Many of us wish that we were more productive in our professional and personal lives. However, actually becoming productive can be a struggle. It can be difficult to know where to start. Which elements of our behavior need to change for our productivity to increase?
In Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg argues that becoming more productive isn’t about working longer hours or constantly pushing yourself to do more. Instead, it’s about making wise choices in certain areas of your life.
Duhigg discusses eight principles that he believes are crucial to improving productivity. Six of these principles relate to improving your personal productivity. The final two principles address how you can improve the productivity of an organization.
The first principle that is important in improving your personal productivity is finding motivation. If you lack motivation, you’re more likely to procrastinate your tasks and less likely to complete your work to a high standard. You may struggle to find the drive to pursue your goals. This ultimately harms your productivity.
Research has suggested that there are two things you can do to improve your motivation. Firstly, you can make choices that help you to feel in control. Even making a small choice about the task in front of you, such as deciding to respond to a particular email first, can help you to feel in control of a situation. In turn, this feeling of control will increase your confidence, make you more willing to push yourself, and boost your motivation.
The second action you can take to generate motivation is finding meaning in your choices. Sometimes, simply making a choice isn’t enough to increase your motivation, especially when the task in front of you is difficult or unpleasant. However, reminding yourself of the meaning behind your choices—why you’re doing what you’re doing—can give you the boost you need to get started. If you link a difficult task to a higher purpose, it can become more palatable and you can become more motivated to complete it.
Another important facet of productivity is maintaining focus on your tasks. If you constantly get distracted from your most important work, your productivity will suffer.
Two cognitive processes can harm your ability to focus. The first process is cognitive tunneling. If you enter a cognitive tunnel, your brain becomes hyper-focused on an immediate and obvious stimulus, such as an email you’ve just received, at the expense of everything else that’s going on around you.
The second harmful process is reactive thinking. When you think reactively, the brain responds automatically to a certain stimulus or event using a familiar mental process. For instance, if you’re driving and begin to approach a red light, your brain may instinctively tell you to start braking.
These cognitive processes can forcibly drag you away from your most productive path. After all, the most immediate and obvious stimulus may not be the one you need to focus on to get your work done. Likewise, thinking reactively becomes unproductive when the brain selects an inappropriate reaction to your current situation.
Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking are often triggered when the brain has to jump from a relaxed state to a focused state quickly or unexpectedly, or when you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed.
How can you avoid these harmful cognitive processes and teach yourself to focus? Psychologists believe that creating mental models can help you to stay on track.
Mental models are stories that you create about the world around you. You may internally narrate a story about what you’re experiencing in real-time. For example, during a meeting, you may create an internal narrative of who is speaking, what they’re saying, and how other participants are responding to their points. Narrating your life like this prevents your brain from slipping into a fully relaxed state. This makes its transition into “focused mode” much smoother and averts the panic that can cause unhelpful cognitive processes to take hold.
You can also create mental models that outline your expectations for the future. You can decide in advance what your goals for a certain period will be and what you need to do to meet these goals. When it’s time to put your plan into action, you know exactly what you need to focus on to maintain your productivity. If distractions crop up that don’t fit into your original mental model of the day, you can identify them quickly and choose whether to address them or dismiss them.
Setting effective goals is another principle you need to implement if you want to increase your productivity. You need to have a clear idea of what you’re working towards. You also need to make sure that you’re aiming for the right results.
There are two types of goals that you can use to enhance your productivity: stretch goals and SMART goals.
Stretch goals are far-reaching objectives that, at first glance, may not even seem possible. They’re ambitious and audacious, and often require a lot of forethought and effort to achieve.
In contrast, SMART goals are targeted and focused objectives that often represent the smaller steps you’ll need to take to meet your stretch goals. SMART goals must be specific; measurable; achievable; realistic; and timely.
For stretch and SMART goals to be effective, they must be used together. For instance, you may choose to set an ambitious stretch goal and then break it down into actionable steps using SMART goals.
If a stretch goal is used alone, it can become too overwhelming for you to work towards. If SMART goals are used alone, you may fall into the trap of “cognitive closure”—a mental process that makes you focus more on the satisfying feeling of completing your goals, and less on the actual productivity or usefulness of those goals.
While you’re pursuing your goals, you must constantly evaluate whether these goals are still the best way forward. You should consider whether new information has rendered your goals inappropriate or unproductive so you don’t blindly pursue goals that, while initially well-intentioned, have become unproductive.
An important element of productivity is making productive decisions: decisions that help you to achieve your goals. At the root of productive decision making is the ability to predict the future with some accuracy. You need to be able to forecast what the consequences of your decisions will be, and, based on this, whether you should pursue a certain course of action or not.
Predicting the future is by no means easy. Nobody can do so accurately all of the time. However, there are ways for you to increase the accuracy of your predictions. For example, you can use probabilistic thinking. Studies have shown that this type of thinking can increase the accuracy of predictions by as much as 50%.
Probabilistic thinking is a cognitive approach that involves identifying all of the possible futures that a decision could lead to and calculating the odds of each future coming to pass. You can use this information to decide whether to proceed with the decision or not.
For example, imagine you’re trying to decide whether or not to propose marriage to your partner. There are two possible futures here: they say yes, or they say no. After considering all of the evidence—for instance, the strength of your relationship, your partner’s attitude towards marriage, and your overall compatibility—you come to the conclusion that it’s 75% likely that your partner will say yes, and 25% likely that they will say no. Based on these odds, you proceed with the proposal.
However, probabilistic thinking isn’t infallible. You may struggle to find the information you need to make an accurate estimation of the odds of each future coming true. In cases such as this, it may be helpful to pair your probabilistic thinking with another cognitive approach: Bayesian cognition.
Bayesian cognition involves using your assumptions about the world and how it operates to make accurate predictions. Your brain forms these assumptions based on experiences that you internalize and patterns that you notice. When you’re faced with a situation that seems to fit a previously observed pattern, you can apply your assumptions to predict, hopefully accurately, how this situation will progress.
It’s important to note that Bayesian cognition only helps to make your predictions more accurate if your assumptions are accurate. If you base a prediction on a flawed assumption, it follows that the prediction will be flawed, too.
For example, a study required a group of students to predict how much longer an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh would rule if he’d already been on the throne for 11 years. Many students assumed that a pharaoh’s lifespan—and therefore his total time on the throne—would follow the same pattern as the lifespan of a European king from a later period. However, this assumption was flawed. In reality, pharaohs had much lower life expectancies than these kings. Therefore, their rules were much shorter. The students’ incorrect assumption led to bad predictions: They predicted that the pharaoh would rule for on average another 23 years. Meanwhile, the data suggested that he would only rule for another 12 years.
You can increase the accuracy of your assumptions by seeking out as much information about the world as possible. In particular, you should make sure to look out for examples of failure. The brain tends to ignore information about how we and others have failed, and it instead focuses on examples of success. This can lead to your assumptions being unrealistically skewed towards success. You need to actively work to counterbalance this cognitive bias if you want your assumptions, and therefore your predictions, to be accurate.
An innovator is someone who formulates fresh and exciting ideas. You may not think of yourself as an innovator, but innovation is likely a crucial aspect of your job. If you make your creative process more productive, you’ll increase your overall productivity. But what makes a productive innovator?
To innovate in a productive way, you need to come up with ideas in a timely manner without compromising on quality. Implementing four principles can help you to do this.
Firstly, you can combine old ideas in new ways. For instance, Benjamin Spock combined two existing ideas—traditional childcare methods and Freudian psychological theories—to innovate his best-selling work, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.
This is much quicker than trying to come up with completely new ideas. However, it still retains the creative element that distinguishes innovation from simply copying someone else’s ideas.
Secondly, you can use your past experiences and emotions to validate and generate ideas. You can use your emotions to check whether the old ideas you’re using are of a high quality, or if they’re just tired clichés. How you feel about those ideas—whether they feel fresh or just predictable—will help you to decide whether they’re usable or not.
For example, the creator of West Side Story, Jerome Robbins, instructed his co-writers to completely re-write the show’s opening because after reading it, he felt that it was too predictable and, therefore, boring. The opening scene went from being a traditional discussion between characters to an iconic and revolutionary communication of ideas through dance.
You can also use your past emotions and experiences as inspiration for new ideas. These ideas are almost guaranteed to feel genuine; after all, they’re based on your real life.
The third principle you can follow is embracing frustration and anxiety as fuel for new ideas. For instance, if you’re feeling frustrated about a certain area of your life, innovate a solution to relieve this irritation. You might just come up with the next big idea.
Needing to innovate quickly can leave us feeling anxious. This anxiety can cause us to enter a state called “creative desperation.” In this state, we spend our time frantically searching for a good idea. We desperately formulate unusual combinations of old ideas in the hope that we strike gold. By doing this, we might just stumble upon an amazing idea that we would have otherwise ignored.
The final principle that can help you to innovate productively is remaining open to alternative ideas. When you’ve finally innovated an amazing new concept, you may shut yourself off to new ideas. You might become so focused on the idea you’ve already come up with that you refuse to consider that there might be a better approach out there. This can cause problems if you’re only midway through the creative process and need to keep innovating to meet your goal.
You can force yourself to remain open to alternative concepts by making an effort to re-examine your ideas. In doing so, you recognize that there may be a way to make your idea even better. You should also try to retain emotional distance from your ideas to prevent yourself from becoming too attached to them.
Finally, in a team environment, you may be able to restart the innovation process by slightly adjusting the dynamic of the team. By moving people into slightly different roles, you force them to look at ideas from a new perspective. This creates the conditions for innovation to thrive once more.
The final principle that can help you to improve your personal productivity is using data productively. In our technologically advanced society, we’re surrounded by data almost all of the time. However, simply having access to this data doesn’t guarantee we’ll use it productively. We may even become so overwhelmed by the amount of data out there that we stop taking it in. We enter a state of information blindness.
To avoid information overload and interact productively with the data that you need and that interests you, you need to do something with it. This could mean writing out the information by hand, plotting it on a graph, or explaining the information to another person.
Interacting with data in this way is sometimes called “creating disfluency.” Disfluency involves adding extra effort to the process of absorbing information, thus making the process a bit more difficult. Adding this effort and difficulty requires you to consider the data more deeply and pay extra attention to it. You process the data in a thorough way, leading to the information sticking in your brain.
