Category Archives: Opportunity

  • 01
    Mar 22
  • 0

The Imperative for Two Dimensions of Transformation

Category:Collaboration,Edges,Institutional Innovation,Learning,Opportunity,Passion,Strategy,Transformation

Now, more than ever, we live in a world of massive change. Not surprisingly, “transformation” has become a buzzword throughout our economy and society.

Transformation has been a focus of my work for decades and I’ve learned many lessons along the way. In this post, I want to explore two distinct transformation imperatives as we scale the edge.

Scaling the edge

Those who have been following my work know that I’ve become a strong champion of scaling the edge as a way to drive transformation in large, traditional institutions. This approach is in stark contrast to the more conventional “top down, big bang” approaches that are used to drive change. By seeking to transform the entire core of the institution, these efforts require a lot of money and they will take a long time – you can’t turn around a battleship overnight. As a result, these approaches have a high failure rate because they under-estimate the significant power of the immune system and antibodies that exist in all large institutions. The immune system and antibodies will mobilize aggressively to crush efforts at massive change, especially those that will require a lot of money and take a lot of time.

Scaling the edge can reduce the risk of immune system attack because it doesn’t seek to transform the core of the institution. Instead, it focuses on finding an edge to the existing institution that, given the forces at work in the broader economy and society, has the potential to scale very rapidly to the point where it will become the new core of the institution. To be clear, this is not just an “experiment” or a diversification or growth initiative – the commitment is to make it the new core of the institution and, in the process, drive the transformation that will be required to thrive in a rapidly changing economy and society. I’ve written a lot more about the design principles for successful edge scaling initiatives here.

The two transformation imperatives

But what does transformation really mean? Virtually every large institution today has a “digital transformation” program, but the focus of these programs is to apply digital technology so that existing tasks can be done faster and cheaper. That’s not transformation from my perspective. I use the metaphor of the caterpillar to the butterfly to describe transformation – it has to produce something completely different from before. If we’re just helping the caterpillar to walk faster, that may be helpful to the caterpillar, but please let’s not describe that as transformation.

So, what is transformation in the context of our existing institutions? I believe it will have to occur on two dimensions given the Big Shift that is transforming our global economy and society.

The first dimension involves re-thinking at a fundamental level the value that will be delivered to customers and other stakeholders. The nature of the value being delivered will change at a very basic level.

The second dimension involves re-thinking at a fundamental level what is required to deliver that value to customers and other stakeholders. The approach to delivering value must be redesigned from the ground up.

Let’s explore both of these dimensions more deeply.

Transforming the value delivered

We live in a world of exponential change. In that kind of world, there is a natural tendency to shrink our time horizons and just focus on today’s needs.

That tendency needs to be resisted. Instead, we need to look ahead, far ahead, to anticipate emerging needs that are fundamentally different from the needs we are addressing today. That’s certainly challenging in a rapidly changing world.

That’s why I’ve become a strong champion of a very different approach to strategy that I call “zoom out/zoom in.” I’ve written about that approach extensively here. This approach calls on leadership of institutions to move beyond their comfort zone and to look ahead 10-20 years. The two key questions to address are: What will our relevant market or environment look like 10-20 years from now? What will be the biggest unmet needs of our customers and stakeholders that will provide an opportunity to build an institution that is far bigger and more successful than the one we have now?

If we truly understand the nature of exponential change, we need to be prepared to embrace the fact that the value we are delivering today will become obsolete and that we need to embrace very different forms of value that will address emerging needs and become a key to success in the future.

What would be an example? Take the example of a large fossil fuel company today. Given the changes that are occurring in the energy industry, there may be a need to leverage some of the expertise that this company has developed and focus it in a very different direction. For instance, one of these companies might decide to leverage its expertise in resource extraction to provide extraction services in a wide range of industries that rely on natural resources. Another possibility would be to focus on its expertise in building and managing large-scale distribution networks to provide these services to a wide range of industries. Whatever path these companies take, they are likely to be serving a very different set of customers and delivering a very different form of value.

The zoom out/zoom in approach to strategy has many benefits, but one key benefit is that it can help the leadership of an institution to select an edge to their existing institution that has the potential to scale rapidly to the point where it becomes the new core. And they won’t just select the edge, they will commit to scaling it because it represents a much bigger opportunity than anything they have addressed in the past.

Transforming the delivery of value

But transformation doesn’t stop there. There’s another dimension of transformation that needs to be understood and addressed. This is transformation in how the value is created and delivered to customers and other stakeholders.

What do I mean by this? Large institutions around the world have been pursuing a scalable efficiency model for the past century. For them, the key to success has been becoming more and more efficient at scale – finding ways to do their activities faster and cheaper. They have determined that the best way to do this is to tightly specify every activity that needs to be performed, highly standardize those activities so they are done the same efficient way throughout the organization and tightly integrate those activities, removing all inefficient buffers.

This approach has been highly successful around the world for the past century. The challenge is that the world is rapidly changing and this approach to efficiency is paradoxically becoming more and more inefficient. Workers are confronting more and more “exceptions” – unexpected situations that cannot be addressed by the process manual. They are scrambling inefficiently to find ways to address these unexpected situations.

In this rapidly changing world, we need another dimension of transformation – institutional transformation. We need to shift from a scalable efficiency institutional model to a scalable learning institutional model where the focus is on helping everyone in the organization to learn faster together. This is especially challenging because the learning that is increasingly required is not learning in the form of sharing existing knowledge in training programs but instead learning in the form of creating new knowledge. That doesn’t occur in a training room – it occurs in the workplace when people act together to address new situations and reflect on the impact that they are achieving so that they can evolve their actions to achieve even more impact. I have written about this institutional transformation extensively here.

If we take this seriously, it will require challenging and changing virtually every aspect of how institutions organize and operate today. We’ll need to move from hierarchical, command and control organizations to networked organizations that organize around small, front-line groups of 3-15 workers – I call them impact groups. We’ll need to move from a focus on business process re-engineering to business practice redesign, cultivating practices within the impact groups that help all participants to learn faster. We’ll also have to redesign our work environments to provide all the participants with the tools they need to learn faster. One key objective is to help draw out and cultivate the passion of the explorer in all workers so that they become excited, and truly motivated, by the opportunity to learn faster together.

This dimension of transformation will need to be pursued in parallel with the other dimension of transformation.

Bottom line

If we’re going to unleash the exponential opportunities that are being created by the Big Shift, we need to commit to drive transformation on two intersecting paths – transforming the value that we are delivering to our stakeholders and transforming how that value gets delivered to the stakeholders. This is certainly very challenging – it’s why I urge leaders to focus on scaling the edge as the most effective way to drive transformation. Significant opportunities await those who see the need for both dimensions of transformation and aggressively pursue them on the edge of existing institutions.

