On My Path for Creative Destruction

Flickr creative commons from Christopher Robbins

I am becoming obsessed with the challenge of “not enough time” that I am seeing with ALL my clients, friends and colleagues. We are doing more, and it seems, getting less out of this frenzy. I am riveted to the concept of “creative destruction” to help understand and decide what tot STOP doing.

As a consequence, I’m seeing ideas everywhere. Here is one from Kevin Cashman from his book, The Pause Principle: step back to lead forward.  And expect to hear more from me on this topic!

1.  Pause for understanding.  Certain that you know the answer?  That’s a good time to step back, gather more information, ask another relevant question, listen to someone else’s perspective, consider alignment with values and purpose. ..
2.  Pause for growth.  Schedule time and invest in your personal leadership growth through self-awareness and learning.  Help others grow and develop their talent… Step back to reward risk-taking; celebrate and appreciate failure for the learning that emerges.

3.  Pause for teams. Lost your focus? Feel like you’ve gotten off track?  Take the time to give everyone opportunity to express concerns, share their genuine feelings, ideas and listen authentically in the spirit of real collaboration…

4.  Pause for resilience.  Step back from the hurried, hectic pace, the onslaught of information and demands for energy, clarity, and fresh perspective.  Go for a walk or run.  Sit by the river… New ideas and innovation emerge in the spaces between the doing.

5.  Pause for significance.  Engulfed in hyper-speed and productivity?  Next time you pick up your mobile device for a stream of transactions, pause and ask yourself, “What is really important today?”  When you step back to reconnect with what you really value, what will you choose to do or not do?

via BK Communiqué Author Lists Blog: Five Non-Traditional Ways to Pause.

Thanks to Christopher Robbins for creative-commons-ing his beautiful photo so I could share it again.

6 thoughts on “On My Path for Creative Destruction”

  1. I decided some years ago not to have a mobile phone and that I would never buy a smart phone. We have one ancient mobile for the whole family. It was a good decision, when we go out I do not stare at a screen, I can not just hold it like some sort of electronic comfort blanket as I witnessed loads of people doing on a rare trip to London recently. I work long hours staring at a screen I don’t want to do that when I am out and about.

    I stopped doing Facebook and G+ also good decisions.

    I always live in remote locations so outside there is a frenzy of nature rather than concrete and people.

    I am not sure there is anything I want to change at the moment.

  2. This is a classic problem for us. I talk about this as a problem of generating too many good / interesting ideas and deciding to act on them. We need to do a better job of separating the idea generation from acting on it. And it would be great to focus on getting the existing stuff DONE, providing space to do the next things.

  3. This pointers given in this article are excellent. Our mentality is often to go, go, go. We feel like the point of life is just to get things done. However, we exhaust ourselves in the rush to accomplish, to learn. As a college student, there is often a lot on my schedule, and at the end of the day, I still have a pile of homework to do. I find that if I can find some time to get away — even just half-an-hour to take a walk or run to somewhere quiet — I can refocus and refuel. Then I will have more creative energy to dive into my next project.
    Pausing is important. As is often said, we are human “be-ings,” not human “do-ings.” With all our doing, we can sometimes lose the forest for the trees. In these times, we need to spend more time “being” and less time “do-ing.” We need to pause in our busy lives to comprehend, recollaborate, rejuvinate, and reassess what is important.
    Thank you for sharing this great article!

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