This is the moment where we do our best Babe Ruth impression and point the bat to where we are about to hit the ball. Having done this work for so long, we have watched, over and over again, when teams have four big epiphanies: realizations that fundamentally change the way they think about business and the performance of teams. This is a description of what those epiphanies are and when they happen.
It’s our hope that reading this will do what all of our work is designed to do: accelerate you and your team through these perspective-altering epiphanies, more rapidly getting you to the better results and smoother operations that live on the other side of each realization.
We believe that people are always growing. Always. Our colleagues, customers, friends, and family are a constant source of feedback, therefore we are all in a constant state of hearing how we could be better, learning new things, and experiencing personal growth. The question isn’t whether we are growing or not. The question for each of us is whether we are accelerating or decelerating our growth.
When individuals and teams are decelerating their growth, they are trying to not listen to the feedback; trying to stay the same today as they were yesterday, seeking validation instead of opportunity. But we know this attempt is futile: the feedback is going to continue to build and intensify. In this mentality, some people can take years to learn and adapt, they may struggle with self awareness and build up a big powder keg of overdue growth, but it will eventually happen.
So, here’s our take: why not accelerate growth rather than resisting it? Why not create the conditions where managers, contributors and even leaders can learn in months what might otherwise take them years, accelerating their effectiveness as professionals, managers, leaders, and teams?
While our work accelerates a wide range of learning and habit improvements, it also causes the following four big-picture epiphanies to occur rapidly (in about 3 months) instead of slowly (usually over the span of about 10+ years, in most professionals).
These epiphanies are inevitable for all human beings. They have been had by billions of humans in the past, and yet many people in the present have to learn each of these things the hard way. By accelerating each of these realizations, we help teams rewire how they think of human motivation and how it relates to business performance. We essentially accelerate the most fundamental mental models that allow people to think and approach everyday situations with the wisdom of someone with 20 more years of work experience.
This is when a person realizes that intelligence, particularly strategic intelligence, is more important than brute force and raw execution. Prior to this epiphany, the individual prizes work ethic and grind for its own sake. After this epiphany, the individual realizes that working on a smart plan nearly always creates better results in less time using fewer resources.