It is common for a person experiencing fatigue to be more rigid in thinking, have greater difficulty responding to changing or abnormal circumstances, and take longer to reason correctly. Tired and overwhelmed, we want problems to go away—we don’t care how—because we lack the capacity to analyze or solve them.
Working through the night is heroic; long hours are interpreted as commitment. When companies fail or big deals don’t deliver (mergers and acquisitions have a failure rate of 40 to 80 percent), nobody stops to consider that exhausted brains might be the culprits.
Productivity isn’t linear. We can work well for forty hours a week but no more than that. After forty hours we get tired and make mistakes—so we need extra time to clear up the mess we’ve made.
The more attention we try to pay to everything, the less discerning we become. But when we focus, we get better at concentrating—and remembering what we did. We feel less exhausted. So monotasking—focusing on one task at a time—isn’t only more efficient; it also leaves us better able to use the knowledge we have gained.
Those who consistently attempt multitasking find it harder to ignore irrelevant information and take longer moving between tasks—in other words, for all their frantic activity, they’re actually wasting time. And because the brain’s competing memory systems store information differently, whatever is retained is harder for the multitasker to recall. While these energetic minds might feel that they’re on top of the world of information, in reality they are at its mercy.
Listening requires courage—it means you have to be open to what you hear.
The best thinking partners don’t confirm your opinions but build on them.
The late Richard Hackman’s research into teams showed that superior teams tended to be very stable; they work together for a long time, getting to know and trust one another. Switching people in and out didn’t make them more creative—it was disruptive and dangerous: newness was a liability. Shuffling roles within a stable team produced enough change, while preserving the value of familiarity that develops from working together over time.
Some companies now ban coffee cups at desks, not to protect computers, but to ensure that people hang out together around the coffee machine.
When it came time to draw up the company’s annual budget, each department head drew up a budget for that department—but then had to explain it so cogently to one colleague that the colleague could defend it at the leadership team meeting. The chief technology officer would argue the case for marketing, the head of sales spoke on behalf of operations, customer care explained technology’s needs. The impact of this simple exercise was profound. Everyone had to see the whole company through eyes not their own.