<ul><li>Surprise is a big deal to our brains. It makes us stop, notice, and learn.</li><li>Surprise comments from others work below our conscious radar, helping us reshape our self-perception and reexamine long-held patterns of thinking.</li><li>Most of our formative moments—the moments that cause a revolution in our thinking—are the result of surprise.</li><li>We can use surprise comments strategically to enrich others’ lives and to shift our perspective on ourselves.</li></ul>

Key Takeaways

Surprise is the error signal our brains produce when something unexpected or mis-expected happens. It was an essential adaptation for our ancestors because it forced them to freeze and focus on threats and opportunities. Those who could not experience surprise could not react or learn quickly enough to survive.On a <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/neuroscience">neural</a> level, surprise is a <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/dopamine">dopamine</a> trigger, producing the neurotransmitter that drives <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/attention">attention</a> and <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/motivation">motivation</a>.

Defining Surprise

<ul><li>Surprise is a key ingredient in our formative moments. Formative events are the experiences that have shaped who we believe we are. They form our self-concept.</li><li>All of us are influenced by the combination of our past experiences, and the majority of our experiences are part of a slow, gradual evolution in self-perception. </li><li>Formative events are like a sudden revolution, resulting in a sudden shift in how we perceive ourselves.</li></ul>

A Powerful Ingredient In Life Experiences

<ul><li>Spot a self-criticism you’d like to help someone revise. For example, perhaps your student sees herself as a slow learner, your employee believes he lacks <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/creativity">creativity</a>, or your spouse beats themself up for being overly cautious.</li><li>Next, identify the strength that is the opposite side of the same coin. For example, maybe the student who thinks she learns slowly is also very thorough. The employee who thinks he lacks creativity is highly logical. And the flipside of your spouse’s concern is their attention to detail.</li></ul>

How to Trigger a Shift in People’s Self-Perception

Share your sincere perception of the individual’s strength. Make your message quick and to the point, as though you’re stating an empirical fact. The more you dwell on the topic or dress it up as flowery praise, the less surprising it will be, and the less power it will have to change someone’s mind.

Delivering The Message: Be Quick And Sharp

Surprise has the power to help others change how they see themselves. But, crucially, it also gives us the power to change how we see ourselves. Armed with these new surprise skills, you can now see yourself as an agent of surprise—unlocking people’s <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/confidence">confidence</a> and <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/self-esteem">self-esteem</a> wherever you go.

The Bottom Line

The invisible role we play in changing people’s minds.

Stashed ideas

The Power of Surprise

Having a great assistant can be a game-changer. But learning to delegate tasks can be time-consuming if you don't have a lot of experience. Tree tips can help you save time when delegating tasks to your assistant using a spreadsheet such as Excel or Google Sheets.

Making use of an assistant

Getting everyone on the same page can be challenging if your team has separate to-do lists. A master project list is helpful. Let your assistant own the project list and put everything they do on the list, even small tasks such as checking the mail or paying the light bill. The list can be helpful should your assistant go on vacation or if they are sick.

Create a master project list

If you have several things going on simultaneously, create tabs or sub-lists to keep it all straight. For example, tab names could be active projects, archived projects, ongoing/recurring projects, etc. Within each tab, you will have the project/task name, the date assigned, the date due, and other people involved. Break each list further by giving each one a priority rating. For example, number one for important items, number two items should only be started once number one items are complete, and number three items are as time allows.

Break it down into sub-lists

Use colour to highlight new updates within your master list. For example, your assistant could write all their updates in red, and once you've read them, you can change the colour to black. You can write your notes in a different colour so that your assistant knows that you left a response, and when they're done reading, they can change the colour back.

Colour code it

The goal of doing this is to minimize the number of meetings and back and forth questions.

3 Tips to Save Time When Delegating Tasks

“If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going.”

Think of an effective end-of-year business review as an executive summary for the entire year. What were the key takeaways? The presentation should include high-level information such as an evaluation of goals, achievements, rates of growth, obstacles and setbacks, future goals, and financial data. While it might be easier to simply list all of the year-end parameters in a single, lengthy report, that type of presentation is unlikely to impress audiences — regardless of whether they're clients, employees, management or investors.

An Effective End-Year-Review

A high-quality annual business review should feature an overarching summary reflecting the big picture for the company. <ul><li>The business summary might highlight the brand’s founder, co-founders, business leaders, and other decision-makers, while also summarizing the company’s product offerings, including any digital editions, intellectual property rights, and international business ventures. </li><li>This is also a good place to talk about the company's mission, values, and overall culture. It sets the stage (literally and figuratively) for the information to come later in the presentation.</li></ul>

Company Overview

Before the year’s goals can be evaluated, audiences need to know what they were. The second portion of the year-end business review should summarize the year’s goals. The list of goals can be obtained from the prior year’s annual review (if that's available), but keep in mind they may have been modified or updated throughout the past 12 months. Explain what each goal was, and why it was chosen (its importance), before you dive in to the results.

Business Goals

It's important to celebrate a company’s successes. Once you've mapped out what the year's goals were, you can talk about if and how you accomplished them. No annual business review could possibly be complete without featuring the year’s highlight reel. What goals were accomplished, and what were the missed opportunities, in the previous 12 months? What can be learned from the company’s successes?

Accomplishment of Goals

Numbers tell a big part of a company’s story, and they are a vital piece of the annual business review puzzle. This is where key performance indicators (KPIs) and results come in to play.Present data on the company’s performance in the form of financial statements, rates of growth and retention, customer satisfaction metrics and any other data that supports the business' story over the past year. KPIs are an easy way to assess performance throughout the year, so you should know exactly where you stand when it comes time for the end-of-year review.

