As I closed our meeting and bid farewell to 25 attendees from around the country, I first looked at my teammates from The Clearing, then out a nearby window to take in the hustle and bustle of humans near the Pentagon and bridges headed into and out of Washington, D.C. I saw on my teammates’ faces something that I couldn’t quite place. Then, I felt something I couldn’t pinpoint, but that I knew I couldn’t ignore: a deep, enveloping feeling of having nothing more to give.

We’d just finished three full days of in-person meetings for one of our largest and most-trusted clients. The dialogue was rich and required the usual for large-format multi-day sessions – honoring our detailed meeting design, fielding real-time feedback from the group, and performing the mental gymnastics required to remain open to what the group gave us in real-time. And all while achieving the outcomes we’d agreed on during months of preparation.

This is one of the things we do best at The Clearing. It’s also one of my greatest strengths, so that sense of emptiness, co-mingled with pride and relief at having successfully navigated my first in-person session since COVID imposed its will on us all in March 2020, weighed on me deeply. Its internal gravity existed in my psyche for days, then weeks before I was able to give it its right name. That name was fatigue, and its counterpoint is endurance. I’d lived inside the former without knowing it for the better part of a week, and was now uniquely aware of the latter as a result.

Our ability to not just endure these sorts of interactions, but to derive energy and a newfound sense of alignment and purpose from them, has changed over the last 2.5 years. Before our world changed in the spring of 2020, I could call on a deep store of professional endurance built on a solid foundation of nearly twenty years of experience in the trenches and leading. What I learned about myself, having experienced the sea change that was our response to a global pandemic, was that my ability to endure in a professional sphere was greatly reduced. Not because I was lesser, or worse, or diminished in any way, but rather because I’d simply let this very particular muscle atrophy. That set of professional muscles might be different for you, but chances are good they’ve atrophied over the last 36 months as well.

What We Can Do About It

First, call this phenomenon by its right name. In my book For All: Democratizing Big Ideas, I call out a Confucian proverb that’s shifted my life: “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right name.”

Words have power – names even more so. By accurately naming our fatigue, and also our ability to persist and endure, we gain a measure of power and personal agency. Sugarcoating or writing the reality off as a result of something else doesn’t serve us.

Next, listen to the signals your body sends you. Consciously or unconsciously, we’ve learned to minimize or ignore the physical in service of the intellectual. My body sent me clear signals during that three-day session: a deep and compelling desire to be alone, physical activity only further draining me (usually one of my greatest sources of energy), and a diminishing ability to positively engage with complexity. Had I tuned in to those signals earlier, I could’ve called for reinforcements, or engaged with coping strategies. Proactivity is the key here.

Finally, let go of who you were. This includes whatever levels of professional endurance you enjoyed pre-pandemic. Once I gave myself permission to stop measuring myself against a past (no longer applicable) version of me, I was more fully able to step into the rehabilitation process. One great positive of the shared experience that is the global pandemic is just that – its universal nature, and the connective tissue that’s created for all of us to tap into. As it was eloquently put in Harvard Business Review: “There’s rarely been as universal an opportunity for reinvention as this moment, and it requires each of us to reject stagnation.”

Part and parcel of this letting go of your past self is to ask for help when you need it – from your colleagues, your clients, and the organizations you’re a part of. Each, in their own way, has a responsibility to you. Respecting boundaries, raising your hand when you’re approaching the limits of your endurance, and tapping into organizational resources are three ways we must advocate for ourselves.

At The Clearing, we specialize in individual and organizational resilience. In our work in this space, we’ve learned that self-advocacy is crucial not just to positive outcomes, but also to long-term sustainability and happiness at work. You can learn more about how we think about personal and organizational resilience here.

If you have your own professional endurance or resilience story to share, or could use a helping hand navigating a lack of endurance within your organization, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line at hans.manzke@theclearing.com.

