AMBIDEXTERITY 101
Image Credit: Uknown
When you're that successful, things have a momentum, and at a certain point you can't really tell whether you have created the momentum or it's creating you.
Annie Lennox (1954—) is a Scottish singer, songwriter, political activist, and philanthropist who achieved, together with David A. Stewart, major international success in the 1980s as Eurythmics and has won more awards than any other female artist. Entrepreneurial and progressive, Lennox is ever-striving, heading for the top, and enjoying an enterprising, ambitious, and determined personality to do things well, and an unyielding dedication to her plan until the goals are achieved.
Lennox looks to her past to manage her present and see her future. In addition to working memory, she taps her emotional memory—an underlying tool that helps her creative expression.
Neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, and prolific brain-book author Richard Restak offers some vital tips on how to optimize your brain, central to which is honing the capacity and performance of your memory:
Another aspect of recall is emotional memory, when we relive how we felt at moments in the past — elated, sad, depressed, or angry. When we lose emotional memory of our own youth, we find that we no longer understand young people. If this forgetting progresses, we begin to lose touch with ourselves. And if we allow our emotional memories to disappear, as happens with Alzheimer’s patients, we will find a stranger staring back at us from the mirror.
The concept of tapping emotional memory is featured in Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, where cultural icons in their letters to their younger selves. Throughout her career, Lennox grounded herself in the roots of her family, the region she came from, and her partnership with Dave Stewart and the Eurhtymics. That too became an essential aspect of grounding her as she continued to develop and define her next phase.
Annie Lennox reflects on the highs, lows, and inspirations behind her albums ‘Diva’ and ‘Medusa’.
AMBIDEXTERITY 101
To grow and innovate, we must successfully manage in between short- and long-term planning, fast and slow thinking, and certainty and uncertainty. We must learn to manage the tension between two poles.
Leaders across every discipline must constantly look backward, attending to the achievements of the past, while also gazing forward, preparing for the innovations that will define the future.
This mental balancing act is one of the toughest of all challenges as we learn to manage our self-development. It requires us to explore new opportunities even as we work diligently to exploit existing capabilities. It is no surprise that few people do it well. But from those that do it well, what is their secret?
These people give space for their new, exploratory endeavors. In companies, sometimes this is a whole other department where research and development is done. Maya Angelou “went to work” to a hotel room where she wrote. Some people have a craft area in their home where they can literally “play.” However it’s done, it’s a practice where people can leave traditional notions behind and just entertain new ideas, creativity exploits, etc. They can experiment with different processes, structures, and ideas; at the same time, they maintain tight links across with their known skills. Such “ambidextrous skills” allow people to pioneer radical or disruptive synchronicity while also pursuing incremental gains.
Of utmost importance to the ambidextrous person are is an environment or community sensitive to the needs of very different kinds of talent. They possess the attributes of daily discipline, with free-thinking entrepreneurism while also maintaining the objectivity and practiced judgment required to make difficult trade-offs.
We renew ourselves through breakthrough achievements—giving birth, graduate school, radical career changes—but we shouldn’t do so at the expense of our day-to-day success. In other words, any radical achievement we have should not be so disruptive as to blow up our lives. The same goes for business, an innovation can’t be so explosive that it completely disrupts the company. Building an ambidextrous mind is by no means easy, but it is not difficult to understand. With enough discipline and open-mindedness, anyone can become more ambidextrous.
We develop two sets of eyes—one pair focusing on what lay behind, the other on what lay ahead. We must constantly look backward, attending to the products and processes of the past, while also gazing forward, preparing for the innovations that will define the future.
Ambidexterity increases our resilience and relevance. It helps us bounce back from setbacks more quickly and rise to essential challenges because we are continually learning in the direction of our future success. We are also more agile and able to get things done quickly, try a few new ideas, and “failing fast.”
How do we manage the middle, find the sweet spot, between the ups and downs?
