{"id":4356,"date":"2023-06-20T15:39:38","date_gmt":"2023-06-20T19:39:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/?p=4356"},"modified":"2023-06-20T15:39:38","modified_gmt":"2023-06-20T19:39:38","slug":"smarter-faster-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/?p=4356","title":{"rendered":"Smarter, Faster, Better"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>Charles Duhigg\u20142016.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>INTRODUCTION<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>One chapter, for example, examines how a feeling of control can generate motivation, and how the military turns directionless teenagers into marines by teaching them choices that are \u201cbiased toward action.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Connecting these eight ideas is a powerful underlying principle: Productivity isn\u2019t about working more or sweating harder. It\u2019s not simply a product of spending longer hours at your desk or making bigger sacrifices. Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>1: MOTIVATION<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more. They are, on average, more confider believe they have authority over themselves often live longer than their peers. This instinct for control is so central to how our brains develop that infants, once they learn to feed themselves, will resist adults\u2019 attempts at control food into their mouths.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>From these insights, a theory of motivation has emerged: The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination. In experiments, people are more motivated to complete difficult tasks when those chores are presented as decisions rather than commands. That\u2019s one of the reasons why your cable company asks all those questions when you sign up for service. If they ask if you prefer a paperless bill to an itemized statement, or the ultra package versus the platinum lineup, or HBO to Showtime, you\u2019re more likely to be motivated to pay the bill each month. As long as we feel a sense of control, we\u2019re more willing to play along.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cYou know when you\u2019re stuck in traffic on the freeway and you see an exit approaching, and you want to take it even though you know it\u2019ll probably take longer to get home?\u201d said Delgado. \u201cThat\u2019s our brains getting excited by the possibility of taking control. You won\u2019t get home any faster, but it feels better because you feel like you\u2019re in charge.\u2019<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>This is a useful lesson for anyone hoping to motivate themselves or others, because it suggests an easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any choice that allows you to exert control. If you are struggling to answer a tedious stream of emails, decide to reply to one from the middle of your inbox. If you\u2019re trying to start an assignment, write the conclusion first, or start by making the graphics, or do whatever\u2019s most interesting to you. To find the motivation to confront an unpleasant employee, choose where the meeting is going to occur. To start the next sales call, decide what question you\u2019ll ask first.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control. The specific choice we make matters less than the assertion of control.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Krulak began reviewing studies on how to teach self-motivation, and became particularly intrigued by research, conducted by the Corps years earlier, showing that the most successful marines were those with a strong \u201cinternal locus of control\u201d\u2014a belief they could influence their destiny through the choices they made.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Locus of control has been a major topic of study within psychology since the 1950s. Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A student with a strong internal locus of control, for instance, will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts. A salesman with an internal locus of control will blame a lost sale on his own lack of hustle, rather than bad fortune.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In contrast, having an external locus of control\u2014believing that your life is primarily influenced by events outside your control\u2014\u201cis correlated with higher levels of stress, [often] because an individual perceives the situation as beyond his or her coping abilities,\u201d the team of psychologists wrote.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Studies show that someone\u2019s locus of control can be influenced through training and feedback. One experiment conducted in 1998, for example, presented 128 fifth graders with a series of difficult puzzles. Afterward, each student was told they had scored very well. Half of them were also told, \u201cYou must have worked hard at these problems.\u201d Telling fifth graders they have worked hard has been shown to activate their internal locus of control because hard work is something we decide to do. Complimenting students for hard work reinforces their belief that they have control over themselves and their surroundings.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cWe never tell anyone they\u2019re a natural-born leader. \u2018Natural born means it\u2019s outside your control,\u201d Krulak said. \u201cInstead, we teach them that leadership is learned, it\u2019s the product of effort. We push recruits to experience that thrill of taking control, of feeling the rush of being in charge. Once we get them addicted to that, they\u2019re hooked.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In his fourth week of training, for instance, Quintanilla\u2019s platoon was told to clean the mess hall. The recruits had no idea how. They didn\u2019t know where the cleaning supplies were located or how the industrial dishwasher worked. Lunch had just ended and they weren\u2019t sure if they were supposed to wrap the leftovers or throw them away. Whenever someone approached a drill instructor for advice, all he received was a scowl. So the platoon began making choices. The potato salad got tossed, the leftover hamburgers went into the fridge. And the dishwasher was loaded with so much detergent that suds soon covered the floor. It took three and a half hours, including the time spent mopping up the bubbles, for the platoon to finish cleaning the mess hall. They mistakenly threw away edible food, accidentally turned off the ice cream freezer, and somehow managed to misplace two dozen forks. When they were done, however, their drill instructor approached the smallest, shyest member of the platoon and said he had noticed how the recruit had asserted himself when a decision was needed on where to put the ketchup. In truth. It was pretty obvious where the ketchup should have gone. There was a huge set of shelves containing nothing but ketchup bottles. But the shy recruit beamed as he was praised.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cI hand out a number of compliments, and all of them are designed to be unexpected,\u201d said Sergeant Dennis Joy, a thoroughly intimidating drill instructor who showed me around the Recruit depot one day. . \u201cYou\u2019ll never get rewarded for doing what\u2019s easy for you. If you\u2019re an athlete, I\u2019ll never compliment you on a good run. Only the small guy gets congratulated for running fast. Only the shy guy gets recognized for stepping into a leadership role. We praise People for doing things that are hard. That\u2019s how they learn to believe they can do them.