Cooperation is about working toward the benefit of the group. If what we are doing doesn’t benefit everyone involved, then it’s not cooperation. It’s something else. It could be ministry or service, where it helps others. Or, it could be selfishness, where it only benefits a small group or us.
Read MoreModern Craft Skills: Bonding
Between hard work and enthusiasm is us and how we interact with one another. When trying to get something accomplished, most managers, under the pressures of the business, will offer the advice, “You don’t need to like each other or be best friends to accomplish a goal.” That might be true, but study after study indicates that trust is a crucial ingredient to effective teams. It is also the foundation of friendship.
Read MoreThe Prepared Mind: Skills v States
To tackle the wicked problems of our present and future, we need to embrace a strange, counter-intuitive irony: as organizations across all sectors continue to create and adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, employees need to stay relevant by increasing their subjective intelligence.
My research on master craftsmen and how they gain mastery might be the place to seek initial solutions. One way to do that is to increase self-awareness with your inner experience. As you learn to manage your feelings, you clear the way to develop a greater feel for your work.
Credit: Alina Grubnyak
Living and working with Craft is about being confident in your vision, knowing how to get there, and what it will do for your life. Most of us focus on the how—those more tangible skills that map where we need to be.
Because the idea of mission and fulfillment are more ethereal—they require a bit of a leap of faith. In the space between hard skills and soft skills lies the unknown. In the unknown is where a whole spectrum of emotions from excitement to anxiety reside.
When we are confronted by emotions that trouble us we reach for the concrete. We focus on the result.
For example, constructive self-talk is the skill to mastering a state of confidence in any condition—but how many of us think of that while we are beating ourselves up for not being confident? Regulated breathing is the skill to mastering a state of being calm in any condition—but how often are we gaining awareness of our breathing when we feel under attack by a manager or peer?
When we get into environments that are stressful or have pressure and consequence, and we abandon our goals and skills only to survive, it’s because we lack the mental skills. Effective self-management comes through honed skills like constructive self-talk and regulated breathing while one is under pressure. We have to be tested over and over and over again to develop mastery of mental skills.
As you explore your inner world, your outer world will come more sharply into focus.
As you face your imagined barriers, you will encounter real ones, as well.
—Julia Cameron
PRACTICE: How do you apply this idea yourself?
Write in a journal. Write without stopping for 15 minutes every day. Increase that time if you can or want to. If you can be honest on paper, you can find out who you are.
For people new to journaling, there is a pressure to choose certain words to express. Sometimes you self-edit, sometimes you gain clarity. With clarity comes conviction.
Everyone has a voice. When it comes to being effective, it's critical to listen to its tone and content.
If you find yourself blaming your (mental) tools, do something about it. Learn about mental models, learn from how Craftsmen talk about how they learn and get better at what they do and more importantly, take ownership. Moving forward requires change but change by itself does not mean that you are moving forward. As Socrates said, “The un-examined life is not worth living.”
Christine Haskell, Ph.D. is a leadership consultant and adjunct faculty at Washington State University. She helps busy leaders take responsibility for their learning and development. She writes on the topic of “Craftsmanship and The Future of Work.” sharing lessons from master craftsmen and women on personal and professional mastery, is due out late 2019. Sign up for her (semi-regular) newsletter here.
Modern Craft Skills: Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm is about genuine enjoyment. We will only succeed if we have some excitement for what we are doing. It is what gets us through the hard times. When we genuinely enjoy what we do, if we have enthusiasm for it, we’ll do better and come closer to reaching our potential.
Read MoreModern Craft Skills: Deliberate Practice
Deliberate Practice is made up of hard work and planning.
HARD WORK
There is no substitute for the ability to deliberately showing up. Hard work is not always about working hard. Sometimes finding the easiest way to solve a problem can also be a sign of elegant, efficient thinking. Bill Gates has stated, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” In the long run, however, that engineer won’t fully develop their talents, wrestle with complexity, and innovate on the tough problems. That requires a more serious application of effort.
There is a time in our careers when we think; I’m going to do what I do better than anyone else. As we mature our thinking shifts to; I’m going to do what I do to the best of my ability. Some people interpret that statement as accepting 3rd place. Competing against one’s self is a sign of maturity. We learn later in our lives that we only have control over ourselves.
As we gain depth in our craft—whatever that is—we learn to critique and evaluate our work. We read up on the topic, take classes to advance our knowledge, and connect with others doing something similar. Sometimes we mentor and teach novices, seeing through their eyes, further deepening our understanding of the skill, context, and ability to improvise. We view our craft from multiple perspectives.
PRACTICE
Choose an aspect of your craft and study it thoroughly.
Make a list of issues in your life that need some hard work.
Choose one area and establish a plan to develop excellence.
Who will you contact?
What will you read?
What will you do?
COMMIT
[ ] I commit to myself a lifestyle of hard work so that I can reach my fullest potential.
PLANNING
Hard work, when unfocused, can lead us astray. Showing up to practice is one thing, but how much time to we invest in preparing for an effective practice? Planning is a key component of hard work.
