The pandemic brought more clearly a current feature that is increasingly present in the issues we face: ambiguity. Changing the or for the e, even if things look different and divergent is one of the requirements to continue overcoming the challenges. Below, I bring a reflection on performance and balance. By understanding the relationship between these two skills and how to live knowing how to use both, we will be better able to combine happiness and health with productivity and performance.

Performance

Everything is constantly changing. What Buddhism calls impermanence.

But impermanence has become more dynamic. The lifetime of things, situations and structures that are no longer solid to be fluid.

Impermanent is victory, but also defeat. It is the process as well as the product.

Living in a dynamic world, as sociologist Zigmunt Bauman defined it as liquid modernity, is somehow comfortable for the natives of this time and challenging for the immigrants of another era. But the benefits and inconveniences are felt by everyone, even if in different ways.

Knowing how to deal with the benefits and inconveniences defines both the balance and the productivity of each one of us.

Productivity and performance feed on movement. It is necessary to act to produce, and it is necessary to act with frequency and excellence to create performance. Technology shortens distances, speeds up time and generates exponential productivity. We do more with a smartphone than an entire company did in the past. We are multiple in ourselves, learning and doing things as different as our interests or needs demand.

Capitalism lives on productivity and, in general, companies live on capitalism. This demand for more productivity means that time is money is being multiplied both by technology and our productivity as participants in this dynamic world. Think about how many social networks you access today and how many technological tools you use to be present in different spaces, producing diverse interactions and products/services. Okay, automation and robotization are doing much of the work of distributing this production, but creativity is a continuous and differentiated process that humans still dominate. And it is creativity that generates such important innovation to delight new and old customers, develop new markets, conquer others and maintain relevance and competitiveness in an increasingly impermanent world and markets. The creative process demands time, connection, observation, introspection, elaboration and production. One of the significant problems of digital natives is to create a conception that the value creation process is as fast as the value distribution process. And it’s not! The gain in the current chain is in distribution. We can see the number of followers, how many likes, how many subscriptions and so on. It is the result of algorithms, automation, technology. But creativity is not! Creativity comes from a more analog process. An idea is not born out of nowhere. It is born from many observations, experiences, connections and elaborations, as already mentioned here. How, then, establish a creative process capable of generating value to be distributed exponentially and making all the investment of effort, time and everything else that was part of the process profitable? I will try to answer in the second part of this text:

Balance

In Eastern philosophy, balance is the main force! Homeostasis between the internal system with its subsystems and the external system is the objective of medicinal practices. There is no treatment of just one part of the body, as it is common in the West, including the fractional view that science has brought to medicine and the business world. There is an action on a part dedicated to the balance of the whole. The vision is always systemic.

When I studied philosophy and oriental medicine, it took me a while to absorb the systemic view, but I could never see anything in isolation after I saw it through this “lens”. Everything is impermanent, but everything is also interconnected. Later, while studying social science and analyzing social phenomena, I understood that no radical or partial solution to a social problem generates a permanent solution. Composing different solutions is the best way to deal with problems. In the world of companies, it is no different, as well as in your personal life. The balance between work and play, between stress and relaxation, between control and freedom and so on. There is no effective solution out of balance and systemic vision. This requires taking a step back, looking higher, looking further. When Einstein said that “you cannot find a solution to a problem, using the same consciousness that created it,” he confirmed that the brain needs to “breathe,” find new connections, enter the creative process. It’s no use having speed in the wrong direction and movement doesn’t always mean rate. Time is money, but a well-crafted creative process is more.

It was the time that was more. More can be less, but mostly more is balance. And balance, as well as organization and control, need to be dynamic in a dynamic world. Within balance, there is room to make mistakes, learn and do better. There is space to disconnect and reconnect fields of action in our lives so that we are present where we need to be. Productivity with a balance is working with intelligence. Whether you are reading a book, watching a movie, playing a sport, taking a trip, or anything else that enriches your experience as a being, you will be improving your ability to create and produce. Balance, in addition to being healthy, generates energy and raw material for creativity.

But just as creativity is a process that requires training and constancy, so is balance. Balancing isn’t easy, but it’s simple. First, it is necessary to see yourself as a system with physical and mental health demands, then to see the world, a society, as companies as systems in which it is not pure efficiency or effectiveness that determines the result, but the balance. A result on one side can have a side effect and cause and effects are constant. The systemic view always.

The workshop that I develop in companies addresses balance and productivity as the foundation of happiness and intelligent productivity. The focus is always on company profitability but in a more strategic, systemic and healthy way.

As I said above, it is a practice, just like happiness and productivity.

May you have constant balance and incremental productivity every time!