Going beyond productivity: exciting profound effectiveness concepts you need to know about
Something I have noticed in working with 100's of leading medical researchers in consortium projects is that the most effective have an uncommon degree of agency.
By agency, I mean they have the ability to accomplish things regardless of the challenge.
The power of agency
Agency is a first concept you don’t hear discussed that often, yet it is clear that agency is a distinguishing factor for effectiveness.
Those that are less effective have limited agency. They default towards the feasible.
It is not only that effective researchers solve problems, they solve them efficiently and sometimes with surprising solutions.
Here is a great example.
Challenge: In one of the consortium projects I was guiding, the moonshot goal was to have new real world data registries all across Europe. The feasible goal for which there was funding was to organize the 10 existing registries.
Solution: Through the course of a single discussion, one of the leaders made the connection and realized that by using an existing infrastructure she could create everything needed for countries without a registry to set up a registry at little or no cost besides their own time and effort.
It still required setting up a foundation and a set of contracts, which she accomplished with efficiency by collaborating with others.
The result: The moonshot was achieved before the feasible goal was achieved and it was largely due to the agency of that leader.
Why do some people have so much more agency and are more effective?
Agency killers
First, let’s analyze three agency killers that limit effectiveness.
The first is avoidance.
You may believe you are effective enough because you are busy and getting things done. But do you spend enough time on the things that matter?
Checking email and doing busy work can be a form of avoidance. Doing more reading instead of writing is a form of avoidance.
Why do we avoid some tasks or activities over others? Fear. I don't mean the type of fear that is a bear standing on its hind legs and huffing at you.
Those types of fear make everyone effective. In fact, many use this type of fear to increase their effectiveness.
The classic is waiting until near the grant deadline to do the thinking and writing needed to submit a proposal.
Some trot around saying this is the only way they can get things done.
If this is you, then you are succumbing to another type of fear.
It is the smaller, almost trivial fears that damage your effectiveness the most.
They often stem from a fear that you will not be able to produce something good enough or that you won't know what to do. The situation is often worsened by the curse of knowledge.
The example of the latter is filling out some sort of form, or working to understand the intellectual property terms in a contract.
Even though this is not bear-chasing-you type of fear, you will still manifest physiological changes in your body just as if there was a bear standing in front of you.
For me, in these situations, my biceps become tense and twitchy. We don't like those feelings, and since there is no real bear, we default to avoidance.
The second agency killer is not generating the right ideas.
Research is a creative process, but only a handful of researchers can be the first to identify a new molecule or make a major finding like deciphering the genetic code.
This means that to be successful, most have to be off the curve creative with their ideas.
They have to develop new ideas in a field that is typically defined by a rush of activity after the initial breakthrough is made.
What makes things worse is the difficulty distinguishing signal from noise.
This is because when you are on the engulfing edge of a rapidly expanding field, the current paradigm defines what is signal and what is noise.
But what if the noise is the signal?
The classic example is Tom Cech.
I remember his story because he won the Nobel Prize while I was still in medical school at the University of Colorado.
Cech shared the Nobel Prize with researchers who discovered that RNA can replicate itself.
The prevailing paradigm was that proteins that make up the ribosome are the only way for RNA to be replicated.
So these researchers struggled as they kept finding more RNA in their preparations without ribosomes.
They figured there must be some sort of contamination. This was the case until they got curious and thought it wasn't noise, but rather the signal.
The third agency killer is not having the knowledge and resources to solve challenging and complex problems.
Science, particularly medical science, is extremely complex.
In fact, I would venture that the human brain is the most complex thing in the Universe.
Not just because of the network of neurons, but because of the network of neurons and all of the molecular complexity.
This is particularly true when one considers that the immune system also operates in the brain.
The point is that when we engage in meaningful endeavors such as medical research, we make a deal to have to struggle with complex problems ranging from complicated systems , to the need for sophisticated resources, to the requirement to work with multiple disciplines.
Beyond traditional productivity advice
One solution for increasing your agency could be to look toward standard productivity advice.
I have had a little obsession with productivity advice for sometime, but most of it is interesting, not that helpful.
I like the way Oliver Burkeman puts it.
