To overcome lethargy focus on promise

Last month I shared my thinking about lethargy being the root of our productivity puzzle with Mike Ogilvie’s Business Builder Forum in Eastbourne. I was made really welcome and as an added bonus I had the opportunity to meet up afterwards with Andrew Wright who is an expert in neuroscience.

This was a fabulous conversation because Andrew gave me all the scientific reasons to back up what I know to be true. Improving productivity requires us to change what we are doing, and do things differently. As humans we resist change. We often like the idea, provided it doesn’t affect us.

What I know to be true, is that one of the best ways to overcome lethargy associated with change is to undertake the change within a wider programme – one which excites and engages everybody involved – I call this promise. So, rather than implementing a new piece of software in isolation, stop pushing water uphill, and run a programme which creates excitement and involvement, of in which the software is an enabler, rather than the outcome.

What Andrew shared is that at the level of the brain, lethargy is the result of the brain’s natural predisposition to conserve energy.  If it can get through the day without doing any real thinking it will be very happy.  It would far rather use patterns and predictions to help us function than the hard work of ‘thinking’.

In order to ‘trick’ the brain to overcome this lethargy, he explained we need to engage emotions.  To create an impetus for action we need purpose, connection, agency and autonomy, and opportunity for creativity and involvement or stake in our work. 

This is the reason that most software projects are so painful – they rarely deliver any of these things.  After all, unless you’re a geek like I am, who gets excited about new software?

For me, it’s a bit like falling in love.  When our heart rules our head, we do all kinds of things with which we wouldn’t usually bother.  We put in the effort, we travel vast distances, we put on our best behaviour.

Organisations that want to improve productivity might like to consider how they stack up against their promise.  Is it widely shared, and is everybody in love with it?  If the answer is not yet, your first project has been defined.