Quality is Non-Linear

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Imagine a scale for “quality” that goes from 0 to 100, where quality is “anything that makes something good or special.”

As a novice, I look at that scale and trick myself into thinking it is linear: the difference between what it takes to be able to produce a quality of 40 vs a 30 might be the same as the difference between what it takes to go from 90 to 100.

As in: when I started played guitar, I couldn’t reliably pluck the string I wanted to, let alone do it rhythmically.  (0 to 10)

Then, I could find the string most of the time, but I only plucked down, not up and down. (10 to 20).

Now that I can do that well, and now that I’ve mastered ten other plucking skills, I’ve been told that my picking technique has too much wrist, I’m holding my pick perpendicular to the string when it should be at a slight angle, I should be executing a relaxed figure 8 pattern over each string….all this just my first year of lessons. Imagine what next year will hold!

The expert knows that, as we make progress, we learn about nuance and details that were previously invisible.

This is why quality is not linear, it is logarithmic: the closer we get to “great” the more skill, will, and effort it takes to improve a little bit more.

This means that the move from 40 to 41 could take as much time and effort as getting from 0 to 10: because improvement at the beginning was relatively easy, it was the work of going from terrible to OK, and maybe all the way to decent.

But good to really good? Really good to great? Great to exceptional? Exceptional to best in class?

Each of those is a full journey: being open to the idea that better exists; taking the time to understand what it entails; building that new skill on top of your already-strong foundation; having the attention and patience to master the next micro-skill and the one after that.

This is why greatness is both expensive and rare. It’s why, at the 3-star Michelin restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro, apprentices, who train for 10 years, aren’t allowed to touch the fish for the first few years. The same goes for expert watchmakers, knifemakers, and makers of F1 racecars.

If we’ve had the patience and discipline to develop mastery of any skill in any domain, we understand this intuitively, because we’ve walked that path. We just need to retain the humility to see that each new journey, each new skill, will have as much depth and nuance as the skill we’ve already mastered.

And if we work with people who haven’t yet developed mastery—of other skills or these skills—it can be difficult to communicate clearly about “the distance from here (where you are) to there (where you’d like to be).”

As in: we’ve all met the bright-eyed newbie who “wants to do strategy” as if that’s something that is 6 months away and just requires “good analytical skills”—when the reality is that good strategic decision-making is the accumulation of years analyzing, thinking, putting yourself on the hook, making the tough call, being right or wrong, living with the consequences, and doing it all over again.

The job of the expert, then, is to cultivate curiosity in the novice, to point out all the progress he’s made, and, also, to show, with patience and a commitment to detail, the difference between “90% there” and “100% there.”

And the job of the novice is to have the humility to say “I got to this point quickly, it’s possible that I don’t fully understand what it takes to be great, but I’m willing to keep being curious and keep on putting in the work.”

 

What Are We More Afraid to Miss?

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Which scares us more:

  • Missing something, or
  • Not devoting enough time to the important things.

To explore this question, here’s a short parable of modern work life: how I manage my Inbox.

Starting 15 years ago, I established my current approach to my Inbox. It is based on the philosophy that there are two kinds of emails:

  1. Ones I need to act on
  2. Ones I don’t need to act on

The approach is brutally simple:

  1. The first group is unread
  2. The second is read.

No filing of any kind. Search works great. Zero inbox is meaningless; zero unreads is not. Voila!

This approach, plus ruthless use of the “mark as spam / block sender” functionality in my Gmail interface, has served me well for years.

Last week, for the first time in ages, I decided I needed to adjust my system.

I think it’s because of an explosion of workflow-related emails: Calendar updates, Calendly updates, Zoom meeting updates, Docusign updates, Box updates, AI recording updates, etc.

Combine this with the general flotsam of subscriptions of varying degrees of usefulness, and the ratio of must read:optional to read emails in my Inbox had gotten out of whack.

My solution to this is that I caved in to using filters in Gmail (I’m sure there are many better solutions (Superhuman, etc.).

What’s interesting is the experience of setting up those filters: it’s the task of taking every nonessential but interesting email and putting it somewhere other than my Inbox—the only part of my email world that I’ve looked at consistently for more than a decade.

