The objective

The expectation of the facilitator and the participants should be known before a meeting is scheduled. The planning process that we discussed previously (Effective Meeting Basics - Part 1) will lay out the objective of the meeting, whether it is educational, to solve a problem, or to gather input/feedback on an existing process. The answer to the question, “Why are we assembled here?” must be clearly stated and communicated to the participants, preferably in advance.

The expectation

The result, or return on the investment of time, of the meeting must be something attainable. If it is a training session, the return is a minimum amount of knowledge about the topic. If you are looking to solve a problem, you should come up with a solution, or list of possible solutions. If the meeting is to provide input or feedback, there should be a way to communicate the summary of findings to participants and show its value.

The information

The knowledge that the meeting imparts must be accurate and available to the participants. This information may be used as a reference or foundation for any decisions to be made or actions taken because of the meeting.

The Next Actions

Each meeting should end with a list of action steps to be implemented afterwards, who these actions are assigned to, and their due dates. In addition, the facilitator should communicate a follow-up schedule for each Next Action.

Providing the objective, expectation, and information required for a meeting to all participants in advance of a meeting is a best practice to follow for all meeting planners. This pre-conference information gives the participants the time and the opportunity to:

• think about the issues that pertain to the meeting;
• read, contextualize and assimilate the information;
• make preparations of their own for furthering the goals of the meeting.

The more that information is shared before a meeting, the greater the likelihood of having a successful meeting. The next post in this series will explore the process involved in planning a meeting.

Each weekly post on the habits is supplemented by a worksheet to help you start focusing on the new habit.

For those of you who may not have read Stephen Covey’s landmark book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, here is a brief synopsis of the fourth habit: (from Wikipedia)

Think Win/Win describes an attitude whereby mutually beneficial solutions are sought that satisfy the needs of oneself, or, in the case of a conflict, both parties involved.

Habit IV - Think Win/Win

Stephen Covey’s description of the Fourth Habit of Highly Effective People is based on two important concepts:

1. The first three Habits are “Private Victories”, the building blocks of personal growth and development. Being proactive in your environment, practicing the skill of visualizing results, and focusing on the things that are truly important are the core goals of self-mastery. The fourth Habit is the first of the “Public Victories”, an interpersonal skill that enhances your leadership skills.
2. Think Win/Win depends upon the “emotional bank account” that other people hold for you. The emotional bank account is an expression of your credibility, your communication level, and your ability to persuade/influence others.

The Emotional Bank Account

Every time you express your faith in someone else, through trusting them to do their job, or acting on their input, or even just listening when someone needs to talk, you are making a deposit in the emotional bank account that you have with that person. This bank account is a virtual and tenuous thing. It is that person’s measure of you as a person, and of your particular relationship. When you act with integrity, keep your commitments, and communicate clearly you become a depositor.

You can also make withdrawals from that account, and when you do it hurts that person in some way. Being late to a meeting, being disrespectful, acting with immaturity - all of these are examples of how to diminish your ability to influence people in a positive way.

Think about the petty office tyrant in your past (or present), the micro-manager that insists on practically doing your job herself, or that “friend” that you can count on when you are picking up the bar tab - but is never around when you need to clean out your garage. These are the people with low (or over-drawn!) emotional bank accounts. Do they get your trust? Do you put any credence in promises that they make? Can you count on this person in a pinch? I would hazard a guess that the answer is, “No”.

6 Ways to Make Deposits

1. Understand the individual - Like a snowflake, every person is different. Some, of course, are flakier than others. Develop an understanding of what makes people “tick”, play to their strengths and help them to compensate for their weaknesses.
2. Attend to the little things - Small acts of kindness and appreciation go a long way with people. I have seen a co-worker’s attitude turn 180 degrees when I noticed that they were having a tough day and I asked them, “How can I help?” Sometimes they just need someone to talk to, other times they need a little more.
3. Keep your commitments - Be on time to meetings. Complete assigned tasks. Do what you say you will do. This sounds silly, practically a cliche, but it is less common than you think. A corollary is to learn to ask for help. If you find that you are not going to be able to keep a commitment, ask someone to help you. This way those that are counting on you will know that you are not hanging them out to dry.
4. Clarify your expectations/understand theirs - Again, clear communication of the end results of an action as well as the steps to get there enable tasks and projects to be completed successfully. Poor communication or changing expectations creates stress and frustration, enormous withdrawals from the emotional bank account!
5. Show personal integrity - Develop trust and respect for the people you know, and the people that know you. Your personal reputation is the lynch-pin of all of your interpersonal relationships.
6. Apologize for withdrawals - You will make withdrawals from your emotional bank accounts from time to time. Tell them that you know it happened and that you are sorry. Show real sincerity. Ask them how you can learn from the experience so that it doesn’t happen again.

“We have committed the Golden Rule to memory;
let us now commit it to life.”

~ Edwin Markham

Believing in Win/Win

The emotional bank account is the foundation of the fourth Habit. It cultivates a state of mind, and a belief in your heart, that you can and should seek to discover the mutual benefit in all human relationships. Most, if not the vast majority, of your relationships depend on interpersonal transactions that are interdependent upon other relationships. You may have a friend that wants to borrow your truck to help another friend move. If you let your friend down, his friend gets caught in the withdrawal too.

On the other hand, you can make a deposit by not only offering to lend your truck, but offering to help. This can gain a new friend, create a new relationship, and strengthen your current friendship. The moving gets done faster, and everybody wins.

Getting to Win/Win

The Win/Win mind-set can be a difficult path to follow until you develop the skills and attributes that are needed. The first of these is Character - the measure of your personal integrity, maturity, and an abundance mentality.

