17 October 2019
3 Methods To Manage Your Time For Better Results
Fast-forward to 2019, and pressures of automation are forcing organisations to find new ways to reduce their time footprint. And to truly ‘rise to the prize’ as a new competitor in this fierce environment – this also means combining shorter tasks with a higher level of productivity.
However, in observing high-performance leaders across the domains of sport and enterprise, ‘gut feeling’ perspectives may have more than meets the eye: with the right tweaks, recent studies may in-fact reveal that meetings can be restructured to compress time and make each compressed task pack a more productive punch.
And in addition to hinting at several real-life systems behind the scenes, this effect of intuitive reasoning may play a larger role than we might expect: where pre-planned micromanagement may help streamline a corporate project, this does not tell the coach when to whistle under the sound of a thudding basketball – fine-tuned intuition also plays a role, and this may be the management ingredient that has had the biggest effect on meeting efficiency all along.
FIRMER OBJECTIVES MEAN FASTER MEETINGS
To many admirers, Jeff Bezos epitomises the modern manager: purely data-driven, and with little regard for social relationships as part of his management repertoire. And in the case of company meetings, the idea that this would too be structured under more of a ‘system’ would not take anyone by surprise.
“OKRs and KPIs may seem unnecessary for
the majority of meetings. But ultimately, –
this means less chit chat, and more getting
things done”
However, as we take a closer look at the attitudes of fortune-500 CEOs when organising teams within a multinational company, this added ‘systematisation’ of meetings may not only be a smart method of reducing risk as departments and projects scale – but also a tangible method of ‘creating space’ for innovative thinking by compressing traditional activities into a shorter period of time.
The SMMP Meeting Management model. 2003.jpg
In taking a closer look at the SMMP model of meeting management developed in 2003 at the dawn of the internet era, this concept of ‘swapping’ repeatable (and automatable) activities for higher-leverage ‘thinking’ activities was already picking up steam:
Today, modern organisations are able to summon this machine-assisted automation at the snap of a finger: this means that modern team managers are now not only able to log the behaviours and strategies that appear to trigger productive team outcomes – but are now also able to create a direct bridge that tracks the relationship between project objectives and behavioural KPIs (Marinos, 2017):
This not only suggests that the monitoring and tracking of past leadership behaviours could be used to create more project value within a shorter time period – but may also suggest that certain ‘pre-tuned’ modes of leadership behaviour could be used to re-create these same conditions from one team to the other, and act as a sort of ‘back-up’ for crucial pivots and emergency decisions.
TUNED INTUITION MEANS FASTER PROJECTS
Although modern tools and automation through technology may enable project leaders to ‘trace the trail’ of past choices of leadership behaviour, and how this impacts team productivity according to hard metrics: this further raises the question of whether certain modes of behaviour could be used to substitute modern pre-planning when time is running short.
“Ultimately, every target is a moving one.
And when there is no time to re-invent the wheel –
some form of intuition needs to kick in”
In the case of Coach Nancy Lieberman, gut intuition is not only described as a ‘last resort’ when corporate management tools are not available – but is actually seen as a source of decision-making that is better suited to the real-time and instinctive nature of activities within a sports scenario: when backed by the Women's National Basketball Association, there is no lack of quantitative tracking and researchers to improve conditions from one game to the next – but this is still no substitute for an intuition-based source of intuition that can act instantaneously, and trigger the correct solution 90% of the time.
The Intuitive Decision-making Model. Chenglin, 2007.
However, when we take a closer look leadership methodologies such as the Intuitive Decision Framework (2007) developed in an era before the suite of ‘instant trackers’ became affordable for most organisations: the process of intuitive reasoning is treated not only as a last-resort alternative in the absence of objective measurement and data sources – but also as part of the ‘reason system’ that can be tuned to take appropriate decisions through exposure to past cases (CWT, 2016).
Under the three-part continuum of preferable behaviour, productive social characteristics can be ‘nudged’ procedurally in a way that drastically improves team collaboration and communication efficiency with patients in a difficult scenario. However, this spectrum of boundaries is simultaneously used to detect where friend-like behaviours pass the ‘benefit threshold’ and morph into a dangerous distraction from life-or-death patient outcomes (Kersh, 2016).
REFRESHED INTUITION MEANS REFRESHED TOP-DOWN LEARNING
Although it would be a mistake to not implement traditional indicators and OKRs when structuring meetings for shorter task periods, omitting the ‘amplification effect’ of real-time intuition will simply guarantee a glass ceiling before the foundation of your corporation is even built. However, although certain team leaders may recognise the eventual need to ‘switch on’ this intuition, the wrong intuition can be just as dangerous: this is a difficult tightrope to walk – and indicates that team leaders running on an intuition that is not based on the ‘wider market scan’ may be doing their team more harm than good.
Actions to apply as a team leader:
If you are a project manager or team leader in the professional coaching sector, consider applying the following tasks in-time for your next team session:
What can be measured can be managed - first build up the textbook basics: delving deeper into the management life of high-performance CEOs do reveal a more complex picture, with social intuition at the heart of this real-world dynamic. But exploring this complexity still requires an understanding of the traditional theory this added layer is intended to improve: planning and defining projects according to measurable targets that can be re-evaluated on a planned basis will not only force you to re-process the deeper goals behind your team and organisation, but this delegation of repeatable measurements also means less ‘re-inventing the wheel’ – and that ironically means more headspace for creative and social input with your team members.
Become a social A.I before real A.I. enters the arena: fast-forward 100 years, and the very concept of strategy and innovation may itself have become an automatable activity in a world where businesses ‘build themselves’. This may mean a mass extinction of ventures that cannot keep up the pace with new machine intelligence – but failing to at least acknowledge meetings as a social data collection event may already mean game-over for teams over the next decade. Your team meetings should be analogous to the A.I with which you will later have to compete – and this means treating social interactions as something to both adapt and amplify for productivity.
Upgrade your social senses with a CONQA seminar: our private one-day events are not available to all of our readers. However, successful applicants do have the opportunity to access collective leadership methodologies across hundreds of military, business and political management cases – and then take a ‘shortcut’ by compressing this same experience in a single one-day format.