21
Contextual Momentum

Just pause reading this, and have a look at the date today.

***

I know, right? Can you believe how quickly the months have flown on by?

Most cannot. We find ourselves perpetually surprised by the passage of time. Months go by, and yet we still haven't progressed that important piece of pioneering work. We've been busy, and we keep saying we'll get around to it, but other urgent things always seem to crop up, and so we don't.

Part of this is due to the default view of most of our productivity tools (whether they be calendar apps, task managers, diaries or wall planners) confined to a day, a week or a month. And so our focus becomes contained within those parameters — we think in terms of daily, weekly or monthly priorities, and therefore struggle to progress our quests and the bigger projects that matter.

RITUALS CHANGE THIS.

They are the sacrosanct time we dedicate to ensuring meaningful progress. But how do we go about creating such rituals? When do these sacred routines occur, and what purpose do they serve?

MOMENTUM IN CONTEXT

If you get the big, compelling why behind leading a quest (outfoxing the Inevitable Kraken of Doom by unlocking new value, pioneering new growth arcs and securing enduring relevance — refer to figure 4.1 on p. 46), and the what (pioneering leadership and Quest-Augmented Strategy — refer to figure 5.1 on p. 60), then we may be ready to craft the how.

This takes the shape of a model I call ‘contextual momentum'. I first introduced this framework within The Game Changer, and I've used this to help senior leadership teams establish new rituals for meaningful progress. Here, we focus on various time contexts to ensure we are engaging in the relevant pioneering thinking and doing at each level. It looks like this (see figure 21.1).

A few things are going on with this model. Let me explain its parameters, and then we'll get into the juicy bits relevant to leading a quest.

Firstly, you'll notice that the model represents a number of time contexts — from daily through to weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly and decennially. Each of these contexts nests potential rituals of differing activity and focus (which we'll get to soon).

These time contexts are mapped across a spectrum — from specificity to fuzziness. This is almost like exploring Google Earth, where you can start in a detailed ‘street view', and then zoom out to suburb view, city view, state view, country view and planet view. The more proximal the focus, the more specific and detailed we are. The more distal, the fuzzier things get.

Some enterprises get this important spectrum totally mixed up. Instead of embracing the sheer complexity of an uncertain future, they attempt to deny it by manufacturing specific distant goals. Some will go as far as putting specific numbers to it. Not only does this hobble the enterprise's ability to adapt along the way, but the emphasis on narrow, distant outcomes can also make how we can progress towards these goals unclear — particularly if progress requires us to challenge our own defaults. It's akin to a motivational speaker asking high school students to visualise exactly where they want to be in 10 years' time. ‘What job will you have? What car will you drive?' I've heard a speaker ask. Erm, I think. There are going to be entirely new industries in 10 years' time — the likes of which we can barely perceive right now. Let's not rob ourselves of the ability to adapt.

Contextual momentum keeps our thinking and our activity in context. It serves meaningful progress, providing specific actions while preserving the ability to adapt.

You'll notice three lenses by which we view each time context. I suspect you are quite familiar with these by now:

• The WHY lens extends across all time contexts. This is where we connect our activities to purpose and meaning. When we stop and think, Wait — why are we doing this?, we are returning to the bigger why. This is powerful in any given moment or time interval.
• The WHAT lens is generally useful from the daily to quarterly level of focus. It's here that we determine our experiments and projects that matter, and what our mission critical actions may be. In some enterprises, extending this lens to a yearly level may be prudent — but in many cases what is important changes faster than we may think. A quarterly focus encourages us to maintain the pace, and balance thorough thinking with faster learning.
• The HOW lens is useful at the daily and weekly level, and frustrating or unnecessary at any other level. Have you ever been in an annual strategic summit where people find themselves debating tactical issues at the micro-level? It's just not really that helpful within that context. Likewise, if you're struggling to make meaningful progress at a daily or weekly level, connecting with your bigger why may help — but it may also be helpful to identify the friction that's getting in the way, or to change your methodology.

Righto! Having now paced through our framework for contextual momentum, let's drill down.

We're going to explore rituals that serve to integrate pioneering leadership into enterprise culture, and assist you in progressing a quest. But! We're not going to pace through this in a logical, sequential manner. If only meaningful progress were that neat! First we'll start with yearly rituals you can adopt and adapt to your context. Then, we'll explore quarterly rituals, followed by daily, weekly, monthly and decennially anchored rituals.