  • 31
    Jan 22
  • 0

Increase the Power of Your Narratives

Category:Collaboration,Community,Connections,Emotions,Fear,Movements,Narratives,Opportunity,Passion,Small moves

I’ve written a lot about the untapped power of narratives, including in my new book, The Journey Beyond Fear. But, what are the specific elements that contribute to that power? I’ve been participating in the development of quite a few narratives, and it’s led me to focus on four elements that will make or break a narrative.

Stories and narratives

Let me start, though, by reminding everyone what I mean by narrative. Those who have been following me will remember that I make an important distinction between stories and narratives, even though most people view them as the same thing.

For me, stories are self-contained – they have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories are also about the storyteller or about some other people, real or imagined, but they’re not about the people in the audience.

In contrast, for me, narratives are open-ended. They focus on a big threat or opportunity out in the future, but the threat or opportunity has not yet been achieved. The resolution of the narrative hinges on the people in the audience – it provides a call to action that will ultimately determine the outcome of the narrative.

As I discuss in greater detail in my book, narratives can play a powerful role at multiple levels, starting with us as individuals – we all have a personal narrative. But narratives can also have significant impact at the level of institutions, geographies (cities, regions and countries) and movements. The elements that I’m going to explore below apply to narratives at all these levels.

The four elements of a powerful narrative

As I indicated, narratives can focus on either a significant threat or opportunity in the future. Since I believe we are in great need of more opportunity-based narratives, I’m going to focus here on opportunity- based narratives. Based on my experience and research, the four elements that will determine the power of an opportunity-based narrative are:

  • Framing the opportunity
  • Identifying trends enabling the opportunity
  • Identifying obstacles and challenges that stand in the way of achieving the opportunity
  • Framing the call to action

Framing the opportunity

The foundation of an opportunity-based narrative is of course the opportunity itself. This is ultimately what will motivate people to come together and act for impact. For this reason, it is important to find an opportunity that really inspires and excites the people we are trying to reach – it should not just be something that is “rational” or supported by data. Finding this kind of opportunity requires a deep understanding of the people we are trying to reach so that we find an opportunity that is aligned with their aspirations. Of course, they may not yet be aware of the opportunity, but we should explore whether this opportunity would excite them, once they become aware of it.

Effective narratives focus on a very big opportunity that will require long-term effort by many to achieve. If the opportunity can be quickly achieved by a few people, it will not become the catalyst for large-scale action by a growing number of participants. What we need are narratives that can sustain us and excite us over a long period of time. Of course, that also implies that we should be able to make progress in addressing the opportunity relatively quickly so that we will be encouraged to continue on the journey together.

The opportunity framed by a narrative also needs to be a positive-sum opportunity. This means that the opportunity will expand as the number of participants expands. If an opportunity is fixed in its size and rewards, it will discourage more people from joining and collaborating with each other.

Identifying trends enabling the opportunity

One of the big risks with framing large, long-term opportunities is that it can generate a lot of skepticism, especially from those consumed by fear. For this reason, it’s important to be able to identify some long-term trends that suggest this opportunity is achievable, and not just a fantasy.

But there’s a balance that needs to be maintained. While these trends should reinforce our belief that the opportunity is achievable, they should not be viewed as making the opportunity inevitable. If the opportunity is inevitable, we will tend to become passive. Why would we need to act and take risks if the opportunity is going to emerge anyway?

Identifying obstacles and challenges

That leads to the third element of powerful narratives. Somewhat paradoxically, the strongest narratives are those that identify and assess significant obstacles and challenges that will make the opportunity difficult to achieve. This will underscore that significant effort will be required to address the opportunity identified by the narrative. We can’t just sit back and assume that the opportunity will emerge on its own.

This will also help to prevent early participants from becoming discouraged too quickly. If they’re expecting obstacles and challenges, they’ll be motivated to forge ahead and find ways to overcome the obstacles and challenges.

Framing the call to action

A call to action is a critical pillar of powerful narratives. The people addressed by the narrative need to be clear that the outcome depends on the action they take.

For this to be effective, another balance needs to be struck. The call to action needs to be high level enough that participants can improvise and adapt the action to their specific context, especially as unexpected situations emerge. On the other hand, the call to action needs to be specific enough that it can provide tangible direction to people regarding the kind of action that will be needed to achieve the opportunity.

The call to action also needs to be framed in a way that people can initially make small moves and begin to see progress in addressing the broader opportunity. If people believe that their action will not yield any positive results for decades, they’re much less likely to maintain their excitement on continuing the journey.

This increases the importance of focusing on impact, not just action. Effective narratives have a call to action where the progress can be measured and monitored. The call to action needs to be specific enough that it can help to define metrics that matter. This will help all participants to assess how much progress is being made and to reflect on how to achieve even greater impact. It will also give them encouragement when they can see the progress that is already being made.

Bottom line

Properly framed, opportunity-based narratives can be very powerful. At their most basic level, they excite people about coming together and acting to achieve a really inspiring and meaningful opportunity. It’s ultimately about moving people beyond fear to hope and excitement.

As with most things in life, it’s ultimately about balance. We must believe that the opportunity is achievable, but also that it will not materialize without concerted action because of roadblocks and challenges that stand in the way. We need to be able to take small steps, especially at the outset, but we also need to see how those small moves can set big things in motion.

  • 24
    Dec 21
  • 5

Seek the Gift

Category:Collaboration,Community,Connections,Exploration,Growth,Opportunity,Passion,Poem,Potential

Christmas

Is a time of

Giving

And receiving.

We should be grateful

For what we have received.

But let’s not just look around.

Let’s look within.

Our greatest gift is

The energy and spirit

Residing within us,

Waiting to be discovered

And unwrapped

And brought out

For others to see

And experience.

The greatest gift

We can give to ourselves

Is to seek

That energy and spirit

And nurture it,

Drawing it out,

To help us pursue

What is really meaningful.

If we do that,

We will offer

Ever expanding gifts

To those

Who mean so much

To us.

Our gift within us

Can be the gift

That keeps on giving.

The gift to us

Can become the gift

That we share

With others.

  • 06
    Dec 21
  • 0

Is Digital Transformation Missing the Real Opportunity?

Category:Emotions,Fear,Institutional Innovation,Learning,Opportunity,Passion,Strategy

Everyone is talking about digital transformation these days, but I have to confess that I am a bit of a contrarian on this topic. I’ve spoken a lot about this in recent years, but the catalyst for writing this post was a session on digital transformation at a conference that I just attended.

