Category: Decision Making

Team Knowledge Management

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What is the best way to share knowledge within an organization?

Most organizations have never thought about this problem. Those that have often use solutions such as virtual discussion forums or open office spaces that they hope will naturally bring people together. However, these attempts seem to rarely create the sharing synergy needed to move the organization forward. What can be done about this?

Tiago Forte has studied this challenge and believes his PARA system can be used to address it. In a recent posting on the Forte Labs website, he shares that a bottom-up approach is more likely to succeed.

All of this leads to my conclusion that modern organizations need to take a “bottom-up” approach to knowledge management instead of a top-down one. It can’t be about “extracting” knowledge from their people; it has to be about empowering them to do their absolute best work.

He then shares five recommendations on how to create this team knowledge management environment. The first step is getting clear on the organization’s flavor of PARA.

Even if you’ve decided you’re going to follow my advice to the letter, there is always a “flavor” of PARA that makes sense for your culture. This can include decisions such as:

  • What is our definition of a “project,” “area of responsibility,” “resource” and “archive”?
  • What needs to happen when we kick off a new project for it to be considered “active”?
  • What needs to happen when a project gets completed, put on hold, or canceled (for it to be considered “inactive”)?
  • Who is responsible for maintaining the standard for each shared area of responsibility?
  • What are the officially supported platforms on which PARA will be used?
  • What are the strict rules, softer “rules of thumb,” dos and don’ts, and cultural norms that govern how people will use PARA?
  • Who will be the “PARA Champion” who oversees its implementation and makes sure the guidelines are being followed?

Learn the other four recommendations at the Forte Labs website.

Choosing What To Do

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It’s Monday morning – how are you going to start your week? What is the most useful task to get done first? How will you ensure the most important parts of your upcoming projects will be done? Also, how will you ensure that nothing is missed along the way?

Following the core concepts of GTD can help anyone prioritize their day. In a recent blog post, the folks at Getting Things Done shared the five fundamental steps to successful workflow. They also took time to explain the limiting factors affecting the abilty to engage. Below is an excerpt from their article.

The five steps of GTD workflow are Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage. When it’s time to Engage, people often ask how to choose from what may be long lists of tasks to do. That’s when it’s helpful to use the criteria for choosing:

Context – What place, tool, or person will the action require? This is the first limitation for choosing–it has to be. If you’re not in the right place, don’t have the right tool, or access to the required person, you can’t take the action.

Time available – How much time do you have to take the action? If you have 20 minutes, only consider actions that you think will take less than 20 minutes.

Resources – What is your energy like to take the action? Have you been in back-to-back meetings all day and you’re tired? Or are you just finishing your morning coffee and feeling alert and enthusiastic? You’re probably already considering this more than you realize when you choose what to do.

Priorities – What’s the most important one to choose based on your roles, goals, long-term strategy, and purpose?

Read the whole post and learn more about how the Horizons of Focus can be a great guide to engage effectively.

How Managers Can Help Their Team Focus

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Have you ever been on a team that lost its focus? You and your teammates may have wasted time wandering down dead ends, getting caught up arguing over trivial items, or had assumed next actions lie incomplete due to a lack of delegation? While there are many contributing factors to such failures, a good manager can make or break a team.

In an increasingly distracted world, one skill that can elevate managers is the ability to focus their team on the priorities. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, GTD founder David Allen and Justin Hale break down seven ways that managers can help their teams focus on work. Not surprisingly, the ideas are born out the GTD principles. This first suggestion is to inventory tasks and projects.

This is a discipline where common sense is not common practice. If your people don’t have a complete list of their commitments and projects, they can’t realistically prioritize. As a leader, hold people accountable for keeping current to-do lists and give them time each week to do a full weekly review of these commitments so they can stay in control.

Another way managers can help their employees focus is to make meetings meaningful.

Most people’s workdays are monopolized by meetings. Help employees stay focused by allowing them to decline meaningless meetings. To improve meeting efficacy, one manager we coached set a bold precedent. He said, “If someone invites you to a meeting without a clear agenda and reasons why you’re vital to the success of the meeting, you have my permission to decline it.” This manager put the onus back on the meeting creator (which was often himself) to show greater respect for others’ time. It also put employees in control of their days so they could focus on high-priority work.