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cTechnically, we could send them back to start over because each person didn\u2019t hear a direct verbal command from the team leader,\u201d a drill sergeant later told me. \u201cBut that\u2019s the point of the exercise: We know you can\u2019t hear anything with the gas masks on. The only way to get across the pit is to figure out some workaround. We\u2019re trying to teach them that you can\u2019t just obey orders. You have to take control and figure things out for yourself.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cWhy are you doing this?\u201d Quintanilla\u2019s pack buddy wheezed at him, lapsing into a call-and-response they had practiced on hikes. When things are at their most miserable, their drill instructors had said, they should ask each other questions that begin with \u201cwhy.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cTo become a Marine and build a better life for my family,\u201d Quintanilla said. His wife had given birth a week earlier to a daughter, Zoey. He had been allowed to speak to her for a total of five minutes by telephone after the delivery. It was his only contact with the outside world in almost two months. If he finished the Crucible, he would see his wife and new child. If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier, Quintanilla\u2019s drill instructors had told him. That\u2019s why they asked each other Questions starting with \u201cwhy.\u201d Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cYou think boot camp is going to be all screaming and fighting,\u201d Quintanilla told me. \u201cBut it\u2019s not. It\u2019s not like that at all. It\u2019s more about learning how to make yourself do things you thought you couldn\u2019t do. It\u2019s really emotional, actually.\u201d (TAP)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Moreover, to teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values and goals. That\u2019s the reason recruits ask each other \u201cwhy\u201d\u2014because it shows them how to link small tasks to larger aspirations.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The significance of this insight can be seen in a series of studies conducted in nursing homes in the 1990s. Researchers were studying why some seniors thrived inside such facilities, while others experienced rapid physical and mental declines. A critical difference, the researchers determined, was that the seniors who flourished made choices that rebelled against the rigid schedules, set menus, and strict rules that the nursing homes tried to force upon them.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Tile choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we\u2019re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>This theory suggests how we can help ourselves and others strengthen our internal locus of control. We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>This is easier in theory, of course, than practice. We all applaud self-motivation until a toddler won\u2019t nut on his shoes, an aged parent is ripping a dresser out of the wall, or a teenager ignores the rules. But that\u2019s how an internal locus of control becomes stronger. That\u2019s how our mind learns and remembers how good it feels to be in control.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>What\u2019s more, we need to prove to ourselves that our choices are meaningful. When we start a new task, or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves \u201cwhy.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>2: TEAMS Psychological Safety at Google and Saturday Night Live<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>It always struck Julia as odd that those two teams felt so different. Her study group felt stressful because everyone was always jousting for leadership and critiquing each other\u2019s ideas. Her case competition team felt exciting because everyone was so supportive and enthusiastic. Both groups, however, were composed of basically the same kinds of people. They were all bright, and everyone was friendly outside of the team settings. There was no reason why the dynamic inside Julia\u2019s study group needed to become so competitive, while the culture of the case team was so easygoing.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The People Analytics group\u2014Google\u2019s human resource division (Get a meeting)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>People Analytics\u2019 biggest undertaking in recent years had been a study\u2014code-named Project Oxygen before it was revealed\u2014that examined why some managers were more effective than others. Ultimately, researchers had identified eight critical management skills. \u201cOxygen was a huge success for us,\u201d said Abeer Dubev. A People Analytics manager. \u201cIt helped clarify what differentiated good managers from everyone else and how we could help people improve.\u201d The project was so useful, in fact, that at about the same time Julia was hired, Google began another massive effort; this one code-named Project Aristotle.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Project Oxygen found that a good manager (1) is a good coach; (2) empowers and does not micromanage; (3) expresses interest and concern in subordinates\u2019 success and well-being; (4) is results oriented; (5) listens and shares information; (6) helps with career development; (7) has a clear vision and strategy; (8) has key technical skills.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>And some norms, the data indicated, consistently correlated with high team effectiveness. One engineer, for instance, told the researchers that his team leader \u201cis direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; She also takes the time to ask how we are, figure out how she can help you and support you.\u201d That was one of the most effective groups inside Google.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>There is strong evidence that group norms play a critical role in shaping the emotional experience of participating in a team. Research by psychologists from Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Oregon, and elsewhere indicate that norms determine whether we feel safe or threatened, enervated or excited, and motivated or discouraged by our teammates.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The data indicated that one particular norm\u2014whether people were punished for missteps\u2014influenced if they were honest after they screwed up.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>As her research continued, Edmondson found a handful of good norms that seemed to be consistently associated with higher productivity. On the best teams, for instance, leaders encouraged people to speak up; teammates felt like they could expose their vulnerabilities to one another; people said they could suggest ideas without fear of retribution; the culture discouraged people from making harsh judgments. As Edmondson\u2019s list of good norms grew, she began to notice that everything shared a common attribute: They were all behaviors that created a sense of togetherness while also encouraging people to take a chance.