Welcome to Chapter Eighteen of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) book club. In the spirit of a book club discussion, I have responded to all previous comments and will continue to do so. Of the 37 all-star pieces out of the 260 in the series, the randomizer picked as the eighteenth chapter Personal Effectiveness Strategy. This one is from the second smallest category – personal development in the domain of strategy. You can find the whole PTW/PI series here.
My Reflections on This Piece
I wrote the original piece in response to frequent questions about me and my personal effectiveness. People note that I get a lot done and wonder how I do it. The piece turned out to be a useful reflective exercise for me and readers found it valuable too – a win-win.
The focus of the piece – and its subtitle – was managing signal versus noise. A good ratio supports high personal effectiveness, a bad one the opposite. The prescription is not to attempt to eliminate noise. That would be futile in any event – no one can eliminate all the noise in their life even if they try their hardest. But if you try and you obsess about not experiencing any noise, you will restrict your access to signal.
I used my PTW/PI series as an illustration. The final piece is the signal. The noise is all the words that get left on the cutting room floor during multiple rounds (usually ten or more) of editing. Readers never see those noise word. The signal – which the final piece manifests – gets stronger with each round of editing. But to get great signal, I must play with plenty of noise along the way.
Strategy (at least the way I advocate doing it) is similar. I encourage starting with multiple possibilities – not just one lead horse. By definition, all the possibilities that are not chosen represent noise – because they aren’t put into action and become lost in the mists of time. But that doesn’t mean that zero noise is a great idea. I believe that without considering multiple alternative possibilities, you won’t get to a great solution. If you start with a single favored idea, I very much doubt it will be the best one.
That having been said, if you start with too much noise, you risk never finding the signal. That is why I encourage limiting the number of possibilities a team considers. I find that considering more than ten possibilities risks the team working on strategy being overwhelmed by the noise. I like pursuing five-to-seven possibilities at the front end of strategy. While not a perfect measure, I find that produces a positive signal-to-noise ratio.
On the personal effectiveness front, the key to operating with a productive signal-to-noise ratio is to live a theory-driven life. By that I mean you need to have an explicit logic behind your actions – if I do this, I will produce that outcome. That way, if the actions fail to produce the desired outcome, you can diagnose the failure to come up with an alternative logic/theory – which you can then try. That process of learning is the mechanism that reduces the noise over time.
However, if you don’t make your logic explicit to yourself, you won’t be able to test your logic against the outcomes it produces, and you won’t learn. Without learning and improving your theories of action, you will keep generating lots and lots of noise, and that noise production will ensure that your signal-to-noise ratio never gets into the optimal zone.
In this sense, strategy is an important tool. It is a structured way to design a theory, put it in action and learn, then iterate and learn some more. Strategy doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. If it helps you learn and improve, it is always valuable.
I think I summarized the personal effectiveness argument well in the conclusion of the original piece, so I will just repeat it here:
Your personal effectiveness is best measured by your signal-to-noise ratio. Noise is inevitable to get great signal. But you need to keep noise level under control. Dedicate efforts to drive down useless noise — noise generated by atheoretical activity. Whenever you do something new, you will have to accept learning-related noise. But drive down that noise by having a theory against which you can assess outcomes and diagnose sources of noise.
Reader Comments
This piece appeared three-quarters of the way through the series, meaning it had a sizable audience by that time, and additionally, it turned out to be very popular with readers. So, it had a very healthy number of comments – 30. And they were wildly positive – maybe more so than any other piece. This is a selection of favorable comments: I like this one; very good article; great insights; loved this piece; great; it was great; great insight; very, very deep, fundamental writing; inspiring stuff; thank you; many great insights; impressive and meaningful content; great read; and this was great, great advice.
Longer form praise included:
Rruizc: Thanks, Roger! I love most (if not all) of your pieces, and I especially love those that have a direct message for my personal life.
CDavis: This is a piece I have needed to read and did not even realize it. Way to much noise, way too little theory.
Andrew: Extremely timely article for me…your articulation of a theoretical life has given words to something I’ve been sensing for a while. Thank You!