Another way to use data productively is to use it to solve problems and make decisions. You can do this using the engineering design process.
The engineering design process requires you to consider all of the available data before making a decision or solving a problem. You can then use this data to formulate different approaches to your dilemma. Finally, you can evaluate which approach is likely to see the greatest success.
Using the process helps you to break free of one of the brain’s unhelpful automatic processes: trying to streamline decision making as much as possible. The brain loves to simplify things and often uses a limited frame of reference to view decisions and problems. It tries to resolve these issues based on just one or two variables. In contrast, the engineering design process encourages you to analyze all of the different variables that may affect your choice, a process similar to probabilistic thinking. You’re more likely to make a good decision if you use this thorough approach.
An important aspect of organizational productivity is building productive teams. In a team situation, making sure you’re personally productive isn’t always enough for you to achieve your goals. The team as a whole needs to be productive. But how can you build a productive team?
Research suggests that the membership of a team is not all that important when it comes to productivity. The “who” doesn’t really matter. Instead, a team’s productivity is influenced by the norms that its members adopt.
Norms are the unspoken and unwritten rules that we abide by. Studies have shown that certain norms are more likely to foster productive teamwork. In particular, creating a norm of psychological safety is crucial.
If a team is psychologically safe, its members feel that they can speak their minds and share their ideas without fear of retribution. They feel that mistakes won’t be harshly criticized, and that dissenting views won’t be silenced.
Creating an atmosphere of psychological safety is usually the onus of a team’s leader. The leader must ensure that two conditions are in place:
Team leaders can create these conditions by modeling appropriate behaviors themselves. For instance, if a team member has been particularly quiet in a group discussion, they can encourage that person to speak and thus participate equally. Likewise, the leader should monitor and respond to team members’ emotions. Leading by example will hopefully allow psychological safety to flourish.
Managing a productive workforce is another important facet of organizational productivity. According to Duhigg, workers become more productive when they believe two things: that they have the authority to make decisions, and that their managers trust them and want them to succeed. It’s the responsibility of managers to create a company culture in which these two statements are true.
One technique that managers can implement to create such a culture is lean manufacturing. In lean manufacturing, the person closest to a problem is given the authority to make decisions on how to solve it. This is true of all workers, from janitors to executives. Everyone is given a small amount of control and responsibility. In short, all workers have the authority to make decisions, even if these decisions are relatively small. Therefore, lean manufacturing satisfies the first element of Duhigg's metric.
However, implementing lean manufacturing isn’t always simple. Even if every worker is given a small amount of control, they may not feel comfortable enough to use it. They may fear punishment if they make a bad choice or act against the wishes of their superiors. To help workers feel comfortable enough to implement the practices of lean manufacturing, managers should also try to create a commitment culture.
As the name suggests, this is a company culture in which employers make clear their commitment to each employee’s growth and success. In return, each employee shows commitment to their employer. This mutual commitment breeds an atmosphere of trust: employers trust employees to work effectively and diligently, while employees trust that employers have their backs and won’t punish them needlessly. In such an atmosphere, lean manufacturing can flourish.
But how can you create a commitment culture? Implementing lean manufacturing can in itself help to lay the groundwork for such a culture. Giving each employee some degree of decision-making power shows that you value them and their expertise. It also demonstrates that you trust them to make good decisions.
Other steps that managers can take to create a commitment culture include investing in employee training; offering generous employee benefits; and refusing to lay off employees unless strictly necessary.
Smarter Faster Better explores the techniques that you can use to increase your productivity. But what does “being productive” actually entail?
Productivity can mean a lot of different things to different people. However, it commonly involves four key elements:
Charles Duhigg argues that becoming more productive doesn’t necessarily involve working for longer or pushing yourself to work harder and harder. Instead, he believes that it’s all about making smarter choices in certain areas of your life.
Each chapter of Smarter Faster Better covers one of eight concepts that are instrumental in boosting productivity. Six of those concepts relate to boosting your personal productivity:
Duhigg also explores two concepts that relate to organizational productivity: building a productive team and managing a productive workforce.
All eight concepts involve making behavioral decisions that help us and others to become smarter, faster, and better at our tasks: in short, more productive.
We've reorganized the book’s chapter order for coherency. As a reference, here's how the summary chapters correspond to those of the book:
The first concept that is crucial in increasing your personal productivity is finding motivation.
Motivation is, in short, having the enthusiasm and drive to do something. It’s a crucial factor in being productive for two reasons. Firstly, if you don’t have the motivation to do something, you’re less likely to do it efficiently or well (or, in extreme cases, at all.) Secondly, if you’re demotivated, you’re more likely to procrastinate tasks and become paralyzed by inactivity. Consequently, your productivity will suffer.
Being able to self-motivate is becoming an increasingly important skill in the modern economy. Currently, more than a third of working Americans are self-employed, and this figure continues to rise. When you’re self-employed, you have no boss to motivate you. You have to set your own goals, manage your own time, and make your own choices. To do this effectively, you need a degree of self-motivation.
Unfortunately, finding motivation is something that many people struggle with. We can all recall the feeling of knowing that we need to do something, but fundamentally not wanting to do it!
Those of us who’ve turned to self-help materials in our quest to become more motivated have often been met with the assertion that motivation is a personality trait that we either have or we don’t. Likewise, it’s frequently assumed that motivation is a subconscious process in which our brain compares the effort of a task against its potential reward.
These ideas have framed motivation as something that you can’t necessarily change; it’s already ingrained in your personality or brain chemistry. However, the reality is more complex—and optimistic—than this. You can learn how to be motivated. Motivation is more comparable to a skill than a static trait; it’s a muscle to be flexed and strengthened.
But how can you develop motivation? Research has revealed two key actions that you can take:
The more you put these actions into practice, the easier it becomes to make motivation a habit.
(Shortform note: For more on creating new habits, read our summary of Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit.)
Researchers have suggested that there is a strong link between feeling in control and feeling motivated. Studies have shown that when we feel in control, we experience increased activity in the striatum—an area of our brain that is believed to drive motivation.
Feeling in control gives us confidence, increases our drive, and makes us more willing to push our limits. But what can you do to generate a feeling of control?
The answer lies in making choices. According to researchers at Columbia University, making a choice instills a sense of control in us—even if the choice doesn't actually offer any tangible benefits.
Your choice only has to be small: for instance, you might choose which email in your flooded inbox to respond to first, or decide the location of a meeting that you need to arrange. In many ways, the details of your choice don’t matter. It’s the act of choosing that gives you a feeling of control, and, by extension, a feeling of motivation.
Duhigg suggests that making a subversive choice—one that breaks the rules or challenges the status quo in some way—may be particularly powerful in establishing a feeling of being in control.
Acts of rebellion strengthen what psychologists call your “internal locus of control”; your belief that you control your own life and destiny. By breaking the rules, such as rearranging the furniture in your senior living home when you're not supposed to, you’re reminded that you have agency and don’t have to blindly follow others’ guidelines.
If you develop a strong internal locus of control, you’re more likely to believe that your actions will make a difference to your life. Because of this, you’re more likely to succeed at self-motivation. It’s much easier to motivate yourself to complete a task if you genuinely believe that it will improve your life.
Making these subversive choices can be daunting, especially if you’re not used to breaking the rules. Likewise, witnessing others—your children, your friends, or others around you—making subversive choices can be exasperating and hard to accept. For example, dealing with a toddler who’s making the subversive choice to refuse to eat their dinner is going to frustrate you.
However, Duhigg argues that you should push through this discomfort and make, support, and reward subversive choices as much as possible. This will enable you to strengthen your own and others’ internal locus of control, thus increasing your or their ability to self-motivate.
Here’s a day-to-day example of how making choices can put you in control and generate motivation.
Imagine you’ve got an intimidatingly full email inbox, but you have no motivation to reply to any of the messages. Set yourself the task of choosing one email to reply to first. It could be the simplest message to resolve or the one that requires the shortest reply.
In doing this, you’ll have decided where you want to start. You’ll have asserted some control over the situation, and you’ll feel more motivated to complete your task.
We’ve considered the positive effect that making choices to gain control has on your motivation. However, sometimes making choices alone is not enough to generate motivation. This is often the case if a task is particularly challenging or unpleasant.
In such cases, you need something else to push you towards action. This added factor is finding meaning in your choices.
To find the meaning in your choice, link it to a higher purpose or goal; to something bigger than itself. Put your choice and your task in context. You can do this by asking yourself why you’re actually completing the task. Finding the “why” serves as a reminder that as difficult or unpleasant the task may be, it will benefit you in the long run and help you to advance your goals. If you keep this fact in mind, you’re more likely to find and retain motivation.
Finding meaning in your choices and actions is a motivational technique used in the US Marine Corps, as discovered by one recruit, Eric Quintanilla, during his basic training.
During training, Quintanilla’s drill instructors instructed the recruits to, in moments of struggle, ask themselves questions that began with “why.” This helped them to get to the root of why they were doing what they were doing. Once they identified the purpose of their task, they felt more motivated.
For Quintanilla, this method came into play during “The Crucible.” The Crucible is the final task in the Marine Corps’ basic training. It’s a notoriously demanding three-day challenge featuring obstacle courses that stretch for 50 miles. The closing stretch of the Crucible involves climbing the Grim Reaper, a steep and difficult hill.
As Quintanilla and his fellow recruits struggled up the Grim Reaper, they put their drill instructors’ recommendations into practice. One of Quintanilla’s pack buddies asked him why he was climbing the hill and completing the Crucible.
For Quintanilla, the answers were clear. Firstly, he wanted to finish his training and become a Marine. Secondly, he wanted to do this for his family; not only to improve his family’s lives by gaining a stable career but also to finally see his newborn daughter.
Quintanilla linked the difficult task of climbing the hill to a higher purpose, giving him the motivation to carry on. He completed the Crucible successfully and was able to begin his career in the Marine Corps—and meet his baby daughter.
Learn how to become more motivated by linking your task to a higher goal.
What's a task you're not looking forward to tackling, or one that you frequently have trouble motivating yourself to complete?
What is one small action you could take to feel in control of the situation? For example, you could choose which part of the task you’re going to focus on first.
What higher purpose could you link the task to in order to generate motivation? What overarching goals could completing the task help you to achieve? Think about the bigger picture that this task slots into.
