THE GOLDEN HOUR: YOUR SECRET FOR UNLOCKING SUPERPERFORMANCE

The author, a business transformation specialist, compares superperformance to the golden hour—when we're in a flow state and performing at our peak. The late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about the psychology behind this phenomenon in his tremendously influential 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. “When we think about any leadership challenge,” the author writes, “it's important not just to focus on the things that are getting in the way of our success, but instead to focus even more on the things that are already helping us succeed.” He further describes “the prison of expectations,” and what we can “learn from the lean philosophy of management, which is an approach to eliminating losses in productivity by empowering employees.” He relates the value of questions: “You've got to ask,” he writes, “the right questions—not the obvious ones around what's wrong, or what you could improve. You need to ask questions that help you uncover the problems that your organization paid the price to learn.” Also, regarding the importance of questions: “I often ask teams, what is the cost of the troubleshooting we are doing? What are the constraints to driving change? What knowledge about the root cause of our success have we institutionalized?”