diana kander – Workplace Navigator

I can make things a lot harder than they need to be. In fact, as Greg McKeown writes in his book, Effortless, “Challenge the assumption that the “right” way is, inevitably, the harder one.” I remember seeing Diana Kander last year at a coaching conference and her saying that we have an additive bias. So instead of what do I need to add to my list, what should I stop doing? This came up for me recently in my morning routine. I have been doing a brain teaser app for almost ten years. The majority of the games are no fun for me anymore, I’ve long ago plateaued at a certain level and it’s become an annoyance. So, I stopped doing it. McKeown sheds light on the things I rarely question because it’s a habit or it’s expected or I’m in an out-of-date paradigm.

Here are 6 tips towards effortlessness:

Find easy. McKeown recommends asking yourself, “What if this could be easy?” McKeown calls this Effortless Inversion. He shares an experience when he over prepared for a presentation on leadership, and because he over prepared, he bombed. I facilitate trainings frequently and I know if I have cue cards or too strict an agenda, it’s never as good as when I am in the moment and adapt and adjust to the audience. Something is taking too long but the group is in a zone? Cut the content piece that will take 15 minutes. I’ve learned in over 30 years of facilitation; the easiest course is the best instead of trying to cram everything I ever knew on the subject into the heads of the participants. Look for the easy path.

Presence. It’s so easy to get caught up in a work messaging channel, your social media feed or your news feed. I think of how a crawler on the bottom of a screen just creates a sense of doom. I feel like I have to read so I don’t miss out but 99% of the time it’s not critical. When my mind is distracted, everything seems harder. I can’t seem to catch a break and be in the present moment. McKeown suggests clearing the clutter (in this case visual clutter). Get rid of the irrelevant so you can make space for what matters. When I get caught up in overwhelm, I head outside for a 10-minute walk to flush out the clutter. Being present makes things more effortless.

Add joy. “It’s no secret that many essential activities that are not particularly joyful in the moment produce moments of joy later on,” writes McKeown. “But essential activities don’t have to be enjoyed only in retrospect. We can also experience joy in the activity itself.” I have learned to enjoy doing the dishes. I also try to add joy by either playing dance music while I put the laundry away or listen to books or podcasts while commuting or on long drives. I look forward to long drives because I know I’ll probably finish a book I’m reading and get to start a new one. I light a candle when I meditate although while I find it essential, I don’t find it to be arduous. It helps me look forward to it though. Figure out ways to add joy.

Just start. When I finished reading 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, my biggest takeaway was doing what he calls “serializing” which is putting aside 30, 60 or 90 minutes a day across the work week to do focus work. You don’t have to label it with a specific task, you just need to get started on whatever has risen to the top of your to do list that requires focus. The main thing is to just start. Because most focus work takes more than 30 minutes to do, you start but don’t finish. We procrastinate because, if we don’t have time to finish, we don’t start. If you let go of the idea that you have to finish, it’s much easier to get started. McKeown writes, “Instead of procrastinating, wasting enormous amounts of time and effort planning for a million possible scenarios, we can opt for taking the minimum viable first action: the action that will allow us to gain the maximum learning from the least amount of effort.” Take the minimum viable first step.

Fail cheaply. Practically everything I write is what Anne Lamont calls a $hitty first draft. I don’t bother perfecting outside of obvious typos if I glance back at the last sentence. My long-suffering editor Susan can attest to this. The main thing to me is to get started and get the words and ideas on paper. I don’t get wrapped up in perfection. I’ve seen many of my clients get stuck in perfection. In James Clear’s Atomic Habits, there was a classroom of photographers who were divided into two groups, the quantity group (take as many photos as you can) and the quality group (focus on each photo being perfect). At the end of the semester the quantity group had the best photos. Fail cheaply and often.

Set limits. This is all about setting a pace. A pace that can be maintained. I think of my calendar, I don’t want to work past 4 PM. It’s a rare week when I do. I also don’t work Friday afternoons. I never write more than one blog post a week. As McKeown wrote, an effortless pace: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Reject the false economy of “powering through.” Create the right range: I will never do less than X, never more than Y. Recognize that not all progress is created equal. Keep a range and pace that works on a consistent basis.