The feeling is the same one I have when there’s an “internal meeting I could join but maybe don’t have to join.” You know the one: the content is important, you will probably learn something and maybe will make the meeting a little better. But do you absolutely need to be there?

The same goes for the Slack channel that’s been there forever that I rarely read; the client call that might be helpful to join even though someone else is running the meeting; the conference that I always attend, even though I can’t show concrete business results.

Most of us feel short on time—including time to be unproductive. We ache for open space, time to be generative, time to do the things that matter most… “once all this stuff is out of the way.” We tell ourselves that there’s no real way to create this kind of space.

One way to explore if this is true is to experience the fear of missing something: that essential email, that meeting where a wrong decision gets made, that photo op at the conference….

Perhaps that fear is justified, and the consequences would be significant.. Maybe success is defined by you getting to everything right on time; you being present to optimize each and every decision; you seeing all the edge cases and fixing them immediately. That might be what we need most from you.

Or it might be that there’s more resilience in the system than you expect.

That the cost of tracking and sifting through everything is real.

That setting a different bar for “what requires me” would create such a seismic, structural shift in your days and your weeks that it would be a little bit, or even a lot, disorienting.

This is what the sixth stage of Kevin Kelly is all about: “finding those things to which you are uniquely suited, and doing only those things.”

Not the places you can add value, not the things you are best at. The things that only you can do.

It’s a really high bar, and it cuts against the culture in most organizations.

It’s also worth exploring.

Podcast Alert: Patrick Thean

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Patrick is an author, CEO coach and mentor, and I was happy to get the chance to join his podcast recently. Our discussion covered topics that will be familiar to readers of this blog and, as always, I discovered that talking about a topic helps me understand the topic better.

If I had to summarize my reflections from the conversation, they are:

  1. How we do anything is how we do everything
  2. One way to learn how we do anything is by digging into new domains we are exploring

What follows is a conversation that starts with 60 Decibels,  my motivation for doing work in the social sector and my Generosity Experiment; but quickly turns to learning to play the guitar, my favorite AI use cases, and the attitude Patrick and I would suggest towards getting over your lingering AI resistance.

You can listen to the full podcast here (20 mins):

• Apple: https://bit.ly/3GB5W0P
• iHeart Radio: https://bit.ly/40eTeLU
• Spotify: https://bit.ly/4lqkhfM

The Road Runner

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My son, who has been lifting weights regularly, has a 12 week cycle. 12 weeks of doing the same exercises in the same order before you switch.

He told me that there’s some science that says that the first 8 weeks of improvements are just your body getting used to doing these movements— muscles firing more in conjunction, tendons adjusting —and meaningful change in strength at the level of muscle fibers only happens in the last 4 weeks.

It’s a useful metaphor for all changes: the first steps in the process are just getting used to doing the new thing. I don’t need to be stronger or faster to improve, I just need to spend regular time in the activity, and all my existing abilities will come together more effectively to produce a better output.

So if I’m trying to run more, I just need to run more, even if that’s a tiny bit every day. The every day is what matters the most, much more than effort or time or the perfect coaching.

Consistency –> New habits –> Reordering of our internal systems –> Improvement

The amount of “improving” we need to do is less than we think and easier to achieve than it appears.

We just have to remember to form new habits, and it all starts with the mantra:

That thing that’s terribly hard for me today will be easier for me tomorrow if I just do it today. 

Thin slice your skills, and your story

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Last weekend, we visited my daughter at college. She’s a first-year student, and is running on her school’s cross-country team. On Sunday, parents and siblings were invited to join the team for their long run (typically 10-15+ miles).

Clearly this is an invitation one should decline!  Which might explain why exactly three parents (myself included), plus two younger sisters (including my youngest daughter) showed up in the pitch black at a woodsy parking lot at 7:25am on a Sunday morning.

None of our group of five had illusions of keeping up with the XC team. But it appeared that I was the only one in our small group who had not been running regularly.

One of the parents, a regular marathoner, popped out of her car and announced, “We agreed we’re running 8 miles at an 8:30 pace.” I knew I was way out of my depth. The four of them (including the 13 and 14 year old) did, in fact, run 8 miles at an 8:20 pace. I, working very hard, managed half that distance at a slower pace.

