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You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions.

Thought Of The Week

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times…. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to it’s limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This week I worked with a highly successful leadership team in Oman. Flow, and how to create it, was a theme of our week. Muscat sits on the Gulf of Oman with its deep, still, warm water and I managed to keep one afternoon free to freedive into the Gulf.

As we sailed back from our dive site, we spotted spinner dolphins playing half a mile off our port side, so naturally we went to greet them.

They were leaping and twisting in the air, perfectly formed Aquadarts of muscle and joy but as soon as they noticed us coming, they all changed course in unison and rushed over to play.

You can watch them on my Instagram feed here.

They moved fast and in flow, the whole pod adapting the plan together without words or ‘sign offs’. Eventually they were bored with us and went off together, leaping over each other and spinning through 360 degrees in the air as they breached.

Last week I introduced the idea of creating an organisation that is a courageous, fast-moving, adaptable, organism rather than a slow, commanded and controlled machine: an organisation inspired, perhaps, more by dolphins than by clocks.

The spinners showed many of the things we humans need in order to operate in flow:

1. Complete concentration on the task – truly absorbed and lost in it.

2. Clarity of ‘goals’ and immediate feedback form their work – they leap, they land, they swim, they interact with the dolphin racing beside them.

3. No concept of time – I’m not a spinner dolphin but these relatives of ours seemed LOST in their play!

4. An experience that was intrinsically rewarding, had an end itself. They seemed to need nothing more but would not have permitted anything less.

5. An effortlessness and an ease about them.

6. A balance between challenge and skills – they were clearly loving pushing themselves to max speed with mighty gymnastic leaps to play with the boat – and keep our speed - but without pushing into stress.

7. Actions and awareness that were merged, had they been humans – there would have been no self-conscious internal judgement.

8. A feeling of utter control over the task.

These are, of course, Csikszentmihalyi’s characteristics of flow.

Dear Ukrainian Readers – I will be heading from Lviv to Kyiv tomorrow and we can meet in Kyiv at Knyharnya Ye on Levka Lukianenka Street at 18:30 on Tuesday 7^th October.

Please come along. All royalties from the Ukrainian edition of ‘Go where it is scary’ are divided equally between Unbroken and Gen.Ukrainian 

How, then, can we create an organism in FLOW and not a machine second guessing the cog above, but feeling unsafe to ask for permission to act – all the while downing tools every twenty minutes to answer emails ‘fast’.

The answer is, of course, a live, bespoke and iterative year long piece of work following on from careful data analysis, not a Sunday morning coffee thought provoker.

But I didn’t want that to stop me from getting our juices flowing! So here are just a few questions to help you reflect:

1  Do I even allow deep concentration on the task and the outcomes or are we a performative ‘answer fast’ and ‘notifications on’ interruption culture?

2  Is it exciting to visit me as a manager, or that beating, energising heart of the organism – the exec team - can I be in flow and on my ‘A Game’ with them or do I have to be scared and self-conscious?

3  Do I connect my people to the difference they make in the world, the value of the results they produce?

4  And is it fun?

My client, now friends, this week in Muscat were masterful and mischievous at creating fun and laughter whilst delivering world class quality and service in incredibly complex and technical projects.

That’s not my natural strength. I can take it all too seriously. So thank you to my new friends, and to the spinner dolphins of Oman, for making me reflect on how we can generate flow: and fun.

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My Week

When a legendary founder born into extreme poverty dies, the next generation of owners come from a very different start. They are under unimaginable pressures and powered by a different fuel.

How can we see the legacy of the generation before not as the defining achievement that it was in its day – but as the foundations of greater achievements to come? And how does an executive team bring in process to recruit and grow – whilst embedding the pioneering spirit and speed?

That was the challenge we took on together at the start of the week with great progress made and decisions taken.

My week ends as you read this at the Lviv BookForum today (and yesterday) and a life changing visit to Unbroken before taking the train to Kyiv tomorrow: precisely as I promised I would when the event was cancelled earlier this year.

Book Of The Week

One of the most strategic thinkers I know, and a thought leader in the implementation of technology, especially AI, is Benedetto Conversano - my great friend, and also the (recently) former CIO of Diageo.

For some years now I have been influenced by the ideas in Playing to Win by Roger Martin and A.G.Lafley which was recommended to me by Benedetto.

There is a lot of confusing nonsense around strategy. Playing to Win gives you a solid structure which I find consistently useful ‘in real life’.

The most compelling reason for exploring the book is that Lafley (when CEO of P&G) and Martin (his strategy thinking partner) used the approach repeatedly and successfully with billions of dollars at stake.

(As you know, I don’t much like reading an advisory book unless the author went to the trouble of proving their approach in the real world – preferably under significant ‘pressure’  😉.)