What Makes People Do Extraordinary Things? "Product people - Product managers, product designers, UX designers, UX researchers, Business analysts, developers, makers & entrepreneurs 5 January 2017 True Mind the Product Mind the Product Ltd 412 Kiko Thiel talks about what drives high performance people at ProductTank London Product Management 1.648
· 2 minute read

What Makes People Do Extraordinary Things?

What is the difference between Extraordinary and Excellent?

Excellence is about doing what everybody else is doing, but doing it better than those people. In the world of business, this is done by setting standards, clearly articulating your goals and defining the processes by which you will achieve your outcomes. All of this is done whilst operating within societal or business norms.

Extraordinary comes when you are operating outside of the ‘norm’. Once you find this, rather than progressing along a bell curve, you will be operating on an altogether different curve to everyone else.

How do you get to Extraordinary?

Within the innovation space, this difference is referred to as being between Exploitation and Exploration. The first being the continued development along a set line, whilst Exploration takes place in untapped areas of opportunity. Within a large company, you would often have different departments taking on these different roles.

In our brains, it is the difference between using the areas that are good at solving problems that we can see vs those that use our imagination to picture a new future. It is difficult to switch between using these two areas at speed – but it is the same thing you need to do if you want to get from Excellent to Extraordinary.

There is no path to the Extraordinary. You will be breaking new ground. You’re a pathfinder.

How do you break out of conformity?

The world survives because we conform on so many things. However, if you want to find the path to Extraordinary, through Innovation you have to be able to break away from the norms.

Often you are prompted to conform by fear. Fear of looking stupid, making a mistake or repercussions for example. As such, if you want to break through the norms to Extraordinary, you need to understand the fears that are holding you, your team or your stakeholders back and tackle them head on.

So what do I do next?

In order for your vision of a new future to be heard and appreciated by your audience, you need them to be in the headspace that encourages imagination, rather than being focussed on solving tasks.

When you’re Extraordinary, you’re redefining goals and redefining the means to get to them. Behaviours that help you to do this:

  • Questioning current paradigms
  • Finding ways to break existing ways of doing things
  • Asking how it can be done, not if
  • Happy to rewrite the rules

Comments 1

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