Is There An Advantage in Your Disadvantage?

​Eggs Anyone?   What does Dr. Seuss have to do with your ability to use a constraint to improve your performance? Well, it turns out most of us only have so much resolve to repeat a task over and over, and there is a point of diminishing returns with the "rinse, repeat" strategy of human learning.  This is where the concept of adding a constraint to your practice enters our field of view. Most of us have acquired some level of skill in order to meet our consumption needs, and if we are really fortunate we enjoy the tasks we are paid to perform. Yet the forces of creative destruction are high, and it pays to keep improving and adapting (anyone reading this on a blackberry??)  

A recent study showed that ​when participants were given a constraint to their practice, their output increased over the average. A living example of this......

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​is the book “Green Eggs and Ham,” which was written when Theodore Geisel was given the constraint of writing a children’s book with no more than 50 words. A frequent way to think about this concept is in daily life, the moment something changes to the negative see if you can ask yourself, what is the advantage in my apparent disadvantage? Does this new constraint open up an opportunity to enhance my performance? 

Connecting this back to you and your team's production, how might you change up the practice and or rhythms of the group with a fresh constraint? How might thinking about changes this way improve both the resiliency and the adaptability of your team? Consider asking a few folks to diversify your data set and then let us know what you come up with. 

Read our post Free Falling Into Failure next!