Responsiveness vs. reactivity.

What do you do when you encounter something new, something hard?  In our world, we are bound to run into things we don't know how to unpack or process or deal with.  None of our current tools seem to work.  The easiest thing to do is to react: get busy and attack the problem with tools and strategies that, although familiar, clearly aren't suited to solve the issue at hand.

Even though you know a fork isn't the right utensil for eating soup, rather than pause and search for a spoon, you try to compensate by working harder.  You scoop up tiny forkfuls of soup as fast as you can so everyone can see you're working as hard as you can to empty the bowl. 

But you aren't doing your best - you're just wasting a lot of time and energy in a very unproductive way.  

Stop.  Reflect on the situation for a moment.  Ask for help.  Ask for advice. Search the web for "best utensil to eat soup".  Take a few minutes and go find a spoon.  Buy one if you have to.

It takes discipline and confidence to stop reacting, to take a moment in order to determine the most effective way to respond to a pressing issue.  You need a good answer for the boss if she sees you sitting around thinking while that expensive soup is getting cold.  She needs to explain to her boss why nobody's doing anything about this problem.  Tell her the soup will get cold by the time you're done trying to eat it with a fork, anyway.  And if you don't take the time to get the spoon this time, then next time, you won't have the right utensil to do a better job emptying the soup bowl, either.  If you can convince the bows to let you invest the time into finding a better solution to the problem this time, you'll save everyone a ton of time, money, and frustration down the road. 

Respond, don't react.

"What does eating soup with a fork have to do with cybersecurity?", you ask.  Everything.  

Flywheels and Bullets

Why are high-performers so much better at executing?  They seem to be able to take on new work and initiatives almost effortlessly and even gain momentum in the process. How do they do it?

There is never a single decision or action that will propel you to excellence.  Success is incremental. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, writes of what he calls the Flywheel Effect.  Rather than thinking of work as a series of steps, think of it as a well-placed nudge to a wheel that is already in motion.  If you exert the right degree of force at the right inflection point, you will increase the momentum.  It will feel inevitable: if you do A, you almost can't avoid doing B, and C just follows naturally, and so on.  This builds organic momentum.  

Now the problem is discovering what actions propel the flywheel.  Experiment.  Fail as much as you have to, but fail small.  Fail early.  Fail when it's cheap and easy to clean up any mess you make.  Most important, fail while you still have momentum so you can course correct and find the right way to build momentum.   The key is to fail until you find the sweet spot, the synergy. Then you stoke it patiently over a long period of time and you will see that your results begin to amplify.  You will also begin to discern an underlying logic that you can extrapolate into other categories of work. The flywheel principle explains why the Lean principle of failing fast is such a key element.

Another of Collins' dictums is to fire bullets first, then fire a single cannonball.  The idea here is that you can significantly reduce risk and maximize return by starting.  Fire as many bullets as you need to in order to get your range and windage.  Then when your target is within perfect range, and you are hitting bulls-eyes with the small bullets, bring out the big gun, and knock out the target.  In other words: baby step, baby step,  baby step, baby step, baby step, baby step, giant leap,  baby step,  etc.

Slow and steady may win the game, but taking well-timed, calculated risks can provide exponential returns.