Clarity of Simplicity
Experiencing “information overload”, finding it difficult to zero in quickly on the key issues
“Which book would you buy?” Leading Change” or “Who Moved My Cheese?” “Leading Change” sold 210,000 copies, “Who Moved My Cheese?” sold 14 million copies. “Leading Change” was written by a highly respected professor at Harvard Business School. “Who Moved My Cheese?”, is a tale of dumb rodents looking for missing cheese. Summarise and express your ideas in a vivid and colourful way.
Find time and space to think long and hard. Don’t allow today’s immediate pressures drive your decision making. Don’t over react to short-term problems to set in motion a series of events that will make things worse. Sometimes it may be better to stop and rethink your goals. See the big picture. Keep asking: what is this really about? What am I trying to achieve for the future? And look beneath the symptoms of problems to work out the fundamental causes. Don’t allow one aspect of a problem, the most vivid, pressing and personally troublesome, distort your overall perspective and take you off on a trivial tangent.
Attack woolly thinking. Others want to persuade you around to their agenda. They want you to do what they want. And arguments are the tactics they use. A good argument consists of a compelling logic that translates solid initial premises into robust conclusions. A bad argument consists of unsustainable premises (assumptions, opinions or spurious facts) with an illogical leap into an indefensible recommendation. Agreeing to weak arguments will tangle you in half-baked plans and projects with potential to distract you from what is important and productive. Be prepared to attack an argument at each and every point in your opponent’s reasoning process. Don’t play the role of difficult and awkward critic. But do zero in on the flaws in others’ proposals to ensure you don’t get caught up in cock-eyed and ultimately damaging plans. www.austhink.org
Take the “elevator test”. It’s Hollywood. You are pitching for a new project but you only have the time between stepping into the elevator with your audience of studio executives and exiting at the 15th floor – around 70 seconds – to summarise your ideas. A ridiculous way to do business? Maybe. But it is also a powerful discipline. What do you say in the 70 seconds? Know what you know and how to communicate this to others in a simple and direct way.
“Satisfice” rather than maximise. “Maximisers” in life want to make the absolute best decision every time. Maximisers also go through life in a perpetual state of worry, worrying they haven’t got the best deal, the cheapest price, the optimum value, found the best partner, property, holiday, etc. Good enough is good enough for many decisions. Don’t waste valuable thinking time on things that won’t make a genuine difference to the quality of your life. “Satisfice” to choose the “fit for purpose” solution.
Eliminate the trivial choices from your life. Just because more choice generally improves the quality of our lives, it doesn’t mean that unlimited choice makes for a better life. Don’t allow junk mail or life style media bombard you with recommendations and prescriptions for the “better life”. Ignore this information. Don’t let your life options be determined for you by consumer advertising. Know what you want. Don’t let others dictate your life choices. Cut the out crap of life. Know what is important to you, the fundamentals of what you are setting out to achieve, and how your efforts are contributing to these goals. And get rid of everything else.
See the big picture. Keep asking: what is this really about? Look beneath the symptoms of problems to work out the fundamental causes. Don’t allow one aspect of a problem, the most vivid, immediate, pressing and personally troublesome, to distort your overall perspective and take you off on a trivial tangent. Keep asking “why” to identify that underling factor, which “explains” the situation, and helps you zero in on the central issues.
Manage the “law of unintended consequences”. Don’t focus on one aspect of your life situation to develop a solution that resolves a specific problem but with consequences to create other and potentially more damaging problems. Focusing only on achieving success in one part of your life can lead to failure in other areas. “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it”. See the big picture of your life.
Zero in on high content. Don’t waste time acquiring information with little intelligence value. Most newspaper and magazine articles, books, radio and TV programmes say very little that is both new and true. And if they do, they take too long to say it to get to the important stuff. Ask those whose opinions you value to recommend what they’re reading and listening to. Even better, ask them to distil down the key learning to provide you with a personal summary of the issues.
Buy a good map. As Einstein observed, “There is nothing more practical than a good theory.” Ideas, concepts and theories help us make sense of the world. They explain why things are the way they are and predict what will happen in future. They are our maps to guide us through the complexity of the world. But some maps are better representations of the world than others. And some maps will take you off into a maze. Be careful then in your choice of a map.
Causes, connections and consequences: 3 Cs of problem solving. No one single concept can explain or predict everything. But some concepts are better than others. A powerful concept:
- tells us a lot about other things – we can generalise from the concept because it pinpoints some fundamental causal factor
- creates new insights. Not only should it explain what we already know, it should open up our understanding to spot things we didn’t think of initially. It helps make sense of different problems by spotting the inter-connections.
- predicts the future. A useful concept maps out “what if”, identifying the future consequences of current circumstances to predict what will and won’t happen. Good concepts help us take action to manage the future.
Review your preferred ways of thinking about the world, business, career, family etc to check they are helping you understand cause and effect; making connections with other problems; and identifying consequences you can manage.
Trade off to decide wisely. In life, there are few “no brainers”, the blindingly obvious solutions that are easy to implement. Most of the time, life throws up problems with different potential solutions, each with their particular opportunities and risks. Wisdom knows how to trade off the upside and downside of each option to arrive at the best decision. Don’t approach life decisions with the expectation that one solution will “pop up”. It won’t. You will have to trade off:
- speed vs. accuracy
- the short-term vs. the long-term
- cost vs. quality
- time vs. money
Be clear about your “bottom line” – what fundamentally matters to you – to manage life’s compromises and trade-offs shrewdly.
Walk away from complex projects. Any activity that requires sophisticated plans and charts, ongoing project review and planning meetings, coordination across different departments and functions, and involves more than five people is an activity that is likely to fail and therefore, generally, one to avoid. Keep your life simple by working on clearly defined tasks with a small team in which you can maintain control over your own personal destiny.
“There is less to this than meets the eye”. Don’t be overly impressed by complex proposals, incorporating technical language or sophisticated statistical analysis. Someone is camouflaging a lack of understanding and insight about the essentials. Or they are building up their own importance with a view to build an empire or sell expensive services. Keep business activity simple. Because, business, stripped down to its essentials, is very simple. Don’t allow management theory or consultancy jargon distract you from the fundamentals: understand your customers, give them products they want, keep your operation efficient, treat employees with respect, and give your shareholders a decent return. Don’t pursue the latest business fad. Work through the basics in your own mind before you bring in any external advisers to guide your decision making. External advisers need to complicate business life to justify their fees.
“When in doubt tell the truth”. Make life easier by keeping your commitments; no exceptions, no negotiables, no “ifs” or “buts”. Stand by your promises. Life becomes much easier and simpler if you keep to the truth. The little “white lies” of life have potential to tangle you up in unnecessary complexity. Know the fundamentals of your life values and stick to them.
Know what you don’t know. You will never be an expert on everything. Don’t even attempt to be one. And don’t pretend to be well informed on issues you don’t know much about; it will only prevent others giving you the information you need. Instead learn how to ask the right questions in the right way with that humility which listens and is receptive to new ideas.
Sticky thinking. How do you get people's attention? And how do you keep it? Does your message “stick”? Does it pass the tests of SUCCES." To stick, ideas should be Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotion-evoking and embedded in Stories. Take a long and hard look at your communication impact - your presentations, meetings, proposals, your emails. Make an impact by communicating a clear and consistent message. Bring it alive with practical examples and stories. And incorporate an element of surprise to trigger curiousity. www.businessweek.com