This article is a curated compilation of writings by Francis Sopper, CEO of GTD Focus, exploring the Five Horizons framework and how we navigate complexity through different levels of focus.
The Five Horizons
In the intervening years since I first engaged Getting Things Done in 1998, I’ve experienced four economic recessions, one divorce, started three businesses, had five significant shifts in job roles and responsibilities, married a second time, reared two children, moved more than 1200 miles twice, and experienced serious illnesses and deaths among my loved ones.
Oh yeah, and all the personal and professional disruption resulting from the response to a global pandemic.
And I’m still here, trying to imagine what’s next. At this point, most of the time I’m able to get to a place of quiet competence where I know, no matter what life sends my way, I have a way of engaging.
It takes all five horizons
Level 1 – The Runway
Your next actions. The things that you have to do in the real world in order to reach a desired outcome.
Level 2 – Projects
A project is a series of next actions that, again, produce something in the real world. You keep moving forward because you defined your desired outcome, identified the necessary next action, or understand the powers beyond your control.
Level 3 – Areas of Focus and Responsibility
These are things we do because of the commitments we make to ourselves or others. Commitments aren’t static: we recommit and renegotiate the commitment on a regular basis.
Level 4 – Vision
This is where you put your ideas. Ideas aren’t filmable actions, but can lead to real world outcomes. Rather than, let’s build a bridge here, it’s — do you think there should be a bridge here?
Level 5 – Purpose and Core Values
These are your life’s final exam questions. What kind of person do I want to be? What mark do I want to make? This takes you straight back to Level 1. Are the specific next actions I take every five to ten days the ones that will get me here.
Vision and Refocus
Sometimes we can be in overwhelm, need support, and can’t find the time to get the support. It’s a distressing position. Parents understand this: I’m stressed and need help with child care. However, finding child care I can trust is harder than putting out a measuring post at the end of the driveway with a sign, “You must be this tall to babysit.”
I’ve found clients running rapidly growing organizations or organizations undergoing change needing to fill important positions. How are they going to find time for the uncertainty of the search and hiring?
What makes this so hard, is the process straddles multiple levels. Filling a job is an area of focus and responsibility. It’s identifying and defining a project. You write a job description. You identify job requirements. Now you have projects and actions to find a person who meets your requirements.
However, a client had a person leave a position. It appeared they were at the level of finding a replacement. What showed up is a question: is the role actually what we need now? What does our group need now? Now it’s not level 2: Activating projects and actions to fill a role, and it’s not yet level 3: Defining a job and job requirements. It’s level 4: What does our organization need now? What is the most effective way to meet that need?
This involves looking at your organization from a higher level, potentially restructuring it, and negotiating the restructuring up the organizational chain which is committed to the organizational chart as it is. Sometimes you can be the CEO and have the power to do this, but you’ll have to manage the disruption. Engaging all this when you’re already in overwhelm? Forget it. Advertise the position.
But you want to do better than that.
Vision and Refocus embraces multiple areas of focus — without ignoring the others — because your visions have to manifest in commitments, and if you’re making new commitments you’ll inevitably need to renegotiate and or close off existing commitments. At the same time, those new commitments will need to be supported by projects and next actions.
Big life-enhancing change needs space to be seeded, incubated, and developed. Vision and Refocus helps you make that space.
Time and Chance
We, humans, are particularly suited for probability: this might happen; this might not happen; and chance: this will happen, but maybe not; this won’t happen, but might. We’re also suited to recognize the passage of time; and therefore, can anticipate, activate in the present, and reflect on the past. Andy Clark, in his book, Surfing Uncertainty calls us “prediction machines.”
Statisticians, by contrast, tell us humans are particularly unsuited for these things: here and here.
And, yes, both are true.
We’re very good at short time and simple probability. By contrast, understanding the speed and complexity of the modern world, not so much. In recent paper describing the probability of contracting Covid 19 after either infections or vaccinations, there was a long paragraph describing the methodology with sentences like this:
We used a uniform prior on the coefficients for the spline basis functions that implement the monotonicity constraint for the spline.
The point is not whether any of us understand this sentence. Maybe a couple of you do. What’s important to me is I trust the people who wrote this. Also today, I trusted someone to stop at a red light today, even though I would have been badly hurt if they hadn’t. I had less of an advantage to trust this person I knew nothing about, than I do the mathematicians who ran this meta-analysis. Still my world relies on my trusting a whole lot of people to know their jobs and do them with integrity, even though some probably won’t.
In order to navigate the modern world, I have to trust people. I can’t possibly learn enough, know enough, experience enough, to know whom to trust. And yet, I probably can.
This is when I lean on Higher Horizons — Purpose and Core Values. In an impossibly complex world, I work very hard to be a trustworthy person. I trust you are doing the same.
When It’s on You
Everyone thinks you’ve arrived. You’re the acknowledged one.
At the same time, if you’ve risen to a high level of competence and responsibility, you can lose the wisdom of the crowd. We often say, groupthink, like it’s a bad thing, but preponderance of evidence is usually true — operative word, usually. We often say, peerless, like it’s a good thing, but you may not have anyone to check your work or to order you back into the fray.
As we move up the Horizons of Focus into higher levels of accountability, into complicated goals and objectives, into motivational purposes and principles; we can find ourselves stalling. Often that loss of momentum is the result of letting go of best practices. Lots of times, we know exactly why we let go of those practices.
Other times we don’t know: we ask ourselves, why am I not doing the things I know I should do; what’s wrong with me?
Or worse, we believe the wrong things about ourselves: I’m not smart enough, I’m not working hard enough. Everyone else is better than I am.
And further, there are unconscious leaks of energy from fear, shame, resentments, misperceptions, and misunderstandings.
Here’s a common danger for individuals who have achieved a level of distinction.
At the same time we achieve singular competence, we can lose touch with what others know about us that we don’t know about ourselves. We have fewer people who have the authority to challenge us.
And occasionally our position can be rare enough, there simply aren’t people who know what we don’t know, so can’t act as authorities or guides. Hence, the expression, “it’s lonely at the top.” Further, who wants to hear that from you? Especially after you won the competition to get there.
We do.
If any of this sounds familiar, call us, and learn how we can support you where the air is thin.