YEARLY RITUALS

Here are some important rituals that should be performed at least once per year. Such rituals are more concerned with bigger, contextual questions and longer-term strategy and purpose. But don't be fooled by their relative infrequency — this infrequency (when compared to other rituals) doesn't mean they're less important. Quite the contrary: each of these recommended rituals is so important that the time and effort required to do them well precludes them from greater frequency.

Future mapping

At least once per year, you will want to get a large and diverse team^[1] immersed together in the imagination of a broad and diverse range of possible future contexts (as outlined in part III). From this, we are able to identify the common, overlapping incoherencies between possible future contexts. From here, we can begin to harvest potential strategic options.

If this is the first time you are doing this, a good amount of time will need to be dedicated to establishing relevant core ‘themes' that seed and initiate pioneering thinking and exploration. You will also need to have an up-to-date representation of your business model and identity (as per the strategic immersion ritual, covered next), your clearly articulated current strategy, and someone to facilitate progress and hold the space over two to four days.

The strategic immersion

At least once per year, you'll also want to get your smaller and more immediate team of leaders together for a strategic immersion. As outlined in part V, this will be for a minimum of two days, and is ideally held off-site.

Resist the temptation to bundle this ritual in with the future-mapping ritual to ‘save time'. That's the Curse of Efficiency talking. These rituals serve two very different purposes — whereas future mapping is concerned with exploration and optionality, strategic immersion is focused on reviewing viable strategic options and making good decisions. Ideally, these rituals occur in tandem (six months apart) so as to allow for the development of a quiver of viable alternative options to default strategy.

The yearly conference

Conferences can be very effective ways to communicate strategic intent and connect your people with each other, and with the bigger purpose and evolving identity of your enterprise.^[2] Also included will be operational updates, a review of achievements and setbacks, lessons learned and general progress made toward future coherence.

Conferences are also a great way to reduce the path-length between the clusters and silos within your enterprise, if your organisation isn't responsive or networked yet.

Your annual enterprise conference is primarily a cultural ritual, existing to serve the wider cultural norm you wish to cultivate. It's here that you may launch new ‘culture books', highlight success stories, reward interesting failures,^[3] and even have spontaneous jam sessions among staff.^[4]

QUARTERLY RITUALS

Your yearly rituals provide a meaningful context and purpose for your quarterly rituals. Of all the time signatures in our framework for contextual momentum (refer to figure 21.1 on p. 246), the quarterly rituals require the most deliberate attention.

Across all productivity and time management tools, you rarely have the option to view time from a quarterly perspective. And so days, weeks and months fly by — and, before you know it, another year has passed in which we haven't progressed any of the pioneering projects that matter.

Quarterly rituals keep us on track with the what in service to the why.

Reviewing options and experiments

After identifying common incoherencies across multiple possible future contexts (as part of the ‘future mapping' ritual), it's important that the conversation and learning around potential options is kept current and fresh. This is helped by having a good internal communications platform and the continuous monitoring of diverse feeds. Of course, the existing experiments are also at play — some of which will be progressed with enhanced methodologies, and some of which will be encouraging us to rethink the hypothetical stance we take with an option.

By dedicating at least a day or two to reviewing our quiver of options and the drivers for change, we can have a better sense of what future contexts are more likely to manifest. This then enables us to determine which experiments we need to prioritise.

Reviewing strategy

Similar to our options review, you need to reconnect with your guiding strategy at least once a quarter. Not only does this keep strategy front of mind and integrated into the fabric of our work, but it also serves to mitigate the Delusion of Progress. Rather than chipping away at a project or program over a whole year, if a quarterly strategy review reveals that that stream of activity is no longer viable or relevant to the future, a whole heap of time, money and effort can be saved early. As a result, an enterprise can stay focused on progressing the projects that matter.

Here is also a time to review updates on options in development, and experiments in progress. Timely feedback may allow certain experiments to progress options toward a more viable status quicker than they would if strategic reviews happen less frequently.

Now is also a good time to determine which — out of all the things you could do — are the projects, missions or experiments that matter. I suggest you choose three projects to focus on each quarter.

If we choose just one, we'll procrastifectionate^[10] over it, and it won't get done. If we choose two, we'll enter binary judgement mode and make one more important than the other.