Now that you’ve tried to give yourself control and thought about the higher purpose, how do you feel about the task?
Becoming motivated enough to complete a task is only one part of being productive. You also need to make sure that you remain focused on what you’re doing. If you continually become distracted or flit between tasks, you’re not going to be as efficient or as effective.
When you’re learning how to remain focused, it helps to consider the factors that can prevent you from doing so. The brain’s ability to focus effectively can be hampered by two factors:
Cognitive tunneling arises when your brain is forced to transition from an automatic state to a focused state too suddenly.
When you enter a state of “automatic pilot,” your brain takes the opportunity to rest. It disengages you from your surroundings. When you suddenly have to focus again, often due to an unexpected event such as receiving an unforeseen message or an unarranged phone call, your brain has to snap into “focused mode” very quickly.
When this abrupt transition occurs, the brain panics and doesn’t know exactly what to focus on. Rather than using common sense and concentrating on the thing that’s most important to you in your current situation, it takes the easy option. It focuses on something that’s right in front of you and ignores everything else.
Cognitive tunneling may occur during times of extreme stress. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, this may trigger your brain’s panic reaction, kick-starting its frantic search for an easy and obvious stimulus to focus on.
Cognitive tunneling’s harm lies in the fact that the most obvious stimulus in front of you isn’t necessarily the right stimulus to focus on to maintain your productivity.
For example, imagine you’re at work. If your brain jumps to focus on the most obvious task that’s in front of it—such as an email you’ve just received—it may bypass more important or productive tasks. You’ll end up focusing your energy on a less useful activity, and your productivity will fall.
Likewise, cognitive tunneling hurts your productivity by robbing you of the ability to choose what to concentrate on. You can no longer choose to focus on tasks that further your priorities and goals. Instead, you’re left at the mercy of your brain’s panicked automatic reaction.
Reactive thinking is another cognitive process that can cause your focus to be diverted from its most productive path.
Reactive thinking is at the core of creating habits. It allows your brain to respond to certain situations without really having to pause or think about what’s happening. Instead, the brain instinctively reacts using a familiar mental process. For instance, if you’re driving and begin to approach a red light, your brain may instinctively tell you to start braking.
In and of itself, reactive thinking isn’t a bad thing. It can help you to deal with situations quickly and effectively, without having to pause to consider your course of action. However, reactive thinking becomes problematic when your instinctive reaction is the incorrect response to the situation.
For instance, your brain may trigger reactive thinking in a scenario that requires conscious thought and judgment in order to find the best way forward. Some situations can’t be successfully resolved solely using instinct; but, your brain may try to do so anyway. This instinctive response may prove to be unhelpful or damaging.
For example, imagine you’re driving down a country road when you notice an obstacle in your path a little way ahead. The thoughtful and appropriate response to the situation would be to brake smoothly and steadily as you approach the object, or to carefully swerve around the object if it’s possible and safe to do so. However, your brain’s instinctive reaction to seeing an obstacle may be to panic and sharply brake. In some situations, this can be dangerous—for example, if a car is close behind you, the driver may not have time to brake and may crash into you. Braking too hard can also damage your car’s brake pads and tires. To solve this situation in the best possible way, you can’t let instinct take over: you need to think carefully about your response.
Likewise, even in situations where reactive thinking may, in theory, be useful, your brain may inadvertently trigger the wrong automatic response for the situation. Because you can’t consciously control reactive thinking, you can’t ensure that the brain chooses the correct reaction.
This unhelpful form of reactive thinking can negatively impact your productivity. For instance, if your brain selects an instinctive reaction that doesn’t further your goals, or a reaction that causes issues that require time and effort to fix, this may hinder your ability to be productive.
Unhelpful reactive thinking occurs in a similar way to cognitive tunneling. It can be triggered when an unexpected event takes you by surprise and requires your brain to jump from “relaxed mode” to “focused mode” very quickly. The brain wants to deal with this surprising new situation swiftly, and so relies on a process that cuts down your response time: reactive thinking.
However, the brain doesn’t pause to consider whether the reaction it’s triggering is appropriate or not; it’s too startled to do so. It merely jumps to a reaction that you know well—a reaction that is familiar, rather than the one that is most effective. Thus, you’re left at risk of responding to the situation in an inappropriate way. You’re distracted from the most productive solution to the situation and prevented from focusing on the right thing.
Up until now, we’ve concentrated on the cognitive processes that can prevent you from focusing. The next step is to consider what you can do to avoid these traps and maintain your focus. According to psychologists, the key to doing this may lie in creating mental models.
A mental model is a narrative that you create in your mind about the world around you. There are two forms of mental model:
You may have already been creating mental models without even realizing it. This way of thinking is a common framework that your brain uses to understand the world around you. However, you may not have considered how you can harness the power of strong and thorough mental models to improve your focus.
Creating mental models can help with focus in two ways. Firstly, creating mental models of what’s happening around you in the present can lessen your chances of slipping into unhelpful processes such as cognitive tunneling or reactive thinking.
If you keep up a consistent mental model of your day as it’s happening—narrating each event as it happens—your brain never gets the opportunity to slip into a fully “relaxed” mode. It’s constantly active and paying attention to your surroundings. This means that if a sudden event occurs that requires your focus, the brain doesn’t have to make the sharp adjustment from relaxation to concentration. The transition is much smoother, leaving less room for the panic that triggers cognitive tunneling or reactive thinking.
In preventing these unhelpful processes from taking hold, you are maintaining control of your focus. You’re not at the mercy of our brain’s automatic reactions any more: you preserve your ability to consciously choose what to focus on and what to ignore. You can direct your focus to the task that’s going to lead to the highest amount of productivity.
Secondly, creating mental models that outline your expectations for the future can prevent your focus from being derailed by distractions. Spending time creating an outline of what you think ought to happen during a certain period of time (for example, during a certain hour or on a certain day) helps you to identify what your focus should be during that period. You can easily decide what you need to concentrate on to make your outline reality.
Then, when the time comes to put your plan into action, you can swiftly identify potential distractions from this vision. Because you have such a strong idea of how you expect things to go, deviations from this outline grab your attention. You can then decide whether these distractions are important enough to require your focus, or whether they can wait until later. By consciously deciding whether distractions deserve your attention or not, you’re taking control of your focus and making sure that it stays on the path that will result in the greatest productivity.
On November 4th, 2010, Qantas Flight 32 from Singapore to Sydney successfully made an emergency landing despite suffering catastrophic damage mid-air. Disaster was averted largely due to the actions of Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny, the pilot in command.
De Crespigny was known for creating mental models and discussing them with his crew prior to every flight. The models outlined what he and his co-pilots would do in case of various emergencies.
However, when Qantas Flight 32 suffered difficulties, too many systems failed for de Crespigny and his co-pilots to maintain focus using their standard mental models. All but one of the plane’s 22 main systems either suffered damage or shut down completely. The numerous malfunctioning systems were all providing the pilots with instructions on how to solve their various issues. This created information overload, and the pilots found it hard to know what to prioritize and where to channel their focus.
De Crespigny was able to take control of the situation by formulating a new mental model. He imagined that he was trying to land a Cessna rather than an Airbus A380. An Airbus A380 is a huge aircraft containing many complex systems. In contrast, a Cessna is a small, simpler airplane that only uses the basics.
By concentrating only on what a basic aircraft would need to do in order to land, de Crespigny simplified the situation and narrowed his focus. He was able to discern which of the Airbus' complicated systems weren’t relevant to his present situation. Instead, he focused only on operating the basic systems that would be instrumental in ensuring a safe landing.
De Crespigny and his co-pilots were able to successfully land the plane using this new mental model, saving hundreds of lives.
Imagine you have an important report that’s due by the end of Monday. How could creating a mental model help you to focus on and achieve your goal?
On Sunday night, you spend time creating a mental model. You imagine yourself spending Monday finishing and then sending off your report. This helps you to narrow your focus for the day: it’s all about the report.
Monday comes along, and you put your mental model into action. You know that small and non-time-sensitive tasks should wait, and you should instead focus on your report. However, midway through the day, you receive an email containing a question about a project that you’d managed.
Receiving this email wasn’t a part of your mental model. The model had you focusing on the report to the exclusion of everything else. Your mind immediately flags the email as a potential distraction. Rather than panicking and immediately shifting your focus to responding to the email, you evaluate whether or not it requires your attention now.
You consider whether the email is urgent enough to require your focus to be diverted from your report, and decide that it isn’t. There’s no time pressure on the query; your response can wait without there being any negative consequences. Meanwhile, there is time pressure on completing your report. It needs your focus right now.
Therefore, you continue to follow your mental model and make a note to return to the email later. Creating and sticking to your mental model has enabled you to maintain your focus.
We’ve considered the methods you can use to stay focused on your goals and boost your productivity. But how can you set effective goals in the first place?
Having the right goals is crucial in maintaining productivity for a number of reasons. Firstly, to be productive, you need to know exactly what you’re striving towards. Secondly, you need to be sure that you’re aiming for the right results. Finally, whether or not you meet your goals is often used as a measure of how productive you are. That measure will be inaccurate if your goals were flawed from the start.
This chapter considers two types of goals that you can use in tandem to enhance your productivity:
A stretch goal is an aim so audacious that at first glance, it might not seem possible. Examples of stretch goals include running a marathon, starting a successful company, or writing a book.
Setting and pursuing such ambitious goals can transform your perspective and your way of working in three ways:
Research has demonstrated a strong link between setting stretch goals and increased productivity. For example, a 1997 study found that Motorola ordering its employees to set stretch goals led to a tenfold decrease in the time it took engineers to develop new products.
(Shortform note: To learn more about setting stretch goals, read our summary of Measure What Matters.)
In the 1950s, the 320-mile train journey between the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Osaka could take up to 20 hours. This long journey time was problematic; this was a high-demand route, in terms of transporting both people and raw materials. So, in 1955, Japan’s top engineers were challenged to invent a faster train.
Within six months, the engineers had created a prototype of a train that could go 65 miles per hour. This was an impressive feat: they’d created one of the fastest trains of its kind in the world. However, when the engineers presented their design to the head of the railway system, he wanted something faster. He set them a new, audacious stretch goal: building a train capable of traveling at 120 miles per hour.
