What gets in the way of improvement?  Stated differently, what gets in the way of on-going success?  Understand that today’s success is tomorrow’s mediocrity.  I believe the answer is related to our clarity of vision, our focus. We have heard the cliché, “Keep your eye on the ball”.  The question is which ball?

I believe that the answer is also related to how much energy we spend on maintaining the status quo. We can easily create an overload of rules, processes and metrics that keep us from doing our best work.  Like the swimmer who spends their energy treading water to avoid drowning, instead of swimming to shore.

Compare that to the stories behind Lockheed’s Skunk Works and the Manhattan Project.  These folks embraced the horror of working without a safety net (the status quo).  The risk of failure became the challenge and the motivation to accomplish great things.

Consider the following questions:

• People do what you incentivize them to do, so are we incentivizing the maintenance of the status quo? Or for seeking excellence? Do we spend energy defending our performance? Or for striving to get better?
• Are we accountable for maintaining the targeted goal? Or accountable for pushing past it?
• Focusing on who to blame, or reward, will prevent us from winning the race. This is called siloing. “This is my sandbox, stay out”.  Do you welcome ideas from outside your group and seek constructive criticism?
• What do you spend your time doing?  Are you making a case for why you are OK?  Or what you intend to do to make it to the next level of performance?

Here, I believe is the secrete sauce:

• Cooperation. Working together to drive improvement.
• Open mind to the ideas and criticism of others.
• Willingness to fail, in order to succeed.
• Getting out of your comfort zone. Comfortable folks are those to whom the status quo is a good thing, and change is a bad thing.
• Being just a little bit dangerous.

In my life, I have been most successful when failure was a real possibility.  It makes you come alive to potential.  Answering the difficult questions and tackling the difficult problems give the biggest rewards.  Let’s become dangerous to the status quo.