Hard work + Planning = Deliberate Practice
The University of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari and Seattle Seahawks football coach Pete Carrol are accomplished and respected coaches that have achieved impressive results. Both cite former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden as a primary career mentor. Coach Wooden meticulously planned every aspect of his teams’ practice. He calculated drills to the minute. Every element of their sessions is choreographed, including where the practice balls were placed. Coaches do not want any time lost by players running to a misplaced equipment bin.
Practices start and end on time. If practice does not end on time, players start to hold back a little effort and save their energy. Coaches want their players to try their best throughout practice, so they become sticklers for time management. If we carefully orchestrate our practice, we work harder and get more done in less time.
If we are to rise in our Craft, we need to work hard, but we also need to be deliberate about the time we are putting in. Planning places effort where effort is most needed. People who combine these two ideas have a firm foundation of deliberate practice upon which they can move toward success.
Make a list of the activities you do each week.
Estimate the time spent on each activity.
Does the time spent reflect the amount of time you’d like to spend?
Do you start and end on time?
What changes do you need to make to better manage your time and become more deliberate in your practice?
COMMIT
[ ] I commit to myself to establishing and maintaining a time of reflection.
Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves successfully in their pursuit of mastery. Learn more about applying craft skills in the modern world.
GOOD HUMANING: Coming together and falling apart..on the road to repair.
“Things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” ~ Pema Chödrön
Important to consider when shooting for resolution or results. The tangible outcomes we favor are often more ethereal than we would like to admit. Sometimes a friendship lasts for a time, sometimes a lifetime. What resolves a situation today might only be a band-aid for what we need to reckon with tomorrow.
If change truly is the only constant, then any “resolution” is impermanent by definition.
Which brings me to this visual.
Photo Credit: unknown Wabi Sabi bowl.
In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete".
In essence, the process is the result.
This post-series is about trying to anchor my experience by exploring within and reminding myself about what it means to practice "good humaning." It's about moving forward imperfectly. To follow this thread in my posts, look for these tags: #NotesFromMyYogaJournal
Christine Haskell, Ph.D. is a leadership consultant and adjunct faculty at Washington State University. She helps busy leaders take responsibility for their learning and development. She writes on the topic of “Craftsmanship and The Future of Work.” sharing lessons from master craftsmen and women on personal and professional mastery, is due out late 2019. Sign up for her (semi-regular) newsletter here.
Emotions are a tool
[ from Neuroscience News ]
Summary: People have more control over how their emotions are influenced by others than previously thought. Researchers found people who wanted to stay calm when presented with upsetting stimuli remained unfazed by angry emotions expressed by others. However, when they wanted to feel angry, they were more highly influenced by others who were angry.
Source: Stanford
Photo Credit: Neuroscience News
In a new study, Stanford psychologists examined why some people respond differently to an upsetting situation and learned that people’s motivations play an important role in how they react.
Their study found that when a person wanted to stay calm, they remained relatively unfazed by angry people, but if they wanted to feel angry, then they were highly influenced by angry people. The researchers also discovered that people who wanted to feel angry also got more emotional when they learned that other people were just as upset as they were, according to the results from a series of laboratory experiments the researchers conducted.
Their findings, published June 13 in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, reveal that people have more control over how their emotions get influenced than previously realized, the researchers said.
“We have long known that people often try to regulate their emotions when they believe that they are unhelpful,” said James Gross, a professor of psychology at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. “This set of studies extends this insight by showing that people can also regulate the way they are influenced by others’ emotions.”
….
Researchers have largely assumed that people’s emotions get influenced automatically – in an unconscious, immediate response to other people’s emotions, said Goldenberg. His team’s new research challenges that perspective, he said.
“Our emotions are not passive nor automatic,” Goldenberg said. “They are a little bit of a tool. We have the ability to use our emotions to achieve certain goals. We express certain emotions to convince other people to join our collective cause. On social media, we use emotions to signal to other people that we care about the issues of a group to make sure people know we’re a part of it.”
Further research needs to be done in order to understand the relationship between people and their emotions. One of the next topics Goldenberg says he wants to examine further is whether the desire of people to want to see and experience certain emotions around them lies at the core of how they choose their network of friends and other people around them.
“It seems that the best way to regulate your emotions is to start with the selection of your environment,” Goldenberg said. “If you don’t want to be angry today, one way to do that is to avoid angry people. Do some people have an ingrained preference for stronger emotions than others? That’s one of my next questions.”
Christine Haskell, PHD has built her practice on credible, published research and data. In the Research Series, you’ll find highlights, shareable statistics, and links to the full source material.
Fundamentals of workplace automation
[ From McKinsey ]
As the automation of physical and knowledge work advances, many jobs will be redefined rather than eliminated—at least in the short term.
