Operate in the Meta Zone
How am I going to live today in order to create the tomorrow I’m committed to?
—Tony Robbins
I’ve now covered four strategies that are all indispensable to any organization looking to stay healthy and grow. They present tools for managing, mitigating, and manipulating every scenario for success—both the fine-tuning and the massive overhauls. So what’s missing?
The implementation.
We’ve discussed all the theory you’ll ever need, but at what point do you sit down and start making decisions? My fifth and final strategy lays out the framework for doing just that. It’s simple, digestible, and doesn’t require many resources other than time and energy. The catch? It’s personal.
Working smarter and not harder means juggling lots of variables. Concrete and actionable planning is necessary for success—but it’s not sufficient. True success eventually boils down to the person whom you present. Ask yourself, “How do I make decisions? How do I manage my time? How do I invest in the long term?” Your responses to each of these will radically impact your success.
I’m referring to the big picture. It’s a daunting conversation for anyone to have, especially senior leaders. (If you or your team struggle with this, chances are good there’s room for improvement.) I call this final strategy levitating, which is the ability to escape daily mundane activity and examine everything that’s going on around you. To levitate, you must be able to step away from your limiting beliefs to look at the past, present, and future. You must be able to operate in the meta zone. In other words, you must be able to examine your organization from a vantage point that can perceive blind spots, hidden opportunities, unexpected challenges, and other impactful factors. Levitating is one of the most proactive and rewarding steps to success an individual or an organization can take.
I’m sure you’re thinking, “We already do this on our annual retreats!” But I’m here to tell you that retreats are not enough, not in this day and age. The speed at which industries are evolving and innovating is itself speeding up. Take a look at Moore’s Law, which has been successfully predicting that computing power is exponentially increasing as the necessary size of the hardware that houses the technology is exponentially decreasing.1 The simple truth is that our world is changing too rapidly for an annual summit to be effective (Figure 7.1).
The obvious solution to this is to increase the frequency of your higher-level discussions. However, levitating goes deeper than this. It knocks you out of your daily fog and takes you to a higher level of awareness and intention. Let me explain what I mean.
We’ve talked about how to address disruption in the last four chapters—each strategy uniquely covered how to make sure your internal processes are aligned with external circumstances (what’s going on outside your organization that may alter your trajectory?). But how do you superimpose these strategies onto your day-to-day operations? When and where does the decision making happen?
Many of my clients find themselves bogged down by the particulars of a current hurdle, which is our default reaction. We develop laser-focus for tackling a devised plan. It comes from our problem-solving nature that’s been pounded into our heads and reinforced since Day One. Succeeding in any position demands these kinds of skills. If this is something at which you excel, that’s fantastic. But we need to recognize the downside.
As we cultivate our expertise as problem solvers, we begin to only operate in this mindset. We start to rely too heavily on this strength and lose sight of the wider perspective. When massive disruption affects our organization, we’re suddenly disoriented and unprepared. Or, worse, we react to the crisis with strategies that worked for an isolated situation, but have no proven application outside that context.
Figure 7.1 Moore’s law
To avoid this hyperfocus, you need to make time to step away from just checking off boxes and take a macroscopic view of what’s going on. Here’s how:
1. Create time to operate in the meta zone.
As the driver of change within your organization, you, of course, need to stay responsive to unexpected circumstances, which is a great promise to make, but how do you do it?
• Take control of your calendar. Every organization out there will ask more of you and your time than you’re capable of giving. It’s critical you make time. Not only will no one schedule this for you, but others will ask to impose on this time. Stay strong and understand the necessary investment you’re making in yourself and your organization.
• Devoting time to operate in the meta zone can look different for everyone—there is no one-size-fits-all prescription. Some people need an hour once a week. For others, it may take an hour just to clear their heads, in which case they’ll need to devote a full day. Some prefer sitting alone at home or in their office. Others love having company off whom to bounce their ideas. These are all different parameters to experiment with and see what works.
• Of course, sometimes you can’t make it happen. There’s a company emergency, some unforeseen work arises, or maybe someone needs you at home. It’s ok! Scheduling these sessions will provide much more value than not scheduling them at all. Remember what Thoreau said, “Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.”2 Levitating should become a frequent practice, not an isolated event.
• Practicing levitating holds true both for you and your senior team. I recommend finding time once a quarter where you and your team have the ability to sit down and discuss big picture topics. It can be as simple as one day offsite where everyone’s laptops are closed, and phones are off. Getting into a rhythm with these kinds of meetings will create a new level of clarity—you should be able to identify ways to align your internal strategies, collaborate on problem-solving, and reflect on new directions for your organization.
2. Ask questions.
Consistently mapping out all the different facets of your organization, your agreed-upon plans, and expectations of some disruptions will ensure that you run into as few surprises as possible. As I’ve said before—you can’t plan for everything. But it’s always better to ask more questions, rather than fewer.
• Taking the time to think is so important. There are so many variables to consider when growing a business; in addition, you have to contend with the unexpected. None of it can be dealt with passively. To levitate, you must be able to actively understand your environment and how you’re operating within it.