As I finished the run, it was tough not to compare myself with everyone who ran further and faster than I did, and tougher still not to tell myself a story about my fitness.

“I’m just not in the kind of shape I used to be in.”

A few days later, I came across a video of a running coach giving a scientific explanation of the value of Zone 2 (comfortable pace) running.

The gist of it is: your heart, your circulatory system, and the energy transfer system that gets oxygen to the mitochondria in your cells all improve dramatically when you run at 60% pace. Specifically, the mitochondria, which convert oxygen to energy, get more efficient at that process; they even move closer to the surface of the cell (!!) if you’re running consistently.

Something about that explanation clicked for me. I’ve not been running, so I’ve not being doing the exact activity he said helps with oxygen transfer, so I don’t do that efficiently. That led to a much more specific, useful story:

“Having not run regularly over the last 10 months, my body is less used to converting oxygen to energy, and my mitochondria aren’t hovering around the surface of my cells to create maximum efficiency.”

That feels a lot less damning, and a lot less existential, than “I’m just not in the kind of shape I used to be in.”

The difference is important, because the “what kind of shape am I in?” story is personal, it’s big, and it might have some staying power in terms of how I see myself, the choices I make about health and fitness, etc.

Whereas the more specific analysis leads to very different conclusions about what is or isn’t going on with my mitochondria and the specific actions I could take to change that. This narrow story doesn’t ladder up to a mess of inaccurate meaning. It doesn’t entice me with a woeful tale of the long, declining path I’m on.

I just haven’t been running, and if I were to run more, I’d get better at running.

What I’m doing here is thin-slicing my story. Visualize it like this, with the highlighted part describing the story I’m telling myself.

I could just say “I’m just not in the kind of shape I used to be in.” That kind of story looks like this.

And this is a story at the level of identity, one that’s much bigger and much more personal than what actually happened.

Whereas a story that starts with “Having not run regularly over the last 10 months, my body is less used to converting oxygen to energy…” looks a lot more like this.

This story, focused on specific skills and aptitudes, stays at that level. I can decide that developing those skills is (or is not) something I want to invest in. But that whole conversation is very contained, and it runs little / no risk of taking on a life of its own.

You can apply this thinking in a million situations, as in:

I just got rejected on this sales call, again.

  • I’m a terrible salesperson OR
  • I’m not calling the right people / not identifying a need correctly / not asking the right questions

A teammate didn’t help me when I asked for help.

  • They don’t like me or care about my success OR
  • What’s going on in their day? / Did I make it super clear what needed to happen by when? / Did I express both the what and the why behind my request?

My boss is mad that there was a mistake in the materials we presented to the client.

  • I’m a total screw up, I’ll never succeed in this job OR
  • I need to create a system where I give myself a 24-hour break before doing a last review of client-ready materials

Thick-sliced stories about our identity keep us stuck. They are the antithesis of a growth mindset, because “I” (our ego) is always at the center of these stories.

Thin-sliced stories, fed by thin-sliced skills, are both more accurate and more useful. They highlight what’s really going on and where we can focus our energy. With a thin-sliced story, a shortfall, a misstep, or a slow run is just what it is, nothing more, nothing less…and certainly not a verdict about you as a person.

I Bought This Tesla Before I Knew…

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

At this point, you’ll have seen or heard about this bumper sticker.

This flavor of virtue-signaling is particularly ham-fisted, but it’s also an example of something that happens all the time.

What interests me about this is the ways in which our likelihood to act is impacted by our internal narrative.

“I bought this before Elon went crazy” communicates, presumably, some sort of solidarity along the lines of, “Just so you know, I’m not in favor of the authoritarian tendencies, the dehumanizing of people, the willingness to pull billions of dollars of life-saving spending on a whim. I’m a good person just like you.”

That last sentence is likely true, but the much more accurate sentence is, “While I’m sickened by what’s going on, that unease is less important to me than the inconvenience of selling my $80,000 car to buy another $80,000 car.”

And that’s really the rub: we plaster the sticker on the car, and it serves as a release valve, in the form of saving us from an uglier story about ourselves than the one we’d like to believe.

We repeat this pattern in hundreds of smaller ways. It shows up every time we talk about something being broken without putting ourselves on the hook to fix the broken thing.