The engineers protested that this task was impossible. They named all sorts of issues that would prevent them from meeting the goal. For example, trains traveling that fast would derail if they turned corners too sharply. To get rid of the need for trains to turn, they would need to tunnel through mountains, which would be an incredibly expensive process. It just didn’t seem feasible. However, the head of Japan’s railways was insistent: they were going to do whatever it took to meet their stretch goal.
The engineers realized that the only way to meet their seemingly impossible stretch goal was to completely transform every element of the Japanese railway system. Over years, they innovated everything from new train cars to stronger tracks. They even drilled tunnels through the mountains! With each innovation, the train’s maximum possible speed would increase.
Eventually, the engineers achieved their goal. The new bullet train traveled at an average speed of 120 miles per hour. This reduced the journey time between Tokyo and Osaka from 20 hours to just under four hours. The stretch goal gave the engineers the push they needed to challenge their perceived limitations, innovate, and produce the seemingly impossible.
SMART goals are objectives that follow certain criteria. They must be:
These goals often have a much smaller scope than stretch goals. For the stretch goal of writing a book, a SMART goal might be writing one chapter, or even one section of a chapter.
There are various benefits to setting SMART goals. Because SMART goals are by design detailed and have been extensively thought through, the path to achieving them is often very clear. This can have a motivating effect. It’s easier to motivate yourself to work towards a goal when you have a clear plan to follow.
Likewise, by forcing you to set a timeline for the completion of your goal, SMART goals can encourage discipline. You can no longer procrastinate your task: you’ve got a deadline to meet.
In 1975, two psychologists conducted a study on how setting goals could boost productivity. For their experiment, they recruited 45 typists from a large corporation. These typists were already considered very productive; on average, their output was 95 typewritten lines per hour. Each typist was given the goal of increasing their output by a certain number of lines per hour.
The psychologists made sure that the typists’ goals were SMART. Each typist received a specific output level to aim for that was realistic and achievable based on their capabilities and situation. They were given a timeline of when they should achieve this increased output, and they were shown how to measure their hourly output so that they could measure their progress towards the goal.
Within a week of starting the experiment, the typists’ average output rate had increased to 103 lines per hour. After another week, the average rose again to 112 lines per hour. When the researchers checked on the typists in three months, they were all still typing at their new faster rate. In fact, some were typing even faster than before. Having a SMART goal had boosted the typists’ productivity to unprecedented levels.
When used alone, stretch and SMART goals both have pitfalls. For instance, if used alone, stretch goals can become too overwhelming. You’ve come up with big ideas, but have no idea how to act on them. Because you’re unsure how to move forward, you just do nothing.
Likewise, if you simply give yourself a list of snappy SMART goals without any overarching goal to tie them together, you can lose sight of your higher purpose and the objectives you should prioritize to achieve that purpose. You risk becoming too focused on achieving cognitive closure.
Cognitive closure is a thought process that’s rooted in a preference for decisiveness over ambiguity. In general, your brain is drawn to making quick, clear choices, rather than remaining in a state of uncertainty or confusion. You find yourself wanting to get things done and meet your goals because it makes you feel productive. It brings you a feeling of closure that is satisfying.
Chasing cognitive closure can sometimes be useful. It can help you to move forward efficiently, rather than spending a long time going back and forth over what to do. However, it becomes problematic when feeling the closure and satisfaction that comes with completing a goal becomes more important to you than the actual productivity of the goal. If you fall into this trap, you may be tempted to set SMART goals that are quick and easy to complete so that you can feel closure swiftly, rather than goals that will help you to move forward and achieve your higher aims.
To overcome these pitfalls and achieve maximum productivity, you should use stretch and SMART goals together. You should start with an ambitious stretch goal and then flesh out the process of achieving that goal using targeted SMART goals.
Doing this makes the goal-setting process smoother in two ways. Firstly, if you break down your ambitious stretch goal into smaller, easily actionable SMART goals, you can avoid becoming overwhelmed. Creating concrete steps towards meeting the stretch goal makes it much more manageable. You’ve created a framework you can follow to move closer to achieving your dreams.
Secondly, pairing your SMART goals with a stretch goal helps you to avoid the trap of cognitive closure. The stretch goal provides you with the focal point that you need to ensure that your SMART goals are truly productive, and not just fast-track routes to closure. If you create your SMART goals keeping your stretch goal in mind, you’re less likely to veer off course.
One final element of successfully using SMART and stretch goals is a willingness to be flexible with your goals.
In our pursuit of cognitive closure, we can become unwilling to revisit our goals once we’ve set them. We want to chase the satisfaction of meeting those goals, and not risk losing our closure if we revisit our goals and find that they’re no longer appropriate for our situation. Because of this, we slip into a state of rigidity of thought. We become unwilling to consider any other possibilities than our current goals.
If we become too rigid and refuse to revisit our goals, we could spend large amounts of time focusing on a goal that’s no longer productive. Instead, we need to be open to constantly evaluating and reconsidering our goals, and deciding whether they’re still the best way forward. Do we have new information that affects the relevance of our goals? Have our priorities changed? If so, we need to set new goals accordingly.
In 1972, Eli Zeira was appointed head of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, a body with the responsibility of updating the Israeli people on the likelihood of war with their old adversaries, Egypt and Syria. When he was appointed, Zeira two had clear goals:
Zeira introduced a new formula to assess the likelihood of war, known as “the concept.” He theorized that Egypt and Syria wouldn’t attack again until they had long-range missiles and stronger air forces. They had lacked these capabilities in the last war—unlike Israel—and had been defeated. He was sure they wouldn’t risk the same fate again.
Zeira also enforced a new mindset in the Directorate which prioritized efficiency and decisiveness. Once a risk estimate was made, everyone was committed to it. Dissenting views weren’t tolerated, and rigidity of thought was encouraged.
In early October 1973, worrying signs suggested war was coming. Egypt and Syria were increasing military activity at their borders with Israel. Likewise, the Soviets had evacuated all of their advisers from Syria and Egypt, suggesting imminent danger.
Despite these signs, Zeira was adamant that war was not likely since neither Syria nor Egypt had met the criteria of “the concept.” He felt that there was no need to raise the alert or begin to prepare for a war that would not come. The Israeli Prime Minister and her other senior military personnel heeded Zeira’s advice.
On the morning of October 6th, the Israelis gained credible intelligence stating that the Egyptians would invade later that day. They could no longer deny that war was imminent and finally began to prepare. However, they had left it too late to be fully ready for the invasion. It was hard to mobilize the army and the reserves effectively in such a short time frame. The fact that it was Yom Kippur, a religious holiday, made the process even slower.
When Egypt and Syria invaded, Israel was unprepared and struggled to respond effectively. While the Israelis eventually staved off the invasion, it was a close call. Thousands of Israelis lost their lives or were injured.
Zeira and his colleagues had become overly focused on their original goals of reducing Israeli anxiety and only raising the alert when necessary. They hadn’t been willing to re-examine and amend their goals, even when evidence suggested that they were no longer appropriate. They should have adopted a new goal: keeping the Israeli people safe. Their refusal to do so had devastating consequences.
Learn how to make a stretch goal more manageable by setting a SMART goal.
Describe a stretch goal that you’d like to work towards. Remember, this goal can be as audacious and ambitious as you want.
Do you feel confident about this stretch goal? At this point, can you see a clear path you can take to achieve it, or does it feel overwhelmingly ambitious?
Next, identify an initial SMART goal that will help you move closer to completing your stretch goal. Try to include as much of the SMART criteria as possible: make your goal specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
Now that you’ve set this SMART goal, how do you feel about your stretch goal? Does it feel more achievable? Do you have a clearer idea of your way forward?
Now that you’re motivated, focused, and have stretch and SMART goals to aspire to, what else do you need to do to maximize your productivity? The next step is ensuring that you’re making productive decisions; decisions that will move you further towards meeting your goals. Making bad decisions can lead to mistakes, wasted energy, and unproductive actions.
But how can you make sure that your decisions are productive? In short, making good, productive decisions is arguably all about being able to predict the future with some degree of accuracy. You need to be able to discern the consequences of your decisions, whether these consequences will be positive or negative, and whether they’ll help or hinder your productivity. Once you’ve got an idea of what the consequences of your decision will be, you can decide whether or not to proceed with it. If the likely consequences are positive, great! If not, it might be time to rethink your course of action.
Admittedly, accurately predicting the consequences of your decisions can be a difficult and imprecise art. Nobody can fully foresee what’s going to happen in the future, and nobody is going to get it right all of the time. However, to increase the accuracy of your predictions, you can engage in probabilistic thinking. This is a cognitive process that involves identifying all of the possible futures that your decision could lead to, and then calculating the probability of each possible future coming true.
Probabilistic thinking works on the assumption that the future isn’t one set path that’s definitely going to occur. Instead, it’s a series of possible outcomes, some of which are more likely to occur than others.
When thinking probabilistically, you must first thoroughly outline all of the possible futures that your choices could lead to, including futures that seem contradictory. Then, you need to accurately estimate the odds of each scenario coming to pass. To do this, you need to consider all of the different variables that could affect the odds of an outcome coming to pass, and decide on a probability accordingly.
Once you know the odds of each possible future occurring, you can decide whether to proceed with your decision or not. You know the relative odds of the decision having a positive or negative outcome, and can use this information to make a wise choice.
Research has demonstrated that probabilistic thinking helps us to generate accurate predictions about the consequences of our decisions. A study conducted by psychologists from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California-Berkeley found that training people to think probabilistically increased the accuracy of their predictions by as much as 50%. By basing your decisions on accurate predictions, you can vastly increase the chances that your choice works out well.
Using probabilistic thinking can have a range of benefits. For one, it adds rigor to the decision-making process. It requires you to consider your decision and its possible consequences from numerous vantage points. It also forces you to be honest with yourself about the consequences of your choices, even if that involves confronting harsh truths—for instance, discovering that a decision that you desperately want to make has low odds of success and should probably be avoided.
Secondly, approaching decisions in a probabilistic way stops you from rushing into choices that are based solely on what you want in a given moment, and not on the actual benefits or risks of that decision. Ultimately, you’re able to make wiser choices.
Finally, probabilistic thinking forces you to consider all of the possible negative outcomes of your decision and their odds of occurring—an often distressing process that you may otherwise avoid. By making sure you identify these possible negative outcomes, you can prepare for them and, if possible, make decisions that prevent them from coming to pass.
