For me, summer is all about beach days with water-stained pages of my current read. Here are three summer reads I wanted to share with all of you because, while they might not be obvious to some, I totally see them as linked to engagement and the work of the engagement professional.
Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles
What is ikigai? Sometimes referred to as “raison d’etre”, Garcia and Miralles put ikigai at the nexus between “what you love”, “what the world needs”, “what you can be paid for” and “what you are good at”. Much of the little book, which can be consumed in a single beach day, is about the “blue zones” and the secrets to long life. The secret is fully live, have friends, move your body and eat less and well. As an engagement professional, what I took away from it was the simple reflection of: “what gets me out of bed in the morning?” How do I balance off the vector of “what you can be paid for” with “what you love”? Working in engagement can be intense and rewarding, but it is also nuanced. There are many different components that we tend to “lump” together and call engagement, but I think it’s worth pulling them apart. Do you love connecting with people? Making meaning with varied information? Holding space? This might just be the little book that prompts you to think more deeply about your skills, your passion and how they come together in service of what the world needs.
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Cal Newport
Engagement work is generally knowledge work and Cal Newport has a new manifesto to address the pseudo-productivity that is often used as a measure of a knowledge workers “productivity”. Pseudo-productivity is about looking and being busy without actually achieving anything – think overflowing email inbox and meetings for meetings sake. His book flushes it out, but basically, he has three points:
- do fewer things,
- work at a natural pace and
- obsess over quality.
For me, this speaks so much to my work in engagement. Often there is an obsession with “more engagement”. Engagement becomes a numbers games: How many people took the survey? How many people engaged online? How many focus groups did we do? High numbers don’t equate to quality; in fact, they are often a contradiction. This book had me reflecting on:
- What is a natural pace of work in engagement?
- How can we bring a focus on sustainability to the work we do?
- What systems do we need to put in place (for our team and to support our clients’ teams) so that we can have high quality engagement, that is achieved at a natural pace and where numbers alone don’t qualify as “good” engagement?
I have often said: focus on fewer, finer things. … but I don’t really mean things. I don’t have tons of friends for example, but the ones I have are amazing. I don’t buy boxes of wine (no judgment here), but for me I’d rather have one great glass of pinot noir. I suppose Newport’s manifesto speaks to me in that I am committed to working towards a work environment where we have truly compelling, quality engagement that doesn’t lead us all to working at midnight. The alternative, pseudo-productivity and the hyperactive hive mind (another Newport-ism: constant, frantic and often unnecessary communications) is, in most work environments, the default almost to the point where we don’t question it. This book will make you question how you work and give some practical tips on how to focus on achievement without burnout.
Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential, Tiago Forte
As someone who has said: “I need another brain”, this book spoke to me. This year I have been focused on how I take notes, my recall, and how to ensure I have the right information at the right time. Forte has developed a process called CODE, which stands for Capture. Organize. Distill. Express. The book explores how we can create systems which help us to better manage information and in doing so we reduce our cognitive load, feelings of being overwhelmed and that feeling like your mind is always processing.
If you are like me, you might have had a time when you had to restart your computer, or it crashed, and you lost all your open tabs and you cried or really wanted to! This might be a sign you need a better way to manage information so that you can actually think — as opposed to simply tracking information. Most engagement results in a report on findings of what we learned. This means that we are often in a place of making meaning from a variety of sources. Distilling information and then turning that information into knowledge is of critical importance to the work we do. This book helps the engagement professional think about the systems we use to consolidate data, distill meaning and then communicate what we’ve learned so that it can be used. Thinking about how we take data and turn it into a useful piece of knowledge, I believe, is true engagement gold and something that we can continuously improve on.