their financial and physical assets, will manage to change better and consistently outperform their competitors. Those that can not, will be left behind.

Personal Spirit - 7 Tips to Make Your Spirit Soar

Life is such a ride. I am a green guy. I am full of ideas, positive spirit - easily distracted and an endless innovator. It's my gift to the universe and my tragic flaw. I enjoy good red wine with friends. It always feels fine at the time, but throws me off balance the next day. I get fat easily. It creeps up on me, like cheap underwear. It's always been a struggle for me to stay on track, to follow through, to go from start to finish. I am either on track or off track and not often in the middle. To succeed, like everyone, I need to harness my total intelligence - go red and make decisions, go yellow and get organized - with focus and deliberate practice.

Personal spirit is the most important dimension in our work. Since our system is based on learnable strategies, not personality traits like other systems, personal spirit is something you can learn, work on and strengthen every day. Someone asked me recently, "So, how was your day?". I stopped and reflected on what that really referred to. My day is made up of so many moments, encounters - each distinct and isolated in their own right. Waking up, thinking about the day ahead, stretching, dressing, selecting and preparing morning tea, making breakfast, mumbling about plans for the day ... some good moments, some not.

Cognitive psychologists claim that each of us experiences from 10,000 to 30,000 or more moments in a day. Typing this paragraph, I am aware of a flood of different thoughts, ideas and memories flowing through my mind, even as I write this sentence. Days are made up of so many perfect, unique small micro-episodes. These are everything from fleeting thoughts, feelings of happiness, fear, anxiety, gratitude encounters with others - whether over the phone, face to face, in e-mails, on the street, or in our mind where we ruminate or speculate on someone else.

If indeed, there are all these moments, then how we approach each of these moments is crucial to our overall personal spirit.

Personal spirit is what you think, feel, say and do. Moment to moment, do you turn the switch and choose to act positively or not. Your choice. Your responsibility. Your life. Such an inconvenient truth! It was always easier to blame your genes, your upbringing, other people. Inner change is not easy. Think of it as a set of shifts. You can choose to strengthen your personal spirit, one moment at a time.

Suzanne Segertrom's work on optimism Breaking Murphy's Law, 2007, highlights some of the new research on how to build your optimism and personal spirit.

How we get great at anything - see Passion, Perseverance and Practice:

• passion - you gotta wanna
• perseverance - you have to keep at it and not quit early
• practice - deliberate practice - daily acts to build your mental skills.

Given that, there are 7 simple points for those of us who really do want to build up their personal spirit and live a more positive and engaged life:

1. Mind the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
2. Deliberately look for the silver lining in the moment.
3. Keep a daily list or log of 3 good things that happened to you, every day.
4. Focus on what you want by setting a positive goal.
5. Keep a journal on first the issues you are currently wrestling and second on the steps you could take to move forward.
6. Act your way into a new way of thinking - or fake it until you make it.
7. Just do it.

A personal postscript: When I am on track, I follow what is called my 'daily practice program'. It is not easy, but it works for me. I pay attention to my body - remember I get fatter easily now. I am more deliberate about my day and pay attention to both big stuff and small stuff. I start the morning right - meditate for 15 minutes, stretch for 10 minutes, do some abdominal exercises; eat right 3 times a day; hold the licorice and chips; have fruit for snacks; no alcohol and walk/exercise/bike/ski/row. I make sure I read stimulating and enlightening stuff for 15 minutes or more. I make my plan for the next day the night before - my red items, my yellow items, my green ideas and my big white stretch initiatives and keep a journal on my daily issues, tasks and progress. Find what works for you to strengthen your personal spirit and try these simple techniques for a week, a month or a life.

How To Be Great: 7 Keys to Achieving High Performance

We all want to get better at something that is vital and important to us. If you are serious about building your skills in total intelligence or anything else for that matter, here are some of the core elements to achieving high performance.