Key Performance Indicators and Results

A round-up of upcoming company goals is a key element to any actionable year-end review. Objectives from the prior year might remain in place, if they weren't met, or you may shift your goals based on accomplishments, failures, or changing market conditions.By sharing your new objectives, you're holding your team accountable to work towards them. To that end, once you've defined your goals for the upcoming year, it's time to explain how you and your team plan to achieve them. Put your money where your mouth is, so to speak.

Opportunities for Next Year

It’s not enough to simply create a list of goals for the upcoming year. You must also share how those goals will be met. An effective end-of-year business review should include a plan of execution for the upcoming year. What processes will be put in place to meet next year’s goals? What budget will be allocated to implement these plans, what team members or resources are required, and what's the estimated timeline?

Execution

How To Create an Effective End of Year Business Review

I’ve already shared why <a href="/google-design/motion-design-doesnt-have-to-be-hard-33089196e6c2">Motion Design Doesn’t Have to be Hard </a>, but I wanted to make it even easier for designers to use the Material motion principles I know and love. After Effects is the primary tool our team uses to create motion examples for the <a href="https://bit.ly/2L5R0K6">Material guidelines </a>. Having used it to animate my fair share of UIs, I wanted to share my workflow tips and…

A basic sticker sheet and workflow for animating user interfaces

Download this basic sticker sheet to see a project completed using my streamlined workflow (outlined below). It contains a collection of Material components, baseline UIs, and navigation transitions.

My After Effects sticker sheet

First things first, we need assets to animate. Most of the visual designers on our team use Sketch, which by default doesn’t interface with AE. Thankfully <a href="https://www.battleaxe.co/">Adam Plouff </a>has created <a href="https://adamplouff.github.io/aeux-doc/">this plugin </a>that adds this functionality. I used it to import our library of baseline Material components from Sketch into AE. These assets are found in the sticker sheet’s Components folder.

Importing assets into AE

With this library of baseline components, new UIs can quickly be assembled by dragging them into a new AE comp.

Creating UIs

Master properties in Ae make it possible to create a single reusable asset. The App bar is often customized by changing its Icons, colors and shadows. You can find these in the baseline UIS folder in the Download.

Customizing components

The examples in the navigation transitions folder illustrate a method for applying material motion patterns in after effects. To start, each property is animated without easing. The parent composition is then time Remapped to apply easing and set duration for all the nested Keyframes. This allows for quick adjustments to easing and duration since only two time Remapped Keyframes control the entire transition. This method can be used to consistently animate most transitions that use material motion principles.

Animating transitions

Guide to Material Motion in After Effects

This design trend is all about the feeling of warmth, comfort, and relaxation. It's as if we're introducing humanity back into design.

Cozy Design

When design, fashion, and decor feel a little too perfect, this design type swings back in the other direction in order to inject some life back into the design that gives it a little bit of nostalgia.

Analog Media Mimicry

Mimicking analog effects:<ul><li>Practical photography</li><li>Painting / Drawing</li><li>Collage</li><li>Sculpture</li><li>Scanning / Film</li><li>Sewing, etc.,</li></ul>This design type is wortht the time it takes to make because of its "unique" feel to it and often it's quite visually stunning.&nbsp;

Analog Methods and Practical Design Techniques

Fine art is making a comeback as a design trend. A reawakening of the craft. Even Alexander McQueen took their paintbrushes out of storage!

Fine Art

Palettes are getting softer and new color systems may shift toward the warmer end of the spectrum for a cozier appeal that feels human.

Warmer, Softer Colors

The theme of this design trend is comfort in authenticity. There are so many things happening when it comes to technology, social media, politics, and traditional media to the point that we're just aching for slow-down comfort.&nbsp;

The craving for slow-down comfort

Whenever you write a design trend article, I think it’s required to mention how much you hate design trend articles, and how they’re always way behind the times, and how the trends are always stupid…

Tastemaking: 2019 Design Trends

The term Feature Factory is when a software developer is just sitting in the factory, churning out features, and sending them down the factory line.

The Feature Factory

<ul><li>Teams do not measure the impact of their work. Or measurement is done in isolation by the product management team.</li><li>Rapid shuffling of teams and projects. Teams deal in feature and project assignments.</li><li>Success theatre around shipping, but little discussion about impact.</li><li>Infrequent acknowledged failures and scrapped work. The measure of success is delivered features, not outcomes.&nbsp;</li><li>No connection to core metrics. The team cannot connect work to key business and customer satisfaction metrics.</li><li>No product managers retrospectives on the quality of their product decisions.</li></ul>

Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory

<ul><li>There is a mismatch between prioritising what gets worked on and deciding if it was the right thing to work on.</li><li>No tweaking. Once the work is done, the team instantly moves to the next "project", leaving no time to iterate.</li><li>The prevailing culture of hand-offs with no involvement in research, problem exploration, or experimentation.</li><li>Large batches instead of delivering incrementally.</li><li>Chasing upfront revenue.</li><li>Little appreciation for the health of the whole project and instead focus on shiny new objects.</li></ul>

More Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory

I’ve used the term Feature Factory at a couple conference talks over the past two years. I started using the term when a software developer friend complained that he was “just sitting in the factory…

The Power of Surprise

3 Tips to Save Time When Delegating Tasks

How To Create an Effective End of Year Business Review

Guide to Material Motion in After Effects

Tastemaking: 2019 Design Trends

Charles Brown