Midway through the working day, your spouse asks you out to lunch. This lunch could go one of two ways:
Because you know that number two is a possibility, you can actively reduce the likelihood of it happening. If your spouse tries to bring up the childcare issues, you can ask them to wait until the evening to discuss the subject. You can steer the situation towards Outcome #1. By contemplating the possible negative outcomes ahead of time, you’ve helped yourself to make a wiser decision.
No method of predicting the future is infallible, and probabilistic thinking is no exception to this. Ultimately, the whole process falls apart if we aren’t honest with ourselves about the odds of each possible outcome coming true.
When we really want a particular outcome to come true, we might be tempted to assign it very high odds of doing so—not based on the actual likelihood of it happening, but based on our emotions. We’re likely to ignore or downplay any signs that the odds are low and overestimate the significance of signs that the odds are high. We may then end up making a poor decision based on this inaccurate assessment of the odds. We’ve set ourselves up for potential disappointment or difficulties further down the line, when the consequences of our decision prove to be quite different from what we’d hoped.
To avoid this, it’s important that we estimate the odds of each outcome realistically. Doing so may feel hard or disappointing when the odds don’t end up reflecting our preferences. But it’s a necessary step if we want our probabilistic thinking to actually benefit us and lead us towards the wisest decision.
Even if you approach calculating odds with an honest mindset, it can still be a difficult process.
You may struggle to find the information you need to calculate accurate odds. Sometimes, there’s simply no way of knowing how a decision will pan out. In other cases, you may find some information that indicates the possible consequences of a choice, but not enough to be certain.
Luckily, you don’t have to use probabilistic thinking in isolation. You can pair it with Bayesian cognition. This involves using assumptions based on your experience of the world to accurately predict outcomes.
Proponents of Bayesian cognition believe that we can predict the future fairly accurately if we make assumptions based on previously observed patterns and information. For example, if you’re asked to predict how much longer a 50-year-old person will live, you can make an assumption based on life expectancy patterns.
You may already be using Bayesian cognition without even realizing it. The brain constantly gathers data about patterns that exist in the world around you. It uses this data to form assumptions about how the world works. It then instinctively applies these assumptions when it’s time for you to make a prediction.
Forming accurate assumptions about the world and how it operates can help to make your probabilistic thinking more reliable. You may be able to instinctively tell how likely a particular outcome is based on situations and patterns you’ve observed in the past. However, the crucial word here is “accurate.” You need to make sure that your assumptions are correct. If they’re not, issues with Bayesian thinking can arise. If you start out with faulty assumptions about the world, any predictions you make based on these assumptions will be inaccurate.
(Shortform note: To learn more about Bayesian cognition, probabilistic thinking, and making smart decisions, read our summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow.)
In the 1990s, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted a study on how people are able to make predictions when they have limited data on a topic. They asked students to make predictions based on one small piece of information—for instance, asking how much longer a U.S. congressman will serve if he’s already served for 15 years. The situations that the students were asked to predict predominantly followed strict patterns. However, the students weren’t given information about these patterns in advance.
The study found that a lot of the time, the students’ predictions were spookily accurate. In some cases, they made predictions that were within 10% of what the data indicated was the “correct” answer. The students couldn’t always explain why they’d made these accurate predictions; they often claimed that their answer had just “felt” right. They’d intuitively used their prior assumptions and knowledge to come to the right conclusion. This was strong Bayesian cognition in action.
However, there was one situation in which the students failed to predict the answer accurately.
They were asked to predict the total reign of a pharaoh in Ancient Egypt if he’d already ruled for 11 years. The students predicted that the pharaoh would rule for on average another 23 years. However, the data suggested that the pharaoh would only rule for another 12 years.
The students were unable to predict this answer correctly because they’d begun with a faulty assumption. They’d based their predictions on the assumption that a pharaoh’s lifespan—and therefore his total time on the throne—would follow the same pattern as the lifespan of a European king from a later period. These kings tended to survive until they were elderly if they made it past middle age, leading to a lengthy reign.
However, the students were missing a key piece of information. They didn’t realize that in the time of the pharaohs, people generally had much lower life expectancies compared to the kings of later eras. For this reason, the average length of time a pharaoh spent as a ruler was significantly shorter than that of European kings. Because they didn’t have this information, the students were unable to make an accurate prediction. They were unable to apply Bayesian cognition effectively.
To ensure that your assumptions are accurate, you need to take in as much information about the world as possible. You should seek out experiences and perspectives that will widen your knowledge of the patterns that surround you.
Easy, right? Unfortunately, not quite. To make sure you take in the right kind of information, you need to be aware of certain biases that the brain has when it comes to the information it seeks out.
A major example of such a cognitive bias is the way we internalize success and failure. Our minds tend to place greater importance on times we’ve succeeded than on times we’ve failed. Sometimes, we omit failures from our memory entirely. For this reason, we tend to have an inflated view of the odds of success and forget to factor in the likelihood of failure. As a result, our assumptions become inaccurate. We end up predicting success too often.
To counteract this, we need to actively search for information on times we and others have failed. We should build up a picture of the factors that can increase the likelihood of failure, where we and others have gone wrong in the past, and why these failures occurred. It’s not fun to contemplate why you’ve failed, or to ask others why they’ve failed. But, it’s necessary in order to improve your likelihood of making good decisions in the future.
Another way to strengthen your assumptions is to consider situations in which you were certain things would turn out one way but were ultimately proved wrong. Why were your Bayesian instincts so incorrect? Did you work on a faulty assumption? What information do you need to seek out to stop this from happening again?
Poker is all about making predictions; predicting what cards are going to come up, and what your opponents are going to do. Players can strengthen these predictions by using probabilistic thinking and Bayesian cognition.
In the 2004 Tournament of Champions, former psychology student Annie Duke was up against some of the world’s best poker players, including Greg “the FossilMan” Rayner. In a crucial turn, Rayner pushed all of his chips into the pot. This suggested he had a very strong hand. Duke needed to decide whether she should match this bet, or fold.
Duke thought of all of the possible futures that could come from this hand and the variables that affected these futures’ odds. Duke had a fairly strong hand. If this hand turned out to be stronger than Rayner’s, she could end up winning big and becoming the frontrunner of the tournament.
However, Rayner could have a stronger hand than she did. If Duke matched Rayner’s bet in this scenario, she would end up losing everything and being knocked out of the tournament. If Duke folded, she would lose a lot of the progress she’d made in this game, but would be able to carry on in the tournament.
Ultimately, Duke needed to figure out how likely it was that Rayner had a strong hand. Rayner could be bluffing and actually have a terrible hand. He could have gone all-in simply to scare Duke off and encourage her to fold, knowing that this was the only way he’d emerge from the round victorious. Or, Rayner could genuinely have a strong hand. He could have gone all-in because he’d confidently predicted that he would beat Duke.
Throughout the tournament, Rayner had proven to be a very rational player. He’d never gone all-in without having a good reason to do so. Based on this, Duke theorized that it was most likely that he’d bet as if he had a strong hand because he actually did have a strong hand. He wasn’t bluffing or taking a massive risk; he was acting rationally based on the hand he’d been dealt.
Duke folded. Later, Rayner told her that she’d made the right choice; he’d had a stronger hand than she did.
Probabilistic thinking isn’t the only cognitive approach that can help you in poker. Bayesian cognition can come in handy, too.
According to Annie Duke, observing certain traits about your opponent can help you to make Bayesian assumptions about how they’ll play. For instance, Duke’s experience has taught her that 40-year-old businessmen usually only care about the prestige that comes with playing poker against experts; they don’t actually care about winning. Because of this, they’re likely to take a lot of risks. Using this assumption, Duke can make strong predictions about how a game against someone in this demographic will pan out and play in a way that maximizes her chances of winning.
However, for Duke, coming up with these initial assumptions isn’t enough. She updates her assumptions as she begins to observe how her opponents actually play. For instance, she may find that a 40-year-old businessman is able to make excellent bluffs. This would suggest that he is a cautious and skilled player after all, and that she shouldn’t underestimate him. Duke wants to keep her assumptions as accurate as possible so that her predictions regarding her opponents’ actions remain accurate, too.
The next element of productivity to consider is becoming a productive innovator. You may not think of yourself as an innovator, but innovation is likely a crucial aspect of your job. If you make your creative process more productive, you’ll increase your overall productivity. But what does being a productive innovator actually mean?
An innovator comes up with new and exciting ideas. A productive innovator does this relatively quickly while also maintaining a high standard of work.
To be a productive innovator, you need to be creative. This is a skill that in many ways can’t be taught. After all, creativity is often spontaneous. It’s hard to artificially trigger it by following a prescribed set of instructions.
However, you can learn how to create the right conditions for creativity and productive innovation to thrive. There are four principles that you can implement to create such conditions:
This first principle centers on the fact that innovation doesn’t have to be about creating something totally new. At the same time, simply rehashing somebody else’s idea without putting your own spin on it isn’t particularly productive. Instead, the most productive path forward is often the happy medium between these two approaches: finding new ways to combine tried and trusted concepts.
Combining old ideas rather than creating totally new ones can make you more productive by helping you to innovate faster. Not having to start from scratch will inevitably save you time and energy. At the same time, you’re retaining your innovative spirit: even though you’re starting with someone else’s ideas, the way you’re using them is original and creative.
This is a method of driving innovation that’s seen success in a range of industries and situations. For example, the bicycle helmet was invented when a designer took the durable design of a boat’s hull and made it hat-shaped. Likewise, to create his best-selling baby book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, Benjamin Spock mixed existing childcare techniques with the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud.
While drawing from old ideas can be powerful in speeding up innovation, you need to make sure that these old ideas are actually good. Combining two weak existing ideas in a new way won’t necessarily create a good new idea. For instance, if you’re embarking on a creative project such as a film or a play, you need to make sure that you don’t fall into the trap of combining old clichés.
Clichés don’t usually represent reality. They’re a neat way to tie up a story, but they aren’t authentic, and your audience will know that. So, if you choose to innovate by combining clichés, you’re going to end up with a new concept that doesn’t feel realistic or true. People won’t be able to fully connect to your creation emotionally. For this reason, it probably won’t be successful.