No — three is the magic number. Because once we have three declared projects that matter, we can then seek to actively fail half of them.^[11] Gosh, did I just use the F-word? I think I did.

Remember — the opposite of success is not failure. It's apathy. And a lot of conservative risk aversion is merely apathy in disguise. And, besides, in science there's no such thing as failure — there are only flawed methodologies and disproven hypotheses (as per figure 10.1 on p. 133). The only way we can disprove a hypothesis is by collecting evidence, which means we're actually doing something.

Attending an external event

Each quarter, attend at least one conference, meeting or event outside of your own enterprise. This can be done as a team — or folks (including yourself) can attend events or learning opportunities of their own choosing, reporting back and sharing their learning on the comms platform and as part of a monthly ritual.

The event you choose to attend could be anything from a guest presentation from a visiting scholar or an online webinar^[12], to a startup pitch night, a local meetup, a breakfast networking event, or a cool conference. Ideally, the things you choose to attend will provide new learning.

Now, you might think, Why do I need to attend an event? Can't I just download the executive summary? You can, of course. And that would be very efficient. But you know what will likely happen — you'll proceed with the best of intentions, only to find yourself caught up in some busyness at some point.

Actual events disrupt this, and wake us up from our default thinking and efficiency. They offer us a chance to expose ourselves to new patterns and new ways of thinking. This serves to mitigate the threat of the filter bubble and insular thinking — the phenomenon in which we become ignorant of ideas outside our own experience.

Even if the event we attend turns out to be crap, we have an opportunity to be curious — why does this event suck? What can we learn here?

Hosting a low-key learning event

This is particularly important for teams progressing the exploration of options, and for any pioneering team working in a new mode. And the event doesn't have to be a lot of fuss — it could simply be ‘a crash course' in understanding a new technology or an emerging trend.

The benefits of this are twofold. Firstly, the event provides a visible progress to the rest of the enterprise about the value this team (and the mode in which they operate) generates.^[13]

Secondly, this ritual is good at focusing a new team. Knowing you have to teach/share/deliver new learning to others does wonders for enhancing your own capacity to learn.^[14]

DAILY RITUALS

Yes, we're doing a jump here^[15] — from yearly rituals, to quarterly rituals, to the routines you hold sacrosanct each and every day. Naturally, these will differ for everyone. Some folks I know, for example, go on a run or hit the gym every morning. If they miss out on this activity, they feel as though their day is missing something — they just don't feel as productive or motivated.

I wish I had that kind of chemical imbalance. For me, things like running and physical activity are very deliberate acts. It takes time to build it into a habit — a routine with a consistent rhythm.

But the same could be said about pioneering work, and the activities required to lead a quest and pursue meaningful progress. Unless we deliberately carve out time to devote to the things that matter, we'll always be swayed by the Delusion of Progress.

Whereas most other rituals are group activities, most of the daily rituals suggested here can be undertaken as a solo act.

3 × mission critical actions

Many folks — myself included — have started their days by checking email. At one point early in my adventures, I was ‘so efficient' that I'd be checking and responding to emails within minutes of my alarm going off.^[16] Such is not the way to live and work, though, because all this does is set up our day for reactive work. We find ourselves responding to other people's urgencies, instead of investing effort into the things that contribute to meaningful progress.^[17]

But each morning presents an opportunity to disrupt that pattern. Instead of beginning your day with email, create a new hard edge: no email^[18] until 10 am.

^[19] With this new time you have carved out, you have one very important thing to do: identify the three things you can do today that will contribute to meaningful progress. These are your mission-critical actions.^[20]

By mission critical, I mean all the things we discussed in chapter 18. The tight time frame mitigates the nasty side effects of specific goals. Instead, we are left with a focused imperative to achieve before we get absorbed back into our busy default work.

Monitoring feeds

In chapter 8 I introduced the importance of establishing diverse information feeds — sources of information that provide quality insight relevant to emerging hunches, trends, options and experiments. If you're looking to embed pioneering leadership into your culture, you'll want to be actively reviewing syndicated feeds and sharing relevant articles and insights with your team.^[21]

Remember: we're all on an information diet, but most of what we consume is junk — unless we are mindful. Much like making yourself a good, healthy breakfast, each day offers you a chance to consciously choose what information you consume (and what you choose to share).