Michael: Thank you, Roger, for this latest installment of Playing To Win! I look forward to them, each and every one.
I don’t recite these comments to brag – see how much readers loved it! Rather, I am taking it as a signal that doing this All-Stars Book Club series was necessary to figure out. Writing the series is time-consuming – one piece every week. There are two relevant implications of that. First is that it is hard to have time to review all the comments of last Monday’s piece while working on next Monday’s. Second is that even if I did, I wouldn’t have the comparative perspective across pieces to determine what aspects of the comments are particularly striking.
But it now feels clear that I haven’t done enough pieces in the category of personal development in the domain of strategy. As mentioned above, it is the second smallest category with 3 All-Star pieces (out of the 37). At first blush, that may indicate that readers don’t find these pieces valuable. But as I have looked at it more closely, I can see that is spectacular performance given that I only did 10 of the 260 total PTW/PI pieces in this category. That means 30% (3 of 10) of the personal development pieces made the All-Stars list versus 14% (37 of 260) of all pieces. That caused me to look even more closely at the performance of this category of pieces, and I found that 8 of the 10 in this category were in the top half based on views, reads, and claps.
Net, the signal is: do more of these, Roger! And I welcome reader ideas on this front. What personal development in the domain of strategy topics would be valuable for me to explore?
Across the 30 comments, here were really no criticisms of the piece – again a striking feature – though two readers misinterpreted it (I think). Both interpreted me as advocating the elimination of noise – and they said that was a bad idea. Fortunately, they were in the minority in having that interpretation. In stark contrast, four readers, praised the piece’s view that noise is to be managed, not eliminated. Each had interesting observations, so I am providing the thoughts of the four below:
James: This is a fascinating take on personal effectiveness, especially the focus on managing signal vs. noise rather than eliminating noise entirely. Thank you for sharing this post!
Olivia: You raise an important point about personal effectiveness. Noise is not always bad – sometimes it is necessary. The real challenge is achieving the right balance between signal and noise. Mastering this balance can greatly improve productivity and success.
Diego: It’s interesting to identify noise and reduce it instead of eliminating it as TQM theory says. Also, the main idea to prioritize high-value actions (”signals”) that will bring results aligned to a strategy that must be applied to each one, making better design decisions and not just doing stuff.
Hristia: One needs two automatic triggers based on ratios. One, for identifying the min signal that have some sense and, two, for identifying the max noise ratio you can handle. Ratios drives/triggers decisions. Thanks, Roger.
Lastly, one commenter, Fede, had questions: Great article, thanks! A couple of questions: Is having a theory the same as having goals? If not, what are the differences? The best way to think about a goal (in the context of this piece) is as a component of a theory, not the theory itself. There needs to be a theory about how to achieve a particular goal. Then that theory can be put into action to ascertain the extent to which it is valid – i.e. it drives us toward the desired goal. If it does, it is a useful theory. If it doesn’t, we need to amend the theory and try again.
Lots of people – and companies – have goals: I want to be rich, or we want to achieve $10 billion in revenues. But many people and companies have weak and/or implicit theories about how to go about achieving those goals. And because they don’t have explicit theories, they find it difficult to understand why they aren’t achieving their goals and what to do about it. Hope that clarifies, Fede.
Without further ado, the original article…
Chapter Eighteen
People frequently ask me about personal effectiveness — in part because they see me getting so much done and wonder — aloud to me — how I do it. They are all busy — but they wonder whether they are busy in a good or a bad way. And they don’t have a clear way to think about it. To give them a way, I have dedicated this Playing to Win/ Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) to Personal Effectiveness Strategy: Managing Signal vs. Noise. All previous PTW/PI can be found here.
How I Think About Personal Effectiveness
I preface my thoughts by acknowledging this is not the only way to think — and maybe not even the best way! But since I get asked how I think about personal effectiveness, I thought I would describe my way.
I play close attention to and try to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio in my work. And I did long before Nate Silver’s best-selling book — The Signal and The Noise. Signal is the valuable stuff that you want, and noise is the useless stuff that comes along with it. I think of my personal effectiveness as the product of producing lots of valuable signal without incurring much noise.
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