The best way to assure rapid and effective completion is to look past the emotions of “defensive” and accept Gote into the attainment of your goals.What Personal Kanban seeks to do is visualize how your work is actually done. Whether you are doing Sente or Gote work, the work needs to be done. We’re lucky that it is predictably so, but it still does not adhere to our plans. It’s why that damn plumber is STILL HERE installing the dishwasher.Life is by its very nature chaotic. It’s why people don’t feel they get what they want from consultants. We wanted to learn Spanish by Tuesday and now we have to wait.Well, this is why most businesses fail. This makes us feel like we are on the English term defensive, and that upsets us.
Mopping up water and pulling down saturated wall board isn’t helping us achieve our goal of learning Spanish. Other days your water heater explodes and covers your basement in water, steam, and destruction.Some days you are at work, methodically finishing up your report and other days you are surprised to get a report back with particularly nasty comments and an unrealistic deadline to fix it.On days like this we realize that life doesn’t always respect our personal goals. They are yard work or cleaning the house. The nature of personal work is that some days are quiet, comfortable, and predictable. The Sensei knows that reaction is itself an action.Why is this important?Life comes at you fast. There are Go Masters who can win a game and play almost entirely from a Gote position. Reaction, for human beings, naturally caries a fight or flight response.In Go, Sente and Gote positions are perfectly acceptable at all times. Reaction is the gazelle taking flight when the cheetah springs forth.
The other is that the goal of your defensive strategy is to quickly regain an offensive strategy.This comes from the animal brain inside us all. One is that you are on the defensive when you’ve lost control of something. The word “defense” has a few connotations we’d like to avoid when working.
However, there’s a subtle difference here. “ Sente” is the term for the initiative, “ Gote” is the term for being reactive.In English, we’d be tempted to equate these to Offense and Defense. It is normal, and nothing - not Personal Kanban, not GTD - is going to change that.In the game “Go” (“Weiqi” in Chinese) there are balanced strategic concepts for the natural ebbs and flows of taking the initiative or reacting to a change in a situation. Sometimes your relationship to work is initiative based, other times it is reactive.
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