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cWe call it \u2018psychological safety,\u2019\u201d she said. Psychological safety is a \u201cshared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks.\u201d It is \u201ca sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up,\u201d Edmondson wrote in a 1999 paper. \u201cIt describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>When both teams first formed, each member was asked to complete what\u2019s known as the \u201cReading the Mind in the Eyes\u201d test. They were each shown thirty-six photos of people\u2019s eyes and asked to choose which word, among four offered, best described the emotion that person was feeling.&nbsp; This test, you are told, measures people\u2019s empathy.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cThis kind of collective intelligence is a property of the group itself, not just the individuals in it.\u201d It was the norms, not the people that made teams so smart. The right norms could raise the collective intelligence of mediocre thinkers. The wrong norms could hobble a group made up of people who, on their own, were all exceptionally bright.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>There were, however, two behaviors that all the good teams shared. First, all the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as \u201cequality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.\u201d In some teams, for instance, everyone spoke during each task. In other groups, conversation ebbed from assignment to assignment\u2014but by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Second, the good teams tested as having \u201chigh average social sensitivity\u201d\u2014a fancy way of saying that the groups were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>For psychological safety to emerge among a group, teammates don\u2019t have to be friends. They do, however, need to be socially sensitive and ensure everyone feels heard. \u201cThe best tactic for establishing psychological safety is demonstration by a team leader,\u201d as Amy Edmondson, who is now a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. \u201cIt seems like fairly minor stuff, but when the leader goes out of their way to make someone feel listened to, or starts a meeting by saying \u20181 might miss something, so I need all of you to watch for my mistakes,\u2019 or says \u2018Jim, you haven\u2019t spoken in a while, what do you think?\u2019 that makes a huge difference.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Onstage, Bock brought up a series of slides \u201cWhat matters are five key norms,\u201d he told the audience.<ul><li>Teams need to believe that their work is important.<\/li><\/ul><ul><li>Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful.<\/li><\/ul><ul><li>Teams need clear goals and defined roles.<\/li><\/ul><ul><li>Team members need to know they can depend on one another.<\/li><\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>But, most important, teams need psychological safety.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>To create psychological safety. Bock said, team leaders needed to model the right behaviors. There were Google-designed checklists they could use: Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it. They should admit what they don\u2019t know. They shouldn\u2019t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once. They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways. They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>There were dozens of tactics on the checklist. All of them, however, came back to two general principles: Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>For three months. Project Aristotle traveled from division to division explaining their findings and coaching team leaders. Google\u2019s top executives released tools that any team could use to evaluate if members felt psychologically safe and worksheets to help leaders and teammates improve their scores.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>As a team leader, then, it\u2019s important to give people control. Some team leaders at Google make checkmarks next to people\u2019s names each time they speak, and won\u2019t end a meeting until those checks are all roughly equivalent. And as a team member, we share control by demonstrating that we are genuinely listening\u2014by repeating what someone just said, by responding to their comments, by showing we care by reacting when someone seems upset or flustered, rather than acting as if nothing is wrong. When we defer to others\u2019 judgment, when we vocally treat others\u2019 concerns as our own, we give control to the group and psychological safety takes hold.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>3: FOCUS Cognitive Tunneling, Air France Flight 447, and the Power of Mental Models<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>In Optimal conditions, a human might fly for only about eight minutes per trip, during takeoff and landing.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cCognitive tunneling\u201d\u2014 a mental glitch that sometimes occurs when our brains are forced to transition abruptly from relaxed automation to panicked attention.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Cognitive tunneling can cause people to become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of their eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks. It\u2019s what keeps someone glued to their smartphone as the kids wail or pedestrians swerve around them on the sidewalk.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Reactive thinking is at the core of how we allocate our attention, and in many settings, it\u2019s a tremendous asset. Athletes, for example, practice certain moves again and again so that, during a game, they can think reactively and execute plays faster than their opponents can respond. Reactive thinking is how we build habits, and it\u2019s why to-do lists and calendar alerts are so helpful: Rather than needing to decide what to do next, we can take advantage of our reactive instincts and automatically proceed. Reactive thinking, in a sense. Outsources the choices and control that, in other settings, create motivation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>People like Darlene who are particularly good at managing their attention tend to share certain characteristics. One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see. These people tell themselves stories about what\u2019s going on as it occurs. They narrate their own experiences within their heads. They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple responses. They say when they daydream, they\u2019re often imagining future conversations. They visualize their days with more specificity than the rest of us do.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The first thing the researchers noticed, as they began crawling through all that data, was that the firm\u2019s most productive workers, its superstars, shared a number of traits. The first was they tended to work on only five projects at once\u2014a healthy load, but not extraordinary. There were other employees who handled ten or twelve projects at a time. But those employees had a lower profit rate than the superstars, who were more careful about how they invested their time.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>But as the economists looked more closely, they found the opposite: The superstars weren\u2019t choosing tasks that leveraged existing skills. Instead, they were signing up for projects that required them to seek out new colleagues and demanded new abilities. That\u2019s why the superstars worked on only five projects at a time: Meeting new people and learning new skills takes a lot of additional hours.