Okay, we've asked you throughout the weeks what a takeaway was that you guys had, if you could share with us what maybe your top favorite thing and I know that's going to be hard because there was so much good stuff.
Thank you Dion for imparting all of this good stuff to us for these 13 weeks taking the time to, to, to help us learn all this. What was your guys's number one favorite thing that you've learned over the last 90 days.
We'd love to hear that. And Elaine I do see that you said, the upstairs, staying upstairs versus downstairs so that's a really good takeaway.
Okay, well, without further ado, as you guys are putting those in, we'll take a look at those and keep looking for them. Dion, I'm going to hand it over to you for the wrap up of making your learning permanent.
Thank you, Jenny really appreciate love the comments. I like reducing switching costs, Stephen that's great.
Elephant on the pathway. Great to see all the comments really appreciate it. The key here is, don't feel like, oh my goodness, I have to have mastered every single thing that we did over these 12 weeks now week 13 as we summarize, but you do need to have a couple
of core elements in place and looking at the comments there. Looks like you guys are on it. You know, the cue book, deep work, the some of the other elements which I'll mention here at the end.
So as I go through this.
I wanted to just point out that one of the best things you can do as a leader is hit the pause button every now and again, and summarize what your team has accomplished.
And so just to remind you again of this idea. You know the three times this really helps one is if you're going through a very intense time of change just like we are at Brilliant, then hitting the pause button at the end of a week and saying
look at what we did this week and usually it's amazing even though people have a general sense of what you did just hearing it, one after the other is a tremendous sense of it's inspiring.
It's a sense of it creates a sense of togetherness. And wow, look what we can do as a team. If, but then also doing it regularly like once every six months, you know, hit your, hit your review and say okay this is what happened this year.
And in that it's not just the financials or how many new customers or sales certainly those are elements. But what did we do as a team the projects how people grew some of the new things you know you took on hey we installed deep work in the last six months
it's now become you know part of our culture, those kind of summaries really really inspiring to a team. And so I don't want to do the same for you.
But I want to go as we go through this and by the way sometimes just helps to remind somebody on an individual basis too. So I want to do that for you.
And the purpose of doing this is exactly that for you to get an overview, because we kind of learn different things. When we stop and see the big picture so today's a big picture, not to make you feel overwhelmed like oh there's 10 more things.
So we hit episode one on week one, and we talked about moving to prime. And yes, you will get a cheat sheet which has been dropped there for you so if you want to click it and follow along you're most welcome.
I definitely don't want to read every single thing this is a pretty substantial cheat sheet. So you'll see it's quite a few pages long, but then it does.
It does summarize an entire season of work in one shot. So, success to prime. We learned a new paradigm for leadership, the idea of the leader being the conductor, the lead the conductor is the only musician who does not make a sound, but becomes powerful
by making other musicians powerful so we talked a lot about this idea of the paradigm or the metaphor of a conductor, that your job as a leader is to conduct your team, no matter you know where you are in the organization.
And then we introduced the concept of becoming a team of leaders, not just a team with the leaders, yes sure you still have a leader, but now the leader has to learn to lead leaders so that's an upgrade for the leader, but it's an upgrade for everyone else to think like a leader.
And to help drive this home. We use the firefighter net analogy, we said imagine a firefighter, all holding on to the net. And obviously if the person jumping from the building.
We want to be able to catch them in this case support the business is the analogy, and so that there has to be tension in the net and so tension means that we have healthy balance that nobody's pulling too hard nobody's just letting go.
Nobody's being so compliant and so agreeable. If we all just agree then the net lies on the ground doesn't support us.
the business. So we talked about tension. There's a healthy tension and there's an unhealthy tension.
Unhealthy tension, you have somebody walking and just rips the net out of people's hands. Then we
talked a lot about, you know, whose hand should be on there and as leaders how can we encourage
people who are not speaking up enough to speak up and to take more responsibility or at least
pull for their side of the business. So that was all what we did in episode one and that set us up
beautifully for talking about what on earth are we doing, what's the purpose of our business.
