Do More Great Work Exercise

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This exercise is excerpted from the book “Do More Great Work” by Michael Bungay Stainer Where Are You Now? To get to a destination, you need to know your starting point

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Just What Is (and Isn’t) Great Work? Graphic designer Milton Glaser started this ball rolling for me. Even if you’ve never heard of him, you probably know his most famous creation: I LOVE NEW YORK. His book Art is Work is mainly a collection of his design work, but he opens it with a curious and powerful insight. He says everything we do falls into three basic categories: Bad Work • Good Work • Great Work

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Bad Work Bad Work is a waste of time, energy, and life. Doing it once is one time too many. This is not something to be polite about. It’s not something to be resigned to. This is work that is pointless. Sadly, organizations have a gift for generating Bad Work. It shows up as bureaucracy, interminable meetings, outdated processes that waste everyone’s time, and other ways of doing things that squelch you rather than help you grow.

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Good Work Good Work is the familiar, useful, productive work you do—and you likely do it well. You probably spend most of your time on Good Work, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Good Work blossoms from your training, your education, and the path you’ve traveled so far. All in all, it’s a source of comfort, nourishment, and success.There’s a range of Good Work: At one end it’s engaging and interesting work; at the other, it is more mundane but you recognize its necessity and are happy enough to spend some time doing it. You always need Good Work in your life. At an organizational level, Good Work is vital. It is a company’s bread and butter—the efficient, focused, profitable work that delivers next quarter’s returns.

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Good Work has its attractions Even as we hunger for more Great Work, we’re always drawn back to the comfort of Good Work. It’s a perpetual tension—the challenge, risk, and reward of the Great against the familiarity, efficiency, and safety of the Good

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Great Work Great Work is what we all want more of. This is the work that is meaningful to you, that has an impact and makes a difference. It inspires, stretches, and provokes. Great Work is the work that matters. It is a source of both deep comfort and engagement—often you feel as if you’re in the “flow zone,” where time stands still and you’re working at your best, effortlessly. The comfort comes from its connection, its “sight line,” to what is most meaningful to you—not only your core values, and beliefs, but also your aspirations and hopes for the impact you want to have on the world. But Great Work is also a place of uncertainty.

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and discomfort. The discomfort arises because the work is often new and challenging, and so there’s an element of risk and possible failure. Because this is work that matters, work that you care about, you don’t want it to fail. But because it’s new and challenging, there’s a chance that it might. For organizations, Great Work drives strategic difference, innovation, and longevity. Often it’s the kind of inventive work that pushes business forward, that leads to new products, more efficient systems, and increased profits.

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Great Work decays Over time, Great Work decays into Good Work. As Great Work becomes comfortable and familiar as you master it, it no longer provides the challenge, stretch, or rewards it once did. Your Great Work of today won’t be your Great Work five years from now. The iPod syndrome kicks in. Remember how special iPods were when they first arrived on the scene? Now everyone has one, and they’re taken for granted.

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1. Divide a circle into three pie slices representing how much Bad Work, Good Work, and Great Work you are currently doing. Trust your intuition on this—you don’t have to be overly precise. And by the way, the proportions are almost certainly not one third each. 2. Write down two examples of each type of work in each segment. This helps make it clear to yourself just what you’re talking about.

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1. What does your current mix tell you? How do you feel about how things are? What are you happy about? What are you disappointed about? 2. What would your ideal mix be? How would you like the map to look? Most people want no Bad Work and more Great Work, but the mix of Good and Great varies from person to person and from time to time. This “gap analysis”—where you are now as compared to where you want to be—will help provide some of the impetus to make changes, and also give you clues as to what work you might want to stop doing, continue doing, and start doing. If you’re interested in the bigger picture, I’ve asked people from around the world, and most say their percentages in the three work categories currently fall somewhere within these ranges: 10–40 percent Bad Work 40–80 percent Good Work 0–25 percent Great Work If your mix is different, don’t worry. This is just a snapshot of what you see now. In six months, your mix will most likely be different—especially if you’ve been putting this book to good use!

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asked people from around the world, and most say their percentages in the three work categories currently fall somewhere within these ranges: 10–40 percent Bad Work 40–80 percent Good Work 0–25 percent Great Work If your mix is different, don’t worry. This is just a snapshot of what you see now. In six months, your mix will most likely be different—