• Integrity - Can your friends and colleagues count on you? The first three Habits are the tools that you need to pro-actively execute your daily activities according to your deeply-held principles and values. Becoming results-focused aids you in keeping your commitments, and knowing which results are most important and actively working toward them creates a discipline of success.
• Maturity - Having the courage to stand up for your principles while maintaining a sense of consideration for the principles of others is the hallmark of the Win/Win philosophy. Communication is at the core of maturity, in order that you listen and understand the situation completely.
• Abundance Mentality - Believe that there is plenty of success to go around. In our hyper-competitive business culture, this may seem counter-intuitive or even wrong. The truth is, “success” is not a pie of limited size - just because I get a bigger slice doesn’t (necessarily) reduce the size of your slice. Become part of the culture that enables and cultivates this mentality, as opposed to the back-stabbing and sabotage that accompanies a mentality of scarcity.

Practical Applications

Those of you who have been reading since the beginning of this series should now see where the first three Habits have brought you. A brand-new paradigm is in front of you that has the power and potential to revolutionize your relationships. Using the trust that comes from your character will enable you to grow and enrich your relationships with enhanced credibility; open, two-way communications; confidence in risk-taking that can lead to incredible successes.

1. Incorporate Your Weekly Plan

Take some time to discern Win/Win activities during the Weekly Planning of your activities this week. (See the last post for a 7 Habits Worksheet and instructions.) Download this week’s worksheet and brainstorm some ideas for taking this interaction to the next level, making it a Win/Win proposition:

• Clarify the desired results
• Communicate guidelines and measurements
• Allocate resources
• Define the accountability for each party
• Outline the consequences of failing to live up to the agreement

2. Make a Personal Commitment

Commit to the Abundance Mentality. Let go of the idea that others win at your expense, or that your success diminishes another. Pull more people into your circle, your team must get larger in order to have greater success!

3. Teach to Learn

One of the best ways to establish your own understanding of a new topic is to explain it to another person. Pick someone that you can teach the new habit to, it can be your accountability partner or someone else that you have recently added to your circle of influence.

Meetings do not happen by accident

Whether you are planning a regularly scheduled staff meeting, a faculty retreat, a product launch planning session, or even a sales conference, every meeting requires careful advance preparation. An effective meeting has an intentional outcome that leaves the participants satisfied with the process that led to that outcome. This series of posts will teach you the basic steps needed to plan and execute a successful meeting.

The basic components of a successful meeting

Three things are needed, at the very least, for a successful meeting - a facilitator, a group of attendees, and a reason to gather.

In order to have a successful meeting, it is important for the facilitator to consider the following list of components:

1. A meeting needs to have an objective that defines the purpose of the meeting.
2. Each participant should understand or have an expectation of what will occur by the end of the meeting.
3. A meeting should provide some benefit for the investment of time to attend.
4. The facilitator needs to create a list of attendees.
5. The physical space for the meeting should be appropriate to the format and facilitate two-way participation.
6. A clear definition of the roles and responsibilities of the participants.
7. An agenda and prepared materials.
8. Define the content of the meeting, and the process to deliver it.
9. Proper presentation skills to inform, influence, or motivate the attendees.
10. An atmosphere of trust and security.
11. Win-win approaches to decision-making.
12. Access to a time-keeper to keep the agenda on track.
13. A method to track and assign Next Actions.
14. A method to follow-up on these assignments and communicate progress reports.

The attendees also need to have a basic understanding of what it is that they are expected to bring to the meeting in terms of information or equipment.

Putting it all together

The reason for having a meeting needs to be compelling. The participants must be able to see that their investment in time to attend the meeting will have a return that exceeds the opportunity cost of attending.

The next post in this series will address the content of the meeting and how to construct it.

Last week we learned about the different ways that our time and effort is spent or invested. This week we will focus on how to establish your personal Roles and how to use them to plan your week.

Before we begin, please download this 7 Habits Weekly Planner in PDF.

This template will allow you lay out your weekly hard landscape at a glance.

Identifying your Roles

Every task that we address and activity that we pursue is an expression of one of the Roles that we play each day of our lives. Whether the role is basic, such as Cook when we make dinner, or more complex, like Husband when I plan and execute our weekend getaway to celebrate our anniversary, every part of our daily lives can be represented by a Role.

When you look over your To-Do list, you should be able to identify which Role each action affects. Some sample Roles:

• Spouse
• Parent
• Mentor
• Home manager
• Spiritual leader
• Office manager
• Team member
• Employee
• Business person/owner
• Writer/painter/creative artist

Each person will have their own list of Roles that they play over the course of their daily life, and the list will change over time as new commitments are added and others are completed. Note also, that the majority of the Roles are described as being part of a relationship with another person or group.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…”
~ John Donne

Look over your list of roles in the context of the coming week, which Roles are affected by up-coming actions? Which Roles would you like to develop or enhance? Write your own list of Roles in the boxes on the left-hand side of the worksheet.

Planning your Week

Assign the action items on your To-Do lists to the appropriate roles, in the second column of the worksheet. Are they balanced? Is there one (or more) roles that carries a preponderance of activities? Is one of the Roles that you identified being neglected?

This neglect, while mostly unintentional, is often the source of much of the stress in our lives. For example, if you listed “Spouse” as a Role knowing that there are actions that you need to take to develop and maintain your relationship with your partner yet there are no actions or activities in that list, you know that there will be a problem for you at the end of the week.

Next, review the actions in the second column in terms of your personal mission statement. Do these actions support your personal goals? Do they fit your principles and values? You may be shocked to discover that you are doing and accomplishing things that you do not want to do, or even need to be doing to achieve your goals. This is a moment for you to Delete or Delegate these activities.