We talked a lot about clarity. That clarity, you know, that the mist in your mind, you know,
becomes the fog in the organization. That as the organization grows, complexity comes in and with
complexity is a loss of clarity and so complexity is the enemy of clarity and we use this concept
that if you're still dealing with complexity, you're still the student but when you're dealing
with simplicity, you've become the master. So when you find things in your organization are simple
because simplicity drives speed. That was from Jack Welsh, so from GE. So the whole of GE was built on
self-confidence, drive simplicity, drive speed. So it's an incredibly powerful idea. So simplify,
simplify, simplify and to help us do that, we asked ourselves three key questions. Number one,
what are we doing as an organization? Why are we doing it? Simon Sinek said we should start
with that question, which is fine or and specifically, how do I fit in? And then we had a lot of fun
coming up with creative one-line descriptions. Anybody use the one-line description idea?
This is my job, you know, coming up with a one-line. Don't be limited by title and formal functions and
so we shared quite a few ideas of one-line job descriptions and so the power of that is everybody
now knows what everybody else in the team is doing. So that was week two. That's already,
we'd created a lot more clarity, there were a lot of worksheets and then week three, we introduced
the idea of how do we measure success and we called it the triple bottom line and that is
how much money do we make, how many people do we reach and how alive is the team doing it and we
measure that aliveness by their shiny eyes. Does the team have shiny eyes and if they don't
have shiny eyes, then we ask the first question of leadership. Anybody remember what the first
question of leadership is? What am I being that this is the result? What am I being as a leader
that my team does not have shiny eyes? We don't do the weak thing of why
are my team not getting their act together? I told them we're doing this, why are they, you know, my
team is done, why don't they listen to me? That's not great leadership. Great leadership is
to be the conductor and so what am I being as a leader that this is the result and then we talked
about one of the powerful things of understanding the triple bottom line is understanding how much
money we make and we talked about using the rule of three and the rule of three is an easy way to
summarize our profitability, our revenues, our costs and so on. So, we can see how much profit we're making
and then how much of that profit did we keep? In other words, our efficiency. So, from our
profit, we have to pay expenses and salaries and so on, we end up with a net profit. So,
how profitable are we and then how efficient are we? So, that landed us at the end of
season three, sorry, episode three. All good so far? We have a lot to cover so I'm just going
to keep checking in with you that you're still awake and alive. Very good, excellent, excellent.
Then, we talked about a much more substantive subject around creating a culture of trust
and this might be one of the biggest needle movers of all the things we talked about
because if we pull this off, the amount of innovation, creativity, sense of belonging,
leadership development comes out of this atmosphere, this safe environment or what Simon
Sonney called a circle of safety because we went through the brain chemistry of when your team
members feel safe, all the things that it releases there and I won't read the whole list
and then we talked about why it's dumb to let your team feel unsafe or untrusted because it
literally changes their brain chemistry, they're going to protective mode and it literally impairs
their ability to be creative, to commit because now their brains are trying to protect their work,
they're trying to protect their job. So, if you're making people feel like, hey, if you do that again,
I'm going to fire you, if that's in the air and people feel that, oh, I don't know,
am I going to get fired, am I going to get fired, you have to remove that.
completely. People need to know if you're at risk of being fired you will know because we'll give
you a 30-day period and we say 30 days we want to see these changes otherwise we're done. If we have
not had that conversation your job is safe. This is really important. I'm amazed how we create these
toxic environments in business and we're poisoning people's bodies physically and then we're telling
them bring your a-game so are we killing them slowly you know or maybe not so slowly we're
telling them to bring their a-game and so that was why we thought this was such a powerful way and
then we gave 10 habits of a trust-based culture just how we want to be with each other you know
how we speak about each other how we do give negative feedback how we give encouragement we
went through those 10 habits of a great trust-based culture. Cool and now we get to the one that many
of you really liked and that's the Q management tool and we talked about that we have to find time
not just for the important but for the significant the things we want to do with our lives and we
said you can be creative and organized we broke the myth that you either creative or organized
no you can be both and you need a system that your mind trusts and if to do's keep jumping
back into your mind that's because your mind doesn't have a system it trusts and if you find
yourself your mind being freed somebody already mentioned that at the beginning of the session
having a free mind finding that freedom because you know it's in the system you've queued it up
it's in your queue system and we talked about paper being your control your one ring to bind
them all your command and control center is on paper why because your brain can map that
visually can map that and you can remember the little squiggle line on the side and the little
note and it had a thing on the side your brain literally maps the looking when it's digital
it's moving all the time your brain can't map that so yes we use digital tools but for the
