Thinking is invisible and none of the actions we undertake can ever take place without it, yet we don’t pay thinking the serious attention it requires. The quality of our performance is determined by the quality of our thinking.

Think Quick can help your organisation improve the quality of its thinking, and in doing so the quality of its performance.

We can help build your organisation’s ability to adapt and perform at their best in a world that is complex and shifting. Accelerating change is now the norm and the familiar ways of doing things are not always sufficient to address our current issues.

We require new thinking methods to develop improved service offerings, generate savings, increase revenue and ensure ongoing viability.

No business is easy these days. Increasing demand and shrinking budgets mean we must do more with less. If we are to continue to survive and thrive, our thinking must adapt to keep pace with the world around us.

At Think Quick we liken ourselves to river-navigators that help guide your people’s thinking “back upstream to the river’s source” where they can generate their own, improved downstream outcomes. This is done with a unique blend of methods to utilise and build upon the current knowledge and expertise of your people.

We focus on the practical application of the new and different thinking to current issues and on generating a return on investment to the client. Think Quick has three primary foci:

We will also assist in the design and implementation of projects where new perspectives, new insights and new ideas are required. These include Evaluations, Knowledge & Change Management, Strategy, Planning, and initiatives to positively impact Workplace Culture.

Permalink|Comments(0) | ->

Having given some thought over the years to the way people think and interact in meetings, I have pulled together this simple model of interactive collaboration, or What is the thinking behind the behaviours that we observe in our meetings?

The model is an inclusive one with a place for all interactive styles depending upon context, however in this instance I present it as a judgmental one, suggesting that the top right quadrant is where we should be if we have some serious thinking and interaction to do.

The two key criteria I have included on the axis are FOCUS and PERSPECTIVES. Without either there’s probably not much point convening to meet.

By FOCUS I refer to: What does the assembled group want to get out of the meeting? What is the intended outcome? Too often we venture into meetings (me included) with very different expectations.

By PERSPECTIVES I refer to the diversity of views that are carried by the meeting attendees. It is important that we are able to hear and  incorporate these views where appropriate. Too often we hear a view that is contrary to our own and we shut-down our thinking because we are of course – Right! It is important to be able to incorporate diverse perspectives because it is through diverse approaches that we are more likely to gain traction on difficult issues.

The Four Thinking Quadrants

Starting in the bottom left quadrant we have adversarial thinking. Here we seek to have our own views prevail over others. It this quadrant is is usually about winning. Unfortunately most of us don’t take too kindly to having our views contradicted and opposing views expressed. When this happens we waste time and brain-power in rambling discussion and argument, which in many instances is counter-productive when you have a specific outcome you must achieve.

Those who are more senior or the best at argument and debate will usually prevail in this quadrant, irrespective of whether or not their perspective is the best one. In this area we have a minimal number of perspectives tolerated and little agreement on how to achieve our focus. For a great example of adversarial thinking watch our Parliament in action.

Top left we have disparate thinking. Here the approaches are less adversarial but remain scattered and unfocused. We have many views here but not all are overly productive and add little value to the meeting. In this quadrant there is often the diversity required but insufficient focus to incorporate its value.

Bottom right is the quadrant where group-think happens. Here we tend not to have a sufficiently diverse group in the room to offer alternate views and opinions, or more commonly we have dominant or more senior personalities who everyone will tend to agree with once they have expressed their view. The reasons people do this are varied and can included the assumption that because person is senior they must know better than me. (The most dangerous of assumptions I’ve always found!)

In group-think mode people will just tend to agree with the prevailing view for fear of being seen as different. Often, in a hierarchical organisation group-think happens because expressing a view that is different to more senior views can be a career limiting move. With Group-think there tends to be little exploration of the possible outcomes and even less exploration of possible means of achieving the outcomes.

The top right quadrant is where parallel thinking occurs. Parallel thinking is a term coined by Edward de Bono and it finds its best expression in the application of the Six Thinking Hats methods. Here the focus of the session is clear, people know why they are in the room and what is expected of them. Here also there is a very deliberate incorporation of the multiple perspectives that are around the table. This is achieved by the group examining the topic at hand from the same thinking perspective at the same time. Diverse perspectives are welcomed but do not bring people into conflict because they are expected and welcomed!

