Progress-focused

In a recent training group I had been teaching participants about several progress-focused techniques such as the NOAM 7 steps  approach , the progress-focused circle technique , the positive no technique , and progress-focused directing (which is a way of making your expectations clear in a motivated and constructive manner). On the second day of the training, one of the participants made a remark which was something like this: "First of all, I really find all of this interesting and useful but I am wondering about something. If both we employees and managers learn progress-focused skills aren't both parties just becoming better at conversational trickery? First my manager will try to make a clever formulation to try to get me to do something and then I will counter that will some clever formulation of the positive no technique. It feels just like we are just applying tricks? I just don't think we will still be able to be honest and spontaneous!"

The progress-focused circle technique is getting more well-known and popular. It works like this: the coach draws two circles on a piece of paper or on a flip-over sheet, an inner circle and an outer circle. On small post-it notes clients write down what progress they have already achieved and then they hang them in the inner circle. Next, clients write on post-it notes what progress they further need and/or want to achieve and they hang these in the outer circle. Finally, clients choose which note(s) they first want to be able to move from the outer circle to the inner circle and how they will try to accomplish this. On the first day of a training I gave to a group of teachers I explained the circle technique and invited them to experiment a bit with it. I also gave an example of how I had once used the circle technique with a client of mine. What was interesting in that situation was that my client had not only hanged post-it notes in the inner and outer circle but also outside ...

In his new book Social Physics , MIT data scientist Alex Pentland introduces the discipline of social physics, a big data approach to social science. The discipline focuses mainly on how ideas flow through groups and communities and how social learning takes place to enable productivity and creativity. The book describes much large scale research and many core concepts of social physics and it introduces ideas on how groups, organizations, cities, and societies can be made more effective.

As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer have shown, making progress in work that is meaningful is one of the most motivating, if not the most motivating, things in work. Even small progress may have a big positive impact on one's inner work life (this is the authors' term for perception, emotions and motivations in one's work). 'Meaningful progress', of course, consists of two parts: the meaningful part and the progress part. I have focused a lot on the progress element in many previous posts. I'd now like to focus on the meaningful part.

The feeling of making progress in something which is important to you is very motivating. But sometimes you make progress without being aware of it and thus you miss this motivating effect needlessly. In this article I explained some reasons why achieved progress can sometimes be hard to notice. One reason I mentioned is sensory adaptation. This means that we get used to the progress we have made and because of this we stop perceiving it. A second reason I mentioned is that we may interpret progress negatively. An example of this is that we may view the availability of technological resources not as advantages but as perils or problems. A third reason why we may not notice progress is that we may, sometimes unconsciously, concurrently raise the bar for ourselves. When this happens, not only our competence level has increased but also the level we aim for. Because of this, the distance between our current level and our goal remains the same (or even increases).

Professors are Not Elderly: Evaluating the Evidential Value of Two Social Priming Effects Through P-Curve Analyses By Daniel Lakens Abstract : It is possible that the number of false positives in the literature is much greater than is desirable due to a combination of low statistical power , publication bias , and flexibility when analyzing data. Recently, some researchers have argued t he replicability crisis social priming research is greatly exaggerated ( Dijksterhuis, 2014 ; Stroebe & Strack, 2014). To quantify the extent to which researcher degrees of freedom are a real problem, I present two p-curve analyses that examine the evidential value of research lines on professor priming and elderly priming. The results indicate studies examining elderly priming are p-hacked , while studies examining professor priming contain evidential value. I believe a polarized discussion about whether social priming is true or not, whether direct replications or conceptual replicat...

I am often intrigued by the complexity and paradoxes in optimal human functioning. One thing which interests me in particular is that our performance may sometimes be improved by deliberately adding constraints to the circumstances in which we have to perform. I came across nice example when I was watching Back and Forth about the rockband Foo Fighters. Just before starting to record the 2011 album Wasting Light , Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl decided that instead recording the album digitally they would record it on tape. This implied that the recording process would be harder and less flexible. While digitally recorded music can be easily manipulated and corrected, analogously recorded music can't be. Grohl realized that the easiness of digital recording might make musicians a bit lazy and easy. After all, any mistake could be relatively easily corrected. But analogous recording would require the band members to be really sharp and play really well. While we can't know ...

