Hello, and happy day before spring (in the northern hemisphere)!
I took last week off of work to be home with the kids during spring break. I had a really great time!
Leading up to the week I created a to-do list on the latest page in my notebook; all the things I’d love to get done with the time.
Importantly, this is a “could do” list instead of a “must do” list. Tasks have a tendency to create stress, but a mindset shift to treat them as optional makes them more fun. They’re the paint for the canvas of your life, and you can choose which paints to use and when.
For the record I only crossed out 8 of the 14 items on the list 🙂
I loved how much time I had to pursue things outside of work. I stayed off the computer most of the week. It gave me plenty of time to do outdoor work, and it also gave me a ton of time to exercise, which is tough during work. These breaks are really important to rest and recharge!
During the week I ran 17.4 miles and walked 11.3, including a five mile ruck. The running was all Zone 2, meaning low heart rate. Because it was Zone 2, I had good recovery and could run four miles one day and be ready to go again the next. My goal going into next week is to figure out how to incorporate more exercise into my normal working day.
Do you have a break coming up or in the recent past? What did you get up to? Email me back at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz.
Kevin
A Quote
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“Compassion without accountability gets you nowhere. Accountability without compassion gets you alienated. Blending the two is the essence of leadership.”
— From “Conflict Without Casualties” by Nate Regier
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Three Things
1 – 🎙️ Richard Rumelt on Lenny’s Podcast – I know Richard’s name having read, and loved, “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” in 2018. This section of the podcast video is about bad strategy: “High level goals, they’re not strategy…they’re ambitions. And ambitions are not a strategy. A list of all the different things you wish would happen is not strategy.”
2 – 📙 “First Principles” Book About Roman and Greek Influence on America’s Founding – I didn’t realize how much our founding fathers studied Roman and Greek philosophy, and how much it influenced their thinking on how to create America. It’s also full of great stories. Washington was almost shot dead in the woods. Harvard ranked and seated students by their social standing, and the breakfast served was bread, butter, and beer. Jefferson never set foot in the American frontier.
3 – 🙈 Dr. Seuss’ Unorthodox Taxidermy – I didn’t know Dr. Seuss created animal sculptures in addition to his books. His dad worked at the zoo and would ship home beaks, antlers, and horns after animals died. Dr. Seuss would imagine the rest of the animal and created 18 sculptures that live on today. I saw them in an art gallery in Austin and they’re really neat!
Deeper Dive on How Your Information Diet Influences Strategic Outcomes
There’s a causal chain from your information diet to your strategic outcomes. That means you can improve your outcomes by improving your information diet.
Today I’ll walk you through the causal chain from the things you consume to the outcomes you drive. I’ll also make some suggestions on how you can design your information diet to improve those outcomes.
What’s an information diet?
An information diet is the set things you put into your brain. It’s the people you talk to. The books you read. The videos you watch. The podcasts you listen to. Anything that gets put into your brain is part of your information diet.
The high level causal chain
An information diet is interesting in and of itself. However, it’s power comes from its ability to influence outcomes for the important things we care about. I’ll walk you through this causal chain below:
A strategy is a set of coherent actions taken to solve a problem.
Actions are taken based on our decisions.
Decisions are made based on how we see a situation (our assessment).
Assessments are influenced by our thinking; our judgment, intuition, mental models, etc.
Thinking is influenced by the information we consume.
So the chain looks like this: information diet → thinking → assessments → decisions → actions → strategic outcomes.
All aspects of that causal chain can be interrogated and improved to influence outcomes! I’ll dive into all of these areas in the chain over time, but today I’ll focus on the information diet.
How exactly does an information diet influence outcomes?
There’s a long-term and a short-term layer to our information diet and how it influences our outcomes. The long-term is about improving your brain’s ability to solve problems. The short-term is about the specific strategic situation at hand.
Long-Term
The long-term influence is about mental models, principles, and intuition. This is the deeper influence on your brain that you’ll take with you wherever you go. This is like developing a library or a toolbox of skills and concepts that you can apply in situations.
Things like this newsletter and high quality books, for example, can impart the principles and mental models you need. The more high quality information you consume, the bigger and more powerful your library becomes.
Intuition is essentially pattern-matching. It’s the “System 1” part of your brain making reactionary decisions based on historical data (we explored “System 1” a little bit, here and here). This is why a lot of business schools do case studies. Case studies give you access to decades of business situations that you file away. In the future you might experience a situation that feels like one you’ve read, but didn’t experience directly.
Consuming broadly gives you more patterns to recognize than you’d have just on living your own life, which improves your intuition faster.
