Being aware of and adapting one's focus is crucial in success.
As a team building exercise at Fannie Mae one of the team members suggested that the whole team attend to a pistol shooting range for target practice as a team building exercise. She suggested this while I was speaking with our manager, Steve, regarding his prior experience working in a gun store. The team liked the idea and so in a month or so it came to be. First we had a safety meeting, run by Steve, for about two hours going over the safety rules of safe gun play, er, practice.

After a drive to the facilities, next to an air force base outside of Washington, D.C., we got equipped (Steve brought his assorted collection). Then the fun and focus began.

Years earlier I had taken a Neuro-Linguistic Programming course in Expert Performance Modeling with Wyatt Woodsmall, an amazing educator and master in NLP. During this weekend course he described how he had devised a new pistol and M16 marksmanship course for the US Military. Critical to shooting accurately is where and what you focus on. His first step was to ascertain how the experts did what they did and in that case this meant how did they shoot their guns accurately hitting the targets almost every shot (39 out of 40). What he found was that the experts that were sent to him weren't the top guns. So he asked the Generals for their best of the best. He got them.

While we didn't use any guns at the course and Wyatt only told us his experiences and the heart of the matter of accurate shooting it did make an impression upon me.

While at the shooting range for the team building exercise I began to fire a real gun for the first time. I ran through the entire process that Wyatt had described in detail a decade earlier. Bullseye. Next shot, bullseye. And again and again and again. All my shots that day were bulls eyes or very close to the center of the target. The distance was about 30 feet.

"What you focus on is what you get" as a principle can assist in guiding one towards success in whatever activity and projects you undertake.

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Improving Team Process Efficiency
The The Value and Result Focused Process enables people to see where they are current at in a team project process and how to move forward to the desired results. It's about focus. It's about results being what the stakeholders intend. Gaining this alignment requires that the team keep focused on the results and the process they are using to get there.

The result focus process enables one to see where each team member is, or members are, currently active and allows for the validation of these efforts.

In many cases during meetings I've discovered that people are not understanding each other due in part to the area that they are working in. Some are active in the design and implementation loops of the process while others are attempting to clarify what the results and requirements should be. From experience there are many different disconnects that I've witnessed. You actually want your people focused on their tasks and yet you need them to connect with other team members as efficiently and effectively as possible.

One strategy for assisting team members to connect is done through bridging their respective ongoing conversations to branch out through the process and visit each others process area. Walk in each others shoes so to speak. Both sub groups can do this and often it just takes one person checking out what the others are doing to have an experience that relates sub groups of the team.

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