I work with a lot of large companies around the world and I can guarantee that virtually every large company now has a “digital transformation” program. When I press executives for details about the program, I invariably find out that the focus of the program is to apply digital technology to do what the company has always done faster and cheaper, but the business and the company remain largely the same.

Is that really “transformation”? Definitions differ, but I use the metaphor of the caterpillar and the butterfly in assessing whether transformation is really occurring. If we’re just applying digital technology to help the caterpillar to walk faster, that may be helpful to the caterpillar, but please don’t call it “transformation” unless the result is a butterfly that would be unrecognizable relative to the caterpillar. In my experience, digital transformation programs are just helping caterpillars to walk faster.

Why does this matter? It matters, because in a rapidly changing world going through a “Big Shift,” there are exponentially expanding opportunities that can only be effectively addressed if companies and other institutions are prepared to undertake true transformation, asking the most basic questions of all: What business should we really be in? How can we expand our ability to deliver more and more value to our stakeholders? How can we motivate ourselves to take more risk?

Let’s look at three levels of transformation:

  • Pursuing fundamentally different business opportunities
  • Crafting fundamentally different institutional models
  • Cultivating fundamentally different emotional drivers

Pursuing fundamentally different business opportunities

In a rapidly changing world, there’s a strong temptation to shrink time horizons and just focus on the business we have. The paradox is that this Big Shift world is creating exponentially expanding opportunities – we can create far more value with far less resources and far more quickly than ever before.

To see these opportunities, we need to be able to look ahead, far ahead, and anticipate significant  emerging unmet needs that we could address. This requires a very different approach to strategy – a zoom out/zoom in approach to strategy, something that I have written about extensively, including here and here.

Zooming out requires us to look ahead 10 – 20 years and focus on trends that are reasonably predictable and that will give rise to opportunities far larger than anything we have addressed in the past. If we look ahead 10 – 20 years and believe we are still going to be in the same business that we are today, we don’t understand exponential change. It forces us out of our comfort zone to imagine becoming a fundamentally different business from the one we are today. We begin to see the butterfly.

As just one example of how different our businesses will become, I urge you to consider Unbundling the Corporation, a perspective that I first wrote about a couple of decades ago. We need to challenge ourselves to see how fundamentally businesses are changing and the opportunities that these changes create.

As a side note (worthy of an additional blog post), the best way to pursue this form of business transformation is by scaling the edge.

Crafting fundamentally different institutional models

As we look ahead and begin to see the magnitude of the opportunities that are emerging, we will begin to realize that our current institutional models are ill-equipped to help us on the journey to addressing those opportunities – in fact, they are becoming significant barriers.

What do I mean? I’m going to generalize, but over the past century, all large institutions around the world have embraced an institutional model that I describe as “scalable efficiency.” In that institutional model, the key to success is to become more and more efficient at scale, and the way to become more efficient is to tightly specify and highly standardize all activities in the institution so that they are done in the same efficient way everywhere.

Large and very successful institutions have emerged around the world using this institutional model. The challenge is that in a rapidly changing world this approach to efficiency is becoming less and less efficient. It also misses the key requirement for success in the future: scaling and accelerating learning.

To address the opportunities in the future, we will need to embrace a very different institutional model: scalable learning. I have written about this need for institutional innovation here.

And, let me be clear – when I talk about scalable learning, I’m not talking about learning in the form of training programs that focus on sharing existing knowledge. In a rapidly changing world, the most powerful and necessary form of learning is learning in the form of creating new knowledge. That doesn’t occur in training rooms, but requires all workers to learn through action in the workplace. It also requires coming together into impact groups and orchestrating larger and larger ecosystems of participants from many different backgrounds to learn faster together.

Scalable learning can help expand our focus beyond efficiency – doing the same things faster and cheaper – to see the potential to learn how to deliver far more value as well. When we unleash scalable learning, we have the potential to deliver exponentially expanding value to our customers and other stakeholders. We are constantly finding new ways to deliver more value in a rapidly changing world. Scalable learning can also accelerate our progress towards addressing the fundamentally different business opportunity that we see in the future.

Pursuing this kind of scalable learning requires us to re-think and redesign all aspects of how we organize and operate in our institutions. It requires us to explore what is needed to become a butterfly.

Rather than trying to transform the core of our existing institution, we will be much more likely to succeed if we scale the edge, viewing the edge as the cocoon that will give birth to the butterfly.

Cultivating fundamentally different emotional drivers

Transforming into a butterfly can be very scary. As I discuss in my new book, The Journey Beyond Fear, more and more people around the world are consumed by fear, given the mounting performance pressure that is being generated by the Big Shift in our global economy. While understandable, the emotion of fear can also be very limiting.

In this context, fear can increase our resistance to change. We simply want to hold on to what we have and continue to do what has made us successful in the past.

If we’re going to make the transformation journey, we need to add another level of transformation – emotional transformation. We need to find ways to cultivate emotions that will help us to move beyond our fear and achieve impact that is far more meaningful to us.

In this context, I believe the emotion that can help all of us to pursue the transformation we need is the passion of the explorer. It’s a very specific form of passion that I discovered when researching environments where sustained extreme performance improvement had been achieved. I have written about it extensively, including here and here. The passion of the explorer is a fundamentally different emotion from fear.

I believe we all have the potential to draw out the passion of the explorer within us – it’s not just something that is limited to the gifted few. The challenge is that we live and work in environments that are deeply suspicious of this form of passion and actively seek to suppress it. The good news is that the two other levels of transformation – business opportunities and institutional models – will help to foster environments that will help to draw out the passion of the explorer.

But if we’re serious about pursuing transformation, we need to find ways to draw out this emotion, even in environments that are still seeking to suppress it. External transformation will not succeed without internal transformation. We need to move on both fronts.

Bottom line

Pursuing genuine transformation requires evolving from the caterpillar into the butterfly. It can be hugely rewarding because it positions us to address the exponentially expanding opportunities that are created by the Big Shift. Of course, digital technology can play a significant role in helping us to address those opportunities, but the key is to focus the application of digital technology on true transformation.

But genuine transformation isn’t just an opportunity – it’s an imperative. In the Big Shift world, those who hold on to what made them successful in the past – or who simply focus on doing the same things faster and cheaper – will be increasingly marginalized. Transformation is an imperative.

Three levels of transformation need to be pursued in parallel, but we need to understand that emotional transformation is ultimately the foundation that will enable us to successfully pursue the other two levels of transformation. If we can find ways to move beyond our fear, we will soon discover the butterfly that is waiting to emerge from the cocoon and venture out to amazing new areas that have never been explored. And we will see that digital transformation is designed to limit us to the lives of caterpillars.

