“Proactive” is an adjective which can be defined as “creating or controlling a situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened.” I have twice in the past week prepared draft legal documents for a transaction I am working on which were clearly going to be urgently required, but had not yet been requested. I did this in an attempt to get ahead of the game and anticipate what might be needed - and without really thinking too much more about it. On reflection however being proactive in this manner and not just passively waiting to be asked to do something is a valued professional and indeed management asset which should be recognised as such and encouraged in our working lives.

If say your boss is very busy but you need them to approve or review something, don’t just pass the parcel as it were, but prepare all the facts for them and even offer to take on the task for in their place, anticipating what their concerns or questions might be. Or if you are meeting with a legal client or medical patient don’t just focus on the immediate problem they present, but check if there may be some overarching legal, business or health concern that may lie behind the obvious symptoms.

There is of course a risk with this approach in that things may move on in the transaction you are dealing with, or your boss may not want to delegate, so the anticipatory work may not be needed. However generally even then proactivity will be appreciated by your clients and your co-workers (and hopefully your manager) who will see the value in this extra effort.

For a good summary of what is required to be proactive see this article  What is a proactive worker? which suggests “A proactive worker is an employee who thinks ahead. When a problem arises, proactive people look for solutions right away instead of waiting for direction. They always strive for the best possible outcome and put extra thought and effort into each task they complete.” It lists characteristics of proactive employees including:

• Forward-thinking: A proactive worker plans ahead. They’re always thinking about what they can do to keep things running smoothly
• Independent: Proactive employees are highly independent. They complete assigned tasks, help their colleagues and look for other opportunities to use their skills, all without any micromanagement.
• Action-oriented: Proactive employees avoid procrastination. Instead of waiting until the last minute, they start new assignments right away and often finish their work early.

I found this Forbes article 5 Ways Successful People Are Proactive At Work which proposes that “Being proactive may not eliminate all issues, but it can help you resolve issues more effectively” and recommends ways to achieve this in practice including:

• Be curious – Proactive people crave knowledge. They enjoy learning. They are open to new information.
• Get to know people in other functions - Proactive lawyers will reach out to operations professionals to understand real life processes and better identify risks.
• Connect the dots - Proactive people connect the dots to uncover what could happen in the future.

While another Forbes article The Power Of Being Proactive: 5 Ways To Develop This Surprising Skill identifies the value of this characteristic “If you’re trying to get ahead or nurture greater happiness and satisfaction in life and work, there’s a trait you may not have realized is quite so important: the ability to be proactive.” It proposes that “when employees are more proactive, business outcomes are improved through greater effectiveness and enhanced competitiveness.” According to research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology “40% of whether you’re proactive can be attributed to your genes, but fully 60% is based on environmental factors, so it’s worth the effort to develop the capability.” In order to achieve this it helps to

• Tune In - pay attention and explore your situation.
• Make Plans – aspire for the long term and your ideals.
• Take Action - When you see problems, take initiative to recommend solutions.

This theme is picked up in a wikiHow article, with some good illustrations, simply called How to Be Proactive which starts “If you feel like you’re always planning and never doing, there are plenty of ways to change that.” Its seventeen recommendations include:

• Set concrete, realistic goals.
• Pick a single important task and do it now.
• Accomplish one minor task every day.
• Let go of the stuff outside your control.
• Take initiative instead of waiting for help.
• Be empathetic and explore new perspectives.
• Choose to see the bright side.

Turning to a more academic source this Harvard Business Review article When to Take Initiative at Work, and When Not To provides some balance, recognising the benefits and value of proactive workers but warning that it can go wrong if not channelled in the right way. According to their research analysing positive and negative outcomes they “identified three ingredients that strongly align with psychologist Robert Sternberg’s balance theory of wisdom. The theory argues that wisdom comes from balancing one’s interests with the interests of others and those of broader society. What we define as “wise proactivity,” or the right way to be proactive, thus includes the following three elements.
Managing yourself.
Considering others.
Aligning with organizational goals.”

The speaker and author John C Maxwell sums this topic up nicely “If you're proactive, you focus on preparing. If you're reactive, you end up focusing on repairing.”

As Barack Obama once commented “The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”
​
While (allegedly) Confucius said succinctly “Better light a candle than curse the darkness.”

