Change the Task, Not the Person

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Ask yourself. Does our company only hire the best and the brightest? Only accept the most remarkable and enlightened ones?

And does our company try to mold them, transform these new recruits so they talk like we do, sell like we do, write code like we do, and write marketing copy like we do?

What if the way our company does things is tired, stagnant, and outdated? What if our company is recruiting talented people with new skills and ideas, and then training it out of them?

Maybe the problem isn’t teaching the new person our way of doing things. Maybe the problem is the task, and the tools we’ve been using.

Don’t try to change someone to do a task or a process better. Change the task or the assignment to better fit the strengths of the amazing new people you hire. Or better, let the new person choose the task and the tools.

Who Does Not Move Forward, Recedes

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I spent this past weekend visiting with dear college friends, reminiscing, laughing, and catching up. Of course, we’ve all changed over time. But back in the day we thought we were special, unique.

The term is chronocentrism. It’s the belief that our group, our cohort, at a particular moment in time is special, and poised on the brink of history, as if we are locked in a remarkable and magical moment. It’s pretty common for graduating classes to feel this way, or groups of employees at a company to feel this way when working together during a period of change or growth. During these times we solidify our values, deepen our identities.

It’s a good feeling and creates lasting bonds among the group that can persist for a long time. But it’s also important to move on. It may have been a watershed moment in your evolution, but who you are then is not who you will become.

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you have ever been.
– Dan Gilbert

Never believe that you are done learning, or done changing and evolving. The choices we make today will lead to who we become tomorrow.

En francais, “Qui n’avance pas, recule.” Which means, “Who does not move forward, recedes.”

Learning is Interactive, Not Consumptive

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We have a new puppy. The kids named him Wallace, although he has immediately become “Wally”. Neighbors want to hold him, get a selfie with him. He is adorable. He also creates disasters everywhere around the house, chewing, shredding, drooling, peeing everywhere. He can be a wrecking ball.

He’s also learning more quickly than I expected. We have an older yellow lab named Penny who knows all the tricks of the house. She knows when mealtimes are, where to nap, where the walking trails are, and where the bathroom is (See Wally? It’s in the woods beyond the backyard, not in the living room).

Wally is picking up on all of this by following Penny’s lead. He’s not learning half as much from the humans. On walks, Wally follows right behind Penny and sniffs where she sniffs, stops where she stops.

Numerous studies demonstrate puppies (and chimps, and rabbits, and cats, and mice, …) all learn faster by imitating the behavior of older, more experienced members of their own kind. Here is a super cute video of an older dog teaching a puppy to walk down scary stairs:

The same is, of course, true in humans. Yet in the United States younger people don’t apprentice under masters nearly as much as they do in other countries around the world. Britain has been enjoying a renaissance of apprenticeships with their successful “Get In, Go Far” initiative.

Get In, Go Far matches younger aspiring learners with companies and opportunities to develop skills in their particular interest. And it’s not confined to skilled labor jobs like electrical or plumbing work. Get In, Go Far is matching younger people with apprenticeships in information technology, project management, marketing, computer science, teaching, and much more.

We conducted a leadership workshop recently with participants from around the world including Brazil, Spain, Germany, England, Poland, Philippines, Canada, and the United States. When the conversation turned to mentoring at work, everyone said they had strong mentorship and lots of opportunity to learn from masters at work. Everyone, except the participants from the United States. They said the philosophy at their US-based location was more “sink or swim” or “figure it out on your own.”

It’s time-consuming, and expensive to find, and keep, good talent. Retaining talented people requires constant care and respect for their development. Remember these two small truths about mentoring:

  • It’s not one to one. People in organizations can, and should, learn from many different people, in different settings, with different skills. You have your workout group, your monthly book group, your hiking friends, and your dinner club. You learn different things from all of those experiences. The same is true at work. Create variety. Diversify learning opportunities.
  • It’s a two-way interaction. Whatever your level of seniority, you have something to teach, something to share. Learning is an interactive process, not a consumptive process. You don’t get paired with a single master, like Obi-Wan, and metamorphose into a Jedi. You have an obligation to contribute. You’d be surprised what you know that others don’t understand yet.

