Thomas Edison had no standing in the (gas) lighting industry when he started to create a lighting system.
Outsiders have the advantage of not knowing what “can’t” be done.
Look at your business through the eyes of an outsider. What’s weird? What’s wrong? What’s cool?
When I look at my business with outsider eyes, I see:
Things that are weird:
Things that confuse me
Things that need to be changed
Years ago, I read The Wellspring of Knowledge (Dorothy Leonard-Barton, 1995), and was influenced by her description of T-shaped skills.
The vertical part of the T denotes the deep knowledge we have about our job. The horizontal part of the T denotes the other skills we need in order to connect with others in the workforce and society.
Look at your skill set. Are you a generalist who needs a specialty to build upon? Are you a specialist who needs broader skills in order to interact with more of the organization?
Society needs people with good T-shaped skills. Experts who can’t talk with others in their organization are useless. Generalists with no area of expertise will soon be replaced by early artificial intelligence apps.
It’s the crossbar of the T that keeps you connected. List those areas in which you need enough knowledge to converses with people outside your department. (Personal confession: ignorance of finance hurt my early career.)
Good thinking is not about answers; it’s about questions. And where do we discover our great questions? They are triggered by our curiosity.
And therein lies the problem for many adults — we “lost” our curiosity as we progressed through our formal schooling. As kids we were curious about EVERYTHING. But as we progressed through school we were rewarded for answers and, over time, our questions and our curiosity atrophied.
Is that a problem? YES! IT’S A PROBLEM!
Why? Because we will be unprepared for the future unless we are curious about how it might be different from, or the same as, today.
We are in the midst of developing a webinar and a hybrid course focused on preparing leaders for the future so they will not being taken by surprise. And, quite naturally, the opening phase of the process is the old and obvious advice of “scan the horizon.” The tough part comes with addressing how you might do so.
Our answer is that you have to become intentionally curious. How might you do that? One recommendation is to change your thinking by intentionally changing your vocabulary. Here are three examples.
Do you have recommendations about becoming more curious? Please send them to bill.welter@mindprep.com. I promise to respond. Thanks for the help.
Many organizations use brainstorming to work on problems or to take advantage of opportunities. However, brainstorming sessions often stop after the group exhausts all of its initial ideas.
When you sense the group has reach a dead end you might want to fire up the group by asking for illegal, immoral or unethical ideas.
People will stare at you, shake their heads, and then start to laugh. But once someone comes up with a “bad” idea the other ideas will flow. Why? because it’s “unusual” and, frankly, kind of fun.
Now, take some of these ideas and them “bring them back” into the legal, moral or ethical world.
In one of my workshops, for example, the concept of “kidnapping” customers to increase sales resulted in further discussion about making existing customers so happy that they would never leave.
Make a list; how could you cheat without cheating? Steal without stealing? Be bad without being bad? Go ahead — sometimes it’s fun to color outside the lines.
Want more ideas? Get MindLab II — A Place to Think at Amazon.
Good thinking is triggered by great questions. Anyone can find answers, but not everyone can ask questions that deserve answers.
Some questions are focused on others to answer. But the most important question are those you ask of yourself.
Balance “What don’t I know that I should?” with “What do I think I know that could be wrong?”
Now, ask yourself three questions that will drive you forward.
Do you like these little thinking exercises? You can get little workbook, MindLab II, HERE. I like writing in books, so I suggest the paperback version. It’s not expensive.
Let’s learn from the past.
Well over 100 years ago, the telegraph and telephone changed the impact of distance on the lives of people and companies.
Photographs and phonographs extend the concept of time.
Distance and time were both fundamental constraints and barriers to early life and business.
List the constraints imposed on your business by the ongoing pandemic. Who has already dealt with those constraints and what did they do? You might find a (partial) solution.