3. Say no to shiny, new objects.
Make sure you don’t fall into the abundance trap. We face so many choices in every waking moment of our day that we sometimes end up spending a significant amount of time making insignificant decisions. Many of us end up adding activities into our lives that are shiny and enjoyable, but hardly rewarding.
• If you remember that your time is finite, you’ll also recall that your goal is to get as big a bang for your buck as possible. So, it should make sense that mindlessly accumulating vain abundance can grow to be a burden on your productivity. I’m sure you’ve heard this before.
• Avoiding the abundance trap is a direct byproduct of stepping back to reprioritize or levitating. When you operate in the meta zone, you’re able to recognize what your primary goals and obligations are. You have the opportunity to reconfigure your commitments and how you spend your time. This is a helpful way to explicitly define what your internal strategies are (what you and your organization is spending time on) and how well they’re aligned with your external processes (the kind of results you’re getting from your market).
4. Develop your staff.
While levitating is very much a personal strategy, it’s weakened by self-reliance. As a senior leader, you should be high performing and collaborative. All too often I’ll hear from my clients, “I can’t take time off because no one else can do the work I need to get done.” Or sometimes, “I could give this to my staff, but they have enough to do already.” It’s a common thought process, but it eliminates opportunities for both you and your staff.
• It may be counterintuitive, but if you shift some of your time and energy from completing your work to teaching your staff how to do some of it, you will create more time and energy for yourself down the line. Developing your employees’ competencies helps you free up your schedule for more important activities (like reevaluating your organization’s direction) and allows your staff the opportunity to develop their skills. It’s one of your most important and impactful activities, and it’s a win–win!
• It should then also make sense that doing the opposite is a losing proposition. Not developing your workers means that you have more to do and the people that work for you lack opportunities to advance. As I saw during my final days at Texas Instruments, people will leave an organization if they aren’t given chances to improve their capabilities. Not only that, but you risk impeding your organization’s growth too.
There’s a useful framework that many of my colleagues and I use to help organizations look for a wider perspective—or, in other words, levitate. It’s called the Johari Window model.3 Maybe you’re familiar with it. It’s a 2 × 2 matrix that helps with all kinds of organizational roadblocks. There are four cells: what you know, what you don’t know, what others know, and what others don’t know. Each of these allows a richer understanding of how best to communicate with your organization and uncover mistaken assumptions.
In cell 1, you have what’s known by both you and your organization. Everything here is out in the open, ready to be mined for value. Cell 2 has what’s known by your organization, but unknown to you, which can represent your blind spots, emerging because of an unintentional ignorance or a withholding of information. In cell 3, you have what’s known by you, but unknown to your organization. Here you have an organizational blind spot, where your company is unaware of something internal or external. Finally, in cell 4, you have what’s unknown to both you and your organization, where both you and your firm must come together to understand what you as a collective are not seeing (Figure 7.2).
Figure 7.2 Johari window model
When levitating, it’s helpful to consider how you can shrink cell 4 as much as possible, which comes back to my point about asking questions in order to map out as much of your internal and external strategies as possible. Consider what you can share with your fellow senior leaders. What about with your board? What can you share with the rest of your organization? Engage with these questions on the meta level.
The most common technique for shrinking your own blind spots is by asking for feedback. What might you ask your staff, partners, peers, or customers that would help uncover some helpful information about yourself? To shrink the blind spots of your organization, what do you need to share with your staff, partners, peers, or customers? How about collaborating to reduce the mutually unknown space? What methods will reveal your collective blind spots? Agile experimentation works perfectly here. Create plans where you don’t know the outcome. (Just remember those guardrails!)
Questions like these will never come up in your typical meeting, which is precisely why it’s so important you make time to ask them. Good questions represent one of the core values to levitating.
Sometimes, the work required can be quite simple. One of my recent client’s company was dealing with a massive change of direction. The President was going from one meeting to another all day, every day. Each day’s appointment added to a larger and larger pile of bad news. By the end of every day, not only was he drained, but he was also utterly dispirited and incapable of motivating his team. My advice was to work on actively reengineering his day-to-day experience. I told him to get a breath of fresh air, take a walk, hold one of the meetings outside, or do whatever it took. He needed to figure out how to improve his mental attitude or else the negativity would bog him down and get in the way of any real success.
A straightforward intervention like this can allow us to step back and begin to introduce levitating regularly into our hectic lives. Ross Mason, the founder of the tech company MuleSoft, once shared a telling anecdote in a work session.
Right after his company went public, people began coming up and slyly nudging him, “What are you going to do next?” To which he’d reply, “I’m going to keep looking for ways to add value to MuleSoft.” “No, really, what are you going to do?” they’d all ask. But he meant it. He explained that at the end of every year, he’d prop his feet up with a shot glass of whiskey and think about how he could best add value to his company. One year, it might be to focus on technology, the next it might be on his sales force. Whatever area he saw needed attention, he would work on that the following year.
Ross’s passion, foresight, and clarity not only took the company to great heights, but it also resulted in a massive buyout from Salesforce—to the tune of $6.5 billion.4 It seems the hardwork paid off. And what a shining example of levitating!
