Activity timeline
November 22, 2009
The heavy burden of evidence is that creativity is much more available to us than we tend to think. The most significant constraint as with all kinds of exceptional performance, is mostly likely to be our willingness to do the difficult work required.
Organizations can take two other steps that are especially effective in light of how innovation really happens: telling people what's needed, and giving them freedom to innovate.
One of the main reasons why the people in organizations don't produce more innovation is that the culture isn't friendly to it. New ideas aren't really welcomed. Risk taking isn't embraced.
Organizations that are the most successful at building team performance are especially skilled at avoiding or addressing potential problems that are particularly toxic to the elements of deliberate practice, such as:
- Picking the wrong team members
- Low trust
- Competing agendas
- Unresolved conflicts
- Unwillingness to face the real issues
"I'm not lookin' for the best players, Craig. I'm lookin' for the right players" -- Herb Brooks
Give us people who are dedicated to making the team work, as opposed to a bunch of talented people with big egos, and we'll win every time. -- John McConnell
Great organziations apply principles of great performance follow these rules:
- Understand that each person in teh organziation is not just doing a job, but is also being stretched and grown
- Find ways to develop leaders within their jobs
- Encourage their leaders to be active in their communities
- Understand the critical roles of teachers and of feedback
- Identifying promising performers early
- Understand that people development works best through inspiration, not authority
- Invest significant time, money, and energy in developing people
- Make leadership development part of the culture
- Develop teams, not just individuals
A rich mental model contributes to great performance in three major ways:
- A mental model forms the framework on which you hang your growing knowledge of your domain
- A mental model helps you distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information
- Most important, a mental model enables you to project what will happen next.
Top performers understand their field at a higher level than average performers do, and thus have a superior structure for remembering information about it.
We can abstract from the research a few ays, directly applicable in business, that top performers perceive more. They understand the significance of indicators that average performers don't even notice.
Questions...
- Is that all there is?
- What determines who does it?
- Could the explanation possibly be genetic?
- What is all that practice doing?
- How does is work?