In Going from Good to Great with Complex Tasks , Ozgun Atasoy explains that the belief that consciously thinking about what we are doing, when performing complex tasks, by definition harms our performance, is wrong. It is true that some type of conscious thinking can harm our functioning. For example, when we are typing on a keyboard, we run largely on auto-pilot. If we would try to consciously control the typing of each separate letter, this would slow us down a great deal and probably cause us to make many mistakes.

Soon, I will post an article in which I make a plea for interest-focused development. In that article I will explain what I mean with interest-focused development and what its advantages are for individuals and organizations. Here, I will give a preview of that article by mentioning the direct advantages of interest-focused development. When we are doing something which interests us, in other words, which we enjoy and find meaningful, we enter a psychological state of attentive engagement and we experience positive emotions. In this state we think more clearly, we comprehend things deeper and more easily and we remember better (Murphy Paul, 2013) due to which we learn more efficiently and better.

Why expert performance is special and cannot be extrapolated from studies of performance in the general population: A response to criticisms K. Anders Ericsson Abstract : Many misunderstandings about the expert-performance approach can be attributed to its unique methodology and theoretical concepts. This approach was established with case studies of the acquisition of expert memory with detailed experimental analysis of the mediating mechanisms. In contrast the traditional individual difference approach starts with the assumption of underlying general latent factors of cognitive ability and personality that correlate with performance across levels of acquired skill. My review rejects the assumption that data on large samples of beginners can be extrapolated to samples of elite and expert performers. Once we can agree on the criteria for reproducible objective expert performance and acceptable methodologies for collecting valid data, I believe that scientists will recognize the n...

Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the greatest classical composers of all time (for example, read  this  and this ). Many people have pointed out that his oeuvre is both enormously large and enormously varied and that it hardly has any weak spots. Many people even rave about Bach that his work is indeed flawless and use hyperboles like that Bach's music was divinely inspired, that Bach was God's pupil or even, perhaps only half-jokingly, that Bach IS God. John Eliot Gardiner , the famous conductor, has written a new book called Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven . In this video , he says that biographers of Bach make a logical error by thinking that because Bach made such great music he must have also been a great man. Then, Gardiner goes on to say that Bach certainly wasn't a paragon of virtue and that he actually was a deeply flawed character. He says this because in Bach's life, according to Gardiner, there is "almost a repetitive pattern of antagonistic b...

Human nature not only has a competitive side to it, which expresses itself through tendencies such as resource striving and status seeking ; it also has an equally important, if not more important, cooperative side which expresses itself through tendencies such as fairness and reciprocity seeking and group identity seeking (for more about this read The dual human nature: competitive and cooperative forces ). Here, I want to focus on one of those cooperative tendencies, namely  reciprocity seeking . The principle of reciprocity seeking, which has a strong impact how we behave in social interactions, implies that if someone else does us some kind of favor we want to give a favor in return to that person. Negative reciprocity, by the way, means that if we feel that someone treats us badly, we want to treat them badly in return. In other words, we tend to want to give back what we feel we get.

There is much evidence that the world, on the whole, is getting better in many ways (see for instance work by Matt Ridley , Steven Pinker , and Hans Rosling ). In accordance with this view is a new article by  Zack Beauchamp  on Thinkprogress called  5 Reasons why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History . He presents the following 5 reasons:

One type of question which progress-focused coaches ask is the coping question. This question is mainly used when coachees experience their circumstances as really hard and more or less hopeless. The basic for of this type of question is: How do (/did) you manage to go on under such difficult circumstances? But there are many different ways in which the question can be asked, such as:

In Social: why our brains are wired to connect  (also read this post ), Matt Lieberman explains that, within our brains there are two quite distinct neural systems for respectively social and non-social thinking. These two systems appear to be antagonistic in the sense that when one of the two is very active, the other is largely inactive. In addition to this he explains that whenever a person is focused on a specific task the non-social system is turned on and as soon as the person stops focusing on the task, his or her social system will turn on. Because this neural system becomes active as soon as one finishes a specific task, it is called the default nework. It seems that when we are not focusing on a specific task we are not doing nothing. We are engaged in social cognition, in other words, thinking about other people and our relationships with them. Lieberman writes:

My view is that prolonged growth of inequality in developed economies is likely to be detrimental for human well-being (here are some references: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ). People on the political right often defend this inequality by claiming that the super rich must be allowed to stay super rich because they are the motors behind job growth. In this video , Clayton Christensen explains that how investments are made determines how economies develop. Essentially, investments can be targeted at three types of innovations: 1) empowering innovations which transform products from complex and unaffordable for the mass to simple and affordable, thereby expanding markets and creating jobs, 2) sustaining innovations , which make good products better, and which do not create many new products because they do not make markets larger, 3) efficiency innovations , which is making the same products at lower prices and which destroy jobs and free capital.