How can you separate strong ideas from clichés? By drawing on your personal experiences and emotions. You should ask yourself whether the concepts you’re using feel clichéd. Does the concept match up with how you’ve experienced the world, and how those experiences made you feel? Does it feel true? Or does the concept feel emotionally hollow, predictable, and unrealistic? Your answers to these questions will tell you whether the concept is authentic enough to pursue, or if it’s a cliché that needs to be abandoned.
Of course, if you choose to abandon your clichéd concepts, you’ll need to find new ideas to replace them. In such situations, you can use your own life experiences and emotions as creative fodder. To take the example of creating a film or play, this may take the form of putting a little bit of yourself into your story – making your characters feel what you’ve felt, or experience what you’ve experienced. By doing this, you ensure your idea is rooted in reality and feels authentic. After all, it’s based on your true experiences.
West Side Story is a wildly successful musical that combines the existing art forms of ballet, opera, and theater to create an entirely new kind of Broadway show. Part of the show’s success is rooted in its innovative nature—a nature that the show’s creator, Jerome Robbins, took great pains to cultivate.
During the show’s planning stages, Robbins was insistent that clichéd and predictable theatre techniques should be avoided. For instance, the play’s opening scene was initially a traditional discussion between characters. Robbins scrapped this. To him, it felt boring and clichéd. Instead, he demanded an opening scene that was ambitious and different from anything that came before.
The result of this demand was the creation of the iconic West Side Story prologue, which expresses the tension between two rival gangs – the Jets and the Sharks – through dance. No words are spoken; instead, movement tells the story.
Robbins also encouraged his co-creators to pour their own emotions into the show to increase its authenticity. West Side Story explores themes such as suffering from prejudice, being ambitious, and feeling like an outcast. The show’s creators had all experienced these emotions. Channeling these feelings into their work allowed the creators to add authenticity and emotional resonance to the show.
Anxiety and frustration are generally considered to be negative emotions. However, they can each have a positive impact on the process of innovation. They can push you to make breakthroughs that lead to productive innovation.
If you take the time to contemplate areas of your life that are making you feel frustrated, you may identify opportunities for innovation. You can look for creative solutions to your problems that will decrease your frustration and make your life easier. In doing this, you might just come up with the next big idea.
For example, the inventor of the Post-it note was an engineer who became frustrated when his bookmark wouldn’t stay put in his church hymnal. He added an adhesive to the bookmark, thus innovating a solution that eventually evolved into a highly successful product. Likewise, cellophane was invented when a scientist, motivated by frustration, looked for a way to shield his tablecloth from spilled wine.
Struggling to innovate new ideas quickly and effectively can push us into a state of stress and anxiety. This is especially true if there are time pressures involved and we need to innovate a new idea as quickly as possible.
This anxiety can lead to a cognitive state that psychologists refer to as “creative desperation.” When we experience creative desperation, our anxiety drives us to desperately search for new and creative ways of looking at an issue. We might start formulating unusual combinations of old ideas, in the hope that one of these new approaches works. In our desperation, we may stumble upon an innovative idea that we would have otherwise ignored.
Studies have shown that creative desperation plays a large part in generating innovation. For example, research by psychologist Gary Klein suggests that this type of stress is a factor in around 20% of creative breakthroughs.
Once you’ve had a creative breakthrough, the relief can be immense—especially if you were in a heightened state of anxiety beforehand. Unfortunately, this relief can hurt your ability to innovate and ultimately harm your productivity.
Once you’ve finally come up with a good idea, you may become so happy that you’ve reached this point that you become blind to other, even better possibilities. You don’t want to relive the stress that you endured while searching for your innovative idea. Instead, you focus all of your attention on this one idea and refuse to consider alternatives.
This way of thinking is especially problematic if you’re still midway through a large project, and need to continue to innovate to make it to the end. You can end up feeling stuck and unable to move forward. You may go around and around in circles trying to push your existing idea further, rather than contemplating alternative approaches.
There are a number of techniques that you can employ to avoid becoming closed off to new ideas. Firstly, you can maintain an awareness that this type of thinking can set in. If you stay vigilant, you can actively try to avoid falling into this cognitive trap.
Secondly, you should force yourself to re-examine your big ideas, no matter how much you want to avoid doing so. Don’t let the fear of having to restart the creative process stop you from honestly evaluating the success or effectiveness of your innovations.
Thirdly, keep some emotional distance from your ideas. That way, you’re able to look at your innovations objectively and may recognize that there are superior alternative options out there.
Finally, if you’re innovating as part of a team, you can startle yourself and your colleagues out of this kind of innovative rut by disrupting the team dynamics, even by a small amount. For instance, you could switch around people’s roles within the team and give each member new responsibilities. Having a different role forces you to look at the team’s ideas from a new perspective. You may spot possible areas for improvement or alternative approaches that you wouldn’t have noticed in your old role.
It’s hard to imagine that Disney’s Frozen was ever anything but a smash hit movie. But, just 18 months before Frozen was due to be released, the film had numerous issues:
The result was a film that audiences struggled to connect to emotionally.
Frozen’s creative team knew that they needed to innovate—and fast. In the end, they used some of the principles outlined above to turn the film’s fortunes around.
Frozen’s creative team used their own experiences and emotions to create characters and character dynamics that felt more authentic. For example, they used their own experiences of sibling relationships to make Anna and Elsa’s sisterly dynamic feel more “real.”
At first, Frozen’s writers had chosen a binary “Anna is good, Elsa is evil” dichotomy to create tension between the sisters. However, they eventually realized that this didn’t feel true. Nobody is purely “good” or “evil.” We’re all complex humans and bring that complexity to our relationships. The writers needed to reflect this in Anna and Elsa’s relationship if they wanted the audience to connect with the characters.
The writing team was particularly inspired by writer Jennifer Lee’s experience with her sister. They’d become distant as they’d grown older, creating tension between them. However, they grew closer again when, in a time of great need, Lee’s sister was there for her. In many ways, Anna and Elsa’s relationship in the final film reflects this real-life situation. The result is a relatable dynamic that feels much more authentic.
Another example of this principle is one of the film’s chief songwriters, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, channeling her own experiences and emotions when writing Elsa’s signature song, “Let It Go.”
Lopez conceived Elsa as a character who’s judged for both having a curse and not managing to control that curse perfectly. To make Elsa’s reaction to her treatment feel authentic, Lopez considered times when she’d felt judged or been held to impossible standards, and what her reaction to such situations had been. Lopez realized that she wanted to let go of other people’s expectations and opinions. She felt that this should be Elsa’s response, too. Thus, the concept of the song “Let It Go” was born.
Eventually, Frozen’s team successfully laid out two-thirds of the film’s plot. However, they then became stuck. They realized that they had no idea how the film should end.
A major factor that contributed to this creative roadblock was the team’s relief that they’d finally come up with innovative ideas. Because of this relief, they’d become attached to their ideas, and they weren’t willing to revisit them to see if there was a better way forward that would make the film’s ending clearer. They didn’t want to lose the progress they’d made.
Disney’s executives recognized that to get out of this rut, the creative team needed to be shaken up. So they decided to promote writer Jennifer Lee to a directorial role.
This change had the intended effect. Lee underwent a small shift in perspective that unlocked her creativity. As a writer, she’d spent most of her time pitching ideas. Now, as a director, she spent more time listening to others’ ideas. Each team member pitched an ending that focused on a different core idea or theme of the movie. However, none of these endings felt quite right.
Lee began to think about the core idea that she wanted to communicate in the ending. She decided that she wanted to explore the nature of love and fear; specifically, that love is a much more powerful force than fear. Thanks to this breakthrough, Lee and her team were able to come up with the ending that made it into Frozen’s final cut. One small change in the team dynamic led to this productive innovation.
Learn how you can use your frustrations to inspire innovation.
What’s something that’s frustrated you, a family member, or a friend recently? Describe the situation, its causes, and its effects.
In a perfect world, how would you solve the frustrating issue? Are there any existing ideas or solutions to other problems that you could rework to solve your issue?
What elements of your ideal solution might work in the real world? In what ways might it fall short?
Consider how you feel about the frustrating situation now. Do you feel any closer to resolving it?
The final method you can use to boost your personal productivity is learning how to use data productively.
Thanks to improvements in technology and the omnipresence of the Internet, we have access to vast amounts of data, both about ourselves and about the world at large. We can measure and track everything from our spending habits, to our calorie intake, to the number of steps we take every day.
If we make the most of this data, it can be a powerful force for change. We can track patterns, identify areas for improvement, and use the data to drive personal growth. We can even use data to help us solve problems and make better decisions. However, the idea of “making the most of the data” is easier said than done. While having access to lots of data can be very useful, it can cause problems.
Studies have shown that if we’re presented with too much data at once, we can enter a state called “information blindness.” Our minds simply cannot cope with the huge amount of data they’re being asked to process—so, we stop trying. We either start to ignore some of the data, misinterpret the data, or become so overwhelmed that we refuse to engage with it at all.
If you want to avoid information blindness and effectively absorb the data that’s necessary for your work, you can’t passively allow that data to wash over you. If you do, the brain won’t process it thoroughly. Instead, you have to interact with the data in a meaningful and effective way.
To interact with data effectively, you have to do more than just look at it: you have to do something with it, too. It almost doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do something.
This “doing something” can take many forms, including:
The process of interacting with data in this way is sometimes referred to as “creating disfluency.” “Creating disfluency” means adding extra effort to the process of absorbing information, thus making this process a little more difficult.
Adding this element of effort and difficulty forces you to pay extra attention to the data as you take it in. To fully absorb the data, you have to look at it closely and think about it deeply. This ultimately helps the information to stick in your brain; you become so engrossed in it that you automatically process it in a more thorough way.
In the mid-2000s, South Avondale was one of the worst-performing elementary schools in Ohio. Its test scores were very low. For years, the city of Cincinnati had flooded the school with resources to try to improve it. This included giving teachers software that used huge amounts of data to track the performance of each student. The software collected data on everything from participation levels in class, to test scores, to each child’s attendance record. Teachers were encouraged to use this data to ascertain each student’s specific needs and the assistance they required.
The city felt that if this data were harnessed correctly, it could help to turn the school around.
Unfortunately, this simply wasn’t happening. The vast majority of South Avondale’s teachers confessed that they hardly ever looked at the data, let alone used it. So, in 2008, the city decided it was time for a new approach. They devised a program called the Elementary Initiative (EI.)
