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What do I love about: The Breakthrough Manifesto?
Very practical and digestible. This book provides practical examples and guides on methods to implement each of the 10 principles
What do I not love about: The Breakthrough Manifesto?
Nothing
Who should read: The Breakthrough Manifesto?
Anyone looking for ideas for breakthrough thinking or approach to problem solving
Who should not read: The Breakthrough Manifesto?
People not interested in any form of leadership.
Notes about The Breakthrough Manifesto
- Silence Your Cynic: Suspend disbelief and assume anything’s possible.
• Judgement delivered early in a relationship, before trust has been established, or early in the generation of an idea, contributing to the breakthrough process.
• Belief is the feather that gives you the confidence to fly.
• Whether you believe you can, or believe you can’t, you are right.
• Encourage volume and diversity of ideas early on.
• There is a time and place for looking at ideas critically, but first give yourself time to dream explore and get expansive and build on ideas before poking holes in them.
• How: Interrogate yourself, Ask what if, Change your mindset, Get physical, Buddy up. - Strip Away Everything: Question your assumptions and adopt a beginner’s mindset.
• Human lives are built on assumptions, and that can wreak havoc on the choices people make.
• Yerkes-Dodson law states that performance suffers in the absence of stress, presumable there is not enough motivation to perform. Performance then improves with increasing levels of stress, but only up to a point. When stress gets too high, performance starts to decrease again.
• Don’t stay in an endless, existential loop of examination, but make sure you are thoughtfully applying scrutiny to validate or challenge assumptions.
• How: Flip orthodoxies, Defy constraints, Sleuth for truth, Reuse and repurpose, - Live With The Problem: Invest time in understanding a problem deeply before attempting to solve it.
• Occam’s razor- the simplest explanation is often the best.
• Sunk cost fallacy is where one sticks with a direction, even when it clearly does not make sense anymore, because so much has been invested already.
• When you encourage your team to live with the problem awhile, it can enable more opportunities for those who like to consider and reflect before they speak.
• Research has suggested that strong emotions can be detrimental to creativity, but milder emotions can enhance it.
• Stick with exploring a problem just long enough to get clear on what you are really solving for.
• How: Act like a toddler, Change the lens, Try question storming, Stretch out your brainstorming, Passive percolation, - Check Your Edge: Push your thinking and ask whether your ideas are truly innovative or unique.
• Human beings have a preference for the ways things currently are.
• The desire may be rational, keeping you in a secure space, but it can also be irrational, causing you to stay in a rut that may be contrary to your best interests or that may not push you to your full potential.
• Nothing ventured nothing gained.
• You can also increase your chances of experiencing the unpredictable by challenging yourself to break the routine, defy habit, or forge a different trail. E.g strip a meeting room of the traditional boardroom table and replace it with bean bags. Or host a discussion in a park with a picnic lunch themed to the topic Or take a field trip to literally walk in the shoes of your customers or stakeholders.
• Sparks creativity and imagination by introducing surprise and novelty.
• Push past boundaries but stop short of spinning off into the ether.
• How: Think 3 bears, Mix it up, Push yourself. - Enlist a Motley Crew: Seek unusual perspectives on a problem, from beyond your own team or usual suspects.
• To get truly motley, you will want to consider multiple layers of diversity. The initial impulse to add some men to a team made up exclusively of women is okay but not enough.
• Diversity unexpressed is potential unrealized.
• Dissenting opinion can have a positive effect even if it is inaccurate, because dissent broadens our thinking and stimulates originality, and consensus keeps thinking narrow. But if a team member with a different perspective doesn’t share it with the group, that perspective can’t help others explore or shift their own thinking.
• Cognitive diversity can be a powerful, particularly when ideating, but expertise and other factors are still valuable.
• How: Reveal your superpower, Assess your team’s diversity, Mind the gap, Interrupt cascades, Celebrate slogans, - Get Real: Get vulnerable with each other and share your whole , authentic selves.
• If you are looking to get a little more real yourself, consider sharing more about your perspectives on the world and the problem you are trying to solve and maybe even the life experiences that have formed your perspective.
• Expressing emotions is different from acting them out. Although it may be helpful to share with your team that you feel frustrated by a lack of progress for instance, acting brusque and slamming things around is likely to be less so.
• Allowing emotions in and exploring what’s spurring them can lead to its own kind of breakthrough.
• Be yourself and also maintain some boundaries-consider why you are sharing something before you share it.
• How: Start a vulnerability loop, Flag highs and lows, Explore trust, Ask deeper questions (i.e. ask for stories not answers), Listen. - Make a Mess: Try something out or create a prototype rather than just talking about hypotheses or possible solutions.
• Play is a state of mind that one has when absorbed in an activity that provides enjoyment and suspension of sense of time. And play is self-motivated, so you want to do it again and again.
• Dive in and play around, create prototypes, experiment, then assess what’s working and what’s not, and clean things up a bit to move on to the next stage.
• How: Immerse yourself. - Don’t Play “Nice”: Speak the truth and call out the elephants in the room.
• Not playing “nice” means being honest, even when it may ruffle some feathers, but delivering the message with caring so that it’s not destructive but is challenging in a supportive and productive way.
• Research has shown a bit of healthy selfishness-maintaining respect for one’s own health, growth and happiness-is associated with higher self-esteem and life satisfaction, as well as more positive relationships. In addition, studies have found that being communally motivated (i.e. caring for the welfare of others) is associated with better relationships, but only among people who neglect themselves. In other words, you benefit from finding a balance between serving others and satisfying your own needs.
• No need to be mean in order to avoid playing nice.
• How: Save a seat for the Elephant, Go to extremes, Frame feedback. - Dial Up The Drama: Use storytelling or other ways to engage emotions and senses as you solve a problem.
• Research has shown that what you wear is not only important for how others perceive you but also influences how you see yourself, and thus behave as well.
• Evoking emotion can be impactful, but data and facts still matter.
• How: Color me breakthrough, Light it up, Make a playlist, Be a character - Make Change: Champion change, embrace flexibility, and always keep evolving.
• Make change when it matters, not just for the sake of it.
• How: Establish rituals, Find and communicate your why (individually, team and organization), Plan for scenarios, Motivate with nudges
• Nudges are small changes in environment that are easy and inexpensive to implement and can significantly change human behavior. The idea is to make it more likely that an individual will make a particular choice, or behave in a particular way, by altering the environment so that automatic cognitive processes are triggered to favor the desired outcome.
Other Interesting Points
• Making change starts with changing your own mind about how you view change.
• Another powerful way to increase your own and others’ dispositions to change is to be transparent about the purpose of that change.
• Our best allies are not the people who have supported us all along. They are the ones who started out against us and then came around to our side. And it is our former adversaries who are the most effective at persuading others to join our movements. They can marshal better arguments on our behalf, because they understand the doubts and misgivings of resisters and fence-sitters.
• Nelson Mandela once said, “One of the most difficult things is not to change society but to change yourself”.