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Something else the superstars had in common is they were disproportionately drawn to assignments that were in their early stages. This was surprising, because joining a project in its infancy is risky. New ideas often fail, no matter how smart or well executed. The safest bet is signing on to a project that is well under way.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>However, the beginning of a project is also more information rich. By joining fledgling initiatives, the superstars were cc\u2019d on emails they wouldn\u2019t have otherwise seen. They learned which junior executives were smart and picked up new ideas from their younger colleagues. They were exposed to emerging markets and the lessons of the digital economy earlier than other executives. What\u2019s more, the superstars could later claim ownership of an innovation simply by being in the room when it was born, rather than fighting paternity battles once it was deemed a success.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The superstars were constantly telling stories about what they had seen and heard. They were, in other words, much more prone to generate mental models. They were more likely to throw out ideas during meetings, or ask colleagues to help them imagine how future conversations might unfold, or envision how a pitch should go. They came up with concepts for new products and practiced how they would sell them. They told anecdotes about past conversations and dreamed up far-fetched expansion plans. They were building mental models at a near constant rate.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what\u2019s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes. These storytelling moments can be as small as trying to envision a coming meeting while driving to work\u2014forcing yourself to imagine how the meeting will start, what points you will raise if the boss asks for comments, what objections your coworkers are likely to bring up<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you\u2019ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you\u2019ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what\u2019s ahead when there\u2019s a well rounded script inside your head.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Companies say such tactics are important in all kinds of settings, including if you\u2019re applying for a job or deciding whom to hire. The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. \u201cWe look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative,\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>That\u2019s why we have human pilots. It\u2019s our job to think about what might happen, instead of what is.\u201d After the crew\u2019s visualization session, de Crespigny laid down some rules. \u201cEveryone has a responsibility to tell me if you disagree with my decisions or think I\u2019m missing anything.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The plane was descending at fourteen feet per second. The maximum certified speed the undercarriage could absorb was only twelve feet per second. But there were no other options now.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Mental models help us by providing a scaffold for the torrent of information that constantly surrounds us. Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>We may not recognize how situations within our own lives are similar to what happens within an airplane cockpit. But think, for a moment, about the pressures you face each day. If you are in a meeting and the CEO suddenly asks you for an opinion, your mind is likely to snap from passive listening to active involvement\u2014and if you\u2019re not careful, a cognitive tunnel might prompt you to say something you regret. If you are juggling multiple conversations and tasks at once and an important email arrives, reactive thinking can cause you to type a reply before you\u2019ve really thought out what you want to say.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. When you\u2019re driving to work, force yourself to envision your day, while you\u2019re sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you\u2019re seeing and what it means. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what\u2019s next. If you are a parent, anticipate what your children will say at the dinner table. Then you\u2019ll notice what goes unmentioned or if there\u2019s a stray comment that you should see as a warning sign.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>4: GOAL SETTING Smart Goals, Stretch Goals, and the Yom Kippur War<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cSome 400 laboratory and field studies [show] that specific, high goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals such as the exhortation to \u2018do one\u2019s best,\u2019\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Many of the SMART goals the consultants found inside the factories were just as detailed\u2014and just as trivial. Workers spent hours making sure their objectives satisfied every SMART criterion. But spent much less time making sure the goals were worth pursuing in the first place.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Stretch goals can spark remarkable innovations, but only when people have a system for breaking them into concrete plans.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>This lesson can extend to even the most mundane aspects of life. Take, for instance, to-do lists. \u201cTo-do lists are great if you use them correctly\u201d Timothy Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University, told me. \u201cBut when people say things like I sometimes write down easy items I can cross off right away, because it makes me feel good,\u2019 that\u2019s exactly the wrong way to create a to-do list. That signals you\u2019re using it for mood repair, rather than to become productive.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The problem with many to-do lists is that when we write down a series of short-term objectives, we are, in effect, allowing our brains to seize on the sense of satisfaction that each task will deliver. We are encouraging our need for closure and our tendency to freeze on a goal without asking if it\u2019s the right aim. The result is that we spend hours answering unimportant emails instead of writing a big, thoughtful memo\u2014because it feels so satisfying to clean out our in-box.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>5: MANAGING OTHERS Solving a Kidnapping with Lean and Agile Thinking and a Culture of Trust<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>In 1994, two business school professors at Stanford began studying how, exactly, one creates an atmosphere of trust within a company. For years, the professors\u2014James Baron and Michael Hannan\u2014 had been teaching students that a firm\u2019s culture mattered as much as its strategy. The way a business treats workers, they said. Was critical to its success. In particular, they argued that within most companies\u2014no matter how great the product or loyal the customers\u2014things would eventually fall apart unless employees trusted one another.