Stubbleblog

For the past year or so, Sarah and I have ended each day by telling each other two good things. For the bulk of the year, our format was for the two things to be things that happened during the day that had made us happy such as closing a deal, getting a compliment, or hearing a great joke. We started the practice at a time when we were both at the beginning of major projects that were the essence of delayed gratification. Personally, I felt crushed by the amount of work ahead and the distance to the goal.

What two-good-things taught us was how to appreciate the good things that were happening to us every day. Most days we had a bundle of good things to report (reporting more than two was allowed). I can only remember a few days, less than five, where I had to manufacture a second good thing (”my burrito at lunch was great!”).

Sarah likes credit so I’ll say that the idea was hers, but the reason it clicked with me was that I had been reading a lot of Scott Adams’ blog and was struck by the way he’d used positive thinking while building his career. Here’s his essay on affirmations, and how fifteen times a day he wrote down his affirmation that he would become a syndicated cartoonist. After that, and ten years without taking a day off, he found himself a syndicated cartoonist.

Recently we decided to switch our two-good-things format. We’d gotten even busier and things we wanted the other person to do weren’t getting done. It was easy to look at the situation as one of us was slipping, but it’s hard to take criticism when you’re working harder than you’ve ever worked. So we changed the two-good-things format to acknowledge two things that the other person had done.

Of course we still don’t limit ourselves to just two things and we even let the other person give reminders about things they deserve points for. The result is that we each feel better about the other person’s contributions, about our own contributions, and strangely we’re both getting more things done that we think we can get points for. I feel like an addict but I’m not actually spending more time–I’m just more efficient. I used to spend hours avoiding the dishes but now when I walk by the sink I feel a happy calling and then suddenly the dishes are done.

There are a lot of parallels in business.

I’ve always liked Marc Hedlund’s application of lessons from the cat circus to engineering management, essentially “pick a cat that does something useful and then encourage the hell out of it.”

One of the speakers at MX 2008 talked about how at every executive meeting they end with the executives nominating people they’d like to thank in a different department. Then the executive goes and thanks that person face-to-face. Pretty good for encouraging cross-department team work.

There’s also an idea, Appreciative Inquiry, to build organizations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn’t.

One of the biggest hurdles to being positive at work is that a lot of times it doesn’t feel fair. You end up finding some trivial thing to attach some positive feedback to when the ‘fair’ thing to do is punish the massive screw up that got your attention in the first place. Scott Adams makes a big deal about how mystical his affirmation practice seemed, but his key point, and the key point with all these practices, is that they’re effective. I like to think of them as brain hacking–and I wish I could manufacture positive reinforcement hacks for everything I try.

For example, what would happen if instead of your team starting the day with a meeting talking about what they were going to do, you ended the day with everyone giving kudos for tasks they saw other people do? Would you create a culture of people addicted to accomplishment?

Tags: business, mind hacks, positivity, productivity

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.