magazine asked executives at six hundred companies to estimate the percentage of their workforce who could name the company’s top three priorities. The executives predicted that 64 percent would be able to name them. When Inc. then asked employees to name the priorities, only 2 percent could do so. This is not the exception but the rule. Leaders are inherently biased to presume that everyone in the group sees things as they do, when in fact they don’t. This is why it’s necessary to drastically overcommunicate priorities. The leaders I visited with were not shy about this. Statements of priorities were painted on walls, stamped on emails, incanted in speeches, dropped into conversation, and repeated over and over until they became part of the oxygen.
Try this: go to your Twitter content settings and change the country to Germany. The Nazis go away! It’s the software equivalent of D-Day. Nazis gone. The next time Twitter tells you they don’t know how to find the Nazi stuff, be assured they’re lying. They’ve already had to tag it. Why don’t they turn it off worldwide? Great question. In fact, I asked Jack Dorsey that question in person. He said it’s not illegal in the United States. It may not be illegal, but giving a voice to someone who uses it to silence others is indecent, unethical, and cruel. As designers, our job is to protect the people who come in contact with the tools we build. Sometimes the law can back us up, like with the GDPR. Sometimes the law may be lagging a little bit behind.
Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before. Generating purpose in these areas is like supplying an expedition: You need to provide support, fuel, and tools and to serve as a protective presence that empowers the team doing the work. Some ways to do that include: • Keenly attend to team composition and dynamics. • Define, reinforce, and relentlessly protect the team’s creative autonomy. • Make it safe to fail and to give feedback. • Celebrate hugely when the group takes initiative.
As design educators, we need to stop pulling out a syllabus that was put together while watching the Nixon impeachment hearings, and we need to stop convincing students they’re special unicorns immune to consequence.
Hao raised his glass. “I have seen that look before. I would have pity for those you seek, but for the fact that they deserve whatever you have planned. May you find your revenge and may it taste sweet.”
Talk to individuals. Ask what kinds of problems they have with “teaming.” When an organization is having trouble with change, managers usually say they know what is wrong. But the truth is that often they don’t. They imagine that everyone sees things as they do, or they make assumptions about others that are untrue. You need to ask the right questions. If you ask, “Why aren’t you doing this?” you’ve set up an adversarial relation and will probably get a defensive answer. If, on the other hand, you ask, “What problems are you having with this?” you’re likelier to learn why it isn’t happening.
Talk about transition and what it does to people. Give coordinators a seminar on how to manage people in transition. Everyone can benefit from understanding transition. A coordinator will deal with subordinates better if he or she understands what they are going through. If they understand what transition feels like, team members will feel more confident that they haven’t taken a wrong turn. They’ll also see that some of their problems come from the transition process and not from the details of the change.
BY THE SUMMER OF 1826, THOMAS JEFFERSON KNEW THAT he was dying. Although he was the greatest living Virginian, he was, like many of his planter neighbors, bankrupt. His habits had been too rich and his soil too poor. His last recourse, a special lottery authorized by the State of Virginia for his benefit, had failed to generate enough money to save him.
One trick almost every distiller I visited tried to play on me was to get me to stick my head into the vat during the final stages of fermentation, when the headspace—the volume of air above the liquid—is a cloud of CO2. Taking a whiff is like sticking a knitting needle up your nose. Too much of it, and you can pass out and fall right into the vat. Fun!)
The trouble shows up when they need to organize output—deciding what to do when and then controlling their own behavior to get there. Because they have what it takes to absorb information and learn math and language and other school subjects, you may assume that much simpler tasks like making a bed or taking turns should be a no-brainer. But that’s not the case because your child may have intelligence but lack the executive skills to put it to best use.
Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health also suggest that a “use it or lose it” process may be occurring in the frontal lobes during this time. Neural connections that are used are retained, while those that are not exercised are lost. If this is the case, then the practice of executive skills is critical. It means that kids who practice executive skills are not only learning self-management—independence—but in the process developing brain structures that will support their executive skills into later adolescence and adulthood. Practice is important to acquisition of executive skills for another reason. Researchers who study the brain using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) have found that when children and teenagers perform tasks that require these skills, they rely on the prefrontal cortex to do all the work rather than distributing the workload to other specialized regions of the brain, such as the amygdala and the insula, two parts of the brain that are activated when making quick decisions that affect safety and survival (the fight-or-flight response). Adults, in contrast, can spread out the workload in part because they’ve had years of practice to develop the neural pathways to make this possible. Activating executive skills takes more conscious effort with children and with teenagers than it does with adults, which may help explain why they are less inclined to engage their working memory to perform tasks of daily living.
The scheme we arrived at consists of 11 skills: Response inhibition Working memory Emotional control Sustained attention Task initiation Planning/prioritization Organization Time management Goal-directed persistence Flexibility Metacognition
Malting is how people turn barley’s starch into sugar, which they can turn into beer and booze. Whisky is, basically, distilled beer—and this was the process Takamine hoped to obliterate. Brewers and whisky makers use barley because it’s easy. Other grains are maltable, but wheat, for example, produces less starch-breaking enzyme. Oats have too much protein and fat. Corn needs too much heat to untangle the starches before malting, and the oils tend to turn rancid. Barley is the way to go.
do highly experienced professionals like nurses and anesthesiologists really need to be explicitly told that their role in a cardiac surgery is important? Do they really need to be informed that if they see the surgeon make a mistake, they might want to speak up? The answer, as Edmondson discovered, is a thundering yes. The value of those signals is not in their information but in the fact that they orient the team to the task and to one another. What seems like repetition is, in fact, navigation. Those signals added up in a way that you can hear in team members’ voices.
in the boardinghouse the justices were staying in, dislocating his shoulder and suffering a mild concussion. As he recovered, he wrote a sweet letter to Polly. “Old men”—Marshall was sixty-eight—“do not get over sprains and hurts quite as quickly as young ones.” He had, he went on, plenty of time on his hands as he recovered, which he spent recalling the episodes of their courtship, over forty years ago: “our little tiffs and makings up.… the lock of hair… all the thousand indescribable but deeply affecting instances of your affection or coldness which constituted for a time the happiness or misery of my life.” They could “never be lost while recollection remains.”
In his Life of Washington, Marshall had described the passage of the Fifth Amendment and its nine fellows. By the end of 1791, Congress had passed and the states had ratified ten amendments. The Ninth and Tenth were general statements about the division of rights and powers among the federal and state governments and the people. The First through the Eighth, by contrast, listed specific prohibitions—no establishment of religion or warrantless searches—and guarantees—freedom of the press, the right to keep and bear arms. The inclusion of this compendium, according to Marshall, had been a matter of political and emotional housekeeping. The “friends” of the government “were anxious to annex to the constitution those explanations and barriers against… possible encroachments… on the liberties of the people which had been loudly demanded, however unfounded… might be the fears by which those demands were suggested.” The Constitution as it left Philadelphia in 1787 was fine, but nervous folk feared imaginary dangers; to please them, Congress drew up the Bill of Rights.
the term executive skills comes from the neurosciences literature and refers to the brain-based skills that are required for humans to execute, or perform, tasks.