Several of our colleagues recently revealed the most-asked questions they receive about our work at The Clearing. So far, we’ve covered FAQs around Customer Experience (CX), Hybrid Workplaces, Shared Services, and Workplace Culture. Today, we’ll focus on Organizational Capability (OC) with OC expert and published author, Hans Manzke. Here are the Top 5 questions we receive from our clients and partners in this area.

What is Organizational Capability?

We humans are social creatures – we group together naturally. This affinity is in our DNA, so we congregate together knowing that we can accomplish bigger things together than we can alone. So it goes for our professional organizations – agencies, companies, teams, professional groups, and more. However, the drivers that push us to come together naturally aren’t always aligned with the incentives that our professional organization calls for from us individually and collectively. That’s why The Clearing made Organizational Capability one of its Solution Areas – a combination of Leadership and Strategy.

Organizational Capability is, quite simply, a group’s ability to navigate change or transformation successfully and in an aligned way by achieving their most crucial outcomes. Sounds simple, right? If you think back to the last time your team, company, or agency had to navigate a big transformation effort, you know it’s not as easy as it may seem.

One of the reasons that navigating change and complexity is difficult is because while we’re social creatures, alignment between the constituent humans in a group becomes harder and harder to achieve or maintain as a group gets larger or as complexity increases. At The Clearing, we bring focused tools and approaches to bear to increase your Organizational Capability. This includes services such as:

Change Management and Communications
Organization Design and Organization development
Culture Assessment and Culture Change
Strategy Creation, Strategy Alignment, and Strategy Execution
Facilitated Alignment Sessions
Leadership Development and Executive Coaching
Thought Partnership and Advisory Support
Training and Outfitting
Why Does Investing in Organizational Capability Matter?

Each of the tools, approaches, and offerings is laser-focused on just one thing: getting your organization to its most important outcomes in an aligned way. For a few moments, think about the most complex, thorniest challenge you face – perhaps you’re tasked with creating a strategy for your organization for the next 1, 2, or even 5 years. Maybe you sense a discrete need for up-skilling your workforce, but don’t know where to begin. Or, perhaps you’re looking to drive positive culture change by investing in the shared vocabulary and sense of purpose that a tool like CliftonStrengths® can effect.

On the flip side, perhaps you have an important opportunity in mind such as measurably improving your FEVS scores, growing your business by 40% year over year, or creating a compelling vision of the future as a new leader. In any of these scenarios, The Clearing’s OC offerings provide you not just the tools, approaches, and support you need, but also the thought partnership that often feels lacking for many leaders and high flyers. One unique characteristic of our OC Solution Area is that you’ll never feel you’re walking the workplace change path alone.

Where Should I Start Building My Organizational Capability?

One great place you can begin an engagement with The Clearing through the lens of OC – or any of our Solution Areas – is with a Chalk Talk. Imagine an engaging, in-person or virtual, two-hour workshop that brings our visual consulting skills to bear as well as the OC abilities of some of our sharpest minds. We focus all of our energy on one challenge or opportunity you face, produce aligned progress, and you keep the results – free of charge.

Other great entry points into our OC universe are engagements where you have a discrete need already in mind. This may include developing a strategy, managing change, or focused training like an organization-wide or team-based CliftonStrengths® engagement.

What Sets OC Apart from Your Competitor’s Offerings?

Through the lens of OC, two big things come to mind that set us apart: 1) focus and 2) an all-for-one approach. Let’s break each of those down.

When we say we’re focused, we mean we focus our efforts on a few things – your most critical outcomes. We resist the natural inclination to do a little about a lot of things in service of achieving the game-changing goal you’ve been chasing. At The Clearing, we’re relentless in our pursuit of your outcomes, and we’re relentless in our focus on the human experience.

When we say we take an all-for-one approach, we mean you get access to the full breadth and talent of our firm. We have in-house, full-time graphic designers that produce world-class visual products and amplify the impact of anything we create. Our executive team is ready to engage with you one-on-one to give you crucial leadership training and perspectives. And, we feature an interdisciplinary team of consultants from non-profit, academia, government, finance, law, and other backgrounds.

