There’s thinking and there’s overthinking

How much thinking is enough?

I'm reading a book by an author who’s a marketing ninja guru genius and they keep letting the reader know how much thinking they do. The author's stories are about the times when they were:

- thinking about possible scenarios

- thinking about the numbers

- thinking about solutions

- thinking about ideas

- thinking about the questions clients and colleagues might ask

- thinking about what other people might be thinking.

When we do this thinking, the problem is we are mostly OVER-THINKING. We are such wasteful thinkers.

We disguise thinking as:

Wondering

Imagining

Conjuring

Reasoning

Analysing

Rationalising

Reflecting

Contemplating

Deciding

Judging

Assessing

Evaluating … and

Mentally rehearsing.

We mentally rehearse scenarios trying to ‘prepare’ or ‘be ready’ for what lies ahead. We default to overthinking believing it's a useful way to solve a problem.

But calling an end to overthinking could be way better for us.

Move in to action sooner; to get real evidence and results - not imagined.

Q: What do you often overthink? 

Full to overflowing

This morning I'm keynoting aand opening a conference. It’s a 2-day program, with 3 streams running concurrently, which means there will be about 30 sessions for people to choose from.

Many conferences present us with this choice about what to do, what to attend. As delegates, we're about to be blasted by a firehose of information. The information flow is never ending.

We start the day with high hopes, clear minds and open eyes, ready to capture the insights from presentations and conversations.

But during the day, we hit the wall, full to overflowing and we experience 'the overload'.

To deal with it, we need to manage it. No one will do it for us. We need the skill of 'cognitive load coping' which the Institute for the Future said we'd need about now.

Yet I don’t see enough of it in the workplace to equip people to cope with all the information!

In today’s keynote I :

✅ Show how multitasking at a conference lowers our IQ;

✅ Explain we have a blindness to information, missing key content; and

✅ Share templates and techniques for better cognitive load coping.

This quote below from Seth Godin is a goodie! More on this topic as the week goes on.

Managing the overload

Do we consciously think how we’ll manage the deluge of information we’ll be exposed to today? Or do we just hope for the best?

Yes, we read, think, assess, evaluate and make sense of so much stuff. Every day. And while we’re trying to make sense of the information that’s INCOMING to us, don’t forget we also need to make sense of the information that we’re preparing for others : our OUTGOING.

We can spend too long on how things look - a presentation or report for example - when it may actually be all wordy, with jargon, cliched. That’s hard work for people to make sense of.

As you manage your own cognitive load, be aware you need to help others manage their load too. When preparing information, make it easy for them. If it’s easy - that doesn’t mean simple - if it’s easy, it gets digested, absorbed and, importantly integrated into our learning and understanding.

You'll feel less zombie-ish and more alert if you make conscious cognitive load management one of the ways you go about your day. I’m opening the SIRF Roundtables National Forum with a keynote on this super skill, cognitive load coping.

I’ll share more on cognitive load coping this week.

Up in the clouds... or down in the details

Up in the clouds... or down in the details. Author Jim Haudan suggests people across an organisation 'fly' at different levels. You'll experience it every day.

We have different altitudes of perspective and so we see different things, think differently.

We know this from being in an aircraft:

✈️ On the ground: you can see the airport, trees and tarmac as you're taxiing to the runway;

✈️ Up in the air: up to a few thousand feet up there, you can see cars, roads, rivers and patchwork quilts of fields and farms; and

✈️ Cruising Altitude: way up there, at 35,000 feet and above it’s cruising altitude and you're getting the big picture.

You can see a broader perspective stretching way w-a-y over the horizon. Today's leaders need to be able to fly at all levels - and most of all, to be able to recognise it or hear it when others are speaking.

This is one of the capabilities of the 'Leader as Facilitator' I posted on yesterday. Your preference may keep you 'locked' at a level that's not helpful.

Q: What say you? Are you an 'up in the clouds' person, 'down in the details' or do you fly somewhere in the middle? 

Don't be bored will you

Some days are filled with so many activities, commitments and appointments back-to-back there’s no time for anything else. No deliberate anything, not even lunch on some days. (Boo!)

As a child, I frequently said to my mum, ‘I’m bored!’ and she’d list off a few things I could do to counter the boredom. I had a creative mind and was always looking for something to work on, play with, experiment or try.

In the modern workplace, lurching from meeting to meeting, screen to screen, racing through the day, something big about this isn’t right.

It’s not sustainable and it’s not smart.

Are we allowing, creating or letting ourselves be a little bored? Even for a few minutes? Great creativity, ingenuity and insightful thinking comes when you let yourself be bored.

Your brain goes to work providing you with potential solutions to the problems you’ve been endlessly giving it. If there’s no break, there’s no space.

Rather than automatically reaching for your device to fill the space, have a go and let yourself be bored. Notice things and people; think ... whatever comes to mind. This allows us to make sharper connections when we really need them.

How could you let yourself be boredf?