Our natural tendency
We willingly take on attractive ideas, often without questioning them. They just look good, don’t they? We also reject unattractive ideas too easily, and too often without questioning. They are ugly, we want to get them out of our sight. For attractive ideas, we look for any supporting evidence we can find. Then we stop there. For unattractive ideas, we look for an contradictory evidence and stop there. No balance. Those ideas turn into beliefs, and before we know it, we have a belief system which looks good to us, but may not be representative of reality at all.

The consequence
Reversing this trend is critical for success and sanity. The alternative is a head full of pretty ideas, where pretty does not always mean good. It is often said that the truth is beautiful, but a deception can seem just as pretty, until you see it for what it is. A deceptive idea is just that, by definition it misleads you. If we have been deceived about something, we are, by definition, unaware of the deception. Think about it.

The cure
Spotted any beautiful ideas recently? Everyone gets deceived by wrong ideas at some point. Once deceived, it is hard to reason our way out. Over time reality slips further and further away, buried under layers of wrong ideas. The best way to escape from a deception is not to be deceived in the first place. Easier said than done. Check out new ideas as they come in the door, even before you head out on the first date with them. Don’t judge them by how attractive they at first seem, judge them by how true they are. What is the consequence of that new idea? If it seems attractive, check for contradictory evidence to that idea. If it seems unattractive, is there any supporting evidence that has been missed? Has the idea been examined in a broad enough context – is it over- or under-generalizing. Is it taking something we found to be true and applying it in a new context where it is not longer valid?

In conclusion
Ideas are just ideas. In the end, action is what counts, but action is exactly what creates the consequences for a beautiful idea. Wrong ideas, wrong actions.

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I think the concept of their being a reality to any situation, which can be described by a set of facts, is a key foundation to getting a grip on life. The next step is understanding that we don’t perceive reality directly. We perceive the situation via other people’s words, as they describe what they have seen with their eyes and ears. A side note here: Even if we were there we don’t perceive the world directly ourselves, since we are also perceiving it via our our eyes and ears.

The senses can be funny things, they can be influenced by our assumptions and beliefs. If you are not sure what I mean, then think of a magic show that you might have seen, particularly something involving objects appearing or disappearing. That kind of magic, sometimes called close up magic, depends on the expectations of our brains overriding what our eyes really see, or misdirecting our eyes to one place. As that happens, we miss something being moved or hidden in another place. More often than not, we see what we want to see (because of Gestalt – see coincidence?). We also hear what we want to hear, again there is some experimental evidence for this. This tendency is something to be very conscious of when we are communicating with other people. We hear what we want to hear. They hear what they want to hear. Usually, nobody is any the wiser. For the modern knowledge worker, who deals almost exclusively in information, this can make work into hard work.

A thought experiment for you to try. In a minute, imagine a situation where we are in a near-by forest, right in the middle of February, standing on the ground facing the sun. Shut your eyes now, and imagine the sights, sounds and feelings. Done it? Was it nice there? Was it peaceful? Let’s compare notes. In my forest, there was a sprinkling of snow on the ground, it was dry and there was a row of brick houses behind me. At this point I have probably lost half of you. In the northern hemi-sphere, February is winter, in the south it is summer. Our experience creates assumptions of what February is. Your forest might have had no houses, or it might have had houses all around.

We have different experiences, which lead us to different expectations and assumptions about a situation. There are lots of reasons that our forest example is silly, we weren’t recalling the same situation of course, but you would be surprised how many details people fill in even when recalling a real situation.

Now, let’s go riding in the our forests. How is the ride? Are you on two wheels, four wheels or four legs? Notice how we fill in the blanks, it is just natural. If we didn’t, we would struggle to function. You can start to see why understanding the reality of a situation via a third party is so hard. Assumptions can sneak in and knock us off track. It is good to ask ourselves “that is interesting, how do I know that?” and “is that really the case?” at regular intervals. Not to cause us to doubt ourselves and get into a muddle, but to sift the facts from the assumptions, the beliefs.

Facts always have some form of proof or evidence. A fact stated without evidence is just an assertion, it is a claim that something is true, which requires further investigation. The speaker might not even think that it is a fact, it could be just speculation – a suggestion of what the facts might be. To be sure, we must find the evidence, we that supports the claim. For example, a news reader on TV says “Carbon dioxide is resulting in global warming, causing the polar ice caps to melt”. That is an assertion. How do we know it is the carbon dioxide causing the ice caps to melt? We may have video evidence of the ice caps melting, but the polar ice caps melt every year for a season, and then they reform. The idea that carbon dioxide is causing it is an assertion by the news reader. It happens to be a common, or ‘shared’ belief, so we are comfortable with it. It might be true, but how do we know it is true? Actually, we don’t, since all we have is some second hand opinions about it, based on some facts and some assumptions that we are probably unaware of. We take it on faith, trusting in what we have read or been told by people we often haven’t even met. Lots of people believe it to be true, but based on the diagram, does that give any more reason to believe that it actually is?