If an activity on your list does not support your personal mission statement, nor fit in with your principles and values, why on earth would you consider doing it?

Bear in mind the 3 types of impact that we discussed in the first post of this series. They are:

1. Direct - situations involving your personal behavior
2. Indirect - situations involving the behavior of others
3. and some are Beyond our control

Look at how each category affects the others. These are relationships.

The failure of prioritizing

This method of breaking down our daily and weekly activities into the relevant roles, rather than simply the Contexts, is a tool for developing our personal relationships and ourselves. Many times we attempt to prioritize our activities without a larger frame of reference, that is, the Role that each activity supports and how the activity impacts our personal mission.

Planning your week according to your Roles and personal mission statement allows you to discover where you may have situations that cause stress via cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is often associated with the tendency for people to resist information that they don’t want to think about, because if they did it would … perhaps require them to act in ways that depart from their comfortable habits. They usually have at least partial awareness of the information, without having moved to full acceptance of it, and are thus in a state of denial about it.

I would submit that this is a state to be avoided, by following your principles and staying true to your values.

Planning your week using this method increases your ability to work and live in the Quadrant 2 area of the Time Management Matrix. This is the portion of your attention where you get to work on the Important things, rather than those that are Urgent, focusing on prevention, preparedness, and personal development.

Advancing your effectiveness

As we discussed last week in part I of this post, Putting First Things First involves using your principles and values to drive your activities in a way that supports and develops your personal integrity.

• The Weekly Planner empowers you to visualize exactly how you invest your time in the pursuit of activities that are truly important and effective.
• Defining your Roles creates a set of rules for prioritizing your activities in a way that enables you to live your life in accordance with your inner values.
• Eliminating activities that do not support your personal mission statement gives value and meaning to the activities that you do pursue, bringing you closer to achieving your long-term goals.
• The Weekly Planner displays, at a glance, the “big picture” view of your life over the next week. The primary focus is on your relationships and the results of your activities, rather than on the time element.

Practical Applications

The following exercises will aid you in fully implementing the Third Habit, Put First Things First, into your daily life. Be sure to review your personal mission statement, and apply the learning principles:

These activities are:

1. Analyze Your Time Expenditure

Take some time at the beginning of the week to draw a Time Management Matrix and estimate the amount of time that you spend or invest in each Quadrant. Log your time in 15- or 30-minute intervals over the next three days to confirm our estimate. Incorporate your new 7 Habits Weekly Planner and your Roles into this practice.

2. Make a Personal Commitment

Commit yourself to defining your Roles and sorting your activities to ensure that they are balanced among your Roles and that the activities are honest and value-driven .

3. Teach to Learn

One of the best ways to establish your own understanding of a new topic is to explain it to another person. Choose someone that you can teach the new habit to, it can be your accountability partner or someone else at work or at home.

Secondary Applications

• Make a list of the activities on your To-Do list that do not support your personal mission statement or values. Where did they come from? Can they be Deleted or Delegated? Think about how you can re-direct these inputs in the future.
• Organize next week with the Weekly Planner, paying careful attention to your Roles.
• Add the Weekly Planning practice to your Weekly Review, or set another appointment with yourself to do it. Make a commitment with your accountability partner to keep this appointment.
• High-level thinking: Write down in detail a long-term goal that will lead toward achieving your personal mission. Choose something to plan that inspires you, something that you have always wanted to accomplish.

Each weekly post on the habits is supplemented by a worksheet to help you start focusing on the new habit.

For those of you who may not have read Stephen Covey’s landmark book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, here is a brief synopsis of the third habit: (from Wikipedia)

Put First Things First. Here, Covey describes a framework for prioritizing work that is aimed at short-term goals, at the expense of tasks that appear not to be urgent, but are in fact very important. Delegation is presented as an important part of time management. Successful delegation, according to Covey, focuses on results and benchmarks that are to be agreed upon in advance, rather than prescribed as detailed work plans.

This habit is so important that Stephen Covey wrote an entire book about it, which I recommend to everyone that I meet! You can order it from Amazon here [link].

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least” ~ Goethe

The third habit is the practical application of what we learned in the first two habits. Habit 1: Be Proactive puts you in charge of your responsibilities and your environment. Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind shows you the steps that you need to follow to create a path toward completing the various tasks and activities that you are responsible for.

Putting First Things First is the habit that enables you to actualize your principles and values by prioritizing your tasks and actions. The daily exercise of assigning priorities according to your values and principles puts you in control of your current situation and points you toward advancing and achieving your long-term goals.

Ask yourself two questions

Get a piece of paper [or download the worksheet] and write down the answers to these 2 questions:

1) What is one thing that I could do on a regular basis (But I am not doing now) that would make an important positive difference in my personal life?

2) What is another thing that I could do on a regular basis (But I am not doing now) that would make an important positive difference in my work or professional life?

Remember that there is no one “right” answer. Activities that have a positive impact on your life can vary, sometimes wildly. Some folks may have a simple answer like “Lose X pounds by eating a salad and walking for 15 minutes each day at lunch.” Others may have a more complex answer, such as “Improve personal communication skills and team cohesiveness by scheduling a weekly one-on-one meeting with each of the salespeople and going out on calls with them once per month.” Whatever your answer is it likely involves something that you already know that you should do yet, for whatever reason, don’t.

“The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to their strength of purpose.” ~ E.M. Gray

Importance vs. Urgency

Take a look at the answers that you wrote down. Do they reflect an activity or practice that is important to your personal or professional development? Yes? If not, you may have a wrong answer!

