At February’s Innovation Day, we welcomed Dr Gavin Weeks, Psychologist and Leadership Development Consultant. He shared his professional insights on how to play the long game by managing the overload of the present and prepare us to thrive in the future.
How can we play the long game while our lives and minds are already overloaded? What can we do to be resilient and stay relevant in today’s fast-changing world? How can we avoid what has been called “death by information overload?”
While the information floodgates open, we scramble to become more agile and accomplish more and more in less time. However, the modern workplace often induces what researchers call “attention deficit trait” or “continuous partial attention,” which is caused by the relentless cascade of information we receive every day. We are powered by the constant desire to feel connected and informed in real time, and yet this results in a chronic state of distraction which “follows us” long after we shut down our computers. Are you able to stop and create some space for deep thinking, creativity, energy and purpose?
So how can we best keep up with the future and survive the age of overload?
Acquire new capabilities to face new challenges. As the pace and intensity of the contemporary world are not likely to change, building new skills is necessary to effectively navigate modern work life. These three key capabilities can help you thrive for the long game:
- Agility, which will help lay our foundations.
- Awareness, to enable us to focus, maintain attention and think deeply.
- Adaptability, to stay fit for the future.
Boost your resilience. Use these three practices to do so:
- Compartmentalise your cognitive load such as emailing, strategy and business-as-usual meetings, and create dedicated times in the day to specific activities in order to optimise the way we process information.
- Develop mental agility and make deep work a priority: you can train your brain to “decentre” stress – pause and observe the experience from a neutral standpoint – and then try to react to the problem, rather than impulsively respond to it.
- Practice mindfulness: being mindful enables you to come out of distractions and step back, cultivating awareness and monitoring your experiences.
Push your boundaries. Whether physical exercise or a career goal, if you have something to work towards you are more likely to sustain focused attention and improve, pushing beyond what you consider to be your limits. This does not mean pushing yourself to exhaustion; it could be as simple as picking up a habit of daily movement. Achieving a goal does not happen by accident, but needs to be practiced every day.
These are just some key highlights taken from February’s Innovation Day. Each month, clients of the Innovation Programmes receive a full ACT report, capturing the guest expert’s research, the implications and next steps for leaders to apply back in their team and organisation.
Sources: Weeks, G. (2020) ‘The Long Game: Surviving the Age of Overload, Thriving in an Uncertain Future’, KnowledgeBrief Innovation Day Presentation, 12 February.