Read the other five suggestions at the Harvard Business Review website.

Productivity Propaganda?

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At first glance it would seem that productivity is a good thing. After all, who doesn’t want to get more done in less time? However, what happens if the push for increased productivity comes at the expense of enjoyment of life? Does it matter if you get more done if that which is being done is of little value?

Digital anthropologist and author Rahaf Harfoush recently explored this topic in a book called Hustle & Float: Reclaim Your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed With Work. In her book she explored workplace burnout and how to avoid it. Bloomberg Businessweek interviewed her during the COVID pandemic to learn more about how to balance work and life in the era or work-from-home.

This isn’t a normal time, so it shouldn’t be treated as normal work-from-home time. The lines between home and work, personal and professional, are blurred with an additional pressure to be productive since the thinking is that we all suddenly have more available time. This isn’t the case, and furthermore, working nonstop simply doesn’t work. We have turned busyness into a coping mechanism. Now, people are applying that to their personal time while sheltering at home, filling it with back-to-back Zoom calls, baking, workouts, and more activity. It’s important to use some of this time to process our emotions and reflect on the discomfort from all this productivity propaganda. Operating as usual will not only negatively affect your work but could compromise your health.

The interview ended with a warning for those who work around the clock.

If you’re a high performer and recovery isn’t an intentional and strategic part of your time and workflow, you’re only damaging your output in the long run.

Read the whole interview online.

Are You Overthinking?

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Have you ever slept on decision? Spent weeks debating both sides of a problem? Kept looking for that extra bit of information to sway you one way or the other? If so, you may have been overthinking!

While thoughtful deliberation can be very helpful to make a decision, it is also easy to waste too much time before making a choice. Sometimes this is driven by a lack of confidence, other times it is fear of making a mistake, and simply worrying about how other people may react.

Harvard Business Review writer Melody Wilding looking into the issue and wrote a short article to outline ways to prevent overthinking. The first tip is to avoid seeking perfection.

Perfectionism is one of the biggest blockers to swift, effective decision-making because it operates on faulty all-or-nothing thinking. For example, perfectionism can lead you to believe that if you don’t make the “correct” choice (as if there is only one right option), then you are a failure. Or that you must know everything, anticipate every eventuality, and have a thorough plan in place before making a move. Trying to weigh every possible outcome and consideration is paralyzing.

Photo by KoolShooters on Pexels.com

What are the ways to avoid this trap? Wilding suggests you ask yourself these questions:

  • Which decision will have the biggest positive impact on my top priorities?
  • Of all the possible people I could please or displease, which one or two people do I least want to disappoint?
  • What is one thing I could do today that would bring me closer to my goal?
  • Based on what I know and the information I have at this moment, what’s the best next step?

Learn four more ways to avoid overthinking by reading the entire article.

After you finish reading, consider this question: What decision are you overthinking?

Once you identify one, pick one of the five tips to help reach a resolution. Then enjoy the clarity that comes from making a final decision.

Steps to Successful Resolutions

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It’s that time of year again, the end of the year that is, when people consider making New Year’s Resolutions. The changing of the calendar is often seen as a time to install new habits and behaviors, but the rub is that it rarely works. The web site, Discover Happy Habits breaks down the rather depressing numbers:

According to a 2016 study, of the 41% of Americans who make New Year’s resolutions, by the end of the year only 9% feel they are successful in keeping them.

Part of the problem is that the initial enthusiasm for the resolution fades over time. However, the article also shares many other reasons they fail:

  • In one 2014 study, 35% of participants who failed their New Year’s Resolutions said they had unrealistic goals.
  • 33% of participants who failed didn’t keep track of their progress.
  • 23% forgot about their resolutions.
  • About one in 10 people who failed said they made too many resolutions.
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Should we simply abandon the practice of making resolutions? Probably not. After all, if there is something in your life you want to change, it is important to start at a specific point. However, one cannot rely on willpower or excitement alone to make it work. To help make a change stick, the article shares four success tips.

The first tip is to develop the necessary skills and mindset ahead of time:

Multiple studies have shown that self‐efficacy and readiness to change predicted positive outcomes for those who made New Year’s resolutions.

Having the skills necessary to change was another important factor.

