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Leaders need to set the conditions for good social interaction and it should be face-to-face. The focal point of interaction is the visualisation of work. That leads to a further point. We need to infuse teams with the ability to break work down so that it can be visualised at a level of granularity where value becomes clear. Work break down is a missing skill and one with very few experts. Visualisation is the forum for critique, suggestion, experience sharing, and ideas about how work creates value. It is the venue for good social interaction.

From our work with athletes we learned that visualizing a performance challenge in advance is a very effective way to allay anxiety and to perform without awkwardness or self-consciousness.

Bob Bowman, designed this physical routine with Phelps. But that's not all. He also gave Phelps a routine for what to think about as he went to sleep and first thing when he awoke. He called it "Watching the Videotape."2 There was no actual tape, of course. The "tape" was a visualisation of the perfect race. In exquisite detail and slow motion Phelps would visualise every moment from his starting position on top of the blocks, through each stroke, until he emerged from the pool, victorious, with water dripping off his face.

To understand why this sort of mnemonic trick works, you need to know something about a strange kind of forgetfulness that psychologists have dubbed the "Baker/baker paradox." The paradox goes like this: A researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and the other that his last name is Baker. A couple days later, the researcher shows the same two guys the same photograph and asks for the accompanying word. The person who was told the man's profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his surname. Why should that be? Same photograph. Same word. Different amount of remembering.