The Power of Full Engagement by Loehr and Schwartz

This book is an included in this section because performance is an engineering design consideration. The interpretation I am making for this book is a creative stretch, but nevertheless, the principle of full engagement is a useful technique for thinking about enhancing the performance of any system - man or machine.

We might desire that our chess pieces become (and remain) 'fully engaged' in the game. We then have to come up with a way of measuring engagement. We can define a concept similar to energy, and define it as the ability to potentially attack enemy pieces and support friendly pieces. Pieces that do not have high potential in this performance metric are not fully engaged in the game.

p.4"Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance."

Loehr and Schwartz define 4 properties of this energy.

p.4"Without the right quantity, quality, focus and force of energy, we are compromised in any activity we undertake."

Why are we concerned with energy? Performance depends on it. We take responsibility to measure it in our evaluation function so that we can search for positions we can force that have a high potential energy level for our pieces.

p.5"Performance... [is] grounded in the skillful management of energy... The more we take responsibility for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become."

Managing our energy in the right way can help us transform the situation as it exists now to one that favors us. That is, we can obtain leverage over our opponent and obtain a real, measurable advantage in a chess game, according to principles laid down by grandmasters and those qualified to teach the game.

p.6"Learning to manage energy more efficiently and intelligently has a unique transformative power"

Measuring the engagement level of the pieces lets us focus our machine's attention and direct the critical resources along analysis lines that are promising and interesting.

p.9"You must become fully engaged. The challenge of great performance is to manage your energy more effectively in all dimensions to achieve your goals."

Looking for positions where pieces are fully engaged allows us to safely 'prune' large numbers of positions from our search process, at a low risk that we are missing a critical move sequence. This heuristic lets us manage an exponentially growing tree of possible move sequences.

p.18"Full engagement is the energy state that best serves performance."

It would be to our advantage to first 1. define our purpose and 2. face the truth before we take important actions like pruning moves from consideration and making a final decision on the best move to play in the game of chess.

p.18"Making change that lasts requires a three-step process: Define Purpose, Face Truth and Take Action."

Our chess program should ideally be focused on finding and exploring the moves and move sequences that represent the most promising course of action, and on evaluating the winning chances appropriately. Ideally, we should not waste time looking at moves or move sequences that are not promising - however, this does not mean that we should completely ignore such sequences.

p.94"Nothing so interferes with performance and engagement as the inability to concentrate on the task at hand. To perform at our best we must be able to sustain concentration, and to move flexibly between broad and narrow, as well as internal and external focus. We also need access to realistic optimism, a paradoxical notion that implies seeing the world as it is, but always working positively toward a desired outcome or solution. Anything that prompts appropriate focus and realistic optimism serves performance."

We should aim to be be realistic about our assessment of each position we evaluate in our search tree. Facing the truth requires that we consider carefully measuring what each piece can do, and the limiting factors that stand between it and objectives.

p.108"The mental energy that best serves full engagement is realistic optimism - seeing the world as it is, but always working positively towards a desired outcome or solution."

Ideally, we should consider the advantages of defining the chess-related values that have meaning to us before we write the evaluation function for our computer chess program. Most of these values are easily obtainable in books which teach playing a positional game of chess (for example, Simple Chess by Michael Stean). As a programmer, it would be to our benefit to keep these values firmly in mind.

p.146"A vision statement is a declaration of intent about how to invest one's energy. Regularly revisited, it serves as a source of sustaining direction and a fuel for action."

p.147"A vision statement, grounded in values that are meaningful and compelling, creates a blueprint for how to invest our energy."

Facing the truth requires that we consider taking actions such as replaying the chess games played by our computer program and identifying the moves played which do not reflect our values. We might use a high-performance program like Rybka, Zap! or Hiarcs to do this for us. We then might consider reviewing our code and identifying the parameters that might be changed to correct the misplayed moves. Perhaps we should hold ourselves accountable for sub-par performance.

p.156"Facing the truth requires making yourself the object of inquiry - conducting an audit of your life and holding yourself accountable for the energy consequences of your behaviors...

On a scale of 1 to 10, how fully engaged are you in your work? What is standing in your way?
How closely does your everyday behavior match your values and serve your mission? What are the disconnects?
How fully are you embodying your values and vision for youself... Where are you falling short?
How effective are the choices that you are making... serving your key values?
To what degree do you establish clear priorities... How consistent are those priorities with what you say is most important to you?"

We must not be afraid to ask ourselves if we are wrong in any of our assumptions. What are we missing?

p.158"Another way we deceive ourselves is by assuming that our view represents the truth when it is really just an interpretation, a lens through which we chose to view the world... The facts in a given situation may be incontrovertible, but the meaning that we ascribe to them is often far more subjective."

We must face the truth periodically, but not become obsessed by it. Heuristic algorithms are rules of thumb that work most of the time - we should not worry about rare moments when they fail if we have done the best we can in constructing them. There is always tomorrow to perfect.

p.161-163"Facing the truth requires that we retain an ongoing openness to the possibility that we may not be seeing ourselves - or others - accurately... If the truth is to set us free, facing it cannot be a one-time event. Rather, it must become a practice."