The ant’s way
Are you familiar with the ant’s story? Did you ask, “Which one?” Here is my retelling of it.
The Ant’s Way — Lost
In Seattle, there lived an ant. She worked at a reputed firm. She used to arrive at work early, focus on her work and produce a lot. She was happy. She had a boss, a lion. The lion wanted to lead, having recently been trained in a workshop that —
“Without initiative, leaders are simply workers in leadership positions.” — Bo Bennett, an American businessman
He decided to help the ant, by providing her a supervisor who would train, mentor and find ways to increase her productivity.
Managing
The lion recruited a cockroach who had extensive experience as a supervisor as borne out by his impressive resume. What a great combination, with an inspiring leader in the lion, an experienced manager in the cockroach and a dedicated worker in the ant! The cockroach remembered the management thinker, Peter Drucker’s quote —
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” — Peter Drucker, an Austrian management consultant
Multitasking
The cockroach set up a clocking in attendance system. He also hired a spider to write reports, file them and manage his communication. With the spider’s help, the cockroach analyzed the ant’s work and concluded that the ant needed to do more multitasking, since in his words —
“The digital age offers us wonderful multitasking tools in our computers and phones with split-screens, round the clock email and message notifications and opportunities for our colleagues to reach us anytime and anywhere.”
The lion was delighted with this and asked the cockroach for more ideas. So the cockroach decided to buy a new productivity management software and recruited a fly to put in place a new office layout, workflow and work schedule.
Memos and Meetings
Now the ant had software on her computer that monitored every minute of her work, produced work logs which she had to review and upload every day, ad hoc email memos that she had to respond to immediately, morning and evening stand up meetings to report her work, and open office arrangement where the lion, the cockroach, the spider or anyone else for that matter could immediately call out to her for urgent meetings.
The ant had it all, but she hated it. Her productivity went down instead of going up.
Motivation
The lion concluded that the department needed better motivation. So he hired a cicada to come up with new vision and mission statements. The cicada also reviewed the goal setting and bonus plans and recommended 2X of the usual target for the ant as a stretch goal to increase motivation through both carrot and stick policies.
As a self-professed leader, having brought in the right management team and policies for multi-tasking, memos, and meetings, and motivation, the lion found out that production was much less than before. So he recruited an owl, a prestigious consultant to carry out an audit and suggest solutions. The owl spent 3 months in the department and came out with an enormous report with many beautiful charts that concluded that the department was overstaffed.
The ant was fired since her productivity had shown a steady declining trend despite multiple interventions. Also, her attitude showed a lack of motivation and appreciation for the management’s efforts.
The Ant’s Way — Regained
The ant was out of work for a few weeks. Then she was hired by another firm. Here, her boss was an elephant. The elephant had only recently been promoted to a leadership position in her organization. Earlier, in her career, she had worked at the same level as the ant and had gradually risen up rungs of the corporate ladder.
The ant, having earlier experienced the misalignment between how she approached her work and how her boss, the lion did, tentatively asked the elephant, “So, how are you going to manage my work?”
Managing Revisited
The elephant replied, “Why should I manage your work? You know your work and you manage how it should be done.”
The ant asked, “In that case, pardon my asking this question, but what is your role?”
The elephant laughed at this question and answered, “Well. My role is to help you in three ways, as follows:
- When you need something from a co-worker or another department, and if you find it difficult to get that, I can facilitate that. So, I can help you with interpersonal activities.
- If you need some information about the company or the department, I can disseminate that.
- If you need some decisions to be taken which go beyond your authority, I can do that.”
The ant was intently listening to the elephant. She asked her, “What if I need some guidance?”
“Sure. I will share my thoughts when the right time comes” replied the elephant.
One Thing
The ant was quite pepped up to work in this new organization and with the elephant as her boss. She made sure that she answered every single email, attended to every request that came her way and that she did it as soon as the email or the request came, without making the other party wait. In fact, she was so knowledgeable and efficient about her work, that she started getting more and more requests. The ant worked harder and longer than ever, but soon her incoming requests were far more than she could deliver on. So, she went to the elephant for advice.
“What is the issue?” asked the elephant.
Ant — “I am swamped with work. I keep doing more and more, but still keep falling short of being able to deliver on all the work demanded from me. What should I do?”
Elephant — “Let me quote from a book that I have read, named “The One Thing,” by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.”
“We can’t fall prey to the notion that everything has to be done, that checking things off our list is what success is all about. The truth is that things don’t matter equally and success is found in doing what matters most.” — The One Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
Ant — “How should I prioritize what I should be doing at any given time?”
