Overcoming constraints

Timestamps 

00:00:00: Introduction 00:01:16: What is a constraint? 00:01:51: How a constraint makes you feel 00:02:58: Three stages of constraint emotion 00:03:52: The "can if..." thinking 00:06:22: Take all the constraints out the room 00:06:51: Big ambition and significant constraint 00:09:20: Halloween for Hunger example 00:12:24: Adam's Career Advice 00:13:49: Final thoughts  

Interview Transcription 

Sarah Ellis:  Hi and welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I'm Sarah, one of your hosts, and this episode is part of a special series that we've created to bring to life some of the ideas and insights in our new book You Coach You.  In this series of six episodes we will be talking to experts to get their thoughts on how we can help ourselves through some of the knottier moments in our Squiggly Career.  It might be coping with a challenging relationship at work, feeling like your progress has stalled, or maybe figuring out how to find more meaning from your job.  Every episode relates to a chapter in You Coach You and today we're focusing on our progression chapter and specifically, how we can overcome some of the constraints that come our way during our career.  You will hear me talking to the brilliant Adam Morgan, author of A Beautiful Constraint.  Together we'll talk about how having a stubbornly adaptive mindset is important and also how sometimes constraints can be moments of curiosity and creativity that can create new opportunities for our career.  I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with Adam and get some good ideas for action and practical hints and tips to take away.  Adam Morgan:  A constraint is a limitation of some kind.  So, a constraint is something that limits you that is usually externally imposed, or you feel it's externally imposed; so, time typically, "I haven't got enough time to do this"; it can be about money; it can be resource; it can be, "I've got to earn a certain salary, I've got a certain amount of bills to pay.  That is a constraint I have around the career or the career move I can make".  They are usually, as I say, externally or we feel they are externally imposed upon us and that's what makes them feel restrictive.  It's this kind of, "I don't have a choice, I've got to put up with this thing".  The key thing here is the relationship between the constraint and the ambition.  Naturally, and I include myself in this when I started exploring this, we feel ourselves to be the victim of a constraint.   What happens when you feel the victim of a constraint is you reduce the level of ambition accordingly.  "Oh wow, okay, so I've only got this amount of time to do this particular task", for instance.  Let's just think about task related within a particular job.  In that case, "I'll inevitably have to compromise on the quality of what I do within it".  So, you reduce the level of ambition to fit the nature of the constraint.  I initially thought that when you go out and look at people and talk to people, some people are just naturally good at making constraints transformative, and some people are just naturally unable to do it.  I thought it was to do with nature, not nurture.  I went out to interview a lot of people in a lot of different spheres, some including careers and some beyond careers.  One of the most brilliant people that I met, who was actually really good at transforming constraints said, "I think what you will find is they are not three different kinds of people, there's victim, neutraliser, transformer.  It is actually three stages we all go through".  We will all naturally start off in victim mode.  Even I, they said, who spent all my time transforming constraints into opportunities, I always start off feeling a victim to it, it is perfectly natural.  The first thing is to recognise it's natural to feel a victim to it.  Equally, what we need to get from that, because we are ambitious people, we want to progress, we need to evolve to a more transformative way of thinking about the constraint as something that could be a positive for us.  It could be an opportunity, it could perhaps be a gift actually that leads us to find a solution, or a way of progressing in our career, that actually we wouldn't have arrived at and actually could be better than the perhaps linear, more predictable path that we otherwise would have had.  That's really what making a constraint beautiful is about.  It's about the strategies that take you from that victim mode to that more transformative phase around the constraint.  I think, there's this thought that I learned from somebody, who at the time was the Chief Technical Officer at Warburton's Bakery, Colin Kelly called "Can if".  He said, "When I'm working on a difficult problem of any kind, I don't allow myself or anybody around me working on that problem to start a sentence with the words, "I can't do that because…".  I have to start with, "I can do that if…".  That is a really powerful thought for me because it does two or three things that are essential.  The first is, "I can do that if…", is something that hangs onto the ambition, first of all, so that is that the bit I'm being stubborn about.  It says, "I'm going to be adaptive around how I arrive at the solution to that ambition.  It keeps optimism and curiosity alive, so it makes us curious about what other ways there might be of getting to deliver that overall direction for me.  The story it tells about myself, if we believe that we are the stories that we tell ourselves, the story that tells about myself is, "I am a person who finds lateral solutions to problems, rather than I am a person who finds problems intractable and gets defeated by them".  