These aren’t just differentiators that sound good on paper – they’re ways in which we provide an experience like you’ve never had before, all centered on making that critical change or organization transformation happen for your group.

How Will I Know if I’ve Achieved My Outcomes?

When you’ve achieved that game-changing outcome, there’s no mistaking it. Every individual in your organization can feel a change for the better. The progress is tangible and measurable, and the impact on your people and your customers changes how you engage with one another. Perhaps most critically, the way you and your colleagues feel at work will shift for the better – more positive energy, an increased sense of possibility and creativity, and a more equitable and pervasive sense of psychological safety at work are just three outcomes we’ve helped our clients create during our OC engagements.

And, very critically, we celebrate! One of the benefits of partnering with an external group like The Clearing is that groups are often so close or so in a change effort that they may not realize when they’ve achieved an important goal or milestone. Not only can our teams at The Clearing see that achievement, but we’re uniquely capable of designing and executing celebrations that fit inside your organizational culture. We bring not just our creativity and interdisciplinary backgrounds to bear here, but also the world-class skills of our in-house graphic designers. Social scientists have long realized the criticality of recognition – think of a celebration as a declaration of your outcome achievement as well as a way to harness and direct your group’s energy toward its next outcome.

What’s Next?

If you have more questions about Organizational Capability or want to chat about beginning or revamping your organization’s OC, please reach out to one of our Organizational Capability consultants. I’m available at hans.manzke@theclearing.com; while Solution Designer Sonya Patel can be contacted at sonya.patel@theclearing.com.

In the meantime, you can read more about OC impact in the private sector here. And, if you’d like to get big, creative ideas on how you can move yourself and your organization forward through complexity, read my recently published book – For All: Democratizing Big Ideas.

Two information-sharing sites (or intranets). Neither being used effectively – or much at all.

Siloes reinforced and collaboration reduced. What to do?

That’s the challenge the CIO of a D.C.-area local government brought to us at The Clearing. This leader recognized a missed opportunity, and knew the power that a functional, well-designed, collaborative intranet could have on the organization’s geographically dispersed workforce.

However, “nuts and bolts” functionality advantages were just the tip of the iceberg. Our CIO had a longer-term vision in mind: using a well-designed and effectively implemented intranet as a way to shift the organization’s culture. In short, the intranet was one of many ways to achieve a longer-term culture shift – changing how colleagues interact with one another, how they adopt and use new technology, do their jobs more efficiently and with higher fidelity, and more. To paraphrase in inimitable Mary Poppins, “A spoonful of intranet helps the culture change go down.”

The Why

The Clearing’s goal was simple: partner with the CIO and other key stakeholders on two things. First, we needed to choose one instance of the Intranet or the other, and second, we needed to revamp and revitalize the winner into a nexus for collaboration and efficiency. To begin, we asked a series of open-ended questions during our discovery phase to a cross-section of county employees – things like “do you know the intranet sites exist?” and “do you know what their purpose and functions are?”

Their responses revealed the organization had some catching up to do in the realm of technology adoption. However, we also discovered a lot of energy around modernizing how the organization leveraged technology. Leadership knew it needed to create infrastructure that could accommodate its incoming, more tech-savvy workforce that is already filling the shoes of current staffers looking to retire over the next 5 to 10 years.

Finally, leadership recognized that the longer it took to modernize, the harder it would become to deliver quality services to its customers. One example of this was the organization’s rent relief program. From a process mapping perspective, it looked like any other conventional program; however, the organization wanted to implement a modern customer relationship management tool – Zendesk – to automate and streamline the application and interaction process, making it easier for residents to use and getting rent relief funds to those who need it faster. This is just one example of how driving culture change through technology adoption has real-world, big-ticket impact.

The Clearing created and implemented a heuristic assessment in the discovery process.

