As I prepared for my recent interview with journalist Tim Harford, I was struck by the diversity of the output he produces—from books to a weekly Financial Times column to his Cautionary Tales podcast (it’s fantastic, check it out) and BBC radio series(es).
Beyond being an interesting and broad set of activities, there’s something about this pattern of activity that is self-supporting. Like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, there’s a core theme layered with deviation, a center to return to while playing around the edges.
My theory is that working across a lot of media is a way of both being focused and producing high-quality, diverse work.
As we discussed on my podcast, the theme underlying Tim’s work is an understanding of economics and social systems, plus the ability to tell a story. And the variation—consistently applying this core skill set to different media—elevates the work by creating many opportunities to get feedback and improve.
In many ways, as I’ve shared before, being prolific is the antidote to mediocrity.
I see this show up in my work. As I work with more and more organizations, I learn more about the underlying challenges my clients face. I learn more about the ways that I can be helpful, which sharpens my focus and simultaneously lets me experiment to find the right skills needed for a given situation. I learn a lot about myself and the work along the way.
Choosing diverse ways to work on a common focus is something that we all learn from.
Let’s say, for example, that you are managing a team of engineers tasked with process innovation in a large company. You’re undertaking a big, complex project with lots of moving pieces: a training/upskilling component, a component around how you work with data, and a component around implementing a new system to track work-in-progress (WIP), so managers get better visibility into what they’re doing.
You might create a plan for the year and break it into quarters, tackling a little bit of each aspect of the project as you go. That can work.
But consider an alternative: prioritizing your work around an area of focus so you start to get feedback early and build your capabilities as you go. Working on training and data during the first quarter, for example, might better prepare line managers to use your new WIP system.
As an example, as my team makes The Breakdown™ podcast, we’ve searched for aspects of our work that would complement the progress we’re making and the skills we’re getting, like making and editing videos.
Being prolific is something that I see some of my most successful clients doing, as well. They’re not afraid to try and combine different aspects of their work.
Consider a law firm that I work with. My client there, a litigator, recently came across a group of clients whose cases required arbitration instead of traditional litigation.
He realized that, thanks to the systems that he spent years building to make his practice more efficient, he could take on the arbitration cases (and likely succeed). Yes, the application was different, but he saw the power in being able to apply the same system that he had spent years building to a slightly different kind of problem.
What about you? What’s a variation to your core strategy that you might try?
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