Check out our new micro-learning series Raising Resiliency featuring bestselling author Jen Shirkani. Message me if you’re interested and we’ll send you a preview. Enjoy!

    ____________________________________________________

SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

You Can’t Control People. But You Can Control the Environment

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This may surprise you, but prior to the early 1970s the word “parenting” didn’t exist. The word parent was a noun, not a verb. A parent was something you are, not something you do. In the same way that we don’t child our parents, and we don’t husband our wives.

According to Alison Gopnick, a researcher at the University of California, in the 1970s we came to think of being a good parent as a problem to be solved, a skill to be developed. And if only we had the right manual, and the right set of skills, we could then excel at being a parent, in the same way we try to excel at our classes or our jobs.

The analogy she uses to illustrate her point is to imagine a carpenter and a gardener. The carpenter is exacting, measured, controlling the materials, bending them to her will, designing the results. The gardener creates an ecosystem, plants seeds, introduces fertilizer and diversity, and watches growth unfold. The gardener manages an environment, the carpenter presses resources into service of his vision.

In her research, Gopnick has found that parents in the United States and western Europe have, over the past few decades, gradually adopted practices to design outcomes for their children (in extreme, think Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother). In doing so, we have also increasingly removed the level of risk we allow children to take.

In 1971 80% of third-graders walked to school alone or with their friends. By 1990, it had dropped to 9% and today is even lower. Most parents will tell you the world is more dangerous than it was back then, but it’s not. There are fewer traffic accidents, fewer playground injuries, and fewer of the most horrifying of fears – abductions. The rate of classic abduction-by-a-stranger is less than one-hundredth of 1% of all missing children, which itself is less than .04%, and also trending down over the last few decades. I understand any number above zero is intolerable, but the chances of a child being kidnapped by a stranger are more remote than being hit by lightening or winning Powerball.

Alison Gopnick’s point is that as we attempt to remove risk from our children’s lives, we also remove their ability to solve problems, persevere through adversity, and deal with the inevitable uncertainties of life.

In a post-industrial world, exactly the skills that we need – innovation, creativity, risk-taking – are exactly the ones that we’re not encouraging in this very kind of narrow, competitive, academic parenting culture.
– Alison Gopnick, Ph.D.

Deep play – the kind that is unstructured, open and immersive – helps build critical thinking skills necessary for thriving later in life.

Kids then grow up and go to work. At our workplaces, most organizations set clear guidelines for behavior, and expectations for performance. Salespeople are expected to sell in a certain way. Programmers are expected to code using particular protocols. Marketing writers are expected to follow rules of copywriting, and product placement to drive customer influence. And everyone needs to keep track of what they do.

As a leader, instead of controlling people, try instead to change the environment and give opportunities for deep play by:

  • Changing the environment: schedule a walking meeting outside, meet at a different location, attend a conference or event with your team, ask your peers in other departments to flash mentor members of your team.
  • Pushing people to develop new skills: Encourage people to grow new capabilities by providing opportunities and encouragement to try new tasks, and take on new projects.
  • Giving autonomy: Define what needs to be done, not how to do it. Help team members envision best results, but let them decide how to accomplish the task.

Check out our new micro-learning series Raising Resiliency featuring bestselling author Jen Shirkani. Message me if you’re interested and we’ll send you a preview. Enjoy!

    ____________________________________________________

SmallActs-3DWe’re doing the best work of our lives right now at Mindscaling, a company designing custom curriculum, and building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can buy a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Grab a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

How to Trigger a Great Day

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Whatever you love to do, aspire to be, or dream of creating, keep at it.

Keep at it every day. Even if for just a bit. Think of it as your craft, something you need to stay close to, something that requires nurturing, like gardening or singing or cooking. If you don’t attend to it, you’ll lose your place, and lose your rhythm.

