How to take action
Chapter 3 - Thinking
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Welcome to the action page
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- Nature never betters one characteristic. It enhances the whole. In business, optimisation of the individual (with productivity as a goal) should be replaced by improving the team, the department, and the entire organisation.
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Core ideas
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What we can leave behind
Exit willpower
| Once you have your goal, how do you go about pursuing it in your day-to-day life? There is a popular belief that what is needed is willpower. Indeed, a recent poll in the US found that people cited a lack of willpower and ‘being lazy’ as the main reasons they would fail at their New Year’s resolutions. It’s true that willpower can work in the moment. Studies show that when people report more effort at resisting a temptation, they are less likely to give in. But over the longer term, it’s a different story. Consider one of my studies published in 2017 in which I asked 159 participants to set themselves four personal goals and then use their smartphones to track throughout each day, for a week, the desires and temptations they experienced (more than 2,300 collectively), and the extent to which they used self-control to resist them. Three months later, the participants reported their progress on their goals, and it turned out that using more self-control, or using it more frequently, was unrelated to goal progress. In other words, repeatedly using self-control to resist desires that interfere with your goals is unlikely to help with goal attainment down the road. |
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| Marina Milyavskaya - To meet your goals, forget willpower and fill your toolbox - Aeon - 2022 |
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Exit to much
| A decade ago, the American psychologist Adam Grant argued in a journal paper that this ‘too much of a good thing’ phenomenon might be a general rule. Some motivation produces excellent performance; too much motivation produces choking. Some group collaboration produces cohesion and enhances productivity; too much of it leads to staleness. Some empathy enables you to understand what another person is going through; too much could prevent you from saying and doing hard things. |
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| Efficiency - Aeon |
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Taking the next step
(Active) Experiential (thinking)
Experiential is a far more rich concept than experience. Experiential is in the first place about creating the proper context where people can start learning. Inducing a sole dominant narrative becomes a burden if it is not adaptable to changing situations because between purpose and productivity stands a relational process. This process is about the intended active use of memory, knowledge, thinking and imagination to compass primary experiences to create a model of a foreseeable future. This includes, among other things, Bayesian, complex, systems, causal and model thinking.
Being human, we tend to treat our experiences through one of these four perspectives:
- A constructivist perspective holds that what we experience we can conveniently group in sets of manifestations
- A diagnostic perspective holds that we divide what we experience into latent classes underlying the manifestations
- A dimensional perspective holds that what we experience we measure with latent continua
- A causal systems perspective holds that we experience causal networks consisting of manifestations and direct causal relations between them
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Thinking about Growth
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| But by approximately 70,000 year ago, we have unambiguous evidence of the advent of a full-scale “Cognitive Revolution” that empowered Homo sapiens to do what they have been doing ever since: transform the world, for better and for worse, through cognition and cooperation. This is the point at which human beings began to create culture, processing their environments through symbols and signs, which they continuously recombined and rearranged in language.It is the point, we can be certain, at which human beings began to stop treating the world, as other creatures do, essentially as a given, and their relationship to it as fixed. It is the point, as one observer aptly puts it, “when history declared its independence from biology". (1) |
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| (1) | Equality - D. McMahon - Ithaka - 2024 |
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GROW as an acronym
The GROW model of coaching has been designed by Sir John Whitmore and is central to his best-selling book ‘Coaching for Performance’. This coaching model can be used to structure mentoring conversations. In a 2009 article, John Whitmore claimed that Max Landsberg coined the name GROW during a conversation with Graham Alexander and that Whitmore was the first to publish it in the 1992 first edition of his book Coaching for Performance. Landsberg also published it a few years later in the 1996 first edition of his book The Tao of Coaching. Elsewhere Whitmore said that the model had been in use for some time before it was given the name GROW. Alan Fine's 2010 book You Already Know How to Be Great claimed that Fine had codeveloped the model with Whitmore and Alexander. Other (later) similar models include collaborative helping maps in family therapy and Gabriele Oettingen's WOOP model. (1)
Goal
Define a clear and specific goal that we want to achieve.
Reality
Assess the current situation, including any obstacles or challenges that may be preventing from achieving the goal.
Options
Brainstorm potential solutions and strategies for overcoming the obstacles and achieving the goal.
What is to be done?
Identify any actions that need to be taken and create a plan for moving forward, including a timeline and accountability measures.
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WOOP as an acronym
WOOP (an acronym for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) is a scientific strategy that people can use to identify and fulfill their wishes and change their habits. It is a combination of two self-regulatory strategies: mental contrasting by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and implementation intentions by psychologist Peter M. Gollwitzer. Mental contrasting contributes the “WOO” part (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle) in WOOP, whereas Implementation Intentions contribute the “P” part (Plan). (2)
Mental contrasting
Mental contrasting (MC) is a self-regulatory strategy to change cognition, emotion, and behavior. It was introduced introduced by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen (New York University, University of Hamburg) in 1997. It enables people to discriminate between feasible and unfeasible wishes and concerns. This, in turn, strengthens wish fulfillment and goal pursuit when expectations of success are high, and weakens it when expectations of success are low, thus allowing people to adjust their aspirations or pursue alternative more promising goals. In mental contrasting, you first positively fantasize about a wishedfor future and then mentally elaborate the current reality that stands in the way of realizing that future. By imagining the future and then imagining the critical obstacles of reality, people understand that in order to realize the wished-for future, one has to act on the current reality.
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