Swimming, Splashing or Sinking?

We can learn much from studying high caliber athletes like Michael Phelps and comparing their technique to that of weaker swimmers. The novice swimmer uses a lot of energy, generating a lot of splash but not moving very quickly, whereas experts seem to move through the water effortlessly, finding a smooth, splash-free, alignment and flow. 

With this in mind, a plot of effort versus results produces the following 4-quadrant diagram:

EFFORT	2. Splash	3. Sweat
	1. Sink	4. Swim
	RESULTS

 These quadrants can be summarized as:

Quadrant 1 ‘sinking’: no effort put in and no results obtained.

Quadrant 2 ‘splashing’: energy is used to push water into the air (splash) instead of directing it into propulsion, giving the impression of plenty of action without producing results.

Quadrant 3 ‘sweating’: much effort is used to make progress, giving short-term results that are difficult to sustain.

Quadrant 4 ‘swimming’: energy is focused into obtaining the desired outcome; there is little wasted effort and a sustainable flow is developed.

There is abundant ‘splashing’ in today’s workplace, examples abound of large amounts of energy directed at activities that do not contribute to attaining goals. A continual focus on the urgent (including activities that are not important) is one root cause; the accompanying neglect of communication and training, with reduced time to build relationships and trust [1] causes splash through re-work, poor quality, unclear priorities and discontentment. Not to mention email, a large proportion of which is ‘falsely urgent’, driving many executives to spend hours splashing at work and wherever they can access their ‘splash-machine’, the ubiquitous Blackberry.

I think the majority of us are prone to spend much of our time in Quadrant 3, sweating, working hard to get the results we desire, while not having time or resource to invest in higher-value activities. Again, this can be a symptom of pressure to attend to short-term priorities at the expense of longer-term benefit. To ‘swim’, moving into the fourth Quadrant, requires focusing energy into activities that will produce the greatest benefit, a concept that has been expressed many times in varying ways, famously in the ‘Pareto Principle’ [2]. As Michael Phelps demonstrates so gracefully, sometimes we have to use less effort to get more results, to go faster we first have to slow down to review where our time and energy will be most valuable.

References

1. Covey SR, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything, 2006, Simon & Schuster.
2. Pareto Principle, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle