Problem solving / possibility seeking

When you’re problem solving are you also possibility seeking?

When you're into possibilities can you also see things from the problem perspective? T

hese are 2 sides of a coin, a page, two different moods, sunshine and rain.

🌑Problems to be solved require us to sit among some mess, discomfort and irritation. Some people don’t like it. They’ll dismiss it as negative thinking, poo-poo it and want us to all ‘move on’ to more positive ways of thinking.

🌕Possibilities require us to conjure, create and imagine a new world of delight and happy. Some people don’t like it. They dismiss it as positive thinking, poo-poo it and want us to dig back into details of why and who and what of problems.

Leaders in our rapid problem-solving world need to deliver value, and so also need to be alert to these ways of thinking.

Wherever you prefer to ‘live’ (and some of us aren’t fussed, existing happily in both), know that not everyone sees things this way. You’ll need to invite, allow and let in different styles of thinking.

It can be uncomfortable or awkward if not framed, positioned or guided well. And it’s why leaders need to be able to to facilitate at work and do it well. 

Collect plenty of ideas

Not just one idea or three, but plenty. You never know when you’ll need them.

Many people ask me about my blogs and posts.

They ask:

- How do you post everyday?

- How do you come up with ideas?

- Tell me/show me how you do it...

The key things you need are to be able to generate content, to deliver value via that content and then to execute on the idea ... among that is to have a wad of ideas. (I don’t know how many a wad is!)

I focus on ‘curating’ my ideas; collecting them as I think of them. I don’t ’sit down to have a good idea’. I grab them when they arrive. Once collected in an Evernote file, I wander through that file each day and think, ‘which of these ideas is buzzing for me?’ (Singing, buzzing, humming, glowing - whatever the verb, it’s about the idea that I react to.)

That’s the one I pick ... and then I write.

I don't stockpile pre-canned posts.

I don't copy and paste from the past.

It's more like I’m riffing from an idea I collected, likely a while ago - days, weeks, months.

You can do it too… to share your thinking, ideas, thoughts and value.

Become what I call a ‘Leader of Value’. So to get started, collect plenty of ideas.

Could the discovery experience of travel, work at work

The promises and rewards of travel are many : exploration, discovery, insight, learning, life-changing experiences. We are invited to show up, not knowing much about a country or culture, encouraged to tour, learn, listen, sample, test and experience.

Could more leaders in more businesses encourage the joys of discovery at work, like travel does for us?

Are there fears that all that discovering will take/waste a lot of time?

That it won’t really deliver any benefits?

Or that it isn’t needed: at work we just do what we do, same as yesterday, last week or last year.

Newer ways of thinking and working include doing things like deliberate discovery. It’s invited, welcomed and expected. I’m not suggesting it switches to all, full-on discovery, 100% of the time. It’s not an all or nothing thing.

It’s about some. Allowing some time for discovery. Some budget. Some opportunity. Some guidance or coaching so that your team knows how to discover, explore and unearth.

Otherwise, one day you’ll wonder where all the good people went to, why they left. They’ll go where there are opportunities for a better ‘adventure’.

If you don’t think you're creative...

While we hear that creativity is even more important in today’s crazy world, it’s a big shift for some of us to believe ourselves to be creative... or capable of creative thinking and inventive work.

I’m not here to debate your level of creativity so could we just look at this another way? With another word?

Let’s go for INGENUITY. It’s not creativity on steroids or more or bigger.

It’s different.

Creativity is about being generative, inventive, it's the making.

Ingenuity is about being resourceful and being able to use the skills you have, the resources on hand to fix something, solve something or find a clever way of working it out.

When we put our smarts to work on solving a challenge, this is being resourceful, using what we have, accessing whatever we can. It’s a sweeter, more helpful and practical mindset than thinking we have to be creative, running the tiresome loop that is the ‘I’m not creative’/‘oh yes you are’ game. That does little to give us more resourceful ways of thinking and working!

Think more about using what’s already available to you (that’s ingenuity), using whatever resources you can access, and worry less about whether you’re being creative enough. 

Could you do it in reverse

I collected the mail from my mailbox yesterday at 11am and saw the postal delivery worker, the ‘postie’, finishing delivering mail to other letterboxes.

Usually she delivers the mail to our area at about 3pm.

‘Hi!’ I said. ‘Hey you seem a bit earlier, a different time today?’

‘Yes', she said, 'I thought I’d do my round in reverse today; you know, keep it fresh.

She went on...'It’s easy to become a machine, doing the same thing, same way, same route, riding up streets the same direction, the same order and same views. But wow, this has really snapped me out of things today; I’ve had to think and not just go by habit.'

She delivered the mail and a great insight.

What’s the current way you do something? And how could you reverse it? Even a small part of it? Go try.

Creativity and novel thinking data suggests this helps us see new things, make new connections, make sense in other ways.

Most of all, it changes our locked-in perspective.