Just thinking, or capturing the thinking

Working on tasks like problem solving, idea generation or planning and decision making means we can get into some pretty heavy thinking.

I wonder... are we doing too much thinking and not enough capturing of the thinking?

Have you had that situation where you've come up with an idea, some clever thoughts and then ... it's gone, disappeared as quickly as it arrived? Can't remember it?

It’s a waste to think great things and not net, trap or curate and gather them. Too often we dismiss our thoughts and ideas as not being valuable, but they’ve just been created as thoughts; they haven’t been further morphed into an action or an implementable thing.

Give yourself the credit that yes, you did come up with an idea, a possibility. Then capture it as soon as you can!

A library of ideas is something to draw from later on.

We can't always sit down and expect brilliant ideas to come to us on demand. Rather, we can capture them when they come throughout our daily habits and activities. This is the clever art of idea curation.

Q: Do you lose your ideas or do you catch them?

When things go around in circles

Have you been in a meeting recently when the discussion seemed to keep spinning around in circles, not getting anywhere?

Aaarrgggh! It’s so frustrating, time-wasting and a waste of efforts, energy and ideas.

It’s also a sure sign that people are talking and thinking about different things… and it’s something that can be remedied. Phew!

What can happen is someone launches off with data or detail, shifts into their opinion and then finishes up with their prescriptive ideas and suggestions of what the actions should be.

It's a mess of information. When things get messy and seem to go around in circles, I separate the mess into these 4 chunks:

1️⃣ facts

2️⃣ opinions

3️⃣ ideas

4️⃣ actions.

Do you see how different these are? It’s tricky for us to hold all 4 elements in our mind at once.

When someone is talking and they manage to cover all of these 4 things (in one breath) and then someone else does the same, yes it feels like it’s going around in circles - all that information, going nowhere. What do we do? Tune in, look out and listen for these 4 different types of communication and expression. Facts. Opinions. Ideas. Actions.

Everyone’s got note pads but no one is making sense

A meeting room I was in recently had a table with 8 people seated at it. Each person had arrived at the meeting with a collection of props and belongings:

- a water bottle

- their ID/security card

- their mobile device

- notepad and pen.

The notepad and pen - yes, an analogue tool, but powerful nonetheless.

Everyone in the meeting was writing their own notes down. Their own insights, their own wording, their own triggers for ideas, their own recollection.

It was very singular, individual even though it was a group meeting. Great! They’re making sense of things, but oh no ...they're doing it alone. Someone says something, then everyone’s head drops down and they all write it down in their own notepad, their own 'map' of the world they're talking about.

We’re individuals trying to work this stuff out as a group.

Sensemaking - it can be done alone or better... together.

Rather than everyone looking at their own 'map', make a group map, a central map on a whiteboard or flipchart.

More progress is made in uncertainty when we have a common point of visual context. 

How we confuse ourselves

In a meeting recently I saw a colleague write up more than 5 pages of notes. The next day they said how confused they felt about it all.

What were all the notes about then?

Sometimes we can capture content others are delivering, thinking we’re doing well, getting all of that information down. But it can end up meaning nothing to us later. We don’t seem to be able to find what the key points were or what the essence of it was.

As I chatted with my colleague later and we reviewed their notes, they were words, phrases, things underlined. These were the key things they heard. But later, none of it really made much sense. There was no synthesis, distilling, connections or conclusions. The notes were parts of sentences.

In sensemaking, it helps to pause, listen, make sense of what’s going on, and write that down. It is habit (and fear) that drives us to write it all down like a court reporter! But we don’t need to write it all.

So make sense as you go, capture information as it makes sense to you.

Go for distilling information rather than transcribing it!

The cost of waffle

In the battle for people’s attention, why do we waffle?

🔆 Did we run out of time to read and edit?

🔆 Do we think more words sound smarter, clever, impressive?

🔆 Do we feel our idea or content is ‘weak’ and so more words might bolster it?

Waffle, jargon and filler is wasteful. Visually in a report or document, it looks like too much hard work to read. Our eyes tire and our brains are exhausted from working through slabs of wordy text.

Long sentences lose people.

If it’s too much hard work, your audience will go into cognitive overload and they'll distract (or rescue) themselves, looking away, disengaging and disconnecting. Keep it clear, clean, as many words as needed. No filler.

Q: What does wordy waffle do to you?