Discussion Forum > Emergent Goals - a process for discovering the goals you already have, rather than defining the goals you think you ought to have
This was a long post, intimidated me from reading it all, until now. And having read it, I don't think you actually described you process. It's sort of implicit in the article, in the same way that your goals are implicit in your actions. The process I infer is this:
1. Take two competing priorities, both things you want to spend more resources on, but which actions seem at cross purposes. D and D'
2. Think what is the larger project B that needs action D, and the project C that needs action D'. These projects might be abstract or whatever.
3. Consider what larger goal A these projects serve. The purpose of this exercise is not to solve the conflict, but simply to become aware of the space it operates in. This space of connections is termed a twig.
4. Do this process where ever confusion arises.
5. When you have many such twigs you can consider how they connect. This is not easy but requires deep thinking.
6. Ultimately with a growing network of goals, projects, tasks, you can make decisions about which really matter and which are more effective. Tasks can be discarded in favor of others that achieve the same goal; and goals can be discarded/deprecated in favor of others that produce higher value towards a greater end which is shared by other goals.
1. Take two competing priorities, both things you want to spend more resources on, but which actions seem at cross purposes. D and D'
2. Think what is the larger project B that needs action D, and the project C that needs action D'. These projects might be abstract or whatever.
3. Consider what larger goal A these projects serve. The purpose of this exercise is not to solve the conflict, but simply to become aware of the space it operates in. This space of connections is termed a twig.
4. Do this process where ever confusion arises.
5. When you have many such twigs you can consider how they connect. This is not easy but requires deep thinking.
6. Ultimately with a growing network of goals, projects, tasks, you can make decisions about which really matter and which are more effective. Tasks can be discarded in favor of others that achieve the same goal; and goals can be discarded/deprecated in favor of others that produce higher value towards a greater end which is shared by other goals.
January 5, 2020 at 15:05 |
Alan Baljeu
Alan Baljeu
Hi Alan,
That's a pretty good summary, thanks!
I'd probably rewrite your number 4 as "Do this process whenever a conflict arises or you feel stuck"
And number 6 probably needs an illustration to help demonstrate how powerful this has been for me. I'll see if I can put something together.
That's a pretty good summary, thanks!
I'd probably rewrite your number 4 as "Do this process whenever a conflict arises or you feel stuck"
And number 6 probably needs an illustration to help demonstrate how powerful this has been for me. I'll see if I can put something together.
January 5, 2020 at 22:35 |
Seraphim
Seraphim
Can you give a worked example as it applies here please? From what I gather it's an approach that can be used to reveal shared interests between parties in an otherwise stalemate situation.
Using it the way you describe seems to need people to take an almost schizophrenic view of their own mind (assigning it the role of the parties and mediator in some sense) and to adopt a passive approach to the paths that they take, allowing these sort of pseudo-goals to reveal themselves as the cause of conflict, rather than creating and owning real goals based on desire and then forging a path to them with time-proven techniques.
Using it the way you describe seems to need people to take an almost schizophrenic view of their own mind (assigning it the role of the parties and mediator in some sense) and to adopt a passive approach to the paths that they take, allowing these sort of pseudo-goals to reveal themselves as the cause of conflict, rather than creating and owning real goals based on desire and then forging a path to them with time-proven techniques.
January 6, 2020 at 0:03 |
Chris
Chris
Seraphim:
The example given in the Wikipedia article seems a very long way round of discovering that "Wow! Guess what! The problem would go away if we made smaller batches!"
The example given in the Wikipedia article seems a very long way round of discovering that "Wow! Guess what! The problem would go away if we made smaller batches!"
January 13, 2020 at 11:42 |
Mark Forster
Mark Forster
Whenever I try to explain this process to anyone (online or offline), nobody can seem to understand what I am talking about, LOL. Alan did a pretty good job summarizing the process, but I think I need to simplify the whole thing to make it practical for other people.
In the meantime, I've been turning to this process whenever I have any sense of trouble with my SNL list, or feel unfocused, and it really helps me sort it out. So I'll keep working at it and try to share when I have a version that is simpler to explain / illustrate with examples.