See also: Wikipedia – A Means not an End

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My big take away for the moment is this: A change of context is the quickest way to change your thinking. Do you remember me loosing my car recently (shaken, not stirred)? I had a different replacement vehicle for a few weeks. And I mean completely different. A fraction of the size and power and a very different driving experience. The strangest thing is that it completely changed the way I thought about things. It altered my perspective, and if you drove it and experienced its (non-)braking capabilities, you’d know why. I’m back with my own car now, but my attitude to driving and my habits have changed.

Effecting personal change can be tough, especially if it involves creating good new habits or trying to break bad old ones. Be it habits of doing or of thinking, sometimes, if you want to change, the easiest thing to do is to start by changing your point of view. A different point of view creates a fresh perspective. That different perspective shifts your thinking, and destabilizes old habits by creating fresh new thought patterns. When using ThinkingRock, I have found that when I get stuck breaking down or planning projects, printing out the project reports and going somewhere else with a paper and pen helps me get unstuck. I now even have a specific thinking and planning place, just going there gets my planning and mission juices going. Keeping a context seems to be a good way to support (good) new habits.

Changing the context can completely break a habit or a stuck thought. Addicted to the Internet? Change context. Go to a place that has no Internet for a week or two. Less extreme, try changing where you spend your time or even just changing the colour of a room. It can be a fantastically effective way to loosen your mind up enough to make those big planned changes. From now on, if I am struggling to make a change, I’ll start by changing something else! Do something different, to create a change.

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I have been planning to study a little philosophy and critical thinking for myself (for which I haven’t found that many resources yet). Not that you want to spend too much time hanging around with people who spend all the time thinking about thinking. Don’t think about that one too much. However, it seems that a bit of philosophy as a child does do us good, according to this research. The original work was carried out by Professor Keith Topping at the University of Dundee.

The key findings of the study were that:

• There were significant improvements in cognitive (thinking) abilities. (on average 6.5 IQ points)
• Pupils’ self-esteem and confidence rose.
• Pupils were more aware of their own feelings and those of others.
• Classroom behaviour improved.

The Philosophy for Children (P4C) process includes three features central to promoting cognitive skills and educational attainment:

• cognitive challenge, a situation that lacks a simple factual answer and requires thought to resolve or clarify.
• social construction, working together to develop understanding or resolution that would not be possible working individually.
• metacognition, reflecting on and developing awareness of the thinking and learning processes used.

To summarise it all another way: If you use your brain, you get smarter. There you have it. These are all valuable work place skills, if you work with technology or not.

Anyway, time to dig out that introduction to philosophy book. You’ll have to pull me back from the edge, if it pushes me over it!

There is an update, linking to the final research here: A little bit of philosophy realy does make you smart.

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I’ll warn you now, I  this is a long one, but you’ll get something good out of it I am sure!

In the beginning

At the start of my career I was trained as a teacher, a domain where the idea of aims and objectives was beaten into you on a daily basis. You worked out where you were headed and set objectives to make sure that you were getting there, in the time available, for every hour of the day. This was followed up with constant reflection on how you were doing, with the occasional random assessment, just to frighten you into action.

When I moved into the business domain I quickly lost site of all that and was educated into mission, vision and MBOs. These seemed to get updated about once every three months, with a cursory check-up on an annual basis.

My recent exploits in the productivity domain have started to introduce me to the language of focus and action – to do lists, a mission and values. Plus a whole dictionary of terms that seem to have arbitrary definitions, but are still useful.

Thrashing it out

These things have all been conflicting in my head, so I decided it was time to do the right thing: Get a piece of paper and let these ideas battle it out!

Let’s take the idea of progress as distance moved, with little arrows to show bits of progress. I think progress is something we all seek at some level, although we never seem to make as much as we want. There are all sorts of reasons for this. Take the direction that the arrows point as aims, with each arrow ending at a goal. You could think of mission as the total path of the arrows. These are really just metaphors to help think through the issues, without depending on the language.

Dissipation

Sometimes we apply our efforts to many different things in many different directions, all at once. When we do, we don’t get anywhere. When you look at the big picture it is clear why we feel that way. This is lots of activity, but it isn’t getting anywhere. Effort spread across many different things, in many different directions, with different aims, doesn’t create much real progress. This is life with no mission. Lots of effort, not much distance moved, no big achievements.

Conflict and Stress

Sometimes we create focus and concentrate all of our efforts, but there are conflicting aims or no clear mission. That leads to stress, frustration and a lack of progress. There is lots of effort, but no movement. In fact progress in one place seems to come at the expense of progress in another. The diagram here is an extreme, but many coaching books focus on surfacing and resolving conflicting aims or values and you can see why. If you are focussed, but you are not making progress, it is quite likely you have some conflicts to resolve. You need to discover what these conflicts are and resolve them. If you don’t, your stress and frustration will keep building and you won’t be able to move on. Write down all of your aims and goals and weigh them against each other.

Drifting Focus

We might have focus, aims and goals, but they are short term and they keep changing over time. Randomly changing short term aims will tend to lead us round in circles, on the balance of probability at least. Again, this is an extreme case. You probably won’t end up exactly where you started, as the arrows here do, but you may not be satisfied when you look back over your progress. It feels like you have made some, but it feels like you could have made more. You haven’t found your mission. Without a mission, we will struggle to know what direction our aims should take us in. The understanding of the mission may change and evolve over time, but a long term focus helps to plot a straight path.