  • 25
    Nov 21
  • 1

From Gratitude to Plenitude

Category:Collaboration,Connections,Emotions,Fear,Narratives,Opportunity

As we come together in the US to celebrate Thanksgiving, it’s a great opportunity to reflect on what we can be grateful for, even in trying times shaped by the pandemic and other forces.

The source of our gratitude

Here’s the remarkable thing – virtually all of us can find things to be deeply grateful for, even though we may be very challenged and economically deprived. Why is that?

It’s because what we’re most grateful for usually doesn’t involve physical goods or financial assets. Our gratitude tends to focus on our relationships and the impact that we’ve been able to achieve with the people who matter the most to us. We’re grateful for our family and for our friends who stand by us in times of need and who provide us with the joy and fulfillment that comes from deep connection. We’re also grateful for our ability to help these people through actions that matter to them and to us.

Reflecting on our gratitude

Reflecting on what we’re grateful for can be especially valuable in trying times. In a world of mounting performance pressure, we can become consumed by a fear of the future. Fear can set a vicious cycle in motion – the more fear we experience, the more we tend to focus on the bad things happening around us, and that intensifies our fear. By making an effort to reflect on what we are grateful for, we can begin to see that there are good things in the world as well, no matter how challenging it might seem.

As we do this, we can begin to shift our time horizon. Think about it. Gratitude is generally about things in the present or the past. But perhaps we can also find ways to be grateful about our future as well.

I’ve written a lot about personal narratives as our view of the future and the actions that we and others need to take to address opportunities in the future. You can read about this in my new book, The Journey Beyond Fear, as well as in shorter pieces like this blog post.

We all have a personal narrative, but few of us have made the effort to articulate it, much less reflect on it and seek to evolve it in ways that can help us to have more impact that’s meaningful to us.

As we reflect on our gratitude, we can gain a lot by stepping back from the specifics and reflecting on what types of relationships and actions make us most grateful. What are the common elements that seem to be the most meaningful to us and why?

Much of our gratitude is about the people we are connected with. What is it about those people that makes us so grateful to be connected with them? What if we made more effort in the future to connect with other people like that? What is it about how we are connected with them that makes us so grateful? What if we worked to craft more connections like that? How rich could our life become?

Our gratitude is also about the impact that we have achieved that is meaningful to us and meaningful to others that matter to us. What if we could find ways to achieve much greater impact that really excites us and fulfills us?

Focusing on the future

By shifting beyond the past and the present and focusing on the opportunities for connections and impact that matter in the future, we have the potential to shape our emotions. We can help overcome the fear that consumes more and more of us today and cultivate emotions like excitement and passion that will propel us forward into a much more meaningful life.

Bottom line

Gratitude can become a powerful fuel to help us find ways to cultivate connections and to achieve more and more impact that really matters. We will begin to see the untapped potential that we have to lead much more fulfilling lives. Gratitude can lead to plenitude if we unleash its potential as a catalyst.

  • 14
    Jun 21
  • 1

The Journey Beyond Our Edge

Category:Collaboration,Edges,Emotions,Exploration,Fear,Learning,Opportunity,Passion,Potential,Workgroups

Over the past four weeks, I’ve posted a series of blog entries providing an overview of the key themes in my new book, The Journey Beyond Fear. In this blog post, I want to focus on the journey ahead.

My book focuses on the fear that has been spreading around the world for years (it’s certainly not just the result of the current pandemic). While the emotion is understandable (we live in a world of mounting performance pressure), it’s also very limiting. My key goal in the book is to share lessons about the journey beyond fear that I’ve learned in my personal journey as well as from research that I’ve been pursuing for decades.

But, now what? My hope is that the book will help us to acknowledge our own fears and then see that we do have the ability to move beyond fear and cultivate emotions that will help us to achieve much more meaningful impact. I don’t want to suggest that this journey will be easy – it’s very challenging and there are many obstacles and barriers we’re going to confront along the way.

That’s why I suspect that reading my book will not be enough to make the journey. Hopefully, it will be a catalyst to help us see the potential of the journey and motivate us to get started on the journey.

Beyond the book

I want to do more than write a book to help others on the journey. My goal is to offer programs and services that will bring people together around a shared desire to make the journey beyond fear.

Some of the programs will be targeted to help individuals, but some of the programs will also be targeted to leaders of organizations, communities and movements who are seeking to move their participants beyond fear. As I indicate in my book, we as individuals will make much slower progress on this journey if we are living and working in environments that feed the fear, so my intent is to help individuals to evolve while at the same time helping to evolve our environments so we are supported and encouraged on our journey.

On both fronts (individuals and environments), the programs will not just be standalone events. They will be woven together so that individuals and leaders can continue to be supported throughout their journey.

A key objective will be to bring people together into small groups of 3-15 people who can both challenge and support each other on their journey. I call these groups “impact groups” – they’re not just discussion groups, they’re committed to acting, achieving impact and learning through action. Programs would help people to see the importance of these impact groups and help them to form an impact group. Then there would be coaching services to support the impact groups and programs tailored to impact groups.

Another objective (and they’re all related) will be to help people find and nurture their passion of the explorer. As people find their passion of the explorer and come together with others who share their passion, they’ll be driven to increase their impact in the domain that excites them. They’ll discover that this is a journey without end, because they’ll soon realize that, no matter how much impact they have already achieved, there is so much more impact to be achieved.

That leads to another objective: to help deploy and scale learning platforms where impact groups can gather and accelerate their learning and their impact. Impact groups will be pursuing a diverse set of opportunities on this platform, driven by the passion of the explorer that is finally manifesting within them. Impact groups pursuing the same opportunity will come together into broader and broader networks, helping them to scale their impact.  But there will also be growing interaction across these networks as participants discover that many of the opportunities they are pursuing are related and that the approaches being used to address one opportunity can also be applied to address other opportunities.

And then, of course, it can become even more complex as I seek to build relationships with other organizations and movements that share a common goal to help us move beyond fear and achieve impact that is more meaningful to all of us. We will hopefully see networks within networks and networks across networks blossom over time as people see the value of coming together in the journey beyond fear.

Exploring the edge

I don’t have a detailed roadmap or blueprint of what all of this will look like as it emerges and evolves. In classic zoom out/zoom in fashion, I’m focusing on framing the long-term opportunity to support people on the journey beyond fear and some of the early programs that can be offered to get the journey started.

I’m heading beyond the edge and that certainly brings out some fear as I explore terrain that’s never been explored before. But I’m so excited about the opportunity to build a platform that can bring more and more people together in their journey beyond fear that I am eagerly moving forward, in spite of the fear.