I went to boot camp this morning. It’s an exercise class I go to with my wife in the middle of the night at 5:15am. Or I used to go to. I haven’t been in weeks, and after I rubbed my eyes, and looked around during the warm-up I felt like I didn’t know half the people there. I turned to my friend Karen and whispered, “I haven’t been here for so long the clientele has turned over.” Even the warm-up routine was different. It’s called a routine, and it felt entirely new to me. That’s how long it had been. I had lost touch a little.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, says she writes a little bit every day, even if it’s only for 30 minutes. The novelist John Updike once said the best novels in the world were written less than an hour at a time. The National Cathedral in Washington D.C. was commissioned in 1907, and completed 83 years later in 1990. Which means it was started, and then completed over multiple professional lifetimes. To work on something that won’t be finished in your lifetime takes vision, and patience.

Think of your work, your dream, your aspiration as a verb, not a noun. In an interview we had recently with Aaron Hurst, author of The Purpose Economy, he talked about understanding our purpose as not a noun, but instead a verb. It’s an act of constantly becoming, not a destination.

It’s the same with all of our goals. If we want to become an athlete (noun), it happens through the constant, and diligent practice of exercising. If we want to write a book (noun), it happens through regular writing. And if we want to help build our communities, it happens one conversation at a time.

As we have learned from studies with Harvard researchers, making progress in work we find meaningful is the most powerful motivator of all. Money, praise, support, recognition, and vision are all important, but making progress has the biggest likelihood of triggering a feeling of a “great day.” The most common event triggering a “worst day” was a setback.

Focus on making incremental progress, identifying catalysts around you, and nourishing the progress of others. Uplifting others is also positive progress.

Have a look at our new micro-learning series Raising Resiliency featuring bestselling author Jen Shirkani. Message me if you’re interested and we’ll send you a preview. Enjoy!

    ____________________________________________________

SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Break the Cycle of Loneliness at Work

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Do you ever feel like you don’t really connect with anyone at work? Do you feel as if your relationships at work are superficial? Do you feel as if people at work don’t really understand you? You’re not alone.

“It was an average morning. I was up at seven, helped get the kids their breakfast and hustled them to get ready for school. They left, and I went back upstairs to get dressed for work. But that’s not what I did. I got back into bed, and lay there for another hour, staring at the ceiling. I’m lonely at work and staring at the ceiling for an hour was about as much as I could face.”
– Anonymous

According to a new survey of 20,000 Americans conducted by health care provider Cigna, we are at an all-time alarming high in terms of feeling lonely and isolated. Almost half of us (47%) feel as if we are left out, which also means that only the other half (53%) feel as if we are having meaningful, connected and valued conversations.

Don’t blame it on social media. According to the study, use of social media wasn’t a big predictor of feeling isolated and alone. Those who describe themselves as regular social media consumers had social loneliness scores nearly identical to those who don’t use social media at all.

The implications for work are enormous. People who feel disconnected socially at their jobs, also feel disengaged from their work. Loneliness in the workplace isn’t a private and personal issue, it’s an organizational culture issue.

“It’s critical that employers create a space where employees can connect face-to-face and form meaningful relationships with their co-workers.”
– Douglas Nemecek, M.D.

Be an Emotional Catalyst
You can start by being the instigator of positive emotional contagion. In order to feel more connected at work, we have to start by being more connected ourselves. I’m suggesting that solving our sense of isolation starts by taking social initiative. Our emotions are contagious, and the more we reach out with intentional empathy and connection to others, the more likely we are to be graciously received. It starts a virtuous cycle and elevates the mood state of our team.

Signal Emotional Fit
When it looks like someone is retreating emotionally and psychologically, be that person who first reaches out. Even better, create an institutional expectation that we support, connect and affirm one another. On the playground, at our daughter’s elementary school there is something called the “Buddy Bench.” By sitting on the Buddy Bench you are signaling to others you don’t currently have someone to play with. As our daughter describes it, there is no stigma associated with it, kids go sit there all the time.