“And that’s the key distinction here, I think: the unstated appeal of a lot of productivity advice, very much including the Seinfeld Strategy, lies in the bewitching idea that there might be a rule, or a set of rules, that would force accomplishment to occur, rendering it inevitable and automatic.” (1)
Productivity advice to Burkeman is more like we expect a rule or a set of rules to shoulder the burden of thinking for us.
However, rules will never be sufficient; they lack the depth needed to have real agency and to be effective.
So what can you do to increase your agency and improve your effectiveness?
A story about increasing agency
Something that happened to me a few weeks ago made the answer to this question much clearer to me.
I became one of the help coaches for my son's soccer team.
The club was having trouble finding a coach for their team. They had recently hired a new coach, and he had just started.
For the first match after becoming a help coach, the head coach and the other help coach could not attend the match. So, I was the coach for the day.
The thing you have to understand is that this was a team whose attitude was down.
They had not won a game all season. So, I was not expecting much.
I had only played soccer for a couple years and I had never coached a soccer match.
Not having any experience as a soccer coach or a player, I focused on getting them motivated.
I told them I had watched most of their games and for a couple of the 15 minute periods they played, they were as good or better than the teams they faced.
I told them I knew they could do it; they could be good.
I then had them do a round robin about what they each thought they could do better. It was typical answers such as get more in front of the player as he is approaching, pass more, shoot earlier, etc.
Then I asked them a silly question.
How could we win even if we do not make more goals than the other team?
That got a puzzled look in response and to be fair, it was a guess what I am thinking question.
I told them it was by doing better on an individual basis than the last game. It was delivering on what they thought they could do better. If everyone did that we would be a team of winners. It was always up to them.
It turned out that not only did they improve individually, collectively they won 8-5 and dominated the whole time.
They were getting better and improving, so it was more of a situation like when someone is trying to open a tight bottle cap and hands it to you and it is really easy. The coach had made them loose. I was just lucky to be the coach of the day when they won for the first time.
Nonetheless, the experience made me realize that the season-long string of losses was not because they were not capable; it was more that they had lost their sense of agency and hence were not effective.
What happened during that game was that they shifted their mindset.
For most of the season, they had a fixed mindset. When things did not go well on the field, it was a direct reflection on them.
When you have a fixed mindset, you don't believe you can improve; every setback is a judgment of how good you are.
When you have the opposite, a growth mindset, setbacks are opportunities to learn how to do better.
By telling them I knew they could do better, I gave them a different way to think about setbacks. I helped them shift their mindset.
How to think about mindsets
I view a mindset as a strategy for thinking.
When you try to find a definition of mindset, there is not a clear definition; in fact, there are at least 100 different definitions (2).
Most define mindset as a habit of thinking or a pattern of thought.
I define mindset as a strategy for thinking because that makes the concept particularly useful. It also makes it clear that you can shift your mindset for improvement.
During that game, they had a growth mindset.
A growth mindset is the concept that when we are faced with a challenge or a failure, we view it as an opportunity to learn.
Carol Dweck started her research career with the intent of studying how people deal with failure.
She began with children, giving them a set of difficult problems to solve. She was surprised to see that some children liked being challenged with a problem they could not solve. They flourished in the face of adversity. (2)
A growth mindset is a very adaptive and optimistic mindset.
This means with a growth mindset you are more willing to take risks and engage in ambitious projects.
But a growth mindset is more than an eagerness to learn.
A growth mindset is how you stay motivated in the face of adversity. Things don't go as you planned, as is often the case. Do you despair, or do you view the problem as an opportunity to learn?
This is a nice piece of advice, but for me, it falls through the floor when I am heavily vested in what I am doing when the problem arises, or my willpower is low.
I don't see a problem at that point as an opportunity to learn. It is an opportunity to get frustrated.
Can we actively guard against an undesirable shift in mindset?
Maintaining or changing your mindset is second concept that is rarely discussed.
When we view a mindset as a strategy for thinking, the answer is yes.
We need to change strategy.
But of course, that leaves us questioning is meant by strategy.
Strategy is another concept that has a million definitions. If we define strategy in way that can be useful, we can develop a way to shift or maintain our mindset.