Now for the tricky part: Do you consider this activity to be urgent? Most likely this answer is “No”, or you would not be neglecting it! The struggle of importance vs. urgency is one that we all face every day. The tasks and activities that we execute tend to be sorted by urgency, by the scale of their effect on our immediate situation.

I am sure that most of you reading this can recall a day when you were frantically busy “putting out fires” but nothing you would consider Important was accomplished. This is not to say that responding to a crisis is not important, and no one is recommending that you file your receipts when the building is on fire. But I would submit that taking proactive steps to avert crises is surely more important, yet considered less urgent. Whenever I am in this type of situation, the expression, “There’s never enough time to do it right, but there always seems to be time to do it over” comes to mind.

Your personal values and principles should reflect the idea that having the appropriate tools and training is not only important, but urgent, and must be acted upon.

The Time Management Matrix

One of Stephen Covey’s most famous contributions to the world of Time Management is the Time Management Matrix, as shown below:

This matrix (abbreviated as: TMM) divides the way we spend or invest our time into 4 Quadrants based on a value of Importance vs. Urgency. Most of us, before we took an active interest in productivity practices, likely spent a lot of time in Quadrants 1 & 4. The diametrically opposite states of crisis management and goofing off are the most common ‘default’ states for busy people. Because we spend time goofing off instead of investing time in preparedness, we are later forced to spend time recovering from catastrophe.

Being busy, however, is not the same as being productive. I know people that can be busy all day long and accomplish exactly zero by 5:00. One can be very busy maintaining the widget machine, but if there are no widgets being cranked then your time & effort do not count as being invested (i.e., generating a return) but as being spent.

Time that is simply spent is gone forever.

Covey contends that if we consciously work toward inhabiting the Quadrant 2 portion of the TMM we can avert the crises and problems of Quadrant 1, delegate or eliminate the ‘filler’ work of Quadrant 3, and avoid the wasteful spending of Quadrant 4.

How do we get there

One of my favorite movies is “Funny Farm“, starring Chevy Chase (no judging!!). There is a scene in the movie where a couple of hard-bitten New Yorkers working for a moving company ask for directions. The man they ask, an older fellow sitting on his porch sorting apples, responds to their question with, “If I was goin’ to Redbud, I wouldn’t start from here.”

How often do you feel like that while you are coping with an environment dominated by Q1 activities - emergencies, deadlines missed, crises, employee difficulties? At times like this Q2 can seem so far away that is seems like you can’t get there from here. The secret path to Q2 lies in reducing the size of Quadrants 3 & 4.

Delete, Defer, and Delegate

Take a look at the graphic of the TMM, and the types of activities described in Q3 and Q4. The very first thing that you can do to reduce the scale of this real estate is to Delete those tasks and activities that are:

1. Not Important
2. Not Urgent
3. Can be deleted without affecting the organization

Those “Fwd:Fwd:Fwd” e-mail jokes, Minesweeper, Solitaire games and the like all need to go. Show some discipline and you can have the ‘fun’ things back when you have grabbed the reins of everything else. Be ruthless. Those stacks of magazines that you have been meaning to read? Toss’em or file’em. But get them out of sight.

Second, take a look at the tasks or activities that can be Deferred. If it does not need to get done today, file it in the Tickler File, or write it in your calendar. Get rid of it. But be careful! Only Defer the things that have survived the Deletion phase and can’t (or shouldn’t) be done by someone else. Keep in mind that some of these tasks can become opportunities for development, your own or a team member’s.

The third step is to Delegate as much as possible, but be responsible about it. This is a powerful tool for leveraging your own Quadrant 2 real estate. Is there something on your list that can’t be delegated today, but could be turned into a training and development tool for one of your team members? This is a Q2 opportunity! Embrace the change and let planning, prevention, and relationship-building become your watchwords.

Learning to say “No”

Another method of increasing the amount of time you get to invest in Q2 is by saying “No” to some of the new inputs that belong to Quadrants 1, 3, & 4. Obviously there are assignments that you cannot say no to, but generally you can apply the following criteria to new inputs and demands on your time:

1. Does this new input/demand fall into Quadrant 2?
2. Does this new input/demand match my values and principles?
3. Does this new input/demand align with my Personal Mission Statement?
4. Does this new input/demand advance any of my long-term goals?

If the answer to 2 or more of these questions is “No”, then you should seriously consider that your answer to the new demand be “No”. Taking on a new task or activity that does not meet at least 2 of the above criteria will increase your stress level and have a negative impact on your overall productivity.

You will not want to do this new task, because it does not fit into your model for achieving your purposes, and it very well may not get your best efforts.

Tune in tomorrow for Part II of this post, where we will examine methods and practices for investing more of your time in Quadrant 2, for greater returns on your productivity. Don’t forget to get the worksheet [right-click and "Save As"].

Each weekly post on the habits is supplemented by a worksheet to help you start focusing on the new habit.

For those of you who may not have read Stephen Covey’s landmark book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, here is a brief synopsis of the first two habits: (from Wikipedia)

The Seven Habits

The chapters are dedicated to each of the habits, which are represented by the following imperatives:

1. Be Proactive. Here, Covey emphasizes the original sense of the term “reactive” as coined by Victor Frankl. You can either be proactive or reactive when it comes to how you respond to certain things. When you are reactive, you blame other people and circumstances for obstacles or problems. Being proactive means taking responsibility for everything in life. Initiative and taking action will then follow. Covey also shows how man is different from other animals in that he has self-consciousness. He has the ability to detach himself and observe his own self; think about his thoughts. He goes on to say how this attribute enables him: It gives him the power not to be affected by his circumstances. Covey talks about stimulus and response. Between stimulus and response, we have the power of free will to choose our response.
2. Begin with the End In Mind. This chapter is about setting long-term goals based on “true north” principles. Covey recommends formulating a “personal vision statement” to document one’s perception of one’s own vision in life. He sees visualization as an important tool to develop this. He also deals with organizational vision statements, which he claims to be more effective if developed and supported by all members of an organization rather than prescribed.

