Clay Christensen on what 40 years of innovation learning means for your family life and your temperament.
Clay Christensen is an innovation legend. He’s spent 40 years studying innovation, and recently wrote a LinkedIn post about what he learnt.
In one part, he talks family. He puts his finger on one fundamental difference between the worlds of work and family life. Feedback loops.
Feedback loops have become a big thing for innovation. Silicon Valley plucked the idea of the OODA Loop from an old US Air Force fighter pilot and Colonel, John Boyd. The Colonel realised that the faster you can Observe what’s happening, the better you can Orientate yourself, which means you can Decide and Act better. Then you Observe again and the cycle goes on. Speeding up feedback gives performance a big kick forward.
Now, compare the feedback you get at work and home.
Even if your work’s stuck in the 8o’s and people are afraid to have adult conversations, you probably have a performance review once a year. You also get lots of little bits of feedback along the way about how well you’re doing. Sales go up, awards get won, people say ‘thanks that was really good’, or not, accounts get published, deadlines get hit.
At home, you’re playing the longest game, as I’ve said many a time before. Parents for life. Here, time moves slowly. Our children are learning the hardest thing of all, how to be a responsible, kind, creative, confident, caring, and courageous when called on, human being. It takes years and years. Progress is slow and you’re, hopefully, there every step of the way, so the changes aren’t stark and visible, but gradual.
This difference runs deep. It influences a lot of our behaviour. Understanding it means seeing reality more clearly, which makes for better decisions and a better life. For you and your family.
Clay points to one important area of our decisions — where we spend our time.
“Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you make poor choices about how to invest your resources, the outcome can be bad. When people who have a high need for achievement have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they often unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, get paid or promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your friends and family typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids, for instance, misbehave every day, and it’s not until 20 odd years later that you can say, “I raised a good kid.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers — even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.”
The other area this difference in the pace of feedback hits is your temperament.
Work conditions us to expect short term feedback, because we spend so much time doing it. This causes problems when we’re with our children because we expect them to respond and react at a similar pace. It’s an irrational expectation though, because they haven’t gone through the stages of development needed to be able to meet our expectations.
Advice to slow down or go easy is often the first port of call when we realise we’re being too harsh, expecting too much of their little minds. But it’s rubbish advice to rely on, because it doesn’t work at the right level. We need to understand why we have to slow down first, in order to ignore the knee jerk reaction to nag, set a consequence or worse, shout.
When you realise your expectations are set too high, you can adjust them. You don’t need to put effort into self-control because you’re no longer playing at the pace of the adult world. You’re in their world, accepting them for who they are. And acceptance is one of those things that makes for a great parent. Acceptance is the basis for unconditional love. If you don’t accept who your children are right now, your love is by definition conditional.
Acceptance is so important, it warrants a quick detour. Perhaps the best way to sum it up is this quote from the next article in this newsletter. It’s the quote from a teenage girl when asked about her relationship with her dad.
“Dad just says I’m wrong when I try to say what I think — so I don’t bother anymore.”
Taken to the logical, and inevitable conclusion, if you don’t accept your children for who they are unconditionally, you will end up, as that girl said so powerfully, without a relationship with them. Ouch.
Back on track, let’s wrap this one up.
Acceptance isn’t the same as going easy or dropping your standards, mind you. That’s not a good thing to do, it’s about having appropriate standards for the reality of the situation. Standards that then work to change that reality. Without either standards or a clear grasp of reality you’re setting yourself, and those around you, up for misery. And that’s definitely not the marker of a great dad. Or a great person.
I used to be an angry, impatient dad. I’ve spent ten years researching and experimenting on how to be a more patient parent. I’ve distilled what works into a book.
The Patient Parent is a short, practical book for busy parents who want to make the most of the time with their kids before they grow up.
Kids are only little once, so if that’s you, the book’s for you.