Charles Darwin once said: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." This sounds like a strange idea. Is it true that confidence sometimes signals ignorance? Is it true that people who are very confident about their opinions may actually be more ignorant than people who are less confident? If it is true, it might lead to a paradoxical prescription: if you feel very confident you are right about a topic you may not know enough about it. Is there evidence that confidence and ignorance may go hand in hand? Yes, a new study by Philip Fernbach et al. does provide some evidence: Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding Philip M. Fernbach, Todd Rogers, Craig R. Fox, & Steven A. Sloman  Abstract : People often hold extreme political attitudes about complex policies. We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do (the illusion of explanatory depth) and that polarized attitudes are en...

Readers of this blog will probably know that believing that human abilities and traits cannot be developed (this type of belief is called a fixed mindset ) has several disadvantages. One of those disadvantages is a fear of challenges and doing things that are hard. When you do something which is challenging you may make mistakes and fail and this could be interpreted as a lack of natural ability.

In this post I mentioned some questions about work engagement. Now, here are some answers about what work engagement is, what causes it, and what benefits is has. 1. What is work engagement? Work engagement is a fulfilling state of mind of people at work which is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption ( ref ). Vigor refers to the energy, effort, persistence, and resilience; dedication refers to involvement, sense of significance ,  enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and challenge; absorption refers to concentration, happy engrossment in one's work, feeling that time passes quickly and finding it hard to detach oneself from work. 2. What are work engagement's benefits? Work engagement is associated with workers’ creativity, their inclination to help colleagues, their organizational citizenship behaviors ( ref ; ref ) and their mental health ( ref ). Also, clients of engaged workers tend to be more satisfied ( ref ). 3. How stable is work engagemen...

One book which has had an important influence on me, through the years, is David Maister's True professionalism . In the book David argues - apparently completely unafraid to be seen as naive or idealistic - for an ethical, ambitious, and principles-based approach to doing one's work. I have known this book ever since was published in 1997 and I still agree with the large majority of things in it and I'm still inspired by them. And perhaps more importantly, I think they work. Here are 20 quotes from the book.

Just for fun, my son Brent and I made a brief poll: Who is the Greatest Classical Composer ever?  115 people filled in the survey. Here are the results (by the way, the difference between no. 1 and 2 was only 1 vote): Top 10 Greatest Classical Composers Ever

In a review of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature , Bill Gates said that the book "stands out as one of the most important books I’ve read – not just this year, but ever". Who am I to disagree? The book is an unbelievably rich resource documenting the steady decline of violence throughout history. To get an impression of how strong this decline has been, take a look at this graph.

In 2007, Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players ever, wrote the book How life imitates chess . In that book he looked back on his great career and he made comparisons between life and chess. The book contains some inspiring thoughts. Here are some quotes: You must know what questions to ask and ask them frequently Personal style is not generic software that you can download. You must instead recognize what works best for you and then, through trial and error, develop your own method- your own map.

As you may know , how we think about our own qualities has a big impact on how we feel, how we behave, how we learn and how we perform. Thinking our abilities (such as our intelligence) are fixed (this is called a fixed mindset) makes us less challenge seeking and less persistent and also more defensive. Also our performance is lower over time. A growth mindset, thinking that our qualities can be developed through effort, leads to more challenge seeking, persistence, openness, learning and performance over time. Thinking about others' qualities as fixed also has consequences such as being quicker to stereotype and label people, to be less open to new information about people, and to punish them quicker when they have done something wrong. In a chapter in a new book , Carol Dweck mentions two lesser known finding with respect to mindsets.

In 1965, psychologist Hadley Cantril wrote an article describing an intervention he called The Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale . This intervention can be considered a precursor to what has now become one of the most popular techniques used by coaches: the scaling question. The scaling question came to fruition by the developers of the solution-focused approach, Insoo Kim Berg, Steve de Shazer, and their colleagues at the Brief Family Therapy Center in the United States. They added important new elements to the question of scale. Over the years, its application in coaching practice has been further refined and its applications have become broader. Scaling questions are among the most flexible and versatile techniques coaches use today.