1. Deliberate Practice (best described by Ericsson et al...)
   "Not all practice makes perfect. You need a particular kind of practice - deliberate practice - to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can't do well - or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can't do, that you turn into the expert you want to become."
2. Deliberate Thinking
   Experts not only use deliberate practice but according to Ericsson, they also think deliberately. The thinking process is no more left to chance than is the conscious and deliberate practice of the skill. Experts think well and approach each challenge as unique. They continually tap into the white of their personal spirit to stay focused and positive during adversity. They deliberately go to yellow - to analyze and understand the situation; go to red to determine the crux of the problem; go to green to explore all options and shift to red to come to the best conclusion.
3. Daily Hard Work
   You can't get to great or to really good at anything without regular, sustained hard work and sacrifice. You have to put in the miles. You may decide that world class expertise is not the level you want. But the reality is that hard, disciplined work is an essential aspect of higher level skill development and high performance results in every field.
4. Passion
   The fire in any high performer is a passion for what they are doing. This passion is a personal choice for pursuing what you choose to do. Passion is the fuel needed to do the hard work and put in the time to achieve the knowledge, competence and results in a domain.
5. Perseverance
   The willingness to keep doing something and pursuing a goal despite obstacles. High performers don't quit early. Perseverance is a state of mind. It is the heart of personal spirit. They keep on giving and they do not give up when they face hard challenges.
6. Self Discipline
   The ability to stay focused, act deliberately and refrain from doing things that subvert or distract you from what you need to do to achieve your goal. Self discipline is as much about what you don't do as it is about what you do choose to do.
7. Positive Outlook
   Optimism is a common characteristic of high performers. They use it to persist on their path and to get through the problems and inevitable roadblocks they face.

The best performers know what they are doing well. They focus their efforts on the tough stuff - what they aren't doing well at and what they need to do much better. They use self discipline to ensure that they practice everyday on what they need to master and skillfully avoid letting the daily demands completely eat up their time.

At OneSmartWorld, our aim is to help people everywhere succeed by learning how to use their total intelligence. We will continue to do that by building simple, practical tools and processes for students and people to use to learn how to think more deliberately.

Passion, Grit and Practice - What it Takes To Be Great

Most people want to be the best they can be. People everywhere want to harness their talent and energy to make a positive difference and achieve their goals. The latest research is now showing what it takes to be great.

These are my reflections on keys to high performance, drawn from The Making of An Expert, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2007, by K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues; What It Takes To Be Great, Fortune, October 2006; and The Winning Edge by Peter Doskoch in Psychology Today, December 2005.

What does it take to be great? What separates the good from the great? How important are raw talent and innate ability compared to sustained hard work and perseverance? What do the best performers do differently that sets them apart?

My goal is to give you some useful guidelines on how to deliberately build your own skills and those of the people you work with. I wish that I had known this sooner. The findings are useful to anyone who is serious about building skills and getting really good at something. These keys to success are as empowering as they are enlightening. They are very helpful in our work at OneSmartWorld. Our core purpose is to help people everywhere succeed, by learning how to think better and work smarter together. These guidelines will be incorporated into our work to help you succeed.

First, the good news. Experts are made, not born.

1. Talent and raw ability only gets you so far. Talent is never nearly enough to win in the long run.
2. IQ accounts for only a fraction of success - anywhere from 5% to 30%. The rest is up to you - knowing your passion, pursuing it relentlessly.
3. Giftedness is more an end point, not a starting point. High performers end up gifted because they worked hard and they worked smart to achieve their mastery.
4. You can master a skill or discipline if you are prepared to work hard and deliberately over the years.

So, what does it take? Ericsson, editor of the most comprehensive summary ever produced on expert performance states:

"The journey to truly superior performance is neither for the faint of heart nor for the impatient. The development of genuine expertise requires struggle, sacrifice and honest, often painful, self assessment. There are no short cuts. It will take you at least a decade to achieve expertise, and you will need to invest your time wisely by engaging in deliberate practice - practice that focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort."

In other words, nothing great comes easy. High performance and expertise are the result of sustained, deliberate, fearless and ruthless self-discipline. Like physical fitness, expertise is a long journey that requires smart, focused, daily commitment. The ground rule for high level expertise in any domain is 10 years or 10,000 hours of continuous skill development.

Personal Spirit Notebook

Notes and Comments on THE OPTIMISM REVOLUTION by Jill Neimark, Psychology Today, June 2007

by Bob Wiele.