Our Approach

As touched upon earlier, The Clearing started with a broad discovery survey of county employees. One of the questions we needed to answer directly was who knew about the intranet(s) existed in the first place. Indirectly, we wanted to measure the workforce’s temperature with regard to technology adoption. From there, we shared findings with the leadership team, and facilitated a conversation at that level through the lens of their overall organizational goals. We encouraged the leadership team to take on the fewest, most important initiatives possible to move the needle on its new intranet instance and technology adoption in general. Focus is everything.

The leadership team decided to migrate to a single intranet instance, powered by SharePoint. Next, we partnered with The Clearing’s unparalleled visual consultants to develop visual frameworks and to better understand the workflows associated with the intranet’s core constituents. We used visual maps to build out wireframes for required and desired intranet pages, partnering with our client’s most important stakeholders to ensure critical needs were met.

Along with wireframes, we developed and delivered an implementation plan, including a critical but often overlooked component: steps to catalyze the desired culture shift. In essence, we used training engagement as a proxy to demonstrate how to adopt new technology effectively. In service of this critical but amorphous goal, our visuals team created job aids to help the workforce understand the purpose and importance of the intranet, how they could leverage it most powerfully, and how it would make their lives at work better. By creating a long adoption runway, we effectively used the intranet project as a test case on technology adoption at scale. Those learnings continue to serve the leadership team as they determine the roadmap for future technology programs.

The Clearing developed wireframes to better understand the workflows associated with the intranet’s core constituents.

The Impact

The biggest impact was the choice the leadership team made on its own: choosing to invest the time, energy, focus, and resources a project like this requires. With the insights developed by The Clearing, they were able to determine a clear path forward for this project and future modernization efforts as well.

While an intranet site can be many things to many people, it is, at its essence, a shared resource. For many, sharing resources is a part of our natural mental model – we want what we want when and how we want it. Through that lens, what’s best for our colleagues, or the good of the whole, isn’t always top of mind at the most basic level. My biggest takeaway from this project was that by making difficult tech choices and focusing real energy on adoption, engagement, and communication, an organizational culture can shift.

If you’re curious about technology implementation, culture change or how to use focused projects to drive big transformation, I’d love to hear from you. Reach out to me at hans.manzke@theclearing.com to start a dialog. I look forward to hearing from you.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I was born and raised in San Antonio, TX as the child of high school teachers. My mom taught Spanish and my dad taught calculus and computer science. Growing up in that environment I felt really confident that my parents could answer any question I could come up with. This in turn fed my natural curiosity about the world and people around me. This was the beginning of the thousands of ‘why’ questions I’d ask throughout the course of my life.

When I was finishing high school and thinking about college, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study and pursue. My interests were as diverse as the questions I’d ask my parents as a child – thus, I realized pretty quickly that a liberal arts education was right for me. It would allow me to sample my different interests in an environment that empowered my curiosity. I graduated from Middlebury College with a dual degree in English and History.

After graduation, I followed my interest in the world of writing and got my first job in journalism followed by a second position in publishing. I learned almost immediately that those positions and environments didn’t play to my unique strengths. Thankfully, I was introduced to the world of management consulting via a childhood friend and started my career at Touchstone Consulting (founded by John Miller and Chris McGoff). It was there I learned and grew for 8 years before joining The Clearing almost 7 years ago.

Did you always want to write a book?

Yes! From a young age, I have always wanted to write a book. I’ve always been drawn to the idea, but struggled with the enormity of the task – it just felt too big. Where would I begin? What’s the first proverbial thread I should pull as an author in what feels like a three-foot-wide ball of yarn?

What made you finally settle on an idea and start writing?

Through The Clearing, I had a connection with a Georgetown University book writing seminar called The Creators Institute. It’s a year-long program that supports authors going from a loose idea to holding their published book in their hands in twelve months’ time. Creators Institute Founder Eric Koester helped me get clear on what to write about through a series of exercises and ideation sessions.

