Achieved Strategies

Can your passion blind you from achieving results?

I say yes.  It can create blind spots. Blind spots are beliefs that are hidden from your awareness.  They influence your actions, and you are unaware of it.

To ensure we’re all on the same page, I want to quickly explain how blind spots develop.  Blind spots develop from the conclusions you make from your life experiences.  You believe those conclusions to be accurate.  They then become the way in which you make sense of situations/interactions.  We all do it.  It’s how we’re wired.  We make meaning out of everything we experience – accurate or inaccurate.

The trouble with blind spots is that if they go unexplored, they begin to adversely affect the results you want to create.  They even affect the results of groups, teams, even families.

If you’re not aware how your beliefs are influencing a behavior that is negatively impacting a group, results will be suffer.  You need a way to surface blind spots and then develop a plan to overcome or work around them.

But how?

I’ll share an approach my executive team took in one of our meetings.

We had called out the need to discuss a trend in missing deadlines.  Not deadlines for clients, but internal deadlines.

1.    Prior to the meeting, I emailed a question to get us thinking about our conversation: “What do we each need to deal with to build Achieved Strategies?”  I wanted us to begin thinking about what’s going on our own world and what’s impacting our effectiveness.  We didn’t answer the question in the meeting.  It merely served as mental preparation for the conversation.

2.    In the meeting, we shared what we thought the other person’s blind spot is. We even articulated what we thought our own blind spot is. And we discussed what we believed to be our team’s blind spots.

The outcome

We agreed that our team’s blind spot was our desire to want to do everything; that we over commit our selves in the process of wanting to do everything.  We’re incredibly passionate about the work we do. So passionate that we have a hard time not taking on exciting new projects or starting our own new projects.  Passion is important, but resources need to be available to execute those passionate ideas and pursuits.

It was suggested that over committing was “too pretty” a description.  We replaced over committing with “piggyness.”

3.    With piggyness as our new description, we distilled our conversation into two statements of intent.  These serve as our guide for making decisions in the next 15 months.  If proposed work doesn’t align with our statements of intent, the work won’t be started at that time.

4.    We listed hours available per person, per month, and listed our accountabilities.

5.    We identified two buckets of work that align with our statements of intent, assigned owners of the buckets, and deadlines.

As president, I will open each meeting with our statements of intent to remind us of our agreement.  I also must lead by example by holding each person accountable to monthly available hours when new opportunities surface.

We’ve taken good first steps to address the negative influence our blind spot has on our ability to achieve results.  As is true with most blind spots, it takes diligent work and straightforward communication to counter their negative influence. And we need to call each other on beliefs and behaviors that stem from blind spots.

Can passion blind you from achieving results? Yes, but passion’s outcome doesn’t have to lead to blindness.

Other tools and resource to help you work with blind spots.

Chris Argyris’ Ladder of Inference

Right Hand Column-Left Hand Column