With parallel thinking we have a single Focus and multiple perspectives incorporated. The inclusion of the multiple perspectives allows a full subject matter exploration – something we rarely get when time is short and argument prevails. An important side benefit of getting your people thinking in parallel is also that the meetings will dramatically reduce in length, a valuable outcome in itself when work demands increase and our time-poverty increases with them.

Most meetings will not stay within the one quadrant throughout, often they will tend to move between quadrants. We shouldn’t seek to eliminate this movement entirely, rather we must get participants to maximise their time in the parallel space and minimise their time in the less productive thinking spaces. We do this by using a range of techniques that assist meeting participants to move from Adversarial, Disparate and Group-think into Parallel thinking. When such techniques are incorporated, interactions becomes more focused,  inclusive and outcome oriented.

If you’d like your meetings to be more oriented toward outcomes and business results, Think Quick can help you  -  Just give us a call.

Permalink|Comments(0) | ->

We often see strategic plans, change projects and innovation approaches struggle to gain traction in organisations for a range of reasons. The reasons are many and varied depending upon context, yet from experience I have found that there is one key area that is often taken for granted or ignored.  Getting the collaborative approaches and attitudes right to start off with.

The premise behind this brief post is that you cannot develop sound strategy and then the new ideas you need to evolve unless you can incorporate multiple and diverse perspectives from the start.

The problem is that that when we elicit perspectives, their diverse nature brings us into disagreement and conflict.

Despite our claims to the contrary, we are not good at collaborating in ways that allow these perspectives to both emerge and be fully considered. This is almost a default position for us given 1000′s of years of relying largely on the winning and losing of debate to determine the best outcome.

We all bring very diverse ranges of experience, education, learning, backgrounds and knowledge to the table. These in themselves are powerful forces for addressing difficult issues.  However, this very diversity can be  an impediment to our success. So, before we start to ask our people to become more innovative and produce new ideas to improve our productivity we need to assist them with techniques that allow them to collaborate in a manner that allows alternate opinions to prevail and be considered, instead of being rejected out of hand.

This diversity is an essential element of good strategy. A good strategy involves broadly scanning and incorporating multiple perspectives. Once we have a good strategy in place we are then well place to generate new insights, perspective and ideas to achieve that startegy. To get the best possible perspectives and ideas we need to have a broad and inclusive strategic view of the world. To be able to develop up a braod and inclusive view of the world we must learn learn to Collaborate and Interact better. If we ignore this aspect we are building on sand.

Therefore before you attempt to drive innovative approaches and new ideas to generate better business results, get your broad and inclusive strategic scanning done first, but don’t forget, that to do this well you must have you people interacting in a manner that allows the inclusion of diverse and multiple perspectives. This is the hard part and the part we most routinely ignore. As a result our strategies, new approaches and outcomes are often not quite as good as they might be.

First Collaborate, Second Strategise and then the best Ideas will come!

Do it by the numbers and your business results will improve.

Permalink|Comments Off | ->

During a discussion on elephant conservation a friend once commented tongue in cheek, “Wouldn’t be interesting to hear what the elephants had to say in an anecdote circle?” This was one of those crazy and provocative comments that quite often act as a stepping stone to an even better proposition. Right now, we need lots of good propositions because the Asian Elephant population which once numbered in the millions is diminishing at a rate of knots and now numbers less than 30,000.

Elephants actually do have their own sophisticated language but we are not quite at the stage of comprehension. However ….. What if we undertook the next best thing? What if we collected the stories and experiences of the people that know the elephants better than anyone else in the world?  The elephant’s Mahouts.

In most instances an elephant and its Mahout are paired together at a young age and spend the remainder of their lives together. Collectively, the mahouts possess a body of knowledge about elephants that no one in academia or research can ever hope to match. Who better then, to provide experiences and insights that may assist in saving this species, which many are now suggesting may not survive beyond this current generation?

To assist the great many already undertaking elephant conservation work worldwide, Think Quick is now working with A Future with Elephants and has developed and commenced implementation of the Elephant Mahout Insight project (EMI) with a view to collecting the stories and experiences of the elephant mahouts across South East Asia and the rest of the world. Cognitive Edge from Singapore will be partnering us in this project by allowing us access to their unique Sensemaker software which we will use to both capture the narrative from the mahouts and to help build deeper insights and understandings about the elephant and its current, and future place in the world.

