This suggests that team members who check in with their leader frequently have an enhanced sense of being able to use their strengths every day, of being recognized for excellent work, and of having opportunities to grow. Although this study did not distinguish between correlation and causation (we could not tell whether the increased frequency of conversation led to increased engagement or vice versa), subsequent research, a portion of which is described in the final section of this appendix, indicated that it was in fact the increased attention, via frequent conversation, that led to the increased levels of engagement.

Chapter Seven: Appreciating Systems

“In addition to organizational systems such as 3M, all of us operate in systems in our everyday lives—family systems, ecosystems, and school systems, to name a few. This makes system awareness—especially understanding how systems can produce unwanted failures—a crucial skill in the science of failing well. A system’s results are less shaped by its individual parts than by how the parts relate to one another. This simple but powerful idea can help you analyze and design various systems in your life to get better results. Later in this chapter I’ll return to how 3M designed a system to generate the right kind of wrong and thereby spawn countless innovations. But first, let’s take a closer look at what it means to think in terms of systems.

That said, there are three prevalent sources of fuel for the inner fire across the vastly different lives in the study. In addition to love of the doing, the two others are:

Extend Out/Circle Back: This is a continuous dynamic process of extending yourself— growing, learning, experimenting, expanding capabilities, discovering new encodings— while simultaneously drawing upon encodings discovered and capabilities developed earlier in life.

I believe questions can be even more powerful than answers. As I indicated at the very beginning, this is a self-knowledge book, not a self-help book. It is a call to “Know Thyself”— and to bring that knowledge to life in the choices you make— not a prescription. Questions are the seeds of discovery, and the spirit of discovery is at the very core of this work. Not only about discovering shared patterns across the vastly different lives in this study, but also about making discoveries pertinent to our own lives.

A friend once said of my earlier work that I wrote with a signature of “well-founded hope.” The mountains of systematic research, combined with my dedication to drawing insights from the evidence, provided the “well-founded” part. “But the message is always hopeful,” he said. “You demonstrate with evidence that good can become great, that people can build organizations worthy of lasting, that strong values can win in a hypercompetitive world.” Well-founded hope. This study only added to that signature for me. It made me feel even more hopeful and optimistic, not directly about the world at large, but about people. And people, after all, make the world.