The potential of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics to perform tasks once reserved for humans is no longer reserved for spectacular demonstrations by the likes of IBM’s Watson, Rethink Robotics’ Baxter, DeepMind, or Google’s driverless car. Just head to an airport: automated check-in kiosks now dominate many airlines’ ticketing areas. Pilots actively steer aircraft for just three to seven minutes of many flights, with autopilot guiding the rest of the journey. Passport-control processes at some airports can place more emphasis on scanning document bar codes than on observing incoming passengers.
What will be the impact of automation efforts like these, multiplied many times across different sectors of the economy? Can we look forward to vast improvements in productivity, freedom from boring work, and improved quality of life? Should we fear threats to jobs, disruptions to organizations, and strains on the social fabric?
Earlier this year, we launched research to explore these questions and investigate the potential that automation technologies hold for jobs, organizations, and the future of work.3 Our results to date suggest, first and foremost, that a focus on occupations is misleading. Very few occupations will be automated in their entirety in the near or medium term. Rather, certain activities are more likely to be automated, requiring entire business processes to be transformed, and jobs performed by people to be redefined, much like the bank teller’s job was redefined with the advent of ATMs.
More specifically, our research suggests that as many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.4 In the United States, these activities represent about $2 trillion in annual wages. Although we often think of automation primarily affecting low-skill, low-wage roles, we discovered that even the highest-paid occupations in the economy, such as financial managers, physicians, and senior executives, including CEOs, have a significant amount of activity that can be automated.
The organizational and leadership implications are enormous: leaders from the C-suite to the front line will need to redefine jobs and processes so that their organizations can take advantage of the automation potential that is distributed across them. And the opportunities extend far beyond labor savings. When we modeled the potential of automation to transform business processes across several industries, we found that the benefits (ranging from increased output to higher quality and improved reliability, as well as the potential to perform some tasks at superhuman levels) typically are between three and ten times the cost. The magnitude of those benefits suggests that the ability to staff, manage, and lead increasingly automated organizations will become an important competitive differentiator.
Christine Haskell, PHD has built her practice on credible, published research and data. In the Research Series, you’ll find highlights, shareable statistics, and links to the full source material.
AI helps brewers predict new beer varieties
Craftsmanship refers to something made with the highest quality. It requires a distinct mindset and approach. Values like durability, integrity, and calling are often associated with craftsmanship.
In this story, AI enhances the notion of craft for a Carlsberg brewing team, extending capabilities that have been practiced for centuries.
Read MoreProfile in Craft: Nel Wieman 1st Indigenous Female Psychiatrist in Canada
To tackle the wicked problems of our present and future, we need to embrace a strange, counter-intuitive irony: as organizations across all sectors continue to create and adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, employees need to stay relevant by increasing their subjective intelligence. My research on master craftsmen and how they gain mastery helps connect the dots on this new dilemma, and might be the place to seek initial solutions.
When it comes to open ended problem solving and learning to improvise with what we are given; master craftsmen have something to teach us. Having to work with a material where they cannot be sure what will happen is something they are used to. Combined with the more structured training and education offered to us today, improvisational thinking in the face of uncertainty is useful to leaders in any sector. Even in the face of countless books and articles about how important it is, most traditional business school programs and organizational training fail to address sophisticated thinking about ambiguous problems.
Listen to Dr. Cornelia Wieman, Canada's first Indigenous psychiatrist, and current Senior Medical Officer, Mental Health & Wellnessas at FNHA as she speaks about Indigenous perspectives in psychiatry and her own personal story. - via aboriginalhealthVCH
Nel Wieman is one of the survivors of the '60's Scoop'. She was taken from her biological parents at the age of three and adopted by a non-Indigenous family in Ontario. Nel Wieman went on to become the first Indigenous female psychiatrist in Canada.
Nel works with people in intensely distressing periods of their lives. She uses her training, but also who she is as a person to help and support her clients. When she got to medical school she learned she was the first female aboriginal psychiatrist in Canada.
She works at the Center for Addiction and Mental Heath and feels that in order to make an impact “you need to give something of yourself to the interaction.” Her patients are depressed and suicidal and have been in the emergency room for some type of crisis. She works intensely with people over a short period of time and finds her rewards in the gains they are able to make in that time frame.
Nel also teaches at McMasters University where she recruits students into the health sciences professions and helps nurture them through their education. She appreciates hearing people’s stories as it reinforces her culture’s oral tradition.
As she became more aware of indigenous health issues, she became more aware that mental health was a tremendous need. She hoped she could make an impact. Now she meets children in indigenous communities across the country and serves as a model of someone, like themselves, who has walked the path before them. She shows the meaning and importance of creating a path of support and guidance for others.
Christine Haskell’s research focuses on individuals dedicated to the craft of their professions, in pursuit of excellence, sustainability and integrity. Craftsmen and women use those principles to raise standards toward a better world. Her current work is featured in Look To Craftsmen Project. featuring the Profiles in Craft Series. You’ll find a trove of profiles of intriguing artisans and innovators spanning a wide variety of professions across the globe that illustrate her research with links to the full articles. Christine’s book The Future of Work Will Require Craftsmanship is due in late 2019. To understand more about Christine’s work, check out Our Current Problem.