Thinking In Circles
Sharpen your product mindset by utilizing Stephen R. Covey’s concept of concern, influence, and control
In Product, like in many other disciplines, you are confronted with ambitious goals and complex challenges on a regular basis. Our brains are hard-wired to jump to solution mode and immediately ask ourselves: “What can I do to solve this or achieve that?” This immediate focus on action often prevents us from fully understanding the problem at hand and discovering promising routes to solving it.
In the following, you will learn how Stephen R. Covey’s circles of concern, influence, and control serve as a great lens to look at and examine complex challenges, and how this will allow you to start thinking about solutions from a more systemic perspective.
Key Takeaways
- Applying Stephen R. Covey’s idea of the three circles of concern, influence, and control to your challenges in Product, business, and beyond helps you to tackle them proactively and from a system-thinking perspective.
- In any given system context, like your organization or your target market, Exploring and understanding your circle of influence enables you to look beyond your limited circle of control in any given system context like your organization or your target market.
- By consciously directing your actions towards changing the behavior of relevant system actors, you can impact the course of the overall system.
The Three Circles
Product folks, at least the ones I know, are pretty ambitious people. It’s not surprising that you’ll find quite a lot among them who are familiar with Stephen R. Covey’s circles from his bestselling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I myself read it — the Audible way — already some time ago. While I immediately appreciated his concept as general life advice, it took me a bit until I discovered its value specifically in the context of development and managing products. But first, let’s recap before we dive in further.
In his book, Stephen Covey introduces the reader to the idea that we mentally operate across three spheres, represented by concentric circles (from the outer to the inner circle): The circle of concern, the circle of influence, and the circle of control.
The circle of concern as the biggest outer circle contains all the things that we, for whatever reason, are relevant to us but have little to no influence on. Consider it the rules, paradigms, and macro-level behaviors of the system you are acting within like the laws of Physics, the weather, or our political or macroeconomic environment.
In contrast, the next smaller circle of influence comprises your closer system environment. Closeness here is less defined by spatial proximity but rather by means of connection and access. Neither the conditions nor the actors with their views and behaviors within this environment you can directly control. But, as part of an interdependent system, they are subject to influences and effects resulting even from small system changes.
The smallest inner circle of control finally represents just the things you can directly do and decide on your own. This is the circle you as an individual system actor with all your own behaviors, views, and capabilities reside in. Here you form intentions and take action.
Reactiveness And Proactiveness
Covey utilized the concept of the circles to illustrate the difference between what he describes as the reactive and the proactive mindsets. A reactive person’s mind operates mainly in the circle of concern. With their head in the stormy clouds of complexity and ambiguity of a high-level system perspective and their feed in their limited circle of control, they tend to mainly react to the evolving state of the system. This focus on things out of one’s control often entails a feeling of powerlessness and of being at the mercy of their circumstances. They ask: “What’s happening to me?”
A proactive person on the other side has a stronger focus on their circle of influence. They acknowledge and accept the circumstances but, rather than letting themselves be shaped by them, treat them as a raw material that they can shape or build upon — through influence. Their decisions and actions within their circle of control are directed toward their circle of influence. They take action consciously and strategically to create the desired ripple effects in their close system environment. They seek to develop and expand their capabilities, and invest in their means of connection and access to, bit by bit, expand their circle of influence. They understand that the change to their own system environment and the behavior of its actors will cause further ripple effects that propagate beyond their own circle of influence and, thereby, can potentially impact the overall system’s behavior. They rather ask: “What can we make happen?”
I’d dare to add even a third mindset to the list that lives fully within and is limited to the circle of control. This is where blind actionism has its home where doing things becomes an end in itself in unawareness of the actor’s system context and the effects their actions might have on it.
The Circles In Product
The job of a product person is to develop new products and, ideally, make them successful. The bare act of creating something new and innovative is in itself fundamentally proactive. So having Covey’s circles in mind can, in a very concrete way, help you as a product manager keep your focus on the system environment your product exists and evolves within.
Whether it comes to leading your cross-functional development team through influence rather than authority, managing upward, and sideways, or taking care of internal and external stakeholders, the circles give you a great model to optimize your course of action for impact within your organization. Do you want to make your organization more customer-centric? Who are the relevant people that need to understand why this is important? What actions can you take so that they will understand that building the right things brings significant business value?
Looking at a market as your system of interest, its distinct paradigms and mechanics contour the outer circle while the different market actors and their behaviors in your close system environment form your circle of influence around you and your organization. While you might not change the rules and mechanics of your market directly, you can influence the market actors’ behaviors and attitudes. Take AirBnB: They turned consumers into hosts, they succeeded in shifting the general perception of staying in foreign people’s private homes (for money!), and through a lot of such smaller and bigger changes in the views and behaviors of market actors had a drastic impact on the hospitality market at a global scale.
Understanding the outer circle of concern as the representation of the system in which you operate, allows you to apply the model to any kind of context and challenge you might face within your field of work — in product and beyond. It sets your perspective and allows you to think about who the actors are that lie in your circle of influence in a particular system. From there, it is all about understanding what views and behaviors of which actors would need to change, be prevented, or be further incentivized. With this in mind, you can consciously choose and prioritize actions that are the most probable to unfold the desired effects and, consequently, will best support your strategic goals.
Where To Go From Here
While this might feel, up to this point, still a little theoretical, it will become far more obvious how fundamental this concept actually is as soon as you realize how greatly terminologies, models, and methods broadly used in product and business map to Covey’s circles. In my following posts, which will heavily build on this one, we will get more concrete and talk through a few other concepts that you most likely are already familiar with but which might simply become a bit clearer and easier to grasp when you see the dots suddenly connect. The very next post will be revisiting the terms of impact, outcome, and output that have been established as an integral part of product lingo the latest since Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf’s book Lean UX and Seiden’s later Outcomes over Outputs. Can you already guess how they relate to Covey’s spheres of concern, influence, and control?
(This article was originally published in Decoding Product.)
