The Progress Principle

Readers of the dojo know that I am trying to:

• Monotask


• Practice my career like I practice guitar


• Find more balance between doing, managing and setting strategy

And so it was with some delight that a twitter post led me to an article which led me to the book The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work. It backs up my feelings with some real-world research.

Some salient quotations:

• Three types of events - what we call the key three - stand out as particularly potent forces supporting inner work life, in this order: progress in meaningful work; catalysts (events that directly help project work); and nourishers (interpersonal events that uplift the people dong the work).


• Even seemingly mundane events - such as small wins and minor setbacks - can exert potent influence on inner work life.


• Although we eschew the vague "bad morale" terminology, our decade-long research on Karpenter and other companies reveals the power of workers' unspoken perceptions, emotions, and motivations, the three components of inner work life. In the short term, bad inner work life compromises individual performance

and most germane to my recent focus:

• In general, scholars argue, little things really do matter a lot. In Karl Weick's seminal 1981 paper he argued that social problems could be tackled in more innovative ways if they could be approached successfully on a small scale initially. Suggesting that the enormous scale of most social problems causes paralyzing emotionality and overwhelms cognitive resources, he proposed that there are great advantages in the small wins that can be gained from breaking down such problems into manageable pieces.

And that is exactly right. When trying to learn a new piece to play on the guitar, the most successful approach is NOT to start at measure 1 and try to play through the whole thing, fumbling and ingraining mistakes and building up frustrations. Rather, tap the rhythm out away from the guitar. Work on just the right hand fingering. Work just a few key measures (or even a few notes) in difficult passages to get the movement of the hands to be precise, relaxed and efficient. Play slowly enough, when you are playing the piece at all, to not make mistakes. In short, break the problem down into bite sized chunks. When you have a component of the piece under your belt, you build a motivating "inner life" based on these small wins.

I will approach work the same way. "Implement CRM" is more daunting than "learn Bach's Chaconne". So, if the decision is to implement CRM, then how can that be broken down into doable chunks? I found first, get the product (this company had already purchased the license years ago). Then, read through the implementation planning guide; then, setup the servers; setup the database environment; setup the SharePoint environment; install the base product; etc.

In David Allen "Get Things Done" fashion, it's important to focus on "what's the next action?" Doing it this way, the team can have that satisfying feeling that comes from making progress.  If we all ask the right questions and therefore know that we are working on the right problem, then collecting small wins along the way builds a self-reinforcing momentum to success. So sure, cleaning the entire basement may be the end goal. If however, today's goal is to clean up this little corner, then you can end the day with a small victory and  visible progress to the end goal. If you don't break it down, then you will end the day with the demotivating thought "man, this place is a huge mess."