Bottom line

I need all the help that I can get in making this journey. I’m wide open to suggestions and ideas for developing and delivering programs that can help people to make the journey beyond fear. I’m also looking for ideas on how to build awareness of these programs and the opportunity they address. Of course, my hope is that many people will read my book and that it will pull them to these programs, but how do I pull people to read my book? There are so many things competing for our attention that it’s challenging to rise above the noise. Please message me if you want to help and have some ideas and suggestions on how to get started.

Let’s overcome our fear and venture out onto the edge together so that we can craft a platform that will help a growing number of people to achieve more and more of their potential!

  • 31
    May 21
  • 0

From Fear to Passion

Category:Collaboration,Connections,Emotions,Exploration,Fear,Growth,Learning,Movements,Narratives,Opportunity,Passion,Workgroups

My new book, The Journey Beyond Fear, was published last week! It suggests that a very specific form of passion can help all of us in overcoming fear. Passion draws out excitement and motivates us to act in spite of fear to achieve more impact that’s truly meaningful to us. But most of us have not yet found our passion and many of us have given up looking for it, because we live in environments that are hostile to passion. We need to change that.

Passion of the explorer

Passion is one of those words with an infinite number of meanings. My book focuses on the passion of the explorer – an insight that emerged from research into environments where we see sustained extreme performance improvement. Despite the diversity of those environments, all the participants had this specific form of passion.

The passion of the explorer has three components. First, people who have this form of passion have made a long-term commitment to a specific domain – it could be anything from gardening to sales. They’re not just committed to being in the domain, they’re committed to achieving an increasing impact in that domain over time.

The second component of the passion of the explorer is a questing disposition. People with this passion are excited when confronted with an unexpected challenge. In fact, they’re constantly seeking new challenges as a way to achieve increasing impact.

The third component of the passion of the explorer is a connecting disposition. When confronted with new challenges, the first reaction of people with this form of passion is to seek out others who can help them get to a better answer faster. They are extremely well connected with others.

Why it matters

We live in a world of mounting performance pressure. That world generates fear within more and more people. While understandable, that fear is very limiting. We need to cultivate emotions like hope and excitement that will help us to move forward in spite of our fear so that we can achieve the impact that is most meaningful to us.

The passion of the explorer generates excitement, not just in the moment, but over a lifetime. That excitement cannot be under-estimated. It turns pressure into opportunity that we pursue to achieve more of our potential.

This passion also cultivates a learning or growth mindset. No matter how much they have accomplished, people with this passion are eagerly seeking to find ways to achieve even more impact. They are never complacent or satisfied with the knowledge they already have – they are always wanting to learn more.

Equally importantly, the passion of the explorer drives each person to connect with others, not just in a transactional, exchanging business cards kind of way, but in a way that builds deep, trust-based relationships because they are very willing to express vulnerability. No matter how smart or talented any individual is, they will learn a lot more and achieve much more impact if they can find ways to build this kind of deep relationships with others. It will also help them to overcome their fears, because they are connected with others who share their passion and who will energize and support them through the most challenging of times.

Push back on passion

I often receive a lot of push back from people regarding passion. They say to me that some people are capable of passion, but most of us just want to be told what to do and have the security of a paycheck.

I resist that push back. I believe that we all, as humans, have the potential to find and pursue our passion. While relatively few children have found their passion of the explorer in terms of the domain that they want to commit to for the rest of their lives, they all have a powerful questing disposition and connecting disposition.

I also use the example of Toyota where they redefined work in their factories and told workers that their primary job was to identify problems and to solve the problems. Worker passion levels went way up because they were now not just cogs in a machine, but making a difference that matters by finding problems that no one else had seen before.

Our environments need to change

I believe we all need to find our passion of the explorer, regardless of how old we are (I was in my 50’s. before I fully connected with my passion of the explorer), if we’re going to make the journey beyond fear. My book outlines some of the approaches and actions we can take to find our passion of the explorer based on my own personal life experience and broader research that I’ve done on the topic.

But I’ve also come to believe that we’ll be much more successful in this quest if we live in environments that encourage and nurture the passion of the explorer, rather than seeking to crush it. Unfortunately, most of the environments we live and work in today are driven to crush this passion. It’s one of the reasons that, based on a survey I did of the US workforce, only 14% of US workers have this form of passion in their work.

In an institutional environment of scalable efficiency, we’re taught that the key to success is just to read the process manual, follow the instructions and deliver the anticipated results reliably and efficiently. Passion is viewed as deeply suspect. Passionate people ask too many questions, they take risks and they deviate from the script.

And our school systems are explicitly designed to prepare us for work in those institutional environments. As young people, we’re told that if you have a passion, pursue it on the playground or at home, but don’t bring it into the classroom. We’re also told to focus on finding a career that pays well and has high status, not something that we’re passionate about. Many parents also echo this message with the well-intentioned desire that their children do well in life.

If we’re all going to achieve more of our potential and have impact that’s meaningful to us, we need to come together to evolve our environments in ways that encourage and nurture the passion of the explorer for everyone. My book helps us to understand what those environments will need to look like.

Drawing out our passion

But we can’t just wait until our environments evolve. We need to get started now so that we can overcome our fear sooner rather than later and find a more fulfilling life.

In my book, I outline the role that our personal narrative plays in shaping our emotions and our lives. We need to make our personal narratives explicit (they are implicit for most of us) and then find ways to evolve our personal narratives so that they begin to focus on opportunities that are truly exciting to us. As I indicated in my previous blog post and in my book, I have a very different definition of narrative than most people do, so that’s key to understand.

And sooner rather than later, we need to find a small group of people (not more than 15 in total) who share our desire to move beyond fear and who will both support us in our efforts as well as challenge us to have even more impact.

The key is to move beyond conversation and focus on action that will help us to connect with the opportunity that excites us the most and learn more as we go.

As we begin to focus on the opportunity that excites us the most, we also need to take steps wherever possible to evolve our personal and work environments so that they support us in our quest to address the exciting opportunity.

My passion

As I share in my book, my passion of the explorer focuses on the opportunity to help people make the journey beyond fear and to develop platforms that will help to deepen their excitement, accelerate their learning and connect with more and more people who share their passion.

That effort starts with this book, but it doesn’t stop there. My intention is to set up a new Center that will offer programs based on the book and support people over the long-term in their journey beyond fear. I’ve started to develop some pilot programs on this front, but I’m still at a very early stage in determining how to best support people in their journey. I will learn as I go and I seek help from others who see what an exciting opportunity this is. If you’re interested in learning more about this initiative and perhaps interested in helping me in this effort, please sign up here for updates.

