Look where you want to be
I often welcome opportunities to refresh my knowledge, usually about tooling, since documentation can provide many insights on best practices which tend to change over time. And recently I applied the same to a different skill set and took a driving skills improvement class. It’s been a long time since I was in the driving school and it sounded like an opportunity to learn a few tricks.
Truth is, it was a blast. Aside from refreshers on basics of car behaviour on the road it included a lot of exercises on handling the car in the various conditions including wheel loosing contact with the road.
One thing that was constantly being told by the instructor was “look where you want to get to”. If you concentrate on that point on the road where you want to get, you’ll have a higher chance of sending your car right there, and not into the obstacle you’re rightly concerned about.
It sounds too simple to be true, but our brain does work in a way that it directs our decisions to make things happen to reach the desired outcome.
In everyday life all of us have things that are important. Those can be different for different people, but consciously identifying them and ruthlessly trimming distractions is a way to get to sustain and grow what is valuable to us.
At a workplace things are no different. There is an interesting quote from Martin Fowler and Tim Cochran on how they changed the product culture at one of their clients:
With outcome statements, starting with a customer or business outcome allows the team to experiment with many different ideas to achieve the outcome by tying them to measurable KPIs. The less precise an outcome is, including its KPIs, the harder it is to specify. When preparing for possible initiatives, each product team created a two-page brief summarizing the outcome, the measurable impact, and the initial investment required.
Those outcome statements is “where you want to be.” Keep your focus on them, not on the “how to get there” or “what to avoid”.