command and control piece the book is the way to go but if any of you uh forget how to do it
electronically i've been trying this for over 30 something years and i'm always interested to learn
because usually by the way don't tell me you've got it together unless you've used it for six
months because people come after one or two months oh i've got this powerful tool then three months
later it's like oh yeah i forgot i got busy so we talked about q stands for catcher use and
enhance so you're always tweaking your system when you drop something so that your brain learns you
can really really trust this okay we're not going to go through the nuts and bolts of queue because
i think you kind of got that but the one biggie there is every monday morning start a new to-do
list if you forget everything else about q remember that one every monday morning start why
because it makes you ask those the three d's and the a question can you remember what they are
three d's and a when you find yourself writing the same item again and again you ask can i delete this
can i delay this can i delegate this or can i automate this so we talked about how to
that's the continual enhancement idea awesome then as we got to the middle of the course
in episode six we talked about getting work done at work and we talked a lot about this idea
of cognitive control so cognitive control is one of the big sort of buzzy words in in the
in the neuroscience community and we talked about how dividing your week up into buckets
it doesn't have to be perfectly that but as a starting point to start to group similar tasks
together to reduce switching costs and so the whole idea of switching cost is when you change
from task to task to task what's happening is even though you're you've moved on to the next
task your brain hasn't fully dropped the last one and he's transitioning to this one and there's
this fuzzy period this kind of low performance mode for about 20 to 40 minutes we call that
switching cost to switch from one thing to another that's why multitasking makes you dumb
so and i shared some research from the university of london about that and then we talked about you
need to be kind to your mind focus on just one thing and manage interruptions and when you do
this you'll find that your mental fatigue your cognitive fatigue at the end of the day will be
far far less so red flag if you're feeling mentally exhausted at the end of the day you're probably
paying a huge amount of switching cost during that day now sometimes that's life right sometimes just
this is what it is can't avoid it all the time but be aware that that's what that is
Okay. That was the halfway mark. Let me take a breather. Check in with you. How are we
doing, Jenny?
Doing well. Lots of comments. Lots of comments. I think we all like the one ring to rule.
Shandi says one ring to rule all other management tools regarding the QBook. Yeah.
Well, you may forget or may remember the comment last time I said that one ring to bind them
all. Somebody wrote ring binder. But here's the point, though. From these tools, you should
be feeling in yourself in control, feeling your mind being freed up, getting a command
and control center that's yours, operating in a culture that you love to work in, that
you feel trusted in. So as we're going through that, you know, I want us to be really dry
for clarity, simplicity and understanding what it is that we're doing. Okay. Let's look
at what we did the second half of the season. We spent two sessions, seven and eight, on
deep work. And we said this is your superpower to become the master of your craft. But I
would also add. It's also to make your contribution to the world is going to come from these sessions.
It's when you write a book. It's when you invent a new process. When you come up with
some new process in the company, we said this is the time that you work on the business,
not in it. We define deep work as focused, undistracted work on a task that pushes your
cognitive ability to their limit. Why? It's like gym. It's a workout. And so that, you know,
we want to do meaningful work, shallow work, answering emails, producing reports, going
from meeting to meeting, customer calls, all that. We need to do a certain amount of shallow
work. That's just life. But we have to be careful that if we spend too much time in
that shallow work state, you can permanently reduce your capacity of deep work. Because
what happens is the longer you spend in it, the less that muscle, it's like you've been
a couch potato from a cognitive discipline viewpoint. So shallow work is the couch potato
mode from a mental viewpoint. So while I worked so hard, no, you just lay on the TV, you just
lay on the couch and flick channels, you know, answered emails, click, click, click. Okay.
I like that image, because it just kind of inspires me to not be that person. I love
deep work. We talked a lot about, you know, be kind to your mind, you know, gather stuff
together. We talked about three types of work. There's deep work, think of a mountain cabin,
working on the business, not in it. And we're targeting about four hours uninterrupted.
Then we talked about focus work, think of a coffee shop. Then we're also looking for
uninterrupted work on existing work, that's just getting existing work done. And we batch
some of the stuff together to reduce switching costs. And we're targeting about two hours,
one to two hours, but two hours, I found is the better number there. General work is the
storefront, it's the shallow work, we have to do it, we're highly responsive to the team,
to customers, and we're really on the ball. And so we said, we have to change our culture,
you can't always give that instant answer on Slack, that instant response to a text,
that instant response to an email, that doesn't show that you're a high performance worker,
it just shows that all you do a lot of is shallow work. So don't do that, right? Have,
get permission to take four hours off when you talk to no one. And so I'm off doing my thing,
or two hours to do focus work. And we talked a lot about how to prepare. There's a lot of
detail in there, how to prepare and the different modalities for deep work.