Short-Term
One of my favorite quotes on strategy comes from Richard Rumelt. It makes the concept of strategy very accessible.
“A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.”
As it relates to an information diet, this is about setting up a system where you have access to the people, data, conversations, and insights that enable you to comprehend the situation.
The higher quality your short-term information, the better your assessments will be.
So now we know about the causal chain from information diet to our actions and outcomes. We also know that there’s a long-term and a short-term component to our information diet.
How we do leverage this to improve our outcomes? What are the principles we should use to design our information diet?
Principles for Designing Consumption
There are four key principles I use in designing my information diet: Diversity, Relevance, Credibility, and Adjustment.
Diversity – Just like your food diet should include different nutrients and food groups, your information diet should do the same. Access a lot of variety. Look at multiple viewpoints or sources on a topic. Choose a variety of channels (books, videos, newsletters, etc.). Explore different genres and disciplines.
Relevance – Consume things that are relevant to what you need to learn or know; things that are relevant to your goals. This makes them more interesting and you’ll retain the information better because you’ll be using it right away.
Credibility – Develop your judgment on quality and choose sources with credibility. Ray Dalio uses a term called “believability” throughout his book, “Principles,” that applies here. You want to pick sources that have a track record of success and can explain their approach.
“I define believable people as those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished the thing in question—who have a strong track record with at least three successes—and have great explanations of their approach when probed.”
Adjustment – Assess how well your information sources are contributing to your long-term and short-term layers of thinking. Make adjustments as you and your situation change. What’s relevant to you changes – so change your sources when that happens. If you discover a new source, consider giving it a bigger slot in your diet. Switch up your podcast feed. Read something from a different genre.
As for the specific information sources and channels, that’s what you get to have fun deciding! Mine is mostly books, followed by podcasts, then newsletters, then articles, then videos. I use the principles above in curating my own information diet.
Let me know if you’re interested in knowledge management – how I manage and use all of this content. It’s beyond the scope of today’s newsletter, but I’d be happy to write something up if you’re interested.
” Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.”
– Harry S. Truman
Tactics for your Short-Term Information Diet
Lastly, I wanted to talk about some tactics and ideas for navigating information diet in your business. You’re trying to drive outcomes in your work, and many of you work as part of a larger team. What does an information diet look like at work?
Data – There’s a limitless number of things you can measure, and they’re relatively cheap to produce. That means it’s very easy to get overloaded with numerical information. But going back to the earlier principles, how much of it is relevant or credible? Be clear on what you need to know and why. What data helps you comprehend the situation? What helps you see the challenges? Be intentional about your data diet.
Meetings – Who are you meeting? For how long and how frequently? Why are you meeting? What’s the agenda? These are the elements you can design to influence your diet. Be intentional about selecting who you want to meet with and why. Back to the principles, think about credibility – who has trusted context that you need? Who can challenge and strengthen your thinking? And make sure you’re killing a meeting when it no longer serves your purposes (adjustment).
Questions – As a leader, you guide the dialogue, and you do it through your questions. What do you want to know? Why do you want to know it? Be present in the meeting and don’t let the conversation wander aimlessly. Seek out uncertainty. Seek out risk. Seek out alternative viewpoints. Probe for depth of understanding – find the limits of you and your team’s knowledge.
“Stay informed about how things are going. Execution demands that you create a means to stay informed.”
As with everything, be conscious and intentional about designing your system of information. You have agency and can influence all of the above items. Going back to our causal chain, these are the elements that start the process of assessing a situation so that you can make decisions and drive appropriate action.
Bringing it All Together
There’s a causal chain from your information diet to your strategic outcomes: information diet –> thinking –> assessments –> decisions –> actions –> strategic outcomes.
Your information diet are the things you put into your brain. The long-term layer is about the mental models, principles, and intuition you have access to. The short-term layer is about setting up a system that enables you to comprehend the situation you’re in.
The four principles for designing your information diet are: Diversity, Relevance, Credibility, and Adjustment.
The tactics you can use to influence your information diet at work are: Data, Meetings, and Questions.
Be conscious about setting up your systems because they put you on a stronger path to your strategic outcomes.
Call To Action
As Richard Rumelt said in the quote earlier, most of strategy is figuring out what’s going on! Start this week by figuring out what your information diet looks like.
What is your long-term layer? Do you have a diverse set of relevant and credible sources that you consistently consume? How could you improve that?
What is your short-term layer? Do you have the right data, meetings, and questions to know what’s going on in your business? How could you improve that?
I’d love to hear about your information diet! What sources do you love the most? What changes did you make after reading this? Email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz and let me know!
Have fun with it this week!
Kevin
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