Oliver Burkeman recommends what seems to be a brilliant book - The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins To Ignite Joy, Engagement And Creativity At Work by the wife-and-husband team of psychologists Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer.
Almost 30 years ago, the organisational theorist Karl Weick made an observation that campaigners on everything from global warming to homelessness have been ignoring ever since. Sometimes, he pointed out, convincing the world that you're fighting a Very Serious Problem actually makes it harder to solve. In a paper entitled Small Wins: Redefining The Scale Of Social Problems, Weick argued that perceiving challenges as huge made people seize up – disabling "the very resources of thought and action needed to change them". The history of gay rights, feminism and environmentalism, he claimed, showed that pursuing little victories was the better plan. They delivered quick motivation boosts, triggering a snowball effect. Want to change the world? First, stop trying to change the world.
By collecting diary entries from 238 people at seven companies, the authors generated 12,000 person-days of data on moods and activities at work. The striking conclusion is that a sense of incremental progress is vastly more important to happiness than either a grand mission or financial incentives – though 95% of the bosses didn't realise it. Small wins "had a surprisingly strong positive effect, and small losses a surprisingly strong negative one." Which chimes with recent research among US entrepreneurs by the business scholar Saras Sarasvathy: whatever they tell you on TV's Dragons' Den, the successful ones rarely made long-range business plans, and scorned market research. They went for quick wins – a few sales, then a few more – instead. Their philosophy was "ready, fire, aim".
Almost 30 years ago, the organisational theorist Karl Weick made an observation that campaigners on everything from global warming to homelessness have been ignoring ever since. Sometimes, he pointed out, convincing the world that you're fighting a Very Serious Problem actually makes it harder to solve. In a paper entitled Small Wins: Redefining The Scale Of Social Problems, Weick argued that perceiving challenges as huge made people seize up – disabling "the very resources of thought and action needed to change them". The history of gay rights, feminism and environmentalism, he claimed, showed that pursuing little victories was the better plan. They delivered quick motivation boosts, triggering a snowball effect. Want to change the world? First, stop trying to change the world.
By collecting diary entries from 238 people at seven companies, the authors generated 12,000 person-days of data on moods and activities at work. The striking conclusion is that a sense of incremental progress is vastly more important to happiness than either a grand mission or financial incentives – though 95% of the bosses didn't realise it. Small wins "had a surprisingly strong positive effect, and small losses a surprisingly strong negative one." Which chimes with recent research among US entrepreneurs by the business scholar Saras Sarasvathy: whatever they tell you on TV's Dragons' Den, the successful ones rarely made long-range business plans, and scorned market research. They went for quick wins – a few sales, then a few more – instead. Their philosophy was "ready, fire, aim".
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