Thinking Beyond Science

An important question is to determine what areas you have to get better in and how you get better in those areas. Let us say you are trying to get healthier. What would you assess at the end of a few months to know if you are indeed getting healthier? In all probability you would assess your weight and possibly if you get tired easily, etc. You know you have become healthier if your weight has reduced and you don’t get tired easily. To be able to achieve this you have to exercise regularly and have a diet plan that you follow with discipline. In this analogy ‘what’ you are trying to get better at is reducing your weight and increasing your stamina and ‘how’ you are doing that is through regular exercise and diet.

In a similar way, for getting better at work, it is important to understand ‘what’ areas we are trying to get better at and ‘how’ will we get better there. That what’ for work needs you to make progress on two fronts:

1. Don’t stop at knowing the answer; get to the method of finding the answer.

2. Build your core capabilities.

When we go through a situation, we learn some answers at the end of it. However, if we stop at knowing the answers and do not go into the method used to find the answers, we will struggle in the future when faced with more complex situations. The simplest example of this is multiplication tables. If somebody asks us what 12 x 12 is and if you immediately say 144 without having to calculate it, that is knowing the answer. If you know the method of multiplication, then that’s the method by which you find the answer. Knowing the answers does not work beyond the easy questions, like 3 x 3 or 12 × 12.

If somebody asks us what 734 x 498 is, we won’t know the answer. We have to use the method of finding the answer, which is multiplication. The exact same thing happens at work—there are many answers we know and remember by virtue of precedent, or because somebody taught us.

But we often stop at knowing the answers, we do not master the method of finding the answers and hence struggle when faced with more complex situations.

The second area of getting better is building your core capabilities. Let’s take the example of a person who has poor listening skills and hence does not understand the problem accurately to begin with. Unless this person fixes their ability to listen, knowing the method of finding the answers might not help as the problem for which the answer is to be found will not be clear. The core capabilities are in four areas :

1. People skills/relationships/leadership/personal value system

2. Analytical skills/comfort with numbers/logical reasoning/rigour

3. Conceptualization and intuitive skills/creativity/ insightfulness

4. Organized/disciplined/planned/efficient

If you have to assess if you have got better in the last one year then check if these two things have improved. Your method of finding the answers should have improved for both existing situations as well as new situations. The same should be the case with your core capabilities. If these two things have changed positively, you have got better; if not, you have not got better, however hard you worked in that one year.

The ‘how’ to get better is what is called the Get-Better Model (GBM), your model to continuously get better. If you have a good GBM, it means you can get better at a rapid rate. For a given amount of work, a superior GBM will get you to knowing more methods of finding answers and better capabilities.

A GBM is made up of four key components and these must be practiced deliberately for getting better:

1. Getting better by yourself: This is about deliberately getting better from what you do on a daily basis by yourself, without external help.

2. Getting better by leveraging others: This is about deliberately leveraging all external resources available to you to get better.

3. Make others get better: This is about deliberately building an ecosystem around you that multiplies your efforts.

4. Making and implementing a get-better plan: This is about deliberately making a plan and implementing it to get better in a few areas of focus.

Source : Get Better at Getting Better by Chandramouli Venkatesan

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43321299-get-better-at-getting-better