And we talked about it comes down to three big challenges. Develop your ability to focus more
intensely for longer periods. So if you're starting off, and your deep work session last
40 minutes, and then you're out, fine. The next time 50, next time an hour, but you're pushing
towards your target for hours. So it's okay, if you don't get there right off the bat, that's fine.
But work towards that. The second thing is develop an ability, and it really is an ability
to resist and manage distractions. And then we talked about also reframe this as I love this
kind of work, make it something you look forward to, because this is your superpower, that helps
you make your contribution to the world. And for the for the moms out there, you know, doing this,
I know this, you know, if you have little ones around, this takes a lot more organization to get,
you know, longer periods of time where you can work, I certainly appreciate that if you're a mom
with or a dad at home with young kids, it takes a little more organization, but it doesn't change
the fact that it is.
It is deeply meaningful and feels very satisfying.
In episode nine, we kind of picked it up a bit
and talked about what does done mean
and the three quick steps to help you
kind of get a project going.
Take 60 seconds to visualize the end point.
I'm on a diet, so I have to visualize
what number will be on the scale when I stand on it.
We talked about, you know, a couple of techniques
like in your cue book, you know,
instead of just prioritizing everything,
ask yourself, what if I had a done for the day list?
And the acid test there is, at the end of the day,
if I've done my done for the day list,
would I feel satisfied?
So, you know, it's not just about what you have to get done,
but what would you love to do?
What would you, not just what do you have to do?
And then step two was do the first obvious thing, right?
We talked about, you know, get the broom
before you start cleaning the garage.
Just do the one obvious thing
and then do a microburst for 10 minutes.
Just work flat out for 10 minutes.
And what that will do is program your mind
and your whole ability to create momentum in the project.
And usually that will just drive you through the rest
of the project, however long that takes.
And I love this one thing that neuroscience has worked out,
that the word now, I'm gonna do it now,
lasts for about five seconds.
I've seen some research that says two and a half seconds,
whatever, but here's an interesting thing.
You normally will talk yourself out of anything
within five seconds.
I wanna do this, five seconds later,
if you haven't like, okay, I'm gonna visualize it,
I'm gonna, and you start the microburst and you're off
and you grab the first obvious thing,
you're much more likely to do it now.
Otherwise you'll just talk yourself out of it.
Now, the way you stop yourself from doing that
is put it in your cue book, cue it up,
and that way you can come back to it
and do these three steps.
And then episode 10 was fun because we spent time
on the six hats, the six ways of thinking.
And I did allude to the fact that in later seasons,
we'll talk about the other two hats,
we're a little more advanced.
And I don't know how many we've done of brilliance
in the last week and a half,
but we did another one yesterday for almost two hours,
we covered a tremendous amount of material.
And we have, I think we shared a notion template for this,
for those of you that use notion,
where you can literally just jump on
and then landing that blue hat to actual executable things
and who's doing what, when, and you're off to the races.
So if we have a six hat session,
what will happen in your culture is over time,
people will get to trust that this will actually,
good things will change.
It won't be like those three day offsides,
we will talk for three days and then three months later
as though we did nothing.
We've all been in those brainstorming sessions, right?
Which really is a tremendous waste of time
for the most part.
So that stops that from happening.
And then episode 11,
we talked about how to be a change agent.
And fundamentally we said there were three levels
to respond to change.
Level one is you're the critic, you resist change.
It's framed as, I don't like change.
And we talked a lot about that,
the threat of tomorrow's success is today's success.
And as leaders, we don't say,
well, our people won't change.
They won't do that.
We only say we haven't led them there yet.
So, and that, I think that statement came
from Craig Rochelle, which I appreciated.
And then level two, a bystander is more framed as,
well, I suppose change is okay.
Yeah, we can do this.
But people reach a certain change capacity limit
and they can't change anymore.
And sometimes that just happens in your team
and you have to keep your rate of change as a team member,
at least that as fast as the organization.
Or at some point you'll just hit that limit and time out
and go to another organization
which has a lower change rate that feels more comfortable.
And then the top one, we said level three
is the advocate for change,
where you realize that change is essential.
And so we gave some power questions to ask yourself.
If the company hired someone new to do my job,
what's the first thing that would change?
Or if change, there's been a bad response to change
you've suggested as a leader,
then you ask that first question of leadership.
What am I being as a leader?