To your point, I think actually when you start to think about having candid conversations, having two or three other people with you to just sit down, over a glass of wine or something, and just think about other ways we might get to where I want to get to is useful.  Inevitably, there is a certain kind of tunnel vision you develop as you drive towards an ambition and a particular purpose.  As you say, when you get knocked back from it, you think, "I can't see outside this.  I've been driving towards it so clearly".    So, you need that peripheral vision, you need those other people who can say, "Actually, hang on, you haven't got that job, but maybe you could go and work with a supplier or a partner for a year".  "I can make progress if I go and work with them for a year, I'll then have an authority when I come back into that role in two years' time that I wouldn't otherwise have had, because I'd stayed within the company all the time".  Or, "I can make progress even though somebody else is in role if I practise my leadership skills or I get the company to send me on some leadership courses, so that by the time I get there, I am much more practised in a number of leadership qualities that I otherwise wouldn't have had".  So, I think it is much easier to do it with some intelligent naivety around you, people who know you, at the same time are not so close to you, possibly even outside the business, who can just push you a little bit outside your natural -- stop you being stubborn in the wrong places.  Don't be stubborn in the wrong places, be stubborn in the right places.  I've spent a lot of my time, in my career, leading brainstorms and what the client always wanted to do and what we always agreed to do was, "Let's take all the constraints out the room.  I want to come up with some brilliant new ideas about where I could go in my career or what this product could be or moon waffles, or whatever it happens to be.  Let's take all the constraints out the room because constraints are restrictive, they will stop us being all we could be", and you come up with all these wonderful ideas.  At the end of the day, the constraints come back into the room and 99% of those ideas wither and die and you are left with one small thing in the corner.    Actually, if you look at breakthrough and if we think of breakthrough with our own personal lives, I'm betting it has been the balance between an ambition and a constraint in some of kind of way.  You think back personally to, I don't know, when I quit smoking or when I ran the marathon or whatever I happened to do, usually it's been a combination of an ambition and a constraint.  So, a propelling question says, "We're not going to take the constraint out, what we're going to do is we're going to have a big ambition and we're going to have a significant constraint and we are going to put them in the same question".  It is the combination of those two things which don't belong together that if you talk to cognitive scientists will say, "They make the brain very uncomfortable, because the brain doesn't think these two things belong together, and it forces you to question the relationship between those two things".  I call them a propelling question because it propels you out of the assumptions you have been making up to now.  It forces you to find new kinds of relationships, new kinds of ways of thinking, new kinds of approaches.  And the mistake that people make when they are trying to develop their own propelling questions is think, "You're just talking about a big ambition".  It's not, it's the combination of that big ambition and that significant constraint.  So, "How could I be twice as satisfied with my current role when they won't promote me for another two years?" that is a propelling question.  I hadn't thought about that before.  I assumed I would only be satisfied if I got promoted.  I don't want to be as happy, I want to be twice as happy or five times as happy.  Dial up the ambition and the constraint.  That's when it gets really interesting.    If you dramatically dial up the time constraint, in a separate kind of way, we're talking about the frustrations of this, but thinking it is going to be a two-year cycle, "How could I get promoted in one year?" is kind of interesting, "How could I promote in three months?" that's a whole different level of lateral thinking, that's a whole different level of "Can if" that you need to generate.  When you do propelling questions, dialling up the constraint and the ambition at the same time is the thing that becomes really stimulating.  Of course, it makes you uncomfortable, but being productively uncomfortable is what Squiggly Careers are all about, right?  It is about being productively uncomfortable, not uncomfortably uncomfortable, but productively uncomfortable, and I think that is the benefit of something like a propelling question and can if gives just enough structure to allow us to move from victim to transformation.  I think just enough structure and just enough strategy is essential in what we do and how we live.  In the spirit of talking about how just a few simple techniques and tools can be useful, we had a very interesting experience the other day where we were contacted by a teacher from Canada, in British Columbia.  If you flew into Vancouver and drove five hours east you'd come to this school, Summerland Secondary School.  He was teaching an elective course at 8.30am in the morning on Thursdays in the cold of a Canadian winter during lockdown to a business class.  He thought, "What shall I teach?" and he came across the book, A Beautiful Constraint, and thought, "Well, I'll teach this".  