The EI focused on helping teachers to effectively use the data at their disposal. It tried to encourage them to actually interact with the data. Surprisingly, this didn’t involve looking at the online data dashboards that the city and the school had spent so much time creating. Instead, the EI introduced a new approach to data analysis. Each school had to have a “data room,” a room where teachers could go to interact with data on their students.
Teachers were encouraged to visit the room to write down data such as test scores and attendance on index cards. Then, they had to sort those index cards – and thus the data – into different groups. For instance, they could group cards based on which students were excelling and which were struggling.
The teachers were also encouraged to use the data to draw graphs charting student progress. They were also told to run experiments based on what the data showed – for example, investigating whether placing students in smaller reading groups could boost their test results.
At first, teachers were reluctant to use the data room; it seemed like a waste of time, especially considering they already had all of the data on their easier-to-use computer systems.
However, they eventually realized that visiting the room and interacting with the data was helping them to spot patterns they’d otherwise have missed. They could then take steps to change these patterns.
For example, one teacher found that some of his students struggled with learning fractions, but had easily got the hang of pronoun use. Another teacher found that his students were in the exact opposite situation: struggling with pronouns, but excelling at fractions. The teachers swapped lesson plans, and in both classes, students’ test results improved.
Over time, it became clear that the EI was highly effective. By the 2010 to 2011 school year, South Avondale was transformed. Student performance had increased drastically; test scores had shot up.
This success was down to the fact that the EI harnessed the power of disfluency. The process of working with the data in such a hands-on way had helped it stick in the teachers’ minds. They were now able to recall the data effectively, analyze it much more thoroughly, and spot areas of strength and weakness in their students. They could then act on the data to help their students to progress.
Another important way in which you can use data productively is by incorporating it into your problem-solving and decision-making processes. You can do this using the engineering design process.
The engineering design process is a data-driven framework for solving problems and making choices. While this process originated in the engineering industry, we can apply it to decision making in our everyday lives.
The engineering design process is made up of five defined steps:
Step 1: Clearly outline the problem you need to solve or the decision you need to make.
Step 2: Collect data related to this decision or problem. In this context, “data” means any information that could help you to come up with a solution to the problem, or help you to decide the best way forward. This could include:
Step 3: Use this collected data to brainstorm all of the possible approaches you could take to solving the decision or problem. What are all of the different choices you could make, and the different paths forward that you could tread?
Step 4: Conduct experiments to test the possible approaches to your problem or decision. For example, imagine what might happen if you pursued a certain choice. Think about what might go well, and what might go wrong. If you’re in a group situation, you can discuss and evaluate these different approaches together.
Step 5: Repeat steps 1 to 4 until an appropriate solution is found.
Using the engineering design process provides several benefits. Firstly, it can help you to make decisions and solve problems more objectively. The process is based on objective raw data, rather than your subjective emotions and biases or the expectations of others.
Secondly, the process may help you to view your past experiences in a different, more positive way. Even bad things that have happened to you and mistakes you’ve made become useful sources of data that you can use in the future.
Thirdly, the process breaks down what can seem like a huge decision or an overwhelming problem into smaller, more manageable steps. It can make your dilemmas feel like much easier hurdles to overcome.
Finally, and most importantly, the engineering design process can help you to overcome the brain’s unhelpful default reaction when we face a difficult decision or problem.
The brain often wants to find resolutions to such situations quickly and easily. It loves to make things simple. So, it streamlines the process of finding a solution as much as possible. It finds a limited frame of reference in which to view the situation. Rather than considering every possible variable that could affect your approach to the situation, it focuses on two or three. It ignores a lot of the data that could help you to make your choice, entering a version of the “information blindness” state.
This unhelpful process can be illustrated through the example of deciding which car to buy. This can be a complicated process: there are many different cars out there, and many variables to consider. The most sensible course of action is to consider all of these variables before making your choice. After all, a car is a big investment: you want to make sure you buy the right one.
However, your brain may choose to focus on only a few variables to try to make the decision easier. For instance, it may reduce the choice to the simple binary of “do I want a car with a built-in GPS or heated seats?” This may make your choice easier in the moment, but it also ignores other, important factors in the choice, such as “can I actually afford this car?”
By using the engineering design process, you can prevent this unhelpful thought process from taking hold. You can break free of an unhelpful, limited frame of reference, and use one that’s more thorough. The process forces you to consider every possible variable involved in a decision and problem as you examine all of the relevant data that’s available to you. Likewise, the process requires you to come up with multiple solutions to a problem, rather than just jumping to the quickest and easiest resolution. You’re more likely to make good decisions and solve problems effectively if you’ve taken this thorough approach.
Following the success of the Elementary Initiative, the city of Cincinnati tried to replicate the program in struggling high schools. While this did lead to some improvements, teachers felt that the approach wasn’t quite right. High school students have a much shorter window of intervention compared to elementary school students; it can be hard to change their habits and attitudes. Unfortunately, analyzing data in the style of the EI wasn’t necessarily a quick process, so it was easy for this window to be missed.
The teachers felt that what these students needed was a way to get better at making the difficult, life-changing decisions that many of them faced. For example, should they go to college or get a job? Which of their many struggling family members should they help?
To address these issues, the school district set up a new program for high school students. This program aimed to help students to make choices based on objective data, not their emotions or the expectations of their loved ones. It taught the students how to use the engineering design process.
At Western Hills High, one of the schools that implemented this new program, a student named Delia Morris signed up for the classes.
Delia was a very gifted student, and her teachers felt she definitely had the potential to go to college. However, many gifted students at Western Hills High were prevented from reaching their full potential due to poverty, and Delia was at risk of this—she had a tough home life.
During Delia’s sophomore year of high school, her older sister had a baby. She asked Delia if she could babysit each afternoon. Delia was under pressure from her father to agree; after all, family helped each other out, right? Delia found herself needing to make a tough decision.
Delia decided to use the engineering design process to work out what to do. She collected data about how babysitting would impact her and her schoolwork; for example, the time it would eat up, and the time she would have left behind to study. She also collected data from the past experiences of people she knew. For instance, when Delia’s sister had agreed to take on a job to help her family, she’d had to put her aspirations – including college – on hold.
Delia analyzed all of the data she’d collected and tested all of the different approaches she could take to the problem. Eventually, she decided that she couldn’t babysit. It was too much of a commitment and would threaten her future. She would be too tired at the end of each day to complete her schoolwork. Her grades would suffer. Likewise, she might start to resent her family. When she explained her reasoning to her father, he agreed with her conclusion. Delia was able to harness the power of data to make the decision that was best for her.
Learn how to absorb data effectively by interacting with the information.
Describe some data that you’ve been struggling to absorb. What type of data is it—numerical, written, or another form? What does the data relate to?
Why do you think this data is so difficult to absorb? For example, is there a lot of it? Is it very complex?
How could you interact with this data to make it stick in your brain more effectively? For example, could you explain it to a friend, write it out by hand, or plot it on a graph?
Learn how to use data to help you solve a problem.
Think of a problem that you’re currently facing. Describe this problem in detail. What area(s) of your life is it affecting? How did the problem originate?
Outline any relevant data you have that could help you to further understand and solve this problem. For example, how is the situation affecting you now, and how could it affect you in the future? How did you or others approach a similar issue in the past, and what were the consequences of this approach?
Using the data you’ve considered, formulate some possible approaches to solving the problem. Outline the steps you’d need to take to put these approaches into action, and consider what the consequences of each approach might be.
Now that you’ve come up with some approaches to solving your problem, consider how you feel about the situation. Has your way forward become any clearer? Which approach—if any—do you think would be the best to take?
So far, the concepts we’ve explored have related to increasing your personal productivity. Now we’ll shift the focus to organizational productivity. In particular, we’ll discuss how you can build productive teams in the workplace.
At some point in your working life, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll need to work in a team. In this situation, maintaining your personal productivity isn’t always enough for you to meet your goals. Instead, the team as a whole must be productive. How can you ensure that this is the case? What are the secrets to building an effective team?
Creating a productive team isn’t necessarily about who is part of the team. Research has shown that the personal attributes of team members are not that important when it comes to making a team effective. For example, one study found that having a team filled with people with high intellect didn’t necessarily mean that the team would be more productive. In fact, the opposite often proved to be true. These teams were often less effective than teams made up of people with lower intellect.
Instead, the key to building an effective team is creating the right norms within the team environment. Norms are the unwritten and unspoken rules about behavior that exist within a particular group. These rules control factors such as how people communicate, how members treat each other, and how decisions are made.
Norms can have a negative impact on a team’s effectiveness; for example, if there are norms of giving unconstructive or overly harsh criticism, placing personal gain over the aims of the team, or constant competition between members to become the team leader.
Similarly, generating the right norms can hugely improve a team’s effectiveness and thus its productivity. Research suggests that the norm that is most crucial in creating an effective team is psychological safety.
When a team is psychologically safe, the members of the team believe that they can share their views and take risks without having to fear retaliation or rejection.
Psychologically safe teams have a culture that encourages participation from every member and discourages needless or overly harsh criticism or judgment. People don’t face punishment or humiliation for sharing their views, even if these views go against the general group consensus. Debate is encouraged rather than avoided. Such a culture requires respect and trust between the members of the team.
To create a culture of psychological safety in a team, two key ingredients are required.
During meetings and other group situations, each team member should speak for around the same amount of time. Domination by one person or just a handful of people should be avoided. This equal participation helps team members to feel that they have an equal voice and affirms that their opinions are of equal importance to those of their team members. In turn, this will help team members to feel secure, valued, and psychologically safe within the group.
There is one caveat to this ingredient: equal participation won’t create psychological safety if nobody listens to their fellow team members. The person speaking needs to feel like everyone wants to hear their contribution. They shouldn’t be made to feel that people are listening begrudgingly or out of mere politeness. Team members need to be fully committed to both sharing their own thoughts and listening to everyone else’s.
“Social sensitivity” is the ability to read others’ emotions using cues such as tone of voice and body language.
In a team setting, social sensitivity is an important way of monitoring people’s emotional reactions to discussions, proposals, and each other. It enables teams to detect whether any members are feeling frustrated or are having misgivings about the direction of the team’s work.