Bottom line

The passion of the explorer is something that we all have within us, waiting to be discovered and nurtured. If we want to make the journey beyond fear, we need to make the effort to find that passion and pursue it, not just on nights and weekends, but in our day jobs. It will help us to turn a world of mounting performance pressure into a world of exponentially expanding opportunity.

I invite you to join me on this journey – it’s an exciting one that will help all of us to achieve more and more impact that is meaningful to us.

  • 23
    May 21
  • 0

Narratives Shape Our Emotions

Category:Collaboration,Community,Emotions,Fear,Growth,Movements,Narratives,Opportunity,Passion,Potential

My new book, The Journey Beyond Fear, that will be released on May 25 suggests there’s a significant untapped opportunity to be addressed with narratives. It explores the role that narratives can play in helping us to move beyond fear and cultivate emotions that will help us to achieve more impact that’s meaningful to us.

But, to address that opportunity, we need to embrace a very different definition of narratives. And we need to craft narratives at multiple levels – for individuals, institutions, geographies and movements. We can make progress at each level, but it’s only when we find ways to align narratives across all these levels that we will unleash the full opportunity.

What is a narrative?

Most people view narratives and stories as synonymous – they mean the same thing. I believe there’s an important distinction that can and should be made. Stories are self-contained – they have a beginning, middle and end. Also, stories are about the story-teller or some other people, real or imagined, but they are not about you in the audience.

In contrast, the way I define narratives, they’re open-ended. There is no resolution yet. There’s some kind of big threat or opportunity out in the future and it’s not yet clear whether it will be addressed. The resolution of the narrative hinges on you – the people being addressed by the narrative. Your choices and actions will help to determine how the narrative plays out.

Why are narratives so powerful?

By looking out into the future, narratives can play a powerful role in shaping our emotions and actions today. Threat-based narratives feed our fear. Opportunity-based narratives, in contrast, help to cultivate hope and excitement about the future and motivate us seek out the opportunity. The most powerful opportunity-based narratives become catalysts for finding and drawing out our passion of the explorer. As I discuss in my new book, the passion of the explorer ultimately holds the key to helping us turn mounting performance pressure into exponentially expanding opportunity. We need to do whatever we can to unleash that passion and to pursue it.

Narratives also are powerful because they are a call to action to others, so they bring people together. If it’s a threat-based narrative, it brings people together in fear, and amplifies the fear in each person. In contrast, opportunity-based narratives bring people together who share excitement about the opportunity ahead. Collective excitement draws out even more excitement, and we are encouraged to act even more boldly in our quest for the opportunity. That’s why I focused on narratives as one of three promising pillars that can help us to make the journey beyond fear.

In a world that is increasingly enveloped in fear, we need to become much more active in crafting opportunity-based narratives that will help us to move beyond fear.

Personal narratives. Narratives can be crafted at multiple levels, starting with each of us as individuals. Personal narratives are about our view of our future and they are about our call to action to others. We all have personal narratives that are shaping our lives, but few of us have made the effort to articulate this narrative, much less to evolve it so that we can have even more impact.

To address the untapped opportunity of personal narratives, we need to ask ourselves some difficult questions:

  • Is our view of the future primarily about threat or opportunity?
  • Are we really focused on an opportunity that is the most exciting for us?
  • Are we calling others to join us in addressing this exciting opportunity?

In my book, I share how my own personal narrative has evolved and how it has helped me to move beyond fear. We all have a need to do this.

Institutional narratives. Beyond personal narratives, institutional narratives also represent an untapped opportunity. Few institutions at this point have crafted a compelling narrative. The key in these narratives is to focus on framing a really big, inspiring opportunity that is meaningful to the customers or other stakeholders of the institution – it requires expanding horizons beyond opportunities for the institutions and focusing on opportunities for others. And it also includes a call to action to these customers or other stakeholders – what actions will they need to take that will be most helpful in addressing the opportunity?

One example of the power of an institutional narrative is provided by Apple back in the 1990’s. It condensed the narrative into the slogan “Think different.” The narrative indicated that digital technology in the past had taken away our names and given us numbers and made us cogs in a machine. Now, for the first time, there was a generation of technology that could enable us to express our unique potential and individuality in the future. But it wouldn’t happen automatically – we needed to think different. That was the call to action.

Institutional narratives, properly framed, can draw out significant excitement from customers and other stakeholders and pull more and more people in to address the opportunity. At a time when we all have a hunger for hope and excitement, this can become a catalyst for those emotions.

Geographical narratives. Moving up the stack, there’s another level of narratives – narratives for cities, regions and even countries. I’ve lived in Silicon Valley for over 40 years and I’ve come to believe that a key to its continuing success has been a geographical narrative that focused on the opportunity to change the world by harnessing the exponential improvement in digital technology. It has been such an inspiring opportunity that it has drawn people from all over the world to Silicon Valley. Few people realize that the majority of successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were not born in the U.S., much less Silicon Valley itself. It’s a key reason why Silicon Valley sustains a culture of optimism – everyone is excited by the opportunity.

My book looks at the role of geographical narratives in helping to build the growth and prosperity of cities, regions and countries around the world. Unfortunately, again, these opportunity-based narratives are few and far between.

Movement narratives. But there’s more. I’ve studied movements for social change throughout history and in many different parts of the world. Despite significant diversity in these movements, the most successful movements have one thing in common. You guessed it! Opportunity-based narratives.

The classic example is provided by Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC. These narratives focus on the amazing and wonderful things that can be accomplished if we all come together and act together to address new opportunities. Yes, they certainly acknowledge the challenges and obstacles along the way, but the focus is on a really big and inspiring opportunity. That motivates people to come together and act now because now they are tapping into hope and excitement that enables them to move beyond fear.

My book explores the potential that current movements have to achieve much greater impact by crafting more inspiring opportunity-based narratives.

Bottom line

We all need to focus on crafting and evolving narratives that can help us to move beyond fear and cultivate emotions of hope and excitement – and ultimately unleash the passion of the explorer that exists within all of us, waiting to be drawn out and nurtured. If we make this effort, we will tap into exponentially expanding opportunity.

But, there’s a challenge. If the narratives at all the levels I’ve covered are not aligned, we’ll limit our potential for impact. If we’re able to evolve a more compelling personal opportunity-based narrative, but we work in institutions that are driven by threat-based narratives and we live in geographies that are driven by threat-based narratives, the fear of others around us will limit our ability to achieve more of our potential.

What we need are movements driven by opportunity-based narratives that can become catalysts for the profound changes we need in all of our institutions and our communities. If we all come together around opportunity-based narratives, the sky’s the limit in terms of what we can achieve.

