4 traits of an enthusiastic, forward-thinking human
Take your vital signs to diagnose what’s meaningful for you and achieve your own change-embracing transformation in the new year
Digital technology changes so fast. By the time an organization launches its latest product or service, its user interface may already be stale or its technology out of date. Fjord, the organization I work for, has a countermeasure to this adapt-or-die threat; it’s called Living Business. This concept recommends digital transformation through organizational transformation. If you engage employees through a culture that not only adapts, but also thrives on change, your business will be able to stay ahead of the market.
But staying relevant in an ever-shifting Darwinian digital landscape is just as important for the individual working within it as it is for the organization. By the time I learn how to do one thing, it can become outdated as projects need to be done faster to meet tighter budgets and timelines. In addition, I’m in content design, a discipline that is essential to creating meaningful content and frameworks for services and products, but it faces some challenges:
- What we do is not readily understood by clients or the people who sell and staff projects.
- We suffer from being pigeonholed, as well as the pigeonhole principle — tasks we could do or share with other disciplines more often go to other disciplines when there are limited spots on a team.
What is the pigeonhole principle?
Merriam-Webster defines “pigeonhole” as “to assign to an often restrictive category, which is relevant, but not the same as the Pigeonhole Principle. This principle contends the following: If the number of objects exceeds the number of holes you’re putting them in, then one of the holes must have two objects. For a digital project, if the budget only allows two team members, but the project has three tasks that require disparate skillsets, then according to this principle, one team member has to take on two of those tasks.
So what’s an individual to do who wants to use her expertise and grow nascent talents to see herself and what she brings to the table in a whole new light? I propose adapting the Living Business framework to create what I call a Living Individual Manifesto to help individuals like me stay ahead of the pack.
The Vital Signs
What is the Living Business framework? It centers on embodying four vital signs to create a culture of agility, adaptability, and innovation:
- Personality — The set of behaviors, beliefs, and values that guide you
- Instinct — The way in which you make decisions and adapt to change
- Craft — Your skills and talents that make your offering unique and inimitable
- Relationships — The way you relate and collaborate with others
These vital signs are intended to be defined as traits of an “enthusiastic, forward-thinking human.” Who wouldn’t want to be this person? What organization wouldn’t want to hire this person? Or have an entire workforce of these people?
Because I see myself reflected in how my studio has defined itself, I’ve integrated it into my manifesto.
Personality
As part of the brains and backbone of our central nervous system, I seek to be a vital, valued, and vibrant team player and problem solver by being:
• Empathic
• Benevolent
• Strategic
Instinct
To be thoughtfully adventurous, I seek to:
• Be proactive
• Develop a strong POV on all things digital
• Exercise bravery
Craft
To deliver the best customer experiences, I seek to:
• Identify new interests and talent gaps, then pursue skills to fulfill them
• Take more ownership of the business through strategy
• Find compelling ways to communicate my work
Relationships
To be a facilitator of meaningful connections, I seek to:
• Be an advocate for my colleagues, the client, the target audience, and the content author
• Teach what I know and guide the work of colleagues
• Lead the work on my projects
Creating my manifesto is a way for me to prioritize my values, put a stake in the ground, and hold myself accountable. However, these value statements should be the by-product of a healthy person, not the driver of one. So how do I establish the drivers to fulfill my vision?
System, Practices, and Behavior
As with any goals for transformation, like weight loss or adhering to a budget, creating the manifesto and envisioning the person I want to become is the fun and easy part. Actually translating those goals into a sustainable system and consistently putting them into practice is the hard work.
Because I want to ensure that my system, practices, and behavior align with my values, I will establish them with growth and optimization in mind:
• System — Create a goal-setting and assessment structure that optimizes flow
• Practices — Establish procedures that adopt a growth mindset
• Behavior — Define and take clear actions that express my values
Flow Optimization System
What is flow and why should I create a system that optimizes it? If you’ve ever been engaged in a challenging activity where you’ve lost track of time, then you’ve experienced flow. This positive psychology concept founded by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi is “the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”
The benefits for systematically optimizing flow are many. Flow not only helps you gain greater clarity in what you’re doing and confidence that you can achieve your goals, but also increases your internal motivation and happiness to embrace and overcome challenges.
So how does an individual create a system that fosters a flow state? Build the following conditions into how you do your work:
• Set clear goals for your work and monitor your progress
• Seek out immediate feedback to make sure you’re on the right track
• Take on challenges that will help you stretch your skillset
• Give yourself distraction-free time and space to do your work
In many ways, the conditions for flow feed into and work together beautifully with growth-mindset practices.
Growth-Mindset Practices
What is a growth mindset? A growth mindset, a psychological concept founded by Carol Dwecker, is the belief that your talents can be developed through dedication and hard work. It is the opposite of a fixed mindset, the belief that your talents are innate.
Why is it important to create practices that reflect it? No matter who you are or how much experience you have, you will face challenges and new problems to solve. By adopting a growth mindset, you get your mind right to embrace learning and find the resilience to accomplish potentially great things.
No one has a pure growth mindset. Most of us fall somewhere between growth and fixed in the mindset spectrum. So how can you move the needle more firmly towards the growth-mindset end? Practice the following actions:
• Talk back to your fixed mindset with a growth mindset voice
• Take responsibility for your work, including errors
• Collaborate and share information
• Try new strategies and reward those that lead to learning and progress
• Take smart risks, knowing some won’t work
• Capitalize on setbacks to move forward
Talk back to your fixed mindset.
Recognize that you have a choice in how you interpret a situation. When your fixed mindset starts talking, talk back!
Aligning Behavior with System and Practices
If the manifesto, system, and practices are talking the talk, ultimately, your behavior is how you walk the walk. By aligning your behavior with these growth-forward systems and practices, you not only ingrain your values into what you do, but you’re also more likely to acquire the traits of an autotelic personality:
• Curious
• Persistent
• Charitable
• Intrinsically motivated
• Action-oriented
These are people who not only tend to experience flow more often, but are also stimulated by and grow from complex and challenging opportunities, much like the Living Individual I seek to become.
But if there are gaps between your system or practices and behavior, then your manifesto fails to have impact and may be rendered meaningless. For example:
· System — Behavior Gap: I want to optimize flow on my projects, but don’t set clear goals or seek feedback.
· Practice — Behavior Gap: I want to identify and fill talent gaps, but don’t make time to learn new skills.
For individuals like me, failure to stay relevant could result in a less-than-optimal performance and/or not meeting chargeability benchmarks.
The Promise of the Manifesto
The promise of creating your manifesto is the promise of embodying, or more deeply ingraining, the traits of an enthusiastic, forward-thinking human by:
• Establishing your values to create a richer sense of who you are, what you stand for, and how you want to move forward
• Optimizing flow to increase productivity, innovation, and happiness
• Adopting a growth mindset to strengthen your ability to roll with the punches, adapt, and take smart risks
• Aligning your values with your system, practices, and behavior to be the best you can be and contribute to something greater than yourself
Whether you’re looking to transform professionally or personally, the Living Individual Manifesto can help you define what you stand for and how to put your values into practice so that you thrive, design new ways to embrace change, and help yourself achieve your goals to stay ahead of the pack in the new year!