For me, what rose to the surface was my lifelong proclivity for big ideas, including some I’d been introduced to at The Clearing, like The PRIMES (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., copyright © 2012). I am fascinated with concepts and ideas that help people engage with complex topics in an accessible way. To explore this idea, I researched the frameworks and concepts, tested my assumptions, and landed on a way to make big ideas accessible For All, regardless of where they are in their careers or their socioeconomic backgrounds.

What’s a major takeaway for your readers?

My hope is that after reading my book, readers will have a much deeper insight into themselves and access to an array of ideas that they use to better themselves and the world around them. This book is about opening up new avenues for self-awareness. Regardless of what your next personal or professional endeavor is, the most powerful starting point is getting to know yourself. Using these big ideas, you can create the reality you want to experience in your own life. I’ve personally deployed each of the big ideas I describe in my book on my own self-awareness journey, and I’m hoping my readers will find value in them as well.

Where are you in your own self-awareness journey?

I’m far enough into this journey to be able to look back and see some growth and breakthroughs, as well as some dead ends that I had to navigate. I can also see decades more work in front of me, and that excites me. What I’ve learned about myself and observed in others is that true self-awareness is a life-long journey.

For me, a turning point was realizing that I had become quite adept at doing certain things in a certain way, and was having trouble adapting and evolving. I built my professional reputation by being able to connect with people deeply, and by using those strong personal relationships to deliver high-quality outcomes. It worked well for me, but those connections aren’t always available depending on job, team, or focus area. Effectively, I’d discovered a big personal blind spot. The crux of the matter was that I needed to be brutally honest with myself about the person I was versus the person I wanted to be.

Do you have any advice for someone looking to become more self-aware?

Everyone’s starting point and journey are different.

For me, the journey began with radical self-honesty and candor. Holding up the self-image I project out into the world vs. what I actually know to be true about myself allowed me to see where there was congruence and where there was a lack of congruence. That’s one tool anyone can use.

Some of the big ideas I discuss in the book are ones I’ve used as major stepping stones on my own journey. Those concepts can push boundaries on how we think about ourselves, especially in our own environments, and force us to consider new versions of the future that hold new possibilities.

What is one concept or method you talk about in your book that you are most passionate about?

That’s a tough question – I have passion and energy for every big idea in my book. However, the two ideas that I’m digging into the most right now are Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning–Kruger effect. Both ideas feel more critical now than ever before.

Imposter Syndrome*: This big idea is pretty universal. It’s a feeling in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud.” In my book, I explain my own experience with Imposter Syndrome, and share insights on the topic from some big names that you’ll probably recognize.
Dunning-Kruger Effect*: The basic idea is that the people who know the least about something are the most confident in their abilities and knowledge. Those that know the most about something grasp the enormity of how much they don’t know – thus, they paradoxically believe themselves to be less informed.
Any advice for anyone looking to write their own book?

Just begin. You’ll surprise yourself.

Looking back on my own book-writing experience, I’m a big believer in the time-bound process, as well as external accountability. I needed the word count goals, deadlines, and commitments to my editors – I don’t know if I would have been able to complete the book without those things. While that’s not the case for everyone, I needed the structure to pair with my natural adaptability.

If you are interested in writing a book, be honest with yourself on what it takes, and make sure you have the necessary energy. It’s no small thing to see it to the finish line. For me, the best part is now – getting to meet and learn from people who have read the book and can expose me to their own big ideas and experiences.

Where can you get a copy of the book?

You can learn more about For All: Democratizing Big Ideas and purchase a copy of the book by visiting amazon.com!

*(Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247.)

*(Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134.)

In February, I explored the topic of Flow and provided tips on how to harness Flow in service of the outcomes that matter most to you – at work and in life. Fresh off the new year, so much felt possible. In so many ways, the world has changed drastically since we took our first look at Flow together.

Just because our world looks different today than it did in February doesn’t mean the possibility we explored is gone. Much is still available. At this critical juncture in time, it feels important to take our February insights and apply them to a larger scale – how we can collectively harness Flow in the context of organizations.