Each Monday we will look into how to apply each of the Habits in a meaningful way that you can incorporate into your own personal productivity practice. At the end of the week we will re-group to discuss how we did. Each week you will be able to download a PDF worksheet for use as an aid to starting this new habit.

[Right-click this link and "Save As" to download the study guide]

I ask you to take on three simple activities that will help you administer and adjust to your new habit.
These activities are:

1. Create a Weekly Plan

Take some time at the end of your Weekly Review to plan your activities for the coming week. If you are not familiar with the Weekly Review, click here for more information. One of the basic principles that Covey teaches is that of the Big Rocks. These are the vital commitments that you need to put into your agenda first. Then you have room for the smaller stuff, the “pebbles and sand”. Your big rocks for this week include practicing one of the Sample Activities found at the end of this article.

The weekly planning is a big part of being proactive (Habit 1). A weakness of David Allen’s GTD system is that there is no mechanism for the items on your Next Action list to get pulled into the hard landscape of your calendar. This is where the idea of ‘Big Rocks’ and Most Important Tasks come in.

Each week, during your Weekly Review, you should look over the Next Action list with the purpose of ‘promoting’ some of these NAs to Big Rocks or MITs. These items are, by their nature, limited in number so as not to create a burden in your hard landscape.

2. Make a Personal Commitment

Commit yourself to adding one simple activity each week to implement and practice the new habit. Most new learning is lost the first week. Guard against this by sharing. If you have trouble keeping appointments with yourself, get a friend, partner or co-worker to hold you accountable. A burden shared is a burden eased.

You can also share the worksheet with your accountability partner. [Right-click this link and "Save As" to download the study guide]

3. Teach to Learn

One of the best ways to establish your own understanding of a new topic is to explain it to another person. Pick someone that you can teach the new habit to, it can be your accountability partner or someone else.

Now you are ready to get started!

Habit II - Begin with the End in Mind

“To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination” (Stephen Covey).

How you envision the outcome of your activity is essential to its final success. If you have a clear vision of exactly what you are working to achieve you can then create the list of action steps needed to get there. Every goal is created twice, first in your mind, second in reality.

As discussed in the e-book Project Planning in Context, visualizing the outcome of your project is the vital first step. Without having a firm grip on the outcome, it is impossible to know when you can stop. “Busy-ness” for the sake of being busy in not productive, it’s spinning your wheels. When your goal is clear in your mind, and the project has been determined to be worth doing, i.e. you have outlined the “Why” of the goal, your next step is to set the conditions that define its successful completion.

Here is a short list of questions that can help create the vision of a successful outcome:

• What do I want the future to be?
• What benefit do I want to give to my __________? (family, company, career, etc.)
• What returns do I seek?
• What standards am I aiming at?
• What values do I believe in?
• What are my strengths, and how can I leverage them to success?
• What weaknesses do I have in approaching and overcoming obstacles?
• Are there potential opportunities for changing the plan to meet changing conditions?
• How might this affect the outcome?
• What might prevent me from reaching the best result?
• What will the success of this goal mean in a year? In three years?
• What is the best possible result of my activities?

Once you have completed a realistic analysis of the opportunities for change, the next step is to decide precisely what the aim of your plan is. Deciding and defining an aim sharpens the focus of your plan, and helps you to avoid wasting effort on irrelevant side issues.

Ready, Fire, Aim, Fire

The aim is best expressed in a simple single sentence. When the goal of a project is clear and sharp in your mind it is that much easier to communicate with the decision-makers and those who will be implementing your project.

Your description of the outcome is the final mark on the yardstick that you will be using to measure your progress through the plan’s stages. When you have properly defined the outcome of the project you can then create and define specific activities and sub-goals to reach your objective.

You can present this aim as a ‘Vision Statement’ or ‘Mission Statement’. Vision Statements express the benefit that an organization will provide to its customers. Mission statements give concrete expression to the Vision statement, explaining how it is to be achieved.

Write Your Own Mission Statement

How different would your life be if you had had a clear understanding of what was truly important to you five or ten years ago? Some of you reading now may have performed an exercise like this back then, and have gone on to create wonderful things. Others may never have heard of this process. We will work through it together and be better for it.

A personal mission statement is similar to that for a company or organization, in that it defines the values and principles that will be followed in the everyday activities and long-term planning. Having a written set of core values can be a very helpful tool in planning and executing your activities.

Think about the things that are important to you. Make a list of how you perceive or handle obstacles and opportunities in the following categories:

• Family
• Spouse
  
• Work
• Career
• Money
• Possessions
• Comfort
• Friendships
• Conflicts
• Faith
• Personal development

It’s all connected

Keep in mind the 3 types of impact that we discussed in the first post of this series. They are:

1. Direct - situations involving your personal behavior
2. Indirect - situations involving the behavior of others
3. and some are Beyond our control

Look at how each category affects the others. For example, your relationship with your family may be impacted by your current financial situation (for good or ill).

How you handle conflict with your friends, family, and adversaries can impact your work and career.

The way that you perceive comfort may be different from the way that your spouse or co-workers do (have you ever worked in a sweltering office and the person next to you keeps complaining how cold they are?)

Take some time to flesh out this list, considering the inter-connected nature of these principles. Write down how each category impacts the others, and how others may view them differently. Note that family and spouse are separate categories, as your relationships with them are likely to be very different. Likewise work and career are separate, as how you make a living may not necessarily be what you want to do in the future.