The book

There’s a lot more to explore on this topic in my book, The Journey Beyond Fear. In addition to narratives, there are two more pillars that can help us on that journey – the passion of the explorer and learning platforms. But that book is just the beginning – once you’ve read it, reach out and connect with me so that we can continue the journey together.

I’ve scheduled some virtual (and free) launch events next week that will help to introduce some key themes in the book.

My first launch event on May 25th will be with Jean Houston and will explore how we can achieve more and more of our potential when we cultivate emotions of hope and excitement. You can register for this event here.

My second launch event on May 26th will be with Quentin Hardy and the focus of this event will be on the untapped opportunity in the business world to cultivate emotions that can lead to exponentially expanding opportunity. You can register for this event here.

My third launch event on May 26th will be with Dale Dougherty and here we will focus on how movements can significantly increase their impact by focusing on positive emotions, rather than playing to our fear. You can register for this event here.

I invite you to join me in any or all of these launch events to learn more about the ground that my book covers. I would also deeply welcome any and all help you might be able to provide in increasing awareness of this new book within your networks. I believe it’s very timely and very much needed by all as we strive to make a difference that matters.

  • 07
    Apr 21
  • 5

Growing Into Growth

Category:Collaboration,Community,Connections,Emotions,Exploration,Institutional Innovation,Learning,Opportunity,Potential,Uncategorized

I need help. I’m struggling with words. I’m trying to capture what excites me and motivates me to start a new chapter in my life.

Here’s the challenge: the word I am drawn to has received a very mixed reaction at best, and often a very negative reaction. What’s that word? It’s “growth.”

Growth has always excited me. I’ve come to believe that we humans have unlimited potential for growth – it’s why I cringe when I hear the phrase: “achieve my full potential.” I don’t believe anyone can achieve their “full potential” – no matter how much of our potential we achieve, there’s always more potential waiting to be drawn out. That’s why I keep saying that we’re not “human beings,” we’re “human becomings.”

Of course, growth has many different meanings. For many, growth tends to focus on physical size – whether of the body, a community or an economy. The desire is to find something that’s easy to measure, and that leads to an emphasis on physical entities – people and products.

For me, growth has a different meaning. It focuses first of all on growth of insight into the world around us. But it doesn’t stop there. Growth of insight has little value until and unless it is translated into growth of impact that is meaningful. That requires action, but it shifts the focus from the action itself to the impact achieved and how meaningful that impact is, both for those who are taking action and those who are benefiting from the action.

Why growth has a bad reputation

So, why does growth seem to have such a bad reputation? There are many reasons, but I believe that it stems from a zero-sum view of growth. In this view, one person’s growth can only occur at the expense of others. If you win, I lose.

How does that work? Well, let’s start with environmental impact. For many reasons, we have embraced a view of economic growth over the past couple of centuries that has led to serious damage of our global ecosystem, including pollution of water, the growth of carbon emissions and pollution of our atmosphere. While many have benefited from this economic growth, even more have suffered from its adverse effects.

Another force at work involves our shrinking time horizons when we pursue growth that is narrowly focused on material goods. We’re not focused on long-term economic growth; we’re focused on short-term material gains. If we’re focused narrowly on material goods in the very short-term, the quantity of goods is fixed – the only question is who will acquire them – you or me? Once again, while some will benefit from economic growth, it will be at the expense of others.

What’s the alternative?

As growth has acquired a bad reputation, many people have rallied around a number of other words – sustainability, regeneration, circular economy, and resilience are perhaps some of the most prominent ones.

What strikes me about all of these alternatives is their focus on holding on to what we have, or what we had. Take sustainability – we want to sustain what we have. Or regeneration – we want to generate what we once had. Or the circular economy – it’s all about re-using what we have. Resilience has many different meanings, but the one I hear most frequently is the desire to be able to “bounce back” to where we once were before some disruption happened.

While they tend to focus on somewhat different elements, they all share a static view of the world in the sense that the resources we have are a given and the question is how to re-use them so that we preserve what we have, or regenerate what we had, and reduce damage to others.

While the aspiration to avoid environmental damage and waste is certainly something we should all embrace, these alternatives strike me as inherently limiting. Is that all there is? Don’t we have the potential to create much greater meaningful and positive impact with far fewer resources over time?

Maybe there’s another perspective

What if we move from a zero-sum view of the world to a positive-sum view of the world? What if we believed that opportunity has the potential to expand for everyone, not just for a privileged few? And what if we believed that expanding opportunity generates even greater opportunity for everyone? What would that require?

First, it would require us to take a longer-term view of the world. Rather than just focusing on the short-term, we would need to look ahead and imagine how our ability to achieve greater positive impact can increase over time.

Second, we would also need to take a broader view of the world. Rather than just focusing narrowly on how to increase our own well-being, we would need to recognize that by increasing the well-being of others we can set into motion an increasing returns dynamic where everyone would achieve more and more of their potential and the well-being of all of us would expand significantly.

Third, we would need to deepen our view of impact. Rather than focusing just on material goods as a metric for growth, we would need to see that our greatest impact can come from motivating others to achieve more of their potential. The growth of others will help all of us to accelerate our own growth. This unleashes a powerful network effects dynamic where the more people who are motivated to achieve more of their potential, the more everyone will be motivated to achieve more of their potential.

Finally, we would need to focus on emotions as a key driver of motivation. If we’re driven by fear, we tend to narrow our focus to ourselves in the short-term. If we can cultivate hope and excitement, we can begin to see more opportunity for all, not just for ourselves. This, of course, is the theme of my new book, The Journey Beyond Fear, that will be published next month by McGraw Hill. I’ve come to believe that our emotions are shaping how our world is evolving and that there is a need to cultivate emotions that will help us to move forward in spite of the fear that is consuming more and more of us.

Back to growth

If we adopt a positive sum view of the world, now growth begins to become more attractive. The more any of us grow, the more all of us will be able to grow. And the potential for more growth becomes unlimited for two reasons.

First, as I’ve already indicated, we all have unlimited potential, so none of us will ever achieve our full potential in terms of delivering meaningful impact to those around us. Second, we live in a world of exponential improvement in technology performance that can help us to amplify our impact in ways that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago.

Growth focuses on the actions we’ll need to take and the impact we’ll need to achieve to help us to evolve flourishing societies and ecosystems. A key element of these flourishing societies and ecosystems is that they will continue to provide opportunity for all of us to increase our impact over time, while at the same time minimizing, and ultimately eliminating, any damage and waste that might occur as a by-product of growth.

This is why I’m reluctant to abandon growth as the way of framing the opportunity for all of us. What am I missing? Is there a better word to describe the opportunity ahead? I’m open to any and all suggestions.

