Deduce the meaning

When meetings and workshops get messy and don’t seem to make sense:

🌕 Clarify the Content

🌕 Traverse the Breadth

🌕 Explore the Depth.

And then… Deduce the meaning.

As you go into depth on a topic, try and get to meaning, understanding and comprehension as quickly as possible. The game is not to guess. The game or race is to meaning. The sooner you can get the meaning of things - as you progress - the better progress, the better sense you'll make.

Help people understand. Get to the meaning of what this is about.

But how would you know if it's making sense to them? You ask. Ask not 'Is this making sense?' or 'Does this make sense?' Both are tragic closed yes/no answers.

Ask 'What sense is this making right now? or 'What sense are you getting from this?' These are open questions, inviting people to make a summary of the meaning they're getting right now.

Q: How do you work out what the meaning of something is?

Explore the depths

I'm posting on thinking and sensemaking skills - so far, we've

✅Clarified the context

✅Traversed the breadth and now...

⬇️ Explore the depths.

With big picture knowledge of 'why' a topic, and an idea of the breadth of the topic, you can go on in and dive dive dive!

Where would you dive in? If you're on a train from say, London to Paris, would you get off at one of the stations along the track, or continue to the end of the line?

We can dilute our sensemaking efforts by time-wasting non-sense making! It's when we dart from here to there, back to that, up to there and then back again! It's hard work when we don't know the context and haven't seen the breadth of a topic. It overwhelms us because it takes brain-processing energy to keep making sense of where we are again and again. It's like how a GPS freaks out when you don't follow the suggested route. It displays the 'recalculating route' message.

We repeatedly have to do this when things don't make sense.

Context. Then breadth. Now depth.

Q: Do you like diving into the details?

But you do need to capture something...

I've called out the information overload behaviour we have of writing too much down in a training program, meeting or at a conference. We don’t need to write it ALL down. But we do need to write something.

To all you ‘sponges’ reading this who sit in meetings and conferences thinking you can ‘soak it all up’, without actively capturing any notes... ummm you can't. This is precisely a behaviour that can worsen cognitive overload.

We do nothing, sitting passively, letting information supposedly flow over or through us, thinking we’ll remember it and absorb it. But like all sponges, we fill up - and sooner than we think.

A participant in a workshop sat all day with arms crossed, nothing written down. ‘I can remember it,’ she said, ‘I have a photographic memory.' But she didn't remember it and later showed how she'd missed plenty. Given her leadership role, number of direct reports and her responsibility in the organisation, it was poor role modelling and self-management.

It’s a foolish denial - and a cognitive load coping error - to not write something.

Don’t write everything.

And don’t writing nothing.

But absolutely... write something. 

You don’t need to write (or type) it all

I’m talking cognitive load coping this week; how to handle all the information we’re exposed to.

The times when we need to use cognitive load coping the most include training, meetings, conferences, conversations, coaching; whenever people are thinking and talking together and information is shared.

This information can be:

🌕 written: a report, presentation or a pack of information; or

🌕 spoken: the verbal part of a presentation or conversation.

Plus our own thinking process.

We need to manage our own cognitive load better than we do.

Here’s one of the biggest tips I can give you: You don't need to write (or type) everything down. We can write or type w-a-y too much information in an attempt to ‘catch’ or ’trap' what's happening and what's being covered. But some of the information may not be ‘worth’ catching or trapping! Yet we do it. And it makes our cognitive load worse.

Notice the feeling of wanting or needing to catch and trap so much information. You don’t need it all.

Are you a catcher or 'trapper' of information? Do you want to catch it all?

The 2 things for better cognitive load management

In their prediction for the skills we’d be needing now, by 2020, the Institute for the Future identified Cognitive Load Management in the Top 10.

It's about how we cope with all that information.

But it’s not one thing; I see Cognitive Load Management involving 2 capabilities:

🔹 To discriminate + filter information for importance, and

🔸To understand how to maximize our cognitive function (using a variety of tools and techniques.)

The answer is not about having a new app to manage, store or retrieve our own information better. We need to be able to firstly identify what’s important in the information we’re exposed to. And then we need to work with our own thinking, listening and sensemaking capabilities to handle that information better than we currently do.

I’m helping teams (via 1/2 day workshops) and individuals (via 1:1 skills sessions online) to build skill and change the way they cope with information.

It could be the best value session of your development program this year - being able to handle information better. What’s that worth to you?