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.

Do you know how you think

Not the 'glass half empty/glass half full' kind of thinking, but how flexible, adaptable and malleable our thinking might be.

Much of what we do is so ruled by habit, routine and bias, that to be able to have 'meta cognition' - thinking about how we think - can be out of reach. We need to learn, to be taught it.

So can we 'get above' our thinking so we know what it is.

That could be mighty helpful:

- in a conflict or argument

- in the depths of a dull meeting

- in a brand new job role

- in a complex decision making process.

Our thinking patterns can open us up to adopt or try new ways, and our thinking can also close us down, snapped shut, blocked and rigid. As much as we might hope we're flexible, adaptable and malleable, are we really?

Could we think some more about how we think?

Let's aim to spend more time 'up there' where we are aware of what we are thinking. Hmmmmm 🤔 

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.

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. 

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?