(#27) Baby Steps
“When we make a beginning, we get out of our own way and allow the angels to come in and do their job.”
Big ideas need small actions. So, how do we get started on those ambitious goals without being scared off?
Bob Wiley’s life is halted by his phobias and obsessive compulsive behaviours. He is dependent on his psychotherapist and is divorced from his wife…who liked Neil Diamond (when Bob did not). The first glimmer of hope for Bob comes when the egotistical psychotherapist Dr Marvin shows Bob the magic of ‘Baby Steps’. It just so happened that Dr Marvin had a new book of the same name. In any case, the troubled Bob widens his eyes when he sees that he doesn’t always have to think about the scary big picture of going all the way home without the magic of Dr Marvin to lean on. He can focus on the tiny shuffles of his feet, heading out one room and into another. Baby steps out of the doctor’s office. Baby steps out of the reception area. Baby steps towards the elevator. Baby steps into the elevator. This is the plot of 90s comedy movie What About Bob? Hilarity ensues as Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss play out their parts, but the Baby Steps scene presents a more serious point.
The saying that ‘journey of a thousand miles’ that ‘begins with a single step’ shows that where you’re headed needn’t be found in one impossibly large stride. Similarly, the phrase ‘to chip away’ at something helps you visualise the process of hammering shards off a target until the whole colossal structure is weakened by your labouring hand.
The book Think Small reveals that people with a single goal, who fixate on that goal and nothing else, who set actionable and regular deadlines, are more likely to persist and prevail than the person who doesn’t ever open a calendar. In the same book comes a necessary reminder that, with tiny nudges in behaviour, you can make bigger changes than you or anyone in your team is even aware of. Consider, more laterally, how such nudges relate to the psychological practice of Exposure Therapy. Anxious fears can be managed through a series of small, escalating challenges, each bringing you in closer contact to what you feared than the last.
Many big projects require many people with different expertise to make it work. There is no lone genius at the height of what humans can achieve together. To run the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments at CERN, job listings include (but are not limited to) resourcing, recruitment, software development, design engineering, theoretical physics, and administration. In running my own microcosmic multidisciplinary research team, I’ve found some projects can leave team members hyper aware that they know so little about so much. It’s been a challenge to move away from the collective instinct to dwell on what we don’t know, and onto making baby steps towards our larger research goal. And still, with the right step size, it’s been possible to mentor a struggling undergraduate to the level of running point on a pioneering software project. So, how to get there?
This is where nudges to ask team to present more of their work in lay terms than in jargon can help.
This is where making your team aware of the pros and cons of being the Jack or Jill of All Trades versus the Master of One can help.
This is where thinking small can help you think really, really big.
How will you help your team take its smallest viable step towards its overarching goal?
References
[1] Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals, Owain Service, Rory Gallagher, Michael O'Mara (publisher), 2017, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34735779-think-small
[2] Nudge Theory, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory
[3] Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein, Riverhead Books, 2019, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41795733-range
[4] Exposure Therapy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_therapy#:~:text=Exposure%20therapy%20is%20a%20technique,overcome%20their%20anxiety%20or%20distress.
[5] See below:
‘Baby Steps’ scene from the 1991 comedy movie What About Bob?