Sample Applications

Stephen Covey has a list of recommended activities for implementing this habit. Two of them are:

1. Look carefully at your list of values and principles. Does a pattern emerge? Is this really the person that you are? Or want to be?
2. Identify a project that you have coming up. Apply the principle of visualizing the final outcome. Write down the results that you desire and the steps that you need to take to achieve those results.

I would also recommend:

1. Look at every task you have this week with a new perspective. Visualize the best end result, and decide if this action will get you there.
2. Use the worksheet to create your own personal mission statement. Keep it handy and be prepared to revise it if necessary. Watch for opportunities to incorporate this mission statement into your daily interactions and decisions.

Thank you for participating, we will check back with you on Saturday for a review of how you did. Be sure to download the PDF for your own tracking here (link).

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

The chapters are dedicated to each of the habits, which are represented by the following imperatives:

1. Be Proactive. Here, Covey emphasizes the original sense of the term “reactive” as coined by Victor Frankl. You can either be proactive or reactive when it comes to how you respond to certain things. When you are reactive, you blame other people and circumstances for obstacles or problems. Being proactive means taking responsibility for everything in life. Initiative and taking action will then follow. Covey also shows how man is different from other animals in that he has self-consciousness. He has the ability to detach himself and observe his own self; think about his thoughts. He goes on to say how this attribute enables him: It gives him the power not to be affected by his circumstances. Covey talks about stimulus and response. Between stimulus and response, we have the power of free will to choose our response.
2. Begin with the End In Mind. This chapter is about setting long-term goals based on “true north” principles. Covey recommends formulating a “personal vision statement” to document one’s perception of one’s own vision in life. He sees visualization as an important tool to develop this. He also deals with organizational vision statements, which he claims to be more effective if developed and supported by all members of an organization rather than prescribed.
3. Put First Things First. Here, Covey describes a framework for prioritizing work that is aimed at short-term goals, at the expense of tasks that appear not to be urgent, but are in fact very important. Delegation is presented as an important part of time management. Successful delegation, according to Covey, focuses on results and benchmarks that are to be agreed upon in advance, rather than prescribed as detailed work plans.
4. Think Win/Win describes an attitude whereby mutually beneficial solutions are sought that satisfy the needs of oneself, or, in the case of a conflict, both parties involved.
5. Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood. Covey warns that giving out advice before having empathetically understood a person and their situation will likely result in rejection of that advice. Thoroughly reading out your own autobiography will decrease the chance of establishing a working communication.
6. Synergize describes a way of working in teams. Apply effective problem solving. Apply collaborative decision making. Value differences. Build on divergent strengths. Leverage creative collaboration. Embrace and leverage innovation. It is put forth that when synergy is pursued as a habit, the result of the teamwork will exceed the sum of what each of the members could have achieved on their own. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
7. Sharpen the saw focuses on balanced self-satisfaction: Regain what Covey calls “production capability” by engaging in carefully selected recreational activities.

Each Monday we will look into how to apply each of the Habits in a meaningful way, to synchronize with your own, personal productivity practice. Then on Saturday we will re-group to discuss how we did. Each week you will be able to download a PDF worksheet for use as an aid to starting this new habit.

[Right-click this link and "Save As" to download the study guide]

I will ask you to take on three simple activities that will help you administer and adjust to your new habit.
These activities are:

1. Create a Weekly Plan

Take some time at the end of your Weekly Review to plan your activities for the coming week. If you are not familiar with the Weekly Review, click here for more information. One of the principles that Covey teaches is that of the Big Rocks. These are the vital commitments that you need to put into your “buckets” first. Then you have room for the smaller stuff, the “pebbles and sand”. One of your big rocks for this week is to practice one of the Sample Activities found at the end of this article.

The weekly planning is a big part of being proactive. One thing that I have found to be a weakness of David Allen’s GTD system is that there is no affirmative way for the items on your Next Action list to get pulled into your activity queue. This is where the idea of ‘Big Rocks’ and Most Important Tasks come in.

Each week, during your Weekly Review, you should look over the Next Action list with the purpose of ‘promoting’ some of these NAs to Big Rocks or MITs. These items are, by their nature, limited in number so as not to create a burden in your hard landscape.

2. Make a Personal Commitment

Commit yourself to adding one simple activity each week to implement and practice the new habit. Most new learning is lost the first week. Guard against this by sharing. If you have trouble keeping appointments with yourself, get a friend, partner or co-worker to hold you accountable. A burden shared is a burden eased.

You can also share the worksheet with your accountability partner. [Right-click this link and "Save As" to download the study guide]

3. Teach to Learn

One of the best ways to establish your own understanding of a new topic is to explain it to another person. Pick someone that you can teach the new habit to, it can be your accountability partner or someone else.

Now you are ready to dig in!

Habit I - Be Proactive

Being Proactive is, of course, the very first habit that you need to ingrain in order to become highly effective. Being proactive means more than simply taking the initiative, it also means taking responsibility - or as Covey writes “response-ability”. The ability to choose our response is based on our preparation, our planning, and our flexibility.

Being proactive means reading the conditions of a situation that we face, enabling us to make a choice as to how we will respond. Being reactive means allowing those conditions to dictate our response. Covey writes, “The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.” An impulse is something that happens to you when you are controlled by your environment.

Observe Your Environment

Do you remember the last time you were in line at the supermarket? While you were waiting for the checkout, what type of environment were you in?

