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Good ThinkingBy John Canfield
Management Consultant
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Regular readers will now know this article’s mantra: Good thinking drives good performance.
Thinking is a skill and can be improved.
I am recommending you find one area in particular for the new year and get really good at it. It might be business related, or it might move you towards “Someone’s Got Talent.”
Learning is a celebration of the fact that we aren’t done with who we want to be, regardless of our age. One cheap trick is to think about and present your age in Celsius (vs. Fahrenheit) … I’m still 16 and feel great.
Back to work. Learning is all about searching for, finding and appreciating new ideas. One speed bump: You cannot will yourself a new idea. As previous articles have presented, new ideas are stored in the new dendrites of our brains, at the end of some of the billion axons under our skull.
At the same time you cannot realize what you cannot imagine. So we have learned over the past five years that you can either let this happen accidentally, or know how to provoke new ideas — to use techniques like process improvement, creative thinking skills, strategic planning, scenario planning and others that provide a great sequence of great questions. This is the trick to ideation — to ask questions that engage your prefrontal cortex — where the executive functioning takes place. I call the messy collection of new ideas “junk drawer,” like the one in your kitchen. Just a mush of stuff assembled for good reasons. When you open the drawer, likely with a goal in mind, to solve a problem somewhere, your brain goes to work quickly comparing items and creating new combinations that just might work. I call this Yenta, as in “Fiddler on the Roof:” “Have I got a match for you!”
Some junk drawers I’ve enjoyed where all sorts of ideas were there for the mixing:
Just about any museum. Three of my favorites:
There are all sorts of virtual museums too — idea websites — the current national favorite TED (technology, entertainment, design): www.ted.com. Watching one of these a few times a week is inspiring. And put TED in Google and look down the list for other options. I also enjoy Bloomberg Business Week’s Innovation site — www.businessweek.com/innovation/
In picking your learning target, do honor the Pareto principle — the vital few, the trivial many. Pick one topic that will affect much of your life and interest — and will hold your interest — for at least 60-90 days, after which it will then be a new habit.
Another helpful concept when searching for ideas is equifinality. This is a term Marvin Weisbord (Productive Workplaces) introduced to me. Equifinality is the notion that there is not only one way to do something, but rather a number of ways which, successfully supported, will generate an acceptable result. Our goal is to pick a good one, and deliberately make it a success. Example:
A team of three competitors is part of a multiple event relay race. The next leg of the race asks the team to do the following:
There are two issues here: Pick a fast boat (your target learning idea), and row the boat fast (learn deliberately with a plan and a schedule). Equifinality says you do not need/want to spend a long time choosing a boat. Make the decision, and then make the decision a success. Getting out into the middle of the lake and complaining about the choice of the boat is not helpful.
I am hoping this note might inspire you to pick something to learn. In a recent breakfast outing while sharing hobbies with another “16-year-old,” he reported that our breakfast discussion moved him to do something he had wanted to do for a while — set up some guitar lessons so he could become a rock star — or at least play one song all the way through.
You may also enjoy comparing leadership styles (different thinkers) of supervisors leading teams in my recent book, Think or Sink — A Parable of Collaboration, available at amazon.com.
Independent trainer and meeting facilitator John Canfield helps clients build high performance business teams. Reach him at 616-392-2634, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or visit www.johncanfield.com.