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The final category was known as the \u201ccommitment\u201d model, and it was a throwback to an age when people happily worked for one company their entire life. \u201cCommitment CEOs say things like, \u2018I want to build the kind of company where people only leave when they retire or die,\u2019\u201d said Baron. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t necessarily mean the company is stodgy, but it does imply a set of values that might prioritize slow and steady growth.\u201d Some Silicon Valley executives told Baron they saw commitment firms as outdated, remnants of a corporate paternalism that had undermined industries such as American manufacturing. Commitment companies were more hesitant to lay people off. They often hired HR professionals when other Start-ups were using precious dollars to recruit engineers or salespeople. \u201cCommitment CEOs believe that getting the culture right is more important at first than designing the best product,\u201d Baron said.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In fact, when Baron and Hannan looked at their data, they found the only culture that was a consistent winner was the commitment firms. Hands down, a commitment culture outperformed every other type of management style in almost every meaningful way. \u201cNot one of the commitment firms we studied failed,\u201d said Baron. \u201cNone of them, which is amazing in its own right. But they were also the fastest companies to go public, had the highest profitability ratios, and tended to be leaner, with fewer middle managers, because when you choose employees slowly, you have time to find people who excel at self-direction.\u201d Employees in commitment firms wasted less time on internal rivalries because everyone was committed to the company, rather than to personal agendas<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decision making authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success. A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and innovations, people need to know their suggestions won\u2019t be ignored, that their mistakes won\u2019t be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>6: DECISION MAKING Forecasting the Future (and Winning at Poker) with Bayesian Psychology<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>And most surprising, a particular kind of lesson\u2014training in how to think probabilistically\u2014significantly increased people\u2019s abilities to forecast the future.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The lessons on probabilistically thinking offered by the GJP had instructed participants to think of the future not as what\u2019s going to happen, but rather as a series of possibilities that might occur. It taught them to envision tomorrow as an array of potential outcomes, all of which had different odds of coming true. \u201cMost people are sloppy when they think about the future,\u201d said Lyle Ungar, a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania who helped oversee the GJP. \u201cThey say things like, \u2018It\u2019s likely we\u2019ll go to Hawaii for vacation this year.\u2019 Well, does that mean that it\u2019s 51 percent certain? Of 90 percent? Because that\u2019s a big difference if you\u2019re buying non-refundable tickets.\u201d The goal of the GJP\u2019s probabilistic training was to show people how to turn their intuitions into statistical estimates.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The GJP\u2019s training modules instructed people in various methods for combining odds and comparing futures. Throughout, a central idea was repeated again and again. The future isn\u2019t one thing. Rather, it is a multitude of possibilities that often contradict one another until one of them comes true. And those futures can be combined in order for someone to predict which one is more likely to occur.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Many successful people, in contrast, spend an enormous amount of time seeking out information on failures. They read inside the newspaper\u2019s business pages for articles on companies that have gone broke. They schedule lunches with colleagues who haven\u2019t gotten promoted, and then ask them what went wrong. They request criticisms alongside praise at annual reviews. They scrutinize their credit card statements to figure out why, precisely, they haven\u2019t saved as much as they hoped. They pick over their daily missteps when they get home, rather than allowing themselves to forget all the small errors. They ask themselves why a particular call didn\u2019t go as well as they had hoped, or if they could have spoken more succinctly at a meeting.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>This, ultimately, is one of the most important secrets to learning how to make better decisions. Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible. We need to sit in crowded and empty theaters to know how movies will perform; we need to spend time around both babies and old people to accurately gauge life spans; and we need to talk to thriving and failing colleagues to develop good business instincts.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>How do we learn to make better decisions? In part, by training ourselves to think probabilistically To do that, we must force ourselves to envision various futures\u2014to hold contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously\u2014and then expose ourselves to a wide spectrum of successes and failures to develop an intuition about which forecasts are more or less likely to come true.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>7: INNOVATION How Idea Brokers and Creative Desperation Saved Disney\u2019s Frozen<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>But almost all of the creative papers had at least one thing in common: They were usually combinations of previously known ideas mixed together in new ways. In fact, on average, 90 percent of what was in the most \u201ccreative\u201d manuscripts had already been published elsewhere\u2014and had already been picked over by thousands of other scientists. However, in the creative papers, those conventional concepts were applied to questions in manners no one had considered before. \u201cOur analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests that science follows a nearly universal pattern,\u201d Uzzi and Jones wrote. \u201cThe highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations.\u201d It was this combination of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, that typically made a paper so creative and important.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>That\u2019s why the Disney method is so powerful, because it pushes us to dig deeper and deeper until we put ourselves on the screen.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Jerry Robbins pushed his collaborators in West Side Story to draw on their own experiences to become creative brokers. The Toyota Production System unlocked employees\u2019 capacity to suggest innovations by giving them more control. The Disney system does something different. It forces people to use their own emotions to write dialogue for cartoon characters, to infuse real feelings into situations that, by definition, are unreal and fantastical. This method is worth studying because it suggests a way that anyone can become an idea broker: by drawing on their own lives as creative fodder. We all have a natural instinct to overlook our emotions as creative material. But a key part of learning how to broker insights from one setting to another, to separate the real from the clich\u00e9d, is paying more attention to how things make us feel<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A few months after the story trust meeting, the songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez were walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, anxious about all the songs they needed to write, when Kristen asked, \u201cWhat would it feel like if you were Elsa?