I was watching a quiz show this week, Richard Osman’s House of Games, which had Sir Chris Hoy the Olympic cyclist as a contestant. The host asked him what the best winning advice was he had ever received as a decorated sportsperson. Sir Chris said the top Olympic coaches drilled into him the imperative to “focus on the process and not the outcome”. This is great advice in sport generally; I play tennis a lot and by far the best approach is to concentrate on the point you are playing regardless of the score. The New York Tennis Magazine sums this up nicely “The best way to give yourself a great shot at winning is to focus on what you need to do on the way to the desired outcome….. reminding yourself to follow through the same way every time on your groundstrokes is a good focus point”. I think this is another of those sporting principles that translates really well into our professional working world.

See this really apposite article Why Focusing On Process Over Outcome Matters which defines these two types of goals as follows:
“Outcome goals are a result that you hope to achieve, while
Process goals are processes you will need to repeat to achieve that result.”
It observes that “Instead of focusing on an outcome goal such as winning an intense competition, a process goal is a goal that is much easier to achieve. This also helps you with self-confidence, since you'll feel better once you start working towards that outcome.” and suggests that “focusing on the process can even improve your emotional well-being.”

This theme is picked up in a Forbes article How To Focus On Progress Not Results To Prevent Stress And Burnoutwhich advises that “Finding a way to evaluate your year more positively based on progress, not outcome, can help you avoid being too hard on yourself, celebrate small wins and redefine progress in the upcoming year to prevent stress and burnout.” It cites a book by Richard Boyatzis Helping People Change which “states that overemphasizing results [outcomes] or what "should be" makes people operate in this negative state of fight or flight, fear, and anxiety”. It then proposes 7 ways to focus on progress which include: 

• Trust the process and stick to it.
• Divide your goals into smaller steps or milestones to be able to see progress even when a complete goal is not achieved.”
• Create a safe space to make mistakes.

The article concludes “By celebrating progress, no matter how small, you can feel more confident to evaluate where you are more often, adjust your goals or action items, and, more importantly, enjoy the journey.”

While this article How To Learn To Enjoy The Journey, Not Just The Destination develops the journey analogy  further and provides some sensible advice on how to achieve this (and actions to take) including:

• Focus on what you have – your confidence will then grow
• Celebrate every part of the process – don’t ignore the progress and small milestones
• Detach from the outcome – things won’t always go as planned.

It rather sagely concludes “All you have is the present moment. Enjoy the journey while you’re at it. Whatever the outcome, it’ll be a fun adventure.”

I also like this article I found 4 Reasons Why You Should Stop Setting Goals (and Focus on Process, Instead) by Ozan Varol a rocket scientist turned author and law professor. He says that “When we switch to a process-focused mindset, we condition ourselves to derive intrinsic value out of the activity.” whereas “An outcome-focused approach counterintuitively makes it more difficult for you to achieve your goal.” Returning to tennis “Maria Sharapova describes focus on outcomes as the worst mistake that beginning tennis players make. Watch the ball as long as you can, Sharapova cautions, and zero in on the process.”

This incremental approach is a particularly valuable asset for business leaders. As this blog Why Leaders Need to Focus on Process, NOT Results says leaders who are successful “realize that it’s not all about the end-goal and results” instead they focus on and importantly enjoy the process – “your business is a process, not an event.” While this blog Leadership Tip of the Week: Process vs. Outcome counsels “Focusing on outcomes instead of the process is a mistake many leaders make. Leaders need to learn how to maintain focus on the “controllables” — the things they can actually impact. These are also called lagging or leading indicators. Lagging outcomes are the results that occur as a result of leading indicators.”

And this approach can take time – as the novelist Tom Clancy (and allegedly the business man Jeff Bezos) once said “overnight success is ten years in the making,”

But it is worth it. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winning coach Bill Walsh “Concentrate on what will produce results rather than on the results, focus on the process not the prize.”… “The score takes care of itself.”

While the athlete Carl Lewis reinforced this “It’s all about the journey, not the outcome.”

