Habits, Maturity Continuum and the P/PC balance
This article is part of a series of articles that I’m writing as I go through the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. I…
This article is part of a series of articles that I’m writing as I go through the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. I recommend you start your reading from the first article in the series to have the full context around this journey.
Before we can develop the 7 Habits that will be analysed as I will go through the second part of the book, it's important to align on a common definition of habit. The important thing to realise here is that the Habits that Covey focuses on are not what I'd call behavioural habits. Making 5 push-ups every morning, making your bed first thing after you wake up, standing-up from your desk once every hour are all examples of such behavioral habits. They are definitely beneficial, but they they focus on changing the way we behave in a mechanical way rather than addressing the fundamental principles at the cofre of how we act day in and day out.
The catetory of habits that the 7 Habits of the book fall into is what I'd call Character Habits, following Covey definition of the Character Ethic that we saw in the previous article. These habits focus on developing abilities such as the ability to actively and profounly listen to others, to trust other individuals and such. They are not purely mechanical artifacts, but rather deep changes in the way we are. To build these habits is hard, but not impossibile. It requires a significant amount of energy and the coexistance of three key factors:
Knowledge, or the why to and what to of a habit, also referred to as the theoretical paradigm. One example of such knowledge could be knowing that in order to interact effectively with people around you — your colleagues, your family — you will need to develop the ability to listen. This knowledge alone is not enough though, it requires two more elements;
Skill, or the how to of a habit. Following the same example, this would mean knowing how to effectively listen to others. Knowledge and Skill are still not enough, they need a third element to be present in order to fully develop a habit;
Motivaton, or the want to. To really develop the habit of listening to others, I really need to desire it profoundly, and this desire and motivation is what will provide the energy investment to build the new habit.
Borrowing the termonology from logic: each one of these thre components is a necessary condition, but none of them in isolation is a sufficient condition to succeed building effective habits. It's only when we combine the three of them that this can happen.
The way the 7 Habits develop through the second part of the book follows what Covey refers to as The Maturity Continuum. The concept seems trivial and very intuitive once you read it, but I doubt that coming up with it was an easy task. This concept represents a progression across subsequent maturity stages of each individual: from dependence to independence to interdependence.
The lowest level of maturity is the one represented by dependence. Typically this stage is associated with infancy: young kids depend on adults on a physical, emotional, mental and financial level. The reality is though that even some adults might still be at a dependence level in one or more of these areas. For instance, some people can be physically dependend as the result of accidents or genetic malformations, while others can be emotionally dependent in a relationship.
Independence is a state of higher maturity, where an individual can rely on him/herself in any of those different areas. If dependence is the world of "you do", as in "you do this for me", independence is dominated by "I do", as in "I do this for myself", etc. Interestingly enough, Covey was noticing how all the literature and communication around the Personality Ethic that we saw in the previous article was focused around independence. The stage of independence is clearly a key stage and a fundamental one to move to the next stage of interdependence, but not an end state in itself. Focusing too much on independence can easily lead to extreme individualism and selfishness.
The ultimate stage of maturity is the one of interdepencence. At this stage, dominated by the idea of "We do", the individual realises that it's only through positive interactions with others that better results and satisfaction can be achieved. The sequence of the 7 Habits is one that will help the individual develop independence first and then move into interdependence. The reason for that is precisely captured in the following quote from the book:
Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make. Dependent people cannot choose to become interdependent. They don't have the character to do it; they don't own enough of themselves.
The most fascinating concept I found in the first part of the book is finally the P/PC balance. This resonates well with me since I can relate it to how we reason about Technical Debt in the Software Engineering world. The concept is quite simple, but as it happens often with Covey, it is presented in very powerful way. But what is this P/PC balance?
P stands for Production, the output of a certain activity. Production for a manufacturing plant would be its outpit, i.e. the artifacts that are produced. PC stands for Production Capability. Following the same example, this will actually be all the machineries and tools that are part of the manufacturing plant.
Now, here is the deal: when there is no balance between investing on generating P and maintaining PC, results will either be non sustainable or unsatisfactory. We're all very familiar with situation where we try to squeeze P at the expenses of PC to maximise short term returns: not doing maintenance on our car to save money, adding quick hacks to a software project in order to ship out new features without even refactoring the existing codebase, burning fossil fuels without developing alternative sources of energy or solutions to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, etc.
Funnily enough, the opposite approach of focusing entirely on PC will also be ineffective. That would be the case for instance of a permanent student that keeps sharpening his/her knowledge without ever putting that to practice to produce concrete resuls. We tend to think less of such examples beacuse they seem to be less common, but nonetheless it's important to be aware of the risk of going down this path.
To illustrate the P/PC concept, Covey uses the famous tale from Aesop called The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs, in which greed led the farmer to ultimately destroy the PC (the goose) in an attempt to squeeze even more P (the golden eggs) out of it. Despite the fact that this tale is more than a couple of thousand years old, it seems like we often forget that lesson.
Ultimately, true effectiveness only happen when we achieve a healthy balance between Production and Production Capability. There is no silver bullet or magic formula to achieve that, but the key message is that we need to make sure we're not too unbalanced on one side or another.
The concept of the P/PC balance is one that is particularly close to my hearth: having been working in the realm of Digital Products and Software Engineering during my whole professional career, I've encountered way too many situation where organisations tended to focus too much on P and not enough on PC. Endless discussion and debates on short term value capturing vs long term value creation, on adding yet one more feature as opposed to investing in maintenance of the underlying platform came to my mind while reading this part of the book.
What I found enlightening though is that the same principle of healthy balance does not only apply to the professional environment. It's even more important in the personal dimension! With this renewed level of awareness we're finally ready to dive into Part 2 of the book, where we'll start by looking at the first of the Seven Habits: Be Proactive.