“Coming into the office more doesn’t make sense because we just take our calls from the office instead of from home. No one takes advantage of the in-person time.”

“I would love to advance in this company, but I can’t because I never get any feedback.”

“People on my team don’t take responsibility for their actions. There’s no follow-through.”

“My kids are addicted to their phones; it’s impossible to get their attention.”

“The culture around here doesn’t make people feel valued for their unique contributions.”

“I just can’t get this build right because the user requirements aren’t clear.”

“Morale just isn’t what it used to be. People aren’t feeling a sense of connection.”

“We’re just not taking advantage of all that AI has to offer. Everyone is being so timid.”

When we articulate a concern about the current state of affairs, we might be doing one of a few overlapping things:

  1. Group creation: by signaling that I see the world the way you do, I create solidarity with you
  2. Narrative to self: by naming something I dislike, I maintain my self-image as someone who doesn’t support that negative thing
  3. Venting: getting something off our chest so we can get ourselves unstuck
  4. Persuasion: attempting to convince others that something is not the way it should be (ideally to enlist them to make change)
  5. Exploration: engaging in dialogue to figure out more clearly what’s going on that needs to be fixed
  6. Enlisting authority: we inform someone with greater ability than ours about a problem that we’d like them to address

And while it’s true that all of these actions can be done with more or less intention to act, typically the first three decrease pressure to act (because they are focused on internal / shared narrative) and the second three increase pressure to act.

For example, our favorite bumper sticker:

  • Group creation: identifies us (to ourselves, others) as anti-Musk
  • Narrative to self: “I’m a Tesla person with an anti-Musk bumper sticker. That’s a little less uncomfortable.”
  • Pressure to act: goes down, because I feel like less of a jerk

Because what’s at play is:

  • The amount of discomfort the “bad” thing creates for us (Musk = bad; Tesla = Musk; therefore Tesla = bad)
  • The amount of discomfort we think action would create for us

Anything that decreases our discomfort, by definition, decreases the likelihood that we’ll take action.

The subtlety we discussed last week is that good diagnosis can decrease discomfort (“I figured something out!”), so it runs the risk of decreasing pressure to act.

And, remember, powerlessness is not a viable excuse because we all have some agency. Our problem is that agency involves inconvenience, discomfort, or personal / professional risk, and none of those is particularly pleasant.

Here’s an easy way to see what’s going on: for every observation we make, let’s add an action in the form of an “I” statement. As in:

“Coming into the office more doesn’t make sense because all we do is take our calls from the office instead of from home…and I’m planning to take forward a proposal to create a scheduled lunch hour for everyone twice a week.”

“I would love to advance in this company, but I can’t because I never get any feedback. I’m terrified, but I’m going to ask my boss for detailed feedback in our next 1:1.”

“People on my team just don’t take responsibility for their actions.  There’s no follow-through. I’m going to start a shared accountability chart and put my name and weekly To Do’s at the top of the list, and ask others to also fill it out each week.”

“My kids are addicted to their phones; it’s impossible to get their attention. We’re banning phones at mealtime and starting a ‘all phones in the kitchen drawer starting at 9pm’ house rule. These rules also apply to grown-ups.”

“The culture around here doesn’t make people feel valued for their unique contributions. I’m initiating a 10 minute ‘amazingness hack-a-thon’ each Friday where our team shares at least 1 amazing thing each team member did this week in or outside of work.”

“I just can’t get this build right because the user requirements aren’t clear. I’m locking the Product Manager, the subject matter expert, and my engineering lead in a room for 2 hours and we’re going to leave with 100% clarity on the spec.”

“Morale just isn’t what it used to be. People aren’t feeling a sense of connection. I’m going to schedule one 15 minute virtual coffee a week with a colleague, and I’ll come in with three questions that ensure I have a chance to learn more about them and their work.”

“We’re just not taking advantage of all that AI has to offer. Everyone is being so timid. I’m going to invite 10 people to a 2 hour after-work AI hackathon where we come up with 10 ideas that could move the needle, and we will start working on them.”

We can chuckle at the guy with the bumper sticker, but we’re all wearing bumper stickers of one kind or another.