Flow in Organizations: A Case Study

Over seventy years ago, Masaru Ibuka founded the company we know today as Sony. One of his first actions was to publish a series of statements he called “Purposes of Incorporation,” a vision of the future organization Ibuka dreamed to create. The very first Purpose of Incorporation statement reads as follows:

“To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their heart’s content.” 

Sony’s de facto mission statement says nothing about transistors, radio receivers – technology of any kind. It does not focus on products, services, profits, or growth. What it envisions delivering into the marketplace is nowhere to be found. Instead, the words are carefully crafted to inspire, challenge, and give permission to its staff to seek contentment through their chosen profession – in essence, flow in practice in the work environment. The father of Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, refers to Ibuka’s first Statement as “the perfect description of how flow functions in the workplace.” (Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning)

How do groups, teams, and companies take the critical insights that Flow uncovers and apply them at an organizational scale? Here are three actions you can take to leverage Flow inside your organization.

Seek Meaning in Your Work – Don’t Stop till You Do

No one can tell you what your values and personal meaning are or should be at work. Finding meaning takes searching, trial and error, and a willingness to fail, and that meaning can take different forms. Some discover meaning at work by contributing to a powerful mission like defending the environment or promoting social justice. Others derive their meaning from partnering with people they care about – colleagues and clients for example. Still, others derive meaning from the opportunity to deploy a specific talent, gift, or skill – teaching or dancing for example.

No matter which avenue provides the most meaning to you, it’s critical to feel meaning in your work. Ask yourself: do you feel a sense of purpose and meaning from alignment with organizational mission, partnering with people, or getting to use one of your talents?

It might be necessary to abandon comfort in search of an opportunity that more closely aligns with your values and give you the best chance to find meaning in your work. It is possible to be professionally challenged, fulfilled, happy, and positively defined. Seek and you will find.

Find Flow With Another

Residents of the Japanese island of Okinawa live considerably longer than most. It’s no coincidence their level of happiness is also higher than average. Okinawa is one of the world’s five designated Blue Zones, areas with the highest average life expectancy. Okinawans don’t just live long lives – they lead good lives.

One key facet of Okinawan life is the concept of moai – a formal, life-long bond between a small group of approximately five individuals. Members of this group meet regularly and function as a social safety net in times of great hardship (family death, illness, etc.) Moai is the first place an individual goes to share big news – good, bad, and in-between. In effect, they almost single-handedly eradicate feelings of personal and social isolation. The impact of inclusion and a sense of belonging on quality of life cannot be underestimated.

The good news is that you don’t need to be a member of an Okinawan Moai to find flow with a coworker or work partner – a shared pursuit that you care about greatly increases your chances of finding true meaning in a professional context. Increase your odds of success by pursuing an idea with an interested individual, who learns and focuses in similar environments, and who is willing to take some low to medium-grade risk together without judgment.

Seek Out Flow-Adjacent States – Alone at First, Then With Teams

Flow is just one of eight key mental states that Csikszentmihaly identified in his decades of research. When arrayed on an x-axis of skill and y-axis of challenge level, the mental states of Arousal and Control appear on either side of Flow. As Flow is an optimal state and inherently more difficult to achieve, one system hack is to deliberately step into situations that slightly exceed your current skill level (Arousal) or situations where you don’t need to use all available skills to meet a challenge (Control).

For example, you can enter into an Arousal state by agreeing to lead the creation of a product that you know will present a true challenge, and which will require some quick up-skilling above what you currently possess. In this state, you feel almost over-alert, as you’re deliberately testing the boundaries of what you can comfortably perform. A Control state could look like agreeing to lead the creation of a product that you have experience performing multiple times in the past. The overall challenge presented by this endeavor is lower, and you know your skill level is commensurate with what you’re asking of yourself. As both of these mental states share a border with Flow, you can more readily access a Flow state by seeking out Arousal or Control states and fine-tuning the level of challenge and skill required.

