The following is the second of two posts by Michael Bungay Stanier, senior partner at Box of Crayons and author of Do More Great Work
Four questions
I start almost every workshop I run asking the participants to score themselves between 1 (low) and 7 (high) on these three questions:
- How active and engaged do you plan to be today?
- How much risk do you plan to take?
- How much do you care about the others around you?
And then I ask this question:
4. What do you want from today?
Passive vs Active
You can see why I do that as a training piece. It’s to shift the expectation that your role as an audience member is passive, and that it’s entirely up to the trainer to make this a good day or a bad day.
(I’m reminded of the quote from Henry Ford, “Whether you think that you can or that you can’t, you are usually right.” Same goes for whether you think the training is going to be good or not.)
… and what does that look like?
The questions work really well as a daily check in, too.
What takes them from being an interesting exercise to something likely to have an impact on how you show up for your day and how best you make the most of the 1,440 minutes of those 24 hours is when you ask yourself this:
“… and what does that look like?”
This moves from intention to behaviour. In other words, what will you do (or not do, or continue doing) that will reflect your commitment to hit those numbers.
That’s when Great Work starts to happen.
__________
Michael Bungay Stanier is the author of Do More Great Work: Stop the busywork and start the work that matters. He also created The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun, and is the Senior Partner of Box of Crayons, a company that helps organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. You can follow his blog at www.BoxOfCrayons.biz
One Comment
Love the spirit of this, although #1 seems like it gives away your punch line. I read #1 and I hear you asking me about the seminar. It might play better if you switched 1 and 4…just a thought.