What is the Management Horizon?

The Management Horizon is the overall timespan an individual can independently plan and act to achieve a goal under conditions of uncertainty. That is in a state of autonomy.

Key to the concept of the Management Horizon is our capability to comfortably deal with uncertainty in our state of autonomy.

A crucial part of stimulating meaningful work lies in people’s ability to perform work with autonomy. Having the autonomy to make and implement decisions is what makes work meaningful. For example, if I hand you a solved Soduku or crossword puzzle, there is no feeling of satisfaction. What is the point? I can give you a simple one that you can solve in seconds and immediately feel bored, or I can hand you a tough one that you can focus on for hours and end up frustrated because you can’t solve it. Between those two, there is a sweet spot where the puzzle is difficult enough to challenge you and keep you focused but not hard enough to frustrate you because you feel you can’t solve it. That is the sweet spot where the challenges in our work are slightly above our capability, our skill set expands, and confidence is built. The opportunity to stretch our ability to deal with manageable challenges and achieve results makes us grow and develop. Finding and understanding that sweet spot for ourselves and others is the holy grail of leadership. That sweet spot is describe as flow by esteemed psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Often referred to as “being in the zone,” flow is what encompasses those moments of absolute rapt attention and total absorption; when you get so focused on a task that everything else disappears. It is the ubiquitous state that propels performance to the highest of levels. In flow, action and peak execution merge seamlessly into a space where time distorts and falls into the background. You are engrossed in what you are doing. However, it is not hyperfocus, in which a person maintains intense fixation on a task that they find interesting to the point of struggling to give attention to anything else. Flow derives from the amount of meaning a task provides and when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming an achievable challenge, such as, yes, work. What’s even more exciting is that, as far as we know, anyone can tap into it and should.