Or to put it another way “I hated every minute of training, but I said. Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.” Muhammad Ali.
​
And for a final word “Sooner or later it doesn't matter who's winning because you're learning the process and getting better results. If you put all your energy and focus just on the final results while ignoring the process, you will never walk away fulfilled because your happiness will only be based on the results and not the process.” Tony Logan VP of a publishing company

When I go to our London office, I travel by train from Cobham in Surrey and then on the London Underground to Warren Street which is the nearest tube station to our headquarters. For nearly a year this journey involved taking the train to the mainline station Waterloo and then changing to the Northern line. Almost by accident coming back from Euston on a business trip I realised there was a better route taking the Victoria line from Warren Street to Vauxhall and catching the Cobham train there – and vice versa. This is an easier and slightly quicker commute and avoids a longer changeover at Waterloo, and whilst not a dramatic improvement is still very worthwhile. I get to work – and then home – earlier.

When we think of beneficial change in a work context it is easy to look for major improvements, quantum leaps if you like. Yet in reality in professional life I suggest it is these smaller incremental changes which are the true path to improvement. As this blog Incremental Improvement suggests “When trying to identify and solve big problems that face your organization, it's tempting to focus all of your efforts on finding big solutions, too”. While in reality “Improvement doesn’t have to come only from big, sweeping changes. While it is sometimes necessary to tackle big problems using big projects, this is not always the case. Incremental improvement is an approach to process improvement in which you and your staff focus  efforts on smaller solutions that slowly but surely move the business toward success. These ideas are typically low-cost and low-risk, and are implemented by employees throughout the entire organization.”

The thing is when you are very good at something, which most professionals by definition are, sudden large significant changes are much harder to make and may not even be feasible. By contrast continuous small change can be really effective. See this excellent article This Coach Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent and Here’s What Happenedwhich cites the impact Dave Brailsford had on British professional cycling when he was hired as a new performance director in 1973 after “nearly one hundred years of mediocrity”. At that time Great Britain’s cyclists had such a bad reputation that European manufacturers would not sell them bikes because it might hurt sales! What Brailsford did was to “adopt a strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do.” So they made small but perhaps expected adjustments like redesigning bike seats and racing suits. But they went much further and for example:

• tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the fastest muscle recovery.
•  hired a surgeon to teach each rider the best way to wash their hands to reduce the chances of catching a cold. 
• determined the type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night’s sleep for each rider. 
• Even painted the inside of the team truck white, which helped them spot little bits of dust that would normally slip by unnoticed but could degrade the performance of the finely tuned bikes

The results were staggering. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics the British cycling team won 60% of the gold medals. At the 2012 London Olympics they set nine Olympic and seven world records. The same year Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist ever to win the prestigious Tour de France. 

The article is actually an extract from a book I have just downloaded on Kindle called  Atomic Habits by James Clear who “knows that real change comes from the compound effect of hundreds of small decisions: doing two push-ups a day, waking up five minutes early, or holding a single short phone call” which he calls “atomic habits”.

Another outstanding sporting coach who believed in the benefits of marginal gains was Sir Clive Woodward OBE who led the English rugby team to win the 2003 Rugby World Cup. See this article  Winners and Losers of the Pro Era - Why did England win the 2003 Rugby World Cup? which suggests “Woodward completely  changed the job description of the modern day Head Coach in Rugby Union as he took a far more managerial role and spent years building the right support team to take England forward.” But more importantly, in his own words “Winning the Rugby world cup was not about doing one thing 100% better, but about doing 100 things 1% better”.

There is a Japanese term for this approach – kaizen - which is “a Japanese business philosophy that concerns the processes that continuously improve operations and involve all employees. Kaizen sees improvement in productivity as a gradual and methodical process.” See this article Kaizen: Understanding the Japanese Business Philosophywhich says the approach “focuses on gradually improving productivity and making a work environment more efficient”recognising that “Improvements can come from any employee at any time. The idea is that everyone has a stake in the company's success and everyone should strive, at all times, to help make the business model better.”

The AI engine Microsoft Copilot quite aptly describes the benefits of incremental change for professionals as follows – with some edits by me:

• Reduced risk: allowing the testing and evaluation of changes on a small scale before implementing them on a larger scale. 
• Improved agility: enabling adaptation to changing circumstances more quickly and efficiently. By making small changes over time, professionals can respond to new challenges and opportunities as they arise.
• Increased engagement: helping us feel more engaged and invested in the change process which can create a more positive and productive work environment.
• Better outcomes: over time by making small changes and evaluating their impact

As the American author and commentator Dick Morris said “Like the battleships of old, omnibus programs present too tempting a target, too easily destroyed by a single attack, to make it through a fight.... It is through incremental change after change, step after step, that a statesman of today can vindicate a bold vision.”