Elephant — “The short answer is to ask yourself the question, “What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” You can do this by applying the 80 / 20 principle as suggested in the book. What you need to do is to identify 20 per cent of your work which can produce 80 per cent of your results. Then you can keep applying the principle till you identify the top priority. So, for example, if you first list 25 tasks to be done for a day, applying the 80 / 20 principle in the first pass will give you the top 5 tasks for the day, and then applying the principle again to those 5 tasks will give you the top most priority for the day. Does that make sense?”
The ant nodded her head in the affirmative.
The elephant went to a mini bookshelf in her cabin, pulled out the book, “The One Thing” and gave it to the ant saying, “You can learn more by reading this book.”
Deep Work
The ant found the technique suggested by the elephant to prioritize her work to be very helpful. Now, she could work on her important tasks first, instead of working on any task that first came up her way. However, she did continue getting a number of requests from her colleagues. The ant would consider the request, and if it seemed like something which could be done quickly, she would do it first and then return to her scheduled work. These distractions could be an email with a request for some information, someone calling to find out the status of an ongoing activity or someone dropping by her cubicle to get a clarification on some work.
The ant wanted to remain helpful to others, but was finding these multiple interruptions to her work sapping away her productivity. Every time she attended to a different request, she not only stopped her work for that time, but in fact felt that she had to also take time to first understand the other request being made, and then take time after it was done to come back and focus on her original work. For instance, if she was working on a document, the ant had to take a few moments to relocate where she was at and what were her thoughts before the interruption.
The ant went to the elephant with this problem. The elephant heard her and said, “Did you ever wonder, why we don’t have the so-called agile, open seating arrangement which is so popular with many firms nowadays?”
Ant — “As a matter of fact, I did. We used to have that kind of arrangement in my last firm.”
Elephant — “And how did it work for you?”
Ant — “To be honest, it was most distracting and made it very difficult for me to focus on my work.”
Elephant — “Don’t worry. You are not the only one. In fact, being enamored by the idea of an open seating arrangement facilitating better collaboration, we too had embarked on the same. Then we found that it seemed to reduce both our productivity and our creativity. To understand why, the owner of this firm, the monkey, spoke to a university professor who has researched and written on this subject. He pointed out the fact that how numerous studies have shown that multitasking actually lowers both productivity and creativity. There is a far higher cost of task switching than most of us realize.”
Ant — “So what did you guys do next?”
Elephant — “The monkey was guided by what Cal Newport has written in his book, “Deep Work.” I quote —
“Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.”— Deep Work by Cal Newport
The ant had an ‘Aha!’ moment when she heard this. She went about blocking time on her calendar every morning to do her ‘deep work.’ Initially, she could not afford to block-off three to four hours every day since she still wanted to be helpful to others. So, she started with an hour and then raised it to two hours every morning. That itself proved very effective in lifting up her ability to do some amazing work.
Flow
The ant was more productive and more creative than ever. She had found a good firm and a great manager to work with. She had learnt the techniques of prioritizing the ‘one thing’ and of blocking her calendar every day to do ‘deep work’ and applying those techniques had made her work life much easier than ever before. However, now handling her work seemed too easy at times and she was bored. She needed another challenge. So, she went to her manager, the elephant.
Elephant — “You are doing very well now. So, what it is the problem?”
Ant — “I am bored. The tasks that I am doing seem rather easy for me now. I want some challenging work.”
Elephant — “Well, that makes sense. So, you want to be in a flow.”
Ant — “Flow? What is that?”
The elephant went up to the small whiteboard in her cabin and drew two axes, one of which she named as ‘skill’ and the other as ‘challenge.’ Next, she drew a broadband at an angle of about 45 degrees and named it ‘flow’. It looked somewhat like the figure below.
The elephant turned towards the ant and spoke to her, “You are bored since your skill is currently higher than your challenge. However, if your skill were lower than the challenge of your work, you will feel anxious. You can get the optimal state of flow by taking on increasingly challenging work with increase in your skill level.”
The ant nodded in understanding. The elephant went on, “Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book named “Flow”, defines it this way —
“Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.” — Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The ant learned that to find happiness at work, she needed to do three things —
- She had to keep increasing her skill levels and along with increased skill levels, she had to keep looking for more challenging work. This was similar to playing increasingly higher levels in a video game,
- She had to find intrinsic value and meaning in her work, so that she found her work to be enjoyable, and
- She had to completely immerse herself in her work while doing it.
The first two techniques of ‘one thing’ and ‘deep work’ that the ant had learned earlier, helped her immensely in her efforts to find ‘flow’.
The ant did well. A few years later, she became a manager. Now, she was passing on her learning to her team members just as the elephant had done with her. People had gradually forgotten the old ant story. Now a new one was popular. It was called, “The ant’s way.”