These members can then be encouraged to voice how they’re feeling. They will feel that their opinions are valued and their emotions respected, thus increasing their psychological safety.
Social sensitivity can also help team members to monitor each other’s general emotional wellbeing. If someone seems upset or preoccupied, the other members of the team will know that they need to check in with this person. This will make the upset person feel seen, valued, and cared for, again increasing their psychological safety within the group.
The most important player in creating psychological safety is the team leader. If you’re in this position, you need to quite literally lead by example. You need to encourage others to engage in behaviors that promote psychological safety by modeling these behaviors yourself.
Firstly, you need to ensure that every team member has had an equal opportunity to participate in discussions. If certain members have been quieter during a meeting, you should directly ask them what their perspective is. Refrain from simply allowing the loudest team members to dominate the discussion. This will prevent equal engagement.
Secondly, you should make sure that team members feel listened to by discussing their ideas and answering their questions. A simple technique that demonstrates that you’ve been listening is to summarize what members have said after they’ve finished speaking.
Thirdly, you must encourage social sensitivity by monitoring and acknowledging all team members’ emotions. You also need to react respectfully and sensitively to these emotions. Don’t brush off team members’ emotions or ignore them outright.
Finally, you should prevent damaging norms from developing by refusing to engage in these norms yourself. For example, never interrupt others when they’re speaking. This may create an interruption norm that leads to team members feeling disrespected and not listened to.
By modeling these behaviors, you will encourage your team to follow suit. This will enable a psychologically safe culture to flourish. Your team will work together more effectively and will become more productive.
In the early 2010s, Google began to research how to construct the most effective team. They codenamed their efforts Project Aristotle.
Before the study began, Google’s researchers defined the criteria of what made a successful team. These criteria included whether the team met their targets or goals, and the feelings of the members of the team. Did they feel productive? Were they happy in the team?
The first phase of the study focused on who was in each team. What were their personality types and backgrounds? Did they have certain skills or characteristics? How did the team members interact with each other? Did they socialize outside of work?
Ultimately, the researchers found no evidence that the makeup of a team made any difference to the team’s productivity. Most strikingly, teams that had almost the exact same membership could vary wildly in their effectiveness.
Next, the project examined each group’s norms. Did the team encourage debate or lean towards groupthink? Did they interrupt each other or take turns to make their points?
After analyzing each team and their differing norms, the researchers found that some norms are frequently linked to effective teamwork. They specifically found that many of the norms that correlated with effective teamwork were linked to psychological safety.
Eventually, Google’s researchers outlined the key norms that effective teams should have:
What steps should leaders take to create psychological safety in their team?
We’ve learned how creating a culture of psychological safety can boost the productivity of teams. We’ve also considered how crucial managers and leaders are in fostering psychological safety. However, that’s not the only step managers can take to increase organizational productivity.
According to Duhigg, workers become more productive when they believe two things:
It’s up to managers to create a culture in which these two beliefs can flourish.
To do this, you should implement two management techniques. The first is lean manufacturing. In this ideology, the person who's closest to the problem should have the authority to fix it.
The second technique that you should implement is the creation of a “commitment culture.” This is a workplace culture in which employers are truly committed to their employees’ growth, success, and happiness, causing their employees to commit to the company in return.
Also known as the Toyota Production System due to its origins in the company of the same name, lean manufacturing is a system designed to maximize efficiency and productivity. It’s enabled Toyota to cut costs while keeping quality high.
Lean manufacturing is a complex philosophy that’s made up of many important elements. However, Duhigg chooses to highlight one aspect of this ideology that he believes is crucial to productivity: giving the worker closest to a problem the decision-making authority to solve it.
This method of decision making is based on the idea that the person closest to a given system or machine is likely to have the strongest knowledge of it. Therefore, if something goes wrong, they’re in the best position to fix it. The system utilizes every worker’s expertise, from executives to janitors.
Implementing this element of lean manufacturing has various benefits. For one, it makes day-to-day work more efficient. Workers don’t have to wait around for permission from on high to make their decision. They can get started on fixing issues straight away.
Crucially, this system also has the benefit of giving every employee a little bit of decision-making power. Every worker is allocated some authority, and thus a little bit of control. As we learned in Chapter 1, feeling in control fuels our motivation—and if we’re motivated, we’re likely to be more productive.
Lean manufacturing has proved to be so successful that it’s been adapted for other industries. For example, the Agile management ideology that’s often used in the software industry is largely based on this system. However, there are some caveats to lean manufacturing’s success.
Implementing lean manufacturing isn’t as simple as giving workers the power to make decisions and expecting things to change overnight. Just because workers have this power doesn’t automatically mean they’ll feel comfortable using it. They might be afraid of negative consequences if things go wrong—if they make the wrong decision, or if their “right” decision has unexpected drawbacks.
For lean manufacturing to truly work, workers need to feel respected and trusted. They need to feel that their employer will have their back regardless of the effects of their decisions. They should feel that managers are committed to helping them improve and learn from their mistakes, rather than just punishing them. They should also be assured that when they make good decisions, they will be recognized and respected for it, and not just ignored. One way to generate this atmosphere of trust and respect is to create a commitment culture.
As its name would suggest, a commitment culture is a workplace culture in which the employer is committed to each employee; specifically, committed to each employee’s growth and success. It’s a culture in which employees are truly valued. Both managers and employees understand that everyone plays a vital role in the company’s success. Workers are given the room to make mistakes, learn from them, and improve their workflow accordingly. Employers are willing to invest in each employee’s growth even if that growth is slow.
When a commitment of this kind is shown to employees, they respond in kind and remain committed to the company. They’re driven to work harder because they genuinely care about the fate of the company and the work they’re doing. Workers will often choose to stay at the company even if they receive a better offer elsewhere. During hard times, such as recessions, the company and its employees are more likely to stick together: they want to weather the storm together.
In a commitment culture, a sense of trust develops between workers and employers. Employers trust their employees to do a good job and to help the company move forward. Likewise, employees trust their employers to have their backs, invest in their growth, and be tolerant of their mistakes (within reason).
This atmosphere of trust makes it easier for lean manufacturing to flourish. Workers are more likely to use the control they’ve been given, as they’re less worried about repercussions if their decisions don’t go to plan.
In general, commitment cultures have proved to be hugely beneficial to companies. A study of Silicon Valley technology start-ups found that companies with a commitment culture vastly outperformed their peers in many ways:
Companies with commitment cultures also reap the benefits of having committed employees. Employee retention in such companies is often high, meaning companies don’t lose their workers’ expertise to a competitor. They also avoid having to spend time and money replacing their lost employees.
You can create a commitment culture using various methods. Firstly, implementing lean manufacturing can lay the groundwork for a commitment culture to flourish. Empowering people to make decisions is a way to show that you value them, are committed to their growth and success, and see them as important to the business. Having a small amount of control makes each worker feel like they can have an impact on the company’s success, which increases their commitment.
Likewise, lean manufacturing promotes the trust that’s key in a commitment culture. Every worker knows that they are trusted to do well. That’s why they were given power in the first place.
Outside of the principles of lean manufacturing, there are some other actions you can take to create a commitment culture. For example, the companies in the Silicon Valley study that successfully implemented commitment cultures took the following steps:
In the mid-1980s, General Motors and Toyota partnered up to reopen a car plant in Fremont, California. They called their new venture the New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc., or NUMMI.
The Fremont plant had closed two years earlier due to a myriad of issues:
Toyota planned to revolutionize the plant by introducing lean manufacturing. However, due to a union agreement, 80% of the reopened plant’s laid-off workers had to be re-employed. This meant Toyota had to introduce lean manufacturing to the misbehaving workers who’d become used to a completely different system.
As a first step, the Fremont plant’s employees were sent to a Toyota plant in Japan for two weeks to witness lean manufacturing in action. One such employee was Rick Madrid, who’d worked at the Fremont plant back in its pre-NUMMI days.
Madrid was shocked by what he saw in the Japanese plant. He witnessed the workers closest to a problem being empowered to make decisions on how to fix it. All workers had the power to stop the production line and fix issues as they spotted them. They simply had to pull on a hanging cord—called an “andon cord”—and the line would eventually grind to a halt.
Madrid also witnessed respectful collaboration between workers and their managers. If a worker was fixing an issue, they could give orders to their manager and the manager would help them. Such collaboration never would have happened at Fremont in its pre-NUMMI days, when managers had shown no respect to their workers.
Finally, Madrid noticed that workers at the plant were encouraged to suggest improvements to boost the productivity of the production line. For example, one worker suggested a new tool for installing struts. The next morning, all workers were given a version of the tool. In the past, managers at the Fremont plant had ignored their workers’ suggestions.
While Madrid returned to Fremont full of optimism about lean manufacturing, not all of his colleagues were convinced. They were worried that their new-found power would come back to bite them. They feared retaliation if they made choices or suggestions that managers didn’t approve of. A commitment culture hadn’t taken hold at NUMMI yet.
Because of the workers’ doubts, lean manufacturing wasn’t yet working in the factory. This became evident during a visit from NUMMI’s president, Tetsuro Toyoda. Toyoda noticed that a worker was having issues while installing a taillight. He asked the worker to pull the andon cord and stop the production line so that he could fix the problem. The worker was reluctant to pull the cord: he, along with many NUMMI workers, still feared negative consequences if he did so.
Eventually, Toyoda convinced the worker to pull the cord and fix the problem. Afterward, rather than chastising the worker for resisting pulling the cord, Toyoda apologized to him for not fully explaining to the plant managers the importance of encouraging workers to pull the cords. Toyoda also assured the worker that he was a crucial part of the plant’s success.
This incident finally convinced NUMMI’s workers that their managers did value them. It showed that NUMMI’s leaders were committed to helping every worker succeed, rather than blaming them when things went wrong.
From this point onwards, things changed at NUMMI. Workers began to pull the andon cords, and productivity increased. Within a few years, the Fremont plant was more productive than any other General Motors manufacturing site. Productivity levels had doubled compared to the plant’s pre-NUMMI days. Lean manufacturing and a commitment culture had transformed the plant and its workforce.
Reflect on what you’ve learned from Smarter Faster Better.
Of the eight principles discussed in the book, which do you think will be most useful in improving your or your organization’s productivity?
What steps are you going to take to put that principle into practice?