Journalling

I'd love to be able to recommend meditation as a daily ritual. It seems to be one of the most common rituals shared among effective leaders and extraordinary people. However, I'm yet to get into the rhythm of it. But, what does work very well for me (and for many) is journalling.

This is something I try to do at the start of every day. In fact, I bundle the three daily rituals I've shared so far into my morning. Whenever possible, I'll get up early, skate to a nearby cafe, order a magic^[22], and begin to review relevant feeds. I'll then switch to a shlong^[23] and begin journalling.

The first benefit of journalling is that it puts you into a dissociated metacognitive state. Whether you're reflecting or projecting, you can't help but liberate your perspective from busy default work — and this puts you in a great space to identify your mission critical actions for the day. But before I even begin to do this, I start with gratitudes.

One of the downsides to progress and constructive discontent is the ‘discontent' bit. We are perpetually discontent, because more progress can always be achieved. We can always do more, and we always have things we can improve. Such a philosophy can be fatiguing — which is why gratitude is so important. Listing what we're grateful for gives us perspective, and reminds us that we are enough, and that everything is perfectly imperfect.

Digital sunsets

There is a certain irony as I write this (late into the night), but — it's important to switch off at the end of each day.

At its purest, a digital sunset is a ritual in which all digital devices are switched off at a certain point in the evening (ideally, before dinner). This may be very challenging for some, so the watered-down version simply means turning off all emails and notifications at a certain point in the evening.

As inefficient as this sounds, it creates a delightful paradox. By not working every minute of the day — and well into the night — we are more efficient and effective when we are working.

Just like we create a hard edge to the start of our day (in order to identify and progress our mission critical actions before we enter the land of distraction), creating a hard edge at the end of each day is equally important. This allows us to attend to some of our other areas of responsibility — like our relationships, sleep and health.^[24]

WEEKLY RITUALS

Righto, now we are in the territory of things that would be wonderful to do daily — but just probably aren't feasible. We can't escape the fact that at least 80 per cent of our work must still be the default, business-as-usual things that must be done. But if you are able to embrace these small team rituals, your work will be much more pioneering, and much more conducive to meaningful progress.

Progress rallying

Once per week, rally your immediate reports together (ideally in the same physical space) for eleven to twelve minutes to review progress made.^[25]> Here is where you reconnect with any projects or experiments that matter, the strategy, and the bigger context in which you operate.

A visible progress map^[26] is a good element to keep updated for these rally points, because it serves to provide a clear, quantitative sense as to what has been delivered and how we are progressing. The discussions that form around this serve to provide a qualitative sense of progress — if people are attuned to celebrating small but meaningful wins, this can create a momentum of good effort.^[27]

This ritual also allows you to take more advantage of the Hawthorne Effect — the scenario in which our performance naturally elevates because we are observed. Each week, our actions are under the spotlight — not for critical review, but to reinforce the things that contribute to meaningful progress.

If you're pioneering, this is particularly important.^[28] Rather than rely on implicit assumptions about what constitutes meaningful progress, a shared discussion with the team will have everyone better understand the next steps needed.

Lunch and learn

This is another ritual that is intended to keep your team curious and connected. If you share a workspace, create a rotating roster. Once per week, someone nominates a relevant short video to share over lunch, along with a meaningful or relevant question for the team to discuss.

Plenty of timely, relevant and insightful videos are available online these days — though the key is not necessarily the video itself, but the conversations and thinking it may trigger.

Friction review

Friction is the enemy of efficiency and efficacy. It's what gets in the way of meaningful progress, and is usually the result of default thinking, and old policies, procedures and technology that no longer serve our current context (let alone our emerging future context).

This ritual occurs on two levels. Individually, you should review and reflect on your week. What mission critical actions didn't you achieve? Was it an issue with your methodology?^[29] Or did friction get in the way?

If the answer is your methodology, well, that's easy — try a different approach.

But if your answer was friction, this gets interesting.

The second level of this ritual is a shared review of friction — something you can do together at the end of the week.^[30] If you've noticed a pattern of friction forming, and you suspect that others might experience similar friction, discuss it with your team. Perhaps you are in the midst of an incoherence right now. If that's the case, you know what to do. It's time to lead a quest, and find viable alternative options.