Of course, more dramatic disruption can warrant very specific and intentional levitating. We experienced this numerous times at Compaq.
For many years, computer companies sold through distributors. They’d design and manufacture the product and sell them in bulk to vendors, who would offer them directly to consumers. Some of you might remember ComputerLand, one of the widespread retailers. In those days, the average consumer knew very little about how computers worked or which one was the best for their needs. And yet at the same time, the capabilities this machine offered made it an asset to both individuals and businesses. This dynamic created the need for a middleman to guide consumers through the process of buying a personal computer.
However, there came the point when the market shifted. Consumers suddenly felt comfortable buying their computers directly from the manufacturers. It turned Compaq’s business model on its head. Companies with which we had partnered, like ComputerLand, had the rug pulled out from under them. All of their business disappeared. To survive, Compaq had to respond quickly and effectively. We had to shift our operations from serving retailers to serving consumers, which required stepping back from the situation—or levitating—to recognize the shift in the market and understand that our loyal customers were about to go out of business. At the business model level, this is a shift from a B2B model to a B2C (Business to Business vs. Business to Consumer)
Another example of levitating came after I left Compaq. I had spent 14 years pouring myself into a company that had skyrocketed in size and revenue. Suddenly, I was on my own.
And I had no idea what I was going to do. When I’d tell people this, they would exclaim, “What do you mean you don’t know what you’re going to do?” The truth was, not only did I not know what I wanted to do, I didn’t want to know! I understood at the time that there were so many unexplored possibilities I needed to experience before I could commit to a particular path. I was able to see, on a meta level, that it wasn’t time to take the next step yet. First, I had to survey my options.
Another long-time client of mine has sought outlets for meta-level foresight. His name is Dave Keil, and he’s the CEO of the Inc. 500 software testing company QASymphony. I had the pleasure to sit down with him and discuss the behaviors and communities he’s found to be the most helpful with his levitating.
Endeavor, a global nonprofit organization that seeks to help entrepreneurs maximize their potential and grow the entrepreneurial communities around the world, has been an incredibly fruitful resource for Dave. The executive retreat they host has put him in touch with a diverse set of minds. He was able to discover new frameworks for facing challenges and opportunities as an audience member, while sharing his own two cents and collaborating on new ideas as an active participant.
The CEOs can come together and learn from other established CEOs that have already scaled their firms. I’ve found those sessions during the past couple of years to be outstanding for getting a different viewpoint and taking the blinders off. I can’t say enough about that network. It’s not only successful from a vertical standpoint, but it’s also been very effective from a global perspective. To get the perspective of CEOs from Brazil, Morocco, and other countries to which I would normally not be exposed has been extremely valuable. I have had the opportunity—to see how they think about business and to learn how they tackle their challenges.
The same has been true about Insight IGNITE Innovation Roundtable series, another offsite event that brings together executives to shed light on cutting-edge topics in the tech industry as well as to connect leaders from all kinds of different backgrounds.
They focus on bringing together very established Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from global organizations. I just attended this event for three-and-a-half days in Iceland, and the level of executives and outside speakers at this event was exceptional. Regarding topics of conversation—it was everything from artificial intelligence to digital transformation to scaling organizations to talking about catalysts for being bolder. It added value to what had traditionally been a gap.
But how about your senior team? How can you bring this kind of value back from a retreat? How else might an organization’s executives inject this meta zone thinking into their workday?
It’s so easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day. I see through my experiences how valuable it is to have these different perspectives—whether it’s outside training or interaction with some of the teams at Insight. We have a few board advisory members, and they’ve been very impactful. I’ve highly encouraged bringing in or working with third parties, including mentors and coaches, who can offer a different viewpoint to the senior team.
It comes back to interfering with your typical thought process to change the channel and think about things in a new way. How might you rewire your schemas, adopt a refreshing new framework, or challenge your team to problem solve in a new way? Once you can break away from autopilot and begin to see things through a fresh lens, you can levitate.
The last piece here will be to integrate this into your organization’s operations. It must be a continual practice. Otherwise, how valuable can any of this be? Successfully adding levitating to your behavior involves diligence, consistency, and commitment.
It’s time to take some notes. What would it look like for you to levitate? How about you and your senior team? What kind of timeframe could you arrange for yourself and your team? What environment changes or other techniques might help you disconnect from distractions of narrow ways of thinking? What disruptions might be worth exploring? Are there any major disruptions you feel like you or your organization is ignoring? Which ones might be too pivotal to keep ignoring? What kind of questions are you looking into? Are there any major disruptions you feel like you or your organization are ignoring? Which ones might be too pivotal to keep ignoring? What kind of questions never get raised at a meeting? What do you wish you could ask your staff, peers, or CEO that you’ve never gotten the chance to ask?
1“Moore’s Law.” Investopedia, November 24, 2003.
2O. Shephard, ed. 1961. The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, 1st ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1961).
3J. Luft and H Ingham. 1982. “The Johari Window: A Graphical Model of Awareness in Interpersonal Relations,” NTL Institute.
4J. Novet. April 3, 2018. “Salesforce reveals it was the sole bidder for MuleSoft and even paid 18 percent more than its original offer,” CNBC.