Conversely, social support and behavioral skills were not predictors of a successful outcome.

In another study, men achieved their goal 22% more often when they engaged in goal setting and set their New Year’s resolutions in terms of small and measurable goals such as “lose 1 pound a week” instead of “lose weight”.

Read the other tips and then put them into practice to help you succeed.

Happy 2023!

Avoiding Procrastination Regret

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Have you ever put off doing something? Of course, you have!

However, have you ever put off doing something for a long time, years even? Perhaps it is taking that dream vacation, or switching careers, making a commitment to exercise, or telling that special someone you love them? If we wait too long to try new things or take risks, this procrastination can lead to regret. How do we avoid it?

On his blog, Darious Foroux recently shared his thoughts on procrastination.

We all know that putting off our dreams for one week turns into a month, then into a year, and then into decades, and finally, we die with regret.

If that sounds harsh, it’s because it is harsh. When you keep procrastinating you become one of those people who never do what they say. 

How do we change our behavior to avoid regret? Foroux offers ten behaviors that challenge us to keep moving forward. The first one is stay curious.

Never stop getting excited about doing new things. If you let your curiosity drive you, you will never run out of motivation and inspiration.

Along with curiosity, he advises us to never stop learning.

Your curiosity will lead you to new topics, challenges, goals, and desires. To achieve those things, we need to learn more. When you do that every day, you keep making progress.

Review the other eight on his blog, then see if they can help you avoid the regret of prolonged procrastination.

Thriving in Uncertainty

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With all the rapid changes happening around us, it seems like the only certainty is more uncertainty. While some enjoy the chaos, the everchanging landscape makes it hard to set worthwhile goals that can be realistically achieved. Rather than give up, is there a way to cope with uncertainty?

Tiago Forte explores this question in a recent post on this website titled How to Thrive in a World of Uncertainty. It is part of his exploration of the concept of 12 Favorite Problems. In this piece, he shares an important shift to our thinking that makes all the difference.

Goal-setting was once central to our conception of what it means to navigate the future successfully. But goals can no longer serve as guides to an unfolding future that we have so little control over.

But this doesn’t mean that we have to throw up our hands in defeat. It doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do to influence our fate. It just requires us to make a shift from leading with goals to leading with questions. 

What does he mean by this? In essence, he proposes a way to embrace the uncertainty and use it as a force for creativity and accomplishment.

Questions ask you to start with what you don’t know but would like to discover. They draw in others to pitch in and make their own contributions. They serve as open invitations to collaborative projects, versus the solitary path of individualistic achievement envisioned by goals.

In a world of uncertainty, questions are more powerful than answers. Answers serve you for a season, but a question lasts forever.

Read the posting to learn more about this shift in perspective, including three values proposed by physicist Richard Feynman that can make the transition smoother and more enjoyable.

The Fear That Should Scare You the Most

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It is the day before Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve Eve?) and most people’s thoughts turn to frights! This is the season when we enjoy being scared. Of course, fears stay with us the entire year, but in the spirit of the spooky season, now is an ideal time to consider the fear that scares you the most.

Shola Richards has looked fear in the eye and blogged about it. In a post titled, Never Too Late, he shared the one thing that he fears the most. It is not snakes, vampires, the dark, or taxes, but something much simpler and profound.

I have always found it so strange when people say that they’re fearless. Let me tell you upfront that I’m not one of those people.

Just like most rationally thinking human beings, I have fears (quite a few, to be honest). And without question, this is the fear that scares me the most:

Looking back on my life and realizing that I haven’t lived fully.

How is that his greatest fear? Shola proceeds to tell us exactly why over the next few sentences.

If you are going to be afraid of something, don’t be afraid of what may happen if you decide to fully live your life and chase your dreams.

Instead, be afraid of what will happen if you decide not to fully live your life and allow the ghosts of “what might have been” to haunt you relentlessly for the rest of your days until you finally die with a pitiful whimper.

That’s freaking terrifying to me. It should be for you too.

Through this post, Shola is issuing a challenge. What plan or dream for your life is being left to gather dust on the shelf due to fear of failure or ridicule? Just as on Halloween we face illusionary frights then laugh about it afterwards, why not do the same with the fears around your goals?

Face the fear and see what happens next.

It may not be as scary as you fear.