How Will You De-Isolate Yourself in 2011?
This past Saturday evening I once again got off a plane feeling sluggish and nursing a low grade headache. More than once I have found myself ill with a cold, even one time pneumonia within a couple of days of completing a cross country flight. Such are the experiences many of us share who travel regularly for business.
Somewhere along the way someone got the bright idea that if you fortified yourself with enough vitamins and minerals ahead of time maybe you could stave off the ill effects of an extended plane trip. They invented something called Airborne® which must work to some degree because it seems to be doing quite well in stores.
This experience got me thinking as I often do in metaphorical terms. I began to wonder what might be the organizational equivalent of Airborne® now that we are organizationally launching new flights (fiscal years) all around the country and the world.
What initially came to mind was some sort of plan for professional development. So I did a couple of searches through the blogosphere and lo and behold almost everything I came upon had something to do with advancing skills and knowledge. Not at all the medicine I was looking for!
I wasn’t interested necessarily in new skills or knowledge, not that I am against that sort of thing. No, it really was something like an opportunity to create a preventative regimen that I was seeking.
What I have noticed in recent years, especially having my own company, is a tendency to become isolated from ideas and thinking outside one’s own environment as that environment begins to require more and more maintenance. I found myself going a couple of years without attending a workshop or seminar offered by someone where travel and time away from my familiar environment was required. And there always seemed to be plenty of legitimate reasons to put these opportunities off.
“I recall that my father became very uneasy when he and my mother moved into a new home, one requiring little to no maintenance. He only lived there a couple of years before he convinced my mother to move to another, older home, one requiring considerable maintenance. Once there his peace of mind was once again restored as he was able to return to old familiar habits of painting and patching which allowed him to solve problems with existing knowledge and experience, no new learning required.”
As economic conditions have tightened or remained challenging one historical pattern has reemerged just about everywhere and another is emerging. Non-essential training budgets have been and are continuing to be cut or shrunk. More emphasis is being placed on on-line learning and LMS systems. Both these trends are troubling to me and I believe should be to you as well as a manager, leader and developer of people.
No doubt you have heard this quote from Albert Einstein more than once in your professional career:
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
If we are not intentionally engaging with environments outside our own how will we manage to develop new thinking? How will we keep ourselves well and sharp if we continue to re-think the same thoughts with the same thinkers? Is the situation really all that different than the metaphor I suggested earlier with the plane trip, recycled air producing sluggishness and sometimes even illness? I think not, and yet there is the reality of the economics and sometimes budgetary discretion being beyond your control.
So what can you do?
Here are a few things I can think of and I am sure you can add some more yourself.
- Attend continuing education programs at a local community college. These are usually offered at really bargain pricing. I took a class on “economic gardening” this past summer, it was fascinating and I didn’t even know there were people working on growing local economies.
- Read, read, read, and not just business books or those in your technical area but also non-fiction non-related books.
- Visit www.TED.com and peruse the Talks section. Make arrangements to watch a few of them next year with the members of your staff, stay after and hold a downloading discussion on ideas that were generated.
- Create a Peer-to-Peer Coaching Group. Gather up to eight other managers outside your function. Meet monthly for two to three hours to work together on resolving problems in each other’s areas. Make it a committed activity, if you are going to participate you must attend every session or don’t play. (I like groups that can break into threes to work as pods).
And what can you add to this list? How will you get outside and into the open air of new thinking?