Our construct of personal spirit continues to be a defining difference of our work at OneSmartWorld. Although we developed the construct in 2000, the literature on optimism and resilience is expanding as leading psychologists turn their attention away from their singular focus on what is wrong with people to defining the behaviors and mental approaches that contribute to long term health and high performance.

Personal spirit itself was constructed as a mutually reinforcing system of 3 factors:

• Outlook – a belief that an optimistic approach to life enables one to find the positive, hidden potential and meaning in any situation, task or person. It is a an active way of engaging in the world with realistic optimism
• Sense of control – a belief that one can exert personal control, through one’s own efforts, to impact on an outcome. It empowers you to take charge of your life and the situations you are in
• Initiative – a belief that one should go above and beyond conventional boundaries to do what it takes, to complete important tasks and assist others.

As more and more research on optimism comes out, it is clear that our personal spirit construct is a powerful and useful contribution to the understanding of human performance.

This article in Psychology Today by Jill Neimark is an excellent sharpening of the working definition of what optimism is. It is also a sweet validation of our personal spirit construct. It turns out that the standard view of optimism has been too simplistic. The author’s premise is that optimists are not pie in the sky dreamers, with a one size fits all happy face. Optimism has long been seen as a critical asset when facing adversity. As a life long trait, optimism is strongly correlated to health and life performance. Larry Dossey, a pioneer in mind-body medicine, says: “Optimists…have a stronger sense of self efficacy, so they are more likely to invoke healthier behaviors because they think it can make a difference.”

A positive long term outlook is an asset. But outlook, as a happy face, is less important than behavior itself. Taking action is an essential part of the emerging understanding of optimism. This is where our outlook as engagement, sense of control and initiative come into play. Personal spirit is a way of engaging in the world. It is a can-do approach, based on finding the hidden potential in a situation and working hard to engage with life’s challenges to achieve one’s objectives. This new view of optimism is emotion plus motion, positive feelings coupled with taking constructive action.

When I was developing the 4D model of human behavior, I had a quote from John Coltrane, the blazing jazz pioneer, on my wall:
“ It’s the striving, man, that I want.”
I really see personal spirit as all about positive striving – the constructive engagement with the issues you face, in a positive, hopeful and active way. It is in the effort and the striving to achieve meaningful gain that the real benefits are.

Suzanne Segerstrom, a University of Kentucky psychologist and author of Breaking Murphy’s Law: How Optimists Get What They Want from Life – Pessimists Can Too has a great quote that really fits with personal spirit as real inner work. It working on your game, working on dealing positively and proactively, with what life presents us.

“ If you’re an optimist and working harder on a task, your stress hormones may go up. Your immune function may dip a bit. But it is like doing crunches at the gym. Short term, more crunches hurt. Long term, you get a big payback in terms of health and fitness. Optimism leads to increased well-being because it leads you to actively engage in life, not because of a miracle happy juice that optimists have and pessimists don’t”

This new approach and the research on optimism is more in line with our construct of personal spirit - a positive outlook triggers one’s sense of control to take action and vice versa – taking action energizes us. It is about engagement and persistence.

One of my favorite stories is about Albert Einstein who, when asked, what is the most important question in life, paused and then answered: “Is the universe friendly?” How you answer this question determines your life approach. If you believe the universe is friendly, then you embrace life fully, completely with all its opportunities and challenges. It you believe that fundamentally the universe is unfriendly, then you retreat from life and live in fear.

Segerstrom says a very similar thing:
” The kind of optimism I study is based upon a very simple concept: Do you think the future will be mostly good or bad? If you believe it will be mostly good, you’ll be motivated to persist through tough times.” Optimists tend to work longer on challenging tasks, not giving in and not giving up as quickly as pessimists.

When we did our research on personal spirit, the strategy of ‘reframe problems into opportunities’ was co-related to higher personal spirit. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis describes how the ability to reframe life and find new meaning is central to how optimists operate. They tend to combine active, positive coping with re-appraisal, looking for the hidden benefits, and using some green flexibility, write a new chapter in their life.

Personal spirit is activated by making personal choices. It is in the choice making that you engage your personal spirit. Optimism as defined in Neimark’s excellent article sounds a lot like elements of personal spirit – hoping for a good outcome but also working hard to accomplish it – using persistence, attention to detail. It is a catalyst for the full life, well lived.