Liking it or living it

Have you read something, loved it, talked about it… but not done anything with it? Maybe you learned something and thought ‘oh there's a whole other world out there I wasn’t aware of.' Wherever you are with something may not be where others are.

❇️ If you’ve just learned about it, others may have been living it. For ages.

❇️ And if you’re fanatically living it, others can be still completely unaware of it.

Whether it’s a fitness regime, food choices, a way of working or a way of thinking, there’s a progression, a ladder. Fans of stuff admire and enjoy it. But only a few of us go on to actually use it and live it. This applies to skills, activities, techniques, knowledge.

Old guitar in the garage?

Skateboard in the shed?

Business technique you've never really tried?

App you’ve never opened?

Just being aware or admiring it keeps you out of the game. It keeps you safe from learning, developing and changing. To avoid failing or looking silly we spend a lot of time admiring and enjoying others’ activities, ideas and achievements. Yet we complain of overwhelm and overload.

Use it and live it, or consider deleting it. It takes up real estate in the place you keep all of your overwhelm.

It’s not just a meeting

It’s an opportunity for consultation, collaboration, co-design. For information sharing, attitude adjusting and belief shifting. It’s an opportunity to make the workplace safer to speak up.

It’s an opportunity to have a conversation not a presentation. To turn the data show off, to pass on the PowerPoint deck and instead engage, ask questions.

It’s an opportunity to hear what would improve their experience as an employee, contractor or team member, colleague, customer, user or client. How you could support them more, better, differently.

It’s an opportunity to bring people together, not p*ss people off.

A meeting is a place and space where you can do work together, collectively. But when most meetings are poorly run, boring and unproductive, it’s up to you the leader, to get the development you need to make better work of every one of the meetings you lead.

Learn the subtle, nuanced, yet complex skills of facilitation. They’ll be so glad you did.

Working out what we think

As we cycle around something, a situation, an idea, a problem, a possible solution, we're usually trying to work out our relationship with it, to it. We're working out what we think, what we know and what we should or could do ... if anything. We exchange information with others. We try to advance the conversation.

Our opinions may not be fully formed. Our ideas may initially be hunches or hopes.

When we're in dull meetings, that perhaps should be exploring our relationship and connection to information, rather end up being status plays and waffle-fests with little if any structure to guide us through this exploration and sensemaking.

'Busy' leaders with time pressures don’t engage in or lead sensemaking activities often enough. But they pay the price later when team members are disengaged, disconnected, disinterested.

Spending some time deliberately making sense of ideas and information is engaging, exploring, discovering. It’s not time wasting but insight gathering for more swift and impactful decisions later.

Sensemaking is a super skill for today and most definitely a skill that lends itself to the uncertain future. 

What’s the new-A-U

Business as usual has been, well, business as usual (BAU) for ever!

In the business world it’s the stuff that’s done to make everyday operational activities happen.

So ...what’s the NEW A U ? What new things are happening that will bring about change? What’s planned up ahead that will continue to challenge thinking, challenge convention and bring a new mindset and behaviour to how things are done?

Whether you’re a leader of a team, a team member in an organisation, or a solo operator running yourown show, what's your ’new as usual’?

How are you bringing new things into your business regularly? The new can be scary, untested, untried. I heard someone recently say, ‘I’m not trying something new unless it's guaranteed to work’. But how will you know it could work, unless you try it?

New ways of thinking and working help you gain the benefits of those new ways sooner, delivering advantages and value to your customers, gaining the advances of first and early movers. Want to wait until more or the majority of people are doing something, because it’s less risky or safer? Great. Go line up and wait... over there. I’m moving along to NEW-A-U. See ya!

The value is in the summary

You know how we zone out in meetings, get overloaded, lose focus and do other things? (We check our devices for email, social media, anything to relieve the pressure of information overload.)

What do you do to counter this situation? Most people I work with initially blame the phone or device and say things like ‘put them away’ or ‘don’t use them’.

But it’s less about the phone, more about what’s going on in our heads.

Information overload is a daily, even an hourly challenge. And most of us don’t know how to cope.

It’s called 'cognitive load coping' and we haven’t learned how to do it. So we reach for our dopamine device as relief.

Rather than punishing the person reaching for their device, make the processing of all of this information easier.

There’s are more than 32 techniques I teach in cognitive load coping.

Here’s one to use often : SUMMARY. As you go through a meeting, summarise where things are up to, what’s been done, what’s yet to do. Summarise the facts, the evidence, the opinions, the key points, the proposed solutions and the discussions so far. A summary takes little more than a minute. Less. And we don’t use them nearly enough.