What are your goals for 2017?

 

Each new year brings with it a wealth of new possibilities and untapped opportunities. I once read something to the effect that opportunity is the domain of the prepared mind. So how do we best prepare our mind for opportunity?

As a practitioner in, and writer about agility, I tend to turn my attentions towards how I can improve my mind and my ability to more adaptable. Most years that meant more reading, more thinking, and more writing.

This year I thought I'd start off a little differently, so I've decided to take a couple of courses, one on how to improve my mind,  and the other in how to improve my writing.

As we age we gather more and more information. But how much of what we read and hear do we actually retain? When you essentially make your living, as many of us do, in the collection, distillation, and sense-making from large volumes of information, having a mind that is better prepared to do that becomes important. We are constantly inundated with blogs posts, eBooks, social media and all manner of different sources of information. We are often in information overload. It can be overwhelming.

As an HBR article recently noted, Peter Drucker realized that we now generate value with our minds more than with our muscle:

since at least 1959, when in Landmarks of Tomorrow he first described the rise of “knowledge work.” Three decades later, Drucker had become convinced that knowledge was a more crucial economic resource than land, labor, or financial assets, leading to what he called a “post-capitalist society.” And shortly thereafter (and not long before he died in 2005), Drucker declared that increasing the productivity of knowledge workers was “the most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century.”

But is it someone else's responsibility or our own to increase our mental capacities? Who can decide to improve your mind but yourself? I think you know my answer. I think we are each responsible for our own personal and professional development. It's our own careers and livelihoods that we are nurturing. Plus it's rewarding to feel we are always improving our preparedness for opportunity whenever and wherever it may arise.

We collect, distill, and sense-make from the voluminous amounts of information so we can communicate its meaning to colleagues, clients, or customers, whether verbally or in writing. To do hat we need to have effective writing and communication skills. Funnily enough, good communications and good writing are complimentary skills.

So for me in 2017, instead of looking forward to retirement as many of age cohorts are doing (I am not really the retiring type - at least not yet), I am looking forward to improving my learning, thinking and writing skills so I can continue to generate value with my mind.

Doing those two things will also help me to prepare for starting our third book in The Agility Series on Cultural Agility. It will also me to help collect, distill and sense-make from what is happening at the Inaugural Business Agility Conference in NYC Feb 23-24th with my good friends Evan Leybourn and Jen Hunter. Hope to see you there!

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How to contact me:

1. Send me an e-mail directly
2. Follow me on Twitter: @cooperlk99
3. Connect to The Agility Series Webinar Channel

Want to engage me and my friends:

1. Check out our LinkedIn Group
2. Check out our learning portal: www.MPlaza.ca - lots of free stuff plus some great courses on Scrum  and PRINE2 Agile. Go get The Adaptive Strategy Guide and Organizational Agility while you are there - both are FREE.
3. You can also purchase the second book in the Agility Series on Leadership Agility or my very first book Agile Value Delivery: Beyond the Numbers
4. We provide coaching and mentoring in Agile and Scrum for public and private sector clients. Contact me for more details
5. We also offer classroom training  for Scrum.org courses plus other agile and Scrum training (http://bssnexus.com/education/)