He taught these poor students, getting up in the cold and miserable dark of a Canadian winter to go and voluntarily, it's an elective class, learn this thing.  They then had an interesting point where they came to Halloween.  The schoolchildren do an annual Halloween food drive called Halloween for Hunger, which fills the foodbanks in the local community over Christmas.  It is a very important thing, but they thought, "It's lockdown".  We go and we knock door-to-door and we ask them for their food and they give us their food and we take it away.  Nobody is going to do that in lockdown, they aren't opening their doors to people, even nice charming people like us.  Their initial response was, "Victim".  "We just can't do it this year, we will have to give up".  Then one of them, a 17-year-old called Jessica said, "Do you know what, let's just try applying the principles of A Beautiful Constraint.  What's our propelling question?  Our propelling question is, 'How can we have a successful door-to-door food drive when, significant constraint, people won't open their doors to us?' that is the propelling question".  Initially you feel victim, "We can't.  If they won't open their doors, we cannot have a door-to-door food drive".  They had two can ifs.  The first can if was, "We can if we leaflet drop them in advance, so we'll tell them that we're coming round, so, we're not going to make it spontaneous".  Second, can if, "We ask them to leave the food in a box on the doorstep.  They don't have to open the door, we will just pick it up".  That's what they did, this was last year.  They found two unexpected benefits, and I think unexpected benefits are a key theme that perhaps we have not talked enough about in this, which is you have tried to solve one problem and unexpected benefits come out of it.    The unexpected benefits were, if you ask people in advance to leave food on the doorstep, they leave more food on the doorstep than they would have done spontaneously, because actually they spend more time doing it.  Secondly, much though they like their neighbours, because you do not have to stop and chat to them, you get round more houses in your allocated two or three hours, or however long you've for your thing.  So, you are collecting more food, more quickly.  Last year, using these two simple techniques, they collected four times the amount of food they had in any previous year.  That is really interesting isn't it, because at the age of 17 or 18, you are never going to forget that?  That is going to be a lesson that you have learned, and that was forced on them by the limitation of lockdown.  They wouldn't have chosen to do it, but once you have learned that you can't unlearn it again.  They are never going to go back to doing what they did before.  They have now got a completely different way to do it.  She says, "We moved from victim, to neutraliser to transformer and that transformative approach has completely changed not only the way we think about generating food, but actually how I'm going to progress in my life".  Sarah Ellis:  Adam, we always ask all of our guests this on Squiggly Careers Podcast, but I'd love to know from you one piece of career advice or it can just be life advice, that you'd like to share with our listeners.  Adam Morgan:  I am going to offer a piece of advice that actually I was given last year.  I was having a fascinating conversation with this guy in America who'd written a book about soft power, and we were introduced and so we had a phone call together, nice phone call and chat about what he was doing, what I was doing.  Then we got to the end of the call and this guy, I don't know maybe he was early 30s, he said, "Can I give you a piece of advice, Adam?"  I went, "Okay", I wasn't expecting it.  I didn't think we'd got to that, that is fine.  He said, "I don’t think I know what you want out of this call.  What do you want out of this call?"  I said, "I don't know, I just thought we were catching up meeting each other".  He said, "No, my advice is know what you want out of every conversation that you have".  Clearly at some level, if you do that all the time it can become a bit tedious, sometimes coffee is just a coffee, but he made a really good point I think.  I'm in a more entrepreneurial phase of my life now, me being the only driver of this whole business, but that sense of being much more conscious about what I want out of each meeting and what success would look like out of it is key for me.  In particular I've got much better at asking for things.  I found if you ask for things in meetings and in networking in particular, you get two or three times more out of the meeting than you do on your own.  Sarah Ellis:  Thank you so much for listening to today's episode.  Next in our special series, you'll hear Helen talking to David Hieatt who is the founder of DO Lectures, so I'm really excited to hear that conversation because I'm very much hoping, after a couple of years of planning to go, and for very obvious reasons not making it, to go to DO Lectures in 2022.  Of course, You Coach You is out now if you'd like to grab yourself a copy.  There are more than 50 ideas for action, 100 coach-yourself questions and lots of tools to try out, whether you want to develop in a new direction, build your belief or invest in your resilience reserves.  Hopefully there's something to help you with your challenges and also to make the most of your opportunities in your career.  We'd really love you to support and share our work, so do let us know what you think of the book, if you've started to read it already, and tag us in your posts and pictures @amazingif.  Thanks so much and we'll speak to you again soon.