Create a Connective Environment
I’ve been reading a number of interviews with Zappos founder and CEO Tony Hsieh, who claims one of the key ingredients in a successful company with highly engaged people, and high levels of innovation, is to create more moments of casual, unpretentious human to human conversations, or “collisions” as he calls them.

“Research has shown that most innovation actually happens from something outside your industry being applied to your own. And those are the results of random conversations at bars or coffee shops or just when you have collisions with other people.”
– Tony Hsieh

Positive group environments are linked to elevated sense of satisfaction, cooperation with others, heightened work engagement, and performance outcomes. I’m not suggesting we remain constantly positive and ignore failure, give false praise, or overlook adversity. In fact, sharing negative feelings can create solidarity and unify a group. But that shared negativity needs to be brief, specific, and then set aside to move on.

Have a look at our new micro-learning series Raising Resiliency featuring bestselling author Jen Shirkani. Message me if you’re interested and we’ll send you a preview. Enjoy!

    ____________________________________________________

SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

When Cultures Start to Drift from Values

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Diane Vaughan is a social scientist who coined the term “normalization of deviance” to describe the way organizational cultures can begin to drift morally and then rationalize that drift over such a slow time horizon that they aren’t even aware of it themselves.

As she wrote about in her book The Challenger Launch Decision, Vaughan studied the infamous 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion and discovered that faulty O‑rings, linked to the disaster, were identified as fallible long before the disaster occurred. Engineers knew they could fail, it had simply become “normal.”

“The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.”
– Steve Gruenter and Todd Whitaker

NASA, from the beginning of the space shuttle program, assumed that risk could not be eliminated, according to Vaughan, because the ability of the shuttle to perform in a real launch could only be mathematically predicted and tested in simulations. For that reason, the engineers expected anomalies on every mission, and disregarding danger signals, rather than trying to correct any problems, became the norm.

“Social normalization of deviance means that people within the organization become so much accustomed to a deviation that they don’t consider it as deviant, despite the fact that they far exceed their own rules for elementary safety.”
– Diane Vaughan

For example, after space shuttle Discovery launched on January 24, 1985, and then returned safely to earth, engineers performed an autopsy on the vehicle, which included carefully examining the O‑rings. In disassembling the Discovery’s O‑rings, the engineers discovered an alarming amount of grease that was blackened from exceedingly high pressure and temperature.

The O‑rings in the Discovery launch held but were more damaged than they had been in previous launches. Engineers calculated that the O‑ring temperature at the time of Discovery liftoff was approximately 58 degrees Fahrenheit. “[Challenger] could exhibit the same behavior,” the engineers reported after the examination. “Condition is not desirable, but is acceptable.”

They also recommended proceeding with the next launch of Challenger. In fact, they not only recommended proceeding with the next launch, engineers painstakingly argued their position regarding the tolerable O‑ring damage in a formal report. At the eleventh hour, only a day before the fatal launch, engineers Bob Ebeling and Roger Boisjoly contradicted themselves and strenuously argued to NASA officials that the O‑rings could stiffen and fail to properly seal the joints of the booster rockets because of the cold January temperatures.

These arguments were not persuasive to NASA officials because, after all, they had the original detailed engineering report stating that the risk was acceptable. It’s important to understand that the engineers were not simply acting or pretending that the damage was acceptable. Up until the engineers made their final plea to officials to halt the launch of Challenger only the day before, they actually believed that there was nothing wrong at all with that classification. “No fundamental decision was made at NASA to do evil,” Vaughan wrote. “Rather, a series of seemingly harmless decisions were made that incrementally moved the space agency toward a catastrophic outcome.”

The O‑ring damage observed after each launch was normal. The culture had simply drifted to a state in which that condition was also considered acceptable. In the NASA example, the existence of the damaged O‑rings after each launch was deemed acceptable. It became an implicit, and accepted, rule that everyone simply tolerated and believed to be quite normal.

