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Topic 4 - Understanding Ability and Discernment
We have one more layer to add to understand how we can manage a team that produces peak performance output. Ability.
Understanding Ability with more precision can make us better at troubleshooting, feedback, communication, driving personal growth, and building a team culture that helps us use our minds best.
Learning Objectives
Understand the 3 ways we can immediately enhance our ability and quality of output
Learn better discernment, so we can more accurately see ability in ourselves and others
Understand how we can plan specific, impactful growth plans for ourselves and others
Weave this precision into everyday things like communication, feedback, alignment, hiring, and more.
what this will help you do
Create a shared vocabulary for how you and your team can be intentional and precise about ability and growth
Give precise, actionable, impactful feedback
Understand how you and your team can easily produce better thinking and output
Overcoming a potential issue with discernment
We can all get principled about how things should be vs. how things are. We are going to have to grapple with this if we are going to become accurate and effective with ability.
Key Take-Aways:
We must focus on what is true, not what should be true
A person’s horizons are useful to understand because this is where mistakes begin
Ability can shift very quickly and usually very easily, resulting in big improvements to output
The Reality Horizon
Our connection with reality has to do with all of our knowledge, including learned skills, facts, definitions, and surrounding knowledge like context, history, and understanding the bigger picture.
Key Take-Aways and Points to Ponder:
Reality is about the volume and accuracy of our knowledge and awareness
There are significantly-different levels of reality horizons
Your connection with reality influences your priorities
Dramatic improvements can happen very quickly
The Reason Horizon
Our reasoning is how we logically process the connection between inputs and outcomes. This is how we become great problem solvers, great at root cause analysis, and great at predicting outcomes.
Key Take-Aways:
Reason works in both directions, from inputs to outcomes and from outcomes to inputs
High reasoning means we solve problems better, and focus more on inputs
Teams aligned on reason find it easy to align on strategy and tactics
We must be open to closing logical gaps and driving improvements to reason
the imagination horizon
Imagination enhances our ability by giving us the capacity to explore the unknown. It is incredibly effective at generating options and envisioning the future, deepening our ability to think and strategize beyond the provable, empirical world.
Key Take-Aways:
Imagination is useful in generating options and seeing how things might play out
Imagination is incredibly difficult to understand until we push ourselves into it
Imagination is also difficult to trust at times, and can be intellectually unpleasant
There are systems and processes that can make you and your team more imaginative
The Value of Discernment
Apart from all of the personal and team growth this all hopefully implies, let’s wrap up by focusing on how valuable better discernment will be as you manage and partner with people.
Key Take-Aways:
Discernment and your understanding of ability will help in all interactions
You might not get as far as you want every time, but you can avoid failing with people
We must trust what is instead of what should be, and use that to find the best starting points
Next Steps & Discussion Points
What parts of Reality, Reason, and Imagination can you develop?
What parts of Reality, Reason, and Imagination would boost your team’s performance most?
What parts of Reality, Reason, and Imagination can you help people on other teams boost?
What personal commitment can you make to exercising more discernment and strategy in conversations?
We look forward to seeing you!