You know, that this is the response.
So that's all we went through.
And then last week we went through finding delight at work.
We came up with a very practical exercise
where you can plot joy against your contribution.
And then we said,
Firstly, we want high joy, high contribution.
And we went through all the different components
and then there was a step-for-step guide
of taking all your tasks, putting them in those categories
and then how to upgrade them.
But the bottom line is you generally wanna get rid
of number fours and upgrade twos and threes
as much as you can to get them closer to a one.
And then, so as we went through that process,
the idea there was to bring you
to a new understanding and joy.
Okay, very good.
Okay, where are we on?
Oh, somebody remembered the Porsche or the Miata?
That's great.
Speaking my language there.
I love that, yeah, yeah.
So, you know, it's all the perfectionists out there, right?
Go wash the car, suddenly it's seven hours later
because now you've done every little detail
or you just decide, you know what done means?
Done means this in 40 minutes
and this is what I'm gonna do.
All right, there you go.
Any questions about that?
So that is a tremendous amount of material to be working on.
And I wanna encourage you to go back,
review the materials as often as you need to.
It does take several hearings.
So Jenny, would you say,
since you've been through this four times,
did you get it the first time around
and, you know, which ones did you pick up on pretty quickly
and which ones took a little longer?
Sure.
No, I didn't get it all the first time around.
And I think I realized
I wasn't getting it all the first time around
when I kept hearing because you kept reminding
and saying, remember, we do this, this, and this
and reminding me of the process for each step.
The things that I grabbed ahold of
were definitely the cue book, the buckets
and what done looks like.
Those just, they speak my language.
They put just my way,
the way that it makes me feel when I'm working
is everything in its place and everything has a place.
So I know exactly where everything is
and when I'm using those.
What took me a little bit longer
was definitely the deep work
and understanding working on the business and what is new
because sometimes there can be those little subtleties
maybe you've done it before,
but you're expanding whatever it is a task
or you're upgrading a task.
And so that is something new
because you're taking it where it hasn't been before.
And so that was something
that took me a little bit longer.
I think it took me a couple of explanations
to really get that in practically what that looked like.
But I do wanna say that going through it this time
has just been delightful
because I trust this process
and there is no pressure that's attached to it.
So I'm so excited for everyone else.
Oh, are you muted?
You're muted.
Thank you.
What's happening here though is we're developing language.
So the first thing we're doing is we're changing perception
of how we see a situation
and now we're developing common language.
So we can also speak about,
and when we use that language, we all know what we mean.
And so what happens is the cultural,
the language of the organization
starts to develop its own expression.
And when new people come in,
it's a little bit of sipping from the fire hose.
I know Cindy just joined us recently.
So Cindy, I'm sure you felt that a little like,
whoa, every third word is what are they talking about?
You know, and then you catch on
and you get, oh, so okay, I catch on.
But it's much easier to come into a culture.
I know that Jalen shared with us
that it was a lot easier coming into a culture
where this was already functional.
So, you know, if you're saying
how will new people come into this?
Don't worry about that.
It goes a lot faster for the people
coming into something that's already functional
than for those of us that are building it
for the first time,
because we're all learning together
and we're all kind of making mistakes
and we're figuring it out.
So I wanted to encourage you on this idea
start to develop your language,
start to use these terms that we've defined
or create ones that are meaningful to you.
Okay.
How are we doing?
Doing really well.
Okay.
Any questions or feedback on,
this is your last opportunity for a few weeks
to ask questions around these different ideas, thoughts.
So one of the things that,
you know, we talked a lot about
use the ice cube analogy objective here.
One of the.
practices is to do leadership training every week. Why? Even
if it's only half an hour, why? It's because it's turning up the
temperature one degree at a time on the ice cube. And as it goes
from, you know, 16 to 25 to 30, when it hits 32, it melts by
itself. And everybody wants to concentrate on how did you get
the ice cube to melt? That is the wrong question. The question
is, what was the process? Jenny said, I trust the process. What
was the process that got the ice cube to melt? That's what we're
sharing with you. And it needs a place to land. And the best
place we found, best practice that I've, you know, done over
many years is do this regular weekly shift where we all take a
moment, and we invest in our people above what they can just
produce for the company. It's not just about sucking every,
you know, drop out of everybody in the team. That's not the
idea here. The idea is to empower them. So if they leave
us, they're the smartest person in the room wherever they go,
because we've exposed them to the best leadership and
management practices. Awesome.