But if we step back for a moment and study the situation, as Vaughan did in her analysis, that acceptance of damaged O‑rings seems pretty crazy.

To avoid groupthink, encourage debate and populate your team with different personalities and areas of expertise. And recognize that speed can kill. When we are rushing to deadlines, and racing to complete projects, it’s much easier to overlook mistakes and rationalize errors in an effort to get it done.

As the great John Wooden once said, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

Check out our new micro-learning series Small Acts of Leadership to begin making cultural shifts one small act at a time. Message me if you’re interested and we’ll send you a preview. Enjoy!

    ____________________________________________________

SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Innovate How You Innovate. Reward Creative Deviance.

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HCL Technologies is a big company, with 117,000 employees and 7.4 billion in annual revenue, it’s big. And as a big company you might think it’s also slow to react, slow to innovate. Not quite. HCL has built innovation into the mindset of the people in the company and created a culture that can sometimes be intentionally, creatively subversive.

A few years ago, Krishnan Chatterjee, HCL Technology’s senior vice president of marketing, was approached by a group of young associates who wanted to create their own social media sharing environment, accessible only to the company’s employees. Kind of like their own internal Facebook. They were really excited about the idea.

They wanted to build their own private social media environment instead of licensing something else. Chatterjee objected. Chatterjee told them it was a waste of time. They could easily license social platforms such as Yammer, Chatter or Jive, make them readily available for HCL associates, and the company wouldn’t be responsible for the hosting and the maintenance of these external systems. So why build our own? Chatterjee isn’t opposed to innovation of course, but he is opposed to wasting time and energy.

The young engineers at HCL listened to Chatterjee’s advice, and then they did it anyway. They built an online forum, and called it MEME. MEME allows HCL employees to interact with their colleagues across the organization, and quickly attracted more than 50,000 members.

Initial reviews of the social media site were positive, and Chatterjee himself confesses to being a big fan and an active member. HCL Technologies has an average employee age of 26 and consistent double-digit growth, and innovative leaders need to understand they are invited to take initiative, regardless of where they sit on an organizational chart.

“In most companies people walk in and leave their true personality hanging on a hook outside like an overcoat. That’s not what we want at HCL.”
– Krishnan Chatterjee, HCL Technologies

But this particular project wouldn’t have happened if those junior programmers in the company had heeded the advice of their managers. Instead, they chose to persist in their creative subversion. Ultimately, of course, they were acknowledged, and rewarded by their bosses.

The advice is this: if you have a dream, stick with it, gather a following, and build, or at the very least prototype what you’re championing and proposing, because the farther along you get in your thinking and development, the more likely you are to build support. When you pitch an idea, start first by creating value before you create perceived risk.

Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse challenges.

Innovation isn’t rocket science. It can be deconstructed and learned by anyone. Try our course Out•Innovate the Competition to build measurable innovation in your workplace.

    ____________________________________________________

Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Buy a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

You Are Not Your Current Project. Move on. Stay Curious.

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Our poor dog. Penny found a bone out on her morning walk. Perhaps it was in the neighbors yard, perhaps she unearthed it. But now the bone is hers – hers to carry, and own, and jealously protect. There she is. I can see her from the window, walking intently through the backyard with her new bone, looking furtively around. She is clearly stressed about this bone.

She marches into the woods behind our house, buries the bone carefully with earth and leaves, looks around, then digs it up again, and carries it somewhere else. It wasn’t safe there. Surely someone would find it.

She can’t put it down, and I start to think the bone owns her. The bone has finally found a dog and now will not let go of the new owner. Poor Penny is now doomed to carry around her new owner the bone. I think she should chew it, enjoy it, and then leave it for the next dog who comes along. I think she should let go.

We attach ourselves closely to our current efforts. We define ourselves by what we’re working on at the moment, but it’s important to understand you are not your latest project, in the same way you are not the car you drive or the clothes you wear. Hopefully your work will change over time. Hopefully you’ll create a new job. Hopefully, what you are doing at the moment is learning for the next thing you create.