And, just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that this opportunity will be an easy one to address. There will be many obstacles and challenges along the way. At a personal level, we need to find ways to move beyond the fear that consumes more and more of us and limits our potential for impact. We’ll need to cultivate emotions that will motivate us to take bold action and significantly increase our potential for impact. At a broader, social level, we need to focus on transforming our institutions and our societies so that they create environments that will help us to move beyond fear and provide us with the tools we’ll need to significantly increase our impact in ways that support a thriving global ecosystem and society. It will be a challenging journey, but a journey very much worth pursuing.

Bottom line

I’m seeking help in choosing the right word to frame the opportunity ahead. I’m attracted to “growth” because it highlights a dynamic and expanding opportunity that, if pursued in the right way, will lead to expanding opportunity for all. But, I also understand, that it can lead to some very negative reactions. I’m just not sure I can find a better word. Any and all suggestions are welcome. It will become the “north star” that will frame my efforts on the journey ahead.

  • 15
    Mar 21
  • 0

The Untapped Potential of Personal Narrative

Category:Collaboration,Emotions,Exploration,Learning,Narratives,Opportunity,Potential

We all have a personal narrative. For some of us, it is liberating and energizing, but for most of us, it is limiting and draining. The good news is that we all have ability to evolve our personal narrative to make it more fulfilling, if we choose to make the effort.

I’ve written about personal narrative before, including here and here, and it is a key theme in my new book, The Journey Beyond Fear, that will be coming out in a couple of months. For those who have not been following me, I should clarify that I have a very different view of personal narrative than most psychologists.

For psychologists, personal narrative involves looking back over our lives and crafting a story of the choices we made that brought us to where we are today. For me, personal narratives have two key components: our view of the future and our call to action to others.

When we look out into the future, are we focusing more on threat or opportunity? That view of the future will play a key role in shaping our emotions and actions today. Also, as we seek to address the threat or opportunity out in the future, are we asking for help from others or are we trying to go it alone?

We all have a personal narrative that’s driving us forward, but few of us have made the effort to make that personal narrative explicit, much less reflect on how well it might be serving our needs and potential for impact. That effort can be very rewarding, especially if we use it as a catalyst to evolve our narrative so that we are motivated to have much greater impact that is meaningful to us and can motivate others to join us in that effort.

Opportunities for evolution

Our personal narratives can evolve on multiple dimensions. Let’s start with our view of the future. In a world of mounting performance pressure, more and more of us have adopted a dystopian view of the future where threats are everywhere. The world is coming to an end, our societies our crumbling and our personal lives are more and more vulnerable to disruption.

While certainly understandable, that view of the future feeds our fear and makes us more risk averse and we become even more vulnerable to mounting performance pressure.

But there is an alternative view of the future. The same forces that are creating mounting performance pressure are also creating exponentially expanding opportunity – we can have far more impact, with far less resources and far more quickly than ever before. We need to make the effort to see those opportunities and to search for the opportunity that excites us the most.

If our view of the future is shaped by a really inspiring opportunity, we will begin to draw out emotions of hope and excitement that will motivate us to move boldly forward. We’ll find ourselves having much more meaningful impact and we’ll be driven to learn how to have even more impact in addressing this opportunity over time.

But there’s more. If we can focus on an opportunity in the future that really excites us, it increases our desire and ability to motivate others to join us in the quest to address this opportunity. Truth be told, most of us are pursuing personal narratives today that don’t provide a call to action for others to join us. Personal narratives that focus on a threat in the future tend to isolate us. As fear takes hold, we find it harder to trust others and we are more inclined to try to move forward on our own. That sense of isolation further intensifies the fear.

On the other hand, if we’ve found a really exciting opportunity out in the future, we can become very motivated to ask for help from others and, if the opportunity is appropriately framed, it can motivate many to invest time and effort in addressing the opportunity. This helps us to get significant leverage and have far more impact than if we try to do it all by ourselves. If it’s a big opportunity that will take years to achieve, it can also help us to build long-term, trust-based relationships that will play a significant role in overcoming our fear.

Challenges of evolution

When I talk about evolution of personal narrative, many people interpret this as writing up a new, and more fulfilling, narrative based on reflection of their existing narrative. I wish it were that easy. In my experience, personal narratives can’t evolve just by thinking and writing. They need to evolve through action – and it’s not just a one-time evolution, but a continual process of evolution shaped by actions taken and reflection on the impact achieved through action.

As we begin to focus on an opportunity in the future, we need to test and refine that opportunity through action now. We need to identify and pursue actions in the short-term (ideally weeks or a few months) that have potential to address that opportunity. As we pursue these actions, we need to reflect on whether those actions are generating the level of excitement we anticipated and whether they are helping us to make progress towards achieving the opportunity. If not, we need to either evolve our view of the opportunity that would be most exciting to us or our view of the actions that would have the greatest impact in making progress.

We also need to start reaching out to those we think could be most helpful with a call for them to join us in our quest to address the opportunity we’ve identified. Are they really investing the time and effort required to address the opportunity? Are they achieving real impact from their efforts?

If not, we need to further evolve our personal narrative. Is the opportunity we’ve identified big enough to motivate others to participate? Have we identified the right people to address the opportunity ahead? Can we frame the call to action in a way that would help them (and us) to achieve greater impact?

Our personal narratives are capable of, and require, continual evolution if we are going to achieve the impact that is most meaningful to us. There is always the potential to achieve more. In fact, if we’re truly excited about the opportunity we are identifying, we will be constantly seeking ways to have greater impact.

Effective personal narratives will trigger a learning mindset. We’ll be excited by the opportunity to have more and more impact over time. And we’ll realize that the most effective way to learn is through action, not just sitting in a chair and thinking about it.

And, it’s not just learning through action – it’s learning through action together with others. No matter how smart we are as individuals, we’ll learn a lot faster if we can come together with others who share our excitement about the opportunity we’ve identified. That’s why it’s so important to have a call to action to others that excites and motivates others to come together and constantly seek to increase impact.

Bottom line

Our personal narratives have untapped potential, no matter how well framed they are today. If we’re going to unleash more and more of that potential, we need to commit to continually evolve our personal narratives by acting together with others in ways that help us to learn faster.

NEW BOOK

(if you've read the book, click here)

My new book, The Journey Beyond Fear, starts with the observation that fear is becoming the dominant emotion for people around the world. While understandable, fear is also very limiting.

LEARN MORE
BUY NOW

The book explores a variety of approaches we can pursue to cultivate emotions of hope and excitement that will help us to move forward despite fear and achieve more of our potential. You can order the book at Amazon.

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