Reflect ... or Decay

We live in a world where
business, economics, and politics collide in ways that are frustrating and
painful.
Some scholars characterize
our existence as living on a nonstop treadmill.
The typical executive’s
workday is full of meetings, e-mails, phone calls, travel, reports, crisis
management, problem-solving, and
decision-making.
The Boston Consulting Group’s “index
of complicatedness” has been increasing 7% per year for 50 years now.
When was the last time you
read a book in one sitting? Or in a day? Or in a week?
When was the last time you
wrote down important points from your reading in a journal?
When was the last time you
tried one of those “new ideas” in your work?
A Harvard Business School study of top leaders provides some
startling figures:
They spend 60% of their time in meetings.
They spend 25% of their time on the phone or at public
events.
That leaves 15% for everything else.
This busyness as if the world may end tomorrow has an indeterminable cost.
We do not know everything
about the human brain. We know enough to appreciate that our brains have limits
in their ability to concentrate, to pay attention to others, to understand, to
remember, and to process information.
Our
fascination with multi-tasking breaches
those limits.
Today’s hyper-competitive environment creates a strong bias for action.
After all, we judge people by
their performance.
Without action, there can be
no performance.
The
critical mistake is to confuse action with effectiveness.
Cal
Newport says that many people mistakenly believe “busyness
as a proxy for productivity.”
What is the solution?
Reflection.
While critical thinking tries
to solve problems, reflective thinking examines one’s underlying assumptions,
core beliefs, and knowledge.
A mass of empirical evidence
suggests that reflective thinking
enhances our ability to frame problems, search for new meaning, recognize
useful (and useless) patterns, and provides a solid foundation for the future.
Mary
Helen Immordino-Yang of the University
of Southern California suggests that “constructive internal reflection
helps us to make meaning of new information and to identify creative, and
relevant relationships between complex ideas.”
Warren
Buffet reads 5-6 hours every day. So does Bill Gates (he reads 50 books a year). So do anyone that you can think of as being among the
top in their field.
Cognitive
science tells us that reflective thinking and goal-oriented thinking occur at
opposite ends of a “digital switch” in the brain.
When
one is “on,” the other is “off.”
Three
Simple Rules:
As with most other things, we
can break down reflective thinking into three simple rules (an idea formulated
by Kathleen Eisenhardt of Stanford).
1.
We need a schedule
and a structure
– reflective thinking is not a random process. It is as much a part of executive
life as anything else. And it takes as little as 12 hours to make it a habit.
Some of the questions that can help start the process are:
A. What
are some of the patterns/issues/dilemmas
in our company that we rarely, if ever, acknowledge?
B. What
are some highly successful business models of today that we may be overlooking?
C. What
are the explicit and implicit aspirations and dreams that we want to achieve –
personally and professionally?
2.
In a world that worships success-stories and
swiftly condemns a failed initiative or a misstep, and the advent of social
media creates relentless pressure, leaders tend to amplify “heroic stoicism.” Leaders can do no
wrong. Leaders are always optimistic. Leaders embody confidence and success.
All this is fine except that it can exist only in utopia. One of the best
enablers of reflective thinking is a person who you trust – completely and
unconditionally – and who is not afraid to challenge your assumptions. A
dialogue with a trusted person is a powerful catalyst for reflection. Ideally,
the person should be from outside the organization.
3.
Most importantly, we need to practice noting down important
ideas/lessons/shortcomings and turn to them to guide future action. A random act of reflection may be useful but
cannot provide lasting value.
The
reflective executive is rich in imagination and exemplary in execution.
I
am indebted to Roseline Torres, Martin Reeves, Peter Tollman, and Christian
Veith of the Boston Consulting Group for the core idea presented
in this blog.

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