Strategy, in the first instance, is a set of choices and as a set of choices, it makes decision making easier. It’s like a set of rules that are a priori decisions. Unlike the rules that make up the body of the most productivity hacks, which are rules for behavior, Strategy in the context of a mindset is a set of rules for thinking.
Strategy can also be viewed as a system (3). Then a mindset becomes a system for thinking.
When we go back to the plethora of definitions for strategy, we see the concept that mindset is a habit of thinking.
A Mindset can be thought of as a strategy for creating a habit of thinking.
Linking mindset and strategy to habits is also very helpful from the practical point of view.
To form new habits and break old habits, we should work with triggers and replacement behaviors. When you feel the urge to smoke, chewing a piece of gum is a trigger habit loop that has saved millions of lives.
Curiosity kills cats, but strengthens mindsets
Thus, if you want to shift your mindset from a fixed to a growth mindset, establish a rule that when you feel frustrated by a problem, a lack of progress, or a mistake you made, use that as a trigger.
Then replace anger and frustration with curiosity about what you could learn from the situation.
Curiosity is in itself a sort of mindset, particularly if you practice systematic curiosity.
Ann Laure Le Cuff developed a conceptual framework for systematic curiosity by curating existing literature on curiosity. (4)
The systematic approach she proposes takes into consideration cognitive, behavioral, and emotional dimensions.
Systematic curiosity is a deep and deliberate form of curiosity that follows a pattern similar to scientific inquiry with observations, hypotheses, and testing.
She argues that by adopting a systematic approach to operationalizing curiosity, we can create a culture of deliberate inquiry that will help solve problems, create social cohesion, and enable the understanding of different perspectives.
“The possible applications of systematic curiosity extend beyond personal development, with the potential to foster a culture of deliberate inquiry that can in turn lead to innovative problem-solving, enhanced social cohesion, and a deeper understanding of diverse perspectives.” (4).
For me making curiosity deliberate means that when faced with a problem that stimulates a fixed mindset and you find yourself thinking: "
Why does it always happen like this?" "Why can't this ever go right?" get curious and ask questions.
Getting curious together
One of the best ways to make use of a growth mindset and systematic curiosity is to not just ask questions of yourself.
Instead, bring your challenges and your questions to a group of collaborators.
Exposing your challenges to the collective intelligence of a diverse group of experts or stakeholders is a way to exponentially scale your agency.
This is one of the most underutilized aspects of consortium projects. Not only do you get access to a powerful way of thinking through problems openly, helping each other with problems improves the strength of a collaboration.
Consortium projects are like flywheels that increase your agency, productivity, and effectiveness.
This is why one of the core concepts I wrote about in Assembled Chaos is a highly interactive consortium mindset.
The Agency Framework: Putting It All Together
Let me give you a concrete framework for developing greater agency, based on everything we've discussed:
Recognize Your Agency Triggers
Notice when you're defaulting to "feasible" instead of "possible"
Identify which agency killer (avoidance, idea generation, or complexity) is holding you back
Pay attention to physical signs of resistance (like those twitchy biceps)
Deploy Strategic Curiosity
When facing a challenge, ask: "What's interesting about this problem?"
Generate three different approaches before settling on a solution
Document what you learn from each setback
Build Your Agency Network
Share challenges openly with trusted colleagues
Create regular opportunities for collective problem-solving
Actively seek diverse perspectives on complex problems
Practice Mindset Shifts
Use frustration as a trigger for curiosity
Replace "I can't because..." with "How might I..."
Schedule weekly reflection on what you've learned from challenges
Start by choosing one element from each part of the framework. Practice it deliberately for a week.
Notice how your effectiveness increases as you build these new habits of thinking and acting.
Remember: Agency isn't about having all the answers—it's about believing in your ability to find them.
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And if you're ready to apply these concepts to consortium building and major funding initiatives, let's talk.
Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
Buchanan, A. (2024). What is mindset? 100 definitions from the field. Preprint manuscript. https://doi. org/10.31234/osf. io/5xeqv.
Dweck SC. Mindset: The new psychology of success. 2007
This is Strategy, Seth Godin
Le Cunff, A. L. (2024). Systematic curiosity as an integrative tool for human flourishing: A conceptual review and framework. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 1-19.