The insights gained will be shared with elephant stakeholders across South East Asia in a number of workshops where we hope to co-design new experiments, interventions and projects that will make a difference to the long term survival of the species. One of the most important premises of the EMI project is that we make no claims about our knowledge of elephants and how to save them, but rather we will rely upon the distributed intelligence of those that work with elephants on the ground in Asia. Our skill lies in capturing the narrative, helping stakeholders to make sense of the patterns appearing and assisting assisting them to design new ways forward.

It is important to note also that there are many elephant experts across South East Asia who are, and have already undertaken significant research with mahouts and we hope to incorporate as much of this knowledge as possible into the EMI project.

In addition to the opportunity to gain insight and design new interventions in this conservation effort, the narrative collected will also serve as an ongoing knowledge repository which will be made available to interested parties and researchers globally to aid in future conservation efforts. Of course as the numbers of elephants decline so do mahout numbers and their collective knowledge. So another reason this activity is a priority is it will play an important part in capturing the experiences of mahouts while we still have them amongst us.

This approach to knowledge harvesting offers significant opportunity for any group or organisation that is facing the issue of an aging workforce and the subsequent skills shortages that many retirements will bring.

We believe this is one of the more resonant and extensive knowledge management projects being undertaken in the conservation / sustainability space at the moment and we hope to report on significant progress over the coming year.

Anyone seeking more information or would like to contribute to the project in some way, shape or form is very welcome to contact me.

Follow a Future with Elephants on Facebook & Twitter.

Frank Connolly

Permalink|Comments(0) | ->

One of the great difficulties in getting people to understand the absolute necessity for creativity and lateral thinking is that all good lateral solutions will appear logical in hindsight. So, if the solution is logical we don’t need lateral thinking only logical thinking. Right?

Wrong!

Lateral thinking allows us to change the way we perceive a given situation or issue by disrupting our usual way of perceiving it. Through this disruption we can begin to see new options and possibilities to help address an issue that we would not have otherwise considered.

The methods can throw our thinking into new and strange places we would not normally visit, and this in itself can be threatening to the thinker that relies solely on logic. It is because of this that the first port of call when we think laterally, is usually a place that can feel uncomfortable, strange or even a bit crazy. Unfortunately, this initial discomfort often proves to be too much for those that struggle beyond the linear.

The key thing to remember however is that from this “strange” place we can perceive the issue through a very different lens and start to generate new and novel ideas to address the issue. We all know the old sayings, from left field and outside the box, well unless you’re ready to actually jump into that field, or stray outside that box, you will rarely produce the new and novel ideas that our complex world now demands.

OK, we have been all theoretical to this point, so I’d now like to turn the concept of thinking laterally into real-life practice. To do this I’ll briefly describe some of the elephant conservation work using lateral thinking that we are currently undertaking across South East Asia.

First some very brief context. The numbers of Asian Elephants has diminished over the years from the 10′s of millions across Asia to a figure of around 30,000 or less. The reasons for this are many and include loss of natural habitat, hunting, reproductive issues and human/elephant conflict, which occurs when elephants decide they’d like to eat the crops of local villagers (and when a herd of wild elephants decide to eat your crop, you generally don’t argue.)

A future with Elephants (AFWE) is an action focused, conservation fund designing and applying experiments and projects to help save this highly intelligent and social creature from extinction. Some predict this extinction could be as soon as before the end of this century. With an initial focus on reducing human/elephant conflict, lateral thinking tools have been applied in the design of potential interventions.

The lateral approach initially applied was Provocation and Movement. With this approach we  ….

1. Establish what it is we’re trying to do: Eg: Design an effective barrier that can be placed between the elephants and the village crops.
2. We then discussed a range of factors, characteristics, descriptions, assumptions about things that may visually and physically deter an elephant.
3. Having done this we then set up Provocations, i.e. deliberately provocative statements that are designed to push our thinking into new places and provide a stepping stone for a new and better ideas.
4. Provocations commence with the word “Po” to clearly indicate the provocative nature of the statement, and in this instance one of our provocations was: “Po, we produce a barrier that is invisible to the elephant.”
5. Now, this is a seemingly strange statement, however it did allow us to look at the problem from different perspectives and the resultant perspective shift has realised a current project in Sri Lanka where NFE are recording and experimenting with the sounds of naturally occurring hornets as a deterrent to the elephant crop raiding. (Every year an average 60 people and 200 elephants in Sri Lanka, alone are killed as a result of this type of Human/Elephant conflict. 200 out of a total population of 3000 is horrendous.)

