Finding a path to greatness in your career has never been more challenging than it is right now. But there is opportunity amidst the chaos, says author Whitney Johnson.
Johnson’s new book, Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company cracks open an important conversation around growth and how we experience it as individuals.
Specifically, Johnson provides a deep dive into her S Curve of Learning™, a simple visual model that demystifies the process of growth. Every new skill learned, every challenge faced, takes the form of a distinct learning curve, which has three stages:
- Stage 1 is the launch point. Whenever you start something new, you're at the launch point of a curve. Growth feels slow because you're still figuring things out and putting pieces together.
- Stage 2 is the sweet spot. Here you accelerate into competence and confidence. Growth happens quickly.
- Stage 3 is mastery. This is where you get very good at what you’re doing. Things become easy or feel like second nature to you.
In this interview, Johnson discusses how to navigate and leverage the S-curve of change to achieve smart growth in your career.
Melody Wilding: What inspired you to write this book? Is there a certain story or event that led you to write it?
Whitney Johnson: I've written two books prior to this, and in those I had reimagined the S-curve that was popularized by Everett Rogers. It gave readers a way to think about what growth looks like as an individual. As I promoted those books, I would continually have people say to me, “let's talk about the S curve.” It was so simple, so visual, that people kept finding themselves drawn toward it.
And then I had this aha moment. I realized that disruption itself was the mechanism by which you make progress along the curve. So the motivation for writing this book was to get very, very clear on how to use the S-curve of learning to help you demystify the process of growth. You can use it in organizations, but it starts with you, the individual.
Wilding: Can you tell us more about how this work and the S curve came to you?
Johnson: I was working as an investor and I had started a fund with the late Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School. We were investing using the theory of disruption. We were also using the S-curve to help us figure out how quickly an innovation would be adopted.
That was fascinating for me, and what I found in my career was that I was more interested in the momentum of people, not stocks. I was more interested in disruptive innovation as it applies to people, not products in the S-curve. I was more interested in finding out what this meant for me. What does it mean for people? How do we grow?
So around 2012 I published an article in the Harvard Business Review, Disrupt Yourself. It was about understanding this S-curve and this way to think about growth. In many respects, I was at the top of my S-curve of learning as an investor. I wanted to jump to the bottom of a new one and figure out how do we really use these ideas to help people? And that was the beginning of me building out my own business and coaching leaders think about their own growth.
Wilding: I think that leads perfectly into what we're facing right now, which is the Great Resignation, but you say it should be called the Great Aspiration. Why is that?
Johnson: Prior to the pandemic, we were on an S-curve and that we were pushed off of. The consequence of that is scrambling to get our footing on this brand new S-curve, but it’s helped us realize that we were far more resilient than we thought. We realized that we were already in movement. We had overcome our inertia and we rethought our lives – our personal lives, but especially our work lives. We were forced to discover want we want more of. I believe that people aren’t so much resigning from their lives, but rather aspiring to more in their lives. People are thinking about where they want to go, and they need a map. The S-curve of learning gives them that map to think about where they are and what’s next.
Wilding: Right now many people are finding it hard to uproot themselves–to take a new job or to create healthier work habits. Why do we have that resistance to change, even if it's something that is going to be helpful to our lives?
Johnson: There are a couple of reasons. First, we've got neural pathways that are very thick. These are the super highway of our habits. As we contemplate doing something new, it is the equivalent of a cow path in our brain. We are trying to go from the super highway of our habits to a newly formed cow path. That's not as easy. Part of the reason why it's difficult to do something new is because the neural pathways aren’t created yet.
The second reason is that as we consider making a change, we focus on the bad things that will happen to us. Loss aversion theory from Daniel Kahneman says we're 2.2 times more motivated by what we may lose than versus what we may gain. We're naturally motivated to not lose what we have. We can flip that though and ask, “what bad thing will happen to me if I don't change?”
Once you jump to the bottom of a new S-curve, what you want to do is recognize that you are on the launch point. Your brain is running a prediction model, many of which are going to be inaccurate. Your dopamine's is going to drop, so change is going to feel frustrating and discouraging. But remember to reminder yourself, “this is normal, because I'm at the launch point of a new curve.”
Wilding: What are some strategies or tips that people can use to achieve smart growth in their career?
Johnson: Start by understanding S-curve. When you have that map, it's going to make it easier. Attaining peak performance is really about the ability to navigate the entire cycle. It's the ability to navigate the launch point and being willing to be uncomfortable. It's the ability to have the optimized attention that comes in the sweet spot. Then once you reach mastery, it's the willingness and ability to disrupt yourself and do something new without waiting to be disrupted. As you master completing that growth cycle, you're going to be able to better manage through upheaval and change.
As you are gaining momentum and becoming more competent, you can easily get distracted. So in the sweet spot, it's very important that you learn how to focus. Not just on any given day, but really pay attention to whatever you're doing right in the moment. Pay attention to what will help you stay in the sweet spot and actually gain momentum along the curve.
And be willing to try something new. If you don't you'll stagnate, your plateau becomes a precipice.
Wilding: What are some strategies people can use to make change last?
Johnson: There's some wonderful work by B.J. Fogg. He talks about how emotions create habits. If you want to create positive habits you therefore need to create positive emotions. You can use the idea of celebration when you're at the launch point of trying something new and then when you get into mastery and you've achieve what you set out to achieve, celebrate again! What that does is creates habits that are going to allow you to continue to move productively throughout the growth cycle.
Another thing is to set your ego aside. When you're trying something new, you have to give away your sense of identity. When you were at the top of one curve, whether you liked it or not, your identity was wrapped up in that. When you jump to the bottom of a new curve, your identity will have to shift. If you can take your ego off the table, it's not in the equation, there's no referendum around your ego or your sense of self. If you're just trying something new, that's going to allow you to experiment. Put your ego aside and you're going to be able to run these experiments that allow you to grow faster.
Wilding: You talk about the milestones of gratitude and grief, which is interesting because we don’t always think of grief and success going hand in hand. What role does grief play in sustaining success over the long term?
Johnson: The reason that grief is important is that when you finish something, you're ending something. You've got to the top of a mountain and now you're going to climb another mountain because growth is our default setting. However it does mean that that there is a mountain you finish and there's a sadness that comes with that.
As part of that celebration of mastery, I think there also should be time to honor what’s over. Take time to be sad about it. Just like when you finish a job and you go on to a new job, you're so excited about your new job or new role, but there's still a sadness there. Be willing to feel your feelings, when we're able to feel then we are able to live a life that is happy. If you can't feel grief, I can't feel joy. When you feel grief, it also means that you cared about something. It’s an important emotion for us to feel because it allows us to feel alive and it honors the experience and it honors that things end, but it also honors that things begin.
