We’ve touched on:
- why to improve
- what to improve
- what better might mean
- setting a baseline for measurement
For any of these topics, when deciding what our goals should be and for how to improve, we could just go with what we know, and do our best based on what we’ve heard. If I want to improve how fast I can run a 5 kilometre race, I could think to myself, “I’ve heard better gear could help” and go buy lighter clothes and better shoes. I could try adjusting my diet and hydration and training program based on what I think might work. Through trial and error I could figure some things out to make improvements.
I think most people find that these techniques do work for most types of improvement, and then performance reaches a plateau. Sometimes performance may even decrease. The unintended consequences of my attempts to get faster could lead to injury, poorer health, too much time spent training taking away from other activities, or other results.
So in most cases when we are serious about improving performance, we want to go beyond what we already know to tap into what the others know. I could ask my buddy, who is about a good runner as I am, for tips. That might help, but I think you’d agree that finding out what the experts know, and some kind of course or coaching, would be a reasonable next step, and ultimately we could figure out what’s the best performance that anyone has achieved and how they achieved it. Study of world-class athletes and coaches could be used to develop new goals for performance and strategies for improvement.
This doesn’t apply as much for the running example, but you could also study what knowledge was collected, what approaches have been attempted or been successful in the historical past. Sometimes wisdom or techniques have been set aside or forgotten and there is much that can be applied.
A third approach is to use imagination, modeling, simulation, visualization, storytelling and other techniques to project into what the best possible performance and methods could be. In business these may take the form of what Jim Collins and Jerry Porras called big hairy audacious goals, but it’s not just about goals, it could be about systems, methods, processes, cultures, etc.
These three types of sources — self, others, best possible — can be used for any type of inquiry:
- what could goals be?
- what does better mean in this discipline?
- what are the methods that could be used?
- what are the possible risks and unintended consequences?
- what types of knowledge should I explore to understand this field?
Exercise
1. What knowledge and resources do you already possess about your goals, performance, and methods in your area of improvement?
2. Who are the leaders and experts, examples of best performance and improvement, past and present, for your area? What can you learn from what others have done?
3. What is the best possible performance, improvement, methods, that could be imagined? What hasn’t been done yet but might be possible?
About Learning
The role of perfection. Blogs are ephemeral and permanent; standalone and integrated. I’m a perfectionist and as I write I’m continually getting new ideas, associations, and improvements. Each post represents my best thinking within a constrained time period at a snapshot in time. At the same time web pages are captured by people and search engines and bots and probably intelligence agencies just for fun, so they don’t disappear completely.
Is any post perfect? Far from it. I have to aim for “helpful”, “not wrong” and “good enough” and hopefully “not embarrassing in retrospect”. When I review a previous post I always see room for improvement. I’m trying to build up a whole journey so everything will link and connect to something else, and in the context of recent thinking and posts, and continually emerging plans for future explorations and posts, it’s hard not to continually make changes.
References
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by James Collins and Jerry Porras