MONTHLY RITUALS

Righto, now we are at the monthly interval. These things need to be scheduled in the calendar — they're too infrequent to be in the rhythm of, and not big enough to make a fuss of. But our monthly rituals are part of the thread that connects all of the things we do to meaningful progress.

Track alignment

Complexity and scope creep are very real. Part of the key to keeping this entropy at bay — and ensuring we don't burn out or succumb to efficient default (non) thinking — is to review where our efforts are going.

Each month, check in with your team and how you are tracking. What's working? Are any projects, experiments or activities no longer generating value? Do we have enough evidence to consider quitting them? What does the upcoming month look like? Are our activities aligned with the bigger strategy — or is it time to review and update the strategy?

This is a conversation that can easily occur over an hour or two. It's an important stop-check that may help to ensure our efforts don't go off track or significantly out of alignment to our overarching intention.

Book club

One of the most wonderful things to hear as an author^[31] is how your book is being used. I can list at least half a dozen times^[32] in which The Game Changer has been used as part of an enterprise team ‘book club'.

Reading a book well requires time, and reflection. Whereas something shown at a weekly lunch and learn might expose people to new thinking and generate discussions in a short space of time, reading a book well requires thorough thinking and reflection.

This is not a passive activity. To read a book well, I suggest you use three different coloured highlighters.^[33] The first coloured highlighter — let's make it yellow — is for those cool sentences, quotes and other stuff you'd be inclined to highlight anyway. Go for it.

The second highlighter (let's make this blue or green) is for anything you read that makes you think, Yeah, but …^[34] They're the things that cause you to question or disagree. A good book doesn't try to please everyone, and will contain things that you disagree with. The interesting thing is exploring why you disagree with certain points. What's informing this? What are the antecedents for this response? And what might others in your book club think?

By capturing these ‘yeah-buts', your book club will benefit from richer conversations. Likewise, you will all also benefit from conversations orbiting around any ‘yes-ands'. Use a pink highlighter for these. They are the statements within a book that make you think, Oooh! We can do that! And if we combine X with Y, that'll work even better!

By approaching a book like this,^[35] and by having a monthly book club where you can discuss books, ideas and the inherent implications or imperatives for your enterprise, you foster more curiosity and thorough thinking. This, in turn, influences the richness of options explored, and how deeply strategy might be augmented.

A long lunch

Each month, get out of the office and visit a good cafe or restaurant on a Friday afternoon for a late, long lunch. Mix up the seating and invite folks from other business units to join you. This is not a Fun Thing to force upon folks — rather, it's another circuit-breaker. Something designed to foster greater connection and deeper conversation across your team and the wider enterprise.

The context is what matters here. It's hard to rush conversations over a long lunch. Breaking bread with colleagues also eases tension, and allows ideas to be explored comfortably via different perspectives.

Some folks working at progressive enterprises might hear this suggestion and think, Pfffft. Of course! We do this anyway. We don't even need to turn this into a formal ritual — it just happens.

Others folks may think about how they could possibly justify the expense in their enterprise. Not in terms of money — people can pay for their own lunches — but in terms of time. That's 90 minutes folks could be working …! Such is the ridiculousness of the default norms that have emerged. In order to lead a quest, you need to look after your team, and invest in the activities that enrich thinking and form fellowship.

DECENNIAL RITUALS

And now we are well and truly back in the land of the fuzzy. If you don't know what the future holds, or what the meaning of life is — great! No clear answers are possible anyway — just keep searching.

I'm not sure that rituals can be sustained over decades, but one thing that is a useful concept to keep in mind is the sabbatical. At some point in your career — and I'm speaking to you, as an individual leader outside of the context of your enterprise — you'll want to embark upon a sabbatical. Take three to twelve months away from your normal work. During this time, your sole focus is to reflect, gain perspective and explore.

Of course, you can do this more frequently than once per decade. But, if it's been more than ten years since you last had a sustained period of time away from your usual work,^[36] perhaps it's time to consider a mini-sabbatical. Yes, you have finances, handovers and other factors to keep in mind, and this may require some careful planning and consideration. But, of the people I know who have done this, not a single one of them has regretted it.

***

And there we have it — a few rituals for you to play with. Of course, these are just ideas: suggestions to get you started. Refer back to figure 21.1 at the start of this chapter and ask yourself, ‘What am I doing in each time frame to facilitate meaningful progress? What rituals do we have for pioneering leadership? How are we making clever happen?'