Training in Context

Welcome to part two of the series on how to implement the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in a Getting Things Done-style system. Because this is a fairly intensive plan to implement, I am writing a set of seven posts that will guide you through the stages of implementation over seven weeks. This will give you a chance to focus on each new habit in your life for one full week before beginning the next one.

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).

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 each of the habits: (from Wikipedia)

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: Continue reading »

Organizing Ideas Into Common Themes

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.

Today I would like to share a list of questions that you can ask your team (or yourself) in order to prompt your thinking and brainstorming sessions.

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?

Continue reading »