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Your Present Vs. Future Orientation Mirrors Your Execution Vs. Innovation

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Do you live in the present or work for the future? Whatever your personal philosophy, it can affect how you view and do your work, and live your life in general. I would also suggest that the perspective relates to how well you execute or innovate.

[Note: Fellow Forbes bloggerSteven Kotler’s book The Rise of Superman (New Harvest, 2014) keeps inspiring me with many new ideas, so it is hard to do a single review on the whole thing. Instead, I will keep peppering my pieces with the insights I have gained from it. ]

What does it mean psychologically to be time-oriented? The story begins with Philip Zimbardo, Prof. Emeritus of Stanford University’s department of Psychology, and his observations on immediate versus delayed gratification. Zimbardo is known for a seminal work the Stanford Prison Study that examined how people, even randomly assigned to a role as prison guard or inmate, begin to assume the role and objectify the other. Some of that research was later chronicled in his bestseller, The Lucifer Effect (Random House, 2007). From his work, he raised the question of time-orientation as our outlook at our lives and the roles we play.

Present Hedonists live in the now. They live life to the fullest as it is occurring. As Kotler describes,

[Present Hedonists] are the life of the partycreative, spontaneous, open-minded, high-energy, risk takers who play sports, have hobbies, make friends easily… Unfortunately, this comes at a cost… because they act without anticipating consequences, don’t often learn from past failures, and are across the board unable to resist temptation… When it comes to the long path toward mastery, … Presents have a difficult time accumulating anything close to 10,000 hours of practice.

Future Orienteers easily agree to delay their gratification for a chance at a greater reward in the future. They can imagine all the steps in between the present towards some event that shows greater value later on. Startup Entrepreneurs of the world, that means you and I.

Per Kotler, across dozens of studies they outperform Present Hedonists in almost every category: better grades, more educated, more optimistic, more financial success, and more consistent results. Kotler: “They are the movers and shakers of the world.” Is that too good to be true? Yes, unfortunately. They are workaholics and prime candidates for many stress related ills: high blood pressure and heart disease, irritated bowels, marriage failures, weak friendships, and supernova burnouts.

So which do you think you are? Someone who lives for the present? Someone who works for the future? Which of these ills seem more related? You don’t have to answer to anyone but yourself, honestly. But the more extreme you are towards either end, the more likely those around you will already recognize symptoms.

We come back to the something in the middle. Zimbardo, after decades of research, found that the healthiest, happiest and highest performers are a blend of the two. And back to the central subject of Kotler’s book, working and achieving flow in your work that creates that balance.

Kotler says flow balances people at either end of this spectrum towards the other side. It neuro-chemically creates happiness of living in the moment, while also making us calculate the many possible outcomes of our actions in the future. It is autotelic; doing something that is its own reward. “Because flow involves meeting challenges and developing skills, it leads to growth,” as Csikszentmihalyi explained in his book Good Business: Leadership, Flow and the Making of Meaning (Penguin Group, 2004)

[FYI: See my earlier post on engagement, productivity and flow.]

Innovation vs. Execution

Innovation is very much future-orientated. It is about looking at what is possible and making that change, even if difficult. The bigger the change, the more the number of steps away, the greater that orientation. That distance does not greater impact; rather, how different it is from the status quo.

In comparison, rapid execution emphasizes working in the present scenario, greater pay-offs in the short-term. Fewer changes to the operation means a lower risk burden, and greater security that more people securely know how things are supposed to operate.

Both paths are appealing and, in reality, organizations rarely exclusively do one or the other. Instead, they are a blend. The danger is the temptation of short-termism can paint you into a corner. We know the speed of business has been accelerating for some time, but this doesn’t automatically point to a need to focus just on execution. Massive changes from innovation have reshaped entire industries over the past decades, and put once-leaders of an industry of complete collapse. The enabling technologies of the Web and Internet are perennial examples, but so is a focus design & experiences. The examples by economist Nicholas Nassim-Taleb in The Black Swan point to the dangers of not recognizing left-field ideas, and over-reliance on predictability.

As in individual flow, it is finding a balance in the middle that really matters. Flow calls for mastery through stringent practice, but it also suggests having the leeway to take big risks. This is hard to do on an entire organization level, but it is much less so when you get to smaller teams. From a risk perspective, that also means compartmentalizing the spread and impact of that risk into smaller units.

What it does require is the leeway for such a team to have the freedom to take that risk, to possibly waste resources, time and even fail spectacularly. But unless they fail, they won’t know what risk cost. Or they could spectacularly succeed.

This isn’t about just giving employees permission and “20% Free Time to Innovate.” It is providing them the necessary resources and real support to make that special project take life.

It is not about allowing ad-hoc teams of ‘whoever wants to work on my open source innovation.’ The greater the anticipated risk, the more real evidence you need evidence that the people on that team have of a history of high-performance, and trust in each member knowing how the other works. Right there are the new performance metrics to quantify.

You can reach me on Twitter @rawn or on Facebook.