To think or not to think... alone

Posted on June 09, 2024 by Remi Vogel, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

That is the question… Is Thinking by yourself always the best solution? Or are there better strategies sometimes? Thinking is inherent to all professionals and especially Managers who need to find creative solutions to new challenges, report on performance, plan for projects, create a vision, prepare communications, resolve conflicts….

As a new manager, I have found myself many times sitting at the end of a day reflecting on continuous improvements for long hours, sometimes to carry on over multiple days or weeks. And periods of reflection can quickly spiral down into analysis paralysis if like me your mind is creating and testing a lot of ideas at the same time. But over the years I started discovering/developing new strategies.

The first one is limiting the time available for thinking through a problem. Instead of leaving reflections for the end of the day, why not book a moment in your agenda for personal brainstorming or mind-mapping? That has 3 advantages:

· First it forces your mind to focus on solutions in a shorter timeframe

· Second it obliges you to determine the objective of the session which makes the session more effective

· Third one avoids you waking up in the middle of the night or struggling to get to sleep on some nasty issue

My previous boss suggested starting with AIM (Aim In Mind), which I believe is a variation of “Begin With The End in Mind” by Stephen Covey. I like the AIM acronym better as it is easy to remember and in fact, I had it for many years on a label stuck to my laptop. I found in the past that such sessions sometimes open further questions and I need to book a follow-up meeting with me, which is fine. When these sessions don’t bring further progress, it is a sign to change strategy.

The second strategy is a simple variation of the first one, but surprisingly less applied by new managers. It consists of involving others. If you have been spending a lot of time thinking on a subject with little progress it means that your brain needs more input. Get help! ask your boss, other managers, your coach, your mentor, your friends, family, or even better…. your team.

The problem you are trying to resolve is probably related to your team, so who’s better than them to give you insights and ideas? So instead of booking a brainstorming session with yourself organize a session with your team or bring the subject to your 1-to-1 meetings. I know that as new managers we are sometimes scared of involving others. Would my boss or my team think less of me if I came to them for help? After all, they promoted me to this position to solve the issues…

Actually, your boss will probably be proud to share some of his experiences with you. Of course, you need to come with some pre-work done already, your thoughts, the potential solutions, and where you are blocking… You don’t want to be dumping your problems to your boss. You seek his help to help to choose or get a different point of view.

I found out that asking your team has multiple advantages:

· First, they feel recognized for their expertise. They are more involved in the details of the operations and they can point you to potential blockages or clarify some ideas. I have frequently discovered by involving my team that I had misunderstood something or missed an important implication of a new process or idea

· Second, it creates more engagement from the participants in the overall mission of the team. It develops collaboration, accountability, and commitment. When someone has been involved in a decision, he/she is usually more committed to implementing it.

· Third, this is a great way to know better your team, to assess them outside of their usual environment, and sometimes to discover potential future leaders.

Here are some ideas on how to best use these approaches:

If you are brainstorming by yourself, I find that writing on a blank page is the most powerful way to keep your ideas flowing. Another way is to vocalize your questions and try to answer them orally.

I realized that trying to brainstorm on a digital platform (like a word editor) would take me about double of time as my mind would be blocked on how I write rather than the idea itself. So, I usually prefer a simple pen and paper or a whiteboard if available. I frequently take pictures of my whiteboard to be able to refer to in the future but also to copy it back to my notebook.

Brainstorming is good for small groups (5 to 8) but it gets very quickly messy and unproductive when there are too many people. If you need to involve many people you can use the world café method, which has a specific framework to have productive and creative meetings with a lot of people (personally I have done it with up to 30 people).

Mind-mapping can be a powerful technique to use in conjunction with brainstorming sessions. Starting with an initial idea in the center of a page allows you to draw dependencies, and connections all around. Then you can repeat the process with the dependencies…. For visual people, it helps you build a global view of a question. Although I tend to do it on paper, I usually transfer to an app such as SimpleMind Pro which allows me to keep interacting with the ideas when I am commuting.

Another tool that I recently discovered to keep track of ideas on the go is Workflowy, it allows you to create multilevel bullet points that you can collapse or expand to show the bigger picture or the details.

Thinking is essential for any professional, but the strategy you choose can have very different impacts on your productivity and effectiveness.

Last advice, if someone in your team answers a question by “I think”, make sure to ask him to check and get data and not only beliefs.

Read the original article here www.linkedin.com/pulse/think-thinkalone-remi-vogel/