(the answer is: an impulse-rich environment) Think about the “chute” that you stand in at the supermarket:

• Glossy magazines at the entrance
• A soda cooler separates the chutes
• Rows and rows of candy, most down low where children can reach them
• Small racks of nearly useless items that “might be cool to have”
• The most expensive batteries in the store

There is a reason that these items are called impulse purchases. The environment of the checkout line is specifically designed to overcome your values and compel you to buy one or more of these items. Most of these items are available at other locations in the store, where they (or an alternative) may be priced less. For example, you can often buy a 10-pack of chewing gum for $1.99 in the candy aisle versus a single pack for $.99 at the checkout.

The proactive person, acting on the values of economy and preparedness, will select the 10-pack while doing the rest of their shopping. The reactive person will be influenced by the environment of the checkout and purchase the more expensive and less efficient single pack.

Admittedly this is a very simple, even silly, example. Take a moment and think about how your own situation in other environments is like the checkout at the supermarket. What sorts of things happen around you at home? At work? Think about how aspects of the environment impact your choices and decisions.

Three types of impact

Our environment and the situations that we face can generally be divided into three types, or areas:

1. Direct - situations involving your personal behavior
2. Indirect - situations involving the behavior of others
3. Beyond our control - situations you have no control over, like the weather, or a traffic jam

Each type of situation, however, is initially affected by our own ability to choose. Direct areas are the result of our own habits and our recent choices. For example, when you choose to get enough sleep, you will be rested and ready-to-go in the morning.

Indirect areas can be affected by the influence we have over others. When your co-worker is moody because they did not get enough sleep and it is raining, you can choose to go on cheerfully.

And areas that are beyond our control to change, can nonetheless be prevented from impacting our own behavior. Just because it is raining does not mean that you too must be gloomy or “down”.

If your value is to be prepared for your workday, and be productive, and you choose to act on that value, then none of the other impulses can control you.

How to Apply this Habit to Your Life

Covey recommends some activities for learning to implement proactivity into your daily life:

• Listen for reactive language. For one entire day, take the time to listen carefully to yourself and those around you. How often do you hear expressions such as “I can’t”, “I don’t want to but I have to” or “If only”. These are reactive expressions that indicate someone is being influenced by their environment. When you hear something like this, use your own response to the statement in a proactive way.
• Analyze one of your problems. Write down one thing that is frustrating you at work or in your personal life. Write down whether the impact is Direct, Indirect, or Beyond Your Control. Brainstorm some proactive solutions to your frustration, choose the best one, and do it.
• I also recommend adding some proactive activities to your daily routine, such as:
  • Wake up one half-hour earlier in order to do one activity that you may have been neglecting.
  • At the end of your day, pause to reflect on what you accomplished, and what you plan to do tomorrow. A Book of Days can be a very useful tool for this.
  • Spend one entire day without using the word “no”.

Thank you for participating, and tune in for the next post in the series. For more information, and help in applying the 7 Habits to your own life, see Stephen Smith coaching services page.

Is it ever a bad thing to have too many ideas? Probably not, but if you’ve ever experienced information overload or struggled to know where to begin with a wealth of data you’ve been given, you may have wondered how you can use all of these ideas effectively.

When there’s lots of “stuff” coming at you, it is hard to sort through everything and organize the information in a way that makes sense and helps you make decisions. Whether you’re brainstorming ideas, trying to solve a problem or analyzing a situation, when you are dealing with lots of information from a variety of sources, you can end up spending a huge amount of time trying to assimilate all the little bits and pieces. Rather than letting the disjointed information get the better of you, you can use an affinity diagram to help you organize it.

An affinity diagram helps to synthesize large amounts of data by finding relationships between ideas. The information is then gradually structured from the bottom up into meaningful groups. From there you can clearly “see” what you have, and then begin your analysis or come to a decision.

Affinity diagrams can be used to:

• Draw out common themes from a large amount of information
• Discover previously unseen connections between various ideas or information
• Brainstorm root causes and solutions to a problem

Because many decision-making exercises begin with brainstorming, this is one of the most common applications of affinity diagrams. After a brainstorming session there are usually pages of ideas. These won’t have been censored or edited in any way, many of them will be very similar, and many will also be closely related to others in a variety of ways. What an affinity diagram does is start to group the ideas into themes.

From the chaos of the randomly generated ideas comes an insight into the common threads that link groups of them together. From there the solution or best idea often emerges quite naturally.

Affinity diagrams are not purely in the domain of brainstorming. They can be used in any situation where:

• A single, best solution is not readily apparent from a series of choices
• You want to reach a consensus or decision and have a lot of variables to consider, concepts to discuss, ideas to connect, or opinions to incorporate
• There is a large volume of information to sort through

Step-by-step guide to the affinity diagram

Here is a series of steps that you can practice with to show how the process works.

1. Describe the problem or issue
2. Generate ideas by brainstorming. Write each idea on a separate sticky note and put these on a wall or flip chart. Remember to:
   • Emphasize the quantity of ideas, rather than simply quality
   • Suspend judgment on creative or unusual approaches
   • Encourage “Piggybacking” on other ideas
3. Sort Ideas into natural themes by asking:
   • What ideas are similar?
   • Is this idea connected to any of the others?
4. If you’re working in a team:
   • Separate into smaller groups of 3 to 4 people
   • Sort the ideas IN SILENCE so that no one is influenced by anyone else’s comments
   • Keep moving the cards around until consensus is reached
5. Create total group consensus
   • Discuss the shared meaning of each of the sorted groups
   • Continue until consensus is reached
   • If some ideas do not fit into any theme, separate them as “stand-alone” ideas
   • If some ideas fit into more than one theme, create a duplicate card and put it in the proper group
   • Try to limit the total number of themes to between five and nine
6. Create theme cards
   • Create a short 3-5 word description for the relationship
   • If you’re working in a group, do this together, out loud
   • Write this theme/header on a blank card and place at the top of the group it describes
   • Create a “super-headers” where necessary to group themes
   • Use a “sub-header” card where necessary as well
7. Continue to group the themes/headers until you have reached the broadest, but still meaningful, categories possible
8. Draw lines connecting the super-headers, themes/headers, and sub-headers

The Final Structure of Your Ideas

You will end up with a hierarchical structure that shows, at a glance, where the relationships are. Grouping ideas under headings, and then grouping headings under super-headers in an affinity diagram is a practical way of “chunking” information generated in brainstorming sessions, during mind mapping, or even a planning exercise.