Simple and effortless is easier than hard and complex. It’s about keeping boundaries, letting others know what they are and keeping yourself accountable. Which will you try first?

I was fortunate to attend the bi-annual International Coaching Foundation’s Converge Conference in August and see the keynote, Diana Kander. She brought up some innovative ways to change up problem solving for individuals, teams and organizations. Kander is a petite woman yet she owns the stage with thought provoking concepts and humor. She was a refugee from Ukraine at the age of 8; and is an author, entrepreneur and a fireball of determination.

Here are her 4 ways to kickstart innovation:

Is this the right problem? Think about your current offerings; are they solving the right problem or are they focused on “Is this the right solution?” I think of a tortilla manufacturing company who decided to retrofit the manufacturing plant to make tiny fried tostada shells. They focused on the solution of increasing sales by adding another item on the grocery shelf but the real problem was producing enough regular tortillas to meet demand. I remember looking for a box of Ritz crackers few years back and all I wanted was a “regular” box of crackers and there were upwards of 15 different types on the shelf. Some were even football shaped and/or low sodium. What problem were they trying to solve? I think of managers who look to tighten deadlines to get more productivity as a solution when the problem is really the process in which items are handed off within the team or that someone needs more training on the team. If someone needs more training, a tighter deadline is not the right solution if the problem is productivity. Be sure to focus on the right problem.

Who else can we ask? It’s important to be focused using the right resource instead of on what else we can try. Kander brings up an issue at a children’s hospital in Great Britain that had a high mortality and complication rate after children were transferred after surgery. They were able to reframe the problem and ask folks from a Ferrari race car team to come in and look at the time and communication it took to transfer the patient after surgery. The Ferrari pit crew was able to reduce the time and mishaps significantly by focusing on communication problems and breakdowns during handoffs. When I coach people and I ask, “Is there another resource you could talk to about this that you haven’t thought of before?” It’s amazing to see the light bulbs go off. Sometimes you realize that you have a cousin who’s really good at time management or have an old friend that is great at finding a deal. Figure out who else you can ask.

Is it a 1-10? How does the solution rank on a scale of 1 to 10 instead of “Is it a yes or no?” I can think of a product an old employer added several years ago and I remember the discussion the leadership team had about adding the product. I can tell you that if we had asked everyone in the room how they felt about this new product on a scale of 1 to 10, we would not have spent the next five years trying figure out how to add the product into into all of our systems and processes. Focusing on the binary view of yes or no is so limiting and it’s not an expression of confidence in the product or service. So, if you ask your partner if they want to go to Aruba or Switzerland, ask them how they feel about it on a scale of 1 to 10. As a coach, I ask clients how confident they are in completing whatever task they committed to on a scale of 1 to 10. If they are a 7, I ask what would it take for them to get to a 9. To say you are going to do something is not the same as measuring your motivation on a scale of 1 to 10. Focus your efforts on the 8, 9 and 10’s.

What should we stop? This was a big learning for me. Kander mentioned something called the additive bias. This is where we are constantly adding to do more instead of less. My clients (and I!) fall into this bias all the time. The way to better time management is through using a new app or getting up earlier or being more efficient with email. We add more things to the list instead of subtracting. It’s quite easy to buy stuff at the store but it’s an entirely different thing to get rid of stuff I don’t need or use any more. Managers will feel like they have to attend every meeting instead of delegating one or two meetings to someone who could grow from it or to ask a peer to give them the notes. We attend the meeting and then “multi task” doing email or slacking and aren’t really present for the meeting. To multitask during a meeting is one of the most exhausting things to do because we are skimming everything…the emails, the slack messages AND the meeting. We aren’t present for any of it. Think about what you can subtract.

One last thing to point out is that you should innovate but you have to be able to cut your losses. Kander calls these Zombies. Things that are more effort than the value they add. She showed over 15 products that Amazon had added and then torpedoed in the last ten years because they were more effort than the value they added. What zombies are in your life?