In the meantime, I've been turning to this process whenever I have any sense of trouble with my SNL list, or feel unfocused, and it really helps me sort it out. So I'll keep working at it and try to share when I have a version that is simpler to explain / illustrate with examples.
January 26, 2020 at 23:25 |
Seraphim
Seraphim
Actually I am trying an experiment. This process has been working so well for me in getting my work clear and focused, that I think the task management system itself has become quite secondary. So my experiment will be to try to use this process with DIT, and after awhile Simple Scanning, and see how it goes.
Here is the basic idea of the experiment. My hypothesis is that overcommitment is the result of one or more underlying conflicts. And this Cloud / Emergent Goal process is great at identifying and articulating the conflict, putting it context, and pointing the way to a solution. With Serial No-List, if there is ever any angst about unfinished items on the list, this process eliminates it. In fact it often prompts me to clear many items off my list altogether, because it becomes clear they aren't needed at all, now that I have more clarity about my real goals.
If the hypothesis is correct, then the same process should work just as well with DIT or Simple Scanning or any other system, as long as there is some way to prompt me to apply the Emergent Goal process. With DIT, this seems straightforward enough -- whenever the DIT rules tell me to do an Audit of Commitments, my Audit will consist of finding the one or two old tasks on the list that bother me the most, and analyzing them with the Emergent Goals process. With Simple Scanning, it's not quite so obvious how the process should be triggered, but I suppose I can just enter it on the list and do it whenever it stands out.
Anyway, I will let you know how it goes.
Here is the basic idea of the experiment. My hypothesis is that overcommitment is the result of one or more underlying conflicts. And this Cloud / Emergent Goal process is great at identifying and articulating the conflict, putting it context, and pointing the way to a solution. With Serial No-List, if there is ever any angst about unfinished items on the list, this process eliminates it. In fact it often prompts me to clear many items off my list altogether, because it becomes clear they aren't needed at all, now that I have more clarity about my real goals.
If the hypothesis is correct, then the same process should work just as well with DIT or Simple Scanning or any other system, as long as there is some way to prompt me to apply the Emergent Goal process. With DIT, this seems straightforward enough -- whenever the DIT rules tell me to do an Audit of Commitments, my Audit will consist of finding the one or two old tasks on the list that bother me the most, and analyzing them with the Emergent Goals process. With Simple Scanning, it's not quite so obvious how the process should be triggered, but I suppose I can just enter it on the list and do it whenever it stands out.
Anyway, I will let you know how it goes.
January 26, 2020 at 23:36 |
Seraphim
Seraphim
I may have summarized the process, but I don't yet understand it. It's quite opaque to me how this will reach practical solutions.
January 27, 2020 at 18:39 |
Alan Baljeu
Alan Baljeu
With Serial No-List, I found I was staying on top of my work pretty well - it's been working just fine. One consequence of this is that I found myself thinking a lot more about the larger goals and conflicts in my life. I've been using a kind of process to think through these things and try to make sense of things and get a sharper focus in my life.
Basically it starts by looking closely at any conflict I am facing -- something serious enough to really bother me. Sometimes it's just something that is right in front of me, bothering me all the time. Other times, they are things that are stuck for one reason or another on my task list -- a single task or project that isn't going anywhere, or maybe a couple of tasks that seem to be in conflict with each other.
I use Eli Goldratt's "Evaporating Cloud" process for framing this conflict. I have written about this process previously. Basically you make a diagram showing five elements:
A: Your goal
B: Something required to achieve the goal
C: Another thing required to achieve the goal
D: An action required to achieve B
D': An action required to achieve C
The conflict is in D and D': they are mutually exclusive for one reason or another.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporating_Cloud
Normally when you draw one these diagrams, you can follow some guidelines to help eliminate the conflict. This is a powerful and very useful process; I use it quite frequently.
However, the thing that intrigued me this time wasn't the ability of the Cloud process to resolve the conflict. It was simply the realization that you can take any two things that are in conflict -- two goals, two tasks, two competing priorities -- and discover the common goal that unites them. Do this repeatedly, or perhaps recursively, and it creates a hierarchy of goals -- or a hierarchy of values.