While another American the teacher and writer Tal Ben-Shahar suggests “Incremental change is better than ambitious failure. . . Success feeds on itself.”
​
And yet a third American the entrepreneur and author Jim Rhon advises that “Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.”

Happy New Year one and all. On this first weekend of 2024 I was looking forward yesterday to a relaxing day getting up late, removing the Christmas decorations and doing a Tai Chi class. Instead, I was rudely awoken early in the morning with the news that there was a power cut. Normally this is just some light bulb going which triggers a cut-off switch you push back up again. No, this time when I phoned the electricity emergency line (105 in the UK and it really works they answer quickly) they informed me there was a fault at a local substation following reports of a fire and they had had to turn off the electricity to the whole street. Whilst an emergency engineering team was on the way they would not arrive for half an hour – and then it could take another 4 hours to fix (which it duly did). The text communication with the emergency line was good and kept us up to date, if a little worrying because it said the engineers after fixing the fault might “walk our cabling route throughout the area!” In the event the electricity came back on after about four and a half hours – not before we had a fight with the burglar alarm, which insisted on going off whatever code we entered and was only silenced after removing its emergency battery (please don’t tell our house insurers!).

What struck me was the amazingly thin line we walk to successfully support our daily work and home lives. Everything needs electricity from lighting and heating to cooking and refrigeration. And of course, our router was down so we could only use phone connections to access the Internet and that only whilst the battery lasted. I finally found a use for the low power mode on my iPhone. And of course, no charging of electric or hybrid cars. In this instance when things went wrong we could not fix the problem by, for example, calling an emergency electrician out (at no doubt great cost) because the fault was with the electricity system not in our house. After some initial panic we did however did what we could to mitigate the power cut including lighting a stove fire, but we were a bit in the lap of the gods. The cat simply went and sat by the fire!

When things go wrong in our professional lives, as they inevitably will, it is I suggest not the event itself, but how we react that matters. See this short University of Nottingham blog When things go wrong which  advises “Your first step should be to recognise the problem and try to get a sense of scale. When you first notice an issue it's easy to feel overwhelmed but try to take a moment to think things through calmly. Next, identify any immediate action you need to take in order to rectify things and limit any further damage.” It also points out that you can turn things to your advantage by reframing them positively which can lead to:

• Learning opportunities
• Building resilience
• Improving work relationships as colleagues pull together and help.

See this Forbes article 10 Things To Remember When Everything Seems To Be Going Wrong At Work which (rather like our power cut) says when things go wrong “the biggest challenges are the ones you have little control over.” but
“The one thing you can always control, however, is how you respond to these challenges. The way you think about your circumstances affects your mental strength.” It has some helpful suggestions on what to tell yourself when things do go wrong including:

• I’ve Survived Tougher Challenges
• Some Things Are Going Right
• Five Years From Now This Won’t Matter So Much

I also like this Harvard Business Review article You Made a Big Mistake at Work. What Should You Do? which in summary suggests “Here’s the thing about mistakes: Everyone makes them. But making a mistake at work doesn’t have to be career limiting. As awful as it might feel in the moment, we can take steps to regain trust, minimize damage, and mend the situation.” Its wise counsel includes:
Be proactive.
Once you are aware of the mistake you have made, try to get in front of the situation before it spirals.
Offer an apology.
Offer a genuine and humble apology, acknowledging your error and the harm you caused to the other person, team, or the business.
Have compassion
…we can become excessively self-critical. While practicing self-compassion will support you in regaining clarity and confidence, and moving forward productively from a setback.

As an illustrative postscript, we had not lit our stove fire since I replaced the glass in the door late last year; because it did not fit back on again properly, I assumed it was broken. In fact, I had not properly reconnected the door to the oven, and because of our electricity crisis I found and remedied my error. So now we can have fires again just as it seems to be getting colder.

As Vincent Van Gogh said “Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.”

While another painter Camille Pissarro, a contemporary of Van Gogh, sagely says “Don't be afraid in nature: one must be bold, at the risk of having been deceived and making mistakes”.

And George Bernard Shaw counsels “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

I particularly like this quote for the new year from the English writer Neil Gaiman “I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.”
​
To end on a sporting note as the Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp observed “Football is a game you cannot play without making mistakes.”