In case you haven’t heard, there was a pandemic during 2020…far more people got sick and died than should have, and we were really exposed as a human race (regardless of your opinions and political views) for our inability to handle serious shit.
Now, looking forward, there is a need to start to look at blind spots. That’s where the innovation part of Boost Innovation comes to the forefront.
First, let’s talk about perfectionism. We have said for years that passion, not perfection, is where your focus should be. Check it out here. However, being perfect is skewed a ton by students, teachers/professors, athletes/coaches, and (most importantly) employees/supervisors. This simple post from our friends at the Interaction Design Foundation lays it out pretty clearly. We need to start to take out all the screwups in order to find the things that are perfect. It’s not about just dropping something awesome right away, it’s about starting with a block of stone and whittling it down to something that we feel great about just like Michelangelo did.
Now, let’s look at performance and “high performance”. Performance truly is relative. Click here to read more on this, but a great example is the behaviour of our politicians during the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic. We elected officials, we (the people) hold them to a higher standard, because their “high performance” is different so therefore we are establishing their relative high performance.
The great part about this is that it actually re-enforces all of our daily habits of excellence. If we would hold a politician to a higher standard because they are elected, than it stands to reason that the same relativity would mean we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard because we:
-Accepted a job
-Had a child
-Engaged in a relationship/marriage
-Signed a contract
-Etc, etc, etc
I’m simply not interested in scenarios where people can’t find their own version of high performance. There’s no gold standard here, which makes researchers uncomfortable, but it’s true. We have to identify what our factors of performance are (our GRW Project does this for business and our FLW Project does it in sport) and then find ways to leverage them in order to achieve our own specific individual, and group, “high performance”.
So, to close, we need to highlight the fact that hurt is a necessary step to growth, and that we are experiencing a serious period of hurt.
SO NOW IS OUR BEST TIME TO GROW.
When we use data and calculated risk we are able to grow in ways we didn’t imagine we could. Measuring and identifying our situation in this time of hurt is the perfect time to leverage for serious growth by using the “chiseling” effect this time period has had on our people and groups. So many are scared about how because the ability to clarify it doesn’t exist yet but that’s what we’ve been working hard on.
1) Acknowledge the Challenge
COVID-19 gave us a massive amount of grief (as shown in our massive data collection project in Miami, Florida). We have to be aware of that or we won’t be able to move forward in a well informed way.
2) Identify The Starting “Block”
What are we chiseling away from? Who cares? We just need to start chiseling in order to identify what kind of potential is underneath.
3) What does the sculpture look like?
If we start to “perform”, we can start to identify “high performance”, and using data and analytics to get to that point is a huge leg up. No matter what you’re doing now, there’s a version of it that is high performance…what is it? The same way you hold the President of The United States to a higher standard…look at it from the perspective of the ones who hold you to a higher standard.
I sincerely hope this helps you get better moving forward. Contact me anytime if you want to chat.
-KK
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