Affinity diagrams are great tools for assimilating and understanding large amounts of information. When you work through the process of creating relationships and working backward from detailed information to broad themes, you get an insight you would not otherwise find.

The next time you are confronting a large amount of information or number of ideas and you feel overwhelmed at first glance, use the affinity diagram approach to discover all the hidden relationships. When you cannot see the forest for the trees, an affinity diagram may be exactly what you need to regain your focus.

The following list is available as a PDF for download here (right click and “Save as”).

Resources

• Whose input do we need?
• Whose input could we use?
• Has anything like this been done before?
• What mistakes can we learn from?
• What successes can we learn from?
• What resources do we have?
• What resources might we need?

Executive issues

• How does this relate to the strategic plan?
• How does it relate to other priorities, directions, goals?
• How will this affect our competitive position?

Administration

• Who’s accountable for this project’s success?
• Lines of communication
• Methods of reporting
• What structures do we need?
• What planning is still likely to be required?
• What re-grouping will we need? How often?
• What people do we need?
• Current staffing?
• Hiring?
• Subcontractors?
• Consultants?
• How do we get involvement?
• What skills are required?
• Who needs to know how to do what?
• What training do we need?
• How do we get it?
• What other communication do we need?
• Who needs to be informed as we go along?
• What policies/procedures affected? What needed?
• What about morale? Fun?
• Staffing?

Finance

• What will this cost?
• How do we get it?
• What might affect the cost?
• Might we need additional $?
• What are the potential payoffs ($)?
• Who signs the checks?

Operations

• What is the timing?
• Hard deadlines?
• What might affect timing?
• Who’s going to do the work?
• How do we ensure complete delivery?

Quality

• How will we monitor our progress?
• How will we know if we’re on course?
• What data do we need, when?
• What reports, to whom, when?

Politics

• Whose buy-in do you need?
• How can you get it?
• Stakeholders - Considerations?
• Board
• Stockholders
• Employees
• Suppliers
• Customers
• Community

Legal

• Issues?
• Regulations?

Space/Facilities/Equipment

• What requires room?
• How do you get it?
• What tools do we need? When?
• Phones
• Computers

Research

• What might you need to know?
• Where can we find/buy it?
• Do we need a consultant?

Public Relations

• Is there value in others knowing about this?
• How do we do that?

Risks

• What could happen?
• Could we handle it?

Creative thinking…

• Who would have concern about the success of this project?
• What would they say, ask, or input, that you haven’t yet?
• What’s the worst idea you can imagine, about doing this project?
• (What is therefore the best idea, which is its opposite?)
• What is the most outrageous thing you can think of, about this project?
• How would a 12-year-old kid relate to this project?
• What would make this project particularly unique?
• What the worst that could happen?
• How could we deal with that?
• What’s the best that could happen?
• Are we ready to deal with that?
• How do we feel about this project?

What would you add?

How you envision the outcome of implementing your plan is essential to its final success. If you have a clear vision of exactly what you are working to achieve you can communicate it to the rest of the team.

Your vision of the outcome is the final mark on the yardstick that you will be using to measure your progress through the plan’s stages. When you have properly defined the outcome of the project you can then create and define specific activities and sub-goals to reach your objective.

What happens when it’s over?

If the project has been determined to be worth doing and you have outlined the “Why”, your next step is to set the conditions that define its successful completion. Here is a short list of questions that can help create the vision of a successful outcome:

• What are the potential rewards?
• What are the potential obstacles?
• Are there potential opportunities for changing the plan to meet changing conditions? How might this affect the outcome?
• What will the success of this project mean in a year? In three years?
• What is the best possible result of the project?
• What might prevent you from reaching the best result?

As with Defining the Purpose, clear Outcome Visioning can greatly increase the enthusiasm of the participants. Knowing where you are going is always preferable to blundering blindly about.

Tools for answering the questions

There are plenty of tools and methods that individuals and teams can use to capture the potential solutions. Brainstorming and Free Association can be helpful in exploring unexpected problems as well as opportunities. These also happen to be very good Team-building exercises which can be very helpful to the overall success of your project. Getting everyone to participate and contribute to the solutions to a problem raises the level of buy-in and enthusiasm for a project.

Flip-charts come in handy for brainstorming sessions, lots of room for writing down the ideas and suggestions. They are also very handy for mind-mapping, a method of capturing ideas and determining the connections between them. Often these connections prompt more ideas!

Mind-Mapping Software

Here are a few links to some of the mind-mapping resources that are available online:

• Mind-Mapping.org - a list of over 200 resources!
• Exploratree - web based “thinking guide”
• Flying Logic - web based mind-mapping
• Freemind - a free download that you can take with you

Other Brainstorming Tools

Depending on the type of project that you are working on, other resources might be helpful as well:

• Storyboards
• Weddings
• or even Travel Planning

Whatever tool that you use, the basic principles are the same:

1. Understand “Why”, what is the purpose of the project?
2. Visualize the outcome, what is the final result?
3. Brainstorm ideas, and capture every one for evaluation.

In future posts in this series we will discuss organizing these ideas into a coherent structure and identifying Next Actions.