Once you’ve explored Flow-adjacent states and how to access Flow alone and with a partner, consider the same approach with a team. Work to expand your concentric circles to include increasingly larger groups as you become more proficient. Remember, more people equals more complexity, so hold your insights loosely and be prepared to explore wholly new territory when scaling Flow.

Do you have a story to share about a flow state? Do you want to collaborate on flow, personal purpose, or organizational potential? Reach out to me via email.

We’ve all been there. In fact, many of us are there right now. As we adjust to a new way of living, which for many of us means working from home, we close our laptops each afternoon or evening to call it a day and open that same laptop back up again the next morning. As the days become weeks, we notice our machines running slower, and with perceptibly more effort. Perhaps we hear fans kicking on to cool overheated hardware – the strain is palpable. Maybe we even get far enough along in this slow march toward entropy that we find ourselves checking the machine’s manufacture date, thinking it’s older than it actually is, and wondering if it’s time to start scraping our nickels together for a replacement.

In the realm of this increasingly common occurrence, our friendly neighborhood IT support people have a message not just for our struggling hardware, but also for their users. There’s a reason that the most common helpdesk advice takes the form of the ubiquitous “Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?”

It turns out that fully powering down a laptop, tablet, phone, smart TVs – pretty much any device that has hardware and software – performs almost the same function as getting a decent night’s sleep, going on a particularly relaxing vacation, or journaling each day. Whether you fastidiously close each application and browser window, or you’re more like me with a litany of programs and browser tabs going at once, there’s a direct correlation between the period of time between full device shutdowns and that device’s performance.

Humans are no different. Think of our laptop or phone’s hard drive as our brain’s limbic system: storing memories, sensations, and instincts. The CPU and motherboard can be likened to our prefrontal cortex – our mind’s logic center, responsible for higher-order thinking, morality, and much more. The device’s operating system and the applications that we select and overlay on the machine’s hardware are the learning packets our minds take in during school, jobs, hobbies, training, and task execution.

WHY REBOOTING IS IMPORTANT

What happens when we don’t occasionally power down our minds? Gone unchecked, memories, actions, old priorities, and other formerly important things continue to accrue, making our heads feel full and rendering recall, creative thinking, or improvisation effectively impossible. I liken the phenomena to cholesterol accumulation in an overworked artery. In time, your mind’s capacity to function at its peak performance is steadily diminished. That manifests in any number of nefarious ways – lack of patience and anxiety, just to name two. The sensation feels like the human equivalent of running your car’s engine ‘in the red’ consistently, but toddling along at 10 miles per hour. Huge energy investment, very little return.

With this new corollary in mind, how can we most effectively mimic the hard reboot our devices so sorely need and reset our brains? Most particularly, how can we force reboot when things get truly dire? For people, this is not so simple as reading and implementing a checklist they stumbled across in a blog like this one. Some most readily access their creativity and flow-like states when they’re surrounded by inspiring things – articles, books, quotes, videos, art – this can lead to the very sprawl that slows and reduces the capacity of our devices and minds alike.

The key is balance. We almost always breathe a sigh of relief when we finally allow our machines to execute that software update and power down. When we hard boot our brains, we can begin anew with a clean slate and an opportunity to build and explore all over again.

HOW TO HIT THE RESTART BUTTON

Give yourself some space. One tactic that can be used to great effect is clearly demarcating physical space for your inspiration, especially if you’re prone to sprawl. That space need not be expansive – in fact, Marissa Mayer taught us that creativity loves constraint, so challenge yourself to winnow your inspiration down to its essence by reconfiguring an unused corner or portion of a room. Better yet – build yourself a creativity kit that you can pack and unpack relatively easily – this makes your inspiration mobile and untethered to a specific area.

To balance that engineered sprawl, have a similar space where you go exclusively to focus. If you’re fortunate enough to have the purpose-driven tech for your work, more so the better. A little positive compartmentalization goes a long way. The world can still be the fascinating place it is because of its infinite variety and complexity without all of the inertia that all of those things can create. In fact, you may find that lightening up a bit can unleash newfound ways of thinking and a refreshed ability to make connections.