\u201d As they walked past swing-sets and joggers, Kristen and Bobby began discussing what they would do if they were cursed and despised for something they couldn\u2019t control. \u201cWhat if you tried to be good your entire life and it didn\u2019t matter because people constantly judged you?\u201d she asked.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Kristen knew this feeling. She had felt other parents\u2019 looks when she let their daughters eat ice cream instead of healthy snacks. She\u2019d felt glances when she and Bobby let their girls watch an iPad inside a restaurant because they wanted a moment of peace. Perhaps Kristen wasn\u2019t cursed with some deadly power\u2014but she knew what it felt like to be judged. It didn\u2019t feel fair. It wasn\u2019t her fault that she wanted a career. It wasn\u2019t her fault that she wanted to be a good mom and be a good wife and a successful songwriter, and so, inevitably, that meant things like home-packed snacks and sparkling dinner conversation\u2014not to mention thank-you notes and exercise and replying to emails\u2014sometimes fell by the wayside. She didn\u2019t want to apologize for not being perfect. She didn\u2019t think she needed to. And she didn\u2019t think Elsa should have to apologize for being flawed. Either.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cElsa has tried to do everything right, all her life,\u201d Kristen said 1 Bobby. \u201cNow she\u2019s being punished for being herself and the only way out is for her to stop caring, to let it all go.\u201d As they walked, they began riffing, singing snippets of lyrics. What if they wrote a song that started with a fairy-tale opening, Bobby suggested, like the stories they read to their girls at night? Then Elsa could talk about the pressures of being a good girl, said Kristen. She jumped up on a picnic bench. \u201cShe could change into a woman,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s what growing up is, letting go of the things you shouldn\u2019t have to care about.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>She began singing to an audience of trees and trash cans, trying out lyrics for Elsa to convey that she\u2019s done being the good girl that she doesn\u2019t care what anyone thinks anymore. Bobby was recording her impromptu song on his iPhone. Kristen spread her arms. Let it go, let it go. That perfect girl is gone.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The Frozen team had solved almost all their problems. No one wanted to lose all the progress they had already made. But they couldn\u2019t figure out how to end the film. \u201cYou start spinning when your flexibility drops,\u201d said Catmull. \u201cYou get so devoted to what you\u2019ve already created. But you have to be willing to kill your darlings to go forward. If you can\u2019t let go of what you\u2019ve worked so hard to achieve, it ends up trapping you.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cThe thing I noticed, when I first became a director, was that the change was subtle, but at the same time, very real,\u201d Jennifer Lee told me. \u201cWhen you\u2019re a writer, there\u2019s certain things you know a film needs, but you\u2019re just one voice. You don\u2019t want to seem defensive or presumptuous because other people have just as many suggestions and your job is to integrate everyone\u2019s ideas. \u201cA director, though, is in charge. So when I became a director, I felt like I had to listen even more closely to what everyone was saying because that was my job now. And as I listened, I started picking up on things I hadn\u2019t noticed before.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>However, Frozen could have only one ending. Someone had to make a choice. And the right decision, Lee wrote, is that \u201cfear destroys us, love heals us. Anna\u2019s journey should be about learning what love is; it\u2019s that simple.\u201d At the end of the film, \u201cwhen she sees her sister out on the fjords, she completes her arc by the ultimate act of true love: sacrificing your needs for someone else\u2019s. LOVE is a greater force than FEAR. Go with love.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Later that month. Lee sat down with John Lasseter. \u201cWe need clarity,\u201d she told him. \u201cThe core of this movie isn\u2019t about good and evil, because that doesn\u2019t happen in real life. And this movie isn\u2019t about love versus hate. That\u2019s not why sisters grow apart. \u201cThis is a movie about love and fear. Anna is all about love, and Elsa is all about fear. Anna has been abandoned, so she throws herself into the arms of Prince Charming because she doesn\u2019t know the difference between real love and infatuation. She has to learn that love is about sacrifice. And Elsa has to learn that you can\u2019t be afraid of who you are, you can\u2019t run away from your own powers. You have to embrace your strengths. \u201cThat\u2019s what we need to do with the ending, show that love is stronger than fear.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Lee described her theory of love versus fear again. Explaining how Olaf, the snowman, embodies innocent love while Prince Hans demonstrates that love without sacrifice isn\u2019t really love at all; it\u2019s narcissism.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Creativity can\u2019t be reduced to a formula. At its core, it needs novelty, surprise, and other elements that cannot be planned in advance to seem fresh and new. There is no checklist that, if followed, delivers innovation on demand.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>But the creative process is different. We can create the conditions that help creativity to flourish. We know, for example, that innovation becomes more likely when old ideas are mixed in new ways. We know the odds of success go up when brokers\u2014people with fresh. Different perspectives, who have seen ideas in a variety of settings\u2014 draw on the diversity within their heads. We know that, sometimes, a little disturbance can help jolt us out of the ruts that even the most creative thinkers fall into, as long as those shake-ups are the right size.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>If you want to become a broker and increase the productivity of your own creative process, there are three things that can help: First, be sensitive to your own experiences. Pay attention to how things make you think and feel. That\u2019s how we distinguish clich\u00e9s from true insights. As Steve Jobs put it, the best designers are those who \u201chave thought more about their experiences than other people.\u201d Similarly, the Disney process asks filmmakers to look inward. To think about their own emotions and experiences until they find answers that make imaginary characters come alive. Jerry Robbins pushed his West Side Story collaborators to put their own aspirations and emotions on the stage. Look to your own life as creative fodder, and broker your own experiences into the wider world.