Focussed Drifting

If we find our mission, but we don’t have goals on the way, or clear aims, we won’t know if we are on track. It is possible to have aims, but no goals. An aim, or a value, is not something that you specifically achieve. For example, you might aim to be a great parent, you value parenting. To some that might sound like a goal, but for most people this is something that you can never finish. There will always be room for improvement, you can’t tick it off as a job done. It is an aim, and a hard aim to check yourself against at that. Spending an hour of focussed time with my child is a goal. The aim is to be a great parent, but the goal (or objective if you like) is something that I can check I achieved along the way.

Nearly There

Some focus, some goals, some progress, but no clear picture. It looks like something good is happening here, but there are some things that just don’t fit. There are a few distractions around the edges. I think this is how I feel right at the moment. I am seeing some of the benefits of having a small number of aims and goals and focusing on them, but not yet the full power of a singular mission. Must try smarter!

Focussed Aim Overloaded

If we try to express our aim or our mission across too many different things, we can actually end up not making much difference. Everything moves in the right direction, but if we are trying to move everything, everything ends up moving not much. I love to do lots of different things at once, but am starting to see the reality of how inefficient that is. In trying to do more and more, you achieve less and less. There is a lack of efficiency which the diagram doesn’t cover, but somehow it seems to speak to it.

Focussed Mission with a single aim and goals on the way.

I struggled with this diagram, because I had loads of arrows left over that didn’t fit on the page, so I parked them at the bottom. There is a fraction of the number of arrows used in the line that head off of the diagram, less than half. Suddenly a light went on in my head. If we have aligned aims, one focus, one mission, with goals on the way as checkpoints, we can get somewhere. Really fast. This is true for companies as well as individuals. We greatly reduce the amount of work, by staying on track. Wow! Now, I’m not sure that life lets us make things as simple as this diagram, most of us have many different roles that we have to serve: Worker, partner, parent or whatever other responsibilities we have acquired. What is clear is that within each role there is a massive efficiency that comes from having a clear aim, a singular mission, with focussed execution and goals along the way. I must have read 30 books that have told me as much, but it took a picture to bring it home. Finding synergies across the different roles helps this even further.

The metaphor here isn’t perfect, but exploring it has helped me resolve to be even more focussed. I know that where I have been, I have seen real progress and rapid results. That spurs me on and increases my motivation. I’m sure that there will be set backs on the way, but that isn’t a reason to change direction.

One last point before I jump. Even if you have gone around in a circle, you haven’t really ended up where you started. I’ll bet that you are a different person. It isn’t just about progress; it is also about who you become on the way. Anytime you stop yourself to say “I’m really not getting anywhere.” you have actually made progress, you’ve become more self-aware, and that is the first step to taking hold of life. You are transformed. You might make that step more than once, but enjoy the journey and the decisions you make – that is real progress!

More like this post: What does success look like?

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The incident brought home that excellent, if often used, coaching question: “If you had six healthy months left to live, what would you do?”. I know that very few people end up in that situation, but it is a useful question to frame how you spend time. If there isn’t a tomorrow, the importance of putting First Things First, as Covey would have it, jumps right out at you.

When you are working out what needs doing, put the big important things at the top of the list, then do them first! It stands to reason that if you do them first, you are significantly less likely to run out of time in which to do them. More on that after the jump…

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What will you do today?

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Pauses are powerful things. Time to reflect. To think. Time to realise. To resolve. Much is being made of ‘going slow’ these days, with sites like slow leadership expounding the reasons for going slow (great site!).

My wife plays netball, and as we were talking about this, she told me about the ‘three second rule’ in that game. When you receive the ball, you have to pass it within three seconds. That sounds like a rush, a hurry. However, as players are coached, they are taught to use ALL of that three seconds before passing. New players almost always end up passing the ball too quickly, they don’t get the most of the pause. They still act, you have to move the ball on, but take the three seconds first. Stop and think, before passing.

Could we use the three second rule in life? A forced gap between action and reaction. An enforced time to think, before we act. A pause between the demand and the doing. For some little tasks, it is easy to end up spending more time thinking about it than doing it. That isn’t efficient. However, it is all to easy to get caught up doing the wrong things. A pause for thought to say “is this the right thing to do right now?” can be a valuable check. We do have to do – after those three seconds, the player has to act, – to move quickly. But getting things done quickly doesn’t come from doing them in a rush. One of the fun things about ThinkingRock is that it enforces that pause and creates some structured reflection, if it is used correctly. Very useful.

Whatever you are doing, happy pausing!

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2006 was a pivotal year, 2007 will be a defining one. I plan to fill my year with good things and to close out the bad, as much as that is under my control, which is more than I imagine. To replace the distractions and the diffusion of effort with focus and achievement. What will your year be full of? I hope that it is packed with good change, brought about by your efforts! Write lots, read lots, and do just the right amount of things!

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