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
– Albert Einstein

Our level of curiosity has a strong influence on our ability to learn unrelated things, the kinds of things that appear in our peripheral vision, come out of left field, drop in over the transom. Instead of being distracted and annoyed by surprises and uninvited interruptions, are you open to new and unrelated ideas?

Dr. Matthias Gruber and his colleagues performed an interesting study in which they found that curious people have better memories of extraneous information. In their study, first they showed participants a series of questions, and asked participants how curious they are about the answers (Who was president when Uncle Sam first appeared with a beard? What does the word ‘dinosaur’ mean?).

Then, before the participants were shown the answers to the questions, they were briefly shown a photograph of a face, a fairly nondescript face of someone. Then the participant was told the answer (Dinosaur means ‘terrible lizard’).

The interesting part came next. Those who said they were curious about the answers to the questions were almost twice as likely to accurately remember the faces shown, the extraneous information.

“Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it,”
– Dr. Matthias Gruber

We already know we learn better when we are interested in something. But it turns out that we notice, and remember, unrelated things when we are curious. Stay curious my friends.

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Related article: Learning goals are stronger than performance goals

Act Your Way Into a New Way of Thinking

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“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting.”

– Jerry Sternin

How do we help someone learn something new, or attempt something difficult? Instead of adjusting rewards and incentives, or scaring people with negative punishments, try changing the environment.

Disney’s Animal Kingdom has an attraction called Kilimanjaro Safaris. It’s one of their premier attractions, just behind Expedition Everest in terms of tourist volume. And if you take the eighteen minute safari you will be awed by the sight of Black Rhino, Cheetah, Elephant, Flamingo, Gazelle, Giraffe, Hippo, Lion, or Wildebeest.

As you admire the lions sitting nobly on a grand rock for the tourists as they pass by, you might think it all looks a bit staged, a bit orchestrated, just a wee bit too convenient to have a noble lion poised on a rock just as you roll by in your propane fueled jeep. Because it is.

The engineers at Disney have created climate-controlled rocks, so in the hot summer months when a big lion might prefer to hide in the shade, they are instead enticed to nap on the artificially cool rock. Or in the chilly winter relax on the artificially warmed rock. All for the pleasure of the tourists.

You can’t often make a lion do things she doesn’t want to do, just as you can’t coerce performance from the people around you. Sometimes it’s best to instead create the environment and the circumstance for people to learn new things.

We all want to possess those traits of honesty, respect, humility, perseverance, gratitude, self-discipline, and willpower. We want our kids to have these traits. We want our colleagues to behave like this. But these are not behaviors we can learn just by being told or reminded. We have to live them. We have to experience them.

To understand perseverance, we have to actually persevere through something difficult. To understand gratitude, we have to discover what it means to be sincerely grateful. To possess problem-solving skills, we have to first solve some real problems.

This summer two other fathers and I took our teenage kids and bicycled from Seattle to Portland, Maine. The seven of us pedaled over the Cascade mountains and into Yakima valley, over the Idaho Bitterroots, through Paradise Valley Montana and into Yellowstone, onward to the Bighorn Plateau of Wyoming, Thunder Basin, Devil’s Tower and across the plains of South Dakota and the Cheyenne reservation, across Lake Michigan (on a ferry), into Canada over Lake Ontario, down through the northern kingdom of Vermont and into Maine.

It was adventurous, beautiful, painful, and joyous. And it required that we collaborate, persevere, and solve problems on a daily, even hourly basis.

Our brains like complexity and challenge. We stay more alert in changing environments as we try to understand and assimilate new contexts and new circumstances. When we want innovative outcomes, or new habits for ourselves or for those around us, instead of changing motivational influences, try changing the physical environment.

To accelerate Innovation on your team, see Out•Innovate the Competition by Stephen Shapiro. Message me and I’ll send access to preview the course. It’s awesome.

    ____________________________________________________

SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com