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Second, recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isn\u2019t a sign that everything is falling apart. Rather, it\u2019s the condition that helps make us flexible enough to seize something new. Creative desperation can be critical; anxiety is what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways. The path out of that turmoil is to look at what you know, to respect conventions you\u2019ve seen work and try to apply them to fresh problems. The creative pain should be embraced.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Finally, remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to seeing alternatives. It is critical to maintain some distance from what we create. Without self-criticism, without tension, one idea can quickly crowd out competitors. But we can regain that critical distance by forcing ourselves to critique what we\u2019ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from a completely different perspective, by changing the power dynamics in the room or giving new authority to someone who didn\u2019t have it before. Disturbances are essential, and we retain clear eyes by embracing destruction and upheaval, as long as we\u2019re sensitive to making the disturbance the right size.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>There\u2019s an idea that runs through these three lessons: The creative process is, in fact, a process, something that can be broken down and explained. That\u2019s important, because it means that anyone can become more creative; we can all become innovation brokers. We all have experiences and tools, disturbances and tensions that can make us into brokers\u2014if, that is, we\u2019re willing to embrace that desperation and upheaval and try to see our old ideas in new ways.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cCreativity is just problem solving,\u201d Ed Catmull told me. \u201cOnce people see it as problem solving, it stops seeming like magic, because it\u2019s not. Brokers are just people who pay more attention to what problems look like and how they\u2019ve been solved before. People who are most creative are the ones who have learned that feeling scared is a good sign. We just have to learn how to trust ourselves enough to let the creativity out.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>8: ABSORBING DATA Turning Information into Knowledge in Cincinnati\u2019s Public School<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Instead, the EI focused on changing how teachers made decisions in their classrooms. The reforms were built around the idea that data can be transformative, but only if people know how to use it. To change students\u2019 lives, educators had to understand how to transform all the spreadsheets and statistics and online dashboards into insights and plans. They had to be forced to interact with data until it influenced how they behaved.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>When those researchers visited South Avondale, teachers told them that the most important ingredient in the schools\u2019 turnaround was data\u2014the same data, in fact, that the district had been collecting for years. Teachers said that a \u201cdata-driven culture\u201d had actually transformed how they made classroom decisions.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Each school, under orders from the central office, had established a \u201cdata room\u201d\u2014in some cases, an empty conference room, in others, a large closet that had previously contained cleaning supplies\u2014where teachers had to transcribe test scores onto index cards. They were told to draw graphs on butcher paper that was taped to walls. They ran impromptu experiments\u2014do test scores improve if kids are placed in smaller reading groups? What happens when teachers trade off classes\u2014and then scribbled the results onto whiteboards. Rather than simply receiving information, teachers were forced to engage with it. The EI had worked because instead of passively absorbing data, teachers made it \u201cdisfluent\u201d\u2014harder to process at first, but stickier once it was really understood. By scribbling out statistics and testing preconceptions, teachers had figured out how to use all the information they were receiving. The Elementary Initiative, paradoxically, had made data more cumbersome to absorb\u2014but more useful. And from those index cards and hand-drawn graphs, better classrooms emerged.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cIf you make people use a new word in a sentence, they\u2019ll remember it longer. If you make them write down a sentence with the word, they\u2019ll start using it in conversations.\u201d When Alter conducts experiments, he sometimes gives people instructions in hard-to-read font because, as they struggle to make out the words, they read the text more carefully \u201cThe initial difficulty in processing the text leads you to think more deeply about what you\u2019re reading, so you spend more time and energy making sense of it,\u201d he said.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>But Fludd\u2019s employees noticed it, because they were looking for clues to prove or disprove theories. They were interacting with the data embodied in each conversation, turning it into something they could use. This is how learning occurs. Information gets absorbed almost without our noticing because we\u2019re so engrossed with it. Fludd took the torrent of data arriving each day and gave her team a method for placing it into folders that made it easier to understand. She helped her employees do something with all those memos they received and the conversations they were having\u2014and, as a result, it was easier for them to learn.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Then one day a third-grade teacher had an idea. Since he had to spend so much time transcribing test scores, he decided to also note on each student\u2019s index cards which specific questions they had gotten wrong on that week\u2019s assessment exam. He convinced another third-grade teacher to do the same. Next, they combined their cards and made piles by grouping students who had made similar mistakes. When they were done, the piles showed a pattern: A large number of students in one class had done well on pronoun use but had stumbled at fractions; a large number of students in the other classroom had scored the opposite way. The teachers traded curricula. Both classes\u2019 scores went up.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The following week, someone else suggested dividing cards from multiple classes into piles based on where students lived. Teachers started giving everyone from the same neighborhoods similar reading assignments. Test scores ticked up. Students were doing their homework together on the bus rides home.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>That\u2019s how the school-wide Hot Pencil Drills started. Soon, students such as eight-year-old Dante were spending each morning filling out multiplication tables as fast as they could, and then speed-walking to the main office to have the fastest test takers\u2019 names read over the PA system. Within twelve weeks, the school\u2019s math scores were up by 9 percent.