The most dangerous one is the one that says, “I’m so good at figuring out what needs to be fixed that I’m able to stay completely in my comfort zone.”

All meaningful change involves some degree of discomfort and risk. How much is up to you.

What to Wear in the Rain

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If it’s pouring rain out, and you’re heading for a walk, you have two good options.

A completely waterproof boot, one that will keep your foot totally dry.

OR

A flip flop, one that will allow your foot to get soaking wet, but you don’t care, because it’s your foot and it’s a flip flop.

Meaning, when your external environment changes radically, there are only two smart ways to react: you either decide you use the tools you have to fight it head on and win, or you choose to fully embrace the new reality.

Unfortunately, all too often we opt instead for a soggy shoe, soggy sock strategy, one that leaves us squishy and uncomfortable because we planned poorly and didn’t fully acknowledge that our world has shifted.

(and, no, this post isn’t only about AI).

Use AI to Turn Meetings into Action

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

My friend Irwin reminded me today of two things:

  1. How good it feels to figure something out
  2. How dangerous that good feeling can be

Meaning, if you’re a thoughtful, analytical, caring person, there’s a significant psychological payoff in diagnosing something correctly.

Imagine this:

  • There’s something not quite right going on in your company / organization (someone is unhappy, some process isn’t working, some results are off)
  • You and a colleague or two get together to figure out what’s what
  • You have a great conversation and unearth important things
  • Voila! You come up with real clarity on what’s wrong and what needs to happen

That’s all great, but be careful about how good that “Voila!” feels.

What happens next, for many of us, is that we jump to the next thing: another meeting, another task.

And the risk isn’t simply that we’ll lose some of the texture or nuance of the clarity we had in the meeting, though that often happens.

The risk is the fact that the meeting feels like success. We got to the answer!

At the extreme, a great conversation that leads to no action is literally worthless.

Even if you don’t fall into this trap, is it possible that the psychological reward of experiencing that insight and clarity lead you to do 70%, or 60%, or 50% of what you need to do? Could it be less?

If so, I have a proposal for you.

  1. Start by scheduling differently. For any problem-solving meeting, keep the hour after the meeting free / scheduled for just you.
  2. In addition (optional), record the meeting with an AI tool. (You decide your comfort level with this; I’ve found it very helpful.) In addition, take whatever notes you’d normally take during the meeting.
  3. At the start of your scheduled hour after the meeting, go to your paid AI tool of choice. While everything is still 100% fresh in your mind, speak (not type) freely to the tool. What’s the problem you were trying to solve? What were the specific issues you worked through? What solutions did you come up with? Talk as you would talk to a colleague who would want to understand all the ins and outs. Lots of detail. All the little juicy bits. Everything.
  4. Finally, take that text and ask the AI to summarize what you’ve told it. Ask it to give you a well-defined structure: headline problem statement; detailed issues that were discussed; proposed solutions.

(Here’s a starter prompt: What I just described is the output of a 90 minute problem-solving meeting. Take that detail and write a structured summary of the headline problem, sub-issues, and all proposed solutions. Be as detailed as possible. Before you start, make sure to ask me for any additional context you need and/or any clarifying questions. I want you to be confident you understand everything I’m saying and my proposed solution.)

These steps—from your input to the first AI output—shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes: you talk for ~5 minutes, write a prompt, respond to questions from the AI tool, get the first summary. Now the fun begins.

Read the output the tool has given you and start working with and through the AI.

You might say/write things like “this point you made wasn’t quite right: [quote the point]. Here’s why:” and explain it in more detail. Do this both for things the AI didn’t explain well and for areas where reading the summary helps you see gaps you didn’t see before. Keep at it until you have a document you’re satisfied with. This step can easily take 30 minutes or more.

Once you’re mostly satisfied with the content, structure, tone, and detail, you’re ready to put the finishing touches on the document.

I find myself consistently asking the AI to be a more specific with its points / language / descriptions, and I inevitably go into the document and edit some parts myself. I also always ask for specific next steps, a timeline/workplan for all parties involved, and a 1-2 page executive summary.

