BOOK SUMMARY 10 Think Better
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Summary written by: Dianne Coppola
"The power of productive thinking lies in its
potential to increase your chances of finding, developing, and ultimately
implementing unexpected connections."
- Think Better, page 15
Don’t
let the title of Tim Hurson’s book scare you away. While Think Better will
definitely appeal to people who consider themselves ‘innovators’, the wisdom
contained in its pages can be applied by ordinary folks too. In fact, there is
so much good stuff packed between the covers I had a hard time choosing only
three key takeaways!
Hurson
methodically presents a six step process for upping the way you think about the
challenges you face – in business and in life. These steps include describing
what’s going on, defining success, pinpointing the real problem, generating
answers, forging the solution and aligning needed resources for action. Within
each step there are a number of sub-steps and approaches that help you dig
beyond the obvious, often with a mnemonic to guide you – AIM (advantages,
impediments, maybes), DRIVE (do, restrictions, investment, values, essential outcomes),
KnoWonder (what do you know? What do you wonder about?) and C5 (cull,
cluster, combine, clarify, choose).
Hurson
uses real life stories and case examples to illustrate how the productive
thinking model works, and there is a generous serving of quotable quotes to
delight and inspire you along the way. I actually read this book while on
vacation in Panama so you know it is an easy and enjoyable read!
The Golden Egg
TTT – Things Take Time
"Productive
thinking requires us to not rush to answers but to hang back, to keep asking
new questions even when the answers to the old ones seem so clear, so obvious,
so right."- Think Better, page 55
Things
Take Time. Why is it that we know this to be true
and yet time and time again mindlessly rush through things or seize upon
perceived shortcuts? Things that are worth doing take time – mastering a skill,
preparing an elegant five course meal, painting or sculpting a masterpiece. And
yet, we seem unduly swayed by a sense of urgency that is often of our own manufacturing.
We schedule a one or two hour meeting to figure out how to increase sales,
solve a supply chain bottleneck or reduce production errors. And then we wonder
why in a month’s time, we are holding another meeting to try and answer the
same question again because our first attempts fell short.
Hurson
notes one reason for this self-defeating behaviour is that human beings are
uncomfortable with ambiguity. We need to ‘know’, and be seen to know, the
answers to questions; we need to eliminate ambiguity in order to regain our
sense of equilibrium. This can be attributed in part to brain biology – we are“hardwired
to categorize the sensory inputs from the world around us” and
generate recognizable patterns. Hurson also observes that our education and
employment systems tend to reward people who have answers more than they reward
thinkers or questioners. Coming up with the right answer quickly is viewed as a
sign of intelligence and is a highly prized skill in today’s competitive
environment.
To
combat this tendency to rush toward the ‘right’ answer, I think we need to
proactively build thinking time into our weekly schedules. We need to ask (and
answer) 1001 questions in order to move beyond the obvious and open ourselves
up to the wisdom that lies in exploring potentially wrong answers. Let’s try to
be curious, absurd, bold, magical.
Gem #1
Let Go So Ideas Can Flow
"Your
mind is a treasure box of ideas and inspirations and insights, ricocheting and
resounding through your hundred billion neural connections. Sometimes you just
have to wait for them to come into view."- Think Better, page 65
I love
the idea that my mind is “a treasure box”. The phrase immediately engages my
imagination and I visualize myself sorting through the many ideas, insights and
memories I have, like a child looking through Mr. Dress-Up’s tickle trunk for
the perfect costume. I can sense the delight that comes with finding the
pirate’s hat or the princess’s tiara and liken that to the ‘ah-ha’ feeling one
gets when disparate thoughts finally meld together and unlock previously
unrecognized potential.
We’ve
all had those ah-ha moments and I’m willing to bet they often occurred in the
most unlikely places – in the shower, washing the dishes, waiting for the bus
or shortly after waking up in the morning. We weren’t actively searching for
solutions, they simply came into view. At times, finding new connections
requires the nudge that comes from a visual cue or a different environment. And
sometimes, we need to open the tickle trunk of our imagination and rummage
around to find what we need.
Gem #2
Make Time for Play
"Giving
ourselves permission to imagine allows us to access a huge resource of
cognitive capacity that we often ignore."- Think Better, page 135
Wow –
I find it ironically absurd that as adults we have to “give ourselvespermission to
imagine” when as children our imaginations were constantly in overdrive! How
much more invigorating and exciting life was when we imagined ourselves flying
to the moon, rounding up cattle on the plains of the mid-west or dancing our
way into the National Ballet! Today, many of us find ourselves tied to SMART
goals and objectives solidly grounded in the reality of our present
circumstances. We may daydream as a way to escape the mundane, however
daydreaming is a mere shadow of what the full out power of imagination can be.
Hurson
encourages us to create an IF statement; an ‘imagined future’ that is so
captivating it untethers us from our practical inclinations and pulls us into
the land of possibility. This imagined future doesn’t have to be real or
logical or even achievable. It just has to direct our attention toward a
different, more fulfilling and ideal future. This reminds me of a quote
attributed to George Bernard Shaw, “Some look at things that are,
and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask
why not?”3
I
personally don’t think it is an either-or choice. I think we need to answer
both types of questions so we can understand why things are the way they are and
then imagine how they might be different. Hurson would unleash this creativity
with the simple question, “How might I/We…?” and push us to identify 50+ ways
to accomplish that imagined future. Yes 50+ ideas. That’s where the magic lies.
You’ve got to sort through a lot of hay to find the needle hidden within the
haystack. The solutions for many of our persistent challenges is a lot like
that needle – hard to find, but pure gold when you put in the effort.
So,
here’s my challenge to you. Join me and schedule a block of time in the coming
week specifically to get lost in the magical world of your imagination. Think
about a current challenge you face or an idea that hasn’t gained much traction.
Pretend for the moment that you have a magic wand or a Genie that will grant
you anything you wanted. What would your imagined future (IF) look like? What
would you choose to make happen? And then, think hard about how you might make
it so!
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