Scale Yourself
Leverage is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of value creation, yet few folks look far enough beyond the balance sheet to reap the rewards of the strategy. We can immediately realize the value of leverage by strategically assessing our ongoing work, and looking for connections.
I’m always looking for opportunities to create leverage across projects. Whether it’s using an existing client relationship to prototype a new learning experience, or it’s leveraging research I conducted for a documentary appearance as fuel to power my daily blogging practice (which I did with the article on Rihanna and Fenty), or it’s leveraging my discord community to get smart on a subject matter (which inspired the article on Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco, which I then triple dipped when I wrote about drawing on a network), I’m always looking for situations where 1+1=3.
Not my friend Brandon Middleton. Brandon is a multi-sport innovation athlete, cultivating a vast project portfolio across his lives as an educator, an angel investor, a technologist, and a community organizer. He insists 1+1=11 when you make use of what he’s dubbed leverage: “Intentional Congruence, which means seeking points of congruity across projects so that one activity can yield 10x for the various parts of the portfolio.”
Personally, I’ve seen how intentional congruence breathes fresh life into lackluster projects, when I realize that doing x (perhaps the “dreaded” task) can actually deliver y (something I’ve been meaning to get done, but haven’t yet). All of a sudden, my time is double delivering through intentional congruence, and I reap the returns of leverage ordinarily only associated with financial engineering.
Related: Challenge The Paradigm
Related: Bypass Bureaucracy
Related: Draw On A Network
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One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.