Voila! again, but now your best thinking is turned into a detailed action plan. With this approach, you’re:

  1. Capturing, and acting on, that beautiful moment of insight you have at the end of a great meeting
  2. Seeing what a professional summary of those insights looks like, so you can make it better
  3. Forcing yourself to engage in further brainstorming to refine your idea
  4. Creating clear next steps and a timeline
  5. Documenting it all in ways that makes it easier for everyone to act

If before you were acting on 50% of your best thinking from the meeting, this approach gives you 150% or more.

A loose grip

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Novices hold on tight, experts have a loose grip.

That’s because when we’re novices, we grasp for control. New motions are unfamiliar, our minds and bodies are not confident, so we clutch tightly, knuckles white, straining, in an effort to get it right.

Experts, on the other hand, holds their tools—a paintbrush, a pencil, a baton, a racquet, a guitar pick, their breath—loosely. With mastery comes relaxation, ease, and effort expended only where it is needed most.

If you’ve ever gone scuba diving, you know this. When you finish a dive, compare how much air you’ve used to that of the dive master. In my experience, the dive master uses half, or even one third, of the air I’ve used in a single dive.

Think about that: two to three times the oxygen, because it was new to me, because I was tense, because of unnecessary effort.

What’s interesting is that some people get stuck in the white-knuckled phase and some move past it.

I don’t know the skeleton key to get from there to here, but some of the ingredients are an intention to give up control, the comfort with being “not great” for a while, finding places not to grip—in your mind, your body, your breath—and breaking the skill down to smaller, slower pieces so you have time and space to get those pieces right.

The 90 Percent Expert

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Think about your experience reading the newspaper: on most topics, the quality of the journalism, the insights and the perspective hit the bar for you. That’s why you read, after all.

Except in the rare cases when there’s an article about your area of expertise. Then the Emperor has no clothes. You can see where all the shortcuts and generalizations are, all the misses that the journalist made, the questionable choices on expert sources.

But does that stop you from reading the newspaper? Of course it doesn’t.

In a discussion group that I’m part of, one member suggested that this is how we should think about AI: it’s not perfect, but it is so good so often, that we shouldn’t let that 10% of time where we can see the flaws keep us from using the tool (read: keep us from reading the newspaper).

If you’re still stuck on this side of the fence, it might help to personify your AI a bit—meaning, move from “I’m going to use ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity etc.” for this task to “I have access to a 90% expert across any topic I can think of.”

I’ve already shared my ongoing use of ChatGPT as a physical therapist, which is still my favorite use case.

This weekend, I used ChatGPT as an Apple Genius Bar Employee—because making an appointment at, and going to, the Apple Genius Bar is a hassle.

I had an old, powerful Mac that my son had used, and I wanted to wipe it clean. It was not playing along.

First, my son had partitioned the hard drive, so that created a series of problems. Then the Operating System refused to update—it took 6 different attempts at that problem to get it solved. Then, with a new OS installed, iCloud login wasn’t working (because the laptop is for my daughter, and age restrictions with Family Sharing didn’t allow her to log out). Etc, etc, etc. until I solved the problem a few hours later. All of this with ChatGPT calmly troubleshooting with me, providing a series of options, being endlessly patient when I asked new questions or corrected it. I’m positive I would have failed at this task a year ago with just Google search.

The laptop is beside the point (especially because, once I’d solved the problem, we discovered that the battery life was terrible….argh). The point is to think about what it means to have access to this kind of expertise: the best gardener, the best physical therapist, the best coding instructor, the best brainstorming partner.

Better yet, that expertise doesn’t have to be generic (though the generic is pretty amazing). Seth Godin has created a series of personas on Claude, each of which has been taught to respond like some of the greatest thinkers and doers of all time.

So if you have a question for Charles Darwin, Fredrick Douglas, Stephen Pressfield, Seth Godin, Zig Ziglar, Annie Duke, Carol Dweck, Clayton Christensen, David Allen, Mahatma Gandhi, Kevin Kelly, Marcus Aurelius, Simone Biles, Tim Ferris, Sun Tzu, Pema Chodron, or 36 other world-shakers, the answers are at your fingertips.

Try spending a week carrying around the idea, “I have access to a 90% expert on any topic in the world.”

Choose to act on that idea by consulting that expert on a real problem you’re facing.

I promise you you’ll get great (but not perfect) answers fast, in ways that might just blow your mind.