Rev Up with Design Factory Melbourne #14

Rev Up with DFM is a series of short posts to get your day started. Delivered in bite-sized chunks, this series gives you a taste of a wide range of activities, that you can try out to enhance your own workflow or share them with your team. Each week, we will share an activity varying in four different themes; Gain Focus, Boost Energy, Find Inspiration and Make Connections.

This week’s theme: Gain Focus

This week’s Rev Up with DFM explores how to focus on the things that you can influence and ways you can expand your agency. We’ll share The Circle of Influence -framework that helps you in increasing the feeling of being in control despite challenging circumstances.  

The constant change and transformation we are experiencing in our day to day can easily feel overwhelming. These large systemic changes may make you feel that we have very little control of the environment around us, and that our actions ultimately would not have much impact. 

Shift in thinking that we have more power than we realise

We want to start with an example that Martela & Kent (2020) share in their recent article. 

“During the 9/11 attacks, Manhattan resident Nicole Blackman was as lost as anyone in the city. She wasn’t trained to do rescue work and didn’t belong to any emergency management organizations. But she felt the need to help in any way she could — so she decided to donate some sandwiches to the rescue workers at Ground Zero. From there things quickly escalated: After delivering the sandwiches, she stayed around for a while at the volunteer drop-off point. When the person in charge of operations left for the day, Blackman ended up taking over. In a few weeks’ time, as she recounted in Damon DiMarco’s oral history, Tower Stories, she was leading an ad hoc volunteer organization involving hundreds of people, with job titles, divisions of labor, and an expanded mission. Most government agencies in the area even assumed her group was an established nonprofit like the Red Cross.”

As this example highlights, ultimately we have more influence than we think and our actions carry a much bigger opportunity for impact than we might think. Agency is about “active striving, taking initiatives, or having an influence on one’s own life situation” (Etel?pelto et al, 2013:46). It “refers to acts done intentionally” and inherently carries out the notion of our power and control over our own life (Bandura, 2001:6). Thus, we all have power, and a responsibility, to create change towards the kind of life we want to live and the kind of world we want to be a part of creating. Instead of focussing on things that we can’t influence, we should strengthen our ability to map out areas, actions, relationships, behaviours that we can influence and impact. 

“The core features of agency enable people to play a part in their self-development, adaptation, and self-renewal with changing times” (Bandura, 2001:2)

There are ways of increasing the feeling of being in control 

Regardless of the role or job title you hold, there will be issues that you can advance and influence on your own or through identifying people in your networks to tap into to aid the process. It might be as small as altering one’s perspective or attitude, which is often fundamental before creating tangible changes as well. This is an active endeavour, which requires self-regulation and -direction (Bandura, 2001). 

“Agency thus involves not only the deliberative ability to make choices and action plans, but the ability to give shape to appropriate courses of action and to motivate and regulate their execution.” (Bandura, 2001: 8) 

Another way of approaching an overwhelming situation is to break it into smaller chunks. Identifying an aspect you can work on to improve the situation is the key to get us moving. Starting from the smallest action, smallest step or minor element of the whole doesn’t only help us to take agency over a seemingly overwhelming situation, but also gives us more information about the situation and makes us feel more effective. This in turn increases our motivation and capacity to start expanding our sphere of influence, moving on to more meaningful goals (Martela & Kent, 2020). Thinking about the possible benefit, reward or impact of your actions can help to boost motivation and behaviour towards change (Bandura, 2001). 

“The idea here is just to get moving: Try a number of things and see what sticks. We assume that our goals determine our actions. But the reverse is also true. Our small actions generate feedback that allows us to discover more-meaningful goals.” (Martela & Kent, 2020)

At the end of this post you’ll find an activity that helps you to recognise your agency and reveal how you could expand your influence. Taking a moment to map out your sphere of influence might help you to identify new opportunities and perspectives, and reveal a much larger area than you originally had thought of. 

Taken together, our approach matters and you have influence over your decisions. Becoming aware of this agency and taking action is the avenue for everyone to “redesign and construct environments to their liking, create styles of behavior that enable them to realize desired outcomes, and pass on the effective ones to others by social modeling” (Bandura, 2001: 22). This ultimately increases our well-being and mechanisms for thriving.

Map out your Circle of influence - How to do this? 

One way to increase your awareness of your influence is to use the tool Circle of Influence (Covey, 1992). It is a good activity for mapping your concerns in a systematic way and to create clarity around your ownership and opportunities for action. 

You can use the Circle of Influence for different contexts and circumstances that affect your life. You could for example think of a challenge you are currently facing, a situation where you are currently in, a future aspiration, or a conflict you want to resolve. The key is to start somewhere, and see how the framework can support you the best and unlock new insights and perspectives towards your agency.

We encourage you to get tactile with this activity, to get a pen and paper and draw your Circle of Influence. If you have post-its, we encourage you to use them, as it makes it easier to move things around as you start mapping and prioritising elements on the framework. If you prefer, you can also use a digital whiteboard and post-its.

1. Think of a context or circumstance that affects your work or life and your agency in creating change
2. Create a large circle, with two smaller circles inside of it. See the figure below for reference.
3. Thinking of the context you chose, at the very centre of the diagram, place yourself and write a list of things that you know are within your control. In this place, we have the ability to make and keep commitments and promises. We can have the authenticity and trust that tasks within this circle will be completed. This is your circle of control. 
4. In the next layer of the circles, reflect on the areas in which you don’t have direct control, but can however influence some aspects or parts. What or who do you need to influence? This is your circle of influence, it may be larger than you realise. 
5. In the outer circle, consider all of the things you find lingering on your mind as areas of concern. These may be systemic, health-related, financial, political or personal concerns. Consider what might be inhibiting you from proceeding with your focus.

Spend some time doing this mapping and if using post-its, move your thoughts around accordingly. 

Now, what can you see? What does this make you feel and think? Did you realise something unexpected or recognise an area you have more influence over than you perhaps originally realised? How do you feel now that you have mapped your concerns? Were you able to create clarity around things that are within your reach and which are not? 

Looking at the mapping you created, think about whether you tend to be proactive or reactive towards creating change and the environment around you? 

Reactive approach tends to see and focus on the things that are beyond control and have little opportunities to change. With the reactive mindset you might feel burdened by your concerns, feel that you have influence over only very few things, and might perceive the circle of influence shrinking as a result of this. 

Proactive approach means that you focus on issues and elements that you can do something about, thus topics that are within your circle of influence. Advancing these things means you are working towards creating positive change and pushing the boundaries of your circle of influence, and ultimately expanding it through your actions and behaviours. 

“Being responsible for our own lives … our behaviour is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.” (Covey, 1992)

We encourage you to think about how you could embrace the proactive mindset and approach more, to take action within your circle of influence and by doing that, expanding your agency. 

Stay tuned for the Rev up with DFM next week!

References 

Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual review of psychology, 52(1), 1-26.

Covey, S. R., (1992). The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Simon & Schuster.

Etel?pelto, A., V?h?santanen, K., H?kk?, P., & Paloniemi, S. (2013). What is agency? Conceptualizing professional agency at work. Educational research review, 10, 45-65.

Martela, F. & Kent, D. (2020). What to do When Work Seems Meaningless. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 28.8.2020.