A fairly logical way of potentially deterring elephants you may say, but it took lateral thinking to produce this “logical” option.

The team then took this new idea and applied another lateral approach known as Concept Extraction. In this approach we:

1. Commence with a starting idea: i.e. “Use the sound of naturally occurring hornets to deter the approach of elephants.”
2. We then extracted a concept that underpins that idea: i.e. the concept of using sound as a deterrent.
3. The group then generated new ideas in which sound might be used to reduce crop raiding.
4. One of the many new ideas that arose has resulted in a major ongoing project to “Record and playback different elephant vocalisations as a deterrent to crop raiding.”
   

While these projects are currently underway and in their early stages, there has been some promising results recorded. Again all quite logical but arrived at by lateral thinking!

The point to which I am laboriously making my way is that there is some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is that we can no longer be so rigid in our thinking that we simply assume lateral thinking and creativity are not part of our “normal” business. As the world becomes increasingly, complex, connected and competitive we have an urgent need to dramatically increase our capacity to generate new ideas that will help us act with impact.

The good news is that you do not have to be a creative genius to think laterally. If you did, I wouldn’t be writing this now. You simply have to learn these powerful, process based tools and apply them to the areas in which you need new thinking, new options, new possibilities and new answers. In fact, why limit their application to problem areas, apply them to things that appear to going well, you’ll be surprised at the new potential they can shed light on.

(NB: Word just in from Sri Lanka (9:30pm 2/2/11) says that AFWE’s initial wild playback experiments have been completed and have achieved a 100% success rate at diverting elephants away from food sources.)

Permalink| Comments(3) | ->

Recent trips to Malaysia and Thailand are starting to convince me that Australia as we have known it is gone and is soon to be consumed by South East Asia. Now that sounds a bit threatening on one hand but I suspect on balance, it’s going to be a good thing.

When one walks around the cities of South East Asia there is a vibrancy that we seem to lack in Australia, there are people everywhere and more often than not, they are friendly. Not something we can’t claim in Australia anymore. You can now walk quite safely in many areas at night in Bangkok which is something we can’t say about our big cities here. I think in terms of violent crime we are going backwards. In our altogether civilised attempts at addressing our anti-social behaviours we seem to have gone very wrong somewhere.

When one looks in awe at all of the development happening in Sth East Asia one asks, would this type of  structure or design happen in Australia? The answer is almost always, No. We seem to have become so hamstrung and heavily laden with taxation, policies, rules, regulations, laws and bureaucracy there is just no way such projects would ever get off the ground. There is a boldness to many of them too, which our planning people would run a mile from for fear of forever fighting losing battles for approval.

The public transport systems too, are pleasantly surprising. When I think of how well the train systems run in Bangkok (both above and below ground) I am ashamed to think of the mess our public transport system is here in Melbourne. We can’t even get a ticketing system to work and yet, in Sth East Asia they have a brilliant systems that are intuitive, can be easily understood by foreigners and are far more functional than anything here. And, the trains run on time!

My last observation is purely anecdotal but the younger students I have trained in South East Asia seem to have a serious “get up and go” about them that many in Australia seem to lack. Not only do they embrace and enjoy doing the Lateral Thinking but they learn and do so in a language that is invariably a second language to them. How good is that!  How many of us could do the same? Not me.

The students seem to intuitively understand that life is messy and they don’t necessarily default to the old  belief that A + B must = C. Nor do they seem to assume, as we tend to here in Australia, that logic is the best and only way of moving forward. For me the very thought of whole groups of young adults having the foresight to embrace new ways of thinking and idea generation using tools such as the lateral thinking tools makes for a future full of many grand possibilities.

I suspect we have had it so good, for so long here in Australia we have become very complacent. Countries we have simply viewed as “developing” have well and truly developed and in many aspects shot right past us. In some respects we are becoming a bit of a backwater.

The future however, is not as bleak as that would seem to indicate. After all, as migration continues into and out of Australia and other South East Asian countries, we will increasingly become a part of “Asia Proper” and not a stand alone entity just happy to plod along and sit on our rears watching “reality” TV.

(Pic: The 33 metre reclining Buddha at the Wat Chayamangkalaram in Penang, reclining and facing west toward Nirvana.)

Permalink|Comments(0) | ->