A different approach to recall. Perhaps most importantly, small moves and practices can play an outsized role in effecting a human hard reboot in service of our short-term effectiveness and long-term resilience. Downloading outstanding tasks, random musings, and potential connections can work wonders for our mental bandwidth. Write out a list, create a visual, or simply journal – whatever works best for you. This shifts what would otherwise be an act of mental recall to one of execution – crossing things off of a list also gives our brains a nice flush of dopamine. This helps us remain focused and continues the virtuous cycle of productivity.

So, remember – the positive outcomes that a regular human hard reboot can engender are available to us all — regardless of age, access, or field of endeavor. Invest the effort in yourself and immediate results will follow.

Oh, and don’t forget to power down that poor laptop of yours every once in a while.

Do you have a story to share about how you hard boot your brain? Reach out to me at hans.manzke@theclearing.com.

Remember back to a time when you focused on a particular task so wholly that time melted away. Upon the wildly successful completion of said task, you snapped back to yourself only to realize that the sun had set, your belly was clamoring for cheese fries, and you had 71 unread messages on the group text.

In that moment you experienced a concept called “flow.”

“Flow” is a mental state where a person channels an energized and radical sense of focus and enjoyment into a task or activity. Experiences that trigger a state of flow are equal amounts challenging and demanding of our highest skill level – not too much or too little of either.

These experiences push your limits just slightly, which creates a sense of excitement around what’s possible. As a result of entering a flow state, individuals are fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.

In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one’s sense of time and self.

The human nervous system can only process about 110 bits of information per second. Listening to one person speak occupies over half of your mind’s total bandwidth. This explains why we can’t focus on and comprehend more than one person talking at once, and it also frames why many or all of our bodily sensations and external distractions melt away when we enter a flow state. When in flow, we are incapable of monitoring our hunger or fatigue, conflict with those we care for – even our self-consciousness and ego. Essentially, our brains turn off access to many cognitive functions in order to remain engrossed in one singular task.

With this in mind, how might we increase the likelihood of accessing flow states in everyday life? Here are three things to increase those chances:

Stretch your limits – but not so far something breaks

If you find yourself performing tasks or focusing on areas that you can do in your sleep, chances are it’s time to push your limits. Flow states are most accessible when a task requires you to lean out over a skill precipice, but not so far that you’re likely to plunge over the edge.

Choose what supercharges you and ruthlessly eliminate distraction

Deeply understand the environment and factors you require in order to focus and tune into flow best and most often. To practice this, identify and stop doing tasks and activities that bore you: outsource, say “no” to energy drains, and eliminate any non-necessary tasks that feel like chores. Simultaneously, try at least three new tasks, activities or experiences each month. After each of these new experiences, ask yourself: “What specifically did I like about this task, activity, or exercise? What parts didn’t I enjoy?” Record your findings in a way that makes sense to you. Treating these experiences as a lab for evaluating your focus and enjoyment will drastically increase your chances of accessing powerful flow states.

Recharge your mindfulness batteries early and often

No matter how packed your schedule is, the more in balance you are, the more likely you are to achieve flow. Prioritize a walk around the block, seek out and engage with a friend or colleague you wish you spent more time with, or just find a quiet space where you can set aside the day’s rigors for a few minutes.

So how does this apply to your everyday work?

Organizations – not just individuals – can embody flow. Would you like to learn how to create more flow for your teams in your daily work? Part two of this series will talk about creating flow across teams. For now, consider this – seventy years ago Sony drafted this Purpose of Incorporation statement:

“To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their heart’s content.” 

Sony’s mission says nothing about transistors, radio receivers – technology of any kind. Instead, their words inspire, challenge, and give permission to seek contentment through a profession – in essence, flow in practice in the work environment.

Do you have a story to share about a flow state? Do you want to collaborate on flow, achievement, or purpose? Reach out to me at hans.manzke@theclearing.com.