In the 1950s, in the wake of the Second World War, Japan was intensely focused on growing its economy. Every day, tens of thousands of people travelled by train between Tokyo and Osaka. Vast amounts of raw industrial materials were transported on those rail lines. But the Japanese topography was so mountainous and the railway system so outdated that the 320-mile trip could take as long as 20 hours. So in 1955 the head of the Japanese railway system issued a challenge to the nation’s finest engineers: invent a faster train.
Six months later, a team unveiled a prototype locomotive capable of going 65mph – a speed that at the time made it one of the fastest passenger trains in the world. Not good enough, the head of the railway system said. He wanted 120mph. The engineers explained that was impossible. At those speeds, if a train turned too sharply, centrifugal force would derail the cars: 70mph was more realistic, perhaps 75. Any faster and the trains would crash.
But the railway chief insisted on this seemingly impossible goal, and over the next two years the engineers experimented, designing train cars that each had their own motors, rebuilding gears so they meshed with less friction. There were hundreds of innovations, each making the trains a little bit faster than before.
In 1964 the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, the world’s first bullet train, completed its inaugural trip at an average speed of 120mph. Within a decade there were high-speed rail projects in France, Germany, and Australia. What was created in Japan eventually revolutionised industrial design around the world.
The invention of the bullet train is a demonstration of what a “stretch goal” can achieve. When I first began exploring the neurology, psychology and organisational insights of productivity, I was told by researchers that the most productive people tend to set goals differently from everyone else. In particular they tend to identify big, seemingly overambitious objectives.
These “stretch goals serve as jolting events that disrupt complacency and promote new ways of thinking”, a group of scientists wrote in the Academy of Management Review business journal in 2011. “By forcing a substantial elevation in collective aspirations, stretch goals can shift attention to possible new futures and perhaps spark increased energy in the organisation. They thus can prompt exploratory learning through experimentation, innovation, broad search or playfulness.The solution is to make sure, before you begin writing a series of easy tasks, that you scribble, at the top of your to-do list, a big stretch goal that will constantly remind you of the overarching, main objective you are trying to get done. Underneath comes the nitty-gritty: the small tasks that tell you precisely what to do. “That way I’m telling myself what to do next, but I’m also reminded of my larger ambition,” Pychyl said.This lesson can be extended to the most mundane aspects of life. Take, for instance, to-do lists. “To-do lists are great if you use them correctly,” Timothy Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University in Canada, told me. “But when people say: ‘I sometimes write down easy items I can cross off right away, because it makes me feel good,’ that’s exactly the wrong way to create a to-do list. That signals you’re using it for mood repair rather than productivity.”
Setting stretch goals demonstrates a key secret to productivity: the most productive people tend to train themselves to think differently. And in doing so, they unlock capacities that help them excel.
Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg (£14.99, William Heinemann). To buy a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
No comments:
Post a Comment