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Ground to a halt? What you need is Impetus.
Everyone gets stuck at some point in their working day. You don’t know what to do next – or you do know, but just don’t want to do it. And maybe there’s no one there who can help.
This is a book for that moment.
Whatever’s keeping you stuck – constraints, resistance, objections, ignorance, panic, boredom, weariness – Impetus offers you a compendium of practical and manageable actions for the quick next step that will get you unstuck. Small wins that will give you the momentum to get going, and keep going, so you can do the work that matters.
Including a simple diagnostic tool to help you to choose the right tactic, real examples that show how it will help you and notes on the science to explain why, this book will get you moving again with confidence.
Kathryn Bishop CBE FRSA is a director, NED, educator and consultant who has worked with teams in the public, private and voluntary sectors to get difficult things done. She has distilled into this book everything she has ever tried that worked to make progress with those problems.
Kathryn Bishop CBE FRSA is a director, NED, educator and consultant who has worked with teams in the public, private and voluntary sectors to get difficult things done. She has led organizational change, implemented new systems and processes and responded to crises. As an Associate Fellow at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford, she has worked with leaders from across the world to help them to address the challenges they face.
Kathryn’s previous books include Make Your Own Map: career success strategies for women (2021), and the award-winning Board Talk: 18 crucial conversations that count inside and outside the boardroom (2023). She has also written articles for a wide range of publications, as well as a prize-winning case study for business schools. Her website is Kathryn-bishop.com and her Wikipedia page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Bishop.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Being Stuck: what and why?
The power of a tactic
- Rethinking
- Re-motivating yourself
- Resources for doing
Choosing and reviewing
- Start by starting
- Risks and Benefits
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How to choose your next step
Tactics to choose from
Rethinking
- Name and explain
- Talk to a specialist
- Find a similar problem elsewhere
- Try Free writing - unlock your intuition
- Think creatively- Use a metaphor
- Reschedule
- Go back to first principles
- Change the objective
- Define the Minimum Viable Product
- Get more data
- Check your assumptions
- Examine your biases
- Ask more and better questions
- Use your superpower
- Get on the balcony
- Lower your standards
- Change the format
- Set yourself some metrics
Re-motivating yourself
- Change your environment
- Find a short fun distraction
- Take a break
- Sleep on it
- Quit - walk away
- Face it: No-one is coming to help
- Fake it: pretend its going well
- Focus: what really matters here?
- Stick with it
- Understand what motivates you
- Get some feedback
- Plan your Rewards
- Eat something
Resources for doing
- Share the problem
- Work with a coach
- Outsource it
- Bring in expertise from outside
- Delegate it re-allocate the task
- Pedal harder - try it again
- Experiment
- Ask AI
- Find the procedure manual
- Fire, ready, aim
- Rearrange your day
- Batch your work
- Plan to pause
- Switch to a different task
Afterword
Future Propulsion; Reflecting
Permissions