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Psychologists say learning how to make decisions this way is important, particularly for young people, because it makes it easier for them to learn from their experiences and to see choices from different perspectives. This is a form of disfluency that allows us to evaluate our own lives more objectively, to offset the emotions and biases that might otherwise blind us to the lessons embedded in our pasts.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>In one study published in 2014, researchers from Princeton and UCLA examined the relationship between learning and disfluency by looking at the difference between students who took notes by hand while watching a lecture and those who used laptops. Recording a speaker\u2019s comments via longhand is both harder and less efficient than typing on a keyboard. Fingers cramp. Writing is slower than typing, and so you can\u2019t record as many words. Students who use laptops, in contrast, spend less time actively working during a lecture, and yet they still collect about twice as many notes as their handwriting peers. Put differently, writing is more disfluent than typing, because it requires more labor and captures fewer verbatim phrases.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>When the researchers looked at the test scores of those two groups, however, they found that the hand writers scored twice as well as the typists in remembering what a lecturer said.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>No matter what constraints were placed on the groups, the students who forced themselves to use a more cumbersome note-taking method\u2014who forced disfluency into how they processed information\u2014learned more. In our own lives, the same lesson applies: When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data. It\u2019s not enough for your bathroom scale to send daily updates to an app on your phone. If you want to lose weight, force yourself to plot those measurements on graph paper and you\u2019ll be more likely to choose a salad over a hamburger at lunch. If you read a book filled with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts to someone sitting next to you and you\u2019ll be more likely to apply them in your life. When you find a new piece of information, force yourself to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend\u2014and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the core of learning.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>APPENDIX<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>General Krulak had told me something that stuck with me: \u201cMost recruits don\u2019t know how to force themselves to start something hard. But if we can train them to take the first step by doing something that makes them feel in charge, it\u2019s easier to keep going.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I noticed two things: First, it was much easier to reply to an email once I had at least one sentence on the screen. Second, and more important, it was easier to get motivated when that first sentence was something that made me feel in control. When I told Jim that I could only stay for twenty minutes, it reminded me that I didn\u2019t have to commit to his project if I didn\u2019t want to. When I drafted a reply to someone asking me to come speak at a conference, I began by typing:\n<ul>\n<li>I would like to leave on Tuesday and be back in New York by Thursday night.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Which reinforced that I was in control of whether I attended or not.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Self-motivation becomes easier when we see our choices as affirmations of our deeper values and goals.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>That\u2019s why Marine Corps recruits ask each other \u201cwhy\u201d. \u201cWhy are you climbing this mountain?\u2019<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Forcing ourselves to explain why we are doing something helps us remember that this chore is a step along a longer path, and that by choosing to take that journey, we are getting closer to more meaningful objectives.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>To motivate myself to read studies on airplanes, for instance, I began writing at the top of each manuscript why it was important for me to get that task done. When I pulled a study out of my bag. Then, it became a little easier to dive in. Something as simple as jotting down a couple of reasons why I am doing something makes it much simpler to start.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>TO GENERATE MOTIVATION\n<ul>\n<li>Make a choice that puts you in control. If you\u2019re replying to emails, write an initial sentence that expresses an opinion or decision. If you need to have a hard conversation, decide where it will occur ahead of time. The specific choice itself matters less in sparking motivation than the assertion of control.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I needed a stretch goal, something to spark big ambitions.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>AND I needed a SMART goal, to help me form a concrete plan.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>One of the most effective ways to formulate both objectives. Experts told me, is through a specific kind of to-do list. I needed to write out my goals\u2014but in a way that forced me to identify my stretch objectives and my SMART aims. So I began writing to-do lists, and at the top of each one, I wrote my overarching ambition. What I was working toward in the long term. (That helped me avoid the need for cognitive closure that can force us to become obsessed with short-term, easy-to-achieve goals.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>TO STAY FOCUSED\n<ul>\n<li>Envision what will happen. What will occur first? What are potential obstacles? How will you preempt them? Telling yourself a story about what you expect to occur makes it easier to decide where your focus should go when your plan encounters real life.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>What\u2019s most important, throughout all these concepts, is the foundational idea undergirding these lessons, the tissue that connects the eight insights at the heart of this book: Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook. It\u2019s about making certain decisions in certain ways. The way we choose to see our own lives; the stories we tell ourselves, and the goals we push ourselves to spell out in detail; the culture we establish among teammates; the ways we frame our choices and manage the information in our lives. Productive people and companies force themselves to make choices most other people are content to ignore. Productivity emerges when people push themselves to think differently.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Duhigg\u20142016. INTRODUCTION 1: MOTIVATION 2: TEAMS Psychological Safety at Google and Saturday Night Live 3: FOCUS Cognitive Tunneling, Air France Flight 447, and the Power of Mental Models 4: GOAL SETTING Smart Goals, Stretch Goals, and the Yom Kippur War 5: MANAGING OTHERS Solving a Kidnapping with Lean and Agile Thinking and a Culture [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4357,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238,19,242],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4356"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4358,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4356\/revisions\/4358"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}