PRACTICE:
Most of us struggle with tensions driven by the need to optimize for today’s needs—our current performance. Building capacity for tomorrow can sometimes feel frivolous, outside our reach, or not the right time. But if we aren’t always learning, we are unprepared and miss key opportunities. Now more than ever, we need to understand that the shelf-life of skills is three to five years. Artificial intelligence, predictive data, and robotics are impacting every profession, making low-end, repetitive work obsolete. In the past, change happened over maybe a decade or more. Drive-ins, payphones, and DVDs once shifted industries and are now artifacts marking a period of evolution. Today, things are moving exponentially faster.
To maintain ambidexterity, we must maintain a loose relationship with our certainty and expertise. We need to be willing to give up what we know today to learn something that will help us tomorrow. Rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 by circling the number that best fits you.
List a few significant times when you were caught flat-footed. What certainty and expertise were you over-relying upon?
What areas do you need to invest in learning to remain more dynamic in your skills and knowledge?
Richard Restak recommends an exercise for reacquainting ourselves with our emotional memory. He writes:
Find a picture of yourself in which you are half of your present age. Stare at the picture for a while.
Then write a letter to your older self from the perspective of the younger you in the photo, expressing all of the younger self’s hopes and concerns about the future.
Follow this with a letter back from the present self to the younger you, telling that younger self about all the things they will do in their future and who they will grow into.
Hopefully, you will uncover feelings and memories of things you haven’t experienced for years.
COMMIT
[ ] I commit to myself to connecting to myself, deeply, holding my certainty loosely, maintaining a practice of ongoing preparation, and remaining open to new possibilities and alternative solutions.
FURTHER READING/ WATCHING
'How did we do all that?': Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart discuss Eurythmics legacy.
Sweet Dreams Are Made of This: Recounts the life and career of the Scottish singer best known as a member of the Eurythmics, and discusses how her gender-bending appearance opened a new approach for women rock performers
The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning : In The Ravenous Brain, neuroscientist Daniel Bor departs sharply from this historical view, and builds on the latest research to propose a new model for how consciousness works. Bor argues that this brain-based faculty evolved as an accelerated knowledge gathering tool. Consciousness is effectively an idea factory -- that choice mental space dedicated to innovation, a key component of which is the discovery of deep structures within the contents of our awareness. This model explains our brains"; ravenous appetite for information -- and in particular, its constant search for patterns. Why, for instance, after all our physical needs have been met, do we recreationally solve crossword or Sudoku puzzles? Such behavior may appear biologically wasteful, but, according to Bor, this search for structure can yield immense evolutionary benefits -- it led our ancestors to discover fire and farming, pushed modern society to forge ahead in science and technology, and guides each one of us to understand and control the world around us. But the sheer innovative power of human consciousness carries with it the heavy cost of mental fragility. Bor discusses the medical implications of his theory of consciousness, and what it means for the origins and treatment of psychiatric ailments, including attention-deficit disorder, schizophrenia, manic depression, and autism.
In Her Words…
“When you're that successful, things have a momentum, and at a certain point you can't really tell whether you have created the momentum or it's creating you.”
“Our ancestors are totally essential to our every waking moment, although most of us don't even have the faintest idea about their lives, their trials, their hardships or challenges.”
“Ask yourself: Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world.”
“The future hasn't happened yet and the past is gone. So I think the only moment we have is right here and now, and I try to make the best of those moments, the moments that I'm in.”
“There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won't.”
“Ask yourself: Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world.”
“Well I thought my time was over, but it’s only just begun.”
“Dying is easy, it's living that scares me to death”― [All The Tracks From The Album Arranged For Piano, Voice & Guitar]
What we don’t see on the resumes we review or the job descriptions we want is the litany of emotional entanglements we bring to our roles, uninvited, to the team and organizations we work in. 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 in the presence of setbacks. In short, those who learn lead.
Observing subjective qualities in others past and present gives us a mental picture for the behaviors we want to practice. Each figure illustrates a quality researched from The Look to Craftsmen Project. When practiced as part of our day-to-day, these qualities will help us develop our mastery in our lives and work.
References:
Johnson, B. (1996). Polarity management: Identifying and managing unsolvable problems. Amherst, Mass: HRD Press.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.