There are a few things that are especially intriguing to me about this.
(1) You start with the problems, conflicts, or just major tasks that you are facing, and you can discover the implicit goals behind those tasks. There is always some goal there, hiding behind the problem. It's easy to articulate problems -- much harder to articulate goals. This gives a practical method for clarifying the goals. This is helpful even if you don't go on to use the Cloud to resolve the conflict. Just getting clarity on your goals is very powerful and helpful.
(2) This avoids the problems associated with "goal setting" and "mission statements". Whenever I have tried to write out my goals a priori, I either come up with goals I imagine I *should* be striving for, or I come up with goals that feel too abstract or artificial. They always feel a little disconnected from reality. The advantage of this "emergent" approach is that I am simply going through the process of discovering and articulating what my actual goals already are. The goals are *already there*, driving my decision process, my prioritization process, my intuition about what needs to be done -- but they are usually *implicit*, not articulated clearly, hiding in the background, and niggling at me when they come into conflict in one way or another. This process makes them visible and puts them into words.
(3) Once you have sorted out a few conflicts in this way, you have a handful of goal "twigs" that might not really connect to each other. Each "twig" shows three or more objectives that you have -- there is always at least two goals or desires, and then the common goal to which they both contribute. At first, it might be hard to connect one "twig" to another "twig". But eventually they all start to connect. This is when it becomes really powerful. You find that all the different motivations and goals rattling around in your psyche all connect -- the process reveals the one or two overarching goals to which all the other goals are subordinate. The whole network reveals a hierarchy of your values -- maybe not the values you *thought* you had, but the values that you discover are actually present and active in your life whether you've ever put them into words or not.
I have been calling this my "emergent goals" process. It's been very powerful to clarify what is really important to me, and why, and also where things tend to get stuck in this personal value stream.
The most important thing I realized, once the goals started to converge into a single tree, was that my ultimate goals could be achieved more directly and immediately. I had often been making false assumptions about the things required to achieve the goal. The things I had always assumed were prerequisites actually weren't.
For example, near the top of my goal tree is the desire to support my family and raise my kids well. And one of the prerequisites for this goal is the need to provide an income. But I tend to spend so much time at work, and in other endeavors to try to supplement or replace the income from my full-time job, that I have very little time or energy left over to just be present and engaged with my wife and kids at home. Faced with this problem, I kept trying to find more and more ways to make more income so that I could support the family better. But this would just take more and more time away from them.
As I gradually put these conflicts into words and into a diagram showing their relationships to each other, I realized I had been making a lot of assumptions about what is needed to support my family -- I was totally focused on "generating income". But really, I can make a big contribution directly to the "support family" goal simply by sitting down and reading a book with one of the kids, or otherwise being engaged and present. This is what I mean when I said above, "my ultimate goals could be achieved more directly and immediately".
I am sure many people could have made this kind of realization without the use of any diagrams, but it's been really helpful for me. And not in just this one area, but in *all* the areas of my life. It's been really helping me uncover the false assumptions that have kept me going in circles trying to achieve all my different conflicting goals. So many of the most important goals really don't have all the prerequisites that I had somehow convinced myself needed to be achieved before I could touch the larger goals.
As a result, large swaths of goals have simply ceased to be important -- I saw that they just weren't contributing to the larger, more important things that really do matter to me. This has made my life simpler, too.
Many of the conflicts are still present, but they just don't seem as angst-ridden and don't generate so much WORK. This has made my Serial No-List much shorter each day, which gives me more time to get clear about what really matters. It's been good... but also difficult. This emergent goal process is very powerful, but it's somewhat of an emotionally draining process. It's not easy staring at these diagrams showing relationships between goals, and realizing something is missing or hidden or wrong there, but because I have been operating under so many assumptions and habits of mind for so long, I just can't see what the missing piece is. But when it does suddenly pop into view, wow it is powerful. It seems so obvious in retrospect. And it brings clarity and focus and stronger sense of purpose and achievement.
Anyway, that's what I've been pondering the last couple of months, for what it's worth...
How has everyone else been doing? 🙂
(And Happy New Year to everyone also! 🙂)